Lady and the Tramps: The Cultural Work of Gypsies in Nancy Drew and Her Foremothers

In his phenomenally popular anthology of nonsense verse, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), Shel Silverstein includes a poem entitled "The Gypsies are Coming." To accompany the text, Silverstein has drawn a picture of an old crone who carries on her shoulders a large sack, out of which extend the arms and legs of enslaved children. The poem begins: "The gypsies are coming, the old people say, to buy little children and take them away" . . . and continues . . . "[a]nd kiddies, when they come to buy, It won't do any good to cry. . . ." (50)¹ Silverstein is having his characteristically macabre fun here with one of the more persistent and fascinating cultural images that has dogged children's literature since the early nineteenth century.

Silverstein's use of this popular icon to fire our imagination while feeding certain fears is hardly original; the gypsy character has long functioned as a narrative device in children's literature. The literary representation of gypsies is not limited to children's books but can also be found in both popular and elite culture of the western world throughout the last several centuries. The West's captivation by the romantic gypsy is confirmed, for instance, in the ballads of Scott, in the music of Haydn, in Bizet's opera Carmen, and in the novels of George Eliot, as well as in many other works. But in no body of literature has the gypsy been pressed into service so tenaciously as in the popular series books written for children in the first part of this century where, as Bobbie Ann Mason notes, gypsies "skulk in and out like panthers on the prowl" (142). An examination of their function is important to an understanding of the larger cultural meanings of girls' series books. A study of the use of the gypsy convention in popular fiction offers a good example of how seemingly antithetical attitudes can be joined in narrative to work through social conflicts—how, through such images, we can watch a culture thinking about itself and can assess the kind of "cultural work" such books perform.²

As part of the apparatus of the popular girls series books prior to and including the Nancy Drew mystery stories, the fictional gypsy continues to confirm an apparent paradox of attractiveness and danger; a paradox that is the essence of traditional discourse about women of color. Like other marginal groups, the alien gypsy becomes the "other" in order that white middle-class women might define themselves. Through the representation of the dangerous, eroticized gypsy woman in particular, the parameters of legitimate behavior for the heroines—and by extension for readers-is demarcated, the limits of their freedom defined. It is not surprising to find that gypsies figure more prominently in books for girls than in those for boys, since the gypsy threat, as I will define it, loses much of its force when applied to boys.

In brief, the series gypsy is configured to symbolize all the aspects of the other that both thrill and fascinate young readers, but of which they must be warned. On the one hand, the gypsy is positioned as the heroine's inferior opposite. By depicting these nomads as irrational, depraved, fallen, dirty—in toto, different—Nancy Drew and her foremothers can be understood as rational, virtuous, mature—that is, normal. On the other hand, the taboos personified in the gypsy figure are mysteriously attractive to many series females, who run off to join gypsy tribes or marry gypsy violinists. The twin poles of repugnance and fascination give expression to those anxieties that early twentieth-century adults felt: unrest over the influx of immigrants from southern Europe, fear over the threat of white slavery (a catastrophe that also threatened heroines of movie serials of the day and to which Silverstein playfully alludes), or anxiety over the "new woman" of the early twentieth century, whose independence appeared to threaten the gender order. The interaction between white girls of serial fiction and the gypsy involves a complex relationship of power and domination, and, as such...