In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Girl SleuthA Feminist Guide
  • Joan Joffe Hall (bio)
The Girl Sleuth: A Feminist Guide; by Bobbie Ann Mason. 144 pp. Illustrated. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press. $3.75.

Like most nostalgia, The Girl Sleuth, a first-rate guide to series such as Honey Bunch, The Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and others, is profoundly ambivalent about its subject. And this is because Bobbie Ann Mason's own childhood was deeply influenced by her reading of this type of fiction. Only in books did she visit homes with central heating; only in books did she glimpse an escape from rural domesticity into a world of exciting and independent girlhood. Even while she deplores, then, she cherishes. A similar complexity lies at the heart of many good studies in popular culture.

Mason points out that although girl adventure stories began out of the "stirrings of liberation" before the turn of the century, and although the automobile and airplane soon came to represent, in the hands of these heroines, outdoorsiness and mechanical skill, much of what a child learns from such fiction contradicts mobility and nestles in the bosom of convention.

Nancy Drew first appeared in a book in 1929 and the series has been put out at the rate of about a book a year since then, regardless of Crash, Depression, War. Nancy is the ideal girl—smart, beautiful, poised, forever-young, financially independent. She has no mother to nag her but a wonderful daddy always ready to come to her rescue. She always knows how to act; when a leading lady falls ill, she can take her place after only one rehearsal. "Once!" Mason sighs, "I feel as if I have rehearsed my whole life." In her blue roadster Nancy is the embodiment of both real and illusory independence. "The books hold up one image of life and teach another." Nancy is trapped by the ideals she represents. Servants must know their place; undesirables and members of minority groups are likely to be villainous (except that's where the mystery is!); refinement and virtue are class determined; and the story's "job is to preserve class lines." Moreover, appearance and reality correspond perfectly in these mysteries with a regularity that would make a girl a "moral midget."

Sexually, too, Nancy's independence is a sham. She has a boyfriend [End Page 256] Nick, but whereas real girls giggle or worry about shaving their legs, Nancy is never either insecure or aroused. She is buffered by her two friends, silly Bess and tomboy George, female types "we are taught to loathe," who represent the extremes Nancy must shun. At her best Nancy "trespasses into male territory without giving up female advantages." Yet though she must not be silly it's seldom through intellect that she solves the mystery: coincidence does that. And so the typical Nancy Drew plot is like a "sonnet" with its variations, an enlarged dollhouse. Like Honey Bunch for little girls the Nancy Drew mystery provides the teenager with a "perfect playhouse," while luring her with the possibilities of adventure. The ultimate mystery to the adolescent girl is sex, of course, but from sex Nancy runs full speed, all the while chasing "substitute forms of evil." Ironically, at the solving of each mystery Nancy finds "the very world—the happy ending . . . the symbolic wedding—she seeks to escape."

For all Mason's disapproval, she loves Nancy Drew. Judy Bolton, whom she finds more individualized, more in contact with the real problems of girls, and more sympathetic to wrongdoers, gets only one-third Nancy's space. Nancy Drew is the female version of Tom Sawyer, especially if one remembers Leslie Fiedler's view of Tom as the Good Bad Boy, whose rebelliousness is real but superficial and who endorses the values—the slavery and violence—of his culture. Nancy is the conventional independent girl, the adolescent Honey Bunch (whose very name suggests both purity and sexuality). And if Tom Sawyer grows up to be Mark Twain, small wonder the avid reader of Nancy Drew grows up to be a sleuth, a scholar like Bobbie Ann Mason, whose first book was a study of Lolita.

At...

pdf

Share