Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture ed. by LuElla D'Amico (review)

Girls' series fiction occupies a curious place in the literary world: it rests on a nexus between immense consumer popularity and critical disdain. Girls' series comprise a body of work that encodes cultural messages about how girls (and boys) ought to behave and the kinds of lives they should aspire to, both radical and conservative. Readers have been able to sift and choose among these messages in any way they wish, and tremendous sales figures suggest that series books are one of the primary sources that girls use to understand the culture around them and their place(s) within it.

While girls' series are beloved by both adolescent and adult readers for their independent heroines and their attention to the social world(s) and moral questions that girls must learn to navigate, literary critics tend to see these same texts as one-dimensional, repetitive, and morally simplistic, and their heroines as naïve do-gooders who, at best, can serve as character models for the young.

This same disdain by academics and literary arbiters has meant that girls' series fiction has received little critical examination, save some attention to a handful of "exceptional" authors who managed to transcend their own genre (e.g., Louisa May Alcott and J. K. Rowling). The Nancy Drew series is another exception to the critical rule; Nancy's apparently inexhaustible popularity certainly has something to do with this, along with the fact that so many influential women have cited the girl sleuth from River Heights as a positive influence (Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg among them).

However, a significant number of scholars from the academy have found value in and begun to draw attention to the cultural influence and moral complexity of girls' series fiction, and the scholarly literature on girls' series is slowly growing. LuElla D'Amico's excellent new collection, Girls' Series Fiction and American Popular Culture, sets out to prove that girls' series are anything but simple and uncomplicated, and that they are worthy of study not only as literature, but as cultural narratives that shape girlhood and womanhood. As D'Amico herself states in the introduction:

This collection seeks to remedy this critical gap through a targeted, inquisitive study about girls' series and their sweeping influence on the girls that read them and the culture that produces them. As a field, girls' studies itself is in its nascence, and it is vital that young women's stories begin to be afforded proper space in academic circles, that the narratives that help construct adolescent females' lives are no longer viewed as inferior.

(ix)

Indeed, the fourteen chapters in D'Amico's anthology (which manage to cover thirteen different girls' series) suggest that girls' series fiction is one of the primary places that academics and social scientists should be searching for clues to girls' identity formation. An almost infinite number of messages about girls, their potential and capacity for achievement, and the expectations of the wider culture reside within the pages of these volumes, messages that are sometimes incredibly liberating and at other times highly restrictive.

Take, for example, contributor Eva Lupold's keenly insightful reading of the Katy series by Susan Coolidge. Lupold argues that the disability narrative in the Katy books functions simultaneously as a conservative (and problematic) warning against gender misbehavior and as a subversive space in which emotionality, creativity, reassessments of beauty, and queerness can flourish. Katy's disability is, in part, used as a punishment for her defiant, nonfemale gender behavior. However, both Katy's temporary disability and her cousin Helen's permanent disability are in fact crucial to the girls' exploration of creativity and queerness; while adult characters (and readers) see their disabilities as restrictive, Helen and Katy use the space afforded them by disability to defy gender norms, explore creative expression, and develop their friendship/relationship. Their rooms become spaces for play and storytelling, where no one in the family has to be...