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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Nancy Drew taught me everything I needed to know about being a tough, independent woman. Too bad today's girls don't have the same role model.
Feb 1, 2005 | When I was a kid, my mother would take me every Saturday to the Borders in our neighborhood. I would go straight to the children's section in the back of the store and pull down three Nancy Drew mysteries -- the maximum I could afford on my weekly allowance. Though I tried every week to ration them, I would invariably have finished the last book by Sunday night, and the rest of the week was an agony of waiting until the following weekend.
The addiction lasted between the ages of 7 and 10, and it probably would have gone on a bit longer if I hadn't outpaced the publisher. I graduated from the yellow-spined hardback original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories to the digest-size paperback versions, to the spinoff aimed at teen readers, the Nancy Drew Files, which carried higher-stake mysteries and romantic side plots. Eventually I had to box up my collection and make room on my bookshelf for other, more grown-up characters. But even as Nancy Drew moldered in my parents' basement, the teen sleuth still lived in the center of my heart, and became, ultimately, the most forceful role model in my life.
This year, Nancy Drew turns 75. Since the publication of "The Secret of the Old Clock" in 1930, more than 200 million Nancy Drew mysteries have been sold. Nancy has, through successive rewriting, transformed from a 16-year-old girl with a roadster to an 18-year-old with a Mustang. But no matter how often the details changed, Nancy remained more or less the same: a model citizen with a perfect balance of toughness and femininity, an icon of independence and poise. As such, she has provided a connective thread between the six generations of girls she has ushered into adulthood.
But like all good things, Nancy Drew, it seems, has come to an end -- or at least the Nancy I grew up with. In her latest incarnation in Nancy Drew Girl Detective, Nancy gets a car (a gas/electric hybrid), lingo and fashion sense befitting a new-millennium sleuth. But the Simon & Schuster series also tweaks her character. For the first time, Nancy narrates in first person, makes mistakes, worries about love, and succumbs to emotions; she is, in other words, a perfectly normal teenager. Supposedly, the changes are in service of making Nancy a more likable, real girl, someone to whom 21st century kids can relate. The Nancy of old wasn't at all normal. She was a distant ideal, with no interior life and an inability to fail at anything. But that is exactly what made her so appealing.
