In recent years, feminists have vociferously debated Nancy’s status as the golden girl of 20th-century tween literature. The stories made Nancy Drew an icon-and, perhaps inevitably, a symbol of controversy. It was unthinkable in 1930 that a teenage girl could be headstrong, intelligent, resourceful, inquisitive, and-when you really get down to it-a social-justice warrior. From 1930 to 1979 she roared through those 56 spirited tales in her jaunty blue roadster and, later, a convertible, fusing the traditional ideal of American feminine propriety (Nancy adores her dad, Carson, and dotes on her fretting housekeeper, Hannah) with the notion that a teenager could also bend the rules of young-lady decorum to outmaneuver crooks, all while keeping her suitors (mainly the perennially flustered Ned) on their heels with her insouciant emotional unavailability. Lithe, “titian-haired,” and affluent, she was also much more than that. Wandering about haunted mansions, bridges, and even a showboat, Nancy confronted whispering statues and climbed creaky staircases unearthed vexing clues in dusty albums and chimneys and bested shifty, villainous characters with her keen eye, relentless pursuit of the truth, and fashionable wardrobe. The result was rich, textured, and surprisingly complex chronicles that were hardly your run-of-the-mill missing-jewels cases. The timid, weeping girl must be a thing of the past.” He engaged a plucky Iowa writer named Mildred Wirt Benson to ghostwrite the initial Drew stories under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. “Better cut it-in these days the girls and women have about as much nerve as the boys and men. “I see in your books you have a tendency to fearful fainting girls and women,” he wrote. So there’s that.ĭespite a slightly stiff, pious bearing, Stratemeyer, the father of two strong-willed daughters who would continue his publishing legacy, was quite progressive, something reflected in his early notes to one of his writers. But Nancy’s still chasing ghosts-in the first episode, she’s after a prom queen who plunged to her death from a gothic bluff.
(What’s a stronger word than sacrilege?) Her BFFs have also been radically made over: Tomboy George is now an Asian frenemy pudgy Bess is now a thin, gorgeous rich bitch slumming it by waitressing too.
#Teen nancy drew tv show series#
Flashlight in hand, she’s now coming back to television in the CW’s brooding Riverdale-esque series Nancy Drew, which reimagines her as a disaffected crab-house waitress (sacrilege!) in the town of Horseshoe Bay (No River Heights? More sacrilege!) who has sex with Ned (now nicknamed Nick), her mechanic boyfriend, in the garage he sleeps in. The subject of a series of film serials in the late 1930s, the character was resurrected for weekly television in the 1970s and was the subject of both a feature film in the mid-aughts and a failed CBS pilot in 2016. The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories-the classic 56 books that comprise the original canon-still sell more than 350,000 copies a year there are currently more than 70 million Nancy Drew books in print, a figure that includes the classics as well as several modern spin-offs.
She is one of few fictional detectives-namely, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot-to remain alive in the national cultural ether for a century or more. In the same book, she also survives an earthquake, a confrontation with a ghost, a kidnapping, and being tied up on a sinking, burning boat.
In The Mystery at Lilac Inn (1930), her fourth adventure, her canoe capsizes, a bomb is placed under her bed, her car veers into a ditch, her cottage is set on fire, and she’s attacked underwater by a spear-wielding assailant.
0 kommentar(er)
