Marketing Transnational Girlhood Through the Nancy Drew Series

Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series Elizabeth Marshall Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2012, pp. 210-227 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/chq.2012.0018 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chq/summary/v037/37.2.marshall.html Access Provided by University Of South Florida Libraries at 01/28/13 5:00AM GMT Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series Elizabeth Marshall Nancy Drew is often seen as emblematic of American girlhood as self-reliant and aspirational, within the parameters of middle-class, mid-century striving. Since the creation in the 1930s of “the titian-haired sleuth that all American girls love” (Kehe), the character herself, the mystery series, and associated products have crystallized as a durable brand of national identity, consumerism, and girlhood.1 Nancy Drew is an indelible character through whom the category of girlhood is consistently reproduced in relation to modernity and nation; but an indissoluble and underexamined aspect of her well-studied presence in the production of American girlhood is the global scale of the series. The ways in which the character of Nancy Drew continues to be revived globally constitute a key feature of the series’ circulation and success. Given that the Nancy Drew Mystery series “was first licensed for foreign editions in the 1930s” and that the mysteries “have been published in nineteen countries and translated for audiences in the Scandinavian countries, Malaysia, South Africa, Israel, Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia” (Kismaric and Heiferman 112), Nancy Drew can also be considered a successful global brand marketed to and consumed by a range of reading publics in a variety of locations. Just as the series travels across national borders, the character Nancy Drew travels transnationally. Of the fifty-six titles in the original series, Nancy travels outside the United States in thirteen, roughly a quarter of the total (Fox). The first transnational mystery takes place in 1935 inThe Message in the Hollow Oak, when the teen sleuth goes to Canada; the last in the original series brings her to Japan in The Thirteenth Pearl (1979). In the newly rebranded Nancy Drew Girl Detective™ Papercutz graphic novels, the mysteries lead to Turkey and India. Beyond expanding the geographical scope of the girl sleuth’s activities, transnational travel emphasizes the brand’s focus on mobility and allows for Elizabeth Marshall is Associate Professor in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. She is coeditor of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media, and has published articles on the representation of North American girlhoods within children’s literature, popular culture, and women’s memoir. 210 © 2012 Children’s LiteratureChildren’s Literature Association. Association Pp. 210–227. Quarterly contact between Nancy Drew and a series of “exotic global girl strangers” who need her assistance to solve a mystery. Nancy Drew’s interactions with such strangers frame a number of fantasies about racial difference within the series. In this article, I focus on three of these imaginings: the construction of girls from across the globe as a “global sisterhood”; the representation of Nancy Drew as benevolent global girl tourist; and Nancy’s desire and ability to masquerade as a girl of color. Through the figure of the exotic global girl stranger, a variety of racialized girlhoods are put up for consumption by characters in the series as well as by actual readers. In what follows, I focus on the representations of girlhood within three ex- emplary titles, two from the original series, The Mysterious Mannequin (1970) and The Thirteenth Pearl, and one of the contemporary Papercutz graphic novels, The Girl Who Wasn’t There (2006).2 I choose these three texts as a way to historicize how travel and the figure of the exotic global girl stranger serve as essential elements of the Nancy Drew brand. Throughout, I seek to uncover a “politics of girlhood” that the figure of the exotic global girl stranger blots out within the series: namely, that Nancy Drew’s “feminism” or “girl power” is relational and relies on the imaginary and ultimately hierarchical representations of racialized global girls from a range of non–North American, non- European locations. What is at stake here is how the imaginary representation and marketing of exotic global girl strangers to sell the Nancy Drew series relates to contemporary theorizations of North American girls as subjects who find empowerment by consuming or performing “Other” racial and/or ethnic identities. Theorizing Girlhoods in the Nancy Drew Series This analysis contributes to previous Nancy Drew scholarship,3 as well as to the interdisciplinary field of girls’ studies,4 by building on and adding to previous critical analyses of Nancy Drew that focus on race, gender, and nation within the context of postcoloniality.5 Specifically, I contextualize this paper within transnational girlhood studies.6 This strand of girls’ studies originates in transnational feminist theoretical practices (Ahmed; Grewal), and is concerned with how “global capitalist and imperialist dynamics operate within the material practices and representations of ‘girlhood’ or ‘the girl child’” (Weems 179). Just as this approach delineates the differences between and among women, it also allows for an attention to hierarchical relationships between and among girls—often theorized in popular discourse as apolitical, vulnerable, and/or innocent subjects—within the context of globalization. Sara Ahmed’s theorization of the figure of the stranger inStrange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality structures my analysis of the visual and discursive representations of global girls within the series. The Nancy Drew materials demonstrate what Ahmed defines as “stranger fetishism”—a prac- tice through which the figure of the stranger is imbued with meaning. In the Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series 211 Nancy Drew series, girls of color from a range of non–North American and non-European locales are fetishized as exotic global girl strangers who are just different enough from Nancy Drew to suggest that racial and cultural difference can be bridged through consuming or passing as a racialized girl. Thus “Stranger fetishism is a fetishism of figures: it invests the figure of the stranger with a life of its own insofar as it cuts ‘the stranger’ off from the histories of its determination” (Ahmed 5; italics in original). The series invests the figure of the exotic global girl stranger with meaning so that girlhood—rather than race, religion, ethnicity, and/or nationality––becomes the universal category that binds all girls together. In the process, larger histories of imperialism are denied in favor of a representation of Nancy Drew as benevolent (and politi- cally innocent) global girl.7 The representations of girlhood within the Nancy Drew series, then, are em- bedded within complicated global flows of goods and media depicting fictional representations of Other places. Ahmed writes that “[t]he flow of images and objects across border lines invites us to consider how identity is reconstituted in an intimate relationship to ‘the strange’ and the exotic” (116). The figure of the exotic global girl stranger in the Nancy Drew series offers consumers a “close encounter” with this exotic Other. Tracing the representation of the girl stranger from the original series through the recent graphic novels under- scores the ways in which difference is elided through the fetishism of the exotic global girl stranger. Thus this project adds to transnational girlhood studies as it attends to differences between and among girls, rather than the similarities between them, to make visible the limits of theorizing empowerment only in relationship to gender. This is particularly important, because current efforts to market Nancy Drew rely on tapping discourses of “girl power” as a way to sell the series. About the girl sleuth, an author for USA Today writes: “An ultra-early icon of girl power, Nancy had the smarts and feistiness that made her an inspiration to teens and preteens in the 1930s” (Strauss). Nancy Drew as plucky American girl enters into larger cultural debates about girls as subjects in the public sphere through the ideological work of her branding. The series itself is a commodity, aimed at selling a particular idea about American girlhood as an identity that attends to the global. Branding Nancy Drew Nancy Drew remains a “best-selling literary franchise” (“Warner Bros.”). The original Nancy Drew mystery series, as well as the newly branded Nancy Drew, Girl Detective™ books and graphic novels, are authored and illustrated by multiple people. “Carolyn Keene” is a pseudonym for several authors, most famously Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. Nancy Drew was created by Edward Stratemeyer, tycoon of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century children’s series fiction, and published by Grosset & Dunlap until 1979; since 1984, Nancy Drew’s image has been owned and controlled 212 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly by Simon & Schuster, a division of the multinational CBS and one of the four largest English-language publishers. The Nancy Drew character has been licensed for products that include board games, television shows, films, and graphic novels. Simon & Schuster relies on savvy and zealous marketing to “expand Drew’s presence as a brand” (Strauss par. 8), aiming its products at “a core target group”: tween girls ages eight to twelve. Since the mid-1980s, Simon & Schuster has pursued an aggressive publishing program, offering several Nancy Drew lines designed for different ages and book outlets (Greenberg 67). These books are carefully designed, both visually and in terms of plot and character, to sell to the girls who read them.

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