Out of Reach: The Ideal Girl in American Girls’ Serial Literature

157 Pages·2019·0.656 MB·English

by  Kate G. Harper

Out of Reach
Out of Reach: The Ideal Girl in American Girls’ Serial Literature traces
the journey of the ideal girl through American girls’ series in the twentieth
century. Who is the ideal girl? In what ways does the trope of the ideal girl
rely on the exclusion and erasure of Othered girls? How does the trope
retain its power through cultural shifts? Drawing from six popular girls’
series that span the twentieth century, Kate G. Harper explores the role of
girls’ series in constructing a narrow ideal of girlhood, one that is out of
reach for the average American girl reader. Girls’ series reveal how, over
time, the ideal girl trope strengthens and becomes naturalized through
constant reiteration. From the transitional girl at the turn of the century
in Dorothy Dale to the “liberated” romantic of Sweet Valley High, these
texts provide girls with an appealing model of girlhood, urging all girls
to aspire to the unattainable ideal. Out of Reach illuminates the ways in
which the ideal girl trope accommodates social changes, taking in that
which makes it stronger and further solidifying its core.
Kate G. Harper holds a PhD (Arizona State University) and an MA
(Georgia State University) in Women and Gender Studies. She has taught
courses on gender in literature, popular culture, and daily life in the
Departments of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University
and the University of Colorado Boulder. She has previously published
work on the Nancy Drew series in Girlhood Studies and is a coeditor of
Girls’ Sexualities and the Media (2013).
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Bronwyn Lowe
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Kristen B. Proehl
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Carissa Turner Smith
Out of Reach
The Ideal Girl in American Girls’ Serial Literature
Kate G. Harper
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
Out of Reach
The Ideal Girl in American
Girls’ Serial Literature
Kate G. Harper
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Kate G. Harper to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
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trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-33081-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-31789-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Anya

Contents
Foreword viii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction: An American Girl at Her Best 1
1 A Girl of Today: Merging Models of Girlhood
in Dorothy Dale 13
2 Who Is Nancy Drew? The Arrival of the Great
Girl Sleuth 30
3 The Ideal Girl Goes to Work: Negotiating
the Fractured Fifties 53
4 The Baby-Sitters Club Sells Diversity 73
5 Sweet Valley High Romances the Ideal Girl 93
Conclusions 117
Bibliography 127
Index 142
Foreword
My fascination for the culture of girlhood began in my family’s basement
in Queens, New York, in the late 1950s. The knotty pine bookcase built
by my grandfather housed dozens of girls’ serial books that had belonged
to my mother and her cousins in the 1930s. I was completely enamored
of the musty, dog-eared books that transported me to another time and
place, and I reveled in the adventures of Beverly Gray, the Radio Girls,
and Janet Warner. Soon I discovered Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, Trixie
Belden, and numerous other girls’ series so popular in the 1950s and
1960s. I remember what a treat it was to get to buy a new Nancy Drew
at Friendly Frost and to read and reread these treasured books under the
covers at night well past my bedtime. To this day, my own bookshelves
are filled with the same books and others I have continued to collect
through the years.
This early passion led to an academic career as a Women and Gender
Studies professor whose research focused on the popular artifacts of girl-
hood. The field of Girls’ Studies has changed a great deal since I gave my
first paper on representations of female delinquency in films of the 1920s
at the Organization of American Historians Meeting in 1987. Kate G.
Harper is emblematic of the new scholars in the field. Our paths first
crossed in 2009, when she entered the fledging Doctoral Program in Gen-
der Studies at Arizona State University. I could hardly wait to meet the
new graduate student whose work centered on Nancy Drew and whose
research interests so closely mirrored my own. I knew it was going to
be the beginning of a wonderful collaboration, and it has been that and
more as Kate has become both a trusted colleague and a friend.
Having supervised this work in its first incarnation as a dissertation, it
is particularly heartening to read it in its current iteration. Out of Reach
examines the ways that serial literature reflects, perpetuates, and rein-
forces cultural understandings of what it means to be a girl in the twen-
tieth century and how those meanings “sedimented” over time. Using
discursive analysis and literary criticism, this study traces the genealogy
of the trope of the ideal girl through representative girls’ series, includ-
ing Dorothy Dale, Nancy Drew, Vicki Barr and Cherry Ames, the Baby-
Sitters Club, and Sweet Valley High. Instead of being a narrative history
Foreword ix
of girls’ serial literature, however, this book focuses on the most salient
moments of production. That is, it examines the points at which contra-
dictions and contestations reveal significant discursive formations in the
genre. She contextualizes these productive moments in the material con-
ditions that created them. Out of Reach is particularly adept at demon-
strating how cultural and historical conditions create a context in which
the “ideal girl” is disseminated and reproduced and underscores the ways
in which girls’ lived experiences and cultural practices are connected to
cultural texts.
This project constitutes an important contribution to the interdisci-
plinary mapping of girlhood because serial literature is a major source
of the process of becoming a girl. Girls’ serial literature offers a useful
window through which to view the ways in which gender ideology is pro-
duced, reproduced, or subverted. This work further illuminates the ways
in which the process of representation produces gender, race, and class
inequities as well as privilege, difference, and identities. It also points
to the possibility of challenging and reconfiguring these representations.
One of the strengths of the study is the ways in which it interrogates the
tension between the ideal girl and her nonideal counterparts and how
they are reproduced in raced, classed, and sexualized ways. Out of Reach
focuses on girls as active subjects who interact with cultural forms as
well as resist and reproduce these discourses. This work is a significant
contribution to the scholarship on girlhood and popular culture, because
in denaturalizing the reproduction and dissemination of the ideal girl, it
reveals normative gender narratives and images. It also reminds us that
girlhood is not a monolithic, uncontested construction.
While Out of Reach is primarily a scholarly work, it will also appeal
to a more popular audience. Many older women still derive enormous
pleasure from the idealized tropes of series literature. This nostalgia is
illustrated by the numerous fan sites, conventions, blogs, and Pinterest
pages dedicated to girls’ series. Perhaps their continued popularity sug-
gests that as young readers, girls were able to create alternative meanings
and thus alternative identities from series’ protagonists. One of the inher-
ent pleasures of reading (and rereading) girls’ series was seeing beyond
the gender ideologies and imagining the possibilities ahead. Girls’ serial
literature offered predictability, comfort, and endless hours of enter-
tainment to its readers. I am both a historian of girlhood and a former
consumer of those same cultural products. Out of Reach reconciles that
duality – that of the researcher interested in theorizing social prescrip-
tions of girlhood and the young girl reading under the covers to discover
how Nancy ultimately saves the day.
Georganne Scheiner Gillis
Professor Emerita
Women and Gender Studies
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona 2019