Читать книгу A Companion to Children's Literature - Группа авторов - Страница 51

When Hunt describes pre-1970s mainstream children’s literature as reflecting an image of childhood innocence, he deliberately excludes “popular” texts because they were so much less circumspect. Prominent among the texts voraciously consumed by young readers, yet criticized by adult gatekeepers, were the series books produced in large quantities by stables of ghost writers, the most famous being Edward L. Stratemeyer’s Syndicate. Stratemeyer began his career in the 1890s as a writer of dime novels, but increased his influence on children’s literature exponentially by creating the Syndicate and hiring other writers to create books based on his ideas and skeleton plots (Donelson 1978). The most well-known series produced by the Syndicate are Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift, but there were dozens of others as well, with different titles focusing on male and female audiences and featuring adolescents solving mysteries, travelling the world, flying planes, and engaging in other exciting careers. Nancy Drew, as a model of independence, resourcefulness, and intelligence, has resonated particularly effectively with young women, and post-1970 the series has drawn scholarly attention as lively as the multiple reincarnations of Nancy in text and on screen. Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov (1995) and Melanie Rehak (2005) are among the scholars who have publicized the roles of Mildred Wirt Benson and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams in creating the “original” Nancy Drew – though originality is an elusive concept when discussing a ghost-written character who has gone through so many revisions. During the 1930s and 4190s, Benson wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew novels under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene, which would continue to be used for all Nancy Drew titles. However, Adams, who inherited the Syndicate after her father’s death in 1930, rewrote many of Benson’s titles, not only updating the language and removing some of the most racist elements (more on this below), but also completely altering the plot in many cases and revising Nancy’s character to align with a more conservative image of femininity. The rewritten books, with their distinctive gold spines, quickly became the standard edition, and scholars only began to redirect attention to the earlier versions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Nancy Drew books also support a status quo based on class hierarchy. As Carolyn Garpan (2009) notes more generally about girls’ series novels, they often “feature wealthy girls who have every material thing a girl could ever want. If the protagonist is from a middle or lower class family, she … proves she is worthy by obeying and protecting the system” (pp. xi–xii). However, there are exceptions to this rule, particularly in the series created outside the ghost-writing system. One example is the Judy Bolton series, written by Margaret Sutton between 1932 and 1967, which tends to challenge rather than confirm existing hierarchies of class as well as gender (Moran 2009; Parry 1997). Perhaps because of the outlets that girls’ series offered for women who felt limited by the options provided by their society, and the lasting effect the books had on those women – novelist Bobbie Ann Mason’s memoir The Girl Sleuth (1975) has become a classic example – there has been more scholarship about the girls’ series (see also D’Amico 2016) than the boys’, though the latter has also received some attention (Greenwald 2004).

Regardless of the popularity of series books among young people during the first half of the twentieth century, librarians en masse rejected the novels as lacking in both style and substance. A particularly vivid expression of this opinion was “Blowing Out the Boy’s Brains” (1914) by Boy Scouts of America librarian Franklin Mathiews. According to Emily Hamilton-Honey (2012), who cites Mathiews as a key Stratemeyer opponent, “Stratemeyer felt that he was producing books that were morally clean, patriotic, and gave good models for behavior. His books were everything that dime novels were not and had never been; he wanted young people to be reading books that were good for them and would not give them evil ideas or bad habits” (p. 772). Hamilton-Honey argues, however, that adult resistance to series novels was more about their connections to youthful autonomy than their quality or morality; she points out that in addition to depicting empowered young people, they also engendered a sense of economic control in child readers who might be able to afford the cheap prices for the books they desired (p. 773). While series books had been popular as well in the nineteenth century, Hamilton-Honey suggests that the new consumerist direction of twentieth-century series constituted a significant departure from the “safe, community-centered space that encouraged obedience and selflessness as well as social activism,” which was depicted in series by Louisa May Alcott, Martha Finley (author of the Elsie Dinsmore series) and Isabella Macdonald Alden (p. 769). If aetonormativity prompted the division of children’s literature from that for adults and justified adults’ protectively restrictive attitude toward mainstream texts of the twentieth century, then series fiction, along with other rising popular forms like the comic book, gave children the opportunity to claim some cultural territory for their own. The lasting personal and scholarly influence of this fiction should serve as a cautionary tale for adults who assume that their judgment necessarily outranks that of younger readers.

While twentieth-century adult gatekeepers rejected series fiction on aesthetic grounds, more recent assessments find strikingly problematic elements in these novels’ depictions of non-white characters. As Tanfer Emin Tunc comments in “Manifest Destiny’s Child: Mary Hazelton Blanchard Wade and the Literature of American Empire” (2017), the creation of the Stratemeyer Syndicate aligned with the inception of Stratemeyer’s “Old Glory” series, which formed part of a robust imperialist trend in children’s literature in the early decades of the twentieth century (p. 249; see also Sands-O’Connor 2014). Later in the century, attempts to address the most overtly racist images only amounted to whitewashing, as in the Nancy Drew series when Adams simply removed the villainized characters rather than integrating positive images of Black, Asian, Indigenous, or Latinx people. As with so much United States history, therefore, the tradition of US children’s series books intersects with racist ideas from the very beginning.