title: Harriet Stratemeyer Adams and the Nancy Drew mystery stories : feminist gender tales, 1930-1990 : the construction and destruction of a heroine
title: Feminist gender tales, 1930-1990 : the construction and destruction of a heroine
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Berryman, Martha Ann, 1946-
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 1990
Subjects: subject: Harriet Stratemeyer Adams
subject: Nancy Drew mystery stories
subject: Nancy Drew characters
subject: Criticism
subject: Interpretation
subject: Heroines in literature
subject: Sex role in literature
subject: Girls in literature
subject: Feminism in literature
subject: Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer--Characters
subject: Keene, Carolyn--Nancy Drew mystery stories
subject: Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer--Criticism and interpretation
subject: Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer--Influence
subject: Heroines in literature
subject: Sex role in literature
subject: Girls in literature
subject: Feminism in literature

description: In this thesis I will present Harriet Stratemeyer Adams as an individual storyteller who has influenced and generated changes in the larger "cultural-script" (Sanday 1981) concerning gender roles in American society. She conveyed her ideas and effected her influence by gaining access to a public medium of mass communication, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, and using it to produce The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, 1930 - 1982. Through these fictional formula series stories Mrs. Adams influenced girls' self-perceptions and their perceived fields of action and adult potential. Interviews I have held with women who remember reading Nancy Drew stories in their childhood attest to the influence of the stories in the adult women's lives. It is the incorporation of the stories into active memory, as well as Mrs. Adams' culturally responsive feminist message embedded in contemporary social conventions and her creative work with character portrayals, which locates this analysis in the anthropology of lived culture. The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories were organized around a heroine who deals head-on with social issues of class and gender definitions. Through her heroine Mrs. Adams addressed social and economic concerns of the twentieth century America by setting out plots of resolution, challenging prevailing social codes and structures. Her stories influenced generations of girls who grew up to become "real-life heroines" taking direct action in real-life social problems. Looking at how social structures are ultimately influenced through the creative works of an individual and the effect of that work as it is received by others provides insights about the role of the individual in culture and how cultural transformations are generated (Radford 1986). It is also useful to examine how such individual "heretical" (Bourdieu 1977) works are vulnerable to mediation by agents of the dominant culture. Four periods of the Nancy Drew stories will be included in my analysis: Mrs. Adams' original stories were published 1930 - 1960, the re-writes of the previous stories occurred during 1960 - 1975, the new stories written during the 1960 - 1975 period which have a similar revisionary quality, the stories written after the revisionary period, and finally, the new Nancy Drew stories 1986 - 1990 written and published after Mrs. Adams' death. I will treat the original stories as the base for my analysis and address the changes in the stories as they reflect cultural responses to women's changing status in American culture