According to the Polls...
Our winner in the what-should-a-girl-sleuth-boyfriend-do category still lies with the role of heroic rescuer! In other words, we still have a soft spot in our hearts for the Ned Nickersons of the girl-sleuth world, even as the options of being a dithering bystander watching his ladylove’s peril, or partnering with her in her detective adventures, showed strongly too. While our attitudes about boys standing aside and letting their ladies pursue their goals, or joining up with them as equal partners, have clearly grown a bit, we still seem to favor the girl-sleuth boyfriend as knight-in-shining-armor coming to rescue the heroine in peril. Maybe our ideas about the man’s role versus the woman’s role aren’t as evolved as we think?
Bear in mind, though, that Nancy herself was an evolution from older ideas that girls were delicate creatures to be kept on short leashes (so to speak) and protected against the world. Carson Drew letting his vivacious teenaged daughter Nancy loose on the world with her blue roadster and proclivity for getting into trouble was itself quite an advance on the idea, which was only about a decade old at the time, that girls were fully capable and autonomous human beings. The right of women to vote was only ten years old itself when Nancy appeared on the scene, and the idea of a teenaged girl gallivanting around sleuthing (even fictionally) had to be shocking to many of the public!
So perhaps Ned was a bit of a compromise, a way to allow the newly (partially) liberated “weaker sex” to step out on her own without giving up the long-ingrained instinct to protect her. One might think that such an attitude would be rather passé by now—and maybe it is in real life—but apparently we like our girl sleuths to need their heroes to get them out of peril! Or is it just a Nancy Drew thing? The floor is open for debate…
Our winner in the what-should-a-girl-sleuth-boyfriend-do category still lies with the role of heroic rescuer! In other words, we still have a soft spot in our hearts for the Ned Nickersons of the girl-sleuth world, even as the options of being a dithering bystander watching his ladylove’s peril, or partnering with her in her detective adventures, showed strongly too. While our attitudes about boys standing aside and letting their ladies pursue their goals, or joining up with them as equal partners, have clearly grown a bit, we still seem to favor the girl-sleuth boyfriend as knight-in-shining-armor coming to rescue the heroine in peril. Maybe our ideas about the man’s role versus the woman’s role aren’t as evolved as we think?
Well, someone's gotta save those silly little girls when they get in over their heads ...
ReplyDelete--Lars Beckert
it's a stereotype, and stereotypes are so for a reason, plus like Mr Beckert says, who else is there to save them, cos in this type of novel, the police are dunderheads who follow helplessly in the wake of the young detective. plus it's one of those romantic thingies everyone talks about, where the dude saves his girl in times of extreme peril.
ReplyDeleteDex
You know, of course, that the hero rescuing the damsel goes at least as far back in Western literature as Perseus and Andromeda; the damsel Andromeda is chained to a rock and menaced by a seamonster, and Perseus, seeing her in peril and instantly falling in love with her, comes to the rescue by killing the monster and freeing the girl, with the requisite Happily Ever After ending following. So perhaps it is a stereotype, but one deeply ingrained into our Western culture. Old habits are hard to break, I suppose...
ReplyDelete