1997

19.3

Michelle Gibson and Deborah T. Meem
The Case of the Lovely Lesbian: Mabel Maney’s Queering of Nancy Drew

Nancy Clue and Cherry Aimless spend the first night of their acquaintance making passionate love in a San Francisco motel room. Bess Marvel and George Fey have been lesbian lovers for years. Midge Fontaine is a handsome dark-haired butch. Joe and Frank are “Hardly” boys. Something queer has happened to the chums who shared a gay childhood during a time when assumptions were straight, and possibilities were narrow. Mabel Maney’s The Not-So-Nice Nurse appeared in 1993. Since then, Maney has written and published The Good-For-Nothing Girlfriend (1994) and The Ghost in the Closet (1995). These books are primarily inspired by the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames girls’ serial books of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. In general, Maney’s books break all the rules that the writers of the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames serials worked so hard to establish. While the Drew and Ames books were respectable, asexual, earnest, and heterosexist, Maney’s are bawdy, sexy, funny, and lesbian.

Maney undermines heterosexist assumptions about lesbianism, sex, and gender transgression with coded language and representations of sex and gender that resist the heterosexism of the larger culture and introduce lesbian, gay male, and transgendered rhetoric to the discourse used in the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames series. Maney’s novels reject several notions that were assumed by the Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames writers to be self-evident: (1) in mid-century America lesbianism did not exist; (2) young women do not fall in love and have passionate sex with each other; and (3) gender transgression is odd and dangerous. The characters in the original series inhabit a heterosexual utopia in which young girls learn to be independent enough to be adventurous but not so independent that they challenge white, middle-class social order. Maney’s characters, on the other hand, inhabit a kind of lesbian utopia in which even the straightest of them either don’t notice or don’t much care about the lesbianism of the main characters, in which straight 1950s middle-class language and imagery are seen through the lens of the Gay (nineteen-) Nineties, and in which gender transgression goes virtually unnoticed. Therefore, once readers have encountered Nancy Clue and her cohorts, they can no longer encounter Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and their casts of characters on the same terms.

This transformation reflects the realities of late twentieth-century American culture. In order to resist oppression, lesbians and gay men have of necessity changed the American idiom, and in so doing have also changed the world view of many Americans, who no longer believe that same-sex love is shameful, but celebrate it as an authentic form of self-expression. Similarly, assuming gender to be both political and performative, many now see gender transgression as at once a form of resistance and a form of play. In this essay we will examine how Mabel Maney’s three novels take up the issues of language, sexuality, and gender transgression (acknowledging, of course, that they do much more as well).

CODED LANGUAGE

Over the past century, lesbians and gay men have “queered” the American idiom; words that were once used against us now belong to us. Therefore, we now have at our disposal a kind of linguistic “magic wand” that allows us to recreate the literary artifacts of a time when queers were written out of existence. Maney, an important contemporary godmother, has waved the wand, and presto! Through the fairy dust we see a literary utopia in which lesbians and gay men existed and were acknowledged all along. Unlike the Drew/Ames books, which so fully assume a straight, white, middle-class girl reader that they make her invisible, the Maney books assume an adult reader who understands, on some level, the complexities of race, gender, and class. Maney capitalizes on the fact that as literary texts the girls’ serial books are transformed by 1990s readers reading in a changed culture and with a changed idiom. Today they are full of the possibility of sex, of lesbianism, and of gender transgression. Maney’s expanded contemporary idiom invests heterosexual language with lesbian meaning. Assuming a lesbian audience, Maney’s books base a lot of their humor on the concept of the lesbian “in” joke. They operate by superimposing the 1990s idiom upon 1950s plot and setting in such a way as to assume reader understanding of the incongruity. Words like queer, gay, and out are packed with implications that are present only because of the queer content of Maney’s works. The words’ straight definitions follow rather than precede their lesbian definitions.

For example, near the beginning of A Ghost in the Closet, Cherry says to Velma, “Midge is acting queer,” to which Velma responds, “What else is new?” Cherry insists, “No, Velma, Midge is acting very queer. Not at all like herself” (82-83). Here and throughout her books Maney embeds the word queer in a discourse and plot that never let us forget that the word is doing double time. All straight bets are off; Cherry must actively resist Velma’s lesbian interpretation of the word in order to foreground its heterosexual usage. The word queer also appears frequently in the early Nancy Drew books. In The Secret of the Old Clock it describes a person: “Some people thought him queer” (45); in The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion it describes a place: “What a quaint old house, and in such a queer setting!” (5); and in The Secret at Shadow Ranch it describes an event: “There’s something queer about the whole affair” (100). At the time of its earlier appearance, few outside the underground homosexual community would have read "queer" to mean anything other than "peculiar." Today’s readers, especially those in Maney’s audience, cannot read it as anything but "queer homosexual."

The same is true of the word gay. In A Ghost in the Closet, Uncle Nelly cries to Nancy Clue and the Hardly Boys, “Gaily forward!” (71). Here, the “joke,” recognizable to any American queer, is multi-layered: (1) it assumes "gay" to mean queer; (2) it plays on the word nelly, another slang term for "homosexual"; (3) it represents a general exhortation to gay/lesbian people to wear their queerness with joy and pride; and most significantly, (4) it replaces the phrase “straight ahead” in the everyday parlance of many 1990s lesbians and gay men, as the idea straight is excised in favor of the idea gay. This joke is based upon the conscious way queer subcultures have changed the larger culture’s idiom in order to write ourselves into it. Uncle Nelly’s exclamation is not his own; it belongs to his subculture, so his use of it invites us all in to the moment he shares with Nancy and her chums. Just as Maney highlights the conscious change in idiom, Keene and Wells resist (unsuccessfully, we argue) that change. In the girls’ serials "gay" is resolutely straight; it means "joyous" every time it is used. In The Secret at Shadow Ranch we read, “Gaily the three girls set forth for the distant town” (76); in The Hidden Staircase, “the girls chatted gaily as they prepared the food” (90); in The Secret of the Old Clock, “Conversation at supper was gay and animated” (56); in Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, the narrator tells us that Cherry misses “the bustling clinic and the gay crowded nurses’ dining room” (213). But our cultural idiom has changed since the 1930s and 1940s, so the 1990s reader of these early books must do as Cherry Aimless does when she is talking to Velma: consciously brush aside the queer definition of the word in order to retrieve the straight definition.

It seems obvious that the writers of the early Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books were on some level dismissing a popular use of the words queer and gay, because as much as a century earlier, the words had begun to be used to indicate alternative sexualities. For instance, the word gay was used interchangeably with prostitute in the Victorian satirical journal Punch as early as 1857. By the 1890s, the word queer had also begun to slide in meaning; as a homosexual subculture began to arise in large cities, its self-identifying jargon developed as well. Given this definitional history, then, it is not surprising to realize that by the 1930s and 1940s, when the first Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books appeared, both those words possessed fairly well-developed subcultural connotations. By the 1970s, post-Stonewall and post-Gay liberation, even mainstream cultural institutions such as the New York Times bowed under the weight of common usage and decreed that from henceforth and forevermore, "gay" would mean "homosexual." So 1990s readers both of the Nancy Drew/Cherry Ames books and of the Mabel Maney spoofs encounter these books with an understanding of the changed idiom.

The words out and closet, unlike the words queer and gay, only have lesbigay connotations when they are used in connection with sexually transgressive people. These words are not queer because of their usage as words, but because of their representation of ideas. The closet, in lesbigay usage, connotes the self-hating “place” where gayness is concealed, and more generally, any self-protective but emotionally unhealthy concealment of transgressive sexuality. Choosing to be "out" means refusing to hide sexually transgressive identity; the related idea of outing refers to revealing another’s closeted sexual transgression (a violation of the unspoken code of protection) as a political act. Here is where Maney takes the in joke to an even deeper level by making it dependent on a particularized idiom rather than on a change in larger idiom. Maney does exactly what the Ames and Drew books expect the reader to resist: she privileges the sexual, transgressive usage over the asexual, conventional usage. And, by rejecting the notion that the Drew and Ames books can avoid being influenced by lesbigay existence, Maney creates a context that allows lesbigay readers to inject our existence into the older books.

For instance, in Maney’s The Ghost in the Closet, the closet is the place where knowledge is found; in different closets we find the Hardly Family Command Center, a space for Midge and Velma to have sex, pictures that reveal that the Hardly Boys’ father is really a woman, and a storehouse of memories about the sexually transgressive childhoods of Uncle Nelly and Fanny/Fennel Hardly. Because Maney makes sexual transgression the subject of her books, only lesbigay conceptions of closet and out are considered by the reader. At one point, Uncle Nelly cries,

I remember now--there was a closet under the stairs at our charming cottage at Lake Merrimen. Your father and I would play games in there on rainy afternoons, and use it for a hiding place when it came time to eat our vegetables. . . . Mother was forever urging us to come out of the closet, so in 1923, when she redecorated the cottage, she had it boarded up. (113)

There is no misreading this passage. Uncle Nelly is speaking about coming out of the closet in which sexually transgressive identity and behavior are hidden. Nelly, out of the closet since 1923 (these books are set in the late 1950s), has to think carefully to remember a time when he and his sibling played “games” in the closet at the lake where men are merry. And, in this lesbigay utopia, mothers urge their children to bring their games out into the open, to come out of the closet. Interestingly, Fanny/Fennel Hardly does not come out of the closet as a transgendered person until Frank Hardly and his chums discover childhood pictures which reveal that the person they thought was a male was born a female. At that point, Uncle Nelly is forced to “out” his sibling by explaining that in order to be taken seriously as a detective Fanny had to become Fennel, that at one point in history (humorously located before 1959 in this book) girls were considered inferior to boys.

The insistent queerness of Maney’s books makes any straight reading of the Drew and Ames books feel weirdly inadequate. Consider this passage from Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, where Cherry, the innocent probationer, tries to find her way to the nurses’ dining room:

[G]etting everything hung away in the closet, . . . [Cherry] walked toward the end of the corridor and boldly went into the first door that looked promising. She found herself in a huge linencloset, with sheets and blankets and towels stacked in neat V’s. Cherry backed out, and headed for a glass door that might lead to stairs. It led down a short corridor and to another door. Without thinking to knock, Cherry walked in. A very drowsy nurse was just climbing out of bed. “I--I beg your pardon. . . I thought you were the way out.” (23-24)

Maney and her lesbian audience bring much linguistic and imagistic baggage to this passage. Here is one way we might read it: Cherry carefully hangs in her closet the outward signs of who she is, both her “civilian” clothes and her student nurse’s uniform. Feeling lost and between identities, she wanders into another closet, where she finds intimate items stacked in a sexually suggestive manner. In alarm, she retreats backside first, then bursts into another closed room, where she finds a woman in bed. Not knowing what to say or what to feel, she stammers what the lesbigay reader interprets as literal truth: that the half-dressed woman might be Cherry’s way “out” of her sexual “closet.”

These examples illustrate a particular linguistic phenomenon: when Maney uses language specific to the lesbigay subculture to create recognizable meaning, that language will not be contained within the boundaries of her narrative. Rather, it bleeds into the lexicon of the larger culture, and colors even the most simplistic didactic narratives of that culture. Maney’s use of language can thus be seen as a political act, for it blurs distinctions between genres (adult fiction and girls’ fiction) and cultures (lesbigay and straight). Because Maney recontextualizes rather than replaces the language used by the authors of the Drew and Ames books, it is easy for readers to forget that the lesbian books are not meant to be sequels to the girls’ books in the same way that Scarlett is meant to be a sequel to Gone With the Wind. Cherry Aimless is not a grown up Cherry Ames and Nancy Clue is not a grown up Nancy Drew, but the similarities in language among the books sometimes make us forget the differences. So, Maney subverts the heterosexuality of the girls’ fiction (and of the heterosexist culture it was designed to reflect) by creating a linguistic relationship between the girl serials and her lesbian serial--and by extension, between straight culture and lesbigay culture.

SEXUALITY

Another part of Maney’s political strategy involves subverting the relentlessly asexual intention of the Ames/Drew books for girls by consistently and deliberately introducing the element of lesbian or gay sexuality. Midge and Velma, for instance, seem always to be trying to slip away to have (specifically oral) sex; Cherry barges in on them unannounced several times, in her self-absorption paying no attention to what they might be up to. Yet Cherry is not really as “cherry” as her blundering foolishness might indicate; she and Nancy Clue meet in a lesbian bar, then enjoy a night of hot sex together in Nancy’s motel room--all this before Cherry even knows that Nancy is the girl sleuth she has been reading about and lusting after. And when the Hardly Boys and Nancy Clue arrive at Uncle Nelly’s cottage near Lake Merrimen, they find Nelly tied to a settee. The boys (not Nancy, one notes) rush in to rescue him, assuming that he has been robbed. It turns out that he has only been tied up as part of a sex game with his lover Willy. These three incidents exemplify Maney’s insistence on introducing sex and sexuality into the serial fiction genre. The presence, indeed the high visibility, of sex in the three Maney parodies changes how we read Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames. Maney sensitizes us, as it were, to a way of reading that foregrounds sexuality and integrates it so fully into the text that the reader and writer become complicit in sexualizing rhetoric, action, and imagery. Once initiated to the role of sexual insider, the Maney reader who returns to the Drew and Ames books allows herself to sexualize them, to read them as if their authors are privy to the sexual banter she and Maney share. So, by sexualizing her adult books, Maney by extension sexualizes the juvenile books on which they are based.

Contemporary readers tend to want to read the Drew/Ames books as artifacts of a nostalgia-filled era. There is a tendency to interpret the earlier part of the century as a simpler time when solid rules governed sexual behavior, when people stayed married, when young women worried about nothing more consequential than who would be their next dates, or what they would wear to the next social event. Of course, most of us know that no such time ever existed, and Maney pushes us to read the early 1900s in a different way, to understand the Drew/Ames books less as artifacts and more as deliberate revisions of history designed to promote specifically conservative values and to train women to be bold and adventurous, but traditionally feminine nonetheless. She parodies nostalgic re-visioning of history by placing lesbians and gay men at the center of the 1950s and using their lives and conversations to point out the utter silliness of popular assumptions about that time. Consider these passages from The Ghost in the Closet:

[Cherry] took the stairs two at a time, raced down the hall and burst into Midge and Velma’s room, forgetting in her haste that unannounced entrances into others’ bedchambers can be startling affairs indeed! Midge was so surprised that she flung herself off Velma and went crashing to the floor. . . . Velma smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. . . . Midge got up off the floor, smoothed her hair and took a cigarette from the pack on the night stand. “Always remember to lock the door,” she grumbled. (48-49)

Midge kicked the door shut. The latch clicked into place. She dropped to her knees, pushed up Velma’s slip and began mouthing the soft flesh of Velma’s inner thighs. “I think of you all the time, Velma,” she sighed. “Some days it’s all I can do to walk and talk in your presence.” She laughed ruefully as she slowly pulled down Velma’s panties. A minute later Velma forgot all about their angry exchange. (43)

In these passages, Maney reminds us in no uncertain terms that in her books, (homo)sex is a possibility for every character. Because we all know the nostalgic version of early twentieth-century history, there is instantly a tension between Maney’s sexy subplots and her historical setting (1959). Here, the in joke is double layered; any straight American reader who has been privy to our nation’s tendency to favor nostalgia over accurate history can get the joke, but the lesbigay reader both gets the joke and celebrates it. For lesbigay readers, the joke both pokes fun at the nostalgia that has excluded us from American history, and writes us back in. By training readers to read her books with a dirty mind, then, Maney challenges us to read history in a more accurate light. And, as if challenging our nostalgic, inaccurate memories of history is not enough, she connects her sexy books to the purposefully asexual books which are their inspiration.

Consider how the first of the following two passages (from The Ghost in the Closet) influences our reading of the second (from The Secret of the Old Clock):

“Stand back, Joe,” Willy ordered as he picked up the crowbar and jammed the tool into the wall. Sweat glistened on Willy’s thick corded neck as he pressed his broad powerful shoulder against the rod. He rocked back and forth . . . pulled the heavy bar out of the wall, and with his feet firmly planted on the floor, found another soft spot in which to insert his tool. . . .

Joe’s jaw dropped in admiration as sweat poured down the wedge of the man’s back, causing his snug tee-shirt to cling to his broad torso.

“I’m almost there!” Willy cried.

He thrust his sturdy tool into the pliant wood over and over again. The panel groaned and creaked with each powerful probe, bringing it closer and closer to bursting wide open. . . .

Joe was so excited he could hardly breathe. . . . How long could Willy keep it up? Finally there was a shudder and a heave, and the crowbar found its mark. The entire wall, molding, floorboards and all, seemed to explode and fell in splinters around Willy’s boots. (116)

The young sleuth inserted one end [of a wooden rod] in the space between the hinges and the door, and threw all her weight against the rod. At first the door did not move in the slightest. . . .

As she applied steady pressure to the rod a second time, she saw that the hinges were beginning to give. Encouraged, Nancy again pushed full force on the “lever.”

“It’s coming,” she cried.

Once more she threw her weight against the rod. A hinge tore from the casing and the door sagged. It was now easy to insert the wedge, and Nancy joyously realized that success would soon be hers. With renewed strength she continued her efforts.

Then, just as another hinge gave way, she started to hear footsteps. Someone came running into the study, and a heavy body hurled itself against the door of the closet. (114-15)

The similarities are striking. Both Willy and Nancy insert a sexually suggestive tool/rod/crowbar into a crack/wedge/space, in order to break down a barrier. They throw their full weight repeatedly against their tool, crying out (“I’m almost there!” and “It’s coming”) as they approach success. Both Willy and Nancy are destroying closet doors, though Willy is trying to enter the hidden closet, and Nancy is trying to escape from the closet. But we see immediately how Maney has turned up the butane on the sexual suggestiveness of her description. For one thing, the Willy passage is extended and at least twice as long as the Nancy passage. In addition, Willy’s body is overtly sexualized, through the tight tee-shirt, the sweat, the rippling muscles; Nancy’s body is never mentioned. We see sexy Willy through the admiring eyes of young Joe, who can “Hardly” contain his excitement as Willy’s efforts approach their explosive climax. By contrast, Nancy is viewed through the gaze of that transparent, conventional, asexual girl reader mentioned above. Finally, the Maney passage clearly shows Willy “coming” with a “shudder and a heave” and an explosion of broken closet door shards. Nancy, on the other hand, never quite “comes”; her near-success is thwarted by the arrival of the caretaker, who “hurls” his “heavy body” against the closet door and keeps her confined within.

GENDER TRANSGRESSION

Perhaps the most dramatic political aspect of Maney’s writing is her embracing of gender transgression, both in its historical and current usages. She represents gender transgression both as a strategy for lesbigay survival in a culture which privileges heterosexuality, and as a celebratory, performative element of queer sexual expression. This approach reflects both historical and contemporary lesbigay reality, as “passing” has given way to a sense that gender is fluid, and can be useful as well as confining. In the Mabel Maney books, transgression plays itself out in the author’s refusal to believe that gender is anything more than a social (though socially useful) construction. On the other hand, in the Ames and Drew books, gender transgression is both more subtle and more tied to history. While coded language and the introduction of sexuality allow for an ahistorical reading of the Ames and Drew books, gender transgression remains contextualized by history; for Cherry Ames gender transgression is a means of containing romantic feelings for other women, and for Nancy it is a means of appearing to be independent in a plot that demands dependence. In the Ames books, Cherry transgresses to keep herself in sexual check, in order to deepen her emotional connections to the women around her without actually sexualizing them. In the Drew books, gender transgression functions as a kind of authorial tool to make Nancy appear bold and adventurous, yet not resistant to the dominant culture’s demand that she remain “feminine.” Gender transgression is liberatory to Maney’s characters, functional to Cherry Ames, but finally confining to Nancy Drew.

Maney envisions gender as a social convenience, which one can put on as easily as, say, an apron. Butch Midge and fairy Frank look so much alike as to pass for each other; in fact, Midge (whom the town matrons conveniently assume is Frank) marries Velma at the end of The Case of the Good-For-Nothing Girlfriend. When “Midge” appears in a frilly apron preparing a picnic, Cherry nearly faints from surprise--until she learns that Midge is cleaning the grill, and it’s really Frank in frills. One of the plot twists in The Ghost in the Closet is the revelation that “Fennel” Hardly, husband of Mrs. H. and father of Frank and Joe, was born Fanny Hardly and has been passing in public as a man for years. These two are examples of perhaps the oldest type of gender transgression: passing for the purpose of usurping heterosexual privilege. Passing is a kind of benign homosexual gender transgression designed to achieve equality in a discriminatory heterosexual society. Midge passes as a man so she can marry Velma. Fanny is able to work as a detective, marry a woman, and adopt and raise Frank and Joe because she passes as a man. And, finally, Frank is able to dupe the ever-dupable Cherry, providing his entire queer family with a good laugh, because he passes as a woman.

In the Ames books, Cherry is only emotionally transgressive. She transgresses gender boundaries in the only way her time would allow the main character of a young girl’s book to transgress: in her mind. At one point in Student Nurse, she says of Marjory Baker, the young, golden-haired head nurse, “If I were a man . . . I’d be in love with her” (165). In Senior Nurse, Cherry romances Mildred, her young probationer “adoptee.” In a “favorite French way,” Cherry creates a nosegay of six carnations, three pink and three white, and pins it on Mildred saying, “There, my love” (172). Cherry then goes on to act as Mildred’s suitor, taking her out for a fancy meal and two sodas and keeping her out so late that the girls must call a taxicab to hurry them back to their dormitories. As the two girls part, Mildred bids Cherry goodnight, saying, “I liked it. Let’s do it again soon” (175). Cherry replies, “As soon as we have a few cents in our jeans again. . . . Good night, Carnation,” then goes off to her dormitory “feeling warmly satisfied” (176). In both of these situations, Cherry takes on what is in her era a masculine role, silently falling in love with a woman who has authority over her, then romancing (shamelessly) a woman over whom she has authority. In fact, she acts toward Mildred exactly as handsome intern Lex Upham acts toward her just a few pages later--romantic, aggressive, in charge. Nowhere in the Ames books is it suggested that lesbian sex takes place, but in both these cases Cherry clearly has romantic feelings for another woman, which she can express only by transgressing the boundaries of gender.

In the early Nancy Drew stories, Nancy is carefully positioned between her chums Bess and George. Bess is all girl--plump, cautious, and boy-crazy; George (a girl with a man’s name) is variously described as boyish, athletic, and a tomboy. Nancy splits the difference. She possesses many stereotypically male attributes: she shoots a gun, rides even better than George, drives her own car, is independent, courageous, risk-taking, smart, and resilient. Certainly these are “transgressive” attributes for a girl. At the same time, however, Nancy is carefully described as conventionally feminine: she dresses fashionably and is even perfectly accessorized (that ubiquitous handbag saves the day many times), is unfailingly polite and discreet, and dates boys. “Carolyn Keene” shows us a Nancy who can apparently do anything; and this image is designed for (white, middle-class, presumably heterosexual) girl readers to admire. But Keene also makes clear that Nancy Drew is never to usurp male privilege; thus Nancy’s transgressive behavior is finally squelched with a healthy dose of gender role conformity, monitored by powerful males. Let us return to Nancy’s attempt to escape from the closet. Putting aside her fear of isolation and darkness, resourceful Nancy figures out a way to force the closet door using a curtain rod as a lever. A reader who has warmed up on Mabel Maney sees Nancy as powerfully sexualized in this passage, using her “tool” to break out of the locked “closet” of restrictive heterosexuality. But this coitus is interruptus, as a man slams the closet door shut again. Nancy then must earn her way out of the closet by convincing the caretaker that she is not a man posing as a woman; she proves her femininity with a “long, loud, feminine scream” (115). Before he agrees to open the door, Jeff Tucker “takes care” that Nancy remains within conventional heterosexual gender expectations; in fact, she must perform (straight) femininity by screaming. Thus for Nancy Drew, gender transgression allows her only a superficial freedom; when it really matters, she is forced to conform, and the conformity reinforces her confinement to the closet.

CONCLUSION

In her article “The Rhetoric of Laughter,” Julia Allen analyzes the function of humor in Maney’s The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse. Allen theorizes that oppressed groups use humor to create and maintain solidarity in two ways: (1) by laughing at themselves (and earlier versions of themselves), and (2) by laughing at those who oppress them. We agree with Allen that these two manifestations of humor are present in the Maney books, and we see a third aspect as well--the flipped relationship of gay and straight in her fictional world. The foregrounding of gay relationships allows Maney to highlight and reveal the ludicrousness of several assumptions about homosexuality that have been and still are common in American culture. First, in Maney’s books the only characters who die are straight, and their deaths seem inconsequential except when they create problems for the protagonists, e.g., disposal of bodies, or having to defend oneself in court. This parallels the current attitude about gay men who die of AIDS, whose disease was inconsequential until it attacked hemophiliacs and other “innocent” (read “non-gay”) individuals. Second, homosexual romance is seen as the norm among the characters. Like straights in the “real world,” these characters assume their own normalcy. Straight relationships in the books are either asexual (Judge and Mrs. Meeks) or covertly queer (Mr. and Mrs. Hardly). All romance is, in fact, queer; butch-femme roles are normalized over sex-specific gender expectations. Third, all characters are considered homosexual unless and until proven otherwise. Thus, transgendered sexuality and butch-femme are seen as exclusively queer constructions, not as imitations of heterosexual role models. Maney never assumes that her butch or transgendered characters want to be men; rather, they perform maleness to acquire privilege.

By parodying heterosexist assumptions about the way the world works, Maney reveals the fluidity of such assumptions and finally makes them seem like aspects of a cultural hoax. When we read her books, we are constantly reminded that they are built on fantastic and wonderful queer illusions; that knowledge forces us to realize that the world they parody is in itself built on straight illusions. The Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames books depict a world and time where shared cultural values are assumed and unquestioned. Mabel Maney’s recent parodies highlight the ways such values have served as agents of disempowerment for various minorities. Reading Maney offers us a lively and humorous re-vision of the Bad Old Days; it also sheds ironic light on girls’ serials by simultaneously acknowledging their muted subversiveness and highlighting the manner in which they reflect the sexism and heterosexism of the culture that produced them.

University of Cincinnati
Cincinnati, Ohio 45221
 

Allen, Julia M. “The Rhetoric of Laughter.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. MECCA Convention Center, Milwaukee WI. 28 March 1996.

“Gay.” Oxford English Dictionary. 1981 ed.

“The Great Social Evil.” Punch, Or The London Charivari. 12 September 1857: 114.

Keene, Carolyn. The Secret of the Old Clock. 1930. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1959.

---. The Hidden Staircase. 1930. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1959.

---. The Secret at Shadow Ranch. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931.

---. The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1941.

Maney, Mabel. The Case of the Not-So-Nice Nurse. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1993.

---. The Case of the Good-For-Nothing Girlfriend. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1994.

---. A Ghost in the Closet. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1995.

“Queer.” Oxford English Dictionary. 1981 ed.

Wells, Helen. Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1943.

---. Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1944.