B i g L o v e : Rewriting the Modern Man
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Mildred Wirt Benson in 1947 and was revised by others in 1977. The difference
in this scene between the two editions, besides erasing italic font attributes that
are used apparently for emphasis, is the last line in the corresponding chapters.
After Nancy and Hannah Greun decipher the messages in the blanket hinging on
Nancy’s confusion between son and sun, the 1947 edition reads: “Well, at long
last, the light is beginning to dawn on m e \” (159). The 1977 edition adds the
housekeeper’s name and erases Nancy’s italicized reference to herself. This
edition’s exclamation reads: “Hannah, at long last the light is beginning to
dawn’’ (124). Taking Nancy’s name out and inserting Hannah’s is one example
of the deliberate act of rewriting these two characters into a more familial
relationship. While in both editions, Nancy must seek Hannah’s interpretive
advice, the second edition clearly downplays Nancy’s own agency toward
authorship as her literacy discoveries must pass through Hannah’s name. If
Hannah Gruen is the housekeeper in the “Beware” blanket scene, literacy
requires adult hermeneutic guidance but allows Nancy ownership of the
interpretation in the emphasized “me.” If Hannah Gruen is a surrogate mother in
that scene, then literacy is about familial permissions and bringing literacy
education within the domestic sphere.
This constant interruption by adults, especially those that tie her to family
and gendered norms, keeps Nancy from being too independent and thus too
controversial, especially as an adolescent girl. Nancy’s name-as-password is
revised into her name-as-signature granting her less agency by limiting her
access to adult behavior and spaces.
It is Nancy Drew’s first ghostwriter, Mildred Wirt Benson, who sought to
create an adventurous Nancy. Wirt Benson’s authorship of the texts maintained
a spunky, independent Nancy yet her fluctuating agency in the syndicate system
allowed Nancy’s character to be revised making her more conservatively
feminine, less bold and self reliant. Wirt Benson would be given an outline and
wrote her narrative from that framework. In an article for the 1995
Rediscovering Nancy Drew book, she admits concentrating her attention on
Nancy by “trying to make her a departure from the stereotyped heroine
commonly encountered in series books of the day” (Benson 61). After creating
the first book, Wirt Benson recalls that Edward Stratemeyer, the owner and chief
executive of the Stratemeyer Syndicate who produced these and other series
books, did not think the Nancy character was appropriate. She claims that he
called her “too flip ... too vivacious”—that “[Nancy] was not the namby-pamby
type of heroine that had been dominating series books for many, many years”
(qtd in Johnson 36). Stratemeyer sent the manuscript to the publisher anyway
and an unknown reader at Grosset & Dunlap publishing was enthusiastic, thus
the Nancy Drew books began their run (Johnson 36).
Although the original outlines that Wirt Benson worked from were fairly
thorough, often being 2,000 words, Diedre Johnson argues in her study of the
writing process of book three, The Bungalow Mystery*, that Wirt Benson showed
independence as a creative writer (Johnson “Transitions” 8). For this particular