<
https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170837/https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-tragic-misfit-behind-harriet-the-spy>
"There is a certain alchemy by which canonical characters, especially the
figures of children’s literature, come to exist outside of history. Stripped of
their initial contexts, and cleansed of any outdated particularities, they seem
to endure in an eternal present tense. Take, for instance, the
nineteen-sixties’ most iconic underage sleuth, Harriet M. Welsch, a.k.a.
Harriet the Spy. In 1996, Nickelodeon transported her out of the mid-century,
with a goofy live-action film starring Michelle Trachtenberg. Animation lends
itself more readily to the blurring of time periods than live action does, and
a new cartoon Apple TV+ adaptation, starring Beanie Feldstein, could be set at
any point in the past half century. (There are no cell phones, but Harriet’s
prep-school class is multiracial, and any dated features of the source material
have been excised.) As the rebellious tomboy is revived for an audience
unlikely to see her as especially gender-bending, it’s easy to lose sight of
what she meant in her own time. That’s a story that can be filled in with a
look at the life of her creator.
In “Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade
Author of Harriet the Spy,” published last year, the biographer Leslie Brody
argues that Fitzhugh put forward “an entirely new and radically different
version of the American girl.” Harriet is an intrepid eleven-year-old spy who
lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with her parents and her beloved nanny,
Ole Golly. She carries around a composition notebook filled with brutal
observations about her classmates and neighbors, many of whom she follows on
her “spy route.” Peering into windows and crawling into dumbwaiters, she tails
her subjects: the bickering family in charge of the local grocery store, the
dedicated birdcage builder who spoils his cats, the widow who believes that
lying in bed is the secret of life. In her bluejeans, old sneakers, and fake
glasses, Harriet takes after her inventor, characterized by the poet James
Merrill as a “bright, funny, tiny tomboy.” At four feet eleven, Fitzhugh was
sometimes mistaken for a child, and she dressed in boys’ or men’s clothing
throughout her life. A typical outfit, Brody reports, was a Brooks Brothers
suit with combat boots and a cape."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
