Character Profile: Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew has been my hero since I was six. This is true. When I was first allowed into the "chapter books" section, my elementary school librarian loaded me up with Newbery and Caldecott Medal bookmarks and each one of those found their home inside the collection of old Nancy Drew books on the fiction shelf. As soon as I worked my way through all of them, I started over again.

Why did I idolize her so much? Nancy was an older girl with two great best friends (George the stereotypical tomboy and Bess the stereotypical girly-girl), an awesome car, a loving lawyer father, a stand-in mother for a housekeeper, and a college boyfriend. Those were all things that made Nancy cool but in my mind it was actually her intellect and her willingness to take risks to help people that made her a heroine.

Nancy asked questions that wouldn't have easy answers, that often led to more questions and dangerous situations. She risked her life many times and frequently for people she had only just met. Nancy wasn't concerned about being paid, she cared about good people who were in need. She turned to her friends for help and they leapt to her aid and offered her their advice (most of the time, from Bess at least, it was to be careful). Her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, was on hand to rescue her when she needed it, though Nancy often rescued herself. She combined clues (often while displaying some impressive talent) to unravel complex mysteries. For a character who debuted in 1930, Nancy is an impressively intelligent and self-reliant young woman. The women who wrote as Carolyn Keene clearly made an effort to present an admirable heroine to the girls of their respective times.

(Like Clare, Nancy will be featured again. I have a book about "Carolyn Keene" that's begging to be reread.)

Character Profile: Clare

At long last, another of our awesome female characters: Clare DeTamble from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (beware: this will contain spoilers though I try to gloss over specific plot points). I have read this book countless times now. In fact, the first time I read it, I closed it, sat for a minute, and then opened it up again to start over. One of the greatest things about Clare as an element of the story is that while so much of the storyline is about Henry, the real factor at play here is the way that they have shaped each other through time and circumstance.

She is the titular character here and the first one that we hear from. The story is written from two viewpoints: Henry, the involuntary time traveler, and Clare, the time traveler's wife. Though Henry's voice is so dominant in the chronicle of their lives it is truly Clare's story that shines through and gives it definition. It's Clare who we follow from youth to adolescence to adulthood with a much greater focus. We get snippets of Henry's past but nothing like a clear picture of his life, really. He travels back and meets her as a young girl and as he begins shaping her life (admittedly in an inadvertently twisted way), she begins to change him in the time that he comes from. Clare teaches Henry to be reliable, or as reliable as he can be. She teaches him to maintain hope through the futility of his life. That's really what this novel is about. It isn't an epic love story. It's a story about the futility of predestination, about reliving memories over and over, about learning from the past even if you don't know if you can change the future.

Henry is the tennis ball in The Time Traveler's Wife, batted back and forth through time, and Clare is his constant. She is the one thing we can depend on in this story. The only times we truly see her fall apart are when they are trying to conceive and when Henry dies. She is a rock not just for Henry but for the reader. We know who she is and we can rely on her to act, for the most part, with wisdom, compassion, and justice. Clare isn't perfect and as I've said before, no good heroine is perfect. If she was, we couldn't aspire to be more like her--she would be out of reach. Clare's biggest flaw is that she spends so much of her time just waiting. She tries to find things to do to fill the time while Henry is gone but she doesn't seek to do them with other people, just by herself. And she goes back and forth between glorying in the freedom and despairing in the loneliness.

Clare is strong and determined with an incredible foresight. So much of the end is left to our imagination but from what I read into Clare, I know this much is true: In spite of defining herself as simply The Time Traveler's Wife, she rises up beyond her relationship with Henry and builds herself a life with her daughter and teaches us that we are not victims of circumstance as long as we pull ourselves above it and move forward.