What Does Sotomayor's Love for Nancy Drew Tell Us About Her?

Sonia Sotomayor says that as a young girl she devoured Nancy Drew. President Barack Obama added that her love of the mystery series “ignited” her interest in the law. In the world of the Titian-haired, roadster-driving sleuth, everything is a clue. What can Sonia Sotomayor’s affection for these books tell us about her?

Like Sotomayor, Nancy has a woman-as-pathbreaker angle to her story. The series was launched in the 1920s, in the age of the “New Woman,” as the first wave of feminism found its footing and its political energies helped women win the vote and enjoy new social freedoms. Nancy’s curiosity and fearlessness reflect those energies: At heart, she is a tomboy with an appetite for solitary pursuit of criminals—something like the young Sotomayor must have been as a prosecutor in New York.

Yet Nancy is something of a paradox, as Bobbie Ann Mason observed in her incisive 1975 study The Girl Sleuth . She is far from a radical. She likes “dainty” gold jewelry, cinnamon toast, and belted dresses. She has a rather conventional boyfriend. She takes time out from sleuthing to go shopping with her girlfriends; in the very first book in the series, we find her at the local department store, trying on a “lovely pale-blue dance creation” of a gown, and grinning at herself in the mirror, before slipping out to pursue some hunches.

Those who would paint Sotomayor as a prosecutor with “radical” leanings should take note: Nancy Drew’s quests reflect a faith in a clean-cut, traditional social order. Each book is essentially a variation on a theme. The sleuth comes across a scowling man or woman in the town of River Heights. She soon discovers a mystery (a lost will; a smuggler; a missing heiress), and sets out to put things to rights. In the end, whatever faint darkness troubled her idyllic suburban town is successfully expelled, and order and justice reign. Nancy’s doting father, after all, is a lawyer, and she has prosecutorial blood running through her veins. As I wrote in a New Yorker profile of the creator of the series, “The message [in Nancy Drew] is confidence-inspiring: The world is rife with crooks, but it is negotiable, and fundamentally rational. Hard work pays off. The damned remain damned—unless they repent—and the wronged (long-lost maharajas’ sons, heirs to candlemakers’ fortunes) are restored to their rightful life at the intersection of High and Elm, among the rangy Colonials and the tall trees.” This dovetails with the Sotomayor Adam Liptak analyzed today in the New York Times—the judge whose opinions are marked by “diligence, depth, and unflashy competence.”

The irony, of course, is that the racial politics of the original Nancy Drew series are dodgy. The earliest versions of the books contained offensive stereotypes of blacks, Jews, and others; many of these passages were cut out in the 1950s, when the books were revised and rewritten, but their shadow remains. Even in the updated editions, the forces that threaten River Heights are often depicted as “swarthy” or “large-nosed.” “Gypsies” nearly always spell trouble.

Sotomayor may not remember Nancy Drew’s racial undertones. She may have ignored them as a kid, noticing only Nancy’s inspirational confidence and diligence. She may have identified not with the swarthy strangers but with white, American Nancy. Or perhaps she identified with justice more than with the “dark” ones—as her detractors worry she will do reflexively. Or, most likely, she has complicated feelings about all this, as her Berkeley speech suggests she does.