Donna Parker: That Spitfire!

Ah Donna. Our 1950s teenage gal with a flip who stared in seven books, each with a mystery twist, has been characterized on Wikipedia as follows;

"Calm, loyal and understanding, Donna is prone to worry about events outside her control. She is quick to help people and very polite."

Well, yeah, calm and very polite ... sometimes. At other times--fairly frequent times -- she can exhibit a firecracker outrage similar to Nancy Drew's. For example, in Donna Parker: Mystery at Arawak, Donna gives her friend Teddy a dressing down when he accuses her of making him look like a fool with her competency:

“Donna felt the blood rise to her face: ‘So I was supposed to do a poor job to make you look better? I never heard of anything so stupid!’ … She was just furious. Imagine Teddy stopping her for a conversation like that! She hoped she would never see him again.”

That's some calm and polite.

You go girl!

So my question: can you think of other instances when supposed "demure" girl characters show their spirit? I think I'll write about memorable outrage in Nancy Drew tomorrow ....

On Donna

Cool:

"But the girl who captured my heart completely was -- and always will be -- Donna Parker. Anytime I see one of those brightly painted cardboard covers at yard sales or Salvation Army book collections, I snatch it immediately. Remember good ol' Donna? She never had to face the kind of death-defying mysteries that Nancy or even Trixie confronted, but she had her share of adventures. Pretty, sweet and good-hearted, she nevertheless had killer nerves and lots of courage -- hot stuff for a girl like me, growing up in a single-mom household in the poor part of town. As Jessica Zafra recently wrote in her book Tw7sted, We can never be truly safe; we can only be brave. Donna Parker took that to heart and was among the bravest girl heroines.

I thought of her as I read through Cara Black's latest Aimee Leduc mystery, Murder in the Rue de Paradis. The stylish, hip, and I-eat-nails-for-breakfast Aimee is basically Donna Parker all grown up -- self-assured, witty, smart and a smart ass, a risk-taker (sometimes a reckless one), but with that streak of vulnerability that's both endearing and endlessly frustrating. Yeah, that's my girl."

From myinnerfrenchgirl.blogspot.com/2008/03/book-review-murder-in-rue-de-paradis.html

Touring Donna Parker's "Summerfield"

On Friday, I met and lunched with Martin Levin, husband of the late Marcia Martin, author of the Donna Parker series. After lunch, Martin gave me a tour of Rye, New York, the setting of the fictional Summerfield, New Jersey, where Donna lives.

We saw Donna's home--incidentally the Levin's home from 1950-57-- a white frame Dutch colonial with black shutters on a shady street. Here Donna lived with her mother and father, Grace and Sam Parker and her little brother Jimmy. Amazingly, it looked just as I pictured Donna's house! Here too, Marcia Martin penned Donna's story, sitting in bed with a yellow legal pad balanced on her knees.

Martin also showed me the stone high school Donna attended, at least for one book, Donna Parker Takes a Giant Step. I also saw The Sweet Shop, the malt shop that is the backdrop for dates, lunches and conversations--as well as some rowdinesss. Called Poppy's, it's on the main drag in Rye and still boasts a long counter with red leather swivel seats.

Rye is on Long Island Sound, a lovely body of water naturally left out of descriptions of Summerfield, New Jersey. But as Martin Levin pointed out, little has changed in Rye since the 1950s. The town is clearly more upscale than it would have been in Donna's day, but it still has an idyllic, small town flavor, with many streets of modest frame homes, a big public library and a central shopping district.

It was a treat--a thrill--to actually meet Marcia's husband and hear stories about the connections between the Donna Parker series and Marcia's life. I had no idea how autobiographical the books were.

Time

I have been thinking lately about why Emily Bronte set Wuthering Heights in the past: the novel begins about 75 years earlier than Emily's time period and ends about 40 years earlier. In other words, she wrote the novel in the mid 1840s and it spans the years from about 1770 to 1803. Translated to today, it would mean starting a book written now in the year 1935 and bringing it up to 1968.

In contrast, series books tend to be set in the present, whenever that present happened to be when they were composed. In Nancy Drew's case, the setting was meant to be timeless, and I remember that one book, written in 1940, had to have its locale changed from England to Mexico because of the outbreak of World War II. Donna Parkers have more of sense of time because Donna does get older in the books and changes and grows.

Carolyn Haywood's Betsy books are set in the present day of their composition (the 1930s and 40s), but apparently reflect Haywood's memories of her own childhood in the very early years of the 20th century.

Since most series literature is written by older people--people in middle age rather than the teen years or childhood--the books would arguably be conservative, grafting the memories and consciousness of a previous generation on to the present. To me, even Donna Parkers that were written in the early 1960s have more the flavor of the 1940s than the 1960s.

All that being said, no book can be timeless, and it's remarkable how much social history is packed into the pages of our favorite books. This is what gives them their texture and appeal, I believe. Often we remember the details more than the plots, which tend to blur. But what doesn't blur is Nancy Drew ordering cinnamon toast! Or Meg in "A Wrinkle Time" under the covers in her attic bedroom with the wind howling all around the house--and then drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen with Charles Wallace.

What details stick with you from your favorite books?

Waxing philosophical: TIme after time

“Time was moving so fast. She [Donna] had a mental picture of Time, like a kite that had broken loose from its string, sailing off into the sky above her. If only she could catch that bit of string and hang onto it, hold it still for a few minutes.” (Donna Parker Takes a Giant Step, 237)

Does Nancy Drew ever wax philosophical this way? I remember she has what border on attacks of nerves and boredom at the beginning of The Hidden Staircase, but does the timeless heroine ever stop for a moment of self-reflection on the passage of time?

What about in other girls' series lit? Or Jane Austen?

I'm struck that there's a part at the end of Little House in the Big Woods, when the young Laura, perhaps five or six, is tucked into her trundle bed in her log cabin in the 1870s with her father playing the fiddle in the next room, wanting to hold on to that moment in time forever.

Any other passages come to mind?

Emma and Donna

I've been thinking about similarities between Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse and Marcia Martin's Donna Parker. One first glance, the two characters don't seem to have much in common-except perhaps looks. Both are dark-haired and pretty.

Donna Parker is a 1950s teenager in Summerfield, N.J., oldest child in a family that includes her mother, father, herself and her younger brother Jimmy. Emma Woodhouse is a 21 year old from early 19th century England. Her mother died when she was very young, and she been raised by her doting hypochondriac father and equally doting governess, Miss Taylor. She has an older sister, who is married and lives in London. Emma is the first lady of her small village of Highbury.

The primary characteristic that jumps to mind about Emma is her snobbery. And indeed she is snobbish, but more profoundly, she misjudges people. The novel turns on the grand hinge that Emma always gets everything wrong. Her perceptions are comically--and potentially tragically--skewed. Yet hers are the main eyes through which we see the action of the novel. The other eyes are a sort of chorus that slides in and out Emma's consciousness and tends to reinforces her misjudgments--the almost equally blinkered set of commonplace attitudes, gossip, lies and half-baked opinions that Austen wickedly places out there as authority by blurring it with her own authorial voice. Beyond Emma and the chorus comes the input of people with agendas: Mrs. Weston, Mr. Knightley, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, the Bates, Jane Fairfax. Seldom, if ever, is the reader on safe ground, if by safe we mean "these are the facts, ma'am."

In "Donna Parker Takes a Giant Step," Donna, like Emma, displays a marked tendency to judge and misjudge people. In this book, the last in the Donna Parker series. Donna heads off to high school, which we are initially led to believe is her "giant step". In high school, which starts in the tenth grade, she's flattered to be befriended by senior Janie Ingersoll. Janie is pretty and wealthy and dates the high school football star Rudy Hinckle. Donna, taken in by Janie's status, believes the older girl's story that her parents don't really care about her and oppose her relationship with Rudy only because he's poor. As it happens, we learn that Janie is somewhat spoiled and unpredictable, and that Rudy is objectionable not because he's poor, but because he's irredeemably lazy, spoiled and irresponsible.

At the end of the book, Donna has what we might term a series of epiphanies. She starts coming to terms with ambiguity or shades of gray. On the subject of responsibility—this book’s theme—Donna learns that people, including herself, can be a mix of responsible and irresponsible, and that she can make mistakes in judgment"

“’If you’re too involved in something, I guess you just don’t see the obvious things,’ Donna thought to herself." (276)
Donna "giant step," thus, is actually the discovery of her own limitations: “I guess it’s very hard to know all about anyone, even yourself.” (278) She adds, “it’s hard to get to know what people are really like.” (278) She asks her boyfriend Paul: “Do you think we see only what we want to see?” (278)

Emma does not ask herself such broadly philosophical questions, although, she more than Donna, arguably ought to, but she does reflect on her own misperceptions as the book ends, and resolves, to become "more rational, more acquainted with herself." This being Emma, we can only hope-- this 21 year old doesn't reflect on, as almost-15 year-old Donna does, "that we only see what we want to see"--for some growth of self-awareness. Personally, however, I have little hope that Emma will become more self aware.

What most interests me, however, is the way a book like "Donna Parker Takes a Giant Step" prepares us for reading a much more complex and nuanced novel like Emma. By being taken in, at a young age, by a flawed and limited point of view, we're unconsciously prepared as readers to encounter unreliable narrators in adult books. What do you think?