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Popular Culture Review
you’re going? ... We got laws, you know!” Nancy yells that the driver she is
chasing is a thief (Keene Album [1947] 175, [1977] 140). The police officer
questions her authority as they race down the road asking who she is. Nancy
can’t finish her answer, “Nancy Drew. Carson Drew’s daugh. . before the
officer shot down the road like a rocket to catch that thief (Keene Album [1947]
175, [1977] 140). Nancy’s name alone is not enough for access to an alternative
morality to break the speeding laws and the autonomy to use it. Nancy must lean
on the authority her distinguished lawyer father has earned. Her name must pass
onto his and derive agency from it. Nancy’s name is a password. Her own name
passes on to her father’s name. In logical turn, her father’s signature defers to
the authority of his parents and so forth so that the building of moral credit
progresses backwards with the movement characteristic to the Natural law, a
movement that cannot find an origin outside of God. Nancy’s name becomes
detached from her individual person to perform that password. Nancy’s name is
also a password in that it grants her access to alternative, more adult-like spaces,
places, information, and moral behavior. There is a different structure between
the password and the signature that hinges on this idea of access that shortcuts
the signature’s hierarchical regression.
The agency Nancy achieves through the access her name-as-password
allows is tempered because it must pass onto her father’s name. Nonetheless,
Nancy is a powerful adolescent. Besides her nearly unrestricted access, Nancy’s
primary power is derived from her advanced literacy. In order to be a good
detective, Nancy must deal with present and absent information to rewrite
disparate clues into a coherent narrative. Literacy, the ability to discover, read,
interpret, and use “texts” involve turning reading