tumblr crosspost: what if Harriet "the Spy" M. Welsch grew up to be Gossip Girl?
Nota Bene/Disclaimer/Whatever: I've never read the Gossip Girl books or seen an episode of the show; everything I know about it, I know from posts on my tumblr dash, Wikipedia, and Gossip Girl fan things. It's been a loooong time since I read the book of Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. This all started because I had part of the 1996 film adaptation's soundtrack stuck in my head this morning and got pondering while trying to avoid the errands I need to go run.
But seriously, though. Just think about it for a minute. On a surface level, it makes a good deal of sense, albeit in a sort of cracky crossover way: Harriet somehow knows a good deal of things, due to snooping. Gossip Girl publishes blind items on a blog - should she be able to know all of the things that she publishes? Maybe? Maybe not? Easiest way she could know them? Snooping. One snoop grows up to be another snoop. One snoop goes from letting her life be overturned by other kids who found out her secrets to using other people's secrets to stir up shit in their lives.
But as you break down the details of this idea, especially of Harriet as a character and her motivations - and as you start dragging some realism into a kids' realistic fantasy story (meaning that yes, the story is fundamentally realistic, but various events, especially in the resolution, make it an escapist fantasy as well) - the notion that Harriet M. Welsch could be Gossip Girl starts making more and more sense.
(A degree of sense that requires suspending any notions of, "but the stories take place at two different times~!" but considering what disbelief some crossovers expect you to suspend, that's not a huge deal, really.)
First, let's consider the character of Gossip Girl: Voiced by Kristen Bell since the pilot, "Gossip Girl" is the narrator of the show, an unseen character whose gossip commentary blog is widely visited by the youths of the Upper East Side social scene, often stirring the lives of the main characters. Her identity remains a secret but still manages to lure readers with catty wordplay and scandalous news provided via tips through the members of the Upper East Side social network. Gossip Girl has avoided discovery twice when her blog was the subject of getting shut down during Dan's incident with Miss Carr and when Serena attempted to confront her personally but failed. Gossip Girl showed a personality trait in the fourth season episode 'The Townie' where she responded to a request from Blair for the location of Juliet with the address and 'find the bitch,' showing that she does not appreciate anyone who may threaten the validity of her blog, leading one to believe she may be personally motivated. (from Wikipedia; emphasis mine.)
"Catty wordplay and scandalous news": this, I don't think I need to explain too much. Harriet's a writer. Even in her notebook, when she was assuming no one would read it until she was older and published and important, she breaks out creative ways of expressing herself. Expecting a readership, she'd probably up the ante and go out of her way to make her news an interesting read, not just because of what she's saying but because of how she's saying it.
"Gossip Girl has avoided discovery twice": a huge issue of Harriet's story is that what she writes in her private, personal notebook gets discovered and read for her entire class. And, as I'll get into, Harriet has certainly learned from the experience, but… at the same time, she's only human. She's going to screw up sometimes. Especially considering…
"…she may be personally motivated": As I'm going to show, Harriet has some of the BEST personal motivations for doing what Gossip Girl does.
Now, on to Harriet.
So, to recap the story for everyone who hasn't seen the movie or read the book in a while: Harriet M. Welsch is in sixth grade, she fancies herself a spy (which mostly means that she snoops around and writes her observations and judgments down in a black-and-white marble composition notebook), and she has a very close relationship with her nanny, Golly… until Golly leaves nannying behind and Harriet's life starts falling apart.
The big thing that happens is that Harriet gets in trouble because she writes judgmental things about her classmates in her notebook, the other kids find it, and they're all totally aghast because they're probably thinking the exact same things, but Harriet broke the number one rule of social interactions, namely: "don't tell people what you really think about them, even in your journal, because chances are good that they don't want to hear it."
Having been in the same/a similar position before, I think I can safely say that the easiest way to modernize Harriet into the twenty-first century would be to have her blogging her thoughts and assuming that no one reads it. So she just writes whatever the Hell she wants, doesn't put a privacy filter on it or anything, and expects that no one's ever going to find it because no one cares to do so.
(In fact-checking a few things, I found out that the Disney Channel actually did this. Which… I guess is cool, but at the same time, it's Disney Channel, so it's not really reflective of what real teenagers are like but a parent-friendly fantasy aimed at younger kids, and this story could be done so much more expertly.)
…No, seriously: eighth grade was rough for me, and made worse because I assumed this same thing, had several bad days, and my "best friend" at the time decided that clearly, being a teenager and having shitty days and disliking some of the people in our class made me unstable, violent, and a potential danger to other people. And I repeated this mistake a few times over before it really sunk in. It's a huge issue of the digital age, and of growing up in it: you think that what you put out there is private just because it doesn't get comments or whatever, but it's not.
But anyway, back to Harriet. Modernization or not, there's a big flaw in the ending of Harriet's story, for me.
Nominally, the lesson here in Harriet's story is, "don't be a dick to people," but one of Harriet's most defining characteristics, in the book and the movie, is that she's clever. Some of her others? Are that she's resourceful, creative, crafty, and determined. And even with the retraction of her notebook - I'm going off the movie here because my memory of the book is way too fuzzy - what she did was a pretty big violation of the trust that her classmates could put in her. (Even though it would've been fine if she'd been more careful with her notebook.)
It's like, why tell Harriet anything? Why let Harriet in on anything? Sure, she SAID that she's sorry and she learned better and everything, but… where's the evidence of that? What, you're just supposed to trust the word of someone who admittedly spies on people for fun and takes notes on it? Not even kids believe that kind of statement. So… after the happy ending, Harriet still ends up being something of a social pariah - no one trusts her, no one has an reason to trust her, maybe Sport and Janie are better at trusting her(-ish), but she still outed really personal things about Sport and called Janie - her best friend, remember - "a total nutcase."
And that would suck.
Ask anyone who's ever been an outcast, for any reason. Ask anyone who's ever been to middle or high school or some comparable institution in countries that aren't America. Human beings are social animals; even introverts need some degree of human contact and the need for acceptance is incredibly pronounced in adolescents because they're stuck in one of the more precarious positions most of them will ever know. They're expected to act like adults, but still treated like children. They're trying to find themselves and carve out an identity, a niche in the world, only for a lot of their efforts to be squashed by parents and authority figures.
Teenagers have stress dumped on them, left and right, from school, parents, hormones and psychological growth, having to make decisions about college, and work, and what they're supposed to do with the rest of their life, when they haven't even lived a quarter of it, if you go with the assumption that average human life expectancy is about 75 years. It causes social bonds to become that much more important to them - everything from knowing who your friends are to having a view of the world that enables you to think of other people as your "enemies." And because they're still going through several crucial moments of ego/identity formation, they can't entirely stand on their own yet.
They need validation. They require validation. They thrive on validation.
The only validation that Harriet would get from her peers is that she's untrustworthy, and a reject, and mean. That she only writes the things she does about everyone because she's jealous of how pretty and popular Marion Hawthorne is, or because she wishes she were as smart as Janie, or because she wishes her parents were around for her like Sport's dad, or because she wishes she had Beth Ellen Hansen's boobs. Everywhere, from everyone, for most of her days, Harriet would just get told and/or shown, time and time again, that she's terrible. That no one likes her and that she's not worthy of being liked.
And as I said: it would suck.
It would totally suck. It would suck for anyone, but it would suck doubly so for Harriet, for the following reasons: she's a teenager, she knows what she's missing (having had friends and trust before), and she would know that, her carelessness aside, there's really no one she can blame but herself, since it's her thoughts and her scribblings and her assumption that no one would ever find out or care that all got her into trouble in the first place.
So, Harriet goes through seventh and eighth grade, not necessarily longing for acceptance by her peers, but denied it at most turns anyway (save possibly from the Boy in the Purple Socks) because as much as she needs validation, so do her classmates and what they got from Harriet and her notebook was a smack in the face. So, instead, Harriet could get validation from Golly… but not regularly enough to make too much of a difference, and sure, maybe her parents learned something from the whole ordeal and having to drag Harriet to therapy… but I kind of doubt that they would.
It's nothing against Mr. and Mrs. Welsch, really. It's just… they seem like society/career parents. They love and care about their daughter, sure, but they have work. And fancy parties. And other distractions that keep them away from home. They're around enough for Harriet to know what she's missing when they're not there, but not around enough to actually effect any change in her life or behavior - and it's all too likely that this pattern would reassert itself once they were out of the "danger zone," so to speak. Once Harriet had had her little "incident" and made nice with everyone and claimed to learn better.
Given all of these ideas, it's not entirely out of the question that Harriet might give herself too much over to her resentment of others - previously established in how she gets snotty and snarky with everyone, not to mention how she enacts her "revenge" spree on everyone… like how she hates Marion Hawthorne for being a queen bee and goes as far as telling her that her absentee father doesn't love her (which, as a kid whose parents are often out of the house, Harriet would know is a very real fear and a very real hurt).
Given that she's smart and creative and a writer and her parents have a decent enough income, it's not entirely impossible for Harriet to get into one of the Upper East Side prep schools that the Gossip Girl characters attend. The Upper East Side of Harriet's day - that is, the mid-sixties, when the novel was written - had a different character than the UES of Gossip Girl. And I had to fact-check because I was pretty sure that the 1996 Nickelodeon movie moved the story to Brooklyn or Queens.
The whole point I want to get at, though, is that Harriet's parents have money, but possibly, maybe not enough to pay for UES Manhattan prep school tuition on their own. Not without scholarships.
And see… Harriet's not been raised in Society. Her parents go to fancy schmancy dinners and parties and stuff, but she hasn't been raised with the same expectations as Society kids are. Her parents are almost definitely not old money, the way most Society kids' parents are. So, she would probably not really know what to expect going into this, leaving her middle school classmates behind for prep school.
She'd think she's getting a good education AND a chance to reinvent herself as someone new in high school. Someone with friends. Someone people trust. Someone who's not an outcast… but Harriet M. Welsch would get a huge wake-up call when she showed up there and started trying to integrate herself into the Upper East Side socialite scene. They wouldn't know her; they would know that she's likely a scholarship case, that she doesn't speak like them or act like they do, that she's different.
This time, she wouldn't be ostracized because of something she actually did to violate people's trust in her; she'd be ostracized for factors outside of her control, like not being filthy stinking rich and not being in Society.
And I think it goes without saying that at least SOME of her new classmates would remind her too much of Marion Hawthorne, bane of her life, for Harriet to ignore.
Add into this the demanding course-load of a legit, for reals prep school, and how much Harriet's parents would be looking for academic excellence… Especially if she got scholarships. Because she could've just gone to PS whatever-the-fuck with Sport and Janie for her parents' tax dollars and no other investment, but she had to go to prep school… so without scholarships, it's that they're spending a ton of money on her education; and with them, it's that they're making a financial investment and she has to keep doing well or she might lose her scholarships)… Everything adds up to one thing: STRESS.
And how does Harriet cope with stress? …She snoops on people and starts writing shit down.
And, by this point, Harriet would know what writing things down about people does, and she would know that revenge won't make her feel better… but she's crafty. And determined. And she wants to carve out a new identity for herself - but she can't do it as Harriet M. Welsch because her middle school peers know too well that Harriet M. Welsch is only human, and because her high school peers don't know who Harriet M. Welsch is and they don't care, beyond using her status as Other and Different to reaffirm that they're on top and she's dirt.
So, Harriet creates Gossip Girl. She observes, and she snoops, and she finds ways to quietly insinuate herself when no one's paying attention - and she creates an alter ego who's more than she thinks she ever could be. Gossip Girl might not be universally loved… but she's popular. Even the people who hate her have to pay attention. And Harriet has the power and control that she wants… just not over her own life, so she takes it out on other people's.
Even if no one likes Harriet, she gets to live vicariously through how much attention her blog gets. And how she can upturn other people's lives with a few keystrokes and a click on the "post" button. And then people can call her whatever names they want, because she has easy access, anonymous and therefore consequence-free retribution. They can ostracize her and call her a freak and do anything they want to her, but she'll always get the last laugh. Because she knows things that make for outstanding leverage, and she has a platform from which to shout them.
This makes her invincible. Gossip Girl makes her invincible.
As long as people keep caring about the expectations of them. As long as people keep secrets from each other. As long as people keep giving her fodder to for her blog and as long as people keep reading and believing.