That’s a story that can be filled in with a look at the life of her creator. (There are no cell phones, but Harriet’s prep-school class is multiracial, and any dated features of the source material have been excised.) As the rebellious tomboy is revived for an audience unlikely to see her as especially gender-bending, it’s easy to lose sight of what she meant in her own time. Animation lends itself more readily to the blurring of time periods than live action does, and a new cartoon Apple TV+ adaptation, starring Beanie Feldstein, could be set at any point in the past half century.
In 1996, Nickelodeon transported her out of the mid-century, with a goofy live-action film starring Michelle Trachtenberg. Take, for instance, the nineteen-sixties’ most iconic underage sleuth, Harriet M. Stripped of their initial contexts, and cleansed of any outdated particularities, they seem to endure in an eternal present tense.
There is a certain alchemy by which canonical characters, especially the figures of children’s literature, come to exist outside of history.
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