Harriet the Spy and the Heroism of Debt

Harriet the Spy, published in 1964, is a children’s book about a young girl who wants to be a writer and believes that to do so she needs to know everything and see everything. She spies on everyone in the neighbourhood, and writes everything down in a diary. As she is an observant and rather judgmental young person, the entries in her diary are sometimes cutting and insulting, especially regarding her schoolmates.

THAT PINKY WHITEHEAD IS THE MOST DISGUSTING THING I EVER SAW. WHAT MUST HIS MOTHER HAVE THOUGHT THE FIRST TIME SHE LOOKED AT HIM? SHE MUST HAVE THROWN UP.

Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh (HarperCollins, 2016), p. 228. [Harriet’s diary entries are in all caps throughout the book.]

SHE’S SO DULL IF I WAS HER I COULDN’T STAND MYSELF. I GUESS IT’S NOT MONEY THAT MAKES PEOPLE DULL. THERE IS A LOT I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS THING OF BEING DULL.

p. 57

She can be equally mean in person. With a classmate whose father is absent she initiates the following exchange:

[S]he asked Rachel Hennessey why she didn’t have a father living in the house. Actually what she said was, “You don’t have a father, do you, Rachel?” in a fairly conversational tone. Rachel looked at her, horrified, and yelled, “I do TOO.” Harriet said briskly, “Oh, no, you don’t.” “I do too,” Rachel shouted. “Well, he doesn’t love you.” “He does too.” “Well, then why doesn’t he live with you?” And Rachel burst into tears.

p. 243

This exchange is not entirely unprovoked as the class including Rachel are ganging up on Harriet during this part of the book. I will not go into detail on the plot leading up to that – the book is worth reading in full. Suffice it to say that Harriet is capable of being mean. However, she is not unsympathetic. She is unendingly curious. Her parents are well-to-do but slightly neglectful. Her nanny Ole Golly is attentive and encouraging but stern and emotionally reserved. Harriet doesn’t get people but she really wants to, and that is at the root of her spying. She has many questions, and they are good questions:

LIFE IS A GREAT MYSTERY. IS EVERYBODY A DIFFERENT PERSON WHEN THEY ARE WITH SOMEBODY ELSE?

p. 97

WHY DON’T THEY SAY WHAT THEY FEEL? OLE GOLLY SAID “ALWAYS SAY EXACTLY WHAT YOU FEEL. PEOPLE ARE HURT MORE BY MISUNDERSTANDING THAN ANYTHING ELSE.”

p. 170

Harriet is an interesting character, intelligent and well-meaning but somewhat at odds with her environment and having difficulty expressing herself in a socially acceptable way.

In 2021, Apple TV+ released for streaming a series based on the book. The book and the platform are an uncomfortable mixture. One is sharp, incisive and confrontational, the other designed to be uplifting, inclusive and family-oriented. The most popular product of Apple TV+ so far is Ted Lasso, the famously kind and optimistic comedy series. Its determination to stay on the sunny and inoffensive side is typical of Apple TV+ content. How would the acid-tongued Harriet fare in such a setting? The adaptation is, as the (rather unenthusiastic Kirkus review) notes, “kinder and gentler“. Harriet’s propensity for mordant commentary on those she encounters is removed. She still wants to write, to spy and to know everything and still has something of a non-conformist streak but her propensity for sharp and unkind commentary on those around her has disappeared, making her a less challenging character.

In the first episode of Harriet, the plot centres of one of Harriet’s spyees (unfortunately a word hitherto unknown to standard dictionaries), Agatha K. Plumber. Agatha appears in the book, too, interspersed through various chapters, but in the book the overarching plot concerns Harriet’s development rather than that of any of her spyees. In the series, by contrast, Harriet’s character is static throughout the opening episodes. She is not in conflict with her surroundings to the extent book-Harriet is, so she doesn’t need to go on a journey of adjustment. Instead, each episode has a self-contained plot and, in episode 1, it concerns Agatha, who has taken to her bed and shows little interest in leaving it.

Mrs Agatha K. Plumber … was a very strange, rather theatrical lady who had once married a man of considerable means. She was now divorced, lived alone, and apparently talked on the telephone all day.

p. 42

Book-Harriet is curious about Book-Mrs Plumber and wonders why she doesn’t try to do something, but she remains detached, an observer who writes what she sees and does not take part. Series-Agatha, rather than having wealth through marriage, was a lawyer but has left her job and taken to her bed. She dreams of setting up a dog-pants making business and Series-Harriet, less an observer and more activist than Book-Harriet, wants to help her to do it.

Episode 1 of the series ends with an extraordinary resolution. The moment of cathartic uplift at the end of the episode occurs with Agatha agreeing a loan with her bank manager. This is mentioned several times in the episode and provides the impetus for Harriet’s uplifting speech:

I have to try and fix what I messed up, which is you making history. I know it is scary to try something new, but Ole Golly says life is a struggle and you can never quit, whether you are a writer or a spy or someone who has a dream of making pants for dogs.

Harriet the Spy, Apple TV+, 2021, series 1 episode 1.

If you don’t get off your butt, get a hairdo that makes you feel like 10 million bucks and then go to the bank and get your loan and open your dog pants store, I swear I will barge into your room like a maniac every single day for the rest of your life.

1.1

Agatha does so, the music reaching a triumphant crescendo as she shakes the hand of her bank manager and agrees to take out a loan, Harriet spying outside the window with a pleased grin on her face. It is an extraordinary narrative point. Debt has often been a theme of fiction. Dickens characters like Mr Micawber and William Dorrit are classic examples of those whose life is blighted by debt. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice turns on debt and the dangers inherent to it. It is never a good thing; at best, a necessary evil. Here, though, in a truly 21-century perspective on debt, it is a heroic embracing of life’s possibilities, the only alternative to opting out of the economic opportunities our society has to offer. Here we have one of popular culture’s first celebrations of the act of indebting oneself, and doing so in a cause so apparently unworthy and frivolous as a dog-pants business. We never find out how Agatha’s business goes, and that is the point: getting a loan is an end in itself, a moment of catharsis and triumph.

Harriet, spying, from Kirkus

We all, particularly the younger generations, face into an intended future wherein long-life debt is the norm. Housing debt, education debt and health debt have taken on astronomical proportions in some western countries and the trend is growing. Mauricio Lazzarato has written of The Making of the Indebted Man and Slavoj Žižek has outlined how, within current economic systems, “debt is an instrument to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction” (Event, Penguin: 2014, p. 184). That is, the debt does not want to get repaid, but for the state of indebtedness to continue endlessly. The modern citizen, Žižek argues, has to first of all become an entrepreneur of the self; he or she must consider everything an investment in his or her self and, thus, accept the principle of debt in relation to development of that self. Harriet, in this adaptation, has become an instrument of that ideology, a way of teaching children to expect and to love debt, to see the incurring of debt as an end in itself and as a key to life. In this regard, at least, Apple TV+’s Harriet the Spy is an innovative text and an utterly contemporary one.