Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright©, 2005
Just Take A Deep Breath And Dive...
Even If Not Everything You Find Might Be New
by
Silke Guenther
“All Sydney ever wanted was acceptance. Friends who cared about her. Parents who loved her. A place where she could
fit in. SD-6 gave Sydney what she needed. A family. A purpose. A reason for her life."
So far, twelve prequel novels based on the ABC series "Alias" have been published since 2002. Each is about
200 pages long and deals with the heroine’s life before we got to know her on TV as Sydney Bristow,
fighting to bring down SD-6. These novels give Sydney a past that shows how she became who she is on
TV and round the picture of a female lead character in an action series.
Cultural gender images communicated through the media influence the way adolescents develop images of
themselves. These novels create images of a tough woman leaving behind her teenager years struggling to
rebalance her life in search of a female identity in spite of several unresolved conflicts that come up in each
novel. The construction of identity has become a requirement in modern Western societies and, in a limited
way, the mass media creates space for more diverse identities.
At the core of Sydney’s struggle is her fear of not being able to fit into any group that can give her the
strength to become an adult woman. Sydney barely remembers her mother she believes to have died in a
car accident several years ago. Her relationship with her father is strained and full of insecurities.
Although she has almost no control over when he will show up, how long he will stay, and whether she
will get hurt or not, Sydney tries repeatedly to create the image of a family, but in vain.
At the beginning of the first novel, she starts college and feels like she doesn’t belong there or anywhere
else. Sydney is an avid reader and runner who has an aptitude for languages, and prefers individual
competition over team sports. At Freshman orientation she’s paired up with a girl who becomes her best
friend, but Sydney doesn’t belong to a any larger group that equips her with secure relationships.
Sydney's recruitment into SD 6, an organisation she believes to be a covert branch of the CIA, provides her
with another opportunity to create a family. It’s an opportunity that depends on her performance as an
agent in training. In spite of her fear, she wants to see how far she can go with them and advances quickly.
Learning to meet the physical requirements of the job increases her self-confidence. As a result of this she
suddenly gets noticed and starts to define her relationship with the other sex.
She has what it takes to become a member of SD 6 and meets men who trust her abilities as an agent.
Sydney represents a notion of “girl power” that enables her to be tough and independent while
maintaining elements traditionally associated with femininity. She wears stunning clothes and perfect
makeup during her assignments and is emotionally vulnerable. Violence is an inevitable part of her life, but
it is often portrayed as self-defence or a necessity to prevent a greater evil, and never originates from Sydney
herself.
When she’s finally part of a group, things start to unravel when she discovers at the beginning of the
television series that she doesn’t work for the real CIA but an enemy organisation. So she must rely on her
own strength, and starts to fight them.
These novels offer a picture of femininity that is marked by the struggle to establish meaningful
relationships that provide strength, and the subsequent failure of some of them, so that the heroine must
rely on herself and thus can create a space to form an individual identity in spite of retaining elements
traditionally thought of as female.
Contributor's Notes...
I have a degree in teaching and wrote this essay in preparation for the current work on my thesis dealing with
media effects on the development of female identity. This is my first time in "print" as a non-native writer and I live
in Lübeck, a German town close to Hamburg.
