Session VIII: Sleuths and Subversions

Mitzi Brunsdale (Mayville State University, Mayville ND): "Deadlier Than the Male? Three Ages of Women Detectives"

Since time immemorial, women’s principal roles in society have been defined as maiden, wife, and crone, identified in the Western tradition as mythological figures intimately connected with the phases of human life. The mythological Fates of ancient Greece and Rome share vital functions with the Norns of Scandinavia: to spin the threads of human existence, to weave them into intricate tapestries, and finally to shear them off in death. Women’s intimate connection to the chronological journey of our lives illustrated in these myths is reflected in the development of popular murder mysteries from their Golden Age in the 1920s and 1930s to the present, many written by mistresses of the genre like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, both of whom even allowed their female detectives to outwit their male counterparts. The fictional careers of Nancy Drew, a girl sleuth; Amelia Emerson Peabody, an intrepid late Victorian wife and archaeologist; Jessica Fletcher, a widowed mystery author; and Miss Marple, an elderly village snoop, continue to be popular today in books, film, and television, suggesting what may give husbands some possibly indigestible food for thought: that the female may indeed be deadlier than the male in cunningly solving crimes and bringing the ungodly to justice.


Gretchen Ronnow (Wayne State College, Wayne NE): "The “Cozy” Meets “Tartan Noir”: Intertextual Transmogrifications in M.C. Beaton’s Hamish MacBeth Stories"

While M.C. Beaton's Hamish MacBeth novels clearly fit inside the parameters of the "cozy" (small village, apparently bumbling but likeable local constable, gentle "off-stage" deaths, no sex, idiosyncratic sleuthing skills), the television adaptations of these stories enter the realm of the so-called "tartan noir," dwelling on the dark duality of the soul, on issues of redemption and abjection, and on an ever-present existential abyss in MacBeth himself.  This "Caledonian antisyzygy" is strikingly reinforced when male writers Dominic Minghella and Daniel Boyle re-write the novels into dark and sometimes violent screen treatments and when Robert Carlyle (noted for playing "crazed and brutally violent characters")  of "Trainspotting" and "The Last Enemy" fame is cast as Hamish MacBeth.  These new narratives, transmogrifications of the original stories, fit Merivale's and Sweeney's list of themes of the postmodern "metaphysical detective story":  1.  the defeated sleuth, 2. the world as labyrinth, 3. the mise en abyme aspect, 4. the eerie meaningfulness of clues and evidence, 5. the missing person, and 6., the absence or self-defeating nature of any closure to the investigation.  Traditionally Scottish mystery writers long resisted American noir, but it seems our literatures of darkness have overtaken the Scottish detective's domesticity.  John Ruskin thought that one's home and home place should be a monument to human life, work, and experience, that its very stones should be inscribed with a summary of its dweller's life and experiences  The "cozy" mystery, usually written by women authors, reinforces the ideology of domesticity which, as Gillian Brown writes, "clothed the individual with a sense of enduring value" and protected private and intimate community space as "articulated through intrinsic feminine characteristics. . . . The tautological turn by which the domestic encapsulates nostalgia for itself works as the mainspring of a fable of continuity."  Turning Beaton's gentle MacBeth into (in Carlyle's words) a "f***nutter" is a truly stunning "about face."

Sreerupa Sengupta (Kolkata, India): "Poirot and Marple: Transgressing and Redefining Gender Norms"

The blurring out of the border between the sexes is a phenomenon uniquely cultivated by the “Queen of Crime”, Agatha Christie who viewed sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual identity as variables that change along a continuous spectrum of self-expression . Christie chose a purely masculine form and a male territory and exploited their feminine possibilities. On the one hand, she created a male detective whose femininity, instead of posing obstacles, gloriously contributes to his success, on the other, she introduced a female detective who, in spite of being a good woman by the parameters of patriarchy, invades the male territories of logic and rationality as an intellectual force. She is an empowering yet, compassionate role model to many of Christie’s female readers. Her detectives—Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple—challenge the stereotypical tendency of society to constrict realms according to gender by revealing the fact that s exual orientation, gender identity, and sexual identity are independent of each other. A person may express any variation of each of these in any combination. To discourage the free expression of identity and orientation by an individual is to impose a damaging burden of conformity and this needs to be transgressed.

Though it cannot be said that Christie was an obvious feminist (as she testified in her autobiography), her subversive vision is evident in her works as well as in her presentation of her detectives. She attempted to contest the masculine narcissism with the aid of a feminized detective Hercule Poirot and created some very admirable female heroes like Miss Marple to explore many problems women face as a result of the sexism that pervades our society due to lack of symmetry in the gender norms.