Abstract
Hoffman analyses the treatment of the female murder victim’s body as well as the female killer’s body in golden age crime narratives. Women’s bodies represent sites of transgression that must be contained at the narrative’s conclusion so that order can be restored. Texts examined in this chapter include Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House (1932), Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Dumb Witness (1937), Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942), as well as Gladys Mitchell’s Speedy Death (1929) and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Unnatural Death (1927). Hoffman argues that the bodies of women killers and victims in these texts are occasions of confusion, disguise and deception, emphasising both a disruption of social order and the instability of class and gender stereotypes.
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Notes
- 1.
The significance of the body in crime fiction as a site of potentially fruitful examination has been recognised by critics such as Gill Plain, who writes that ‘the wider assumptions that shape our knowledge and understanding of the genre are based not on textual observation, but on a series of distorted generalisations. The familiar landscape of genre fiction needs to be remapped, and one of the many possible routes to this remapping is through an analysis of the body.’ Gill Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), p. 30.
- 2.
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 74.
- 3.
Linden Peach, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 64.
- 4.
Peach, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction, p. 70.
- 5.
Several critics have referred to the body in crime narratives in terms of a page on which such meanings are written; in Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body, Gill Plain argues that ‘Murder literally is “written on the body” and bodies are never neutral. They inevitably bear the inscriptions of their cultural production—socially determined markers of gender, race, sexuality and class that profoundly influence the ways in which they are read by witnesses, police, detectives and readers.’ Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, pp. 12–13.
- 6.
Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 13.
- 7.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.
- 8.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
- 9.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
- 10.
Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Blue Train (London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 225.
- 11.
Agatha Christie, Lord Edgware Dies (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1986), p. 19.
- 12.
However, Carlotta is still the victim of an ethnic stereotype: her death is suggested to be the direct result of a congenital Jewish weakness for money. Indeed, anti-Semitism is evident in many golden age crime narratives; see, for example, Malcolm J. Turnbull, Victims or Villains?: Jewish Images in Classic English Detective Fiction (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1998). Focusing on Christie specifically, Merja Makinen notes that her representations of Jewish characters are often extremely ambivalent, reflecting both sympathy and the most basic of stereotypes. Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 175–8. Makinen also points out that Christie often uses ethnic stereotypes as red herrings, as I examine with relation to Bella Tanios’ Greek husband Jacob in Dumb Witness. Makinen, Investigating Femininity, p. 179. Nevertheless, as in the case of Carlotta, some of these xenophobic assumptions are confirmed even as they are ostensibly called into question. Jacob Tanios turns out to be innocent of murder, but he is guilty of financial imprudence and a domineering attitude towards his wife, both of which are implied to be connected to his foreignness.
- 13.
Christie, Lord Edgware Dies, p. 45.
- 14.
Christie, Lord Edgware Dies, p. 189.
- 15.
Interestingly, it is a woman, Lord Edgware’s housekeeper, who insists upon Jane’s guilt throughout the entire novel and recognises the transgressive potential of Jane’s body before the male investigators are able to see beyond Jane’s flighty act. Miss Carroll, who is a witness to Jane’s entrance into the house on the night of Lord Edgware’s murder, is adamant that there was no mistaking the woman as Jane, even though Poirot proves that Miss Carroll could only have seen the woman from the back: ‘Back of her head, her voice, her walk! It’s all the same thing. Absolutely unmistakable! I tell you I know it was Jane Wilkinson—a thoroughly bad woman if ever there was one.’ Christie, Lord Edgware Dies, p. 58.
- 16.
Christie, Lord Edgware Dies, p. 190.
- 17.
Christie, Lord Edgware Dies, p. 192.
- 18.
Christie, Lord Edgware Dies, p. 192.
- 19.
Ernst Jentsch, whose 1906 essay ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’ was a source for Sigmund Freud’s influential 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’, identifies the wax figure as an example of an uncanny object that can evoke discomfort in the observer: ‘The unpleasant impression is well known that readily arises in many people when they visit collections of wax figures, panopticons and panoramas. In semi-darkness it is often especially difficult to distinguish a life-size wax or similar figure from a human person. For many sensitive souls, such a figure also has the ability to retain its unpleasantness after the individual has taken a decision as to whether it is animate or not … The fact that such wax figures often present anatomical details may contribute to the increased effect of one’s feeling, but this is definitely not the most important thing: a real anatomically prepared body does not need in the least to look so objectionable as the corresponding model in wax.’ Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, trans. Roy Sellars, Angelaki 2.1 (1996), p. 12.
- 20.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
- 21.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 7.
- 22.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 124.
- 23.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 286.
- 24.
Mary Whittaker’s second and third victims, Bertha Gotobed and Vera Findlater, are killed through the same means as her aunt, by injection with a syringe full of air. In the case of Bertha Gotobed, the police-surgeon ‘is quite convinced that the death was perfectly natural … there is [not] the slightest reason to suspect foul play’. Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 61.
- 25.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 73.
- 26.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 255.
- 27.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 182.
- 28.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 248.
- 29.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 292.
- 30.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 294.
- 31.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 299.
- 32.
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 4.
- 33.
Agatha Christie, Dumb Witness (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 97.
- 34.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 194.
- 35.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 250.
- 36.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 19.
- 37.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 129.
- 38.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 139.
- 39.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 214.
- 40.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 245.
- 41.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 226.
- 42.
Christie, Dumb Witness, p. 158.
- 43.
Agatha Christie, Peril at End House (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1980), p. 27.
- 44.
Christie, Peril at End House, pp. 27–8.
- 45.
Christie, Peril at End House, p. 40.
- 46.
Christie, Peril at End Ho use, p. 113.
- 47.
Christie, Peril at End House, pp. 62–3.
- 48.
Christie, Peril at End House, p. 56.
- 49.
Christie, Peril at End House, p. 9.
- 50.
Christie, Peril at End House, p. 33.
- 51.
Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 20.
- 52.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 19.
- 53.
Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 180.
- 54.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 9.
- 55.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 9.
- 56.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 9.
- 57.
Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina and Sarah Stanbury (eds.), Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 412.
- 58.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 15.
- 59.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 18.
- 60.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 105.
- 61.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 66.
- 62.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 95.
- 63.
In The Psychology of the Female Body, Jane M. Ussher defines neurasthenia as ‘a collection of varying symptoms, many of them similar to those of hysteria, including headaches, masturbation, vertigo, insomnia, and depression. Neurasthenia generally affected single women … Women who had ambitions and desires, conscious and unconscious … became victims of the collection of symptoms labelled neurasthenia.’ Jane M. Ussher, The Psychology of the Female Body (London; New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 5.
- 64.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 135.
- 65.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 135.
- 66.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 139.
- 67.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 160.
- 68.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 183.
- 69.
Craig and Cadogan, The Lady Investigates, p. 179.
- 70.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 164.
- 71.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 165.
- 72.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 165.
- 73.
Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 7.
- 74.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 21.
- 75.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 21.
- 76.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 21.
- 77.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 18.
- 78.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 19.
- 79.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York; London: Routledge, 1999), p. 175.
- 80.
Christie, The Body in the Library, pp. 21–2.
- 81.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 22.
- 82.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 27.
- 83.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 29.
- 84.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 252.
- 85.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 181.
- 86.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 99.
- 87.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 204.
- 88.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 161.
- 89.
Christie, The Body in the Library, pp. 165–6.
- 90.
Christie, The Body in the Library, p. 163.
- 91.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 20.
- 92.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 14.
- 93.
Alan A. Jackson writes that ‘Until the early 1930s … most of the bourgeois resorts continued to offer bathing machines,’ which sheltered women from the eyes of men while they were bathing. However, what was seen and known of the female body was beginning to change radically, and ‘by 1930 … most holidaymakers under middle age were starting to indulge in new rituals at the seaside, exposing faces and bodies to the full glare of the sun for as long as possible, in search of the tan which they were assured would give them additional physical attraction and health. Equally important, it provided tangible evidence on their return that the holiday had been successful. With the sun cult came more attractive and briefer bathing costumes (often never wetted by the sea) as well as special accessories and fashions.’ Alan A. Jackson, The Middle Classes, 1900–1950 (Nairn: David St. John Thomas, 1991), pp. 309–10.
- 94.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 297.
- 95.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 153.
- 96.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, pp. 172–3.
- 97.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 17.
- 98.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 301.
- 99.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 23.
- 100.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 27.
- 101.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 69.
- 102.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 71.
- 103.
Christie, Evil Under the Sun, p. 298.
- 104.
Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 20–1.
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Hoffman, M. (2016). Sensational Bodies: Villains and Victims. In: Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53666-2_6
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