Abstract
This chapter argues that Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943) anticipates key traits at the heart of contemporary domestic noir: the eponymous heroine, for example, transcends the dichotomy between femmes fatales and ingénues to flourish as a fully rounded, not necessarily flawless, yet entirely sympathetic modern woman. The feminist charge of the novel’s nuanced characterization of Laura, and of her male admirers, is further thrown into relief when discussed alongside Otto Preminger’s famous 1944 cinematic adaptation, for the film reverts back to the very same tropes challenged by the original narrative. Ironically, while facilitating the recent rediscovery of the novel, Preminger’s Laura’s iconic place in the history of film noir has obscured Caspary’s own well-deserved position as a pioneer of “domestic suspense” (Weinman).
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Notes
- 1.
With its 1950s companion featuring novels by Charlotte Armstrong, Patricia Highsmith, Dolores Hitchens, and Margaret Millar, this volume provides an important counterpart to the male-dominated anthologies American Noir (1997) and the Hammett (2001) and Chandler (1995) box-sets, through which this publisher had already elevated crime writing to the rank of literary fiction. Weinman’s 1940s selection also features Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946); this lesser-known (compared to its three companions) novel had been reissued in 2011 in “The Best Mysteries of All Time” series by ImPress, an imprint of The Reader’s Digest Association.
- 2.
Sarah Weinman, “Introduction to Women Crime Writers”, http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=187 [accessed 9 September 2016].
- 3.
Library of America [online], “Interview with Sarah Weinman”, 11 February 2016, https://loa.org/news-and-views/1122-sarah-weinman-on-_women-crime-writers_-they-had-their-own-stories-to-tell-in-distinct-sometimes-ruthless-ways [accessed 9 September 2016]. Elsewhere, Weinman credits specifically Gillian Flynn “for paving the way” for her own project of rediscovery of neglected female crime writers (quoted in Laura Miller, “The Grandmothers of Gone Girl”, Salon, 16 August 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/08/16/the_grandmothers_of_gone_girl/ [accessed 9 September 2016]). In her review of Weinman’s box-set, Val McDermid concurs with the idea that “there is a clear line of descent from this style of storytelling to the current crop of best-selling novels labeled by the book trade as ‘domestic suspense’ or ‘suburban noir.’ I can’t help thinking that authors like Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman , Megan Abbott and Paula Hawkins have learned a thing or two from such foremothers” (“Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s”, The New York Times, 28 October 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/books/review/women-crime-writers-eight-suspense-novels-of-the-1940s-and-1950s.html?_r=0 [accessed 9 September 2016]).
- 4.
John T. Irwin, Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), p. 204. Tellingly, the cover of the Penguin edition of In a Lonely Place is a still from Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film. Persephone Books also capitalize on the existence of two film adaptations in their online blurb for The Blank Wall (see http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/the-blank-wall.html).
- 5.
Stefania Ciocia, “Lost in Cinematic Translation: The ‘Soft-boiled’ Housewife in The Blank Wall and American Gender Politics after WWII”, Literature/Film Quarterly, 43.3 (2015), 170–87.
- 6.
James W. Palmer, “In a Lonely Place: Paranoia in the Dream Factory”, Literature/Film Quarterly, 13.3 (1985), 200–207 (p. 201).
- 7.
See also Lisa Maria Hogeland: “The film raises the question of the extent to which the investigation itself is a trigger for Dix’s violence”, “Afterword” in Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place (New York: The Feminist Press, 2003), pp. 225–50 (p. 246). Her brief assessment of Ray’s film reaches the conclusion that “however unintentionally, something of Hughes’s proto-feminist analysis does survive the adaptation”, p. 247. For an insightful reading of Hughes’s novel, and Ray’s film, see Christopher Breu, “Radical Noir: Negativity, Misogyny, and the Critique of Privatization in Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place”, Modern Fiction Studies, 55.2 (2009), 199–215.
- 8.
Sarah Weinman, “Introduction” in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense (New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. xv–xxv (p. xviii).
- 9.
Janey Place opens her incisive overview of female characters in film noir with the observation that “[t]he dark lady, the spider woman, the evil seductress who tempts man and brings about his destruction is among the oldest themes of art, literature, mythology and religion in western culture” (“Women in Film Noir” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan [London: British Film Institute, 1998] pp. 47–68 [p. 47]). The film noir femme fatale is a modern incarnation of this deadly figure, whose explicitly sexual, and dangerous, iconography finds memorable expression in Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944) and Jane Greer’s Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947). Place offers Gilda—from the eponymous 1946 film—and Laura as examples of spider women who turn out not to conform to the archetype; nevertheless, “the images of sexual power they exhibit are more powerful than the narrative ‘explanation’” that vindicates their real nature and individual identity (p. 58).
- 10.
Eugene McNamara, “Laura” as Novel, Film, and Myth (Lewinston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p. ii.
- 11.
As Elizabeth Cowie remind us, Laura is “one of the original films designated by Nino Frank as a film noir when he coined the term” in L’Ecran français in 1946 (“Film Noir and Women” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993) pp. 121–56 [p. 126]). In their seminal A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941–1953 (1955), Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton mention Laura as one of the five titles through which French moviegoers discovered this new cinematic genre in the summer of 1946. These early taxonomies have undoubtedly cast a long shadow over the history of reception of Laura. Later critics have variously pointed out that the film “still possesses much of the structure of the classical whodunnit detective story” (Michael Walker, “Film Noir: Introduction” in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron [London: Studio Vista, 1994] pp. 8–34 [p. 10]) or have drawn attention to where it departs from noir conventions altogether, especially if compared to movies that decidedly belong to that canon: “next to Double Indemnity […] we can see that Laura is not a noir […] Laura is not a spider woman” (McNamara, p. 10) or “Laura signifies a reversal of traditional noir story structure. Laura Hunt’s woman of mystery is a polar opposite from the traditional noir images of Jane Greer, Claire Trevor or Barbara Stanwyck” (William Hare, Early Film Noir: Greed, Lust and Murder Hollywood Style [Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003], p. 125). Note that Laura’s distance from the femme fatale trope is identified as the reason why the film is not a typical noir.
- 12.
Mark Jancovich, “Phantom Ladies: The War Worker, the Slacker and the ‘Femme Fatale’”, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8.2 (2010), 164–78 (p. 172).
- 13.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 33.
- 14.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 33.
- 15.
Preminger used “a photo of Gene Tierney touched up to look like a painting”, (A.B. Emrys, Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the Casebook Novel [Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2011], p. 119). For Emrys, the “glamorous” portrait “embodies the male gaze of the infatuated artist rather than the living woman” (p. 119) both in the film and in the novel. While I agree with this point, I would argue that the film tries to obscure the extent to which this image of Laura—the Laura Waldo and Mark fall in love with—is a projection of their masculine desires.
- 16.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 65.
- 17.
On this scene, see Bran Nicol , The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), p. 170: “the image of her in close up, bathed in light, wearing a shawl which resembles the dress in the painting, echoes the earlier phantasmatic image in the portrait”.
- 18.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 65.
- 19.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 14.
- 20.
McNamara, p. 2.
- 21.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 48.
- 22.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 28.
- 23.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 34.
- 24.
In a 1971 article entitled “My Laura and Otto’s”, Caspary explains that “the cane was a symbol (Freudian) of Waldo’s impotence and destructiveness, actually the theme of the novel” (Saturday Review, 26 June 1971, 36–7, p. 37). She also recalls her unsuccessful battle with Preminger about retaining Waldo’s deadly walking stick in the film.
- 25.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 104.
- 26.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 61.
- 27.
In a scene recollected by Mark towards the end of the novel (p. 158), Waldo “turn[s] to the mirror” (p. 12) and sees himself looking innocent. He imagines Mark pacing in front of the same mirror (p. 19) which will later frame the detective’s first impression of Shelby (p. 21) and of Laura’s Aunt Sue (p. 23). Waldo sees Mark’s “guarded countenance” (p. 50) in a mirror, and regards Mark’s pallor as a “reflection” (p. 55) of his own. Laura’s maid Bessy first sees the corpse in the reflection on the glass globe (p. 32), whose distorting qualities are discussed by Waldo (p. 103). Even Mark is drawn to check in the mirror to see if he “look[s] like the kind of sucker who trusts a woman” (p. 159).
- 28.
Bram Dijkstra, quoted in Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 59.
- 29.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 146.
- 30.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 155.
- 31.
McNamara, p. 42.
- 32.
The casting of “the virtually ‘out’” Clifton Webb as Waldo, and his characterization as “a classically waspish, fussily dressed queen” strengthens the impression that his love for Laura is non-sexual (Richard Dyer, “Postscript: Queers and Women in Film Noir” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: British Film Institute, 1998), pp. 123–29 [p. 123]).
- 33.
Emrys, p. 114. Caspary’s choice of the name of her protagonist predates her discovery of Collins, who is widely identified as one of the pioneers of detective fiction. On Caspary’s adoption of the “Wilkie Collins method of having each character tell his or her own version” of the story, see Emrys, p. 112 and ff.
- 34.
McNamara, p. 28.
- 35.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 1.
- 36.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 13.
- 37.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 6.
- 38.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 7.
- 39.
As Waldo observes, Mark is well read and, in his idiosyncratic way, “a snob […] worse, a Scotch snob” (p. 9), “a prig […] a proletarian snob with a Puritan conscience” (p. 93).
- 40.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 52.
- 41.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 18.
- 42.
Compare with the treatment of the same incident in the film, where the “siege of Babylon” which leads to Mark’s injury is recalled by Waldo as evidence of the detective’s heroism: “Are you the man with the leg full of lead? The one who walked right in and got him [the gangster with the machine gun, who had already killed three policemen]?” Mark takes Waldo’s admiration at face value (“I hope you won’t have any reason to change your mind about me”), inviting the audience to subscribe to his characterization as an effortlessly courageous and dynamic man.
- 43.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 9.
- 44.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 158.
- 45.
McNamara, p. vi.
- 46.
See also McNamara, for whom these two early occasions when Mark “almost smiles […] serve to reinforce the opposition in two types of character. One is the tough, physical man of action and the other the aesthete whose chief weapon is verbal wit”, p. v.
- 47.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 21.
- 48.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), pp. 10, 100.
- 49.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 84; see also p. 21.
- 50.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 84.
- 51.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 107.
- 52.
See also Waldo’s take on Shelby, reported by Mark in his section of the narrative: “The hero she could love forever immaturely, the mould of perfection whose flawlessness made no demands upon her sympathies or her intelligence” (p. 107).
- 53.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 108.
- 54.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 110.
- 55.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 110.
- 56.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 122.
- 57.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 129.
- 58.
The final remark is a bitter reference to Shelby’s tryst with Diane, to whom Laura nonetheless lends her apartment while she goes away to spend the weekend in her country house. Shelby is in Laura’s bedroom when Diane opens the door to Laura’s would-be murderer, and gets killed in her place.
- 59.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 23.
- 60.
See also, “‘I hope you don’t think I’m completely a heel, Mr. McPherson,’ Shelby said ruefully. ‘I never liked borrowing from a woman’” (p. 27).
- 61.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 123.
- 62.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 123.
- 63.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 142.
- 64.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 142.
- 65.
This passage closely informs one of the scenes in the film which, as already discussed, really does bank on Waldo’s self-perception as Laura’s maker. In the novel, however, the task of recording and shaping her story is described by Waldo at the beginning of the narrative as a poor substitute for the part he would have liked to have played: “For all of his rough edges, [Mark] was the man I should have been, the hero of the story. The hero, but not the interpreter. That is my omniscient role” (p. 18).
- 66.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 136.
- 67.
We have already dealt with Shelby as a big baby. Laura compares Waldo to “a sickly, sensitive child” (p. 149), but also to “a fussy old maid” (p. 78). See also Mark’s observation that Waldo’s voice is “like an old woman’s” (p. 104).
- 68.
A predatory version of the novel’s Aunt Sue, Ann has her own matrimonial designs on Shelby, whom she recognizes as being “no good”, like herself. Her other argument in favour of the suitability of her match with Shelby is that she “can afford him”. (Incidentally, Preminger’s characterization of Shelby as a “gigolo” outraged Caspary; see “My Laura and Otto’s”, p. 37). Ann’s callousness is given a vaguely malicious edge by the casting of Judith Anderson, who played the evil Mrs Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). Hitchcock’s film, based on Daphne du Maurier’s novel, explores much more ominously than Laura the destructive influence of a beautiful dead woman.
- 69.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 108.
- 70.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), pp. 110–11.
- 71.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 111.
- 72.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 157.
- 73.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 31.
- 74.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 31.
- 75.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 107.
- 76.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 129.
- 77.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 29.
- 78.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 69.
- 79.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 70.
- 80.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 80.
- 81.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 71.
- 82.
Nicol, p. 11.
- 83.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 64.
- 84.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 64.
- 85.
Nicol, pp. 169–70.
- 86.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 77.
- 87.
Vera Caspary, Laura (London: Vintage Classics, 2012), p. 77.
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Ciocia, S. (2018). Hollywood and the Trailblazers of Domestic Noir: The Case of Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943). In: Joyce, L., Sutton, H. (eds) Domestic Noir. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_3
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