Series Fiction and the Challenge of Ideology: The Feminism of Sara Paretsky

Abstract

Sara Paretsky published Indemnity Only, her first V.I. Warshawski novel, in 1982. Coming hot on the heels of the second feminist wave of the late 1960s and 1970s, this book helped kick-start a new crime fiction subgenre, the feminist hardboiled detective novel. Paretsky’s success, along with that of contemporaries such as Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller, drew a large number of women writers into the genre, together with new, feminist readers of crime fiction. Paretsky’s most recent Warshawski novel, Breakdown (2012), is part of a chain that links the heady Reaganite 1980s with Obama’s America of 2012. The Warshawski series also traverses an important tranche of feminist history, between what are now commonly referred to as the second and third feminist waves. However, it would appear that a lifetime of feminism has brought both creator and protagonist to lassitude and despondency: ‘I am tired, V I is tired, but we both need to get back on our horses and try to raise the siege of Orleans’ (2009b, 50). Like Jeanne d’Arc at Orléans, however, neither the character nor the creator — who here aligns herself with V.I. — intends to give up the fight.¹