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Title Dangerous Crossings : Class Passing, Identity Intersectionality, and Consumer Culture in U.S. Crime Fiction and Film, 1940-1960

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Author Rolens, Clare

Publication Date 2014

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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO

Dangerous Crossings: Class Passing, Identity Intersectionality, and Consumer Culture in U.S. Crime Fiction and Film, 1940-1960

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

Literature

Clare Rolens

Committee in charge:

Professor Michael Davidson, Chair Professor Rebecca Plant Professor Roddey Reid Professor Shelley Streeby Professor Nicole Tonkovich

2014

Clare Rolens, 2014

The Dissertation of Clare Rolens is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically:

Chair

University of California, San Diego

2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………iii

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iv

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v

Vita……………………………………………………………………………………...viii

Abstract of the Dissertation………………………………………………………………ix

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1

CHAPTER ONE The Femme Fatale on the Home Front in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and Vera Caspary’s Laura (1942)..………………..42

CHAPTER TWO For Richer, For Poorer: Class-Passing Mothers and Domestic Noir in Vera Caspary’s Bedelia (1945)……………………………………………..……90

CHAPTER THREE The Homme Fatal Strikes Again: Male Class Passers in Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)….……………………………………………………………..….140

CHAPTER FOUR Economically Queer: Class and Gender Passing as Anti-Racist Resistance in Chester Himes’s All Shot Up (1960).………………………...….176

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...208

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………214

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Studying writers, I cannot help but note certain patterns in the writing process.

One is the combination of the writer as always alone in her craft, and the other is writer as constantly supported, challenged, critiqued, and shaped by family, friends, colleagues, editors, advisors, and well-wishers. First and foremost, I would like to thank my kind and diligent advisor, Michael Davidson. Because of his detailed feedback and enthusiasm for my project, my doctoral studies have been not a long and onerous slog but a delight. Even late in his career, his energy and pleasure in scholarship has been infectious. I am particularly grateful for the moments when he demanded more of me, pushed me to a higher standard, and fostered ever more provocative work. My mother Debra and father

Jim introduced me to the endlessly rich world of crime fiction; my father was my historian, and my mother my poet. Thanks to both of them for shaping my life as a writer, thinker, and reader. My brother, Sam, a journalist, songwriter, and playwright, has always been a source of inspiration and an invaluable collaborator for me, as has my endlessly creative poet of a sister-in-law, Jacquie. My aunt Lin is my intellectual sounding board, and a woman of grace and forceful, creative, and curious thought— my thanks to her for making me a traveller, and thus opening a wide world to me. My dear Sierra has been like a sister to me in my writings, my readings, and my travels. Lani taught me how to have complicated and ambitious conversations about everything under the sun, and taught me to enjoy and crave such conversations. Jessica developed this skill further, in long talks over cocktails and long walks on the beach collecting shells. Christie and Lata helped me to have fun and make my college years into countless good stories. Neil asked

me to think more complexly and feel more deeply, and was my partner in American history and inquisitive study of masculinities in American culture.

I was lucky to have a fabulous committee who supported me with both praise and constructive criticism. My thanks go to Nicole Tonkovich for her advice in all matters academic and personal; her tireless commitment to teaching and scholarship has set the bar high for me. Shelley Streeby pushed me in the right direction in my study of working class identity and gender studies, and has made me a more well-rounded scholar. Roddey

Reid’s class on glamour and popular culture, as well as his work in masculinity studies, provided the foundation for my overall scholarship. Rebecca Plant’s historian’s eye allowed me to write more textured and complete contextualization for my literary analysis, and encouraged my fascination with motherhood and domesticity in crime fiction and film. I had so much help at UCSD beyond my committee. Kate was my model academic and friend, without whom graduate school would have been a lot more confusing and a lot less joyful; Jack stood by me in balancing school and work, and taught me the best chicken recipe. Sarah gave me fresh passion and a new standard for academic work, as well as superlative feedback and guidance, and remains a partner in crafting exciting and moral scholarship. Mark, with his endless energy for ideas and cheeky chapter titles, brought a sense of fun to my gender studies scholarship. Soren,

Satoko, and Juliana read draft after draft, and were generous with their feedback and support. Amanda introduced me to San Diego and its many pleasures, and introduced me also to all my Sunday Funday friends who have made my time at UCSD the best years of my life. Meredith and Charlie helped me through tough times with legal help, happy arguments, and Cards Against Humanity, and Tony reminded me to look at novels like a

novelist. Above all, Jimi’s infinite creativity, curiosity, and support have made me into the scholar and the person that I am. I hope he never stops asking me questions. No one could ask for a more wise, lovely, and loving partner.

vii

VITA

2005 Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Santa Barbara

2006-2007 Tutor, Santa Barbara City College

2008-2014 Teaching Assistant, Eleanor Roosevelt College

2012 Master of Arts, University of California, San Diego

2012-2013 Teaching Assistant, Literature Department, University of California, San Diego

2013-2014 Dissertation Fellow, Literature Department, University of California, San Diego

2014 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego

PUBLICATIONS

“Write Like A Man: Chester Himes and the Criminal Text Beyond Bars,” in Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Johns Hopkins University Press. Spring 2014.

“Revising the Prison in the Literary Marketplace: Blurred Boundaries and Absurdity Obscured in Chester Himes’s Prison Novels,” in the peer-reviewed essay collection New Chester Himes Criticism, Eds. Michael Gillespie and Gary Holcomb. Forthcoming.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Twentieth century U.S. literature U.S. crime and detective fiction and film Consumer culture and advertising African American literature and culture Jewish American literature Critical gender studies Class in U.S. literature and culture

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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Dangerous Crossings: Class Passing, Identity Intersectionality, and Consumer

Culture in U.S. Crime Fiction and Film, 1940-1960

Clare Rolens

Doctor of Philosophy in Literature

University of California, San Diego, 2014

Professor Michael Davidson, Chair

In “Dangerous Crossings: Class Passing, Identity Intersectionality, and Consumer

Culture in U.S. Crime Fiction and Film, 1940-1960,” I argue that a close analysis of class masquerade illuminates the intersectional nature of identity and the criminalization of socially mobile individuals in American literature and popular culture. The midcentury

American crime narrative is structured by the stubborn prevalence of a figure I call the class passer, that is, a character who performs a false class identity in order to be socially mobile and to conceal their class origins. This “dangerous crossing” of class lines is a catalyst that also destabilizes any notion of gender, race, and sexuality as fixed

categories. My focus serves as a critical lens for crime fiction’s engagement with consumer capitalism, as well as for the study of class, and more broadly of identity itself as a fluid, yet rigid, concept in midcentury discourse. Chapter One, “The Femme Fatale on the Home Front in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and Vera

Caspary’s Laura (1942),” pairs Chandler and Caspary’s noir novels to illustrate the crucial role of class in the femme fatale’s danger to capitalist patriarchy. In Chapter Two,

“For Richer, For Poorer: Class-Passing Mothers and Domestic Noir in Vera Caspary’s

Bedelia (1945), Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), and No Man of Her

Own (1950),” I compare Caspary and Woolrich’s stories of pregnant women who are criminal class passers, as well as the latter novel’s 1950 film adaptation. In Chapter

Three, “The Homme Fatal Strikes Again: Male Class Passers in Dorothy Hughes’s In a

Lonely Place (1947) and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955),” I argue that female authors revise conventions of the crime genre to frame the encroachment of consumer culture and postmodern notions of identity as threats gendered as masculine rather than feminine. Chapter Four, “Economically Queer: Class and Gender Passing as

Anti-Racist Resistance in Chester Himes’s All Shot Up (1960),” uses queer of color critique to examine how passing in Himes’s series of Harlem crime novels expose fixed identities and white supremacy as confidence games. Ultimately, my project demonstrates the importance of popular genre in the broader study of U.S. literature and culture, specifically in terms of class, intersectionality, and postmodern identities.

Introduction

In 1922 Carroll John Daly created what many scholars of crime fiction recognize as the first hard-boiled character in a pulp magazine when the story “The False Burton

Combs” was published in Black Mask. Although Dashiell Hammett popularized the hard- boiled detective in the character of Sam Spade (in The Maltese Falcon (1929)), Hammett owes a debt to Daly and “The False Burton Combs,” the tale of a tough, wisecracking, irreverent, and violent con-man adventurer who is first and foremost his own man. This unnamed 1922 character displays all the exaggerated traits of the hard-boiled male detective—autonomous, authentically masculine, rough rather than refined, unaffected rather than sentimental, and quick to violence and other physical displays of dominance over women and weak men. These traits are clear in Daly’s protagonist, whose virility and independence make him a model for independent masculinity in the fraught landscape of twentieth century manhood.

The protagonist’s masculinity, to be imitated in innumerable future fictions, embodies a tension between working and upper class models whose boundaries are sometimes permeable, and sometimes rigidly strict. He is travelling on a riverboat when a well-dressed gentleman approaches him and offers him a job; the gentleman’s name is

Burton Combs, the son of a millionaire, and he is being followed and threatened by mobsters. Burton Combs and the narrator are strikingly similar in height, coloration, and facial feature, but drastically different in personality. Where Combs is delicate and cowardly, his hard-boiled double is strong and brave, so Combs asks if he will

2 impersonate him and ward off the attacks of these mobsters, hopefully to permanently stop them from making threats. The two men switch places, and Daly’s protagonist spends the rest of the story as the “false Burton Combs.” He dresses in Combs’s finery, lives in his luxurious hotel suite, courts an heiress, perfects his manners, and generally passes for upper class. The false Burton Combs at first clings to his rough-and-tumble coarse masculinity, but grows increasingly attracted to the world of the upper classes and his new, albeit fake, identity as a gentleman. After killing some of the mobsters and scaring the rest away, the hard-boiled narrator so impresses Combs’s father that he gives him a high-earning and high profile job; he wins the love of a beautiful heiress, settles into upper-class life, and appears not to look back after his crossing. He is “false” no more.

This early example of hard-boiled masculinity in a pulp magazine is paired with class passing (that is, convincingly enacted false class identity) and ultimately, at the end of the story, what begins as charade ends as reality. Daly’s narrative of class passing, fascination with consumption, and a love of fine clothing as combined with hard-boiled violent masculinity may seem anomalous in the greater scheme of popular crime fiction.

However, I argue that the character of the passer, and particularly the class passer, is a primary aspect of hard-boiled and noir American crime fiction. Using Daly’s story of a tough con man as my starting point, this dissertation examines the figure of the passer.

Why are class desires and multiple identity performances tied up with class passing in crime fiction and film from the eve of World War II through the 1960s? Why should the class passer, social mobility, and self-transformation be as consistently central to crime

3 narratives as the more expected genre features of gritty underworlds, violence, and detection?

In “Dangerous Crossings: Identity Intersectionality, Class Passing, and Consumer

Culture in U.S. Crime Fiction and Film, 1940-1960,” I argue that the stubborn prevalence of the class passer serves as a critical lens for crime fiction’s engagement with consumer capitalism, as well as for the study of class, and more broadly of identity in U.S culture and literature. During the World War II and in the first decades of what Henry Luce called the “American Century,” the criminalized class passer dramatized fears of consumer capitalist society’s hopes and failures in the era’s most popular mediums; pulp magazines, slick magazines, novels, and films. In a nation where working-class individuals could theoretically be socially mobile and reinvent themselves as higher-class citizens, the lingering presence of the passer, even into the supposedly prosperous economic boom from 1945 and into the 1960s, represents a problem for the American myths of meritocracy and the self-made man. Yet while many of the class passers so central to crime fiction function as scathing critiques of the egalitarian promise of

American consumer capitalism, they are also at times villainized as class traitors, illegitimate men and women, fakes on a monstrous, criminal scale who not only undermine social order, but worse, unravel stable selfhood and identity. It is this

“dangerous crossing” of class lines that the passer illuminates from the 1920s to the

1960s, the peak decades of hard-boiled and noir narratives of class passing criminals. It is more than a coincidence, furthermore, that the trope of racial passing so prevalent at the turn of the century began its decline in American literature just at the time when the class passing criminal in hard-boiled crime fiction became increasingly ubiquitous.

Class passing is linked not only to questions of racial identity, but also to classed models of gender. In Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940), sinister class passer Velma Valento sheds her status as a “cute,” “dime-a-dozen” dame with a vaguely ethnic-sounding name by performing a new high class identity as Helen Grayle, a blonde, beautiful, elegant, and powerful lady. In her case, to alter one’s class is to alter one’s femininity, and Velma is willing to commit murder to escape her past as a showgirl and remain her new position as a chic heiress. In an economy that transforms women into commodities, Velma/Helen is like a counterfeit coin; she passes herself off as a woman of value when in fact her origins mark her as common and cheap. I contend that the figure of the class passer, often in the archetypes of the dangerous femme fatale and homme fatal, plays out economic fears of speculation, political fears of imposter infiltration, and social anxieties concerning illegitimately mobile working-class men and women who usurp upper-class privilege. Crime narratives in this time period conflate gender and economic anxieties by critiquing consumer culture and models of identity that privilege surface above substance. Thus, my approach to the field of crime fiction studies illuminates how intersections of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and consumer identity reflect a broader economic and cultural shift in the U.S. that linked the “right” kinds of femininity and masculinity with the “right” terms of economic exchange and social mobility. Gender studies and queer of color critique have focused on gender, sexual, and racial identities as performative or socially constructed rather than as essential categories.

My study joins a relatively small but growing body of work that considers class in this critical context. Crime fiction authors, through what I term the class passing crime

5 narrative, dissect and critique the criminalization of the socially mobile worker and the simultaneously threatening and promising possibilities of malleable class identity.

The American crime story as it appeared in Black Mask from the 1920s to the

1940s, and as it appeared subsequently in film noir and literary noir from the 1940s to the

1950s, imagined a world of cynicism, corruption, broken promises of prosperity and success, and an unjust and uncertain social order. Film noir, a term coined in 1946 by the

French film critic Nino Frank, refers to a kind of American crime film that European audiences perceived as a shift to more dark and complexly philosophical narratives after

World War II. Some scholars define noir as a style or a mood, characterized as it is by high-contrast lighting, nocturnal and underworld settings, and pervading pessimism expressed aesthetically and thematically.1 Still others see it as a genre in its own right. I define noir as falling somewhere between a general style and a specific genre. It is a nightmarish counterpart to the mainstream Hollywood film, but more importantly, noir crime stories are structured by intertwined themes of entrapment (akin to nineteenth century Gothic fiction) and the dark side of postwar consumer capitalism. In noir’s atmosphere of dreams turning to nightmares in the individual’s doomed fight to achieve a measure of freedom and autonomy, the passer recurs with obsessive consistency. Like the noir protagonist, the passer also navigates an unjust society where he or she must employ an illegitimate or duplicitous means of social mobility and self-invention, since legitimate means of social mobility are unavailable. The world of noir, far from being merely a backdrop for the passer’s plight, popularized both the danger of the class imposter and

1 See Erik Dussere’s America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture (2013), Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955), Paula Rabinowitz’s Black and White and Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (2002), and Lee Horsley’s The Noir Thriller (2001).

6 the broken promise of the American dream. Recent scholarly work argues that noir as a concept is characterized by uncertain identity, subjectivity of truth, inability of the image to convey meaning, entrapment, and the limits of rational detection and empiricism; this debate should be considered alongside the issues of consumption, commodity fetishism, class, and passing. The generic features and cultural origins of crime fiction have something unique and important to say about what class is, how class intersects with gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity, how class constructs and is constructed by the criminal other, and how class constructs and is constructed by consumer culture.

Studies of popular culture have long been partially based upon publication and critical reception history, as well as the kinds of advertising and consumer culture that disseminated masternarratives of ideal gender and consumer roles. My project is concerned with histories of cultural and literary production alongside a close literary analysis of style and form. Thus, I draw on film theory, gender studies (including both feminist and masculinity studies, especially the work of Mary Anne Doane), and the more historicizing approach of scholars like Lee Horsley, Erin Smith, Sean McCann, and

Christopher Breu. I also add to scholarship (like that of Leonard Cassuto) on the multi- generic nature of crime fiction and its place in a longer tradition of nineteenth and early twentieth century writing. These authors draw on a range of periodicals, ads, images, and reviews to place crime fiction in a broad context, and they work to understand the different historical roots of this genre as well. Popular texts are cultural artifacts, and they also merit serious attention as literary texts.

Class Passing

The passing narrative, wherein an individual conceals his or her “original” or

“true” identity through the performance of an “artificial” or “fake” identity, has been re- examined in recent years as a trope that troubles any notion of a “true” identity. In the literature of the United States, the trope of passing usually involves African Americans passing for white. As such, it was a tool of social critique and melodramatic tragedy

(especially in the figure of the tragic mulatta) for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An important dimension to the fear of the imposter was the threat of a multiracial American that undermined the legal, cultural, and supposedly biological boundary between white and non-white. The racial passer was a central figure in late nineteenth century and modernist stories of crime—see for example Mark Twain’s

Puddin'head Wilson (1894), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), and William Faulkner’s

Light in August (1932)—but the class passer continues this tradition of social critique in crime and detective fiction in a different way. The illegitimate and illicit desire for a fluid class identity joins criminality and the culture of consumption, since both shopping and murder allow the passer to take on multiple unfixed class, gender, sexual, ethnic, and racial identities.

My project brings together the seldom-joined scholarship on hard-boiled or noir crime narratives and passing, as a means of foregrounding the understudied notion of class passing. While class passing is not a commonly used term, the phenomenon it is everywhere in American culture.2 The class passer enacts a “false” and deliberate class performance designed to both conceal his or her class origins, and achieve self-invention

2 Class passing is not my own term, but there are very few scholars who critically engage with the concept. These scholars include Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Chris Straayer, Peter Hitchcock, and Andreá N. Williams, among a handful of others.

8 by creating and maintaining a new class identity. As Andreá N. Williams observes (in one of the few instances of explicit and sustained critical engagement with class passing), the class passer, like the racial or gender passer, is constantly in danger of discovery should their performance slip and their passing be exposed or unconvincing. In

Williams’s words, “Unlike what is touted as upward mobility gained openly through one’s effort in a supposed meritocracy, class-passing is characterized by self-conscious calculation that allows the passer to transgress seemingly fixed social boundaries” (135).

Examples are as wide-ranging as Charles Brockden Brown’s shifty hero in Arthur

Mervyn (1793), simultaneous race and class passing in William Wells Brown’s Clotel

(1853) (the first novel by an African American author), Louisa May Alcott’s thrillers

(especially Behind a Mask (1866)), Horatio Alger’s series of nineteenth-century novels about socially mobile boys such as Ragged Dick (1868), and the eponymous class passer in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), all the way to contemporary examples such as that of Vivian Ward in the 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman and Don Draper in the 2007-2014 AMC television series Mad Men.

A range of terms are possible to describe the act of performing a “false” class in a way that conceals one’s “true” class. Class crossing, class cross-dressing, class drag, and class transvestiture, could be, and have been, used in reference to the phenomenon. The term “class imposter” is often useful as well in describing the class passer as the insidious, unwelcome other infiltrating a class circle that is not his or her own. The term

“drag” could mean anything from a consciously artificial and exaggerated, as illustrated by popular contemporary drag performers (examples include as Hedda Lettuce, whose drag is an outrageously false performance of extravagant femininity that draws attention

9 to its inauthenticity, and Courtney Act, whose drag is characterized by her “realness,” that is, her understated and realistic portrayal of femininity, and thus her potential to pass). However, “passing” specifically indicates not an obviously and exaggeratedly artificial performance, but an attempt at a superficially natural performance designed to be undetectable and indistinguishable from the authentic. I find “class passing” to be the most accurate and rich term for my purposes. The term “class passer” describes not only a person whose class performance is convincing enough to be taken as authentic, but also conveys that that performance is inauthentic. One does not “pass” as one’s “real” class.

Inherent in the term is the idea of authenticity set in complex opposition to inauthenticity, as well as a failure to “become” what you can “pass” as. Finally, unlike the terms transvestiture or cross-dressing, “passing” implies the complicity and participation of an audience in whose eyes the passer manages to pass. It takes one to cross-dress, but it takes two to pass: the “inauthentic” passer, and the person whom the passer seeks to convince or fool. This onlooker or audience can be an “authentic” member of any class, but tends to be either from the class the passer imitates, or from the class of the passer’s origin.

For the class passers in these texts, their new high-class selves can only exist by erasing or hiding their “true” class identities, a process that depends on both their savvy use of consumption and their ability to read and learn the culture of another class. In the process of this identity performance, characters like Clotel and Jay Gatsby raise the questions of whether any “true” class identity exists, and whether class must be hidden or can be altered. Class passing undermines the very idea of distinct class characteristics and exposes the performative elements of class, but it can also serve to reinforce class lines.

Though part of a broader tradition, the class passing story is quite an American phenomenon, as it brings together the contradiction between a nation of strict hierarchy that treats the social climber as imposter, and a nation of self-made individuals who can reject old world convention and pursue some form of the American dream of upward mobility. Karen Halttunen’s Confidence-Men and Painted Women explores how the threat of the imposter grew during a spike in urbanization in the early to middle decades of the nineteenth century, and how fears of inauthentic individuals focalized in the figure of the confidence man, as well as in the figure of the loose or ingenuously “painted” woman. Thus, the class passer’s status as an imposter and a fake has long marked him or her as the dark side of the myth of American social mobility and meritocracy, a site of danger that undermines our ability to know and make stable meaning.

The role of class in crime narratives has been well studied by several scholars, but class passing is rarely a topic of scholarly investigations. A few works, including one book-length study by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster called Class Passing: Social Mobility in

Film and Popular Culture (2005), have been devoted to class-passing, along with a handful of articles and book chapters that range from examinations of how class and sexuality passing intersect in The Talented Mr. Ripley (Straayer), to downward class- passing for the purposes of research in Herman Melville’s works (Chura), among several other examples. Andreá N. Williams has recently devoted a chapter to the subject in her book Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction, and Peter Hitchcock’s

“Passing: Henry Green and Working-Class Identity” considers how class passing fits into a broader interest in identity politics and the trope of identity passing. Although I have drawn from these works, my approach differs in a few key ways. While Foster

11 compellingly uses Judith Butler’s theories of performativity to examine primarily contemporary popular examples of what might be called “everyday” class passing that

Americans perform, from wearing fake designer jeans and living in McMansions to reality TV shows like Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, she does not consider the longer generic tradition of passing literature (and film) in her study. As a book-length study on an understudied subject, Foster’s text reads more like an overview of the concept of class passing in American life rather than an anchored study of class passing in a particular time period or context. The same can be said of Patrick Chura’s study of characters that perform a “downclassing” cross-class trasnvestiture across a broad swath of American

(high-brow) literature, from the 1840s to the 1940s. While my study of class passing fleshes out a broader definition of the trope and how it structures narrative, I pair class passing with crime stories as a way to understand the criminalized class imposter within a few decades of U.S. culture.

Finally, several scholars have read crime narratives as critiquing the notion of social mobility and meritocracy in the United States. Principle among them is Mark

Osteen’s Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream, which considers how the question of whether identity is malleable or rigid structures film noir. He suggests that the genre undermines American Dream discourse by “portraying characters whose defeat or death seems fated” because they fail to “reinvent” themselves (2). However, his study differs from mine in a few key ways. I anchor my arguments in a close reading of and I focus primarily on literature, whereas he looks exclusively at film and his approach to identity is more general and does not hinge on questions of class specifically. He also tends to treat film noir as presenting a unified critique of American Dream discourse; I

12 am interested in the variety and ambivalence of crime narratives, which I argue constitute a multivocal conversation about the American Dream, but class identity more narrowly, achieved through innovative reworking of genre formulas, plotlines, and archetypes.

Finally, according to Osteen, “Noir… posits an inversion of equality whereby almost everyone is equally trapped” (4). However, the texts I examine articulate a keen awareness that not everyone is “equally” trapped. My attention to narratives published in mediums intended for particular class audiences (Black Mask tailored for working-class male readers, Good Housekeeping for middle-class female readers, etc.) suggests that the authors, publishers, and consumers of crime fiction tackled not general social malaise so much as specific kinds of entrapment and injustice.

Defining Class

One conventional view of post-World War II class studies has long been that the

United States transitioned from the Great Depression era when class distinctions played a major role in U.S. politics and culture, to an era when prosperity and the growth of consumer capitalism rendered American society classless, or at least rendered class an insignificant social division, after World War II. Andrew Hoberek works against this simplistic interpretation, following Robert Seguin’s assertion that such a masternarrative is downright “utopian” (4). Seguin suggests that discourse surrounding class after the war managed to simultaneously illuminate and obscure class identity and class concerns in the

U.S., so that the poor worker and the wealthy stockbroker both managed to enfold themselves into an ideology of middle-classness (or rather middle-classlessness) all the while erasing the idea of class as a meaningful identity category. Thus, class was visible

13 and invisible, “stubborn and fleeting” against the backdrop of expanding consumer capitalism and Fordism (2). In short, in the time period I study, class is exceedingly dynamic and difficult to define.

This project is confined and contextualized within about two decades because class is highly contingent and quickly changes in response to cultural, political, economic, and ideological discourses. More than analyzing the every-day-always kinds of class-passing that characters (and people) engage in, as Foster and others do in their work, I am interested in how class is depicted in crime novels of this particular era not as a permeable social and economic boundary, but as a strict border that is actually quite difficult to cross legitimately or free of violent repercussions. Class as a concept changed significantly during the time period I investigate. Hard-boiled crime fiction’s origins in working-class and popular sources in the 1920s make the genre necessarily intertwined with a pre-World War II culture of working-class pride and of leftist notions of class consciousness, a culture altered by the war and by the ensuing Red Scare. For example, the first text I examine, Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940), was first published serially in the working-class pulp magazine Black Mask in 1936 and 1937, and treated the subject of class identity and class passing in the context of the New Deal.

Chandler lived in a world of powerful leftist politics, socialism, unions, and a Great

Depression that apparently signaled the failure of the nation’s old capitalist economic model.3 Over the course of the next two decades, World War II (among other things) ended the Depression, stimulated postwar consumption, and laid the groundwork for a

3 As an employee in a Los Angeles oil company in the 1920s, Chandler saw the corruption and the instability of boom and bust capitalism first hand, and grew increasingly cynical about American Dream rhetoric and the potential for working-class social mobility (see Chapter One).

Cold War that demonized communism and socialism. By the late 1940s, leftist politics were less influential and consumer capitalism represented, for most political rhetoricians and mainstream Americans at any rate, the primary hope for U.S. security and geopolitical dominance.

Such a shift is especially evident in the works of Daniel Bell and that of other

1930s socialist critics who by the 1960s had rejected their former radicalism. In Bell’s classic work The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties

(1960), he argued that Marxism as a unifying political and intellectual force in the United

States was spent. Indeed, although he focused specifically on leftist ideologies rendered moot with the supposedly diminishing importance of class hierarchy, he argued that ideology in general (be it on the left or the right of the political spectrum) was too vulnerable to the simplistic thinking of zealots and extremists, making complex or nuanced thinking impossible. Fascist and Communist regimes during World War II seemed to bear out this thesis. Americans, Bell argued, had turned away from ideology in favor of less polarized political positions. While he and his fellow intellectuals had devoted themselves to the critique of capitalism the 1930s, by the time the Port Huron

Statement had been written, they stood largely opposed to students in the New Left. The struggle against class inequality, so intertwined with socialist ideology during the

Depression, seemed outdated and even dangerous in the anti-Soviet intellectual and popular atmosphere of the Cold War, and anti-communists conflated anti-classism with un-American activity. Class shifted from being a rallying cry for anti-capitalist political action, to a category of greatly diminished political power and cultural currency in the supposedly classless era of the postwar years when consumer capitalism became both the

15 index and the hope for legitimate U.S. dominance and superiority. Of course, this shift was uneven and complex, but nonetheless it is safe to say that conversations regarding class, socioeconomic hierarchy, and consumer capitalism changed considerably in this time period. Crime fiction served as a platform for these shifting concerns regarding class.4

My interest in class passing and its relationship with consumer culture aligns more with western post-Marxism and cultural studies than with classical Marxism, the latter focusing more on production rather than consumption as the basis for class position.

Linking class identity with consumer culture is a relatively new formulation, and one that builds upon and modifies Marxist approaches. Rather than viewing class as primarily a function of relationship to the means of production and to various kinds of labor, post-

Marxist theorists, especially those of the Frankfurt school, were among the first to explore and establish the links among consumption, class identity, and mass culture.

However, I differ from most Frankfurt School theorists in my approach to popular culture and various forms of mass media. For Marx and Engels, ideologies disseminated by mass culture functioned to benefit the ruling classes and naturalize their power and superiority.

According to this view, serially published genre fiction was part and parcel of a consumer capitalist system that disempowered working classes. However, this formulation does a disservice to the complexity and nuance of the genre. Crime fiction can, and often does, offer both critique and praise for capitalist economic systems and the logic of consumer culture, and is quite capable of multiple layers of meaning on literary and social levels.

4 If class dropped out of cold war intellectual debates, race always haunted the margins of these debates, as I’ll discuss at more length in Chapter One.

Class depends on a tangle of income, taste, education, labor, race and ethnicity, region, clothing, diet, reading practices, relationship to popular culture, notions of family, models of ideal femininity and masculinity, life goals, consumer practices, self- presentation, degrees and kinds of privilege, and occupation. According to Max Weber, social prestige, power, and education define class, not only income or one’s relationship to the means of production. Especially important for my purposes are definitions of class that hinge on the degree to which class is malleable. Raymond Williams argues “[t]he essential history of the introduction of class… relates to the increasing consciousness that social position is made rather than merely inherited” (61). Thus, he sees the tension between fixed and unfixed class position to be at the heart of the modern concept of class.

Williams also cites a tension between economic and social readings of class, unified by the term “socio-economic” which addresses class as related to both social status and economic circumstance. I agree with Williams that a defining element of class is the degree to which it can be read as inherent and contingent, economic and social; these tensions in class as a concept guide my own approach to the topic.

I define and theorize class through the lens of my project’s other theoretical concerns: passing, consumer culture, and the genre of crime fiction. Principally, I am interested in class as a visual form of self-presentation, or a form of aesthetics invoking material relations and social status. Passers depend on the supposition that a person’s class is determined, at least in large part, by the class they superficially appear to belong to; furthermore, reading class through consumer culture lends itself to an emphasis on class as a visual component of identity, since taste makers, particularly in the postwar years but certainly before, promoted the possibilities for social mobility and class self-

17 transformation based on an aesthetics or superficial appearance of consumer taste rather than a more substantial measure of class based primarily on income or socioeconomic origin. This approach to class is necessarily related to the debate occurring in midcentury crime fiction regarding the distinction between class as inherent, material, and substantial

(something one is born into and can never truly change) versus class as contingent, aesthetic, and superficial (something one invents for oneself through learned and conscious performance).

Crucial to my theorization of class are approaches to the subject in both scholarship on consumer culture and scholarship on identity passing. Thus, an important figure in my approach to class is Pierre Bourdieu. Although some have critiqued

Bourdieu’s notions of class and status as being somewhat ahistorical and specific to

French culture, his theories regarding the relationship between taste and class are to a significant degree born out in portrayals of class passers in midcentury crime novels. In

Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste, Bourdieu argues that class is closely related to the concept of taste, particularly in terms of an individual’s artistic taste and taste as a consumer. Rather than viewing taste as an individual’s personal aesthetics, he sees taste as shaping social class, and vice-versa. Members of the dominant class determine a hierarchy of taste for society, thereby naturalizing class divides and authorizing their dominance through their superior sense of aesthetic judgment and preference. Taste and class shape one another in upbringing, class culture, and day-to-day rhythms of life.

Working-class aesthetics are systematically coded as common, unrefined, and of low value. A person’s sense of taste divides him or her from other social classes, since “art

18 and cultural consumption… fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences”

(7).

Bourdieu suggests that to challenge a hierarchy of aesthetic and intellectual taste is to challenge the class hierarchy that taste reinforces. But this challenge is exceedingly difficult to realize, as is the alteration of one’s class. Class-based taste is so ingrained in a person from birth, that changing one’s taste is no easy matter. According to this view class is not inherent but learned, and yet it is deeply ingrained in the most basic terms of selfhood—in dreams, diet, manners, movements, values, etc. Furthermore, if working- class people wish to change their social position, they must adopt high-class tastes rather than challenge the supposed correctness and cultural value of those tastes. In short, according to Bourdieu, changing classes involves a sort of fundamental re-education to distinguish low aesthetics from high aesthetics, and to fully appreciate this high and low distinction and the class culture they invoke. Class passers must first learn what they are supposed to find beautiful before they can create a convincing class performance, learning and internalizing the visual code of taste as determined by the class they seek to imitate and infiltrate.

As Foster and others scholars of identity passing have argued, class mobility or class passing tends to be seen as more natural than other kinds of passing. The logic goes thusly: one is genetically born with particular physical features of race and gender, so race and gender passing involves an unnatural concealment of “true” and immutable race and/or gender with the illusion of a “false” race and/or gender.5 Since class is not

5 Of course, racial and gender passing narratives, scholarship of such narratives, critical race studies, gender studies, and a range of other fields have challenged the notion of “inherent” or genetic racial or gender identity; I merely summarize a common argument made, especially in scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s,

19 typically viewed as being genetic or located in the body, it is thus seen as more situational, and so class passing could be better termed social mobility— it is not only desired by all, but it should be desired by all according to the ethos of American culture, since everyone should wish to, and be able to, improve their financial and social position.

This should be achieved by hard work and assimilation into higher classes, in which case it is not “passing” but rather a position that is learned and earned. But the literary portrayal of the class passer as an imposter, a fake, and even a criminalized and dangerous figure who almost consistently fails to permanently cross class lines functions to challenge the “natural” quality of class passing or social mobility. Class is not so mutable in narratives featuring class passers, either in the racial passing tradition or the crime story.6 For example, Bourdieu addresses the degree to which class becomes second nature.

…because a person is taught his or her tastes at an early age, and thus are deeply internalized, such social conditionings are very difficult to change, and thus tend to permanently identify a person as having originated in a certain social class. This impedes upward social mobility…Orienting practices practically, they embed what some would mistakenly call values in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body—ways of walking or blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking—and engage in the most fundamental principles of construction and evaluation of the social world … (72)

about class passing as related to other kinds of identity passing. See Elaine Ginsberg’s introduction to Passing and the Fictions of Identity, where she states: “as illustrated by the ease with which assimilation has so often been accomplished, class, ethnic origin, and sexual orientation are not difficult to enact or disguise. Race and gender, however, present other complications” (4).

6 In many passing novels, it is portrayed as “natural” to wish for class mobility, but it is self-hating and racial betrayal to wish to pass for white. While I have no intention of arguing that class passing involves the same degree of danger and difficulty as racial passing (whiteness opens countless doors to social mobility, and is usually a precursor to any kind of class passing in popular culture or literature), class passing is consistently portrayed as less “easy” and “natural” as one might think. Furthermore, as has recently been argued in regards to class passing novels like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Larsen’s Passing, class tends to be implicitly or directly related to racial or ethnic difference. The low class white person is often rendered “off-white” because of his or her class origin.

Building upon Bourdieu, I approach class not (only) as a fixed identity based on income or occupation, but as a set of desires and everyday practices formed according to consumer identity and fantasies of a “better” version of the self. A careful reading of mid- twentieth century American crime fiction suggests that class is a multivalent manufacture of consumer culture, and thus as varied and nuanced as consumer culture itself. Class, then, is intimately connected, dependent on, and produced by the fantasies, desires, aesthetics, ideals, and marketing strategies that work in the service of consumer culture to sell products. Commodities, and thus consumers, become infused with complex class meanings.

In contrast to Bourdieu’s formulation of taste and hierarchy, the texts I examine suggest that working-class taste was not always viewed as necessarily inferior. Crime fiction’s origins in working-class pulp magazines, and thus their attendant element of intense working-class pride, mean that the class passer in much crime fiction in the pulp era (1920s-1940s) is viewed as disloyal, self-hating, and traitorous for renouncing his or her (superior) working-class roots. Bourdieu argues “the ‘working-class aesthetic’ is a dominated aesthetic, which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics of the ruling class” (41). Yet Chandler and other authors of hard-boiled crime fiction, as well as leftist authors like Vera Caspary writing in slick magazines, specifically celebrate working-class tastes. They may also convey an ambivalent fascination with the beauty and elegance of upper-class people and spaces, but such texts and authors unmistakably portray working-class aesthetics, values, and people as in some ways superior, more authentic, and even better for the nation in comparison to high-class

21 ones. Both Frankfurt School critics and Bourdieu view aspects of mass culture like popular genre fiction, film, and fiction published serially in periodicals as bolstering a consumer culture that naturalizes, legitimizes, and strengthens class hierarchy. I disagree, arguing that authors of crime fiction has an at times interdependent, at times critical, but always complex relationship to both consumer culture and the logic of class hierarchy.

Consumerism and Crime Fiction

Just as many scholars have commonly viewed class as a significant force in U.S. society only before World War II, so many have commonly viewed consumer culture as a significant force only after World War II. As my discussion of Karen Halttunen’s

Confidence Men and Painted Women attests, the growth of cities and the concurrent growth of consumer capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century (both fueled, in part, by steam power and train travel, and the consequently increased movement of goods and people) inspired novels like Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, wherein the influence of buying and selling commodities dissolves stable identity and severs ties to coherent truth. Emile Zola’s naturalist novel Au Bonheur Des Dames (1883), examining the advent of the department store and thus of shopping and its changing relationship to gender and class, anticipated American novels of class passing and consumer culture like

Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Department stores shaped an age of spectacle, when fluid crowds allowed shoppers to fashion superficial identities. So for a long time before the 1940s and 1950s, the influence of consumer culture inspired both fear and hope in American economic, political, and cultural discourse. It could destroy the ties of

“confidence” and stable identity that bound together Americans (as explored by Melville

22 and Halttunen). However, it could also provide a level of choice and freedom that many found to be in line with the nation’s founding principles of meritocracy and social mobility that contrasted with the hierarchies and strictly proscribed classes of Europe.7

My study begins at an interesting moment not just in class relations, but also in consumer culture history. The working-class pulps flourished in the 1930s, and when

Raymond Chandler published Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, the Depression years of economic hardship were bleeding into the early war years of rationing. Print advertising’s approach to wartime consumption was to encourage rationing as every American’s patriotic duty and to simultaneously make lofty promises of consumer abundance as a reward for such patriots in the post-war period. Aimed primarily at women, magazine advertisements assured readers that although now they might have to give up sugar or aluminum during the war, American victory would deliver not only peace and freedom, but also gleaming kitchens, labor-saving high-tech devices, and the (middle class, or classless) domestic paradise that consumer culture was busily imagining for them.

Enter the noir criminal passer. Vera Caspary’s 1942 novel Laura, published in

Collier’s magazine alongside glossy advertisements promoting short-term rationing now and a lavish domestic life later, tells the story of a working-class girl who, through a wealthy benefactor, hard work as an advertising executive, and skillful class passing, lives the high-class life (and as the high-class lady) she advertises. While on one level the novel is a sharp critique of consumer culture in the war years, on another level the text is uneasily ambivalent. Caspary’s heroic and fiercely working-class detective disdains

7 Edgar Allan Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” (1840) is the classic instance of a work fusing consumer crowds and crime, further illustrating the centrality of consumer culture to the genre of crime fiction.

23 decadent consumer culture (coded as upper-class in crime fiction), and yet he is troublingly drawn to its glamour and beauty. Erik Dussere in his book America is

Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture (2013), one of the only book-length academic studies focused primarily on the connections among consumer culture and noir crime fiction and film, argues that noir authors self-identified their medium as authentic, standing in defiant opposition to the inauthenticity of an encroaching and every more powerful and corrupting consumer culture. However, as my discussion of Laura suggests, noir crime narratives were materially connected to, rather than strictly opposed to, consumer culture’s masternarratives, and they were not simply or entirely critical of what one character in Laura calls a consumerist culture of “surface lusters” (17).

The growth of consumer culture had far-reaching effects on class identity, and particularly in the ways that class identity intersected with gender identity. As Roland

Marchand and Erin Smith argue, the early twentieth century (when hard-boiled crime fiction was first being written) saw an increasing emphasis on self-presentation, rather than skilled labor, as a means of individual social, financial, and professional advancement. This shifting emphasis was especially apparent in print advertising that appeared not only in slick magazines aimed at middle-class readers, but also in pulp magazines aimed at working-class readers. De-skilled jobs in a Fordist economy threatened to render a fantasy of skilled, tough, and autonomous working-class manhood obsolete, and the growth of consumer culture threatened to render character and integrity secondary to superficial self-presentation. According to Warren Susman in “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” a “culture of personality,” dependent

24 upon the subject’s ability to consume strategically and create a calculated superficial impression, began to eclipse a “culture of character” wherein identity depended upon land ownership, skilled labor, and integrity.

One forerunner of such formulations is Thorstein Veblen in his writings about conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen sets outdated and more modern masculine traits in opposition to one another, so that

“strength,” “aggression,” and intrepidity” are no longer enough to secure or enact high- class manhood. The gentleman in an age of consumption “is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male,—the man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods” (74). Furthermore, we can see the seeds of Bourdieu’s notions of taste and class in Veblen’s thinking. The gentleman must not only consume the correct commodities, but

“there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner.

His life of leisure must be conducted in due form. Hence arise good manners …High- bred manners and ways of living are items of conformity to the norm of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption” (75). Veblen, Bourdieu, and Susman, then, analyze class in an era of increasing consumption as something performed, with an emphasis on visual surface rather than internal character.

Certainly it could be argued that the “culture of personality” displacing the

“culture of character” is an overly simplistic binary, and that the “culture of character” has continued to thrive, not necessarily distinct or opposed to “personality.” Similarly, appearance was by no means unimportant to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century

25 workers. However, in the pages of crime pulps like Black Mask and Dime Detective, as well as in more high-brow glossy magazines like Collier’s, Today’s Woman, and Good

Housekeeping, among others, this binary, and the notion that modern society increasingly required savvy consumption and self-presentation, was consistently invoked in both advertisements and stories. In Smith’s words, “Pulp magazines addressed themselves to the tensions between a residual model of identity based on one’s essential character and an emergent one based on personality… What constituted manhood in a world where skilled artisanal work and the family wage that used to accompany it were eroding?

…Was manliness anything more than performance or masquerade… an identity constructed or reiterated from the raw materials of commodity culture?” (64). More recently, Christopher Breu in Hard-Boiled Masculinities (2005) has read postwar hard- boiled and noir fiction as drawing on interwar pulps as well as representations of hyperphysical African American men to forge a brand of working-class masculinity that rejected both Victorian conceptions of manhood that “emphasized physical restraint” and postwar consumer-based models of masculinity (6). Dussere expands on the concept of these opposing worldviews, and Susman’s notion of the “culture of personality” versus the “culture of character” is reflected in Dussere’s claim that noir crime narratives are primarily concerned with national authenticity as opposed to the inauthenticity of consumer culture. The class passer embodies the tension of such transformations of

American society; while the working-class detective adheres to a “culture of character,” rejecting consumer culture and thus standing for masculine and working-class authenticity, the class passer adheres to the “culture of personality,” rejecting identity based upon production or essential interiority. Indeed, the class passer embodies and

26 challenges the distinction between authentic and inauthentic, self-contained and contingent, “true” and “false” identity. Perhaps equally complex, the working-class protagonist is seldom immune to the beauty and allure of the “culture of personality” and its “surface lusters,” often embodied by a seductive femme fatale.

At first glance, scenes of shopping for an identity, or examples of costume changes that transform a character, seem to show that identity is malleable and thus constructed. However, a new suit cannot always banish the old identity completely. Most examples of passing in literature and film imply a failure to “become” an adopted identity, while simultaneously, passers often mourn the loss of their previous selves. In short, this state of neither/nor fractures coherent selfhood, a fracture facilitated by the rising influence of consumer culture in American life. A number of postmodern critics have theorized the fraught connections among class, consumer culture, and authenticity.

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation explores the concepts of original and copy in relation to postmodern society. Baudrillard explores degrees of authenticity and inauthenticity; some copies are based upon originals, other copies are constructed to suggest an original that never actually existed, and still other copies do not purport to have any connection to originality, authenticity, or reality. Similarly, the criminal class passer displays degrees of artificiality. Some passers seek to accurately copy an original, and some trouble any notion of originality; at the end of “The False Burton Combs” the eponymous hero seeks to closely emulate the original Burton Combs, while Patricia

Highsmith’s class passing murderer Tom Ripley invents his own version of the cosmopolitan gentleman that improves upon, rather than merely copying, the original.

Thus, Tom Ripley’s passing could be read as an unfaithful copy of reality, or even, more

27 radically, a copy that belies the absence of any stable reality to be copied. Each of these characters take a cue from consumer culture, which advertises that class identity can be purchased as easily as an identically manufactured prêt-à-porter suit. If class identity can be altered through consumption, then it is a mass-produced commodity that can be purchased by anyone with the means and the acting skills, undermining any sense of originality or inherence.

In the plotlines of midcentury narratives of crime and class passing, identities are created by an individual’s relationship to and use of consumer culture. The passer’s place within the larger framework of consumer culture often directly relates to the crime committed, the motives of the criminal, and his or her detection. Be it the violent consequence of the passer’s attempt to cross class lines, or the passer’s inability to realize their class, gender, and racial fantasies through consumption and material acquisition, crime is woven into a larger story of noir characters’ struggle to fulfill dreams of alternate or fantasy identity, dreams fashioned by consumption, advertising, and the market.

The Femme Fatale

Expanding upon the intersectional nature of class and gender, I bring scholarship on the iconic femme fatale, or deadly woman, to bear on class passing. The femme fatale is frequently a class passer; indeed, class passing is central to the archetype. The femme fatale’s appearance is a mask, a deception, and a visual dream that may conceal a nightmare. Feminist film scholar Mary Ann Doane argues that the femme fatale undermines the image’s ability to convey meaning, and thus undermines the existence of

28 meaning itself. The femme fatale is not what she seems, and her allure is related to a shell of high-class style concealing her potentially low-class origins. All of these characteristics of the femme fatale are related to her identity (or lack thereof) as a class passer, including her use of an upper-class disguise to invent a new truth and hide her

“real” self, and her attempts to illegitimately elevate her economic and social status. For example, in the iconic 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck plays one of the most famous femmes fatales in the genre, Mrs. Phyllis Dietrichson. While Phyllis at first seems polished, refined, and high-class (albeit a bit too provocative in her dress and manner to be a proper lady), we learn more and more about her past as a nurse who killed

Mr. Dietrichson’s first wife so that she could take her place. Phyllis is portrayed as a woman with money, but without real class. Her murderous co-conspirator, Walter Huff, detects this right away. Her living room is “like every other living room in California, maybe a little more expensive than some, but nothing that any department store wouldn’t deliver on one truck” (4). Other furnishings in the house are “right out of the same can”

(4), suggesting that Phyllis can imitate good taste, but is unskilled and generic in her imitation. The film adaptation goes further; director Billy Wilder insisted that Phyllis wear a cheap-looking blond wig, to signal to the audience her artificiality and her sleaziness. Her wealth does not match her taste, suggesting her status as a violent imposter (indeed, Phyllis murdered her current husband’s former wife, so that she could take her place). As this example illustrates, the femme fatale’s two major characteristics, that is, external allure that conceals violence and high-class appearance that conceals class origins, are deeply intertwined. The beautiful, evil woman as murderer and class

29 imposter functions to criminalize class passing and gender the break between surface and depth.

A significant body of scholarship exists on the figure of the femme fatale, or deadly woman, in part on the subject of the different kinds of threats or anxieties the archetype embodies. As I explain above, my contribution to this scholarship is the notion that class plays a major role in shaping the femme fatale as the embodiment of intertwined class, economic, sexual, and gender dangers. Mary Ann Doane in her book

Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis defines the femme fatale thusly:

The femme fatale is the figure of a certain discursive unease, a potential epistemological trauma. For her most striking characteristic, perhaps, is the fact that she never really is what she seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or manageable. In thus transforming the threat of the woman into a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered, the figure is fully compatible with the epistemological drive of narrative, the hermeneutic structuration of the classical text. Sexuality becomes the site of questions about what can and cannot be known. (1)

This passage brilliantly outlines the particular terms of the femme fatale’s threat—her threat to patriarchal control, but also her threat to the coherence or knowability of truth.

Not only does sexuality become “the site of questions about what can and cannot be known,” but class as well is, I argue, a site of uncertainty that troubles meaning and undermines objective detection. Intersections of class, (hyper)sexuality, gender, and ethnicity produce the femme fatale’s illegibility and thus the danger she poses to a reliable economic system in a genre that is centrally concerned with detection of truth and containment of crime.

Class is related to the origins of the femme fatale, who, like courtesans of the nineteenth century, is often an exaggerated performer of class and femininity. Courtesans were women of lower-class origin who used class markers like costumes and who presented their own exaggerated and imitable interpretations of ladies by appropriating class performance and commodities. Thus, the archetype of the femme fatale and the figure of the (female) class passer share much in common. Neither is what they appear to be; both subvert stable notions of truth and identity, and both tend to meet violent ends that function as punishment or as cautionary tales before the order they troubled is re- established. Additionally, both are framed as selfish and dangerously erotic, hyperfeminine and deceitful. Such traits are associated with extreme consumerism and the “painted women” that Halttunen argues have long indexed fears of passing and aberrant femininity in relation to American capitalism and culture. The class passer and the femme fatale, so often one and the same, “harbors a threat which is not entirely legible,” bearing “a secret, something which must be aggressively revealed,” as Doane says. This project is the first to argue for this specific reading of the femme fatale as a class passer.

The Homme Fatal

Following this line of thought, and because I will draw heavily on masculinity studies scholarship in the field of crime fiction, my attention to passing highlights the importance of a similar archetype, the homme fatal, or deadly man. The concept of the homme fatal has been little studied, and so my arguments about the figure constitute a significant contribution to crime fiction and film scholarship, as well as to masculinity

31 studies and the history of consumer culture. Seductive and duplicitous men in these novels use their deceptive appearance to control and destroy women. This increasing role of consumer culture in forming models of masculinity produces the figure of the class- passing homme fatal whose attractive appearance conceals a fractured and violent male subjectivity.

As I have illustrated, the anxiety and danger that characterize the figure of the femme fatale are products of the complex and ambiguous intersections of class and gender identity. The femme fatale’s trademark illegibility and propensity for deception have to do with her false class identity and the eroticizing, gendered effect of this uncertainty or instability. Detecting and uncovering her class transgression reveal her new high-class model of femininity to be artificial; thus her sleaze, her allure, and her glamour. Drawing from scholarship on the femme fatale can produce a more nuanced and generically informed reading of how female authors developed the homme fatal, and how this figure differs from the feminine counterpart that has been so well studied in noir and crime fiction scholarship. The patriarchal lens and control of literary and filmic production (along with the well known misogyny of much midcentury American crime fiction) establishes female characters as “others” and as objects of a masculine point of view. Female authors in the crime fiction genre are so often seen as enigmas. However, women were key contributors to the genre. For example, Dorothy Hughes and Patricia

Highsmith are two prime examples of women being active participants in shaping and intervening in crime fiction, indeed, in cutting edge ways, especially in their use and development of the homme fatal archetype.

Like the femme fatale, the homme fatal performs a masquerade that profoundly troubles visual and textual meaning. The homme fatal’s break between appearance and that which it conceals is connected to his aberrant sexuality and his class model of masculinity. Furthermore, as a murderer and as a class passer, his masculine illegibility transforms “the threat of the” man “into a secret.” Thus, he is a threat to heteronormative structures, to female security, to production in a capitalist marketplace, and to the coherence and legibility of identity and truth. But the homme fatal as an archetype or concept is not merely a reversal of the patriarchally produced femme fatale, because the homme fatal’s character is tied up with economic influence on gender, women’s vulnerability in a capitalist and patriarchal society, and the particular nature of gender relations in a range of contexts. In her introduction, Doane goes on to explain how changes in economic structure altered gender identity and gender relations. She observes also that the “the femme fatale is represented as the antithesis of the maternal—sterile or barren, she produces nothing in a society which fetishizes production” (2). In the “baby boom” period of relative prosperity after World War II, men were expected to be producers on two fronts. First, the returning veterans and men coming of age were expected to productively participate in the recovering and economy. The U.S. now had the most powerful and prosperous national economy in the west (and beyond), an economy whose success and productivity was in part the basis for U.S. claims to cultural and political superiority and global dominance. Secondly, men were theoretically

“domesticated” to a certain extent in the sense that as part and parcel of being a man they were expected to produce children and provide for their families. A strong emphasis on being a good father, husband, and all-around family man in the wake of war and the

33 return to normalcy served to link masculinity with a set of postwar middle-class economic and family values. Scholars like Barbara Ehrenreich in The Hearts of Men:

American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1984) have argued that the centrality of the “breadwinner role” for men in the decade after World War II conflated economic and domestic production as the basis for “healthy” and “mature” manhood.

While these expectations may have characterized many men’s postwar experiences, there are a range of fissures, incongruities, and alternate ideologies that work against this monolithic interpretation of hegemonic gender roles and economic ideals of the 1940s and 50s.8 Prosperity and a supposed return to normalcy did not define everyone’s postwar experience, and furthermore, Ehrenreich illustrates the ways in which many men (whom she calls “grey flannel rebels”) rejected or critiqued the expectations imposed upon them (28). She cites Beat writers and the consumer and heterosexual hedonism offered and encouraged by Playboy magazine, among others, as examples of

“grey flannel rebels.” Hughes’s homme fatal Dix Steele can be read as the quintessential target reader for Playboy; he is actively heterosexual, constantly objectifying women and making advances, yet he is also passionately interested in interior design, fashion, and a range of other consumerist concerns usually associated with women. Crime fiction’s hommes fatals are exaggerated representations of the anxieties surrounding the rise of consumer culture’s role in shaping male (or rather, in shaping the intersection of gender and class) identity in the early Cold War, and of the cracks in idealized American

8 See Sally Robinson’s Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (2000), Cynthia Lee Henthorn’s From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939-1959 (2006), Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (1989) edited by Lary May, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), and Suzanne Clark’s Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West (2000), and the aforementioned Hard-Boiled Masculinities (2005) by Breu.

34 masculinity. Specifically, the homme fatal’s status as a consumer rather than as a producer illustrates how their sexuality and their economic identity are woven together to produce a threatening and illegible masculine subject.

Take the example of the (anti) hero of the 1955 film noir Kiss Me, Deadly, Mike

Hammer, who embodies many traits of the midcentury homme fatal. Like Hughes’s Dix

Steele and Mad Men’s Don Draper, Mike is a toxic combination of what Smith calls the

“residual” working-class hard-boiled masculinity in part based upon displays of physical strength, and emergent post-World War II masculinity more centered upon consumption and suave self-presentation. Coming near the end of the era of films noirs, Kiss Me,

Deadly is to a certain extent a penultimate, and a parody of, film noir. It stands as an exaggerated interpretation of noir conventions, pushing them to their limit and thus exploring the absurd extremism of hard-boiled masculinity in particular. Whereas earlier examples of the hard-boiled detective in the noir film were likable despite their violence, their drive to dominate women, and their relative immorality (Humphrey Bogart’s edgy yet sympathetic portrayals of Sam Spade in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon and of

Philip Marlowe in the 1946 film The Big Sleep come to mind), Mike is a monstrous caricature of the archetype. His brutality, his misogyny, and his lack of compassion reveal the villainous qualities in a supposedly heroic kind of character. Rather than restoring justice and social order, he threatens it; he is a toxic combination of various models of masculinity. Such a homme fatal changes the standard dynamic of the film noir; beautiful women who come into contact with Mike are not dangerous femmes fatales, but exploited and victimized characters that he endangers. Indeed, even

Humphrey Bogart, who as I’ve outlined often played the quintessentially heroic hard-

35 boiled detective in Hollywood, played Dix Steele in Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film adaptation of Hughes’s In a Lonely Place. The film has Bogart playing his usual brainy tough guy, but here as a homme fatal whose masculine control of his girlfriend nearly turns lethal. In this and other films, such figures are fatal because his constant and extreme fear of emasculation renders them unacceptably aberrant masculine subjects.

Chapter Summaries:

This project is composed of four chapters, three of which use a comparative model to discuss two texts together (the fourth chapter deals with one author only). The first chapter, “The Femme Fatale on the Home Front in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell,

My Lovely (1940) and Vera Caspary’s Laura (1942),” pairs Chandler and Caspary’s noir novels as a means of illustrating the crucial role of class in the femme fatale’s danger to capitalist patriarchy. The femme fatale is a threat to national economic strength because she creates false value through performance rather than through labor. She uses masquerade to appear wealthy and thus valuable, using artful consumption rather than honest economic production to achieve mobility and worth. Furthermore, the chapter argues that portrayals of the femme fatale critique the devaluation of working-class femininity. While Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely approaches working-class femme fatale passers from a working-class male point of view, Caspary’s Laura includes the eponymous heroine’s own working-class perspective. Thus, my arguments illustrate the diversity within the genre, challenging the notion that crime fiction is an exclusively masculine genre.

In the first section of Chapter One, I use original archival work to explore

Farewell, My Lovely’s origins in the pulp magazine Black Mask, and the consumer context of that publication. Chandler and other popular authors who published in Black

Mask participated in a broader literary project, that of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction that celebrated masculine working-class values in opposition to feminine upper- class consumer values.9 In this framework, the femme fatale represents the ultimate villainy, because she rejects working-class identity in favor of a less authentic high-class identity that values appearance above substance and labor. As a contrast to Chandler’s portrayal of the archetype, I show how Vera Caspary wrote Laura building on and responding to the hard-boiled pulp tradition of detective fiction. Drawing from Caspary’s earlier racial passing novel, The White Girl, as well as her varied work as an advertising copywriter before she turned to fiction, I contextualize Laura within Caspary’s anti- consumerist and anti-racist ideology. Laura constitutes Caspary’s effort to draw from the literary tradition of racial passing narratives to illustrate the complexity of class passing and the challenges facing white working-class women who, despite their race and consumer agency, are unable to successfully pass into the upper classes.

Having established the femme fatale as a threat to working class manhood, in my next chapter I consider her threat as wife and mother to upper class homes. In “For

Richer, For Poorer: Class-Passing Mothers and Domestic Noir in Vera Caspary’s Bedelia

(1945), Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), and No Man of Her Own

(1950),” I compare Caspary and Woolrich’s stories of pregnant women who are criminal class passers, as well as the latter novel’s 1950 film adaptation. I argue that the public

9 I do not mean to say that working class values were indeed masculine whereas upper class values were feminine; hard-boiled print culture and narratives coded various class positions as masculine or feminine.

37 wartime and Cold War fears of the political imposter are mirrored in narratives about private life that I dub “domestic noir.” The wife and mother as working-class usurper and duplicitous imposter in upper-class domestic spaces speak to (genetic) fears of the class and criminal other as tainting white, wealthy, and strong American national identity.

Furthermore, I contend that the enchanting masquerades of these class passing wives and mothers critique marriage as requiring performance rather than “natural” wifely femininity. The class passers in Caspary and Woolrich’s texts are more successful in their quest for both social mobility and ideal wifeliness than the women around them who do not enact a complex performance; thus, these novels and others like them suggest that the characters of upper-class husband are complicit in the class passer’s duplicity and criminality, since they prefer wives who present an artificially perfect wifely performance. Moreover, class passing criminal wives are portrayed not simply as monsters, but as sympathetic figures that have turned to passing and murder as a response to the poverty of choices available to single working-class women. In the texts I examine, we see the limited options of poor women who are excluded from secure and prosperous domestic spaces.

Shifting from a primary focus on intersections of femininity and class, my third chapter turns from the femme fatale to an understudied but prevalent male counterpart. In

“The Homme Fatal Strikes Again: Male Class Passers in Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely

Place (1947) and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955),” I argue that female authors revise conventions of the crime genre to frame the encroachment of consumer culture and postmodern notions of identity as threats gendered as masculine rather than feminine. This constitutes a feminist reworking of the genre and a feminist

38 critique of consumer-based models of masculinity. Through Hughes’s main character

Dixon Steele, and Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, I consider the connection between the serial killer and the class passer. I argue that in the case of Dixon Steele, Hughes explores the violence and vulnerability of the classic figure of the hard-boiled male hero by creating a tough veteran who is ultimately destroyed by his conflicting desires. He wishes to retain a fantasy of working-class masculinity, and to also fully adopt the appearance of a more refined and upper-class masculinity based upon consumer power rather than labor or physical power. This conflict of gender and class desires creates a man who is forced into the role of a violent imposter, excluded from a cultural fantasy of postwar plenty, and driven to murder as a means of establishing his masculine dominance.

While Hughes’s 1947 novel has much in common with Highsmith’s 1955 novel,

Highsmith’s protagonist Tom Ripley differs from Dixon Steele in important respects:

Ripley’s desire to class pass is linked to his efforts to pass for heterosexual; Ripley gladly leaves behind his lower-class identity without any nostalgia for a model of masculinity not based on wealth and refinement; and Ripley is completely successful in his class passing to the point of dissolving any self-contained identity. In narratives of class passing hommes fatals, I also contend that such a reconfiguration of the crime narrative places women in the role of detective, since female characters must detect and contain the violence and duplicity beneath the homme fatal’s stylish and gentlemanly appearance.

Finally, I explore how in The Talented Mr. Ripley illegible class and sexual identity are conflated in the eponymous main character’s threat to heteronormative, consumer capitalist society.

Unlike my previous chapters, Chapter Four centers on only one author, Chester

Himes. In “‘Lie for Kicks’: Class and Gender Passing as Anti-Racist Resistance in

Chester Himes’s All Shot Up (1960),” I examine how intertwined class and gender passing in Himes’s series of Harlem crime novels exposes fixed identities and white supremacy as confidence games. As a complement to The Talented Mr. Ripley, Himes’s crime narratives imagine a kind of passing that unravels the idea of an inherent pre- passing identity. I argue that Himes portrays class, gender, and sexual orientation passers who are economically queer, that is, who prefer confidence-games to legitimate forms of production and wage-earning just as they prefer extramarital, same-sex, or cross-class sexual relationships rather than heteronormative, monogamous, and legally sanctioned sexual relationships. The overall argument of the chapter is that Himes (similar to

Highsmith) links unstable and postmodern class identity with unfixed sexuality, using class passing in the service of “queering” identity in a post-World War II consumer capitalist framework.

Also in contrast to my previous chapters, passing in Himes’s work suggests the promise, rather than the danger, of postmodern identities based upon performance. I read passing in these stories as important kinds of agency for Black residents of Harlem.

Himes portrays myriad passers, cross-dressers, drag kings, drag queens, and confidence men and women who challenge fixed notions of identity as a way to challenge liberal narratives of racial uplift. Himes’s crime novels have sometimes been accused of reductive and humorously demeaning portrayals of African Americans, and especially of queer African American cross-dressers. However, I argue that it is the straight, non- passing characters that are victims of the broader American confidence game of capitalist

40 ideology based upon racial hierarchy and heteropatriarchy, whereas economically queer passers stand as an alternative model of identity fluidity. Such an emphasis on passing, identity instability, the break between appearance and truth foreshadows the decidedly postmodern turn in neo-noir crime fiction and film in the latter part of the twentieth century, up until the present moment. Finally, I contend that Himes’s emphasis on queer passers as the primary sites of, and hopes for, radical resistance in his crime novels suggest a shift away from the genre’s traditional hero, the heteronormative working-class detective. Thus, Himes’s work illustrates an important new direction in the American crime novel, especially compared to the hard-boiled novels I examine at the start of this dissertation.

Conclusion

What does a look at class passing and consumption in the crime genre tell us about changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity in the United States, about the nature of class, and about deep cracks in the promise of the American century? In Daly’s

1922 story, the “false” Burton Combs is able to legitimately pass from the lower to the upper classes, apparently achieving authentic self-transformation. This project works to understand why similar instances of class passing are not so successful or anxiety-free.

Daly’s story of the negatively-eponymous “false” character is a formula much like that of the murder mystery. The plotline uses the blueprint of the class passer, suggesting that the hard-boiled or noir crime narrative was always part-and-parcel of the class passing formula, here reimagined as a violently charged sort of Horatio Alger rags-to-riches parable for the working-class male reader of Black Mask. The many contrasts and

41 similarities among “The False Burton Combs” and the texts I will examine in my chapters suggests the multiplicity, the complexity, and the fluidity not only of class, but of the crime fiction genre, in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Chapter One

The Femme Fatale on the Home Front in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely

(1940) and Vera Caspary’s Laura (1942)

The femme fatale, or deadly woman, is perhaps as central to early twentieth century American pulp detective stories as the detective himself. The hard-boiled detective is a masculine hero navigating the tangled, labyrinthine streets of the modern city, and the devious femme fatale represents that which the detective seeks to uncover, contain, or destroy. In this study I argue that duplicitous class performance, or class passing, is a key component of the threat posed by the femme fatale to the working or lower class detective. The conflation of the femme fatale and the class passer or class imposter10 is so prevalent as to be an important and heretofore unaddressed pattern in noir fiction and film’s portrayal of the archetype.11 As mid twentieth century examples of class-passing crime narratives, novels like Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely

(1940) and Vera Caspary’s Laura (1942) are discussions of class identity, anxiety surrounding the “wrong” kind of social mobility, and the limits of the “right” kind of social mobility. The particular focus of this class anxiety is young working-class white women trying to achieve economic security and become, or pass as, ladies. The femme

10 Elizabeth Hatmaker in a forthcoming essay on The Talented Mr. Ripley suggests the term “imposter noir” to describe the prevalence of the imposter in noir plotlines as almost a noir sub-genre. See “The Flexible Mr. Ripley” in Post-World War II Masculinities in British and American Literature and Culture, Eds. Kevin Floyd and Stefan Horlacher.

11 Novels and films noirs such as Mildred Pierce (1945), Gilda (1946), Laura (1944), The Big Heat (1953), In a Lonely Place (1950), Double Indemnity (1944), I Married a Dead Man (1950), and Vertigo (1958), among many others, come to mind as examples of the class passing femme fatale. Even other genres’ contributions to the archetype also suggest connections between classed and gendered kinds of “deadliness” at play in dangerous women in texts as far reaching as Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Larsen’s Passing (1929), Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), and others).

43 fatale uses appearance and superficial performance, rather than hard work and

“legitimate” self-invention, to ascend the social ladder. I explore these dimensions of the femme fatale as a lens for intersections of gender and class, as well as a lens for the ways in which popular fiction responded to shifts in U.S. consumer capitalism in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In the minds of most devotees and scholars of American crime fiction, Raymond

Chandler may be the quintessential crime novelist. His detective, Philip Marlowe, achieved broader fame in 1944 when the first major film adaptation of one of his novels was released (Murder, My Sweet, based on Farewell, My Lovely). Two years later in 1946

Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in Bogart’s second on-screen appearance with Lauren

Bacall in The Big Sleep, which now serves as the gold standard for the hard-boiled, noir detective on screen, and the post-war eminence of film noir. Despite Chandler’s fame as an author of hardcover crime novels and their adaptations as major Hollywood films in the 1940s, Chandler’s work has its roots in working-class pulps of the interwar years. In particular, his second novel (and the subject of the first part of this chapter), Farewell, My

Lovely (1940), is a creature of the pulps. Chandler fashioned the text by combining, rewriting, and weaving together three of his short stories that were originally published in

Black Mask magazine in the mid to late 1930s. As I discuss in my introduction, Black

Mask and other pulp magazines of its ilk (Dime Detective, Clues, etc.) were largely produced by male authors, editors, and advertisers. The magazine consciously appealed to and interpolated working-class male readers, both through its advertisements and editorial content, and through its published stories’ idealization of working-class models of masculinity. Working-classness as critical to “authentic” and honest masculinity, often

44 placed in opposition to “inauthentic” and dishonest femininity, constructed ideal manhood by its difference from fatal women and genteel men.12

While this pulp context of misogyny and intense masculine working-class pride may have been the origins of the hard-boiled detective and a particular kind of classed femme fatale in the pages of Black Mask, the second part of this chapter considers the reconfiguration of pulp plotlines in the hands of one female author among many writing for different kinds of periodicals and publishers. Vera Caspary’s Laura was published serially in Collier’s magazine in the fall of 1942, later published as a hardcover novel by

Houghton Mifflin in 1943, and was finally famously adapted as a film noir in 1944.

Caspary’s novel constitutes a significant re-imagining of the class-passing femme fatale by presenting one part of the novel from her narrative point of view, and by critiquing consumer capitalism’s devaluation of lower-class women. In this novel the independent class-passing woman proves not to be the villain; rather, it is the effeminate, inauthentically masculine upper-class man who is the murderer, suggesting a critique of upper-class culture and values that does not simultaneously antagonize or punish the socially mobile woman.

The class passing femmes fatales of these novels represent the trend in corporate capitalism of a shift from the cult of character to the cult of image or personality.13 As I have outlined in my introduction, the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a changing economic systems once based upon (small-scale) production by skilled workers, and moving increasingly to large-scale production by de-skilled workers

12 See Erin A. Smith, Megan E. Abbott, and Christopher Breu, among others, for a more in-depth discussion of working-class masculinity in Black Mask magazine.

13 See Smith, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Mike Featherstone, among others.

45 in a system where identity came to be based more upon consumption than production.

Although of course this distinction is far more blurred and complex than I outline here, pulp crime stories of the 1920s and 30s responded to changing economic ideologies

(principally Fordism, Taylorism, and theories of conspicuous consumption theorized by

Thorstein Veblen) that created new kinds of intersections among gender, class, labor, and consumption. Principally, as many scholars have argued, a society once centered on the needs of the producer came more and more to center on the needs of the consumer. This shift was also connected to an emphasis on appearance of success (conspicuous consumption) rather than the worthy character of the producer or the quality of what he

(and much less frequently in this ideological framework, she) produced (Donohue 4-6).

Pulp stories, and subsequently Caspary’s re-working of pulp plotlines in more high-brow venues, tended to cast labor-based working-class notions of value as diametrically opposed to consumer-based upper-class notions of value. While Chandler genders the former as masculine and the latter as feminine, Caspary retains the class dichotomy while complicating the gender dichotomy. Chandler’s femme fatale in Farewell, My Lovely,

Velma Valento, embraces consumer desires for the fantasy of wealth and the impulse to engage in risky speculation. Caspary’s potential femme fatale in Laura, Laura Hunt, at first embraces but ultimately rejects such upper-class consumer values and aligns herself with the working classes. Thus, she avoids destruction and proves herself to be an independent working woman rather than an evil femme fatale.

These various, complex intersections of class and gender are reflected by equally complex attention to the visuality of class, or as I term it in my introduction, class aesthetics. In novels about the class passing femme fatale, it is important that class is so

46 intensely visual and visible. The passer and the femme fatale depend on manipulating their exterior to send a particular visual message, since this exterior is intended to conceal a discordant interior. In addition, in works about both the passer and the femme fatale, social identity is based on surfaces rather than interiors. The tension between visual versus more profound meaning structures the detective plotline, making Chandler and

Caspary’s preoccupation with class aesthetics crucial to the intertwining of passing and criminal narratives in early- and mid-twentieth century noir novels. Thus, my reading of each novel will highlight the ways that class is portrayed as hypervisible, making the working-class detective of pulp narratives into a class detective as much as a detective of crime. The intertwining of class and criminal duplicity means that the1940s crime narratives I examine here make crucial interventions and critiques in broader debates over consumer capitalism, American Dream discourse, and the ways that class and gender intersections organize access to social mobility. It is this relationship between class’s visible clues/markers, and the overlaying of class and criminal detection, that makes the detective story uniquely important for the study of class and attitudes towards gendered social mobility in this time period.

Part One: Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely

Farewell, My Lovely (1940), the focus of the first part of this chapter, begins when a recently released white convict named Moose Malloy goes to Florian’s, the dive bar where his girlfriend Velma Valento used to work as a singer and dancer. Malloy has been in prison for eight years, and to his dismay, he finds that Florian’s (once in a working-class white part of town) has become a “shine joint” and the neighborhood has

47 become almost completely black. Velma no longer works there, and her whereabouts are unknown. A series of murders and the investigation of a jewel theft structure the rest of the narrative. A man named Lindsay Marriot hires private detective Philip Marlowe to help deliver ransom money to thieves in exchange for a jade necklace they stole, and

Marriot is mysteriously murdered in the dark canyon where the exchange was to take place. The solution to Velma’s tangled identity is the key to detective Marlowe’s solution of these various mysteries. He first searches for Moose Malloy by searching for Velma, but Marlowe soon learns from the widow of the nightclub owner that Velma is dead. In a sense this information is correct; the individual Velma Valento, woman of low origins and disreputable profession, no longer exists.

As Marlowe investigates the seemingly unrelated murder of the effeminate, wealthy Lindsay Marriot, he discovers that Velma has shed her class past as a showgirl in a night club to become Mrs. Helen Grayle, wife of a millionaire, living in a sumptuous mansion. Velma/Helen staged the ransom of the supposedly stolen necklace, all to lure

Marriot into a dark canyon at night. Marriot knew her true identity, and so she murdered him before Marlowe could realize Marriot’s importance and interrogate him. In effect, floozy working-class Velma has re-incarnated as blonde, polished, high-class Helen. The violence in the novel stems almost completely from this break in past and present class identity and the gendered, classed threats Velma/Helen poses to patriarchal control and notions of stable identity.

Of course, a young and beautiful lower-class14 woman who marries an older, wealthy man is a common method of social mobility both on the page and beyond. It is

Velma/Helen’s invention of a false (class) identity and her violent attempts to hide her past that mark her as a class-passing femme fatale and thus an economic, gendered threat.

She profits not from labor but from duplicity, and she manipulates the system to accumulate wealth at any cost and by any means. While her husband Mr. Grayle is the actual monetary earner in Farewell, My Lovely, it is his wife who most exemplifies or embodies (since the femme fatale is ultra-embodied) the darker implications of get-rich- quick capitalist ideology in the wake of a depression where hard work did not translate to social mobility and material success.

Noir scholar Paul Skenazy sees Velma as classically Californian: “The California

Myth grants magical, transformative power to alterations of place… Little Velma, a two- bit singer and moll, becomes Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle, a woman of fashion” (98).

More than representing California as a “magical” place of self-invention, the femme fatale, according to my reading of how class functions in crime narratives, is the embodiment of a set of economic desires and strategies. The femme fatale in Farewell and the many other L.A. noir novels suggests the ways in which capitalist market ideology, particularly in Southern California (where Chandler lived, worked, wrote, and invested) during the interwar years, is itself a confidence game. Velma Valento

14 I prefer the term lower class to working-class because in Chandler’s novel, as well as in other hard-boiled narratives with pulp origins, women are seldom shown at work, and are framed as consumers as opposed to workers or producers. In Farewell, Chandler alludes to Velma’s labor as a singer, but it is women’s consumption (their clothing, how they have decorated their houses, their choice of liquor, etc.) that seems to determine their class. Thus, the term “lower-class” as applied to women seems more appropriate in the context of hard-boiled pulp crime narratives. As I will illustrate in the second part of this chapter, female crime authors like Vera Caspary were far more likely, in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, to portray women engaged in various kinds of labor as a defining aspect of their class in addition to their consumption.

49 capitalizes on her beauty and her capacity for convincing performance. The risk she takes and profits from is a false identity that, like fake currency, allows her to commit fraud and speculate based on the image, and thus the apparent value, she can create for herself.

Velma dramatizes a fear that in the (early) midcentury capitalist marketplace at the tail end of the depression, value is rendered meaningless and citizens/investors can be defrauded by false appearance. Thus, the destabilization of a reliable economic system and a stable connection between appearance and “real” identity, or even the existence of any “true” or “real” identity at all, are brought together in Velma Valento passing as Mrs.

Helen Grayle.15 Without any guarantee of authenticity, confidence in the market and confidence in people to accurately represent themselves are destroyed.16

Raymond Chandler had first-hand knowledge of the dangers of speculation and false value. Born in Chicago in 1888 and a resident of Britain until his twenties, he fought in World War I for the Canadian army before moving to Los Angeles in 1919. After marrying and needing to support both his new wife and his aging mother, he took a job as a bookkeeper at Dabney Oil Syndicate in 1922. Chandler capitalized handsomely on the oil boom taking place in Southern California in the 1920s, being promoted to chief auditor and finally to vice president late in the decade. The time, place, and professional field operated according to a “get rich quick” economic ideology, with speculators in oil employing California Dream rhetoric to take financial risks and attract hopeful investors in schemes that sometimes paid out big, but more often defrauded those who placed their

15 Recent scholarship on Chandler tends to focus on this issue of objective truth undermined in his novels, and the femme fatale as especially dangerous to stable identity and the detective’s ability to “know” anything.

16 See Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women for a discussion of confidence games and the threat they pose to economic and social stability.

50 confidence and their money in this rhetoric of risky futurity, rapid social mobility, and high-class fantasy. One advertisement for Julian Petroleum ran: “Come on, folks, you’ll never make a thin dime just lookin’ on. I’ve got a surefire winner this time, a thousand to one shot. We just can’t lose. We’re all out here in California where the gushers are and we just ought to clean up. Come on folks, get aboard for the big ride” (Williams 132, emphasis mine). This rhetoric promises not moderate material gain through hard work, but fantastic wealth (the “big ride,” not the middle-class ride) and an easy “surefire” way to “clean up.”

Such advertisements proved to be empty promises. Chandler himself was one of thousands of defrauded investor in the Julian Petroleum scandal wherein a group of oil speculators, lawyers, brokers, and bankers perpetrated a complex confidence game that promised sudden riches to investors and preached the wisdom of financial risk, only to deliver a burst bubble that dashed the savings of some 40,000 Los Angeles citizens in

1927 (Williams 130-134). Chandler, as auditor, office manager and finally vice-president of Dabney Oil, saw the corruption and risky capitalist structure of the oil industry from the inside. As his alcoholism gradually caught up with him, his work performance worsened until in 1932, only a few years into the great depression, Chandler was fired for absenteeism and alcoholism. In his forties and without a career, he decided to see what money writing could earn him. His first story (“Blackmailers Don’t Shoot”) that he was able to sell was published in Black Mask pulp magazine in 1933, and he got his start in its pages as he garnered steady readership throughout the 1930s. Three of his stories published in pulp magazines, “Try the Girl” (Black Mask January 1937), “Mandarin’s

Jade” (Dime Detective November 1937), and “The Man Who Liked Dogs” (Black Mask

March 1936), served as the basis for Farewell, My Lovely.

Chandler was certainly aware, then, of an economic context of boom and bust, risky speculation, manipulation of the market and misrepresentation of value, and fantasies of rags to riches California wealth. Indeed, this rhetoric and the business it produced (and that produced it) were central to Chandler’s livelihood and his professional identity for ten years. I read Farewell, My Lovely as taking up the threads of this booming

1920s economic ideology of Southern California’s oil industry that left Chandler defrauded and unemployed in a city, and a nation, whose economic promise seemed dashed and irrevocably broken by the time he began writing crime fiction. The excessive emphasis on the visuality of class, classed spaces, and class identities is the product of

Depression-era class concerns leading into the World War II era. The huge gaps between poverty and wealth, detailed descriptions of luxury on one hand and threadbare cuffs on the other, suggest the broader critique of Chandler’s tale of social mobility gone awry and blood money obtained through risky speculation.

As previously discussed, class visually marks spaces, individuals, and material objects in crime novels like Chandler’s. Subtlety and quality are conveyed by a high-class aesthetics of muted colors, carefully tailored clothing, and a sense of luxury and comfort that is distinctive rather than generic. High-class aesthetics often involve the careful balance of extremes: simplicity and extravagance, vintage and modernity, natural and artificial. For example, Mrs. Helen Grayle wears a dress that is “rather plain except for a clasp of diamonds at the throat” (123), and in her living room “there was comfort, space, coziness, a dash of the very modern and a dash of the very old” (123). Working-class

52 aesthetics, in contrast, are painted by Chandler in terms of loud or gaudy colors, clumsy excess, lack of uniqueness or distinction, visibly low quality, threadbare conditions, etc.

Chandler’s preoccupation with the visuality of complex class identities also signals that the ultimate key of the murder mystery is the past class identity of the femme fatale. One could almost read Farewell as a series of detailed descriptions of clothing and interior design, since the hypervisibility of class functions as a narrative backbone holding together an otherwise fragmented crime plotline (fragmented, in part, because it is a suturing together of three pulp short stories). The centrality and visuality of class is nowhere more apparent than in the opening scene of the novel. Detective Marlowe, on an unrelated job and in a poor, black neighborhood of Los Angeles, happens to see a tall and loudly dressed man standing beneath a neon sign for a dive bar called Florian’s. The man

“was looking up at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty” (3).

He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes ... he looked about as conspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. His skin was pale and he needed a shave. He would always need a shave. He had curly black hair and heavy eyebrows that almost met over his thick nose. (4)

The man, whose name is Moose Malloy, seems incapable of appearing polished and subtle. His racial identity is what I would call “off-white” in this description of “curly black hair and heavy eyebrows that almost met over his thick nose.” The off-whiteness and classed portrayal of Malloy, alongside the earlier comparison between Malloy and an immigrant looking with “a sort of ecstatic fixity” at the neon sign at Florian’s as if it were

53 the Statue of Liberty, emphasizes the text’s interest in American Dream discourse and social mobility.

Malloy explains to Marlowe that he has just finished a long prison sentence, and is looking for his ex-girlfriend, “little Velma.” Once in the dive bar, which is a “shine joint” (an establishment for black clients) Malloy becomes so enraged that the manager does not know Velma’s whereabouts that he breaks the manager’s neck and flees. The case is given to L.A.P.D.’s Detective Nulty, whose “shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn’t look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy” (16). Following the detailed description of Malloy’s clothing and an explanation of his criminal and lower-class roots, we get a description of Nulty that also emphasizes his economic situation and his class appearance. Nulty is described in terms of his relationship to labor, and to material and professional value. His class appearance conveys an over worn, overtired, underpaid shabbiness, indicative of honesty but perhaps not of competence. While Nulty is in the pay of a hierarchal and institutional police department and as such does little substantial work (he spends most of his time complaining about his treatment by the management),

Marlowe is an independent worker who performs substantial and skilled labor. Scholars like Sean McCann, Erin Smith, and Christopher Breu read the hard-boiled detective as adhering to a different labor model than the de-skilled, scientific managerial model that gained prevalence in the 1920s and 30s. Even before we meet the femme fatale who represents an economic ideology diametrically opposed to the hard-boiled detective, we see that even a man in a similar profession represents a conflicting notion of manly labor and professional worth.

As we shall see to an even greater degree in Laura, lower-class women in disreputable lines of work (and here lower-classness and lack of respectability are conflated, since respectability in American culture has long been a class issue17) are described as disposable, of low value, and destined for ruin or violence. Marlowe learns that the widow of the owner of the bar Florian’s, Jessie Florian, still lives nearby.

Thinking she might know the whereabouts of Velma, he goes to see her so as to help

Detective Nulty, who instantly appears stumped by the mystery. Jessie Florian is an alcoholic, elderly woman, living in a poor part of town and in a peeling, shabby house

(again, the description of her house, living room, and personal appearance is detailed and extensive, since they are all clues to her class). When Marlowe asks about Velma, Mrs.

Florian remembers a “Cute little redhead… Nice legs and generous with ’em. She went off somewhere. How would I know what them tramps do?” (29-30). She brings Marlowe a stack of photos and “Newspaper stills. Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter. People from the joint they are” (32). Looking through the images, Marlowe remarks “The women had good legs…But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s office coat. Blondes, brunettes… Small sharp eyes with urchin greed in them. One or two of the faces obviously vicious” (32). Jessie Florian’s comment that “How would I know what them tramps do?” and “Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter,” reinforced by Marlowe’s interpretation that their faces are “as threadbare as a bookkeeper’s office coat,” aligns them with African Americans mentioned earlier in the novel (particularly the employees and the owner of Florian’s) whose murders arouse little interest and are half-heartedly

17 See Eric Lott’s entry for Class in Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

55 investigated by officers and detectives who write them off as acceptable and expected casualties of their sordid and violent world. While we never actually see Velma in the world and the identity she once inhabited, we get the ghostly suggestions of flashbacks to her life as a disposable and vulnerable object in a harsh and patriarchal world of sexual economies and bottom lines.

The intertwined language of class and value in this text is that of uniqueness or dime-a-dozen generic, indicative of individuality versus beauty that is “strictly assembly line” and unremarkable, as if drawing the class contrast of individual skilled artist production and a mass-produced commodity. This kind of language is intricately tied up in questions of gender and worth, especially, in this novel, in terms of different models of femininity. The same language of value is applied in gendered terms to the mass produced images of cheap women in the stack of photos, in particular, to a photo purporting to be of Velma Valento (we later learn that this is not really a photo of Velma, but is intended to throw Marlowe off her scent):

It was like the others but it was different, much nicer... I wouldn’t say the face was lovely and unspoiled, I’m not that good at faces. But it was pretty. People had been nice to that face, or nice enough for their circle. Yet it was a very ordinary face and its prettiness was strictly assembly line. You would see a dozen faces like it on a city block in the noon hour…It was signed across the lower right-hand corner: “Always yours— Velma Valento.” (34)

The notion that the woman’s beauty is “strictly assembly line” points to the gendered kinds of value at play. Whereas men like Nulty and Marlowe make themselves useful or useless, of low (masculine) worth or high based on the quality of their skilled labor and the authenticity of their self-representation, labor as a way to attain value and authenticity is not available for women like Velma whose value is based on beauty and feminine

56 virtue.18 In a sense, Velma’s only capital is her physical appearance, and so she cannot use her labor, as Marlowe does, to secure autonomy, integrity, and gendered authenticity.

The squalor and grotesque alcoholism (both traits associated with the lower classes) of

Jessie Florian’s life perhaps suggests the fate of such women in the mass-produced photos who are unable to marry rich and/or unable to sever their class ties like Velma does.

Velma herself, now called Mrs. Helen Grayle, is a paragon of feminine beauty, elegance, and myriad signs of sophisticated consumption. No traces of Velma Valento remain. Mrs. Helen Grayle seeks to keep tabs on Marlowe and obstruct his investigation.

She invents a false jewelry theft as an excuse to speak with Marlowe and hire him. When

Marlowe visits her in her fabulous mansion, he is entranced by her well-crafted class and feminine self-presentation:

She was dressed to go out, in a pale greenish blue. I didn’t pay much attention to her clothes. They were what the guy designed for her and she would go to the right man. The effect was to make her look very young and to make her lapis lazuli eyes look very blue. Her hair was of the gold of old paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much…The dress was rather plain except for a clasp of diamonds at the throat... (123-124)

His conversation with her is peppered with asides about the perfection of her looks: “She was leaning forward, her fine eyebrows—not daubs of paint—drawn together in a frown of thought” (132). Mrs. Grayle embodies the right mix of naturalness and artificiality, understated quality and intense sensuality, a pitch perfect interpretation of upper-class femininity that has been “fussed with just enough but not too much.” Marlowe even notes how much he likes to listen to her speak (“She had a nice way of talking… she rounded

18 Thus, as I have suggested, the term “lower-class” is better applied to women in such narratives, whereas men’s role as producer and laborer makes the term “working-class” appropriate to describe masculinity.

57 her words well” (128)), and we later learn that she has been taught, by a professional speech therapist, how to speak in a way that is sophisticated and high-class. There are a few signs of her conscious class performance, but for the most part, her performance is such that it does not seem like a performance at all. She is, by and large, a successful class passer, until she becomes the focus of Marlowe’s investigation.

By the end of the novel, Marlowe has cracked the mystery of her identity, and plans to confront her. After they make a date over the phone, “She hung up, leaving me with a curious feeling of having talked to somebody that didn’t exist” (271). She “doesn’t exist” on several conceptual levels. Not only is “Mrs. Helen Grayle” an invention rather than a “real” person, but in a similar sense, the name “Velma Valento,” since it is a stage name invented by a dive-bar singer and dancer, also denotes an invention rather than a

“real” person. The passer is a fiction, an illusion that obscures or even subverts the concept of “true” identity, so that we cannot know who this woman “really” is. Both

Helen Grayle is also a stage name in a sense, since it is a conscious performance that serves the function of securing income, like “Velma Valento.” The character of “Mrs.

Helen Grayle” gives its actress not only income but also a high-class position and thus a high-class femininity. When she walks through the door of Marlowe’s shabby apartment in the final climactic scene, her appearance evokes a fantasy of wealthy womanhood and all the intangible charms that attend such a staged fantasy.

However, after Marlowe confronts her as a class imposter and a murderer (as he puts it, “A girl who started out in the gutter became the wife of a multimillionaire”

(281)), we see her façade shatter. “She leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She

58 looked merely like … Grade B. Hollywood” (279). As feminist film scholar Mary Anne

Doane asserts of the femme fatale, “she never really is what she seems to be. She harbors a threat which is not entirely legible, predictable, or manageable,” and so her danger is framed as a woman with a secret, “something which must be aggressively revealed, unmasked, discovered” (1). Once Marlowe has “aggressively revealed” the class past that her false appearance and carefully crafted misrepresentation conceals, her performance becomes akin to that of a bad actress; that is, her acting becomes apparent and the spell of her class performance is broken once we can see its seams. Whereas before she had the allure of a grade A actress whose performance is seductive and in some way convincing, the quality or value of her performance and thus the quality and value of her person (and her femininity) diminish to a grade B, mass produced, run of the mill entertainment intended for thoughtless consumption, like the many mass-produced images of women that Mrs. Jessie Florian showed to him. Most importantly, once her intertwined identity as a murderer and a class imposter destroys her previously maintained fiction as high- class and innocent, “she ceased to be beautiful.” In this scene, feminine beauty is contingent on upper-classness, or at least on the performance of upper-classness.

As in most noir and passing plotlines, and all Chandler’s novels, Farewell ends on a dark note. Marlowe invites Moose Malloy to his apartment to identify Velma, and when Malloy sees her, he recognizes her voice before recognizing her image, since she is so visibly altered by her class makeover. He realizes that it was she who turned him in to the police eight years ago (for the reward money, and to be rid of him so that she could begin a new life in a new class). Velma/Helen fatally shoots Malloy and tries to shoot

Marlowe, but she is out of bullets and flees. She is found by a detective in Baltimore months later, singing in a nightclub; she shoots the detective, and then herself.

Farewell and the many novels like it that feature class-passing femmes fatales are not so much cautionary tales for young women of the working classes as they are cautionary tales for working-class men. Take great care, the novel warns, in where you place your confidence, and rely upon yourself in order to preserve your integrity, manhood, authenticity, morals, and your pocketbook. Speculation can lead to fraud and confidence games, which eviscerate working-class capital and values through the temptation for rags to riches success and the glamour of high-class aesthetics and a high- class language of value. This warning suggests a language of value that even as it finds pleasure in wealth and its attendant aesthetics, also forms an alternative measure of value that exists beyond the corrupting web of the market or consumer-based economics. Mrs.

Helen Grayle’s high-class value proves false; Philip Marlowe’s working-class value proves authentic.

Part Two: Vera Caspary’s Laura: The Class Passer Tells Her Story

As I have argued, the female passer (whether her passing be racial, class, or both, etc.) is cast as the femme fatale in much crime fiction and passing narratives. Vera

Caspary uses this genre convention to play against reader expectations. Published serially in Collier’s magazine 1942, Laura’s eponymous protagonist Laura Hunt is beautiful and mysterious. She comes from lower class origins, but now lives in an expensive and well- furnished apartment in Manhattan. She holds any number of possibly dangerous secrets behind her enchanting features and her polished manners, and she may or may not be a

60 murderer, perhaps driven to a jealous rage when her fiancé begins an affair with a model.

Just as dangerous, she is a high-powered high-earner, professionally successful as an advertising executive and largely a self-made woman who is autonomous and fiercely independent, refusing to rely on men for her emotional or financial security. While for a considerable portion of both the novel and its 1944 film noir adaptation, Laura is presented as a potential femme fatale, she is ultimately revealed to be something more complicated.

This second part of this chapter serves as a contrast and a supplement to my analysis of Farewell, My Lovely, and brings in a more detailed discussion of how consumer culture shaped intersections of gender and class in midcentury crime fiction.

Unlike Velma Valento, Laura Hunt does not marry to attain social mobility, but is able, through the help of a wealthy benefactor and her own hard work and professional skill in advertising, to transform herself into an upper middle-class lady. But like Velma and most (if not all) literary passers, beneath her excellent class performance and her seemingly effortless class transition, her passing creates anxiety and even violence.

Whereas Chandler’s Farewell centers on a language of value, speculation, and misrepresentation of worth through the contrast of gendered economic models, Caspary’s

Laura critiques the “unreality” and artificiality of class passing and consumer-based identities that produce women as commodities for men’s consumption.

Even more so than Chandler, Caspary draws from the broader genre tradition of the passing novel as well as that of the crime novel. Implicit in the claim, of course, is the intertwined nature of these two genres, a claim that underpins this dissertation. Caspary’s fiction is centrally concerned with the stakes of identity intersectionality, perhaps most

61 evidently in her first published novel The White Girl (a 1929 racial passing narrative) and

Laura. In these texts, high-class models of femininity are achieved by passing as a means to attain both a sense of self-worth and agency that, in the context of Caspary’s work, are not possible for women who identify as working-class.

Caspary’s Passing Novels: The White Girl and Laura

In the late 1920s, Vera Caspary (1899-1987), daughter of lower middle-class

Jewish parents, quit her unsatisfying job in advertising to do what she considered the more “honest” work of writing a novel (71). Her first novel, The White Girl, follows the life of Solaria Cox, a light-skinned black woman from a lower-class family who works as a storeroom clerk for a Jewish dressmaker in Chicago until she moves to New York to pass for white and work as a model for advertising agencies. Solaria passes first in order to support herself financially in a way that raises her above the working classes, and second in order to attain the model of femininity she desires. To be a successful model, she must maintain a high-class public profile and wear only the best, most fashionable clothes. Autonomy and the “right” kind of racial and class feminine beauty are the goals of her identity masquerade, and given her occupation, consumption plays a major role in

Solaria’s negotiation of race, gender, and class intersections. In large part, her expert tastes and strategic consumption are what allow her to invent herself as white, ladylike, and well bred. Solaria’s passing, and the numerous Jewish characters who appear integral to the world of advertising in The White Girl, create a book that explores the boundaries of whiteness and “successful” or “valuable” femininity in the context of late 1920s consumer culture.

Over the next ten years after publishing The White Girl, Caspary wrote many more books, articles, and advertising copy. She also became involved in socialist circles, finally joining the Communist party in the mid 1930s. Although by the time she wrote her most famous work, the noir crime novel Laura (1942), she was disillusioned with

Communism and had given up writing a “proletarian” socialist novel, her interest in literary passing and in radical left-wing thought is more than subtly evident in this later work. Caspary considered writing Laura to be a way to “escape politics and war news in the early forties” (Emrys, Bedelia afterward 196), but I read the novel as engaging with the range of political subjects (the limits of American Dream discourse, the difficulty of social mobility for working-class women, women’s value as dependent on their class and racial identity, the destructive nature of consumer capitalism) that had always interested

Caspary.

Laura is not narrated by a single, hard-boiled male’s point of view, as Farewell is;

Caspary’s use of multiple narrators presents a more complex view of intersections among gender, class, and consumer identities than Chandler’s sole first-person narration. As one of the primary narrators,19 Laura is an active subject. She is a kind and compassionate woman of integrity, but she also has a weakness for handsome men and beautiful commodities, blurring the dichotomy of the hypersexualized, superficial femme fatale, and the saintly, virtuous lady. She describes in detail the cracks in her own class and gender performance, and the anxieties that her class crossing creates for her. Caspary’s novel thereby interrogates the position of socially mobile working-class women who

19 See Liahna Babener’s essay “De-Feminizing Laura: Novel to Film” (1994) for a discussion of how Laura’s narration relates to her agency and active subjectivity. My contribution to this and other arguments about narrative voice in the novel (versus the film, where the only narrative voice is the murderer Waldo Lydecker’s) is to examine how Laura expresses and complicates her own class position and class desires.

63 invent new class versions of themselves via new consumer identities, women who rely upon consumption, clothing, and gendered marketing ideals to fashion themselves as valuable commodities in an upper-class marketplace.

Laura is told through three main narrative points of view. The first person narration of well-to-do and dandyish columnist and snobbish cultural critic Waldo

Lydecker begins the novel. He explains to the reader that the beautiful Laura Hunt, whom he helped raise from the lowly position of clerk to an important position at a Manhattan advertising agency, has been brutally murdered. Her body was found with the face blown away by a point-blank shot from a powerful buckshot gun. She was found lying on her back in front of the open door of the apartment (suggesting that the murderer rang the doorbell, she answered the door, and was shot as soon as she opened it). Mark

McPherson, a seemingly hard-boiled working-class NYPD detective, is assigned to the case. He finds Waldo, and Laura’s genteel and extremely handsome fiancé, Shelby

Carpenter, to be frivolous men. But as he learns more about the murder victim herself, he becomes increasingly fascinated by her and shows signs of not-so-hard-boiled sentimentalism20 and sensitivity.

We then switch to Detective McPherson’s first person narration as he becomes enchanted with Laura during the course of his investigation. But the twist in the tale comes when Laura suddenly returns home, very much alive, from a weekend away in the country. The texts then shifts from McPherson’s narration, to Laura’s, and back again to

McPherson’s as he works to uncover both the identity of the victim, and the identity of

20 These two concepts, the hard-boiled and the sentimental, are intertwined in complex ways that I do not have the space to explore in this chapter. See Leonard Cassuto’s introduction to Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of the American Crime Story for a history of these terms and their interactions in American crime fiction.

64 the murderer. It seems that Shelby was having an affair with another woman named

Diane Redfern (a model for Laura’s advertising firm, who closely resembles Laura, and was house sitting for her during the weekend that Laura was away). The two were in

Laura’s apartment on the night in question, and Diane was shot in Laura’s place. The murderer is ultimately revealed to be Waldo, Laura’s benefactor, who out of a covetous desire to possess Laura tried to murder her and unknowingly killed Diane instead. When he tries again to murder Laura, he is foiled by McPherson. This not only resolves the murder mystery plotline but also cements McPherson and Laura’s romantic relationship when he saves her life and professes his devotion to her. In Laura’s choice of McPherson as her romantic partner, both characters’ working-class origins unite them in opposition to the artificiality and hypocrisy of the upper-class spaces that constitute the setting for the novel. In essence, Laura’s high-class benefactor Waldo proves to be an evil murderer, and she chooses both a working-class man and thus working-class values (as they are articulated in the novel) as her hope for redemption and as a rejection of class passing.

In both Farewell, My Lovely and Laura, the values of lower-class characters triumph over the hypocritical values of the upper classes. Upper class values, in the context of each novel, include elevating artificiality above reality, privileging surface over substance, molding oneself according to specific consumer models of femininity and masculinity, and reviling physical labor. In contrast, Detective McPherson’s working- class worldview prefers reality and honesty to artificiality and performance (similar to

Marlowe’s class-based worldview and set of economic values). While Chandler’s critique of consumer culture is directed at male readers and sets the independent, non-consuming, skilled professional Philip Marlowe as a model of resistance to a consumer-oriented

65 capitalist economy, Caspary does not frame her critique in exclusively masculine terms.

As I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the primary threat in Laura comes not from the duplicitous class-passing femme fatale who speculates with her identity and creates false value from appearances, but from the power-hungry, feminized, and narcissistic upper-class man who seeks to control women. Furthermore, whereas

Farewell portrays a femme fatale who relies on appearance and performance above labor to achieve her goal, Laura suggests that even when skilled labor and professionalism are the basis for a working-class woman’s social mobility, she remains a class outsider and a fractured subject perpetually haunted by her past. Indeed, Caspary’s noir crime novel makes an interesting contrast to The White Girl, since despite Laura’s whiteness she still is unable to smoothly transition up the socioeconomic ladder without violent fallout.

Vera Caspary and the Publication of Laura

Before its hardcover publication by Houghton Mifflin in 1943, Laura was published serially in Collier’s magazine in the fall of 1942 (under the title Ring Twice for

Laura, reminiscent of James M. Cain’s iconic hard-boiled crime novel, The Postman

Always Rings Twice (1934)). Collier’s had a history of cutting edge investigatory journalism and an emphasis on social reform, stretching back to the turn of the century. It is perhaps fitting that Caspary, an activist working in Socialist circles and advocating for feminist and economic reform, should publish a novel critiquing consumer culture and intersectional class and gender hierarchies in Collier’s pages at a time when women were entering the wartime U.S. workforce in high numbers, and the Communist Party was still

66 an active force in Caspary’s Northeastern intellectual, professional, and artistic community.

Despite being published in a “slick” magazine21 (that is, a magazine published on high-quality slick or glossy paper rather than low-quality, rough, pulpy paper like that of

Black Mask), the plot and characters in Laura would have been familiar to the habitual consumer of American pulp crime stories. There is McPherson, a tough police detective who represents a socially lower-class and authentic masculinity, Laura’s playboy fiancé

Shelby Carpenter who represents superficial masculine gentility, and the refined, foppishly intellectual, but inauthentically masculine Waldo Lydecker. As I have already outlined, Laura herself seems at first to be the femme fatale, a figure of mystery, allure, and potential evil in the eyes of the men around her, since upon her return she becomes a primary suspect (after all, the murder victim is her fiancé’s lover). Even after Laura enters the novel in person, we see her as these three men view her, and not until she narrates her own story does she reveal her “true” nature, which is itself unstable and conflicted. Thus, Caspary uses archetypes of the genre and then makes significant alterations to genre expectations, since Laura, and to a lesser degree the surprisingly gentle and sentimental McPherson, complicate conventional gendered aspects of stock character types.

21 Both Caspary and Chandler aspired to be “literary” authors rather than exclusively authors of popular crime fiction. It is important to note that while the serial origins of Farewell, My Lovely are the pulp detective magazine Black Mask, Collier’s published a broad range of high-brow authors from Ernest Hemingway and Willa Cather, to more popular, genre authors like Zane Grey and Erle Stanley Gardner. Thus, Laura could be said to occupy a space of intersecting genres and cultural tastes.

Caspary’s choice of subject places her in a long tradition of Jewish authors writing about various kinds of class, ethnic, and racial passing.22 Her interest in the boundaries of whiteness and the nature of malleable class identity in a consumer culture context responds to discourses regarding Jewish identity in the early decades of the twentieth century23. According to Daniel Itzkovitz, Jewish identity in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries was discussed in terms of “chameleonic” identity. The

“natural” state of the Jew, according to this logic of Jews as white yet non-white, normal yet abnormal, was a state of identity flux. Jews could adapt racial, class, professional, and religious identity to blend in, which meant they posed a threat to stable notions of whiteness (Itzkovitz 41-44). In a post-Plessy v. Ferguson society, two competing models of American identity dominated the rhetoric of social mobility: first, the notion of potential self-transformation for any American citizen with talent who is willing to hard work, and second, a rigid racial identity that was fixed and prevented social mobility beyond a racially bounded community (Itzkovitz 41, Rottenberg 75-76). In The White

Girl, Solaria’s failed race and class passing suggests the latter notion of American identity, and Laura Hunt’s class passing, which is fraught and in some ways unsuccessful despite her whiteness, challenge the former notion that whiteness itself makes class transformation possible. While Laura Hunt is not Jewish but rather of Scottish ancestry, like her love interest McPherson, we can read Caspary’s own life and ambiguous class,

22 See not only novels by Jewish authors about racial passing (such as Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933)), but also the prevalence of Jewish characters in racial passing novels such as in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), Charles Chestnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and, tangentially but crucially, the history of Jewish performers in blackface (see Samson Rafaelson’s short story The Day of Atonement and its famous film adaptation The Jazz Singer (1927)).

23 See Catherine Rottenberg, Stephen Belluscio, and Itzkovitz.

68 gender, and racial identity as a Jewish advertiser and self-made woman throughout her novels of class passing femmes fatales. Caspary’s writing engaged with the broader discourse of American identity tied up in questions of Jewishness as balanced between notions of fixed and unfixed race and class. Such a reading is particularly apt for the consumer backdrop of Laura, since Itzkovitz cites literary examples of Jewish

“chameleonism” in the field of advertising as especially illustrative of Jews’ “unstable” identity. If the Jew is portrayed as a natural chameleon, claims Itzkovitz, it is fitting that

Jewish characters would be frequent in narratives about passing and about manipulating images and language to advertise goods. Caspary enlarges the scope of such a discourse to consider “chameleonic” passers in Laura as troubling not only the notion of equal access to social mobility and the American Dream, but troubling any notion of stable truth.

While on the one hand The White Girl follows the predictable plotline of the tragic mulatta,24 Caspary pairs the text’s passing story with a critique of consumer culture’s set of fictions and constructed ideals that undermine truth and devalue lower class and racialized femininity. Solaria can only feel like a worthy and successful woman if she passes for white and passes for upper class, since she sees the two as conflated.

High-class blackness does not exist in Solaria’s worldview, and successful black femininity also does not exist for her. If she is low-class and black (and if she is black, she must be low-class, in her understanding), then she is not beautiful and feminine, and thus she is a failed woman of low value to male admirers and to society at large. Caspary

24 After her heroine Solaria loses her white fiancé, Caspary had originally had her do “what every working girl has to do— go back to work” (The Secrets of Grown-Ups 116). However, Caspary’s publishers asked to have her heroine commit suicide at the end, cementing the sensational tragedy characteristic of the archetype, and violently punishing the passer.

69 critiques not only the fiction of race and the fear of miscegenation, as most other passing narratives do with a set of somewhat overused conventions, but she critiques Solaria’s notion of feminine worth and identity based almost entirely on her relationship to consumer culture (what kind of dress she wears) and on relationships with white men

(what kind of man she can get). The novel explores how Solaria’s own view of her womanhood relies on a classist and white-supremacist feminine ideal promoted by the consumer culture that she, as a model for ads and an avid shopper, actively consumes and produces.

Although many, if not most, racial passing narratives tend to naturalize class passing as compared to the artificiality of race passing (suggesting that while characters can and should elevate their class status, racial passing is an act of racial self-hatred and creates a fractured and duplicitous identity), Laura is centrally concerned with the artificiality of class performance and passing. Indeed, the kinds of guilt and loss that result in racial passing novels are also prominent in Laura, where the heroine longs for her previous class culture and regrets trading her working-class identity for “a mess of pottage,” as the unnamed narrator of Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man says at the end of that novel. As I have already begun to outline, Caspary’s look at intersectionality most commonly employs a lens of consumer culture. The protagonist and the majority of the other characters in The White Girl work as models, copywriters, and dressmakers, including Solaria’s white friends and her white fiancé. Laura Hunt, her fiancé Shelby

Carpenter, and the woman killed in Laura’s place, Diane Redfern, work as an advertising executive, copywriter, and model, respectively. Caspary illuminates and critiques the

70 connections among consumption, intersectional passing, and hierarchies that disempower and devalue working-class women.

Women in Advertising

Vera Caspary’s first published writing was in the form of advertisements in the early 1920s. In her autobiography, she lays out the kinds of deceptive strategies and clichés that informed her advertising career. Caspary’s earliest writing job was for The

Rodent Extermination League of America, which purported to be a humanitarian and progressive organization promoting awareness and public health, but was in fact merely an elaborate ploy to sell a particular kind of ineffectual rat poison. Caspary writes in her autobiography that “It’s letterhead was the League’s only reality” (52), and that ultimately the supposed organization came to an end because the rat poison it sought to sell did not work (53).

Despite her success (she was ultimately promoted and given a raise, although she still made about half of what her male colleagues made (54)), she became increasingly disgusted with the deception and tawdriness of advertising, even going so far as to call her time in advertising “those fraudulent years”:

At the start of those fraudulent years I felt no guilt…for the Van Vilet Institute’s spurious board of teachers and directors, for guarantees, for …unreduced price reductions, I had my rationale … [the] urgent necessity of denying that I earned my bread and theatre tickets by deceit. “People want what we give them,” I’d say with the emphatic conviction of the unconvinced. “They need illusions. Their lives are so drab that they welcome anything that stirs their imagination and gives them hope.” (68)

Indeed, in The White Girl, Solaria’s white fiancé David explains his discomfort with the advertising industry in which he works. His mother “says the business is rotten because

71 we’re putting a false value on a worthless thing. But you can’t be in business to-day and act like Diogenes with a microscope. God knows I hate lying worse than any other human fault, but this is just merchandising” (216). Summing up both the advertising industry and the passing game that Solaria plays, he explains “it’s just that you can’t write the whole truth when you’re writing ads. After all, modern business is intrigue and if you don’t play the game you’ll always be in a rotten little rut” (216). The desire to escape from “a rotten little rut” by “putting false value on a worthless thing” motivates Solaria’s race and class passing, as well as Laura’s class passing; Solaria and Laura “play the game” of “modern business” by necessity in the same way advertisers do. Laura herself expresses misgivings over the morality of her work as an advertiser, regretting the role of advertising in society at large, in her rise to the upper classes, and in her attempt to convincingly play the part of her new class. Thus, passing plotlines in both The White

Girl and Laura conflate women’s social mobility and economic worth with modern consumer capitalist principles of the “cult of personality” that, as I have suggested, fashion the economic and gendered threat of the femme fatale.

After Caspary grew tired of the myriad deceptions and artificial promises that drove the advertising world, she quit her job, telling her boss that she wanted to be “a real writer,” and to begin doing “honest work” (71). Like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe,

Caspary found the world of consumer culture to be artificial and mindless, albeit crucial to her own economic success throughout much of her life. Nevertheless, Laura appeared serially in the pages of Collier’s magazine alongside advertisements for leather shoes,

American wartime industries, cigarettes, and toothpaste. This publication context

72 suggests that novel writing and advertising copy were rarely completely separate for authors of popular crime narratives like Chandler and Caspary.

If Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely is a creature of the Depression-era pulps, then

Laura is a creature of wartime print culture. The war years saw a dramatic rise in women in the workplace. According to Melissa McEuen’s Making War, Making Women, seven million women joined a workforce where, due to the economic desperation of the

Depression and subsequently rising numbers of working women in the 1930s, eleven million women were already employed (1). McEuen and other scholars of World War II- era advertising suggest that this apparent threat to traditional gender roles created fears that American femininity would be eroded by female employment, especially in “male” occupations like factory work, management, etc. In a time of war when national security and stability were on the forefront of government officials’ minds, this supposed erosion of femininity and a crisis in gender roles (however much wartime production needs necessitated such new roles) posed a threat to American national strength and values

(McEuen 1-4). Thus, advertising during the war years encouraged a hyperfeminine ideal wherein marriage was the goal and whiteness, submissiveness, and the right class model of femininity were the prerequisites. Ideal (marriageable) American womanhood was framed as a woman’s duty to pursue, in part because she needed to be “good enough” for men to fight for abroad.

Advertisers promoted one kind of “ideal” wartime face for American women, and that face was a white, upper-class, and submissively feminine one whose use of particular skincare products determined her economic, social, marital, and class destiny. A considerable proportion of wartime ads focused on specific parts of the woman’s body,

73 especially her face and skin. In Laura, Laura herself works on a campaign for Lady

Lillith face powder, and the model (and murder victim) employed by her ad agency,

Diane Redfern, poses for the Lady Lillith campaign. The use of the word “Lady” in the product’s title, alongside its promise to whiten and soften skin, evokes feminine softness framed as ultra-white femininity of the leisure class. Both Laura and Diane subscribe to another growing (yet already prevalent) trend in the World War II advertising years, what

McEuen calls “transferring prestige”25 by using an upper-class socialite or upper-class language to promote a relatively lower-end product, for example, Ponds face cream (9-

10).

But feminist scholars rightly view a range of often-contradictory messages at play in ads during World War II. While many products encouraged or promised a hyperfeminine or traditionally feminine domestic ideal to female consumers, advertiser’s associations and partnerships with the U.S. government meant that promoting women’s power as workers was also idealized. Thus, conflicting class ideals were simultaneously employed to promote both women’s labor and women’s refinement. Perhaps represented most iconically by Rosie the Riveter, a number of ad agencies glamorized working women by emphasizing not their conventional femininity as docile fiancés and dutiful mothers, but their potential in the workforce. The U.S government and those advertisers creating the fabric of consumer ideology persistently sent the message that a patriotic woman could help the war effort by going to work, not only as secretaries or

25 For example, in the Collier’s October 17, 1942 issue, which carried the first installment of Laura, an advertisement for Long’s Hats proclaimed them the “Aristocrat of Fine Fur Felts,” “regal” and luxurious (34).

74 stenographers, but as factory workers, the latter of which could hardly be integrated into an upper-class model of feminine beauty as delicate and clean.

Maureen Honey’s research on World War II-era magazines suggests that physical labor and working-class jobs were promoted even in magazines marketed as middle- class. Stories in these magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post, portrayed middle-class women choosing to work in a factory rather than going to college, since labor for the war effort was more important than class identification and individual advancement.

Collier’s, which was tailored for educated and non-working class readers, also participated in this discourse. In the issue of Collier’s that carried the first and second installments of Laura, ads promoting women’s labor show “former secretaries, singers, milliners…and housewives” leaving their previous “women’s” middle and lower-middle class jobs to work in factory jobs that they can be “proud of” (Oct. 24, 1942, page 43).

This particular ad features “Jackie Maull, onetime model” who is now “building a bomber,” suggesting that the value of feminine beauty need not contradict the worth of working-class factory labor.

Wartime advertising rhetoric suggests not only working-class desires to pass for a higher class, but the contradictory impulse to embrace working-classness as, in terms of patriotic contribution to the war effort, superior to the upper classes and to high-class models of femininity. The thrill of working with one’s hands was glamorized in both middle and working-class women’s magazine, says Honey. For example, in the

September issue of the working-class magazine True Story, a lower-class heroine decides to go to work in a factory rather than continuing with school. Honey adds that “In addition, she chastises her mother for urging her to dress in a way that will hide her

75 working-class origins, reminding her that it is the workers who are primarily responsible for producing weapons that will defeat the enemy” (679). In this and other instances, celebration of women’s labor, especially labor positively framed as working-class, abounded in the era’s print culture and advertising images. Caspary herself worked for

True Story magazine for a time before the war, and was intimately aware of her working- class audience and the most effective strategies of appealing to working-class readers and customers.

Despite positive portrayals of working-class womanhood in wartime publications,

Linda M. Scott’s “Warring Images” and McEuen’s work illustrates how upper-class models of femininity were celebrated in ways that idealized women of leisure rather than labor. These kinds of contradictions are dramatized in Laura, where a class-passing adwoman and a hard-boiled detective must untangle class performances, class values, and a mysterious crime in order to uncover both the murderer as well as uncover the duplicity and artifice of upper-class consumer culture. By the end of Laura, Caspary’s characters outline what working-class values are, and portray them as superior; the idea of labor as

“noble” (Honey) for working-class women in the war effort may have struck a chord for readers of Laura in Collier’s during the fall of 1942. However, as McEuen and others show, a celebration of a specifically upper-class femininity that “transferred prestige” and promised consumers that shopping could transform their class status marketed an ideal womanhood that stood in opposition to working-classness.

Laura’s “Lustre”: Class Characterizations and Class Consumption

Characters are cast as reflecting a particular class from the opening pages of the novel, and the aesthetics of class are as hyper-visible in Laura as in Farewell, My Lovely from the very first. On the opening page when the first narrator, foppish Waldo Lydecker, learns that detective Mark McPherson has come to question him at his apartment, he feels that interrogation by such a “not unimportant member of the Police Department… conferred a certain honor” (3). It seems that McPherson has a reputation as a sort of public hero of progressive and working-class causes.

In the case of The People of New York vs. Associated Dairymen his findings had been responsible—or so the editorial writers said—for bringing down the price of milk a penny a quart. A senatorial committee had borrowed him for an investigation of labor rackets, and only recently his name had been offered by a group of progressives as a leader of a national inquiry into defense profits. (3-4)

Watching McPherson pace around his drawing-room as he waits for Waldo, Waldo observes “He was the sort of man, I saw at once, who affects to scorn affectation…My drawing-room irritated him; to a man of fiercely virile temperament, the delicate perfection must be cloying,” (4, emphasis mine). Possessions and relationship to commodities to serve as indicators of character in Laura, and this scene establishes

McPherson’s working-class masculinity as “virile,” while Waldo’s is as “delicate” as the glassware in his drawing room. McPherson and Waldo also initially have opposing views of Laura. McPherson proclaims the case to be simple. “A two-timing dame gets murdered in her flat. So what? A man did it. Find the man” (5-6). He refuses to “work overtime” on

“this third-class mystery,” since “I’m a workingman. I’ve got hours like everyone else”

(6). Waldo is “Pained by his vulgar estimate of my beloved Laura…” (6).

In this and other moments early in the novel, McPherson displays a rough and dismissive attitude toward women, which Waldo (and later Laura, when Waldo tells her how McPherson speaks about women) understands to be part and parcel of working-class male misogyny, perhaps reminiscent of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and other hard-boiled detectives that Caspary deeply disliked.26 When McPherson suggests that perhaps she was expecting a male caller on the night she was killed, he asks Waldo, “Tell me, what kind of dame was she anyway?” Waldo replies coldly, “She was not the sort of woman you call a dame… Look at this room. Does it reveal nothing of the person who planned and decorated it? Does it contain, for your eyes, the vulgar memories of a young woman who would lie to her fiancé, deceive her oldest friend [Waldo], and sneak off to a rendezvous with a murderer?” (30).

Indeed, Waldo judges McPherson’s taste, sophistication, and worth according to how he judges Laura on the basis of her apartment, since Waldo says “…the room still shone with Laura’s luster” (31) and “If [McPherson] failed to appreciate the quality of a woman who had adorned this room,” then he is “proletarian” in his taste (30, emphasis mine). Here, quality means both moral and material worth. McPherson is indeed impressed, because although he affects to completely reject upper-class values and aesthetics, Waldo sees that although he is “[c]ontemptuous of luxury, he is also charmed by it. He resents my collection of glass and porcelain, my Biedermeier and my library, but envies the culture which has developed appreciation of surface lustres” (16-17). The seduction, value, and meaning of “surface lustres” and the “culture” of such superficial

26 Caspary speaks through her heroine when Laura confesses to McPherson that she finds detectives “detestable,” particularly “the hardboiled ones who are always drunk and talk out the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct,” but that he is “different” because the targets of his investigations “ought to be exposed” for their corruption (77).

78 beauty are the central concern of the novel. Whereas McPherson is “contemptuous” of the artificiality and superficiality of this upper-class world, his infatuation with Laura suggests that he indeed “envies” and deeply desires the high-class femininity that

Waldo’s upper-class world and its patterns of consumption produce.

Before Laura returns, McPherson, Shelby and Waldo are all in love with the possessions and images that imply a certain fantasy of womanhood. They all admire her portrait (painted by another man who was in love with her) and praise her taste and her apartment as they look for clues to her murder. Part of the fantasy that these men project onto the absent figure of Laura involves class, particularly for McPherson. Through his investigation, he gains access to upper-class spaces that would otherwise be denied to him (when he goes to Laura’s aunt’s house to question her, it is his “first visit to a private home on Fifth Avenue” (18)), and McPherson’s growing obsession with Laura has to do with the woman that her upper-class possessions and apartment imply. There are long scenes of McPherson alone in her apartment, ostensibly doing detective work, as he drinks her good liquor, looks through her drawers, admires her furniture and books, and even brushes his hand against the dresses in her closet. His hard-boiled toughness melts away in the face of the seductive softness of high-class feminine taste. Just before her unexpected arrival, he sits in an armchair directly beneath her portrait and stares at it, with something more than wistfulness, until he falls asleep. Thus we see that Laura is glamorous in her absence through a process of fetishization that locates her within her possessions. Who she is, in this case, is synonymous with what she buys, and interior decoration precisely reflects character in the minds of the men who love her posthumously. It is her return that causes the real trouble between the men; while she is

79 dead, she is whoever they wanted her to be. Now that she is alive, she does not conform to their particular (class and gender) fantasies and thus challenges their attempts to control and possess her. She goes from being an angelic victim to an economically and sexually threatening femme fatale.

It is after Laura comes back from the dead (so to speak) that her conflicted class position is illuminated. Laura, like McPherson, admires the “culture which has developed appreciation of surface lustres” (16-17) as Waldo puts it, and her success as an advertising executive means that consumer culture has facilitated her social mobility and her autonomy. However, as a class passer she feels a strong sense of nostalgia for her class origins. Whereas after her return McPherson narrates her as a potential femme fatale, Laura’s own narration paints a picture of a flawed young woman, going on thirty and not immune to the seductions of handsome upper-class men and a genteel lifestyle, who fiercely guards her independence and cannot quite accomplish a smooth class transition. Laura explains all the kinds of acting she has to perform to be the right kind of lady to fit her new financial station. For example, she used to buy cheap scotch until

Waldo taught her what brand to buy. She did her own housework until Shelby chided her for doing the work of a servant, and she enjoys the labor of tending to her garden herself despite Shelby’s objections. These and other aspects of Laura’s past class identity break into her new upper-class performance. Her narration in the novel suggests that above all she is her own invention, a working girl’s interpretation of a modern woman and sophisticated lady, still shadowed by her class origins.

Her interactions with McPherson reveal these two class sides of herself. For example, after her return, he insists that for her own safety she remain in her apartment

80 and not contact anyone, in case the murderer should try to finish the job. He brings her groceries, and when she makes breakfast, they decide that rather than being “elegant” and eat in the dining room, they will “be folksy and eat in the kitchen,” since as McPherson says, “Until I was a grown man, I never ate in anything but a kitchen” (84). In this and other ways they are at home with one another, since they share a similar socioeconomic and cultural background. Laura’s lingering working-class worldview attracts and softens

McPherson, and so Caspary not only re-imagines the archetype of the femme fatale as a self-sufficient professional woman, but also re-imagines the working-class hard-boiled detective as far more considerate and respectful of women than both the upper-class men he investigates and the archetypal tough detective of the pulps. Laura and McPherson’s meals in the kitchen are oases of working-class virtue and authenticity, cast as complexly gendered class ideals in contrast to the negative upper-class social realm that surrounds them.

Laura’s contradictory performance of and distrust for upper-classness comes out most strongly in her growing dislike of her fiancé Shelby, who comes from southern money but has lost his fortune. This loss leaves him with the “husk” of “gentility” (111) as Waldo eloquently puts it; yet, characteristic of the novel’s portrayal of the cultural importance of surfaces versus interiors, the “husk” of gentility is enough to broker financial gain in the form of a profitable marriage to Laura. She explains that Shelby

“…could never know the fulfillment of working with your hands in your own house. My people were plain folk; the women went West with their men and none of them found gold. But Shelby came from ‘gentle’ people; they had slaves to comb their hair and put

81 on their shoes” (146).27 She goes into careful detail in describing the fine clothes she was wearing on a particular night, and then explains that she parked her car in a cheap garage so as to save two dollars a month (152), a fact that McPherson admires as sensible thrift and a charming throwback to her class roots. But despite her dislike of Shelby, Waldo, and their world, she is nevertheless enchanted by refinement and high-class consumption, and this tension in her character drives the events of the novel. Shelby, for example, is handsome and stylish, practically a high-class commodity in himself akin to a designer purse. In her professional life she produces consumer desire and glamorizes upper- classness, and in her personal life she is also propelled by similar fantasies. Her ability to alter her consumer identity at once socially and financially elevates her, and when combined with her reservations and her class nostalgia, places her in a neither/nor divided class position despite her convincing class performance as a refined lady.

These and other indications of class identity, however fluid and ever changing that might be, become important points in McPherson’s murder investigation as he reconstructs the suspects’ movements on the night of the murder. For instance, the question of how a cheap bottle of scotch got into Laura’s liquor cabinet on the night of the murder becomes a central mystery, and points to a person whose consumption marks them as a class outsider in the lavish space of Laura’s tasteful apartment. Waldo maintains that he “taught” Laura to buy a better brand of scotch (103), and so it could not be hers and must have been purchased by the murderer, who logically must be common and low class. But Laura’s maid Bessie tells McPherson that after the murder, she found

27 This line about Shelby echoes Caspary’s critique of class and race intersections in The White Girl. Here, as in her earlier novel, upper-classness is conflated with whiteness in the sense that both are defined as non- black. Shelby’s class and racial position has meaning through its negativity, that is, through the absence of blackness and the subjugation of blackness.

82 the bottle and two glasses in the bedroom; she washed the glasses and concealed the bottle in order to erase all implication of Laura being the kind of woman who buys cheap

Scotch, and the kind of woman who drinks it in her bedroom with a man.

This question of whether Laura has slid back into her lower-class shopping and consumption habits, or if someone else with less ample finances purchased the bottle, becomes the crucial mystery of the murder investigation. Thus, consumer practices are the medium through which truth and “real” class or criminal identity can be detected (the bottle turns out to have been purchased by Shelby to drink with his mistress Diane; he must resort to buying cheaper consumer goods until he marries Laura and has access to her money). Moreover, a behind the scenes look at Laura’s performance as a lady as well as the cracks in that performance emphasize the artificiality of Laura’s enchanting masquerade. The possibility that her current class performance may be “hiding” another class identity marks her as a potential class-passing femme fatale like Velma Valento, particularly in the implication that if she has returned to lower-class consumption habits

(the cheap scotch), she has also returned to lower-class feminine value and morality (the two glasses in the bedroom). The mystery of whether Laura has fully “become” a refined woman, or whether aspects of her lower-class consumer identity linger in her present life, is overlaid upon the question of whether she is a “fine lady” of morals or a loose woman cheating on her fiancé, an innocent intended victim or a vicious murderer.

Feminine Value: Working-Class Mobility and Artificial Identities

The novel makes clear the stakes involved in women’s social mobility and intersectional class and gender performances. Every character, from Laura’s many suitors

83 to her maid, are enchanted with Laura’s taste, ladylike demeanor, polished appearance, and quality. The same kind of admiration is rarely extended to working-class women whose class performance is less successful. When Laura’s maid Bessie hears that the model Diane Redfern (whose real name is Jennie Swobodo, a girl of working-class background from New Jersey trying to attain social mobility as a model) was actually the woman murdered, Bessie says without hesitation “It’s no more than she deserved” (98).

Diane is the “kind of girl” who takes lovers (like Shelby) and stays out all night without anyone waiting up for her. Diane’s landlady barely noticed that she had not been seen for several days because “There were so many girls in the city and they were such loose creatures that it didn’t make any difference whether one of them got misplaced once in a while” (116)28. McPherson investigates Diane’s room at a boarding house, and finds evidence of a poor girl spending every last dime on family members from her class past and the accessories and costumes of a high-class performance for her new life.

There was a single bed, a second-hand dresser, a sagging armchair… Diane had made enough to live in a better place, but she had been sending money home to the family. And the upkeep of her beauty had evidently cost plenty. She’d been crazy about clothes; there were hats and gloves and shoes in every color…She must have been hurt by the contrast between those sleek studio interiors [where she modeled] and the second- hand furniture of the boarding house; between the silky models who posed with her and the poor slobs she met on the moldy staircase. Laura’s apartment must have seemed like a studio setting to Jennie Swobodo…” (116-117)

While Laura may have the apartment, the income, and the manners to match her closet, all of which Diane/Jennie lacks, Laura is playing a similar part with just as much artificiality in her upper-class performance. Laura’s apartment is indeed a “studio,” as

28 Bessie echoes Jesse Florian’s comment in Farewell, My Lovely, “How would I know what them tramps do?” (29-30).

Laura herself invented interiors that would match the lady she also invented. She has merely learned the part better than Diane and has been able to make more money to support the performance, and so she manages to be more convincing and more comfortable in her contrived appearance.

The dark side of working-class women’s social mobility is not only that Waldo helps to invent Laura as an ultra-feminine, artificial, fetishized commodity that he seeks to destroy so that she might be possessed by no one else. The even darker side of seemingly mobile consumer-based identity is that Diane Redfern, aka Jennie Swobodo, worked toward a dream of high-class transformation but instead, because she was a working-class woman in an industry that does not attribute value to such women, was sexually used by Shelby, unable to achieve social mobility like Laura, and was brutally murdered in Laura’s place without anyone noticing her absence. Like Velma Valento,

Diane Redfern is a stage name, a glossy but hollow fiction, and a disposable “dime-a- dozen” commodity a patriarchal consumer capitalist economy.

A.B. Emrys observes that while Laura does not prove to be a femme fatale, the character who most closely aligns with the archetype is Diane (Bedelia, Afterword, 199), who in a sense threatens to usurp Laura’s identity by living in her apartment, wearing her clothes, and having an affair with her fiancé. Diane represents uncontained and unrespectable female sexuality, and is also a class passer who, unlike Laura, does not have the bank account or the taste to give material substance to or convincingly perform her class masquerade. Interestingly, Diane shares striking similarities with the heroine of

The White Girl, Solaria Cox, and her fashion model friends. Both Solaria and Diane have left their families but occasionally send them money, live far beyond their means because

85 they dress like upper-class women, and work as models for advertising companies. Both women’s class passing is overlaid by ethnic or racial passing; Jennie Swobodo, whose name suggests German or Eastern-European ethnicity, changes her name to pass as

Anglo and non-working class. Similarly for Solaria Cox, any class passing necessitates race passing, making visible the conflation of whiteness and the potential for social mobility. They are also both sexually exploited by upper class men who are married or engaged to other women. Both women class-pass and capitalize on their beauty to attain worth and a measure of independence and financial security that their class pasts denied them. Finally, both die, Diane being shot at the start of Laura and Solaria committing suicide at the end of The White Girl. Working-class women who “buy into” the notion that female worth depends upon the “right” class model of femininity meet dark ends in

Caspary’s work, in passing narratives, and in noir crime fiction generally. Laura, who uses her brain and her skills far more than her looks to attain independence and a new class identity, is cast as far less vulnerable and far more successful than Solaria and

Diane. Still, it is only when Laura rejects upper-class identity, consumer culture, and upper-class men who surround her for working-class values in the figure of McPherson, that she is finally able to develop a sense of authentic self-worth and escape the other two women’s violent fates.

The artificiality of class performance, and even artificiality more generally as a central component of each character’s identity, is a common thread weaving together

Caspary’s critique of the limits of gendered class mobility and the rise of consumer culture in the Depression and World War II years. McPherson often comments that certain scenes in real life among his high-class suspects feel scripted and rehearsed, and

86 that these scenes and their actors strike him as uncannily familiar, as if from a movie or advertisement he has seen somewhere before but cannot recall. He at first attributes this to deception related to his criminal investigation. Specifically, McPherson is plagued by the sense that he has met Shelby somewhere before. It is when McPherson investigates

Diane/Jennie’s apartment that the mystery of how he knows Shelby clicks into place.

Shelby is (figuratively, not literally) the man in most every cigarette ad, in car ads, on billboards, and many other marketed images of ideal upper-class identities, tastes, and lifestyles. He is a fake man, an image without a meaningful interior, shaped according to consumer fantasy rather than material reality.

The moment that McPherson understands the layers of unreality that define Laura,

Shelby, and Waldo’s high-class world is a turning point in the novel. As he examines

Jennie/Diane’s apartment, he tries to see the suspects of her murder through her eyes.

Laura’s apartment must have seemed like a studio setting to Jennie Swobodo, who hadn’t been so long away from Paterson and the silk mills. Laura’s Upper East Side friends must have been posing all the time in her eyes, like models before a camera. And Shelby…I saw it all then. I knew why Shelby was so familiar. I’d never met him while I was pursuing crooks. He’d never mixed with the gents I’d encountered in my professional life. I’d seen him in the advertisements. Maybe it wasn’t Shelby himself. There was no record of his actually ever having been a photographer’s model. But the young men who drove Packards and wore Arrow shirts, smoked Chesterfields, and paid their insurance premiums … were Shelby. (117)

McPherson and his upper-class suspects are trapped in a world of artifice and performances, masks and scripts; the detective’s search for the “truth” of the crime and the “real” identity of the suspects, victim, and culprit takes on a desperate search for some reality in a world that may only contain artifice. Individuality seems impossible in this world of fabricated consumer identities that become the ideal mold for characters in

87 search of the “right” kind of class masculinity or femininity. Ideal men and women are massed-produced and disseminated through advertisers like Laura herself.

McPherson feels angry and “cheated” when he realizes the extent of Shelby’s artifice. “I was sore. First, at myself for having believed that I’d find a real clue in a man who wasn’t real... the pinball gang [criminals he previously caught and who were convicted] had been flesh-and-blood men with their hands that could pull triggers…But

Shelby was a dream walking” (117). The noir world of Laura is that of a blue-collar man and a formerly lower-class woman trapped in a film or an advertisement of a white-collar world of excessive luxury. In this world, men and women are “dreams” rather than

“flesh-and-blood.” Indeed, one aspect of Laura and McPherson’s romance is their almost concurrent epiphany that fantasy and artifice have created a world disconnected from reality, substance, or emotional satisfaction they seek.

Conclusion

At the heart of these texts are competing economic models and class values, since while men like Marlowe and McPherson value individuality and skilled quality of labor, women like Velma, Diane, and Laura make their livings through manipulation of appearance, high-class performance, and the invention of consumer fantasy wherein the right kinds of conspicuous consumption can result in social mobility. Even more deeply ingrained in these texts, however, are competing models of identity and self-invention.

Issues of authenticity versus artificiality threaten to dissolve any notion of “real” identity beyond surfaces and fictions of class and gender performance. Shelby and Waldo’s reliance on commodities and consumer ideals de-authenticates their masculinity and

88 produces them as their own fictions. Working-class women’s attempts to use consumption and upper-class performance to re-invent themselves and achieve social mobility result in fractured subjectivities, the threat of artificiality masquerading as authenticity, inflation of value, and rupture between appearance and truth. In both

Farewell, My Lovely, and in Laura, truth itself is threatened by the encroachment of consumer culture and the class passing that it encourages.

As I have illustrated, Chandler’s Velma Valento differs from Caspary’s Laura

Hunt, particularly because Laura ultimately proves not to be a femme fatale. However, both characters’ similarities suggest the ways in which Laura draws from and re-works the archetype. Both characters work to re-invent themselves according to a pre-made mold, designed for them by an increasingly pervasive consumer culture that sets the terms of gendered value and class identity. Their efforts to create the appearance of financial success, high-class femininity, and sophisticated taste betray them. Laura is cut from the same cloth as Jennie Swobodo, Solaria Cox, and Velma Valento, demonstrating that the class passing femme fatale constitutes crime fiction authors’ engagement with discourses surrounding not only femininity but class, social mobility, and consumer capitalism.

Whereas women in Farewell, My Lovely seem to believe that appearance can translate to reality, or at least they attempt this translation, Laura finds she is unable to translate her class-passing to an authentic identity or self-invention. Yet the lingering tension of these novels lie in Laura, McPherson, and Marlowe’s simultaneous admiration and disgust for the artificiality and superficiality of consumer culture and high-class consumer-based identities. These texts echo the conflicted portrayals of working-class

89 and high-class femininity in wartime print culture and advertising. Farewell, the Black

Mask stories it are based on, The White Girl, and Laura simultaneously condemn and simultaneously in a pleasurable excess of lovely, expensive commodities worn and purchased by lovely, expensive women, despite (or perhaps even because of) the artificiality of their class performance. Even though McPherson ultimately loves Laura for whom she “really” is (although this notion of the “real” Laura remains unstable throughout the text), he first falls in love with her clothes, apartment, and other possessions, suggesting an enduring preference for commodities over reality. Similarly,

Philip Marlowe sees Mrs. Helen Grayle as the pinnacle of exquisite womanhood, an admiration that conflicts with his rejection of all she stands for. Midcentury American crime narratives, whether in the rough, pulpy pages of Black Mask or the slick, glossy pages of Collier’s, are as much about murder as they are about resisting the exquisite danger and powerful allure of consumer culture’s construction of identity and self- invention.

Chapter Two

For Richer, For Poorer: Class-Passing Mothers and Domestic Noir in Vera

Caspary’s Bedelia (1945), Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), and No

Man Of Her Own (1950)

Most readers and viewers of noir crime narratives, either in the present day or in the 1940s and 50s, might not associate mothers, marriage, and domestic spaces with noir’s apparently masculine plotlines. The stereotype of literary and film noir involves gangsters, single men in shabby offices with a fifth of something in the bottom drawer, and trench coats in lonely places. 29 Since the golden age of noir, scholars and fans have characterized it as a predominantly masculine subgenre, antithetical to feminine melodramas, romances, and family dramas. However, beginning with feminist re- evaluations of twentieth century crime fiction and film, scholars have begun to challenge the masculinist narrative that casts noir as the purview of male authors, readers, and viewers.30

As I have illustrated in my introduction and first chapter, hard-boiled crime fiction emerged in the magazine Black Mask, and during its formative years (the mid-

1920s to the late 1930s) was produced by mostly male authors and targeted an audience of working-class men. These early stories, in part, formed the basis of noir in the 1940s

29 See William F. Nolan’s The Black Mask Boys: Masters in the Hard-Boiled School of Detective Fiction (1985), William Marling’s The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler (1995), and John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976).

30 See Women in Film Noir edited by E. Ann Kaplan (1998), Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel by Maureen T. Reddy (1988), Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir by Jans B. Wager (2005), and Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (2009) by Julie Grossman.

91 and 1950s. However, even Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain

(often regarded as the trinity of American crime fiction) wrote stories and novellas in

Black Mask and beyond that were centrally concerned with the family or with female protagonists. Mildred Pierce, Cain’s 1941 novel (and a successful 1945 film noir, starring

Joan Crawford) about an economically vulnerable single mother who works her way into the upper classes and tries unsuccessfully to assimilate into her new class, is perhaps the most iconic example of hard-boiled literature and film noir’s preoccupation with domestic spaces, mother-child relationships, and the plight of desperate working-class single mothers.

Leonard Cassuto, in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of the

American Crime Story, argues that despite the standard critical opposition drawn between men’s hard-boiled, lone wolf crime fiction, and women’s domestic, sentimental fiction, they are closely related. According to Cassuto, “crime fiction is really about the pleasures and challenges of community,” and most specifically and prominently, family (3).

Following Cassuto’s lead, I read the genre of noir crime narratives as being about failed families, the threats that undermine ideal families, and the uncanny insecurity of the apparently safe home. This chapter builds on studies like Cassuto’s by examining several narratives of class-passing criminal wives and mothers.31 Both Vera Caspary’s novel

Bedelia (1945) and Cornell Woolrich’s novel I Married a Dead Man (1948) are about pregnant women who use class passing and crime to negotiate the dangerous terrain of marriage, domesticity, and motherhood. In these novels the main female characters are

31 Two of the finest examinations of the maternal and the domestic in noir crime fiction are “Mères Fatales: Maternal Guilt in the Noir Crime Novel” (1999) by Lee Horsley and her daughter Katherine Horsley, and “The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-war Housewife, Melodrama, and Home” (2003) by Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd.

92 usually left punished and dissatisfied as a result of their passing, usurpation, and murder; thus, the threat of the duplicitous and sexualized outsider is contained before it can permanently taint upper-class spaces and family lines. However, this chapter will finish with a reading of the 1950 film adaptation of Woolrich’s novel, No Man of Her Own, in which the class passing and criminal mother succeeds in attaining the security and marital bliss of a peaceful, idyllic, and upper-class domestic role as wife and mother. This last text is particularly significant because it seems to condone criminal class passing as perhaps the only means of social mobility for working-class unwed mothers.

The three texts I examine in this chapter, as well as a range of other crime novels and films from the 1940s and 1950s, exhibit a preoccupation with the desperate need for security for single, working-class female characters (as I demonstrate in my previous chapter). Elaine Tyler May argues that the concept of security was central to the early

Cold War period, when the looming threat of Soviet power and new military technologies made world war and global annihilation quite real possibilities (3-10); similar concerns for national security dominated the war years, as a host of World War II spy novels attest.

Concern for national security in the public sphere, May and others contend,32 was echoed in a similar concern in the private sphere. According to dominant national discourses, the

American family was the ideal to fight for during the war. Women specifically were the keepers of American family values, values in need of protection from fascist and

32 See Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992), Regina Kunzel’s Fallen Women, Problem Girls (1993), Jessica Weiss’s To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change (2000), and Rebecca Plant’s Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (2010), among others.

93 communist forces. After the war, the nuclear family became the bastion of security, correct Americanness, post-World War II restored gender roles, and authentically

American femininity and masculinity beset by threats on all sides. Allan Carlson in The

American Way observes “images of social rebirth and family strength undergirded much

American policy in the Cold War against communism” (xi).

Indeed, such fears of infiltration and the undermining of the American family directly shaped the lives of Caspary and Woolrich in the 1940s. Caspary, a secular Jew and a former Communist, was having an affair with a married man throughout the decade. She wrote Bedelia specifically so that she could propose it as a film project in

England where she fled to escape blacklisting in the United States and to join her similarly exiled lover, filmmaker Isadore Goldsmith. Woolrich was a closeted homosexual and prolific author of violent noir plotlines about failed families in an era when the American government and subsequently mainstream thought conflated non- heteronormative sexuality with the threat of Communist infiltration. Clearly, in the lives of such radical authors of literary noir and in U.S. society more broadly, the “right” kind of strong American family was in danger of being undermined by a host of dangerous

“others,” be they nationally, politically, sexually, or philosophically at odds with the

“American way.” As national, sexual, or ethnic “others,” Caspary and Woolrich were ideally positioned to offer critiques of mainstream fears regarding class mobility and the domestic and national other. The genre of noir crime fiction was their ideal medium.

I contend that like a funhouse mirror, in crime novels and films from the mid-

1940s to the 1950s, the desire for domestic security becomes not safety but entrapment

94 within a home that might appear secure but is in fact a dangerous, toxic space.33 Thus, what I term “marriage noir” or more broadly “domestic noir” constitutes the dark side of the notion of security in debates over the American family and the strength of the nation during a time of World War II and early Cold War anxiety. Film and literary noir is often referred to as the dark side of mainstream Hollywood. In this sense, the domestic noir narrative re-imagines the happy marriage plot as one of entrapment and/or outsider infiltration that shatters security. Because Caspary and Woolrich’s narratives originally appeared serially in 1940s women’s magazines, they intervened in midcentury periodicals’ role in shaping domestic and gender discourse in the early, formative years of what magazine and media mogul Henry Luce called “American Century.” Women’s roles in the new postwar world, as well as their the capacity for legitimate social mobility in the rapidly growing postwar consumer capitalist economy, were of central concern to the many architects of 1940s debates about family, motherhood, marriage, and class identity. Crime fictions like these stage a complex debate about the nature of class identity, the intersections of gender and class, and the relationship between marriage and social mobility.

My overall argument for this chapter is that by looking at Bedelia, I Married a

Dead Man, and No Man Of Her Own together, particularly in the context of many other examples of midcentury domestic noir, we can see a complex discourse about the nature of class identity framed in terms of reproduction, marriage, and the home. Whether or not

33 Some of the most provocative and characteristic examples of American “domestic noir” plotlines include James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Mildred Pierce (1941), Woolrich’s The Black Angel (1943), and Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water (1957), which portray marriage as a nightmarish trap wherein spouses often turn to murder as a way to break free. Furthermore, although John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) does not fit the genre conventions of noir, the character of Cathy Ames undoubtedly draws from the femme fatale tradition and more specifically the maternal femme fatale of domestic noir.

95 class is inherent or malleable, and whether or not unwed mothers of the lower classes may “legitimately” or permanently attain social mobility, is in question in these narratives. Indeed, the concept of economic, social, gender, reproductive, and familial

“legitimacy,” broadly conceived, was the primary concern of midcentury marriage or domestic noir featuring pregnant or maternal class passers. The tension between identity and value as being based either on birth or environment is played out literally, or is rather embodied, in noir narratives of illegitimacy.

Defining Class in Bedelia, I Married a Dead Man, and No Man Of Her Own

The particular contrast of Caspary and Woolrich’s narratives, as well as the latter’s film adaptation, highlights the intricacies of defining class in domestic noir. In all of these texts, crime is coded as lower class, so the upper class family and the male in the upper class family in particular must guard its borders against savage, low-class, criminal imposters.34 However, while Bedelia suggests a vaguely eugenic attitude held by the rich toward the criminal poor,35 I Married a Dead Man and No Man Of Her Own suggests that working-class immorality and duplicity are social ills and the product of circumstance, rather than a criminality and lack of (sexual) ethics inherent to lower class women. These latter texts center on Helen Georgesson, a working-class unwed mother

34 This dichotomy of the evil working-class wife as imposter and the virtuous high-class husband as protector of family values stands in sharp contrast with hard-boiled detective narratives. In Chapter One, I illustrate how in hard-boiled crime fiction working-class values, coded as masculine, represent authenticity and integrity while it is upper-class values, coded as feminine, that represent inauthenticity and corruption. Thus, we can see that sub-genres of crime narratives (the hard-boiled detective story, and the domestic noir story) hold very different assumptions about the intersections of class and gender. Chapters One and Two of this project, then, demonstrate the diversity of the genre and its capacity for a range of debates over class identity.

35 I hasten to add that this subtly eugenic attitude is critiqued in the novel, rather than reflecting the author’s views.

96 who uses class passing to become a “better” version of herself, rather than a completely new person. In other words, Helen is capable of “learning” better taste and morals, unlike

Caspary’s femme fatale class passer Bedelia, whose intertwined criminality and lower- classness are essentialized. In these stories centering on women’s reproducing bodies, the question of whether class identity is a part of the female body organizes criminal plotlines. Finally, I Married a Dead Man and No Man of Her Own demonstrate the ways in which class identity, much like race, is treated as a form of property, property that

Helen is able to “earn” by being a good daughter, mother, and wife.36 Ultimately, all of these texts suggest that criminal class-passing wives and mothers are more a product of patriarchal classism than they are purely villainous self-contained threats to U.S. public and private security. According to domestic noir, it is the gender and class inequalities in the existing socio-economic framework, and not the fundamentally evil character of the outsider or imposter, that threaten the ideals of the American family and the American way.

Part One: Vera Caspary’s Bedelia

Moving from one Vera Caspary novel to another, one would expect more similarities between Laura (discussed in Chapter One) and Bedelia. Both are centrally preoccupied with the intersection of class and femininity, and with the mutually constructive intersection of these identity categories as based upon performance proscribed by a classist consumer culture rather than anything inherent or biologically determined. Both novels center on the poverty of choices for lower-class women, and

36 See Cheryl A. Harris’s 1993 article “Whiteness as Property.”

97 both critique forms of masculinity contingent upon women’s weakness and submission.

The female passers in each novel, however, employ very different strategies to gain economic autonomy, security, and upper class feminine identity. Bedelia’s Bedelia Horst, like Laura’s Laura Hunt, comes from humble origins and manages to become a refined and financially successful lady, but unlike Laura, Bedelia accomplishes this through marriage, professional wifedom, and serial murder. Read side by side, the novels suggest that, according to Caspary, legitimate social mobility for lower-class women is virtually impossible through the only two options available to them: labor (when a “new woman” takes on the professional responsibilities and freedoms of a man, and is secure without the support of a husband, as in Laura) or marriage (when a “professional wife” plays a hyperfeminine role for the benefit of a financially secure husband, as in Bedelia).

According to the predominant reviews of the novel at the time of its publication,

Bedelia promotes a sincere and submissive model of wifeliness by condemning an evil murderess who transgresses normative gender roles. However, I agree with contemporary scholars who interpret the novel as being “perversely sympathetic” (Emrys, Bedelia

Afterward, 203) to its villain rather than “reinforcing traditional gender roles” (Vorachek

71). A.B. Emrys, in her afterword to the latest reissue of Bedelia by the Feminist Press, and Laura Vorachek in her article “Dangerous Women: Vera Caspary’s Rewriting of

Lady Audley’s Secret in Bedelia” in Clues: A Journal of Detection, view the novel as a critique of women’s limited choices in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as a critique of the notion of feminine value as predicated on marriage, reproduction, and conspicuous consumption. There are only two major academic treatments of Bedelia

(those by Emrys and Vorachek); otherwise, reviews at the time of the novel’s publication

98 and the British film adaptation’s release, as well as occasional mentions by scholarship on other texts and topics, constitute the body of criticism on the novel. This stands in contrast to the wealth of criticism devoted to Caspary’s first noir novel and its famous adaptation, Laura. I contribute to this small debate on Bedelia a focus on how the text defines the intersectional relationships among class, gender, and genetics, as well as the notion of the domestic class imposter in 1940s domestic noir. In this way, I argue for

Bedelia’s importance in the broader scheme of noir narratives centered on class-passing wives and domestic spaces.

Caspary first published Bedelia, ironically enough, as serial installments in the magazine Good Housekeeping in its September and October issues of 1944. Much like the other crime narratives I have discussed so far, Bedelia’s wartime critique of hyperfeminine consumer identity and consumer culture’s devaluation of working-class female identity and encouragement of class passing was originally published alongside advertisements. The issue of women’s choices in and out of the home were of great concern to the U.S. government and print culture that reinforced the government’s wartime message; women’s magazines, including Good Housekeeping, presented conflicting narratives encouraging women to support the war effort and enter the workforce, and also encouraging women to idealize upper-class models of femininity and to quickly return to being professional housewives after the war.37 Such dual discourses made women’s relationship to marriage and the economy central to the nation’s masternarrative in the mid-1940s, a masternarrative that stressed a period of heretofore

37 See my discussion of this tension in Chapter One.

99 unbridled modern consumption for American families and a reinforcement of separate spheres gender roles once the fight was over.38

Set in upper-class domestic spaces of a small, traditionally New England town in

Connecticut, Bedelia begins on Christmas day of 1913 in the home of newlyweds Charlie and Bedelia Horst. (Like so many historical novels, Bedelia engages as much with the time of its publication as with the time period of its setting). Charlie is infatuated with his seemingly perfect wife (who is in the early stages of pregnancy), but when he falls suddenly ill, his doctor implies that Bedelia may be poisoning him. It seems the doctor has heard dark rumors about Bedelia from a local artist, Ben Chaney, whom in fact we learn is a detective on the trail of a black widow serial killer that he suspects is Bedelia.

The woman he seeks has left a series of dead husbands in her wake; she is beautiful, goes by many different names, and always leaves town without a trace after her husband dies in a seemingly random accident (two cases of drowning, and one of fatal illness from bacteria in food, for example). Furthermore, this mysterious serial killer has a pattern to her crimes. She usually tells her well-off husband that she is pregnant, and thus he buys extra life insurance disproportionate to his income to ensure her security in the event of his death. Local doctors in the wake of the husband’s death and her disappearance invariably say that she was actually not pregnant as of her last check up.

Charlie is horrified when Detective Ben Chaney tells him that his wife may be this serial killer, and at first refuses to believe the story. After all, his wife’s pregnancy is

38 It is difficult, even impossible, to say how particular stories in periodicals were read. However, it is entirely possible that Bedelia could have been read by subscribers of Good Housekeeping as presenting an alternative message than the advertisements framing it, that is, as a warning against becoming a hyperfeminine, submissive, high-class “professional wife” (framed by Caspary as a serial killer) rather than an independent working woman critical of male desires for an ideal wife (framed by Caspary as a virtuous and honest character named Ellen, as I will discuss later).

100 indisputably real, as the family doctor and a becoming baby bump confirm. However,

Bedelia’s behavior becomes increasingly odd, as she pleads with him to take a long vacation with her in Europe, and lies about her financial situation and her (class and criminal) past. Ultimately, Bedelia confesses to her husband, but implies that the men she married always gave her reason to kill them—while each seemed at first to be a kind and gentle man, she maintains that ultimately men are “rotten” (94). So horrified is Charlie at the falsity of his marriage and the threat that scandal poses to his puritan, upper middle class family, that he tells Bedelia to drink her own poison in a glass of water. Devastated at his rejection of her (since she claims that he is the only good man she has ever met and the only one she has truly loved), she obeys him. Even at the last Bedelia’s “true” motives are ambiguous; while at first she says she will drink the poison because she prefers death to a life without Charlie’s love, she also implies that her death will be interpreted as murder, and he will hang. In a toxic mix of sentimental love and noir murderous duplicity, the ending of the sensational (and more than a little implausible) novel is deeply unsettling rather than providing a sense of security at the class imposter’s expulsion and containment.

From the start of the novel we see that Bedelia is a woman who specifically fashions herself as an object of the male gaze. To this end, she passes in myriad ways.

She plays the part of the ideal wife; she is refined with good taste in clothes, hair, makeup, interior decoration, and food. She is also the pitch-perfect blend of chaste and sexually alluring, extravagant and understated, dependent on her husband yet acting also as his caretaker. At the Christmas party at the very start of the novel, we see her charm and her excellent class performance in action: “She was different from the other women

101 in the room, like an actress or a foreigner. Not that she was common. For all her vivacity she was more gentle and refined than any of her guests. She talked less, smiled more, sought friendliness, but fled intimacy” (7). Bedelia manages to be glamorous and colorful without being “common” or vulgar, a difficult balancing act indeed for a lower-class

Westerner39 to perform in a stuffy, puritan New England domestic space. She is an enchanting outsider who still hits the right class notes of refinement and ladylike demeanor, the muted tones of high-class grace. In essence, she is a good actress, who does not overplay or underplay her class and gender role.40

When the other primary female characters are introduced, we see the spectrum of feminine identities and the delicate balance each woman in the novel must try to achieve in order to be successfully female. Charlie’s previous sweetheart, Ellen Walker, is described as “calm and honest,” a woman from Charlie’s own Connecticut upper class circle who supports herself by working as a journalist for a local paper. She is too masculine and plain in her dress, too old-fashioned in her style, and because she is self reliant and accustomed to working alongside professional men, she does not hesitate to speak her mind plainly. She represents a traditional conception of upper class New

England self-presentation that values honesty and sincerity above the flash and extravagance of more modern trends in flashy femininity.41 She stands in stark contrast to

39 Bedelia claims to have been born into a wealthy San Francisco family, although it is later revealed that she was probably born to a lower-class poor single mother in rural California.

40 The complexity of this balance brings to mind Velma Valento’s finely tuned class and gender performance as Mrs. Helen Grayle in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940) (see Chapter One). Like Bedelia, Helen is also the right mixture of natural and artificial, simple and extravagant, demure and erotic.

41 As I outline in the previous chapter, economic and cultural historians trace a shift in the early part of the twentieth century from an emphasis on the “culture of character,” wherein identity is based on integrity and

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Abbie, another local who has moved to New York City and embraces extravagantly modern trends in feminine beauty (she is even a divorcée). While Ellen wears a

“mannish” coat (7) and a hairstyle that is “absurdly out of style” (8) to Charlie and

Bedelia’s Christmas party, Abbie “wore a costume so striking that her face seemed merely an accessory. Charlie thought she looked like a drawing in a fashion magazine, dashing but one dimensional… she wore a brooch so extravagant that it was obviously set with rhinestones” (8). Charlie is repelled by Abbie, whom he considers false and affected.

To achieve the right intersection of class and gender performance, Bedelia must exude both the naturalness and honesty of Ellen, which is coded as old-fashioned and “absurdly out of style,” and the modern flashiness of Abbie’s outrageous artificiality, modeled by the “fashion magazines” of consumer culture. Ellen and Abbie’s extremes frame

Bedelia’s balance of tasteful yet exaggerated femininity that seems at once glamorous and natural.

In the context of the novel, the push and pull of naturalness and artificiality, sexual provocation and chaste beauty, can only be balanced correctly by a woman who is almost complete invention, a professional confidence woman. The text suggests that

Bedelia as the ideal wife is not authentic, because the men in the novel do not want women as they really are; the men in the novel prefer to be treated to a show, even a respectable, puritan New Englander like Charlie who supposedly despises artifice of any kind. Although to the careful observer Bedelia’s contradictory blend of artificiality and sincerity seems obvious (Abbie immediately notices that Bedelia dyes her hair, for labor, to a “culture of personality,” a more “modern” notion of identity as dependent on exteriors, consumption, and self-presentation. See Smith’s Hard Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (2000) and Kathleen G. Donohue’s Freedom From Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (2003).

103 example) Charlie finds his wife’s portrayal of natural womanhood convincing.42 Holding his wife up to Abbie in his mind, “he rejoiced because his wife was without affectation”

(9). We see in the figure of Bedelia, who creates a false past for herself, a false name, and a false image of naturally submissive, beautiful, and feminine wifely devotion, the notion that the professional wife is like a professional actress or passer. For Bedelia and all the other women in the novel, success as a woman depends on their ability to tailor gender and class performance to men’s tastes. Thus, while it is true that Bedelia’s duplicity marks her as the villain of the piece, Ellen (who breaks down and borrows some of

Abbie’s modern clothes so as to appear more feminine) and Abbie (who wears rouge, and a “rat” or a false hairpiece that achieves the “Gibson girl” style popular from the 1890s up until the eve of WWI) participate in a similar form of socially sanctioned duplicity in response to an increasingly modern consumer culture that encourages women to employ artificiality and the right kind of class, gender, and sexual performance to be the right kind of woman. Consumer culture is each woman’s medium of feminine self-invention, a medium that Bedelia has mastered almost to perfection as she decorates her new marital home, adorns herself exquisitely in natural-looking makeup and sophisticated jewelry, and dresses at the height of understated fashion. In other words, Bedelia is not the author of her own duplicity, since she is merely conforming to a complex ideal constructed by her new upper-class world and an ever growing consumer capitalism.

42 Distaste for feminine affection and falsity is a common theme in noir narratives. The insurance man/detective Barton Keyes (played by Edward G. Robinson) in the 1944 film Double Indemnity distrusts all women because he discovers the woman he had planned to marry died her hair—that was enough to discredit her.

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The Class Passing Femme Fatale and Creation of False Value

Like other femme fatales, Bedelia creates an illusory value, an illusion of herself as a unique and expensive possession. Her almost impeccable class performance invents rather than “earns” class value for herself, in part because performance and marriage are the only avenues of social mobility available to her. Bedelia’s use of marriage as an avenue of social mobility underscores that ways that marriage, rather than being a sentimental and purely love-based institution, is shaped by market values like any other business venture. In short, no framework exists for her to legitimately “earn” class value.

Despite her apparent innocence, Bedelia’s comparison to an actress or a foreigner cues the astute reader of serially published noir crime stories to her role as a potential femme fatale. She fashions herself as the authentically valuable possession of her husband, although her history of fleecing and murdering her husbands and the insincerity of her wifely, high-class performances mean that her value as a wife and a possession are inventions rather than inherent features of her “real” identity. At the very start of the novel, Charlie recites a poem about worthless things masquerading as worthy things:

“Things are seldom what they seem,/Skim milk masquerades as cream,/Jackdaws strut in peacock feathers,/Highlows pass as patent leathers” (2). The poem immediately frames the novel as being about creating false value through artificial performance, in a vein similar to the economic model represented by Velma Valento that I outlined in Chapter

One. Incidentally, the poem comes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera H.M.S.

Pinafore, and continues: “Gild the farthing if you will,/Yet it is a farthing still.” Like

Velma Valento, Bedelia’s imitation of upper class and moral womanhood cannot transform her “true” self beneath the gilding.

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Indeed, the language of the novel suggests that marriage is akin to a form of economic speculation. Such speculation is rendered unstable when a husband or wife projects a false value or performs an identity that is not consistent with what is “true” and internal. When the economic transaction of marriage is based on false appearance, it becomes a confidence game or a scheme to fleece the more wealthy party. This becomes evident when the novel takes a turn and Charlie falls gravely ill. When his physician,

Doctor Meyers, warns him that Bedelia may be trying to poison him, Charlie responds only with anger and disbelief. He illustrates his trust in his wife soon after Dr. Meyers’s warning, when she comes into the room and she and Charlie embrace: “What Doctor

Meyers saw before him was a demonstration of faith. No spoken declarations could have made the point more clearly. Charlie was investing his faith in Bedelia. A charming picture it made, husband and wife holding hands, looking fondly into each other’s eyes, flaunting their love” (57, emphasis mine). Words like “investment” suggest the economic dimension of marriage, and the ways in which the husband-wife relationship connects to broader public economic structures and discourses, and in this case to fears of fraud and misrepresentation in a consumer capitalist marketplace.43

Domestic Security Threatened

The break between appearance and reality also organizes Charlie’s idealized, naïve view of his home, suggesting domestic space to be akin to a stage set promoting a false sense of security. After Bedelia (who suspects that Ben Chaney is a detective on her trail) tells Charlie suddenly that she wants to move to Europe, he is unsettled by her odd

43 See Chapter One, where I discuss this concept of inventing false value at more length.

106 behavior. However, he finds comfort, not only because he attributes her odd behavior to her pregnancy (which he understands as exacerbating women’s already irrational minds), but because his home and his marriage appear secure and stable: “The curtains had not been drawn and the darkness outside made the window a mirror so that Charlie saw reflected the lamplight, the pink chair, and himself at the end of the bed, holding his wife’s hand. It was a reassuring picture. Solid walls shut out the blizzard” (75). It is a comforting picture, but perhaps not a comforting reality, reflecting Charlie’s misplaced trust that Bedelia’s exterior accurately reflects her interior. Like the femme fatale, just because a domestic scene looks good does not mean it is. In this case, with the blizzard outside, he reads his house and a marriage as keeping them safe from the cold and the storm. However, one could also read this scene as Charlie and Bedelia perilously entrapped in the home and the marriage they have built for themselves.

When Charlie learns that the nature of Bedelia’s secret might be criminal, a series of passages conflate low class and criminality. Upon discovering that his wife may indeed be a serial killer, and on top of that a serial killer motivated by profit and the desire for illegitimate social mobility from low class origins, Charlie draws a gendered class distinction laid upon a similar distinction between criminality and honesty: “This woman was his wife, he knew her intimately, was not blind to her faults and weaknesses.

He had been madly in love with her, dazzled by her charms, but he had not lost his head so completely that he had mistaken a vulgar adventuress for a sincere woman.” (116).

“Vulgar” and common femininity is set in opposition to “sincere” and respectable femininity. Ironically enough, any involvement with scandal and crime, even in the capacity of detecting criminals and bringing them to justice, threatens the security and

107 purity of upper-class morality and social capital. When Charlie learns that Ben Chaney is a detective rather than simply a local artist, his response is strikingly reminiscent of his reaction to Bedelia’s possible criminality:

A detective! Had Charlie known this at the start, he would never have become intimate with Ben Chaney. Perhaps he was a snob; the Philbricks had always been snobs, but they had successfully protected themselves against the humiliation suffered as a result of intimacy with inferiors. Would his mother have asked a detective to dinner? He could hear her answer, “One might as well dine with a burglar.” (117)

Both Bedelia and Ben, despite their being on different sides of a legal cat-and-mouse game, are lumped together as dangerous class imposters and social untouchables, both capable of tainting a good family’s name. The dangers to upper class domestic security lie as much in cross-class contact, or “intimacy with inferiors,” as they do in association with actual criminality.44

Bedelia’s image of herself and the story she weaves for herself is too sensational to be high class, and this lack of literary sophistication is the key to detecting concealed class history that is intertwined with her criminal history. As many have argued,45 much twentieth-century noir crime fiction draws from nineteenth-century literary genres and traditions; Caspary references nineteenth-century sentimental literature overtly when revealing the flaw in Bedelia’s high-class performance, that is, her reading habits. The first moment that Charlie becomes truly suspicious of Bedelia is the moment he connects the story of her class past with her terrible literary taste. Up to this point her taste has only been described as impeccable, so her literary taste constitutes perhaps the only

44 In Laura, Caspary also portrays wealthy characters that fear and disdain “intimacy with inferiors,” and frequently treat NYPD detective Mark McPherson as an uppity servant.

45 See Cassuto, Nickerson, and Emrys, among others.

108 misstep in her class passing.46 “Bedelia’s taste was hideous. Charlie had tried to wean her away from Laura Jean Libbey by reading aloud to her from Carlyle’s French Revolution.

She had listened dutifully at the beginning, but, later, had confessed that good books put her to sleep” (132). Her taste in books, coupled with her inability to “learn” better taste to match her sophisticated taste in clothing, furnishing, and manners, suggest to Charlie not only her truly lower class origins but her overall duplicity. As he skims through the trashy books she has chosen to put on the shelf, their plots remind him of Bedelia’s own account of her past. Thus it is the literarily “low class” sentimental plotlines she fashions for herself, along with the “low class” purchase of low-brow literature, that first indicates to

Charlie that she may be a class passing murderess. The clue to her class is the clue to her criminality. Charlie selects a book from the shelf, and after reading for a moment, determines it to be “… just what he had expected. A beautiful heroine with windswept locks was caught in the jungle ... Single-handed, the hero fought and conquered the savage horde, love triumphed … Lady Pamela laughed away the memory of that quarrel which had separated them at the tennis party given by the false Rosamund” (131). This strikes him as being eerily familiar to Bedelia’s own tragic story of riches to rags, a narrative she uses to explain why she is a legitimate, well-bred member of the upper classes, even though she is without fortune or family:

Her father had been an English gentleman, but his father had been a younger son without fortune and had come to California during the gold rush… the grandfather had struck gold, dinners for twenty-four had been set on gold plate in a dining-room with stained-glass windows, music had floated up to the nursery where the child, Bedelia, slept in a nightgown of the finest French flannel, hand-stitched by the family seamstress. The

46 There is a similar critique of the class passing femme fatale wife Phyllis Nirdlinger in the novel Double Indemnity (1943) and its 1944 film adaptation—she is indicted as a killer by her lack of refined taste.

109

earthquake of 1906 cost them their fortune…and the girls at the boarding school… made her so miserable that she had to run away… (132)

Bedelia’s elaborate history, written like a penny dreadful, is on its surface one of an originally and inherently upper-class woman of “good blood” and English gentry (131) who has been unfairly excluded from her class by natural disaster and greedy, unreasonably snobby people. Her reality is the opposite of this fictional formulation.47

But there is an additional danger posed by Bedelia’s criminal and class past. As previously quoted, in speaking of his friendship with the detective Ben Chaney, Charlie fears the embarrassment that would result in “intimacy with inferiors.” This sentiment extends even to the notion of the racialized criminal, and thus the racialized lower class imposter, in the figure of Bedelia. The sexual “intimacy” in which he has engaged with her, a woman who he learns is his “inferior,” implicitly equates to interracial procreation that taints whiteness and high classness with genetic, tawdry criminality. Reflecting on

Bedelia’s potential identity as a serial killer, Charlie cannot wrap his head around such criminality in his own tight-knit puritan New England community. “The sort of people who committed murder, or allowed themselves to become the victims of murder, were to him as incomprehensible as savage Igorotes, [a particular group of indigenous peoples of the Philippines] and such crime as remote from his understandings as hara-kiri [samurai’s ritualistic suicide] or child marriage” (118). In the previous passages he equates criminals with low-class, socially inferior imposters that he does not wish to associate with, and in

47 Ironically, it is a lowbrow noir tale of a class-passing serial killer that frames the lowbrow sentimental story Bedelia has invented for herself. A “low class” (domestic noir) literary genre, the modern equivalent of Bedelia’s penny dreadfuls, raises the very question of whether “good taste” can be learned, and whether taste is an indicator of class.

110 this passage he racializes and exoticizes criminality. The criminal, as well as the class imposter, becomes less than or imperfectly white, a part of uncivilized inhumanity.

The respectability of Charlie’s entire family line, and the home they have created, are at stake in the question of Bedelia’s moral womanhood and honesty. At first, when

Bedelia expresses her distrust of Ben Chaney (the detective on her trail, masquerading as a local artist) and her sudden desire to move to Europe, Charlie suspects that perhaps

Bedelia and Ben may have had an affair that she now seeks to flee. “In Charlie’s house there was no room for such treachery. Infidelity had never dwelt in the old Philbrick house, could never dwell there. The ceilings would rot, the walls cave in, the floors lose their solidity” (76). The solid upper-class tradition of respectability is destroyed by a class and criminal outsider, because she brings false value, misrepresentation, extravagance, and immorality to the house. Here, the integrity of upper-class dominance and the notion of domestic security, in the private and public realms, are embodied by the grand house itself.

The conflation of the class passing criminal and imperfect bodies underpins

Bedelia’s genetic and social challenge to patriarchal, white supremacist class structures that Charlie lives by. Learning more than he wants to about Bedelia’s tacky and common past, he finds out that she grew up poor in California, and that her given name is Annie

Torrey (although Bedelia is so vague and untrustworthy that every supposed fact she shares about herself is uncertain). Charlie responds that if she has taken a false name then they may not be legally married and their child may be illegitimate, to his horror.

Marriage, illegitimate or not, is a familiar state for Bedelia; she tells him that her first husband, Herman Bender, worked in stables and offered her meager security as his wife,

111 but ultimately proved to be abusive and cruel. He questions Bedelia about how Herman died, but does not ask plainly whether or not she has ever committed murder.

Delicacy forbade it. He could no more speak to Bedelia of murder than he could mention deformity in the presence of the deformed. There had been pathos in her confession that she had married Herman Bender because the man was willing and he made a good living. No other answer could so clearly have shown that her early life had been sordid … it pointed to youthful poverty and shame. (150)

A passage that begins with murder and physical “deformity” ends in her low class origins that she has not been able to transcend fully. The implication is that if Charlie considers murder as linked to her low class past, and he sees murder as is akin to deformity, he believes Bedelia will pass on to her child her low class and her criminality. Charlie has helped to breed the very qualities in society that he despises and that he sees as beyond the secure boundaries of his class, race, and region. Indeed, when he learns of the full extent of Bedelia’s crimes (which include at least four murdered husbands and thousands of dollars illegally obtained), he fears for his future child. “And even if the courts should free Bedelia, the stigma would endure; she would be a marked woman, stared at and whispered about wherever she went, and her child would be marked too, with the brand”

(154-155). The criminality and immorality of his wife, both traits he associates with the lower and working classes, will physically “mark” their offspring, evoking a literary tradition of racial passing as well as class passing. The text consistently suggests that one can spot an imposter if one reads closely enough, and that no performance is perfect—

Bedelia’s class and criminal identity are fixed and can only be concealed, not transformed, by her class environment or complex performance. Her class might not be

112 legibly inscribed upon her body, but it is present nonetheless if only the keen detective looks closely enough.48

Charlie is as much horrified by Bedelia’s immorality as by the shame this will bring his respectable family, a worthy family that will be rendered less worthy and valuable when they are sucked into the tawdry and cheap world of sensational journalism.

In contrast, he defines his own family tradition and old-fashioned class values as

“American,” a fortress of sincerity struggling to withstand the insidious influence of what he sees as “modern” trends of ingenuousness and false value. Charlie’s family is made up of hard-working, sober, and traditional New England puritans, and he himself is upper middle class rather than upper class because he works as an architect for a living. While the details of the original family fortune are not explained in the novel, we know that the

Horsts and his mother’s people, the Philbricks, are models of prosperous and virtuous hard-working professionals in their small town. As he shovels snow from his drive way and worries about his murderous, passing wife, he realizes “He had to quit thinking. It was better to invest his energy in hard work. Each time he raised the shovel and straightened his body, he looked around and saw…his house, so sturdy and honest in its proportions, and so American and secure and right with its clapboards and its clean green shutters” (167). Charlie conflates the value of hard work, the “security” and “rightness” of the home, and the integrity of correct Americanness, all of which Bedelia subverts with her social mobility based on appearance rather than substance. The connections among the physical house and the physical body, and the home and the family, points to the relationship between social and physical inferiority, the low-class woman and the

48 As I will discuss in the next two chapters, such insistence that class as well as blood “will out,” that is, that fakes can and will eventually be detected, is less common in the 1950s and early 1960s crime fiction.

113 impure reproductive body. Thus, the “honest,” “American,” “secure,” and “right” home are at stake in the class and criminal imposter’s insidious invasion and usurpation.

Domestic Noir’s Anti-Misogynist Critique

While Caspary certainly fashioned the character of Bedelia from many iterations of the femme fatale in both nineteenth-century sentimental literature and twentieth- century noir fiction, Bedelia is not portrayed simply as a monster. She is more than an evil class imposter who reinforces or legitimizes a classist, patriarchal structure designed to keep her in her place. In other words, Bedelia is not a cautionary tale dramatizing the consequences for upper-class men who marry outside their class or fail to verify their wives’ class credentials. Rather, Bedelia is an immoral yet sympathetic femme fatale serial killer who refuses to be the victim of a misogynist institution and a rigid class hierarchy. The narrative is written in free and indirect style mostly from Charlie’s point of view49 (with occasional sections written from his former paramour Ellen’s point of view), and the reader catches only glimpses of Bedelia’s thoughts and feelings behind the submissive and ladylike mask she presents. One of these glimpses involves her own view of gender relations, especially within marriage. She understands her actions as a response to an oppressive patriarchy that makes women vulnerable to the chronic cruelty of men.

When Bedelia falls ill with a bad cold and Charlie must perform the housework for the week, he uncomplainingly cleans the kitchen, tidies, and cooks a good lunch for his wife.

49 Charlie’s role as narrator functions to show the reader his snobbery from the inside-out. This narrative style, wherein the reader sees events through Charlie’s eyes even though he is an object of feminist critique, is similar to Dorothy Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place (discussed in Chapter Three). Hughes’s novel is narrated from a hard-boiled masculine point of view even as it offers a critique of hard-boiled masculinity. Such a narrative strategy is common in mid-twentieth-century women’s crime fiction written in, and subverting, the noir and/or hard-boiled traditions.

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Bedelia pronounces him better than any other man she has met, and Charlie comments that she must not have “much faith in men” (94). In a moment of uncharacteristic frankness, Bedelia responds “Men are rotten! ... You don’t know, Charlie. Men are awful

... Beasts!” (94). In opposition to this male evil and oppression, Bedelia views femininity as helplessly subject to abuse. When the couple are talking together in the kitchen, the snap of a mouse trap and the cry of an injured mouse causes Bedelia to scream; Charlie comforts her that it is just a pest, and kills the creature out of Bedelia’s sight. “I shouldn’t have minded if she had died right away, but I suffer when creatures struggle for life”

(157). When Charlie points out that the mouse could have been male, Bedelia responds

“All helpless things seem female to me” (157).

Ultimately, when Bedelia confirms Charlie’s suspicions of her, Charlie also confirms her supposition that men are “rotten” and “beasts” in their treatment of women.

Taking off his work boots in a pantry adjacent to the kitchen, he oversees Bedelia sneaking poison into Ben Chaney’s grocery order (which must be delivered to him after the snowy roads are cleared- the grocer only managed to get to the Horst’s home, not to

Ben Chaney several miles further into the countryside). Faced with the indisputable proof of Bedelia’s calculating cold-bloodedness, Charlie is overcome with anger and violently confronts her:

His fingers dug into her shoulders. He jerked her toward him. The neck of her robe was cut out like a V and above it her throat was like porcelain. His hand curled around it …She fought back desperately, writhed in his arms, kicked at his legs. A kind of ecstasy seized Charlie. His knuckles bulged, knots rose in his hands as they felt the warm throbbing of Bedelia’s throat. Her jetty restless eyes reminded Charlie of the mouse he had caught in the trap and he thought exultantly of the blow that had killed it. (171)

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Even Charlie shows himself to relish in physical power over his wife, suggesting that

Bedelia is right that all men have the capacity to be “rotten” and “beasts” to women.

Under Charlie’s hand, Bedelia becomes less than human, akin to a “porcelain” doll or a pestilent “mouse” that requires killing to protect the cleanliness and safety of the home.

In contrast, her weakness and vulnerability to male abuse make Charlie manlier,

“bulging,” “throbbing,” and “warm”-blooded. In this passage, as in many others, it is a model of masculinity predicated on domination of women, as well as the male desire for an impossible fantasy of femininity, that invite false performance and insincerity and threaten the fabric of upper-class marriage and domesticity.

Aside from illuminating the destructive inequality, proscribed gender performance, and male preference for artificiality that in Bedelia are all part-and-parcel of the institution of marriage, Bedelia poses a further threat. Her passing and performance have the effect of stripping relationships down to their economic core. Thus, she is fatale in the sense that she exposes marriage as a transaction— it is a performance of a feminine ideal wherein sex, tasteful domestic consumption, and housework are exchanged for money, security, and material comfort, undermining the romance and sentimentality that disguises the economic nature of marriage. Charlie reflects sadly that:

There was no mystery about her motives. She had killed for money, planning her life like a business man who hopes to lay aside a tidy fortune for his old age. She had arranged her business affairs with acumen, had invested a part of her capital in each new venture. There was no mystery about it, no grandeur, but here was an enigma, the enigma of the soul of a human being who is able to commit crime as normally and efficiently as the business man plans a deal. (150-151)

Bedelia learns her tricks or her business model from a broader capitalist culture, in that for both marriage and business there is a lack of “grandeur” but rather a dehumanizing,

116 even immoral interest in the bottom line. In this sense, as in Farewell My Lovely and

Laura discussed Chapter One, capitalist ventures and consumer culture are linked to the duplicity and evil of the femme fatale even within domestic spaces and the institution of marriage. Finally, this passage is somewhat sympathetic to Bedelia, because it suggests that she sees marriage for what it is, a form of economic speculation accomplished through skillful performance and the right kind of high-class consumption and self- presentation, a transaction by which she hopes to profit; she plays by the rules, but she didn’t invent the game. Thus, Caspary’s critique extends not only to traditional conceptions of marriage, but also to the business world from which women are largely excluded.

Part Two: Illegitimacy and Domestic Noir in Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead

Man (1948) and No Man Of Her Own (1950)

Much like Bedelia, I Married a Dead Man was first published in a women’s magazine. Originally titled “They Call Me Patrice” in the April 1946 issue of Today’s

Woman, Cornell Woolrich’s narrative centers on a new mother haunted by her class past.

The protagonist is a poor, single, white pregnant woman, Helen Georgesson, who out of desperate necessity and through a series of unlikely coincidences has the opportunity to pass as a widowed young mother and heiress, Patrice Hazzard. Helen/Patrice is an imposter, a phony, a usurper of a family fortune who has used duplicity to illegitimately attain a high-class status. She is guilty of attempted murder as a means of protecting her false identity. Furthermore, as a lower-class woman who has had sex before marriage and became pregnant outside of wedlock, she is a sexual and gender threat; she has strayed

117 beyond the boundaries of respectable society, and is thus a “problem girl” with possible psychological issues that may have caused her sexual and reproductive deviance. On the surface, Helen/Patrice seems to be a class-passing femme fatale imposter similar to

Bedelia, or the vampish Velma Valento in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, discussed in Chapter One.

Yet, for all of this, the novel, and to an even greater extent the 1950 film noir adaptation No Man Of Her Own, depicts Helen/Patrice as a moral, sane, sympathetic character. Her genuine desire for security rather than pure wealth, for herself and her illegitimate son, seems to ultimately legitimate her immoral means. Indeed, in the film adaptation, she is more than just moral and sympathetic; she is ultimately successful in her class passing, and she proves to be a good daughter, mother, and wife. Rather than being punished for her illegitimate pregnancy, usurpation, and attempted murder, she is rewarded with a hefty inheritance, a stately upper-class home, a relatively clean conscience, and a handsome and kind husband who loves her despite knowing her secret.

While the film’s happy ending is almost always interpreted as a tacked on, “implausible,” and selling-out compromise on the part of filmmakers to satisfy audiences, I read it much differently. While in Bedelia the pregnant class-passing wife is severely punished for her crimes and is thus contained by the upper-class world into which she intruded,

Woolrich’s text in its various forms portrays a duplicitous, murderous class-passer who is nonetheless cast as a moral heroine and rewarded for her expressions of agency and familial love. Helen/Patrice’s success at the end of the film indicates her successful class self-transformation; social mobility can be earned, even if that social mobility was initially achieved through usurpation, and violence. Indeed, the film suggests that these

118 immoral means are the only way to achieve legitimacy and domestic security, both of which are coded as upper class.

I Married a Dead Man and No Man Of Her Own provide crucial contrasts to

Bedelia in several ways. Woolrich’s narrative suggests not that class and criminal identity are inherent and unchangeable (as in Bedelia) but rather situational and adaptive. Helen

Georgesson may be immoral and sexually uncontained as a lower-class unwed teen mother, but once she becomes Patrice Hazzard she adapts to life with the high-class family around her and thus grows into her new role as a dutiful and moral family member. Furthermore, unlike Bedelia’s unborn child, Helen/Patrice’s child is not marked by his mother’s class or criminality. Because she and her son are white, they bear no fixed genetic mark of their class imposter status, whereas Bedelia’s child will “bear the mark” of her criminal and class past.

Finally, whereas Bedelia is portrayed as mentally unbalanced and immature, part and parcel of her sexual promiscuity, criminality, and class origins, I Married a Dead

Man and No Man Of Her Own work against dominant professional and cultural attitudes towards unwed motherhood by portraying Helen as a mentally stable, moral, and mature woman capable of normalcy. Thus, social mobility is akin to class assimilation rather than class passing for Helen when she becomes Patrice, and through her new life in a secure and luxurious family setting becomes a “better” version of herself. Another way I define class, using close readings of Woolrichs’s novel and film as my primary basis for this definition, is akin to property similar to how Cheryl A. Harris and many other scholars have understood whiteness as a sort of property. Helen usurps a more valuable identity, that of the widow Mrs. Patrice Hazzard, just as she effectively (if not

119 intentionally) steals her valuable, jewel-encrusted wedding ring. The story, then, tells of

Helen’s quest to legitimately “earn” Patrice’s valuable identity, an identity that is portrayed as metaphorical property, as well as very literal and material property, for herself and her son.

Summary of I Married a Dead Man (1948) and No Man Of Her Own (1950)

I Married a Dead Man begins when Helen Georgesson is nineteen, unwed, jobless, broke, and eight months pregnant. She desperately tries to contact the father of her child, the handsome rogue Steve, but he will not see her and instead slips under her door a train ticket from New York back to San Francisco, where she grew up, but where she has no family network upon which to fall back. Once on the train, the despondent

Helen meets and befriends well-off newlyweds Patrice (who coincidentally is also eight months pregnant) and Hugh Hazzard. They buy Helen dinner, and Patrice and Helen are in the train washroom together when Patrice asks Helen to wear her wedding ring “for safe keeping” while she washes her face and hands. Just in that moment, the train crashes and the Hazzards are both killed, but Helen survives, giving birth to her child in the wreckage of the train. She is later mistaken for Patrice because she is still wearing the wedding ring, which has Patrice Hazzard’s name engraved inside the band. Despite her guilt and initial attempts to clear up the misidentification, the allure of money and security is so great, that Helen decides to become Patrice for the sake of her newborn son.

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Her motivation for her identity passing is framed as specifically that of a concerned mother who wants security, opportunity, and close-knit family support for her child.50

Things begin to go wonderfully for Helen/Patrice. Her past of poverty, shame, and desperation recede into the distance, as the Hazzard family takes her in and treats her like a daughter. She even strikes up a flirtation with Hugh’s handsome young brother,

Bill, who begins to suspect Helen/Patrice’s secret but who nevertheless grows to love her.

However, her security is shattered when Steve, the rogue father of her child, discovers her duplicity and begins to blackmail her. He demands that she marry him, so that he will have control over the Hazzard fortune of which Helen/Patrice is now the primary heiress.

Helen/Patrice agrees and marries him, and in a chilling scene of coerced matrimony, marriage becomes a violent, extortive form of entrapment. Rather than remaining married to Steve, Helen/Patrice plans to murder him to prevent him from destroying the Hazzard family and usurping their fortune. Hours after the forced marriage, she goes to his apartment and shoots his body lying on the bed, only to find he has already been shot to death. Bill Hazzard follows her to Steve’s apartment and confesses that he has figured out that she is not Patrice Hazzard. Professing his love for her despite her duplicity, they dispose of Steve’s body together and conceal the evidence of his murder (all of which would incriminate Helen/Patrice), although they do not know who killed him. At the end of the novel, the guilt of this cover-up destroys their relationship, and makes a happy family life impossible. Their immorality marks them forever and prevents any hope of domestic happiness or security. In the film, however, one of Steve’s many ex-girlfriends

50 This plotline is repeated in several noir texts, especially in the postwar period; in particular, see the 1951 film noir The House on Telegraph Hill, in which a Holocaust survivor adopts the identity of a deceased friend so as to act as mother to the friend’s small son in San Francisco, and simultaneously ensure her own financial security after the war.

121 is revealed to be the murderer, and with a relatively clean conscience Helen/Patrice, her son, and her new husband Bill live happily ever after as one of the most secure and wealthy families in the state of Illinois. Like Bedelia, I Married a Dead Man seems to jointly borrow from winding, implausibly sensational plotlines of sentimental melodrama and noir crime stories. Unlike the majority of narratives in these two genres’ traditions, duplicitous Helen is not an evil femme fatale punished for her crimes, but a moral heroine fighting against unjust expectations for female respectability and sincerity.

Feminine Value and Class Aesthetics: The Stakes of “Real” Womanhood

In my introduction and first chapter, I established how femininity is classed in particular ways, just as class is gendered. Specifically, I illustrated how lower-class femininity is portrayed in midcentury crime fiction as less authentically, desirably, and valuably feminine than its higher-class counterpart. Lower-class working girls like Velma

Valento (in Farewell, My Lovely) and Jenny Swobodo (in Laura) pass as Helen Grayle and Diane Redfern, respectively (see Chapter One), just as Annie Torrey passes as Mrs.

Bedelia Horst (in Bedelia), to increase their feminine value in a patriarchal consumer marketplace. Such a shift in value requires the acquisition of traits like delicacy, refinement, and unique elegance associated with the “right” kind of classed womanhood.

There is a similar dynamic at play at the very start of I Married a Dead Man, when Helen is pregnant and seeking the father, Steve. Because of both her class and her status as an unmarried woman in a delicate condition, Helen is a dime-a-dozen, used and discarded, worn and invaluable commodity:

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She was about nineteen. A dreary, hopeless nineteen, not a bright, shiny one. Her features were small and well turned, but there was something too pinched about the face, too wan about her coloring, too thin about her cheeks. Beauty was there, implicit, ready to reclaim her face if it was given the chance, but something had beaten it back, was keeping it hovering at a distance, unable to alight in its intended realization. (17)

Class identity here maps on to a specific kind of beauty. Upper-class women in the novel are described as being fresh, well cared for, golden, full of color and life, unlike Helen whose upper class worth and respectability, like her upper-class beauty, are there as potential or “implicit” but are stifled by lower-class circumstances and her status as an unwed mother. By being poor, unwed and pregnant, Helen has “failed” in her womanhood on many levels, not the least of which is connected to her identity as a

(failed) consumer. “The heels of her shoes were a little run-down. A puckered darn in the heel of her stocking peered just over the top of one. Her clothing was functional, as though it were worn for the sake of covering, and not for the sake of fashion, or even appeal… she was too thin, except in one place” (17). In this passage, her poverty and the ways it affects her intersectional identity as consumer and as woman is finally connected to her pregnancy. Her apathetic attitude towards her clothing reflects her broken and incomplete womanhood, as if her status as non-consumer or failed consumer de- feminizes or even de-sexes her.

The relationship between consumer culture and her pregnancy is emphasized as she sits in a telephone booth, futilely trying to call Steve. In the glass booth, “She was like a doll propped upright in its gift-box, and with one side of the box left off, to allow its contents to be seen. A worn doll. A leftover, marked-down doll, with no bright ribbons or tissue wrappings. A doll with no donor and no recipient. A doll no one bothered to

123 claim” (18). Helen has failed both as a consumer and as a commodity; women of high value have the middle to upper class qualities of respectability and the “right” kind of femininity, signaled both by their identities as consumers purchasing the right commodities and their identities as the right commodities ready to be consumed. Helen’s value has been exhausted, despite her role as (re)producer in a capitalist economy.51 The language linking feminine value as a function of female commodification and female consumption echoes similar language in Bedelia. In Caspary’s text, lengthy passages describe Bedelia’s fine taste, her extravagant shopping trips to New York, and her passion for beautiful material goods. Bedelia “loves finery” (2), and so she herself is as fine as the things she buys. Whereas Helen is “A leftover, marked-down doll, with no bright ribbons or tissue wrappings,” in Bedelia Charlie observes admiringly of his pregnant wife dressed in fine silks “Her mouth…was small and perfect, a doll’s mouth”

(10), signaling Bedelia’s value as a woman on the marriage market as well as the value of her baby.

Unwed Motherhood in the Post-War Period

As not only a class passer but also a working-class unwed mother, Helen is guilty of the kind of sexual indiscretion that was historically so often associated with the lower classes as a symptom of hypersexuality and female pathology. She is sexually

51 Helen’s passing as Patrice increases not only her own value, but the value of her child as well. Whereas Helen is a producer of a low-value child, Patrice produces a high-value child. The illegitimacy and the class status of Helen’s child make her son valueless, and indeed a burden to society whereas the legitimacy and high class of Patrice’s child make him valuable. It is Helen/Patrice and her child’s whiteness that makes this malleability possible, and it is a prerequisite for class mobility and an increase, whether legitimate or illegitimate, of value. Thus not only does she consume items of value, but she produces bodies of value, and both this consumption and production shape her own worth.

124 uncontrolled and dangerous, she has no private means to aid her, and thus she is a “social problem” taxing the resources of the system and disrupting the fabric of mainstream,

“healthy” heteronormative society. Helen’s gender identity depends on not only her class, but also the intersections between her class and her pregnancy. Helen’s lower class defeminized her, and her status as an unwed mother-to-be also de-feminizes her.

According to Regina Kunzel, experts in 1940s white society viewed a person’s ability to

“adjust” themselves to their surroundings, especially in terms of their familial roles, as determining the overall “health” of an individual: “out-of-wedlock pregnancy was stigmatized as an ‘abnormal’ departure from ‘normal’ gender roles. Out-of-wedlock pregnancy thus became an index of abnormality that was defined in opposition to normal femininity” (152). Some went further; in 1947, antifeminists Marynia Farnham and

Ferdinand Lundberg wrote that pregnancy out of wedlock equated to being “a complete failure as a woman” (Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, 280). Being pregnant with an illegitimate child, then, makes the bearer an illegitimate woman.

When it came to pregnancy and motherhood, “real” womanhood was at stake.

After being defeminized by her poverty and unwed pregnant status, Helen/Patrice is ultimately able to reclaim her femininity and serve as a good wife and mother, but only after she has assimilated into an upper-class lifestyle, culture, and identity, becoming a better high class version of herself. This suggests that the disadvantage of class is what initially makes Helen fallen and un-feminine, and additionally that the materiality and culture of the upper classes is so superior that it is able to redeem the formerly poor and disgraced. Indeed, Steve, a lower-class man, is an exploitative, lying womanizer, in stark contrast to the morality and generosity of upper-class men like Bill Hazzard. Helen’s is a

125 story of class and thus feminine redemption; her ability to assimilate into life with the wealthy Hazzards saves her from her lower-class (im)morality and inauthentic womanhood. However, the narrative’s sharp turn into noir violence reminds us that this redemption is never so easy or simple, as the past can never be completely banished.

Indeed, the function of noir more broadly is to resist simple or easy social mobility, self- transformation, or acquisition of cultural or fiscal capital.

The rise in middle class white illegitimate pregnancy in the 1940s caused a shift in experts’ views of white illegitimacy. If educated middle-class women were getting pregnant out of wedlock with more frequency (as was the case in the 1940s), then, as one expert put it, “our former stereotype [is] less tenable. Immigration, low mentality, and hypersexuality … can no longer be comfortably applied when the phenomenon has invaded our own social class—when the unwed mother must be classified to include the nice girl next door, the physician’s or pastor’s daughter” (Kunzel 147). This shift in thinking came to apply to all white unwed mothers, regardless of class, as race became a more prominent characteristic by which social problems were categorized. According to

Rickie Solinger in Wake Up Little Susie, working-class white unwed mothers were, until the 1930s, viewed as “genetically flawed” or the product of an immoral class environment, often in combination. The white unwed mother “became, instead, a treatable neurotic… The biological stain, however, remained affixed to black unwed mothers, who were often portrayed by politicians, sociologists, and others in the postwar period as unrestrained, wanton breeders, on the one hand, or as calculating breeders for profit on the other” (Solinger 9). Race, then, replaced class as the primary basis for categorization of illegitimate procreation among social workers, medical professionals,

126 and sociologists. This shift in emphasis and significance from class to race in the field of illegitimacy is evident in Helen’s class passing as Patrice. Her race allows her to cross class lines, and counteracts her lack of value as a poor unwed mother. Helen’s baby’s race gives him an implicitly high value despite the class he is born into via his biological mother and father. According to Solinger,

With the rise of the psychological explanation of white single pregnancy and the decline in the belief in the genetically flawed illegitimate mother and child, white babies were born out of wedlock not only untainted but unclassed as well. Thus, the salient demographic fact about white unwed mothers was that they were white. The salient demographic fact about black unwed mothers, then, was that they were not white. (9) Whiteness is a precondition of Helen’s passing as Patrice and her assimilation into the

Hazzard household. Helen’s whiteness allows her baby to be “unclassed”: while clearly class is still very much a key factor in intersectional and co-constructive identity, it can be concealed in a way that race as a visual marker usually prevents. Race and class remain ideologically intertwined as identity categories nonetheless, and I will discuss in the next section.

Identity, and Legitimacy, as Property: The Materiality of Marriage

Like Bedelia, I Married a Dead Man and No Man Of Her Own portray the intersection of class and gender identity through the lens of commodities. The first time that Helen sees the woman she will ultimately replace, Patrice Hazzard, she sees her shoes. The train is full and no seats are available, and as Helen sits uncomfortably on her suitcase, she notices “a diminutive pair of pumps, pert” and “saucy,” and next to these shoes, “a pair of man’s brogues, looking by comparison squat, bulky, and tremendously heavy” (24-25). The Hazzards are early on reduced to the commodities that define

127 them,52 in this case, as gendered in terms of a high degree of gender difference that accentuate both. We know that Patrice (who is well off enough to be college educated and to be well-travelled, but is by no means upper class in origin) is a bit racy, while

Hugh (who is from a higher class than his wife) exudes solidness, muted style, and reliability. When Patrice offers Helen her husband’s seat on the train and she grudgingly accepts. Falling into the seat, Helen is transported by the pleasure of sitting (“in ineffable bliss, she sank back” (26)) instead of being perched precariously on her suitcase. This foreshadows her larger shift from precarious insecurity as Helen to the “ineffable bliss” of domestic and financial security as Patrice; crossing class lines causes immediate material and physical change.

Patrice’s “radiant” and “glittering” (29) appearance stands in sharp contrast to

Helen, and employs the same language of warmth and luxury used to describe a range of high-class spaces and objects throughout the text. “She had corn-gold hair, this sun- kissed being. She wore it in a hazy aureole that fluffed out all over her head. She had freckles that were like little flecks of gold paint…” (30, emphasis mine). This description is directly followed by a similarly detailed description of her wedding ring: “She continually… caressed it, so to speak, fondled it… as if to say, ‘Look at me! Look what

I’ve got!’… it had a row of diamonds, and then a sapphire at each end for a stop” (30-31, emphasis mine). Helen’s deep envy is clear. “You’ve both been awfully friendly to me,” she said. “‘It must be an awful lot of fun to be—you,’ she murmured wistfully” (34). This sense of pride in and envy for possession is echoed by the 1950 film, where the last name

52 The film adaptation is faithful to this emphasis on commodities, showing Patrice and Hugh’s shoes before showing their faces. The only difference is that in the 1950 film, Patrice’s shoes are considerably more conservative, reinforcing her respectability in contrast to Helen.

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Hazzard is changed to Harkness. As Patrice introduces herself and her husband, she jokes with Hugh that Harkness is a “funny sort of name.” He jokingly returns that he is just trying it out on her, and she replies that “it’s mine now!” implying an identity attained through marriage that can be possessed like gold or a diamond ring, a commodity that bespeaks legitimacy, respectability, and feminine value.

While other marriage noir narratives imply that the right intersection of class and feminine identity is akin to property, Woolrich emphasizes this notion more than most other texts of the time period, and especially in a series of scenes between Helen and

Patrice on the train. The two women strike up a friendship as seatmates, and they talk all evening until late. Waiting a long time for the washroom, the previous occupant finally leaves and the two women gain access and lock the door; Patrice declares “‘There. We’re in. And possession is nine-tenths of the law.’” (38). While the notion that “possession is nine-tenths of the law” clearly foreshadows Helen’s possession of Patrice’s wedding ring after the train crashes and Patrice is killed, the phrase could also apply to Helen’s newly acquired upper-class and respectable status that falls upon her once she is mistaken for

Patrice. Much like how the racial passer is framed as a usurper because passing for white means that he or she illegitimately claims a racial identity more valuable than his or her

“true” race, as if “passing off” false or low-value currency for that of higher value, Helen is passing herself off as a higher-class and thus more “valuable” person than she is.

Many critics in whiteness studies, and most specifically Cheryl A. Harris in her article “Whiteness as Property” in the June 1993 issue of Harvard Law Review, argue that whiteness can be seen as a sort of social property that must be protected from those who do not “own” whiteness. Helen’s illegitimate possession of a respectable, educated,

129 cultured, married, and non-working-class woman’s identity is akin to her obtaining social property (symbolized by the diamond-encrusted wedding ring) that is not rightfully hers.53 She “possesses” Patrice Hazzard’s respectability, morality, worth, class status, her

“real” womanhood as a heteronormative married and well-off mother to be. This possession of valuable identity is materially manifested, and made possible, but Helen’s literal possession of Patrice’s wedding ring, suggesting the ways in which the possession of commodities and a husband define female identity (reiterated in the title of the film adaptation, No Man Of Her Own)). The central question of the narrative is whether or not

Helen can legitimately “earn” Patrice’s identity, security, femininity, and class position, played out in upper-class and moral Bill’s growing affection for her despite his knowledge of her class and sexual past. If she can “earn” the love of a wealthy and respectable man willing to be her legitimate husband and the father of her child, then she can “earn” a legitimate place in the secure world of postwar upper-class domesticity

As Helen and Patrice rub cold cream on their faces and perform their bedtime rituals, they discuss Patrice’s destination, that is, her new husband’s family in Caulfield,

Illinois, who have never seen her. As Patrice begins her ablutions, she gives Helen the ring for safekeeping. “‘It’s beautiful,’ Helen said wistfully. She watched it curiously as it slowly descended the length of her finger, easily, without forcing. There was a curiously familiar feeling to it, as of something that should have been there long ago, that belonged there and had been strangely lacking until now” (41). Patrice fears the challenges before her, since Hugh’s family are “very well-off,” which in her view adds to the pressure to make a good impression. While Patrice does not give signs of being upper class, she also

53 Reading issues of class into Harris’s argument suggests the intimate relationship between class and race, and how they shape one another in legal and economic terms.

130 bears the sense of privilege of someone who has never suffered hard financial deprivation. She says of her and Hugh’s travels in Europe “We were always on a shoestring, the whole time we were over there. We had an awful lot of fun, though. I think that’s the only time you have fun, when you’re on a shoestring, don’t you?” To which Helen, who knows the harsh reality of poverty, uneasily replies “Sometimes…”

(42). Patrice has already married above her class and now is nervous about meeting

Hugh’s wealthy family. Added to this, for Helen, is an additional required performance on top of learning her new class and taking on a new identity, that of performing and learning respectability, sexual morality, and self-worth— all classed characteristics.

Patrice has to learn to be Mrs. Hazzard, already a new identity, and in turn Helen has to learn to be Patrice learning to be Mrs. Hazzard. The underlying identity change is part and parcel of marriage, evidenced by the name change for women.

A moment of disaster marks the violent break of Helen’s crossing from lower to upper class. Helen glances at Patrice’s reflection in the mirror behind her in the washroom, when the trains crashes suddenly and “… the whole alcove seemed to upend, shift on a crazy axis, so that what had been the wall before her until now, had shifted to become the ceiling over her…” (45). The subsequent overturning of the train “on a crazy axis” that makes the wall becomes the ceiling reinforces this switch, as if a turning of the class system has occurred, making Helen upper class and Patrice lower class. This moment is visually dramatic in the film, when we see Helen’s reflection (as gazing at herself in a mirror, touching Patrice’s ring on her finger) shatters. This shattered image signals the “death” of Helen and her rebirth as Patrice.

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When Helen wakes up the hospital after giving birth to her baby in the wreckage of the train, her world is already drastically improved. Based on her misidentification as

Patrice Hazzard, the Hazzard family has paid for her to be in a private room, until she recovers and goes to live with the Hazzards in their stately home in Caulfield, Illinois.

Just as in Bedelia, the physical house itself is a force of its own, acting as a character directly related to the class dynamics of the narrative. Helen/Patrice revels in “A roof over your head. A roof to keep out the rain and cold and loneliness—Not just the anonymous roof of a rented building, no; the roof of home. Guarding you, sheltering you, keeping you, watching over you” (77). Although of course home, love, and security need not be contingent upon a certain social and financial class level, Woolrich presents them as such. Insecurity is only presented in the context of tasteless, shabby, and anonymous lower-class spaces and the desperation of an unwed mother-to-be, or it is presented as the haunting threat of that class past breaking into a prosperous present. Security is only presented in the context of tasteful and personalized upper-class domestic space, and later in the novel, the love of an upper-class man. The distinctions between the two, sometimes exaggeratedly polarized, class worlds that Woolrich draws also reinforce the argument that class requires a finely tuned and complex performance, making the recurring, almost ubiquitous figure of the class passer ground zero for noir’s complex engagement with broader discourses surrounding class, identity intersectionality, the role of consumer culture in the construction of class, and the potential for legitimate social mobility in mid- twentieth century American society.

Although Helen seems to be slowly but surely becoming Patrice, assimilating to her new class and domestic identity and indeed thriving, it is a slow and uneven process.

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She complains of moments where she fears she has betrayed her true origins, especially in her interactions with Bill Hazzard. At one point she worries she has encountered

“another pitfall. Or rather the same one, ever-present, ever lurking treacherously underfoot as she walked this path of her own choosing” (93). In other words, despite her convincing performance, in many ways it remains a performance and her not completely concealed “true” class self is “ever-present,” relentless haunting. In scenes where Bill explores his suspicions about Helen’s class origins, he tests her identity as a consumer, suggesting that her “lurking” and “ever present” past class identity manifests itself in her practices of consumption. During a pleasant shopping excursion downtown,

Helen/Patrice runs into Bill, and they go shopping together. Bill explains that he needs a new fountain pen, and asks her to try out one pen in particular.

Incautiously, her mind on the proportions and weight of the barrel in her grasp, her attention fixed on what sort of a track the nib would leave, whether a broad bold one or a thin wiry one, she put it to the pad. Suddenly “Helen” stood there on the topmost leaf, almost as if produced by automatic writing…She checked herself just in time to prevent the second name from flowing out of the pen. (97)

As a consumer, her natural inclination is to behave not as Patrice Hazzard but at Helen

Georgesson. Her “automatic writing” as a consumer judging the qualities of a commodity is beyond the bounds of her contrived class passing, suggesting that one’s “true” identity is revealed in the act of public consumption. So anxiety provoking is this slip for Helen that she can no longer enjoy her shopping as Patrice. “Funny how quickly a scene could change, the same scene; the sunlit pavements and the bustling shoppers weren’t fun any more to watch” (99). In a narrative where Helen’s authenticity and worth as a woman, her and her son’s financial future, and her social respectability are at stake, she seems

133 disproportionately preoccupied with the potentially lost pleasures and practices of consumption, wherein the savvy reader of noir crime stories can locate a character’s most profound (class) selfhood.

Indeed, Helen/Patrice is able to read Bill in a similar way. Although he claimed to need a new fountain pen (thus the need to shop for one with her), some time later she finds a fountain pen in his jacket pocket. “It was gold and had his initials engraved on it; some valued, long-used birthday or Christmas present from one of his parents probably.

Moreover, it was in perfect writing order, couldn’t have been improved on, left a clear, deep, rich trace. And he wasn’t the sort of man who went around displaying two fountain pens at a time” (100). Just as Bill can detect her “true” identity by going shopping with her, so Helen/Patrice can detect what “sort of man” he is by an astute examination of the commodities he possesses. Based on the quality of his fountain pen, she concludes that his shopping excursion with her “had been a test” of her real identity, a test which “she had given a positive reaction, as positive as he could have hoped for” (100). Failing such

“tests” of her identity performance suggests that Helen/Patrice will be unable to become rather than pass as high class.

Helen/Patrice’s security is more fully shattered when she begins receiving anonymous blackmail letters from the father of her child, Steve. Both film and novel become increasingly noir-esque the more her security is broken. In periods between

Steve’s letters “security crept back a little” (137) for Helen/Patrice until he accidentally- on-purpose runs into her at a dance party. Steve still views her as Helen, a lower-class fallen woman, rather than as the respectable heiress she has become. She is terrified of

Steve and appalled at his return to her life, and he accuses her of “overdramatizing,”

134 which he regards as “the unfailing hallmark of cheapness. You’re a cheap girl” (153).

Whereas the narrative of her life with the Hazzard family reads like a sentimental domestic novel, the noir plotline introduced by Steve’s blackmail erodes the sense of sentiment and love that infuses upper-class domestic space. Much like Bedelia, who views her performance of perfect wifeliness, her high-class femininity, and her murders as the calculated actions of a businessman, Steve maintains that in regards to his blackmail “There’s no villain in this. Let’s get rid of the Victorian trappings. It’s just a business transaction. It’s no different from taking out insurance, really…” (154). When he later forces Helen to marry him, thus giving him access to the Hazzard estate, he exposes marriage as an economic transaction, undermining Helen/Patrice’s hope that her place in a high-class family will provide her with both financial and emotional security.

Despite Steve’s claim that she is “a cheap girl,” we get a sense of Helen/Patrice’s assimilation into upper class culture when she looks down her nose at Steve, a man she once adored, because of his lack of social graces. She complains that “His indolent ignorance of manners was more insulting than any overt rudeness would have been,”

(160), so that even in the midst of his blackmail scheme, what she finds especially repulsive about him are his “ignorance of manners,” and thus his lack of class.

Lower-class masculinity is coded as violent, cruel, and common; in this way,

Steve is implicitly connected to Helen’s working-class father. During the baptismal ceremony for her son, the Hazzards ask Helen/Patrice what her father’s name was, thinking it might be a good choice for a middle name. “She actually hadn’t been able to recall her own father’s name at the moment; it came back to her some time after, not without difficulty. Mike: a scarcely remembered figure of a looming longshoreman,

135 killed in a drunken brawl on the Embarcadero when she was ten” (83). Like lower-class femininity, working-class masculinity is a dime a dozen, “scarcely remembered” and destined for a crass, violent end that shatters any hope of domestic stability. This is contrasted with her own son’s future as a Hazzard, “The infant [conceived in] a New

York furnished rooming house who had become heir to the first, the wealthiest family in

Caulfield [Illinois], in all the county, maybe even in all the State” (84).

No Man Of Her Own and the Unpunished Class Passer

In No Man Of Her Own, Helen was played by Barbara Stanwyck, a large screen presence, a major star, and a veteran in the business who could handle a film that interspersed the genres of melodrama and film noir (genres that domestic noir often combines). Stanwyck’s star making performance was the hit melodrama, Stella Dallas

(1937), where (strongly reminiscent of No Man Of Her Own) Stanwyck played an eponymous lower-class mother trying to assimilate into the upper-class world of her well- to-do husband. Her attempt to assimilate, and even to class pass, fails; she decides that in order for her daughter to smoothly enter the upper classes, Stella must return to her lower-class roots and not be a part of her daughter’s life. While Stella is portrayed as a moral character and a good mother, she is nonetheless punished for her inability to

“learn” or “earn” upper-class status. Despite her legitimate marriage to a wealthy man and their legitimate child, she never becomes a legitimate lady but is rather a cheap imitation of one. As in No Man of Her Own, her character must also put aside her own desires and decide how best to ensure that her child is successfully educated in upper- class culture and manners; such narratives implicitly assume the superiority of the upper-

136 classes. One of Stanwyck’s other big hits was the now iconic film noir Double Indemnity

(1944) already mentioned, where she plays a lower-class woman who marries into wealth and class passes as a trophy wife. She then seduces another man and persuades him murder her husband so that she can quickly inherit his fortune54; once her new lover commits the murder, she plots to kill him, too. The evil pair finally shoots one another, with Stanwyck’s character being shot in the stomach, emphasizing the threat she poses as a reproductive, errant female body, as well as her failure as a mother.

For 1950s audiences, it would have been no surprise to see Stanwyck in either a noir wherein the class passing femme fatale was brutally punished (as in Double

Indemnity), or a melodramatic picture wherein the moral class passer sacrificed herself for her family (as in Stella Dallas). No Man of Her Own is an interesting Stanwyck film because until the final scene, it is unclear whether Helen/Patrice’s fate will follow more in line with the actress’s portrayal of the “good” and thus rewarded lower-class girl turned rich, or the “bad” and thus punished lower-class girl turned rich. In contrast to the novel, her filmic counterpart plays the class-passing femme fatale but nonetheless wins love, security, and inclusion in her new class. This differs also from Laura, discussed in

Chapter One, in which the female class passer can only achieve safety, love, and redemption by rejecting her new high-class status and returning to her lower-class roots.

54 While in Double Indemnity she does not personally strike the blow that kills her husband, Stanwyck was often married to dead men on the silver screen; her casting in an adaptation of I Married a Dead Man is uncannily fitting.

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Indeed, a class passing lower-class woman being rewarded rather than punished is unusual for a post Hays Code55 crime film, and for the genre more generally.

The film begins with Stanwyck holding her baby in a sumptuous drawing room; the scene’s apparent luxury and security is undermined by the overlaid monologue, which opines that the beauty of the neighborhood and the safety of the home are “not for us.”

The couple’s immoral actions and the illegitimate means by which Helen/Patrice has obtained and maintained her new identity make real security impossible. Whereas the novel returns to this scene at the end and reinforces this initial sense of exclusion, the film returns to this scene but then continues, to reveal that in fact it was Steve’s lower- class girlfriend who murdered him. A policeman comes to tell Helen/Patrice and Bill

Hazzard the news, and after they embrace with relief and love, the film cuts to the unnamed girlfriend being ushered into a cop car. Her hair, her accent, and her manners mark her as lower class; Helen, who has now fully become Patrice, and her wealthy new husband rejoice in the re-established safety of their wealthy domestic space, while violence is located firmly within lower-class femininity beyond the boundaries of their high-class world.

Conclusion

These texts about the possibilities of redemption and legitimate social mobility for lower-class-class wives and mothers attests not only to the domestic strain in noir crime narratives, but also the prevalence of female protagonists and female authors in the genre.

55 The Hays Code, or Motion Picture Production Code, implemented in the mid-1930s in the United States, required that characters that committed immoral actions be punished in films. For example, see the unpunished and positively portrayed confidence men and extramarital sexual relationships in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932), versus similar portrayals in later films.

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While Bedelia, I Married a Dead Man, and No Man Of Her Own do have male detectives, like the more canonical Mildred Pierce, the male detective is secondary to the concerns of class-passing wives and mothers. Through the lenses of pregnancy and legitimacy, these texts stage a debate surrounding definitions of class and the terms of feminine value in a consumer capitalist marketplace. While Bedelia and Helen/Patrice are surely portrayed as immoral imposters in many ways, they are also portrayed as products of a gendered economic system. The “domestic” threat of the early Cold War era was not the class passer so much as it was the rigid class lines and unmalleable hierarchies that created the class passer. In other words, it is not the illegitimate mother or the worthless woman who is the primary threat, but rather the consumerist gender ideology that renders her illegitimate and worthless. Fears of infiltration by a malevolent imposter run parallel to fears of class mobility for sexually illicit and lower class women. At issue in Caspary and Woolrich’s stories of class passing mothers are women’s roles in the post war family, and working-class people’s roles in post-leftist “classless” Cold War society.

In No Man Of Her Own, Helen is ultimately justified in passing as Patrice, and even in attempting to murder her working-class lover. The only way to be a good mother and to elevate oneself is to class pass and defend her new, ill-begotten identity. In this way her usurpation seems to be a means of fighting against unjust forces that would confine her to poverty and shame. On the other hand, there is something decidedly conservative and classist in portrayals of working-class masculinity and femininity in No

Man Of Her Own and in many other examples of domestic noir. Violence, a lack of love and sentiment in domestic spaces, and crime reside in the lower classes, while the book unabashedly suggests that the upper classes are more moral, more conducive to a loving

139 domestic space, and of higher cultural value. All poor people care about is money, whether or not they remain poor or manage to claw their way into a class above; those born rich are above such cares and can love more fully and without duplicity. Therefore, the high-class family and marriage is better than those of the lower classes. This is the logic of Caspary and Woolrich’s texts, so that despite their subversive implication that the system of value unjustly entraps lower-class women, on some level both authors buy into some terms of this unjust hierarchy of gendered, classed value. In this sense, while domestic noir narratives differ from the hard-boiled ones I examined in Chapter One, both kinds of stories present a deeply ambivalent and complex, even contradictory, view of class identity. While sincerity and truth are certainly celebrated in noir crime narratives, the duplicity, inauthenticity, and high-class aesthetics associated with class passing present an undeniable allure.

Chapter Three

The Homme Fatal Strikes Again: Male Class-Passers in Dorothy Hughes’s In a

Lonely Place (1947) and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

A habitual reader of mid-twentieth century U.S. crime fiction knows that a stunning blonde wearing an expensive, well-cut dress and a necklace of real stones is trouble. Her good clothes and seductive self-presentation are evidence of her association with un-manning and destructive forces in American society; she is an expert consumer and a social climber, the embodiment of the encroachment of feminization and style over substance that the hard-boiled male detective fights against. This femme fatale performs a false high-class and hyperfeminine identity, using her beauty and exquisite taste as a consumer as a means of concealing her true evil. But after the end of the World War II, an increasing number of crime novels (often penned by women) in the United States framed these very same threats in masculine terms. In the years after the war, when consumer culture increasingly interpolated men and a narrative of democratic prosperity bolstered U.S. claims of global dominance, the figure of the deadly male or the homme fatal shadowed the pages of crime novels.

The homme fatal is a recurring trope in American crime narratives of all eras.

Catherine Nickerson argues that in nineteenth-century U.S. women’s detective fiction, the culprit tended to be a violent man who represented a form of aggressive capitalism

(coded as male) that threatened to destroy the virtuous bonds of the domestic space

(coded as female). The homme fatal in myriad forms also remains a potent one in contemporary literature and popular culture beyond the boundaries of the crime story.

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Although he appears in many forms, I am particularly interested in his close connection to carefully performed class identity and to consumer culture. The prevalence of class markers, conspicuous consumption, and masculine violence appears not only in many genres, but also in many mediums.56 A fine example of the archetype is that of Don

Draper, the main character of the AMC television series Mad Men, which premiered in

2007. Set in the 1960s, the show centers on a group of advertising executives in a

Madison Avenue office. Don was born Dick Whitman, an impoverished orphan, but he has escaped his lowly class past and fashioned a new identity for himself as a suave, high-class, and sophisticated professional, the creative director of Sterling Cooper advertising agency.

Don functions as a lens through which the creators of the series examine intersections of class, masculinity, and consumer identity. He bears an uncanny resemblance to the femmes fatales I have examined in the two previous chapters: he has achieved social mobility by adopting a false identity, his high class and his masculine charms conceal his capacity for violence and deceit, and his appealing image hides his

“true” selfhood, if any such truth exists. Indeed, viewers get the sense that perhaps the

“real” Don Draper cannot be known. He subverts stable knowledge, he unravels the connections between exterior and interior, and his occupation in advertising requires him to promote falsity rather than truth. While he is not a murderer and Mad Men is a drama

56 Although he is not a class passer, Vladimir Nabokov’s narrator in Lolita, Humbert Humbert, is a good example of a homme fatal in literary fiction whose allure is in part due to his class self-presentation. He is patently aware of his effect on women, and his movie-star looks belie his destructive nature; he dresses smartly and with special care in preparation for committing murder (268), and the book begins with Humbert’s statement that “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (9). Humbert’s foppish, “fancy” style is implicitly linked with his violence and criminality.

142 rather than a crime series,57 Don himself represents destructive potential similar to a criminal. As one character puts it, Don “makes the lie” (1.08) of consumer society. When one of his co-workers discovers that he is “not who he says he is,” he calls him “a fraud and a liar, a criminal even” (1.12). In a later episode about serial killer (5.3), Don has a disturbingly real dream wherein he murders a ex-lover in a similar way as that of Richard

Speck in Chicago in 1966. This dream is presented to the audience as a real event, and both the audience and Don himself are at first unsure whether the murder has really taken place. In this and other moments, Don is implicitly connected to male violence against women. He represents the destructive, threatening potential of consumer culture, consumer-based models of masculinity, and a socially mobile system based upon appearance rather than internal or inherent truth. What is interesting about Don, and many hommes fatals like him, is that this destructive potential is specifically gendered as hypermasculine, not hyperfeminine.

Little scholarly work has been done on the concept of the homme fatal. In the field of crime fiction, this dearth can perhaps be attributed to the relatively understudied work of female crime authors in the post-World War II period. My close attention to the most prolific female author of noir thrillers in the 1940s, Dorothy Hughes, illustrates how women contributed to and in fact made key interventions in the genre, particularly in regards to the homme fatal. I connect Hughes’s novel In a Lonely Place (1947) to Patricia

Highsmith’s better-known The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), both to illustrate the prevalence of the homme fatal in women’s crime writing, and as a way to explore

Highsmith’s innovations in the archetype. Chris Straayer suggests that the eponymous

57 Mad Men flirts with noir, and is sometimes charged with a noir resonance even as its characters navigate the tempestuous world of advertising rather than the criminal underworld.

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Tom Ripley of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is “like the classic femme fatale but here a man…He is a homme fatal: handsome, wanting, duplicitous, enticing, unknowable, and fatal” (118). However, while Straayer is among the very few scholars who define Tom Ripley specifically as a class passer, he does not explain the crucial link between Tom as homme fatal and as class passer. I elaborate on and argue for an archetype of the homme fatal as particularly important for the two decades following

World War II. In this context, the homme fatal is nearly always a product of his relationship to consumer culture, and his complex and multiple class positions.58

Many scholars have examined the ways in which popular crime literature and film after 1945 are shaped by the masculine anxiety of returning veterans and the dark side of the supposed economic prosperity of consumer capitalism after the deprivation of the

Great Depression and the rationing of the war. Despite a great deal of optimism regarding the growth of consumer culture in the early Cold War period, ambivalence and fears associated with this growth were prevalent as well. In Hughes’s In a Lonely Place and

Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, this mixture of hope and fear is tied up in consumer society and is gendered as male. In the context of the series Mad Men, as in

Hughes’s and Highsmith’s novels, the homme fatal’s ability to use consumer culture, violence, and class performance to re-invent himself is framed as a sign of both the health

58 For instance, and as have discussed in my Introduction, Robert Aldrich’s interpretation of detective Mike Hammer in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly is a playboy living in a modern and posh apartment, the ultimate bachelor pad. His appreciation for good cars and interior design is made possible by his shady business practices: blackmail, sexually exploiting his secretary, and using brutal, often gratuitous violence to extort information. Other examples include Cornell Woolrich’s suave, well-dressed, wealthy killer in The Black Angel (1943), the deadbeat and greedy father Steve in Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man (1948), Charles Willeford’s used car salesman protagonist in The Woman Chaser (1960), and posh but insolvent Monty Beragon in Mildred Pierce (1941). The homme fatal appears in male-authored crime fiction, but is more prevalent in crime narratives by female authors (see Craig Rice, Vera Caspary, and later Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, among others).

144 and the sickness of the postwar consumer capitalist economy. This contradiction makes the archetype central to the early Cold War period. In this sense, the homme fatal is a key figure in an ongoing debate over the influence of consumption on American masculinity.

My examination of male class passers as violent hommes fatals is also in part an examination of shifting notions of masculinity that focused increasingly on consumption rather than on production and labor, and new kinds of masculine anxieties created by this shift in a Cold War context (I have discussed this in my Introduction, but it bears repeating, albeit briefly). According to socioeconomic historian Walter Susman, the period of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century saw a gradual and uneven move from a producer-centric society to a consumer-centric one. Accompanying this shift was a departure from ideal manhood as based on a “culture of character,” where integrity defined a man’s value, to an ideal manhood based on a “culture of personality,” where class performance, charisma, and style defined masculine worth. While of course this theory far more clean-cut than the complex reality of cultural representations of masculinity and men’s lived experiences, such a dichotomy does tend to structure midcentury crime fiction and is especially useful in understanding the cultural resonance of the homme fatal. The hommes fatals analyzed here represent extreme interpretations of the “culture of personality,” since for him surfaces and performances are what matter most in securing masculinity, class, and worth.59 Although consumer society is generally

59 In their forthcoming essay “The Flexible Mr. Ripley: Noir Historicism and Postwar Transnational Masculinity in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Christopher Breu and Elizabeth Hatmaker frame this distinction as “self-directed” and “other-directed” individuals in the context of Fordist postwar capitalism.

145 read as feminine,60 in the relative and uneven prosperity following the war when masculinity came to be more and more associated with various kinds of consumption, the issue of the male consumer and the “right” kind of American masculinity became crucial and vexed in new ways.

Hughes’s In a Lonely Place presents a male main character that is monstrous precisely because he defines authentic masculinity as contingent upon taste, consumption, appearance, and the performance of upper class identity. Dix Steele disdains working- class values and men who respect production over consumption, and so his inability to pass his way into the upper classes creates acute masculine anxiety. In his efforts to secure his manhood, Dix becomes a serial rapist and killer, even as he creates an elaborate class performance to pass as upper class. His violent sexuality and his obsession with class passing are closely connected.

While Patricia Highsmith’s treatment of the homme fatal is strikingly similar to

Hughes, she takes the concept of the deadly class-passing man further than Hughes and most others in the decade and a half following the war. Not only is Highsmith’s homme fatal protagonist Tom Ripley an ultra-sophisticated consumer, like Dix, but his illegibility persists throughout the narrative beyond detection; indeed, his illegibility serves to unravel the narrative itself. Rather than attempting to “read” Tom Ripley in my analysis of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), it is Tom’s resistance to interpretation that will be my focus. I argue that his illegibility is precisely what makes him a blank screen upon which to project intersecting anxieties associated with gender, sexuality, class, and consumer capitalism in an early Cold War context. Thus, my analysis in the

60 See Mark A. Swiencicki’s “Consuming Brotherhood: Men’s Culture, Style, and Recreation as Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in Lawrence Glickman’s Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (1999).

146 second part of this chapter is as much about how we can interpret Tom Ripley as it is about how we cannot interpret him.

Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place: The Hard-Boiled Consumer

Dorothy Hughes began her writing career as a poet, but starting in 1940s, she began to write crime novels, and then proceeded to write one or two crime novels a year throughout the decade. Several of these novels were adapted into A-list movies; Hughes was hardly an occasional contributor to the genre, and indeed was among the first authors to shift perspective or emphasis from the detective to the serial killer. In this way, she anticipated the rising importance of the serial killer in American popular culture, and when she wrote about such male killers, they were almost always passers in some way.

Even compared to other examples in the genre, Dorothy Hughes employs hidden identities and masquerades with remarkable frequency and with striking effect. Her novels are marked by pervasive surveillance and paranoia, obsessive disguises and shields of layered false identities, all tied into the political and cultural panic and instability of the war years and their aftermath. Indeed, Geoffrey O’Brien complains in

Hardboiled America that hidden identities occur so often in Hughes’s novels that the reader familiar with her work is no longer surprised by them (90). While O’Brien sees this as a flaw, I read Hughes’s (over)use of hidden identities as central to the ways in which she re-works the genre. In the world of her noir thrillers, a good looking man in a good suit and hand-knit tie could be a Spanish spy (The Fallen Sparrow, 1942), a murderous Nazi (The Blackbirder, 1943), a petty thief and killer-for-hire (Ride the Pink

Horse, 1946), or a serial killer re-living the thrill of wartime violence (In a Lonely Place,

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1947). While Hughes’s wartime novels feature heroes and heroines pursued by unsavory

Axis agents, her work after World War II turns to different kinds of escape and entrapment that are more haunting and tragic because they take place in the mundane, anti-climactic, muted panic of day to day life after the war. Her post-war work centers on a new kind of Americanness threatened: a fantasy of individualist American masculinity troubled by the class hierarchies and consumer culture that entrap lower-class men in racialized61, subordinate identities, limiting their manhood and thus driving them to murder, theft, and confidence games.

Hughes’s most psychologically complex novels are written from the point of view of violent hard-boiled men, who are obsessed with and ultimately destroyed by their desire to mold their class and masculinity through clothing and strategic consumption.

Hughes’s male characters are portrayed using the conventions of a genre defined by dominant, strong masculine figures, but even as she uses the stock language of autonomous hard-boiled masculinity, she outlines cracks in the archetype to suggest weakness and failure of the model of individualist manhood made famous by pulp characters like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Raymond Chandler’s Philip

Marlowe, as well characters in the works of more high-brow authors like Ernest

Hemingway and William Faulkner, among others.62 Hughes casts the hard-boiled man in the role of the villain rather than in that of the detective hero. In a Lonely Place is a

61 For example, Sailor, the class passing protagonist of her 1946 novel Ride the Pink Horse, fears that if he is perceived as working class he will also be perceived as non white. Set in Santa Fe and featuring a number of Native American and/or Chicano/a characters, Sailor’s determination to class pass translates to his determination to secure and constantly illustrate his whiteness.

62 As Lisa Marie Hogeland puts it, “While presenting perfect hard-boiled prose, and perhaps lifting a little herself from Chandler et al., Hughes uses the hard-boiled genre to explore from the inside the masculinist and misogynist ideas at its heart, to allow the genre in some sense to perform an auto-critique” (Afterward, In a Lonely Place, 240).

148 meditation on why this hard-boiled archetype becomes a killer, and how his ideals of masculinity and his consumer fantasies are related to his turn to the criminal, the brutal, and the murderous. Unlike Chandler’s Marlowe and other pulp hard-boiled detectives of the 1930s and early 1940s, In a Lonely Place’s main character Dix Steele does not see working-class masculinity as superior to upper-class masculinity. Rather, he believes that lack of money and a failure to convincingly present himself as upper class undermine his manhood, even though he wishes to retain some of his hard-boiled toughness.63

While Lisa Marie Hogeland in her afterward to The Feminist Press’s reissue of In a Lonely Place reads Dix as mostly antithetical to hard-boiled masculine ideals, I argue that Dix represents a deadly (or fatal) combination of hard-boiled and consumer-based models of masculinity, and that this contradictory blend represents a particular tension at the root of masculine anxiety in the post-war years.64 He covets both the suave masculinity of the high-class gentleman who knows how to shop, as well as the hard- boiled, tough, working-class man who knows how to fight. Dix tries to pick and choose the characteristics he desires from two opposing models of class masculinity, and in an impossible quest to have his cake and eat it too, he cannot secure what he sees as stable and authentic manhood.

Dix is a veteran whom the war has left damaged and volatile. He dreams about, and indeed feels his race and his gender entitle him to, the kind of status, freedom, and

63 To refer back to my introduction, such characters as Dix Steele begin life like the protagonist of “The False Burton Combs,” and wish to become like Burton Combs; they are tortured by the thought that they might be “false” in their class and thus in their masculinity.

64 As Bill Osgerby argues, manhood based on consumption carried with it an implicit effeminacy, and thus men’s magazines forged ways for men to consume while still explicitly displaying their heterosexuality and toughness. This difficult balance drives In a Lonely Place.

149 masculine self-assurance he enjoyed during the war.65 Dix pairs wearing good clothes and having “class” with having “any woman you wanted” (114). He goes to drastic lengths when this sense of entitlement is threatened. Near the end of his tour of duty he murders a nurse named Brucie when she refuses his advances. Despite the terrible guilt he feels in the wake of Brucie’s murder, it stimulates his interest in having power over women as a means of ensuring his own sense of masculinity. Thus, the violence he participated in as a soldier and pilot is redirected after the war against young women.

Returning to the east coast to beg his wealthy Uncle Fergus for money, and finding him unwilling to offer his support, Dix begins to serially rape and murder women as a means of empowerment. He feels that without money, he is not a “real man,” and thus must violently compensate for his perceived (class) emasculation. Dix’s sense of class entitlement does not disappear after his Uncle will not provide the substance to support that privilege, and which fuels his class passing and his violence. He moves to Los

Angeles after his Uncle agrees to send him money on the condition that Dix must try in earnest to finish a detective novel (Dix claims to have ambitions as a writer, although this is only a pretext, and we never see him working on it).

Since Dix dropped out of Princeton both because of low grades and enlistment in the military, and since his only work experience is as a pilot, he would have to begin in a low-paying job before working his way up. Thus he is loath to find employment that he considers to be beneath him. As luck would have it, Dix runs in to a wealthy college

65 The novel lays out this change in class status explicitly: “The war years were the first happy years [Dix] had ever known. You didn’t have to kowtow to the stinking rich, you were all equal in pay… You wore swell tailored uniforms, high polish on your shoes. You didn’t need a car, you had something better, sleek powerful planes. …You were the Mister, you were what you’d always wanted to be, class. You could have any woman you wanted…” (113-114).

150 friend in Beverly Hills, Mel Terriss.66 Dix murders Mel, accesses his credit, his bank account, and his tailor, and begins living in his swanky apartment and driving his car.

Now Dix has two ways to establish his masculinity: he passes as the stylish playboy- bachelor in his Beverly Hills apartment, and he continues to sexually assault and murder young women. The novel begins after these events, and through Dix’s free indirect style, the reader begins to piece together this backstory and a fractured, distorted image of Dix himself. It is when he reconnects with an old army-buddy turned police detective, middle-class and respectably married Brub Nicolai, and when he begins to date an aspiring actress named Laurel Grey, that Dix’s charade begins to crumble. The novel is split between Dix’s daily sense of maddening loneliness, anxiety, and masculine crisis, and the cat-and-mouse game he plays with Brub and Brub’s perceptive and beautiful wife, Sylvia. In fact, it is Sylvia and Laurel, rather than the detective Brub, who ultimately solve the mystery and bring Dix to justice.

The common assumption in studies of fictional serial killers is that literary and popular fascination with serial murder begins in U.S. culture in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, Hughes’s novel has long been overlooked in such studies. In a Lonely Place, however, as Leonard Cassuto suggests in Hardboiled Sentimentality, is a potentially rich primary source for the topic. Feminist studies of the serial killer in literature and film examine how the figure often invites the viewer or the reader to take pleasure in, or even celebrate, misogynist violence. Such narratives also simultaneously position the figure as an “ultimate evil…essentially unknowable” (Simpson xii), and thus an exception to and distinct from everyday society. In Carla Freccero’s words:

66 This plotline is strikingly similar to The Talented Mr. Ripley, where Tom Ripley re-connects with his wealthy friend Dickie Greenleaf, murders him, and usurps his identity.

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The serial killer is a popular figure of dementia, universally regarded as unthreatening precisely because of his singularity… and the individualized and eccentric nature of his violence… We are thus able to locate the violence in his disorder rather than in ourselves or in the social order. (48)

In a Lonely Place resists inviting pleasure in sexual violence or the encouragement of

“individual masculine terrorism against female victims” (Simpson ix) as well as in distinguishing the villain as “eccentric” and separate from mainstream masculinity. As

Hogeland observes, by not providing Dix’s first-hand account of his murders, Hughes does not give the reader a chance to voyeuristically participate in his gratification.

Secondly, Hughes’s use of intimate free indirect narration establishes him and reveals him not as a strange other, but as a product of mainstream gender ideals and the trauma of the war. Furthermore, not only are his serial crimes an offshoot of conventional rather than aberrant models of manhood, but they are also shaped by consumer and class expectations that Dix considers necessary for being a “real” man.

Men at Work, Men at Play: Models of Masculinity in In a Lonely Place

The men in In a Lonely Place struggle with an imagined binary troubling the contested terrain of white masculinity, that is, whether they should demonstrate their manhood through work or consumption, through substance or style. While Dix’s uncle

Fergus worked hard to earn his fortune before the war and values hard work, Dix feels debased and ashamed when he works hard and is more interested in appearing successful and projecting a certain model of upper-class manhood. Dix rejects the model of manhood that links labor with “real” masculinity. For Dix, acting wealthy will make him so; for the previous generation represented by Fergus, hard work based on a set of

152 individual skills and strong character are the path to wealth and worth.

Dix’s masculine crisis is first triggered in his college days, when he feels inadequate as a conspicuous consumer alongside his classmates at Princeton. His Uncle

Fergus, who grew up poor and believes in the old-fashioned, “hand-embroidered, gold- framed motto: No work, no money” (112), denies Dix the spending money that would make him like “one of the fellows he saw around town, driving a fast car, careless about expensive clothes and money and girls, club fellows” (112). His lack of money and thus his inability to pass for wealthy directly connects to his sense of failed heterosexual masculinity, since “A fellow had to have money, you couldn’t get a girl without money in your pockets” (112). Furthermore, he feels abject and powerless when he does try to work for the money he craves; for a time in his college days he works in his Uncle’s hardware store, but he is “afraid to look anyone in the eye, afraid he’d see the sneers openly, or the pity” (112). He concludes simply “He didn’t want to work that hard,” and thus begins “Latching on to boys with money…You could wear their clothes, smoke their cigarettes, drink their liquor” (112-113). Thus, Dix begins to learn high-class consumption, taste, and self-presentation early on as a means of securing a sense of masculine power.

The tension created by this imagined binary of different models or conceptions of masculinity is also played out in the relationship between Brub (who is, as I mentioned, an L.A. police detective and a friend of Dix’s during the war) and Dix himself. Brub

Nicolai comes from a wealthy family who will do “anything to keep from working.

That’s the motto of the Nicolais. Graven on their crest” (11), but rather than using his family money and connections to remain in upper-class circles, Brub returns from the war

153 to work as an LAPD detective. Brub describes the rest of his family with contempt, establishing a set of negative connotations associated with upper-class people, connotations that shape the rest of the novel’s class and criminal plotlines. Brub outlines a shift from one generation of his family to the next:

My old man was a land baron, never did a lick of work. But land baroneering is outmoded, so I couldn’t do that….Raoul, my oldest brother, is an investment broker. That’s what it says on his gold-lettered office door. Investment broker. Up and to the office by ten… To the club for two quick games of squash. Shower, shave, trim, and lunch. Leisurely, of course. A quiet nap after, a bit of bridge—and the day’s over. Very wearing. (12)67

Brub describes his brothers’ lives with disdain. They are not productive members of society seeking to improve the nation, they overcome no challenges, and they offer no work or innovation or expertise. Raoul and his father are lazy, spoiled, perverse, and useless, in Brub’s eyes. Such men, Brub implies, are the parasites of the healthy capitalist economy. Dix wishes to count himself among these “useless” men, and believes that if he plays the part well enough, his performance will become reality.

To this end, Dix is painfully aware of how he appears to others, although whether or not he has a realistic understanding of his self-presentation cannot be known due to the unreliability of his narration. When Dix first reunites with Brub, he watches Brub looking him over. Dix “knew exactly what Brub saw, as if Brub were a mirror he was standing before” (7). A description of Dix, or as Dix imagines Brub to see him, follows: “…a

67 Pendergast, Smith, and Osgerby argue that value for work over superficial displays of style constitutes a more conventional, perhaps even less “modern” ideal of masculine self-invention and socioeconomic advancement.

154 good-looking face but nothing to remember, nothing to set it apart from the usual.68 Good gabardine suit, he’d paid plenty to have it made, open-necked tan sports shirt” (7-8).

Dix’s notion of being high-class requires that a gentleman should master the nuance of high quality and understatement; his clothes match his face, “good-looking” but “nothing to remember.” Dix’s desire to dress in such as a way as to seem safe, appealing, and understated are perfectly in line with his notion of both upper-class style and with his goal to attack women with impunity. His good clothes make women more likely to trust and desire him, and their quiet excellence cause witnesses to doubt that he was the perpetrator in question and make them unable to pick him out of a crowd. Thus, Dix’s ability to dress above his class is part and parcel of his murderous activities.

The Class-Passing Homme Fatal:

Dix is aware of his masculine beauty and charms, and he is a homme fatale precisely because his charms and his physical attractiveness distract from, and facilitate, his violence. Once Dix meets Brub’s lovely wife, Sylvia, he hopes that his masculine appeal has worked its charm upon her, since he envisions her as his next possible victim.

When Brub invites him to have dinner at their club, he thinks to himself that “It might be that Sylvia was the one who wanted him along, that her play of indifference was a cover- up. He was clinically aware of his appeal to women. He’d seen their eyes sharpen as they

68 The hommes fatals I discuss take advantage of their racial, gender, class, able-bodied, and national position in classist, white supremacist, and patriarchal American society. Like Tom Ripley, Don Draper, and a host of other examples, Dix’s whiteness and his maleness make him unmarked by race or sex, and can thus take on a range of class identities; Tom and Dix are blank slates, and far more malleable than characters who do not have the privilege of a face whose race, gender, and apparent physical ability mean there is “nothing to set it apart from the usual.” Whereas being “unmarked” and not racialized or gendered tends to cast while male protagonists as heroic upholders of the “right” social order, in the case of these hommes fatals, it is their very ability to appear normal and unmarked by aberration that makes them illegible and dangerous, since their true danger is masked by visual normalcy.

155 looked at him” (21)69. Dix automatically assumes that women are duplicitous, sexually immoral, and quick to employ cunning facades to prevent men from seeing their true intentions or feelings. Dix’s view of all women as potentially fatale serves as a basis for his misogyny, legitimating his violence against them. The irony in Hughes’s re-working of the genre, of course, that these characteristics apply to Dix far more than to his female victims.

When Dix meets his beautiful neighbor Laurel Grey, he grows increasingly obsessed with her. Dix’s primary goal for the remainder of the novel is to seduce Laurel through a calculated class performance. However, from the very first, his attempt to pass as independently wealthy suggests to Laurel not only the artificiality of his performed class identity, but also the violent means through which that performance is possible. On their second meeting, when Laurel takes a cigarette out, Dix lights it for her as a gentleman should, but uses Mel Terriss’s beautiful gold lighter. Dix’s use of Mel’s lighter on Laurel’s cigarette, a fatal mistake since Laurel was friends with Mel and even gave him the lighter as a gift, represents Dix’s usurpation of class accessories and identity.

When Laurel asks him if he is a friend of Mel’s, the question throws Dix off guard because he was not aware of their acquaintance. But despite a moment of trepidation, he recovers quickly and plays it cool.

She was like all women, curious about your private life. He laughed at her; she’d find out only as much as he wished. “An old friend,” he laughed.

69 Again, this quote is strikingly similar to Humbert Humbert’s statement in Lolita that he is, “despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male… tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose…” (25). Here, Humbert articulates the power and the danger of the homme fatal. His beauty “conceals” the “sullen and congested something” of his evil, and he feels he can “obtain” any woman he wishes.

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“Pre-war. Princeton.” Princeton meant money and social position to her, calculation came that quickly under her skin. She was greedy and callous and a bitch, but she was fire and a man needed fire. “I’m from New York,” he threw in carelessly. It sounded better than New Jersey. (60)

The punchy, terse language of this passage (“She was greedy and callous and a bitch, but she was fire and a man needed fire”), a nod to hard-boiled detective fiction and prose, casts Dix both as related to the hard-boiled archetypal hero (akin to Phillip Marlowe) even as he adheres to an ideal of masculinity that depends upon consumption, style, and more upper-class self presentation (mentioning as he does Princeton and New York for calculated effect). While the story is filtered through free indirect style, the reader gets a sense of Dix’s tone, his inner voice, as being the brutally misogynistic narration of the hard-boiled lone wolf, even as he tries to convince Laurel that he possesses the sophisticated money “social position” that an Ivy League school bestows.

Class Passer and Serial Killer: Intertwined Criminal Identities

Dix’s class performance is subtle and carefully crafted, but ultimately unsuccessful. Perhaps Laurel is correct in saying of rich people that she can “smell them a mile off” (68), perhaps because she, like Dix, is a social climber, and a more successful one at that. She is certainly more literate in class performances than Dix is, and is a better detective of whether such performances are backed up by bank accounts. Shortly after they meet, Laurel follows Dix into his bedroom and watches him dress for dinner. Laurel notices the tweed jacket he takes from his closet, and comments on it, surprised that Mel would give Dix his best clothes: “He even left you his car. You must have done him a favor once. I never thought he’d give away an old toothpick” (76). This is a key passage,

157 because it is one of the first moments that both Laurel and the reader have enough information to begin suspecting what might really have happened to Mel Terriss, and how Dix is able to dress so well and present himself as high class. In short, it is this moment of Laurel’s recognizing Mel’s jacket on Dix and puzzling over Mel’s simultaneous absence and uncharacteristic generosity that Dix’s bold game of passing and murder starts to show at the seams. Dix’s good clothes, worn to create a fiction of high class, are both the motivation and the evidence of his violent crime.

Whereas in classic hard-boiled crime narratives it is the male protagonist who must unveil the criminality of the femme fatale, or rather, detect the class and criminal secrets concealed by her hyperfeminine and high-class performance, it is up to female characters to be class and criminal detectives of the suavely handsome Dix Steele.

Reliance on attractive appearance is ultimately their undoing. From the start of the novel,

Sylvia stands out as being an astute detective. Dix notices this:

You didn’t fool Sylvia. She burrowed under words, under the way of a face and a smile for the actuality...Sylvia had been burrowing beneath his surface since the night he had come out of the fog into her existence. Irritation heated him. She had no business trying to find an under self in him; she should have taken him as he was taken, an average young fellow, pleasant company… she didn’t like him. He didn’t like her either with her damn prying mind. Her bitching, high-toned mind. (101-102)

While Laurel is immediately attracted to him, and appreciates surfaces in the way he does, Sylvia perceives danger in Dix from the start (in Sylvia’s final encounter with Dix, says that: “From the beginning I knew there was something wrong with you. From the first night you walked into our living room and looked at me, I knew there was something wrong. Something terribly wrong” (220)). In this and other ways, “fiery” and “warm” redheaded Laurel serves as a contrast to “pale” and “cool” blonde-haired Sylvia. The

158 novel could be read as a caution to women to follow Sylvia’s deeper approach to reading men, rather than Laurel’s initial desire for Dix based on surface attraction. Truth as located in that which lies beneath an appealing and misleading surface, rather than truth as located in superficial beauty itself, is what redeems the women in the text and is what saves countless future women from a violent death at Dix’s hands. If the detective can burrow beneath appearance can defeat the homme fatal, then she can uncover and contain the threat of the entitled, duplicitous and handsome class-passing man.

In this sense, Hughes’s novel continues the noir tradition of critiques the ideological underpinnings of the logic of consumer culture. Hughes’s novel articulates a danger in post war consumer culture’s influence on masculinity, specifically on returning veterans like Dix Steele, who embodies both the psychological damage wrought by the war and the threat posed by male identity based upon consumption and a “culture of personality” rather than an older “culture of character” based upon labor. As early as the

1930s, magazines like Esquire claimed that men had better define their masculinity by

“the way in which he wears his dinner suit” and “the tilt at which he sets his hat” rather than his “high ideals” and “long hours of toil” (January 1939, quoted in Pendergast).

Perhaps fittingly, in a last desperate attempt to keep Laurel with him, Dix promises her that he can get a good job in advertising if they move to New York together for her acting career. That the only labor Dix can see himself doing is advertising links him to many other hommes and femmes fatales. Along with Don Draper, Tom Ripley (who at one point pretends to work in advertising), a host of characters in Vera Caspary’s novels, and many others, the sinister class passer is conflated in crime fiction with advertising, class

159 passing, and murder, thereby using the homme fatal as a means of critiquing male violence in an increasingly consumer-oriented social hierarchy.

The Homme Fatal as Illegible Man in The Talented Mr. Ripley

In the second part of this chapter, I consider how In a Lonely Place and The

Talented Mr. Ripley have much in common, particularly in their portrayal of the mysterious and violent homme fatal. However, I read Highsmith as using Tom Ripley’s illegible sexual identity (as opposed to Dix’s active heterosexuality) as a more radical interpretation of the archetype. By linking Tom Ripley to Dix Steele, I frame Tom’s unfixed identity as central to Highsmith’s refiguring of the crime genre to articulate consumer-based masculinity as a site of danger of grand, even philosophical proportions.

Tom Ripley subverts or dissolves boundaries, such as those of the homo/heterosexual divide, upper/middle/lower class lines, distinctions between true and false or artificial and authentic, etc. Blurring of boundaries and persistent illegibility mark Tom as particularly threatening in the context of Cold War political culture and paranoia, a time when a “for us or against us” mentality laid strict boundaries around the “right” kind of heteronormative, “hard” masculinity.

Patricia Highsmith has attracted a rush of scholarly and popular attention in recent years. Two major biographies, a host of articles and book chapters, and a book-length study of her literature since the late 1990s complement several film adaptations of Tom

Ripley novels as well as 2014 adaptations of lesser-known works like The Two Faces of

January (1962) and the lesbian romance The Price of Salt (1952). Highsmith wrote The

Talented Mr. Ripley (the first of a series of novels about the eponymous character) in

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1955 after the smashing success of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950, famously adapted as a film noir by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951). Her penultimate protagonist Tom

Ripley has been interpreted as representing 1950s fears of homosexuality, most notably in Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film adaptation which unambiguously portrays Tom as actively, and even exclusively, homosexual. Highsmith’s novel is far more tangled and uncertain.

Tom is a lower class twenty-five year old scrambling to make a living in New

York City, orphaned at an early age, and resentful of his low class position. He is initially sent to Europe because his onetime acquaintance, the wealthy heir Dickie Greenleaf, is living lazily in Italy and refuses to come home to run the family business. Dickie’s father,

Herbert Greenleaf, asks Tom to go to the village of Mongibello on the Amalfi coast, find

Dickie, and convince him to come home and work hard at the family’s shipbuilding company.70 Instead, Tom and Dickie’s brief friendship suggests a deterioration of both men’s generational line, living leisurely as they do off the income of Dickie’s hard- working father. This seeming deterioration of masculine labor and productivity is paired with both Dickie and Tom’s apparent lack of interest in heteronormative relationships.

Both men have close female friends in whom they claim to have no romantic or sexual interest; thus, they are not producers in the professional or in the domestic sphere.

Tom and Dickie grow close, and Tom covets Dickie’s wealth, his careless and bohemian lifestyle, and his high-quality and fashionable clothing and possessions. When

Dickie grows less enthusiastic about his friendship with Tom, Tom coldly decides to

70 Highsmith loosely based this initial situation on Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903), though much of the novel’s characterization was shaped by Highsmith’s own travels in France and Italy in the spring of 1954.

161 murder Dickie and usurp his identity. The novel follows Tom as he shifts roles (Tom one minute, Dickie the next), enjoys class role-playing, and works to evade detection and punishment by the police or by Dickie’s family and friends (namely, Dickie’s good friend

Marge Sherwood, and Dickie’s father). By writing a number of letters as Dickie, and through excellent identity performance and class passing, Tom manages to escape detection and obtain Dickie’s fortune through a forged will. While his adventures are followed by four more novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley ends with Tom arriving in

Greece, and asking a taxi driver to take him to the best hotel in town (“Il meglio, il meglio!” (290), echoing Dix Steele’s fantasy that with money he will have, and thus be, the best). Despite a lingering paranoia that the law will catch up to him, he evades detection, and his class passing translates to real class transformation and the freedom.

Tom is unique among the criminal passers in midcentury crime narratives, not only because he is never brought to justice, but also because he is a successful passer. He finds real satisfaction in consumption and for the most part is unbothered by the inauthenticity of his violently and deviously acquired class identity. In this sense, Tom is not passing at all. The notion of passing implies a concealed and immutable or self- contained identity. Therefore, to pass is to fail to completely assume or become a new identity. Tom’s character appears to draw from passing narratives like In a Lonely Place, but transcends passing by being so malleable as to become a new class, a new man, a new self. Tom Ripley represents the threat of the de-valuation of the authentic, since he does not privilege authenticity over artificiality. Indeed, in the second of five Ripley novels,71

71 Tom Ripley is the main character in five of Highsmith’s novels (The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991)), collectively called the “Ripliad.”

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Ripley Underground (1970), he prefers a forged painting to an authentic one, and considers forgery to be more impressive because it is not “natural” for the forger to paint like another painter (352, 362). To “become” another person is more admirable and valuable than remaining one’s “natural” self, because it requires more thought, craft, and precision. For Tom Ripley, passing becomes a game of self-transformation that celebrates artificiality and unravels stable knowledge.72 In The Talented Mr. Ripley (as opposed to

In a Lonely Place, Farewell, My Lovely, Laura, Bedelia, I Married a Dead Man, or even

Mad Men), appearances succeed where interiors fail. Tom only finds depth or truth in commodities and performances. In Highsmith’s world, it is excellent taste and the capacity for convincing performance that make class identity and serve as the basis for social mobility. Murder is a consumer tactic, like shopping, in the service of living the good life at the top of the social ladder of taste and sophistication.

In a Lonely Place as Precursor to The Talented Mr. Ripley

Hughes and Highsmith certainly knew of each other. When Hughes was asked to write a blurb on Highsmith’s 1958 novel A Game for the Living, she declined, admitting that “I shall have to confess abjectly that I have an enormous blind spot where Patricia

Highsmith is concerned. I don’t like her writings…” (quoted in Schenkar 344). While there is no particular evidence that Patricia Highsmith was influenced by Hughes’s In a

Lonely Place, the similarities between the two texts are striking, suggesting, to my mind, that Highsmith had read at least part of Hughes’s novel. At the very least, the overlapping characteristics of each text suggest a common set of post-war concerns with the grammar

72 In this way, Tom is similar to the figure of the dandy in nineteenth-century western European and U.S. culture.

163 and trappings of class, anxiety over intersections of masculinity and class, and a sense of pathological violence underpinning lower-class men’s fantasies of social mobility and self-worth. The narratives are not entirely similar, to be sure. Dix is a veteran of war while Tom is not. As previously discussed, Dix seems to be actively heterosexual, even exaggeratedly so (given that he seems to constantly notice and appreciate attractive women, and given that he is a serial rapist of women). Tom on the other hand is not actively sexual, and his sexual orientation is illegible or even non-existent depending on interpretation. While Dix murders his wealthy friend Mel Terriss and takes over his possessions, he does not impersonate or become him as in the case of Tom and his friend

Dickie Greenleaf. Finally, Dix operates in Beverly Hills while Tom operates in Europe, primarily Italy and France.

These differences aside, there are remarkable similarities. For example, both use free indirect style of narration as a way to present a subjective point of view confined to the homme fatal’s unreliable perceptions. Dix and Tom’s biographies also share much in common. Both were orphaned at an early age and raised by a family member whom they despise, and who treat them in a dismissive and emasculating way. As previously discussed, Dix is raised by his uncle Fergus, a man from the working classes who fought his way up the socio-economic ladder with hard work and some luck. Dix despises his uncle, and in particular, he is disgusted by what he perceives as his uncle’s stinginess and lack of high-class tastes. Fergus wants Dix to attend Princeton (at one point, Tom claims to have attended Princeton), but he is unwilling to provide Dix with the money to give him the upper-class identity and lifestyle as fellow young Princeton students. Dix complains:

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When other fellows had cars and clothes and free spending, he had platitudes. It wasn’t that the old skinflint didn’t have it. There was plenty of money for stocks and bonds, real estate. Everything salted away for an old man’s idea about being a solid citizen. You’d think Uncle Fergus would have recognized the need for the things that made living worth living. (111)

Dix considers himself a man destined for an unusual appreciation of the finer things in life, the “things that made living worth living,” such as meals in fine restaurants, excellent clothes, cocktails in posh clubs, and the like. Similarly, Tom despises his aunt

Dottie, who raised him after the death of his parents. When he writes to her from the boat headed to Europe, he tells her that he has accepted an “unexpected business offer” and that “I just wanted you not to worry and not to send me any more cheques, thank you”

(36). He feels triumphant to be free of her, and money, and her tight-fisted condescension:

No more snidely digging letters, the sly comparisons of him to his father, the piddling cheques for the strange sums of six dollars and forty-eight cents …as if she had had a bit left over from her last bill-paying, or taken something back to a store and had tossed the money to him, like a crumb. Considering what Aunt Dottie might have sent him, with her income, the cheques were an insult. (37)

As these similar passages suggest, both men have spent their youths dependent on family members whom they seek to define themselves against and free themselves from. These passages also point to a sense of entitlement in both men, a disgust with what they see as old fashioned or unkind members of the previous generation. Woven into Dix and Tom’s narrative that they fashion for themselves is a sense of victimization that is shaped by a sense of emasculation due to their class position, and their dependence on a reluctant benefactor. Connections between their tortured relationship to these figures and their sense of threatened masculinity is clear in later parts of these same passages. Dix

165 complains that only a man with money, money that Uncle Fergus denied him, is able to take a girl to the dance and buy her dinner later. For both Dix and Tom, the only way to be the “right” kind of man involves a shift in class identity and their ability to convincingly enact a particular class self.

Finally, the texts share a sense of homosocial jealousy that fuels Dix and Tom’s

(violent) misogyny. Dix perceives that Brub’s wife Sylvia does not like him, and that her dislike threatens the two men’s friendship: “He knew it with cold clarity, he’d sensed it from the first moment of the meeting, she didn’t like him. He didn’t like her either with her damn prying mind…Brub was all right; she wasn’t going to spoil Brub with Dix. She wasn’t going to be allowed” (102). This follows Dix’s fantasies of raping and strangling

Sylvia. Similarly, when Tom looks through a window and sees Dickie kissing his friend

Marge’s neck, he runs to Dickie’s bedroom and puts on one of Dickie’s suit. He then enacts a murderous fantasy, where he:

…made a grab in the air as if he were seizing Marge’s throat… until at last he left her limp, on the floor... ‘You know why I had to do that,’ he said, still breathlessly, addressing Marge, though he watched himself in the mirror. ‘You were interfering between Tom and me—No, not that! But there is a bond between us!’ (79)

In the case of these two hommes fatals, part of their deadliness involves a murderous obsession with preserving homosocial relationships at the cost of heterosexual ones. Tom and Dix’s violent misogyny disrupts heteronormativity and domesticity by placing the male-male relationship above all others. Because of the many similarities between Dix

Steele and Tom Ripley, I read both characters as distorted mirror images of one another, constituting different characterizations of the same archetype.

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Sexuality and Dangerous Masculinity: The Case of Tom and Dickie

Unlike In a Lonely Place, The Talented Mr. Ripley can be read as an anti- detective story of Tom’s sexual identity. The anti-detective story, a form often associated with literary postmodernism, offers detective story conventions (a mystery, clues, an investigation by a detective, locked doors, femmes fatales, etc.) without any solution.

Such an open-ended structure renders clues meaningless and nonsensical, and challenges the logic of empiricism upon which the detective narrative is based. In this sense, it is male sexuality itself that partly constitutes the unsolvable mystery of the novel, rather than simply the mystery of Tom’s evil, or his crimes. In line with the structure of the anti- detective story, the text offers a range of clues to Tom’s sexual preferences, but without allowing those clues to form a clear picture of his orientation. For example, a few pages before he murders and becomes Dickie Greenleaf, he looks at Dickie asleep on the train to San Remo, at once attracted to and repelled by his high-class snobbery and homophobia (since Dickie has disdainfully expressed his suspicion of both Tom’s aberrant sexuality and his inability to pay his own way). “A crazy emotion of hate, of affection, of impatience and frustration was swelling in him, hampering his breathing. He wanted to kill Dickie” (100). Passages like this offer the reader a range of (sometimes competing or contradictory) interpretations, opening up the possibility that Tom is sexually or romantically interested in Dickie, but simultaneously suggesting that his interest in Dickie has more to do with class, economics, and consumer desire.

Tom’s illegible sexual identity is mirrored by Dickie Greenleaf’s equally illegible sexual identity. While Dickie and Marge first suspect Tom to be homosexual, Tom denies it, and furthermore, he does not pursue any sexual or romantic relationships with men.

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Dickie also feels the need to declare to Tom that he is also not homosexual, but follows this declaration by denying any interest in Marge. Dickie says: “I haven’t been to bed with her and I don’t intend to, but I do intend to keep her friendship” (82). Thus, both men claim to not be homosexual, but also never explicitly identify themselves as heterosexual. In effect, the absence of visible or declared heterosexuality is enough to make both men seem “queer” again and again in the novel. Indeed, much later in the novel, after Tom has murdered Dickie, passed as him, killed Dickie’s friend Freddie, and then returned to being Tom Ripley, the police ask him about Dickie’s emotional connections to Marge. The police apparently suspect that Dickie (as played by Tom) murdered Freddie as a result of a love triangle with Marge. This is an interpretation that

Tom wishes to foster, in order to deflect suspicion from himself:

He could lead them on indefinitely, Tom thought. Marge would back it up, just by the emotional way she would react to questions about Dickie, and the Italian police could never get to the bottom of Signor Greenleaf’s emotional involvements. He hadn’t been able to himself! (206)

Not Tom, Marge, the police, nor the reader are ever able to “get to the bottom” of

Dickie’s sexuality or “emotional involvements.” Indeed, one of Tom’s talents is his ability to manipulate illegibility to his own advantage, encouraging a particular interpretation of events and people without confirming one single interpretation definitively; that is, he can “lead [people] on indefinitely.” While Dickie does go shopping for a refrigerator with Marge, thereby enacting a heteronormative, domestic activity with her, Dickie claims not to have enacted sexual heteronormativity with Marge.

Thus, even when Tom takes on Dickie’s identity, he is, as Dickie, sexually illegible.73

73 This is quite different than the 1960 and 1999 film adaptations of the novel (René Clément’s Plein Soleil and Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, respectively). In both film versions, Tom and Dickie express

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Rather, Tom takes his pleasure from consumer goods and highbrow works of art, like the man whose identity he usurps.74 Like Don Draper, Dix Steele, and Dickie, it is

Tom’s relationship to consumption that makes him particularly indecipherable. After murdering Dickie, Tom takes a train back to Mongibello.

The white, taut sheets of his berth on the train seemed the most wonderful luxury he had ever known. He caressed them with his hands before he turned the light out…Tom had an ecstatic moment when he thought of all the pleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables, seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure. Then he turned the light out and put his head down and almost at once fell asleep, happy, content, and utterly, utterly confident, as he had never been before in his life. (111-112)

A slippage between his ambiguous class and sexual identities blurs the boundary between his sexual and consumer desire, rendering him threatening not only to the ability of the image or the narrative to render truth, but to the coherence of the homo/heterosexual divide, of heteronormative masculine identity (so politically charged in 1955), and thus to the existence of any stable truth for a detective to detect. Tom’s usurpation of Dickie’s identity is clearly linked to promises made by advertising and consumer culture. Tom feels that his new possessions and his new identity (the two of which are closely linked) allow him to re-invent and improve himself, a common narrative in advertising. Tom lovingly surveys his new commodities as Dickie Greenleaf, including “the old brown grain-leather shoes, the kind advertised in Punch as lasting a life-time, the old mustard- coloured coat sweater with the sagging pockets, they were all his and he loved them all.

sexual desire in some form, not rigidly defining them as heterosexual or homosexual, but at the very least suggesting that both feel sexual desire and are sexually active, and feel the need to declare and perform a particular sexual orientation.

74 Christopher Breu and Elizabeth Hatmaker argue that Tom’s desire “to be the right class of person consuming the right kind of stuff” means that “his desire…can be described as eroto-economic” (23).

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And the black fountain pen with little gold initials. And the wallet, a well-worn alligator wallet from Gucci’s” (126). His desire for Dickie, then, resists clear interpretation, as it mixes class and sexual desires apparently fueled by advertising and brand names that interpolate the male consumer. The erotics of male consumption come dangerously close to homoerotics, making Tom’s unreadable sexual identity closely related to his consumer-based notion of masculine identity.

Tom’s main adversary, and the person who comes closest to detecting his class and criminal duplicity, is Marge. This is quite similar to In a Lonely Place and other crime narratives that feature the deadly male, where a female detective (amateur or official) must uncover the secrets of the homme fatal. After Dickie’s murder, Tom begins to write letters as Dickie, primarily to convince Marge that Dickie is alive and well, albeit different, since he has now decided to reject of her friendship and live alone in Rome.

Reporting that he will be spending a little more time with Tom in Rome, Marge writes

Dickie to warn him about Tom. She first addresses Tom’s sexuality, complaining “All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, which is even worse. He isn’t normal enough to have any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean” (123). Tom is not “normal enough” to have a sexual identity, to be marked or categorized, which is “worse” and even more abnormal than being queer. Furthermore, he has a negative effect on Dickie.

Marge writes:

I don’t say that Tom is going to do anything actively bad to you, but I know that he has a subtly bad influence on you. You act vaguely ashamed of being around him when you are around him, do you know that? Did you ever try to analyze it? … He’ll never help you or anybody else to get straightened out about anything. In fact it’s greatly to his interest to keep you muddled and string you along and your father too. (123, emphasis mine)

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This tone of this letter, especially the notion of Dickie acting “vaguely ashamed” with

Tom and Tom’s being a “bad influence” that will “muddle” the Greenleaf family, leaves itself open to a range of analyses. She could be alluding to the shame of sexually perverse desire, and the “muddling” influence of Tom may be that of luring Dickie off the straight and narrow path of heteronormative sexual orientation. Since Tom at one point tries to convince Dickie to join him in a drug-smuggling operation, she may also be alluding to

Tom’s criminal bent, which she may see as attracting Dickie but also making him feel

“muddled” and as low-class as a common criminal. Juxtaposition with the phrase “string along” also implies that she joins the idea of being “muddled” with that of an exploitative economic relationship; Dickie’s shame could also be connected to his being taken advantage of by Tom, or feeling used, or giving in to irresponsible consumer desires as

Tom does.

The ambiguity itself shows Marge to be astute— whatever the nature of Dickie’s

“ashamed” and “muddled” reaction to Tom, those very aspects of their relationship suggest that Tom is a homme fatal for Dickie, representing destructive desires, whether sexual, extralegal, or economic, that blur boundaries and ultimately lead to his death at

Tom’s hands. Tom brings out Dickie’s shameful wishes, his self-destructiveness, and his anxiety concerning the borders of supposedly stable identity, even though the specific nature of these wishes, anxieties, and borders is nebulous. Dickie and Marge read Tom’s

“muddling” and shameful influence as queer, precisely because he is ambiguously evil or perverse. The “queerness” that Dickie and Marge read as sexual perversity suggests the conflation of economic and sexual perversity, so that a class passer obsessed with

171 consumption and commodities above all else ceases to be legible in conventionally masculine ways. Thus, as in many noir texts before Ripley, Tom is coded as queer not only because of his potential homosexuality, but also because of his perverse and emasculating devotion to fashion, taste, and high-class refinement, along with his preference for style over substance. Indeed, Tom keeps every character in the novel muddled, from start to finish; that, along with his real satisfaction in material wealth and high-class taste and style, is his ultimate “talent” referred to in the title. But unlike In a

Lonely Place’s Sylvia Nicolai, who can penetrate surfaces and read interiors, Marge is unable to read Tom and ultimately remains as muddled as Dickie was, unable to

“straighten out” the tangle Tom invents as he joins fact and fiction to author his own version of truth.

The Homme Fatal as Ultimate Author

After Tom murders Dickie, the novel swiftly becomes about reading and writing, both literally and metaphorically. Highsmith’s prose itself slips in and out of Tom’s complex intertwining of the version of reality and identity he is authoring, and the version of reality and identity that exists beyond his authorship. Aiding this process, in both In a Lonely Place and The Talented Mr. Ripley, is Hughes and Highsmith’s similar use of free indirect style, as I have already mentioned. While Hughes uses this technique for the dual purpose of casting subjective doubt over the narration and creating a sense of entrapment inside Dix’s unstable mind, Highsmith subverts stable narration and stable identity, so that slippages from truth to fiction reflect Tom’s ability to use storytelling to remove the boundary between self and other, real and invented, authenticity and passing.

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For example, the narrative follows Tom’s letters to Marge and the slippage between his and Dickie’s fictive and real identities.

On the tenth of January Tom wrote Marge that he was back in Rome after three weeks in Paris alone, that Tom had left Rome a month ago, saying he was going up to Paris, and from there to America though he hadn’t run into Tom in Paris, and that he had not yet found an apartment in Rome but he was looking and would let her know his address as soon as he had one. (132)

While the subject of the sentence is Tom at first, the subject shifts to Dickie discussing

Tom as an object, so that the “he” of the sentence could be read as both Dickie and Tom.

This slippage on the level of sentence structure mirrors both the confusion of Tom and

Dickie’s identities, and the conflation of truth and fiction in the fabric of the narrative.

Tom slips in and out of being Dickie, and fiction slips into truth within the space of a clause, so that the text itself is complicit in Tom’s invention and authorship. Tom explains why he is so adept at deception and thus at authoring alternative narratives of reality: “His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them” (253). His false account of Tom’s whereabouts at one point is “So simple it bored him- it was the truth” (253), because he has transformed lie into truth through his own ability to write reality. This again aligns him with Dix, who, as we see in

Hughes’s complex narration, slips between acknowledging the falsity of the lies he tells, and treating those lies as truths. For example, at one point Dix indignantly protests to himself that Sylvia has “no business” suspecting him of the murders he has committed, and even in his mind reacts as if he were innocent, even though he is exceedingly guilty and has seriously contemplated killing her. Similar to Tom’s attempts to re-write the truth of his crimes and his original class identity, Dix uses the pretense of writing a detective

173 novel in order to influence Brub’s interpretation of the clues, and to effectively author, for Brub and for himself, a false narrative of the crimes and their culprit. Indeed, Dix’s claims of authoring a detective novel also serve as an alibi, since Dix claims to have been writing during the time that he was in fact committing a murder (174).

The primary cat-and-mouse subterfuge in The Talented Mr. Ripley becomes that of Marge as author/detective (after all, she comes close to uncovering the truth of

Dickie’s death, and she is writing a book about her life in the village of Mongibello) versus Tom as author/detective, with Tom ultimately proving himself the more adept reader of character (he can “read” Marge easily by the end of the novel) and the more talented author of believable storylines. Tom dismisses Marge’s authenticity or quality as a writer, saying the book she is writing about Mongibello “must stink… He had known writers. You didn’t write a book with your little finger, lolling on a beach half the day, wondering what to eat for dinner” (96). He also dismisses Marge as lacking upper class identity or taste; apparently part and parcel of his disdain for Marge, Tom views her as low class and incapable of performing a higher class. Tom finds Marge’s “speech” to be

“abominable, both her choice of words and her pronunciation,” and he scoffs at a photo of her childhood home in Ohio, “just a plain clapboard house” (70). She is part of “the class of people he despised” (247). Thus, she fails in both convincing authorship and convincing class performance, two things that Tom values above authenticity or truth.

In contrast to Marge, Tom demonstrates his parallel talents for authorship and perfectly tuned class performance late in the novel, when he decorates his new Venetian bachelor pad with impeccable taste (214). He then sits down to write an “inspired letter” as Tom to his Aunt Dottie, and then composes Dickie’s will, whose signature he forges,

174 leaving all Dickie’s money to Tom Ripley (215). Tom’s quality of taste and the quality of his lies, both crucial talents for the class-passing murderer, prevent Marge from reading him accurately. Indeed, his penchant for a high-class lifestyle seems to seduce Marge

(that is, his finery seduces her as a consumer) and thus obscures the dark truth of his new class position. The class passing homme fatal is victorious, and even the astute and suspicious Marge cannot detect or read beneath his high-class surface, if indeed, there is any “truth” to read beyond that surface.

Conclusion

The figure of the postwar homme fatal as class passing consumer and murderer illustrates crime fiction’s consistent, and even innovative and experimental, engagement with the influence of consumer culture on gendered identity. The contemporary popularity of Mad Men’s Don Draper, the videogame L.A. Noire, and films like L.A.

Confidential, among a host of other popular examples, suggests an enduring cultural investment in various iterations of the homme fatal specifically in the context of the two decades following World War II. Even in contemporary examples (Bret Easton Ellis’s

1991 novel American Psycho, the 2000 film adaptation, and a 2014 musical theater adaptation currently in production) American popular culture cannot seem to shake the haunting links between consumer-oriented masculinity, a compulsion to perform high- classness, and the disturbing potential for masculine violence. I suggest that the unease associated with this figure is part of a tradition of female authors of crime narratives who, responding to a classist patriarchal world of white male entitlement, offered a complex popular critique of consumer culture’s influence on masculinity. Indeed, as Highsmith’s

175 work suggests, such cultural priorities produce class passers so adept at creating truth through performance that identity itself becomes a matter of shopping, grooming, and surfaces, as well a murder here and there.

Chapter Four

“Economically Queer”: Class and Gender Passing as Anti-Racist Resistance in

Chester Himes’s All Shot Up (1960)

In Chapter Three, I explored the connection between class passing and unfixed sexual identity in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). I interpreted

Highsmith’s protagonist and murderous class passer Tom Ripley as a homme fatal or deadly male not only because of his violent tendencies, but also because of his intertwined ability to resist definite class and sexual identity. Hommes fatals in a range of texts are rendered illegible and thus dangerous by their (class) identity performance as extreme and savvy consumers (rather than as producers, the more economic role more commonly associated with men). In this chapter, I expand on my discussion of intersecting sexuality and class performance in an analysis of Chester Himes’s series of

Harlem crime novels, the first such series by an African American specifically within the noir and hard-boiled tradition.

Highsmith and Himes are similar in the ways they cross genre boundaries, play with crime narrative conventions, and employ passers in their works, and the connections between them have yet to be substantively explored. Both authors became expatriates who ultimately made their homes in Europe (Highsmith lived in France and England before she settled in Switzerland, while Himes lived and wrote in Paris for about fifteen years before he made his home in Spain). Both were critical of their home country and felt more at ease abroad or on the road. They traveled in similar intellectual and professional circles, sharing literary agents, editors, and publishers. They even met at

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Yaddo writers’ colony in 1948 (their rooms were on the same hall- Himes made a pass at

Highsmith, but she was not at all receptive) and exchanged letters well into the 1970s.

Perhaps most important for the study of passing in crime narratives, they are strikingly similar in the sense that questions of gender and sexuality underlie their intense preoccupation with unstable class identity.

Himes’s portrayals of class and gender performance expose the links among heteronormativity, consumer capitalism, and white supremacy. In his crime novels, he imagines a space for intersecting forms of resistance to intersecting forms of oppression. I argue that similar to Highsmith, Himes imagines class, gender, and sexual orientation passers who are economically queer, that is, who prefer confidence-games to legitimate forms of production and wage-earning just as they prefer extramarital, same-sex, or cross-class sexual relationships rather than heteronormative, monogamous, and legally sanctioned sexual relationships.75 First, I will explain what I mean by “economically queer.” In the critical framework of queer theory, “queer” refers not simply, or not exclusively, to homosexual orientation. The fluidity of the term mirrors the field’s interest in destabilizing identity categories themselves; queer theorists seek to question a range of supposedly inherent identities, so that queerness can refer to fluidity of identity generally and it can also refer to sexual identity specifically. Queerness denotes ambiguity. Still another definition of the term queer is that which “is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (David Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62). Economic normativity in the context of Himes’s novels (and beyond) would denote legitimate

75 Unlike Highsmith’s passer Tom Ripley, who has the privilege of whiteness and the kinds of social and spatial mobility that entails, for characters in Himes’s crime novels there is no question of legitimate rise into the upper classes or even non-criminal means of self-invention. Their race all but precludes any avenue of legal or socially sanctioned socioeconomic mobility.

178 economic exchange, capitalist productivity, and the social constructs associated with such forms of exchange (heteronormative patriarchy, as well as racial hierarchy, for example, as I will soon illustrate). Himes’s economically queer class passers position themselves

“at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” illustrating the ways in which various normative identity categories are intertwined with normative, or “legitimate,” economic structures.

Himes links unstable class identity with unfixed sexuality, using class passing in the service of “queering” identity in a post-World War II consumer capitalist framework.

It is through this “queering” of identity, or rendering it ambiguous, that class and gender passers manage to resist the hierarchies that would confine them. Himes portrays myriad passers, cross-dressers, drag kings, drag queens, and confidence men and women who challenge fixed notions of identity as a way to challenge liberal narratives of racial uplift.

Himes’s crime novels have sometimes been accused of reductive and humorously demeaning portrayals of African Americans, and especially of queer African American cross-dressers. However, I contend that it is the straight characters or “squares” (as

Himes calls them) of his novels, that is, those heteronormative characters that play by the rules, adhere to stable identity categories, strive for economic normativity, and believe that appearance conveys truth, that are rendered fools and suckers. “Squares” are victims of the broader American confidence game of consumer capitalist ideology based upon racial hierarchy and heteronormativity, whereas economically queer passers stand as an alternative model of identity fluidity. Such an emphasis on passing, identity instability, and the break between appearance and truth foreshadows the decidedly postmodern turn in neo-noir crime fiction and film in the latter part of the twentieth century, up until the

179 present moment.76 Finally, Himes’s emphasis on queer passers as the primary sites of, and hopes for, radical resistance in his crime novels suggest a shift away from the genre’s traditional hero, that is, the heteronormative working-class detective. Thus, Himes’s work illustrates an important new direction in the American crime novel, especially compared to the hard-boiled novels I examined at the start of this dissertation.

Highlighting the similarities between Highsmith and Himes as I do works against the usual ways in which Himes has been approached by scholars. Whereas criticism on

Highsmith’s novels tends to focus on questions of gender and sexuality, Himes tends to be classified as either an author of racial protest fiction, or an author of hard-boiled crime fiction that introduced the genre in an African American context. Thus, attention to

Himes’s work tends to focus on the issue of race often to the exclusion of other dimensions of his writing.77 The emergence of queer of color critique, a theoretical field that insists on treating identity categories as unstable and intertwined rather than discrete and self-contained, has yet to frame a study of Himes’s crime fiction. In this chapter, then, I do the long overdue work of examining the prevalence of class and gender passing along with issues of racial identity in Himes’s later work.

Himes is certainly not the first African American author to write crime and detective fiction. Pauline Hopkins’s “Talma Gordon” (1900) is widely regarded as the first story featuring a black detective, and Rudolph Fisher’s novel The Conjure-Man Dies

76 For postmodern crime narratives since Himes’s All Shot Up (1960), See Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1987), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000), David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive (2001), and the HBO series True Detective (2014), among many, many others.

77 This stands in contrast to Highsmith’s work, since she rarely featured non-white characters (a fortunate omission in her work, given her prejudice against African Americans).

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(1932) is an novel about black criminals and detectives that proved an early blueprint for writers later in the century. However, since Himes began writing crime stories as early as the 1930s, and because unlike Fisher he was directly influenced by hard-boiled and noir authors (he read Black Mask while he was in prison in the 1920s), it is fair to say that as perhaps the earliest African American author writing in the vein of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, he has had a tremendous impact on contemporary noir African American crime writers, particularly Walter Mosley.78 Indeed, according to Daylanne K. English, much contemporary black crime fiction is set in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s (when Himes was most prolific) in part as a way for authors like Mosley “to comment on a distinct lack of progress regarding race within legal, penal, and judicial systems in the U.S.” (773-774).

But few contemporary black crime authors, and certainly even fewer in the 1960s, included such radically affirming portrayals of queer characters as did Himes.

African American Cross-Dressing in Literature and Culture

My emphasis on intersectional identity passing in Himes’s crime novels explores how control of marginal populations hinges on fixed identity, and how cross-dressing has radical potential for destabilizing the logic of identity hierarchy by de-essentializing identity itself. As Marjorie Garber argues in her Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and

Cultural Anxiety (1993), accepting one’s socially bestowed identity at face value implies accepting one’s place in a hierarchy predicated upon stratified identity categories (22).

The cross-dresser, then, serves as a catalyst for “category crisis” (16). Transvestitism, as

78 Incidentally, Mosley’s most famous novel and the first in a series to feature his detective Easy Rawlins, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), takes place in the era of noir (1948) and features a gorgeous blonde femme fatale who turns out to be both a racial and class passer.

181 she defines it broadly, “is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself” (16-17).79 Roderick Ferguson and Jodi Melamed, among others working in critical race theory and queer of color critique, argue that midcentury liberal ideology operated according a masternarrative wherein African Americans could fully become and equal citizens only by assimilating to gender, sexual, and class normativity as dictated by white society. Enacting the “right” gender and sexuality, conflated with practicing the “right” kind of economic exchange and production, were preconditions for achieving middle-class normativity and thus racial uplift. As Ferguson argues:

…the distinction between normative heterosexuality (as the evidence of progress and development) and non-normative gender and sexual practices and identities (as the woeful signs of social lag and dysfunction) has emerged historically from the field of racialized discourse. Put plainly, racialization has helped to articulate heteropatriarchy as universal. (5)

He contends that blackness and non-normative sexuality have long been constructed as standing in opposition to healthy capitalist and liberal “progress,” a progress coded as heterosexual and white. By unraveling the logic of identity coherence, Himes undermines the logic of racial, gender, and class hierarchies that entrap himself as an African-

American novelist in a white-dominated literary marketplace, and entrap his characters in

Harlem’s criminal underclass.

While Garber, Ferguson, Judith Butler, and others argue for the subversive potential of cross-dressing generally, the tradition of African American male to female gender cross-dressing and drag in literature and popular culture has long tended to be

79 As this quote makes clear, Garber and other scholars of cross-dressing and drag focus on gender and sexuality, while the majority of scholarship on passing focuses on race. Both fields of inquiry tend not to examine class cross-dressing or passing, an oversight that this project addresses.

182 reductive, at once de-sexualizing and hypersexualizing the black male. In part originating in nineteenth-century blackface performance and vaudeville, the black man in drag can represent “A painfully familiar stereotype—that of the feminized black man, disempowered and made ridiculous, the object of the (white majority) gaze” (Garber

269). Himes fluctuates between humiliating and empowering portrayals of class and gender passers, ultimately turning this degrading tradition of parodic black cross-dressers on its head; he carves out a place for queer black subjects and communities through a fraught balance of parody and serious representation. As I have already suggested, he does this by making “squares” the butt of the joke rather than queer characters that crisscross the borders of intersecting gender, sexual, racial, and class identity. The term also describes characters that are what they appear to be and enact proscribed gender, heteronormative, and class identities, and do not engage in criminal activity. This multifaceted use of the term “square” as Himes uses it in his work suggests the conflation of criminality, queerness, passing, and illegitimate economic activity as opposed the conflation of legality, heterosexuality, sincerity, and above-board capitalist transactions.

Chester Himes: From Convict to Author

Chester Himes (1909-1984) grew up in Ohio, where he attended Ohio State

University, that is, until his many criminal activities caught up with him and he was arrested for armed robbery in 1927. He spent seven years in prison, and then spent most of the late 1930s and 1940s working blue-collar jobs, trying to make a career for himself as an author. He left the United States for Paris in 1953, frustrated with his inability to sell his literary protest novels in his home country. Once in Paris he met Marcel

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Duhamel, the editor of Gallimard publishing house’s crime series, the relatively new

Série Noire. According to Himes in a December 16, 1954 letter to his friend Carl Van

Vechten, Duhamel first asked “how I was fixed for money. I told him I was broke.”

Duhamel suggested that Himes write a novel for the series, which featured French translations of hard-boiled and noir American crime fiction, and French crime authors writing in the American vein. Himes outlined a plot about a black piano player working in Paris, but editors at the Série Noire did not like his first attempt. Like Himes’s editors in the United States, they found his work too intellectual to match reader expectations about black literature. In the same letter to Van Vechten, Himes explained editors’ specific requests for the novel.

I had my piano player improvising on Chopin—they crossed that out. I had another Negro exGI who ran a restaurant getting married to a French woman so he could stay in business (a true story)—they ruled that out. It came out slowly that they wanted this Negro to be a clown. So they decided to drop the idea and then wanted me to write a Harlem story— “put plenty comedy in it, not too much white brutality, in fact there didn’t need to be any white people in it, just an action-packed funny story about Harlem.”

Disgusted by this request but broke and desperate, Himes took Duhamel’s advice, and his first attempt at a Harlem crime novel (A Rage in Harlem, published in 1957 and featuring a ridiculous square who is cheated out of all his money, a black male heroine addict passing as a nun, and a cheap confidence man passing as a millionaire gold miner) made him a celebrity in France. He went on to write ten crime novels set in Harlem, nine of them featuring his trademark NYPD detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones.

Unlike his naturalistic protest novels written in the 1940s and early 1950s, which were labors of love (or rather labors of passionate anger) that took him years to write, he

184 approached most of his late 1950s and 1960s crime novels as commodities to be quickly produced.80

Many contemporary American and French scholars view these crime novels as

Himes’s vindication, since they brought him the recognition and income he felt his writing deserved, and because the novels were the first successful series of African

American crime novels in the hard-boiled, noir tradition. Sean McCann calls the series “a remarkable, and unclassifiable, literary achievement… easily the most significant innovation in the postwar American crime novel and the last serious attempt to use the form as an effort to split the difference between popular literacy and literary expertise”

(252). McCann goes further, arguing that until Himes turned to crime fiction, he was a

“second-rank novelist” whose “early novels tended to spill into lugubrious tirades of self- justification. But the built-in limits of the detective novel dispensed with those flaws”

(252). Jonathan P. Eburne claims that Himes’s use of humor in his Harlem crime fiction makes it more subversive and innovative than his earlier works, the latter of which he sees as adhering to a black naturalistic literary tradition represented by Richard Wright

(807). However, for many critics of Himes’s own era, the comedic aspects of violence, cross-dressing, and borderline racial caricature in his Harlem crime novels served as simplistic parodies of black urban life, pandering to French stereotypes about exotic and perverse African American urban culture. Van Vechten expressed his disdain for Himes’s

Série Noire novels in a May 30, 1964 letter: “I was enchanted with your letter in which you outline your plans for your new book and say you will start on it immediately. We

80 In a 1963 interview, Marvin Van Peebles asked Himes how he wrote his crime stories. Himes replied that since his contract required books of about 220 pages, he stacked 220 pages next to his typewriter, and when the stack began to get small, he would start to wrap up the plot (Introduction, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, 14).

185 need a long serious book from you … to make one forget the funny detective stories, very good in their way, but you have a better way.” Moreover, the majority of Himes’s audience was white and French; unlike somewhat contemporaneous African American pulp authors like Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, who wrote primarily for a black audience, Himes was commonly seen in his lifetime, often detrimentally, as the white

European’s black author.

I interrogate the tension of these two interpretations, arguing that while they are not necessarily mutually exclusive (much like the passer’s multiple identities are not mutually exclusive—the passer can be high and low class, masculine and feminine, rather than either/or), the two points of view suggest how Himes’s work navigates expectations for African American authorship and artistic identity in a racially hierarchal consumer culture. Just as demeaning and affirming portrayals of cross-dressers function on two levels at once, a complex, literary, and radical novel can “pass” for simple, trashy, and mainstream, or vice-versa. The notion of “both” rather than “or” renders the idea of

“true” identity simplistic and even nonsensical, especially in Himes’s works since he was adept at creating texts, and characters, that could be read on multiple levels. This issue of conservative and mainstream or radical and complex, so prevalent in Himes’s critical reception, comes up with striking frequency in cross-dressing and passing narratives.81

Take, for example, Garber’s discussion of the 1982 gender passing film Tootsie:

The either-or spirit of a certain critical response to Tootsie (good for women; bad for women) has been accompanied by a certain tendency toward dismissiveness: the film, say detractors, is slick, mainstream, unthreatening, not really a critique of gender roles, opportunistic and

81 This “subversive or conservative,” “literary or mainstream” either/or formulation also structures much criticism on crime and detective fiction.

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exploitative, a cop-out. It is also, to my mind, a very good film, even richer in detail on reviewing that it is the first few times around. If it is not a critique of gender roles, that may be because it is a critique of gender itself as a category. And if it is slick, unthreatening, mainsteam, etc., that may be because Tootsie… successfully passes, and, in passing, has both its secret pleasure and its cultural effect. (9)

Cross-dressing with the goal of passing challenges rigidly binary modes of analysis and criticism, which is also my goal in this chapter and indeed this dissertation. While the arguments I develop about intersectional gender, sexuality, class, and racial passing emphasize the subversive potential of Himes’s Harlem crime stories, readers and scholars of his Série Noire novels must not lose sight of publication context and Himes’s very real financial need to meet French audiences’ expectations and consumer desires.

All Shot Up (1960)

All Shot Up was Himes’s fifth Harlem crime novel written for Gallimard’s Série

Noire, at the peak of a period of remarkable productivity.82 The book begins with a

“square” or straight sailor named Roman Hill and his girlfriend Sassafras Jenkins purchasing a gold Cadillac for a good (perhaps too good to be true) price. Although the car is worth roughly $8,000, a shady and flamboyantly queer car salesman named Mr.

Baron sells it to Roman for $6,500. Roman, Sassafras, and Mr. Baron take the newly purchased car for a quick drive late on the cold night of Groundhog Day in Harlem, joyriding until they accidentally hit an old woman who walks into the car’s path. Fearful of arrest (since the car is not yet in Roman’s name, and he has not yet purchased

82 As previously stated, Himes wrote his first crime novel, A Rage in Harlem, in 1957, won France’s Grand Prix de Literature Policière (the prize for the year’s best crime novel). He followed that success with The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959), and The Big Gold Dream (1960), before All Shot Up was written and published (1960). He even published one more crime novel in 1960, Run Man Run.

187 insurance) they drive on. They are pulled over by three policemen and arrested for the hit and run, but in fact the policemen are criminals masquerading as cops. They steal

Roman’s gold Cadillac and all the money he paid to Mr. Baron for the car.

Like these “policemen,” little in this opening scene is what it seems. Later in the novel we learn that Mr. Baron engineered the hit and run by using his friend Black

Beauty, a glamorous female impersonator, to play the old woman, who actually simulated being hit and injured by the gold Cadillac. Mr. Baron planned to con Roman out of the

Cadillac by framing him for a supposed hit and run and compelling him to leave town, but instead the three false cops (who are not part of Mr. Baron’s plan) really do hit and kill Black Beauty with their car before robbing Mr. Baron and Roman. Finally, as I will discuss later at length, Mr. Baron turns out to be the drag king alter ego for another character named Leila Holmes, a socialite and high-profile politician’s wife. One complex confidence game perpetrated by passers and targeting squares is superseded by yet another confidence game.

Two black police detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones (Himes’s heroes throughout his series of crime novels) find out that the three false cops are also responsible for knocking out and stealing campaign donations from Harlem’s most powerful and beloved black politician, Casper Holmes. Casper is injured by the robbery, but not killed. The two detectives search for the mysterious Mr. Baron and for some clue to the “cops’” identity, but all they find is Roman and his girlfriend Sassafras. They have no information about the three false cops; neither does Casper’s exquisite and high-class wife, Leila Holmes. It gradually becomes clear to Grave Digger and Coffin Ed that the powerful Casper is more duplicitous and greedy, and indeed more queer, than he appears.

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In fact, it was with the help of his boyfriend Snake Hips that Casper engineered the

“robbery” so he could pocket the campaign funds. But Casper is in over his head, and the three false cops (whom he hired to feign the theft of the campaign funds) kidnap him and try to get the money for themselves. Only by solving the mystery of the identity of Mr.

Baron can the detectives find Casper and his kidnappers; Mr. Baron is in fact the cross- dressing alter ego of Casper’s beautiful wife, Leila. The story climaxes in a shoot-out where Leila is stabbed, perhaps fatally, and the detectives find where Casper has hidden the stolen campaign funds. They donate the stolen money to a local charity, but Casper gets away with his crimes and continues to be Harlem’s political hero. Perhaps most troubling, no one is ever able to satisfyingly solve the mystery of why the powerful and stunning Mrs. Leila Holmes cross-dressed as the queer, male, and petty thief Mr. Baron.

As this summary of the labyrinthine novel suggests, the break between surface and depth that the many instances of passing create function to unravel any sense of logic, order, or meaning on the level of plot as well as on the level of detection.83

Gold Cadillacs, Young Grandmas, and Girl-Boys

The novel’s opening episode of the gold Cadillac involved in a false hit-and-run before being stolen by false cops is narrated through the perspective of the only bystander, a tire thief. As he works in the cold night to steal a tire from a parked car, he sees a series of spectacles, each of which demonstrate a disjunction between appearance and reality, exterior and interior. Himes’s prose emphasizes the unreliability of the visual

83 A labyrinthine plotline is common in noir crime narratives, and especially in more postmodern neo-noir texts; see especially Joel and Ethan Cohen’s film The Big Lebowski (1998) for an example of a farcical yet serious and often nonsensically complex neo-noir plotline that evokes Himes’s work.

189 to express truth. According to the tire thief (whose name we never learn), the Cadillac

“looked as though it were made of solid gold” (6, emphasis mine). What something looks like is not the same as what it really is— this phrase suggests the break between surface

(“looked as though”) and depth (“solid gold”). The tire thief sees three people in the car, one of who, Mr. Baron, is revealed much later in the novel to be the high-class Leila

Holmes. The car painted to look like “solid gold,” carrying a female socialite dressed as a small-time gay con man, then hits an poor old woman who is neither poor, nor old, nor a woman, and the passengers of the gold Cadillac are conned out of the car and their money by criminal out-of-towners impersonating local cops. Those who take image to be truth are suckers, and there are only surfaces that look too good to be true and do not correspond to substance. For both the reader and the NYPD in the novel, even a multilayered process of detection cannot completely “straighten” out this scene and locate stable truth.

Even on the level of narration, we see that detection is useless in a world rendered absurd by cross-dressers and confidence men who sever the link between surface and depth.84 The tire thief thinks to himself “He hadn’t seen the Cadillac actually run over the old woman. But there she lay and there it went. So it must have run over her. It made sense” (6). But in the context of Himes’s Harlem, the search for what “makes sense” based upon empirical evidence can only lead to nonsense.85 This becomes even clearer as

84 Of course, cross-dressing in Himes’s work is not only about the relationship between surface and depth; it constitutes a much more meaningful act, a protest against the intertwined normative gender, racial, and class identities that according to liberal ideology are the only “right” path to racial equality, as I will discuss at length later in the chapter.

85 As I will discuss later, examples include Roman’s naiveté when he is rendered a fool by believing the “cops” who steal his car, and Coffin Ed and Grave Digger’s absurd search for Mr. Baron in the gay community when he is in fact Leila Holmes. In Himes’s first crime novel, the protagonist, a hard-working

190 the tire thief’s narration progresses. After the gold Cadillac hits what is apparently an old woman, the tire thief sees her begin to get up, seemingly unhurt. When a black Buick carrying the three criminals passing for policemen screams around the corner, violently hits the old woman, and drives on, all sense is lost. The tire thief “was not naïve about the grisly jokes of death. But what he saw now scrambled his brains” (10). The unexpected contradiction of policemen committing the crime of a brutal hit and run functions to

“scramble” rationality and to sabotage meaningful detection. The tire thief begins to doubt any sense of reality or identity. “‘Either I ain’t me or what I see ain’t that…Haw haw haw.’ He laughed and then began talking to himself. ‘Whatever it is I is dreaming, one thing is for sure—ain’t none of it true’” (15). The outrageous fakeness of the car that

“looks like…solid gold,” and the reversals that Mr. Baron and the fake cops’ masquerades make possible, cause the spectator to lose his own sense of certain identity and to question the truth of what he sees with his own eyes.

This pattern of disconnection between appearance and substance, a disconnection that troubles the notion of stable truth itself, is further articulated in terms of queer of color identities and gender and class passing. When Coffin Ed, Grave Digger Jones, the

NYPD medical examiner, and a handful of other detectives come to the scene of the hit and run, they find the (false) “old woman” hit by the (false) “cops.” As a result of the car’s impact, the body is grotesquely and almost cartoonishly wedged against the wall of a convent.

The corpse was flattened against the wall in an upright position, with its arms hanging straight down and its feet raised several inches from the

square named Jackson, is made a fool by trusting his girlfriend Imabelle and by believing outlandish stories about a chest full of gold (it proves to be fool’s gold, and metaphorically, so does Imabelle).

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pavement. It was entirely covered, except for the head, by a long, black, shapeless coat, threadbare and slightly greenish, with a moth-eaten, rabbit- fur collar. The hands were encased in black, knitted mittens; the feet in old-fashioned, high-buttoned shoes that had recently been cleaned with liquid polish. The face seemed to be buried in the solid concrete, so that only the back of the head was visible. Glossy waves of black, oily hair gleamed in the dim light…“Anyway, she’s no grandma,” Grave Digger said. “Her hair looks like a job from the Rose Meta beauty parlors.” (40- 41)

The corpse’s class is marked by its clothing. A “shapeless,” “threadbare,” and “moth- eaten” coat classes her as common and poor, and she appears as “old-fashioned” and out of style as her shoes. But her advanced age and her low class are both contradicted by her hair, since it is “black” and in “glossy waves” marking her as young and stylish. Grave

Digger’s comment that it appears to have been “a job from the Rose Meta beauty parlors” adds a further class inconsistency, since this particular line of beauty parlors was famous for being high-class and in-vogue, and frequented by stars and socialites (Walker 60-

61).86 Another homicide detective finds a “cheap wig of gray hair, fashioned in a bun at the back” in the street, completing this picture of low-class and old-fashioned drabness contradicting and concealing youth, glamour, and high-classness.

When they dislodge the body from the wall, they see a horribly bloodied face.

Upon removing the “shapeless” and “threadbare” coat, they reveal a sexy woman in her mid-twenties wearing a black cocktail dress and silk stockings. The horrible disfigurement of her face jars with her beautifully shaped body. “That’s death for you,”

86 The high-class marker of the corpse’s hair in “glossy waves” made that way at a “Rose Meta Beauty Parlor” also indicates the intersection of racial and class identity performance; in the 1950s and 60s, as now, ideals of African American beauty often emphasize hair that is ironed straight or in waves, that is, hair that is manipulated to appear more like hairstyles and hair consistency of that of white people. For Black Beauty’s hair to be in “glossy waves” suggests a concurrent emulation of whiteness and high-classness, which perhaps stands as a contradiction to her the otherwise subversive claim to black pride (which her name denotes).

192 the medical examiner says. “She was probably a goodlooking woman” (45). Despite her bloodied face and the fact that she is a corpse, the body and its clothing are nevertheless erotically charged; as they begin to undress her to determine the cause of death, the scene becomes a grotesque strip-tease.

Doc [the medical examiner] cut open the thick black dress with a pair of shears. Underneath she wore only a black uplift bra and lace-trimmed nylon panties. Her limbs were smooth, and well-rounded, but muscular. Falsies came off with the bra, revealing a smooth, flat, mannish chest. Underneath the nylon panties was a heavily padded, yellow satin loincloth… [they] didn’t get it until the loincloth had been cut and stripped from the hard narrow hips. “Well, I’ll be God-damned!” the Homicide lieutenant exclaimed. “She’s a man!” (45)

The stripe-tease element of the examination shifts from a heterosexual one, where straight men undress and admire a “goodlooking woman” (albeit a corpse), to a homosexual one, where straight or “square” policemen are unexpectedly queered by the final phase of the strip tease.

This conflation of gender and class passing is potentially a strategy of radical antiracism. Rather than casting queer cross-dressers as “clowns” or fools, Himes uses queer identity performance as a way to articulate Black resistance to white supremacist heteropatriarchy and to capitalist ideals. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed learn that the corpse was named Black Beauty, a small-stakes pimp, drag queen, and confidence (wo)men.

They only later learn that Black Beauty’s “straight moniker” (as Grave Digger calls it

(48)) is Junior Ball, who is the cousin of Casper’s elegant wife Leila Holmes. In other words, Black Beauty is Junior Ball’s name for himself when he is engaged in gender and class cross-dressing, and it is also his name for his criminal and economically queer alter ego. “Black Beauty” is more than his stage name (a term applied to drag queens), since

193 he uses the name on the streets and in his double life rather than specifically as a performer in an official venue; it might more accurately be termed his underworld name conflated with his “drag name.” Himes’s Harlem characters all have nicknames or underworld names to denote multiple identities, but Black Beauty’s multiple names and identities merit particular attention. Junior Ball comes from a relatively wealthy and powerful Harlem family, and is a successful high-end dressmaker. While Junior Ball is a productive and respectable member of Harlem’s straight society and its legitimate or straight capitalist marketplace (the effeminacy of the profession of dressmaking notwithstanding), Black Beauty is a pimp, cross-dresser and con (wo)man operating outside of the boundaries of straight consumer capitalist society and exchange.

The “drag” names of economically queer gender passers are overlaid with a simultaneous reconfiguration of racial identity. Given the civil rights context of the early

1960s, Junior Ball’s “straight moniker” could be read as similar to a “slave name.” A slave name in black communities during the Civil Rights era87 denoted an individual’s officially designated American name. For example, the Black Panther member and Black

Power activist Assata Shakur rejected her slave name, JoAnn Chesimard, which for her represented an identity dictated to her by a white supremacist state that worked to fashion her in a tradition of enslavement, racial containment, and black dehumanization. Creating an alternative name (“Assata Shakur”), and thus identity, constitutes a radically resistant act that reclaims blackness as a source of power and pride rather than capitulating to the

87 I do not mean to suggest that the concept of a “slave name” originated in the Civil Rights movement—far from it. The notion of a slave name has a long history, reaching back to ancient Greece. The prevalence of African Americans rejecting their slave name in favor of a name they themselves select, a name often associated with Muslim and/or African culture, rose during the Civil Rights era in comparison to the decades preceding it.

194 demands of white society. Black Beauty’s official name in the eyes of the government and the police, Junior Ball, suggests a conflation of slave name and straight name. Thus, it is through queer gender cross-dressing that Black Beauty enacts racial resistance.

Creating a queer alter ego allows Black Beauty to claim a racial identity that rejects white supremacist liberal ideology of black citizenship, racial uplift, and the “right” kind of sexually normative black capitalist consumer. Even the name itself suggests black pride conflated with feminine attractiveness, so that she claims dignity and power by the very virtue of her queer of color identity.

Black Beauty, along with her cousin and fellow cross-dresser Mr. Baron, are queer cross-dressers in more ways than one. Because both are upper-middle to upper class, their drag king and queen alter egos as small-time crooks constitute examples of class passing as well as gender passing. Moreover, because they class pass “down” the class hierarchy, their passing does not fulfill an obvious socioeconomic need. Garber argues that many cross-dressing narratives present themselves as “progress narratives,” wherein passing is framed as the only possible means of professional or economic advancement. For example, in the previously mentioned film Tootsie, out of work male actor Michael Dorsey passes as an actress, named Dorothy Michaels, to get a part on a television series. In another example, in the film Some Like It Hot (1959), musicians Joe and Jerry cannot find jobs as men, and so they pass as Josephine and Daphne respectively to get jobs in an all-girl band that assure their physical and financial security. The progress narrative is common, almost universal, in class passing narratives about working-class characters passing for upper class—indeed, the progress narrative is far more prevalent in class and racial passing narratives than in gender-passing ones. Cross-

195 class dressers usually pass to create or obtain an identity deemed more valuable by mainstream society, as I discuss throughout this dissertation. But such an explanation cannot apply to Black Beauty and Mr. Baron, whose straight alter egos are already professionally, socially, and financially well to do in Harlem. When the medical examiner and detectives discover that Black Beauty’s corpse is not old at all but merely dressed like an old woman, a homicide lieutenant exclaims: “What beats me is why would a young woman masquerade as an old woman for?” (43), presumably raising this question because it is preferable to be young and female than old and female. Grave

Digger responds that “maybe she had a racket… Folks up here are dreaming up new rackets every day. They got the time and the imagination, and all they need is a racket to make the money” (43).

However, when Coffin Ed and Grave Digger tell Leila Holmes that her cousin

Junior Ball was passing as a attractive confidence woman named Black Beauty, she points out “I can’t see why Junior should have been mixed up in any kind of racket. He was doing well in his own field; he didn’t need anything. And I still don’t understand how this man, Baron, can help you find the scum who robbed Casper” (106). As this quote indicates, the issue of why a professionally and economically high-status person should class pass “down” might be asked of Leila herself, who despite her socially ideal model of femininity, her wealth, and her prestige as a politician’s wife, passes as Mr.

Baron, a gay man involved in small-time con games targeting lower-class squares like

Roman. At the end of the novel, Detective Anderson (Coffin Ed and Grave Digger’s colleague) asks why Leila would “get mixed up in a cheap chiseling racket like that?

She’s a lovely woman, a socialite. She had a hundred activities to keep her occupied”

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(157). Garber suggests that we should not take the “progress narrative” at face value, arguing instead that the “progress narrative” can serve as an alibi for the pleasures, even the erotics, of passing and identity play. Rather than the “progress narrative” that ostensibly fits into a normative capitalist and class logic of monetary and socioeconomic or professional advancement, Black Beauty and Mr. Baron reject the liberalism implicit in the progress narrative and cross-dress for no detectably profitable or productive reason.

The most convincing explanation of their identity play and passing is that is brings them pleasure and independence, a space of resistance to the straight or square world that their alter egos Junior Ball and Mrs. Leila Holmes inhabit. As Grave Digger says, it is difficult to detect truth and identify guilty parties in Harlem’s queer community, because “the trouble with these people is they lie for kicks” (50, emphasis mine). Indeed, the ways in which “these people” (that is, queer people and/or passers) lie, severe the connection between appearance and reality, class and gender pass, engage in many kinds of drag and self-transformation, and otherwise involve themselves in con- games “for kicks” suggest a rejection of capitalist “progress narratives” of liberal racial uplift, as I have already argued. This resistance depends upon a similar rejection of

“straight” identities, thereby conflating class, sexual, and gender indeterminacy as a means of unraveling the logic of class hierarchy and capitalist ideology.

The threads joining heterosexuality, normative middle-class identity, and black capitulation to white liberal ideology are established in several places in the novel. In one scene, Grade Digger and Coffin Ed drive past droves of square Harlem residents making their way to church on Sunday morning.

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…the good colored people of Harlem were on their way to church…Old white-haired sisters bundled up like bales of cotton against the bitter cold; their equally white-haired men, stumbling along in oversized galoshes like the last herd of Uncle Toms, toddling the last mile toward salvation on half-frozen feet. Middle-aged couples and their broods, products of the postwar generation, the prosperous generation, looking sanctimonious in their good warm clothes, going to praise the Lord for the white folks’ blessings… (91-92)

For Himes, an author long critical of organized religion, “the good colored people of

Harlem” are “good” in the sense that they obey the rules set for them by white society; they are compared to “bales of cotton” and “the last herd of Uncle Tom.” But perhaps more interestingly, this critique is framed by their heteronormativity, signaled by the heterosexual uniformity of “sisters” and “their men” as well as “middle-aged couples and their broods.” Furthermore, the language of “middle-aged couples and their broods”

(since they are “products of … the prosperous generation”) is conflated with productivity and post-war affluence as shaped by a consumer capitalist framework. Their efforts at racial, class, economic, and sexual normativity, articulated as “looking sanctimonious in their good warm clothes, going to praise the Lord for the white folks’ blessings,” are minimally materially and socially rewarded. The price, as this passage makes clear, is submission to rules set by liberal white society, rules that continue a tradition of racial oppression and shape middle-class straight black subjects as contemporary “Uncle

Toms.” Heteronormative couples that are proud of their place in, or seek entrance into, the middle classes through forms of legitimate labor or economic exchange, lose out— they are the “marks” or victims of a complex confidence game that creates and targets squares, that is, contained and normalized black subjects. Himes imagines space for

198 resistance through the figure of the queer passer, like Black Beauty, by insisting on a rejection of both economic legitimacy and heteronormative identity.

Resistance for What?

Black Beauty and Mr. Baron’s tendency to “lie for kicks” and cross-dress without clear economic reason at once reflects Himes’s optimism and his pessimism, especially regarding the potential of unfixed identities. On the one hand, queer characters’ rejection of liberal racial uplift underscores the impossibility of that rejected ideology in terms of achieving civil rights and racial equality. Despite Junior Ball and Mrs. Leila Baron’s apparent financial, social, and material success as upper-middle to upper class members of the black elite, that success depends upon the “master’s tools” (see Audre Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984)). That is, any measure of equality, social respect, or material advancement can only be achieved on white terms. As I have argued, Mr. Baron and Black Beauty achieve a measure of independence from white-dominated ideologies of identity. But on the other hand, despite their acts of resistance, as queer cross-dressers they do not necessarily achieve equality, social respect, or material advancement, either. Queer cross-dressers are unable to dismantle identity hierarchies in the broader scheme of American society; their acts of drag and passing do not disempower white society in material ways. Squares are fools mainly in that they “buy” the terms of success sold to them by white society, but Black

Beauty is tangibly no better off than the square, straight characters working for the state like the sailor Roman or NYPD detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones. On the contrary, Black Beauty is horrible killed by cop impersonators, and Mr. Baron, as Leila

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Holmes, is stabbed in the stomach at the end of the novel with only a slim chance of recovery. Thus, in a sense, we could read Black Beauty and Mr. Baron, along with the other economically queer cross-dressers of All Shot Up and Himes’s other crime novels, to be tragic passers whose perversions lead to death, injury, and loss. This is a common theme in passing narratives, particularly in the figure of the tragic mulatta and, as I have demonstrated in Chapters One and Two of this dissertation, the nearly consistent demise and punishment of the class-passing femme fatale.

Yet Himes’s Harlem crime novels raise the question of the significance and value of resistance “for kicks,” that is, resistance for the sake of resistance even if it does not tangibly lead to material, legal, or political change. Black Beauty and Mr. Baron pose an ideological, if not material, challenge to postwar capitalism and the normative identities it proscribes. The question of the cultural significance and value of Himes’s own literary efforts in the crime fiction genre parallel the issue of resistance within those literary efforts. Ultimately, it must be asked, what is the point or the radical potential of Himes’s insistence on identity instability (illustrated by cross-dressing and passing), especially in relation to more conventional literary or material forms of protest?

Himes long considered white liberal expectations for black literature to be constraining. The notion that literature by authors belonging to marginalized or oppressed groups should work to achieve racial progress within a liberal, democratic framework has long had the effect of de-emphasizing artistic innovation in multiethnic literature in favor of political advancement, narrowly defined. This constraint shaped Himes’s artistic goals from the first. For example, in Himes’s earliest efforts at a novel, he wrote a prison story about a white protagonist, a move that confused white publishers, audiences, and critics

200 to no end. He also made that protagonist educated and middle-class yet criminal, as well as ambivalently queer. These aspects of the work clashed with expectations that midcentury African American authors write about oppressed black characters overcoming obstacles and modeling a liberal, democratic solution to racial inequality.

Critics then and now tend to devote a disproportionate amount of time to analyzing

Himes’s more heteronormative characters in his crime novels. Tough detectives Coffin

Ed and Grave Digger Jones fit more neatly into both the tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction and into the tradition of African American protest fiction than do his many queer and criminalized class and gender passers.

Jodi Melamed, in her article “The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes’s

End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits of Midcentury Racial Liberalism,” suggests that

Himes challenged the terms of “racial liberal cultural politics” of the 1940s and 1950s.

He did this through what she terms a “race radical practice of literature” (773), which she defines as

…the consistent deployment of literary forms and devices to reimagine race in line with versions of antiracism not compatible with ‘official’ U.S. antiracism and the presumption of U.S. supremacy… what unifies the category of race radical practice of literature is… to reconsolidate race as a sign with the cultural, ideological, and social forces of worldly and radical antiracist movements and the critical perspective they generate on race as a genealogy of global capitalism. (790)

She contends that starting with his 1955 satiric novel End of a Primitive, Himes ceased believing in the political power of literature, and especially lost any faith in the liberal framework that shaped the naturalistic protest novels written by African American authors in the 1940s and 50s (including his own If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945),

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Lonely Crusade (1947), and The Third Generation (1954)). Himes himself said of his literary and political outlook upon finishing and publishing Primitive: “Forever afterwards, I have been shocked by the absurdity of racism… My mind became free and highly creative and in the following eight years I wrote twelve books on the absurdity of racism and its effects” (quoted in the Introduction to End of a Primitive, 1997 edition).

Melamed continues, saying of Himes’s Harlem novels, “In the face of such irrationality, the detective novels offer no pedagogy; they mostly laud the principled nihilism that sustains their protagonists, Harlem police detectives Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed”

(790). Thus, Melamed does not even count these crime novels as “race radical” literature, since they “offer no pedagogy” and are more “nihilistic” and “irrational” than productively political.

It is perhaps due to this common and expected structure for African American anti-racist literature (not to mention genre conventions of detective fiction) that most scholars view Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, rather than the economically queer criminal passers they investigate, as the most radical and redeeming aspects of Himes’s

Harlem novels. Leonard Cassuto and Robert E. Skinner locate the only optimism and potential for positive change in Himes’s post-1957 work in his portrayal of his detectives

(that is, starting with A Rage in Harlem, his first crime novel). Skinner says that although the Harlem crime novels are overall dark meditations on the absurdity and violence of

Black life in a white supremacist society, “at the same time, by the story’s end, something positive had occurred. Bad people had been punished or at least circumvented…

Sometimes, two determined detectives were able to establish a modicum of peace in the middle of chaos and hopelessness” (21). He specifically views Coffin Ed and Grave

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Digger Jones, the “two determined detectives,” as “his most appealing protagonists,” who he sees as heroically and specifically heteronormatively male, or as he puts it “virile and utterly masculine” (22). According to Cassuto, “The only hope of redemption in Himes’s carnival of violence lies in his detective heroes” because of their loyalty and love for one another, and their tireless fight for justice. Indeed, on the surface All Shot Up is a hard- boiled novel about heroically heteronormative male detectives striving to establish or restore meaning and order in the wake of a crime. But as I have argued, tucked beneath that surface is an anti-detective narrative about the erotics of class and gender cross dressing, about non-normative sexualities, and about a Harlem that is radically and redemptively queer in both its economics and its desires. The two straight, manly hard- boiled detectives may have the biggest guns, but the “girl-boys,” drag kings, and queers exert the greatest degree of resistance and agency. While it may seem, and as it has been argued, that Himes’s groundbreaking interpretation of hard-boiled detective fiction hinges on creating black detectives, his reconfiguration of the genre is more radical than that. As I will illustrate, Himes imagines a materially unproductive, anti-liberal form of protest “for kicks” because it constitutes a form of resistance without the limits of heteronormative protest.

The Limits of the Heterosexual Working-Class Detective

From the very beginning of Himes’s career, he was doubly engrossed in the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction and conscious of its conservatism in terms of race. In his first detective story written from a prison cell in 1933, “He Knew,” he writes about two hard-boiled black NYPD detectives (striking similar to Coffin Ed and Grave Digger). In

203 the course of bringing criminals to justice, these detectives kill their own teenaged children, who without their fathers’ knowledge are budding criminals. The message is tragically clear; to be a black cop in a black neighborhood means enforcing laws which criminalize and violently contain one’s neighbors, friends, and even family. The detectives in that story realize that they are the arms of oppression, acting in the service of a white-supremacist state. This concern continues in Himes’s later crime novels, and particularly in All Shot Up. Coffin Ed and Grave Digger may seek to make Harlem a more just and safe place, but they are also “squares” that enforce law, adhere to heteronormative expectations of black masculinity, and reject queer identity play and class passing.

Himes suggests that the detectives’ ambiguous roles as both protectors and oppressors of the black community parallel their simultaneously ambiguous role of protecting and antagonizing the queer community in Harlem. The detectives themselves understand the connections among blackness and queerness, especially in terms of the tight-knit communities to which both identity categories lend themselves. Because

Casper Holmes was injured and robbed directly in front of a gay bar, and given their search for the elusive Mr. Baron as well as the mystery of Black Beauty’s “straight” moniker and his/her murderer, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger know that they must penetrate a queer community that is fearful of cops and resistant to any outsider. As they search for witnesses in the Paris Bar, the gay bar in front of which Casper was robbed, they are met with a wall of silence when they ask patrons about the crime. The customers are “bitchy young men wearing peacock clothes with bright-colored caps, blue and silver and gold and purple, perched atop greasy curls straight from the barber shop at seven

204 dollars a treatment” (25). Coffin Ed and Grave Digger’s usual strategy in dealing with witnesses in Harlem is to appeal to a shared racial community: “Don’t try to give me that silent treatment,” Coffin Ed tells the patrons. “We’re all colored folks together” (26). But this approach does not work among the black queer community, because the homophobic detectives cannot say, “we’re all queer folks together.” Squares may not claim membership in the group, just as whites may not claim membership in Harlem. Coffin Ed becomes increasingly angry that the Paris Bar customers resist questioning. “Coffin Ed was not a moralist. But their cliquish quality of freezing up on an outsider grated on his nerves” (25). As Grave Digger says of homosexuals:

They’re all just one big club. But you got to know it. It’s like when I was in Paris at the end of the war. All of us colored soldiers, no matter what rank or from what army or division, belonged to the same set. We all hung out at the same joints, ate the same food, told the same jokes laid the same poules. There wasn’t anything that one of us could do that the whole God- damned shooting party didn’t know about. (49)

Queer black subjects in Harlem are a minority within a minority, much like African

American soldiers were their own minority within the group of American soldiers in

Paris after World War II (the gay bar is called the Paris Bar, reinforcing this connection).

Here, Himes suggests that the “straight” black community is more like the queer community (that is, queer communities of any race) than Coffin Ed and Grave Digger realize, facing similar isolation and oppression. The detectives see themselves as standing manfully in opposition to, and as fundamentally different from, queer blacks who are doubly marked by mutually reinforcing non-normative identity categories. But by insisting on fiercely maintaining their “square” normative straight masculinity, they are in

205 fact less powerful in their racial and class resistance to the white forces that control them than are the queer subjects they reject.

Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are visibly and palpably working-class, in the tradition (which I have outlined and analyzed) of hard-boiled detective narratives. Much like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Caspary’s Mark McPherson, and Hammett’s Sam Spade,

Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are what they appear to be; they adhere to the more old- school “culture of character” rather than the more modern “culture of personality,” since they value integrity and substance above style and surfaces. Like their archetypal predecessors, they could be read as heroic models of working-class manhood that resist the superficiality, inauthenticity and obsession with consumer culture embodied by the class passer.

The liminal nature of Coffin Ed and Grave Digger’s position in relation to

“queers” versus “squares,” to the concerns of a criminalized black underclass, and to the ideology of liberal white society, is illustrated in one telling scene at Casper and Leila

Holmes’s apartment building. The Holmeses live in a Harlem building that was once, before the war, inhabited by wealthy whites. What with the prevalence of white flight in the 1950s, the building has been evacuated by whites and replaced with the upper crust of black society. Given the high-class character of the building, scruffy and clearly working- class Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are viewed with distaste by the elevator man. When the detectives tell him that they have an appointment with Leila Holmes and wish to go up to her penthouse apartment, the elevator man denies them, saying Mrs. Holmes did not say she had an appointment with them. “We’re the men,” Grave Digger says flashing his badge, to which the elevator operator tartly replies, “Makes no difference to Mister

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Holmes. He’s The Man” (102, emphasis original). This term “the man” has multiple meanings. It could denote “the man” in a negative sense, meaning the all-powerful boss working for his own self-interests, and thus the oppressive hand of the ultimate authority, the state. Indeed, Casper Holmes as well as Coffin Ed and Grave Digger do represent the state, and wield the state’s power. NYPD officers, no matter their color, enforce laws authored by a white supremacist body of lawmakers, and Casper, a high-profile politician, is involved alongside other black and white politicians in crafting those laws.

Certainly it is promising that black people could bring a positive anti-racist point of view as enforcers and makers of laws, but at the same time they must also compromise with the white powers that be and participate in and reinforce the existing power structure.

Thus, “The Man,” that is, the powers that be in white society, bestow Casper and the detectives’ power upon them even as they are disenfranchised by “The Man” they represent.

But “the man” or “the men,” as Grave Digger and Coffin Ed intend it, also has a positive connotation. “The man” means a successful, powerful, or good person.” More literally, “the man” suggests authoritative and positive masculinity. As opposed to being

“boys,” a term long used by whites to disempower and emasculate African American men no matter their age, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger are “the men,” a prestigious position illustrated not only by the size of their guns but by the respect accorded to them by all black subjects in Harlem, including Casper. Yet because “the men” could have this dual meaning, I claim that Himes implies the detectives’ heroic masculine authority is problematic and limited. For example, in a scene where Coffin Ed enters a white bar and asks to use the phone in order to call his precinct, the white bartender lies and says that

207 the bar does not have a phone. “Coffin Ed flashed his shield. ‘Do that once more and you’re out of business,’ he said. Without a change of expression the bartender said, ‘In the rear to the right.’ Coffin Ed restrained the impulse to yank him over the bar and hurried back on the telephone booth” (135). While Coffin Ed may “flash his shield” just as on the streets he may flash his gun to secure obedience and authority, he remains vulnerable to racist restrictions from white spaces and privileges. Flashing a badge or a gun, patriarchal signs of state or masculine power, or his ability to physically punish or intimidate others (evidenced by his desire to “yank him over the bar,” a desire that he must “restrain”) proves consistently impotent in terms of broader African American empowerment. The lure of masculine heterosexual power is hollow, with an only superficial sense of authority for men like Coffin Ed and Grave Digger who by virtue of their form of employment must ultimately tow the line of a racist patriarchal state. As long as the detectives base their conception of black power on heteronormative models of manhood and view queer identities with disdain, their potential for a deeper resistance is curtailed.

Conclusion

My analysis of All Shot Up makes it apparent that the crime genre changed a great deal from Raymond Chandler’s work in the 1930s (where I began this dissertation), to the early 1960s (where I end). At the tail end of the Great Depression and at the start of

World War II, Chandler’s Philip Marlow and Caspary’s Mark McPherson were presented as working-class detective heroes because they valued sincerity, displayed working-class masculine authenticity, and were loyal to the notion of manly labor and truth as superior to effeminate performance or surficial flash. If I may quote from my first chapter,

“working-classness as critical to ‘authentic’ and honest masculinity, often placed in opposition to ‘inauthentic’ and dishonest femininity, constructed ideal manhood by its difference from fatal women and genteel men” (43-44).

However, these similar traits in working-class detectives Coffin Ed and Grave

Digger make them narrow and limited in their powers of resistance against classism. In this sense, Himes’s Harlem series anticipates and makes possible contemporary turns in the genre. The ways Himes intertwines sexuality, race, class, and gender identity categories as unfixed and mutually constructed rather than fixed and discrete suggest an increasingly postmodern and radical turn in crime fiction and film. The rise of consumer culture and the effect of the “culture of personality” on various intersecting kinds of identity formation are, in Himes’s hands, the potential grounds for a challenge to hierarchies based upon stable identities, rather than threats to “authentic” models of whiteness, femininity, masculinity, and working-classness as in 1940s crime novels. By unraveling the logic of liberal racial uplift, Himes effectively shifts the focus of the crime narrative from the authentic (heteronormative male) detective to the queer and

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209 inauthentic passer. The working-class Joe whose surface matches his depth is outmoded and undone by the nimble passer, whose anti-essentialist notion of identity functions to permeate the boundaries between identity categories and hierarchies. Even as Himes dished out made-to-order “funny, action-packed” crime stories about “black clowns,” he deconstructed binary thinking and celebrated queer of color power.

In any study of popular genre fiction, the elephant in the room is the question of quality, of whether it is worth our time as scholars to study “low” formulaic genres, and of whether we should bother engaging with popular fictions in the same ways we do with works in the canon of “high” literature. In this sense, my analysis of classism in crime fiction mirrors the way that the genre itself has been relegated and dismissed. Every author I focus on in this study struggled with the high-low literature divide, and none of them considered themselves typical writers in their field. All of them yearned, and at times actively sought, to remove from themselves the brand of “crime writer.” Woolrich began his career in the 1920s writing modernist novels inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Hughes’s first publication in the 1930s was an award-winning poetry collection, which she viewed as the first step of a career in “serious” literature. Caspary proclaimed herself

“not a real mystery writer”— ironically, given her fiction’s concern with questions of authenticity. For decades, Himes wrote hard-hitting protest novels for an American audience that took relatively little notice of him, until his first commercial success for the

Série Noire eclipsed his earlier writing; as I’ve shown, he himself resented his crime fiction. Yet for all of them, murder was their bread and butter. Crime fiction and its formulas made them, established them as commercially and critically successful, and shaped the course of their professional and artistic lives. They excelled because they

210 understood how the crime story could be an entry into questions of class, self-invention, gender ideals, and the forces of consumer capitalism on the concept of identity. Yet even though these authors were simultaneously celebrated for not being “typical” or

“formulaic” crime writers, even authors like Highsmith whose works are now viewed as transcending the box of genre fiction were, in their lifetimes, still unable to break into the classification of “literature.”

Brooks Hefner argues that there have long been roughly two approaches to the study of popular culture: the first (which Hefner links with the Frankfurt School) is that it is predominately a tool for subjugating the progressive spirit and agency of the working classes; the second (which Hefner links with Michael Denning) is that popular fiction can express the worldview of the working-classes and serve as a platform for a critique or even the subversion of the class system. As a scholar interested in liminal passers who enact multiple identities, I cannot advocate for one distinct position and oppose another. I would also be missing the point, I think, if I folded crime writing firmly into the general canon of literary fiction, or relegated it simply to the category of “genre” fiction, albeit

“better” than most. I hope I have illustrated how crime narratives can be both transgressive and conservative, radical and conventional, that they allow for multiple levels of interpretation, and are themselves fractured and ambivalent.

In Mechanic Accents, Michael Denning begins his study of dime novels with a discussion of formula. “To know a culture is to know its conventions and formulas, to know the patterns it places on the world, the stories with which it tells its lives” (74). It is precisely this tendency of “formula” in genre fiction that is the basis of its stigmatization.

However, it is this repetition, with a difference, of a formula that makes crime narratives

211 so interesting and so powerful. Repetition of a story bespeaks a cultural obsession with the familiar but endlessly varied plotline of violent crime, detection, and punishment. As

Patricia Highsmith said, “Obsessions are the only things that matter” (qtd. in Schenkar,

Paris Review). I’ve laid out an argument for an obsession repeatedly intertwined with that of the murder mystery: the narrative of the class passer. The texts I’ve examined are structured around mainstays of the class passing crime formula. A lower-class person adopts a higher-class identity, this “dangerous crossing” illuminates the degree to which self-invention is possible for working or lower class people, the text explores the ways that gender and class shape one another, and the crossing results or is accomplished through violence and the subversion of certain meaning. It is precisely the retellings of these tropes and plotlines that make the crime narrative a platform for diverse popular conversations about class identity, intersectionality, and criminality in a consumer capitalist United States.

In future studies of class in crime fiction, it should be especially important to recognize and analyze the heterogeneous nature of the genre. Chandler and Caspary championed working-class causes, and on one level Farewell, My Lovely and Laura celebrate working-class values as superior to upper class ones. Yet even these authors’ texts seem enchanted with the high-class consumer world of “surface lustres,” that is, with detailed descriptions of chic women and luxurious interiors, suggesting that it is working-class men’s attraction to higher classes that poses the greatest danger, not the femme fatale herself. For all Chandler and Caspary’s similarities, conflicting models of identity, and specifically of classed masculinity and femininity, are handled quite differently in their works. The eponymous female working-class passer in Laura proves

212 to be the heroine, and Caspary’s archetypal working-class detective proves surprisingly sensitive and not so tough after all; Chandler portrays the violent detective’s justified triumph over the villainous femme fatale. The overreaching, illegitimate class passer is punished in most texts, like in the novels Bedelia and I Married a Dead Man, but she is rewarded beyond her wildest dreams in the 1950 film No Man Of Her Own with wealth, love, and security. Hughes uses formulaic hard-boiled prose to create a failed homme fatal and reorient the genre to cast the inscrutable woman as the detective, whereas

Highsmith employs, and moves well beyond, the criminal class passing formula to unravel the logical coherence of the very text she writes. Tom Ripley’s pleasure and success in his dangerous crossing dissolve the barrier between authentic and inauthentic.

Indeed, he so excels at identity fluidity that he models a preference for exciting, empowering inauthenticity over stale, confining authenticity. In this sense, he foreshadows Himes’s radical passers who “lie for kicks” and nimbly cross from high to low, male to female, straight to queer.

According to Catherine Nickerson, the murder mystery involves a crime that, in the middle of the plotline, profoundly disturbs order. However, that crime is ultimately contained and order is restored in the final scene. She suggests that we read the genre not for the comforting conclusion of the plotline, but for its more disturbing middle.

“Detective fiction with its stable endings and unstable middles, its gothic fascination with secrets, its ability to point to many and contradictory villains, is ideally suited for a veiled and ambivalent kind of social critique” (96). In a similar vein, we should read crime narratives for the passers, and not for the detectives. Passers destabilize identity, acting as a catalyst in the same way that an unsolved murder makes everyone a suspect and throws

213 social order, social ties, and the ability for exteriors to convey meaning into doubt. While the detective usually serves to pin down identity (to reveal to all the suspects the identity of the murderer in the wake of a crime), passers perform the opposite function. Looking at detection and class passing in the crime story suggests the limits of detection to uncover truth, or even the limits of any stable truth to be detected. The “dangerous crossing” of the passer is a catalyst of destabilization. With class rendered fluid, then race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and the many other supposed categories also slip, thereby illuminating the intersectional and mutable nature of identity.

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