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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G. Phd, Mphil, Dclinpsychol) at the University of Edinburgh

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This Thesis Has Been Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for a Postgraduate Degree (E.G. Phd, Mphil, Dclinpsychol) at the University of Edinburgh This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: • This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. • A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. • This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. • The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. • When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Guilty But Insane: Psychology, Law and Selfhood in Golden Age Crime Fiction Samantha Walton PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2013 ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Theories of Mind 22 1. Psychological Detection 48 2. Guilty But Insane 95 3. Born Criminals 133 4. The Concealed Enemy of the Self 169 5. Irrational Detection 213 Conclusion 257 Works Cited 261 iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to my supervisors, Aileen Christianson and Greg Walker, for their expertise, enthusiasm, and encouragement throughout the project. Their probing and questioning of my argument and constructive criticism on my writing were an invaluable guide, while their diligent supervision, always helpful suggestions and unfailing good humour helped make the completion of the thesis a pleasure. My external examiner, Patricia Waugh, and my internal examiner, Aaron Kelly, must be warmly thanked for assessing the thesis and for their insightful and challenging comments, feedback and guidance. An examination which could have been anxious and stressful was a pleasure thanks to their generosity and humour. I am thankful to the department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and particularly to my fellow doctoral candidates, for creating such a friendly and supportive intellectual environment in which to work and study. Finally, I owe special gratitude to my parents for their enduring support and love, and to Jow for his unflinching patience as I have talked through iterations of this project, and prematurely revealed the killer of countless crime novels. iv Abstract Writers of golden age crime fiction (1920 to 1945), and in particular female writers, have been seen by many critics as socially and politically detached. Their texts have been read as morality tales, theoretically rich mise en scenès, or psychic fantasies, by necessity emerging from an historical epoch with unique cultural and social concerns, but only obliquely engaging with these concerns by toying with unstable identities, or through playful, but doomed, private transgressions. The thesis overturns assumptions about the crime novel as a negation of the present moment, detached and escapist, by demonstrating how crime narratives responded to public debates which highlighted some of the most pressing legal and philosophical concerns of their time. Grounded in meticulous historical research, the thesis draws attention to contemporary debates between antagonistic psychological schools – giving equal space to debates within psychoanalysis and adaptive neuroscience – and charts how these debates were reflected in crime writing. Chapter two explores the contestation of the M’Naghten laws on criminal responsibility in light of Ronald True’s case (1922), followed by readings of crime narratives in which perpetrators have ambiguous and controversial legal status in regard to criminal responsibility. At the intersection of psychiatric discourse and the popular literary imagination, a critical and ethical perspective developed which not only conveyed a version of psychological discourse to a wider public, but profoundly reworked the foundations of the genre as the ritual unveiling of deviancy and the restoration of the rational institutions of society. In similar vein, chapter three explores the status of the ‘Born Criminal’ in law and medicine, and looks at crime writer Gladys Mitchell’s efforts to expose both the pitfalls of categorisation, and competing discourses’ limitations in adequately accounting for crime. Chapter four, whilst maintaining close medical- legal focus, opens up the study to consider how understandings of deviant selfhood in modernist writing inflected crime writers’ representations of unconscious and epileptic killers. Finally, chapter five continues this intertextual approach by asserting that certain crime novels express an exhaustion with the genre’s classic rational and scientific heroes, and turn instead to the affective epistemologies and v notions of subconscious synthesis concomitantly being celebrated in modernist writing. Altering the position of the authoritative detective in ways that profoundly alter the politics of the form, the chapter and the thesis in total propose a reading of golden age crime fiction more responsive to cultural, psychological and legal debates of the era, leading to a reassessment of the form as neither escapist nor purely affirmative of the status quo. 1 Introduction: Whodunit? Why and How. The aftermath of the Great War saw the decline of the short story of detection and the rise of the mystery novel, and with it, the rise of a new breed of crime writers. Their works have been known as formal English detective novels, classic crime fictions, whodunits, murder mysteries, clue puzzles, and the ubiquitous golden age mystery. A division of mass publishing previously associated with sensational heroism and produced by celebrated male authors such as Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, during the interwar years the genre came to be dominated by immensely popular, influential and irreverent female writers, the ‘Queens of Crime’ as they have been termed (see Scaggs 26; Munt 7; Shaw and Vanacker 27). Agatha Christie began to produce a bestseller on a near yearly basis after the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, while between 1923 and 1939 the poet, scholar, and lay theologian Dorothy L. Sayers won acclaim through eleven novels and three short story collections featuring her charismatic aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Coincident with the sustained growth of a female readership supplied with books by local libraries and lending services at Boots the Chemists (see Symons 93), these novels frequently located criminal deviance in the English country house, drew attention to clues which had specific relevance to the home, and placed familial dysfunction at the heart of the mystery (see Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction 109; Munt 8; Thompson 128- 9). In a trend started by the hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler in his 1950 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Sayers, Christie and their peers – most obviously Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – have been condemned by some for their so- termed feminisation of the genre and their light-hearted portrayals of domestic murders. Chandler has particular contempt for admirers of the golden age novel, ‘the flustered old ladies – of both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages – who like their murders scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded that murder is an act of infinite cruelty (196-7). Associating golden age tropes with pungently aging femininity and masculine lack, Chandler’s criticisms are reiterated in Julian Symons’ 1972 Bloody 2 Murder, in which the author asserts that golden age novels were ‘written specifically for maiden aunts,’ (98) and located in a ‘fairy tale’ land in which ‘murder was committed again and again without anybody getting hurt’ (104). Widely held perceptions of the golden age crime novel persist. It has been classed as a ‘cosy’ form (Munt 8), generic, homogeneous (see Munt 7; Shaw and Vanacker 10), and ideologically committed to containing deviant elements that threaten the bourgeois status quo (see Knight, Form and Ideology 128-9). Alison Light terms the clue puzzle novel ‘a literature of convalescence’ (65) because in the aftermath of the First World War, to a generation experiencing unprecedented social upheaval and the psychological repercussions of prolonged and catastrophically deadly conflict, the certainty of a resolution to a problem had therapeutic advantages. In recent years, feminist scholarship by Sally R. Munt, Gill Plain, Susan Rowland, Marian Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, has highlighted instances of gender transgression, deviance and heterodoxy in golden age writing. Drawing attention to constructions of the body as ‘uncontainable and excessive,’ (Plain 27) their studies in various respects address the cultural anxieties to which golden age crime fictions speak, and expose the personal and political tensions which underlay these otherwise conservative forms of popular writing. By detecting the feminist content of golden age narratives, bent as they are on the examination of domestic scenarios, social relations and structures of power within the bourgeois and aristocratic home, feminist studies have led the way for a revaluation of the crime novels of the interwar years. Probing notions of stable identity, gender roles and class positions in pursuit of a malefactor who is emphatically not other, but who is part of a social milieu rendered unfamiliar, the golden age novel has undeniable
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