Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. For the history and survey study of pulp magazines see Server (1993, 1994). For more on Black Mask and hardboiled crime fiction, see Nolan (1985) and Smith (2000). 2. Hardboiled crime fiction developed in the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, fully maturing in the 1940s. The genre can be said to emerge from the turmoil spawned by Prohibition, the Depression and two World Wars. However, this study does not provide an exhaustive overview of the genre, and it is not a historical survey. If anything, it intends to move away from the generic complexities of the history of crime fiction and genre models that have been extensively addressed by a number of critics including Julian Symons (1985), Dennis Porter (1981), Stephen Knight (1980, 2004), Robin Winks (1980), and John G. Cawelti (1976). 3. In the context of film noir, both Christine Gledhill (1978a) and Janey Place (1978) discuss what the latter calls “the two poles of female archetypes”: the “dark lady … and her sister (or alter ego) the virgin, the mother, the innocent, the redeemer” (35). Gledhill also describes this polarity in similar terms; women “on the fringes of the underworld … bar- flies, night club sing- ers, expensive mistresses, femme fatales, and ruthless gold- diggers … and then there are women on the outer margins of this world, wives, long- suffering girl- friends, would- be fiancées who are victims of male crime, sometimes the object of the hero’s protection and often points of vulnerability in his masculine armour” (14, original emphasis). 4. Boozer also argues that the pervasive presence of the femme fatale in classic noir films clearly pointed to “a mass market” that wanted these women to be “put back in their domestic ‘place’” (1999: 22). 5. Film noir is usually bracketed between 1941 (The Maltese Falcon) and 1958 (Touch of Evil). This view, which is embraced by Schrader (1995: 221– 3) and some of the contributors to Kaplan’s influential book Women in Film Noir (1978) such as Place, is challenged by other critics of film noir. For example, Palmer (1994) argues that film noir started in the late 1930s and early 1940s and continues to the present. Despite the disagreement on the timeline of film noir, the late stages and the immediate aftermath of World War II marked the prominence of many noir films, which presented iconic images of the femme fatale on the big screen. Examples of noir films, some of which are adaptations from hardboiled crime fiction, include, but not limited to: Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Detour (1945), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Lady in the Lake (1947), and Out of the Past (1947). 6. Feminist detective fiction emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with the writings of female authors such as Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky, among others. The works described as feminist detective fiction feature a 163 164 Notes female protagonist, usually a detective, who is an addition to the genre that is notorious for the central role of the male detective. The female detective is granted, in Smith’s words, with “emotional baggage – conflicted friend- ships, troubling memories of dead parents – unknown to the hardboiled, masculine, sturdy- individualist PI” (1991: 80). For more on feminist detective fiction see, for example, Knight (2004), Klein (1988, 1995a), Walton and Jones (1999), Munt (1994), Irons (1995), and Cranny- Francis (1988). 7. This study does not use biographical material of the authors’ lives, nor does it approach the narratives from an authorial point of view. Despite the con- nections between these authors, especially as scriptwriters in Hollywood, I avoid value judgments, questions of intention, and speculations about why the authors I selected as examples to give a more general, more collec- tive, idea of the hardboiled genre as whole, created these particular female characters. The trends that this work addresses are cultural and discursive; they question the customary orthodoxies and go beyond the bounds of any single biographical subject. I have worked from the assumption that fic- tional works can contain far greater levels of meaning and significance than their authors intended or even could have anticipated. The radically feminist potential of reading forms of agency within these criminal femmes fatales in hardboiled crime fiction – for which there may not necessarily be any evidence of an authorial intent – is, I think, a key example of the complex possibilities that are specific to fiction. 8. A number of scholars propose different types of agency. Ortner (2001) suggests a differentiation between “agency of power” and “agency of intention,” although she acknowledges the practical difficulty in making these distinctions. Others, such as Wertsch, Tulviste, and Hagstrom (1993), Vygotsky (1978), and Bateson (1972) propose a non- individualistic approach to agency because “it is frequently a property of groups and involves ‘media- tional means’ such as language and tools” (qtd. in Ahearn 2001: 113). 9. Pollack notes and criticizes the psychological paradigm within which the concept of agency is often individualized, especially in discussions about female criminality. That is, in the context of criminal women “feelings of disempowerment, rather than actual disempowerment, lead to women’s law- breaking behaviour” (2000: 82, original emphasis). See McClellan, Farabee, and Crouch (1997), Henriques and Jones- Brown (1998), and Sommers (1995) for accounts of agency in relation to female offenders. For more on agency in relation to social work, see Young (1994), Browne (1995), and Townsend (1998). 10. Ahearn (2001: 112– 113) rehearses some of the questions that militate against a simplified definition of agency: “Must agency be individual, leading to charges of unwarranted assumptions regarding Western atomic individual- ism (Ortner 1996)? … What does it mean to be an agent of someone else? Must agency be conscious, intentional, or effective? What does it mean for an act to be conscious, intentional, or effective?” 11. The victimization of women is ascribed to male power and domination both on the individual and institutional levels. It is usually discussed in relation to living under oppression. On the victimization of women, see, for example, Dobash and Dobash (1979, 1998) and Hanmer (1978). Nonetheless, a number of scholars such as Austin (1995), Mahoney (1994), Abrams (1995), Notes 165 Richie (1996), and Chetkovich (2004) show how women can act as agents even under oppression. 12. Many feminist readings of agency argue that resistance to the patriarchal order is necessary in order to demonstrate agency (Goddard 2000: 3). For more on resistance and agency see Bosworth (1999), Faith (1993), Sanchez (1999), MacLeod (1992), and Ortner (1995). 13. See Brauer (2003) for an excellent survey of the scholarship on 1930s crime fiction that focuses on its relation to cultural and historical contexts and its function as social and political critique. 14. For more on the femme fatale, especially in fin- de- siècle period, see Auerbach (1982), Allen (1983), Menon (2006), and Craciun (2003). 15. Mulvey’s article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was first published in 1975 in film theory journal, Screen, and has been republished a number of times since. I am using the reprinted article in Durham and Kellner’s Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2006). 16. For studies of the femme fatale in film noir see, for example, Gledhill (1978a, 1978b), Harvey (1978), Place (1978), Cook (1978, 1993), Maxfield (1996), Snyder (2001), Vares (2002), Scruggs (2004), Hanson (2007), Hales (2007), and Grossman (2007, 2009). 17. A common trope that emerged was male anxiety with women’s acquisition of power and economic influence during the war. See, for example, Boozer (1999) and Scruggs (2004). 18. For similar readings, see also Wager (1999: xiv), who traces the roots of film noir to Weimar street film, as well as addressing spectatorship in her analysis of the female film viewer. She argues that film noir is not merely focused on male experience and that the films offer “stories that address a female specta- tor by providing her with various visual and narrative pleasures.” 19. Grossman criticizes Gledhill’s description of the power of the femme fatale as “mysterious and unknowable” on the basis that this view not only par- ticipates in producing a “misreading” of many films in the noir genre, but has also “fed into cultural and critical obsessions with the bad, sexy woman, which inevitably become prescriptive and influence cultural discourse about female agency in counterproductive ways” (2009: 5). 20. Hanson leans on Steve Neal’s contention that the category of the femme fatale, within the domain of film, is “heterogeneous” and is not limited to film noir (Neale 2000: 153). She also explains that the “ working- girl,” for example, the secretary in films such as Phantom Lady (1944) and The Dark Corner (1946), are qualified to assume the role of the “investigator” by their “possession of intelligence, resolve and resourcefulness” (Hanson 2007: 19). 21. Grossman states that women in film noir are doubly victimized, first by “the social rules that dictate gender roles and, second, [by] reading practices that overidentify with and overinvest in the idea of the ‘femme fatale’” (2009: 2). 22. Nicole Rafter’s Shots in the Mirror (2000) also employs theories of criminality in her study of crime films. As a law professor, she argues that views of criminality are products of their time and with this in mind addresses a range of film genres including noir. She contends that film noir is an “alternative tradition,” which presents crime as the rule rather than the exception (60). Her work, however, is limited to film. 166 Notes 23. There are a number of studies that address the “disordered” femme fatale in film noir.

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