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The Case of the Femme Fatale

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The Case of the Femme Fatale AmericanitmericanMteratureSociety Literature Society in Japan 55 SUWABE Koichi The Case of the Femme Fatale: A Poetics of Hardboiled Detective Fiction his paper will survey the poetics of hardboiled detective fiction by a."s,'"trfig.f.em.'hl2,:hzr.a,c`e.r:Y,:}:":,`io.",si:,P,:e,Ska:･,le;.:)zr T ,1",El "femmes attention to the characters categorized as fatales," which will lead me "mothers" to consider the as the other pole of a stereotyped binarism in the "femme representation of women in thirties America. The term fatale" has been popular thanks to the recent attention to film noir, but there has been little effbrt to give a general view of the femme fatale in American fiction even though she appeared repeatedly in the thirties, preceding the advent of film noir in the forties. Whereas many film historians have studied the thirties in terms of the representation of the femme fatale, the scholars of literature have "popular" hardly approached the same topic. I limit my fbcus to the genre, but "modernist" I try to construct my argument in relation to fiction in general, "Mass with Andreas Huyssen's assertion in mind: culture has always been the "masculinizing" hidden subtext of the modernist project" (47) for art(ists). The thirties came right after the Jazz Age, which drastically changed women's lifestyle. The appearance/proliferation of the femme fatale is in- extricably interwoven with the changing gender politics in early twentieth- century America. Americans were fascinated by the rise of the New Woman as a symbol of the new age. Making her into a symbol of the new era, however, was in itself an attempt to alleviate their anxiety toward the rapidly changing world. Thus the shift in gender politics of women was often debated as if it represented all changes occurring in the midst of modernization. When Cur- rent ,Elistot:y magazine devoted its October 1927 issue to a syrnposium on the 7'he Journat of the American Literature Society of Japan, No. 2, February 2004. @ 2004 The American Literature Society of Japan NII-Electronic Library Service AmericanitmericanMteratureSociety Literature Society in Japan 56 SUWABEKoichi "There New Woman, the introduction said: is, perhaps, ne aspect of piresent day social history more controversial in character or more delicate in its implications than that of the new status of Woman" ("The New Woman" 1). It is probably natural that the works of the novelists who served their apprenticeships in the twenties reflect this controversy about the New Woman. The stereotyped binarism between femme fatale and earthmother suggests their ambivalent attitudes toward the new gender politics. Furthermore,, even "The after Great Depression actually brought the indulgent 1920s fiapper to an abrupt end" (Riley 212), men still found it hard to keep their authority as patriarch because of financial diMculties. According to Robert McElvaine, "a `feminization' Depression America is characterized by of the American society" (340). It is no wonder that the binary between (damned) femme "emasculating" fatale and (praised) earthmother survived into the period. "political" I stressed this historical or background before considering the "poetics" "masculine" of hardbeiled detective fiction, not simply because this genre was born in late-twenties America but also because its aesthetic origin "Dashiell was unseparable from its ideological consciousness. Hammett, Ray- mond Chandler, and the other writers for Black Mask," Ross Macdonald " remarks, . were in conscious reaction against the Anglo-Arnerican school "If which . had lost contact with contemporary life" (14). the mystery novel " is at all realistic," Chandler himself states, . it is written in a certain spirit `[hardboiled of detachment" (Simple 2). The school," as I will argue,, pro- "mystery" blematizes not the itself but rather the mystery's social/ideological connotation, and the connotation is revealed not by the detective's detached deduction but by his commitment to the case. The mystery in hardboiled fiction is ideolegical, which the hero's involvement with the case foregrounds. "In "the the detective novel," Ernst Bloch writes, crime has already occurred, outside the narrative" (255): the crime scene is posited on the level "metanarrative." of Hardboiled detective fiction, viewed in this light, is a "modernist" "metanarrative" genre which tries to approach the both ideologically and aesthetically: it cannet be purely coincidental that Hamrnett "iceberg" "One reached the Hemingwayesque theory in his own terms: says to `I his reader: am deliberately telling you less than the truth. You've got to belieye more than this'" (qtd. in Johnson 329n9). The mysterious femme "objective fatale, an emblem of money and sex, is an correlative" of the NII-Electronic Library Service AmericanitmericanMteratureSociety Literature Society in Japan The Case of the Femme Fatale 57 "metanarrative" in the modern world as well as in the fictional world. Al- "mysterious though women" appear, for instance, in the Sherlock Holmes stories (Belsey 1 14), Hammett's use of the femme fatale is more deliberate in highlighting the historical/ideological context. Traditional detective fiction, I should hasten to add, is not ideology-free. Actually, critics have often discussed the issue of ideology in detective fiction studies. Some theorists insist that the genre is conservative; others assert that it is not. These two sides have remained far apart, I think, mainly because their topics are different: the former focuses on the plot; the latter on the detective. "[Detective The first group says: fiction] offers its readers a reassuring world "the in which the status quo is never really in danger" (Tallack 251); master- pieceofpopular literature[likedetectivefiction]is. the bookwhich bestfits "We its genre" (Todoroy 43); and read these books...to repeat in slightly different form an experience we have had already" (Aydelotte 77). The other "the camp emphasizes double-sided figure of the detective: on the one hand a cool rationalist, certain of his or her identity, on the other the modern, angst-ridden subject, the artist, bohemian orflaneur" (McCracken 68"69). Walter Benjamin, of course, takes this stand ("No matter what trail theflaneur may fo11ow, every one of them will lead him to a crime. This is an indication of how the detective story, regardless of its sober calculations, also participates in fashioning the phantasmagoria of Parisian life" [41]), and Bloch, following "surplus" Benjamin's lead, concludes that a hero's detection proyides the of meaning, which goes beyond limited ideologies of the rational (250-55). artistic emphasis of hardboiled fiction is on the second The detective put "mystery" aspect of the genre. In hardboi}ed fiction, to put it an extreme way, "private the solution to the mystery is unimportant. The eyes" from Sam Spade (Hammett) and Philip Marlowe (Chandler) in the thirties, through Lew Archer (Macdonald) and Mike Hammer (MickeY Spillane) in the fifties, to Spenser (Robert B. Parker) and V.I. Warshawski (Sara Paretsky) in the eighties hardly meditate on the mystery: they just annoy people till something comes up. Their commitment to the case is more personal than the armchair "Watson," detectives'. Traditional mystery writers like to use the whose status "The Ronald Knox defines: stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly...below that of the average reader" (qtd. NII-Electronic Library Service AmericanitmericanMteratureSociety Literature Society in Japan 58 SUWABEKoichi in Ousby 67). Macdonald writes:"[`Watson'] helps to eliminate the inessential....More important, the author can present his selflhero, the detective, without undue embarrassment, and can handle dangerous emotional material at two or more removes from himself" (12). This remark also suggests the features of hardboiled detective fiction, which rarely employs "Watson": the the inessential details survive, and the sleuth feels embarrassment because he handles dangerous emotional material without detachment. A hardboiled detective must be emotionally, not just physically, involved with the case. This is what separates Hammett and Chandler from Gai'dner, who also belonged to the Black Mask school. Gardner, who hated the "Hammettizing" of the Black Mask (Johnson 58), stresses the distinction "hardboiled "action between detectiye story" and detective story," and. con- "there cludes: is some evidence indicating that the so-called hard-boiled story may be losing in popularity while the action detective story is gaining in "the popularity" ("Early" 206). Gardner, who was most popular whoduniter of his times" (Mott 267) and eleven of whose Perry Mason stories were listed as bestsellers between 1933 and 1938 (Hackett 117-18), did not regai'd his work as hardboiled. And we should agree with him even though Mason has many characteristics of the hardboiled investigator. "hardbeiled" We can easily enumerate aspects in the characterization of Mason. He, for instance, takes a case not for fee ("To hell with the money!" "a [Caretakerls 109]) but for matter of principle" (22). He calls himself a "self-made "go[es] fighter" (Hbwling 68) and always out [and] mix[es] [himselq into the cases" (Sul]cy 116). His commitment to a case, however, is not emotional/personal but intellectual/detached. For him, a case is a game: "I want excitement," he says (Hbwling 20). To win the game, he even desrelops "iceberg" "I
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