Private Eye.Pdf

WIELAND SCHWANEBECK (DRESDEN) "You're not the usual kind of Private Eye": The Deconstruction of the Whedunit in PJ). J ames's Cordelia Gray Mysteries Even though female authers and, te seme degree, female protagonists have been inte- gral to the development of detective fiction, critics and genre encyclopaedias fre— quently continue to betray their misogynistic bias towards these women, much as they may pride themselves on the amount ef spaee they dedicate to the "Queens of Crime" and their considerable output. The title ef the "first British detective" story, for in— stance, is often attributed to Wilkie Collins's The Women in White (1859), Charles Felin's The Notting Hill Mystery (1865), or Charles Diekens's The Mystery ef Edwin Dread (1870), yet other books tend to get written out of history. This largely concerns works by female authors (like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Trail ef the Serpent of 1860, which precedes some of the aforementioned titles by several years) as well as narratives featuring female detectives. In Wilkie Collins's The Diary afAnne Radway (1856), the eponymous heroine and homodiegetic narrator, a poor working-class girl, attempts to solve the murder of her roommate, in spite of being ridiculed and threat— ened by policemen and sinister landlords. Self-reliant and perceptive as Anne is, in a world dominated by men who held public office and who control the means of produc- tion, she cannot help but withdraw to the secluded space of her lodgings, longing for the return of her fiance: "0, what a relief and help it would be now if Robert should come back!" (Collins 1856, 33). As seen as he appears on the scene, he removes Anne from the investigation, and she humbly accepts his opinion that "it was best that he should carry out the rest of the investigation alene; fer my strength and resolution had been too hardly taxed already" (ibid., 35). Net much of a surprise, then, that even a professional investigator like Andrew Forrester's Female Detective of 1864 is earefi11 net te draw too much attention to herself; she even rejects the simple use of the first- person pronoun in order to recede into the background: "I shall take great care to avoid mentioning myself as much as possible. [...] I determine upon this rule [..-] to avoid the use of the great I, which, to my thinking, disfigures so many books" (Forrester 1864, 3). This critique is aimed at the school of self-centred, homodiegetic narration fa— voured in a number of male-dominated genres, including the novel of education. In the content of the emerging detective story, Forrester's anonymous narrator renounces the conflation of subjectivity and epistemic privilege, her criticism of the pronoun extend— ing to that of the concept of seeing and knowing: the "great I" is the privilege of the "private eye", and when Ferrester published his book, the latter was already in the process of becoming entrenched and institutionalised as male. Though they may not be overtly feminist texts, these early narratives of detection are highly indicative of the kind of conundrums which female investigators are regularly presented with in fiction. Their skills of detection tend to be credited to stereotypically feminine traits like sensitivity and curiosity, and when they succeed in resolving the very public matter of crime, the alleged failures of their private life are held against 202 WIELAND SCHWANEBECK them, as they continue to be subj ected to literary conventions which fall outside of the genre's immediate jurisdiction and are rather reminiscent of Gothic melodrama. This tension plays out repeatedly in the genre, both in literature and on screen: recent TV detectives for whom the private and the professional clash with tragic consequences include detectives Ellie Miller in ITV's Braadehnreh (2013-2017) or Robin Griffin in Top of the Lake (2013-2017). Ne wonder that detective fiction has been claimed as the patriarchal genre par excellence. Teresa L. Ebert (1992) reads the detective as a phallic character who acts in—the-name-of-the—father, and who contributes to the repreductien of gender difference and asymmetrical divisions of labeur. Crucially, the ideological sub— texts of many detective novels are about how male investigators (private dicks, as it were) protect the upper class and its patriarchal system of inheritance against interlopers and reformers. As a result, female detectives often find themselves caught in a double- bind: the generic framework dictates that their investigations should help sustain the very system that discriminates against them so that the female detective "simultaneously thrives on and is confined by the limits of the genre" (Maassen 1998, 153)- "Golden Age" detective fiction may not be exactly brimming with alpha males — .in fact, many classic sleuths are queer on a number of levels —, but it tends to leave said patriarchal framework of class and inheritance intact. It is telling that even Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels, far from being a role model for literary feminism, are considered quite progressive in that they provide a kind of "female space", albeit a de- cidedly "non—threatening and de-sexualized" one (Watson 2010, 134), and one charac- terised by the worm's—eye view of the marginalised.1 Like Agatha Christie, PD. James is the inventor of two iconic detective characters,"Z but unlike Christie, she abandoned her female investigator halfway through her publishing career after only two novels, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull beneath the Shin (1982), which provoked quite diverse reactions. Critical assessments of both are torn between admi- ration for their proto—feminist agenda and the exact opposite, and a lot of this can be attributed to PD. J ames's notoriously anti-feminist reputation- Following a brief intro- duction to the character of Cordelia Gray, I will scrutinise the second novel in more detail, focusing mainly on its intertextual engagement with John Webster's the Dach- ess of Mafi (1613) in order to highlight how the novel depicts its protagonists struggle for agency and how it exposes the genre's underlying patriarchal bias- 1. Introducing Cordelia Gray- PD- James's particular segment of highbrow detective fiction constantly toys with lite— rary allusions, starting with the name of her heroine, Cordelia Gray. Her last name a1- ludes to Hercule Poirot's famous "little grey cells",3 and she shares her first name with. 1 Miss Marple is the quintessential spinster character in fiction, an old woman who is not taken seriously by the police and who tends to blend into the background when she investigates. More- over, her method rests on gossip, the most "denigrated form of communication" (Malonen 2006, 59). 2 'Whilc James has Dalgliesh and Gray be acquainted with one another, Christie made a point of keeping the fictional universes of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple apart and deliberately did not force them to age — the final Poirot mystery, Curtain (1975), which concludes with the detective's death, is a notable exception. .3 Christie references them throughout the Poirot series, like in the following example from The Murder of Roger Aakrayd (1926): ‘"Methud, order, and the little grey cells.‘ — 'The cells?‘ said the inspector, staring- — 'The little grey cells of the brain,‘ explained the Belgian" (ibid., 124). "YÜU'RE NOT THE USUAL KIND ÜF PRIVATE EYE" 203 that of King Lear's youngest daughter, who is disinherited by her father for failing to flatter him. Fittingly, James's Cordelia Gray starts out as a young woman of 22 who must deal with a dual less of fathers. At the beginning of the first novel, Gray, who is an orphan to begin with, loses her surrogate father, private investigator Bernie Pryde- What follows from this episode of loss is a somewhat traditional female Bildungsre- man in which "a young woman of determined self-sufficiency" seeks to "maintain her intellectual and emotional self—respect" (Campbell 1983, 500), as Gray is pushed head- first into her first major case while attempting to come to terms with the legacy of her mentor — Bernie not only leaves his agency to the young woman (Pryde symbolically bestowing "pride" upon her), but also his unabashedly phallic gun. A second, even more persistent struggle is the misogynistic bias which Gray is up against, for she is constantly reminded by both clients and suspects that detection is "[not] a suitable job for a woman" (James 1972/2005, 12) and that she neither "look[s] like a private eye" (ibid., 76) nor corresponds to "what [is] expected, not the usual kind of Private Eye" (ibid, 220). In spite of these misgivings, the first volume has been read as a female success story in that it sees Gray overcome prejudice, institutionalised sexism} as well as several attempts on her life, and she emerges the stronger for it, solving the case without accepting credit for her efforts. Both novels put her through symbolic ordeals which the quite well-read protagonist herself has no trouble identifying as "a parody of a difficult labour towards some desperate birth" (ibid., 156). This motherless detective repeatedly exits symbolic wombs like the well into which she has been thrown by a henchman: "She wouldn't let herself drown, wouldn't die in this horrible place, alone and terrified. [...] She was alive and capable of thought- She had always been a survi— vor. She would survive" (ibid., 155)- Critics who hailed An Unsuitable Job for a Woman as a feminist achievement embraced this kind of resilience, even though they tended to overlook various ambiguities and the detective's ultimate refusal to commit an outright transgression, possibly in order to make a strong case for Gray as a role model for female empowerment.

Load more