Detective and Mystery Fiction in the Age of Photography
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 Transparent Interiors: Detective and Mystery Fiction in the Age of Photography Melissa D. Dunn Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/712 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Transparent Interiors: Detective and Mystery Fiction in the Age of Photography by MELISSA D. DUNN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy; The Graduate Center, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 MELISSA D. DUNN All Rights Reserved ii Transparent Interiors: Detective and Mystery Fiction in the Age of Photography by Melissa D. Dunn This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Wayne Koestenbaum _______________________________________________ _______________________ _______________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Mario DiGangi _______________________________________________ _______________________ _______________________________________________ Date Executive Officer Wayne Koestenbaum Nancy K. Miller Anne Humphreys Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii Abstract TRANSPARENT INTERIORS: DETECTIVE AND MYSTERY FICTION IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY By Melissa D. Dunn Adviser: Wayne Koestenbaum This dissertation is a meditation on the mutable boundaries that define interior life in the age of photography. I probe these boundaries through selected readings in two literary genres that share conceptual links with photography—detective fiction and mystery fiction. Photography plays an important role in a radical reconsideration of the boundaries between public and private, engaging two dominant and often conflicting cultural values that shape American life at the turn of the twentieth century—the mandate to define and protect privacy and the simultaneous call for greater transparency in public and personal life. Photography, through its perceived transgressions against private life, helps initiate a demand to define and protect privacy as well as satisfying the desire for candid exposure of the personal. Likewise, detective and mystery fiction, which I align with photography as cultural vectors, both promote and interrogate the conflicting values of privacy and transparency. I show that the detective and mystery fiction genres, which enjoyed enormous popularity at the end of the nineteenth century, activate the same cultural fault lines between public and private as photography. These genres confront questions similar to those photography raises about permeability, legibility, and transparency—themes that anchor the three core chapters of this dissertation. Like photography, detective and mystery fiction challenge the unstable relations between interior and exterior, surface and depth, transparency and opacity, conscious and iv unconscious, knowable and unknowable. While not an exhaustive study of these genres, I argue that Anglophone detective and mystery fiction of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engage the conflicting impulses between the values of privacy and transparency—or concealing and revealing—that shape the late Victorian period in the age of photography. Likewise, the conflicts around privacy and transparency that drive the plots of the stories and novels discussed herein frame the concerns and contradictions around privacy in the modern era. While the detective genre most often resolves the conflict between public and private in favor of greater transparency, the mystery genre brings resolution while retaining some opacity. Focusing on the domestic detective genre, chapter one, “The Permeability of the Interior: Domestic Detective Fiction, Architecture and Surveillance,” examines the permeability of domestic space, drawing comparisons between the photographer and the detective as representatives of a growing surveillance culture. The chapter focuses primarily on the novels of Anna Katherine Green, a best-selling author of detective novels in the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries and an important innovator in the genre. Complementing my discussion of Green’s novels, I include two other examples of the genre, texts by Mary Roberts Rhinehart and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In these novels, women detectives, frequently spinsters or young women, use their mastery of the domestic sphere as a means to enter homes and gain access to the private lives of others. I argue that the phenomenon of the female sleuth in domestic detective novels should be read in the context of new viewing opportunities for women created by the expansion of photography as a hobby in the snapshot era. Demonstrating the value of surveillance, these women detectives seek to penetrate the facade of the middle class family. They impose transparency, eliminating contradictions between public and private life. In these novels, architecture doesn’t define the boundaries of private life, but rather functions as v permeable membrane; the bourgeois home is realized as a transparent space in which family secrets are exposed. Focusing on the relationship between the detective genre and forensic photography, in chapter two, “The Legibility of the Interior: Photographic Vision and The Conquest of Incognito in the Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Gertrude Stein,” I place the detective story at the center of a cultural crisis of identity that is hastened by modernity and a growing insecurity around whether it is possible to identify or truly know anyone. I examine how photography was employed to read the surface of the body as a key to identity. The idea that the body could be translated into legible signs corresponding to inner character is rooted in the popular pseudo-sciences of physiognomy (reading facial features and expressions) and phrenology (reading the bumps on the skull). Likewise, photography, often in conjunction with these philosophies, was employed in the nineteenth century as a forensic tool to document criminal and racial types as well as to track recidivists. The detective, applying scientific methodology and employing new technologies like the camera to solve crimes, can be read as an extension of this project of social legibility. While the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” a progenitor of the literary detective, applies physiognomic analysis to the problem of identity, Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who share a photographic gaze, function as proxies for the camera. In contrast to Poe’s Dupin trilogy and Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, which mythologize the detective’s camera-like vision, Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and Stein’s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor provide counter- narratives that cast doubt on the notion that the detective’s vision is all-penetrating or infallible, and, more profoundly, on the project of social legibility. vi In chapter three, “Transparency and Opacity (or Between Science and the Supernatural): Photography and Mystery Fiction,” I read photography in the context of the cultural history of the last decades of the nineteenth century, exploring the links between the proliferation of photography, the peak in popularity of the mystery genre, the rise of the Spiritualist movement, and the advent of psychoanalysis. The chapter takes shape from my interest in articulating what is haunting about photography. Why is the genre so often linked historically to death, ghosts, the occult, and the uncanny or unconscious? I argue that photography’s spookiness is the result of the medium’s positioning between science and the supernatural. In the nineteenth century photographic technology becomes for scientists “the pencil of nature,” (as Francis Talbot titled his 1844 book on photography). Revolutionizing astronomy, microscopy, and medicine (with the invention of the X-ray), photography reveals the unseen world in astonishing detail—the moon’s craggy surface, a crystal’s complex structure, a body’s hidden skeleton. Given the heady pace of these revelations and the degree of photography’s penetration of the unseen world, some of the more dubious experiments involving photography—attempts to photograph the human soul and thought, or the spirits of the departed—become plausible even for the scientific-minded. Because photography functions at the threshold of what is visible and invisible or knowable and unknowable, the medium seems to hold the dream of transparency—a utopian belief that all will be revealed. Likewise, I argue that photography’s vexed position between science and the supernatural places it, in terms of another significant cultural continuum of the period, between the detective story’s rational transparency and the mystery tale’s unsettling opacity. I will examine the medium’s conceptual links to mystery fiction through readings of both popular and literary works in the genre by period authors E.W. Hornung, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Henry vii James. I will also develop a theoretical discussion of what is haunting about photography through readings of texts by Walter