Class, Gender and Memory in Golden Age Crime Fiction by Women
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‘How Are You Getting on with Your Forgetting?’ – Class, Gender and Memory in Golden Age Crime Fiction by Women Értekezés a doktori (Ph.D.) fokozat megszerzése érdekében az Irodalomtudomány tudományágban Írta: Zsámba Renáta okleveles angol és francia nyelv és irodalom szakos bölcsész és tanár Készült a Debreceni Egyetem Irodalomtudományok doktori iskolája (Angol-amerikai irodalomtudományi programja) keretében Témavezető: Dr. Bényei Tamás ……….………………………………. (olvasható aláírás) A doktori szigorlati bizottság: elnök: Dr. ………………………… tagok: Dr. ………………………… Dr. ………………………… A doktori szigorlat időpontja: 200… . ……………… … . Az értekezés bírálói: Dr. ........................................... Dr. …………………………… Dr. ........................................... A bírálóbizottság: elnök: Dr. ........................................... tagok: Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. Dr. ………………………….. A nyilvános vita időpontja: 20… . ……………… … . 2 „Én Zsámba Renáta teljes felelősségem tudatában kijelentem, hogy a benyújtott értekezés önálló munka, a szerzői jog nemzetközi normáinak tiszteletben tartásával készült, a benne található irodalmi hivatkozások egyértelműek és teljesek. Nem állok doktori fokozat visszavonására irányuló eljárás alatt, illetve 5 éven belül nem vontak vissza tőlem odaítélt doktori fokozatot. Jelen értekezést korábban más intézményben nem nyújtottam be és azt nem utasították el.” 3 Doktori (PhD) Értekezés ‘How Are You Getting on with Your Forgetting?’ – Class, Gender and Memory in Golden Age Crime Fiction by Women Zsámba Renáta Debreceni Egyetem BTK 2018. 4 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………….5 Chapter 1: Places of Memory in Middle-Class Remembrance…………………………..29 1.1. The Myth of the Countryside and Country Houses………………………...31 1.2. Criminal Houses in Town…………………………………………………….38 1.3. Suburban Homes……………………………………………………………...48 Chapter 2: The Gentleman Detective as a Site of Memory………………………………56 2.1. Albert Campion……………………………………………………………….66 2.2. Lord Peter Wimsey…………………………………………………………...71 2.3. Robert Blair…………………………………………………………………...74 Chapter 3: The Other Society: Women and Crime in Golden Age Crime Fiction……..78 3.1. The Female Criminal in Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair…………...82 3.2. The New Woman as a Villain in Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds…...86 3.3. Sayers’ Women in The Documents in the Case……………………………..91 Chapter 4: The Female Gentleman as a Bridge Figure…………………………………111 4.1 Harriet Vane as a New Woman……………………………………………...119 4.2. Harriet Becomes a Female Gentleman………………………………….….123 4.3. Harriet as a Bridge Figure…………………………………………………..132 4.4. Amanda Fitton: The Growth of an Adolescent into a Female Gentleman…………………………………………………………136 4.5. A Post-45 Postscript to the Union of the Gentleman Detective and the Female Gentleman………………………………………………………142 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….146 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………..155 Abstract in Hungarian…………………………………………………………………….161 Abstract in English………………………………………………………………………...163 Publications of the Author………………………………………………………………...165 5 Introduction Relatively early in Margery Allingham’s Hide My Eyes (1958), in a scene set in Edna’s Club, Gerry Hawker, the villain and the murderer, suddenly starts playing the piano and improvising on a song, apparently in order to ease the tension between himself and his lover Edna Midget. Although we are not provided with details about the love life of the couple, Edna, who is probably furious with Gerry for neglecting her for a long time, is also desperate to warn him about a certain Warren Torrenden, a racing driver, who is after him due to some shady business. The whole scene seems rather absurd and tense as Gerry, while eagerly playing the piano, is also involved in a conversation with Edna, who is dancing with his new friend, Richard, to what is, a popular number of the day: “He was improvising on a popular number, a favourite with the crooners, ‘How are you getting on with your forgetting?’, and as he let the familiar notes trickle through his fingers he watched with wide-open lazy eyes the irritated woman standing above him” (71). The exchange between the two concerns Gerry’s fishy affairs with Torrenden which he simply refuses to remember having ever taken place. To dissolve the tension, he is only focusing on this song, singing that “Nothing is serious today”, while he is “shaking his head and sliding into a rumba rhythm,” instructing Edna to “[D]ance […] Dance it off” (71). This scene in which the criminal is playing the piano to divert himself in order not to have to think about the consequences of his crimes might be seen as allegorical in terms of Golden Age whodunits. On the one hand, the song might be seen as a mise en abîme of the genre, often identified as “escapist” entertainment in a period of economic and political unrest and crisis. Since its birth in the middle of the 19th century, as Bargainnier points out in The Gentle Art of Murder, crime fiction had often been labelled as escapist, offering a temporary release from the grim realities of the present: “Classic detective fiction is a type of escape fiction, and no one wishes to escape into uncertainty, terror or poverty. The escape it provides is to a world of political and social order, moral certitude, and usually of wealth and culture. Though the peace of this world is broken, the reader can be assured that it will be restored or have a new birth by the end” (10-11). This view is reinforced by the observations of some of the leading writers of the Golden Age as well. Richard Martin’s monograph on Margery Allingham, Ink in Her Blood, besides remarking that her choice of writing crime novels stemmed from her enjoyment of “lighthearted adventure stories” (17) and also that “[t]his enjoyment coupled with the natural 6 urge to write was encouraged by the demand for what she referred to as ‘a literate and intelligent literature of escape’”, recalls Allingham’s own definition. “Allingham defined the much maligned term ‘literature of escape’ as an instrument of solace, ‘an escape from an intolerable hour’ […]” (18). Martin explains that the modern mystery story written within the framework of escape literature was undoubtedly a passionate reaction “to the crises and upheavals in Western society that began in the mid-thirties” (ibid.). What she considered to be the goal of her books was “the telling of home truths with the business of entertainment” (ibid.). Allingham’s own definition seems to endorse the critical dismissal of the genre. The very scene in question suggests that Golden Age fiction reflected upon its own identification as escapist, while also necessarily addressing the very world of crisis from which it provided escape. Until very recently, critical reception disregarded both the self-reflexive dimensions of this body of fiction and its sometimes half-hearted but always symptomatic engagement with the realities of the contemporary world. This tendency was obviously reinforced by the novels’ emphasis on the often puzzle-like plot at the expense of characterization or social commentary which might divert one’s attention from the abundance of cultural references and subtexts. Frank Kermode was among the first, who, in his influential essay of 1972, “Novel and Narrative”, set out to explore the claim that, unlike serious or highbrow literature, crime fiction is formula fiction written in accordance with a set of rules1 , and therefore devoid of any serious “content.” Kermode pointed out that no one had actually tested these claims, and his essay anticipates the study of popular fiction enabled and initiated by the cultural turn in criticism. Kermode’s analysis of Bentley‘s Trent’s Last Case (1913) – a precursor to Golden Age fiction – was one of the first memorable examples of a new kind of reading that tries to “activate other systems of reading or interpretation” (184) in dealing with popular genres. Kermode, who was experimenting here with the system of codes worked out by Roland Barthes, argued that, although the puzzle-like plot structure – what Barthes called the hermeneutic code – in itself might not be very interesting, “the processing of clues” (184) is never exhausted in a contentless winding down of the hermeneutic machinery, and that such fiction repays critical attention for its wealth of cultural and symbolic materials. According to Kermode, “the processing of hermeneutic material has entailed the provision of other matter from which we may infer an ideological system […] so the hermeneutic spawns the cultural [and] it also spawns the symbolic” (ibid.). Thus, he concluded that Bentley’s novel “has a cultural significance” (ibid.). Following Kermode’s lead, one can approach crime fiction expecting that the processing of 1 In 1928, S. S. Van Dine (the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) published twenty rules on how to write an appropriate detective story. The rules appeared in The American Magazine, titled as “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories”. 7 hermeneutic material inevitably uncovers or “spawns” what he calls the cultural content waiting to be recognized behind the clues during the reading activity. Even though Frank Kermode was no devotee of cultural criticism, his argument can be seen as the precursor of the recent critical tendency to read popular literature with a view to unravelling the ideological and cultural presuppositions that govern the deeper layers of their organization. Approached with this kind of critical apparatus, the classical whodunit, which had