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Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction

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Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction Crime Files Series General Editor: Clive Bloom Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. Published titles include: Maurizio Ascari A COUNTER-HISTORY OF CRIME FICTION Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION Anita Biressi CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES Ed Christian (editor) THE POST-COLONIAL DETECTIVE Paul Cobley THE AMERICAN THRILLER Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s Michael Cook NARRATIVES OF ENCLOSURE IN DETECTIVE FICTION The Locked Room Mystery Barry Forshaw DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction Barry Forshaw BRITISH CRIME FILM Subverting the Social Order Emelyne Godfrey MASCULINITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE Emelyne Godfrey FEMININITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND SOCIETY From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes Christiana Gregoriou DEVIANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION Lee Horsley THE NOIR THRILLER Merja Makinen AGATHA CHRISTIE Investigating Femininity Fran Mason AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction Fran Mason HOLLYWOOD’S DETECTIVES Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir Linden Peach MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION Criminal Deceptions Steven Powell (editor) 100 AMERICAN CRIME WRITERS Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker FRENCH AND AMERICAN NOIR Dark Crossings Susan Rowland FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction Melissa Schaub MIDDLEBROW FEMINISM IN CLASSIC BRITISH DETECTIVE FICTION The Female Gentleman Adrian Schober POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM Contrary States Lucy Sussex WOMEN WRITERS AND DETECTIVES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRIME FICTION The Mothers of the Mystery Genre Heather Worthington THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR FICTION R.A. York AGATHA CHRISTIE Power and Illusion Crime Files Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–71471–3 (hardback) 978–0–333–93064–9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of diffi culty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction The Female Gentleman Melissa Schaub University of North Carolina, Pembroke, USA © Melissa Schaub 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-27695-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-44690-2 ISBN 978-1-137-27696-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137276964 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 For Frank and David This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface viii 1 Introduction: Middlebrow Women and Detective Fiction 1 The history of gentlemanliness 7 The rise of the middlebrow 10 The politics of detective fiction 20 Middlebrow feminism, then and now 23 2 Victorian Contexts: Failed Gentlemen and New Women 27 Failed gentlemen 30 New Women in theory 36 New Women in fact and fiction: social conventions 39 New Women in fact and fiction: education and careers 43 New Women in fact and fiction: sexual relations 46 Interlude: literary history and literary value 54 3 Anatomy of the Female Gentleman 58 Birth and social class 62 Courage and the annexation of social class 69 The honor of the mind 86 Rationalism and irony 103 4 Conclusion: Assessing the Female Gentleman 126 Notes 137 Bibliography 153 Index 159 vii Preface During the late nineteenth century, literature developed a tiered hier- archy, as highbrow literature separated itself from lowbrow fiction; the transformation was completed in the early twentieth century by the addition of a middle category. Modernist writers began to see them- selves as set apart from society, and as alienated even from many readers whom Victorians would have considered cultured. So the term ‘mid- dlebrow’ was coined, to designate, often pejoratively, any serious writer whose work was accessible to a wider audience than the avant-garde. One result of this stratification was the invention of the genre labels still used by publishers today to imprint the spines of paperbacks. Detective fiction was both the most popular and the most intellectually respect- able of these genres, and therefore it was the form where high and low were most likely to mingle and become middlebrow. Middlebrow fiction of the modernist period undertook to educate its middle-class readers, as Victorian literature had done but avant-garde modernists would not, and has therefore been all the more scorned by highbrows of its own period, and of ours. Yet detective fiction of that ‘Golden Age’ is still widely read and enjoyed today, and the social interventions it performed in its own period warrant a more nuanced assessment than is common in scholarly histories of the genre. Middlebrow novels in general, and detective novels in particular, pur- sued their ideological transformations of readers by their presentation of characters with whom readers would wish to identify. Ideal characters of both sexes were consistently and frequently depicted as gentlemen, thus producing an ideological composite that was mildly conserva- tive in its approach to social class, but progressive in its approach to gender. Were Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Ngaio Marsh, or Dorothy L. Sayers feminists? Critics disagree, but the most common scholarly answer to that question is No. By examining more fully the interactions between class and gender ideology in their novels, and by setting them within the wider context of middlebrow literary history, I hope to change that answer to a qualified Yes. Of course, one cannot write a book like this without being an avid reader of the genre, and therefore I know that one of the pleasures viii Preface ix of these texts is solving the puzzle and figuring out whodunit before the detective does. I have therefore tried not to spoil the endings of the novels I write about. It was unavoidable in several cases, where the resolution of the plot or the mechanism of the murder were integral to the theme. Most readers who would pick up this book probably already know how Death on the Nile or Gaudy Night end, however, and I hope I can be forgiven for giving away the endings of a few other novels as well. This study of feminism in detective fiction began its life long before I became a literary scholar. Although the focus of the book is to explain what a commonly recurring character type, whom I have named the Female Gentleman, can tell us about both the history of feminism and the ideology of British middlebrow literature between the wars, its purpose is also, in some part, to explain me to myself. Every scholar of literature came to the profession through a love of books. We are not always willing to acknowledge which books we loved first, however, and I hope to change that. In this volume I come to the conclusion that even a form almost universally criticized by scholars for its conservative underpinnings – the Golden Age mystery novel by female authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers – can shape its readers into feminists. No intellectual history can be written without the aid of many people and organizations. I am grateful for the financial support of the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and particularly its Teaching and Learning Center, which awarded me a Summer Research Fellowship in 2010; and for the encouragement of many colleagues both inside and outside the Department of English and Theatre.
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