Department of English and American Studies English

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Simona Hájková Representing Women in Robert Galbraith's Strike Series Bachelor's Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Filip Krajník, Ph. D. 2019 / declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. Gender Representation in Crime Fiction and Its Development 5 2. Female Investigators 10 2.1. Robin Ellacott from the Strike Series 12 2.2. The Cordelia Gray Mystery Novels 20 2.3. The Hard-boiled V. I. Warshawski 27 2.4. Lisbeth Salander from the Millennium Trilogy 31 3. The Female Criminal 39 3.1. The Ruthless Murderess 41 4. The Female Victim 47 4.1. Lula Landry 47 4.2. Female Victims as Sexual Objects 52 Conclusion 57 Bibliography 63 Summary 65 Resume 67 Introduction Our private eye Cormoran Strike is back. He's a tough guy, burly ex-soldier with half a leg missing, but he also went to Oxford, so he can translate a Latin phrase before he dislocates your jaw with his fist (...) There are so many problems with The Silkworm, least of all the complete lack of pace or intrigue (...) if Rowling was actually a man called Robert Galbraith, she probably wouldn't get away with describing so many women as "curvaceous" and adorning them with "clinging " dresses. (Hamilton 46) The quotation comes from a rather ironic review of the second instalment of Robert Galbraith's detective series, The Silkworm, by Ben Hamilton, published in The Spectator. The text touches upon a delicate topic, since, by the time of the review's publication, it was widely known that Robert Galbraith is, in fact, a pen name of J. K. Rowling, who decided to publish her detective stories under a male name. It might be observed that the author of the Harry Potter fantasy is well-known for her feminist and philanthropic statements and comments, which she very often shares via her social media pages, interviews, and more importantly, by her writing: Now, I consider myself to be a feminist, and I'd always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free choice to say, "Well, I'm going to raise my family and that's going to be my choice. I may go back to a career, I may have a career part time, but that's my choice." (Weiss) The present author, therefore, decided further to explore the issue of gender representation by this prominent female author, focusing on the way in which gender, or 1 more precisely, female characters are depicted in Rowling's detective series. All of the essential characters of all crime fiction narratives, that is, the criminal, the victim, and the investigator, and how these are delineated and employed by Rowling will be analysed in this thesis. For each of the analytical chapters, a historical context summarising the conventions and typical tropes of the genre will be provided. In the centre of Rowling's detective series are characters of the private detective Cormoran Strike and his co-worker Robin Ellacott. Strike is an ex-army member, who is incapacitated because of the loss of his calf he suffered when serving in Afghanistan. In the first novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, Strike is desperately trying to keep his business running despite his debts. Robin Ellacott is a university drop-out, who moves to London to live with her fiance there, and she eventually helps Strike to keep and build up his private investigative agency. As the series proceeds and their relationship evolves, Strike and Ellacott as private investigators solve several cases, which involve various characters from a victim who suffers from BHD (Body Integrity Identity Disorder) to a young schizophrenic man and a transgender woman. Rowling's detective series have also been adapted into the television mini-series Strike. The adaptations of the three novels, that is, of The Cuckoo's Calling, The Silkworm, and Career of Evil, have been broadcasted on BBC One, staring Tom Burke as Cormoran Strike and Holliday Grainger as Robin Ellacott. In the first instalment of the series, The Cuckoo's Calling (2013), Strike and Ellacott investigate the assumed suicide of a mixed-race model named Lula Landry. In the second instalment, The Silkworm (2014), Strike's agency is to investigate a brutal murder of a writer named Owen Quine, whose murderess is, in fact, his old friend and colleague Elizabeth Tassel. The third instalment, Career of Evil (2015), introduces a character of the serial killer named Donald Laining and a number of his victims, 2 including Robin Ellacott, who, fortunately, manages to overpower him. In the latest novel of the series, Lethal White (2018), Strike and Ellacott are hired to investigate the murder of the minister of culture. Over the course of the series, Robin's role evolves from a temporary secretary to a capable investigator and best friend to Strike; the nature of Robin's and Cormoran's relationship changes, too, as they eventually fall in love with each other. The present thesis is divided into four main chapters. In the first one, the general concept of the traditional way in which women have been depicted in crime fiction narratives is provided. This chapter addresses the historical contexts of the narratives written in several distinct eras of the past, that is, the Victorian era, the Golden Age era, and the era of the feminist movements. As we will see, the social context of each of these periods influenced its literature. In the Victorian era, for instance, women were dictated their roles and proper behaviour in both personal and public spheres, resulting in typical female characters of either victims or catalysts for men's crimes. The second chapter introduces an analysis of the leading female character of the Strike series, Robin Ellacott. Analyses of other significant female investigators of recent past follow, providing a comparison of Ellacott to the way in which the characters of Cordelia Gray by P. D. James, V. I. Warshawski by Sara Paretsky, and the character of Lisbeth Salander by Stieg Larsson, were pictured in their detective series. In each of these sub-chapters, the issues and areas where those characters, as women, struggled are analysed, along with the topic of violence against women, which is addressed vastly by Rowling in the third instalment of her series, Career of Evil. With respect to the topic of violence against women, the sexual aspect of it is involved in the analysis as well, especially regarding the cases of Robin and Lisbeth. 3 The third chapter provides an analysis of Rowling's female criminal Elizabeth Tassel. This chapter introduces the traditional picture of a female criminal, along with the ones by P. D. James and Stieg Larsson. The analysis of Elizabeth Tassel is confronted with the criminals of James's and Larsson's, which provide a comparison between the ruthless murderess Tassel and women, whose criminal behaviour is, more likely, a result of a certain deprivation which they experienced in the past. The last chapter is dedicated to the depiction of Rowling's female victims. The first analysis is aimed at a murdered mix-raced model named Lula Landry, the other to a number of victims of the serial killer Donald Laining, who targets his victims because of their gender. In this chapter, Rowling's special emphasis on the sexual aspect of Laining's violence against women is addressed, along with the way in which Larsson deals with the same issue in his Millennium Trilogy. 4 1. Gender Representation in Crime Fiction and Its Development In her study Key Concepts in Crime Fiction, Heather Worthington claims that during the 19th and 20th centuries, certain social conventions existed which dictated proper masculine and feminine proper behaviour - something that was naturally reflected in literature including crime fiction. For centuries, women were considered the weaker sex which relied on emotions rather than logic and which was supposed to be submissive in both the private and public social spheres. Contrary to that, men were perceived as the strong sex, employing rationality and science. Those conventions determined men as active in the social sphere and dominant over women in private life (Worthington 41). In the crime fiction written during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a specific concept of male and female characters and their roles in the plot was established. This concept was shaped by strict gender norms, which clearly defined roles for both men and women, and society's answer to any deviation from these norms could be very severe, especially in case of women not adhering to behaviour expected of them. In crime fiction, men were thus usually the perpetrators or the ones to solve the crime. Detectives were of male sex because of their believed nature of a rational human being with the ability to employ science. As Heather Worthington claims, "professional and the satisfactory resolution and closure of crime narratives are also strongly gendered as masculine" (Worthington 41). Secondly, according to Worthington, gender expectations in crime fiction also entailed the nature or character of crime, which was different for women and men. It was usually men who trespassed laws, committing murders, violence, theft, etc. 5 Women, on the other hand, were usually depicted as "the passive victims or the catalyst of crime" (Worthington 41). Crime in crime fiction was, therefore, usually a male domain. When criminal behaviour of females occurred, it mostly involved their sexuality and transgression of gender norms, which was a rare case for men (with the exception of homosexuality).

Load more