Guy, Annika 2018 English Thesis Title
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Guy, Annika 2018 English Thesis Title: "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman": Gender, Genre, and the Victim-Detective Advisor: Kathryn Kent Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No “AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN”: GENDER, GENRE, AND THE VICTIM-DETECTIVE By Annika Guy Kathryn R. Kent, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts April 16th, 2018 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A million thanks are owed to my advisor, Professor Katie Kent, for always remaining enthusiastic and providing me with endless wisdom, guidance, and direction. Thanks also to Professor Gage McWeeny, the chair of the Honors Program, for all of his wonderful support and advice over the past year. Thank you also to Professor Julie Cassiday, for teaching Detective Fiction three years ago, and setting me on the path that led to this thesis. Thank you also to my parents, for always filling our home with books, and for proofreading all ninety pages of this project less than twenty-four hours before the deadline. Thank you to my sister, who made me binge-watch Veronica Mars with her three years ago, neither of us imagining the academic pursuits it would inspire. Finally, thank you to all the detective fiction lovers who got really, really excited about this project, and to my dad in particular, without whose love of crime literature this thesis wouldn’t exist. I hope I’ve done your beloved genre justice. CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Pam Nilsen .............................................................................................................. 13 Chapter Two: Blanche White ........................................................................................................ 38 Chapter Three: Veronica Mars ...................................................................................................... 62 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 89 Guy 1 Introduction From misogynist stories of female passivity and male heroism, to sadistic works that turn a voyeuristic eye on the rape victim’s violated and traumatized body, representations of rape in mainstream detective fiction maintain a clear distance between the detective and the victim. The genre’s investment in conservative social and gender hierarchies has played a major role in shaping these conventions, and while many detective fiction writers have challenged such hierarchies, convention often still prevails. Detective fiction’s formulaic trajectory towards closure and the reestablishment of social order is so powerful that even sub-genres and counter- canons that specifically aim to contradict that conservatism still, as a matter of form, reinforce the traditional messages that legal and social disobedience are wrong. Moreover, detective fiction’s appeal stems in part from its reassertion of social order through crime-solving, and its unique ability to contain that which in life is seen as wholly disruptive, unthinkable, and incomprehensible: murder. This containment is a fantasy brought about by the detective’s investigation, which, in solving the murder, produces a sense of closure for the novel and the reader. Rape, however, defies this kind of closure, because unlike murder, which is itself an ending—a “closing” of a life—rape does not constitute a literal end on its own. Moreover, with a murder case, the victim is a corpse, and so cannot speak to give voice to their1 violation. The story that remains is typically only that of the detective, who determines the nature of the violation and the narrative produced around it.2 As a result, murder lends itself more easily than rape to one-dimensional detective narratives that can provide closure because there are no competing accounts to be produced. Meanwhile, the fact that the victim in a murder case 1 I use singular “they” pronouns when a character or character classification does not traditionally indicate a particular gender within the conventions of detective fiction. 2 This is the standard for traditional detective fiction, although there are stories that reject this convention and allot narrative space to the victim’s loved ones and their grief. Guy 2 obviously cannot identify their killer to the investigators is central to the production of the mystery element, which in turn allows detective fiction to move the “problem” of murder away from the death itself and to the question of “whodunit.” In answering that question, the detective “solves” the murder, and thus produces closure: this is the standard formula of detective fiction.3 That formula can similarly contain rape, to the extent that it can control the surrounding circumstances of the assault case to mirror those of murder as closely as possible. Stranger rape can effectively and efficiently produce such circumstances, which may account partly for the fact that stranger rape appears to be the most common form of rape portrayed in detective fiction,4 in spite of its relative infrequency in real life compared to acquaintance rape.5 Stranger rape offers two major advantages for the detective fiction rape plot: firstly, it guarantees the rapist is unknown, thereby producing a mystery, and secondly, it often minimizes the victim’s role in the investigation, allowing the rape victim to more closely approximate the function of the corpse in a murder plot. The second point is particularly important, because the rape victim’s survival allows her6 to give voice to her own violation, which interferes with the detective’s traditional role as a determiner of truth in the investigation. In the case of stranger rape, however, the rape victim has relatively little information to offer the detectives after her initial testimony, and so she can be absent for most of the story of the investigation (which, as Tzvetan Todorov notes, 3 The effect of murder in real life, of course, cannot be contained in the way it is in detective fiction—it destroys lives, families, and communities. Part of the traditional structure of detective fiction is its elision of these narratives, and of grief and trauma more generally. 4 This is not statistically based information, although Lisa Cuklanz’s Rape on Prime Time does offer a numerical analysis of rape cases in police procedurals that aired between 1976 and 1990, and finds that an overwhelming majority are stranger rape. And, of course, the disproportionately high rates of stranger rape in detective fiction are likely due to public perceptions about what constitutes “real” rape as well as the demands of detective form. 5 According to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), seven out of ten sexual assaults are committed by people the victim knows (“Perpetrators”). 6 While rape victims in life can be any gender, in detective fiction, they are almost exclusively women. Guy 3 traditionally constitutes the majority of the detective fiction narrative; 45-47). Indeed, in prime time police procedurals involving rape cases, Lisa Cuklanz observes the virtual absence of the rape victim from the show; she typically has few lines, and exists primarily as the catalyst for the investigation (6). Cuklanz’s book focuses on rape on television, and not detective fiction specifically, and so she does not draw the obvious parallel here: the role of the rape victim in these shows is not at all unlike that of the murder victim—a character whose only contributions to the investigation are their death and their autopsied corpse. In these shows, then, the focus is not on the rape victim but the (usually male) detective hell-bent on finding the rapist. The textual absence of the victim is complicated, however, when the detective is a woman. Although the gender of the detective does not obviously necessitate such a change, because the presence of a female detective character does not itself give the victim a larger presence in the text or show, her womanhood connects her to the victim. As both Cuklanz and Sandra Tomc note, the female detective who investigates rape is always implicitly or explicitly at risk of sexual violence, and thus of becoming a victim herself (Cuklanz, 111; Tomc, 53). Cuklanz notes that when women detectives appear in police procedural rape investigations, they often become almost-victims themselves, typically after offering themselves as bait to catch a serial rapist; always, however, they are saved by their male colleagues before the rape occurs (111). While Cuklanz limits her analysis to police procedural television shows, Tomc offers a similar analysis that encompasses the entire detective genre. Tomc argues that when a female detective character investigates rape, the implicit reality that she, too, could become such a victim always underlies the investigation, while the male detective almost never appears to be Guy 4 personally sexually endangered by hunting down a rapist in the same way (52-54).7 Further, as Tomc and Cuklanz both note, the potential victimization of the female detective blurs the line between detective and victim (Tomc, 59; Cuklanz, 112), and so these usually discrete and carefully delineated roles in the genre suddenly become murky. This blurriness, taken in conjunction with the issue of the victim’s presence