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 and absence, suggests that the character of the female detective makes it more difficult for the victim to vanish, because the detective’s presence constantly invokes her own capacity for victimization, and the subsequent possibility of the hero becoming a victim at any time. Pushing this claim even further, then, it stands to reason that the female investigator of rape might at all times invoke or even stand in for the victim— and, indeed, all victimized woman—and thereby prevent the victim from being as silent and absent as the closure-producing formula of detective fiction requires. This makes the kind of story Tomc considers doubly destabilizing, as it at once creates slippage between the usually strictly delineated roles of hero-detective and victim, and prevents the victim from disappearing.
What neither Tomc nor Cuklanz considers, and what I will explore throughout this project, is what happens when the female detective is subjected to sexual assault, erasing the line between hero-detective and victim completely. Since the detective is always the protagonist, and often (in line with the tradition of American hard-boiled detective fiction) the narrator as well, this victim can never vanish. As a result, her victimization does not fit easily into the closure- producing formula of detective fiction; indeed, her centrality to the story guarantees the presence of not only her victimization but of her enduring trauma, a trauma that is antithetical to the static temporality of traditional detective fiction and its usual erasure of grief and healing—in other
7 As noted earlier, detective fiction almost always treats rape as a crime that exclusively targets women. It is thus extremely uncommon for the male detective to be at risk of or subjected to sexual violation; a notable exception is Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Guy 5 words, of life after the crime. The figure of the victimized detective, then, instigates complex negotiations regarding genre, especially in relation to closure and gender politics.
Language is tricky here. For the sake of efficiency, I will refer to the character of the female detective who experiences (or has experienced) rape as the victim-detective. This choice is difficult for a number of reasons, and there is not a perfect solution—I worry, for example, about assigning such a complicated and nuanced character a two-word label, especially when one of these labels represents something so devastating and difficult as rape. On the other hand, I need to be able to reference this character without using the word “rape” every single time, because I use it so frequently in the following chapters that it risks losing meaning.
The word “victim” is itself objectionable for a number of reasons, the main one being the lack of agency it affords to the people it describes. For this reason, most contemporary anti- sexual assault and feminist discourses reject “victim” in favor of “survivor,” which is much less dehumanizing and disempowering. “Survivor-detective,” in this light, would be the obvious label for my purposes, except the detective fiction formula and plot revolves around the characters of detective / victim / criminal, and when rape replaces murder in the detective plot, rape survivors necessarily fill the victim role. Moreover, the figure I am studying is important in no small part because she destabilizes these roles by occupying two that historically have been mutually exclusive: victim and detective. Referring to her as the survivor-detective would mean giving up this discursive meaning and, more significantly, erasing the way victimhood is handled in detective fiction and renegotiated by the figure of the victim-detective.
A relatively small number of texts feature the victim-detective, especially given the sheer size of the detective fiction corpus, but that number has increased significantly in recent years. Guy 6
The first text with a victim-detective was published in 1986,8 but only a few more victim- detectives appear in the following twenty years, and the majority appear in media produced since the mid-2000s. Other than their statuses as women, detectives, and survivors of sexual assault, there are few universal traits shared by these characters. They appear on television and in print, in series ranging in popularity from that of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and J.K. Rowling’s crime books (written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith) to much less well-known titles from small feminist publishers. Victim-detectives vary in age, race,9 sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and profession (some are cops or PIs; some are amateur sleuths with day jobs). Series featuring victim-detectives are primarily Anglophone or Scandinavian; all, however, are in some way successors of the American hard-boiled crime tradition, which is why
I have chosen to focus on three American examples. The first is Barbara Wilson’s Seattle-based crime series featuring the lesbian, thirty-something, amateur detective Pam Nilsen; the author published the trilogy between 1984 and 1989 with Seal Press, a small feminist press she co- owned. The second is Barbara Neely’s quartet featuring Blanche White, a black middle-aged domestic worker-turned-sleuth, which was published by Penguin between 1992 and 2000. The third and final series, Veronica Mars, is a teen noir television show that aired on UPN from
2004-2006 and on the CW from 2006-2007, and which starred Kristen Bell as the titular teenage girl working part-time at her dad’s PI agency.
8 That I have found. Short of reading every detective novel with a female protagonist published prior to 1986, there is no way to know for certain if this is really the first. 9 This is the area with least range: I have only found one woman of color that fits the criteria, the black amateur sleuth in the series by Neely. Guy 7
The American and British crime fiction traditions split early in the twentieth century.
Previously, in the time between the genre’s inception in 1841,10 and the end of the nineteenth century, the two nations’ detective fiction looked fairly similar, incorporating feminist gothic elements (Nickerson, 37; Reddy, Traces, 52) alongside the conventions produced by Poe’s
Auguste Dupin tales and cemented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. But by the twentieth century, the British detective tradition had evolved firmly into the whodunit,11 a style that enjoyed its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s, under the reign of the British queens of crime
Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. During this era, murder moved from the big cities of
Holmes and Dupin to countryside manors and estates; at the same time, the upper-class and well- bred detective’s investigations also moved into a strictly wealthy sphere. Where Holmes mixes with the London working class, Golden Era detectives such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple rarely interact with non-aristocrats other than the servants who staff the wealthy homes these detectives frequent. While this subgenre led to a proliferation of female crime writers and female detectives—the second of which was enabled in part by the re-emergence of the armchair detective, a holdover from Poe’s stories, in which a detective solves the mystery without ever leaving their living room, allowing a woman to occupy the role without needing to leave the domestic sphere—its focus on the aristocracy and gentry marks its social elitism. This form of detective fiction is also the most politically conservative, particularly in its subscription to an ideology of murder as an isolated incident that disrupts the social order, and in which that disruption is resolved by the detective’s investigation and solution (McCann, Gumshoe). The
10 The year Edgar Allen Poe published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is widely considered the first detective story. 11 This subgenre is often called “classic” detective fiction, but I find this label causes confusion, because it is also sometimes used to refer only to texts written prior to the twentieth century, or to any “traditional” form of detective fiction, including American hard-boiled. To avoid this problem, I adopt Todorov’s use of “whodunit” (44) throughout this project. Guy 8 main goal of the Golden Era British detective story, then, is the restoration and preservation of normative social order (Gates, “Maritorious,” 26).
By contrast, in America, an opposite shift occurred in the 1920s and 30s, and through pulp magazines and dime novels, the hard-boiled detective story emerged. Here, murder not only stayed in the city, but became endemic to urban life and its underworld of gangs, mobs, and career criminals (McCann, “Hard-Boiled,” 43). This shift in the genre came about in explicit response to (and rejection of) the increasingly cozy, closed-community-oriented British style; as
Raymond Chandler famously proclaimed, Dashiell Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley” and returned it to “the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse” (“Simple,” 530). In this way, hard-boiled crime writers made claims to a form of gritty realism, and simultaneously produced a more cynical social and political ideology than the whodunit espouses. In these novels, crime is highly organized and corruption runs rampant among the law enforcement and justice systems. By focusing on the lone hero who stands against these problems, these novels, Sean McCann argues, deliver a “populist vision” that highlights the “failures of the legal and social order to protect decent people from elite predation and criminal abuse” (56). These novels are far more critical of society as a whole, and treat murder not as a singular, resolvable ill, but as something symptomatic of a larger social evil that cannot be eradicated, but only beaten back by certain brave individuals—the hard-boiled detectives (McCann, 56).
However, the brave individual heroes of hard-boiled detective fiction are, at least in the foundational period of the genre, exclusively white and male. Moreover, as Maureen Reddy and
Margaret Kinsman both note, strict gender and racial hierarchies underlie hard-boiled fiction’s anti-elitist sentiments, and yet the American crime tradition has nonetheless proven a productive Guy 9 site for anti-racist and feminist detective stories alike (Reddy, “Race,” 137; Kinsman, 147). The
1980s saw the mainstreaming of the (white) female detective in hard-boiled crime fiction,12 and the 1990s the black (male and female) detective (Reddy, “Race,” 145).13 These works vary widely in their relationships to the traditional politics of detective fiction, with some confronting and subverting the racial and sexual assumptions of the genre, and others simply changing the gender or skin color of the detective, leaving the core politics of hard-boiled fiction unchallenged.
Many of the earlier texts featuring the victim-detective fall into the latter category, but as her presence in the genre has increased and moved into more mainstream texts, her employment has become less genre-breaking. Still, the victim-detective produces major complications for detective form, forcing even the most mainstream texts to contend with genre and gender in complex ways. Additionally, as Tanya Horeck argues in Public Rape, the victim-detective has specifically feminist14 roots (127), which means the character always has a historical literary connection to intentionally genre-challenging material, even in the most genre-conforming works.
For Horeck, not just the victim-detective, but rape in women’s crime fiction more broadly, results from an explicitly feminist impulse. She contends that “scenes of sexual violence are central to the female crime writer’s attempt to refigure the terms of the male crime novel”
12 Well-known examples include Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski. Equally well known, but from the 1990s, are Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta and Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum. 13 Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins is by far the most famous example, but other black crime writers of the decade include Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, and Gar Anthony Haywood. 14 “Feminist” here refers to the feminist anti-rape movement, out of which Tanya Horeck argues the feminist crime novel’s consideration of rape grew. Guy 10
(Public, 121), and notes that, in spite of rape’s near-ubiquity in women’s crime fiction, there is a curious lack of scholarship on the topic (127). She further argues:
Beyond an obvious understanding of the significance of rape for feminist crime novels, it
is possible to argue that the story of rape is inseparable from the establishment of the
contemporary feminist crime thriller. It is not, or not only, that the inception of feminist
work on rape in the late 1970s and early 1980s coincides with the genesis of feminist
detective fiction, but that the political and representational issues surrounding rape are in
some way inextricably connected to the form of the thriller itself. (127)
Horeck thus places rape, and issues surrounding it, at the roots of the female detective novel.
Rape in literature is not, as she notes, a transparent issue, but rather, “Rape exposes the double meaning of representation insofar as it is often made to serve as a ‘sign’ for other issues, and as it is also frequently used as a means of expressing ideological and political questions concerning the functioning of the body politic” (Public, 7). Sabine Sielke makes a similar argument in
Reading Rape: “Talk about rape does not necessarily denote rape, just as talk about love hardly ever hits its target. Instead, transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for other social, political, and economic concerns and conflicts” (2). This is particularly true because, as Sielke points out, it is often the case that “cultures do not articulate their obsessions directly, without mediation and ironic distance” (183). And yet, while discourse about rape may be used to negotiate issues other than sexual violence, discourse about rape is still about rape, even if it does not intend to be. The invocation of rape in and of itself prevents rape rhetoric from ever being fully separated from “real” rape, even as rape and the meaning of rape “circulate in opposite directions” (Sielke, 76). The tension between rape’s use as a signifier Guy 11 for other concerns and its constant invocation of its own reality results in representations of rape that are both entirely about rape and not about rape at all.
Rape in crime fiction, then, cannot be reduced to a simple signifier of “real” rape, but it is equally important not to make the mistake of divorcing represented rape from real rape altogether. My project explores the implications of this for texts that consider rape specifically in relation to their female detectives. I will focus, as previously mentioned, on three series with victim-detectives: the Pam Nilsen series by Barbara Wilson (1984-1989), the Blanche White series by Barbara Neely (1992-2000), and Veronica Mars, a television show created by Rob
Thomas (2004-2007). These texts are not impressive or noteworthy for their literary qualities, nor are they particularly exemplary works of detective fiction: the mysteries are unoriginal and contrived, the plots are either overly simplistic or overly convoluted,15 and the narratives often fail to generate the suspense or intrigue expected of the form. However, they all deal centrally with rape and engage with complicated questions about gender and victimhood, which makes them significant as works of genre fiction.
As I will demonstrate, all of these texts employ rape in ways that produce divergent political meanings and imply particular visions for social change (or lack thereof), which are at once about and not about rape itself. As a result, I argue, the meaning of rape in these texts often splits apart from its “reality” (both in real life and its real presence in the texts), producing a complicated interrelationship between rape, politics, and the genre within which these issues are being negotiated. By using rape for political purposes, the works inevitably invoke questions of feminism, womanhood, and victimization; the feminist roots of rape that Horeck identifies in crime fiction are thus not always explicitly or avowedly present, but I will explore how they
15 In spite of this, each work, like all detective fiction, is heavily plotted. As a result, I devote more space to plot summary in this project than is traditional. Guy 12 nevertheless become part of the texts’ examinations of rape in complex ways. Similarly, the series must also contend with rape’s narrative complications, particularly with regard to its genre-challenging and closure-defying properties, which disrupt the formula of the traditional detective novel. As I will show, these works deal with rape’s narrative complications by proposing real-world methods for ending sexual violence, thereby deviating from both the hard- boiled and the whodunit traditions.
Guy 13
Chapter One: Pam Nilsen
Barbara Wilson’s Pam Nilsen series criticizes the formula, politics, and mission that underlie traditional detective fiction (both British whodunit and American hard-boiled), and thus has a tense relationship to the genre. This is not in and of itself altogether significant: detective fiction, as explained in the Introduction, has historically been a socially and politically conservative form, and this conservatism has inspired numerous counter-canons that aim to revise the politics of the genre, with very few actually succeeding. While scholars often treat the emergence of white women’s hard-boiled detective fiction in the mid-to-late 1980s as thoroughly revolutionary and subversive, critics such as Anna Wilson argue against this kind of framing.
Wilson points out that the entrance of straight women detectives into the genre parallels that of middle-class white women into positions of power (254), suggesting that the rise of the female detective in hard-boiled fiction is not revolutionary, but a reflection of the mainstreaming of liberal feminist16 ideals in the wake of second-wave feminism’s influence in the 1970s and early
1980s. Wilson further argues that because of the way (straight) women’s detective fiction employs the conventions of the genre, it only replicates the norms and hegemonies of male detective fiction that it wishes to subvert (254). For Wilson, as well as Johanna Smith and Linda
Mizejewski, only lesbian detective fiction succeeds in carving out a truly politically subversive counter-canon. Smith praises lesbian detective fiction’s ability to reject masculine definitions of femininity, claiming that (straight) women’s detective fiction merely manages to question it (81); similarly, Mizejewski argues that only lesbian detective fiction succeeds in embodying feminist ideals well enough to produce a true feminist project (21). By framing lesbian detective fiction as
16 Liberal feminism emphasizes individual actions and behaviors as the key to gender equality. Guy 14 the only real feminist17 detective fiction, these critics posit lesbianism as a kind of ultra- feminism, while simultaneously situating the purpose of lesbian detective fiction as one of women’s liberation.
But while the genre-critical bent of the Pam Nilsen series is typical for the lesbian detective novel, feminist politics and concerns are at the forefront of the series, and not just in its relation to genre. Each book in the Pam trilogy has a main, non-genre-related political focus: the first considers race and international politics in what could be considered an attempt, if confused, at intersectional feminism;18 the second focuses on a radical feminist critique of prostitution and rape; the third centers on feminist debates about pornography and S&M. The exploration of the main feminist political issue that grounds each text is closely tied to its genre negotiations; for instance, in the first book, Murder in the Collective, as Pam investigates a murder, her first- world, white feminism is exposed and the novel educates her in a more intersectional and race- conscious feminist ideology. This kind of formula, in which Pam fails politically and then learns from her mistakes, is a distinctive feature of the series, and large portions of each of the three
Nilsen novels are dedicated to Pam’s feminist19 education.
17 These critics do not define feminism, and instead treat it as an abstract, universal ideal without historical specificity. However, by identifying and rejecting traditional liberal feminism, these critics implicitly locate both themselves and the lesbian detective novel outside of that particular brand of feminism, and by extension in a more radical and lesbian-centric feminism. 18 Intersectional feminism is a form of feminism that attempts to understand how different forms of oppression (race, gender, class, sexuality, immigrant status, disability, etc.) intersect and impact people who hold multiple marginalized identities. 19 Feminism is tricky to define in the Pam series, mostly because the novels understand feminism as a complex, multivalent movement encompassing a large variety of perspectives; they locate certain feminisms as better or worse, but none are cast off as non-feminisms. In general, however, “good” feminism in the series is a thoroughly 1980s radical feminism, with a hint of lesbian separatism emerging in the final book. Pam herself begins as a relatively liberal feminist, and her feminist education involves a consistent movement towards radical and separatist feminisms. Guy 15
The growth Pam undergoes with regards to her feminism, as well as her lesbian coming out narrative, both constitute major breaks from the traditional formula of the genre: the detective novel is typically anti-growth, with its main focus being an exposition of a secret past rather than movement towards the future (Todorov, 44). Additionally, in most detective fiction, the detective operates as a determiner and often creator of truth (Reddy, Traces, 55); the detective rarely wavers in conviction, and while he may come to a false conclusion somewhere along the way, in the end, he is always right, and this leaves little room for character development or growth. In feminist detective fiction, this rightness often extends beyond the mystery to politics: the books may be preachy or didactic, and the detective’s feminism is uncomplicated, unassailable, and unchallenged. Although the Pam Nilsen novels are certainly didactic, Pam, as Maureen Reddy notes, does not “[function] as an authority figure who finally establishes a single vision of reality,” but is instead “[endowed]… with the great gifts of fallibility and tolerance” (Sisters, 14). Because Pam does not ultimately define or delineate feminist truth, the series is able explore many versions of feminism. The books indicate preferences for certain feminisms over others, but feminist plurality is maintained, and characters hold conflicting opinions without condemnation or dismissal. Just as important, however, is the fact that Pam is routinely wrong—about feminism, her cases, and even her self. In all cases, she requires outside support and assistance to find her way to the truth, and even then, the truth is always multi-faceted.
As noted in the Introduction, Tanya Horeck argues in Public Rape that this kind of feminist growth and education is typical of women’s crime writing, especially with regards to rape. In fact, for Horeck, rape within the crime genre is specifically a catalyst for the production of feminism and feminist identification; she writes, “rape... is the event that provokes or initiates Guy 16 woman’s entry in to feminism” (128). In the case of female characters who are detectives before they are raped, like Pam, that entry into feminism20 takes the form of a newfound ability to identify with other women, and especially with the victims for whom they seek justice: “In feminist crime novels, rape is the privileged means of turning the female detective back into a female like any other character/reader” (Horeck, 127). Conversely, when the female character is raped prior to becoming a detective, rape functions as an origin story (128), inducting the character into feminism and into a detective identity at the same time. In both cases, for Horeck, the investigative work of the victim-detective constitutes a kind of feminist solidarity or action, meant to protect and help other women and victims.
While Horeck’s analysis relies upon a shifting and blurry definition of feminism, and, in the process, reduces the narrative and political differences between female detectives who become victims and female victims who become detectives, she nonetheless identifies here the complexity of the role of rape in crime fiction and literature more broadly. Horeck’s argument also provides context for two major aspects of the Pam Nilsen series: first, the genre-breaking exploration of gender and violation in relation to the detective, and second, the role Pam’s rape plays in her larger feminist education throughout the series. While rape is not a major part of the first Pam novel, and Pam herself does not become a victim-detective until the end of the second novel, the genre negotiations of Murder in the Collective lay crucial groundwork for the way rape functions in Sisters of the Road.
Pam does not, at the outset of the first novel, consider herself any kind of detective.
Instead, she becomes involved in the murder investigation because of her distrust of the police
20 Although Pam is a self-identified feminist before her rape, Horeck specifically includes Pam as evidence for her argument. The easiest way to reconcile these tensions is to understand Pam’s rape as her initiation into a particular kind of feminist identification, rather than into the movement or politics of feminism more broadly. Guy 17 and her personal connection to the murder victim, Jeremy, a member of the feminist printing collective Pam and her sister started. But even then, she hesitates to get involved, and embraces the detective role only when she begins to investigate Jeremy’s death alongside Hadley, a member of a lesbian typesetting collective and Pam’s eventual lover. 21 But even after Pam accepts her detective identity (alongside her lesbian identity), her location in the genre remains complicated, and the novel reflects self-consciously upon that position. Pam and Hadley compare their situation as “real” people solving a murder to that of fictional detectives, bemoaning that “if this were a movie” (127), they could simply hop on a plane whenever they needed to investigate an out-of-state lead. But, as Pam notes wistfully, “Real life is always so low-budget” (127).
Although hers is not, in fact, a real life, these references to the unreality of genre convention create a veil of realism for the novel in opposition to the apparent fantasy of other detective stories, even as they remind the reader that Pam is exactly as fictional as Nancy Drew or Philip
Marlowe. The novel’s efforts to distinguish itself from its own genre become more pointed when
Pam and Hadley joke about themselves as “sleazo detectives” running between “seedy motels and luxurious estates” with “dazzling blondes answering the doors in negligees”… “just trying to corrupt us” (127). Here, Murder in the Collective invokes conventions of genre in order to criticize hard-boiled fiction’s misogynistic fantasies, and compares Pam to the traditional hard- boiled detective to highlight the differences between them. This exchange drives an ideological wedge between Pam and genre, establishing her as the anti-hard-boiled detective in a move that is both genre-aware and genre-critical.
Interestingly, however, even as the novel distinguishes Pam from other detectives and itself from other detective novels, it also points its genre-criticism inward, and frames Pam’s
21 Pam considers herself straight before meeting Hadley, and comes into both her detective and lesbian identities through this relationship. Guy 18 occupation of the detective role as a self-indulgent, politically objectionable fantasy. When the police arrest Zee, a printing collective member, for the murder, Pam is the only major character who struggles to support her fully; the others either do not believe she is guilty or do not particularly care if she is, and remain steadfastly loyal. Pam, meanwhile, cannot place her political interest in feminist solidarity before her need for the truth, and she pursues Zee with interrogative techniques so harsh that they draw criticism from the usually mild Hadley. But even this is not enough to stop Pam, and she remains confident in her methods, even after she accidentally intimidates a suspect, Elena, into confessing to a different crime altogether.22 Her determination reaches its peak when, along with Hadley, Pam plans a dramatic strategy to get
Zee to confess to the murder: Pam will interrogate Zee, work up to a confrontation, and then, just at the right moment, Hadley will enter wearing a pair of Zee’s earrings that the detective duo found in the murder victim’s home. Zee’s reaction to the earrings is expected to be damning, but the plan never reaches that point. Instead, just as Pam is about to reveal Zee as the killer, in that crucial detective novel climax, she is interrupted by a false confession from June, another collective member. June, who has flagrantly disregarded genre norms and solved the mystery before the detective, verbally eviscerates Pam for her approach, her callous unconcern for Zee, and her ignorant condescension towards June herself,23 effectively destroying the climax and breaking away from the detective formula the book otherwise follows.
22 The same night as Jeremy’s murder, someone ransacks and destroys the typesetting collective’s offices; Elena confesses to being the perpetrator, for reasons unrelated to Jeremy’s death. 23 June is black, and Zee is an immigrant from the Philippines, so June here seems to be critiquing Pam’s failure to include women of color in her feminism, although the narrative redirects that critique into a pseudo-deracialized feminist critique of the detective role. In other words, a specific complaint about Pam’s first-world, white feminism becomes an evaluation of the detective project’s incompatibility with feminism in general, and the racial dimension is ultimately minimized. Guy 19
June criticizes Pam and Hadley for “acting like detectives” (175), but she objects not to
Pam and Hadley’s false or audacious occupation of the role, but to the ethics of the role itself.
Reddy observes that June’s challenge makes Pam realize her investigation could cause “another woman’s incarceration” (Sisters, 138), a realization that causes Pam to question, as June has already done, whether there is value to detection at all, if it is so at odds with women’s interests
(139). June’s challenge also reveals the performative nature of their respective roles, further exposing the questionable ethics of the detective structure. After June’s confrontation, the women sit in silence, and Pam thinks, “It was suddenly as if none of us knew what to do or say anymore” (176)—and they don’t, because June has thrown them all off script, and pushed them outside the narrative legibility of the detective genre. When the doorbell rings, and Hadley makes her entrance, it briefly appears that the dramatic moment will restore the structure and return the characters to their roles. Instead, what was intended to be a “stunning entrance” (177) is barely noticed. Zee confesses, but the drama is gone. Her story plays out without the usual fanfare of a final reveal; the truth comes out, but without the implication of future consequence, because the women all agree to keep Zee’s guilt a secret. In the aftermath of this anticlimax, Pam ruminates on June’s role, and realizes, “June’s sense of direction had been keener than ours, but she hadn’t pursued Zee like a detective, she’d confronted her like a woman and stayed to comfort her like a friend” (179). Approaching the situation as a woman allows June to see the truth sooner than
Pam, while generating far less collateral damage in the process.
Pam’s adherence to genre conventions causes her to be cruel and thoughtless, and by framing Pam’s detective work as actively harmful towards women, Murder in the Collective questions the radical feminist potential of the detective project. The end of the novel thus undoes the apparent project of the rest of the book, rendering useless both Pam’s detective work and the Guy 20 work of the narrative structure. In the end, the victory of the novel is not the detective finding the killer, but the detective casting off her role as detective and embracing her role as woman in order to preserve the freedom of another. This ending sets up an opposition between woman and detective, and in doing so, radically revises the feminist detective project. Whereas typical women’s detective fiction, in classic liberal feminist form, simply replaces a male power figure with a female power figure, Barbara Wilson’s novel suggests that the power structure itself is dangerous and misogynistic, regardless of who fills the role. Murder in the Collective thus proposes that being a good feminist means choosing womanhood over detective identity. For
Pam, this means practicing an unconditional solidarity towards other women by having their backs, no matter the cost or circumstances.
But Pam’s self reflexive revelation about the importance of female solidarity is immediately interrupted by Hadley’s abrupt departure at the end of the novel, when she leaves
Pam in order to rekindle a relationship with an ex-girlfriend. By the beginning of the next novel, the newly woman-oriented, detection-rejecting Pam is more isolated from other women than ever, and occupies a much more traditionally hard-boiled relational status. Ann Wilson argues that the perpetual singleness of (straight) (female) detectives is a convention of genre, writing,
“The doomed relationship is, of course, part of the tradition of detective fiction, not just hard- boiled fiction, because detective fiction tends to celebrate the individual” (155). Anna Wilson
(not to be confused with Ann) similarly locates aloneness within a detective tradition, but suggests that the woman detective’s singleness must be justified. She writes, “The lesbian detective… is more typically found in a state of nonrelation. She is alone and defined through this solitude… While the hard-boiled ‘op’ simply appears in the text untrammeled either by relational ties or by the need to justify their lack, the feminist hard-boiled hero, in reaching for Guy 21 this masculine space, must account for an unnatural absence” (259). Pam’s love life undergoes this presence and absence through Hadley’s removal, and in Sisters of the Road, Pam could be easily classed as the kind of non-lover Anna Wilson discusses. In fact, most of her loved ones are out of the picture in this novel, in spite of their presence in both the previous and subsequent installments: Penny, her twin, is in Nicaragua, along with Ray, Pam’s ex-lover and Penny’s new beau, while Pam herself has moved out of her collective home into her own apartment, a move that Reddy identifies as part of the bildungsroman aspect of the coming out narrative (129). But her moving out also represents a move away: away from community, and away from other women.
Pam’s physical removal from the feminist utopianism of the collective home should constitute backwards movement for her radical feminist education, but by placing it in the time jump between Murder in the Collective and Sisters of the Road, the author sidesteps the plot inconsistency. Pam at the end of Collective makes no mention of moving out, and by the time
Sisters begins, Pam has already grown sick of the solitude, as well as the “promiscuous phase”
(13) she fell into right after. This phase produces a string of ex-lovers, but no present lovers, allowing Pam to stay in a realm of non-relation while still providing sufficient evidence for her continued lesbianism even in the absence of the woman who apparently inspired it. Because all of this occurs off the page, the novel detaches Pam from women and hastens her lesbian growth without devoting much narrative space to either development. This places Pam in a peculiar position at the outset of Sisters of the Road: she has embraced female solidarity and is furthering her radical feminist education, but largely in the absence of other women, either as friends or as lovers. But in spite of—or perhaps because of—Pam’s lack of female community, her newfound Guy 22 female solidarity24 shapes the events of the second novel.25 In this book, Pam approaches the murder by prioritizing the survivor over the murder victim; rather than seeking to find closure for
Rosalie, the girl whose death starts the novel, she races to save Rosalie’s friend, Trish, from the same fate. In doing so, Pam shows she has learned to place female solidarity before detective work, and preserves the genre subversion of the previous novel. Additionally, however, Pam’s shift is necessary for the plot of the novel to work: as a detective, Pam would have little to offer the prostitution- and rape-oriented politics of the novel, because, at the base of it, there is little to solve in Sisters of the Road. Moreover, solving Rosalie’s murder would do nothing about the main problem in the novel—male violence and female victimization—and so would fail to satisfactorily offer the closure that detective fiction demands. But as a woman, and as a feminist,
Pam has more potential to produce a solution to sexual violence than she does as a detective.
In the 1980s, feminists were deeply divided on the issue of prostitution,26 with sex- positive feminism on one end arguing for the agency and economic opportunity it provided women, and radical feminism on the other arguing against it as degrading, victimizing, and violent towards women (Outshoorn, 145).27 Sisters of the Road does not fall neatly into either
24 I use “female solidarity” to refer to women supporting, protecting, and fighting for each other, often from / against male violence (which may be individual, systemic, or institutional, depending on the context). That said, the phenomenon I describe as female solidarity throughout this chapter is far more fluid and mutable than this static definition captures. 25 Plot summary: at the beginning of the novel, Pam is flagged down for help by two young prostitutes, one of whom is bleeding severely. She takes them to the hospital; Rosalie, the injured girl, dies, and Pam takes the other, Trish, into her home. Trish disappears, and Pam searches for her. At one point she finds Trish, but Trish runs away again. Eventually, Pam catches up with Trish at a cabin, where she has been taken by her pimp, Wayne; Wayne rapes Pam, and is about to kill her when June, Pam’s friend, arrives with the police. 26 This is a very charged category. Today, the preferred term is “sex work,” but this implies a kind of agency Trish does not have, and adheres to a sex-work-positive feminism that Sisters of the Road strongly resists. 27 These arguments reflect the larger radical / liberal divide. Radical feminists conceive of women’s oppression as the result of structural patriarchy, while the liberals emphasize individual Guy 23 category. Instead, it constructs a dialogue between the two, in an effort to show the complexities and nuances of each side of the debate. As in the rest of the series, no single stance is portrayed as the perfect one; instead, “good” feminist characters must strive to understand both sides without reductively condemning one or embracing the other, although Pam and the novel both clearly favor a more radical interpretation. Pam’s semi-radical feminism is paired with a privileged detachment from the prostitution debate, which is revealed by her comment upon the
Green River Murders28 that “none of the dead were women that I or any of my friends knew. We didn’t know any prostitutes” (5). This combination defines Pam’s interactions with Trish, a teenage prostitute, as Pam exhibits a consciously feminist concern for the girl’s victimization that seeks to save her without considering the instability of Trish’s situation as an underage runaway who survives by selling sex, or the danger she faces from both the police and her pimp as a result of Pam’s interference.
While the novel critiques Pam’s lack of awareness about the threats prostitutes face, particularly her decision to involve the police in her search for Trish in spite of her knowledge of the criminalization of prostitutes and Trish’s existing criminal record, it does not challenge her view of Trish as a one-dimensional tragic victim. Even the most liberal feminist characters have to work hard to frame Trish as an empowered agent of her own life (although Janis, a defense lawyer for prostitutes, does maintain that even young, abused girls make choices and have agency). Moreover, the fact that Trish, a fifteen-year-old being pimped out by her stepbrother- boyfriend, is the only prostitute significantly present in the novel offers a very singular picture of
ignorance. As a result, liberal feminists believe oppression can be solved within the system, while radical feminists demand a complete deconstruction of it (Johnson, 114-123). 28 A string of murders committed by serial killer Gary Ridgway in the 1980s and 1990s. Ridgway targeted teen runaways and prostitutes, and dumped their bodies near the Green River in Washington (Dolak). Guy 24 what prostitution is (victimizing and degrading) and what it is not (empowering). Similarly, while Pam and Janis’s heated debates about prostitution end with both conceding some points to the other, Janis, the liberal feminist, tends to make more concessions than Pam, the burgeoning radical feminist. Janis’ biggest concession is her confession that both she and her clients are “full of bullshit” (148), and that “You can talk all you want about a prostitutes’ union and women controlling it themselves. But it’s never going to be a safe profession. Because men aren’t safe”
(147-148).
Although a bit of a throwaway line, “men aren’t safe” is a solid summary of this novel’s politics. Even the irony produced when taken out of context—the suggestion that men are at risk—is important, because the structure of the sentence is carefully chosen to place full responsibility on men for their violence. While “women aren’t safe” might be a more common way of expressing women’s risk, and “men aren’t safe for women” would be more specific, the wording in the novel refuses to delimit the danger men pose or make them passive perpetrators of violence. Moreover, in Sisters of the Road, the threat men pose to prostitutes is equally matched by their culpability in its production, creating the image of a world of prostitution that male violence generates and maintains at every level. This view goes largely unchallenged in the novel, both in the characters’ dialogue and in the plot. Trish’s life story bears witness to the role male violence plays in producing prostitutes: over the course of the novel, Pam discovers that
Trish was sexually assaulted by her biological father, physically abused by her stepfather, and raped by her stepbrother, Wayne, who later becomes her pimp. When confronted, these men repeatedly deny their roles in Trish’s decision to run away and become a prostitute, and their lack of remorse emphasizes the extent of their cruelty. But while individual men push girls like
Trish into prostitution, a more generalized specter of male violence maintains it by ensuring a Guy 25 steady stream of demand (a stream Pam observes in the form of faceless men in darkened cars picking up girls on the streets). Simultaneously, criminalization guarantees a supply force composed of women that are economically and psychologically unable to leave prostitution:
Janis tells Pam that prostitutes’ legal records prevent them from finding other jobs, while Beth, a social worker, locates the moment a girl becomes impossible to rehabilitate after the first arrest, when she “takes on the whore label and starts feeling like that’s what she is” (57). In this way, men and patriarchal systems create and sustain prostitution by pushing women into it and ensuring they cannot get back out.
But while men bear the blame for sexual violence and exploitation in Sisters of the Road, they are not the only characters shown to be capable of predatory or misogynistic sexual behaviors. The heroine herself exhibits some of these tendencies, through what Anna Wilson describes as Pam’s move towards hard-boiled sexuality. Pam discusses her ex-lovers with detached condescension, at one point noting, “I wasn’t unsympathetic to people nursing hopeless crushes; my own undying feelings for Hadley fell into pretty much the same category, but at least I had the dignity to shut up about it” (19). Anna Wilson sees this self-representation, in which Pam is “besieged by old girlfriends, the harvest of her recent wild oats” (262) as reminiscent of Philip Marlowe and his contemporaries, and connects it to Pam’s occupation of a predatory male gaze, which causes her to misinterpret a coworker’s conversations as invitations for sex. In this sense, Pam’s sexual situation post-Hadley places her in a role akin to that of the trope-y fictional detectives the pair mocked in the first book, while jokingly comparing themselves to “sleazo detectives” (Murder, 127). In a way, this imagined take on hard-boiled sexuality from the first novel is made real in Sisters of the Road, and yet guilt and discomfort always plague Pam’s occupation of the predatory male role. As a result, unlike in Murder in the Guy 26
Collective, where Pam recklessly but intentionally inhabits the sleuth fantasy, in Sisters of the
Road, Pam resists the wholly undesirable hard-boiled position of non-relation and predatory sexuality. When thinking about her coworker, Carole, Pam notes, “All I really wanted was to go to bed with her, and not become her friend, and as a good feminist, that made me feel guilty”
(105). Later, after Pam proposes sex with Carole and Carole refuses her, Pam notes with embarrassment that she had “projected onto [Carole] the image of accessibility” (123). Pam’s concern for women prevents her from truly assuming a predatory gaze, while, as Anna Wilson notes, Carole’s rejection of Pam prevents the success of the hard-boiled sexual model. Pam’s temporary occupation of the role does not endorse it, but instead reveals its harmful nature.
Moreover, her ability to resist the temptation to stay in that role shows that one can achieve control over one’s sexual desires, and thus the novel thoroughly rejects the notion that predatory sexuality is natural or inevitable for people attracted to women. Similarly, Pam’s brief identification with the men who pick up prostitutes, revealed by her momentary admission,
“Why couldn’t I—I… for the first time felt the persuasive logic of it all—just go out and get a prostitute?” (71), serves less to normalize purchasing sex and more to identify the psychological sadness and weakness of capitulation. As a result, Pam’s brief encounter with predatory sexuality only further condemns men in this novel, making their role in prostitution not only comprehensive, but also reprehensible.
Given the near-total vilification of men in Sisters of the Road, it follows that only women could be posited as a solution—and this book, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its rejection of the solution-producing formula of detective fiction, is deeply invested in solutions. And, indeed, all of these solutions are women-instigated, and the novel only shows women helping women, from Beth’s work at the Rainbow Center to the women’s café, “Sisters of the Road,” that Pam Guy 27 visits and from which the novel takes its name. No good men exist in this book, a fact that is all the more significant because it had to write out a main male character from the rest of the series in order to accomplish it.29 But while women fighting for women are nearly as ever-present in the novel as the violence they attempt to stop, they rarely succeed. Sometimes they fail due to the sheer power of male violence: while Janis advocates for sex workers in court and Beth tries to help young girls through counseling, both acknowledge the limitations of their work against the source of the problem, and even Pam bemoans “the hopelessness of it” (85). Moreover, as the story eventually reveals, this kind of female solidarity previously resulted in Rosalie’s murder, when Rosalie attempted to help Trish leave the prostitution scene. Because this murder is the premise of the novel, Rosalie’s ineffectual effort to enact female solidarity catalyzes the entire story.
And yet, for every moment where female solidarity fails in the novel because of its own apparent limitations, there is another where it fails because its practitioners sabotage it by trusting men to share in their feminist work. The most egregious breach of solidarity occurs when Beth, Janis, and Pam find Trish with her biological father. They know that he raped her as a child, and Pam has actually heard him confess to both assaulting and gaslighting30 Trish, and yet all three women agree to leave her with him. This moment, while seemingly shocking, is actually a fairly typical manifestation of Pam’s lukewarm commitment to female solidarity. In spite of the ubiquity of rape and male violence in the novel, Pam consistently entrusts men with
Trish’s safety. Her continued inability to draw the appropriate radical feminist conclusion from her growing knowledge of male violence hinders her application of female solidarity. Because
29 Ray, Pam’s sister’s lover, spends this book in Nicaragua. 30 An abuse tactic that makes someone question their own sanity or memory. In Trish’s case, her father tells her she imagined being raped. Guy 28
Pam refuses to apply her theoretical knowledge of male violence to her victim-saving efforts, and continues to believe that men have the potential to be a part of the solution, she is unable to prevent victimization before it occurs. By keeping her systemic analysis of rape distinct from her on-the-ground work, Pam proves that her evolving radical feminist leanings are not yet strong enough overcome her liberal feminist tendency to see individual men as separate from the epidemic of male violence.
Because of this lingering commitment to liberal feminism, Pam never seriously suspects
Wayne of being Rosalie’s murderer, in spite of his sexual relationship with his underage stepsister. She knows him to be a statutory rapist and pimp, but is taken in by his charm and good looks, and focuses her suspicion on his business partner, Karl, because he has a cruel face and frightening eyes. In spite of June’s warnings that men like Wayne are the most dangerous ones, because “you never know where you are with them until it’s too late” (81) and they are
“exactly the type” who become serial killers, “look at Ted Bundy” (103), Pam persists in trusting that Wayne is innocent of Rosalie’s murder (if not much else). Her abandonment of the detective form compounds the issue, as she applies inconsistent sleuth logic to the situation, telling herself that Wayne has no motive for murdering the girls who worked for him, “whereas Karl look[s] like he could kill someone without blinking a matte black eye” (79). Karl has, as far as Pam knows, no more incentive to kill Rosalie than Wayne; it is their respective appearances that vindicate Wayne and indict Karl. But while Pam’s newfound female solidarity is still too limited and liberal to perceive Wayne’s villainy, it simultaneously prevents her from returning to the hard-boiled sleuthing method of the former novel.
The failure of the women to enact appropriate solidarity becomes particularly prominent and urgent in the events that immediately precede Wayne’s rape of Pam. When Pam decides to Guy 29 go to Wayne’s mountain cabin to look for Trish without calling the police first, June, in appropriate solidarity, accompanies her, even as she warns that they may end up dead if the killer is there. The two later reflect on this decision, with June saying they never should have gone alone, and Pam reminding her that Trish would be dead if they’d waited for the police (200).
These reflections make the implications of narrative explicit, by exposing how female solidarity and an initial rejection of male police presence save Trish’s life, but contribute directly to
Wayne’s rape of Pam. Pam’s rape is then framed as the price for saving Trish. But this conversation between Pam and June erases the fact that it was not merely the lack of police that made Pam vulnerable, but June leaving her for the sake of retrieving them. Had they remained committed to female solidarity, and not attempted to enlist the help of (male) law enforcement,
Pam would not have been alone when Wayne arrived. June’s suspicion of Wayne would have prevented Pam from letting him into the cabin, and the subsequent rape would not have occurred.
That failure of solidarity worsens when its separation of the women causes Pam to feel the need to rely on a man yet again to save other women: Pam worries that Karl will encounter June in the mountains and kill her, and, believing she may need Wayne’s help to save her, Pam lets Wayne into the cabin. Once again, concern for women coupled with misguided trust in men leads a woman to make the wrong decision. In the middle of being raped, Pam is saved (from death) by
June, in another partial victory for female solidarity, and in the end, this is all female solidarity accomplishes: saving women from murder, when it could not save them from rape.
However, for all the novel appears to advocate for a female solidarity not reliant upon men, it does not provide a sufficiently robust cast of women to make that feasible. The lack of female community or romantic partner for Pam may place her in a more traditional hard-boiled position of relation in Sisters of the Road, but that hard-boiled position does not supply her with Guy 30 the strength or invulnerability of the male hard-boiled detective. While the male detective’s lone wolf tendencies shield him, and his rejection of romance protects him from the seductive dangers of the femme fatale, Pam’s aloneness makes her vulnerable. Women detectives, both straight and gay, differ in fiction from male detectives in their connection to communities: Margaret Kinsman writes, “The placement of these fictional female detectives within solid and dynamic communities of other women… is one of the most significant markers of the counter-tradition.
First, the community involvement provides an abiding contrast to the loner figure of the earlier male detective; and second, it is testament to the importance of female solidarities in the history of feminist action, analysis, and vision” (155). But while women detectives need these communities for investigative support, they also need them for protection. The female detective is perpetually vulnerable in a way the male detective is not, and to sexual violence in particular, as noted in the Introduction. In Pam, that vulnerability is actualized, and she becomes a victim of the very violence that pervades the novel.
Pam’s solitude in the novel thus directly contributes to her rape by making her an easier target for Wayne. It also puts her in Wayne’s path in the first place, because her loneliness influences her drive to find Trish by imbuing her with a sense of desperation and sadness that makes her hell-bent on saving this one girl. This, combined with her lack of female community
(straight or gay), causes her to enter a male-violence-infested world with inadequate support.
Neither Carole nor June can fill the hole left by Hadley, in either Pam’s romantic or investigative lives, and the lesbian community she slowly builds through Beth and Janis is still too nascent to provide the community-based radical feminist power and protection necessary to save Pam from the violence she encounters. Instead, their intermittent presences merely delay the inevitable, something Wayne alludes to just before he rapes Pam, saying, “I’ve thought about this for a long Guy 31 time… When you came with that game of buying the coke. If you hadn’t had your friend with you I would have” (194). Here, Wayne references an earlier scene, in which Pam and Carole visit his apartment under the pretense of purchasing drugs, with the intention of snooping around for clues. Wayne affirms the role women play in protecting one another from male violence, albeit from a vastly different angle, and in so doing partially attributes his eventual success to
Pam’s solitary status in the rape scene, which is brought about by one of many breaks in female solidarity in the novel. The homophobic dimension of the rape highlights the need for a lesbian community in particular, when Wayne shouts, “Bitch, cunt, lezzie, pervert, whore, how do you like this, you fucking dyke” (194). By targeting her lesbian identity in her most painful, vulnerable, violated moment, Wayne isolates Pam from straight women victims, and consequently the protective power of straight feminist community; her rape is not merely a manifestation of gender violence, but a particular combination of homophobia and misogyny that ties the violence she experiences to her lesbian self. Wayne’s slurs weaponize Pam’s sexuality against her, robbing her of any pride or comfort she may have taken in her lesbian identity by implicating it in the violence he inflicts upon her. At the same time, both her feminist and lesbian identities cease to be entirely during the rape, because all of her identity disappears: Pam narrates, “I almost blanked out; my whole being reduced to a tiny pinprick that cried out no… I felt that whatever made Pam a person, whatever I knew or had known about myself was being crushed out of me, was spinning into fragments like a planet smashed by meteors” (194).
This line, painful and difficult though it is, is an unusually literary piece of prose compared to the rest of the series, and the strangeness of the prose in context produces a kind of narrative distance. This is not Pam’s usual voice, and so it removes the event just slightly from
Pam and the reader’s vicarious experience of Pam’s life. This effect is exacerbated by two Guy 32 separate shifts in temporality that occur during the rape scene. First is the shift that occurs right after Pam has let Wayne into the cabin, when Trish’s voice ominously comes from where she lies nearly dead in the loft, warning Pam not to trust him; immediately after Trish’s words, there is a section break on the page, and the next words are, “Afterwards, like all victims, I went over and over the events looking for things I should or shouldn’t have done” (192). After a paragraph of this kind of contemplation, the narrative jumps back to the real-time events of the rape scene, even though Pam’s post-rape commentary has already revealed exactly what is to come. For the next page and a half, the narrative is deeply immersed in the small details: Pam narrates every single one of Wayne’s actions, watching in terror as he prepares injectable cocaine and gloats about his plan to rape her. But at the end of his speech, another time jump occurs, smaller this time, and noticeable only for its contrast to the earlier play-by-play narration. After Wayne finishes speaking, Pam narrates, “He raped me. With a punishing violence that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with rage and hatred. My vagina was as dry as my mouth and every pounding blow stabbed through my body like a sword dipped in fire. It was like surgery without anesthesia, like nothing I’d ever felt” (194). Here, Pam recounts the event in fragments and after-the-fact observations, and her extensive use of metaphors further distances the reader from the immediacy of the event, even as it renders the pain more explicit for its comparison to readily imaginable forms of pain. The way Pam recounts this experience is at once a complicated rendering of trauma—the mix of graphic details and distancing language seems reflective of the overwhelming realness of rape and an attempt to cope with that—and a way of making a narratively illegible event more containable and stable. The distance produced by the unique way rape is narrated in this scene suggests that rape was too much to narrate in the usual style of the Guy 33 series; this style contains it, makes it manageable, and prevents it from becoming as destabilizing and overwhelming as it might otherwise.
That containment is also central to the political project of the book, which emerges most obtrusively when Pam, in the middle of narrating her rape, stops to clarify that rape is about power and not sex. Reddy highlights the political purpose of the explicitly punitive nature of
Wayne’s rape of Pam, saying, “Most of the crimes investigated in lesbian feminist crime fiction are committed by men against women as a way of enforcing women’s obedience to patriarchal order” (131). Pam’s rape is no exception: Pam’s lesbianism as well as her interference into
Wayne’s exploitation of Trish constitute a violation of the patriarchal order, and Wayne punishes her for this trespass. Reddy argues that the lesbian detective novel posits the solution to this kind of overwhelming violence within the lesbian community, which functions not only as a defense against violence but as a revolutionary action (130). She claims that, in this light, the ending of
Sisters of the Road is in fact optimistic; in spite of the overwhelming horror of male violence, it
“suggest[s] that lesbians (and straight women) speaking the truth about their lives and acting together in the support of each other, collectively and individually, will eventually defeat the patriarchal order and, along the way to that goal, will continue to triumph over threatening manifestations of that order” (135). This reading is overly optimistic, given the failures and absences of female community and solidarity that recur in the Pam series, but it nonetheless correctly identifies the potential these books imagine for community and solidarity enacted correctly and consistently. Still, the fact that this potential is never fulfilled limits an optimistic reading, because it remains unclear whether such a flawless enactment of solidarity is even possible, and if it were, whether it could be as effective as hoped in the face of overwhelming male violence. Guy 34
Earlier in the novel, Pam watches an episode of Cagney and Lacey in which a young policewoman overzealously hunts down a serial rapist, ultimately killing him in revenge for her own rape (which a different man committed). The ending greatly disturbs Pam, who narrates, “I almost burst into tears. It was as if I understood the story on some profound level and was afraid of its meaning. Was that the only way to stop violence against women? To kill men? To kill them back? I didn’t want to believe that” (161). But the end of the novel suggests the answer may be yes. Trusting men in Sisters of the Road only ends poorly, and, ironically, forces women to continue to trust men in order to save them from the consequences of trusting other men. But that trust always comes at a cost. Even the police with June who help save Pam participate in her violation as voyeurs, and Pam observes one officer in particular who seems aroused by the sight of her raped body. The rape thus teaches her, after the first novel failed to, that female solidarity must be unwavering, and must not only seek to help victimized women but avoid recourse to the men who victimize them.
The didactic function of Pam’s rape becomes even more apparent at the end of Sisters of the Road, when Pam asks June if she thought she could have been raped in the same situation, and to her surprise (and the reader’s), June says yes. This then produces a heavy-handed claim, through June, that rape can happen to anyone. In the context of the plot, however, this claim is unsustainable: this particular rape would not have happened to June, not because she was stronger or tougher (as Pam thinks), but because she was less trusting. Still, by showing June and
Pam reflecting upon the feminist lesson they have learned from Pam’s rape, the novel clearly employs rape as teaching tool, both for Pam and for the reader. For Pam, being raped gives her a feminist perspective she previously lacked. It is only by becoming a victim that she is able to truly understand victimhood; in this sense, the rape produces the kind of feminist identification Guy 35
Horeck discusses. At the same time, the rape attempts to make the reader a better feminist, by actualizing the threat of male violence that underpins the entirety of the novel, and showing, as
Pam and June claim to have learned, that rape can happen to anyone. Charlotte Sharke suggests that the reader is “raped” alongside Pam, writing, “Making the reader the target of male violence allows a reader to begin to imagine the impact of male violence, abuse, and stalking (not that many of us women need reminding)” (20). By being raped by proxy, the reader learns the same lesson as Pam about victimhood and the pervasiveness of male violence.
Moreover, by framing the events leading up to the rape as the consequences of Pam’s poor decisions, Sisters of the Road attempts to guide the reader to a point of nearly blaming Pam, only to turn it around on the reader as a teaching moment. Pam’s internal monologue about everything she could—should—have done differently is a realistic rendering of trauma, but it also appears to mirror the thought process of an assumed victim-blaming audience. By having
Pam blame herself in this way, the novel tries to expose victim-blaming rhetoric as harmful and misguided. But while Pam’s rape is itself shocking to an experienced genre reader, who would take the invulnerability of the detective for granted, the identity of the killer—especially by the time Pam lets him into the cabin—is not. Sisters of the Road’s strength is not in its mystery craft, and the identity of the killer is poorly concealed throughout, with not only the narrative, but other characters, consistently noting Wayne’s suspicious behavior, and Pam insistently ignoring it.
Because Wayne’s villainy is abundantly apparent to the reader, Pam’s decision to trust him entirely undermines any attempt to undo victim blaming, and the novel fails to put the reader through the same painful learning experience as Pam. When June, at the end of the novel, confesses to Pam, “I used to think rape was something that happened to stupid people. But you’re not stupid, no more stupid than me anyway” (200), the reader is clearly supposed to Guy 36 agree, having also been blindsided by Wayne’s duplicity, hoodwinked by the charming man with the nice face and smooth words. But just as June’s words are narratively forced (since she saw through Wayne all along), so is the reader’s complicity in the situation. In trying to show that rape can happen to anyone, Sisters of the Road inadvertently reinforces the belief that it doesn’t.
On the most basic level, the use of rape as a didactic tool moves the series into an ethically murky territory. “Raping” Pam and the reader to teach them both a lesson implies that rape is an appropriate and feminist “corrective” for undesirable politics, and by using rape in this way, Sisters of the Road participates, if only figuratively, in violence against women. Worse, perhaps, the novel fails to teach the lesson the rape is intended to convey, because the narrative so clearly implicates Pam in her own rape. Ironically, simply by using rape as for feminist education, the novel undermines its own political messages: the role rape plays in furthering
Pam’s radical feminist education reframes her rape as a punishment, and suggests that in addition to causing her own rape, Pam on some level deserves it—or, at the very least, needs to endure sexual trauma to become a better person. In this sense, then, the novel’s attempt to educate readers about rape causes it to participate in the very discourses it seeks to debunk, and its use of rape is as ultimately as ineffectual as it is ethically questionable. Moreover, by employing rape as a teaching tool, Wilson minimizes the reality of sexual violence, and co-opts trauma for her own authorial and political purposes; making a point about rape becomes more important than telling the story of trauma in a compassionate or sensitive way. And, in the end, she does not even succeed in making that point.
But while rape fails to enact a radical feminist message in Sisters of the Road, it does succeed in continuing the series’ project of genre subversion. After her rape, Pam reflects that,
“if it had been Cagney and Lacey, the show would have stopped right there, with the dramatic Guy 37 moment of rescue. But somehow it didn’t. I had to go on living. And living was hard” (195). The fantasy of detective fiction’s closure-producing formula, especially with regard to rape, is exposed in this line, as in the novel more broadly. Catching the rapist, and even bringing him to legal justice, are shown to be utterly insufficient for producing “real” closure, because the victim must continue to live with the trauma he inflicted. This wrong can never be righted; detective fiction is powerless to resolve the crime. Furthermore, what little closure could be established by the fact of the novel ending is undone by the existence of a subsequent installment. The nature of a series, to be always open to revision and continuation (Harris, “Not,” 161), ensures that the reader not only abstractly knows Pam must go on living, but can see her struggle to do so in the third novel, The Dog Collar Murders. And yet the debunking of closure does not result in a totally cynical or pessimistic ending to the novel: tentative healing is shown through Pam’s emotional connections to June and Trish, and in the next novel, it is clear that Pam has worked hard to recover from her traumatic experience, by going to therapy, taking self-defense classes, and reconnecting with women (including Hadley, who she begins to date again). In this way, then, the Pam Nilsen series responds to detective fiction’s inability to produce closure for rape by offering feminist solutions—even if those solutions are complicated, contradictory, and never fully complete.
Guy 38
Chapter Two: Blanche White
In contrast to the Pam Nilsen series, the Blanche White31 detective novels by Barbara
Neely are, in many ways, barely detective fiction. This is not a judgment on their quality32 so much as an observation of their priorities: while each book has a loose mystery plot, political concerns, rather than the detective story, occupy the main focus of the narratives. Neely addresses this aspect of the series in interviews, saying of her work, “I realized the mystery genre was perfect to talk about serious subjects, and it could carry the political fiction I wanted to write. In a way, I feel the genre chose me” (“Damn”). That is not to say that she does not take genre seriously, however, but that questions of genre come second to representing the experiences and concerns of black women. As she says, “You can't call yourself a mystery writer without understanding how the genre works. On the other hand, for me the question isn't ‘Have I got the clues right?’ but ‘What would Mrs. Buffalo who lived across the street from me do about this?’” (Neely, “Damn”).
Neely’s choice of detective fiction as a vehicle for political writing seems logical when she talks about it—for, after all, detective fiction has always dealt centrally with political concerns, and is certainly well structured for dealing with difficult issues. But given the genre’s historical racial hierarchies33 and the hard-boiled story’s valorization of white masculinity in particular, it is rather surprising that she, and other black crime writers of the 1990s, found the
31 Blanche is a dark-skinned black woman, and the irony of her having a name that means “white white” is commented on throughout the series. 32 That said, these books are, in fact, not particularly well written by most standards, even for genre fiction, which on its own has a reputation for “poor” writing. 33 Both the American and British crime traditions tend to center whiteness as goodness and the racial “other” as criminal. Note, for example, the prevalence of dangerous foreign bodies in classic detective fiction such as that of Poe and Conan Doyle, as well as the often sinister presence of immigrants in whodunit stories and the relegation of people of color to criminal roles in most hard-boiled fiction (Robinson, 6). Guy 39 detective genre so useful for their anti-racist projects. As noted in the Introduction, even hard- boiled detective fiction, which is deeply invested in a self-representation as populist and anti- elitist, still subscribes to strict racial and gender hierarchies (Kinsman, 147; Reddy, “Race,” 137).
But while the hard-boiled tradition fails to extend its anti-elitism to racial equality, one of its innovations has proven extraordinarily useful for writers interested in rewriting race in the genre: extreme distrust of law enforcement and the police. In the case of the Blanche White series, legal corruption and police racism shape much of the conflict and action of the novels, including
Blanche’s refusal to report her rape at the hands of a white employer to the police, and her eventual decision to exact revenge upon her attacker, because she can neither obtain legal justice nor accept a future in which no justice at all is served. In return, however, the rape plot and the series’ related consideration of extralegal justice constitutes a major departure from the genre’s formula of investigation-as-solution, and so the use of hard-boiled convention serves only to push Blanche White even further outside the canon.
From the opening scene of the first novel, the Blanche plot is shaped more by its political interests than the detective formula. While most detective stories reveal the mystery plot within the first few pages, the first third of Blanche on the Lam focuses on Blanche as she appears in court for writing bad checks, receives a prison sentence, escapes police custody, and goes on the run. Each part of this plot is saturated with political meaning. Blanche only ends up in court because her white, wealthy employers fail to pay her wages on time (as noted by critic Maureen
Reddy), and the judge bases his harsh sentence on the lie34 that this is Blanche’s fourth time in court for bad checks (Blanche insists it is only her second). Further, Blanche only decides to flee
34 Whether this lie originates from a prosecutor, the judge himself, or a clerical error is not clear. By not specifying the source of the misinformation, the narrative disperses blame across the entire justice system, rather than placing it on a single employee. Guy 40 police custody when she sees the local country commissioner talking to the press about his bribery scandal, and she notes to herself that he wouldn’t get thirty days in prison but likely “a little bad publicity, and a lot of sympathy from people who might easily be in his position” (5).
Once on the run, it is Blanche’s invisibility, as a black domestic employee, that allows her to hide in plain sight on a local estate, where she discovers a murder. As the detective plot emerges fully, almost halfway into the book, it remains grounded in race politics, because the white characters’ disregard for Blanche enables her to be a uniquely effective investigator: she goes unnoticed most of the time, and when she is noticed, she is generally not viewed as a threat to the criminal schemes of the white characters.
The mystery plot itself, to the extent that it exists in the novel, is weak and confused, and its clearest feature is a critique of whiteness and wealth, when it is revealed that two wealthy white characters have killed their (white) grandmother to protect their inheritance, and then replaced her with the grandmother’s illegitimate (and mixed race) sister.35 To read Blanche on the Lam purely as a mystery, then, would be majorly disappointing, but also a fundamental misreading of its nature: it is not a detective novel so much as social commentary that uses a murder investigation to give itself shape. And yet, even as political fiction and social commentary, the Blanche series struggles, especially with audience. On the one hand, its lack of interest in respectability politics,36 its meditations on black intracommunity problems, and its
35 This plotline serves to highlight the extent of the wealthy white characters’ entitlement in the novel, and the extremes to which they will go to ensure their inheritances. But it also reflects the broader anxiety of white people about the mixing of races and bloodlines, and the dangerous possibility that whiteness could be usurped or infiltrated by blackness. 36 Respectability politics involve an effort on the part of a marginalized group to gain conditional acceptance among the majority population by adhering to the majority’s standards of respectable behavior, or by proving their own values to be aligned with those of the majority. These books have no interest in producing such an account of blackness or the black community; rather, they Guy 41 interest in working through questions surrounding black identity, black subjectivity, and black collectivity (Reitz, 225) suggest an intended audience of black people and especially black women, or at least an audience that is not primarily white and racist. But on the other hand, the overt nature of its race commentary often veers into what Reddy calls “scenes of instruction”
(Traces, 66), designed to educate a presumably white audience about racism in America. These scenes often come at the expense of narrative flow, and, potentially, reader investment, as the overt didacticism of the commentary disrupts the reader’s immersion in the action of the story.
For some white readers, however, these moments do seem to be effective. Book reviewer Mimi
Wesson writes that Blanche on the Lam “taught me more about ‘intersection’ feminism than a dozen essays” (22), and applauds Neely for producing a protagonist who is more authentically outside the law than her white male hard-boiled precursors, because Blanche “has not chosen her marginality, out of daring or any other motive” (22). But while Blanche’s outsiderness is more authentic than any white detective’s, that outsiderness is the result of a race and gender identity that contradicts the white masculinity underlying the structure of the hard-boiled genre.
Blanche’s characterization is marked by this kind of contradiction. Blanche has a distinctly hard-boiled persona that combines street smarts and irreverence to produce an inner monologue that is as clever as it is bold, delivering rapid-fire narration and constant social critique. However, that inner monologue is communicated through free indirect discourse rather than a more traditional first-person perspective, which breaks from the individualism of hard- boiled fiction’s narrative convention while still allowing Blanche’s unique voice to dominate the story.37 Additionally, while Blanche’s narration and behavior are fearless, Blanche’s actual
reject white communities and white values, and specifically show black people to be in opposition to both. 37 The significance of the narrative style of the series will be explored later in the chapter. Guy 42 emotional state is far more complicated, and her hard-boiled disdain for the police is tied closely to a much less traditional terror of them. Her comments upon police brutality in Blanche on the
Lam demonstrate this duality: “She still remembered the police beatings of people in the sixties, and the murders of young black and Puerto Rican males by cops in Harlem… To Blanche’s mind, Southern law enforcement people were even worse: the descendants of the paddyrollers and overseers who’d made their living grinding her kind into fertilizer in the cotton fields of slavery” (Lam, 90). Moments like these give the hard-boiled distrust of law enforcement a new meaning, by locating the source of that distrust not in a conventional rejection of corruption and classism38 but in fear and anger produced through centuries of racist violence. Blanche’s racial commentary here and elsewhere thus reflects the original anti-law enforcement ethos of the
American crime tradition, but refitted to an anti-racist (and anti-misogynist) politics that actively contradicts the ideology and assumptions underlying white detective fiction, because it condemns the same whiteness and masculinity that the genre has historically made heroic. It seems only natural that, in response, the series would posit black women as a solution. Crucially, however, it is not black women as individuals, but black women collectively, that are positioned as the answer to society’s problems, moving this series even further from the individualist ethos of the hard-boiled genre.
As in most women’s detective fiction, white and black, the Blanche series does away with the loner figure of the hard-boiled detective in favor of a less individualistic and more community-oriented approach to both identity and investigation. Accordingly, Blanche is deeply rooted in a community of black women that supports her and from which she draws a sense of
38 The Blanche series also deals with class issues, but class issues are almost always treated as symptomatic of structural racism more broadly, and so are not located as a source of corruption but its consequence. Guy 43 identity and belonging. Her friendship with Ardell, a black woman with whom Blanche grew up, is an important thread in the series, in spite of its largely auxiliary nature in terms of plot or even narrative presence—for three of the four books, Ardell is present only through lengthy phone conversations. Ardell thus plays an indirect role in Blanche’s detective life, but her wisdom and emotional support are nonetheless crucial to Blanche’s strength and character. The black female community more broadly plays a more direct role, particularly through Miz Minnie, an old woman in Blanche’s hometown community, who is a vital source of information for her on both the black members of Farleigh and the wealthy white people whose homes they staff.39 Catherine
Reitz argues that Blanche’s community connections make her an ideal example of the “Other hero” (214), a figure, she asserts, that is desperately needed in detective fiction. Asking, “What difference does difference make?” (214), Reitz expresses disappointment with much counter- traditional detective fiction, stating, “We don’t need another hero, we need an Other hero, a figure whose identity challenges not only the whiteness and/or maleness of the figure, but also the traditional notion of the hero as an exceptional individual representing a community he can stand above” (214). For Reitz, much multicultural detective fiction fails to produce such an Other hero, and instead simply shows another hero, replicating the pattern of the hero as “a paradoxical figure, at once ‘typical,’ in that he stands for a community and ‘exceptional,’ in that he stands above it” (217). Blanche, Reitz argues, does not stand above her community, but firmly within it, and her success stems from this position: “Blanche fulfills the aspirations of her underrepresented communities—and solves the crime—because she uses, rather than transcends,
39 This may seem like a reductive way of defining the relationships between a town full of people, but this is truly the entirety of Farleigh’s racial and social structure in the novels, with the minor exception of some poor white characters introduced in the final book. Guy 44 her social condition… Blanche’s heroism is not because she rises above the collisions of her social position, but because she stays put” (229).
But while deeply embedded in her community, Blanche struggles to form and sustain long-term relationships with other black people (English, 774), in large part due to the class, color, and gender differences that continue to divide them. This can be seen particularly clearly in her romantic life, an aspect of her storyline that comes much closer to the hard-boiled form than almost any other. Blanche does not have a consistent romantic partner, but has brief flings with various men throughout the series. She dates and has sex because she wants to, not because she is looking to marry or settle down. In fact, she expresses extreme distaste for the notion of marriage, and by framing Blanche’s sexuality in this way, the books simultaneously tie her closer to the hard-boiled genre and challenge the Mammy stereotype’s desexualization of fat, dark- skinned, middle-aged black women like Blanche. Blanche’s hard-boiled sexuality thus produces anti-racist and anti-misogynistic messages that stand in direct contrast to the aggressive, white, masculine sexualities of Sam Spade and his contemporaries. Similarly, Blanche’s refusal to marry is initially framed terms of individualism and independence in a more traditional hard- boiled register. She refers to her ex-boyfriend’s desire to marry her as an attempt to “hogtie”
(Blanche Among the Talented Tenth, 11) her, and notes that, in the past, when other men had expressed interest in marriage, she felt “overcome by the same feeling she’d first experienced at the age of twelve, while stuck in a small elevator for three hours” (Tenth, 12). But over the course of the series, that framing shifts, and the final novel articulates Blanche’s singleness in terms of her concerns about marrying a man who could turn violent. When a man she dates casually begins to act possessive, she tells him about a friend whose controlling husband murdered her, and says, “I know most jealous people don’t go crazy and kill someone… But Guy 45 how’s a person supposed to know which kind of jealous person they’re dealing with?” (Blanche
Passes Go, 238). In this way, the Blanche series rewrites the meaning of Blanche’s solitary status, moving it away from a relatively straightforward hard-boiled independence towards a black feminist40 assessment of domestic abuse and the pervasiveness of male violence against black women.
The shift in articulation of Blanche’s single status is one of many changes the last novel makes while returning to and revising Blanche’s pre-series rape and her relationship to her trauma. When Blanche first references her rape, she does not frame it in racially unspecified terms of male violence, but as an example of racial injustice enabled by white economic power.
Blanche describes her rape as a “painful and private” punishment for the liberty she took in a white household—taking a bath in her employer’s bathroom (Lam, 63). Blanche further explains,
“She hadn’t bothered to report it to the police. Even if they’d believed her and cared about the rape of a black woman by a white man, once it came out that she’d been attacked while naked in her employer’s bathtub, she’d never have been employed in anyone’s house in town again. But she still had hopes of fixing that motherless piece of shit one day” (Lam, 63). Thus, as she reveals her rape, Blanche figures it as both racially motivated and racially determined, because both the cause of the assault and its consequences are racialized. Moreover, her rape is an explicit punishment for her refusal to respect racial and class boundaries, as well as a manifestation of white masculine power held over from slavery. However, that punishment does
40 Applying “feminist” as a label to the Blanche series is complicated. Blanche never refers to herself as one, and the only explicitly feminist character is a famous black feminist writer in the second book, who turns out to be classist, colorist, and academically elitist. In contrast, Neely refers to Blanche as a “behavioral feminist” (“Damn”), and Blanche’s politics certainly align with what could be considered black feminist ideals. The books, then, are extremely suspicious of academic and theoretical feminism, and so in turn offer a model of practiced feminism without the name attached. But for expediency’s sake, I will use “feminist” to describe the series’ politics. Guy 46 not actually effect any change in Blanche’s behavior, as is made clear through the fact that she first mentions her past assault while engaging, in the real-time narrative, in the same activity that catalyzed it—taking a bath in a white employer’s bathroom. By showing Blanche continuing to ignore racial and social boundaries in spite of having been so horribly punished for it in the past, the narrative uses rape as a backstory to establish Blanche’s persistence and courage. In doing so,
Blanche on the Lam treats rape vastly differently from much white women-driven and white woman-authored crime fiction, in which rape typically constitutes a major turning point for a female character, the moment when a woman leaves behind an idle, passive existence and is reborn with a new desire to fight male violence, either as a feminist or an investigator (Horeck,
Public, 128). But while Blanche’s rape predates the series, its seeming utter lack of impact on her life trajectory prevents it from functioning as an origin story. It does not make Blanche bolder or less willing to follow societal rules; indeed, the rape was the direct result of her refusal to obey such rules in the first place. The rape does not “teach” Blanche anything, or even appear to change her in any significant way: she does not become more or less politically motivated, more or less societally acceptable, more or less outspoken.41 Instead, the rape highlights
Blanche’s boldness, and sends the message that not only has she always been this way, but that nothing—not even what is often considered the ultimate trauma for women—will change that.
The use of rape in the Blanche White series comes, in this sense, more from a black literary tradition than the detective genre. While, as Priscilla Walton notes, it may have been the
(white) feminist crime writers of the 80s who first politicized rape in popular fiction (“Girl,” 22), black women have been politicizing rape in other kinds of fiction for generations, from the slave narratives of the antebellum south to more recent explorations of incest and familial abuse
41 This is revised in the fourth and final installment of the series, but is nonetheless an accurate description of the rape’s impact on Blanche throughout the first three books. Guy 47
(Sielke, 15-17; 140-143). Common tropes surrounding rape have shifted over the decades, from the white master raping the black house slaves to the specter of the black man preying on white womanhood, but a common thread of white male supremacy can be traced throughout this history, as rape has been used both literally and rhetorically to control the behavior of black men and women (Horeck, Public, 129). Here, Sabine Sielke’s argument that rape rhetoric is not necessarily about rape becomes especially salient. As quoted in the Introduction, Sielke writes,
“transposed into discourse, rape turns into a rhetorical device, an insistent figure for other social, political, and economic concerns and conflicts” (2). The phenomenon Sielke describes can be observed in the way that rape functions as backstory in the first three Blanche novels. Rape itself is not the point in these stories; racism and violence are. But at the same time, rape is still rape: it cannot merely denote racial violence for literary or political purposes without introducing its own connotations, history, and meanings. It is in this way, then, that Blanche’s rape can function as a signifier of racial violence, as basic character development, and as its own theme all at once.
Thus, Blanche’s explanation of her refusal to report her rape functions as a part of the novel’s anti-racist work, and so her rape does not denote rape so much as racism and inequality.
Further, her virtual non-reaction to the event removes the personal element of rape and trauma from the story, allowing rape to be treated as a generic example of racial injustice rather than a specific, material experience. This is accomplished in part through the narrative placement of the rape outside the real-time action of the story, which produces a distance between the rape and the story; by placing rape in an ill-defined past, the novels are able to restrict its narrative presence, distilling the entire experience of trauma to a single reference and political assessment. This allows the novels to separate rape from its material reality, and so effectively metaphorize an otherwise extremely physical, tangible, and specific form of trauma. By ignoring questions of Guy 48 trauma or women’s experience in favor of an emphasis on the political meaning that circulates around and through rapes committed against black women, the first three Blanche books employ rape separately from its meaning, using it to articulate concerns that are not unrelated to rape but are not specifically about it either.
However, defining rape’s function in the Blanche series as an indicator or communicator only of racism would be reductive, particularly in light of the fourth and final installment,
Blanche Passes Go. This novel undoes virtually everything the series previously has done with rape. In the first three books, Blanche’s rape exists only as backstory, but in Blanche Passes Go, rape, or perhaps more accurately, healing from rape, is the central storyline, rather than the more specifically race-oriented themes that dominate the first three books. (The mystery, as always, merely provides scaffolding; it is not what the books are about). In this book, unlike the previous novels, rape and male violence are racialized but not race-specific. While the violence typically has particular racial dimensions, neither white men nor black men are exclusively responsible for violence against black women. Moreover, white women in this novel are, for the first time, placed in victim roles alongside black women, but while the perpetrators of violence against black women can be either black or white, only white men hurt white women in Blanche Passes
Go. In this way, the novel contradicts the historically racist trope of black men raping white women, while still acknowledging the existence of white female victimhood.42
Blanche Passes Go’s very title alludes to its central themes of sexual assault and healing from violence, although the meaning of the phrase only becomes clear upon reading the book.
42 White women’s victimhood becomes a vehicle in this book to address this racist trope: when a white woman is found dead, the Farleigh police terrorize the black male community on the assumption that the murderer must be a black man. In this respect, then, violence against white women is actually deployed in this novel specifically for the purpose of subverting and condemning the white fear of black men preying on white womanhood. Guy 49
After seeing her rapist, David Palmer, for the first time in years, Blanche is stricken, and the narrative explains, “Suddenly she felt as though she’d been frozen for the last eight years, as though her life were a game of Monopoly in which she was stuck at Go. Certainly she had gone on with her life and she’d done all right with what she had to work with. But she could see now that a part of her was still back there, curled up like a broken child on that bathroom floor” (27).
It is only as Blanche comes to this realization that the reader comes to understand that her cavalier (non-)treatment of her past rape was a pretense. Blanche has not yet moved on with her life, despite all appearances, and over the course of the novel it becomes clear that the only way to move on from such an event—to “pass go,” as it were—is to get revenge, and through revenge, closure. But this metaphor foretells the failure of the very closure it proposes: passing go in Monopoly does not “close” anything, but merely allows a player to continue moving around and around the board in circles, in a repetitive motion very similar to the experience of trauma. The Monopoly metaphor also undermines Blanche’s earlier observation that “Life was a forward-moving thing. Trying to go back was like swimming upstream with rocks in your pockets” (5). Monopoly, by contrast, is only forward-moving in the immediate sense. Zoom out, and it becomes clear that motion in the game is not linear but cyclical. Life may be forward- moving in theory, but at least in the case of life after trauma, it cannot be truly linear. Blanche clearly knows this, because by returning to her hometown to face her past and seek revenge,
Blanche is going back. But, as in Monopoly, going back for Blanche is moving forward—or, perhaps more accurately, to move forward she must first go back, must continue the circling.
Blanche’s decision to seek vengeance for her rape places her within a tradition of violated women who take revenge upon their rapists. These kinds of stories are popular, in part because, as Marla Harris notes, they offer the “appealing possibility that women who find themselves in Guy 50 the position of victim can change the plots of their lives” (“Rape,” 78). In the case of the Blanche novels, however, the possibility of changing the plot of her own life first requires Blanche to rewrite her backstory, by having Blanche Passes Go negate the previous novels’ implication that she has recovered in favor of a narrative in which Blanche has never moved on, but only fooled herself into thinking she has. Her denial is made explicit midway through the fourth book, when she tells herself “[Her rapist] hasn’t changed a thing, not a thing,” and then adds, “It wasn’t true, of course. Everything, from the way she left her house, to the way she crossed the street, had changed” (195). On the one hand, this revision of the previous novels reads like an authorial intervention, a moment where the hand of God interferes for the sake of the writer’s political messaging. But, on the other hand, this is also a fairly accurate rendering of trauma, which is far from temporally linear in terms of both memory and recovery, and which has a tendency to write and rewrite itself, not only changing and revising over time but rewriting memory and history again and again. Trauma, then, poses a huge problem for narrative, and especially for something so plot-oriented and temporally controlled as the detective novel. Moreover, as I describe in the first chapter, trauma is antithetical to the detective plot because it resists the closure from which the genre derives much of its satisfaction for readers.
Blanche Passes Go at first appears to address the problem of rape’s anti-closure by tying
Blanche’s revenge and recovery to the mystery she investigates. Her trauma is tied to the novel’s mystery plots both emotionally (as she investigates a murder she suspects Palmer of committing) and professionally (as she is hired to investigate a related case).43 The emotional connection is most important, however, when she finds herself investigating the murder of Maybelle Jenkins, a
43 Archibald, a wealthy white acquaintance from the first novel, hires Blanche to investigate the fiancée of his developmentally disabled nephew. This is more professionally hard-boiled than Blanche has ever been (as her first paid case), but Blanche only accepts the job for the protection it offers as a cover story, should her investigation of David Palmer be discovered. Guy 51 poor white woman she believes Palmer, her rapist, killed. Revenge initially motivates Blanche’s investigation—she hopes to prove him guilty of the murder, and so see him incarcerated—but as she seeks the justice for Maybelle that she never sought for herself, the two become equated, and bound up in one another. By connecting her post-rape trauma to a closure-producing mystery plot, the novel creates the potential for a kind of doubling in which the closure created by the resolution of the murder case can double as—or, at the very least, be mistaken for—closure with regards to Blanche’s trauma. But Blanche’s efforts to prove Palmer guilty are thwarted, and instead, closure is offered in the form of his sudden death—a death Blanche assumes was committed by one of his partners in crime. As a result, Palmer’s death constitutes a satisfying resolution for both the reader and Blanche: Palmer is dead, punished for his crimes against both
Blanche and poor dead Maybelle. When Blanche learns of his death, “She seem[s] to be floating, weightless with joy above her bed. I will never have to see him again, she [thinks]” (301). After the news has had time to settle, she struggles with a sense of guilt, but both her mother and
Ardell encourage her to celebrate. Ardell points out that Blanche did not want him dead: “It’s like a gift. It didn’t have nothing to do with you” (302). Blanche’s mother is more direct, saying,
“Person don’t often git to see they dream come true. I wished that man dead and now he is.
Thank you, Jesus, even though I know it ain’t a Christian thing, wishin people dead” (303). It all has a powerful sense of poetic justice, and appears to be a beautifully uncomplicated closure both for Blanche as assault victim and for the murder case.
But this closure is abruptly shattered when Blanche discovers that her belief in Palmer’s guilt had been communicated to Maybelle’s family, who murdered him in retaliation. Worse, she discovers that Palmer did not actually murder Maybelle, or even sleep with her, as Blanche believed; rather, his friend Jason was involved with her, and her boyfriend, Bobby, murdered her Guy 52 after discovering her infidelity. The novel then ends on a strange note, with Blanche’s rapist dead
(as punishment for a murder he did not commit), the real murderer also dead (as punishment for attempted extortion of Jason), and Jason alone walking free (after a likely hefty payout to the police to let the case go). Meanwhile, Blanche’s emotional investment in the case, and the connection she made between her trauma and Maybelle’s death, not only fail to bring about the closure they seemed to promise, but actually implicate her in the death of her rapist. That the novel ruins its own closure in this way is baffling: why would a writer go to so much effort to contain such a narratively disruptive topic—and, by all measurements, largely succeed—only to undo her own work?
The answer lies in the novel’s exploration of black female community and collective trauma. In addition to representing black female community in terms of Blanche’s character arc, the very narrative structure of the series invokes this community, albeit one that struggles with solidarity, through the use of the third-person voice. The first person narrator-detective is a hallmark feature of the hard-boiled genre, a feature that is so aesthetically memorable that it is easy to forget the political and ideological purpose of the narrative voice. By having the detective narrate the story, hard-boiled detective fiction furthers its messages of individualism and heroism, while at the same time establishing a central authority figure as the determinative voice of the text. The third person narration of the Blanche series challenges that individualism and the figure of the hero, individualism that, as Reitz notes, is characteristic of most detective fiction by white women as well as men (213-214). Reitz further argues that the third person narrative voice not only decenters the hero, but actually invokes a collective consciousness that both drives the
Blanche series and functions as the basis for her heroism: “Blanche’s reality, Neely suggests, is collective and cannot be spoken in a single voice… The communities that speak through Neely’s Guy 53 third-person narrative are historically specific, such as African Americans brought to this country as slaves or women struggling against oppression” (Reitz, 226).
That collective consciousness extends to sexual violence in Blanche Passes Go, producing a complicated tension between the novel’s framing of trauma as collective and the individual way that rape itself is typically experienced. The narration of Blanche’s rape maintains an uneasy tension between these two ways of understanding trauma, as it at once attempts to preserve her personal experience and present it in a way that can be generalized and metaphorized. Blanche recalls her attempt to get away:
Slipping, banging her knees and legs against the tub, trying to get on her feet, too
shocked and scared to scream. Then the knife. The knife: long, slim, pointed; carvings on
its fancy bone handle—the kind of knife a boy got for his twelfth birthday. The kind of
knife that stopped all struggling, that made her repeat, ‘Please, don’t cut me, please, over
and over again, as though the words could protect her from a slit throat, a pierced heart.
(27)
This narration begins with an account of physical actions, of literal, tangible motions, much like
Pam’s narration of the events immediately preceding her rape in Sisters of the Road. Unlike
Pam’s story, however, there is no break here between the account of the actions and the emotional assessment; rather, the shift happens more organically, but in a choppy and fragmentary way that brings the reader into Blanche’s traumatized mindset. And yet the immediate and visceral nature of Blanche’s account of her rape is somewhat undercut by its status as memory. As mentioned earlier, Blanche’s rape is placed in backstory and consequently cannot be narrated in real-time, and so there always exists a major temporal gap between the rape and the events of the novel that distances it from the immediate story and, as a result, from the Guy 54 reader. Even in Blanche’s account of her own rape, she describes it as if viewing the past event from outside her own body, saying, “She watched herself pleading for her life while parts of her were being stolen and murdered. When it was over—when he had grunted and poked and shivered his sperm into her, then finally fled—for just a flash, for just a fast beat of her heart, she’d been grateful that he had only raped her. For this alone she would hate him until the moment after she died” (27). This temporal distance, and the continued narrative reminders that the event is being recounted at a later date, mediate the telling of the rape in a way that allows it to be generalized; rape loses its urgency, its specificity. Similarly, this part of the rape narrative forgoes the earlier literal language in favor of an oddly literary and euphemistic (but still quite graphic) tone. In a series that is otherwise marked by Blanche’s simple, straightforward voice, the use of more artful language in the rape scene detaches it from her specific experience, allowing it to be collectivized along with other black women’s trauma. The change from
Blanche’s voice to a voice that seems not quite her own similarly suggests that the story of the rape is not quite her own, or at least, not just her own, but part of a larger set of historical events and experiences.
But while the particular narration of the rape allows for the displacement of the individual for the collective, it is Blanche’s religious practice that actually invokes a specific collective,44 and locates her trauma within a horrible kind of bond shared between black women throughout generations. Blanche references that bond and the cultural history of rape while praying to her ancestors about David Palmer: “She knew she didn’t need to explain it to them. They knew about
44 There is some irony in this, given the extreme individualism of Blanche’s religion: she considers herself “her own priest and goddess,” (Passes Go, 12), and develops her own religious practice composed of eclectic rituals and beliefs. At the same time, of course, the very concept of praying to ancestors ties Blanche to a community and history, so the tension between individualism and collectivity persists throughout all areas of her life. Guy 55 rape, they knew about fear, and they hadn’t been stopped by either. They’d found ways to fight back—from running away to killing as many slavers as they could, from aborting the slaver’s issue to hexing his penis so he’d never want to touch that particular woman again” (32).
Blanche’s experience of rape thus connects her with a historical legacy of black women’s sexual trauma, and her recognition of collective trauma inspires her revenge: the narrative explains,
“She was suddenly sure that the ritual she needed to rid her life of David Palmer was to take action against him—not in a legal way, or even by getting in his face… No. She had to find a way to get to him so that he would really suffer” (32). This account offers a different angle on the rape-revenge plot, which typically treats rape as an individual crime remediable through individual revenge. Here, instead, Blanche’s desire for revenge is located within a kind of collective action taken by black women through the centuries, as a way of dealing with their collective trauma.
And yet, when Blanche seeks revenge, her methods are largely individualistic. Her meditations on the divided nature of the black community explain this approach, and these musings often follow the most apparently collective and community-oriented scenes. One such scene occurs when Blanche first explicitly acknowledges black women’s collective experience of rape, after a white man assaults a member of the (black, female) catering staff at the same party where Blanche will encounter Palmer for the first time since he raped her. The brother of the assailant intervenes,45 but the event still brings back Blanche’s own assault:
Blanche was thrown back to the days just after she was raped, when she had longed for
the solace of telling her then boyfriend, Leo, what Palmer had done to her. She hadn’t
told him for the same reason Clarice wouldn’t tell Mr. Henry about Seth. Blanche pulled
45 While his intervention makes him appear to be relatively decent white man, this character, Jason, later turns out to be a rapist and a murderer himself. Guy 56
Clarice to her and hugged her hard, as if that could protect them from this piece of black
women’s old race knowledge: their rapes and mistreatments at the hands of powerful
white men could also cost them the black men who loved them. There were more local
stories than either woman wanted to remember of what had happened to black men
who’d attempted to defend their daughters and wives, mothers and sisters. (23)
This passage poignantly lays out the reality of black women’s shared situations, but just as crucially, it explains the way that the threat of further racist violence regulates black people’s ability to respond to the initial violence. In so doing, this passage at once shows the collectivity of black women’s trauma and explains how the racist power relations involved in producing that collective trauma also divide the black community. The guarantee of retaliatory violence against black people who seek either justice or revenge for sexually assaulted black women renders the black community ineffectual, not just as a means of avenging past violence or preventing further violence, but even for something so ostensibly simple as comforting the victim.
This scene lays crucial groundwork for Blanche’s one-woman approach to dealing with her rape, and particularly for explaining why she refuses to consistently enlist community support, in spite of her success in doing so with certain black women early on in her project.
Indeed, Blanche’s most fruitful attempts to gather information always involve her connecting with other black women through a shared understanding of violence and violation. Miz Minnie understands why Blanche is asking about David Palmer even though Blanche does not reveal the truth herself. When Blanche reacts strongly to Minnie’s comment that men shouldn’t touch women without permission, and insists she never said Palmer touched her, Minnie replies,
“Course you did, chile. Lookit how you sittin there” (84). Rape, as a common experience, thus creates a common language between black women so powerful that Blanche can be “read” by Guy 57 another black woman without having intended to be. Blanche later uses that common language to convince a black female bank worker to give her information on Palmer’s financial situation, and then reflects, “It was moments like this that made her believe wholeheartedly in the connection between all the black women in the world” (103). But this pro-collectivity sentiment is quickly qualified, and Blanche notes, “She knew the feeling would fade, smudged by a run-in with some sister whose circumstances forced her to focus solely on the need to do whatever was necessary to survive and who was rightly angry about it” (103). After this encounter, Blanche refuses to take advantage of collective trauma again, although she expresses uncertainty about her decision when she struggles to get information without playing that card. She comments, “Maybe outrage left over from times past, when the rape of a black woman by a white man was as common as a rainy day and just as accepted, would have loosened their tongues. Maybe not. Maybe the reality of a black community still too weak to protect its own would have kept them mute” (152).
Individualism, then, is not the ideal route for Blanche, but the necessary one, in the face of the black community’s divided and limited nature. And yet, in the end, individualism fails, because the problem is not an individual one, but a structure of violence that victimizes black women en masse. Blanche’s attempt (and failure) to get revenge (and through revenge, closure) on her own constitutes a subtle critique of the crime fiction rape-revenge plotline, in which characters attempt to take control of their storylines (Harris, “Rape,” 78) and reverse the usually downward slide from hero to victim (Tomc, 59). But the rape-revenge plot individualizes male violence, in order to locate a single woman’s revenge upon her rapist as a satisfying solution, and espouses what Carine Mardorossian calls an “anti-victimist ideology” (15): the rape-revenge plot as enacted through characters such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander rests on the valorization of the victim who refuses to be a victim, and in so doing transcends the Guy 58 stigma and shame of the label by proving her agency and rejecting passivity (Mardorossian, 15).
Blanche Passes Go is not interested in doing either of these things, so the collapse of Blanche’s rape-revenge plot is inevitable. The collapse of this plot appears to be foretold from the beginning, from Clarice’s assault to Blanche’s meditations upon the history of slave rape before her ancestral altar. The rape-revenge plot is a white liberal feminist ideal; it relies upon a notion of rape as individual in order for individual empowerment to be an effective remedy, and so any recognition of the systemic nature of male violence renders it incoherent. Collective trauma, then, challenges the premise of the rape-revenge plot and consequently negates its closure- producing abilities.
In the end, then, both the rape-revenge plot and the resolution of the mystery fail to give
Blanche closure, or allow her to “pass go.” But in spite of these failures, Blanche does begin to heal, healing that occurs alongside, if not because of, her investigation and attempted revenge.
That healing comes largely through the personalization of collective trauma. Although Blanche has always located her trauma in a collective, in a history and memory of trauma inflicted against black women throughout time, that collectivity is abstracted; it is not composed of women she knows and loves, but despecified and depersonalized black women. When she realizes that her mother and best friend have both been victims of domestic violence, Blanche’s understanding of the pervasiveness of trauma becomes more concrete:
She added her mother to the circle of bruised women that included Blanche herself, her
neighbor across the street, poor dead Maybelle, Daisy, even Ardell, back in the days. She
wondered if there were women in the world who hadn’t been slapped, or probed, or
punched, or shouted out or down, or at least scared for half a second when some man—
on purpose or by accident—let her see, in the way he stood over her, or punched his fist Guy 59
into his open palm, or inflated his chest and moved a step closer, just how their argument
or difference of opinion could easily be solved and who would win and how. (253)
Recognizing this circle of bruised women enables Blanche to begin to confront her own deeply held shame and self-blame, and so begin to heal. After Palmer’s death, Blanche discusses trauma with her mother, and thinks, “The shame of the wounded. What was it that the rapists, batterers, and torturers did to make women they hurt feel ashamed of what was done to them, to suspect, at least for a moment, that they deserved to be raped, maimed, and bruised?” (306). In addition to tying trauma to shame here, the book locates healing in victims defying that shame and speaking their truth, thereby reclaiming their narratives and positioning themselves as the masters of their own stories. Blanche mourns the violence done to her and her mother, but takes comfort in their solidarity, noting, “But at least they’d healed enough to say their hurt out loud” (306).
Interestingly, by approaching trauma in this way, the book generalizes violence committed against women, first among black women specifically and then across racial lines.
Where Blanche’s trauma was initially collectivized in terms of white men raping black women, by the end of the novel, the collective trauma of black women includes domestic violence committed against them by black men. Just before Blanche finally takes her stand against male violence, by confronting a male neighbor’s domestic abuse, she thinks, “They were all the same, those raping, punching, killing motherfuckers. This was what they wanted: a woman cringing in a corner, a woman begging him to be careful with that knife, that gun, that rope around her neck”
(Blanche Passes Go, 316). By tying sexual and non-sexual violence to one another, the novel collapses both into a singular set of causes and effects (cause being men, effects being trauma), and despecifies the racial dimensions of Blanche’s particular trauma by collectivizing it alongside black male violence in order to locate it within a broader framework of violence Guy 60 against black women. Even more strange, perhaps, are the moments where that collective experience of violence is expanded to included white women, blurring the racial line the books work so hard to draw. Blanche includes two white women, Daisy and Maybelle, in her circle of bruised women, and invokes them in her final triumphant stand against male violence, after she hears a domestic violence conflict at her neighbor’s house and rushes into the street, banging a spoon against a pan to create a scene: “‘Stop!’ she shouted for herself as she banged her pot.
‘Stop!’ she shouted for Mama. ‘Stop!’ she shouted for poor, lovesick Daisy. ‘Stop!’ she shouted for dead Maybelle. Maybe the only way to end this mess was for every woman to stand up for every other woman, even if she couldn’t stand up for herself. ‘Stopstopstopstopstop!’ she shouted as she banged on her pot” (316-317).
This moment re-embeds Blanche not only in the fractured community she has resisted, but also despecifies the racial dimensions of that community, and thus undoes much of the race- related political work of the earlier books in the series. While this produces a nicer, more optimistic outlook for the closing scene, through an invocation of women as a united front, it remains a perplexing decision on Neely’s part, insofar as her primary intention in writing these novels is the expression of a black feminist politics. However, taking into account the demands of genre—which may not be Neely’s priority, but which she certainly cannot fully escape while writing within it—may help clarify the sudden departure from the established political project. If rape resists closure through the survival of the rape victim, and consequently destabilizes the detective novel, then the detective novel in return demands that closure be produced somehow.
However, the tension between rape’s defiance of closure and detective fiction’s need for it might be left unresolved if it were not for the particular way that rape, both as a literary device and in real life, itself seems to demand attention in the form of solutions. If the detective novel requires Guy 61 solutions, and rape demands to be solved, but the detective novel cannot solve rape, it follows that a solution external to the conventions of the genre must be proposed. In the Blanche series, that solution is universal female collectivity, both in terms of collective action—organizing to stop the violence—and collective healing, as modeled through Blanche and her mother. While only black women model that collectivity in practice in the series, the inclusion of white women in the theoretical model produces a feminist vision in which collective action could involve a community broad enough and strong enough to protect all women, together, from male violence.
Guy 62
Chapter Three: Veronica Mars
Veronica Mars, of the three series considered in this project, has the least consistent politics with regard to sexual violence. This is likely because Rob Thomas, the creator of the show, is not an activist like Barbara Wilson and Barbara Neely, and did not write Veronica Mars with specific, didactic, political intentions. As a result, rape and its meaning move in a variety of directions in the show, often in contradictory ways, and so it is impossible to extricate a coherent political stance on rape or gender. In fact, it is difficult to extricate almost any kind of coherent politic from the show on any particular issue—race, gender, and queerness all receive confused and fragmented treatments, the show one minute highlighting injustice and inequality and the next perpetuating it. The closest the show comes to producing a clear political message is on the topic of socioeconomic class and legal corruption, and in terms of genre, this constitutes little more than a basic preservation of hard-boiled fiction’s long-established ideals. Even then, the show’s class politics are confused: Veronica figures herself as a marginalized, low-income outsider in her high school, but she consistently dates wealthy male classmates, and so essentially has a free pass to the world of the rich and enjoys a fair number of the perks that come with money (Harris, “Not,” 162). It comes as no surprise, then, that rape should play a divergent and often self-contradictory set of roles throughout the show, with particular shifts between the seasons; however, in spite of these tensions, Veronica Mars consistently employs rape in a way that increasingly opposes feminist collective action and favors more individually- oriented solutions. In fact, as I will demonstrate, the show embodies a version of mainstream, postfeminist liberalism in circulation at the time of its airing, from 2005-2007.46
46 By comparison, the Pam and Blanche series are each deeply invested in major feminist movements of their times, but they reflect minority opinions within the larger population. Guy 63
Veronica Mars, with its teenaged protagonist, beachy high school setting, and pop music soundtrack, would seem to be the series with the least investment in preserving the conventions of detective fiction, and yet its class politics and individualistic thrust make it much more straightforwardly hard-boiled than the Pam Nilsen or Blanche White series. Veronica herself is the most hard-boiled of the protagonists as well, at least in terms of profession: while she does not acquire a private investigator license until the third season, throughout the show she takes paid cases and works for her father’s PI office. She also models herself after classic hard-boiled detectives; unlike Pam Nilsen, who references other fictional detectives to differentiate herself from them, Veronica compares herself (and her father) to Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade in a gently mocking, but overall affectionate, manner. But unlike her hard-boiled predecessors,
Veronica’s jadedness and cynicism are not treated as an innate part of her personality.47 Instead, she is hard-boiled because of the chain of tragedies and traumas that befall her prior to the beginning of the series: the murder of her best friend, Lilly Kane; her father’s removal from the sheriff’s department; her mother’s abandonment of the family; her social ostracism; and her rape at a high school party. These events are related in flashbacks narrated by Veronica’s rapid-fire, matter-of-fact voiceover,48 and the Veronica in these flashbacks is not the hard-boiled Veronica of the real-time show. Her voice is higher pitched and softer, her hair longer and curled, her clothing more feminine, and her face open and innocent. She is also not, at this point in her life, a detective. That aspect of her persona is necessitated by her father’s removal from the sheriff’s office, after which he moves into private investigation and Veronica helps run his business in order to make ends meet. Veronica’s hard-boiled personality is thus the “after” in a before/after
47 Some male hard-boiled heroes do have tragic backstories, but the prototypes, Spade and Marlowe, do not, and it is certainly not an essential part of the genre. 48 Veronica’s voiceover is a clever preservation of hard-boiled fiction’s first-person narration in a medium like television that does not allow for a single narrative voice. Guy 64 binary that defines Veronica’s character in the first season. This binary establishes Lilly’s death and its consequences—including, most crucially, Veronica’s rape—as an origin story for
Veronica’s current heroic self in the show. The rape at Shelley Pomeroy’s party is the final event in her origin story, the final catalyst for her rebirth as a hard-boiled detective.
While her black jewelry in the party flashbacks indicates that she has already begun to embody a harder, edgier persona, she is still mostly her non-hard-boiled self in these scenes, from her appearance (long hair, virginal white dress), to her personality (she accepts a drink from a stranger at a party full of people who hate her). The drink, as her voiceover narrates, turns out to be “your basic rum, coke and roofie” (“Pilot”), but the emotionlessness of her voiceover is contradicted by the morning after scene, when she realizes what has happened. In this post-rape scene, she has black makeup smeared under her eyes and her dress is torn; she picks her white underwear up from the floor and a tear slips down her cheek. This moment signifies a particularly brutal loss of innocence for Veronica, and its centrality to the production of her hard- boiled self is confirmed by her voiceover, in which she explains, “I never told my dad. I’m not sure what he would have done with that information but no good would have come of it. And what does it matter? I’m no longer that girl” (“Pilot”). But her transformation from “that girl” into the Veronica of the show is not complete until after she attempts to report her rape to the
Sheriff’s Department, and Sheriff Don Lamb laughs at her while she cries.
Veronica’s tears in this scene, as well as in the scene in which she wakes up (having been drugged) and discovers her rape, contrast starkly with Veronica’s real-time voiceover, which matter-of-factly introduces her rape with the words, “You wanna know how I lost my virginity?
So do I” (“Pilot”). According to Thomas, this was the first line he wrote of the pilot (“Preface,”
34), and he fought the network to keep the rape storyline, because “had it been excised from the Guy 65 pilot, Veronica’s motivations would have all become fuzzy. The pilot wouldn’t have made sense” (“Introduction,” 6). Clearly, then, Veronica’s status as a victim of sexual violence is central to her tough-girl persona, which in turn defines her character. Because Veronica’s rape functions as an origin story for Veronica’s more heroic self, her assault storyline largely fits
Tanya Horeck’s description of the role of sexual violence in feminist crime fiction. Of course, unlike in the women-authored crime novels Horeck analyzes, Veronica’s rape does not serve to induct her into feminism per se—nor can it, since the series has no apparent investment in a coherent feminist ideology, and never refers to Veronica herself as a feminist or shows her engaging with feminist movements, organizations, or collective action.49 However, while
Veronica’s assault does not make her a feminist, her behavior at Shelley Pomeroy’s party while drugged produces a lasting negative impression of her on her classmates, and the sexual harassment she experiences in the aftermath does seem to encourage her to help other girls who are targeted by similar treatment. To that end, there is a level of feminist solidarity modeled here, but that solidarity is connected more to sexual harassment than sexual violence, and the two are treated as unrelated issues.
Consequently, Veronica’s rape is relegated largely to backstory in terms of her character’s motivations and behavior; it produces her world-weary and cynical personality, but does not drive her actions in the present tense in the same way that Lilly’s murder does. This is particularly significant given that, due to the unknown identity of her rapist, Veronica’s rape sits alongside Lilly’s murder as one of the main mystery plotlines of the season (the other being the reason for Veronica’s mother’s disappearance). Through this, the show assimilates rape into the closure-producing formula of detective fiction, simultaneously employing rape as a detective plot
49 In spite of this, Veronica is often hailed as a feminist icon, and the show cited as a feminist text. I explore this contradiction in greater depth when I discuss the third season below. Guy 66 device and using detective plot structure to produce the same fantasy of closure for rape that it typically produces for murder. Veronica herself articulates her investigation in terms of this kind of closure-production, and attempts to use mystery-solving to fix her problems. In a voiceover,
Veronica explains, “Tragedy blows through your life like a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos. You wait for the dust to settle, and then you choose. You can live in the wreckage and pretend it’s still the mansion you remember… or you can crawl from the rubble and slowly rebuild… Because after disaster strikes, the important thing is that you move on...
But if you’re like me, you just keep chasing the storm” (“Meet John Smith,” 1.03). As she explains here, she chooses neither denial nor forward motion; instead, she simply avoids her grief, for her mother and Lilly as well as for her former self, choosing to chase answers to the unsolved mysteries in her life in the hope that these solutions will bring closure. But, as Daniel
Wack and Marla Harris point out, Veronica learns the hard way that solving the mystery does not always guarantee a happy ending, and that closure is not restoration (Wack, 69; Harris, “Not,”
161). She does find her mother, but finds her an addict, and drains her savings account to pay for her mother’s rehabilitation. When her mother finally returns home, she steals a $50,000 check from Veronica’s father and leaves again. Similarly, the resolution to Lilly Kane’s death does not have the kind of restorative effect Veronica imagines. Once the killer is in police custody,
Veronica has a dream in which she and Lilly float in the pool at the Kane estate:
VERONICA: Isn't it better, like this?
LILLY: So much better.
VERONICA: This is how it's supposed to be.
LILLY: Totally.
VERONICA: This is how it's gonna be. From now on. Right? Lilly? Guy 67
LILLY: You know how things are gonna be now, don't you? You have to know.
VERONICA: Just like this. Just like this.
LILLY: Don't forget about me, Veronica. (“Leave it to Beaver,” 1.22)
With this, Lilly disappears, and Veronica floats alone in the pool. This scene captures a necessary but painful step in Veronica’s healing process: now that she has found the murderer, she has closure, but that closure does not resolve her pain. Instead, it forces her to move forward, and begin to deal with the grief she has avoided. Oddly, however, while these two mystery plots teach Veronica that solving the mystery does not always solve the pain, Veronica’s resolution of her rape mystery does, in fact, solve the pain—by doing away with its source altogether, and revealing that Veronica was never actually raped.
Given the show’s willingness to explore the limits of closure, it is unclear why such a neat ending would be necessary for the rape plot, particularly considering the rape plot’s comparatively small presence in the season. While Veronica searches obsessively for her mother and Lilly’s killer, and these investigations are sustained over the course of multiple episodes, her rape is introduced in the pilot and largely forgotten until the twentieth episode of the season,
“M.A.D.,” when she discovers another girl was drugged at the same party. After that, the actual investigation into the rape spans only one full episode, “A Trip to the Dentist” (1.21). It is only here that Veronica visibly exhibits trauma—which, by the end of the episode, is established as the result of a horrible misunderstanding. The minimal narrative presence of Veronica’s rape and corresponding trauma, and the subsequent revision of both, suggests that rape may be more destabilizing than murder or parental abandonment. That destabilization is likely related to the persona the show wants to maintain for Veronica’s character. The series invokes rape to establish
Veronica’s origin story, but at the same time as the sexual assault produces hard-boiled Guy 68
Veronica, it constitutes a major gap in her persona, because her empowerment is so wholly based upon an experience of powerlessness. By portraying Veronica’s most victimized self solely in this one episode, and immediately revealing the falseness of its source, the show tightly contains
Veronica’s trauma, and prevents Veronica from seeming like too much of a victim. Moreover, in the single episode in which Veronica’s trauma is clearly visible, the insertion of a rape-revenge plot moderates her victimhood.
The rape-revenge plot has often been cited as a feminist innovation, because, as outlined in Chapter Two, it proposes the possibility that, rather than remaining defined by victimhood, women who experience sexual violence can take control over their storylines (Harris, “Rape,”
78). In the context of a crime notoriously underreported, under-investigated, and under- prosecuted, allowing the female detective to write her own post-rape narrative, particularly after law enforcement has refused to investigate her assault, as in Veronica’s case, seems empowering.
And yet, as explained in Chapter Two, the rape-revenge plot relies upon an anti-victimist ideology, in which the rape victim proves herself to be a “good” victim by rejecting passive victimhood in favor of radical agency through revenge (Mardossian, 15). As a result, the rape- revenge plot distinguishes acceptable from unacceptable rape victims by treating a violent assertion of power as the only appropriate response to sexual assault; anything else is a passive acceptance of victimhood, and therefore a failure to earn the right to personhood and subjecthood in the wake of victimization. This sort of anti-victimism certainly reigns in Veronica Mars, which portrays getting tough (and, to a degree, getting even)50 as the only laudable response to
50 Veronica’s personal philosophy is, “You get tough. You get even” (“Like a Virgin,” 1.08), but while the first half goes unchallenged, the second is questioned throughout the series. Still, Veronica’s toughness in the show is proved in no small part by her ruthlessness in getting even, so it unclear how she would accomplish getting tough without getting even, and the two remain largely conflated. Guy 69 pain and cruelty. In “A Trip to the Dentist” (1.21), Veronica’s most vulnerable moments are often followed by threats or warnings: after discovering her boyfriend, Logan, had GHB51 the night of the party, she tells him for the first time that she was raped, only to declare, “I’m gonna find out who did this to me and I’m gonna make them pay. Even if it was you.” But in the end, she cannot get revenge on any single person, because the account of the night she pieces together at once indicts and absolves everyone at the party.
In this account, Veronica was drugged accidentally, after Dick Casablancas, a classmate, attempted to drug his own girlfriend, Madison Sinclair, in the hopes that she would sleep with him. Madison, not knowing her drink was drugged, spit in it and gave it to Veronica—the “Trip to the Dentist” for which the episode is named. Veronica, inebriated, lies down on a pool chair, where a group of classmates take body shots off of her mostly unconscious body, but her ex- boyfriend, Duncan Kane, intervenes; Logan, concerned that Duncan is too uptight, gives him a drink laced with GHB. At some point after, Veronica makes her way to a couch, where Dick and his friends feed her more shots to keep her intoxicated, and she is made to kiss a female classmate. Later, when Veronica is unconscious again, Dick and his friends take her to the guest bedroom, where Dick encourages his younger brother, Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas,52 to have sex with her. The other boys leave, and then Cassidy does as well, suddenly sick from the alcohol. At some unspecified later point, Duncan finds her in the guest bedroom; Veronica has
51 Gamma-Hydroxybutanoic acid, a knockout drug used to treat narcolepsy. It can also be used as a date-rape drug, as it is in Veronica Mars, or taken recreationally. 52 The Casablancas brothers’ respective nicknames are extremely apt: Dick is popular, hyper- masculine, and hypersexual, while Beaver (a slang term for vagina) is more effeminate, a virgin, and only tolerated in his social circle as Dick’s brother. Guy 70 regained consciousness, and the couple has consensual sex.53 That Veronica cannot remember the incident, and was drugged and plied with alcohol throughout the night by other men, somehow is not enough for the event to maintain its status as a rape within the discourse of the show; the fact of her accidental drugging, as well as Duncan himself having been unknowingly drugged, is framed as sufficient evidence for her non-rape, in spite of the clear inequality between their levels of intoxication indicated by Duncan’s memory of the event compared to
Veronica’s total blackout. Moreover, Duncan believed Veronica was his sister at the time,54 while Veronica had no notion whatsoever of their potentially shared paternity, adding yet another layer of non-consent to the situation.
The showrunners’ apparently vague understanding of consent aside, this ending does not quite entirely rewrite Veronica’s victimhood. Instead, by removing the most significant violation
(the rape), the narrative dilutes and disperses blame for the myriad of other violations over a much larger group—an entire party full of people who watched as she was mistreated, and did nothing to intervene. Here, for a brief moment, the show veers remarkably close to a structural analysis of sexual violence, by producing an image of Veronica as “raped” by all of her classmates (Whitney, 158). However, that metaphorical rape is, throughout “A Trip to the
Dentist,” closely tied to the real rape that Veronica assumes has happened. As a result, the metaphorical rape gains much of its significance from its supposed connection to the occurrence
53 Multiple eyewitnesses confirm most parts of this story, but Cassidy’s statement that he left without touching her, and Duncan’s assertion that Veronica was conscious and initiated the sex, are both uncorroborated. 54 Prior to the show’s events, Veronica’s mother and Duncan’s father have an ongoing affair, and when Duncan and Veronica begin to date, Duncan’s mother breaks them up by telling him that they are siblings (which she believes). Veronica and Keith Mars both learn of the affair during Season 1, and Keith orders a paternity test, confirming that Veronica is his daughter. The soap- opera-esque nature of this plotline is fitting, in light of the show’s parent genres of teen drama and film noir; the latter, as Philippa Gates has shown, shares many conventions with classical melodrama (“Maritorious,” 26-29). Guy 71 of her actual rape, and so once the real rape is removed from the story, the metaphorical one loses its material basis, and with it, its weight. The violations Veronica experiences at the hands of her classmates still remain, but are largely forgettable in comparison to the drama of the rape that never really happened. In the end, then, the materiality and horror of sexual violence are displaced, and all that remains is a weak social commentary on bystander apathy and a condemnation of irresponsibility and carelessness.
Bringing Sabine Sielke’s argument (outlined in the Introduction), that rape rhetoric is not really about rape, into dialogue with Veronica Mars makes it clear, then, that rape in the first season has very little to do with real rape—in fact, it has so little to do with sexual assault that the pilot’s stated instance of sexual violence actually stops being a rape altogether. Rape in the first season functions as character development and backstory first, and then a fragmented social commentary on society’s refusal to look out for or protect its own. In terms of genre, this is a much more hard-boiled-friendly take on the rape problem than those offered by the Pam or
Blanche series, because as far as social commentaries go, a condemnation of bystander apathy is a comfortably liberal, individualized critique. It recognizes a problem with society, but posits a solution of individual action and accountability. In the context of rape specifically, it does not address the source of rape, or offer a solution for preventing rapists from coming into existence.
Instead, it places the burden on individuals to prevent rapes in the moments before they occur, meaning sexual violence can only be prevented one event at a time. This exact kind of tension, between the recognition of widespread social problems and the promotion of individualized responses, is itself quite characteristic of hard-boiled detective fiction. However, the intentionally cynical outlook this imbalance produces in traditional hard-boiled fiction does not sit well in Guy 72
Veronica Mars, which attempts to portray individual solutions as sufficient remedies for non- individual problems.
It may be partially for this reason that the first season removes the rape plot and its already limited social commentary, thereby minimizing the potential pressure placed on its individualized solutions and avoiding the question of their adequacy for addressing major societal problems. But in the second season, the show revises Veronica’s rape yet again, and reveals that, prior to having sex with Duncan, Veronica was raped by Cassidy. This revision is a strange move on multiple levels: with regard to rape politics, it brings the tension between society and the individual back to the forefront, and with regard to genre, it casts doubt on the authority of the detective plot and its resolutions. Consequently, it pushes the limits of viewers’ engagement, because in undoing the last season’s closure it renders ineffectual the satisfaction- producing component of detective fiction. It also casts doubt on the trustworthiness of witness and memory (Whitney, 160), both of which are centerpieces of traditional detective stories, and shines a spotlight on the fact that Veronica’s “evidence” for the solution of her rape mystery was purely based on testimony from largely unreliable characters.55 But while this second revision poses a number of problems for the show, it also allows the show to deal with the tensions posed by its own rape ideology, which were minimized, but not excised, by the first season’s revision.
Instead of letting that tension remain, the second season of Veronica Mars moves away from the pessimism of hard-boiled politics, in which individualism is the only trustworthy ideology but remains too weak to adequately address widespread social problems, and towards the politics of
55 As Sarah Whitney notes (159), the possibility of Veronica having also been raped was never truly foreclosed by the resolution offered in “A Trip to the Dentist”; Cassidy’s claim that he left without touching Veronica went uncorroborated, in the absence of any other eyewitnesses. Guy 73 the whodunit.56 In this more optimistic ideology, rape, like murder, is the result of exceptionally evil people who are societal aberrations, and so liberal individuals can conceivably triumph. In
Veronica Mars, this move towards individualism is made through an in-depth exploration of
Cassidy’s character throughout the second season, which enables the show to locate Veronica’s rape solely in his individual evil.
Season Two positions Cassidy as a classic underdog, who endures cruelty from his brother, mockery from his father, and neglect from his mother. At the same time, his romantic relationship with Cindy “Mac” Mackenzie, one of Veronica’s few friends, places him in a positive social location with regards to the series: he continues to be an 09er,57 and therefore still a member of the group that torments people like Veronica and Mac, but his relationship with a non-09er, and one without Veronica’s claims to traditional beauty, frame him as a “good” 09-er in contrast to his brother, Dick. Through this relationship, Cassidy’s sexual anxieties and avoidance become clear, which generates more sympathy for his character and foreshadows
Veronica’s discovery that Cassidy was molested as a young boy by his Little League coach (and current Neptune mayor) Woody Goodman. But while this crucial piece of backstory might seem to contribute to his sympathy as a character, his trauma and villainy are coupled together, because the facts that Cassidy was a victim of sexual assault and that he raped Veronica are communicated to the audience at the same time. In fact, Cassidy’s victimhood functions as the final missing piece of the puzzle, the “clue” that allows Veronica to solve the season’s mystery, and so his trauma almost becomes a form of guilt in itself. At the very least, his victimhood explicitly produces his villainy, by catalyzing both his rape of Veronica and his murder of an
56 I outline these politics in the Introduction. 57 The show’s term for residents of the fictional, and extraordinarily wealthy, 90909 zip code. Guy 74 entire bus full of high school students.58 The former is an attempt to prove his manhood and cope with his trauma; the latter is engineered to kill two of Woody’s other victims, who were planning to come forward and “out” Cassidy with them.
One could argue that there is a subtle critique of normative masculinity or homosocial relationships in this plotline, because Cassidy’s need to inflict trauma on other people stems from his sense of emasculation and sexual inadequacy following his rape: Veronica says that Cassidy raped her because he “wanted to prove [he was] a man,” and that her unconsciousness made it easier for Cassidy, because it allowed him to “imagine whatever it is [he] needed to imagine”
(“Not Pictured,” 2.22).59 However, by making Veronica’s rape the result of Cassidy’s inability to deal with his victimhood without producing more victims, the show removes the specificity of
Veronica’s rape, and makes her a kind of collateral damage in a conflict between two men. It also constitutes the show’s second use of rape as origin story, but this time for a villain. That shared victimhood makes Cassidy a hybrid character much like Veronica, both of them blurring the usually neatly defined genre roles of detective / victim / criminal, Veronica as a victim- detective and Cassidy as a victim-criminal. This creates an overlap between the spheres of detective and criminal, which in turn begins to break down the distinction between the hero and the villain—a distinction that is particularly threatened by Veronica and Cassidy’s shared desires to “get even” with the people who harmed them.
58 He sets off a bomb on a bus, causing it to veer off a cliff, killing everyone inside. This bus crash is the main murder mystery plot of the season. 59 It is implied earlier that Cassidy has a difficult time getting and maintaining an erection, and so struggles to have sex with women. Here, Veronica seems to imply that her unconsciousness allows him to imagine he is having sex with a man. The boys that Cassidy kills in the bus crash are both gay, and in the third season, Cassidy’s brother suggests Cassidy was gay as a result of Woody’s molestation. The show thus proposes a potential causal relationship between sexual victimization and male homosexuality. Guy 75
In a way, this doubling of Veronica and Cassidy’s storylines has the potential to move the show towards a structural assessment of sexual violence, by identifying normative expectations about heterosexual male behavior as a source of men’s desire to commit assault, and producing an account in which sexual violence is encouraged or perpetuated by cultural forces. Instead, however, it serves only to further condemn Cassidy’s (objectively horrific) behavior, by setting up Veronica as a rape victim who handles her trauma the right way, and Cassidy the wrong. That both Cassidy and Veronica experience sexual violence but only one becomes a rapist and murderer clearly indicates that monstrosity is a choice one makes, as an individual, and so
Cassidy’s evil cannot be blamed on society, toxic masculinity, or even his own personal victimization. In this respect, the fact that Veronica never does exact any significant form of revenge upon the show’s main criminals is crucial. Her revenge is typically minor, such as cutting car wires, damaging property, or framing someone for misdemeanor crimes. Most importantly, even at her most vengeful, Veronica never targets the innocent; her rage is always directed at those who hurt her. Cassidy, however, not only seeks revenge on his assailant, but further harms Woody’s other victims and produces assault victims of his own—and sees these actions as justifiable.
Any audience sympathy Cassidy might have gained, even after these crimes, is destroyed through his behavior on the hotel roof where Veronica confronts him.60 His behavior is erratic, vacillating between violent anger and easy laughter. When she first gets to the roof, he points a gun at her and demands to know what she knows, but, as she actually accuses him, he is the picture of comfort, and laughs at her fraught emotional state. When she finally shouts, “You
60 Although Cassidy’s sympathetic portrayal is wholly undone in this scene, it is nonetheless significant that Cassidy receives more backstory and development than any major “bad guy” in the show. The show’s investment in humanizing Veronica’s rapist is disconcerting, even if that humanization is ultimately reversed. Guy 76 raped me!,” Beaver simply smiles and says ironically, “And Dick still thinks I’m a virgin” (“Not
Pictured,” 2.22). Later, after he has blown up a plane that Veronica believes her father to be on, he crouches next to her sobbing form, and says, “Yeah, sorry about that. I know this might be a, uh, a real bad time to ask for a favor. How would you feel, now that you've got nothing left to live for, about just rolling yourself off? I just, I really don't want your DNA all over my shirt.”
This line marks the beginning of a brief soliloquy, which he delivers as he attempts to murder
Veronica; the soliloquy ends when Veronica’s boyfriend comes to her rescue.
As Whitney notes, true villains in Veronica Mars have a tendency to “speechify” in this way (163). Aaron Echolls, Lilly Kane’s murderer, gives his speech while threatening Veronica in the distinctly thrillerish finale to the first season, and Mercer, the serial rapist in the third season, gives his speech to a drugged-unconscious girl as he prepares to rape her. Even Woody
Goodman, who lacks the honor of being the “main” villain in any single plot, delivers a short speech monologue, when he defends his molestation of young boys to Keith Mars, saying,
“That's not how it was. It wasn't that way at all. Those boys...if you knew their fathers, how they ignored them, mistreated them, they needed someone. I listened to them, I cared about them”
(2.22).61 These unnerving claims and the criminals’ utter lack of remorse make these speeches markers of true villainy, and in so doing, separate these characters from other characters in the show (all of whom are morally ambiguous on some level), resulting in a location of evil and cruelty in a kind of distinct inhumanity. The more disturbing the show’s villains are, the more clearly “bad” people are separated from “good” people, and the more closely the show begins to mimic a British whodunit ideology, thereby legitimizing its individual solutions.
61 That Cassidy has been ignored and mistreated by his father adds to the creepiness of Woody’s justification, in part because it is clear that Woody specifically targeted the vulnerable, but also because it lends a horrifying authenticity to Woody’s account—these kids were neglected and did need someone to care about them, but instead, Woody molested them. Guy 77
Thus, the second season of Veronica Mars moves away from its hard-boiled and film noir roots towards a British whodunit ideology. Significantly, however, this individualization of evil is not consistent for all crimes: rampant corruption remains present in the legal and law enforcement systems of Neptune, and even murder is not the exclusive domain of villains like
Cassidy and Aaron Echolls, but also committed by gang members, career criminals, and even regular “good” people. In the end, only sexual violence receives an exclusively individualizing treatment: rapists in Veronica Mars are always monsters. Remarkably, the show manages to maintain this individualistic treatment of sexual violence even in the third season, which focuses on campus rape. Given the high number of rapes committed on college campuses,62 and the sheer number of rapes committed on the fictional Hearst College campus, which Veronica and her friends attend after high school, this storyline ought to produce a structural account of rape or rape culture. Instead, it carefully delineates “real” campus rape—violent stranger rape—from other kinds of coercion, and maintains an individualization of rape by attributing all of the Hearst rapes to a single man, Mercer Hayes.
Granted, as in the second season, the individualization of rape in Season Three is moderated partially by the role abusive relationships between men play in producing the rape plot. While only one student, Mercer, commits the rapes, another student, Moe, an RA in one of the dorms, chooses and drugs the victims for him. The relationship between Mercer and Moe is extremely unbalanced and controlling, and more bizarrely, the result of a psychology professor’s re-creation of the Stanford Prison Experiment,63 in which they had both participated some years
62 RAINN estimates that 21.3% of female students experience sexual assault during their time as undergraduates (“Campus”). 63 The Stanford Prison Experiment was a 1971 psychological experiment studying power relations. The sadistic and authoritarian behaviors produced among the “guards” were so horrible that the experiment was aborted early (Zimbardo). Guy 78 past. Two of the main characters in the show, Logan and Wallace, take part in the same experiment earlier in the season (“My Big Fat Greek Rush Week,” 3.02). The subjects are divided into guards and prisoners, with the former given almost free reign over their treatment of the latter. Predictably, brutal behavior and abuse ensue. However, unlike in the original Stanford
Prison Experiment, in Veronica Mars only one of the “guard” students exhibits violent and cruel behavior, while the other guards are visibly uncomfortable with his tactics, and so the episode produces not a social critique but an individualization of evil once more. The result of the experiment when Logan and Wallace participate is a continued “friendship” between the cruelest guard, Rafe, and his favorite victim, Samuel, which appears to maintain the power dynamics between them as guard and prisoner. This relationship foreshadows that between Mercer and
Moe, who are also guard and prisoner, respectively, and so the individualization of cruelty in
Rafe’s character carries over into Mercer’s. As a result, then, what would appear to be social commentary on human brutality becomes a more conservative message about abuse as a deviation from the norm.
Moreover, Mercer is the most one-dimensionally evil villain in the show—even Aaron
Echolls, the murderer of Lilly Kane, has a backstory as an abused child. But Mercer has no backstory. Instead, his character is defined almost exclusively by the episode in which his role as the Hearst College rapist64 is revealed. Immediately after this reveal, he delivers a villainous monologue over the body of an unconscious girl:
It's unfortunate that when you wake up, all you'll know is that your hair is gone. Because
it's gonna be good. I'd wager your best ever. And it's a me thing, I'm sorry to say. I have
no patience. I mean, if I'd met you in a bar or, uh, at a party, I would have had you back
64 As this title (which is used throughout the season) indicates, Hearst College apparently has no other rapists. Guy 79
here and on your back in an hour. But that's an hour of my life I would have never had
back, an hour of listening to you talk about unicorns,65 and your high-school boyfriend
and how you hate the taste of beer. I'm just taking what you would have happily given. I
mean, that's hardly a crime. (“Spit and Eggs,” 3.09)
The overt misogyny of this monologue obviously acknowledges the connection between hatred of women and rape, and yet it is so over-the-top, so uniquely callous and disturbed, that Mercer’s misogyny as a motivation for rape does not quite indict all other misogynistic men along with him. Additionally, his abuse of Moe shows that his cruelty is not gender-specific, even if it manifests differently towards women than men. In fact, the third season of Veronica Mars goes to a fair amount of effort to distinguish between basic misogynists and rapists, and the individualization of rape plays a central role in this distinction. Characters who cannot make this distinction are demonized, like the feminists of Lilith House,66 who subscribe to a more systemic view of rape and so falsely accuse the Pi Sigma fraternity—home to some of the most appalling sexists on the Hearst campus—of committing the serial rapes.
The only explicitly feminist characters in the show, the women of Lilith House are portrayed as angry, emotional, volatile, and vengeful from their very first scene—a Take Back the Night rally staged on campus.67 Their anti-rape activism is shown to involve duplicity (they
65 The girl’s room, where this monologue takes place, is decorated with unicorns. 66 In Jewish mythology, Lilith is Adam’s first wife, exiled from the garden as a punishment for her refusal to be submissive. She is also the mother of demons and/or monsters in extracanonical biblical mythology, and her name has been claimed by a variety of feminist groups for different purposes. As a result, the show’s use of the name references real-world feminist organizing and ties it closely to monstrosity. 67 The staging of this rally is bizarre: the crowd in attendance cheers and whoops with laughter and excitement, as if seeing a celebrity perform, rather than listening to serious calls for an end to violence against women. Similarly, all the “Take Back the Night” banners shown in this episode are pink and purple, with bubble letters more appropriate for a bake sale sign than an Guy 80 fake a rape), censorship (they object to a rape threat published against one of their members in a campus satire magazine, and somehow are framed as fascists for this objection), and even sexual violence (they anally rape the president of the Pi Sigma fraternity by inserting an Easter egg into his rectum). Moreover, of the three main Lilith House women, two are women of color, and these two women comprise nearly half of the recurring female characters of color in the entirety of Veronica Mars. More than one critic has noted the obvious anti-feminism of these representations, and yet most of these critics persist in treating Veronica Mars as a whole as a feminist text, in spite of its harsh portrayal of feminists in the third season, and Veronica’s utter lack of feminist self-identification or participation.
For the most part, these critics deal with the rape politics of the third season by arguing that they are either a departure from the show’s “real” feminism, which is modeled by the first two seasons, or simply a critique of bad feminism.68 Neither of these are terribly compelling: the former must disregard one third of the show in order to justify its political reading, while the latter ignores the fact that there is no named “good” feminism to counter the “bad” feminism of
Lilith House. Moreover, given that the basic ideology around rape—in which rape is an individual crime, and “real rape” is stranger rape with a defenseless victim—remains consistent throughout the show, it seems more likely that the misogyny and suspicion around rape that surface in the third season are not a break from previous seasons, but a more extreme or fully realized version of the same politics. The sudden crystallization of Veronica Mars’ rape politics in the third season is not without cause: Thomas was influenced by current events, and the rape
anti-rape campaign. Together, these elements portray the campaign as frivolously feminine, rather than a serious effort to put an end to a horrific form of violation. 68 See Whitney, Burnett and Townsend, and Butcher and Peters. Guy 81 storyline and Lilith House women’s representations stem particularly from his reaction to the
Duke lacrosse case of 2006.69 An interviewer quotes Thomas:
I will say that the portrayal of those women...it was affected by the coverage of the Duke
lacrosse scandal. Immediately, when they turned those cameras on and cut to the
demonstrators, so many people, before anyone heard anything, were willing to hang those
kids, or to support them70 fully. And I just found that remarkable and distasteful. So there
was some reaction to that, watching. You don’t know what happened, and yet you want
those boys in prison. By the way, I look at those lacrosse boys and my own personal gut
reaction is that they're a lot like Dick Casablancas, you know—that they are probably
lunkheads and male chauvinists, but I’m not willing to call them rapists before we’ve
even heard anything. And… oh, the word I was looking for is “strident.” There was
certainly some notion of putting the strident people who I reacted to in the Duke lacrosse
thing into the show. (Thomas, “Second”)
This quote speaks volumes about the head writer’s politics, and while Thomas’s personal beliefs cannot be assumed to transfer completely to the show, the views expressed here certainly emerge within it. The contrast between his use of “kids” and “boys” to describe adult men, and his textbook misogyny in using “strident” to describe women of the same age, corresponds neatly to the show’s representations of the Sigma Pi fraternity brothers and the Lilith House women respectively. The comparison Thomas makes to Dick Casablancas to make this point is strangely self-defeating, however. While Dick himself has not explicitly committed a rape over the course of the show, in the first season he encourages his brother to rape Veronica, and, moreover,
69 This scandal, involving a rape accusation against several members of the Duke lacrosse team, occurred in March 2006, during the airing of the second season of Veronica Mars, and likely around the time that Thomas would have been writing the third season. 70 It is unclear whether this refers to the demonstrators or the lacrosse players. Guy 82 attempts to drug and rape his own girlfriend. If Dick Casablancas is not a rapist, it is not for lack of trying, but Thomas’s description frames him as an everyday misogynist totally distinct from actual perpetrators of sexual violence. And yet this is exactly what the individualization of rape and the third season’s rape politics do: by having misogynistic frat boys be falsely accused of being rapists, and then locating rape not in generic male socialization but particularly disturbed men, the show soundly rejects a connection between rape and normative masculinity or homosocial bonding practices. On the other hand, the Pi Sigma brothers are not exonerated of all misbehavior; their sexual humiliation of a sorority girl named Patrice Pitrelli was so cruel that she tried to kill herself.71 Yet Veronica Mars insistently maintains that the Pi Sigs do not deserve to be disbanded, simply because they aren’t actually rapists.
Having rejected both feminist collective action and a radical feminist analysis of rape,
Veronica Mars offers instead a more individually oriented vision for change. This individualized solution to rape is present in the previous seasons, through Veronica’s one-woman quest for justice, but the third season makes that vision much more pointed by placing it in stark opposition to feminism. This opposition is seemingly self-contradictory, to the extent that the show condemns the Lilith House women’s quest for revenge but maintains a more neutral stance on Veronica’s, but the moral distinction lies in Veronica’s individualism and her role as the
“objective detective” (Whitney, 161). This objectivity allows her to investigate the rapes, searching for the true culprit, while the Lilith House women blame the Pi Sigma fraternity brothers. But it is also her status as a rape victim that gives her authority within the show to speak about sexual violence, and she is clearly positioned as a “good” woman and rape victim, in contrast to the feminists of Lilith House and, to an extent, the other rape victims who receive
71 This is actually the Lilith women’s “origin story,” so to speak; one of them was a close friend of Patrice, and this drives their efforts to get the Pi Sigma fraternity disbanded. Guy 83 significant airtime. Twice in the series Veronica exonerates men falsely accused of rape, and in both cases, organized feminist groups and other rape victims vilify her for her actions. In response, Veronica turns their criticisms back around on them, and rebukes the Lilith House women for faking a rape, saying, “Nothing hurts the cause more than that” (“Lord of the Pis,”
3.08). Her behavior towards other rape victims is more educative than indicting: when Parker
Lee, one of the Hearst rapist’s victims, shames Veronica for exonerating the Pi Sigs of her rape,
Veronica responds, “You wanna nail someone to the wall, just to have someone nailed there, or do you want the person responsible to pay?” (“Charlie Don’t Surf,” 3.04). Parker looks disconcerted, and perhaps even ashamed, as if she knows Veronica is right. After this, she distances herself from the feminists of Lilith House, who, it is suggested, exploited her trauma for their cause. Thus, Parker’s involvement with feminist collective action and her misdirected anger at innocent men are framed as the result of feminism preying upon rape victims for political attention.
The notion that feminism exploits victims of sexual violence contrasts strongly with the
Pam and Blanche series, in which female community and organized feminist spaces are sites of healing and empowerment for the protagonists after their assaults. And yet, much like Pam and
Blanche, Veronica as a detective does not stand totally alone, but relies throughout the series on a network of friends, allies, and partners for case-solving and backup muscle. Unlike Pam and
Blanche, however, Veronica’s network is almost exclusively male; she rejects female community in favor of male company throughout the show.72 The problem with collective action then seems
72 This is partly due to the fact that the premise of the first season is the death of her female best friend, but even then, the new friends she makes are almost exclusively men. Cindy “Mac” Mackenzie and Meg Manning are the only recurring female characters that could be called Veronica’s friends, and Meg spends the first handful of episodes of the second season in a coma before dying after giving birth to Veronica’s boyfriend’s baby. While Mac has a larger role in the Guy 84 to be somehow exclusive to women. Veronica’s inability to deal with the show’s true villains on her own compounds this issue: her investigations of the major murder plots in the first and second seasons result in her near-death at the hands of the unmasked killers, and she only survives these encounters due to the heroic intervention of male characters. Thus, in addition to rejecting female community, Veronica cannot triumph without men. And yet, in a surprising twist of events, it is in the third season—with all its misogyny, anti-feminism, and condemnation of female collective action—that for the first time, another woman saves Veronica.
Even more surprising, that woman is Parker, another rape victim, and her involvement in feminist collective action directly contributes to her rescue of Veronica: in “Spit & Eggs” (3.09),
Parker tables at a Take Back the Night booth, handing out drug-testing coasters and rape whistles to female students, including Veronica. Veronica expresses skepticism about the usefulness of the whistles, asking, “You actually think people would come a-running, huh?” Parker shrugs, and Veronica tells her, “You have more faith in mankind than I do, my friend.” Veronica’s skepticism is warranted, given her earlier experience of having been drugged and raped at Shelly
Pomeroy’s well-attended party, but when Mercer captures her and Veronica blows the whistle,
Parker hears it, and comes running. This moment very nearly produces a celebration of feminist collectivity, or at least female solidarity, but the potential for a women-based triumph is diverted when Parker’s confrontation of the rapist in the hallway gathers the attention of several male residents. Rather than a gathering of women aligned against a rapist, these male students save
Veronica, and the show offers an image of men and women uniting to stop rape, inspired by a
show, it revolves primarily around her relationship with her boyfriend Cassidy in the second season, and her role as Parker’s roommate in the third. Parker also becomes Veronica’s friend, but that friendship originates from a shared experience of assault, and promptly fractures when Parker begins to date Logan, Veronica’s main love interest in the show.
Guy 85 single individual’s intervention. As a result, the vision for change proposed is ultimately not one of early prevention or structural change, but basic bystander intervention. The show thus presents stopping rape as an issue of taking notice and speaking up, which, as far as collective responses go, is still highly individualized.
That the show offers any kind of vision for change is unexpected, given that it consistently locates sexual violence in individuals. In series like those of Pam and Blanche, which treat rape as a major systemic problem that victimizes vast numbers of women, suggestions for large-scale solutions to sexual assault seem necessary to balance the overwhelming horror of sexual violence. But in Veronica Mars, which treats rape as an individual act of violence, it does not necessarily follow that sexual assault would need to be
“solved,” particularly considering the serial rape mystery plot’s effective use of stranger rape to produce investigation-based closure. One possible explanation is that rejecting a feminist vision necessitates offering an alternative, and that by placing a systemic view of rape in the narrative, even if only for the purpose of contradicting it, the show acknowledges the existence of understandings of sexual violence that are bigger than individual rapists and rape victims. Even after the show has soundly rejected this perspective, the possibility of rape as endemic to society remains, and so the show might be interested in covering all the bases, as it were. This interpretation, however, cannot account for the show’s sudden shift, and there is a more convincing alternative, which revolves around the third season’s unique handling of rapists and its representation of rape.
The second and third seasons differ in the way they handle rapists: the second season kills them, while the third only incarcerates them. Due the corruption and incompetence that plague Neptune’s law enforcement and criminal justice systems, major criminals in the show Guy 86 rarely face real prison time. As a result, incarceration in Veronica Mars is far from a permanent solution, which could account for the third season’s decision to propose an actual (albeit minimal) plan for preventing—rather than simply avenging—rape. Moreover, even if Neptune’s justice system could be trusted to effectively incarcerate rapists and murderers, rape itself becomes more urgent in the third season, due to two main changes in the show’s representation of sexual violence. Firstly, this season shows an unprecedented amount of trauma, perhaps because when Veronica is not the main rape victim, that pain can be on display without risking her hard-boiled persona. But while it does not create character problems, it does create problems for closure, because Parker’s very visible trauma, and the emotional effect on the viewer of seeing her attempt to rebuild her life in the aftermath of her rape, make simple legal justice seem weak, especially in a show with such a bleak outlook on the criminal justice system’s ability to reliably incarcerate bad people. Secondly, and just as importantly, while rape is individualized in the third season, it is not a singular occurrence; an enormous number of rapes take place, producing a huge number of victims, all through the work of one man (and his sidekick). The sheer amount of raped women in Season Three produces a sense of urgency around rape. Even if rapists are uncommon, one rapist can clearly do an enormous amount of damage, and thus stopping rape becomes a pressing concern. Hence, the third season of the show wrestles with the consequences of its own politics and relation to genre: having moved away from the hard-boiled cynicism of a lone hero fighting widespread evil, but preserved its distrust of criminal justice systems, the show attempts to employ whodunit ideology to individualize rape and make it individually resolvable, and fails to do so convincingly.
In this respect, Veronica Mars is at once the least subversive and the least comfortably hard-boiled text considered here. It rejects the cynicism of hard-boiled politics, but it does so in Guy 87 favor of a more optimistic, and yet more conservative, belief system, thereby losing much of the already limited liberal impulses of hard-boiled fiction. The Pam and Blanche series, on the other hand, also disavow the cynicism of the hard-boiled genre, but do so by removing the other half of its politics: whereas Veronica Mars deals with the insufficiency of individualist responses to collective evil by individualizing evil, Wilson’s and Neely’s novels spurn individualism in favor of collective solutions.
The fact that all three series, in spite of their divergent politics, different historical contexts and lineages, and contrasting authorial subject-positions, are unable to maintain the hard-boiled cynicism that has proven perfectly sustainable across innumerable works written over the course of nearly a century, points to the unique narrative destabilization of rape. After all, none of the three series explored in this project offer any solutions for preventing murder, crime, or corruption; their visions for change revolve exclusively around methods for ending violence committed against women (and usually around sexual violence specifically, although the Blanche series includes domestic abuse). Rape places more pressure on these texts than does any other crime, so much so that the Blanche series and Veronica Mars each revise one of their core beliefs in order to deal adequately with sexual violence—the Blanche books overcome their wariness of collective action and vigilante justice, while Veronica Mars sacrifices its investment in a jaded, fatalistic perspective. (The Pam trilogy, meanwhile, embraces collective action and collective solutions from the start, and its fundamental politics remain consistent throughout.)
Rape’s unique urgency in these texts results from a combination of the victim-detective’s constant invocation of trauma and the mystery formula’s failure to “solve” rape as it does murder. In a traditional detective story with a murder plot, the victim is, by definition, dead.
Beyond the death itself (which is no small thing), there is no emotional or physical damage that Guy 88 needs to be processed over time, at least on the part of the victim. While in life, the totality of death makes murder one of the worst crimes a person can commit, in fiction, this end enables the detective narrative to produce closure, because it excises any long-term consequences that would persist even after the murderer is discovered and brought to justice. Rape, on the other hand, has lifelong consequences for the victim, and this reality is less easily removed from the narrative.
Further, while murder ensures that the victim cannot also be the detective, thereby guaranteeing that victimhood is always at least one step removed from the protagonist, the survival of the rape victim allows that distance to be closed. The victim-detective, then, places the enduring trauma of rape at the forefront of the detective story, dismantling the closure-producing formula of the genre while simultaneously forcing the horror of sexual violence into the spotlight. Moreover, the problem of rape for the detective narrative is not limited to its own narrative destabilization, because rape as represented in these texts is at once rape and not rape: it signifies numerous other social and political issues, while, by nature, invoking the act’s own reality. As a result, the pressure that rape places, through the victim-detective, upon these texts is doubled. With the investigation formula totally unable to resolve this massive destabilization, these texts must look outside genre and to the real world for answers.
Guy 89
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