CONTENTS
Introduction 2
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Rendell´s Crime Novels 4
1...... ……...... …......
Appearance of the Characters and Setting 7
2...... …......
2.1 Dangerous Ordinariness 7
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2.2 Gothic Sublime 12
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Importance of Family Background 18
3...... …….
3.1 Characters Coming from Deprived Background ...... …. 20
3.2 Characters Coming from Middle and Upper-Class Background ... 30
Class Barriers 35
4...... ………
4.1 A Fatal Clash between the Classes ...... ….. 37
4.2 Class Imprisonment 48
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4.3 The Socially Excluded 51
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Racial and Ethnic Otherness 56
1 5...... ……..
Transgressions in Gender 61
6...... ……...
Conclusion 66
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Bibliography 70
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INTRODUCTION
This diploma thesis analyses different social issues that influence the individual´s personality and his or her emotional and social development in the following selection of nine novels by Ruth Rendell: Wolf to the Slaughter (first published in 1967), The Best Man to Die (1969), The Face of Trespass (1974), A Demon in My View (1976), A Judgement in
Stone (1977), A Sleeping Life (1978), The Bridesmaid (1989), The Keys to the Street
(1996), and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (2001). I attempt to take into consideration the social life and changes that took place over the span of four decades this selection covers.
The selected books fall into the two categories of Rendell´s works, the Wexford novels, with a leading character of Chief Inspector Wexford, and social thrillers that lack the questing detective.
2 Ruth Rendell is the acclaimed British author with an established reputation in crime fiction who has transformed the criminal genre by blending the mundane aspects of everyday life with the murky impulses of obsession, greed, desire, envy and fear. My aim is to find a close parallel between the psychology of Rendell´s damaged characters and the circumstances that have led them to commit the crime. I focus on Rendell´s responses concerning the contemporary British society through a detailed examination of her characters who often seem to be the victims of the social system.
I divide my diploma thesis into six chapters. The first chapter briefly describes the genre that the novels written by Ruth Rendell represent. The second chapter analyses the relations between the appearance of the characters and their psyche in the context of
Rendell´s detailed description of the setting including the Gothic features she employs to emphasize the existence of the ever-present danger of crime. The next chapter examines the influence of family background and childhood on the character´s mind and behaviour. This chapter also concentrates on different social, cultural and economic factors in family life that are possible sources of disruptive and criminal behaviour. The fourth chapter deals with the topic of class structure, class differences and conflicts that Rendell critically discusses in her novels. The following chapter is closely related to the previous one concerning the notion of ethnicity and race in connection with the British feelings of superiority that considerably influence the individual´s life and identity. The last chapter of this thesis explores Rendell´s construction of gender and its stereotypes with regard to the family upbringing and Freud´s psychoanalysis.
In my analysis of the relations between culture and personality, I inquire into psychological studies, research and approaches for a wide range of personality disorders published in the works by Cyril Höschl and Michael R. Zales. Considering the issue of class, ethnicity and gender I rely on Ivan Reid´s demonstration of the ways in which social
3 differences reach into every area of human life, and Arthur Marwick´s survey of the development of British society in particular periods in which the selected novels were written. Among other sources listed in the bibliography, I also draw on inspiration from various articles commenting Rendell´s personal and social life and work.
1. RENDELL´S CRIME NOVELS
Ruth Rendell publishes in three related genres of literature: the Wexford detective series, social thrillers, and psychological novels, which she writes under the name of Barbara
Vine. She creates novels that release her from the standards common to detective fiction because they not only examine the psyche of different characters, but also break new ground in the area of social critique. Rendell´s works directly challenge the reader to consider social problems of contemporary British society.
This diploma thesis deals with the first two categories of Rendell´s novels. The
Wexford novels take place in a fictional provincial town of Kingsmarkham and each of them can be seen as a continuation of the life of Inspector Reginald Wexford and his family.
Rendell provides the reader with deep insight into Wexford´s personal life together with his loyalty and responsibility for the police force. Reginald Wexford is a thoughtful, witty, and insightful policeman as well as a family man who adores his two adult daughters, although
4 he is not blind to their flaws. While solving the crimes together with his sidekick, Inspector
Michael Burden, Wexford´s own family problems keep him busy as well. He always balances on the edge between his own family life and the interrogation of strange and perplexing cases. McDermid adds that Rendell successfully manages to provide the reader
“with fresh insights into Reg Wexford´s personality as he struggles to balance his responsibility for a major investigation with a personal drama that threatens the very foundation of his life” (McDermid, On Inspector Wexford). However, his family crises always help him to solve the crime. Rendell uses Wexford´s character to characterize other individuals in her stories often guiding the reader to various plausible yet wrong conclusions. Despite including fundamental aspects of a traditional detective story, such as a police procedure, surprising turning points, a sufficient number of false scents and single mistakes based on a monotonous routine of police work, Wexford novels undoubtedly break new ground in detective fiction. Not only do they examine the hidden motives behind the particular crime, but they also deliver a strong message concerning the class, gender and racial inequalities influencing the psyche and mind of their characters.
Rendell elaborates the above-mentioned characterizations further in the second category of her novels called social thrillers, which somewhat differ from traditional
Wexford whodunits because there is neither “the Great Detective“ nor the extensive criminal investigation following the central line of the novel. Instead Rendell puts a psychological study dealing with the criminal´s anamnesis and personality in the foreground. Here the study of her characters is deeper, including the social pressure which eventually provokes their violent response. These people usually went through a traumatic childhood experience which is pent up for some time but which, at the moment of the increasing menace, causes a growing panic leading to desperate resistance to the whole environment.
5 However, it is not only Rendell´s characters that make her novels so special, but also the dramatic setting and story that help to create a compelling whole. Thus Wexford´s fictional Kingsmarkham is almost as real and atmospheric as London, which Rendell uses as the setting for her non-Wexford novels. Rendell demonstrates an exceptional ability to draw the reader into the streets of both Kingsmarkham and London to get acquainted with their environs intimately.
Rendell´s writing skills are coupled to her sharp eye for social criticism giving a picture of contemporary British society. Her characters often balance along the edge of society and sanity, trapped and imprisoned in a class system, gender stereotypes, and cultural bias. The dark sides of their antisocial and disruptive behaviour are firmly rooted in their family background as well as in social inequality and oppression. The suspense of
Rendell´s novels arises from the uncertainty of whether or not social justice will be served.
They represent a serious challenge to the very society upon which Rendell makes her critical comments.
6
2. APPEARANCE OF THE CHARACTERS AND SETTING
Rendell is frequently concerned both with the external appearance of her characters and the environment they occupy and provides a vivid description of these. Writing about the characters and setting seems to be more important for Rendell than to write about the crime itself. A great deal of her crime writing is not about the crime but about the people leading ordinary lives whose circumstances conspire to push them over the edge. Her portrayals are excellent, vivid and frightening, though she always retains a deep affection for her characters. She has a brilliant sense of place, creating both urban and rural setting both idyllic and dramatic. Her detailed description helps the reader to get inside the characters´ hearts and minds and to work out why they behave the way they do and how they feel, which makes the reader more sympathetic towards them. Rendell´s characters are always well-drawn, seemingly realistic and believable despite their individual quirks and peculiarities.
2.1 DANGEROUS ORDINARINESS
7 As for the appearance, most Rendell´s criminal characters have very much in common. They often give the misleading impression of ordinary, decent and law-abiding citizens who conform to the established conventions of their apparently secure environment.
The ordinariness of Rendell´s characters is exactly what makes her stories so frightening and terrifying. Moreover, she pushes their ordinariness to the points of the bizarreness while remaining consistently believable.
Minty Knox from Adam and Eve and Pinch Me is a thirty-seven years old, small and thin, “little wispy woman, very white-skinned with pale, no-colour eyes, thin lips, hair like a baby´s” ( AAEAPM , 416). She never wears make-up, and is usually dressed “in a clean pair of cotton trousers and a long-sleeved T-shirt” ( AAEAPM , 23). Her fair, fly-away hair is always perfectly washed and she keeps her hands and nails clean and scrubbed.
Linda Grover, a murderer from Wolf to the Slaughter , has soft and satiny pale bright hair compared to a child´s, and “grey eyes, large and listless” with “the smooth dove- coloured eyebrows” ( WTTS , 35). She is rather tall and slim with long thin legs. Her favourite clothes are a short grey dress. She works in her father´s newsagent shop which has
“the shady, almost sordid, aspect of a shop in the slum streets of some great city” ( WTTS ,
34). The shop is dark and dusty with a terrible mess in the shop window. The mess in the shop reflects Linda´s emotional mess in her mind. However, Linda and the shop stand in a striking contrast to each other. The central character, a policeman Mark Drayton, compares
Linda to a fresh flower growing in a dump, “they [ daffodils ] and the girl he had just seen shared the same quality of untouched exquisite freshness and like the girl they flowered in squalor. The roughly made dirty wooden box was to them what the sordid newsagents was to her, an ugly unfitting background for breathless beauty” ( WTTS , 36). Nevertheless,
Linda´s deprived background considerably influences her life and behaviour and eventually results in a murder.
8 Polly Flinders from A Sleeping Life and Eunice Parchman from A Judgement in
Stone are the ugliest from all the women characters I intend to analyse. Poor, colourless, bland and timid Polly has a very tall, stoop figure “in an attempt to reduce her height” ( ASL ,
57). Besides, she has two prominent incisors in her upper jaw giving her an impression of a rabbit. Her fairness is described as “just absence of colour, the eyes a watery pale grey, the hair almost white” ( ASL , 57).
Wexford´s comparison of Polly Flinders to a girl from some legend of fairy story, who was
“so fair and white and with skin so transparent, that when she drank, the course of the red wine followed could be seen as it ran down her throat,” evokes the Gothic sublime in which terror expands the sense of self and the sense of what possibly can happen ( ASL , 161).
Despite the plain and ordinary look of these women characters, the reader feels a sort of ever-present potential threat behind their ordinariness, which is particularly striking in Eunice Parchman´s character. The reader is suddenly aware of the stifling, strained and even hostile atmosphere which prevails when Eunice appears on the scene: “It was as if a coldness, almost an icy breath, emanated from her. Wherever she was, she brought a chill into the warm air“ ( AJIS, 12). Later in the novel, Eunice is referred to as “a female Banquo,“
“a boa constrictor“ or “Miss Frankenstein“ ( AJIS , 116, 114, 107). Even her appearance puts forward the idea of a rather austere, distant and somewhat cold person. She is described as
“a placid-looking creature with rather too small a head, pale firm features, brown hair mixed with grey, small steady blue eyes, a massive body that seemed neither to go out nor in, large shapely hands, very clean with short nails, large shapely legs in heavy brown nylon, large feet in somewhat distorted black court shoes“ ( AJIS , 14).
Similarly, Arthur Johnson from A Demon in My View is described as a very ordinary and plain man: “tallish, thin, with a thin, reddish and coarse-skinned face“ with “thin, grayish-fair hair“ which are always “carefully combed to conceal a bald patch and flattened
9 with Brylcreem“ ( ADIMV , 31). He wears a pair of gold-rimmed glasses “on his rather long, straight, and quite fleshless nose“ ( ADIMV , 31). His striking difference from the other people is illustrated in the following description: “In that crowd, London working class, hippy-costumed drop-outs, brown immigrants, his clothes and his air set him apart and enclosed him in loneliness. Time and change had passed him by. He was a sad and bitter anachronism” ( ADIMV , 158).
Both Eunice and Arthur are always decently and respectably dressed in conservative and somewhat old-fashioned clothes. However, Arthur´s wardrobe is a bit more extensive than Eunice´s which contains only a few pieces of clothing such as a navy blue crimplene suit, a blue and white check dress and a navy blue raincoat including such accessories as dark grey-blue woolly hat and scarf, and a black hair net. The primary reason for this difference in a wardrobe is probably because of their class allegiance. Whereas Eunice is a member of the working class, Arthur belongs to the lower-middle class. Moreover,
Arthur is much more meticulous about his personal appearance than Eunice because of his strong need to preserve an immaculate ego and to be thought well by all people. He always wears an immaculate dark grey suit and a white shirt with a tie “neatly knotted“ and “a clean white handkerchief in his breast pocket“ ( ADIMV , 22). All his clothes must be properly washed and ironed. Not only do the criminals´ conservative clothes reflect their ordinariness, but also their stiffness and bigotry, which is emphasised by the choice of their favourite colours such as dark blue, brown and grey.
Sometimes, the sinister aspect of the character is not seen till the very end of the story just as in the case of Carl Nash, a criminal from The Keys to the Street . His appearance is quite likeable and handsome. He is tall, very slim and pale, and “his body movements as elegant as a black´s man” ( TKTTS , 234). His longish hair is fair and his eyes light grey. Like Senta Pelham from The Bridesmaid Carl is able to dissemble. Rendell,
10 probably intentionally, chose for both of them the profession of actor and actress. Mary
Jago, who becomes his deceived girlfriend and victim, has a very similar appearance to
Senta, even though her character is a complete opposite. Besides, Mary looks like Carl himself, that is why they are often mistaken for brother and sister. She is delicate and lovely as a china statue, “with an appearance of fragility, as if the wind could blow her away”
(TKTTS , 21). She is beautiful and slim creating an impression of “a lily, long-necked, white- skinned and very fair” ( TKTTS , 21).
Rendell highlights sharp differences between her characters´ appearances according to their different class origin. Most of the above-mentioned lower-middle-class and working-class characters are very similar as for the appearance because of their ordinariness and plainness. Ordinariness of the characters helps them to merge into the crowd, to become invisible, thus posing serious threat to society because they are difficult to identify.
On the other hand, the criminals from the upper classes are depicted as striking and extraordinary considering their appearance and clothes. Drusilla Janus from The Face of
Trespass , a young upper-middle-class woman coming from high-class London suburbia, is described as a vamp - charming, attractive and magnetic. She wears expensive designer clothes, jewellery and a perfume with an apt French name Amorce dangereuse meaning
“dangerous allure”. The way she dresses and moves reflects her strong personality able to assert her claims as illustrated in the following example: “A hand was thrust out of the window, beckoning him. She sat in the middle of the seat, dressed in white trousers, a fur jacket, a huge black hat and huge black sunglasses” ( AFOT , 40).
Drusilla´s counterpart from The Best Man to Die , a murderer Jolyon Vigo, is another strong personality, which is enhanced by his striking appearance: “The dentist had a fine leonine head, the fair hair and abundant. His jaw was strong and prominent, the mouth thin” (78). The reference to lion´s appearance reflects Vigo´s superior position in
11 society, but, at the same time, danger he poses. Rendell´s description of his house reflects
Vigo´s charismatic and dominant personality:
Wexford followed him through the pleached walk and they entered the house by a glazed garden door. It was like stepping into a museum. Wexford hesitated, dazzled. He had heard of Chinese rooms, heard of Chinese Chippendale, but he had never seen a room furnished in the style. The brilliance of its colours turned the remembered garden outside into monochrome. His feet sank into a carpet whose blues and creams evoked a summer sky and, at Vigo´s behest, he lowered himself uneasily into a chair with yellow satin seat and legs of rearing dragons. The dentist moved with apparent carelessness between tables and cabinets loaded with china and jade and stood, a faint smile on his thin lips, under a long picture of red fish painted on silk. ( TBMTD , 79)
Vigo´s country house represents the richness and snobbery of the bourgeois upper class that exploits the working class. This issue is discussed in detail in Chapter 4.1. Rendell sees the country house as “a battleground structured through economic instability”
(Rowland, 44). Thus Vigo´s house, despite its expensive and comfortable furnishings, is not a safe place for its inhabitants as well as for its visitors.
2.2 THE GOTHIC SUBLIME
Rendell´s novels often contain such essential Gothic elements as shadowed rooms, dark basements, staircases, cemeteries and parks which evoke the feeling of claustrophobia and mystery. Both Rendell´s London and fictional town of Kingsmarkham carry the nocturnal ominousness of the Gothic. The secrets of her characters are often hidden in quiet neighbours, deserted and gloomy streets, and rambling old houses.
Rendell´s vivid description of Regent´s Park in the opening chapter of The Keys to the Street emphasizes the sinister atmosphere of the novel:
Iron spikes surmount each of the gates into the Park, twenty-seven of them on some, eighteen or eleven on others. For the most part the Park itself
12 is surrounded by thorn hedges but thousands of feet of spiked railings still remain. Some of these spikes are blunted, as on those enclosing the gardens of Gloucester Gate, some are ornamented and some take a bend in the middle. On the tall railings outside one of the villas the spikes have a claw-like protuberances, six on each, curved and sharp as talons. [ ... ] Its 464 acres of land fill a circle. Inside the ring of streets which surrounds it lies another ring and within this, widely separated, the equilateral triangle of the London Zoo, the lake with its tree arms and four islands, and around the ornamental gardens a road which on the map looks like a wheel with two projecting spokes. (TKTTS , 1)
The architecture of the park with its inner and outer circles which do not align serves as a symbol for the inequalities between the wealthy inhabitants of the park neighbourhood and the homeless people who occupy the streets surrounding the park.
The Gothic features are even more remarkable in the character of Senta Pelham, the mysterious bridesmaid, who proves to be ‘a bit’ more mysterious than a reader could imagine. She is pictured as a kind of supernatural being from Germanic myths, a fairy or elf, which is emphasized by her Icelandic origin. She is like an enigma; beautiful, amoral and as not-of-this-world as the statue of the goddess Flora she resembles as the following description suggests: her face is “the perfect oval contour, the straight rather long nose which describes an unbroken line from its tip to the top of her forehead, the widely separated calm eyes,” [ ... ] “colourless eyes, clear as water in which a single drop of dye is spreading in streaks and whorl sits dark greenness,” [ ... ] “the short upper lip, the lovely mouth that was neither full-lipped nor narrow” ( TB , 58, 60). Her rather small, no more than five feet tall figure, is very slender. She has small blunt-nailed hands like a child´s. Senta´s complexion “as smooth as the inner side of an ivory waxen petal” is marble white, “not what people mean when they talk about white skin, very fair or creamy but whiter than milk, white as the inner side of some deep sea shell” and her tarnished silver-blonde hair is “very long, nearly waist-length, straight and smooth” covering her back like a veil ( TB , 58, 101).
Even the way she moves and stands produces an image of a supernatural creature: “She
13 walked as if she were a much taller woman, up straight with her head held high, but at the same time very gracefully“ carrying herself with patient confidence ( TB , 59). Senta´s clothes appear as if they were from a different world not much suitable for the contemporary young people. Her favourite colour is black, green and grey. She applies silver eyeshadows and silver nail varnish, which gives her an odd appearance of a fairy or mermaid as the following description illustrates:
She was dressed in something new - or new to him. It was a long dress, nearly ankle-length, of silky semi-transparent pleated stuff, sea-green with silvery-green beads sewn into it. The thin slippery material clung to the voluptuous curves of her breasts, seeming to drip from them like slowly cascading water and trickle over her hips to stroke her tights in a wave´s caress. ( TB , 205)
She also wears strange old dresses that might have belonged to her grandmother, a grey one with silver threads woven into it or an old Japanese kimono in faded blues and pinks “on the back of which was embroidered a rose-coloured bird with a long curving tail”
(TB , 99). The only exception when she wears jeans and running shoes is when she is going to kill someone.
Senta´s characterization is heightened by the Gothic setting full of mystery, danger or even the supernatural. Senta´s story, coloured with passion and imagination, is set in a strange slum basement room of her stepmother´s house whose description evokes overwhelming sense of loneliness, desolation and Gothic terror:
The house where Senta lived was in a terrace of plum-coloured brick. All the windows were flat and rectangular and recessed in the facade. A flight of ten steps led to the front door, a heavy panelled wooden door, once, many years past, painted dark green, and now so pitted with chips and actual holes that it seemed as if someone had used it for target practice. From these steps it was possible to look over the plastered wall which served them as a balustrade and into the area, clogged with rubbish, tin cans, paper, orange peel, that fronted the basement window. [ ... ] The house was large, with three floors above the basement, but as soon as he was inside Philip sensed, without knowing how, that they were alone in it. [ ... ] The smell of the place was new to Philip. He couldn´t have defined it except to say it smelt very subtly of an accumulation of various kinds of ancient dirt, dirt that was never removed,
14 never even shifted from one surface to another, one level to another, of food crumbs years old, fibres of unwanted clothes, dead insects, cobwebs, grains of mud and shreds of excrement, spilt liquids long dried, the hair of animals and their droppings, of dust and soot. It smelt of disintegration. ( TB , 74-75)
Such a description significantly contributes to Rendell´s characterization of a psychopathic character of Senta. Rowland suggests that “terror, in the Gothic sense, signifies the psyche-enlarging fears engendered by notions or events that are unrepresentable in full, or which evade classification and ‘mapping’ in the human mind”
(111).
The Gothic aspects are not only embodied in the characters of criminals, but also in some of Rendell´s likeable characters. Gray Lanceton from The Face of Trespass , Roman
Ashton from The Keys to the Street , and Mark Drayton from Wolf to the Slaughter represent a Byronic hero who, to a certain extent, disregards both social and moral rules to pursue his own desires. All of them possess the essential attributes of the Byronic hero, such as a sad and grim face, black or dark eyes with eyebrows knitted in an almost permanent frown, dark longish hair, and a pale skin. Moreover, they are often dressed in black or dark clothes, which supports their demonic appearance.
Gray Lanceton, described as a “tall dark bloke” or even “the young Rasputin,” with shoulder-length dark hair, uneven beard and dark melancholic eyes is obviously a romantic figure with his mysterious past and dark looks ( AFOT , 2, 10). He lives in quiet exile in a small cottage surrounded by the forest. He is a typical social outcast preferring solitude and isolation. His condition indicates that what he feels towards Drusilla is more than love, it is more like a violent obsession with her, which is shown in his inability to function rationally without her.
Mark Drayton, a young police officer, is another charming, magic, and demonic character whose emotional relationship with Linda Grover gradually develops throughout
15 the story despite his intention to never get seriously involved with any young woman. Here
Linda represents a young woman who becomes a target of a strange man´s desires and schemes provides an impressive example of a Gothic element. Rendell reveals Burden´s conservative attitude to Drayton´s Byronic appearance:
The dark Italianate face with its guarded eyes and its curved mouth showed nothing of his thoughts. His hair was rather long, much too long for a policeman, and he wore a dark grey duffel coat over slacks and sweater. Burden objected to the coat and the hair, but he could find no fault with Drayton´s economy of speech, nor with his reserve, although it was a different brand from his own. ( WTTS , 37)
Roman Ashton, a voluntary homeless, represents a kind of archetype of autonomy, self-reliance, defiance, and power, living by his own moral code in an effort to make a complete break with the past. Thus Roman finds a partial balm for his personal tragedy in his rootless anonymity. He also represents a dark and mysterious loner as his description illustrates: “His hair was dark, the thick bushy beard that covered the greater part of his face iron-grey” ( TKTTS , 37). Roman´s life later intersects with other homeless characters occupying the area of London´s Regents Park whose ellaborate description creates the
Gothic atmosphere both claustrophobic and terrifying.
A typical feature of Rendell´s stories is her clear visual perception of the countryside. A Judgement in Stone depicts the changes of the countryside in the course of seasons. The reader can imagine the snowstorms and snowdrifts in winter, the woods, valleys and slopes carpeted with flowers in blossom during spring and summer, a dense fog in the moors and he can even catch the smell of rotten leaves in autumn. In A Judgement in
Stone , not only do the seasons and the weather change, but also the action of the story which corresponds to the victims´ fate. Their tragic fate also provides a snowstorm, which serves as a metaphor for their entrapment making their escape almost impossible as
Jacqueline´s feelings express: “It was as if, Jacqueline said later to her husband, she were
16 a deaf patient in a home for the handicapped and Eunice a wardmaid. And even when the work was done, and Eunice departed upstairs to watch afternoon serials, she felt that it was not the snow alone which pressed a ponderous weight on the upper regions of Lowfield
Hall“ ( AJIS , 127).
The description of the seasons, even though the story is not set in the country but in the city, is rather vivid in A Demon in My View as well. The whole story takes place in autumn and winter London. The weather is damp, freezing and dismal, which again corresponds to the stifling Gothic atmosphere of the novel.
Rendell´s Gothic sublime is mixed with horror, and is intricately concerned with obsessive passions. Moreover, the setting, in particular the buildings Rendell´s characters occupy, evoke a Gothic lineage, thus serving to destabilize the belief that conventional social norms will be sufficient to restore order. On the other hand, it seems that Rendell´s
Gothic characters and settings are implicated in her critical concern with class distinctions and power.
3. IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY BACKGROUND
Family as the oldest social institution and the basic social unit creates a certain emotional climate and cultivates interpersonal relations. Ethical, aesthetic, educational, cultural and political norms and values are fostered in the family. It is a place of primary
17 socialization which helps its members integrate into a social structure. Social assumptions, moral attitudes, and everyday behaviour are first learned at home. While various sorts of welfare and various schooling might be an offer, the choices actually made depend heavily on parental attitudes. Family background is a fundamental aspect in Rendell´s novels where she shows how different family backgrounds effect the human psyche. She considers family background as an important factor in an individual´s adaptation to his new environment.
Rendell often puts her characters in various family relationships admitting that she
“can´t write about people who don´t have parents and grandparents” (Rowland, 194). She demonstrates how working class children most often have their educational progress brought to a premature halt. Her novels provide a number of excellent examples of characters coming from disadvantaged background. Her psychopaths often lack concepts of home or family and of reciprocal relationships. Social, cultural and economic elements contribute to the development of character and character disorders. Deprived background can be a source of a number of fears and phobias, which may lead to serious personality disorders. Children from unstable and dysfunctional families where parents are alcoholics, drug addicts or showing a lack of good education suffer severe social and cultural deprivation. These children grow up in conditions discouraging their intellectual, moral and emotional development and values. Children and adolescents with aberration of behaviour often seem to act to gratify parental expectations vicariously. There is a multitude of factors causing crime such as maternal deprivation of young children, an absence of father, neglect, alcoholism or violence in family. According to Frazier and James:
Adolescents and older violent persons recalling their adolescent years have characterized their family interactions as: 1./ lack of involvement in constructive family functions; 2./ defiance against parents; 3./ disruptive family behaviour with alienation from family, a feeling of future futility, poor planning abilities, and problems with authority. (66)
18 Absence of family after the early developmental period may lead to multiple tentative interpersonal relationships with depressive periods but without alteration of behaviour. Premature separation from the family causes affection-seeking behaviours, with frustration and intermittent explosive outbursts of violence. A lot of Rendell´s characters such as Minty Knox from Adam and Eve and Pinch Me , Gray Lanceton from The Face of
Trespass , and Philip Wardman from The Bridesmaid , show the classic symptoms of a strong unhealthy affection towards the opposite sex. In young men, the search for power and dependency satisfaction may lead to fears of failure to meet a previously image of masculinity, which can result in a violent behaviour. Arthur Johnson from A Demon in My
View , unable to develop emotional relationship with a woman, has no social ways of coping with his frustrations. Thus he gives vent to his anger towards all women through strangling a plastic shop window model in his cellar.
3.1 CHARACTERS COMING FROM DEPRIVED BACKGROUND
One of the main reasons for criminal behaviour of Rendell´s characters is a lack of love and affection they suffered from in their childhood. Eunice Parchman, a murderer from
A Judgement in Stone , grew up and lives in a terraced house “with its front door opening directly on to the pavement“ situated in a socially deprived area of London ( AJIS , 30). She lived with her father who worked as a railway guard and her mother. During the Second
World War Eunice was sent to the country before she could learn to read and write. When
19 she returned to London, she seldom attended school and her teachers never took the trouble to discover her illiteracy. Thus her handicap has gradually become her nightmare:
The printed word was horrible to her, a personal threat to her. Keep away from it, avoid it, and from all those who will show it to her. The habit of shunning it was ingrained in her; it was no longer conscious. All the springs of warmth and outgoing affection and human enthusiasm had been dried up long ago by it. Isolating herself was natural now, and she was not aware that it had begun by isolating herself from print and books and handwriting. ( AJIS , 48)
However, she successfully manages to hide her disability by means of such well developed skills as an excellent auditory and visual memory including a good sense of direction which is vitally important for her as she cannot read any signposts or timetables.
Thus she quickly remembers the process of cleaning and loading a gun after observing her employer, George Coverdale, one day. All these skills are the clue and key to her understanding and knowledge. Besides, she is also remarkably manually skilled. Her exceptional ability to tidy up, do the shopping, cook, iron, sew and knit gains Jacqueline´s
(George´s wife) great admiration.
Arthur Johnson from A Demon in My View was brought up by his aunt Gracie, a cold and prudish spinster whose strict upbringing and general dissatisfaction with him have resulted in Arthur´s inferiority complex. Arthur was strictly forbidden to play with other children in the street, which made him a social outcast unable to easily communicate with other people or to make friends. Like Eunice, Arthur does not want “to get involved with anyone“ because he finds upsetting “to have to know people“ ( ADIMV , 37). Arthur´s inability to communicate is demonstrated in his apologetic letter to his new neighbour after opening his letter by mistake. Arthur´s letter is too long and full of rather awkward phrases and unnecessary information. His letter implies that Arthur wants to give an impression of a respectable and decent citizen who tries to avoid any problems that would inconvenience him:
20 Dear Mr. Johnson, please accept my heartfelt apologies for having opened your letter in error. Considering the gravity of this intrusion into your private affairs, I think it only proper to give you a full explanation. I was myself expecting a letter from the council of the London Borough of Kenbourne in reply to one of my own requesting action to be taken with regard to the disgraceful situation concerning the cessation of a regular refuse collection. Reading the Borough´s name on the envelope, I opened it without more ado only to find that the communication was intended for your good self. Needless to say, I did not read more than was strictly necessary to inform me that I was not the proper recipient. In hopes that you will be kind enough to overlook what was, in fact, a genuine mistake, I am, Yours sincerely, Arthur Johnson. ( ADIMV , 46)
Despite Arthur´s dissatisfaction with some of his aunt´s rules, he feels that he has to be deeply thankful to her and he is convinced that “he could never make up to her for what she had done for him if he struggled till the day of his death“ ( ADIMV , 23). Arthur gradually grew up into a punctual and extremely tidy person obsessed with dusting the furniture, polishing silver, china and cut glass, and even washing the net curtains by himself.
His sheets and pillow cases are always spotlessly clean; his towels, shirts and underwear snowy. Arthur´s constant preoccupation with orderliness, perfection and his urgent need to do everything right reveal his obsessive-compulsive personality disorder characterized by punctuality and social conventionality. According to Höschl, the obsessive-compulsive personalities tend to get caught up in details often missing the bigger picture. They set unreasonably high standards for themselves and others, and tend to be very critical of those who do not live up to these standards (Höschl, 259). Hence Arthur´s contempt of the scruffy appearance and reckless behaviour of his neighbours, Brian Kotowsky and Jonathan
Dean because he “wished only to be esteemed, to keep with the right people, to know where he stood” ( ADIMV , 7).
Arthur´s loneliness and his aunt´s continuous emotional abuse perverted his desire for love and respect into a carefully controlled penchant for violence. His inclination to violent behaviour demonstrated by overcontrolled hostility and sadism is shown in his early
21 childhood. Once, when he was twelve, his aunt had some visitors and she asked him to bring her a teaspoon from the other room. He shut a mouse in a drawer and observed with a tremendously “deep satisfaction“ its struggle for life ( ADIMV , 53). Arthur´s ruthless character is further revealed when he had to look after a little baby while his aunt was out of the house. He took a large safety pin and thrust it into the baby´s stomach. The power he has over something or somebody gives him an absolute delight.
Arthur´s violence escalated one day and resulted in a murder of a young prostitute when his aunt suffered from a headache and could not go out with him. The turning point in
Arthur´s life is his aunt´s death. The first night after her death he went out and strangled a girl in a lonely spot not far from his house. After his aunt´s death Arthur moves to a flat in a poor and grey London suburb. One day, when looking for a stepladder, he finds a plastic shop window model in the cellar. He dresses her in his aunt´s black dress, puts his aunt´s shoes on her feet and hooks his aunt´s handbag over her arm. After dressing her, he strangles her. He keeps on murdering his “white lady“ who thus becomes his mother, counsellor, housekeeper, sole friend and “guardian angel and protectress,“ instead of dead
Auntie Gracie ( ADIMV , 79, 83).
Arthur usually creates a perfect setting for his “murders“ described on the very first pages of the novel: “First he rested the flashlight on a brick ledge at the level of his knees so that she was in shadow, so that the room took an aspect of an alley into which a street lamp filters dimly,“ which enables him to release his violent emotions and to vent his hatred of women ( ADIMV , 2). After every murder he arranges the mannequin into her former position so that she “was ready to die for him again“ ( ADIMV , 3).
Eunice Parchman also often suffers from a sudden and irresistible urge as her father´s murder makes clear. She used to rearrange the furniture in her room, unsew and remake her dresses or go for a walk. Being exploited by her parents Eunice soon learned to
22 exploit other people. Moreover, her talent for observation led her to another occupation - blackmail. Once she tried to blackmail a homosexual and after succeeding she kept on blackmailing more and more people. One of her victims, Annie Cole, drew Eunice´s attention to the Coverdales´ advertisement in order to get rid of her. She managed to persuade her easily because Eunice hoped to avoid responsibility for dealing with authorities. Unfortunately, she was completely unaware of the fact that she was going to move to a house full of books and other printed materials.
At first the Coverdales are completely satisfied with their new housemaid and her work, so Eunice´s stay in Lowfield Hall is quite pleasant and comfortable. She spends evenings watching television criminal series and eating chocolate, her perhaps least dangerous obsession. Another Eunice´s psychical frailty is the fact that she finds more delight in objects than in people and other living creatures as the following sentence illustrates: “Things could not hurt her - the furniture, the ornaments, the television - she embraced them, they aroused in her the nearest she ever got to warm emotion, while to the
Coverdales she gave the cold shoulder“ ( AJIS , 44). Like Arthur from A Demon in My View , she is obsessed with cleaning and polishing the furniture, china and silver in the Coverdales´ house. Her actions are so robotic that she is almost repellent but the Coverdales are simply too blind to observe anything strange in her behaviour. They ascribe her indifferent attitude to any event to shyness and regard it as a desirable discretion of a good servant. The first who becomes suspicious about Eunice is George. He realizes how cold and emotionless she is, because Eunice does not express a slightest feeling of sympathy when his daughter,
Paula, has some complication when giving birth. Later, when Melinda proudly shows her the baby boy before his christening, George notices Eunice´s cold indifference. She neither smiles nor bends over nor touches the baby. Eunice´s behaviour illustrates the typical features of an alienated sociopath who has never developed the ability to love, empathize,
23 or affiliate in real life with another person. Höschl points out that these people have a cold, callous attitude towards human suffering or any social problem in the society they live in
(257).
Araminta or Minty Knox from Adam and Eve and Pinch Me , a grown-up foundling, dumped by uncaring mother, was brought up by her mother´s friend Winifred Knox who she calls “Auntie”. Minty lives in her dead aunt´s house in London suburban area. Even though Minty´s childhood was much better than Arthur´s and Eunice´s in terms of economic security, the reader can see a considerable influence of her adoptive family on her behaviour. Minty´s aunt brought her up to be very clean, which probably contributed to her obsessive-compulsive disorder of mysophobia, which Höschl defines as a deep fear of touch and dirt (25). Minty´s obsession with hygiene is manifested by her fear of germs threatening to multiply and overwhelm her. All the world seems a Petri dish for Minty who sees germs everywhere trying to attack them with Wright´s Coal Tar soap. Everything in her house must be spotless and laboratory-clean. The only place where she feels safe is her bathroom where she can bathe, scrub and disinfect herself. Rendell´s narrative painstakingly follows all
Minty´s purifying procedures:
Like everything else in the bathroom, the nailbrush had been Auntie´s. It was turquoise blue with a handle, which meant you could get a good grip on it. Minty scrubbed her nails. She had brought this hygienic measure to a fine art. It was no good just rubbing the brush across your fingertips, you had to insert the bristles on the outer edge right under your nails and move them rapidly back and forward. She washed her feet last, taking care to get plenty of soap between her toes, then using the nailbrush on her toenails. [ ... ] Minty dried herself and dropped the used towel into the basket. She never used a towel more than once and she never used body lotion or perfume. Deodorant, yes, and on the soles of her feet and palms of her hands as well as her underarms. Body lotion only dirtied clean skin as make-up did. [ ... ] If she´d ever worn perfume it would have smelt like bleach. ( AAEAPM , 3 - 5)
Like Arthur´s and Eunice´s, Minty´s daily programme as well as her daily tasks are regular and routine. According to Frazier and James, psychopaths are concrete in operations
24 of thought and interpersonal relations. Their failure to recognize the similarity between situations is often characterized as a failure to learn from experience. They think that responsible living entails a set of concrete isolated acts and is not built in ethical or moral standards. People are viewed as basically hostile, and interpersonal relationships are reduced to power struggles. The psychopath thinks all people experience these changes of mind, but others hide them better (65). All these symptoms are clearly demonstrated by the above- mentioned characters´ inability to communicate with other people, make friends and their deep-seated belief in being hated and purposely mistreated. They are asocial, self-centred, impulsive and suffer from an acute anxiety neurosis. They fear other people who represent a menace to their own integrity that is why they often live in private isolation.
Eunice´s as well Minty´s perception of the world was extremely limited in their youth because they came from economically and socially deprived background. By the time she was thirty, Eunice “had never been into a public house, visited a theatre, entered any restaurant more grand than a tea shop, left the country, had a boy friend, worn make-up or been to a hairdresser“ ( AJIS , 32). When she was seventeen her mother became ill with multiple sclerosis and was confined to a wheelchair. Eunice had to look after her for twenty years. However her duty did not end because her father quickly grasped the opportunity and adopted the role of the invalid. Three years later, Eunice suffocated him one day with a pillow. Then she returned to the sweetshop where she worked before her mother fell ill.
Similarly, Minty´s stereotypical life is strictly limited to her domestic chores and her work at the drycleaner´s. When her aunt lived Minty spent the evenings with her watching television or going to the cinema. To understand Minty´s behaviour it is necessary to go back to her aunt´s life. Winifred Knox as the youngest child of the family had to look after her disabled mother. Here the reader can see a parallel with both Eunice´s and Minty´s life.
A young woman´s life is limited to house chores and full-time care of her sick parent.
25 Winifred could marry only after her mother´s death. However, she described her married life as a nightmare, which seemed to affect Minty´s opinion of men and marriage as the following passage illustrates:
All her life Minty had never spoken to a man who wasn´t someone´s husband or her employer or the postman or bus conductor. Those sort of people. She´d never seriously thought of having a boyfriend, still less of getting married. When she was younger Sonovia used to tease here a bit and ask her when she was going to get a man of her own, and Minty always said she wasn´t the marrying kind. Auntie´s mysterious but horrific account of her marital experience had put her off. Besides, she didn´t know any unattached men and none showed any signs of wanting to know her. ( AAEAPM , 23)
Both Minty´s and Arthur´s aunts, adopting a role of mother, had to assume the burden of single parenthood. They may have suffered feelings of social failure, of being an inadequate parent, and of humiliation when idealized images of parenthood held internally are not met, which could result in blaming the child who thus becomes their victim. “‘I have no legal right to you,’ she [Minty´s aunt] often said. ‘It´d be hard to say who you belong to.
Still, no one´s showing any signs of wanting to take you away, are they? Poor little nobody´s child you are’” ( AAEAPM , 20). Arthur´s aunt or “Auntie Gracie”, as Arthur calls her, bought him from his mother, her own sister, for a hundred pounds when he was only two months old and “she had never missed an opportunity of telling him” often reminding her adopted son of his origin: “‘Had to give her a hundred pounds, Arthur, and a hundred was a lot money in those days. We never saw her again. She was off like greased lightning’”
(ADIMV , 23). The continuing emotional deprivation results in a faulty sense of self, a lack of ego development, and a failure of development of self-esteem, which leads to a complete distortion of interpersonal relationships and cruel indifference to others.
Another example of a psychopath is Senta Pelham, a motherless child, who lives alone in a basement flat of her stepmother´s house. Evidently suffering from the lack of motherly care and emotions, she tries hard to make her boyfriend, Philip Wardman,
26 dependent on her by proving his love for her by killing someone: “You have to prove your love for me and I have to prove mine for you,” she says ( TB , 108). Senta´s lying about her family background should conceal the fact that her promiscuous mother has given her up.
Thus she revolts against the whole society apparently willing to break its laws with a clear conscience: “My opinion is that you worry too much about the law and society and things like that. People like you and me, exceptional people, are above the law, don´t you think?
Or let´s say beyond it” ( TB , 170). Being too decent and submissive, Philip falls easy victim to her strange wishes. Despite his aversion to violence, which sounds almost pathological,
Philip´s love for amoral Senta grows passionate. Rendell again sets subdued tones creating stultifying atmosphere, and omniscient narration, which stresses an excellent depiction of the main characters´ mutual psychological obsession.
Family background of Philip Wardman from The Bridesmaid is similar to Senta´s because he also grows up in an incomplete family. His mother, a widow, working as a hairdresser, is unable to secure her family financially. To provide her children with a stable and favourable family environment she attempts to find a suitable husband who would replace their father. Rendell uses a marble statue of the Roman goddess Flora that belongs to Philip´s mother as a symbol of family solidarity. Losing this symbol, Philip´s family loses its ability to live in accordance with social norms. Philip´s sister becomes an irresponsible gambler and shoplifter. Dysfunctionality of family results in Philip´s deep affection to Senta who resembles the statue of Flora. Entirely dependent Philip is unable to recognize Senta´s derangement and squalidity of her house. He does not manage to leave her even though he knows she will destroy his life.
Family rejection, abandonment, separation as well as the threats of these may result in a much lowered self-esteem, perceiving hidden motives in various people, connecting events and actions which are not connected except by coincidence. Frazier and James claim
27 that psychopathic people have “a paranoid cognitive style characterized by guardedness, secretiveness, avoidance of blame, general expectance of someone´s playing tricks on them, questioning of friends and acquaintances about loyalty, inability to see the forest for the trees, easiness in taking offence, and humourlessness” (64). A number of these characteristics is illustrated in Rendell´s psychopathic characters, such as Arthur and Eunice, who suffer from continuous nagging and often unfounded suspicion.
Rendell shows strong bonds within the poor working-class families in some of her novels. Her character Hob from The Keys to the Street is a striking example of a person coming from disadvantaged background. Hob, a crack addict finances his habit by renting out his talent for violence, has alcoholic and promiscuous mother who provides him with a number of “uncles” instead of his biological father. Despite his poor family background,
Hob´s extensive but very close-knit family supports each of its members through any crisis as the following paragraph illustrates:
His family was one in a million, solid as a rock, supportive was the word he was looking for. He didn´t have to ask them, he didn´t have to say a word – well, he couldn´t, he was in that police car with the driver glaring at him – they came out with it all without hesitation, his stepfather told him on the phone afterwards. Of course Hob had been at the party, there from nine till they packed in when the extension ended at one-thirty, and he slept the night at their place. Two of his half-brothers and his stepsister´s ex and the ex´s girlfriend, they all backed him up, and his stepsister´s ex who had an imagination said he´d done a beautiful rendering of ‘I´ll be Your Sweetheart’ while they were cutting the cake. ‘Any time, Hob, you know that,’ his stepfather said. ‘You don´t have to ask.’He saw that he didn´t. ( TKTTS , 224)
Rendell points out that it is clear that there are vast areas of ignorance considering the causes of violence within society. She stresses the fact that the whole society unwittingly defeats its own progress by ignoring violence because of its fear of becoming its victim. Her novels illustrate how the inadequacies of child intervention, family, and
28 educational programs to handle this enormous need have resulted in the criminal justice system´s becoming the net that catches the people who fall between the programs.
3.2 CHARACTERS COMING FROM MIDDLE AND UPPER-CLASS
BACKGROUND
Sometimes Rendell´s characters come from middle and upper-class families, which are to a certain extent dysfunctional too. Mary Jago, a central character from The Keys to the Street , was brought by her grandparents when her parents died in a plane crash. Even though she developed a stronger and more emotional bond with her grandmother than with her mother, Mary still suffers from the lack of close and intimate relationship. The lack of a warm maternal affection during Mary´s adolescent years resulted in her repeatedly establishing unhealthy and failed relationships with men who use her honesty and gullibility.
She leaves her boyfriend Alistair, a brute and bully, just to create an inexplicable bond with
Carl, the taken-for-granted recipient of her bone marrow.
Gray Lanceton, a central character from The Face of Trespass , growing up as a fatherless upper-middle-class child since the age of fifteen, refuses to accept his stepfather
Honoré, a French waiter, convinced that he married his mother because of financial gain.
This family situation results in a number of Gray´s psychological problems leading to suicide threat and emotional dependence on his girlfriend, Drusilla, who finally robs him of his freedom. Rendell brilliantly describes Gray´s obsession with Drusilla, in particular, his anxious and tense waiting for her Thursday phone call:
This was her most usual time for phoning - this and, of course, Thursday evenings. While he´d adjusted more or less to not seeing her, he still couldn´t manage the problem of the phone. He was neurotic about the phone, more neurotic, that is, than he was about other things. He didn´t want to talk to her at all but at the same time he passionately wanted to talk to her. He was
29 afraid she´d phone but he knew she wouldn´t. When the tension of wanting and not wanting got too bad he took the receiver off. The phone lived in the horrible little parlour Isabel referred to as the “lounge”. He thought of it as “living” there rather than standing or just being because, although for days on end it never rang, it seemed alive to him when he looked at it, vibrant, almost trembling with life. And when he took the receiver off on Thursday evenings, it seemed baulked, frustrated, peevish at being immobilised, its mouth and ears hanging useless from the dangling lead. He only went into the “lounge”to answer the phone - he couldn´t afford actually to make calls - and sometimes he left the receiver off for days. ( AFOT , 7)
Only after his mother´s death is Gray able to recognize his stepfather´s harmonious and intense relationship to his mother. He sees that he was wrong and feels guilty for his misunderstanding, irrational jealousy and suspiciousness.
Family is expected to provide both moral guidance and social stability. Rendell´s description of family background seems to be very essential to her, especially in the exploration of intense relationships. She herself suggests that, “the inhabitants of many modern novels are strangely bereft of families” (Rowland, Conversation with RR). In her
Wexford novels she uses the Wexford family as an excellent example of a very close-knit family whose members support each other through any crises.
When investigating crime Wexford often needs to use something outside the structures of policing, useful and illuminating insights derived from his deep family relationships, in order to read events more accurately. Wexford novels suspend the protagonist between his relational familiar identity to wife, his daughters, Sylvia and Sheila, and usually dysfunctional families focused through the murder investigation. Wexford´s self is thus constituted within familial construction, haunted by his intuitions of extreme and darker passions as an underside to the nuclear family.
The structure and relationship in Wexford´s family can be compared to the structure and relationship in the Coverdale family from A Judgement in Stone . Both the Wexfords
30 and the Coverdales represent financially secure and educated middle-class people who live in comfortable and elegant country houses.
The head of the Coverdale family is George, a doctor of philosophy, now a managing director of Tin Box Coverdale running the family business. He is a very handsome man with an athletic figure despite his late fifties. His wife, Jacqueline, studied at the Royal Academy of Music and now she works as a member of the local charitable organization. She is a beautiful, fair and slender forty-two-year-old woman. George and
Jacqueline have been married for six years. George´s late wife died of cancer and Jacqueline divorced from her husband who had left her and her son, Giles Mont. Giles is a seventeen- year-old student of the secondary school. He is a teenager who gives the impression of an absent-minded and brooding intellectual interested in reading and various religions such as
Buddhism and Hinduism. He is secretly in love with his stepsister, Melinda, and often has unrealistic dreams of their relationship. Nevertheless, he is an excellent student always at the top of his school.
George has two daughters, Paula and Melinda, and a son, Peter from his previous marriage. Paula and Peter have their own families and Melinda lives with him and her stepmother, Jacqueline, in Lowfield Hall. Melinda is probably the most likeable character in the novel. She is twenty, very pretty, a kind of hippie girl concerning her clothes and behaviour. She studies English literature at the University of Norfolk in Galwich. Melinda is an extrovert, full of energy, friendly and sociable, knowing everyone in the village and calling everyone, “even ancient gaffers and gammers, by their Christian names“ ( AJIS , 26).
Melinda is very similar to Wexford´s younger daughter, Sheila, a drama student. She is also an energetic, open and reckless young woman able to twist her loving father round her finger. Wexford´s deep affection for his daughter is illustrated in the following excerpt:
31 Wexford wondered what life held for her. Would she succeed and the future be a succession of triumphs, starring parts, world tours, fame, the increasing terror of growing old? Or would she marry some young idiot like this Sebastian and forget all her aspirations in the possession of two children and a semi? Because he was a father and no longer young he confessed to himself that he would prefer the latter. He wanted her to be safe. Nothing on earth would have made him tell her so. ( TBMTD , 56)
Wexford´s intense relationship to both of his daughters reflects a typical masculine attitude. Most men consider their son for a rational and independent human being capable of his own decision-making whereas father-daughter relationship is much more caring and protective. “Your son´s your son,” Wexford says, “till he gets him a wife, but your daughter´s your daughter the whole of your life” ( ASL , 15). Rendell admits that Wexford has quite a lot of her own father´s features: “I realised that I had put an enormous amount of me - and to some extent my father - into him, but it may be that women creating a detective always put their fathers into them” (Brooks, Dark Lady of Whodunnits).
Wexford´s cultured rather than privileged family symbolizes a solid base and a safe island isolated from the outside world of crime he has to fight. Wexford always returns home from work in search of his healing familial setting being aware of potential dangers of the crime that overwhelms society and threatens to overwhelm his own family. He assumes that his daughter Sheila as a successful actress would be more likely exposed to the encounter with deranged people than if she stayed at home partially isolated in a semi- detached house under her loving husband´s protection.
Functional family is a safe place for Rendell whose characters coming from deprived background are easily influenced and manipulated because of their apathy, psychological withdrawal, feelings of futility and loss of will to live. Rendell brilliantly describes how society, often unconsciously, repudiates these people. Such a person, supposing that there is no way out, often ends his life with a suicide or commits a crime to resolve his difficult situation when he finds himself without his friends´ and his family´s help and support.
32
4. CLASS BARRIERS
33 According to Rowland, “crime fiction implies naming and capturing a criminal,” which suggests the restoration of both moral and social order (39). However, such a restitution can easily condense into a social conservatism which manifests itself as a nostalgic reforming of social classes. Rendell´s works point towards development in the crime genre in a liberal recasting of form. The crime in her stories is connected to traditional social conceptions of class which come under her strong criticism. The issues of class are frequently raised in her novels.
To understand Rendell´s intentions it is necessary to discuss the conceptualisation of class and its importance in Britain, which helps to understand the inequalities in resources, life and educational chances of Rendell´s characters. Besides, the issue of class relates to other social divisions I intend to discuss, such as gender, race and ethnicity. The interconnections between social stratification and other social divisions are very complex.
Social inequalities are invariably structured by all of the above-mentioned divisions because they are gendered and racialised.
The word ‘class’ in the social sense is relatively new. It appears in the English and other Western European languages at the time of the Industrial Revolution. By the early nineteenth century, a recognition of capitalist societies as containing three social classes, an upper class, a middle class, and a working class, had become widely recognised. According to modern conceptualisations of class, the relation of higher and lower classes is based on the grading of some objectively measurable characteristics. There are two basic schemes of gradations, simple and synthetic (Ossowski, 76). In the case of simple gradation, concern is most commonly focused on gradations of wealth or income. The distribution of economic resources, then, defines the various class situations that individuals can occupy in society. In this view, relative wealth or income determines class membership, and assigns respective class positions in the vertical order. In contrast, ideas about synthetic gradations reject
34 a simple gradation of classes in terms of economic criteria and combine these with the factors of education, occupation, social standing and the like. Reid confirms that social differences, based on social class, are recognized in people´s appearance and speech, attitudes and behaviour both public and private, “where they live and come from, what they do for a living, how they spend time and money and what their interests are” (2). Therefore class should be seen as a matter of culture and identity, and not only a matter of underlying material inequality. Rendell appears fully aware of these significant aspects of social differences and inequalities, which affect people´s behaviour towards each other.
Rendell´s novels illustrate that class distinctions are tied to a world of tradition and subordination. A person´s class situation is a casual component in determining both the life chances and the interests that he has in protecting and enhancing these life chances. Rendell seems to call for necessary social reform in her novels emphasizing the fact that stratifying society into layers may have additional compensatory functions for the people involved in all but the very lowest rank because the finer the gradation and the larger the number of dimensions used for establishing class position, the greater the conservative or stabilizing potential of stratification schemes. For her, traditional class structures do not regulate desire but instead collide with it, often leading to crimes where individual murderous impulses cannot be isolated from more general social oppressions. Rendell´s stories accuse the conservative social bias of oppression because they provoke criminal desire. To understand the criminal and his or her deeds thus does not restore moral and social order because
Rendell´s criminals are in part victims of the conservative social codes.
In the following sections I attempt to analyse the irreconcilable differences between social classes and their consequences as well as the crisis of an individual´s imprisonment within his own class.
35
4.1 A FATAL CLASH OF CLASS DIFFERENCES
Rendell considers class as the social problem likely to provoke disorder rather than maintain social stability. The crime in her novels is often the result of oppressive class structures in contemporary British society. Rendell´s ideas seem to have much in common with social conflict theory based on the Marxist thought which challenges the way in which contemporary society views its legal system and the implications it has on its citizens. This theory examines the social control made by ruling class and imposed on the rest of society.
To a certain extent, Rendell reveals a direct correlation between social class and crime due to the social control of a capitalist government. She does not view those who display deviant behaviour as rebels who cannot conform to social norms, but rather as victims of the social system.
Marx believed that the character of every civilization was determined by its mode of production, the way its people developed and produced material goods. The economic system controls all aspects of human life, and these lives are left to revolve around the means of production. According to Marx, the capitalist system contains the seeds of its own destruction in that it is constantly competing to produce goods more efficiently and cheaper.
The result is cutting wages so low that the working class is unable to purchase the goods produced, which leads to economic crisis (Senna, 227). When conditions are bad enough the oppressed working class will rise up against the ruling class and capitalism will destroy itself. Some of Rendell´s novels symbolically illustrate the violent resistance of the working class against the privileged classes. The primary task of social conflict theory is to examine the relationship between the ruling class and the process by which deviance is defined and controlled in capitalist society where the government creates laws and rules to maintain the
36 power and position for the governing elite. On the other hand, Rendell insists that social stratification encompasses not only wealth, income and the ownership of property, but also a large number of other factors including lifestyle, education, values, beliefs, attitudes and patterns of behaviour.
Rendell´s novels have developed a typical structure in which a murder is initiated because a damaged character, being a victim of social conservatism, releases pent-up aggression against society. The personal freedom and living space of her characters are usually strictly limited by the rules of conservative British society. She implies that a natural frustration exists in society in which a high value is placed upon being rich and powerful, which is something unattainable for the majority of the citizens. A deep hostility develops among the lower class towards a social order in which they cannot participate unless it is by illegal means. Rendell describes how working-class citizens commit crime because the economic, educational, social and cultural system excludes them from advancements. Thus the crime becomes the price the capitalist society would pay for capitalism, unfortunately, all citizens end up paying the price.
The extent of the criminal´s dysfunction is often concealed from the privileged classes because of their apparent indifference to the suffering of the ‘others’ and because of their rigid social conventions. This is what occurs in A Judgement in Stone where an illiterate working-class woman wipes out an upper-middle-class family that unknowingly antagonizes her by interfering with her life. Eunice´s story is a result of both mental disorder and class oppression. Having identified the murderer, the victims and the motive, the novel proceeds to show the horrifying collision between a nice well-meaning privileged family and a woman with such depths of deprivation that she has never become a socialized being.
Together with class oppression Rendell is a sharp critic of the conservative Victorian values and rituals that the Coverdales as an upper-middle-class family embody. George´s and
37 Jacqueline´s discussion over Eunice´s letter stresses the importance they ascribe to Victorian socio-moral codes: “It was correct usage for the Victorians,” George says, and Jacqueline replies: “Maybe, but we´re not Victorians. Oh dear, I wish we were. Imagine a smart parlourmaid waiting on us now, and a cook busy in the kitchen” ( AJIS , 10). Reid claims that
“certainly the Victorian era was characterized by what might be termed ‘class consciousness’ or ‘awareness’,” which supports Rendell´s intentions to prove the
Coverdales´ upper-class consciousness which still remains deeply ingrained in contemporary
Britain (29). Rendell sees the increase in crime as a return to Victorianism. Marwick also observes that “perhaps increase in crime should be seen more as a return to Victorianism rather than a move away from it” in the 1970s when Rendell´s A Judgement in Stone was published (145).
The Coverdales, due to their own class superiority, claim the right to interfere in their housemaid´s way of life. Despite their effort to make her life full and amusing, Eunice´s interactions with them are more and more intriguing as she struggles to keep her illiteracy a secret, which is emphasized by her socially inappropriate responses to everyday situations.
Her behaviour reflects the typical attitude of an uneducated member of the working class being afraid of derision because of her handicap, which finally leads her to the crime.
The turning point in her life comes when she meets her co-killer, Joan Smith, an ex- prostitute and a religious fanatic who suffers from a kind of mental disorder, convinced that her duty is to reveal the sinners who surround her. Thus Joan highly welcomes to establish friendship with someone that is as socially demented as herself. Both Eunice and Joan begin to use each other; Joan in order to get to the Coverdales´ house and to search out everything about their lives and lapses, and Eunice to use Joan´s inventiveness to conceal her illiteracy. Their secret relationship, which finally results in a fatal and tragic outcome, evidently symbolizes the working-class conspiration against the ruling class.
38 The first conflict arises when Eunice is caught seeing Joan out of the Coverdales´ house. Both Jacqueline and George reproach her for inviting Joan to their house. The second conflict occurs when George phones and asks Eunice to find out some materials he needs for an important conference. Being illiterate she is unable to find them and therefore she does not answer the phone when George calls back several times. On such occasions the reader even begins to sympathise with Eunice´s struggle to circumvent the discovery of her disability and her desperate need to hide it. One of such examples is Eunice´s first experience with the metropolitan transportation system. According to Rowland:
It is she [Eunice] who is truly marginal to society, excluded by class deprivation, repressed by social forces she cannot comprehend. Such deprivation is unwittingly, but not innocently exploited when the Coverdales take her on as a servant. It is Eunice whose desire is potent with Gothic horror as her deprived and unformed self erupts into violence. (155)
However, Rendell sees no way out of Eunice´s desperate situation, which is supported by the opening sentence of the novel: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write“ ( AJIS , 7). The reader knows who the murderer is, who the victims are and what the prime motive for the crime was, yet he gradually approaches the inevitable end. The most climatic and dramatic moment arrives when
Melinda discovers Eunice´s handicap. Even though Melinda´s attitude is very sympathetic and friendly, Eunice is totally shattered and tries to blackmail her (she secretly listened to
Melinda´s phone call with her boyfriend and learned about Melinda´s worries about her pregnancy which finally proved to be unnecessary). Discovering Eunice´s blackmail, the
Coverdales decide to lay her off, but unfortunately, they gave her one week´s notice, which is their fatal mistake.
Rowland compares Eunice to Jane Eyre focusing on her as “servant in the psychic damage of servitude and unequal access to education” (121). Rendell´s creepy and revengeful Jane-Eunice is deformed through her illiteracy whose eventual discovery results
39 in a ghastly outcome. Ironically, Eunice´s illiteracy finally leads to her imprisonment because she overlooks an important piece of convincing evidence which is a copy of the Radio
Times with Jacqueline´s notes concerning the opera they were recording when the murder took place. When Eunice hears her voice on the tape, she thinks that the Day of Judgement has come and faints. The title of the book A Judgement in Stone implies Eunice´s fate as well as her cold and emotionless character: “A stone that breathe was Eunice, as she had always been” ( AJIS , 160).
There is no real motive and no premeditation behind Eunice´s murder because she gains neither money nor security by her crime. Moreover, as a result of her crime, her disability is made known to the whole country. Eunice´s story illustrates a classic example of a clash between the two Marxist classes, the exploiters and the exploited. Rendell seems to imply that if the Coverdales were not so patronizing towards Eunice, they might have saved their lives, which again raises the issue of the bourgeois class superiority.
Just like the Coverdales interfere in Eunice´s life, Arthur Johnson´s, a character from
A Demon in My View , relatively peaceful life is suddenly interfered in by a new tenant who moves into Arthur´s sheltered environment and who coincidentally has the same first initial and the last name as Arthur, Anthony Johnson. In this case Rendell illustrates the clash within the middle class between a well-educated upper-middle-class man, Anthony, and a lower-middle-class member, Arthur. Anthony Johnson is a scholar finishing his thesis on psychopathic personalities. Anthony is handsome, confident and friendly and, simply, all the things Arthur recognises he himself is not. Arthur envies Anthony because “fate hadn´t saddled this man with a propensity that placed his life and liberty at constant risk“ ( ADIMV ,
47). Here Rendell develops the plot of the story of one man´s romance with a woman married to a violent man, and a psychopath brought to the edge by seemingly tiny
40 circumstances. Rendell places two stories side by side, and brings them together in a mind- blowing resolution.
Anthony wants to organise free-time activities of the children from his neighbourhood, which again shows Rendell´s deep interest in social problems. Thus
Anthony unintentionally interferes in Arthur´s life when he uses his plastic mannequin as a guy. When Arthur´s “white lady“ is burnt as an effigy of Guy Fawkes, Arthur´s cellar refuge is no more, and his frustration, paranoia and violence increase and lead him to another murder. This time, unfortunately for Arthur, the murdered woman is one of his neighbours. Arthur also wants to revenge on Anthony and, like Joan Smith from
A Judgement in Stone , he begins to open Anthony´s letters from his girlfriend, Helen. The most climatic moment arrives when Arthur is shot by Helen´s jealous husband who mistook him for Anthony.
Anthony to a certain extent denies the existence of barriers between the classes. He does not mind to mix socially with the working-class people from the house where he lives.
Despite being a member of the upper-middle class he is able to accommodate to the working-class people, such as Jonathan Dean and Brian Kotowsky. On the other hand, he realizes that he differentiates and does not belong to their stratum. Deep down he knows that his pretence is only temporary because he would not be able to live permanently in a company of such people: “Years of living in hall and rooming houses and hostels had taught him the folly of making friends for the sake of making friends. Sooner or later the one or two you really want for your friends will turn up, and then you have the problem of ridding yourself of these stopgags” ( ADIMV , 40). Arthur Johnson, coming from a lower class than Anthony and lacking his education, feels distinctly different from not only working-class people, but also from the members of his own class. He is not able co
41 communicate with any of them. He feels socially superior to most of his neighbours. “I have a flat , you see, not a room,” he says to a new tenant Anthony ( ADIMV , 31).
Class still remains a relevant factor in Britain. Marwick cites the novelist, Lynne
Reid Banks, who summed up a widely expressed opinion in the Observer :
Class is so deeply embedded in our national sub-conscious it is poisoning every aspect of our lives. Not just industrial relations and politics, but our choice of districts to live in, jobs, schools, friends - even which bar to drink in at our local. It´s a kind of civil war we are perpetually fighting, wearing out our energy and emotions, wasting our time and money. It holds back progress, destroys prosperity, impedes social and working relations on every side. (202).
Certainly, Rendell is under no illusion as to the disappearance of class boundaries.
She herself reminds that “she has lived for much of her life in Suffolk” speaking of “the inhabitants of an English country village as even now divided between ‘the people and the others’,” where “‘others’ are the middle and upper classes, who never mix socially with the ordinary working people of the village” (Rowland, 193). On the other hand, when reading her books the reader realizes that sometimes it proves impossible for the middle and upper class people to establish a close and intimate relationship with the working class people who may consider such an attempt as a sign of weakness. A characteristic example illustrates
Melinda´s unsuccessful attempts to make friends with Eunice, which finally turns against her.
Rendell´s novel, The Best Man to Die , written in 1969, underlines the fact that the issue of class at the turn of the 1960s and 70s was very far from losing its traditional significance in British society. The novel reflects that class divisions had certainly proved remarkably enduring in Britain, but at the same time the lines, both between middle class, upper-middle class, and upper class, and between working class and middle class, were less firm than ever they had been because of a significant increase of vertical social mobility.
Manual workers did not become the middle class, but a lot of them became far better-off
42 than earlier generations. Charlie Hatton´s, the victim´s, job proves that within the working class, the expansion of a such occupation as that of lorry driver involved a real physical mobility and freedom uncharacteristic of traditional working-class jobs. Marwick points out that the 1960s saw a real growth in manual worker incomes, and the general improvement in economic conditions allowed many more people to buy domestic consumer goods that were, in the past, available only to the privileged or were simply not available at all (204).
Charlie Hatton represents an affluent worker who could afford to buy new kitchen equipment, expensive clothes and jewellery for his wife, and furnish his house in much more comfortable way than before. His case suggests that in industrial confrontations the self- employed lorry driver, most certainly allied himself against the organized working class.
Working as a lorry driver, Charlie is able to make a great deal of money, which fills the people from his working-class community with envy. Charlie is presented as an individual, a kind of outsider, who manages to escape out of the working-class conditions and to acquire a better socio-economic status than the other members of his class. Marx recognized that in capitalistic society there was a group, represented by Rendell´s Charlie,
“who, while not owning the means of production, were saved from exploitation because they had skills and knowledge which the bourgeoise needed” (Reid, 31). On the other hand, however, Rendell implies that Charlie´s deeds were the act of resistance against the upper classes. When his illegal dealing is revealed, his friends, the Pertwees, defend him: “He was getting back at the big nobs. What does losing a load mean to them? They´re all robbers, anyway. Capitalism´s organised robbery of the working classes. Charlie was only taking back what was due to him,” thus explaining Charlie´s revenge on capitalist society
(TBMTD ,153). Such arguments again support Marx´s idea about the division of society into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
43 Rendell focuses on a striking difference between Charlie and another lorry driver,
Maurice Cullam, who did not manage to be as successful as Charlie, which is reflected in his harsh and poor living conditions seen through Wexford´s eyes:
[ ... ] the remains of lunch were still on stained crumb-scattered tablecloth and a woman sat at the table feeding a baby from a bottle. [ ... ] A weariness that was as much chronic boredom as physical tiredness seemed the most dominant thing about her. It was the sordid exhaustion of poverty, of overwork, of perpetual near-incarceration, of eternal nagging demands, and to be left alone just to sit for perhaps only five minutes in unthinking apathy was her sole remaining desire. [ ... ] A middle-class woman, a woman with more money and fewer children, might have apologised for the squalor and the smell of a hundred stale meals. Mrs. Cullam didn´t even look at him [ ... ] ( TBMTD , 49).
Grinding poverty, a tense financial situation and extreme envy finally leads Maurice
Cullam to take a large sum of money off Charlie´s dead body.
The differences in social habits and culture are still considerable in Britain. Marwick emphasizes the fact that in the 1970s the general working-class attitude was represented by
“a sense of bloody-minded resignation and a feeling of ‘once a worker always a worker’ and why, anyway, aspire to anything better?,” which proves that to be the working class, despite the occasional mobility, meant a kind of ‘life sentence’ of hard manual work (208). The partial homogenization of standards of consumption between manual and non-manual workers, however, was not matched by the changes in their property and employment relations or in their life chances generally. Most importantly, consumer goods were acquired because of the opportunities that they opened-up, and not because they were the status symbols of a middle-class lifestyle. People bought washing machines to wash clothes, televisions to provide entertainment, and cars to provide them with mobility. These things were not accumulated simply in order to make a claim to higher status. Both status and class divisions remained and still remain sharp in contemporary Britain. Manual workers do not engage in many common forms of leisure-time associations with non-manual workers.
44 The attainment of middle-class living standards Charlie´s family attempts to aspire takes its toll. Rendell seems to put forward these ideas in her novel where Charlie´s social climbing finally proves fatal to him because of his attempts to mingle among the upper-middle class society. Charlie fails to recognize his exploitation by the nobs because he suffers from the false class consciousness unable to recognize his real situation. His murderer, Jolyon Vigo, is a distinguished doctor coming from a privileged background. Vigo as a member of the upper-middle class is acutely aware of his high status, which he stresses in his conversation with Wexford: “‘The fact is I don´t have many dealings with people of Mr. Hatton´s ... ’
Vigo paused. Wexford was sure he had been about to say ‘class’. ‘Er, background,’ said the dentist” ( TBMTD , 82). In this novel, Rendell again illustrates the rigid distinction between classes, which inevitably produces a tragic outcome.
Uneducated working-class people are often full of bias against the literary language used by educated people always expecting subterfuge, deception and ridiculing from them as shown in the novel examined. They condemn an educated person for such petty reasons as envy, even though he is not a man of means. Rendell portrays Charlie´s working-class family as less happy despite their acquired wealth they prefer to education. They are not satisfied with their living conditions and are consumed with envy for educated people. Even
Wexford investigating Charlie´s murder is accused of “Showing your bloody education!” by the working-class Pertwees ( TBMTD , 134). Rendell presents working-class people as acutely aware of striking class differences. Marilyn Thompson, Charlie´s wife´s friend, responses to Wexford´s investigation: “And if he´s got things like your class take for granted you jump right on him, say he must have nicked them. Class, class, class. [ ... ]
That´s all you think about” ( TBMTD , 63). Rendell seems to agree with Marwick´s citation of one middle-class woman´s opinion:
45 I can´t understand people who feel guilty about the working classes. People will always be different, even if everyone has the same houses and the same money. We would always be richer in our minds than the working classes, just by reading books. Labourers can earn a lot of money these days; God, they must have money, the prices they charge! But all they are concerned with is revenge, in the petty ways of their minds. Jealousy and bitching is their main occupation. Look, if everyone had the same amount of money, some people would manage their money better and then things would still be unequal. A person with a different background will live in a different way regardless of money. (207)
Rendell sees the persistence of class-ridden attitudes and the continued use of the word ‘class’ as evidence that Britain has failed to adopt the more modern approach to life in such apparently classless societies as the countries of continental Europe and the United
States. On the other hand, all these societies are unequal societies because they show vast and continuing differences in income, wealth and property ownership and so all can be described as class societies. Other differences of culture, attitudes and lifestyle point to quite different kinds of social division. The economic relations of class are often contrasted with cultural matters, in particular with status, those more visible styles of life led by people, which affect their standing in the community.
4.2 CLASS IMPRISONMENT
A crucial point Rendell tries to get across in her novels concerns class consciousness and class identity. Her characters seem not only to benefit from their class, but also to be imprisoned by it. Going up the class ladder may create personal conflicts. An individual may feel guilty about being disloyal to his former friends because they are likely to feel that he is a deserter just as in the case of Charlie Hatton from The Best Man to Die . Thus, he
46 encounters feelings of hostility from below coupled with derision from above aimed at his
“social climbing”.
The relationship between Eunice Parchman and Joan Smith from A Judgement in
Stone also reflects the remarkable phenomenon of class imprisonment Rendell attempts to investigate. Both Eunice and Joan seem to be imprisoned by their own class and both are contemptuous of each other for their origin, which apparently gives one a strong feeling of superiority over the other. Deep down they both think the other looks ridiculous, but that is not derogatory to their friendship. Such a mutual feeling establishes a solid base for their friendship which often blooms at its best when one friend is convinced that he or she is superior to the other. When describing their relationship Rendell points out:
In her heart, each thought the other looked fool, but this did not alienate them. Friendship often prospers best when one party is sure she has an ascendancy over the other. Without letting on, Eunice thought Joan brilliantly clever, to be relied on for help whenever she might be confronted by reading matter, but mutton dressed as silly young lamb all the same, a hopeless housewife and a slattern. Without letting on, Joan saw Eunice as eminently respectable, a possible bodyguard too if Norman [ Joan´s husband ] should ever attempt to carry out his feeble threat of beating her up, but why dress like a policewoman? ( AJIS , 92).
When Joan sees Eunice as fat, ill-dressed and frumpish, she feels a kind of sympathy, pity as well as an overwhelming superiority because she considers herself to be elegant and smart. Similarly, Eunice, when she sees Joan in her ridiculous high heels and short skirts at her age, thinks how glad she is that she is a woman of taste who dresses decently and suitably.
Another example of class imprisonment is in the case of Anthony and Arthur
Johnson, two complete opposite characters belonging to the middle class. When invited to the wedding reception given by an African couple, even Arthur is “aware of the isolation of himself and the ‘other’ Johnson, both of whom were left out these exchanges. [ ... ] As the only English people present, for the loathsome Dean didn´t count and was very likely an
47 Irishman, anyway, it was their duty to present some sort of solid front” ( ADIMV , 160).
Rendell shows how the middle-class people, living in the poorer areas in which the new immigrants congregated are well aware of the disruptions and strains brought to their everyday lives.
Some of Rendell´s characters attempt to understand the social world in which they live, and a central part of this social understanding is the interpretations of the social inequalities they or the others experience. Thus for the snobbish, upper-crust that live around London´s Regent´s Park, the homeless who occupy this area are an eye-sore and a nuisance in The Keys to the Street . Only Mary Jago, a meek, sensitive young middle-class woman who has recently moved into the neighbourhood to house-sit shows compassion.
Mary also seems to be imprisoned by her social class trying to escape by getting involved with a man from a lower class, “a poor, sick, deprived young man from what sounds like a council estate behind Euston Station,” as her grandma puts it, which finally becomes almost fatal to her ( TKTTS , 57). Mary appears to be caught in a pincer that leaves her in conflict and stress. Not only the people who live in the streets not far from her luxurious house, but also she becomes a “homeless child” no longer able to identify with the class from which she comes and equally unable to fit into the class of her boyfriend Carl.
Rendell confirms that middle-class citizens also face problems such as alienation of individuals, the competitive struggle, and the absence of human feelings, all of which are aspects of social system, which contributes to middle-class delinquency and crime rate. Thus an upper-middle-class citizen, Drusilla Janus, becomes bored with her life with her wealthy husband and decides to get rid of him to marry a young tennis coach. She uses another upper-middle-class citizen, Gray Lanceton, to commit the crime she requests. When he refuses she inventively manages to accuse Gray of the crime she committed herself. Rendell shows how those who occupy the same class and status are likely to develop a shared
48 understanding of pattern of social stratification and the boundaries of social strata. This common awareness is most likely to result to the extent that people work together, live in the same neighbourhood, and engage in the same leisure activities in Rendell´s novels. This consciousness of social stratification forms a central part of overall images of British society. Thus Gray, fortunately, receives help from his own upper-middle-class circles when one of his friends, the Member of Parliament, proves his innocence.
Rendell´s characters challenge “the generic cliché of individual evil, emanating from isolated selves” (Rowland, 47). They are often the victims of social oppressions and class barriers. Even though there is something hidden about human desire of Rendell´s characters, the darkness of their mystery is always linked to social injustice.
4.3 THE SOCIALLY EXCLUDED
Rendell´s deep involvement in social issues is thoroughly discussed in her novel The
Keys to the Street . Here she focuses on a minority cluster at the bottom of society, the homeless people. The novel vividly describes the social exclusion as a process that derives from multiple disadvantages, such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, bad health, and family breakdown. Rendell shows how this process can affect people or the whole neighbourhoods.
The Keys to the Street is set on the streets of London, in particular around Regent´s
Park. The narrative brings together the lives of both the middle-class people living in the luxurious and elegant houses near the Park, and those who occupy the streets carrying plastic bags containing their worldly belongings along with pieces of cardboard to shelter from the cold. Rendell demonstrates the marked and blatant inequalities of wealth and
49 poverty in contemporary Britain by placing the wealthy right beside the dispossessed, thus making a huge gap between them clearly visible, which is emphasized by her description of the area:
Albany street is not leafy and sequestered like almost every other street in the vicinity of the Park, but wide, grey, without trees. Barracks fill much of one side but beyond the other side of it lie the grandest and most lavish of the terraces - Cambridge, Chester and Cumberland, with their colonnades, their pediments, their statutary and their wealthy occupants. Beyond the barracks on the other side the are quickly becomes less respectable, ... . ( TKTTS , 3)
Rendell finds the issue of homelessness very vital and burning. She is aware of the problem with the categorisation of the homeless people. These categorisations often lack objectivity and contain presumptions of a presence of both abnormality and asocial tendencies within the homeless community, which obscures the fact that homelessness might be a symptom of an infected housing market and a poor social policy. The symptoms such as drug-abuse or mental illness are more likely to be caused by the extreme situation the homeless are in rather than being the reason for their desperate situation.
The central character, Roman Ashton, a former publisher, makes himself voluntarily homeless to repress memories of his personal tragedy after his wife and two children were killed in a car accident. Rendell uses the character of Roman not only to provide his own reflections on the homelessness, but also to show the bias people frequently have towards the homeless. Roman´s character thus functions as a probe into the society of dispossessed and excluded.
Through Roman´s eyes, Rendell illustrates how people tend to see the homeless as a homogenous group, comprised of lower class people with a history of material and social deprivation. When Mary Jago sees Roman sitting on a bench reading Gogol´s Dead Souls , she reacts with curiosity: “He was reading. That made him different, set him apart,” and later on when they exchange a few words she is intrigued by his accent: “His voice
50 interested her. Perhaps she was a snob, but she had not expected a man such as he to have a voice and an accent like his. Nor to have been reading what he was reading, come to that”
(TKTTS , 33, 97). Similarly, when Roman comes to the police station to identify the murder victim a policeman is mystified by his manner and accent. However, after a careful observation of Roman´s clothes, he makes the assumption that he is a vagrant, though with a cultivated voice. Such examples serve as evidence that people are treated according to what social class they are thought to belong to. Even Roman himself is aware of his accent when hesitating if he should call the police after a discovery of a murdered man: “All calls could be quickly traced, he was sure of that, but he had his voice to rely on. An anonymous call made in the accent of Westminster School and Cambridge would hardly lead police to the vagrant with his barrow” ( TKTTS , 110).
Rendell is aware of a striking difference between Roman and other homeless people raising the issue of class superiority deeply ingrained in Roman´s mind. These ideas are put forward after Roman´s involvement with a homeless woman, Effie: “Even then he had not shaken off his old, ingrained sense of superiority, of belonging to an elite, and as he moved with her on to her blanked spread on the grass, into the well of darkness between tombstones, it was a favour he felt he was doing her” ( TKTTS , 90). At the same time,
Roman´s deep middle-class class awareness supported by his family background, education and former occupation is fostered here:
So ingrained was his middle-classness, his education, his gentility , that it was impossible for him ever to feel the same toward a woman as he had before he made love to her. Strange term for what had passed between him and Effie, but what other to use that would not also revolt his middle- classness? He and Effie, though in grotesque circumstances, had performed that act that must make him for ever feel some tenderness for her. He could never be otherwise than aware of a bond between them, though she hadn´t spoken his name, was probably unaware of what it was. ( TKTTS , 109)
51 Despite Rendell´s acute sense of social justice, she herself, coming from the upper- class background, is aware of the fact that the reality is much harsher. The fact that Roman has money and could easily get off the streets if he wanted contributes to his false image of a vagrant. Even though his street life is described as free and self-chosen because “he had become unaccommodated man, perhaps even what those existentialists said man should be - free, suffering, alone, and in control of his own destiny,” he himself feels a considerable difference between him and the other homeless people ( TKTTS , 41). Rendell points out
Most of the street sleepers, the dossers, the dropouts, the jacks men, were on the street because they had nowhere else to be. They were without roofs of their own, or roofs rented, to put over their heads. This was not true of Roman, who had had a roof, who had had his own home, but who was on the street because he had no more choice than those others, because the outside was the only option if he was to continue to live. ( TKTTS , 71)
Such a declaration re-establishes Roman, though wealthier than his street companions, as a victim of circumstances. Rendell implies that homelessness is something that can happen to anyone, thus making this issue more difficult to avoid. Nevertheless,
Roman realizes his “middle-classness” and returns back to the social class he comes from because the street is no place for his sort and “what he had done had served its purpose but had now become artificial, a quixotic slumming, and to continue it was self-indulgence”
(TKTTS , 289). Besides, he admits that “homelessness could not be artificially contrived but must come about through need and real deprivation” ( TKTTS , 260).
The Keys to the Street partly displays a sound knowledge of the street life and partly some of the common prejudices. Rendell´s careful social observation shows that to understand this issue it is necessary to understand the underlying causes. The increasing rate of homelessness is seen as a result of deregulation and decentralisation in Britain. Rendell seems to be critical of social politics and the state that to a great extent transferred its responsibilities to the municipality and civic initiatives, which makes the boundaries of
52 responsibility unclear. Such a situation results in the holes in the social safety net that is supposed to save people from falling to the bottom of society.
5. RACIAL AND ETHNIC OTHERNESS
53
Class and ethnicity are interrelated because relations of class are shaped in and through the processes that also shape relations of ethnicity. According to Reid, some ethnic groups differences “may be attributable to class or class in combination with ethnicity”
(303). Ethnicity remains a significant force in Britain, a major form of group identification as well as a major determinant of family patterns. Britain is indisputably a multi-racial society and “race might well be seen, then, as a more significant, and certainly more dangerous, divide in British society than class” (Marwick, 221). Rendell is aware of an ethnic hierarchisation that leads to social and cultural fragmentation in society. Her novels illustrate how the British people orient themselves towards their own distinctive character and against so called “the Other,” which is different and therefore strange. The immigrants and ethnic minorities are considered subordinated often in terms of assigned racial characteristics, in particular the colour of their skin or other signifiers that make them different. Rendell´s notions of ethnicity raise the possibility of understanding and interpreting British multicultural society. Her novels are based on her own personal experience of being a child of Sweedish mother:
When my mother first came to this country it was very much the attitude that there once was to Afro-Caribbean people. Foreigners were not welcome, and during the Second World War a lot of people thought my mother must be German. That was hard. It´s strange, because although she always had a faint accent she spoke absolutely perfect English because she´d had to learn it. She was very grammatical and taught me to be. What I mind in modern society very much it the awful lack of grammar. (Brooks, Dark Lady of Whodunnits)
That is probably why the issues of language and accent often appear in her novels.
When Anthony Johnson from A Demon in My View meets Arthur Johnson for the first time he immediately notices that his voice is “uneducated, underlying the pedantic preciseness of
Kenbourne Vale´s particular brand of cockney” ( ADIMV , 31). On the other hand, Rendell
54 seems highly observant of conservative bias that are displayed when the external appearance does not somehow correspond to the pronunciation and accent of the character. Thus conservative Inspector Burden is unable to put up with the striking difference between the appearance of an eccentric artist Rupert Margolis in Wolf to the Slaughter and his middle- class accent because he “expected the local brand of country cockney, something to go with the clothes, anything but this cultured effeteness” ( WTTS , 10).
A Demon in My View illustrates how the white community assimilates the ethnic minorities in a London residential suburb. Rendell vividly describes the homely atmosphere of busy streets filled with cooking and spicy smells, packed with people of different races such as “brown women pushing prams with black babies in them, gypsy-looking women with hard, worn faces, Indian women with Marks and Spencers woolly cardigans over lilac and gold and turquoise saris” ( ADIMV , 30). Strolling around the streets, Anthony Johnson realizes that the typical English features of the city life has slowly disappeared in favour of the “ethnic boom”. In A Sleeping Life , Wexford visiting London shares the same feelings when he sees “children of all ages, all colours, pure races and mixed races” in London streets ( ASL , 60).
However, despite their assimilation, ethnic minorities still retain their distinctive features that become a salient feature in British society. Anthony perceives Linthea, a “tall daughter of African gods, with her pearly-bloomed dark face, and her black hair, oiled and satiny, worn in a heavy knot on the crown of her head,” as somebody unusual, exotic and different ( ADIMV , 61). Similarly, Wexford is aware of the clear difference between ethnic and English, even though it concerns the external appearance of the two young women,
Malina Patel and Polly Flinders:
In this case, the contrast was very marked. Beauty had opened the front door to him, beauty in a peacock-green sari with little gold ornaments, and on hands of a fineness and delicacy seldom seen in Western women, the
55 width across the broadest part less than three inches, rings of gold and ivory. An exquisite small face, the skin of a smoky gold, peeped at him from a cloud of silky black hair. ( ASL , 56)
Rendell´s stories prove that the visible differences of what is perceived as different ethnicity, such as the way the immigrants dress or talk in a certain way, seem to play even a more important role in the construction of Englishness and categories of “us” and “them” than actual ethnic identities. These presumptions then lead to dangerous racial bias, which are based on superficiality and racial blindness. These aspects are embodied in a character of
Arthur Johnson, a psychopathic murderer from A Demon in My View . Arthur represents the conservative racial bias that still survive in contemporary society. He is shocked by the fact that a new tenant is of a different race:
The man was as black as the taxi from which he alighted, and not only black of skin and hair. He wore a black leather coat which, even from that distance, Arthur could see had cost a lot of money, and he carried two huge black leather suitcases. To Arthur´s horrified eyes, he resembled some Haitian gangster-cum-political bigwig. ( ADIMV , 64)
Arthur´s perception of the black colour of a newcomer serves as a symbol for his fear of the primitive inhabitants of the dark African continent and the West Indies as well as the dangers their dark Otherness poses to his bigotry and conservatism. He is even more disturbed when he learns a new tenant´s name, Winston Mervyn, thus revealing his deep- rooted Englishness: “Winston! The cheek of it, some West Indian grandchildren of slaves christening their son after the greatest Englishman of the century!” ( ADIMV , 64).
Nevertheless, Arthur´s personal conviction about his superiority and domination over the ethnic minorities is suddenly shaken when he realizes that the West Indian tenant is evidently much wealthier and more educated than Arthur himself. The aspects of Arthur´s racial prejudices are also demonstrated in his opinion of his neighbour, a Taiwanese girl Li-li
Chan. He perceives her as a silly prostitute who spends each day with a different man and is
“always giggling, mostly about nothing” ( ADIMV , 21). When well-set-up, clean-looking
56 young Englishmen come for her in expensive cars, Arthur feels a deep shame not only over them, but also over the whole English nation which is too tolerant to immigrants and ethnic minorities. He refuses to accept the fact that “Asian communities have developed more casual attitudes towards the opposite sex” (Storry and Childs, 16). Rendell chose a character of an Irishman, Jonathan Dean, as a sharp contrast to Arthur. Dean admires Li- li´s exotic beauty pointing out that “he could understand those Empire builders who had deserted their pallid, dehydrated wives for oriental mistresses,” comparing Li-li to a little flower ( ADIMV , 40). Again the external appearance is considered more important than the internal qualities of an individual. Rendell´s ideas appear to be identical with Said´s who claims that the worst and the most paradoxical is “to allow people to believe that they are only, mainly, exclusively, white, or black, or Western, or Oriental” (408).
Not only does Rendell deal with ethnicity, but also with the British superiority over the other European nations. Being Englishmen, both Anthony and Arthur consider their
Polish neighbours, the Kotowskys, somehow subordinate and despicable. Brian and Vesta
Kotowsky are described as an unconventional couple that does not stick to traditional marriage, each of them giving absolute freedom to the other. They spend their free time quarrelling and visiting pubs. Despite her Polish origin, Vesta Kotowsky´s clothes compose an ethnic mix because “her dress was long and of dark dirty Indian cotton, hung with beads and chains and partly obscured by a fringed red shawl” ( ADIMV, 40). Vesta´s attempt to merge in the crowd of the West Indians, Africans, Chinese and other minorities suggests her revolt against the dominant white English majority.
Another example of English feelings of superiority is illustrated in the relationship of
Gray Lanceton from The Face of Trespass and his French stepfather. Gray´s attitude towards Honoré Duval is not only influenced by his jealousy of a man who married his mother, but also by his bias towards the French. He despises Honoré´s broken English and
57 his insisting on “writing in the horrible dining-room English he had picked up while a waiter in Chaumont” ( AFOT , 27). In Gray´s eyes Honoré “looked what he was, a French peasant in a farce written by an Englishman” ( AFOT , 87). However, later, after his mother´s death
Gray realizes the true nature of his stepfather. Honoré reveals to be a moral leader who, in difficult times, provides the family with affection, attention, and support and is responsible for creating a climate of security. Gray finds out that his class and cultural prejudices towards his stepfather were irrational and blind. Finally, he understands that even though his mother married below her standard, her married life was happy and full.
Rendell´s novels demonstrate how the members of ethnic minorities often face prejudice, discrimination and conflict from others. Rendell calls for a change in human minds, which would lead to racial recognition and tolerance. Her novels imply that it is time for the British to abandon their racial superiority which seems to be encoded in their genes.
6. TRANSGRESSIONS IN GENDER
Rendell deals with the issue of gender in connection with both the family and class background of her characters. Her emphasis on the notion of gender not only shows her feminist engagement, but also its importance for understanding the structure of British society and individual lives and identities. Rendell´s novels challenge the traditional stereotypes concerning the social roles of men and women. She disrupts the ways “in which femininity and masculinity have been previously construed as mutually exclusive and mutually constitutive” (Rowland, 16). A lot of Rendell´s characters show a certain ambivalence concerning their female and male traits.
58 Rendell´s female characters often carry a great deal of masculinity. A representative example of such immasculation is Eunice Parchman. Even though she is sexually female,
Eunice thinks, acts and looks like a man. She has never been married, so she did not have to suffer from pregnancy as other women. She was confined to the family circle, but she freed herself from it by murdering her father. Eunice´s reticence, limited vocabulary, rationality and even her manual dexterity, in particular her remarkable ability to use the gun, are typically male features. Besides, she never shares her inner feelings or opinions of life with anybody. She is depicted as a “machine,” accurate, efficient, reliable and automatically performing essential functions, and whose satisfactory working “depended on its being suitably oiled and its having no objection to stairs” ( AJIS , 30). Like men, Eunice simply prefers actions to words. Eunice´s role of Joan´s guardian in their relationship also displays her male traits, which is enhanced by the way she looks and dresses. She never dyes her hair, wears make up or fashion accessories to improve her feminine image. She does not even attempt to reduce her weight as most women do.
Another woman character with male traits is Drusilla from The Face of Trespass .
Despite her visual appearance that gives an impression of womanishness, delicacy and sensuality arousing a feeling of despair, Drusilla is able to plan all her murder scheme intelligently and rationally. She has a diplomatic skill to find a kind of man whose qualities predetermine his role of her victim. Unlike Drusilla, her lover Gray gives an impression of an effeminate and irresolute character. He is jealous, fearful, and imaginative unable to act rationally spending days by dreaming. Besides, Gray is hopelessly impractical. He has problems to go shopping, clean up the mess or repair anything in his friend´s cottage. His inability to manage his money has finally resulted in his poverty trap.
Rendell´s novels reflect her keen interest in Freud´s psychoanalytic theory of personality. They treat the tradition of psychological interpretation that springs from the
59 Freudian fascination with the detective genre as an archetypal narrative of the Oedipus complex. In accordance with Freud, Rendell accepts childhood as being a critical period in the development of adult personality. Gray from The Face of Trespass and Philip from The
Bridesmaid seem to suffer from the Oedipus complex, in which the child lusts after the parent of the opposite sex and looks upon the parent of the same sex as a rival. Both Gray and Philip are favoured by their mothers, but at the same time, they are threatened by their loss because of the new rivals substituting their dead fathers. Gray as well as Philip fall in love with women who considerably influence their behaviour. They are blind and not able to see the true nature of either Drusilla´s or Senta´s personality. Rendell applies Freud´s ideas to explain Gray´s and Philip´s behaviour. According to Mitchell, blinding in the Oedipal legend is a metaphor for castration (75). Thus Drusilla and Senta are defined by the castration complex, which defines the differences between the sexes. They make both Gray and Philip abandon their disturbing thoughts about their mothers and end their lovers´
Oedipus complex, but, on the other hand, they represent the psychological fear of loss and hence of danger. Juliet Mitchell explains that the fear of castration provokes a death-wish:
“death-wishes against the father (always an aspect of the Oedipal situation),” which “gave way to a more complex association of castration as an identification of death” (79). Thus
Senta becomes an instrument in Philip´s hands promising him to kill his mother´s suitor.
Philip becomes a feminised victim because of his obsessive devotion for Senta despite his pathological fear of and a deep aversion to violence.
Another ambivalent character with feminine qualities is Inspector Wexford, a psychologically complex character; attentive, anxious, taking care of his family and household. He does his best to fulfil his family commitments. Rowland points out that
Wexford seems “feminised, creating an ambivalence about gender which moves away from prewar styles of male heroism” (19). Wexford´s behaviour if completely different in the
60 domestic sphere, where he accepts a feminine role, and at work in the police force where he acts rationally as a professional detective.
Rendell´s growing preoccupation with a social position of women is firmly embedded in her novels. She attempts to reject the gender stereotypes that still exist in contemporary society. Rhoda Comfrey, a victim from The Sleeping Life , is forced by unfavourable social circumstances to live a double life of both a woman and a man. Her decision results from her family background because Rhoda´s domineering and possessive father did not allow her to continue her education at a college even though she was a very bright student. She had to leave school at sixteen and go to work because her patriarchal working-class father “wanted her money” ( ASL , 29). When her mother died, Rhoda was left with her father “tied to him hand and foot,” as her family friend explains ( ASL ,30). At the age of thirty Rhoda wins a great deal of money, which enables her to break the bonds with her family. She leaves for London to seek her fortune, but she soon realizes that in the contemporary yet patriarchal society, she can become a successful novelist only in disguise masquerading as a man. Rendell draws an interesting parallel between Rhoda´s father and
Wexford who tries to solve his daughter´s marriage problems telling her “that he hardly cared for the idea of her attending some college or course while her mother was left to care for Robin and Ben [Sylvia´s sons]” ( ASL ,66). Similarly to Rhoda, Sylvia requires for consideration and respect giving vent to righteous anger when speaking about her experience in the mechanic garage:
A couple of weeks ago Neil [Sylvia´s husband] backed the car into the gatepost and I took it to the garage to get a new rear bumper and light. When the mechanics had done whistling at me, d´you know what the manager said? ‘You ladies,’ he said, ‘I bet he had a thing or two to say when he saw what you´d done.’ He took it for granted I´d done it because I´m a woman. And when I corrected him he couldn´t talk seriously about it. Just flirtatiousness and silly cracks and I was to explain this and that to Neil. ‘His motor’, he said, and to tell him this, that and the other. I know as much about cars as Neil. It´s as much my car as his. ( ASL , 67)
61
Sylvia´s opinion that a woman “would have to be an eonist to get man´s rights” finally helps Wexford to solve the complicated case of Rhoda Comfrey because Charles Éon de Beaumont was a historical figure who masqueraded for thirty-three years as a woman
(ASL , 171). Unfortunately, Rhoda´s secret life finally resulted in her murder committed by a woman who had fallen in love with the man Rhoda pretended to be. This kind of masquerade reveals Rendell´s awareness of the fact that a woman living in the world ruled by men has little chance to succeed even though she attempts to change her identity in disguise. It is a paradox that Rhoda is murdered by a member of the same sex, which implies
Rendell´s hidden message that women in the patriarchal world destroy each other pointlessly instead of displaying mutual loyalty and support.
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CONCLUSION
The primary task of this diploma thesis was to find the close relation between the social factors and the development of an individual´s personality in some of Ruth Rendell´s novels. A detailed examination of the novels reveals that the personality of characters analysed is to a great extent influenced by social institutions, in particular by family background, values and the ideals of British culture. Studying both the primary and secondary sources I have drawn the following conclusions:
To unravel a deeper understanding of the personality it is necessary to look not only at the genetic, but also at the environmental influences because individual characteristics are complexly determined through the interaction of heredity and environment. Rendell´s characters often show that their personality is in no small degree a function of the social environment in which they grew up. She puts a considerable emphasis on the variety of social motives learned by an individual as he grows up through interpersonal relations in the family. Her sociopathic personalities thus seem to be an unfortunate fusion of biological, interpersonal and socio-cultural factors.
In her Wexford novels, Rendell points up the importance of functional family using the Wexford family as a symbol of moral guidance, social and emotional stability, which
63 stands in a stark contrast to the disadvantaged family background of her psychopathic characters. Even though Wexford´s family is not completely flawless, the crises his family has to go through always help him to solve the crime.
Rendell´s criminal characters always come from disadvantaged background, which considerably influenced their mental development and contributed to their character disorders. Most of them lost parents in early childhood or come from emotionally deprived families. Eunice Parchman´s life was strictly limited to household chores and care of her ill parents who did not allow her to master at least the basics of the primary education, which eventually resulted in her illiteracy. Eunice´s unsocialized character due primarily to parental failure led to her emotional poverty, limited range and depth of feelings. Suffering from the lack of maternal care and affection during the adolescent years can also result in establishing failed relationships with other people just as in the case of orphaned Mary Jago and adopted
Minty Knox whose boyfriends took advantage of their gullibility and honesty.
Both Minty Knox and Arthur Johnson were deprived of parental love in their childhood being brought up by apparently hypocritical aunts who privately belittle their adopted children while publicly presenting the image of a happy family. Their egocentricity, excessive punctuality and strictness gradually deformed both Arthur´s and Minty´s personalities. This lack of moral and emotional development resulted in their lack of understanding for other people´s feelings. Eunice, Minty as well as Arthur seem to live in a shell showing more emotions towards their personal artefacts than towards other people.
Even though they look sane, they are full of tension, irritability and rage. That is why Eunice violently erupts when the Coverdales reveal her disability, Arthur begins to kill again after his artificial victim, a plastic mannequin, is destroyed, and Minty murders her unfaithful lover.
64 On the other hand, Rendell presents all her sociopaths and psychopaths as intelligent people who know how to manipulate others into thinking that they are normal. Thus
Anthony Johnson, despite being a specialist in psychopathic behaviour, did not recognize the psychopath, Arthur Johnson, even though he had lived with him in the same house for three months. Similarly, the Coverdales are so blinded by their conservatism that they are unable to see any aspects of Eunice´s deranged mind.
Closely related to the family upbringing is the issue of gender. Some of Rendell´s novels demonstrate the unhealthy mother-son relationship, which may be the cause of various personality problems. Gray Lanceton, as the only child, and Philip Wardman, growing up with two sisters, were brought up by widowed mothers whose attention and care was too meticulous. Apparently suffering from the Oedipus complex, both Gray and
Philip seek for satisfactory substitutes when their mothers find new partners only to fall victims to Drusilla and Senta. Rendell reveals how changes in society influence the notion of gender ascribing the masculine features to female characters and vice versa. In the case of
Rhoda Comfrey, she establishes a strong connection between family upbringing and its influence on gender identity. Being brought up in patriarchal family ruled by strict and possessive father, Rhoda revolts the female oppression by masquerading as a man to become a successful novelist. However, the price of her freedom and success is too high because she never develops an intimate relationship and is murdered, ironically, by a woman who falls in love with her.
Another important aspect that influences an individual´s behaviour is his class membership. Rendell criticizes the traditional conservative Victorian values characterized by strong class awareness. In A Judgement in Stone , the upper-class indifference and superiority is symbolically punished by the oppressed working class embodied in the murderer, Eunice Parchman. In turn, Charlie Hatton, the victim from The Best Man to Die ,
65 as a member of the working class suffers for his attempt to keep up with the upper-middle class represented by his murderer, a privileged doctor. Rendell often investigates a social phenomenon of class imprisonment that results in various personal conflicts of her characters. Mary Jago tries to escape from the luxury of the middle class by getting involved with a man from the lower class who later proves to be a murderer. Similarly, Drusilla Janus bored with her upper-middle-class life decides to kill her wealthy husband only to marry a tennis coach.
This thesis reveals that there is certainly a large number of social factors that influence the development of personality in the novels by Ruth Rendell, but it is more or less impossible to consider the family background, class, ethnicity and gender in isolation because focusing on only one of them would result in a problematic and limited analysis.
Failed by family, the education system, social services and the whole community, Rendell´s characters are, in their turn, a source of violent retribution that the police as well other social institutions are powerless to prevent. However, it is necessary to point out that even though Rendell draws heavily on the contemporary society, her stories are works of fiction after all, thus social factors are not the only source of personality disorders. All the above- mentioned factors refer to different aspects of people´s everyday life but function together in the construction of social oppression and inequality against which Rendell directs her major criticism. Her novels serve as a clear warning against widespread ignorance, associated with prejudiced and rigidly divided classes within British society.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
A List of Primary Sources
Rendell, Ruth. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me . London: Arrow Books, 2002. ( AAEAPM )
---. The Best Man to Die . London: Hutchinson, 1994. ( TBMTD )
---. The Bridesmaid . London: Arrow Books, 2001. ( TB )
---. A Demon in My View . New York: Bantam Books, 1979. ( ADIMV )
---. The Face of Trespass . New York: Bantam Books, 1987. ( TFOT )
---. A Judgement in Stone . London: Arrow Books, 1978. ( AJIS )
---. The Keys to the Street. London: Arrow Books, 1997. ( TKTTS )
---. A Sleeping Life . New York: Bantam Books, 1986. ( ASL )
---. Wolf to the Slaughter . New York: Ballantine Books, 1970. ( WTTS )
A List of Secondary Sources
Brooks, Libby. “Dark Lady of Whodunnits.” The Profile: Ruth Rendell. Guardian , 3
Aug. 2002. 17 March 2005
Frazier, Shervert H. and William S. James. “Character and Violence.” In Character
Pathology: Theory and Treatment . Ed. Michael R. Zales. New York:
Brunner/Mazel, 1984.
Höschl, Cyril. Psychiatrie pro praktické lékaře. Jinočany: H H, 1996.
Marwick, Arthur. British Society Since 1945. London: Penguin Books, 1996.
67 McDermid, Val. “On Inspector Wexford.” Behind the Book Vintage Catalogue.
3 April 2005
&view=authdes.html>. Mitchell, Juliet. Psychoanalysis and Feminism. London: Penguin, 1990. Ossowski, Stanislaw. Class Structure in the Social Consciousness . London: Routledge, 1963. Reid, Ivan. Social Class Differences in Britain. Life-Chances And Life-Styles. Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1989. Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell . London: Palgrave, 1999. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism . London: Vintage, 1994. Senna, Joseph and Larry Siegel. Juvenile Delinquency: Theory, Practice, and Law. New York: West Publishing, 1998. Storry, Mike and Peter Childs. British Cultural Identities . London: Routledge, 1997. MASARYK UNIVERSITY IN BRNO 68 FACULTY OF ARTS Department of English and American Studies Diploma Thesis The Impact of Society upon the Development of Personality in a Selection of Ruth Rendell´s Novels Author: Ing. Eva Ellederová Supervisor: PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSc. Brno 2005 69 I declare that I have worked on this diploma thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ...... Ing. Eva Ellederová 70 I would like to thank my supervisor PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková whose advice and critical suggestions have been worthwhile. I also want to express my sincere thanks for her helpful guidance during our consultations. 71