Noora Rouvinen 233139 Pro Gradu Thesis
English Language and Culture University of Eastern Finland April 2016
Table of Contents 2
1. Introduction 5
2. Theoretical and Cultural Background 11
2.1. The Concept of Masculinity 11
2.2. Historical and Cultural Background 16
2.3. The Golden Age Detective Novel 22
2.4. The Detective Novel and Gender 27
2.5. The Detective Novel and Masculinity 34
3. Textual Analysis of And Then There Were None 43
3.1. Masculinity as Activity 45
3.2. Masculinity as Rationality 54
3.3. Masculinity as Heterosexuality 62
3.4. Masculinity as an Omnipotent Fantasy: Judge Wargrave’s
Narration 69
3.4.1 Wargrave as the Detective/Murderer 69 3.4.2. Wargrave’s Confession: Constructing
Masculinity 75
4. Conclusion 88
Bibliography 91
ITÄ-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO – UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
Tiedekunta – Faculty
Philosophical Faculty Osasto – School
English Language and Culture Tekijät – Author
Noora Anna Onerva Rouvinen Työn nimi – Title
Constructing Masculinity in Agatha Christie’s Novel And Then There Were None Pääaine – Main subject Työn laji – Level Päivämäärä –
Date
Sivumäärä – Number of pages
English Laguage and
Culture Pro gradu -tutkielma x 12.4.2016 94
Sivuainetutkielma Kandidaatin tutkielma Aineopintojen tutkielma Tiivistelmä – Abstract
This thesis is a study of the construction of masculinity in Agatha Christie’s 1939 detective novel And Then There Were None. The study consists of two parts. The first part presents the theoretical background, which establishes the theoretical framework for studying masculinity in the novel. The second part consists of analysis of Christie’s novel and the ways in which masculinity is constructed in it.
The theoretical framework has been divided into five sections. The first section is a theoretical approach describing how masculinity is constructed. Although the feminine is usually considered to be the opposite of masculinity, embedded within the concept of masculinity are a number of different masculinities, including hegemonic, subordinated, complicit, and marginalized masculinities. The second section presents a historical approach to masculinity and how it has been constructed in Britain before and after the Second World War, which is a key historical moment for the novel. The third section consists of a concise definition of the Golden Age detective novel and its defining features. The fourth section analyzes the relationship between the Golden Age detective novel and the representations of gender, while the fifth concerns specifically masculinity and the detective story in relation to one another.
The novel And Then There Were None is analyzed through a historical and cultural close reading, using binary concepts such as feminine/masculine and irrational/rational in order to determine how masculinity is constructed in the novel. All of the characters in the novel are guilty of murder, and therefore irredeemable in the context of an Agatha Christie novel. This means that they have transgressed the norms of society and are acting rather than embodying proper masculinity. The analysis has been divided into four sections. The first section concerns masculinity as activity, and the analysis shows how both activity/passivity and violence are used to construct masculinity both by the characters and the narration. The second part concerns masculinity as rational, and the analysis shows how the male characters are portrayed as both rational and irrational. The third part shows how masculinity is constructed as heterosexual, and contrasts the ideal heterosexual relationship found in Christie’s other novels with the blatant non-existence of equal, supportive relationships in And Then There Were None. The fourth part is an analysis of the character of Judge Wargrave. The analysis has been divided into two subsections, the first of which deals how Wargrave’s character acts as a detective/murderer within the novel, and how the double role is constructed as masculine. The second subsection consists of a deeper analysis of Judge Wargrave’s character, concentrating on his confession letter and how he uses the document to represent himself as having masculine qualities.
The thesis shows that although the male characters in the novel strive to construct their masculinity through activity, rationality, and heterosexuality, in the narrative they are shown to be passive, irrational, and non- heterosexual. Hegemonic masculinity is the model to which the male characters aspire to. Although the characters construct their masculinity in a very traditional manner, the inclusion of female characters and the feminized genre subtly renegotiate the traditional construction of gender.
Avainsanat – Keywords
Agatha Christie, 1930s, detective novel, gender, masculinity, And Then There Were None
ITÄ-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO – UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
Tiedekunta – Faculty
Filosofinen tiedekunta Osasto – School
Englannin kieli ja kulttuuri Tekijät – Author
Noora Anna Onerva Rouvinen Työn nimi – Title
Constructing Masculinity in Agatha Christie’s Novel And Then There Were None Pääaine – Main subject Työn laji – Level Päivämäärä –
Date Sivumäärä – Number of pages
Englannin kieli ja kulttuuri Pro gradu -tutkielma x 12.4.2016 94 Sivuainetutkielma
Kandidaatin tutkielma Aineopintojen tutkielma Tiivistelmä – Abstract
Tutkielman aiheena on maskuliinisuuden rakentuminen Agatha Christien salapoliisiromaanissa Eikä yksikään pelastunut (And Then There Were None, 1939). Tutkielma koostuu kahdesta osasta, teoreettisesta viitekehyksestä ja romaanin analyysistä. Ensimmäisessä osassa luodaan teoreettinen ja kulttuurinen konteksti, jonka avulla teosta analysoidaan. Toisessa osassa analysoidaan niitä tapoja, joilla maskuliinisuus rakentuu Christien romaanissa.
Teoreettinen viitekehys on jaettu viiteen osaan. Ensimmäinen osa käsittelee maskuliinisuuden käsitettä ja käsitteellistämistä. Feminiinisyys hahmotetaan usein maskuliinisuuden vastakohdaksi, mutta maskuliinisuus- käsitteen sisältä löytyvät hegemoninen, alistettu, myötäilevä, ja marginaalinen maskuliinisuus. Toisessa osassa käsitellään maskuliinisuuden rakentumista historiallisesti Iso-Britanniassa ennen ja jälkeen toisen
maailmansodan. Kolmas osio määrittelee lyhyesti millainen oli maailmansotien väliin sijoittuva niin kutsuttu
’kultaisen ajan’ brittiläinen salapoliisiromaanigenre. Neljännessä osiossa käsitellään sukupuolen ja
salapoliisiromaanin monimuotoista suhdetta, ja viidennessä osiossa keskitytään tarkemmin maskuliinisuuksien rakentumiseen salapoliisiromaaneissa.
Eikä yksikään pelastunut – romaania analysoidaan historiallis-kulttuurisen lähiluvun kautta. Analyysin kohteena on maskuliinisuuden rakentuminen romaanissa, ja analyysin apuna käytetään binäärisiä käsitepareja kuten feminiininen/maskuliininen ja irrationaalinen/rationaalinen. Kaikki romaanin päähahmot ovat syyllistyneet murhaan, mikä tarkoittaa sitä, että Agatha Christien romaanituotannon kontekstissa he ovat rikkoneet yhteiskunnan asettamia normeja. Tällöin heidän kaikkien voidaan tulkita ”näyttelevän” korrektia
maskuliinisuutta. Analyysi on jaettu neljän alaotsikon alle. Ensimmäisessä osassa maskuliinisuuden rakentumista tarkastellaan aktiivisuuden ja väkivallan kautta. Toisessa osassa analyysin kohteena on maskuliinisuus ja sen suhde rationaalisuuteen. Kolmannessa osassa analysoidaan maskuliinisuuden rakentumista
heteroseksuaalisuutena ja erityisesti tasaveroiseen parisuhteeseen tähtäävänä heteroseksuaalisuutena. Neljäs osa, tuomari Wargraven henkilöhahmon analyysi, on jaettu kahteen teemoiltaan erilaisiin osiin. Ensimmäisessä tarkastellaan Wargraven maskuliinisuuden rakentumista romaanissa etsivän ja murhaajan roolien kautta, kun taas toisessa fokuksena on Wargraven kirjoittama kirje, josta analyysin kautta muodostuu kuva ideaalisen maskuliinisuuden vajavaisesta konstruktiosta.
Tutkielma osoittaa että vaikka romaanin mieshahmot pyrkivät rakentamaan omaa maskuliinisuuttaan aktiiviseksi, rationaaliseksi, ja heteroseksuaaliseksi, romaanitekstissä heidät esitetään passiivisina,
irrationaalisina, ja ei-heteroseksuaalisina. Hegemoninen maskuliinisuus on ideaali johon mieshahmot pyrkivät.
Vaikka maskuliinisuuden rakentuminen esitetään perinteisiin maskuliinisiin arvoihin ja ideaaleihin perustuvana, romaanin naishahmot ja genren feminiinisyys uudelleenneuvottelevat sukupuolen rakentumisen tapoja.
Avainsanat – Keywords
Agatha Christie, 1930-luku, salapoliisikirjallisuus, sukupuoli, maskuliinisuus, And Then There Were None
1. Introduction
If this had been an old house, with creaking wood, and dark shadows, and heavily panelled walls, there might have been an eerie feeling. But this house was the essence of modernity. There were no dark corners – no possible sliding panels – it was flooded with electric light – everything was new and bright and shining. There was nothing hidden in this house, nothing concealed. It has no atmosphere about it.
Somehow, that was the most frightening thing of all… (And Then There Were None, 89-90)
Agatha Christie is one of the bestselling authors of all time. During her career Christie contributed significantly to the detective novel genre, both in volume and in content. Apart from her most famous creations, the Marple and Poirot mysteries, she also wrote a considerable number of other detective novels, comical thrillers, poetry, plays, and novels.
Although her mystery novels tend to be formulaic both in plotting and characterization, great variance can be perceived when considering her oeuvre as a whole. For example, her 1932 novel Death in the Clouds is very formulaic and plot-centred, whereas Five Little Pigs (1942) combines the structure of a detective novel plot with deep themes and subtle characterization with great efficiency and skill. Apart from re-using mystery plots and character types, Christie’s detective fiction tends to feature recurring themes: the dynamics of a large, slightly dysfunctional family, murders corresponding with the lyrics of a nursery rhyme, love triangles, and murder being a crime which demands justice. All of these elements were used repeatedly during Christie’s long writing career.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine Agatha Christie’s 1939 detective novel And Then There Were None1 from a masculinity studies point of view in order to understand how masculinity and male characters are portrayed in her works. Agatha Christie’s novels have been studied before in relation to gender: however, the gendered readings have mostly concerned female characters and the portrayal of femininity in her work. The focus of this thesis is to study villainous male characters in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the presentation of gender issues in Christie’s fiction. In this study I will describe and analyse how masculinity is constructed as rational, active, and heterosexual, as well as passive, irrational, and non-heterosexual. The study builds upon previous studies concerning English masculinity, gender in the detective story genre, and studies of Agatha Christie’s work. Since Christie’s detective fiction has a tendency to be formulaic, the construction of masculinity in this particular novel ought to be applicable to understanding the construction of masculinity in her other works as well.
And Then There Were None is usually considered to be one of the best works Christie produced in her entire career. It has proved to be continuously popular; the blurb of the 2007 edition defines it as “the world’s best-selling mystery: over 100 million copies sold.”
Light astutely describes it as “the most inward, least comic of Christie’s fictions, relentless in taking the logic of her own fears about the social fabric to its extreme conclusion: every person is both a potential murderer and victim” (98). Curran, approaching the novel from a more structural perspective, views it as “her greatest technical achievement” (111). The novel can be seen as a culmination point of her career as a mystery novelist, a story in which the detective novel has been taken to its logical extreme wherein the novel is populated only by people who kill and get killed. Despite its immense popularity, And Then There Were None has not been studied as much as other well-known Christie novels,
1 The novel has also been published under the titles Ten Little Niggers and Ten Little Indians.
such as The Murder of Roger Acroyd (1926) and The Body in the Library (1942). This study aims to rectify the situation.
Plot-wise the novel tells the story of ten people invited to spend their holiday on Soldier Island off the coast of Devon. All of them have been invited there by a mysterious Mr Owen, who is nowhere to be seen. The sunny island getaway acquires a sinister atmosphere when the first evening on the island reveals that all the persons present have at some point of their lives committed a murder. A disembodied voice, later revealed to be a record placed on the record player, identifies each guest as a murderer by mentioning their names and victims. That same night two of the ten people die. As time passes, the reluctant guests trapped on the island diminish in number one by one. The ways in which they are killed coincide with the disappearing soldiers described in the children’s poem “Ten Little Soldiers”, from which the novel derives its title. One of the guests on the island is more of a murderer than the rest of them.
The novel will be studied using close reading in the context of the historical and cultural period. The concepts of masculinity, femininity, and gender are central in my analysis. Masculine and feminine are understood to be opposed qualities describing culturally male and female attributes, although in both reality and fiction the distinction is not so well-defined. The study has been divided into two separate parts. The first one details the historical and cultural background of the novel, offers a brief definition of the detective fiction genre and the relationship between genre and gender, and finishes with an exploration of the relationship between masculinity and the detective story. The second part consists of a detailed analysis of the novel And Then There Were None, which shows the different ways in which masculinity is constructed and portrayed in the novel.
Although the specific focus of this study is on And Then There Were None, I will frequently use quotations and examples from other works by Christie to illustrate that the
novel, and by extension any work by Christie, is better understood as a part of her extensive oeuvre rather than as a single separate piece. For example, there are a number of Christie texts which are thematically “related to” And Then There Were None, including
“The Witness for the Prosecution” (1933), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Cards on the Table (1936), and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975).
As a popular fiction author Agatha Christie’s work has not been studied as much as it perhaps deserves to. Like Chapman astutely observes, crime fiction “is often labelled as paraliterature and like most popular fiction is excluded from official canon because it is not elite or exclusive enough.” However, literary studies have not excluded Christie completely. In 1991 Light criticized the lack of critical work on Christie by remarking that
[i]t may be respectable to write about Conan Doyle or even Raymond Chandler but Christie remains beyond the pale, the produced of harmless drivel, an unsuitable case for a critic. It is an extraordinary fact, given the centrality of her work to British cultural life, that no self-respecting British critic has ever written at decent length about her, or felt impelled to look more closely at what that work might speak to.
(64)
After making the above statement Light proceeds to analyse Christie’s fiction to reveal how modernist and unconservative Christie’s fiction can be, which is in contrast to the usual perception of her work. Voicing a different critical opinion on Christie, Symons claims that as a detective story writer
[h]er skill was not in the tight construction of the plot, nor in the locked-room mystery, nor did she often make assumptions about the scientific and medical
knowledge of readers. The deception in these Christie stories is much more like the conjurer’s sleight-of-hand. She shows us the ace of spades face up. Then she turns it over, but we still know where it is, so how has it been transformed into the five of diamonds? […] She was not a good writer, but she was a supreme mistress in the construction of puzzles and had a skill in writing light, lively and readable dialogue that has been consistently underrated by critics. (118-119)
In her study of bestselling female detective novel authors, including Christie, Rowland conveys the opinion that “lack of critical engagement with the profoundly influential work of all six writers is astonishing” (viii; emphasis added). Like Light, Rowland seeks to rectify the situation by supplying a study of her own. In 2006 Makinen devoted a whole work to analyzing the various female characters and ways of being feminine in Christie’s detective fiction. In her Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity she confidently expresses the view that given her enormous and continuing popularity, there simply must be more to Christie’s fiction than cleverly constructed plots (116). McKellar places Christie’s mystery novels as belonging to an earlier era when detective fiction is characterized by “means of enacting justice and restoring balance to society,” and it is only in modern works of detective fiction in which “[n]o longer do we encounter the overriding, universal set of moral imperatives which drove early examples of the genre: the detective’s quest for justice and balance often degenerates into a quest for personal satisfaction.”
McKellar’s overall argumentation is sound, but as my analysis of the character of Judge Wargrave will show, to describe Christie’s And Then There Were None as not a “quest for personal satisfaction” for a detective-like character is to grossly misunderstand the novel.
In short, what many critics have expressed is that on the surface Agatha Christie may seem
like a simple popular author, but in reality her fiction contains subversive and varied elements which are well worth studying and discovering.
2. Theoretical and Cultural Background
The first part of this study presents the theoretical background, and it has been divided into five subchapters. The first subchapter contains a short explanation of the concept of masculinity and its culturally construction. The second gives a historical and cultural background for the ways of constructing masculinity in the time period when Christie’s novels were produced. The third subchapter offers a brief and concise definition of the detective story during the Golden Age of detective fiction. The fourth section concerns the relationship between Golden Age detective fiction and gender. Although gender roles were portrayed traditionally in Golden Age detective fiction, a close reading can uncover subtle renegotiations of gender in the text. The final part is concentrated on the relationship between the Golden Age detective fiction and masculinity. After the First World War the attitudes towards male heroes changed, which created a chance for new kinds of heroic masculinities to emerge. The aim of the theoretical part is to gain an understanding of the gender politics of the time in order to be able to understand and analyze And Then There Were None.
2.1. The Concept of Masculinity
The concept of masculinity is central to this study. To start with, in Masculinities Connell claims that “’[m]asculinity’ does not exist except in contrast with ‘femininity.’ A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern European/American culture” (68). Therefore masculinity is not an essential quality, but a relational one. The existence of the feminine creates the masculine. Culture defines what is
considered to be masculine and what is not. Since culture is not static, neither are perceptions of masculinity. Masculinity itself is not a single, unified concept. Within the concept of masculinity there are different roles or modes of masculinity, classified by Connell as hegemonic, subordinated, complicit, and marginalized masculinities. According to Connell, hegemonic masculinity “can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (Masculinities 77). Hegemonic masculinity is therefore what is culturally considered the most “right” or effective way of performing masculinity. But, as Connell clarifies, “[t]his is not to say that the most visible bearers of hegemonic masculinity are always the most powerful people. They may be exemplars, such as film actors, or even fantasy figures, such as film characters” (Masculinities 77). Therefore, presenting an example from British popular culture, it would be plausible to say that James Bond is more a masculine figure than James Hacker, although both are constructed as heroes in their respective series. I would suggest that within fiction the characters who embody hegemonic masculinity are usually the heroes.
In relation to the hegemonic masculinity, Connell describes three other forms of masculinity which are needed to compliment it. First, there is subordinated masculinity, which is dominated by hegemonic masculinity. Connell offers gay men as an example of subordinated masculinity, since they are “subordinated to straight men by an array of quite material practices,” including for example both legal and street violence, and economic discrimination (Masculinities 78). The subordination of gay men also infers that heterosexuality is a compulsory element of hegemonic masculinity. Second, there is complicit masculinity which has a connection to hegemonic masculinity but does not embody it. Specifically, Connell says that “[m]asculinities constructed in ways that realize
the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy, are complicit in this sense” (Masculinities 79) and, most interestingly, “[a]
great many men who draw the patriarchal dividend also respect their wives and mothers, are never violent towards women, do their accustomed share of the housework, bring home the family wage, and can easily convince themselves that feminists must be bra burning extremists” (Masculinities 80). This passage implies many qualities associated with hegemonic masculinity. Firstly, that there must be an element of violence, specifically violence against women, in hegemonic masculinity. Secondly, married and domesticated family men are unlikely to embody hegemonic masculinity. Thirdly, a man embodying complicit masculinity might doubt what a man embodying hegemonic masculinity already knows: that a woman who speaks for her rights is a threat to the allegedly proper order of things. Finally there is marginalized masculinity, which is the masculinity of “subordinated classes or ethnic groups” (Masculinities 81), for example the masculinity embodied by black men in a white-dominated society, or in the novels of Agatha Christie, the masculinity of the working class as opposed to the masculinity of the middle class. While
“feminine” is used to understand what constitutes as “masculine”, it is equally important to consider the differences within “masculine.” Different kinds of masculinity are used to determine which is the most dominant and therefore hegemonic.
There are two key facets in the construction of masculinity. The first one is the active male body. Connell writes that “[i]n historically recent times, sport has come to be the leading definer of masculinity in mass culture. Sport provides a continuous display of men’s bodies in motion. Elaborate and carefully monitored rules bring these bodies into stylized contests with each other” (Masculinities 54). Masculinity is visibly constructed not only as an active male body, but also in relation to other active bodies. From a British perspective Boyd describes a similar issue when she talks about the history of upper class
boys’ education in Britain: “[o]n arrival at public school, boys quickly adapted to a social organization which from the 1860s stresses peer cooperation and physical rather than mental expertise as the crucial signifier of manliness” (15; emphasis added). Hegemonic masculinity is therefore built through physical prowess. Whoever is stronger or faster than his peer is more likely to embody hegemonic masculinity. Of course, it is important to note that physical prowess alone does not constitute to hegemonic masculinity and may turn on itself. As Connell argues:
[t]here can, for instance, be too much sporting prowess. Messner cites the troublesome cases of American football players whose ‘legal’ violence became too severe. When other players were badly injured, the enactment of masculine aggression risked discrediting the sport as a whole. (Masculinities 37)
Therefore merely possessing the active, capable male body is not enough to constitute to hegemonic masculinity. The element of violence is present, but its overabundance constitutes non-hegemonic masculinity. Therefore, from a bodily perspective hegemonic masculinity is a fragile, contingent construct. Too much or too little bodily activity and, by extension, violence are disqualifying elements for hegemonic masculinity.
The other significant component in constructing masculinity is rationality. As Connell asserts,
A familiar theme in patriarchal ideology is that men are rational while women are emotional. This is a deep-seated assumption in European philosophy. It is one of the leading ideas in sex role theory, in the form of the instrumental/expressive dichonomy [sic], and it is widespread in popular culture too. Science and technology,
seen by the dominant ideology as the motors of progress, are culturally defined as a masculine realm. Hegemonic masculinity establishes its hegemony partly by its claim to embody the power of reason, and thus represent the interests of the whole society; it is a mistake to identify hegemonic masculinity purely with physical aggression. (Masculinities 164)
What is of particular interest in this passage is Connell’s statement that mere physical power or violence does not constitute hegemonic masculinity. The combination of rationality and physicality is what constitutes to hegemonic masculinity. Rationality and physicality have in common the element of action. Masculinity is produced and expressed by the active body and active mind. Therefore it is reasonable to assert that activity is used to construct acceptable masculinity, especially in contrast to femininity which is usually culturally constructed as passive.
Deane uses Connell’s framework of masculinity to analyze popular fiction and notes that it is “not without its critics, who point out that to select one cluster of masculine values as hegemonic can oversimplify the diverse range of other contemporary ideals” (6).
However, Deane also argues that Connell’s framework
challenges us to understand how some masculine models enjoy a privileged relationship to institutional power, and thus exercise enormous influence over the lives of men and women whether they accept those models or not. At the same time, Connell’s concept implies the fragility and contingency of a dominant model – any hegemonic masculinity stands uneasily at a moment between the configuration it has displaced and that which will displace it – and so spurs us towards a more historically nuanced analysis that, say, the uncomplicated alignment of masculine
identities with social class. Connell’s framework is helpful […] because it highlights the power of an idealized masculinity, even when the kinds of activity are unavailable to the men who consent to it. Before the First World War, only a fraction of Victorian and Edwardian men had any direct experience of military or colonial life, much less of the rowdy voyages of colonial adventure fiction, but popular audiences found the dream of imperial masculinity no less compelling. (6-7)
Deane’s argument highlights important points in Connell’s definition of masculinity: first, that the culturally constructed ideal masculinities are at the same time highly influential and a subject for sudden change, and second, that the lack of participation does not equal lack of engagement in hegemonic masculinity. Deane’s mention of military and colonial life suggests that the construction of national identity and masculine identity are closely linked.
In this study I wish to make the argument that in Agatha Christie’s work hegemonic masculinity, which is encompassed by heroic characters and idealized and strived at by many other male characters, is active, rational, heterosexual, and never excessively violent.
Heroes and other male characters may exhibit violent behaviour occasionally,2 but murderers are never portrayed as having ideally masculine qualities, since as murderers they cross the line between acceptable and unacceptable violence.
2.2. Historical and Cultural Background
Historically speaking in Britain there have been two distinct spheres of masculinity, one for the upper classes and one for the lower classes. In her work about a popular fiction
2 The most extreme case of this can be found in Christie’s 1948 novel Taken at the Flood, where the hero strangles the heroine in a fit of jealous rage, but does not kill her, and is implied to marry her. Apparently the fact that he did not succeed in killing her mitigates his actions.
genre, the boys’ story paper, Boyd presents a concise description of the lives of adolescent males in the time period between the second half of the 19th century and the start of the Second World War. She draws a clear distinction between the lives of upper and upper middle class boys, and lower middle class and working class boys. The former would have been educated in public schools, wherein the curriculum included the classics, athleticism was promoted and encouraged, and the students were from a very young age placed both in a hierarchy defined by age, and a society compromised of their social equals. The influence of both mother and father was diminished as the influence of the school was introduced (Boyd 14-15). Although several reforms in schooling took place during the time period, in essentials the public school education remained the same, as did its effect: attending a public school guaranteed a place in the elite of the society (Boyd 16-17). Boys of the lower classes had a different upbringing. For them, the family unit was the central influence of their lives. Lower class boys were expected to participate in the household expenses and chores, and the relationships within the family would have been the most significant ones in their lives (Boyd 18-19). Unlike for the upper class boys, school was restricting and designed to turn the pupils into obedient future workers (20). Concerning the whole time period Boyd says that the “[i]nterwar youth did not experience boyhood all that differently from their Victorian and Edwardian ancestors” (24), which suggests a certain slowness concerning social reform.
There are several points of interest in Boyd’s description. Firstly, upper and upper middle-class masculinity and lower and working-class masculinity were produced in very different environments. The upper class ideas of masculinity were formed mainly in a homosocial environment. The most important point of reference in construction of masculinity for the upper class boys were their peers and teachers in school. The school also provided a chance for networking, to form bonds with other boys. This is the
framework of masculinity that may have been familiar to both Agatha Christie and the male characters that inhabit her novels. On the other hand, in the lower classes the distinction between feminine and masculine spheres was not so clearly defined, and neither was the distinction between feminine and masculine labour within the family and the home.
Homosociality is in fact a key concept when discussing the construction of masculinity both before and after the First World War. When analyzing literary representations of the gentleman (“a symbol of quintessential Englishness” [12]), Berberich perceives a change in the second half of the 19th century:
The stress was no longer on educating refined gentlemen, but hardened empire- builders who could deal with any situation without showing emotions. Etiquette books became superfluous as men followed a new code of behaviour – namely that of ‘playing the game’ with a ‘stiff upper lip’. The notion of self-fashioning still applied; but the focus had shifted to the tough adventurer ready to conquer new worlds for Queen and Country.
This inevitably led to yet another trend: a homosocial, exclusively male world which caused changes in domesticity. Economic factors again played their part: as the century advanced, it became increasingly important for a man to be financially secure before contemplating marriage. And the longer men remained bachelors, the more they got used to male-only society revolving around school, gentlemen’s clubs, sporting associations and the hunting seasons. (22)
Besides homosociality Berberich also classifies the emotionless exterior, an active body, and institutions like schools and clubs as essential signifiers of and arenas of construction
for English masculinity. This argument is reinforced by a similar view of Deane’s, who defines the British popular literature of the Victorian and Edwardian eras as being
“centered on interactions between male characters; women – especially British women – were driven to the narrative margins, leaving questions masculine identity to be decided by relations between and within male groups rather than by reference to feminine virtues” (2).
Therefore, masculine identity and masculine ideals were constructed largely in a male-only environment. Although Berberich mentions institutions such as schools and clubs as the prime locations of homosocial masculinity, there are also other, more informal situations in which masculinity has been constructed. Although a contemporary observation rather than a historical one, Easthope’s claim that “[j]okes are often used by men to exchange the idea of a woman among themselves, so excluding woman and affirming the male bond” (160;
emphasis added) can be applied here as well. Masculinity is constructed homosocially in informal, non-institutional situations as well, for example in popular literature, as Boyd’s and Deane’s studies show.
In order to illustrate the connection between the school system and the construction of specifically English masculinity, I will present an example from Christie’s own fiction, her 1937 novel Death on the Nile.
‘Now, Monsieur Fanthorp,’ [Poirot] said, ‘to our business! I perceive that you wear the same tie that my friend Hastings wears.’
Jim Fanthorp looked down at his neckwear with some bewilderment.
‘It’s an O.E. tie,’ he said.
‘Exactly. You must understand that, though I am a foreigner, I know something of the English point of view. I know for instance, that there are ‘things which are done’
and ‘things which are not done.’’
Jim Fanthorp grinned.
‘We don’t say that sort of thing much nowadays, sir.’
‘Perhaps not, but the custom, it still remains. The Old School Tie is the Old School Tie, and there are certain things (I know this from experience) that the Old School Tie does not do! One of those things, Monsieur Fanthorp, is to butt into a private conversation unasked when one does not know the people who are conducting it.’
(186)
In this passage the phrase “the Old School Tie” is implicitly used as a metonym for a gentleman and subsequently for thoroughly acceptable English masculinity. O.E. is most likely an abbreviation from Old Etonian, which indicates a great deal about Mr Fanthorp’s character, education, background, and values, as Poirot correctly deduces. “Old School Ties”, a metaphorical expression which refers to English gentlemen, abide by an unspoken set of rules which control their conduct and behaviour when other people are concerned. It also implies a set of values which transcend generations. Poirot’s friend Hastings is old enough to have served in The First World War while Mr Fanthorp is not, and yet Poirot is able to determine a flaw in Mr Fanthorp’s conduct based on what his friend Hastings would or would not do. As is befitting to the code of conduct Mr Fanthorp shows, his apparent “lapse” by “butting in” to a private conversation turns out to be beneficially motivated. It also worth noting that although things are not “said much nowadays”, the
“custom still applies,” which means that the old rules governing proper masculine conduct, familiar to Mr Fanthorp’s father and grandfather, are still relevant. It is also worth noting that Mr Fanthorp also addresses older Poirot as “sir”, which is another sign of his proper masculine conduct.
When Connell’s framework of masculinity is applied to literature produced in the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian eras, it can be said that the upper-classes are more likely to embody the hegemonic masculinity, while the working classes are relegated to the status of the subordinated, complicit and marginalized masculinities in fictional representation. As Boyd asserts: “[t]he function of the tales of adventure in the boys’ story paper was to crystallize the link between masculinity and class status. For this reason the stories are concerned with showing that true manliness emerged only from within the elite classes” (47). Likewise, Allen’s discussion of Muscular Christianity in Thomas Hughes’s 1859 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays concludes with the following view:
[m]oreover, Hughes is able to co-opt the very concepts of the body and work associated with the working classes precisely because, identified with unmeaning materiality, the working class cannot represent itself, either in politics or in literature, while the bourgeoisie, associated with the notion of representation, becomes the universal signifier, which must of necessity stand in for the working class. Such assumptions are, finally, the basis of Victorian middle-class paternalism, the notion that the bourgeois male represents all men. (129-130)
Although it is maybe risky to generalize too much, this citation from Allen can certainly be applied to Christie’s fiction, which also represents popular literature of its time. An overwhelming majority of Christie’s male characters are middle-class, or “bourgeois”.
While the female characters are more likely to originate from different class backgrounds, the male characters are very likely to be doctors, lawyers, authors, businessmen, gentlemen-of-leisure, and other assortment of middle-class positions and, implicitly, values. The rare working-class male characters tend to be servants. Upper class male
characters are represented frequently, but most often as the victims or suspects, very rarely as heroes. Christie’s heroic characters, the detectives and the bold adventurers, are certainly always represented by the middle-class.
2.3. The Golden Age Detective Novel
Detective fiction produced in the interwar period has been retroactively dubbed as the
“Golden Age” of detective fiction. Golden Age detective fiction has characteristics that distinguish it from the earlier and later periods. In this chapter I will briefly outline some of its defining features in order to characterize the genre in where And Then There Were None and by extension most of Agatha Christie’s literary work belong.
The first distinguishing feature of the detective story in the 1920s and 1930s is its popularity. The production and consumption of detective fiction increased exponentially in this period, and the number of volumes published increased significantly between the two World Wars (Symons 108). It is also at this point where the dominant form of the detective story shifts from the short story to the novel (Symons 86). The second distinguishing feature is the change in the construction of the story. The detective novels of this period have been characterized with the phrases “fair play” (Sayers), “whodunit” (Light), and
“clue-puzzle” (Knight), all of which refer to manner in which the story is written. The Golden Age detective novel was plot-centred, with less emphasis on character and more of the intellectual puzzle of solving the crime. Thirdly, the Golden Age detective story is deliberately distanced from the political and social upheavals of the real world. According to Horsley,
[w]e would never guess, immersed in the world of golden age detection, that we were reading about a period of history during which there was, for example, rapidly increasing unemployment, the General Strike of 1926, the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and the rise of the European dictatorships. (36)
A relative sense of timeless, plot-heavy construction, and novel-length are therefore the key features which distinguish the Golden Age detective story from its predecessors and followers. Curran, on the other hand, describes the Golden Age detective story as
the era of the country house weekend enlivened by the presence of a murderer, the evidence of the adenoidal under-housemaid, the snow-covered lawn with no footprints and the baffled policeman seeking the assistance of the gifted amateur.
Ingenuity reached new heights with the fatal air embolism via the empty hypodermic, the poison-smeared postage stamp, and the icicle dagger that evaporates after use.
(29-30)
Although slightly tongue-in-cheek, Curran’s portrayal is fairly accurate. It draws attention to some other characteristics of the Golden Age: the middle-class milieu, the amateur sleuth, and the intellectual game between the author and the reader. On the whole, the Golden Age detective story can be defined as deliberately light and plot-centred.
In addition to the above, there is another distinguishing feature of interwar detective fiction which is not directly linked to the form, but rather to the attitude towards the genre.
It is during this period that the writers of the genre began to take their craft seriously. As Symons says, “[b]y the end of the [1920s], however, a body of criticism had been produced to which tried to lay down the limits within which writers of detective stories ought to
operate” (93). Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” from 1928 and Knox’s “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” from 1929 established conventions and rules to define the genre. For example, according to Van Dine, in a detective novel the
“detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit”, “[t]here simply must be a corpse”, “the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means”, for the role of the culprit a “servant must not be chosen”, and it should
“contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations” (190-192). Knox’s restrictions are similar to Van Dine’s, for instance ruling that “[t]he criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story”, “[n]o hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end”, and that the “detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader” (194-196). Whether all these rules were obeyed by detective fiction writers is a point of contention, but the very fact that the rules were established means that by the 1930s both the writers and readers of detective fiction were knowledgeable of the conventions and definitive features of the genre.
In other words, detective fiction became a self-aware genre. Dorothy L. Sayers, a detective fiction writer herself, also contributed by writing “The Omnibus of Crime” in 1928-29, in which she traces the history of the detective story from folk tale to the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, finishing her essay with the fair play form of her own time. Her essay is important in terms of legitimizing the genre. To this end, Sayers says that there is “one respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle, and end” (Omnibus 101). This comment of Sayers’s infers that the detective story is a worthwhile genre and entitled to credit as a form of literature.
By providing the detective story genre with both rules and history these writers helped to both define and elevate the genre.
With their rules and conventions the detective novels of the 1920s and 1930s served an important purpose as light entertainment. Light defines the interwar detective story as “a literature of convalescence” (65) and describes the “whodunit” as becoming “enormously successful between the wars and [having] a wide and heterodox appeal” (65). She notices that “what is most noticeable about the appearance of the whodunit, and paradoxical, is the removal of the threat of violence” (69). Plain discusses the same phenomenon when she analyses the way dead bodies are seen in Christie’s work: “the fragmented, inexplicable and even unattributable corpses of war are replaced by the whole, over-explained, completely known bodies of detection” (34). Since the dead body in a detective novel is known and explained, it is not threatening. After the chaos of the First World War there was a need for literature that discussed death as merely an intellectual puzzle. As death is discussed in a palatable manner, the detective novel provides a safe haven for the reader, a world in which people and events are predictable. In essence, the detective novel is on purpose meant to be escapist in nature.
When the novel And Then There Were None, the focus of this study, arrived to the literary scene in 1939, it was within the context of an already-established and clearly defined genre with a wide readership. Although not a pure example of the genre, And Then There Were None can be classified as a detective novel for several reasons. It abides by most of Van Dine’s and Knox’s rules for writing detective fiction, as described above.
There are only two rules this novel does not explicitly follow, since the case is solved (from a reader’s perspective) by an “unmotivated confession” instead of a detective’s efforts, and there is no central character of a detective in the novel. Detective work is done in the novel, but none of the characters is a detective, since they do not identify themselves
as detectives, nor do they solve the crime. The clues needed for solving the case are mostly given fairly to the reader, because, as Van Dine says, “[t]he reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery” (189). Although the latter half of the novel is at points stylistically similar to the horror genre, there are no supernatural forces at work and at the end all mysteries have been given a rational explanation. The basic setting of the novel, a small number of people trapped on a desert island, is reminiscent of the genre of the Robinsonade, but this is simply a means to provide a plausible background for the claustrophobic closed circle murder mystery. At its core the novel contains the essential elements of a detective story: there are a limited number of suspects, a specific setting, and a straightforward plot. Likewise, And Then There Were None follows an accepted detective story convention in that it is not set in a very specific time. All that can be discerned is that the novel takes place some time after the year 1935, according to the dates of the crimes provided in Chapter 3. There are no topical references to actual historical events to date the novel’s timeframe. The reader can, if they so wish, assume that the novel takes place on the same year that it has been written (1939), but there is no evidence to either support or debunk the supposition. The novel takes place in an imagined, timeless England where it is perfectly plausible to invite ten murderers to an island and kill them according to the lyrics of a nursery rhyme. And finally, the novel also engages in slight metafictional humour when the character Blore remarks that “[i]t’s only in books people carry revolvers around as a matter of course” (146). Later on, the murderer confesses to enjoying “reading every kind of detective story and thriller” (302). Detective fiction is often prone to referring to itself, a “self-conscious form given to self-parody”
(74), as Light puts it.
In conclusion, the interwar detective story has its own distinguishing markers like any other form of popular culture in a certain time and place. The “whodunit” is best
described as more concerned with plot than characterization, at the same time both defined and constricted by a set of rules, and self-aware both in content and in authorship. The intellectual, rather than emotional, approach to death was a result of the atmosphere after the First World War. Dorothy L. Sayers’s amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey remarks that
“in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have”
(Strong Poison 132), and this observation sums up one of the defining characteristics of the genre quite accurately. The interwar detective story is often simple and uncomplicated. A crime is committed and solved, and the wrongdoers punished. And Then There Were None, although in some respects more complex than the average Golden Age detective story, is also fundamentally a representative of the genre. The novel is centred on the murder mystery plot, and the resolution of the mystery marks the end of the narrative.
2.4. The Detective Novel and Gender
The relationship between gender and the detective story in the period after the First World War is complex. On one hand, the genre and its authors became more feminine. In addition to Christie herself, the most well-known detective story authors of this period were women: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. In contrast to the foggy streets of London associated with the immensely popular Sherlock Holmes stories, murder and crime relocated themselves into large country houses and idyllic small villages.
Horsley argues that in this period the detective story itself became feminized, which was seen in “the domestic scale of the action, the politeness of the language, the effeteness of many of the detective protagonists, and their frequent association with kinds of knowledge traditionally considered to be feminine” (38). Rowland offers a similar view, writing that
“[g]olden age fiction located crime at home. It is to be found amongst the colonels,
spinsters, minor gentry, middle-aged businessmen, impecunious relatives and young feckless socialites” (68). In other words, the interwar detective story located itself in the comforts of middle-class and acquired feminine features. This femininity is seen not only in the settings but also in the characters and the language used. Rowland takes the argument of the detective novel being a feminized genre further and argues that it can be seen as the “other” of the masculine legal establishment:
[a]ll crime fiction, when clearly defined as fiction, is offering a story that the laws cannot or will not tell. It is saying, in effect, that there is more to crime than the institutionalised stories told in courts and police stations; there is more to criminals, their motives, actions and lives that can be represented through the cultural authority of the legal system. Crime fiction is the other of the powers of legal institutions to represent crime to the culture. […] In this sense we could suggest that detective fiction is structurally gendered as feminine. (17; emphasis original)
Rowland suggests that the form of the detective story is feminine, since it offers a point of view which is opposite to the official, male-dominated establishment. However, the actual content of the interwar detective story can be described as conservative and male- dominated. Scaggs characterizes the genre as set in tradition in relation to gender:
In these hundred years or so, from the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ in 1841 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, both crime fiction writers, and the detectives that they created, seemed to endorse an undeniably patriarchal world-view. With only one major exception, this being Agatha Christie’s spinster detective Miss Jane Marple, all of the fictional detectives of this period were
men. Again, with very few exceptions, it is masculine heroism and rationality that solves crime and restores the social order […] the crime genre during this period was a particularly powerful ideological tool that consolidated and disseminated patriarchal power, and its voice was the rational, coolly logical voice of the male detective or his male narrator. (20)
While in the above citation Christie is flatteringly singled out as a creator of Miss Marple, Scaggs’s argument about the genre being male-dominated rests on solid ground. If we observe Christie’s oeuvre, the male detectives are overwhelmingly more common. In addition to Poirot she also has other recurring detectives, such as Colonel Race, Inspector Battle, Mr Satterthwaite, and Parker Pyne, whereas the aforementioned Miss Marple solely represents the female detective. The dominance of the males is not confined to the detectives, either. A Christie detective novel chosen at random will almost without a fail present male characters predominantly as middle class professionals, while women are portrayed mostly in domestic and subservient roles. More often than not, in the representations the male and female genders are traditional.
While the form and style of the interwar detective story can be described as feminine, the representations of gender within the genre are better described as traditional rather than modern. How to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory assertions? How can a genre be simultaneously innovative and feminine in form and yet patriarchal and traditional in its approach to gender? Devas presents interesting conclusion in her analysis of a novel by Christie: “[t]he various texts of 4.50 from Paddington provide a site for a rebuttal of the silenced or hysteric woman and allow her a place of belief, action, and investigation, albeit within the prescribed limits of the genre” (191; emphasis added). This statement illustrates the situation aptly. Although this particular conclusion concerns a Christie novel published
in the 1950s, rather than in the 1930s, it demonstrates the gender issue in question concisely and appropriately. The detective novel is a popular fiction genre, and therefore it can not be expected be revolutionary in its approach to gender. However, building on Devas’s argument, the work can include what I term subtle renegotiations of traditional gender roles and boundaries. These subtle renegotiations occur within the accepted limitations of the genre. We can not expect the detective novel to be completely revolutionary in its approach to representations of gender, but by reading closely evidence can be found to support a more nuanced interpretation. In other words, Christie’s fiction does not fundamentally challenge the state of society and how gender is perceived, but it can contain the possibility of change.
The traditional construction of gender coupled with the feminized aspects of the genre is best understood by using an example from Christie’s fiction. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) the following description of a male character can be understood on more than one level.
Hector Blunt is perhaps five years Ackroyd’s junior. They made friends early in life, and though their ways have diverged, the friendship still holds. About once in two years Blunt spends a fortnight at Fernly [Ackroyd’s manor], and an immense animal’s head, with an amazing number of horns which fixes you with a glazed stare as soon as you come inside the front door, is a permanent reminder of the friendship.
Blunt had entered the room now with his own peculiar, deliberate, yet soft- footed tread. He is a man of medium height, sturdily and rather stockily built. His face almost mahogany coloured, and is peculiarly expressionless. He has grey eyes that give the impression of always watching something that is happening very far
away. He talks little, and what he does say is said jerkily, as though the words were forced out of him unwillingly. (36)
On the surface the above passage presents a typical description of an English out-of-doors man, a man who is accustomed to acting instead of talking. The tone of the text, however, suggests a more slyly humorous approach to the character. Blunt is strongly associated with hunting, and yet the only visible marker of his profession is an unidentified animal’s stuffed head mounted on the wall. He has an “expressionless” face and he is unwilling to talk, which is an exaggeration of the typical English reserve. Blunt’s faraway gaze is implicitly directed at the Empire, but as later events in the novel imply, it also means that he is not at all good at observing anything which is at close quarters. On a novel-wide scale Blunt, although active and capable, is not the hero of the story. The hero of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is Hercule Poirot, a fussy elderly Belgian who has retired to the country to grow vegetable marrows. Blunt’s role is that of a murder suspect. In the story he represents a character type. This type is both symptomatic of the formulaic genre and an easily identified stock character in Christie’s concise writing style: a solid, unimaginative Englishman. Male characters similar to Blunt appear regularly in her works, with slight adjustments made according to the time and place. However, as the above description implies, the character type can be used humorously instead of seriously in order to mock established gender stereotypes while not disregarding the stereotypes themselves. In short, while the representations of gender in detective fiction are more traditional, the style used to convey them suggests a potentially more revolutionary attitude, or the potential for subtle renegotiations of gender.
Previous studies dealing with Agatha Christie and gender have had a tendency to focus on female characters and the feminine. Makinen’s comprehensive study Agatha
Christie: Investigating Feminity (2006) offers a fascinating analysis of Christie’s extensive literary output and identifies her work as being more diverse and subversive in its representations of gender than previously thought. Makinen argues that Christie’s female characters are far from being stereotypical and instead employ a number of active roles.
Particular attention is also paid to the female murderers and other villains, who are characterized in similar terms to male villains, and are shown as capable of using gender roles to their advantage in order to avert suspicion away from themselves (Makinen 115- 134). In Makinen’s view, Christie’s female characters are seen as capable of negotiating within the boundaries of society in order to insure their personal happiness (114). Although it is not the main focus of her work, she also mentions the wide array of renegotiated masculinities which complement the available femininities in Christie.
As mentioned above, Devas’s article “Murder, Mass Culture and the Feminine: A View from the 4.50 from Paddington” is concerned with the subtle renegotiation of female roles within the boundaries of a popular fiction genre. Devas focuses on Christie’s 1957 detective novel 4.50 from Paddington and its two film adaptations in order to prove that women are capable of acting as detectives while occupying acceptable feminine positions.
The female characters in the novel responsible for apprehending the murderer include a middle-aged, respectable woman, and elderly spinster, and a young domestic worker. What Devas finds significant for a female reading is that a woman’s voice is heard, not silenced, by the authorities. While women are visually and verbally placed in traditional scenes of domesticity, the domestic attributes are not trivialized but rather celebrated. Devas argues that the novel and the films are not feminist texts, but they do offer a gentle renegotiation of the traditional domestic role offered for women within the parameters set by the popular genre (187-191).
Another viewpoint to the representation of femininity in Christie’s work can be found in Rolls’s recent article “An Ankle Queerly Turned, or the Fetishised Bodies in Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library”, which explores the original 1942 Christie novel and its 2004 film adaptation. The adaptation differs from the original novel in changing the identity and the sexual orientation of one the murderers from male to female and from heterosexual to lesbian. Applying close reading, Rolls identifies the female ankle/leg being used in a fetishised manner in the film, which leads him to uncovering a potential lesbian subtext in the original novel. Implicitly, his analysis reveals that Christie’s supposedly conservative texts are open to a variety of interpretations, and that their simplistic form can conceal powerful subtext. Bernthal’s “’If Not Yourself, Who would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie’s Second World war Detective Fiction” focuses also on The Body in the Library, as well as Evil Under the Sun (1941), and it proposes the idea that rather than being simple entertainment, the novels offer a sharp-eyed look into gender roles and dynamics during the Second World War. The dead bodies in these novels are deliberately and distinctly feminine, in contrast to the realities of the war. Much is made of the bodies being misidentified and misread, and clothes and make up play a significant role in relation to female characters (Bernthal 48-51). Bernthal also notes that the female characters who accept their roles as wives and mothers fare better and are rewarded within the text, which suggests a veiled social commentary of the gender roles of that time period (53-55).
Critical texts concerning Agatha Christie in relation to gender have a tendency to focus on female characters and femininity. The role of women in society and the potential significance on the female body, dead or alive, has been of interest to academics studying Christie. Her male characters and depictions of masculinity have received less attention. It is perhaps symptomatic of gender studies to focus first on the “othered” aspects of the text.
However, I argue that the representations of Christie’s male characters, although from a readerly perspective not as engaging or imaginative as her best female characters, can also be as varied and subversive. It is the aim of this study to shed some light on Christie’s male characters and her representations of masculinity.
2.5. The Detective Novel and Masculinity
The phrases “detective story” and “masculinity” used in conjunction do not primarily evoke the comfortingly conservative, middle-class image of an Agatha Christie novel.
Rather, the hard-boiled detectives of American film noir are more likely to be connected to the study of detective stories and masculinity. However, Britain has produced at least one detective who may be said to embody traditional masculine attributes. I will start this chapter by discussing Sherlock Holmes, as he has been studied in depth by Kestner.
Kestner’s study of masculinity and the detective novel concerns many of the same themes which are also relevant to Christie, and the chapter on the Georgian Sherlock Holmes is as a time period very close to the one examined in this study. Christie’s career as a writer overlaps with Doyle’s as her first novel was published in 1920, and the final Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle appeared in 1927. I argue that any study of Agatha Christie would be incomplete without referencing Sherlock Holmes, since, as Knight points out, “[i]t is not hard to see the main influences on her – she had obviously read Doyle, from whom comes the initial model of detective and narrator” (89). In fact, Poirot may be interpreted to be a sort of conscious reworking of Sherlock Holmes, a master detective who is the complete opposite of Holmes: elderly, foreign and feminine in his behaviour in contrast to the subdued, active, rational, and consummately British Great Detective.
The chief point of Kestner’s lengthy analysis of gender in Sherlock Holmes canon is that it establishes that masculinity must be constantly reinforced after it has been questioned, often by comparing and contrasting it with the Other. This Other is often represented by a foreign masculinity, as a violent or criminal man from America, a German man connected to espionage, or a woman who is somehow perceived as a threat to the current order. The great detective himself is constructed as a “universal model and particular prototype of the masculine” (208). During their long run the Sherlock Holmes stories have discussed many different challenges which have been imposed on masculinity, with the conclusion that science and rationality triumph over any transgressions. They also demonstrate that the definition and construction of masculinity is an ongoing process, one which is constantly challenged and must therefore be constantly strengthened.
Additionally, the more recent the stories become, the notion of masculinity itself becomes increasingly more unstable in the progress: whereas many of the earlier Sherlock Holmes stories are concerned with the possible failing of the masculine body, exemplified by numerous references to wounded or crippled men, in the analysis of the short story “The Veiled Lodger” Kestner suggests that the circus as an environment implies that
“masculinity is performative, delusive and deceitful” (182). It could be suggested that the stability of masculinity can also be interpreted as dwindling alongside the power of the British Empire itself. The discussion of masculinity in the decades-long Holmesian canon is mirrored by the decades-long discussion of masculinity in the Christie canon. In both writers the reader can observe the changing times in gender issues: Conan Doyle writing a Sherlock Holmes story in the 1880s discusses different subjects than Conan Doyle writing a Sherlock Holmes story in the 1920s, just like the Christie’s novels from 1920s are different in their representation of gender from those written in the 1950s.
