Susan Allen Ford

Detecting (and Teaching) the Gothic

Detective fiction has always been about genre. These are fictions that investigate and define not only their celebrated crimes and criminals but the conventions of art and community that make such injustice possible and plausible. The two major traditions of detective fiction, the Classic (or Formal) and the Hard-Boiled, have long developed in opposition to each other. Raymond Chandler’s remark that the hard-boiled writer Dashiell Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley” (14) conveys that sense of the importance of generic identity. These two traditions, however, though developed oppositely in terms of the nature of the societies they investigate, or the resolutions permitted by such societies, or even the nature of the detective, share one common definition: both the Great Detective and the Hard-Boiled Dick are male. Although both figures stand in some way apart from their worlds—either because of an eccentric brilliance or a kind of dogged morality—they both, through their very gender, command a kind of privilege or power. When the detective in the classic tradition has been female, as in the case of Miss Marple, her marginality is both a strength and a weakness, her function the maintenance of the status quo. Before 1977, a credible female private-eye in the hard-boiled mode simply does not exist.

Since 1977, however, the emergence of the hard-boiled feminist detective novel has entailed a re-invention of the form, as women writers, increasingly feeling the constraints of male-dominated conversations, have attempted to discover their own voices by fusing elements of their paternal generic inheritance with an even older form, the Gothic, a part of their maternal inheritance. The result is a new genre, a new room of one’s own in the house of fiction. Two contemporary and influential writers, the American Sara Paretsky and the British Liza Cody, are among those who have used the Gothic as a way of shaping this new kind of detective fiction.

Because their uses of the Gothic as well as of the two detective traditions differ, both Paretsky and Cody are exciting writers to examine in a course on detective fiction, or indeed in any course focusing on forms of fiction. Teaching the Gothic through detective fiction is helpful as a way of introducing students to the ways the very choice to write within a popular literary genre itself implicitly raises feminist issues. It is also useful in allowing students to investigate the instability of genre as well as the cultural and gendered pressures behind that instability.

The class in Detective Fiction that I teach, like many at institutions around the country, invites the participation of a variety of students: some are English majors, experienced in dealing with literary texts; others are non-majors looking for a course that sounds interesting or entertaining and that will simultaneously fulfill a requirement; others are people from outside of the academic community; and some are avid consumers of detective fiction. Some students bring to the course an extensive reading of detective fiction; for more, the course represents the early stages of interest in the genre. For most students, this course is their first serious and extended consideration of a popular genre. The course is structured as a survey that establishes the two major traditions of British and American detective fiction and the evolution of those traditions over time; it also examines significant writers within those traditions as well as a variety of subgenres. Contemporary women detectives in the hard-boiled tradition are well-represented by either the novels of either Sara Paretsky or Liza Cody. If time permits, the inclusion of both of these writers can provide an interesting look at two different ways of transforming the hard-boiled detective novel through the use of the Female Gothic.

By the time we’ve reached these women writers struggling to possess the traditions of detective fiction they’ve inherited, students are very familiar with the nature and varieties of the two traditions. They’ve read novels by Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers and considered the definition of the classic detective novel suggested by W. H. Auden’s “The Guilty Vicarage.” They’ve also read novels by such hard-boiled practitioners as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and the early Robert B. Parker as well as George Grella’s essay “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel,” with its emphasis on the detective novel as quest romance and its analysis of its private-eye hero in terms of his physical ability, his self-imposed isolation (partly a consequence of his independence, partly a reaction to the corruption of the society he inhabits), and his moral code. Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder” helps clarify the pattern for the hard-boiled detective. Students have also noticed the way women are used in this tradition—as damsels in distress, or death-dealing seductresses, or, often, both. Although writer Lawrence Block in the very early years of the hard-boiled feminist detective novel declared that “[w]omen don’t fit well into a trench coat and a slouch hat” (qtd. in Stasio 39), students are ready to discuss not only the problems of fit but also the ways these writers have tailored the generic coat and hat.

There’s plenty of classroom excitement in discovering those similarities and differences and the way those connections are marked by gender: the shared emphasis on detection as work; the similar positioning of the detective on the margins of his or her society; the shared rebelliousness, both of act and word, against systems of power (for women writers, systems particularly marked by gender inequities). Perhaps most interesting to students are the ways women writers deal with the problematic independence of their detectives. The characters’ separation from their families and from traditional family structures underlines their independence. Further, the crimes they unravel usually reveal the corruption at the heart of the patriarchal family structure, an exploration that leads to the detective’s reconstruction of the family around untraditional (and usually female) lines of connection.

This emphasis on family is a good way to introduce the discussion of the Gothic elements of these detective novels. After her first two novels, written within the generic boundaries of the masculine hard-boiled tradition she inherited, all of Sara Paretsky’s novels featuring her Chicago-based detective V.I. Warshawski make use of Gothic conventions. While traditional hard-boiled novels rarely if ever mention the detective’s family, students are struck by the role played by V.I.’s dead mother Gabriella, who appears to V.I. repeatedly, both in dreams and through memory. Claire Kahane’s essay “The Gothic Mirror” is particularly helpful here, and I might provide students with an excerpt (pages 334-41) from it. That essay economically sets up features of the Female Gothic such as the motherless female protagonist, the struggle against abusive paternal authority, the labyrinthine spaces she explores as womb- or tomb-like spaces that figure the female herself. But most useful is Kahane’s emphasis on the mother at the heart of the Gothic maze: “repeatedly locked into the forbidden center of the Gothic . . . is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront” (336). And, indeed, as the students recognize, V.I. continually confronts the conflicting images of femininity her mother provides. Her mother is both hero and victim, a voice of challenge to courageous action but also a figure who sacrificed independence and career out of gratitude and a need for protection.

Perhaps two novels, Killing Orders (1984) and Tunnel Vision (1994), offer the clearest examples of Paretsky’s transformation of hard-boiled conventions through the power of the Gothic. In Killing Orders, V.I. both confronts the legacy of her mother’s past and discovers the misdeeds of a secret, right-wing Catholic organization that launders mob money and channels illegal contributions to right-wing forces in Central America. Acting on a promise she’s made to her mother, V.I. undertakes an investigation on behalf of her mother’s hostile Aunt Rosa. The cityscapes of the hard-boiled novel are reconfigured here into a Gothic landscape as the heroine—at one point disguised as a monk—penetrates the monastery from which the scheme is effected, exploring its physical and financial labyrinths while confronting both her fears of being physically and emotionally wounded as well as her mother’s guilt about her own erotic identity.

The terror that V.I. confronts in Killing Orders is partly the physical and psychic fear that her acid-throwing opponents will scar her, but it is also a fear that as a consequence she will find herself reliving her mother’s history: “I was clenching and unclenching my fists, trying to keep rage under control. Protection. The middle-class dream. My father protecting Gabriella in a Milwaukee Avenue bar. My mother giving him loyalty and channeling her fierce creative passions into a South Chicago tenement in gratitude” (177). Throughout the novel, V.I. moves between a sense of separation from Gabriella and connection to her, at one time assuming Gabriella’s voice as a disguise and at another recognizing the calm and strength attendant on exercising her own voice as part of her mother’s legacy. Although Killing Orders does unravel a pattern of corruption at the heart of this society in the abusive paternal authority of the Church, governmental policy, big money, and organized crime, the novel’s center is as much personal and psychological as political. V.I. must confront not only the effects (in some cases mortal) of her investigation on other people but also her own capacity for a reactive violence that she almost cannot control: “What kind of person kneels in the snow threatening to destroy the leg of an injured man? Not anyone I wanted to know. I pulled the hammer back with a loud click and pointed the gun at his left leg” (237). Further, she recognizes the complexity of her maternal inheritance: the effects of her mother’s guilt as well as the strength Gabriella imparted to her daughter.

Tunnel Vision offers an even clearer example to students interested in detecting the Gothic. Turning on spousal abuse and father-daughter incest, Tunnel Vision examines the conflicting issues of hostility, identity, separation, and need in the relationships between mothers and daughters. Further, the connection between ruined and imprisoning structures and the condition of the patriarchal family in the Gothic is explored in this novel: the disintegrating families V.I. must confront are mirrored in crumbling Chicago landscapes. Students can collect a range of descriptive passages that invite close reading. The Pulteney Building, site of V.I.’s office, is slated for destruction, falling down around her, its abandoned corridors haunted by a wraith-like mother and children hiding from father and the law. The landscape of Vic’s dreams, endless stairs she must descend while her mother and surrogate-mother Lotty chastise or mock her, is concretized by the very stairs she descends to the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the Loop. When those tunnels flood, V.I. battles rats and her own fears, descending to rescue women and children threatened by male power. Further, that labyrinth is internalized in V.I.’s response to a young girl’s account of her experience of paternal rape and her mother’s murder: “As we made our way to the NMR building I tried to imagine what a picture of my brain would show. . . . Emily’s agony printed over and over again on X-ray paper, like a shredded flower” (315).

Tunnel Vision is particularly useful to students as a way of highlighting the political valence of both the Gothic and the feminist detective novel. The alternate paths of maternal resistance to the world and its masculine power structure can provoke some lively discussion. In the case of one character, such resistance leads to her own madness and to the death of the daughter she’s trying to protect. In the case of another, the anger of overt acquiescence and covert resistance leads to self-destruction and the abuse of her daughter. Such responses call up for V.I. the image of her own mother, whose strength has led her through the novel: “Gabriella had been like some wild bird, choosing a cage as a storm haven, out of bewilderment, then beating her wings so fiercely she broke herself against the walls. If that was what compromise brought, I didn’t want it” (121). Again, the Gothic mother provides a model for what V.I. should be as well as a warning for what V.I. could become.

Liza Cody’s Eva Wylie novels—Bucket Nut (1993), Monkey Wrench (1994), and Musclebound (1997)—rewrite the definition of the detective novel. Some students may have read Liza Cody’s first series, featuring London detective Anna Lee, a character who shares with V.I. Warshawski many of the features of the feminist private eye: an innate rebelliousness, a resistance to intimacy, a physical fear that must be overcome, an investigative method that combines reason and passion, and an ability to move among different strata of society while providing a means of identification for the middle-class reader. Though rebelling against the repressions of middle class life and the limited possibilities offered to women by the police force, Anna remains within the system, working as an employee in a detective agency and controlling only her own apartment “in an ordinary London house just north of Holland Park Avenue” (Dupe 9), a place defined by music, space, and light.

Cody’s Eva Wylie series represents a 180-degree shift. Point of view moves from third person limited to first (and even second), from a narrator who effaces herself in the shared consciousness of detective and reader to one who assaults the reader, treats her as opponent, collaborator, even as mark. Anna Lee is relegated to the status of minor character, defined as The Enemy and as polizei, pushed aside by Eva Wylie, a female wrestler and sometime hired muscle. Eva is almost monstrous: not pleasing or accommodating but angry, not feminine but big and muscular, not upwardly mobile but squarely opposed to the middle-class world of social workers and bosses. In an interview, Cody discussed the conventional outlines of feminist detective fiction: “There we are flying the flag for competent, caring women: women who try and solve other people’s problems, women who think about the victim, women who people can go to in trouble. And in some ways how trapped we are by the necessary fact that a private detective must be a good deed in a naughty world. I was thinking there’s a trap here and I’ve got to get out of it” (36). Eva is, indeed, the madwoman in the attic, her usually marginalized perspective unleashed.

These are anti-detective novels. Liza Cody here effects a shift in fictional strategy by marginalizing the voice of the woman detective, a figure whose job is to control anger while restoring some measure of order. That voice is displaced, however, not by a more repressive or authoritarian (masculine) one but instead by the voice of an angry and unruly female. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their landmark The Madwoman in the Attic, define the figure of the “monster-woman” for the male writer as one who “embodies intransigent female autonomy,” representing both his anxieties and his inability to control them (or her) through narrative (28). For women writers, they argue, such a monster-woman can be liberating, projecting “the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage” (78): “this figure arises like a bad dream, bloody, envious, enraged, as if the very process of writing had itself liberated a madwoman, a crazy and angry woman, from a silence in which neither she nor her author can continue to acquiesce” (77). Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis, as students discover, has an uncanny application to Liza Cody’s own account of the sources not just of her own fiction but of her own authorial self. In “A Heroine for Me,” a recent essay (short enough to distribute in class) on her discovery of Eva Wylie, Cody remembers her own rage and her efforts to repress it.

“Ignore them,” my mother used to say to me when I came home bleeding internally from some playground slight. “Show them you’re above it all.” I couldn’t. I wasn’t. I always made matters worse by fighting back. But like most little girls I wanted to be loved and approved of. So when I grew up I learned to control my temper. I taught myself to be nice. Most of the time. Women are supposed to look good, to behave well, to court love and approval. (192)

Out of Cody’s memory of this rage and an accidental encounter with a professional wrestler named Klondyke Kate sprang Eva Wylie, fully formed. Reading these novels, students are jolted, and not just into a nightmare world mediated for them by a Radcliffean or Paretskian guide who shares their sensibilities and their middle-class position (however broadly defined); this is a nightmare world in which they must see through the eyes of the feminine Other—and be insulted for their pains.

Discussion of Cody’s landscape elicits from students a recognition of the Gothic’s representation of the political and psychological construction of self and world. Eva’s world is the nightmare reflection of middle-class capitalistic aspirations, the rubble left for the underclass to inhabit. Her home is a windowless Static trailer in the breaker’s yard she guards, in which she keeps herself independent by refusing electricity and relying on her dogs to keep out intruders. Eva’s London is a world of junk yards and chain-link fences, a world in which the owners of abandoned buildings hire security to keep squatters out, a world where Waterloo Station is not a point of departure but a place to pick the pockets and scavenge the leavings of the middle-class traveler. And Eva’s world is also one in which time and space mysteriously collapse: in her rage and puzzlement she finds herself geographically and emotionally transported—and face to face with her mother.

Eva’s mother is defined in ways that set her not as a figure of challenge or nurture or even repression but as one of antithesis. She is a victim of poverty, of men, of her own need for alcohol—forces which cause her to be not just an inattentive mother but a dangerous one. Once, after locking her children in the cupboard, she is beaten by the man she’s picked up in the pub and brought back to her flat. Falling into a drunken stupor, she sets the flat on fire: the claustrophobia, the smoke, the panic haunt Eva. This mother is also emotionally brutal, with little tolerance for anything but the traditionally feminine, sometimes telling Eva that she wishes Eva had never been born, at other times helping to separate Eva from the sister she’s seeking. Eva is surprisingly (though sporadically) sympathetic to and even admiring of her mother, acknowledging her beauty in the evenings before alcohol and men wreak their havoc and excusing her mother’s deficiencies with the explanation that she’s “had a hard life” (Bucket Nut 17). But her anger at her mother’s lack of family feeling breaks through, as well as her insistence on defining herself in opposition to that un-maternal figure. At the end of Monkey Wrench, Eva rescues a puppy and determines to raise it: “But Milo would grow up big and strong. . . . All he had to do was learn how to fight and learn mental discipline. Like me. I learned all that, so I could teach him” (234). But Eva’s mothering is not entirely successful. Indeed, in Musclebound, Milo’s experience—fire, violence, and removal from the home—seems to repeat Eva’s traumatic childhood and suggests the necessity for Eva to reinvent what it means to be a mother.

And yet, as the figure of Eva’s mother is endlessly reflected in these novels in the other female characters, Eva’s struggle is to see her commonality with these marginalized and self-destructive women, to recognize in them her own identity as well as otherness. Eugenia DeLamotte’s formulation is helpful here: “Two fears dominate this Gothic world, the fear of terrible separateness and the fear of unity with some terrible Other. . . . Where, if they exist at all, are the boundaries of the self?” (22-23). Indeed, this question is the very one that students—that all readers—must confront as they confront the complexity of their simultaneous separation from and identification with Eva.

The Gothic dimensions of these novels prevent the recovery of innocence that W. H. Auden so admired in the classic detective novel. Instead, these hard-boiled feminist Gothics become a tool that not only excavates the oppressive structures of society but also reconstructs a strategy of protest. DeLamotte remarks about the nineteenth-century Gothic novels that “most of these books are about women who just can’t seem to get out of the house” (10). For the women created by Paretsky and Cody—and for their readers—the mean streets somehow lead back to the house as out there the detective discovers structures that only replicate home’s dysfunctions, its terrors. Change can come only one book at a time.

Susan Allen Ford

Division of Languages and Literature

Delta State University

Cleveland, MS 38733

Works Cited

Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage.” The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. London: Faber, 1948. Rpt. in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1980. 15-24.

Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay.” 1944. The Simple Art of Murder. 1950. New York: Vintage, 1988. 1-18.

Cody, Liza. Bucket Nut. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

—. “A Heroine for Me.” Deadly Women. Ed. Jan Grape, Dean James and Ellen Nehr. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998. 191-93.

—. Dupe. 1981. New York: Warner, 1983.

—. Interview. Talking Murder: Interviews with 20 Mystery Writers. By Charles L. P. Silet. Princeton: Ontario, 1999. 24-38.

—. Monkey Wrench. 1994. New York: Mysterious, 1996.

—. Musclebound. New York: Mysterious, 1997.

DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Grella, George. “The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1980. 103-20. Rpt. of “Murder and the Mean Streets: The Hard-Boiled Detective Novel.” Detective Fiction: Crime and Compromise. Ed. Dick Allen and David Chacko. New York: Harcourt, 1974. 411-28.

Kahane, Claire. “The Gothic Mirror.” The (M)other tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 334-51.

Paretsky, Sara. Killing Orders. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

—. Tunnel Vision. New York: Delacorte, 1994.

Stasio, Marilyn. “Lady Gumshoes: Boiled Less Hard.” NYTBR 28 April 1985: 1, 39-40.