The Sleuth and the Goddess

Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite in Women’s Detective Fiction

Susan Rowland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000047141
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rowland presents a detailed exploration of how the archetypes of ancient goddesses Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite breathe into and shape female-authored detective fiction. Representing aspects of characterisation not bound by gender, the book examines how these archetypes emerge in themes like the home and hearth, hunting, survival and desire. Rowland assesses numerous examples from a range of works, providing a clear illustration of each archetype and illuminating aspects of femininity, psyche and being. This uniquely interdisciplinary work of literary analysis sheds light on the popularity and underlying mystique of the genre.

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CHAPTER ONE



INTRODUCTION

MYTHICAL KNOWING AND DETECTIVE FICTION

Opening: The Mystery of the Detective

Detective or mystery fiction is a haunting and haunted literary genre, in which there is always another, a ghostly, perhaps even divine, presence.¹ Doubleness characterizes its nature. On the one hand, it has alternate names of “detective” stories, indicating a focus on its lead figure, and “mysteries,” hinting at metaphysical dimensions of plot. On the other hand, this form also has dual origins as both a peculiarly modern, and yet distinctively ancient, type of literature. Moreover, its doubling does not end here. It has evolved two main subgenres: “hardboiled” and “cozy,” along with an ambivalence between seriousness (the crime is always murder) and frivolity (in its liberal invitation to humor). In addition, mystery fiction identifies itself with popular vacation reading, while its addiction to self-referentiality invites its readers to make use of their own knowledge.²

This book, The Sleuth and the Goddess, will explore detective fiction, or mystery’s lingering duality, not least in adopting both terms to maintain awareness of this uncanny doubling. However, in order to offer depth, I will concentrate on work by women, in particular those of the United States and United Kingdom in recent decades. In its focus on women authors, The Sleuth and the Goddess is therefore not limited to women detectives. So, for example, I will include intrepid Marcus Didius Falco making an uneasy living in Ancient Rome at the behest of his author, Lindsey Davis.³ In addition to exploring works by many writers, each chapter, including this one, will have four case studies of specific novels germane to the material.

On the other hand, apart from the inevitable appearance of Mr. Sherlock Holmes in this opening chapter, the work of male writers will be avoided.⁴ I make this difficult decision for reasons of giving space to those who have been relatively unappreciated, and in order to further a particular exploration of gender that I will outline in Chapter 2. For similar reasons The Sleuth and the Goddess is limited to print novels and will not embark upon treacherous excursions into film, TV, or digital versions of the genre. These powerful treatments are, by definition, put together differently, usually collectively, and therefore repay study that attempts to adjudicate their variations from the printed or audio book.

Most significant for The Sleuth and the Goddess will be a new argument about a haunting of our (post) Christian modern era with ancient mythical structures identified as pagan goddesses. Those especially scrutinized are Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Hestia. This introductory chapter will make a case for mysteries as goddess haunted in the sense of C.G. Jung’s assertion that “the gods have become diseases.”⁵ What were named gods and goddesses in ancient times are now to be found in our modern dis-ease, and, this book suggests, lurking in spaces where the pressure of the dominant paradigm is less overt, such as in margins of popular culture. As I will explore later in this chapter, in such overlooked and undervalued domains, detective fiction embodies the repetitive strategy of myths as structuring processes of the human psyche. Yet here at the beginning, no exploration of myth in women’s mysteries should fail to pay tribute to Christine A. Jackson’s groundbreaking Myth and Ritual in Women’s Detective Fiction (2002).⁶ This remarkable work pioneers research into myth and mysteries, in particular making a case for them to be treated as more than expositions of a formula.

Whodunits signify serious business in our death-repressed culture, and they deserve close scrutiny. Mysteries are not less than novels; they are full-fledged novels that happen to be mysteries.⁷

Jackson’s book differs from this one in that, while her focus is on mythological themes such as rebirth, the underworld, the wasteland, and the environs of hell, this book looks toward the realm of goddesses. Part of this differing emphasis stems from Jackson’s interest in Joseph Campbell’s more narrative approach to myth, which bears out her thesis about the ritual quality of these works. Oriented to consider goddesses as modes of knowing and being, The Sleuth and the Goddess will instead investigate how women’s mysteries incarnate multiple divinities in order to critique conventions. In doing so I suggest that mysteries offer something ancient to be renewed and reborn in the modern psyche.

Heroes Modern and Mythical

While the fictional detective appears to be a modern figure, “he” is also thousands of years old as the protagonist of a hero myth. Yet crucial to this book is the refusal to collapse the detective figure into the male protagonist of the hero monomyth famously examined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).⁸ Campbell’s monomyth hero is a young man who receives a call to adventure, battles a monster successfully, and finally receives his reward from a grateful community in the form of a valuable bride who secures his new role as a leader.⁹ Arguably such a myth resembles a male initiation rite at puberty more than the all-purpose development of an ego structure it is often taken to be.

Although some examples of detective fiction do indeed provide monsters in the form of grotesque criminality, the myth of the form is both more flexible and more precise. In a previous work, The Ecocritical Psyche, I suggested that the founding myth of detective fiction is that of the trickster, in which, most importantly, the tricky protagonist could stand for hero or villain or both.¹⁰ Indeed, The Ecocritical Psyche makes use of Lewis Hyde’s formidable work, Trickster Makes This World, to argue that, in Hyde’s terms, if the trickster myth emerged from archaic times when humans learned to hunt and be hunted, then modern detective fiction preserves and exposes us to that elemental structure of consciousness.¹¹

In possessing the trickster’s plural capacities, including that of varying gender traits and deceit, the detective hero reveals flexible trickster traits. In planting such protean qualities throughout mystery fiction as an identifiable genre with specific characteristics, the trickster as genre is more precise. Indeed, by positing the trickster myth as foundation in human evolution’s prehistory, this book suggests that it serves as bedrock for the various gods and goddesses of knowing that come after. Such a possibility also draws in detective fiction’s close relative of crime fiction, often considered to begin in Western literature with Aesop’s Fables, in which a trickster is profoundly at work.¹²

Given that detective or mystery fictions are always also crime stories, it matters that the reverse is not inevitably the case. Not all crime fiction involves a quest for truth that I take to be the necessary feature of mysteries. Moreover, strictly speaking the category of crime indicates a violation of law that could encompass such historically determined crimes as adultery and slander, whereas the modern mystery concentrates on the illegal killing of one or more human beings.

Most striking in the distinguishing of detective fiction from the larger category of crime fiction is the modern character of the figure questing for justice in the context of the relatively recent invention of a professional police force that protects society by upholding its laws. While Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey rightly asserts in the 1930 mystery, Strong Poison, that the modern sleuth inherits the medieval knight’s quest for justice, the distinctively contemporary quality of the detective on a hero’s quest is her or his relationship to the police.¹³

Once industrialization produced urban populations in the early nineteenth century, keeping order and solving crime could no longer be left to the military or privatized ventures.¹⁴ The arrival of police forces marked a shift, in that society was prepared for a hero who defends the law rather than celebrating tricky lawbreakers such as the elusive Robin Hood. Moreover, a further mark of modernity in the detective hero is her or his emergence contemporaneously with, and resemblance to, psychoanalysis, as invented by Sigmund Freud (1860¬1939), and later figures such as C.G. Jung (1875–1961).¹⁵ This book will use the term “depth psychology” to stand for theories that stress the importance of the unconscious to psychic functioning.

What links depth psychology to detective fiction is a similar sense of knowledge as a problem with tricky overtones, rather than something subject to wholly rational analysis. Both the detective and the psychoanalyst have to search for clues to a truth that is hidden from view. In both cases the truth sought for is of unknown extent. Both cultural forms additionally structure their quests in terms of seeking an ultimately narrative understanding of knowledge. This is to say that the revelation of “whodunit” is not enough; it is the process, the story of discovery, that embodies the true knowing of the genre, as I shall show.

Finally, both depth psychology and detective fiction partake in what has come to be known as “modernism,” a movement in the arts and sciences that by the end of the nineteenth century was challenging the dominance of rational modes of knowledge.¹⁶ What for historians had become a complex weave of colonial nations and for cultural critics the subsequent awareness of arts quite outside Western tradition, for scientists was discoveries undermining centuries of assumptions about the structure of matter. Modernism was an attempt to reinvent or re-figure Western assumptions of unquestioned superiority in its rational paradigms.

In this sense, the detective and the psychoanalyst are trying to save their world from within the complex trickiness of modern culture and psyche. By aiming to find out the truth about a murder or to uncover psychic trauma, mysteries and depth psychology both emphasize the importance of what is hidden and repressed to the modern self. Consequently, they both operate mythically in seeking out those stories that embody what has been lost to the modern person.

Therefore, The Sleuth and the Goddess brings together four core elements: the tricky detective or mystery genre, depth psychology excavating myths, urban cultures of modernism, and goddesses as modes of knowing. It is time to look a little further at that quintessentially modern male hero of detection who later haunts writers of either gender: Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes as Trickster and Dionysian Parent

In his very first story, “A Study in Scarlet” (1887), Sherlock Holmes meets Dr. Watson while preoccupied by discovering a test for blood. His quest for knowledge requires that he use his own body.¹⁷

Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it,” he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. “I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else.”…

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us…

“Let us have some fresh blood,” he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger and drawing off a drop of blood in a chemical pipette.¹⁸

From this seminal moment two images haunt the later detective genre, both of which are worth examining skeptically: the forensic nature of detecting and the masculine rationality of the sleuth. While it is undeniable that forensic science as an ingredient of police work is seeded in this scene, in such fictions as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) Holmes also champions the productive method of detecting, where his renowned presence starts a reaction in a group of characters that ultimately leads to finding the guilty party.¹⁹

Moreover, Holmes’s fixation on subjecting crimes to rational analysis is far from guaranteeing detecting as wholly masculine or predominantly rational, even for him. Living in a nurturing partnership with a man, Dr. Watson, Holmes’s detecting seems to require non¬rational sources such as mood-altering substances like tobacco and cocaine, and pursuit by means of myth in the eponymous “hound.” Of course the resemblance in the latter story between heroic detective and deviant criminal, Stapleton, also problematizes the supposedly rational opposition of good and evil. The trickster nature of Sherlock Holmes will be examined in the following case study, but first his dissecting habits merit further exploration.

In “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings,” psychologist and cultural critic James Hillman points out that C.G. Jung stresses “dismemberment” as his key feature in the many myths of the god Dionysus.²⁰ In fact, in the distinction between Apollo, the god of light, reason, and distance, and Dionysus, divine bringer of body and ecstasy, Hillman identifies a division between the preferences of rational modernity versus the succeeding age of deviance in modernism. In Jung’s dismemberment of the god, Hillman discerns a possibility of psychic renewal in the corporeal rending of an aging god. Apollonian Christianity, an era dominated by one god defined by distance and disembodiment, is to be followed by dismemberment in a mythic narrative.²¹

Jung sees a two-stage dismembering process: first comes a separation into opposites, such as the very notion of Apollonian and Dionysian itself. Opposition is then transformed into multiplicity, with a wider dispersal of the divine in matter, which both Jung and Hillman call archetypal. To Jung, archetypes are inherited potentials in the human psyche for certain sorts of images and meaning.²² They represent the possibility of many different modes of psychic functioning; or as Hillman later puts it, a polytheistic psyche in which the gods are diverse ways of being in the world.²³ Hillman also points out that this second stage of Dionysian dismemberment entails an entry into a different type of consciousness. We enter a new cosmos with the dispersed fragments of the body of the god.²⁴ Distance from the divine becomes interiority within t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One Introduction: Mythical Knowing and Detective Fiction
• Chapter Two The Goddesses for Women Writers Gendering the Genre: Gendering the Genre
• Chapter Three Hestia: Detecting Hearth and Home
• Chapter Four Hunting with Artemis
• Chapter Five Athena’s Justice
• Chapter Six The Mysteries of Aphrodite
• Chapter Seven The Nature of the Twenty-First Century: The Sleuth and the Goddess After 9/11
• Notes
• Subject Index
• Index of Works Cited
• Authors Index
• Subject Index