Tattoos in crime and detective narratives

Marking and remarking

Kate Watson, Katharine Cox, Kate Watson, Katharine Cox

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526128676
• eBook ISBN: 9781526128690
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Tattoos in crime and detective narratives examines representations of the tattoo and tattooing in literature, television and film, from two periods of tattoo renaissance (1851-1914, and c1955 to present). It makes an original contribution to understandings of crime and detective genre and the ways in which tattoos act as a mimetic device that marks and remarks these narratives in complex ways. With a focus on tattooing as a bodily narrative, the book incorporates the critical perspectives of posthumanism, spatiality, postcolonialism, embodiment and gender studies. The grouped essays examine the first tattoo renaissance, the rebirth of the tattoo in contemporary culture through literature, children's literature, film and television. The collection has a broad appeal, and will be of interest to all literature and media scholars, but in particular those with an interest in crime and detective narratives and skin studies.

PART 1

Psychoanalysis, patternings and the medical imagination

1

A knot of bodies: The tattoo as navel in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘V.V.: Or, plots and counterplots’

Alexander N. Howe

INTRODUCTION

The public image of Louisa May Alcott was changed forever in 1943 when Leona Rostenberg published her essay, ‘Some anonymous and pseudonymous thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott’, in the Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America. In this work, Rostenberg announced to the world that Louisa May Alcott, beloved author of Little women (1868), named the ‘children’s friend’, in fact published numerous stories of intrigue anonymously (and under a variety of pseudonyms) until 1868 when she turned her energies almost exclusively to more lucrative markets. The unearthing of these thrillers began in earnest after the Second World War, but it was not until 1975 that any of the works saw print again, and the recovery was ongoing over the next two decades until Madeleine Stern published a volume of the Collected thrillers in 1995. The revelation of this secret publishing history is obviously tantalising for biographical criticism that would read Alcott, a celebrated nineteenth-century feminist figure, as bristling under the strictures of Victorian decorum – both within the publishing world and without.

Certainly, in Alcott’s journals and correspondence there is evidence of the secret pleasure she takes in writing the thrillers, narratives that stand quite apart from the ‘moral pap for the young’ (Alcott qtd Cheney 2010: 296), as she described her later work. She once claimed that her ‘natural ambition is for the lurid style’ of ‘blood and thunder tales’, which might feature ‘Indians, pirates, wolves, bears, & distressed damsels in a grand tableau’ (qtd Smith 2000: 45). While such comments suggest the common trappings of adventure and intrigue, the ‘damsels’ depicted in these tales are not-so-distressed and are hardly reducible to genre fiction of the time. In this way, the thrillers are a major landmark in the history of crime fiction in North America, although Alcott’s achievement on this score remains largely unacknowledged. In this chapter, I will analyse one of the perhaps better-known Alcott thrillers: ‘V.V.: Or, plots and counterplots’, first published in 1865 in The flag of our Union under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard.¹ This story of a spurned woman seeking revenge upon the aristocratic family that has wronged her is remarkable for a number of reasons, particularly for scholars of crime fiction, as we find what Nickerson has claimed is the first example of a detective in American women’s writing (Nickerson 1998: 23). However, of equal interest is a tattoo on the body of the villainess, Virginie Varens, which is used to make what initially appears to be a definitive identification that ensures apprehension and punishment. Alcott muddies the waters of this common narrative trajectory significantly, a gesture that problematises any final marking – and thus knowing – of the woman. Virginie’s tattoo in fact serves as the navel of the story, in the sense spoken of by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman and others – that is, a tangled knot of signification that remains impenetrable to interpretation. The navel marks that point where signification traumatically touches the body, yet in this tangle the body likewise speaks through its disruption of narrative. Alcott engages this disruption by embodying Virginie incessantly and inscrutably throughout the story, thus proleptically marking the limits of the detective’s knowledge and the limits of the emergent detective genre.

GENDER AND GENRE: HYBRIDITY AND DETECTION IN THE ALCOTT THRILLERS

At the level of genre, the thrillers might be understood, initially, in terms of sensational fiction of the nineteenth century. The latter very often depicts a violent and lurid public space that reveals the idyll of the private space of the home to be a fiction. Sensational fiction is thus a sort of seamy underside of domestic fiction, although these two genres of course share the common strategy of engaging a reader’s emotions rather than intellect. The intended audience of sensational writing was both men and women of the working class, and unsurprisingly working-class politics are frequently present in such tales. Importantly, in addition to introducing working-class men as protagonists, sensational fiction likewise often presents active women who are voracious and irrepressible. Alcott’s thrillers certainly fit the bill on this score; however, these stories are far from formulaic potboilers. A good deal of the criticism of these stories has emanated from a biographical perspective that embraces a feminist re-interpretation of the author. This approach often limits the genre discussion to the modes of domesticity, sentimentalism and sensational literature, with little consideration of Alcott’s unique voice as a crime writer (Watson 2012: 85). On the contrary, as Kate Watson argues, ‘[Alcott] inverted the domestic and sentimental novel and her crime-inflected stories do not efface her criminal/discursive tracks by conventionally punishing the (usually female) wrong-doer/“criminal”’ (ibid.). The sensationalism of Alcott’s thrillers blurs the distinction between public and private spaces with violence – both literal and symbolic –perpetrated by strong women characters who are, in several instances, little murderers; and as Watson suggests, justice often remains wanting.

The settings of these stories are often exotic locales derived solely from Alcott’s own imagination and reading. While these distant settings are in keeping with the weekly magazines in which these stories appeared, as are Alcott’s ‘exotic’ (or implausible) plots, this expanse is at the same time appropriate to the dominant theme of the thrillers, which is identity in crisis. It is not incidental, then, that Alcott foregrounds the act of detection in the thrillers. While detective fiction continued to be dismissed as a conservative genre in academic circles, Alcott was a savvy enough reader of Edgar Allan Poe to recognise the possibilities of critique inherent in tales of sleuthing. Much like Poe, Alcott often pairs gothic elements with detection, always with a deliberate focus on the act of reading.² Consequently, at the level of genre, the Alcott thrillers are hybrid texts that are as complex as they are engaging. Catherine Ross Nickerson has elaborated upon the intersection of detection and the gothic genre, particularly within early American women’s detective stories (Nickerson 1998: 8). Her account interestingly examines the trope of the ‘unspeakable’ that the famous gothic critic Eve Sedgwick identifies, a device that is often linked to uncanny repetitions and the power of language as incantation or curse. To these ends, Sedgwick speaks of ‘a kind of despair about any direct use of language’ (Sedgwick 1980: 13) that is common to the gothic genre. Rather than exposing or illuminating, words only further mask and equivocate. This is precisely the presentation of language in the Alcott thrillers and ‘V.V.: Or, plots and counterplots’ in particular, which focuses upon the act of reading – and mis-reading. Cleverly, Alcott uses a tattoo upon the wrist of the villainess of the story to assay the limits of reference and determination from the framework of a detective narrative.

TATTOOS AND TEXTUALITY

While tattoos as identifying marks appear frequently enough in nineteenth-century literature, it is productive to briefly consider Alcott alongside her fellow dark romanticist Herman Melville. In Moby-Dick; Or, the whale (1851), Melville uses the tattoos of the harpooner Queequeg as identifying marks; and while these remain ‘hieroglyphic’ in nature, they are nonetheless discernible and representative of the sailor’s experience. The tattoos are alternately referred to as a ‘complete theory’, a ‘mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth’ and a ‘wondrous work in one volume’ (Melville 1981: 441), and thus they offer a harmonious synthesis of the harpooner’s mind, body and story – just as Ahab’s disfigurement suggests his contrasting disharmony and rage. While Ishmael assures the reader that ‘what you see is what you get’ with Queequeg, as his story is literally tattooed upon his forehead, clearly Melville’s greater project within Moby-Dick is an excursion into the limits of textuality to capture experience in a perfectly transparent fashion. Here it is wise to remember that, contrary to popular belief, Moby-Dick actually begins with the word ‘etymology’. With this gesture, Melville forcefully reminds the reader that language is the result of a process and history. Meaning is not divine or inherent in things; rather, meaning is the result of reading and interpretation. Queequeg’s marks may in fact be readable, but they must be deciphered and thus interpreted; they cannot, then, function in a straightforwardly indexical fashion.³

However, in Alcott’s story, the ‘V.V.’ tattoo initially presents itself as exactly such an index, and here it is perhaps helpful to move more squarely into the realm of detective fiction, albeit nearer the end of the nineteenth century, with a comparison to Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing. Tattoos appear only sparingly in the Sherlock Holmes opus, although their use provides a definitive mark of identification. In A study in scarlet (1887), for example, a tattoo is the obvious sign missed by Watson in the midst of one of Holmes’s dazzling displays of method. In this case, the mark allows the detective to identify a sergeant of the marines from across the street. In the later well-known story ‘The adventure of the red-headed league’ (1891), the small pink fish tattoo on Jabez Wilson’s wrist allows the detective to amaze Watson and Wilson with his powers of perception. Holmes even admits to having ‘made a small study of tattoo marks’ and claims to have ‘contributed to the literature of the subject’ (Doyle 2005: 44a). Amusingly, as is often the case, Wilson is suddenly struck with the simplicity of Holmes’s insight, to which Holmes responds ‘[o]mne ignotum pro magnifico’ (2005: 44a) and then suggests that it is perhaps best to not give up his secrets. In this instance, the colour of the tattoo unmistakably indicated that Wilson had travelled to China, which in turn suggests details about his occupation. It is truly simplicity itself, as Holmes often claims, and while ‘The adventure of the red-headed league’ is largely comic in nature, Holmes’s assessment of the simplicity of reading the tattoo perhaps ought to be taken seriously. With the tattoo, X does indeed mark the spot – something that is often quite vexing to the individual in question. The third instance of a tattoo in Holmes’s stories speaks to this danger. In ‘The adventure of the Gloria Scott’ (1893), the individual in question, Mr Trevor, has actually gone to great lengths to obscure what he claims are the initials of a former love he had tattooed on his arm. As he says, rather poetically, ‘[the tattoo’s meaning] is just as you say. But we won’t talk of it. Of all ghosts, the ghosts of our old loves are the worst’ (Doyle 2005a: 507).⁴ Here again, the tattoo apparently gives away, with great ease, a past bond with another and a former self that the bearer wishes to leave behind. The fact that these initials refer to Mr Trevor’s original name does not undermine this view. The tattoo functions as a mark that binds its possessor to a given narrative; the mark upon the body does not lie. Given only three references to tattoos in the Holmes canon, one wonders if the tattoo was potentially ‘too simple’ a trick even for the positivist Holmes. At the very least, the great detective’s application of the tattoo as identificatory mark was certainly far too literal.

Frances Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe similarly analyse tattoos in literature, departing from Franz Kafka’s ‘In the penal colony’ (1919), and posit that these marks suggest a unified body that exists outside culture. Culture writes upon the body (just as the apparatus does in Kafka’s tale), inscribing it and thus limiting it to a particular social function and narrative. For men, in particular, tattoos likewise serve as a mark of a more permanent identity, something that becomes particularly appealing in a time when more traditional rites of passage fail to offer points of stable identification (Mascia-Lees and Sharpe 1992: 153–54). While this may be true for men, women on the contrary are frequently tattooed or branded to establish ownership, as is seemingly the case with Virginie Varens’s tattoo, ‘V.V.’, where the second ‘V’ links her to her plundering cousin. This domination and arbitrary ownership are emphasised all the more by her subsequent pairing with Colonel Vane (though admittedly this relationship does not end in marriage). The tattoo marks Virginie as the property of either man. The men are as interchangeable as their initials, just as Virginie is interchangeable as a trophy or object of pleasure. Llewellyn Negrin has likewise analysed the potentially stabilising effects of the tattoo in response to changing notions of the self and fashion, especially for women, during the nineteenth century. When dress becomes a matter of choice and aspiration rather than a mark of an immobile identity and defined attributes, fashion is ‘undercoded’ and opens itself to an interchangeability of meaning (Negrin 2008: 10). Varens’s play with dress and disguise, and of course the brand of ownership he...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Psychoanalysis, patternings and the medical imagination
• Part 2: Practitioners, place and contemporary identities
• Part 3: Urban textualities, humans and other animals
• Part 4: Children’s literature: Dark marks, scars and secret societies
• Part 5: Film: Adaptation, memory and constructions of self
• Part 6: Television: Branding, tech-noir and fan culture
• Index