Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction

The Female Gentleman

M. Schaub

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137276957
• eBook ISBN: 9781137276964
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This is a feminist study of a recurring character type in classic British detective fiction by women - a woman who behaves like a Victorian gentleman. Exploring this character type leads to a new evaluation of the politics of classic detective fiction and the middlebrow novel as a whole.

1

Introduction: Middlebrow Women and Detective Fiction

In Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), the final full-length Lord Peter Wimsey novel, Dorothy L. Sayers explores in detail the dynamics of marriage between two professionals. After their first real fight, Harriet Vane apologizes to Lord Peter, her new husband, by vehemently rejecting any possibility that she will resort to the emotional and sexual tactics she has seen other women use:

‘“My husband would do anything for me. …” It’s degrading. No human being ought to have such power over another.’

‘It’s a very real power, Harriet.’

‘Then,’ she flung back passionately, ‘we won’t use it. If we disagree, we’ll fight it out like gentlemen. We won’t stand for matrimonial blackmail.’¹

Harriet’s desire to fight like a gentleman makes explicit a common thread in similar novels by British women of the early twentieth century. Recurring characters like Harriet Vane, Ngaio Marsh’s Agatha Troy, Agatha Christie’s Tuppence Beresford, Margery Allingham’s Amanda Fitton, and dozens of non-recurring characters in all these women’s novels – plus those of Georgette Heyer and other middlebrow authors of the period – all distinguish themselves as heroines by acting like gentlemen. Not all use the word explicitly, but all embody a remarkably consistent code of behavior and set of personality traits. This frequently occurring character type, which I will call the Female Gentleman, is a representative example of the unrecognized feminism of middlebrow British novels; their aspirations can still be relevant to readers today.

During the years after World War I, British cultural norms in the areas of gender and class changed radically. Fiction of the era changed in response, both in form and in content. The history of literary modernism’s response to social change has been frequently rehearsed and well documented; in general, highbrow authors followed a pattern of withdrawal from mass culture and social change, and promoted instead an image of the artist as an isolated, visionary figure whose politics were, if anything, conservative. But high literary modernism comprises only a small fraction of the novelistic production of the era. Writers working in popular forms like the mystery or romance differed sharply from their more avant-garde contemporaries not only in their attitudes toward changing social norms, but also in their style and tone. Mystery novels by women, in particular, took on an interesting and repeated set of similarities in form and content, combining a light ironic tone with a consistently ambiguous feminism. If Andreas Huyssen is right that mass culture was the feminized ‘other’ of high modernism,² then female novelists such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Georgette Heyer were very other indeed. Their otherness has been reproduced in scholarship, as relatively few literary historians have investigated the authors I will examine here. Some good work on ‘middlebrow’ forms has been done, but with more emphasis on American authors than on British ones. Histories of detective fiction, meanwhile, tend to dismiss the so-called Golden Age³ novels of these female authors as too conservative and conventional to be literary, giving more attention to the American hard-boiled category. Nevertheless, British women mystery novelists are worth attending to; their amalgamation of forward-looking gender politics with backward-looking class politics is unique. In volume after volume, these novels depict a consistent ideal of female behavior, a feminist reappropriation of the Victorian ideal of middle-class masculinity. The Female Gentleman unites old ideas about class with new ideas about gender, in a combination that sheds light on today’s feminisms. Because the tone of these Golden Age mystery novels is so much more like that of contemporary speech than any literary modernist novel is, I believe that Sayers, Christie, and their peers are more likely to influence today’s readers who pick up their books than Joyce and Lawrence are, and because of their wide and ongoing distribution in print, it is important to understand exactly what that influence might be.

The first step in understanding the influence of these novels is clarifying their social background. I would argue, against the grain of modern scholarship, that the central class concept of popular British culture of the interwar period was that of the ‘gentleman’. Many commentators on the concept of the ‘gentleman’ in British society have felt that by the 1920s the idea was dead, democratized out of existence. This is a common thread in histories of gentlemanliness that span the Renaissance to the late Victorian era, which all tend to trace a similar narrative. A word that began as a strict indicator of rank – ‘gentle’ meaning well-born or of good blood – became more complicated through its application in the eighteenth century to moral qualities as well as class position. The rise of the middle class was facilitated by their annexation of the term gentleman, as they altered it to express virtues of behavior and manner rather than those of family or rank.⁴ During the nineteenth century, the conflicts between the two ways of defining the gentleman were a fruitful source of literary material, and also key to the transformation of British society. The fact that many people were able to call themselves gentlemen and so identify with the interests of the upper classes allowed Britain to avoid a revolution and assimilate the industrial nouveau riche and the lower middle classes into a new class structure for society, according to many commentators. But the process of broadening the term gentleman accelerated so quickly by the end of the century that shop clerks were claiming it, and most historians end their narratives at this point: ‘The English gentleman did not die, or simply fade away; he was overtaken by social inflation.’⁵ However, this is a limited view, perhaps inevitable because literary scholars who study gentlemanliness tend to be Victorian specialists; class has been much less interesting a concept to scholars of modernism. But while ‘gentleman’ may have become a contested term after World War I, every interwar British novel still operates under its shadow, even when the word itself is not explicitly invoked. Gentlemanliness was still a desired state, and middlebrow novelists used its desirability to leverage their vision of women’s progress by co-opting it for their own use. After World War II, there was a far more profound shift in British thinking about class; when ‘gentleman’ lost its last vestige of desirability, sometime in the 1950s, women authors stopped writing Female Gentleman novels.⁶

At the same time that the class structure of English society was undergoing radical shifts, gender roles were changing as well. The self-conscious high culture split from mass culture that Huyssen calls the ‘great divide’ relied on an explicit othering of textual productions deemed to be inferior and feminine. Avant-garde experimentation with both formal conventions and language itself has been largely accepted today as the hallmark of ‘modernism’. Such literary experimentalism was regarded for many decades as a masculine pursuit, and the accepted canon of modernist authors was largely male.⁷ Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have depicted avant-garde experimentalism as a ‘reaction-formation of intensified misogyny with which male writers greeted the entrance of women into the literary marketplace’ in the late nineteenth century, a reaction-formation of ‘murderous intensity’.⁸ But an array of feminist scholars has, largely successfully, broken up this closed canon and argued for the centrality of gender to the creation of modernism’s signature literary forms, including its linguistic experimentation, which can be seen as radically feminine. The ambiguity depends largely on which literary techniques of high modernism one sees as central to the form: the ‘cool, tough detachment’ in attitude, or the ‘indeterminacy, multiplicity, and fragmentation’ that can lead one to associate the modernist style with écriture féminine.⁹ High modernists’ ‘anxiety of contamination’¹⁰ by feminized mass culture, exacerbated by the blows to masculine identity delivered by the Great War, resulted in many modernist texts that were aggressively masculine, and just as many that seem féminine instead. The detachment that marks many high modernist texts can sometimes turn into irony, but far more often the tone of these novels is ‘haunted’.¹¹ From Stephen Dedalus’ vision of hell, to Septimus Smith’s shell shock hallucinations, modernism’s tone is lyrical, intense, and ghostly, both women and men haunted by the scars of their battle of the sexes, as well as the battles of World War I.

That ‘haunted’ or ‘murderous’ intensity is not present in the novels I examine in this study – even though most of them are murder mysteries. The transformations of class and gender that shaped high modernism operated equally on less highbrow writing, but with very different results. Middlebrow cultural productions represented the new gender norms after World War I with the same rational detachment that highbrow authors did, but with considerably more irony – comical rather than lyrically intense or haunted. Many scholars of detective fiction have noted the playful quality of Golden Age mysteries when contrasted with the darker crime fiction of today’s authors; but that playful tone is common to much fiction of the period, not just detective fiction. The difference in tone maps onto a significant difference in politics as well. In The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, Nicola Humble describes the new gender norms: ‘The new man of this moment rejected the old masculine values of gravitas and heroism in favour of frivolity and an effete and brittle manner. The new woman took on the practicality and emotional control once the province of the male: she was competent, assured, and unemotional.’¹² The most interesting feature of this new ideal of women’s behavior is that it so closely resembles the older ideal of gentlemanliness that World War I was said to have destroyed, especially in the area of emotional self-control. In other words, in the works of mystery, romance, and other middlebrow novelists, moderately feminist women of the 1920s through the 1950s were urged to act like gentlemen.

The ‘effeteness’ of male detectives in Golden Age novels has been frequently noted in works on detective fiction, leading many scholars of detective fiction to see the novels of Christie and company as ‘feminized’¹³ and therefore culturally conservative. This designation essentially reproduces the cultural politics of avant-garde highbrow modernism, as one subcategory of middlebrow fiction is deemed to be less authentic, groundbreaking, or radical than another, based on dubious gender politics. Most older detective fiction criticism completely embraced the common but facile equation of ‘feminine’ with ‘conservative’, and more recent feminist scholars have not been as successful in overturning the resulting faulty judgment of middlebrow women authors as they have with highbrow modernists. Middlebrow genre fiction displays no exaggerated alienation from society, but that does not make it less important than either high modernism or the hard-boiled American private-eye novels preferred by many scholars of detective fiction.

Like most middlebrow writers, the authors I will examine were popular and influential in their own day, despite the scathing reviews of high-culture critics. Perhaps more significantly, all the novelists I have named have continued to be popular, in both England and America.¹⁴ None of them has ever been out of print since first being published,¹⁵ and all of their novels are periodically reissued by various publishers in paperback. Georgette Heyer has been especially influential because she founded a particular subgenre of romance novel, the Regency romance; the current authors of this subgenre all follow to varying degrees the formula laid down by Heyer, the ‘queen of the Regency romance’ (as Harper proclaimed her on the covers of their early 1990s era reprints). A later Harlequin reprint series carried forewords written by contemporary Regency romance novelists, introducing Heyer to the 1990s reader, and discussing Heyer’s influence on their own early reading and writing. Given the number of bestselling authors Harlequin was able to find for this series, it is clear that Heyer’s principles have had influence well beyond her own oeuvre. Dorothy L. Sayers also influenced other writers, through her role as a founding member of the Detection Club (a social organization of mystery authors founded in the late 1920s in London, and still in existence today) and her frequent essays about the art of detective writing, found in introductions to collections and in articles for the popular press. More broadly, the genres in which these authors wrote, the detective novel and the romance, have been the most popular genres among adult readers from the beginning of the twentieth century to the end.¹⁶

I myself read works by most of these authors as a teenager, long before I encountered any high literary modernist. I love Virginia Woolf with the intellectual love of an adult, but I love Georgette Heyer with the deeply passionate emotional attachment reserved for the favorite texts of one’s youth. I suspect that Heyer had a much more formative influence on my character, for precisely that reason. Clive Bloom’s definition of the difference between popular fiction and literary fiction makes clear why this should be; in Bestsellers, he argues that ‘Art fiction highlights its style, delights in it and makes of style a fetish. Popular fiction neutralises style … and delights in making language invisible’ so that it ‘releases a desire in language to become the very life that is being portrayed by it’.¹⁷ Popular fiction, then, by its very nature, will effect more direct changes in the lives of its readers than literary fiction can, because literary fiction always focuses at least as much attention on its construction and language as it does on its characterization. While I would argue that all realist fiction, including ‘art fiction’, influences its readers by making its world seem so real that readers act as if they had become a part of it, I certainly do agree that characterization is one of the most important means by which it does so, and Female Gentleman novels rely heavily on characterization and dialogue for their effects.

There is a second central technique of realist fiction, however: irony. The subtleties of narrative point of view in popular fiction are poorly accounted for by binary models like Huyssen’s or Bloom’s that leave no room for a middle position between high culture and mass or popular culture. Yet modernist authors themselves recognized the influence of those middlebrow cultural productions, even while deploring it. To be middlebrow is to be more than simply a bit more serious than other popular novels. Like other middlebrow fiction of the early twentieth century, Female Gentleman novels relish language for its tonal properties, exploring irony and wit in all their different permutations. Only rarely do they pursue their liking for ellipsis and irony to the extent of becoming as opaque as their high modernist contemporaries, for to do so is to risk losing their audience; of the five main authors in my study, Margery Allingham, who was the most prone to linguistic experimentation, is also the least known today. But neither do they ever let language disappear into invisibility. I will examine both mysteries and romances in the course of this study, and I hope to be able to treat them seriously as literature, but not so seriously that their language becomes a fetish obscuring their effect in the world.

Part of my motivation for this investigation is the same as Janice Radway’s for her seminal study of American middlebrow novels, A Feeling for Books.¹⁸ She devotes the first chapter of that investigation to a personal reading history, probing the intense emotional conflict caused by her love of the Book-of-the-Month Club novels she read in her youth and the scorn with which her graduate school professors and fellow students referred to such texts. I know that I am not the only feminist literary scholar who started life reading mysteries, science fiction, and romances, and who feels a sneaking shame over it. One male graduate school friend of mine said dismissively that he had read all of Agatha Christie’s novels in high school, but hadn’t been able to find her interesting since then. I have never yet met a literary scholar who will admit to having read Georgette Heyer at any age. I began this study by trying to determine whether I became a schola...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Middlebrow Women and Detective Fiction
• 2 Victorian Contexts: Failed Gentlemen and New Women
• 3 Anatomy of the Female Gentleman
• 4 Conclusion: Assessing the Female Gentleman
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index