Sarah Fairbanks, a spinster of twenty-nine, is the fascinating narrator/suspect/investigator of this murder story. Her father has been shot dead, probably—according to a professional detective who offers her his help—by someone with an arm abnormally long enough to open the door from the outside. Her neighbors15 are two elderly unmarried dressmakers who have lived together since girlhood, Phoebe dominating the timid Maria. It is they who point the finger of suspicion at Sarah herself, suggesting that she killed her father because he was standing in the way of her marriage. Sarah does not return the favor by accusing Phoebe, not even when she discovers that her father recently got Maria to change her mind (after rejecting him forty years ago) and agree to marry him. She cannot believe Phoebe is the killer, even when she notices the woman’s arm is “seven inches longer” than Sarah’s own. (This suggests that Phoebe has a hint of the ape about her, and the “seven inches” is strikingly phallic too.) “There is no motive,” Sarah continues to insist; as a spinster whose whole community has turned against her, she may identify too strongly with Phoebe and Maria to let herself see through the façade of their Boston marriage. Like many fictions16 of desire between women, “The Long Arm” is an epistemological puzzle: the knowledge of lesbianism is constantly evaded and postponed, until Phoebe—seizing the power of narration from Sarah in a two-page confession—chooses to explain her motive herself.
I stopped it17 [the marriage] once before. This time I knew I couldn’t unless I killed him. She’s lived with me in that house for over forty years. There are other ties as strong as the marriage one, that are just as sacred. What right had he to take her away from me and break up my home?
Still in some denial, Sarah turns not to sexological science but to the older discourse of religion to make sense of these “other ties”: she blames Phoebe’s jealousy on “demoniacal possession.” But actually Phoebe sounds remarkably self-possessed: it is as if she is relieved to declare herself as the killer, in what we could also call a coming-out speech. Hauled off to prison, however, she pines away and dies in a month, leaving Maria—as if being punished for her dithering—bereft of either kind of marriage, the official or the unofficial kind.
“The Long Arm” is often contrasted with a piece Mary Wilkins published eight years earlier, “Two Friends” (1887). In this benign domestic comedy, as in the murder story, a devoted partnership between two middle-aged spinsters is overshadowed by an old secret. Thirty years ago, Sarah was at the deathbed of Abby’s mother, and heard her give permission for her daughter to marry John Marshall. The crime Sarah confesses now, in the face of Abby’s own serious illness, is that she was too greedily possessive of her beloved to pass the message on: “I couldn’t have her18 likin’ anybody else, an’ gittin’ married.” The joke of the story—the happy ending, despite Abby’s aproaching death—is that the threat was an illusion, and so the crime was no crime:
The poor sick woman laughed out, with a charming, gleeful ring.
A look of joyful wonder flashed over Sarah’s despairing face. She stood staring.
“Sarah,” said Abby, “I wouldn’t have had John Marshall if he’d come on his knees after me all the way from Mexico!”
Wilkins was writing19 from personal experience, having lived with her childhood friend Mary Wales (and Wales’s family) for four years already when she wrote “Two Friends.” But for three years she had known a businessman called Charles Freeman, and in 1889 she would agree to their engagement; they finally married (with Mary Wales as witness) in 1902. The marriage was overshadowed by his alcoholism, and ended after a few years when she had him committed to an asylum. When she wrote “The Long Arm” in 1895, reusing the name of the possessive partner (Sarah) for the narrator this time, she was reworking a rivals plotline in a new, darker light. But as Lillian Faderman20 points out, the abyss that separates “Two Friends” from “The Long Arm” may be attributed not only to the changes in Freeman’s life, but to the seismic shift in interpretations of love between women around the Alice Mitchell murder trial of 1892 (discussed in chapter 4), which was a clear influence on the story of “The Long Arm.”
A very similar plot shapes the last Miss Marple mystery Agatha Christie wrote, Nemesis (1971, first serialized in Woman’s Realm). A young man called Michael has already served ten years for the brutal murder of his girlfriend Verity. The investigation brings the elderly sleuth to a sinister house of three sisters—one widow, two spinsters—and it turns out that one of them, the handsome and learned Clotilde, took the orphaned Verity in, at eighteen, as a beloved protégée. Miss Marple, discovering that Verity and Michael had been on the point of getting married, manages to look past the cliché of the brutish man who kills the woman he desires—to the possessive woman who kills the girl she is about to lose to a man, and frames him for it. “You loved Verity21 too much,” Miss Marple tells Clotilde bluntly. She sees it as inevitable that the girl should have tried “to escape from the burden of the bondage of love she was living in with you,” as she explains with uncharacteristically awkward grammar. Maurice Richardson, writing in The Observer on October 31, 1971, particularly relished this scene in which the aged sleuth, “alone in bed, quite defenceless with not even a knitting-needle…is confronted by a brawny great fiend of a butch.” But Christie has a subtler take on Clotilde than her reviewer; ultimately Miss Marple judges Clotilde not as a monster (the way the police do), but—even before her suicide with drugged milk—as a “poor, lost soul,” haunted for ten years by the beautiful girl buried in her garden. The crime is shown as springing not from malice but from the unbearable pressure of an ill-defined, only semirequited love between two women of different generations. Across eight decades, what links the killers of “The Long Arm” and Nemesis is that neither has a socially legitimate language in which to insist Don’t marry him, stay with me. Their jealousy, partially gagged, finds expression in murder.
Interestingly,22 it is not always the domineering member of the couple who does the killing; sometimes the meeker woman is the one who lashes out. Death of a Doll (1948)—the best of the four novels that “Hilda Lawrence” (Hildegarde Kronmiller) published in her fifties, before lapsing into silence again—is a subtle and atmospheric thriller set in a hostel for New York workingwomen. The sweet-natured Miss Angeline Small (her names suggesting virtue and timidity) has a passionate relationship with the older, richer manager, Miss Monica Brady, which has promoted her from a boarder almost to the status of a partner in the boardinghouse. “Angel” and “Monny” exchange loving notes during the day, meet for cocoa every night, and are planning to resign their exhausting jobs and go off to live in Europe together as soon as Monny’s inheritance comes in. “Does anybody23 in the world have one half as much fun as we do?” cries Angel. Hilda Lawrence misleads readers about this relationship by presenting Monny as the dominant giver of orders and of treats, Angel as the childlike, lower-class one who takes the marshmallow out of her cocoa when Monny expresses disapproval. However, she does drop hints that point the other way: “Everybody thinks you’re the strong one,” Angel tells Monny, “but I am.” The detective who comes to investigate the death of a girl called Ruth is bewildered by this strange environment; in one nightmarish party scene, the girls all dress up as identical masked dolls, like interchangable ghosts who haunt the corridors. And he misunderstands the bond between the manager and her partner, because he assumes that it is Monny’s money Angel is after. It is only when he learns to take their passion seriously that he can figure out killer and motive: the saccharine Angel murdered Ruth to avoid being exposed to Monny as a shoplifter with a prison record, because she feared losing Monny’s love.
In P. D. James’s claustrophobic mystery Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), Detective Adam Dalgliesh invades the closed world of a nurses’ residence to solve a series of murders, much more confident than his opposite number in Death of a Doll of his ability to interpret the emotional terrain. Ironically, it is his modern awareness of what can go on between women that knocks hi
m off course; titillated, he pays most attention to the overtly sexual involvement between the man-hating Sister Rolfe and the promiscuous bisexual Julia Pardoe. But it is a red herring; he should really be looking at the much quieter, pseudomarital bond between the boring Sister Brumfett and the beautiful Matron. Brumfett’s knowledge of Matron’s Nazi past has the effect of a loaded gun, winning her a cozy intimacy with her beloved: as Dalgliesh comments wryly when he finally figures it out, “A more orthodox blackmailer,24 merely demanding a regular tax-free income, would have been infinitely preferable to Brumfett’s intolerable devotion.” This unholy yoking drives both women to murder—Brumfett to kill various people, in a deranged attempt to protect her beloved from exposure, and Matron to finally throw off Brumfett’s suffocating embrace by killing her and making it look like suicide. Love not only involves blackmail, in Shroud for a Nightingale; it is blackmail.
IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE
Interestingly, Dalgliesh figures out the complex affiliations in the closed world of Shroud for a Nighingale only with the help of his informants and friends, the birdlike Miss Beale and the sturdy Miss Burrows, who have spent their adult lives in mutual devotion, each convinced that her partner is an exceptional nurse: “The happiest marriages,”25 P. D. James jokes urbanely, “are sustained by such comforting illusions.” In the same way, the male detective in Death of a Doll is aided by two amateur sleuths: an eccentric, squabbling pair of women in their sixties. Hilda Lawrence seems to be including a benign image of lesbianism to set in the scales against the sinister twosome at the heart of her story. But by making their male detectives rely on the insights of female couples, both authors may also be implying that love between women is a knot that only knowledgeable insiders can untangle.
This pattern is particularly striking in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Unnatural Death (1927). Both Agatha Dawson and the grandniece, Mary Whittaker, who murders her live in rural female couples, but of different generations and kinds: Agatha in a fifty-year Victorian idyll as “domestic partner”26 (i.e., housewife) to a mannish horsebreeder, Mary in a stormy relationship with an infatuated girl called Vera. To probe these subtleties, the sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey has to call on the experience of his female assistant, Miss Climpson. But the subject is a fraught one for her; she describes herself defensively as “a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman.” After some preliminary investigation she derides Vera’s feelings for Mary as a “‘pash’ (as we used to call it at school)” and pronounces their plan to set up a chicken farm together (shades of Lawrence’s The Fox, published just five years earlier) as “unhealthy” on the basis of having “seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence!” Tactfully, Miss Climpson makes absolutely sure Lord Peter—and of course the readers—know she is talking about lesbianism by mentioning Clemence Dane’s “very clever book on the subject,” i.e., Regiment of Women (1917). Overinvested in this particular case, Miss Climpson soon goes beyond her sleuthing duties and starts trying to save young Vera. Here Sayers’s persistent interest in the subject of relationships between women causes her to go off on a tangent and give us six whole pages of a conversation in which the girl boasts that she is “absolutely happy together” with her beloved Mary, and Miss Climpson counters that it would be “more natural—more proper, in a sense” to feel this for a man. It is significant that the normally cogent Miss Climpson is almost stuttering at this point, and finds it impossible to spell out exactly what she means or ask Vera directly whether she and Mary have become lovers.
Later, when she just so happens to come across some words Vera has scribbled down in preparation for the Roman Catholic sacrament of confession, Miss Climpson extrapolates from them an elaborate proof that Mary has seduced and then dumped her girlfriend.
Humiliating,27 degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearing of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred. “Beastly, blood-sucking woman,” said Miss Climpson viciously.
This paragraph is a strange excess, in a book that is otherwise witty and worldly. It is not so much a summary of the relationship as an associative swarm of possibilities: a nightmare world of lesbian abandonment (in both senses). With its alliteration, its piling-up of hackneyed adjectives—“beastly,” “blood-sucking,” and “barren”—it sounds rather as if it has been badly translated from the Anglo-Saxon. Ultimately, it tells us less about Mary and Vera than about what Miss Climpson herself may have endured in her own “WOMAN-RIDDEN existence.”
It is very suggestive that Mary’s method of killing her great-aunt turns out to have been the injection of an air bubble into her bloodstream. “There’s nothing28 in that,” insists Mary when she is shown the empty syringe. The weapon in this very “unnatural death” is a mere absence, undetectable except to educated eyes—much like lesbianism, you might say. Sayers’s original title for Unnatural Death was The Singular Case of the Three Spinsters, but that was an underestimate: the novel has at least five significant spinsters, who could be categorized along affectional axes (the four woman-loving ones vs. the insistently heterosexual Miss Climpson) or moral ones (the two good Victorians and Miss Climpson vs. the hapless Vera and the wicked Mary). Working as a copywriter during this period, Dorothy Sayers is popularly credited with having invented the catchphrase “It pays to advertise,” and certainly the title she finally decided on, Unnatural Death, advertises the novel’s chief preoccupation. The paperback reprint in the homophobic 1950s bore the more discreet title The Dawson Pedigree, which nonetheless does manage to suggest a sort of lesbian line of descent, from Agatha’s Boston marriage to Mary’s sordid Bloomsbury-flat scenes.
So a male detective is often provided with female assistants who have insight (whether placid or paranoid) into relationships between women. But for the first novel that puts a sapphic sleuth in the lead role, we must go…no, not forward, but all the way back to the mid–nineteenth century. To the title that has been called the first thriller, in fact: Wilkie Collins’s masterpiece The Woman in White (1860). A sensation on first publication—bonnets, cloaks, perfumes, and dances were immediately named after it—the novel has never been out of print. Its real heroine is not the lovely, sensitive (and often rather feeble) heiress Laura Fairlie, but her half sister Marian Halcombe: yet another woman-loving character whose name derives from the Virgin Mary. Collins, perhaps thinking of his friend George Eliot, took the risk of matching all Marian’s traditionally womanly traits (sympathy, tenderness, tact) with manly ones: she is sensible, frank, flippant, energetic, and…ugly, with “almost a moustache.”29 She constantly describes herself, or is described by others, as having masculine attributes, from her firm grip to her taste for chess and billiards—but she has none of the crude, blustering mannishness of a character like Bell Blount in The Rebel of the Family (1880).
“The strangeness and peril of my situation,” in Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White [1860] (c.1900).
This unsigned illustration in the New York edition of Collins’s works captures the moment when Marian undertakes surveillance in a rainstorm for the sake of her beloved Laura.
Marian and Laura exchange passionate words and caresses throughout the novel. Marian’s love may be technically half sisterly but it is also fiercely romantic: “I won’t live without her,30 and she can’t live without me,” she declares at the start. Notice that for the frail Laura it is a matter of need—she “can’t” live without Marian—whereas for the tireless Marian it is a matter of will, “won’t.” All Marian can offer men is a comradeship that is entirely lacking in flirtatiousness. But when, out of duty, Laura lets herself be married off to the sinister Sir Percival Glyde, Marian erupts in language that, visceral and political at once, has the ring of 1970s lesbian feminism:
Men!31 They are the enemies of our innocence and our peace—they drag us away from our parents’ love and our sisters’ friendship—they t
ake us body and soul to themselves, and fasten our helpless lives to theirs as they chain up a dog to his kennel. And what does the best of them give us in return? Let me go, Laura—I’m mad when I think of it!
Marian sees this marriage as a “death”; what devastates her is the idea that the beloved “will be his Laura instead of mine!” She has to break it to the naïve Laura that she will not be coming along on the honeymoon:
I was obliged to tell her that no man tolerates a rival—not even a woman rival—in his wife’s affections, when he first marries, whatever he may do afterwards. I was obliged to warn her that my chance of living with her permanently under her own roof, depended entirely on my not arousing Sir Percival’s jealousy and distrust by standing between them at the beginning of their marriage, in the position of the chosen depositary of his wife’s closest secrets. Drop by drop I poured the profaning bitterness of this world’s wisdom into that pure heart and that innocent mind…The simple illusions of her girlhood are gone, and my hand has stripped them off. Better mine than his—that is all my consolation—better mine than his.
Here, Laura’s discovery that a beloved woman might be seen by a nasty husband as his “rival” is presented as a kind of “stripping” or “profaning”—a deflowering, in other words—and it is Marian who has been “obliged” to do it, tenderly but firmly.
By portraying his heroine as a feminist spinster with manly traits, possessively devoted to a woman, Wilkie Collins must have known that some of his audience, at least, would read her as a woman who desired women. (Though not, presumably,32 the handful of male readers who sent Collins proposals of marriage to pass on to Marian, who they were convinced was real.) So how did he get away with it—how did he make her so obviously sapphic, and yet so universally popular? It could be argued that he pulled his punches: by making her Laura’s half sister, he harnessed the incest taboo to keep the idea of lust between them virtually unthinkable. But as I see it, his real trick was to channel all Marian’s passion away from sex and into detection.
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