Notes
1. Jacques Barzun, “Detection and the Literary Art” in Robin W. Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Spectrum, 1980), p. 149.
2. Stephen Knight, “Murder in Wartime” in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds.), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), p. 163.
3. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 81.
4. Ibid., p. 94.
5. Barzun, “Detection,” p. 149–150.
6. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger (London: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 32.
7. Ibid., pp. 32, 152.
8. Gill Plain, “A Stiff Is Still a Stiff in This Country: The Problem of Murder in Wartime” in Petra Rau (ed.), Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 112. Light shares this view, emphasizing the sinister underbelly of Christie’s villages even in the “Golden” interwar years: “Christie’s rural settings, which many have seen as hermetically sealed, provide an especially empty security, apparently representing order and harmony but quickly revealed as a ‘cover’ for its opposite.... The village in her novels is a community whose members ought to know each other but don’t” (p. 92).
9. Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 31.
10. Ibid., p. 8.
11. Ibid., p. 97.
12. Ibid., p. 93.
13. Light, Forever England, 94.
14. Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 89.
15. Ibid., p. 155.
16. Plain, “The Problem of Murder,” p. 113.
17. Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 119.
18. Agatha Christie, After the Funeral (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 32, 36.
19. Ibid., p. 117.
20. Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns, “Agatha Christie: Modern and Modernist” in Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (eds.), The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1990), p. 122.
21. Christie, After the Funeral, p. 15.
22. Ibid., p. 7.
23. Ibid., p. 8.
24. Ibid., p. 11.
25. Ibid., p. 153.
26. R. A. York, Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 83.
27. Christie, After the Funeral, p. 105.
28. Ibid., pp. 35, 98.
29. Ibid., p. 123.
30. A cruel term for single women who needed to work developed in public discourse around women and the workplace of the nineteenth century, and revived after the loss of a generation of men in World War I left women unmarried or widowed. See, for example, Gerry Holloway’s Women and Work in Britain Since 1840 (London: Routledge, 2005).
31. Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 126.
32. Christie, After the Funeral, p. 40.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 107.
35. Ibid., p. 247.
36. Birns and Boe Birns, “Modern and Modernist,” p. 122.
37. Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse (London: Harper, 2002), p. 11.
38. Ibid., p. 12.
39. Ibid., p. 9.
40. Yorke, Power and Illusion, p. 83.
41. Christie, The Pale Horse, p. 84.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 331.
44. Ibid., p. 208.
45. Ibid., p. 96.
46. Ibid., p. 231.
47. Ibid., p. 234.
48. Ibid., p. 238.
49. Ibid., p. 43.
50. Ibid., p. 165.
51. Ibid., p. 141.
52. Ibid., p. 142.
53. York, Power and Illusion, p. 41. Theatricality is the essence of At Bertram’s Hotel, in which the hotel seems to be full of Edwardian pre-war comfort but is in fact a front for organized crime. For more discussion of the novel, see York’s monograph.
54. Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (London: HarperCollins, 2011), p. 79. A lack of atmosphere linked to murder also appears in Sparkling Cyanide (1945): “Most of that August they spent in the country at Little Priors. Horrible house! Iris shivered. A gracious well-built house, harmoniously furnished and decorated (Ruth Lessing was never at fault!). And curiously, frighteningly vacant. They didn’t live there. They occupied it. As soldiers, in a war, occupied some look-out post” (London: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 370. It turns out that Ruth Lessing is a murderer, who killed both Iris’s sister Rosemary and Rosemary’s husband.
55. Christie, The Moving Finger, p. 119.
56. Ibid., p. 33.
57. Christie, After the Funeral, p. 38.
58. Ibid., p. 41.
Bibliography
Barzun, Jacques. “Detection and the Literary Art” in Robin W. Winks (ed.), Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Spectrum, 1980, pp. 144–153.
Birns, Nicholas, and Margaret Boe Birns. “Agatha Christie: Modern and Modernist” in Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (eds.), The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1990, pp. 120–134.
Christie, Agatha. After the Funeral (1956). London: HarperCollins, 1993.
_____. The Moving Finger (1943). London: HarperCollins, 2010. E-book.
Knight, Stephen. “Murder in Wartime” in Pat Kirkham and David Thoms (eds.), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995, pp. 161–172.
Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.
Plain, Gill. “A Stiff Is Still a Stiff in This Country: The Problem of Murder in Wartime” in Petra Rau (ed.), Conflict, Nationhood and Corporeality in Modern Literature: Bodies-at-War, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 104–123.
York, R. A. Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Queer Girls, Bad Girls, Dead Girls
Post-War Culture and the Modern Girl
Sarah Bernstein
Although a number of Agatha Christie’s detective novels take their titles from children’s nursery rhymes, critics of her work have tended to overlook the representation of children in her narratives. Several of Christie’s post-war novels, however, feature dead or dangerous (or dangerous and so dead) children. In texts that span the post-war period, from Crooked House (1949) to Nemesis (1971), it is the figure of the girl who is the locus of particular anxiety. The problem of the “modern girl” is central to debates in the post-war era about delinquency and welfare reform, as girls’ agency must be carefully managed lest they disrupt traditional gender and familial orders. Though these later texts have been much maligned by critics, Christie’s enduring popularity through this period evinces her skill at filtering into her stories contemporary social changes and their attendant public anxieties.
In their representations of girlhood, Christie’s post-war texts weave together motifs of crime and cultural change, suggesting the three are linked in ambivalent ways in the cultural imagination. Debates concerning the balance of care and control that emerge with the creation of the Welfare State and continue throughout the mid-century are expressed in Christie’s novels as being intimately connected with the problem of the modern girl. In No Future (2004), the queer theorist Lee Edelman discusses the extent to which political discourse is invested in a fantasy of the future, represented by the image of the child. The figure of the child comes to represent the “telos” or culmination of the social order and, importantly, is responsible for securing and reproducing it. This conception resonates with the rhetoric of national reconstruction and modern nation building after World War II, which placed particular emphasis on the role of motherhood and domesticity as crucial to the survival of the British nation. In this context, children’s
behavior—particularly that of girls—must be carefully policed, so that they grow into and exercise their important reproductive capacities as mothers in order to secure the future of the nation. Edelman’s conception of the child is useful in thinking about different kinds of refusals of social reproduction rendered in Christie’s texts and how girls, represented in the novels as queer in various ways, are perceived as destabilizing the narrative (and social) order. Drawing, then, on Edelman’s conception of the (imagined) child as a powerful image of social fulfillment and futurism, and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s figurations of the queer and “dangerous” child in the twentieth century, this essay explores the ways Christie’s post-war novels braid together queerness, criminality, and young femininity. I posit that, in registering changing cultural and legal mores about women, children and the mentally ill, and in eliding these categories into and under the heading of “queer,” Christie’s narratives reflect an anxiety surrounding certain possibilities for new womanhood that occlude or disrupt discourses of futurity. In so doing, Christie’s texts highlight the fraught socio-political approach to girls at the mid-century, which held girls to be in need both of protection and of policing, of care and of control.
This essay therefore focuses on the representation of children in Christie’s work in order to explore the ways in which cultural tensions circulating in the second half of the twentieth century, tensions about welfare reform, permissiveness and the family, are worked out in—and, indeed, are deeply embedded within—her narratives. In this way, the essay provides an important context for reading Christie’s work, suggesting that her crime novels engage with post-war culture—and as the preceding chapters by Merja Makinen and Rebecca Mills demonstrate, culture between the wars—in ways that have not been discussed in a sustained manner. In the years following World War II, there was, as Ian Taylor writes, an “outburst of social and political anxiety over the condition of youth and its contribution to delinquency and social disorder.”1 Occasioned in part by the displacement caused by wartime evacuation of children and the separation of families, concern over dislocated and delinquent youth helped to guide public policy interventions into the family. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s studies in the 1940s popularized the notion that problem families cause delinquency, arguing that juvenile offenders are a product of home lives in which there is a failure of attachment. Around the same time, Leslie Wilkins produced a Home Office report that claimed to prove a causal relationship between delinquency and broken families, further feeding unease over the state of the family. As Taylor explains, the linking of problem families to delinquency directly influenced juvenile justice system reforms in the 1950s and 1960s in England and Wales, particularly in the different emphasis on “care” and social rehabilitation. Thus, child welfare policy after World War II also created a new kind of child: the child at risk, who is in danger not only of being harmed, but of becoming delinquent. In this way, welfare reform advanced legislation that collapsed the distinction between children in need of protection and those in need of control.
Problem Children
In The Parlour and the Suburb, Judy Giles argues that “in Britain, in the 1950s, children (and the reproductive capacities of the mothers who bear them) became central to the programmes of successive governments for rebuilding Britain, not as it had been in the recent past, but as a ‘modern’ nation.”2 Giles’s parenthetical statement—that women are relevant insofar as they are reproductive—takes on a particular resonance in the context of discussions about problem families. The coinciding “social” and interventionist aspects of the state created a “new politics of governmentality,” which was clearly demarcated by gender.3 As Pamela Cox writes, “one of the key ways of managing the population was to regulate those who were to literally reproduce it—to give birth to it, to mother it, to nurture it.”4 If politics, according to Lee Edelman, depends upon “reproductive futurism”—securing the future of the social order through its transmission to “the Child”—and in the post-war period, women were still largely responsible for nurturing and inculcating values to this child, then women also must be carefully handled.5 Thus, as Cox explains, “connections between bad girls, bad mothers and bad families remained close and powerful in modern topologies of delinquency.”6
Anxieties surrounding delinquent and vulnerable children—particularly girls—are reflected in Christie’s fiction after World War II. The three novels discussed in this chapter, Crooked House (1949), Dead Man’s Folly (1956) and Hallowe’en Party (1969), span the post-war years and feature dead girls, dangerous girls, or a combination of both. Critics Alison Light and R.A. York have already pointed up Christie’s use of the nursery rhyme, with Light explaining that Christie’s texts employ “the suspense that lies in the nursery rhyme … [expressing] the child’s fear of the unexpected violence which manifests itself first in the most apparently secure of places, family life.”7 The actual representation of children in Christie’s novels, however, has largely been overlooked. Merja Makinen’s 2006 study of Christie and femininity includes a fascinating reading of the child who kills in Crooked House, but her analysis assimilates the child, Josephine, into a broader discussion of femininity. In this chapter, I will read the girl-killers and girl-victims in Christie’s texts in terms of their nebulous status as persons without legal personhood—as girl characters. The girls are not-yet-straight, not-yet-sane, and not-yet-woman, and the narratives characterize the presence of these pubescent children as ambiguous and unsettling.
Formally, the detective story is especially suited to discussions of futurity. In his 1977 work What Will Have Happened, Robert Champigny writes that the detective novel is a “text [that] has to be precisely oriented toward the denouement”—the revelation of the murderer’s identity—but “as long as what is to be made explicit remains implicit, [the narrative] is borne by a perfect modified by a future.”8 Moving towards the future unraveling, the detective narrative is also urged along by it, the narrative’s teleology amounting to the future, as Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, coming “back in advance.”9 The aesthetic frame that supports the detective novel is future-oriented; its telos of sequence presupposes a future reveal that will restore order to a social world disrupted by murder. And the world of the cozy mystery, especially, is domestic, middle-class, family-centered. Even after World War II, when the cozy narrative is on the decline, Christie still employs its characteristic elements, though she begins to jumble them up, anatomize and atomize them. As Alison Light writes, “The fiction may in the end work to offer ‘reassurance,’ but since [depicted] communities always thrive on suspicion, their insecurities can never be resolved.”10Even familial relations become ambiguous and “thrown out of kilter.”11 In these texts, family—and by extension society—becomes estranged from itself; the resulting instability of social exchange calls into doubt any possibility of meaningful community. And futurism, according to Lee Edelman, “generates generational succession, temporality, and narrative sequence, not toward the end of enabling change, but instead, of perpetuating sameness, of turning back time to assure repetition—or to assure a logic of resemblance … in the service of representation.”12 In retaining tropes of the conventional Golden Age detective novel (such as the country house and the extended, “respectable” family) at a time when the very basis of these institutions is being called into question, Christie’s post-war texts evoke tensions about and around the role and preservation of the family.
According to Edelman, “politics remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child.”13 Securing the future of the social order thus depends upon its transmission to “our children.” This poses a problem at a time when one of the prevailing anxieties was about growing social permissiveness due to loosening familial bonds. Various strands of social scientific discourse after World War II reconstruct the modern family as a particular and peculi
ar case for concern. Sociologists and psychoanalysts set out to explore what they perceived as the breakdown of the traditional family, effected by social liberalization and a new culture of permissiveness. Stuart Hall et al. write that some groups felt this permissiveness would cause an erosion of moral constraints, which would, in turn, undermine the authority of the law itself. The message, then, of family-centered studies of delinquency is that “what goes wrong goes wrong early. In policy terms, this has meant early intervention and risk-focused prevention.”14 Because it requires welfare workers to identify children with the potential to become criminal, risk-focused prevention collapses the distinction between the child who needs protecting and the child who needs to be contained. In a phrase that would well fit an analysis of Christie’s Crooked House, Paul Knepper writes that, “from this perspective, pruning young lives before they grow crooked is the most sensible means of reducing crime”; the child we fear is thus tidily telegraphed onto the image of the child we would protect.15 Risk-focused intervention also depends upon a very specific—and ideological—model of the family, and arrangements that diverge from this paradigm are at risk of being considered a “problem” and subject to policing. In this way, governing institutions mobilize very real (and legitimate) fears about the exploitation of children in order to sharply delimit the boundaries of acceptable morality, couching it in terms of a moral renewal. For who, after all, would not claim to be on the side of those “fighting for our children”?16
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 7
