The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  Queer Girls, Bad Girls

  Throughout the twentieth century, girls have been the special targets of discourses on moral health. As Cox has shown, while fewer girls than boys appeared before juvenile courts, girls were more often the objects of informal (and moral) reformatory projects aimed specifically at their innocence, protection and salvation. Social developments that saw more women in the workplace and more autonomy for girls were accompanied by panicked discourses of waywardness, which bespoke both criminality and imperiled moral purity. According to such discourses, the liberalizing effects of these social developments undermined parental (paternal) authority, and this, in turn, led to delinquency. This is an idea that circulates especially in Christie’s texts of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Christie’s Hallowe’en Party (1969), which centers on the murder of thirteen-year-old Joyce, found drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket, Superintendent Spence tells Poirot, “I suspect that girls have always been partial to the bad lots, as you say, but in the past there were safeguards,” and Poirot replies, “That’s right. People were looking after them.”17 Rowena Drake, a not entirely disinterested character (she is the murderer), reiterates the sentiment: “I must say that mothers and families generally are not looking after their children properly as they used to,” she says to Poirot.18 It is a kind of circular reasoning in which girls are both product and propagator of generational, gender, and familial disorder.

  In Nemesis (1971), Professor Wanstead, a criminal psychologist, is Miss Marple’s ally in solving the puzzle left her by the recently deceased and wealthy financier Mr. Rafiel. He tells Miss Marple, “Girls are said to mature earlier,” but at the same time, “in a deeper sense of the word, they mature late.” His theory is muddled, connecting girls’ wish to be “free to do what they think are grown up things” with their “wish not to become adult—not to have to accept our kind of responsibility.” He relates this to girls’ contemporary fashion choices—“their miniskirts … their Baby Doll nightdresses, their gymslips and shorts,” which, according to Wanstead, reflects young women’s “worship of childishness.”19 Tied up in Wanstead’s partly censorious, partly erotic description of girls’ dress is his implication of mothers in the breakdown of familial order. It is Mom “away at work,” as Rafiel’s solicitor and will executor Mr. Broadribb says, who trips up the correct sexual sequence, making girls at once mature too early and too late. Wanstead takes his analysis further, accusing mothers of contributing to and covering up for girls’ sexual waywardness: “Girls, you must remember,” he says, “are far more ready to be raped than they used to be. Their mothers insist, very often that they should call it rape.”20 Girls’ delinquency, which is ostensibly caused by broken-down parental authority (specifically, owing to ineffective mothering), tends to feed back into and rupture the family unit in a perpetual and self-destructive sequence. Wanstead, as a criminal psychologist, and Broadribb, as a solicitor, are figures working in some capacity for the legislative system. That Christie’s narrative singles out these two men to relate their distasteful views on delinquent girls and mothers suggests that the novel is interested, more broadly, in exploring the connections between perceived social changes as they relate to girls and systems of surveillance and legislation. The novel’s correlation of changing roles and mores with the legislative system indicates, in turn, that Christie’s text is engaging with the moral and actual policing of girls and women. The circular figuration of girlish delinquency conveniently stresses “the importance of managing both the natural and the social”; girls’ “pubescent bodies had to be managed and their sexual energies safely channeled,” while at the same time their “relationship to the wider culture … had to be carefully negotiated.”21 In Christie’s narratives, it is the girls’ pubescent bodies that elude narrative attempts to fix them; they are not orderly and obedient, but girls who take power where they can get it: in money, in secrets, and in bodily autonomy. Part of their agency lies in their refusal of reproductive futurism and even, in the case of Crooked House’s Josephine, of familialism.

  In her study The Queer Child: Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton suggests that “evidently we are scared of the child we would protect,” that perhaps “we are threatened by the specter of their longings that are maddeningly, palpably opaque.”22 The child, she writes, “is the act of adults looking back … a ghostly, unreachable fantasy.”23 As a “managed delay,” and suspended in a state of futurity, the child is prevented (by adults) from growing into adulthood, and thus, having “nowhere-to-grow,” queers time by growing sideways instead of up.24 In this way, Stockton’s sketches of children who are queer in various ways “horizontalize History … making History broaden itself by growing outside and beside itself.”25 The temporal strangeness of children unsettles linear narratives of history, and also of the law. As Stockton goes on to remark, in the twentieth century, which has been termed the century of the child, laws that would protect children also produce them as a form of “legal strangeness,” that is, beings more in need of protection than of freedom, who are suspended in a state of non-adulthood.26 This very notion of children as a form of legal strangeness is a troubling motif in Christie’s post-war novels.

  In Hallowe’en Party, Poirot arrives on the scene after the body of thirteen-year-old Joyce is discovered. Ariadne Oliver tells Poirot,

  I mean, children do queer things sometimes. I mean, there are queer children about, children who—well, once I suppose they would have been in mental homes and things, but they send them home now and tell them to lead ordinary lives or something and then they do something like this.27

  The word “queer” grows out of its original sense of “crosswise,” “going wrong” and, later, “peculiar,” to its more common usage, from the turn of the twentieth century, as a derogative for “gay,” and Ariadne’s confused use of it here seems to reflect this polyvalence. Her sentiment regarding “queer children” who might once have been institutionalized but who are now told to “lead ordinary lives” is likewise expressed by various characters. Retired Superintendent Spence tells Poirot that, in his day,

  we had our mentally disturbed, or whatever you would call them, but not so many as we have now. I expect more of them are let out of the places they ought to be kept safe in. All our mental homes are too full; over-crowded, so doctors say, “Let him or her lead a normal life. Go back with his relatives,” etc. And then the nasty bit of goods, or poor afflicted fellow, whichever way you like to look at it, gets the urge again.28

  Spence’s comments evoke the seemingly irresolvable tension between care and control also at the heart of juvenile delinquency policy: like the child at risk, the released patient is a nasty bit of goods who must be contained or else he is a poor afflicted fellow in need of treatment. When a police surgeon echoes these remarks, he insists upon a historical specificity. These are social developments, he tells Poirot, of the last seven to ten years. So what happened in the late 1950s and early 1960s? After World War II, the abandoning of the Poor Law model of social welfare that had begun in earnest during the interwar period gained momentum. In general, new Welfare State policies, following more progressive interwar attitudes, turned towards a model of community care over institutional care: “regulation within, rather than removal from the community.”29 This change had particular resonances for child welfare, given that the Curtis Committee in England and Wales had “concluded in 1946 that boarding out was … preferable to institutional care.”30 Further, the 1959 Mental Health Act sought to normalize mental illness by collapsing the distinction between psychiatric facilities and other hospitals, and by adopting an after-care policy in which local authorities would be compelled to provide “residential accommodation … facilities for training or occupation … [and] any ancillary or supplementary services for or for the benefit of” the mentally ill.31 The bill, in other words, made care in the community into law. The characters in Hallowe’en Party reflect a broader social unease about such changes,
and the manner in which they formulate this anxiety seems to have to with a fear of misrecognition. For example, of the categories of children “deprived of a normal home life” listed in the 1945–46 Report of the Care of Children Committee, those “Removed by Order of Court (delinquent or in need of care or protection),” both fell under the purview of the Home Office.32 The feared-for child was no longer discernible from the child we feared. More generally, boarding out and care in the community helped in theory to break down markers of difference. What is frightening, for the middle-class characters in Christie, is that the people leading so-called normal lives may not be “normal” at all. It is interesting that the cast of Hallowe’en Party explicitly addresses these anxieties but, as Muncie points out, British social history is “replete with such ‘respectable fears’ in which the present is compared unfavorably with the past.”33 Christie’s registering of changing cultural and legal ways is significant because of the ways in which her texts braid these together and connect the resulting changes to “queerness.”

  Anxiety about the “mentally disturbed” is coupled with children in two ways in Christie’s fiction: first, the worry of “the things you find out in the papers,” that “children don’t home from school because they’ve accepted a lift from a stranger, although they’ve been warned not to.”34 And second, the fear of children’s strangeness, their murderous motives. In Hallowe’en Party, Mrs. Goodbody tells a story of a seven-year-old girl who killed her infant brother and sister: “Beautiful little creature she was, too,” she says. “You could have fastened a pair of wings on her, let her go on a platform and sing Christmas hymns, and she’d have looked right for the part. But she wasn’t. She was rotten inside.”35 The solicitor Jeremy Fullerton remarks that crimes were so often associated with young people, and that it was difficult to know precisely what to do with such young delinquents. Crooked House develops this theme in more specific detail. The Assistant Commissioner tells the narrator that, for the murderers he has known,

  the break that operates with most of us doesn’t operate for them. A child, you know, translates desire into action without compunction…. Lots of kids try to take a baby out of a pram and “drown it,” because it usurps attention—or interferes with their pleasures. They get—very early—to a stage when they know that it is “wrong”—that is, that it will be punished. Later, they get to feel that it is wrong. But some people, I suspect, remain morally immature.36

  If this formulation seems familiar, it is because it is, in effect, a Freudian formulation of the child, for whom the id “is the special province … that libidinal repository of insatiable desires,” the force that needs to be repressed in the interest of the social bond.37 Freud’s conception of homosexuality is also characterized by this notion of arrested development, which, as Stockton writes, is, for Freud, still a form of growth, but “growing sideways” rather than growing up.38 In Christie’s novel, it is killers who are like children, and this articulation imaginatively ties together child, killer and queer. Mental illness, delinquency and queer children thus braid together in a general fear-of-and-fear-for the child.

  Makinen has argued that Christie’s representation of female killers signals a certain feminist impulse in her writing. Christie, she comments, “in her villains allows women an agency, an importance and a dangerous competence to disrupt society…. Deviant women behaving badly have the potential to disrupt the textual world and the preconceptions of Christie’s readership.”39 What of Christie’s victims? What Crooked House, Hallowe’en Party and Dead Man’s Folly have in common is a dead girl. Three dead girls, in fact. If we can believe Poirot’s adage that one’s “death [is] like so many things are in life, a result of [one’s] actions,” then what actions lead to the girls’ deaths?40 All three, Josephine, Joyce and Marlene, encompass the problem of fearing the child we would protect. The little power they wield lies in their unexpectedness. In Hallowe’en Party, Poirot says, “Children do see things. They are so often, you see, not expected to be where they are” (100).41 They are killed because they know—or are thought to know—things they cannot be trusted to keep to themselves. Marlene is a blackmailer; Joyce, a boaster with a blackmailing brother; and Josephine, a girl-killer with opaque longings. They are dangerous in that they present the texts with what “for at least two centuries [has] largely been viewed as antithetical to childhood: sex, aggression, secrets, closets, or any sense of what police call ‘a past.’”42As the texts repeatedly tell us, these are queer girls with obscure and possibly mad motives; girls who are not-yet-straight and never will be. Christie’s novels conflate the thematics of mental illness, juvenile delinquency, and femininity into the notion of queerness to reflect new social unease about the logic of “reproductive futurism” that subtends, as Edelman argues, the political system in its entirety.

  Within the logic of reproductive futurism, securing the future of the social order depends upon its transmission to our children. Stockton explains that “‘the future’ and ‘our children’ are always bound together in a kind of frightening (and hermetically sealed) ‘reproductive futurism.’”43 The image of the child, “not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, [thus] serves to regulate political discourse.”44 Politics, according to Stockton, is now done only in the name of our children’s future. The queer children of Christie’s novels have no future themselves (they are dead), and while they lived, being queer and “crooked” girls, put “the goal of socially-sanctioned couplehood on perpetual delay.”45 Josephine, for example, is a queer child, ever standing on thresholds, swinging on doorways in a disused yard, emerging from the opening of the yew hedge. Her grandfather’s young widow tells the narrator that Josephine “looks queer. She gives me the shivers.”46 There is something decidedly uncanny about her: she is described as “goblin”-like, “ghoulish,” a “malicious gnome,” her mother’s “funny ugly baby … a changeling.”47 In one sense, she is queer in that she is not-yet-straight (and never will be), yet she “is, nonetheless, a sexual child with aggressive wishes” and murderous motives.48 Marlene and Joyce are likewise not-yet-straight (and never will be). In Dead Man’s Folly, Inspector Bland asks whether Marlene was “fond of boys,” to which Constable Hoskins responds, “I wouldn’t say they’d much use for her.”49 Though Hoskins goes on to suppose that Marlene might have liked it if they had, the oblique remark seems deliberately suggestive coming from an otherwise voluble character. In the comic books found with her body, Poirot notices that Marlene has been doodling in the margins: “Jackie Blake goes with Susan Brown,” “Peter pinches girls at the pictures,” “Georgie Porgie kisses hikers in the words,” “Biddy Fox likes boys.”50 There is a curious ambiguity in that Jackie, who goes with Susan, could be either girl or boy, and also that at fourteen, Marlene finds it suggestive that a girl her age, Biddy Fox, likes boys, and the ambivalence opens the text to a reading that considers queerness as a possibility.

  Dead Girls

  Unlike other girls their age, Josephine, Joyce and Marlene position themselves outside of the “going-steady” paradigm. They derive their pleasure from secrets rather than heterosexual bonding; all three girls, we are told, “get a vicarious thrill by … spying and peering at [their] young contemporaries.”51 Instead of coupling off with boys their age or dreaming up wedding scenarios, instead of submitting to the imperative of reproductive futurism, in other words, the girls are interested in murder: the bloodier the better. And indeed all three girls divulge a predilection for gore. Josephine regretfully tells Charles that in her mother’s theatrical production of Jezebel, “They threw her out of the window. Only no dogs came and ate her. I think that was a pity, don’t you? I like the part about the dogs eating her best.”52 In Hallowe’en Party, Joyce says to Ariadne Oliver, “I like murders to have lots of blood,” and Dead Man’s Folly’s Marlene rues that her role as pretend corpse in the Murder Hunt calls for strangulation and not stabbing, and tells Poirot that she “like[s] sex murderers.”53 The girl
s’ fascination with death and dismemberment brings about their own murders, as the narrative codes their enjoyment of bloody (fictional) murder as unnatural. Josephine’s playing at murderer and detective is another manifestation of ego and desire running unchecked, and Marlene’s interest in murder is “hungry,” expressed with “avidity” and “relish.”54

  Edelman, in No Future, opposes “the compulsive narrative of reproductive futurism” to the death drive.55 While the narrative of reproductive futurism underpins the Symbolic order, the death drive is what is remaindered, an “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within … the negativity opposed to every form of social viability.”56 He writes, “Queerness, therefore, is never a matter of being or becoming but, rather, of embodying the remainder of the Real.”57 The girls’ queerness is, to be sure, also a matter of excess; they are keenly interested in blood and guts, the insides of bodies, and their own bodies seem to be everywhere all the time in the texts. Josephine’s embodiedness, for instance, makes Charles uncomfortable. He remarks upon her smell, “of flowers,” which is in his nose, and even on her breathing: “Josephine came nearer and breathed heavily in my face,” he tells us, and she leaves the room “breathing excitedly.”58 Similarly, Joyce’s murder (drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket) is recalled continually and in unnecessary detail by characters not witness to it. The texts find the girls especially troubling because, of course, they are girls, and on the cusp of fertility that they seem unlikely to put to use through proper channels. The texts code their fertility as excess, a dangerous waste. The girl corpses are evoked persistently, making them hang over the texts in an expression of claustrophobic and entropic femininity. In the case of Josephine, the narrative attempts to defuse this tension by gradually ghosting her. At first, she is “Sophia’s sister, Josephine,” a basically normal child with familial links: soon she becomes “a ghoulish child,” “an unpleasant child,” and finally, in conversation with his father and Inspector Taverner, Charles refers to her as “he, or rather she—or I’d better say it.”59 This is significant for two reasons. First, the narrative ghosting of Josephine speaks to the ghosting of queer children in the legal system. Stockton writes that Anglo-American “law-courts do not believe in … overtly same-sex oriented children,” and that in fact “the tendency of metaphor … to reconfigure relations and time … prove[s] why fictions uniquely nurture ideas of queer children.”60 Second, Christie’s narrative’s ambiguous treatment of Josephine—its difficulty in naming her—is relevant in that it reflects contemporaneous tensions around and about the “modern girl.” According to Cox, “successive generations of girls in England and Wales have been cast as posing an ever new threat to the social order requiring ever-new restraints.”61 The problem of the modern girl is, then, one of managing agency. If, in the newly permissive post-war world, familial roles have been unbound, girls’ agency—particularly their sexual agency—needs still more to be directed into appropriate and productive channels. The girls in Christie’s narratives, however, disrupt discourses of futurity that appeal to the Child by embodying the queer (girl) child who will not reproduce, and so threaten to destabilize the social order.