Settler Narratives and Greenwood
Because of its emphasis on the roles of ambivalence and the status of a settler colony as “occup[ying] a site of struggle between contending ‘regimes of value,’”18 settler postcolonial theory, rather than postcolonialism per se, is more useful for analyzing Greenwood’s series and its relationship to Christie’s work because it is more relevant to writing in and about Australia than straightforward models of postcolonial “writing back.” Settler postcolonial theory opens a space to consider what Alan Lawson has identified as settlers’ ambivalent engagement with colonialism and the manifestation of this in literature. Lawson defines the settler subject as simultaneously colonizing and colonized, and explains that settlers have an ambivalent relationship to two points of reference: the old place of “authority” and new the place of “authenticity.” The settler subject constantly oscillates, Lawson suggests, between these two poles and occupies a place of “double subjectivity,” which makes settler narratives unstable and ambiguous.19
A similar dynamic can be seen in Greenwood’s novels. On the one hand, the series manifestly draws from a place of authority—in this case from Christie—and it clearly refracts canonical detective fiction conventions onto an Australian milieu, even while subverting them. On the other hand, Greenwood does establish Australia as her place of authenticity, the place in which she engages with late colonial history. In her discussion of historical fiction in settler postcolonial domains, Victoria Kuttainen has shown that these narratives have particularly “shifty qualities.”20 Historical fiction in settler domains, she has argued, often displays an ambivalent relationship to time and history: a desire to be free of both the authority of empire and the guilt of a colonial past. Kuttainen draws on Tom Griffiths’ proposal that Australian settler literature is fraught with a psychological guilt relating to colonial violence and dispossession. This guilt, she argues, manifests itself in texts exhibiting a compulsion to eradicate colonial wrongs and re-write history in order to reconstruct a more positive national image. In this vein, Greenwood attempts to revise an era of history burdened by the aftermath of colonial racial prejudice and to break from Christie’s British milieu, stratified by class and race. Not only does Greenwood attempt to revise and reverse elitist imperial ideology, also she responds to these historical tensions by positively presenting an imagined community of characters who are not racist, as demonstrated in Phryne’s and her household’s close relationship with Lin Chung and his Chinese culture. In fact, Phryne’s household represents a slice of society where racism during the interwar period is either non-existent or rapidly diminishing.
Still, whereas Greenwood’s positive depictions of the Chinese in Australia show her attempt to confront past racism toward this group, they also present the fantasy of an inclusive multicultural interwar society. In reality, this was the era of the White Australia policy, fraught with prejudice and racial tensions, exemplified in the discourse that proliferated concerning the “yellow peril.” Contemporary readers could be lulled into imagining that justice towards this marginalized group had already been served in Phryne’s 1920s, but this is only a confection of Greenwood’s, not a reflection of social or cultural reality. The Fisher series, then, appears structured by what Lawson classifies as settler postcolonial “ambivalence”21; oscillating between sympathy for the plight of the marginalized suffering at the hands of settlers and colonists, and complicity with colonization in continuing the erasure of history and seeking to assert a conciliatory narrative that places the white settler in a sympathetic and anachronous position. This does not mean that historical narratives within a postcolonial domain should be dismissed, but it does open a space for serious consideration of the cultural work undertaken by historical fiction, such as Greenwood’s series, that engages with Australia’s past.
Even with the fantasy element in the Fisher series, its attempts to correct the wrongs of a settler colonial past could be viewed as not merely escapist. More saliently, other readings point to ways the series provides not only entertaining fiction, but a potentially instructive agenda beneath its sleek surface, especially in terms of feminist and middlebrow interpretations. In fact, this is what is most exciting about the connections between the Australian contemporary author and a precursor like Agatha Christie. Greenwood’s novels are not just a postcolonial tribute series: she draws out the “middlebrow” aspects of Christie’s authorship and readership, and plays upon these, too.
The Phryne Fisher Series and Its Middling Position
In The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s, Nicola Humble offers this definition:
The middlebrow novel is one that straddles the divide between the trashy romance or thriller on the one hand, and the philosophically or formally challenging novel on the other: offering narrative excitement without guilt, and intellectual stimulation without undue effort.22
In contrast to the recent recuperative criticism of scholars like Humble who affirm this middling position, Virginia Woolf derided the category of the middlebrow as inauthentic literature. She argues that there is a battle between “highbrows and lowbrows joined together in blood brotherhood against the bloodless and pernicious pest who comes between.”23 Until the rise of middlebrow studies, there has remained a persistent aversion in academia to scholarly study of books from this middling category, including Christie’s fiction, even though they comprise a large portion of the books the public actually read. This is also because middlebrow fiction is supposedly driven not by artistic integrity but by commercial success.
If “brows” still matter and continue to inform assessments of literary value, then perspectives of the middlebrow could be useful in reading Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series and in exploring, again, another form of ambivalence in how the series dazzles readers with glamor and lures them with confection on the one hand, but also offers intellectual puzzle work and cultural critique on the other. In this way, I argue, Greenwood’s fiction links two forms of “middling position”—as settler postcolonial writing positioned midway between colonial and colonizing writing, and as middlebrow literature between serious fiction and entertainment. In addition, the middlebrow has been linked by critics such as Humble to women’s experience, and reading with an eye to this aspect of Greenwood’s fiction alerts us to similar aspects of her precursor, Agatha Christie.
Humble has argued that between the 1920s and the 1950s, the feminine middlebrow novel in Britain was concerned with shifting gender roles, and elements of this can be seen in Christie’s fiction. This is demonstrated by a break from old Victorian and Edwardian feminine molds with her inclusion of modern 1920s flapper-like figures. Tuppence Beresford and Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent are two examples. Both exhibit a lack of Victorian sentimentality, are fearless and are accorded traditionally masculine attributes. For example, Tuppence plunges boldly into solving the mystery in The Secret Adversary, and the reader is told that she is “accustomed to take the lead” in her partnership with Tommy Beresford. At one point she is even labeled with the infamous name of Sherlock.24 Further, she knows that she would not fit into the old mold of dutiful daughter because her father “has that delightful early Victorian view that short skirts and smoking are immoral. You can imagine what a thorn in the flesh I am to him,” indicating her movement from Victorian standards of feminine behavior to more modern ones.25 Bundle also proves to be more fearless and daring than her male counterparts in The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), willing to risk her safety by confining herself in a cramped cupboard in the perceived deadly Seven Dials enemy clubrooms in order to spy on their meeting. However, even with these headstrong, seemingly independent characters, marriage is never far from the plot and, with it, the suggestion that a woman’s true identity lies in the domestic realm. Yet this is both complicated and affirmed by Christie. In Partners in Crime (1929), Tuppence, married and at home in her modern flat in suburbia, complains that that her domestic life is “satisfactory, but dull.”26 She longs for some excite
ment away from the monotony of her domestic duties, her exercise routine and her numerous shopping trips.27 Her desire for something exciting is met when the chief of British Intelligence, Mr. Carter, suggests that Tuppence should again “try her hand at a little detective work” alongside her husband.28 In this, Christie seems to suggest that marriage can be a partnership or a “joint venture” (as she repeatedly reminds us with Tuppence and Tommy in The Secret Adversary), rather than a hierarchy of gender roles. The multiple and sometimes ambivalent images of women in Christie’s fiction—such as independent and strong women, and those who are married and enmeshed in domesticity—serve as a commentary on interwar modernity, where new roles for women were being carved out in unprecedented ways concurrent with the tensions that this created. This complex social undercurrent in Christie’s work is a middlebrow theme, and one which Greenwood’s series picks up.
Phryne’s reverse migration and settlement back into Australia’s interwar society, the tensions this brings, the resistance she encounters, and the new ground she occupies also reflects women’s experience during this period, and this theme forms the backbone of the Fisher series. Angela Woollacott has noted that women of the 1920s were acquiring new skills for the workplace, which enabled them to be independent both financially and socially.29 Phryne’s own flourishing career aligns with the increasingly independent status of women during this time, as does her refusal to be married and dependent on a man and his income, which is the case for Tuppence. Instead, Phryne’s private detective services provide her income in part, supplemented by her investments in real estate and government stocks.30 In the novel Away with the Fairies (2001), Phryne agrees with a female editor of a women’s magazine, in whose opinion
every woman can be educated, can have a career, can be the breadwinner for her family, can run a household and go into parliament or medicine or law, and when there are enough of us as doctors and lawyers and parliamentarians, when there are many women in public life, the Man cannot ignore us. We will take our rightful place.31
Throughout the Fisher series Phryne encourages other women to become independent and pursue careers, giving special attention to the development of her own adopted daughters, Jane and Ruth. She provides both girls with an education, formally and informally, encourages them to pursue future careers and gives them opportunities to foster their intellectual talents. Linked to this 1920s shift in women’s work and independence is the increase in women’s social freedom, and Phryne also exemplifies this change. Phryne’s freedom to be mobile both spatially and socially helps further establish her status as a 1920s modern woman. Woollacott notes that “modernity, for white women, was linked to physical freedoms and mobility.”32 Phryne and Christie’s Bundle exemplify Woollcott’s claim, for both characters drive Hispano-Suiza sports cars, and Phryne, like Bundle, drives fast enough to terrify both her passengers and nearby pedestrians. The social and cultural issues that Greenwood and Christie engage with are historical concerns that framed the 1920s, and through the Fisher series, readers are provided with a window onto this pivotal period of Australia’s colonial modernity, as Christie provides another such window onto British modernity. Even though Phryne is a fantasy figure in terms of her classlessness, her sexual liberty and her anachronistic attitude to race, she nonetheless may be seen to represent the 1920s woman and her gains in independence and autonomy.
Though Phryne reflects the shifting status of women during this period and indicates Greenwood’s engagement with serious social themes, literary critics attached to notions of highbrow or serious literature may not find this enough to regard it an artefact worthy of scholarly attention. In particular, Greenwood’s use of the detective fiction genre may itself be enough for critical, although not popular dismissal. This is another point at which Greenwood and Christie’s work meets, as Christie’s fiction has often been rejected in the academic domain. For Q. D. Leavis middlebrow fiction is a “faux-bon,” a consumable that leaves readers “with the agreeable sensation of having improved themselves without incurring fatigue.”33 Leavis also draws links between class, taste and gender:
In the bestseller as we have known it since the author has poured his own day-dreams, hot and hot, into dramatic form, without bringing them to any such touchstone as the “good sense, but not common-sense” of a cultivated society: the author is himself—or more usually herself—identified with the leading character, and the reader is invited to share the debauch.34
Leavis’s dismissive attitude toward bestsellers here in particular, which she extends also to the middlebrow, provides evidence for Erica Brown and Mary Grover’s contention that the middlebrow “is a nexus for prejudice towards the lower middle classes, the feminine and domestic, and towards narrative modes regarded as outdated.”35 Leavis is not the only esteemed critic to have scorned middlebrow literature and its place in the literary landscape. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno labeled the “idiotic women’s serial” as an object that “embraces the whole of mass culture” and exemplifies the way the culture industry can lull society into a mediocre existence that “corrupts” the individual.36 Such comments are provocative for feminist scholarship. This is because these pejorative undertones perpetuate gender hierarchies, linking books, authors and judgments of taste with gender. In addition, as Faye Hammill points out, “much middlebrow writing has been ignored by the academy because of a misperception that it is so straightforward as to require no analysis, while in fact, its witty, polished surfaces frequently conceal unexpected depths and subtleties.”37 The historical, cultural and social depths of Greenwood’s fiction are at least partially concealed by the novels’ glossy covers and their protagonist’s glamorous persona. Greenwood is honest enough, though, to acknowledge the fantasy aspect of her protagonist. She states:
Because I wanted her to be a female wish-fulfilment figure, I wanted her to be like James Bond, with better clothes and fewer gadgets…. All I really did was take a male hero of the time and allow her to be female. No one thinks it odd that James Bond has blondes and no regrets…. The modern women detectives are afflicted with self-doubt, neglect their diets, worry about exercise, think they may be growing fat (as if fat was a disfigurement), and are generally burdened with low self-esteem and guilt.38
However, a fantastic surface does not signify a complete absence of depth, as Light and Kaplan have shown separately with Christie’s fiction. Alison Light argues: “For Christie it was by denying the feminine (in its late Victorian and Edwardian dress) and by ventriloquizing what had been the male part, cheerily domesticated, that she could find ways of speaking as a modern woman. Reticence could be a form of conservative self-protection but also if a new-found power.”39 Light affirms the depths that can be plumbed in Christie’s fiction, beyond its entertaining surface. So too are there depths to be explored in Greenwood’s fiction, even though it is something with which few critics have engaged. Yet Bookscan data shows that Greenwood is in the top twenty Australian authors for the early twenty-first century and, outside the scholarly domain, her novels are widely discussed in terms of Australia’s literary landscape.40 The popularity of her novels is compounded by the success of the television series, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012–present), which has been met with acclaim in Australia and overseas. Of course, much like Christie’s fiction, Greenwood’s market success may itself suggest the series’ commercial ambitions and its place in commodity culture rather than literature, and this success may be one reason the series could be dismissed as an escapist fantasy that is too facile for scholarly critique.
Recent critical work on production and reception in the Australian literary field offers insight into the reception and classification of Greenwood’s series, along with other fiction written by women. Bode analyzes the increasing number of female fiction writers in Australia’s literary landscape. Her statistical analysis demonstrates that “women now dominate the Australian novel field.” However, Bode suggests, “far from being a sign of women’s liberation �
�� this gender trend in authorship has produced a de-valuing of this literary form, and a re-establishment of male novelists at the centre of critical discussion and acclaim.”41 At this center she places Peter Carey, David Malouf, David Williamson, Les Murray and Patrick White, who are the top five Australian authors discussed in the academic domain.42 Her argument echoes scholars of the middlebrow, who claim that cultural devaluation and gender are linked: “constructions of modernism are gendered, associating literary value with masculinity and exile, and thus implicitly associating the feminine and domestic with the devalued middlebrow.”43 Bode does not discuss women writers in terms of middlebrow authors, but she does mention in her notes that “when I refer to literary fiction I am [also referring to] the broader category of middlebrow fiction … the books we find in the ‘good book stores.’”44 Greenwood is included in her discussions on authors of literary fiction, and Bode points out that despite much general dialogue around Greenwood’s work, it is “not prominent in academic journals.”45 The link between the de-valuation of women’s fiction, the preference for male novelists in critical scholarship, and the middling category of Greenwood’s fiction may explain why the Fisher series has been overlooked by most literary scholars. The series’ market success, its tentative alignment with a middlebrow perspective, and its potential to enable critical readings, can nevertheless be easily dismissed in a scholarly domain that, as Bode has shown, prefers male fiction over female fiction. Yet as discussed in this chapter, middlebrow scholars have sought to recover fiction dismissed as too facile for scholarly analysis, especially during the golden age of this mid-range fiction that appealed to massifying and professionalizing urban readerships: Christie’s milieu of the 1920s. These scholars have argued for the value of middlebrow fiction in that it can provide a means to comment on social change and shifting values, and they affirm that this fiction can also provide a window onto women’s experience. Humble, Kaplan and Light’s work on Christie serves as an exemplar for this type of project. Likewise, as Greenwood gestures to Christie and signals to the middlebrow in general, even so far as enabling her fiction to be positioned within this category, the Fisher series can also provide insights into society and culture. It can urge readers, as Christie’s fiction does, to consider women’s experience critically. Even with the obvious fantasy element in the series, to dismiss it on literary value only affirms the downward trend for profiling and assessing women’s writing that Bode’s work highlights.
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 23
