Crime Fiction Essay
To what extent does the representation of female agency in a crime novel depend upon the presence of a female detective protagonist?
All world societies are gendered; they are structured such that both men and women are expected to fulfil certain cultural roles based on their biological characteristics. For example, men are expected to be the providers and protectors and women to bear children and be homemakers. Due to this gendered structure, most societies are as equally patriarchal and through-out history through socio-political, economic and educational methods; women have been systematically assigned a subordinate role to men. Looking particularly at America in the mid-20th century, a woman had very little agency over her social role; her purpose was to serve the interests of the man as an obedient wife and homemaker. If she were to work, it would often be in a subsidiary supporting role such as a secretary, typist, cook or cleaner. Moreover, just as women’s role in society was deemed to serve the interests of a man, their role in popular culture serve a similar function. Women both on paper and on screen are ‘turned … into objects of display. They are simply the scenery on to which men project their own fantasies’.1 They are stereotyped into vacuous roles such as the romantic interest, damsel in distress and femme fetale. Female characters are given little to no agency by white male writers and this is overt in 20th century hard-boiled American crime fiction. In the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, female characters exist only to serve as foils to re-emphasize the hyper-masculinity of the Continental Op and Phillip Marlowe, their respective detective protagonists. I put emphasise on the quantifiers ‘white’ and ‘male’ because writers such as the African American Chester Himes in Cotton Comes to Harlem and the female Sara Paretsky, creator of the female private detective V.I Warshawski, subvert the hardboiled form in order to give their female
All world societies are gendered; they are structured such that both men and women are expected to fulfil certain cultural roles based on their biological characteristics. For example, men are expected to be the providers and protectors and women to bear children and be homemakers. Due to this gendered structure, most societies are as equally patriarchal and through-out history through socio-political, economic and educational methods; women have been systematically assigned a subordinate role to men. Looking particularly at America in the mid-20th century, a woman had very little agency over her social role; her purpose was to serve the interests of the man as an obedient wife and homemaker. If she were to work, it would often be in a subsidiary supporting role such as a secretary, typist, cook or cleaner. Moreover, just as women’s role in society was deemed to serve the interests of a man, their role in popular culture serve a similar function. Women both on paper and on screen are ‘turned … into objects of display. They are simply the scenery on to which men project their own fantasies’.1 They are stereotyped into vacuous roles such as the romantic interest, damsel in distress and femme fetale. Female characters are given little to no agency by white male writers and this is overt in 20th century hard-boiled American crime fiction. In the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, female characters exist only to serve as foils to re-emphasize the hyper-masculinity of the Continental Op and Phillip Marlowe, their respective detective protagonists. I put emphasise on the quantifiers ‘white’ and ‘male’ because writers such as the African American Chester Himes in Cotton Comes to Harlem and the female Sara Paretsky, creator of the female private detective V.I Warshawski, subvert the hardboiled form in order to give their female