The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre

Midwest Modern Language Association

The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre by Kathleen Gregory KleinReview by: Tom LewisThe Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring, 1990), pp.78-81Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315039 .

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The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. By Kathleen Gregory Klein. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. x + 261 pp. $24.95

In The Woman Detective. Gender and Genre, Kathleen Gregory Klein offers a powerful view of the relation between detective fictions having female detectives as protagonists and the historical periods in which these fictions appear. Her pri- mary methodology is feminism, while her secondary methodology is literary and social historicism. The combination of these approaches leads to strong contextualizations of some 300 detective novels written between 1864 and 1987. On the basis of the interpretations that result from such contextualizations, moreover, Klein draws the challenging conclusion that the detective genre - whether as practiced by female or male writers-is fundamentally hostile to women's liberation even when the detectives are female. This is the right conclusion to draw in my judgment, and it can be seen to unsettle widely held beliefs concern- ing "narrative excess" and the inherent ability of literature to subvert dominant ideologies.

Faced with the sheer size of the genre of mystery fiction, Klein first defines the particular subset of literary works that claim her attention. Her choice remains open to criticism, but her justification persuades.

I deliberately limit this analysis to the paid, professional woman detective who is the protagonist of the novel. As a member of Western capitalistic society, the private investigator who offers herself as a professional for hire would be expected to provide competent service for her employer. Thus readers could anticipate that the woman detective would (or should) be successful in the terms defined by the formula: outthink the police and outsmart the criminal. I have excluded amateurs and policewomen like Miss Marple or Sgt. Nora Mulcahaney as neither is comparable to the paid professional. The amateur is allowed extraordinary scope for error, foolishness, and luck as she solves a mystery; she has no client, no responsibility, and no commitment to investigation as a profession. Her accepted lack of creden- tials means that readers have no standards against which to compare her. Police, on the other hand, are bound by bureaucracy, hierarchies, and politics. Historically, they are paid by a system which inhibits individual action and decisions; they are assigned to cases, bound to standard investigative behavior, and responsible to the state's vision of justice .... Conflating the professional with either her official or amateur counterparts reinforces the critical assumption that there are no significant variations within the field. (5-6)

This way of delimiting the field might be questioned insofar as Klein's choice of texts could be said to determine in advance her main thesis that, "since the 1864 appearance of the first professional woman detective, she and her professional competence have been consistently undercut despite overt claims for her abilities, successes, intelligence, and cunning" (1). Nevertheless, the theoretical and generic perspectives advanced by Klein adequately forestall such criticism: "Although [the woman detective] is identified as the hero, her authors - whether

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female or male - seldom allow her to function like one; her failures can be found among all the major sub-genres. Because detective fiction follows rather than parallels social reality, the genre's inherent conservatism upholds power and privi- lege in the name of law and justice as it validates readers' visions of a safe and or- dered world. In such a world view, criminals and women are put in their proper, secondary places" (1).

Klein evaluates female detectives both explicitly and implicitly against what she understands as the three dominant paradigms of the successful male detective: Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Spenser. On Klein's view, Sherlock Holmes represents the "classically ratiocinative sleuth," Sam Spade "the ultimate hard- boiled private eye," and Spenser "a stand-in for the sons of Sam in the seventies and beyond" (2). Klein's argument is sufficiently nuanced so as not to claim that these are or have been the only available paradigms of the successful male detective. Rather, she maintains that "the characteristics of these three establish the standard for the woman detective as well as the restrictions which her creators en- countered" (2). As Klein's chronicle of the changes in the detective genre, its for- mulae, and its conventions goes on to clarify, "no single detective character or sleuthing style (not even as practiced by these three) completely dominated at any time. Nonetheless, no other models have successfully challenged the preeminence of those established by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, and Robert B. Parker" (2-3).

One chapter, "The Hard-Boiled Private Eye and Her Classical Competition: 1928-63," is particularly key to comprehending Klein's overall method, argument, and goals. Klein's discussion of Gale Gallagher's [Will Ousler's and Mar- garet Scott's] 1947 1 Found Him Dead, for example, contrasts this work with G. G. Fickling's [Gloria and Forrest E. Fickling's] 1971 Stifas a Broad. Even beyond the shared tough-guy ideology, surface differences between detectives Gale Gallagher and Honey West wane in the light of Klein's critical approach, which sees parody as "the dominant authorial stance. . . . These writers undermine the genre, undercut their protagonists, and ridicule women's challenges to male dominance. Like the dime novels, these works unquestionably inscribe their readers as male" (131). As stripteases, corpses, and assaults multiply over the years (not to mention the pages), the inevitable conclusion is that, far from promoting feminist empower- ment, Gallagher and West serve only to titillate the male thralls of the ruling capi- talist order:

I'm a private eye, With a private list of parts, That you cannot buy In any stores or supermarts. My equipment is expensive, And sometimes quite recompensive, As you can see! (Fickling, Blood and Honey 25; quoted in Klein 132)

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I would second Klein's suggestion that only males would be interested in "buy- ing" these private parts: I would add that not all men would be interested in doing so and that ruling class males are the most likely group to be able to afford to do so with any regularity. Victims of both exploitation and oppression, moreover, women readers "in reading a masculine genre which replaces the usual male hero with a female one and then diminishes her as both a woman and a detective ... have to adopt an antifemale as well as an antifeminist stance unless they become self-consciously resisting readers" (132). Klein thus insists convincingly that such texts do nothing to encourage self-conscious resistance on any reader's part.

Feminist writing must be struggled for and over, and so one might legitimately inquire as to whether changes in what Klein refers to as the social "scripts" available to women at given historical moments now permit the creation and develop- ment of a genuinely feminist practice of detective fiction. I am guessing that at some stage of her project Klein probably hoped to discover forms of detective fiction that could meet the demands of feminism: one thinks immediately of fictions involving female-male partnerships or self-consciously feminist women detectives. In the case of novels portraying female-male partnerships, however, Klein judges that in detective fiction they are "a fallacy; there is no partnership. ... No matter who proposes, the male partner decides. Like unlucky spouses, these women devote themselves to associations where they are protected against their wishes, managed, and used" (196-97). Moreover, while recognizing that Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski embodies "the simultaneous rejection or minimiza- tion of typical features of the [detective] formula and the explicit introduction of some essential elements of feminism" (215), and that M. F. Beal's Angel Dance helps to inaugurate "a sub-genre of the eighties - the explicitly feminist detective novel usually published by a woman's press" (216), Klein finally asserts that "radi- cal feminism cannot work within even the broadest boundaries of the detective genre" (220).

Klein's study of the woman detective suggests the need to reconsider a number of related theoretical assumptions. First, her argument basically leads to the position that the detective genre cannot be subverted from within; not reform but revolutionary transformation is required. This position in turn unsettles current notions about "narrative excess," that is, the view that narrative structures can never manage to contain and control all their significations and that some- usually "progressive" - meanings always escape from attempts to impose a discur- sive regime. Second, Klein's study challenges reigning notions of the "literary." Here I do not mean simply that she has focused upon "noncanonical texts"; I mean that her arguments deny any transcendental properties to "literature" at all and instead point to the need to understand "literature" as a variable set of discourses engaged in the articulation of social "scripts" for subjects of varying gender, class, and race. Finally, and especially given her skepticism that the detective genre might ever serve the ends of women's liberation, Klein's study calls for a reader-based assault on the ideology of detective fiction, one launched more

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from the point of consumption than from the point of production: "A reinterpretation of detective fiction is crucial; abandoning the formula as an unprofitable site for women's stories merely leaves the old imperatives in place" (229).

After such a period of reinterpretation, it may also develop that "women- centered, gender-aware detective fiction can and must reinvent the genre; its beneficiaries will be writers and readers alike" (229). Yet, if I am reading Klein's tone at all correctly, I think she remains hesitant about ensuring a place for detective fiction in the process of bringing about a replacement of "received attitudes with open-ended diversity" (229). I share her hesitation, perhaps because I also share her view that detective fiction "follows rather than parallels social reality" (1).

Tom Lewis The University of Iowa

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Documents

The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre