crimeculture
Family Discord: Challenging the Choreography of Crime Fiction in P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
Kate Watson, Cardiff University
Kate Watson's paper has also been accepted and now published by EJES: The European Journal of English Studies Special Edition: 14.2: "Crime Narratives: Crossing Cultures and Disciplines" (Forthcoming 2010) ed. Heather Worthington and Maurizio Ascari
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman focuses on precisely what it suggests; that the female protagonist in the role of the detective is, at the moment of writing and in terms of genre, unsuitable. Writing in 1995, Marty Roth (xiii-xiv) underscores masculine assumptions involving the woman as a crime fiction producer, suggesting that in the first half of the twentieth century, British women’s writing in the genre was confined within the bounds of a tradition strongly gendered as masculine:
Despite the prominence of women writers in British analytic detective fiction (Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey), my controlling assumption is that in detective fiction gender is genre and genre is male; Jane Marple and Modesty Blaise are feminine notations that perform a masculine function.
While to some extent agreeing with Roth, I want to suggest that P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, a narrative which primarily revolves around families of individuals and of texts, challenges this masculine domination of the genre. The women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s marks the beginning of a transition away from patterns of the ‘suitable’ roles for women seen in traditional, especially Golden Age, crime fiction with its patriarchal strictures. There were female detectives in the Golden Age texts, but they were either non-threatening and de-sexualized, often elderly spinsters like Christie’s Miss Marple, or acted as assistants to the dominating male detective, as in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase (1932). Here, Harriet Vane is subordinate to and ultimately usurped by Lord Peter Wimsey in her investigation into the murder that is the focus of the narrative. In the Golden Age period, including the inter- and post-war years, society, and the literature in which society was represented back to itself, depended on or sought normality, stability and ‘rules’. The sexual revolution instigated in the 1960s disturbs not only the ordered institution of the nuclear family but the ‘family’ of crime fiction; the increase in divorce rates and feminine freedom is re-enacted in the divorced and disjointed form and body of the crime genre and this is clearly evident in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. While the masculine frame of traditional crime fiction is preserved, the female protagonist here is central and, to paraphrase Roth, writes her own notation. The heroine, Cordelia Gray, inherits a detective agency—and agency as detective—from her erstwhile employer and mentor, Bernie, who has committed suicide. Cordelia’s first solo case is the investigation of the suspicious death of Sir Ronald Callender’s son, Mark. Eventually, Cordelia discovers that Sir Ronald has killed his own son and made the death look like the consequences of autoerotic strangulation taken too far. The case is further complicated by distortions of family and bloodlines—Mark’s blood mother, we discover, is Sir Ronald’s secretary, Miss Elizabeth Leaming.
In pursuit of the facts of the case, Cordelia metaphorically steps into Mark’s shoes, living in his cottage, sleeping in his bed, and borrowing his sweater and his belt; leaving Mark’s cottage in Cambridge for the first time Cordelia comments that ‘[s]he drove away from the cottage with a feeling very like regret, as if she were leaving home.’ (61) Further to this ‘[s]he believed that Mark Callendar had been murdered because she wanted to believe it. She had identified with him, with his solitariness, his self-sufficiency, his alienation from his father, his lonely childhood. She had even—most dangerous presumption of all—come to see herself as his avenger.’ (87) As she shows signs of discovering the truth, Cordelia is threatened by and subjected to actual violence. Her eventual success in investigation rests on the question of blood groups which will prove that Mark is not Lady Callendar’s son and therefore is ‘unsuitable’ as the heir that Sir Ronald desperately needs in order to ensure the continuance of his work as a micro-biologist. George Bottley, Mark’s supposed grandfather had ‘bequeathed half of the residue of his fortune to his daughter, absolutely, “now that she has demonstrated that she has at least one of the normal attributes of a woman.” The remaining half he left to his beloved grandson Mark Callender on attaining his twenty-fifth birthday.’ (143) There is no satisfactory closure to the narrative: Sir Ronald is killed by Miss Leaming and, with the help of Cordelia, his murder is passed off as suicide. While Cordelia is the central investigating figure in the text, always in the margins is the shadowy figure of Inspector Adam Dalgleish, P. D. James’s already established detective and, I suggest, the patriarchal figure that embodies the conventions of the traditional family of crime fiction.
The title of the novel draws attention to the relocation of women in society and their ‘suitability’ for roles other than those dictated by family and domesticity. The role of music and dance in the text foregrounds choreographed notions of crime and bodies, their ‘coda – fication’, and reveals the discord and dissonance consequent on the refusal to conform to the choreography of the crime genre’s narrative concerns. The body of the female detective challenges gender categories, as does the body of the central victim, Mark, who is defined and delimited by his patronym; he literally embodies family inheritance, and crimes genetic and generic. Mark’s familial nexus which should be integral to the novel’s structuring, is dislodged from its proper location by the central detecting protagonist of the text, Cordelia Gray, who as an orphan, similarly fails to ‘produce’ a known blood line of discourse and the family body.
Mark Callender is the catalyst of the novel’s plot and is emblematic of the 1970s contestation of family values. Stipulated and secure continuations of the body of the family are, in this period, dated and in decline; the structures of domesticity are disrupted. The maxims of earlier crime fiction and the familial nexus which should be integral to the novel’s structuring are disrupted by Cordelia’s revelation that ‘[a] man and wife both of whose bloods were A could not produce a B group child.’ (James 1972: 129) Bodily offspring and an apparently ‘proper’ family, here, not only fail to ‘reproduce’ traditional familial and static forms, but also fail to ‘produce’ a known blood line of discourse and the family body. Prior crime fiction equations which result in the product of ‘the classic form’ (Knight: 88) of the family, the corpus of crime fiction, and the literal and literary body, now fail literally to marry words and meaning.
In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, murder is firmly fixed within the family: as Cordelia says to Sir Ronald: ‘[y]ou killed your son!’ (159) The violence and changeability of 1970s society infiltrates the family milieu and body, breaking up the ‘comfortably solid’ (148) crime fiction conventions of character and plot. Not only is Mark a victim of his father’s actions, but so is Sir Ronald’s wife, Lady Callender: she dies as a consequence of Sir Ronald’s patriarchal interference in maternal concerns, emphasising the death of what should be the protected and protective body of the family and of society. The roles of mother and son enacted by Mark and his ‘mother’ are superficially representations of normative family reproduction, but emerging in this 1970s narrative are the violent consequences of deviation from family norms in the contemporary social body.
Mark’s body, as victim, complies with generic convention in its immobility and absence, but also deviates from those conventions, and this is a deviation articulated through metaphors of music and dance. His body, which should comply with the choreography of the genre’s plot, as merely the pretext for the investigation, no longer functions as a signifier which replicates and upholds crime fiction’s ‘familiar sights and sounds.’ (150) The contemporary ‘failure to harmonize surface images’, as Lee Horsley (253) has it, is made clear when the text describes the photograph of Mark’s dead body: ‘The neck was elongated so that the bare feet, their toes pointed like a dancer’s, hung less than a foot from the floor.’ (69) Initially, then, his body conjures up images of a ballet dancer, implying the smooth, graceful positioning of the body which is synonymous with the patterned, graceful movement of a professional dancer. What Stephen Knight (Crime Fiction: 86) calls the ‘static harmony’ of the generic body of crime fiction and the victim’s body and placement is here reworked as ‘life dance[s] grotesquely.’ (49) Mark’s body and feet are hanging above the floor, suggesting that the choreography of the crime fiction plot is now failing to connect with its origins and is so ungrounded in an unstable world. As Mark’s body refuses to dance to the proper beat, Cordelia must take (feminist) steps to ascertain the reasons for Mark’s less than harmonic positioning in text, family, and society. Such a feminine interpolation is, I suggest, a discordant element in conventional crime fiction’s conservative choral harmony.
The detecting body, which is here assigned primarily to Cordelia, introduces discord into the harmonious generic rules of earlier crime fiction. The female in a changing society is, apparently, here allowed the controlling and investigative role of detective. The marriage of plot and character familiar in Golden Age fiction gives birth to a dysfunctional and deviant version of the crime fictional form as this new detecting force emerges. Cordelia articulates this deviance when she says ‘I only had a mother for the first hour of my life’ (19), and reveals that she has, rather, had a ‘succession of foster mothers.’ (27) This, I suggest, can be read metaphorically as referring to earlier female crime writers and their fictional female detectives. These crime fiction ‘foster mothers’, such as Agatha Christie’s spinster detective Miss Marple or Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver, far from teaching Cordelia how to evolve and grow as a 1970s progressive female body, foster different notions of imposed stasis, reiterating the limitations of the feminine in a masculine role – traditionally they have only been able to take on a detective function because they are in effect dis-gendered by their age and spinsterhood. Miss Jane Marple first appeared in 1930 in Murder at the Vicarage, with her final novel/appearance in 1977 in Sleeping Murder. Miss Silver first appeared in Grey Mask (1929), with her final novel/appearance in The Girl in the Cellar in 1961. This representation is evident in Hugo Tilling’s statement that Nanny Pilbeam is ‘an old nanny type dressed in black. She cast rather a gloom over the proceedings, I thought. Actually she looked so exactly like an old family retainer that I suspect she was a policewoman in disguise.’ (75-6) Cordelia acknowledges this feminine/detecting history when she explains the rationale behind her actions:
This belief in her mother’s love was the one fantasy which she could still not entirely rick losing although its indulgence had become less necessary and less real with each passing year. Now, in imagination, she consulted her mother. It was just as she expected: her mother thought it was an entirely suitable job for a woman.
(19)
Davie, Isabelle, Hugo and Sophie contest this, as does the title which states that detection is ‘not a suitable job.’ (86) Cordelia, though, adheres to and succeeds in a career path she imagines her mother would support.
The 1970s family is also shown to be deviant in this text, opening a space between the norm and the new, or distorted form; Shari Benstock (11) defines this gap as being ‘between (m)Other and Other.’ The disrupting ‘other’ continually invades previously safeguarded aspects of the family. Cordelia’s real father is dead, and her detective mentor, Bernie, functions as a ‘foster-father’, literally and, in terms of genre, metaphorically. The subsequent removal of Bernie from the text, as the quasi-paternal figure who introduced Cordelia into the realm of detection both by his teaching of detective skills and practices and by his suicide, reinforces Cordelia’s need to fend for herself and begin, in Lyn Pykett’s words (50), ‘adopting […] in parodic form’ the masculine profession of detection: she is a ‘new woman’ who can create and detect meaning and now ‘foster’ herself.
The dead body depicted in the opening line of the novel is not, as might conventionally be expected, the body of the victim; it is the body of Bernie, the patriarchal detective who should solve the case: the generic lines of the novel and the body of the genre are immediately destabilised. Instead of the supposed conventional masculine and paid detecting position, and thus by proxy the patriarchal parenting and cultivation of the female, Bernie’s death allows Cordelia to step beyond convention: the controlling detective ‘father’ is absent for the majority of the text. This is, however, only until Cordelia is recuperated back into patriarchal control by Dalgliesh, yet another metaphorical father figure. But Dalgliesh had been the trainer and mentor of Bernie and so frames and pervades the narrative. There seems, ostensibly, to be a lineage of fathers as Bernie ‘used to work for the Metropolitan Police in the C.I.D. with Superintendent Dalgliesh.’ (15) Cordelia comments: ‘how often she had listened with politely concealed impatience to Bernie’s nostalgic reminiscences of his time in the C.I.D. [...] or to his eulogies on the virtues and wisdom of Adam Dalgliesh.’ (15) It is wisdom that Bernie imparts to Cordelia and which she internalises to use in her first solo case; as she says to Miss Leaming: ‘Bernie taught me some of the things he learnt in the C.I.D.: how to search the scene of a crime properly, how to collect exhibits, some elementary self-defence, how to detect and lift finger prints-that kind of thing.’ (27) As the case progresses, Cordelia continually asks herself ‘What was it that the supercilious, sapient, superhuman Super had taught?’ (35) She uses this ‘genuine Dalgliesh dogma’ (53) in getting to know Mark, questioning his father, examining the cottage for the first time, backing up hunches, and not destroying the evidence from the cottage. Dalgliesh’s filtered detective tips, then, help Cordelia forward in her case.
Cordelia inverts this masculine control when, after the murder of Sir Ronald, she is giving evidence in court and is asked how Sir Ronald came to possess her gun: ‘She remembered a piece of Dalgliesh dogma, reported by Bernie [...] ‘Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murderers have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.’ (178) Dalgliesh’s masculine and ‘fatherly’ power over the case is conveyed in his interview with Cordelia: ‘She had been closely questioned before. The Cambridge police had been very thorough. But this was the first time she had been questioned by someone who knew; knew that she was lying; knew that Mark Callender hadn’t killed himself; knew, she felt desperately, all there was to know.’ (196) Later Dalgliesh records his knowledge of Cordelia’s actions: ‘So he had found out about Somerset house and the call to Dr. Venables. Well, it was to be expected. He had credited her with his own brand of intelligence. She has behaved as he would have behaved.’ (197) This suggests, perhaps, a kind of acknowledgement of his influence. While Cordelia is granted freedom in this instance, it is still praise which is given by the ruling male, and praise which, in turn, praises himself as he has set down the detecting ‘notations’ for her and others to follow and emulate.
Cordelia’s proto-feminist claim on autonomy, her ability partially to ‘parent’ herself, and her consequent parody of and challenge to maternity, are apparent in her possession and use of Bernie’s gun, part of the Detective Agency’s equipment and central to Cordelia’s own detective agency. Cordelia is shown taking ‘the gun in her right hand, cradling the muzzle with her left.’ (153) What she is ‘cradling’ is not in alignment with the conventionally depicted iconography of mother and child; she is rather embracing a masculine weapon. Her control over and possession of the phallic gun not only bestows power, but it is also a postmodern reversal of reproduction: the gun allows her metaphorically to penetrate bodies, as does her new female role as detective. I suggest that 1969, which Alison Light (24) has as the ‘date of [...] the birth of second wave feminism’ permits this 1970s development in crime fiction, enabling the representation of the female detective, albeit in limited form. Cordelia, in the absence of father and mother, and lacking appropriate crime fiction role models, is, I argue, ‘self-mothering’, an action that is later allegorically enacted in her experience in the well—Sir Ronald’s assistant, Chris Lunn, throws Cordelia down the well in the garden of Mark’s cottage when she seems to be getting close to the truth of Mark’s death. Escaping from the well, ‘[i]t seemed that she had been climbing for hours, moving in a parody of a difficult labour towards some desperate birth.’ (147) Here Cordelia is both mother of her new detecting self—it is after this experience that she finally takes control of the case and takes it to its conclusion—and the child that the metaphorical ‘labour’ would produce, hence ‘self-mothering.’ The resisting female body is still, though, punished for its resistance to the patriarchal and familial norm. Cordelia is violated—her skin is broken as she climbs out of the well, fulfilling Knight’s contention (‘The Knife’: 153-5) that the female detective’s bodily integrity can be and always is broached—penetrated—in the course of the investigation. But in this early and radical version of the female detective the penetration of Cordelia’s body is superficial; it is skin-deep and suggestive of a denial of patriarchal and phallic power.
Where, though, are musical notation and dance movements in relation to Cordelia? Her very depiction, I suggest resists the choreographed movements of crime fiction convention, making instead feminine, feminist, unintelligible moves. These are evident in what is, I argue, Cordelia’s musically composed body. In response to her feminised detecting movements and self-choreographed footwork, the dominating patriarchal language inscribes a threatening echo of ‘murder’ inside her body, to control the autonomous female inside the bounds of the masculine and to relocate her in her proper role of victim. But even as Cordelia despairs of finding the truth about Mark, there is a ‘word dancing at the back of [her] mind […] the blood-stained word. Murder’ (59), which impels her forward in her investigation. The subsequent attack by Lunn and the reassertion of masculine power though violence temporarily returns Cordelia to her proper female place and patriarchal harmony is briefly restored: ‘Cordelia could detect the note of desperation, almost hysteria, in her own voice.’ (151) Cordelia, even though she is now a ‘detecting’ force is, after her attack, rendered hysterical and so her body is brought back into an established and traditional patriarchal coda, one which stipulates that the woman who resists patriarchy must be mad, dancing to the wrong tune and striking discordant notes.
The textual body of An Unsuitable Job and its language resist what Horsley (1) calls ‘the deadening effects of “easy classification’’ in the 1970s.’ The opening sentence of the narrative immediately demonstrates how the dead body, seemingly usual to the genre, is informing the crime fiction form in new ways: it is Bernie Pryde’s death which disrupts the order and ceremony of the opening moment of the text. Despite the ‘death of the male detective’, masculine control of the narrative and initially the plot is apparent in ‘Sir Ronald’s note of authority’ (45), the letter of appointment which enables Cordelia’s detecting work. It controls and limits Cordelia’s detecting movements and, on a larger scale, is reminiscent of the traditional, pre-1970s position of the female writer of crime fiction: she can only write and move within the discursive limits of the set, masculine crime fiction discourse and conventions. In the 1970s it is possible to destabilise these patriarchal limitations on and control of the body of language and crime fiction, as An Unsuitable Job demonstrates. Not only does the male detective die in order to enable the creation of the female detective, but the murderer, Sir Ronald, is not subjected to the (masculine) state authority. He is, as Pykett (53) notes, ‘killed by his secretary/mistress.’ Here, Miss Leaming overturns masculine control and appropriates masculine power, both of the state and of the individual: she shoots Sir Ronald, ending his control over feminine movement, language and narrative form. The previous purported literary certainties of masculine meaning and set crime fiction delimitations and regulations are dislodged by Miss Leaming’s firing of a literal bullet into Sir Ronald’s brain:
It was an execution, neat, unhurried, ritually precise. The bullet went in behind the right ear. The body leapt into the air, shoulders humped, softened before Cordelia’s eyes as if the bones were melting into wax, and lay discarded at last over the desk. A thing; like Bernie; like her father.
(163)
Sir Ronald’s body in its ‘leap’ is suggestive of dance, a choreography which is oxymoronic as it softens—a traditionally feminine attached signifier—into nothing. Sir Ronald’s claim over family and authority are cancelled here, a cancellation which is connected to Cordelia’s detecting freedom as Sir Ronald is coupled with Cordelia’s other patriarchal figures: Bernie and her father. The idea of bones as wax is indicative of malleability, suggesting that the masculine body can be re-worked, moulded, by the female.
Post-1970, crime fiction becomes less soothingly predictable and the female, writer and detective, partially reclaims language, re-writing it in her actions, as the Author’s Note in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman suggests: it is signed ‘P.D.J’. The initials are ambivalent and ungendered, and purposely imply gender equality and the equal indefinability of discourse. This discursive indefinability is intensified in the final words of the novel. Cordelia says to a potential new client, Mr. Fielding: ‘Won’t you come in?’ (p. 205) It is the female who is now in control of the narrative and of the investigations promised by the genre; Cordelia invites the male client into her female domain. This could function as a simultaneous metaphorical questioning of the ‘insides’ of the novel, its structures and gendered meaning; Cordelia is appropriating what has previously been the male realm of detection—she claims the detective agency as her own. The fictional world of An Unsuitable Job opens up and questions bodies; literally, and generically. But this apparent female triumph is, however, limited.
The text cannot fully escape masculine and patriarchal control; the male still must have some say about what goes in to the body of crime fiction. This is most explicit in the interaction between Cordelia and Chief Inspector Dalgliesh. He, as a police superintendent and ‘official’, is the one who is shown still to have the power to summarise and control all the facts of the case, not Cordelia, who is the unofficial female detective; the woman’s body in this novel is still written into the subordinate schema within the body of crime fiction. Where Cordelia closes the narrative, Dalgliesh closes the case: he is shown speaking to the Assistant Commissioner, making his report on Callender’s murder. He goes on to say ‘I find it ironic and oddly satisfying that Pryde took his revenge. Whatever mischief that child was up to in Cambridge, she was working under his direction.’ (204) Dalgliesh is, and remains, in P. D. James’s crime fiction, the central and controlling masculine figure of detection and of the novel; he knows Cordelia’s true actions. Cordelia is the ‘contemporary fictional female private eye in a male world.’ (Stout: xxxii) Ultimately, it is Dalgliesh who choreographs the narrative; the private, criminal pas de deux of Cordelia and Miss Leaming is ended by Miss Leaming’s death in a car accident. Cordelia summarises: ‘She had won. She was free. She was safe, and with Miss Leaming dead, that safety depended only on herself.’ (202) This safety, though, is still contingent upon conforming to the masculine patterns, patterns which are interconnected with Dalgliesh and the law. Despite Cordelia’s actions, eventually it is Bernie and Dalgliesh who are controlling the choreography of the narrative.
Copyright © 2009 Kate Watson
Acknowledgements
The Arts and Humanities Research Council.
References
Benstock, Shari (1991). Textualizing the Feminine: On the Limits of Genre. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma.
Horsley, Lee (2005). Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
James, P. D. (1989). An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. London: Penguin.
Knight, Stephen (1991). ‘The Knife Beneath the Skin: Crime Writing, Masculinity and Sadism.’ Arena 97: 145-56.
Knight, Stephen (2004). Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Light, Alison (1989). ‘Putting on the Style: Feminist Criticism in the 1990s.’ From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World. Ed. Helen Carr. London: Pandora. 24-35.
Pykett, Lyn (1990). ‘Investigating Women: The Female Sleuth after Feminism.’ Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction. Eds. Ian A. Bell and Graham Daldry. London: Macmillan. 48-67.
Roth, Marty (1995). Fair and Foul Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press.
Stout, Cushing (2003). ‘A Suitable Woman for the Job: Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography.’ Sewanee Review 111: xxx-xxxix.