| FROM MARLOWE
TO MILLHONE :
THE FEMINIZATION OF THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE
page 2
DETECTIVES, WOMEN, AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Dreams are not reality. . . . Deidre’s fantasies and dreams had not
freed her, they had damaged and limited her. They had killed her.
--Karen Kijewski
When we think of women in American detective fiction, no doubt most
of us conjure familiar images in our minds: the veiled face of the bereaved
but beautiful widow who wants to know who killed her husband and
why; the tomboyish (or conversely, vampish) secretary in the outer office;
and perhaps most likely of all, the seductive femme fatale who keeps a
pistol in her purse and who, all too often, is pretending to be the bereaved
widow.
Were we to think of the detectives, we would likely imagine someone
very much like Humphrey Bogart; that is, a man in a trenchcoat, fedora
pulled low over eyes narrowed with cynicism, smoke curling past the brim
from a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth; a tough
guy who hits hard, drinks hard, and shoots straight.
These images are American icons. Yet they are troubling images.
The received wisdom out of which such icons are formed is that a) a man
has to be tough to be a hero, and b) women are dangerous, changeable, and
not to be trusted under any circumstances. It is difficult for a
woman to identify with these icons. When I, as a woman, read Chandler,
I “become” Philip Marlowe, throwing Carmen Sternwood out of my bed and
then tearing the bed apart because of its “contamination.” I do not
want to identify with these women; I want to be the hero. Yet I know I
cannot be the hero, because I am not that man. So I am forced to
look again to the women, whom I am not and do not wish to be.
The germ of this thesis was planted in the summer of 1989, when
I was working as a summer librarian in a small community library.
My supervisor at the time was (and still is) an avid reader of detective
fiction. One day, she recommended Sue Grafton’s novels to me.
There were three in the library’s collection: “A” is for Alibi, “B”
is for Burglar, and “D” is for Deadbeat. (I never did know what happened
to the third letter of that alphabet.) I read them all, one after
another. I was hooked. Here, finally, was what I had wanted,
a detective-hero with whom I could identify: tough, witty--and female.
I did not wonder at what made Kinsey Millhone the type of character I wanted
to “be,” at least not then; I simply devoured her adventures.
As I continued my undergraduate studies, I began to realize
that developments in detective fiction parallelled developments in general
literature, that its elements could be found elsewhere, and that my reading
of detective fiction often provided me with examples that helped me understand
whatever I was studying. However, it was not until I began muddling
through a course that brought together American drama, film, and literary
theory that seeds planted much earlier sprouted. I suddenly realized
that nearly every American film is at heart a Western, and every American
hero a cowboy: the Virginian is Sam Spade is Luke Skywalker.
Cowboys. Not cowgirls.
Who was Princess Leia?
***
Much American literature--popular, classic, and filmic--is built
around the American dream, which is both ever-changing and means
something different to each dreamer. And while the American
dream is an individualist dream, it is nonetheless a male dream: in
American literature, few if any women are able to pursue the dream successfully.
They cannot head for the frontier (always the land of opportunity and the
dream) in the same way as men because of its hostility toward women.
Only men can ride into the sunset, tall in the saddle. In the American
mythos, women are relegated to the all-but silent margins, subordinated
to (and by) the men around them.
This subordination of women in American literature occurs still,
despite feminism’s influence. If an intelligent, spirited female
character appears in a Hollywood film, for example, she is apt to be subsumed
by the male star, either by death (as in the recent film Mission: Impossible
[1996], in which every female character, with the exception of the almost-androgynous
Max, is killed) or by love. Even if the actress is billed as the
star, chances are she will be involved in a plot that leads to her subordination.
Nothing I have just said appears to bode well for the potential
agency of the female detective. It appears that she will not succeed, because
she is not a cowboy.
Yet she is.
As I argue in the first chapter, the hard-boiled detective is a
direct descendant of the cowboy. Thus, simply by virtue of genre,
the female hard-boiled detective is a “cowboy.” Yet, one cannot simply
put a woman in the place of the hard-boiled man: a mere gender-swap creates
characters like Modesty Blaise and the laughable Barb Wire. In such
a case, the female protagonist fails “as either an investigator or a woman--or
both” (K. G. Klein 162). She becomes either Sam Spade with breasts
or a peculiar sort of investigator who invariably must be rescued by a
male partner, who then solves the case. (Recall, for example, the
1980s television series, “Remington Steele,” each episode of which included
the male character’s rescue of the female lead and his solution to the
case, although he was clearly described at the outset as the one lacking
investigative qualifications.)
In the thesis that follows, I argue that female hard-boiled detectives,
as created by female authors, are significantly different from their male
predecessors and counterparts. Each of the authors and detectives
I examine are feminists in some way. The novels carry implicit (sometimes
explicit) criticisms of patriarchy and of patriarchal institutions such
as law, medicine, bureaucracy, and business. They also animate feminist
sensibilities, articulating feminist attitudes toward issues such as violence
and concepts of justice.
The first chapter constitutes an overview of detective fiction
in general and a brief examination of the hard-boiled sub-genre in particular.
The second deals with some aspects of feminist literary criticism and how
they may be applied to the novels I am examining. The third chapter
offers a more in-depth look at selected works by Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky,
Sue Grafton, and Karen Kijewski, focusing on the development of each of
their protagonists over the course of their series. The fourth and
final chapter examines specific elements common to all four writers in
light of feminism and of feminist literary theory .
©1997 Catherine Thompson
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