The Ageless Agatha Christie
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Crooked House, the earliest of the novels, takes up this theme most explicitly. The text’s murder mystery is embedded within the story of Charles and Sophia’s courtship. Sophia tells Charles at the start that she cannot marry him until her grandfather’s murder is solved, and the novel ends with their engagement. The narrative of the queer child is thus subsumed into the logic and “constraining mandate of futurism.”62 This is significant, because Josephine is perceived to disrupt familial lineage. Even while Charles remarks upon her presumed resemblance to her grandfather, she is ever a changeling, nobody’s child, who seems to have come from nowhere, an unexpected eruption in the family.
Charles reflects that Josephine “had been born with a kink. The crooked child of the crooked house.”63 Hers is a kind of belonging dislocated from familial bonds. She is the house’s child, the child of a cottage “swollen out of all proportion,” a malignant growth, a mistake.64 When Aunt Edith drives herself and Josephine to their deaths, she claims that it is in Josephine’s interest, to protect her from suffering “as I believe she would suffer if called to earthly account for what she has done.”65 But when Sophia asks Charles what would have happened to Josephine had she lived, he answers that she would likely have been sent to a reformatory for a few years before being released. As we have seen, it is likely that Josephine would have been released, for, as Stockton argues, a child’s motive is not a publicly available concept: “children are those peculiar legal creatures … who are generally deemed by the law not to have a motive to harm, or most especially, any rational intent to kill.”66 But Edith goes further: she conceals Josephine’s crime. In killing Josephine, she is protecting the extant Leonides family from the shame of association to a queer, murderous child. In killing Josephine, she is pruning, as it were, the family tree of a sick branch so that the rest of the family can grow into their futures, and the novel ends in the promise of marriage, thus reifying the logic of reproductive futurism. This speaks to the anxiety the characters in Christie’s novel feel about concretizing familial roles, especially those of mothers and girls, and it is a tension that the form of the detective story ultimately cannot resolve.
The queer child is, then, a source of anxiety because she occludes discourses of futurity and because she destabilizes the very image of the child that remains, as Edelman puts it, “perpetually on the horizon of every acknowledged politics.”67 In Christie’s texts, the living child whose presence threatens the social order is done away with in the interest of preserving the imagined child. Stockton writes, “In the century of the child, the child is feared to disappear.”68 This has an unexpected resonance in Christie’s post-war fiction, in which the narratives kill off the child they would protect. The adult characters, over whose world hangs the specter of a dead girl, imaginatively connect this child (these children) to new welfare policies they perceive to be ineffective. Christie’s texts thus reflect a more pervasive anxiety that the image of the Child, which “serves to regulate political discourse [and even] to prescribe what will count as political discourse” is symbolically breaking down.69
Notes
1. Ian Taylor, Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), p. 42.
2. Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (New York: Berg, 2004), p. 162.
3. Pamela Cox, Bad Girls in Britain: Gender, Justice and Welfare, 1900–1950 (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 14.
4. Ibid.
5. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 13.
6. Cox, Bad Girls in Britain, p. 152.
7. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 88.
8. Robert Champigny, What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 59, 21.
9. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 10.
10. Light, Forever England, p. 97.
11. Ibid., p. 88.
12. Edelman, No Future, p. 61.
13. Ibid., p. 3. Emphasis original.
14. Paul Knepper, Criminology and Social Policy (London: Sage, 2007), p. 114.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Agatha Christie, Hallowe’en Party (Glasgow: Fontana, 1972), p. 29.
18. Ibid., p. 40.
19. Agatha Christie, Nemesis (London: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 201. Emphasis original.
20. Ibid., p. 183.
21. Cox, Bad Girls in Britain, p. 161.
22. Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 36, 126.
23. Ibid., p. 5.
24. Ibid., pp. 90, 124.
25. Ibid., p. 36. Stockton’s discussion covers the protogay child, the grown homosexual, the child queered by Freud and the normative child queered by innocence.
26. Ibid., p. 64.
27. Christie, Hallowe’en Party, p. 23.
28. Ibid., p. 32.
29. J. Clarke, quoted in John Muncie, Youth & Crime (London: Sage, 2004), p. 79.
30. L. Abrams, “Lost Childhoods: Recovering Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Scotland” in Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (eds.), Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 152–172 (p. 163).
31. “Bill [passed, cap. 72] to repeal the Lunacy and Mental Treatment Acts, 1890 to 1930, and the Mental deficiency Acts, 1913 to 1938, and to make fresh provision with respect to the treatment and care of mentally disordered persons and with respect to their property and affairs; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid [as amended by Standing Committee E],” 20th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers (House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, 1958–9). Web.
32. United Kingdom, The Home Department, the Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Education, Report of the Care of Children Committee 1946 (London: HMSO, 1946). Web.
33. Muncie, Youth & Crime, p. 51.
34. Christie, Hallowe’en Party, p. 32.
35. Ibid., p. 131.
36. Agatha Christie, Crooked House (London: Penguin, 1953), p. 95. The same anecdote appears in Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939) and Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975).
37. Chris Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 72.
38. Ibid., p. 24.
39. Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 134.
40. Christie, Hallowe’en Party, p. 166.
41. Ibid., p. 100.
42. Stockton, The Queer Child, p. 30.
43. Ibid., p. 13.
44. Edelman, No Future, p. 11.
45. Stockton, The Queer Child, p. 101.
46. Christie, Crooked House, p. 65.
47. Ibid., pp. 71, 72, 98, 143.
48. Stockton, The Queer Child, p. 27.
49. Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly (London: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 97.
50. Ibid., p. 190.
51. Ibid.
52. Christie, Crooked House, p. 73.
53. Ibid., p. 9.
54. Ibid., pp. 76–77.
55. Edelman, No Future, p. 23.
56. Ibid., p. 9.
57. Ibid., p. 25.
58. Christie, Crooked House, pp. 71, 74, 76.
59. Ibid., pp. 71, 72, 75, 83.
60. Ibid., p. 16.
61. Cox, Bad Girls in Britain, p. 3.
62. Edelman, No Future, p. 4.
63. Christie, Crooked House, p. 191.
64. Ibid., p. 25.
65. Ibid., p. 190.
66. Stockton, The Queer Child, p. 158.
67. Edelman, No Future, p. 3.
68. Stockton, The Queer Child, p. 37.
69.
Edelman, No Future, p. 11.
Bibliography
Abrams, L. “Lost Childhoods: Recovering Children’s Experiences of Welfare in Modern Scotland” in Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (eds.), Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 152–172.
“Bill [passed, cap. 72] to repeal the Lunacy and Mental Treatment Acts, 1890 to 1930, and the Mental Deficiency Acts, 1913 to 1938, and to make fresh provision with respect to the treatment and care of mentally disordered persons and with respect to their property and affairs; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid [as amended by Standing Committee E].” 20th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, 1958–1959.
Champigny, Robert. What Will Have Happened: A Philosophical and Technical Essay on Mystery Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
Christie, Agatha. Crooked House (1949). London: Penguin, 1953.
_____. Dead Man’s Folly (1956). London: HarperCollins, 2009.
_____. Hallowe’en Party (1969). Glasgow: Fontana, 1972.
_____. Nemesis (1971). London: HarperCollins, 2002.
Cox, Pamela. Bad Girls in Britain: Gender, Justice and Welfare, 1900–1950 (2002). London: Palgrave, 2013.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. London: Routledge, 2006.
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
Giles, Judy. The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity. New York: Berg, 2004.
Hall, Stuart, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1977). London: Macmillan, 1978.
The Home Department, The Ministry of Health, and the Ministry of Education. Report of the Care of Children Committee 1946, Cmd. 6922, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1946. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, 2015.
Jackson, Louise. Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Jenks, Chris. Childhood. London: Routledge, 1996.
Knepper, Paul. Criminology and Social Policy. London: Sage, 2007.
Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.
Makinen, Merja. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.
Muncie, John. Youth & Crime. London: Sage, 2004.
Scraton, Phil. “Defining ‘Power’ and Challenging ‘Knowledge’: Critical Analysis as Resistance in the UK” in Critical Criminology: Issues, Debates, Challenges. London: Palgrave, 2002, pp. 15–40.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Taylor, Ian. Crime in Context: A Critical Criminology of Market Societies. Cambridge: Polity, 1999.
York, R.A. Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
“With practised eyes”
Feminine Identity in The Mysterious Mr. Quin
Charlotte Beyer
“He arrived just after the curtain went down … in time to glance round the house with practised eyes.”
—Agatha Christie, “The Face of Helen”1
This essay examines the representation of feminine identity in selected texts from Agatha Christie’s short story collection, The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930). Christie’s representation of femininity has received welcome scholarly attention from Merja Makinen, among others,2 yet the Mr. Quin stories are among the less examined of Christie’s works. Michael Cook also comments on the lack of attention paid by critics to Christie’s Mr. Quin short stories. He argues that this volume is among her best work, stating that “it is perhaps the least well-known of her early texts and certainly one which has received scant critical attention.”3 Cook goes on to assert that these stories constitute “some of [Christie’s] finest prose and acute observation of the art of detection and its relationship with human nature.”4 This essay will explore these questions further, by focusing on the Mr. Quin stories and their examination of the central question of femininity in the interwar years. In terms of genre, the Mr. Quin tales are mystery stories and are characterized by a prominent crime dimension. The protagonist Mr. Satterthwaite functions as an amateur detective within the stories, aided by Mr. Quin, a mysterious figure who appears in the stories to alert Satterthwaite to important events, only to disappear again seemingly without trace.5 Cook suggests that in the Mr. Quin stories, the detective function “is actually divided between the spectral Quin and the earthly Satterthwaite.”6 Satterthwaite is an elderly gentleman, who often appears marginalized in the company of the stories’ younger characters. Through his character, Christie challenges conventional cultural notions of ageing and explores alternative or ambiguous masculine roles.7 Satterthwaite is outside the heterosexual romance plots often depicted in the Mr. Quin stories, and in terms of gender he is often shown to represent a more fluid position. As Cook suggests, although Satterthwaite solves mysteries, these stories differ from conventional crime fictions in highlighting the role and significance of intuition and emotion, through the character of Quin.8 Through these strategies, Christie has created short stories which exceed genre boundaries and reflect a willingness to experiment.9 As we shall see, the narratives feature a number of textual elements and ideas that suggest these short stories provide a formal and thematic bridge between genre writing and literary fiction. The way in which these stories problematize and interrogate gender and femininity in the interwar years is central to this bridging, and contributes to situating Christie’s work centrally within her contemporary culture, critiquing and participating actively in that culture. As Melissa Schaub has stated, “the 1930s [were] a transitional decade, away from an older generation’s vision of feminism and toward another.”10 The stories considered in my essay are crime texts which invite wider considerations of questions around women’s creativity, modernism, location, and class in the interwar years.
Examining three main areas of enquiry in the Mr. Quin stories, I investigate Christie’s use of the crime short story genre as a site for exploring strategies for the representation of femininity, agency and creativity. The Mr. Quin stories, “The Face of Helen,” “The Bird with the Broken Wing,” and “The World’s End,” explore differing aspects of femininity and its conflicts. In these three Mr. Quin stories, Christie probes with a remarkable and deceptive lightness of touch some problematic stereotypes associated with female identity and its representation in crime fiction and her contemporary culture: objectification and power, victimization and resistance and the female artist and intergenerational conflict between women. My discussion also considers the role of Mr. Satterthwaite in negotiating these gender codes. In its examination of “The Face of Helen,” my chapter focuses on the depiction of female physical beauty and sexuality, and considers the role of art in contesting one-dimensional understandings of perfection and power. “The Bird with the Broken Wing” explores women’s impossible choice in relation to male partners, between compatibility and safety as opposed to passion and excess.11 Christie’s examination of this topic suggests that genre writing and literary fiction both have the capacity for critical scrutiny of these social and cultural questions in relation to gender. My examination of “The World’s End” centers on Christie’s portrayal of a female artist figure pursuing her singular aesthetic vision regardless of the dismissive reception of her work she endures from her surroundings.12 In all three stories, the problems experienced by female characters are foregrounded by the isolation they are experiencing. None of them are seen to enjoy close female friendships or continued closeness with their mothers or other female family members. This isolation from other women, the stories suggest, are to the detriment of these female characters, who struggle alone against an often hostile or at be
st indifferent patriarchal society.