Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2000 by Catano, James V

But to read detective fiction is to gaze not only on the violence seen and enacted by the detective. It also is to look at violence performed on the detective. Performance in these cases is not something the subject simply does by itself but very explicitly something done for-and even to-the subject. As Judith Butler notes in a passage quoted by Walton/Jones, "performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, and regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject"' (Bodies That Matter 95; Agency 102; ny emphasis). The use of violence directly to display the detective's subjectivity, what Walton/Jones note as Todorov's "story of the vulnerable detective" (174), has always been a staple of the genre. As such it raises further questions about the place of violence in the genre.

Given their own interests, Walton/Jones argue that violence acted on the body of the detective "signifies differently in women's detective novels, partly because it signifies differently for women outside the novels" (174). They suggest that thematic engagement of these questions by the novels provides room for critique within the performance, at least interrogating if not quite altering-and certainly not reinscribing-the vulnerability evidenced by the violence. Agency, for detective and reader, thus lies in reconceiving as much as in reversing one's role in relation to violence.

That sense of the reading process is certainly valid, but there are other connections between looking and violence, as Walton/Jones note when they suggest that "female characters are often ambiguously placed as retributive agents and eroticized victims of violence" (233). The ensuing tension between agency and restriction, between the detective looking at violence and the reader looking at violence enacted on the detective, underwrites much detective fiction. It is also, of course, heavily reminiscent of another genre-the Gothic. Both genres, after all, are rooted in a sense of unending threats to and entrapment of the protagonist, an issue clearly present in Grafton's scene. Questions regarding violence and reader pleasure in one are thus likely to be helpful in critiquing the other.

Catherine Nickerson suggests as much in The Web of Iniquity where she studies the blending of detective and gothic forms in certain authors, a linkage that leads to her own revision of the detective genre and its tradition. Nickerson's main line of argument is that "in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, American women formulated a style of detective fiction that drew on the moral force of the domestic novel and the symbolic language of the gothic mode to critique the gender and class politics of maturing capitalism" (197).

As proof of her claim, Nickerson provides a thoroughgoing historical and textual analysis of women's fiction, wrapping it all up in an "Afterword" that offers a substantial review of the hard-boiled school and is itself a useful bit of critique and summary. The main emphasis, however, is on female writers and detectives, and her text begins with a theoretical discussion of "several of the most important threads" woven throughout detective and domestic novels, along with the gothic mode, as she describes there in her subheadings (Chapter 1).