Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel

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

Nickerson's general structural purpose at the outset is to establish the elements and devices, expectations and ideologies that are part of each of these three forms of writing so as to provide a foundation for the upcoming chapters. These chapters, in turn, provide specific discussions of female detective novels with settings and characters drawn primarily to represent middle- and upper-class domestic situations. The characters and crimes are thus a particular slice of each historical period under study, and they are exemplified in the domestic detective novels of Metta Victor and Pauline Hopkins from the postbellum period (Part One, Chapters 2 and 3), Anne Katherine Green and the Gilded Age (Part Two, Chapters 4 and 5), and Mary Roberts Rinehart and the Modern Era (Part Three, Chapters 6 and 7).

Nickerson's close readings of each and all of these works readily support her specific critical purpose: to use highly popular, female detective stories from the period between Poe and Hammett to create a "corrective history of detective fiction" (xi) and, in the process, to clarify "ideologies of gender and domesticity" from the Victorian to the Modern eras (xiv). The ensuing arguments are complex and varied, displaying Nickerson's goals of combining shared thematic and narratological concerns in domestic-detective narratives with particularized arguments regarding, for example, the trope of textuality and writing as a form of secrecy and disguised attack on cultural norms (Chapter 4) or the spinster figure not as failed woman but as emblem of freedom and self-control (Chapter 7).

These historical and topical analyses are made even more interesting through further analysis of elements from the gothic mode. In establishing such connections among detective, domestic, and gothic genres, Nickerson mainly stresses the novels' attempts to Provide positive opportunities for detective agency. In her words, "The domestic detective novel is far more interested in and optimistic about the efficacy of surveillance by the police or other moral arbiters, which means that detectives are not only more important figures in these novels, but also more effective ones.... [T]he American novels, ... are more interested in how women can foil the gothic plots laid against them ... " (20).

As a result of this emphasis on direct agency, the related act of looking is heavily weighted toward positive revelation and control on the part of the detective. In the domestic detective novel, Nickerson argues, the right to look is seen as a means within the plot by which "uncovering a crime realigns and reaffirms the important bonds of love and duty" (53). Such a reading follows Nickerson's emphasis on the positive agency provided to detectives within the novels she addresses. But the detective's power to look has long been linked to other issues of power and control as well.

As is true for the Gothic, surveillance is "an intimate act" (Web 53), an emphasis readily apparent in Nickerson's suggestion that "a well-trained Freudian or Lacanian scholar could do fascinating readings of Rinehart's version of the family romance; of special interest might be the scopophilic curiosity of her virginal heroines" (242-43n). This latter suggestion by Nickerson, which is well worth making, still stresses the detective and her actions of looking. At the same time, however, it appears within a discussion of the pleasures of reading, and such suggestions add yet another "voyeur" to the narrative scene-the reader. As Walton/Jones note, that reader may well find pleasure in watching (and identifying with) the agency, scopophilic and otherwise, of the detective. But issues of scopophilia can't be raised, at least within current critical discussions of the Gothic, only to consider issues of positive agency.