Crime writing is a significant instantiation of gender ideology. Mainstream crime writing (the low-brow entertainment sub-genre) has been a male preserve for a long time, and the underlying ideology has not only been conservative but also patriarchal, the hard-boiled detective story embodying one of the extreme models of maleness (the “macho” male) available to members of society. Since the seventies circa, the minority strand in detective fiction – crime writing as a vehicle of social criticism – has come of age, and detective fiction has been employed to reveal and condemn many facets of racism against Otherness, embodied by such domains as ethnicity, age, nationality, religion, political stances, gender having played a significant part in this strand. The present article deals with a precursor of the “feminist” detective story, Margery Allingham’s Three is a Lucky Number, Allingham being a writer who cannot be classified as a feminist. Nevertheless, this story is memorable (as well as highly entertaining, showing that even serious works can be entertaining) not simply because of the conceptual content - turning-the tables on the “baddie” - but because it represents a battle of wits between the two antagonists, in which one is fighting for her life. A battle of wits because the woman realises the man she has married is out to kill her, but, crucially, because she realises that he has a classic patriarchal male mentality (the story is set in England in the 1950s) while her ideas on gender are less traditional, which means she wittingly has to make a great effort to make her behaviour appear to be that of a traditional female who bows down to the will of her husband in order to lull him into false security, enabling her to lay a trap for him with the help of the police, so that in the end the “new woman” wins out, thereby defeating traditional ideology. The advantage of a close reading employing the tools of stylistics (speech act theory, conversational implicature, speech and thought presentation, and so forth) is that it enables the ideology (ideologies) implicit in the words (and unbeknown to the carriers of those ideologies themselves) to be pinpointed with extreme precision, thereby enabling the identification of the subtleties of the writing.
Ideology, Language and Gender Identity in a Detective Story
DOUTHWAITE, JOHN
2007-01-01
Abstract
Crime writing is a significant instantiation of gender ideology. Mainstream crime writing (the low-brow entertainment sub-genre) has been a male preserve for a long time, and the underlying ideology has not only been conservative but also patriarchal, the hard-boiled detective story embodying one of the extreme models of maleness (the “macho” male) available to members of society. Since the seventies circa, the minority strand in detective fiction – crime writing as a vehicle of social criticism – has come of age, and detective fiction has been employed to reveal and condemn many facets of racism against Otherness, embodied by such domains as ethnicity, age, nationality, religion, political stances, gender having played a significant part in this strand. The present article deals with a precursor of the “feminist” detective story, Margery Allingham’s Three is a Lucky Number, Allingham being a writer who cannot be classified as a feminist. Nevertheless, this story is memorable (as well as highly entertaining, showing that even serious works can be entertaining) not simply because of the conceptual content - turning-the tables on the “baddie” - but because it represents a battle of wits between the two antagonists, in which one is fighting for her life. A battle of wits because the woman realises the man she has married is out to kill her, but, crucially, because she realises that he has a classic patriarchal male mentality (the story is set in England in the 1950s) while her ideas on gender are less traditional, which means she wittingly has to make a great effort to make her behaviour appear to be that of a traditional female who bows down to the will of her husband in order to lull him into false security, enabling her to lay a trap for him with the help of the police, so that in the end the “new woman” wins out, thereby defeating traditional ideology. The advantage of a close reading employing the tools of stylistics (speech act theory, conversational implicature, speech and thought presentation, and so forth) is that it enables the ideology (ideologies) implicit in the words (and unbeknown to the carriers of those ideologies themselves) to be pinpointed with extreme precision, thereby enabling the identification of the subtleties of the writing.
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