Susan Rowland

Social Negotiations: Class, Crime and Power

Popular preconceptions of these six novelists and, indeed, the whole detecting genre tends to associate their works with conservative politics and against the democratising forces of modern society. Crime fiction implies naming and capturing a criminal. This, in turn, suggests the restoration of both a moral and social order. Such a restitution can easily condense into a social conservatism which manifests itself as a nostalgic re-forming of social classes. The elements of such a structure are perceptible in five of the six authors, Christie, Sayers, Allingham, Marsh and James, but it is heavily compromised in the golden age quartet by their distinguishing self-referentiality. By portraying detecting as a self-consciously fictional ‘game’, golden age writers both democratise the form in promoting reader participation and, crucially, permit a self-critical depiction of social class embedded in the genre.

Lives of Crime

One of the welcome innovations in approaches to women’s writing has been the possibility of a more nuanced consideration of authors’ lives in the context of their work. Therefore this book embarks upon its re-evaluation of these novelists by considering the effects of biographical knowledge upon our understanding of their neglected art. This chapter is divided into two parts: brief biographical sketches of the six authors will be followed by an essay, ‘Lives of Crime’, which will look at themes closely connected to subsequent chapters, such as psyche and inspiration, families, artistic and generic arguments, religion and the vexed question of ‘homes’.

Jung for Literature and Literary Theory

The wide-ranging discipline of literary studies has neglected the potential of Jung for literary theory. Such neglect becomes acute in an age when meta-narratives such as those of Freud and Marx are tested, reconfigured and reinscribed for a postmodern era. Where is the interrogation of Jung which can also diagnose the ‘otherness’ of his writings? Could a powerful contemporary critique such as feminism detect a textual hysteria in Jungian theory? Could such a project as this offer a contribution to still pertinent debates about psyche, gender, power, history and discourse? My argument rests upon the contention that what has been previously undervalued in Jung is what Doris Lessing has called his sense of the ‘double face’ of truth,1 the ability of his theory to be one capable of disputing its own authoritative claims. Such a theory may be said to problematise or even to ‘deconstruct’ the boundaries between theory and fiction. In this chapter I shall present Jung’s most important concepts in the context of some of the most significant modern literary theories. The aim, as always, is twofold: to employ techniques such as post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism (and in later chapters new historicism, reader theory and postcolonialism) to critique the humanist Jung, while at the same time exploring the potential for Jungian ideas to contribute to these modern literary discourses in a productive and non-hierarchical manner.

Jung and the soul of education (at the 'crunch')

C. G. Jung offers education a unique perspective of the dilemma of collective social demands versus individual needs. Indeed, so radical and profound is his vision of the learning psyche as collectively embedded, that it addresses the current crisis over the demand for utilitarian higher education. Hence post‐Jungian educationalists can develop creative classroom strategies, for example in the United States, Canada and Brazil. The article revises two Jungian ideas in order to teach literature by promoting personal and social growth. By taking Jungs categories of literature as categories of reading and by using his notion of therapeutic ‘healing fiction’ to understand literary narrative, both social and psychic individuation and transformation are facilitated.

Jung's cultural writing and Modern man in search of a soul (1933): spiral essays and performing symbols

C. G. Jung published in English, in 1933, Modern man in search of a soul. This book, I argue, is a response to related problems of psychologists writing cultural analysis, and to the difficulty of writing down the psyche itself. Given that Jungs most foundational belief is of the importance of the unconscious as source of creativity and of mystery, writing itself has to make room for ‘other’ voices and ‘other’ ways of arguing, in addition to rational abstract concepts, in order to fulfil Jungs vision. Symbol, myth, narrative and, crucially, spiral form embody and enact the psyche in culture.

Gothic Crimes: A Literature of Terror and Horror

Why does Roderick Alleyn refer to himself as a werewolf?1 How can we understand Reg Wexford’s claim to be possessed of near supernatural powers,2 and why do both Lord Peter Wimsey and Adam Dalgliesh appear to re-enter the terrifying machinery of Wuthering Heights?3 To track these uncanny spectres in the writings of the six authors, it is necessary to explore the twilight territory of the literary Gothic.

Lands of Hope and Glory? Englishness, Race and Colonialism

These six queens of crime are not chroniclers of Britain when it comes to the negotiation of national identity. The kingdoms of Wales and Scotland rarely merit a murder. Northern and western regions of England occasionally appear as remote areas in which wealthy southern settlers fail to evade nefarious pasts. These six novelists are artists of the dominant region of English political culture in the twentieth century, the southern and eastern lands radiating from London. The detection of crime in the English hearth and home almost obsessively concentrates on what are still known as the ‘home counties’. Therefore this chapter will look at the novels in the context of the construction of a dominant form of Englishness, still deeply imbued with class structures (see Chapter 3), but nevertheless formed in tension with a constant preoccupation of twentieth-century Britain: race and the legacy of colonialism.

The Spirits of Detection

The sense of the crime and detection genres as inherently metaphysical is important to the novels of all six writers. A religious dimension is a persistent expression of the form, from Agatha Christie’s invocation to the ‘Immortals’ in The Mysterious Mr Quin,2 to Lord Peter Wimsey suddenly acquiring a god-like perspective, and to Adam Dalgliesh’s intimations that professional routines aim to substitute for sacred rituals. As argued elsewhere in this volume, the native self-referentiality of the golden age genre enables a fantasy of overcoming death to be included in the rhetorical ‘play’ or, as W.H. Auden put it: ‘The fantasy … is the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.’3

Detecting Psychoanalysis: Readers, Criminals and Narrative

Like detective fiction, psychoanalysis is a narrative art. Both function as a literature of crisis in looking for clues to previously unsolved traumas and in seeking secure boundaries to fix knowledge and desire in a social context. Sharing not only methodology but also tropes of analysis, plotting and deciphering, both detective fiction and psychoanalysis promise popular culture certainties which they cannot ultimately deliver. Psychoanalysis is often cited as a form of secure knowledge of human motivation and desire, but it reveals a double nature, simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of a firm grasp on what is, by definition, unknowable, the unconscious. Similarly, detective fiction offers a narrative guarantee of answers as solutions, but, as Scott McCracken points out, individual novels raise more questions than they are able to satisfy.1

Gendering the Genre

In 1920 the character of the fictional detective changed.1 For a fanciful moment, we could imagine the advent of a refugee Belgian at an English country house called Styles coinciding with the arrival of a deferential ex-soldier at a Piccadilly flat. Bunter’s taking up his post begins the healing of the shell-shocked Lord Peter Wimsey into the socially active yet ambiguous role of the detective: one who uncannily succours the innocent and deals death to the guilty. More inferentially, it is surely now that a young diplomat embarks on mysterious adventures culminating in the switching of careers to the metropolitan police. Roderick Alleyn’s devotion to law and the professionalisation of ‘duty’ is never suspect; but far more marginal (in all senses) is the pre-career of Albert Campion, who by 1920 is testing out his ambivalence towards the law. We might even extrapolate from the 1960s debut of those idiosyncratic policemen, Adam Dalgliesh and Reg Wexford. In about 1920 we envisage an obscure but respectable birth in a quiet Sussex town for Wexford and a marriage of Dalgliesh’s clergy parents to be followed by the birth of their solitary child some 10 years later.