Family Relationships in Contemporary Crime Fiction: La Famiglia [1 ed.] 1527531589, 9781527531581

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Family Relationships in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Family Relationships in Contemporary Crime Fiction: La Famiglia Edited by

Bill Phillips

Family Relationships in Contemporary Crime Fiction: La Famiglia Edited by Bill Phillips This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by Bill Phillips and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-3158-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3158-1



CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Terrible Mothers. Four Images of “The Bad Mother” in Contemporary Spanish Crime Fiction (Dolores Redondo, Rosa Ribas, Susana Hernández, Margarida Aritzeta) .................................. 5 Elena Losada Soler

 It All Stays in the Family: The Revival of Domestic Noir in 21st Century Crime Fiction ................................................................... 22 Katarzyna Paszkiewicz  Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and the Nuclear Family as Torture Device ...... 48 Cristina Alsina

 Holmes and Watson in Sherlock: From the Nineteenth-Century Professional to a Twenty-First-Century Homosocial Relationship ........... 67 Carme Morell

 The Unusual Family of Detective Phryne Fisher....................................... 81 Catalina Ribas Segura 

 Family Monsters in Meu pai vaite matar by María Xosé Queizán ......... 100 María Xesús Lama López 

 Sleuthing the Family Origins: Revisiting Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987) ...................................................................................... 117 Martin Renes

 A Poetics of Disruption: Traumatized War Children and Defective Human Rights in A Shattering of Silence ............................... 137 Isabel Alonso

 



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The Family and Performativity in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games ..... 152 Bill Phillips and Haritha Chalil Savithri Contributors ............................................................................................. 169



INTRODUCTION    “The Family must never die,” (Puzo 1996, 196), says Don Domenico Clericuzio in The Last Don. The Don’s concern is understandable given the exciting lives of Mario Puzo’s crime families, whose villainous activities rarely give them time to catch their breath. In The Godfather we learn that “The day after the shooting of Don Corleone was a busy time for the Family” (Puzo 1970, 113), as the spiral of violence accelerates under the brutal leadership of the Don’s’s eldest son, Salvatore Corleone, popularly known as ‘Sonny’. But it is Michael, the studious youngest son who finishes the job, murdering the culprits, Sollozzo ‘the Turk’ and police Captain McCluskey, over their spaghetti in an Italian restaurant. “You, the high-class college kid, you never wanted to get mixed up in the Family business” (Puzo 1970, 136), expostulates Sonny, but Michael will not be restrained.  Family for these fictional mafiosi is always spelt with a capital ‘F’, and Puzo spins a romantic tale of Italian-Americans of Sicilian origins in which only blood can be trusted (though rarely even that), as centuries of oppressive and corrupt regimes have subjected and inured the island’s peasantry to lives of brutality, poverty and privation. The blood-soaked figures of the crucifixion and pietà provide a model of physical and spiritual suffering in which the father oversees the deeds and death of the son while the mother holds his bleeding head in her arms. There is no-one like Puzo for depicting the monstrous hypocrisy of these pious, pitiful people. For the Corleones “Blood was blood and nothing else was its equal” (Puzo 1970, 101), but this is, of course, an ambiguous statement: there are the blood-ties of family, the bloody business of the Family and blood-letting within the family itself. The murderous, dysfunctional Famiglia, ruled by its pitiless Godfather and his homicidal sons, is a marvellous metaphor for the 'family' in general. Indeed, both in crime fiction and real life it is commonplace to suspect someone in the family when murder takes place, especially the men. “Husband checks out?” asks Spenser of Lt. Quirk after being hired to investigate the murder of Olivia Nelson in Robert B. Parker’s Paper Doll. “How long you think I been doing this? Who do we think of first when a wife is killed?” is Quirk’s axiomatic reply (Parker 16). Fiction and reality

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coincide: “Half of female adult victims aged 16 and over were killed by their partner or ex-partner (82 homicides) in the year ending March 2017” according to the UK Office for National Statistics (Flatley). True, the partner or ex-partner, may also be a woman, as the website recognises: “Partner or ex-partner includes adulterous relationship, boyfriend or girlfriend, common-law spouse or cohabiting partner, ex-spouse, excommon-law spouse or ex-cohabiting partner, ex-boyfriend or exgirlfriend, spouse (including civil partner)” (Flatley), but mostly they seem to be men; in the same year, “only 3% of male victims aged 16 and over were killed by their partner or ex-partner” (Flatley). The website is coy about identifying the sex of the perpetrator, but the difference between victims is clear: women are seventeen times more likely to be murdered by a partner or ex-partner than men.  The family as a social unit is a global phenomenon. Occasionally, societies at different times and in different places offer alternatives— Classical Sparta or the matrilinial Minangkabau people of Sumatra, for example, or celibate religious communities—but families consisting variously of parents, children, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, all livng together or in close proximity, are to be found just about everywhere. And murder and mayhem are to be found there as well, as demonstrated by the abundance of crime novels from South Africa, Australia and India—to name just three countries in a world increasingly fascinated by crime narratives. The three afore-mentioned countries were all colonies of the British Empire, and postcolonial studies takes an interest in those places whose peoples and cultures were subjugated by a colonial power in the relatively recent past. Fiction from postcolonial countries—at least when not written by the (ex)colonisers themselves— provides an alternative voice to the earlier colonial discourse, reassessing the impact of the colonial occupation on lost, misrepresented, damaged or unfolding lives and cultures. Over recent decades crime writers have shown an interest in injustice, poverty, insecurity and inequality—issues which are also of concern to many postcolonial crime writers. Given the preponderance of crime in the family, it is hardly surprising, then, that family, crime fiction and postcolonial preoccupations provide a fascinating combination. The essays compiled in this collection deal with all of these issues. Elena Losada's analysis of crime fiction written by women from various parts of Spain discusses the way in which a feminisation of the crime genre has transformed it, not only by providing a space and a voice for women—who can be doctors, judges, police—but by shifting the emphasis away from the lone detective and his windswept street. People, as Losada

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reminds us, have families—someone must have conceived them, and given birth to them, if nothing else—and the relationship between women, especially mothers and daughters, is a particularly fertile ground for the crime writer's imagination. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz chapter, “It All Stays in the Family” continues the theme of crime and family relationships with a reading of The Girl on the Train (2015) in the context of the domestic noir genre, as does Cristina Alsina whose analysis of Gone Girl (2012) questions expectations of gender behaviour.  Another fertile area for crime writers is the alternative family. Carme Morell’s chapter on Sherlock, the 2012-2017 BBC series of dramatisations of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, questions the traditional heterosexual nuclear family, as does Catalina Ribas’s chapter on female sleuth, Phryne Fisher. Set in Australia, the Phryne Fisher stories provide a critical analysis of early twentieth century colonial rule in which racism, and class and gender inequality, are institutionalised by government and white society. Colonialism and its consequences are also central to the chapters by María Xesús Lama López and Martin Renes. The former analyses the Galician novel Meu pai vaite matar (My Father Will Kill You) by María Xosé Queizán and which is set in both the southern Galician port of Vigo, and Patagonia. Argentina has long been the destination of Galician emigrants, so much so that Spanish immigrants in general are referred to as “Gallegos” (Galicians), whether they are from Galicia or not. Lama’s study theorises the novel as a “transgenerational transfer of trauma” in which crime within the family crosses generations and spans the Atlantic in a journey of discovery and rebirth. A similar journey of discovery is analysed by Martin Renes in his study of Sally Morgan’s autobiography, My Place (1987). When viewed as a crime narrative, the damage inflicted on Aboriginal communities and families by the British and Australian governments is thrown into vivid focus, while Morgan’s investigation into her own and her family’s past includes many of the characteristics of detective fiction. Postcolonial concerns are also the subject of Isabel Alonso's chapter about South African writer Farida Karodia’s novel A Shattering of Silence. Set in Mozambique, it deals with the greatest crime of all: war, and the effect that this most traumatic of disasters has on families, and children in particular. Finally, Bill Phillips and Haritha Chalil Savithri, in "The Family and Performativity in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games", bring us back to the Mafia Don and the construction of a crime family. Chandra’s novel, however, is set neither in Sicily nor America, but in Bombay. The protagonist’s efforts to establish his own famiglia are used by the author to analyse the weight of religious myth in Indian society, the consequences

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for world peace, and the hope that common humanity will prevail over religious fundamentalism. 

References Flatley, John. 2018. “How are victims and suspects related?” Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2017. Office for National Statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjusti ce/articles/homicideinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2017#whichgroups-of-people-are-most-likely-to-be-victims-of-homicide Parker, Robert B. 1994 (1993). Paper Doll. London, Penguin. Puzo, Mario. 1970 (1969). The Godfather. London: Pan Books Ltd. —. 1996. The Last Don. New York: Ballantine Books.



TERRIBLE MOTHERS: FOUR IMAGES OF “THE BAD MOTHER” IN CONTEMPORARY SPANISH CRIME FICTION (DOLORES REDONDO, ROSA RIBAS, SUSANA HERNÁNDEZ, MARGARIDA ARITZETA)1 ELENA LOSADA SOLER

Abstract: Crime fiction authored by women has led to the emergence of new female investigators (policewomen, female judges, female journalists, female forensic doctors) who have revised, distorted, and reconstructed the old gender and genre roles that characterize this type of narrative. One of the most frequent and outstanding features of this new fiction is the presence of social and family bonds that move the female investigators away from classical figures of lone detectives, such as Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe. These new female characters have mothers and their relationship with them is, on the whole, bad. Through the notions of maternity formulated by Adrienne Rich and Luisa Muraro, amongst others, and through the Lacanian concept of “havoc”, we aim to analyze the specular mother-daughter relationship in the works of four contemporary Spanish women writers.

Introduction According to Tolstoy, in the now famous beginning of the novel Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. So too is every unhappy relationship between a daughter and her mother, every matrophobic relationship, unique, while matrophilic relationships all tend to look the same.

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Translation by Andrea Ruthven.

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Using family conflicts as a microcosmic means of representing macrocosmic problems and circumstances is a practice as old as literature itself, and continues even today in the twenty-first century and in the popular literary genre of crime fiction in all its sub-categories, not just in so-called domestic noir. Murdering the family, murdering for the family, within the family, with the family, all demonstrate the strength of this bond, even in its most perverse form. And among all the family bonds, perhaps the most special in its intensity, variety, and capacity for generating pain and malfunction when it goes awry, is that between a daughter and her mother. The present chapter aims to analyse this topic as it appears in the crime novels published by four women authors in Spain after the year 2000: Rosa Ribas, Susana Hernández and Dolores Redondo, publishing in Spanish, and Margarida Aritzeta, publishing in Catalan. First, however, it is worth delineating a brief panorama of crime fiction written by women in Spain, given that the “colander” effect of the canon – in this case the crime fiction canon – means that women always seem to be filtered out. With the 1979 publication of Lourdes Ortiz’s novel Picadura mortal [A Fatal Sting], the contemporary trajectory of women publishing crime fiction in Spain began. Although Emilia Pardo Bazan was a pioneer who published La gota de sangre [The Drop of Blood] in 1911, and in the 1930s some mystery novels like Crim [Crime] (1936) by Mercè Redoreda, were published, for political and cultural reasons, the first contemporary crime novels written by women in Spain— including all of the subgenres, not just mystery but also noir or police and courtroom procedurals— do not emerge until the final years of the Transition. During the dictatorship, because of the obvious socio-political reasons which made it rather difficult to narrate crime, given that, in a society of “order” crime could not exist, crime novels were only minimally present (El inocente [The Innocent], by Mario Lacruz, is an exception). When texts of this kind were published, as paperbacks or dime novels, the action usually took place in another country—often in the United States—and the author would use an Anglosaxon pseudonym. Writing at the beginning of the 1960s, this was the case for María Fernanda Cano Caparró, whose pen-name was Mary Francis Colt, for the noir novels that she wrote for Bruguera.  After its increasing success through the pioneering work of Vázquez Montalbán, the genre grew during the 80s and 90s and during the first decade of the 21st century until becoming what it is today: an undeniable reality, as undeniable, in fact, as the important role the women authors



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play in this literary genre2. Crime fiction—and its female authorship—can no longer be considered as marginal. Women have collaborated, to an important degree, in creating the boom in the genre, which is increasingly less paradigmatic, with more flexible templates, until it has become a narrative form around which a large portion of popular literature is articulated: mysteries and crimes set in the present or the past (Roman, medieval or Victorian detectives), investigated or committed by men and women from a wide variety of social, cultural and sexual spheres. The “crime novel formula” has spread its borders toward other genres: horror, police, urban novels, etc. On the other hand, the traditional Anglo-Saxon hegemony (begging the pardon of Simenon’s Maigret, Camilleri’s Montalbano, and Márkaris’ Kostas Jaritos) has been replaced by Scandinavian crime fiction, with its cruel and icy crimes, and which includes a number of highly relevant women.  In Spain we can also find the names of many women. It goes without saying that the women writing Spanish crime novels are not a homogenous group, and not all of them are writing from a feminist perspective, not all of them use the same literary models, not all have the same social perspective, and the results they achieve are not all on the same literary scale, but among them all they create a diverse literary fabric that contributes to making women’s writing more visible. In an attempt at a, necessarily, incomplete, summary, it is worth mentioning how, after the aforementioned novel by Lourdes Ortiz,3 the

 2

One of the results of the research project Mujeres y novela criminal en España (1975-2010): autoras, figuras de poder, víctimas y criminales [Women and Crime Novel in Spain (1975-2010): Women Writers, Power Figures, Victims and Criminals] (MUNCE) FEM2011-22870 and of the follow-up, Víctimas y agresoras. Representaciones de la violencia en la narrativa criminal escrita por mujeres [Female Victims and Aggressors. Representations of Violence in Crime Fiction Written by Women] (VANACEM). FEM 2014-55057-P is an open access online database (www.ub.edu/munce) which functions, among other things, as a catalogue of women’s crime writing, which is neither scarce nor merely anecdotal, but constitutes an extensive, complex, and ever-increasing corpus. 3 Lourdes Ortiz has only written the one crime novel. Of the 130 titles listed in the database, only 44 are part of a series, the rest are isolated Works. The phenomenon of the “one-off novel” is quite frequent among women writers—contrary to the tradition in this literary genre, that is sustained by the loyalty readers feel for the main characters, from Sherlock Holmes to Pepe Carvalho—and this could be interpreted in a variety of ways, as a stylistic exercise—the case for Carme Riera, who has claimed that she has no desire to repeat the experience—or as a demonstration of women authors’ aversion to being labelled as writers of a literature that literary criticism has scorned, even today (though things are slowly changing).



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pioneers of the 1980s emerged: Marina Mayoral, Núria Mínguez, Josefa Contijoch, Maria Aurèlia Capmany and Maria-Antònia Oliver, among others. In the wake of their work came the series by Alicia Giménez Bartlett, featuring the detective Petra Delicado, which is a milestone in the genre, representing as it does a new form of women’s empowerment in a world that—in both reality and in fiction—barely makes room for a woman detective. In the 21st century, names such as Berna González Harbour, Blanca Álvarez, Mercedes Castro, Rosa Ribas, Cristina Fallarás—who uses the most terrible acts of violence in a way that is most interesting for gender studies—, Empar Fernández and her novel Gris asfalto [Grey Asphalt], with its strong interest in social issues, or Dolores Redondo, who maintains one foot in the genre of fantasy through her novels rooted in Basque anthropology, a style followed more recently by Eva García Sáenz de Urturi. There is a wide range of offerings that cover the entire ideological spectrum, from the lesbian crime fiction by Isabel Franc and Susana Hernández to the curious case of the Catholic crime novels by Reyes Calderón, and that reflect attitudes and aesthetics that are at times antagonistic. On the other hand, women’s crime fiction has expanded equally into all of the languages and cultures of the Spanish state, each with its own sociolinguistic situation and potential reading public. The production in Catalan is notable, and it is worth pointing out the contributions of Margarida Aritzeta, who has once again taken up her “criminal” side, Teresa Solana, who, in Negres tempestes [Black Storms] interestingly joins an ironic depiction of contemporary Barcelona with historical memory, the social noir writing of Anna Maria Villalonga, or Carolina Solé’s only contribution, Ulls de gel [Eyes of Ice] which shows us that crimes are also committed in rural areas, and of course the acclaimed Carme Riera’s sole foray into the genre in her novel Natura quasi morta [Nature is Almost Dead]. In the French Basque country, Itzaro Borda has created a rural detective, Amaia Expeldoi, who investigates in equal measure the mysterious murder or the theft of a cow, or the disappearance of some participants in an onomastics conference in Bilbao. And in Galicia, Laura Caveiro offers a wonderful parody of the paradigms of North Amercian noir fiction in Polas inmensas e alleas fortunas [For the Immense Fortunes of Others]. The crime novel, understood as a narrative structured around a crime and its investigation, directly reflects social realities, changes and contradictions that can remain hidden in other literary genres; this is why it is so interesting for gender studies. The current boom reflects political and social evolution; the crime novel was the first to react to the economic



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crisis and its consequences, it also shows the diversity of cultural identities and has also reflected on questions pertaining to gender. The first of these is the representation of powerful women, empowered women with agency, who are quite different from the traditional model (the spinster Jane Marple or the widow Jessica Fletcher, women of a certain age, with no visible sexuality, and as such ‘not womanly’, similar to the active and grumpy old women in Dickens), capable of combining the “virility” necessary to carry out a good investigation with their more “natural” inclinations toward domesticity. The new detectives work without experiencing the ethical conflicts that Amelia Valcárcel calls “the master’s power” (1994: 165), that is, they participate in the same patriarchal power structure: they are policewomen (Petra Delicado, by Alicia Giménez Bartlett; María Ruiz, by Berna González Harbour; Cornelia Weber-Tejedor, by Rosa Ribas; Amaia Salazar, by Dolores Redondo; Norma Forester, by Teresa Solana; Mina Fuster, by Margarida Aritzeta; Rebeca Santana, by Susana Hernández, etc.) or judges (Gabriela Aldama, by Elisa Beni or Lola MacHor, by Reyes Calderón). And, by creating these female figures, equipped with “the master’s power” and his phallic symbolism—the law and the gun—the authors have also, of necessity, created new masculinities: subaltern men, like Fermín Garzón in Alicia Bartlett Giménez’s works, men who are victims and “fragile men”, thereby profoundly altering the conventions of crime fiction as a literary genre and also the stereotypes linked to each gender. The new detectives, to a large extent working as police officers, are characters that relate to their environment in a quite different way from the solitary detectives of North American crime fiction: they have families, parents to care for, social relationships, and unresolved issues around maternity and motherhood, as well as a different awareness of their bodies, a body that is no longer only susceptible to the traditional methods of harming women, for example through physical or sexual abuse, but also through being shot. To this effect, the relationship that detective María Ruiz (Margen de error [Margin of Error], by Berna González Harbour) has with her convalescent body after she is seriously wounded in the line of duty in the previous novel is especially suggestive. The relationships, the inclusion of the detective in the world, also constitute a different characteristic in comparison with the crime fiction paradigm, especially when compared to the classics written by men. Remember that Sherlock Holmes had no mother, nor did Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, or even Pepe Carvalho. Certainly, more recent characters have started to have more interpersonal relationships, sometimes in rather more unconventional ways than with the calming presence of Mrs. Maigret, who acted as a resting place for the



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warrior, as is the case for the detective Leo Caldas in Domingo Villar’s novels, however, without a doubt, one of the specific characteristics that can be traced in crime fiction by women, and taking into account the need to be especially careful with binary identity labels, is the creation of detectives with strong community and familial ties. Women such as Ana Martí (Rosa Ribas), Amaia Salazar (Dolores Redondo), Rebeca Santana (Susana Hernández) or Mina Fuster (Margarida Aritzeta) are, in spite of themselves, strongly linked to their mothers. From what Adriana Cavarero has called “an individualist ontology of disassociation”4 (2009: 48), which has dominated European culture and which is especially visible in Hobbes’ self-referential subject, for whom the other is always the wolf stalking its prey, there seems to emerge, albeit timidly, a tendency in the new crime fiction toward a concept of relationships derived from the consciousness of horror, of the constant professional contact with evil and the probability of losing one’s own life or that of family and friends, a need for relationships that Judith Butler praised in post-9/11 North American society. These detectives, primarily police officers, know that “there is nothing in our social constitution as women that excludes us from becoming violent” (Butler, 2006: 70), however, precisely because they are constantly exposed to violence, both from others and from the self, they are conscious of their vulnerability and of their need to build affective bonds.  Together with the empowered women and the men who follow a model of masculinity in transition, there have also appeared new interpretations of social crimes, such as abuse or trafficking in women, as seen in El hombre del corazón negro [The Man With the Black Heart] by Ángela Vallvey, or depictions of new types of criminal women: women who murder for reasons unrelated to their feelings or in ways that are not traditionally tied to female stereotypes (using poison or tricking a man into committing the crime for her), women who participate in organized crime or who commit murder to gain power. Perhaps this is the most innovative—and the most disturbing—element to emerge in consideration of evil women in these texts. Might bad women be acting of their own volition, without being a victim of the patriarchy? Can the one who gives life also be the one to take it? The question of evil women has been a difficult one for feminism to come to terms with, and in studying it we come up against the non-normative, that which transgresses patriarchal stereotypes and the frameworks of feminist theory alike, which have attempted to sidestep the issue because of the discomfort that it awakens

 4

Unless otherwise indicated, all direct quotations cited in this chapter were translated by AR.



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and for the ease with which it can be distorted. Female criminals have been treated by classic criminology of the Lombroso school as either monsters or victims, neither of which are individuals with their own agency, regardless of whether or not this agency is to do ill. But the “symbolic catastrophe”, to use Adriana Cavarero’s words (2009: 180), represented in the case of the Abu Ghraib torturers has demonstrated the need for this kind of analysis.

Mothers and daughters: Four matrophobic relationships Of the social and familial ties, those that the detectives weave with their mothers are, as indicated, especially important. In some cases (though these are few), these mother-daughter bonds are positive, as seen in the relationship that the detective Weber-Tejedor, by Rosa Ribas, has with her mother Celsa. What are more abundant, however, are the “terrible mothers”: Amaia Salazar’s ogre-mother in the trilogy by Dolores Redondo; Ana Martí’s matriarch (Ribas-Hofmann), Rebeca Santana’s criminal-mother (Susana Hernández) and the “devouring mother”, in both the Lacanian and the general sense, of Mina Fuster (Margarida Aritzeta). For good or bad, the mother-daughter relationship is an exceptionally strong bond. It is worth taking a brief moment to consider here the difficulties that feminist thinkers have had throughout the 20th century to come to terms with the question of maternity (Kristeva or de Beauvoir, for example5), especially in terms of the social discourse around maternity and to not fall into the trap of lauding the feminine that comes with it. Today, and always, the topic is rather polemical because there is something in maternity that is essentially contradictory for the construction of a free subjectivity, and because the heaviest pressure for women is constructed around it. In the current climate of biologism, maternity has once again taken a central role within the new avatars of the patriarchy and in certain feminisms. The result is a general blaming, even for the so-called “Grey Wave”, of all women who do not fit into the discursive model: the bad mothers, the not mothers, the part-time mothers, those that have doubts, those who do not breastfeed or who resist attachment parenting, etc. 

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Though de Beauvoir coincides with Kristeva in that “in the future, the mother will cease to exist as the antithesis of the subject and object” (553; translation by AR), she does not see in this collapse a reason for joy but rather a feminist principle inciting women to reject maternity because it destroys feminine subjectivity (Zerilli, 1996: 156).



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Turning, then, to the mother-daughter relationship, or as is the case here the daughter-mother relationship, because they are always narrated from the point of view of the daughter, as the most frequent (De la Concha 2004: 16) given that most generations look to even the score with the previous, not the following, generation. We will begin with two simple premises. The first was stated by Adrienne Rich in her famous essay on maternity: “Women are also born of women” (Rich 1996: 46). The second comes from Luisa Muraro in The Symbolic Order of the Mother, and is even simpler: “The logical beginning is that I should learn to love my mother” (Muraro 1994: 18). It is not always that easy. In a patriarchal society, learning to love the mother—and the grammatical construction is key here, as it implies a performativity and a will that goes beyond the presumed filial instinct—is a process of interpretation of our identity that allows us to order, and disorder forever, the “symbolic order” (Muraro 1994: 21). In the case of the daughter-mother relationship, a speculative bond of acceptance or rejection is drawn. The mother is what we will be or what we hope not to be. This is the essential ambiguity: wanting to be her but not wanting to be her, not “turning into your mother” (Rich 1996: 339). The female characters in these novels establish an unequivocal relationship of rejection with their mothers and try to avoid identifying with them. This rejection occurs to different extents in each novel. In those about the journalist Ana Martí6, set in Barcelona in the 1950s, Rosa Ribas and Sabine Hofmann present a situation of discreet confrontation that can hardly be called rejection with a “mother who has adapted to the patriarchy and wants a daughter as well adapted as she is” (Sau 1990: 147), an attitude that was quite common at the time the novel is set. The relationship between the detective of the Mossos d’Esquadra Mina Fuster and her mother, the insufferable Maria de Amorebieta i de Landáburu, progresses in the two novels7 by Margarida Aritzeta, of which she is, to date, the protagonist, toward what could directly be defined as the devastation caused by a mother who has “adapted to the patriarchy who can barely tolerate and even rejects the daughter who seeks to free herself” (Sau 1990: 147). The cases of Rebeca Santana, the junior detective in the

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Don de lenguas [Gift For Languages] (2013), El gran frío [The Great Cold] (2014), Azul marino [Navy Blue] (2016). 7 L’amant xinès [The Chines Lover] (2015) and Els fils de l’aranya [The Spider’s Webs] (2016).



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novels by Susana Hernández8, and Amaia Salazar, the detective in the regional police force in Dolores Redondo’s Báztan trilogy9, are even more extreme than the first two. Rebeca Santana’s mother is a murderer serving time in prison and Amaia Salazar is the daughter of a psychotic murderer and member of a satanic cult. In the face of such “terrible mothers” the daughters’ reactions must be constructed far more elaborately. 

The patriarchal and the “devouring” mother In Ribas’ and Hofmann’s trilogy, set in Barcelona between 1954 and 1958, the protagonist Ana Martí’s only possible career is as a journalist. A Spanish woman in the 1950s was prohibited from joining the police or judiciary, such that the only profession she could exercise that would bring her in contact with criminal investigations was journalism, though she generally had to publish her articles under a male pseudonym. This is the case for Ana, who leads a double life through her texts in the imaginary, but realistic, Mujer Actual [Contemporary Woman], where she signs her own name, and those texts she publishes under a man’s name, or anonymously, for El Caso [The Case], for decades the most widely read newspaper featuring police reports in Spain.  Ana Martí wants to be a different kind of woman than the one her time allows her to be: she is interested in culture, social issues, and she is aware of the political happenings of her time because her father, a famous journalist during the Republic, was punished under the Franco regime. Her mother, Patricia Noguer, on the other hand, is a woman fully of her time. As the wife of a victim of reprisal, she has seen how her social status and her daily life have collapsed and she experiences a change in flat and neighbourhood as an unjust exile. This fictional mother, faithful to the exquisite reality with which Ribas and Hofmann have constructed the narrative, could be no other way, nor could her relationship with her daughter be any different. Mrs. Noguer, in her newly reduced circumstances, wants a better future for her daughter, social status like the one she has lost, a status that can only be achieved, in her mind, by marrying well. In 1950s Spanish society, men—fathers or husbands—are the ones who confer social rank on women, just as they give them a name in society: “Patricia Noguer de Martí”, through the use of the humiliating

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Curvas Peligrosas [Dangerous Curves] (2011), Contra las cuerdas [Against the Ropes] (2012), Cuentas pendientes [Pending Accounts] (2015). 9 El guardián invisible [The Invisible Guardian] (2013), Legado en los huesos [Inheritance in the Bones] (2013), Ofrenda a la tormenta [Offering to the Storm] (2014).



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“de” (in English “of”) that makes the dependence in the relationship glaringly obvious. Patricia Noguer wants the best for her daughter, and honestly believes, belonging as she does in all aspects to the patriarchal structure, that the best thing is a respectable husband. She cannot understand why her daughter rejects this future and breaks off her relationship with a “good catch”: “For her mother, it was a catastrophe. Her daughter had broken up with a promising lawyer in order to continue, as she called it, her ‘fantasy of being a journalist’” (Ribas and Hofmann 2014: 47). As Adrienne Rich stated, “the mother is afraid to appear in the eyes of society as the one responsible, to a certain extent, for the daughter’s deviance” (1996: 335). Ana Martí, however, does not entirely reject her mother, even though she cannot accept her world. She separates the feelings she has for her from her inability to accept the model of femininity she represents, choosing instead an alternative model, her cousin Beatriz Noguer, philologist and victim of reprisal. She is the symbolic mother who can do what her biological mother cannot: open doors rather than closing them. Mina Fuster, the protagonist of Margarida Aritzeta’s novels, lives in a very different Spain, but her problems with her mother are even worse than those of Ana Martí. In the two novels published to date, the dislocation of the criminal genre in contemporary Catalonia becomes clear. Barcelona is no longer the only possible location, other minor spaces, urban, semi-rural or touristic in the province of Tarragona become the setting for the adventures of detective Fuster in a strictly contemporary frame. Mina’s sphere of action is varied, but her mother, Maria de Amorebieta i de Landáburu, only has one, a luxurious attic apartment that she rarely leaves, in a coastal town in Tarragona. However, even though she occupies such a determined and closed space, Maria de Amorebieta is constantly out of place, as her mildly ironic name suggests. Her surnames, with their rather pretentious air of old nobility, are incongruent with her environment, given that the woman lives alone now that her husband has, in more ways than one, gone to a better place, and her home is not a stately manor house in Navarra but only an apartment on the coast, surrounded by noisy tourists. Mina’s mother is selfish, insufferable, and an old-fashioned snob, for whom others are always “riffraff” or “trash”: “What happened to others never mattered to her, she was the centre of the world, and when she whistled, everyone had to come running. One of those mothers that no one would want to put up with” (Aritzeta 2016: 44-45). Mrs. Amorebieta is a dominating and castrating woman for a daughter who came too late, and who was unwanted, and further still, seems determined to ruin all of the



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expectations she had placed in her. This woman, whose past holds a secret that might be revealed in the next novel, is constantly wreaking havoc on her daughter’s life. All of her behavior and conversation is directed at undermining (perhaps the detective’s name is not a coincidence, Mina means “to mine” or “undermine”) her self-esteem by questioning each and every element of her life: her work, her friends, her relationships, her clothing, etc. Added to this is Mina’s feeling of guilt for not earning her mother’s approval regardless of what she does, rather she lives with the bitter feeling that she is “killing her mother with disappointment”: “Now you’ll tell me that the air can hurt me. If I haven’t died from disappointment in you, a little bit of air will hardly do anything!” (Aritzeta 2015: 99). The relationship between the two women comes to be framed as a “war”, born from a profound incomprehension of each other: “For twentyfive years now this deaf battle had been waged. It started one day when she was ten and decided she did not want to go to horse-riding classes, as her mother wanted, nor did she want to play the violin […] I hate you mum, she ended up saying, you have no idea how I hate you. And from then on they had not managed to love each other […]” (Aritzeta 2015: 106). This quotation demonstrates how Mina shows her hatred, a hatred that is more a desire for freedom and an expression of her helplessness arising from not being able to love her mother. This inability to love is solidified by the verbal expression of hate, and creates such a profound breach that the possibility of love is forever prevented. And without love, these two women are but strangers: “For Mina, this woman would always be full of surprises, until the day she dies. And then maybe she would realise that she had never found the way to get close to her, to share anything. They were two strangers. Two strangers that had never known how to love each other, unless always being at each other’s throat was a way of loving” (Artizeta 2016: 220). We do not yet know what past secret is hidden by the strange baby picture that Mina finds, but we can imagine the effects of this conflict-filled relationship, of the constant fighting, in Mina’s personal life and her predilection for difficult men.

The criminal mother If Mina Fuster’s relationship with her mother is defined by emotional warfare, the relationship that Rebeca Santana has with her mother is clearly matrophobic. Throughout the three novels with Santana as protagonist that Susana Hernández has published to date, the relationship Rebeca has with her mother the murderer, and her mother’s presence as a



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character, has evolved markedly, and the mother’s character has grown to the extent that she fulfills an important role in the third novel. Rebeca Santana, the character created by Susana Hernández, is a junior detective in the National Police, with a degree in Criminology and Psychology, and is a lesbian in a context that does not favour diversity. This diversity can be seen in Rebeca’s social circle, where different paradigms for insertion in heteronormative society can be observed. Rebeca herself has no desire to reproduce the heteropatriarchal paradigm in a lesbian version, and she seems to integrate her homosexuality with no difficulty. However, her delay in telling her colleagues and the answer she gives her friend Vicky who asks her why a non-hegemonic subject like Rebeca would become part of a law enforcement agency with such a long tradition of homophobia, “I don’t have to air my private life” (Hernández 2011: 49), indicates that the topic is hardly resolved. Despite all of this, Rebeca’s principal problem is her conflictive relationship with her mother, Puri Garcia—a common and humble name when compared to that of Maria de Amorebieta i de Landáburu—, is serving a sentence in a women’s prison in Barcelona for having killed her husband’s lover and child with a hunting rifle, earning the title “the birthday murderer” in the tabloids. All of Rebeca’s decisions are marked by this matrophobic relationship: she studies psychology (to understand?) and becomes a police officer to compensate through her belonging to “the order” for the “disorder” created by her mother’s act: “She did everything she could to be the flip side of the coin, the other side of the mirror; to be, in the system, everything she wasn’t. This is why she decided to join the force. To be on the other side. On the good side. Would it be enough?” (Hernández 2011: 84).  The narration of the murder, what Rebeca calls “The Great Tragedy” (Hernández 2015: 111), becomes as important an element in the novel as the book-burning in the Pepe Carvalho series by Vázquez Montalbán. And this story—The History—is told through a different narrative form in each story. In Curvas peligrosas, it is told through the insertion of a tabloid television programme that makes the protagonist relive the horror of what happened, and in Contra las cuerdas the narrative is written in Susana Hernández’s characteristic heterodiegetic voice. In the third novel, Cuentas pendientes, “The Great Tragedy” is not just an analepsis from the protagonist’s past, because her mother, recently released from the prison, has disappeared and Rebeca must find her. Here, the relationship with her mother becomes a second, autonomous plot in the novel. By becoming its own plot and developing throughout the entire novel, the succinct explanation of what happened years ago is resolved with the narrator



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saying: “Puri, the junior detective’s mother, condemned for a doublehomicide committed twenty-two years earlier” (Hernández 2015: 15). This “bad mother”, who is so obsessed with her husband that she cannot love her daughter, causes more harm than Mrs. Amorebieta, and causes a rejection that leads the protagonist to question her own idea of maternity: “Motherhood is overrated […] All the cows, pigs and ants on the planet have more maternal instinct than my mother. She did not want to have children […] She had me for my father, because he wanted a child. It was a way to keep him, nothing more. I was a bother to her. She had to take care of me, feed me, and what’s worse, share my father with me, and she could not stand it” (Hernández 2012: 65). The anguish caused by the maternal detachment becomes, for Rebeca the child, true fear, almost as primal as the fear Amaia Salazar fears from her mother-ogre: “As I child I was afraid, so many times, fear that she would do something to me. Sometimes I would catch her looking at me… and it gave me the chills. I know she thought about it, that she thought about hurting me, in getting rid of me. This feeling haunted me for years” (Hernández 2015: 66). We could think that it is Rebeca’s fear that has constructed this spectre of maternal aggression, but an external voice, that of the widow of the woman Puri killed, corroborates this image of the “bad mother” independent of the fact that she is a killer: “When she scolded Rebeca, she didn’t do it in a way that was, what can I call it… normal […] She only really loved him, that simpleton” (Hernández 2015: 165). Junior inspector Santana refers several times to the desire mentioned earlier by Adrienne Rich to “not be like her”, to deny the trace of her mother in her own body, a desire to extirpate this trace to such an extent that it becomes terribly literal when she decides to use sulfuric acid to erase the features she sees in the mirror that belong to her mother: “I wanted to erase her face from my mirror. I wanted to do so at any price. Seeing her face in my own, looking so much like her, drove me crazy” (Hernández 2012: 66). In absolutely negating her mother, all the positive elements connoted by maternity—a mother’s smile, physical contact—are transformed into something negative, strange, or useless. “Her mother’s smile was as strange to her as the customs of the Amazon tribes. She didn’t know how to handle that smile so that it didn’t hurt her” (Hernández 2012: 120-121). Throughout the three novels, however, the daughter-mother relationship evolves. In the first novel, the absolute hate is violently verbalized: “I wish for you, mum, all the suffering in the world. I hope you die alone, like the dog you are” (Hernández 2011: 81), with a force that is increased by the contrast between the affectionate ‘mum’ and the brutality



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of the rest of the sentence. In the third, the ferocious hate is transformed to the point where she recognizes its uselessness, to the point where she finds that her hate for her mother is the dead weight keeping her from moving forward: “No. I don’t hate her. Not any more. […] I’m so tired. I don’t want to waste any more energy on hating her” (Hernández 2015: 248).

The monstrous mother If the potential for the mother to exert physical violence on her daughter is a possibility that never materialises in Susana Hernández’s novels, in the case of Amaia Salazar, the character created by Dolores Redondo, the act is not just carried out, but is only the beginning of something even more terrible: that a child must accept that her mother wants to kill her. Salazar remembers how: “When I was nine, my mother hit me on over the head with a steel rolling pin; when I was lying unconscious on the floor, she hit me again, and then she buried me in the kneading trough and emptied two 50-kilogram sacks of flour over my body … that’s why I lived the rest of my childhood with my aunt” (Redondo 2013: 348). This cold account of the facts that Amaia tells her husband many years later, without apparent emotion, without adjectives, without assessment, without crying, indicates the depth of her vulnus, of the pain that can only be narrated superficially because the words to express its essence cannot be found. In Amaia Salazar’s case, there is no possible ambiguity: she must avoid becoming like her mother, she cannot be, for her son that everyone thought would be a girl, who has broken the female continuum in the family, the monster that her mother was for her. A mother that forced her to accept the unacceptable, that her mother was not nutrition, protection, or love, but death: “You don’t love me, she whispered. And she knew she had to run, because it was the night of her death” (Redondo 2013: 34).  The crescendo of Rosario’s violence toward her daughter passes through four well-differentiated phases. In the first, the mother rejects the daughter and allows no physical contact, not even being near her child. When the mother and father dance with their two older daughters, the third, the one who is excluded, “Knew that if she got up and joined the group, the dance would stop the second she even brushed against her mother” (Redondo 2013: 79). In the second phase there is a small physical violation that carries an important cultural weight: the mother cuts off her daughter’s hair as a punishment. This symbolic mutilation, the destruction of her femininity (which is also an important motif in Carmen Laforet’s 1945 novel Nada) is especially painful for Amaia: “The day after her



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communion, her mother made her sit on the bench in the kitchen, braided her hair and cut it off” (Redondo 2013: 122). The third phase is the aforementioned attempt to kill her daughter, the violence converted into a brutal aggression with the intent to kill: “Crazed with fear, she turned her face toward her mother in time to see the coming blow from the steel rolling pin that her father used to roll out the pastry” (Redondo 2013: 227). Finally, the process culminates in a fourth moment, when she accepts that her mother is a monster. This phase is produced after the murder attempt and before the child is definitively separated from the mother, when this is turned into not a potential attempt but a living nightmare: “Her mother came to the door of the living room and she could finally see her face. This was enough […] and she knew that she would lose control of her bladder […]” (Redondo 2013: 243). The same mother-ogre that many years earlier, apparently weakened and interned in a mental clinic, can still terrify her daughter the police officer by whispering: “I won’t eat you now, but I would if I could get up” (Redondo 2013: 285). Being the object of a mother’s hate is shown as monstrous in Dolores Redondo’s trilogy, especially in the first novel, where the bases are set, with elements taken from fairy tales that construct Rosario as an “ogress”, the witch who eats the children in Hansel and Gretel or the Baba Yaga of Slavic lore. The debt to this tradition is explicitly expressed in the first volume, when Amaia sees the cadaver of a young woman that has been strewn with flowers and exclaims: “It’s Snow White” (Redondo 2013: 238). The whole trilogy is based on this premise, and owes much to Basque ethnology, and acquires another traceable element: the reworking of the very themes of children’s literature.  The mother-ogre owns a bakery, Mantecadas Salazar, that acts as Amaia’s centre of attention, much like the witch’s gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, and like those children, attracted by the sweets, finds pain within the flour and sugar, through the pastry tool turned into a weapon of aggression: the steel rolling pin. What can produce pleasure can also cause death. Furthermore, the dichotomy between Rosario, the mother, and Engrasi, the aunt, reproduces the characters of the step-mother and the fairy godmother, with the additional problem that Rosario is actually a mother, not a trope like the step-mother from the stories. The three Salazar sisters also fit with the three-part structure of children’s stories analysed by Vladimir Propp. Flora, Rosaura, and Amaia—the strong, the weak, and the interrogator—reproduce the essential structure of popular literature, from folk tales to King Lear. Flora is a duplicate of the mother, Rosaura inherits the sweetness and weakness of the father, and Amaia, who wants to flee, ends up returning to the scene of the horror to



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start a criminal investigation that is also an interrogation that leads her to discover why her mother hates her. Finally, the resolution of the police case, which forms part of the paradigm of the genre, coincides here with an essential structural element in the construction of popular stories: the death of the villain and the restoration of good. As Bettelheim asserts: “The child feels like the world functions perfectly and can only feel secure if they know that the villains are always punished” (Bettelheim 1979: 209).

Conclusion As we have seen, the power of fairy tales, and their ancestral themes and motifs, even serve today as a means of articulating contemporary texts, like a trilogy of crime novels that are only apparently different, serving as a means of creating the framework of images that allow for the description of the oldest of fears: that our mother does not love us and that she will hurt us. Through these 21st century Spanish novels, we can see four different representations of matrophobic relationships, at different levels and severity: two situations of maternal hostility, a relationship in which the daughter unequivocally rejects her mother, and the impossible relationship with a monstrous and insane mother. But the four, Ana, Mina, Rebeca, and Amaia, cannot ignore this bond that causes them such pain, because even though it harms and hinders their lives, it is the primary and essential bond with which every woman must come to terms throughout her life. For this reason, studying this bond in popular literature like crime novels allows us to analyse the stubborn persistence of its power.

References Aritzeta, Margarida. 2015. L’amant xinès. Barcelona: Llibres del Delicte. —. 2016. Els fils de l’aranya. Barcelona: Llibres del Delicte. Bettelheim, Bruno. 1979. Psicoanálisis de los cuentos de hadas. Barcelona: Grijalbo. Butler, Judith. 2006. Vida precaria. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Cavarero, Adriana. 2009. Horrorismo. Nombrando la violencia contemporánea, Barcelona௅México D.F.: Anthropos௅Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. De la Concha, Ángeles. 2004. “La figura materna, un problema transcultural. Reflexiones sobre su representación en la novela de autoría femenina” in Las mujeres y los niños primero. Discursos de la



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maternidad, edited by Ángeles de la Concha and Raquel Osborne, Barcelona: Icaria. 155-178. Hernández, Susana. 2011. Curvas Peligrosas. Madrid: Odisea Editorial.  —. 2012. Contra las cuerdas. Barcelona: Alrevés. —. 2015. Cuentas pendientes. Barcelona: Alrevés. Muraro, Luisa. 1994. El orden simbólico de la madre. Madrid: Horas y horas. Propp, Vladimir. 1970. Morphologie du conte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Redondo, Dolores. 2013. El guardián invisible. Barcelona: Destino. Ribas, Rosa & Sabine Hofmann. 2013. Don de lenguas. Madrid: Siruela. Rich, Adrienne. 1996 (1976). Nacemos de mujer. La maternidad como experiencia e institución. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra / Instituto de la Mujer. Sau, Victoria. 1990. Diccionario ideológico feminista. Barcelona: Icaria. Valcárcel, Amelia. 1994. Sexo y filosofía. Sobre “mujer” y “poder”. Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos. Zerilli, Linda M.G. 1996. “Un proceso sin sujeto: Simone de Beauvoir y Julia Kristeva, sobre la maternidad.”, in Figuras de la madre edited by Silvia Tubert, Madrid: Cátedra. 155-188.





IT ALL STAYS IN THE FAMILY: THE REVIVAL OF DOMESTIC NOIR IN 21ST CENTURY CRIME FICTION KATARZYNA PASZKIEWICZ

Abstract: This chapter explores the current revival of domestic noir, in particular, its distinctive dramatization of the problems and contradictions of the contemporary family. While vastly popular and visible in the mainstream press, the genre has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. In critical discourses that circulate around novels labelled as domestic noir—most of which are authored by women—the genre has been trivialized because of its focus on “feminine” private preoccupations, such as relationships, family life and motherhood. In contradistinction to this critical derision, I call for a reappraisal of domestic crime fiction, in which a number of contemporary writers have pursued observant cultural commentary on the gendered inequities of family life. The proposed reading of The Girl on the Train (2015) by British author Paula Hawkins in the second part of this chapter will show the domestic noir genre to be unexpectedly well placed to critique contemporary gender roles and lingering social inequalities in the domains of work, motherhood, finance and domestic responsibilities. In their recently published collection on neoliberalism and the collapse of a progressive politics of the family, Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen and Angie Voela aptly remind us that “the family, as we know, has only ever succeeded through a gendered and generational exercise of power under which some members flourish and others are exploited” (2016, viii). Under neoliberalism, they add, “the complex machinations of the nuclear family fantasy—a problematic space which relies on the exercise of such gendered and generational power, but also a space where political claims to a generous, stable, secure family wage can be made—have […] started



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to fray” (2016, viii).1 The editors build here on Lauren Berlant’s influential work, Cruel Optimism (2011), in which she famously dubs our historical present “crisis ordinariness.” Berlant considers crisis not as an exceptional state, sited in trauma, but as “process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming” (2011, 10). Despite deteriorating social, economic, and environmental conditions in Western societies, she argues, people still seem to remain attached to fantasies of the “good life,” no matter how injurious or cruel these fantasies might be. The scholar turns to aesthetic as a way of apprehending and adjusting to the current pressures in our lives: it allows us “to rehabituate our sensorium by taking in new material” and “provides metrics for understanding how we pace and space our encounters with things” (2011, 12). In reference to this issue, Berlant suggests that some “genres,” understood broadly as affectively-invested zones of expectations about the narrative shape a situation might take, are no longer sustainable in the present and that new aesthetic forms are emerging: alternative genres that allow us to experience and recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies (2011, 12). If, as several commentators have argued, “the dream of neoliberalism […] enables new kinds of fantasies, anxieties and defenses” (Garrett et al. 2016, x), how do these manifest in different spheres and practices of mediation, for example in popular culture? What are the new aesthetic forms that are taking hold in the present and how do they depict, manufacture, regulate or undermine the nuclear family fantasy?  Crime fiction, in particular its recently revived variant, domestic noir, has an important role in articulating these tensions. In scrutinizing the middle-class home—which, “despite its symbolic importance as locus of comfort and identity, is a difficult and anxiety-inducing location, hiding the passions and vices of its outwardly respectable inhabitants from public view” (Cain 2016, 289) —it speaks volumes about the ways in which domestic life serves as a crucial site for the exercise of biopolitical power, elucidated by Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics. Arguably, it also opens up spaces for resistance, not simply as a way of adjusting to the present, but also as a series of potentialities that open up new sensibilities. This chapter explores the current upsurge in domestic noir, in particular, its distinctive dramatization of the problems and contradictions

 1

Following these authors, I understand neoliberalism as a form of biopolitical engineering, in Foucauldian terms: “an aggregation of ideas, a discursive formation, governmental programmes, and over-reaching ideology, a hegemonic project, an assemblage of techniques and technologies for the formation of subjects” (2016, x).



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of the contemporary family. While vastly popular and visible in the mainstream press, the genre has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. In critical discourses that circulate around novels labelled as domestic noir—most of which are authored by women2—the genre has been trivialized because of its focus on “feminine” private preoccupations, such as relationships, family life and motherhood. In contradistinction to this critical derision, then, I call for a reappraisal of domestic crime fiction, in which a number of contemporary writers have pursued observant cultural commentary on the gendered inequities of family life, despite its reputation for banality.  In order to address the multifarious phenomenon of domestic noir in contemporary Western culture, I will adopt the critical traditions of Cultural Studies to underline the delimiting ideological ramifications effected by discourses surrounding this genre. I scrutinize the US/UK media reception of a set of novels promoted as domestic noir, while also drawing on textual analysis. The proposed reading of The Girl on the Train (2015) by British author Paula Hawkins in the second section of this chapter will show the domestic noir genre to be unexpectedly well placed to critique contemporary gender roles and lingering social inequalities in the domains of work, motherhood, finance and domestic responsibilities.

Domestic or Chic(k)? Even though “domestic noir” as a genre label was used earlier in discussion of film noir popularized in the 1940s, more recently the term has been employed to describe a literary phenomenon which emerged after the publication of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), a suspenseful tale of a dysfunctional marriage in which the husband is (apparently) implicated in the disappearance of his wife. Both the book and its film adaptation, directed by David Fincher in 2014, were met with commercial success and critical acclaim, and gave rise to the widespread circulation of the label “domestic noir” in the mainstream press. What domestic noir novels seem to have in common,3 as noted by a number of journalists who have

 2

There are several male writers, too, for example S.J. Watson and his novel Before I Go to Sleep (2011), adapted to cinema by Rowan Joffé (2014). 3 Writing for The Guardian Jon Stock (2014) identifies five novels as “chick noir,” another term for domestic noir: Gone Girl, A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife (2013), Natalie Young’s Season to Taste (2014), Lucie Whitehouse’s Before We Met (2014) and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known (2014). All of these examples were published between 2012 and 2014 and were written by British or American authors. Other frequently quoted titles include The Girl on the Train and



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addressed the genre, is a focus on modern-day women and relationships that have “gone sour,” as well as the fact that “women make up the majority of not only readers but also writers” (Whitney 2015) of these texts. If, during decades, the image of a corpse tossed in a dark alleyway epitomized the iconography of crime fiction, in domestic noir it is a family, a cornerstone of society, which constitutes the crime scene. The crime happens in the kitchen, in the matrimonial bedroom, in the children’s room. Very often the horror in these novels is not the crime itself, but the denigration of a sentimental relationship that leads to it. The emphasis is shifted thus from the investigation of the murder to the developments and events that surround the crime. In 2013, novelist Julia Crouch, who has been described by another crime writer, Elizabeth Haynes, as “the queen of domestic noir,”4 defined this production in her blog: “In a nutshell, it takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants” (Crouch 2013). Lucie Whitehouse, in turn, whose fiction has also been labeled and promoted as domestic noir, describes her novels as “psychological thrillers that explore the fears and anxieties experienced by many women. They deal with the dark side of relationships, intimate danger, the idea that you can never really know your husband or partner” (quoted in Stock 2014).  This idea is, needless to say, not new, as it stretches back, for instance, to the 19th century Gothic novel,5 or books by Patricia Highsmith, Vera Caspary, Daphne Du Maurier, Dorothy B. Hughes and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding that inspired the 1940s and 1950s popular film noirs such as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944), The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949) and In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray,

 Liane Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty (2016). PD James, Ruth Rendell and, more recently, Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), are also concerned with similar issues. 4 Elizabeth Haynes, posting on A.J. Waines’ blog (August 2014), https://awaines.blogspot.com.es/2014/08/suburban-domestic-and-chick-noirnew.html. 5 In addition to Gothic novels, which as many commentators have noted show urbanizing society’s trend towards the domestication of crime, Ruth Cain (2016, 290) points to the Victorian domestic crime fiction, and its trope of the “criminal angel” and “her saintly demeanor concealing unspeakable things.”



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1950), among many others.6 Interestingly, what the recent domestic noir novels appropriate from the American hardboiled and film noir tradition7 are not its iconic tough detectives, but the (equally iconic) female figures: the deceitful and murderous femme fatale that evades the law and the naïve, but eventually homicidal, housewife, who takes vengeance on her husband because of his continuous abuse or infidelity.8 By relocating the crime to the household, domestic noir unmasks the bliss of the American Dream and a set of its underlying values and assumptions, as delineated by Robin Wood: capitalism (the right to property); legalized heterosexual monogamy and family as a validation of capitalism; motherhood; work ethic; progress, technology and the city; success and wealth; the United States as a country where everyone is, or can be, happy and where all problems are resolved within the current system (which might require the occasional reform, but never a radical change) (Wood 2012, 79-80). Far from re-establishing order through the investigation of a crime and its subsequent punishment—a common feature of the traditional detective novel, which has been said to interpellate its readers into “conformity with the hegemony of white, male, middle-class values in Western capitalistindustrial societies” (Rzepka 2005, 21)— domestic noir presents a deeply pessimistic, cynical view of society. While it is often based on a desire to avenge and punish the abuser, which can be readily yoked to conservative interpretations, in fact, as Victoria Kennedy notes, it offers “only gruesome solutions to the social, economic, and romantic unhappiness” it illuminates (Kennedy 2017, 34). Terrence Rafferty observes that “women have been writing books like those ever since [the 1940s and 1950s], but until Gone Girl, publishers tended to look askance at stand-alone crime novels and instead encourage their writers to develop series characters, which could be marketed more

 6

The co-implication between the domestic noir novels and Hollywood films continues to the present day—it is not a coincidence that so many domestic noir books have been adapted to cinema in the last couple of years. 7 Noir is closely related to the American hardboiled tradition in detective fiction, associated with tough male investigators like Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. As Victoria Kennedy observes (2017, 30), the term “noir” tends to be used as a cinematic term and “hardboiled” as a literary term. There has been much debate over whether noir should be considered a genre, a style or a movement. For the purposes of this chapter, I assume the common definition of domestic noir as a genre. 8 It is also worth noting that the most popular hardboiled detective novels featuring femme fatales were written by men, while most of the contemporary domestic noir fiction is written by women, which might imply a possible reframing of these literary archetypes (see also Kennedy 2017, 32).



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easily” (Rafferty 2016). What does seem to be new, then, is the increasing media attention given to the term “domestic noir” and its use as a marketing strategy, alongside other terms, including “toxic marriage thriller,” “suburban thriller” or “chick noir.” The latter makes reference to “chick lit” or “chick flick,”9 that is, a series of cultural productions like romance, soap opera, or romantic comedy, culturally codified as “female” because they are (supposedly) addressed to women and/or they construct a subject position that is identified as female, a supposition supported by extratextual discourses, such as promotional devices, as well as reference to textual strategies, including narrative and mise-en-scène, that construct a world in which women are presumably constituted (the family, the personal, the domestic, and so on). Some critics use this association to deride domestic noir as “nothing more than a darker version of production-line chick-lit” (East 2015). The gendering of genres is an ideologically loaded issue; thus, it is not easy to provide an exhaustive account of the discourses that are at stake here. These labels are never neutral, as they are embedded within a much longer history of taste formation, in which hierarchies of values are constructed along the lines of gender (as well as other power relations, such as those associated with sexuality, age, ethnicity and class). In this framework, women’s authorship, especially in popular forms codified as “female,” points to a complex terrain, which correlates their creativity (or lack thereof) to the consuming practice of the presumed female readers/viewers, associated with a deficient taste, which is a new facet of an old idea that devalues women as writers or readers: incapable of writing or reading real literature and “naturally” inclined to “low” forms, which are, furthermore, the ones which tend to be highly lucrative. Women exist in artistic processes as passive and voracious consumers, almost never authors (see also Paszkiewicz 2018). 



9

The term chick flick refers to the most recent female-orientated cycles of romantic comedy, dating from the mid-1990s. It is frequently understood as only one form of a popular phenomenon that has been described as chick culture, which also includes chick lit (associated with Helen Fielding’s widely popular 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary) and chick TV (for example the series Sex and the City, based on the book by Candace Bushnell), among others. In general terms, “the chick culture boom both reflected and promoted the new visibility of women in popular culture” (Ferriss and Young 2008, 2). In fact, as Ferriss and Young clarify, the term chick flick dates back considerably further than the 1990s and it used to be applied in a derogatory manner “by unwilling male theatergoers to their girlfriends’ film choices” (2008, 2).



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Mostly male-written reviews and promotional material that accompany the release of domestic noir novels incessantly return to culinary metaphors and the vocabulary associated with chick-lit: “Our Growing Appetite for ‘Chick Noir’” (Stock 2014), “Chick Noir is a New Guilty Pleasure,”10 “The Female Noir that Puts Fifty Shades of Grey in the Shade” (Rainey 2013). In view of this, it is not at all surprising that a number of fans and novelists do not feel particularly comfortable with the label or simply do not identify with it, seeing it as solid evidence of sexism in the industry, which unfairly elevates male over female writers, delegating the latter to a domestic sphere, generally perceived as inferior. The novelist Luana Lewis writes that this term is “viewed as offensive and degrading by many […]. The word ‘chick’ inevitably implies female; or as a synonym for ‘not to be taken seriously’” (Lewis 2014). Writing for Cosmopolitan Rosie Mullender complains: “When a black-jacketed thriller is given a ‘chick’ appendage simply because it features a female protagonist and was written by a woman, it’s unhelpful at best and sets feminism back a century or two at worst” (Mullender 2014). The media fervor around the label begs the question of whether domestic/chic noir is merely a marketing strategy devised to sell the crime thriller, traditionally masculine turf, to women readers used to devouring “cookie-cutter” chick lit—as many commentators imply—or whether there are indeed some narrative formulae and patterns that might suggest an appearance of a new genre (or, at least, taking the old genre towards new directions). Comparing the features of chick noir to those of chick lit, Victoria Kennedy argues in favor of the latter supposition: the crime thriller has clearly been revitalized, she contends, through crosspollination with chick lit. She sees them as two sides of the same coin: chick lit and chick noir address similar concerns relating to the modern woman, offering two different responses (humor and horror) (Kennedy 2017, 19). This crosspollination between chick lit and crime fiction is not new, as it generated another detective subgenre, known as “tart noir” (a term used in the 19th century to refer to a prostitute and which later came to denote a female who is attractive and perceived as promiscuous). Tart noir was labeled as a genre in the 1990s by writers Sparkle Hayter, Lauren Henderson, Stella Duffy and Katy Munger.11 Their novels feature strong, independent-minded female sleuths, defined by the writers on their website as “neofeminist women, half Philip Marlowe, half femme fatale,

 10

See promotional materials for Lucie Whitehouse’s Before We Met (2014), available at https://www.amazon.com/Before-We-Met-Lucie-Whitehouse/dp/1408853582. 11 See, for example, Santaulària (2008, 97).



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who make their own rules, who think it’s entirely possible to save the world while wearing a drop-dead dress and stiletto heels.”12 Similar to other “tough women” or “action chicks” in popular culture, tart noir heroines are aware of their physical attractiveness and use it for their own benefit. While some scholars consider the general rise of these new “action chicks” as more or less straightforward evidence of women’s increased power and status—“a sign of the different roles available to women in real life” (Inness 2004, 6)—other writers have been more skeptical about the progressive potential of such representations. Lisa Coulthard, for instance, points to the “apolitical, individualistic, and capitalistic […] celebration of the superficial markers of power,” which—for all the irony that underpins some of these texts—is in fact not transgressive at all, as it returns these violent heroines to a normative femininity or a fantasy of individualized violence (Coulthard 2007, 173). A number of other commentators have pointed to how an acritical celebration of the empowering potential of the female violent heroine is symptomatic of the neoliberal and postfeminist climate, which celebrates white, middle-class, heterosexual femininity grounded in competitive individualism, with an emphasis on sexualized self-definition, personal development, and empowerment through consumption.13 These works throw into relief that it is necessary to describe the representation of violent women with greater precision and complexity, beyond the somewhat obsolete and stereotypical conceptualization of an alienated, violent “vigilante” —one of the gender roles clearly “legitimated” under neoliberal individualism. The protagonists that populate recent domestic noir fiction, however, could not be more different from the detectives in tart noir (if only by virtue of their status as criminals).14 It is interesting to observe that most domestic noir novels have “girl” in the title, making reference to the “girl culture” in a wider sense, which, as has been argued, epitomizes

 12

Tartcity.com. Broadly defined, “postfeminism” encompasses, according to Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (2007), a set of assumptions that feminism has accomplished its goals, and is characterized by phenomena ranging from action films featuring violent heroines to the “girling” of femininity in different manifestations of popular culture. 14 We could also mention here other heroines in female-authored books written between the mid-1960s and the early 1990s: private eyes (Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone), medical examiners (Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta) and police inspectors (Ruth Rendell’s Reg Wexford). As Terrence Rafferty (2016) argues, these authors put “a feminist spin on the old, fading male-empowerment fantasies.” 13



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postfeminist values (Projansky 2007, 45). Some examples include the already mentioned Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, as well as a plethora of other novels, such as Sarah Addison Allen’s The Girl Who Chased the Moon (2010), Mary Kubica’s The Good Girl (2014) and Jessica Knoll’s Luckiest Girl Alive (2015). The “girls” in these books are mostly middle-class women, housewives and mothers; they have grown up and taken on adult responsibilities: marrying, having children and creating homes for other people, all of this with almost no “girly” pleasures in sight. They embody, but at the same time seriously undermine, the discursive formation of neoliberal femininity, the image of a glamorous, empowered and independent woman, who can easily combine a professional career and a love life, who is free to choose and who can “have it all” (a point to which I shall return later). Thinking back to Kennedy’s argument on chick noir as a dark mirror to the pleasures of chick lit, recent domestic crime fiction might be read as “a manifestation of feminist anger and anxiety—responses to the contemporary pressure to be ‘wonder women’” (2017: 19). But, pushing this idea a bit further, I would like to suggest that what Kennedy refers to as “chick noir”—and what I will call in this chapter “domestic noir,” principally to underscore its connections with the American noir tradition and second-wave feminism15—is not only symptomatic of, but also possibly oppositional to, the current postfeminist climate. If postfeminist values—or “genre,” in Berlant’s terms— marked the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, as epitomized by the heroines of tart noir, then the domestic noir novels, all written in the second decade of the 21st century, seem to ask: what’s next? Paula Hawkins’ 2015 novel, The Girl on the Train, is to my mind a good example of the productive use of genre conventions to undermine postfeminist values, the nuclear family fantasy and the gendered exercise of power that feminist scholars have long debated.16 Although, for reasons of space, I can cast nothing but a cursory glance over the book here, I would like to stress how the images of women who kill have the potential of unhinging fear from female victimhood and of transforming the

 15

In fact, Kennedy herself observes that the term chick noir “seems to have fallen by the wayside” and is largely replaced by domestic noir (2017, 20). 16 The “family” has been a thorny issue for feminist criticism in debates too lengthy to précis here. Not unlike “family,” the issue of “motherhood” has an equally long and complex history in feminist criticism. Feminist critiques of the patriarchal, capitalist construction of motherhood can be traced back to the roots of the Enlightenment thought and the birth of modern Western feminism. See, for example, Garrett et al. (2016, xviii).



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symbolic function of the feminine in popular narrative.17 Rather than focusing on potentially misogynist elements in these representations, I will underline the affective force of vengeance and rage against social injustice and power relations embedded in the contemporary nuclear family under neoliberalism.

The Promise of Happiness The Girl on the Train, which many reviews referred to as “the new Gone Girl” (Saner 2015), spent more than eighty weeks on The New York Times bestseller list (Rochlin 2016). As was the case with other popular domestic noir novels, it was adapted for the big screen: the film, starring Emily Blunt and directed by Tate Taylor, was released in 2016, one year after the book’s release.  The story is told from the point of view of three women: Rachel Watson, Megan Hipwell and Anna Watson. The divorcee and addicted to alcohol Rachel commutes every day to London by train and watches through the window her old house, now occupied by her ex-husband Tom, his new wife, Anna, and their daughter Evie. As she struggles to forget about her pain and compensate for her loneliness she also begins spying on an attractive couple who live a few houses away from Tom, Megan and Scott (whom she names Jess and Jason), fantasizing about how they are a perfect happy family. The real Megan, who seems to embody everything Rachel ever wanted to be—beautiful and married to a devoted man—has a troubled past that she conceals from everyone: when she was seventeen, she fell asleep in the tub with her new-born child, waking up to find her baby drowned. One day, Rachel witnesses Megan kissing a man other than her husband and decides to intervene. However, she wakes up the following morning, after another episode of heavy drinking, covered in blood, bruised and completely oblivious to what happened the night before. Soon she learns that Megan is missing. After Anna reports having seen Rachel wandering drunk in the area, the latter is interrogated by the police. Rachel becomes an amateur detective herself and starts her own investigation, which leads to some dreadful discoveries about Tom. In the final confrontation, her ex-husband attacks her and she stabs him in the neck with a corkscrew as Anna watches from the window. Angry that Tom had lied to her, too, Anna moves in, twisting the corkscrew in deeper and deeper, to make sure he dies from the wound. Rachel and Anna are both

 17



See Halberstam (1993, 199).

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arrested, but they separately testify that Rachel killed Tom in self-defense and are both released. The Girl on the Train combines, thus, two narrative patterns: that of the detective novel, which investigates a murder (of Megan) and that of the thriller, which charts the lead-up to a murderous climax (see Kennedy 2017, 32). As is the case with other domestic noir novels, it features unreliable or confused female narrators, often portrayed as passive and overly dependent on men, rather than strong, independent or free-thinking women who firmly stand up against misogyny and abuse.18 However, while they are all mistreated in various ways by their partners, they are not victims in a traditional sense. Drawing comparisons with Gothic fiction, Ruth Cain points to the complexity of this “simultaneous exposure of feminine suffering/victimization and feminine wrongdoing” in recent manifestations of domestic noir: “While the Gothic and sensation novel helped to reveal the abuse of women and girls in ‘respectable’ homes, it also sometimes obscured the capacity of women themselves to commit acts of violence, selfishness and cruelty. [In contemporary domestic thrillers] women are victimized, murdered and assaulted, but also directly implicated in murder and victimization; feminine capacity for violence is implicit” (Cain 2016, 295).19  Although Rachel and Anna are finally capable of defending themselves, or even executing their revenge (as is definitely Anna’s case), they do not embody the liberatory fantasies of omnipotence à la postfeminist girl power which, as Kathleen Rowe Karlyn (2011) asserts, became a milestone in the 1990s. Significantly, what the three protagonists have in common is that they are well educated and they used to have professional careers, but now they all depend financially on others, and in this way they constitute a powerful contrast to the typical chick-lit heroine, a young urban female who unapologetically values her career and successfully balances this with other aspects of her life. “Chick noir picks up at the end of the chick lit narrative and becomes a dark sequel that calls into question the stability chick lit associates with relationships, a

 18

It is interesting to quote here Cain’s observation on what she calls “postfeminist victimology and the new anti-heroines”: “feminine moral ambiguity in crime literature has developed alongside the rise of neoliberal individualism and the exposure of personal trauma and victimization in memoir and fiction” (2016, 294). As Cain suggests, the resentment so characteristic of maternal memoirs becomes the plot driver for many of the domestic crime novels. Indeed, the novel under discussion here seems to be composed of diary entries. 19 Gone Girl stands slightly apart from this trend in that the female protagonist is not intended to be seen as a victim in her own right.



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successful career and belonging to a privileged social class,” argues Kennedy (2017, 26), and this observation can easily be applied to The Girl on the Train. Rachel used to work in public relations but, after her divorce, her drinking got worse and it has caused her to lose her job. She conceals her unemployment from her flatmate, following her old routine of taking the train to London and back every day. Once a real estate agent, Anna becomes a stay-at-home mother after marrying Tom. She contends, as if trying to convince herself: “We are happy. We had lunch and lay out on the lawn, and then when it got too hot we came inside and ate ice cream while Tom watched the Grand Prix. […] I think about how lucky I am, how I got everything that I wanted (emphasis in original)” (Hawkins 2015, “Anna, Saturday, 20 July 2013”). As with Anna, Megan—who used to work in an art gallery—also settles into the routine of a suburban housewife. She admits at some point: “Sometimes, I don’t want to go anywhere, I think I’ll be happy if I never have to set foot outside the house again. I don’t even miss working. I just want to remain safe and warm in my haven with Scott, undisturbed” (“Megan, Thursday, 10 January 2013”). Her husband encourages her to take the job as a babysitter (caring for Anna and Tom’s child) to help convince her to become a mother, which she has no desire to be. As she later confesses to her therapist, when she gets home, she rushes to shower “to wash the baby smell off [her]” (“Megan, Tuesday, 14 August 2012”). Motherhood and its intimate terrors are, alongside the problems of marital relationship, a significant feature of contemporary domestic noir. Chick noir novels usually contain, Kennedy notes, references to “the protagonist worrying about her biological clock, having reproductive difficulties, or having anxiety about not wanting children” (Kennedy 2017, 27). According to the scholar, “this anxiety about infertility and childlessness is a dark reversal of the representation of pregnancy in chick lit, which is done to comic or romantic effect” (2017, 27)—the Bridget Jones novels are perhaps the best example of this trend.20 In The Girl on the Train, Rachel blames herself for her inability to conceive a child that began her spiral into alcoholism: “It didn’t happen. No doctor has been able to explain to me why I can’t get pregnant. I’m young enough, fit enough, I wasn’t drinking heavily when we were trying” (“Rachel, Wednesday, 17 July 2013”). After an unsuccessful round of in vitro fertilization (only one, because it was “all we could afford”), Rachel narrates how this experience “broke her”:



20 The latest sequel of Bridget Jones, Bridget Jones’s Baby (Sharon Maguire, 2016), illustrates this trend in Hollywood.



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It All Stays in the Family The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it, all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? […] I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under and I gave up hope. At the time, I resented the fact that it was always seen as my fault, that I was the one letting the side down. But as the speed with which he managed to impregnate Anna demonstrates, there was never any problem with Tom’s virility. I was wrong to suggest that we should share the blame; it was all down to me. (“Rachel, Wednesday, 17 July 2013”)

As Kennedy rightly observes in reference to other heroines of domestic noir, “the anxieties that [they] experience with regard to the question of becoming mothers suggest the extent to which biological motherhood remains a central social signifier of a woman’s worth and status in patriarchal society” (Kennedy 2017, 27). Rachel seems to be aware of this when she bitterly contends: “I liked my job, but I didn’t have a glittering career, and even if I had, let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers. I’m not beautiful, and I can’t have kids, so what does that make me? Worthless” (“Rachel, Wednesday, 17 July 2013”). While Rachel feels guilty over infertility and childlessness, Anna, who at first sight seems to personify an ideal of a nurturing parent, also displays anxiety about her role. As Caine observes, “the domestic thriller deals with women’s own struggles with the nightmare-figure of the Bad Mother” (Cain 2016, 296). This is immediately clear in the novel when other mothers (not so) subtly imply that Anna is an irresponsible mother for letting Megan take care of her child: “Diane glanced slyly up at me and asked, ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’ She was enjoying it, I could tell. […] They were all being terribly concerned, saying how awful it must be for me, but I could see it on their faces: thinly disguised disapproval. How could you entrust your child to that monster? You must be the worst mother in the world” (“Anna, Wednesday, 7 August 2013”). Furthermore, in spite of her desperate attempts to keep up the façade of success and happiness, Anna feels bored and lonely, and she often seems conflicted about her daughter: I’m bored. I can’t think of anything to do. I fancy going shopping, spending a bit of money on myself, but it’s hopeless with Evie. She gets irritable and I get stressed. So I’m just hanging round the house […].



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I rang around to see if anyone was up for a playdate, but everyone’s got plans. I even called my sister, but of course you’ve got to book her at least a week in advance. In any case, she said she was too hungover to spend time with Evie. I felt a horrible pang of envy then, a longing for Saturdays spent lying on the sofa with the newspapers and a hazy memory of leaving the club the night before. Stupid, really, because what I’ve got now is a million times better, and I made sacrifices to secure it. (“Anna, Saturday, 3 August 2013”)

In her detailed account of the complexities of hegemonic mothering, Cain observes that domestic noir often dramatizes “an increasingly pathologized maternal ambivalence, enhanced by intensive neoliberal parenting and privatized, isolated motherhood” (Cain 2016, 292). Under neoliberalism, she argues, family life and maternal responsibility have become promoted as a realm of private “choices” and failures, but despite this ubiquitous language of freedom, neoliberalism remains essentially coercive.21 “Thus the neoliberal citizen is encouraged to see herself as a freely choosing individual dealing independently with the consequences of life decisions such as becoming a mother” (Cain 2016, 291). Domestic noir fiction expresses fundamental conflicts of neoliberal maternal life: “the clash between individual desire and increased responsibility for children and home, and the incompatibility of maternal duty with the rewards offered to the carefree (and uncaring) consumer-citizen of the new ‘flexible’ market economy” (2016, 290). While the intensified demands of neoliberal-mothering culture, and its consequent “mother blaming,” tend to affect most heavily poor, working-class and socially marginal mothers (2016, 293), they also land on the most privileged subjects. Cain points out how relatively affluent mothers often express “dismay and shock at the profound split between their pre- and post-childbirth lives, following years of a relatively ‘ungendered’ existence, usually spent living independently and in skilled, paid work” (2016, 293). Anna’s sense of disappointment, despite outward success, and her desire to escape the confines of her household, come to the surface in various moments in the novel and subtly expose the mythology of neoliberal motherhood:

 21

“The familial subjects who emerge through this neoliberalist discursive formation are marked by the tyranny of ‘choice’; even those who experience little in the way of either freedom or autonomy are exhorted to understand themselves in these terms” (Garrett et al. 2016, xvi).



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It All Stays in the Family Still, when we were finally done and she [Evie] was playing happily by herself, I let myself cry for a minute. I allow myself these tears sparingly, only ever when Tom’s not here, just a few moments to let it all out. It was when I was washing my face afterwards, when I saw how tired I looked, how blotchy and bedraggled and bloody awful, that I felt it again—that need to put on a dress and high heels, to blow-dry my hair and do my make-up and walk down the street and have men turn and look at me. I miss work, but I also miss what work meant to me, in my last year of gainful employment, when I met Tom. (“Anna, Tuesday, 13 August 2013”)

As Cain observes, for many women motherhood represents “the end of participation in the debt-fueled post-1980s consumption boom” (2016, 293), and this is thrown intro relief in recent examples of domestic crime fiction. Kennedy also makes an interesting point about the genre’s entanglement with material culture, observing that one of the key conflicts for female protagonists in chick noir is a change in financial status.22 “While chick lit heroines like Bridget Jones and Becky Bloomwood [the main protagonist from the Shopaholic series by British author Sophie Kinsella] are drawn to men who are wealthy providers, many of the women of chick noir demonstrate that wives of wealthy men, even when they have their own careers, can still experience the stress of precarious financial autonomy” (Kennedy 2017, 28). Megan’s economic status seems to move up, but she becomes dependent on her partner who has brought her into this world of comfort. At some point, we learn that she tried to set up her own business, but she failed: “I carry on past the park and down towards Roseberry Avenue. If I turned right here I’d go up past my gallery—what was my gallery, now a vacant shop window—but I don’t want to, because that still hurts a little. I tried so hard to make a success of it. Wrong place, wrong time—no call for art in suburbia, not in this economy” (“Megan, Tuesday, 25 September 2012”). Anna also feels entrapped in her house, even more so because this is where Rachel and Tom used to live. Despite her insistence, Tom refuses to sell the house, claiming that in view of the climate of economic instability they could lose a lot of money. Last but not least, financial status is one of the decisive factors in Rachel’s attempts to become a mother. After her round of IVF failed, Tom told her they did not have the money to try again: “We’d taken on a big mortgage, he had some debts left over from a bad business deal

 22

Similarly, in Gone Girl, Nick relocates to his hometown and Amy finds herself living as a housewife in a house she hates; she had to abandon her career and she is now completely dependent on Nick.



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his father had coaxed him into pursuing—I just had to deal with it. I just had to hope that one day we would have the money, and in the meantime I had to bite back the tears that came, hot and fast, every time I saw a stranger with a bump, every time I heard someone else’s happy news” (“Rachel, Wednesday, 7 August 2013”).  Several scholars have commented on the “happiness imperative” of neoliberalism: “the demand for flexibility and entrepreneurialism commands cheerful obedience to the demands of the labor market […]. The expression of unhappiness is regularly interpreted as evidence of personal failure” (Cain 2016, 291). In addition to legal, cultural and personal discipline, the citizen is subject to the imperative to triumph economically at almost any cost. Women, however, have further obligations; they are neoliberalism’s “ideal subjects” (2016, 292), in the sense that “the disciplinary apparatus of neoliberal law, medicine and media focuses heavily on feminine and maternal responsibilities” (Cain 2016, 292). These include requirements “to consume appropriately by buying the right products and services and dressing correctly, or to conserve public funds by having ‘well-planned’ children, to take care of their own and their families’ physical health, and to bring up (the right kind of) productive, non-disruptive children” (Cain 2016, 292). There remains a tacit knowledge that “‘good’ familial choices and practices […] produce happiness, security and success,” while “failure and struggle can only be understood via discourses of individual pathology and deficiency” (Garrett et al. 2016, xvi). The neoliberal regimes of thinking produce a sense of secure identity by excluding the vulnerable or repulsive Other (Garrett et al. 2016, xi). Rachel’s failure marks her as an undesirable body that is bound to be expelled: “I am not the girl I used to be. I am no longer desirable, I’m offputting in some way. […] It’s as if people can see the damage written all over me, can see it in my face, the way I hold myself, the way I move” (“Rachel, Wednesday, 10 July 2013”). Drawing on Berlant, it could be argued that Rachel is “stuck in what we might call survival time, the time of struggling, drowning, holding on to the ledge, treading water, notstopping” (Berlant 2007, 279, emphasis in original). This idea of simultaneous “stuckness” and “notstopping” is materialized in Rachel’s accounts of her walks around her residential area: Ashbury isn’t really a good place to walk, it’s just shops and suburbs, there isn’t even a decent park. I head off through the middle of town, which isn’t so bad when there’s no one else around. The trick is to fool yourself into thinking that you’re headed somewhere: just pick a spot and set off towards it. I chose the church at the top of Pleasance Road, which is about



38

It All Stays in the Family two miles from Cathy’s flat. I’ve been to an AA meeting there. I didn’t go to the local one because I didn’t want to bump into anyone I might see on the street, in the supermarket, on the train. When I get to the church, I turn around and walk back, striding purposefully towards home, a woman with things to do, somewhere to go. Normal. I watch the people I pass—the two men running, backpacks on, training for the marathon, the young woman in a black skirt and white trainers, heels in her bag, on her way to work—and I wonder what they’re hiding. Are they moving to stop drinking, running to stand still? (“Rachel, Tuesday, 6 August 2013”)

Rachel, a socially displaced and marginalized wanderer, might indeed be seen as “worthless” in capitalist system, if only by virtue of her nonproductivity. She is faking commuting to work, going back and forth each day, for no reason. The sluggishly advancing train serves as a perfect metaphor for the arrested nature of her journey: the affective slackness of her suspended agency, her “stuckness,” and inability to progress within the harsh demands of a material world. Furthermore, there is a sense that there is no way out from this situation: “That’s my train. It’s the one I take. That’s the way it is” (“Rachel, Monday, 29 July 2013”).  Of all protagonists, perhaps it is Rachel who illustrates best the dynamics of cruel optimism, as brilliantly proposed by Berlant: “A relation of cruel optimism is a double-bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing” (Berlant 2013). In Sara Ahmed’s terms (2010), Rachel conjures up a “happy object,” something she deliberately turns herself towards in the hope of future pleasure: a perfect family. “Twice a day, I am offered a view into other lives, just for a moment. There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home” (“Rachel, Friday, 5 July 2013”). When she observes Megan and Scott, she assumes that they are “a perfect golden couple” (“Monday, 8 July 2013”): “They’re what I used to be, they’re Tom and me five years ago. They’re what I lost, they’re everything I want to be” (“Wednesday, 10 July 2013”). This, of course, turns out to be untrue: neither are Megan and Scott a happy couple (the latter is controlling and abusive), nor was her past relationship with Tom as idyllic as she wants it to be (it has been colored by Tom’s manipulation). Megan, just like Rachel, is also stuck, albeit in a different way: “All those plans I had […] they feel a bit pointless, as if I’m playing at real life instead of actually living it” (“Megan, Thursday, 20 September 2012”). Megan finds the domestic space she inhabits suffocating and oppressive:



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I can’t sleep in this heat. Invisible bugs crawl over my skin, I have a rash on my chest, I can’t get comfortable. And Scott seems to radiate warmth; lying next to him is like lying next to a fire. I can’t get far enough away from him, and find myself clinging to the edge of the bed, sheets thrown back. It’s intolerable. I thought about going to lie down on the futon in the spare room, but he hates to wake and find me gone, it always leads to a row about something. Alternative uses for the spare room, usually, or who I was thinking about while I was lying there alone. Sometimes I want to scream at him, “Just let me go. Let me go. Let me breathe.” So I can’t sleep, and I’m angry. I feel as though we’re having a fight already, even though the fight’s only in my imagination. And in my head, thoughts go round and round and round. I feel like I’m suffocating. When did this house become so bloody small? When did my life become so boring? Is this really what I wanted? I can’t remember. All I know is that a few months ago I was feeling better, and now I can’t think and I can’t sleep and I can’t draw and the urge to run is becoming overwhelming. At night when I lie awake I can hear it, quiet but unrelenting, undeniable: a whisper in my head, Slip away. When I close my eyes, my head is filled with images of past and future lives, the things I dreamed I wanted, the things I had and threw away. I can’t get comfortable, because every way I turn I run into dead ends: the closed gallery, the houses on this road, the stifling attentions of the tedious pilates women, the track at the end of the garden with its trains, always taking someone else to somewhere else, reminding me over and over and over, a dozen times a day, that I’m staying put. I feel as though I’m going mad. (“Megan, Thursday, 13 June 2013”)

While Megan’s urge to run away might be rationalized through her traumatic experiences from the past, this does not seem to be Anna’s case. Her “stuckness” unfolds as more collective than individual, and it deeply resonates with Sara Ahmed’s provocative question in The Promise of Happiness: “Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?” (Ahmed 2010, 1). According to Ahmed, happiness gets used as a form of social control and Anna’s feelings confirm this: I watched Tom getting ready for work this morning, putting on his shirt and tie. He seemed a little distracted, probably running through his schedule for the day—meetings, appointments, who, what, where. I felt jealous. For the first time ever, I actually envied him the luxury of getting



40

It All Stays in the Family dressed up and leaving the house and rushing around all day, with purpose, all in the service of a pay cheque. It’s not the work I miss—I was an estate agent, not a neurosurgeon, it’s not exactly a job you dream about as a child—but I did like being able to wander around the really expensive houses when the owners weren’t there, running my fingers over the marble worktops, sneaking a peek into the walk-in wardrobes. I used to imagine what my life would be like if I lived like that, the kind of person I would be. I’m well aware there is no job more important than that of raising a child, but the problem is that it isn’t valued. Not in the sense that counts to me at the moment, which is financial. I want us to have more money so that we can leave this house, this road. It’s as simple as that. Perhaps not quite as simple as that. After Tom left for work, I sat down at the kitchen table to do battle with Evie over breakfast. Two months ago, I swear she would eat anything. Now, if it’s not strawberry yoghurt, she’s not having it. I know this is normal. I keep telling myself this while I’m trying to get egg yolk out of my hair, while I’m crawling around on the floor picking up spoons and upturned bowls. I keep telling myself, this is normal. (“Anna, Tuesday, 13 August 2013”)

It is not a coincidence that so many journalists compare domestic noir with Gothic fiction. Kennedy observes that “in chick noir, there is an element of Gothic in [the] sense of inescapability […] of women’s entrapment within social systems that continue to replicate the problems faced by previous generations of women” (Kennedy 2017, 27). As Cain also points out, “the domestic thriller genre replaces the Gothic castle with the sinister gleam of comfortable homes concealing hidden horrors and the labyrinth with a mass of evidential and psychological complexity” (Cain 2016, 295). Anna, more than any other character in the novel, struggles to keep up appearances, driven by the promise of happiness, the stability and safety of marriage, at whatever cost. Her idea of happiness is closely embedded with her return to domesticity: “It’s funny, because a few years ago I would have hated the idea of staying in and cooking on my birthday, but now it’s perfect, it’s the way it should be. Just the three of us” (“Anna, Saturday, 20 July 2013”). However, her anxiety comes to the surface again and again: Everyone told me I was insane to agree to move into Tom’s house. […] They were right […]. On days like today, with the sun shining, when you walk down our little streets—tree-lined and tidy, not quite a cul-de-sac, but with the same sense of community—it could be perfect. Its pavements are



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busy with mothers just like me, with dogs on leads and toddlers on scooters. It could be ideal. (“Anna, Saturday, 20 July 2013”)

As Kennedy usefully observes in her examination of a number of domestic noir novels, “modern-day women are expected to be domestic angels at the hearth, successful career women, well-liked socialites, sexy and glamorous wives, and doting mothers” (Kennedy 2017, 36). These women are angry because “the promises of finding empowerment and security by becoming ‘wonder women’ prove false” (2017, 37). The striking popularity of the domestic angel trope—or the nostalgic revival of the cinematic “fiftiesness,” as Roberta Garrett proposes in reference to films such as The Stepford Wives (Frank Oz, 2004), Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2004) and Mona Lisa Smile (Mike Newell, 2003)23—is complex and deserves closer attention. In her journalistic piece “Tupperware and Terror: The Rise of ‘Chick Noir’,” Paula Rabinowitz comments on the images of upper/middle-class femininity that permeate domestic noir novels: The women in these novels populate pristine suburban or city kitchens, with careful manicures and sleek outfits (even when they once might have worn all black), some highly paid, often with Ph.D.s and publications (but not the jobs that should go with their education). They may have married only recently, feeling the ticking of their biological clocks, or they may wake up one morning to the realization that despite decades of living together for one reason or another (including amnesia), they know nothing about their husbands. Some have dogs, some children—all are superb cooks and jog daily to keep fit. They share glasses of white wine with husbands and friends—they are independent, even creative women (or once thought of themselves as such) and now find they are entangled alone in a dark web; marriage is no picnic. In all these novels […] men may make money and support their wives, but it is all a house of cards ready to disintegrate at any moment: The formerly independent women who have left good jobs to join their husbands in another country or who might make more money than their men but do so through precarious work —like selling Tupperware—do not lean in. Instead they stand apart with the knowledge that their men are killers, rapists, blackmailers. At best, the slimy guy sleeps with his best friend’s

 23

As Garrett suggests, a rejection of past roles in some of these films—articulated through the trope of “fiftiesness”—“exhibits a complex mix of hostility and sympathy in [their] treatment of the culturally and historically overloaded figure of the domestic goddess” (Garrett 2007, 13).



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It All Stays in the Family daughter. Once powerful women, now reduced to empty shells, they must be instructed on the basics of daily living. Today, wash the windows; tomorrow, discover that your mate has strangled a woman. But the day after … well. Reader, I murdered him. (Rabinowitz 2016) 

Rabinowitz links the shift from “chick lit” to “chick noir” to the economic recession of 2008, arguing that for the post-recession readers (“some [of whom] have professional careers, others dwell among the precariat, working in a desultory fashion as artists, union organizers, overseas ESL teachers”), the so-called “chick lit” is just “too smileyfaced” (Rabinowitz 2016). What is striking here is how the fictional trajectory of women in crime fiction—turning back into domestic work— recalls women’s experiences in the aftermath of World War Two, when their wartime public service was rapidly reconfigured as taking returning soldiers’ jobs. As a consequence, (white middle-class) women’s freedoms were retracting and many of them were pushed back into home, childbearing and childcare; a similar narrative to the more recent recession-era retreat to domesticity. Drawing on Emily Matchar, Jorie Lagerwey observes: “While postfeminism is still an active ideological pressure, the Great Recession has disrupted the consumerism-as-selfempowerment narrative central to postfeminist culture and fostered both a return to domesticity and the reemergence of feminism” (Lagerwey 2017, 202-203), the very balance we see the protagonists negotiating in The Girl on the Train.24 In a similar vein, Kennedy states that “the rise of chick noir suggests a heightening of social unease about women, their careers, their reproductive choices, their maternal wealth and their relationships. Just as hardboiled fiction manifested anxieties about agent women in a post-war American context, chick noir manifests anxieties about women and their place in the twenty-first century” (Kennedy 2017, 34-35).  One could trace several compelling correspondences between post-war period femme fatales—claimed to embody male anxieties about women’s

 24

In Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (2013), Emily Matchar addresses the ways in which, after being denied access to the workplace since the economic crisis that began in 2007-2008, many well-educated women have returned to the domestic sphere. In a similar vein, Cain suggests that “women have disproportionately suffered (in terms of employment, income and personal opportunity) from neoliberal fragmentation and privatisation of the Western state’s educational, administrative and medical institutions, in which they (and ethnic minority citizens of both sexes) are overrepresented as employees and firstinstance users” (2016, 292).



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liberation—and the contemporary domestic noir heroines, but there are some important differences which should not be ignored. “The downfall of the femme fatale in these iconic hardboiled novels [Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep]—both of which were made into successful noir films—is that while her sexuality might lure men in initially, modesty and innocence are still the most prized female qualities. The femme fatale is ultimately villainized, and she usually does not get what she wants” (Kennedy 2017, 31). Kennedy suggests that domestic noir female authors “appear to be reclaiming the femme fatale and deploying her as a critique of contemporary women’s position between the aspirations of feminist ideology and the realities of living within patriarchal society.” The protagonists are rendered “more sympathetic, with more understandable motives; these women are tired of being cheated on, kept financially dependent, and having their desires and needs subordinated” (Kennedy 2017, 32). I would further contend that, more than “criminal angels” or “femme fatales” in a traditional sense, these protagonists become “domestic” detectives who uncover the crimes of their husbands and unmask their own victimhood. Although it would be possible to censure their violent behavior or legitimize their actions by making use of girl power discourse, I am more inclined to underscore the affective dimensions of their crimes and how these novels challenge the individualistic scripts of neoliberal society, vocalizing a form of collective rage against abuse. 

Conclusion The cruel optimism—the hope that the best is yet to come—fostered by neoliberalism is “deeply nostalgic about family and seeks to retrieve the imagined family of the past” (Garrett et al. 2016, xxvi). While domestic noir participates in this reconstruction, it nonetheless clearly undermines such troubled feelings of nostalgia. Just as the consumer-led iconography of the suburban housewife/mother figure of the 1950s was met with resistance from the second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s (Garrett et al. 2016, xviii), contemporary domestic noir suggests a degree of women’s disenchantment with the contemporary ideology of female domesticity. The novels offer a devastating critique of the dynamics between a man and a woman in a heterosexual marriage, as well as dramatizing the female experience of alienation as a subject position opposed to the oppressive regime of heteronormativity, intrinsically bound up with the nuclear family. This is not to suggest that domestic noir is inherently subversive. One should not overlook the overwhelmingly white middle-class facet of these novels, even if they certainly upset “the



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idealized image of the […] domestic bliss chick lit protagonists strive toward” (Kennedy 2017, 34). On the other hand, the domestic noir heroines’ characterization as mature women who are capable of executing revenge, who express rather than repress their rage, should be understood within the wider context of postfeminist media culture, even if they appear prescient with regard to a possible decadence of postfeminist ideals. As E. Ann Kaplan argues in her analysis of Nancy Meckler’s Sister My Sister (1994)—a blend of the maleoriented horror genre with the so-called woman’s film—the current preoccupation with female violence and aggression “may be a reaction to the utopianism of 1980s hopes for female solidarity” and the feminine imagination understood as essentially non-violent and nonaggressive. When women gain access to the dominant means of production, “they are able to imagine the violent, aggressive woman [...] while showing her relatively sympathetically and in ways far from stereotypes of the female killer such as the classic femme fatale. It is women’s attraction to violence, long unacknowledged, that [women] dare to address through figures that are cathartic because imaginary” (Kaplan 2012, 75). These representations have potential, thus, to provide women readers and viewers with an aesthetic access to violence and anger in genres traditionally conceived as “male.” While it could be argued that popular literature, alongside film and television, reproduce the clichés of dominant gender norms (the criminal angel, the femme fatale, the gruesome caricatures of “monster-mothers”), they can also become a vehicle for otherwise hidden fantasies of “gendered transgression” (Cain 2016, 291). Rather than rejecting these representations, it seems far more productive to interrogate their affective politics, as well as generic conventions that determine and facilitate this emotional excess. We shouldn’t reject, either, women’s capacity to enact violence, its destabilizing potential, or the readers’ complicity in framing these acts of vengeance as potentially empowering. Janice Radway’s ground-breaking work on the Harlequin Romance novels already argued that romance-readers engage in a fantasy world “to imagine a more perfect social state as a way of countering despair” (Radway 1984, 222). The scholar encourages the cultural resistance of romance reading and to treat this form seriously: “If we do not, we have already conceded the fight and, in the case of the romance at least, admitted the impossibility of creating a world where the vicarious pleasure supplied by its reading would be unnecessary” (1984, 222). Domestic noir fiction might be seen as operating in a similar way, urging us to imagine social realities in which these fantasies would no longer be needed. If fantasy, as Judith Butler



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argues, “is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise” (Butler 2004, 29), then the benefits of exploring feminist potentialities involved in its realm are multiple. 

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP. —. 2007. “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosette.” Public Culture 19.2: 273-301.  —. 2013. “On Citizenship and Optimism.” Society & Space, March 22, 2013. http://societyandspace.org/2013/03/22/on-citizenship-andoptimism/. Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Cain, Ruth. 2016. “‘Just What Kind of Mother Are You?’: Neoliberal Guilt and Privatised Maternal Responsibility in Recent Domestic Crime Fiction.” In We Need to Talk about Family: Essays on Neoliberalism, the Family and Popular Culture, edited by Roberta Garrett, Tracey Jensen and Angie Voela, 289-311. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Coulthard, Lisa. 2007. “Killing Bill: Rethinking Feminism and Film Violence.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, 153-175. Durham and London: Duke UP. Crouch, Julia. 2013. “Genre Bender.” Julia Crouch Blog, August 25, 2013. http://juliacrouch.co.uk/blog/genre-bender. East, Ben. 2015. “On the Dark Side: A Look at the Rise of ‘Domestic Noir’ Novels.” The National, August 15, 2015.  https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-the-dark-side-a-look-at-therise-of-domestic-noir-novels-1.147670. Ferriss, Suzanne and Mallory Young. 2008. “Introduction: Chick Flicks and Chick Culture.” In Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, 1-25. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Politics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Translated by Graham Burchell (Naissance de La Biopolitique: Cours au College de France, 1978-1979). London: Palgrave Macmillian. Garrett, Roberta. 2007. Postmodern Chick Flicks: The Return of the Woman’s Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan.



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—. Tracey Jensen and Angie Voela, ed. 2016. We Need to Talk about Family: Essays on Neoliberalism, the Family and Popular Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Halberstam, Judith. 1993. “Imagined Violence/Queer Violence: Representation, Rage, and Resistance.” Social Text 37: 187-201. Hawkins, Paula. 2015. The Girl on The Train. New York: Riverhead Books. Kindle.  Inness, Sherrie, ed. 2004. Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaplan, E. Ann. 2012. “Troubling Genre/Reconstructing Gender.” In Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas, edited by Christine Gledhill, 71-83. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kennedy, Victoria. 2017. “‘Chick Noir’: Shopaholic Meets Double Indemnity.” American, British and Canadian Studies 28.1 (June): 1938. Lagerwey, Jorie. 2017. “The Feminist Game of Thrones: Outlander and Gendered Discourses of TV Genre.” In Women Do Genre in Film and Television, edited by Mary Harrod and Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, 198212. New York: Routledge. Lewis, Luana. 2014. “Trends in Crime Fiction: From Psychological Thrillers to Domestic Noir.” London Writers’ Club June 24, 2014. http://londonwritersclub.com/2014/06/trends-in-crime-fiction-frompsychological-thrillers-to-domestic-noir/. Matchar, Emily. 2013. Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kindle. Mullender, Rosie. 2014. “Get the Chick out of Our Lit!” Cosmopolitan, January 17, 2014.  http://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a24960/chick-lit-vschick-noir-books/. Paszkiewicz, Katarzyna. 2018. Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Projansky, Sarah. 2007. “Mass Magazine Cover Girls: Some Reflections on Postfeminist Girls and Postfeminism’s Daughters.” In Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, 40-72. Durham and London: Duke UP. Rabinowitz, Paula. 2016. “Tupperware and Terror: The Rise of ‘Chick Noir.’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2016. http://www.chronicle.com/article/TupperwareTerror/234716. Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.



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Rafferty, Terrence. 2016. “Women Are Writing the Best Crime Novels.” The Atlantic, July/August, 2016.  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/women-arewriting-the-best-crime-novels/485576/. Rainey, Sarah. 2013. “Gone Girl: The Female Noir that Puts Fifty Shades of Grey in the Shade.” The Telegraph, March 27, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9956996/Gone-Girl-thefemale-noir-that-puts-Fifty-Shades-of-Grey-in-the-shade.html. Rochlin, Margy. 2016. “The Girl on the Train Takes the Fast Track from Book to Screen.” The New York Times, September 29, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/movies/the-girl-on-the-trainbook-movie-adaptation.html. Rowe Karlyn, Kathleen. 2011. Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers: Redefining Feminism on Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press.  Rzepka, Charles J. 2005. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity Press. Saner, Emine. 2015. “The Girl on the Train: How Paula Hawkins Wrote ‘The New Gone Girl.’” The Guardian, April 21, 2015.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/21/the-girl-on-the-trainpaula-hawkins-new-gone-girl-female-thriller-authors-gillian-flynn. Santaulària, Isabel. 2008. “Un estudio en negro: la ficción de detectives anglosajona, desde sus orígenes a la actualidad.” In Género y cultura popular, edited by Isabel Clúa, 65-108. Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.  Stock, Jon. 2014. “Our Growing Appetite for ‘Chick Noir.’” The Telegraph, January 16, 2014.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10574425/Ourgrowing-appetite-for-chick-noir.html. Tasker, Yvonne and Diane Negra, ed. 2007. Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Durham and London: Duke UP. Whitney, Rebecca. 2015. “Domestic Noir is Bigger than Ever.” Independent, January 13, 2015. http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/features/domestic-noir-is-bigger-than-ever-topten-releases-for-2015-9975488.html. Wood, Robin. 2012. “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” In Film Genre Reader IV, edited by Barry K. Grant, 78-92. Austin: University of Texas Press.





GILLIAN FLYNN’S GONE GIRL AND THE NUCLEAR FAMILY AS TORTURE DEVICE CRISTINA ALSINA RÍSQUEZ

Abstract. The family and the houses/homes it inhabits have been a longlasting, central concern in American literature through the centuries. This chapter explores how Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) lays bare the twisted and perverse nature of what pass for standard social structures and human behavior in our societies offering a depiction of the monstrosity of ‘normality’. In the development of this story of deception and domestic violence, the home and the family are transformed, from the sanctuary they are believed to be, first into an “estranging abode where all sense of hospitality is lost” (Quéma 2015, 178) and eventually into a torture device. In such a family structure the only possible subject positions one can occupy are those of the victim or the victimizer and Amy Dunne, the master criminal mind, will resort to the perverse use of all mediated expectations on gender behavior to secure the latter for herself. 

Introduction In her seminal critical study Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001), Gill Plain states that, “gender transgression and the disruption of ‘normative’ sexuality have always been an integral part of crime narrative” (Plain 2001, 6). In this respect, the genre is resistant “to reductive gender categories” in the development of its plots, but still tends to conservatively rely “upon resolution and the restoration of the status quo” (2001, 6). Gillian Flynn takes this characteristic of the genre a step forward when, instead of using Gone Girl to explore ‘deviant’ gender and sexual behavior, she offers a depiction of the monstrosity of ‘normality’, a normality that, in its condition as such, does not seem to require closure. There is no need to restore order because apparently order has never been breached. Flynn lays bare the twisted and perverse nature of what passes for standard social structures and human behavior in our societies.



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She seems to be acutely aware that “crime, like its counterpart respectability, is seldom what it seems” (2001, 6) and she decides to focus on that apparent respectability and problematize it. If, according to Plain, it is precisely the production of “textual closure that gives the crime genre its conservative appearance” (Plain 2001, 6), Gillian Flynn also turns this convention upside down by presenting an ambivalent ending which favors the victory of the criminal mind over the restoration of the law and offers a commentary on the complacency of mass opinion and on how easily it is appeased, soon abandoning any desire or even curiosity to get at the truth once the narrative is naturalized into the standard, pre-existing archetypes. The cruelty of Amy’s abuse is forgotten as soon as the family is back together and Amy is to be a mother. And while everybody can go back to the pretense of normality and social bliss, the readers—and it is implied also those surrounding the couple— know that the terrorizing and psychological abuse of Nick is still ongoing. However, as long as the neighbors/readers do not have to witness it, they/we are ready to accept Amy’s domination and Nick’s defeat and spectralization, in a reversal of the gender stereotypes attached to domestic violence. As long as the uncanny has the home as its main scenario, it will remain silenced. Flynn’s novel can then be considered an example of a pattern, noticed and analyzed by Anne Quéma, in which what the readers witness is: “the transmogrifying of the home as space of the familiar and the familial into an estranging abode where all sense of hospitality is lost and where protagonists stumble their way through the unheimlich” (Quéma 2015, 178).

Gone Girl Gone Girl, thus, confirms the thesis, defended by Quéma, that domestic violence offers an interesting twist to Foucault’s repressive hypothesis. The fact that domestic violence has been mostly regarded as a ‘private affair’ and any discussion of it as a symptom of a larger social malaise has been repressed, has not prevented, contrary to what one would expect, the proliferation of textuality about it. In Quéma’s words: “on the one hand, novels, studies, manuals, reports, surveys, medical and police records amount to a proliferation of documents on domestic violence; on the other, the very topic of domestic violence is under proscription even though or, perhaps, because the phenomenon hits close to home” (Quéma 2015, 172). The novel offers uncountable (meta)textual accounts of the different kinds of abuse Amy and Nick inflict on one another and of Amy’s final triumph, but it never names the nature of a violence that is hushed as it hides behind



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Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and the Nuclear Family as Torture Device

the walls of the ‘home’. This calls to mind the all-to-recognizable structure of “abjection and recognition, estrangement and tacit knowledge, whereby the group is cognizant of the situation [of abuse], yet systematically […] hushes it up” (2015, 172). Gillian Flynn mentioned in an interview published by The Guardian on May 1, 2013 that her goal when writing Gone Girl was to “to make spouses look askance at each other” (Flynn 2013). The novel is divided in three parts whose titles refer to the three key moments in classic romantic comedies, although the first two are not presented in the expected order: “Boy Loses Girl”, “Boy Meets Girl”, and “Boy Gets Girl Back (or Vice Versa).” The inversion of the usual order of the first two parts seems to open up the possibility for the girl in the second title not to coincide with that in the first one and may induce the reader to believe we are facing a story in which one girl is replaced by another. That is partly true in as much as Real Amy replaces Amazing, Cool, and Diary Amy. However, what the novel structure reinforces is Nick’s agency in said hypothetical substitution and, hence, the hypothesis presented by Diary Amy in the first part of the novel: Amy is the victim of domestic violence and dies at the hand of her husband Nick, who has already ‘met [another] girl.’ The first part of the novel alternates two narrative voices: Nick Dunne’s and his wife’s, Amy Dunne, who, as we find out at the end of chapter three, the second one narrated by Nick, has disappeared. Amy is, in her own words at the beginning of the second part of the novel, “Technically, missing. Soon to be presumed dead” (Flynn 2012, 295) and her voice gets to us in the first part of the novel through the chapters from a diary she claims she started keeping when she met Nick and continued to do so until her disappearance. That voice, which is almost a spectral presence, depicts an Amy that moves from being “embarrassed at how happy [she is]” (2012, 13) that she has met Nick to being afraid for her life and thinking, when she finds Nick looking at her “with those watchful eyes, the eyes of an insect, pure calculation” (2012, 277) that “This man might kill me” (2012, 277). Later, in the second part of the novel, we find out she made the diary up after she discovered Nick was having an affair with a younger woman and she went on the mission she calls “Fuck Nick Dunne” (2012, 319). The first item in that list is “Write Diary Entries for 2005 to 2012. Seven days of entries, not every day, but twice monthly, at least. Do you know how much discipline that takes?” (2012, 319-320). The second part of the novel begins with an unexpected plot turn. The two narrative voices are kept but Amy’s reaches the reader not through the diary she kept before her disappearance, but from the present in which Nick tries to prove his innocence. The time span covered in the last two



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parts of the novel goes from Amy’s narration of the very same day in which she disappears to that of one day ten months, two weeks and six days after her return to Nick. Amy opens the second part of the novel and closes the third. She opens it with a “I’m so much happier now that I’m dead” (2012, 295), which she utters while she watches Carthage, Missouri, recede in the rear-view mirror. Carthage is Nick’s hometown and, after he lost his job, he decided, against Amy’s will, to move there and be close to his family. While the reflection of “dread Carthage” (2012, 295) grows smaller, she finds herself smiling for the first time in a long while. She closes the third part of the novel with: “I don’t have anything else to add. I just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I’ve earned that” (2012, 555). These parts of the novel weave together three different narrative threads: Amy’s narrative on how she had maneuvered to be able to escape both her marriage and Carthage and how she had managed to make everybody suspicious of Nick’s role in her disappearance and her presumed death; Amy’s narrative of her adventures on the road; Nick’s narrative of his attempts to mount a solid defense of his innocence and, once Amy returns, his account of the process by which he accepts his role as both the nemesis of but also the necessary complement to his wife’s sick and violent mind: Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. […] I’m rising to my wife’s level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I’m the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It’s a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can’t imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist. We are one long frightening climax. (2012, 553)

This is, after all, a novel about the radical impossibility of ever knowing another human being, even one’s husband or wife: “The heart of another is a dark forest always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own” (Cather 2008, 45). Flynn’s thesis here is not new. On the contrary, she inscribes her novel in the long list of American literature which analyzes the heteronormative nuclear family as a source of a frustration expressed in episodes of varying degrees of harmful violence: Hawthorne’s male characters, lessened by their radical incapacity to accept adult sexuality; Willa Cather and her dismantlement of the heteronormative family in her defense of structures based on the principles of equality, empathy, hospitality, and friendship; Faulkner’s presentation of the nuclear family as an incestuous, perverse place that leads to the dehumanization of its



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members; Jonathan Franzen’s description of the epic effort needed to survive a smothering family structure that annuls the individual, to name but a few. The family and its discontents seem to be one of the core concerns of American literature across the centuries.  Still, to this basic structure, Flynn adds a couple of twists which individualize her project. She places at the center of her plot a cruel, perverse, and spiteful woman, ready to instrumentalize to her advantage the prevailing—and necessary—discourses of social condemnation of gender-based violence against women in order to unleash her own destructiveness on her husband. Flynn also takes the description of the nuclear family as a violent structure a step further. In her universe, one either dies at the hands of said family model or manages to escape from it. She turns it into an instrument of torture that gradually but inescapably subdues and annuls the individual, keeping him / her barely alive to continue enduring the pain. 

The Reception of the Novel Needless to say, Flynn’s novel was met with harsh criticisms for her use of gender stereotypes to both create her characters and develop her plot. As Emine Saner wrote in The Guardian on 7 October, 2014: “the US writer found herself accused of a ‘deep animosity towards women’” (Saner 2014). Saner quotes from a blogger who summarized her objections to the novel by writing that Amy “is the crystallisation of a thousand misogynist myths and fears about female behaviour. If we strapped a bunch of men’s rights advocates to beds and downloaded their nightmares, I don’t think we’d come up with stuff half as ridiculous as this plot” (Saner 2014). Most of the critics of the novel find it problematic that Amy is such a perfect fit to the misogynist stereotype according to which, in writer and TV producer David Cox’s words, unfortunately, women are depicted as “self-serving, venomous and deceitful” creatures who, nevertheless, “can get away with whatever they want” (qtd. in Saner 2014). Flynn has had to face strong accusations that she is harming the agenda of the feminist movement. However, the author presents herself as a feminist and retorts that we are not doing the feminist cause any favors by not addressing women’s capacity for evil. Being morally outraged at the existence of female characters that outdo men in their capacity for evil and demanding their eradication from novels in case their presence reinforces society’s misogynist fears “puts a very, very small window on what feminism is” claims Flynn: Is it really only girl power, and you-go-girl, and empower yourself, and be the best you can be? For me, it's also the ability to have women who are



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bad characters … the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad—trampy, vampy, bitchy types—but there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish. (qtd. in Burkeman 2013)

The uproar generated by Flynn’s novel—and its film adaptation34—might also be the result of the fact that, in Eliana Dockterman’s words, there are so few strong women in literature (or TV shows or movies) the burden falls on the writers who do write about women to make them represent all of womanhood. And that's simply not fair. We should have all sorts of women in our novels—just as we have all sorts of men. Very few writers are creating complex, evil female characters with interesting motivations. Gillian Flynn is. It seems sexist to assert that female characters ought to be, at their core, loving and good. (Docktermann 2014)

Gillian Flynn has specialized in the creation of perverse female characters with sharp criminal minds; that has made most critics state she has “Patricia Highsmith’s level of discreet malice” (Maslin 2012), but Flynn’s Ripley is a woman. As has been noted by the critical reception of the novel, Tom Ripley and Amy Dunne share a number of distinguishing traits: they are both obsessed with becoming somebody else—Tom Ripley wants to become Dickie Greenleaf and Amazing/Diary/Cool Amy wants to become Real Amy; they are both manipulative, dishonest, and remorseless. But unlike what happens in Highsmith’s novel, Amy has no class hatred justification for her actions and that makes her evil nature more difficult to naturalize. The women in Flynn’s novels are, by far, more morally perverse than any of the men. Moreover, Flynn shuns political correctness and includes in her novels numerous examples of women who pretend to have been raped and/or abused in order to victimize the men who are the object of their wrath. Flynn herself comments on this in her blog: It’s not a particularly flattering portrait of women, which is fine by me. Isn’t it time to acknowledge the ugly side? I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock

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The controversy heated up with the premiering of the filmic version of the novel, featuring Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck. As Jessica Coen admits in Jezebel, Oct 6, 2014: “Movie Amy pales in comparison to the vivid character we meet in the book. Strip away Book Amy’s complexities and you’re left with little more than ‘crazy fucking bitch’. That makes her no less captivating, but it does make the film feel a lot more misogynistic than the novel.” (Coen 2014)



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Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and the Nuclear Family as Torture Device so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains—good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn’t necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn’t qualify either). I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don’t tell me you don’t know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves—to the point of almost parodic encouragement—we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids.

What makes Amy and most of Flynn’s female criminal minds the object of such fierce critical reaction is, probably, how well they embody Kristeva’s notion of the abject as: something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order […] The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior… (1982, 4)

Patriarchal Structures and the Nuclear Family Flynn’s female criminals are all of that and, what is more, they have come to occupy those subject positions by strictly complying with the gender stereotypes that conform mainstream society. Amy is the third character of said characteristics in a series that started with Ama and Adora in Sharp Objects (2006) and continued with Diondra Wertzner in Dark Places (2009). Flynn’s novels, however, do not aim at being sociological portraits. Thus, reading her female characters as representative of female gender in general is a superficial analytical exercise that leaves aside the literary value of texts that neither attempt to document our day and age nor to provide a utopic account of society, where only positive role models can figure. With the creation of evil but plausible female characters, placed in a domestic/family framework which plays a fundamental role in their construction first as victims and later as victimizers, Flynn is not trying to badmouth or punish women. Instead, she is making it possible for us to think meaningfully about complex topics such as the unhealthy structure of the nuclear family, the gender discourses that help put it together and



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keep it alive, the complexity of the relationship between victim and victimizer, and the imbrication of both subject positions in the processes of victimization. The psychostructural relationships in Flynn’s text depend upon patriarchy. The novel reproduces the underlying structure/culture of patriarchy (Lewiecki–Wilson 1994, 25). But not in the way most reviewers seem to posit it does. This is not a novel that defends patriarchy by exonerating the self-absorbed, selfish, cheating husband the text turns into a helpless victim, and condemning the cheated-on, neglected wife whom it turns into a smooth and cruel manipulator with a criminal mind to fit the stereotype of any misogynist imagination. This is, instead, a novel that denounces the devastating effects of the patriarchal structure which has the nuclear family as the basic, ineludible social structure. Family, in the novel, is both that which Amy desires to build with Nick, out of learned discourses on happiness and domestic bliss, and also a finely attuned instrument of torture which she can use against Nick at her will. Already from the titles of the different parts of the novel, the author plays with the reader’s expectations, mediated by preexisting narrative matrices on gender behavior widely spread in the mass media, and which, in turn, precondition our perception of gender violence. This point is driven home forcefully by the abundant presence in the novel of textual references to mass media and their use of stereotypical gender images. A case in point is the first paragraph in Amy’s diary: “Tra and la! I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this […] like some Technicolor comic of a teenage girl talking on the phone with my hair in a ponytail, the bubble above my head saying: I met a boy!” (Flynn 2012, 13). Amy, all through her diary, describes herself through stock images from popular culture that allow her to connote a lot without revealing much about herself. Nick, in turn, also shows his expertise in the power of these narrative structures and stock images: when the police question him on the day Amy disappears, way before he finds out about the existence of the diary with which Amy will incriminate him, he thinks: “It’s always the husband […] Everyone knows it’s always the husband, so why can’t they just say it: We suspect you because you are the husband, and it’s always the husband. Just watch Dateline” [original italics] (2012, 58). The reference to Dateline, the NBC TV program, is significant. Dateline investigates mysteries, disappearances, and murders and gives the narrative of the events and the ongoing investigation a markedly subjective slant, allegedly to bring audiences closer to the humane component of the tragedy under investigation. The crewmembers define themselves as agents in the investigation who cooperate with the police, the attorneys,



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and the lawyers in their attempt to capture the culprits and send them to jail. However, they also feel they have the duty to “help the real people who lived the events share their journeys with you [the audience]” and to do that in an entertaining and show-businesslike manner35. Dateline shows are paradigmatic examples of the spectacular products generated by the ‘true-crime industry’, which, through a careful process of selection of scenes and calculated arrangement of the narrative timeline, pretend to be presenting to the audience a truthful if heart-felt account of the real events. The ‘true-crime’ stories, whether presented to us as TV programs, novels or films have an enormous influence in the processes that determine the narrative framework from which we read, tell, and even think about the instantiations of gender-based violence. Almost without exception, they tend to present the—female—victim as somebody one can sympathize with, a good person, with no ill feelings towards anybody and in possession of all the virtues traditionally considered feminine—she is, in short, ‘a good soul’. She is the absolute victim of crime, the victim that does not “have the ability to protest or object against the crime in which they were targeted” (“Absolute Victims” 2011). This image is constructed by putting together a highly engineered combination of stories shared by relatives and friends that talk about her as a good citizen concerned about the well-being of a boring yet honest community where they all know each other. She is a good mother and selfless, happy wife who has been gradually becoming unhappy and sullen due to what the witnesses believe was the growing violent and/or controlling behavior of her husband. The husband, on the contrary, is presented as somebody whose past is unknown to the community. With this information, the audience jumps to the conclusion that, as Nick says: “It’s always the husband” (58)36. Dateline provides, thus, an illustrative example of the use of gender stereotypes to construct recognizable narratives with which the audience can identify and which allow them to form strong opinions as to the innocence or lack thereof of the main characters in the tragedy. These are the same kind of gender stereotypes that Amy will resort to in her diary in order to generate a story that will enmesh Nick in a sophisticated, convoluted plot which, with each new twist, contributes to further establishing his guilt. Besides, the inclusion of the reference to Dateline serves another, this time narratological, purpose: it turns this novel into a commentary on the perverse, destructive uses of textuality: Amy’s diary, the Amazing Amy

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http://www.nbc.com/dateline An example of this highly teleologically deterministic narrative structure can be found in the episode “The Trouble in Quitman” (Season 2016) of Dateline.

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books written by Amy’s parents, the narratives developed by the media on both Amy and Nick, Nick’s attempt to write a novel entitled Psycho Bitch, Amy’s novel, the last in the series of the Amazing Amy stories… all of those are attempts to control reality and violently shape it into what one needs it to be. The success of the plot woven by Amy depends on the rigidity of the gender structures of the collective unconscious and on the preexistence and circulation of narratives that naturalize and reinforce them. Her story will draw on the trope of the ‘disappeared/abducted white woman’, which has animated a long literary tradition of female victimization in American literature which has its origins in the early captivity narratives. According first to Richard Slotkin in Regeneration through Violence (1973) and later to Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream (2007), the Indian captivity narrative can be considered one of the founding myths of American culture: “In [a captivity narrative] a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. The sufferer represents the whole, chastened body of Puritan society” (Slotkin 1973, 94). In narratives which include an abducted white woman as their main character, these women, while absent, are, more importantly, silent, and their silence fosters a reappraisal of their nature so that they are presented as flawless daughters, mothers and/or wives. Doubting the goodness of the abducted person is tantamount to doubting the gender roles that are the cornerstone of the status quo. Amy’s disappearance is a perfect example of this trope. Flynn, then, is telling a familiar story, one that has a long history and to which we are exposed in the media almost daily. Yet she defamiliarizes it by introducing substantial changes to it so that, in the end, the story presented to the reader only uncannily looks like the archetype it is based on. To start with, far from being silent, each of the main characters tells his/her own version of the events; those versions, in turn, are further complicated by the stories told by the press in their coverage of Amy’s disappearance that tend to become the most widely circulated and generally accepted narratives of the events, the ones which mold public opinion. In this regard, the TV coverage of the disappearance in the Ellen Abbot Live show is particularly relevant. In the novel, the Ellen Abbot Live show is meant as a parody of Nancy Grace’s homonymous cable TV show. Nancy Grace was a successful prosecutor before she started hosting TV programs. She had decided to go to law school at age 19 after her fiancé was killed. When she started her TV career, she first co-hosted TV Court with Johnnie Cochran and then moved on to hosting Nancy Grace for HLN, one of the cable channels owned by CNN. With a relentlessly aggressive



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style which has turned her into one of the most talked-about personalities in HLN, Grace became the advocate of victim’s rights in a nightly show which “regularly highlight[ed] abused and murdered women, missing children, negligent mothers and what she perceive[d] to be miscarriages of justice” (Abramovitch 2016). The ratings of some of her programs were staggeringly high, particularly during her first years, and remained reasonable throughout her career until the show was discontinued at the end of 2016. Her style has also a large number of fierce opponents that accuse her of stepping over the line and of having turned justice into a moneymaking spectacle. As David Carr wrote in The New York Times, “the presumption of innocence has found a willful enemy in the former prosecutor turned broadcast judge-and-jury” (Carr 2011). The inclusion in the novel of a show that mimics Nancy Grace serves multiple complex purposes. It primarily points the reader in the direction of the ‘guilty husband’ disappearance scenario as the audience of the show/reader of the novel grow certain that the pressure coming from being depicted in Ellen Abbot Live as an uncaring selfish writer that sponged on his wife will lead Nick to a final breakdown and confession. Ellen Abbott, following the script of most of these real crime programs, presents Nick, who never gets a chance to tell his side of the story, as follows: “A shocking story to report today: a beautiful, young woman who was the inspiration for the Amazing Amy book series. Missing. House torn apart. Hubby is Lance Nicholas Dunne, an unemployed writer who now owns a bar he bought with his wife’s money. Want to know how worried he is? These are the photos taken since his wife, Amy Elliott Dunne, went missing July fifth—their five-year anniversary.” Cut to the photo of me [Nick] at the press conference, the jackass grin. Another of me waving and smiling like a pageant queen as I got out of my car. (Flynn 2012, 218)

Beautiful, young, inspiring wife. Good-for-nothing heartless husband. Conclusions are reached. Nick must be guilty. When the story unfolds to reveal the full perversion of Amy’s capacity for evil, however, the inclusion of the above episode reads less as a plotadvancing device and more as a commentary on the capacity of the media to manipulate public opinion and on the power of mainstream gender stereotypes that naturalize the reading in which she is the victim and he the victimizer. In 1990, Lee Ann Hoff noted that academics and human service professionals have recently taken an interest in the topic of wife abuse […] grassroots activists […] had brought it to



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public attention, and demonstrated that wife abuse was one result of unequal power relations between women and men, rather that the assumed psychopathology of women who seek their own victimization. (1990, 6)

Domestic Violence and Gender However, in Gone Girl, Amy is the one who exercises power over Nick and manages to reduce him. This poses a challenge to the insistent and widely spread media coverage that analyzes gender relationships in terms of masculine domination and feminine victimization. So, Flynn has generated a fictional account of domestic violence that forces us to accept that, to quote Quéma in her appraisal of the work of Rebecca E. Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, “men and women are equally capable of domestic violence” and to consider the phenomenon of domestic violence “as the product of […] a constellation of violence, which allows one to grasp this violence in its intersectional complexity” (Quéma 2015, 169). Unquestionably, the number of male victimizers is overwhelmingly higher than that of female victimizers but the existence of female aggressors should also be factored in in any sound analysis of domestic violence. Besides, Amy uses to her advantage all of the gender stereotypes that go into the creation of the female victim—male victimizer paradigm. Amy knows that domestic violence is “grasped and theorized as a social pattern” (2015, 17037) and plays that to her advantage. Thus, her case being taken up by Ellen Abbot was part of her plan all along. She actually counted on that intervention of ‘media-turned-show-business’ as one of the cornerstones of Nick’s incrimination: “Ellen Abbot is part of my plan too. The biggest cable crime-news show in the country. I adore Ellen Abbott, I love how protective and maternal she gets about all the missing women on her show, and how rabiddog vicious she is once she seizes on a suspect, usually the husband. She is America’s voice of female righteousness” (Flynn 2012, 329). And that unreflective, blind righteousness is what Amy banks on to condemn Nick. Moreover, when she disappears, she leaves behind a diary that conforms to every convention of the genre. Diary Amy, as Amy herself says, “is a work of fiction” (2012, 297), “an affable and naïve persona, a woman who loved her husband and could see some of his flaws […] but was sincerely devoted to him” (2012, 319). Her diary is the way Amy has to rewrite her story in such a way that it “would restore my perfection. It would make me the hero, flawless and adored” (2012, 315-316) and at the same

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That is the way it is theorized by a considerable number of socio-legal scholars, among which Quéma highlights Deborah Lockton and Richard Ward (Quéma 2015, 170).



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time lead the reader into believing that “Nick was indeed planning to kill me!” (2012, 319). The diary is Amy’s murder weapon as it frames Nick as a murderer and, in turn, because there is the death penalty in the state of Missouri, turns the administration into the executioner, all of which allows her to “commit the perfect murder” (2012, 317). But that is not her only tool to punish Nick. Once Amy’s life on the road turns sour and Nick’s television persona becomes more and more believable and likeable, Amy plans her return, to be able to continue playing her power games with her husband until he becomes the man she wants him to be. In her own words: “he can choose to truly love me the way he once did, or I will bring him to heel and make him be the man I married” (2012, 526). Amy needs complete control over her husband and neurotically seeks a nostalgic instantiation of her husband we, as readers, cannot even know whether he ever existed as our access to this Nick is limited to Amy’s descriptions in her fictional diary. Amy, however, is determined to get that disembodied ideal back. And when Nick is not only unwilling to become the obedient, devoted husband she obsessively demands he becomes, but also shows signs of rebelliousness hitherto unexpected in him, she feels entitled to exercise the punishment that will eventually bring him to his knees.  When Amy makes her reappearance, Nick receives her with a public expression of happiness aimed at the press stationed outside his door, while he whispers “you fucking bitch” (2012, 496) in her ear and secretly works to find evidence to incriminate her and make her pay for what she has done. The novel now makes explicit what their sick relationship has been about all along: a sustained attempt to be the one in control of the story of their marriage. Once back together, Amy works at perfecting her previous attempts and where her diary failed to be the definitive attempt to re-write her husband, she feels the new Amazing Amy book, which she writes as a continuation of the saga started by her parents, will prove final: “I have a book deal: I am officially in control of our story. It feels wonderfully symbolic. Isn’t that what every marriage is, anyway? Just a lengthy game of he-said, she-said? Well, she is saying, and the world will listen, and Nick will have to smile and agree” (2012, 544). Nick, on his part, is writing his own book, that Amy calls “his side” which, she knows, is not “a love story” (2012, 548) and which opens with a self-explanatory: “I am a cheating, weak-spined, woman-fearing coward, and I am the hero of your story. Because the woman I cheated on—my wife, Amy Elliott Dunne—is a sociopath and a murderer” [original italics] (2012, 547). These are the only two sentences of Nick’s version of the story that we have access to, but we also know he gives it the title Psychotic Bitch and



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that the text is an exercise of full disclosure of the sordid, spiteful nature of their marital bond.  Gone Girl is a story about the monstrosity of patriarchy and the heteronormative reproductive family, but here, woman may be monstrous—like the Sphinx—but she is definitely not silent. Amy’s ‘rebellion’ shatters the gender role division on which the basic heteronormative structure stands and her struggle to become a self-made subject and not a daughter/wife/mother. From the first chapter in Part Two of the novel, Amy reveals her desire to tell us, the readers, who she really is: “I can tell you more about how I did everything, but I’d like you to know me first. Not Diary Amy, who is a work of fiction (and Nick said I wasn’t really a writer, and why did I ever listen to him?), but me, Actual Amy” (2012, 297). Hers is, as we have already established, a desire for textualization, the will to come up with the final, unquestionable narrative of herself. In her desire for pristine clarity and unambiguous truth, she comes up against reality and its stubborn resistance to fit any narrative structure. Unable to navigate the waters of subjectivity, multiple interpretations, and doubt, Amy embarks on the project of transforming reality to make it fit her story and, thus, to give truth validity to her narrative, irrespective of the damage she needs to cause on those surrounding her. Her truth will prevail as the truth even if that implies the destruction of all of those who might offer alternative readings. In short, silent is the one thing she is not. Real Amy is not only re-writing and substituting Diary Amy and Cool Amy, the version of her Nick falls in love with—“Nick loved me. A six-o kind of love: He looooooved me. But he didn’t love me, me. Nick loved a girl who doesn’t exist. I was pretending, the way I often did, pretending to have a personality” (2012, 299)—, but, above all, she is erasing Amazing Amy, the self-emerging from the story told by her parents in the shape of a series of teenage fiction novels about their only surviving daughter: Amy is their first and only kid; she is born after her mother’s five miscarriages and two still-births. Amy, in her own words, is “the one who made it. But I’ve always been jealous too, always—seven dead dancing princesses” (2012, 299). Her unborn sisters “get to be perfect without even trying” while for her every day “is a chance to be less than perfect” (2012, 299). Hence, Amy’s insistence on fixity and perfection. Real Amy, unlike Amazing Amy, feels life is exhausting when so many expectations are placed on her but also compulsively needs to live up to the standards set by her parents’ fictional child.  All of the roles Amy plays are perfectly recognizable: the domestic violence victim from her diary, the perfect daughter from the teenage fictions her parents wrote, the cool, understanding wife persona she puts on



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to make Nick fall in love with her: all of these fade when Real Amy makes her appearance as she comes to realize that “she was so much better, more interesting and complicated and challenging, than Cool Amy” (2012, 303). But Nick seems to prefer Cool Amy and that is where the hatred begins: “Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you?” (2012, 304). Hatred at being rejected triggers Amy’s desire for vengeance, which is fueled by Nick’s decision to drag her to a life in Missouri she despises. Amy finds her existence boring and provincial, resents the fact that Nick spends all of their remaining money on a bar he opens with his sister, and is finally pushed to breaking point when she finds out that Nick stereotypically cheats on her with a young student of his. Condemned to the clichéd life of the cheated-on, stay-at-home wife in the suburbs, she paradoxically resorts to all available gender stereotypes when engineering her revenge strategy. She first creates Diary Amy—the victim of domestic violence, scared of her violent husband, who disappears mysteriously, leaving behind enough clues to get her husband accused, condemned, and executed as a murderer; later, when she reappears, she reinvents herself as a mother.  To her dismay, Nick has started to speculate as to who he would be without Amy and he feels he needs to “find out. I had to tell my own story. It was all so clear” (2012, 547). He needs to redefine himself from outside the stereotypes to which Amy has banished him—cheating husband, psychological and emotional abuser, and, finally scared henpecked husband— and he starts a similar process to that which she has needed to go through in order to free herself from her emotional frailty and from the gender clichés to which her own parents reduced her. Although Nick does manage to tell his story in the shape of a novel, we are not privy to it. Just as Amy starts feeling that Nick is questioning her presence in his life, when he finishes writing his novel and is ready to tell Amy that he “was no longer part of her story” (2012, 549), she manages to use Nick’s frozen sperm to artificially inseminate herself as she knows too well that the argument of his biological fatherhood will be final for a highly conventional Nick. In a time when the definition of ‘family’ has shifted from what it is— essence—to what it does—performance—so that a major break has occurred which consists in defining family in terms different from those of blood and marriage (Barlow 2007), Nick clings to old notions of ‘family’ and allows himself to be enmeshed in Amy’s carefully woven net. Amy’s natural capability to reproduce crosses over into some system of meaning assigned by cultures (such as kinship systems) (Lewieki-Wilson 1994) and Amy’s pregnancy, however artificial and non-consensual, seals the—sick and sickening—social contract between Nick and Amy. The traditional



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family structure has been transformed from the safe haven whose function is to offer sanctuary to the prison that promises a lifetime of pain and suffering: “I was a prisoner after all. Amy had me forever, or as long as she wanted, because I needed to save my son, to try to unhook, unlatch, debarb, undo everything that Amy did” (Flynn 2012, 551). Amy becomes a perverse mum-to-be and uses her pregnancy to trap Nick in her net so that she can continue torturing him emotionally and psychologically. She has understood that what is really hurtful is precisely those stereotypes they are both running from and the family structure that emerges from them and that the most effective way to hurt Nick is to keep him tied to said family structure. As Quéma states, “Deployed in the household, domestic violence turns the familiar into the unfamiliar and sets up a regime of dread where harmony and protection would be culturally expected” (Quéma 2015, 174). The novel, thus, “undermines the master narrative that has the household as a major site of kinship” (2015, 187). Following Bourdieu’s ideas on the nuclear family, the novel’s underlying tenet seems to be that “as natural as the family appears, it is actually the process of symbolic violence that created our particular view of what is natural” (Carrington 2002). Amy’s pregnancy is her stroke of genius and also the clearest narrative marker that, if in this novel words are a weapon, it is also unquestionably the case that family, that over-determined site, is both the criminal structure generating the conditions for Amy to resort to violence in the first place and the torture device she uses to revert her process of victimization by turning into a victimizer herself. Amy, who has ingeniously engineered all sorts of evil deeds against her husband, finally settles for the nuclear family to keep Nick unhappily by her side: “He is learning to love me unconditionally, under all my conditions. I think we are finally on our way to happiness. I have finally figured it out” (Flynn 2012, 555). Nick is bound forever to Amy’s ‘regime of dread’ in a twist to the most common and expected pattern of domestic violence.  “From a symbolic standpoint” Quéma argues, “it can be argued that the abuser uses the other’s body so as to make her [in this case, him] comply with his vision and division of the world, betraying a belief in a perfect performative match between signifier and signified” (Quéma 2015, 169). If Nick’s body behaves as Amy’s idea of a perfect husband, then he is a perfect husband, Amy is a perfect wife, and she has achieved her craved for perfection. What is interesting, in this case, is that the only body that has suffered physical violence is Amy’s, albeit self-inflicted: she has cut herself, she has tied herself up and bruised her ankles and wrists to pretend captivity, she has bruised her own face, she has feigned having been raped, she has poisoned herself… in short, she has victimized her own body so as



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to be able to accuse Nick first and Desi later of being her abusers. If she is the victim of (self-inflicted) assault and battery, Nick is the victim of psychological harassment “which has a serious detrimental effect upon the health and well-being of the victim, albeit that there is no violence involved in the sense of physical force” (Law Commission, qtd. in Quéma 2015, 170). So, “the hits and blows [which] are performatives of a gender division of the social world […] [and] an unquestioned interpretation of gender identity and relationships” (Quéma 2015, 170) are used by Amy precisely to unveil the constructedness of said identities.  Amy forces Nick to delete his novel and with it his own voice, his subjectivity, and his version of their story. Any attempt to counter Amy’s own narrative is abandoned and she is left as the single author of the authorized account of their life together. She has the floor now and she concentrates all of her efforts into textualizing their marriage as “the world’s best, brightest nuclear family” (Flynn 2012, 555). But as Nick’s sister had warned him: “You are literally going to be a nuclear family, you do know that? You will explode. You will fucking detonate” (2012, 552). All that is needed for the explosion to be triggered is for Nick to step out of line and say or do something that is out of kilter with Amy’s version of the story, for him to answer Amy’s question about the reasons why he is so wonderful to her with a “Because I feel sorry for you” instead of the “You deserve it. I love you” that Amy feels she merits (2012, 555). At the end of the day, Amy is determined to make sure she has “the last word” (2012, 555) and she will not be crossed. The (family) order has been restored—and that only temporarily; justice, however—or, more accurately, consequently— hasn’t.

References Abramovitch, Seth. 2016. “Nancy Grace to Depart HLN After 12 Years”. The Hollywood Reporter, June 30.  http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/nancy-grace-leaving-hln907480. Anon. 2011. “Absolute Victims”. Researchomatic, November.  http://www.researchomatic.com/Absolute-Victims-92724.html. Barlow, Anne. 2007. “Family Law and Housing Law: A Symbiotic Relationship?” In Family Life and the Law: Under One Roof, edited by Rebecca Probert, 11-26. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Burkeman, Oliver. 2013. “Gillian Flynn on her bestseller Gone Girl and accusations of misogyny”. The Guardian, May 1. 



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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/01/gillian-flynnbestseller-gone-girl-misogyny. Carr, David. 2011. “The Media Equation: TV Justice Thrives of Fear”. The New York Times, May 23.  http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE1DA1E3DF930 A15756C0A9679D8B63&mcubz=3. Carrington, Victoria. 2002. New Times: New Families. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Science + Business Media. Cather, Willa. 2008 (1925). The Professor’s House. Radford (VA): Wilder Publications. Coen, Jessica. 2014. “Gone Girl’s biggest villain is marriage itself”. Jezebel, October 6. https://jezebel.com/gone-girl-s-biggest-villain-ismarriage-itself-1642978659. Dockterman, Eliana. 2014. “Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist?” Time, October 6. http://time.com/3472314/gone-girl-movie-book-feministmisogynist/. Faludi, Susan. 2007. The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. New York: Picador. Flynn, Gillian. 2012. Gone Girl. New York: Crown Publishers. —. 2017. “I was not a nice little girl…” http://gillian-flynn.com/forreaders/. Hoff, Lee Ann. 1990. Battered Women as Survivors. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lewiecki-Wilson, ͒Cynthia. 1994. Writing Against the Family: Gender in Lawrence and Joyce. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Maslin, Janet. 2012. “The Lies That Buoy, Then Break a Marriage: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn”. The New York Times, May 29.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/books/gone-girl-by-gillianflynn.html?_r=1. Plain, Gill. 2001. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburg University Press. Quéma, Anne. 2015. Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature. University of Toronto Press. Saner, Emine. 2014. “The Gone Girl backlash: what women don’t want”. The Guardian, October 7.  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/07/gone-girl-backlashdavid-fincher-misogynist-feminist.



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Slotkin, Richard. 1973. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. “The Trouble in Quitman” Dateline Season 2016,  https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/video/full-episode-the-trouble-inquitman-690983491890.





HOLMES AND WATSON IN SHERLOCK: FROM THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROFESSIONAL TO A TWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY HOMOSOCIAL RELATIONSHIP CARME MORELL

Abstract. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson have become two of the most iconic characters in literature and film. This chapter analyses how Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat adapted Conan Doyle’s characters to their twenty-first-century Sherlock (BBC, 2011-2017). Starting with an overview of the process of adaptation, this chapter revises previous adaptations of Sherlock and points towards the problematics of adapting such an iconic character to new cultural and social contexts. For that purpose, I will analyse in depth the episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” which I will argue represents a turning point in the relationship between Holmes and Watson. Thus, I will show how this episode marks the change from a Victorian relationship to a more contemporary homosocial one with which audiences can better identify. In addition, I will pay attention to the development of the character of Mary and her role in this homosocial relationship throughout the third and fourth seasons of Sherlock, which plays with the ideas of modern family and reflects Gatiss and Moffat’s aim of breaking with tradition.

Introduction: a brief account of adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in general and Sherlock in particular Sherlock Holmes and his inseparable companion, John Watson, are two of the fictional characters most often adapted to film, television, and even videogames. They are also characters whose relationship has changed greatly in the different adaptations made since they first appeared in the short film Sherlock Holmes Baffled in 1900. However, I shall argue that none of the different adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories has been so faithful to the original as the BBC TV series Sherlock (2010-2017)



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in terms of key aspects, visual language, and ways of thinking and feeling. It must be admitted that there are exceptional adaptations such as those produced by Universal during and after the Second World War, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, which managed to capture the tragic circumstances of Europe and the rest of the world at that moment. This paper, however, does not aim to compare previous memorable adaptations of Sherlock Holmes to the big screen with that of the BBC’s series, which ran from 2010 to 2017. This paper will not dwell either on the intricacies of the adaptation of narrative to visual language (see Morell, 608-614). My aim, rather, is to analyse in depth what the creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat considered to be the real subtext of Sherlock. According to Carlen Lavigne, Moffat “argues that the series’ true subtext is the story of the platonic Holmes and Watson relationship—the story of the greatest friendship ever”—and that “although people talk about it being ambiguous or mysterious, the truth is that the books are completely clear” (Levigne, 15). Moffat had previously argued that “A modernised retelling would allow the viewer to see the original stories the way the original reader would have read them—as exciting, cutting edge, contemporary stories, as opposed to the relics they've become” ( Barnes, 168). Moffat, then, does not claim to bring anything new to our current understanding of what a film adaptation should be, that is, the translation from narrative into cinematographic language, be it a period film or a modernised version adjusted to contemporary times, such as the above mentioned adaptations by Universal. To be more specific, an adaptation deals with themes, genres, plots, characters, time periods, and even pictorial or musical motifs if we were dealing with art or music. If only themes, time periods, or genres were adapted, it would become quite clear that we could not speak of adaptation but merely of literary traditions. However, when plots are adapted, the references which may be recurrent throughout the history of literature and film, or easily discernible in a hypertext, are narrowed down. Moreover, if specific characters and plots are adapted, as is Sherlock’s case, the references work as a mirror image and further narrow the angle of a given adaptation. In fact, when this occurs, the narrowing is such that the audience expects full fidelity to the original. Years of academic and critical work have been necessary to demonstrate how film and TV adaptations express themselves in more creative ways, putting forward their own cinematographic (rather than narrative) language, and establishing their own rules independent of narrative and drama. In sum, a film adaption does not have to be faithful to the original literary work. What is more, it cannot be, at least in a literal sense, because of the differences in length (See Seger, Linda).



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This paper will approach adaptation in the terms explained above. The adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories have been revolutionary in many ways. Firstly, because Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are characters created not only for a British audience but also for readers all over the globe and which have become part of our social imaginary. Alongside other characters such as Adam and Eve, Ulysses, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are not the cultural heritage of a single country but rather belong to the whole world, as Doyle himself discovered when he tried to put an end to Sherlock’s stories1.  Gatiss and Moffat were thus confronted with the difficult task of adapting an iconic character, who had been endlessly adapted to the screen for over a century. But, as they explain in the quotation above, the project would not be interesting if it were just creating another icon. Their adaptation would have probably been as successful if they had only translated the stories into our century, making the plot more modern and replacing what was disquieting or terrifying for nineteenth-century audiences with other events that could be equally so for the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, we have to bear in mind that Gatiss’s and Moffat’s was not a film adaptation but a TV series, which, because of its extension, allows something that a film cannot do: extensive character development, which is especially useful when we are dealing with a character with such extreme traits as Sherlock Holmes. The TV series, which goes beyond the limited and limiting average time of an hour and a half of a feature film, creates a believable character arc that transforms and further develops the already complex psychology of Sherlock. Gatiss and Moffat, being aware of this, made the most of the TV series length to turn Sherlock into something more than just a contemporary witty and hilarious adaptation. The development of the characters in general and of the two protagonists in particular gives the series a brilliance that originates in the protagonists of the Victorian stories. In fact, this is a return to these Victorian characters, which makes it remarkably difficult to disassociate the nineteenth-century detective and his colleague Doctor John Watson from the characters in the TV series, the strange family that Sherlock and John are, and which goes beyond the strict relationship between colleagues and friends found in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. 

 1

It is well known that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, hurt by the fact that his historical novels did not share Sherlock’s success, tried to put an end to this era of his literary career. However, he had to resuscitate the character of Sherlock Holmes because his readers sent protest letters en masse. Consequently, Doyle published The Hound of the Baskervilles, which does not mention Holmes’s death. I will get back to this story later on.



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From Holmes and Watson to Sherlock and John: the importance of a name As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Moffat and Gatiss considered, from the beginning, that Sherlock and John were the real subtext of the TV series. As these characters became closer in their relationship as friends, understood from a contemporary perspective, there was a shift in the way they refer to each other: from their surnames to their first names. Alan Barnes considers this change one of the most revolutionary aspects of Sherlock: “Rather, it’s “Sherlock and John”. Never an antiquated, Eton and Harrow “Holmes and Watson”— “Sherlock and John”. That one, small, semantic shift renders Sherlock unique, making its two leads the most likeable since Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Lovable, even, for their frailties, not despite them” (Barnes, 121). I agree with Barnes’s contention that, despite it being a small semantic change, this alters everything. Not only does it modernise and turn Sherlock and John into our contemporaries—since nowadays it is highly improbable that two friends would call each other by their surnames, as would have happened in Victorian times—but it also brings them closer to the audience and brings to the fore a more complex and rich understanding of these characters.  In the TV series, Sherlock continues to be a man with a privileged mind, faithful to Doyle's description. In addition, we now have a digital native. Traditionally, Sherlock was a man knowledgeable in the experimental sciences, while now he has the most modern technical means, such as computers, to search for data, and sophisticated microscopes for analysing blood samples. He is also somebody who carefully studies all sides to any question and who applies his investigative skills to the limit. Like Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Gatiss’s and Moffat’s Sherlock retains in his memory any data which might be useful for his cases. If he does not remember that the Earth rotates around the sun it is because, as the Victorian Sherlock reasoned, this fact would not help in closing any of his investigations and it occupies a valuable space in his memory which might be needed for his job. Let us not forget that Sherlock is addicted to work, up to the point to which he has no life beyond his job and becomes depressed if there is nothing exciting to solve— although, nowadays, when this happens he does not inject himself with cocaine as the Victorian protagonist did but rather falls back on his work and palliates his cravings with nicotine patches. Like Doyle’s character, this contemporary Sherlock plays the violin, has a brother, Mycroft, who works for the British Government, and lives at 221b Baker Street in 2010



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London. He has parents, although he rarely sees them. He still lacks empathy and is inconsiderate towards other human beings. And he is still a sociopath who is rude to everyone, cares little what others think of him, of his ironic take on things, of his bad temper, and of his arrogance. As Piers Wenger, controller of BBC drama, explained when the TV series was being written two years before its release: “Our Sherlock is a dynamic superhero in a modern world, an arrogant, genius sleuth driven by a desire to prove himself cleverer than the perpetrator and the police—everyone in fact” (Wenger).  Sherlock is, then, a cunning character, who will meet John Watson, requiring him to go through the difficult test of sharing a flat and subsequent investigations with him. The changes discernible in the character of John Watson are as powerful as those found in Sherlock. He is no longer that Doctor fascinated by Holmes’s mind portrayed in Doyle’s stories. John is aware that a true hero must not only be magnanimous but must also be kind, and that being kind is also quite different from developing empathy towards others. Francesca Marinaro and Kaley Thomas have already explored this idea in detail and conclude that John is able to provide Sherlock with the kindness that Doyle’s character was missing, and thus turns Sherlock into an authentic contemporary hero (Marinaro and Thomas, 6580). In addition, it should be remarked that John is a character who also manages to change the terms of the relationship that was established in the stories between Holmes and Watson. John Watson is already a kind man in Doyle’s stories and he is often shocked by Sherlock Holmes’s rudeness to others. But, while in Doyle’s texts Watson did not express his shock, in Sherlock John increasingly speaks up about the dismay he feels when confronted with Sherlock’s lack of empathy. John will increasingly manifest his horror and he will eventually turn their asymmetrical relationship in the Victorian stories into a symmetrical one among peers in Gatiss’s and Moffat’s. In fact, this is the change that will radically transform the terms of the relationship between the two protagonists. Through the four seasons of Sherlock we witness the development of the protagonists’ arcs and these include the change from a relationship between two proper Victorian gentlemen who did not show their feelings or emotions (in Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes does not even seem to have feelings at all: he does not risk asking intrusive questions about the other’s private life, focussing only on solving cases and thus entertaining readers) to a more symmetrical one, which provides Sherlock Holmes and John Watson with a more complex dimension. Not to forget Mary, John’s wife, a character who was only mentioned but not developed in the stories and who now appears as a character in her own right.



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The pilot of the TV series confirms that John will be the character who provides Sherlock with the kindness he lacks. However, the turning point of their relationship will arrive much later, in the second episode of the second season: “The Hounds of Baskerville”, which was one of the riskiest episodes to adapt for Gatiss and Moffat. The Hound of the Baskervilles, not a short story, but the third of four Sherlock Holmes novels, has become Doyle’s most adapted narrative, though its tale of Gothic terror is clearly a departure from the Sherlockian canon. The most extreme example of this understanding is found in the film The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), produced by Hammer Films and directed by Terence Fisher, which was also the first filmic adaptation to be shot in colour. In this film the plot is complicated by innumerable dramatic effects, often gruesome. The character of Sherlock (played by Peter Cushing) is distorted to unusual limits and, as is consistent with Doyle's original novel, Holmes disappears for more than half an hour. This results in Watson (André Morell) and Sir Henry (Christopher Lee) becoming the real protagonists of the film. The characters become blurred in a sea of digressions, some of which appeared in Doyle’s novel and others which were added to increase the atmosphere of terror. This is not surprising given that the release of Hammer Films’ The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 had catapulted Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee to fame and the production company sought to capitalise on their success. Hammer’s goals had nothing in common with Gatiss’s and Moffat’s, who wanted to make the most out of this cult narrative to bolster a symmetrical relationship between the protagonists. This goal becomes evident from the second episode of the second season onwards, which adapts the The Hound of the Baskervilles and clearly stresses their emphasis on building a symmetrical relationship between Sherlock and John. Gatiss and Moffat successfully avoided the problem of the disappearance of the protagonist for a third of the narrative, and also that of the greater one: the multiplicity of unexpected events. These two issues appear in the novel and, as mentioned above, are central to film adaptations such as Terence Fisher’s which were largely concerned with these unexpected events, and less with the main characters. It is my contention that this happened precisely because The Hound of the Baskervilles is a narrative which departs from the Holmesian canon, thus allowing it to become susceptible to such uncharacteristic interpretations. Gatiss and Moffat, on the other hand, in an episode which might have displayed little concern for the development of the characters, do not deviate from what they considered the main subtext of Sherlock: the relationship between Sherlock and John. And it is precisely in this episode



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where Gatiss and Moffat place the turning point of the characters’ relationship.  It is, then, in the second episode of the second season of Sherlock, “The Hounds of Baskerville”, that John, once and for all (or so it seems), stops merely admiring Sherlock, or believing himself to be of an inferior status and positions himself, thereby establishing a more equal and symmetrical relationship with him. Moreover, there is an added element in this episode: for the first time, Sherlock is scared and starts to have doubts. Like any other human being, Sherlock starts to feel and be affected by emotions, as he will confess to John at the hotel bar. In this long sequence, Sherlock reveals his fears and confirms that he has also seen the hound. It is then that the roles are reversed: John tries to convince him that it was just a hallucination caused by acute stress, and he reminds him, as if Sherlock himself were talking instead of John, that he, more than anyone in this world, must stick to the facts, analyse them empirically, and not let himself be carried away by his emotions. Sherlock, hurt by John’s words, shows him, through one of his signature chains of deduction, all there is to know about the people surrounding them at that moment, that his powers of observation remain intact, and that there is nothing wrong with his mind. He is so angered that he ends up shouting at John, who bitterly asks why he should listen to him if he is just his friend. Sherlock’s reply deeply hurts John: “Friends? I don’t have friends”. By this time John has become accustomed to Sherlock’s affronts, but this is a step too far, and as he stands up to leave he replies, with bitter irony: “No. I wonder why?” (season 2, episode 2, 19-44:24).  The next morning, and despite his lack of empathy, Sherlock realises that he has hurt John and seeks to apologise to him. Sherlock admits that he was scared, that doubt overcame him and that he, Sherlock Holmes, cannot afford such weakness. But, above all, Sherlock realises that his words were true. He does not have any friends. Just one: John. Nevertheless, these words (which would have sent Doyle’s Watson over the moon had Sherlock ever pronounced them) do not convince John. He knows that Sherlock always ends up manipulating his feelings and he no longer trusts him. Although he is still hurt, John will eventually give in when Sherlock asks him about his research on some Morse code signals which will provide Sherlock with the clue to solving the case: the word hound is not only a noun but also the initials for the project HOUND. He gives in because Sherlock says something taken directly from Doyle’s story: that John might not have a mind as privileged as his, but he manages to stimulate it nevertheless. In the original story the exact words were: “I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to



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give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow that I am very much in your debt” (Doyle, 670). In any case, the praise in the original story appeals to the intellect and even, perhaps, Watson’s vanity, but not to his heart, and even less so to a cynical character from the twenty-first century. It is necessary to provide this moment with a language that speaks of John’s feelings, even if it is through Sherlock’s crude and laconic manner. This also shows how Gatiss and Moffat manage to transform a single comment in the original story; to expand it and complete it to perfection, adding feeling to the habitually rational dialogues of Doyle’s characters.  Nevertheless, soon after, Sherlock takes advantage of John’s renewed trust to make him undergo a scientific experiment and, in doing so, he does not behave ethically towards his alleged friend. Even so, this episode marks a turning point for the better in Sherlock’s behaviour. This is not a radical change—otherwise, it would not be believable. But in this episode, Sherlock, previously portrayed by Doyle as a thinking machine, starts to feel as well. He realises, without Watson’s help, that the owners of the hotel had not put the dog down and that, even if they had it would have been done out of compassion. Furthermore, he admits that he had been wrong about making John go through the experiment and, above all, he is able to tell John that such an experiment will not take place again, which is Sherlock’s own way of saying sorry without compromising the original identity of Doyle’s character.  These are, therefore, crucial moments in this episode of Sherlock that best reflect the change in the relationship between Sherlock and John, but there are other clues, less obvious perhaps, which are also relevant. At the beginning of the episode, we see John, who has repeatedly encouraged Sherlock to quit smoking, refuse to give him any cigarettes; he forces Sherlock to apologise to Mrs. Hudson, when Sherlock, showing withdrawal symptoms, upsets her terribly; he complains when Sherlock is more concerned about inhaling Henry’s cigarette smoke than with the traumatic experience the boy is narrating. He also becomes annoyed when Sherlock, revealing that they are going to enter Baskerville under a fake identity, pulls his coat collar up, telling him he is fed up with his affectations and poses. He does not agree to Sherlock’s idea of going to the meadow at night because he knows that, for Sherlock, it is just an experiment but that it will bring suffering to the boy. As mentioned above, John does not tolerate Sherlock’s assertion that he has no friends since he



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has proved time and again that he is indeed his friend and not merely a colleague. Nor does he give in when Sherlock tries to win him over. John wants Sherlock to become fully aware of the pain he has caused. John reprimands Sherlock when he is inconsiderate of Henry when, while laughing, Sherlock thanks the boy for having provided him with the most brilliant of his cases. He gets angry with Sherlock again when he finds out that he has been the object of yet another of Sherlock’s experiments when he gave him sugar stolen from Henry—although he will accept Sherlock’s apologies in the end. It should be acknowledged that all of this lies latent in Doyle’s stories. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, addressing the reader, and aside from Holmes, Watson admits that: “I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods” (Doyle, 670). Later in the story, Holmes admits that he had lied to Watson when he told him that he had gone to London but was, in fact, hiding in the meadow. To this, Watson bitterly exclaims: “Then you use me, and yet do not trust me!” (Doyle, 667). Furthermore, there are numerous cases in which Watson complains about the fact that Holmes is always giving his plans a halo of mystery. Take, for instance, the following example: “One of Sherlock Holmes’s defects—if, indeed, one may call it a defect—was that he was exceedingly loath to communicate his full plans to any other person until the instant of their fulfilment […] The result, however, was very trying for those who were acting as his agents and assistants. I had often suffered under it” (Doyle, 685). It should be pointed out that Gatiss’s and Moffat’s Watson has managed to make the most of these three moments in the story. They have created, out of these discreet and restrained comments in typical Victorian style, a character as intensely modern as John Watson. In doing so, they have been able to completely reformulate the relationship between Watson and Holmes, something which can be done only by authors who are fully aware that the art of adaptation lies in bringing to the fore something which is only hinted at in the original literary work and which could be highly appealing to a contemporary audience. Since I believe that I have already explained the main reasons why the relationship between John and Sherlock is portrayed as symmetrical and equal, I will now turn to other ideas that also work towards this goal. As Lavigne explains, Moffat himself stated that they had always assumed that Sherlock was an asexual character (Lavigne, 15). John, however, reaffirms his own heterosexuality through his marriage to Mary and the arrival of their daughter and, above all, through the love they show each other. In the episode here analysed, John complains again when the owner of the hotel



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regrets not being able to give them a double room. From the first episode of the TV series, whenever they are perceived as a homosexual couple, John explains that the fact that they share a flat together and work together does not turn them into a couple. Neither were they in Doyle’s stories. There is nothing in these narratives that could lead us to think they were a couple. As seen at the beginning of this article, Moffat and Gatiss argued that there was nothing ambiguous in Holmes’s and Watson’s relationship.  Having shed some light on this matter and as Thomas rightly argues, it should be added that the relationship between Sherlock and John could be explained through the concept of “homosociality”, defined as “the seeking, enjoyment, and/or preference for the company of the same sex” (Thomas, 40). This means that the friendship between the two Victorian gentlemen Holmes and Watson has been transformed through time and has been inscribed within a new contemporary concept that explains a way in which men establish relationships with each other. In this episode, at least, the relationship between Sherlock and John can be read in such terms. This paper cannot dwell on a detailed analysis of the concept of homosociality but it is obvious that the role of women in contemporary societies, at least in developed countries, has changed not only the relationship between men and women, but also between men and other men. One of these relationships, defined by the homosocial, is based on a friendship that would have been compatible with Victorian sensibilities. The type of man to which we are referring is often addicted to work. He could be married or single and his social life—activities, journeys, dinners, hobbies—are all shared with men and only men. Lovers are outside of this relationship, or brotherhood. Many of them may meet women in private but do not boast of their conquests. It is as if this relationship between men needed to negate women’s existence in order to maintain its purity and authenticity. If we focus on this pattern, we discover that Sherlock and John are two men deeply committed to the twenty-first century. They have not only become digital natives, who have changed letters, telegrams, and older methods of study for computers, mobile phones, websites and blogs. These elements, crucial to the contemporary plot, are only the façade under which the true modernity of the series hides. What makes John and Sherlock truly modern, what makes them adapted to our century, is above all their personalities and how they relate to each other. Tim Walker quotes Martin Freeman, after winning the Bafta for best supporting actor. Freeman said that the series: “is about the relationship between two men and how it develops and how it changes. It is about the things that wind each other up and the things that they genuinely love about one another as well. We all certainly saw it as a love



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story. These two people do love and kind of need each other in a slightly dysfunctional way, but it is a relationship that works. They get results” (Walker). 

Sherlock and John become a family, with Mary’s blessing By way of conclusion, it is important to point out the direction in which the TV series is guiding the two protagonists. By now, we can no longer speak of Sherlock as the main protagonist but of John and Sherlock as coprotagonists, which was the turning point that this paper has analysed. In the third season, Gatiss and Moffat develop John’s character further. He experiences a profound sorrow when he loses his friend. As mentioned before, Doyle wanted Sherlock to disappear, but to no avail. And the same happens in the TV series: in a tension-filled episode (season 2, episode 3), Sherlock kills Moriarty, and dies. In the following season we learn that he did not actually die but was following a plan concocted by Holmes and his brother, Mycroft. What is missing in the stories is John’s grief, which is one of the main topics of the third season. Here, it will be Mary who takes him out of this dark place. In the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, after his “resurrection”, Watson gets married and lives with his wife, but he still occasionally visits his friend, or stays with him for a few days, because Holmes needs him to solve a case or because Mary is away seeing her family. This is the means by which Dr Watson, even after getting married and returning to his profession, continues to be Holmes’s assistant and also the narrator, in the newspapers, of the cases he solves. But in the stories we do not see Watson’s married life; we do not see him expressing his feelings for his wife or sharing them with Holmes. Mary’s character is not fully developed and she is not a character in her own right. In this sense, the fact that Watson is a married man was irrelevant, as he no longer shares a flat with Holmes, nor do we see him again taking on patients; nothing must stop him from being the faithful admirer, assistant and narrator of Sherlock Holmes.  A study of the character of Mary and her relationship to both her husband and Sherlock is beyond the scope of this chapter. But it must be pointed out that Mary is not an ordinary woman. When Sherlock returns in the third season, first scaring John to death and then causing him great anger for having let him suffer needlessly—so much so that John tries to punch him—Sherlock immediately realises that Mary is a woman well suited to John, not only intellectually but also in terms of height. Sherlock accepts John’s marriage to Mary because a relationship between two turns into one between three. This is possible because, according to the concept



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of the homosocial, Mary behaves as a friend to the two protagonists. The fourth season will reveal that she was in fact an undercover agent who has had to hide her true identity in order to remain alive. This is how she has been able to help Sherlock and John with their cases: her professional behaviour is not arbitrary but something which required long training and thorough preparation. Neither Sherlock nor John know any of this yet, but they perceive her cleverness and intelligence. Thus, the more they know her, the more they treat her as an equal. Therefore, in the third episode of the third season, Sherlock can affirm in his speech as best man at their wedding that Mary deserves John as much as John deserves Mary.  However, what turns Sherlock and John into a strange family, with a daughter, is Mary’s death. In the three episodes released in 2017, Mary becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter. In the first episode, Sherlock becomes the godfather of this little girl and he even spends the ceremony sending and receiving WhatsApp messages declaring his love for both Mary and the girl. Sherlock truly shows his love when Mary’s past comes back. When one of Mary’s old colleagues wants revenge because he believes her to be a traitor, he discovers her living under a new identity. Sherlock promises John he will protect her with his own life if necessary. The fact that Mary literally takes a bullet for Sherlock in the very last moment is not his fault.  From then on, we witness a downward spiral in both characters. John declines because he has lost his wife and his friend, whom he wrongly and bitterly blames for Mary’s death. John’s kindness has a limit and his grief is such that he believes that Sherlock has broken his promise, that there is somebody responsible for Mary’s death and that this is not part of the absurdity of human existence. Sherlock suffers because he cannot bear having lost Mary and John and because he blames himself for not having been able to avoid her death. To get John back, he goes to John’s old and new psychologists, he takes drugs, he puts himself at risk of death and once again he almost dies. He wants John back since he can no longer live like this. But he is still Sherlock and he is sure that, even if John hates him that much, he would not let him die. This happens because Sherlock receives a video of Mary’s post-mortem. She foresaw that John would be in the depths of despair if she were no longer there. She knew that she could die and that, if this happened, only Sherlock could save John. Thus, she leaves Sherlock with what she classifies as the most difficult mission he has ever faced.  The two friends finally reconcile. In the third episode of the season, they talk about family. This time, Sherlock’s. In this episode, Sherlock meets a sister that all members of the Holmes’s family, except Mycroft,



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believed to be dead. Suddenly, he is confronted with an intelligence superior to his own. But, above all, he will discover the origin of his lack of empathy, his excesses, his madness, even. Having now gone through the trauma that had turned him into a sociopath, Sherlock can become a father for John's daughter, live with him again and save John and himself. This is how they become a family, albeit a strange one. Reality itself and many other TV series show us that there are many types of families in our complex contemporary times, that the idea of family has expanded and that, most likely, it will continue to transform itself.  Obviously, the relationship that Sherlock and John establish in this season of the TV series could not have appeared in Doyle’s stories. This last season is, in terms of the characters’ development and their relationship, the result of the creativity of two scriptwriters who could see the potential of the stories and were brave enough to break with tradition.

References Barnes, Alan. 2011. Sherlock Holmes on Screen. London: Titan Books. Doyle, Arthur Conan. 2009. The Hound of the Baskervilles. In The Complete Sherlock Holmes. New York: Barnes & Noble (633—730). Fisher, Terence. 1959. The Hound of the Baskervilles. U. K.: Hammer Films. Gatiss, Mark & Steven Moffat (creators) 2010-2017. Sherlock. U.K.: Hartswood, BBC Wales for Master-piece (in co-production) Lavigne, Carlen. 2012. “The Noble Bachelor and the Crooked Man. Subtext and Sexuality in the BBC’s Sherlock.” In Lynnette Porter, Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century. Essays on New Adaptations, (pp. 1323) Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company. Marinaro, Francesca M. y Thomas, Kaley. 2012. “Don’t Make People into Heroes, John. (Re-De) Constructing The Detective as Hero.” In Lynnette Porter, Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century. Essays on New Adaptations, (pp. 65-80) Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company. Marvin, Arthur. 1900. Sherlock Holmes Baffled. USA: American Mutoscope and Biograph. McGuigan, Paul. The Hounds of Baskerville. (8th January 2012). Sherlock. Steven Moffat & Paul Gatiss. (Season 2, episode 2). U.K.: BBC. Morell, Carme. 2017. “Sherlock o el arte de la adaptación en el siglo XXI”. In Avanca/Cinema 2017, edited by Antonio Costa Valente. Avanca, Portugal: Ediçoes Cine-Clube de Avanca, 608-614. Nollen, Scott Allen. 1996. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Cinema. A Criti-



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cal Study of the Film Adaptations. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company. Seger, Linda. 1992. The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Films. New York: Holt Paperbacks. Thomas, Kaley. 2012. “Bromance is so passé”. Robert Downey, Jr.’s Queer Paratexts”. In Lynnette Porter, Sherlock Holmes for the 21st Century. Essays on New Adaptations, (pp. 35-47) Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company. Walker, Tim. (24 May 2011). “Sherlock is the ‘gayest story in the history of television’,says Martin Freeman”. In The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited. Wenger, Piers. (19 December 2008). “BBC to make a Modern Day Sherlock Holmes”. In The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited.





THE UNUSUAL FAMILY OF DETECTIVE PHRYNE FISHER CATALINA RIBAS SEGURA

Abstract. Detective Phryne Fisher is the main character in the Phryne Fisher Mystery Collection (1989-2013), a collection of twenty novels written by award-winning Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Set mainly in Melbourne in 1928 and 1929, these crime novels present a pretty, smart, rich, young Australian woman detective who challenges stereotypes and conventions, and solves mysteries, many of them in domestic settings. This article argues that Fisher represents a hybrid between the second (feminist) and third (female) phases of women´s writing, following Elaine Showalter´s model presented in A Literature of their Own (1977). Moreover, this essay analyses the character of Phryne with Howard Gardner´s multiple intelligences theory (1983) and Linda Mizejewski´s concept of the detective as a fantasy figure (2004). It also explores the construction of Phryne´s family, including her approach to maternity, the (mainly negative or absent) figure of the father and it reflects on the number of crimes involving children that are included in the series. 

Introduction This article focuses on a collection of novels published by Australian author Kerry Greenwood and whose main protagonist is the Honorable Phryne Fisher, a rich female detective who solves mysteries and murders in 1928-1929 Australia. One of the aims of crime fiction is to explore social problems, their causes and consequences; challenging the reader when faced with certain situations and crimes; and providing a sense of justice when the mystery has been solved and the guilty character/s is/are brought to justice. To put it in another way, much crime fiction deals with justice, including social justice, and tries to analyse the social ills within a specific context. As academic and writer Lee Horsley explains, crime writing is an “effective instrument […] of socio-political critique, using



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the genre to address issues of class, race and gender, to expose corruption, and to explore the nature of prejudice” (Horsley 2005, 158). The Phryne Fisher Mystery Collection can be considered to be “comfort” reading, just as Arthur Conan Doyle´s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie´s Miss Marple stories are, because they present a disruption of the social order, which is restored by the crime’s resolution. However, in Greenwood´s texts this social order is defied, not just disrupted, and alternatives are explored. It might, therefore, be said that Greenwood´s novels are a postcolonial re-writing of some of Christie´s texts. As Sue Ryan-Fazilleau (2007) argues:  Greenwood is mischievously indicating that she does not write classic Christie detective fiction with its long, drawn-out investigations, set in stuffy 1920s England and conducted by plodding, ageing, asexual detectives. She promises investigations with a faster pace, set in young dynamic 1920s Australia and conducted by an alluring young female detective. This attitude and the geographical transfer from the imperial Centre to the colonial Margins could signal her intention to undertake a postcolonial “rewriting” of the Queen of Crime. (59)

Christie, of course, was preceded by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930), whose Sherlock Holmes appeared in four novels and 56 short stories, and became “the model and the signifier of the great detective” (Klein 7). Holmes represents Enlightenment and Victorian masculinity: he uses deduction to solve his cases, which most often involve mysteries rather than deaths, and his brilliance may be taken as indicative of British superiority in the heyday of the empire. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot also became iconic: the eccentric detective who, with his more down-toearth friend, Captain Hastings, used reason and deduction to solve their cases. Hercule Poirot, it should be noted, uses his wide knowledge of domestic issues to solve many mysteries as does Christie’s other great protagonist, Miss Marple. The latter, perhaps because of Christie’s dominant status within the genre, becomes the paradigm of the female detective, neither breaking nor defying the established social order. She is a passive asexual female figure who solves her cases through deduction, her knowledge of human nature acquired through decades of life in the village of St. Mary Mead which, while thoroughly domestic and parochial, is a microcosm of the wider world.

The Fictional Female Detective Female detectives have appeared in literature since the mid-nineteenth century (Craig and Cadogan 1981, Klein 1988, Knight 2004, Mizejewsky



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2004, Reddy 1988). Their construction differed from that of Victorian male detectives and the later American hard-boiled heroes because writers had to create female characters who did not openly defy patriarchal conventions, such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, or who protested against traditional values, but who appealed to the female reader, such as P.D. James’ Cordelia Gray. Most of these female detectives did not have families to take care of and, when they did, these were small and relationships among its members were difficult. How were women to combine the active characteristics of the male detective with being a woman? Socorro Suárez, in her article “Desarrollo de las detectives en la literatura contemporánea” (2003) argues that women have traditionally been seen as nosy and to enjoy gossiping while, paradoxically, expected to be silent and patient, often confined for long periods of time, for reasons of pregnancy, childbirth and the care of infants and the home, or simply because society did not expect them to be in public for any length of time. Thus, women had the main characteristics of a detective: patience, stillness, curiosity and an ability to observe and interpret. This defense of women as ideal investigators appears in one of Greenwood’s novels, Death before Wicket, in which an Arts professor at the University of Sydney compares detectives to mothers: “They tell me you’re an investigator. About time they had women investigators. That’s what women have always been good at. Never miss a thing, women. Recall m‘own mother looking at me for only a moment before she knew that I´d been eating green apricots and me protesting all the time that I hadn´t been near the tree. Knew from the green stains on m‘shirt. Very acute, mothers. Well, stands to reason. No one tells them the truth about their misdeeds, and what difference there is between me and my stout denial about the apricots –I thought I was dashed convincing, tooand some murderer protesting that he didn’t kill his wife? None at all, as far as I can see.” (Death before Wicket 108-9)

The closing decades of nineteenth century England saw witness to attempts to change the status of women in society. Many women did not agree with the Victorian ideal of the woman (domesticity, motherhood, respectability) and wanted to study, work, be independent, and feel liberated. As Suárez says, “The suffragist movement allowed the normalization of women detectives, at least in literature” (Suárez 170). Suárez goes on to discuss women’s detective fiction in the light of Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), in which the latter identifies three phases of women’s writing: feminine, feminist and female. In the first, women imitate the dominant models, internalizing dominant artistic and social standards. In the second, women protest against these standards



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and values, and defend the rights and values of women, including freedom and autonomy. In the third, women seek their own identity in a process of self-discovery, without dependency or opposition (1982: 13).  Miss Marple is an example of the feminine phase, which was predominant in the English tradition: female detectives are not professionals but amateurs, solve mysteries from home using logical deduction, and analyse the clues they encounter. They are busybodies, naïve, kind and are motivated by friendship or curiosity (Suárez 2013: 173). Professional detectives V.I. Warshawski (by Sara Paretsky), Cordelia Gray (by PD James), and Kinsey Millhone (by Sue Grafton) are examples of feminist detectives: they are professional detectives who can argue and defend their values, have no families to take care of, carry a gun (though rarely using it), are active in their jobs and look for clues and witnesses to solve their cases. Moreover, they are patient and follow the rules and norms of people they admire (Suárez 174). They can also be understood as a response to the American hard-boiled detective: the strong, violent, sexist, racist, homophobic male hero who purports to protect the weak, especially women (if he considers them worthy). Sara Paretsky’s response to this model was to create a female hard-boiled detective whose cases span twenty novels published between 1982 and 2017: V. I. Warshawski. As Stephen Knight (2004) explains, [V.I.] always works alone, she lives alone, she is very active, with a penchant for furious driving and night-time break-ins; she is often quite badly hurt, spending a period in hospital in almost every novel. Generally though, she keeps herself fit by running and, if reluctantly, will carry and use a gun. (167-168)

Like the male hard-boiled hero, this private detective actively looks for clues and witnesses and often uses her physical strength to solve cases. However, unlike her male counterparts, who rarely have a family life, are usually single, and all too often turn to alcohol to solve their problems, she has a circle of friends which cares about her, good relations with family and friends, and does not turn to alcohol, quite so often, to solve her problems. V.I. Warshawski displays most of the multiple intelligences described by Howard Gardner (1983). These give her the ability to solve many different types of situations, problems or difficulties in varied, multifaceted ways. These multiple intelligences are: the verbal-linguistic, the logical-mathematical, the visual-spatial, the bodily-kinesthetic, the musical-rhythmic and harmonic, the interpersonal, the intrapersonal, and the naturalistic. V.I. Warshawski was a defence lawyer, understands



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business matters and was part of the “women´s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, with an emphasis on abortion rights” (Knight 168). Consequently, her verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences are well-developed, and her visual-spatial intelligence through her ability to create mental images and use maps, graphics is a necessary tool in her work. Furthermore, her fitness and coordination, already developed in her childhood and teenage years in street fighting and basketball, allowed her to enter university on a sports scholarship, thus, showing her bodilykinesthetic aptitude. Her musical-rhythmic intelligence is also developed, as she loves opera and classical music, can sing arias and plays the piano. Her interpersonal skills are also explored, given the fact that she married a fellow law student but divorced him when his true, bullying character emerged, and although she has no children, when she finds teenagers who have been neglected or abused, she cares for them. Moreover, she builds an alternative family with her friend, a neighbour, and his dog. Warshawski’s intrapersonal intelligence is also explored as she “bears rich but bittersweet memories of her upbringing, her parents’ immigrant values and hopes, and her own self-constructed distance from them” (Knight 168). She analyses and understands her feelings and her surroundings. As Knight (2004) explains, “Warshawski focuses a powerful interrelation of the personal and the political, a convincing fictional realization of the key insight of second-wave feminism” (Knight 168). The character of V.I. Warshawski, then, is consciously constructed as an answer to the male hard-boiled detective and as an example of a feminist detective. Examples of the third phase of literature written by and about women who are confined neither by imitation nor by protest, that is, the female phase, are detectives Sophie Rivers and Kate Power (by Judith Cutler), Helen West (by Frances Fyfield), the sleuths presented by historical fiction writer Lindsey Davis such as Flavia Albia and, of course, Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels. These detectives are aware of their relevance, fight to improve the lives of those women who surround them, while their agency and curiosity have no limits. Sue Ryan-Fazilleau (2007) argues that Kerry Greenwood has mixed three popular sub-genres: the clue-puzzle, the police procedural and the action thriller. “The resulting hybrid”, Ryan-Fazilleau explains, “borrows blithely from both the classic British clue-puzzle and the American hardboiled heritages. Its narrative structure combines multiple strands and culminates in multiple climaxes that follow each other in relatively quick succession near the end of the story” (60). In my opinion, Miss Fisher is an example of the female phase as she takes the main characteristics of the feminist phase (she is a professional detective who can argue and defend



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her value, can use a gun but avoids doing it, is active, determined, strong and cares for and about people) and develops them to become an inspiration for other women, fights to improve the lives of those around her (especially women, but also men and children as she cannot stand injustice) and her determination, organization, leadership skills and curiosity are outstanding. Phryne is active, independent, brave, liberated, can fight, and has even operated as a spy (Murder and Mendelssohn 74). She is aware of her social relevance and capacity to change unfair norms and attitudes. She encourages women around her to follow, fight for and fulfil their dreams. She is inquisitive, determined and uses her wit as well as her deductive and physical skills to overcome dangerous situations and solve the cases. As Klein argues, “As a member of Western capitalistic society, the private investigator who offers herself as a professional for hire would be expected to provide competent service for her employer. Thus readers could anticipate that the woman detective would (or should) be successful in the terms defined by the formula: out-think the police and outsmart the criminal” (Klein 5). Phryne is an example of such an investigator: not only does she have the qualities and skills, but she also has the motivation: “One reason why Phryne solved puzzles is that she hated mysteries” (Murder on a Midsummer Night 207). Furthermore, Phryne is aware of her weaknesses and limitations and asks those around her for help, for example, her maid and secretary Dot, her adopted daughters Jane and Ruth, her fostered son Tinker, her friends Cec and Bert, Detective Inspector Robinson, Constable Collins, her Chinese lover Lin and his bodyguard, Li Pen. These are some of the closest relations she has and she relies on them to help her solve her cases. That a detective should have such a large family and busy personal life is groundbreaking. Her role as a mother, however, is traditional for her class: she sends her offspring to boarding schools, adopting an almost hegemonic masculinity, overseeing the education of the children, deciding what has to be done and expecting everyone´s obedience, respect, admiration and love. Within the context of the fictional female detective, this article will explore the topics of family relations, maternity and the figure of the father in the collection of twenty The Phryne Fisher Mysteries novels published between 1989 and 2013. Set in Australia, mainly in the state of Victoria, in 1928 and 1929, the main character is Miss Phryne Fisher, a rich young Australian woman who is also a detective. The collection of novels was adapted to a TV series: Miss Fisher´s Murder Mysteries, created by Deb Cox and Fiona Eagger and aired by the ABC, an Australian public network, over three seasons: in 2012, 2013 and 2015. Given the fact that the



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adaptation is not faithful to the novels, especially in the sense that the transgressive nature of many characters in the novels is not respected1, only the literary collection is going to be the focus of analysis.

The character of Miss Phryne Fisher Miss Fisher was born in a low working-class Australian family on 13th January 1900 (Murder on a Midsummer Night 2) and had a difficult childhood as her father drank heavily, but was not physically violent. Furthermore, one of her sisters disappeared and the case was not investigated because they were poor. Years later, some wealthy relatives in England died and the family migrated there because her parents inherited a country estate and became lord and lady. Phryne had a governess and later on studied in a convent school. Then she joined an all-women ambulance brigade in France during World War I, where she saw much loss of life. After the war, aged 18, she moved to Montparnasse and became an artist´s model. When she went back to England, her parents tried to marry her off to a suitable man, but she was not interested. At a dinner in 1928, some friends of her parents offered her a job: to go to Melbourne and befriend their daughter in order to find out whether her husband was poisoning her. Phryne decided to accept the job, but she established her own conditions. Consequently, she left Australia as a poor child and went back to her birth country not only from England, the “mother country”, but as a rich educated young woman with a noble title. Her aristocratic position and her money helped her establish herself in Melbourne, solve the mystery and start a new life there.  The character of Phryne evolves during the novels. After spending some weeks in a most luxurious hotel, Phryne moves to a big house with her new maid and companion, Dot, and her butler and her cook, Mr Tobias and Mrs Aurelia Butler, respectively. Over the following months, she adopts two adolescent girls, Ruth and Jane; a cat, Ember, and a dog, Molly. The seven of them, together with her sister Eliza and partner, Lady Alice Harborough, and her lover, Mr Lin Chung, constitute her family, as she herself declares when she has a photo of most of her family members taken at Christmas 1928 (Murder in the Dark 10). Some weeks later, in 1929, a teenage boy, nicknamed Tinker, becomes another member of the family. Phryne´s immediate circle is also formed by Cec and Bert, two wharfies (wharf labourers), taxi drivers and communists, Detective Inspector “Jack”

 1

For more information on this, see Ribas Segura’s “Phryne Fisher: A postcolonial female detective in Ruddy Gore (1995)” Coolabah, 20 (2016): 48-66.



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Robinson and Constable Hugh Collins, who becomes Dot´s fiancé, Dr Elizabeth MacMillan and other friends who appear throughout the novels. As mentioned before, the fact that Phryne has such a big family to take care of is highly unusual for private detectives. In the first three novels (Cocaine Blues, Flying too High, Murder on the Ballarat Train), she adapts to her life in Australia and creates the core of her family. In the sixth novel (Blood and Circuses), Phryne feels lost and faces her greatest fear: being alone. Phryne realised that she has always lived with someone, has always been taken care of or had someone to care for. In this case, she goes to a circus and has to create her own community there. Feeling vulnerable she is forced to face her fear. After that, in novel seven (Ruddy Gore), Phryne meets Lin, a man with all the characteristics and charm she could desire (elegant, educated, rich). He is a Chinese businessman born in Australia and, consequently, their relation, which develops over many novels, defies conventions for both cultures, the Anglo-Australian and the Chinese. Phryne does not give up her freedom and lifestyle: she wants to enjoy their time together, regardless of the duration of their relationship. In the following novels, Phryne keeps opening her heart and house to her sister and to Tinker but she does not stop being true to herself, despite the occasional disapproval of her closest relations.  The character of Phryne Fisher displays Gardner´s multiple intelligences to a high degree. Her verbal-linguistic skills are highly cultivated, as she is witty, quick in thought and response, can be sarcastic, recite poems, quote texts, and speaks French fluently together with some Italian and Spanish (Death by Water 22). Her logical abilities surprise those around her. She does not like mysteries and this is the reason why she wants to solve them (Murder on a Midsummer Night 207). Her mathematical talent, however, is low, as she admits: “she had no head for mathematics… she had never understood any physics or mathematics except the Newtonian, because they were the ones which got you shot” (Murder and Mendelssohn 19). In regard to her visual-spatial intelligence, Phryne is greatly skilled at recreating spaces, adapting quickly to new areas and finding her way even in the dark and in unfamiliar places. Furthermore, her bodily-kinesthetic intelligence is highly developed: Phryne has physical strength and agility, can shoot, drive sports cars, fly planes, ride horses, swim, dance and model. Regarding her musical-rhythmic and harmonic intelligence, she loves classical music and jazz, can sing, and can analyse songs and rhythms. Her intrapersonal intelligence is also developed throughout the novels: she is aware of her origins and the different vital experiences of her life.



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Phryne believes in herself and in her deductive and physical skills, she is determined, controls her thoughts and can be highly disciplined when she wants to. She is aware of her weaknesses and limitations, is not arrogant and asks those around her for help. In the sixth novel (Blood and Circuses), Phryne faces her major fear: being alone. The experiences she goes through in this novel leads to a change in her and she modifies her priorities and attitude toward life: they help her mature and start a new phase of her development. Moreover, her interpersonal skills are outstanding: she is keen on justice and, in order to obtain it, she goes out of her way to help others, she mixes with peoples from all social classes, religions, sexualities, and lifestyles and displays no prejudices. She has eleven different lovers in twenty novels, sometimes more than one in the same novel. She is aware of her social status and ability to challenge unfair rules and restrictions, and is not loath do so. Her contempt for racism sometimes leads to confrontation in the White Australia of the period, while her belief in the Australian notion of class equality and the “fair go” chimes more easily with common opinion of the time. Phryne has both cultural and national capital and, because of that, her English wealth and social position are not questioned, while her humble Australian origins impel her to defend fairness and egalitarianism. As Ryan-Fazilleau (2007) explains, “This is a playful reversal of a motif frequently found in colonial literature: the attainment of legitimacy and social recognition through the recovery of a British birthright” (63). Greenwood includes egalitarianism and criticises elitism, racism and discrimination as, contrary to colonial characters and classical detectives, Phryne is interested in the motivation of the crimes and social justice, not in the maintenance of morality and the restoration of order. Her non-racist attitude is sometimes at odds with that of other characters, especially in novels number five (Ruddy Gore), six (Urn Burial) and twelve (Murder in Montparnasse), because it defies eugenics and the official white Australia political discourse of the time. This is especially relevant to Phryne´s lover, Mr Lin Chung, a young, handsome, elegant and cultivated Chinese-Australian businessman. This relationship defies conventions in both the Anglo-Australian and Chinese-Australian communities but they are not to be dissuaded. Mr Lin´s grandmother and matriarch of the family accepts Phryne as long as she is his concubine, and not his wife. Phryne does not want to marry Lin and they both agree to this arrangement. Lin will have a Chinese wife and, as concubines were traditionally accepted, Phryne does not represent a threat to the harmony of the community. Phryne will continue to enjoy her freedom protected by her wealth and aristocratic status, which shield her from the disapproval of her



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own community. For Phryne manners and respect are essential. She feels empathy for others but does not like dramas and hysterics. She is a leader and her family follows her out of love and admiration, not out of fear or obligation, as a character in the last novel, Murder and Mendelssohn (2013), states: “Miss Fisher´s minions served her… out of love” (268). The character of Phryne follows the conventions of the action heroine as a fantasy figure. As Linda Mizejewski explains in her Hardboiled and High Heeled. The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (2004), this action heroine “crisscrossed genders, desires and politics, imaginable as a supermodel, Wonder Woman, and reverie from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, cooler and … self-confident” (141). Her experiences make Phryne outgoing, fearless and determined. She creates her own family in Melbourne choosing their members carefully. Furthermore, Phryne can also count on some female friends, Dr Macmillan and Bunji, a pilot. Together with some other young, brave and independent ladies, they maintain the Adventuresses Club, started in 1919 exclusively for women who had been in the war and had: “driven ambulances, climbed mountains, flown planes, written novels- and [who] could not find life comfortable without a few like-minded friends to talk with” (Away with the Fairies 52). There, they have their own space with their own rules and a break from routine. As a female investigator, Phryne follows Linda Mizejewski’s depiction: she is “a powerful woman character wholly outside romance, neurosis or melodrama – the traditional “good” boxoffice roles for women” (141-142).

Phryne’s Family Over twenty novels the character of the Honourable Phryne Fisher is constructed as a “liberated woman detective” (Knight 172), a complete, coherent, mature, and reliable person with an admirable personality. As mentioned before, she does not live alone but relies on the members of the family she has created: a main difference from the construction of previous detectives. How does she balance the personal, familiar and professional areas of her life? To begin with, her role as a mother does not interfere in her profession or in her relations with others. Her approach to motherhood is not one of constant nurturing but she is clearly influenced by both her stay in the convent school when she was an adolescent and her life experiences as a rich lady who is also part of the British Empire. She expects schools to educate young boys and girls, and to show them how to live in society and



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what is expected of them. Both Jane and Ruth are delighted to live in their boarding school and also spend time at home, especially during the holidays. As long as the two of them are together and Ruth can take care of Jane, they are happy. Both know that Phryne loves them, takes care of them and would do anything for them. The girls feel protected and loved. Phryne is not distant with them, worries about their wellbeing and tries to enhance their knowledge, skills and abilities. She spends quality time with the girls, especially dinners, going to the dressmaker’s or swimming. She earnestly enjoys it, but being a mother does not limit her movements or freedom. Phryne encourages the girl´s vocations: Jane to become a doctor, and Ruth to become a cook. She gives them responsibilities, values their efforts and challenges them to improve and excel. She wants them to be independent, self-sufficient, determined and to speak their minds. Phryne knows that she is a model for them and that they look up to her: her personality, her lifestyle, her elegance but, above all, her sense of justice, rational thinking and courage. However, when asked whether she has motherly feelings, Phryne replies “No, I seem to have missed out on them” (Dead Man´s Chest, 232); she is not the kind of mother whose blind love condones the faults of her children. Phryne comes across Jane and Ruth in novel three (Murder on the Ballarat Train). She does not adopt Jane and Ruth out of a wish to become a mother, but out of a desire to protect them from further pain. Jane had been abducted, drugged and was lost when Phryne found her. Phryne saves her from white slavery and fears that she has been physically and sexually abused. Ruth is her friend, who has been constantly beaten, insulted, illtreated and lived as a slave. Both of them are brave and determined and, when Phryne tells them of her plan to trap those responsible for their situation, they agree to participate, even if that means being in danger. Phryne has a connection with the girls as she also endured a poor childhood and will not allow them to be left in an orphanage. Thus, she asks them whether they want to be adopted. Both of them agree as they wanted to live together and like Phryne. The girls could have had individual bedrooms in Phryne´s house, but they prefer to share and Phryne respects that. Tinker joins the Fisher household in novel eighteen (Dead Man´s Chest) and his reasons are different from those of Jane and Ruth. Tinker is 16, lives in Queenscliff and he has a father –who is a sailor–, a mother and several siblings. He needs to work in order to earn money to help his mother raise all the children. In the novel, he becomes the guardian of the Fishers´ house and helps Ruth, Jane, Dot and Phryne in anything they need. He wants to become a police officer and, when he meets Hugh, he



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follows him and observes him. He enjoys the company of each family member and likes “being a Provider” (Dead Man´s Chest 203) for his family. When the Fishers are finishing their holiday, Tinker talks to Phryne and asks her what will happen to him. Phryne gives him the option of staying with them, going to school and, at 18, becoming a police cadet. Phryne explains that school “won´t be nice. They will torment you for being a stranger” (Dead Man´s Chest 254) and he will have to leave his family behind. He is happy to do this in order to help his family and, meanwhile, he decides to get a job as a delivery boy to send money to his mother. Phryne suggests a trial period of six months and then to decide whether to continue or depart. Tinker is elated and readily accepts. When the family is back at St Kilda, Tinker feels it difficult to find his place in the house, so Phryne gives him the shed. This is going to be his space, his own place, and he can hear the sea: “This angel, this goddess, had broken open his prison doors and given him a priceless gift. His own place” (Unnatural Habits 12). Phryne does not adopt Tinker but fosters him. She takes his needs into account and he becomes a central member of the house by helping everyone. He gets on well with Jane as he is good at Maths and Jane enjoys talking to him and playing chess with him. He enjoys the food and always compliments Mrs Butler and Ruth’s dishes. He talks to Mr Butler, who enjoys masculine company and fishing. He respects and obeys Dot, who is delighted to have him guard the back of the house. He takes care of Molly the dog, who sleeps with him. He helps in the investigations and he wants to protect Phryne and the whole household, which is highly appreciated. The fact of having another teenager in the house, who “didn´t know how to treat [the girls]… hadn´t got used to the length of his arms and legs, so he knocked things off tables, tripped over rugs, and broke china” (Unnatural Habits 13), does not worry Phryne. On the contrary, she is fond of him and helps him become a policeman. The character of Dot is complementary to that of Phryne. Phryne met Miss Dorothy Williams in novel one (Cocaine Blues), when she had falsely been accused of trying to seduce the son in the house where she was a maid. She had been dismissed and wanted revenge. Phryne stopped her from mishandling the affair and helped her obtain her revenge in a comical way. From that moment onwards, Dot is loyal to Phryne, cares about her and loves her dearly, even when they think and act differently. Dot is a devout Catholic who has been raised with a sense of decorum and modesty and enjoys household tasks. She is often described as a plain young woman in plain clothes and a “[g]ood girl, in bed every night by ten, read improving books, saving up for her own home, good plain cook, very compe-



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tent about the house, probably had a bloke of her own” (Dead Man´s Chest, 21). As Phryne often admits that she knows nothing about domestic matters, she relies on Dot´s skills and opinions when such subjects arise in the course of an investigation. Phryne supports, encourages and praises Dot and their relation is that of mutual respect and care. Both of them use their femininity to further their investigations, but each has a different approach. This does not mean that Phryne is a “masculine” character and Dot a “feminine” one, but that Dot complements Phryne´s skills and both work as a team. Regarding Jane, Ruth and Tinker, Dot is the one who attends to their daily needs and who tells Phryne when they need something, such as new clothes. Dot also attends to Phryne’s wishes and rhythms: she takes her breakfast to her bedroom, chooses her clothes, prepares her bath, combs her hair and dresses her, waits for her at night when she is out and, basically, takes care of her. Phryne´s family also consists of her sister, Eliza, and her partner, Lady Alice Harborough, who appear in novel thirteen (The Castlemaine Murders). Phryne is determined not to go back to England and live her life on her own terms in Australia away from the desires and control of her father. Thus, when her sister appears at her door, she is not happy about it but slightly overwhelmed by the situation. Eliza had escaped from England because their father wanted her to marry one of two unsuitable prospective husbands chosen for her because of their position in society. Eliza loves Lady Alice and they both want to help the poor, especially poor women, but they cannot do it together in England. Eliza´s father has threatened to dispossess her of her pension once she turns 25 (the following year) if she has not agreed to marry either of the two suitors. Her escape to Australia is a warning to her father: he must either accept that she will not get married, or he will not see her again. In Australia Eliza is initially defiant, combative and even disrespectful towards Phryne but she slowly begins to trust her, improves her behaviour and shares her fears with her sister. After certain difficulties have been resolved, Eliza leaves Phryne’s house and moves in with Lady Alice. Both of them decide to help women in difficult situations in the Melbournian East End, especially prostitutes, and are happy together. Having a family to take care of is not an impediment for Phryne to be a detective. Indeed, Phryne encourages her family to help her in her investigations and some of them love the idea. For example, Phryne allows Jane, who wants to become a doctor, to participate in an autopsy (The Castlemaine Murders), to study bones and to read academic books to find clues (Dead Man’s Chest). Jane and Ruth also disguise themselves in order to follow a boy home, which involves taking trams and walking along dark



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alleys and streets past 11pm (Murder in Montparnasse). Dot overcomes her shyness, reinforces her self-confidence, conducts searches and goes on her own to interview witnesses or people in the hunt for clues (Away with the Fairies). Lin helps Phryne to solve some cases and mysteries (Ruddy Gore), and gives her his support and collaboration whenever he is asked. Cec, Bert, DI Robinson and Constable Collins always help her and quite often Mr Butler drives them around while Mrs Butler takes care of all of them when they return home. However, sometimes, briefly, Phryne misses her independence, she wished for a moment that she had never acquired all these followers and family and could just ravish her beautiful lover on the floor of the parlour. But living in the world meant living with people and it was time to get up and see how Dot was, greet the returning daughters… (The Castlemaine Murders 86).

Phryne’s Men The male characters in the novels (Mr Butler, Cec, Bert, Constable Collins—from Dead Man’s Chest onwards, he is Detective Sergeant-, Li Chung, Lin, DI Robinson) play a secondary role and often do not appear either as fathers or as sons. There are no references to their own fathers and there are hardly any references to Mr Butler and DI Robinson’s offspring, the only two characters who have children. All these men love Jane and Ruth, care for them and help them whenever they can, but none would dare to behave as a father, as Phryne is their mother and it is not their role within the family. Another male character is Tinker, too young to have progeny, whose own father is a sailor and, thus, mainly absent. He admires Detective Sergeant Collins, who becomes fond of him, but he is approached as a mentor, or an older brother, not as a father figure. Regarding the paternal figures of the female characters, only Dot’s father is described as decent (Murder in the Dark), but, as a Catholic, he is partly excluded from mainstream Australian society. Jane is an orphan and there are no references to her progenitors; while Ruth, who meets her father in novel 14 (Queen of the Flowers), keeps in postal contact with him because he lives overseas. Phryne´s father lives in England and they do not get on well. He is depicted as authoritarian, verbally abusive, controlling, short-tempered and fond of alcohol. Novel 16 (Murder in the Dark) includes many references to Phryne´s father, such as, “old buffalo”, “perfect viper”, “perfect tarantula” (55), “detestable old lush” (66), “loathed pater” (84) or “her ne’er-do-well father” (183). In novel 17 (Murder on a Midsummer Night), he extolls the benefits of alcohol regardless of the situa-



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tion: “as my father the baronet says, “What a man needs after a good soaking is a good whisky”, replied Phryne […] “Mind you, he´d say the same after a good sunning” (29). Generally speaking, Phryne does not like the construct of fatherhood that she experiences and she exclaims “Damn all fathers. They were nothing but trouble” (Queen of the Flowers 40). Consequently, the role of the father as the provider is not present among the main characters. Phryne considers that children learn how to behave and live in society in schools, boarding schools or from tutors and she expects discipline and manners not only from her daughters but also from other children. In fact, in novel 18 (Dead Man’s Chest), she threatens three children with contacting their school and explaining their appalling behaviour so that they will be punished accordingly.

Domestic Crime One last topic I would briefly like to refer to is that of the abuses and crimes that take place in the domestic sphere. The Phryne Fisher Mystery Collection includes many mysteries and crimes which involve middle- and upper-classes, crimes which take place in a part of a society usually taken as a model or ideal. In this collection, children are kidnapped, raped, molested, suffer incest, forced marriages, forced abortions or forced adoptions of their own children, attempted murders, or are used as white slaves in Australia or sent to the Middle East. Most of these crimes are depicted in novels one to six and twelve to twenty, two periods when Phryne´s family is created or enlarged. Some of these crimes are shocking for their brutality and cruelty, such as incest between a mother and her son, or teenage mothers forced to abandon their babies, who are the result of rape, and are then repudiated by their own families. For the characters themselves, these crimes are often perceived as natural, common or logical, especially the incest between a brother and a sister or even the forced abortions girls suffer after being raped by a priest. As explained elsewhere,2 some of the plots may have been influenced by news and reports of real events. On 16th November 2009, the Prime Ministers of Australia and England, Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown, respectively, offered a formal Apology to the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants, more than 500,000 Australians, many of whom suffered abuse and neglect while in out-of-home care during the last

 2

In a presentation entitled “Postcolonial Crime Fiction and social ills in The Phryne Fisher Mystery Collection (1989-2013)” in the 41st International AEDEAN Congress in Universidad de La Laguna on 8 November 2017.



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century. Then in January 2013, “the Governor-General appointed a sixmember Royal Commission to inquire about how institutions with a responsibility for children had managed and responded to allegations and instances of child sexual abuse” (Mathews iii). Such crimes would have occurred in the 1920s, along with many others, and it is thus pertinent that they appear in Greenwood’s novels. As Pearson and Singer (2009) state, Certain features of the hard-boiled detectives –their urbanity and modernity, their ability to cross racial and class lines as easily as they traverse the city, and the tendency of their investigations to broaden out from individual criminal acts to implicate larger social ills- are easily adopted to the cultural critiques common to postcolonial literature (5-6).

This is true of Phryne as a professional detective, but the label “hardboiled” does not describe her. It is adequate to say that she is urban and adapts easily to any situation in the city, to the different neighbourhoods and peoples. Moreover, she is modern in her thoughts and attitudes: she is not traditional. Phryne does not follow conventions and, at the time of the White Australia Policy, she is not a racist. The Phryne Fisher Mystery Collection includes characters from a wide variety of ancestries (Indigenous Australians, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Latvian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, French, Italian and Spanish -with many Catalan characters-) and religions (the most frequent ones being Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Buddhists and Taoists). Also, she easily adapts to people from different social classes. But another relevant characteristic of this collection is that many of the crimes depicted tend to be silenced out of social shame; as hushed up family secrets. Most of the cases that Phryne investigates affect the middle- and upper-classes, for whom keeping up appearances is of the utmost importance. Many of these families have unhealthy relations, as there are vampire women, overprotective mothers, domineering fathers and wife-beaters. Some of these crimes depict ‫ލ‬honour‫ ތ‬killings, ‫ލ‬honour‫ ތ‬violence, forced marriages and sexual abuse for money, or family members sent away to hide the shame of their physical appearance (either disfigured or pregnant). The family Phryne creates has healthy relations and it is based on trust and respect. Even though Jane and Ruth are just girls, they are aware of the cruelty of this world because they have suffered from it, and are eager to help Phryne and those suffering or in need.



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Conclusion Kerry Greenwood creates a female detective who breaks conventions because she is not passive, is single and sexually active, has a family and is a woman. She is feminine and enjoys her femininity and this does not prevent her from being strong, agile, brave, determined and active. Greenwood presents a female detective who is not a subaltern, who resists the colonial past of Australia, the effects of neo-colonialism in her present and tries to create a post-colonial, inclusive alternative community where each member is accepted for whom they are, especially if they are brave enough to break the conventions that do not suit them. If the model of hard-boiled masculine detective, with Raymond Chandler´s Phillip Marlowe as one of its main exponents, appeared in the 1920s as a reaction to a post-War crisis in masculinity because many women had joined the workforce during World War I, Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher presents an alternative, a cross between the feminist and the female detectives. Consequently, this hybrid becomes a superwoman, not just through her skills, as shown by Gardner´s multiple intelligences theory, but also by becoming an inspiration to those around her. The fact that she has a family of her own, is a mother and asks her family for help are ground-breaking characteristics in female detectives, even in those depicted in the twenty-first century. The weak depiction of fathers and the many unhealthy relationships between family members presented in the crimes voice abuses that are usually silenced and are not often explored in crime fiction. The Phryne Fisher Mystery Collection is also ground-breaking in this sense as the variety of characters, the types of relations explored and the comprehensive portrayal of crimes involving children provide a heterogeneous image of late 1920s Australia at a time when the main discourse emphasised the homogeneity and fairness of society.  The author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad for the writing of this article (Research Project: FFI2013-45101-P).

References Craig, Patricia and Mary Cadogan. 1981. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. New York: St Martin’s. Gardner, Howard. 1983. Frames of the Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books. 



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Greenwood, Kerry. 2001. Away with the Fairies. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Blood and Circuses. 1994. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. The Castlemaine Murders. 2003. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Cocaine Blues. 1989. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Dead Man’s Chest. 2010. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin. —. Death before Wicket. 2003. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Death by Water. 2005. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Flying too High. 1990. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press.  —. Murder and Mendelssohn. 2013. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Murder in Montparnasse. 2002. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Murder in the Dark. 2006. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press.  —. Murder on the Ballarat Train. 1991. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Murder on a Midsummer Night. 2008. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Queen of the Flowers. 2004. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —. Ruddy Gore. 1995. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press.  —. Unnatural Habits. 2012. Scottsdale: Pen Poisoned Press. —.Urn Burial. 2015 (1996). London: Constable & Robinson Ltd. Horsley, Lee. 2005. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction. Oxford: OUP.  Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. 2006. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Klein, Cathleen Gregory. 1995 (1988). The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: U of Illinois Press. Knight, Stephen. 2004. Crime Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan. Mathews, Ben. 2014. Mandatory reporting laws for child sexual abuse in Australia: a legislative history. Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Commonwealth of Australia: Sydney. Mizejewski, Linda. 2014. Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. New York & London: Routledge.  Pearson, Nels and Marc Singer. 2009. Introduction: Open Cases: Detection, (Post)Modernity and the State. Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. Ed. by Nels Pearson and Marc Singer. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 1-14. Reddy, Maureen T. 1988. Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel. New York: Continuum.  Ribas Segura, Catalina. 2016. “Phryne Fisher: A postcolonial female detective in Ruddy Gore (1995).” Coolabah, 20: 48-66.  Ryan-Fazilleau, Sue. 2007. “Kerry Greenwood’s ‘Rewriting’ of Agatha Christie.” JASAL, 7: 59-70.



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Showalter, Elaine. 2003 (1977). A Literature of their Own. From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing. Rev. and expanded ed. London: Virago.  Suárez Lafuente, Socorro. 2013. “Desarrollo de las detectives en la Literatura contemporánea.” Raudem: Revista de Estudios de las Mujeres, 1: 167-182.





FAMILY MONSTERS IN MEU PAI VAITE MATAR41 BY MARÍA XOSÉ QUEIZÁN MARÍA XESÚS LAMA LÓPEZ

Abstract. Meu pai vaite matar (My Father Will Kill You), by María Xosé Queizán, is a hybrid between the thriller and memoir-novel, causing the intersection between the two genres to change the police investigation into an enquiry into the protagonists’ personal and family backgrounds. The main character experiences both an anagnorisis and personal fulfillment/rebirth. Analysis of the plot shows that the action evolves around the idea of transgenerational transfer of trauma suggesting that self-knowledge is only possible through an understanding of the past, the restoration and healing of the family and the dismantling of the mechanisms of tragedy. The policewoman protagonist represents a Hannah Arendt-style reassessment of concepts of authority and power.

Introduction To situate the works of María Xosé Queizán within peninsular literature it is necessary to keep in mind her quite lengthy career, given that her literary production started in the 1960s when a group of young people of her generation decided to inscribe their work in a literary field that both lacked a market and occupied a precarious institutional position. The group decided to write in Galician during the Franco dictatorship, wellaware that their books would only be published and read within a limited circle, with scant cross-over into neighbouring fields. Queizán participated in the reorganisation of political Galicianism by founding the Consello das Mocidades Galeguistas [Council of Galicianist Youth] in 1963, and of the independent Unión do Pobo Galego (UPG) [Union of the Galician People] in 1964. A militant feminist central to the feminist movement in Galicia, she also participated in the creation of the Asociación Galega da Muller (AGM) [Galician Women’s Association] in

 41



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1975, a faction of which would go on to found the Feministas Independentes Galegas (FIGa) [Galician Independent Feminists]. Predominant in the fields of narrative and essay (literary or feminist), with a few incursions into the poetic, and even rarer still into theatre, with her first publication, the novel A orella no buraco [The Ear in the Hole] (1965), her work began, further proliferating in the years of the democratic transition at the end of the 1979s and beginning of the 1980s. She is also the founder of the journal Festa da palabra silenciada [Party of the Silenced Word], a publication of literary studies created in 1983 whose objective was to make women’s literature visible and to promote feminist thinking and criticism in the fields of art, politics and science. The novel to be analysed here, Meu pai viate matar [My Father Will Kill You], was published in 2011 and is defined by the author, in an interview published in the newspaper Faro de Vigo (Mauleón, 2011), as a crime, adventure and travel novel. Indeed, a cross between various subgenres, the action takes us to Vigo where the main character’s family lives, then to far-off Patagonia, where some of the family has emigrated and where a fair portion of the novel is set. This double generic label, along with the doubling of the location, in the familiar and the exotic, though inhospitable, landscapes, suggests, however, a parallel with Arthur Conan-Doyle’s classic A Study in Scarlet (1887), which was the first in the series of adventures of the emblematic Sherlock Holmes, in which over half of the novel is about an intrigue in a Mormon community in Salt Lake City, United States, and serves as the backdrop for the crime that will be investigated years later in London. Conan-Doyle’s novel, the main character of which is inspired by the Chevalier Auguste Dupin from Poe’s detective stories, offers interesting similarities to Meu pai viate matar. In A Study in Scarlet, two different plots, set in two completely different spaces, are developed such that the investigation occurs when these two utterly separate worlds meet through the person of Jefferson Hope. On the other hand, justice is presented as an implacable mechanism that can act upon anyone who is formally guilty, even when the culprit is in reality an agent of justice. Jefferson Hope is wanted for murder in London but, expanding the field of action, we realise he had simply been pursuing his fiancée’s and her father’s murderer because he cannot accept the impunity of the criminal. However, Sherlolck Holmes's logic-driven investigation does not extend so far as to question the true sense of justice: it is only useful in decoding a hieroglyph. In Queizán’s novel the connection between Vigo and Patagonia is established through the displacement of Moncho Santorum, and the consequences of the protagonist’s investigation result in a dubious reinstatement of order.



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Having established this parallel with one of the historical referents in the crime genre, María Xosé Queizán develops a gruesome family drama marked by two profound traumas: incest and emigration, seasoned further with episodes of psychological and physical abuse. In both the private and the social spheres, forces are at work that feed into each other and create undercurrents that drag the individuals along, without any possible means of escape, toward instability and violence. The author’s trip to Argentinian Patagonia and her visit to the Ushuaia Penitentiary serve as the turning point that gave rise to the novel, as Queizán has explained in several interviews (Fraga, 2012). Indeed, to some extent the central figure of the narrative is the vision of the frozen desert and the fight for survival in extreme conditions, much like the Utah desert and the closed-off world of the Mormon settlements in Conan Doyle’s novel. The isolation of communities dominated by an implacable authority, whether this is based on the power to dominate prison inmates or on a religious dogma which demands blind obedience, forces the human being to confront both its own animality and the horror of being faced with the loss of the civilized world built by reason. The narrative leads us toward just such an abyss, although the departure point seems to deal with familiar surroundings. The characters lead a conventional life in a contemporary urban environment, and only through the main character’s investigation into the family’s past do we have access to a dark background where distortion and suffering prevails.

Through crime fiction and prison novel to family trauma Diana, a criminologist and police officer, finds a case worth investigating in her inner circle: her Aunt Lola harbours a secret—‫ޤ‬the erotic relationship she had with her brother Moncho when they were children and that, when it was discovered by their father, results in Moncho’s trip to Argentina, from which he never returns. Diana decides to investigate the family history at the same time as she discovers her own memories of her aunt’s abuse that she was unable to understand as a child. When this aunt dies, she finds Moncho’s letters, in which the emigrant brother had narrated for Lola his memoirs about his experience in an Argentinian prison. These texts reveal to Diana that the unknown Uncle Moncho committed another act of abuse against a minor in Buenos Aires, with a girl who turned out to be the governor’s daughter, and this time his libidinous attack has further grave consequences: the girl falls, hits her head, and dies. For his crime, Moncho is imprisoned in the terrible Ushuaia Penitentiary, in use between 1904 and 1947, in the southernmost



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city in the world, used to house repeat offenders and, occasionally, political prisoners. The prison was especially arduous due to the climate, the geographical isolation, and the fact that it was run by military personnel. The investigation in the novel offers a dual temporal plane in the representation of the family environment: the presence of the adult characters and the past of their childhood. On the one hand, the main character is depicted as living in an apparently harmonious family setting and, on the other hand, it delves into memories that call forth a perverse chain of broken childhoods. Her parents are a happily married, progressive and leftist couple with no mysteries or sharp edges: both are presented as flat, purely functional characters that serve as a backdrop to embrace, support and protect the young protagonist. She is the one who must go out into the world to fight against evil in the daring role of a member of the forces of order, though this may be from a rearguard position as a specialist detective far from the hand-to-hand confrontations of violent situations. The primary family nucleus is healthy and balanced while the disfunction appears at the next level of kinship, in her mother’s family. The importance of the family network is structurally present as the first chapters are dedicated to introducing each of the characters that form the framework of relationships that surround the protagonist in the present: her parents, María and Xoán, her boyfriend Mario and her Aunt Lola. And, finally, the absent Moncho, an uncle that the main character never meets and of whom she only has a few references given through the two sisters, her mother and her Aunt Lola. With the death of the latter and the inheritance of the family home where she lived comes the need to organize her belongings and fate leads the action toward a new dimension, inviting the protagonist to dig into her own interiority while discovering the family’s past and opening the immediate family to the dimension of the clan42. A tragic and paradoxically slow anagnorisis, which submerges the protagonist in an almost macabre search for the avatars of her family, leads to a profound transformation wherein she discovers new facets of her

 42

The need to explore the dark holes of the family clan lead to the construction of subjectivity through reconciliation with the idea of the group, corresponding to the idea that the anthropologist, Almudena Hernando (2012) holds of the traditional attribution of the relational identity of women, given the social demands that relegate them to the function of maintaining relationships. Thus, the patriarchal order is built upon the “fantasy of the individual”, as only men are offered the potential to develop an individual identity, founded on an unrecognised dependence: this individuation can only happen if the role of cultivating relationships is assigned to others.



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personality and that her present relationships are less harmonious than they appeared. Aunt Lola’s secret hides the entire history of Diana’s mother’s family. On her father’s side, the novel gives nothing away. It is the maternal saga that is told here, in a family intensely marked by female characters that create and maintain affective bonds: her mother María, her Aunt Lola, and her grandmother. All these are juxtaposed against male characters that are, in one way or another, always absent: the grandfather nobody knows who emigrated to Argentina but who occasionally returns only to leave again; Moncho, María and Lola’s brother, absent from the girls’ childhood because he was sent to live with an uncle who was a priest, and later absent from the whole family’s life because his father forced him to move to Argentina while still an adolescent; and the uncle who was a priest, her grandmother’s brother, a truly abominable and corrupt being who abuses Moncho under the façade of his religious authority in an environment removed from the space of the nuclear family, where the child finds himself alone and unprotected. All of these absences, and in some ways the permanent expulsion of Moncho, are a latent explanation for the deviation toward perverse and delinquent behaviours. Significantly, Aunt Lola’s secret appears in a trunk that must be opened by force, as the key is missing, perhaps never to be found, buried in the tomb with her aunt. Yet another box sealed forever, the tomb of the final inhabitant of a house reeking of rot, custodian of a time that is dead, and of strange mysteries that might best be forgotten. Diana, the desecrator, forces the lock on the box, releasing the (evil?) spirits from the family’s memory. Yet somehow this new Pandora’s box is not a destructive gift, but is rather a discovery uncovered through the protagonist’s deductive reasoning and desire for knowledge, and thus does not have quite the same effect as the box of Greek mythology. It holds Moncho’s letters, sent from the prison in Ushuaia, and through this discovery the novel undergoes a formal turn, as the text takes on the epistolary form of the memories of the prisoner43. It also undergoes a conceptual and spatial-temporal turn as it transports us to a hidden episode in the family’s past, to the causes of the dark hole in the collective psyche of the clan, to a distant and exotic setting that is not only strange but also inhospitable, and the experience of expiation is taken to the extreme of

 43

Prison memoirs are a genre with notable examples like, The House of the Dead (Dostoyevsky, 1962) “Pinched”. A Prison Experience (1907) by Jack London, or the Galician Bretaña, Esmeraldina (1988) by Méndez Ferrin.



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fully annihilating the individual, to whom any possibility of redemption is denied.  The drawn-out presentation of the setting which comprises the protagonist’s world is necessary in order to understand the bases of her personality: an open mind, a critical attitude and a sense of justice. Firstly, the family’s nucleus is essential, independent and isolated, made up of her parents, who are independent of the family home and live in a modern and anonymous flat in the city. They are thus situated in a present that has been built by their generation through a culture of freedom of choice as opposed to family tradition: parents who are in love, intellectuals, poetry readers, who instill in their only child a love of culture and social protest, surrounded by the poetry of Jorge Guillén, the songs of José Afonso, contemporary art exhibits, and books of theory by Marxists, Feminists, African revolutionaries or Galician exiles. Following this, the protagonist’s boyfriend, Mario, is introduced, and an entire chapter is dedicated to demonstrating their harmonious and fully affective environment. Young, athletic, and in love, Mario offers camaraderie in her police work and a connection through familial origins with a rural world that, for Diana, is alien and exotic. His admiration for Diana’s intellectual superiority does not generate envy or frustration, and his sincere egalitarian attitude introduces a new masculinity, although some details seem to announce occasional hidden obstacles, inherited from a more traditional value system. Finally, through Diana’s conversations with her Aunt Lola before her death, the mysteries encapsulated in the maternal saga emerge, along with dark networks of dependence and abandonment, hidden threads that were buried in the old house and that lead to sociological clues to the recent past in Galicia. The decline of a rural society with elite landowners and the birth of urban industrial capitalism serve as the backdrop for the grandparents’ generation, represented by the typical relationship between the impoverished gentleman, Bieito Santorum and the young María Pedreira, daughter of affluent merchants. The social tension thus generated leads to Bieito’s flight to the new world in search of fortune, leaving his young wife as the widow of a living man, married yet alone with her three small children. This absence and the economic incapacity of the woman estranges the oldest son who is given to an uncle, a priest, thus opening up the path of disintegration of the symbolic order represented by the traditional family and which culminates in Lola’s descent into decadent solitude. The smell of rot in the family home, the dark and solitary life of the aunt, frozen in time, symbolizes a world heading toward extinction juxtaposed to the life of modernity represented by Diana’s parents.



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At last, Lola’s death forces the protagonist to reconsider her origins through the inheritance that obliges her to come to terms with the house and all its contents, a responsibility or a trap from which her mother had fled. Diana is the one who must undertake the adventure and explore the forces that govern the destiny of the clan; an obligation for one whose vocation is healing. Her tendency toward action surprises her inactive parents, living as they do in a state of contemplation that seeks to escape from sordid reality through cultural refinement and the construction of comforting utopias.

Empowerment through the search for truth Queizán incisively introduces into her novel a female police officer who is both highly qualified and trained as a sign of a new society in which women can now take on roles and break with the preceding generation. Starting with a grandmother who was a prisoner of romantic love and condemned to embody the cliché of a women “seduced and abandoned” despite, and even with, the support of the institution of matrimony, to the reaction of the mother who breaks with the family ghosts and escapes toward modernity, Diana manages to form a relationship based on camaraderie and a common ideology. But to the surprise of the mother who had obtained the reduced liberty of the private sphere, Diana firmly steps into the public sphere, taking on a profession associated with authority and the defense of order for coexistence44, thereby transcending the conquest of freedom in the intellectual and mental dimensions, to conquer the material and social spheres as well. The development of an athletic body and police training offer an autonomy that liberates her from paternalistic protection and her professional competence projects her as an active agent with a social function within the practical order. However, the adventure she is embarking on obliges Diana to take action: the presentiment of an enigma that has been hidden in her own subconscious and that must be discovered if she is to understand the strange memories of her childhood, associated with perverse sexual games instigated by her aunt, supposedly maternal, but dangerously closer to the evil step-mother. 



44

On the possible relationship between a woman and positions of authority, it is worth bearing in mind Arendt’s proposal that separates the concept of authority from that of authoritarianism and power to reclaim that relationship with the recognition of moral authority, recognition of the other and the capacity for leadership (Arendt, 1954).



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The author, then, takes readers on an adventure where the professional and personal are intertwined. Overcoming her reticence and her fear of confronting the ghosts hidden in the past, the protagonist begins her investigation into a crime, into her family’s past and into her own personal history. She is presented as a highly qualified professional, but when she embarks on an investigation of a personal nature, she departs from the stereotype of a police officer who represents the established order within the system45. This adventure requires her professional knowledge, but at the same time she is questioned as an individual subject who must come to terms with her self-knowledge and the profound reasons for the criminal behaviour represented by her mysterious Uncle Moncho.  The transgressions of the clichés of the crime genre that accumulate in Queizán’s novel are varied, but perhaps the greatest is this revision of the protagonist’s family environment46. Of significance is the conversation at the beginning of the novel, in which the supposedly courageous “Diana the Huntress” appears in a filial position, defending her little rebellion against her parents to justify dedicating herself to a profession that goes against the progressive ideals of a generation that, from their comfortable position in the middle class, has yet to face up to a critical analysis of their own ideological positions. The harmonising function of loving parents willing to discuss discrepancies distances the protagonist from any pitfalls and confines her adventure to comfortable territory, like a trapeze artist who tries a new trick knowing there is a safety-net. The real chasm is in the other: the delinquent, the transgressor, the monster. The fact that this disturbing alterity makes its presence known in the family itself is what inspires in Diana the need to investigate, perhaps to know to what extent this hidden reality is also a part of her. And, indeed, this search ends up revealing new aspects of her personality and leads to the need to enter into action, revealing a Diana who is transgressive and able to kill. 



45

Klein considers novels with police as the main character as a subgenre, rather than those with a private detective in that role, given that members of the police “are bound by bureaucracy, hierarchies and politics. Historically they are paid by a system which inhibits individual action and decisions; they are assigned to cases, bound to standard investigative behaviour and responsible for the state’s vision of justice.” (1995:6). 46 The authors coincide in underlining the importance of the family and familiar ties, according to Elena Losada “one of the specific features that can be traced through crime fiction by women, and keeping in mind all the precautions we must take when using dichotomous labels, is the creation of the woman detective with familiar and community ties […] relational networks they are bound to through caring and belonging, as well as being cared for and protected” (Losada 2015: 59)



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However, of what does the crime she is investigating consist? Toward what does the protagonist direct her investigation? What she discovers after her Aunt Lola’s death is the biography of the missing Moncho, through the letters that he had sent his sister from the terrible Ushuaia Penitentiary. The narrative leap takes us to memories in epistolary form that lead to another genre also connected to prison literature with literary precedents such as Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, addressed to his lover. Moncho Santorum’s letters interrupt the narrative by introducing a spatialtemporal leap that situates the action in the southern prison in a temporal pirouette that is difficult to piece together47. All crime novels require a crime to be investigated and it is difficult to blend the narrative tension required for an investigation with the organisation surrounding a past crime that has already been tried and punished. This is why the criminal action also unfolds in the two temporal planes such that the protagonist appears to have the function of an investigator in one and a victim/agent of authority in the other. When Diana goes to Argentina to continue investigating her uncle’s history, two new but related cases are triggered at the same time with the unfolding of the Argentinian landscape representing the dualism between barbarity (Ushuaia) and modernity (Buenos Aires). In the first, the brother of the murdered girl appears, and tries to kill Diana in an act of vengeance against the family of the murderer. Further, Diana falls in love with Odile, a French biologist she meets at random in Buenos Aires, thereby provoking a violent reaction from her boyfriend upon her return to Galicia. The supposedly progressive young man, defender of equality, reacts with an attack of pride and anger when he feels betrayed and rejected, thereby unveiling the deceptive appearance of a camaraderie sustained in reality by erotic attraction48. The

 47

Bearing in mind that the Ushuaia Prison closed in 1947, the time difference creates a large age gap between the two siblings: “When he emigrated, my mother had not yet been born” (Queizán 2011:173), and omits further references to Moncho’s arrival at Ushuaia “at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Queizán 2011:135). The action mentioned in the letters from the prison must have taken place at some point prior to its closing, while the protagonist’s mother forms part of the university generation of the 60s or later, and Lola, who receives the letters, appears to have died after the 90s given the references to the Ouviña case and to the echo of complaints about gender violence in the media. 48 In her theoretical work, Queizán frequently denounces the power relations that are hidden within sentimental relationships: “Behind the ideological mythification that hides reality, matrimony is still the acquisition of women and our work, just as in the beginning of history. And while men and women continue to be dependent upon the economic system of matrimony, sexuality will continue to be the instru-



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patriarchal blueprints that have taken hold beyond conscious rationality are revealed in the end, demonstrating Mario’s limitations and inability to accept a respectful and equal relationship, and thus showing the fragility of the individual dominated by hegemonic frameworks that, when faced with destabilising behaviour, reacts with an explosion of uncontrolled violence.  The temporal expansion that the novel’s plot displays through the investigation of the family’s past appears to respond to the proposal of an analysis of a phenomenon that Queizán frequently interrogates in her work: the abuse of minors. This focus interprets each act of abuse as an element that is derived from a network of events, as is noted in social psychology, situating the phenomenon of “aggression” as a type of social interaction (Mummendey, 1984) and the action of each individual is the result of a context of experiences, tensions and values that make it possible. Further, the phenomenon could be perpetuated by intergenerational transmission, in a chain of behaviours learned through imitation, usually within the family, such that conscious knowledge of certain determinants in familial relationships is a necessary premise for breaking the chain49. As a result, the abuse suffered by the protagonist, and which she herself qualifies as mild and not traumatic50, is located in the novel within a larger context that attempts to give a causal explanation that evidently does not imply a moral justification. Diana attempts to objectively analyse her feelings in order to reconstruct diluted memories from within the fog of her far-off childhood and the powerful eraser of disgust; a fog so thick that, from the pretense of objectivity required by her scientific training, she wonders if her mind is not fabricating these memories, perhaps conditioned by a professional experience that familiarises her with the crime:

 ment for domination by one part and for alienation by the other” (Queizán, 1980: 57). 49 Bandura (1896) suggests that social behaviour is transmitted by observational learning and further develops the concept of the vicarious learning of aggression, indicating that children tend to repeat the behaviour they observe, even when the original determinants are absent. This could indicate how the chain of transmission emerges between the members of the protagonist’s family. 50 In trying to explain the relationship that the young Diana had with her aunt, and the slow distance that emerged in her youth, there is an inexplicable reaction of rejection to the mirrors of the family home that the young woman does not know how to explain through her confused memories: “Diana began to lose her faith and her affection. She began to obsess over a dark enigma. She knew too much about children’s reactions not to consider the sexual aspect. She did not think it probable because sexual abuse in childhood usually lead to changes in sexual behavior in the future. She had no trauma” (Queizán 2011: 65).



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Family Monsters in Meu pai vaite matar by María Xosé Queizán Because she was increasingly convincing herself that these fleeting scenes that came to her were real. The more she thought about Lola’s fear and the unease she began to feel in the house, the more she was convinced that she had been abused by the beloved Aunt Lola. How terrible! To be the victim of someone so well-loved in childhood, abused by the woman she trusted, and her mother as well! Hopefully she was wrong (Queizán 2011: 65).

It is infrequent for sexual abuse to occur at the hands of another woman, but in this way the author avoids a Manichean and paternalistic representation of the female victim, and assumes with normality the social dimension that converts her into a transmitter and reproducer of values and behaviours. However, the typical representation of sexual impulses in the conservative female mind appear to have the positive effect here of limiting their aggression, minimising their consequences. The desire to negate the experience she barely remembers does not impede the protagonist, however, from confronting and exploring her own fear, so that her discomfort sets off the investigation into the family’s past and her suspicions are confirmed through the strange reactions of Aunt Lola and the questions about her hidden brother, apparently expelled from the family. It is in the far-off past, farther still than Lola and Moncho’s childhood, that the causes of a perverse relationship between the two originate and which result in Lola’s abuse during Diana’s childhood. On the one hand, the difficult relationship that the narrative voice presents between the grandparents, María Pedreira and Bieito Santorum, reflects the convulsions projected by the private sphere in a social conflict derived from the crises of the Old Regime and the substitution of the elites in power. The loss of the dominant position of the landowner, as Bieito Santorum submits his masculine psyche to the public humiliation of a marriage of convenience with a young bourgeois woman, feeds a permanent thirst for vengeance that can only be assuaged in the sphere of intimacy. The imbalance between his lower economic status and his inherent superiority as a man, which the patriarchal system established within the power relations of a couple, unleashes the compensatory mechanisms that are projected onto the relationship. Santorum must publicly claim his territory and thus, rebelling against the working restrictions placed on him by his businessman father-in-law, he flees to America. This adventure, that the economic solution of marriage had made unnecessary, returns to him his social dignity by demonstrating his ability to take the initiative in looking for viable alternatives while at the same time restoring his superiority as the dominant male within the relationship by recovering an autonomy that the economic dependence on María’s family had questioned. The result of this subterranean war is that his wife



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is left submerged in uncertainty and repeated abandonment. María Pedreira represents the situation of the middle-class woman who becomes an object of exchange in the business of social upward mobility. As such, she becomes a ‘thing’ and as such can expect no respect or consideration for her growing feelings, like a wild bush at the mercy of animals and the weather. In love with her husband, to whom she is given just like any fair maiden to her requisite hero, she fulfils her role as the stereotypical woman who is seduced and abandoned, with the added burden of depending on a sentimental relationship in which her feelings are an imposition, the matrimonial bond doubly imprisons her and the chains of her bondage are periodically renewed through fleeting visits by the man marking his territory by impregnating her. These are the solid bases upon which the maternal family of the protagonist are founded: a social war transferred to the private sphere, a solid catastrophe that can only produce pieces of rubble: Moncho and Lola, the children of a devastated mother and an absent father. But things can always get worse. We must also take into account the ecclesiastical element, the other means by which the working class can climb the social ladder, and that enters the narrative through the figure of María’s uncle, Father Pedreira, the pedophilic priest. Whatever may be the determinants to be taken into consideration from social or biological psychology in order to understand the causes of his behaviour, in the novel, Father Pedreira represents a monstrous character, a presence who introduces the unknown nature of evil. In the face of the instability provoked by social and psychological factors, the perversity that resides in exercising cruelty with hedonistic ends on defenseless children represents a challenge to the rational mechanisms for understanding the world. He is the personification of the dangerous individual who escapes from all normalising disciplinary processes (Foucault, 2000) and his monstrosity resides in both his morally perverse nature51 and in the fact that he undertakes his criminal activity under the protection of the structures of power – not just material power but also spiritual and symbolic, as a representative of the Church with the authority that this bestows on him precisely in the moral field. The influence of this character emerges in the veiled interrogations that Diana the police officer makes of her Aunt Lola, in an investigative strategy that

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Along with the medical and juridical conditions for the transgression of the Monster who disobeys natural law, as Foucault notes, here we are faced with transgressions of a psychological and moral nature, represented in the lack of empathy and in the perverse narcissism that acts with no feeling of guilt. The horror that this figure provokes resides in his capacity to evade punishment by any law, human or divine.



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the aunt detects and evades, but that ends up revealing the confused role of María, guilty of terrible negligence in handing over her son to the monster, if not of the cruel vengeance of a desperate Medea who punishes her husband through their son52. The allusions are enough for Diana to compare her clues with reality: Father Pedreira was the priest in a small village where, once her questioning begins, the tragic memories of the abused children who were trapped in his net of altar boys quickly come to light.  Diana’s ability as a police detective easily reconstructs the chain of abuse in the clan: Moncho is a victim of his uncle and somehow reproduces this sexual transgression with his sister Lola, who, in turn, reproduces it by abusing the innocence of her young niece. However, two elements emerge to unsettle Diana. First, the primary culprit can no longer be punished: the pedophilic priest freely committed his crimes throughout his life, on a number of victims who have carried the consequences of his abuse throughout their own lives, and he has died without anyone daring to accuse him. Thus, an investigation can generate knowledge, but it cannot restore the profoundly destabilised and irrecoverable order. Second, Moncho’s sexual abuse, reproduced by initiating his younger sister in sexual acts, does not generate rejection in his victim. On the contrary, between the siblings, a complicity that strongly links them against the hostility of the outside world takes hold, and this is especially true when faced with the authority figure who is their father, who only appears to punish and destroy. Lola explains to her niece how her brother was expelled without clarifying the reasons, presenting a despotic father who acted irrationally: “To annoy us. We were happy before father arrived” (Queizán 2011: 79). However, she makes clear her unconditional love for this lost brother who, apparently, was never heard from again. And perhaps it is his exclusion which allows the younger daughter, Diana’s mother, to grow up healthily, as she was born after he had left and never comes to know her older brother as he is lost to memory for this new branch of the family. He remains only in Lola’s memory, keeping her linked to the past and buried in the family home, alone with her memories, while her sister builds a new future that offers continuity for the saga. The outline for the tragedy is in place: the familial transmission of guilt, the detection of the pharmakon or the scapegoat53 who

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This emerges in Lola’s words: “Maybe father insisted: how can you let the boy go with that pervert? Lola abandoned caution to rage. Don’t you care what he does with the boy? The father wrote from Argentina. If you are so interested in your son, come back and raise him, my mother replied. Yeah, yeah, whatever” (Queizán 2011: 68-69). 53 Moncho meets all of the characteristics of the scapegoat: he is guilty of a real crime, for which he is immediately punished and expelled and, further, he has a



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must atone for the guilt and heal the community, in this case the family, and the departure of the victim into exile. Diana unravels the tragedy, acting more as a goddess of light and knowledge than as a hunter, and the unconsciously sought stability that her mother had built, almost by chance, is transformed into a consciously sought stability in the hands of the young woman. The endeavour requires that she plumb the depths of knowledge, and these depths can only be achieved through some extraordinary event, a symbolic rite of passage opening out into another level of experience and understanding. This event is the death of Aunt Lola, the discovery of the trunk and later reading the letters it holds. This sort of digression explains the life of the expelled individual in his exile and contributes to centering the position of the protagonist in relation to her own life: it reveals aspects of her own personality that were hidden from her and leads her to question the conventional nature of her relationship with Mario, plagued as it is by uncomfortable differences that have been silenced, and to confront her most profound desires without fear, overcoming self-censure and unconscious repression.  The memories from Ushuaia Prison introduce the perspective of the prisoner into the text and reveal the path of degradation to which he was condemned. Moncho has no possible salvation. Being expelled from the family is perceived as a necessary punishment that the paternal power must inflict in order to heal the body of the community, but it encapsulates an essential injustice for the individual, as he is judged for the transgression he represents and not for his intentions or the damage he causes54. Marked by a damaged unconscious more than by a cruel destiny, Moncho seems to present a new prototype for the moral monster given that, as opposed to his executioner, he has feelings, he loves and suffers, and certainly he never acts from a position of power. As a result, his crime does not go unpunished. Expelled from the familial paradise, first by his mother who punishes the father by handing the boy to the rapist priest, and secondly by order of his father, who punishes him for committing an act of

 stain on his moral integrity with the perversion inoculated by the abuse, and he is even disfigured by a birth mark that provokes scorn and rejection from his father: “Let’s see, he would say to my mother, one day you’ll tell me who is the father of this horror. So ugly, he can’t be mine. This is not a Santorum!” (Queizán 2011: 134). Later, in America, everyone laughs at the terrible stain on his face: “They called me crooked eggplant and, in latin, horroris cara” (Queizán 2011: 150). 54 The debate that could be held around the concepts of guilt and justice is similar to that reflected in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, which presents an Oedipus who is punished for a crime he does not consciously commit. The representation of his life in exile in the second play, Oedipus at Colonus, shows that the expelled individual can still exert great influence upon the destiny of Thebes.



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incest that the siblings do not feel guilty for, given that they had grown up in different homes, almost as strangers, he follows the trajectory of the Fallen Angel who reproduces his crimes in a fall that leads him to the hell of Ushuaia. The description of the prison is truly that of an infernal spectacle of collective eternal suffering that does not lead to any kind of social redemption and is converted into a form of purifying ritual by the magnitude of the pain and degradation to which the prisoners are subjected. Delinquents and criminals merge with the marginalised for whatever motive, all of them condemned to this world without laws, where only force triumphs: I was eighteen years old when they put me in a boat with a group of delinquents and criminals. Don’t think that I was the youngest. Boys and girls who lived on the street but had committed no crime arrived at the prison, as they could find no other way of getting rid of them and cleaning up the city. I guess you understand that being so weak, along with the rigid discipline and crushing work, they were made to suffer all kinds of abuse (Queizán 2011: 135).

The forced labour used to build the prison itself, in a geographic area with an extreme climate, increases the physical suffering that leads to the death of many of the prisoners. Escaping only makes matters worse as it leads Moncho to even greater misery, condemned to wander a frozen desert without end, devoured by hunger, thirst and cold, making him miss even the tortures of prison, resulting in a humiliating voluntary return to Ushuaia. The horror generated by this first-person narrative from the depths of the hell of the prison acquires further significance by delving into a reflection on the relationship between transgression and the mechanisms of punishment that invariably lead to Foucauldian criticism on the structures of power and its mechanisms for control. The prison as an institution for punishment turns out to be a means of destruction of ineffable efficiency, and the shock felt by the protagonist as she reads about it awakens a desire to understand that leads her to travel there.

Denouement Finally, the process of anagnorisis that the investigation opens for the protagonist situates her in a new position when she arrives in the space of renewal represented by the city of Buenos Aires. Diana is discovering her own history and to a certain extent she is discovering herself as a new being who must reconstruct her moorings in life and in the world. It is in



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this situation that she is attacked by Horacio Rosas, the brother of her uncle’s victim who appears so as to demonstrate that the chain of revenge never stops as, once again, as in classic tragedy, the individual appears to have inherited his family’s guilt. This is when Odile appears on scene, a new woman who represents scientific knowledge and the reign of reason, not only through her profession but also in her lineage as a member of a family of scientists and of French origin, locating her in a cultural field that is linked to progress and light, Enlightenment and revolution. Friendship bursts forth, as quick as lighting, between the two women, and the mutual affection and attraction leads to an erotic encounter, completing Diana’s process of anagnorisis with a type of recognition of the place she truly wants to occupy in life. Afterward, the action flows toward an anticlimax that closes the chapters and doors in order to preserve the perfect image of plenitude. Diana returns to Vigo and ends her relationship with Mario after a disappointing final episode. Her gruesome family history can finally be closed as, in self-defence, she kills the assassin pursuing her because of uncle’s Moncho crime in Argentina. Her parents’ understanding and affection finally situate her at her own balanced centre, allowing her to start a new amorous relationship that appears to represent the perfect opportunity for sharing longings and passion. A happy ending? Perhaps on this occasion the author chose not to give up her magic wand as a means of rectifying all the meanness and chaos that life offers us and to play with the possibility of bestowing improbable fulfillment. This text is part of my work for the research project FEM2014-55057-P

References Arendt, Hannah. 1954. “What is authority”. http://pevpat-ugent.be/wpcontent/uploads/2016/09/H-Arendt-what-is-authority.pdf. Bandura, Albert. 1986. Social Foundations of Thought and Action. A Social Cognitive Theory. New Jersey. Prentice Hall.  Foucault, Michel. 2000. Los anormales. Curso en el Collège de France (1974-75). Buenos Aires. Fondo de Cultura Económica. —. 2002. Vigilar y castigar. Nacimiento de la prisión. Buenos Aires. Siglo XXI.  Hernando, Almudena. 2012. La fantasia de la individualidad, sobre la construcción sociohistòrica del sujeto moderno. Madrid. Katz.



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Klein, Kathleen Gregory. 1995. The Women Detective. Gendre & Genre. Urbana and Chicago. University of Illinois Press. Losada, Elena. 2015. “Entre madre e hija: vínculos y genealogías femeninas en las novelas de Rosa Ribas”. In Tras la pista. Narrativa criminal escrita por mujeres, edited by Elena Losada Soler and Katarzyna Pasziewitz. Barcelona: Icaria. 55-70. Mauleón, Amalia. 2011. “Entrevista con María Xosé Queizán”. Faro de Vigo. (14/12/2011). Mummendey, Amélie (ed.) 1984. Social Psychology of Aggression. From Individual Behaviour to Social Interaction. Berlin-Heidelberg. Springer Verlag. Queizán, María Xosé. 2011. Meu pai vaite matar. Vigo. Edicións Xerais.  Perrone, Reinaldo and Martine Nannini. 1992. Violencia y abusos sexuales en la familia. Una visión sistémica de las conductas sociales violentas. Buenos Aires/ Barcelona/México. Paidós.





SLEUTHING THE FAMILY ORIGINS: REVISITING SALLY MORGAN’S MY PLACE (1987) MARTIN RENES

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to revisit Sally Morgan’s autobiography My Place (1987), not so much as a novel about Indigenous-Australian identity formation, as it has predominantly been read by mainstream readership, but rather as a crime novel which centres on the double taboo of interracial intercourse and incest—an Ab/original Sin of sorts which is at the heart of Morgan’s family’s origins. Contentiously niched as a piece of Aboriginal lifewriting or Indigenous autobiography, My Place has been both praised and criticised as a landmark text in Aboriginal identity formation. Indeed, the vexed racial origins of Morgan’s family and the way its members have had to deal with this in terms of passing for white have raised many a doubt about the representativity of her autobiography as Indigenous life experience. This paper argues that Morgan’s autobiography is vitally concerned with the uncovering of the fundamentally exploitative, criminal nature of the relationship between Black and mainstream Australia, without which the traumas assailing Indigenous identity formation cannot be properly understood.

Introduction Over the last ten years, crime fiction has been re-interpreted and expanded in postcolonial ways, allowing for the inclusion of non-standard structure and narrative in a fertile exploration of the limit zones with other genres. In Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006), Christine Matzke and Susanne Muehleisen present a transnational inventory of novels, such as Michael Ondaatje's Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000), which are not traditionally considered crime fiction but boast crime and mystery elements in their revelation of postcolonial skeletons in the closet. This domestic detectivesque metaphor takes us to the aim of this paper, which



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is to revisit Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), not so much as a novel about Indigenous identity formation, but rather as a crime novel which centres on the double taboo of interracial intercourse and incest—an Ab/original Sin of sorts which is at the heart of Morgan’s family’s origins. Contentiously niched as a piece of Aboriginal lifewriting or Indigenous autobiography, My Place has been both praised (Brett 1987, 10-11; Gare 1987, 80-81) and criticised as a landmark text in Aboriginal identity formation (Huggins 2003, 60-65; Langton 1993, 29-30; Muecke 1988). Indeed, the vexed racial origins of Morgan’s family and the way its members have had to deal with this have raised many a doubt about the presumed representativity of her autobiography as Indigenous life experience. While it is not my aim to analyse these tensions in depth, they do bear on the psychological and physical violence that may affect Indigenous-Australian identity formation within the seat of the family, the most personal and pivotal level of identification for the individual but also the focus of intergenerational trauma due to the genocidal impact of colonisation on Indigenous Australians (Atkinson 2002, Moses 2005, Veracini 2003, Wolfe 2000), which has been attested to in official government reports such as Bringing Them Home (1997) on the Stolen Generations and Little Children Are Sacred (2006) on child sexual abuse within remote Indigenous communities. Put in this light, Morgan’s autobiography is equally—or even more some would argue (Langton 1993, 29-30)—concerned with the uncovering of the fundamentally exploitative, criminal nature of the relationship between Black and mainstream Australia. This harsh reality Morgan’s narrative develops on many levels and ultimately flags in sexual, Freudian terms of dysfuncionality. To understand how, it is necessary to contextualise My Place historically and socially.

Placing My Place Historically and Socially Australia started out as a British convict colony in 1788, with the landing of the First Fleet at Botany Bay, present-day Sydney. It took this role over from the USA after its independence from the industrialising British Metropole, which was in need of a new marginal, self-sustaining location to expel its impoverished working classes to. As of the mid 18thc., the latter had developed into what was perceived as a threat to the upper classes and status quo, and they overpopulated English prisons, many accused of and condemned for petty crimes committed in the fight for survival, a dire situation which inspired Karl Marx’s writing of Das Kapital, his analysis of the social impact of the Industrial Revolution in



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England. The American Revolution (1765 - 1783), a comfortably-distant colonial conflict, and the French Revolution (1789 - 1799), an uncomfortably-nearby class conflict, spurred the British authorities to curb potential revolt at home, and in Orientalist manner, they used Captain James Cook’s scientific exploits and discoveries in the South Seas to provide a permanent solution. For nearly a century from 1788, up to 162,000 convicts were transported from British prisons to the newlyclaimed, isolated island continent, most never to return (Davison et al. 2001). The harsh convict experience has given a particular twist to Australian identity (Hodge and Mishra 1991, ix-xix). Crime has been a pervading source of shame as well as pride in Australian history, which over time has spoken to the essence of the white nation and what it has meant to be Australian, boosting upbeat battler versions while glossing over its less glamorous sides.  Through the concept of mateship, a feeling of solidarity forged by the hardships and sufferings of the poor convict population, mainstream Australian society generally identifies with a class-effacing equality, politically translated as a democratic ‘fair go’ for all; yet, traditionally this does not include women or the Indigenous peoples (Hodge and Mishra 1991, xv). The ‘white trash’ expelled from the British Isles occupied Aboriginal land illegally, displaced and dispossessed the First Nations while brandishing the myths of Terra Nullius, Benign Settlement and the evolutionary backwardness of the Indigenous Australians, and ignored the Enlightened instructions of the far-removed British Colonial Office to respect the First Nation’s rights and possessions (Reynolds 2001). White supremacist convictions still persist and structurally inform Australian nationhood—as Andrew Bolt (20171), Pauline Hanson (1996), and Keith Windschuttle (2000) show—and put the post-/colonial history of Aboriginal disenfranchisement, dispossession and dislocation into a genocidal perspective (Moses 2005, Veracini 2003, Wolfe 2000).  As a result of the racist attitudes and policies that justified and enabled the white grab for land, the Indigenous Australian peoples have taken the brunt of the colonisation process, much more so than the poor settlerconvicts expelled from the Imperial centre, who transferred the

 1

The journalist Andrew Bolt is one of the most insistent cases. One of his latest opinion pieces denies Aboriginal dispossession and praises the Stolen Generation policies, ignoring or twisting objective research data. It was published in the newspapers The Herald Sun and The West Australian in August 2017, and it received a firm rebuttal co-signed by twenty-five Curtin University distinguished scholars, retrievable at http://humanrights.curtin.edu.au/about/news/. The full text has been attached as an appendix to this article.



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hierarchical divisions of British society to Australian soil and projected themselves as the owners and rulers of the new-found land (Hodge and Mishra, 1991). A considerable number of Aborigines represent a Fourth World within the Australian mainstream’s First World, be it on the urban fringes or in the Australian Bush and Outback. As ABC journalist Claire Moodie pointed out, “Aboriginal living conditions in Western Australia,” a state with a large Indigenous population, “have been described as shameful and Third World” (2010). Additionally, a substantial amount of lighter-skinned mixed-descent Aborigines were forced to assimilate and pass as white in order to avoid the impact of eugenic policies, though nowadays a more accommodated Aboriginal middle class is also coming into existence. Crime fiction would make an excellent discursive locus to reflect upon the particulars of Australian society. Indeed, in his study Continent of Mystery: A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction, Stephen Knight argues that crime fiction takes up an important place in Australian literary culture as a result of the convict past in a context of colonial reclusion and isolation, which offered fertile ground for the genre to develop in the 19th and early 20th c. (1997, 56). He defines a series of local subgenres that initially sprouted from the original convict narrative, such as the goldfield mystery, the squatter thriller and the criminal saga, which map the process of colonisation from different perspectives. He also points out the genre’s incorporation of, and adaptation to European and American form and content in later years, in a thematic shift from the country to the city, from the Outback and Bush to the Suburban and Urban, as living conditions for the white mainstream were changing in Australia and incorporated middleclass features and referents. As commercial popular fiction, the Australian crime novel has become more standard over time and now shares a common set of narrative features with the American and European models in the search for crime’s resolution, such as the hard-boiled private eye thriller and the society clue puzzle—see for instance Peter Temple’s Jack Irish and Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series (Knight 1997, 10-44).  But while mainstream Australian crime fiction has developed from crime’s decisive presence in the building of the colony and later nationstate, it has also glossed over the tense nature of the Indigenous/nonIndigenous cultural interface, and so co-opted the mainstream discourse on Indigeneity. It has barely laid bare the various forms of violence by which the Indigenous population has been either absorbed and assimilated into, or hidden and removed from the mainstream over many decades of informal as well as institutionalised racial discrimination. Consequently, in not addressing the various mainstream genocidal practices and in



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obscuring the Aboriginal presence, Australian crime fiction has also been complicit in their disenfranchisement. The genre has traditionally not welcomed Indigenous voices and writers—a salient exception being the Sydney-born Kamilaroi author Philip McLaren, who sees himself not as a crime writer per se, but as an author who writes about the endemic presence of crime and violence in Aboriginal society due to post/colonial disenfranchisement. While McLaren’s disacknowledgement of the genre serves emancipatory purposes, the celebrated white Australian writer Peter Temple, who immigrated from South Africa in 1980, tends to incorporate a sole Aboriginal character in a subsidiary role in his novels, which represents a somewhat tokenistic recognition of Indigeneity. The successful white female author Kerry Greenwood never addresses the Australian particulars of the gender and race overlap and keeps her sympathetic protagonist far from Indigenous Australia: not surprisingly, female detective Phryne Fisher is an emancipated flapper living in the city. The exception to this rule of absence is the exceptional, long-lived series featuring part-Indigenous Bush detective Napoleon Bonaparte, “Bony”, created by the English immigrant Arthur Upfield in the late 1920s and who became more popular abroad than in Australia, which shows the difficulty for Indigenous voices to be heard in the genre. In sum, apart from Philip McLaren’s oeuvre and with the exception of Nicole Watson’s The Boundary (2011), it is hard to find an Australian crime novel in which race and gender productively overlap to carve out a niche for Indigeneity, but we can expand the narrow parameters of the genre following McLaren’s self-definition as a writer and so look at My Place from a crime-writing perspective. Bearing in mind these silences and absences, the story told in My Place must also be read against the official policies of mixed-descent children’s removal from their Aboriginal parents in the period 1930-1970, and the later publication of the Bringing Them Home report issued by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC 1997), which critically assessed them. Based on five-hundred eye-witness reports, the Royal Commission’s Report convincingly found that the removal policy had affected at least 1 to 3 out of every 10 children in IndigenousAustralian families and communities in that period (Quoted in Haebich 2001, 15), and constituted a dehumanising, genocidal practice that deserved apology and repair from the Australian Nation. Although an official Apology was offered by Parliament in 2008, the politics of intervention of the Indigenous family nucleus are deeply ingrained and hard to budge. Some observers even argue that the Apology is only a symbolic gesture and as such obscures past suffering as there is no



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material repair. The current drama of the Northern Territory Intervention, activated in 2007, plays out on a state level the domestic policing My Place denounces at the family level.  The Northern Territory is the Australian state with the largest percentage of Aborigenes in its overall population, the greatest percentage of remote communities (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006: 32%) and— not insignificantly—with the least political autonomy. The territory has been intervened since 2007 by a military and police task force sent in by the Federal Government to control an explosive situation in many households of the so-called “remote” Indigenous communities. The Intervention was put into place with controversial bipartite support after an Official Inquiry, whose title Little Children are Sacred emulates the political correctness of the earlier Bringing Them Home. The report found ample evidence of endemic child and substance abuse and domestic violence within what were classified as dysfunctional Indigenous family units. The on-going character of this Federal Emergency Response denotes the failure of conservative, assimilative policies to integrate the Aborigines into the mainstream, as well as of progressive schemes that aim for their self-rule, at some remove from Western civilisation but still subject to its neo-colonising impact. The Aboriginal ‘fit’ into the mainstream has been wrought with the traumatic loss of land, family and community structure, and means of sustenance; this is a vexed reality which has been long covered with the proverbial cloak of the “Great Australian Silence” as the famous Australian anthropologist WEH Stanner would famously have it (Boyer Lectures, 1967). Indeed, it has taken the Indigenous peoples a long time to make their voices heard and respected in different social arenas, and literature and particularly crime fiction have been no exception, as discussed above. Sally Morgan’s My Place inscribes itself into this recovery, polemical as her novel may be in terms of authenticity due to the acquired character of her Indigeneity. 

Placing My Place Generically In the light of the above it is hardly coincidental that Aboriginal literature starts with the publication of a series of ‘silenced voices’: narratives which are embedded within a tradition of autobiography in Australian literature describing the lives of ‘ordinary Australians,’ which becomes a popular way of expressing Aboriginal women’s life experience as of the late 1970s. These narratives are known as “Aboriginal lifewriting”, and tend to give a first-hand account, either written by the female protagonist or noted down by a sympathetic informant (Grossman 2006). The genre flourished



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for a couple of decades, creating a niche from which Indigenous sexuality, motherhood and domesticity could be discussed and positively reassessed, and the official White History of the nation rewritten from an Indigenous grassroots perspective. This was also a niche whose existence was informed by the “subaltern” (Spivak 1988) position of Indigenous women, who can be understood as doubly colonised in terms of race as well as gender—and perhaps one should also say in terms of class/labour, as the hierarchal binaries of race and gender cause economic exclusion and so affect the family sphere, as My Place goes at length to show. My Place belongs to the genre of lifewriting but would become far more successful than the broad sway of autobiographical narrations. As it was written from an ostensibly ‘white’, non-confrontational perspective— for a third of the book, Morgan is ostensibly unaware of her partIndigeneity—it created a point of encounter between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal Australia and so made Aboriginality visible and accessible to a large mainstream audience. National sales were over half a million copies within a decade of its publication, distribution in English and non-English speaking countries was widespread and critical interest was plentiful. In the case of Catalonia and Spain, where the initiative for this volume of essays was taken, the novel was published in 2002 both in Catalan by Edicions Proa (El meu lloc) and in Spanish by Editorial MAEVA (Mi lugar). It was successfully marketed nationally and internationally and, categorised as ‘authentic’ Aboriginal life experience, it became a well-read and famous text. Indeed, My Place’s hybrid domestic setting in one of Perth’s suburbs is the site of a remarkable Indigenous battler story of resilience against all odds, despite the damage inflicted by racist attitudes, behaviour and policies. Like its quite white, suburban protagonist, the text is culturally and generically hybrid and may be read in a number of complementary ways, such as a biography, autobiography, quest, Bildungsroman, gothic novel, oral narrative, mystery novel and crime fiction. Formally classified as an autobiography, Morgan’s novel is as much about the crime of sexual abuse and its transgenerational traumatic consequences as it is about the process of the author’s increasing identification with Aboriginality; both are inextricably connected, as the search for Aboriginality implies the search for the original crime committed in the family sphere and vice versa. In a way, Aboriginality, reassessed positively, is the compensation Morgan receives for finding out about an atrocious past of sexual abuse, and this makes the assimilation of the trauma generated possible. My Place addresses Morgan’s revelation of this hidden heritage, an account of how her family, in which the paternal



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side is largely absent, came into being from its very start—ab origine: with origins both Aboriginal and European in eugenic Australia. This has made the text controversial, not only because these biological origins to which Morgan makes claim are still questioned in the mainstream as well as in the Aboriginal community, who are both confronted with a shameful past of uncouth and unclean sexual behaviour that affects intercultural relationships; but also—and paradoxically—because Morgan’s whitened and non-confrontational account entered the mainstream as ‘paradigmatic’ Aboriginal life experience at the moment of the Bicentennial. The latter was Australia’s celebration of 200 years of white colonisation in 1988 for some, but for others an intense moment of revision of Australia’s white colonial history by highlighting the Aboriginal participation in the construction of the nation. My Place does so by critically engaging with the binaries of race, gender and class that have oppressed the Aboriginal population in Australian society for over two centuries.

My Place and the Black Battler Starting out with her own story as a child and adolescent, in My Place Sally Morgan subsequently records the oral accounts of Arthur Corunna, her grand-uncle; Gladys Milroy, her mother; and Daisy or Nan Corunna, her grandmother, and thus closes slowly but inexorably in on the mystery of her origins, rooted in sexual abuse. Part of the attraction of My Place for mainstream readers is that it identifies the characters in the novel as ‘battlers’, a well-known mainstream trope expressing resilience and stamina against all odds and a strong will to survive and improve, which harks back to the harsh convict and early settler experience as well as the Australian contribution to, and great losses in, the First World War effort, both of which inspired the moral backbone of (white) Australian nationhood. Depicting Nan, Gladys and Sally as battlers and survivors makes for white empathy and acceptance and so renegotiates the bases of national identity. The character who most responds to the inscription as a battler, on a first reading, is male, however. Significantly, this is the story of Sally’s uncle Arthur Corunna, Nan’s mixed-descent brother, who is the first to tell his life story and comes in as the second voice in the text, which starts with Sally’s younger years. This narrative positioning is strategic, as Arthur’s account is a faithful reflection of the overlapping character of race and class discrimination, while making clear that Arthur is a strong, resilient, and independent man in his own right. It is also opportunely staged early in the novel, because his oppression is race rather than gender-related, and so his account is less vexed, less dependent on the



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sexual-abuse narrative than in the case of the three women, and effectively allows Morgan to package the family secret towards the end of the novel.  Arthur is physically as well as mentally very much a ‘man amongst men’. Though repeatedly tricked and abused by white employers and partners, who feel empowered by their whiteness, by sheer insistence he eventually manages to carve out a place for himself in mainstream society when buying and successfully running a small farm. It is not coincidental that he is depicted as a tough fighter and boxer in his younger years, taking on and beating white opponents. While being black working-class he is respected as a man, a battler among battlers. By the time Arthur tells his story, he is ready to die but looks back on a ‘successful’ life, although not without laying bare the structural race and class oppression of the Indigenous peoples in white society he has had to fight against. The following few words summarise the issues at the heart of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationship: You see, the trouble is colonialism isn’t over yet. We still have a white Australia policy against Aborigines. Aah, it’s always been the same. They say there’s been no difference between black and white, we all Australian, that’s a lie. I tell you, the black man has nothin’, the government’s been robbin’ him blind for years. There’s so much whitefellas don’t understand. They want us to be assimilated into white, but we don’t want to be. They complain about our land rights, but they don’t understand the way we want to live. They say we shouldn’t get the land, but the white man’s had land rights since this country was invaded, our land rights. Most of the land the Aborigine wants, no white man would touch. (Morgan, 212–13)

My Place and Racial Passing Arthur’s tale is not excessively traumatic but does build up to the more insidious forms of repression displayed in Gladys’s and Nan’s accounts, which evince deep emotional scars. Ultimately, the real drama in My Place must be understood within the context of the various overlapping, longstanding forms of mainstream oppression of the Aboriginal populations in Australia and especially how this has affected Aboriginal women, most vulnerable to white patriarchal violence, which in My Place is also shown to carry strong class connotations. If anything, the combined effects of class, race and gender oppression suffered by Nan and Gladys show them to be even more resilient battlers than Arthur. Sexual abuse of Indigenous women by white men at the frontier and the formal and informal policies of separation of mixed-descent children from their Aboriginal parents went hand in hand and caused Sally’s family to live as non-Indigenous



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people away from the rural milieu in the suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, which Sally intuits is as much a literal as a metaphorical white lie. Thus, My Place digs into the all too common “deceit” of racial ‘passing’ or the pretence to be white or at least non-Aboriginal so as to elude the effects and impact of Australia’s eugenic laws and policies. Sally’s ‘half-cast’ grandmother Nan and her ‘quarter-cast’ mother Gladys had managed to reunite after their earlier separation, which had been imposed by racist practice and legislation, but at the price of being locked into a self-defeating circle of shame, fear and silence about their Aboriginal roots as well as the concomitant fear of being separated from their children. This is exacerbated by the dysfunctionality of the white working-class father figure, a mentally and physically ill ex-prisoner of war, who terrorises his family with the legal authority he wields as the white breadwinner. Upon his untimely death the fear of the children’s removal from the nuclear family inevitably holds the mother and grandmother in check. Thus, Sally is instructed by her mother to tell her classmates she is “Indian” (Morgan, 38) to prevent rejection and separation, though she never fully identifies with this identity—she acutely feels something is amiss and part of herself missing, only revealed in her odd drawings, behaviour and unconventional women-only family make-up. The void Sally felt as a poor suburban ‘immigrant’ girl has to be filled with a search into her mother and grandmother’s origins: “How could I tell Gladys [...] a vital part of me was missing and that I’d never belong anywhere” (Morgan, 106). According to Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton, it was Morgan’s suspicion of a deceit about her past that made her decide to investigate the dark secrets of her roots (1993, 29–30). Sally will engage in a search for her Aboriginality by reading up in the local libraries, talking to her direct kin, and looking for the dark-skinned members of her family in the Western Australian Outback. Later she will put all this experience and data into book form—My Place, an account of where and how she is situated as an Australian.  While Sally explains on several occasions how she always felt different as a child and out of place—Homi Bhabha´s “the same, but not quite” (1994, 86)—the final revelation of her Aboriginality does not come until adolescence: “for the first time in my fifteen years, I was conscious of Nan’s colouring” (Morgan, 97). Thus, the first third of the novel almost reads like any suburban person’s life in Australia and strikes the Aboriginal critic Jackie Huggins as “the life of a middle-class Anglo woman” (2003, 62). While this structurally works to package the secret and surprise effect contained in the story, it also reveals Sally’s insertion



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into the mainstream, and the effectiveness of the politics of assimilation both as external and internal pressure on identity formation. Thus, the politics of fear, shame, and silence operate on two, mutually reinforcing levels: the resistance towards retrieving a collective history of oppression and the difficulty of articulating an individual identity.

My Place and ‘Black Velvet’: ‘Whodunnit?’ As Sally is going to find out, the absence of men in her family—and therefore in My Place—is grounded in the old frontier custom of white male settlers to relieve themselves with ‘black velvet’, the sexual abuse of Indigenous women, which produced mixed offspring. The taboo, guilt and shame this involved generally meant the white paternal line was silenced and lost, and only the Indigenous female line remained visible—as is eloquently commented upon in Alexis Wright’s marvellous but excruciating novel Plains of Promise (1997). Worse even, in Sally’s family the white great-grandfather, the wealthy and prestigious station owner Howden Drake-Brockman, presumably commits incest with Sally’s grandmother, who is his own daughter begotten by an Aboriginal woman, wife to the local mob’s leader. At pains to hide any biological traces back to the white forebear, the Drake-Brockmans separate Sally’s mother from Nan. As the novel/Nan2 refuses to unveil the deepest secrets of the family’s past—the plausibility of incest—Nan’s death ultimately renders the narrative inconclusive. Her grandmother’s evasive non-communication turns into an insurmountable barrier, and Sally has to resort to the ‘ethnographic’ evidence of family photographs in order to articulate her identity. Gladys’s barely pronounced hunch that Howden DrakeBrockman could have fathered her is confirmed in a mirror scene in which Gladys appears as the dark double of her white grand/father: “Suddenly, I held up a photograph of Howden as a young man next to [Gladys’s] face [...] We both fell into silence. ‘My God [...] he’s the spitting image of you!’” (Morgan, 237). While Gladys is depicted as yet another hard-working but successful battler, her marriage to white trash Bill Milroy locks her into a downward spiral of domestic violence. Painting a stark contrast to Arthur Corunna’s status as a strong, masculine battler, Bill Milroy is an ex-prisoner of war of Anglo-Celtic descent who has gone through terrible, undigested

 2

Note the French version of My Place bears a different title: Talahue, which is Nan’s Aboriginal name, and so centres the focus of attention differently, on the sexual crimes surrounding the family’s origins.



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experiences in German concentration camps. Already dead, he does not acquire his own voice in the narrative, but his story is strategically framed within Gladys’s. It appeals to a mainstream understanding of the Aboriginal plight by offering a white example of the excessive damage inflicted by racial/ethnic violence, a parallel teased out by Bill’s haunting imprisonment near a Jewish extermination camp (Morgan, 288) and by the internment of Aborigines during WWII by A.O. Neville, Western Australian Protector of the Aborigines from 1925 to 1940 (Morgan, 211). Bill Milroy is described as “the absent male [...] physically [...] as well as emotionally” (Bird and Haskell 1992, 7), and in that spectral non-role he is comparable to Howden Drake-Brockman. Constantly out of work, a chronic drunk and often hospitalized, his mental imbalance derived from what must be post-traumatic stress disorder is never understood by the Australian state as an illness caused by the war effort. His traumatic sodomization by a German officer maps ethnic violence across gender, converging on Nan’s incestuous secret, and the very German officer who abused him appears in Perth under a different guise, which plunges him into terminal illness and madness. Through Bill, Gladys’s life slowly develops into a torment of gender, race and class violence, which undercuts her attempt at passing. As the family struggles on financially and Bill’s mental condition deteriorates, his racial prejudice against Aborigines increases. Turning violent against his kin, he forces them to spend nights at their neighbour’s but always tries to lure them back home (Morgan, 294). The state apparatus reinforces this unhealthy situation of haunting persecution. Bill’s legal position in childcustody favours him over his part-Aboriginal wife, which effectively traps Gladys in her home. Her husband’s death in the early 1960s comes as a release, but the fear of child removal by the Native Welfare Department forces Gladys and Nan to hide their Aboriginal origins altogether. Ruled by fear and shame, they hide in their domesticity, even long after the politics of assimilation have been abolished (Morgan, 348). To Gladys, breaking the silence is a final release from this trap, a therapeutic catharsis based on finding a custodian for her traumatic embodied experience: “It hasn’t been an easy task, baring my soul. I’d rather have kept hidden things which have now seen the light of day. But like everything else in my life, I knew I had to do it. I find I’m embarrassed sometimes by what I have told, but I know I cannot retract what has been written, it’s no longer mine” (Morgan 305). Nan only shares her life’s experience after a terminal illness has been detected, but buries essentials: “Well, Sal, that’s all I’m gunna tell ya [...] I got my secrets, I’ll take them to the grave [...] They not for you or your



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mother to know” (Morgan 349). Nan’s story runs from 1901 to 1983, the year of her death, and focuses on the impact of child removal on herself and her children, and on her insertion into the Drake-Brockmans’ domestic economy. Fathered by the white patriarch, Talahue (Nan’s tribal name) was soon separated from her Aboriginal mother, and incorporated as Daisy into the group of ‘half-caste’ house Indigenes, who, being lighter and whiter, enjoyed higher status than ‘full-blood’ camp Indigenes. As a teenager the rupture with her Aboriginal kin is consummated when the Drake-Brockmans take her to Ivanhoe estate east of Perth and put her to work as a servant and nanny. In Sally and Nan’s conversations, the painand shameful question of incest that riddles Morgan’s origins is never answered: Nan ends up acknowledging that Alfred Howden DrakeBrockman, the white patriarch, is her own father, but refuses to reveal her daughter’s biological origins. Nevertheless, Nan’s insistence on keeping the incest secret acquires a further uncanny profile a decade after the publication of My Place. In 1999, Sally Morgan stated that her grandmother must have had at least six children, all fathered by Alfred Howden Drake-Brockman (Laurie), making interracial rape and incest structural in Nan’s life. This imposed sexual availability would explain why she alone of all the available servants was to accompany the Drake-Brockman family away from Corunna Downs. All Nan’s six children were removed according to the dictates of the official absorption and assimilation policies of the period, and so protected the Drake-Brockmans’ interest in obscuring this dark, destructive episode of family history on the margins of discrete divisions of race, class and gender; by the time of the interview, Sally’s mother was still haunted by this obscure past, attempting to uncover the lost family connections, while The Drake Brockmans were fighting their own battle to defuse the damning knowledge released by Sally’s investigations, denying any genetic admixture between both families and inviting the Milroys to a paternity test. The Milroys have not responded to this challenge, no doubt convinced that truth in Aboriginal society is established not by scientific evidence, but on the basis of word given, testimony to the strength of the oral tradition in Indigenous-Australian culture (Muecke, 1992). Arthur Corunna puts it succinctly when he reveals that Alfred Howden DrakeBrockman fathered him and Nan by Annie Padewani, the wife of a local Aboriginal chief. This knowledge is validated through the testimonial quality of custodianship in Indigenous narrative, which fixes truth where Western mechanisms of recording truth are blatantly and intentionally absent:



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Conclusion Thus, the skeleton that hides in the closets of Morgan’s family homestead is initially identifiable with the Indigenous grandmother but as we read on, increasingly with the white great/grandfather; it takes the search for an Aboriginal place of belonging and identity in Australia back to the original sin—‘Peccatum Ab Origene’—of the White Father, rather than the Black Mother of the family (cf. Ommundsen, 1993). There is, after all, a case for pride in Indigenous origins, and if we emphasise the criminal vein in Morgan’s novel, the shame and blame attached to “black velvet”—a derogatory term for interracial sexual intercourse in eugenic Australia— are relocated to the mainstream in a process in which the issue of Indigenous belonging becomes as much a conduit to expose the criminal behaviour of the empowered dominant group as a point of arrival, a place of personal belonging. In truth, what sweetens the bitter pill of family origins in interracial rape and incest is the knowledge that an Aboriginal heritage has been preserved, an Aboriginal identity has been found and recovered. It is this process of shifting into place, into belonging that Sally Morgan’s autobiography traces so beautifully. My Place starts out as a rather innocent and gullible journey into the Indigenous origins of an Australian family but soon turns into the investigation of a heinous crime repeatedly committed in the intersection of race, gender and class oppression. Marcia Langton underlines the ambiguous status of Morgan’s novel when she writes that My Place does not deal with revealing “the ‘Aboriginality’ of the family, but the origins of the family in incest” (1993, 117). One may assume that the past of the Stolen Generations and their families will always be riddled by vexed questions of authenticity as long as genetics must dictate the terms of belonging. In a similar vein, Wenche Ommundsen concludes that the lack of closure haunting the novel and its author’s identity has its roots in the sexual taboo of incest but also that this inconclusiveness signals Sally’s resistance to let the oedipal, patriarchal narrative determine her new-found identity: “real Australian readers of [My Place] are invited to search for



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their identities elsewhere: outside masterplots of European civilization, outside the sins of their white Australian fathers, outside, finally, the narrative structures which locate identity within the sexual vagaries of family history” (1993, 262–63.). At the end of the day, it is at least ironic that the Freudian hierarchy of civilisations, theorised on the sublimation of the incest wish and therefore enthroning Europe (Civilisation and its Discontent), is disproven in the very cultural context that Freud saw as the most “most backward and wretched” of all (Totem and Taboo:1).  The author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad for the writing of this article (Research Project: FFI2013-45101-P).

References Atkinson, Judy. 2002. Trauma Trails. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2007. Population Distribution, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Australian Government: Canberra. August 15.  http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/4705.0 Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 85-92. London: Routledge. Bird, Delys and Dennis Haskell. 1992. “Interview with Sally Morgan”. In Whose place? A Study of Sally Morgan’s My Place, edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell, 1-22. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Brett, Judith. 1987. “Breaking the Silence: A gift to the reader.” Review of My Place, by Sally Morgan. Australian Book Review, August. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. 1997. Bringing Them Home. Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth Government,  https://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-homereport-1997 Dally, Helen. “Sally Morgan: claims of fabrication.” ninemsn Pty (sunday.ninemsn.com.au 1997–2006).  https://web.archive.org/web/20090617062431/http://sgp1.paddington.n inemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/transcript_1507.asp Davison, Graeme, John Hirst, Stuart MacIntyre. 2001. “Convicts and the British colonies in Australia.” In The Oxford Companion to Australian



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History (Revised Edition), edited by Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart MacIntyre. Oxford University Press.  http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/convictsand-the-british-colonies Freud, Sigmund. 1961. “Civilisation and Its Discontents,” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, edited and translated by James Strachey, 59–145. (Das Unbehagen der Kultur, 1930, translated 1961.) London: Hogarth. —. 1998. Totem and Taboo, Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated by A.A.Brill (Totem und Tabu: Einige Übereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker, 1913, translated 1918.) New York: Dover Publications. Gare, Nene. 1987. “Review of My Place”. Review of My Place, by Sally Morgan. Westerly 3: 80-1. Grossman, Michèle. 2006. “When they write what we read: Unsettling Indigenous Australian lifewriting.” Australian Humanities Review 39-40 (September). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/IssueSeptember-2006/grossman.html. Haebich, Anna. 2001. Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000. Fremantle, WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Hanson, Pauline. 1996-2007. “Maiden Speech.” Paulinehanson.com. http://www.paulinehanson.com.au/pauline-maiden-speech.pdf. Hodge, Bob and Vijay Mishra. 1991 (1990). Dark Side of the Dream. Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. Sydney: Allen & Unwin,. Huggins, Jackie. 2003. “Always was always will be.” In Blacklines. Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians, edited by Michele Grossman, 60–5. Carlton, Melbourne: MUP.  Knight, Stephen. 1997. Continent of Mystery. A Thematic History of Australian Crime Fiction. Melbourne: MUP. Langton. Marcia. 1993. “Well, I heard it on the radio and I saw it on the television…” An essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things. North Sydney: Australian Film Commission,.  Laurie, Victoria. 1999. “An Interview with Sally Morgan.”  www.unionsverlag.com. 23 October.  http://www.unionsverlag.com/info/link.asp?link_id=6000&pers_id=91 &pic=../portrait/MorganSally.jpg&tit=Sally%20Morgan. Matzke, Christine and Susanne Muehleisen. 2006. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Edited



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by Christine Matzke and Susanne Muehleisen. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Moodie, Claire. 2010. “Aboriginal living conditions in WA have been described as shameful and Third World”. ABC News Online, March 10. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-03-10/third-world-livingconditions/357718. Morgan, Sally. 1988 (1987). My Place. London: Virago.  Moses, Dirk A. 2005 (2004). Genocide and Settler Society. Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History., edited by Dirk A. Moses. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. Muecke, Stephen. 1988. “Aboriginal Literature and the Repressive Hypothesis”. Southerly 4: 405–18. —. 1992. Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies. Kensington NSW: NSWUP. Ommundsen, Wenche. 1993. “Engendering the Bicentennial Reader: Sally Morgan, Mark Henshaw and the Critics.” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 36 (October): 251–63.  Reynolds, Henry. 2001. An Indelible Stain?: The Question of Genocide in Australia's History. Ringwood, Viking. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988 . “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana & Chicago: UIP. Stanner, W.E.H. 1991. “After the Dreaming.” In The Dreaming and Other Essays, introduced by Robert Manne, 172-224. Collingwood VIC: Black Inc. Agenda. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2003. “Of a ‘contested ground’ and an ‘indelible stain’: a difficult reconciliation between Australia and its Aboriginal history during the 1990s and 2000s.” Aboriginal History 27: 224–39.  Watson, Nicole. 2011. The Boundary. St Lucia: UQP. Wild, Rex; Julie Nicholson and Patricia Anderson. 2007. “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: ‘Little Children are sacred’. Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse.” Department of the Chief Minister Office of Indigenous Policy. Darwin: Northern Territory Government. April, 30. http://www.inquirysaac.nt.gov.au/. Windschuttle, Keith. 2002.The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1: Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847. Sydney: Macleay Press.  Wolfe, Patrick. 2000. “The Limits of Native Title,” Meanjin 59.3: 129–44.  Wright, Alexis. 1997. Plains of Promise. St Lucia: UQP.



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Appendix Letter to the Editor in the West Australian, published September 13, 2017: p.26, signed by 25 Curtin University academics including Hannah McGlade, Marion Kickett, Simon Forrest, Kim Scott, Suvendrini Perera, Anna Haebich, David Whish-Wilson, Thor Kerr, John Kinsella, Carol Dowling, Caroline Fleay, Lisa Hartley and Baden Offord. Responding to the wanton amnesia of Andrew Bolt who claimed recently that the Stolen Generations was untrue. The full text, as written by Hannah McGlade and Suvendrini Perera, runs as follows: “Failure to Acknowledge Ugly Truths of Colonisation.”

 “The recent Opinion piece by Andrew Bolt ‘Time for truth about history’ is a highly offensive piece of writing that seeks to deny the racially discriminatory history of Aboriginal dispossession and child removal. It is a vicious attack on Aboriginal people and an affront to the national commitment to Reconciliation and human rights. “The article was published by The West Australian on 31 August 2017 and was also published online by The Herald Sun prior to West publication. The Opinion of Andrew Bolt fails to acknowledge that Australia was colonised by the British without a Treaty with the Aboriginal people. This was not in accordance with the practice of international law as reflected in the Treaty arrangements entered into in New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Aboriginal people in Australia were simply dispossessed without any equitable arrangement and this wrongful usurpation of Aboriginal sovereignty and rights to land has had devastating consequences to this day. The High Court in the case of Mabo v The State of Queensland (1992) denounced the colonial acquisition perpetrated on the basis of a racist doctrine known as Terra Nullius as ‘the darkest aspect of the history of this nation’. The national Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in its ‘Bringing Them Home’ Inquiry (1997) examined Aboriginal child removal and concluded that the practice was racially discriminatory and genocidal in intent. “The publication does not acknowledge the HREOC Inquiry or the finding that the forcible removal of children from one cultural group to another amounted to genocide as defined and prohibited by international law.



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There was considerable evidence provided to the Inquiry by Aboriginal people who had been wrongfully removed from their families as to the profoundly traumatic and damaging consequences this had upon their lives. This evidence was subsequently confirmed by research in ‘The West Australian Child Health Survey’ conducted by the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research and involving a survey of 5,289 West Australian Indigenous children. “According to this research, of the children whose main carer had been forcibly separated from their family as part of the past discriminatory policies, 32.7 per cent, (nearly 1/3) were at high risk of clinically significant emotional or behavioural difficulties. By comparison, Aboriginal children looked after by carers who had not been forcibly separated from their natural family were 21.8 per cent at risk and nonAboriginal Western Australian children aged 4–17 years were found to be 15 per cent at high risk of clinically significant emotional or behavioural difficulties. “Andrew Bolt, The West Australian and Herald Sun newspapers have not provided a fair or balanced report on these issues. Key facts and evidence such as the HREOC Inquiry and the findings of the Inquiry concerning racial discrimination and genocide have been omitted and denied. Evidence concerning the impact of past practices of Aboriginal child removal is ignored because it does not support the shocking suggestion that Aboriginal children forcibly removed were ‘saved’ by government. Aboriginal children were not ‘saved’ in missions where they were subject to physical, emotional, psychological and sexual abuse. This Opinion flies in the face of the national apology offered in 2008 by the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who acknowledged that those past laws and practices ‘inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss’ on Indigenous Australians. “The Andrew Bolt publication and the claims made in the article are derogatory to Aboriginal people, a distortion of history and arguably a form of racial propaganda in contravention of the commitments Australia has made in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). We are concerned that this publication also undermines and places at risk the national process of reconciliation and Australia’s commitment to human rights.”



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Source: Centre of Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Western Australia. Sep 15, 2017. https://humanrights.curtin.edu.au/about/news/archive/2017-2/





A POETICS OF DISRUPTION: TRAUMATIZED WAR CHILDREN AND DEFECTIVE HUMAN RIGHTS IN A SHATTERING OF SILENCE  ISABEL ALONSO BRETO

Abstract. This chapter explores Farida Karodia’s novel A Shattering of Silence (2003), in which the use, manipulation and fate of children in time of war is critically analysed. The novel has a salient political agenda, linked to the pedagogical function of writing creatively about real world conflicts. Focussing on the Mozambican war of Independence, it offers a critique of armed conflict and of several derivations of this barbaric form of negotiating divergent views. It does so by deploying what has been defined as a poetics of disruption, in which poetics is at the service of politics and has the function of dislocating the binaries always lying at the heart of conflict, whose basic configuration is by principle antagonistic. In this particular reading, the protagonist’s individual experience is seen as representative of the universal plight of children in contexts of war. The analysis contends that the novel warns about a number of problematic issues, such as transnational child trafficking and, along with it, the inadequate configuration—and ineffectiveness—of the discourse on Human Rights in the world, especially in contexts of armed conflict. In this regard, the article unpacks the ways in which A Shattering of Silence produces a subtle yet effective criticism of the efficacy of the observant status of the United Nations.

Introduction This chapter critically explores Farida Karodia’s novel A Shattering of Silence (2003), in which the use, manipulation and fate of children in time of war is critically analysed. The novel has a salient political agenda, linked to the pedagogical function of writing creatively about real world conflicts. Set in the time of the Mozambican war of independence, waged



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between 1964 and 1975, it performs a solid critique of armed conflict and of several derivations of this barbaric form of negotiating divergent views. Like other novels set in times of conflict, A Shattering of Silence deploys what I choose to call a poetics of disruption in which poetics is embodied in both the character of Faith, the story’s protagonist, and the author of the novel herself, Farida Karodia, as they position themselves within the space between cultures and political options.  The poetics of disruption operates through tracing moments, events and performances where the elementary form of binary thinking, the ontological structure shaping any conflict or agon, is debased, deconstructed or problematized. Symbolically and metonymically, the philosophy underlying such poetics explores more convivial forms of cohabitation than those which, in the history of humankind, systematically result in armed conflict. This idea is encapsulated in the following quote by Homi Bhabha, where he summarizes the overall message of the essays compiled in The Location of Culture: Our notions of the uses or abuses of generality or universality are often based on some kind of binary thinking: theory/specificity, generality/ particularity, universality/historicity, conditionality/context. ... In The Location of Culture I've tried to get away from that model, to suggest that there may be ways of thinking about the general as a form of contingent conditionality, or as an “interstitial” articulation that both holds together and “comes between”— not only in the sense of being a space or mode of passage but in the colloquial sense of “coming between,” that is, meddling, interfering, interrupting, and interpolating: making possible and making trouble, both at once. There may be a way of thinking generality not in that binary and mimetic way but through the iterative. Perhaps the conditions of generality can be established through repetition and displacement, as Judith Butler too suggests in her fine work on the performative as social agency. (Mitchel 1995, n.p.n.)

Repetition and displacement are in different ways coterminous with the poetics of disruption, and, as both Bhabha and Butler have detailed in their writing, they are pregnant with political possibilities, since they are endemically tinted by difference. Besides the authorial location and characterization, discussed in Karodia’s earlier work, another remarkable way whereby the poetics of disruption is conveyed in A Shattering of Silence is the attention it pays to the fate of children in times of conflict. Like Faith’s inter-racial and crosspolitical position, which has led her to trauma, and Farida Karodia’s own, transnational and transcultural one, children can be seen to occupy in the novel a realm beyond antagonistic economies of conflict, displaying a po-



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etics of disruption, and can thus “meddl[e], interfer[e], interrupt…, and interpolat[e], making possible and making trouble, both at once”. Put this way, they are neutral territory in the economy of conflict, and thus incarnate the productive third space of enunciation which Bhabha has eloquently defined. The fact that they are not infrequently used as soldiers in wars orchestrated and sustained by adults and adult interests, represents an execrable perversion of the natural (a compromised expression which can yet be of use here) order of things. The expression “Children as Zones of Peace” was coined in 1983 to ensure and promote the right of children to live in peace. Endorsed by UNICEF, it empowered humanitarian organizations to deliver assistance to children in conflict, creating a peace zone within those areas for the supply of food or medical attention. Children were thus instrumentalized in the service of overcoming conflict, since “many came to believe that humanitarian spaces for children could be uniquely effective in depoliticizing a conflict environment and used as confidence-building measures that might set warring parties on a path to peace” (Kleinfeld 2009: 875), a practice which, unfortunately, has not always produced the desired results. In A Shattering of Silence, the trauma endured by the main character, who lost her parents violently in a deeply traumatic episode as a child, and then condemned to live in a state of war until adulthood, is a metonymy for those millions of children, from Africa and beyond, who are forced to undergo analogous war experiences. In what follows I discuss some implications of the novel’s concern with child abductions, a distressing reality which goes against elementary Human Rights. The latter part of my discussion will focus on the deficiencies of what has been termed Human Rights Discourse, which is arguably partial and insufficient to cater for the diversity of human experiences, particularly for the traumatized children prominently featured in the novel. This paper is a preliminary delineation of the novel’s thematic concerns (war children, collective trauma, deficiencies of Human Rights discourse in its present state and the implications of this fact), and as a means of understanding in what politically committed ways the text itself performs a poetics of disruption. My claim is that this novel walks a liminal terrain beyond antagonistic power economies and that, in writing it, Karodia uses motifs and strategies which intend to move forward in the direction of peace.



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Traumatized War Children In a recurrent pattern of diasporic writing, in A Shattering of Silence the narrative is triggered by Faith’s return to her homeland. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, “the story of the returning stranger seems very central to our time” (Ondaatje in Weich, n.p.n). In Anil’s Ghost the character of Anil returns to Sri Lanka without an obvious need to heal past trauma, something which, to my mind, raises a haunting question. If, according to Maryse Jayasuriya, “Ondaatje’s characterization of Anil makes the important point that not all diasporics are yearning for their homeland” (Jayasuriya 211: 139), what prompts Anil to choose Sri Lanka as a destination, if it is neither nostalgia nor, as I claim here, the necessity to heal from trauma? In the case of Faith her return and subsequent narration accomplish a fulfilling function, completing and providing closure to a healing process which had started before, when after going into exile Faith underwent psychological treatment and started filling notebooks with her recollections. Piotr H. Kosicki suggests that the overcoming of trauma undergoes several stages. Although his reflections relate to collective trauma, they are useful to understand how unfolding her narrative means the completion of the recovery process for Faith. Hosicki cites four sites of memory that lead to recovery: the traumatic moment itself, testimony, post-traumatic culture, and reappraisal (qted. In Singh 2010: 22). Following these stages, once in London, Faith begins to recover the ability to speak after undergoing several surgical interventions, as her vocal cords had atrophied after years of silence. At the same time she receives psychological treatment and begins to fill her notebooks. This period in her life corresponds to the stage of testimony. For Hosicki, “testimony may open floodgates of post-traumatic culture even as testimony continues for years” (Hosicki qted. in Singh 2010: 22). This is precisely what happens to Faith, as her healing process only begins in London, and continues through the years, both there and in other parts of the world she visits, in her role as public activist denouncing the war victimization of children. Thus, for decades Faith lives in a state of “post-traumatic culture”. But her healing process needs to be completed through a full process of on-site remembrance, which only begins once she sets foot on Mozambican soil again after so many years. Her arrival initiates the last stage in her path to recovery; that of reappraisal, which becomes the narrative text we are here engaged with. Faith’s return to Mozambique after several decades is triggered by an event which provides an important key to the novel. She decides to return



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when she reads in a newspaper about the death of a woman named Lodiya Chidekunde, who was killed assisting Rwandan refugees across the Tanzanian border. This news arouses Faith’s desire to go back; why is this so? The last time she had seen the woman who has now died, Faith must have been seven years old at most; however, Lodiya has remained a crucial absence in her life. A few years older than her, Lodiya saved Faith’s life by taking her away to the forest, that fateful day when her parents were murdered along with the rest of the inhabitants of the compound where they served as missionaries. Lodiya lost all her family members as well. The only survivors of this massacre were the two girls, and they decided to seek refuge at the nearby São Lucas Catholic mission. Unfortunately for Faith, after a few months Lodiya chose to abandon the mission, leaving Faith – still a small girl – in a vacuum regarding her own past. Father Fernando, in charge of the mission, chose to erase the girls’ family records to prevent the possibility of the murderers tracing and killing them as witnesses to their atrocities. For its part, as a mechanism of self-protection, Faith’s memory completely erased the traces of her past, both of the massacre and of the life she had led up to that day, including her parents. That Lodiya and Faith were children when they became victims of war atrocities is crucial, since denouncing the exploitation and victimization of children, especially in times of war, is a core concern for the novel and an integral part of the poetics of disruption which, as I am arguing, it develops. Annette Horn points out that the main focus of A Shattering of Silence is the recovery of Faith's memory and voice through writing (Horn 1994:5). In a similar vein, Govinden (2008) claims that the central value of the narrative is Faith’s achievement of a sense of identity. These ideas make a lot of sense considering the overarching narrative structure that we have reviewed. Reading the text from an eminently individual perspective embodies a liberal approach in tune with a plot strongly focused on a single character and, furthermore, narrated in the first person singular. However, A Shattering of Silence needs to be assessed also as a collective event, since the novel vigorously condemns war at numerous levels, engages with a sense of human community and commonality and condemns the suffering of children in particular.  In times of war, children are particularly prone to loss: family, relatives, friends, shelter, and other basic needs such as health or access to education (Machel 1996). They often have to endure situations of extreme danger, including abduction and slavery (Miers 2000: 730-733). I would therefore like to re-direct the exegesis of the novel towards a sense of human community, not discarding readings which focus exclusively on



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Faith’s ordeal yet aiming to complement them. My claim is that Faith’s story is purposely presented by the authorial voice as paradigmatic of the experience of thousands of children, and thus as representative of a collective rather than individual experience. It can be argued that the individual has remained central in the scope of contemporary science, even in social sciences. Against this, remarkably, a call for a shift of attention from the individual towards communal aspects is currently felt in various areas. This would be the case with modern psychology and psychiatry, for instance, which has always “had a western medical illness model perspective that is primarily individualistic in orientation” (Somasundaram and Sivayokan 2013: 3). Without fully dismissing the important work done so far on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from an individual perspective, Somasundaram and Sivayokan claim that “PTSD is a recent western construct that does not apply in nonwestern societies” (2013: 3). For them, there is an urgent need to reconceptualize this pathology in order to apply it successfully to societies which escape the individualistic, liberal-minded cultural imperatives of the Global North, places which Boaventura de Souza Santos has baptised as “the territories of being” (Grosfoguel 2008). In societies which do not necessarily comply with the straitjacketing demands of modernity, and to quote Somasundaram and Sivayokan again, “we need to go beyond the individual to the family, group, village, community and social levels if we are to more fully understand what is going on in the individual” (2013: 15).  This concern for the social in the study of trauma is also felt with regard to dispossessed or maligned communities such as the Native American. In these groups, it has been argued that “forming a coherent narrative of trauma experiences requires that the individual take the experiences of others into account. Individual transformation cannot occur simply through the active gathering of memories; rather, the most important process is to shape and subsequently articulate the narrative within a specific social context” (Denham 2008: 395-396). Again, there is emphasis on the idea that individual trauma cannot be understood without reference to community and social and societal values. This connection between the singular and the plural, the subtle balance between personal and collective grievances, is deeply at stake in A Shattering of Silence. Therefore, limiting the novel’s relevance to underlining the recovery of Faith from PTSD puts paid to Karodia’s deep concern for the fate of millions of aggrieved war children. Faith’s childhood experience is played out as paradigmatic for all children who have lost their families to war. She experiences a deep sense



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of disorientation and loneliness in the mission, the orphanage and the convent, successively, and with the only exception of her forbidden friendship with Sister Angelique, these spaces are perceived as lacking in any material comfort and as emotionally bleak and barren of affection. The only oasis of well-being for the girl comes about during her stay with Mama Ria and her little family of orphan girls. However, this is a brief interval soon interrupted by the generous woman’s death. Except for this period, Faith is deeply unhappy through her childhood, even when she is occasionally treated with a certain deference because of her whiteness. Later on, the adult Faith’s heartfelt connection with children who are war victims emphasizes their centrality to the narrative. Indeed, when she begins working with damaged children at the hospital, she feels a sense of achievement because she envisages the possibility of helping them somehow: At last I was beginning to see more of the children who had been injured by shrapnel from exploding mines, and children who, like me, had lost their ability to speak because of traumatic experiences. Some had witnessed their parents or siblings being killed, or even been forced to participate in the atrocities. For these children, too, there was little help, except in coping with their day-to-day existence. (81)

Not long afterwards, Faith becomes deeply concerned about the systematic disappearance of children in Maputo, to the extent that she eventually undertakes a risky investigation into this issue. This research will lead her to a close relationship with the anti-colonial guerrilla forces, to witness a murder, and to seriously endanger her own life. She will end up discovering that, adding to the tragic effects of the anti-colonial struggle, hundreds of children are being kidnapped and smuggled away to foreign countries where they are sold as slaves. Ironically, her concern for the children is not the direct reason for her forced exile. Rather, this will be the necessary consequence of her involvement with the rebel forces in the form of covering up for her friend Rita, one of her best friends, who is involved with the liberation group FRELIMO. With regard to the politics of disruption and its emphasis on liminality, the abduction and smuggling of children shows again that children stand in a no-man’s-land with regard to the Mozambican conflict, embodying a symbolic absence from within its agonistic, conflict-ridden economy, yet suffering its worst consequences. This is a conspicuous absence, which significantly is not a withdrawal because they were innocent in the first place, and which is directly connected to their absolute lack of responsibility or guilt with regard to war and conflict. Via her rebel



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contacts, Faith will eventually manage to obtain photographs of this inhuman slave trade, images which mean the possibility of reporting the situation presenting material evidence at international forums such as the United Nations. In fear of the inquisitorial PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) after helping her wounded friend Rita, Faith is forced to leave her country for good. Later on, she devotes her life in exile to voicing the children’s plight in the form of abductions, enslavement, and general brutalization. Again, the text pivots between Faith’s and the collective trauma of the children, the first acting as a way of introducing the second. 

Defective Human Rights The close-knit correspondence between the main character and the collective of traumatized children is made clear in Faith’s account of how she presented her case before a United Nations commission: After the introductions I was welcomed to the podium with an enthusiastic round of applause. Through the interpreter I described my own circumstances but concentrated on events in Mozambique. I spoke especially about the spiralling escalation of killing and particularly the effects of landmines on the locals and the children. Especially important was making them understand the plight of the children. (276)

At this point, and in general throughout the novel, a strategic mise en abyme shows the same thing happening at the intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels: Faith with her speech and Karodia with her novel are fighting for the same cause in defence of war children. Faith does so by presenting her case before the United Nations and, subsequently, as she explains, through her writing and public speaking, in the media and other forums. Karodia does so through writing the novel. In very similar ways, both women, real and fictional, take up the banner of Human Rights. The rights of children have been the subject of specific international concern and have been on the United Nations’ agenda since as early as the Geneva Conventions in 1949. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was issued in 1989, and it is noteworthy that the most influential report on children in time of war was produced, perhaps coincidentally, shortly after the publication of A Shattering of Silence in 1993. Commissioned in 1994 and sanctioned by UNICEF in 1996, the report Impact of Armed Conflict on Children was authored by Graça Machel, who, coincidentally, was the first First Lady of independent Mozambique. This report has been



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instrumental in the increasing efforts to place war-affected children on the UN Security Council’s agenda (Kleinfeld 2009: 878). Although A Shattering of Silence shows deep concern for the fate of war children and, more generally, for Human Rights, some qualification is needed here as, interestingly, also in the area of Human Rights Studies we find discussions which evince the turn from an individualistic to a more collective and culturally aware type of approach. In “Will the Un-Truth Set You Free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost”, Teresa Derrickson makes the convincing case that Ondaatje’s novel severely criticises the United Nations-sponsored discourse of Human Rights. She argues that Anil’s mission to discover ‘the truth’ about the conflict conflates with the complexity of the conflict itself. In the Sri Lankan context, ‘truth’ is not a word that holds a unitary meaning, as the other characters, Sri Lankabased Sarath, Gamini and Palipana, strive to convince Anil of to no avail. In the same vein, Derrickson reminds us of the inappropriateness of applying a Western-ideated notion of Human Rights, eminently individualistic, to situations where individualism is not a leading social force, and where the well-being of the majority is seen as a priority over the rights of the individual. For Derrickson, “identifying an appropriate course of action, like identifying the meaning of ‘truth’ and ‘justice’, is at least partially dependent on context and culture” (Derrickson 2004: 148). And she claims, insisting that cultural difference is at play even when it is not immediately evident, that “while the codes of conduct promoted by the West may not be at odds with codes of conduct supported by other cultures, the underlying philosophies of such codes are inherently different, and in a way that matters” (Derrickson 2004: 133).  Bhikhu Parekh also engages in a detailed discussion of why Human Rights cannot be understood as a universal frame insomuch as they fail to cater for cultural diversity, providing straightforward examples of their non-viability in certain compromised cases. Parekh emphatically underscores the strength of community imperatives (as different from community values) which are strongly held at societal and political levels in many Asian cultures (2006: 136-141). Both scholars, Derrickson and Parekh, thus conclude that the sense of community and of the collective which is preponderant in many non-Western cultures is neglected by the current discourse of Human Rights (HRD). These considerations insist on the need for Human Rights Studies to widen its focus beyond individual and more towards communal experience. Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, also being aware of the shortcomings of Human Rights Discourse and the need to incorporate



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alternative visions into the directives of global human guardianship, struggles to find ways of incorporating what he calls “political theologies” into HRD. De Sousa Santos ponders the convenience of taking into account imperatives of certain contemporary ethical discourses, religious but not necessarily dogmatic, which are valuable for many cultural groups yet perhaps circumvent crucial aspects of HRD. He does so in an article entitled, not without humour, “If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies. Is Humanity Enough?” Again, De Sousa Santos’s work testifies to the need for finding ways of incorporating alternative discourses into the common parlance of HRD, although, as he concludes, what exactly should be incorporated is not easy to decide. Among the main problems of HRD, then, is the lack of attention to cultural and ethical specificities, and the fact that it neglects the crucial reality that human beings are social beings, and that therefore the wellbeing of many should be seen as prevailing over the individual. These drawbacks are connected to the genealogy of this discourse, since these principles have the biased origin of having been issued by the United Nations which is, in the main, informed by Western cultural values. But the discussion on the universal validity of HRD becomes more problematic if, adding to these, we consider one further aspect: in quite recent times, as Teresa Derrickson explains, “Annan’s admission that the United Nations has entered a strategic partnership with the world’s business community—a business community governed by Western capitalism—signals a key alliance between the high custodian of global Human Rights and the Western world” (Derrickson 2001: 150). In consequence, aware of the awkward partnership between the main sponsor of HRD and blatant capitalism, it is imperative that we become more critical than ever of bland allusions to the discourse of Human Rights as it currently circulates. A Shattering of Silence subtly participates in this criticism of HRD. As mentioned, in exile Faith has an opportunity to speak before a committee of the United Nations. She rejoices in the occasion, as it means the possibility of bringing solace to those thousands of Mozambican children damaged by war and who are, worse still, stolen from their families and sold into slavery. She accounts for her experience on that occasion as follows: My entire story unfolded, and I had a very sympathetic audience. The kidnappings and illegal trade in children seemed to capture their interest, but there were other issues too, issues of the brutality of the war and the minefields.



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From our discussions it seemed that ending the war was a much more complex objective, one that a mere group of individuals would be powerless to achieve. But the kidnapping of the children was something more tangible, something they could act on; hence their interest in the matter. For two days the story was featured on the front pages of some of the most prestigious newspapers in the US. Then, of course, events elsewhere supplanted interest in our story. (277)

Although Faith’s compliant argument at this point is that ending the war must have appeared as a too ambitious objective, some pages later she reminds the reader that in the long Mozambique War of liberation, the government colonialist forces received human and material support from South Africa, Rhodesia and, importantly, the United States, “countries that supplied the military forces with equipment, counter-insurgency support and training” (279). And then the war “became a David and Goliath story. The military attacked the rebels with their mighty force of helicopters, bombs and jet fighters, as well as napalm and chemical defoliants, the use of which had become an international issue in the Vietnam war” (279). The suggestion seems to be that the United Nations could not intervene in a war where the US had such a clear investment. The fact that the news was featured on the main newspapers’ front page for just two days before vanishing from sight may also be read as a comment on the lack of response to the information and evidence provided by Faith at the UN. Furthermore, a few pages later we are told that after several months there was no progress at all on either child kidnapping or slavery, an issue which had initially elicited greater concern at the UN than war itself. Karodia’s criticism is directed at the United Nations, which is not necessarily the same as HRD. However, both institutions are so closely related that it seems difficult, as of today, to think of them separately. Regarding the pervasive influence of “the world’s business community” that Derrickson reveals as being in partnership with UN, in the text there is also comment about the transnational capitalist investments in African countries. Namely, through Faith’s reflections it condemns the fact that they “had allowed their resources to be plundered by large foreign multinational companies and leaders hungry for wealth and power” (281), while Faith immediately fears that Black Mozambicans will not “benefit from the lure of investment” (íd.). Shortly after the novel’s opening, on the plane which takes her back to Mozambique, Faith meets a young woman named Sue who is going to work for an aid agency in Maputo. Faith realises that Sue does not know much about the history



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and cultural reality of the country, and takes on the responsibility of becoming the “native informant” (Spivak 1999) for her: I told her as much as I could in the time we had together on the flight, explaining that in Africa issues are rarely simple and frequently open to misinterpretation; that too often understanding by Western governments of the complicated issues that simmer on this continent is fairly narrow. I reminded her that concepts about Africa are based on Western standards and limited to the Western experience of social, cultural and political structures, which often have little bearing on the reality of life for the people here. (ix)

This is precisely the kind of criticism labelled at HRD from many perspectives, claiming that it fails to take into account locations, in other words, it leaves out the situatedness of Human Rights themselves. All in all, we can conclude that a firm if mildly formulated criticism of international politics and of a narrowly Western understanding of the necessity to protect Human Rights worldwide runs through the novel. Of course, Human Rights discourse should not be simply discarded (O’Byrne 2012), but rather it should be revised and perfected so that it caters for the maximum diversity of human experience. In his excursus about the possibilities of incorporating otherness into HRD mentioned before, De Sousa Santos concludes that “It has never been so important not to squander ideas and practices of resistance. …only by recognising the current fragilities of human rights is it possible to construct, out of them, but also beyond them, strong ideas and practices of resistance” (Santos 2009: 17). This idea coincides with the politics of A Shattering of Silence, which chooses to occupy a conciliatory position condemning war barbarism and, through Faith’s healing and the rescue of a shipload of abducted children, a huge investment in hope. As argued above, then, A Shattering of Silence tackles the relevant issues of individual and collective trauma and shows concern for collective trouble while becoming an instrument of political activism. In this connection, it is important to interrogate, from a perspective of cultural diversity, valuable ethical models such as the discourse of Human Rights, which are still taken for granted regardless of their monological cultural origin. De Souza Santos insists on the convenience of making the most of the work done so far in the area of HRD, as well as in other disciplines, while envisaging ever more liveable societies for all: We live in a time in which the most appalling social injustices and unjust human sufferings no longer seem to generate the moral indignation and the political will to combat them effectively and create a more just and fair



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society. Under such circumstances, it seems evident to me that we cannot afford to waste any genuine social experience that we might resort to in order to strengthen the organisation and the determination of all those who have not given up the struggle for a better society, and specifically those that have done so under the banner of Human Rights. Not to waste social experience means also to recycle and transform it in light of the objectives at hand. (Santos 2009: 29-30).

Conclusions The poetics of disruption is at the service of politics. Its function is dislocating the binaries always lying at the heart of conflict, whose basic configuration is by principle antagonistic, and opening up new spaces of possibility, ontological as well as political, away from it. Against other approaches to A Shattering of Silence which focus on the protagonist’s individual process of healing, the choice here is to read this work as a statement on collective identities, where Faith’s individual experience is seen as representative of the sadly universal plight of children in contexts of war. A Shattering of Silence also expresses a concerned warning about the tragic fact of transnational child trafficking, and again the message seems to be that international efforts addressed at redressing this scourge are insufficient. Reading this work as an effective critique of the dire state of children’s and Human Rights in the world, especially in contexts of armed conflict, this chapter has traced ways in which the novel produces a subtle yet effective criticism of the efficacy of the United Nations and their associated Human Rights discourse. In short, the focus on children as innocent victims of conflicts where they stand outside the binary economy of conflict reads as a strategy of the poetics of disruption. Besides this, the novel propounds an energetic critique of Human Rights as they are conceived at present, that is, biased by inappropriate (read defective) Western-based and Western-oriented epistemologies. This analysis, which has the purpose of locating thematic clusters to facilitate future discussions of this novel and of others set in times of conflict, reinforces such a critique. Reading A Shattering of Silence through a poetics of disruption raises awareness of the profound necessity that we cast aside recourse to weapons as a means of solving conflicts, and that we rehearse alternative methods to settling differences. If nothing else, for the sake of the children who end up being the most innocent victims of wars.



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This paper benefitted from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (MICINN) funding, Ref. FFI2015-63739-P.

References Denham, Aaron R. 2008. “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45.3: 391-414. Derrickson, Teresa. 2004. “Will the ‘Un-Truth set you free? A Critical Look at Global Human Rights Discourse in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Literature Interpretation Theory 15: 131-152. Govinden, Devarakhsaram. 2008. Sister Outsiders: The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected Writings by South African Indian Women. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2008. “Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial studies: Transmodernity, border thinking, and global coloniality.” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 80.  http://www.humandee.org/spip.php?article111. Horn, Annette. 1994. “Writing as Therapy.” Southern African Review of Books. 33:5-7. Jayasuriya, Maryse. 2012. Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature 1983-2009. Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books. Farida Karodia. 2003 (1993). A Shattering of Silence. London: Heinemann. Kleinfeld, Margo. 2009. “The Political Utility of the Nonpolitical Child in Sri Lanka’s Armed Conflict.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 99, 5: 874–883. Machel, Graça. 1987. Promotion and protection of the rights of children: Impact of armed conflict on children. UNICEF.  http://www.unicef.org/graca/a51-306_en.pdf.  Miers, Suzanne. 2000. “Contemporary Forms of Slavery”. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines. 34 (3):714-747. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1995. “Translator Translated (Interview with Cultural Theorist Homi Bhabha).” Artforum. 33 (7):80-84.  https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bhabha/interview.html. Access 01 September 2017. O’Byrne, Darren. 2012. “Re-imagining the Theory of Human Rights.” The International Journal of Human Rights. 16 (7): 1078-1093. Ondaatje, Michael. 2000. Anil’s Ghost. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Parekh, Bhikhu. 2006. Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



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Santos, Bonaventura de Sousa. 2009. “If God Were a Human Rights Activist: Human Rights and the Challenge of Political Theologies Is Humanity Enough? The Secular Theology of Human Rights.” Law, Social Justice & Global Development Journal 1.  http://www.go.warwick.ac.uk/elj/lgd/2009_1/santos  Singh, Jaspal Kaur. 2010. “South Asian Diaspora in Africa: Collective and Individual memory in Fatima Meer’s and Sita Gandhi’s texts.” In Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing, edited by Singh, Jaspal K. and Rajendra Chetty. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 11-26. Somasundaram, Daya and Sambasivamoorthy Sivayokan. 2013. “Rebuilding Community Resilience in a Post-War Context: Developing Insight and Recommendations—a Qualitative study in Northern Sri Lanka.” International Journal of Mental Health Systems 7:3. Spivak, Gayatri Chrakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the Vanishing Present. London and Cambridge, Massachussets: Harvard University Press. Weich, Dave. “Michael Ondaatje’s Cubist Civil War.”  http://www.powells.com/blog/interviews/michael-ondaatjes-cubistcivil-war-by-dave/.





THE FAMILY AND PERFORMATIVITY IN VIKRAM CHANDRA’S SACRED GAMES BILL PHILLIPS AND HARITHA CHALIL SAVITHRI

Abstract. In his novel Sacred Games Vikram Chandra interweaves Hindu concepts of family and performativity together with the chronicling of late twentieth century Mumbai, India’s conflict with Pakistan during and after Partition, and the desirability, or not, of fulfilling one’s religious duty. Using crime fiction as the genre in which to set his exploration of manhood, religious observance and duty, Chandra pits an up-and-coming gangster against an honourable Sikh police inspector in a race to discover the whereabouts of a nuclear bomb set to destroy Mumbai and precipitate Armageddon. The gangster, Ganesh Gaitonde, must decide where his loyalties lie: to the pitiless gods in the shape of his guru, or to his deeplyflawed mob family, his fellow citizens and humanity as a whole. The novel is a condemnation of the hold religion has over people, families, governments and countries; their humanity sacrificed to the callous games played by the gods for millennia. “Where could you find the marriage plot, nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels. Indian novels. You had to go, literally speaking, back in time” (Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot. 2011. p.22).  “Someone, I think it was Jeffrey Eugenidies, has claimed that the family novel today is only possible in the non-West, and I think there is a profound insight here” (Frederic Jameson. London Review of Books, 15 June 2017. p.21).

Introduction The idea of family—usually, though not necessarily, related by blood— permeates Hindu thought and scriptures. The individual’s duty to family,



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and the even greater duty to renounce it when required by God and the pursuit of spiritual advancement, symbolize a paradox inherent to many religions. The family is flesh; it is corporeal; it is dust. But without it, human life—together with the worship of and obedience to the gods— could not continue: [d]espite the immense emphasis that Hinduism puts on the efficacy of ascetic practices, on self-restraint, and the control of the senses, it does not advocate celibacy, for a man’s first duty is to raise up sons for himself, and the state of the householder is therefore considered to be the ‘root’ of all the other aĞramas or states of life (Zahner, 113).

This chapter will show how Vikram Chandra interweaves Hindu concepts of family and performativity in his novel, Sacred Games, together with the chronicling of late twentieth century Mumbai, India’s conflict with Pakistan after Partition, and the desirability, or not, of fulfilling one’s religious duty. Sacred Games, published by Faber and Faber in 2006 is a crime novel of some 900 pages, set largely in Mumbai, and which revolves around the activities of crime boss Ganesh Gaitonde and police inspector Sartaj Singh. In it, as is typical of the contemporary crime novel, issues of injustice, poverty, corruption and violence are presented to the reader, who is led on a journey of discovery through the darker regions of contemporary Mumbai. Chandra has been careful to maintain a number of aspects traditional to crime fiction in his novel. These include not only the city as character—in this case Mumbai—but also the duel between the two protagonists, Ganesh Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh, who build up a rapport, along with the suggestion that they may not be so different: “You were moved by me. Our lives had crossed” (SG 858), claims Ganesh, towards the end of the novel, minutes before ending his life. Ganesh the Mumbai mob boss, pitted against Sartaj Singh, the only Sikh inspector in the Mumbai police force, make an attractive pair—the former seduced by the sex and glamour of Bollywood, the latter clinging precariously to his sense of duty and honour as a policeman. Both, of course, are concerned with a sense of their own inadequate masculinity, as sons, lovers, husbands, fathers and potential patriarchs. Both are assisted by sidekicks, competent and incompetent, loyal and treacherous. Combine this with an action-filled plot beginning with Ganesh’s rise to power and ending with the desperate hunt for a weapon of mass destruction, and Sacred Games becomes one of the great Indian classics of the genre along with Satyajit Ray’s Feluda, and Surender Mohan Pathak’s Sunil series. 



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Sacred Games and the Bhagavad Gita  The novel, however, is far more than a tale of cops and robbers. It is also a dissection of crimes committed by God, and perhaps, against God, in the universal drama of life. Vikram Chandra, in a number of interviews, has discussed the significance of performance and play in his work. As long ago as 2003, halfway through the seven years he took to write the novel, he suggested that this was “what Arjuna and Krishna discuss in the Gita, this idea of performativity, that we as human beings are part of this much larger play, this lila, and our job in a sense is to fulfil and engage in the parts that we are given to perform” (Alexandru 2003, 15). In 2008, in another interview, given two years after the publication of Sacred Games he argued that  [i]n order to translate this concept of lila successfully, you have to convey that the entire universe amounts to the Lord's play. There’s the further idea that everything around us is also somewhat theatrical, and the reason for the theatre is pleasure. But if we are all really participating in a kind of theatricality, if the universe is indeed the Lord’s play, then it follows that there’s a discernible structure to the world (Chambers 45).

Hence Sacred Games. A command performance in which everyone must play their part, or suffer the consequences. These concepts, of performance and duty, as indicated by Chandra’s reference to the Bhagavad Gita, are to be found in the Mahabharata, the world’s longest epic poem and one of the principal scriptures of Hinduism. Written in Sanskrit, and comprising eighteen books, the Gita is part of the sixth book, Bhishma Parva. Describing events from the eighth or ninth centuries BCE, the Mahabharata is in large part the narrative of two families at war, the Kauravas and the PƗ৆ঌavas, whose actions provide opportunity for moral teaching and instruction through multiple narratives. Much of this moral instruction relates closely to the individual’s duty to both God and to the family and, when these duties conflict, to offer obedience to God before all else. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna confesses to Krishna his reluctance to enter into combat with men to whom he is related by family ties and blood:

 For, Krishna, were we to lay low our own folk, how could we be happy? And even if, bereft of sense by greed, they cannot see that to ruin a family is wickedness and to break one’s word a crime, how should we not be wise enough to shun this evil thing, for we clearly see that to ruin a family is wickedness. Once the family is ruined, the primeval family laws collapse.



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Once law is destroyed, then lawlessness overwhelms all [that is known as] family. With lawlessness triumphant, Krishna, the family’s women are debauched, there will be a mixing of caste. The mixing of caste leads to hell – [the hell prepared] for those who wreck the family and for the family [so wrecked]. So too their ancestors fall down [to hell], cheated of their offerings of food and drink. These evil ways of men who wreck the family, [these evil ways] that cause the mixing of caste, [these evil ways] bring caste-law to naught and the eternal family laws. A sure abode in hell there is for men who bring to naught the family laws: so, Krishna, have we heard. Ah! Ah! So are we [really] bent on committing a monstrous evil deed? Intent as we are on slaughtering our own folk because we lust for the sweets of sovereignty (Bhagavad Gita, 47).

Krishna’s reply takes up the rest of the Bhagavad Gita, dwelling, among other things, on the nature of caste, transcendence, sacrifice, worship and God. The ultimate message, though, is of obedience. The gods have decided that a war shall be fought, and it is Arjuna’s duty to participate. No other consideration weighs more heavily than unforced obedience to the divine will. Krishna concludes his arguments by demanding Arjuna’s obeisance “[b]ear Me in mind, love Me and worship Me, sacrifice, prostrate yourself to me: so will you come to Me, I promise you truly, for you are dear to Me. Give up all things of the law, turn to Me, your only refuge, [for] I will deliver you from all evils; have no care” (Bhagavad Gita, 108). Sacred Games, like the Mahabharata, is also a narrative of families at war—some of them crime families—and, not surprisingly given Chandra’s comments about lila, it also contains many references and parallels to the Mahabharata itself, including a modernized, adapted performance of the Bhagavad Gita. 

AĞrama and the Family Chandra also makes use of the Hindu idea of aĞrama, or stage of life. There are four: brahmacƗrya, “an initiation into a new spiritual life, entailing a rigorous discipline for a prescribed period, during which he was required to live as a student in the house of his teacher (guru)” (Stutley, 49); grhasthya, “the stage of the married householder, including procreation, performance of prescribed daily sacrifices, and the responsibility of living in a community” (Stutley, 49); vƗnaprastha, “the stage when the householder gives up his duties and retires to the forest to practice meditation […] preparatory to the complete renunciation of all worldly goods” (Stutley, 49) and samnyƗsa, or renunciation, “when all possessions are given up except for a loin-cloth, water-pot and begging bowl. He must subsist on the food given him on his begging round, and he



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is free from all wordly duties, obligations and observances, and by deep meditation he acquires a calm tranquil spirit” (Stutley, 49). In Sacred Games, Ganesh’s early career as a criminal coincides with brahmacƗrya, and is quickly narrated. His “guru” is Salim Kaka, a smuggler and thief who teaches the nineteen-year-old Ganesh the tricks of their trade. Once trained, Ganesh kills Kaka, and sets about establishing his own gang. The next stage, grhasthya, is the most significant for Ganesh, since his ambition is to become a crime boss, with his own family, territory and reputation—in short, a mafia godfather. This is achieved, though at great cost, and then lost once he reaches the third stage, vƗnaprastha. Chandra is clearly playing, ironically, with the concept of aĞrama: presumably one does not kill one’s guru once his teaching has been imparted. Nor is grhasthya achieved through murder, torture, bribery and extortion, yet this would seem to be Ganesh’s destiny in the divinely orchestrated performance of life.  As Ganesh himself explains, his household is a shanty town built on a wasteland of weeds and bushes—it was municipal land. The government owned it, and so nobody owned it. I took it. You know how it’s done, Sartaj. It’s easy. You pay off three chutiyas in the municipality, oil them up properly and then you kill the local dada who thinks he deserves a percentage on your action (SG 107).

Ganesh and his sidekick Chotta Badriya kill the “local dada,” Anil Kurup, with an icepick in the eye, buried to the hilt (a classic murder weapon in prohibition era American pulp fiction1) and thereafter reign supreme in the newly-built village of Gopalmath: “I didn’t skimp on the materials or the building itself, we made sturdy, spacious and very pucca kholis, laid them out according to plan. You could tell by looking at them, by feeling the solid brick and plaster that these were homes that would last, that these lanes would remain unflooded even during the heaviest of monsoons” (SG 111). Gopalmath is a success, with Ganesh supplying “jobs, and justice, and blessings […] and water, and electricity over wires pulled from the lines near the main road” (SG 112), he settles down with his gang, and consolidates his position by providing the muscle for Bipin Bhonsle, a local Hindu politician, seeking election. Soon, too, he is persuaded to marry by his influential friend Paritosh Shah, who makes reference to the

 1

One of the best-known examples is in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest where the novel’s protagonist, the Continental Op, wakes up to find himself holding the handle of an ice pick buried in a dead woman’s breast (Hammett, 147). Ice picks were short, sharp spikes used to chip ice away from solid blocks for use in drinks.



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good Hindu’s respect for life’s ordained aĞrama: “All the scriptures say a life has its stages. First you are a student, then you are a householder. But you, you live like you’ve given up the world already … You need a woman, she will make a home for you” (SG 263). Ganesh is sceptical. Perhaps because, as we later learn, his first experience of family life had scarred him. His father, an ineffectual and impoverished priest, briefly emerges from his humiliation to murder his benefactor and then flees, gone forever. His mother is forced into prostitution until this humiliation, in turn, drives Kiran, as he was then called, at the age of twelve, to run away to Bombay where he becomes, on a spur of the moment decision, Ganesh (SG 601-604). Not long after advising marriage, Paritosh Shah dies in an attack by a rival gang and Ganesh decides, on another spur of the moment decision, to marry Subhadra Devalkar, the virtuous daughter of a bus conductor. It was what Paritosh Shah would have wanted, he argues, but his late friend’s confidence in the happy state of wedlock proves unfounded as Ganesh confesses that “I was impotent every day and every night of my honeymoon” (SG 380), a state of affairs which continues as rioting erupts across India caused by the demolition of the Babri Masjid Mosque by Hindu militants in Uttar Pradesh. Chandra’s irony—if that is what it is—is artful. With echoes of Daniel Dravot’s prescient claim, in Kipling’s short story “The Man Who Would Be King,” that “I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!” (Kipling 134) we have only Ganesh’s word for it that Gopalmath is an ideal village ruled with a strict but fair hand—the village’s water and electricity, remember, are stolen from the grid, and his rulings are enforced by his boys “with force if necessary” (SG 111). His best friend, Paritosh Shah, dies, shot by his enemies, leading him to marry the lowly bus conductor’s daughter—hardly compatible with his purported status as Mumbai mafia don—and with whom he is incapable of consummating the marriage The demolition of the Babri Masjid Mosque, a real event, which occurred in 1992 (and thus precisely pinpointing the novel’s chronology), is the catalyst, precipitating Ganesh’s transition to the next aĞrama, vƗnaprastha: On December 6, 1992, a mob of Hindus burst through the cordon around the heavily guarded Babri mosque in Ayodha, a Hindu place of pilgrimage in the northern State of Uttar Pradesh, and in a few hours destroyed this four-century old Muslim monument. Even then the Hindus did not stop and the unrest continued, for no sooner had the news of the immolation spread than riots broke out everywhere in northern and central India, lasting for



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The destruction of the Babri Masjid Mosque, in Sacred Games, leads directly to Ganesh’s conversion, against his better judgement, from Mumbai bhai2 to Hindu Don. Lines are drawn across religious lines and Ganesh’s gang—predominantly Hindu, begin to question his loyalties: “The boys are saying … some of them are asking whether Bhai is with us, or with the Muslims” (SG 391), he is told. Ganesh repeatedly asserts that he is “with the money […] And there’s no profit in this” (SG 391), but once he has been offered a substantial sum to burn down a rival mobster’s village, like Arjuna, he accepts his fate: “I had been forced to choose one side of the battlefield […]. I stood ready now. I knew who I was. I was a Hindu bhai” (SG 396). The immediate consequence of this new-found status is the rape of his wife: “I went into her. Her scream thrilled over my shoulders. Afterwards there was blood, on the sheets, on my thighs. I was content” (SG 396). Having finally consummated his marriage Ganesh claims that he “could understand now what Paritosh Shah had meant when he told me I needed to get settled, why he had always extolled the virtues of marriage … I wanted to sit with Subhadra, to watch the evening from our balcony, eat some ghavan and drink chai” (SG 404). Subhadra, as far as we know, complies with this. Soon Ganesh is summoned by Bipin Bhonsle and his associate from Delhi, Sharma, to “protect Hindu dharma” (SG 408). This means smuggling arms into the country to be used by Hindus against Muslims and Ganesh, with a well-established criminal organization, is just the man for the job. The Muslims, he is told “live here but they’re maderchod Pakistanis at heart, bhai.3” Ganesh concurs—as does Arjuna with Krishna:

 2

“Literally, ‘brother.’ In Bombay it also means ‘gangster,’ meaning a member of an organized crime ‘company.’ ‘Bhai’ is roughly equivalent to the American ‘made guy.’ (Chandra 2015, 7). 3 Ganesh, like his Muslim rival, Suleiman Isa, is based, in part, on Dawood Ibrahim, a Muslim gangster. Chandra simply inverts—or conflates—their national and religious affiliations: The ISI’s [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence] overtures to Dawood Ibrahim to secure his help in terrorist activity in India are believed to have



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“I was the Hindu bhai. It was necessary. There was a low moon over us, plump and gentle. I breathed, and took in the fragrance of jasmine. So beautiful, I thought” (SG 408). And a son is born: I loved my son. His name was Abhijaya, and he made me helpless. I thought I had loved other people before, but now I found that I had either wanted them, or had depended on them, that was all. I had never known what love really was … I felt an irresistible soft gushing force crack open my chest and reach into me, and a low laugh came out of me, a feeling that goes up and down my spine: a man has a bond with his own blood that goes down to the beating core, to the nerve and bone (SG 456).

Then Gopalmath is raided by Ganesh’s rival, Muslim mobster Suleiman Isa, Subhadra and Abhijaya are shot dead, and the aĞrama of grhasthya in Ganesh’s life—his duty to marry, procreate, perform sacrifices and live in a community—is over and the next aĞrama, vƗnaprastha, “the stage when the householder gives up his duties and retires to the forest to practice meditation … preparatory to the complete renunciation of all worldly goods” begins.  Ganesh meditates, in fact, in jail, rather than in the forest, but it is there that he first comes into contact with the guru, Swami Shridhur Shukla, who is to transform his life and lead him deeper into vƗnaprastha and the Hindu dharma:4 “I followed Swami-ji’s advice. I hardened my meditation, did it longer, and with greater concentration” (SG 503), Ganesh boasts, and before long he is summoned to the prison governor’s office to meet Mr. Kumar, a senior officer, Ganesh assumes, from RAW (Research and Intelligence Wing—India’s equivalent of the CIA or MI6). Kumar tells him he must leave India and continue his work as Hindu bhai in exile.

 been made through Pakistani smugglers Yusuf Godrawala and Taufiq Jallianwala. By most accounts, initially Dawood Ibrahim resisted the pressure. After the anti-Muslim pogroms of 1992-93, however, his position is believed to have become vulnerable. Members of his gang, including his brother Anees and Mumbai builder Abdul Razzak 'Tiger' Memon, are believed to have demanded retaliation. In the second week of January 1993, at a late night meeting in Dubai, Dawood Ibrahim finally endorsed the serial blasts idea. Within a fortnight, explosives landed on the west coast, marking the beginning of the preparation for the worst act of terrorism in India (Praveen Swami). 4

Dharma is usually translated as duty, and may often be onerous: “However wrong the dharma imposed on you by your caste and by circumstances may appear to you, you are nonetheless duty bound to do it, and if you refuse, then Fate, that is, God’s will, will take you by the forelock and make you” (Zaehner 103).



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Ganesh does so from a yacht, the Lucky Chance, which wanders the Indian Ocean, putting in occasionally at Phuket to provide the crew with women, including the emerging Bollywood star Zoya Mirza, with whom Ganesh falls in love after having her transformed through cosmetic surgery into a woman of extraordinary beauty. Meanwhile, business is carried on over the phone. These include conversations with Swami Shridhur Shukla, hereafter always referred to by Ganesh as Guru-ji. Ganesh has realized that it is Guru-ji who is behind the arms smuggling and demands to know how a man of peace could countenance such a thing. At this point Chandra briefly re-enacts Arjuna’s conversation with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, as Guru-ji himself acknowledges: “‘And what about the advice that Krishna gave to Arjuna on the battlefield?’ this strange guru said to me. ‘Arjuna wanted to be peaceful. He wanted to retire from the world. Should he have gone? Should Krishna have let him?’ I had to agree with him, no, it was clear that Krishna was correct” (SG 577).

Performance Ganesh’s family now comprises Zoya Mirza, his longtime friend Jojo Mascarenas (who supplies Ganesh and his crew with women—usually Bollywood starlets) and his gang. But by following Guru-ji and the Hindu dharma, this third family may also be lost, as were his parents, his wife and his son. Guru-ji’s plan is to wipe out Mumbai with a nuclear bomb constructed from materials unwittingly smuggled in by Ganesh, blame it on the Pakistanis, and precipitate a nuclear holocaust:  Every golden age must be preceded by an apocalypse. It has always been so, and it will be so again. But now we have become too cowardly to let time move on. We stop up its wheels, we clog it up with our fears. Think of it, Ganesh. For more than fifty years we have put off the fight on our borders, and suffered small humiliations and small bloodshed every day. We have been dishonoured and disgraced, and have become used to living with this shame. We have become a whole race of quivering Arjuns fleeing from what we know to be our duty. But enough. We will fight. The battle is necessary (SG 838).

Ganesh, realizing that the world, or at least much of India and Pakistan, is to be imminently engulfed in flame and destruction has a nuclear bunker built back on a piece of Mumbai wasteland, where he makes his final renunciation of the world, the fourth and final stage, or aĞrama of life: samnyƗsa.



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At this point we must return to the concept of lila—or performativity, the play of the gods, and remind ourselves that the novel is entitled Sacred Games, that it follows the aĞramas of Ganesh’s life, and re-enacts the story of Arjuna and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Vikram Chandra argues that “the guru in Sacred Games … wants to persuade Ganesh of the existence of God claiming that there’s a plan, outside of evidence” (Chambers 45) that is holding the universe together. Of course, it has long been claimed by writers that theirs also is a task of creation, even God-like creation. To quote Sir Philip Sidney: Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like (216).

Chandra, then, as novelist, takes on the role of God and determines how and what his characters should perform. Which is, as all too often the way with human beings, badly. Ganesh Gaitonde, vastly powerful gang boss, is impotent; a sexual performer unconsciously reliant on the viagra his paidfor Bollywood starlet lovers slip into his drink, as his one-time friend Jojo Mascarenas finally reveals: ‘Gaitonde, you idiot.’ She was triumphant now. ‘You fool. She made a chutiya out of you. It wasn't you, you simpleton. She gave you a glass of milk and badams. And in that she gave you one crushed-up Viagra, one full big blue tablet. She was going to give you two, but I was afraid we'd kill you. I told her, it’s okay to want to get ahead, you want to go to the moon, I understand, but don’t burst the rocket that’s going to get you there. And it worked. It wasn’t you, saala. It was the Viagra' (SG 855)

This is why he is unable to perform in a proper husbandly fashion on his wedding night or, indeed, throughout his honeymoon—no viagra. This moment, at the end of the novel, and the end of Ganesh’s life, shows both the protagonist and the reader that all is pretence, all is play-acting, all a mask. Both Ganesh and his lover, Zoya Mirza, have undergone cosmetic surgery—Ganesh, to escape the police, Mirza to become a Bollywoord star. Both, also, reveal that gender roles are, by definition, performance, and Ganesh, at least, is found wanting, as Jojo Mascarenas savagely explains that the lovers she supplied him with “laughed at you, gaandu. They made jokes together, about what a pathetic, weak little rat you are” (SG 855). Even worse, the gorgeous Zoya Mirza, with whom Ganesh, Pygmalion-like, has fallen in love, held him in nothing but contempt:



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“You think you’re anything in front of a woman like Zoya? She told me she never got one good night in bed out of you. Poor Gaitonde, a sad caricature of Lord Krishna, the cowherd boy, enchanting the Gopini girls with his magic flute” (SG 855). Ganesh’s performance, then, is merely a charade. Were all of Ganesh’s purported achievements empty performance? The village of Gopalmath, his career as Hindu bhai? Was he not obedient to dharma and the prescribed life of successive aĞramas? Unwittingly led on by Guru-ji, he unquestioningly complies, in fulfilment of the role established for him by God. By supplying the makings of a nuclear bomb havoc will be wrought on the world in a modern-day equivalent of the war between the Kauravas and the PƗ৆ঌavas in the Mahabharata. But it is at this point that the God-like author intervenes, Chandra replacing Krishna as puppet-master in order to rewrite the scriptures and halt the obedience of millennia to capricious and destructive divinities and their human agents, the gurus, the national intelligence services and their religiously motivated governments. Ganesh, his job done delivering the makings of the bomb, is simply cast aside by his guru, a rejection he cannot accept. It is his subsequent angry quest for Guru-ji, a deviation from his role as ordained warrior/terrorist, that leads to the discovery of the bomb, and its deactivation. Ganesh has done what Arjuna would not.  At this point it is not difficult to see where Chandra is going: the fratricidal war between the Kauravas and the PƗ৆ঌavas in the Mahabharata serves as an allegory for the conflict between India and Pakistan. Partitioned in 1947, much of modern day India and Pakistan had been united under the British Empire, and before that in various loose configurations under a succession of Buddhist, Hindu and Moslem rulers. In Sacred Games, Chandra describes the religious violence which flared up at the end of British rule, the separation of families and communities who had hitherto lived together in relative peace, and the onset of a cycle of sectarian murder and hatred which continues to this day, and of which the demolition of the Babri Masjid Mosque is merely one chapter. In Sacred Games, Ganesh refuses to continue playing: he turns away from the requirements of lila—not, perhaps, for very noble reasons—but in doing so he averts the kind of catastrophe unleashed by the gods in the Mahabharata.  In her book Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, in reference to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (which Sacred Games resembles in a number of ways – including scope, setting and subject matter), expresses concern for the hold myth has on the Indian imagination: “this capacity to



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overlook the linear succession of events keeps them in touch with the atemporal memory of myth. But the fact that Indian history appears as no more than mere play is worrying. Politics is a form of play—not just lila, the universe of the gods’ play, but the authorities’ play with people’s lives” (131). Chandra is keen to ensure that blame is not placed entirely on Guru-ji and his Hindu nationalist backers. The game played by the British (Kipling’s ‘Great Game’ in modern day India, Pakistan and Afghanistan5), leads to Partition, in which both Muslims and Hindus are guilty of appalling acts of inhumanity. Chandra devotes an early chapter to this episode, in which we learn something of the history of the other main protagonist of the novel, police inspector Sartaj Singh, whose mother, Prabhjot Kaur, a Sikh, was originally from the Punjab. As the family flees to Delhi, Prabhjot Kaur’s beloved elder sister, Navneet, is kidnapped, never to be seen again. Forced to become Muslim, by a twist of fate—or the gods’ playful sense of humour—she gives birth to the Pakistani intelligence agent, Major Shahid Khan, responsible for one of his country’s major plots designed to destabilise neighbouring India.  This plot involves the theft of Indian currency paper from a warehouse in Ukraine (where the Indian government had its banknotes printed until the fall of the USSR), the printing of counterfeit notes and then its distribution in India where it is used, ironically, to pay Ganesh for his arms smuggling. The Pakistanis believe they are supporting a radical Muslim group called “Hizbuddeen, the Army of the Final Day” (SG 707), but it is, in fact, a false Muslim terrorist group set up by Guru-ji in order to blame the Pakistanis for the planned nuclear explosion in Mumbai. The complicated interweaving of plot and counterplot between the Indian and Pakistani governments and their religiously motivated operatives and religious leaders ironically leads to the same goal; both are seeking the same outcome: the Pakistanis to deal a massive blow to Hindu India’s most populous city, and the Indians to do the same in order to blame it on the Muslims/Pakistanis. Guru-ji, as we have seen, for his part is hoping for a holocaust, the end of the “kaliyug” (SG 838), the age through which the world is currently passing, the last, shortest and nastiest age in each world-cycle [where w]omen forgot all modesty and even Brahman ladies took to themselves men of low caste and even outcastes; caste duties were not observed, and Sudras who,

 5

In Kipling’s novel Kim, the protagonist is inducted into the imperial project for control over what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. This project is referred to as the Great Game. Towards the end of the novel Kim is ominously told that “When everyone one is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before” (Kim 316).



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The Family and Performativity in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games according to the sacred dharma, had no other duty than to serve the other castes, lorded it over Brahmans, and the lives of men became ever more brutish and short (Zaehner 1962, 104).

An age characterized by brutal and domineering casteless figures such as Ganesh, or non-Hindus such as Sartaj Singh. The end of this evil age saw “a mighty conflagration appear which ate its way into the regions of hell below the earth and consumed the denizens of hell; and from thence it flared up into the heavenly regions themselves destroying the gods with all their pomp and splendour” (Zaehner 1962, 104-5). Eventually a new age will dawn but “this in its turn must decline in ruin” (Zaehner 1962, 106). An endless cycle, then, of destruction, rebirth, decline and once again destruction. Slavoj Žižek, in Violence, argues that those countries and cultures which have been exposed quite suddenly to capitalism and the scientific discourse tend to react in ways differently from other parts of the world— Europe, for example—which experienced the rise of these phenomena relatively slowly: In Europe, where modernisation took place over several centuries, there was time to adjust to this break, to soften its shattering impact, through Kulturarbeit, the work of culture. New social myths and narratives came into being. Some other societies—notably the Muslim ones—were exposed to this impact directly, without a protective screen or temporal delay, so their symbolic universe was perturbed much more brutally. They lost their (symbolic) ground with no time left to establish a new (symbolic) balance. No wonder, then, that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of ‘fundamentalism’, that psychotic-delirious-incestuous reassertion of religion as direct insight into the divine Real, with all the terrifying consequences that such a reassertion entails, and including the return with a vengeance of the obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices (70).

This certainly describes and explains the behaviour of Guru-ji, and the Indian and Pakistani authorities, but when applied to Sacred Games an inevitable sense of wry irony creeps in. It may be argued that criminals, or criminal organisations, represent either a paradigm or a parody, of unrestrained capitalism. In Sacred Games, this possibility is represented by Ganesh, and his gang. Indeed, as we have seen, he initially insisted, when offered the role of Hindu bhai, that “There’s no gain for me in doing this” (SG 392), and only changes his mind when he is assured that there are profits to be made. It might appear, then, that Ganesh and his unrestrained and brutal version of rampant capitalism represents an



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improvement on Guru-ji’s fundamentalism. Indeed, Ganesh, though doomed by his criminality, is redeemed by his ultimate rejection of Žižek’s “obscene superego divinity demanding sacrifices”.

A Different Game The Sikhs, meanwhile, notably represented in the novel by Sartaj Singh, appear to enjoy Chandra’s approbation more than any other group. It is true that Sartaj also has a role to perform—that of policeman. It is also true the performance of the Indian police is characterised by endemic corruption—their pay is neither sufficient to provide for life’s most basic necessities, nor to maintain a properly-run police force. For Sartaj, however, it is also a role, handed down to him by his father, of (he believes) honorable service. It is Sartaj who, having learned of the bomb’s existence, discovers its location and hence its deactivation. Presumably it is the fact that he is, unusually for a Mumbai policeman, a Sikh, rather than a Hindu—“[t]here were two Sikh commissioners on the force, but Sartaj was the only Sikh inspector in the whole city, and so was used to being identified by his turban and beard” (SG 29-30)—that allows him to consistently perform outside of the divine lila script. According to Sikhism’s first Guru, Nanak (1469-1504), “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim” (Smart 98). Nanak advocated a faith which “transcended external barriers between religions” (Smart 98-99) so that Sikhism became “a syncretic and peaceful way of combining Hindu and Muslim motifs” (Smart 385). Nevertheless, by the time of Partition, in 1947 “the Sikhs found themselves existentially on the same side as the Hindus, and were regarded as such by the Muslims” (Smart 412) which explains Prabhjot Kaur’s disastrous flight from Punjab, still a disputed territory between India and Pakistan. Despite their loyalty to the new Republic of India (Smart 412), the Sikhs felt that their distinctive identity and rights were increasingly threatened by the Indian government—a fear confirmed by Indira Gandhi’s decision to attack the Sijh’s Golden temple in Amritsar in 1984 and which directly led to her subsequent assassination by her Sikh bodyguards a few months later. In the final chapter of Sacred Games, Sartaj Singh, on a pilgrimage to Amritsar with his mother, visits the memorial to the Sikh dead: 

 He was crying for all the names on all the plaques, and for the Sikh martyrs in the paintings in the museum upstairs who had stood in defence of their faith and had been tortured and mangled and executed. He cried for the six hundred and forty-four names on the list in the museum, for the Sikhs killed when the army had besieged the temple in 1984, and he cried for the



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The Family and Performativity in Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games soldiers who had been knocked down by bullets on these very stones (SG 939).

So many dead in the name of religion. And, as Chandra continually demonstrates, in a complex tapestry involving not just Sikhism, but other faiths as well. This is especially relevant to the convoluted family life of Sartaj Singh. The inspector does not, in fact, make his first appearance in Sacred Games, but in Vikram Chandra’s previous work, a collection of five short stories entitled Love and Longing in Bombay. Sartaj appears in the third story, “Kama” where we meet him in the throes of divorce from his wife, Megha. He does not, however, wish to be divorced, and postpones signing the papers. Consequently his estranged wife comes to visit, and after some initial talk they settle down to a lengthy session of sexual congress. At the end of the story, driven still by the love he feels for her and the wish that she be happy in her future life, he delivers the divorce papers to her home. In Sacred Games, as his romance with Mary Mascarenas, a woman of the Christian faith, develops, memories of Megha occur often, including “the thrill of their impossible college romance, which went across class and the impenetrable boundaries of accent and clothing and music” (SG 784). Despite the failure of the marriage, it is Sartaj’s readiness to overlook, and overcome, religious and social difference for the sake of love and family which seems to both define and embody his role within the novel—that of moral compass, shaky perhaps, but certainly more solid than anyone else's.  Sartaj’s new love, Mary Mascarenas, is the sister of Jojo Mascarenas, the woman with whom Ganesh enjoys a long term, though virtual friendship, until he finally meets her, only to kill her, in his nuclear bunker. Jojo’s profession seems to be both the promotion of Bollywood starlets and the supply of them to men like Ganesh and his gang. Her surname (shared, of course, by Mary) suggests a mask, or masquerade, and indicates her participation in the performance directed by the gods. Jojo (real name, Juliet) is the whore Jezebel, to Mary’s Blessed Virgin, the female polarities characteristic of Roman Catholic ideology. That the two male protagonists of Sacred Games, Ganesh Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh, reinforce their duality, as well as their opposition, by entering into relationships with the sisters—and in doing so cross religious lines— signals their rejection of dogmatic obedience and conformity. True, Ganesh and Jojo, criminals both, die violently, while Sartaj and Mary’s relationship continues to grow; but the world at large is left to its own chaotic devices, free from divinely-ordained destruction. At the close of the novel Sartaj finds himself in a curiously upbeat traffic jam: “He was hemmed in by a BEST bus and two autos, and there was nowhere for



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anyone to go, so they all waited companionably” (SG 946). There is, perhaps, no “discernible structure to the world”, but it is better than being blown up. Sacred Games is a novel which places feelings, love and affection above class, ethnicity and religious observance. Those feelings should not be self-serving—or at least, as little as possible—and they should be leavened with forgiveness. Sartaj Singh embodies most clearly this ideal. Ganesh Gaitonde, the lapsed Hindu bhai, has similar aspirations, but falls short, perhaps because his origins—his early adherence to aĞramas— weigh too heavily upon him; perhaps because Chandra disapproves of the unrestrained, money-grubbing capitalism that he represents. Ironically, for a novel which clearly sets out to subvert traditional orthodoxies, it is the family which offers the best chance for salvation. Ganesh glimpses this with the birth of his son, but is led astray by Guru-ji. Sartaj embraces family, both in Love and Longing in Bombay where he acknowledges his wife’s need to leave him, and in Sacred Games through his loyalty to his parents and their beliefs, his friends and colleagues, and his friends and colleagues’ families. But also in his willingness to connect with Hindus, Muslims and Christians, rich and poor, men and women, and to form new emotional bonds—perhaps to build a new family—across the barriers imposed by the gods and their games. In Sacred Games, then, the ideal of family, human attachment and earthly love prevails over the individual’s duty to perform in the Lord’s play. The author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad for the writing of this article (Research Project: FFI2013-45101-P).

References Alexandru, Maria-Sabina. 2003. “Virtual Reality on Infinite Bandwidth” Journal of Commonwealth Literature.  —. 2015. Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi. Bhagavad Gita. Tr. R.C Zaehner. 1976. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Chambers, Claire (2008) “An Interview with Vikram Chandra”. Wasafiri, 23:1, 45-48. Chandra, Vikram. 1997 (2007). Love and Longing in Bombay. London: Faber and Faber.



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—. 2006 (2007). Sacred Games. London: Faber and Faber. —. 2015. Sacred Games Glossary. http://www.vikramchandra.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/02/Sacred_Games_Glossary_Alphabetical.pdf. Access date: 8.6.2017. Eugenides, Jeffrey. 2011 (2012). The Marriage Plot. London : Fourth Estate. Hammett, Dashiel. Red Harvest. 1929 (1982). In The Four Great Novels. London: Pan Books. Jameson, Frederic. London Review of Books, 15 June 2017 Kipling, Rudyard. 1889 (1994). “The Man Who Would Be King”. In The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories. London: Wordsworth Editions Limited. —. 1901. (1941). Kim. London: Macmillan and co., limited. Sidney, Philip. 1581 (1991). “The Defence of Poesy” in The Oxford Authors Sir Philip Sidney. Katherine Duncan Jones (ed). Oford, New York: Oxford University Press. Smart, Ninian. 1989 (1997). The World’s Religions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stutley, Margaret and James. 1977 (1985). A Dictionary of Hinduism. Its Mythology, Folklore and Development 1500 B.C.-A.D. 1500. London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Swami, Praveen. “Mumbai’s Mafia Wars” Frontline. Volume 16 - Issue 7, Mar. 27 - Apr. 9, 1999.  http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1607/16070420.htm. Access date: 9.6.2017. Van der Burg, Cristiaan J.G. 2002. “Religious Conflict and Hindu Tolerance” in Religion, Conflict and Reconciliation: Multifaith Ideals and Realities. Gort, Jerald D., Henry Jansen and Hendrik M. Vroom (eds). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Zaehner, R.C. 1962 (1966). Hinduism. New York: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008 (2009). Violence. London: Profile Books Ltd.





CONTRIBUTORS    Isabel Alonso-Breto is a lecturer in Literatures and Cultures in English at the University of Barcelona. Her research focuses on postcolonial literatures, including the work of authors of Caribbean, South Asian, African and Canadian origin. Her articles often discuss cultural identities and various types of displacement. She is also interested in creative writing and translation. At present she is Vice-director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies at the University of Barcelona and a member of Ratnakara, a research group devoted to the study of the literatures and cultures of the Indian Ocean. ORCID: orcid.org/0000-00015684-7399 Cristina Alsina Rísquez is a senior lecturer in American literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. She has published several pieces on Willa Cather’s fiction. Her latest publication in the field is: “Neither Old nor New but Other: Willa Cather’s Syncretic Experience of History and Love” (in Harbors, Flows, and Migrations: The USA in/and the World, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017). She has also published on Vietnam War fiction and the US counterculture. She is the co-editor of Innocence and Loss: Representations of War and National Identity in the United States (together with Cynthia Stretch), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. She is currently on the board of AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Nortemaricanos) and of EAAS (European Association for American Studies). She co-directs the indexed academic journal Lectora: revista de dones i textualitat. María Jesús Lama López is a Senior Lecturer in Galician and Portuguese Philology at the Universitat de Barcelona and a member of the ADHUC Research Centre on Theory, Gender and Sexuality. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary Galician literature and her lines of research centre on the appropriation and rewriting of emigrant and exile myths, and the different kinds of violence in police fiction. In 2018, she won the Spanish Premio Nacional de Ensayo for Rosalía de Castro. Cantos de independencia e liberdade (1837-1863).



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Elena Losada Soler is a lecturer in Portuguese literature at the Universitat de Barcelona. She is a researcher at ADHUC—Research Centre on Theory, Gender, Sexuality, where she coordinated Lletra de Dona, an online literary criticism site, and was the director of the UNESCO Chair in Women, Development and Cultures from 2015 until 2018. She has published several studies on gender, especially on the representation of women in 19th century realist narrative and on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. She has translated thirteen of Lispector's works, and for one of these translations—Queridas Mías—she received the Giovanni Pontiero Prize for the best translation from Portuguese in 2012. Since 2011 she has researched crime novels by women, and she has led two research projects financed by the Spanish government: "Women and Crime Novel in Spain (1975-2010): Women Writers, Power Figures, Victims and Criminals / MUNCE)", (FEM2011-22870, 2012-2014), and “Female Victims and Aggressors. Representations of Violence in Crime Fiction Written by Women (VANACEM)” (FEM2014-55057-P, 2015-2017). UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures: director (01/09/2015 31/10/2018). Carme Morell is a lecturer and researcher at the University Pontificia Comillas-CESAG (Spain) where she teaches modules on Spanish language and literature and scriptwriting. She obtained her PhD from the University of the Balearic Islands in 1993. Her thesis studied the beginnings of Catalan theatre in Barcelona. She has also worked as a scriptwriter for television and films. Her research interests include film and television adaptations of literature in general and of British Victorian literature and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in particular. Her latest book chapters were included in the volumes Poètiques catalanes del segle XX and Panoràmica de la literatura catalana (Segle XIX). Katarzyna Paszkiewicz is a lecturer in English Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands and a researcher of ADHUC–Research Centre on Theory, Gender and Sexuality (University of Barcelona). She holds a BA in English Philology (2008, UAM), an MA in Cultural Studies: Audiovisual Culture (2009, UAM) and a PhD in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities (2014, UB). Her primary research is in film studies, cultural studies and gender studies, with an emphasis on film genres and women’s cinema in the USA and Spain. She has published several book chapters and journal articles on Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers, Icíar Bollaín and Isabel Coixet. Her other lines of scholarly enquiry include affect theory and Spanish crime fiction. Most recently she has co-edited, with Mary Harrod, Women Do Genre in Film



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and Television (Routledge, 2017) and published her monograph Rehacer los géneros: Mujeres cineastas dentro y fuera de Hollywood (Icaria, 2017). Her second monograph, Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, has been published by Edinburgh University Press (2018). Bill Phillips holds a BA in English from Lancaster University and a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has been a lecturer in English literature at the Universitat de Barcelona since 1991 where he is currently Head of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department. His main areas of speciality are poetry (at undergraduate level) and crime fiction (at postgraduate level). His research interests began with poetry— particularly that of John Clare—which led to ecocriticism, ecofeminism, gender studies, crime fiction and postcolonial studies. From 2013 to 2017 he led a Spanish government financed research project on postcolonial crime fiction. Martin Renes holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Barcelona and lectures for its Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and English Studies. His main area of interest and expertise is the study of film and novels within the larger framework of Transnational, Postcolonial, and (Indigenous) Australian Studies. He codirects the University of Barcelona’s Interdisciplinary Observatory: Australian and Transnational Studies Centre (http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/), through which he co-edits the indexed journal Coolabah (http://revistes.ub.edu/index. php/coolabah/user) and he is the current Chair of the European Association for Studies of Australia, EASA. He has co-convened congresses on Australian Studies in collaboration with similar centres at Southern Cross University NSW, Curtin University WA, and the University of Tasmania, and the main organiser of the EASA 2018 conference in Barcelona on identity, nationalism, migration and refugeeism in Europe and Australia (https://easa2018barcelona.wordpress. com/). He pertained to a postcolonial crime fiction project at the University of Barceona, which finalised in 2017, and now forms part of a project on transmodernity and literature at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Catalina Ribas Segura graduated from the University of Barcelona with a BA, MA and PhD. She is a Postcolonial Studies scholar whose main area of research is migrant Australian literature. She is a member of the Transnational and Australian Studies Centre at the same University and was a member of the funded research group POCRIF (POstcolonial



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CRime Fiction). Her main interests delve into questions of identity and migration. She is an Assistant Professor at the English Department at CESAG-Universidad Pontificia Comillas (Mallorca-Spain).  Haritha Chalil Savithri is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philology, University of Barcelona. She has an M.A in English Language and Literature from Kerala University and another one in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the Universitat de Barcelona. Her research currently focuses on patriarchy and gender issues in the area of Anglo-Indian literature.