Misogyny and murder: crime fiction by women from 1947-1959

Abstract

This project demonstrates that American women authors from 1947-1959 repurposed the crime genre to critique and engage with misogyny and sexism of the day. Hardboiled crime fiction, which was at its peak popularity in midcentury America, is almost synonymous with a tough, hyper-masculine detective who solves crime through violence, kissing beautiful and marginally consenting women along the way. The women authors in my project subverted this masculinist genre during the late 1940s and 1950s, when the postwar reconversion of the economy reinstated sexist social values. My project recuperates novels by women that were popular with critics and readers at publication, but are largely overlooked now because scholarly examinations of crime fiction of this period are confined to novels written by men. I argue that three female crime authors each use a formal feature—perspective, free indirect discourse, and character—to subvert the genre and question and critique misogyny and sexism. These novels cumulatively point to the harm caused by larger patriarchal society that is specific to the time but also touch on broader, timeless harm caused by patriarchy. In Chapter One, I study how Dorothy B. Hughes critiques misogyny specific to the postwar period by limiting the narrative perspective to Dix Steele, who functions much like a classic hardboiled detective except he is a serial killer. The end of the novel demonstrates retroactively that women characters have used their insight into systemic sexism and misogyny to capture Dix, yet this was behind the scenes the entire time, much like the women who perform unpaid or underpaid and underappreciated work under a patriarchal system. In Chapter Two, I examine how Evelyn Piper’s domestic crime novels protest the pathologization of unmarried and overindulging mothers in the 1950s, specifically through the use of free indirect discourse. Piper uses narration to make the reader complicit in a misogynistic view of mothers before condemning that view. In Chapter Three, I study how character identification functions in Patricia Highsmith’s first novel, Strangers On A Train. Highsmith dispenses with the heavy focus on plot and empirical logic that is so foundational to the crime genre and makes readers identify with a morally ambiguous character. This raises questions about queerness and morality in the heteronormativity-obsessed 1950s.

Each chapter includes study of a film noir adaptation of these novels. Chapter One demonstrates how Dorothy B. Hughes’s serial killer, played by Humphrey Bogart in the film adaptation, becomes a sympathetic hero falsely accused of murder by the women around him. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how Otto Preminger’s adaptation of Evelyn Piper’s work completely removes her critique of the pathologization of mothers by diminishing the mother character and focusing on the men around her. In Chapter Three, I examine Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers On A Train, which follows a more conventional 1950s understanding of queerness than the novel and encourages the audience to identify with its solidly heterosexual and morally upstanding character. All of these films nullify the questions and critiques the women authors raise about sexism and misogyny by changing key plot and character elements to fit the stories into the masculinist film noir genre.

My conclusion jumps to the contemporary era, where crime fiction often features women detectives who work for pay but still function in the same way as their male counterparts by solving crimes alone. However, Tana French’s bestselling series Dublin Murder Squad is not centered around a single detective. Rather, each of French’s novels has a new protagonist who was a minor character from a previous novel and each new perspective shows flaws with the previous novel’s perspective. I argue that this formal innovation challenges the genre’s tradition of a masculinist lone intelligence, showing that women crime authors continue to innovate through formal features.