De-centering the Female: The Spinster Detective and the Restoration of Order in The Body in the Library
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This essay examines the role of gender ideology in Agatha Christie’s The Body In the Library (1942), which according to Kathleen Gregory Klein is an “unexpectedly female-centered text” (103). This essay takes Klein’s argument to task in order to examine if The Body in the Library is unequivocally a “female-centered text” and how Miss Marple’s capacity to transgress as a spinster detective withstand against (or perhaps is undermined by) the tendency of detective fiction to recreate a world of stability and restore, especially in Christie’s case, the “values of the English property owning bourgeoisie” (Knight 107). It is my contention that even as Christie casts women in the most essential roles within detective fiction—that of the detective, the victim, and the killer—she in the end voids the subversive potential of these women (individual and collective) by her eagerness to restore a “cozy” world of nostalgia and tradition within her work.
Abstract
This essay examines the role of gender ideology in Agatha Christie’s The Body In the Library (1942), which according to Kathleen Gregory Klein is an “unexpectedly female-centered text” (103). This essay takes Klein’s argument to task in order to examine if The Body in the Library is unequivocally a “female-centered text” and how Miss Marple’s capacity to transgress as a spinster detective withstand against (or perhaps is undermined by) the tendency of detective fiction to recreate a world of stability and restore, especially in Christie’s case, the “values of the English property owning bourgeoisie” (Knight 107). It is my contention that even as Christie casts women in the most essential roles within detective fiction—that of the detective, the victim, and the killer—she in the end voids the subversive potential of these women (individual and collective) by her eagerness to restore a “cozy” world of nostalgia and tradition within her work.
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