Browsing by Author "Redmond, Robert Stanley"
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- ItemFemale authors and their male detectives: the ideological contest in female-authored crime fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand(Massey University, 2008) Redmond, Robert StanleyIn the nineteen-eighties a host of female detectives appeared in crime fiction authored by women. Ostensibly these detectives challenged hegemonic norms, but the consensus of opinion was that their appropriation of male values and adherence to conventional generic closures colluded with a gender system of male privilege. Academic interest in the work of female authors featuring male detectives was limited. Yet it can be argued that these texts could have the potential to disrupt the hegemonic order through the introduction, whether deliberately, or inadvertently, of a female counterpoint to the hegemony. The hypothesis I am advancing claims that the reconfiguration of male detectives in works authored by women avoids the visible contradictions of gender and genre that are characteristic of works featuring female detectives. However, through their use of disruptive performatives, these works allow scope for challenging normal gender practices—without damage to the genre. This hypothesis is tested by applying the performative theories of Judith Butler to a close reading of selected crime novels. Influenced by the theories of Austin, Lacan and Althusser, Butler’s concept of performativity claims that hegemonic notions of gender are a fiction. This discussion also uses Wayne Booth’s concept of the implied author as a means of distinguishing the performative agency of the text from that of the characters. Agatha Christie, P.D. James, and Donna Leon, each with their male detective heroes, come from different generations. A Butlerian reading illustrates their potential for disrupting gender norms. Of the three, however, only Donna Leon avoids the return to hegemonic control that is a feature of the genre. Christie’s women who have agency are inevitably eliminated, while conformist women are rewarded. James’s lead female character is never fully at ease in her professional role. When thrust into a leadership she proves herself to be competent, but not ready or desirous of the senior position. Instead her role is to mediate the transition of her junior, a male, to that position. Donna Leon is different. The moral and emotional content of her narratives suggests an implied author committed to ideological change. Her characters simultaneously renounce and collude with illusions of patriarchal authority, and could lay claim to be models for Butler’s notion of performative resistance.
- ItemThe femme fatale in "postfeminist" hard-boiled detective fiction : redundant or re-inventing herself? : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, New Zealand(Massey University, 2014) Redmond, Robert StanleyThe femme fatale of the hard-boiled era, who arrived in the late 1920s, seduced, shot and poisoned her way through pulp magazines, hard- and paper-backed novels, and films for almost fifty years, as the iconic figure of evil whose abjection secured a new masculine ideal that found its voice in the tough-guy detectives created by the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane. But by the 1960s her particular brand of villainy was in decline. In the 1980s a new representation of the dangerous woman, in the form of the tough female detective subverted the genre, by decentring the masculine fantasy that was the source of the femme fatale. The female detectives authored by women, such as Sara Paretsky and Katherine Forrest, were a product of second-wave feminism, which, in the 1960s, agitated for legal and customary rights within the masculine hegemony. By the 1990s, the feminism that had driven a host of social and legal reforms was felt by many to have entered a new phase, allowing for the postulation of the return of the femme fatale within postfeminist detective fiction as the representative of the abject “other.” Contemporary gender politics and new postmodern representational regimes, however, make her return difficult. The cultural meaning attached to her has changed. The question is what different form of marginality, or “otherness,” can take her place? The focus of this study is to answer this question through a study of selected postfeminist detective fiction, framed by the theories of Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek. This research suggests that the initial encroachment of the feminine, in the form of the hardboiled female detective, into the genre, and the further intrusion by aggressive women with no regard for hegemonic law, destabilises the masculine imaginary, and in doing so prepares the ground for a female imaginary, which though framed by the symbolic order, occupies its own space. The fiction of Declan Hughes, Megan Abbott, Stieg Larsson, Ian Rankin, and David Peace provides a mirror into a world where the femme fatale, moves, not necessarily in a linear progression, from being the guarantor of a particular brand of masculine subjectivity to a more diminished stature in the recognition that she is too small a figure for representing evil in a world of global corporations, atomic bombs, and national humiliation. Nevertheless, vestiges of the femme fatale remain in postfeminist crime fiction. However, the demands of feminism and the consequential reshaping of the established order make her survival, in whatever form of “otherness,” tenuous. While statistical evidence may provide some measure of women’s progress, perhaps the detective genre makes a better gauge. It reflects not the job numbers, or percentage of degrees earned, by members of each gender, but the changes wrought upon the sociosymbolic contract, and their effect upon traditional representations of gender, through the destabilising of a once-established masculine ideal.