Why the Hunts' marriage is not perfect - or why Gilman created this kind of partnership in the mystery novel 'Unpunished'

Why the Hunts′ Marriage is not Perfect - or why Gilman
Created this Kind of Partnership in the
Mystery Novel ′Unpunished′

by: Linda Schug

Fachsemester: 5

Contents

I. Introduction

II. Main Part

1. The Genre: Detective Fiction

1.1. Historical Background and the Creation of Conventions
1.2. Fictional Detectives by Women Writers - Conventions of the 1920s

1.2.1. Male
1.2.2. Female
1.2.3. Couples

1.3. Unpunished - The Mystery Novel

1.3.1. The Detective Couple
1.3.2. Jim Hunt
1.3.3. Bessie Hunt

2. The Role of Women in Society

2.1. In the Nineteenth Century
2.2. In the 1920s
2.3. Gilman′s Ideal

3. The Hunts′ Marriage

3.1. Jim Hunt
3.2. Bessie Hunt
3.3. Telling Names

3.3.1. His
3.3.2. Hers

III. Conclusion

I. Introduction

In the conclusion to Feminist Fiction, Anne Cranny-Francis (compare to 201-202) brings up the question: How can a feminist use the genre of detective fiction which seems superficially to be about detection and revelation, but which is ideologically about concealment and mystification? Charlotte Perkins Gilman made one of the earliest attempts in 1929 out of "feminist despair at what had become of her society and the movements to build a new one from it" (Robinson 276). "She wrote a novel, a spirited novel in a popular genre, the murder mystery, that would encapsulate her vision of feminism for the new times. The idea, this time, was not so much to hurl feminism into the jaws of post-feminism as to pry open those jaws and slip in a sugar-coated pill" (Robinson 277).

On the one hand, Unpunished has a feminist message about domestic abuse and marital rape. On the other hand, it contains a husband-wife detective team, common stock characters since 1913 (compare to G & K 101/103), not a single woman detective or at least a professional partnership as one could have expected. Creating this unequal couple, it could be said that Gilman adopted the conventions of detective fiction. First of all, I am going to summarize the history of detective fiction and fictional detectives created by women writers to demonstrate the prevailing conventions of the genre and the way these are converted in the book. I shall confine myself to a consideration of the detective couple Bessie and Jim Hunt disregarding their rival sleuth Gus Crasher. According to William Aydelotte, conventions are the elements that make detective stories popular because they correspond to wish-fulfillment fantasies and therefore describe the readers and their unmotivational drives (compare to 307-308). This theory appears interesting to me with regard to the fact that Gilman′s mystery was not published until 1997. Its underlying fantasies seem to have produced certain sensations that the publishers and the readership were not ready for yet. My thesis is that Gilman used the detective couple to make fun of the conventions of the genre and to show that little has changed for women. In the next section, taking the usage of (nick)names and the partnership presented in the book as examples, I will try to prove this against the background of the society and the gender relations in the nineteenth century and in the 1920s.

II. Main Part

1. The Genre: Detective Fiction

Maureen T. Reddy defines the genre detective fiction as all works of literature with the main interest in the investigation of mostly criminal events that are covered up in the beginning of the story. Murder or any other crime is not always necessary, and it does not have to be solved with material clues (compare to II 11). I favor her broad definition because a more puristic one would exclude Unpunished. There is no murder in this mystery as it becomes clear in the end.

1.1. Historical Background and the Creation of Conventions

"Puzzle stories, mystery stories, crime stories, and stories of deduction and analysis have existed since the earliest times - and the detective story is closely related to them all. Yet the detective story itself is purely a development of the modern age" (Haycraft 4). It evolved as a literary genre in the nineteenth century. The first murder appeared in Edgar Allen Poe′s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1852). The first series-detective was invented in England: Arthur Conan Doyle′s Sherlock Holmes (1887), a character that influenced all following works of detective fiction (compare to Reddy II 9). Nevertheless, the first novel of the genre seems to have been written by a woman writer. According to Catherine Ross Nickerson, Metta Fuller Victor′s The Dead Letter (1866) was the first American detective novel (compare to 29). Howard Haycraft, however, states that Anna Katharine Green whose book The Leavenworth Case was published in 1878 has been the first writer who practiced this form in any land or language (compare to 83- 84). She stands in what Nickerson names the tradition of the domestic detective novel. Their main locus "is the domestic spaces of the wealthy professional and mercantile classes" (XI). That is why "surveillance is an intimate act, and the story of uncovering a crime realigns and affirms the important bonds of love and duty" (53). At long last, detective fiction is popular literature and, whether it is written by male or female authors, just responds to society′s demands being "more a commodity produced for mass consumption than a valid social history" (Klein 5). So it appears almost remarkable that the first feminist detective novel, Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, was published in 1935, only six years after Charlotte Perkins Gilman′s Unpunished was refused. But the genre already started to change in the period between the two world wars:

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