The Social Anxieties of Crime and Detective Fiction

As discussed elsewhere in this blog, fiction is thematic. This is particularly true when dealing with detective and crime fiction because it deals with physical, emotional, and social anxieties. We'd rather see the world, our homes, and our lives as safe, and place the dangers of the modern world at a distance. News does this for us: all the bad things happen somewhere else and to someone else. Detective and crime fiction is a safe way to invite these ideas into our homes and see a safe resolution.

The expectation in crime and detective fiction is simple: something has gone wrong and must be set right. Whether it be theft, violence, scandal, blackmail, or murder, the truth is sought, the wrong party brought to justice and amends made to the victims to return the world to a pre-crisis balance. Each possible crime represents more than itself: murder is a threat to the sanctity of life, theft to property, blackmail to privacy. When we see these crimes in fiction it’s an opportunity to explore the significance of these social ills. Even if it is just a little bit, we get to feel anxious about our own life, property, privacy, etc. Thankfully, the detective represents the social order, through their efforts to discover the evil and set it right.

Take the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” This story focuses on a young woman, Helen Stoner, who fears her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Sir Grimsby Roylott, because her sister died shortly before the sister’s marriage. Roylott is a violent man who keeps a menagerie of exotic animals, and keeps his stepdaughter's bed mounted in a room, so it cannot be moved. Holmes and Watson hide in Helen's room and discover a poisonous snake let into her room. They beat it back, and the snake attacks and kills Roylott himself, giving the story some poetic justice.

Roylott represents a threat to Victorian standards with his violent temper and exotic menagerie: hardly a respectable British gentleman. His step-daughter, not of his historically hot-tempered aristocracy, represents Victorian ideals of womanhood: she is innocent and needs protection, which appears in the form of Holmes. The violent, exotic Roylott not only poses a threat to his daughter but to Victorian decorum, womanhood, and fatherhood, in the name of claiming her inheritance. Holmes comes and fulfills the role of paternal protector, performing the social roles Roylott has abandoned. So this is not simply a crime story about violent men, damsels in distress, and exotic animals, but it's a story about foreign threats and influences, and familial duty, with Holmes to fill the gaps.

The villain represents threats to the social order while the victims represent what is good and wholesome and the detective returns the world to a positive situation.

This means when looking at crime and detective fiction, it is important to consider what the crime and villain represent thematically. To explore this idea, I'm going to take a few blog posts looking at how the classic, archetypal detective Sherlock Holmes deals with some of the major crimes and villains he faces, and, perhaps a few other pieces of crime fiction.

To begin, I will look at the three most famous of Holmes villains: Irene Adler, Professor Moriarty, and Charles Augustus Milverton. Adler is famous because she is the woman who beat him, Moriarty because he is “the Napoleon of crime” Holmes' arch-nemesis, and Milverton with the use of information for personal gain.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 4: A Symbolic Death

As the fourth, and last, post dealing with sympathies, audience, and Anton Chekov's play The Cherry Orchard, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the end of the play, wherein an image and a sound are powerfully juxtaposed. The image is of Firs (the old valet) dying, and the sound is the cherry trees being cut down. It seems simple enough, and yet this juxtaposition carries significant symbolic weight.

Firs has been a mainstay at Ranevsky's estate, and even fondly remembers the time before the emancipation of the serfs. After all, he had it pretty good as a valet, one of the head servants, and probably saw his fellow servants go their separate ways once they were emancipated and the estate grew too poor to keep them on. He rose to the highest position he could as a servant, misses the others after they have left, and his closing words, the words that close the play, are “I'm good for nothing.“

As for the felling of cherry trees, Lopahin has made no secret of his desire to do so. He had encouraged Ranevsky to save her land by felling the orchard and building estates. He had used his business savvy to know what would be the best thing to do financially, and will now do the same, making his investment work for himself. But he does so quickly, felling the trees even before the family has left so Ranevsky watches her beloved orchard fall as she leaves her family’s estate.

Ending a narrative is a daunting task: everything has to be carefully resolved, and a Russian play with its full cast is no exception. By this time the other characters have already left and Firs is alone. So the question is, why end the play on this note, with the sound of the ax and the death of an old valet?

The characters represent more than just themselves. Just as Lopahin represents the nouveau riche and Ranevsky the noblesse oblige, Firs represents an old generation, so rooted in its ways that even when emancipation came, he did not accept it and continues to live the same life he always had. Firs, by virtue of his position, his age, and his attitude about serfdom, represents an older way of life, even though he has few lines and little attention. He brings with him a lot of social and cultural baggage and he, ironically, is willing to carry it while the audience must decide how to sympathize with him and what he represents. Even as he dies, he complains that Gaev, Ranevsky's brother, probably left in an inadequate coat. Firs, as a former serf who stayed with the family and became the valet, is a strong representation of that time and that mentality. He's like the cherry trees: an old establishment representing a bygone era. Ranevsky assumed that since they always had been there, they always would be.

So what about when the character dies? All of that dies with him. When a character represents something, like a historical period, a certain mindset or occupation or lifestyle, dies, it means that, unless there's another character that also represents it, everything they symbolize dies as well.

And if they're killed? Firs' death is interesting because it has the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down. Firs stands old and symbolic, alongside the cherry trees, and the two are only further linked symbolically through the juxtapositions of their deaths. Lopahin is responsible for the cherry orchard's removal, just as how Ranevsky is responsible for having lost her money and the estate. Lopahin does not take the ax to Firs, but by felling the orchard, Lopahin symbolically brings about the death of an era, initiating a new world governed by hard work and business rather than estates and inheritances. It's a world that has no place for the old serf Firs. And so, there's nothing left for him.

We don't just sympathize with people. We sympathize with what they represent, and how we demonstrate that sympathy shows how we sympathize with their representations. To pity Firs' death is to pity an old lifestyle. Similarly, to lionize Lopahin would be to lionize all he represents. Characters and people cannot be separated from what they do and what they represent.