Detecting Sympathy in “A Jury of Her Peers”

Not all fictional detectives are the distant, objective Sherlock Holmes; not all detective stories end with clear, clean solutions like Holmes' does; and not every mystery is rooted in the overtly threatening scandal and conspiracy, bringing to light the evil machinations of villainous figures. Some detectives are sympathetic, amateurs, and their adventures offer more criticism than resolution.

For this, turn to Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers,” a 1917 short story that uses a crime and elements of detective fiction in an early feminist critique of the expectation that a woman stays in the home and supports her husband. If that seems like a tall order, it's a major plot point in "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Speckled Band". However, instead of the conservative British Doyle and his Holmes who preserve the social order, we're looking at the fiction of an early American feminist critiquing the social order.

Ostensibly, the story is a murder investigation: Mr. John Wright has been killed and his wife, Minnie Foster, claims to have been asleep while he was strangled. She has since been taken away, held for the murder, while Sheriff Peters and County Attorney George Henderson investigate. To help, they bring along Mr. Hale, who discovered the murder, and his wife, Martha Hale, was brought to help the Sheriff's wife gather a few items for Mrs. Wright while the men check out the bedroom – the scene of the murder – and the barn. Martha Hale and Mrs. Peters therefore spend the story in the kitchen, analyzing and commenting on the state of Minnie Foster’s life once she was married.

A traditional detective story would follow those investigating the murder and look for clues about the murder weapon and motive, to prove whether or not Mrs. Wright did or did not kill her husband. Most detective stories make this easy by bringing in outside detectives, like Holmes, or following the police force, like Sheriff Peters, to investigate. Doing so allows for an objective, almost scientific perspective. “A Jury of Her Peers,” however, chooses to go the sympathetic route. Martha Hale was once Minnie Foster's friend, and laments never visiting her old friend, and it's Martha's role as a friend and fellow country housewife that allows her and Mrs. Peters to read the clues that amount to a life and not just to an event.

It becomes clear to the women that Minnie Foster killed her husband, but that she isn't the villain. The story juxtaposes Martha Hale's memory of Minnie Foster, a happy, friendly person who loved to sing, with the dark, hollow, unkempt house filled with half-completed housekeeping tasks, she has occupied for 20 years as Mrs. Wright. The name “Wright” becomes ironic: Mr. Wright is hardly “Mr. Right,” and even suggesting that Minnie Foster, Mrs. Wright, was right to do what she did. This becomes clearest with the death of the canary, a songbird, whose body Minnie kept in a box. Martha reflects on how Minnie used to sing, a comment that symbolically brings the two together: both sang, and singing is a public act. One can certainly sing in private, but singing is often done for the enjoyment of others. Just as Mr. Wright broke the bird's neck, Minnie Foster, literally, crushed his neck and windpipe. A retaliation for twenty years of marriage wherein she was silenced and kept at the house in the hollow.

It can be easy to look at this story and simply say it's interesting because of its use of detective fiction and how it uses personal relationships and connections in ways more traditional detective fiction doesn't. There is still, however, the social perspective: how the characters and events become critiques of larger, real world social issues and concerns.

More on that in the next post.

Too Much Information: Charles Augustus Milverton

“The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” is a popular story. I think it's popular because it's fun to read about the heroes having to outright break the law. I'm not talking about bending the law or keeping something back from the police on behalf of someone innocent or repentant: I'm talking about burglary, theft, and arson. Oh, and there's a murder.

Milverton deals in information, specifically, scandalous information that he can use to blackmail people. In the story, Holmes is hired by an heiress to negotiate with Milverton on her behalf. Milverton has secured some scandalous letters and he threatens to reveal them just before her wedding. After their interview with Milverton ends without success, Holmes straight up decides to use his own mastery of disguise and people to burgle Milverton's estate and steal only the articles that will be used for criminal purposes. Things don't go quite as planned though, hence the murder and arson.

When people discuss “Milverton,” it's usually about how entertaining it is to see Holmes and Watson on the wrong side of the law, even if they have noble intentions. In this regard, it's a story about how far good people will go to stop evil. Though Holmes and Watson may take the legal system upon themselves on more than one occasion, they are never quite as in the wrong as they are here. 

This, following the spirit rather than the letter of the law, tells us more about the good guys, not the social anxiety the heroes fight against. So what threat does Milverton pose? He threatens personal and private lives with exposure. Accidents or poor decisions, serious or minor, can suddenly be paraded before the world, much to our horror. We like our private lives to remain private and Milverton publicizes all.

So, is Milverton the same as fellow blackmailer Irene Adler, just without the sex?

Hardly.

Adler blackmails, but she is, by profession, an opera singer. Milverton's a professional blackmailer. His position and wealth rely on his ability to blackmail, whereas Adler's was a combination of talent and cunning. Where Adler blackmailed because it was in her interest and typical for her tendency to cross boundaries, Milverton just outright blackmails for his own benefit.

So what kind of a crime and anxiety stem from blackmail itself? As addressed above, it's the threat of the scandal that comes from our secret lives being made public. But there's something more to Milverton, and the fact that he is able to move freely despite his crimes and Holmes and Watson must turn to crime to defeat him only brings the detective and blackmailer closer together, because their work relies on the same commodity: information.

Holmes is a successful detective because of his wealth of knowledge and information and his ability to make significant conclusions from mere trifles. At a glance he can tell significant things about who someone is and where they've been. For the sake of his detective work, this proves useful (especially because it is the gimmick on which the stories hinge). Holmes uses this to discover what remains unknown to everyone else. He deals in hidden secrets: the lives and actions of criminals so he can unravel their schemes and bring their secrets to light for retribution.

Milverton also deals in information and brings secrets to light, but rather than criminals, Milverton punishes the wealthy for their social transgressions. If the victim pays, Milverton returns the evidence. If the victim refuses or can’t, the information is made public and the victim is scandalized. Holmes surprises people with his deductions, but he never uses them to scandalize someone or for personal gain. Both represent the careful use of information but in different spheres and to different ends. Milverton not only shows the power of blackmail, but he shows us the kind of villain Holmes himself could be.

Playing with the rules, not by them: Irene Adler

Where Moriarty's interesting trait was his absence, Irene Adler is interesting because she’s too present. She’s on Serpentine avenue, turning men's heads; singing on the operatic stage; haunting Ormstein's past, present, and future; in the church getting married; in a young man's ulster coat; and, finally, in the infamous photographs (one as a tool for blackmail, the other as a memento). By being present in so many ways and so many places, Adler strains against and breaks the social codes that governed Victorian society.

In “A Scandal in Bohemia,”Adler has a photograph, evidence of an affair between Adler and King Ormstein of Bohemia, which she threatens to reveal shortly before his wedding to a Scandanavian princess. Ormstein gives no details of the tryst, but his association with someone who isn't nobility like himself is scandalous enough. This is more than an illicit love affair. It crosses social class and nationality as well. The social anxieties introduced in “Bohemia” deal with sexual, social, and international borders. If there's a line to be crossed, Adler crosses it.

This was, of course, at a simpler (and I say that with sarcasm, not nostalgia) time, when women were seen in one of two lights: the housewife or the harlot. It's easy to classify Adler as the harlot because of her illicit relationship with a king, whether or not it was sexual. However, there's more to it than that. The housewife, also called the “angel in the home”, was supposed to stay and keep the house in order while men went out into the world. The border-crossing Adler leaves the domestic sphere for the professional one, putting her femininity on display, “turning the heads” of the men on Serpentine Avenue and in the opera house as a professional contralto. Adler's threat is to social structure and hierarchy. Rather than adhere to the rules that maintain order, she toys with and passes right over them, just as she crosses the Atlantic Ocean from New Jersey to Europe or social boundaries by romancing a king.

So why not cross even more boundaries? While Holmes is trailing her, he witnesses Adler's church marriage to Mr. Norton, a lawyer. In doing so, Adler, technically, goes from the scandalous harlot to the domesticated housewife in the eyes of civil law, divine law, and, much to his chagrin, Holmes himself. Holmes changes the way he reads her and judges her behavior. Holmes relies on people to fit in rigid social codes and uses these codes to deduce where people came from and how they'll behave.

While most of the people Holmes encounters adhere to these expectations, Adler doesn’t. So, because she was married in a church, Holmes expects her to be a dutiful Victorian bride and so uses maternal instincts to justify his conclusion for where the photograph is. What Holmes does not anticipate is her crossing the gender barrier to confirm her suspicions she's being tailed by Holmes, Adler disguises herself as a young man by donning an ulster coat to follow Holmes and Watson to Baker Street, and, even though she wishes Holmes good evening, he doesn’t recognize her, allowing Adler and her husband to escape with the photograph.

Adler is pervasive. She appears on many different layers, crossing the finely defined social borders that governed Victorian society (and we're still dealing with today). She's like Moriarty in that people can be more, and even something quite contrary, to what they appear to be, but where we can take Moriarty and decide conclusively that he is a villain, Adler is harder to identify. Her pervasiveness makes her elusive because it is difficult, even impossible to assign labels to her, labels she is perfectly comfortable switching around to suit her needs.

Lurking in Respectability: Professor Moriarty

It's hard to talk about Moriarty or “The Final Problem” without mentioning that Doyle really wanted to retire Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had grown tired of the character: it was all he was associated with. A popular magazine at the time, Punch, actually printed a picture of Doyle fettered to Holmes (pictured below). But Doyle knew merely retiring Holmes wouldn't be enough: he needed to kill Holmes by pitting him against a villain so nefarious, that Holmes would give own life to beat him. The result is both men, locked in mortal combat, plummet to their deaths.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fettered to Sherlock Holmes, from Punch.

From this, you'd expect there to be a wealth of possibilities for study and interpretation, but the stories are a little sparse. Professor Moriarty isn't all that interesting. He plays a role in three stories: “The Final Problem”, “The Empty House”, and The Valley of Fear (he is mentioned in “The Illustrious Client” and “His Last Bow”, but has no bearing on these stories), but in each, his appearances are minimal. In The Valley of Fear, the fourth Holmes Novel, Moriarty is a topic of discussion in the opening chapters and is mentioned at the end, but never appears in the main narrative even though Holmes claims Moriarty was behind the crimes he investigates. In “The Empty House”, which is Holmes' return, Moriarty's dead and the story is about capturing Moriarty's lieutenant, Sebastian Moran. Moran actually has more influence on the narrative than Moriarty did in House, Valley, and even his own story, “The Final Problem”, where Moriarty is, at most, spotted from a distance or unrecognized. Moriarty's primary characteristic is not his resemblance to Holmes, but rather his absence.

By being absent, Moriarty represents what we don't see or understand, and while Moriarty's appearances may be brief, this idea of unseen evil is common in Holmes stories.

In “The Bruce Partington Plans”, Holmes mentions “the thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, ” and in “A Case of Identity”, he states,

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outr ́e results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

And, of course, it's Holmes' job to seek out these chains of events and bring the crimes and evils of his society to light as he preserves Victorian respectability. Or as he says in “Copper Beeches” after Watson remarks on the beauty of country homes,

You [Watson] look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there...It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.

And it's here Moriarty becomes interesting. He doesn’t threaten our property or our bodies, but our very sense of having a secure society, like the picturesque houses that by their beauty hide the evils lurking within. He’s an educated and deeply intelligent man who turned to crime while still maintaining a positive image. Moriarty doesn't correlate with a specific kind of social anxiety, but all social anxieties and crime. Rather than outright committing crimes, he facilitates whatever crime is necessary or requested of him. He represents the idea that crime and evil could be anywhere, especially where it is least expected.

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.

Framing Frankentsein Part 3: Developing and Questioning Reliability

Near the end of Frankenstein, Victor admonishes Walton to beware the monster's eloquence. However, in the following pages, Walton describes how Victor's own eloquence buoyed the men of his ship. This creates an inconsistency: if the Monster is not to be trusted because of his eloquence, why should Victor be trusted for possessing the same talent? And from there, if Victor is eloquent and persuasive, can we really believe his fantastic tale? (For what it's worth, while Victor cheered them, he could not convince them to continue on their dangerous voyage.)

This highlights one of the great issues with a frame narrative, especially Frankenstein: reliability. Reliability is a surprisingly complex issue, one literature scholars continually address and reevaluate. It forces us to stop and think about how and why we trust or distrust, narrators, characters and their stories; and because Frankenstein is focalized through Walton, it is necessary to consider his reliability first.

Walton's narration begins with the letters to his sister. Letters are a unique form of writing: they are personal and intimate, which makes it different from novel writing meant to be public. By using letters to initiate the story, Shelley makes it seem more reliable, more realistic because while a narrator may be unreliable, we expect a brother writing to his sister to be honest and sincere. These opening letters establish Walton's reliability so we will trust him when he takes Victor Frankenstein at his word. This is compounded, at the end of the novel, after Victor has completed his narrative, the monster appears to Walton, removing the Monster from Victor's narrative, and putting him in Walton's.

Why have the monster appear? Because we trust Walton more than we do Frankenstein. Reliable narrators need to do more than accurately tell what happened, but also be able to accurately interpret and understand it. This means Walton is necessary to make the narrative reliable because Victor is harder to trust. Victor, in the course of his narrative, is incapacitated several times and experiences deliriums. He is also unsteady: he switches from one perspective to another, eagerly creating the monster, then shunning it and fearing it, and most importantly, misinterpreting what is around him.

The most prominent example of Victor's failure to interpret is when the monster declares he will be with Victor on his wedding night. Victor takes this as a sign that the monster will try to kill him on his wedding night. However, this is not the monster's goal, and there is actually little evidence to suggest it: the monster elsewhere suggests he wants to make Victor miserable as he has made the monster himself miserable, and has already done this by killing and framing for murder friends of the Frankenstein family and the monster's threats come after Victor has destroyed the woman companion the monster commissioned him to make. The evidence is there: a miserable life, murdered friends and family, the abandoned monster-bride, and yet Victor insists the monster targets him despite all evidence to the contrary.

Between Victor's deliriums, his changing perspective, and his inability to interpret, he becomes an unreliable narrator. However, it is only his ability to interpret we can readily call into question. Walton, conveniently stranded in the arctic, has no means to confirm any of Victor Frankenstein's story, and because Walton believes Victor, and we are intended to believe Walton, we therefore believe Victor. The monster doesn't appear to confirm Walton's narration, but to confirm Victor's and his own narration. His few statements align with Victor's narration, which the monster was absent from, so had Victor contorted the story, the monster could not have known.

Ironically, then, all of the reliability hinges on Walton: is this the fantastic story of a man who was in the right place at the right time, or could he be fabricating this story? It's hard to tell: we have Victor and the monster to confirm one another's stories, but Walton has to rely on narrative devices and techniques: the letters, his station as captain, his dire situation, to affect his own reliability.

But this leads to a perhaps unanswerable question: is Walton's frame a narrative device to make himself reliable, or was he really in the right place at the right time?

Framing Frankenstein Part 2: Frames and Focalization

Focalization is, in its simplest sense, a matter of whose perspective the information is coming from. As a concept it was introduced by French literary critic Gerard Genette, in his book Narrative Discourse, as a replacement for saying first, second, or third person narrator. It is a useful term because it suggests that narrators can be read and understood beyond their use of pronouns.

I bring this up in this discussion of Frankenstein and frame narration because focalization helps us to stop and really think about where the information is coming from, not just who is saying it or their relationship to the events being described: each framed narrative cannot be properly read without considering its relationship to its frame, or, how each level is focalized.

Take, for example, fellow horror fiction Dracula. Dracula is an epistolary novel: collections of letters, diary, and journal entries recreated (presumably) faithfully. Within the context of Dracula these narratives were gathered from many sources and lined up in a logical form. In doing so, each piece is put on the same level, in tandem with one another: it's not a matter of how Jonathan Harker met Van Helsing who told Harker about his pupil, Dr. Seward, who told about his experiences with his zoophagous patient Renfield, but how each character relates their own personal experiences. The epistolary nature of such a story even adds to its immediacy: each character presents relevant information as, or shortly after, it was being experienced. Mina Harker and Dr. Seward do not amend their diaries to reflect what they would learn later. This keeps the information up to date and each voice presented in the narrative is unmediated by any others. When Jonathan Harker speaks, it is focalized through Harker and no one else. 

It would be a grave mistake to call Frankenstein’s layered narration “Unmediated”.

It may be easy to see both as a collection of related stories, but it is not that simple. Where Dracula features different narrators taking turns to tell their own narratives, Frankenstein is about Captain Walton telling the story of Victor Frankenstein, which includes his own narrative about how the monster told his own narrative, which even includes telling the story of the French family, which itself includes the Turkish merchant's story. Dracula is many snippets cobbled together to tell one story. Frankenstein is one story telling other stories.

And just as there are framed narratives, there are also framed narrators. Victor and the monster both assume the role of narrator at their respective moments, with the novel funneling down into and up out of its narrative construction. It's just all the information has come through different narrators, who we trust to relate everything the others have said. And Walton's letters, his doubt his sister will even receive them, mixed with Frankenstein's deathbed confession, serves to frame the story to remove doubt: to make this fantastic tale seem realistic and plausible. But this raises a serious issue with narrative reliability, and we must ask ourselves, to what extent can Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster be trusted? After all, Walton could have altered either Victor or the monster's narrative, and Victor could have altered the monster's. Layers of narration create the facade of reliability, but do more to complicate it. More on that next time.