Title: Exploring the Shifting Dynamics of Female Victimhood and Vocality in Poe and Pirkis
Abstract: recurring in [... many of Poe's] tales is that one or more women have been criminally silenced; the speech that would allow them self-expression has been denied or usurped by male agents. Poe was especially prolific in creating images of violently silenced women, their vocal apparatus the apparent target of their attackers, who, in the earlier stories, are the storytellers themselves. (Jordan 2) The Todorovian assertion that the traditional detective narrative is comprised of two stories, the story of the and the story of the (2), may be extended to posit a gendered duality: one in which the crime portion is often reliant on the absent or silenced woman (physically present but unable to assert agency) and the investigation is dominated by the male logician whose ability to interpret her silence and restore order signifies his structural dominance. Edgar Allan Poe asserts in his 1846 essay Philosophy of Composition that [is most melancholy] when it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world (Poe 179). In the context of the Dupin tales, it may be argued that the death of the beautiful woman is as catalytic as it is poetic--her end is his beginning, her silence a conduit for the triumph of masculine rationality. Catherine Louisa Pirkis' stories, by comparison, feature a female detective who is unapologetically vocal and frequently encroaches on male discursive spaces; her work allows her to move in the public sphere and engage with male peers, many of whom are [territorial] and [exert] pressure to keep her detective work 'inside the house' (Miller 47). The transition from the masculine abstraction of Dupin to the actively feminine method of detection employed by Brooke is one which involves a profound regendering of these discursive spaces. The purpose of this essay is to examine this re-gendering and the extent to which it signified (or did not signify) an enduring genre shift; although a considerable critical body of work has accrued in the wake of Poe's detective fiction, the contribution of Pirkis has drawn little scholarly attention. The following comparative analysis has been undertaken in the hopes of determining the degree to which the gender dynamics of canonical detective fiction have been shaped by the distinctive early efforts of Poe and Pirkis. The first of Poe's Dupin tales, Murders in the Rue Morgue, centres on the mysteriously violent murder of two Parisian women, both of whom are described as fearfully mutilated ... the corpse of the daughter, head downward, [had been] forced up the narrow [chimney] ... upon the face were many severe scratches, and, upon the throat, dark bruises ... [the mother had] her throat so entirely cut that ... the head fell off' (Poe 375-376). Narrated by an unnamed acquaintance of Dupin's, the story follows the process of ratiocination used to unravel the mystery: Dupin is equipped with the observational skills to determine that the brutal act was carried out by an escaped pet orangutan armed with a straight razor. The unlikely chain of events leading to this murderous conclusion is meticulously reimagined by Dupin, who successfully reads the tableau of brutality and subsequently establishes the template of analytic precision most famously embodied in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. In the Dupin stories, this model of detection relies heavily on a victimised female subject; the physical destruction of mother and daughter is the catalyst for Dupin's triumph. It is worth noting that Poe's detective operates in the years prior to the proliferation of feminist ideology; the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention may be identified as the first major event of this burgeoning national movement. The brainchild of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and several other prominent female members of the local Quaker community, the gathering anticipated every demand of nineteenth-century feminism [and] permitted them to state in the clearest possible fashion that they identified the tyranny of men as the cause of women's grievances, according to feminist historian Ellen DuBois (23). …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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