Bunny Lake Is Missing (review)

2003 saw the launch of Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp, a series of female-authored pulp fictions selected for their daring assaults upon genre and gender by the Feminist Press. The first pulp titles to be salvaged from obscurity included Faith Baldwin's Skyscraper (1931), whose heroine is torn between domestic bliss and her exhilarating career at the heart of brittle, brilliant New York, and Valerie Taylor's 1950s sensation The Girls from 3B, where three small-town girls are cast adrift in bohemian Chicago, only to seek refuge from heterosexual predations in a seductive and dangerous lesbian underworld. Modernity and the metropolis thus supply the context for often-radical renegotiations of questions of gender and sexuality, as Evelyn Piper's 1957 best-seller Bunny Lake Is Missing abundantly demonstrates.

Bunny Lake Is Missing begins conventionally enough, with Blanche Lake, a twenty-one- year-old single mother, arriving to collect her three-year-old daughter Bunny from her first day at crèche. Blanche is on edge because she has only just fled the disgrace of unmarried motherhood in small-town Providence for "an office job" in New York. Her vague anxieties about becoming that modern monster, a working mother, are sharpened into nightmare when Bunny cannot be found. None of her teachers can recall the child, and, as Blanche frantically trawls the streets of New York in quest of her, bystanders are quick to name the source of her misfortune: "If anything's happened it's a judgement, that's what I say! That's what they learn them in college—how to drop their kids and leave them for others to take care of" (24). Yet Piper sets up her novel as a cautionary tale, only to interrogate contemporary social pieties about love, marriage, and motherhood.

In an unnerving plot twist, Bunny's disappearance becomes only the start of Blanche's ordeal. Soon, the police, the principal of the school, and the psychiatrist brought in to pacify the distraught mother all admit that they believe Bunny to be a fiction, a phantom child, a symptom of Blanche's diseased, disordered femininity. Blanche's stylish career-girl apartment shows no sign of a child's presence—no high chair, no child's bed, no clothes, not even a toothbrush. Blanche lacks a husband, and, when questioned, begs "Please, please, please, forget about the baby's father" (39). These telling absences take on a chilling resonance when Blanche confesses her guilty secret to her psychiatrist, Dr. Newhouse, who is rapidly falling under her spell. At the close of her teenaged affair with an older married man, she wished her pregnancy away: "You see, before I was sure that Bunny was coming, I prayed not to have a baby" (64). In a malevolent turn of fate, Bunny's thought-crime against fertility is punished; her child vanishes, and Piper seduces her readers into sharing her characters' suspicions that Bunny may be nothing more than one woman's guilty fantasy.

Bunny Lake Is Missing thus throws us headlong into a mystery that is as much about femininity, sexuality, and motherhood as it is about crime, kidnapping, and the dark places of the modern city. As Blanche transforms herself from all-American doting mother to gun-toting femme fatale in her daring, desperate attempts to retrieve her lost child, Piper takes us into a familiar world of pulp noir. Yet, strikingly, Piper exceeds the confines of her genre, just as her heroine Blanche Lake exceeds the role of mother by simultaneously occupying those loaded positions of "career girl" and "hard-boiled" heroine. The novel archly draws attention to its nineteenth-century literary forebears, when Dr. Newhouse diagnoses that "this girl believed she was a wicked girl, and that she should be stoned through the streets with a big red A on her bosom" (58), or when he watches "her little soft hands wringing like the hands of heroines in old-fashioned books" (59). Whilst one effect of these allusions to the cliché of "Victorian...