Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

Notes

Notes Notes to the Introduction 1. See, for example, Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analy­ sis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 197–222, and Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). 2. There are, of course, crime authors besides those I treat who could help extend my argument—were there but space enough and time! Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis, and Patricia Highsmith come immediately to mind, as they seem to me in­ tensely concerned with the exploitation of crime conventions for the subversion of masculinity. 3. The claims of my project here intersect with a larger contemporary rethinking of gender—and also race—in modern American literature. See, for example, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolu­ tion of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Cen­ tury, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–1994); Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–62; Frances Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half­Feminine’: Modernism and the Politics of Emotion in The Great Gatsby,” American Literature 68.2 (1996): 405–31; Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Mod­ ernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 4. To note just a few of these developments: Immigration reached staggering new proportions during this period (a million for the first time in 1913), producing anxieties about the nation’s ethnic purity that culminated in the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924. The Federal suffrage Amendment was passed and ratified in 1920, after a decade of newly intensified feminist agitation that sometimes in­ cluded explicit demands for greater sexual freedom. And African American anger 231 NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION at white racism exploded in the years following the First World War, leading most dramatically and convulsively to a rapid succession of urban race riots in the summer of 1919. 5. This vision of modernism is, of course, largely Eliotic. See especially the essay on James Joyce, where Eliot praises the use of myth in Ulysses as “a way of con­ trolling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” [1923], in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode [London: Faber and Faber, 1975], 177). If I make such arguments central to my understanding, it’s because they seem to me to capture the ambition (if not the actual achievement) of many modernist texts, and because I am persuaded by Michael Levenson’s claims about Eliot’s centrality in defining this ambition. See Levenson, A Geneal­ ogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1984). 6. David Glover argues that authors of hardboiled detective fiction sought to rede­ fine crime writing as a masculine activity, rejecting what they thought of as the aris­ tocratic effeminacy of analytic detective stories in favor of the grittiness of hard­ boiled “realism.” There are obvious parallels here with the modernist revolt against gentility—that is, with modernism’s attempt to reclaim aesthetic production as a space for the redemptively manly virtues of craft, experimentation, and disciplined labor. Raymond Chandler makes this connection himself in “The Simple Art of Mur­ der” (1944). See Glover, “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Masculinity, Femi­ ninity and the Thriller,” in Gender, Genre and Narrative Pleasure, ed. Derek Longhurst (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 74; and Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder (1950; New York: Vintage, 1988), 14. 7. See John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History (London: Faber and Faber, 1972); Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980); and Marty Roth, Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction (Athens: University...