The Traditional English Village and Its Stock Figures in Some Novels by Agatha Christi ee

88 Pages·2007·0.41 MB·English

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

TThhee TTrraaddiittiioonnaall EEnngglliisshh VViillllaaggee aanndd IIttss SSttoocckk
FFiigguurreess iinn SSoommee NNoovveellss bbyy AAggaatthhaa CChhrriissttiiee

Zlata Leibnerová

Supervisor: PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSc., M. Litt.

Brno 2007
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and
secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………..
I would like to thank my supervisor, PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSc., M. Litt. for her
kind help, valuable advice and revision of my thesis.
Table of Contents:
Preface..................................................................................................................................1

1. Introduction.................................................................................................................4

1. 1 Golden Age Detective Stories............................................................................................4

1. 2 Agatha Christie...................................................................................................................6

1. 3 Life in the Village...............................................................................................................9

2. People Who Run the Village Life.............................................................................12

3. Doctors and vicars.........................................................................................................19

4. Retired Army Officers...................................................................................................28

5. Young Independent Women.........................................................................................36

6. Wives and Mothers........................................................................................................46

7. Spinsters and Widows...................................................................................................54

8. Wicked Young Men and Prodigal Sons.......................................................................61

9. Servants..........................................................................................................................67

Conclusion..........................................................................................................................74

Bibliography.......................................................................................................................82
Preface

This thesis attempts to compare and contrast the English village and its inhabitants
as portrayed in the novels by Agatha Christie. It is based on the analysis of eight detective
stories that take place in the country and were written at two different periods of
the twentieth century.
Agatha Christie has been often reproached for having created “a timeless,
changeless world, peopled by cardboard characters” (Barnard 133). Her portrayal of
the country in particular represents the target for the criticism. The English villages
the author created are referred to as Mayhem Parva, which is to be defined as “a world shut
off from the political and social preoccupations of the day” (Barnard 34) and their
inhabitants are said to be based on clichés and stereotypes, lacking any psychological
depth. These assumptions led me to define the area of interest of my thesis, the village and
its figures, and the aim of my work is to trace whether these claims are well-founded
or not.
A village is an ideal setting of a detective story because it provides the writer with
an enclosed group of people. Throughout her career, Agatha Christie wrote many novels
that take place in the country. Her rural settings are rarely anchored in space, they are
predominantly fictitious. However, their creation was inspired by the places Christie
visited during her life (Morgan 176). The best known village is without doubt St Mary
Mead, a place where one of the author’s most famous detectives, Miss Marple, lives. It is
a quiet, peaceful place where everyone knows each other and any one new stands out
a mile. Other villages such as Wychwood, Sittaford or King’s Abbot are similar to this one.
To show whether these communities can be really perceived as sealed from the outside
world I decided to base my thesis on the comparison of the English village as portrayed
at the beginning and at the end of Christie’s career.
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However, the village serves only as a starting point of the thesis. At the core of
the work lie the village characters. The detective stories of the Golden Age period do not
usually leave any place for worked-out character analyses or complicated personal
relationships. This allows the reader to concentrate solely on the resolution of the puzzle.
In her stories, Agatha Christie introduced a set of figures that, as mentioned above, are
referred to as “cardboard” or “flat”, terms used for types that “are constructed round
a single idea or quality” (Forster 73). Thus, the reader usually knows what to expect from
them and recognizes them as soon as they appear on the scene. The village in particular is
a place where the author widely used her stock characters. It is due to the fact that unlike
the city, the village is seen as a stable place where people do not stay just for a while. It can
be associated with a small number of residents, usually elderly people, who settled there
for the rest of their lives. Thus, the typical inhabitants of Christie’s villages are retired
army officers, gossipy spinsters, a vicar, a doctor and a squire. Apart from these figures,
the majority of villages also feature other characters that can be identified with Christie’s
detective stories, such as independent women, wicked men, ne’er-do-well sons, ordinary
wives and servants. These characters are definitely worth noticing as they are not only
typical of Christie’s writing but their way of life might give us an insight into society of
the time. It is also worth exploring whether it is true that Christie relied on these stock
types throughout her whole career or whether she changed them, described them more
elaborately or introduced some new characters. To provide a thorough analysis of
the above mentioned figures, the thesis is divided into eight chapters, each dedicated to
the respective characters. As the life in the countryside revolves around the vicarage and
a consulting room of the local doctor is also of great importance, the roles of vicars and
doctors are explored in one of the chapters. In the part entitled Servants, I illustrate how
Christie wrote about these lower-class characters and the chapter called People Who Run
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the Village Life is dedicated to the aristocracy and upper-class representatives. The thesis
also focuses on the portrayal of women at different stages of their lives (Young
Independent Women, Wives and Mothers, Spinsters and Widows) and the two remaining
chapters concentrate on the description of qualities of Christie’s army officers and on
the way the writer depicts the young male characters.
Apart from this, the work also includes general background that relates to
the period when the detective stories were created. This part provides information
concerning the genre, the author and the English village of the twentieth century.
As already mentioned, the principal task is to show what the village figures
of Christie’s stories are like, what position they have in the village community and whether
they undergo some changes or not. Christie’s work spans six decades. During that time
British society underwent numerous significant changes. To demonstrate whether
the author reflects this development and whether she creates new characters that
correspond to the alteration of the village communities, the thesis concentrates on
the analysis of eight novels that take place in the countryside. Four of them date back to
the beginning of Christie’s career, to the period from 1925 to 1940, and they are as
follows: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), The Murder at the Vicarage (1930),
The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Murder is Easy (1939). The rest of the books were written
towards the end of the author’s career, from 1960 to 1975: The Pale Horse (1961),
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), Hallowe’en Party (1969) and Nemesis
(1971).

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1. Introduction
1. 1 Golden Age Detective Stories

It was after the First World War that the detective story genre was at its peak. These
years are called the Golden Age of the detective story, and to be more precise, it spans
the period from 1920 to 1937. Its beginning is marked by the publication of the first
detective story written by Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the period
closes with the last novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon (Trodd 129).
This literary form was exactly what people wanted after the war – it reflected their
need to relax and escape the monotonous life they led. In contrast to the realism of
the nineteenth century, the detective story represented light reading and was marked
by emotional detachment and absence of violence. The writers of the Golden Age period
did not usually discuss problems of society in their novels, they concentrated on the game,
on the adventure. This aspect corresponds to the period of the 1920s, to the needs
of society shaken by the horrors of the First World War (Light 66).
In 1928 the Detection Club was founded and at the same time, Monsignor Ronald
Knox formulated his famous Decalogue, a set of ten fair-play rules that were to guide
detective fiction. It would be pointless to mention all of them here, let us just provide a few
examples to show some of the restrictions imposed on the genre:
1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which
will need a long scientific explanation at the end. 7. The detective must not
himself commit the crime. 8. The detective must not light on any clues
which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any
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thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly,
but very slightly, below that of the average reader. (Smith)
The core of the detective story lies in the puzzle. The principal question is who
committed a crime and how he/she did it. The other aspects of the novel are of less
importance, they are subordinate to the record of crime and deduction (Symons 8). This
important feature of the detective stories is closely linked to the rules concerning
the characters and the setting. In order not to distract the reader from unfolding a crime, the
list of characters, which means of potential suspects, should be limited. The reader must be
able to get to know all of them. The limited number of characters is then tied to
the restricted setting such as a country house, ship, summer resort etc.
The emphasis put on the construction of the puzzle led to the assumption that
virtually everyone can become a writer of detective stories and there were many critics
of this genre, such as Julian Symons or Raymond Chandler. In his famous essay
The Simple Art of Murder, the latter author attacks the detective stories, the English ones
in particular, for being artificial and wants the “murder” to return to the “alley” where
it belongs:
[Detective stories] do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too
contrived and too little aware of what goes on in the world. […] But if
the writers of this fiction […] wrote about the kind of murders that happen,
they would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is lived.
(Chandler 56)
However, detective fiction also had its supporters. The response to Raymond Chandler was
W. H. Auden’s The Guilty Vicarage where he defends the restricted setting of the genre
by assuming that the universe of the detective stories is “Eden-like” (qtd. in Hubly 512).
The crime disrupts the order of this good place and its solving therefore plays the most
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important role. Once the criminal is arrested, “innocence is restored” (qtd. in Hubly 512)
and the community is purged from the sin. Thus, according to Auden, the detective stories
play with the dichotomy of guilt and innocence and that provides the explanation of
the portrayal of an innocent and idealized setting, for example a village.
There were many detective story writers in Britain in the 1920s, however,
a prominent position was held by female authors who brought some novelties to the genre,
such as introduction of domestic features and social issues. The most famous women
writers of the period are usually called the English Queens of Crime and they are as
follows: Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie. These
authors often break the restricting rules and their works bring more than just
a masterly constructed mystery (Trodd 129-130).
Later on, as the demands of the public on the authenticity of the story increased,
the detective story genre gradually gave way to the different crime fiction whose form is
not that limited by the fair-play rules which prevented the writers from concealing any
important clues from the reader (James 5). The principal change is marked by the basic
question: This time it is not who but why that matters. Thus, the psychology of
the characters plays a much more important role. Furthermore, crime fiction also focuses
on the police procedures and expertise which are rarely developed in the classical detective
fiction (Symons 183-185).

1. 2 Agatha Christie

As mentioned above, Agatha Christie started writing in the 1920s, during the period
that is known as the Golden Age of detective fiction and the author herself is often called
the Greatest Queen of Crime. During her career, she wrote over eighty crime novels and
short story collections and many plays out of which the best-known is without doubt
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