New Left Legacies, Marxist-Feminist Ambivalences
Bronwen Levy
Department of English
University of Queensland
In these postmodern times, much is made of the inadequacy of 'grand' or 'totalizing' or, in a somewhat different register, 'essentialising' theories, often, a critic of such views may feel, in a way that avoids discussion of historical and material issues rather than usefully complicating them, that slaps on a label as a substitute for analysis and investigation. Yet it is not necessary to be suspicious of theoretical approaches that derive in some way from Marxism to be of Elizabeth Grosz's opinion that the idea of "a complete and coherent theory" approaches fantasy, displays its own impossible desire for wish-fulfilment for, as I argue elsewhere, this implies an historically impossible closure, an end of (and to) history.1
The topic of this paper lies in an ambiguous conjunction of ambivalent areas, that is the relations between marxism and other materialisms and feminism, and between politics and theory and literary texts. This conjunction remains in important and necessary senses both incomplete and incoherent, for both sets of relations can make rationalist 'theory' and contingent 'practice' rather difficult. Both feminism and art or literature, when theorised, are affected negatively by too much 'rationalism'; both, in conventional accounts, are seen as 'in excess' or 'extra' to the main political game (of various types); both are therefore destabilizing, likely to be associated with the irrational or even the hysterical and, certainly, with the private which, in its Australian inflection, can also be understood as the 'suburban.'
This may help explain the minor horror displayed at the Rethinking Marxism in Australia Conference about domestic or backyard or Hills-Hoist socialisms2 when, more correctly, the wind-up rotating clothesline has handily assisted the work of the Australian housewife and therefore benefitted her family. It seems no accident that this same clothesline, much improved on its predecessors, is these days so despised&endash;unlike other 1950s paraphernalia, there are no retro-chic moves to revive it&endash;as if this startling-looking instrument is too obvious a reminder of the (post?)modern subject's dependence on the 'feminine' and her (unfashionable) labour. Real boys don't hang out the family washing? Yet, as feminists who consider the requisite material underpinnings consistently argue, neglecting what is, for women, a domestic-industrial continuum allows massive structural discrimination against women to continue. Cuts to childcare, long hours of unpaid housework, and underpayment in the 'public' economy mean that Australian women are currently not so much equal citizens as "slaves to the nation," as Marilyn Lake rhetorically argues: "Women's excessive working hours are an outrage and a national disgrace," further, "women, in taking on double and triple shifts, are being worked to death."3 On a related point Eva Cox notes that a "society in which it is possible to make a mix of roles work," in which options can be exercised, "is still to come" and that, regrettably, for the "system changes" that are needed for this to happen, "it will be the younger feminists that have to do it."4 Cox carefully distances feminism from the 'have-it-all' philosophy, achievable by nobody but with which feminism is often conflated, in her discussion of the as yet only partially realised (or necessarily in-process?) feminist project.
This paper is predicated on the value of maintaining the 'excess' of feminism (for materialism) and of literature or art (for theory and politics) and on seeing how these excesses combine but, following on from the interest in language and economies in Katherine Gibson's paper, in the notion of "language projects … not only yield[ing] new domains of intelligibility" but also providing the "conditions of political desire, "and of "queering the economic landscape, opening every entity up to resignification"&endash;5in rejecting the linguistic violence of 'capitalism' as 'always already,' universally and consistently dominating&endash;I want to allow for the possibility of some aspects of these impossible desires already being with us, but unrecognised, unspoken, or perhaps unheard. I am not here entering into an argument about whether or not Gibson 'sells out' in some way by over-emphasising the political achievements of 'simply' calling some things something else: although re-signification as a strategy on its own is never adequate, its effects are still open for discussion. For my purposes here, however, I wish to contemplate the possibilities that may be offered by an interest in language, histories, and economies in the imaginary fictional space that is, in part, my topic. I would add, however, that the most enlightening discussions of ideas like Gibson's are likely to be those that centrally address similar questions, as does Michelle Renée Matisons in her comparative analysis of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the 'energetic value theory' of Teresa Brennan.6
Class, as has been remarked (by E.P. Thompson and others) is best understood as always in formation, a process rather than prescription or description. So too feminism, including those versions that seek to consider questions of gender in connection with class. The public and the private, the historical and the emotional or psychological become not just connected in such approaches but radically unsettled in their definitions, much less distinct than often thought. Novel reading, just one example, may be done in private but this requires 'public' as well as 'private' institutions and structures; materialist criticisms contribute greatly to our understanding this.
Finding marxism and feminism together as a readily-locatable entity or set of arguments occurs less often these days than it used to (although more often than many people think), and this is an effect of changing and developing times, political conditions, intellectual preoccupations. But perhaps those who are inclined to undertake this search also look in the wrong places for unlikely objects. In a review of three books all drawing from marxism in distinct and distinctive ways, Andrew Milner notes how "complex and internally differentiated"7 the marxist legacy is. So, too, the marxist-feminist legacy, and one cultural space where this can actively be traced is the crime novel, specifically the feminist crime novel which, from the 1980s onwards, has been an expanding genre.
This is not to say that the feminist, or feminist-influenced crime novel is always marxist-feminist as such, although some examples, such as The Lost Time Café by Elizabeth Wilson, a feminist theorist and writer on various left, postmodern, and queer issues (including in this novel) can confidently be claimed for such a literary current.8 Some feminist crime novels lean towards an unreflexive liberalism and, certainly, the crime novel with its individualist focus on a solitary, problem-solving, derring-do hero may be a form with strongly conservative affiliations. But in fiction as in theory, an oscillation between the 'status quo' of centrality and the 'excess' of experimentation can be observed. A simultaneous tendency towards 'multiplicity' and 'instability' has also allowed the feminist crime novel to become a repository of issues that involve a public-private connection, of what would often be described as left-feminist questions, a materialist-influenced legacy. Oddly, but adding to the interest of the form, the contemporary feminist crime novel often plays out (and with) topics of postmodern uncertainty through what are primarily modernist structures and interpretative possibilities. By and large, this is not overly a queerly resignifying form, although there are exceptions such as Elizabeth Wilson's novel, mentioned above, or Jan McKemmish's A Gap in the Records or Finola Moorhead's Still Murder, both shape-shifting, genre-altering novels.9 To these deliberately experimental texts, however, should be added an awareness of some genre changes occasioned, inevitably it seems, by the introduction of feminist, and often specifically lesbian elements. Sally R. Munt argues that the lesbian crime novel "evolved primarily out of lesbian, rather than crime fiction" (1950s and early 1960s lesbian pulp, specifically) so that in some instances "the romantic tension [is] yoked to the crime fictional hermeneutic of alternate disclosure and disappointment";10 lesbian romance merges with crime, in other words.
Reading crime novels involves tension, excitement, satisfaction, and also a curious disappointment, the let-down of an achieved (and achievable) solution. My own reading history is intimately bound up with these books and their associated emotions, for my mother was, and is, a choosey afficionada of the genre (sneaking away to bed every night to read one) so that during school summer holidays I learned to read on her turnover of library books, all with a frisson of danger in their titles. One, called (I think) "The Dear Dead Girls," remains in my memory: it disturbed me that my mother read a book with such a title, given that my sister and I were the only 'girls' in our family. What could this mean about the book, or my mother? Yet a focus on meaning, on signification, is a precisely-defining feature of the genre for in many ways the crime novel works as a paranoid fantasy. With its often too coherent conclusion, a crime novel shows that everything is potentially a sign and has meaning, no matter how apparently unconnected, and that everything leads on in a unified narrative to a single solution (although sometimes the solution's singularity is questioned). Every effect has an identifiable cause so that the more complexly but exactly the ends are tied up, the better for the crime and the novel.
Feminism also aims to decipher, to make meanings; successfully achieving this often signals the presence of a feminist subject who, in this case, might be seen as coherent and unified, a modernist rather than postmodernist entity. An ability to maintain such a stable subjectivity is inherently comforting, given the buffetings any independent woman is likely to experience in the big bad world, in the confusingly chaotic city, suggesting again the close associations in this genre of fear with a desired, rather middle-class resolution, with fantasy. The feminist fictional detective figure, whether amateur or professional, eventually can 'read the signs' around her, but this ain't easy and the narrative shows her abilities improving in this regard. It is surely interesting that so many fictional feminist detective figures come from 'meaning-making' or 'interpretative' professions: cops, ex-cops, private eyes, all seek real stories, but so do fictional readers, writers, translators, as in the character Cassandra Reilly in Barbara Wilson's Trouble in Transylvania and Gaudi Afternoon (and Pam Nilsen, Wilson's earlier detective heroine in Murder in the Collective, Sisters of the Road, and The Dog Collar Murders started off in a collective publishing venture),11 or journalists, as in Val McDermid's Lindsay Gordon novels.12 A close association of writing with feminist activism or, at least, activity and problem-solving, a heroic and potentially political activity is intriguing when posited as a defining feature of a feminist subjectivity. This fictional occurrence also calls into question the relation between the implied reader and the 'real' author. Val McDermid, for example, worked for some time as a journalist, and 'Nicci French,' the author of several feminist-influenced (perhaps rather post-feminist) novels is described in her novels' author-information as a journalist living in London, although 'really' Nicci French is a female-male, wife-husband team of former journalists, writing (though only the spelling of the forename suggests this) as a woman.13 The two are Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, so it may be a wry joke that the authorial name, 'Nicci French,' can also signify 'Mrs French,' a 'politically incorrect' moniker. Wife-and-husband writing teams, while not usual, are more likely to be found in non-fiction writing where the conventions enable dual authorship to be more readily indicated, but a wife-and-husband (or even just woman-and-man) writing under a female signature is more remarkable. The feminist-leaning topics of the French novels may have inclined the authors towards a (mildly androgynous) female signature, and there are comparable cases also in more 'feminine' fiction, such as the romance writer Emma D'Arcy, until the death of the female partner 'really' Wendy and Frank Brennan (who still writes under this pseudonym).
Nicci Gerrard herself has been involved in and written on women's and feminist publishing14 and, while on the topic of authorial signatures, it is pertinent that Katherine Gibson, when writing with Julie Graham, publishes not as a partner in an academic dua but, subversively, as part of a merged, non-sex-specific identity. Probably, both 'Nicci French' and 'J.K. Gibson-Graham' enjoy the 'gender-destabilising' aspects of their signatures, and the latter also brings to mind M. Barnard Eldershaw, the merged joint signature of two female fiction writers, Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw. Who writes (what), and what do you call yourself, is always an issue.
Nicci French's protagonists are professionals although not writers, but they do have to learn to narrativise what is around them. This means bringing into the open, recognizing and naming, that which frightens and threatens them. French's characters, unwilling and therefore especially amateur detectives, are at the outset less knowing, more positioned within the crime, than McDermid's. The French novels are also psychological crime thrillers so the plots are in formal respects more multi-layered and deliberately obscured, more Gothic than McDermid's which, while directly engaging with issues of lesbian sexuality and therefore also critiquing heterosexuality (the French novels take heterosexuality as a given), formally are rather more 'straight.' (McDermid also writes more psychological crime thrillers, and has a series with a heterosexual female sleuth, Kate Brannigan.) French's characters are less knowing, less glamorously 'out there' in the real world and so are positioned neither as potentially capable of becoming decoders of crime and violence, like the Lindsay Gordon journalist figure, nor are they, like the private-eye sleuths of liberal feminist novels as in Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski series, already engaging with crime and corruption as a necessary part of the job, showing, by their choice of occupation, their intention to live up to their 'real world' desires. McDermid's Lindsay Gordon, as a journalist, is already street-wise, it's just that the world is even seamier, more sexist than she knows or thinks. Lindsay Gordon, as detective, gains experience and knowledge and becomes an heroic feminist 'rescuer,' with vicarious satisfaction for the reader in her achievement which is still, realistically, somewhat undercut. Questions about the narrative methods of fiction and journalism, of where elements of detective and romance genres merge with writing 'truth,' form part of the reading context, a type of optional extra, in the French and McDermid novels, I'd suggest. For those in the know about the authors (and the authors' notes do give the requisite clues), and because of the topics of the novels (the kinds of crimes, some of the characters), the subject position of fiction writer and journalist becomes semi-merged as the source of the 'veracity' of fictionally encoded information, so that authorial/narratorial knowledge becomes a kind of power, all rather alluring to the reader.
A sexual difference, of sexual orientation or identity, is also important when comparing the French and McDermid novels, together with their other literary, generic, and political differences. The lesbian-feminist crime novel, like lesbian fiction in general and unlike the heterosexual plots of the French novels, displays a special fascination with what the crime novel relies upon, the decoding and interpreting of signs in the sense that the lesbian figure already knows, at the outset, that to read the straight and the queer world she must constantly, cautiously interpret but also, optimistically, over-interpret, allow for possibilities. The resulting intensity in the novel is especially piquant, for an outsider's ability to interpret comprehensively is both sexy (a source of pleasure) and a sign of intelligence and resourcefulness (useful for survival, particularly where the balance is tipped in favour of masculine strength/patriarchal power). Perhaps this, which can be elegantly or comically presented, helps explain the appeal among heterosexual, as well as lesbian, feminists of considerable volumes of lesbian feminist crime romance. Heterosexual feminists as well as lesbians may respond to and admire the agency of the lesbian fictional detective, both as she engages with the oppressive structures of society and in her erotic desires and encounters. For we are in a space of simultaneous recognition and imagination: McDermid suggests that it is lesbian desire, rather than sex, that is transgressive in fiction. Dorothy Porter (the poet-author of innovative lesbian crime verse-fiction) questions whether lesbianism does not function for contemporary heterosexual readers rather like adultery did in nineteenth-century fiction, that is, it's 'titillating' because out-of-bounds, because (not-quite) forbidden.15
The McDermid and French novels, arising out of and about Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, also arise from preoccupations in left and feminist politics, in Britain and elsewhere, during this period. As novels, and crime novels specifically, a connection between individuals, or groups of individuals, and power in society is structurally foregrounded; the private in connection to the public is explored. That the authors turned from journalism to the novel in part to explore such issues is worthy of consideration, as if 'factual' writing could not contain all that they wished to say. Indeed, in writing these days the instability of fact-fiction distinctions is increasingly apparent, whether in the 'cultural turn' of post-New Left politics (of which these novels form a part, and which has been widely debated in left and feminist circles), or in the generic changes in broadsheet newspapers which today contain more feature and opinion articles, and correspondingly less 'hard' news than some years ago, leading to anxieties in some quarters about the 'softening' or 'feminisation' of the major media. 'Feminisation' also requires the presence of women in numbers approaching a critical mass, so it is worth pondering whether the feminist crime novel has 'feminised' the genre by bringing 'feminine' issues into its political ambit. We may also wish to consider the novel from the point of view of the woman reader for, as well as politicising 'the feminine,' such 'feminisation' also brings other (hard?) political issues into a location, form, or genre that is accessible and appealing to her. An oscillation of public-private is here quite apparent, and it's marked by the class instability of the association of fictional 'glamour' with reader aspirations.
Nevertheless, the political moments of the Lindsay Gordon and the French novels are rather different from each other. McDermid's novels are more clearly socialist-feminist: political questions, which are addressed from this perspective, derive directly from socialist-feminist debates and activities from the mid-1980s onwards. McDermid's 'moment' is that of Thatcherism, and the reader is treated to closely observed, familiar-seeming accounts of the problems of activism and organisation in a right-wing state, of the contradictions of (some) women being (somewhat) successful in their careers at this time, of schisms on the left, all combined with what this means for feminist and lesbian identity, for feminist and lesbian community. McDermid's novels, like French's, are also recognisably British which manifests not only in the attention to questions of British culture (Lindsay's taste in food) or of nationality (the Scots versus the English and, when Lindsay crosses the Atlantic, of British versus American mores, including feminist ones) but, for this reader, in the narratives' assumption of the centrality of such (Northern Hemisphere) issues. The novels are engaged with details of politics, organisation (collectives, unions), and lived experience (what is a feminist private life, for example).
The politics of McDermid's novels thus operate primarily at the level of content. The implied reader of these texts is a left feminist who understands sexuality to be a political issue and who at least leans towards lesbianism. In most other contexts, literary and political, the interests, desires, and achievements of such readers are ignored, are 'excess' to requirements. The serious, but wrily humorous way that McDermid approaches such issues will thus be met with relief as well as recognition by many in her audience: a safe space from which to explore danger is created. Lindsay Gordon is a sympathetic figure, likeable, engaged in glamorous business but not too stylish, capable (and capable of pleasure), not usually naïve but still sometimes acting against her (and the reader's) better instincts. Her lesbian feminist detective identity allows the plot to examine left, feminist, and lesbian issues from within their own debates: an 'insider's view' is presented. For example, the novel Common Murder seems conventionally enough named, with the title playing on varying usages of the word 'common': the law; a plot of public land (the village common of British usage); the double senses of 'shared' and 'ordinary.' But the plot revolves around murders at a women's peace camp at the fictional Brownlow Common, a reference of course to Greenham and the solution, satisfying for feminist readers, involves learning quite a lot about the secret service and about male violence against women. Lindsay is also not-all-that-aligned: she's a feminist who retains the scepticism of her journalist-detective calling, not sharing the politics of separatist feminists but also unsure about the class loyalties of liberal feminist careerists in Thatcher's Britain.
The novel Union Jack also entertains while exploring a range of left and feminist issues. The title, a play on the flag, focusses on the laddish (and worse) behaviour of British male trades unionists, for this is the subversive nickname of one of their number who becomes a murder victim. The novel takes place at the annual conference of the media union, and the reader is treated to the in-politics of left and left-leaning fictional journalists who work for a range of British media (the newspapers have barely disguised names, and so on). Again, the plot involves male violence, patriarchal power structures, the Right, and female collusion, as well as the usual, and pleasurable double-dealing of romantic decoys, true romance and, in a feminist novel, masculine thuggery. This, like the other Lindsay Gordon mysteries, represents both a feminist intervention into the crime novel and an intertwined queering of the romance novel which, in Union Jack, allows for something of a range in the male characters as well. But what does this suggest in terms of overall political interventions, and of the inevitable ambivalences of my topic? McDermid examines the precisions and subtleties of working against the Thatcherite state but, for the reader, there is also a comforting sense of the importance of one's convictions when living in what seems a state of siege, a sense even of one's own importance when left politics, and feminist tendencies within these, are taken seriously (which, in the world of the novel, includes being attacked both by the state and by rightward elements within left groupings). The 'dispossessed'&endash;women, gays, and others&endash;are mostly positioned on the side of good rather than evil, are part of a 'solution' for they aren't, at first, really implicated in violence and retain a reassuring innocence even when unable to escape it; however, the novels also show that all this is rather more complex, and that 'innocence' may be an illusion in McDermid's bleak, somewhat decaying urban landscapes. If you're so inclined, the Lindsay Gordon books are thus more than good reads for as well as being well-plotted (if sometimes a little psychologically clunky), they are politically informed and clever, generically somewhat subversive and, quite often, humorous. Appealingly&endash;or is it, in a novel?&endash;left-feminist and lesbian politics, while presented as complicated&endash;evade middle-class scepticism. They help form the plot and are argued for and about, but the need for their radical insights is not debated. McDermid's novels examine, explore, play with, and imagine the implications of what is in other contexts a source of much female, and working-class, anger.
The Nicci French mysteries take quite a different, although related position on all this and, in their analysis of danger for women in urban or semi-urban settings, also lead in different directions. These are much more sceptical, even ironic, and more middle-class novels; first published in the late 1990s, they focus more clearly on individual and private life although a politicisation of 'individual' private issues does inform this focus. French writes complexly crafted psychological thrillers with strong Gothic associations, of the "someone wants to kill me and I think it's my husband (or other male associate)" variety. Victim and killer could be anyone&endash;who's next?&endash;and the detecting figure is especially isolated. When the suspense doesn't let up, the narratives are sinister, the killer hard to pick, there's lots of enjoyment for the reader.
French's main characters, all women (and heterosexual) are, unlike McDermid's, uninvolved in political activity and from middle-class backgrounds (Lindsay Gordon is working-class, and her class negotiations&endash;whether professional or personal&endash;with different characters help form the plot dynamic). French's characters are, however, all living very contemporary lives with modern (or postmodern?) problems, and there is a lot of 'juggling,' of home, work, family, children, romance, friends, and so on, and also some anxiety about choices, those that have been made and those that might have been. The main characters tend to be in a marooned state of psychological drifting, even malaise which makes them vulnerable, not well equipped to recognise the clues, subtle or otherwise, to the causes of all not being well around them, despite the apparently benign middle-class surface.
In terms of a public-private political connection, French's novels are more quietist than McDermid's. There is horror a-plenty, but comparatively less linking of it to 'public' institutional questions. In some respects they can be interpreted as post-Thatcherite, in that some elements of feminist thinking have become, ideologically, relatively more mainstream, more 'commonsense' than political and, in terms of consumerist lifestyles, of 'choices,' things are more than comfortable. The novels' 'excess,' so necessary for the reader, lies in the more conventional crime thriller domain of what happens when 'private life' goes wrong and lays bare its structural horrors, not just inequalities. The solutions are substantially psychological, even if our twisted villains also possess more power than their victims, but to analyse the psychology that is central to the plot (to nail the murderer, propose solutions), a knowledge of feminist approaches to questions such as sado-masochism, child abuse, sexual exploitation, rape, the politics of the family, is required. Interestingly, the narrative perspective of French's novels, while assuming that such material is horrifying, both in itself and for the reader, does not assume the reader is unfamiliar with these questions. French's implied reader has followed public discussion, in the media and elsewhere, about such issues and, whether feminist or not, understands these are in some respects political, not just personal issues. In the Lindsay Gordon novels, that male left trades unionists may be sexist is presented as a radical viewpoint and a marker of the novels' political credentials; in Nicci French, that child abuse exists is assumed to be common (readerly) knowledge. French's novels require feminism, without being feminist in the clearly indicated manner of McDermid's. Some feminist assumptions seem to be sloughed off: are they in some sense post-feminist?
Herein lies the twist: French's novels could not have been written without feminism but, in the sense of their not particularly advancing a discussion within feminism, in feminist terms, they are not motivated by it. What motivates these texts, what propels the action, and what ultimately helps in providing a plot solution is a questioning of what seem to be posited here as feminist orthodoxies. Taking as their topics what feminists have already established as both socially common and psychologically and politically extreme, French's novels ask whether some results or conclusions of feminist ideas are themselves excessive, are too simple or 'politically correct.' Feminism, a central informing force of the ideological and material circumstances of these novels, is also destabilised in them. A question to be left open and which, as I read the novels, should be if only so it can oscillate with the 'post-feminist' question above is, are these novels, in some respects, subtly anti-feminist? Is 'post-feminism' a sign of the (partial) success of feminism or, in new times and conditions, of a re-grouped conservatism? For this reader, the resulting ambivalence is a disturbing feature of the French experience but also an intriguing one, for it needs to be said that ambivalence and ambiguity, disturbing or not, are often a feature of the 'excess' of both the ‘feminine' and of artistic texts, as I have argued throughout this paper.
Some 'evidence' from the plots: in Killing Me Softly, a (new, young, second) wife exposes her serial killer husband but for her it seems, there is no love quite like it. In The Safe House, the language of 'safety,' so much a part of a familiar social work/therapy discourse of solutions to child abuse, of 'managing' this problem, is undermined. 'Safety' is shown to be ultimately impossible, a desire not a reality in this discourse but, while many feminists will agree that 'safety' is only ever as good as you can manage, the novel also works to challenge the underpinnings of feminist work in such projects. Danger is always lurking, not enough is known about anybody around you, so how far can violence and cruelty be overcome, is there trust, are there solutions? Continuing this preoccupation, The Memory Game combines a critique of some feminist positions on (and readings of) repressed memory syndrome with a critique of interpretation altogether, a clever move in a crime thriller. The problem here isn't that memory may have a meaning but rather that interpreting it with any certainty at all is dicey so that, in the first instance, the wrong murderer (it's a sex crime) is identified. Unusually in a crime novel, the capacity to arrive at a correct interpretation is questioned at the same time that the plot is resolved via a correct interpretation. Such a narrative trick tends to emphasise for the reader the centrality and skill of the writer, and of the interpreter-characters who make better meanings than characters who are too 'fixed' in their opinions. 'Experts' are shown as less likely to change their minds than the apparently disinterested outsider. Interpreting psychological drama and suspense may not be a matter of 'knowledge' and expertise, then, of experience; rather, what is needed is a retention of the possibilities of an intuitive decoding, of something like the sceptical irrational (which, I have suggested, is coded closely with the 'feminine.') The novels warn against a search for political closure as likely to be too simple, and ultimately dangerous. Can feminists 'manage'the dangers thrown up in sexual politics? Do feminists heed the 'feminine' sufficiently? 'Activist' figures do not, as in the Lindsay Gordon novels, arrive at the 'right' (complex) solution, instead the novels represent the partially undercut triumph of the unaligned amateur, the individual. And, if a middle-class, 'safe' world is questioned, then what is confirmed is a middle-class suspicion of all 'others' (including&endash;and this draws on feminist insights&endash;those close to you).
What all this means for interpretation, for materialism, for feminism, should be left appropriately open. In this paper, I'm not aiming for the closure of the crime fiction novel. If materialist feminist questions in cultural form&endash;surely a new left legacy&endash;are not solved in literary texts, then this may be as much to do with politics as with artistic genres. That political issues are presented as socially important, and that sexual politics are taken seriously in this form, offers a measure of feminist success, however, and suggests a materialist legacy. The achieved solutions of McDermid's novels are pleasing but, the reader knows, a new crime will occur tomorrow so that our hero Lindsay will fight again, in her own distinctive way, another day. Resolution leads on to new insecurities, new adventures, or is this wish-fulfilment? The French novels, so much wishing to maintain a distanced position even about that which informs them, move between a genuine scepticism and a semi-ironic or even worried and debilitating lack of position which leads into a questioning that seems to diminish its sources, its assumptions. When should 'evidence' be acted on, when should it be questioned? When, and where and how, do we continue to experiment with, and debate, the politics of re-signification?
1. See my article, "Unhappy Metaphors, Patriarchal Plots and Enemy Classes: Marxism, Feminism and Cultural Critique in the Academy", in Ferrier, C. and Pelan, R. eds., (1998), The Point of Change: Marxism/Australia/ History/Theory, Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland, p. 270. For Grosz, as mentioned here and in my 1998 article, see "Identity and Difference: A Response," in James, P. ed., (1994), Critical Politics: From the Personal to the Global, Fitzroy, Arena Publishers, pp. 29-30.
2. See, for example, Cox, B., Demetrakis, D., Donaldson, M., Leal, R. and Southall, R. (1999) "Katherine Gibson and the Antinomies of Post-Modern Socialism" paper presented at the Rethinking Marxism in Australia Conference, University of Wollongong, 12 Nov. 1999.
3. Lake, M. (1999), "A Republic Fit for Women," Refractory Girl, 53, pp. 15, 16.
4. Cox, E. (1999), "A Balanced Life Is Hard to Find," Refractory Girl, 53, p. 12.
5. Gibson, K. "Diverse Economies: Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist Futures," paper presented at the Rethinking Marxism in Australia Conference, University of Wollongong, 12 Nov. 1999. Copies of the paper are available directly from the author by email.
6. Matisons, M.R. (1999-2000), "Valuing Nature: Teresa Brennan's Economic Theory," Arena Journal 14, 113-26. Also see Matisons, (1998), "The New Feminist Philosophy of the Body: Haraway, Butler and Brennan," European Journal of Women's Studies, 5.1, pp. 9-34.
7. Milner, A. (1999), "Once Were Marxists," Overland, 155, p. 64.
8. Wilson, E. (1993), The Lost Time Café, London, Virago.
9. McKemmish, J. (1985), A Gap in the Records, Fitzroy, Sybylla; Moorhead, f. (1991), Still Murder, Ringwood, Penguin.
10. Munt, S.R. (1994), Murder by the Book: Feminism and the Crime Novel, London, Routledge, pp. 121, 129.
11. Wilson, B. (1993), Trouble in Transylvania, London, Virago; (1990), Gaudi Afternoon, Seattle, Seal; (1984), Murder in the Collective, London, Women's; (1986), Sisters of the Road, Seattle, Seal; (1989), The Dog Collar Murders, London, Virago.
12. McDermid, V. (1987), Report for Murder, London, Women's; (1989), Common Murder, London, Women's; (1991), Final Edition, London, Women's; (1993), Union Jack, London, Women's; (1997), Booked for Murder, London, Women's.
13. Nicci French's crime novels are: (1997), The Memory Game, London, Heinemann; (1998); The Safe House, London, Michael Joseph; (1999), Killing Me Softly, London, Heinemann; (2000), Beneath the Skin, London, Michael Joseph.
14. See Gerrard, N. (1989), Into the Mainstream, London, Pandora. Gerrard helped found the Women's Review (1985-1987).
15. Porter and McDermid spoke in these terms in a panel on gay and lesbian literature ("Walk on the Wildside") at the Brisbane Writers Festival, 17 Oct. 1999. Porter's two crime verse-novels are: (1994), The Monkey's Mask, South Melbourne, Hyland; (1999), What a Piece of Work, Sydney, Pan Macmillan.