Detecting gender: Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger
(1943; using the Harper edition, London, 2002)

Quaint English village, strangely unbloody murder, Miss Marple… yes, all present. Then there are servants, people leading lives of pointless leisure and an absence of external politics. All very much par for the Christie course. One aspect of this novel, however, stands out as particularly interesting, and that is its portrayal of gender.

Some characters are unambiguous – Jerry Burton is a man’s man, injured pilot and all that, and his sister Joanna may be a little ‘fast’, and even smokes, but she is sticking to type by dropping everything to come to the country and nurse her brother back to health. She is ‘very pretty and very gay’ and quite possibly ‘queer’ (pp. 13, 15), though not, obviously in that way – her heterosexual credentials are, in fact, rather played up.

There are, however, a number of characters with problematic or contested gender. Megan Hunter is the girl who will not grow up and assume proper womanly patterns. She is described as child-like, and even, at times, as something other than human. In her ‘drab and unattractive’ clothes (p. 31), she is horse-like, and even doglike. She ‘womans up’, however after Jerry manhandles her into a train and takes her off to London for an ugly duckling to swan-woman transformation.

A greater gender transgressor is Aimee Griffith. She is a ‘handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way, with a deep hearty voice’, ‘an Amazon’ (p. 61) and ‘mannish’ (p. 217). Unsurprisingly, she also turns out to be ‘the Feminist (p. 111). The fact that she is disgruntled at her parents’ preference for her brother and funding of his career but lack of support for her ambitions seems entirely reasonable to me, though apparently it is not, as she has to become a rather pitiful figure in the end, having been hopelessly in love with the unpleasant Dick Symmington all her life, and moved to spite against a pretty girl rumoured to have attracted Symmington’’s interest.

Aimee’s mirror image, Mr Pye, is ‘ladylike’ (p. 45) and likes soft furnishings, antiques and gossip. Joanna places him somewhere between a woman and ‘an ordinary man’ when discussing the likely gender of the murderer and anonymous letter writer (p. 195), calling him ‘a certain kind of man’ and ‘a middle-aged spinster’ (ibid.). Nash, the policeman, sets him apart from other men, saying that he has ‘an abnormally female streak in his character’ (p. 213). Mrs Dane Calthrop contrasts a large red lobster with Mr Pye, saying ‘Have you ever seen something so unlike Mr Pye? Very virile and handsome, isn’t it?’. Rather than a lobster, Mr Pye turns out to have been something of a red herring, and, unlike Aimee, seems to suffer no novelist’s justice for his transgression of gender norms.

Assumptions of masculine superiority, or at least assumptions of essential differences in the character of men and women, are condoned. Jerry is happy to pull Megan into a train (and she secretly likes it, just as Joanna likes being bossed about by Owen). Jerry assumes that ‘an expert’ must be male (p. 285) – the characteristic reaction of men to Miss Marple. Women, too, subscribe to essentialist views. The lobster-wielding vicar’s wife, Mrs Dane Calthrop, expresses traditional views – it is her husband’s duty to preach and administer sacraments. Hers is ‘to know what people are feeling and thinking’ (p. 84). The correct answer to the villain’s identity comes to Miss Marple because of a deduction based on a gendered idea – a woman, unlike a man, would certainly have known enough local gossip to write better-targeted letters (p. 287).

Running counter to these traditional views is the odd touch of progress – Jerry mocks the idea that women might be too nervous to be shown an anonymous letter (p. 19). And of course, most importantly,  running through the book is a mistaken assumption about the sex of the killer and letter writer. The villain is assumed all along to be a woman, but this is not so, or at least not quite, since one letter was written by a woman, but the others by a man copying the letters of a woman in an earlier case. The exposure of this could cause the characters to think about gender and the possibilities for men and women, but judging by the fact that Joanna sends her brother and his new bride a collar and lead as a joke about her being his … well … bitch, they probably don’t. Aimee Griffith does go off on a long cruise with Emily Barton, spinster of the parish, however, so maybe Lymstock was on the verge of experimenting with alternative lifestyle choices after all.

So there you are – Agatha Christie, exponent of postmodern gender indeterminacy. Who’d have thought it?