The Case of the Hidden Gender
Russett Considers Genre-Bending Mysteries
By Eva Emerson
Quick: Are Harlequin romance novels male or female? What about tales of
the Old West? And what about mysteries with tough-talking detectives?
Do books have a gender? Not exactly, but our culture tends to associate
certain genres of books with a specific gender, says Margaret Russett,
associate professor of English at USC College.
In doing so, many belittle the more feminine genres. Even calling a
novel “a genre novel” lowers the book’s perceived value in the literary
world, she says.
So perhaps it isn’t too surprising that one of today’s leading female
mystery writers, Ruth Rendell, tries to “transcend” the detective genre
and publish books more literary in style. Writing under the pseudonym
Barbara Vine, Rendell has authored more than a dozen novels that depart
dramatically from the 40-odd whodunits written under her own name.
Rendell is “a writer long overdue for critical treatment. This is an
interesting person doing serious work,” says Russett, who specializes
in the Romantic period in literature. Using her skills as a literary
scholar, Russett explores the Vine books and, through them, Rendell
herself in a recent essay titled “Three Faces of Ruth Rendell:
Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre.”
Vine’s books are more mysterious than mysteries. There’s no
professional detective, only a narrator. The reader is often told about
a crime, and who committed it, early in the story, leaving the reader
to figure out the why, the how and sometimes even the what.
In her analysis, Russett explores Rendell’s ambition to move beyond
genre, and how this reveals the line separating the literary from the
“generic,” the high culture from the low and popular fiction from elite
literature. Gender issues also complicate Rendell’s shift into the
persona of Barbara Vine. For example, Rendell considers Vine a feminine
alter ego, and the Vine books focus more on women and their issues than
Rendell’s other books.
Russett notes many similarities between the Vine novels and the female
Gothic genre. In the book “The House of Stairs,” Vine/Rendell “makes
explicit allusions to earlier gothic works,” says Russett, an expert on
the Gothic tradition. “Gothic novels are worried about one’s
relationship to one’s mother, which for women is central to identity.
Vine writes a lot about how a mother defines you, and about the
relationship between biological mothers and chosen mother-figures.”
Russett argues that Rendell, writing as Vine, seeks to define herself
as a writer. Metaphorically, Rendell’s literary “natural mother” might
be Agatha Christie, but her “chosen mother” would be Gothic novelists
Ann Radcliffe or one of the Brontë sisters. Russett also identifies
male literary influences in Vine’s work, including Sigmund Freud,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Henry James. Russett links Freud’s case
histories to Vine’s unusual style, which “mimics the progress of
psychoanalysis.”
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