Detection and the text: Reading three American women of mystery

Detective fiction, thematically and structurally, contains the potentially rich ability to stand at multiple places simultaneously. Consequently, it provides an appropriate mediating structure for the discussion of potentially disruptive ideas, particularly ideas on identity. Beginning with an examination of the nineteenth-century literary and cultural contexts, I consider the geography of gender and the literary strands that provided fertile ground for the emergence of detective fiction. Through close readings of detective narratives by the three earliest women writers of the genre, Seeley Regester (1831-1865), Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935), and Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), I examine how these writers thematize the need for informed choice for their female characters, who either as detectives or suspects learn to achieve expansive readings of the confusing signs surrounding them, and seem to request expansive readings by their readers. Paralleling the discourse that moves toward answering the question who did it? is the double text of many of the novels that suggests a series of seemingly contradictory realities: women\u27s entrapment by socially sanctioned roles and the clever ways they achieve freedom; women\u27s victimization by male texts and their creation of a new story; women\u27s invisibility to those unable to hear, see, or understand them and their vivid presence obvious in the emancipatory strategies employed for their survival. The ands suggest the wholeness of the vision of these novels and the possibility of their being read both ways--that is, read for their reinforcement of traditional ideologies and read for the future discourse they evoke. Central to my exploration are the disruptive pauses that begin a renegotiation of gender boundaries in Regester\u27s texts, the significance given to gendered language in Green\u27s novels, and the discourse of humor that demarcates a newly created space for women in Rinehart\u27s narratives. Drawing connections between these early women writers and the presently emerging feminist detective novel, I argue that Regester, Green and Rinehart provide multiple mysteries in their narratives--mysteries that emphasize the desire of these women to understand the boundaries that define them and the ways in which they can change these contours