mariness

Ah, Victorian England: prim, proper and also touched by the occasionally horribly gruesome murder of a three year old, as detailed in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which I just finished and highly recommend.

But first, a bit of a rant: throughout the internet and on other forums, I keep coming across the insistent myth that the labor force greatly changed in the 1960s when women started to work outside the home and/or in professional jobs for the first time.

And then I read books like this one, discussing events in 1860 and the later 19th century, where nearly every woman discussed or mentioned in the book at one point or another held down full time jobs – most for their entire lives.

These included, I need to add, middle class women. And a woman convicted of murdering a child.

The jobs varied. The second Mrs. Kent worked full time as a governess and housekeeper before marrying her employer. Once married, she employed three young women in their 20s as full time servants: a cook, a housemaid and a nursemaid, and also hired a fourteen year old girl to come in and assist the nursemaid on a daily basis and a charwoman to handle the heaviest cleaning. Even with these servants, and with sending the laundry out on a weekly basis, the evidence given at the trial shows that her two oldest step-daughters, technically members of the middle class, continued to do significant amounts of physical labor with household chores – preparing food, running errands, carrying the laundry, cleaning, helping to supervise their younger siblings, doing the household sewing (apparently no small task) and other jobs. They later worked full time as governesses and nurses.

It is possible that these servants were slow, lazy, inefficient workers, which is why the household (a three story home described as "comfortable") needed so many of them and still needed the oldest girls to help out? Maybe, but Mr. Kent never hesitated to fire unsatisfactory servants, and even in the midst of a murder investigation, no one accused the cook and the housemaid of not staying busy and working. The same went for the oldest two girls. The nursemaid was accused of sleeping around and not immediately reporting a missing child – but one reason she didn't report the kid's absence was that she had so many tasks to do in the morning.

Outside the household, we see women working as bakers, as novelists, as skilled, professional naturalists and watercolorists focused on creating scientific books, actresses, singers, nurses, artists, schoolmistresses, laundresses, governesses, innkeepers, boarding house managers, and seamstresses.

Even the convicted murderer worked as a skilled artist in mosaics – her work is still displayed – and later as a highly skilled, trained and greatly respected nurse.

The exceptions? A wife who seems to have been too sick to work, the first Mrs. Kent, and various thieves and prostitutes. If we put "prostitution" under "job," the percentage of women working full time increases.

Look, I don't want to sugarcoat things. The types of jobs available to women were clearly limited. At no point does anyone suggest that one of the Kent girls can go and study marine biology with William Saville-Kent at the British Museum or Brighton Aquaria, for instance (although both of his wives later helped him with his work). The detectives and police are all men; the lawyers, judges, and members of the jury are all men; the doctors are all men; the government employees are all men; the major religious figures (with the exception of one Anglican nun) are all men; the journalists are all men; the politicians are all men. And so on. The women who did manage to work as novelists, scientists and artists on their own were clearly limited in their options – Constance Kent eventually gave up mosaic art for the more lucrative nursing profession which based on her possessions when she died was not all that lucrative. (She may also have had other reasons for giving up mosaic art beyond money.) It is also clear that most of these jobs were very badly paid: at one point, people point out that one of these working women, a seamstress, is near starvation because her job pays so little money. It's very clear from contemporary reports that working as a nursemaid – or at least Mrs. Kent's nursemaid – was a thankless job even if you didn't end up getting suspected of murder. But it was work, paid work, and it is fully documented in the historical records.

And of course, the history of women is not particularly linear – at any given decade in history, women might be doing very well in one place, and not at all well in another place. Louisa May Alcott made some pointed observations on the roles of married women in the 19th century United States, comparing them, not all that kindly, to women in 19th century France. It gets even more complicated when we look at other eras where the historical record is more scanty, or non-European cultures where some of the underlying principles differed. And even in those cases we see variation: the roles and rights enjoyed by women seem to have varied from city to city in the ancient Roman Empire, for example, if the documents we have are any guide – including documents often very hostile to women.

But what I do want to counter is the idea that women just began to enter the labor force in the 1960s, since this is not borne out by the historical records.

What makes this particularly notable is that this is not even a focus of this book, which is interested in how Victorians viewed detectives, not women's labor. The jobs are mentioned casually – in part because they were taken for granted by contemporaries. Victorians did worry about governesses and servants and allowing these outsiders into the inner sphere, and worried about whether or not they were effective (since most of the first Mrs. Kent's children died young, and since the second Mrs. Kent lost a child to murder despite having two servants specifically directed to care for her children, this worry apparently had a pretty valid basis). But for all of the mythology that the Victorians believed that a woman's place was in the home, they also accepted that women could and did work.

Ok. Rant over. Back to the book, which is actually a lot more interesting than I just made it sound since it's about murder not Victorian employment options. Summerscale uses the evidence given at the various trials and investigations and newspaper interviews to reconstruct what happened in the home of the Kents on Friday, June 29. Or at least the agreed upon details, since by the following morning, Saville Kent, the three year son of the household, a cute if occasionally mischievous child, was found brutally murdered, throat sliced through, stuffed into an outdoor privy.

Suspicions immediately fell on the nursemaid, who did not immediately report that the child was missing. The nursemaid countered that she had assumed the kid had gone to his mother (another child did sleep in the parents' bedroom). Many assumed that Mr. Kent was sleeping with the nursemaid – he had, after all, married the governess of his oldest child. Rumors ran rampant. Scotland Yard sent one of its first detectives, a Mr. Whicher, to investigate. Mr. Whicher had another theory: the murderer was the young teenage Constance Kent.

As I noted, Summerscale's main interest here is in murder, and in the development of the detective in both a literary and real life sense. The Kent murder mesmerized the British press and many readers, who all turned themselves into amateur detectives, much like the Casey Anthony trial would years later. It also helped to inspire a number of mystery and sensation novels, eventually leading to the great Golden Age of detective fiction.

And it also offers a mystery for contemporary readers to solve. After all, someone did eventually confess to doing the murder – but did she? Or was she covering for someone else, or deciding to sacrifice her life to save an otherwise innocent person under suspicion?

Summerscale doesn't say, since it's impossible to tell, which may leave readers somewhat unsatisfied – but there's enough here for anyone to create a theory, not to mention a variety of other tidbits.

Bonus: a sidenote here is the biography of early marine biologist William Saville-Kent, who studied, drew, painted and categorized numerous species in Australia's Great Barrier Reef for the first time. His work The Great Barrier Reef was a standard reference book for years; you can still find it in many research libraries. (I've seen a copy although Pacific corals, not my field/thing.) He also liked owls. Those with an interest in this sort of thing, or in the history of cultured pearls, might want to check this book out just for this (I'll be honest, that's why I picked up the book) even though, as said, it's sidelined.

I had a mad, mad desire to see Clue back when it originally came out, back in the 1980s, a desire absolutely nobody around me shared, for about the same reasons. I wanted to see it because I'd heard that the ending was different at each and every movie theatre, and sometimes at each and every showing; everybody else wanted to skip it because they'd heard that the ending was different at each and every movie theatre, and thus thought, with some reason, that it didn't say much for the middle if viewers and the film could come up with three different endings – especially given that the movie was, in theory, a murder mystery, which by all the classic clichés of the genre should have one, and only one ending, unless on rare occasions you are Hercule Poirot and want to give one ending to the police and another ending to a nice cocktail party on a train. But I digress.

Also, perhaps partly thanks to the three separate ending, the initial reviews sucked.

Anyway, that all meant that I never got around to seeing this until last night, which also meant that I saw it the only way it's shown now – with all three endings. And I have to say, those three endings make it into a surprisingly fun and even good film.

Clue is based on the Parker Brothers board game, but despite this, manages to have a tiny bit of actual plot. It starts off rather slowly, as six guests arrive for a dinner party at a Mysterious Mansion at some Mysterious Time in the 1950s. (Cue dramatic lightning, which, obedient to the plot, goes off exactly when necessary.) It is of course Raining. And Cloudy. With Moody Music and TA DAS! The only thing missing: bats.

To somewhat preserve their anonymity, the guests are given pseudonyms from the board game – Mrs. Peacock, Miss Scarlet, Professor Plum, and so on. (Miss Peacock in her glasses and Miss Scarlet in whatever she's wearing make the costumes.) If this leads you to suspect a Gone With The Wind joke, give yourself a hug. They are greeted by a Butler and a Maid, and are served a rather uncomfortable dinner by the Cook, and meet Mr. Boddy, who may, or may not, be the person who has been blackmailing all of them for various reasons. As I said, it's all kinda slow until Mr. Boddy dies, and then it gears up into high farce, as eventually six (or seven) people end up dead, with six (or eight) potential murder suspects, and dealing with the bodies turns out to be decidedly tricky.

The characters all deeply suspect one another, in part because a) they all have excellent motives, b) they are all mostly strangers and thus have no reason to trust anyone, and c) the directors had rather obviously seen a number of Agatha Christie movies. Indeed, the final three endings are all a fairly classic send-up of the Hercule Poirot final explanation for the murder, done in rather more frenzied style by Tim Curry.

But despite the dead bodies, this film is not really about the murders at all. Indeed, as the film rather cheerfully explains at the end, we can easily think of at least three different ways the murders could have been committed. What makes this particularly awesome is that all three endings get at least one detail completely wrong, meaning that even the one that is supposedly "what really happened," even though that's probably the best and most satisfying ending, may not be not "what really happened."

Which makes this, as said, less about the murders, and more about questioning how much any of us can really know about what happened – and more about how storylines can be manipulated. Who did invite the guests? Who did provide the weapons? (We see them handed out in nice boxes, but we have no idea who put them in the boxes.) And, ok, yes, it was the iron pipe in the library, but who was wielding it?

In some ways, it is also one of the most blatantly sexist films I've seen in awhile – quite apart from the camera angles and deliberate shots focusing on the cleavage of Miss Scarlett and Yvette the Maid, the men – with the exception of Mr. Green, are almost constantly fondling or attempting to fondle Miss Scarlett and Yvette, and to a lesser extent the Cook (before she dies) and Mrs. White (who as a – let us be polite – widow of at least five husbands, is given more of a berth). No one tries to fondle Mrs. Peacock – presumably the glasses, which she seems to be wearing partly as a disguise, are too terrifying – but she, too, drops hints in her dialogue that her life has been deeply constrained by men. And yet all of this is, a, perfectly in character and believable for the 1950s (as compared, say, to X-Men: First Class, which was even more sexist, but in a way that failed to show the actual sexism of the 1960s. Yvette, Miss Scarlet, Mrs. White and the Cook have all, in their own ways, learned to deal with predators; Mrs. Peacock has decided to go along with the system.

And it's undercut by the decision of the film to make the two worst sexual harassers – Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard – the most incompetent characters of the film (with the possible exception of the poor singing telegram girl), no matter which ending of the film you believe.

For all of this, this is a murder mystery with multiple endings primarily cast with comedians (and one rock star). The cast is pretty much all hilarious; if some of the sexual innuendo gets a little much, and a couple of the are the groan out loud sort (Wadsworth: "But he was your second husband! Your first husband also disappeared!" Mrs. White: "Well, that was his job. He was an illusionist." Wadsworth: "But he never reappeared!" Mrs. White: "He wasn't a very good illusionist.") Glad I caught up with it.

I've had an odd yen for Georgette Heyer's mystery novels lately.

Georgette Heyer is not well known as a mystery writer, for good reason. She wrote about 12 mysteries (15 if The Quiet Gentleman, The Talisman Ring and The Reluctant Widow, more usually classified under her Regency romances, are included.) Of these, only three are any good as pure mysteries: A Blunt Instrument, Death in the Stocks and Envious Casca. (And possibly – this is debatable - Behold, Here's Poison.) The others are either deeply unpleasant (Penhallow, which I'm not rereading on this reread, because it makes for itchy, rather depressing reading, even leaving aside the homophobia), highly unfair (in the sense of not revealing critical clues until the last few pages), filled with ludicrous motives (particularly in They Found Him Dead) or otherwise flawed. And even in the novels with unfair clues and ludicrous motives, the murderer is far too easy to identify; the real question, which Heyer never answers, is "Huh?"

(In one novel, for instance, we are expected to believe that a husband would not recognize that his ex wife has been living in the area – and coming to have dinner with him every few works and joining him in other social events – for years. Heyer attempts to explain this away by a feeble, well, they were separated for about twenty years, and, yes, the husband is the self-centered sort, but, well.)

Most of the novels follow similar formats (even the somewhat innovative Penhallow): an unpleasant patriarch hated by everyone; a weak, fluffy, ineffectual wife, or a wife who has decidedly married above herself; an attractive young woman who is never, ever the real suspect and her romantic hero, who is occasionally suspected by police but of course never did it (this is not a spoiler); and various Entertaining Suspects, who provide witty dialogue and most of the jokes. The servants are generally stupid, unhelpful and untrustworthy. (This is true in Agatha Christie as well; it seems to reflect typical upper class attitudes of the time.) The snobbery can be breathtaking, even for aristocratic-adoring Heyer, although Heyer also has a wonderful scene where she describes the way a social climbing woman will be greasing her way up the social ladder, by providing a large check to a hospital patronized by a semi-noble patron; the patron will in turn invite the social climbing woman's daughter to all the best parties so she can meet the right kind of man.

Heyer generally treats murder as some sort of game; the victim (or victims) are rarely mourned, and in a couple of novels the characters reflect that it's all really wonderful that this happened because now they all have something to do, which may be the most unintentionally nasty criticism of upper middle and upper class British society ever. Even the more kindly patriarchs (most of the time, the patriarchs are the first victims – providing an easy financial motive) are rarely mourned. Everyone gets merrily into the detection game, happily guessing away at who might have done the crime and how. Only a few novels show any lingering stress from murder (Penhallow, Envious Casca, and, debatedly, The Unfinished Clue); most of the time the murder is regarded as a rather good thing for everybody, really. And that's a problem: if Heyer isn't taking the murder particularly seriously, why should her readers care, either? And Heyer seems to have no concept, like her contemporaries, that murder is an evil act, and that murderers can strike again; one reason to read an Agatha Christie intently is to see if Poirot or Marple will be able to stop the body count from climbing. In a Heyer novel – even one with multiple victims – the distinct sense is that once the murderer gets the money, that'll be it.

I suspect another problem is that Heyer was temperamentally unable to conceive of a motive for murder other than money or sudden rage; it never seems to occur to her, for instance (as it does to Christie and Sayers) that love and revenge are equally good, if not better motives. This is perhaps because, unlike Christie and Sayers, and for all of Heyer's reputation as a romance novelist, Heyer rarely seems to understand passion. Love, yes, infatuation, yes, but fierce passion for anything other than putting on a play or finishing a painting, no, and even then, not really. (This is true in her romances as well, and is one reason they feature little sex and should not be shelved in the romance section of U.S. bookstores, but I'll rant about that if I get around to chatting about her romance novels.) With limited motives, picking the murderer tends to become much easier.

So, now that I've ripped most of these novels apart, why do I continue to read them? Because, for all their flaws, they are (except Penhallow) highly entertaining, laugh out loud books with brilliant, snappy dialogue. If you ignore that everyone is speaking merrily about murder – and Heyer frequently does – these are marvelous comedies of manners, set in a world where the deserving get nice hot chocolate in bed and (usually) marvelous meals cooked for them by the less deserving. (I may have mentioned the snobbery, although it tends to be – this is difficult to explain – a sort of comforting sort of snobbery. It's always fun to imagine being one of those aristocrats, even while knowing that chances are excellent that you actually would have been one of the working servant class.) Everything (except in Penhallow) is wrapped up merrily and nicely, with delightful romantic banter. It's fun, and I have to admit to enjoying that sort of thing.