Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 93
Liminality in Women’s “History-Mystery”:
The Case of Anne Perry
In the genre o f detective fiction, one of the greatest resources of a good sleuth
is the ability to become someone else. Sherlock Holmes was well aware of this
when, in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” he disguised himself as a groom in order to
glean information from some stable-hands—working-class men who would clam
up when interviewed by the gentlemanly Holmes, but would speak freely to one of
their own. Holmes explains his strategy to Doctor Watson: “Be one of them and
you will know all that there is to know” (167-8). The use of disguise, he suggests,
is really a means toward a more fundamental act: the crossing of boundaries, the
infiltration of constituencies from all strata of society, which is often vital if a
sleuth is to unravel a mystery. It is important to note, however, that as a leisureclass man, Holmes only appears to be “one of them.” At the end of the day, he is
once more ensconced comfortably in his easy chair, languidly smoking his pipe.
Having solved the mystery, Holmes has also restored the social order, having foiled
yet another attempt to disrupt the harmony of the British Empire. Holmes’ temporary
crossing of class boundaries serves, in fact, to reinforce social divisions, to maintain
the rigid categories of identity on which the social order depends. What, then, does
it mean for a feminist writer to employ this popular genre, to use its conventions of
disguise and boundary-crossing? B. Ruby Rich addresses this question: “Being a
gumshoe,” she asserts, “gives a girl the right, like a passport, to cross borders
previously closed, to unfix definitions, to ramble through society with a mobility
long considered to be exclusively masculine” (24).1 When a woman takes on the
traditionally masculine role and prerogatives of the detective, the effect is profound,
since this has the potential to challenge fundamental conceptions of gender.
“[U]nfixing definitions,” the woman detective is often not merely transgressive,
but “liminal,” by which I mean that she is “at the threshold” between two positions.
In classical tales like Doyle’s, the detective crosses boundaries between social
categories and then returns to his “real” identity when the coast is clear, a
phenomenon which actually reinscribes the separateness of such categories. Yet as
Rich suggests, in claiming mobility and subjectivity long considered masculine
privileges, the female detective calls into question such Holmesian stability: she
literally occupies the threshold between designations like “masculine” and
“feminine,” moving among them at will and showing the divisions between them
to be fluid and pliable.
In this spirit, a growing body of feminist detective fiction has challenged many