Discussion Topic
Portrayals of gender and the presentation of female characters in The Big Sleep and Strong Poison
Summary:
Both The Big Sleep and Strong Poison present complex portrayals of gender and female characters. In The Big Sleep, women are often depicted as manipulative or dangerous, reflecting societal anxieties of the time. Conversely, Strong Poison features a strong, intelligent female protagonist who challenges traditional gender roles, highlighting the evolving perception of women's capabilities and independence.
How are female characters presented in The Big Sleep and Strong Poison?
If we compare a major female character from each mystery, we get at differences in how each author depicts women. In The Big Sleep, Carmen Sternwood is characterized primarily through her sexual appeal to men. She flirts and she wears sexy, provocative clothing. She also acts like a silly little girl and enjoys sucking her thumb. She is described by Philip Marlowe as
A pretty, spoiled and not very bright little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it.
On the surface, Carmen is seen by Marlowe primarily as having the mind of a child: she is "not very bright," is "spoiled," and is described as a "little girl." Her negatively childish traits are wedded to a woman's highly sexualized body. However, we also find that there is another Carmen lurking beneath the facade who is much more dangerous. She moves from being...
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characterized as a spoiled little girl to being characterized as a snake that is making a "hissing noise." Thischaracterization of her is "naked" as animal would be, with her face primal and animalistic, like a "scraped bone:"
I was aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like a scraped bone.
Carmen is depicted as a child and as a wild animal, but never as a fully adult human being. Through her, Chandler reproduces sexist stereotypes that characterize women as deceptive and untrustworthy, cunning but not very intelligent, and dangerously sexual.
In contrast, Harriet Vane, the Oxford-educated main female character in Strong Poison, is depicted as a fully adult, self-possessed, intelligent human being. She has a sexual side, but it does not define who she is. Peter, who falls in love with her, thinks:
She has a sense of humor...and brains...life wouldn't be dull. One would wake up, and there would be a whole day full of jolly things to do. And then we would come home and go to bed...and that would be jolly too.
Primarily, Peter loves Harriet because she is intelligent and interesting. Her sexuality derives from those qualities rather than from her body or any flirtatious flaunting of her sexuality.
A conversation that Peter and Harriet have helps characterize Harriet as a down-to-earth, fully human, no-nonsense, and self-possessed woman who simply wants Peter to be who he is:
“Oh, by the way—I don't positively repel you or anything like that, do I? Because, if I do, I'll take my name off the waiting-list at once.”
“No,” said Harriet Vane, kindly and a little sadly. “No, you don't repel me.”
“I don't remind you of white slugs or make you go goose-flesh all over?”
“Certainly not.”
“I'm glad of that. Any minor alterations, like parting the old mane, or growing a tooth-brush, or cashiering the eyeglass, you know, I should be happy to undertake, if it suited your ideas.”
“Don't,” said Miss Vane, “please don't alter yourself in any particular.”
In contrast to Carmen, Harriet comes across as fully human. While Harriet is innocent of the murder she is accused of, Carmen is the murderer in Chandler's mystery, proving that she is dangerous and deceptive.
Compare portrayals of gender in The Big Sleep and Strong Poison. Which is more feminist?
The term feminism is often stretched a very long way in describing authorial attitudes and literary characters. The fact that an author writes about strong, intelligent women does not make her/him a feminist. T
he works of Chaucer and Shakespeare both feature formidable female characters. Raymond Chandler is no more of a feminist than Chaucer, and may, in fact, be less of one, since sexism is an essential part of the hard-boiled genre in which he writes and he does nothing to challenge it. The Big Sleep presents women as beautiful, sexually voracious troublemakers. Vivian and Carmen both try to seduce Marlowe in quick succession, but he rejects their advances, not because he is not tempted, but because he is too wise and world-weary to be fooled by them. The style of the novel perfectly reflects the content. Women are described in brief, aphoristic phrases that emphasize their physical appeal and their lack of scruple, as when Marlowe observes,
She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.
In Strong Poison, Dorothy L. Sayers presents an intriguing, complex character in the person of Harriet Vane. Harriet may be a feminist, but Sayers is less of one and is not enthusiastic about her character's unconventional lifestyle. One cannot call Strong Poison a feminist novel in any sense. It requires a man, Lord Peter Wimsey, to save the day, and it is his pervasive personality that governs both style and content in the narrative. Nonetheless, if one had to choose which of the two novels was more feminist, it would be Strong Poison, since The Big Sleep is aggressively sexist and anti-feminist in its portrayal of women.