Essay on Overview of Miss Marple

1. Introduction“Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy–which as with Poirot, provedunfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he could have grown old with me” (Agatha Christie 2011, 436) This is what Agatha Christie, the queen of crime fiction, stated in her autobiography about one of her most famous characters, the elderly female amateur detective Miss Jane Marple. It is doubtful, however, whether a “precocious schoolboy” would have ever reached the same worldwide fame as the sweet, but shrewd, spinster lady from St Mary Mead, who has won our hearts ever since her first appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage. By referring to three descriptive Miss Marple novels, The Murder at Vicarage, A Pocket full of Rye and A Murder is Announced, this paper will show that her power lies not in superhuman analytical abilities or in the meticulous collection of facts. Miss Marple utilises her socially marginal position in order to manipulate other characters, the reader as well as social and cultural conventions and stereotypes. Before being able to examine Miss Marple’s method as a detective in more detail, it is important to have a look at the history of female detective fiction as well as its connection with gender theories. Therefore we will examine if and how female detectives challenge stereotypical gender role expectations. Then the paper will turn to Miss Marple as an important example of a female detective, firstly describing her character and then mainly focusing on her investigation methods. We will see how Miss Marple differs from her male colleagues Sherlock Holme…

…erbach, Edward S. “The British Female Detective”. English Literature in Transition. 48/2, 2005: 224-226.Makinen, Merja. “Agatha Christie (1890-1976)”. A Companion to Crime Fiction. dds. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 415-426.Meizei, Kathy. “Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech: The Case of Miss Marple, Miss Mole, and Miss Jekyll”. Journal of Modern Literature. 30/2 (2007): 103-120.Merill, Robert. “Christie’s Narrative Games”. Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction. Eds. Jerome H. Delmater and Prigozy Ruth. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. 87-110.Reddy, Maureen T. “Women detectives”. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Martin Priestman. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British women writers in detective and crime fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004.

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