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Perceived Values Dissonance?

Lone_Wolf 20 Aug 09 at 1:38 p.m. GMT

I often notice that Dame Agatha often receives some flak for her works supposedly being predjuiced and somewhat offensive. An example of such accusations can be found at TvTropes Values Dissonance pages. Here's a (somewhat spoiler-y) excempt:

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" Agatha Christie could be the patron saint of Values Dissonance.

• Christie saw working-class people who tried to better themselves financially as a threat to her own class's superiority, and tried very hard to convince her readers that the poor would be happier just keeping to their stations in life and letting the rich rule as God meant them to. (How much of this is due to Christie having absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what real poverty entailed is a good question; Christie grew up pampered and protected yet considered herself poor because her family wasn't as rich as they'd been when she was born.) The most egregious case is her short story The Case of the Rich Lady, where she has a nouveau riche character wax nostalgic over the days where she worked hard at back-breaking labour for a pittance. But this opinion informs almost all of Christie's work; count how many of her villains are either upwardly mobile or somehow socially transgressive otherwise. The Values Dissonance in this means that we see some of her villains as more heroic than she did, which can sometimes make the reveal even more surprising to us.
• Christie was also fond of using the term "dago" to refer to exotic non-WASP characters, and was somewhat homophobic. In the some performances of The Mousetrap this came across humorously, in the sense that it's shocking to hear sympathetic characters speaking so ignorantly.
• A non-racial example of this trope comes in Nemesis, when it's noted that the wrongly-convicted fiancé to the victim was convicted at least partly because he had a previous charge of sexual assault on his record. Several characters then note at various points in the novel that rape victims are usually lying to get out of trouble with their mothers for having consensual sex. Also, one of the guests — Lombard — is guilty of causing the death of several members of an African tribe, and he is rather flippant about it. The main female character later casually remarks that they were "just black people." Oddly, it's the otherwise unsympathetic religious fanatic who sternly expresses her disapproval for this attitude.
  • Every case of rape in her stories is a poor, poor, put-upon man who's either been enchanted, seduced, or driven to madness by a woman, who falsely cries rape later on. Every rape victim is a liar and villain.
• Male Christie characters are only promiscuous because they haven't found the right woman yet. The right woman is invariably a virgin who catches him by refusing to have sex with him; after the wedding, the husband is invariably faithful and the woman invariably a sex kitten. Female characters, on the other hand, are only promiscuous because they are bad people. A woman who has sex even once outside marriage (even if it was rape) is automatically promiscuous. Any time a woman in a Christie mystery is said to have had sex before marriage, expect her either to be one of the murderers or to be secretly married to the man she was caught with.
• In Taken by the Flood (originally There is a Tide...) has a man who frames another person for murder and tries to strangle his fiancé after she wants to leave him for a man who, to the modern audience, fits her better. Like her, he shares her unability to return to a normal life after they both were demobalized post-WW 2 and is able to understand her better - this is a theme in the book. However, the second man is working-class whose sister inhereted the fortune originally meant for the first man. Guess who turns out to be the main villain and who gets away scotsfree? It gets especially jarring when the woman "realizes" she wanted a normal life AND loved the first man all along - she wasn't just aware of it."

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It also contained (rather ridiculous) statements that we're apparently supposed to hate Emily Brent in And Then There Were None for dissaproving of Lombard causing death of several Africans, which I deleted. I also pointed out that the working-class guy at Taken by the Flood was characterized as a bit of a jerk from the beginning.

What can you day about these accusations? Are they factually correct but oversensitive, completely correct or factually wrong in sense that there are some counterexamples to the points raised by TvTropes?

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18 replies

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HeiseiHolmes 29 Jan 10 at 4:47 p.m. GMT

That's ridiculous. Most of the facts have been deliberately altered and ignored... It is offensive to me.

go_leafs_nation 18 Sep 09 at 9:41 a.m. GMT

Golden Age writers generally were criticised by (as I like to call them) literary snobs who considered detective fiction a subgenre (very much like those dreadful harlequins you see everwhere for a few dollars). The most famous of these is "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?". The person who wrote it, however, obviously never read the book.

jane_poirot 17 Sep 09 at 6:05 p.m. GMT

go_leafs_nation

She was, Bundle. You may recall her many attempts to push the ATTWN topic in the non-series section to one of the top-posted on the site.

 Lol, yes, that's me.  You'll find me on here from time-to-time when I have something to say. Alas, I'm afraid I've said everything about ATTWN that needs to be said, in my opinion, so there's not much to talk about, really.

Bundle_ 17 Sep 09 at 11:36 a.m. GMT

Oh yes, I remember Jane Poirot now. She had a lot of great comments about ATTWN!

Welcome back, again, Jane!

go_leafs_nation 17 Sep 09 at 11:32 a.m. GMT

She was, Bundle. You may recall her many attempts to push the ATTWN topic in the non-series section to one of the top-posted on the site.

Bundle_ 17 Sep 09 at 10:59 a.m. GMT

Jane Poirot, your user name sounds familair. Were you ever on the older version of the Christie forum?

jane_poirot 16 Sep 09 at 11:55 p.m. GMT

Ugh, yes, I remember this. Someone has serious sensitivity issues. I went in and shortened it to

Agatha Christie could be the patron saint of Values Dissonance, with many of her characters holding beliefs appropriate for her time period yet now outdated by modern standards,

And then I went on to mention how the controversy over the title of ATTWN would have to be her most infamous Values Dissonance incident. That sounds diplomatic and neutral; the previous post was neither diplomatic nor neutral. It was pure Agatha Christie bashing that seriously distorted certain details written out of sheer malicious spite.

Lone_Wolf 25 Aug 09 at 3:02 p.m. GMT

What's with the Random capitalization of Words? And yes, if you think that the only way for a lower-class character to be portrayed is being portrayed as a Gladys, then you demonstrate class prejuice.

And nobody's saying that having upper-class murderers is wrong, so what you're talking about anyway.

Tommy_A_Jones 25 Aug 09 at 12:41 p.m. GMT

I think Getting her Murderers from the Upper classes made ACs books more interesting and I am sure you will find that she is not the only Writer who has had Upper Class Murderers P. D. James for example have upper or Middle class Murderers as well as other current ones like Hazel Holt and Betty Rowlands, I do not think I am a Bigot but Characters from the Upper and Middle Classes in fiction aree so muych more interesting in the main compared to lower Classed Characters although I do think Agatha Christie created Great and Boring Characters from all classes but books with someone like Gladys, Cherry or Albert Murderers just wouldn't have been interesting to read. 

Lone_Wolf 25 Aug 09 at 11:50 a.m. GMT

Here's another piece of AC bashing that, strangely, disguises itself as praise. It places too much value is her spy/thriller novels (which, as already mentioned, I don't like besides "They Came to Baghdad"), contains broad generalizations ("Anyone who is described as an idealist in AC's works is a murderer" - Orly? Taitz, I dare say) and accuses her of fear of "enlightenment rationalism", missing the fact that the very idea of a detective novel of Agatha-style is rationalistic at its core.

That piece has the decency to disapprove of the comments about the supposed "cardboard characterization" of AC, although it doesn't bring any counterarguments against it.

I agree, however, that the anti-communist paranoia in "The Secret Adversary" is just ridiculous.

Lone_Wolf 22 Aug 09 at 5:46 p.m. GMT

Yeah. I agree with the statement that accusations of AC's bigotry, while having some merits, are ridiculously overblown. A logical fallacy I often notice in these accusations is that when an upper-class person is a murderer, that shows AC's bigotry, because she makes the least likely suspects murderers, and, therefore, in her eyes, upper classes are the least likely to murder in RL. But when someone with more common ancestry is the murderer, that shows AC's bigotry too, because she presents lower classes in an unpleasant light. Dame Agatha sometimes just can't win.

Also, I think that she's a better character builder then she's given credit for. Her critics in that regard tend to focus on obligatory (mostly comic) stock characters in her works, while ignoring more complex ones. 

GKCfan 21 Aug 09 at 5:01 p.m. GMT

Well, Miss Marple's friend Lucy Eylesbarrow is a professional housekeeper and she's sharp as a tack.  Miss Marple's maid Cherry observes something and doesn't know it's germane to a murder, but she's got a good head on her shoulders.  In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, parlormaid Ursula Bourne is pretty intelligent, although she's distraught over her love life.  Ada Mason in The Mystery of the Blue Train is clever.  Hildegarde Schmidt makes a fairly intelligent ladies' maid in Murder on the Orient Express.  Anne Morisot in Death on the Clouds, Mary Drower in the ABC Murders, Anne Meredith in Cards on the Table, and Mary Aldin in Towards Zero also qualify as reasonably intelligent women in service.

Lone_Wolf 21 Aug 09 at 3:57 p.m. GMT

Also, I have to confess that I'm tired of reading about all these stupid naive servant girls who tend to withhold important facts from the police for some petty reason. "Well, ma'am, you see, it's not like it was particularly important, and you know what the police are, and I don't know am I right to tell you it or not, but I saw the doctor smashing the poor vicar's head with a hammer". Mrs Marple stories are especially rife with them. Is there a geniune smart servant girl in any of AC's books? 

Lone_Wolf 20 Aug 09 at 6 p.m. GMT

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And re Taken at the Flood, what I'm saying is that David Hunter still would be an unpleasant (although a more complex) character even if he wasn't a murderer and his sister was a geniune article.

However, the actual ending is dubious still.

I also didn't like the book much, because the solution was overly complex and lacked elegance, IMO. I did greatly enjoy the beginning, though, that's also one of the reasons I disliked the ending - because it made the beginning interesting situation of Cloades-Hunter confrontation not that interesting.

Boomcoach 20 Aug 09 at 5:53 p.m. GMT

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Well said, GKCfan.  It is odd to take words that come from characters, and often unlikable characters, and pretend that they show the author's opinions.  Hastings cannot imagine anyone who is attractive, wealthy or part of the gentry committing any crime, but Dame Agatha has no problem have beautiful, wealthy people as the murderer.

Miss Marple at one point acknowledges to herself that her dislike of foreigners is irrational.

The one comment in the TvTropes commentary that I can agree with slightly, is the comment, in at least a couple of books, that rape is often what mothers have their daughters claim after they have been promiscuous.  These comments come from, in at least one instance, a policeman who has been portrayed in a favorable light.  I would expect that this is much more of Christie reflecting contemporary attitudes.  It can hardly be thought of as progressive, but it is not much to hang a "sexist" tag on the author about.

Lone_Wolf 20 Aug 09 at 5:49 p.m. GMT

Why the italics are borked?

GKCfan:I can't think of a single definite case of rape in Christie's books.

-Me too, that's why I was like "bzuh?" at reading it and then decided that I missed something, because I haven't read all AC novels yet.

GKCfan:First of all, I think the author fails to differentiate between what a CHARACTER'S opinions are and what Christie's own views were.

-Exactly. Most of the ethnically insulting phrases in her books is uttered by comical or unpleasant characters anyway.

GKCfan:Christie actually is critical of everyone who has sex outside of marriage in her books, both men and women.

-It's also worth pointing out that one of the most aldultering characters, Amyans Crale from "Five Little Pigs", isn't explicitly condemned nor by Poirot, nor by the author (though the governess does dislike him, but Christie slightly pokes fun at her too). 

I agree on the topic of Emily Brent.

Also, her thriller/spy novels tend to be most un-PC, but I don't like then much, with the exception of "They Came to Baghdad", which is harmless in that department.

There are some cases of geniune bigotry on part of Dame Agatha, though (like Midge Hardcastle's unpleasant Jewish employer in "The Hollow", a book which I otherwise like).

But then again, I confess to liking "Gone With The Wind" (I'm talking about the book here), despite having few sympathies with the South and its "cause", so it's not like it's so difficult to me.

GKCfan 20 Aug 09 at 5:01 p.m. GMT

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I can't think of a single definite case of rape in Christie's books.  Michael Rafiel's past in Nemesis is an exception, but it should be pointed out that nothing is known definitely and Michael is never sympathetic.  In any case, though he's not a killer, he is punished by prison for crimes he escaped justice for earlier.  In Dumb Witness, there is a false allegation by a woman of physical (not sexual) abuse by her husband towards her and her children.  It should be noted though, that the accuser is a British woman of upper-class family and her innocent husband is a foreigner!  Cases in Hallowe'en Party where women may have been raped and murder are viewed with horror, and everyone's sympathy is with the potential victim.

Also, the ending of Taken at the Flood may be morally problematic in some ways, but I agree with your assessment, LoneWolf, that Second Murderer is neither likeable not right for Lynn.  In fact, he probably would have killed her later once he fell for someone else.

In short, LoneWolf, I think the essay you quoted from TVTropes is flawed due to a superficial take on Christie's work, and a failure to put it into context.

GKCfan 20 Aug 09 at 5 p.m. GMT

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First of all, I think the author fails to differentiate between what a CHARACTER'S opinions are and what Christie's own views were. Ethnic prejudice and unsympathetic attitudes towards rape victims were rife in society, and Christie's inclusion of such characters is simply reflecting her world. It should be noted that her main detectives do not share such views. As for Miss Brent... I saw this as a case of character complexity. Miss Brent may be severe and unsympathetic, but that doesn't make her a bigot. The "upwardly mobile" line is, I think, a misreading of the fact that the motive for murder in many cases is MONEY. All this does is show that some people put cash over human life. And money doesn't always make people happy. Also, please note that not very many of Christie's upper-class characters and nobility are especially sympathetic. Many are inbred buffoons or snobs. Christie actually is critical of everyone who has sex outside of marriage in her books, both men and women. Adulterers are harshly criticized by Poirot (see Cornish Mystery) and only in very few cases (like Blue Train) are adulterers or people who have sex outside of marriage find happiness later. The fact is, we don't know the sexual history of most characters in most cases, nor do we know the state of the couple's marital relations after the wedding in all but a handful of cases.