Agatha Christie, Witness to the Evolution: Women, Justice, and the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This thesis investigates Agatha Christie’s evolving portrayal of the relationships between women, their justice system, and society, using an interdisciplinary method drawing from critical traditions including genetic criticism, adaptation studies, feminist criticism, and law and literature. Christie is known for her crime fiction, a form of literature uniquely suited to exploring the concept of justice. She exploited this potential throughout a career that coincided with many of the twentieth century’s momentous changes in the legal status of women. She repeatedly returned to the theme of women seeking, and sometimes subverting, justice, and she carried this theme into a substantial body of work outside the crime fiction genre.

This work is supported by analysis of archival and historical materials, much of it previously undiscussed or little-discussed, including unpublished drafts, early publications of texts that have changed during a century of reprintings, agents’ records, and Christie’s correspondence. It is the first study to historically contextualize her work against the laws governing women, revealing an approach to gender issues that was progressive in some ways from the start and developed over time in ways that challenge outdated critical conceptions of Christie as inherently conservative.

This thesis explores four ways Christie engaged with the evolving legal and societal landscape of women’s lives: her exploration of their changing interactions with the justice system as their right to vote brought participation in judgement as jurors, her acknowledgement of the repercussions of married women’s new property rights, her portrayal of women pursuing vengeance when they perceived that their legal and social structures had failed them, and her depiction of women whose sexual behavior transgressed social norms and gender-specific laws that changed by the year. Her commentary is particularly evident when female characters circumvent legal structures or flout convention in their efforts to shape their world into one that they perceive as just.