Re: RARA-AVIS: Feminist Readings of Chandler

Robert E. Skinner (rskinner@mail.xula.edu)
Wed, 14 Oct 1998 11:25:06 -0500 > Sara Paretsky is also an unabashed, unapologetic feminist, and she,
too, has had many things to say about Chandler over the years, not all
of them complimentary, regarding his treatment of women. Yet, over all,
she's favorable, very favorable.>

I don't know of an angrier character in hard-boiled fiction than V. I.
Warshawski, or a tougher one. I've often thought that she bought into
the hard-boiled mystique far more than many of the modern male writers
in this genre. There are a lot of feminist views in her work, but I've
often thought of V. I. Warshawski as a hard-boiled fantasy, as much in
her was as Philip Marlowe is in his. If anybody ought to be defending
Chandler, it ought to be her.

<(I dunno-I haven't read it [Oates's essay]).

I haven't either, but Dulcy Brainard cites in in her essay on women
P.I.'s in Ed Gorman's THE BIG BOOK OF NOIR. What she got from Oates's
essay is that Oates finds fault with Chandler for making such a case for
hard-boiled heroes being more "realistic" than those of other writers.
She finds Marlowe and his colleagues as much a fantasy as the
traditional British characters that Chandler shoots down in his famous
essay. She may have something there. I've always considered
hard-boiled fiction something of a fantasy, too--straight out of
medieval knight-errantry.

> Oh, and welcome to the playhouse, Robert. I'll be stockpiling some
brickbats as soon as I figure out what they are....>

Thanks . . . and just bring a machine gun. Never mind the brickbats.

-- 
**************************************
Robert E. Skinner, Director
Xavier University of Louisiana Library
7325 Palmetto Street
New Orleans, LA 70125
(504) 483-7303 (voice)
(504) 485-7917 (FAX)
e-mail: rskinner@mail.xula.edu
**************************************
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.