No racism in Cain? The slurs against Mexicans and the Greek
café ¯wner (husband) bothered me when I read the book a few
years ago. Cora is insistent that she's not a "Mex," that
she's white, and the Greek is called greasy over and over.
These remarks serve to build the characters, yet our
sympathies are supposed to lie with the narrator, at least at
the beginning.
In my humble opinion, The Postman Always Rings Twice is
vastly overrated. Cain, unlike Agatha Christie, was a two-hit
wonder. I know he wrote more but everyone thinks immediately
of Postman and Double Indemnity. I think the movies based on
those two Cain novels were better than the books.
Looking for a Cain quote, I found this interesting Anthology
of Thirties Prose, which includes essays, short stories (I
think) and excerpts from novels, divided into various
sections, including one on hobos and tramps. Authors
discussed in Rara-Avis are among them (Ahlgren, Cain, McCoy,
West and more):
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/White/anthology
Karin
At 19:43 12/11/05 -0500, you wrote:
>I think Hammet is much worse on the racism/misogyny
than other writers of
>that period because of the casual assumptions that
fall into the background. It's
>fine to have a character who's a racist, as a
character flaw, but it bugs me
>how it's not really a purposeful point in the Maltese
Falcon. Notice that
>Cain, being in the same era, has no racism, and his
women might be bad, but
>they're not weak.
>Vicki
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Nov 2005 EST