Our approach diverges from the long-held tradition in crime fiction studies that most often focuses on the hero, typically embodied by either the gentleman detective in the English context, as typified by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, or the hardboiled private eye, popularized by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the United States. In his analysis of Chandler and the detective tradition, Frederic Jameson states “the real function of murder…is for order to be felt more strongly,” and in the hero’s solving of a crime he performs a moralizing function, ensuring the maintenance of the status quo and normative systems of power (Jameson, 2016, pg. 5). The papers in this panel instead interrogate the way in which the figure of the criminal can function as a kind of ideological challenge to oppressive discourses of power, specifically normative gender conventions and the colonial enterprise. Accordingly, we ask the following questions: If much crime literature has historically demonstrated a kind of narrative conservatism, as exemplified in the detective story, what transgressive potential can be found in the depiction of the criminal? How might literary renderings of the criminal blur binary constructions of morality and immorality, as seen in anti-heroes and tricksters, whose disruptive behavior often works in the favor of marginalized populations? In asking audiences to identify with a criminal, do authors create new means to resist totalizing narratives of gender, race, sexuality, and national identity?
Donna Campbell will begin the panel with "Edith Wharton's Forty Whacks: Fictionalizing Lizzie Borden," which serves as an exploration of Wharton’s lesser known foray into writing lightly fictionalized crime literature toward the end of her career. Wharton wrote two versions of the Lizzie Borden murders: one, a story later published as "Confession," first appeared as "Unconfessed Crime" in Storyteller Magazine (1936); and the other, an unfinished play called Kate Spain, was never published in her lifetime. Using unpublished letters and Kate Spain as well as "Confession," Campbell proposes that Wharton's two rewritings of the Lizzie Borden legend represent an intensification of Wharton’s perennial theme of the woman constrained by social norms who breaks free from them in destructive or occasionally violent ways. Moreover, the two works' lesbian subtexts, their examination of the erotics of dominance and submission, and the complicated dance of confession and expiation enacted by the women characters in each piece, who remain bonded together by secrecy and violence, sheds new light on the fraught female friendships in Wharton's better-known works.
Also engaging with the figure of the murderous woman, Lauren Kuryloski traces the recirculating narrative of Ruth Snyder across the twentieth century in “’An Essentially Licentious Era’: Ruth Snyder and the Lurking Threat of Female Criminality.” The story of Ruth Snyder – a woman who killed her husband with the help of her lover – was a media sensation in the 1920s, as it seemed to represent the horrifying consequences of women’s increasing defiance of traditional gender conventions in the “Roaring Twenties.” Demonstrating a cultural relevance beyond her contemporary moment, Snyder continues to appear in various literary incarnations throughout the century. In 1928, the same year as Snyder’s execution, Sophie Treadwell’s modernist play Machinal paints a sympathetic picture of Snyder as the damaged product of system designed to limit women’s full humanity, while in James M. Cain’s novella, Double Indemnity (1936) and the classic noir film of the same title (1944), Snyder functions as a prototype for the seductive yet deadly femme fatale. She resurfaces in the 1950s, playing a pivotal role in William March’s work of literary fiction, The Bad Seed (1954), and she is featured on the front pages of sensationalistic true crime pulp magazines published throughout the decade. In a climate of renewed social conservatism and subsequent desire to return women to their traditional roles after World War II, Snyder’s story functions as a touchstone for female deviance as resistance.
Finally, Stanley Orr offers a new lens through which to view the criminal figure by focusing on the transgressive potential of the trickster in his paper, “’I wonder which of you is real’: John Kneubuhl, Sam Amalu, and “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo.” Orr analyzes the ways in which Samoan-American dramatist John Kneubuhl fictionalized confidence man Sam Amalu in “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo” (1966), an episode of the TV program The Wild Wild West. Boasting descent from Hawaiian royalty, Samuel Crowniningburg-Amalu (1917-1986) graduated from Honolulu’s prestigious Punahou School in 1935. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Amalu undertook many colorful schemes, including the 1962 “Mystery Hui” hoax by which he tendered a bogus multi-million dollar offer for Sheraton’s Hawai‘i hotels and other properties. In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai'i Statehood ( 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillo finds in Amalu a “kolohe” (mischievous) trickster who challenged U.S. colonization of Hawai‘i. Kneubuhl anticipated this interpretation by immortalizing Amalu as Prince of the South Sea Coral Islands (Nick Adams), a wily Polynesian aristocrat bent upon destabilizing American hegemony in Oceania. Through interviews given by Kneubuhl and other intertexts, this talk addresses “The Night of the Two-Legged Buffalo” in terms of the relationship between Kneubuhl and Amalu (they studied together at Punahou) as well as the former’s lifelong engagement with postcolonial thematics, modernist absurdism, and Polynesian clowning traditions such as the Samoan fale aitu genre.
Ultimately, this panel makes a critical intervention into the study of crime literature by focusing on a series of figures – Lizzie Borden, Ruth Snyder, Sam Amalu – that have captured the public imagination across the decades and serve as sites for unpacking cultural anxieties surrounding women’s entrance into the public sphere as well as colonial expansion. Taken collectively, they demonstrate how the figure of the criminal can productively upend normative social conventions.