Title: The Cultural Roles of Early American Fictional Spinster Detectives

Abstract: Anna Catherine Green’s The Affair Next Door and The Circular Staircase and Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase create the earliest prototypes of spinster detectives in American literary history. These fictional images are in their nature self-contradictory: as detectives, they play the cultural role of upholding bourgeois morality and family ideals, but as single, autonomous women, they challenge the dominant discourse through their investigation of women’s plight and their recasting of the image of the spinster. In their novels, Green and Rinehart endow the spinster detectives with the right to narrate in their own voices. Their narration not only highlights their roles in defending morality and women’s rights, but also redescribes their characters and potential and subverts the Victorian prejudices governing sex, age, and marital status.

Keywords: spinster detective, moral supervision, female entrapment, fictional spinsterhood

Author: Qiong Li, Associate Professor, College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2021.04.002