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The Social Creation Of The Female Detective: Miss Marple

In a historical period of depression and world conflict, a writer emerged to help bring order and escapism to a dazed English audience. Agatha Christie, or The Queen of Crime, published her first book in 1920, which introduced her most well known character Hercule Poirot. After seeing some success, she presented another character, one who would become her all time favorite, Miss Jane Marple in ‘The Tuesday Night Club'. Agatha Christie stylized Miss Marple after Anna Katharine Green's Amelia Butterworth in that her heroine was an elderly woman with a natural talent for amateur detective work. Through examination of the TV series Miss Marple, played by Joan Hickson, it can be seen that the choices Agatha Christie made about Miss Marple's personality and characteristics of detection are affected by the time period and social landscape in which she was created.
As one of the first female detectives, Miss Marple had large shoes to fill from her male counterparts. When first created, she was described as a "sixty-five year old woman who was caught in the fashions and manners of the turn of the century" (Irons and Warthling Roberts 64). As time went on though, she became less like an elderly woman at the end of her life, but rather a woman who had reached a wise age where she was used for her endless knowledge. In ‘The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side', metaphors to describe her include "as sharp as a knife" and that she has a "mind like a meat cleaver", and with this view of her, she gets a younger look being more like a country-tweedy fashioned woman, notably wealthy and gentile, with a bounce in her step (Irons and Warthling Roberts 66). Through the use of ‘The Mirror Crack'd, Miss Marple is show not as a fluffy, grouchy old woman, but rather a highly astute, observant person, who is a spinster, but a very social one at that. She can also be seen as bumbling or eccentric, and often times very gossipy, which is a mark of the woman's spin on being a detective, and she...