By Delaney Sacia
Detectives are the epitome of objectivity. They systematically extract information from witnesses, suspects, and situations, unswayed by partiality, to reveal the hidden truths of criminal cases. They are analytical, stoic, and methodical, and appraise their surroundings with a cool, impersonal intellect, aiming to expose the decisions and behaviors of guilty parties. They perceive the world as a mosaic of facts and objects declaring who did what and when, always disengaged from their own emotions, experiences, and relationships. In these ways, the detective resembles a disembodied intelligence calibrated to distill relevant information into accurate theory.
The mind of the detective was forged by Victorian writers during the rise of modern science. As such, the rationalism of the detective reflected that of the scientist, whose thinking relied on rigorous classification and objectification. Characters like Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes demonstrated this “valorization of science, technology, and rationality”[1] within detective fiction, detaching themselves from their personal and social environments to identify relations among artifacts, people, and situations. These detectives “imparted to mechanical objectivity [a] high moral tone,”[2] embodied precision as they traced patterns and weighed variables, and modelled dispassion as they rid themselves of any emotional investments that might confound their reason.
During the Victorian period, the construction of scientific objectivity was often bound up with androcentrism, as masculinity was associated with abstract and original thought.[3] As Harrington points out, “late Victorian fiction often poses the trope of the rational, masculine mind, frequently associated with the figure of the male detective, in opposition to the stereotypical irrational, feminine mind.”[4] Detective archetypes reinforced masculinized standards of reason by elevating deduction over intuition and objectification over relationality, systematically prioritizing masculine-associated traits over feminine-associated characteristics. Consequently, as Klein observes, “the predictable formula of detective fiction is based on a world whose sex/gender valuations reinforce male hegemony. Taking male behavior as the norm, the genre defines its parameters to exclude female characters.”[5] Male detectives were celebrated for delineating between concepts, simplifying complex situations, and reducing ambiguity wherever possible—none of which women were thought capable of achieving.
Catherine Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective emerged from within these contexts, featuring a woman detective who, despite her gender, established herself as a successful professional detective. Ebenezer Dyer, Loveday’s managing detective, describes her as “the most sensible and practical woman [he] ever met,”[6] readily defending her analytical abilities to those who would question her competence based on her gender. Nevertheless, Dyer refers to Loveday as “one of the shrewdest and most clear-headed of [his] female detectives.”[7] This suggests that Dyer perceives Loveday’s detective abilities as being informed by her femininity. Dyer’s implicit sexism is reinforced by his frequently contrasting of Loveday with other women, stating that Loveday possess analytical skills “so rare among women,”[8] including perceptiveness, diligence and meticulousness. As such, Dyer promotes a masculinized standard of detection that Loveday, as a rare sort of woman, has managed to realize. In this way, Dyer legitimizes Loveday as a true detective but suggests that Loveday attains such legitimacy in defiance of her sex—whose nature is generally unfit for detective work.
While Loveday embodies certain masculine norms in her work as a detective—for example, by not divulging details about her personal life or by contemplating case evidence in solitude—she often works against masculine objectivities by utilizing non-hegemonic detection methods, such as allowing her intuition, rather than formal logical processes, to shape her interpretation of clues. As such, Loveday often solves cases by drawing connections across apparently dissimilar events, from a penny reading to a robbery, stolen check, or ghost sighting. As Kestner observes, Loveday’s intuitions often conflict with the “typical” case pathways identified by her male colleagues, especially her “ability to read evidence despite male interference . . . [and to] create a narrative about crime different from that concocted by prejudiced, gender-biased male professionals.”[9] What emerges from Loveday’s detection, then, is a profound respect for nuance, expressed through explicitly anti-categorical thinking that defies the scientific compartmentalization characteristic of much detective fiction. Loveday insists that “sometimes . . . the explanation that is obvious is the one to be rejected, not accepted,”[10] acknowledging that “while all people agreed as to the variety of motives that instigate crime, very few allow sufficient margin for variety of character in the criminal.”[11] To these ends, Dyer describes Loveday’s mind as being “unhampered by any hard-and-fast theories . . . [with] so much common sense that it amounts to genius.”[12]
Hegemonic detectives are often portrayed as detached and reserved—especially in their professional relationships. These are stereotypes that Loveday likewise resists. Rather than assessing case witnesses in a disconnected way, Loveday leans into relationships with witnesses in order to glean relevant information from their conversations. In “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” for example, Loveday gathers critical information about a case through casual conversations with the robbery victims’ housekeeper. Loveday leverages people’s expectations of her as a woman—namely, expectations of sociability and approachability—to gain the trust of people close to a case. Dyer recruits Loveday for help in “The Redhill Sisterhood” for this exact reason, explaining that “in cases of mere suspicion, women detectives are more satisfactory than men, for they are less likely to attract attention.”[13] Loveday’s identity as a woman allows her to work “undercover” as she pivots between “gossiping friendliness [and] that of the business woman hard at work.”[14] By utilizing relationship and observation as means for detection, Loveday gains a more comprehensive view of cases and, in turn, rejects the expectation that in order to be rational and effective, detectives must separate their personality from their case methodologies.
Loveday Brooke demonstrates a flexible, embodied rationality that responds to the particularities of individuals and evolves with the unique demands of every case. These decisions make Loveday an unlikely detective, not out of any lack of skill but out of a lack of conformity to traditional detective archetypes, characterized by disinterested, machine-like thought patterns. Feminist critiques of rationality have long sought to dismantle such masculinized forms of logic and reasoning. We may view Loveday Brooke as pioneering such a project, demonstrating that “rationality cannot be considered an objective immutable state.”[15] By demonstrating the possibilities of intuitive, personalist detection, Loveday challenges readers’ assumptions about the nature of objectivity and, in turn, restructures the bounds of justified reasoning itself.
Notes
[1] Claire Meldrum, “Yesterday’s Women: The Female Presence in Neo-Victorian Television Detective Programs,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 43, no. 4 (2015): 202.
[2] Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity.” Representations 40, no. 40 (1992): 118.
[3] Rob Boddice, “The Manly Mind?: Revisiting the Victorian ‘Sex in Brain’ Debate,” Gender & History 23, no. 2 (2011): 326–27.
[4] Ellen Burton Harrington, “Gender and Rationality: Detection and Late-Victorian Domesticity,” (dissertation, Tulane University, 2000), 1.
[5] Kathleen Gregory Klein, The Woman Detective: Gender & Genre (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 225.
[6] Catherine Louisa Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (New York: Dover, 2020), 5.
[7] Ibid., 4 (emphasis added).
[8] Ibid., 5.
[9] Joseph A. Kestner, Sherlock’s Sisters: The British Female Detective, 1864–1913 (London: Routledge, 2017), 74–75.
[10] Pirkis, The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, 123.
[11] Ibid., 25.
[12] Ibid., 5.
[13] Ibid., 65.
15 Ibid., 16.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Anne Ross-Smith and Martin Kornberger, “Gendered Rationality?: A Genealogical Exploration of the Philosophical and Sociological Conceptions of Rationality, Masculinity and Organization,” Gender, Work, and Organization 11, no. 3 (2004): 296.