Philip Marlowe, Family Man

Abstract

Hardboiled detective fiction has long been considered an inherently conservative genre, typified by an individualist ethos, rampant misogyny, and antipathy for racial difference. This article, however, joins recent scholarship that locates a utopian impulse in the genre with a study of family in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. Following Jameson’s “synoptic” method of reading Chandler’s fiction, Beal argues that Marlowe has a latent desire for the collective potential of family in The BigSleep (1939), but that as subsequent texts’ families become more chaotic, that wish becomes more suppressed. The synoptic reading demonstrates a widening gap in Marlowe’s wish fulfillment. Major upheaval in the institution during the modern period, as the family was moving from a hierarchal unit to a more democratic one, made the family an accommodating, even enviable, social experience for a character like Marlowe and granted him access as its normative strictures were easing.