The Big Bow Mystery : Jewish Identity and the English Detective Novel

Abstract

Detective fiction has traditionally been viewed as a conservative genre, popular because reassuring, with its neat solutions, its reliance on fair play and the efficacy of reason, and its final upholding of the social order. Late Victorian detective fiction, in particular, is said to be read now with a feeling of and nostalgia, not only as a period piece but because of its implicit assumption that the status quo is correct and unchanging (Alsenberg 7). In fact, however, although Stereotypie conceptions of Victorian coziness have clung to popular genres with more tenacity than to other forms, the nineteenth-century detective novel could indeed serve as a vehicle for cultural criticism, with the power to unsettle rather than reassure its readers. Even a Sherlock Holmes story such as The Sign of Four invites the attentive reader to evaluate assumptions about race underlying British imperialism. The subject of this essay, The Big Bow Mystery (1891), one of the first and most successful sealed room novels in English, well illustrates the subversive potential of the detective genre. Its detective-hero strikes out against social institutions and ethical norms and, as the fiction unfolds to the reader, the work itself subverts the norms and expectations of the detective genre. Illuminated by ritual theories of culture, The Big Bow Mystery appears as a parable of ethnic marginality, embodying a haunting subtext of its author's own often hidden tensions. And as it reveals the anxieties and anger of marginality, it undermines its readers' confident assumptions about the social order and the nature of good and evil. Israel Zangwill, the author of The Big Bow Mystery, was born in London in 1864 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The position of the established church in England meant that political emancipation for Jews came as late as 1858, after a long Parliamentary struggle; Oxford and Cambridge began granting degrees to Jewish students only in 1871 (see Henriques; also Roth 253, 289 and Endelman 77-80). By the 1890s,