Warshawski's Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Detective

Abstract

When Sara Paretsky began publishing stories about hard-boiled detective Victoria (V. I.) Warshawski, her challenge, she remarked, was to negotiate the change from a male to a female protagonist without making Warshawski Philip Marlowe in drag, to work within the conventions of the traditional hard-boiled detective tradition without making Warshawski's femininity an occasion for parody.' This was not an easy task because, as Paretsky recognized, giving the hard-boiled detective a female body fundamentally complicates the web of associations that legitimate his patterns of action, attributes of character, and relations to his world; it disrupts the genre's association of masculinity with that special kind of self capable of the effective investigation and execution of justice. Escaping from the all-or-nothing economy of formulaic adherence to convention or outright genre parody, Paretsky instead undertakes the more complex work of reimagining and reconceiving the way the convention figures the relation between sexed bodies and individual agency.2 Grounded in the situation of a female body acting within a patriarchal environment, a detective like Warshawski fundamentally complicates the ethical opposition deeply enmeshed in the ethos of American masculinity that informs the classic Chandlerian hard-boiled detective, that between the inherent corruptness of collectivity and the potential purity of properly guarded individuality. The theoretical model that best articulates Warshawski's combination of individualist action with her awareness of its social context is one that, like Warshawski herself, is the product of a feminist reworking of a mid-century, masculinist vision of the world. In much the same way that Paretksy's fiction reconfigures the classic hard-boiled detective, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir reworks the conceptual framework of Sartrean existentialism from a perspective grounded in the embodiedness of female experience.' And, just as Paretsky's fiction seems untimely in its contemporary feminist appropriation of a seemingly anachronistic set of conventions, Beauvoir's work is difficult to take seriously in a contemporary context because of its