‘You don’t even know how you know’: Double Indemnity as anti-office discourse

Abstract

This article argues that the criminal plot at the heart of James M. Cain’s 1936 novel Double Indemnity is primarily one targeted against the structures of the modern corporation, embodied in the space of the office. Such an argument situates Cain’s novel as a striking intervention in a long tradition of anti-office discourse, a discourse in which clerical work and its spaces have persistently been framed as exemplifying urban modernity’s deleterious impact upon and occlusion of the supposed ‘frontier values’ of masculinity, individualism and risk. Walter Huff, the novel’s protagonist, is figured as an agent of those values, a ‘frontiersman’ whose assault upon his insurance firm employer constitutes an attempt to reinvest a regulated, systematized world with a sense of the unpredictable wilderness.