More on The Unknown Weapon
Jul. 27th, 2013 10:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
potentiality_26I may end up having to make a tag for this story...
Like a lot of similar stories written in the Victorian era, the writer of The Unknown Weapon goes out of his way to make it seem like it actually happened. The names of people and places are said to have been changed and the narrator is never named at all. (She's featured in quite a few of the stories Forrestor wrote and is known as Mrs. G_,)
I wanted to break down a few things.
The Mrs. implies that she is married. Since the freest women in the Victorian era were widows, it's probably safe to assume that that's what she was- but her husband isn't so much as mentioned at any point in the story.
Her "sidekick" is a fellow female police officer she convinces to pose as a maid in the mansion where the murder took place. When Mrs. G_ comes to the village, one of the first things she does is get into the confidence of a local busybody, a nosy but never flat out annoying and well drawn woman who happily tells the heroine a great deal about the people and places involved in the crime. The villain is a woman. The witness who supplies the most important information to the case is a woman. The final clue that solves the case is supplied by a female innkeeper.
I'd bemoan the lack of movies based on these stories, except that I think I know exactly why no one will make them. I took a class in collage where we analyzed period pieces made in different eras. The premise of the class was that how a society depicts the past also says something about the society itself. I think most people today don't want us to know that someone wrote stories about a professional female police detective in 1860's, and they definitely don't want us to know that with a few description changes (of clothes, modes of transportation, etc.) it could essentially have been written today. After all, current day inequality problems matter so much less as long as the past was so much worse.
Now, I'm not saying it wasn't worse in some (probably many) respects- but literature and the media used to look forward so much more than it does now. These days, most writers seem more interested in showing how fine things are rather than how much better they could be.
Like a lot of similar stories written in the Victorian era, the writer of The Unknown Weapon goes out of his way to make it seem like it actually happened. The names of people and places are said to have been changed and the narrator is never named at all. (She's featured in quite a few of the stories Forrestor wrote and is known as Mrs. G_,)
I wanted to break down a few things.
The Mrs. implies that she is married. Since the freest women in the Victorian era were widows, it's probably safe to assume that that's what she was- but her husband isn't so much as mentioned at any point in the story.
Her "sidekick" is a fellow female police officer she convinces to pose as a maid in the mansion where the murder took place. When Mrs. G_ comes to the village, one of the first things she does is get into the confidence of a local busybody, a nosy but never flat out annoying and well drawn woman who happily tells the heroine a great deal about the people and places involved in the crime. The villain is a woman. The witness who supplies the most important information to the case is a woman. The final clue that solves the case is supplied by a female innkeeper.
I'd bemoan the lack of movies based on these stories, except that I think I know exactly why no one will make them. I took a class in collage where we analyzed period pieces made in different eras. The premise of the class was that how a society depicts the past also says something about the society itself. I think most people today don't want us to know that someone wrote stories about a professional female police detective in 1860's, and they definitely don't want us to know that with a few description changes (of clothes, modes of transportation, etc.) it could essentially have been written today. After all, current day inequality problems matter so much less as long as the past was so much worse.
Now, I'm not saying it wasn't worse in some (probably many) respects- but literature and the media used to look forward so much more than it does now. These days, most writers seem more interested in showing how fine things are rather than how much better they could be.
