A “Burlesque Queen in Bobby Socks”
Domesticity, Criminality, and Suspense in Charles Williams’s Noir Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895649 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maysaa Husam Jaber (0000-0003-4840-6598, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 52 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35-52 |
| Publication date | 2021-11-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-2021-004 |
| OpenAlex | W3216527313 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
This article proposes that Charles Williams’s mid-twentieth-century noir fiction reshapes post-war representations of gender roles and paves the way for various renditions and developments of noir. Williams’s works are narratives of transgression meeting domesticity, crime meeting docility, and cunning meeting conformity; they portray a deadly recipe that comprises different, even conflicting ingredients of a fusion between domesticity, crime, and suspense. By examining the recurring figure of the criminal housewife in his work, especially Hell Hath No Fury (1953), this article argues that Williams brings forth a complex and subversive gender schema to trouble both the creed of domesticity popular in the 1950s and the stereotyping of the lethal seductress prevalent in noir fiction. By so doing, Williams’s noir not only brings the transgression of women to the fore but also displays a compelling picture of post-war gender roles in the US under McCarthyism
Art · Art history · Burlesque · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Voyeurism · American Political and Social Dynamics · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · History · Modern American Literature Studies · Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |