Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 102

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Popular Culture Review

Mourning , Hester seeks such a lowly position so she can aid Monk in his
investigation of the wealthy Moidore family; as his patron Callandra Daviot explains
to him, Hester is the perfect under-cover sleuth for his case, since he needs someone
“of no importance” to be placed within the household to observe unobserved (129).
As a nurse to Beatrice Moidore, Hester notes of herself, “she was a servant, someone
whose opinion was of no importance whatever, indeed someone not really of
existence” (163). Though she recognizes the strategic value of such a position, she
also finds that it “ranklefs]” (264): “Hester did not know whether to be grateful her
status gave her such opportunity to observe or insulted that she was of such total
unimportance that no one cared what she saw or heard” (165). Disguised in the
garb of servitude, Hester is a kind of invisible insider to the household, and this,
coupled with her military knowledge and connections, allows her, not Monk, to
discover the truth of Octavia Haslett’s murder in the novel.
In addition to allowing her superb opportunities to infiltrate the households of
the gentry, Hester’s invisibility and servant status help her to glean information
from colleagues in the working class. In A Sudden, Fearful Death, while working
as a hospital nurse, Hester registers her lowly status in an encounter with hospital
governor Lady Berenice Ross Gilbert: “Although in any social circumstance
[Hester] would have considered herself Lady Ross Gilbert’s equal,...in her gray
stu ff dress, and with her occupation known, she was at every kind o f
disadvantage....She was a nurse, so to some extent invisible, like a good domestic
servant” (192). Yet Hester’s “disadvantaged” position within the hospital allows
her to gain crucial information about Lady Ross Gilbert from Dora Parsons, the
stereotypical working-class nurse, “rough but not deliberately cruel” (190); though
Dora still resents Hester for giving herself “airs like yer too good fer the rest of us”
(179), she confides in her as she may not have in someone truly from without the
servant class. Circulating among the working classes in Cain His Brother, she
again puts this liminality to use to help Monk’s investigation. Working in a typhoid
hospital in London’s dangerous Limehouse district, she nurses the poorest of patients
alongside the patients’ families and friends. She establishes a bond with the “East
End women” who nurse with her, defending their compassion as “eminently worthy
of...respect” by the upper c \