Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 96

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Popular Culture Review

imagined as impassable in early Victorian England, is crucial to The Face o f a
Stranger, as it will be in later novels as well. When Hester is first introduced, her
family is already compromised financially, yet she nonetheless calls strikingly to
mind the stock aristocratic characters of Perry’s fiction. Initially, Hester is not yet
a sleuth who aids Monk in his inquiries; rather, she is one of many obstructive
upper-class people he must interview in his search for clues in the murder of Joscelin
Grey, the Crimean soldier responsible for the elder Latterlys’ demise. Echoing
countless others who view the police as incompetent tradesmen, Hester chastises
Monk for his “fumbling around” (212). Soon enough, however, Hester’s alliance
shifts. Once Monk confides in her that since beginning his investigation, he has
lost his memory in an accident and must begin anew, Hester forgives his “fumbling”
and helps him to piece together what he had learned before. Ultimately, she puts
her insider status among the upper classes to use in an alliance with the police,
who must induce a confession from one of the gentry. Reminded by the police that
she knows the perpetrator’s family “far better than we could, from the outside”
(333), she hatches a plan to make the criminal reveal himself—and significantly,
this plan can only work if Hester, as a member of the upper class and thus a credible
witness, will corroborate Monk’s accusations. Though charged with “vulgarity]”
by the murderer’s mother for her actions (339), Hester is nevertheless believed,
and the culprit is caught; both gentry and ally of the lowly police, both aristocratic
and vulgar, Hester possesses a liminal status that will continue to make her a crucial
ally to Inspector Monk.
Though her intellectual nature and her desire to pursue nursing in the Crimea
already mark Hester as disruptive to the class and gender identities prescribed for
her by society, the liminality that makes her such a useful collaborator to Monk is
in many ways the result of her experiences in the Crimean War. Like many war
writers, Perry characterizes the war as a frontier region in which not only
geographical but also social, professional, and psychological borders are contested,
where, through violence and necessity, identities are made fluid and transgression
is inevitable. For Hester, the war is a formative moment, “her work in the Crimean
hospitals... changing] her beyond anything” her family “could begin to understand”
{Face 102)6. Professionally, though she is in name a nurse, she also oversteps that
role: “in the army,” she admits to Zorah Rostova in Weighed in the Balance, “I
frequently exceeded my authority” (331); she “had grown used to...making decisions
and being in the heart of emotion [and]...desperately needed” {Face 104). In the
chaos of the war, Hester crosses the gulf between amateur and professional status,
fulfilling when needed the role of doctor and surgeon; as the narrator explains,
“there had frequently been so few army surgeons that nurses such as herself had
had to take matters into their own hands, and there had been little complaint” {A
Sudden, Fearful Death 154). When called upon to defend Hester from a charge of