Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 98

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Popular Culture Review

Oliver Rathbone casts her as a romantic heroine (103). Perry suggests that Hester’s
femininity is innate and essential, something she retains in spite of professed desires
to the contrary, having Rathbone notice that “when she was unconscious of herself
she was curiously graceful” (Defend 159). Yet Hester’s femininity provides her a
distinct advantage as a sleuth; Monk notes that she was an “excellent ally” for him
in part because “she had acute observation, an understanding of women he would
never achieve simply because he was a man” (Defend 96). Though such essentialism
casts Perry’s feminism in doubt, it nevertheless grants Hester powers as an effective
investigator. In Defend and Betray, when brainstorming with Monk, Rathbone,
and Rathbone’s father Henry, Hester is the only one who can discern Alexandra
Carlyon’s motive for killing her husband, though at the time she does not realize
she has discovered it. When Henry asks her, “what would a woman hold so dear
that she would kill to protect it?”, Hester responds that it would be “some threat to
the people I loved most—which in Alexandra’s case would surely be her children”
{Defend 187). In addition to her presumed ability to understand women’s motives
as men cannot, Hester is also portrayed as immune to women’s charms and thus,
again, able to interview them effectively. This ability is one of the keys to her
solution to the murder in Weighed in the Balance: though Monk and Rathbone
have both interviewed the dynamic Zorah Rostova with no success, Hester is able
to obtain crucial information because, as she says, she will not have her “judgment
addled” by her as they have (329).
Though Hester’s feminine qualities are a crucial aspect of her character, her
more masculine attributes are even more important to her role as a successful sleuth.
The arts of femininity generally elude her, as she is “seldom fashionable...and
never really feminine” {Sudden 225), resisting the convention that requires women
to “look dainty and a little childlike” {Dangerous 160). Similarly, Hester is “highly
intelligent, with a gift for logical thought which many people found disturbing—
especially men, who did not expect or like it in a woman” (138). Monk generally
dislikes Hester’s “unfeminine mind” {Face 260) and regrets that he views her as
he would “another man” {Sins 275), yet Rathbone recognizes that this quality allows
her to exceed many of the physical and ideological spaces to which Victorian upperclass women were supposedly limited: “she was not a woman,” he notes, “in the
customary sense of someone separate from the business of life outside the home, a
person to be protected from the affairs or the emotions that involved the mind”
{Defend 149)7. It is, in fact, precisely Hester’s position partially outside Victorian
“customs” of gender that allows her to solve the mystery of fellow nurse Prudence
Barrymore’s murder in A Sudden, Fearful Death. While everyone else has read
into Barrymore’s ambiguous letters a hopeless yet conventionally feminine love
for the doctor Herbert Stanhope, Hester recognizes that in her letters, Prudence
refers not to a love of him but rather of the profession of medicine. Unlike Monk,