Women detectives, agents of feminism, androgynous avatars in the fiction of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs

Resumen

This thesis deals with the comparative study of fictional forensic scientists Dr. Kay Scarpetta and Dr. Temperance Brennan in the series of Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, respectively. The analysis is based on the essential shared characteristics found in both series. On the one hand, the characters - Kay Scarpetta and Temperance Brennan - are middle-aged woman detectives working for the state-sponsored law-enforcement system, and on the other, their creators - Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs -, both women authors born in the United States in the 1950s, are practitioners of forensic detective fiction. The interest of this thesis is the current lack of a comparative analysis of the authors, Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs, their characters, Kay Scarpetta and Temperance Brennan, and the two series of novels in their entirety. The theoretical framework of this thesis takes several parameters into account. First, the novels are embedded within the genre of detective fiction and the conditionings that its male-based literary tradition has established. Then, one should also bear in mind the capacity of detective fiction to reflect social concerns at a given time in history as well as its potential proposal for new ideals. In this sense, since Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs' novels feature a woman hero, the influence of feminist beliefs is also well-grounded. Moreover, the novels of the Scarpetta and Brennan series should also be contextualised within the realm of works of fiction that have extensive readerships and thus, their universalised sales and consequent discursive impact on the attitudes of the international community should be taken into account. Then, considering the first novels of each series - Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem (1990) and Kathy Reichs' Déjà Dead (1997) - as serving to establish the basic tenor and guidelines of the discourse of the entire series, this thesis analyses the characterisations of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta and Kathy Reichs' Temperance Brennan as paradigms. As agents of feminism, Kay Scarpetta and Temperance Brennan are characterised by attitudes and patterns of behaviour both at work and in their private lives which dismantle patriarchal beliefs and socially-imposed gender roles for women, thereby revealing the devastating consequences that these may have, at the same time proposing a more autonomous, emancipated way of life for women. In this way, stemming from the deconstruction of patriarchal discrimination against women and all forms of the abuse of power, Kay Scarpetta's discourse emphasises the need for a more egalitarian society, while Temperance Brennan struggles against the socially-imposed patriarchal passive role for women. The analysis of the characters' constructed discourse is based on the dissection of their -presentation of self' and their symbolic interactions, as all interactions are considered to be meaningful (symbolic interactionism), in the work space - logically, the crime scene and the forensic laboratory, complemented by the office, and in the home, together with those around them - work colleagues, family and friends. This thesis suggests that Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs make use of Kay Scarpetta and Temperance Brennan as androgynous avatars in order to put forward the characters' feminist discourse, but also to express their own agendas by means of this fictional, safe, distancing tool. The study contends that the Scarpetta and Brennan series indirectly portray the authors' differentiated proposals for the improvement of current society. Whereas Patricia Cornwell's feminist agenda assumes sexual undertones and suggests the blurring of socially-imposed, binary, sexual distinctions, the agenda of Kathy Reichs widens the scope of a feminist perspective to encompass the gender-free defence of the weak and the deprived who are abused by those all-powerful in contemporary society. Thus, it is proposed that both Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs use detective fiction, the reading of which is frequently considered a simple leisure pastime, to express their commitment to struggle for a better, more egalitarian society.