| Abstract | Agatha Christie is generally considered a conservative and traditional writer who wrote formulaic detective novels with two-dimensional and stereotypical characters. For this reason, during most of the twentieth century, her novels have been dismissed for lacking intellectual and literary value, and her women characters overlooked by feminist critics because of her conservative Victorian values. This paper will, firstly, look into the history of the detective and crime genre to situate Christie into a literary context. Furthermore, the paper will explore the sociocultural context of the time of Christie’s life and work, focusing on the position of women in the society, as well as Christie’s own views on women and feminism. Afterwards, the paper will closely analyze the women characters in four of her novels: The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), Death on the Nile (1937), Five Little Pigs (1942), and Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952). Before reaching its conclusion, the paper will consider works of critics and scholars written on the matter and try to categorize the previously analyzed characters. The aim of this MA paper is to, by analyzing the above-mentioned aspects of her life and works, argue that Agatha Christie, through her characters, manages to depict a large variety of different women of her time who assume different roles in both the society and the plot of her novels. |
