Criticism In Pd James's An Unsuitable Job For A Woman

PD James’ novel, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, published in 1972, coincides with a new, emerging strand of feminist thought. Not surprisingly therefore, several of the concerns of the text starting from its very title, were some issues raised by the feminist movement of this period. In my paper, I’ll be examining the crime(s), criminals, and the detective in the novel in the light of not only generic context but also against the dominant feminist thought of the time.

The novel opens not with a crime but the suicide of Bernie Pryde, Cordelia’s partner at the detective agency, and who, as the reader discovers, would have headed the investigation of Mark Callender’s suicide. As Kate Watson points out in an essay titled, “Family Discord: Challenging the Choreography of Crime Fiction in PD James’ An Unsuitable Job for a Woman”, that the death of the

The heteronormative family, with the figure of the father having an almost priestly role to play in protecting and nurturing his unit, came under severe censure from feminists during this period. The institution of family as accepted and propagated by the religious bodies as well as formal and informal education systems began to be recognised as tyrannical and abusive and a symbol of patriarchal violence. Millet, in the same work, writes, “Patriarchy’s chief institution is the family. It is both a mirror of and a connection with the larger society; a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal whole. Mediating between the individual and the social structure the family effects control and conformity where political and other authorities are insufficient… Even in patriarchal societies where women are granted legal citizenship, they tend to be ruled through the family alone and have little or no formal relation to the state