The Gossip-grapevine: Using ‘Gossip’ as a Tool of Surveillance in Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Abstract:
Agatha Christie was of the opinion that men mostly tried to marginalize women by labeling ‘gossip’ as harmful and sinful. What concerned them primarily was women’s breaching of trust by exposing their familial secrets in the process of ‘grapevining’ the gossip and that could possibly help women outwitting men within the domestic realm. So, Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd wanted to justify that women, in possession of secretive information, used ‘gossip’ as a means of resistance through which the minority could overshadow the ‘majority culture’. Therefore, it is not surprising that in the novel, unlike Poirot, both Roger Ackroyd and James Sheppard detested the excessively curious nature of Caroline Sheppard, the older sister of Dr. James Sheppard who finally proved to be the culprit. On the other hand, Poirot not only accepted Caroline’s assistance in solving the crime, but also admitted the fact that more valuable information was available to Caroline than to him. In the said novel, Christie portrayed Caroline as an intuitive elderly woman with a keen power of observation, and a thorough understanding of human nature. She depicted Caroline as a spinster in order to question power and gender relations and at the same time to challenge the status quo. Both Caroline and her literary successor Miss Marple were spinsters and used gossip-grapevine as part of their vigilance and detection. Their edgy status gave them the provision to observe the people without being noticed or taken seriously. However, the problem with Caroline was that she could not utilize gossip as a tool of detection; it only remained as a mode of surveillance for her; whereas Miss Marple used it efficiently both in surveillance and detection and thus stood out.This paper would like to explain how Christie has revived feminine methods of
surveillance and detection through intuition and gossip-grapevine using the character of Caroline Sheppard who revealed many secrets of King’s Abbot to Hercule Poirot with her well-knit gossip network and thus helped him in detection.
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