All the Single Ladies

Murder mysteries and working towards wholeness

In writing the final part of this three part series on literary examples for women (read part one and part two if you missed those), I find I've reached the hardest piece to write: on single women.

For my first essay, I considered the mythic and archetypical women of The Lord of the Rings. Much easier ground upon which to stand there, less likely to be criticized to implying something redutionistic either way. Then too, for the post focused on married women, it wasn’t difficult to extol faithful wives and loving mothers, the sort of women we all want in our lives.

But for single women, I feel I am most certainly on uneasy ground, the sort that may turn to quicksand at any moment. Will what I write unintentionally imply that our human interdependence with others, including men, is somehow a weakness and chain, or on the opposite of the spectrum, will it accidentally be understood that women have nothing to contribute outside of serving a husband and having as many children as physically possible?

The above should tell you that I don’t intend either extreme. I do believe men and women are truly different, that we are not interchangeable with each other, and that masculine and feminine has meaning. On the other hand, I most certainly do not believe that virtues and vices can be divided up among men and women, with some belonging to one gender and others belonging to the opposite. Both men and women are made in the image of God, and are both fully human, and so we share more with each other than we do not.

That throat clearing, so necessary online, out of the way, perhaps now I can continue on to the proper point of this essay. What literary ladies can guide us in this specific season, whether it be short or life-long?

I’m fond of Agatha Christie, and other classic mystery writers, and so in a slightly whimsical spirit, I selected my examples from their pens.

For your consideration: Miss Marple, of St. Mary’s Mead, the knitting, gossiping, grey-haired agent of Nemesis. First of all, Miss Marple shows us that you can both value marriage and love and pursue a meaningful single life. We have a tendency to select only side of that equation. Miss Marple often assists Cupid in defending the happiness of young lovers and certainly upholds the dignity of marriage in her prim, old-fashioned way. But she also has value and place in her community as a single woman. You might say that, socially, she has a matriarchal role, though she never has borne children.

Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple in the BBC tv series Marple

Like her author, she is a woman of deep faith and shrewd sense. (Sharp and shrewd older ladies may be among my favorite characters.) She brings to each of her cases a lifetime of observed experience and practical wisdom. Though hopefully none of us ever are involved in a murder investigation, we could all use a Miss Marple in our lives: wise older women, married or unmarried, who offer their experience in a gracious manner, saving us from learning everything the hard way. We all could do worse than aim to become someone whom others respect and who make themselves valuable to their communities.

My second character for your consideration is more obscure, but is one of my favorites ever to be written: Lady Amanda Fitton. She appears in several mysteries penned by Margery Allingham, eventually becoming the love interest and wife of Allingham’s detective, Albert Campion. For the sake of this article, I’ll focus on Amanda as she appears in Sweet Danger and The Fashion in Shrouds as a single woman, as yet not in a romantic relationship with the series detective, but as his friend and detecting partner.

Amanda is a throughly plucky girl from the beginning, trusting to her wits to pull her out of several tight scrapes. In the absence of a father, or any competent grown man for that matter, Amanda finds herself the breadwinner for her ragtag family. She somehow makes work an electric brougham (an early form of automobile, already ancient at the time of the story) and turns the old mill on the family property into a somewhat profitable enterprise. At the time, she’s somewhere around sixteen or seventeen.

As an adult, she goes on to have a career in aeronautics. Perhaps what I like most about her in this aspect is that she doesn’t seem to feel the need to give up being womanlike or in order to have a career, nor when she eventually marries does she stop being the clever and witty woman that she is. She doesn’t go to either extreme, but instead is a whole person.

And that is my main point in this series: we are whole beings, not ideological caricatures. We cannot reduce ourselves to a bullet-pointed list of simple traits, nor turn the complexity of life into narrowly defined chores. Literature gives us a chance to both encounter archetypes and to translate them into everyday life. If nothing else, I hope this little series encouraged you to look deeper than the online caricatures to the abundance of ideals and inspirations, cautionary tales and wrong routes taken, that are available to us.