A Critical Examination of the Concepts of Gender, Race, and Class in the Maltese Falcon - Book Report/Review Example

This paper is a critical examination of the concepts of gender, race, and in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, a story of Sam Spade, who is a white macho American male private eye. The paper discusses his relationships with women, and also a black private eye from Walter Mosley's novel to better understand the concepts in question. Gender, Race, and Class in The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade is the personification of the American private eye in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. He is a tough male who became tougher still when Humphrey Bogart played his role in the movie version of the novel (Hickman, 2003). He is a white guy involved with a wide assortment of individuals searching for a black statue. And, he belongs to a socioeconomic class that is comfortable enough with itself to feel that it is entitled to react aggressively to meddlesome cops and officialdom. Spade is often flippant, and when comparing him to Walter Mosley's black detective, Easy Rawlins, W. Russel Gray (2004) points out that Rawlins cannot afford to be so because in his case, integrity must be drawn from inner resources as it happens with all oppressed people. The white American detective takes his work in his stride by enjoying it as he will; while the black one will not consider asking white policemen to join him for a drink as part of his job, as does Spade. The hero of Hammett's novel meets with Miss Wonderly - wonderful in every way - when she appears in his office to request him to tail a man named Floyd Thursby. Miss Wonderly is undoubtedly a beautiful woman. Here, the beautiful woman is a stereotypical description of a lady who must meet with a macho male that can be hard and intermittently cruel - all for an apparently good cause. The macho male replies to her thus: "You won't need much of anybody's help. You're good. You're very good. It's chiefly your eyes, I think, and that throb you get into your voice when you say things like 'Be generous, Mr. Spade'" (Hammett). Spade's is a hard-boiled masculinity. He is able to suppress the double-dealing Brigid O'Shaughnessy's spider-like threat with cool discipline. His is a firm, self-contained manhood. In principle, there is nothing he cannot fix (Abbott, 2003). Spade tells Effie Perrine: "You're a damned good man, sister" (Hammett, 2004). In truth, the man cannot think beyond his masculinity. In his view, there is one true gender in the world: that of the male. Sam Spade is in fact praising Effie by calling her a good man. From another perspective, we can understand his words with the concept of oneness in mind. Spade does not believe in a separate existence of a man and a woman. He must trust in the fact that both were created out of oneness, a single soul. A good man, then, is both a good woman and a good man. Yet another way to comprehend Spade's words is to assume that he honestly admired his faithful secretary, Effie, for qualities that reminded him of the concept of manhood. She can rebuke him when she must, and remain loyal to him throughout. Finally, the man is definitely not looking upon her with feminineness in mind. He calls her sister, revealing that he does not feel sexually attracted to her anyhow (Hammett). Sam Spade has been perceived as an icon. Dorothy Parker at The New Yorker called him modern, masculine, and sexy. He has three women to choose between: Iva Archer, the promiscuous wife; Effie Perrine, the spunky girl next door; and Brigid, a fantasy, aggressive, sexy and efficient. The three women in Hammett's novel are known to symbolize the trio of Fates that have prodded the male with questions, solved mysteries, and also possessed occult powers. Of these three women, only Brigid appears as Spade's equal, only because she is both intelligent and clever. Spade is unlike anybody else in his time. Hammett's hero became so popular that even today the American private eye must be somewhat similar to him. We even expect the women in his life to be similar to Effie, Brigid, and Iva - a stunning blend of cunningness, beauty, plainness, efficiency, intelligence, and cleverness (Hammett). Hammett has also used a homosexual in his novel. His name is Joel Cairo, and he is described thus: "This guy is queer." The reason that he is referred to this way appears to be that at the time of the first publication of the novel, America was not as tolerant of gays as it is today. The private eye in The Maltese Falcon is stereotypically white. As suggested before, Easy Rawlins could not even dream of the kinds of feats experienced by Spade. Sam is a licensed investigator with a wily lawyer on retainer. He has twice maintained the upper hand when detectives dropped in to his apartment, uninvited, to grill him about his partner's murder. He has also protected himself and his two guests from arrest by extemporizing an outlandish explanation of his guests' mutually hostile behavior. Spade can combine verbal sparring with physical passivity. He can goad the abrasive Lieutenant Dundy into striking him but retain enough self-control not to retaliate and provide a pretext for arrest. At a later state, when the conviction-hunting D. A. threatens to have his license revoked, Sam Spade is foxy enough to call him a bluff and assert his rights of his profession and his clients (Hammett). At the time of the first publication of Hammett's novel, most African Americans did not have the socioeconomic standing to behave like Spade, even if they became private eyes. Russel has revealed that the African Americans still are not at a par with Spade. Sam's behavior was typically white, if we consider that the color white implies dominance in the American society. Spade's nation and his work were his playground. He could come up with any number of clever tricks to get his own way. Had he been black, he would have had to come up with a thousand and one excuses to those same clever tricks as they popped into his head. The blacks felt oppressed and scared at the time. They could not afford to play tricks, period. They had to look around themselves countless times to make sure that they were doing the right thing at the right time. They had to feel suppressed in themselves, too, and seriousness was the only frame of mind they could adopt in order to convince the community at large that they meant well and could perform as well as, if not better than the whites (Russel). Although Mosley's hero from the 1990s was hard-boiled too, compare him to Spade from 1930 in Russel's words to better grasp the concept of race in the profession of private eyes: As if Rawlins's minority status does not make his dealings with the authorities difficult enough, his furtive real estate acquisitions and resultant tax delinquency make him vulnerable to the designs of an overbearing IRS agent and a Red-hunting FBI man. Mosley clarifies that, at the mercy of pre-Miranda police interrogators, Rawlins cannot employ Sam Spade's flippancy. Rather, like oppressed people everywhere, he draws integrity from inner resources. When the third-degree escalates to torture, he avoids the slippery slope of replying, a course that would subject him to contrived self- incrimination. He holds out by imagining that his tormentors are sharks closing in on his leaking raft. As the pain intensifies, he maintains self-control by listening to the voice in his head screaming, "Don't give in, Easy". With self-control, patience, and finesse, Easy resists a rogue IRS agent's psychological coercion. He initially denies being a tax-evader, then buys time by feigning cooperation, and eventually plays his antagonist against a self-serving FBI man. Sizing up a targeted communist as benign, Rawlins delays betraying him to U.S. officials. Only when a murder removes Easy's leverage with the FBI, does he resort to aggressive self-defense, getting the IRS off his case by framing his tormentor and luring him into what turns out to be a deadly showdown. Russel has also pointed out that Easy Rawlin's socioeconomic class was less in ranking than is Sam Spade's. The stereotypical black private eye of America must definitely be less wealthy than the American private eye. To Spade, honor, incorruptibility, and slick, street-smart charm come easy, and without any pressure from the financial side of his life. His acts reveal that he is at ease with himself, and when he faces the government employees such as police officers, he does not need to put up a yes sir, no sir act to enter their good books for the fear that he will somehow lose it all some day. The black man of lower socioeconomic standing must be extremely careful about his behavior, however. Spade is from San Francisco, a city where no white private eye can be expected to be poor simply because it is a rich city with a lot of people requiring the services of such professionals. Some of the people in Hammett's novel are truly greedy souls, bent on finding the statuette which will bring them a lot of money. None of them is really poor. Thus the novel chiefly deals with well-heeled people who are either working honestly or trying to get more and more by hook or by crook (Hammett). For services he provides to Brigid, Spade extracts a hefty retainer, almost all of her money. It is widely known that only people with abundance consciousness can charge a great deal of money without turning back. In the case of an African American private eye, the case could have been different. The poor are normally so grateful for menial jobs that they would accept any amount of money on offer. Not so with the well-to-do. Hammett would only deal with this particular socioeconomic class because the rest are not known for hiring private detectives in any case. Spade might be expecting clients who want to know whether their spouses are cheating on them, and how much their business partners are making behind their backs. In any case, this is a story about the upper middle and the upper class of American society. Spade will not have it another way, and there is no point in his story where we would expect him to. References 1. Abbott, Megan E. (2003). "'Nothing You Can't Fix:' Screening Marlowe's Masculinity." Studies in the Novel, Vol. 35, Issue 3. 2. Gray, W. Russel. (2004). "Hard-Boiled Black Easy: Genre Conventions in a Red Death." African American Review, Vol. 38, Issue 3, p. 489+. 3. Hammett, Dashiell. (2004). The Maltese Falcon. New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. 4. Hickman, Miranda B. (2003). "The Complex History of a 'Simple Art.'" Studies in the Novel, Vol. 35, Issue 3, p. 285+. 5. Parker, Dorothy. 25 April 1931. "Oh Look - Two Good Books!" The New Yorker, p. 83-84. Read More