Ternopol Tatiana Vyacheslavovna – Сandidate in Cultural Anthropology, associate professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Yaroslavl State Medical University; ORCID: 0000-0002-8798-1723
The article examines the crime novels of A. Christie of the 1930s (The Murder at the Vicarage, 1930; The Death of Lord Edgware, 1933, and Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936), in which the plot touches upon the husband’s domestic violence against his wife. The author of the study proves that this plot is based on the writer’s marriage to Archibald Christie, who used psychological and economic violence against his wife due to his narcissistic personality, the peculiarities of Victorian male gender socialization and post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of participation in the First World War. The article notes that tyrant husbands in A. Christie’s crime novels are middle-aged men (40–50 years old), socially successful, without addictions, economic and domestic problems, adhering to traditional gender roles, confident in complete control over the victim, demonstrating signs of psychopathy. According to the author, A. Christie places responsibility for committing violence on tyrant husbands, who carry it out throughout their family life, despite public condemnation. The author of the article notes that the depiction of domestic violence in A. Christie’s works undergoes some evolution: with each subsequent novel, the writer describes the personality of the tyrant husband in more detail, notes the variety of types of violence carried out by one person, the growing perception of such behavior as a reason for divorce, but also the lack of support for victims of violence from both people and social institutions.
domestic violence in fiction; image of a tyrant husband; life and work of A. Christie; English crime novels of the 1930s; the system of images of crime literature.