Agatha Christie Research Paper

Edgar Allan Poe is the father of the detective story. Vidocq inspired Poe; he published The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In Poe’s The Purloined Letter, he introduces C. Augustine a detective that has superior knowledge and has an impeccable eye for observation. Agatha Christie began writing detective fiction while she worked as a nurse during World War I. She published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926. Her novel became not only one of her most successful works, but was one of the most controversial novels as well. Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie have similar writing styles. Because of Poe’s writing style, she aspired to write like him. Poe was not only a poet, but he was also a literary critic and a novelist. Christie primarily wrote detective

In his stories, the women become murdered in the beginning or towards the end. In The Purloined Letter, the entirety of the plot is primarily about a woman who is powerless as a man steals the letter from her. The woman does not have a primary role in the tale, and we do not hear her or have a visual representation of her. The only image given of her is that she is a helpless woman. Because she is a woman, in the eyes of any man, she cannot solve the crime herself. Therefore, she needs the aid of a man. Cynthia S. Jordan says, “Poe was especially prolific in creating images of violently silenced women, their vocal apparatus the apparent target of their attackers, who, in the earlier stories, are the storytellers themselves” (213). Some of Poe’s most violent tales were from Ligeia, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Mystery of Marie Roget. These tales included teeth pulling, strangulation and psychological harm. While The Purloined Letter was Poe’s least violent tale about women Jordan states, “the Queen who sees her "letter" stolen before her very eyes cannot speak to save herself for fear of jeopardizing her position with the King, who fails to understand the crime taking place” (213). Poe viewed women through a different lens than men. The men receive the role of being able to speak, while the role of being helpless belonged to the