Book description
Aside from Ruth Rendell's brilliance as a fiction writer, and her
appeal to mystery lovers, her books portray a compelling, universal
experience that her readers can immediately relate to, the
intra-familial stresses generated by the nuclear family. Even those who
experience the joys as well as pains of family life will find in Rendell
the conflicts that beset all who must navigate their way through the
conflicts that beset members of the closest families. Barbara Fass Leavy
analyzes the multi-leveled treatment of these themes that contributes to
Rendell's standing as a major contemporary novelist. Rendell, who also
writes as Barbara Vine, draws on ancient Greek narratives, and on the
psychological theories Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung derived from them, to
portray the disturbed family relationships found throughout her work.
Leavy's analysis considers what distinguishes mysteries as popular
entertainment from crime fiction as literary art. The potential for
rereading even when the reader remembers “whodunit” will be the basis
for this distinction. Leavy also looks closely at the Oedipus and
Electra complexes and how they illuminate Rendell's portrayals of the
different pairings within the nuclear family (for example, mother and
daughter) and considers the importance of gender differences. In
addition, Leavy corrects a widespread error, that Freud formulated the
Electra complex, when in fact the formulation was Jung's as he
challenged Freud's emphasis on the Oedipus story as the essential
paradigm for human psychological development. Barbara Fass Leavy is a
former Professor of English Literature at Queens College of the City
University of New York. Currently, she is Adjunct Professor of English
in Psychiatry at the Institute for the History of Psychiatry, Weill
Medical College of Cornell University. She has published numerous essays
and given lectures on literature, folklore, crime fiction, gender
relations, and Greek tragedy and psychology. Three of her four books are
on folk and fairy tales and their literary versions; a fourth treats
literature whose subject is epidemic diseases. When asked by her six
young granddaughters what she wrote about, she used to reply,
“mermaids,” and now that they are able to do research online, they have
tested this answer by putting her name and the word “mermaid” into
Google, surprised by the number of entries. Barbara Leavy has published
a book on the fiction of Ruth Rendell, and is currently working on a
collection of essays entitled “Crime Fiction and Culture.”
