Unhomely Counties: Gothic Surveillance and Incarceration in the Villages of Agatha Christie

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Agatha Christie's fictional villages may be interpreted as fundamentally gothic spaces. It makes the case that within the novels The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and The Moving Finger (1943), outdoor spaces do not offer the potential release from captivity that is set out in more traditional gothic paradigms. Instead, exterior landscapes surrounding and connecting homes function as a continuation of domestic interiority, thus acting as able accomplices in a gothic transformation of ‘home’ into ‘prison’. By examining the shifting meanings of panoptic surveillance present within these villages, and the outward extension of private family romances into more public forms of cruelty and humiliation, this article suggests that far from creating idyllic exemplars of English rurality, Christie's fictional villages work to unmask the dark, ‘unhomely’ core that lies buried at the very heart of the English ‘Home Counties’.