Cheating death: the potency and perversity of Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple

ABSTRACT

Comic narratives provide an arena wherein the marginalised are centre stage, in the tradition of the carnival. This article examines Margaret Rutherford's performance in the role of Miss Marple in the 1960s MGM films, exploring how Rutherford's persona articulates complex discourses concerning age, gender and national identity, in the tradition of the contradictory nature of the trickster. The trickster tradition, in its evocation of a mythological resonance, creates a liminal space in the narrative, bridging life and death, male and female, chaos and order. Her narrative function is to restore social stability, to “cure” and “heal”, through chaos and cunning. Rutherford ultimately defies socially inscribed definitions of ageing femininity, inhabiting Agatha Christie's Miss Marple as a comic entity, whose ability to dissemble, impersonate and subvert makes her a potent and yet perverse force for good. Her performance as Miss Marple can be read within the social context of reconfigured discourses regarding age and gender in the second half of the twentieth century; greater life expectancy, social mobility and evolution of family structures challenged the traditional role of the ageing woman. She is a nostalgic articulation of Englishness which draws on the figuration of the village spinster.