2 - Ordeal by Innocence and the Uncanny

Summary

Abstract This chapter extends the discussion of the uncanny from the previous chapter to explore how it is represented through the use of space. The house in Ordeal by Innocence becomes an uncanny space, a departure from the happy ideal presented in some flashbacks. Foucault's theory of heterotopia will be employed to examine how the dark house functions in the Agatha Christie text. As is often the case in Christie narratives, an opposition is established between order, rationality, intellectualism and all matters representative of the Enlightenment, and the transgressive, the dystopian Gothic mode. Narrative tension arises from the conflict of these two modes, often utilised through the past and present. Often, Christie's original books are concluded with the re-establishment of order. In Phelps’ adaptations, however, the dystopian Gothic remains, and the series concludes with unsettled tones.

Keywords: Agatha Christie, crime fiction, the uncanny, adaptation studies, Gothic horror

The whodunit is a staple subgenre of detective fiction and is often a hybrid with other genres, such as drama, horror or comedy. Series such as The Afterparty (2022–present) and films such as See How They Run (2022) and both Knives Out films (2019, 2022) demonstrate the potential for the whodunit to blend with the comedy format. Likewise, the films Brick (2005), Shutter Island (2010) and Prisoners (2013) and the television series Mare of Easttown (2021) are popular examples of the whodunit working in the darker drama format. As highlighted in the previous chapter, the slasher genre, particularly examples from the 1990s cycle beginning with Scream (1996), are a hybrid of the horror and whodunit genres. As such, it is the contention of this chapter that Sarah Phelps’ adaptation of Ordeal by Innocence (2018b) demonstrates the potential for the Christie whodunit to embellish the Gothic potential of the source text. Many of Christie's novels were examples of the middlebrow Gothic, as they concerned the yearning for the “re-establishment of social structures following the disruption” of World War I (D’Cruze 2006, 52–53). The disorder faced in the Gothic middlebrow novel, such as Ordeal, reflected the upheaval of domesticity following changes to social understandings of class and gender “where aspirations towards progress had to negotiate some rather disturbing aspects of modernity” (D’Cruze 2006, 47). The ensembles of characters in Ordeal must all face the communal disturbance that follows the revelation that the youngest son was in fact innocent of murdering his mother.