The leitmotif of wild daughters in Chandler’s

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler is revered as one of the most influential crime writers in American
literature. He is one of the founders of a genre, “hard-boiled detective”. Chandler’s fiction is a
curious blend of the British and the American: a distinct combination of British descriptions and
prose with American speech and dialogue. His novels about private eye Philip Marlowe, the
idealistic and lonely defender of Los Angeles of the 1930s and 1940s, broke the norms of the
conventional detective and mystery story. Previous detective stories were constructed to follow
the classic pattern established by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with the
application of a heroic puzzle-solving detective like Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin or Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes. Chandler however, approached his stories on another level by creating a realistic
portrait of a corrupted city with perverted ideals that subsequently influenced the way the entire
genre was used. He introduced a style and themes that clearly violated the norms and
conventions of the genre of detective fiction and also exposed less acceptable aspects of society.
By sharply questioning people’s normative perception of the society around them, Chandler
violates the rules of the detective novel on a grand scale. The traditional detective story had up to
that point mainly dealt with one layer of society, the upper class, where the murders committed
tended to be elaborately contrived. Chandler saw past the problems of limiting his writing to a
certain social layer and “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not
just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand wrought dueling pistols, curare
and tropical fish.” Chandler stresses on corruption and gangsters as the major source of crime, in
most cases the final climax in his narrative develops due to the personal quests of the villains
against Marlowe. Another recurrent leitmotif in his narratives is the presence of the female
character in a negative role. Heather Worthington calls her the ‘femme fatale’ and explains that
‘the real criminal or source of criminality is always a woman in Chandler’s texts, responding to
contemporary masculine anxieties about female-and male-sexuality.

In 1939, author Raymond Chandler published his first novel entitled The Big Sleep—an
intricate story of murder, blackmail, and deceit—set in the cities of southern California. The plot
is centralized around the work of character Philip Marlowe, a private detective hired by a man
named General Sternwood to investigate a series of promissory notes used as blackmail for
payment of his daughter Carmen’s gambling debts. With a bit of sleuthing, Marlowe discovers
that Carmen has been the subject of various nude photographs taken by Arthur Gwynn Geiger,
owner of a pornographic bookstore and sender of the notes. However, the murder of Mr. Geiger
causes even more problems for Carmen, as the negatives of the photographs are stolen and also
used to blackmail the Sternwood family. Marlowe successfully recovers the photographs from
Joe Brody, who was in the process of taking over Geiger’s business, during a visit to his
apartment house. Carmen also arrives at the scene with a gun, demanding that Brody give her the
pictures and firing a shot to show she means business. With a bit of coaxing, Marlowe eventually
persuades her to return home and let him handle the situation. A second conflict involving the
disappearance of Rusty Regan, the husband of Sternwood’s eldest daughter Vivian, begins to
surface as Marlowe continues to examine through his case. An interview with the captain of the
Missing Persons Bureau leads Marlowe to believe that casino owner Eddie Mars played some
part in Regan’s disappearance, but a series of further incidents reveal otherwise. One night,
Marlowe returns to his apartment to find Carmen in his bed, attempting to seduce him into
sleeping with her. The detective is not swayed by her efforts, and proceeds to throw her out after
she refuses to leave. At the end of the story, Carmen tries to kill Marlowe for denying her
advances, but Marlowe fills her gun with blanks in anticipation of what she would attempt to do.
After all, Marlowe had discovered that Carmen murdered Rusty Regan for the very same reason,
and her sister Vivian had known about it all along. She had asked Eddie Mars to cover up the
crime by disposing of the body in an oil well sump on the Sternwood’s property, which in turn
gave Mars the opportunity to blackmail the family. Marlowe agrees not to turn Carmen over to
the authorities as long as Vivian will send her away to receive treatment for her irrational
behavior.

The Big Sleep manifests female agency through the narrative of two sisters: the younger
Carmen is a medicalized murderess, while the older Vivian is a scheming accomplice in her
sister’s crimes. The book also focuses on Marlowe’s relationship to a male patriarch, while the
detective tries and struggles to maintain his toughness in the face of dangerous women. The Big
Sleep sees Marlowe investigate a blackmail case in the Sternwood family. He then becomes
involved in the disappearance of Regan, Vivian Sternwood’s husband, who we finally learn has
been killed by Carmen, Vivian’s sister. The case takes complicated turns as Marlowe finds
himself embroiled in the corrupt world of the General’s two daughters, a world characterized by
seduction, gangsters, pornography, and murder. Both Carmen and Vivian are fully immersed in
this environment. Their father, General Sternwood, describes his own daughters in damning
terms that also implicate him: “Vivian is spoiled, exacting, smart and quite ruthless. Carmen is a
child who likes to pull wings off flies. Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat.
Neither have I. No Sternwood ever had”. The General’s words establish a sense of grim
anticipation about the Sternwood family which foreshadows the murders that ensue.

Overt sexuality and depravity are decidedly linked in Chandler’s The Big Sleep, implying
that a character’s awareness, and subsequent use, of their sexuality, makes them predisposed to
becoming a part of the city’s criminal underbelly. Sexuality is hidden in plain sight in
Chandler’s The Big Sleep , with various archetypes and tropes such as ‘the femme fatale’
(Vivian), ‘the damsel in distress’, ‘the femme fatale’ (Carmen), and ‘the depraved homosexual’
(Geiger and Carol) being easily identifiable within the novel.

The Big Sleep is set in 1930s California. The world it depicts, in Speir’s words, contains
“a mixed bag of corrupt cops, smug aristocrats, penny-ante grifters, rackets bosses, conceited
parents, rebellious children, naïve lovers, and related narcissists–all set amidst the blasé
decadence of Hollywood and California”. The Big Sleep, as Richter suggests, is unique among
Chandler’s stories in terms of its plot. The multiplicity of criminals, the complicated events and
the lack of a single villain are abandoned in the subsequent novels in favour of a central villain, a
woman, who ends up dead by the end of the book. The focus on the family in relation to the
detective introduces, as Leonard Cassuto suggests, a sentimental element to the hardboiled novel.
Marlowe is “attracted to domesticity—to families rather than detached and dangerous single
women”.

Hence, although Chandler presents his detective in a “male fellowship”, Marlowe is

drawn to the company of men (General Sternwood in this case), his work infuses a sentimental
element into the persona of his detective that ultimately troubles the boundaries of Marlowe’s job
as a detective, and highlights the threat posed to his masculinity by the dangerous women around
him. Carmen can be said to embody contradictory facets of a convoluted triangle of criminality,
infantilization and medicalization, challenging the boundaries between culpability (as a
murderess) and victimhood (as a sufferer of epilepsy). Carmen is thus presented as epileptic,
immature, and of limited education; but also as playfully flirtatious; and, in a further contrast to
both of these positions, an unrepentant murderess. The second set of qualities is manifested in
her first meeting with Marlowe: “When her head was against my chest she screwed it around and
giggled at me. ‘You’re cute,’ she giggled. ‘I’m cute, too”. Daniel Linder suggests that Marlowe’s
repeated use of the words “cute” and “giggle” “create a brutal linguistic irony that lasts in the
reader’s mind long after putting down the novel”. Carmen’s ignorance reaches comedic
proportions in her failure to understand even the most commonplace cultural references: “You
came in through the key hole, just like Peter Pan?” “Who’s he?” “Oh, just a fellow I used to
know around the poolroom.”

Chandler describes Carmen as having “little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh
orange pith and as shiny as porcelain.” (14), alluding to her criminality, the same way he did
with Vivian, showing her appearance tinged with unsettling aspects. She initially fulfils the role
of damsel in distress when Marlowe finds her at the scene of Geiger’s murder, helpless, “a naked
girl” and “not there … at all”, “doped” on drugs (Chandler 29, 30). However, it later becomes
clear that she is a femme fatale and that the damsel in distress is a persona she uses to her own
advantage/result of her illness when Marlowe finds her naked in his bed. He rejects her
advances, giving her “three minutes to get dressed and out of [his apartment]” (Chandler 92).
Upon hearing this, a “hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth” (92) and Marlowe sees her
true self - someone ingenue one minute, dangerous and predatory the next. Jaber states that
“Carmen’s sexuality … represents a threat to the detective who can only negotiate this … by
rejecting Carmen’s advances”, ultimately, angering her but keeping himself untarnished. Irwin is
correct to place Carmen’s behaviour in a larger context of family corruption: “whether the sexual
liaison Carmen had sought was with a brother-in-law or a father-surrogate, both bespeak that
familial corruption Marlowe sensed on his first visit to the mansion and of which he has to steer
clear if he is to do his job”. The commingling of infantility and sexuality is apparent in the
following exchange, when Carmen pulls on Marlowe a gun that he knows is loaded with blanks:

“My, but you’re cute.” [Carmen faints but soon regains consciousness]
“What happened?” she gasped.
“Nothing. Why?”
“Oh, yes, it did,” she giggled. “I wet myself.”
“They always do,” I said.
She looked at me with a sudden sick speculation and began to moan. (TBS: 156-7)
 When Marlowe pieces together the murder investigation following Carmen attempting to
shoot him in the middle of an “epileptic fit” (Chandler 125), Vivian tells him how “[Carmen]
came home and told [her] about [murdering Rusty after he rejected her], just like a child.”,
knowing that her sister is not “normal”, she “knew the police would get [the confession] out of
her … in a little while she would even brag about it” (Chandler 128). Ellwood presents epilepsy
as a “causative factor in the production of the born criminal class” (7). With epilepsy,
infantilization, and sexuality being tied into her murderous actions and attempted murder of
Marlowe, Carmen is “challenging the boundaries between culpability (as a murderess) and
victimhood (as a sufferer of epilepsy)” (Jaber 151). This moral/legal dilemma leads to Marlowe
asking Vivian to “take her away” somewhere “where they can handle her type” hoping “she
might even get herself cured” (Chandler 128) – punishing her for her transgressions.

Carmen’s immaturity is inseparable from her criminality, but is also one of the
manifestations of her medicalization, for it is used to question her culpability in the crimes she
commits. In the conversation above, the use of the “childish word” “giggle”, the fact that Carmen
wets herself, and that she pulls the trigger while having an epileptic seizure demonstrate that her
infantilization, criminality and medicalization are all interconnected. The synthesis of epilepsy
and immaturity not only undermines Carmen’s culpability as a murderess (reiterated by the fact
that she is taken away at the end of the novel), but also underscores that her criminal acts are also
presented as a manifestation of her epilepsy. Additionally, Carmen is frequently depicted sucking
her thumb, a behaviour associated with children but also an invitation to sexual play, though
Marlowe seems cognizant of neither of these connotations. Such oral and digital references and
the erotic significance they carry “suggest [the] disorder, decay, degeneration” associated with
the Sternwood family.

Despite her childish behaviour, Carmen is a dangerous woman who poses a serious threat
to the men around her, killing Regan, shooting at her former lover Joe Brody, and attempting to
kill Marlowe. At the same time, Carmen’s medicalization is not as debilitating as that of
Gabrielle in The Dain Curse – she is not merely a “naked damsel in distress”. The medicalized
woman, an important figure in Chandler’s early writing, is replaced by more lethal and
dangerous women in his later works. The Big Sleep links Carmen’s medicalization to the socio-
cultural wealth and corruption of the Sternwoods, and to Marlowe’s position in relation to
Carmen. In this respect, it is interesting to note that Carmen’s seizures always occur in
Marlowe’s presence, thus raising the question of whether her epilepsy is merely a misogynistic
device to reveal the interrelation between medical and criminological discourses.

Described by critics as a “nymphomaniac” (Whitley 1981: 27) and an “archetypical

‘foreign whore’” (Marling 1995: 207), Carmen is a seductress who attempts to use her sexual
appeal to manipulate men, going, for example, to Marlowe’s house waiting naked for him in his
bed. Marlowe uses one of his strongest weapons, tough cynicism, to reject her, telling her
sarcastically that he is “the guy that keeps finding” her “without any clothes on” (BS: 111). Yet
something else underlies Marlowe’s cynicism here. After forcing Carmen to get dressed and
leave, he “savagely” tears the sheets: “The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her
small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces
savagely” (BS: 113). His next words are revealing: “You can have a hangover from other things
than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick”. A number of critics describe
Marlowe as a misogynist, a view that might account for the representation of Carmen, and
Chandler’s female characters more generally, as dangerous criminals. I argue, however, that
Marlowe’s vulnerability – and his realization of it – is the main motive behind the tearing of the
sheets, rather than “woman-hating” as such. As Gabrielle Robinson contends, Marlowe disavows
his attraction to Carmen by calling her “dope,” revealing:

“Marlowe’s need to defuse and sanitize her surrender with the sensationalism with which he
makes Carmen into a psychotic and a murderess. He does this to create a righteous and rejecting
stance …Having sensationalized Carmen, Marlowe—or is it Chandler? —refuses to consider her
further.”

Robinson’s informative account of this scene is most interested in Marlowe’s actions and
motivations, yet if we shift our gaze to Carmen, it can be argued that she, even with her
medicalization, is presented as a strong-willed woman who poses a potent challenge to the
detective, and whose threat to Marlow is manifested in the effort it takes him to maintain his
toughness and keep his defences intact.

Vivian, the older daughter is represented as the femme fatale, a role typical of female
characters in the hardboiled detective genre and is set as a foil to Carmen. She fulfils this role
well, using her sexuality to get what she wants from men. However, she deviates from the
archetype in that her actions – e.g. covering up the murder of Rusty Regan – are done with the
intention of sparing her family difficulties and heartbreak, in her mind ultimately for the greater
good rather than for her own selfish interests. And because Carmen is a medicalized criminal,
Vivian is established as an able accomplice in the crimes her sister commits, and Vivian’s
agency is thus realized not only in her accessory role but also in the prospective space she
occupies at the end of the narrative as a potential heir of her father.

When Marlowe first encounters Vivian, he is summoned by her. He describes her as

“beautiful”, “slim”, and “strong” with a “sulky droop” (Chandler to her mouth. However,
Chandler presents Vivian’s beauty as tinged with a literal darkness – “dark wiry hair” and “coal
black eyes” (3), alluding to her criminality. He notes that she appears poised and “arranged to
stare at”, sitting so her legs and stockings were “visible to the knee and one of them well
beyond”. Chandler implies here, that she was using her good looks to gain Marlowe’s affections,
later using them to monitor/impede his progress in the investigation; showing the manipulative
aspect of the femme fatale – at the time, her motives are unclear. Vivian attempts to seduce
Marlowe, again, later in the novel by “kissing” him (Chandler 89). However, Marlowe rejects
her due to his distrust and personal code of ethics – he works for her father, leaving her both
annoyed and impressed by this. Using her sexuality to get what she wants is a trick also used by
Carmen, “she lowered her lashes … and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. … That
was supposed to make me roll over on my back”. (Chandler 14), creating a facade around the
sisters.
 Marlowe discovers that Vivian has been protecting the identity of her husband’s murderer
all along – Carmen. She paid Eddie Mars to dispose of the body and never reported Rusty’s
murder to the authorities to prevent her father from finding out about the death of his friend. She
knew that he would call the police “instantly and tell them the whole story … and sometime in
that night he would die” (Chandler 128). Marlowe gives Vivian “three days” (Chandler 129) to
get out of town or he will tell the authorities, supporting Boozer’s theory that, femme fatales
“often [serve] as catalysts to criminal behaviour in men … [encouraging] the blame heaped on
women’s sexuality” (Boozer). He effectively punishes Vivian for her criminality as she loses
everyone that her crimes were supposed to protect, reversing her actions and creating a sense of
moral justice.

In her first interaction with Marlowe, Vivian adopts a sarcastic and condescending tone.
When she tells Marlowe that she does not like his manners, he responds with detached, rather
playful cynicism: “I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad” (BS: 14). In
this exchange and others, Vivian is positioned as an equal to Marlowe, challenging his role as a
detective as she tries to extract information from him about his business with the Sternwood
family. It also displays Vivian’s confidence and her ability to role-play with him whilst keeping
the identity of Regan’s murderer – her sister – a secret.

Vivian is no less implicated in the murders than her sister. Her decision to cover up for
Carmen contributes to the four murders that consequently take place. Vivian’s decision, as Speir
argues, is not born simply out of concern for her father’s reputation. Her motives conceivably
also include jealousy, considering that the General showed more affection and attachment to his
son-in-law, Regan, than to her, his own daughter. Moreover, Vivian wants to protect her interests
in the rich family’s fortune. Her eyes remain focused on the family’s money and power; thus, by
keeping the family’s name clean by concealing the scandal involving her sister, Vivian tries to
protect her status as a prospective heir. In any case, Vivian shows composure and determination
as the consequences of her decision unfold. To achieve her goals and to divert Marlowe from
finding Regan, Vivian resorts to her sexual appeal. Showing Marlowe some nude photos of
Carmen that have been used in a blackmail ploy, she remarks: “She has a beautiful little body,
hasn’t she? .... You ought to see mine” (BS: 44). Although Marlowe rejects Vivian’s advances as
he did those of her sister, she puts Marlowe’s fortitude to the test and he seems afraid of losing
control. The threat that Vivian poses to Marlowe and her awareness of the effect that she has on
him reinforce her agency. Marlowe thus manifests what Robinson calls the “collision of utter
surrender and brutal rejection and Marlowe’s resultant double bind of desperately wanting and
not wanting, of being under the spell of an absolute opportunity and an equally absolute
prohibition”. Ultimately, however, it is Vivian’s capacity to be Marlowe’s equal as a tough,
enduring, hardboiled woman that challenges Marlowe’s authority. Hence, one can argue that
Vivian, who is implicated in all the wrongdoing that occurs in the novel while never committing
a murder herself, exhibits what have been called “accessory agency.” She can also be
distinguished as a prototype for Chandler’s later criminal femme fatales. That is to say,
Chandler’s first work depicts two visible sisters; the medicalized Carmen is presented alongside
Vivian as an accessory agent. Vivian, though not a murderess, demonstrates agency by the end of
the narrative when she walks with money and power. Indeed, The Big Sleep proposes an affinity
between female sexual power and female criminality. The representation of the women’s sexual
power in this work is not only envisaged in the image of epileptic, promiscuous Carmen who
poses naked for pornographic photos, but also in the scheming, intelligent female agent that is
Vivian. Carmen kills when men do not meet her sexual demands; Vivian’s advances towards
Marlowe are also sexual. At the same time, the construction of women’s sexual power in the
novel is delineated within the larger context of a rich, corrupt American family in the 1930s. The
sisters’ privileged background is pertinent to the way Vivian in particular demonstrates agency.
The link between sexuality, criminality and family wealth in the representation of women in The
Big Sleep, highlights women’s capacity to act independently, even though, or perhaps only when,
the actions that they take transgress legal and social norms. The detective’s position in relation to
that of the women is also significant. Commenting on Stephen Knight’s contention that Marlowe
rejects others to protect himself, Robinson suggests that the connection between women, murder,
and detection is even more bewildering and problematic than Knight allows. It hints at disturbing
slippages between desire and murder, which suggest that the murder of desire itself lies at the
heart of Chandler’s crime fiction. Detecting murder turns into a defense against desire and a
justification for rejection, protecting the detective from himself becoming the victim.

This perspective on Marlowe’s “murder of desire,” which can be understood in terms of

his fear of losing agency, allows us to think in turn about female agency in the book. Indeed,
both Vivian and Carmen embody a threat to Marlowe’s masculinity, but Chandler does not
merely execute a re-masculinized denouement by taking away the murderous Carmen at the end.
What is more significant is the fact that the narrative allows Vivian to walk free without any
legal consequences, despite the fact that she has a hand in both the crimes and in covering up for
Carmen. As well as having accessory agency, therefore, Chandler also locates Vivian’s power in
the open-ended finale of the book where she is left as the prospective inheritor of her father’s
fortune. It is a kind of absent, (in) visible agency as far as the narrative is concerned, because we
can only infer and imagine it, rather than know it directly and certainly. Vivian’s power at the
end of the book can be said to supersede Marlowe’s detective code and his legal obligation to
hand both sisters over to the police.

The fact that Marlowe does not report Carmen to the police is telling. Marlowe’s
proposal that Carmen be sent away comes in the form of a question, addressed to Vivian, rather
than a statement: “Will you take her away? Somewhere far off from here where they can handle
her type, where they keep guns and knives and fancy drinks away from her? Hell, she might get
herself cured, you know. It’s been done” (BS: 162). The most obvious, yet cursory, reading here
is that which sees Carmen’s dangerous sexuality as being finally contained behind the closed
doors of the asylum. Alexander Howe, who suggests that the containment of the woman is
typical in classical detective stories, contends that Carmen’s “inhuman characterization—she
remains either animal or succubus” thwarts the skepticism that Marlowe (and Chandler) shows
towards the validity of any psychiatric practice. That she is “beyond his [Marlowe’s] diagnostic
capabilities—and, apparently, those of contemporary medicine” necessitates “contain[ing] [her]
safely elsewhere”. Although Howe’s reading is interesting insofar as it sheds light on the medical
discourse surrounding Carmen, it fails to acknowledge the more complex dynamic between
Marlowe and Vivian. Carmen’s exile creates space for Vivian and underscores the detective’s
anxiety. For Marlowe to ask Vivian to take this decision places Vivian in a position of power,
but also reveals that Carmen represents a threat to him that must be negated. Thus one can argue
that Marlowe’s reasoning here goes beyond loyalty to the General to his own fearful reluctance
to acknowledge Carmen’s power and her ability to kill. The “isolated knightly superiority” of
Marlowe, in Horsley’s words, is a “hedge against his own neurotic unease. His inner-directed,
intellectualizing defensiveness in such a reading acts as a compensation for paranoid fear and
inadequacy”. For Vivian, Carmen’s removal is the perfect means to empower herself further.
With the reader’s realization at the end of the book that Vivian’s cover-up is a success, Vivian
becomes even more dangerous as she walks free. A kind of prospective agency is also
established for Vivian, which is negotiated through the speculative space she enters after the
book ends.

In conclusion, the characters are all involved in the criminal elements of the story, using
their overt sexuality as a factor in their actions. Vivian’s sexuality is used to deter Marlowe’s
investigation; Carmen’s to seduce men, resulting in her rejection and murder attempts. Geiger is
as openly gay as the 1930’s allow, operating a porn shop, resulting in the blackmail scheme.
Carol’s relationship with Geiger causes him to attempt to avenge his death, murdering Brody.
Marlowe is caught up in these events and is as a result, corrupted. The Big Sleep thus shows
Marlowe battling, and ultimately failing, to maintain his toughness and knightly persona.
Dangerous women thwart the journey of the detective. He is called to save the General’s childish
epileptic daughter, Carmen, but he finds out that she is in fact the perpetrator, whilst her
complicit sister remains free to enjoy the family’s money and power. The only comfort Marlowe
can glean from the whole affair is that Regan is safe in his “big sleep”; the novel thus shows the
descent of Marlowe from “moderately optimistic knighthood to a despairing recognition of his
own impotence.”
 Bibliography

1. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

2. www.wikipedia.com

3. www.sparknotes.com

4. The Annotated Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, edited by Owen

Hill, Pamela Jackson, Anthony Rizzuto

5. www.researchgate.net

6. www.academia.edu

7. Fatal woman, revisited: understanding female stereotypes in film

noir by Danielle Larae Barnes-Smith

8. Bade, Patrick. Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating

Women. New York: Mayflower Books, Inc., 1979