Deanna Ballard
Professor Kersh
FYS
9-3-13
Reaction Paper #1
“She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere. Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow. She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes. The hair curling from under her blue hat was darkly red, her full lips more brightly red. White teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.” The Maltese Falcon Page 4
Dashiell Hammett uses very vivid, highly descriptive language when introducing his characters. The intense imagery he uses provides the reader with both a very detailed mental image of the character and a few hints about what the character’s personality is like.
In this specific passage, Hammett is introducing Miss Wonderly and describing her physical appearance in great detail, as he always does. This passage stands out not due to the vivid imagery he uses, but from the sharp contrast to his description of her person, (her build, smile and voice from the previous passage). The description of her person, details about herself that she can not control, paint a picture of a very slight, quiet and potentially shy individual, whereas the description of her appearance, (her clothes, hair and makeup), details about herself that she can control, are very bold and suggest a strong, confident woman.
This sharp contrast between Miss Wonderly’s person and her appearance are indicative of a difference in the person she is on the inside and the person she wants to be viewed as from the outside. The discrepancy she creates implies that she has something to hide or is dishonest. Secrecy ties in nicely with the double murder mystery that is unfolding in front of us and suggests that other “facts” we’ve learned thus far in the story may not be true after all or that there is something else entirely going on.
Later in the story (pg 33), we find out that “Miss Wonderly” is actually Brigid O’Shaughnessy and that she is in fact hiding something. Hammett creating his female character to be this contradictory, dishonest creature was a result of the time this book was written in. This was an era of tension between the sexes; women were taking jobs that used to be done by men. As this progressed, men began to question their masculinity and what it meant to be a real man, so Hammett could not create a strong, trustworthy woman character that would compromise the masculinity of his male characters.