Vere Gordon Childe - Phryne's archaeologist friend?

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog, my digital baby. And in what better way can I celebrate than write a post about two of my favourite subjects: Phryne Fisher and archaeology. The former was actually the subject of the first real blog post I wrote on this blog, a couple of days after the introductory one.

My view on Phryne has changed a little as I have had more time to think about her as a character, but since I started the books I have also started to gain new knowledge about her, so I think an update is needed. However, this post will not be so much about her character as it will be about a mentioning of a friend of hers in the book version of Blood and Circuses. We do not get to know much about this friend other than it is a man and he is an archaeologist who have been bitten by a lion.

Phryne had been told that the moment before the prey was seized by the predator, it went limp. It ceased to fear or care. An archaeologist friend had talked about the moment when a lion's teeth had closed on his shoulder. Dreamy he had said. The world had ceased to matter. The last mercy, he had said to creatures destined to be dinner was that they went down sweetly and gently to death, reconciled to their place on the menu.

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses

As an archaeologist myself, I have been wondering about her archaeologist friend and I think I have found a male archaeologist, contemporary with Phryne, that would fit quite well even if I have no clue if he was ever bitten by a lion.

V. Gordon Childe

His name is Vere Gordon Childe and he is viewed as one of the most prominent archaeologists of his generation. He was born in Sydney in Australia in 1892, but througout most of his career he lived in Great Britain.

Childe came to study classics at the University of Sydney, before moving to England to study Classical archaeology at the University of Oxford. During his time at Oxford he became a socialist, active in the campaign against the First World War which he saw as coerced by imperialists and which hurt the European workers.

In 1917, he returned to Australia, but due to his socialist engagement, he could not find work in academia and engaged himself in the Australian Labor Party. However, working for them, he became critical towards their politics and took another step to the left on the political scale and engaged himself in the left political movement called Industrial Workers of the World.

Childe emigrated to London again in 1921 where he got work as a librarian at the Royal Anthropological Institute and he also travelled the European continent and brought home the notion of culture from German archaeology to British archaeology. In his book The Danube in Prehistory from 1929, he defined it as:

We find certain types of remains - pots, implements, ornaments, burial rites and house forms - constantly recurring together. Such a complex of associated traits we shall call a "cultural group" or just a "culture". We assume that such a complex is the material expression of what today we would call "a people".

How the notion of culture has been used and is still used (both implicitly and explicitly) in archaeology is a subject I love to discuss and I do think Childe's definition still has more relevance for how archaeologists treat the concept today than contemporary archaeologists in general would like to admit. To express my thoughts on the subject would make up at least ten other posts. One thing about his archaeological influence do I need to clarify though.

There are three major theoretical paradigm that usually come up in archaeological publications and classes and Childe sort of has a foot in all three of them. I will here use a lot of -isms that might be tricky to understand if you are not used to an academic language. In those cases, I have linked to the Wikipedia articles about them. If you have any questions about it, please feel free to ask in a comment or on the link post for this entry.

• Chronologically, the first one is usually call Culture-historical Archaeology, Culture Archaeology or simply Traditional -archaeology. This paradigm has a less explicitly defined theoretical base than the later two, but in short the foundation can be found in evolutionism and diffusionism. The notion of culture (pretty much as it was defined by Childe in the quote above) was central to understand the archaeological material. Bruce G Trigger in his book A History of Archaeological Thought (2006) divides up this paradigm between one earlier he calls Evolutionary archaeology and the later Culture-historical archaeology, but most archaeologists do not seem to make the same distinction and the Culture-historical archaeology is very much based on evolutionism also.
• Because of the misuse of Culture-historical Archaeology in Nazi-Germany, archaeology went into a crisis after the Second World War and came out of it by combining a positivistic philosophical theory with a functionalistic view on society and culture into what is normally called Processual Archaeology or New Archaeology. American archaeologist Lewis Binford is normally considered to be the founder, but Childe actually did "experiment" with a functionalistic approach to archaeology before him.
• Postprocessual Archaeology is the newest of the three major theoretical paradigm in archaeology and does not only contain one single theoretical approach but many, for example structuralism, post-structuralism, hermeneutics, gender theory and marxism. The main thing they have in common is their critic of the rigid positivistic approach of New Archaeology and even here you can glimpse the influence from Childe. He turned to marxism to help him in his studies of European prehistory shortly after his first trip to the Soviet Union in 1935.

This is only a short account of Childe's contribution to archaeology. Describing it all would make this entry far too long, like I said above. Therefore I have decided to focus on his personal life.

In 1927, he became Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and took an interest in the Neolithic period on the Orkney Islands. He did some excavations there, the most famous one of the Neolithic village Skara Brae between 1928 and 1930. From 1947 to 1957 he also worked as director of the Institute of Archaeology, London and together with Stuart Piggott and Grahame Clarke he founded The Prehistoric Society.

Upon retiring, he moved home to his native Australia, where he settled down in Blue Mountains for awhile before commiting suicide there in 1957.

Kerry Greenwood uses real life aviator Herbert Hinkler in Ruddy Gore so she is not opposed to the idea of using real life people in a fictional setting. It is, however, very much unclear if Greenwood even knows about Childe (even though he is one of the more influential archaeologists, he might not be known outside of the field). Considering his nationality, where he was active and when, however, I think it is a possibiltiy that Phryne would actually know him.

As I have said before, I am not so found of the comparisson between Phryne and Indiana Jones and to be honest I think the annonced title of the upcoming Miss Fisher film, The Crypt of Tears to fit much better with the latter than the former (which worries me immensely, but I still hope my worries to be unjustified!), if you see Phryne's archaeologist friend as Childe, they do, in fact, have something in common. After all, I have long thought "Indy" might have read too much of Childe's work and he is mentioned by him in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from 2008.

Edit 27 April 2017: Someone on Facebook made me aware of the fact that the person who was bitten by lion that was referenced in Blood and Circuses was none other than David Livingstone ("I presume.") (1813-1873) and linked to this article about the incident. However, he was not really an archaeologists, mostly considered to be an explorer and missionary.





References

• Bjørnar Olsen 2003. Från ting till text. Teoretiska perspektiv i arkeologisk forskning. svensk översättning: Sven-Erik Torhell, Lund
• Bruce G. Trigger 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._Gordon_Childe 

Photo of Childe was borrowed from here.

Phryne and gender norms of the 1920's

As I have said in my previous two entries there is a lot to talk about Blood and Circuses. However, I felt like the entry about Phryne's character was so long, that I could not discuss everything in one entry. This entry will therefore more or less be considered "left overs" from the Blood and Circuses TV vs book one.

In both TV episode and book, a transexual person is murdered. On TV, the person is called Miss Christopher and has met up with a doctor who promised to help her become a woman. In the books however, he is called Mr. Christopher and seems to want to be treated like a man even though the magician Robert Sheridan falls in love with him and wants to treat him like a woman (Christine). The book also involves Miss Molly Younger who is engaged to Mr Christopher and is as it turns out also transsexual.

Mr. Christopher and Miss Younger. Man-woman and woman-man. They were made for each other and no one else would fit.

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses (book)

Interestingly enough, transsexuality sort of fits well into the time period. During the first world war one can say that women broke through a gender wall. They proved that they could drive cars and aeroplane, repair them when needed and also replace them in industries and other businesses. This, more than anything, led to women gaining their democratic rights in many countries. But it also created a new ideal for women.

This first wave of emancipation gave women access to a new world and the ideal symbolised their new freedom and confidence. They were no longer only restricted to the home, but could take their place in the public as well. This clashed against the earlier gender segregations of Western society and the gender norms became visible and could therefore be discussed and renegotiated.

In 1922, Victor Margueritte published the book La Garçonne* which became immensely popular among young women. The book moves around in the borderland between the gender norms. It tells the story of Monique Lerbier who handles her fiancé's infidelity by living a free, hedonistic life-style with multiple sexual partners. The book sold in over one million copies and became a cult book for young women who wanted to rebell against the older gender norms and Victorian prissiness which had sort of trapped their mothers and grandmothers. It created a fashion in which women should dress either in clothes traditionally considered male or in figureless dresses and wear cloches. They were also encouraged to cut their hair short (The winter of 1926 had over 50% of the women in Stockholm short hair.). Margueritte's book is not mentioned (as far as I have read) the Phryne Fisher books, or in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, but it still makes me think about both Phryne and her best friend Elizabeth Macmillan (Mac). I also wonder if it created the so called "lesbian subculture" in Paris that is mentioned in Cocaine Blues (book) when Phryne wonders about Lydia Andrew's sexuality.

Elizabeth "Mac" Macmillan

But not only did the female role change, the male did as well and while the woman became more masculine, the men turned to a more feminine style. One might wonder how this all came about. To make a long story short, I think it has a lot to do with a chaning lifestyle in general due to democratisation, urbanisation and industrialisation, but mostly I think it had a lot to do with the first world war. Both Kerry Greenwood's books and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries brings up how society to a large extent was thrown into a feeling of despair after the Great War. In a way I find the above quoted (and by me translated) part of Swedish contemporary singer Karl Gerhard's song Jazzgossen (Jazz boy) fitting. It talks exactly of those old, traditional gender values with the knights in shiny armour who fight over the fair maidens. A violent culture that can be seen as having culminated in the war. In this way, the ideals became a rebellion against those who were in place before the war and which was held responsible for it. What we can see during the 1920's is a renegotiations of the gender roles. Women became more masculine and men more feminine. In a way this makes a story bringing up transexuality fitting into this world.

 This is just a short overview and I probably will have reasons to go back to it in future entries to the blog as I progress in my reading of Kerry Greenwood's books. Phryne is, after all, the personification of the new woman of the 1920's.

Sources:
Andersen, Jens 2015. Denna dagen, ett liv. En biografi över Astrid Lindgren, Swedish translation: Urban Andersson.
Hirdman, Yvonne & Lundberg, Urban & Björkman, Jenny 2012. Norstedts Sveriges historia 1920-1965.
The photo of Phryne was borrowed here and the one of Mac here.

*I have not read this book myself. Only a general description in Jens Andersen's Astrid Lingren biography Denna dagen, ett liv. This is what I base my knowledge of it on.

Blood and Circuses - TV vs Book

"Justice, not money, determines the cases worthy of my attention."

~Phryne Fisher, Blood and Circuses (TV)

As I said in my entry about the book, there are a lot of different thoughtprovoking issues in Blood and Circuses and I probably get back to it in the future. It was however one issue that was more prominent than others to me and it was how both versions of the case at the circus sort of got to Phryne Fisher herself, but in different ways.

Phryne, Dot and Jane sneek a taste.

I had really decided I was going to leave Phryne as a character pretty much alone until I had read through all the books, but after reading this book (and to some extent also after a person I like said Phryne was only a shallow James Bond character), I figured I needed to address her character pretty much immediatelly, but first I will do a recap of the plot of the TV episode and how it deviates from the book one.

Just like the book, the TV episode starts with Mr Christopher (here called Miss and is considered a woman) and the episode starts with her being found strangled, stabbed and with a python around her neck in the magician’s vanishing cabinet (overkill as Phryne calls it) during the circus Farrell’s show and not in his bed at the boarding house where he lives in the book. Not pleased with Senior Sergeant Grossmith who has been assigned to the case, Phryne’s old friend Samson(Sam) seeks Phryne out to try getting her to help. For once, Phryne is rather reluctant to go back to Farrell’s since it was there that her little sister Jane disappeared while Phryne was too caught up in the magician perform a vanishing act in the same cabinet (at least I think it is) that Miss Christopher is found dead in. 

Jack and Elsie share a moment.

The TV episode is not one of my favourites. It is quite messy and it is not made clear exactly who made what and why. However Elsie Tizzard is probably my absolute favourite among the minor characters. I love her special relationship with Jack, but also how she bonds with Amelia Parkes in the cell. The latter is just one of all the amazing depictions of female friendships that we can see throughout both TV and book series.

Another aspect I really enjoy as an archaeologist is how they have used how memories (even unwelcome ones) are triggered by materialities. Phryne is extremely reluctant to go (back) to Farrell's circus to investigate and it is not until Jack (for once) gives her a definite no that she agrees to Samson's request and takes on the case. When she gets to the circus, the memories become even more prominent and we get much longer flashbacks with Jane and Phryne at the circus. Correct me if I am wrong, but I also think this is the first time we really get to see Janey Fisher's blue ribbons.

We have seen Phryne vulnerable before, but the memories of Jane are humbling in a new way. They seem to give her new insights into what happened to her sister and the episode itself sort of works much more as a build-up to the two that follows it.

'Tonight you shall share my luxury', she said, pulling off the dress and the scarf and shedding battered undergarments, 'because tomorrow I shall share your poverty.'

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and circuses (book) 

Phryne and Samson

In the book, Phryne goes through an even more humbling journey. She is forced to leave her luxurious lifetotally behind as she goes undercover as Fern Williams, the trick rider at the circus. Like Peter Smith, the anarchist, does in the Death at Victoria Dock book, Mr Burton questions what she does at the circus and Phryne gives him a similar answer that she is tired of being said not to understand or being able to manage a more simple life because of her otherwise privileged lifestyle. Because the Janey Fisher/Murdoch Foyle plot was made up for the TV show, the circus does not provoke as many bad memories for Phryne as in the TV show, but it does turn out to be a very hostile environment.

Little Phryne and her sister Jane in one of the flashbacks.

Like the TV episode, the book works a lot with materialities, but instead of connecting them to memores, it connects them to Phryne's self-esteem and confidence in a way that had me thinking of the song Wig in a Box from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The musical is about trangendered Hedwig who goes through sex reassignment therapy, but the surgery goes terribly wrong and she is left with an "angry inch" and in a state of not belonging to either of the binary sex/gender construction that is still considered norm in today's Western society. As you might understand, this can in many ways be related to the transgender theme of both book and TV episode (In the TV episode, we even get to know that Miss Christopher pays a surgeon to have her "additional appendage" removed.), but in many ways it can also be related to Phryne as a character.

Kerry Greenwood made a cameo at the circus in this episode.

As I have said before, I do not like the comparisson of Phryne to James Bond. I actually find it a bit degrading of her character. Phryne is so much more than just a female version of the action male archetype. Yes, she is wild, adventurous and reckless, active in every scene she is in (traditionally male traits), but she is also empathetic, compassionate and kind (traditionally female traits). She does not show many emotions (male trait), but she is sensitive to other people's needs (female trait). (I admit the latter does not always apply to Jack, but in that case it has much more to do with him not behaving like a traditional male way.) She is cunning and clever (male traits), but also flirty and seductive (female traits). She also uses violence and reacts to it in a very different way than Bond (or for that matter Indiana Jones who she is also compared to). Even though she often brings her golden pistol with pearl handle and has a dagger in her garther, she does not use them other than when it is totally necessary to save herself or others. I agree that her wild, reckless and sexual side is far more conspicuous, but I think we more should ask ourself why that is instead of only calling her a female James Bond/Indiana Jones.

Her overall apparence is also totally female with her beautiful, often very feminine clothes, hats and red lipstick. This is also where the relation to Hedwig and the song Wig in a box becomes most apparent. Like Hedwig, Phryne has a dark past which has been made clear at this point in the TV series, but not in the books, so I will leave it until it is brought up. Both of them also hits rock bottom, but they decide to turn their life over and they both sort of find exuberance in fashion. This is also how the book points to the material aspect of Phryne's identity and how important it is to her.

She was feeling of balance. Deprived of her usual props and stays and allies, and having to speak with the accent of her childhoo, she was losing confidence. No one seemed to like her, and she was used to being liked, or at least noticed. She closed her eyes.

~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses (book)

Jane asks Samson for stories about Phryne.

In a way the circus makes her time-travel back to her childhood in poverty in Collingwood, leaving her feeling self-concious and lonely. When the clown Matthias/Jo Jo does her make up for her performance in the circus show, she does no longer recognise her face, seeing only a stranger in the mirror.

But again it is a material object that destroys her identity all together. When she is discovered by Jones and his men and they are about to rape and kill her, they take away both her clothes and the belonings she has hidden underneath and inside them. Among those is the St Christopher medal Dot gave her right before she was leaving her home.

She made no sound until he broke the thong which held the holy medal and pocketed it. Phryne gave a pitiful cry. Her last link with her own self was gone.
~ Kerry Greenwood, Blood and Circuses (book)

The medal triggers a basic instinct inside of Phryne, making her fight the men. Because she is no simple "damsel in distress", she manages to avoid rape, but she does not win her freedom. Instead Jones and his men locks her in an animal case calling her a "wild beast".

This is actually not the first time in the book where humans have been compared to other animals.This is actually a theme also woven into the plot. Trapped in the animal cage and naked, Phryne's identity travels even further back in time (The mentioning of her friendship to the archaeologist being extremely fitting in all of this). Her fear of the lions was established already as Dulcie showed her around the circus and is already then said to enhance a primitive version of herself. She, however, remains quite active, trying to get herself out. In the end though, she realises she might need help from a friend or two. Humans are, after all living in hoards by nature...

Kerry Greenwood - Blood and Circuses

I think this is my favourite among the
art deco-inspired covers.

Blood and Circuses is the sixth installment in the book series about Phryne Fisher by Kerry Greenwood and they just keeps getting better and better. The plot surrounds Farrell´s Circus where a lot of things seem to have gone wrong lately. The latest "mishappening" is the murder of the circus artist Mr Christopher. Some old friends from the carnival following the circus, turn up at Phryne's door to have her investigate what is really going on over at Farrell's. Phryne therefore decides to go under cover as the trick rider Fern Williams.

The circus was vast and bewildering. The number of people who might want to destroy it was unknown and it seemed impossible to keep tabs on everyone. Phryne was concious of being alone in shabby clothes and completely ignorant. You've bitten of more than you can chew this time Phryne, she thought. You'll never make any sense out of this. 
'To understand a circus', she added alound, stepping sideways to avoid a passing camel, 'you obviously have to be born in a trunk.'
'Too right', agreed Dulcie.

At the same time, detective inspector Jack Robinson starts looking into the murder of Mr Christopher together with sergeant Grossmith and constable Tommy Harris. The latter is saved by Amelia Parkes, one of the women living at the same boarding house as Mr Christopher. She has a dark past and is therefore accused of the murder almoste immediately. But things is never as it seems at first.

There really is a lot to talk about here. Not least identity issues due to the victim being androgyne. But since my thoughts about identities to a great proportion involves Phryne to a great extent, I have decided to leave it for my TV vs Book post about Blood and Circuses.

Essie is very beautiful and all, but why not
use a picture from the TV episode with
Phryne dressed as Fern?

Instead, for this entry, I have decided to talk about the, sort of new world, Phryne gets herself into when she goes under cover as the trick rider Fern.

The title is an sort of paraphrase of an expression coined by the Roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenalis panem et circenses (Bread and Circuses - Bröd och skådespel in Swedish). He was not pleased with the decadence of the Roman Empire claiming the politicians kept the population at bay by feeding and entertaining them. It was during this time that emperor Vespasian made the Colosseum, which probably added more argument to Juvenalis proclaim that the distribution of cereals, the spectacles and the gladiator games all was just a trick to have the lower classes thinking about other things than social issues.

The circus in Kerry Greenwood's book however is the modern type which originated in 18th century London where Philip Astley held shows which mainly featured riders doing advanced tricks on horses.

Interestingly, Astley had discovered that a circular shaped stage (the ring) had several benefits. Not only could you get a bigger audience because they were able to surround the stage in stead of just sitting on one side of it. It also proved to help with the horse tricks. The ring helped the horses to gain speed because they could keep going around and around instead of having to slow down to turn every once in a while. This created the centripetal force which helped the riders to stay on.

In Sweden, the history of the circus phenomena can only be traced back to the early 1900s, but there had been travelling menageries before that. Among the artists were often families belonging to the Norwegian and  Swedish Travellers.

I really enjoyed how elaborative Greenwood's description of the circus was. Instead of just writing that  Dulcie shows Phryne/Fern the circus, we are actually getting to follow them around, meeting the people and the animals there.

The circus is described as a society in its own with its own social hierarchy: circus folks-carnies-gypsies*. Among the circus folks there are also a smaller social hierarchy with flyers being seen as the nobility and the others pretty much as simple peasants according to the dwarf* Mr Burton.

'You were at Oxford University?' squeaked Phryne. 'Then what are you doing in Farrell's'
'Where else could my... deformities be valuable? Everywhere else I am a freak. Here I am still a freak but I am a performer. Circuses are the only places where dwarves can get some respect.'

The fact that people who deviated from one or many of the societal norms were more or less forced to be performers at the circus are actually rather terrible. I had encounter it before in history books and in other forms of popular culture, for example Phantom of the Opera, but I still feel terrified by the view on humanity that society had.

I think the Phryne Fisher books just keeps getting better and better. It had a slow, somewhat boring start, but then it really hit of and even though I sort of figured out who did what somewhere in the middle, it did not really matter. And I love that Phryne has a friend who's an archaeologist.

The photo of the Essie Davis cover of the book was borrowed here.
*I know it is preferable to use other terms than these, but they were the ones used during the 1920's which is probably the reason why Kerry Greenwood