Keywords

1 Introduction

British novelist Kate Atkinson, author of the Jackson Brodie series, has shown her commitment to both popular genres and feminism. Since the publication of her first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum in 1995, it could be contended that Atkinson’s narratives are concerned with the representation of all the issues that women face just because of their gender, starting from neo-patriarchal norms and values still embedded in current society to the most brutal and physical form of gender violence: death.1 Atkinson’s work, up to now, can be divided into two distinct plot schemes: those novels with a young female protagonist, with the exception of A God in Ruins (2015), a prequel to Life After Life (2013); and the detective fiction featuring Jackson Brodie and spanning 2004–2019: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News, Started Early, Took My Dog and Big Sky.

In the latter, Kate Atkinson loosely employs the genre of detection, moving between the tradition of crime fiction and what Joyce and Sutton (2018) define as “domestic noir”, to create multiple mysteries all of them tied together and brought to closure around the figure of a detective.2 Her use of the genre places her in this contemporary revision which was labelled as “humanistic crime fiction” by Marcia Muller in 1995 (although probably the term “empathic” is much more appropriate), containing a specific formula in which social critique is placed within the plot.3 The specificity of Atkinson’s commitment to this trend stands out in her portrayal not of the female detective/sleuth Muller signalled as rising at the end of the twentieth century, but of a male one. It seems evident that Jackson Brodie is created as the agent of change around whom closure, in traditional terms, is reached. However, social justice, the necessary outcome of this “humanistic” plot, is always denounced and never achieved, and a form of vigilante justice (taking the law in one’s own hands to punish criminals) is established. Hence, Atkinson’s detective fiction series examines in detail the assemblage of a neo-patriarchal network supporting not only inequality but also gender violence.

This representation of the modes of female coercion and invisibilisation, so familiar in Atkinson’s bildungsromane, is also at the core of the detective series. From Case Histories (2004) to Big Sky (2019), the last instalment so far, gender violence is central to the novels because the female corpses and characters who appear around the male detective are always victims, sometimes survivors, of this type of violence. Moreover, in some of them, Atkinson also explores how the survivors cope with their lives in a world in which they are forgotten by the institutions of law and order, as sometimes the cases are. In fact, the role of the detective always starts where the institutions of law and order stop. These plot devices articulate issues of vulnerability, resistance and autonomy in the actions performed not only by the male protagonist but also by these survivors of gender violence. These interlocked acts bear a direct consequence on the detective, in similar ways as contemporary crime texts do, that is, his gradual alienation from the institutions of law and order and more generally, his social isolation. This isolation reflects on the female victims and survivors’ obliteration in that they and their cases are conveniently forgotten by the institutions whose task is to watch over vulnerable subjects; hence, the detective enters the scene as a peripheral agent in charge of bringing closure to some of the millions of cold cases that pullulate the justice system.

The success of the fiction series and its protagonist brought Jackson Brodie to the TV under the title Case Histories, commissioned by the BBC for one season, airing in 2011, and a second season, in 2013, slightly changing in format.4 Bringing a well-loved fiction character to the TV format was successfully achieved by enlisting actor Jason Isaacs, who had previously been the leading voice of an abridged audiobook. Throughout the episodes in the TV series, Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) inhabits the urban space so popular in recent detection and penetrates the domestic sphere where most of the cases take place. His written popularity endorses the visual impersonation by Isaacs as a materialisation of PI Jackson Brodie. However, bringing a very complicated character to the TV format was much more problematical, as it will be shown in the following pages.

What follows is a comparative analysis of the two detectives, the written Brodie and the visual one, together with some of the female victims, to determine how the constraints of popular culture have transformed Atkinson’s feminist view of vulnerability and autonomy into a palatable and neoliberal conceptualisation that erases the standpoint the novels make. The analysis proposed here will offer a reading of the contemporary depiction of the (male) detective based on Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds’s taxonomy about vulnerability and Mackenzie’s discussion of Martha Fineman’s definition of autonomy; the reading will also include Judith Butler and Sarah Bracke’s disquisitions about vulnerability and resistance; finally, the framing of (gender) violence in the texts will be understood under Hannah Arendt’s concept of “arbitrariness” and Adriana Cavarero’s study in Horrorism (2009) as extreme forms of oppression as analysed by Ann Cudd. This reading will be compared to visual representations of the genre in a transnational environment that reinforces both neoliberal concepts of autonomy and paternalistic attitudes towards female vulnerability.

2 Empathic Detection

Violence and detection are offered by media as entertainment both through fiction and through reality by exploiting the publication of crime fiction in general terms and the coverage of fictionalised accounts of true crime (Dowler et al. 2006). That crime texts traditionally endorse a well-anchored and recognisable social model is widely accepted by theorists of detection (Scaggs 2005; Ascari 2007; King 2014; Evans et al. 2019), who also acknowledge, however, that in recent decades, the detective has also become quite critical of the institutions of law and order as a witness to the horrors depicted. Be it the traditional or this new sort of protagonist, this restoration of the social system requires the detectives to reconstruct the story that led to the crime.

The popularity of crime and its transnational nature have been tackled by recent critical works. As Mary Evans stated, “crime is one of the central concerns of western societies, sometimes through a dramatic and sensational presence in the media, sometimes as a mundane part of twenty-first century life, but always a topic that excites attention and engages the attention of readers or viewers” (2009, 1). Additionally, Ascari acknowledges the turn from reason to emotion in the genre (2013). King proposed to “read crime fiction as an example of world literature” (2014, 10) but, despite this challenging statement, it is true that in recent years, the crime genre has a growing global popularity both in its written and visual forms. It is worth considering as well, as it is asserted in King’s study, that the crime genre did not usually travel safely through borders, considering the localised nature of the legal systems that supported the fictional texts. However, globalisation in the form of cultural imperialism beyond national boundaries has created an audience which is able to read crime in a fundamental Judeo-Christian mode of punishment, regardless of their local legal specificities.

The selling of TV products, such as TV dramas or “true crime” documentaries, to different local and national media networks also helps educate the viewer into the particulars of a given legislation against crime.5 Furthermore, the existence of international legislation and police collaboration among nations, provided by institutions such as the United Nations or the Interpol, additionally entails the creation of an international legal system that answers to international forms of crime. As Pepper and Schmid affirm in their introduction to the edition entitled Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2016), “the global implications of the crimes being depicted (e.g., the link between individual or collective criminal acts and the exigencies of global capitalism) require new forms and new strategies of representation in order to do justice to a changed and changing world” (3). What they label as “hybridized forms of crime fiction” are the perfect example that “facilitate critical reflection on the globalizing imperatives of capitalism” (Pepper and Schmid 2016, 3). Thus, in their proposition the genre is still portraying practices that are institutional and, at the same time, showing how states have been affected by both the transnationalisation of crime and the surveillance by state institutions in this transnational milieu.

It is no surprise then the role television plays in this transmission of globalised, or better: glocalised and hybridised forms of the crime genre. In fact, it could be contended that television has replaced the market square in audiences’ vicarious witnessing of justice and punishment. Following Bourdieu and Hall, television could be considered as the ideological construction of social legitimation, as the means by which these “glocal” texts are consumed by audiences around the world, in which this celebrated new detective is constructed. In recent years, several scholars have tried to explain the popularity this genre has acquired in the twenty-first century, with the explosion of nationalistic portrayals such as “Nordic noir”, “Emerald noir” or “postcolonial/transnational noir” (as some of the contributors to this volume explore) both written and visual; however, this diversification of crime has not involved a diminishing in the popularity of “Anglophone crime”, where the texts explored here belong to, or even its long-standing influence (King 2014, 8–10).

In addition, contemporary texts are populated with brutal scenes depicting physical violence, as well as a stubborn fixation with targeting females as victims, establishing gender violence as a central topic and women as a vulnerable group. The proliferation of women as victims in these texts creates the necessity to explore the feminist conceptualisation of terms such as autonomy, resistance and vulnerability, and their relationship with gender violence to refute the neoliberal paradigms at work. By defining “violence”, it seems that the conflicting definitions between feminism and neoliberalism are clearly delineated. It is true, as Hannah Arendt in her essay On Violence accepted, that “violence harbors within itself an additional element of arbitrariness” (Arendt 1970, 4); however, the general acceptance of this “unpredictability” blinds the perception of the actual act of violence as calculated. Even though Zizek’s distinction of the different types of violence, namely symbolic, systemic and personal (Zizek 2008, 1–2) will likewise be used, it seems that Arendt is offering a study on the institutional discourses that legitimate the use of violence while, at the same time, condemning it as a form of barbarism. This proposition is what makes Arendt’s conceptualisation of violence viable to analyse the violence that is exerted on women, because it is a form of violence that is condemned by social institutions, yet still without a serious devotion to its eradication.

Zizek’s division may sometimes obscure the relationship that exists between violence and power and turn what are examples of systemic and structural violence into just the personal mode, as they are represented in popular crime texts. In this respect, the detective—in general terms—is the agent that may be key to either obscure or clarify the legitimation of gender violence by stating how the violent crime was the doing of just the criminal or was a consequence of this institutional endorsement. Arendt’s discourse on the legitimation of violence by social institutions enlightens why the texts are always explained through the perception of a Zizekian “personal” form of violence instead of forms of structural violence against women. Moreover, in Atkinson’s texts, gender violence is not explained as the single work of a given criminal but is also emphasised as the role social institutions have in formulating and defining gender violence as the isolated work of a madman instead of accepting their compliance in maintaining it. This social critique that the protagonist of the novels is so keen to highlight and that is so evident in the written texts is one of the aspects that has been difficult to translate in the visual ones. Even though, in Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), Brodie asks himself “why did men kill women?” and reflects that throughout his career, he has never been able to answer that question (Atkinson 2010, 96), the simple fact that the question is posed mirrors what both audiences and theorists are also wondering about: the reasons behind the popularity of crime texts whose murdered female victims are the recipients of extreme and brutal male violence. The need to search for an answer, even if it sinks in only after three novels in which women are the targeted victims of the cases he investigates, makes it possible to understand these examples of gender violence alongside Adriana Cavarero’s discussion of the coinage “collateral damage” (2).

In her work, Cavarero is intent on explaining that arbitrariness of violence and the vulnerability it entails. Her initial account of the term “collateral damage” to explain those examples of violence, which are deemed involuntary and thus inevitable (Cavarero 2011, 2), is perceived as just the way to legitimate forms of violence that are illegitimate according to social discourses, but which are labelled so by complicit institutions. Hence, the categorisation of gender violence as personal violence, following Zizek, creates the perfect excuse when describing this form of violence as “collateral damage” in the sense that it is performed by a male individual who sets himself free from the control of the institutions that should prevent it. The trick then is served to the consumers of these forms of entertainment who see the “arbitrariness” of gender violence as a deviance from the institutional regulations of individuals, instead of a form of structural violence born out of millennia of a discourse of male supremacy. This inevitability of gender violence as a mode of isolated, individualised and Zizekian “personal” violence is what results problematic in the crime texts that populate the media.

Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), for instance, deals with a recurrent plot device in Atkinson, a cold case never fully investigated in which a woman was murdered by her policeman lover. The murderer’s superiors not only let the case go cold but also helped the lover to illegally give up in adoption one of the siblings born to the couple, a girl, and made the boy institutionally disappear by sending him to a religious orphanage under a false name. By denouncing the compliance of the institutions to cover the murder, Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie condemns the system that allows gender violence to continue, as well as it denounces the individual as the executioner of personal violence. In addition, Brodie erects himself as the witness, by his expertise as investigator, who can bring closure to the victim’s family. This classic reworking of the genre, giving a closure of sorts to the narrative, is not what makes Brodie part of the group of the “empathic” detectives so celebrated nowadays. In fact, his empathy towards not only the victim but also the survivors are born out of his own personal experience and the lack of closure for his sister’s rape and murder when he was a boy. As many other examples in this glocalised genre, Brodie acts to repair what cannot be mended in his life, and, because his life has been touched by gender violence, Brodie is written as a male detective that shares “feelings and experiences” (Rodino-Colocino 2018, 96) with the victims and survivors. This empathy Rodino-Colodino is alluding to in her article explains his implication in the “case histories” that give the title to the first novel in the series and it also positions him as its main protagonist and centre. In addition, Brodie’s condition might also be understood as “permeability” in the term coined by Leticia Sabsay in her contribution to Vulnerability in Resistance, which she defines as the ability to affect and be affected by others (Sabsay 2016, 286). Permeability, then, Rodino-Colocino’s empathy, is related to affect; it is Brodie’s permeability to the vulnerability of both victims and the survivors that makes him an emphatic detective. In fact, it is in the section entitled “Holy Girls” (Atkinson 2004, 353–363) that Brodie’s personal implication in the “cold cases” is clearly explained: in his teens, his sister Niamh was raped and murdered, and the “killer was never found” (Atkinson 2004, 363). Indeed, this encounter with gender violence explains not only his relationship with his daughter, on the one hand, but also his intention in solving the cases, on the other.

In the next two novels, references to his sister’s murder continue to appear and, when he accidentally “loses” the floating corpse of a young woman in One Good Turn (2006), Jackson’s memory goes back to the day his sister was rescued in the canal while he tries to secure the corpse of this new victim (Atkinson 2006, 139–141); moreover, Detective Sergeant Louise Monroe names the lost female corpse “Jackson’s girl”, making clear his own personal implication with the “unofficial” investigation which is about to start. In fact, at the end of the novel, Brodie makes clear that the dead girl has a name and people who miss her—her family back in Russia and her friends in Edinburgh—breaking the pattern of invisibility common in discourses about gender violence by social institutions (Atkinson 2006, 527).

In the third novel entitled When Will There Be Good News? (2008), Brodie is implicated in another search for a lost woman, this time a wife and mother, who is going to endanger Brodie’s future as detective, reluctantly. In a very Atkinsonian turn of the screw, the lost woman he finds and helps is the same lost girl he found years ago when her family was brutally murdered. Dr. Joanna Hunter, finally found when she frees herself after killing her kidnappers, requires Brodie to clean up the murder scene and dispose of the weapons that could incriminate her (Atkinson 2008, 444) and, as an accomplice, Brodie feels he has fallen on the other side of the Manichaean duality of the genre (Atkinson 2008, 448). It seems that by helping this character and covering her manslaughter, Brodie is aware of their own vulnerability and the only available sources of resistance. In fact, these actions ground his characterisation into this new category of detective who acts with a compassion born out of their own shared experience and the knowledge of the inability of institutions to prevent gender violence. In addition, this example of vigilante justice is nonetheless quite common in contemporary crime texts which since the 1980s are keen to portray the autonomous male subject as the lonely hero.6

The fourth novel, Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), is where this critique of society is much more evident as the undercurrent that connects the cases. Jackson Brodie is hired to find the birth mother of a young woman who has learnt she is adopted. By investigating this, the detective uncovers a plot in which the police and the social services worked together to cover the murder of a woman by her police lover and the illegal adoption of their daughter. At the same time, Brodie is accidentally entangled in a story in which a retired policewoman buys a little girl from his mother. His murdered sister Niamh resurfaces again to mark the “arbitrariness” of personal violence and the laxity of institutions in preventing it (Atkinson 2010, 464) both to excuse the buying of the little girl as the paralegal way to prevent her pathogenic vulnerability (which will be discussed at more length below) in the system and to account for the death of the young mother at the hands of her lover.

Big Sky (2019) is the only novel that is not covered by the TV adaptation. This text deals with recurrent topics, such as gender violence, trafficking and children abuse. Jackson Brodie, who has become a vigilante too, combines his “legal” PI office with this obscure task when he illegally liberates the victim girl of a male paedophile. Accepting the “job” of investigating who is following a Mrs Holroyd is what creates the chaotic environment Atkinson best qualifies for as a writer. However, Jackson Brodie is incapable of closing the cases, and the client herself has to intervene to find any sort of justice: “despite her conclusions about Jackson Brodie’s general incompetence, Crystal felt safer with his presence in the house, although she would never have admitted that to him” (Atkinson 2019, 380).

For obvious reasons, the TV series does not follow the events at the same pace; Case Histories (2011, 2013) comprises two seasons: a first season consisting of six episodes, two for each of the first three novels (Case Histories, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?), and a second season consisting of three episodes, one dealing with the fourth novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, and two extra episodes, “based on the characters created by Kate Atkinson”, as it is announced in the DVD case. In the visual text, Brodie’s exposure to gender violence is revealed quite early in the narrative; that is, the unsolved rape and murder of his sister Niamh: images of a very young Brodie are superimposed on the actual Brodie revealing the moment when his sister’s corpse is rescued. This recurrent memory is what makes Brodie an “empathic” detective, as it has been anticipated earlier, since Brodie is well aware of how easily society forgets the violence that is exerted on women.

This trait in the characterisation of contemporary fictional detectives makes them realise how complicit institutions are in pointing to the wrong causes of gender violence in contemporary society. Besides, this humanisation of the traditional nineteenth-century detective, who seemed not to be affected by the horrors encountered, is clearly rooted in the conception of human vulnerability. By depicting vulnerable subjects as agents of law and order, the narratives manage to manifest a more empathic treatment of the cases and the (vulnerable) victims.7 All in all, this humanisation serves its purpose of focusing on the issue of (gender) violence and female vulnerability. Vulnerability has been broadly defined as a condition of human life that makes humans fragile and dependent on external conditions (Butler 2004; Mackenzie et al. 2014, among others). The condition of human vulnerability is also rooted in our physical bodies, and the concept has been the object of an in-depth study by Mackenzie et al. in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Philosophy (2014). These theorists define three different sources of vulnerability: inherent, situational and pathogenic (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 7–9) as intrinsic to the concept itself. Whereas “inherent” and “situational vulnerabilities” are part of our corporeal nature, pathogenic vulnerability seems to imply that living in groups facilitate that human beings fall to forms of vulnerability specific to social interaction. It seems that this “pathogenic vulnerability” is the source of vulnerability that is required to read Atkinson’s detective series, because of the implication of society as the locus where it is encountered. These theorists expose that “pathogenic vulnerabilities” “may be generated by a variety of sources, including morally dysfunctional or abusive interpersonal and social relationships and sociopolitical oppression or injustice” (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 9); yet, more strikingly, “pathogenic vulnerabilities may also arise when a response intended to ameliorate vulnerability has the paradoxical effect of exacerbating existing vulnerabilities or generating new ones” (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 9).

In Atkinson’s series, from the very first instalment of Case Histories (2004), the vulnerabilities both the protagonist detective and the victims suffer, be them the murdered females or their close relatives, are subjected to refer to this third source Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds develop. In Atkinson’s texts, pathogenic vulnerability is mainly caused by “abusive interpersonal and social relationships” related to gender violence, as it happens in the opening case in Case Histories (2004) which uncovers the story of the abusive father that causes his molested daughter to murder her younger sister in an attempt to prevent her from becoming another of her father’s victims. Furthermore, in the subsequent novels in the series, the consequences of that pathogenic vulnerability which is signalled by the “responses intended to ameliorate vulnerability” are also present. In them, Atkinson emphasises the indifference of the institutions involved, highlighting their general lack of interest in performing the work of social justice. Moreover, Brodie’s control over these messy events is elusive, since Atkinson’s plots contain entangled histories of oppression, such as trafficking, illegal adoptions, family massacres, or child abuse. These twisted plots are generally a way of showing how vulnerable women are, and how the source of this vulnerability is mostly pathogenic.

What all these female (dead or alive) victims have in common is the source of their vulnerability and, as Judith Butler has signalled, the danger here resides in their being marked as vulnerable, for these female victims of gender violence are “fixed in a political position of powerlessness and lack of agency” (Butler 2016, 24). Given that “all the power belongs to the state and international institutions that are now supposed to offer them protection” (Butler 2016, 25), the survivors suffer at the hands of the very same institutions that should protect them. Hence, Atkinson does not maintain a discourse of female vulnerability that is based in inherent or situational sources, as typified by Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds, but clearly denounces that these sources of vulnerability are at the root of society and the institutions that support it. The accusation is articulated through the detective that closes all these cases, becoming little by little as alien to the social institutions as the victims are.

The nature of the protagonist detective’s own vulnerability and guilt, namely the lack of closure for his sister’s murder, does not only create the empathy necessary in these crime texts. It is also the way Atkinson explores the complex nature of the characterisation of the protagonist of the genre in its contemporary formula. By helping the survivors overcome the source of their vulnerability and by closing the cases he has been involved with, Brodie doubles as also the victim of pathogenic vulnerability. In his case, the institutions he once served and the laws he once obeyed are rendered useless to prevent the actual violence that both the murdered victims and the surviving females endure and thus, he has no other choice than to act outside the limits imposed by the legal frameworks presented in the novels. This widely accepted paralegal and vigilante justice Brodie is increasingly applying separates him from mainstream society, equating his performance with that of the female survivors that surround him whose marginality is well established in the novels; in Started Early, Took My Dog, Brodie looks back to a previous case and reflects how his acts are placing him outside the law (Atkinson 2010, 55). This marginality is what accounts for that “powerlessness and lack of agency” Butler associated with “groups marked as vulnerable”, as female victims of gender violence usually are not only in legal discourses but also in fictional ones. However, with the help of this empathic detective, these female victims are able to prevail and “resist” the sources of pathogenic vulnerability they have endured.

Interestingly enough, the novels do not fall into the neoliberal trap of promoting resilience but create an alternative that can be explained through Sarah Bracke’s discussion in “Bouncing Back” (2016) where she provides a profound analysis of the concept from a feminist standpoint to validate the use of the term resistance. With this proposition in mind, the female victims who survive “resist” pathogenic vulnerabilities and show the compliance of institutions when dealing with gender violence. However, their resistance is not enough to position them back in their rightful place in society. With Bracke’s rejection of the term resilience as a neoliberal trap and her advocacy of the term resistance, another term debated in feminist theory may be useful to present what the novels adhere to. Catriona Mackenzie, in her own contribution to Vulnerability (Mackenzie et al. 2014, 33–59), advocates the creation of “an ethics of vulnerability” to foster an understanding that “seeks to dissociate the concept from negative connotations of victimhood, helplessness, neediness, and pathology, reconceptualizing vulnerability as an ontological condition of our embodied humanity” (Mackenzie 2014, 33).

For Mackenzie, it is important to reframe the concept of autonomy in feminist terms and establish the modes in which a non-neoliberal concept of autonomy could be made to respond to situations of vulnerability. This theorist accepts that the traditional “rhetoric of autonomy” implies a neoliberal individualism that excludes state intervention, which clashes with the ethics of vulnerability, she proposes and thus she advocates to move from autonomy to “relational autonomy” so that it is easier to understand how the term is influenced and influences the concepts of vulnerability and justice (2014, 36–37). All in all, her discussion aims to foster an understanding of autonomy that is devoid of the paternalistic forms of intervention that feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler have denounced in their disquisitions about vulnerability. The usefulness of Mackenzie’s proposition is grounded in the acknowledgement of human vulnerability as corporeal, and the need to establish an ethics of vulnerability that does not reinforce victimhood or dependence, as Butler herself advocated, but helps to prevent it. Mackenzie then proposes to explore how “pathogenic vulnerabilities” are also present in situations of vulnerability to understand how these are forms of oppression that enhance situational vulnerability (2014, 39–40). With these specifications in mind, Mackenzie advocates a redefinition of the concept of autonomy and strips it from its neoliberal sense of promoting individualism and resilience, to work towards an understanding of autonomy which includes a “relational” component. For this reason, Mackenzie develops her view of how this new conceptualisation of autonomy could help issues of vulnerability and states: “first, to counter the sense of powerlessness and loss of agency that is often associated with vulnerability; and, second, to counter the risks of objectionable paternalism” (2014, 45). In fact, she advocates to work specifically within these parameters to avoid, as Butler already exposed, “powerlessness and lack of agency” (Butler 2016, 25) that could “generate pathogenic forms of vulnerability” (Mackenzie 2014, 47). This reframing of the concept of autonomy is what can be seen in Atkinson’s detective series, not only in the behaviour the female victims/survivors enact but also in the way Jackson Brodie fares through the cases.

As mentioned above, in Started Early, Took My Dog (2010) a retired policewoman bought a little girl from her mother; this plot runs parallel to another much earlier story in which a girl was illegally given away in adoption. Both are connected through the retired policewoman, as she had been the rookie agent that had discovered the second girl’s murdered mother. In the novel, the policewoman’s learning curve towards autonomy is clearly shown in her behaviour: she now tries to justify her buying of the little girl as a sort of rescue and she uses her knowledge of crime to buy new identities for her and for the girl, both clearly illegal actions. The retired policewoman, no longer that naïve rookie, has lost her faith in the system. She now understands that the institutions themselves are complicit in girls’ and women’s vulnerability and that the line between crime and justice is rather blurred. In that sense, she is performing the sort of autonomy that Mackenzie has described even though she is acting outside the law, and therefore has moved beyond the pale, to the side of the criminals. However, in the second season of the TV series, the one that adapts the plot of Started Early, Took My Dog, it is Brodie (Jason Isaacs) himself who contacts the identity thief on behalf of this policewoman, performing for the media what seems a complete reversal from the written Brodie. This visual Brodie (Jason Isaacs) is thus transformed into the paternalistic male hero who epitomises neoliberal (male) autonomy and accepts to act as a (patriarchal) male protector of a group, women, who have been deemed vulnerable and, thus, powerless and lacking agency.

In her study Analyzing Oppression (2006), Ann E. Cudd undertakes to offer a “conceptual analysis of the term” (vii) as she understands “that the fundamental injustice of social institutions is oppression” (2006, ix). For “institutions”, she describes “formal and informal social structures and constraints, such as law, convention, norms, practices, and the like” as well as “social institutions as the media and popular or high culture” which “fail to treat individuals as moral equals” (Cudd 2006, 20). Cudd also analyses a type of violence, systematic violence (2006, 89), which is exerted to maintain oppression from one group to another and centres her example on “violence against women”, which, according to her, is “invisible”, “diffuse, and often literally hidden enough to appear unsystematic” but “widespread and recognizable enough to discipline women to stay within what is normatively termed their natural place” (2006, 86). It is this insight into gender violence which seems adequate to explain the proliferation of crime texts featuring extreme violence against women. In fact, Big Sky (2019) features all possible forms of gender violence from child molestation to trafficking in what seems an attempt to narrate a full catalogue of the horrors women suffer every day to be disciplined. The survival of Tina/Christina/Crystal is written as a form of resistance that fits into her predecessors in Atkinson’s texts. In the end, it is Crystal who saves herself and her family due to “Jackson Brodie’s general incompetence” (Atkinson 2019, 380) in discovering who is threatening her. In contrast, the BBC two extra episodes of the TV series continue to portray a very different Brodie (Jason Isaacs), the autonomous detective that erects himself as the neoliberal protector that was discussed above. Crystal could be read alongside with Cudd’s proposition to define oppression: brought to foster care when she was a child, Crystal was completely powerless to prevent her being abused by the “benefactors” that visited the centre; when Crystal finally leaves that circle and marries, her life is turned upside down when she discovers that her husband was not only part of the gang that abused her but also a sex trafficker. For Crystal, there is no other end than to kill her husband and run away again.

Crystal’s autonomy and resistance to the oppression perpetrated through gender violence by both society and the institutions that should have protected her are clearly opposed to Jackson Brodie’s inability to do so. In this instalment in the series, Brodie, even though he still works within the parameters of empathy, is no longer the figure he was in the first novel. His incapability to help all the victims around him further enhances the instability of his role as male protector. In fact, it could be contended that, even in his vigilante role, Jackson Brodie has little power to undo the work of gender violence. In all, Brodie is revealed as an empathic member of society whose vulnerability as an individual prevents him from adopting the role as detective he still possesses: to become the protector, legally or illegally, of the victims that ask for his help.

3 Conclusions

As Cudd affirms, oppression as injustice is a form of dehumanisation (2006, 24). In the analysis provided in these pages of the representation of gender violence in Atkinson’s detective series, both the victims and survivors and the protagonist detective are dehumanised by the institutions that create pathogenic vulnerability by endorsing a form of individual violence which targets women. Brodie’s empathic “permeability” (following Sabsay’s definition) in his response to these victims and the paralegal actions he consequently undertakes influence his alienation from this social structure that exhorts vulnerable populations to become resilient in neoliberal terms, as Bracke clearly exposes (2016, 71–72). The understanding of their autonomy in relational terms discloses the neoliberal trap at work in media discourses which place the burden of survival on the targeted population of gender violence while perpetuating traditional discourses on their inherent vulnerability instead of working to end the causes of its pathogenic source. Moreover, popular media entertainment, as the TV adaptation has shown, continues to reinforce this neoliberal discourse to obscure society’s blame in perpetuating violence towards women. The popularity of crime texts in mass media inculcate women the idea that gender violence cannot be prevented, and thus (one) they still are in need of a paternalistic form of protection and (two) they have to waive their rights to prevent it from happening. Finally, the theories used to read both the written series and its visual adaptation provide tools for understanding the implication of media in the perpetuation of neo-patriarchal values.

Notes

  1. 1.

    The term neo-patriarchal is used following the definition proposed by Habiba, Rabia and Ashfaq in their article “From Patriarchy to Neopatriarchy: Experiences of Women from Pakistan”, published in 2016: “This form of power named neopatriarchy is a different and a new concept related to household power hierarchies which disadvantages women in many ways. One of the many outcomes is domestic violence due to clash of interest in the game of power and control. Neopatriarchy is a new form of governance over women in the family, which is functioned through different types of violence to suppress the woman's identity and create dependency in the family” (Habiba et al., 212).

  2. 2.

    Joyce and Sutton (2018) clarify the current popularity of this subgenre “that deals with domestic, intimate, and sexual violence, that deals with a lack of recourse for victims, and that asks questions about the safety, rights, and freedoms of those most vulnerable in society” (1).

  3. 3.

    The use of the term “empathy” throughout this piece follows the definition given by Rodino-Colocino in her article “Me Too, #MeToo: Countering Cruelty with Empathy”: “the sensation of shared feelings and experiences, into toppling systems of oppression and its attendant cruelty” (2018, 96).

  4. 4.

    In fact, Jackson Brodie briefly existed in Twitter from 2010 to 2011 as @jacksonbrodie.

  5. 5.

    For another take on the subject of detection and nation-state borders, see Cuder-Domínguez's essay in this volume.

  6. 6.

    For another discussion on vigilantism, see Iglesias-Díaz’s and Pérez-Vides’s essays in this volume.

  7. 7.

    Some instances would be British TV dramas Broadchurch (2013), Luther (2010) or Marcella (2016), among others, and Spanish ones Plastic Sea (2010), El príncipe (2014), Malaka (2019) and, for the sake of a comparative analysis between a written series and its adaptation, the Netflix adaptation of Dolores Redondo’s The Baztán Trilogy.