看穿簾幕：愛嘉莎‧克莉絲蒂的《簾幕：白羅的最後探案》

Seeing through the Curtain: Agatha Christie’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

Curtain, a detective fiction written in 1946 by Agatha Christie but posthumously published in 19761, illustrates some cultural phenomenon in postwar England. Written in 1940s, Curtain reveals nostalgia of Victorian past and discontent with dominant capitalistic culture in postwar era. The aristocratic country house and the glory of British Commonwealth can stand for a Victorian past which gradually declines but still coexists with the dominant culture in the postwar era. Besides, the conflict between young people and senior generation as well as the women’s role in a postwar society also turn more and more prominent and complicated at that time. The cultural phenomenon in 1940s presented in Curtain implicates that the Victorian cultural values are still both incorporated and not incorporated into the dominant postwar culture. Generally speaking, Christie’s Curtain can be categorized as a classical detective novel written in Poesque/Holmsian tradition. However, the nostalgia of the Victorian cultural value and the discontent with an effective post-war culture lead this novel to differentiate a bit from this tradition, due to that the detective Poirot in Curtain closes his last case by using a personal justice that is higher than a lawful justice made by a dominant culture. The nostalgia and the discontent found in Curtain may relate to what Pierre Macherey calls the “silence” of a literary text. Macherey also relates the “silence” to Freudian “unconscious” and latent meaning hidden beneath a textual surface.