51 pages • 1 hour read
Murder at the Vicarage
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Themes
The Dynamics of Village Life
The theme of The Dynamics of Village Life is crucial in Murder at the Vicarage and indeed many of the Miss Marple books. While Christie’s other famous detective, Hercule Poirot, is a cosmopolitan individual who occasionally assists with cases involving international royalty, Miss Marple’s stories are intentionally the opposite and a good deal of their plot has to do with the dynamic between everyday characters who know each other well and are constantly involved in each other’s business. While it has drawbacks, it turns out to be the feature that saves an innocent life at the end of Murder at the Vicarage.
The proximity of humanity without much outside distraction or influence allows aspects of behavior and emotion to be highlighted. Good and bad characters assume things about their neighbors that often complicate matters. For example, the local police inspector disregards what witnesses say because he has known them to be frustrating personalities in the past. In another case, Clement’s nephew badly misjudges Lettice because he assumes things about teenage girls in small villages. Conversely, a newcomer inspires mystery and speculation with erroneous assumptions all around. The exploration of the personalities in the village is a treat for someone like Miss Marple, who declares her hobby is observing human nature. She compares her town to a petri dish of pond water. When people are always in proximity, they are easy to observe. While murder in the metropolis can occur for random reasons, murder in Christie’s small villages is always personal and an exploration of humanity more than violence. The nosy neighbors and heightened watchfulness, which for most of the novel seem a hindrance, prove to be an asset at the end, as a wrong number phone call brings Miss Marple, Clement, and the doctor to Hawes’ house in time to save him and prove his innocence.
As well as providing a convenient way to observe human nature, Miss Marple’s small worlds also offer good plot devices. The enclosed world of the village in which the murder takes place limits the distance a detective will have to travel and provides an easy lineup of suspects as opposed to a city where the potential murderers can be in the millions. In this way, The Dynamics of Village Life is also a convenient way to establish the basics required for a detective novel like setting and character, and help the reader quickly learn information through convenient human interaction that will help piece the puzzle together. Murder in a small village also promises the important detective story requirement of motive. As opposed to acts of random violence from strangers in a city, a village is small enough that one can discern motives through neighborly interaction.
The final element that the theme of The Dynamics of Village Life brings to the stories is a pastoral, bucolic setting. Because the setting is overall peaceful the crime feels more heinous when it is juxtaposed against the tranquility of the village, especially for the inhabitants. For them, a murder is extraordinary. In St. Mary Mead, everyone feels acutely the ripples from the murder, and the vicar notes that there was excitement in the village, as there hadn’t been a murder for fifteen years (168). The Dynamics of Village Life theme creates a secondary problem for the detective. For someone like Miss Marple, the solution to the crime is not only an act of justice but an act of returning the place they love to its cherished normality.
The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures
The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures is a theme that runs throughout the Miss Marple stories. It is a plot device that helps the detective achieve her goals but also gives the reader extra satisfaction when the underdog unexpectedly triumphs over the often-arrogant authority figures.
While the residents of St. Mary Mead constantly run down one another for various reasons as part of The Dynamics of Village Life there is special vitriol saved for the older ladies of the village. Almost all the characters who are not old or female at one time make a remark about either Miss Marple or older women in general, the mildest of these comes from Inspector Slack who says “You can’t take any notice of what old ladies say” (218). He doesn’t, and the case might not have been solved if the Vicar had not helped bring Miss Marple’s ideas to Chief Inspector Melchett and in return share with her information the police would not have given her. Because she is an outsider functioning from the inside, the Arrogance of Authority Figures helps Miss Marple solve cases. She maintains just enough distance that she can see things more clearly than people who are closely involved and full of themselves. Also, the way characters underestimate her allows her access to situations and interactions that wouldn’t happen in front of the more respected members of the community. Characters talk freely in front of Miss Marple because they consider her harmless. The murderers are careful not to make this mistake because they recognize Miss Marple’s shadowy busybody side and bet she will see and notice things. They don’t respect her enough to fear her mind, however, whereas Leonard Clement, the most open-minded person in the novel who says less against the elderly ladies than the other characters, notes he fears her brain over all the others. While the silliness of the styles of the older ladies’ hats distracts Griselda, Clement sees beyond their exteriors. “Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner—Miss Wetherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is the more dangerous” (13). The word “dangerous” is key in this quote, as it indicates not just the cutting, judgmental remarks the other ladies demonstrate. There is something else about Miss Marple that rises above the rest in a way that can affect one more than hurt feelings or an uncomfortable hour of tea. Her ideas, when one listens, can put perpetrators in prison.
The Evils of Human Nature
While most murder mysteries incorporate The Evils of Human Nature because their inciting incident is a crime, the Miss Marple books make it a staple. Miss Marple repeatedly verbalizes this theme in many forms. Starting in Chapter 2 and reoccurring throughout, Miss Marple says "I’m afraid that observing human nature for a long as I have, one gets not to expect very much from it" (18). This opinion supports the other theme of The Dynamics of Village Life. Being in such a closed community helps Miss Marple engage in her hobby: studying human nature (196). She repeatedly finds that human nature isn’t good, isn’t very unique, and that all the bad and pessimistic speculation "is very wrong and unkind, but is it so often true, isn’t it?" (18).
Miss Marple, however, uses this absolute confidence about the worst in people to serve justice. She uses previous comparable situations that show similar human nature. It works because, in her experience, humans are creatures of habit, and their habits are similar. While Miss Marple’s appearance is droll and demure, her mind is full of the dark patterns she witnesses, which makes her skeptical of even the people she likes in the village. “I was very sorry to believe what I did—very sorry. Because I liked them both. But you know what human nature is” (280). This gives her a realistic and unclouded point of view from which to solve a crime. Despite liking the people around her, she is realistic about all the possibilities, even the ones she doesn’t like, and both she and Clement occasionally despair that her pessimism usually proves correct. Her intuition for human nature is like “reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before” (98). Her bank of knowledge about the evils of human nature depends on life experience, not position or education, therefore the theme of The Evils of Human Nature dovetails with The Error of Arrogance in Authority Figures. While Miss Marple and her peers’ prim and biting observations annoy many members of the community, especially the police, these characters forget the older ladies have been around long enough to see the evil of which humans are capable. They disregard the older women and allow the evil to resurface.
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By Agatha Christie
