Cutting Up the Corpse: Agatha Christie, Max Ernst, and Neo-Victorianism in the 1930s

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Notes

In 4:50 from Paddington, Mrs. McGillicuddy catches sight of the murder because the train in which it is committed momentarily runs parallel with the one in which she is travelling. The murder is thus framed “cinematographically,” like the murder on the train in La Bête humaine when it is seen from the tracks.

Adapting Sergei Eisenstein's description of Edgar Allan Poe, whom he discusses as the practitioner of an analytical “autopsy,” it might be said that Ernst is one of “those in whom a living face and a decaying face are capable of evoking an identical lyrical shudder” (Eisenstein 258).

The aesthetic effect of the sphinx's “returned gaze” is roughly analogous to that of the king and queen reflected in the mirror depicted in Velázquez's Las Meninas, as discussed by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: “the function of that reflection is to draw into the interior of the picture what is intimately foreign to it: the gaze which has organized it and the gaze for which it is displayed” (Foucault 15).

Laura Marcus has claimed that Freud's childhood memory of being sexually aroused by seeing his mother naked on a train founds the theory of the Oedipus complex and that, in this sense, the railway journey “founds” psychoanalysis (Marcus 173–88).

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Matthew Beaumont

Matthew Beaumont is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University College London. He is the author of Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870–1900 (2005) and the editor of three essay collections, including Advntures in Realism (2007). He is currently editing Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance for Oxford University Press.