Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 97

The Case of Anne Perry

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murdering and robbing a patient, her wartime colleague Dr. Moncrieff defends
this professional initiative by citing precisely the fluidity of roles that the war
required: during wartime, he testifies, “both men and women rise to heights of
gallantry, and of skill, that the calm, more ordered days of peace would never
inspire” (Sins o f the Wolf 365). O f course, having returned to the “more ordered
days of peace,” Hester continues to exceed the categories of identity assigned to
her, and, as Moncrieff implies, the war inspired her to violate codes of gender as
well as those of vocational identity. Already less conventionally feminine than her
family—and perhaps she—would like, Hester’s gendered transgressions are induced
nonetheless largely because of her experiences in the Crimea. The narrator of A
Dangerous Mourning hints at such a transformation, explaining that the “horror”
of the war “had brought out the strength in her, as it had in so many other women”
(30). And in a subsequent novel, Perry is more explicit about how the war has
temporarily made gender relations more fluid, an experience which renders Hester
permanently transgressive. Hester, we are told, “had dared...into... forbidden
masculine fields, seen real violence, warfare and chivalry, the honest friendship
where there was no barrier between men and women, where speech was not forever
dictated by social ritual rather than true thoughts and feelings, where people worked
side by side for a desperate common cause and only courage and skill mattered”
(Defend and Betray 52). Having trave