O Shaughnessy In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

Great Essays
A classic detective story from the 1920s, The Maltese Falcon continues to prevail today

as a famous and true mystery novel. The characters within the book seem authentic, each with

quirks and flaws nicking their corners, producing realistic people for the readers to enjoy.

Written by Dashiell Hammett, this story contains an element of credibility to the way the

detectives act, as the author himself worked as a detective during the 1910s. Nevertheless, given

the era in which it was written, limitations appear that restrict the characters of the novel into

categorizations, such as the categorization of women through Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Hammett

portrays Brigid O’Shaughnessy under the stereotype of a femme fatale, creating the idea that,
…show more content…
The archetype of the femme fatale (femme fatale in

French, meaning “fatal woman”) has been present in literature as far back as the Middle Ages,

with characters such as “fair, alluding maids [that] misled the hero when he was lost or tempted

him to sexual intercourse while he slept” (Marling, para. 41). Little differences exist between the

femme fatale from the beginning of the 20th century and its predecessors, as it still represented

women who not employed seduction to distract or fool men, and they do so with the purpose of

self-gain. With the suffragist movement and the changing roles of women in the early 1900s

came a rise in the use of femme fatale characters, especially by the male writers of detective

novels in the 1920s; some scholars believe that the increasing inclusion of a female character

detrimental to the idea of the nuclear family was a way to show the resentment directed at the

change in women’s behavior (“Overview: The Maltese Falcon”, para. 34). O’Shaughnessy is

significantly an attack to the conventional female roles because as a femme fatale, “she

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