Margery Allingham’s Donna Beatrice
The Flaky New Age Lady As Selfish Irritant
I finished ‘Death of a Ghost’ by Margery Allingham yesterday. As ever with reading these older books, I am presented with older stereotypes and typecasts which feel new and refreshing because they differ from what I normally read.
Then I get hung up on this old character type and muddle it with my life. Thus, my fascination with the minor side-character in this book of Donna Beatrice.
The Stereotype
‘Death of a Ghost’ centers on a found family that is hanging around the widow of a famous artist. Donna Beatrice is the woman who had acted as the artist’s model and inspiration for decades and is now living off that legacy.
Donna Beatrice goes on about auras and tries to give advice about it. She demands to be center stage in every event and to call the artist who is paying for her comfort ‘Master’ while trying to make everyone behave the way she wants.
She is shockingly empty-headed.
And after the second murder, she takes to her bed and makes the 70-year-old widow who is actually holding the artist’s legacy together to wait on her. Allingham writes “…finding herself temporarily eclipsed by other more important matters, had promptly taken to her bed on the ancient principle that if one cannot command attention by one’s admirable qualities at least one can be a nuisance.”
The Sympathy Despite Evidence Against It
I live in Northern California and my mother’s business is a reiki-like service for the worried well. Needless to say, I have met many of the people who will use a dowsing rod to pick a meal from a menu (an actual act of one of my mother’s oldest friends.)
This stereotype is unfair to them. Many of these folks with unconventional spiritual beliefs are in fact generous and think they are being helpful. I think they have massive blind spots that make their helpfulness less useful than it might be, but we all have blind spots. That doesn’t make us ‘a nuisance,’ nor does it make us useless in areas where the blind spot doesn’t apply.
Many of these folks are hard-nosed businesspeople who are getting things done at the same time that they are selling healing crystals, and they most certainly are not motivated solely by the need to be the center of attention.
On the other hand, when you think you are helping by ‘moving the energy’ in a way that can never have a bad outcome, you can act in a way that is incredibly self-centered. My mom has jumped to curing someone who is literally just standing near her without asking permission or even explaining what she was doing. It doesn’t cross her mind that other people might not appreciate this.
Is this self-centeredness inherent in fringe spiritual and medical beliefs? No. Not really…except some of the notions, like ‘The Secret.’ That is literally solipsism at its extreme.
And maybe some of these ideas are more appealing to a certain mindset. A person is already prone to imposing patterns relating to that person in specific on the world. That might make some of these tendencies in New Age thought attractive to them.
And I have found those tendencies that go with these beliefs irritatingly self-centered. And yet joyously giving.
Two Opposing Typecasts
I rarely see a Donna Beatrice type in a book written after 1970, and when this stereotype is brought out, it is opposed to the nice, all-giving scientist/doctor who represents new thoughts. Even this line is rare though.
Instead, there is an opposing stereotype: the kitchen witch, whose unconventional beliefs are signs of wisdom. She is the source of strength and heart of the story. She stands against the mean, narrow-minded conventional thinker, and the story is told from the kitchen witch’s point of view or in sympathy with it.
Modern novels tend to hew closely to this stereotype with little variation. It’s a trope that we are now blind to from its ubiquity. There’s an inclination to uphold the unconventional thinker and kind of glide over the more flamboyant examples that can come out of it. Modern unconventional thinkers aren’t blathering about auras and crystals to unwilling audiences. They are gently teaching about ‘herbs, tm,’ and everyone claps for them in the end.
It annoys me at a certain level. There are a few books that explore these beliefs, the people who hold them, and the milieu they swim in, and I can’t expect your average murder mystery or historical fiction novel to depict these things with the same nuance that those books take.
But you don’t have to caricature people.
Look, Donna Beatrice is explicitly described as taking up the aura beliefs late in her life, when her place as model and inspiration was no longer useful. She isn’t Stupid Aura-believer, tm- she’s a retired model who is struggling to find a purpose but is too dumb and sheltered to find a good one. Her flaw is self-centeredness and dimness, not a belief in auras. But the aura thing is the short-hand way of illustrating it in the book.
And I don’t have a problem with this, exactly. It’s simplified characters, but so is the pure Herbalist, tm, and, honestly, there is often a tendency to make the Herbalist, tm, a girl out of time and the dreaded Mary Sue or Gary Stu. In the ‘Death of a Ghost,’ the job of all-knowing Gary Stu is Albert Campion, and he’s a Sherlock Holmes type.
I guess I enjoy seeing a different, older stereotype as a refresher, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is a bit flat.