Jessica Fletcher Is My Hero(ine)
Before she was Mrs. Potts, Angela Lansbury was Mrs. Fletcher
I want to be whatever age Jessica Fletcher is supposed to be in Murder, She Wrote: old enough not to be called “honey” by waitresses ten years my junior, young enough to still be chasing murder suspects through dark alleys, and most importantly, just the right age to get away with saying, “Rubbish!”
For all you fellow whipper-snappers out there, Murder, She Wrote was a wildly popular murder mystery TV series that ran between 1984 and 1996. J.B. Fletcher, the heroine of the series, is a middle-aged widow who, in the pilot episode, sees her first mystery novel published and goes on to achieve national fame on the bestseller’s list. Her knack for coming up with fictional “impossible murders” gives her keen insight into the mind of a killer, which she uses to solve twelve seasons’ worth of perplexing homicides.
Jessica Fletcher is many things: America’s answer to Miss Marple. Your Grandma re-imagined as a homicide detective. The small-town neighbor everyone wishes they had.
She could also be seen as an embodiment of the ideal independent woman. She has a successful, personally fulfilling career, is financially self-sufficient, smart, resourceful, assertive, and by all appearances emotionally complete without a man in her life. She is absolutely secure in who she is, and she is supremely unconcerned with the opinions of others — so much so that she doesn’t see any particular need to keep telling them about it.
J.B. Fletcher seems to be the embodiment of everything that feminism says it wants for women. And yet, she somehow doesn’t quite fit the mold.
Yes, she is an unattached woman, but her single status is not one of choice, but life circumstances. The show makes repeated reference to her deceased husband, Frank, who passed away four years before the events of season one. Fletcher doesn’t seem to be in a particular rush to remarry just for the sake of doing it — throughout the show she becomes the object of several men’s romantic interest (including this creepster from season one),
but nothing ever develops from these brief relationships. An example can be seen in the pilot episode, where Fletcher catches the eye of her publisher, whose interest she returns, but protests that the relationship is moving too fast for her taste and that she is not ready to move on from her husband’s memory. Fletcher shows that while she is not desperate for a man to complete her, she is still open to the idea of romance (in this case a romance that never gets a chance to get off the ground since the episode ends revealing that he is the murderer, which turns out to be kind of a deal-breaker for good ol’ JB).
Also, she is also not sexually “liberated”. Although she is never judgmental of other people’s personal lives, Fletcher is portrayed as being something of a prude, as evidenced by her scandalized reaction when a big-shot movie producer attempts to turn her novel into a “girly movie”, or her refusal to have one of her short stories featured in a men’s magazine that, as she puts it, “caters to people’s weaknesses”. As a card-carrying member of Club Prude myself, I find all this very endearing and relatable.
She appears to harbor no particular resentment towards men: her frequent references to her deceased husband always give the viewer a glimpse of a tender, loving relationship, and a deep sense of loss on Jessica’s part. She has amicable friendships with male characters who form part of the Cabot Cove community. And she always operates from the assumption that murder is an equal-opportunity crime.
Fletcher never shies away from bucking stereotypes (both gender and age related), as when she sweetly informs her young, male assistant that they’ll get along fine if he remembers that, “. . . I’m not your old, addled aunt from East Nowhere”, but she always does so with a gentle good humor that shows that her actions are about her choices, not a knee-jerk reaction to traditional norms simply because they are traditional. She serves her female power with a smile and a piece of pie (yes, she bakes pie), instead of a middle-finger. She can be a tough cookie when she needs to be, but her life is not a perpetual protest. It is her life, pure and simple.
I love Jessica Fletcher for her intelligence, her persistence, her resilience, her confidence, her passion for justice, and her ability to stand her ground in the face of opposition. But I also love her for her caring nature, her infectious laugh, her universal empathy, her neighborliness, her principles, her moral courage, and perhaps most of all, for her portrayal of a woman who is genuinely content with who and what she is.
Feminism is at a crossroads where it must choose between becoming more inclusive of real-life Jessica Fletchers who believe that women are quite capable of choosing their own path but do not fit third-wave ideological stereotypes, or it can choose to demand conformity and ideological purity within its ranks, while presenting a public face that insists that the movement is “just about equality” (for more on “feminism of the ‘just’ ”, see this piece by my womens’ issues doppelganger, Leslie Loftis).
Regardless of which direction feminism, as a label and as a movement, chooses to take, I hope to someday be the possessor of the type of strength that J.B. Fletcher personified — the strength to choose the right, as best I can see it, and to unconcernedly say, “Rubbish!” into the face of the storm.
