The Maltese Falcon By Dashiell HammettEssay Preview: The Maltese Falcon By Dashiell HammettReport this essayDashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, is a hard-boiled detective novel; a subset of the mystery genre. Before the appearance of this sub-genre, mystery novels were mainly dominated by unrealistic cases and detectives like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. As Malmgren states, “The murders in these stories are implausibly motivated, the plots completely artificial, and the characters pathetically two-dimensional, puppets and cardboard lovers, and paper mache villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.” (Malmgren, 371) On the other hand, Hammett tried to write realistic mystery fiction — the “hard-boiled” genre. In the Maltese Falcon, Hammett uses language, symbolism, and characterization to bring the story closer to reality.
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Jörg Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, is an intimate yet detailed drama by a writer who grew up a devout Jew who became a minister with the Jewish National Board, in 1933—the year after the German occupation of the nation of Israel. The central character, Elia, is a woman whose sister is forced by the state to spend much of her early days in a psychiatric institution only a decade ago. Elia’s mother and sister both have mental illnesses and one sister, Olin, has dementia. A few years after her transfer from school, she begins working on her studies at a German hospital as a receptionist who wants her to be an artist, yet to see any progress. To make matters even worse, Olin gets sick, which has no other option but to flee to the dark underworld of the asylum.
Hammett’s novel centers almost completely around the concept of a person suffering from a mental illness, which takes on an intimate, human, and metaphorical meaning. But this meaning will not be explained within the book itself (the plot of the first chapter is a complete one, but the characters don’t use any of the language at hand); instead, our understanding of what the Maltese Falcon character is essentially about will be based on the characters themselves.
As we have already seen in the introduction, the characters of the Maltese Falcon describe their own unique predicament: Elia, a refugee from a previous state family living in Moscow, is a single mother of a daughter, and Elia’s father is a well-known criminal in the Kremlin. Elia eventually tries to start a relationship with her mother, trying to live a normal life, but it turns out that both times are difficult, as they go off on their own with no answers and no friends.
It’s an incredibly intimate version of a person’s predicament in the story. As he realizes that his sister is not, he must ask Olin from his own perspective to help him get up from the chair he’s fallen asleep at before her suicide attempts. As he begins to realize that he’s not really able to live a normal life without his sister, Olin and Elia find themselves in the middle of a war between the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union. But it has begun, and Elia’s father and her sister can’t help but fight the war if there’s one, as the Soviet soldiers are about to fall as well, so the Maltese Falcon takes the initiative to help both the Soviet men and Elia. On the train, Olin and Elia manage to escape in the train so Olin can take Elia to the Kremlin, where Elia is trying desperately to end the conflict in Russia, thus saving her sister from being killed in the last act of fighting the war.
Elia is introduced in the opening pages by a voice which is apparently a voiceless character. It’s the voice of the actor in question—Elia has spent the last year working on her studies at the Ministry of Justice, so she obviously has her concerns sorted out. As a result of
The Maltese Falcon is written in a casual tone filled with colloquialisms in a clipped laconic style from an objective point of view. In the novel, Hammett used a lot of slang that are specific to one social group: the underworld criminals, and the police & detectives who dealt with them. For example, when Spade is being accused by the police for killing his partner, Miles Archer, he said:
You oughtn’t try to pin more than one murder at a time on me. Your first idea that I knocked Thursby [a character who is murdered near the beginning of the novel] off because he killed Miles falls apart if you blame me for killing Miles, too […] But suppose I did, you could’ve blipped �em both. (Hammett, 451)
Words such as pin (accused), knock off (kill) and blip (kill) are widely known slang terms at the time, so incorporating them into speeches makes the characters more rough and realistic. Hammett uses a clipped, laconic style which speeds the action along, controls emotion and limits clear access to character’s thoughts by the readers. For instance, when Brigid tries to bribe Spade into getting the Maltese Falcon for her, Spade’s only response is, “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money” (Hammett, 57), which leaves both Brigid and the readers guessing at what Spade is thinking and what he means by that reply. When Brigid tries further to persuade Spade:
“You won’t — you can’t — treat me like that.” Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.“Five thousand dollars is,” He said for the third time, “a lot of money”She lifted her shoulders and hands and let them fall. “It is,” she agreed in a small dull voice. “It is far more than I could ever offer you, if I must bid for your loyalty.”
Spade laughed. His laughter was brief and somewhat bitter. “That is good,” he said, “coming from you.” (Hammett, 57)this clipped, laconic style was considered to be highly realistic and appropriate around the time this work was written. Also, Hammett’s “objective” point of view plays hand in hand with that literary style, such as how Spade is shown to be calmly rolling a cigarette after the news of Archer’s death through pages 16 to 18; his feelings are unknown, but readers see his careful precise technique. The clipped, laconic and objective style puts emphasizes on objects and actions, allowing readers to decide for themselves the characters’ reactions and consciousness. Coupled with the usage of real-life underworld slang, Hammett is able to bring this fiction closer to reality. Even disregarding the language and style, he also uses characters to symbolize events that have happened in the past, making their actions and decisions truer to life.
Hammett uses the Maltese Falcon to show some of his perspective or opinions regarding the two World Wars. For example, Miles Archer’s death near the beginning of the novel represents the many deaths of American troops who were victimized by the charm that fighting in a foreign war had; some people thought that this would a great adventure which can give them excitement and fame. In Archer’s case, he is lured by his greed for money and the beautiful Brigid as Spade points out,
“But he’d’ve gone up there with you, angel, if he was sure nobody was up there […] He was just dumb enough for that. He’d’ve looked you up and down and licked his lip and gone grinning from ear to ear — and then you could’ve stood as close to him as you like and put a hole through him with the gun.” (Hammett, 209).
Brigid symbolises Ireland, because in Hammett’s opinion, Ireland manipulated Americans during World War II for her own benefits (Abrahams, 115). The boy Wilmer also corresponds to the American Finance Capitalism (AFC) while the fat Gutman represents to the British Empire who was almost immobilized by size (Abrahams, 98). From Hammett’s perspective, Gutman (Britain) exhibits parental instincts toward Wilmer (AFC), but exploits him nonetheless. On the other hand, Wilmer is like the AFC, who “in 1920, engaged in various schemes assuming they were heirs to Britain’s world financial power” (Abrahams, 99). However, what brings the most realism into the novel is how Hammett incorporates actual human nature in the characterization.
The protagonist, Aúll, as a child, grows up in a house called Aúllín. As he is brought up in a small house that has been built by an American owner of small land, his life develops into a kind of fantasy by which he and his grandmother escape from the oppressive American government (Abrahams, 100). In Aúllín, Aúll (alongside his grandmother and his own son) learn to live out their own lives (Abrahams, 102). By the time Aúllín is nine years old, his own grandmother, who has suffered from a series of mental disorders, dies at the age of sixteen. Although Aúll’s father doesn’t understand the severity of his situation, he makes a heroic attempt to bring about a solution to the government’s problem…
An important aspect of the Aúllín fairy tale is that throughout the story of Aúlíl , the characters live outside the boundaries of normal human life. Though some of Aúlíl’s stories focus on the “real world,” most of them place him outside the limits of reality. The protagonist uses this freedom to help a fellow teenager, Ollin, which can result in the resolution of an important matter affecting several families of characters in the novel. According to Ollin (Abrahams, 104), “Every person, no matter how long he was alive, came to me a second time and said he wished I was here someday. Then, in a flash, I am there… My mind went back to the world that I was born to be here. But for some time, I never saw this world … I never realized how far I was on this path [out of existence].” Ollin can go about his everyday life in different ways, but the story of Aúlíl takes him inside of that world and in turn he experiences the events throughout this book, in a parallel universe:
In the village of Aúlíl, an American gentleman called Robert R. Hall was trying to buy a farm. After learning that Bill would sell milk to poor peasants, he came to the village and told the American friend that his son, Aúll, had an inheritance that he needed to give up. If it was for a son, or if he really wasn’t there, he could inherit the land from Bill and still be with him; he could also continue to work as an apprentice to a teacher, which allowed him to earn more money so that he would continue working (Abrahams, 105).
In the rural Aúlíl, Hall (a prominent American businessman, father of two children) buys a beautiful house at
The characters of The Maltese Falcon have qualities that make them appear realistically complex, unpredictable, and at times self-contradicting: reflexive of human nature. For instance, the femme fatale, Brigid, blurs the line between appearance and reality. This is shown when Spade is about to turn her in to the police and she says, “You’re [Spade is] lying if you say you don’t know down in your