The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep is a product of its time. Some of the social beliefs it reflects are today widely deplored. These attitudes and practices, though used as descriptors and not necessarily meant as polemics, betray the author’s biases.

Philip Marlow is a man of his age. It’s the mid-1930s, when the world struggled under the economic Great Depression. Marlowe, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, tough-guy detective, possesses a macho sensibility coupled with a disdain for lifestyles of which he disapproves. Same-sex relationships in the late 1930s were frowned on or outlawed in nearly every jurisdiction in America. During this time, most Americans believed that being gay was immoral and that gay men were inherently less masculine and more flamboyantly feminine. Moreover, a common attitude among many Americans was that minorities were second-class citizens.

One of the novel’s antagonists is a gay blackmailer named Geiger who rents pornographic books. Not only is his sexual orientation used to explain why he is duplicitous, but Marlowe’s description of Geiger’s bedroom also contains deeply anti-gay and anti-Asian commentary based on stereotypes that tended to conflate homosexuality and Asian American men with effeminacy, thus packing a dose of sexism into the mix: Marlowe considers Geiger’s decor “womanish” and notes a “flounced” bedspread, perfume, and a triple mirror (27).

Prejudice against Jewish people is another feature of the novel. Marlowe describes a jewelry-store proprietor as “a tall handsome white-haired Jew in lean dark clothes, with about nine carats of diamond on his right hand” (15). Marlowe also notes that the man is “black-eyed”—a negative trait that echoes the black eyes of the Sternwoods, the depraved family around whom the mystery swirls. Combined, these descriptions paint the jeweler as wealthy, avaricious, and predatory, a harmful stereotype about Jewish people. Marlowe’s disparaging description reflects beliefs widely held in 1930s America, beliefs that contributed to the Holocaust and the continued legacy of antisemitism in the modern day.

Chandler shared many of the attitudes of the novel’s protagonist. Although those attitudes were common, though not universal, among Americans at the time, critics have pointed out that Chandler “was amazingly racist and homophobic, and was pretty nasty toward women, too,” and that contemporaries such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway, though they reflected some of the classic biases of the age, weren’t nearly as vividly negative (Butki, Scott. “Interview With Patrick Anderson, Author of The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction, Part Two.” Blogcritics, 2 August 2007). While the biases of The Big Sleep do reflect Chandler’s time partly, the outsized influence of biases and stereotypes on the novel’s key plot moments and characterization is largely a result of Chandler’s own biases.