The Moving Finger
54 pages • 1-hour read
Agatha ChristieThe Moving Finger
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, death by suicide, graphic violence, gender discrimination, and emotional abuse.
The Role of Secrecy in Small-Town Life
In The Moving Finger, secrecy and an inauthentic social facade are depicted as normal facts of life amongst the inhabitants of Lymstock. The tiny town is a strict, old-fashioned place whose inhabitants are quick to pass on gossip and judgmental assumptions about each other. This claustrophobic, narrow-minded social environment prompts the villagers to do their best to maintain an outward appearance of respectability while hiding various secrets, revealing the role of secrecy in small-town life.
Nearly all of the characters have something to hide. Megan Hunter, the 20-year-old daughter of Mrs. Symmington, appears outwardly apathetic, but inside actually burns with rage against her family and the villagers. She tells Jerry in a rare outburst, “Hateful pigs! I hate everyone here in Lymstock. They all think I’m stupid and ugly. I’ll show them” (56). The contrast between Megan’s outer attitude and inner feelings show how accustomed she is to hiding her real opinions. Similarly, Aimee Griffith appears to be happy with her busy life and brags about her many contributions to the community. She tells Jerry, “‘I’m always busy, always happy! […] My time’s taken up, what with my Guides, and the Institute and various committees’” (25, emphasis added). However, the end of the story reveals that she is not as happy as she seems: She has spent years pining for Mr. Symmington, who is uninterested in her.
Jerry and Joanna, newcomers to the village, maintain their own facades and secrets. Their friendly politeness to the villagers masks their disdain for most of them, as well as the fact that they privately suspect many people of being the letter writer. For instance, they visit Mr. Pye for tea and politely listen to his rants about the villagers, but later Joanna shares that she thinks Mr. Pye is actually “rather a frightening little man” (150). Closer to home, Joanna and Jerry are kind to Partridge, their unpleasant maid. Privately, however, they insult her and wonder if she could be the writer.
The most significant instance of secrecy is found in the revelation of Mr. Symmington’s true identity as both the poison pen letter writer and the murderer of his wife and Agnes. Mr. Symmington spends many years in the village projecting a social façade as a respectable husband and father, and makes a show of grieving for his wife, demanding the letter writer be brought to justice. His façade is so convincing that no one suspects him of the slightest wrongdoing until Miss Marple exposes him: The reality is that Mr. Symmington wanted to get rid of his wife and marry Elsie, so he staged his wife’s death by suicide and sent the poison-pen letters as a misdirection.
Mr. Symmington’s double life reinforces the novel’s interest in secrecy as an important but sometimes dangerous component of small-town life. While many of the secrets and private feelings the villagers have are relatively harmless, Mr. Symmington’s crimes suggests that, sometimes, seemingly innocuous people have something serious to hide.
The Consequences of Gossip and Biased Judgment
In The Moving Finger, Lymstock is a place that appears friendly at first glance, but is actually deeply steeped in gossip and an ever-churning rumor mill. While some of the gossip is relatively inconsequential, other rumors cause serious harm to others and even threaten to derail the murder investigation, revealing the consequences of gossip and biased judgement.
The villagers are frequently shown engaging in petty rumor-mongering against one another, creating an atmosphere of callousness and an eagerness for any scrap of scandal. After Mrs. Symmington’s apparent death by suicide, many in Lymstock use her death inquest as mere fodder for their gossip, assuming that even though their letters were false, her anonymous letter must have been true: “If an innocent woman gets some foul anonymous letter, she laughs and chucks it away” (80, emphasis added). Aimee’s harsh and biased judgment here turns out to be entirely inaccurate, suggesting that believing and repeating such gossip can actually obscure the truth, and in this case, the real culprit behind the letters and murders.
The villagers and police also respond to the poison pen letters in ways that reveal their biased judgments about women. They are quick to assume that the letter writer must be a woman; even the investigators insist that it must be an older, unmarried woman. When Aimee is arrested, the villagers gleefully turn on her as she seems to confirm their prejudices. Colonel Appleton insists that “desiccated old maids are always the ones who go in for it” (213). The villagers also fail to suspect that Mr. Symmington might be the one with something to hide because they are instead quick to assume that Elsie Holland—an attractive, unmarried young woman—must be pursuing him in the hopes of contracting a socially advantageous marriage. Their biased judgments about women, both young and old, therefore lead both the villagers and the investigation astray.
Only Miss Marple’s insight into human nature can overcome the swirling rumors and biased investigation into the case. She perceptively points out that the murderer has manipulated the villagers by exploiting their bad habit of gossiping. The conclusion of Miss Marple’s investigation highlights how prejudice and rumor are not merely silly or impolite, but actually harmful, as the locals of Lymstock realize that their assumptions nearly led to Mr. Symmington getting away with his crimes. Miss Marple’s ability to see through the “smokescreen” of gossip and scandal allows her to catch the “‘clever and unscrupulous’” Mr. Symmington when no one else could (231).
The Corrosive Nature of Social Paranoia
In Lymstock, all the villagers know each other. Rather than creating a tight-knit community, however, the village’s tiny population tend to live in fear of each other’s judgment, and harbor grudges against each other. By showing how the poison pen letters easily rile the town and complicate people’s jobs and relationships, the novel explores the corrosive nature of social paranoia.
While Jerry and Joanna are Londoners who initially marvel at Lymstock’s old-fashioned customs, they quickly start to notice that the village’s friendliness and apparent cohesion are very much surface-level. Jerry and Joanna are soon struck by how the villagers seem easily mistrustful of one another and often jump to the worst conclusions. When Mrs. Symmington dies, no one appears to mourn her sincerely or think her death a tragedy. Instead, many villagers openly voice their dislike of her, with Mrs. Calthrop deriding Mrs. Symmington as having been “selfish” and “stupid” (101), even though there is no evidence that Mrs. Symmington ever did anything specific to incur Mrs. Calthrop’s dislike. Similarly, Mr. Pye mocks his fellow villagers as “backward” and “vandals,” while responding to Agnes’s murder with an open lack of empathy and a taste for the lurid: “You disapprove, you deplore, but there is the thrill. I insist, there is the thrill!” (157). Such habitual callousness in the villagers’ conduct reveals that there are deep fractures in the town’s social fabric.
The poison pen letters also expose the extent of social paranoia in the town, with mistrust swiftly destroying relationships even upon the most tenuous of evidence. Beatrice the maid quits her job in an effort to preserve her reputation after a letter accuses her of having an affair with Jerry. Even worse, Beatrice’s boyfriend also receives letters making false accusations about Beatrice, and ends their relationship: “[D]rove young George mad with rage, it did, and he came round and told Beatrice he wasn’t going to put up with that sort of thing from her, and he wasn’t going to have her go behind his back with other chaps” (48). When Aimee is arrested and accused of writing all the letters, the village immediately turns on her, ostracizing her with such thoroughness and intensity that she ends the novel by leaving town completely to go on a cruise, desperate to escape the “terrible ordeal” (232) to which the villagers have subjected her.
The novel thus suggests that a healthy community is defined not by its size or by its apparent quaintness and charm, but by the trust and loyalty that inhabitants should have for one another. At the novel’s end, it is implied that at least some of the villagers have learned their lesson, with Jerry and Megan now happy to make a permanent home in the village Megan once loathed for its pettiness and cruelty.
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