69 pages • 2 hours read
Agatha ChristieThe Mousetrap
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Construction of Identity
In The Mousetrap, Christie explores identity creation in a transient and secluded location, a snowed-in guest house. Christopher hides his real name and identity as an army deserter, but says, “I do so like knowing all about people [...] people are so madly interesting” (6). Christie shares his enthusiasm in how her characters present themselves to each other. Christopher’s way of creating an alias is largely through omission; he does not reveal that he deserted the army, but otherwise, he retains and perform his identity traits. For instance, he mentions he finds policemen attractive, which codes him as gay, and this aspect of Christopher’s identity likely contributed in some way to his desertion.
In addition to omission, another style of identity formation is to throw out false flags and half-truths. Miss Casewell uses this tactic. She says, “You didn’t know I was a writer, did you?” but almost immediately admits this is not true: “Actually I’m not” (18). Her goal is to find her brother Georgie in whatever disguise he has assumed. Miss Casewell offers half-truths, like when she gives her real first name, Katherine, but not her real last name. Trotter’s reaction to this half-truth is one thing that tips off Katherine that he is really her lost brother, Georgie.
Paravicini constructs his false identity in yet another way: by highlighting his mysterious nature and the amorphous nature of identity in general. Arriving without a reservation or references, he says, “Who am I? You do not know” (14). Mollie and Giles do not know who any of their guests are because they have been given false and/or incomplete information. Paravicini brings this fact to light with his declarations.
Finally, Molly hides her connection to Longridge Farm because of her guilt about being unable to help the children there. Her identity has been changed by her past, and this causes her to be suspicious of others. She says to Christopher, who she most identifies with, “Perhaps you can’t trust anybody. Perhaps everybody’s a stranger” (45). The strangeness of people is at the heart of The Mousetrap. Christie’s play is less about who the killer is and more about what makes people who they are and how they can obscure themselves, emphasizing the essential unknowability of people.
The Legacy of Trauma
Christie explores a variety of ways that trauma can form identity in The Mousetrap. Mollie responds to the death of one of her students and the abuse of two others with guilt, grief, and repression. She says what happened with the Corrigan children “was horrible—horrible...I try to put it out of my mind” (44). Mollie’s repression causes her to keep information from Giles, which causes tension and suspicion between them. Because she keeps secrets, she knows other people have the capacity for to do so as well. After Trotter reveals that Giles has a London newspaper, Mollie worries “that somebody you love and know well might be—a stranger” (45). Christie shows the danger of repression through Mollie. If Mollie was honest about her past, Trotter might not have been able to manipulate her.
The impact of the trauma of living on Longridge Farm differs from person to person. All the Corrigan children experienced “Kicks, blows, starvation, and a thoroughly vicious couple” (29). Katherine does not wind up becoming a revenge-seeking murderer, while Georgie does. Both Katherine and Georgie could have experienced some survivor’s guilt after the death of their brother Jimmy. However, Katherine fashions a new identity—Miss Casewell—and travels overseas. When she returns to England, it is to get Georgie to a place “where they will look after [him], and see that [he] won’t do any more harm” (63) or, in other words, a mental institution.
On the other hand, Georgie changes his identity to stalk and kill people that were involved in the Longridge Farm case. Anyone even tangentially related to the “criminal neglect and persistent ill-treatment” at Longridge Farm (25), such as a schoolteacher who did not receive a letter in time to help the children, becomes a target for Georgie’s homicidal rage. His experience of trauma caused him to become stuck in a child-like frame of mind, only able to see the world in extremes, e.g., guilty or not guilty.
Both Georgie and Christopher—army deserters—are referred to as childish. This points to a difference between Katherine and Georgie; Georgie also seems to have experienced some level of war-time trauma. Christopher, persecuted for his sexual orientation and traumatized from his experiences at war, has some level of arrested development. The combination of childhood abuse and war trauma caused Georgie to lose himself completely.
The Conventions of Detective Fiction
Usually, detective fiction centers on an investigator solving crimes (Christie’s Hercule Poirot is a famous example of this). The Mousetrap challenges the conventions of the mystery genre by making the detective the murderer. Pretending to be a detective—Sergeant Trotter—allows Georgie Corrigan to hide behind the familiar beats of a murder investigation.
Several characters show an awareness of the beats of detective fiction, adding a meta element to the play. For example, Paravicini mentions the structure of investigations, something he is probably familiar with because of his career as a thief. He says, “Ah, that old chestnut. Reconstruction of the crime” (58). “Old chestnut” is an idiom that means repetitive or tedious; Paravicini uses this phrase to express his boredom with the regular flow of detective work. However, even here, Christie subverts the expected—Trotter does not exactly have characters reconstruct the crime. Rather, Trotter has people switch roles in the reenactment, which connects with the theme of identity construction.
Another convention of the detective fiction genre that Paravicini points out is the dramatic reveal. In popular culture, this trope can be seen in the unmasking at the end of every Scooby-Doo episode. Paravicini says, “explanations should be kept to the very end. That exciting last chapter, you know” (57). However, the identity of the murderer as a Corrigan child is known for much of the play. Discovering the identity of the suspect becomes an act of unmasking; the question becomes who the killer is disguised as, rather than simply who committed the crime.
Georgie’s disguise as detective Sergeant Trotter allows for many moments of irony, including hints that he is, in fact, the murderer. For instance, Trotter says, “In a murder case, everyone is under suspicion” (38). The other characters—and perhaps the audience—do not include the investigator as part of “everyone”; the detective usually stands outside of the pool of suspects. Since The Mousetrap, there have been some other famous works of detective fiction that use Christie’s twist, such as a detective being one of the killers in James Patterson’s Kiss The Girls. However, Christie’s long-running play innovated this surprising twist. Audiences have generally kept the secret of the play, and for many years it was not published in print to maintain secrecy.
Related Titles
By Agatha Christie
