Agatha Christie’s childhood was extremely happy and peaceful for the most part, but she did have a childhood dream that would haunt her into adulthood. In its early stages, the dream was of an eighteenth century soldier, with blue eyes, a three cornered hat, and a queue, carrying a musket, the kind of soldier a Victorian child might have seen illustrated in a book by Hans Christian Anderson. Agatha says she was not afraid of the gun or of it being shot. But what frightened her was the fact that the gunman was able to enter any ordinary occasion: tea, picnic, or a walk. He was able to transform into anyone with only his blue eyes identifying him. He turned into her mother, her sister, her brother, a friend, etc.
At the heart of this nightmare is the idea that people are not what they seem, that the most consistent and beloved person can turn suddenly into a negative and threatening force in a person’s life. In theory she could have had this dream because she was unusually aware from her early childhood that there was a split between her body and her observing consciousness and knew that she herself was not what she seemed. In the Burden written by Agatha as Westmacott, she paints a picture of a little girl who was so withdrawn that seemed actually a little slow, yet who was so in love with her parents that she violently hated her little sister who she believed stole love from her parents. It is unclear as to whether or not she felt like that toward her siblings, but seeing how much she loved her mother, it is possible that she could have been driven to a point of extreme jealousy. But what is certain is that when her husband, Archie Christie suddenly came home to tell her that he was in love with someone else, Agatha who was 36 at the time became overwhelmed with anger and grief, and had a very childlike panic attack sort of response to the whole matter. Archie, the real life lover, friend, and husband had become the Gunman of her fantasy. That is actually something that I think is the same between she and I in our chemical make-up. There are certain things that I can be very level headed and mature about, and other things like dealing with betrayal or loss where I deal with it and go through the emotional journey of lets say an eight year old. This sounds a lot like how Agatha dealt with big changes in her life.
But some might say that the Gunman nightmare, although it haunted her, gave her the greatest writing tool of her life. A great strength in Agatha’s books is that any person in the story can be the killer: the child, the sweet young miss, the charming major, the doctor, the maid, etc.
“The Gunman dream indicates that this view of life was not an intellectual conceit or a literary game for Christie, but an elemental structuring fact of her creative unconscious.”
Very insightful analysis!
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