ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines that woman are familiar enough: keeper of the faith, domestic enabler, the servant who gives her master freedom. During the 1930s Gardner evolved the system of secretarial support which matched his practice as a writer, and created in Della Street a paradigmatic figure whose identity was entirely bound up in his enterprise. Perry Mason and Della kiss and cuddle in several of the early stories, but more important even than such scenes are ones where Mason's behaviour is implicitly or explicitly motivated by sexual possessiveness or jealousy of Della, scenes which are absent from the later stories. Clearly Della Street herself must occupy the "middle ground" from which she can observe Mason's exciting deviance, and the middle ground is also and traditionally a maternal ground. The thread that links the two passages is Della's determination to work for a living, and it is this which underlies her refusal to marry Mason.
