Not a Man, But a Miracle

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GAUDY NIGHT

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AGKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to Jocelyn Van Tuyl, for her multifarious guidances and supports as sponsor of this project. Thanks to Amy Reid and Andrea Dimino for their negotiations on behalf of the Literatu re department, and to these latter along with Madi Sharko, Alba Jaramillo, and Scott Ross, for reading my writing and providing smart feedback. Thanks have al ways belonged to Justin Boner, Alexis Cartland, Tierney Elison, Ben Brown, Lisa Avron, Melissa Jacobowitz, Sam Samson and Alec Niedenthal, for love and little encouragements; my thanks always will belong to them A final word of gratit ude to the B-dorm denizens who always nodded their heads when I nodded mine, to the early morning cleaning crew in Ham center, who stoope d and swept around my snoozing work ethic but joked their teeth, absolving me, to Lou Barlow and to Nico for bouncing my yearlong mood around my B-dorm, to Marilynne Robinson, for believing in me, and TO MY MOM AND DAD.

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NOT A MAN, BUT A MIRACLE: ESCAPE[S] FROM HETERONORMATIVITY IN DOROT HY L. SAYERSS GAUDY NIGHT Kateland Harte New College of Florida, 2009 ABSTRACT This thesis examines Dorothy Sayerss 1936 novel Gaudy Night her 1938 essay Are Women Human?, Virginia Woolfs 1928 extended essay A Room of Ones Own, and other feminist works. It cons titutes a close reading of novelist Harriet Vanes psychological and artistic struggle with the competing claims of work and love in the social context of interwar England. As a woman, Harriet struggles against limiting sex roles derived fr om still-present patriarchal structures in the social world following the reforms of first-wave feminism. The thesis demonstrates that Harriets choice of a deliberately separatist, intellectual life at an all-female college ultimately suppresse s her emotional appetites to the point of psychic disturbance. The novels so lution comes in the demonstration by Harriets lover, Lord Peter Wimsey, that her desires are not mu tually exclusive. Wimsey communicates this to Harriet by co llaborating with he r on several writing projects, suggesting that she use the lingui stic playing-field to work through the perceived conflicts in her social world. Th ese collaborations allow Harriet to lead a heterosexual married life without s acrificing her creative work. Sayers fictionalizes an ideal example of a fema le writer overcoming heteronormativity in an unlikely social context. Jocelyn Van Tuyl Literature

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NOT A MAN, BUT A MIRACLE: ESCAPE[S] FROM HETERONORMATIVITY IN DOROT HY L. SAYERSS GAUDY NIGHT Table of Contents Introduction 1 An Essay on Gaudy Night Love or Work? 6 A Psychological Narrative 8 London and Oxford 10 Binary Women 11 Are Women Human? 15 Wittigs Social Contract and Woolfs Room 16 Harriets Heterosexual History 17 Feminist Separatism as a Personal Politics 20 Peter Wimsey: Patriarch? 24 The Female Artists Plight 26 The Ideal of Scholarly Separatism 28 Cloistered Peace? 29 Writers Block 32 A Mysterious Threat At Shrewsbury 34 Shrewsburys Self-Hatred 37 Defecting From Female-Identification 39 Peters Intervention 41 Feminism As Humanism 42 Not a Man, But a Miracle 44 The Sonnets Sestet 46 Solving Shrewsbury 49 Writing Wilfred 50 Marriage and Synthesis 52 Conclusion 54

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Introductio n Fiction is very often microcosmic; it politicizes the personal. In the generous amounts of descriptive detail provided by Sayers in Gaudy Night it is difficult to forget that Harriet Vanes ps ychological narrative is situated firmly in the specificity of its settingthe ficti onal-but-familiar Oxford social world of Sayerss 1930s. In this thesis, I will cl aim that Harriets self-divided psychic problem is, moreover, drawn from the pa rticularity of gender-role structures present in her historical momentan age that encompassed, on the one hand, the radical, restructuring influence of the first-wave feminist movement, and, on the other, the persistent force of sex-role traditions, long held by patriarchs, and roused to an extraordinary desire fo r self-assertion by the new legitimacy claimed for woman workers and woman writers (Woolf, 34). Taken together, these qualities caused Sayers s contemporary, Virginia Woolf, to characterize the era as the most stridently sex-conscious in all of history (34). We will see that in Gaudy Night Harriet Vane constructs an ultimately uninhabitable binary, where two of her leading desiresfor artistic autonomy and for heterosexual engagementare rendered opposites in the social order. Harriets self-imposed psychic situation wi ll give rise, in Gaudy Night to a set of split prerogatives; her consequent ambivalence of purpose will interrupt the novels surface detective and romance narratives and paralyze Ha rriets conscious engagements, including her commitment to feminist separatism and female-identified solidarity. It is only by cooperating with the extr aordinarily progressive Lo rd Peter Wimsey in a 1

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laborious rhetorical c ontestation of the conventions of heteronorm ative romancereconstituting, by means of several transformative written collaborations and exchanges the po wer dynamics of their heterosexual relationshipthat Harriets desire to write is accommodated within this particular couple. No novel is produced in a vacuum, but Gaudy Night especially reveals the social conditions under which it was produ ced. Dorothy Sayers addresses the Authors Note which precedes Gaudy Night easily the most socially critical fiction in her popular and entertainment-driven Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery series, to voicing a reminder to her faithfu l readers about ficti ons relationship to the real. It would be idle, she writes, to deny that the City and University of Oxford (in aeternum floreant) do actually ex ist, and contain a number of colleges and other buildings, some of which are mentioned by name in this book ( Gaudy iii). The details she ascribes to Shre wsbury Womens College, and especially to the particular dons, students and scouts that she populates the place with, are entirely imaginary, she insists (iii). Shrewsbury College is nevertheless cl early drawn from the author's actual experience as a student at Somerville College, an early women's college at Oxford that Sayers attended on a scholarship in 1912. There she studied modern languages and medieval liter ature and finished with first-class honors in 1916, and in 1920, when Oxford changed its rules about awarding diplomas to women, Sayers was among the first to receive an MA degree from the University. The first page of Gaudy Night describes Shrewsbury's "quadrangle, built by a modern 2

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architect in a style neither old nor new, but stretching out reconciling hands to past and present" and beyond it,"a jumble of ancient gables and the tower of New College, with jackdaws wheeling ag ainst a windy sky" (1). The very recent introduction of fe male scholars like Sayers, in reality, or her protagonist Harriet Vane, in fictio n, into the ancient, prestigious and emphatically male setting of Oxford mu st have made observers, in the early decades of the twentieth century, incredulous ; a visible tension is attested in this description. The grandeur of Oxford must have seemed remote from the domestic life that women had, if not grown used to, at least learned to accept as their proper environment, their natural workplace, and the symbol a nd limit of their roles in and contributions to society (Anderson a nd Zinsser). When these same women arrived for good in the neighborhood of th e battlements and old stones at Oxford, fitting their new buildings in among thes e ancient ones (Sayers "apologize[s]" in her Author's Note to Balliol College fo r her "monstrous impertinence in having erected Shrewsbury College upon its spacious and sacred cricket ground"), there must have been culture shock on both sides. This cramped and civil tension is th e very real cultural backdrop against which Gaudy Night is set. Finding space for their physical campuses on the grounds at Oxford was only the first of would-be female college members' difficulties fitting in. The problems su rrounding the incorporation of female students and dons into the Oxford co mmunity are still alive in the 1935 Shrewsbury of Gaudy Night years after Sayerss introduction to the university. The challenge for female academics was not a simple matter of objections and 3

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obstructions posed by any i ndividual m en who resented women's presence there; as Miss Hillyard, a Shrewsbury don, remarks with some irony in Gaudy Night : "all the men have been amazingly kind and sympathetic about the Women's Colleges [,] they are quite pleased to see us playing with our little toys" (55). In order to be truly apprehended, th e difficulties that face the Shrewsbury womenand perhaps real female collegians, like Sayers, in that sex-conscious eramust be traced through a long and embe dded history of patriarchal culture in England; as soon as one begi ns to review the facts of this history, the source of the struggle becomes apparent. In A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf describes the old Oxford fortresses of BalliolLord Peter Wimsey's alma materand Kings: "One thought of all the books that were assembled down there, she writes, of the pictures of old prelates and worthies hanging in the paneled rooms [] of the tablets and memorials and inscriptions [] of the urbanity, the gentility, the di gnity" (24). "Certainly," sh e continues, "our mothers had not provided us with anything comparable to all of this" (24). In her Authors Note, however, Saye rs advances an incisive argument about the powerand also the limita tionsof fiction for describing and transforming social problems. Partly in self-defense for a novel which might have offended certain of her colleagues in the innocent and well ordered community at Somerville, who might not appreciate the suggestion, even in fiction, that distressing events could occur in thei r own hard-wrought home, Sayers offers the following reminder: however rea listic the background the novelists only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, wher e they do but jest, poison in jest: no 4

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offense in the world ( G audy iv). Fiction is a playful, open spacea place for possibilities, for idealizations, for project ions, for fantasies. Sayers was by no means as successful in love as he r heroine, Harriet Vanewhose other autobiographical attributes (Oxford graduate, detectiv e novelist)are difficult to ignore. Sayerss far more redemptive 1936 vision in Gaudy Night is distinct from the pragmatic advice offered in the 1 938 essays anthologized in the volume Are Women Human? and discussed at length in this chapter Harriet Vanes successful balancing of livelihood and l oveaided, of course, by an impossibly munificent modern manis a unique outco me for women of her own ilk in the novel Gaudy Night Sayerss feminist engagements in this work are much more than an evaluation or assessment of the status of women in Sayerss time; instead. she outlines, and idealizes, the possibility of the activation of a timeless romantic narrative in an increasingly complex m odern world. By focusing on Harriets psychological and artistic development Gaudy Night becomes a kind of updated fantasy of the perfect Solution to severa l interrelated problems particular to the modern, Sayersesque woman. In Gaudy Night truth-seeking detective fiction transcends its own generic limits to become a realization of tr ue love, just as Sayers imagines it. 5

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Love or Work? In her 1938 essay A re Wom en Human?, in which she discusses contemporary feminism and the continuing gender struggles of her own time and place, Dorothy Leigh Sayers addresses an ancient and almost-hypothetical question: What, men have distractedly asked from the beginning of time, what on earth do women want? (44). Sayers answers the question, which famously stumped Sigmund Freud, by suggesting that most women want the same thing that most other human beings want: i nteresting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emo tional outlet (44). This formula seems straightforward enough, but in her 1936 novel Gaudy Night, Sayers had already demonstrated the difficulty, for her fe male protagonist Harriet Vane, of accommodating each of these desires in the contemporary social environment. Gaudy Nights social world, set up by Sayers as a locus of recent first-wave feminist reforms and underlying patriarc hal traditions, still supports a system of sex-role divisions which Harriet reads as compulsory. This system maintains an artificial boundary between a new class of intellectual, professional women and a traditional set of heterosexual, domestic women. Having internalized a belief in this untransgressable division, Harriet Vane chooses early in the novel to repress her heterosexual desires in order to fulfill her professional and artistic ambitions. In a deliberate act of female-identified separatism, in conscious dedication to the intellectual work of writing, Vane relocates to the all-female academic sanctuary of Shrewsbury Womens College. Howeve r, through intertwining narratives of 6

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the foundering and failure of Harriets cr eative and profession al work in this environm ent, and through the narrativ e of Harriets consequent psychic unraveling, Sayers reveals the ways in which this move away from the male object of her romantic and sexual desire actu ally forestalls the potential fullness of Harriets productivity. The categories of interesting occupationworkand a sufficient emotional outletlovewhich are set in opposition in the social world of Gaudy Night can only be arbitrated by means of the kind of liberation suggested by Sayerss third stipulation for femalef or, in fact, humanhappiness. This is the reasonable freedom for play which wa s so lacking in a social world that excluded womens assumption of fully hum an (in Sayerss idiom) identities. What better way to mediate this conf lict in her fiction than through keen manipulations of languageHarriet Va nes (and her creators) native and professional playing-fieldproffered by th e star detective of the Sayers canon and the conquering lover of the Harrie t/Peter quartetdet ective Lord Peter Wimsey, himself? In particular, Peters several critical re adings and suggestive rewritings of Harriets artworks, by e xposing her initial meanings as limited, incite Harriet to account for a more complex and multifarious world of possible significations in her writing. By means of several collaborations, Peter proves to Harriet that the best writing relies on a willingness to inco rporate the tension between opposing forces in the human ps ychein the author, herselfand helps Harriet dissolve the barriers of the perc eived binary order which prey on her mind and constrain her art, providing space for th e creation of novels of greater artistic 7

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clar ity, self-awareness and depth. Peters intervention carries implicit import for Harriets life as well as her art; by recasting her various desires as uncontradictory, unproblematic, quintessen tially human, and even artful, he provides denouement for the novels ps ychological plot, and, concurrently, resolves the novels more concrete detec tive and romance plots, whose conflicts Sayers shows to be rooted in these ps ychological complications. The principle of far-reaching heterodoxy that allows Peter to effect this unification of the novels several narratives also advances the goals of Gaudy Nights social engagement and criticism. Peters uses of literar y devices to call conventional, sociallydetermined roles into question, reframing these and, in collaboration with Harriet, inscribing a new model, a third way. In this manner, he effectively neuters the gender binary and breaks down the barriers which checked Harriets creative yields, an accomplishment which is itse lf an argument for the transformative power of literary art in apprehending and working through social problems. Gaudy Night achieves an artistic unity through this coalescence of genres, and sapience in its demonstrated understandi ng of the psychological depth of social issues, which qualities, taken together, fa r surpass its popular, paperback format. In this way, the novel qualifies as a powerful work of literary art. A Psychological Novel In an interview, Dorothy Saye rs reflected that in writing Gaudy Night, she meant to bring the love problem into line with the detective problem by fashioning a narrative in which the same key unlocks both at once (Haack 27). 8

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The answers to the conventional ques tions (Whodunit? and Will the lovers unite?) posed by the genre narratives on the surface of Gaudy Night a mystery and a romanceare obscured, delayed, and driven off over the course of the novels nearly 500 pages by the complicati ng influence of a third, psychological narrative. This is the narrative of Harriet Vanes personal and artistic development, and in particular, of her st ruggle to overcome certain developmental obstacles derived from her (gendered) pos ition in a fictional social world. By narrating the mystery and romance plots through Harriets troubled understandings, Sayers subjects these othe rwise straightforward plotlines to the distortions and torments of Harriets own conscious and subconscious readings. By this device, Harriets psychological narrative rises to prominence in the novel, coloring the events of the mystery and romance plots. It becomes clear that as long as Harriets psychological problem pe rsists, it will preven t the revelation of these other plots outcomes. The only k ey which can unlock the resolutions to the novels generic problems is the k ey which solves Harriets personal problem. In this way, Sayers places the narrative of Harriets development at the center of what looks, by its cover, like merely another Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery twined with romance. It is this psychological narrative, then, and the key that it provides for unlocking Sayerss entire project, which will be the focus of the following thesis. Gaudy Nights psychological narrative focu ses on Harriets crisis of uncertainty about the direction of her development. Having internalized the belief, received from the social world, th at her intellectual an d emotional desires 9

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repres ent opposite, contradictory, and irreconcilable ambitions, and faced with a social instruction to choose between them Harriet finds herself trapped in a net of indecision and distress (67). She counts herself among those unfortunate women who are cursed with both hearts and brains, and who therefore desire both heterosexual partnership and professi onal, intellectual autonomy, in a society where women are expected to live by just one of these essential organs (68). Harriets desire to functi on with both makes her conspicuous even to herself; between the married (or about-tobe-married) and the unmarried, Gaudy Nights narrator reports, Harriet felt herself to be like Aesops bat between the birds and bees (290). In a novel upheld for its compelling Oxford vistas and bustling London scenes, Harriet is out of place. London and Oxford In a society where women finally, a nd for the first time, possessed the same legal rights as men to learn, vote, and work according to their desires, Harriet Vane faces a dilemma: she cannot have what she wants. Gaudy Night is set in a pair of dichotomous worlds, corresponding to Harri ets two principal desires: to participate in a heterosexual relationship, and to liv e as an intellectual and a mystery novelist. The formerthe life of the womanly womanis attended by the duties of re productive and domestic labor (31), and the latterthe purely intellectual lifewould suggest sexless adherence to a cloistered academic regimen (377). Gaudy Night is, by all accounts, a realistic fiction, but the preeminence of this two-world c ondition in the novel is an exaggerated 10

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product of Harriets cleft psychology; her prejudices and perceptions direct our angle of vision througho ut the work. The space between the swift, rattling, clattering, excitable and devilishly upsetti ng world of strain and uproar that was the London home of her ill-fated love affa ir, and the sober and restrained faade of Shrewsbury Womens College, Harriets al ma mater and her niche in the gray stones of Oxford, represents much more to Harriet than a distance in miles ( Gaudy 247). Somewhere between the cities lies an imagined but strict boundary between mutually exclusive lifestyles. This partition is drawn from a social reality, internalized and projected onto concrete structures, so that Gaudy Night becomes a high-contrast world of light a nd shadow, of wide disparities between self and other, minds and bodies, men and women. The tacit binary order of the novels setting, which silently organizes the possibilities and people in the first half of the novel into two categories, also threatens to split Harriet in two. Since no alternative to this model is visible in the social order that she perceives, Harriet meditates on the necessity of finding her way to one edge or the other. Binary Women In Gaudy Night, the gap between women who conform to feminine conventions, and those who except themselves from these conventions, yawns wider as long as Harriet internalizes a be lief in their fundamental difference. The women living on either side of this divide represent two rigidly separate classes of people. For Shrewsbury Womens Colle ge don and economics expert Miss de Vine, a soldier knowing no personal loyalti es [] to whom the quadrangle of 11

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Shrewsbury was a native and proper arena, it is as if the work of scholarship is the only possible occupation (18). For the widowed Shrewsbury scout Annie, who contends with quick pride and j oy that having children of ones own m ake[s] life worth living, and who ra ises her daughters to be good girls [] and good wives and mothers, assuming th e domestic duties of a traditionallydefined womanhood is a natural imperative, the deliberate avoidance of which is a sign of perversion in any woman (346). In contrast to these fully distinguished figures, Harriet Vane wavers on the border between detached universes convinced only that one must make so me sort of choicebut, between one desire and another, she asks, how is one to know which things are of overmastering importance? (37) Harriet sees evidence of a strict sex-role divideand portents of the defining personal choice that attends iteverywhere. Glimpsing names on the doors of the Shrewsbury residence halls, Harr iet perceives the inevitability of the student bodys progress down a pair of divergent paths: Miss H. Brown, Miss Jones, Mi ss Colburn, Miss Szleposky, Miss Isaacsonso many unknown quantities. So many destined wives and mothers of the race; or, alternatively, so many potential historians, scientists, schoo lteachers, doctors, lawyers. ( Gaudy 11, emphasis mine) By social convention, even womens names, the primary markers of their identities, are made subject to this inexor able choice. Wives and mothers of the race, along with their offspring, would assume their husbands names, while 12

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professional wom en would retain their own names. Harriet, weighing the evidence from the lives of married and unmarried Shrewsbury colleagues, wonders: was it worse to be a Mary Attwood ( ne Stokes) or a Miss ShusterSlatt? Was it better to be a Phoebe Bancroft ( ne Tucker) or a Miss Lydgate? ( Gaudy 46). Early in the novel, Harriet is fascinat ed by threats to female intellectual autonomy posed by romance; she collects them. At her alumni reunion at Shrewsbury Womens College in Oxfor d, she uncovers a grim compilation of stories about Shrewsbury graduates whos e heterosexual involvements ended in the waste of their intellectu al potential. Dining in L ondon, on the other side of the partition, with Peter Wimsey, Harriet recites this list of promising scholars, distinguished in their studies and subse quently extinguished by matrimony, with the suggestion that Harriet intends to avoid such entanglements ( Gaudy 67). This is a promise which, made in the romantic context of a dinner date, stands out to the astute reader as a revealingly ironic indication of how little Harriet understands the necessary inte rplay of her fear and desi re at this point in the narrative. Unselfconsciously, Harriet dw ells on the story of Catherine Bendick ( ne Freemantle), the outstanding scholar of her year, who married a farmer after taking her degree, and subsequen tly dedicated herself to a life of childbearing and manual labor. What a waste!, Harriet concludes: all that brilliance, all that trained intelligence, harnessed to a load that any uneducated 13

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country girl could have drawn! (47)1. From her conversation with Bendick, Harriet derives the conviction that the great woman must either die unwed [] or find a still greater man to marry he r, or, alternatively, must allow her intellectual aptitude to decay for the sake of marriage, like the wasted Bendicks (53). Intellectual men in this social worl d are faced with no such crisis: the great man [] could marry where he liked, not being restricted to great women; indeed, it was often found sweet and comme ndable in him to choose a woman of no sort of greatness at all (53). In her recognition of this structural doublestandard in Gaudy Night s social world, Harriet echoes Sayerss description of a similar social phenomenon in Are Women Human? in which she asks, again, almost rhetorically: what woman really pr efers a job to a home and family? and answers: very few, I admit. It is unfort unate that they should so often have to make the choice. A man does not, as a rule, have to choose. He gets both (34). This intertextuality between the socially engaged Gaudy Night and the overtly reform-minded Are Women Human is a testament to Sayerss commitment to carrying her critiques of a problematic st atus quo into her fiction; by having her protagonists grapple with these, Sayers sets her stories up as a space for troubleshooting such issues. 1 Harriet lacks, perhaps, the desired am ount of class sensitivity for modern readers comfort. But Harri ets reasoning here is reve aling. She perceives the aristocratic Wimsey as offering a different (perhaps more civilized and, therefore, more tenable) patriarchal threat th an the one posed by Caroline Bendicks agrarian husband. 14

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Are Women Human? Sayerss nonfiction essay Are W omen Human?, was originally delivered as a speech to a womens gr oup which, in 1938, engaged Harriet Vanes creator to address an extraordinarily popular and controversial topic: the feminist movement (Kenney, 123). Taken together with its companion piece, The Human-Not-Quite-Human, the essay offers a critique of a social order which refuses to admit of the whole and entire scope of wo mens individual humanity ( Are Women Human? 36). In it, she invoke s a piece of conventional wisdom which serves as the dominant stru cture in the fictional, though familiar, social world of Gaudy Night; she writes that women are unlike men. They are the opposite sex (56). Grounding her ar gument in linguistic analysis, Sayers indicates that by such figures of speec h, women are made other and not fully human, a claim which, Sayers writes, is illustrated in the etymology of the sex categories, themselves: Man is always dealt with as both Homo and Vir, but Woman only as Femina (54). She argues that being a female excludes one from the broader category of human being in a social order in which symbols dictate meaning, often by limiting the possible connot ations of the sign ified. She cites D.H. Lawrence to illustrate this: Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal or an obscenity, the one thing that he wont accept her as is a human being, a real human being of th e feminine sex. (44-45) 15

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Harriets sense that she m ay only actualize half of her desires, and thereby enact only one part of her identity, reflects this description of the constricted nature of femininity. By denying her simultaneous possession of both heart and brain, in attempting to define herself by one or the otherHarriet does not, Sayers might say, even consider herself to be fully human. Wittigs Heterosexual Social Contract and Woolfs Room What persuades Harriet of the logi cal necessity of the choice? In A Room of Ones Own (1929) Virginia Woolf illustrates the common sense that upholds the structural dichotomy in the period (20). If, she hypothesizes, a philanthropic mother had donated a rich endowment to a womens college at Oxford, to found fellowships and lectureships and pr izes and scholarship s appropriated to use for [her] own sex, then her daughters might have looked forward [] to a pleasant and honorable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions (21). However, Woolf points out, there is a snag in the argument; if such a mother were to dedica te herself to a career in order to earn the independent income required for the endowment, she could not possibly be a mother; in fact, such fundraising might necessitate the suppr ession of families altogether (22). A socially constitute d wife and mother would be entirely occupied in expending the energy required no t only for giving birth, but also for domestic commitments that were cons idered to be tantamount to that comparatively undemanding act: 16

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First there are nine m onths before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there ar e certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about in the streets. (Woolf 22) Once she enters into a heterosexual soci al contract in which, as Monique Wittig would point out in a later er a, it goes without saying that women will assume primary responsibility for child rearing and domestic labor, a woman could be capable of little else (Wittig 346). Harriets desire for both a life of professional, artistic productivity a nd a life of wifehood and re -productivity cannot be accommodatedor even imaginedin the social world; it represents a conflict of terms, since no human being could sta nd the double duty of making a fortune and bearing thirteen children (Woolf 22). The choice was considered to be a practical and material condition of li fe for women of Harriets time. Harriets Heterosexual History When Gaudy Night opens we are reminded that all Harriet's own personal tragedy sprang from the cons equences of a damaging romance with a former lover, detailed in Gaudy Nights two prequels, Strong Poison and Have His Carcase ( Gaudy 37). Harriets London love affa ir with a writer of higher worth, Philip Boyes, sours when the bohemian Boyes deceives Harriet by declaring that he does not believe in marri age, and stages a manipulative test to see whether [her] devotion [is] abject e nough; he convinces her to cohabit with 17

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him before finally proposing marriage ( Strong Poison 45). In her will to feel, Harriet abandons herself so fully to the a ffair that she becomes unable to perform the professional work of her calling: writing mystery novels ( Gaudy 38). In the end, being condescended to by Boyess li e is humiliating and traumatic for the self-respecting, and, with respect to Boyes, self-sacrificing Vane ( Gaudy 38). Worse, in Strong Poison, Boyes is poisoned, and Harriet is tried for his murder. In the mortifying process, Harriets pr osecutors wield the evidence of her cohabitation with Boyes and her subsequent refusal of marriage to besmirch her public reputation; during the trial, she is jailed. Even in her nonconformism. Harriet begins to associate heterosexu al romance with increasingly cruel and unjust patriarchal practice, re sulting in the forced interr uption of her vocation. By the end of the trial, during which every physical feeli ng [was] battered out of her by the brutality of circumstance, Harriet has chosen to tu rn her back on the whole edifice of hetero sexual love (450). Harriet is finally acquitted thanks to the intervention of detective Lord Peter Wimsey, whose heroics she afterwar d resents. In Peters conduct, she perceives a power imbalance and a sim ply damnable obligation to feel and express gratitude in the context of her continuing relationship with Peter (107). Harriets trauma, though extreme, occurs s quarely in Sayerss realistic social worldin London, in lawand it is from thes e patriarchal structures that Harriet derives her strict belief in the irreco ncilable conflict between emotional and intellectual engagement. The story of Harri ets trial and incar ceration dramatized in Strong Poison can be read as a particularly nightmarish representation of the 18

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anxieties held by a reasonably wary wom an of Sayerss era, a bout the threat of censorship by patriarchs drawn out in this case to the point of literal imprisonment. Such anxiety was no t unfounded. Overt and surreptitious discouragement and interruption of the aspirations of fema le artists, intellectuals, and writers haveas we have come to understand in the age of feminism always determined the shape of British and continental society. Throughout Europes history, in the words of major thinkers and writers the holy books and sermons, the popular tales and sayings (A nderson and Zinsser 336)at all levels of culturethere was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women inte llectually (Woolf 56). Present-day feminists, including Monique Wittig, have made historical arguments that this embedded censorship of cultural pr oductions by women was supported and perpetuated by the institution of heterosexual ity itself. Harriets trauma serves to reiterate the insecurity of her position as a female in society, and to demonstrate her subjection to patriarchal constricti ons. The strategy of self-protection though separatist action which Harriet assumes in Gaudy Night is advocated by subsequent feminist writers as one of th e only paths to female artistic autonomy and self-actualization in a society organized by such structures. Although it does not lead to the resolution of her artistic/identity crisis in Gaudy Night, Harriets carefully reasoned escape to Shrewsbury, one of the few strongholds of femaleidentified solidarity imaginable in Sa yerss England, anticipates second-wave feminist theory and action. 19

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Feminist Separatism as a Personal Politics In the essay Com pulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, which postdates Gaudy Night by several decades but which treats the compulsion to heterosexuality as a historical fact, Adrienne Rich echoes Sayerss description (both through the fictional Harriet and in Are Women Human?) of womens struggle to delimit themselves, a function, Rich argues, of womens indoctrination into the patriarchal order: We have been stalled, she writes, in a maze of false dichotomies that prevents our apprehending the institution as a whole (203). In The Category of Sex, Monique Wittig re iterates this sentiment, writing that masculine/feminine [and] male/female ar e simply social categories whose false, a priori naturalization by patriarc hs conceals the political fact of the subjugation of one sex by the other, [and] the compulsory character of the category itself (Wittig, 5). As long as oppositions (differences) appear as given, already there, before all thought, natural, Wittig warns, there is no dialectic, there is no change, there is no st ruggle (3). But Harriet Vane struggles. As a woman imprisoned in prescriptive ideas of the normalprescriptions which lie on strictly opposite sides of the sex-role binaryHarriet is made to feel, in Richs words, the pain of blocked options, broken connections, [and] lost access to self-definition freely and powerfully assumed (203). Rich suggests that to surmount this, certain women in ever y culture throughout history [] to the extent made possible by their context had assumed a nonheterosexual, womanconnected existence, wresting themselves, their lives, and esp ecially their work from the control of the patriarchal and heterosexual social order (204). The 20

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lesb ian existence (Rich uses this term to designate a female-identified, nonheterosexual, separatist lifestyle, which does not necessarily carry implications about sexuality or sexual orientation) that Rich advocates is in many ways present for Harriet Vane in the promise of Shrewsbury Women s College (203). By the time she appears in Gaudy Night, still reeling from her disenfranchising foray into the world of me n and law, Harriet is resolute in her belief that her heterosexual desire threatens to destr oy her productive professional life. Harriet cannot resign herself to the lifelong and centuries-old commitment to childbearing as the female creative act because she has already apprenticed herself to tasks on the opposite side of the sex-role binary: to writing and scholarly work (Wittig 11). Since she is naturally an adherent of Sayerss specific feminist vision, advanced in Are Women Human?. Harriet prioritizes her work during this time of psychological strain. Though many of her expressed beliefs differ in pointed ways from the strict equal-rights (or fi rst-wave) feminist doctrines that were popular in her time, Sayerss strongest point of solidarity with her feminist contemporaries is her argume nt that each woman, and indeed, each human, ought to identify and occupy her own proper jobthe one that she excels in and prefers to do, before she does anything else (30). The prominence of such fiercely individualist priorities in Sayerss thinking is attested to on the first page of Have His Carcase, where she writes: the best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. Much more efficacious are honest work, physical activity, and the sudden acquisition of wealth (1). 21

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Harriet, then, like Sayers, is distinct ly characterized by her professional participa tion in the Oxford intellectual institution as a member of the first generation of claimants of the rights and privileges of equal-rights feminism2. Harriet identifies her occupation as the one that she has stuck to [] in the face of what might have seemed overwhelmi ng reasons for abandoning it; as a model of her creators feminist ethos, she dedi cates herself above al l to the task of writing mystery novels ( Gaudy 26). She feels that writing is her appointed job, and therefore the single element of hersel f that she must deal with sincerely ( Gaudy 191). It is for this purpose that Harriet returns to Shrewsbury College in Oxford. The Shrewsbury College dons are celibat e by a silent consensus, a fact that is never explicitly interrogated, but is baldly given, by Gaudy Nights narrator. In the world of the novel, it goes without sayingto borrow a phrase from Wittigthat intellectual women, who ve ry recently earned the right to think in a professional capacity, do so only by relinquishing many of the biological functions (the privileges and duties of lives led as wives and mothers) implied in their anatomy. Shrewsbury provides a frag ile shelter for an untested class of female intellectuals and professionals in a woman-identified community largely outside of mainstream society, where they can do their proper job[s] ( Are Women Human? 18). The college, as such, models itself after other Oxford 2 Sayers, though she never aspired toward the academic life of an Oxford don, wore her MA gown in the streets of Oxford after her graduation from Somerville College, and privately expressed her wish to be considered part of a permanent community of scholars, a quality that she hoped would be in evidence in her detective novels (Kenney, 32). 22

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institutions: it is a site f or the producti on of dull and durable cultural capital, where, by contributing a f ootnote [to] a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or rest oring a lost iota subscript ( Gaudy 18), female scholars hoped to be fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material considerations ( Gaudy 29). Far from the radical and subversive professional politics that second-wave and subsequent feminists would espouse in academia, their wish is merely to participate in scholarly life at Oxford. By making rigorously correct contributions to th e honorable academic tradition that had been advanced at Oxford for centuries, Shrewsbury intellectuals hope for nothing more than to begin to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, whether their private pasts, or the longer hist ory of oppressed wo manhood (18). We have seen that first-wave fe minism carved out a narrow legal and political niche for such womens existence. Implicit in Harriets choice to be educated at Oxford, to author myster y novels and survive autonomously on the income earned by their publication, and to re turn to Oxford in an M.A. gown as a Senior Member, is a refusal of long-held beliefs about womens [in]capabilities and about their proper place in society, and an attempt to reach for the opportunity for intellectual equality with men. By the interwar period, many European feminists felt that by finally breaking through the archaic and legally sanctioned seals that divided domestic life and labor according to sexual difference, and by securing a choice between the two, they had done everything they could to ensure female sovereignty. After gaining equal legal status, it was assumed that women 23

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would finally be able to work out th eir own liberation. Harriets choice in Gaudy Night is inform ed by this logic: she concl udes that she belongs in the space that was so recently dedicated for scholar ly women: at Shrewsbury Womens Collegea destination apart from soci ety, and different from any domicile women had ever known. But the idea of a womans robust, cr itical intellectual engagement in a 1936 mans world suggests such a conflict w ith the ancient, archetypal figuration of woman (the definition of which had, unt il very recently, dwelled along strict domestic lines) that a female scholar must have appeared in this society as a living contradiction of terms. Though it was true that first-wave fe minism had provided an opportunity for women to take on such traditionally masculin e roles, still, these were masculine rolesgendered, and thereore placed in opposition with feminine qualities. The prospect of fr eely selecting fundamentally masculine or feminine sex-role identifications in the so cial world is the major source of conflict in Gaudy Night All of the novels complications proceed out of Harriets inability to (permanently and satisfacto rily) make the choice afforded to her by equal-rights feminism. Peter Wimsey: Patriarch? Throughout Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, Lord Peter Wimsey politely dogs Harriet with marriage proposals which the traumatized Harriet invariably refuses. Everything about Peters sleek, titled persona, from his impeccable breeding to rumors that he keeps loversViennese singer[s] 24

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( Gaudy 185)on the European continent, to a playfully predatory fam ily crest, depicting Sable: three mice courant arge nt [] a domestick catt, couched as to spring, proper (370), warns Ha rriet of his membership in the inner circle of the British patriarchs. Peters aristocratic name is itself a testament to a legacy of six centuries of possessiveness, fastened under the yoke of urbanity (450). Peter had always been characterized in the Sayers canon as the picture of the classic detectivethe superior, mascu line mind that ultimately, in each case, recasts reality by revealing the Solution through his brilliant deductions. Peters mastery of hermeneutic tasks in real life gives him an authority that Harriet, as a mere maker of detective fictions, cannot match. In fact, it is Peters power and brilliance which cause Harriet to turn he r back on his proposa lsshe has got a bad inferiority complex with respect to Peter, which is magnified by the debt of gratitude she owes him (28) Convinced that her re lationship with Peter is structured by an unspoken power dynamic, in which to him she was, of course, only the creature of his making and the mirror of his own magnanimity, the same non-conforming, self-respecting Harriet w ho lived with, then refused, Boyes, concludes that marriage along the lines of such an unequal, conventionally gendered power dynamic is out of the question (270). However, beneath her defensive snarl of resentment toward Peter on the level of this perceived power dynamic, Ha rriets desire for h im lurks, either by her own admission I could have liked [Pet er] so much if I would have met him on equal footing ( Gaudy 28)or through slips that expose Harriets subconscious and repressed desires, as will be shown. Even when she becomes 25

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aware of them, Harriet consciously preser ves these repressions, knowing that in the social w orld of Gaudy Night there is no precedent for equal footing between a man of Peters status and a woman like Harriet. To enter into the proposed relationship, however she longs for it, would be to become the idle entity in the plutocratic a nd aristocratic notion that th e keeping of an idle woman was a badge of superi or social status ( Are Woman Human? 63). Harriet refuses Peters advances, therefore, w ith the certainty that if she once gave way to Peter, [she] should go up like straw ( Gaudy 490). Interestingly, Virginia Woolf employs the image of conflagration for an opposite purpose. Woolfs image of incandescence, as we will shortly see, reflects the understanding instituted by Peters metaphors in the novels dnouement. The Female Artists Plight Virginia Woolf writes that fiction is like a spiders web: that novels are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatur es; they are, rather, the works of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things (44). She argues that private prejudices, lik e the torments of Harriets divided psychology, have an immense sway on the minds of women, and, correspondingly and unavoidably, on the work of female artists (74). A novelist who, in her self-divided distress about received patriarchal notions, can no longer distinguish true from false will not, Woolf warns, write well. If such a writers skill is such that her prose rouse[s] first a qui ck and eager response with [] bright coloring and dashing gest ures, still, something seems to check them 26

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in their development (76). The writersthe novels do not achieve their artistic potential. U ltimately, one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says, another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere (76). Accordingly, even as she reaffirms her long-held desire to continue writing mystery novels, Harriet rereads her published novels with a critical eye. As she edits, Harriet finds that she has fallen victim to the pitfalls of the preoccupied artist, who, Woolf laments, will never get her genius expressed whole and entire (73). Just so, when Harriet evaluates her work she feels: Thoroughly jaded and displeased with herself. The books were all right as far as they went; as inte llectual exercises they were even brilliant. But there was something lacking about them. They read now to her as though they had been written with a mental reservation, a determination to keep her own opinions and personality out of view. ( Gaudy 66) Harriet focuses on a dialog about relationshi ps and married life in one of the novels, which comes across as merely clever and superficial; in spite of dexterously-crafted suspense and a neat, puzzle-piece plot, the dialogthe whole feeling of the novellacks appeal( Gaudy 66). The calculated movements of the detective plot takes on a formulism that falls flat. As Harri et studies her own works, she becomes conscious that no ne of her characters are fleshy or convincing; of her character sketches, she notes: human beings were not like that; human problems were not like that (230 ). Even as she edits, Harriet decides that in future writing projects, she will aspire to match the professional ethos of 27

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the ideal sch olar, who possesses a single eye, directed to the object and not dimmed and distracted, like Harriets, by private motes and beams (67). Harriet reasons that if she a pplies the ruthlessly correct standards of scholarship to her work, her next novel will, by necessity, be a superi or work of art. The Ideal of Scholarly Separatism In light of these observations, Harrie t finds herself increasingly inclined toward a sentiment like Francis Ba cons, quoted at the head of Gaudy Night s third chapter: They do best who, if they cannot but admit of love,/ Yet make it keep quarter, and sever it wholly from th eir serious affairs and actions of life [] It maketh man that they can in no ways be/ True to their own ends (39). Based on her investigations of the social worl d, Harriet might agree that love makes women, at least, this way. And given European traditions which insist that women defer and subordinate themselves to men, given traditions which define women only by their relationships with men, given traditions which undervalue women and take men as the standard (Anderson and Zinsser 334)one might ask, how could a self-respecting female novelist like Harriet not need to avoid entanglements with men? Early in Gaudy Night, Harriets colleagues in the Shrewsbury Senior Common Room request that Harriet apply he r theoretical expertise to investigate a mystery, a rash of criminal disturbances, at the college. The invitation is timely; Harriet is keen to conduct a simultaneous investigation of her own suitability for the Shrewsbury lifestyle. She believes that by assuming the separatist lifestyle of 28

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a celibate fem ale scholar at Shrewsbury Womens College, and by clinging on [] to the job, she will be able to f[i]ght her way back to an insecure stability, the ideal of which she will shortl y immortalize in a sonnet portion ( Gaudy 59). At first, Harriet is thrilled with her choi ce. With the contented, if acquiescent, assumption that an all-female college co mmunity at Oxford is an appropriate abode for a professional female author, Harri et begins to identif y with the celibate and ascetic life of the female dons, and with the dons themselves. She romanticizes the sensual details of sc holarly productivity the flutter of the turned page and the soft scrape of pen on paper (242)and takes on an assortment of academic research and writing tasks. Bent to these, she is pleased to find that at Oxford, fi nally, and for the first tim e since her traumatic London tryst, her words [flow] smoothly (204) To be true to ones vocation, she decides, whatever follies one might comm it in ones emotional lifethat was the way to spiritual peace (29). Cloistered Peace? One afternoon, in the melodious silence of the interterm at Shrewsbury, feeling in Oxford like the freeman of th e great [] city, Ha rriet finds that she has regained her capacity to write poetry. Since her queer, unhappy contact with physical passion, Harriets singing voi cehad lain dumb and dead, but as her mind fills with spontaneous verses of poe try, Harriet has the sense that after a long and bitter wandering, she [is] once more in her own place ( Gaudy 243). 29

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Several detached lines of verse orga nize themselves expediently into the following octave, the first portion of a s onnet, which reflects Harriets mood: Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest, Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled; Here in close perfume the rose-leaf curled, Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west, Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best, From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, To the still center where the spinning world Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest. (244) The octave expresses Harriets sense of satisfaction with the Shrewsbury lifestyle, and its writing would appear to signal the success of Harriets objectives in leaving London and returning to Oxford; she has made the correct choice. But even as she manages, in her newfound au tonomy, to stammer these few notes (244), we cue Woolfs caveat: In order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, Woolf writes in A Room of Ones Own the mind of the artist [] must be inca ndescent, [] there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed (58). This image of a burning brainwith its glorification of the ac t of go[ing] up like straw is just what Harriet has feared and fled in her move to Shrewsbury (490). The unconsumed and unconsummated business of Harriets desire for Peterthat one powerful fetter which still tied her ineluctably to the b itter past, acts with violence on Harriets poem (60). Harriet immediatel y detects the same absence of literary appeal in the 30

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sonnet that she found in her published novelsoverall, she is disappointed by its effect (60). The octaves tone is so uniformly demure and so restful that once it is written, Harriets inspirat ion becomes deadlocked, as if lulled back to sleep by her own rather dull metaphor. Harriet is unable to complete the sonnet: She [can] find no turn for the sestet to take no epigram, no change of mood; try as she might, the right twist [does] not come (244). The partial satisfaction that Harriet might derive from this partial wo rk must be measured against the whole scope of her artistic potential, which is not achieved herethe work is not even whole. After putting down a tentative line or two and cross[ing] them out, Harriet gives up on this writi ng task, satisfying herself with the possibility that something might come of [the octave] some day (244). As it turns out, her sonnet portion is not the only work that Harriet is unable to complete during her stay at Shrewsbury. Shortly after writing her octave, Harriet must admit that, far from finding peace at Oxford, she has arrived at an impasse; her various engagements, which correspond to Gaudy Nights several plot lines, seem to stall. Sayers will use the plot of Gaudy Night to demonstrate the pitfalls of Harriets separa tist route of escape. Harriets writing is hampered by restrictions inherent in the se x-role binary. These restrictions spawn repressions. While she follows the patr iarchal dictatemasked as choiceto assume the privileges of an intelle ctual, autonomous and productive, and therefore, a non-female life style at the expense of a reproductive and romantic life, Harriet remains at war with her lot and with herself; she is unable, in her self-divided frame of mind, to get he r genius expressed whole and entire 31

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(W oolf 73). She produces one-dimensional works which fail to express her (repressed) emotional subjectivity, and fina lly descends into a severe bout of writers block. As Harri ets artistic output stagger [s] and fall[s] dumb (to borrow phrases that Peter adds to Harriets sonnet), the full import of Woolfs warnings is felt, and Gaudy Nights atmosphere, informed by Harriets growing frustration, darkens (394). Meanwhile, Harriets logic as a sign-reader and interpreteras a detective and a disoriented, vacillati ng loveris distorted by the same subconscious soundings. Without the benefit of her unified mind on the job, Gaudy Nights romance and mystery plots halt in their progression (36). Writers Block Soon after moving to the college, Harri et begins to write a new thriller with a mind to upholding scholarly standa rds in her writing. She titles the novel Death Twixt Wind and Water, and formulates a mathematically sound, causeand-effect plot, with five suspects, nea tly confined in an old water-mill [] all provided with motives and alibis for a pleasantly original kind of murder ( Gaudy 230). But in the process, she turns up more self-cr iticism. Harriet becomes unhappy with the dead and alive feeling of her story; it lacks psychological verisimilitude (Gaudy 230). The interpersonal relationships between characters begin to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry, which Harriet recognizes as contrived (230). In one epis ode, she attempts to write a section of the novel in which the protagonist, Wilfre d, discovers his love rs handkerchief at the scene of a murder, and concludes that his lover committed murder. Harriet 32

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deliberates with academ ic attention to detail over the description of this handkerchief, experimenting w ith a number of alternatives to determine the most authentic fabric, shape, size and color of the red herring. She rewrites the scene several times, adding factual revisions, but is unable to write past the emotional event of the handkerchiefs discovery. In three separate drafts, Harriet writes that Wilfred experiences: a curious feeling of but cannot complete the sentence (230). On the third attempt, Harriet st ops writing altogether and says: Bother Wilfred! Im taking quite a dislike to the man (231). The episode ends abruptly when, in a rage, she abandons the tir esome Wilfred and sallie[s] out (231). After this episode, Harriets writers block is a firmly established fact: she cannot get a feel for Wilfreds emotions, whic h have gone sticky (230). She will remain blocked until the moment of Pete rs incisive intervention in her life and work (230). The conscientious, but conf used Harriet seems to be channeling Woolfs unhappy female author, w hose conditions of [] life are consistently hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain (Woolf, 52). Harriet asks: How could one, in any case, understand other peoples motives and feelings, when ones own re main mysterious?; her self-reflexive question conceals a revea ling self-discovery ( Gaudy 230). Harriet displays a growing awareness that unnamed feelings and motivescall them desireshave been creeping up through her subconscious since her arrival at Shrewsbury. The silence of the place that she referred to in her octave as the heart of rest is disturbed by interpositions of Harriets turbulent subc onscious (113). She strives 33

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to banish thoughts of Peter by drawing on the lines of her octave. She uses this written (if only halfway) work as a sym bolic jus tification of her separation from Peter. She attempts to prolong her solitary sonnet-mood, telling herself that: here, at the still center (yes, that line was definitely good), he had no place (247). But at three in the morning one long night during the first term of her residency, Harriet wakes up in a internal fray. She has dreamed of being held by Peter, but ruminates that ones dreams never symbolize ones real wishes, but always something Much Worse (114). As she takes stock of her minds willfully repressed contents, and wonders what unthinkable depths of awfulness [] can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peters embraces, Harriet manages only to express the same inarticulate form of frustration which she used to dismiss the incorrigible Wilfred: Damn Peter!, she cries (114). Had Peter Wimsey been present for this episode, he might have remarked, as he does elsewhere, that it shows how hard it is for even the mo st powerful brain to be completely heartless (69). A Mysterious Threat At Shrewsbury From the beginning of Gaudy Night Shrewsbury Colleges asylum conceals a threat; an unspoken dread pervades the narrative that the college, rather than providing sanctuary, will turn out to be that other sort of asylum. Though their existence was le gitimated in law, the actual women who chose to occupy the tenuous new space of the Shrewsbury grounds must have appeared, at best, as obscure and unintelligible entities when measured by a social imagination which 34

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histor ically contextualized all women in a separate and distinctly gendered realm. With characteristic pithiness, the dean of Shrewsbury explicates the paradox created by the figure of the female don: by drawing on conventional classifications, Dean Martin admits, a nyone could point out that womanliness unfits us for learning, or could alternatively point out that learning makes us unwomanly ( Gaudy 374). Since the Shrewsbury dons forgo the opportunity to do what women had always doneand to be, accordingly, what women have always beenwives, motherstheir colle ctive status is extrinsic to any preexisting category in the social world. The arcane and marginal character of the female scholar will take an increasingl y menacing shape in Harriets imagination as the mystery of Shrewsbury, always reflecting the anguish of Harriets internally divided psychic life, darkens and deepens. This mystery is, perhaps, the ci rcumstance that acts on Harriets subconscious most fiercely as her time at Shrewsbury wears on; it is a job that Harriet leaves completely undone. In her i nvestigation of a series of increasingly deranged and violent crimes perpetrated against the Senior Common Room (SCR) and the Shrewsbury undergraduates, Harriet as detective, is responsible for identifying the culprit, divining the true story behind the crimes, and bringing the narrative to resolution. For two full terms, the poison pen writes venomous and threatening messages around the Shrewsbury campus, leaving cruel notes for several sensitive and high-achieving stude nts, driving one of them to attempt suicide; it vandalizes academic buildings and property, and defaces books and manuscripts, targeting feminist arguments. Meanwhile, Harriet scrambles after 35

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the evid ence, unable to identify the prolific (i n contrast to Harriet) culprit. By an early deduction, Harriet narrows the field of suspects to female college members or staff. She and the SCR agree that the at tacks must be kept secret and dealt with in their own community, since were they to be publicized, they would be just the kind of thing to do the worst possible da mage to University womennot only in Oxford, but everywhere ( Gaudy 126). The message in each of the poison pens writings is not dangerous because it is eith er shocking or revelatory. Rather, the poison pen voices a tenet of European cu lture so basic that it could, to reinvoke Wittig, [go] without saying (346). The poison pens shrill and scolding voice articulates some of the most conventional wisdom in the western world, which resounds in Sayerss society as a persistent outpouring [] from school and lectureroom, Press and pulpit, (Are Women Human? 57) reiterating a foundational my th of societynow grumbling, now patronizing, now domineering, now gr ieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, droning on in a voice whic h cannot let women alone (Woolf 78). The poison pens communications are cast in a number of mediumsanonymous letters urging the suicide of stressed-out students, a quotation from Virgil comparing the dons to harpies, nasty, l unatic doodles of naked women inflicting savage outrage on a male scholar, a nd one representational mannequin, dressed in a frock and full academicals and hung in the college chapel, and with a knife through its stomachand all making the same essential claim or threat: that scholarly engagement as it is practiced at Shrewsbury is inappropriate and unnatural, dangerous and evilbe cause the scholars are women 36

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Shrew sburys Self-Hatred The poison pens voice projects th e fears and ins ecurities of the Shrewsbury community, and not least of Ha rriet. In her investigation, Harriet draws on the same deeply-rooted social a ssumptions that the poison pen projects; she suspects that a violent madness, brought on by sexual repression and intellectual activities which she fears may, after all, prove unbefitting to her sex, exists at the heart of intellectual women. She develops a firm suspicion that the perpetrator is a member of the SCR, and convinces hers elf of the guilt of such a woman. To do so, she has only to recite to herself stereotypes in the form of readymade words and phrases, plucked from their prominent place in the symbolic social order: The warped and repressive mind is apt to turn and wound itself. Soured virginityunnatural lifesemi-demented spinstersstarved appetites and suppressed impulses unwholesome atmosphereshe c ould think of whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for circula tion. Was that what lived in the tower set on the hill? ( Gaudy 77-78) Harriets suspicions expose her fear, founded in patriarchal assumptions handed down by dominant culture, about the worth of womens intellectual work. These assumptions operate as ugly phantom[s] lurk[ing] in the corners of her mind, 37

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under the su rface of Harriets failing invest igation, distorting he r readings of the evidence (Gaudy 247).3 Of course, Harriets suspicion of the dons, with whom she identifies, must also be a suspicion of herself, since generalizations about the inappropriateness of womens engagement in intellectual activity would necessarily indict Harriet, all over again. And Harriet is not alone in her problematic self-assessment. If Miss Hillyard, the history tutor, is to be be lieved, the entire SCR subscribes, to some degree, to sex-role conventions which cause them to struggle with a sense of selfsuspicion: The fact is, though you will never ad mit it, that everybody in this place has an inferiority complex about married women and children. For all your talk about careers and independence, you all believe in your hearts that we ought to debase ourselves before any woman who has fulfilled her animal functions. [. .] Look how delighted you are when old stude nts get married! As if you were saying, Aha! Education doesnt unfit us for real life after all! ( Gaudy 248-50) Harriet concludes that it is the dons deliberate, sepa ratist lifestyle, their break with the patriarchal order, that drives at least one of them to self-destructive madness. Through the filter of Harriets fear and distrust, the dons faces [grow] sly and distorted overnight; eyes fearful; the most innocent words charged with suspicion ( Gaudy 286). As Peter will point out Harriet distrusts her own intellectual inclinations, sensing diss onance between these and her properly 3 I am grateful to McFadden, wh o articulates a similar insight. 38

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gendered self in the social world. In f act, Harriets rep ressed self-hatred is the real culprit in the horrifying, abstracted version of the mystery that constitutes Gaudy Nights narrative of the events at Shrewsbury, filtered as it is through Harriets tormented psychology: having more or less made up your mind to a spot of celibacy, Peter calmly explains as he lays out the actual motives for the crime, you are eagerly peopling the cloister with bogies (98). Defecting From Female-Identification As a symptom of this impulse to self -sabotage, Harriets solidarity and identification with the dons deteriorates, a nd she begins to read them as aliens. Harriet observes: they were walled in, sealed down, by walls and seals that shut her out (286). When it becomes clear that Harriet will never, in her shattered state, get to the bottom of the Shrewsbur y mystery alone, instead of calling on an all-female detective agency for help (for it struck her as a fantastic idea that she should fly for help to another brood of spin sters (286)), Harriet finally indulges her repressed wish to [get] hold of Peter Wimsey (287). It is only by breaking out of the ranks of female-identified solidarity with the dons that Harriet is able to express he r longing for Peter. She affects a switch from one side of the binary to the other, substantially aided by her quick assumption of patriarchal notions It is apparent that th is switch is not Harriets first. In retrospect, it is possible to trace her zigzagging progress between London and Oxford lifestyles represented in the binary opposition: first, as a Shrewsbury undergraduate in an all-female environmen t of newly-seized equal rights; then, 39

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indoctrinated through rom ance and trial into the heterosexual and patriarchal order, which she recognizes as problematic and confining; a subsequent retreat to Shrewsbury, where cracks appear in the surface of her self-divided thought, under which the threat of her own madness lurks. Even as she prepares to make another of these exchanges, each of which w ears further on her productive aptitude, Harriet wonders whether "one was doom ed forever to this miserable inner warfare, with confused noise and garmen ts rolled in bloodand [...] the usual war aftermath of a debased coinage, a lowere d efficiency and unstable conditions of government" (78). Nevertheless, Harriet decides to summon Peter to Shrewsbury, to provide necessary aid in an investiga tion which Harriet clea rly cannot carry off by herself. As Peter knocks on the door of her dorm room at Shrewsbury, Harriet is conscious that the knock heralds her switch between poles of the binary, and signifies a kind of treachery: When she said Come in! the commonplace formula seemed to take on a startling significance. For good or evil, she had called in something explosive from the outside world to break up the ordered tranquility of the place; sh e had sold the breach to an alien force; she had sided with London against Oxford and with the world against the cloister. ( Gaudy 305) Harriet is convinced that madness lies on either side of the binary, and that indulgence in the lifestyle suggested by either one of he r oppositely-directed desires leads to self-destruc tion. Nowhere in Sayers oeuvre is her series hero so in demand as at this deep trough in the narrative arc of Gaudy Night. If it werent 40

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for Peters imminent arriva l, Harriet would live languor ing forever in a limbo of writers block and blocked options (Rich, 203). Peters Intervention Indeed, is not until Peter, the ubiqui tous and solution-bearing sleuth of a series of Sayerss novels, becom es presen t in the plot, that not only the mystery, but with it, all of the novels problems, are resolved. Peter identifies Harriets sex-role impasse, and her consequent repres sions of desire, as the source of her ineptitude and ambivalence as both detectiv e and (potential) love r. He offers a resolution by persuading Harriet not to attempt such socially compulsory but selfdestructiveand futilechoices, any longer. He suggests that she stand, with him, outside of the problematic binary structures in the social world which engender this choice. By communicating and collaborating with Harriet in her own artistic medium, on the relatively open and unregulated playing-field of writing, and by employing the devices of figurative language and wordplay to subvert meaning, Peter (with Harriet) uncovers a new model, a third way, synthesizing Harriets desires in a productive and engaged tension that is quintessentially human. Thus freed from her psychological stalemate, and with Peter, Harriet is finally able to see her way to the resolutions of the love and mystery plots (Gaudy 237). Peters heterodoxy becomes a voice of reason in a novel marked by divisions and taboos, a nd by the unifying power of his thought, openness, gameness, and courage overcome the conflicts of each narrative. 41

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Harriet finally inhab its her whole, human identity in autonomous partnership and peaceful accordwith him. Feminism As Humanism The thrust of Sayerss argument in Are Women Human? is that women ought, after all, to be accep ted as human beings; she wr ites that we are much too much inclined these days to divide people into permanent categories which outlast their usefulness for describing di fference (32). She points out that the fundamental difference between me n and women [] is not the only fundamental difference in the world ( 45). Sayerss attention to the significance, flexibility and transformative power of wo rds which will reveals itself in Peters close readings and rewritings is also on display in her nonfiction. Again, she seizes on definitions, writing that insofar as it tried to emphasize the difference and to make femina equal to vir, the first-wave feminist movement was misguided and doomed, since such equa tions actually lead to dangerous ideological fervor and polar ization (23). She writes: What is unreasonable and ir ritating is to assume that all ones tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs. That has been the very common error which men have fallen into about womena nd it is the error into which feminist women are, perhaps, a little inclined to fall about themselves. ( Are Women Human? 25) 42

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Ultim ately, Sayerss critique of communal feminist solidarity and separatism for political purposes is base d on her prominent, already-interposed ethos of self-fashioning i ndividualism, an ethos which specifically downplays sexual difference and privileges individual uniqueness and self-defined autonomy. To this effect, she writes: Though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition for their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come for each woman to insist more strongly on each womansand indeed each mansrequirements as an individual person (Are Women Human? 50). Sayerss feminist/humanist agenda is so prominently promoted in Gaudy Night that the novel reads as if she fic tionalized an argumentcomplete with thesis, antithesis, and synthesisof her own theoretical model. Peter Wimsey appears in the narrative as a tool for enacting Sayerss vision of nonhomogeneous self-fashioning, and as an argument against Harriets initial reasoning. In his deliberate refusal of tradition and redefiniti on of romance, Peter brings the theoretical possibi lity of a truly egalitarian heterosexuality to Harriet. In its parity, their relationship is not a si te of stillness nor peace in the sense of Harriets sonnets romanization; instea d, it becomes a live and fertile ground on which a marriage of opposites is consta ntly being consummated, and as such, 43

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a quarry of creative energy (W oolf 108). A profound artistic truth emerges for Harriet out of the tension, interaction and cooperation between opposite sexes. Not a man, but a miracle During the entire winter term at Sh rewsbury, in her self-divided and repressed psychological state, Harriet exhib its an extraordinary ability to feel two ways about one eventshe look[s] forward with irritation to the receipt of a letter on April 1st ( Gaudy 230, emphasis mine). In spite of her trepidation, Harriet already knows what th e letter will say; it is a marriage proposal (236). But when she receives the letter, it a stonishes her, not because of the any explicitly romantic content, which was expected, but for a passage in it where Peter refrain[s] from offers of help or advice and deliberately agknowledge[s] that [Harriet] ha[s] the right to run her ow n risks (237). Peter writes that he has learned by dark hints that Harriet is involved in some disagreeable and dangerous job of work at Oxford; this, of course, is Harriets investigation of the Shrewsbury poison pennings (236). He writes: I know that if you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid that they should. Whatever it is, you have my best wishes in it ( Gaudy 236). Harriet reads Peters attitude here as shockingly unconventional, for not one man in ten thousand would say [these things] to the woman he loved, or to any woman (236). The socially-prescri bed response from the normal male, Harriet believes, would be drawn from a pool of formulaic phrases similar to the one which helped Harriet articulate he r suspicion of the Shrewsbury dons, and 44

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would run som ething like this: Do be caref ul of yourself; or I hate to think of your being exposed to unpleasantness; or If only I could be there to protect you (236). Peters coldbl ooded response stops the c onventional expectations of the romance plot in their tracks, interrupting these w ith an unexpected, unscripted admission of equality (237). Hi s bold statement startles Harriet out of her defensiveness, opening her mind to a new form of possibility. If he conceived of marriage along those lines then the whole problem, Harriet realizes, would have to be reviewed in a new light (237). A new and heretofore unknown variable has upset a familiar mechanics of reasoning. Of course, snapping back to the unrelenting social reality of her time and place, Harriet decides that such a novel and re demptive conception seemed scarcely possible; to take such a line and stick to it, Peter would have to be not a man but a miracle ( Gaudy 236). But Harriets brisk, twelve -line response, in which she tersely thanks Peter for not telling [her] to go run away and play, warrants the only shift in Gaudy Night s perspective, from Harriets point of view to Peters ( Gaudy 236). The Oxford narrative slips overseas, picturing Peter as he reads her response while seated upon the terrace of a hotel overlooking the Pincian Gardens. (236). The response which astonishe[s] him so much that he rereads the letter four times; in the same mood of preoccupation and co mpulsion that caused the narrator to dwell over the Wilfred trouble, four h eavy-handed accounts are given of these readings (236). Obviously, Sayerss lingering over this scene signifies its importance as a plot point in the psychological narrative of Gaudy Night; in 45

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Peters readings and re-readings, we can lo cate th e initial stages of his cipherdecoding detection, as he applies his deduc tive skills to the mystery of Harriets psychology. The Sonnets Sestet When he arrives at Shrewsbury to he lp investigate the mystery of the poison pennings, Harriet hands Peter a dossier of compiled case notes, among which she accidentally encloses her sonne t portion. When he returns the dossier, Harriet sees that Peter Wimsey has cont ributed a sestet in deceptively neat script below the sprawling cursive of her octaves fi nal foot, to complete the sonnet. The sestet turns the meaning of Harriets unfinished text on its head in a metaphysical conceit reminiscent of John Donne: Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright, Poised on the Perilous point, in no lax bed May sleep, as tension in the verbrant core Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite, Staggering, we stoop, stoopi ng, fall dumb and dead, And dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more. ( Gaudy 395) With characteristic self-d eprecating humor, Peter leaves a comment below the sestet that characterizes his contribution as a ve ry conceited, metaphysical conclusion (395). And so it is: Peters sestet uses the figurative device of metaphysical conceit to transform Ha rriets beautiful, big, peaceful humming top into a whip top, and sleeping, as it were, upon compulsion (395). He 46

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em ploys an ingenious figurative logic to shift the meaning of Harriets restful octave upside-down in ju st six linesexposing, as Harriet perceives, the compulsory nature of her choice to come to Shrewsbury, mocking her violent enslavement by the very idea of peace. Peters verbal wizardry has a clear, provocative, and persuasive purpose; his sestet contains a concise argument in favor of the marriage which Harriet has so far refused to enter into. His use of musical imagery is aptthe idea of polyphony will recur in the novels final scene, at a Bach concert where Peter propos es marriage for the last time. To the strains of tenor and alto twined [] in a last companionable cadence, Peter excepts his relationship with Harriet from heteronormativity by remarking: anybody can have the harmony, if they will le ave us the counterpoint (490). By means of this metaphor, he intimates his wish (to extend his analogy) not to be a solo performer, merely supported by a b ackup instrument. He means, rather, to share his stage with another, distinct mu sician who will play in counterpoint to him; this kind of thing, he says at th e concert, is the body and soul of music, with the implication that both body and soul may, after all, be contained in the same melody (490). Peters metaphorical meanings are qu ite appallingly plain to Harriet, who understands that Peter means to finally effect, with her, a union of carnal physicality with intellect. She also detects hisand th e reader detects Sayerss personal philosophy in the sestet: drawing on physics imagery in the Einstein era, he suggests that life consists unavoidab ly of a balance of opposing forces (3956). If the intrinsic spin of these forces is resisted, the resister will necessarily fall 47

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dum b and dead as a metaphorically sile nced causality of her own lack of engagement (396). All [Peter] wanted, Harriet divines, was a kind of central stability, and he was apparently ready to take anything that came along, so long as it stimulated him to keep that precarious balance (396). This balance is the essence of the humanity that Sayers claims for all women. Accordingly, in the context of a spirited debate over the [in]compatibility of the demands of hearts and brains, Harriet maintains that she has got to choose; she does not think the compromise works ( Gaudy 65). Peter retorts with the same logic that informs his sonnet: you may say that you wont interfere with another persons soul, he says, but you do, merely by existing. The snag about it is the practic al difficulty, so to speak, of not existing. I mean, here we all are, you know, and what are we to do about it? (67). His idea is not to forget, or to be quiet, or to be spared things, or to stay put (395) It is, rather, to embrace the opposing forces, ideas and desire s in oneself and in the world, and to delight in the fight to keep ones footing. By stripping off his protections and revealing his thinking in such a candi d and deliberatively communicative way, Peter takes his earlier admission of equality a step further (395). The importance of the connections made a nd the ideas communicated between Peter and Harriet through the language of the sonnet becomes apparent when the narrator reports that for once, after reading the sonnet, Harriet goes to bed thinking more about another person than about herself (397). Her transgression of the tacit binary between self and othe r goes to prove that even minor poetry 48

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m ay have its practical uses (397). Through wordplay in a work of art, intellectual and emotional selves interact and merge. Solving Shrewsbury In the same weekend that Harriets f ear is dismantled by Peters explosion of the sex-role binary in his sestet, Pe ter solves the mystery at Shrewsbury. He does so by proving through analysis of another of Harriet s incomplete textsthe dossier of criminal disturbances and ot her evidence that she has compiled over the course of her two-semester stay at Shre wsburythat the Shrewsbury criminal is a working-class maid at the college whose patriarchal fanaticism got the better of her. The scouts emotional response to her academic husbands exposure by Shrewsbury don Miss De Vine as an intell ectually dishonest pl agiarist sends her on a murderous rampage against the w hole, undifferentiated community of Shrewsbury scholars. Following Dean Mart ins formula precisely, Annie classes the dons together as both grotesquely unw omanly. and also as women unfit for any form of intellectual work. The monstrous chimera of the repressed intellectual woman is shot down, and A nniethe poison penis sent harmlessly to a hospital. Peter shows that the my stery was only mystifying because of what it suggested to Harriets mind. With Pe ters heroic act of detection, Sayers presents a very neat, very round dnoue ment for Harriets psychological stress with respect to the Shrewsburans: it is alle viated in this comfortable (if classist) solution, restoring Harriets clar ity and unity of mind to her. 49

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Writing Wilfred The collabo ration that cements the relationship between Harriet and Peter is that which restores Harriets profes sionand her means of expressionto her. By aiding her in the reconstruction of the problematic Wilfred character from Twixt Wind and Water, Peter enables Harriet to begin writing the literary masterpiece that is her artistic destiny In the unusual, indispensible circumstance of Peters willingness to supply this ar tistic momentum, the sex-role dichotomy, which would have Peter acting as a patria rchal suppressor of Harriets uniquely feminine voice, is effectively exploded. Harriet recognizes that her professional, artistic world does not need to lie on the opposite side of her romance with Peter, and that in fact, the two might complement and reinforce one another in a form of symbiosis. When in the course of conversation Ha rriet tells Peter of her writers block and describes her Wilfred problem, Peter confirms Harriets suspicion that the Wilfred character lacks psychological verisimilitude: why should the character suspect his dear lover of murder on such paltry evidence as a misplaced handkerchief? Wilfreds interpretation of the evidence is irra tional, hysterical, and unaccountable. To solve the problem, Peter suggests that Harriet bestow Wilfred with a social-sexual pathology to account for his portentous reading of the signs (Haack). Specifically, as a result of his upbringing and events in his past, Wilfred should be characterized by a gloomy conviction that love is sinful in itself and he should, moreover, be c onvinced that anything pleasant must be wrong, Peter instructs ( Gaudy 333). 50

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Peter and H arriets dialog about how to construct such a fiction shifts subtly into a discussion of Harriets own problems in the social-sexual world, which Peter believes can be mediated th rough the brave completion of a work of art. When Harriet complains that Wilf reds socio-sexual pathology might throw her neatly constructed plot out of bala nce, Peter instructs her to abandon the jigsaw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change ( Gaudy 333). When Harriet expresse s doubt that such a project might go too near the bone and hurt like hell, Peter asks, hypothetically: w hat would it matter, if it made a good book? (333). Using this figure of speech, Peter suggests that Harriet develop the fictional figure of W ilfred as a tool for working through the fears and repressions that stymie her own developmen t. Wilfreds problems resemble Harriets own, so her narrati on of his emotional responses must be drawn from Harriets autobiographical sens ibilities. As in the letter-exchange, Harriet is taken abackby [Peters] ru thless attitude about her work: the protective male? He was being about as pr otective as a can-opener! (333). But by the end of Gaudy Night, Harriet reports that she is really working at Wilfred; he has become almost human (498). Her sense of accomplishment when she finally publishes the book [she] is capable of writing is accompanied by the shrewd knowledge that the ability to narra te came, not by limiting herself to the gendered social constraints of the prof ession, but through openness to all things, induced by the winning support of not a man but a miracle (237). With gratitude that she is fina lly able to express, Harr iet dedicates her publishable version of Twixt Wind and Water to Peter, who made Wilfre d what he is (498). 51

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Marriage and Synthesis We have seen that Harriets artist ic output communicates her state of beingthe work of writing is in separable from Harriets happiness, and from her actualized self. When Peters contributions and collaborations prove useful in her novels, it is the final test of the relationships merit. He has interfered with her soul, but against all odds, Harriet has b ecome a better, more unified writerand personfor it. Peter understands that Ha rriets formal dedication in the novel Twixt Wind and Water is also an intimate signal of their relationships evolution to maturity; when Harriet informs him of it, Peter stammers out the emotional truth of the moment: My dearif anything I have said, if you have let me come as far as your work and your life,Here! I think Id better remove myself before I do anything foolishI shall be honored to go down to posterity in the turn-up of Wilfreds trouser (450). The divide between art and life is th e final binary to be torn down by Sayers in Gaudy Night If the measure of Harri ets successfully secured autonomy is her ability to write better myster ies, then it is Peterthat other object of her desirewho provides her with the k ey to this desired object. Lord Peter Wimseys great triumph is revealing to the oppressed Harriet that the conflicts apparent in her life and work are not stri ctly problems to be solved like a math equation or a murder mystery; they are inst ead forces to be balanced and held in tension for more artful outcomes. T hus Peter handily delivers a more dynamic 52

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dnouem ent than one might expect of Gaudy Night leaving Harriet with the sense that she has achieved the greatest sa tisfaction, the most complete happiness as an artist, and as a human being (Woolf 101). 53

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Conclusion This is a ll very well for Harriet Vane, but her fate is certainly not that of every woman in her milieu. Gaudy Night presents the pos sibility of the intervention of not a man, but a miracl e in the life of a woman struggling against the limits and confinements of a real world of patriarchy ( Gaudy 237). It is only through Peter Wimseys unprecedented contributions and suggestions, and by his elective choice to fac ilitate and support Harriets growth, that Harriets various impasses are overcome in the end. Lord Peter is a man empowered by the patriarchal order, and his choice to stand outside of its imperatives and propose an alternative model for his own life, and Harriets, is exceptional. In Gaudy Night, Harriet reaches her artistic potential and gains a form of autonomy she didnt even realize she was missing, a ll through Peters willingness to be a good and equal companion. But even in her happiness, Ha rriet is aware that by having Peter for counsel and companionship, she is unfai rly provided with advantages which more deserving people desired in vain ( Gaudy 48). In the end, Sayerss fiction is just that, a fantasy with a mind to the future promised by first-wave feminism; that is, a future of perfec tly unproblematic humanism. In contemporary fiction, as in life in 2009, we continue to grapple with the same problemswhich, as Sayers knew, are not banished as soon as they are apprehendedand we continue the struggle to that end. Harriet Vanes story is entirely redemptive. But the details of its resolution might be assumed to make female readers of Gaudy Night who share Harriets set of concerns and prerogatives feel alienated: what hope might the 54

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average wom an cherish for a fate as happy as Harriets? The reader comes away with the impression that Harriet would ha ve remained strande d, self-divided, her artistic potential unrealized, in the binary limitations of her social time and place, if not for an incisive intervention by th e champion-detective of so many Sayers mysteries, Lord Peter Wimsey. Peters unprecedented intervention places the narrativewhich is drawn dangerously n ear to the threat of irresolution by Harriets psychic unsettlingsquarely in line with the conventions of any generic romantic plot; Gaudy Night ends with the promise that Harriet and Peter will carry out the ultimate unifying act, the most airtight resolution possible in their context: a marriage. In spite of the convent ional romantic resolutions it yields, we have seen that Peters eleventh-hour intervention in Harriets life and work is constitutive of a true transformation in th e psychological plot of Gaudy Night Peters fantasyintervention sets the lovers down a path of close, intricate inter-communications, generating change in their heterose xual interface. The communications, collaborations, and exchanges of the burgeoning couple bring the problematic implications of heteronormative roman ce, received from the social world as necessary and implicit, into conversation. This allows for a negotiation toward a more tenable heterosexuality between self -fashioning subjects. The figurative, linguistic playing-field in which th ese exchanges occur allows for the interrogation and interrupti on of certain prepossessing assumptions; following a series of these troubleshooting sessions, the romance is reconstituted in a new formone that requires no s acrifice of Harriets artist ic autonomy, and which, in 55

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fact, enhances her creative output. B y consciously encountering, complicating, and overturning romantic conventions, Harriet and Peter arrive at a broader understanding of the possible meanings of heterosexual romance. This understanding loosens Harriets anxieties about threats to he r artistic identity posed by such romance, and allows for a (reconceived) romance to be consecratedin this way, the plot settles it self. But this resolution, derived from the radical commitment of two lovers to carving out a non-patriarchal niche for their partnership, seems like a rare, if not an unlikely, one. Through the fiction of Harriets psychological narrative, Sayers contributes a detailed best-c ase scenario solution for the specific sexual problem she ascribes to Harriet (a nd by extension, to all of the women in the Shrewsbury milieu). This hypothetical event heralds the birth of a self -actualized, fully creative female identity while also reesta blishing the utopian id eals of the timeless romance. This occurs in a setting in which those ideals were understood to be severely challenged and disr upted by first-wave feminisms assertion of womens autonomy and demands for professional empowerment, which, in institutions like Shrewsbury, was understood to preclude he terosexual engagement Both of these outcomes hinge, as we have seen, on the en try of a great man, in this case, the benevolent Lord Peter Wimsey. Such an intervention, like many of the contrivances in Sayerss detective novels, is an imagined event, a story e nding with a predictabl e adherence to the romance-genre formula that drives it forward. As a work of nonfiction, Are Women Human? proposes no such ra dical re-negotiation of terms and 56

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resurrection of rom ance. It can only urge its contemporary female readership to stick to [their] work, since the figure of Lord Peter Wimsey, who offers a seductive second chance at heterosexualit y for professional, intellectual women like Harriet, is, in fact, a fictiona n exceptional modelnot a man, but a miracleand, as Harriet herself observes, one that cannot be available to every woman. Sayerss argument for a radica l humanism, advanced in Are Women Human?, is embodied by Peter in Gaudy Night But Peters action, though it represents an admirable model of indivi dual behavior, and th ough it resolves the personal and psychological struggles faced by Harriet Vane, does not eradicate the social conditions which constitute d those problemsconditions which must be assumed to persist for the other women of Gaudy Night as, perhaps, for Sayerss female readers. Even in the fictional world of Gaudy Night Peter Wimsey represents a special circumstance; one exceptional, condi tional solution to what clearly is for Sayers (as for her contemporaries) a preoccupying social and sexual problem. In this thesis, I examined a specific set of socio-sexual problems, which Dorothy Sayers tackles in Are Women Human? and Gaudy Night and which, as we saw, Virginia Woolf and several more recent pr ominent feminist thinkers also discuss at length. These problems are all related to the notion of the contrariety of new, professionally engaged ideas of female productivity (especially professional writing) and traditional ideas of femininity, defined by relationships to men, and therefore tied to reproductive and domestic life. Harriet Vanes social and psychic struggleswhich are, moreover, drawn fr om her social worldhave so far been 57

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characterized as singular ly situated events. Gaudy Night is d eliberately set in a tenuous environment, where and when firstwave feminist debate was active. So far I have focused on Harriet and Peters microcosmic, individual, self-fashioning encounter with these problems, and have, moreover, located their struggle firmly inside of the unique, transitioning British first-wave feminist culture. It is clear, however, that Harriets problem is not unique; as Sayers writes in Gaudy Night she belongs to a class of women who are cursed with both hearts and brainsthat is to say, all womenand th e details of her str uggle are part of a vast literature documenting similar a nxieties experienced not only by other characters in contemporary British fic tion, but, more interestingly by far, by several profoundly similar charactersfic tional female authorswho face nearly the same struggle at remote historic intervals. Because of its uncanny intertextual resonances with Sayerss work, it will be instructive to briefly compare Harriets story to those of two characters in A.S. Byatts 1990 novel Possession: A Romance The same anxieties that plagued Harriet Vane are present in accounts of id entity crises in eras both preceding and following Harriets specific cultural and hi storical situation; these attest to the rather persistent nature of such probl ems in England, with reference to the evolution of feminist thought there. In the novel, Cristabel LaMotte and Maud Bailey are professional female writers living in the mid-nineteenth a nd late-twentieth centuries, respectively, each of whom experiences anxiety amounti ng to severe ego-fragmentation in the attempt to guard her profession agains t the threat of her own heterosexual 58

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desirethe satisfaction of which (by engaging in rom ance with a man) is perceived in each case to threaten her au tonomy as a writer. Like Harriet at Shrewsbury, both deliberately confine themselves to a life of conscientious female-identified separatism for the polit ical purpose of remaining professionally autonomous, in order to write. From the beginning of Possession, the pre-feminist-era poetess Christabel LaMotte espouses in her private life the id eals of female-ident ified separatism for the sake of a creating specifically fema le artworks. To this end, Cristabel cohabits with another female artist, with whom she shares a conscious dedication to female-identified solidarity and separatism and an ambiguous sexual relationship that certainly belongs on Richs lesbian continuum. Cristabels partner in Possession, Blanche, makes a definite st atement of this prerogative in an excerpt from her diary, which is give n in the text, as follows: [We] have tried, Blanche writes, to live according to certain beliefs about the possibility, for independent single women, of living useful and fully human lives, in each others company, and without recourse to help from the outside world, or men (3330). This is a philosophy which Cristabel and Blanche advance for themselves, on their own; it is imagined by the two artists as a tenuous and deliberate social experiment, where failure is represented by any deviation from this way of life. Their separatist life is characterized as a defensive measure of female creative and intellectual solidarit y against the hostile imperatives of a patriarchal social world. As in Gaudy Night Cristabel and Blanches separatist hypothesis is defeated, with the illusion, at least, of an utter failure, by the 59

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move ment of the narrative in a hetero sexual and romantic direction. When Cristabel becomes involved in a hetero sexual love affair with fellow poet Randolph Henry Ash, she must implicitly br eak the ranks of the fragile, female artistic and emotional fellowship that she so intentionally carved with Blanche. The consequences, however, are shattering: as a result of Cristabels defection, Blanche commits suicide. This betray al complicates the narrative of such defections, bringing the theme that inspir ed Harriets guilt ab out her abandonment of Shrewsbury ideals to a hi gher pitch, and raising questi ons about what loyalty to feminism and female-identified projects really means. Ultimately, in Possession, as in Gaudy Night problematic, heteronormative, power-dynamic-infused romantic expectations are collaboratively interrogated in the context of critical, reform-minded, antipatriarchaland, importantly, ex ceptionalcouples. Again, as in Gaudy Night, these negotiations are accomplished on the level of wordplay and manipulations of figurative language, in textual collaborations between partners with an explicit interest in overturning heterosexual and sex-role norms. These linguistic and literary tools and strategies prove useful in Possession for subverting conventional models and expect ations. Byatt fictionalizes a renegotiation of the heterosexual social c ontract, where by generating new frames of reference, the couples at the center of the novel consecrate actual, working heterosexual relationships which, like Pete r and Harriets, consciously evade the sex-role expectations and power dynamics of heteronor mativity. These allow the women (and the men) to carry on with their professional writing. 60

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The fact that these s trategies are usedand largely workin Possession is instructive because Possessions stories are set at such remote historical intervals, especially with respect to the evolution of feminist thought. Byatt writes in 1990 about the same social pr oblems which Sayers, Woolf, and firstwave feminist reformers had addresse dapparently exhaustivelyin the early part of the twentieth century. Her heroines, a Victoria n woman trying to work out her artistic liberation in an age before wh at is understood as the major tenets of feminist discourse had even been es tablished, and a modern-day feminist academic, are neatly equidistant from Harriets historical moment. But, uncannily, they experience the same struggle, and consider similar escapes from heteronormativity as those presented in Sayerss fiction and nonfiction. Maud and Cristabels stories are interesting for their similarity to Harriets ostensibly distinct experience of anxiety at the deci sive moment of first-wave of feminism; it is remarkable that many of the details of her identity crisis are repeated in these womens experiences. In addition to being a leaping-off point for intertextual study and historical analysis, Byatts novel testifies to the rele vance of Sayerss vision today, and also to the unresolved nature of Gaudy Nights project. Possession offers a vision not merely of the problems persistence and of the parallels present in its various manife stations, but also of its evolution over time. By including similar narratives set at such remote intervals of time, Byatt provides perspective in Possession for the problem at the center of this thesis project, that is, Harriets difficult choi ce. She seems to argue that in any patriarchal culture, the problem must be encountered anew and solved 61

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collaboratively and individually in its unique context; the same sort of negotiation that Harriet conducts with Lord Peter W imsey must be re-embarked upon by each couple. Byatt mirrors Sayers when sh e places an emphasis on writers and on the negotiations of interpersonal and social problems through texts. Byatt suggests that through textual and biological inheri tance over generations, women as a collective can progress, in a piecemeal a nd piddling fashion, toward less mutually exclusive, more fully human, combined professional and romantic lives. Byatts vision of inheritance thus rises to the foreground as a way of apprehending the problem framed so many decades ago by the visionary Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, Byatt does not abandon the idea of self-fashioning individualism that Sayers championed when she insisted on equati ng feminism with humanism. Both Cristabel and Maud must strugg le, in text and in life, toward her own increasingly complex romantic dnouement. 62

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Works Cited Anderson, Bonnie S. and Zinsser, Judith P. A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to th e Present. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Byatt, A.S. Possession: A Romance. New York: Random House, 1990. Haack, Susan. After My Own Heart: Dorothy L. Sayerss Feminism. New Criterion 19.9 (2001): 23-33. Kenney, Catherine. The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. Kent: Kent State UP, 1990. McFadden, Marya. Queerness at Sh rewsbury: Homoerotic Desire in Gaudy Night Modern Fiction Studies 46.2 (2000): 355-378. Rich, Adrienne. Compulsory Hetero sexuality and Lesbian Existence. Culture, Society and Sexuality. 1986. Ed Richard Guy Parker and Peter Aggleton. London: UCL Press, 1999. 199-205. Sayers, Dorothy. Are Women Human?: Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society. Detroit: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005. ---. Gaudy Night. 1936. New York: Harper, 2006. ---. Have His Carcase. 1932. New York: Harper, 2006. ---. Strong Poison. 1931. New York: Harper, 2006.VAN TUYL Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. 1792. Ed. Carol H. Poston. New York: Norton, 1975. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of Ones Own. New York: Harbinger, 1929. 63

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