More on Gaudy Night

I finished Gaudy Night a couple days ago, but time to sit at the computer and write about it was scarce this week, in between subbing and practices, birthdays and snack making, and I really should be heading to bed right now, but I wanted to jot a few ramblings. The dreamy spell of reading it still lingers. Many of the allusions and inside jokes I missed, but every so often some quotidian event occurs that recalls a question raised in or by the book – the kids playing chess (Harriet’s poor antique chessmen! Why is the tragedy of their destruction almost as horrifying – if not as horrifying - as an actual murder? Do beautiful works of art have a right to life?), the celebration of World Marriage Day (Is that companionate marriage of equals that Harriet desires the best model, and if so, how to maintain it?), subbing and working last semester (and failing to be rehired this semester) (can a woman’s heart be equally devoted to scholarship and family life?)


In addition to the theme of marriage, the characters reflect often on principles. Since most of the characters are academics, these reflections don’t come across as overly heavy-handed, even in a detective novel, but they do come across as perhaps a little dated. Do people sit around and discuss compromising principles anymore?  Miss Edwards makes the provocative remark that “you can’t carry through any principle without doing violence to someone,” a viewpoint that seems more relative today - in a relativistic culture.

Peter replies that “if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of quite unparalleled sort – and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.”

Isn't there plenty of evidence that our dedication to principles has only lessened?

Another theme revolves around the question of whether married women should work at the college, if all the dons should be celibate.  My familiarity to Sayers prior to this novel extended to “The Lost Tools of Learning,” The Man Born to Be King, and Unnatural Death.  I also knew she was a friend of C. S. Lewis, so I was a little surprised at the strength of the feminist views expressed in this book.

One of the female dons, Miss Barton, has written a book that decries the Nazi proganda that women should be relegated to kinder, kirche, and kuche - children, church and kitchen. Connecting this viewpoint to the Nazis is cause for squirming, since so many conservative Christians believe that the church wants women there also. Obviously, one could counter that many women saints were women of action and position – queens, abbesses, doctors, and founders of hospitals and charitable organizations, as well as mothers. And yet, the balancing act is difficult, as illustrated by the situations of Annie Wilson and Mrs. Goodwin, the widow with children in the book who works at the college, but gets called away to tend to a child with measles. The other dons hurt their feelings in the discussion with Lord Peter about sticking to principles, because both of them are now single mothers after having been wed to disappointing husbands.

Annie’s emotional display at the end unveils an image of marriage that is everything what Harriet fears – a marriage of unequals, probably full of resentments, between a couple who sacrifice principles out of a false understanding of love. Harriet claims that “if anybody did a dishonorable thing and then said he did it for one's sake it would be the last insult.” The dean suggests that only educated women feel that way. Evidently, unlike Harriet, Annie believed her husband loved her because he sacrificed his integrity, but her unnatural resentment suggests a crippled mind.

Certainly plenty of daily news events suggest that even many educated people don't feel that way anymore. Love and romance trump integrity in most movies.  If this book were made into a movie, I wonder if viewers would have much sympathy for Harriet's hesitations about marrying Lord Peter.  Sexual attraction and money would be plenty to recommend him as a good love interest.  How would a movie maker play up Harriet's fear of compromising principles? Are principles now relegated to being just forms of mind games? Or am I misguided in my guess at the number of people who live quiet lives devoted to maintaining intellectual and moral integrity?

Perhaps the current popularity, among home schoolers at least, of Sayer’s ideas in “The Lost Tools of Learning,” will inspire greater devotion to principles and integrity.

On Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night

A wonderful distraction from pressing realities has been reading Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night. Set in Oxford before the second World War (interbellum?), this mystery centers around criminal action taking place at a fictional women’s college, Shrewesbury. The main character isn’t Sayers’ famous Peter Wimsey, but his love interest Harriet Vane. Someone has been leaving crude and insulting letters directed at the unmarried women academics, destroying gowns and dissertations, and causing havoc in the women’s library. Harriet is called in to uncover the culprit, but I’m 300 pages in, and she hasn’t made much progress. Lord Peter has just arrived on the scene, and they are punting on the Isis in their white linen. Sigh.

Though the pace is slow, the diction is rich, and I’m savoring it. Reading this novel is almost as good as a little vacation to that time and place. (I’m also resurrecting memories of Oxford from a brief visit my mother and I made 14 years ago, when I was 8 months pregnant with my first, to see my sister, who was studying for a semester there. Spring was just arriving, and we spent about a week touring around the Cotswolds in a little micra car and wandering about Oxford. Poking around the museum of natural history was a highlight, as was an afternoon concert. Three days after our flight back home, which was Newport, Rhode Island, at the time, my water broke while we were at church in Boston, and our first born entered the world five weeks early. Happily, he’s a healthy lad who turns 14 next month.)


I have my suspicions about the identity of the criminal, but I’m a little unsure about the romance – will Harriet finally accept Peter’s proposals of marriage or will he stop proposing or will she remain married to her work, writing detective novels? The compatibility of marriage and career is an interesting theme running through the book. None of the female dons is married, but the reasons for not marrying are varied: some are adamantly opposed to women academics marrying, some pity the married, one seems to be a manhater. The “poison-pen” is assumed to be one of the faculty because one of the letters was in Latin, and the suggestion is that celibacy has made this person bitter and malevolent, or at least that is what the college is afraid the outside world will assume.

Harriet has declined Peter’s marriage proposals not only because she apparently was involved in some romantic scandal in an earlier book, but also because she fears an unequal marriage, in which either her career or her husband’s will have to be sacrificed to uphold the marriage. She worries that spouses are doomed to envy or resent the other. She and one of the suspected dons have a conversation about how marriage is a job: “The worst of being a job,’ said Miss de Vine, “is the devastating effect it has on one’s character. I’m very sorry for the person who is somebody else’s job; he (or she, of course) ends by devouring or being devoured, either of which is bad for one.”

If this were the only view presented, I’d despair of Harriet ever accepting Peter’s proposal, but Miss de Vine also says “though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.”

An interesting side trail: I was reading somewhere that the attraction to vampire romances is rooted in the sublimated desire to be consumed by one’s beloved, a sort of twisted desire for unity.


So not only am I trying to put together clues about the identity of the perpetrator, but also clues about Dorothy Sayers’ view of marriage. She has one character say that marriage makes you fat, another is proof that marriage causes premature aging. One epigraph from Richard Burton praises virginity. But then there are a few bright examples of marriage: the archaeologist and her husband who complement each other so well, and Harriet is greatly flattered by a proposal of marriage from an undergraduate she befriended. And her feelings are obviously conflicted about Lord Peter. She seems to be afraid they would be unequally yoked, but it is clear that Lord Peter would view her as a fellow creature, not a job, and would allow her to continue writing and solving crimes.

I’m eager to read more, but I'm glad the book is a thick 468 pages…