DLS: Gaudy Night 2
Aug. 26th, 2003 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyAnd you thought I'd never do it.
Previous DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, and Ralph Lynn, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, media whimsies, music, aspidistra & ampelopsis, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1 & 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors 1, 2, & 3, Gaudy Night.
Spoilers.
I think this may be the last post on Gaudy Night, because so much of what the book does isn't anything I feel the need to analyze. It's there, and it's beautiful, and it's as clear as day. With the earlier books, especially Have His Carcase, I was taking them apart to see how they worked, or, when they failed to work, what had gone wrong. But with GN how it works is so beautifully clear, like the fugue that Peter and Harriet listen to at the end. It doesn't need explaining.
But, as a companion to my last post about gender, I think there does need to be a post on class. Because it's a problem in the book. Less so a problem with the book than it is in some of her other novels (Busman's Honeymoon springs regrettably to mind), but something that the characters spend a lot of time thinking about.
Part of it is a dilemma familiar to anyone who's had anything to do with feminism in the last twenty years or so: the fact that the experience of white, middle-class, well-educated American women is not the experience of all women. The experience of Harriet and the members of the SCR and women like Phoebe Tucker is not the experience of all women, even in the confined world of GN. Annie Wilson is the most obvious example, but there's also Miss Newland and Miss Hudson (who is suspected of being the Practical Joker because she comes from a more common background and thus is assumed to have a more coarse sense of humor) and a few of the other students, as well as the scouts--and Catherine Freemantle Bendick, who has married so egregiously down in the world. Harriet (and Sayers behind her) is aware of the struggles on the rungs beneath her own, but very little effort is made to try to enter sympathetically into that struggle. The only SCR member who protests the idea that the Practical Joker must be lower-class is Miss Barton, and it should be noted that (a.) ultimately Miss Barton is wrong, and (b.) she is one of the least sympathetic characters in the book. And no one pays much attention to her views in any event.
The one place where class is foregrounded as an issue is with Annie Wilson, but even here, the issue tends to get lost. Arthur Robinson made a gross mésalliance (for which, let us also note, no one in the book shows the slightest sympathy--it's categorized simply and without nuance as a mistake), and the wrongness of that (as with the wrongness of Mrs. Bendick's marriage) is emphasized by Annie's failure, again and again, to understand the world her husband came from. Annie's rampant misogyny is one of the most horrifying things in the entire Sayers canon, her brainwashed belief that women should leave intellectual jobs to men, and the book portrays this both as a kind of madness and as a betrayal. If one great point of GN is the loyalty of the Shrewsbury community to itself, then Annie is the antimatter version of that, the woman who will betray all other women (including her daughters) for the ideology of masculine superiority.
She is also, of course, by virtue of her class, associated with the traditionally "feminine" occupations of cleaning (as a scout) and child-minding (her obsessive concern for her daughters). The book would be making a very different statement if Annie's campaign of terror were the result of resentment on her own behalf--which would certainly not be an implausible reaction to being treated like a piece of furniture by the "learned ladies"--but Sayers, whose gender politics are relatively progressive, is a social conservative (and nowhere will that be more clear than in Busman's Honeymoon where the stagnant nature of English society is viewed as a bulwark of security and pride). Annie's oppression is fundamentally constructed as a gendered oppression; if anything, the fact that it is represented through a lower-class character tends to mitigate it rather than intensifying it. Annie is misguided because she's ill-educated, ill-educated because she's only a landlady's daughter. The SCR also suggests fairly explicitly (and is nowhere contradicted) that Annie's inability to understand the concept of integrity--her inability to understand why what Arthur Robinson did was fundamentally and inarguably wrong--is linked to her class-origins as well.
Class is a problem which the book brings up, and circles uneasily, and finally finds itself unable to resolve, except via education. We understand that Newland and Hudson and the other girls of less privileged backgrounds are not going to become Annie Wilsons; they've found their entrée into the academic world, which, if not classless in the purest sense, at least shows much less interest in class origins than other slices of society which Sayers shows us (Peter's sister-in-law Helen is the egregious example). GN shows Sayers's awareness of class as a problem, but not (I think) any sense in which she was able or willing to imagine a solution.
Class snobbery is part of Sayers, just as the casual anti-Semitism is, and if you want to read and love her (as I do), you have to make allowances for the author's own perceptions and mindset saturating her secondary world. GN is much more a book about love than it is a book about class, and looked at purely from that programmatic point of view, there's no reason to complain about class. Annie represents the dangerous kind of person who makes another person their job, the person ruled by passion: the exact thing Harriet is terrified of becoming. (And, indeed, in BH, there is a moment where Harriet teeters on the brink of becoming Annie Wilson, but she drags herself back.) Peter, too, is arguably making a mésalliance (as Harriet herself is keenly and painfully aware), but the incredibly articulate nature of their love seems to be what saves them from disaster. Peter and Harriet talk to each other--which may be what makes them so enduringly attractive. Annie Wilson's husband clearly didn't talk to her about his intellectual life; Catherine Bendick can't talk to her husband. Violet Cattermole and Reggie Pomfret begin to come to a real understanding by talking (albeit about Harriet). Love is communication, says Sayers, and with that I have no fault to find.
There will be a post on Busman's Honeymoon, because I at least want to talk about some of the difference between the novel and the play. Suggestions of other topics are, as always, welcome--either for BH or GN.
Previous DLS posts: Concerning Lord Peter Wimsey, and Ralph Lynn, the Hon. Freddy Arbuthnot, Miss Katharine Alexandra Climpson, media whimsies, music, aspidistra & ampelopsis, Whose Body?, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club 1 & 2, Strong Poison, The Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7, Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors 1, 2, & 3, Gaudy Night.
Spoilers.
I think this may be the last post on Gaudy Night, because so much of what the book does isn't anything I feel the need to analyze. It's there, and it's beautiful, and it's as clear as day. With the earlier books, especially Have His Carcase, I was taking them apart to see how they worked, or, when they failed to work, what had gone wrong. But with GN how it works is so beautifully clear, like the fugue that Peter and Harriet listen to at the end. It doesn't need explaining.
But, as a companion to my last post about gender, I think there does need to be a post on class. Because it's a problem in the book. Less so a problem with the book than it is in some of her other novels (Busman's Honeymoon springs regrettably to mind), but something that the characters spend a lot of time thinking about.
Part of it is a dilemma familiar to anyone who's had anything to do with feminism in the last twenty years or so: the fact that the experience of white, middle-class, well-educated American women is not the experience of all women. The experience of Harriet and the members of the SCR and women like Phoebe Tucker is not the experience of all women, even in the confined world of GN. Annie Wilson is the most obvious example, but there's also Miss Newland and Miss Hudson (who is suspected of being the Practical Joker because she comes from a more common background and thus is assumed to have a more coarse sense of humor) and a few of the other students, as well as the scouts--and Catherine Freemantle Bendick, who has married so egregiously down in the world. Harriet (and Sayers behind her) is aware of the struggles on the rungs beneath her own, but very little effort is made to try to enter sympathetically into that struggle. The only SCR member who protests the idea that the Practical Joker must be lower-class is Miss Barton, and it should be noted that (a.) ultimately Miss Barton is wrong, and (b.) she is one of the least sympathetic characters in the book. And no one pays much attention to her views in any event.
The one place where class is foregrounded as an issue is with Annie Wilson, but even here, the issue tends to get lost. Arthur Robinson made a gross mésalliance (for which, let us also note, no one in the book shows the slightest sympathy--it's categorized simply and without nuance as a mistake), and the wrongness of that (as with the wrongness of Mrs. Bendick's marriage) is emphasized by Annie's failure, again and again, to understand the world her husband came from. Annie's rampant misogyny is one of the most horrifying things in the entire Sayers canon, her brainwashed belief that women should leave intellectual jobs to men, and the book portrays this both as a kind of madness and as a betrayal. If one great point of GN is the loyalty of the Shrewsbury community to itself, then Annie is the antimatter version of that, the woman who will betray all other women (including her daughters) for the ideology of masculine superiority.
She is also, of course, by virtue of her class, associated with the traditionally "feminine" occupations of cleaning (as a scout) and child-minding (her obsessive concern for her daughters). The book would be making a very different statement if Annie's campaign of terror were the result of resentment on her own behalf--which would certainly not be an implausible reaction to being treated like a piece of furniture by the "learned ladies"--but Sayers, whose gender politics are relatively progressive, is a social conservative (and nowhere will that be more clear than in Busman's Honeymoon where the stagnant nature of English society is viewed as a bulwark of security and pride). Annie's oppression is fundamentally constructed as a gendered oppression; if anything, the fact that it is represented through a lower-class character tends to mitigate it rather than intensifying it. Annie is misguided because she's ill-educated, ill-educated because she's only a landlady's daughter. The SCR also suggests fairly explicitly (and is nowhere contradicted) that Annie's inability to understand the concept of integrity--her inability to understand why what Arthur Robinson did was fundamentally and inarguably wrong--is linked to her class-origins as well.
Class is a problem which the book brings up, and circles uneasily, and finally finds itself unable to resolve, except via education. We understand that Newland and Hudson and the other girls of less privileged backgrounds are not going to become Annie Wilsons; they've found their entrée into the academic world, which, if not classless in the purest sense, at least shows much less interest in class origins than other slices of society which Sayers shows us (Peter's sister-in-law Helen is the egregious example). GN shows Sayers's awareness of class as a problem, but not (I think) any sense in which she was able or willing to imagine a solution.
Class snobbery is part of Sayers, just as the casual anti-Semitism is, and if you want to read and love her (as I do), you have to make allowances for the author's own perceptions and mindset saturating her secondary world. GN is much more a book about love than it is a book about class, and looked at purely from that programmatic point of view, there's no reason to complain about class. Annie represents the dangerous kind of person who makes another person their job, the person ruled by passion: the exact thing Harriet is terrified of becoming. (And, indeed, in BH, there is a moment where Harriet teeters on the brink of becoming Annie Wilson, but she drags herself back.) Peter, too, is arguably making a mésalliance (as Harriet herself is keenly and painfully aware), but the incredibly articulate nature of their love seems to be what saves them from disaster. Peter and Harriet talk to each other--which may be what makes them so enduringly attractive. Annie Wilson's husband clearly didn't talk to her about his intellectual life; Catherine Bendick can't talk to her husband. Violet Cattermole and Reggie Pomfret begin to come to a real understanding by talking (albeit about Harriet). Love is communication, says Sayers, and with that I have no fault to find.
There will be a post on Busman's Honeymoon, because I at least want to talk about some of the difference between the novel and the play. Suggestions of other topics are, as always, welcome--either for BH or GN.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-08-27 05:14 am (UTC)What's nagging at me now is the comparative triangulation (quadrulation?) between Harriet Vane, Catherine Freemantle, Annie Wilson, and Lady Mary Wimsey. Vane and Wilson marry up; Freemantle and Wimsey marry down. Catherine Freemantle's unhappiness is put in very deliberate contrast to Harriet's choices, as is Annie's morbid passion, whereas Lady Mary and her domestic bliss go almost unmentioned in the last two books of the series.
Like Georgette Heyer (another intensely class-conscious writer), Sayers considers it more acceptable for the bourgeoise (since it cannot be said that Parker improves his own class standing by his marriage to Mary--another piece of accurate observation, I think) to marry into the nobility than for the working class to marry into the bourgeoisie. The discussion about children in BH make that clear ("Your brother married his own cousin ..."). And we don't have quite enough data to factor intelligence into the equation. (Intelligence isn't quite the right word; I think I may mean something more like the drive for knowledge. But let "intelligence" stand for now.) Peter and Harriet's marriage is successful because they are both ruthlessly intelligent. Mary and Charles's marriage is arguably successful because both of them are second-rate intelligences. Annie married a man smarter than herself; Catherine Freemantle married a man, if not stupider, then definitely less realized in his intellectual potential than herself. But these two unhappy examples correlate with the bourgeois/intellectual class marrying down. The only intelligent, knowledge-seeking members of the lower classes we see are the girls who are working their way up at Shrewsbury; if romantic love is in their future, it's a long way off.
Self-educated members of the lower class get gentle mockery throughout Sayers's work. The best example is Superintendant Kirk in BH, whose reading, and mental use of that reading, has the air of a primitive artist, like Grandma Moses. Harriet and Peter treat him kindly and let him join their game--and value him sincerely for his good qualities--but both they and the narrative condescend to him intellectually.
I've lost track of my point, so I'm going to stop babbling. For now.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 03:31 am (UTC)Miss de Vine said she thought there was too much of it on both sides (in Busman's Honeymoon as well as Gaudy Night), but the Dean said she knew couples who were stupid as owls and thought all the time, so it probably didn't matter either way.
And where does Miss Schuster-Slatt and her eugenics come into it?
no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 04:16 am (UTC)My guess is that Miss SS (can we read anything into these initials??) and her eugenics are part of the whole 'what are women for and what is a womanly woman' motif. There was a lot of anxiety in the early C20th - especially after World War I - that the Right Sort of People were not breeding back up to strength. In particular there was a lot of concern that the Selfish Educated Middle Class Woman was using birth control and/or pursuing a career instead of replenishing the nation with strong, middle-class, sons. (Eugenics was, of course, closely connected with developments in intelligence testing at the same period.)
I imagine that we can assume that Sayers was not sympathetic to the view that women are merely there to transmit germ-plasm to future generations. And that Miss SS and her aims may even (bit of a stretch?) tie into some of the mentions of fascist policies towards women.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 05:37 am (UTC)I can't even take her seriously enough to call her fascist, although her description of herself as a worker bee lends credence to the theory. But mostly she seems to me to be an example of the Wrong Way To Go About It. While Sayers certainly believes that intelligence makes the marriage, she's also arguing for love as something you can't plan, can't calculate, can't engineer.
And I can't figure out how to articulate my point.
no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-08-28 05:45 am (UTC)Miss Lydgate and Miss de Vine seem to me to be doubles: Miss Lydgate's overwhelming charity contrasted with Miss de Vine's skewering perceptivity. (This also makes sense, in an underground fashion, of the savaging of Miss Lydgate's proofs.) Neither one of them is suited for life outside academia. (My sympathies are always with Miss de Vine, probably because I'm rather like her--"she found all the personal contacts uncongenial.") And I think another way to look at GN is to see Harriet trying to balance between them, to balance Miss de Vine's ruthless honesty with Miss Lydgate's compassion. It's not just having intelligence; it's what you DO with it.