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.
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Re: Cross-class marriage and gender
Date: 2003-08-28 08:10 am (UTC)And the elaborately stupid arrangement of the Parker household's money in Murder Must Advertise reinforces this unambiguously. Lady Mary has married down. Parker has not married up. (And the arrangements of the Parker household bother me more and more as I compare them with Harriet having to sacrifice her pride and live on Peter's money. Why isn't Charles forced to do the same thing, dammit? I mean, aside from the fact that he's not a developed enough character to bother with the whole gender-reversal trope.) So, yes, this seems to be a trick only women can pull off. Men who leech on their wife's social status in that way are generally regarded with suspicion and derision. I'm thinking specifically of Giles Bullivant in Emma Lathen's A Stitch in Time (to jump the discussion cavalierly across the Atlantic and 30 years ahead), but other examples or counter-examples should be adduced by anyone who can think of them.
Re: Cross-class marriage and gender
Date: 2003-08-28 01:35 pm (UTC)A book that's good on this sort of convention more generally in the fiction of the period is Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism OUP 2001, which includes Sayers and the other 'Golden Age Queens of Crime'. I have some disagreements with her arguments: some of Stella Gibbons' non-Cold Comfort Farm novels actually contradict her theories, but Gibbons is a bit of an outlier I think. In Nightingale Wood, she even has a middle-class daughter of the house elope with the chauffeur, who is both younger than she is and the offspring of the local amateur tart, and make a successful marriage with him.
Another snippet about women, class and passing. Quite early on in Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City, Martha Quest, just arrived in London from Africa, is taken to dinner by a public-school twit. He suggests that women are capable of 'fitting in' socially to a far greater extent than men, citing the daughter of a sergeant in his regiment who is a secretary in his office (I think he's a solicitor). So there is that idea that women are more adaptable (which I think is a bit different to the idea that they are mouldable).
And on real-life men marrying down with disastrous consequences, the book-launch I didn't get to because of Tube disasters this evening, was for a book on the Abdication Crisis. But the Duke of Windsor was rather a special case.
Re: Cross-class marriage and gender
Date: 2003-08-28 02:08 pm (UTC)This worried me horribly when I first read it in about 1970, because I always said the middle one, and still do, hang it. However, by 1980 or so when I read The Four Gated City I laughed out loud at that comment about women being rather good at these things.
Also, Delany says somewhere that there are infinite possible relationships between sex and power and class, and the one that doesn't interest him is the boringly ordinary one of female to male of infinitesimally higher class. I think he has a point and this is widely countenanced where other things might be seen as a misalliance -- "gentleman's daughter" indeed.
Re: Cross-class marriage and gender
Date: 2003-08-29 02:12 am (UTC)It later occurred to me that there is a (male rather than female) narrative of men marrying (or wanting to marry) up, but on the whole the woman of higher class is seen as focus of aspirations/reward of ambitions, from Dick Whittington to (at least) Room at the Top. (And all those folk tales/songs etc about lucky youngest son or similar attracting wealthy/high-born lady.)
Though in the post-WWII British versions, middle-class wife/love-object often gets to be focus for both misogyny and class-resentment (e.g. John Osbourne, Look Back in Anger). Angus Wilson showed this syndrome rather well in As if by Magic.
I'm trying to think how Mellors and Lady Chatterley fit in here (and how they relate to Lawrence's own hypergamic match), but without much success.
But the meanings of this narrative seem rather different from the woman-marrying-up one. I also suspect that both narratives would being doing different things in different historical periods, i.e. social anxieties at stake would be specific in time and place.