Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Gaudy Night opens when Harriet Vane surprises herself by agreeing to return to her Alma mater, Shrewsbury College in Oxford, for the annual Gaudy celebrations – an old student’s reunion of sorts. Shortly after this visit, she receives the first of many anonymous letters with slurs against educated women. When Shrewsbury College contacts her, she realises that she’s not alone: many members of the college have been receiving similar letters, and these have been accompanied by minor (or not so minor) acts of vandalism, such as obscene graffiti or the destruction of academic manuscripts.

Harriet Vane returns to Oxford, officially to research the life and works of Sheridan Le Fanu (bonus cool points), but also to investigate what’s behind the vandalism. At a time when women had just been begun to be allowed to graduate, and before colleges were co-educational, a scandal at a women’s college could do a lot of damage: it would confirm the prevalent opinion that women who got a higher education were “running wild”, and should be dragged back into the kitchen where they rightfully belonged. For this reason, discretion is essential. First on her own, and later with the help of Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane tries to discover what’s behind this mystery, all the while being extremely careful not to let it come to the public’s attention.

I am SO in love with this book. Please bear with me as I explain why in ridiculous amounts of detail.

First of all: dear book bloggers who pounced on me when I announced I was going to read Gaudy Night and strictly forbid me NOT to read these books in order: I will love you forever. I can't believe I was about to deprive myself of the emotional intensity this book brings to readers who are already emotionally invested in the characters. There are two things I want to talk about here: first, everything this book does in terms of character development, which is simply spectacular; secondly, the mystery itself, which, unbelievably enough, is just as great.

Before I can even begin to try to be coherent, I need to get this out of the way: the! river! scene! AHFHGF!!@ For those who haven’t read the book, a spoilers-free recap: by “the river scene” I mean a chapter in which Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey go boating in the Thames, and their relationship reaches a stunning emotional climax. This has honestly become one of my all-time favourite scenes—almost up there with Liga-telling-Mud-Annie-what-happened-to-her in Tender Morsels, and that’s saying a lot.

The thing about this scene is that it’s not obviously spectacular; there's no huge release or anything. It's subtle, unspoken and subdued, so if these characters were new to me, it would be only natural to miss its significance altogether. But if you’re already emotionally invested in them - wow. Just wow. Because Dorothy Sayers has been building up the tension for over thousand pages, the effect is incredibly powerful. And yes, the emotional pay-off is as huge as advertised. There’s a specific bit when Lord Peter looks up from what he's reading and catches Harriet looking at him, and then looks down again and continues to read. Nothing whatsoever is said, but Harriet notices a change in the way he's breathing. It’s difficult to explain why this moment is so meaningful, but I swear, the tension almost KILLED me. And I wanted to kiss Sayers for doing such a wonderful job of capturing those subtle and unspoken and yet extremely significant moments between people.

Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey’s love story is far from uncomplicated, and that’s part of what makes it so interesting. Through these characters, Sayers explores the impact that general expectations of what was required of a woman and a man in a marriage had on the personal relationships of even those who didn’t subscribe to the dominant patriarchal ideology. Harriet, an intelligent and educated woman (much like Sayers herself), wants real intimacy rather than dominance and subordination. She wants equality; she wants to be with someone who sees her as an intellectual equal and who respects her work, rather than with someone who patronises her and demands her full devotion.

Of course, these were the 1930’s, and the way marriage was predominantly conceived of made this almost impossible. Women were expected to lose their identity in that of their husbands. It’s clear for readers that Wimsey does respect Harriet’s intellect, but this is not so clear for Harriet – yet we don’t begrudge her for not quite realising it. This love story is also the story of a woman's slow realisation than in the world in which she lived, a relationship based on true equality was possible at all.

But as I was saying, there’s more here than a love story. If I loved Gaudy Night, it wasn’t just because the relationship between two characters I love reaches such a climax. No, this time it was the mystery too. You might remember than when I posted about Have His Carcase earlier this week, I said I wasn’t really emotionally invested in the mystery. But with Gaudy Night, I couldn’t have been more invested in every aspect of the book. The mystery here actually has some bearing on what the main characters are going through, as it’s all about gender, the role of women in academia, and the conflict educated women had to face at this time: was there room for them to have both private and public lives? The answer at the time was almost always “no”. If a woman got married, she was expected to leave her job. This, of course, forced them to choose between either intellectual interests or love, intimacy and sex.

Another interesting thing is that Gaudy Night is very much a psychological mystery. It’s not an intellectual puzzle or a “howdunnit”, but a study of motivation. There’s a noticeable focus on all the psychological and sociological variables involved. Interestingly enough, Harriet Vane (who, remember, is herself a mystery writer) is working on a book at a time, and realises that for the story to work at all she’ll have to take a more personal route than what she’s accustomed to. This scares her because she knows it will be painful, but when she discusses it with Peter, he encourages her. I can't help but see this as Sayers commenting on the writing of Gaudy Night itself - it goes to painful places, yes, but that's what makes it stand above the rest.

Dorothy Sayers is actually more poker-faced than most of the authors I usually read. If I try to compare her with Rachel Ferguson, for example, who wrote Alas, Poor Lady at around the same time, I notice that with Ferguson it's much easier to see where the authors’ sympathies lie. With Sayers you can too, but her approach is more subtle. She tries hard to make the authorial voice as neutral as possible. Obviously, being herself one of the first women to graduate from Oxford, we can safely assume she wouldn't be saying that women should return to the kitchen and stay there. But she portrays the issue quite complexly; she includes characters that represent every angle. She makes the conflict feel real, and I’m grateful for that, as it was very real indeed. It was difficult to be in these women’s shoes; they were women who, no matter what they chose, would nearly always have to give up things they cared about.

I remember, before I read any of Sayers’ mysteries (or any mysteries at all really), hearing people say that mystery as a genre is by necessity all about maintaining existent power dynamics; that it is, by definition, all about backing up the status-quo. Of course, I knew better than to unquestioningly believe this (what do people tend to say about fantasy, after all?), but I’m bringing it up because I know I've seen the point illustrated with the following line from Gaudy Night: “What this country needs is a 'itler”.

That's a shocking line, obviously, but it baffles me that someone who's actually read the book would use it to illustrate the idea that mysteries are inherently conservative, unless they are deliberately taking it out of context to misrepresent the author. See, the line is said by a man who works at the college but disapproves of educated women in general; a minor character who believes that Hitler's policy of restricting women to “Kinder, Küche und Kirche” is very wise indeed. That anyone could read this book and think that Sayers is endorsing this view is difficult for me to understand, but maybe it has to do with what I said before about her tendency to be so poker-faced.

I feel that I’ve been blabbing forever but only really brushed the surface of what Gaudy Night is really about: it’s also about intellectual honesty, about empathy and compassion, about the social and personal consequences of certain choices, about responsibility, and about freedom and independence, and, in a subtle way, also about sex. The result is absolutely brilliant, but you really, really need to read them in order to be able to fully appreciate it.

Favourite passages:

‘I take it, Harriet, that you have no new answer to give me?’
‘No, Peter. I’m sorry, but I can’t say anything else.’
‘All right. Don’t worry. I’ll try not to be a nuisance, but if you could put up with me occasionally, as you have done to-night, I should be very grateful to you.’
‘I don’t think that would be at all fair to you.’
‘If that’s the only reason, I am the best judge of that.’ Then, with a return to his habitual self-mockery: ‘Old habits die hard. I will not promise to reform altogether. I shall, with your permission, continue to propose to you, at decently regulated intervals – as a birthday treat, and on Guy Fawkes Day, and on the Anniversary of the King’s Accession. But consider it, if you will, as a pure formality. You need not pay the slightest attention to it.
‘Peter, it’s foolish to go on like this.’
‘And, of course, on the Feast of All Fools.’

‘I quite agree with you,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘about the difficulty of combining intellectual and emotional interests. I don’t think it affects women only; it affects men as well. But when men put their public lives before their private lives, it causes less outcry than when a woman does the same thing, because women put up with neglect better than men, having been brought up to expect it.’

…he had not only refrained from offers of help and advice which she might have resented; he had deliberately acknowledged that she had the right to run her own risks. ‘Do be careful of yourself’; ‘I hate to think of your being exposed to unpleasantness’; ‘If only I could be there to protect you’; any such phrase would express the normal male reaction. Not one man in ten thousand would say to a woman he loved, or to any woman, ‘Disagreement and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should.’ That was an admission of equality, and she had not expected it of him. If he conceived of marriage along those lines, then the whole problem would have to be reviewed in that new light; but that seemed scarcely possible. To take such a line and stick to it, he would have to be, not a man but a miracle.

Other Opinions:
Stella Matutina
Steph & Tony Investigate!
Jenny’s Books

(Let me know if I missed yours.)