Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Marcela Nejezchlebová Brezánska

Harriet Vane: The “New Young Woman” in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Novels

Master‟s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSc., M.Litt.

2010

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I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..

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I would like to thank to my supervisor, PhDr. Lidia Kyzlinková, CSs., M.Litt. for her patience, valuable advice and help. I also want to express my thanks for her assistance in recommending some significant sources for the purpose of this thesis.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 5

2. Sayers‟s Background ...... 8 2.1 Sayers‟s Life and Work ...... 8 2.2 On the Genre ...... 14 2.3 Pro-Feminist and Feminist Attitudes and Writings, Sayers, Wollstonecraft and Others: Towards Education of Women ...... 22

3. Strong Poison ...... 34 3.1 Harriet‟s Rational Approach to Love ...... 34 3.2 Harriet‟s Relationship with Her Murdered Lover ...... 42 3.3 Wimsey‟s Female Helpers ...... 44

4. Have His Carcase ...... 50 4.1 Harriet, the Professional, the Investigator and the Suspect ...... 50 4.2 Harriet and Peter – the Development of their Relationship ...... 56

5. Gaudy Night ...... 61 5.1 Academic Career vs. Domestic Sphere ...... 61 5.2 Identity and Self-confidence ...... 67 5.3 Love and Relationships ...... 72 5.4 Academic Work vs. Writing of Detective Novels ...... 78

6. Busman‟s Honeymoon ...... 82 6.1 Harriet from the Point of View of Others ...... 82 6.2 Harriet‟s Marriage ...... 86 6.3 The Country Women ...... 92

7. Conclusion ...... 97

8. Summary ...... 103

9. Resumé ...... 104

10. Works Cited ...... 105

11. Apendix ...... 109

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1. Introduction

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 – 1957), a writer of detective fiction popular even today, wrote all of her mystery novels during the 1920s and 1930s. It was a period when the position of women started to take a different shape. During the First World War a lot of women had to start to work to fill in the vacant places in the job market. At first it was assumed that several women would be necessary to substitute one man but it soon turned out that women were capable to become a full-value replacement of men.

Although many of these women retired back to their homes when their help was not needed any more, this common experience influenced the further development of female professionalism and other feminist issues.

With the term the “new young woman” I refer to the group of young ladies who gained their independence through the conscious entry into the world of employment and decided to go on even in the time where their professionalism was not further demanded. Before this change occurred, most of the employed women were either servants or workers in textile factories, often badly paid and dependent. In the course of the war women entered spheres of professional life previously occupied by men only.

Their achievements could not stay unobserved by the authorities and significant social changes followed. With the Removal Act of 1919 women were allowed to step into such fields as law or accounting and in 1920 it was possible for a woman to gain a university degree. One of the first such women was Dorothy L. Sayers. Her young female character Harriet Vane seems very autobiographical and like her creator, she has to deal with the consequences of her professionalism.

In my thesis I aim to show how different the new young woman was compared to other female characters of Sayers‟s novels and also in which areas the life of Harriet resembles the life of the author. I want to show what the young woman of the era had to

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deal with and plan to accentuate the heroine‟s values in the context of the social circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s under the influence of a new phase of feminism.

In chapter two I reveal the background of Dorothy L. Sayers divided into three main spheres. I concentrate not only on her life and work but also on the genre of detection which accompanied her for more than fifteen years of her professional life, stressing the role of female writers. I include a section briefly outlining the development of feminism till the 1930s residing on a full specification of this subject due to its extensity and irrelevance to the topic of this thesis.

I begin the actual analysis in chapter three, starting with the first novel where

Harriet appears. Strong Poison reveals her unconventional past and touches upon her sexual behaviour. In this novel she meets Sayers‟s great detective Lord Peter Wimsey for the first time and he immediately falls in love with her. I concentrate on Harriet‟s approach to love generally and also on her relationship to her former lover. I show

Harriet‟s specificity pointing out the other female characters, Miss Climpson and Miss

Murchison, who are Wimsey‟s helpers in investigation.

Chapter four presents the development of the mutual relationship between Harriet and Lord Peter. In Have His Carcase they are both engaged in an investigation but this matter does not influence the fact that they have plenty of time to get to know each other better and shift their relationship closer to a friendship. I aim to demonstrate

Harriet‟s manifestations of masculinity and how they influence all spheres of her life including her job and the possibility of a new relationship.

In the following chapter I deal with many different spheres of Harriet‟s life. In

Gaudy Night she comes back to the university where she studied, thus opening not only the topic of a suitable career for an educated lady but most of all the up-to-date subject of female professionalism combined with family and domesticity. I disclose how

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Harriet struggles in relation to her own identity and display further development of her relationship to Lord Peter which starts from a position where it seems rather hopeless only to end in an engagement at the end of the novel.

Sayers‟s own views, uncertainties and doubts seem to be reflected in Gaudy Night not only in the thoughts and actions of Harriet Vane but also in thoughts and actions of the dons. In this novel Annie – the perpetrator – violently attacks the whole area of female education and professionalism. Her attitudes might be viewed as a personified inner world of doubts and insecurities of all the female professionals.

The subject of the sixth chapter is Sayers‟s last detective novel The Busman’s

Honeymoon, originally written as a play. The newly wedded couple want to spend a calm honeymoon in a shire of Harriet‟s childhood but they get disturbed by a murder which occurred in a house they have just bought shortly before they moved in. The investigation of the crime reveals many unsettled topic of their life together and I want to point to their struggle to make the marriage successful. The novel begins with an exchange of letters and abstracts from a diary of Peter‟s mother which makes it possible to demonstrate the ways the society could have viewed the sort of woman represented by Harriet. I use a contrast with the country women too as their characters are very significant.

The thesis covers the heroine‟s development from confusion to harmony throughout the selected novels. In the conclusion I try to present how Harriet Vane developed in order to achieve her professional as well as her private integrity. I observe her progress with stress on the femininity and masculinity in her and Peter‟s actions and thoughts. I also outline the most significant issues from Sayers‟s background.

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2. Sayers’s Background

2.1 Sayers’s Life and Work

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893 in Oxford. Her father Rev. Henry Sayers was a director of Christchurch Cathedral Choir School at the time she was born but later they moved to less prestigious places. Sayers was gifted in languages, starting to learn

Latin, French and German at a young age. It was her father who supervised her learning and introduced Latin to her. During a lecture in 1952 she recalled: “I was by no means unwilling, because it seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Latin, and would place me in a position of superiority to my mother, my aunt and my nurse”.

(Hitchman 9)

Then she was educated at a boarding school in Salisbury where she was not very popular because she arrived at the wrong time of the term and was later appointed a house prefect, which might have contributed to the impression of being a bigheaded girl. As Hitchman illustrates, “as a prefect she (Sayers) was bossy, with a cutting sarcastic wit”. (14)

In 1912 Sayers won a scholarship to the Oxford women‟s college Somerville. She studied medieval literature and modern languages. Here she became the Bicycle

Secretary and repeated the previous unlucky pattern of bossy behaviour towards other students. She was a musical director and played the leading part in a play the third-year students performed. She made fun of her crush for one the teachers which was generally known and also of her office of the Bicycle Secretary, being not very regardful to the feelings of others. As Hitchman claims, “There must have been a few red faces in the audience when they realized that their complaints and gossiping had actually reached the target.” (22)

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She graduated with first class honours in 1915 and already a year later her first volume of poetry Op I was published. Women could not be granted degrees yet but in

1920 she was one of the first women to receive a M. A. degree. After finishing her studies in 1915 she did some lecturing and administrative work.

Later she went through a relationship with a writer of Russian origin John

Cournos who rejected marriage and children. According to Williams, Sayers refused to have a love-affair only and stopped seeing him. When he later married, Sayers wrote:

“both of us did what we swore we‟d never do” (Williams 82). It is often claimed that she elaborated the agonies of this liaison in Strong Poison. After the relationship ended,

Sayers, looking for solace and violating her own conventions, had a short affair with

Bill White, a motorcyclist and a car salesman. Out of this relationship her illegitimate son Anthony was born in 1924. Sayers decided to have the child brought up by her cousin Ivy Shrimpton. Even though Sayers followed her son‟s development closely, later informally adopting him together with her husband, she never publicly stated that he was her son. This secret was revealed as late as sixteen years after her death

(Williams 82).

She was very insistent when it came to the way her name was written. She disliked when she was featured as Dorothy Sayers as the „L‟ was a reminder of her great-uncle Percival Leigh, who was a well-known amateur actor of his time. Hitchman quotes a letter Sayers wrote to her publisher after her name had been used in an unacceptable form: “„Dorothy Sayers‟ has unpleasant associations for me and I do not like it. It is, if you like, a Freudian complex associated with my school days and possibly I ought to get over it, but I can‟t”. (Hitchman 106)

In 1922 she started to work at Benson‟s advertising agency in London where she stayed for seven years. She seemed to enjoy this job, however, a character most

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resembling herself in Murder Must Advertise says: “My sort make nothing. We exploit other people‟s folly, take the cash and sneer at the folly. It‟s not admirable”. (Williams

83)

In 1926 Sayers married a journalist, Captain Oswald Arthur „Mac‟ Fleming. In the beginning, while both of them were working steadily, the marriage seemed happy but gradually Mac‟s war injures made him unable to work at his full capacity and he spent the last years of his life getting drunk in a local pub with Sayers having to earn money for both of them. Sayers died of heart failure in 1957.

She belonged to the first wave of the so-called Queens of Crime within the

Golden Age of detective fiction (1920 – 1937), together with Christie, Marsh and

Allingham. Sayers‟s Busman’s Honeymoon is generally considered the last novel of this period. Today she is best-known for the detective novels with her main sleuth Lord

Peter Wimsey. The first book of this series was Whose Body? published in 1923. She continued writing Wimsey novels till the 1930s. During this period she published 11 novels and 21 short stories featuring her rich, intelligent and entertaining amateur sleuth with moral responsibility. Harriet Vane, whom Lord Peter eventually marries, appears in four of the Wimsey novels.

Sayers and her heroine Harriet Vane seem to have a lot in common. As Hitchman states: “Harriet resembles Dorothy in looks, being tall and dark-haired, not by any means beautiful. She had a „nice throat‟ with „a kind of arum lily quality‟. She wrote detective stories and always signed her name Harriet D. Vane, an echo of Dorothy‟s insistence on her „L‟. Like Dorothy she had a beautiful speaking voice”. (75)

Like Dorothy, Harriet is a smoker and as already mentioned, both of them had a relationship without marriage which was a controversial issue at that time. Harriet also seems to reflect the author‟s attitude to the press as described in the following chapters.

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Sayers‟s writing produces two kinds of response. People either love her writing or disregard it as a low-level escapist literature. Even the ones who love it are often divided, thus most readers of her Wimsey novels incline to ignore her religious writing whereas the supporters of her religious writing spread the assumption that she only wrote detective fiction to earn money.

However, Sayers herself was giving contradictory statements on this subject.

While still writing the detective fiction, she claimed that she was aiming to raise the status of the genre and when commenting on an article by Chesterton in 1925, she admitted that it was a pleasure for her: “There is not only a trick but a „craft‟ of writing mystery stories. It does give just that curious satisfaction which the exercise of cunning craftsmanship always gives to the worker. It is almost as satisfying as working with one‟s hands” (Hitchman 65). On the contrary, a few years before her death, she said that

“she had written the books only to make money and had no further interest in them”.

(Symons 134)

Whatever the truth was, she joined the Detection Club in 1930. She became president of the Club in 1949 and remained in office until her death in 1957. Even after finishing with the Wimsey series, she wrote some other detective works, for example novels accomplished together with some other members of the Detection Club or a series of short detective stories featuring her other amateur detective Montague Egg, a travelling salesman.

She left one of her Wimsey novels unfinished and it was completed by Jill Paton

Walsh under the title Thrones, Dominations in 1998. Walsh also wrote another novel called A Presumption of Death, based on the „Wimsey Papers‟, letters published in the

Spectator during the World War II.

Apart from her religious and detective writing, she also edited mystery anthology

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The Omnibus of Crime. Many readers appreciate the variability of the ways her victims were dying (by poisoned teeth fillings, a cat with poisoned claws, a dagger made of ice etc.). P. D. James specifies the most remarkable one for her: “I particularly admire the method in a short story by Dorothy L. Sayers where a faithless wife is stabbed with a meat skewer which is then inserted into the roast beef in the oven, a story which never fails to come to mind when I am cooking Sunday luncheon”. (7)

Many of Sayers‟s novels have autobiographical setting which makes them more authentic. Murders Must Advertise takes place in an advertising agency, Gaudy Night reflects the conditions at a Woman‟s College and The Nine Tailors describes the community at an Anglican Church, reminding of her childhood background.

Sayers wanted to avoid negative reactions and in the author‟s note at the beginning of Gaudy Night she wrote:

Detective story writers are obliged by their disagreeable profession to invent

startling and unpleasant incidents and people, and are (I presume) at liberty to

imagine what might happen if such incidents and people were to intrude upon the

life of an innocent and well-ordered community. (GN 6)

Nowadays, Sayers gets often criticized for the way she wrote about Jews. Cawelti gives an explanation which justifies this kind of writing. He calls this a formula, a conventional way of treating some specific thing or person and argues that “the important thing to note about this usage is that it refers to patterns of convention which are usually quite specific to a particular culture and period and do not mean the same outside this context” (Cawelti 5). Another example of a formula would be any other cultural stereotype such as “red-headed, hot tempered Irishmen, brilliantly analytical and eccentric detectives, virginal blondes, and sexy brunettes” (Cawelti 5). Thus

Sayers‟s treatment of Jews (or her detective) can be referred to as formulaic.

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Sayers “lived and worked in a racist society” (Rowland 66) but as her publisher was a Jew and still continued publishing her novels despite her supposed habit of ridiculing the Jews, it seems that this kind of writing was viewed more tolerantly at that time. As Hitchman states, “Dorothy is also insufferably rude about ‟niggers,‟ servants and the working class and has a complex about the Soviet menace” (101). From today‟s point of view this seems intolerable but Sayers wrote her novels in the social climate of the 1930s.

In the late 1930s Sayers was able to stop writing detective fiction because she found a different source of income. She became quite active in broadcasting, a media which was steadily becoming more significant. As Branson states, “the thirties was the period when the mass media – press, radio, film, gramophone records – first began to assume their full modern shape and importance in people‟s lives.” (269)

As stated above, Sayers also wrote several religious works, the most significant being The Mind of the Maker and The Man Born To Be King. The first deals with the stages of creativity in the context of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the latter consists of a series of 12 radio plays about the life of Jesus. It aroused a lot of upheaval prior to its broadcasting and Sayers got accused of blasphemy. In the end it got broadcasted without any major scandal despite all the previous sensation. In 1943

Sayers was offered an honorary doctorate in divinity by the Archbishop of Canterbury but she declined it although she accepted an honorary doctorate in literature from the

University of Durham in 1950.

Another important activity in Sayers‟s life was translating. She translated Tristan from medieval French and Dante‟s Divina Commedia, which is generally considered her best work although left unfinished. She worked on this translation for several years and was deeply devoted to this task. At the beginning she even had to learn to read

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mediaeval Italian which she did within several weeks. In reaction to some criticism in the press on behalf of this work, Sayers argued: “It is not true that I have „turned from popular fiction to take up‟ a pretentious high-browism; I am going on from were I began, after twenty years at the money-making mill of fiction.” (Hitchman 159)

On the grounds of her popularity Sayers also appeared in the works of other authors as in Dorothy and Agatha, a mystery novel by Gaylord Larsen, where her role was solving the crime. Her work was also frequently parodied and the most significant example is Greedy Night by E. C. Bentley. As she was able to make fun of her own writing and showed a great sense of humour in it, it seems probable that she enjoyed this kind of attention.

This chapter is based on the texts quoted and on various internet sources which are all listed in the Works Cited.

2.2 On the Genre

Dorothy L. Sayers is known as one of the authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction. For quite a long period of time this genre did not receive much attention from the scholars and was overlooked by literary criticism. Gradually it became clear that it is not just a kind of escapist literature but that it covers a wide range of significant social issues and thus deserves the interest of scholarly research. The genre can be divided in several subgenres such as the classical detective story, hard-boiled fiction, criminal story, thriller etc.

The development of the detective writing started much earlier than in the 1920s and 1930s when Sayers was active in this area. According to the Encyclopedia Encarta the first traces of the detective story might be found much earlier in the works such as an Italian tale translated into English as The Travels and Adventures of Three Princes of

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Sarensdip in 1722 or the Adventures of Caleb Williams written by English philosopher

William Godwin in 1784. However, many critics view Edgar Allan Poe with his The

Murders of the Rue Morgue (1841) as the founder of this genre (encarta). In the nineteenth century, the classical detective story emerged. It brought about an aesthetic approach to the subject which Cawelti identifies as opposed to religious or moral feeling about crime: “The classic detective story is the fullest embodiment of this attitude because it treats crime as an entertainment, the cycle of crime and punishment becoming an occasion for pleasurable intellectual and emotional stimulation” (55).

The article Detective Story in Encyclopedia Encarta further mentions that the genre became popular after the establishment of the regular, paid police forces and detective departments. These events inspired the emergence of the Great Detective.

The first generally known and perhaps most famous fictitious detective figure was

Sherlock Holmes, the Great Detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes and his assistant Dr. Watson became a source of inspiration for many Sayers‟s contemporaries and successors. For example, P. D. James claims that:

The influence of Sherlock Holmes on the detective story has been lasting and

profound. He bequeathed to the genre a respect for reason, a non-abstract

intellectualism, a reliance on ratiocination rather than on physical force, an

abhorrence of sentimentality, the power to create an atmosphere of mystery and

gothic horror which is yet firmly rooted in physical reality. (6)

Encarta also explains what evoked the shift from the detective short story to the detective or crime novel. Popular magazines published so many Holmes stories that it led to a decline of their popularity. The emerging detective novel “was thought to give more scope for plot development and surprise” (encarta).

With the emergence of suburbs in the 1930s, reading became a good way out of

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boredom and loneliness. Detective fiction was enjoyed by both, men and women, offering adventure with a strong focus on morality. Evans claims that: “fiction became a mirror for conduct and misconduct, and many who were restrained by convention to lives of routine and propriety found stimulus in reading of other who enjoyed richer emotional experiences, though in somewhat more disordered existences” (14). The moral part of the fiction offers to the reader an affirmation that no matter what the outer circumstances are, the moral standards will remain stable. Symons argues that crime fiction offers to its reader: “a reassuring world in which those who tried to disturb the established order were always discovered and punished”. (16)

Detective fiction became significant through a remarkable achievement. The main subject of detection is usually a murder but in detective fiction it is pictured in such a way that the reader can feel safe despite the Gothic horror often associated with this genre. As Light argues, “for what is most noticeable about the appearance of the whodunit, and most paradoxical, is the removal of threat of violence.” (69)

Rowland further develops this idea by claiming that it is the way the authors deal with death which makes the difference. As she puts it: “Death is disposed of as unnatural, solvable, as a mendable tear in the social fabric. In this sense, golden age fiction is about the restitution of comedy in the face of tragedy.” (Rowland 26)

The approaches of the authors were various both in style and in quality. Dorothy

L. Sayers “identified herself strongly with professionalism, and with raising the status of the genre. An Oxford First, who worked for an advertising agency, she was a prominent member of both the society of authors and of the Detection Club”. (Trodd

133)

As already mentioned in the chapter on Sayers‟s life, there were many who believed that she achieved the task of enhancing the quality of the genre, however, there

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were also many of the opposite view, who believed, that she wasted her abilities in vain and without great results. She was not the only author who was denounced of lowering their standards to satisfy the needs of the less sophisticated readership but on the grounds of her education, she was certainly the one most frequently mentioned in this context. Evans argues:

Some writers of erudition and genuine imaginative quality, such as Miss Dorothy

Sayers, abandoned any attempt at stretching their qualities to the full in order to

produce mystery and detective stories for the leisure reading of highly intelligent

people. They brought to an idle and meretricious form all the talents that might

have been used in a healthier period for great creative writing. (14)

At the time when the detective story began to flourish, the ways of dealing with the genre were so much differentiated that it soon resulted in a need for some rules in order to play fair with the reader. In 1930 a Detection Club was founded and Monsignor

Ronald Knox together with another novelist, S. S. Van Dine, created a set of rules to be respected by the writers of the detective story.

It included such requirements as that: “the criminal must be mentioned early on, it ruled out the supernatural, said that the detective must not himself commit the crime and added that no accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition, which proves to be right” (Symons 7). However, these requirements were not always observed. Agatha Christie was famous for breaking them.

Authors also generally agreed with two statements of Sayers, who was often criticised for the snobbery of her Great Detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. She said that there was “a great difficulty about letting real human beings into a detective story”

(Danielsson 41) and “the less love in a detective story, the better” (Munt 10). However, the dominant object of this thesis, Miss Harriet Vane, would never be so interesting

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without a love relationship with Sayers‟s Great Detective. It seems, therefore, that

Sayers herself failed to stick to her own claims or that the genre developed in a different direction than originally expected and the writers, including Sayers, had to adapt their writing in order to satisfy their readers.

As already pointed out in the Introduction, World War I brought another phenomenon of that era - the number of female writers markedly increased due to the social changes in the job market. This was particularly striking in the sphere of detective writing. As Trodd argues, this field was accompanied with features usually perceived as male-dominated with an “emphasis on rationality and on the skilled deployment of a set of rigid formulae, displays of technical expertise in specific areas of knowledge, a large professional audience, frequent reference in prestigious discourses” (130).

Most of women authors of this successful period “inherited the tradition of the heroic male detective but adapted it to women‟s interest” (Trodd 130). The original detective created by Doyle was a man “immune form ordinary human weaknesses and passions. Culturally Holmes exudes and exalts a specifically upper-middle-class

Victorian masculinity based on cool rationality and intellect” (Munt 2). One of the ways of adapting the detective was to make him more feminine. Many literary critics view

Christie‟s Herkule Poirot as feminized and too emotional. These are features to be found not only in Poirot but also in Wimsey (as seen in following chapters) or even

Sherlock Holmes (very rational but playing the violin for comfort). Although feminizing the detective might bear a negative connotation for some, it is a valuable tool of literary skills for others. It might be also viewed as a way of making the Great

Detective closer to reality and an effective vitalization of a stereotype using an “addition of significant touches of human complexity or frailty to a stereotypical figure” (Cawelti

11-12).

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Another way of bringing the female touch in the detective writing is the presence of the female helpers. As Rowland reveals, “those male detectives most footed in the gendered upper class need feminised subordinates to search for clues in female realms

„foreign‟ to them” (21). Thus instead of having Watson, Sayers‟s Lord Peter has Miss

Climpson or Miss Murchinson at hand and these ladies are a valuable component of the whole course of investigation in Strong Poison. In the novels selected for the purpose of this thesis, it is Harriet Vane who plays the role of the detective‟s counterpart. Strong female investigators appear also in the writing of other authors, the perfect example being Christie‟s Miss Marple, and Poirot himself almost always finds a female assistant necessary.

The writers of the period often based their novels on real-life murders. Trodd mentions Sayers‟s The Documents in the Case which is based on the Bywaters and

Thompson murder trial of 1922. Because Edith Thomson and her lover were convicted of the murder of Edith‟s husband, it was generally believed that she must have influenced her younger lover. Trodd claims that the issue “raised difficult questions about relations between the sexes which made her (Edith) a central figure in the interwar mythology of women” (136).

Morris claims that Strong Poison was partly based on the Madeline Smith case which involved “an accused woman who was not convicted although widely presumed to be guilty” (Morris 486), however Harriet Vane in Strong Poison was innocent.

Symons describes the authors of the Golden Age of detective fiction as being to a large degree Right-wing and very conservative. He states that it would be “unthinkable for them to create a Jewish detective, or a working class one” (109) and that they completely ignored some aspects of life such as unemployment, the economic depression, trade unions or the General Strike of 1926. This is not entirely truth in

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regard to Sayers as she touched upon the topics of unemployment and the Nazi-threat in

Gaudy Night even though, on the whole, these issues are not significant in her writing.

Rowland comments on the conservative attitudes too, blaming the reactionary character. She states that “the whole detecting genre tends to associate their works with conservative politics and against the democratising forces of the modern society.”

(Rowland 39)

On the other hand, detective fiction writers achieved a realistic depiction of certain social situations or places. P. D. James argues on their behalf saying:

The detective story….frequently tells us more about the age in which it was

written than does more pretentious literature. For thousands of readers, Victorian

London is Conan Doyle‟s fog-shrouded Baker Street, while in the Wimsey novels

of Dorothy L. Sayers the sound, the feel, the mood, the speech of the „30s seem to

rise from pages strewn with the sad human detritus of World War I. (8)

Near the end of the Golden Age or later, the essence of the genre started to transform. The series characters, widely used in the previous era, were abandoned.

Munt claims that:

The reaction against the pre-War Superman detective was partly political,

prompted by distrust of all Supermen, and partly based upon the writers‟ feeling

that they had something of interest to say which would be hampered rather than

helped by the development of a single character. (14)

Campbell highlights that only rarely did detective heroines appear despite the number of female writers. On the contrary, Munt mentions many female investigators

(e.g. Patricia Wentworth‟s Miss Silver or Gladys Mitchell‟s Mrs Bradley) in the late

1930s and 1940s but these sleuths are not generally known today. Sayers‟s Harriet Vane is, however, one of the amateur detectives who are still somewhat provocative even

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from today‟s perspective.

Harriet Vane is an independent young woman who makes successful living by writing detective stories. But her worldly independence is a complicated issue. As

Campbell suggests, “Sayers gradually reveals two sides of Harriet‟s independence: she is strong enough that she does not need to depend on anyone else, but she also fears that she is too weak to survive any emotional dependence” (499). This fact complicates

Harriet‟s decision whether to marry Lord Peter Wimsey or not: “The decision to marry is identical with the discovery or development of her self-respect.” (Campbell 499)

Campbell compares Sayers with P. D. James who is generally viewed as strongly influenced by Sayers and she stresses the thematic richness of these two authors. She argues that they “are concerned with such issues as women‟s roles, the importance of work, the destructive power of love, and the complex relationships between men and women, parents and children” (Campbell 498).

P. D. James belongs to the second wave of the Queens of Crime which according to Munt, covers the time from the 1960s up to the present day. Apart from P. D. James, this group includes such authors as Ruth Rendel or Patricia Highsmith. As Munt suggests, these authors are:

implicated together by the literary worldview they share; the explorations into the

effects and motivations for murder are expressed as psychological investigation

into the darkness of the human psyche for which there is no effective guiding

moral principle. This together with the strongly ironical strand coursing through

the novels when confronted with the spoors of the cosy canon, situates them in an

evolving relationship with their predecessors. (25)

Even though many Sayers‟s contemporaries could foresee the end of the detective story era, the genre gradually converted to the crime novel and spy thriller and in this

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form is popular even today. As Cawelti argues, it is a genre appealing to all levels of the society and it became a significant cultural phenomenon:

Even scholars and critics professionally dedicated to the serious study of artistic

masterpieces often spend their off-hours following a detective‟s ritual pursuit of a

murderer or watching one of television‟s spy teams carry through its dangerous

mission...these formulaic stories are artistic and cultural phenomena of

tremendous importance. (3)

2.3 Pro-Feminist and Feminist Attitudes and Writings, Sayers, Wollstonecraft and

Others: Towards Education of Women

Dorothy L. Sayers could hardly be described as a typical feminist author of her era although her writing reflects her pro-feminist views to a great extent. Even though she is no passionate supporter of the women‟s rights, it is difficult to deny her belief in equality of both sexes because she was one of the first women to gain a university degree. Harriet Vane, generally perceived as the author‟s alter ego, is the most effective tool for making these attitudes to be heard. Some of her opinions are surprisingly daring, others rather moderate as can be seen in following chapters.

Concerning the status of women, the spirit of the 1920s was in sharp contrast to the previous Victorian era with its expectations and admiration of female obedience and conformity. The questions of female education, professionalism, marriage and contraception became a common issue, not just a marginal topic of isolated female rebels. Stevenson indicates that these questions started to be relevant already at the end of the nineteenth century. She claims that:

The nineteenth century witnessed the beginning of the fight for reproductive

rights – contraception, abortion and so on – and campaigns to improve the social

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and legal position of women; all of which, naturally, affected the nature and scope

of women‟s writing. (Stevenson 132)

But it was not till the 1920s that these issues became common part of the public debate. Contraception played a vital role in Sayers‟s life. First, she experienced unpleasant tension when refusing contraception during her frustrating relationship with

John Cournos only to get pregnant in her subsequent affair. The topic of contraception was widely discussed in the 1930s and according to Branson, the debate was so powerful that it influenced the birthrate of the decade. She states that:

And there were still great areas of ignorance about birth control, so that working

women‟s organizations such as Co-op guilds and Labour Women‟s Sections were

in many areas busy crusading to bring knowledge of it to the younger women as

one of the means towards female emancipation. In the end, women who got

married in the thirties were to have on average fewer babies than either their

predecessors or their successors. (Branson 182)

As already mentioned in the introduction, the reason why the position of women in the society started to change was the fact that a substantial number of men was called up in the war and someone had to replace them in factories and other spheres of the employment market. Women started to substitute them and it proved that their abilities in professional life were comparable to those of men. It resulted in greater independence of women and was followed by some significant social changes.

It is important to state that feminism of this era is not easy to define. There were many interest groups with different goals and the problem of a clear definition starts already in the 1920s. Despite all the discrepancies, it remains a fact that the common feature of all „kinds‟ of feminism is the oppression of women based on their gender differences.

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Compared to militant suffragettes of the previous era, the feminists of the 1920s and 1930s were generally perceived as more acceptable which was caused by their great victory when they gained the right to vote. As Smith comments:

With the principle of women‟s suffrage secured in 1918, British feminists

appeared poised for a significant reformation of society during the 1920s. New

feminist group were created, an important feminist journal was established, an

intense debate over the nature of feminism clarified some of the assumptions

underlying feminist ideology and significant legislation was enacted improving

the status of wives and mother. And by 1930 feminism seemed much less of a

threat to traditional structures. (47)

He also depicts that the different feminist groups were opposing each other because their goals were often contradictory. Their mutual criticism was often very sharp. Smith presents an example of these opposite attitudes pointing to two groups of feminists of that time, whom he describes as equality feminists and new feminists.

According to him the major clash was their attitude towards the self-presentation of women. He states:

New feminists accused equality feminists of seeking to become like men, of

adopting male values and priorities. Equality feminists warned that new feminists

place a „dangerous insistence on women‟s natures‟ which encouraged traditional

notions of femaleness, thereby making it harder for women to escape for

traditional roles. (Smith 48)

There were, and still are, many approaches toward feminism and it is not aim of this thesis to deal with them in detail.

Despite all the political and social changes and many significant feminist organizations, there were still many people who believed that the woman‟s place was at

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home, taking care of the family and bearing children. According to Kent, this belief was based not only on their conservatism but also on the newest scientific research. She claims that: “The insistence upon maternity as virtually the only conceivable occupation for the overwhelming majority of women drew upon the current psychoanalytic and sexological literature on sexual difference.” (Kent 78)

In consequence to these confusing interests in the 1930s the feminist organizations were struggling with lack of attention from the working classes. It was evoked not only by the unclear message of feminist goals but also by the economic development of the country. Many new household devices such as the vacuum cleaner and alike were available and many families could afford them without the necessity of women to work. Pugh explains that “the 1930s were a decade in which the realization of the domestic ideal became more attainable for many women”. (153)

Thus the recruiting feminist organizations had to turn to middle class woman who were usually working at least before the marriage. Actually, their income was often necessary if they wanted to establish a family which made the whole issue of female employment appealing to their own situation. Pugh argues that these women had to work “partly because of the presumed difficulties of finding a husband, and because of the greater difficulties many fathers experienced in providing for their daughters financially”. (153)

Nevertheless, in the 1930s it was still common to expect that a woman who got married would stop working. According to Branson and Heinemann, in the time of big unemployment this issue was even regulated by the state denying benefits to married women which they explain by “the prevailing assumption that married women shouldn‟t work – if they did, it implied a loss of status and a certain reproach to their husbands”

(Branson 32).

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Even though the history of feminism shows that the topic of women‟s position in society was by no means rare or solitary as it might seem through the channels of official education, it takes some effort to find sources openly disclosing their feminist attitudes before 1920s. They existed but because they are not a part of the official canon, they are not generally known. These sources are to be found in the writings of feminist criticism which developed only in the course of the twentieth century. One of the most significant writings of feminist philosophy before the 1920s was Mary

Wollstonecraft‟s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman written at the end of eighteenth century. She certainly was not the only one active in this field but her writing gets often commented on.

The main concern of the books dealing with the female question in

Wollstonecraft‟s era was the domestic education of women. Most of them argued that women should receive sufficient education to become good wives and mothers.

Wollstonecraft believed that woman‟s education should cover all areas of human interest including politics. She claimed that:

If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their

mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of

virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interest of

mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from

such investigations. (Wollstonecraft 4)

But she was not interested only in the female education, she wished “to see woman placed in a station in which she would advance, instead of retarding”

(Wollstonecraft 3). It was not only the woman‟s mind she was concerned with.

Wollstonecraft expressed her disagreement with the common practice of treating a woman as if she was unable of any physical exercise which in her opinion made the

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women even weaker and more fragile than originally desired. She declared that this treatment of women was due to the aim to make the woman an attractive toy for men which unpleasantly violated the position of women “men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment”. (8)

She criticized the habit of educating women to invoke the impression of weakness in order to seek protection from the men. She believed that appropriate education should

“enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent”.

(Wollstonecraft 21)

She pleaded for a relationship based on mutual respect and friendship and suggested that a woman can achieve this balance by exercising her body as well as her mind. She presented: “the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues; become the friend, and not the humble dependent of her husband.” (Wollstonecraft 29)

The development of the feminist issues was definitely not straightforward and easy to follow. There were many ups and downs and the conditions of women differed according to class which meant that in different periods different parts of the social strata showed various levels of tolerance for the independence of women. Stone mentions the habit of educating girls of higher social status in Elizabethan period in

Latin and Greek whereas in other periods women were expected to be occupied only with “skill in music, painting, drawing, dancing and needlework” (143). But the society remained strongly patriarchal till the twentieth century and this social setting was backed up by the Church and the Crown in accordance with the official doctrine of subordination to the sovereign in the state and subordination to the father in the family.

Stone proves it by following statement: “eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century evidence from all over Europe shows peasant wives addressing their husbands in

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deferential terms, never sitting down at the table at which the men and boys were eating, and always walking a step or two behind their husbands.” (139)

A shift or release in conditions of women was often set up by some major political changes. The same way as the situation of female professionalism was enabled by the lack of men during the war, it were political changes in the country and the whole of

Europe that initiated shifts in the previous periods. For example, Wollstonecraft wrote her essay under the influence of social developments following the French revolution.

The major source for feminist criticism are not only the works or writings explicitly interested in the topic of women‟s rights but any other piece of literature written by women or for women. These books usually display the main concerns of the women of the particular era, even though the approach of individual authors differs to such an extent that it is often difficult to trace some general signs of feminist attitudes.

Some critics lay stress on the assumption that not all literature written by women is necessarily feminist. Nevertheless, feminist or not, all such works illustrate some information about the period they were accomplished in, however, as Toril Moi suggests, a common experience cannot be mistaken for identical attitudes. She argues:

To believe that common female experience in itself gives rise to a feminist

analysis of women's situation, is to be at one politically naïve and theoretically

unaware. The fact of having the same experience as somebody else in no way

guarantees a common political front: the millions of soldiers who suffered in the

trenches during the First World War did not all turn pacifist – or socialist or

militarist – afterwards. (Moi 121)

In this respect, it is necessary to mention an essay written by Spender who unfolds that even though the novel is generally believed to be „invented‟ and cultivated mostly by men with occasional and rare reference to female writers such as Charlotte Bronte,

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there were times when the novel was viewed and perceived as a genre ascribed to women. She argues that: “eighteenth-century readers knew something that twentieth- century ones do not: namely that in the beginning, and for quite a long time thereafter, the novel was seen as the female forte.” (Spender 25)

Spender finds it alarming that this knowledge had been withdrawn from the traditional canon, blaming the men from intentional misinterpretation. She appreciates that under the influence of the development of feminism most critics “have nonetheless agreed on the central point that male dominance means women‟s silence and that society can no longer afford to neither hear nor heed the voice of half of humanity”.

(Spender 32)

Although detective fiction was not the only genre women of the 1920s and 1930s were active in, their prevalence in this field is undeniable. Stevenson offers an explanation of this phenomenon pointing to the background of the detective writing, claiming that:

The nature of the detective story is to lay bare the cracks, tensions and

discontinuities in the humdrum surface texture of ordinary family life, and it is

perhaps for this reason that women, whose social role involves the preservation of

apparent harmony in difficult circumstances, should be so good at analysing its

underside. (181)

Rowland evolves this idea even further adding that “the nature of marriage, mothering and singe women proves significant sources of passion, conflict and familial drama”. (157)

However, the Golden Age of detective fiction was not connected with female writers only. There were also many male authors who wrote mystery fiction being equally successful as the ladies. What is really striking in this context is the fact that this

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genre is still generally perceived as masculine. Munt observes: “Despite the huge amount of published work on female detective and crime fiction, the genre continues to be perceived as masculine one.” (27)

The literature of the era was influenced by the emergence of the suburbs were the contact with the community became restricted by the distance from the town centers as the new districts consisted only of family-housing without sufficient infrastructure.

Branson reflects that it influenced women to much greater extent than men who commuted to work. She argues: “it did not take statistical sampling or years of family interviewing to make clear that loneliness and isolation were bound to be common, especially among women.” (Branson 85)

Such situation resulted in greater demand for escapist literature and detective fiction was at that time considered to be such a genre. It took decades till this genre attracted the attention of feminist criticism and the responses were very diverse. Some critics still consider detective novels as low-level literature, others appreciate their projection of the social situation of the era.

Janet Montefiore believes that feminist criticism of the 1930s is strongly influenced by the prejudice of the critics and thus covers only a small part of the female writing omitting major political issues. She argues: “the only political issues in the women‟s writing of the 1930s much discussed by feminist literary historians are gender equality and the sexual politics of representation.” (Montefiore 20)

In her opinion it is not because other political issues would be non-existent in female writing but because the criticism is influenced by what critics assume that was common in that period thus concentrating only on the topic mentioned above.

Montefiore suggests that: “Focusing on them cannot correct the ideological convention that men inhabit the public domain while women represent the home and/or sexuality.

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This archaic assumption of separate spheres, still deeply rooted in our culture, effects nearly all accounts of the 1930s.” (20)

She also argues that the female authors of Sayers‟s era failed in finding new forms of female writing apart from such writers as Virginia Woolf or Dorothy Richardson

“who refused to struggle „manfully‟ with an outmoded realist narrative form” (152) and invented the new „female heroines‟. Since then many traditional writings, including

Sayers‟s, were looked on from this prospective but in Montefiore‟s opinion these works were rather realistic than innovative. She claims that:

feminist readings interpret works of apparently traditional realism as

transformations of old marriage-or-death plots into new exemplary fables of

female heroes, whose quest for consciousness is tied …to the more familiar goals

of autonomy and identity. The surface realism of women‟s fiction is thus read as a

„set‟ for the staging of mythical narratives of free, transcendent identity.

(Montefiore 152)

But most critics believe that even though Sayers was rather conservative, the independent young woman she (and others) introduced was a new phenomenon of the era and it deserves attention of critical writing. Light observes that: “feminist work must deal with the conservative as well as the radical imagination” (13) strengthening the assumption that the conservative realism in the world of Sayers‟s heroines is worth exploring and she emphasizes that it is important to realize “how much it was women who represented modernity in post-war generation”. (Light 211)

The significance of the literary heroines of the 1930s is more relevant when compared to a typical female character of the nineteenth century where women were expected to represent the Victorian values by being passive, quiet and looking sensible.

Coward brings forward that: “The female protagonists of the nineteenth-century novel

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are profoundly silent. The characters express sensitivity and inner feelings. Their looks, as the saying goes, „speak volumes‟.” (37)

But she also shows that even though female obedience was the highest value in the Victorian era, the literature already reflected that women have the ability to make important decisions. Coward claims that “her choices were for a brief moment before marriage of crucial importance, socially and sexually.” (38)

Bergmann implies that the changes in the position of women started already in the middle of the nineteenth century when the ideal of the female heroines started to take a different shape. She argues: “conventional virtues of the heroines, such as obedience and passivity, were being replaced by qualities involving more action and independent thinking.” (Bergmann 89)

An exemplificative heroine would in be Charlotte Bronte‟s Jane Eyre whom she declares to be “something of a prototype” (Bergmann 89). But this kind of heroine was still in a different position than Sayers‟s Harriet Vane who had much wider choices concerning her education and profession as well as other aspects of her life.

Taking into account Sayers‟s own writing and life, it is not surprising to find out that she was rather conservative when commenting on feminism. Williams reflects that even though she was “committed to legal equality and to a woman‟s right to do any job for which she was qualified” (94) she was refusing the theory of the new feminists who were interested in women‟s „biological‟ needs attempting to prove that all women were alike, driven by their sexual instinct. Sayers disagreed with this assumption and on the contrary believed that “each woman had her own personality and interests and was entitled to be treated as a human, not a sexual being”. (Williams 94)

When Dorothy L. Sayers dealt with the topic of feminism, she did so in a humorous manner. She wrote an illustrative radio talk, rejected by the B.B.C., called

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The Human-Not-Quite-Human in which she treated men in such a way that the inspiration by feminist criticism was obvious. She suggested that books titled „History of the Male‟, „Psychology of the Male‟ or „Male in the Bible‟ should be written and raised the question whether men would appreciate if they were written about the way women are. Among other things she wrote:

if he (man) were vexed by continual advice how to add a rough male touch to his

typing, how to be learned without losing his masculine appeal, how to combine

chemical research with seduction, how to play bridge without incurring the

suspicion of impotence. (Hitchman 142)

Once again Sayers proved her ability to touch upon a significant issue without being prescriptive or serious and still remain truthful.

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3. Strong Poison

3.1 Harriet’s Rational Approach to Love

Already in the first chapter we can find out about the crucial influences and conditions shaping Harriet‟s personality from her childhood till the time of the trial. It shows that she was raised to respect traditional values and that she was perfectly self- sufficient which is an aspect on her behalf. The jury hears the following statement:

You have been told that she is a young woman of great ability, brought up on

strictly religious principles, who, through no fault of her own, was left, at the age

of twenty-three, to make her own way in the world. Since that time – and she is

now twenty-nine years old – she has worked industriously to keep herself, and it

is very much to her credit that she has, by her own exertions, made herself

independent in a legitimate way, owing nothing to anybody and accepting help

from no one. (SP 8)

This description is in sharp contrast with the way of life she led in private. She and Philip associated with suspicious people from literary and artistic circles, discussed various inconvenient topics and openly declared that they did not want to get married.

Even though Harriet seemed rather proud of their independent lifestyle, surprisingly she took unusual measures to avoid public dishonour of her family and thus showed her loyalty to her lover as well as to her family. She decided to protect her loved ones by avoiding their contact, “cutting herself off from her family friends and refusing to thrust herself into company where her social outlawry might cause embarrassment and so on – yet she was extremely loyal to her lover and expressed herself proud and happy to be his companion”. (SP 10)

The witnesses at the trial give evidence that it was obvious that Harriet felt uneasy about the free-love issue but they explained it by Philip‟s eye appeal and his ability to

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persuade others. It is quite surprising that she decided to refuse his proposal but Harriet gives a clear and elaborate explanation what made her so upset and resentful, “she was angry with Boyes because, after persuading her against her will to adopt his principles of conduct, he then renounced those principles and so, as she says, made a fool of her.”

(SP 11)

Williams points to another aspect of the whole issue of Harriet‟s relationship with

Philip. She believes that Sayers indicates the independence of her main female character by pointing to her ability to get rid of a lover who disappointed her. She claims: “Harriet is a liberated woman not because she agreed to live with her lover (there is no suggestion that this did her any good) but because she broke with him when she realised that he was exploiting her.” (Williams 91)

Concerning the trial, it is essential to emphasize that Sayers adapted the situation to the new social setting, mentioned already in the previous chapters, where a woman was finally allowed to step into a new spheres of the job market previously not open to her. As Morris claims: “The fact that the chief spokesman for Harriet‟s acquittal is a woman is particularly powerful because the legal profession had been among the last bastions of male exclusivity, and no women sat on juries until 1919, the year the first woman lawyer was admitted to the Bar.” (486)

Morris further shows that even though women had the possibility to become professionals, they often acted rather conservatively in order to assimilate with the male-dominated sphere thus failing to initiate further changes in the position of women.

She argues:

the judge‟s extensive summary and clearly prejudicial attitude focused on the

moral consequences of illicit sexual behaviour and on the ways it undermines a

woman‟s character. Clearly it is a notion that Sayers rejects. Both judges twist the

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defence‟s argument by proposing that the sexual indecorum of the accused was

the reason the crime has occurred. (Morris 487)

When Harriet discusses her relationship to Philip with Peter Wimsey, her statement raises the question why she remained in such a relationship for a considerable time if she was aware of Philip‟s character. It is clear that he was very egoistic and unable to love anyone but himself. The only purposeful explanation was that she was extremely loyal up to the degree of her own destruction. She suppressed her emotions and was able to cope with the fact that he had not loved her. Only when he violated her rational principles, she decided to leave him. Before that she was able to entertain false hopes that their „love‟ was based on some noble fundamentals. When Peter asked her whether they were friends, she replied, revealing the background of their liaison:

Philip wasn‟t the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I

gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn‟t stand being made a fool of. I

couldn‟t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good

enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he

didn‟t believe in marriage – and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether

my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn‟t. I didn‟t like having matrimony

offered as a bad-conduct prize. (SP 52)

Her incongruity is appalling. Not for Wimsey but for the female reader. What kind of woman would like to stay in a relationship without love and would refuse an intelligent and charming aristocrat who is passionately in love with her? Peter is a fairy- tale suitor who admires her looks and her brains and he would feel exceedingly happy to win her love. But Harriet is torn apart by her inner uncertainties and refuses to see his obvious devotion. She seems to be able to give but not to accept what others have to offer to her. This uncovers her low self-esteem and negation of positive emotions. But

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Wimsey in love is emotional enough for both of them and acts and thinks in a feminine way, picturing their future married life:

her skin is like honey – she ought to wear deep red – and old garnets – and lots of

rings, rather old-fashioned ones – I could take a house, of course – poor kid, I

would damn well work to make it up to her – she‟s got a sense of humour too –

brains – one wouldn‟t be dull – one would wake up, and there‟d be a whole day

for jolly things to happen in – and then one would come home and go to bed – that

would be jolly, too – and while she was writing, I could go out and mess round, so

we shouldn‟t either of us be dull. (SP 57)

Harriet finally gives an explanation why she could not marry Peter or any other man. She is preoccupied with her past to such an extent that she would let it ruin the rest of her life and is ready to live a solitary life. She truly believes that no man is able to forget her previous love-affair and that it would hunt them all their lives if they tried to live together. She wants to prevent getting hurt and hurting someone else.

Harriet always tries to take into consideration other people‟s feeling but she carries it to an excess. It prevents her from living her own life. She views love from the intellectual perspective and forgets about her and other people‟s emotions. Or better to say, she takes into consideration only the negative emotions and leaves the positive one, such as tolerance, generosity and understanding, aside:

“I am sorry,” he said. “The fact is, I‟m most damnably jealous of this fellow

Boyes. I oughtn‟t to be, but I am.”

“That is just it,” said Harriet, “and you always would be.”

“And if I was, I shouldn‟t be fit to live with. Is that it?”

“You would be very unhappy. Quite apart from all the other drawbacks.”

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“But, look here,” said Wimsey, “if you married me I shouldn‟t be jealous, because

then I should know that you really liked me and all that.”

“You think you wouldn‟t be. But you would.”

“Should I? Oh, surely not. Why should I? It‟s just the same as if I married a

widow. Are all second husbands jealous?”

“I don‟t know. But it‟s not quite the same. You‟d never really trust me, and we

should be wretched.”

“But damn it all,” said Wimsey, “if you would once say you cared a bit about me

it would be all right. I should believe that. It‟s because you won‟t say it that I

imagine all sorts of things.”

“You would go on imagining things in spite of yourself. You couldn‟t give me a

square deal. No man ever does.” (SP 141-142)

These negotiations about marriage are a repetitive motif in all Sayers‟s novels with Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey apart from Busman’s Honeymoon where they are already newly wedded. It is striking that they rarely touch upon the topic of their class difference even though the class system of the British society remains significant even today. Wimsey‟s sister is occasionally seeing a police inspector who hesitates to propose to her due to this, while Harriet and Peter on the contrary seem to ignore the class issue completely. Harriet only once mentions it thus explaining that she wants to live in a free relationship with Peter so as to make it possible for him to leave her later but it is only a marginal topic:

But you could cut loose any time you wanted too.

But I shouldn‟t want to.

Oh yes, you would. You‟ve got a family and traditions, you know. Caesar‟s wife

and that sort of thing. (SP 270)

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Harriet‟s objections prove to be based on rightful assumptions. In his social circles, Peter has to face biting remarks about his relationship to Harriet and about her character “And is it true, Lord Peter dear, that you are defending that frightful poisoning woman?” (SP 146) He feels urge to protect her reputation by the means of her profession stressing the moral aspect of detective writing and thus defending the writer of such fiction as a high-principled person “Oh, come, said Wimsey, you can‟t think that, Helen. Damn it, she writes detective stories and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They‟re the purest literature we have.” (SP 148)

Especially the women from his social circles are verbally very aggressive and if

Peter believed their views to be relevant, he would show much less devotion towards

Harriet than he actually does. It is difficult to state whether he is so in love or so independent of other people‟s views. He either does not take the views of these particular women very seriously or he generally does not care what other people think about him and the woman he loves. It definitely points to his unshakable belief in

Harriet‟s noble purity and no wonder then her way of talking about others is in sharp contrast with the gossiping females from the high-society circles:

“No, but do tell us, Lord Peter,” cried Mrs Dimsworthy, “what the creature is like.

Have you talked to her? I thought she had rather a nice voice, though she‟s as

plain as a pancake.”

“Nice voice, Freakie? Oh, no,” said Mrs. Featherstone. “I should have called it

rather sinister. It absolutely thrilled me, I got shudders all the way down my spine.

A genuine frisson. And I think she would be quite attractive, with those queer,

smudgy eyes, if she were properly dressed. A sort of femme fatale, you know.

Does she try to hypnotise you, Peter?” (SP 148)

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Considering the view of other people, Harriet is not very easy to define. The jury hears a lot about her abilities and moral standards but they also know that she lived in a free relationship with the victim which was not socially acceptable at the time the novel was written. In Harriet‟s character Sayers denies one of the unwritten rules of detective story: “In a detective story good people and bad people are clearly defined” (Symons

15). Nowadays her liaison would not be seen as immoral but in the 1930s it was different. Even though a survey about the sexual behaviour before marriage shows that

Harriet was in no respect exceptional. Hibbert claims that: “while less than 20 per cent of married women born before 1904 had had such experience before their marriages, 36 per cent of those born between 1904 and 1914 and almost 40 per cent of those born between 1914 and 1924 had been sexually intimate either with their future husbands of with other men (701). However, at that period people would not discus these issues openly and a sexual experience before marriage could bring about feelings of guilt and shame.

Apart from the fact that Harriet truly believes that marrying Peter would be unfair to him, she also reveals her hesitations concerning the loss of her own independence when getting married: “I‟m frightened of it. One couldn‟t get away. I‟ll live with you, if you like, but I won‟t marry you” (SP 270). It indicates that she adopted Philip‟s view of the absurdity of a marriage.

Desperate Peter would do anything to attract Harriet‟s attention. He even tries to make her jealous by describing his past romantic involvement. Harriet does not pay much attention to his confession and laughs at him. At the same time she discloses that the whole affair with Philip has considerably influenced her temper making her more sensitive:

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“If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk

piffle,” said Harriet, severely.

“A humiliating reason, but better than no reason at all.”

“I used to piffle rather well myself,” said Harriet, with tears in her eyes, “but it‟s

got knocked out of me. You know – I was really meant to be a cheerful person -

all this gloom and suspicions isn‟t the real me. But I‟ve lost my nerve somehow.”

(SP 143-144)

Being not very self-confident, Harriet also worries that her possible future partner would have difficulties to accept her controversial profession. She does not know how highly Wimsey values detective fiction writing and asks him about this issue. He replies with abandon that he would even enjoy it: “it would be great fun. So much more interesting than the ordinary kind that is only keen on clothes and people.” (SP 33)

Sayers drives the peculiarity of a detective fiction writer being accused of a murder to extreme by making the situation almost unsolvable. Wimsey seems lost on proving Harriet‟s innocence. It resembles the highest achievement of a detective fiction writer who creates an unsolvable case of murder but consequently does not know how to get out of it satisfactorily. Harriet appreciates the irony of the situation and shows her ability to look at her own case as an outsider with a sense of humour:

Don‟t say that. It can‟t be hopeless, unless you actually did it, and I know you

didn‟t.

Well, I didn‟t, as a matter of fact. But I feel it‟s like one book I wrote, in which I

invented such a perfectly watertight crime that I couldn‟t devise any way for my

detective to prove it, and had to fall back on the murderer‟s confession. (SP 31)

And something similar happens in Strong Poison. Wimsey has to lay a trap to convict the murderer thus resigning on the traditional masculine means of defending the

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beloved woman. Rowland comments on this issue, claiming that: “legally acceptable proof is inadequate. Here the determined detective has to resort to tricks, including a claim to have fed arsenic to the suspect. Strong-arm tactics are not considered.” (30)

3.2 Harriet’s Relationship with Her Murdered Lover

As already suggested above, Harriet‟s relationship with her deceased lover Philip

Boyes did not seem to be based on mutual love and understanding. It was a struggle rather than an emotional refuge. He gives an impression of a person who is not able to love anyone but himself. Harriet‟s feelings are unclear but her devotion seems to stand on rational grounds rather than emotional. It is interesting to explore how Philip‟s friends and relatives view the whole situation.

Philip‟s father expresses a certain amount of bitterness towards Harriet‟s behaviour after Philip‟s death. He was upset that she had not come to the funeral. It was rather strange even if she was really angry with Philip. People usually tend to forget about past offences when someone dies. Harriet‟s reaction appears heartless not only to the father of the deceased.

However, Boyes‟s father shares Peter‟s opinion that Harriet could not be the murderer and is upset at the perspective of her possible penalty:

Poor misguided girl! I assure you, I have no vindictive feelings – that is to say,

nobody would be more happy than myself to know that she was innocent of this

dreadful thing. Indeed, Lord Peter, even if she were guilty, it would give me great

pain to see her suffer the penalty....And I confess that, when I saw Miss Vane in

court, I had grievous doubts whether the police had done rightly accusing her. (SP

70)

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He also tackles the question of Harriet‟s refusal of Philip‟s proposal. He cannot figure out what her reasons might have been and reflects what impact it must have invoked upon his son: “I must say that it was a surprise to me to hear that, after all that had passed between them, she was unwilling to marry him. I still fail to comprehend it.

Her refusal must have come as a great shock to him.” (SP 72)

He accentuates his son‟s attitude who selfishly disclosed his wounded ego in a letter not caring the least for Harriet‟s reasons and feelings. But for both of them this pitiful proposal was a final initiator for abandoning their liaison: “Harriet has succeeded in making a fool of herself and me, so there‟s no more to be said”. (SP 73)

Philip‟s closest friend also openly expresses his view of Harriet. He is a typical male chauvinist who despises independent women. Although his acrimony towards

Harriet could be justified by his belief that she murdered his best friend, his spiteful attitude toward female intellect and independence reveals his obscurant thinking of the woman‟s social role:

Oh, she did it all right. Sheer, beastly spite and jealousy, that‟s all there was to it.

Just because she couldn‟t write anything but tripe herself. Harriet Vane‟s got the

bug all these damned women have got – fancy they can do things. They hate a

man and they hate his work. You‟d think it would have been enough for her to

help and look after a genious like Phil, wouldn‟t you? Why, damn it, he used to

ask her advice about his work, her advice, good lord! (SP 98-99)

Although he believes her advice to be irrelevant and ignorant, he shares his friend‟s embitterment that Harriet was not ready to evaluate Philip‟s work and chose to remain impartial in respect to his writing: “She wouldn‟t give it. Told him she never gave opinions on other author‟s work” (SP 99). Philip‟s friend believed it to be very

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daring of her that she considered herself a writer and he declared Philip‟s work of higher value than Harriet‟s.

Later on, Peter finds out from a female friend of Philip and Harriet that neither the public nor the publishers found much interest in Philip‟s writing and that he felt humiliated that it was Harriet who supported him financially: “No, there never was much money, except what Harriet made. The ridiculous public didn‟t appreciate Phil

Boyes. He couldn‟t forgive her that, you know” (SP 108). She also states that Harriet seemed happy to get rid of Boyes.

In this respect it is very interesting to follow what Sayers thought of financial issues in a relationship. Hitchman points out that before she married Fleming, whom she had to support almost the whole time of their marriage, she wrote “We believe in men and women being equal. Why should the one always be the breadwinner more than the other?” (Hitchman 73)

3.3 Wimsey’s Female Helpers

The first and main female assistant of Wimsey is Miss Climpson who is his companion in several other Sayers‟s novels. In Strong Poison she is a member of the jury judging Harriet‟s case. She is remarkably loyal to Lord Peter and is always ready to get personally involved when he needs her help, although some of the tasks are quite odd from the point of view of an outsider. Peter‟s mother describes her peculiar work for Peter, pointing out her courage: “Yes – such a good thing too, answering all those shady advertisements and then getting the people shown up and so courageous too, some of them the horridest oily people, and murderers I shouldn‟t wonder with automatic thingummies and life-preservers in every pocket, and very likely a gas-oven full of bones”. (SP 23)

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When Wimsey talks about the case at a game of golf with his friends, he emphasizes Miss Climpson‟s stout composition and firm attitudes helping her when she tries to convince other members of the jury that there is a no proof that Harriet really committed the crime. She shows remarkable calmness and efficient way of fighting for truth. She based her presumptions on the belief that Harriet Vane would not be capable of such a beastly deed. Wimsey greatly appreciates the way she proceeds:

Well, the woman I know stuck out for it that Miss Vane wasn‟t that sort of person.

They bullied her a good deal, of course, because she couldn‟t lay a finger on any

real weakness in the chain of evidence, but she said the prisoner‟s demeanor was

part of the evidence and that she was entitled to take that into consideration.

Fortunately, she is a tough, thin, elderly woman with a sound digestion and a

militant High-Church conscience of remarkable staying-power, and her wind is

excellent. She let „em all gallop themselves dead, and then said she still didn‟t

believe it and wasn‟t going to say she did. (SP 45-46)

When Miss Climpson comments on her own behaviour during the trial, she explains that it was not such a difficult task for her as she could easily overcome little discomfort when she believed there was a reason for it. Apparently, she did not do it because Lord Peter wanted her to do it but out of the utter belief that no man or a woman should be sentenced to death if there was a slightest chance that they were not guilty. In such a case she was ready to defend them to excess: “Miss Climpson also said, that in a righteous cause, a little personal discomfort was a trifle, and added that her religion had trained her to fasting”. (SP 47)

It is essential to investigate Miss Climpson‟s comments on the social changes concerning the position of unmarried women in society occuring during her life. After she arrives to the destination of her demanding detective task, she compares the

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situation with the objectives of her youth and is very pleased to state that a lot has changed since she was a young girl. She points to the feeling an unmarried woman had to face when travelling alone in the Victorian era:

I had no difficulty in getting a comfortable room at the Station Hotel, late as it

was. In the old days, an unmarried woman arriving alone at midnight with a

suitcase would hardly be considered respectable – what a wonderful difference

one finds today! I am grateful to have lived to see such changes, because whatever

old-fashioned people may say about the greater decorum and modesty of women

in Queen Victoria‟s time, those who can remember the old conditions know how

difficult and humiliating they were! (SP 195)

She makes a comparison of the possible disguise of the male and female detective, disclosing that their ways of working differ according to their sex but that different approaches might bring similar results and thus both sexes can be proclaimed equal in respect to the detective work: “The male detective, particularly when dressed as a workman, an errand-boy or a telegraph-messenger, is favourably placed for

„shadowing‟. He can loaf without attracting attention. The female detective must not loaf. On the other hand, she can stare into shop-window for ever” (SP 203).

However, in Strong Poison Wimsey is often viewed as put aside in favour of the female investigators. Rowland assumes that it was an intentional design attempting to present the unpleasantness of passivity. She argues: “There is also a sense of Sayers playing with role reversal in that much of the detecting action is taken by the spinsters, with Wimsey in a frustrated and passive feminine position.” (Rowland 30)

Miss Climpson has to face a moral dilemma when she realizes that she could gain an important peace of evidence by pretending that she was interested in spiritualism.

Sayers used this popular activity of the time to put the character through some moral

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divergence. Miss Clipmson has to fight a battle with her conscience. Being a very religious person, she views it as a sin. She would betray a poor lady who believed in it and she would take an active part in the show. She gradually persuades herself that there is no other choice if she wants to save Harriet from getting hanged. She shares her inner clash with Peter when she writes a letter to him vindicating herself on the grounds of her profession: “but I believe the Church takes into account the necessity of deception in certain professions, such as that of a police detective or a SPY in time of WARFARE, and I trust that my subterfuges may be allowed to come under that category”. (SP 244)

According to Rowland, Sayers uses spiritualism to accentuate the femininity as a major component of the masculine activity. She proves this assumption saying that:

“Despite the firm refutation of Spiritualism here, it is also portrayed as a specifically feminine method of detection, one closed to Lord Peter yet crucial to his investigation.”

(Rowland 138)

Apart from Miss Climpson, Wimsey has some more female helpers, such as

Marjorie, a rich friend who accompanies him in the artistic circles Philip and Harriet attended. Marjorie knows all the necessary people Wimsey needs to question in regard to this case. Wimsey generally prefers women to be his partners in investigation and in this respect he differs from the typical male opinion of the era, here represented by a clerk from the solicitor‟s office:

Well, we have to take things as they come, but in my opinion – I‟m an old-

fashioned man – the ladies were most adorable when they adorned and inspired

and did not take an active part in affairs. Here‟s our young lady clerk – I don‟t say

she wasn‟t a good worker – but a whim comes over her and away she goes to get

married, leaving me in the lurch, just when Mr. Urquhart is away. Now, with a

young man, marriage steadies him, and makes him stick closer to his job, but with

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a young woman, it‟s the other way about. It‟s right she should get married, but it‟s

inconvenient, and in a solicitor‟s office one can‟t get temporary assistance, very

well. Some of the work is confidential, of course, and in any case, an atmosphere

of permanence is desirable. (SP 87-88)

It is the solicitor from this particular office whom Wimsey suspects of the murder of Philip. He needs someone to spy there and with the help of Miss Climpson, he chooses Miss Murchison, yet another spinster ready to engage in an adventure. When looking for the right person to carry out this mission, Wimsey gives following instructions to the appearance of the spy “Yes, pick out the steadiest looking, not too much face-powder, and see that their skirts are the regulation four inches below the knee – the head clerk‟s in charge, and the last girl left to be married, so he‟s feeling anti-sex-appeal”. (SP 88)

Miss Murchison matches this description perfectly. Similarly to Miss Climpson, she is totally devoted to her investigation and loyal to Lord Peter. Her own life is very straightforward and in a way boring as she is a business woman with no family, so she seizes the opportunity to spice her life up. She is very agitated when she first comes to

Peter:

Miss Murchison felt a touch of excitement in her well regulated heart, as she rang

the bell of Lord Peter‟s flat. It was not caused by the consideration of his title or

his wealth or his bachelorhood, for Miss Murchison had been a business woman

all her life, and was accustomed to visiting bachelors of all descriptions without

giving a second thought to the matter. But his note had been rather exciting. (SP

157)

Peter then wants to make sure that she fully understands that her task is dangerous and illegal. She displays remarkable commitment. She faces the possibility of

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imprisonment calmly and pragmatically: “I imagine that if I‟m taken up you will pay any necessary costs” (SP 161).

Sayers uses minor but peculiar details to demonstrate Miss Murchison‟s determination. She lets her destroy her own handbag by ripping a piece of its lining out when she pretends to have lost a pattern of silk in an office she needs to search for evidence “She held up a small piece of silk triumphantly. She had torn it from the lining of her bag in the course of the afternoon – a proof, if any were needed, of her devotion to her work, for the bag was a good one”. (SP 254)

Both Wimsey‟s female helpers are determined to carry out their mission in which respect they resemble to Harriet who is a hard-working professional too. However, both the spinsters live only for their work without having any private life. In this respect they differ from Harriet who had a sexual relationship with Philip Boyes.

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4. Have His Carcase

4.1 Harriet, the Professional, the Investigator and the Suspect

At the beginning of the novel, when trying to inform the police about the body found, Harriet meets a man and awaits some kind of action from him. She unintentionally reveals that despite all the independence and free lifestyle, she still expects a man to be more decisive and able to act in a crisis. However, the abstract shows that she is aware of her silly expectations and that she manages to realize that in this respect their chances are equal. Sayers thus accentuated that a modern woman can do without the protection of men: “After all, what could he do? He was in exactly the same boat as herself. With a foolish relic of Victorianism she had somehow imagined that a man would display superior energy and resourcefulness, but, after all, he was only a human being, with the usual outfit of legs and brains”. (HHC 21)

When a police officer asks her to stay in the town so that the police can later take her to a hearing, she displays her interest in the case which disappoints him by its lack of femininity. It shows that despite the changes in society, people still have certain rigid expectations of woman‟s behaviour. He understands that people are interested in crimes

“but a lady ought, surely, to pretend the contrary”. (HHC 35)

Inspector Umpelty suggests that she could stay at a local hostel but Harriet cares about her image of a detective fiction writer and chooses to stay at the best hotel in the town: “Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters. Miss Harriet Vane, when interviewed by our correspondent at

Clegg‟s Temperance Hostel-That would never do” (HHC 35). The topic of the mutual relationship of the writer and the media will be further developed below.

It did not take long for the inspector to realize what kind of behaviour would

Harriet perceive as unacceptable. Even though she arouses his male chauvinism, he

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cannot step out of the conventional pattern of a duty to help to a lady. However, he takes measures to avoid an open conflict: “He had his private cause for amusement. If

Harriet‟s note-case had ensured her reception at the Resplendent, it was his own private whisper of „friend of Lord Peter Wimsey‟ that had produced the view over the sea, the bath and the balcony. It was just as well that Harriet did not know this. It would have annoyed her”. (HHC 35)

Harriet considers that it would be suitable to inform Peter about the murder but she refuses the idea on the grounds of their current relations. When trying to work out the speed of a steam-yacht she assumes that he would be able to solve this problem and for a brief moment, she gets carried away by the idea of a marriage with Peter:

Anybody who married Lord Peter would be rich, of course. And he was amusing.

Nobody could say he would be dull to live with. But the trouble was that you

never knew what anybody was like to live with except by living with them. It

wasn‟t worth it. Not even to know all about steam-yachts. A novelist couldn‟t

possibly marry all the people from whom she wanted specialised information.

(HHC 38)

Being a writer of detective fiction, she immediately starts to develop the idea of professional advisers into a plot of a possible future novel. It might be showing how

Sayers herself gathered the topics for her writing inspired by real life situations and how she further worked with them:

Harriet pleased herself over the coffee with sketching out the career of an

American detective-novelist who contracted a fresh marriage for each new book.

For a book about poisons, she would marry an analytical chemist; for a book

about somebody‟s will, a solicitor; for a book about strangling, a – a hangman, of

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course. And the villainess might do away with each husband by the method

described in the book she was working on at the time. (HHC 38)

Harriet observes the dancing in a hotel lounge where the people are dressed in old-fashioned clothes imitating the old times. She wonders whether they truly believe in the „return to womanliness‟, as this pastime activity was popularly called by fashion magazines: “Were men really stupid enough to believe that the good old days of submissive womanhood could be brought back by milliner‟s fashions?” (HHC 39)

When including this section, Sayers tackles the topic of the outer features of femininity masking the world of the woman‟s inner thoughts and beliefs as presented in the

Victorian writing mentioned in the chapter about feminist background.

Wimsey finds out that Harriet got involved in a case of murder and immediately arrives at the scene. They discuss the case with Inspector Umpelty and afterwards the

Inspector offers Harriet that he could help her avoid the reporters. But she resolutely refuses, converting to a decisive business woman emphasizing the importance of the communication with the press: “I‟ve got to see them and tell them all about my new book. A razor is only a razor, but good advance publicity means sales” (HHC 51).

Inspector Umpelty expresses a worry that Harriet could tell the reporters more than is convenient which could make the investigation difficult. But Peter, who knows

Harriet‟s passion for writing, is of a different opinion: “Oh, she won‟t chuck away a good plod” (HHC 51).

Peter and Harriet are trying to track the origin of the razor found next to the victim and Peter makes some relevant comments on the victim‟s style of clothing. Harriet has to admit that she would not be able to draw such a conclusion without Peter‟s help thus stressing the masculine side of detection mentioned in previous chapters. The issue of male clothing was a complete puzzle for her which she even reflected in her writing:

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“I‟m afraid, admitted Harriet, that I have never managed to learn all the subtle rules and regulations about male clothing. That‟s why I made Robert Templeton (her sleuth) one of those untidy dressers” (HHC 57).

However, even thought it seems that Harriet would not be able to investigate without Peter‟s help, she unobtrusively influences his work procedure: “One of Harriet

Vane‟s overlooked tasks is to get Peter Wimsey to tabulate his progress, for example in

Have His Carcase” (Rowland 19). It is another example of Sayers‟s role reversal already mentioned in the previous chapter as tabulating is an activity associated with reason and thus with masculinity. On the contrary, the feminine approach is usually associated with following features: “Conventional culture has constructed relational, intuitive forms of knowledge as feminine”. (Rowland 93)

The manifestations of masculinity and femininity and their mutual relation presented in the behaviour of Sayers‟s characters is a way of making the novels more realistic and appealing to the readers of both sexes. Rowland argues: “Dorothy L.

Sayers‟s novels are energised by a passionate concern about unequal power in sexual relations.” (164)

Later Harriet tries to explain to Peter that a professional with her past must be on good terms with the press to avoid their fabrications. This is in particular important in a situation when the police take into consideration the possibility that she might have committed the crime. She refuses Peter‟s protection arguing that she has to deal with these difficulties on her own:

Would it have been better to wait till the papers dragged the juicy bits out of the

dust-bin for themselves? I can‟t hide my name – it‟s what I live by. If I did hide it,

that would only be another suspicious circumstance, wouldn‟t it? But do you think

it makes matters any more agreeable to know that it is only the patronage of Lord

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Peter Wimsey that prevents men like Umpelty from being openly hostile? (HHC

173-174)

Concerning the attitude towards the press, it is vital to follow Sayers‟s relationship to the reporters. Hitchman informs that: “She was at time a hater of reporters, and frequently turned them rudely from the door; in spite of that there are many interviews with her in newspapers” (Hitchman, Introduction xi). It suggests that the author‟s attitude to the press was rather ambivalent. The topic reappears in the chapter on Busman’s Honeymoon where it is further discussed.

While staying in the small town, Harriet has to go on working on her new novel. It is not very pleasant because the editor expects the main characters of the novel to get to the point of love-making. Harriet feels very uneasy about it. She cannot get rid of her own obtrusive thoughts bringing to light her current and previous love-life:

Now, a person whose previous experience of love has been disappointing, and

who has just been through a harassing scene with another suitor and is, further,

busily engaged in investigation the rather solid love-affairs of a third party who

has been brought to a violent and blood-bolted end, is in no mood to sit down

holding hands in a rose-garden. Harriet shook her head impatiently, and plunged

into her distasteful task. (HHC 188)

During the investigation, Harriet goes to see one of the friends of the victim who is a girl of doubtful morals. She shows some signs of superiority towards people of mixed nationalities: “One never knew, of course, with these slinky people of confused nationality” (HHC 196). Nowadays, this would not be perceived politically correct, however, as already mentioned in a chapter about Sayers‟s life and work, at that period it would be viewed from a different perspective.

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Harriet proves a remarkable involvement when flirting with the unbearable farmer

Henry who might reveal some information about the case. He believes that Harriet with her compromising reputation might be easy to seduce and treats her accordingly. Henry wants her to persuade Lord Peter to drop the idea of a Bolshevist conspiracy he is after.

Harriet objects but Henry is very confident that she knows how to deal with Wimsey: “I bet you know all right. I don‟t suppose there‟s much you don‟t know, by jove! Henry was obviously well aware that he was talking to a rather notorious young woman”.

(HHC 241)

When doing the dishes after the dinner with Henry‟s mother, Henry seizes this opportunity and tries to touch her but Harriet surprises him by her quick and unexpected reaction: “She dropped the plates and wriggled, pushing his arms away and bending her head down, so that the faithful and long suffering hat was between them”. (HHC 244)

At first it seems that she reacted in this way to avoid his arrogant attack but it soon turns out that she caught sight of his tattoo which helped her to realize that Henry might be the murderer. With horror she reveals her suspicion to Peter: “Peter! I believe

I‟ve been kissed by a murderer”. (HHC 245)

Rowland further analysis the scene where the snake-tattoo on the murderer‟s arm appears and she believes that:

Discovering a „snake‟ in the theatrical Eden of a family picnic reinterprets the Fall

for women and sexuality. Brutally hurt by society‟s criminalising of female

sexuality forcing her into the „murderer‟ role for much of Strong Poison, Harriet

in Have His Carcase employs a gender masquerade to be simultaneously victim

and detective, becoming wholly detective at the discovery of the snake. In this

already Fallen world, Harriet‟s recognition of the serpent is an acquisition of

sexual knowledge that will reveal the cynicism and frequent victimising of

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women behind the accepted manners of courtship. The plot‟s restaging of the

drama of Eden enables the novel to demystify gender roles and point out the

dangers of conventional romance for women. Harriet‟s progress is one enabling

women to be freer agents and „detectives‟ of their own destiny. (Rowland 167)

When Peter and the police investigators discuss the case unfolding some wild theories, Harriet does not feel offended by the fact that the police view her as a possible suspect. She shows remarkable understanding: “It was wise of you to make inquiries.

Because, of course, you had only my word for everything, hadn‟t you? And those photographs were evidence that I was pretty coldblooded? And my previous history was rather – shall we say, full of incident?” (HHC 342)

However, when she gets accused of being driven by her intuition, she disregards this idea promptly: “It‟s not intuition, retorted Harriet. There‟s no such thing. It‟s common sense. It‟s artistic sense if you like. All those theories – they‟re all wrong.

They‟re artificial – they smell of the lamp”. (HHC 339)

It shows that she adopted the idea that an independent woman has to assimilate to the masculine way of thinking if she wants to succeed in the male-dominated world. In this respect she fails to advance the position of women the same way as the judge in

Strong Poison as observed by Morris.

4.2 Harriet and Peter – the Development of their Relationship

The relationship of Harriet and Peter develops further. When Peter cancels a planned rendezvous, Harriet surprisingly realizes that even though she had a rational explanation of her refusal of Peter, her emotions were different: “Harriet, who had been preparing to say that she had work to do and could not waste time rubber-necking round

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Wilvercombe with Lord Peter, experienced an unreasonable feeling of having been cheated”. (HHC 55)

Peter continues asking Harriet whether she wants to marry him. They tend to treat the matter of Peter‟s ongoing proposals humorously and he keeps repeating it on every possible occasion always being politely turned down:

“I‟ll try and be back tonight, so don‟t worry.”

“I‟m not worrying,” retorted Harriet, indignantly. “I‟m perfectly happy.”

“Splendid. Oh! While I‟m about it, shall I see about getting a marriage licence?”

“Don‟t trouble, thank you.” (HHC 58)

They go dancing in order to get hold of some gossip about the victim who was a professional dancer at the hotel. Harriet expects some appreciation as she bought a dress in a colour Peter advised to her and as it is the first time they dance together. But he does seem interested neither in her dancing nor in her dress as his mind is occupied with the case. In a reaction to his indifference Harriet behaves in a foolish manner, getting obstinate and bitter:

“It‟s my fault”, said Harriet. “I‟m a rotten dancer. Don‟t bother about me. Let‟s

stop. You haven‟t to be polite to me, you know”. Worse and worse. She was being

peevish and egoistical.” (HHC 157)

She finally manages to get his full attention and has to realize that he knows her better than she thought. He immediately recognizes the cause of her bitterness and tries to make it up with her. She is taken aback by his compliments showing her inability to take, which is further developed below:

“Darling, if you danced like an elderly elephant with arthritis, I would dance the

sun and moon into the sea with you. I have waited a thousand years to see you

dance in that frock”.

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“Idiot”, said Harriet. (HHC 157)

Even thought Harriet still denies her feelings to Peter, he can see that her attitude is starting to change. He gets very upset when he realizes that Harriet values his judgement and hopes that it means that she likes him:

Wimsey considered, rightly, that when a woman takes a man‟s advice about the

purchase of clothes, it is a sign that she is not indifferent to his opinion….He had

not expected it of Harriet, and was as disproportionately surprised and pleased as

if he had picked up a sovereign in the streets of Aberdeen. Like all male creatures,

Wimsey was a simple soul at bottom. (HHC 161)

In the course of investigation Wimsey has to change into his bathing suit on the beach to be able to prove his assumptions. When he appears half undressed, Harriet inwardly makes some humorous comments on his body: “And he strips better than I should have expected, she admitted candidly to herself. Better shoulders than I realised, and thank Heaven, calves to his legs” (HHC 104). In this respect Sayers made her heroine equal to men because evaluating a person according to their figure is usually associated with men and, at the same time, she displayed how ridiculous this habit is and made fun of it.

When Peter and Harriet discuss the issue of his protective behaviour towards her,

Harriet gets really angry and the stream of her inner thoughts proves that Peter evokes many confusing emotions in her. She gets really passionate, unfortunately, not in the desired way: “The fact that, until five minutes earlier, she had felt perfectly happy and at ease with this man, before she had placed both him and herself in an intolerable position, she felt somehow as one more added to the list of his offences. She looked round for something really savage to do to him”. (HHC 174-175)

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She gets totally alert at the perspective that she should have a reason to be grateful to him and converts the whole situation into an ancient fight for female emancipation, showing her prejudice: “I suppose every man thinks he‟s only got to go on being superior and any woman will come tumbling into his arms. It‟s disgusting”. (HHC 175)

Sayers repeatedly plays with the theme of the feminine and masculine roles turning Wimsey into a romantic fool as opposed to distant Harriet. Peter jokes that he would like to kiss Harriet as she just found an important piece of evidence. He can see that Harriet is not joyful at this perspective and tries to calm her down: “You need not shrink and tremble. I am not going to do it. When I kiss you, it will be an important event – one of those things which stand out among their surroundings like the first time you tasted lichee” (HHC 213). Harriet reacts with sarcasm “I think you are a little intoxicated by the excitement of the discovery, said Harriet, coldly”. (HHC 213)

Harriet‟s imagination plays a vital role in Have His Carcase developing the

Freudian scheme of the subconscious. Harriet is suppressing her feelings, not ready to admit that she is in love with Peter but her subconscious find a way out in the frequent fantasies about Peter. Harriet has no other choice that laughing at it:

she now realised that there was, after all, something godlike about him. He could

control a horse. She had a fleeting vision of him, very sleek, very smart, in a top-

hat and pink coat and gleaming white breeches, loftily perched on an immense

and fiery animal which pranced and jiggled about without even disturbing the

lofty nonchalance of his demeanour. Her imagination, making a terrific effort,

promptly clothed her in a riding-habit of perfect cut, placed her on an animal still

larger and fierier and set her at his side, amid the respectful admiration of the

assembled nobility and gentry. Then she laughed at this snobbish picture. (HHC

214)

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The book ends with an appendix which is supposedly being written by a close relative of Peter A short biography of Lord Peter Wimsey, brought up to date and communicated by his uncle Paul Austin Delagardie (HHC 462). Sayers needs an outsider to comment on the relationship to make it sound impartial. Peter‟s uncle informs the reader that Peter fell in love with Harriet and appreciates her intention not to marry Peter as “gratitude and humiliating inferiority complex are no foundation for matrimony” (HHC 467). Thus Sayers accentuates that Harriet and Peter cannot get married unless their positions are equal.

The uncle further believes that the relationship has a chance provided Harriet learns how to take: “The girl has brains and characters and honesty; but he has got to teach her how to take which is far more difficult than learning to give. I think they will find one another, if they can keep their passions from running ahead of their wills”

(HHC 468).

This statement summarizes the necessity of combining both the principles, the masculine and the feminine or in other words, it emphasizes that a good relationship requires a balance between the reason and the emotions. Concerning Harriet‟s relationship to Peter, this is the main message of Has His Carcase.

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5. Gaudy Night

5.1 Academic Career vs. Domestic Sphere

The issue of the female professionalism opens up already at the Gaudy when

Catherine Freeemantle, a former student who married a farmer, describes the difficulties she and her husband are facing in the agricultural business. After getting married, she decided to give her profession up and become an efficient component of her husband‟s agricultural business. Harriet passionately argues, protecting the female professional scene:

But Miss Freemantle, I mean, Mrs. – Mrs. Bendick – it‟s absurd that you should

have to do this kind of thing. I mean, pick your own fruit and get up at all hours to

feed poultry and slave like a navvy. Surely to goodness it would have paid far

better for you to take on some kind of writing or intellectual job and get someone

else to do the manual work. (GN 47)

The most consistent supporter of the concept that woman‟s place is at home with her family is naturally Annie, the perpetrator. She believes that it is unhealthy when women live together at the college and some of them even give up the idea of having a family and children, “it seems to me a dreadful thing to see all these unmarried ladies living together. It isn‟t natural is it?” (GN 115)

Rowland points to the same fact emphasizing that the woman‟s college is an unnatural place to live at. She claims that the re-entry to Oxford teaches Harriet that

“paradise cannot be gendered or based upon a total separation of the sexes”. (Rowland

172)

However, Annie hates educated women most of all because she is convinced that they are a threat for any working man and consequently for his family. She believes that

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professional women hate men and married women and that they would purposely destroy anyone in order to keep their career and independence:

but it‟s you, it‟s women like you who take the work away from the men and break

their hearts and lives. No wonder you can‟t get men for yourselves and hate the

women who can. God keep the men out of your hands, that‟s what I say. You‟d

destroy your husbands, if you had any, for an old book or bit of writing. (GN 427)

Sayers strengthens Annie‟s fears by putting the words of disapproval in the mouth of her little daughter. She openly pronounces her wish to keep a garage when she grows up and this idea makes Annie really upset, especially after Harriet supports the girl:

Nonsense, said her mother, a little sharply. You mustn‟t talk so. That‟s a boy‟s

job. But lots of girls do boys‟ jobs nowadays, said Harriet. But they ought not,

madam. It isn‟t fair. The boys have hard enough work to get jobs of their own.

Please don‟t put such things into her head madam. You‟ll never get a husband,

Beatrice, if you mess about in garage, getting all ugly and dirty. (GN 217)

Annie is not concerned only with her family but with the whole issue of female professionalism. It seems unnatural to her and she believes that it is a threat to the whole society. As Morris observes: “in Annie‟s view the real crime is the destruction of women‟s traditional, sex-defined roles of wife and mother and its concomitant effect on the status of men.” (492)

Being a good mother and wife is the highest virtue for her and she wants her children to be the same “I hope they‟ll be good girls, madam, and good wives and mothers – that‟s what I‟ll bring them up to be”. (GN 216)

In contrast to that, Harriet believes that children are in the first place independent human beings who ought to be allowed to make their own decisions in all aspects of life and she cannot understand the opposite view: “Curious, thought Harriet, this desire to

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possess children and dictate their tastes, as tough they were escaping fragments of one‟s self, and not a separate individuals”. (GN 402)

Sayers masterly manages to turn a victim into a beast not worth the slightest scent of sympathy making Annie‟s deeds and words cruel and aggressive. On the other hand she also turns her own values into a question by suggesting that the whole academic sphere is lacking any purpose. Even though it is Annie – the enemy – who pronounces these words, she seems to represent the hidden sub-conscious of the academics:

But couldn‟t you leave my man alone? He told a lie about somebody else who

was dead and dust hundreds of years ago. Nobody was the worse for that. Was a

dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness? You broke him

and killed him – all for nothing. Do you think that‟s a woman‟s job? (GN 426)

The distinction between a man‟s job and a woman‟s job is crucial in this novel.

Although women were often connected with the role of a governess who was educating children at home, the roles of dons in the academic sphere were closed to them for a long time. At the time the novel was written (1935) they seem established in this role, however, it is clear that their social position was still difficult. As Morris argues: “For although a woman who assumes a male role or takes a man‟s job does not seem criminal to the rational mind, social pressures make extraordinary demands on her.”

(492)

However, even though Annie believes in the traditional roles of women, she herself becomes very masculine. It is yet another example of Sayers‟s play with role reversal. Morris observes that:

Annie never recognizes that she has become exactly what she despises: woman

who is doing a man‟s job. She is breadwinner by necessity….and when she

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chooses a method to commit murder, she chooses and nearly succeeds at

strangling her victim – an extremely rare method for a woman. (493)

Another issue widely discussed among the dons is whether a woman who is trying to combine her career with domestic duties should give priority to her home affairs or to her job responsibilities when her family needs her. In that time it was a topic which related to a rather small number of women as most females decided either for their career or for their families. It was mostly single mothers, widows or poor women that were forced to combine both.

Harriet believes that intellectual women should get married but she also points to the fact that it is not always the woman‟s decision whether the consolidation of her private and professional affairs is plausible. In her opinion it is impossible for a woman to make such a decision if her partner does not believe in her career: “Harriet agreed that intellectual women should marry and reproduce their kind: but she pointed out that the English husband had something to say in the matter and that, very often, he did not care for an intellectual wife” (GN 45). It is a sad coincidence that she is blind to the fact that she actually could have an appropriate husband in Peter Wimsey if only she was able to see it.

In Gaudy Night Miss Hillyard represents an eager advocate of job duties being the primary responsibility of every working woman and gives a personal example proving it right: “A great many of us have to suffer from anxiety in one way or another, said Miss

Hillyard, sharply. I have been very anxious about my sister. It is always an anxious business to have a first baby at thirty-five. But if the event had happened to occur in term-time, it would have had to take place without my assistance”. (GN 219)

Miss Hillyard goes even further and suggests that women who are not totally committed to their jobs should not get these jobs at all: “But if the domestic

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responsibility is to take precedence of the public responsibility, then the work should be handed over to some one else to do” (GN 219). She does not take into consideration that there are women who simply have to combine both spheres of female interest because they do not have any other choice. Miss Hillyard is aware of the fact that some of the dons might be of different opinion and she even accuses the Dean of hypocrisy in this context: “I shouldn‟t mind, said Miss Hillyard, unheeding, if you said openly that intellectual interests were only a second best: but you pretend to put them first in theory and are ashamed of them in practice”. (GN 220)

Some other dons seem to share her sharp opinions but they are also able to view the situation with more understanding for the mother of the family: “of course, I don‟t say that one should be disloyal to one‟s job for private reasons, said Miss Lydgate. But surely, if one takes on personal responsibilities, one owes a duty in that direction. If one‟s job interferes with them perhaps one should give up the job”. (GN 324)

The discussion above shows that Morris was perfectly right in claiming that a woman combining these two roles “is subject to constant scrutiny and cricticism for the way in which she fulfils – or fails to fulfil – the conflicting demands”. (492-493)

Peter Wimsey also takes notice of this general attitude in the college towards professionalism, but being a superhero, he has to accentuate his own merits. It gives the impression that the poor confused women would be lost without him and totally unaware of their own feelings:

I established for a certainty, what I was sure of in my own mind from the start,

that there was not a woman in this Common Room, married or single, who would

be ready to place personal loyalties above professional honour. That was a point

which it seemed necessary to make clear-not so much to me, as to yourselves.

(GN 420)

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The usual antipathy of men towards female professionals leads to the common assumption that the „poison pen‟ must be a man. Peter Wimsey points to the fact that the wrong-doer was someone who was to some degree educated and hated female academics. This predication supports the theory that it must have been a man and

Wimsey puts forward further evidence seemingly proving this assumption:

I do not think it is a coincidence that the portions most heavily disfigured and

obliterated were those in which Miss Lydgate attacked the conclusions of other

scholars, and those scholars, men. If I am right, we see that X is a person capable

of reading, and to some extent understanding, a work of scholarship. (GN 413)

Peter subsequently proves that the dons came under false belief and the enemy was actually a woman.

However, he was not the first one who pointed to men, it was Miss Hillyard who suggested it already at the beginning of the investigation, observing that: “the thing that in my opinion points to a man, went on Miss Hillyard, is the destruction of Miss

Barton‟s book, which is strongly pro-feminist.” (GN 99)

The text in question, The Position of Women in the Modern State, is not only feminist but it is also political and it makes Sayers‟s Gaudy Night very contemporary because it unobtrusively comments on current political situation in Germany without making it the main topic of the novel: “the burning of Miss Barton‟s book in which she attacks the Nazi doctrine that woman‟s place in the State should be confined to the

„womanly‟ occupations of Kinder, Kirche, Kuche” (GN 413). Thus Sayers masterly combines feminism with politics without writing much about the situation, providing the reader with her open anti-fascist view.

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5.2 Identity and Self-confidence

Harriet‟s thoughts in Gaudy Night get often occupied with the issue of her own identity. She keeps questioning her looks, morals and occupation. There are moments when she acts as a successful young woman, proud and self-confident but she also often displays a total lack of objective self-appraisal and points out to her soft spots and questionable past.

When describing her appearance she accentuates that she is not pretty but there is always something that makes her interesting. This feature is also typical of Sayers‟s potrayal by her contemporaries:

The glass showed her own face, rather pale, with black brows fronting squarely

either side of a strong nose, a little too broad for beauty. Her own eyes looked

back at her – rather tired, rather defiant, eyes that had looked upon fear and were

still wary. The mouth was the mouth of one who has been generous and repented

of generosity: its wide corners were tucked back to give nothing away. With the

thick, waving hair folded beneath the black cloth, the face seemed somehow

stripped for action. (GN 13)

Harriet is often worried whether anyone can accept her with her background and occupation, no matter if a woman or a man and even when heading to the Gaudy she is full of doubts: “What would these women say to her, to Harriet Vane, who had taken her First in English and gone to London to write mystery fiction, to live with a man who was not married to her, and to be tried for his murder amid a roar of notoriety? That was not the kind of career that Shrewsbury expected of its old students”. (GN 8)

Harriet continues to have difficulties to accept her past. With regard to these problems, Morris observes: “unable, even after so many years, to escape completely from the notoriety of being accused of murdering her lover, Harriet is not able to

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resolve her emotional and sexual needs until the events at Shrewsbury force her to confront them directly” (489). Harriet does not want to accept that our personalities are the result of our previous experience and her inner thoughts and feelings are very contradictory. She repeatedly craves the assurance of other people that she is a worthy person. She is even worried that her investigation could get the college closer to public disgrace because of her questionable past but she gets easily assured that it is not so:

That is the thing that made me very unwilling to have anything to do with the

inquiry. It is absolutely true. I haven‟t lived a perfectly blameless life, and you

can‟t get over it”....”If you ask me”, said Miss Allison, “some people‟s blameless

lives are to blame for a good deal. I am not a fool, Miss Vane”. (GN 97)

On the other hand, she is aware of her own popularity and gets jealous when someone else gets more attention than her, especially if it concerns Peter Wimsey: “But although she herself was a notoriety, if not precisely a celebrity, it was an annoying fact that Peter was a still more spectacular celebrity, and that, of the two, people would rather know about him than about her”. (GN 46)

Despite all the contradictions in her mind, Harriet is able to admit how confused she is and that she does not know how to overcome these feelings which are rather intrusive: “How could one, in any case, understand other people‟s motives and feelings, when one‟s own remained mysterious?” (GN 203)

Whenever she is exposed to a male interest in her person, she always seems surprised and totally unaware of her own attractivity. One evening she goes out with a student who is obviously in love with her and is taken aback by his sudden proposal.

She feels guilty and responsible for him but she cannot avoid feeling flattered as well.

She deeply believes that only a fool could fall in love with her:

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She was surprised to find how much Mr. Pomfret‟s simple-minded proposal had

elated her. She ought to have been thoroughly ashamed of herself. She ought to be

blaming herself for not having seen what was happening to Mr. Pomfret and taken

steps to stop it. Why hadn‟t she? Simply, she supposed, because the possibility of

such a thing had never occurred to her. She had taken it for granted that she could

never again attract any man‟s fancy, except the eccentric fancy of Peter Wimsey.

And to him she was, of course, only the creature of his making and the mirror of

his own magnanimity. (GN 237)

Even though she values her freedom and unconventional life highly, she also shows a peculiar inclination to formality. It is crucial in her judgement of the young students. She gets easily agitated and even the way the students dress can provoke her, for example she “observed with irritation that most of them wore their caps badly, and one had had the folly to put on a pale lemon frock with muslin frills, which looked incongruous beneath a gown”. (GN 13)

As if she was not satisfied with her inner peevishness, she immediately starts to justify what she previously disliked herself, comparing the students with male academics: “the bright colours are medieval enough. And at any rate, the women are no worse than the men”. I once saw old Hammond walk in the Encaenia procession in a

Mus. Doc. gown, a grey flannel suit, brown boots and a blue spotted tie, and nobody said anything to him”. (GN 13)

Her inclination to formality is usually connected with the dignity of the academic female professionals and she feels obliged to protect it whenever needed, “Harriet wrote a tart letter to the paper, pointing out that either undergraduate or woman student would be seemlier English than undergraduette, and that the correct method of describing

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Dr. Baring was the Warden. The only result of this was to provoke a correspondence headed Lady Undergrands, and a reference to sweet girl-graduates”. (GN 71)

The disrespect of the public, here represented by the paper, makes her so angry that she irrationally attacks the first male who comes by: “She informed Wimsey – who happened to be the nearest male person handy for scarifying – that this kind of vulgarity was typical of the average man‟s attitude to women‟s intellectual interests”. (GN 71)

Annie managed to accentuate most of Harriet‟s own doubts and fears, by attacking her professional capabilities, loyalty and morals. She hits the mark by bringing to light Harriet‟s deepest hesitations:

Even you, you silly old hags – you had to get a man to do your work for you. You

brought him here. She leaned over with her fierce eyes, as though she would have

fallen on her and torn her to pieces. And you‟re the dirtiest hypocrite of the lot. I

know who you are. You had a lover once and he died....I suppose you‟d say you

loved him. You don't know what love means. It means sticking to your man

through thick and thin and putting up with everything. But you take men and use

them and throw them away when you‟ve finished with them. (GN 428)

But doubtful identity is not only Harriet‟s problem. Annie was able to emphasize the uncertainties and inner uneasiness of the whole female college in the moments of impending danger: “You brazen devils – you all stand together. You‟re only frightened for your skins and your miserable reputations. I scared you all, didn‟t I? God! How I laughed to see you all look at one another! You didn‟t even trust each other. You can‟t agree about anything except hating decent women and their men”. (GN 427)

Thus she brought to light Harriet‟s suppressed feelings. Feelings, that most probably won control over all the students and dons during the outrages of the „poison pen‟. She herself “was suddenly afraid of these women.....she knew the ancient dread of

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Artemis, moon-goddess, virgin-huntress, whose arrows are plagues and death”. (GN

250)

Morris explains that Harriet‟s feelings of threat are based on her belief that celibacy is unhealthy. She claims that:

In choosing the celibate life of the mind of the women she (Harriet) admires and

would like in some ways to emulate have denied a vital, healthy part of

themselves. This denial, she supposes, can result in mental disturbance and crime.

She equates sexual frustration or denial with perversion and madness and the

capacity to threaten and perhaps even to harm other women. (Morris 490)

It is Peter Wimsey who manages to restore the dons‟ professional pride and broken confidence, giving the whole college belief that intellectual women are powerful and capable of the same deeds as men: “Will you let me say, here and now, that the one thing which frustrated the whole attack from the first to the last was the remarkable solidarity and public spirit displayed by your college as a body. I think that was the last obstacle that X expected to encounter in a community of women”. (GN 414)

It would have been a more feminist approach if it were a woman whose speech would have such significance but as Wimsey is Sayers‟s great hero and an ardent supporter of educated women, he can be viewed as a feminist in this context.

Whatever his feminist views might be, the moment when he reveals the identity of the perpertrator is also the moment when he re-establishes his masculinity to the full. He becomes the typical rational and decisive detective without whom the crime could not be solved. Rowland argues that through the restored balance of the college, Sayers‟s heroine can start a new life with Peter: “The dreaded sexual pathology of the unmarried woman is found to be bogus, the value of sincere work affirmed and Harriet finds that

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she has at last discovered how to reconcile the demands of her intellect and passions.

She can now accept marriage with Wimsey as a partnership.” (GN 172)

On the contrary, Danielsson suggests that turning to love after the crime was solved is a typical pattern of detective fiction. She argues that: “Once the unpleasantness….is removed, however, people are free to engage once more in the pursuit of love and thus assure the reader that the case is really and truly over.”

(Danielsson 55)

However, the section where Wimsey discloses the perpetrator is significant through the masculine reasoning he performes. Although the dons get involved in the discussion, it is clear that this moment is the triumph of Wimsey‟s detective work and and a proof of his professional qualities. Cambell comments on this issue in a following way: “Despite the novel‟s explicit endorsement of the intellectual independence and ability of women, in other words, Sayers still allows the one man involved to have the final authority.” (502)

5.3 Love and Relationships

Anyhow, a lot has to happen before it comes to the moment when Harriet accepts

Wimsey‟s proposal. Harriet‟s love life is very boring ever since her trial in Strong

Poison. Being publicly labelled as a woman of doubtful morals, she prefers to live alone because she still views marriage as a binding and unnecessary institution and Peter refuses to live in a free relationship without marriage. She never encounters a man who would be able to outdo Peter Wimsey, which makes him a persistent component of her inner life. She would not admit that she loves him even though it is obvious and she keeps trying to drive him away for good. But she is not very convincing and he keeps

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coming back. When he discovers that she got some nasty letters because of their acquaintance, they have an argument uncovering their unspoken feelings:

“I might have the consideration not to expose you to it. Heaven knows you‟ve

tried hard enough to get rid of me. In fact, I think you‟ve used every possible lever

to dislodge me, except that one.”

“Well, I knew you would hate it so. I didn‟t want to hurt you.”

“Didn't want to hurt me?” She realised that this, to him, must sound completely

lunatic.

“I mean that, Peter. I know I‟ve said about every damnable thing to you that I

could think of. But I have my limits.” A sudden wave of anger surged up in her.

“My God, do you really think that of me? Do you suppose there‟s no meanness

I wouldn‟t stoop to?”

“You‟d have been perfectly justified in telling me that I was making things more

difficult for you by hanging round.”

“Should I? Did you expect me to tell you that you were compromising my

reputation, when I had none to compromise?” (GN 69)

It shows that they both care for each other and that Harriet‟s past still influences their possible mutual future because she is not able to throw off the burden. Rowland views Harriet‟s refusal to marry as a result of an ongoing process of the purification of the feminine. She claims that: “Both Strong Poison and Gaudy Night demonstrate the need for the feminine to be purged of the uncanny before Peter can achieve a companionate marriage of equals with Harriet.” (Rowland 137)

Harriet soon realizes that she does not want to get him out of her life and she is aware of contradictory manifestations of her attitudes. She tries to explain it to Wimsey, uncovering how much she cares about him: “Peter, I‟m afraid I‟m not very consistent.

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I came here tonight with the firm intention of telling you to chuck it. But I‟d rather fight my own battles. I – I – ”, she looked up and went on quaveringly, “I‟m damned if

I‟ll have you wiped out by plug-uglies or anonymous-letter writers?” (GN 69)

Peter always prevents her from getting embarrassed. When Harriet gets too emotional, Peter usually tries to turn it into fun, so that she does not have to feel ashamed, especially when it happens in a public place: “You can‟t cry in this club. It‟s never been done, and if you disgrace me like this, I shall get into a row with the

Committee. They‟ll probably close the Ladies‟ room altogether”. (GN 69-70)

She admires his wit, decisiveness and intelligence but is also able to specify what she most dislikes in him, pointing to his aristocratic uppishness: “Harriet privately agreed that it was not the kind of letter she would care to receive. It displayed, in fact, almost everything that she resented most in Peter: the condescending superiority, the arrogance of caste and the generosity that was like a blow in the face”. (GN 178)

But there are many moments when she realizes that she would really enjoy having him around whenever she needed him: “He at least would be surprised at nothing, shocked at nothing: he had far too wide an experience of the world. And he was completely to be trusted”. (GN 251)

Nevertheless, Harriet would not forget that Peter is a man and thus first of all a rival. She gets easily irritated by his exposure of aristocratic snobbery and enjoys moments of her own dominance: “In fact, for the first time in their acquaintance, she had the upper hand of Peter Wimsey, and could rub his aristocratic nose in the dirt if she wanted to”. (GN 181)

Peter often emphasizes that he wants a partner, not a submissive, obedient wife but Harriet seems to overlook it and fears the loss of her own independence. She keeps offering him other women and he has to persuade her again and again that he means

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what he says: “„Peter, it‟s a shame. Let me introduce you to some nice little woman who adores being protected.‟ „I should be wasted on her. Besides she would always be deceiving me, in the kindest manner, for my own good: and that I could not stand. I object to being tactfully managed by somebody who ought to be my equal.‟” (GN 308)

With all the effort on Harriet‟s part to push him away, she is truly surprised to find out that she actually started to take Peter for granted. When another woman shows interest in Peter, Harriet states the absence of jealousy on her side and she wonders what it might symbolize: “Oddly enough, it had never yet occurred to her to wonder what other women made of Peter, or he of them. This must argue either very great confidence or very great indifference on her own part: for, when one came to think of it, eligibility was his middle name”. (GN 355)

Some of her principles in her relationship to Peter are really ridiculous and she gives them more importance that necessary. After being assaulted, she lets Peter buy her a collar to protect her neck against further attacks. He jokes about her inability to accept a present from him and she realizes how painful it must have been for him and finally allows him to buy her a valuable gift. But their exchange of views also discloses why she is so resentful when it comes to gratitude:

“That collar,” he added, wrapping it up again and laying it on her knee, “deserves

to be put in a glass case.”

“Why?”

“It‟s the only thing you‟ve ever let me give you.”

“Except my life – except my life.”

“Damn,” said Peter, and stared out angrily over the wind-screen. “It must have

been a pretty bitter gift, if you can‟t let either of us forget it.”

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“I‟m sorry, Peter. That was ungenerous and beastly of me. You shall give me

something if you want to.” (GN 365)

When Harriet reflects her own writing of detective stories, she labels psychological analysis as „rather gone out‟ (GN 159) but when it comes to her own dreams, she finds some comfort in analyzing them, even though all her arguments deny the concept of sub-consciousness as a detector of our deep desires. When she dreams about Peter‟s embraces, she pretends that she dislikes the idea but for the reader the message is clear, Harriet is in love:

This won‟t do, said Harriet softly to herself. This really will not do. My sub-

conscious has a most treacherous imagination. She groped for the switch of her

bedside lamp. It‟s disquieting to reflect that one‟s dreams never symbolize one‟s

real wishes, but always something Much Worse. She turned the light on and sat

up. If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of

something like dentists or gardening. I wonder what are the unthinkable depths of

awfulness that can only be expressed by the polite symbol of Peter‟s embraces.

(GN 103)

She discusses her relationship to Peter with Miss de Vine, who is a strong misogamist. Once again Harriet lets someone else comfort her and show her that she is good enough for Peter regardless of her weaknesses and old sins:

“I shouldn‟t be at all a comfortable person for him to live with. I‟ve got a devilish

temper.”

“Well, that‟s his risk, if he likes to take it. He doesn‟t seem to lack courage.”

“I should only make his life a misery.”

“Very well. If you are determined that you‟re not fit to black his boots, tell him so

and send him away.”

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“I‟ve been trying to send Peter away for five years. It doesn‟t have that effect on

him.”

“If you had really tried, you could have sent him away in five minutes.” (GN 431)

Harriet appreciatively accepts her comforting words but there is always yet another objection why she could not marry Peter. She pushes Miss de Vine to become almost a supporter of a marriage. Even though Miss de Vine does not forget to emphasize that she would never do it herself and that an academic mind is needed to solve the matter. She advices regards Harriet‟s hesitations as agonizing for both parts:

“You needn‟t be afraid of losing your independence; he will always force it back

on you. If you ever find any kind of repose with him, it can only be the repose of

very delicate balance“.

“That‟s what he says himself. If you were me, should you like to marry a man like

that?”

“Frankly”, said Miss de Vine, “I should not. I would not do it for any

consideration. A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences

seems to me reckless to the point of insanity. You can hurt one another

dreadfully.”

“I know. And I don‟t think I can stand being hurt any more.”

“Then,” said Miss de Vine, “I suggest that you stop hurting other people. Face the

facts and state a conclusion. Bring a scholar‟s mind to the problem and have done

with it.” (GN 432)

From the quotation above it is clear that Miss de Vine was doing her best to help

Harriet come to a conclusion about her relationship to Peter. Williams describes Miss de

Vine as an unlikeable character who “admits that she is profoundly uninterested in her fellow human beings. Yet, like the characters in earlier detective novels who decide that

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justice must come before personal loyalties, she is observing some kind of moral law”

(97). However, she is very helpful when Harriet is involved. It seems that Harriet‟s openly displayed femininity arouses need for protection not only in Wimsey but also in

Miss de Vine.

When Peter accidentally finds Harriet‟s unfinished sonnet and adds some lines to it in response to her writing, she realizes that he is offering her all she wants:

Yet with all this, he seemed willing to let her run back behind the barriers of the

mind, provided – yes, he was consistent after all – provided she would make her

own way of escape through her work. He was, in fact, offering her the choice

between himself and Wilfrid. He did recognise that she had an outlet which he

had not. (GN 347)

But it is still not enough to persuade her even though she has admitted to herself long before that she was in love with him. When Peter arrived to Oxford and she was handing him over all her notes and documents concerning the investigation, she could not resist to study his face thoroughly and then it struck her: “So, thought Harriet, it has happened. But it happened long ago. The only new thing that has happened is that now I have got to admit it to myself. I have known it for some time” (GN 281). But it takes further hundred and sixty pages till she is ready to accept his regularly repeated proposal.

5.4 Academic Work vs. Writing of Detective Novels

The choice between an academic activity and detective fiction is not that much accentuated by Harriet Vane but it is definitely a major issue for Sayers who eventually decided to quit the genre for good. Harriet seems more in conformity with her profession and her thinking of an academic career only comes forward when she feels

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weak and wants to hide away from her everyday troubles. She believes that the atmosphere at the college might help her forget her own failures and wrongdoings:

If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual

achievement counted: if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some

close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts,

publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-

hunters, and competitors: abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal

jealousies: getting one‟s teeth into something dull and durable: maturing into

solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches – then, one might be able to forget the wreck

and chaos of the past, of see it, at any rate in a truer proportion. (GN 22)

By calling the academic work dull and durable, Harriet may state that she views this kind of activity as a way of making it possible and justified to escape from the real life and suppress one‟s emotions. But it would yet be cowardly to do so. Her thinking seems to reflect concepts and ideas Sayers must have gone through before she decided to make the final cut. She also believed that not everyone was predetermined for this kind of profession. Sayers made Miss de Vine the perfect example of virtues and drives necessary for this role: “The Fellow‟s personality attracted and puzzled her very much.

More than with any other of the dons, she felt that with Miss de Vine the devotion to intellectual life was the result, not of the untroubled following of a natural or acquired bias, but of a powerful spiritual call, over-riding other possible tendencies and desires”.

(GN 124)

At the Gaudy Harriet cannot avoid considerations whether she had not betrayed her ideals by diverting from the path of an academic to a conventional detective story writer and is really glad to hear from Miss Lydgate that this is not how she perceives her

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students. Miss Lydgate offers comfort using reasonable arguments describing what she appreciates in her students:

“You always had a scholarly mind, though,” said Miss Lydgate, “and I expect you

find your training a help in some ways, don‟t you? I used to think you might take

upon academic career.”

“Are you disappointed that I didn‟t?”

“No, no, indeed. I think it‟s so nice that our students go out and do such varied

and interesting things, provided they do them well. And I must say, most of our

students do exceedingly good work along their own lines.” (GN 42)

Harriet gets easily uncertain when someone attacks her job, suggesting it to be of a lower merit. When Miss Allison publicly attacks the writers of her kind, she does not know how to deal with it and reacts inappropriately. She is aware of her failure to face such assaults and that makes the situation even worse “Miss Allison made some rather sharp observation about writers of international celebrity and Harriet left the table, flushing uncomfortably and angry with herself for doing so”. (GN 254)

Miss Barton initiates a debate about the morality of Harriet‟s and Wimsey‟s hobby to investigate crimes. She believes that murders are a delicate issue and one should not interfere in the work of the police. Harriet patiently explains that in the case of her unjustified trial, she had every reason to be thankful that Peter had such a hobby, otherwise she would have been convicted of murder.

When being asked what made her continue to write detective novels after having this personal experience Harriet replied: “I know what you‟re thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don‟t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.” (GN 33)

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Thus she clearly demonstrates that writing of this kind of books is mainly a source of money for her which strongly supports the idea that Harriet Vane is speaking for

Dorothy L. Sayers. She is definitely aware why the readers are interested in this genre and sees the whole politically-economic background:

The fashion for psychological analysis had, she decided, rather gone out since her

day, she was instinctively aware that a yearning for action and the concrete was

taking its place. The pre-War solemnity and the post-War exhaustion were both

gone: the desire now was for an energetic doing of something definite, though the

definitions differed. The detective story, no doubt, was acceptable, because in it

something definite was done, the „what‟ being comfortably decided beforehand by

the author. (GN 159)

When Harriet reflects her own writing, she discloses how intimate the writing of books is for her and that she does not want to give herself away by crossing the thin line between a good writing and an exhibition of her own soul: “they had been written with a mental reservation, a determination to keep her own opinions and personality out of view. She considered with distaste a clever and superficial discussion between two of the characters about married life. She could have made a much better living of that, if she had not been afraid of giving herself away”. (GN 64)

It shows that in her writing she tends to keep her emotions for herself, not displaying them openly, which is usually associated with men rather than with women who often feel relief when they disclose their feelings publicly.

However, in Gaudy Night Harriet disclosed to her friends much more of her inner attitudes than in the previous novels and this shift clearly proves that she is becoming more feminine.

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6. Busman’s Honeymoon

6.1 Harriet from the Point of View of Others

The book starts with extracts from Peter‟s mother‟s diary and an exchange of letters written by Harriet‟s and Peter‟s friends and relatives. These letters disclose how others view Harriet. There are people who judge her by her looks, past, profession or education, influenced by their prejudice. There are her dons from the college who came to the wedding and share their impressions in letters. There are also people who met

Harriet for the first time already as Lady Peter Wimsey (interestingly, here her own name absolutely disappears) and evaluate her according to her new position. And finally there is Peter who knows her best out of all these people but is still to uncover some new sides of his wife‟s personality.

The people from the aristocratic circles tend to look down at Harriet which is not surprising. Moreover, it would be unusual if it was the other way round. A person‟s reputation plays a vital role when joining the high society and Harriet is not totally faultless in this respect. One of the letters to Peter‟s mother comments on Harriet with a sarcastic amusement accentuating her feminist attitudes: “A cynic should have cause to be grateful, since to see your amorous sweet devil of a son wedded to an Oxford-

Bloomsbury blue-stocking should add considerably to the gaiety of the season.” (BH 9)

Peter‟s mother ignores these biting comments and views Harriet as a blessing for her son. Thus, she is not only denying an estimated aristocratic superiority but also breaks the traditional belief of a horrid mother-in-law. She is ready to offer Harriet her helping hand if she was confused about some aspects of her new lifestyle and passionately protects her background:

I shall do my best for Peter‟s wife, if only to spite Helen, who will doubtless make

everything as unpleasant as possible for her new sister-in-law. Naturally, I pay no

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attention to her snobbish nonsense about misalliances, which is ridiculous and

out-of-date. Compared with the riff-raff we are getting in now from the films and

night-clubs, a country doctor‟s daughter, even with a poet in her past, is a miracle

of respectability. If the young woman has brains and bowels, she will suit well

enough. (BH 10)

The gossipers show their displeasure about the fact that Harriet was married from a women‟s college and bring up the topic of her trial accusing her unjustly of a murder of a Bolshevist or a musician.

There is also some minor criticism directed at the ceremony itself and especially the marriage vow arouses some sharp comments concerning Harriet‟s presumable inability to become a cooperative partner in the marriage: “they were married in the old, coarse Prayer-book form and the bride said „Obey‟ – I take this to be their idea of humour, for she looks as obstinate as a mule.” (BH 13)

The different views of Harriet presented above show clearly that an independent young woman with publicly known sexual past had to face a lot of prejudice. The qualities of a self-sufficient female professional were not generally accepted.

As mentioned above Harriet‟s former dons and friends from the college also took part in the ceremony even though it must have been difficult for some of them to get stripped of their gowns which help to cover not only physical but also mental deficiencies and to appear unmasked in Sunday clothes. They admire in particular

Harriet‟s dignity during the ceremony and compliment on her unconventional appearance: “I had never imagined that Harriet Vane could look so impressive. I‟m always apt to think of her, still, as a gawky and dishevelled First-Year, all bones, with a discontented expression. Yesterday she looked like a Renaissance portrait stepped out of its frame”. (BH 17)

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For Peter it is very important whether his trusty butler Mr. Bunter would accept

Harriet. Mr. Bunter would never express his doubts or negative opinion but Sayers lets the reader peep into his inner world to show that although he has a slightly dismissive view of women generally, he can still appreciate Harriet‟s convincing good manners:

“Nothing, thought Mr. Bunter, not even an Oxford education, would prevent a woman‟s mind from straying away after inessentials; but he was pleased to note that the temper was, so far, admirably controlled” (BH 79). It suggests, that for Mr. Bunter, the highest value of a woman is her ability to be non-disturbing. He seems to prefer the traditional

Victorian values.

When the murder becomes public, it evokes a real sensation and reporters start coming to Harriet‟s and Peter‟s new home. Harriet would like to avoid her previous bad experience when a lot of offending nonsense was written. When one of Peter‟s old friends, a reporter, comes to interview them, Harriet tries to persuade him that he should stick to the story and leave the gossip out. She asks the reporter to keep the sensation in reasonable boundaries:

One has to put up with what newspapers choose to say. I‟ve reason to know it.

I‟ve had it before. But if you put in anything sickening about Peter and me – you

know what I mean – any of the sort of things that make one writhe and wish one

was dead, it‟ll be pretty rotten for us and pretty rotten for you. Peter isn‟t exactly a

rhinoceros, you know. (BH 230)

The pressman wants her to answer some questions about her career. She reveals that she is going to continue writing detective stories and that the future books are going to be published under the same name with her husband‟s supportive approval. During their further discussion she succeeds in winning the journalist on her side. He can see that she is driven by her devotion to Peter:

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Salcombe Hardy reflected that Peter Wimsey‟s wife was almost handsome when

she was excited. He sympathized with her anxiety about Peter‟s feelings. He

really thought she must be fond of the old blighter. He was deeply moved for the

whisky had been generously measured. He determined to do all he could to keep

the human story dignified. (BH 231)

It shows, that in this marriage Harriet manages to combine both, her independent job as well as the devotion to her husband, without having to quit on either of these.

These two essentials, the reason and the emotions, are now in a perfect harmony. In the previous chapters Harriet dealt with the press only from the professional point of view.

Most relevant of all views of Harriet is of course that of Peter Wimsey. He has some critical remarks when comparing Harriet‟s appearance to other women he met before but on the whole it is obvious that he admires everything in her and that she has a way of appealing to him no matter what the circumstances:

He forced himself to examine his wife with detachment. Her face had character,

but no one would ever think of calling it beautiful, and he had always – carelessly

and condescendingly – demanded beauty as pre-requisite. She was long-limbed

and sturdily made, with a kind of loosely-knit freedom of movement that might,

with a more controlled assurance, grow into grace; yet he could have named – and

if he had chosen might have had – a score of women far lovelier in form and

motion. Her speaking voice was deep and attractive; yet, after all, he had once

owned the finest lyric soprano in Europe. Otherwise, what? A skin like pale honey

and mind of a curious, tough quality that stimulated his own. Yet no woman had

ever so stirred his blood; she had only to look or speak to make the very bones

shake in his body. (BH 246-247)

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Peter also registers the change in Harriet‟s self-esteem. Even though she still shows some remorse over her past behaviour towards Peter, it is obvious that through his love she won on confidence and became less driven by her anxieties and qualms:

“His wife‟s serene face told him that she had somehow gained all the confidence he had lost. Before their marriage, he had never seen her look like that”. (BH 248)

6.2 Harriet’s Marriage

Peter‟s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, recalls how she first met Peter‟s bride. Harriet approached her future mother-in-law steadily wanting to make sure that she accepted her as she would not want to make Peter‟s situation difficult: “Do you honestly not mind too much about Peter and me? Because I love him quite dreadfully, and there‟s just nothing to be done about it”. (BH 19)

The couple have to agree on some premarital property settlements. Peter disarms

Harriet by foreseeing it as a difficulty and asks her in an irresistible way to sacrifice her pride. After short hesitation she agrees without completely giving in: “H. (Harriet) now meekly prepared to accept suitable income, but has solaced pride by ordering two dozen silk shirts in Burlington Arcade, and paying cash for them”. (BH 23)

Harriet still feels guilty that she was refusing Peter for such a long time thus making both their lives miserable but her current commitment is obvious. When Peter gives her an engagement ring with a big ruby, she hardly pays any attention to it and makes him laugh by her disregard for the jewel: “she was looking at him and ten minutes afterwards, when challenged, couldn‟t even tell him the colour of the stone.

Said she was afraid she never would learn to behave like other people, but Peter had only said it was the first time his features had ever been prized above rubies”. (BH 26)

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In Busman’s Honeymoon Harriet displays her feelings openly for the first time.

Previously she was always denying them as already presented above.

Peter‟s mother‟s diary also gives a surprising proof that it was Harriet who insisted on the word „obey‟ during the wedding ceremony. Peter was refusing it arguing that he would perceive it disrespectful but Harriet managed to persuade him picturing situations where a wife‟s obedience would be necessary. He finally gives in after he makes another change in the vow concerning their financial arrangement:

P. and Harriet to wrangle over the word „obey‟. P. said he would consider it

breach of manners to give orders to his wife, but H. said, Oh, no – he‟d give

orders fast enough if the place was on fire or a tree falling down and he wanted

her to stand clear. P. said, in that case they ought both to say „obey‟ but it would

be too much jam for the reporters. Left them to fight it out. When I came back,

found Peter had consented to be obeyed on condition he might „endow‟ and not

„share‟ his worldly goods. Shocking victory of sentiment over principle. (BH 27)

After the premarital issues are settled, the couple gets married. With the marriage new problems arise and Peter and Harriet realize that many issues have to be further discussed to achieve harmony. Rowland suggests that the main topic is otherness. It regards their personalities as well as the social order. She claims that:

The honeymooning detectives are forced to face otherness within as they both

reveal a primary loyalty to personal integrity which may appear to conflict with

their mutual devotion. The otherness without proves to be a harsh version of the

democratising forces of the modern world combined with capitalism stripped of

ethics. (Rowland 75)

As most married couples Harriet and Peter have a discussion about children.

Harriet never had the urge to have them but when Peter asks her now, she admits that

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she might change her opinion in the future. Peter worries what kind of father he would make and tackles the issue of degrading old aristocratic families, laying stress on the questionable sanity of his relatives. Harriet manages to assure him that none of these issues should be a problem for them: “Your brother married his own cousin. Your sister married a commoner and her children are all right. You wouldn‟t be doing it all yourself, you know – I‟m common enough. What‟s wrong with me?” (BH 37)

Even though Harriet‟s self-esteem developed after she got married, she still gets attacks of her own inadequacy as a wife. When they arrive at their new house and cannot enter it because the former owner is not waiting for them, she gets overwhelmed by the feeling that it is all her fault and that Peter has a reason to feel betrayed: “this, she felt, was her fault. Her idea in the first place. Her house. Her honeymoon. Her-and this was the incalculable factor in the thing – her husband…. The man with rights – including the right not to be made a fool of by his belongings.” (BH 41)

Peter views the situation in a different way and all he cares about is the fact that he finally managed to persuade her to become his wife. Here, in front of their new home, he allows himself to express his joy triumphantly: “Dou you realize, woman, that

I‟ve done it?...that I‟ve got you?..that you can‟t get rid of me now, short of death or divorce?” (BH 41)

They are now able to make fun of those five years where they were unable to find a way to each other. This old anguish is finally starting to vanish and they feel free to speak about the experience with humour and without bitterness. However, no matter how funny their discussion might be, it also suggests that Harriet identifies poverty with bad manners and low intelligence which seems to confirm Sayers‟s often discussed snobbery and conservatism:

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“I believe, if I‟d nothing but a haystack to offer you, you‟d have married me years

ago”.

“I shouldn‟t be surprised”.

“Damnation! Think what I‟ve missed”.

“Me too. At this moment I could have been tramping at your heels with five

babies and black eye, and saying to a sympathetic bobby, „You leave „im be-„e‟s

my man, ain‟t „e?-'E‟ve a right to knock me abaht‟”.

“You seem”, said her husband, reprovingly, “to regret the black eye more than the

five babies”.

“Naturally. You‟ll never give me the black eye.” (BH 42)

In a situation when the honeymoon starts with such an unpleasant thing as a murder, the couple can test their abilities to face difficult circumstances. Peter and

Harriet have an opportunity to discover that both of them are far from losing control easily and tend to stay calm and decisive: “It‟s beginning to convince me, Peter. Such a series of domestic accidents could only happen to married people. There‟s none of that artificial honeymoon glitter that prevents people from discovering each other‟s real characters. You stand the test of tribulation remarkably well. It‟s very encouraging.”

(BH 63)

Sayers includes a lot of little funny episodes or dialogues to show that the couple is in harmony. Thus Peter jokes that their twenty-four hours lasting marriage could be considered a record in these days and Harriet gets ashamed when she inadvertently addresses Peter „My lord‟:

What was that you called me?

Oh, Peter-how absurd! I wasn‟t thinking.

What did you call me?

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My lord!

The last two words in the language I ever expected to get a kick out of. (BH 66)

Despite their humour, Harriet feels uncomfortable about the thought that the first night they slept in the house, the former owner lay undiscovered dead in the cellar. She has obsessive idea of rats upon his body. Peter tries to calm her down and offers to get accommodation in a nearby inn as they have to stay until the inquest is finished. Harriet refuses it, respecting his attitude towards the whole issue “I‟m not going to let you think there‟s any difference between your feelings and mine. That would be worse than rats, even.” (BH 117)

They have a long painful discussion whether Peter should take part in the investigation of this murder. After he explains that he does not want to make the impression of being interested in detection only for fun, Harriet hesitantly agrees, however, she views these negotiations critically: “This business of adjusting oneself was not so easy after all. Being preposterously fond of a person didn‟t prevent one from hurting him unintentionally.” (BH 126)

It is obvious that even though Harriet was previously interested in investigating, she would now prefer to preserve the harmony of her marriage. However, detection is an activity which brought Peter‟s victory in Gaudy Night and he wants to keep it as it is a part of his professional integrity. Rowland claims that: “The fact that Wimsey remains the superior detective is a sign that Sayers is concerned to integrate the feminine within existing structures of power.” (172)

After the investigation of the police starts, the house is full of people and the atmosphere of a honeymoon is difficult to maintain. Peter is very upset about it and withdraws himself from Harriet thus making the whole situation even worse. Harriet tries not to interfer too much, however, in a moment when he acts in a feminine way,

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she has to become more persuasive: “I‟m only trying to tell you, in the nicest possible manner, that provided I were with you, I shouldn‟t greatly mind being deaf, dumb, halt, blind and imbecile, afflicted with shingles and whooping-cough, in an open boat without clothes or food, with a thunderstorm coming on. But you‟re being painfully stupid about it”. (BH 182)

Peter and Harriet also experience a conflict that puts their marriage in question.

Peter wants to disclose to the police an information Harriet gained in confidence.

During a following quarrel Harriet gets really upset and Peter suggest giving his job up.

Harriet refuses this solution as humiliating and ineffective for their marriage: “What kind of life could we have if I knew that you had become less than yourself by marrying me?” (BH 290)

Peter points out that most women would be glad about such result but Harriet insists on their equality and wants them both to avoid sacrifice in their relationship: “If we disagree, we‟ll fight it out like gentlemen. We won‟t stand for matrimonial blackmail”. (BH 290)

Sayers shows that the equality in marriage is not effortless and that it has to be negotiated. Harriet and Peter succeed in forming a functional unity. With emphasis on the significance of their professions, Rowland comments on their achievement in a following way: “Together they represent a psychic re-formation of Englishness, continuous with country house nostalgia, yet crucially permitting both the novelist

(Harriet) and the detective (Peter) to operate with integrity.” (76)

The most significant issue Harriet and Peter have to stand up to comes at the end of the novel when they already know that Crutchley is going to get executed. Harriet knows that Peter suffers terrible wringing of consciousness for causing somebody else‟s

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death but it gets even more frustrating as he is trying to hide it: “The worst feature, she thought….was Peter‟s determined courtesy and cheerfulness”. (BH 367)

After Peter goes to see the murderer in the prison, Harriet would like to comfort him but she believes that it has to be his decision to come to her; she therefore doubts the quality of their relationship once again, believing that it is only her responsibility to make the marriage function, and she thinks: “If he does not want me, I have failed altogether, and that failure will be with us all our lives”. (BH 373)

Harriet finally waits to see Peter coming for solace to her. She manages to drive his feelings of guilt away explaining that if it was not for his interfering, innocent people could be unjustly sentenced to death: “If you hadn‟t meddled six years ago, it would almost certainly have been me” (BH 375). The remark about Harriet‟s thankfulness for saving her life eventually seems to calm him down. It resembles the situations in Gaudy Night where Harriet had to get assurance by others. Now she is strong enough to offer the same to her husband.

6.3 The Country Women

When moving to the country, both Harriet and Peter show some fancy for the rural way of life. It was Harriet who had the sentimental idea of spending their honeymoon in the area where she grew up, connecting thus her happy childhood with the first period of happiness in her adult life. She manifests spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm about the life and people‟s roles in the country: “But in a village – no matter what village - they were all immutably themselves; parson, organist, sweep, duke‟s son and doctor‟s daughter, moving like chessmen upon their allotted squares. She was curiously excited. She thought, I have married England”. (BH 96)

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Rowland explains that the choice of the background of a novel plays a significant role. In her view, even other authors of detective fiction, such as Christie or P. D.

James, often associated the countryside with some specific values. She argues that: “the

„country house‟…is a structure that can be opposed to the social instabilities created by modern capitalism.” (Rowland 44) Thus Sayers creates an atmosphere suitable for a honeymoon, violating it subsequently with an emergence of a murdered person.

There are not many people in a village an aristocrat and his wife would associate with. The vicar, Mr. Goodacre, and his wife are the first ones whom Harriet and Peter come to see. Mrs. Goodacer is a talkative woman with many activities, trying to set an example for the community. She offers Harriet and Peter that they could stay at her house if they felt uneasy about the murder in their house but when they refuse, she explains that she is used to interfere in other people‟s lives when trying to help those who our not able to do it on their own: “In our position one‟s always interfering with people for their good, you know. I‟m sure it‟s a bad habit”. (BH 255)

Harriet and Mrs. Goodacer discuss the matter of the death penalty. Mrs. Goodacer explains that men are not capable to foresee the results of their doings and thus suffer when they actually realize what they caused: “But that‟s men all over. They want the thing done and then, of course, they don‟t like the consequences”. (BH 369)

Another interesting female character is Mrs. Ruddle, rough and uneducated cleaning lady of the previous owner of the house. When they first meet, Harriet and

Peter hesitate whether to keep her in service or not. Mr. Bunter characterizes her shortly and fittingly in the following way: “Her manner is unpolished, but I have observed that her brass is not and she has hitherto maintained the house in a state of commendable cleanliness”. (BH 60)

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It turns out that she is rather malicious and enjoys getting other people in difficulties and embarrassing situations. For example, when one of the policemen fails to mention that he was in the house the night the victim was supposed to die, she triumphantly reveals the truth without being able to suppress the joy over her little victory but it also shows that she acts in such a way out of fear: “Her small eyes gleamed with malicious triumph, behind which lurked an uneasy horror”. (BH 168)

When Mrs. Ruddle has to give evidence in the case, she feels like a film star and is ready to talk to the reporters. But just at that point Harriet and Peter come out of the building and they manage to stop her in time. She has a different view of newspapers than Harriet who puts so much effort into driving the reporters away from her house.

Mrs. Ruddle enjoys being photographed and feels sorry that she was not interviewed:

“It‟s nice to see your friends in the papers, ain‟t it now?” (BH 260)

Mrs. Ruddle wonders how Harriet and Peter can stay in a house where someone was murdered. Mr. Bunter explains that he and his Lordship are used to corpses. Mrs.

Ruddle observes that Peter exercises big influence on Harriet: “Ah! said Mrs. Ruddle, with a deep, sentimental sigh. And w‟ere „e‟s „appy, she‟s „appy. Ah! It‟s easy to see she worships the ground „e treads on”. (BH 258)

Mrs. Ruddle doubts that the relationship of the newly wedded couple would stay so passionate and regardful for long. Here the contrast between her and Harriet is the most striking, as she connects Harriet‟s joking about matrimonial violence with her own actual experience and shows what she really values in a man: “Appy days! But it‟s early days yet, Mr. Bunter. A man‟s a man w‟en all‟s said and done. Ruddle, now – useter knock me about something shocking w‟en e‟d „ad a drop – though a good „usband, and bringin‟ the money „om reg‟ular”. (BH 258)

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Another more prominent female figure in the story is Miss Twitterton. In contrast to Mrs. Ruddle, she arouses sympathy from the reader as well as from Harriet. When

Harriet and Peter meet her for the first time, she surprises Peter by addressing Harriet correctly which is not a commonplace in the country: “Our hostess has a certain refinement (I think that‟s the word) about her which I had not expected. She got your title right first shot, which is unusual”. (BH 51)

However, Harriet, who still remembers a lot of local people from her childhood, finds an explanation for this occurrence: “It comes back to me that she was a village schoolmistress over at some place near Broxford”. (BH 51)

Miss Twitterton is an aging spinster who would like to marry and falls for a wrong man. She gets charmed by Crutchley, the gardener and future murderer.

Crutchley believes that she is going to inherit a lot of money and so he starts to make advances to her as he is after her property. But even then he is not able to treat Miss

Twitterton with respect. He tends to humiliate her and behave in a rude way. When she suggests he could be jealous, he laughs at her: “It was not a pleasant laugh, though it showed his teeth”. (BH 266)

When it turns out that the uncle who was the victim of the murder, left only debts,

Cruchley immediately leaves her. He is not only greedy, but also very cruel towards

Miss Twitterton and also towards his another mistress whom he left pregnant. Although he expresses the loss of interest in Miss Twitterton, she cannot believe it and brings the situation to the boil by being emotional:

“Dear Frank-I know it‟s been a dreadful disappointment-but you can‟t mean this-

you can‟t! I-I-I-oh, do be kind to me, Frank-I love you so....”

In frantic appeal, she flung herself into his arms; and the contact with her damp

cheeks and stringy body drove him to an ugly fury.

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“Damn you, get off! Take your blasted claws out of my neck. Shut up! I‟m sick

and tired of the sight of you.” (BH 269)

This of course considerably shatters Miss Twitterton and makes her cry and interrupt suddenly Harriet and Peter‟s conversation about their mutual love. Peter gives her an angry look and Miss Twitterton gets hysterical. Harriet is trying to comfort her but when it does not work she tries to make her feel better by putting some make-up on her face and barbering her hair. The situation calms down after both the women engage in an activity which could hardly be any more feminine. It is yet another occasion where

Harriet confirms her transformation from a rational professional towards a balanced compassion.

As in the previous novels, the issue of the masculine and the feminine remains very significant. To harmonize their relationship, Peter and Harriet have to find balance in a position where both of them display equal proportions of femininity and masculinity. As Rowland suggests, their professional integrity is a crucial issue in this process. Harriet‟s professionalism is already settled, however, as the scene with the reporter shows, it works better when combined with emotions. The situation is in sharp contrast to the relationship with her previous lover in Strong Poison where her job was viewed as a necessary evil

The development of Peter‟s attitude is vital too, as Harriet could hardly make the marriage work if she was the only one who was further developing. Rowland summarized Peter‟s development in a following way: “it takes several wolumes of a complex love story to convert Wimsey from nerve-ridden „other‟ to English stiff-upper- lip heroism to a country gentleman capable of a reinvention of a somewhat ironic pastoral in Busman‟s Honeymoon”. (64)

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7. Conclusion

In my thesis I explored the development of Sayers‟s heroine Harriet Vane who is often perceived as an autobiographical character. I focused on the changes leading to her professional and private integrity. Before starting the actual analysis, I tried to point to some details from the author‟s life and work to present how her attitudes and experience influenced her writing. Like her heroine, Sayers gained a university degree and made her living as a writer of detective fiction. In the 1920s and the1930s it was much easier for women to become professionals, due to the changes after the World

War I when women successfully replaced men in many professions. However, the women had to face a lot of prejudice. Anything could become an excuse for sharp criticism on their behalf. Thus Harriet Vane fears to start a new relationship after it becomes publicly known that she had a love-affair with a man who was later murdered and Dorothy L. Sayers experiences a lot of suffering after having an illegitimate son whom she never acknowledged as her own child.

I briefly outlined Sayers‟s work which consisted not only of detective writing but also of plays and essays for broadcasting, religious writings and highly-valued translations. Unlike her heroine, who was devoted to her job of detective fiction writer,

Sayers decided to quit the detective fiction writing at the end of the 1930s which is generally perceived as the end of the first wave of the Queens of Crime in the Golden

Age of detective writing.

However, in her writing, Sayers presents many topical issues of the period such as psychoanalysis in Gaudy Night or spiritualism in Strong Poison. She reflects the social changes which enabled women to join the academic sphere or work as a judge and marginally points to the unpleasant development in Germany revealing that the oppression of people‟s rights is often connected with the oppression of women.

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I included a section revealing the development of the detective genre with emphasis on the role of female authors. I pointed to the fact that the genre continues to be perceived as masculine, partly due to the influence of the Great Detective personified by Sherlock Holmes or, in Sayers‟s writing, Lord Peter Wimsey. I focused on the ways of adjusting the genre to the feminist needs by making the detective more feminine (a typical example being Christie‟s Hercule Poirot) or by the involvement of female assistants who help with the investigation. I concentrated in particular on Harriet‟s rational approach to professionalism which reveals Sayers‟s belief that women should adopt the masculine way of dealing with their profession.

I tried to outline the feminist background of the era mentioning contraception, employment of women (not yet perceived as suitable for a married woman) and the feminist organizations and their divergence. I dealt with the early feminist writing of

Mary Wollstonecraft who accentuated the importance of women‟s education and subsequently I continued with the connection of literature written for women and by women. I presented some views of relevant feminist criticism with emphasis on detective writing. I showed that it was at first perceived as an escapist genre and only later it attracted the attention of literary criticism. I also pointed to the fact that Sayers‟s attitude to feminism was rather conservative, however she wrote a humorous essay where she used the language of feminist writing in a connection with men. Thus she managed to ridicule the traditional approach to this issue and pointed to the importance of equality.

Having followed some critical essays as well as Sayers‟s novels in which Harriet appears, I noticed that Peter‟s and Harriet‟s ability to achieve balance in all spheres of their lives is connected with the issue of masculinity and femininity.

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In the beginning Harriet is already an established author of detective fiction, however, the investigation of the murder in Strong Poison soon reveals that her deceased ex-partner Philip Boyes accepted her writing only because Harriet was able to earn money with it. Thus her professional integrity was violated by the disregard of her partner and it could not be perceived as a full-value component of her life. She approached her writing very rationally, which could be viewed at the same time as a masculine aspect. This approach to professionalism is essential in all four novels and as already stated above, it demonstrates that Sayers believed that female professionals should adjust to the prevailing masculine order in this sphere thus failing to advance the position of women.

Through the analysis of Harriet‟s relationship with Boyes it becomes clear that although she is active and successful in her profession, she is very passive in her private life. She offers Philip her devotion without claiming anything for herself. She is very considerate to all other people, however, she forgets to pay any attention to her own needs. She is trying to protect her family from dishonour by avoiding their contact while living with Boyes without marriage and refuses to marry Peter of whom she believes that he would be unhappy with her. She forgets to ask herself the cardinal question what it is that SHE personally wants. Sayers portrays her heroine as a person unaware of her own qualities and unwilling to open up to the possibility that she could live in an equal relationship. Harriet worries that her future partner would have difficulties to accept her past and even her profession. Her emotions are suppressed by reason usually associated with masculinity.

On the contrary, Peter is quite passive with regard to his profession as most of the investigation is accomplished by his female helpers and he gets very emotional when thinking of a relationship with Harriet. I tried to prove that he seems much more

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feminine than Harriet in Strong Poison and that it is impossible for them to become a couple unless they undergo some changes in order to have a satisfying professional and private life without any constraints. My aim was to show that this can be achieved only through a different distribution of the feminine and masculine forces in their activities.

The second text examined, Have His Carcase, shows an essential shift in this context. The novel presents Harriet as still being rather masculine and trying to deal with all spheres of her life rationally. I pointed to the way she co-operates with the press in order to enlarge the sales of her books. This rational attitude is helpful with regard to her profession as already mentioned above, however, it is not very useful when concerning her relationship to men and in particular to Peter. Their relationship starts to shift as he becomes more masculine than in Strong Poison by becoming essential for the investigation. On the contrary, Harriet‟s femininity is getting more significant but it is not yet ready to disclose openly. It takes the form of her subconscious manifested in her imagination. She daydreams of Peter, however, she suppresses these emotions and denies them any relevance.

I tried to point out that this attitude changes radically in Gaudy Night where

Harriet finally realizes that she is in love with Peter. With the help of this recognition

Harriet learns to accept her femininity. First she allows Peter to buy her an expensive present, subsequently she appreciates his protection and finally she opens her heart to his love. Another way of presenting the return of Harriet‟s femininity is her sudden habit to look for advice by others. Thus Miss de Vine has to explain to her that she is a worthy partner for Peter and Miss Lydgate comforts her that the profession of a detective fiction writer is not a failure.

However, as already discussed, a shift in a relationship between Peter and Harriet in Gaudy Night is only possible after the crime is solved and Peter‟s masculinity fully

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unfolded through the triumph of restoring order to the women‟s college. Harriet at first idealizes the academic world, however, she soon realizes that she believes, that suppressed sexuality is unhealthy and dangerous.

To illustrate Harriet‟s personality, Sayers uses the contrast of the behaviour and thinking of other women. In Gaudy Night there are the dons and Annie, in Busman's

Honeymoon there are the country women.

The crucial issue of Gaudy Night is the schism of combining the professional as well as the domestic sphere. The dons believe that everything has to be sacrificed for the job, whereas Annie, the perpetrator, supports the opposite view. I tried to prove that both Annie and the dons personify masculinity. The dons by adapting to the male professional world and Annie by becoming criminal and using obscene language and violence usually associated with men.

The question of combining a job with a family was less relevant in the 1930s when the number of married working women was distinctively low, however, it still remains a topical question today. It is difficult to balance these two dominant female concerns without making mistakes.

In Busman’s Honeymoon I aimed to prove that Sayers believed that although it is necessary for the beginning of a relationship that the man and the woman are fully established in their male and female world, to maintain a marriage is a different matter.

Here the masculine and the feminine features have to be more equally distributed and both the husband and the wife have to make compromises. Thus Harriet starts to offer solace to Peter, instead of asking for it by others and passively awaits his decision to come back to her, however she still remains rational in regard to her profession. Peter, on the other hand, combines his incompliance in investigation with a remorse over a spoilt honeymoon.

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The contrast of the country women is vital too, as Mrs. Ruddle represents a rough spiteful simplicity as opposed to Harriet‟s understanding for Peter‟s problems. Miss

Twitterton, on the contrary, symbolizes suffering caused by passivity, which contrasts with Harriet‟s decisiveness in her career.

The main message of the last novel by Dorothy L. Sayers is that happiness and harmony have to be negotiated and worked hard for and in particular that both femininity and masculinity are essential for the success in all spheres of life.

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8. Summary

The aim of my thesis was to follow the development of Harriet Vane in Sayers‟s detective novels. I explained the social changes which led to the emergence of the “new young woman” in the 1920s. I highlighted the similarities in Harriet‟s and Sayers‟s life and work because Harriet Vane is generally viewed as the author‟s alter ego. I outlined the development of the detective fiction with emphasis on female authors. I devoted one section of the thesis to the feminist background of the era, focusing on female education, historical background, literature and literary criticism.

I concentrated on the manifestations of femininity and masculinity in the behaviour of Harriet and her future husband Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers‟s great detective. I highlighted Sayers‟s belief that female professionals should adjust to the existing male-dominated professional world and I demonstrated her hesitations regarding her profession. I compared Harriet to other significant female characters of the novels such as the dons in Gaudy Night or the country women in Busman’s

Honeymoon. I focused on Harriet‟s rationality and suppressed emotions reflected in her actions and thoughts. I followed her struggle for harmony which she finally achieved in the last novel.

Key words: feminism, detective fiction, femininity, masculinity, professional, rationality, emotions.

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9. Resumé

Cílem mé práce bylo sledovat vývoj Harriet Vane v detektivních románech

Sayersové. Vysvětlila jsem společenské změny, jejichž výsledkem byla “nová mladá

žena”, která se objevila ve dvacátých letech minulého století. Zdůraznila jsem podobnosti v životě a práci Sayersové a její hrdinky, protože Harriet Vane je obecně vnímána jako autorčino alter ego. Nastínila jsem vývoj detektivní beletrie s důrazem na

ženské autorky. Část práce jsem věnovala feminismu se zaměřením na vzdělávání žen, historické pozadí, literaturu a literární kritiku.

Soustředila jsem se na projevy ženskosti a mužnosti v chování Harriet a jejího budoucího manžela Lorda Petera, Sayersina velkého detektiva.. Zdůraznila jsem

Sayersino přesvědčení, že ženy-profesionálky by se měly přizpůsobit profesnímu světu, ve kterém dominují muži. Porovnala jsem Harriet s dalšími důležitými ženskými postavami jako např. s profesorkami v Gaudy Night nebo s vesnickými ženami v

Busman’s Honeymoon. Soustředila jsem se na Harrietinu racionalitu a potlačené emoce, tak jak se projevovaly v jejích činech a myšlenkách . Sledovala jsem, jakou námahu vynaložila, aby nakonec v posledním románu dosáhla harmonie.

Klíčová slova: feminismus, detektivní beletrie, ženskost, mužnost, profesionál/ka, racionalita, emoce.

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10. Works Cited

Primary sources:

Sayers, Dorothy L. Busman’s Honeymoon: A Love Story with Detective Interruptions.

[1937]. Leipzig: The Albatross, 1939. (BH)

Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. [1935]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988. (GN)

Sayers, Dorothy L. Have His Carcase. [1932]. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003

(HHC)

Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison [1930]. London: Victor Gollancz Limited, 1934. (SP)

Secondary sources:

Belsey, C., Moore, J. The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and Politics of Literary

Criticism. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1989.

Bergmann, Helena. Between Obedience and Freedom, Woman’s Role in the Mid-

Nineteenth Century Industrial Novel. University of Goteborg, 1979.

Branson, N., Heineman, M. Britain in the Nineteen Thirties. St. Albans: Panther Books,

1973.

Campbell, SueEllen. The Detective Heroine and the Death of her Hero: Dorothy Sayers

to P. D. James.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance. University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Coward, Rosalind. “The True Story of How I Became My Own Person.” In The

Feminist Reader. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1989.

Danielsson, Karin Molander. The Dynamic Detective: Social Interest and Seriality in

Contemporary Detective Series. Uppsala: 2002.

Evans, Ifor B. English Literature Between the Wars. London: Methuen & CO. LTD,

1949.

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Gorham, Deborah. “Have We Really Rounded Seraglio Point?” “Vera Brittain and

Inter-War Feminism.” In British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. London:

Edgar Elgar Publishing Limited, 1990.

Hibbert, Christopher. The English: A Social History 1066 – 1945. London: Paladin,

1988.

Hitchman, Janet. Such a Strange Lady: A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York:

Harper & Row, 1975.

James, P. D. “An Introduction.” In The Art of Murder, British Crime Fiction. The

British Council, 1993.

Kent, Susan Kingsley. “Gender Reconstruction After the First World War.” In British

Feminism in the Twentieth Century. London, Edgar Elgar Publishing Limited,

1990.

Kristeva, Julia. “Women‟s Time.” In The Feminist Reader. London: The Macmillan

Press Ltd, 1989.

Light, Alison. Forever England: Feminity, Literature and Conservatism Between the

Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.

Moi, Toril. “Feminist, Female, Feminine.” In The Feminist Reader. London: The

Macmillan Press Ltd, 1989.

Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s, The Dangerous Flood of

History. London: Routledge, 1996.

Morris, Virginia B. “Arsenic and Blue Lace: Sayers’ Criminal Women.” Modern Fiction

Studies. Volume 29/3, Autumn 1983.

Munt, Sally R. “Masculinity and Masquerade”or “Is that a Gun in Your Pocket?”.

Murder by the Book? London: Routledge, 1994.

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Pugh, Martin. “Domesticity and the Decline of Feminism, 1930-1950.” In British

Feminism in the Twentieth Century. London: Edgar Elgar Publishing Limited,

1990.

Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. Palgrave, 2001.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Smith, Harold L. British Feminism in the Twentieth Century. London, Edgar Elgar

Publishing Limited, 1990.

Smith, Harold L. “British Feminism in the 1920s.” In British Feminism in the Twentieth

Century. London: Edgar Elgar Publishing Limited, 1990.

Spender, Dale. “Women and Literary History.” The Feminist Reader. London: The

Macmillan Press Ltd, 1989.

Stevenson, Jane. Women Writers in English Literature. Longman York Press, 1993.

Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500 – 1800. London:

Penguin Books, 1979

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. London: Penguin Books, 1974.

Trodd, Anthea. Women’s Writing in English, Britain 1900 – 1948. London, New York:

Longman, 1998.

Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists. London: Macmillan Education, 1987.

Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ltd. New York, London:

W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

Internet sources:

“Dorothy L. Sayers”. Biography Base. October 2010

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“Detective Story”. Online Encyclopedia Encarta. October 2010.

“Dorothy L. Sayers”. Kirjasto. October 2010

“Dorothy L. Sayers”. October 2010

“Dorothy L. Sayers”. Mystery Net. October 2010

“Dorothy L. Sayers”. October 2010

“Dorothy L. Sayers”. October 2010

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11. Apendix

Strong Poison – A short synopsis of the novel

Strong Poison is the first Sayers‟s novel where Harriet Vane appears. Her entrance to the scene is exceptionally powerful as she is the main suspect in a case of murder. The situation is even more peculiar because the victim is Harriet‟s former lover

Philip Boyes with whom she recently broke up on the ground of his proposal.

At the beginning of their relationship, Philip persuaded Harriet to live with him without getting married even though it was very difficult for her and it took some time till she got used to it. Once she established herself in this unusual and socially unacceptable position, he offered her to marry him which Harriet perceived as a breach of their previous mutual attitude towards conventional living and marriage.

They had a big quarrel and later he died. At first it seemed that it was a natural death but it soon turned out that he died of poisoning by arsenic. The police believed that Harriet was the only person who could commit the crime as she handed him a cup of coffee which was the only drink or food he had not shared with anyone else that particular day.

When Peter Wimsey meets Harriet for the first time during the trial, he immediately falls in love with her and as she is in danger of a death penalty, he is desperate to prove that she is innocent.

With the help of Miss Climpson and Miss Murchison, his efficient female help- mates, he manages to set Harriet free and to convict the real murderer. It could be a romantic beginning of a relationship but Harriet refuses to marry him.

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Have His Carcase – A short synopsis of the novel

Have His Carcase is the second Wimsey novel in which Harriet Vane appears.

When walking on the beach she discovers a dead body with blood still running from the the victim‟s cut throat. Harriet tries to preserve some evidence as she can see the tide coming and manages to take some photos before the body gets washed in the sea. The detail of the running blood makes the police believe that the victim must have been murdered shortly before Harriet found the corpse. However, later it turns out that the victim was a haemophiliac and was killed earlier than originally suspected.

Wimsey soon arrives at the location of the case and Harriet cooperates with him while he is investigating. He still would like to marry her and she goes on refusing it but they stay on friendly terms. They even dance together occasionally. Harriet gets passionately involved in the detection replacing personal happiness with passion for investigation.

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Gaudy Night – A short synopsis of the novel

Gaudy Night was supposed to be the last Sayers‟s detective novel of the Wimsey series. Surprisingly it is not Peter who plays a vital role there. It is Harriet Vane and her inner thoughts and feelings. The whole storyline is focused on the academic career of women. In this respect it is generally viewed as Sayers‟s most autobiographical work.

Other issues connecting Harriet Vane with Sayers are the questions of her detective writing vs. academic career and questions of her own identity and love.

The narrative starts with a reunion of the Shrewsburry College, Harriet Vane‟s alma mater. She receives a nasty anonymous note there but she does not pay much attention to it as the event is unexpectedly pleasant and she gets a warm welcome by most of her former teachers and fellow-students.

Later on, the Warden asks Harriet for help when more anonymous letters and other outrageous actions occur. Harriet starts investigating to prevent public dishonour of the college and to uncover the „poison pen‟. When the situation starts to culminate and a threat of violence appears, she calls Peter Wimsey for help once again.

With her efficient assistance he briskly resolves the mystery and uncovers the identity of the perpetrator. It is a widowed college servant Annie with two children. Her husband was an academic who committed a suicide after his fraud in academic field had been disclosed. Annie passionately hates all intelectual women who in her opinion deprive men of their job opportunities by withdrawing from their traditional domestic sphere. This traditional feminist issue is the main topic of Gaudy night.

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Busman’s Honeymoon – A short synopsis of the novel

In Busman’s Honeymoon Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey get married. It is the last Sayers‟s Wimsey detective novel and as generally known, she married Lord

Peter to get rid of him.

The newly wedded couple comes to Talboys where Harriet lived when she was a little girl and where people still remember her father, a local doctor. They plan to spend their honeymoon there but as the title suggests, the idyll soon turns into a detective investigation after they find the previous owner of their new house dead in the cellar.

The book starts with extracts from Peter‟s mother‟s diary and an exchange of letters written by Harriet‟s and Peter‟s friends and relatives. All these letters are concerned with their wedding and the reader can easily follow what other people think not only of the wedding but also of Harriet‟s and Peter‟s personalities.

We can follow what adjustments and discoveries Harriet and Peter have to make to achieve harmony and understanding in their marriage. There are some minor issues they have to deal with such as obtrusive reporters or Harriet uneasiness in a house where a dead person was found but they also have to face some more significant obstacles.

When uncovering the background of the murder, they have to put up with the drawbacks of convicting the perpetrator. Peter finds it very difficult to accept that he assisted to the death penalty of another human being by proving him guilty. He at first wants to face this moral clash on his own but finally he accepts Harriet‟s compassion and understanding and shares his inner doubts about the whole situation with her.

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