University of Warwick



Dorothy L. Sayers: Seminar Discussion PointsContext:Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born at Oxford in 1893, the only child of the Rev. Henry Sayers, of Anglo-Irish descent. Her theology was traditionally Anglican with emphasis on doctrine and informed many of her works. She won a scholarship to?Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1915 graduated with first class honours in modern languages. Disliking the routine and seclusion of academic life she joined?Blackwell's, the Oxford publishers, and from 1922 until 1929 served as copywriter at a London advertising firm.In 1923 she published her first novel,?Whose Body, which introduced Lord Peter Wimsey, her hero for fourteen volumes of novels and short stories. Writing full time she rose to be the doyen of crime writers and in due course president of the Detection Club, but also wrote plays, translated medieval languages and penned many critical essays. She admired E. C. Bentley and G. K. Chesterton and numbered among her friends T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis. Week 5: TO READ Strong Poison (1930) and Chris Willis’ article, ‘Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and Detective Fiction’.As always, keep an eye out for those strange off-hand references to the Empire and the Foreign.Taking Willis’ key points into consideration, examine the attitudes toward, and descriptions of Spiritualism and its relationship with ideas of the unknown and detection in chapters 16-18.‘between you and me, Mr Boyes could not have done better for himself than to go and get murdered like this. Every copy was old out a week after the result of the exhumation [….] Rather disgusting, really, but one can’t help that. We have to do our best for our client, whatever the circumstances. Miss Vane’s books have always sold reasonably well [….] but of course this business has stimulated things enormously.’ (Strong Poison, Chapter 6)Discuss, using other examples from the text, the particular thrill of crime to the public and the detective as characterized in the novel.‘We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Press [….] so kind of them to pick out all the plums for us and save us the trouble of reading the books. [….] ‘Damn it, she writes detective stories, and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They’re the purest literature we have.’ (Strong Poison, Ch.12)Consider, as in previous weeks, the self-referentiality of the novel as fiction, and make not of and examine the ways in which it uses references to other true and fictional criminal cases.‘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.’ (Strong Poison, ch.16)‘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.’? (Strong Poison, Chapter 13)Using other examples, consider the representation of women, women’s rights, “the Cattery”. “…The post-war generation and so on. Lots of people go off the rails a bit – no real harm in ‘em at all. Just can’t see eye to eye with the older people.” (Strong Poison, Chapter 6)What comments does the novel makes about the different generations, their feelings toward each other. Consider particularly the “parties” Peter attends in chapter 8. “I am always happy,” replied Bunter, “to exert myself to the best of my capcity in your lordship’s service.” “I am aware of it …This time I demand a more perilous devotion – perilous for us both, my Bunter, for if you were carried away, a helpless martyr to matrimony, who then would bring my coffee, prepare my bath, lay out my razor, and perform all those other sacrificial rites?”Building on our discussions in previous weeks, consider the politics and interactions between servants in Chapter 9, depicting Bunter the Butler’s visit to Urquhart’s.b) Consider, also, the roles and descriptions of servants and the working classes in other parts of the text.Read the quotes below, and consult the “short biography” of Wimsey that ends the novel, and consider his characterisation as it is bound up with notions of Englishness, Class, the War, relationships and his detective work.What the First World War taught—a lesson that struck at the heart of Edwardian manliness—was that neither a public school nor a military training in manliness, however rigorous, could quell fear. Willpower alone was not enough. As the protagonist remarks in Warwick Deeping’s novel Kitty (1927), “All the decent, honourable feelings you’ve grown up with seem to drop like water out of a burst paper bag. You’re just a cunning, shivery creature ready to bolt into a hole—and leave someone else to do the dirty job…..The social signs of failures of repression would have been widely observable in wartime. The sheer numbers of men diagnosed and treated as suffering from a “nervous disorder,” some eighty thousand during the war itself, ensured this….. The continuing repercussions of war trauma, widely felt by civilians and veterans alike, were captured in literature and drama of the interwar period. Alison Light, for example, has argued that the increasing popularity of detective fiction in the interwar period lay in its capacity to tap into the psychic aftermath of war, especially the memory of fear, among readers. She calls this a “convalescence literature”: emotionally undemanding, it concealed the signs of violence. It was, one contemporary enthusiast commented, “a sedative for the nerves.” (Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity’)That was the second time Wimsey had been asked not to alter himself; the first time, the request had exalted him; this time, it terrified him. As the taxi lurched along the rainy Embankment, he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which is the first warning stroke of the triumph of mutability [….] For the first time, too, he doubted his own power to carry through what he had undertaken. His personal feelings had been involved before this in his investigations, but they had never clouded his mind. (Strong Poison, Chapter 8)?Years after the end of the war, he is still in the business of execution, and his war experiences temper any claim of perfect justice with the harsh reality of death and the ambivalence of crime and human action; after all, Wimsey comes out of a war which made many a soldier a murderer.1?Through solving crime, Lord Peter summons the dream of perfect justice but cannot participate in it. No matter how many criminals he uncovers, he cannot uncover the mystery of his own shell shock, or unravel the enigma of his own personality. Thus, despite the stability of the detective genre?—?its assurances that every crime can be solved and every criminal revealed?—?Lord Peter Wimsey novels represent a much more ambiguous and unsettling world, where the greatest crimes are never brought to justice, and where triumph over even the most hardened criminal cannot be a cause of unmitigated celebration….Lord Peter Wimsey's shell shock, then, is a way for Dorothy Sayers to explore and vindicate the particular plight of the shell-shocked soldier and to create a psychologically complex hero who cannot fully know himself even as his avocation valorizes knowledge. Her treatment of the issue dispels commonplace assumptions about the shell-shocked soldier. Sayers never doubts that the ailment is real. She emphasizes that Lord Peter can be both shell shocked and heroic by portraying him as an officer noted for his bravery and as a veteran whose pursuit of criminals knows no fear. To counter the representation of the shell-shocked soldier as inadequate, Sayers overloads Wimsey with signifiers of privilege and bravery. His anxieties are not about his personal safety but extend into the moral realm; Sayers presents them as awakened by the cruelty of war and challenged by the pursuit of justice in society. As opposed to doctors who claimed to trace the origin of the trauma and restore the normative self, Wimsey has lost the moment of his shell shock and does not seem particularly interested in probing the origins of his illness. For him, shell shock is a wound that cannot be cured, and the restoration of normativity is neither a possible nor desirable goal, since the self he forms after and through illness is more complex, thoughtful, and empathetic than his former self. (Ariela Freedman,?‘Dorothy Sayers and the Case of the Shell-Shocked Detective’)?Week 7: TO READ: Gaudy Night (1937) and Marya McFadden’s article ‘Queerness at Shrewsbury: Homoerotic Desire in Gaudy Night’As in previous weeks, find and consider the use of elements such as:The narrative voice The characteristics of the “detective(s)” Examine intertextuality, literary debt, true crime.Crime, fame, art, performativityThe uses of religion.Different definitions of “Law”, “Punishment”, and “Justice”. What threatens “the nation”.How the novel and its inhabitants haunted by Empire and the Past?Talk about Private/Public, in terms of spaces, reputations, etc.Domestic and Foreign spacesForeign peoples and objectsVision/blindness. Specific contextual signifiers such as technology, politics, references to warsChoose two Epigraphs heading chapters from different sections of the book. What is the message in them and how are they used in relation to the chapter or story as a whole?Consider the subplot of Lord Wimsey’s role as unofficial envoy of the British Foreign Ministry. What is happening in the subplot and what is its purpose textually and contextually?Using the quotes below and finding textual examples, consider the “similarities between scholarship and detection as intellectual work” in the novel, and its relationship to gender.Since the?“aristocratic country-house”?mystery is a well-known staple of British detective fiction, Sayers is often dismissed as a practitioner of that kind of novel….But more of her novels are set in London, especially in the Bohemian world of artists and intellectuals, than in a manor.? Lord Peter may be an aristocrat, but he is an intellectual….The four novels featuring Harriet Vane, a mystery writer, foreground Sayers’?interest in the similarities between scholarship and detection as intellectual work and have influenced a number of writers who have feminist protagonists in academic settings. (Robin Anne Reid,?1992)?Dorothy?Sayers writes about them very often, but never with as much fear and as much love as she bestows on them in?Gaudy Night, in which she celebrates female self-sufficiency and abandons it with Harriet Vane….In concept at least, the women of Shrewsbury?–?unlike many?manless?women in literature, including the Amazons themselves?–?are not defined by negation; they are seen vigorously, in terms of what they have, not of what they lack.? Not only are they committed to their cause, but Sayers reveals with enormous shrewdness the fact that this commitment demands no sacrifice whatever: rarely and winningly, she perceives how much they enjoy their cause, and that alone.? No other academic novel that I know of captures so well the fun that peers out from the methodological rigor and high seriousness of academic life, and the exhilarating privilege of belonging to it….Women like the Dean and Miss de Vine embody not the involuntary mystery of passion, but the greater, because the fully human, mystery of conscious choice. (Nina Auerbach,?‘Dorothy Sayers and the Amazons’,?‘Feminist Studies, 1975)?Instead of linking it [the crime in Gaudy Nights] to “intellect starved of emotion,” Sayers traces the malice to “emotion uncontrolled by intellect”. She had to imagine what harm intellectual women could do to an emotional woman…the widow takes “revenge upon the intellect for the injury wrought by the intellect upon the emotions.” (Strout 2001)‘Oh, nonsense!’?cried the Dean.?‘How many women care two hoots about anybody’s intellectual integrity? Only over-educated women like us?…. Ask Mrs. Bones the Butcher’s Wife or Miss Tape the Tailor’s Daughter how much they worry about suppressing a fact in a?mouldy?old historical thesis.’?(Gaudy Night, ch.17)?’Don’t’?you know what you’re doing? I’ve heard you sit round sniveling about unemployment?–?but it’s you, it’s women like you who take the work from the men and break their hearts and their lives.? No wonder you can’t get men for yourselves and hate the women who can.’?(Gaudy Night, Ch.22)?Engaging with the arguments in McFadden’s article, and finding further examples, consider “queerness” and sexuality in this novel, and other texts we have discussed so far.Selected Reading?Nina Auerbach,?‘Dorothy Sayers and the Amazons’, Feminist Studies 3.1/2 (Autumn, 1975), 54-62?Anna Bogen; “Neither Art Itself nor Life Itself”: Gaudy Night, the Detective Novel, and the Middlebrow. Genre, 49:3 (2016), pp.255–272 James Brabazon, Dorothy?L.Sayers: A Biography (London: 1988)?Sue Ellen?Campbell,?‘The Detective Heroine and Death of Her Hero’, in Glenwood Irons ed., Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction (Toronto, 1995)?Ariela Freedman,?‘Dorothy Sayers and the Case of the Shell-Shocked Detective’, Partial Answers 8.2. (June 2010), 365-387?Margaret?Hannay?ed., As Her?Whimsey?Took Her: Critical Essays on Dorothy Sayers (Kent, Ohio: 1979)?Michael Holquist, ‘Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction’, New Literary History, 3.1 (1971): 135-156. Ralph Hone, Dorothy L Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent, Ohio: 1979)?Agate Krouse and Margot Peters,?‘Murder in the Academe’, Southwest Review, 62.4 (1977), 371-378?Marya?McFadden,?‘Queerness at Shrewsbury: Homoerotic Desire in Gaudy Nights’,?Modern Fiction Studies,?46:2, (2000) pp.355-378Margot Peters and Agata Krouse, ‘Women and Crime: Sexism in Allingham, Sayers and Christie’, SouthWest Review 59.2, (Spring 1974), pp.144-152 Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (New York: 1984)?Robin Anne Reid,?‘The Centenary Caper’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 46.1/2 (1992): 55-62Suzie Remilien, ‘Crossing the Genre Divide: Women and Ethics in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Theory in Action 3.1 (2010). Barbara Reynolds ed., The Letters of Dorothy Sayers Vol.1. 1899-1936: The Makings of a Detective Novelist (London: 1995)?Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914-1950’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (April 2005), pp. 343-362Cushing Strout,?‘Romance and the Literary Detective’, The Sewanee Review 109. 3 (Summer 2001), 423-436?Gail Wald, ‘Strong Poison: Love and the Novelistic in Dorothy Sayers’ in Ronald Walker et al. eds, The Cunning Craft (1990)Laurel Young,?‘Dorothy L. Sayers and the New Woman Detective Novel’, Clues, 23.4 (Summer 2005), 39-53? ................
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