You see why I bluescreened slightly! The introduction to the facsimile edition briefly discusses the question and quotes a letter in which Sayers declared her own skepticism as to the viability of lesbian relationships—linking one of her own phrases to a line in Unnatural Death—but she still not only wrote the poem but submitted it for publication in an unambiguously queer project, leaving me to wonder if there were some sour grapes in those dead sea apples. In any case, I went and threw myself on the grenade of Unnatural Death for the first time since high school and discovered that my legendarily terrible gaydar of the time had missed that there are actually two female couples in the story, albeit one of them in the past. I reproduce faithfully Miss Climpson's italics and capitalization:
"Miss Murgatroyd, who was quite a friend of old Miss Dawson, however, has been able to tell me a little about her past life.
"It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker's great-aunt on the father's side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a 'character,' as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very 'advanced' and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair short(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady—or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.
"Agatha Dawson was a school-fellow of hers, and deeply attached to her. And as a result of this friendship, Agatha's sister, HARRIET, married Clara Whittaker's brother JAMES! But Agatha did not care about marriage, any more than Clara, and the two ladies lived together in a big old house, with immense stables, in a village in Warwickshire—Crofton, I think the name was. Clara Whittaker turned out to be a remarkably good business woman, and worked up a big connection among the hunting folk in those parts. Her hunters became quite famous, and from a capital of a few thousand pounds with which she started she made quite a fortune, and was a very rich woman before her death! Agatha Dawson never had anything to do with the horsey part of the business. She was the 'domestic' partner, and looked after the house and the servants.
"When Clara Whittaker died, she left all her money to Agatha, passing over her own family, with whom she was not on very good terms—owing to the narrow-minded attitude they had taken up about her horse-dealing!! Her nephew, Charles Whittaker, who was a clergyman, and the father of our Miss Whittaker, resented very much not getting the money, though, as he had kept up the feud in a very un-Christian manner, he had really no right to complain, especially as Clara had built up her fortune entirely by her own exertions. But, of course, he inherited the bad, old-fashioned idea that women ought not to be their own mistresses, or make money for themselves, or do what they liked with their own!"
Which looks like an extremely successful long-term relationship, cast in equal rather than predatory terms, not disapproved of by the novel in the person of Miss Climpson, and about as obvious as Sayers could get without spelling out the terms butch and femme. The murderer of the novel is a queer woman, but so was the victim. I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it is complicating.
[edit] It took me more than a week to remember that "dead sea apples" is not strictly a lesbian phrase in Sayers' lexicon. Harriet uses it in Gaudy Night (1935), musing on unequal relationships and specifically her own with Philip Boyes:
"She wondered whether her lover had seen it like that, through that hot unhappy year when she had tried to believe that there was happiness in surrender. Poor Philip—tormented by his own vanities, never loving her till he had killed her feeling for him, and yet perilously clutching her as he went down into the slough of death. It was not to Philip she had submitted, so much as to a theory of living. The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples."
Clara and Agatha definitely do not look like those unhappy people.
no subject
You see why I bluescreened slightly! The introduction to the facsimile edition briefly discusses the question and quotes a letter in which Sayers declared her own skepticism as to the viability of lesbian relationships—linking one of her own phrases to a line in Unnatural Death—but she still not only wrote the poem but submitted it for publication in an unambiguously queer project, leaving me to wonder if there were some sour grapes in those dead sea apples. In any case, I went and threw myself on the grenade of Unnatural Death for the first time since high school and discovered that my legendarily terrible gaydar of the time had missed that there are actually two female couples in the story, albeit one of them in the past. I reproduce faithfully Miss Climpson's italics and capitalization:
"Miss Murgatroyd, who was quite a friend of old Miss Dawson, however, has been able to tell me a little about her past life.
"It seems that, until five years ago, Miss Dawson lived in Warwickshire with her cousin, a Miss Clara Whittaker, Mary Whittaker's great-aunt on the father's side. This Miss Clara was evidently rather a 'character,' as my dear father used to call it. In her day she was considered very 'advanced' and not quite nice(!) because she refused several good offers, cut her hair short(!!) and set up in business for herself as a HORSE-BREEDER!!! Of course, nowadays, nobody would think anything of it, but then the old lady—or young lady as she was when she embarked on this revolutionary proceeding, was quite a PIONEER.
"Agatha Dawson was a school-fellow of hers, and deeply attached to her. And as a result of this friendship, Agatha's sister, HARRIET, married Clara Whittaker's brother JAMES! But Agatha did not care about marriage, any more than Clara, and the two ladies lived together in a big old house, with immense stables, in a village in Warwickshire—Crofton, I think the name was. Clara Whittaker turned out to be a remarkably good business woman, and worked up a big connection among the hunting folk in those parts. Her hunters became quite famous, and from a capital of a few thousand pounds with which she started she made quite a fortune, and was a very rich woman before her death! Agatha Dawson never had anything to do with the horsey part of the business. She was the 'domestic' partner, and looked after the house and the servants.
"When Clara Whittaker died, she left all her money to Agatha, passing over her own family, with whom she was not on very good terms—owing to the narrow-minded attitude they had taken up about her horse-dealing!! Her nephew, Charles Whittaker, who was a clergyman, and the father of our Miss Whittaker, resented very much not getting the money, though, as he had kept up the feud in a very un-Christian manner, he had really no right to complain, especially as Clara had built up her fortune entirely by her own exertions. But, of course, he inherited the bad, old-fashioned idea that women ought not to be their own mistresses, or make money for themselves, or do what they liked with their own!"
Which looks like an extremely successful long-term relationship, cast in equal rather than predatory terms, not disapproved of by the novel in the person of Miss Climpson, and about as obvious as Sayers could get without spelling out the terms butch and femme. The murderer of the novel is a queer woman, but so was the victim. I'm not sure what to do with this information, but it is complicating.
[edit] It took me more than a week to remember that "dead sea apples" is not strictly a lesbian phrase in Sayers' lexicon. Harriet uses it in Gaudy Night (1935), musing on unequal relationships and specifically her own with Philip Boyes:
"She wondered whether her lover had seen it like that, through that hot unhappy year when she had tried to believe that there was happiness in surrender. Poor Philip—tormented by his own vanities, never loving her till he had killed her feeling for him, and yet perilously clutching her as he went down into the slough of death. It was not to Philip she had submitted, so much as to a theory of living. The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realize the deadliness of principles. To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples."
Clara and Agatha definitely do not look like those unhappy people.