An' I wish I was dead 'fore I done what I did

[sovay]

On the strength of D. K. Broster's The Wounded Name (1922), I am prepared to declare the article which was the subject of my previous post stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins, at least where the deniability of the homoeroticism is concerned:

And Aymar's head lay against Laurent's shoulder, and Laurent, who rather thought he was crying himself, and didn't care, was battling with a most unseasonable desire to kiss it there, before everyone; and would very likely have succumbed only that he was sure Aymar had not quite lost consciousness.

The whump and the loyalty kink in this novel go to eleven. There is a quite extraordinary amount of tenderly caring for a bitterly sensitive person who can endure any amount of opprobrium, torture, and self-loathing before going to pieces at kindness. The setting of the previously mentioned bed-sharing and anguished confession is a sea-cave and the bed itself of sailcloth and seaweed, which makes me feel rather personally come for. I don't know how to categorize the heterosexual element which is simultaneously essential to the plot and completely out of left field, except that I think the author reconciled herself to it with OT3. No reader on the planet needs slash goggles. At one point the protagonist's family conclude from his restless, distracted, high-strung behavior that he is obviously in love and the only thing they are wrong about is which of the de la Rocheterie cousins—who explicitly look almost like the male and female versions of one another right down to the famous, unusual bronze hair, a touch more recalling Tanith Lee than Emma Orczy—it is. The author likes epigraphs even more than I do: one chapter has three of them. Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) is sampled twice and Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) furnishes the one that really matters. Did I mention there is not just nursing through a fever, but nursing through multiple fevers? There is no apparent fandom for this book on AO3 and I can't explain it. There's courtroom drama. The tags would go on forever.

Comments

[pameladean]

!!!!!!!!!

How do we get from that to Miss Whittaker? I mean, of course one could see a path but I don't see Sayers walking it somehow wtf.

P.

[sovay]

!!!!!!!!!

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.

[pameladean]

I have been pondering this subject all week. I did take note of Miss Agatha and Miss Clara originally, and Miss Climpson's serene acceptance of their entire story, told with her customary relish. I remember upon my original reading being rather upset with Miss Climpson's talk with Vera Findlater and the way that she characterized relationships of the sort Vera described with Miss Whittaker. Miss Climpson's particular manner of attempting to dissuade Vera from her attachment really ruffled me up. But it forms a useful contrast to the way Miss Climpson describes the Whittaker-Dawson attachment, and I imagine that that was intentional. I would love to have seen Sayers write about the good relationship, but obviously it did not lend itself to drama. It's also very instructive that Miss Whittaker's father very much resented Miss Dawson's getting the Whittaker money. I bet she absorbed that very young.

Thank you for tracking down the other reference to dead sea apples! I knew I'd seen it in Sayers before but I misplaced it into Have His Carcase.

I feel that Sayers must have either participated in, witnessed, or both, a great many unequal relationships.

P.

[sovay]

I remember upon my original reading being rather upset with Miss Climpson's talk with Vera Findlater and the way that she characterized relationships of the sort Vera described with Miss Whittaker. Miss Climpson's particular manner of attempting to dissuade Vera from her attachment really ruffled me up.

It's fine so long as it sticks to—the recurring Sayers theme of—the danger of sublimating oneself entirely to another person and then it flanges off into the stuff about "fruitful affection" and "the right MAN" and at that point in the conversation I too would have blown at least one gasket.

But it forms a useful contrast to the way Miss Climpson describes the Whittaker-Dawson attachment, and I imagine that that was intentional.

It was also more evident to me this time around that Miss Climpson cannot be taken as a stand-in for all her author's opinions. "For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman." I don't entirely know how to interpret that last description, but the rest of the series strongly militates against the default acceptance of masterful men.

I would love to have seen Sayers write about the good relationship, but obviously it did not lend itself to drama.

I'm trying to remember if we ever see her write about good relationships beyond the very end of the Wimsey-Vane cycle, which is just Busman's Honeymoon (1937) and then the three short stories collected in Striding Folly (1972), the last of which was posthumously published and therefore I feel a little weird about. She seems to have spent a lot more time wrestling with whether or not they could even exist.

It's also very instructive that Miss Whittaker's father very much resented Miss Dawson's getting the Whittaker money. I bet she absorbed that very young.

Yes. Which again diffuses the criminal significance of Mary's own lesbianism; she might just as well have done murder for the money she'd been brought up to believe was rightfully her own if she had been straight.

Thank you for tracking down the other reference to dead sea apples! I knew I'd seen it in Sayers before but I misplaced it into Have His Carcase.

You're welcome! It hit me while I was thinking about something else Sayers-related.

I feel that Sayers must have either participated in, witnessed, or both, a great many unequal relationships.

I think so, too. I hope she got one in her lifetime that felt like a true match, but I don't know if she had to write it instead.