![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I built the sea, not the boat you're in
I could have sworn I owned Mo Moulton's The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and Her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women (2019) and it is driving me up the wall that if so I can't find it, because I have been noodling on and off at the question of Sayers and queerness ever since discovering that she was published in the sole issue of The Quorum: A Magazine of Friendship (1920) and in the process of confirming the co-authorship of the original 1936 stage version of Busman's Honeymoon with Muriel St. Clare Byrne, I was presented with this gem from its pages:
Reading both Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon as the product of collaboration between DLS, Bar, and Muriel changes the texts. It's clear, for one thing, that Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane as characters are not just ego projections on DLS's part. They are also composite portraits, capturing the conversations she had with Muriel and Bar about relationships and love and work. In a sense, Muriel and Bar become alternate models for Harriet and Peter. There's Muriel, with her curly blond hair, her scattershot brilliance, and her moods; there is Bar, with her grounded intelligence, her dark-haired comeliness, and her ruby cabochon ring, exactly like the ring Peter gives Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon. Bar's students passed along a rumor that she'd been given the ring by a fiancé who had died in the war, but this is probably mixing two things up. Bar's brother, Graham, was killed leading his company into action in August 1918. It would be reasonable to imagine that the ring, meanwhile, was a gift from Muriel, a 'fiancé' who was invisible because of her sex, not her death.
"Bar" is Marjorie Barber, Byrne's life partner. Modeling an ideal het relationship at least partly on a successful queer one is a deeply appealing idea and I'd love to be able to see if it's supported by the rest of the biography, which doesn't seem to be in my possession. I can't have lent it to someone. I didn't think the pandemic had been so dreadful as to make books simply evaporate. [edit] And now the penny's dropped that the same author was responsible for the magnificent "On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions" (2014), I'm really bitter.
[edit edit] I am beginning to think Marblehead these days is permanently overcast: "If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail."
Reading both Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon as the product of collaboration between DLS, Bar, and Muriel changes the texts. It's clear, for one thing, that Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane as characters are not just ego projections on DLS's part. They are also composite portraits, capturing the conversations she had with Muriel and Bar about relationships and love and work. In a sense, Muriel and Bar become alternate models for Harriet and Peter. There's Muriel, with her curly blond hair, her scattershot brilliance, and her moods; there is Bar, with her grounded intelligence, her dark-haired comeliness, and her ruby cabochon ring, exactly like the ring Peter gives Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon. Bar's students passed along a rumor that she'd been given the ring by a fiancé who had died in the war, but this is probably mixing two things up. Bar's brother, Graham, was killed leading his company into action in August 1918. It would be reasonable to imagine that the ring, meanwhile, was a gift from Muriel, a 'fiancé' who was invisible because of her sex, not her death.
"Bar" is Marjorie Barber, Byrne's life partner. Modeling an ideal het relationship at least partly on a successful queer one is a deeply appealing idea and I'd love to be able to see if it's supported by the rest of the biography, which doesn't seem to be in my possession. I can't have lent it to someone. I didn't think the pandemic had been so dreadful as to make books simply evaporate. [edit] And now the penny's dropped that the same author was responsible for the magnificent "On Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey: An Essay with Personal Interruptions" (2014), I'm really bitter.
[edit edit] I am beginning to think Marblehead these days is permanently overcast: "If we disagree, we'll fight it out like gentlemen. We won't stand for matrimonial blackmail."
no subject
no subject
It was sufficiently obvious that my high school gaydar-of-a-rock took it for granted that Eiluned Price and Sylvia Marriott were a couple. There is also the successful life partnership of Agatha Dawson and Clara Whittaker in the past of Unnatural Death (1927), counterbalancing the unequal relationship of Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater in the present. That one took until quite recently for me to see, i.e., last week, but could only have been clearer if Sayers had used technical terms.
even there queerness is shown as a model, or an influence, for what to want out of a het partnership.
"Eiluned disapproves of conventional courtesies between the sexes." (And Sylvia is correct that there is something suspicious about Urquhart's hair.)
It doesn't surprise me that DLS's eventual marriage wound up unhappy.
I didn't know for sure that it had been, so I'm sorry to hear it. Even the more obviously f/f poem in The Quorum is about being the more loving one. I would have hoped for her to find someone to match her.
no subject
I got distracted by everything else in Unnatural Death, but that's another good point about Agatha and Clara!
no subject
Seriously. Feh.
I got distracted by everything else in Unnatural Death, but that's another good point about Agatha and Clara!
It emerged out of conversation with
no subject
I was lucky enough to attend a talk by Mo Moulton at the Manchester Jewish Museum (in its temporary quarters in the library basement - they've got a lottery grant and are doing a big refurb of the Cheetham Hill building) on aspects of the book, specifically, given the venue, Charis Frankenburg who basically was doing revolutionary things with childcare, midwifery and birth control while using her social position to fly under the radar with them.
no subject
That's difficult. I'm still sorry to hear it.
the Manchester Jewish Museum (in its temporary quarters in the library basement - they've got a lottery grant and are doing a big refurb of the Cheetham Hill building)
The shul of my childhood was peripatetic, frequently meeting in the basements of schools and community centers and at least one other synagogue; they didn't get a building of their own until some time after my grandmother had died and my grandfather moved away, so I've never been inside it, and on some level it's still frankly weird to me that they have a permanent residence at all.
specifically, given the venue, Charis Frankenburg who basically was doing revolutionary things with childcare, midwifery and birth control while using her social position to fly under the radar with them.
Okay, that sounds fascinating. I just don't want to re-buy a book that might be lurking in a perfectly innocent box, you know?
no subject
no subject
Seeing it just now, I'm wondering for the first time if Miss Climpson is actually a deeply closeted, excruciatingly Anglo-Catholic woman who denied all her own chances for happiness in favour of waiting around for the right MAN for her, who never came because "the right" and "man" were for her an oxymoron.
no subject
See link in comments above for the relevant passage. (I am trying to avoid text-dumping one thread into another, with perhaps mediocre results.) One of them was the murder victim, the other the great-aunt of the murderer, and they seem to have been very happy for the whole of their lives together. I had missed them the first time I read the book and then didn't read the book again for decades for the obvious reasons.
Seeing it just now, I'm wondering for the first time if Miss Climpson is actually a deeply closeted, excruciatingly Anglo-Catholic woman who denied all her own chances for happiness in favour of waiting around for the right MAN for her, who never came because "the right" and "man" were for her an oxymoron.
Elsewhere the novel refers to Miss Climpson as "a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman," but I don't think it would take a lot of theory to connect her with the other figures of unmarried women in the novel, similarly professional and independent, who are textually queer. The working title for the novel was The Singular Case of the Three Spinsters. If we assume that the victim was one and the murderer another, that leaves only the investigator as the third.
The scare quotes struggle to contain what is between them
Hmm. Do the victim and murder happen to fit the invert/pervert paradigm that was going around then? I guess they wouldn't, if they were the same social class. But if they did, it'd be three different models of a spinster: one by birth (the "invert", born this way and can't help it, nobly suffering), one by "choice" (the "pervert", capable of "normal" desire but basely choosing to take advantage of the usually-aristocratic "invert"'s "affliction" instead of choosing heterosexual marriage as God intended), and one purely by chance (Miss Climpson, ending up "on the shelf" through neither "defect" (inversion) nor "fault" (perversion) of her own.) So the working title wouldn't require her to be a closeted lesbian herself.
Edit: I've read the quoted passage now, and wow, yes. Back in my teens I always thought the italics etc were just meant to indicate how fluffy Miss Climpson was. But they're carrying a lot more freight than I understood back then!
The scare quotes did their heroic best
I don't think it does. But the novel itself is either really sloppy or revealingly precise about its terminology in ways that interest me. Miss Climpson, Mary Whittaker, and Agatha Dawson and Clara Whittaker are all textually identified as spinsters. Agatha and Vera additionally describe themselves and their partners as old maids, coupled in each case with an explicit statement of disinterest in men; the same term is used by Peter in reference to Miss Climpson, but she herself is careful to try not to attract it by sounding too, to borrow Sylvia's word for Eiluned in Strong Poison (1930), "anti-man." She thinks confidently that Mary "is not of the marrying sort. She is a professional woman by nature" and italicizes the fact that Clara Whittaker was a "good business woman" and is herself a self-supporting, unmarried woman who might have gone for an even less traditionally feminine career had her father's old-fashioned sexism not kept her from the necessary education. I am really not sure the text knows it's collapsed her into these queer categories. Whatever her actions, she's its voice of heteronormativity. But it's still done it—the terms are used scrupulously for this small set of characters—and thus affords one of the reasons I would be willing to credit your reading of a closeted Miss Climpson despite what I assume is the intended heterosexual reassurance of "womanly woman."
But they're carrying a lot more freight than I understood back then!
DEEPLY ATTACHED.
no subject
no subject
Agreed. As noted to
no subject
ETA: found it online. Not a mare, but a terrier. The bloke concludes: "‘The Lord makes a few of them that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose.'"
no subject
No; they're remembered fondly by everyone Peter interviews and Miss Climpson is firmly on their side when she writes about the feud with Clara's family.
ETA: found it online. Not a mare, but a terrier. The bloke concludes: "‘The Lord makes a few of them that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose.'"
He calls the terrier a "business woman," too! Was this a coinage for the novel or a code of the time I just haven't encountered outside of it?
(I have been relying extensively on Faded Page for this conversation, all of my own copies being in boxes.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
That's never pinged much for me [edit: I think because even though they joke about it, the implications of ownership are not pleasant to Harriet; contemplating her collared reflection is what prompts her reverie about dead sea apples and Philip], but in Busman's Honeymoon there's "The last two words in the language I ever expected to get a kick out of."
(Mind you, I'm not sure if Harriet would have been so keen to say 'obey' if Peter hadn't shown his support for her independence across the board - and I recall Peter wasn't keen on 'obey').
He wasn't. They had to negotiate it:
"At this point, Helen got up and left the house, leaving P. and Harriet to wrangle over the word 'obey.' P. said he would consider it a 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."
Which is characteristic of their relationship with or without overtones of kink. They don't do anything by received roles; if they do something traditional, they've talked their way to it. I'm still standing by my statement about "masterful," especially since it is further qualified "even though wicked or foolish." If the series accepted that, it wouldn't have taken Sayers three books to write Harriet and Peter out of the inequalities of their initial position and Gaudy Night would have had a different villain.
no subject
I was not familiar with that letter! I don't seem able to get the full text online (I fell into her Sherlockiana in the process, though), but I see she wrote it to Charles Williams, who I have been given to understand was an interesting choice of person to talk sex with at all. I agree that personally I don't want to place the responsibility for a mutual good time on any one partner alone, but in the context I have managed to wring out of Google snippet view, the rationale behind the statement doesn't look completely bonkers:
"The second Assumption rules out the hasty, the clumsy, the lazy, the inconsiderate, the peremptory, the untimely and (in most cases) the routinier – though one would not wish to be too hard on Mr Shandy, senior, since Mrs Shandy may have been as orderly-minded as himself and possibly preferred it that way – and those who have 'l'Amour Triste' or are morose and unmannerly, or are without skill in the management of bed-furniture or wind the whole combination into toppling and insecure complications of pillows and blankets or (in extreme circumstances) bang their partner's head against the wall."
Also that last part made me laugh out loud and wonder if it was from personal experience.
And the "masterful" man is contrasted with one who is clearly overmastered by his wife, not one who is egalitarian.
He is considered by Miss Climpson to be rightfully masterful whether he's deserving of the accord or no, which I really don't see borne out by the rest of the books.
no subject
*My objection to "obey" isn't just that but that the whole might of the Law of England was for half a millennium hell-bent on enforcing a woman's marriage oath with the full weight of its power, up to and including forcing her to have sex with a husband knowingly infected with active communicable syphilis, whereas the same legal might was equally hell-bent on removing any splinter of truth from the husband's promise to "endow" and protecting his property against the wife's claims come what may.
no subject
no subject
Now you mention it, it sounds exactly what you suggest. The bit Helen is genuinely squeamish about in the traditional prayer book is the stuff which is more 17th century frank than early 20th century prudish about sex. I think the "obey" business is her having a go at Harriet.
no subject
no subject
I don't actually think that "ace" and "lesbian" are mutually exclusive, but I agree that her relations with Vera are utilitarian and narcissistic: Miss Climpson even thinks that if Mary were to choose a husband, he would be the same kind of submissive, infatuated "rabbit" as Vera. Their relations of whatever sort are still woman-to-woman and all of Mary's coding is lesbian for the reader of 1927, with the repeated descriptions of her as handsome, even masculine—"like some young prince out of the Arabian Nights"—and the literary hairpin-drop of Clemence Dane to make it really clear. "Sexless" comes in the same passage as "spinsterish" and then "epicene." The latter term is derogatory but generally male. The former has already been linked by the novel with the older generation of Agatha and Clara in the chapter called "A Tale of Two Spinsters" ("Miss Agatha was never one for flirting and foolishness. Often she used to say to me, 'Betty,' she said, 'I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we're going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen'"). She's evidently magnetic for Vera; she's willing to take advantage of the other woman's "pash." She tries to take advantage of Peter's feigned attraction and can't do it; she can't turn "it" on for him.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Yes. I really liked finding that out! I think their happiness puts them in a relatively small category of Sayers couples, too. (The others that come to mind are Charles and Mary, Freddy and Rachel, and Sylvia and Eiluned—especially once Harriet enters the picture, I think of Sayers as more often exploring the failure modes of romantic relationships than their successes. I am not engaged in an actual re-read of the series, however, and can be corrected with impunity.)
[edit] I just remembered there's another plausibly lesbian couple in The Five Red Herrings (1931):
"Miss Selby and Miss Cochran occupied adjacent cottages and were continually to be found taking tea in each other's living-rooms or bathing together on the sands at the Doon. Miss Selby was tall, dark, rather angular, rather handsome in an uncompromising kind of way and painted rather good, strong, angular and handsome figure-studies in oils. Miss Cochran was round, cheerful, humorous and grey-haired; she illustrated magazine stories in line and wash. Wimsey liked them both, because they had no nonsense about them, and they liked him for the same reason, and also because they found Bunter extremely amusing. Bunter was always distressed to see them cooking their own dinners and putting up their own curtains."
Predatory Mary Whittaker really begins to look like the outlier in this sample set. She should perhaps be classed more usefully with all the men in Sayers' novels who exploit women, from Dr. Penberthy to Philip Boyes to Frank Crutchley and undoubtedly some others I'm forgetting. I still don't like that Miss Climpson effectively ventriloquizes Sayers' own skepticism about the viability of female relationships as cited in the letter she wrote to Leonard Green when he invited her to submit to The Quorum, but (a) she did submit to The Quorum and so we have the poem "Veronica" (b) that skepticism does seem to have backed off with time. Or at least it generalized into her skepticism about the viability of egalitarian relationships irrespective of gender; those dead sea apples recur finally in Harriet's own assessment of her relationship with Philip.
no subject
Yes, I think that's right - as is your conclusion. The "Dead Sea apples" is a reference I don't recognise, but it's a strong and significant one, and it seems to me significant that it ends up being applied to heterosexual failure, too.
no subject
But of course - given its final transference to Philip and Harriet - Sayers probably knew that "sodomy" can also be applied, as a category, to sex between men and women.
no subject
no subject
*hugs*
no subject
Also, even if you've never see "Downtown Abbey," it's worth reading all of Mo's historian companion pieces.
no subject
Thank you. That is a kind offer and I will keep you posted.
Also, even if you've never see "Downtown Abbey," it's worth reading all of Mo's historian companion pieces.
I've read at least one! I just didn't mark the name at the time, any more than I did for their Sayers pieces.
(Do you know them? They seem to have been Boston-local for a while.)
no subject
no subject
Cool. I figured there was a non-zero chance of someone on my friendlist.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I may well have to! It's too recent to be in storage, which is part of what's stressing me!
no subject
no subject
Thank you! I have a distinct memory of holding it which I see no reason to have fabricated. It's not something my memory is in the habit of doing.
no subject
I wonder if they show up in Peter's Bohemian Friends?
no subject
You know, I name-checked Sylvia and Eiluned multiple times in this conversation and didn't make that connection! Good catch.
no subject
no subject
Can I ask you to write them?
no subject
no subject
*in which I radiate unpushy enthusiasm*
no subject