Conundrums for the Long Week-End

by Robert Kuhn McGregor

  In the face of the remote but unremitting danger emanating from Mary Whittaker, Peter Wimsey and Charles Parker return to the more sober and sensitive characterizations Sayers originally created for them in Whose Body? There is no mention of Mary Wimsey; the romantic interest is for the moment buried. Charles is twice described as “nondescript.” His role for the first half of the novel is that of rational skeptic—he doubts that Mary Whittaker has committed any crime at all. Once Wimsey garners enough evidence to suggest otherwise, Parker then assumes his role of grinding professional, interviewing (if he must) every lawyer in London. He is the ultimate professional, unimaginative but industrious.

  Peter Wimsey’s usual capacity for blither reaches truly arresting proportions during the investigation. Random images occur in the midst of critical conversation: “Far from it, as the private said when he aimed at the bull’s eye and hit the gunnery instructor” (25). The puzzle of Whittaker’s method for murder inspires Peter’s best (or worst):

  “I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few gutteral notes into the bass saxaphone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.”23

  Again, as in Whose Body?, the babbling masks a troubled soul. This entire case existed because Wimsey stuck his curious nose into matters that did not concern him. Two innocent young women die in consequence. The puzzle Wimsey must face is more than the resolution of a crime. It is a moral dilemma. Mary Whittaker’s first crime was to kill a terminally ill old woman to secure money the woman wanted her to have anyway. Was that so bad? Legally it was murder, but morally? When Wimsey investigates, believing this to be the ultimate case, he sets off a chain of new killings. Is he responsible for the deaths of Bertha Gotobed and Vera Findlater?

  In some desperation, Peter on the spur of the moment turns to a vicar for advice. The priest reassures him, contending that the murderer’s own guilty conscience eventually would have led to more violence, whether Peter had interfered or not. Mollified, feeling less “rotten,” Peter takes his leave. But the priest has seen through him with remarkable clarity: “Mr. Tredgold watched him as he trotted away among the graves. ‘Dear, dear,’ he said, ‘how nice they are. So kindly and scrupulous and so vague outside their public-school code. And much more nervous and sensitive than people think. A very difficult class to reach.’”24

  Wimsey bears the burden of responsibility for the remainder of the novel. He must put a stop to Mary Whittaker, both to arrest the evil she perpetrates and to halt the chain of events he has set in motion. Faced with the possibility that Whittaker may claim one more victim before the police can take her, he breaks into sobs. There is no drunken celebration to end this story. Wimsey is cold and sick, fully prepared to believe that the world is ending.

  Beyond the dogged determination of Parker and Wimsey, beyond the shadowy wickedness of Mary Whittaker, a still more remote yet crucial personality lingers: Whittaker’s first victim, Agatha Dawson. Already deceased when the novel begins, this stubborn, independent, crafty old woman occupies the very center of the text. In celebrating Agatha Dawson’s fierce determination to live, Dorothy L. Sayers expanded on a theme becoming increasingly critical to the body of her popular fiction: the role of individualistic Victorian women in preparing the ground for modern women.

  The first of these women is Peter’s mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver. After playing a central role in the first novel, she is reprised in Clouds of Witness, where her relentless command of the complexities of spoken English dismays all opposition. The Duchess is discerning and practical, perfectly able to see through her daughter’s subterfuges, her son’s blither, and George Goyles’s empty rhetoric. She does not need to do anything so complicated as investigation; she merely sees—and knows.

  The Duchess makes occasional appearances in subsequent novels, but she gives way to a series of truly ancient standard bearers: Agatha Dawson of Unnatural Death, Felicity Dormer of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and Cremorna Garden of Strong Poison. Each of these women is drawn as an anachronism: a fiercely independent, industrious, and successful survivor of the Victorian age. Here are women who refuse to buckle under to the conventions of the nineteenth century. They defy the marriage plans laid out by their families, they refuse to depend on men for their existence, and they die possessed of considerable wealth earned by their own wits. The crux of each novel is defined by their legacies, pecuniary and otherwise.

  Dorothy L. Sayers well understood that the system of gender roles emerging in the postwar world was very much a relic of Victorianism, however far women may have gone in stretching social taboos. Caricatures of the backlash against the “new woman” are sprinkled here and there throughout Unnatural Death. A coroner lectures on “the prevalence of jazz and the immoral behaviour of modern girls,” the highly moral Mrs. Cropper speaks of all the goings-on “with lots of girls as they are,” and Vera Findlater—no intellectual heavyweight—complains of men denigrating “modern young ladies who want the flappers’ vote.” The struggle for equality was still all uphill (127, 113, 185).

  The roots of the struggle that took shape in the twenties were anchored well back in the Victorian era and before, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. To be sure, sexual divisions of labor and role predate industrialization. The horrors of Mrs. Grimethorpe’s existence suggest the kind of sexual exploitation that can emerge in remote agricultural settings. But industrialization severely aggravated the sexual division by physically separating men and women for much of the day. In the pre-industrial era, home and work were located in the same space, generally under the same roof. The baker, the carpenter, and the storekeeper worked out of his (or, sometimes, her) home. The entire family contributed to the success of the enterprise: the husband as head of the family and director of the business, the wife as deputy director, fully prepared to assume responsibility and direction when necessary, the children, servants, and laborers contributing as required.25

  By centralizing commercial production, industrialization changed the locus of work. People left home to earn a daily wage, now walking steps, blocks, or even miles to work in a bakery, a carpenter shop, a store. Home became wholly domestic, and “productive work” was something done in a completely different place.

  Coping with this revolution in basic lifestyles, people in the nineteenth century cast about for new models of proper behavior, a morality fitted to the industrial world. Developing middle-class images of propriety would become the essential ingredients defining “normal” behavior by Victoria’s time. “Normal” meant that men went out to win the bread, while women stayed home to manage the household. Never mind that thousands of working women had produced within the home for centuries and would go into the shops and factories as the nineteenth century unfolded. The dominant culture determined these women to be culturally marginal, unrefined, and morally treacherous. If they possessed a grain of breeding, they would desire only to get out of the factory and into the home, where they belonged. To the middle-class Victorian, the ideal woman was a dependent woman. Articles in popular journals, stories in mass circulation magazines, and fashionable novels sought to reinforce this stereotype and its attendant assumptions.26

  The culture seriously conflated sexual characteristics (matters dictated by biology) and gender functions (roles allotted the sexes by the culture without real biological justification). Women were regarded as little more than baby producers. They therefore had no need of education, no place in business or the professions. To educate a woman was to endanger her reproductive capability; it was held that overexcitement of the brain would cause the ovaries to atrophy. Wo
men were to emphasize their femininity, entrapping their bodies in elaborate dresses, innumerable petticoats, and unyielding corsets, all to accentuate (or create) the shapely bosom and the hourglass figure. Here sex was emphasized, even as the culture demanded that the passions be sublimated.27

  If the culture demanded (and sex supposedly dictated) that women belonged in the home, the defined characteristics of maleness would naturally lead to opposite behavior. Only the man was fit to sally forth into the workaday world, where competitive aggressiveness was natural and necessary. Men were assumed to be predatory and indiscriminate, outdoing their competitors in business. Left to themselves, they would also pursue sexual relations whenever and wherever possible. It was up to the good woman at home to put a stop to that.28

  The woman’s—the wife’s—role was to be the fountain of virtuous purity. She would maintain the home as a shelter from the cruel world outside; she would exercise her virtue to keep her man on the straight and narrow. In a sense, her husband became her oldest child, subject to the same lessons in virtue exercised on their children. She was expected to be submissive at the same time, to tolerate the necessary sexual union within the home. It was the duty of every couple to increase the population of the empire. Still, for a good woman, sex was something to endure, not to enjoy. Ladies did not move.29

  With the division between the sexes so firmly engraved, strange things were bound to develop. Men and women became truly estranged. Some women suffered from a malady (considered medical in the nineteenth century) that caused them to become hysterical whenever their husbands tried to bring them to the bed. Knocking them out with chloroform was one solution. Other women were kept so completely unaware of the basic functions of sex that they did not know what their husbands expected on their wedding night. (Consider passages from The Devil is an English Gentleman by John Cournos, describing a series of love scenes in which a man and woman lie together, she absolutely clueless of what he wants. The scenes were inspired by memories of his unhappy and celibate affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, which took place in 1922.)30

  This, of course, was the kind of extreme reaction that could be expected to occasionally occur, given the narrow confines of the culture. What really went on behind closed bedroom doors in more than ninety-nine percent of Victorian married households is anybody’s guess; there is virtually no evidence documenting actual behavior. One suspects that matters moved along pretty much as they had for the past hundred thousand years—some men and women happy, others less so. Culturally, what mattered was the public face that Victorians attached to such primal human behavior. The Victorians claimed that sex was dirty, and the ideal was to avoid it as much as possible.31

  Therefore the middle-class English Victorians often chose to accentuate the divisions between men and women. In addition to the natural distinctions of biological function and the new economically imposed divisions of role, middle-class people chose simply to avoid their opposites. Women gathered in exclusive social circles for purposes ranging from giving birth to reforming public behavior. Men viciously ridiculed women’s associations, claiming intellectual and organizational superiority, but women organized and endured all the same. What time men did not spend in business pursuits they often spent at their clubs (no women allowed), sometimes not coming home for weeks at a time. More fortunate men (and a very few women) separated themselves for far longer duration, adventuring in the wilds of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.32

  Separation became the ideal. If sex was dirty, the best men were those who avoided it, using the energy to build railroads or explore the Himalayas instead. Small wonder that Sherlock Holmes was the middle-class hero of late Victorian times. He was the ultimate in energy and self-control, and he was utterly sexless. Like all good men, he was the perfect gentleman, chivalrous to a fault when he had to deal with women. He simply did not trust them, having no use for persons who supposedly based all decision making on emotion and intuition. Like any ideal Victorian man, Holmes was a logical reasoner.33

  The ultimate male adventure was to go to war. Serving the nation, fighting for a glorious cause, separated from women yet fighting to protect their lives and virtue—what greater glory could a man ask? If a man were truly fortunate, he might go to the war and get killed. This was the sublime heroic sacrifice, and it saved him the doom of returning home, getting married, and falling into dirty ways. Only the good die young, you know. In August 1914, the young men of Britain were eager to march off to fight the Huns; the women cheered them, urged them onward. Oxford was nearly emptied of students. The supreme moment for a sexually divided culture had come. Five long years later, a great many Victorian assumptions had fallen by the wayside.34

  In Agatha Dawson, Dorothy L. Sayers created a woman embodying some characteristics of Victorian culture while completely flaunting others. Certainly Agatha avoided men, but to a remarkable extreme. Born in 1852, she decided early “to be an old maid . . . and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen.”35 She took a house with her cousin, Clara Whittaker, a true Victorian anomaly. Clara Whittaker ran a thoroughbred horse business, doing exceedingly well despite the jealous opposition of various men in the district. A sharp and shrewd business woman, Clara Whittaker also rode to the hounds, easily keeping pace with male participants even well into her sixties. Agatha Dawson did not possess the same adventurous spirit or business acumen, but she was fiercely loyal to Clara. Maintaining the forms of convention in a decidedly non-Victorian arrangement, Agatha managed the household, serving as an able domestic partner to her cousin.

  When Clara Whittaker died in 1922, Agatha Dawson inherited the vast fortune that Clara had accumulated. There was some jealousy over this; again, Clara had shocked convention by passing over Whittaker family members to leave the money to her partner. Agatha Dawson continued in the tradition of their partnership, defying the advice of interfering males such as lawyers, toughing out a hideous bout with cancer, and doing things her own way. When her very distant great niece, Mary Whittaker, attempted to trick her into signing a will, she very neatly checkmated the entire scheme. She was not terribly bright, but she was determined and very independent. She was also a decent human being, defying the prejudice of her housekeeper and neighbors to entertain cousin Hallelujah Dawson, “a man of colour.”36 In the 1920s, such determination and independence were the qualities the “new woman” sought to emulate. It was the Clara Whittakers and Agatha Dawsons of the nineteenth century who carved out the path.

  In her next novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Sayers highlights the story of Lady Felicity Dormer, another survivor of the bizarre dictates of Victorian convention. Felicity Dormer was the vivacious daughter of a poor upper-class family. Such money as there was went to purchase a commission for the family’s only son; the parents shamelessly matched the daughter with an old and decrepit (but rich!) member of their class. Felicity would have none of it, stooping to the middle class to elope with (God forbid!) a button manufacturer. The family never forgave her, cutting off all ties and denying her existence. She lived quite happily, however, becoming a wealthy and titled woman with a true zest for life. She succumbed to pneumonia, contracted after watching a fireworks display, at the age of seventy-eight. Here is another woman cut from the mold of Agatha Dawson, a woman who finds happiness by defying the culture and pursuing her own path. A truly independent spirit, she was genuinely successful.37

  Sayers returned to this theme again in her fifth novel, Strong Poison, this time celebrating the career of the notorious Cremorna Garden, profligate singer and actress who climbed the social ladder to wealth using her sex appeal. Modelled on the career of adventuresses such as Lillie Langtry, she was the kind of woman who took everything offered and gave away nothing, ending up as the respectable Mrs. Wrayburn, with untold wealth and a mousy husband firmly under her thumb.38

  Dorothy L. Sayers probably derived her enormous respect for spirited and unconstrained women from the women of her own family. Her mother, Helen L
eigh Sayers, though a parson’s wife for much of her adult life, held strong convictions and took real responsibility for running family affairs in the face of her unworldly husband. Sayers could also look to two aunts, Mabel Leigh and Gertrude Sayers, for prototypes of defiant older women.39 One more from this mold emerges in Unnatural Death: the redoubtable Miss Alexandra K. Climpson.

  Sayers is coy in introducing Miss Climpson, allowing Parker (and the reader) to believe that Lord Peter has taken a mistress. The woman living at the top of six flights of stairs at St. George’s Square is a complete surprise, “a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and a very vivacious manner.”40 She is not Peter’s mistress but his operative, a woman of diligence, quick wit, and keen perception. Because she is middle aged—a “spinster made and not born” (184)—she is privy to sources of information that no man could ever harvest: the boarding houses and tearooms where older single women congregate. Gossip is the pastime of choice, an incomparable source of genuine news. Through no fault of her own, Miss Climpson has long been an involuntary denizen of this world. She is one of the “surplus women” the newspapers loved to pity and deride in the years following the Great War. Sayers was all too aware of the horrid meanness in such an existence; her own Aunt Gertrude Sayers was a victim of its clutches. Gertrude “lived peripatetically as a ‘companion’ to various old cats, . . . aimlessly doing what when done was of little value to God or man.” Dorothy L. Sayers could only thank God she had been spared such “frustrate unhappiness.”41