Besides creepy images that haunt me to this day, the legacy of my time at the Mütter Museum was the draft of a Nancy Drew novel I wrote. I took inspiration for my plot from the museum’s collection of ancient baby-feeding instruments: pap boats, iron nipple shields, bubby cups, and the like. In my tale, Nancy and her sidekicks, Bess and George, are visiting Philadelphia on one of those educational vacations that Nancy’s stately father, Carson Drew, regularly arranges for them. They’re called upon to discover the whereabouts of a pap boat (an object, shaped like a gravy boat and designed to hold gruel) rumored to have been used by the infant Thomas Jefferson, that has vanished from the Mütter Museum. I was proud of my Nancy Drew draft. I thought the plot contained local color, suspense, historical background, and restrained patrician humor in just the requisite proportions. The present-day editors of the series, however, thought the plot also contained allusions to something that has always been forbidden in Nancy’s life: sex. The fact that Nancy is rummaging around in a collection of pap boats and nipple shields, I was told in a rejection letter, brings up the unwholesome suggestion that Nancy herself has breasts. As squeamish Bess Marvin would say, “Eeek!”
Around that time, I also began teaching composition and literature as an adjunct professor at two elite colleges, Bryn Mawr and the aforementioned Haverford, in the WASPy Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia. Like a lot of other bashful introverts, I discovered that I liked teaching a lot because it’s like acting. When I stepped into the classroom, I stepped into a role, one that allowed me to forget myself. Talking about a favorite novel or poem, I felt erudite, funny, enthusiastic, and seductive. Because I’ve always settled for being a second-class (nontenured) academic citizen at first-class institutions, I was usually blessed with smart, engaged students.
My students ushered in new ways of responding to and interpreting familiar works—some provocative, some wacky. Occasionally they’ve even made me laugh as much as I do when reading Lucky Jim. Every teacher has one—the sentence in a student paper that is so earnestly wrong that it lodges permanently in your brain. My most cherished student howler popped up in a paper on E. L. Doctorow’s novel The Book of Daniel. Doctorow’s book is a brilliantly inventive reworking of the Rosenberg case, and after many rereadings, it remains on my short list of the best English-language novels of the twentieth century. I once had a student who, in his paper on Daniel, decided to focus on the Rosenbergs’ (called the Isaacsons in the book) electrocution scene. The day before the paper was due, he showed up at my office with a draft. The latest revisions included this declaration: “The Isaacsons were put to death by electrolysis.” I bit my cheek and asked him if he knew what “electrolysis” meant. Unperturbed, he said it was a synonym for “electrocution”—a word, he’d wisely recognized, that he’d used too lavishly throughout the essay. As a British friend of mine dryly observed when he heard this story, “Well, Ethel maybe.”
During the mid- to late 1980s, I not only taught English at Bryn Mawr but also served as the assistant to the president—a detour into college administration I made in despair over the shrinking job market. My job was to help draft speeches and letters, meet and greet visitors, shuffle paper, take minutes at meetings, and order sandwiches. I think of those as my “Into the Belly of the Beast” years—the “Beast” being the WASP upper class and myself being the intrepid accidental tourist. Bryn Mawr was an institution where newly arrived freshmen were treated to an indoctrination screening of The Philadelphia Story, starring the college’s most famous alumna, Katharine Hepburn. This was also the college that Ira Einhorn’s smart and pretty Texas girlfriend/victim, Holly Maddux, attended and intermittently dropped out of for six years. As Steven Levy details in The Unicorn’s Secret, Maddux was plagued by profound feelings of not “fitting in.” I can imagine to a certain extent how she felt. Not just the clothes you wore (for the faculty: Pendleton or Talbots) or the makeup and jewelry you didn’t, but every vowel out of your mouth—and certainly, most of all, your name—marked you as “us” or “them.” My own name marked me as one of the help, and in fact, at Bryn Mawr I learned that I had the makings of a good Irish parlor maid. The president I was “assistant to” was Mary Patterson McPherson, and she was a rangy, white-haired Juno of a woman who was a walking advertisement for Bryn Mawr’s much touted aim to educate women to be “leaders.” In other historical circumstances, I would have followed her blindly over the trenches or onto the beaches of Normandy—such was her personal magnetism, kindness, and good humor.
Aside from expanding my anthropological knowledge of WASP rituals and dress, my two years as assistant to the president at Bryn Mawr also gave me limited entrée into the most fascinating alternative-family life I’ve ever been a part of, however tangentially. Still trying to assert my adult female identity to myself and to my family and old friends without the traditional imprimaturs of marriage and motherhood, I found at Bryn Mawr a community of women who’d done just that—most of them in the “dark ages” before the Second Women’s Movement. Most of the female administrators at the college and many of the faculty were single, and I observed them with a fluctuating mixture of admiration and dread. Maybe it was my early mostly positive exposure to nuns and/or my happy childhood-through-late-adolescence memories of being part of a tight-knit pack of girlfriends, but I’ve always felt drawn to communities of women, both in literature and in life. I love the picture that Barbara Pym paints in her sunny first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, of the two well-off spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet, living together in their rambling house in the English countryside, tending flowers, sitting down to their Sunday joint of beef, and, well into advanced middle age, still gracefully rebuffing suitors. Describing an evening tea of potato cakes and Belgian buns the sisters share with a woman friend, also single, Pym writes: “At tea they were all very gay, in the way that happy, unmarried ladies of middle age often are.”2 Like every other female reader I’ve ever discussed Little Women with, I experience Father March’s return from the Civil War and Meg’s marriage to the donnish John as rude intrusions into a sororial circle that managed just fine without men, thank you. I’m always delighted by the map of St. Mary Mead that’s included in some editions of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries. There’s Miss Marple’s house, nestled among other spacious houses, many of them owned by “old cats” like herself.
I was predisposed to be charmed by the female community at Bryn Mawr that functioned like a big alternative family. Some of the single women there were discreetly gay; others were hetero; still others were sexual ciphers. Some lived in their own houses and apartments around the campus, while many others shared homes and lives. These women exercised together in the mornings; worked together till late in the day; sipped cocktails and dined together, often at college functions, in the evening; and vacationed together on rugged “walking tours” of the British Isles in the summer months. They were strong, splendid, no-nonsense types who lived for the college and for their intellectual pursuits. Men seemed superfluous. That’s where my feelings of dread entered in. While I could sometimes see myself settling into this single-sex life, it also felt too hermetically sealed—in terms not only of gender but of class as well. The single-sex world of Bryn Mawr was one I ended up visiting as an extended guest, rather than living in. But I’ve always liked returning—through literature—to that fantasy vision of a community of women who are mostly sufficient to one another. Beyond what Barbara Pym called her “excellent women,” or Miss Marple, or the March sisters, the female community of Bryn Mawr found its literary double in a novel I serendipitously read for the first time while I was teaching there, Dorothy L. Sayers’s remarkable 1936 mystery, Gaudy Night.
I once taught an adult course on female mystery fiction at the Smithsonian Institution called “Sleuthing Spinsters and Dangerous Dames,” and in that crowd of some two hundred overwhelmingly female readers was a woman who had read Gaudy Night fourteen times. I may be up to my seventh or eighth reading by now, and with each reading, I be
tter understand that woman’s passion for the book. It’s an extraordinarily compelling fantasy about a woman who’s been badly hurt in a romantic relationship with a man returning to the refuge of an all-female community that offers intimate friendship and mental stimulation. What makes the story mythic in its allure is the sense the reader has that our heroine, Harriet Vane, is not simply indulging in a time-out sojourn at her old Oxford alma mater, Shrewsbury College, but that she’s unconsciously seeking to escape into an earlier stage of heterosexual female development, when the bonds with her girlfriends seemed all-satisfying, before men came lumbering along to muck things up or, as Dylan Thomas put it, “before I knocked and flesh let enter.” I think that, for Harriet, the single-sex community of the fictional Shrewsbury College represents a return to a youthful oasis of possibility where the limits and problems of adulthood—including romantic relationships with men as well as copyright wranglings with publishers—have not yet materialized.
Gaudy Night anticipates today’s feminist-inflected detective fiction, which, as I’ve said, constitutes an updated version of the female extreme-adventure tale. (Sayers’s feminist visions of education and work arose out of the frantic, shift-for-yourself circumstances of her own life. She was part of that extraordinary first generation of women, along with Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, who desegregated Oxford. Sayers received her degree from Somerville College in 1915. While writing the first three Wimsey mysteries, she worked at an advertising agency. Later on she supported her son, who was born out of wedlock and subsequently cared for by a cousin; nursed her sickly husband; and tended to her elderly parents before their deaths.) Like contemporary hard-boiled heroines, Harriet is intellectually, economically, and even physically selfsufficient. In Gaudy Night, she fights her way out of near-fatal disaster and wins the husband of her dreams, with whom she expects to fashion a progressive marriage. Like all such marital fantasies, however, Gaudy Night stumbles when it comes to working out the gritty specifics of its vision.
The tale begins with a journey. Harriet is behind the wheel of her little roadster, motoring from London to Oxford and steeling herself for her reception at the Shrewsbury College reunion or “gaudy.” The occasion is fraught with tension for her because of her notoriety: some years earlier, Harriet had been charged with the murder of her live-in lover, Philip Boyes. In the public spectacle of the trial, Harriet’s bohemian sexual behavior had been crudely discussed. Only the intervention of another man, Lord Peter Wimsey, saved Harriet from the hangman’s noose. Wimsey fell in love with Harriet in the course of investigating the case, but ever since, she’s kept him at arm’s length, not wanting to confuse gratitude with love. Her autonomy is at stake. Harriet was a scholarship girl at Oxford, and though she’s subsequently carved out a successful career as a mystery writer, marriage to the moneyed and titled Lord Peter would effectively diminish her hard-won sense of self.
For five years “the stark shadow of the gallows had fallen between her and that sun-drenched quadrangle of grey and green.” 3 Harriet has allowed herself to be coaxed back to Shrewsbury only because of the entreaties of a seriously ill classmate. Eager to banish her still-persistent class anxieties, Harriet takes pains to convince herself that she has, in fact, become Somebody. The dresses she’s packed for the college festivities are high-quality and severe. The dresses the other alumnae wear turn out to be much splashier. (Like overzealous religious converts, climbers originally from the lower rungs of society tend to go overboard when they ape the upper class.) Stopping to lunch on the road, Harriet orders wine and tips the waitress generously: “She was eager to distinguish herself as sharply as possible from that former undergraduate who would have had to be content with a packet of sandwiches and a flask of coffee beneath the bough in a by-lane.”4
The dreamlike atmosphere of the journey lingers well into Harriet’s arrival. She’s settled in the neighborhood of her old undergraduate rooms, and when she does finally take a deep breath and make her entrance into the welcoming reception, she basks in what every reuniongoer longs for: the golden acknowledgment, by glance and by word, that she is the star of her class. The college dean, sensing that Harriet is uneasy about her notoriety, looks her in the eye and sternly pronounces: “Nobody bothers about it at all. We’re not nearly such dried-up mummies as you think. After all, it’s the work you are doing that really counts, isn’t it?”5
Work, work, work. Just as with the American hard-boiled mysteries, work is one of the great themes of Gaudy Night. The novel affirms a feminist ideal of work in which women are recognized as full-fledged adults and sustained—mentally, emotionally, and financially—by their labors. Harriet, with good reason, worries about what would become of her work life should she marry Lord Peter. Staving off that momentous decision, she decides to accept an invitation from the dean to come up to Shrewsbury some months after the gaudy and investigate some vicious pranks that have been played on the college. A manuscript has been defaced, academic gowns have been stolen and burned in a bonfire, and students have received anonymous hate mail. Her residence at the college allows Harriet the space to pursue not only her amateur detective work but a more “literary” form of writing as well: she begins research on a scholarly biography of the eighteenth-century thriller writer Sheridan Le Fanu. (Foolishly, Dorothy Sayers second-guessed the value of her chosen genre. Harriet’s move from suspense to scholarship parallels Sayers’s own migration from the Wimsey books to her now largely unread but high-toned essays on the Bible and her translations of Dante.) It’s the cloistered environment of Shrewsbury that inspires Harriet to return to her undergraduate intellectual passions. Here’s a key passage from Gaudy Night that captures the nurturing spell of the college:
If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers . . . —then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript.6
Harriet goes overboard here in extolling the nobility of academic work—many academics I know would speedily trade in tenure in exchange for authorship of a bestselling mystery. But the call to turn inward and remove oneself from the world, to transform from a queen bee into a drone, is one Harriet heeds. For a brief space, she’s happily one of the hive. Shrewsbury, like Bryn Mawr, is a single-sex community whose stated purpose is to support women, emotionally and intellectually. Harriet dines in the Senior Commons Room, sips whiskey at night with the warden, and discusses prosody with her old English tutor. Many of the administrators and faculty at Shrewsbury belong (fictitiously, of course) to Sayers’s own pioneering generation of Oxford “undergraduettes.” Theirs is a cordoned-off and robust sanctuary, like that of Bryn Mawr, in which most men are relegated by the female gaze to being distant objects of study.
In addition to its many other attractions, Gaudy Night enthralls so many of us women readers because it engages the two top female “guilty pleasure” fantasies of retreat and rescue. Let’s start with the latter. Harriet plugs away at her detecting, but it’s not until her paramour, Lord Peter, elegantly strolls into the Senior Commons Room that progress is made on the case. Thanks to his superior efforts, Harriet is saved from death by strangulation and the identity of the college’s poltergeist is revealed. The culprit turns out to be a “scout” or cleaning lady named Annie, whose husband had been a tutor at another institution before a female scholar destroyed his career—a misfortune that prompted his suicide. Annie has borne a psychopathic grudge against academic women ever since. (Despite her seeming sympathy for Harriet’s class insecurities, Sayers was something of a snob. Note that the villain of her story
turns out to be a working-class woman who’s too ignorant and normative to realize the worth of the intellectual work done by the refined ladies of Shrewsbury.)
Feminist critics of Gaudy Night make much of the novel’s ending, in which Lord Peter (yet again) proposes to Harriet using her Latinate academic title, “magistra,” and she finally accepts. The form of the proposal indicates Lord Peter’s respect for Harriet’s intellectual accomplishments and foretells an emancipated union. But romantic fantasies—even those penned by the likes of pathbreaking Oxford graduates like Dorothy Sayers—are never quite that politically correct. The fact that Harriet escapes death by strangulation because she’s wearing a heavy leather dog collar that Lord Peter gave her for protection should give one pause. A dog collar? Reinforcing the suspicion that what we female readers might also be naughtily relishing in Gaudy Night is the spectacle of a strong woman being saved and o’ermastered by her male counterpart is the fact that when Harriet and Peter consummate their union in the novel that follows, Busman’s Honeymoon, Sayers tells us that Harriet gasps out a rapturous “My Lord!” at the decisive moment. Harriet pays for that episode of giddy sexual submission by spending the rest of her married life in Lord Peter’s suave shadow. Utopian moments—in art or life—are, by nature, fleeting.
Refuge is the other forbidden female fantasy that Gaudy Night serves up. Rest! Regenerate! Meditate in silence! . . . while a crew of unobtrusive workers washes your soiled linen and cooks up your meals. Put in these terms, Harriet’s retreat into Shrewsbury sounds like an ad for the Golden Door. To escape from the needs of others and to tend to one’s own well-being and ambitions is a luxury most women throughout history could only dream about in their most secret moments. What a lark Harriet’s withdrawal must have been for Sayers to write. Vicariously, Sayers and many of us female readers bask with Harriet in the solicitous solitude of Shrewsbury. Her creative energies undepleted by the usual tedious weekly routine of meetings with agents, publishers, friends, and the fawning Lord Peter, Harriet sits down at her writing desk and produces . . . what? A monograph on Sheridan Le Fanu and a fragment of a sonnet.
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