The purpose of this research is to examine Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, from the perspective of a European woman living between 1930 and 1965, with reference to selected social histories of women. The plan of the research will be to position the context in which the European woman reviews the novel, to set forth the pattern of ideas emergent in the work, and then to show ways in which Gaudy Night illustrates or comments upon the development of women's social history from the time it was written.
What is perhaps most remarkable about Gaudy Night, first written a generation ago, is the modernity of its social insight where women and their life choices are concerned. Indeed, it is as if Gaudy Night were a fictional rehearsal for European social commentary on the state of women in the "real" world. Consider the meaningful shifts in the social status of women in the West in the 16 years since Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex so dramatically (and scandalously) highlighted in philosophical terms "matters that these people believed were best left undiscussed: women's physiology, lesbianism, misogynous myths, and the creation of a female self" (Smith 519). A comparison of the reaction to de Beauvoir's work and the content of Gaudy Night will reveal how little changed social attitudes are, from Sayers to de Beauvoir, and from de Beauvoir to 1965, toward the shoulds and oughts that the culture has declared apply to women.
Just as de Beauvoir discusses what might be termed the female's divided self in a way that obliges her to choose between a life defined in terms of her sexual relationship to one man on
one hand, and one defined in terms of a life that, in effect, has
her competing for career advancement with all men on the other, so much of Gaudy Night describes the tension of choice that defines a woman's life. The mystery plot of the novel has a venomously loyal wife and mother (Annie Wilson) avenging the in...