Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

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 migh

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artin; "because it is obviously much more likely that" "A great deal more likely," said Harriet (Sayers 2289). In Miss Martin's elliptical sentence is contained insight into the result of psychosexual limitation of careertunnel vision that is framed by an unacknowledged rage against half of the human race. But Sayers has a more subtle point to make. Even for the career women who are not unconscious (or unstated) lesbians and who, as Miss Pike says, have for private reasons chosen not to marry (228), there are psychological hurdles. These, however, are such hurdles as are framed chiefly by the culture. They overlap and converge with the animus that Miss Hillyard portrays throughout the novel, but they may be seen as illustrative of the second aspect of Sayers's thought about women's selfdefinition solely in terms of career. This aspect of the argument is that the culture has more or less forced womenunlike mento choose, or if not really to choose, to make a decision about how, this way or that, they will live their lives. The point is that there is a psychological cost to women who realize that they face a decision at all, and further, that no such cost comes into the equation for most men. This is t
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Approximate Word count = 3433
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)