Finding Harriet Vane: A mini-essay on Sayers' Women
You really do need to read the Wimsey books in order, if just to watch in fascination how Sayers develops her Ideas About Women, which culminates in the whole Harriet Vane arc. For context, Christie doesnāt really have Ideas About Women. She has Ideas About People. Her vision of psychology comes down to environment and social pressures, but these are less frequently gender-based. Class, age, and income dictate her characters much more than relations between the sexes, even in crimes of passion (and there arenāt many).
Sayers, on the other hand, develops the theme that finally comes to full chorus in Gaudy Night. E.g., Whose Body? is very much in the Christie vein. You get the impression she could keep going on like this for several more books, but she doesnāt; she writes Clouds of Witness and gives Peter a mother, a sister, and opens her theme of privilege and sexuality in the form of the farmerās wife. The wife is vital here to understanding how Sayers sets up Peter as the peer of the realm, used to taking because that's his privilege. I love the pithiness of this line:
[she had] a shape so wonderful that even in that strenuous moment sixteen generations of feudal privilege stirred in Lord Peter's blood.
This image is vital to understanding how Harriet (rightly) sees him as presumptuous in Strong Poison and sets up why she refuses to tangle with him on his own turf.
Unnatural Death offers another vision of womanhoodāqueer and single womanhood. The relationships between Agatha Dawson and Clara Whittaker, and to a lesser extent Mary Whittaker and Vera Findlater, are clearly Sapphic and complicate the easy upper-class commerce of seduction and possession. In fact, it turns conventional heterosexuality into a farce, in the scene when āMrs. Forrestā attempts to seduce āMr. Templeton" to poison him.
He pulled her suddenly and violently to him, and kissed her mouth with a practised exaggeration of passion. He knew then. No one who has ever encountered it can ever again mistake that awful shrinking, that uncontrollable revulsion of the flesh against a caress that is nauseous. He thought for a moment that she was going to be actually sick.
The two principals are in disguise; one is a lesbian and the other suspects her of murder. Heterosexuality becomes a pantomime, a play of dishonesty in violent and overt language (Sayers, notably by Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon, gets much more coy about real and honest feelings). It's the yearning for honesty that becomes the knot to unravel with Harriet (proclaimed pretty baldly in Have His Carcase).
Aside from queering relationships, this book also introduces us to the inimitable Miss Climpson: the smart sleuthing "old maid" who Parker first conventionally mistakes for Peter's mistress and represents Sayers slyly breaking expectations. A proto-Miss Marple, Miss Climpson both provides Peter with a sensibility of feminism that will eventually help redeem him--he's not too proud to see the worthiness of an independent single woman--and (on a narrative level) allows Sayers to explore female protagonism and her own religious outlook in her fiction.
Finally, The Unpleasantness of the Bellona Club offers us two major women, who interestingly collide in the character of Harriet Vane: the artistic Marjorie Phelps, who exists in a relationship of ambiguous intimacy with Peter, and the plain persecuted Ann Dorland, whose essential non-villainy gets endangered by a man she's in love with. I slightly wonder whether Sayers got her idea for Harriet from the way she wrote Ann Dorland especially; Ann, despite her limited page time, suggests the same love problems, level-headedness, and appeal to Wimsey that typifies Harriet, though isn't allowed the same play.
Sayers has been setting up Peter and his relationships this way for maximum impact when we get to Strong Poison. Harriet, interestingly, gets very little initial on-page description in this book (as opposed to, say, Ann Dorland or Mary Whittaker), and there's the simultaneous sense of her being disappeared and becoming typified not by her looks but by her words/voice, as her dialogue is how we get to know her.
There is a great deal of absurd charm in the openings of the Wimsey/Vane relationship, of course, but Sayers reminds us not to get carried away by it with one line:
[The books] could not show him how to save the woman he imperiously wanted from a sordid death by hanging.
Clearly, we know Peter wants Harriet. We even believe that the way he wants her is rather nice, and at least infinitely superior to the way she had been wanted by her lame ex Phillip. But Sayers cautions us with that fantastic adverb, "imperiously." Remember the farmer's wife in Clouds of Witness, she seems to say. Remember that the way Peter likes Harriet has as much to do with the certainty of his own brilliance as how he sees her. Remember that, even if he says he's not blackmailing her into marrying him by helping her out, he's still Lord Peter, second son of the duke.
What's most fascinating about tracing this evolution, for me, is that you almost see Harriet happening upon Sayers in real time: yes, she's a self-insert, but she's also the natural conclusion to a long line of women through whom Sayers has been trying to talk about women and class and obligation and love, and the best medium for her to come to her final thesis.
