Queerness at Shrewsbury: Homoerotic Desire in Gaudy Night

Abstract

Best known as the author of the popular Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series of the 1920s and 1930s, Dorothy L. Sayers is not usually included among the ranks of British novelists whose innovations and insights contributed to the creation of a distinct "modernist" sensibility that challenged traditional structures of reasoning and hierarchy in the early part of the twentieth century. However, feminist criticism of recent years has wisely cautioned against the valorization of modernism's intellectual and artistic avant-garde as the most subversive or resistant aspect of modern culture, for to do so problematically privileges an elite cadre of predominantly male or upper-class writers. While modern criticism has tended to acclaim the progressive politics of the experimental texts that now comprise the modernist canon, it has done so at the expense of other popular aspects of modern culture which present different types of interventions into dominant social practices. 1 Sayers, while among the intellectually elite members of modern British culture by virtue of her Oxford education, chose to write popular detective fiction [End Page 355] (at least early in her career), and as a consequence, her unique contributions to the radical politics and artistic innovations frequently associated with the modern era have often been overlooked. In the following analysis, I suggest that the most provocative of those contributions may be found in the 1936 novel Gaudy Night, a text deserving closer scrutiny for the ways in which it utilizes a genre with mass cultural appeal in order to enact a potent critique of patriarchal culture and its attendant policing of gender and sexual identity.

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