spirits of discouragement

N.B.: Spoilers for Gaudy Night ahead.

As legal obstacles to women’s full participation in British society were gradually removed in the latter third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth — starting with the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 (with subsequent revisions) and culminating in the Representation of the People Act in 1918 (with subsequent revisions) — certain forms of resistance remained, and primarily took the form of interruptions and discouragements.

So in the opening pages of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf is thinking about her upcoming lectures on “women and fiction” while walking across the lawn of an ancient Cambridge college; her thinking is promising; she is drawing in a little fish of an idea; but then:

However small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind—put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done. The only charge I could bring against the Fellows and Scholars of whatever the college might happen to be was that in protection of their turf, which has been rolled for 300 years in succession, they had sent my little fish into hiding.

One may consider the Beadle as a kind of personification of Resistance to women’s full freedom to participate in society as they wish.

Another such personification is Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse, whose insistance that “Women can’t write, women can’t paint” is often in the mind of Lily Briscoe when she picks up her paintbrush. And in Woolf’s essay “Professions for Women” we get a voice from the other side of the division between the sexes, the Angel in the House — via Coventry Patmore — who is always telling Woolf to subordinate her own interests and energies to the service of the men in her life:

I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty — her blushes, her great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money — shall we say five hundred pounds a year? — so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must — to put it bluntly — tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

These varying personifications of dark forces, these imps of interruption and discouragement, seem less like human beings than … well, than like demons, that is, concentrations of malign power into individual form. The Beadle, for instance, is not a simple human being but rather an apparition: “a man’s figure rose to intercept me” — like a zombie rising from an open grave. It is Charles Tansley’s disembodied voice that whispers to Lily as she paints. The Angel in the House is a “phantom.” These personifications of resistance are not just bad but also eerie, spooky, uncanny.

Which brings us to Sayers’s Gaudy Night. Harriet Vane returns to her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, Oxford — an alternate-universe version of Sayers’ own college, Somerville — for a Gaudy, during which she reconnects with some old friends and former teachers. But something goes wrong.

Someone is pursuing an unpleasant campaign of insult, mockery, and threat — the threats being implicit at first, but later increasingly explicit. The overall message is this: Shrewsbury College is comprised of a bunch of dessicated old maids who hate men and (perhaps more to the point) are usurping the social place of men. Only the women who are married or engaged are spared the vitriol of the campaign, which escalates into vandalism and, eventually, attempted murder.

It is only at the novel’s end, of course, that we discover who’s behind the campaign of hate, and even though I noted above that there would be spoilers here, I am reluctant to say more. (Just go read the book, for heaven’s sake! It’s quite fascinating.) In any case, the point I want to emphasize here is that the women of the College come to call the perpetrator the Poltergeist. They don’t mean it literally, they know that it’s all being done by a person, but it’s noteworthy that they fall back on the language of supernatural agency — as though this is one more in a series of Interrupters and Discouragers who personify misogynistic forces. (“Poltergeist” is also a less threatening word than “Demon,” but that’s fitting in that it takes a very long time for the depth of the Poltergeist’s malice to be revealed.) In each case the enmity feels not like something human but rather something precipitated from the ambient hostility to women’s equality.

And I think that’s true in an especially uncanny way in Gaudy Night because the person responsible seems to know some odd things. For instance, the Poltergeist tears some pages out of a novel — this novel — and once we know the identity of the culprit … well, a knowledge of those pages in that book seems highly unlikely in this person. It’s as though the Poltergeist is absorbing and then emitting information from that ambient hostility. It’s a kind of ideological respiration perhaps.

It strikes me that this is a pretty accurate way of describing how feelings, especially hatreds, circulate in society. It was to try to describe that phenomenon that I wrote this essay.