Sayers and the nonsense of the "proper job" (with some defense of Annie)
Okay, so I've already written a bit about this here but was just rereading and had an additional thought or two, so now I kind of want to put it all in one place.
Gaudy Night is a fascinating book, but one of the biggest pieces of garbage in it is its running thesis about someone's "proper job." I don't think 'll get to one of the particularly bizarre parts of it (Miss De Vine's assertions that a) one shouldn't commit to marriage unless one can make one's spouse one's job and yet b) that someone whose spouse is their job is dangerous in their devotion, which presumably is an argument for global celibacy and living in hermetically sealed tubes), as the book itself doesn't necessarily endorse Miss De Vine's views per se (though it doesn't necessarily really debunk them either). But the parts said by Harriet seem to be part of the book's thesis from beginning to end, and that deserves some examination.
The "proper job" concept is summed up in this line from Harriet:
IÂ know what you're thinking--that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don't see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.
It's backed up by this exchange that Harriet has with Catherine Bendick nee Freemantle, who was a brilliant scholar who married a farmer:
'But Miss Freemantle--I mean, Mrs.--Mrs. Bendick--it's absurd that you should have to do this kind of thing. I mean, pick your own fruit and get up at all hours to feed poultry and slave like a navvy. Surely to goodness it would have paid far better for you to take on some kind of writing or intellectual job and get someone else to do the manual work.'
'Yes, it would. But at the beginning I didn't see it like that. I came down with a lot of ideas about the dignity of labour. And besides, at that time, my husband wouldn't have liked it much if I'd separated myself from his interests. Of course, we didn't think it would turn out like this.'
What damned waste! was all Harriet could say to herself. All that brilliance, all that trained intelligence, harnessed to a load that any uneducated country girl could have drawn, far better. The thing had its compensations, she supposed. She asked the question bluntly.
Worth it? said Mrs. Bendick. Oh, yes, it was certainly worth it. The job was worth doing. One was serving the land. And that, she managed to convey, was a service harsh and austere indeed, but a finer thing than spinning words on paper.
'I'm quite prepared to admit that,' said Harriet. 'A plough share is a nobler object than a razor. But if your natural talent is for barbering, wouldn't it be better to be a barber, and a good barber--and use the profits (if you like) to speed the plough? However grand the job may be, is it your job?'
There's more to the passage, and it goes into some of Mrs Bendick's own ambivalent feelings especially as relate to her relationship with her husband, but this is the key bit where Harriet is articulating a corollary of her "proper job" theory above.
The obvious question from Harriet's "proper job" theory as initially stated was "well whose proper job IS it to scrub floors?" Is there someone whose natural talents and inclinations go toward floor-scrubbing? There are far more floor-scrubbers than mystery-writers in the world; is that because of an inherent trait?
The second passage sort of, whether intentionally or not, answers the question by saying that an "uneducated country girl" should be doing all the menial labor. The implication is that that is HER proper job, while Mrs Bendick should be doing some sort of intellectual work because she was trained for it.
There is... a tremendous amount of classism there. I've written about classism in Sayers in other posts on here that I do not currently have the energy to find, but let's just say that it might be one of the most major blind spots she has when writing the Wimsey books. She just does not get it, because what she is arguing, in this idealized feminist book, is that there are some women who are not just fit for but SUITED for drudgery and some women who are above it.
Who is above this drudgery? The first passage would imply that it's an innate thing- Harriet's talented at mystery writing but not at floor scrubbing. (Incidentally, how does she know she's not talented at floor scrubbing? Has she tried?) The second implies that it's a matter of training- that it's a waste of the former Miss Freemantle's education to have her do hard labor, and that unskilled labor is best suited for uneducated people- or even that uneducated people are particularly suited to unskilled labor! When you combine the idea of the innateness of someone's proclivities with the question of who had access to high quality education/training of the kind discussed in this book, you end up with practically froth-mouthed classism.
Setting aside the obvious point that nobody is above honest productive work, the implication seems to be that there is a kind of person who is suited for education, and a kind of person who isn't and is more suited for the grunt work required to keep the educated mystery writer going (not to pick on Harriet personally). I could point to MANY more examples of this from Sayers, from her arguments in (I think) Are Women Human? about an imagined past when people were shoemakers and loved being shoemakers to the bit in Murder Must Advertise about public schools and class clashes at Pym's. But I think that it's especially germane here, in Gaudy Night, because of the arc of the book being so tied into this idea.
Because the real answer to the question "if it's not Harriet's proper job to scrub floors, whose job is it" is "it's Annie's job."
Annie knows that it's her job. She knows that there are floors that need to be scrubbed, and she knows that in the order of her society, she's the one who needs to do it. But she has an intrinsic motivator- she is a mother of children. She is a provider, though she doesn't think that she should need to be. By all rights, her husband should be alive and supporting them, and she should be above service work, a respectable housewife a rung or two above her current place in the social ladder. She will do the job because she is earning the money it takes to keep her children.
Annie also knows that the women of the college think it's her job too, and not their job- not just because they pay her to do it (or the college does), but because they have something that she doesn't- whether it's their education or their class itself. She of course is depicted as having been below her own husband socially when she married him, with it being highly implied that his marrying her was one of, either, the signs of his weakness of character or perhaps the motivator for him thinking so far below the ideals of academia and prioritizing banal things like, Idunno, feeding your family. Someone with such weakness and lack of class clearly didn't have academia as his "proper job."
(To be clear, I do not support academic fraud and do not believe he made the right choice- but let's be real, the way it's discussed in this book by people who not only have no incentive to say anything different [Peter and Harriet, who have alternate sources of income] but people whose income/lifestyle depends on academic integrity because they've already "made it" and who have no financial responsibility to anyone else [the dons] is a trifle rich.)
Somehow, while Gaudy Night both has Annie raving about the loss of her husband and the uselessness of the women in the college, the connection is never made explicitly to the loss of her own raised social status- from daughter of landlady to wife of academic, as previously stated- except for that of having been a "married woman." She's seen as perfectly fit for her social role of bringer of tea and mopper of floors otherwise. It doesn't occur to any of them to think about what else besides just her husband Annie may have lost- because to them, she never deserved it in the first place.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that Annie Wilson is the bottom line of the whole discussion about "proper job" in this book- NOT because she made her husband her proper job and that's scary, per Miss de Vine, but because she refused to make scrubbing the dons' floors her proper job, as she should have. In a choice between husband and scrubbing, to her mind, who WOULDN'T pick husband (and being treated like a human) vs scrubbing (and being treated like an inferior and an automaton)?
The dons, of course, chose the academic life over family life, or at least so far have (Miss Chilperic is engaged so will eventually leave), Period sexism has forced this choice on them in a way it didn't on male academics, something which gets no comment in this book from Sayers, who needs this juxtaposition between choosing work over spouse vs choosing spouse over work in order for Harriet's emotional journey to make sense. It's ironic, though- for all that people use this book when describing the phenomenon of "surplus women" and use the dons as an example, I'd wager it's at least as likely, if not more so, that it's the scouts who are surplus women- so surplus as to have been forgotten about. Is it meant to be assumed that, like the dons, they too have chosen to eschew personal relationships for the glory of their "proper jobs" of serving academics tea?
I've seen even those who identify a lot with Sayers's intended themes in this book say that Annie's final speech is searing- and I think it's because a lot of truth that Sayers may or may not have intended to say really comes through. She's so good at rounding out her characters that sometimes they say things that it's unclear she actually meant, or maybe she just wanted to give them some airtime even as they are then subjugated under other, more important themes for her. To me, Annie's speech is an indictment of how the book has chosen to regard her- there is an acknowledgement that marriage has given her the most status she has ever had, the only thing she has that these other women don't have- the only thing she can hold onto that gives her dignity in a world of women who give her no dignity at all.
There is often a tendency among people who comment on Sayers to treat her like the same kind of feminist the commenter is; but she very much isn't. Her Are Women Human? is very tied in with these ideas about class and roles- it just assumes that men and women are equivalent on ALL levels of the class hierarchy that she envisions as ideal. She envisions a lower class which may or may not enjoy drudge work but does at least understand that it IS their "proper job" and doesn't aspire to more. Annie Wilson is the fly in that ointment. It's not so much that she aspires to more as that she is clear that she does the job that society is deeming to be proper for her on sufferance and transactionally, because there is something/someone else that she cares about more and that gives her more dignity. And, as I discussed in the above linked post, that is why she is the villain.
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