Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I have two words for you: "peacock bathrobe."  Actually it should be three words, "peacock dressing gown," but I went with the American term. There's other textual evidence, too. I'm not saying so much that Sayers deliberately implied that Peter was gay, but that she was suggesting it as a possibility. I think we're even dull to some of the implications that a 20s reader would have been all over in terms of coded references to homosexuality.
Of course Sayers made Lord Peter rampantly hetero in later books and (I know I've said it) I dislike that she felt it necessary to include the belated preface to explain away and retcon aspects of Whose Body? she later regretted, especially at the price of being quite spoilery about subsequent events. |
Are you suggesting that I should not admit to having a peacock dressing gown, if I don't want to give people the wrong idea about my sexuality, or is that something peculiar to the 1920s?
I do wonder how things might have read in the 1920s. You suggest that "a 20s reader would have been all over in terms of coded references to homosexuality", but might that not be equally true in reverse? (That the things we are interpreting as signals were, in fact, not signals after all.)
It may well be that the "retcon" was made because Sayers found that some people were indeed reading things into her text that she never intended.