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Originally Posted by gmw
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.)
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Well, I probably wouldn't wear the peacock dressing gown to the supermarket, say, and short of that, who's to know? That said, people in my (very quiet) neighborhood walk their dogs in their pajamas and the college kids go to the market in theirs. You know what your environment will stand.
I can't say I read with 20s eyes, of course, but I've read enough of and from that era to feel reasonably comfortable in my saying that Sayers is being suggestive about Peter's sexuality. It's not just the peacock dressing gown, that's just one of the more "flamboyant" examples.
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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.
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Too bad. I'm quite strict about that. The text is the text; people can read into it whatever they like and can support. In fact, it makes it more interesting rather than having an author shut down the possibilities.
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Originally Posted by CRussel
For me, the witty humour were what kept me reading and enjoying this first book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series. And the rest are even better. In this first book, we see some of the elements that have made the books so endearingly popular, but we also see some weaknesses in Sayers craft.
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I think once she stopped imitating and borrowing and felt more comfortable with her own voice, the books improved dramatically. But