When I first started looking at literature from a critical perspective, it was in my Honors Sophomore English class. Excellent class. Everything I needed to know about how to write a paper, I learned in that class. I also learned the fundamentals of poetry that no one seems to teach any more (can you identify dactylic trimeter at a glance? You could, if you’d had Mr. Wood). Until I graduated from high school and started college, however, my papers were essentially formalistic in nature. You know, I wrote about what was actually in the book/poem, without imposing any kind of theory on it beyond a bit of biographical/historical background.

My first brush with critical theory, then, came in my freshman year of college, when I took English 251: Fundamental Literary Criticism. We had a brief (VERY brief) overview of the different theories, and then got to pick one and write a paper on it. I chose multiculturalism and used Amy Tan’s A Pair of Tickets. Why? Because multiculturalism was pretty much the only theory I actually understood. The only thing I can actually remember learning in that class was from a rap that a fellow student wrote for our end-of-the-year talent show (yes, my class was taught by a grad student; why do you ask?): “Of all the authors we have read, one thing that we have noticed: they all were alcoholics and died of tuberculosis). Yeah. That, and my teacher had written a song called “The Last Train to Tocquerville,” which is a teeny little town in Southern Utah. Anyway.

The next year I took English 252: Critical Writing. Again, we had a very brief overview of the theories. I understood even less this time, I think. The class (there were only 5 of us, it was an evening section) chose a single novel (Pride and Prejudice, much to my delight, because the one male in the class said he didn’t want to read anything depressing, which of course eliminates a good 87% of the English-language canon) and each wrote our own papers about it. Mine ended up being deconstructionist, although not really. I just called it that because my teacher said that that’s what I was writing.

After that, for my undergrad at least, I was almost able to forget about theory. I took a Shakespeare class where the teacher tried to help us understand the intricacies of rhetorical criticism (that teacher is actually on my thesis committee now. Funny old world, innit?), and my capstone course had a post-colonial bend to it. But mostly, I my encounters with critical theory were limited to some of my more annoying classmates parroting a few terms here and there.

And then came grad school. I was required to take an undergraduate critical theory course as a condition of my acceptance, which I did, my first semester. Luckily, my prof was actually able to make Marxism, Feminism, and Postcolonialism understandable to me. I even managed to write what would become the presentation I gave at Lumos on the Sorting Hat and Ideological State Apparati. But was that the end? Of course not! Because after taking that class, I was subjected to a graduate-level critical theory course. I took it in the Spring semester, because the guy who taught it for Fall and Winter talks so fast that I can’t understand him. He’s brilliant, but he mumbles. I thought that might not be the best idea.

So, I took 630. I’ve never been in a class that made me feel more stupid. Everyone around me seemed to really get the theories and the theorists we were discussing, but I didn’t. Well, a few I did. But most I didn’t. And, of course, I had to write a thesis. Which meant that I had to pick a theory and understand it enough to write an 80-page paper about it! I chose a hybrid of moral/biographical criticism. I think. That’s how I’m justifying my topic, anyway. Neither of those theories are currently in vogue, incidentally.

And then last year, I took Rhetorical Criticism, mainly because I’d had to take a rhetoric class as part of my breadth requirement, and some of the issues we touched on seemed vaguely intriguing. That was the class I ended up failing.

So, what have I learned from my experiences with critical theory? Well, first, I don’t understand most of it. Seriously. And I’m a fairly intelligent individual. I have the standardized tests to prove it (my scores, let me show you them). I have a sneaking suspicion that most other English majors, graduate and undergraduate, don’t either. They may act like they understand Neitchze, Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, Burke, Eagleton, Said, and their ilk, but they don’t. They’ve assimilated enough of it to parrot the terms, but they’re, at best, pseudo-intellectual poseurs. I know I am.

But beyond the fact that most theory is utterly incomprehensible to any but the most whacked-out of English professors (I am provisionally convinced that you have to be at least partially insane to understand Derrida), it’s how theory is applied. It’s simply impossible to just read a book any more. No, instead you have to declare that the author is dead and therefore what the author meant to say is absolutely irrelevant, or that everything actually means the exact opposite of how it is portrayed, or that every male character is misognynistic and every female character written by a man is unrealistic and every male OR female character written by a woman must be a Paragon of Every Feminist Virtue. You have to point out the injustice of every binary. Economics and social status are crucial to EVERY story. Anything long and skinny is a phallic symbol. Any character with a physical imperfection is an example of the marginalization of the disabled. Sisterly love is actually lesbian incest. And an author just can’t win when it comes to race–either they’re too focused on it or not focused enough or they’re betraying their own racial roots or they’re dooming their race to continued prejudice or revealing their own subconscious racism or. . . yeah. But sorry, you’re not actually allowed to point out the moral messages a book might be sending. Morality is Taboo.

Even those of you who aren’t English majors recognize much of what I said in the previous paragraph, because you’re all Harry Potter fans, and you’ve seen those same things applied to HP. And therein lies the rub. Because even if I were to write about the books I actually enjoy reading, I’d have to do it like that. And I’m sorry, but that stuff right there? Is balderdash. I distinctly remember sitting in a creative writing class in high school, having a poem I’d written critiqued. My classmates were finding all sorts of things I never even thought of putting in there, and a good portion of them went entirely against what I’d actually been trying to do. I think that colored my perception of the value of literary criticism. Of the hundred or so papers I’ve written in my life, even counting those in which I tried to avoid theory whatsoever, I can probably count on one hand the ones I actually believed. And even those, I’d give odds on. I’m about 87% confident that I’m on a close-to-true track with my thesis.

And I hate that. I hate that I’m faking that I even understand the theories I’m applying, let alone that I think there’s any substance to them. Because in English papers, unlike scientific ones, you’re supposed to write that something “is” happening, not that something “might be.” Weasel words not allowed. It seems dangerously close to dishonesty. And when I imagine doing it for several more years to earn a PhD, only to have to keep doing in for more years after that to earn tenure– I’ve come to realize that I just can’t.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many things about being an English major that I love. I’m absolutely certain that there are things about being a professor that I would love. If I hadn’t thought that, I wouldn’t be where I am now. But my experience in grad school has taught me that if I have to keep doing Critical Theory for the rest of my life, I will go absolutely insane.

So, what does this mean? It means that after I finish my MA thesis, I’m done. No applying to PhD programs. No retaking the GRE lit exam. It’s taken me 3 years to realize it, but it’s not for me. Maybe it could have been. I don’t know. When I started thinking of doing an MA in English, it felt very right. Maybe that was because of the lessons I needed to learn, not because of the career path. But I’ve met with nothing but uncertainty, failure, and panic attacks since starting grad school, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep going.

So what am I going to do instead? I’m going to get my MLS. I want to be a Youth Services librarian in a public library. Librarians are semi-in-demand here in Utah, because there are no MLS programs in the state. It will mean two more years of school and a bucketload of student loans, because I’ll have to pay out-of-state tuition. But it feels right. My front-runner program is an online one at the University of Arizona. You see I’ve done my research.

And it’s amazing. I made this decision a few weeks ago. And since then, I’ve felt the most amazing sense of peace. And drive. I’ve been doing meaningful research on my thesis. I should be able to write again soon (although I haven’t tried it, but I have high hopes). It’s like this enormous weight of personal expectations has been lifted off my shoulders. To paraphrase Lois McMaster Bujold, maybe I just needed to free my brain.

I’ve been thinking. About the kind of reading I do, and what that means to my chosen profession.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I first learned how to read at age 4. My brother, who is about 18 months older than me, was learning in Kindergarten. Whether from kindness or a desire to show off (or both), he would come home and teach me what he’d learned. It wasn’t long before he didn’t need to teach me any more, because I’d become just as good as him, if not better. The first thing I can recall really reading is a passage from the Book of Mormon that this same brother (well, I only have one) had used in a talk in our church’s children’s organization. He was trying to give the talk from memory, and therefore was repeating this verse over and over again. And I got out a copy and was able to match the words he’d been repeating to the shapes on the page. I can still repeat a lot of it from memory: “And ye will not suffer your children that they go hungry, or naked; neither will ye suffer that they transgress the laws of God, and fight and quarrel one with another, and serve the devil, who is the master of sin. . .” or something like that. Yikes. I just checked, and indeed, I remembered a good portion of it. I always got stuck on the phrase after that. Although I could recover by “But ye will teach them to love one another, and to serve one another.”

Anyway. We moved just after I started Kindergarten myself, in November, to where we still live now. And the new school district didn’t teach reading in Kindergarten, so while even at my old school I’d been ahead, I now found myself the only one in a class of 30 who could read. My teacher, I suspect, didn’t know what to do with me. At times she had me read to the class while she completed other work. (The detrimental effect of this to my social life is another post in itself.) My first grade teacher didn’t know what to do with me, either. I was far and away above even the highest-level reading group. I ended up spending most of the year reading out of chapter books to a second-grader. Luckily this teacher was a bit more perceptive of how this singled me out from my classmates, and eventually reintegrated me into the highest group, where I was bored. But at least not completely unique. My second grade teacher ignored my skill level and tried to teach me phonics with the rest of the class. I. . . did not react well. I admit that I was a bit of a problem child for my second grade teacher. Boredom will do that. Luckily, by the time I got to third grade, several other girls had caught up with me, and a 5-girl group was formed where we read Newbery books instead of the usual McGraw-Hill readers. The first book I read in this group (I can’t believe I remember this) was The Witch of Blackbird Pond. By the time I was in sixth grade, I read at a twelfth-grade level.

Now. I know I am not unique in this reading-early-and-reading-well thing. But even in that, I’ve come to see my experience as unusual. Because, while I was reading above my level for almost my entire life, my tastes tended toward. . . well. If I’d been Doing it Right, I’ve come to find, I should have been reading Pride and Prejudice at age 12. I should have devoured Hemingway in Jr. High. My shelves should have been filled with Moby Dick, War and Peace, and the unabridged Les Miserables by my sophomore year of high school. But I didn’t do that. I first read Pride and Prejudice my senior year of high school. I read The Old Man and the Sea as an assignment in 9th grade (it was one of several on a list, and I picked it because it was the shortest) and hated it. I’ve never actually read the other three above mentioned. Almost all of the classics that I have read have been assigned in class, whether in my honors/AP English classes in high school, in my undergrad English degree, or my current grad school classes. And to tell the truth, I haven’t really liked most of them. I’ve learned how to read them, how to write about them, but for the most part, I haven’t learned how to enjoy them.

So what did I read, then? Lots of things. Instead of reading far above my supposed level in elementary school, though, I only read a few levels up, and very quickly. Then I’d obsessively reread my favorites. So while most of my peers started reading Nancy Drew mysteries in 5th or 6th grades, I started reading them in 3rd. I’d blow through a Baby-Sitters’ Club book in an hour. I devoured Encyclopedia Brown. I read and reread Little House and the Anne of Green Gables books. Even when, in junior high, I moved away from the children’s section and started on truly adult books, it still wasn’t Steinbeck or Joyce, it was Erle Stanley Gardner–with some R.L. Stine and L.M. Montgomery thrown in for good measure. The librarians would boggle at my stack of books, wondering how I’d ever finish it all in the three-week loaning period. They didn’t know that I’d have them all read by the end of a week.

And, of course, I haven’t stopped. Yes, I’ve got a nice bookshelf full of classics and more recent books of so-called literary merit, but most of them I’ve only read once (and have little to no desire to read again). In the meantime, I buy everything from picture books (have you guys ever read Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type? How about Hooway for Wodney Wat? They’re both absolutely delightful) to middle readers (Ella Enchanted was one of those books I wore out in paperback before finding it in hardcover, and I just bought Robin McKinley’s new Dragonhaven), to young adult (just finished The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale, excellent reading), to sci-fi and fantasy (I need to replace my copy of Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold, it’s falling apart; and of course, there’s Harry Potter), to (tame) historical romance (I’m going to have to start buying my Georgette Heyers from England, ’cause Harlequin has seemingly stopped reprinting them), to mysteries (did you know that the Jane Austen Mysteries are really quite fun?). Maybe it’s a reaction to the regimental reading of grad school (although I don’t think so), but my taste naturally gravitates to genre fiction and children’s books.

I can just imagine all of you going “so what?” Well. . . there’s a problem here. Because when I go to my graduate school classes, when I read literary criticism, when I look at Calls for Papers for conferences– I get the distinct impression that I’m reading (and internalizing) the Wrong Things. It’s simply impossible for some of the people who inhabit the Ivory Tower to conceive that the writers of genre fiction might have just as much to say about the human condition as those who write literary fiction. They’d scoff if I told them that the books that really stick with me aren’t the ones that they think should. And yet– is there not moral ambiguity in, say, the story of Lord Peter Wimsey, whose quest to uncover a murder inadvertently causes the deaths of more innocent people, just as there is in Hamlet? Is Miles Vorkosigan’s struggle for identity in the face of disability and prejudice any less valid than, say, Huckleberry Finn’s, just because Miles’s story involves spaceships instead of a river raft? Why should the One Ring be an unacceptable device for portraying the corrupting influence of power, while an allegory involving farmyard animals is not only fine, but genius? And you will never convince me that Sidney Carton’s self-sacrifice is morally (or even literarily) superior to Harry Potter’s, even if ultimately Harry didn’t die.

See, the thing is, I personally believe that in the examples I gave above, the genre-fiction equivalents are more powerful, simply because they are more accessible. I don’t care what deep, weighty issues a book is dealing with– if the author can’t manage to portray it to me in an understandable, even entertaining fashion, I’m going to forget all about it when I close the book. Maybe even before that. If I can’t comprehend what exactly it is you’re trying to say behind that oh-so-innovative language (or format, or whatever the author decided to do to make their book “literary”), how am I ever supposed to decide whether I agree with you or not? It think that was ultimately my problem with the rhetorical criticism class I took last year– the first class I ever failed. Because I never understood the issues, the theories, well enough to internalize them. (As an aside, you’d think a rhetorician would be able to make themselves understood, wouldn’t you? Hah! Kenneth Burke is as opaque as a piece of wood.)

I’ll admit that things are better than they used to be. There is such a thing as Cultural Studies (as long as you’re careful to make it clear that the pop culture you’re studying is still Just Pop Culture). Every once in a while a university will throw genre fiction a bone, like the British Mystery Writers class I took a couple of years ago. But the change is slow, and you’ll only gain real acceptance in certain circles. I was told by one professor (who I respect very much) that I was committing career suicide by writing my MA thesis on The Lord of the Rings. I shudder to think what he would have said if I’d told him I was thinking of writing on Harry Potter. “Why don’t you write on Austen instead?” he asked, and my answer was that I didn’t have a good Austen-focused idea (and I didn’t, at the time), but I did have a good Tolkien one. “That’s a shame,” he says. Now, my thesis chair, when I asked him if this was a real possibility, said that yes, it would probably close a few doors, but that they wouldn’t be doors I wanted to walk through anyway. At the time, I was satisfied with that answer. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered.

Do I really, really, want to spend the rest of my life in an atmosphere that disdains the kind of reading that I hold most dear? I know, I can join the people in the Ivory Tower to corrupt from within, and I admit that’s my plan. But. . . that means spending at least two, maybe five, more years Faking It. Pretending that the chloroform in print they keep shoving down my throat is worth even reading, let alone writing pages and pages about. And then what? It’s hard enough to get a tenure-track position these days if you’re a canon conformist, let alone if you want to be a rabble-rouser. And if I publish papers on The Female Hero in Young Adult Fantasy, will it even count? (And let’s not get started on literary criticism in general, ’cause that’s yet another post.) Even my chosen PhD topic (if I ever get that far) is unusual– I can just imagine the admission committee reading my statement of intent: “She wants to study Jane Austen paraliterature? Like, sequels and fanfic? Really?”

No wonder I can’t write my thesis. I don’t even know if that’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Mystery in Harry Potter

If there’s one thing everyone can agree on about the Harry Potter phenomenon, it’s that J.K.
Rowling has borrowed quite a bit. This is seen as both a positive and a negative thing, depending
on who’s talking. Harold Bloom, in a famous editorial for the Wall Street Journal in July of
2000, stated that Rowling’s basis was the classic Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes:

“Rowling has taken Tom Brown’s School Days and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkien.�
He dismisses the first Harry Potter book (the only one he bothered to read), asking “Can more
than 35 million book buyers, and their offspring, be wrong? Yes, they have been, and will
continue to be so for as long as they persevere with Potter.� Bloom is not alone in seeing
Rowling’s work as inferior because it is derivative. Others see things differently, proclaiming
that it is Rowling’s skill in weaving together many different genres that makes the Harry Potter
series so unique. Anne Hiebert Alton stated that “rather than creating a hodgepodge with no
recognizable or specific pattern, Rowling has fused these genres into a larger mosaic, which not
only connects readers’ generic expectations with the tremendous success and popularity of the
Harry Potter series but also leads to the ways in which the series conveys literary meaning�

(141). One of the primary genres (other than the obvious fantasy genre) which Rowling makes
use of in her series is the mystery. It is part of what gives Harry Potter its widespread appeal:
adults and children alike enjoy trying to piece together the clues along with (or even before)
Harry.

Each book in the Harry Potter series—numbering six at the moment, with a seventh volume
eagerly awaited by fans—contains a mystery to be solved by Harry, usually with the help of his
two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,
Harry is determined to discover what was hidden in Vault 713 in Gringotts Bank and
subsequently moved to Hogwarts, and who exactly is intent on stealing it. In Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets, Harry must discover who the Heir of Slytherin might be, how they are
perpetrating the attacks which leave students Petrified, and why Dobby the house-elf keeps trying
to save his life. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban finds Harry searching for clues as to
why Sirius Black might want to kill him, why a mysterious black dog keeps showing up, and who
really was responsible for his parents’ deaths. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry must
try to discover the answers to the mysterious dreams he keeps having, who put his name in the
Goblet of Fire, and why various acquaintances are acting very strangely. Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix has Harry looking for clues wherever he can find them about what
Voldemort is up to, what the secret weapon is that he’s so intent on getting, and why he keeps
having these mysterious dreams. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince shows Harry pursuing
several avenues of inquiry—why Draco Malfoy is acting the way he is, how Voldemort’s past
can show him what he needs to know in the future, and what exactly Professor Slughorn
attempted to erase from his memory. Time only will tell what mysteries Harry will be called on
to solve in volume seven, but solving the mystery of the identity and location of the missing
horcruxes is sure to be a large part of it. Overarching all of these mini-mysteries is the greatest
mystery of all: Why does Voldemort want to kill Harry, what really happened the night his
parents were killed, and how can Harry defeat him at last? Each of the smaller mysteries
contributes in some way to the larger one, and each brings Harry closer to the final confrontation
with Voldemort.

Laying the Foundation

The key to any good mystery story is to make the puzzle sufficiently interesting. Rowling
certainly accomplishes this in the first chapter of the first novel, when she introduces the central
mystery of the series. After explaining that Voldemort, a wizard so evil that most other magical
folk fear saying his name, has killed James and Lily Potter, Rowling introduces our hero:

Professor McGonagall’s voice trembled as she went on. “That’s not all.
They’re saying he tried to kill the Potter’s son, Harry. But — he couldn’t. He
couldn’t kill that little boy. No one knows why, or how, but they’re saying that
when he couldn’t kill Harry Potter, Voldemort’s power somehow broke — and
that’s why he’s gone. Dumbledore nodded glumly.

“It’s — it’s true?â€? faltered Professor McGonagall. “After all he’s done…
all the people he’s killed… he couldn’t kill a little boy? It’s just astounding… of all
the things to stop him… but how in the name of heaven did Harry survive?â€?

“We can only guess,� said Dumbledore. “We may never know.� (12)

But we, as a reader, must know—even if it takes seven books to finally find out. Rowling
similarly “hooks� the reader with the mystery of the Sorcerer’s Stone by having Hagrid point out
repeatedly how important it is, only to juxtapose that idea with a tiny grubby package. Again and
again, Rowling lays the foundation for the mystery at hand: Dobby’s mysterious warnings in
Chamber, the terrifying appearance of the large black dog in Azkaban, the murder of Frank Bryce
as witnessed by Harry in a dream in Goblet, the refusal of anyone to give Harry any information
of Voldemort’s doings in Order, and the mysterious behavior of Draco Malfoy in Half-Blood
Prince. Rowling catches our interest, and leaves us eager to find out more.

Clues and Red Herrings

Rowling is similarly adept at giving well-hidden clues while simultaneously misdirecting our
attention. The first example of this comes in Stone, when Harry sees Professor Snape for the first
time:

Harry, who was starting to feel warm and sleepy, looked up at the High
Table again. Hagrid was drinking deeply from his goblet. Professor McGonagall
was talking to Professor Dumbledore. Professor Quirrell, in his absurd turban, was
talking to a teacher with greasy black hair, a hooked nose, and sallow skin.

It happened very suddenly. The hook-nosed teacher looked past Quirrell’s
turban straight into Harry’s eyes — and a sharp, hot pain shot across the scar on
Harry’s forehead. (126)

Harry assumes (as does the first-time reader) that the pain has something to do with Professor
Snape, when in reality his scar is reacting to Voldemort himself, who is hiding under Professor
Quirell’s turban. In Chamber, Rowling cleverly plants clues to the identity of the attacker and the
eventual solution throughout the book: Ginny running back to the Burrow for her diary (66),
Harry’s ability to speak Parseltongue when no one else can (196), the mysterious behavior of the
spiders and the slaughtering of the school roosters (201), and even Ron’s joking uttered
suggestion that Tom Riddle had killed Moaning Myrtle (232). In the meantime, we’re also
misdirected: Hagrid’s appearance in Knockturn Alley (54), Draco Malfoy’s cry of “You’ll be
next, Mudbloods!� (139), Percy’s odd behavior skulking around empty classrooms (219), and
Tom Riddle’s depiction of his “capture� of Hagrid (246–248).

As adept as Rowling is at planting clues for her smaller mysteries, it becomes more and more
obvious as the series goes on that she is even more clever at planting clues for the larger one. We
learn in Stone that it was Lily Potter’s love for Harry that saved his life all those years ago (299),
in Order of the Phoenix it is hinted that love is “the power that the Dark Lord knows not� (841,
844), and finally in Prince it is expressed openly: “‘So, when the prophecy says that I’ll have
“power the Dark Lord knows not,’ it just means—love?’ asked Harry, feeling a little let down.�

“Yes—just love,� said Dumbledore� (509). Similarly, the diary Harry destroyed in Chamber has
turned out to be so much more important than just a diary—it contained a piece of Voldemort’s
soul, and by destroying it, Harry took one step closer to destroying Voldemort for good (500-501). In perhaps the biggest twist of all, the many misdirections which pointed, time after time,
to Snape as the “bad guy� only to be proved wrong, may finally have been proved right: Snape
has, seemingly, irrevocably proved his allegiance to Voldemort (although there are many theories
that dispute that). With one book still left to go, who knows how many more clues we will
discover, hidden in the pages of the previous six books?

In a book review written for the New York Times, Stephen King expressed his admiration of
Rowling’s talent for writing mysteries:

In a Newsweek interview with Malcolm Jones, Rowling admitted to
reading Tolkien rather late in the game, but it’s hard to believe she hasn’t read her
Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Although they bear the trappings of
fantasy, and the mingling of the real world and the world of wizards and flying
broomsticks is delightful, the Harry Potter books are, at heart, satisfyingly shrewd
mystery tales. Potter 3 (”Azkaban”) dealt with Harry’s parents (like all good boy
heroes, Harry’s an orphan) and cleared up the multiple mysteries of their deaths in
a way that would likely have pleased Ross Macdonald, that longtime creator of
hidden pasts and convoluted family trees.

King is correct. Amidst the magic wands, the magical creatures, and the sinister spells, Harry
Potter is a mystery: one that millions of people can’t wait to see solved.

Works Cited

Alton, Anne Hiebert. “Generic Fusion and the Mosaic of Harry Potter.� Harry Potter’s World:
Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives. Elizabeth E. Heilman, ed. New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2003.

Bloom, Harold. “Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes.� Wall Street Journal, 11 July,
2000, p. A.26

King, Stephen. “Wild About Harry�. New York Times, 23 July 2000. Accessed online 15
December 2005.
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/23/reviews/000723.23kinglt.html?oref=login>

Rowling, J[oanne]. K[athleen]. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Levine-Scholastic, 1997.

—. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Levine-Scholastic, 1998.

—. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York: Levine-Scholastic, 2000.

—. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Levine-Scholastic, 2003.

—. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York: Levine-Scholastic, 2005.

Dorothy L. Sayers in Her Time

Harriet Vane, as a character, bears a strong resemblance to Dorothy L. Sayers herself—a woman
with strong convictions, an Oxford education, a brilliant mind, a strong religious ethic that
sometimes manifests itself in odd ways, and, most importantly, a writer of mysteries. Many
believe she is simply a self-insertion, and that Sayers was so enamored of her own greatest
character, Lord Peter Wimsey, that she wrote Harriet and Peter’s love story as a kind of wish
fulfillment. Of course, if you read much of Sayers on her own work, it is clear that she became
heartily sick of Lord Peter by the time she wrote Strong Poison, and in fact stated that she began
the novel intending to marry Peter off and discontinue with the Wimsey series (Haycraft 211).
But Sayers did put a lot of herself into Harriet Vane, as she did all of her characters in varying
amounts. Of particular interest to me was her decision to make Harriet a writer of mystery
stories. Sayers believed that mysteries could indeed be “real literature,� and tried her best to
make her own writing so. As I became better acquainted with Sayers and her contemporaries, I
realized more fully than ever just how unique Sayers was, and still is.

Sayers wrote in what is now commonly referred to as the Golden Age of Mystery, of which she
was one of the principal authors. This period is generally defined as the years between World
War I and World War II in Britain, with the publication of Agatha Christie’s first novel, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 as the most commonly cited beginning. Ngaio Marsh and
Margery Allingham joined Sayers and Christie as the major writers of the period. Although the
mystery as a genre had been around for quite a while in the writings of authors such as Edgar
Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and of course Arthur Conan Doyle, it was during this period that the
genre really came into its own, as the writers of mystery stories made a conscious effort to
improve their own writing and the writing of mystery novels in general.

One of the unique aspects of the period is the codifying of rules or guidelines for writing mystery
stories. In 1928, S.S. Van Dine (the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright) published “Twenty
Rules for Writing Detective Stories� in American Magazine. These rules contain an interesting
insight into the kind of stories that were being written during the Golden Age. A few of the more
interesting ones are these:

3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to
the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse
the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far
too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and
expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary
dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no
“atmospheric� preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of
crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to
the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a
successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and
character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

20. I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story
writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are
familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the
author’s ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the
culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the
brand smoked by a suspect. (b)The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the
culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dog that does
not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f) The final
pinning on the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected,
but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h)
The commission in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The
word-association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually
unraveled by the sleuth. (189–193)

Another author, Ronald A. Knox, also attempted to codify a set of rules for the writer of the
mystery story, in “A Detective Story Decalogue�:

I. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must
not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

II. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

III. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will
need a long scientific explanation at the end.

V. No Chinamen must figure in the story.

VI. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an
unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

VII. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

VIII. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced
for the inspection of the reader.

IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts
which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly,
below that of the average reader.

X. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been
duly prepared for them. (194–196)

Perhaps the most interesting of these sets of rules are those which Dorothy L. Sayers herself had
a hand in writing. In approximately 1929, Sayers, Anthony Berkely, and Ronald A. Knox
founded the Detection Club, a highly selective club of writers of mystery stories. Membership
was by invitation only, and required that the initiate answer questions such as (among other
things) the following:

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes
presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them
and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine
Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery- Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God?

Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?

Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs,
Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen,
Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly and for ever to forswear Mysterious
Poisons unknown to Science? (198)

These attempts to establish rules for the writing of mystery stories demonstrates just how
seriously the genre was taken at the time Sayers was writing, and gives us a clue as to just what
kinds of things one found in the stories of less accomplished writers. The result of this effort was
a large body of clever mysteries which generally adhered to a specific formula. There is nothing
really wrong with this type of story; some of my own personal favorite writers, such as Georgette
Heyer and Erle Stanley Gardner, wrote almost exclusively to a formula. Some of the most
entertaining mystery stories are those which utilize the formula and the rules, and yet still find
clever ways to play around with them in ways the audience wouldn’t expect.

It is interesting to note, however, that these rules which Sayers seemed to take so seriously and
even helped to write, were sometimes completely ignored by her, often to great effect. If Sayers,
for example, had followed Van Dines’s rule number 3, we would now be missing such works as
Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon. From the beginning
of her writing career, Sayers set out to write something, as she put it, “less like a conventional
detective story and more like a novel� (208). Indeed, despite the rules which she herself helped to
make, Sayers claimed that “if the detective story is to live and develop it must get back to where
it began in the hands of Collins and Le Fanu, and become once more a novel of manners instead
of a pure crossword puzzle. . . it is not only that the reader gets tired after a time of a literature
without bowels; in the end the writer gets tired of it too, and that is fatal� (209). Sayers, too, was
determined to allow her characters to grow and develop over time, unlike the vast majority of
detectives of the time, such as Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who stayed the same, year in and year
out. Sayers stated that “any character that remains static except for a repertory of tricks and
attitudes is bound to become a monstrous weariness to his maker in the course of nine or ten
volumes� (210). When it came time for her to marry Peter off “and get rid of him� in Strong
Poison, Sayers found that she could not do it:

I had landed my two chief puppets in a situation where, according to all
conventional rules of detective fiction, they should have had nothing to do but fall
into one another’s arms: but they would not do it, and that was for a very good
reason. When I looked at the situation I saw that it was in every respect false and
degrading; and the puppets had somehow got just so much flesh and blood in
them that I could not force them to accept it without shocking myself. (211)

Sayers knew, almost instinctively, when the story she wanted to write demanded that she break a
few of the rules that she herself had helped create, and which of the rules were okay to break.
Sayers realized, as many less gifted writers did not, that the code of the mystery was, as Captain
Barbossa of the Black Pearl might say, “more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.� This
realization sets Sayers apart from the vast majority of her contemporaries, however enjoyable
those works might otherwise be. In writing such stories as Murder Must Advertise and Gaudy
Night, Sayers was truly ahead of her time, and writers such as P.D. James and Laurie R. King
now follow in her footsteps.

The Golden Age of mysteries was in many ways not a culmination, but a beginning. The efforts
of those who cared about the genre resulted in great improvements, and authors like Agatha
Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham enjoyed great commercial success. Dorothy
Sayers did, too, but her novels stand out from all the rest. By caring enough to create rules but
being smart enough to know when to break them, Sayers created more than just a detective story:
she created literature.

Works Cited

Haycraft, Howard. The Art of the Mystery Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.