The Stories of Women: Dorothy Sayers

our limits and our love of our materials

Aug 12, 2024

In The Mind of The Maker, Dorothy Sayers insists that it is the human calling to co-create with God.1 To co-create is to cultivate the discipline and the love that is necessary to do the work well. “To write the poem (or, of course, to give it material form in speech or song), is an act of love towards the poet’s own imaginative act and towards his fellow-beings.”2 To do the work, and do the work well, should be an act of love. Whether we are writing a poem or roasting a chicken or organizing a meeting or plumbing a house, our work should be born of love both toward the work and toward others.

I’ve long tried to think of my life as the art. The art isn’t something I will make. It’s not a blog roll or a painting or a house that I will build. The art is my entire life, my being in the world. My life is made up of many things I did not choose, some of those better than choices I would have made, some worse, and some perhaps better but far harder. Part of our work of being human is realizing that while we do have some agency, we have little control. There is much we cannot do or change or influence and we are not responsible for that part. But that part, no matter how small or how internal, is ours. Our agency is grown and developed in a world that fights back and systems that contain us in varying ways.3 We cannot, despite what well-meaning adults might have told us, grow up and become anything. We need talent, opportunity, a criss-crossing network of support, something that occasionally looks like luck, though those of us with faith would not call it that.4

To make art from our lives, we have to let go of what’s beyond our grasp. Perhaps our poor aptitude in math means we give up on becoming a biologist but discover we can build businesses from the idea up. Perhaps we want to travel the world or play college ball, but our family is poor and needs our assistance putting food on the table. So we stay, work what others consider a menial job, make it possible for others to be alive and maybe even well. We can still make art in that life; people have done it. But to do it, we will have to accept those limits as part of the art. We cannot sit around and refuse to do anything until the situation changes. We co-create with God where we are and that takes both discipline and love.

Sayers says later in the book, “The business of the creator is not to escape from his material medium or to bully it, but to serve it; but serve it he must love it.”5 She explained it was nonsense to seek freedom from the medium, instead we must accept the limitations that come with the medium. We have agency; we do not have control. We are shaped by many things outside of us. Sayers herself became pregnant before she was married, had the baby in the country, and let her childhood friend raise the baby. When she did marry, her new husband would not consent for the child to come life with them. Her child did not know that Sayers was his mother until after she died. We are all shaped by the cultures we are raised in: cultures that told us that having a child outside of marriage and keeping it would be so devastating that we could not take the risk.

Dorothy Sayers graduated from Oxford with a degree in Medieval French (or modern languages as it was known then) before Oxford was actually giving degrees to women. It took another five years for her degree to be awarded to her. Languages were not new to her at Oxford though. She started learning Latin from her father when she was seven. It should surprise no one that she ended up becoming a well-known translator.6 In a later time, her intellectual ability would have probably led her into academia, but, because she was a woman, that path was closed to her. She did the work with love nonetheless. She developed the jingle that accompanied the Guiness toucan during the time she supported herself writing copy. Her Lord Peter Whimsy detective novels are probably her best known work and the work that supported the rest of her writing. She continued using her language skills and considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work. She also wrote plays and theological texts as an Anglican lay theologian.

I’ve barely started my dive into Sayer’s work. Her work in The Mind of the Maker is not as easy to read if you spend most of your time with more modern writing. But it’s worth the effort. She talks about the Trinity and the laws of nature and continually comes back to love. “Perhaps the first thing that he can learn from the artist is that the only way of ‘mastering’ one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant.”7 She goes on to state that the artist sees life as a medium for creation, instead of a problem to be solved.8 We have to create from our problems, even when they are, in fact, unsolvable. We don’t get to create our own lives from scratch; we have material, a medium, that calls for our cooperation.

Sayers lived from 1893-1957 and was a contemporary of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and their literary group, the Inklings. While she was never an Inkling, she corresponded regularly by letter with Lewis. They developed quite a close friendship and Lewis appears to have even shifted from some of his attitudes about women because of his relationships with Sayers.

I have another of her books on my shelf titled Are Women Human? It’s a reprint of two essays by Sayers that were originally published in 1947. Her clear-headed approach is still helpful to many of us who are wrestling with the issues of what it means to be a woman or to be a man. And she would applaud us for asking the question in the singular, about a specific person, instead of in the plural about a group. She writes “a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”9 It is hard to pull quotes from the first essay because it runs fluidly, each sentence building upon the one before it. However, toward the every end, she writes, “Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general.”10 The second essay is searing satire, directing toward men the attitudes we project toward women. It will take you fifteen minutes to read the entire book and it will make you smile and also grimace that we have made so little progress in some ways.

The book ends with a long, but somewhat well-known, quote.

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!”; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about woman’s nature.
But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day. Women are not human; nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

Sources

https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-34-number-3/dorothy-sayers-self-entire
https://www.sayers.org.uk/biographyhttps://www.sayers.org.uk/biography
https://pickwickbookshop.com/products/9780374536251
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2023/08/dorothy-sayers-solves-her-scandal-of-the-evangelical-mind/
https://currentpub.com/2023/06/30/reflections-on-dorothy-sayers-work-life-and-lost-motherhood/
https://www.christianitytoday.com/scot-mcknight/2020/november/inking-or-not-she-was-their-equal.html

Conclusions

Sayers reminds me that when we cannot do the work we would like, we should do the work we can. We would be robbed of so much if she had refused to write and study in the ways that were available to her.

Sayers’ work reframes how I look at my life. What if I don’t try to solve unsolvable problems? My therapist differentiates between “problems to be solved” and “issues to be managed.” If you try to solve unsolvable things, you’re going to run into problems. What if I look at my life, including my issues that I can’t resolve, as part of the medium of my art?11 If we are to make art, we will make it with things we wouldn’t have chosen.

What are some of the limits of your art? Do you cultivate your work with discipline and love? Have you ever read any of Sayers’ work?

Becoming by Lisa Hensley

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