Bringing up the Body (don’t mention the war): Traumatic Return in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors

Abstract

Expanding the bounds of genre and gender to include popular writers when considering the belated intermodernist confrontation with the impact of the First World War reveals that at a widely accessible level, readers could find fictions which offered them a methodology for re-enacting painful memories and experiences in order to master them. Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novel The Nine Tailors (1934) focuses on a rural community, Fenchurch St Paul, garnished with visible traces of centuries of English history. This representation is a form of epistemological romance, interlacing past and present in the attempt to reclaim these traces as living history rather than as markers of pastness. As in the 1930s itself, imaginative retreat is exploded by the return of First World War to the public memory: in The Nine Tailors, this occurs in the form of a corpse metonymically loaded with wartime significance. Its resurrection forcibly returns readers and characters to the battlefield, and it is only the re-traumatization its veteran-hero experiences when the sound of the village bells and the remembered roar of artillery fuse which provides closure to the mystery, the narrative, and the past.