The Acid Test: Sleep in the work of Dorothy L. Sayers

I've been planning the introduction to my dissertation recently (which means that it's almost done! Deep breaths!), and I've been re-reading the passages that led me to think about watching a sleeper in the first place. Principal among them is a gorgeous piece of prose from the Renaissance scholar Dorothy L. Sayers--who translated Dante, but is most famous for her detective stories. In this passage, Lord Peter Wimsey (her main sleuth) has gone punting with Harriet Vane (the woman he loves, and has loved, unrequited, for years). When he falls asleep in the boat, Harriet studies his sleeping form:

"It was a neat and noiseless kind of sleep... but asleep he undoubtedly was. And here was Miss Harriet Vane, gone suddenly sympathetic, afraid to move for fear of waking him and savagely resenting the approach of a boatload of idiots whose gramophone was playing (for a change) 'Love in Bloom...' Another person's sleep is the acid test of our own sentiments. Unless we are savages, we react kindly to death, whether of friend or enemy. It does not exasperate us; it does not tempt us to throw things at it; we do not find it funny... But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty..." (Gaudy Night, Hodder and Stoughton, New English Library [1935] 2003, 361).

That passage has always stopped me cold. Sayers never comes out directly and says that Harriet has fallen in love with Peter. Instead, there is a look, there are a few brief reactions--and then there's this passage, the observation of a suddenly beloved sleeper, a simultaneous admission of his vulnerability and her own. With the option open to her, Harriet chooses not to indulge in "conscious superiority"; the acid test has shown her feelings for a vulnerable man who cannot openly reciprocate them yet, and she reacts by resenting the boatload of idiots (and their gramophone).

Then, fabulously, she goes through Wimsey's belongings, and starts reading his books until he wakes up. First up: Religio Medici. Second: Donne. With the choice of these books/writers, Sayers is framing the encounter in the context of not only sleep/love, but sleep/death, and--more specifically--sleep/early modern death. How and why is she doing this? To what end? What does the acid test tell us about viewers of sleepers in early modern literature itself? Will Peter and Harriet ever get together?? Tune in for the next installment...