![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to Karen Jacobs, Cassandra Laity, and Roslyn Reso Foy for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. I am also grateful to Stephanie Couey, for her editorial assistance, and Bruce McPherson, for generously sharing a draft of Unborn Gods with me and encouraging me to write about it before it was published.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Jane Garrity is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author of Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (2003); the co-editor, with Laura Doan, of Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and National Culture (2006); and the editor of “Queer Space,” for ELN: English Language Notes (2007). Her most recent essay, “The Haunting of Mary Hutchinson,” appears in Women Making Modernism (2020). She is currently completing a monograph titled Fashioning Bloomsbury.
Notes
1 This photograph is reproduced in Wagstaff, 223. Mary Duff Stirling (Lady Twysden) was a British socialite who was known for being the inspiration for Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The photograph is also reproduced in Blondel’s Scenes from the Life (following p. 204), but there the woman sitting next to Butts is identified as French writer Mireille Havet, and the location is said to be the French Riviera in 1928. Both the biography and Blondel’s Journals contain several references to both women but the identity of the second woman in the photograph remains inconclusive.
2 Natalie Blondel discusses the conception and drafting of Unborn Gods (referring to the novel as “Dangerous”) in The Journals of Mary Butts, but her timeline is very confusing. See pp. 12–14; p. 37, notes 41 and 42. Blondel cites a passage from Butts (written January 3, 1917) that refers to the acceptance of “Agnes Helen” (Journals, 75), but it is not clear that this work is the same as “Dangerous” (or “Unborn Gods”). Butts herself refers to the novel as “‘Unborn Gods’ [‘Dangerous’]” in a journal entry dated November 15, 1916 (Journals, 69), and Blondel notes on that same page (n. 57) that Curtis Browne had agreed to become the agent for her novel. See also p. 77 n. 9 for reference to Curtis Browne. In her Biography, Blondel writes that Butts extensively redrafted “a novel she then called ‘A.H.’ (perhaps based on the short story ‘Agnes Helen’) which probably became her unpublished novel, ‘Unborn Gods’” (141). On p. 448 (n. 10) of the Biography, Blondel refers to the novel as “Unborn Gods” and her index contains no citation for “Dangerous” – only citations for “Unborn Gods.” It is worth noting that a minor male character uses the word “dangerous” (248) to refer to Agnes Helen in Unborn Gods, but he does so within a disparaging and misogynistic context. I am very grateful to Roslyn Reso Foy for helping me to sort through the at times confusing details regarding the publication history of Unborn Gods.
3 Blondel discusses the relevance of the Obscene Publications Act and the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA) of 1914, which was used to “suppress anything that deviated from the views presented in wartime propaganda.” See Journals, 13–15. Blondel cites British writer Vera Brittain, who claimed in the 1930s that she was typical of her generation in knowing nothing about sexuality at the beginning of the First World War (see Journals, 13). This helps us to understand the truly radical nature of Butts’s frank engagement with so many taboo topics throughout Unborn Gods. For example, she intimates incest when Agnes Helen toward the end of novel remembers Phil with a sense of “secret shame” (249). Butts alludes to birth control when Agnes Helen’s lover, Mark (who is married to Jean), reassures her that he “he had taken all the precautions” (37). The first birth control clinic in London was not established until 1921, three years after the publication of Marie Stopes’s controversial Married Love (1918). Even though by the mid-1920s most feminist organizations supported birth control, the vast majority insisted that it should be made available only to married women. For a discussion of British modernism’s relationship to censorship laws, see Marshik, British Modernism and Censorship. For an examination of the overt interest in sexuality as a defining feature of the modernist period, see Marshik and Pease, Modernism, Sex, and Gender, 51–89.
4 Bruce McPherson, the publisher of McPherson & Company, notes that the original manuscript he obtained from the Beinecke lists the title as “Unborn Gods,” which is why he decided to publish the novel as Unborn Gods rather than as “Dangerous” (personal correspondence). The projected publication date of the novel is January 2021.
5 Blondel, The Journals, 12. There is a large body of extant criticism on “Sapphic modernism” that dates from the 1980s and treats in particular the influence of Hellenic myth, Greek culture and spirituality, and the Decadents on lesbian novels and poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. See for example: Callecott, H.D. & Sapphic Modernism 1910–1950; Gregory, “Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.'s ‘Sea Garden’”; Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines; and Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. For a more general discussion of “sapphic modernism” or “lesbian modernism”: see Benstock, “Expatriate Sapphic Modernism.”; Doan and Garrity, Sapphic Modernities, 1–13; Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land; Gubar, “Sapphistries.”; and Scott, Refiguring Modernism. While early feminist literary scholars did not include Butts in their examination of “Sapphic modernism,” her preoccupations in Unborn Gods do remind us of other works by writers such as Reneé Vivien, Natalie Barney, H.D. and Bryher who similarly engage with the influence of Hellenism and Decadence on their representations of lesbian sexuality.
6 Berman, “Practicing Transnational Feminist Recovery Today,” 9. While Butts’s book could have been recuperated within the context of “Sapphic modernism” in the 1990s, today that categorization alone is not enough to secure her novel’s future readership. As Jessica Berman writes: “Feminist recovery is unpopular – again – or still? – and is not likely to land many scholars top jobs” (9). Hence the challenge for scholars in feminist modernist studies is how to recover a book like Unborn Gods within today’s focus on expanded, transnational frames of reference.
7 Virginia Woolf uses the word “indecent” to characterize Butts’ novel, Ashe of Rings, when she declines to publish it at the Hogarth Press. See Nicolson, Letters II, 576. I elsewhere discuss how Butts’ short-story collection, Speed the Plough (1923), was banned from public libraries on the basis of “indecency” and “the absence of normality and health” because it contained an irreverent fictionalization of the annunciation story, in which angels are represented as homosexual figures, as well as a deviant depiction of a young soldier who fantasizes about the trappings of female artifice. See “Mary Butts’s ‘Fanatical Pédérastie,’” 236. For additional readings of the representation of male homosexuality in Butts’s work, see: Garrity, “Mary Butts’s ‘Fanatical Pédérastie.’”; Hainley, “Quite Contrary.”; Radford, “Mary Butts and the ‘Secret Map’”; Rives, “‘No Real Men,’”; and “A Straight Eye for the Queer Guy.”
8 While the primary geographical focus of the novel is London, there are several mentions of other locations such as Australia, China, Spain, and Argentina that in general rely upon imperialist tropes. In the beginning of the novel Agnes Helen talks about an obscure aunt who died and left her 150 pounds so she makes up her mind to go to Australia – but we never actually see her travel there. Instead, Australia is imagined as a barbarous colonial outpost where Agnes Helen’s brother Phil may one day be exiled because he is the “black sheep” (45) of the family. Margaret’s characterization of Australia relies upon classic racist iconography: “Sheep and opals, black men, droughts, bunyips, kangaroos hopping down the streets, hardly many people” (45). (A “bunyip” is a mythical amphibious figure that was originally a part of traditional Aboriginal storytelling but is clearly being used here in order to signal Australia’s lawless and terrifying landscape from an imperialist perspective.) Other references to foreign locales pop up at unexpected intervals, but never in any sustained way that makes larger narrative sense. For example, Agnes Helen briefly considers a possible ocean voyage to China that never materializes (45), and Phil makes reference to a “china man” with “heaps of wives” who is in search of one “little French rip” who fled to “somewhere in Moscow” in order to escape her “celestial lord” (189). We learn that Phil had been in Russia and then traveled inexplicably to South America – living “out in the Argentine raising horses for the government” (211). At the end of the novel characters speculate that Agnes Helen perhaps did not commit suicide but may have emigrated to “the Argentine” (268) – an exoticized space far from London that would be willing to harbor a woman like Agnes Helen who “specialized in trouble” (257). Cumulatively, these kinds of references function more as gratuitous asides than a genuine engagement with cultural and racial difference. At the same time, we do see in Butts evidence of the modernist perception that exposure to primitive culture can be liberating. Thus, when Agnes Helen returns to London after a two-month vacation in Spain she is even more “splendid” – with tanned skin, a “crimson” mouth, and “more power” (32) in her bearing. For a classic examination of Western views on the primitive, see Torgovnick, Gone Primitive.
9 I provide examples of what I mean by “masochistic colonial fantasies” in a later section, “Unearthing ‘secret impulses.’”
10 See for example: Hawkes, “Primitive Modern Practices of Place.”; Matless, A Geography of Ghosts.”; Radford, “Defending Nature's Holy Shrine”; Radford, “The Enchantment of Place”; Radford, “Excavating a Secret History”; Radford, “Mary Butts and the ‘Secret Map’ of Interwar Paris”; Radford, “Salvaging the Roots of Romanticism in Wordsworth, Hardy, and Mary Butts”; Wiseman, “Cosmopolitanism and Environmental Ethics in Mary Butts’s Dorset.”
11 See Ashberry, 8. One online blurb describes the 1924 Cedric Morris portrait that graces this cover of FMS thus: “Mary Butts was a notorious party-goer and drug user and this portrait records the ex-pat friendship circle of Paris.” There is no reference to Butts’s role as a writer. See https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/11147/1-mary-butts-2-nancy-morris-3-halcyon-4-collection-of-18-drawings. We know however that Butts did relish her showy Parisian party life. In a 1923 letter to English writer Douglas Goldring, Butts writes: “The last thing I remember was dancing solely supporting myself by the lobes of Cedric Morris’s ears.” See Blondel, The Journals, 202. As Blondel (like several other critics) acknowledges, the ongoing critical attention to Butts’s public persona has deflected attention away from the seriousness of her writing. See The Journals, 28–9.
12 Ashbery, “Preface,” 12.
13 West, “The Hummingbird of English Prose,” ii.
14 For references to monstrosity, see Butts, Unborn Gods, 114; 120 (hereafter cited in the body of the text). In “Olive Moore’s Headless Woman,” I discuss Rhys and Moore’s use of the rhetoric of female monstrosity and link it to Woolf’s invocation of the language of monstrosity in A Room of One’s Own to characterize female intellectual ambition; Jean Rhys, Good Morning Midnight (NY and London: Norton & Company, 1986); Olive Moore, Spleen (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996).
15 Interestingly, this reference to “monstrous defilement” is uttered by Margaret, who “turned sick and every clean instinct in her cried out” (122) when Mark recounts the details of Agnes Helen’s multiple affairs. This example illustrates that in Unborn Gods women too function as disciplinary agents of social control, marking the boundary between cleanliness and dirt in the domestic space. For an in-depth discussion of the dense web of relations between women and cultural purity, see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 207–231.
16 For an examination of the role of classical myth and mysticism in Butts’s work, see Foy. This remains the only monograph on Butts to date.
17 See for example Benjamin, The Bonds of Love; von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis; Laqueur, Making Sex; Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886-1930”.
18 I discuss these issues at length in “Mary Butt’s England,” 188–241.
19 Rainey, “Good Things,” 14. West, “The Hummingbird of English Prose,” ii.
20 For an overview of Butts’s life and work, see Blondel, Mary Butts.
21 Butts, “Sunday Afternoon,” unpublished poem, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Nathalie Blondel discusses this tumultuous period in Butts’s life in both her biography and in her introduction to The Journals. Bruce McPherson intends to publish a volume of Butts’s verse. First, however, he will publish Butts’s collected essays, followed by Unborn Gods, then Butts’s letters, and finally her poetry.
22 Butts, “Sapphics” (July 1911), unpublished poem, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Blondel briefly mentions “Sapphics” in Scenes from the Life, 21.
23 Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 19.
24 Butts, “To M. M. O” [Megan Myfanwy Owen] (1911), unpublished poem, Beinecke; and “Sunday Afternoon,” unpublished poem, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Blondel touches upon Butts’s erotic friendship with Megan Myfanwy Owen during her enrollment at Westfield College in London. See Scenes from the Life, 21; 24. There is however no index entry for either lesbianism, Sapphism, or female homoeroticism.
25 Blondel, The Journals, 54. Blondel discloses in her introduction that the selections comprise “about half the length of the original” journal and her primary concern has been to “provide a text that charts [Butts’s] development as a writer … Thus references to her fraught familial relationships have been omitted unless strictly relevant” (33). I refer below to some of the unpublished journal entries that highlight those fraught relationships.
26 Butts, journal entries for Oct. 7, 1916; Nov. 11, 1916; Nov. 1, 1916; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
27 Butts, journal entries for Oct. 17, 1916; Oct. 28, 1916; Oct. 30, 1916; Nov. 10, 1916; Nov. 15, 1916; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
28 Butts, journal entries for Oct. 7, 1916; Sept. 15, 1916; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
29 In Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, the contributors focus on the density of historical and cultural detail surrounding the rise of sexology in British culture from 1890 to 1940. Lucy Bland’s chapter, “Trial by Sexology?,” is particularly useful for thinking about Butts’s depiction of Eleanor as a sadist in her journal entries. Alison Moore discusses the role of the female sadist as the object of a pathologizing medical gaze, observing how late nineteenth century medical and sexological texts depicted the female sadist as degenerate because she rebelled against male dominance. See Moore, “Rethinking Gendered Perversion and Degeneration in Visions of Sadism and Masochism, 1886–1930,” 139; 145.
30 Alison Moore traces the dynamics of masochism from the “masochistically passive man and the sadistically predatory woman” (138) in late-nineteenth-century to the pervasiveness of female masochism in the 1920s, when it was made to account for a range of aberrant behaviors such as murder, being a career woman, and frigidity (140). She notes that at the fin de siècle female masochism tended to draw little attention compared to male masochism (147), which is one reason why Butts’s engagement with this particular type of amorous sensuality is so fascinating. Agnes Helen exhibits masochistic tendencies in Unborn Gods, such as the moment when she turns to Mark in bed and says “hurt me, hurt me” (36). Elsewhere it is Mark himself who embodies “abject submission” in relation to Agnes Helen: he “had in him all the elements of a masochist” (263). For Krafft-Ebing, Moore tells us, “the perversity of male masochism was in part determined by the sort of woman the masochist fantasy brought into being: sadistic, dominant, excessive, and nymphomaniacal” (146). These are all elements that both Mark and Gerald would concur are prime examples of Agnes Helen’s distinctly “perverted” (180) and degenerate sexuality. It is worth noting here that several other female modernists (such as H.D., Amy Lowell, and Renee Vivien) write about masochistic/sadomasochistic relationships. See for example Bradshaw; Laity Citation1990. For a discussion of how early twentieth-century writers engaged with sexually explicit discourses in their work, see Pease.
31 Butts, journal entries for Nov. 19, 1916; Sept. 25, 1916; Sept. 15, 1916; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
32 Butts, journal entries for Sept. 28, 1919; Jan. 3, 1917; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
33 Butts, journal entries for Nov. 30, 1916; Feb. 19, 1919; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
34 Butts, journal entries for 1 April 1918; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
35 Blondel, The Journals, 117.
36 Ibid., 93.
37 Butts, journal entries for Nov. 19, 1916; Sept. 28, 1919; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
38 Butts, journal entry for 3 January 1919; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
39 This is a core assumption of much feminist criticism that addresses 1920s lesbian novels by women. See note 4 above.
40 Blondel addresses Butts’s interest in magic, mysticism, and the fourth dimension. See Scenes from the Life, 38–9 and passim. Foy also discusses Butts’s introduction to the black magic of Aleister Crowley (“The Great Beast”) and his occult group in Cefalu, Italy, in the early 1920s. Although Butts eventually severed her relationship with Crowley, her interest in the occult and the supernatural remained a consistent interest throughout her life. See Foy, Ritual, Myth, and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts, 4, 97 and passim.
41 Blondel, The Journals, 86. Foy discusses Butts’s participation in a number of “bizarre, sometimes orgiastic rites” with Cecil Maitland under the guidance of Aleister Crowley (96–97). As Foy observes, in Butts’s fiction the desire to wield magical power generally comes from a female character who is at once woman and goddess (98).
42 Butts, journal entry for August, 24 1927; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. See also Blondel, The Journals, 261.
43 Butts, journal entry for Jan. 13, 1920; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
44 Butts, journal entry for Nov. 19, 1916; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
45 Blondel, The Journals, 248.
46 Butts, journal entry for August, 24 1927; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
47 Stopes, Enduring Passion, 41–3.
48 I provide a detailed reading of Imaginary Letters in “Mary Butts’s ‘Fanatical Pédérastie,’” 241–50.
49 Butts, journal entry for January 14, 1930; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
50 Butts, journal entry for December 9, 1934; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
51 Butts, journal entry for November 20, 1929; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
52 Butts, journal entry for December 6, 1929; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
53 Butts, journal entry for December 9, 1929, and May 25–26, 1928; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
54 Butts, journal entry for December 9, 1929, and May 25–26, 1928; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
55 Butts, journal entry for Jan. 12, 1917; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
56 Mary Butts, journal entry Jan. 22, 1930; at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
57 For a discussion of the association of women’s smoking with lesbians and women engaged in “lesbian-like practices,” see Tinkler, “Sapphic Smokers and English Modernities,” 75–90. It is worth noting that Agnes Helen smokes throughout the novel. The Egyptian cigarette industry was a major export from the 1880s until the end of the First World War. For a discussion of how cigarette manufacturers displayed pharaohs, sphinxes, and other Egyptian motifs in their advertising campaigns, see Brier, Egyptomania, 104.
58 Egypt was claimed as a British protectorate in 1882, during the Anglo-Egyptian war. This occupation did not end until 1952, although Egyptian independence was declared in February 1922. Nonetheless, “Britain’s informal empire” continued to dominate Egypt’s political and financial life through measures such as “tax-gathering efficiency and rigorous control of expenditure” from the 1890s onwards. See Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000, 338–9; also 312–17. Although the rise of mass Egyptomania did not fully materialize until the discovery of King Tutankamun’s tomb by English archaeologists in 1922, during the nineteenth century “Egyptomaniac delights” entertained the British public through displays at the Great Exhibition that took place at Hyde Court at the Crystal Palace in 1851. After the fair ended the displays were dismantled and moved to Sydenham (which was then located in Kent), where new exhibits such as “an Egyptian court graced by massive pharaonic statues” were added and entertained Londoners until a fire in 1936. See Fritze, Egyptomania, 14. For an examination of the ancient history of female homoerotic spells in Egypt, see Brooten, Love Between Women, 73–113.
59 For a discussion of the construction of sexual perversions in nineteenth and early-twentieth century medical, psychiatric, and psychological discourses, see Kahan and Schaffner.
60 For an examination of the links between Swinburne and female homoeroticism, see Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de siècle.
61 Dolores is the daughter of Libitina, an ancient Tuscan goddess of death, and Priapus, a Greek fertility deity who is the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite. The subtitle of Swinburne’s poem “Dolores” is “Notre-Dame des Sept Doleurs,” or “Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.” The Poem was originally published in the first volume of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866. The verse that Butts reproduces is:
62 Butts arguably refers here to the Leda and the Swan statue in the Palazzo Ducale Museum in Venice.
63 See Edwards, “Photographs as Objects of Memory,” 334–5. Edwards argues that the materiality of the photograph contains “resurrectional qualities” that enables the viewer to imbue the past with commemoration and remembrance. In Unborn Gods, it is precisely Cora’s embodied engagement with the sensual and material qualities of the photograph that is especially relevant here.
64 Agnes Helen observes that in her new teaching job in London there is “less prejudice” (30) than in Oxford, and this is consistent with what we know about the history of University College London. UCL was the first university to admit women on the same basis as men in 1878. Oxford and Cambridge did not allow any women to receive degrees by 1916 but University College London did (though women enrolled there were still barred from studying Engineering and Medicine). Margherita Rendel has poured through yearbooks and common room newsletters in an attempt to provide statistics of female academics during the First World War period. See Rendel, “How Many Women Academics 1912–1976?,” 142–61. See also Dyhouse for further discussion of female scholars during this period who were hired almost exclusively at single sex colleges and were most often found in departments of education where they were woefully underpaid and overworked. I am extremely grateful to retired Professor of History, Cynthia Curran, who provided me with this information.
65 Blair, “Local Modernity, Global Modernism,” 821–2. Historian Cynthia Curran observes that many of those who tutored in English literature lived in Bloomsbury near the university in the hopes of picking up paying students. Several of those tutors were likely female, because of the difficulty facing women who wanted to be full-time academics. Butts may well have imagined Agnes Helen as one of these Bloomsbury part-time tutors who were not employed by the Department of English but rather by individual students. (Personal email correspondence.)
66 Butts never conclusively names Agnes Helen’s perceived derangement, but cumulatively the various references to things like her “morbid symptom” (13), her “perverse penitence” (236), and her status as an “over-sexed” (173) “female little brute” (188) underscore the cultural perception that she is unhinged because she is “queer” and “over-educated” (173). For a discussion the psychotic woman as an object of fascination for modernist writers, see Coffman.
67 At one point as Agnes Helen travels from France to England via ocean liner, she imagines her return to London with “a depth of naïve patriotism and at the first sight of England she thrilled with a generous pride of race” (86). We know that there was an elision of racial and national categories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Britain, and here Agnes Helen’s nationalistic fervor can be read as an example of that convergence. There is one interesting moment in which Agnes Helen sits on the grass in Oxford and speaks to a beetle that crawls across her shoe as she contemplates her marginalization from academia: “Beetle, I’m like you. I’m black, and stiff, and awkward, and I’ve no shiny purple clothes. I’ve no money and no prospects of getting any” (20). While overtly Agnes Helen is referring to her black academic dress, on another level she is implicitly aligning herself with blackness in order to signal her cultural ostracism. Her assertion, “I am black,” both points to and conceals the violent history of racism in Britain. Notably, Agnes Helen is not an English rose but has “olive skin” (20), a small but important marker of her “otherness” in the novel.
68 St. Agnes was a virgin martyr of Rome who at thirteen refused marriage because she had dedicated her life to Christ and preferred death to any violation of her consecrated virginity.
69 Mark’s reference to Helen as “Egypt” is an allusion to the legend that Helen had actually been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt instead of Troy.
70 In general, the male characters’ denunciation of Agnes Helen’s “beastliness” (103) stems from their inability to control her sexuality (see also 118, 162, 178, 179). Mark at one point tells her that she has a “filthy mind” for imagining that he is having an affair with Margaret, and then refers to her as “hysterical” for confronting him about “playing around with that girl behind [her] back” (106) – which he is in fact doing. Gerald proposes to Agnes Helen so she can “live straight … no beastliness” (179), but he repeatedly equivocates and ultimately decides that they cannot marry because she is a “filthy little beast” (182). While Agnes Helen does try at intervals to accommodate herself to her male lovers’ demands – at one point she “elaborated undies for Gerald’s satisfaction” (192) – she ultimately elects to be alone rather than subordinate and humiliate herself further. As she asserts to Gerald when he confesses that he will not marry her: “I realise there are depths of bestiality to which I have not descended” (194–195). In a March 1919 journal entry, Butts writes about the shame of female submission: “As a female animal – social training of centuries … I submit to men. I try & please them … It shames me. It shames very many women (who sensually enjoy their irrational abasement). However free we think ourselves, we are caught that way each time.” See Blondel, The Journals, 117–8. Catherine Dollard discusses the degree to which sexological descriptions of female bestiality were based upon cultural assumptions that unwed and childless women were sexually abnormal. Lesbianism was viewed as the “precursor to … bestiality.” Dollard focuses upon Germany, but her analysis is applicable to our understanding of Butt’s use of the language of bestiality in relation to Agnes Helen. See Dollard, The Surplus Woman, 45–48; 59.
71 When Gerald refuses to marry Agnes Helen she imagines herself “in the role of Phyrne” (99), the name of a famous ancient Greek hetaira in the fourth century. The hetaira in ancient Greece occupied a privileged place among the men: they were allowed to discuss political and philosophical issues, be educated, and receive payment for their services, but they still occupied a lower place within the larger culture as a whole. This is one way to understand Agnes Helen’s self-description as a “triumphant courtesan” (89), for she is indeed an autonomous woman with sexual agency who is nonetheless culturally marginalized and economically impoverished because she is unmarried. For an analysis of the social and economic realities of the sex industry in Greco-Roman culture, see Glazebrook and Henry, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean.
72 When the two women first meet, Margaret is a philosophy student at University College in London. She is “half English and Half Greek, the child of two eccentric lovers of the theatre” who appeared to Agnes Helen as a “visionary butterfly” (40) – a classical symbol for the soul. Her full name is Margaret Clomarion Chester. Agnes Helen remarks that “Clomarion [is] a proper Greek girl’s name” (53), but this word has no meaning in Modern Greek and in Ancient Greek a “cloma” [κλωμα] is a heap of stones. However cumulatively the classical allusions point to Margaret’s transgression against gender boundaries. Blondel observes that this character was modeled on G. Margaret Boyd Schleselmann, the dedicatee and subject of a number of Butts’s early unpublished poems. See Journals, 143 n. 16.
73 Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 178.
74 Ibid., 23.
75 Harrison, The Religion of Ancient Greece, 54. I discuss Butts’s use of bee imagery in Armed with Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner in “Mary Butt’s England,” 224.
76 Margaret urges Agnes Helen to wear the bee hair ornament with her “gold frock” (54), further underscoring the image of her as a kind of illuminated goddess. There are additional references to gold in relation to Agnes Helen. She shops with Margaret on Oxford Street for undergarments and selects an expensive style that is “slit and threaded at the knee with gold” (53). Later we see Agnes Helen don “a cap of gold lace” (125) that had been a gift from Margaret. Such references signal Agnes Helen’s embodied radiance – Butts refers to “the gold all about her” (67) – but they simultaneously remind us that gold accessories and garments were linked to Britain’s economic interest in the Gold Coast in West Africa during this period even though Butts does not explicitly allude to this violent history. (The Gold Coast on the Gulf of Guinea was a British colony from 1867 until it gained its independence and became the nation of Ghana in 1957.)
77 Rives, “Problem Space,” 608. Rives also discusses the imperial associations of jade (615) in a different Butts context, but her observation invites us to consider how the jade gem that decorates the bee hair ornament in Unborn Gods is linked to the colonial history of pillage and looting.
78 Rose, “Bizarre Objects,” 82.
79 Mark refers to Margaret as “my golden boy” elsewhere in the text (see 148; 215; 248). She not only challenges gender and sexual boundaries, but subverts conventional expectations surrounding national behavior: Margaret seeks out a book by “some German archaeologist – in war time” (229) and “talks of these German devils as her brother” (224) – moves that scandalize both Mark and Agnes Helen. Margaret in turn is horrified by all of the patriotic propaganda that surrounds her – “precious little but flag-waving” (206).
80 Clio is the name of the ancient Greek mythological muse of history and heroic poetry. In Unborn Gods she offers Margaret a gynophilic escape (226) from Mark’s oppressive presence. He refers to her as “Clio the Absolute” (251) because of her interference. Mark is incensed that Margaret chooses to be with Clio instead of remaining in London with him for the birth and he laments the fact that even the “very doctor’s a woman” (251). Mark is an interesting lower-class character who lives an impoverished life in Hackney and has a minor lectureship at London University when the novel opens. Ultimately he is a foil who highlights the women’s intimacy and agency. Although seemingly progressive on class issues, he holds conventional views of gender; he likes women to be “clean” (36, 98) and “preferred the evolutionary progress to be taken at a decent Darwinian pace” (223) – meaning he opposes the speed with which women like his lovers Agnes Helen and Margaret are gaining autonomy within modernity. Mark’s reference to Darwin and his desire that women remain “static” is consistent with popular constructions of women’s evolutionary nature as primitive, uncivilized, and atavistic during this period. See e.g. Freud, who argues in Civilization and its Discontents (1930) that women are incommensurable with culture: “Women soon come into opposition to civilization and display their retarding and restraining influence … The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men” (50–51).
81 Butts herself abandoned her only child, Camilla (born on November 7, 1920), shortly after she was born and fled to Paris with Cecil Maitland while she was still married to John Rodker. Camilla was raised primarily by her great-aunt Ada. See Foy, Ritual, Myth, and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts, 4.
82 “Heliotrope” was an acutal perfume brand that was developed by Guerlain in the 1870s.
83 Bryher, 8. Butts herself, in a 1929 journal entry, writes: “I need … something for which I have yet to find the words--& this because no one yet has found the words, the names for certain new relations between things.” See Blondel, The Journals, 332.
84 Butts regards mana as a kind of primitive spiritual essence that appears to be transcultural, transhistorical, and translinguistic but is ultimately linked to Englishness and ideas of cultural and racial purity. See “Mary Butt’s England,” 203–6; 214; 228–9; 232. Rose similarly observes that Butts links her “mana-objects” to “the destiny of England” (84).
85 I discuss the racialized implications of mana in “Mary Butt’s England,” 204–7. Butts, in her preface to The Macedonian, defines mana as “the sheer force that lies behind the manifestations of life.” See Hoberman, Gendering Classicism, 141. In Unborn Gods, mana is linked to “the dual sexuality of the Great Gods” (54) and radiates from both Agnes Helen and Margaret in ways that exceed rational understanding. Butts herself concedes the difficulty of conveying her ideas: “as our language was not invented to express these experiences, words will have to be found.” See Blondel, The Journals, 332.