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Our Mothers’ gardens: Mother-daughter relationships and myth in twentieth century British women’s literature

Tyler, Lisa Lynne, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1991

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Aibor, MI 48106

OUR MOTHERS' GARDENS:

MOTHER-DAUGHTER RELATIONSHIPS AND MYTH

IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITISH WOMEN'S LITERATURE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Lisa Lynne Tyler, B.A., M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1991

Dissertation Committee: Approved by:

Katherine H. Burkman

Barbara Rigney Adviser Les Tannenbaum Department of English To Marian Sautter Beery

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Dr. Katherine H. Burkman for her guidance and encouragement. I also wish to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Les Tannenbaum and Dr. Barbara Rigney, for their suggestions and comments. I am indebted to my mother, Marian Sautter Beery, and my sister, Laura Beery, for my interest in this subject; they have shown me how strong the ties between women can be. And I am especially thankful for the support and assistance of my husband (and first reader), Jim, who gave me courage.

iii VITA

January 5/ 1964 ...... Born in Dayton, Ohio

1985 ...... B.A., University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

1985-1988 ...... Editor, University Communications, University of Dayton Dayton, Ohio

1987 ...... M.A., University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio

1988 ...... Writer/Events Specialist, Ohio Public Images, Inc., Dayton, Ohio

1990-Present ...... Part-time Instructor Sinclair Community College, Dayton, Ohio

1990-Present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

Twentieth-Century British and American Literature

Minor Fields: Nineteenth-Century British Literature Composition and Business Communication

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication...... 11

Acknowledgements...... Ill

V i t a ...... Iv

Introduction Unpercelved Patterns ...... 1

Chapter I Mary and Motherhood In Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden .... 24

Chapter II "The Child's a Flower": Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden ...... 53

Chapter III Mothers and Men In Three Short Stories by Doris Lessing ...... 82

Chapter IV The Loss of Roses: Mother-Daughter Myth and Mrs. Dalloway ...... 128

Conclusion The Remythologlzlng Impulse ...... 166

Works C i t e d ...... 176 Introduction

Unperceived Patterns

The ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone (or

alternately, Kore, which means maiden) accounts for the

changing seasons, establishes a basis for the celebration

of annual rites known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, and

celebrates the mother-daughter relationship. The Homeric

Hymn to Demeter, the oldest known version of the myth,

dates back to the seventh or sixth century before Christ

(Richardson 6, 10). The Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret

rites performed each year in honor of Demeter, are much

older, dating back to perhaps as early as the second half

of the fifteenth century before Christ (Mylonas 14). As

George E. Mylonas writes in Eleusis and the Eleusinian

Mysteries,

Let us recall again that the rites of Eleusis were

held for some two thousand years; that for two

thousand years civilized humanity was sustained

and ennobled by those rites. Then we shall be

able to appreciate the meaning and importance of

Eleusis and of the cult of Demeter in the

pre-Christian era. (285)

1 2

Several twentieth-century British women writers have

adopted and adapted this ancient Greek myth of Demeter and

Persephone to articulate the relationship a daughter can have with her mother. In writing of mother-daughter

relationships, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Virginia Woolf,

Enid Bagnold, and Doris Lessing use garden imagery and the

seasonal cycle to link their stories to archetypal mythologies of women's experience.^ The works echo the

dominant themes of the myth, and several focus on a

daughter's literal return to a literal mother, as does the

Homeric Hymn.

The hymn begins with a depiction of the idyllic meadow

of flowers in which the Kore, or young maiden, and her

friends are at play. Attracted by a "wondrous and radiant"

narcissus (1. 10), she "reached out with both hands at

once" to pluck it (11. 15-16). Immediately, the earth

opens up:

[A]nd then over the Nysian field the lord and

All-receiver,

the many-named son of Kronos, sprang out upon her

with his immortal horses.

Against her will he seized her and on his golden

chariot

carried her away .... (11. 17-20)

Her cries for help are heard by both Hekate, a goddess

associated with the moon and the underworld, and 3

Hyperionides, god of the sun. Demeter, Persephone's mother, begins a search for her daughter but is unable to find anyone who can tell her what happened. For nine days, she fasts and abstains from bathing (11. 49-50), and finally, on the tenth day, Hekate comes and tells her that her daughter was abducted.

Both Hekate and Demeter together appeal to Helios, who explains that Zeus "gave [Persephone] to Hades" (1. 79).

Demeter, grief-stricken by her loss, withdraws from the gods and from Olympus and wanders the earth. No longer recognizable as a goddess, she pauses for rest in Eleusis, at the town well. When four young women ask her about herself, she responds with an apparent fiction that stresses her similarity to her daughter:

And now from Crete on the broad back of the sea

I came unwillingly; marauding men by brute force

carried me off against my will . . .

I eluded them and, rushing through the black land,

I fled my reckless masters, so that they might not

en j oy

the benefit of my price, since, like thieves, they

carried me across the sea.

(11. 123-25, 130-32)

The young women arrange for her to nurse their late-born infant brother and bring her to their house, where she has a momentary epiphany. Stricken afresh with grief, she sits 4

"speechless and brooding" (1. 198) and refuses to eat or drink until the jokes of an old woman named lambe (a name which in Greek suggests bawdiness and obscene jokes) provoke her to laughter.

The goddess secretly tries to make her charge,

Demophoon, immortal by placing him in the fire but is discovered in the attempt by Metaneira. The frightened mother understandably fails to comprehend what is going on, and her emotional reaction both ruins the spell and compels

Demeter to reveal her divine identity. She commands the people of Eleusis to build her a temple and an altar and promises to "introduce rites so that later/ you may propitiate my mind by their right performance" (11.

273-74).

Demeter, still grieving, creates a famine on earth by refusing to let seeds sprout or plants grow. A perturbed

Zeus sends first Iris and then each of the immortals in turn to convince Demeter to come back to Olympus, but she

"stubbornly spurned their offers" (1. 330):

She said she would never set foot on fragrant Olympos

and never allow the grain in the earth to sprout forth

before seeing with her eyes her fair-faced daughter.

(11. 331-33)

Zeus then sends Hermes to Hades to persuade him to bring

Persephone up from the underworld. Hades agrees— but gives

Persephone a pomegranate seed to eat "so that she might not 5 spend/ all her days again with dark-robed, revered Demeter"

(11. 373-74). Mother and daughter are reunited. But

Demeter, suspicious, asks her daughter whether she ate in the underworld; if not, Persephone will be able to stay with her mother.

Otherwise, you shall fly and go to the depths of

the earth

to dwell there a third of the seasons in the year

spending two seasons with me and the other

immortals.

Whenever the earth blooms with every kind of

sweet-smelling

springflower, you shall come up again from misty

darkness . . .

(11. 398-402)

Persephone tells her mother of the pomegranate seed:

"Against my will and by force he made me taste of it" (1.

413). She then retells the narrative of her abduction from her point of view; like the poet's original version, this retelling again emphasizes the floral imagery (11. 425-28).

Demeter restores fruitfulness to the planet: "The whole earth teemed with leaves and flowers" (1. 473), and she and her daughter return to Olympus together.

The myth works on several levels; for example. Demeter is undeniably a Corn Goddess, and her daughter's descent into the underworld has been associated with such prosaic 6 agricultural events as the planting of the seeds underground and the storage of reaped grain in an underground granary (Brumfield 230). C. Kerenyi, who has written extensively on the myth, is skeptical of this interpretation :

Is Demeter's motherhood to be understood

metaphorically? Was not the goddess, before she

became completely anthropomorphic, a "Corn

Mother," the ripe corn being taken as a maternal

entity? And consequently, is not her daughter

only apparently a maiden, but in reality a kind of

plant? (Kerenyi "Kore" 116)

True, both goddesses are in some sense vegetation goddesses, and the Eleusinian mysteries apparently included the showing of an ear of corn or wheat to the participants

(Kerenyi "Kore" 115). But as Kerenyi later explains;

The two great goddesses . . . are not diminished

in their aspect as grain; on the contrary, they

become greater, more comprehensive, more cosmic. .

. . The only thing that is impossible is to reduce

the whole mythologem of mother and daughter, and

the innumerable associations that unfold in it

like a bud, merely to the fate of the grain and to

understand it purely allegorically. ("Kore" 118)

Most critics have seen a great deal more in this story than a simple allegory of the planting of the seeds in the 7 underworld of the earth and their rebirth as sprouts in the spring.

Virtually all versions of the myth stress the similarities between Demeter and her daughter. Kerenyi, for example, notes that ancient monuments depict both women carrying torches— usually associated with Demeter's fruitless search for Persephone (Kerenyi "Kore" 111). In some versions of the story. Demeter, too, is raped: "In the legend that has come down to us, it is said that she was overpowered by Poseidon while she was looking for her ravished daughter. This mythological elaboration doubles the rape . . . ("Kore" 123, Eleusis 31). Even in the myth as presented in the hymn. Demeter presents herself as the victim of an abduction by "marauding men" (11. 123ff.).

Several scholars note that the goddesses resemble each other in artistic depictions, in which they frequently appear together as "a pair of mature women often hardly distinguishable in age, or even identical ..." (Zuntz

78). Jane Harrison perhaps overstates the case when she writes,

[I]t is important to note that primarily the two

forms of the Earth or Corn-goddess are not Mother

and Daughter, but Mother and Maiden, Demeter and

Kore. They are, in fact, merely the older and

younger form of the same person; hence their easy

confusion. (274) 8

Complicating matters still further, Kerenyi argues that

Rhea, too, was raped, and thus serves as a double for both

Demeter and Persephone (44, 132), and both N. J. Richardson and Kerenyi point out that Hekate can be regarded as a double for both mother and daughter (Richardson 156, 295;

Kerenyi "Kore" 110-114). In "The Psychological Aspects of the Kore," C. G. Jung argues that these women share an essential unity:

We could therefore say that every mother contains

her daughter in herself and every daughter her

mother, and that every woman extends backwards

into her mother and forwards into her daughter. .

. . The conscious experience of these ties

produces the feeling that her life is spread out

over generations— the first step towards the

immediate experience and conviction of being

outside time, which brings with it a feeling of

immortality. The individual's life is elevated

into a type; indeed, it becomes the archetype of

woman's fate in general. (162)

In her book Reproduction of Mothering, psychologist Nancy

Chodorow suggests that this sense of repetition and continuity— particularly generational continuity— characterizes even modern-day mother-daughter relationships

(175). Such repetition has become more problematic in recent years, however, as feminism has sometimes 9 inadvertently led women to devalue the mother's role in society; "The mother stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr" (Rich Of Woman Born 236).

This difficulty of identifying with the mother while at the same time distinguishing oneself from her creates conflict in the works of both Lessing and Woolf, for example.^

The mother-daughter hostility that Freud identified all too often characterizes such fractious relationships.

Such hostility is notably absent from the Homeric Hymn.

Psychoanalytic critics note, however, that it sharply contrasts the Edenic preoedipal world shared by mother and daughter with the violence of male intrusion and destruction. The resolution of the myth is intriguing, perhaps even disturbing, in that it lacks resolution;

Persephone is doomed to oscillate between the two worlds.

The reunion of mother and daughter does suggest, however, the ongoing importance of this relationship even to adult women.

The myth thus implicitly identifies three passages in mother-daughter relationships— symbiosis, separation/hostility, and reunion/rapprochement— where

Freud outlined only two: the initial preoedipal symbiosis, and the later hostility and estrangement that occur when the daughter discovers that both she and her mother are

"castrated" and therefore lesser human beings. Freud then theorizes three options for the adult woman: 1) She 10 becomes "feminine" and transforms her wish for a penis into a wish for a child; 2) She becomes "masculine" and perhaps lesbian; or 3) She withdraws and renounces adult sexuality altogether (229-30). In none of these scenarios does he outline what the adult woman's relationship to her mother can or should be. Presumably the assumption is that when the woman becomes feminine, she transfers her allegiance wholeheartedly to her husband, and more or less severs her relationship with her mother. The "masculine" woman and the withdrawn woman presumably never emerge from the hostility stage. Freud briefly mentions but specifically declines to discuss the pattern of oscillation, which he attributes to the same cause identified here; the daughter's dissatisfaction with her relationship with a man

(specifically, in Freud's article, her father) prompts her to return to her mother (241).

Psychoanalytic interpretations of the myth suggest a more complex, more highly developed view of the possibilities for women's relationships with their mothers.

For example, feminist psychoanalytic critic Marilyn Arthur, in "Politics and Pomegranates: An Interpretation of the

Homeric Hymn to Demeter," argues that the myth centers on

"the achievement of a successful identification with the mother," which works in the myth as a "form of female solidarity . . . whose basis is the special and particular comfort, affection, and general gratification which women 11 are able to offer one another" (31). She emphasizes that this mother-daughter bond, which is central to the myth, is

"a female solidarity which is discovered in the context of a patriarchal world" (30).

Certainly men seem peripheral to this story: "the man is an indispensable but on the whole disturbing factor"

(177). As Arthur observes, the "male figures of this world are shadowy, half-drawn characters, in contrast to the more pictorially complete personalities of the female realm"

(12). Hades becomes the catalyst who launches the action— but seems irrelevant to the action itself, and

Zeus, who apparently has given Hades permission, seems even further removed from what goes on. Although Zeus sends messengers four times, the poet never reports the god's speech directly (Richardson 262); his silence merely accentuates his remoteness.

The relative irrelevance of male characters highlights what Adrienne Rich has called the "mother-daughter passion and rapture" of the hymn (237). At least in part the breach in the hymn between mother and daughter suggests a division between two not-quite-reconcilable worlds— one of female community and another of heterosexuality. This psychological segregation of the sexes can be difficult to overcome, as Susan Gubar notes in an article entitled

"Mother, Maiden and the Marriage of Death: Women Writers and an Ancient Myth." She maintains that, for the 12 nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers she discusses, the myth "articulates the pain of growing up female in a male-dominated world" in which "female sexual initiation involves a terrifying separation from the female community and grotesque submission to male force" (305).

The myth celebrates a mother-daughter closeness that excludes and thus perhaps threatens men, who in turn intrude to break that bond with a violence that the daughters experience as rape. The author of the hymn mutes the presentation of the rape itself, focusing instead on the abduction. The rape is indicated symbolically, through the opening of the earth, which presumably suggests the opening of Persephone's vagina, and the pomegranate, which symbolizes blood, death, fertility, and marriage

(Richardson 276, Arthur 29). Most critics interpret

Persephone's ingestion of the seed as her sexual initiation.

How willing is Persephone to undergo this initiation?

Richardson, for one, suggests that she "protests too much" when she insists to her mother that Hades forced her to eat the pomegranate seed; in the text of the hymn itself,

Richardson notes, "no mention of compulsion is made" (287).

Adrienne Rich (of all people) emphasizes that the daughter and mother are separated involuntarily: ". . . it is neither a question of the daughter's rebellion against the mother, nor the mother's rejection of the daughter" (Of 13

Woman Born 240). This reading would seem to invalidate the application of the myth to more modern works, in which the mother-daughter separation is often apparently voluntary.

But given Rich's own explication in "Compulsory

Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" of the relative lack of choice for women, the daughter's decision to marry and leave her mother may not be as voluntary as it initially seems. Certainly for the Greeks of that period, marriage sometimes amounted to little more than a kidnapping; the woman's consent (or, perhaps more likely, lack thereof) was irrelevant (Brumfield 129, 226). If like Josephine Donovan we equate Persephone's abduction with patriarchal captivity, can any woman be said to have a choice about her descent into the underworld?

Ultimately, in the myth, Persephone's newly awakened heterosexuality ties her to Hades and prevents her from ever completely leaving the underworld (Brumfield 227):

"Even in their reunion there is still a portion of bitterness .... The mother never quite succeeds in getting her daughter back again" (Kerenyi "Kore" 113-14).

The lack of resolution in the myth is disturbing; it rather daringly implies that, even for heterosexual women (or at least some heterosexual women), a sexual relationship with a man is not enough. Persephone perpetually oscillates:

"Her allegiance is split between mother and husband, her posture is dual" (Hirsch 35). But this dual allegiance is 14 characteristic for women; even heterosexual women rely on other women, rather than their husbands or lovers, for emotional support: "... [W]omen situate themselves psychologically as part of a relational triangle in which their father and men are emotionally secondary or, at most, equal to their mother and women" (Chodorow 199).^ Given that women are primarily responsible for child care, such a pattern becomes inherently normal and even life-affirming:

". . . the life cycle itself arises from alternation between the world of women and that of men" (Gilligan 23).

This pattern of alternation occurs in several of the works involved in this study. Bagnold, Lessing, and Woolf share a sense of the inadequacy of heterosexual relationships for women and somewhat subversively argue for the emotional primacy of women's relationships with other women, particularly their mothers or other maternal figures.4

Women have few models for how to achieve a healthy relationship with their mothers. As Luce Irigaray writes in This Sex Which Is Not One,

The disappearance of the family will not prevent

women from giving birth to women. But there is no

possibility whatsoever, within the current logic

of sociocultural operations, for a daughter to

situate herself with respect to her mother:

because, strictly speaking, they make neither one

nor two, neither has a name, meaning, sex of her 15

own, neither can be "identified" with respect to

the other. A problem that Freud dismisses

"serenely" by saying that the daughter has to turn

away from her mother, has to "hate" her, in order

to enter into the Oedipus complex. Doesn't that

mean that it is impossible— within our current

value system— for a girl to achieve a

satisfactory relation to the woman who has given

her birth? . . . How can the relation between

these two women be articulated? (143)

Burnett, Bagnold, Lessing, and Woolf contest that implicit view by suggesting, first, that mother-daughter relationships do not end with marriage (or a heterosexual relationship), and second, that they do not end in mutual hostility and estrangement. In these works, the mother-daughter relationship is extraordinarily powerful for women and remains powerful for women long after the daughter reaches adolescence. These writers suggest, too, that heterosexual relationships fail many women, that women, unlike men, do not find in heterosexual relationships the emotional closeness and support they need, and that therefore women often turn (or return) to each other for emotional support. Unfortunately, women cannot always offer each other the support they need, either; mothers and daughters sometimes prefer men to each other, for sexual, social, pragmatic, economic, or personal 16 reasons. As Gubar explains, "the grievous separation of mother and maiden implies that in a patriarchal society women are divided from each other and from themselves"

(305).

All four of these authors further posit a relationship between mothers (or other maternal figures, metaphorical mothers) and daughters that allows for both separation (in the Freudian sense) and the continuity, repetition, and healthy identification of the myth. Certainly there are varying degrees of comfort with motherhood in these works— Virginia Woolf is much more ambivalent about mother-daughter relationships than, say, Enid Bagnold, for example— but all stress what Marilyn Arthur has already identified as the theme of the Demeter-Kore myth: "the achievement of a successful identification with the mother"

(31).

This study is significant for several reasons. First of all, it suggests a feminist revision of the Freudian version of women's development— a revision which implicitly calls for women to find solidarity with each other. The study explores literary mother-daughter relationships, which have received considerably less attention than father-son, mother-son, and even father-daughter relationships. It examines the use of myth in women's writings, an area which deserves much more attention than it has thus far received, and it helps to fill a perceived 17 gap in mythography: ". . . w e lack studies of female mythic models that trace the models in modern literature the way male heroes and gods have been traced ..." (Doty

183).

Each chapter examines the ways in which the myth informs and structures the work of a different author. The works are examined in order of ascending sophistication and complexity. The first chapter focuses on Frances Hodgson

Burnett's children's classic. The Secret Garden, in which a young girl achieves an identification with the mother that is both appropriate (given the society in which she lives) and chilling (in the sacrifice of self that it entails).

The second chapter examines Enid Bagnold's The Chalk

Garden, in which three generations of women come to terms with each other with the help of a Hekate-like governess; the garden of the title achieves allegorical significance, for neither a child nor a plant could thrive in the barren, chalky soil of the grandmother's garden.

Three of Doris Lessing's short stories are discussed in the third chapter. In "The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange,"

Lessing depicts a failed Demeter figure who abandons her

Persephone to a violent heterosexual relationship. In

"Flavours of Exile," she depicts a less overtly troubled mother-daughter relationship but nonetheless uses the

Demeter-Kore myth as a basis for an exploration of an adolescent girl's first forays away from her mother into 18 the simultaneously tempting and frightening world of adult heterosexuality. And in "Among the Roses," a mother and daughter reunite in the midst of the rose gardens of

Regents' Park.

Finally, the fourth chapter focuses on Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, in which a daughter departs with her

"seducer," to her mother's grief, but ultimately returns to her mother at the end of the novel; Clarissa^ too, is a daughter long exiled from a world of female community personified by Sally Seton.

These works were chosen for several reasons. They represent a range of genres: children's fiction, drama, short stories, and the novel. The study was limited to twentieth-century British literature for practical reasons; it was limited to women's writing because I was specifically interested in the ways in which women used myth— especially since the Demeter-Persephone myth in particular offered women writers a way to write positively about the mother-daughter relationship.

All of these works include most, if not all, of the motifs essential to the interpretation of the myth outlined here. In each, an abrupt and violent break in a literal or figurative mother-daughter relationship results in a death-like experience for the younger woman; the break is often caused by a male intrusion into the relationship, an intrusion the daughter experiences as a rape. In each 19 work/ a mother-daughter reconciliation is possible, if not always achieved. And either gardens or floral imagery play a dominant role in each. (Indeed, two of the works have the word "garden" in the title, and another title mentions

"roses.")

All four authors were assuredly familiar with the myth, despite their relatively unorthodox educations. Burnett carried Lempriere's Classical Dictionary around as a child and was writing poetry about the gods at age 12 (Thwaite

20-21). Bagnold was taught Greek as a child, although she claimed in her autobiography that "It didn't work" (49).

Lessing's "extensive use of the symbols of traditional myth" is most evident in her novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell, in which the protagonist is a classics professor

(Singleton 69). Virginia Woolf learned to read Greek so that she, like her male counterparts, could read the classics untranslated (Herman 260).

Whether these authors consciously chose to use the myth is, however, perhaps irrelevant. Jung and other myth critics might of course suggest that mythic concepts and structures lie imbedded in our psyches as part of a collective unconscious, that they are part of our inheritance as human beings. As Norman Holland observes, however :

. . .[T]hat is not the only possible explanation,

and others do not require the troublesome 20

assumption that our RNA and DNA, already so

fraught with information, must carry Grimm's fairy

tales as well.

The most obvious alternative is to say not that

literature comes from myth, but that myth and

literature alike stem from common psychological

drives, universal because they are intrinsic to

all human development. (244)

Holland's approach is both less mystical and easier to accept. It also makes the application of myth to literature a useful endeavor that involves more than simply puzzling out authorial intentions.®

In writing of the use of the Demeter myth in Virginia

Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, Joseph L. Blotner suggests

(and his suggestion applies to the other works involved in this study, as well) that "myth may be brought to the work at its reading. It is like laying a colored transparency over a sheet covered with a maze of hues to reveal the orderly pattern which resides within them unperceived"

(241). It is those unperceived patterns which this study attempts to articulate. 21

Notes to Introduction

^Madelon Sprengnether discusses women's use of garden imagery as an element in a distinctive pattern women writers use in revising the Fall. Ironically, many of the elements she identifies as associated with these revisions suggest Greek myth rather than Judeo-Christian religion.

For example, "a garden setting," "a focus on the mother-daughter relationship and the process of separation and loss; an adolescent crisis involving a confrontation with death," and even the eating of fruit (298, 300) are all elements of the Demeter-Persephone myth, as is the triple goddess imagery she identifies in one of the novels she analyzes (312). In fact, the heroine of the first novel she interprets undergoes an attempted rape. It is perhaps more useful to see in such works a conflation of associations, a complex interweaving of mythical and

Biblical allusions. p A recent work of humor suggests the pervasiveness of this problem; the book is titled How Not To Turn Into Your

Mother; Simple Solutions to the Thorny Problem That Has

Kept Psychiatrists Busy for Almost a Century.

O A man is able to replicate the emotional and physical union of the mother-child bond in heterosexual relationships, while a woman is not, Chodorow explains. 22 because "heterosexual relationships are on the model of a nonexclusive, second relationship for her, whereas for the boy they recreate an exclusive, primary relationship"

(198-99).

heterosexual economy makes mother-daughter relationships socially and politically "safer" than relationships to women one's own age:

Lesbian relationships do tend to recreate mother-

daughter emotions and connections, but most women

are heterosexual. This heterosexual preference

and taboos against homosexuality, in addition to

objective economic dependence on men, make the

. option of primary sexual bonds with other women

unlikely— though more prevalent in recent years.

(Chodorow 200)

^Many works— including Marsha Norman's 'night. Mother,

Doris Lessing's The Diaries of Jane Somers, and Toni

Morrison's Beloved— invoke the myth but do not use the garden trope and were therefore excluded from this study; also inappropriate for this study were the countless other works which focused on the mother-daughter relationship but did not invoke the myth, including Marilyn French's Her

Mother's Daughter, Tillie Olsen's "I Stand Here Ironing," and Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter.

®For that reason, among others, I have rejected the approach taken by Eric Gould in his Mythical Intentions in 23

Modem Literature; his argument that myth is essentially about language and its limitations applies spectacularly well to the three authors he discusses— James Joyce, D.H.

Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot— but falls flat when applied to less self-consciously literary works. Instead, in this study, I am tracing the way in which myth serves as a rhetorical device or "prefigurative technique" (White

11- 12). Chapter I

Mary and Motherhood

in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett's children's classic The Secret

Garden— "justifiably regarded as her masterpiece for children" (Bixler i)— follows the tradition of the Gothic romance. It parallels Jane Eyre very closely, as many critics have noted:

Briefly, both books depict an ill-tempered orphan

who lives with a family whose children taunt her

and then moves to a mansion in the Yorkshire

moors. Both orphans encounter secret residents

who function in some ways as their doubles— Mary

finds her hypochondriacal self in Colin . . . and

just before her marriage to Rochester, Jane Eyre

discovers his imprisoned, mad wife, a mirror

image of the angry, rebellious self Jane herself

has been trying to restrain. Finally, a mystical

call from a distant place helps effect the happy

reunion concluding each book— on the Continent,

Colin's father hears his dead wife call him back

to the garden much as Jane hears Rochester's call

24 25

across the moors as she contemplates marriage to

another. (Bixler 100)

But these are not the only similarities. Mary, like

Jane, repeatedly hears mysterious sounds— "a cry in the corridor"— that the servants insist she must have imagined

(54, 62).1 Mrs. Loomis, the cook, pronounces

Misselthwaite Manor "a house of mystery" (256); certainly it is, as Mrs. Medlock says, "a grand big place in a gloomy way" (22). Like Jane, Mary receives dire warnings not to explore: "... You'll be told what rooms you can go into and what rooms you're to keep out of. There's gardens enough. But when you're in the house don't go wandering and poking about. Mr. Craven won't have it" (24). And

Burnett's use of Yorkshire dialect recalls the Gothic novels of both Charlotte and Emily Bronte. For it is not merely Charlotte Bronte from whom Burnett borrows, as her repeated allusions to the "wuthering" wind indicate (52-53,

122-23, 125). Burnett also adopts for her childhood pair the male-female doubling of Heathcliff and Cathy in

Wuthering Heights. Such pairings are extremely rare in literature; same-sex doubles are much more common in fiction by both men and women. Humphrey Carpenter suggests that "the country lad Dickon, who becomes Mary's friend and helper, is a kind of Heathcliff-gone-right" (189). Burnett may also be adopting Bronte's concept of woman as a civilizing influence; just as the motherless (and 26 ultimately orphaned) Catherine Linton tries to civilize both the pampered, sickly Linton Heathcliff and the brutish

Hareton Earnshaw, orphaned Mary Lennox tries to civilize the pampered, sickly Colin Craven. Elaine Showalter notes the similarity, stating, "It is a commonplace in feminine fiction for the sensitive man to be represented as maimed;

Linton Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights . . . and even such late versions as Colin Craven in Frances Hodgson Burnett's

The Secret Garden all suggest that men condemned to lifelong feminine roles display the personality traits of frustrated women" (A Literature 127).

Showalter further suggests that the enclosed and secret garden, like the enclosed and secret room of Jane Eyre,

"came to stand for a separate world, a flight from men and from adult sexuality" (A Literature 33). Similarly,

Stephen D. Roxburgh sees the secret garden "as analogous to the virginity motif that pervades romance" (124).

Certainly Mary's very name links her to the Christian tradition associating the Virgin Mother with the hortus conclusus, the garden enclosed (Verduin 65). Roxburgh elaborates:

. . . Mary's insistence that the garden remain

secret, her dread that Colin will have the

servants open it up, that it will be trampled,

violated, implies an analogous identification of

the "secret garden" with Mary's emerging self- 27

awareness, her embryonic selfhood. Viewed in

this way, Mary's story is a quest for identity,

actually it is the growth of an identity, and,

thus, it partakes of the central concerns of the

romance tradition. (124)

Contrary to Roxburgh's assertion, however, the garden seems ultimately to be associated with maternity rather than virginity— the Virgin Mother, after all, combines the two. Alison Lurie describes the novel's central image as

"latently sexual, though Mrs. Burnett may not have been aware of this: a walled rose-garden in which a girl and a boy, working together, make things grow" (qtd. in Gohlke

899n4). Roxburgh's final distinction is important: This story is not informed by the (traditionally masculine) myth of the quest, but by the (traditionally feminine) mother-daughter myth of Demeter and Perspehone, the myth of the return to— and successful identification with— the mother.^

Claire Kahane's essay entitled "The Gothic Mirror," in which she establishes a theory of the Gothic, brilliantly explicates what is at work in this children's classic that has been described as "a minor gothic masterpiece" (Marquis

164) :

What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden

center of the Gothic which draws me inward is the

spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic

and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the 28

problematics of feminity which the heroine must

confront. (336)

According to Kahane, "The heroine's active exploration of the Gothic house"— or in this case, Mary's exploration of the secret garden— "is also an exploration of her relation to the maternal body that she shares, with all its connotations of power over and vulnerability to forces within and without" (330). For Kahane, then, the heroine

is confronting adult female sexuality and presumably coming to terms with it, not trying to flee or escape. On the contrary, this acquiescence is what the gothic is all about; "Ultimately, . . . in this essentially conservative genre— and for me this is the real Gothic horror— the heroine is compelled to resume a quiescent, socially acceptable role or to be destroyed" (342).

Mary's alternatives are not quite so bleak; the novel poses no threat of destruction. She can remain

"contrary"— and hence, unlikable and isolated— or accept her gender role— and consequent integration into the community: "Mary's entry into community as a fully

integrated social being means that she must accept the only role that this community will allow her— motherhood"

(Marquis 184). She is a Persephone figure who in order to return to life must learn to identify with Demeter.

The novel opens with Mary Lennox's entry into the underworld one "frightfully hot morning" in India (10). 29

Like Persephone, she is playing among the flowers when everything begins to change; "She pretended that she was making a flower-bed, and she stuck big scarlet hibiscus blossoms into little heaps of earth" (10-11). She hears

"wailing" and "mysterious and frightening sounds"; she is surrounded by "appalling things," "mysteriousness,"

"panic," "confusion," "bewilderment"— and, of course, death

(11-12). A cholera epidemic takes the lives of everyone in the household except Mary; she is abandoned. As she waits, however, she spots "a little snake gliding along and watching her with eyes like jewels" and speculates that she and the snake are alone in the bungalow, the only creatures left alive. From this hellish kingdom of the dead, Mary must first cross a river Styx before she can return to the land of the living: "Mary felt . . . that the wide, bleak moor was a wide expanse of black ocean through which she was passing on a strip of dry land" (28). The tree-lined avenue to the manor gives her the impression she and the servants are "driving through a long dark vault" (28).

Thus she returns to her motherland, which much like the earth Persephone returns to, has been devastated by grief.

Certainly the Craven household has been fractured by the loss of the mother. Mr. Craven is preoccupied, "unhappy,"

"ill, and wretched and distracted" (116-17). Even the self-centered Mary can recognize his misery (120). Like

Mr. Rochester before him, he restlessly travels Europe, seeking solace: 30

When he traveled about, darkness so brooded over

him that the sight of him was a wrong done to

other people because it was as if he poisoned the

air about him with gloom. Most strangers thought

he must be either half mad or a man with some

hidden crime on his soul. (271)

It is specifically the loss of the mother which has damaged

Colin so severely as well, as Colin himself acknowledges.

"'If she had lived I believe I should not have been ill

always,' he grumbled. 'I dare say I should have lived,

too. And my father would not have hated to look at me. I

dare say I should have had a strong back. . . .'" (133).

Like Colin's hypochondriac hysteria, Mary's disagreeable

nature is also a direct consequence of motherlessness.

Mary's mother, "a great beauty who cared only to go to

parties and amuse herself with gay people[,] . . . had not

wanted a little girl at all" (9), and she behaves

accordingly, taking advantage of the servants to deny her

motherhood. Mary's Ayah and the other native servants

"gave [Mary] her own way in everything, because the Mem

Sahib would be angry if she was disturbed by her crying,"

and as a result Mary "was as tyrannical and selfish a

little pig as ever lived" (10). Burnett is highly critical

of such inadequate mothering. "Perhaps if her mother had

carried her pretty face and her pretty manners oftener into

the nursery Mary might have learned some pretty ways too," 31 comments Mr. Crawford/ the clergyman who temporarily takes

Mary in. "It is very sad, now the poor beautiful thing is gone, to remember that many people never even knew that she had a child at all" (19). The Mem Sahib— and Burnett notes scathingly that "Mary used to call her that oftener than anything else" (11)— is vain, frivolous, and flirtatious, and it is her selfish foolishness which condemns both herself and her husband to death in the cholera epidemic; she has refused to leave because of a planned dinner party

(11). As Marquis points out, ". . . i n death she goes unloved, unmourned; even the legacy of her beauty is denied her daughter until that daughter earns it not by inheritance but as material reward for an achievement of the spirit" (179).

Ironically, Mary is more saddened by news of Mrs.

Craven's death than by her own mother's: "If the pretty wife had been alive she might have made things cheerful by being something like her own mother and by running in and out and going to parties as she had done in frocks 'full of lace.' But she was not there any more" (24). But even here Mary cannot successfully envision "good mothering"; it is only through her experience with the garden that she learns how to foster the growth and health of another human being— how, in fact, to accept her role as a Demeter and a mother: "In a sense the force of the adventure in The

Secret Garden actually is to define what a mother is"

(Marquis 179). 32

Dickon is one of her teachers. He is, in spite of his

gender, a maternal figure who takes in baby animals, one of which he discovers in a predicament remarkably parallel to

Mary's: . . H e once found a little fox cub half

drowned in its hole and he brought it home in t h ' bosom of his shirt to keep it warm. Its mother had been killed nearby an' the hole was swum out an' th' rest o' th' litter was dead'" (56). He later finds a "new-born lamb . . .

lying by its dead mother" and adopts it, taking it home to warm it and feed it warm milk, and Mary marvels: "A living

lamb who lay on your lap like a baby!" (192). Claudia

Marquis maintains that "although Colin and Dickon have a good deal to do with this lamb, . . . to them it is never a

'baby'" (181). But surely the references to "bosom" and

"milk" suggest that Dickon does behave maternally towards

these animals; he does, after all, carry and feed them. As

Dr. Craven remarks, "Dickon's a lad I'd trust with a new-born child" (204). Burnett later notes that Susan

Sowerby understands the children "as Dickon understood his

'creatures'" (265). Moreover, it is Dickon who brings Mary

seeds and gardening tools (99) and teaches her how to garden; Martha tells her, "Our Dickon can make a flower grow out of a brick wall. Mother says he just whispers

things out o' th' ground" (84).

Even his speech is maternal. Dickon speaks a Yorkshire

dialect that becomes in this novel "a language of 33 tenderness/ a discourse of intimacy"— much as it does in

D.H. Lawrence's work (Verduin 64). This marginal language bears some resemblance to what Julia Kristeva has

identified as the semiotic— it is associated with the mother, never with the father, and is more musical than standard English. It is further associated with emotional closeness, protectiveness, the natural world, and love— all qualities traditionally linked to the mother.

Burnett links motherhood with "magic" through Dickon, who is clearly a Pan figure, as virtually every critic of the novel has observed. He has also been linked to Orpheus

(Verduin 62) and Hermes (McGillis 36). As Mary tells

Colin,"He is not like any one else in the world. He can charm foxes and squirrels and birds just as the natives in

India charm snakes. He plays a very soft tune on a pipe and they come and listen" (142). Mary twice calls him a

"wood fairy" (111, 120) and later pronounces him an

"angel," to Colin's astonishment (166);

"Well, it was rather funny to say it," she

admitted frankly, "because his nose does turn up

and he has a big mouth and his clothes have

patches all over them and he talks broad

Yorkshire, but— but if an angel did come to

Yorkshire and live on the moor— if there was a

Yorkshire angel— I believe he'd understand the

green things and know how to make them grow and

he would know how to talk to the wild creatures 34

as Dickon does and they'd know he was friends for

sure." (183)

Part of Dickon's charm is that he makes no distinctions among people, flowers, and animals. As Colin rather comically explains to Mary, "He's a sort of animal charmer and I am a boy animal" (151). When the robin builds his nest, Dickon urges Mary to pretend not to notice: "Us must keep still an' try to look as if us was grass an' trees an' bushes" (156). Dickon's animism compels the reader to recognize the kinship and similarity of all life— and specifically, in this novel, the mother and the garden:

. . . They had come upon a whole clump of crocuses

burst into purple and orange and gold. Mary bent

her face down and kissed and kissed them.

"You never kiss a person in that way," she said

when she lifted her head. "Flowers are so

different."

He looked puzzled and smiled.

"Eh!" he said. "I've kissed mother many a time

that way when I come in from th' moor after a

day's roamin' an' she stood there at th' door in

th' sun, lookin' so glad and comfortable." (155)

Ben Weatherstaff echoes this sentiment when he obliquely recalls Mrs. Craven's fondness for roses: "She had a lot in a place she was fond of, an' she loved 'em like they was children— or robins. I've seen her bend over an' kiss 'em"

(95). 35

Dickon later attributes Colin's rebirth in the garden to

the intervention of Mrs. Craven: "... Happen she's been

in the garden an' happen it was her set us to work, an'

told us to bring him here" (211). His mother concurs,

telling Colin, "Thy own mother's in this 'ere very garden,

I do believe. She couldna' keep out of it" (268). And when Archie Craven implores Lilias's spirit to tell him where she is, the mysterious and possibly hallucinatory voice he hears responds, "In the garden!" (275).^

Thus, the garden, too, teaches Mary about mothering and

maternal behavior. Her maternal destiny is perhaps

foreshadowed by her own various links to the garden. It

is, for example, the same age she is (68), and its

awakening corresponds to hers. Like the garden, Mary, too,

has been forgotten and neglected (Roxburgh 123-24). It is

the garden which teaches her "the immense, tender,

terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs"— "if

an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl

round and crash through space and come to an end" (250).

Dickon compares Mary and her obsession with the secrecy of

the garden to a missel thrush protecting her nest (111,

122), a clearly maternal image. In her desire for "a bit

of earth," she reminds Mr. Craven of Colin's mother

(118-119). She becomes increasingly maternal as the story

goes on and her relationship with Colin develops. She

sings him to sleep and later tells him a bedtime story

(135, 177). 36

Certainly Mary has for a model a paragon of motherliness: "Mrs. Sowerby is part of the pattern of

perfection towards which Mary must aspire" (Marquis 180).

Mrs. Sowerby is linked to Lilias Craven; it is Lilias

Craven's kindness to her that she returns through her

kindness to Mary (118). "[T]he only adult in the book who

is portrayed positively" (Adams 54), she is clearly a

capable, resourceful woman: "'She's one o' them that

nearly always sees a way to do things,'" Martha tells Mary

(66). Mother of twelve, she nonetheless finds time to worry about Mary as well. She buys her a skipping-rope to

encourage her to play and exercise (74), wonders why Mary

couldn't have a garden (86), and prompts Mr. Craven to see

Mary (114). She literally feeds the children, providing

extra meals so that Mary and especially Colin can keep up

their pretense of ill health. Her child-rearing abilities

are universally respected, as the housekeeper, Mrs.

Medlock, acknowledges:

"Susan Sowerby and me went to school together and

she's as sensible and good-hearted a woman as

you'd find in a day's walk. I never had any

children myself and she's had twelve, and there

never was healthier or better ones. Miss Mary can

get no harm from them. I'd always take Susan

Sowerby's advice about children myself. She's

what you might call healthy-minded— if you

understand me." (119) 37

Part of her healthy-mindedness, of course, is her belief in the power of positive thinking. Dickon tells Mary, .

. [T]here's nowt as good for ill folk as laughin' is.

Mother says she believes as half a hour's good laugh every mornin' 'ud cure a chap as was makin' ready for typhus fever" (181). Mrs. Sowerby laughs herself when Dickon tells her of the way Mary and Colin pretend that Colin is still weak, helpless, and unable to walk: "Good healthy child laughin's better than pills any day o' th' year"

(240). Burnett herself evidently flirted with Christian

Science and what was then called the "New Thought"— the belief in the ability of the mind to heal the body (Thwaite

88-89)— and although she never fully accepted these beliefs, she remained sympathetic to them.

But Mrs. Sowerby's essence is maternal. She is, in the children's eyes, a "comfortable wonderful mother creature"

(241). It is hardly surprising that she midwifes, as well

(277). Dr. Craven pronounces her "shrewd," and even Mrs.

Medlock dimly recognizes her value: "Sometimes I've said to her, 'Eh! Susan, if you was a different woman and didn't talk such broad Yorkshire I've seen the times when I should have said you was clever'" (190). She is almost mystical in her maternal wisdom: "'She knows about children,' said Mary. 'She has twelve. She knows'" (117).

And Susan Sowerby specifically attributes her wisdom to her maternal experience, as Martha tells Mary: "it's like she 38

says: 'A woman as brings up twelve children learns

something besides her ABC. Children's as good as

•rithmetic to set you findin' out things'" (86).

She is also somehow fundamentally connected to the

healing power of the garden: "'Magic is in her just as it

is in Dickon,' said Colin. 'It makes her think of ways to

do things— nice things. She is a Magic person. Tell her

we are grateful, Dickon— extremely grateful'" (244). It is

interesting, given this link, that virtually all of her

references to a deity are ungendered: "Magic," "the Big

Good Thing," and "th' Joy Maker" (266). Perhaps she

envisions a deity different from the patriarchal God of

traditional Christianity, a religion in which it would be

possible for Mary rather than Christ to redeem and

resurrect.

Mary likes Mrs. Sowerby almost as soon as she learns of her existence (66), but she meets her only after she has

accepted and fulfilled her own role as mother: "Although

our attention in the final chapters of the book is almost

entirely on Colin, his recovery constitutes Mary's real

achievement" (Roxburgh 127). Images of rebirth surround his recovery. He has already been indirectly compared to

"a new-born child" (204). Phyllis Bixler notes in her

study of Burnett's writings that "It is approximately nine months from the time Mary first enters the garden, in late winter, until the children publicly exit it in the fall" 39

(101). She notes, too, of the novel's ending, "The exodus

is less an 'escape' than a bursting forth of an exuberant,

secret life that can no longer be contained" (101).

Roxburgh goes on to point out that "... Mrs. Sowerby, .

. . although associated specifically with the Virgin, evokes a considerably older mythic type, the Corn-mother of primitive ritual who represents fertility incarnate and guarantees the harvest" (127). The rather comic insult

Mary delivers to Martha— "you daughter of a pig!"

(33)— further links Susan Sowerby to Demeter, for the pig

is sacred to the cult of the goddess (Keller 32); Frazer even speculates that "originally the pig was an embodiment of the corn-goddess herself, either Demeter or her daughter and double Persephone" (449).

The appearance of this Demeter figure at the end of the novel (in a chapter tellingly titled "It's Mother!")

suggests that Mary has successfully achieved her

identification with the mother and therefore been restored

to her. Mrs. Sowerby's own comments suggest such a positive maternal identification: ". . . I'll warrant

tha'rt like thy mother too. Our Martha told me as Mrs.

Medlock heard she was a pretty woman. Tha'lt be like a blush rose when tha' grows up, my little lass, bless thee"

(264).

As Nancy Chodorow notes,

. . . people themselves need to be reproduced both

daily and generationally. Most theoretical 40

accounts agree that women as wives and mothers

reproduce people— physically in housework and

child care, psychologically in their emotional

support of husbands and their maternal relation

to sons and daughters. If we accept this view, we

have to ask who reproduces wives and mothers.

What is hidden in most accounts of the family is

that women reproduce themselves through their own

daily housework. (36)

It is not through housework but through gardening that Mary

reproduces herself : "Gardening appears to be the only

productive manual labor, aside from needlework and nursing,

permitted the women of the English upper classes before the

Second World War" (Adams 53n5). Through gardening, and

perhaps only through gardening, Mary can achieve something

tangible: "'If I have a spade,' she whispered, 'I can make

the earth nice and soft and dig up weeds. If I have seeds

and can make flowers grow the garden won't be dead at

all— it will come alive'" (87). Her activity in the garden

gives her happiness— and an appetite (84). In talking

about Colin, Dickon tells Mary, "Mother she says that's the worst thing on earth for a child. Thera as is not wanted

scarce ever thrives" (158). Mary is certainly not wanted;

she tells Martha that no one likes her, and admits that she

doesn't even like herself (66). "I have nothing— and no

one," she says to Ben Weatherstaff (96). Yet she thrives 41

nonetheless. She gains weight, her complexion loses its

sallowness, her hair regains its shine, and her mood

improves dramatically, from disagreeable sourness to

laughing cheerfulness (93, 150, 163 249, 255).

Mary brings herself back to life by rejecting the

passivity of Persephone in exchange for the maternal

activity of Demeter:

The few books she had read and liked had been

fairy-story books, and she had read of secret

gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people

went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which

she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no

intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was

becoming wider awake every day which passed at

Misselthwaite. (91)

In rejecting that death-like sleep, Mary is refusing the passive role of "Little Briar Rose" (the name of the princess in Grimms' version of the Sleeping Beauty story)

in exchange for the active maternal work of metaphorically reproducing other people.^

Certainly it is Mary who reproduces Colin. "I am better. She makes me better," Colin tells Dr. Craven

(147). She quickly recognizes that he is "a very spoiled boy" (139) and refuses to humor his bizarre, self-indulgent fancies: "She didn't like the way he had of talking about dying. She did not feel very sympathetic. She felt rather 42

as If he almost boasted of it" (143). As a result, Mary tells Dickon, . . H e says I'm making him forget about being ill and dying" (157). When he begins to feel sorry for himself and insists once again that he is dying, Mary loses patience: "'I don't believe it!' said Mary sourly.

'You just say that to make people sorry. I believe you're proud of it. I don't believe it! If you were a nice boy it might be true— but you're too nasty!'" (166). The fight, Burnett interjects, is "rather good for him" (167).

Ironically, the "grown-up people" called on Mary to coax

Colin out of his tantrum because, Mary realizes afterwards,

"they guessed she was almost as bad as Colin himself"

(172). The nurse chuckles that now Colin has to contend with someone as spoiled as he is (167), and she's not the only one to recognize the similarity:

"Ben Weatherstaff said I was like him,' said

Mary. 'He said he'd warrant we'd both got the

same nasty tempers. I think you are like him too.

We are all three alike— you and I and Ben

Weatherstaff. He said we were neither of us much

to look at and we were as sour as we looked. But

I don't feel as sour as I used to before. ..."

(183)

Colin is Mary's double, a reflection of what she was when she first arrived at Misselthwaite Manor (Gohlke 896) and, like Demeter, she descends to Hades to bring her double back to the world of the living: 43

Just as Colin is Mary's night-world counterpart,

the dark, tapestried room in which she finds him

is a demonic parody of the garden; it is a womb,

like the garden, but in it the child is not

nurtured, he is suffocated. While the garden is

open to the sky and to the fresh air and breezes

that sweep the moors, Colin's room is a black,

stifling hole, heated by the fire that

continuously burns in the grate, located in the

depths of Misselthwaite Manor. . . . Mary

descends into this pit. . . . (Roxburgh 124)

Like Demeter, she has healing powers. It is Mary who disabuses Colin of the idea that he has a hump on his back;

"And now that an angry unsympathetic little girl insisted obstinately that he was not so ill as he thought he was he actually felt as if she might be speaking the truth" (174).

And, again like Demeter, she passes on the secret of eternal life; after her intervention, Colin repeatedly insists that he will live forever (192, 206, 282). His statement carries special weight in this story, which has been described as "preoccupied with death" (Gohlke 896).

Mary transforms her own experience into a model for helping others; "If gardens and fresh air had been good for her perhaps they would be good for Colin" (151). Her speculations gradually lead her to what amounts to a treatment program (Marquis 178); "'I wonder,' she said 44

slowly/ 'if it would not do him good to go out into a

garden and watch things growing. It did me good'" (139).

When Mary later attributes Colin's recovery to the garden, however— "the garden was doing it" (220)— she is only half

right, for he had been taken into the garden before and merely sneezed himself into a fit (139). Whether she and

Colin recognize it or not, it is her ministrations as much

as the magical powers of the garden that bring about his

recovery, as Mrs. Sowerby makes indubitably clear: "'It was a good thing that little lass came to th' Manor. It's

been th' makin' o' her an' th' savin' o' him'" (239).

But Mary's identification with the mother is not as wholly positive as Burnett might like us to think. Colin

gradually eclipses Mary just as, in conventional thought,

the child eclipses the mother (as Mary's namesake is

eclipsed by her Son). Although the book begins with Mary,

and Colin does not even appear until Chapter 13, he

dominates the final chapters of the book.^ Like the

fairy-tale wolf he is compared to (205), Colin swallows up

Mary, the equivalent of Little Red Riding Hood in this

story: "... [P]erhaps we have Burnett in this allusion to 'Little Red Riding-Hood' secretly deconstructing the book's apparent sanctioning of the dominance" of Colin

(McGillis 37-38).

And this new, dominant Colin is not an especially attractive character. Imperious and class-conscious, he 45

plays the role of the "young Rajah" to the hilt and rudely

snubs kindly old Ben Weatherstaff (236). He is not

especially grateful to Mary and in fact pronounces the

magic of the garden to be scientific discovery" (235;

emphasis added). He is determined to impose reason and

science on what Mary and Dickon are content to characterize

as "magic" (Marquis 176). He loses little of his egotism

in his recovery; most of his sentences still begin with

"I." He seems to rather like the sound of his own voice,

for he lectures to the others, who listen not altogether willingly; "'Th' best thing about lecturin',' said Ben, 'is

that a chap can get up and say aught he pleases an' no

other chap can answer him back. I wouldn't be agen'

lecturin' a bit mysel' sometimes'" (258). By the end of

the book, Colin is the "Athlete, the Lecturer, the

Scientific Discoverer" (283)— a series of identifications

that Marquis argues is "a history of identities, inscribing

Colin's introduction into Lacan's Symbolic order, his

progress towards social humanity" (173). As she goes on to

point out.

The language of true power in this displaced

magical world coincides inevitably with that of

the author's own world to this extent at least,

that it is created by the male, the master. In

entering into Colin's strange religious ritual

Mary too accepts Colin's right to supremacy. Life 46

in the garden, then, in spite of its apparent

freedom from social conventions, preserves the

ideological coherence of the narrative by

reaffirming that its true voice is male. (183)

He proves his superiority, "his successful initiation into manhood," by outrunning Mary in the novel's final chapter;

"The Girl must give over to The Boy, as is only right and religiously proper" (Marquis 184-85). Burnett herself makes the same point when writing about herself in the third person in her autobiography. The One She Knew Best of

All: "Being an English little girl she knew the vast

superiority of the Male" (40).

What Colin does not seem to have yet learned is the

lesson Mrs. Sowerby could have taught him if she had been his mother, as he wished (267); Mrs. Medlock quotes her friend :

. . . She says, "Once when I was given' the'

children a bit of a preach after they'd been

fightin' I ses to 'em all, 'When I was at school

my jography told as th' world was shaped like a

orange an' I found out before I was ten that th'

whole orange doesn't belong to nobody. No one

owns more than his bit of a quarter an' there's

times it seems like there's not enow quarters to

go round. But don't you— none o' you— think as

you own the whole orange or you'll find out you're

mistaken, an' you won't find it out without hard 47

knocks. What children learns from children,' she

says, 'is that there's no sense in grabbin' at th'

whole orange— peel an' all. If you do you'll

likely not get even th' pips, an' them's too

bitter to eat.'" (190)

Mrs. Medlock later tells Mr. Roach, "If he does live and

the Indian child stays here I'll warrant she teaches him

that the whole orange does not belong to him, as Susan

Sowerby says. And he'll be likely to find out the size of his own quarter" (202). But Mrs. Medlock may be unduly

optimistic; Mary's unruliness seems to have been

effectively quelled.

Marquis argues that Mary, like Jo March and many other nineteenth-century heroines "learned to conform to accepted

patterns of conduct" and thus "lost those individual

qualities that made her interesting"— a pattern Katherine

Blake has identified as "maturation into loss" in her book

Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature

(Marquis 183). In accepting the maternal role, Mary necessarily accepts her own silencing as well— the true

Gothic horror to which Kahane refers.

There is some evidence to suggest that Mary Lennox's

experience is not atypical. In The Girl Within, Emily

Hancock argues that at about the age of nine, a girl

possesses a solid sense of self that is buried and

suppressed long before she reaches adolescence: 48 Liberated from feminine constraints, her world

encompasses male and female, work and play,

independence and dependence— without subordinating

either to the other. At the center of a universe

in perfect harmony, she is master of her destiny,

captain of her soul. She is, in short, the

subject of her own experience.

But suddenly, well before puberty, along comes

the culture with the pruning shears, ruthlessly

trimming back her spirit. . . . Whereas her

childhood competence knew no bounds, her feminine

effectiveness is channeled into the interpersonal

realm as she approaches puberty. (10-11)

As Hancock goes on to explain, "Contained, adapted, and sexualized long before adolescence, a girl is cowed and tamed as her natural spontaneity gives way to patriarchal constructions of the female" (14). True, Mary Lennox is only seven as the story opens, not quite in the eight-to-ten age range that Hancock cites (11), but that may be because Burnett herself discovered that "girl within" at that age, as she writes of herself in the third person in her autobiography:

Is the age of seven years an age of special

development, or an age which attracts incidents

interesting, and having an effect on life, and the

formation of character? As I look back I remember

so many things which seemed to happen to the Small 49

Person when she was seven years old. She was

seven, or thereabouts, when she discovered the

Secretaire; seven when she began to learn the

Lancashire dialect, and study Back Street people;

seven when she first saw Death, with solemn,

asking eyes, and awe in her soul; seven when she

wrote her first inarticulate story, which was a

poem; and seven when she was first brought face to

face with the enormity of a betrayed confidence.

(90)

Hancock argues that for many adult women, the way to discover one's identity involves rediscovering and recovering this "girl within"; the imagery she uses is especially appropriate for both Burnett's novel and my study;

Women have long tended the gardens of others.

While providing the context for others'

development, they have historically neglected

their own. Women's full development depends on

circling back to the girl within and carrying her

into womanhood. (193)

In other words, then. Demeter must rediscover the

Persephone within herself, the Mother must recover the

Maiden in order to achieve a full identity, and cyclical development need not be regressive but may be progressive and perhaps even necessary for most women. 50

Unlike the other works involved in this study, Burnett's heroine has no experience of rape or violation comparable to Perspehone's. As the analyses of the succeeding works will make clear, such a rape or violation occurs when the male intrudes upon and interrupts the preoedipal mother-daughter relationship. Mary experiences no rape because she experiences no such closeness in her relationship with her mother; unlike, say, Clarissa

Dalloway, Mary has no experience of "the female-centered world anterior to heterosexual bonds" (Abel 34). Burnett explains: "Mary had liked to look at her mother from a distance and she had thought her very pretty, but as she knew very little of her she could scarcely have been expected to love her or to miss her very much when she was gone" (16). No wonder, then, that the snake she sees is

"harmless" (13); she has no Eden from which to fall. 51

Notes to Chapter I

^ Kathie Carlson suggests, in In Her Image; The Unhealed

Daughter's Search for Her Mother, that the cry in the night is the cry of the unmothered daughter within the self (61).

Burnett writes of this experience (using third person to refer to herself) in her autobiography. The One I Knew Best of All; "When she had been a little child lying awake in the Nursery bedroom she had been heart-broken by a fancy of a baby lost in the darkness of the night and storm, and wandering alone, crying, crying for someone to find it"

(197).

^ It is possible to see in this work the (male) myth of the dying god: ". . . is not the garden, dead and overgrown when Mary first finds it, reminiscent of . . . the Waste Land? Its dead state seems profoundly related to the sickness of Colin, who is a kind of wounded Fisher

King" (Carpenter 189).

O The mother's association with the garden may also have something to do with this novel's relationship to folk and fairy tales; Phyllis Bixler notes that in some variants of the Cinderella tale, "Cinderella's dead mother aids her through a plant growing on her grave or an animal she had given to Cinderella before she died" (95).

4joan Myers Weimer has argued that "the well-known fairy 52 tale of Sleeping Beauty . . . resembles the myth of Demeter and Persephone so closely in its characters, incidents, and the psychological conflicts it addresses that it should be considered a variant of the myth" (5). As she later goes on to explain, "All versions mirror the Greek tale in focusing on a royal maiden who is sent into a death-like sleep and awakens to sexual maturity" (11).

^"Mary is silent in the final chapter; the last words in the book are 'Master Colin'" (Adams 54nll). Chapter II

"The Child's a Flower";

Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden

Enid Bagnold's play The Chalk Garden has been extraordinarily and inexplicably neglected by literary critics. The play was first produced on Broadway in 1955 and opened in England in 1956 (Sebba 186-95). In 1964 it was made into a film starring Deborah Kerr, Hayley Mills, and Edith Evans. The play was revived on Broadway in 1982.

As the play opens, applicants responding to a newspaper advertisement await their interviews with Mrs. St. Maugham, who is seeking a governess for her sixteen-year-old granddaughter. Laurel. She hires the first applicant, a

Miss Madrigal, despite her lack of references, because she is the only candidate not frightened off by Laurel, who tells outrageously exaggerated lies and lights fires.

During the course of the play, Madrigal learns that

Laurel's father has died and her mother has remarried; when her mother forgot to give Laurel her goodnight kiss one evening. Laurel had run away and been raped in Hyde Park at the age of twelve. When Laurel's mother, Olivia, now

53 54

pregnant/ returns for Laurel, she is unable to convince her mother to let her see the girl. The play's climax comes when the Judge, an old friend of Mrs. St. Maugham's, comes

for luncheon and recalls, in passing, a murder trial at which a woman later condemned to death defended herself with words identical to words Madrigal had once used with

Laurel. When Olivia once again comes for Laurel after the

luncheon ends, Madrigal mentions before her the rape story, which Olivia knows is not true. Madrigal further convinces

Laurel to go, confesses to Mrs. St. Maugham that she was once condemned to death for murder, and ultimately offers,

in the end, to remain with the lonely grandmother to keep her company.

The play's characters correspond rather neatly to those

in the hymn. Laurel, who claims to have been raped and rather fancies herself as a victim, clearly resembles

Persephone. She lives in exile from her mother, certainly,

in a patriarchal system Mrs. St. Maugham vigorously upholds even in her very name. As a grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham

in fact suggests Rhea, who after all serves in the myth as

Zeus's representative.

Interestingly, Olivia's name, too, is suggestive, for

the olive tree was sacred to Demeter in Greek mythology

(Richardson 182). Certainly, like Demeter, she grieves for the loss of her daughter; "I can't sleep! I can't rest.

I seem to myself to have abandoned her!" (58). On her 55 first visit, she repeatedly resists her mother's attempts to change the subject: "But I'm without her" (56). She pleads with her mother for her support: "Help me to find her! Help me to take her back!" (57). When Mrs. St.

Maugham contends that Laurel is fine where she is, Olivia responds passionately: ""But she'll be a woman ! And I'll never have known her ! (58). By her final visit, at the end of the play, she has gained more resolve: "I have come rather suddenly to fetch my daughter ..." (134; ellipsis

Bagnold's).

And Madrigal plays the part of Hecate, who joins with the mother in her attempt to retrieve her daughter. In variant versions of the myth, Hecate, who is so identified with Persephone that she is sometimes described as

Demeter's daughter, descends to the underworld to guide

Persephone back to her mother (Richardson 84, 295);

Madrigal plays a comparable role in the play. Certainly

Laurel and Madrigal are doubles for each other, as they both recognize. When Laurel exclaims that she hates her mother, Madrigal remarks that she hated her mother— or rather, her stepmother— too (43). Madrigal tells the

Judge, "When I came here I thought I had met myself again !"

(131). When Madrigal erupts during the Judge's visit, she describes her younger self in terms that describe Laurel startlingly well: "A liar! A pathological imaginer! A girl who lied! And lied! And when she told the truth it 56 didn't save her!" (120). Laurel draws the parallel even more explicitly when she covertly threatens to expose

Madrigal, asking her mother if she has thought of the risk

involved: "The risk that— if you take me— I might murder my stepsister!" (138).

Both Hecate and Persephone are associated with death and the underworld; Madrigal was condemned to death and spent

15 years in prison, a kind of underworld. When Madrigal explains that the Judge had once sentenced her to death,

Mrs. St. Maugham exclaims, "To death! . . . But there you are !" and adds a moment later, "Good heavens, how can you be living at all!" (151). Madrigal describes herself to the Judge as having died and undergone an implicit rebirth:

"At out last meeting I died. It alters the appearance"

(133). She is vaguely holy. When she tells Mrs. St.

Maugham "I have ornamented a chapel" (20), the ambiguity of her syntax suggests that she herself was the ornament. She is magic, as well; like Mary Poppins (Travers 3-8), she arrives on the East Wind (96) and refuses to give references (15-16). She also explicitly associates herself with Hecate's primary symbol (Richardson 156): "I am burnt out, white— like the moon, lunar !" (133).

Like Hecate, Madrigal identifies with the mother as well as the daughter (Kerenyi "Kore" 110), Richardson 156). As governess, she is in loco parentis in fact, she at first mistakes the mother for yet another governess (50). She is 57 not the virginal Persephone, Laurel tells Maitland; "She's no maiden lady!" (67). Laurel later in the conversation rather melodramatically insists, "She's had a life of passion!" (67). Madrigal refuses to answer Laurel when she asks, "Are you a maiden lady?" (86), and Laurel deduces,

"You have had a sex life of fire and brimstone" (89)— an accusation that links Madrigal to what Laurel sees as

Olivia's extravagant sexuality.

But the parallels are not all so straightforwardly simple, for Mrs. St. Maugham, too, is a Demeter figure, who has lost her daughter through marriage. Perhaps not coincidentally, she refuses an invitation to preside over

"the village Summer Festival" (18-20). As Maitland explains to the Third Applicant, when she inquires about the London season, "Madame is past the seasons" (9); these allusions suggest that Mrs. St. Maugham, like Demeter of the hymn, is spurning all invitations and halting the seasonal cycle in her grief for her missing daughter.

Olivia is a Persephone exiled to the burning sands of the

Arabian desert, because her husband is "stationed abroad" with the military (22); when she departs with Laurel at the end of the play, they are leaving for the equally remote

Cyprus (136). And in some sense even Madrigal is a

Persephone figure, who is returning, if not to a literal mother, at least to what might be called "the female world of love and ritual" (Smith-Rosenberg 1) after her 15-year 58

sojourn in Hades. Laurel is also a double for her

grandmother, at least in Mrs. St. Maugham's eyes; "I too

at her age . . ." (32).

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the word

"madrigal" refers to "a kind of part song for three or more voices . . . characterized by . . . elaborate contrapuntal

imitation" and "the absence of musical accompaniment"

(OED). Madrigal herself testifies to the term's

significance when she insists to the Judge, "It's more than

a name to me" (132).

The distinction between masculine and feminine worlds

implied in the myth also applies to the society within the

play. As with the hymn, men are rare and relatively

peripheral figures; seven of the play's nine roles are

female. Laurel's father is dead; her stepfather is absent.

Mr. St. Maugham is never mentioned at all. Men are

relevant only insofar as their actions structure the world

in which the play takes place. Women's experiences and

relationships between and among women are the primary

subject matter of the play, which takes place in a

community of women. Bagnold makes this point quite

explicitly. In the play's opening act, the Third

Applicant, characterized as "the Grand Lady" (7), asks, "Is

this a house where there are gentlemen?" and eventually

refuses to wait to be interviewed: "I could not think of

staying in a house where there is not even a nephew!" (8). 59

The play's two male characters are undercut rather severely: Laurel can frighten Maitland simply by calling his prison number (35), and Mrs. St. Maugham damages the

Judge's credibility rather severely by calling him "Puppy"

(71).

Ironically, the chief representative of the patriarchal order in this play is Mrs. St. Maugham, who has indoctrinated her daughter just as the formidable Pinkbell indoctrinated her: "When I was a young woman he educated me . . . my manner with distinguished foreigners. . . . He saw to my Ascots. He bought my wine for me" (156). If she didn't arrange her daughter's first marriage, she was certainly strongly in favor of it, for very practical, traditional reasons; she describes him to Madrigal: "Rich and a fine estate. Four Van Dykes and unique Sheraton furniture. [Bitterly.1 Her mother's one success ..."

(22; ellipsis Bagnold's). Her "unworldly" daughter, however, has come to subscribe to a different system of values: "She was always crying out after to be simple.

Privilege and power make selfish people— but gay ones. It seems such a waste, with all the chances of life, to want to be simple . . ." (23; ellipsis Bagnold's). She is utterly dismayed by her daughter's apparent lack of respect for the values she has devoted her life to upholding:

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

. . . When I count my ambitions and what you have

made of them! 60

OLIVIA

% did what you wanted i

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

But how you resisted me! I was burning for you to

cut ice in the world— yet you had to be driven out

to gaiety! I had to beat you into beauty! You

had to be lit— as one lights a lantern! Decked—

like a may tree! (55)

Confronted by her daughter's intransigence, her unwillingness to conform to the only social expectations she herself can envisage, Mrs. St. Maugham is frustrated and helpless; "But I did what a mother should do. I married you . . ." (55). Like Demeter, she has little real power; her commands have no teeth in them, as her own toothlessness suggests (13). (Revealingly, the Judge snaps at Laurel, "My teeth are my own, thank God!" [125]; he, at least is not powerless.)

Mrs. St. Maugham, Gerald Weales contends, is not the force Madrigal must struggle against, for "she is simply its instrument, its victim" (46). Moreover, Mrs. St.

Maugham recognizes that she belongs to the older order and longs to bridge the gap. When the Judge stops by for luncheon, he and Mrs. St. Maugham sit at one table, while

Madrigal and Laurel sit at another. Exasperated, Mrs. St.

Maugham erupts: "I am trying to weave in . . . Oh whoever invented two tables? Can't one join them?" The Judge 61

responds, "Not across fifty years. Not the Past and the

Present!" (114).

The individual who is perhaps the play's primary representative of the old order never appears on stage. He

is the aging butler, whose faintly ludicrous name,

Pinkbell, must be strongly reminiscent of Peter Pan's companion, Tinkerbell, to anyone familiar with British theatre (Friedman 87). As with Zeus in the hymn, we never hear Pinkbell's words directly; the audience merely sees how others— including Mrs. St. Maugham, Madrigal, Maitland, and Laurel— respond to him. He is clearly more than the average butler: "His standards rule this house," Mrs. St.

Maugham tells Madrigal (25). As she later protests, "But for forty years Pinkbell has never been corrected! He is the butler who was the standard of all London!" (94). He is godlike in his detachment; Laurel calls him "the terrible old man upstairs" (5).

This deity's power is not altogether benign. The relatively peaceable Maitland calls him an "old bastard"

(26)— as does Laurel (31)— and comments "Poison he is— but influential" (68). Even Mrs. St. Maugham eventually admits, "I have always . . . always been afraid of

Pinkbell" (97).

The Judge, too, respects Pinkbell's authority.

Impressed by the butler's "severity, his corklike dryness," the Judge takes him as a role model: "... later on. 62 when I had to rebuke the public eye, I remembered Pinkbell!

My demeanor on the bench is Pinkbell's" (103). When the

Judge later responds to Laurel rather curtly, Mrs. St.

Maugham crows in delight: "You see ! You see how stiff he can be I You see the resemblance!" (115).

Pinkbell disapproves of Madrigal's effect on Laurel, according to Laurel herself, and "is sulking," she tells her grandmother: "He is full of jealous rage against his

Enemy" (73). Madrigal has an equally low opinion of him:

"She says he's the devil in charge" (69). Madrigal openly threatens his authority: She has become "the Boss" (67) and three times disputes his commands— by noting that

"Extract of Humus is too rich for summer biennials" (26), returning the rhododendrons he had ordered by reversing the labels (69), and forcing Mrs. St. Maugham to put either her or Pinkbell in charge of the garden. "I reversed the labels! And if I could I would reverse everything! And I may yet— we shall see!" (79). Madrigal is clearly speaking of more than simply rhododendrons here.

She is perhaps disputing patriarchal authority in general— just as Demeter does in the Homeric Hymn.

Certainly Bagnold suggests that the patriarchal order is sterile, obsolete, empty, hollow, dried-up, remote, distant, impersonal, and cold. The Judge describes himself— evidently with pride— as "garbed and toffed with medieval meanings, obscured by ritual" (114) and depicts 63

his entry into court: "Learned and crumpled like a rose

leaf of knowledge I snuffle and mumble. I sham deaf. I

move into court with the red glory of a dried saint carried

in festival ..." (108? ellipsis Bagnold's). When

Madrigal confronts him after the luncheon, asking, "So now what will you do?" he responds with comic helplessness: "I

am an old man. Miss Madrigal, and very learned. I don't

know" (130). He acknowledges during the meal that "a judge

does not always get to the bottom of a case" (117), and his

final line in the play, just before he exits, is "No man's

infallible" (157).

What Madrigal objects to, then, is not the Judge as an

individual, or Mrs. St. Maugham as an individual, or even

Pinkbell as an individual, but their easy assumption of

authority over others' lives and the illusion of the

system's disinterested objectivity: "Patriarchy is

grounded in the uprightness of the father. If he were

devious and unreliable, he could not have the power to

legislate. The law is supposed to be just— that is,

impartial, indifferent, free from desire" (Gallop 75).

This illusion of impartiality turns up in the myth as well. Demeter's daughter, believing in Zeus's fairness,

appeals to him in vain. The narrator of the Homeric Hymn

comments ironically that at the moment of abduction,

Persephone "raised a shrill cry, calling upon father

Kronides, the highest and the best" (11. 20-21); it is of 64 course Zeus, the "highest and best" of fathers, who has secretly given his approval for the abduction and thus betrayed his own daughter. If he does so to consolidate his own power, as Jenny Strauss Clay argues, his behavior seems especially reprehensible; he is clearly not the benignly impartial patriarch any more than the Judge is.

It is that alleged impartiality that Madrigal questions:

MADRIGAL

The prisoner thinks he is at the judgment seat of

justice. A place where all motives are taken into

account.

LAUREL

And isn't it?

MADRIGAL

No. (336)

Certainly the irony that Madrigal has served 15 years for killing another human being and Maitland has served five years for refusing to kill another human being (307) makes a mockery of the judicial system's impartiality.

But Madrigal goes further still. The quote that lingers in the Judge's mind for 15 years and ultimately discloses

Madrigal's identity contests the validity of Aristotelian forensic logic:

MADRIGAL

Truth doesn't ring true in a court of law.

MAITLAND

What rings true then? 65

MADRIGAL

(To herself, trancelike)

The likelihood. The probability. They work to

make things hang together. [Moving.] What the

prisoner listens to there is not his life. It is

the shape and shadow of it. With the accidents of

truth taken out of it. (81-82)

Most classical rhetoricians would probably acknowledge that Madrigal's argument has some truth to it. As Edward

P.J. Corbett writes in Classical Rhetoric for the Modern

Student;

. . . [F]requently in human affairs it is not

easy, sometimes impossible, to discover the

evidence or testimony that could confirm the

occurrence of an event. In such cases, one must

resort to arguing the probability of something

having occurred. As we have said repeatedly, the

probable is the main province in which the

rhetorician operates; after all, there can be no

room for argument about what is certain. (135)

Madrigal may further be protesting what Carol Gilligan characterizes as a typically masculine reliance on abstract principles of law rather than a typically feminine ethic of responsibility and care. When Madrigal inquires whether, when he goes to church before entering court, the Judge prays for charity, he tells her, "That's outside my job" . 66

(112). As he goes on to explain, "I ignore the heart. Miss

Madrigal, and satisfy justice. [Then to Mrs. St. Maugham.]

Every little line on my face is written by law, not by life" (113). He later adds, "I have to decide according to dry facts— when appealed to in a passion" (113).

Unfortunately, this detachment can become a failure to respond appropriately to another human being in need, as an exasperated Mrs. St. Maugham very comically demonstrates:

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

Stay where you are. Puppy! Men are such cowards!

In the name of discretion or a cool head or some

such nonsense— they leave one in the lurch . . .

JUDGE

So much better . . . better not say anything!

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

There's an undependability in high-minded men!

They sit— objective! When they should be burning

beside one! But— when things become personal . .

. what should you say if your clerk put your wig

on!

JUDGE

(Unhappily)

I should reflect at length, I expect, and decide

on inaction.

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

So you would ! (149) 67

The Judge— and perhaps the patriarchal justice system he represents— deals in rule of law, but the gray areas of human relationships are more difficult to confront. He admits to being "nervous of life" and "not good out of my setting" (135) and tells Madrigal, . . 1 belong to a guild of men— who feel responsibility. And a deep distaste for situations" (133). When the judge concedes, as mentioned above, that "a judge does not always get to the bottom of things," Madrigal responds, "No. It takes the pity of God to get to the bottom of things" (335). Her

"reluctance to judge" is again characteristic of women rather than men (Gilligan 17).

Much of this conflict between the sterile "impartiality" of logic and the more complicated needs of organic, growing beings is played out in the garden of the title, the central motif of this work. Bagnold publicly and rather disingenuously disavowed any intentional symbolism in the work ;

"The equation of The Chalk Garden with dryness of

the heart, which has been made by many critics[,]

did not occur to me while engaged on the play,"

Enid told one interviewer. "I see now that it is

a reasonable interpretation but I was not

consciously working out a parallel as I wrote. I

had simply conceived Mrs. St. Maugham as making a

muddle of everything, her garden and her grand­

daughter." (Sebba 197) 68

Despite her disclaimers, however, the play "introduces and sustains the metaphor of the chalk garden so graciously that the attentive playgoer cannot miss the fact that it is bbth a symbol and a real garden, never one or the other," as Gerald Weales so perceptively and persuasively proves

(42). The centrality of the garden to the work is evident from the opening stage directions:

. . . Backstage is a long refectory table under

which lie in disorder baskets, garden trugs, a

saw, grasscutters, a log basket with raffia. On

top are strewn scissors, strings, gardening books,

flower catalogues, gardening gloves, a small

watering can, trowel, etc. This table is the

working pivot of the room.

Behind it are French windows and through them a

bosky, be-lilied garden runs slightly uphill.

Mrs. St. Maugham, in speaking of Laurel, tells Madrigal,

"The child's a flower," and within half a dozen lines the

Nurse has entered with the news that "The madonna lilies have blown over!" (33), suggesting the multiple maternal failings within the context of the play. Madrigal later objects to Pinkbell's choice of flowers: "Mrs. St.

Maugham— there must be some mistake I This is a chalk garden! Who has tried to grow rhododendrons in a chalk garden?" (59). Mrs. St. Maugham then describes the rhododendrons as "unhappy," confirming the impression that 69 these flowers are somehow symbolic of Laurel, and perhaps of Olivia as well. It hardly seems coincidental that both women bear the names of plants— and plants associated with classical literature, at that. Laurel's name suggests that, like Daphne, she has been turned into a plant to protect her from rape; the garden thus represents for her a kind of refuge from violent male sexuality.

Madrigal, who believes the flowers are dying, complains that "Nothing in the world has been done for them!" and that "... the soil can't give what it has not got" (59,

60; ellipsis Bagnold's)— remarks which convict Mrs. St.

Maugham for her failure to supply Laurel and Olivia with the nurturing they need. Olivia's parting plea— "Don't go!

The wind blows from the sea here and growing things need protection!"— further links Laurel to the garden's flowers

(60). Madrigal's assessment of the situation echoes that categorization; "... and the lilies have rust . . . there is a black spot on the roses . . . and the child is screaming in the garden" (61; ellipses Bagnold's). The garden takes on an almost allegorical importance; in asking for responsibility for the garden, Madrigal demands: "Have you time— before death— to throw away season after season?"

(96).

The link between girl and garden as growing things becomes clearest near the end of the play, when Madrigal tells her employer that Laurel must go with her mother. 70

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

This girl of special soil! Transplant her?

MADRIGAL

You have not a green thumb, Mrs. St. Maugham, with

a plant or a girl. This is a house where nothing

good can be made of her!

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

My house!

MADRIGAL

Your house! Why even your garden is demented! By

the mercy of God you do not keep an animal! (144)

After her granddaughter leaves with her daughter, the bereft and lonely Mrs. St. Maugham asks Madrigal, "What do women do— in my case?" (161). "They garden," Madrigal responds. When Mrs. St. Maugham asks about affection,

Madrigal protests, "But you have been living all this while without affection! Haven't you noticed it?" and adds, a moment later, "When will you learn to live on chalk?"

(163). Mrs. St. Maugham speaks, according to the stage directions, "jji exactly same tone" of plants she could not possibly grow and the daughter she fears will never forgive her; the analogy is complete; "She's a great gardener, but nothing grows for her" (7).

It is Laurel who articulates that problem, and it is that problem and Laurel— and more specifically Laurel's animosity toward her mother— which form the crux of the 71 play. Mrs. St. Maugham diagnoses that animosity as the girl's hostility outlined by Freudian psychoanalysis.

Laurel seems to have swallowed this interpretation whole; as she tells Madrigal at their first encounter, "My mother married again. She married for love. It has given me an adolescent repugnance to her. My case is practically in

Freud. My grandmother will explain it to you" (6). Mrs.

St. Maugham confirms this explanation: "My granddaughter has developed an interesting mother-hatred, which is clearly explained in Freud" (24). Madrigal, asked about her experience in such matters, sums up the situation

"pursily," according to the stage directions: "Your granddaughter is naturally alienated— that a sex life has broken out again in her mother" (24).

During the course of the interview. Laurel asks her grandmother, "Shall I go and fetch the book that explains me?" (32). In a later conversation with Madrigal, she explains further: "Have you read Hamlet? It tipped my hand and turned me against my mother" (44). The connection between Laurel and the Danish prince becomes stronger still when Maitland asks her, "Why do you sham mad— dearest?"

(66). She describes herself as "Delilah's daughter"

(32)— thus casting shy, awkward Olivia as an unlikely femme fatale. Both Mrs. St. Maugham and Laurel refer to Olivia as a "Colonel's Lady" (53, 92) in what may be an allusion to the adulterous title character in W. Somerset Maugham's 72 short story, "The Colonel's Lady." But Laurel's mention of

"Judy O'Grady" suggests that both terms may allude to

Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Ladies," in which the womanizing narrator comments on how much he has learned about women from his lower-class and native mistresses, concluding with the italicized lines.

When you get a man in the case.

They're like as a row of pins—

For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady

Are sisters under their skins! (Kipling 442)

This allusion would seem to confirm Laurel's apparent disgust with her mother's sexuality.

Ironically, however, it is specifically not her mother's sexuality that disturbs Laurel so deeply; in fact, she seems to admire it, as Madrigal discovers:

LAUREL

(Unnoticinq)

Maitland won't let me say so but my mother is

Jezebel! She is so overloaded with sex that it

sparkles! She is golden and striped— like

something in the jungle!

MADRIGAL

You sound proud of her. Does she never come here?

LAUREL

To see me? Never! She's too busy with love!

Just now she's in Arabia with her paramour!

(43-44) 73

Clearly, Laurel does not see her mother as a rival for male attention; on the contrary, she sees her stepfather— the

"paramour"— as her rival for her mother's attention— and a successful rival, at that. As she rather wistfully tells

Madrigal, "The night before she married— she forgot to say good night to me . . . D o you think that sounds a little thing?" (44). Madrigal "passionately" responds, "Oh, no!

It lights up everything"— as quite clearly it does.

When Olivia asks "But why did she pretend? Why was it done?" Madrigal responds, "Odd things are done for love"

(147). In more clinical terms:

What a girl comes to realize is that her common

genital arrangement with her mother does not work

to her advantage in forming a bond with her

mother, does not make her mother love her more.

Instead, she finds out her mother prefers people .

. . who have penises. (Chodorow 125)

Laurel discovers that her mother seems to prefer her stepfather and reacts by running away. "When nothing would stop the wedding— she ran from the hotel into the dark . .

.," Mrs. St. Maugham tells Madrigal, "... and by some extraordinary carelessness she was violated in Hyde Park at the age of twelve" (24; ellipses Bagnold's). She adds, "Of course we put it less strongly to her mother" (24). Joan

Myers Weimer sees "this tension between the male-female bond and the mother-child bond" as "central to the myth of

Demeter and Persephone" (8). 74

That Laurel describes what happened to her as a rape is

perhaps not surprising, given how psychologically painful

her discovery is. As Edna O'Brien once commented,

If you want to know what I regard as the principal

crux of female despair, it is this: in the Greek

myth of Oedipus and in Freud's exploration of it,

the son's desire for his mother is admitted; the

infant daughter also desires its mother but it is

unthinkable, either in myth, in fantasy, or in

fact, that that desire can be consummated.

(qtd. in Roth 40)

This despair is accentuated by the daughter's discovery

that she is seen as inferior not solely by her mother but

by society as well: "The mother's preference is

experienced not only as a rejection but as a betrayal, as

if by choosing a man as her primary love object the mother

affirms the superiority of males and acquiesces in her own

inferior status" (Herman and Lewis 150).

Laurel's consequent eccentricities thus seem much less

irrational in the light of this discovery. In The Second

Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes how 10- to 12-year-old girls respond to their discovery of their inferiority in

society, and her description sounds remarkably like a case

study of girls like Laurel:

. . . they become bored, and, through boredom and

to compensate for their position of inferiority,

they give themselves up to gloomy and romantic 75

daydreams; they get a taste for these easy escape

mechanisms and lose their sense of reality; they

yield to their emotions with uncontrolled

excitement; instead of acting, they talk, often

commingling serious phrases and senseless words in

hodgepodge fashion. Neglected, 'misunderstood,'

they seek consolation in narcissistic fancies:

they view themselves as romantic heroines of

fiction, with self-admiration and self-pity.

Quite naturally they become coquettish and stagy;

these defects becoming more conspicuous at

puberty. Their malaise shows itself in

impatience, tantrums, tears; . . . they like to

play the part of victims: at once a protest

against their hard lot and a way to make

themselves more appealing. (334)

Laurel's tantrums are common: "She's so fond of screaming"

(21). Her theatricality is also well-known to her grandmother: "Oh, Laurel— to make a drama . . .!" she tells Madrigal (21; ellipsis Bagnold's), adding a moment later, "She loves a small limelight!" (22). Mrs. St.

Maugham is familiar, too, with Laurel's penchant for lying, for making up stories. "She has a need for fantasy," she tells Madrigal. And she takes pride in her granddaughter's hodgepodge of sense and nonsense: "Words leap and change color in her mouth like fishes!" (32). She is, Maitland 76 says, "vain and in love with the glory of [her] misfortune!" (67).

Mrs. St. Maugham even encourages Laurel to see herself as a helpless victim. When Maitland cautions Laurel that if she finishes off the creme de menthe, her grandmother will be furious with her, she responds "Not with me. I'm not responsible," adding later, "I am a victim and you ought to love me" (38). She describes herself— not altogether accurately— as "a child that's been forsaken by its mother" (39) and cultivates Maitland's sympathy for her

(92). Certainly Mrs. St. Maugham contributes to Laurel's excesses: "But I encourage her. . . . One must be tender with her" (22; ellipsis added). When Madrigal objects that

"The child's outlandish!" Maitland replies, "Only what

Madame makes her" (12).

Like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Mrs. St.

Maugham is using a young woman to revenge herself upon someone she loved who has left her. Miss Havisham turns

Estella into an ice princess who attracts men without being attracted and can thus hurt men the way Miss Havisham's fiance hurt her. Estella is virtually destroyed in the process. In Bagnold's play, Mrs. St. Maugham turns Laurel into an irreparably damaged work of art, a damaged granddaughter who can attest to the perfidy of Olivia, who more or less jilted Mrs. St. Maugham. Just as Miss

Havisham encourages Estella to despise men, Mrs. St. 77

Maugham encourages Laurel to despise her own mother.

Laurel/ too/ is hurt by this use of her; when Madrigal asks whether her grandmother loves her, Laurel responds, "She thinks she does! . . . But I am only her remorse" (42).

Ultimately, however, Bagnold is kinder to her characters than Dickens was to his.

Mrs. St. Maugham sees Laurel as a kind of personal monument to her, as a work of art she is fashioning in remembrance of herself. She calls her "My original !" (129) and tells Madrigal, "Laurel is a novel one reads out loud!"

(32). She tells Olivia, "To me she is like a porcelain on a shelf— cracked in some marvelous way for the better!"

(142). She repeats this motif again and again:

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

She is my parchment sheet on which I write! I

hope she will remember my life and times! There

seems no one else to do it . . .

LAUREL

I am your little immortality! (33)

Immortality is what Mrs. St. Maugham seeks. She twice asks others whether there is an afterlife— first the Judge, who predictably equivocates (156), and then Madrigal, who answers with surprising definitiveness, "Certainly," explaining, "One does not sit alone for fifteen years without coming to conclusions" (162). Mrs. St. Maugham objects quite strenuously to the notion of her own eventual death: 78

LAUREL

I should have thought as one got older one found

death more natural.

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

(Beginning to sort out the lilies on the table)

Natural! It's as though the gods went

rook-shooting when one was walking confident in

the park of the world! and there are pangs and

shots, and one may be for me! Natural!

MADRIGAL

(Involuntarily)

That is why a garden is a good lesson. . . .

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

What?

MADRIGAL

(Looking through the window at garden. Low)

. . . so much dies in it. And so often.

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM

It's not a lesson I look for! . . .

(46-47; first two ellipses Bagnold's)

Mrs. St. Maugham apparently seeks to defeat death by making

a memorial out of her granddaughter, as she ultimately

confesses to her daughter:

OLIVIA

. . . Why did you want her?

MRS. ST. MAUGHAM 79

Is it a crime to want to be remembered? (Dryly)

The Pharaohs built the Pyramids for that reason.

OLIVIA

The thoughts of a daughter are a kind of memorial.

(161)

It is precisely this kind of immortality which the Demeter-

Persephone myth celebrates. Martin P. Nilsson suggests that for the Greeks,

. . . the individual was only a link in the chain

of the generations. Such an age had no need of a

belief in the immortality of the individual, but

it believed in the eternity of life in the sense

that life flows through the generations which

spring from each other. (60)

An excerpt from another of Enid Bagnold's works suggests that this impersonal immortality is what she envisions. In

The Squire, Bagnold's lyric novel on the experience of pregnancy and birth from what Carol H. Poston has called

"the participant point of view," the protagonist has four children and bears a son— but it is through her daughter,

Lucy, that she experiences immortality (Cosslett 281);

She took her place then in a line of women like a

figure on a roll of film, her mother before her,

her children behind. . . . "Lucy," whispered the

squire, and had an odd sense that Lucy was

herself, that she herself was her own mother, that

these three women were one. 80

And with a deep, female pride, she felt herself

an archway through which her children flowed; and

cared less that the clock in the arch's crown

ticked Time away. (263-64)

This intergenerational continuity, then, is the secret

of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret that the mother

gives in gratitude for the return of her daughter. "We are both mysterious," Laurel tells Madrigal, who responds, "The human heart is mysterious" (85-86). Understanding that mysteriousness, that mystery, is women's province; as

Laurel says of Madrigal, "she knows about life" (91).

Madrigal's knowledge may in part result from her gender:

Jean Baker Miller suggests that women, by virtue of their childcare work, have a privileged relationship to growth and change (54); Sara Ruddick sees growth as one of the three most important principles of what she calls "maternal thinking" (348). Bagnold would seem to subscribe to such a theory, although she recognizes that not all women possess such knowledge of the laws of growth, and those who do not possess such knowledge, who do not provide the nurturing necessary for growth, such as Mrs. St. Maugham, can damage

a child severely. But while some women lack this knowledge, men would seem to be at an even greater disadvantage, in that because of their separation from both children and gardens, they do not seem to have equal access to it in the first place. Madrigal speaks, for example, of

Pinkbell's "shallow knowledge of the laws of growth" (94). 81

At the end of the play, Laurel is literally reunited with her mother; they leave together. Olivia is metaphorically restored to her mother, as well; The two are reconciled, and Olivia has more or less assured Mrs.

St. Maugham that as a daughter, she will honor her mother's memory. Moreover, Madrigal, who has functioned throughout the play as a double for Olivia, seems perfectly willing to take her place as a daughter surrogate for Mrs. St.

Maugham.

With its verbal comedy, almost Eliotic use of language, and eccentric upper-middle-class characters. The Chalk

Garden is light, bright, and sparkling, especially compared to the Lessing stories and Woolf novel also included in this study. It is perhaps understandable that Doris

Lessing, a class-conscious realist, should during her brief stint as a theatre critic disparage the play as

"middle-class corn" (Page 4). With its two unambiguous reunions of two mother-daughter pairs, the play is genuinely and unreservedly optimistic about the possibilities for this relationship. The chapter that follows analyzes Lessing's much darker view. Chapter III

Mothers and Men

in Three Short Stories by Doris Lessing

In discussing the state of scholarship on Doris Lessing,

Paul Schleuter commented in 1978, "[L]ittle has been done regarding the short stories thus far" (6). Little has changed since then; while Lessing's novels have been extensively analyzed, interpreted, and discussed in the

critical literature, her other writings— which include plays, essays, poetry, and reviews, as well as short

stories— have largely been ignored: "Although she is hardly a neglected writer, her short fiction has received

surprisingly little critical attention, and it includes

some of her most accomplished work" (Gardiner Rhys, Stead,

Lessing 5). The lapse is especially surprising given the

quality of her short fiction; Lessing herself has

commented, "I think some of my best work is in my short

stories, actually" (Lessing "Entrevista" 6).

Only a handful of her stories— including the three

discussed here— concern mother-daughter relationships, but

anguished mothers and daughters haunt Lessing's work— most

82 83 notably, perhaps, in her Children of Violence series of novels and in Memoirs of a Survivor, a work she billed as autobiographical. Unlike both Burnett and Bagnold, however, she avoids sentimentality and never idealizes the mother's role; as Florence Howe observes, "... Doris

Lessing's stories don't make me feel comfortable. They're tough-minded, thoroughly unsentimental, sometimes cruel, often pessimistic, at least about personal relations. What comedy they offer is painful, black" (Howe 1).

Certainly she is pessimistic about personal relations in

"The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange," in which a British farmer hires a new assistant, an Afrikaner whose wife finds adjustment to the lonesomeness of the veldt difficult. The atmosphere of the story is Conradian; for example, like the

Company's chief accountant in Conrad's Heart of Darkness,

Major Gale is both admirable and slightly ridiculous in his dandified appearance; "... it was no easy matter not to let oneself go, not to let this damned disintegrating gaudy easy-going country get under one's skin. It wasn't easy, but he did it; . . . one finds a man like Major Gale only in exile" (105). The "long, timeless abstraction of growing things and mountains and silence" further sounds suspiciously similar to the "strange world of plants, and water, and silence" in Conrad's novella (34).

Unlike Conrad, however, Lessing focuses on female characters. She presents her story's central (and focal) 84 character, Mrs. Gale, as a failed Demeter figure. Like both Demeter and Persephone (Frazer 359), she, too, is associated with the corn, as her husband's image of her reveals :

Now he really observed her for a moment; he saw an

elderly Englishwoman, as thin and dry as a stalk

of maize in September, sitting poised over her

letters, one hand touching them lovingly, and

gazing at him with her small flower-blue eyes.

(106)

Even with him she is "a little too comforting and maternal"

(106). But she rejects Demeter's traditional attributes, just as she rejects her role as mother figure— or potential mother figure— to young Mrs. De Wet.

The story opens with a description of lush vegetation and the moon:

The verandah, which was lifted on stone

pillars, jutted forward over the garden like a box

in the theatre. Below were luxuriant masses of

flowering shrubs, and creepers whose shiny leaves,

like sequins, reflected light from a sky stained

scarlet and purple and apple-green. This

splendiferous sunset filled one half of the sky,

fading gently through shades of mauve to a calm

expanse of ruffling grey, blown over by tinted

cloudlets; and in this still evening sky, just

above a clump of darkening conifers, hung a small 85

crystal moon. (103)

Confronted with these traditional symbols of Demeter, however, "Mrs. Gale shook off nostalgia like a terrier

shaking off water and rose, saying 'Mosquitoes!'" (103).

She responds with similar irritation to her equivalent of

Demeter's torch, an important symbol of the goddess since

she presumably needed one to search the underworld for her

lost daughter (Richardson 167): "From time to time Mrs.

Gale rose impatiently to attend to the lamp, which did not burn well" (104).

Her reactions foreshadow her failure to respond to the

Persephone-like Mrs. De Wet, who is so young that Mrs. Gale

initially mistakes her for Mr. De Wet's child rather than his wife (112). Certainly Mr. De Wet, who is "burnt as brown as toffee" (112), is a Hades figure in Mrs. Gale's eyes. If, as Shirley Budhos asserts, ^ Wet means "law" in

Afrikaan (38), his very name suggests patriarchal authority. Certainly it is reminiscent of conflict and

foreshadows the clash between British and Afrikaaner settlers in this story: Christiaan Randolph De Wet led the

Boers against the British in the war in the Transvaal in

1880-81.

Jack De Wet had, Mrs. Gale tells herself, "behaved with violence and folly" (113). She later overhears a command— "You'll do what I tell you, my girl"— followed by

"sounds of scuffling, laughter, and a sharp slap" (114). 86

She ultimately discovers him engaged in domestic violence:

"There was De Wet, his face livid with rage, bending over his wife, who was huddled on the floor and shielding her head with her arms, while he beat her shoulders with his

closed fists" (126). But even in this early scene, both women are more or less afraid of him. Mrs. Gale is described as "glancing almost apprehensively at this man"

(112-13); Mrs. De Wet "glanced with delicious fear up at her husband" (113).

The similarity of these two lines suggests the ultimate

similarity of the two women. The girl— as Lessing generally refers to the young Mrs. De Wet in the course of

the story— is clearly a Persephone figure, perennially

dressed in "flowered frock[s]" (114, 116). She is later compared to "a queen who has been insulted" (123). While

she is not, like Persephone, abducted and raped, her life changes nearly as abruptly, as she confesses to Mrs. Gale:

"He met me in a cinema and we got married next day" (112).

She is brought down to an underworld home, a house of death: "It looked dead, a dead thing with staring eyes, with those blank windows gleaming pallidly back at the moon" (108). And like Persephone, this girl, too, grieves

for her loss— a loss which Mrs. Gale herself has experienced and which the older woman belatedly realizes

she could have done much to mitigate:

". . . I am so lonely. I wanted to get my mother

up to stay with me, only Jack said there wasn't 87

room, and he's quite right, only I got mad,

because I thought he might at least have had my

mother ..."

Mrs. Gale felt guilt like a sword: she could

have filled the place of this child's mother.

"And it isn't anything, Mrs. Gale, not really.

It's not that I'm not happy with Jack. I am, but

I never see him. I'm not used to this kind of

thing. I come from a family of thirteen counting

my parents, and I simply can't stand it."

Mrs. Gale sat and listened, and thought of her

own loneliness when she first began this sort of

life. (118)

That the older woman has shared this experience is clear. Mrs. De Wet speaks to Mrs. Gale, at least

initially, "as one girl to another" (113). She tells of

late-night walks, and Mrs. Gale remembers similar experiences in an acrimonious conversation with Major Gale:

"'Tell that fine young man that his wife often goes for

long walks by herself when he's asleep. He probably hasn't noticed it.' Here she gave a deadly look at her husband.

'Just as I used to,' she could not prevent herself adding"

(123). She also recalls staying up late trying to undo her own separation from all she had loved: "writing letters, reading old ones, thinking of her friends and of herself as a young girl" (118). 88

As in the myth, mother and maiden are doubles for each

other and become indistinguishable. Mrs. Gale's letters to

and from her old friend Betty help her preserve her sense

of herself as a Persephone who "came to exile in Southern

Rhodesia" (104); after reading the latest one, "she put it

aside gently and sat smiling quietly: she had gone back half a century to her childhood" (105). She enjoys

"dreaming about the past, the very distant past, when she had been Caroline Morgan, living near a small country town,

a country squire's daughter. That was how she liked best to think of herself" (107). Even her name, Mrs. Gale,

suggests a possible allusion to another young woman who is

involuntarily displaced to a strange and colorful alien

land but who yearns only to return home— Dorothy Gale of

Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.^

If the young Mrs. Gale was not exactly raped, neither was she an entirely willing sexual partner: "What a relief when he no longer 'loved' her! (That was how she put it.)

Ah, that 'love'— she thought of it with a small humorous distaste. Growing old had its advantages" (106). She

later remembers getting up to read letters "in the early

days after her husband had finished his brief and

apologetic embraces" (118).

Upon her arrival, she changed the farm's name from Kloof

Nek to Kloof Grange, "making a link with home" (107), and

even her furniture suggests her former homesickness: 89

"Africa and the English eighteenth century mingled in this room and were at peace" (104). But Mrs. Gale has overcome much of her initial loneliness, as the peace of the schizophrenically furnished room perhaps implies. It is her husband. Major Gale, who makes the most explicit reference to the myth, in which Persephone is abducted and taken to the underworld; "You always complain I bury you alive" (105). Ironically, it is in response to his comment that Mrs. Gale most clearly acknowledges her change of heart: "In fact, she had learned to love her isolation, and she felt aggrieved that he did not know it" (107).

She plans to do well by her new neighbor-woman: "She would arrange things, in kindness, for a woman who might be unused to living in loneliness; she would be good to this woman" (109). But she herself is enmeshed in the kingdom of death. She tries to pretend that this new arrival will be her friend Betty, "as if it were she who would be coming to the farm," but "something else was invading her dream: it was a very bad smell, an odour of decay mingled with the odour from the flowers. Something had died on the veld"

(109); it is, of course, her friendship with Betty "that had died years before. She knew it very well, but tried not to think of it. It was necessary to her to have Betty remain, in imagination at least, as a counter-weight to her loneliness" (110). The fact that the most recent letters are stained with blood and evidently bear the "sour smell 90

of raw meat" is richly symbolic of the deadness of the

friendship they represent (103-04); Major Gale's jocularly

patronizing remarks about "spooks" and the native servant's

dread of "unnameable phantoms, ghosts of ancestors, [and]

wraiths of tree and beast" further confirm the association

(104).

Trapped in the underworld herself, this Demeter is

unwilling or unable to rescue Persephone. Mrs. Gale is

cold and critical (115); "What could one talk to a girl

like that about? Nothing! Her mind, as far as Mrs. Gale was concerned, was a dark continent, which she had no

inclination to explore" (117). She repeatedly experiences

anger (or fury or rage) at Mrs. De Wet's situation (115,

122, 123, 125, 127), but her anger lacks the efficacy of

Demeter's. Young Mrs. De Wet waits expectantly for her

rescue: "She broke into bright chatter when a topic mercifully occurred to her; in between were polite silences

full of attention to what she seemed to hope Mrs. Gale might say" (119). But the older woman has nothing new to

tell her: "Mrs. Gale was saying silently under her breath,

with ironical pity, in which there was also cruelty: You'll

get used to it, my dear; you'll get used to it" (121). She

openly rejects the girl's mute appeals; the girl backs away

from her husband ". . . s o that she came side by side with Mrs. Gale:she even reached for the older woman's hand. Mrs. Gale did not take it: this was going too far"

(123). 91

The older woman recognizes her failure; "From time to

time Mrs. Gale wondered uneasily what on earth the poor

child did with herself all day, and felt it was her duty to go and find out. But she did not" (117). As Mary Ann

Singleton remarks,

The loneliness of Mrs. Gale's life has led to an

aloofness suggested by her favorite pastime,

sitting and watching the mountains . . . [T]he

remoteness the mountains suggest becomes concrete

when Mrs. Gale is unable to give the young woman

sympathy and comfort when she needs it. (73)

Even when Mrs. De Wet has her breakdown, Mrs. Gale

"hold[s] herself stiffly away from this disturbing contact"

(117); the girl, sensing Mrs. Gale's unease, promptly withdraws, to Mrs. Gale's astonishment: "But she felt more comfortable with the distance between them, she couldn't deny it" (119).

She does walk over later and offer to show Mrs. De Wet the garden: "Mrs. Gale was relying on the effect of her garden" (119). It is here that the older woman finds consolation:

. . . inside the fence were two acres of garden,

that she had created over years of toil. And what

a garden! These were what she lived for: her

flowering African shrubs, her vivid English lawns,

her water-garden with the goldfish and water

lilies. Not many people had such a garden. (108) 92

But the girl does not share her response to the greenery;

this Demeter has failed to rescue her daughter from the

underworld, and the long-sought-for reunion of mother and

daughter does not take place. As she leaves, she "lagged

up the path behind her husband like a sulky small girl,

pulling at Mrs. Gale's beloved roses and scattering crimson

petals everywhere" (121). Ironically, the girl responds to

the river, instead; as Richardson notes, "The cult of

Demeter and Perspehone is especially connected with sacred

springs" (181).

When the girl inexplicably disappears, Mrs. Gale responds much as Demeter did; she, too, begins to destroy vegetation, in a way that again underscores her similarity to Mrs. De Wet: "... she was walking crazily up and down her garden through the bushes, tearing blossoms and foliage to pieces in trembling fingers. She had no idea how time was passing ..." (125). She refuses to sleep or eat or even sit down:

That night Mrs. Gale hated her garden, that

highly-cultivated patch of luxuriant growth, stuck

in the middle of a country that could do this sort

of thing to you suddenly. It was all the fault of

the country! In a civilised sort of place, the

girl would have caught the train to her mother,

and a wire would have put everything right. Here,

she might have killed herself, simply because of a

passing fit of despair. Mrs. Gale began to get 93

hysterical. She was weeping softly in the circle

of her husband's arm by the time the sky lightened

and the redness of dawn spread over the sky.

(126)

Like Demeter, too, Mrs. Gale is especially angered by her knowledge that both Major Gale and Jack De Wet— who in this respect rather resemble Zeus and Hades— have colluded against her and her "daughter." Just as Demeter is furious that she was not consulted concerning her own daughter's marriage, Mrs. Gale is furious at the way she is excluded from conversation:

Major Gale left his meal and went out to the

verandah to discuss business. Mrs. Gale finished

her dinner in state, and then joined the two men.

Her husband rose politely at her coming, offered

her a chair, sat down and forgot her presence.

She listened to them talking for some two hours.

Then she interjected a remark (a thing she never

did, as a rule, for women get used to sitting

silent when men discuss farming) and did not know

herself what made her say what she did about the

cattle; but when De Wet looked around absently as

if to say she should mind her own business, and

her husband remarked absently, "Yes, dear," when a

Yes dear did not fit her remark at all, she got up

angrily and went indoors. Well, let them talk,

then, she did not mind. (115) 94

She is further incensed when her husband laughs in response to Jack De Wet's remark that "I'd better be getting home.

I'll catch it hot/ as it is" (115). Later/ De Wet stops by to see if the Gales had seen his wife:

". . . Maybe she's gone further this time— being

upset/ you know."

"Yes/ I know/" said Major Gale. Then they

both laughed. The laughter was of a quite

different quality from the sober responsibility

of their tone a moment before: and Mrs. Gale

found herself sitting up in bed/ muttering: "How

dare he?" (124)

But unlike Demeter/ Mrs. Gale does not seek out her

"daughter" herself; although she offers suggestions on where to search/ she waits passively at home rather than going out to help. In the final moments of the story, when she attempts to take the side of the abused wife against her violent and insensitive husband, Mrs. Gale's failure becomes brutally clear: "Mrs. De Wet heaved herself off the floor, rushed on Mrs. Gale, pulled her back so that she nearly lost balance, and then flung herself on her husband.

'Jack/' she said, clinging to him desperately, 'I am so sorry, I am so sorry. Jack'" (127). Abandoned by Demeter, this Persephone has chosen to love her abductor; in this, she is more like Mrs. Gale than either woman recognizes. 95

Nancy Chodorow notes that women "try to fulfill their need to be loved" and "try to reexperience the sense of dual unity they had with their mother" in two chief ways;

One way that women fulfill these needs is through

the creation and maintenance of important personal

relations with other women. . . . However, deep

affective relationships to women are hard to come

by on a routine, daily, ongoing basis for many

women. . . . There is a second alternative, made

all the more significant by the elimination of the

first. (200)

This second alternative is to have a child: "The exclusive symbiotic mother-child relationship of a mother's own infancy reappears, a relationship which all people who have been mothered want basically to recreate" (201). As

Chodorow goes on to explain.

Women come to want and need primary relationships

to children. These wants and needs result from

wanting intense primary relationships, which men

tend not to provide both because of their place in

women's oedipal constellation and because of their

difficulties with intimacy. (203)

In attempting to reassure the hysterical Mrs. De Wet,

Mrs. Gale recalls her initial sense of isolation and thinks, "But that was before she had her first child. She thought: This girl should have a baby; and could not help 96

glancing downwards at her stomach"; Mrs. De Wet "said

resentfully: 'Jack says I should have a baby. That's all

he says'" (118). Clearly, both Mrs. Gale and Mr. De Wet

are simultaneously correct and culpable: A child would

probably help the girl by giving her the closeness she

craves— but so could either her husband or the only woman

available to befriend her. Mrs. Gale later realizes that

advising the girl to have a child amounts to acknowledging

the impossibility of intimate heterosexual relationships:

"The story is meshed with hints of marital inequities,

bitterness, and compromises which remain unspoken and

insoluble" (Budhos 39). Mrs. Gale responds to Mr. De Wet with anger: "'You don't realize,' said Mrs. Gale futilely,

knowing perfectly well there was nothing he could do about

it. 'You don't understand how it is'" (122). "There's more to women than having children," she later contends

(123). But part of her anger is, or should be, at herself, for failing the girl as much as the girl's husband has. In their initial meeting, the girl tells Mrs. Gale how she and her husband had met: "It seemed as if she were

in some way offering herself to the older woman, offering

something precious of herself" (112). It is Mrs. Gale's

failure to accept this offering, to respond to a woman in

need, that drives Mrs. De Wet to behave as she does. This

story, like others by Lessing, "hides both a subtext of

female bonding and a feminine fear of closeness" (Gardiner 97

Rhys, Stead, Lessincr 102). Mrs. Gale prefers her own

imagination to other people; she imagines the brothers who

used to own her farm until she discovers they had fought

with each other and mismanaged the farm: "After this

discovery Mrs. Gale ceased to think about them; a pleasant

fancy had become a distasteful reality" (107). No wonder,

then, that the story opens by comparing the Gales' verandah

to "a box in the theatre" and describes the couple as

"critically watching, like connoisseurs, the pageant

presented for them" (103). They are spectators rather than

participants in life.

In failing to respond adequately to Mrs. De Wet, Mrs.

Gale is condemning her to a kind of death from which the

younger woman can rescue herself only by in turn becoming a mother. Lessing implicitly condemns Mrs. Gale for her

failure to respond, which suggests that the author sees a

need for such woman-to-woman bonding while simultaneously

recognizing the unlikelihood of achieving such friendships.

If Doris Lessing is skeptical about the possibility of

close relationships among women, she is even less sanguine

about the possibility of creating and maintaining a deep

affective relationship with men, as she demonstrates vividly and lyrically in her short story "Flavours of

Exile."

"Flavours of Exile" simultaneously makes the most overt

reference to the Demeter-Persephone myth and— superficially 98 at least— seems the least concerned of the three stories dealt with here with mother-daughter relationships.^ In the story, the narrator, an adult woman, recalls herself at twelve, when she and her family lived in Africa.

Exasperated by her mother's homesickness and her obsession with the foods she ate as a child, the unnamed protagonist proceeds to fall in love with the boy next door, William.

She develops an interest in her mother's pomegranate tree, which has unexpectedly begun to flower; she waits anxiously for a single pomegranate to ripen so that she can share it with her childhood friend and would-be lover, William.

When she finally brings him to see the fruit, he declares it rotten and brutally smashes it with a stick. The protagonist returns with him to their families and pretends not to care.

Certainly the pomegranate recalls the myth; "The pomegranate is exotic and special to both mother and daughter because it is a symbol of their own lives, of daughter becoming mother. . . . Hence William's attack, with its sexual imagery, is a symbolic rape, the young girl his victim" (Allen 8). Gardiner offers a similar analysis, using the Roman names for the characters of the myth:

Like the god of the underworld, the boy

separates Proserpina the pomegranate-eater from

Ceres, her mother, violently breaking the girl's

identification with her mother as a sexual,

maternal person by breaking her identification 99

with her mother's exotic fruit. At the same time,

as in the Proserpina myth, this rupture of the

preoedipal mother-daughter bond places the

daughter in an oedipal subordination to

patriarchal culture and dominant values. Her

Eden destroyed, its fruit uneaten, she joins the

boy in humoring the adults; she too becomes a

grownup, that is, a socially responsible person

who hides her feelings and expresses proper

cliches. She allows the dominant culture of home

and family to define her and her experience.

Although the narrator adapts to her social

situation, the author rebels against this

conformity by stressing its falseness and the

violence needed to bring it about.

("Exhiliration" 139)

Gardiner notes that while the mother in the story is both "active" and "angry," the father is "shadowy, barely there" ("Exhiliration" 137) but does not note the resemblance here to the Homeric Hymn. In comparing the story to a similar short story by Jean Rhys, she dissects the element of dominance that underlies the story:

In both stories, the oppressive imposition of

adult values on children parallels the impositions

of the master culture on the colonial one and is

complicated by the imposition of male authority on

women. (137) 100

Like Mrs. Gale and Persephone, the protagonist's mother is

exiled against her will in an alien world. And, as

Gardiner points out, Lessing's protagonist, like

Persephone, does ultimately achieve identification with her

mother: "... the narrator's own nostalgia exactly

parallels her mother's, albeit with the poles of Africa and

England reversed" ("Exhiliration" 145).

Surprisingly, however, Gardiner argues that Lessing's

story "champions heterosexuality" in that the girl's crush

liberates her from her family and its values: "... the

story thus redefines heterosexuality itself as a kind of

exile, breaking the dominant culture of home, encouraging motion away from its closed circuit, and therefore enabling

art" (Rhys, Stead, Lessing 15). Admittedly, Lessing does

redefine heterosexuality as a kind of exile, but hardly as

a positive experience, as Gardiner suggests. On the

contrary, because "puberty requires that she deny the

beauty of her own womanhood," the protagonist of this story

"suffers the most tragic exile of all, an exile from her

own sense of self" (Allen 8, 12).

William brutalizes not simply one girl, but female

sexuality as a whole. Lessing here unites classical,

Judeo-Christian, and modernist depictions of female

sexuality through one densely allusive paragraph: "I

looked at the ugly little tree and thought. Pomegranates!

Breasts like pomegranates and a belly like a heap of wheat! 101

The golden pomegranates of the sun, I thought . . . pomegranates like the red of blood" (550). While the pomegranate suggests Greco-Roman myth, Lessing insists on further associations as well: The narrator's reference to

"breasts like pomegranates and a belly like a heap of wheat" is not a direct quotation from the Song of Songs but certainly falls within that rich tradition of celebrating heterosexuality and the body. Moreover, the bride in Song of Songs is repeatedly compared to pomegranates and describes herself as waiting to see if the pomegranates had bloomed.

Lessing's imagery of Persia (which appears in similar form in an autobiographical essay entitled "My Father") recalls the Middle Eastern setting of the Biblical poetry:

". . . she had lived among roses and jasmine, walnut trees and pomegranates" (549). The narrator recalls this sensual imagery when she imagines, in rather hazy and veiled terms, her own sexual initiation: "William MacGregor would come visiting with his parents and find me among the pomegranate trees; I could hear the sound of his grave voice mingled with the tinkle of camel bells and the splashing of falling water" (551).

The second comment, "the golden pomegranates of the sun," surely alludes to W.B. Yeats's "The Song of Wandering

Aengus," a poem short enough to be worth quoting in full:

I went out to the hazel wood.

Because a fire was in my head. 102

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame.

But something rustled on the floor.

And some one called me by my name;

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossoms in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone.

And kiss her lips and take her hands; and walk among long dappled grass.

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon.

The golden apples of the sun.

(Yeats 149-50) 103

Lessing's story could be read as a revision of Yeats's poem from the point of view of the girl. In Lessing's revision, the girl's abrupt departure is neither whimsical nor arbitrary; she leaves because she is both rejected and repulsed by male violence, specifically sexual violence.

Such violence may also be implicit in the imagery of

Yeats's poem, whose narrator possesses a "hazel wand" rather like the stick William picks up. The imagery of the poem's final line does suggest female sexuality, among other associations. The berry that the narrator uses as bait further recalls the innocent sensuality of the gooseberries in Lessing's story:

We used to creep under them, William MacGregor and

I, lie flat on our backs, and look through the

leaves at the brilliant sky, reaching around us

for the tiny sharp-sweet yellow fruits in their

jackets of papery white. The smell of the leaves

was spicy. It intoxicated us. We would laugh and

shout, then quarrel; and William, to make up,

shelled a double-handful of the fruit and poured

it into my skirt, and we ate together, pressing

the biggest berries on each other. (548)

The contrast between this sensuality and William's savagery further recalls the myth, which presents two contrasting possibilities for women: "The first, the innocent virginal state, is a romantic paradise of carefree 104

joy. . . • The second, the patriarchal order controlled by

men, carelessly and brutally disregards women's feelings

and imposes helplessness upon them" (Arthur 14). No

wonder, then, that in Lessing's version, the female

protagonist retreats in dismay. Lessing herself has

commented that when she was writing The Grass is Singing,

she "was soaked in Eliot and Yeats and Hopkins" (Bertelsen

148), so she was very likely familiar with the poem.

The concluding reference in this paragraph-long

meditation on the meaning of the pomegranate is

"pomegranates like the red of blood" (550). Like Laurel in

Bagnold's play, Lessing's protagonist is twelve when she

undergoes her symbolic rape. Her age and the imagery of

this passage suggest that it is puberty— specifically, menarche— which prompts her conflict. References to the

pomegranate's "sticky red ooze" and a "scar [which] oozed

red juice" connote menstruation, as well, albeit in

pejorative terms (551-52).

As Gardiner notes ("Exhiliration" 138), later imagery

confirms the association of the pomegranate with female

sexuality and specifically with maternity and the mother;

"The fruit looked lumpy and veined, like a nursing breast"

(554). The seeds are linked to fertility: "I spat them

out and thought that a score of pomegranate trees would

grow from that mouthful" (551). The narrator's imagery

suggests an extraordinary fecundity, as, for example, when 105 she contemplates ants beginning to pick up seeds from a burst pomegranate; "The ants would carry these seeds for hundreds of yards; there would be an orchard of pomegranates" (551).

But Lessing also describes the pomegranate in imagery that suggests the daughter; the first fruit, for example, is "the size of a child's fist" (550), and the tree itself, the narrator says, "is about my height, a tough, obstinate-looking thing" (550). While she waits for the single yellow fruit to mature, she thinks to herself, "it seemed as if my whole life was concentrated and ripening with that single fruit" (551). Once ripe, it will be "the size of both my fists," she realizes (551). And the narrator herself carefully distinguishes her disdain for her mother's nostalgia from her respect for her mother's interest in the pomegranates: "The truth was, my emotion over the pomegranates was not entirely due to the beautiful lesson in courtesy given me by William. . . .

[P]omegranates were an exotic for my mother; and therefore more easily shared with her" (549). As Gardiner explains,

"... she is trying to identify with her mother's tastes by fostering her mother's sickly pomegranate tree. It not only represents the narrator's efforts to unite with her mother but also her adolescent self on the verge of sexual awakening ..." (Rhys, Stead, Lessing 15). 106

The initiation the narrator awaits is clearly sexual;

. . it must happen that William and the moment when the pomegranate split open would coincide" (552). She tells herself "[I]t must be the final unbearable thrust of the hot sun that would break it" (552).

William's reaction is foreshadowed in the text. When she first falls in love with him, the narrator remembers,

"I gazed and gazed, until he gave me a slow, direct look that showed he knew I had been staring. It was like a warning, as if a door had been shut" (550). She later contrasts "that marvelous feverish world" of love with the actual presence of "a half-grown boy in dusty khaki, gripping a piece of grass between his teeth as he stared ahead of him" (552). She must prompt her mother to invite the whole family over in order to see him, and when he does arrive, she must call him to her; even then, after initially ignoring her, he frowns, swears at the thorns, and responds angrily, pronouncing the pomegranate "bad" and her "mad" (553-54). Afterwards, too, he gazes at her:

"Those clear eyes were grave again, thoughtful, and judging. They held that warning I had seen in them before"

(554). William seems to be warning her against himself, warning her not to expect the romance and the emotional response that he can't give.

Perhaps most disturbing of all is what she terms his

"indulgence" of her mother (553). When her mother prepares the long-awaited Brussels sprouts. 107

I said scornfully that I couldn't see what all the

fuss was about. But William, three years older

than myself, passed the plate up and said he found

them delicious. It was like a betrayal; and

afterwards I demanded how he could like such

flavourless stuff. He smiled at me and said it

cost us nothing to pretend, did it? (549)

What she later terms "the beautiful lesson in courtesy given me by William" is, in fact, a betrayal— but not in the sense she means. William is not betraying her by siding with her mother; on the contrary, he is teaching her how to side with him, how to accept the patriachal,

Conradian view of women as creatures who must be protected from the truth. The next time her mother prepares one of her English delicacies, "I sighed with her, ate fervently, and was careful not to meet her eyes" (549).

"[0]ne's first love is inevitably the enemy of one's family because it is through this love that the power of early ties is diminished," Katherine Dalsimer writes in

Female Adolescence (78). But Lessing's narrator sees the break in less sanguine terms than Dalsimer and Gardiner do.

The narrator is, after all, indulging in nostalgia even in the act of narration, and it is her mother's nostalgia that she most despised as a young girl. This daughter, like her mother, especially recalls (and even mourns) the food of her youth, and it is hardly coincidental that it is mothers 108 who first nourish children. The narrator makes this association between garden-grown vegetables and maternal love explicit when she writes of her mother, "She had in her mind, perhaps, a vision of the farmhouse surrounded by outbuildings and gardens like a hen sheltering its chicks"

(548). In mourning the loss of her mother's irreplaceable home-grown vegetables, she is mourning the loss of her mother's nurturing, recalling with nostalgia the lost plenitude of maternal love: "Nursed from that fabulous soil, carrots, lettuces, beets, tasting as I have never found vegetables taste since, loaded our table and the tables of our neighbors" (547, emphasis added). In telling the story and lamenting the loss of those first foods, the narrator is enacting her own return to the mother.

Moreover, since the eating of a pomegranate represents sexual initiation in the myth, the narrator's longing for the foods of her youth perhaps indicates that she prefers the passion of the mother-daughter relationship to the passion of heterosexuality. The action of the story brings about the narrator's damage rather than her growth; the narrative essentially chronicles this Persephone's descent into Hades.

Frederick R . Karl sees this pattern as characteristic of

Lessing's work:

While the English novel has not lacked female

novelists, few indeed— including Virginia Woolf—

have tried to indicate what it is like to be a 109

woman; that is, the sense of being an object or

thing even in societies whose values are

relatively gentle. For her portraits, Mrs.

Lessing has adopted, indirectly, the rather

unlikely form of the descent into hell, a mythical

pattern characterized by her female protagonists

in their relationships with men, an excellent

metaphor for dislocation and fragmentation in the

sixties. Like Persephone, her women emerge

periodically from the underworld to tell us what

went awry— and it is usually sex. (77)

Only much later in her career, in a work published in the unlikely (but ultimately appropriate) venue of a popular

American women's magazine, did Lessing begin to write more hopefully about women's lives.

Lessing has long demonstrated in her work a love-hate relationship with women's magazines, which she seems to regard as contemporary equivalents of conduct books: repressive, didactic works which stress conformity to tired gender roles and which celebrate frivolity at the expense of thought. Ella, the fictional figure that Anna creates in The Golden Notebook, works for Home and Hearth; its parodically conventional name perhaps suggests a certain disdain on Anna's part, and quite possibly Lessing's.

Lessing is more openly scornful in Play with a Tiger. When

Harry taunts Tom with the prospect that his new job will 110 entail "administering to the spiritual needs of the women of the nation through the 'Ladies Own'" (sic, 13), Tom responds, "I'm only going to be on the business side. I won't be responsible for the rubbish they— " and "stops, annoyed with himself. Harry and Mary laugh at him" (13).

Clearly, women's magazines epitomize the establishment, and writing for them amounts to selling out.

Lessing modifies her stance slightly in The Diaries of

Jane Somers, in which Janna edits a women's magazine named

Lilith; here, Lessing recognizes the work which goes into such publications, although not exactly endorsing their contents. Nonetheless, the publication of a Lessing short story in the April 1989 issue of Ladies' Home Journal comes as something of a surprise. Given the story's content, however, its publication there is not altogether inappropriate.

As the magazine puts it, in "Among the Roses," "The renowned British writer examines the most complicated relationship of all; the one between a mother and her daughter" (96)^ In the story, Myra, the mother, visits a rose garden in Regent's Park and unexpectedly encounters her daughter, Shirley, whom she has not seen since they quarreled in Myra's garden three years earlier. Shirley had earlier made clear her disdain for her mother's hobby:

"Shirley not only hated plants and gardens, but the country as well .... [S]he thought people who gardened were Ill stupid and boring. Yet here she was" (100). Spotting her daughter, Myra thinks to herself, "What was she doing here?

The last place! Flower gardens were not her style at all, let alone being by herself. Shirley was never alone, she hated it" (99). Myra watches her daughter take a cutting from one of the roses on display and marvels, "Shirley into gardening! Was it likely?" (99). Myra only gradually realizes why Shirley is there at all: "Suddenly it occurred to [Myra]: Perhaps she came here hoping to run into me? She knows I come here a lot" (103). Myra's suspicions are confirmed when she moves away, only to hear

Shirley's "noisy feet running" after her (103).

Every event in the story takes place in the context of one garden or another.^ The imagery of roses, birds, and fountains suggests traditional Marian imagery, and Myra's name is an anagram of Mary; the garden is at one point identified as "Queen Mary's Rose Garden," in reference, of course, to the former Queen of England, but perhaps suggesting the Queen of Heaven as well (96). The ubiquity of gardens in the work further suggests the idyllic meadow of flowers from which the young Kore was abducted in the ancient Greek myth, and the rebirth of vegetation when mythological mother and daughter were reunited in the hymn.

Shirley suffers during her exile to the underworld— in this case, marriage to a physically abusive man who roughly parallels Hades. Myra notes that Shirley looks 112

"discontent/" "sad," "alone and lonely" (100). Shirley later, uncharacteristically, tells her mother, "I'd just like to see you, I've been missing you, believe it or not"

(105). The separation has hurt Myra as well. When she first spots her daughter, "Myra at once felt a much too familiar anguish, which she chose to attribute to the tactlessness that permitted that dress on that body" (99; emphasis added). She is later more honest with herself;

"Soon Shirley came in, and Myra's heart hurt at the sight of that face ..." (100). Clearly their separation has grieved them both.

If they need each other so desperately, why, then, have they spent three years avoiding each other? Shirley ostensibly broke off the relationship over her mother's nosiness. Myra had gone over to Shirley's house on a visit: "No answer from the front door, so she went to the back and there, through the window of the kitchen, saw

Shirley having it off with some man certainly not her husband" (99-100). Not surprisingly, a quarrel follows this inverted primal scene. As Shirley then indicates, it's not her mother's "spying" (100) that bothers her, but the prospect of her mother's life: "If she, Shirley, thought she was going to end up like her mother, then . . .

It went on and on . . ." (99). Shirley doesn't want to

"end up like her mother," to ^ like her mother, to become her mother. 113

Timid and conventional, Myra, much like Mrs. Gale, abhors conflict and much prefers the peace of rose gardens to the Sturm and drang of human relationships. In her passage through the gardens, she considers that what she most enjoys is her sense of control and choice: "There was no greater pleasure than this, wandering through roses and deciding. I'll have you . . . no, you . . . no, perhaps . .

." (96). In her role as a mother, she lacks such control and choice, and clearly, this lack disturbs her. Two years ago, she had chosen a rose called "Just Joey"; "joey" is a slang term used to refer to a young animal or child (OED).

"This charmer had done well," Myra recalls (96), not unlike her elder daughter, Lynda. As this year's choice, she prefers a rose called "L'Oreal Trophy" to the one Shirley chooses, "Troika": "Myra was not going to buy that, it lacked subtlety, did not have that unearthly shimmer to it"

(100). Unfortunately, Myra cannot so easily reject her daughter, who is also, in her opinion, "bold, highly colored" and lacking in subtlety (99).

Interestingly, what seems to disturb Myra most about her problem child is Shirley's physicality: "The dress was too tight and emphasized a body that managed to be thin and lumpy at the same time, because of big buttocks and prominent shoulders" (99). During the confrontation that results in their three-year separation, "Myra stood listening to Shirley standing there with her hands on her 114

round hips, her big knees showing under a short ugly dress,

her face scarlet with rage— and thought how common she

looked" (99). Myra later observes Shirley, "her big

shoulders hunched forward, her shining black hair making

licks down her red cheeks, her short gaudy skirt showing

big knees" and paradoxically notes immediately following

this extraordinarily uncharitable description, "This ugly woman was attractive to men, always had been, even as a

small girl. Men were looking at her now" (100). Myra's

description of Shirley is obviously distorted by Myra's own biases. She is uncomfortable with Shirley's sexuality,

perhaps because she has so thoroughly repressed her own.

Ironically, this daughter is more "earthy" than Demeter.

Like Shirley, Myra is dismayed by the differences between herself and her daughter. Greatly disturbed by

their quarrel, "Myra had not bothered to get in touch after

that. The truth was, she was glad of the excuse not to see her" (99). She prefers the more congenial Lynda, whom she

thinks of as "her other (her real!) daughter" (99) to the

troublesome Shirley;

Lynda, the elder daughter . . . now lived the same

kind of life her mother did, with two children, a

boy and a girl. When the two women were together,

Myra and Lynda— ample, slow, calm-eyed— people

knew at once they were mother and daughter, but no

one had ever at once thought Shirley was Myra's

daughter or Lynda's sister. Where had Shirley 115

come from? (100)

Myra apparently sees Shirley as a kind of changeling, a

daughter so foreign to herself that any relationship is

certain to be complex at best. Yet ironically, as the

story goes on to show, the two are more alike than they are

different.

For example, Shirley pauses before "a rose Myra herself

rather fancied," and Myra thinks to herself, "By this time

next year the plant would be in Myra's garden. And in

Shirley's?" (100). Similarly, Myra is described as

"adjusting her pace to her daughter's" (99).

Later, in a less peaceful moment, Shirley shrieks that

her mother "always put up with everything" and angrily

demands to know why her mother has never stood up to "Dad"

(105)— yet paradoxically, she herself admits of her former

husband, "He beat me. Mum!", and Myra detects a tone of

admiration in Shirley's voice (103). In Of Woman Born,

Adrienne Rich writes: "Many daughters live in rage at

their mothers for having accepted, too readily and

passively, 'whatever comes.' A mother's victimization does

not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who

watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman"

(243). Rich later goes on to point out that "a daughter

can feel rage at her mother's powerlessness or lack of

struggle— because of her intense identification and because

in order to fight for herself she needs first to have been 116 both loved and fought for" (244). Thus even Shirley's anger grows from her sense of unity with her mother.

Moreover, throughout the story, both Myra and Shirley consciously make reciprocal gestures of identification with each other; Shirley begins by taking up her mother's hobby of gardening; Myra responds by inviting Shirley to see her roses. Myra mentions that Dad is "off fishing this weekend" (105), and Shirley in turn confides that the man she lives with goes on "'nature rambles . . . every bloody weekend'" (105). Myra notes the similarity of their situations: "'Then I'll be a fishing widow and you'll be a nature-ramble widow,' dared Myra, smiling— as she knew— with nervousness" (105).

It is this final gesture of identification which very nearly sets Shirley off once again. These tentative gestures of identification further echo the Demeter-Kore myth, in which the mother and daughter are doubles (Kerenyi

32-33). The Homeric Hymn and Lessing's short story resemble each other structurally, as well. As with The

Chalk Garden, male family members are conspicuous by their absence; the reader knows next to nothing of Myra's husband, and Shirley's husband and lovers are only slightly more present. Christine Downing's remark about the hymn pertains equally well to Lessing's story: "Clearly this representation of a primal dyad between mother and daughter, not intruded upon by a father or siblings, could 117 fairly be called 'a family romance'" (230). Moreover, in both the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Lessing's short story,

"the attempt to re-establish the mother child unity is related . . . from the mother's point of view" (41n28).

At least in part the breach between mother and daughter suggests a division between two not-quite-reconcilable worlds— one of female community and another of heterosexuality. When Shirley initially rejects her mother's gardening as a hobby, "She claimed she loathed

Nature except (wink, wink) for a little of what you fancy"

(100)— thus making explicit this choice between two alternatives. It is, after all, her mother's (literal) glimpse of her active sexuality that causes the breach between them in the first place. Others have noted such divided allegiances in Lessing's oeuvre, most notably, perhaps, in The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and

Five, the second volume in her space fiction series:

The avatar of this triangle may be Doris Lessing

herself, the Outsider, Everywoman on the veld,

with the wise, omnipotent, unattainable, remote

British Empire on one side, and the warm, human,

emotional, impoverished, culturally inferior (in

the eyes of white settlers), ignorant, black

population on the other. Or perhaps the paradigm

is even more personal: Doris Lessing torn between

the remote, aloof father and the emotional. 118

irrational, less admirable mother of the Children

of Violence novels. (Kaplan 152)

As we have seen, Gilligan suggests that this pattern, which

Marianne Hirsch describes as one of "oscillation," can be life-affirming: "... the life cycle itself arises from alternation between the world of women and that of men"

(23). Lessing affirms this pattern in Marriages, in which only the marriage of a man and a woman who come from alien worlds can restore fruitfulness to both their planets.

Certainly, as a number of her critics have noted,

Lessing favors dialectic both as a mode of thought and as a narrative strategy (Sprague 4).^ She implies in "Among the Roses" that this relationship may be a dialectical one, that mother and daughter will once again quarrel— and once again return to each other, that they will endlessly repeat the cycle. Before Shirley approaches her, "Myra decided for the hundredth time she didn't want any more of Shirley"

(103). Later, Shirley, perhaps a little frightened when her mother uses the same word, "widow," to refer to them both, very nearly explodes in a fit of temper: "She stopped, evidently remembering that she had just made up with her mother and did not want to quarrel again. At least not yet" (105). Even the story's final sentence suggests repetition; Myra sighs: "But she changed the sigh into a cough, for fear it would set Shirley off again"

(105). As Marianne Hirsch writes of the myth, "Loss is 119 presented as inevitable, part of the natural sequence of

growth, but, since time is cyclical, mother-daughter

reunion forms a natural part of the cycle" (5).

Lessing's story, then, emphasizes cycle as well as

dialectic. Myra apparently returns to the rose garden

annually, and her route is a "circuit" that brings her back

"to where she had started" (96, 99). She and her daughter

repeatedly meet in rose gardens, and a rose garden will be

the site of their next meeting. Claire Sprague suggests

that Lessing's mother-daughter repetitions "are one expression of the inevitability, perhaps even the desirability, of circularity in fiction and in life" (121);

Betsy Draine, too, has argued forcefully and convincingly of Lessing's Children of Violence series that "It is

Martha's reaction to the idea of repetition that is futile, and not the cycle itself. . . . [T]here is saving power in the cycle of repetition" (196).

As Draine's quote suggests, the anguished mother-daughter relationship in this short story seems a kinder, gentler version of the embattled relationship of

Martha and May Quest in Lessing's Children of Violence

series, in which "the mother-daughter battle is never resolved" (Sprague 62). Shirley's "characteristic sullen defiance" (99) is equally characteristic of Martha, as are

Shirley's two marriages, her series of jobs, and her unpredictable outbursts of rage at her mother. Both Martha 120 and Shirley resemble their creator in many respects;

Lessing, too, had a stormy relationship with her own mother, as she explains in an essay entitled "Impertinent

Daughters":

Better say, and be done with it; my memories of

her are all of antagonism, and fighting, and

feeling shut out; of pain because the baby born

two-and-a-half years after me was so much loved

when I was not. She would recognize none of this,

nor accept it. . . . She didn't like me— that was

the point. It was not her fault: I cannot think

of a person less likely than myself to please her.

But it would have been impossible for her to admit

it: a mother loves her child; a child its mother.

And that's that! (61)

What James Gindin has said of Martha could arguably be applied to Shirley, as well: "Her emotional attachment to her mother is deeper than that to either of the two husbands she marries in unsuccessful attempts to discover herself" (68).^ Shirley seems, however, to be approaching a realization of this attachment that Martha achieves only after her mother's death. For Martha, "It is women, not men, who are the enemy, and in defense against any alliance with the women who fail, who give in, Martha ranges herself with the men" (Sukenick 106). Adrienne Rich is blunter still about Lessing's work: 121

. . . [T]he failure of The Four-Gated City and of

what has come after is a real failure to envisage

any kind of political bonding of women and any

kind of really powerful central bonding of women,

even though individual women get together in her

novels and go through intense things together. In

some ways I feel it goes back to that notion which

she evidently has, that women become lesbians—

bitter and full of hatred— not because there is a

fulfillment in loving women, but because there is

this terrible battle of the sexes going on and men

just get to be too much to deal with. . . .

(Rich "An Interview" 182)

But Lessing seems, in this story at least, to be showing

women attempting to create such a bond, although admittedly with great difficulty and some reluctance. Shirley's anger

at her mother is extreme, out of proportion. Her response

perhaps suggests that there is something fishy about her

father's fishing trip; marriages in Lessing's fiction are

rarely portrayed positively, and she generally implies that

extramarital affairs are almost inevitable. But Shirley's

"furious black resentment that positively scorched her

mother" may also be displaced anger, anger at the men and

the society that place both her mother and herself in such

a weak, dependent position that they must "put up with

everything" and never stand up to their husbands (105). 122

Contrary, perhaps, to Rich's critique, Lessing has

elsewhere suggested that such mother-daughter conflict is

not inherent in the relationship and that, in fact,

patriarchy divides women from each other. In her

nonfiction work entitled In Pursuit of the English, she presents an especially tortured mother-daughter pair, Mrs.

Skeffington and Rosemary. Mrs. Skeffington repeatedly

abuses her daughter both physically and verbally, so

severely that the narrator contemplates calling the

authorities. Her friend Rose argues against the idea:

"What she needs help for, is against her husband and what

are they going to do about him?" (92). Rose insists that

the beleaguered Mrs. Skeffington mistreats her daughter

only because of her financial anxiety, physical exhaustion,

and understandable resentment of her boorish husband's

incessant sexual demands. He will tire of her and leave.

Rose shrewdly predicts: "And then she'll be better off and her temper'll improve. You'll see" (93). They notice,

later, that Rosemary no longer cries during the night, a

fact whose significance Rose proceeds to explain:

"The way I look at it is this. My lady upstairs

knows she's had that precious husband of hers for

good. She's stopped fretting. Or at least she's

stopped working herself up, and she doesn't have

to fetch and carry for the lazy beast. So she's

not taking it out on Rosemary." (206) 123

As in the Demeter-Persephone myth, then, "The grievous

separation of mother and maiden implies that in a

patriarchal society women are divided from each other and

from themselves" (Gubar 305).

Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis and Judith Kegan Gardiner

both suggest, contrary to Rich's argument, that it is not

that Lessing's women see other women as inadequate

substitutes for heterosexual relationships; on the

contrary, men are merely inadequate, unsatisfactory

substitutes for that unattained and unattainable first love

of Lessing's female protagonists;

Increasingly in her later fiction, Lessing

indicates that women's future is with each other.

In several of her novels in the 1970s and 1980s,

women thrive better with one another than with men

so that her women's needs to fuse and suffer in

heterosexual relationships look like neurotic

distortions of their unhealed needs for mother

love. (Gardiner Rhys, Stead, Lessing 109)

Lessing's own jealousy of her sibling and the word "Troika"

in this story suggest a possible family love triangle in which the father (so crucial to the oedipal stage!) is

never involved.

In "Among the Roses," Lessing posits a complex

relationship between a mother and her adult daughter, a

relationship that avoids both the symbiotic unity of 124

Infancy (which, as Nancy Friday rather graphically points out, becomes grotesque in adulthood) and the matrophobia that characterizes so many women's works, and particularly the works of feminist daughters with conventional, traditionalist mothers. Their relationship is not assured; on the contrary, Lessing stresses how stormy and difficult fashioning such a relationship is likely to be. But both women are clearly trying, and the story ends rather comically (especially for the sometimes dour Lessing, whose sense of humor rarely appears in her work) on a note of mutual tolerance and agreement:

"Oh, God," said Shirley. "I can't believe.

I simply cannot believe ..." She stopped,

evidently remembering that she had just made up

with her mother and did not want to quarrel again.

At least, not yet. "Oh, well, it takes all

sorts," she conceded, as agreeably as was possible

to her.

"Yes, it certainly does," said Myra with a

sigh. But she changed the sigh into a cough, for

fear it would set Shirley off again. (105)

This story perhaps constitutes Lessing's most optimistic examination of the mother-daughter relationship; certainly it is one of her most tightly focused. Her novels, whose mother-daughter relationships have received more attention, sometimes seem by comparison overstuffed with an 125 embarrassment of plots, subplots, and complex themes.^

In these stories, the disciplined spareness of design compels the reader to confront the dramas and difficulties of mother-daughter relationships directly. The next chapter examines Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dallovay, which deals much more obliquely with a difficult mother/daughter relationship. 126

Notes to Chapter III

^ Evelyn Silten Bassoff, devotes a chapter of her book

Mothering Ourselves; Help and Healing for Adult Daughters to an analysis of The Wizard of Oz; "Indeed, the story of

Dorothy Gale, the little girl from Kansas, describes a journey that every daughter who has been wounded by her mother makes in order to become whole" (84).

^ The story's relationship to the myth has already been explicated by both Orphia Jane Allen and Judith Kegan

Gardiner; I am indebted to those readings.

^ My understanding of this story has been extraordinarily expanded and enriched by the students in an

Introduction to Fiction course I taught during winter quarter 1991 at Ohio State University.

For more information on Lessing's use of gardens and related organic imagery in her work, see Singleton 62ff. and Sibyl Lutz Severance's article, "Their Own Michaels:

Doris Lessing's Women and the Garden."

^ Mona Knapp sees such a form as especially typical of

Lessing's shorter fiction: "The stories' structure is dialectic: each protagonist comes into conflict with a given collective force, and wrests from the ensuing battle her or his identity and self-definition" (76). Claire

Sprague, moreover, suggests that "Lessing's 'profoundly 127 dialectical consciousness' sees double and multiple forces in constant interaction" (4); Sprague further stresses the

"coexistence of repetition and dialectic" in Lessing's work: "These two seeming opposites overlap and interact"

(4, 59).

® See also Clare Hanson's "Each Other: Images of

Otherness in the Short Fiction of Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys and Angela Carter," in which Hanson makes a similar point:

"Marriage may provide an interesting interlude, but ultimately women . . . are closer to each other than they can be to any man" (70).

^ See for example Rebecca J. Lukens's "Inevitable

Ambivalence in Doris Lessing's Martha Quest," Katherine

Fishburn's "The Nightmare Repetition: The Mother-Daughter

Conflict in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence," Grace

Stewart's study of the Demeter myth in The Golden Notebook in The New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as Heroine

(84-89), and Chapter 6, "Mothers and Daughters/Aging and

Dying" in Claire Sprague's Rereading Doris Lessing. Chapter IV

The Loss of Roses:

Mother-Daughter Myth and Mrs. Dallovay

Doris Lessing's critics have long recognized— but only begun to document— her indebtedness to Virginia Woolf.

Nancy Joyner, Molly Hite (87), and Barbara Rigney have

launched initial investigations of this influence, which pertains to theme rather than style or technique. Both

Woolf and Lessing have written about many of the same

complex themes: male-female relationships (particularly

the perils thereof), violence, politics, madness, war, gardens, feminism, and the difficulties of mothers and

daughters. Perhaps Lessing's use of the mother-daughter myth of Demeter and Persephone owes something to Woolf's use of the myth, as well.

Virginia Woolf respected, perhaps even revered the

classical scholar Jane Harrison, whom she refers to in A

Room of One's Own. Woolf's critics have begun to trace

Woolf's use of Harrison's work in her writings; the

staunchly feminist critic Jane Marcus has most extensively

studied the two, arguing, for example, that Woolf's novel

128 129

The Years "offers a ritual purification and purgation of the whole community such as the Eleusinian mysteries provided" (38). Sandra Shattuck has discussed the influence of Harrison's Ancient Art and Ritual on Between the Acts; Patricia Maika has also worked on the relationship between Jane Harrison's work and Between the

Acts. Woolf labored to learn to read Greek and greatly respected the classics she was then able to read in the original, as her essay "On Not Knowing Greek" demonstrates.

William Herman in fact suggests that "probably Woolf knew a great deal more Greek than Joyce ever managed to acquire"

(266). She would almost certainly have been sufficiently familiar with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter to use it in her work, either consciously or unconsciously;

Harrison's work on mothers and daughters in

pre-classical Greece, her study of the transition

of the powerful myths of mother-goddess worship

into patriarchal Greek thought as we know it, was

very important to Virginia Woolf's writing and

thinking. The Hymn to Demeter and the story of

Persephone were especially moving for a writer who

always thought of herself as a "motherless

daughter." It may help us to understand what she

meant by "thinking back through our mothers." She

sought in her friendships with women both freedom

and protection. The Demeter-Persephone myth

affirms eternal refuge and redemption as well as 130

resurrection. The mother will never abandon her

daughter. She will weep and wail and search the

underworld, bring her out of the darkness of

sexual experience, childbirth, madness, back into

the world of light and freedom. (Marcus 13)

Woolf's use of the Demeter-Persephone myth has been noted and explicated by critics studying her other novels— specifically The Voyage Out (by Madeline Moore) and

To the Lighthouse (by Joseph Blotner, Anne Golomb Hoffman, and Avrom Fleishman).^ But the role the mother-daughter myth plays in Mrs. Dalloway— in which a living mother is grieved and angered by the temporary loss of her daughter— has been inexplicably overlooked. Reuben Brower, for example, has criticized as unnecessary two aspects of the novel which demonstrate its ties to the Homeric

Hymn— first, the scene in which the solitary traveller encounters a figure described in Demetrian terms, and second, Woolf's use of "pseudo-Homeric similes" (Brower

135). The similes are only "pseudo," of course, if one fails to recognize their source (or perhaps in the quibbling sense that the Homeric hymns were probably not written by the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey). Her use of the idea of the Greek chorus in the novel (Richter

Virginia Woolf 139) further suggests a classical source for its plot. Woolf does openly refer to the myth at least 131 once in the novel, although she uses the Roman version of

Demeter's name, when she notes that the War "smashed a plaster cast of Ceres" (129). Yet the only critics who do note the connection either mention it briefly, in passing

(Schlack 52-53), or relegate it to a footnote (Richter

"Ulysses Connection" 318nn22 and 31).

Her use of the myth would both strengthen and weaken the argument that Woolf was influenced by Ulysses. Her work would no longer be autonomous, as Jean Guiguet has contended (241), and thus would be more like Joyce's masterpiece in that respect. But the myth would also give her work a completely different focus; her Homeric similes would no longer be gratuitous echoes of Joyce's very different project, but signposts of her own revision of myth— thus confirming that "the use she makes of the classics is radically different from her male compeers"

(Herman 266).

The events of Mrs. Dalloway, like those of Ulysses, take place on a day in June, as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for the party she gives that evening. Her activities are juxtaposed with those of Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran who has gone mad from grief over the loss of his friend and officer; his wife, Lucrezia, is troubled by his illness. Portions of the novel are also seen through the eyes of Peter Walsh, who had once proposed to Clarissa and been rejected; Richard Dalloway, Clarissa's husband; and

Elizabeth, the Dalloways' teenaged daughter. 132

Perhaps the most intriguing representation of the

Demeter myth in Mrs. Dalloway is the anonymous "battered

woman" whose singing Peter hears; she has "the voice of an

ancient spring spouting from the earth" (122)— a symbol of

the myth— and sings of love and death. Like Demeter, she

is both timeless and immortal: She has been there

[t]hrough all ages" and "would still be there in ten

million years" (122, 124). She is associated with

fecundity; her voice is "fertilising, leaving a damp stain"

as she sings (123). As Shirley Neuman notes, "... the

fecundation is achieved without any male presence" (68).

And her language is specifically maternal: "... [T]he

broken syllables of the old woman's song escape the lexical

and syntactic grids of the symbolic order ..."

(Minow-Pinkney 73). But she is only the most obvious

reference to a myth that pervades the novel.

Clarissa is Demeter, goddess of vegetation.^ she is

associated with flowers from the opening sentence of Mrs.

Dalloway— and flowers are specifically and repeatedly

associated with motherhood throughout the novel. Clarissa

notes, for example, during her morning excursion, that

"June had drawn out every leaf on the trees. The mothers

of Pimlico gave suck to their young" (9). Clarissa's

former suitor, Peter, in thinking of her, comments to

himself, "She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips. 133 now a child in a perambulator ..." (118). At the party,

Sally Seton, the girlfriend of Clarissa's youth, is remarkable both for her five sons and for what Clarissa terms her "miles of conservatories" (286). Perhaps most telling of all is the only moment in the novel in which

Clarissa's own mother is mentioned;

"Dear Clarissa!" exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She

looked to-night, she said, so like her mother as

she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey

hat.

And really Clarissa's eyes filled with tears.

Her mother, walking in a garden! But alas, she

must go. (267)

Lucy recognizes her mistress's Olympic grandeur; the maid, "taking Mrs. Dalloway's parasol, handled it like a sacred weapon which a Goddess, having acquitted herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds, and placed it in the umbrella stand" (43-44). Lucy later thinks to herself,

"Of all, her mistress was loveliest— mistress of silver, of linen, of china, for the sun, the silver, doors off their hinges, Rumpelmayer's men, gave her a sense . . . of something achieved. Behold!" (56). At one point, Clarissa thinks to herself "that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense ..."

(44). Her experience here is analogous to the bereaved 134

Demeter's, who, when she enters the home of Metaneira,

"stepped on the threshold and touched/ the roof with her

head and filled the doorway with divine radiance" (11.

188-89).

Peter, in telling Clarissa he's in love, speaks "not to

her however, but to some one raised up in the dark so that

you could not touch her but must lay your garland down on

the grass in the dark" (66). Even he grudgingly

acknowledges her mystery;

. . . [I]t was awfully strange, he thought, how

she still had the power, as she came tinkling,

rustling, still had the power as she came across

the room, to make the moon, which he detested,

rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.

(71)

She possesses, he thinks to himself, "that extraordinary

gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own

wherever she happened to be" (114).

Clarissa becomes, then, a kind of high priestess (Henke

126): "In the world of the novel, shattered by the First

World War, the perfect hostess, the mediator between

people, is the closest thing to a holy person that there

is" (Perazzini 410). Woolf implies this herself when she

describes the social ritual involved:

And so there began a soundless and exquisite

passing to and fro through swing doors of aproned

white-capped maids, handmaidens not of necessity. 135

but adepts in a mystery or grand deception

practised by hostesses in Mayfair from one-thirty

to two .... (157-58)

Woolf uses fairy tale imagery when she compares Clarissa besieged by the importunate Peter Walsh to "a Queen whose guards have fallen asleep and left her unprotected . . . so that any one can stroll in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving over her" (65). Woolf alludes here to Sleeping Beauty (Schlack 60), a tale of an apparently dead young woman who later revives. As in The

Secret Garden, the allusion is merely a variation on the mythic theme (Weimer 5).

Just as Demeter is "like a bird" in her search for her daughter (1. 43), Clarissa has "a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious" (4)— or as she herself more harshly puts it, she had "a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's" (14). She describes herself as "like a bird" once more in the final pages of the novel (281).

Peter associates Clarissa with a honeybee, a traditional emblem of Demeter (Keller 33):

It is Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep

emotion, and an extraordinarily clear, yet

puzzling recollection of her, as if this bell [of

St. Margaret's] had come into the room years ago,

where they sat at some moment of great intimacy. 136

and had gone from one to the other and had left,

like a bee with honey, laden with the moment.

(75)

She has on her mantelpiece a crystal dolphin (56, 57), a creature associated with Demeter (Keller 32); the mention may also constitute a private joke, an allusion to Woolf's nickname for her sister Vanessa, who was, not coincidentally, in many ways a maternal figure for her sister (Letters I 362). And Clarissa's own thoughts link her to the torch associated with Demeter's search for her daughter (1. 48). Later, when considering Septimus's suicide, which takes place at the end of the novel,

Clarissa thinks, "Better anything, better brandish one's torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away like some Ellie Henderson!" (255). In the opening pages of the novel, Clarissa recalls that "she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party" (6).

Similarly, in the Homeric Hymn, Demeter radiates light: ".

. . from the immortal skin of the goddess a light/ shone afar, as her blond hair streamed down over her shoulders,/ and the sturdy mansion was filled with radiance as if from lightning" (11. 278-80). Even Clarissa's name means light, while Demeter is given the epithet "light-bearer" (Keller

31).

Clarissa's image of orgasmic illumination— "a match in a crocus" combines two of Demeter's symbols, the flame (of 137 the torch) and the flower (47). And her command to

"Remember my party to-night!" (72) recalls Demeter's command in the Homeric Hymn that the people of Eleusis celebrate rites to propitiate her (11. 273-74).

Further confirming Clarissa's link to Demeter is the solitary traveller's vision of "the giant figure at the end of the ride" (85). Presumably a dream of Peter's, this passage concerns a female figure vaguely associated with the "grey nurse" beside Peter on the park bench;

. . . if he can conceive of her, then in some sort

she exists, he thinks, and advancing down the path

with his eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly

endows them with womanhood; sees with amazement

how grave they become; how majestically, as the

breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark

flutter of the leaves charity, comprehension,

absolution . . .

Such are the visions which proffer great

cornucopias full of fruit to the solitary

traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens

lolloping away on the green sea waves, or are

dashed in his face like bunches of roses, or

rise to the surface like pale faces which

fishermen flounder through floods to embrace.

(85-86)

The symbols here— cornucopia, roses, mermaid— suggest both 138

Demeter and Clarissa, who is perenially associated with flowers and who is herself described as a mermaid later in the text (264).

Finally, like Demeter, Clarissa, too, knows the secret of immortality; she once propounded to a skeptical Peter

a transcendental theory which, with her horror of

death, allowed her to believe or say that she

believed (for all her scepticism), that since our

apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so

momentary compared with the other, the unseen part

of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might

survive, be recovered somehow attached to this

person or that, or even haunting certain places

after death • . . perhaps— perhaps. (231-32)

As the opening pages make clear, Clarissa still subscribes to such a belief:

Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking

towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must

inevitably cease completely; all this must go on

without her; did she resent it; or did it not

become consoling to believe that death ended

absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of

London, on the ebb and flow of things, here,

there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each

other, she being part, she was positive, of the

trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling,

all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people 139

she had never met; being laid out like a mist

between the people she knew best, who lifted her

on their branches as she had seen the trees lift

the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life,

herself. (12)

If Clarissa is a Demeter figure, then Elizabeth, her daughter, is assuredly a Persephone. Clarissa, in thinking of her, emphasizes her daughter's youthfulness; "In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature, like a child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect baby; and that was charming" (209). Elizabeth reminds people of the flowers, water, and springtime associated with the ancient myth: "People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies" (204). She has the same effect at Clarissa's party: "She was like a poplar, she was like a river, she was like a hyacinth, Willie Titcomb was thinking" (287). Interestingly, she has the same effect on women, as well: "She was like a lily, Sally said, a lily by the side of a pond" (294). Clarissa compares her to "a hyacinth, sheathed in glossy green, with buds just tinted, a hyacinth which has had no sun" (186). Even "poor Miss

Kilman," Elizabeth's history tutor, thinks of her as "a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade" (205). Like

Persephone, "She had no preferences," and "She inclined to be passive" (204). But this Persephone half-recognizes her 140

own danger in the comic imagery associated with the

omnibus; "The impetuous creature— a pirate— started

forward/ sprang away; she had to hold the rail to steady

herself, for a pirate it was, reckless, unscrupulous,

bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously, boldly

snatching a passenger ..." (205).

Woolf presents Doris Kilman as the Hades figure in her

revision of the myth. As the novel progresses. Miss Kilman

attempts to take Clarissa's daughter away from her. Her very name suggests death (as well, perhaps, as masculinity), and Clarissa links her to both the underworld

and the use of force by naming her "one of those spectres with which one battles in the night; one of those spectres who stand astride us and suck up half our life-blood,

dominators and tyrants" (16-17). She later thinks of her,

equally melodramatically, as "Elizabeth's seducer; the

woman who had crept in to steal and defile" (266). After

dismissing thoughts of Miss Kilman, Clarissa enters the

florist's shop and, surrounded by flowers, envisions the

scene that opens the hymn: ". . . as if it were the

evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet

peas and roses after the superb summer's day, with its

almost blue-black sky" (18). Perhaps not surprisingly.

Miss Kilman does not care for flowers (198). Woolf

regularly associates her with heat, possibly conflating the

Greek and Christian concepts of the underworld. Miss 141

Kilman is "bitter and burning," and "hot and turbulent feelings . . . boiled and surged in her" (188). She is also perpetually perspiring (16). Elizabeth twice notes that it is "stuffy" in the Army and Navy Stores (199, 205).

Even the trip to the Army and Navy Stores and the allusion to Miss Kilman as "an unwieldy battleship" (196) suggest death in a novel so filled with memories of the Great War.

No wonder, then, that Clarissa wonders to herself, "What was she trying to recover? What image of white dawn in the country . . ." (12). Immediately afterwards, she spots in a bookseller's window a volume opened to the quotation from

Shakespeare's Cymbeline that recurs throughout the novel:

"Fear no more the heat o' the sun/ Nor the furious winter's rages" (13). In the play, the quotation is part of a funeral dirge sung over the apparently dead body of a young woman (disguised as a boy) who later revives; the characters who sing the dirge had earlier sung it over their mother's body (Ferrer 39). The allusion thus foreshadows both Elizabeth's return to her mother and

Clarissa's own experience, in the novel's final pages, of a kind of rebirth. Her initial questions, which link what she is trying to recover with an "image of white dawn in the country," further suggest that in recovering her daughter, she is recovering herself, her own past.

When Peter recalls Elizabeth the last time he saw her, he remembers that she had "nothing of her mother in her" 132

(119). He repeats this assessment later, at the party, in a conversation with Sally: "She was not a bit like

Clarissa, Peter Walsh said" (287). While a number of critics have unquestioningly accepted this assessment,^

Elizabeth and her mother actually have much in common. To begin with, Clarissa, like her daughter, had a woman tutor with a Germanic name, Fraulein Daniels (11). Although

Elizabeth's age is specifically stated as 17 (186), Peter

Walsh thinks "she can't be more than eighteen" (84), and

Ellie Henderson, Clarissa's poor cousin, thinks "she could not be more than seventeen" (257). Hugh Whitbread rather implausibly assures Clarissa "that she might be a girl of eighteen" (8), and she spends much of her day reconsidering her refusal of Peter's proposal at Bourton, which occurred when she literally was "a girl of eighteen" (3).

Clarissa thinks to herself, "Elizabeth really cared for her dog most of all" (15), and in fact Elizabeth worries about her fox-terrier. Grizzle, throughout Clarissa's party

(252, 287). Similarly, her mother turned to her dog to comfort her after the contretemps about an out-of-wedlock pregnancy:

As she opened the door, in came that great shaggy

dog which ran after sheep. She flung herself upon

him, went into raptures. It was as if she said to

Peter— it was all aimed at him, he knew— "I know

you thought me absurd about that woman just now;

but see how extraordinarily sympathetic I am; see 143

how I love my Rob!" (90)

Peter later recalls that Clarissa "disliked all animals, except that dog" (233). Indeed, it may be Clarissa's dog that ultimately influenced her decision to choose Richard over Peter, as Peter himself acknowledges;

. . . how good he was, for instance, when that

great shaggy dog of Clarissa's got caught in a

trap and had its paw half torn off, and Clarissa

turned faint and Dalloway did the whole thing;

bandaged, made splints; told Clarissa not to be a

fool. That was what she liked him for perhaps—

that was what she needed. "Now, my dear, don't be

a fool. Hold this— fetch that," all the time

talking to the dog as if it were a human being.

(113)

During Elizabeth's excursion into London, as Bernard

Blackstone notes, "She is enchanted, like her mother, with the sheer movement of life" (91). Both women, too, can be startlingly impassive. Peter complains of Clarissa's

"coldness," "woodenness," and "impenetrability" (91), whereas Elizabeth is "like the figurehead of a ship"; "the heat gave her cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring incredible innocence of sculpture"

(206). Even the bus trip itself parallels her mother's

(Clements 19, Garvey 71). 144

But most importantly, Clarissa at 18 fell in love with

Sally Seton, and she now speculates that perhaps Elizabeth is falling in love with Doris Kilman. Sally, like Miss

Kilman, is vaguely foreign— "Sally always said she had

French blood in her veins" (48). Both women are impoverished; Sally "literally hadn't a penny that night when she came to them" (49), whereas Miss Kilman "was never in the room five minutes without making you feel . . . how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be" (16). Sally also shares Miss Kilman's materialist politics; Clarissa remembers, "They meant to found a society to abolish private property, and actually had a letter written, though not sent out" (49). Just as, before meeting Miss Kilman, "Elizabeth had never thought about the poor" (198), Clarissa, before meeting Sally, "knew . . . nothing about social problems" (49).

Relationships with other women are clearly primary for both Clarissa and her daughter, as Elizabeth Abel has so clearly explicated. Abel sees in this novel a palimpsestic plot that further underlines the novel's association with the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. She describes Clarissa's reminiscences as "Woolf's subversive account of the force required to break the daughter's attachment to her mother"

(144n4). Sally is, of course, a maternal figure for

Clarissa despite their closeness in age. Abel maintains 145 that Peter's intrusion into what Clarissa calls "the most exquisite moment of her whole life" (52), the moment when

Sally Seton kisses her, "suggests a revised Oedipal configuration; the jealous male attempting to rupture the exclusive female bond, insisting on the transference of attachment to the man, demanding heterosexuality" (Abel

32-33). Clarissa describes his intrusion in rather violent terms :

It was like running one's face against a granite

wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was

horrible! . . . She felt only how Sally was being

mauled already, maltreated; she felt his

hostility, his jealousy; his determination to

break into their companionship. . . .

"Oh this horror!" she said to herself, as if

she had known all along that something would

interrupt, would embitter her moment of

happiness. (53)

Peter's action thus casts him as Hades, violently intervening in a mother-daughter romance:

Woolf herself exacts poetic justice by subjecting

Peter to an inverted replay of this crucial scene

when, thirty years later, Clarissa's daughter

unexpectedly interrupts his emotional reunion with

her mother . . ., asserting by her presence at

that moment the primacy of female bonds (despite

the actual attenuation of these bonds between 146

Clarissa and Elizabeth). "Here is my Elizabeth,"

Clarissa announces to the disconcerted Peter, the

possessive pronoun he finds so annoying self­

consciously insisting on the mother's privileged

relation to her daughter . . . (Abel 33)

In an earlier manuscript, Woolf was even more explicit:

Peter asks Clarissa outright, "Why didn't you marry me?" and Elizabeth walks into the room, almost as if in answer to Peter's question (Hoffman 182).

Peter envisions himself as "an adventurer, reckless, . .

. swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from

India) a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties . . . He was a buccaneer" (80). It is surely significant to note, then, that Demeter tells Metaneira's daughters that she herself was attacked by what some translations term "pirates": "... marauding men by brute force/ carried me off against my will ..." (124-25). As already noted, Elizabeth compares the omnibus to a pirate, capturing people against their will (205). And in tracking a woman he does not know through London, Peter sees her in terms of imagery that pointedly— and poignantly— recalls the grieving Demeter, searching for her daughter by torchlight:

On and on she went, across Piccadilly, and up

Regent Street, ahead of him, her cloak, her

gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes

and the laces and the feather boas in the windows 147

to make the spirit of finery and whimsy which

dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as

the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over

hedges in the darkness. (80)

Thus this scene, which Reuben Brower, predictably, describes as a failure (134), further links Peter to the menacing abductor of the hymn. Even Brower, however, recognizes that Peter is a "destroyer" (130). Peter's perpetual fingering of his pocketknife— equivalent, presumably, to a "little pocket signifier" (Cixous 261)— suggests implied violence, and he even enacts a symbolic rape of Clarissa:

When she hears Walsh at the door "she made to hide

her dress, like a virgin protecting chastity," and

a subdued note of sexual violation pervades the

scene: "'And what's all this?' he said, tilting

his pen-knife towards her green dress" (45-6).

Her sewing up of the dress becomes the restitching

into wholeness of a hymen which Walsh constantly

threatens to tear. (Minow-Pinkney 68)

Clarissa's comment that "with Peter everything had to be .

. . gone into" (10) confirms that "... Peter is above all intrusive" (Squier 104).

Peter's role as destroyer is mirrored, in exaggerated form, by Sir William Bradshaw: "He swooped; he devoured.

He shut people up" (154). The doctor's ruthlessly hearty 148 insistence on the importance of maintaining "a sense of proportion" sounds suspiciously similar to the advice that

Hyperionides, apoloogist for Zeus, offers Demeter: "... stop your great wailing; you mustn't give/ yourself to grief so great and fruitless" (11. 81-82). As for Lady

Bradshaw, yet another Persephone, "Fifteen years ago she had gone under" (152).

No wonder, then, that Clarissa and Sally share Demeter's apocalyptic view of heterosexuality: "they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe" (50). It is interesting, too, that what Clarissa most fears and abhors is what she terms "the crime of 'forcing' the soul, where forcing has the meanings of forcible entry into a locked house, of rape, and of making a growing thing bloom out of its proper season" (Rose 134).

Other evidence supports Abel's unorthodox reading of this text. Clarissa, on first meeting Richard Dalloway, calls him Wickham and introduces him as Wickham throughout an entire afternoon (92); the incident strikes Sally as so comic that she remembers it more than 30 years later (285).

The traditional interpretation of this allusion to Jane

Austen's Pride and Prejudice asserts that

. . . [T]he Clarissa-Peter-Richard triangle is an

echo of the triangle formed by Elizabeth Bennet,

Wickham, and Darcy. Elizabeth Bennet has the same

sort of choice to make as Clarissa; she finally

realizes her error and acknowledges her love for 149

Darcy, whereas Clarissa marries her "villain"

after rejecting her hero. (Schlack 61)

Similarly, David Dowling contends that Peter resents

Elizabeth not because Clarissa loves her but because

Elizabeth is a "symbol of his rival Richard's hold over

Clarissa" (121).

But Sally's reiteration of the allusion at the party may suggest another, more recent triangle, one which involves an Elizabeth as well as Wickham/Richard and which thus casts Clarissa as Darcy. Clarissa can, like Darcy, be cold, reserved, even "arrogant" (89). Sir Harry, for example, complains of "her damnable, difficult upper-class refinement" (267). The allusion here suggests that

Elizabeth's disdain for her mother will eventually be replaced by love (just as Elizabeth Rennet's disdain for

Darcy was eventually replaced by love) and that she will ultimately learn to value her mother.

The references to Clarissa's "silver-green mermaid's dress" and to Clarissa herself as "a mermaid" (264) might allude to an illustration in Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of the Greek Religion (265 fig. 61), which depicts a goddess that Harrison identifies as the "Lady of the Wild Things"— a version, in other words, of "the Great

Mother" (266). The references might equally well allude to

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," in which a mermaid opts to give up her voice and her freedom of 150

movement in an unsuccessful attempt to win a human male;

Clarissa would seem to have made the opposite choice. The

mermaid has sometimes been interpreted as an emblem of her

lesbianism (Hochman 162). Finally, the allusion could

also refer to T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock," in which the unfortunate title character

laments, "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./

I do not think that they will sing to me" (7). Woolf knew

Eliot personally; Hogarth Press published some of his work.

She was almost certainly familiar with the poem. Her use

of the allusion here might further confirm Abel's reading,

that men feel excluded when women have close relationships with each other or with their children— an explanation which clarifies Peter's otherwise bizarre resentment of

Elizabeth; ". . . i n came Elizabeth and everything must

give way to her" (119).

Lee Edwards has already done much to document the ways

in which the sexes are segregated in this novel, and the

painfully high cost society must pay to maintain such

segregation:

Thus, in Mrs. Dalloway, wars, madness, the love of

suffering and pain, adherence to an abstract,

hierarchical, authoritarian set of values and

means of organisation are linked to death, and

frequently, if not exclusively, to a particular

notion of masculinity; conversely, parties, roses,

joy, and the celebration of the spontaneity and 151

variability of life are tied to and embodied in

various female figures. (162)

It is interesting, then, to note that other female figures in the novel echo Clarissa's longing for Sally and share her pain at the cost of her separation from that loving female world.

Lucrezia mirrors Clarissa, for example (Abel 34).

Lucrezia and Septimus initially seem to have little to do with Clarissa; Septimus, a 30-year-old war veteran, wanders through London, hallucinating and gibbering to himself, and

Lucrezia, his Italian war bride, tries helplessly to bring him back to sanity. Yet the abbreviated version of

Lucrezia's name emphasizes its similarity to both Clarissa and to Ceres (Schlack 53), and like Persephone, Rezia is exiled from her mother's love: "'Septimus has been working too hard'— that was all she could say to her own mother.

To love makes one solitary, she thought" (33). She sees herself as alone and in darkness (35).

Like Clarissa, Rezia finds herself plucked by

marriage from an Edenic female world with which

she retains no contact. Her memories highlight

the exclusively female community of sisters

collaboratively making hats in an Italian setting

that is pastoral despite the surrounding urban

context: "For you should see the Milan gardens!"

she later exclaims, when confronted with London's

"few ugly flowers stuck in pots" (34). . . . 152

Marriage and war explicitly coalesce for Rezia as

agents of expulsion from this female paradise . .

. The death of her husband releases Rezia to

return imaginatively to a past she implicitly

shares with Clarissa: the female-centered world

anterior to heterosexual bonds. (Abel 34)

Rezia is also like Clarissa in her creative abilities,

both in making hats and creating social occasions. When

Mrs. Filmer's granddaughter brings the evening paper, for

example, Septimus watches Rezia playing and joking with her

and thinks to himself, "For so it always happened. First

one thing, then another. So she built it up, first one

thing and then another" (219). His observations concerning

Rezia's actions echo Clarissa's concerning her own: "For

Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating

it every moment afresh ..." (5). As women, they share

what Phyllis Rose calls "the creativity of everyday

feminine life" (130).

Like Demeter and Clarissa, Rezia, too, is compared to a bird. Septimus I'could feel her mind, like a bird, falling

from branch to branch, and always alighting, quite rightly"

(222); she is later described as "like a little hen" (225).

Rezia had moreover earlier thought of herself in terms which suggest the vulnerability of Persephone and the

indifference of the world that looks on as she is abducted: 153

She was like a bird sheltering under the thin

hollow of a leaf, who blinks at the sun when the

leaf moves; starts at the crack of a dry twig.

She was exposed; she was surrounded by enormous

trees, vast clouds of an indifferent world,

exposed; tortured; and why should she suffer?

Why? (99)

Rezia speaks of the cost of her exile in terms of death;

"Every one has friends who were killed in the War. Every one gives up something when they marry" (99). The parallel

sentence structures suggest the losses are equal in her eyes— a startling statement of the painfulness of the break marriage has made in her life.

Like Persephone, too, Rezia longs to return: "She could

stand it no longer. She would go back" (101). And

Septimus sees her in archetypal terms: "She was a

flowering tree; and through her branches looked out the

face of a lawgiver, who had reached a sanctuary where she

feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a miracle, a

triumph, the last and greatest" (224). It is hardly

coincidental that one of Demeter's epithets is

"Thesmophoros"— the lawgiver (Keller 33). And in the final vision that Abel speaks of, Rezia sees herself running

"through cornfields"— an image that recalls Demeter's role

as goddess of the corn (Frazer 365). 154

Septimus seems a pitiful Hades figure, but he himself suggests certain possible parallels: "how he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole ..." (137). He is unquestionably associated with death and what Maria

DiBattista describes as "the epic motif of the descent into the underworld" (28), as for example when ". . . h e descended another step into the pit" (136). Like Hades, he lives in a world of shades. He is compared to a hawk

(222)— a bird that preys on other birds— and Rezia "called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being malicious and a great destroyer of crops was precisely like him"

(225); Demeter is of course associated with crops and agriculture.

As with young Mrs. De Wet in Lessing's "The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange," Rezia wants a child to make up for the lack of emotional closeness in her marriage: "At tea Rezia told him that Mrs. Filmer's daughter was expecting a baby.

She could not grow old and have no children! She was very lonely, she was very unhappy! She cried for the first time since they were married" (136). No wonder she finds it

"comforting rather" when a little girl named Elise Mitchell abruptly runs into her in the park (98); here is a distress she can understand and comfort.^

Rezia suggests, by her very presence, that Clarissa's experience is common for women ("Every one gives up 155 something when they marry"). Women share emotions that men have no access to, as even Lady Bruton recognizes:

. . . her inquiry, 'How's Clarissa?' was known by

women infallibly, to be a signal from a

well-wisher, from an almost silent companion,

whose utterances (half a dozen perhaps in the

course of a lifetime) signified recognition of

some feminine comradeship which went beneath

masculine lunch parties and united Lady Bruton and

Mrs. Dalloway, who seldom met, and appeared when

they did meet indifferent and even hostile, in a

singular bond. (161)

It is interesting to note that (like Caroline Gale) even the prosaic, hard-nosed Lady Bruton dreams, when she dozes, of herself as a young girl, as a daughter who, like

Persephone, roams in "a field of clover in the sunshine this hot June day, with the bees going round and about and the yellow butterflies" (169). June is, incidentally, the month in which at least one scholar suggests the descent of

Persephone would have been celebrated (Nilsson 52).

The inimitable Sally, too, seems to mourn for a lost

Edenic past much like Caroline Gale and Lady Bruton:

"Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her"

(293-94). Like Lessing's Myra, she prides herself on the 156

garden in which she takes refuge from the people who so

often disappoint her. She hardly seems to have "fulfilled herself completely in motherhood and gardening," as David

Dowling contends (118). It is important to note that while

Sally plays Demeter to Clarissa's Persephone, Sally is herself the violated daughter, too: "Hugh Whitbread's kiss

is an act of sexual violence, the rape on a miniature scale

. . ." (Minow-Pinkney 71).

Even the brief appearance of Maisie Johnson further

emphasizes Woolf's point, that "... beneath the romantic

fable, . . . there persists a virginal integrity that remains the exclusive knowledge of the female and a powerful source of feminine bonding" (DiBattista 40).

Maisie (whose name suggests maize) is frightened by the untoward appearance of Septimus and wonders why she had not

stayed at home— thus suggesting that she is yet another

Persephone in search of experience but frightened by heterosexuality. She is observed by an older woman (not unlike Mrs. Gale in Lessing's "The De Wets Come to Kloof

Grange") who knows the perils of marriage and wishes that

she could somehow warn young innocent Maisie; even the older woman's very name recalls Demeter:

That girl, thought Mrs. Dempster . . ., don't know

a thing yet; and really it seemed to her better

to be a little stout, a little slack, a little

moderate in one's expectations. . . . She had had

a hard time of it, and couldn't help smiling at a 157

girl like that. You'll get married, for you're

pretty enough, thought Mrs. Dempster. Get

married, she thought, and then you'll know. . . .

Every man has his ways. But whether I'd have

chosen quite like that if I could have known,

thought Mrs. Dempster, and could not help wishing

to whisper a word to Maisie Johnson; to feel on

the creased pouch of her worn old face the kiss of

pity. For it's been a hard life, thought Mrs.

Dempster. What hadn't she given to it? (39-40)

Even impoverished, overworked Carrie Dempster shares

Clarissa's sense of loss; "... she implored, pity.

Pity, for the loss of roses" (40).

This sense of loss pervades the entire novel, which could, like The Secret Garden, be described as "preoccupied with death." Perhaps the most apparently gratuitous death is that of Clarissa's sister Sylvia:

To see your own sister killed by a falling tree

(all Justin Parry's fault— all his carelessness)

before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of

life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always

said, was enough to turn one bitter. (117-18)

This death, which echoes that of Lilias Craven in The

Secret Garden, again suggests that women's very nature is somehow fatal; her name means wood, and she is killed by a falling tree. But Woolf also attributes her death to the 158 father's carelessness, suggesting that somehow men bring about this latent fatality in women's nature:

If there is an autobiographical parallel for the

death of Sylvia, it is the death of Stella, the

half-sister whom Virginia loved very much. . . .

If Virginia felt that her father was in any way

responsible for Stella's death, she might have

felt that Stella married to escape from his

domination and demands. When Stella died of

peritonitis a few months later, the fact that she

was pregnant may have reinforced Virginia's

feeling about the death of her mother: that the

demands of the male were ultimately lethal.

(Harper 114)

Thus Sylvia, too, becomes a Persephone abducted into the kingdom of the dead.

But it is of course Septimus whose death dominates the novel. In her startling introduction to the novel, Woolf notes rather quietly that "in the first version Septimus, who later is intended to be her double, had no existence; and that Mrs. Dalloway was originally to kill herself, or perhaps merely to die at the end of the party" (36).

Septimus, too, becomes a Demeter figure, then, as well as a dying vegetation god: "That he symbolizes war and death is established in part by the allusion to Ceres— the dead were frequently described as 'Demeter's people'" (Schlack 66). 159

Demeter founds the Eleusinian Mysteries, which transmit the secret of immortality. Septimus trumpets "the birth of a new religion" (33) and hears birds sing in Greek of immortality; "... they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death"

(36). Like Demeter and Clarissa, he, too, is associated with vegetation: "... leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up V and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made that statement" (32). Bonnie Kime Scott has explicated the way in which the seed metaphor Septimus uses— "the word split its husk" (105)— evokes the myth (375). He later hallucinates in more morbid ways that nonetheless reiterate the association between gardens and the natural cycle:

"Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head" (103). These disturbing images foreshadow his eventual suicide.

He is closely associated with Clarissa; many of their thoughts are interchangeable. Both are sensitive, moody, bereaved. Both use the tag line from Cymbeline, "Fear no more," and both are repulsed by Sir William Bradshaw.

Septimus's fascination with dogs (102, 130) suggests a psychotic distortion of the love for dogs that Clarissa and

Elizabeth share. Dogs, too, are associated in Greek myth 160

with Hecate, the goddess who doubles both mother and

daughter.

Septimus's imagined resurrection foreshadows Clarissa's:

"I have been dead, and yet am now alive ..." (104).

During her party, Clarissa vicariously dies when she learns

of Septimus's death: "Always her body went through it

first, when she was told, suddenly, of an accident; her

dress flamed, her body burnt" (280). Septimus becomes for

her a kind of scapegoat: "Septimus dies that Clarissa may

live" (Henke 126). He is her double, and his death thus

creates in her a sense of renewal: "He made her feel the

beauty; made her feel the fun" (284). She also obliquely

acknowledges her loss; in recognizing and lamenting so much

that is trivial in her life, she singles out her kiss from

Sally as something apart: "She had schemed; she had

pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted

success. Lady Bexborough and the rest of it. And once she

had walked on the terrace at Bourton" (282).

After undergoing this ritual death, Clarissa confronts

the old woman opposite, who as a "crone" joins mother and maid to make up the triple goddess associated with the

Demeter cult— a point underlined when Clarissa hears "the

clock striking the hour, one, two, three" (283). When the

old lady puts out her light, she prefigures Clarissa's

death, as Clarissa herself implies: "... the words came

to her. Fear no more the heat of the sun" (283). Her 161 return to the party, which is usually termed an epiphany, parallels Demeter's revelation of her true identity (11.

275ff). Certainly Peter's otherwise extraordinary reaction seems an appropriate response to the sudden appearance of a goddess :

What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he

thought to himself. What is it that fills me with

extraordinary excitement?

It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was. (296)

Her return amounts to a rebirth: "And she came in from the little room" (284), a rebirth that is comically echoed in the narrator's aside regarding Aunt Helena: "For Miss

Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive" (271).

Peter repeats the point: "... and Miss Parry was still alive. Never had he had such a shock in his life! said

Peter. He had been quite certain she was dead" (287).

Even in her mention of the elderly servant, Woolf suggests the cyclical nature of women's lives: "... old Ellen

Barnet, who had been with the family for forty years, . . . came every summer to help the ladies, and remembered mothers when they were girls" (253). It is highly appropriate, then, that J. Hillis Miller writes of Woolf's use of the literary technique of repetition in an essay titled "Repetition as the Raising of the Dead" (176). 162

It is at the party that Clarissa is reunited with

Elizabeth. Abducted by what Clarissa terms "[t]he odious

Kilman (192), Elizabeth, unlike Persephone, must rescue herself, and she does so "most competently" (205), without expecting maternal or paternal help. She also differs from

Persephone in her refusal to eat; she seems to be physically repulsed by Miss Kilman's greed (197, 199). If

Persephone's eating represents her sexual initiation,

Elizabeth's distaste suggests her distaste for sexuality— or at least the kind of greedy, grasping sexuality that the (presumably lesbian) Miss Kilman represents.

Woolf openly equates the daughter's decision to return to attend her mother's party with Persephone's return to

Olympus. Once Elizabeth realizes that "it was later than she thought" and turns toward home, the clouds she sees

"had all the appearance of settled habitations assembled for the conference of gods above the world" (210).

Abel argues that Elizabeth, unlike Clarissa, has little difficulty in choosing between men and women; she has already overcome her love for her mother and become close to her father— in other words, progressed easily from the preoedipal to the oedipal stage (42-43). Elizabeth is, after all, waiting at the end of the novel with her father, who tells her that at first he had not recognized "that lovely girl" as his daughter (296). Elizabeth's reunion 163 with her mother admittedly lacks the emotional resonance of the one described in the myth, but it does signal

Elizabeth's rejection of Doris Kilman in favor of a return to her mother. Even her clothing suggests rapprochement and perhaps even identification; She is wearing a pink dress (252), which mirrors the "pink gauze" Clarissa wore the night Sally kissed her (51).

This muted reunion lacks the emotional impact of Lily's coming to terms with the memory of Mrs. Ramsay in To the

Lighthouse. But it is in some ways more hopeful, for

Elizabeth achieves her successful identification with her mother while Clarissa is still alive. 164

Notes to Chapter IV

^ All of these works are included in the works cited list.

^ Evelyn Haller's contention that Clarissa is an Isis figure is not necessarily incompatible with my argument;

"The African Isis was closely related to Demeter ..."

(Keller 36).

O Roger Poole writes, "Apart from a certain pride in her daughter, Mrs. Dalloway seems to have no relation to her"

(172).

The importance of the mother-daughter relationship in this novel suggests that Elise— whose name closely resembles Elizabeth's— is a surrogate daughter figure for

Rezia, thus contradicting James Naremore's contention that she is an expendable narrative device:

Little Elsie [sic] Mitchell serves no other

purpose than to form a bridge between Septimus and

Rezia . . . Elsie is altogether too patent a

contrivance, of course, and for that reason the

transition seems forced. (87)

Presumably Naremore means Peter rather than Septimus.

Stuart Rosenberg makes the same complaint in "The Match in the Crocus: Obtrusive Art in Virginia Woolf's Mrs.

Dalloway": 165

When a novelist creates a character such as the

little Elise Mitchell . . . solely to have her run

from her nurse, who is seated on the same bench as

Peter, into the legs of Lucrezia Smith[,] . . . it

is obvious that she is manipulating the novel's

material as blatantly as when she provides a

rhetorical transition from one aspect of a

paragraph to another. (215)

On the contrary. Elise Mitchell recalls the world of feminine community Rezia has lost and rekindles her longing for a child who could give her the emotional closeness

Septimus cannot consistently provide; in that sense, Rezia resembles young Mrs. De Wet. Conclusion

The Remythologizing Impulse

From ancient Greece onward, male writers have been able to invoke Oedipal myth— "the classic and paradigmatic story of individual development in Western civilization" (Hirsch

1)— to illustrate the subjective experience of their psychological development. Freud's theories later illuminated the reasons for its extraordinary aptness and resonance. But there was no equivalent myth for female psychological development. Male authors could also call on the myth of the dying vegetation god to suggest cycles of barrenness, the waste land, and death followed by resurrection, rebirth, and renewal. Again, women seemed exempted and excluded from such mythologies.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, however, women writers have found a myth that is both personal and cultural. It illustrates a profound psychological truth that, if not universal, at least applies to Western bourgeois women; the myth at the same time presents the cultural cycle of barrenness followed by rebirth in terms of women's lives.

The myth's power and aptness are indicated by its presence in the diverse genres covered in this study—

166 167 children's literature, drama, short fiction, and the novel.

The myth's structures are also apparent in such popular

commercial films as Steel Magnolias (Tyler) and Thelma and

Louise, poetry (most notably, perhaps, in the writings of h.d.), Marsha Norman's 'night Mother (Burkman), and the writings of Edith Wharton, Willa Gather, and Ellen Glasgow

(Donovan).

In its various incarnations, the myth tends to retain certain motifs; most versions include either a literal or a psychological rape (a "forcing of the soul," to use Woolf's

felicitous phrase), an experience of death or the underworld, and images of rebirth or renewal. What varies the most in the versions discussed here is the power of the mother to rescue her daughter.

Examined chronologically, the works analyzed in this study present a chilling loss of faith in maternal power.

The mother in Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel literally comes back from the grave to call the father home, and the garden that is associated with her has the magical power to heal not only Mary and Colin, but presumably Archibald

Craven, as well. Susan Sowerby, the archetypal maternal figure in the novel, apparently possesses a great deal of personal power despite her poverty and lower-class status.

Individual mothers (like Mrs. Lennox, for example) may fail, but the institution of motherhood stands fast. 168

Similarly, in Bagnold's drama, the mother comes back from the Middle East specifically to fetch her daughter and

despite her reserve manages to stand up to her rather fierce mother and win back her daughter's love. Madrigal, too, despite her conviction for murder, seems to possess enormous reserves of the personal power that she employs for maternal purposes; she triumphs over the representatives of patriarchy in the play and assists the mother in reclaiming her daughter.

But Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, while grieved by her daughter's loss, remains passive. Her relationship with her daughter seems distant at best, in part, perhaps, because Elizabeth does not wish to identify with her mother; she is "quite determined, whatever her mother might say, to become either a farmer or a doctor" (207). Unlike the archetypal garden of Burnett's novel or the allegorical garden of Bagnold's play, Clarissa's "enchanted garden" is

largely an illusion; "Just a few fairy lamps, Clarissa

Dalloway had said, in the back garden! But she was a magician!" (291).

And Lessing's three mothers seem the most powerless of all. The mother of the narrator of "Flavours of Exile" seems permanently stuck in a state of sickly nostalgia; she

is largely peripheral to the story, and her garden is not what she wants it to be. In "Among the Roses," it is the daughter who seeks out the mother; they are perpetually 169 quarreling over nothing, and the garden seems to have lost its power altogether.

Perhaps the most disturbing story of all is "The De Wets

Come to Kloof Grange," in which Mrs. Gale positively recoils from the young woman who seeks her mothering, abandoning her to possible death; as Mrs. Gale acknowledges, the girl

"might have killed herself, simply because of a passing fit of despair" (126).

Such a twist of the myth emphasizes the deadly potential of whatever minimal power the mother still possesses: If she can save Persephone from death, she can also leave her to die. Mrs. Lennox has essentially done just that; in the opening pages of The Secret Garden, she confesses that she has risked exposing her family to the cholera epidemic in order to attend a dinner party.

Enid Bagnold offers a considerably more deliberate maternal deadliness. In an earlier play entitled Lottie

Dundass, the title character, a typist with dreams of becoming an actress, is asked to fill in for an actress who became stranded in a snowstorm. When the actress unexpectedly returns in time for the performance after all,

Lottie kills her and goes on in her place as planned. There is some suggestion that she is killing a rival for the

(mother's) love and attention she needs. Between acts,

Lottie has a sudden seizure, and her mother, who is horrified when she learns what Lottie has done, refuses to 170 give her daughter the heart medication that would save her life. Lottie's friend Rose, who watches, aghast, as Lottie dies, says in horror, "You didn't save her. You didn't do it. You've let her die. You could have saved her" (86).

Even more horrifying, of course, is the possibility that the mother could actively engineer the daughter's death. In

Richard Adams's novel The Girl in a Swing, Kathe, who is repeatedly compared to pagan goddesses, murders her young daughter to preserve her relationship with the novel's narrator, Alan Desland. In this dystopian version of the myth, the daughter returns from death to haunt her mother's garden. Kathe dies, at the end of the novel, of an ectopic pregnancy that ruptures during sexual intercourse, a startling development that emphasizes the incompatibility, for her, of motherhood and heterosexuality.

In these cases, the mother's murderousness suggests both an underlying maternal anger at the often overwhelming demands a child makes of the mother and an infantile fear of the omnipotent mother. But the mothers of these stories are clearly not omnipotent, and their "castration" becomes increasingly apparent. Mrs. Dundass is trying to care for several children, and Lottie asks too much of her. Kathe is desperately trying to preserve a relationship with a man who has bluntly declared his distaste for children. Lilias

Craven, like Kathe, is destroyed by her own maternity.

Olivia's power is limited to the social realm; she must go 171 wherever her husband is transferred, after all. Madrigal can exercise her power only if Mrs. St. Maugham keeps her on. Lessing's heroines are at the mercy of their men, and

Clarissa's power is limited to her parties.

In part, the dwindling efficacy of mothers and their gardens in these works indicates a growing awareness of sexual politics: "Alienation between mothers and daughters

in its present extreme form is a rather recent historical development, related to the degradation of the mother's role within the family" (Herman and Lewis 141). Given such an awareness, mother-daughter repetition and identification become less appealing. Increasingly reliable birth control and the gradual expansion of life choices available to women have made the daughter's repetition of her mother's life both less inevitable and less desirable. The higher status of paid work often seems more attractive than the low status society accords unpaid maternal labor. Thus, mothers who did not have choices have increasingly been confronted with daughters who do; the hostility may lessen as more women gain access to more choices in their lives.

Mother-daughter repetition is especially problematic for women who do not come from privileged backgrounds. My title for this study is taken from "In Search of Our Mothers'

Gardens," Alice Walker's essay on the ways in which oppressed black women were often able to create art in spite of their oppression— although the forms of their art were 172 not necessarily those recognized by bourgeois white society.

In adopting her title, I am taking a dubious liberty. The myth of Demeter and Persephone may be decidedly more problematic for black women writers, for whom mother-daughter repetition may be a decidedly less desirable goal. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, for example, the mother kills her daughter precisely to save her from repeating her mother's life— in this case, a life of slavery.

Sometimes, too, it is the daughter who chooses another lifestyle, and her choice often becomes a kind of referendum on her mother's lifestyle— whether she intends it to be or not. The daughter's implied rejection of her mother's life can become a rejection of her mother as a person:

The oppressed condition of women is thus the

ultimate, usually hidden, source of the daughter's

disappointment in her mother, and it fuels the

daughter's desire to separate and be different

from her mother. The failure to discern the

larger context in which the daughter's contempt

arises can make it appear as if the mother-

daughter conflict is inherent in their gender and

thus almost impossible to resolve. This is the

mistake Freud made. (Herman and Lewis 153)

It is here that the Demeter myth becomes most applicable, for it details the love mother and daughter share while 173 simultaneously pointing out the limited power of the mother to help the daughter. Demeter is powerful, yes, but she can use her power only indirectly. In the Homeric Hymn, she wins her daughter back only by wreaking havoc on the earth; she cannot rescue her daughter herself, nor can she affect

Zeus directly, although she does try. Her bizarre attempt to make Demophoon immortal has been interpreted as an attempt to create an ally for herself (Clay)— a male ally this time, who cannot so easily be taken away. Despite the

Victorian platitude that "the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world," mothers rarely have the power to save their daughters. In fact, much to their daughters' disgust, mothers rarely have the power to save themselves.

Daughters are thus torn between their mothers, who are like them but weak, and their fathers, who are different but powerful. Like Persephone, daughters oscillate.

Consequently, even in victory Demeter loses, for her daughter is not hers to keep. If she has forced Zeus to make concessions, he has forced her to make concessions as well. Demeter's power is limited within a strictly patriarchal context, and women writers using the myth have both rejoiced in the power she does wield and mourned her inability to do more.

Thus, the myth and the consequent use of gardens as a trope together offer women writers a way to envision the reunion of mothers and daughters. As Alice Walker does in 174 her essay, we women must recognize the limitations of the mother's power (the illusory nature of Clarissa's garden, the nostalgic artificiality of the sickly British plants expensively maintained on the African veldt) and at the same time find in her that part of her soul that would not be forced and reclaim it for ourselves.

That is, of course, what Clarissa does, not with her mother but with Septimus. Ultimately, the myth offers possibilities that extend beyond the mother-daughter bond.

If Miss Kilman is a Hades figure and Septimus a Demeter, then the forcing of the soul can be inflicted upon men as well as women, and the culprit can be a woman rather than a man. Woolf thus deconstructs the gendered nature of the myth. She implicitly argues that while the myth is especially poignant and meaningful for women, the issues it involves— the forcing of the soul (i.e., the wreaking of one human being's will upon another, a kind of moral coercion), which brings about an experience akin to death, which is in turn followed by a rebirth or renewal— transcend gender.

The myth thus becomes cultural as well as personal in its implications— a myth of death and resurrection enacted by women rather than men.

Certainly the mysteries of Eleusis with which the hymn is inextricably connected were open to both male and female initiates (Kerenyi "Kore" 138), and what little of the ceremonies we know could be interpreted both in terms of 175 women's lives and in terms of human life in general: "Every grain of wheat and every maiden contains, as it were, all its descendants and all her descendants— an infinite series of mothers and daughters in one" (Kerenyi "Kore" 153). This reading of the myth complements rather than contradicts my reading— just as the reading of the Oedipus myth as a myth of community renewal complements rather than contradicts the better-known Freudian reading.

In fact, the myth's ineradicable basis in ritual— in the acts human beings perform to reassure themselves— is perhaps what gives this myth (and possibly all mythology) its depth and resonance. "Both myth and ritual . . . provide cultural solutions to problems which all human beings face," Clyde

Kluckhohn maintains (41), but no one myth ever quite solves these persistent problems: "... the crises occasioning myth by definition do not disappear but produce further myth" (Gould 177). It is this remythologizing impulse which generates literature. It is the problem of women's achievement of a successful identification with their mothers which generates the remythologizing literature of

Frances Hodgson Burnett, Enid Bagnold, Doris Lessing, and

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