Englishness, Literature and Sexuality, 1918-1939

Home , Archibald Bodkin, Compton Mackenzie, Mary Sophia Allen, Radclyffe Hall

BODIES, BOOKS AND THE BUCOLIC: ENGLISHNESS,

LITERATURE AND SEXUALITY,

1918-1939

WREN SIDHE

A thesis submitted to

Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education

in accordance with the requirements of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities

May 2001 ABSTRACT

The hypothesisthis thesistests is that interwar hegemonicdiscourses of Englishness locatedit as originating in the heterosexualbond betweena masculinenational subject and a feminine nature/landscape.Discursively, this left little spacefor women to insert themselvesinto sucha cultural formation. However, a paradoxof this heterosexualising 0 cultural matrix may havebeen to give a voice to lesbiansubjectivity, sinceIf 'women' might not be English, could lesbiansbe? If national land was figured as feminine, and women desiredidentification with their country-as-land,to becomeEnglish might mean for somewomen that they shouldbecome lesbian. In order to explore this, three main

questionsare examined.Firstly, to what extent did the dominant discourseof the rural

in the interwar period define 'Englishness'as masculineand 'Nature' as feminine?

Secondly,if women were excludedfrom this discursiveheterosexual relationship, can

it be seenparadoxically to haveopened up a spacefor alternativesexualities to emerge?

If lesbianismwere an instanceof the latter, then what writing strategieswere adoptedin

order to articulatea relationshipbetween Englishness and lesbianism?Thirdly, what can

censoredand other literary texts of the period reveal aboutthe relationsbetween such an

English masculinenational subject,the meaningand powersattributed to literature,and

forbidden sexualitiesand subjectivities?

In its analysisof the relationshipbetween national identity, geographical

location and sexuality,this thesiscontributes to studiesof Englandand Englishness

through the addition of the conceptof 'sexuality' to an understandingof their

construction.It also contributesto lesbianand gay critical theory by examiningthe

nationalprocesses which impinge of the construýtionof the homosexualsubject.

Beyondthat, ýheimportance of the materiality of the locationsoffered to different

subjectivitiesshows how nationalidentifies are both enabledand limited by thesesame locations. Author's declaration

I declarethat the work in this t4esiswas carried out in accordancewith the regulations of Cheltenhamand GloucesterCollege of Mgher Educationand is original except where indicatedby specific referencein the text. No part of the thesishas been submittedas part of any other academicaward. The thesishas not beenpresented to any other educationinstitution in the United Kingdom or overseas.

Any views expressedin the thesisare thoseof the author and in no way represent thoseof the college. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was undertakenwith the financial supportof the Arts and Humanities

ResearchBoard, to whom I am enormouslygrateful. Other financial supportwas also

given by the John Marshall Memorial Fund and the DaphneDoughton Fund who

helpedme out at a tricky moment.

I feel very lucky to havehad sucha committed and supportiveset of

supervisors.This comeswith my thanks to ProfessorPeter Widdowson, Dr. Hilary

Hinds and Dr. Alison Oram and also to ProfessorDiana Woodward, Jacqueline '

Collinson and Roberta Stevensonwho run a friendly and stimulating graduateschool.

I have also had many interesting discussionswith membersof the English, History,

Women's Studies,and Geographydepartments at Cheltenhamand Gloucester

College, especiallythose who were in the Genderand Spatiality Group. In particular, I would like to thank CaraAitchinson, Simon Barker, Alan Brown, Andrew Charlesworth,Simon Dentith, Jo Gill, Melanie Ilic, Manzu Islam, Ros Jennings,

Ruth McElroy, CharlesMore, Fatih Ozbilgin and Shelley Saguaro.

I havecorresponded with David Matlessand Michael Bartholomew

about H. V. Morton and Englishness,chatted with Kath Holden about single women

betweenthe wars, with Asphodel Long and Daniel Cohenabout folklore, paganism

and fascism, with Lindsay River about lesbianwritings, with Nickianne Moody about

catsand popular fictions. Laura Doan kindly took me out to lunch to discusslesbians

of the interwar period. JayneNelson was a wonderful companionon a coachtrip to

view the museumsand battlefields of the WesternFront. Mrs. BarbaraWestgate 0 kindly sharedrecollections of her father, H. V. Morton, with me, and Brian de

Villiers discussedhis memoriesof H. V. Morton in SouthAfrica. The SouthWest

Englandand SouthWales Women's I-Iistory Network hasbeen 4 stimulating forum

for debate.But, in the end, all mistakesare my own, as indeed,they were in the beginning. I would like to thank staff at Cheltenhamand GloucesterCollege, in particular thosewho deal with the inter-library loans,those at the library of the

University of the West of England,especially Amanda Salter,staff of the British library at Eustonand the ColindaleNewspaper Library, the Imperial War Museum and the National Maritime Museum.The Soil Associationkindly allowed me accessto their collection at a time when they were very busy.

My biggestthanks go to my children, Maya Savarin-Wengraf,Joseph

Wengraf and Katia Wengraf - whosewitty views on life haveprovided a counterpart to my own seriousness- and to Helen Udo-Affia - who besidesbeing a girlfriend of extraordinaryqualities also sortedout my computerproblems with cheerful calm. CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

1. BANNED AND RESTRICTED BOOKS: UNACCEPTABLE IN

ENGLAND 27

2. H. V. MORTON'S PILGRIMAGES TO ENGLISHNESS 67

3. MEN-, IN-EARTH: A TROPE OF ENGLISHNESS 84

4. ALL AT SEA 115

S. WOMEN AND EARTH 144

6. THE LESBIAN AND THE NATION 171

CONCLUSION 205

BIBLIOGRAPHY 217 INTRODUCTION

So now they were launchedon the streamthatflows silent and deepthrough all great cities, gliding on betweenprecipitous borders,away and away into no-man's-land - the mostdesolate count? y in all creation. '

When the lesbianlovers, Stephenand Mary, in Radclyffe Hall's 7he Well of

Loneliness becomeinvolved with a lesbianand gay community in Paris,the narrative providesthe abovecommentary on their situatiori. Homosexuality,it seems,is neither metropolitannor rural, but outsidenational boundariesand in a liminal spacebetween borders.Previously, Stephenhad been exiled from England becauseof her desirefor other women. This was a bitter irony to her since, through her love of England,she had chosento becomeinvolved with the war effort in defenceof England.However, when the Great War endedshe, and other lesbians,found they were still unwantedin En-land:

The very public whom they had servedwas the first to turn round and spit upon them; to cry: 'Away with this cankerin our midst, this nest of unrighteousness and corruption!' That was the gratitudethey had receivedfor the work they had done out of love for England! I

Whilst the war had enabledStephen to meet othersof her kind and createa lesbian identity for herself, it had also provided a metaphor- 'no-man's-land' - for the way sheperceived her place in relation to the nation.Without roots in the English landscape,she can only drift on a dangerousstream of water. The silenceof this streamsuggests that homosexualityis also outsidelanguage. In the face of exile from

England,desolation has becomeStephen and Mary's 'country', but this desolation could be amelioratedif only Englandwould acknowledgetheir lesbianism.Stephen doesnot acceptthat her desirefor women invalidatesher love of country.

It is the relationshipbetween national identity, geographicallocation and sexuality that this thesisexplores. Is Stephenright that national identity and lesbianismare antithetical?This would imply that Englishnessis heterosexual.

Nonetheless,the. dangers attributed to homosexuality,figured through 'the precipitous borders' betweenwhich the streamflows, can be avertedthroug ha call on nation.

This streamis, dangerous because it hasno national identity, thereforeto provide 2 nationalidentity to homosexualitywould makehomosexuality a safesubjectivity to inhabit. But why is homosexualitypositioned as outsideof nation?Is this a peculiarity of Radclyffe Hall's writing, or do other texts figure homosexualitydifferently? Is it possibleto inscribe a homosexualsubject who is also national?These are someof the questionsthis thesisaddresses through a study of literary texts from the interwar period.

The interwar period constitutesa particularly significanthistorical momentin which to examinethe configurationsof sexuality and nation through

literary texts for two main reasons.Firstly, the nation was in upheavalafter the Great

War, both in terms of the disruption of previousýgender and classrelations, and also

in termsof a widely perceivedneed that the nation neededa cultural renewal,and that

English literature was a prime site through which, it was argued,the nation could be

renewed.English culture was seento have becometoo ferninised,and neededa

renewalto take place through 'virility' -a key term in debatesabout the stateof the nation. Secondly,as Jeffrey Weeks has shown, 'by the end of the nineteenthcentury

a recognisably"modem" male homosexualidentity was beginningto emerge',and 3 later, in the interwar years,the lesbianwas emergingas a formal identity. Her

position in the nation was subjectto parliamentaryand other debate.In 1921,for

example,Parliament debated whether to criminalise lesbianismas a meansto

strengthenthe nation againstmoral downfall. Whilst somesaw lesbianismas a danger

to nation, othersthought it harmlessenough to be (pointedly) ignored.The

conjunction of thesetwo conditions offers a fruitful areaof analysis. The hypothesisthis thesistests is that interwar hegemonicdiscourses

of Englishnesslocated it as originating in the heterosexualbond betweena masculine

national subjectand a feminine nature/landscape.Discursively, this left little spacefor

women to insert themselvesinto sucha cultural formation. However, a paradoxof

this heterosexualisingcultural matrix may have beento give a voice to lesbian

subjectivity, sinceif 'women' might not be English, could lesbiansbe? If national

land was figured as feminine, and women desiredidentification with their country-as-ý 3 land, to becomeEnglish might meanfor somewomen that they shouldbecome lesbian.In order to explore this, I examinethree main questions.Firstly, to what

extent did the dominantdiscourse of the rural in the interwar period define

'Englishness'as masculineand 'Nature' as feminine? Secondly,if women were

excludedfrom this discursiveheterosexual relationship, can it be seenparadoxically to

haveopened up a spacefor alternativesexualities to emerge?If lesbianismwas an

instanceof the latter, then what writing strategieswere adoptedin order to articulatea

relationshipbetween Englishness and lesbianism?Thirdly, what can censoredtexts of

the period reveal aboutthe relationsbetween such an English masculinenational

subject,the meaningand powersattributed to literature, and forbidden sexualitiesand

subjectivities?Such questions need to be addressedin relation to a numberof areasof

critical and theoreticaldebate - i. e. thoserelating to questionsof 'England and Englishness','Nation and Narration', 'Nation and Gender' and 'Nation and

Sexuality' - in order to illuminate the processby which Englandis narratedas a nation which gendersand attributesa sexuality to its national subjects.

England and Englishness

Two categoriesof work fall under this heading.The first is an:examination of notions

of England and Englishness,and the secondis an examinationof the cultivation of

English studiesand English literature as a disciplinary power in national regulation.

Robert Colls and Philip Dodd's 1986edited volume, Englishness:Politics and Culture

1880-1920,straddles both. ' Working from the premissthat 'Englishness' is not a

natural quality which thoseliving in the place called 'England' possess,but rather an

attribute needingto be madeand re-madeunder varying historical conditions,the

various contributorsexamine the category'English national identity' and the

institutions involved in its production.This identity was partly forged through the

creationof an English literary tradition, and PeterBrooker and PeterWiddowson importance literature in 'maintaining "the forms" show the central of ... rhetorical and "sentimentalculture" necessaryto patriotic nationalism[in] the shapingof a versionof

the pastby way of a constructedEnglish literary tradition.' -This literary tradition 4 utiliscd the idea of a timelesscustom within an Englandthat was essentiallyrural, even though,as Alun Howkins argues:

Since 1861England has been an urbanand industrial nation.The experience of the majority of its population is, and was, that of urban life, the boundaries of their physical world defined by streetsand housesrather than fields or lanes.Yet the ideology of Englandand Englishnessis to a remarkabledegree rural. '

Here, in this rural image, is the presentationof a 'real England', Howkins says, where 'men and women still live naturally. The air is clean,personal relationships is (except It matter... there no crime "quainf' crime like poaching)and no violence ... is an organic society,a "real" one, as opposedto the unnaturalor "unreal" societyof the town. 97

How is this rural Englandgendered? If in this ruralist discourseof

Englandand Englishnessmen and women lived naturally, what was natural to them as genderedsubjects? Jane Mackay and PatThane suggestthat a:

Clearly defined,uncontested, image of the Englishwomanis surprisingly elusivein this period of the constructionand redefinition of Englishness.The classicEnglish man of the period was held to combinecertain qualities, including leadership,courage, justice and honour,which were defined as distinctively 'English'. He hasno female equivalent.'

Arguing that womenwere not identified with 'nation' but 'race', they explain the elusivenessof an identity for the Englishwomanas dependenton the fact that:

Women were believedto possesstransnational qualities. Nationality played in in ... a more significant role the redefinition of masculinity ... than that of femininity; oneof the distinctionsbetween male andfemale was that the conceptof nationality was almostalways on the male side of the divide. Women, indeed,had no fixed nationality.They were madeto adoptthat of their husband;on marriageto a foreigner they lost their English statusand its accompanyingrights. '

Clearly, thereexisted two, gendered,relationships to the nation. Men were equated

with the nation, and thereforewith culture, whereaswomen were transnationaland

outsideEnglish culture. Identified with 'race', womenwere thus reducedto an

essentialand biological function. In this way, a woman's nationality could only be

relational,in that it would derive from her relation to a man's nationality.This view of

the Englishwomanas not quite nationalcan be found replicatedas recently as 1999in JeremyPaxman's The English: A Portrait ofa People.Here, in a book of eleven 5 chapters,women are not discusseduntil the tenth.The ninth chapteris entitled 'The

Ideal Englishman' and the tenth, 'Meet the Wife. The first feýypages of this chapter on the Englishman'swife are more of a descriptionof one versionof English masculinity than of the Englishwoman,and begin:

It is not often you meet someonewho hashad a bottom transplant.The man in question,lowly, balding, 50ish, in a pinstripe suit and well madeshoes, looks the picture of British probity. You know he prides himself that his word is his bond. By day, he runs a merchantbank. At night, he likes to be spankeduntil the blood runs. His obsessionhas becomeknown as le vice anglais. "

Following this is a descriptionof the banker'suse of 'muscularblack women' prostitutesl.In Paxman'sEngland, black women are associatedwith prostitution and white womenare national when positionedas married accessoriesto Englishmen.

Lesbiansare non-existent.As in the interwar period, white women are subsumed underpatriarchal and heterosexualmasculinity's control throughthe sign the 'wife', ratherthan through a sign which grantsthem autonomy.Here, again,women are associatedwith naturethrough their sexualityrather than with English cultural institutions.

For JeremyPaxman, 'being English is a stateof mind' which one can decidewhether or not to adopt,such that '[bleing English is a matter of choice'. Although Michael Wood's In Searchof England.Journeys into the English Past

(2000) similarly neglectsto give English women any statusin the shapingof England and Englishness,Wood providesa different origin for Englishnessto that of " Paxman's'state of mind. He hesitantlytakes a more biological and racial stanceon Englishnessand arguesthat:

Sociologiststell us one of the key factorsin the creationof nationalidentity is facing up to disastersand the achievementof a senseof a sharedpast. This is not a literal past,of course,save, possibly, in a biological sense.It is images of the past:often as highly structuredand selectiveas myths i rinted, almostin the mannerof geneticinformation, on our sensibiliýymlf

Wherewomen might fit into either of theseversions is difficult to tell. Paxman's

'being-English-by-choice'evades the questionof who can make this choice,and also evadesdiscussing who will authorisethe legitimacy of this choiceto be English once it is made.The legal system,for example,would not acceptasylum seekers who claim 6 a right to an Englishnessthey have 'chosen'. In order to chooseone has to be already

English. SincePaxman's masculinised version of contemporaryEnglishness excludes womenfrom being English in their own right, it would seemthat to be already

English meansto be masculine.Similarly, his view of black women would suggest that to be previously English one must also be white. Only then can onemake this

'choice'. However, in Wood's version of Englishness,women would presumably function as the vehicle throughwhich Englandbiologically reproducesmore national subjects.As such,to be English would entail having a family history of being English where biological bodiescarry this Englishnessin their geneticstructure, or in the mythical spaceof their 'sensibility', from generationto generation.

While Paxmanand Wood presentmonolithic views of Englishness, Judy Giles and Tim Middleton in Writing Englishness 1900-1950: An Introductory Sourcebook on National Identity, refuse an essentialising Englishness to present a more complex view in which various groups take up, reject, oppose or adapt different versions for their own ends. " However, in some ways, they concur with Paxman in their definition by arguing that:

Englishness is 'the but not simply about somethingC) called national character' has to be seen as a nexus of values, beliefs and attitudes which are offered as unique to England and to those who identify as, or wish to identify as, English. In other words Englishness is a state of mind: a belief in a national identity which is part and parcel of one's senseof self. "

Again, Englishnessis seenas a stateof mind with which one identifies, or not, accordingto choice,and as sucherases the legal dimensionto nationalidentity.

Similarly, it erasesthe gendereddimension to nationalidentity that Mackay andThane identified concerningthe Englishwoman'slack of a fixed nationality and her possessionof transnationalqualities. Although this thesisis not primarily concerned with the law regardingnational identity, it doesdiscuss the placeof the law with regardto the regulationof Englishliterature in legal attemptsto makecertain subjectivitiesnot-English. "

Defining Englishnessas a stateof mind ignoresthe fact that this mind residesin embodiedsubjects who can perform English acts.So, for example,H. V. 7

Morton, a popularcommcn tator on Englandin the interwar period, wrote in his travels aroundthe Middle Eastthat no one lays a table as well as the English. Other suchacts may be seenin the interwar popularity of the pageantwhich madea communalritual performanceof Englandand Englishness.Similarly, for someclasses fox-hunting functionsas a petformanceof their English identity. Thesevarious actions which perform bodily 'acts of Englishness'may be as important in constructingnational identity as thinking of oneselfas English. In this way, Englishnessmay be seento be performativerather than cognitive.As such,it is similar to the way in which Judith

Butler conceivesgender. Gender, she argues:

Is the repeatedstylization of the body, a set of repeatedacts within a highly rigid regulatoryframe that congealover time to produce.the appearanceof substance,of a natural sort of being. "

PerformingEnglishness would havethe sameeffect of producing 'a natural sort of being', the English subject,whose acts of Englishness' areperformative in the sense that the essenceor identity that they otherwisepurport to expressarefabrications manufacturedand sustainedthrough corporealsigns and other discursivemeans. That the genderedbody [like the English body] is performativesuggests that it hasno ontologicalstatus apart from the various actswhich constituteits reality.' " However, aswe shall later seein the main part of the thesis,only somepeople are allowed to perform theseacts. Their exclusionfrom Englishnessis implicated in the construction of this very sameEnglishness and helpscreate the f iction that Englishnessis somehownatural to somepeople and not others.Englishness, then, I argue,is not abouta free and open choice,as suggestedby Paxman,but is formed through identification with certainstates of mind, sharedcultural practicesand values,bodily acts,and exclusionarypractices, underpinned by legal notions.

Thesedebates relate to my researchquestions in a variety of ways. Did nationaladdress in the interwar period privilege both the rural and masculinityas English, whereaswomen and the urban were lessvalued terms in discoursesof

Englishness?Could women be fully national subjects?if constitutedas peripheralto the nation, might thosewomen who searchedfor a nationalidentification contestthe 8 meaningsof Englandand Englishnessthrough other performancesof Englishness?

This contestationwould be possiblebecause, as I have suggested,Englishness has no prior ontological status.Any statusit hasis producedthrough a performativity which constitutesit as real.

Nation and Narration

Like all studiesof nationsand nationalisms,this thesisowes a debt to Eric Hobsbawrn andTerence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition "' and BenedictAnderson's ImaginedCommunities, both of which show the role of imagination and the performanceof invented'traditional' actsof nationalallegiance in the creationand maintenanceof the nation." Hobsbawrnpoints out a paradoxwithin the nation, wherebyits modernity is setagainst its constructionas timeless.'Modem nationsand all their impedimenta',he writes, 'generally claim to be the oppositeof novel, namely rootedin the remotestantiquity, and the oppositeof constructed,namely human communitiesso "natural" as to requireno definition other than self-assertion.' 21

Andersonconcurs, arguing that '[ilf nation-statesare widely concededto be "new" and "historical", the nationsto which they give expressionalways loom out of an immemorialpast. 22In order to maintain the modemnation as historic, peoplemust usetheir imaginationsto invent this fiction. In this process,love of nation arises throughthe lattachmentthat peoplesfeel for the inventionsof their imaginations'.22,

Andersongives both novelsand pilgrimage (orjoumey) important statusin the

creationof the nation.The novel is importantbecause it can representthe imagined

communityof the particularnation. In the act of readingit, readerscan imagine

themselvesas locatedwithin a nationalcommunity of readerswho sharesimilar

territory, languageand ways of apprehendingthe world. The readerwill nevermeet

all other readersof the novel but can be broughtinto an imaginaryrelationship with

them. Pilgrimage,orjoumeying, can also producethis imagined senseof national

community.In journeying arounda particular geographicalterritory, the traveller will in encounterpeople from 'placesand families he [sic] hasscarcely heard of and ... experiencingthem as travelling-companions,a consciousnessof connectedness 9

("Why here are we ...... togetherT')emerges, above all, when all sharea similar language-of-state.924 In the caseof English nationalism,the answerto this questionof

'why are we hereT would haveto be 'becausewe are Enolish'. The interwar popularity of rambling in the English countrysidecould then be understoodin

Anderson'sterms as creatingthe imaginedcommunity of the nation, and significantly, pilgrimage and readingcollide in the work of H. V. Morton whosework is discussed in ChapterTwo. As Morton writes of his travels aroundEngland, one can seea specificexample of how the nation is definedand reproducedin the storiestold about it.

In my examinationof the ways in which Englandand Englishness were narratedin the interwar period, I draw in particular on the work of Mary N. Layoun, who arguesthat: Nationalism both the is ... of nineteenthand twentieth centuries... a masterful effort of narrativeconstruction. Like all narrative,nationalism tells a story by articulatingdiverse but presumablylinked elements,and not by chance,it also constructsand privileges- sometimesas virtually omniscient- its own narrativeperspective. Narratives of nationalismpropose a grammarof the nation.That is, they proposethe correct and orderly placementand useof the constituentelements of the nation.And, not leastof all, that grammar the definition ý' prescribes proper and situation of genderedcitizens ... This idea of 'the grammarof the nation' as an orderly placementof constituent elementsis one which I deploy throughoutmy examinationof narrativesof England and Englishnesswhich link diverseelements to constitutethe nation.As Homi

Bhabhapoints out, thereis a similarity betweennarrative and nation because

'[njations, like narratives,lose their origins in the mist of time and only fully realize their horizonsin the mind's eye.' " Contributorsto Bhabha'sedited volume, Nation andNarration, agreeabout the fictive quality of the nation, and how literary myth is complicit in its construction.However, Geoffrey Benningtonreasons that although

'[alt the origin of the nation, we find a story of the nation's origins', we shouldbe wary because:

Our own drive to find the centreand the origin hascreated its own myth of the origin - namely that at the origin is the myth. In this story, narrationcomes too easy,too soon;investigating the nation is herecomplicit with the nation's own story.The problemis no doubt a result of the pretensionto reachthe centre directly, whereassuch access is in generalillusory: the approa6hto the nation 10

implies borders, policing, suspicion,and crossing(or refusal of entry) - try to entera the (by flying in, borderis country at centre 0 say), and the still there to be crossed,the frontier shifted from peripheryto centre.

At the bordersof the nation, he argues,one meetswith other nations,such that the origin of the nation is complicatedby the fact that it dependson its differentiationfrom other nationswhich havealready begun. Therefore it is importantto analysethe nation when it is narratedfrom and in the borders,wherever they might be.

This thesisexamines both works which the centredoes not acceptand excludesfrom publicationand narrativeswhich are locatedwithin marginalEnglish geographicallocations in order to seethe dialoguebetween narratives which resist centraldefinitions and thosewhich appearto acceptthem. Thus Edward Said's thesis that 'the formed by literature belongs from, corpus works of ... to, gains coherence and in a senseemanates out of, the conceptsof nation' is usedto show how even thoseresisting narratives are still tied up with notions of Englandand Englishness.

Similarly, thosesubjects of Englishnessthat Bhabhaidentifies as within the discursive addressof the nation - which 'make[s] them the immanentsubjects and objectsof a rangeof socialand literary narratives'- are examinedin their acceptanceand resistance to thesenational discursive addresses. "' What Bhabhamost usefully showsis the ambivalenceand ambiguity within nationaladdress rather than its totalising imperative.Putting together the youthfulnessof the nation with its mythical ancientness,and indicating what the nation hasto repressor hide aboutitself in order to the fiction its Bhabha how knowledge maintain of age, shows a'problem of ... hauntsthe symbolic formation of social authority' of the nation.'0 We are obligedto forget that the nation is not naturally given, and in this senseitý too, is a problemof knowledge.Can we actually 'know' the nation in any meaningful sense,or shouldwe view it as liminal? It is this liminality of the nation, he argues,that shouldbe established,and then once 'its "difference" is turnedfrom the boundary"outside" to its finitude "within", the threatof cultural differenceis no longer a problemof "other" people.It becomesa questionof the othernessof the people-as-one."l This thesis examinesnarratives to totalising Englishness which either subscribe 0 versionsof or 11 which threatenthe idea of 'the nation as onepeople' in their rejectionof heterosexual forms of English identity.

The 'natural' statusof the nation hasto be maintainedthrough fictions, and literature,again, is important in this process.Narratives of the nation link up diverseelements to constitutethe grammarof the nation, and in this processthey naturalisethe linkage, so that theselinkages appear as an inevitablepart of national order.However, it is also importantto exan-dnenarratives of the nation when they are narratedfrom and in the margins,in order to seewhat disruptionsappear in the grammarof the nation from thesespaces. Here, the limits to the totalisingimperative of national addressmay be seen;here may be revealedwhat we havehad to 'forget' aboutthe nation in orderto maintainits ontologicalstatus as 'real'; hereis a site in which Englandand Englishnessis contested.

Thesedebates about narratives of the nation raisea numberof importantquestions pertinent to the presentproject. How is the grammarof the nation formulatedin culturally valuedtexts, and how is it formulatedin marginaltexts? How is the grammarof the nation genderedand attributeda sexuality?What implications

follow from the ways in which the nation is ordered?

Nation and Gender

Who is the national subjectwhose story is to be narrated?To what extentdo the

categoriesof gender,race and classinflect this nationalsubject differently? Since

Andersonwrote that the pilgrim/travellerwill createnational identity through

encounterswith peoplefrom 'placesand families he [sic] hasscarcely heard of', he

hasbeen rightly crificisedfor ignoring the gendereddimension in the imagining of the

nation." The national subjecthe discussesis masculineand previousformulations of nation and nationalidentity haveoften alsotaken little accountof gender. However, GeorgeMosse, in tracing the history of nationalism

alongsidethe history of respectability,provides a corrective.His argumentthat the

allianceof bourgeoismorality with that of nationalismgrew to control sexualitygives

women a place in the nation.As 'guardiansof morality, and of public and private 12 order', woman 'as a national symbol was the guardianof the continuity and immutability of the nation,and the embodimentof its respectability.9 33 This symbolic statusaccorded women without a correspondingeconomic or political statushas led to the argumentthat '[w]omen are both of and not of the nation.t 3' CarenKaplan,

NormaAlarcon and Mnoo Moallem arguethat an essentialisedversion of woman, without nationalpower herself,'becomes the nationaliconic signifier for the material, the passive,and the corporeal,to be worshipped,protected, and controlled by those with the power to rememberand to forget, to guard,to define and redefine. 35

Includedin thosewith the 'power to define' woman are most of those contempormyintellectuals who havetheorized the nation whilst ignoring gender.

This, Nira Yuval-Davis suggests,is a curious omissiongiven that' a major school of have in nationalismscholars ... seen nationsa natural and universalphenomenon which is an "automatic" extensionof kinship relations."' Yuval-Davis's work is concemedboth with genderingthe nation andwith 'nationing' gender,such that gendercan be seento be a product of discoursesof nation. Both genderand nation, sheargues, should not be treatedas discretephenomena but analysedthrough the ways they infonn and constructone another.She suggests that two of the primary ways women havea place in nationaldiscourse is through biological reproductionof the nation and throughits cultural reproduction.Arguing that 'the pressureson women to haveor not have children relatenot to them as individuals... but as membersof specific nationalcollectivities', Yuval-Davis showshow nationalist:

Projectswhich focus on genealogyand origin as the major organizing principlesof the nationalcollectivity would tend to be more exclusionarythan othernationalist projects. Only by being born into a certaincollectivity could one be a full memberof it. Control of marriage,procreation and therefore sexualitywould thus tend to be high on the nationalistagenda. When constructionsof 'race' are addedto the notion of the commongenetic pool, fear of miscegenationbecomes central to the nationalistdiscourse. 37

Shealso argues that thereis anotherway of imagining nationalcollectivities beside that of 'genetic pools', and locatesthis in notionsof a people'sculture and tradition. This: Which is usually partly composedof a specific version ... of a specific language,is anotheressentializing dimension, which in different national 13

prOjectsacquires a significancehigher or lower than that of genealogyor blood.... Gendersymbols playa partictilarly significant role in this. 38

The importanceof women in this version of nation lies in their role as cultural reproducersof the nation, and:

Becauseof the centralimportance of social reproductionto culture, gender relationsoften cometo be seenas constitutingthe "essenceý'of culturesas ways of life to be passedfrom generationto generation.The constructionof "home" is of particularimportance here, including relationsbetween adults and betweenadults and children in the family, ways of cooking and eating, domesticlabour, play and bedtime stories,out of which a whole world view, ethical andaesthetic, can becomenaturalized and reproduced.39

Both of theseforms of imagining Englishnesscan be seenat work in the interwar period.A rhetoric of the nation as a racialisedentity (the island race)and a rhetoric of appropriategender spheres were in operation,as will be seenin subsequqnt chapters.So, for example,when H. V. Morton travels through parts of London where 'Lascars', 'Chinamen' and 'Jews' live and work, he describeshimself afterwardsas having to catch a bus 'back to England'. He hasno way of knowing whetherthese people have been born English, but evenif they had beenhe doesnot seethem asfull membersof the nationalcollectivity: their 'race' precludesthis, as they are not'white'. Whilst white Englishwomenwere chargedwith reproducingthe

'race", they were also chargedwith the cultural reproductionof Englishnesswithin the home.Mrs Miniver, a mythical middle-classEnglish housewifewhose diaries were serialisedin 7he Times,provide a striking exampleof this and, accordingto Alison

Light, althoughthey 'seemto occupythe most personaland subjectiveof spaces', they take us 'simultaneouslyinto the most nationaland public territoriesof being

English betweenthe wars."' Women,then, have been accorded a symbolic ratherthan a political statusand havebeen given a placein the nation throughthe biological reproductionof more national subjectsand throughreproducing the cultural valuesof Englishness within the home.The nation allots womena biological and racial statuswhich it then controlsin the interestsof nationalreproduction. In this way, nationalwomen must be heterosexual.This imbfication of heterosexualityand nation leadsme to ask how this heterosexualityis performedand regulated within nationalliterature. Does the 14 performanceof English heterosexualityhave implications for other sexualities?How is sexualitydiscursively regulated to ensurewomen's heterosexualityfor England?

Which sexualitiesare allowed to the masculinenational subject? Nation and Sexuality

The 1992collection, Nationalismsand Sexualities,carries on and respondsto the work of GeorgeMosse, who had arguedthat in generalnationalism produced and privileged male homosocialbonding, w4ilst enshriningwoman as mother.

Contributorsargue that one effect of this 'idealization of motherhoodby the virile fraternity would seemto entail the exclusionof all nonreproductively-oriented sexualitiesfrom the discourseof nation."' However, the nation is tied up with the erotic in that:

Wheneverthe power of nation is invoked - whetherit be in the media,in scholarlytexts, or in everydayconversation - we are more likely than not to find it couchedas a love of country: an eroticizednationalism. The reverseis [homophobia] also true ... showsthat this commercebetween eros and nation can ran in the other direction as well. "

The collection asks'[h]ow is it that the world hascome to seeitself divided along the seeminglynatural lines of nationalaffiliation andsexual attachment? How do these categoriesinteract with, constitute,or otherwiseilluminate eachother? " The imaginaryquality of the nation doesnot meanit is merelyfictive, becausethe institutionalforces which regulateit producethe effect of it being real. Therefore, the 'carries immense freight disenfranchised since nation ... this political ... groups havehad to appealto nationalvalues precisely to registertheir claims as political.' 44

If in the interwar yearsheterosexuality was the nationalnorm against which other sexualitieswere measured,this may not have alwaysbeen the case.

Henry Abelove arguesthat in Englandbetween 1680 and 1830the hugepopulation increasecan be seenin termsof a changefrom an era of very diversesexual practice to an era in which heterosexualsexual intercourse came to be the most culturally sanctionedform of sexualactivity. This, Abelove argues,could be relatedto the rise of capitalismand the new importanceplaced on production:

While productionincreases... it also becomesdiscursively and phenomenologicallycentral in ways that it had neverbeen before. Behaviours, 15

judged be customs,usages which are to nonproductive... come under extraordinaryand ever-intensifyingnegative pressure. If I shouldbe right in speculatingthat the rise in popularity of sexualintercourse so-called in late eighteenthcentury England is an aspectof the samephenomena that include the rise in production, then we shouldexpect to find that sexualintercourse so- called becomesat this time andin this place discursivelyand phenomenologicallycentral in ways that it had neverbeen before; that nonreproductivesexual behaviours come under extraordinarynegative pressure;and finally that both develo?,m6nts happen in ways that testify to their relatedness,even to their unity. in That the idea of the modem nation valorisesheterosexuality ýCan also be seen the work of Mary Layoun. Sheexamines the narrativesof Palestiniannationalism and

their deploymentof the trope of the wedding, the union of a man and a woman, in

order to arguethat:

This prosaicimage of the conjugal union of man and woman as a trope for the union of the nationalcitizen with national territory underthe authority of a national stateis at the heart of virtually all nationalistrhetoric. (And it has situateditself as well and with considerableregularity at the heartof nationalist grammaras stateorder. ) This vexedtrope is arguablythe generativebasis for the absenceand longing on which national desireis erected.And, following mundanelyon the termsof that trope, the representationof the fulfillment or consummationof desireis possessionand control of the land-as-woman."

How are women to respondto sucha nationalist rhetoric?If 'this vexed trope' is the

basisfor national desire,how are women to orient themselvesin relation to it? If they

repudiatetheir objectificationin nationalidealised femininity and want to become

national subjects,rather than objectsof nationalism,must their desirebe oriented

toward the national territory? Given that territory is figured through the idea of land-

as-woman,to becomenational subjectsmust women desireunion with this womanly

land? In this way, could their desirebe said to be lesbian?

The difficulties of inscribing this problematicrelation between'nation'

and 'lesbian' can be seenin Emily Hamer's Britannia's Glory: A History of

Twentieth-CenturyLesbians, which, despitesignalling itself as a history that might

conjoin ideasof nation/Britain with biographiesof lesbians,in fact doesnot. Although

Hamer hasproduced a useful resourcebook in her attemptto 'map lesbianhistory: a

history of how lesbiansthought of their lives, understoodtheir experiences,and

chartedtheir commitments', quite how notions of Englishness,or even Britishness,

might haveimpinged on their lived experiencesof themselvesis not given 16 consideration.47Similarly, Terry Castle's 7heApparitional Lesbian:Female

Homosexualityand Modern Culture, whilst looking at representationsof lesbians.in variousmoments of Europeanculture, doesnot examinethe ways in which these representationsmay havebeen inflected by their nationalpositioning. 4' Her general thesisthat the lesbian'has been"ghosted" - or madeto seeminvisible - by culture itself' makesculture ahistoricaland without a national dimension.49 However, since a prime argumentin Nationalismsand Sexualities is that non-reproductivesexualities are excludedfrom discoursesof nation, then representationsof homosexualitymust be analysedin relation to thesediscourses of nation. The exclusionof homosexuality from nation meansthat it is constructedthrough this exclusionarydiscourse, and ideas of nation are complicit,in the (im)possibilitiesof how homosexualitycan be represented.The presentthesis aims to redressCastle's view, since its impetus arose out of identifying, in a rangeof literary texts and traditions,the difficulties inherent in inscribing the category'lesbian' with that of 'nation' in the interwar period.

One suchtext, Virginia Woolf's Orlando,seems to presentthe nation as blocking literary explorationsof genderand sexualidentity, suchthat the place in which theseexplorations could happenappear to be 'abroad', elsewhere,or in another time. " But I doubt Virginia Woolf's famous statementthat 'as a woman I have no country', sinceher argumentseems simultaneously to suggestthat women can have a strongly emotionalrelationship to nation that can producethe feeling of having a country. Writing aboutthe condition of the English woman as outsidea masculine

England and Englishness,Woolf arguesin 7hree Guineas: "Our its history has country" ... throughoutthe greaterpart of treatedme as a slave;it has deniedme educationor any sharein its possessions."Our" country still ceasesto be mine if I marry a foreigner. "Our" country deniesme the meansof protecting myself, forces me to pay othersa very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautionsare written on the wall. Thereforeif you insist upon fighting to protect me, or "our" country, let it be understood,soberly and rationally betweenus, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannotshare; to procure benefitswhich I have not sharedand probably will not share;but to instincts, For in not gratify my or to protect either myself or my country. ... fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. And if, when reasonhas said its say, still someobstinate emotion remains,some love of Englanddropped into a child's earsby the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splashof waveson a 17

beach,or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes,this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion shewill make serveher to give to Englandfirst what she desiresof peaceand freedom for the whole world.[My italics] "-

This passageis generallynever quoted in its entirety in cultural and literary criticism, leaving the impressionthat Woolf has said that a woman hasno country. However, shedoes make a claim for it as belongingto her, irrational as shestates this claim to be. The ambiguity of the relation betweenwoman and Englandis expressedin the phrase'my country'. VVhilstdisparaging it as not-hers,Woolf, nonetheless,expresses an obstinateand irrational love of England,in the face of its rejection of women.Her relationshipto Englandis sensualand bodily rather than intellectual. It is the sensual pleasureshe derives from loving Englandthat leadsher to argue,not that countries shouldbe destroyedin favour of the whole world's peaceand freedom, but that England should still exist as somekind of flagship nation.

Perhaps,then, women do have a country derived, albeit in a second- handway, from patriarchaland heterosexualfamilial relationsin which nationality is conferredthrough fathers and husbands.Or, alternatively, perhapswomen do n ot, have a country, but are necessaryto the processof nation creationand building through reproductionof. further national subjects,and through the cultural reproductionof national values.This problematicis one of the issuesat stakein this thesis,as is the questionof sexuality. What of thosewomen who fall outside these heterosexualties? In consideringthis question,I have drawn on the work of Monique

Wittig, who arguesthat:

The refusalto become(or to remain) heterosexualalways meant to refuseto becomea man or a woman, consciouslyor not. For a lesbian this goesfurther than the refusal of the role 'woman'. It is the refusal of the economic, ideological and political power of a man. "

Asking '[w1hat is womanT, Wittig suggeststhat becausethe term only hasmeaning 'in heterosexual heterosexual [Ilesbians systemsof thought and economic systems... are not wornen.' 53Lesbian, she says:

Is the only conceptI know of which is beyondthe categoriesof sex (woman and man), becausethe designatedsubject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically,politically, or ideologically. For what makesa woman is a specific social relationshipto a man, a relation that we havepreviously called servitude,a relation which implies personaland physical obligation as well as 18

economicobligation ("forced residence",domestic corv6e, conjugal duties, unlimited production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbiansescape by refusing to becomeor to stay heterosexual.'

Given that 'Englishwoman' is in a relational categorywith 'Englishman', is it lesbians who do not have a country, whereas'women' do? Within the grammarof the nation, then as now, the term 'Englishlesbian' is non-existent,suggesting the impossibility of a nationalisedformulation of this identity. This considerationof the difference betweena woman's relation to Englandand a lesbian'srelation to Englandunderlies this thesis,as doesa study of Wittig's position with regard to national identity. Given that her work is not primarily concernedwith individual relationsbetween men and women,but the political and economicregimes these relations of heterosexuality operatein, one could broadenher definition of the lesbianas constitutedoutside of any relation to man - to include her as outsideof any relation to political and economic structuresof patriarchy.If the nation is one such structure- as Yuval-Davis and

Layoun, for example,have argued- the lesbianinevitably is outsidethe nation. Would this then meanthat thosewho refusenational identifications might be marked as lesbian?Would a specific'relationto nation thereforebecome a sign that one is, or is not, lesbian?If one engageswith the project of nation, doesthis meanthat one cannotbe lesbian?Conversely, if one refusesto partakein nationalistprojects and agendas,is one thereforelesbian?

Radclyffe Hall's fictional lesbiancharacter, Stephen Gordon, cannot be seento agreewith Wittig's descriptionof lesbiansas not-women,or, taking accountof the broaderimplications of her theory, as not-English. Stephen'schallenge is to reconcilethe differencesbetween England and the lesbianso that they might coexist. Neither did shethink of her lover, Mary, as not-woman.As far as Stephenis concerned,the problem betweenthem lies in her inability to make Mary's womb fertile. To apply Wittigian theoriesto theserepresentations of lesbianswould be to cooperatewith thoserhetorical structureswhich Terry Castleidentifies in The

Apparitional Lesbian which producethe lesbian as a sign that is displayedprecisely in order to be erased.Stephen would have to be marked as not-lesbianbecause of her 19 identification with and desirefor Englandand Englishness.It would be ironic to use a lqsbiantheory to deny the existenceof lesbians.If lesbiancultural theory can be used to deny lesbianexistence, this might reveal the limitations of suchtheories. However, on the other hand,it could broadenthe way in which the lesbiancan be understood.as sheinteracts with nation. In this way, the lesbianmay offer a powerful subject position outsidethe nation from which to provide a critique of national processes.

This would make the lesbianless of a sexualsubject and more of a political one. Such debatesas I have outlined above,with regardto literature, nation, genderand sexuality, are examinedin various ways in the chapterswhich follow.

The first chapterexamines censored books in order to deal with my researchquestion concerning the relationshipbetween a masculinenationq subject, the meaningsand powersattached to literature, and forbidden sexualitiesand subjectivities.The particular writings examinedin this chapterwere thosewhose publishershad been subjectto prosecution,or texts which had beensubject to censorshipin its varied forms, whether self-censoredby the writer, bannedby circulating libraries or by the Home Office and the Director of Public Prosecutions,or were censoredin that only certain categoriesof readerswere allowed accessto them.

This chapterestablishes the importanceof literature as a primary site through which the nation was being (re)imaginedafter the GreatWar, and examinesthe rhetoric deployedin interwar debatesabout literary censorshipin order to discoverwhat was imaginedas 'non-national' when certainliterary texts were rejectedfor the national canon.The chapterasks how the acceptableface of Englandand Englishnesswas being constitutedin and through this censorship.Which subjectivitiesand forms of writing were excludedfrom notions of Englishness?Was there another,more valorised,form of literature that stoodin contrastto 'indecent' literature and if so, what characterisedit?

ChapterTwo turns to a popular exampleof clean and healthy, fresh-air literature. H. V. Morton's work has particular resonanceswith Benedict Anderson's how the 'imagined is notion of community' of the nation createdthrough pilgrimage. 0 20

Morton himself suggestshis travels aroundEngland are a form of pilgrimage, and to readof his travelsbecomes yet anotherform of pilgrimage. The Call ofEngland, In

SearchofEngland, and othersof Morton's travel texts, are analysedin order to examinethe hypothesisthat interwar hegemonicdiscourses of the rural located

Englishnessin a heterosexualbond betweena masculinenational subjectand a feminine nature/landscape.Beyond that, Morton's work is also investigatedto understandthe relation between'woman' and 'nation'. Do women havea location within his formulation of Englishness?What national locational identity is offered for men?How is literature configuredin the nation when Morton 'finds' England?

ChapterThree follows on from Morton's version of Englishnessas a bond betweenman and earthto considerthe historical conditionswhich madethis trope prevalent.Turning to the GreatWar, it looks at the material conditionsof the trencheswhere at times men and earthbecame almost indistinguishablefrom one another,and askswhy the masculinespace of trench experiencebecame a particularly powerful way of apprehendingthe war for post-war society.What could it offer at a time when Englishnesswas being re-imagined?The texts examinedhere were implicated in the project of making the nation virile. How did they achievethis? This chapterasks whether a relationshipwith earth could guaranteethe. national heterosexualityof the masculinesubject. A variety of autobiographicalaccounts of the

First World War, alongsidefictional and literary accounts,such asAll Quiet on the

WesternFront and Her Privates We,are looked at. However, a pre-war text, The

Wind in the Willows, is also analysedto show the use of the trope of men-in-earth prior to the war. The Hobbit is chosenbecause Tolkien had written it in an attemptto provide a mythology for England, and the various works of T. H. White becausethey My signal through their tides - Earth Stopped,Gone to Ground, EnglandHave Bones The Sword and in the Stone - that they dealt with the materiality of earthand a human relationship with it. Geoffrey Household'sRogue Male representsa popular example of this trope, publishedat a tenseperiod of history just prior to the outbreakof the

SecondWorld War. Later filmed by Fritz Lang asMan Hunt, it providesan example 21 of the power of the trope in the face of fears aboutan Englandfelt to be yet again under attack.

ChapterFour examinesthe statusof the masculinenational subject when he is unableto touch earth. Sailorstrouble heterosexualitywithin this interwar sexualeconomy because they relateto sky and searather than to earth.The chapter also askswhich landscapesmake possiblethe inscription of the lesbianand homosexualsubject. Few literary texts are analysed,as the main drive here is to examinewider cultural debatesabout the sailor as national subject,his reading-matter, and the statusof the sea.However, the literary work of JamesHanley is considered because precisely Hanley straddlestwo subjectivities- that of the sailor, and that of the national writer whosework appeared'before the law'. The publishersof his novel, Boy, were subjectto a summonscalling them to accountfor publishing an

'obscenelibel', and the text is discussedin this chapter,rather than the one on banned and restrictedbooks, since it providesuseful insights into the ways in which the nation, sea,and the sailor are configured as problematicfor England. Since E. M.

Forster's Maurice beginswith a striking image in which diagramsof heterosexualsex are washedoff the beachby the incoming sea,this text is chosento supply an opportunity to analysethe powersof both the seaand watery landscapesin enabling the inscription of the homosexualsubject. " Daphnedu Maurier's Rebeccaprovides a popularfictional accountof the relationsbetween the nation and the solitary woman sailor, Rebecca.More than this, however, through the body of the woman buried in

Rebecca'splace, and who appearsto havebeen divorced from all heterosexualfamilial relations,the novel showsthat what the seacan wash up into the national landscapeis unassimilableunder the grammarof the nation, and thus threatensnational order.

David Garnett'sThe Sailor's Return placesthe returning sailor in the archetypical

English village. The ensuingdialogue between sea and earth, sailor and villager, offers a useful point of analysisfor the constitutive elementsof national order and thoseof national disorderwhich the returning sailor provokes. 22

ChapterFive looks at the few texts which representa woman in earth in order to show how this trope is usedto representmonstrosity, disorder and dismembering,rather than the orderedre-membering that the trope of man-in-earth representsin national imaginings.The paucity of texts in which women go to earth is in itself significant. Does earth,then, offer a locational.identity for masculinitywhich is not also offered for femininity? The chapterdiscusses the questionof whetherthis disallowal of the bond betweennational subjectand earth to women might paradoxicallyhave been productive of lesbiandiscourse and identity in the interwar period. Women, it appears,cannot go to earth, but if women cannot,can the lesbian?

The chapterdiscusses the questionof whetherEngland and Englishnesscan be lesbianised,or whether that possibility is oxymoronic. Brarn Stoker's The Lair of the

White Worm is, like The Wind in the Willows, usedas an exampleof a text which usesthe trope prior to World War One, with the differencethat it has a woman rather than a man in earth.After the war, there were no routine configurationsof women with earth. But there was one enormouslypopular suchtext, Mary Webb's Gone to

&rth, which camewith a public recommendationfrom StanleyBaldwin, the Prime

Minister.Here, the attemptof a woman to go to earthwith her fox-cub leadsto a discussionof the place of fox-hunting within national imaginings through such texts as David Garnett'sLady into Fox, D. H. Lawrence's The Fox, and Siegfried

Sassoon'sMemoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In thesetexts, the associationof the fox with femininity, and fox-hunting positedas a method through which a young boy achievesadult masculinity, offer a more obliquely metaphoriclook at the questions about the relation betweenwomen, earth and masculinity. E. M. Forster'sA Passage to India is discussedhere in counterpointto Rupert Brookes's poem 'The Soldier'.

Since Brookes's soldier confersEnglishness on the foreign soil of his burial place, can the women who enter the Indian MarabarCaves in Forster'stext do the same?In this respect,A Passageto India providesa point of inquiry for the place of English women who enter earthin a foreign country. Other texts examinedare Radclyffe

Hall's Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself and Sylvia TownsendWarner's Lolly Willowes or 23

The Loving Huntsman.These are selectedas examplesof texts which examinethe questionof whetherwomen can go to earthin England.However, the statusof the characterswho do this is debatable:are they women,are they men, or are they lesbians?

ChapterSix discussesthe contradictorypositioning of the lesbianin national culture. By looking at literary texts and methodsof reading,both the

centrality of the lesbianin national processesand her marginality are put in dialogue.

A variety of texts are chosento demonstratethe variousways in which tropesof

Englishnesscould be criticised and re-written to include the lesbian.Thus, Mary

Gordon's Chaseof the Wild Goose is discussedas an exampleof a text which

attemptsto give lesbiansa history within England.Other texts which give lesbian

charactersa centrality, evenif obliquely, (Vita Sackville-West'sPie Dark Island, Naomi Royde-Smith'sThe Island: A Love Story, ComptonMackenzie's

Extraordinary Women:Themes and variations,and Rýdclyffe Hall's The Well of

Loneliness),are selectedto examinehow the lesbianis discursivelyconstructed both

within national and non-nationallandscapes. The chapteralso analysesthese writings

to revealthe kind of landscapewhich are amenableto the inscription of the lesbianand

askswhat the implications are for her nationalidentity when sheinhabits these

geographicalplaces. However, given the difficulty writers appearto have in inscribing

the lesbianin the nation, this chapterthen turns to Virginia Woolf's BetweenThe

Acts, in which a lesbianis central to the revelationof Englandand English history.

How is it possiblethat shecan be written as centralto the nation?Sharing a similar

liminality with that bf the nation, the lesbiandoes seem to mirror the repressedterms

that Homi Bhabhaand othersidentify as presentin narrativesof the nation. Given that

national narrativesinterpellate their subjectsthrough their discursiveaddress, is it any

surprisethat a national subjectmight be produced,in and through thesesame

narratives,%ýho reveals what hasto be repressed?Is it ifievitable that shecould

becomecentral to the nation? 24

The thesisthus brings togetherquestions of Englishness,geographical location, genderand sexuality as expressedand representedin literary texts, and examineshow the natural world figures in the grammarof the nation.The landscape of Englandis examinedin order to discoverif it is genderedand how. What is the genderof this land and what relationshipdoes English masculinity haveto it? Is

English femininity allowed a relationshipwith the national landscape,and if so, what sort of relationship?If the nation valorisesheterosexuality, how is it that non- heterosexualsexualities come into being?Similarly, if narrativesof the nation are heterosexual,how can the lesbiancome into writing? Given that many texts were subjectto censorshipin the interwar period, did the lesbianfigure in suchtexts?

Firstly, in order to deal with thesequestions, the grammarof the nation, as it is articulatedin variousliterary texts and national processes,needs to be analysedto see which diverseelements constitute England and Englishness.The processesof censorshipand the contentof bannedand restrictedliterary texts is where I now turn to seethe nation being renewedthrough the processof expelling that which it considersunfit for 'English literature'.

1 Radclyffe Hall, 7he Well ofLonefiness [ 1928] (London: Virago, 1997), p. 360. 2 Hall, p. 412. 3 JeffreyWeeks, Sex, Politics and Society: 7he Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 115. 4 Robert Coils and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness:Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croorn Helm, 1986). Peter Brooker and Peter Widdowson, 'A Literature for England' in Coils and Dodd, p. IIS. Alun Howkins, 'The Discovery of Rural England' in Coils and Dodd, p. 62. 7 Howkins, p. 63. 'Jane Mackay and Pat Thane, 'The Englishwoman' in Coils and Dodd, p. 191. 9 Mackay and Thane, pp. 191-192. '0 JeremyPaxman, 7he English: A Portrait of a People (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 207. 11 Paxman,pp. 76-77. 12 Michael Wood, In Search of England.,Journeys into the English Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Wood's book title is taken from H. V. Morton's In Search ofEngland which is discussedin Chapter Two. 13Wood, pp. 3-4. 14Judy Giles and Tim Middleton, eds., Writing Englishness1900-1950: An Introductory Sourcebookon National Identity (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 5. Giles and Middleton, p. 5. One of the problems with defining England and Englishnessis the way in which 'England' has often beenused as a hegemonicsynecdoche for 'Britain' and has thereforeexcluded perspectives from Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. The term 'British' tends to subsume-theWelsh, Scots and Northern Irish under this sign with6ut examiningthe specificity of the differencesbetween them and erasesthe histories of domination and oppressionin their relationshipswith England. Similarly, the 25

term 'island' was used to refer to both England and Britain, while Britain itself often actually meant England. However, if 'England' designatesa singleterritory, rather than co-opting other nations such as Wales, under its umbrella, and if 'Englishness' were an obvious attribute of an easily identifiable English people, then there would be little discussionor struggle for the definitions of their meanings. 17Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversionof1dentity (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 33. "Butler, p. 136. '9 Eric Hobsbawmand TerenceRanger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983). 20Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism 11983](London: Verso, 1991). ' Hobsbawm in Hobsbawin and Ranger, p. 14. 22Anderson, p. 11. 23Anderson, p. 141. 24Anderson, pp. 55-56. 23Mary N. Layoun, 'A Guest at the Wedding: Honor, Memory, and (National) Desire in Michel Khleife's Weddingin Galilee', in Between Womanand Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms,and the State, ed. by Caren Kaplan, Noma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem (London: Duke University Press), p. 93. 26 Homi K. Bhabha, 'Introduction: narrating the nation', in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 1. 27 Geoffrey Bennington, 'Postal Politics and the institution of the nation' in Bhabha, p. 121. 23 Edward Said, 7he World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991), 169. 29 p. Homi K. Bhabha, 'DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modem nation' in Bhabha, p. 292. 30 Bhabha, 'DissemiNation', p. 297. 3'Bhabha, 'DissemiNation, p. 301. 32Anderson, pp. 55-56. 33 GeorgeMosse, Nationalism andSexuality. RespectabilityandAhnormal Sexuality inModern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), pp. 17-18. This can be seenin the way the figure of Britannia was usedto representBritain, Marianneto representFrance, and the Statue of Liberty as a representativeof America. 34Kaplan and others, p. 12. 35Kaplan and others, p. 10. '6 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p, 1. 37Yuval-Davis, pp. 22-23. 38Yuval-Davis, p. 23. 39Yuval-Davis, p. 43. 40 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatismbetween the Wars fLondon: Routledge, 1991), p. 12. 1 Andrew Parker, Mary Russo and others, 'Introduction', in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo and others (London, Routledge, 1992), p. 6. 42Parker and others, p. 1. 43 Parker and others, p. 2. " Parker and others, P. 8. 45 Henry Abelove, 'Some Speculationson the History of "Sexual Intercourse" During the "Long Eighteenth 46 Century" in England, in Parker and others, p. 339. Layoun, p. 95. 47 Emily Hamer, Britannia's Glory; A History of Twentieth-CenturyLesbians (London: Cassell, 1996), p. 1. 4' Terry Castle, 77zeApparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University 49 Press, 1993). Castle, p. 4. '0 Virginia Wool& Orlando [1928] (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1993). 51 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and 7hree Guineas 1929 and 1938] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 313. 52Monique Wittig, Me Straight Mind and Other Essays (New York: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1992), 13. Wittig, p. 32. 14Wittig, p. 20. 26

" Although E. M. Forster wrote Maurice prior to the Great War he worked on revisionsthroughout the interwar period. It is theseinterwar revisionswhich I believe entitle me to considerit as a text belongingto the interwar period. 27

CHAPTER ONE

BANNED AND RESTRICTED BOOKS: UNACCEPTABLE IN

ENGLAND

Thereare decent-mindedpeople who read booksand appreciatesome of the beauties in English literature, and they look to the strong arm of the law to checkandprevent the broadcastingof suchfoul stuff as this. '

The laws of censorshipoperated in favour of maintainingEnglish literature as both

'decent' and 'beautiful'. Obviously, English literature was not naturally this way,

otherwiseit would not have neededto be legislatedinto conformity with ideasabout

its respectability.Nonetheless, without this desireon the part of 'decent-minded

people', it would have beendifficult for the law to administerits various forms of

censorshipin the interwar period: they provided notjust the supportfor the law to

operate,but also the impetusto ensurethat it did. As such,their actionswere

implicated in locating literary value in sometexts, but not in others.In this way,

canonical'English Uterature' was safeguardedthrough the rejection of texts defined

as unsuitablefor national reading.At the heart of governmentwere severalsocial

purists, including Joynson-Hicks,or 'Jix', a devout churchmanwho was Home

Secretarybetween 1924-1929; a former memberof the Council of the National

Vigilance Association,Sir Archibald Bodkin, was Director of Public Prosecutions;

while the evangelist,Sir ThomasInskip, was Solicitor Generaland Attorney General

between1922 and 1936.Cate Hasteexplains that becauseof their support,the 'Public

Morality Council was allowed discreetinfluence over public policy' through most of

the interwar period and 'was given regular accessto the Lord Chamberlain.' But why

shouldthe quality of literature havemattered? The aim hereis both to establishthe

importanceof literature in the interwar period as a site through which the nation was

being (re)imagined,and to frame the chaptersthat follow which examinemore valued

forms of Englishness.The chapterexplores books which were seenas problematic for

the nation and English literature in order to understandwhat was unacceptablefor

'Englishness',so that the constructionof the nation can be revealedthrough what it 28 expelsas non-national.As such,it offers an exploration of the reverseside of

'England' and 'Englishness'.

What were the perceivedproblems with interwar societythat literature was meantto solve?The war had disruptedboth the genderand classrelations which had previously obtained,and as women gainedmore power someperceived this as meaningthat English culture was losing its virility and becomingfeminised. Alison

Light maintains:

That the 1920s and '30s saw a move away from formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of national destiny and from a dynamic and missionary view of the Victorian and Edwardian middle classesin 'Great Britain' to an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private - and, in terms of pre-war standards, more 'feminine'. 31

Contemporarycommentators in the pro-censorshipdebate generally agreed that the

influence of the GreatWar was responsiblefor the immorality perceivedto be present

in post-warculture and literature,and that this immorality revealeditself in sexual

behaviour.Susan Kingley Kent has shown how 'anxiety about the war frequently

took shapeas anxiety about sex,or was articulatedin sexualterms", and has analysed

how the war was representedas 'unleashedheterosexuality'. -5 Freud's popularisation

in Britain, Kent argues,meant that 'the English could readily acceptthe notion that

impulsestoward sex and aggressionwere intertwined with one another;indeed, many

Britons held a view of the war as a releasefrom long suppressedlibidinal energies."'

Interwar books such as SexqalLife During the World War, by sexologists H. C.

Fischer and E. X. Dubois, arguedthat war had, on the one hand, corrupted men's

natural sexuality to allow variousimmoral sexualactivities like homosexualityand

bestiality to increase,whereas, on the other, it had highlighted women's naturally

perversesexuality, allowing it to flourish. ' Men's sexuality was by naturemoral,

whereaswomen's sexuality was by nature perverse.Women, whosenaturally

perversesexual desires were more generallycontained and controlled in peacetime

culture, were rousedto a dangerousfever-pitch by a bloodlust causedby seeingand

imagining the injured, dying and deadmen of the battlefields.This problem was not

peculiar to Englishwomen:French and Germanwomen were the same. 29

Anxiety about the GreatWar's impact on sexualpractices, can also be tracedin fiction. In 1915,Lord Alfred Douglashad written that 'it is just as important

to civilization that Literary Englandshould be cleansedof sex-mongersand pedlarsof

the perverse,as that Flandersshould be clearedof Germans." Literary sex-mongers

representeda national enemy as much as the Germansdid. R. Brimley Johnson's

Moral Poison in Modern Fiction arguedthat the war was responsiblefor the poison

presentin modemfiction sincethe war's coming meantthat:

Normal existencewas wiped out by a flash of lightning. The old duties, habits, manners,responsibilities, were rudely cast aside:for what seemed,and perhapswas, a higher call. The whole of life was revisedin a few hours; and it is to that knew the 9 no exaggeration0 say none their way about new world. For young people '[qluite unusedto the normal "decencies",without experiencein

"ordering" themselves,the sex-instinctbecame explosive, a sense-riotunrestrained', and 'our daughters':"

Had no chanceto know and choose,no test betweenreal emotion and fevered desire- their own or another's.Inheriting a beautiful home-womanliness,the flower of shelteredinnnocence, they had to make and be themselvesin the opening of a new world. Nobility shoneout among us in thosedays, miracles beyond belief of what woman can do and suffer for big, or small, men: a new vision of mothering of humanity that brought God to our side.Also, alas, terrible shatteringof English girlhood, ugly staining of the pure in heart, feverish unrest, a fury of overdoing, a hard glitter of coldjoy.

Developing a metaphorof bodily ingestion,Johnson suggested that 'the food for

thought' given to readersof modemfiction:

Forcedsex-problems upon the most thoughtless;demanded for all on the thresholdof life full licence for self-expression;analysed what they called the soul in undigesteddetail; lingered over body-contact,flushes and fires of the flesh; loudly proclaimednew Laws of Love. "

The solution to the problem of a societythat appearedto have lost control of women's

sexuality was bound up with controlling literature so that non-nationalsubjectivities

and forms of behaviourcould be excludedfrom the national canon.

However, classconflict was also a problem in the renewalof the

nation. When Henry Newbolt published his The Idea OfAn English Association in

1928,he wrote of the associationas having 'been waiting to revealitself at the fateful

moment,the moment of greatnational need'." Set up in 1907,the aim of the

Associationwas 'to promote the due recognition of English as an essentialelement in 30 the national education.' 14In the fateful momentof post-GreatWar society's national need,when the disturbanceto classrelations threatened national unity, English languageand literature togethercame to be the vehicle that would also 'form a new elementof national unity, linking togetherthe mental life of all classesby experiences which havehitherto beenthe privilege of a limited section.' `5This unity would be

achievedthrough English literature providing to all classes'the commonpossession of

the tastesand associationsconnected with it'. " Newbolt, drawing on the ideasof

Matthew Arnold, arguedthis would succeed'[i]f we useEnglish literature as a means

of contactwith great minds, a channelby which to draw upon their experiencewith

profit and delight, and a meansof sympathybetween the membersof a human

society'. " The governmentcommittee, set up to report on the teachingof English in

England and chairedby Henry Newbolt, proposedthat the whole educationalsystem

shouldbe re-orderedaround the centrality of English languageand literature.The

committee'sreport, The Teachingof English in England, also known as 'The

Newbolt Report', was, accordingto Chris Baldick, 'greeted almost as a best seller"on

publication in 1921." The report coveredthe teachingof English in stateand public

schools,commercial and technical schools,adult educationsuch as evening

continuationschools and WEA classes,teacher-training institutions and the

universities.Deploying a metaphorof earth,the report arguedthat through the study

of English literature, a literature 'native to our own soil', " readerscould profit

morally from 'intercoursewith thosewhose view of life is deepestand most virile. '

[My italics] " The study of language,too, would engendernational pride and provide

'a bond of union betweenclasses'. " However, the report revealsseveral anxieties.

What to do about the working-classman? Members of the Committee:

Were told that the working classes,especially those who belongedto organisedlabour movementswere antagonisticto, and contemptuousof, literature,that they regardedit 'merely as an ornament,a polite accomplishment,a subjectto be despisedby really virile men'. Literature, in fact, seemsto be classedby a large number of thinking working men with antimacassars,fish-knives and other unintelligible and futile trivialities of 'n-dddle-classculture, ' and, as a subjectof instruction, is suspectas an attempt to side-trackthe working classmovement. We regardthe prevalenceof such opinions as seriousmatter, not merely becauseit meansthe alienation of an important sectionof the populationfrom the 'confort' and 'mirthe' of 31

literature,but chiefly becauseit points to a morbid condition of the body politic which if not taken in hand may be followed by lamentableconsequences. For if literature be, as we believe, an embodimentof the bestthoughts of the best minds, the most direct and lasting communicationof experienceof man to man, a fellowship which 'binds togetherby passionand knowledgethe vast empire of human society,as it is spreadover the whole earth,and over all time,' then the nation of which a considerableportion rejectsthis meansof grace,and despisesthis greatspiritual influence, must assuredlybe headingto disaster.[My italics]

To bring working-classmen into this national unity meantthey had to havewrested

away their associationsof literature with domesticity andfemininity in order to be

persuadedof the virility of literature. By a remarkabletwist of argument,poetry was

felt to be able to do this, sinceit 'is natural for man to delight in poetry; the history of

mediaevalsociety, to say nothing of all primitive societies,proves this. ' "

Presumably,the committeewas working with a notion of 'heroic' poetry as its model.

Having rhetorically brought the problematicworking man under

control, a later portion of the'reportaddressed itself to 'Some PossibleDangers In

Reading'. Describing readingas a potentially passiveprocess in which the reader's

mind is a tablet written on by the writer, one might well understandthe fears of some

working-classmen that the study of literature might divert them from classstruggle

and ferninise them in the process.Suggesting of literature that 'as a nation we are still

far from understandingits power and importance', '4the report notedthat it may be

'harmful as well as beneficial', and yet arguedagainst prohibition. " Utilising the

trope of contagion,the report reasonedthat prohibition of vulgar literature:

Is both futile and undesirable:but it doesnot follow that there is no remedy againstthe debilitating effect of vulgarity in print. Mental, like physical, contagionis best avoidedby maintaining a vigorous health.The risk cannotbe escaped,but it can be forestalled.We have in English an abundanceof good literature interesting to the 0 enough arouseand satisfy appetiteof youth,26 and an abundantsupply of it should be ready to hand in every school library.

The readingof good literature could preventbodily harm coming from 'vulgar'

literature.Since literature cameto be seenas of centralimportance in the renewalof

the nation, other commentatorsthought prohibition desirablein the interestsof this

renewal,and bannedbooks became caught up in a debateabout what constituted

'national literature!. Books were bannedor censoredin various ways in order to renew the nation. 32

Someunacceptable texts, such as thosedeemed pornographic, which were clearly 'foreign' having beenpublished abroad and written by 'foreigners, were generallyseized by Customs.They policed the externalboundaries of the nation in an attemptto ensureinternal national purity. JamesJoyce's Ulysses,printed and publishedin Paris, was one such text. Under section42 of the CustomsConsolidation

Act of 1967,copies were seizedat Folkestoneand burnt in 1923.Travellers returning from Franceroutinely had their baggagesearched for copiesof books bannedin

England but publishedin Paris, such as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness,

Joyce's Ulysses,Frank Harris"s Life and Loves, and Norah C. James'sSleeveless

Errand. In 1931, Jack Kahaneset up the Obelisk Pressin Paris in order to re-print

booksunavailable in Britain, and re-printed severalbanned books, including James

Hanley's Boy, Wallace Smith's BessieCotter and Sheila Cousins's To Beg I am

Ashamed.In this way, texts that had been expelledwere now seento threatenthe

nation from outsideits borders.Other texts could be seizedby the PostOffice, sinceit

was illegal to sendobscene publications through the postal systemunder Section63 of

The Post Office Act of 1908.D. H. Lawrence's manuscriptof his poetry collection,

Pansies,was seizedin this way in 1929,but later released.Texts taken in suchways

might never appearbefore the courts,with Customsauthorities and the PostOffice

determiningtheir allegedobscenities. In caseswhere the police supportedsummonses

being taken out, their only evidencefor prosecutionwas often that of other policemen.

In 7he Law and Obscenity,Frederic Hallis highlighted how 'officers of the law were

the authorsof that information on which the searchwarrant was granted,and they, in

their discretion, took possesssionof the alleged obsceneworks. ' "' Onepoliceman

had to be held back from seizingwork by William Blake on the groundsof its

oýscenity.` However, its canonical statussaved it from destruction.Once a work was

acceptedas canonical,it was difficult to dislodgeit, and consequentlyEnglish

literature becamepoliced more thoroughly. 33

Both the National Vigilance Associationand the Public Morality

Council mountedcampaigns to searchout the indecentin literuture and haveit banned.

Given that the ObscenePublications Act of 1857empowered 'magistrates, upon the swom complaint of a singleperson, to searchfor and seizeany written or printed matter allegedto be obscene,and to order its destruction,in the absenceof good reasonshown to the contrary', membersof thesebodies were routinely disgustedby what they found in their searches,and presentedpublications to a magistrate.[MY italics] " If organisationscould do this, so too could private individuals. E. J.

Bristow suggeststhat in 'an averageyear like 1931 over one hundredcomplaints were lodged with the authoritiesand many were actedon. "' In 1937,Bishop Winnington

Ingram took in twenty-one 'filthy books"to the Home Secretaryto ask for their publishers' prosecution?' Both public and circulating libraries practisedtheir own censorship,but Mudie's Library also complainedpublicly about sometexts. Bessie

Cotter,a story about prostitution in Chicago, was destroyedon ordersof the Attorney

Generalafter complaintsfrom Mudie's and the Public Morality Council. 32The

publishersof Boy, a story of a boy-sailor sodomisedat sea,were brought before the

court becausea memberof a public library had found it thereand objected.33 If

libraries did not keep their lists as pure as possible,the Public Morality Council's

Annual Report of 1928shows that they could expectthe attentionof the Council. The

report statesthat 'books were submittedto the Literature Panel,and acting on their

opinions, requestswere madein twelve instancesto the libraries or publisher to

restrict the circulation and saleof them as far as possible.' 34It is noteworthy that

thesewere not publicationsthat had beensubject to legal proceedings.The Public

Morality Council itself was acting as 'the strongarm of the law' in provoking a

climate in which publishersand writers fearedtheir attentions,and so often operated

self-censorship.E. M. Forster was an example of the latter, fearing to publish

Maurice,his novel of homosexuallove, in the period he wrote it. " Although Maurice

may representa specialcase in that male homosexualityactually was illegal at the time, and Forster wanted to write a happy outcomefor Maurice. Conversely,T. H. White, 34 writing under the nameof JamesAston, could publish They Winter Abroad, a satirical tale of English peoplein an Italian hotel, sincehis aptly namedcharacter, the homosexualMr McInvert, commits suicide at the end and is thereforesuitably punished." White and his publishersescaped prosecution. But murder is also illegal, and yet Agatha Christie's works, for example,were not prosecuted.Anti-censorship commentatorsnoted the absurdityin prosecutingrepresentations of behavioursthat were in themselvesperfýctly legal. Gilbert Armitage arguedthat:

Even if we assumefor argument'ssake that obscenepublications are in fact capableof convertingpreviously well-orderedpeople to the practiceof fornication, adultery,masturbation or homosexualityit must be remembered that only the last of these,and then only betweenmales, is contrary to the law of England,does it not immediately occur to one as a trifle illogical that, while the physical performanceof certainactions can only involve a liability to be censuredby public opinion, or at worse be mulcted in daniages,the uttering of a hypotheticalinducement to the performanceof suchactions should be punishableby fine or imprisonment? 37

Armitage's questioncan be productively answeredin coming to an understandingof this illogicality, for if booksare brought before the law for portraying actionsand behaviourswhich are not in themselvesillegal, then perhapsit is the book that is more important than the sexualpractice. In other words, if one shifts the focus of the argumentfrom the behavioura book representsto focus insteadon the book itself, one could arguethat in this casethe law is being usedin the serviceof delineatingthe official national literature rather than policing particular social behaviours.This would suggestthe force which English literature and languagewas to carry in England's regeneration.In other words, English behaviours,mattered less than English writings.

Thesewritings were to createnew English subjectivitiesto reclaim the nation from the fear that thosemor-ally contaminated by the Great,War might cometo representthe nation. This would also explain the focus on the effects of poisonousliterature on the young. Apparently, the old were not a categorywhich could be corruptedor poisoned; they were either immune, or alreadycorrupt. Therefore, new national subjectivities could be createdthrough legislation concerningliterature as much as through legislation conceming,immoral behaviouritself. 35

In March 1929,the Home Secretary,Sir William Joynson-Hicks, receiveda deputationfrom the London Public Morality Council. The Times reported that the chairmanof the Council, Archibald Allen, suggestedof writers and publishers of indecentbooks that '[slo far,as the youth of the country is concernedthese people are poisoningthe world. ' The report carried on:

Among the bookswhich Mr. Allen condemnedwere thosedealing with birth control, translations,such as the Decameron,and books of a psuedo- sociologicalor scientific character.One which he had read,he said, seemedto him to glorify prostitution and advocatepromiscuity at the earliestpossible , age. 'I had this book senthere in the hope that proceedingswould be basedon it, but your advisorsdid not seetheir way to taking any action,' he said. Mr. Allen then describedan 'incident' connectedwith the book which cameto his notice. A teacherin a college, who was a corruptor more than an instructor of youth, gaveit to a youth aged20, who lent it to a girl of 17, and shortly afterwardsthe youth and the girl had establishedillicit relationsand were glorying in the fact. 38

However, of particular interestin this report is the power creditedto literature in shapingbehaviour. In general,as here,campaigners against indecent literature did not publicly namesuch books, fearing they would then becomebestsellers since people obviously wantedto read them: this unnamedbook being creditedwith the power to makepeople behave illicitly and to glory in illegitimate sexualitywithout feeling a proper senseof shame." Clearly, the London Public Morality Council believedthat it was a national moral questionrather than a moral questionbetween the two youths, sinceMr. Allen was discussingthe youth of 'the country', that literature should be madeto servenational intereststhrough the control of sexuality,and, indeed,that literature had the power to do this.

Publishersand booksellersalso colluded with censorshipat times. In

1921,George Allen & Unwin publishedthe anonymouslyauthored, A Young Girl's

May, translatedfrom Germanand introducedby SigmundFreud. " Although saleof this book was restrictedto professionalpeople in the areasof law, medicine and education,the Director of Public Prosecutions,Sir Archibald Bodkin, describingthe book as 'filth', wanted to prosecute.In discussionswith the publisher, it was ultimately decidedthat the Director would not prosecuteas long as booksellers suppliedhim with the names,addresses and occupationsof all thosebuying the 36 book." Given that the categoryof 'professional' peopleexcluded by definition the working class,children (by virtue of their age) and most women, since the professionswere predominantlymasculine and racially white, virtually the only peopleentitled to readthis book were middle-classwhite men. However, the 'F of this text is, as the title suggests,a young girl, but a young English girl wanting to read herselfin this narrativewould be unableto obtain the book. If shehad similar secret thoughtsto the young girl of the diary, shewould not be able to discoverthis. The fiction of English girls' sexualpurity could thus be maintained.

The publishersof To Beg I Am Ashamed by Sheila Cousins,which purportedto be the autobiographyof a lady prostitute,behaved similarly to thoseof A

YoungGirl's Diary. In 1938,the Home Secretarywas approachedby the Public

Morality Council who had seena review copy of qOusins'sbook. The police visited

the publishers,George Routledge & Sons,who then decidedto withdraw the book

rather than face prosecution.Contemporary writers in the anti-censorshipcamp noted

that indirect censorship,such as that effectedby publishers,circulating libraries and

the PostOffice, suited an Anglo-Saxon ideal of maintaining secrecy.M. L. Ernst and

W. Seagleargued that:

In any event the Anglo-Saxon hatesto go to law when it can possibly be avoided.He will not budgefrom his standbut he hatesto be disagreeable.It is sucha nuisance.When the sameresult can be quietly effectedwithout a clash or scandalor public notice, it is infinitely to be preferred.The fact that sex is involved (which of courseis not to be draggedinto the open) makessuch tactics peculiarly desirable.In terms of tendencythe sex-censorshipmay be particularly describedas tending towardsthe ideal of secrecy."

Indeed,this is one of the ways in which the Public Morality Council operated:by

making representationsto libraries and publishersto restrict circulation of certain

books.However, an irony of the censorshipdebate was shown in a cartoon by Will

Dyson entitled 'Impure literature V and subtitled '[Moral reformers,in the nameof

the Young Person,are eagerfor the suppressionof "impropee' novels in which

women novelists, by the way, do such a brisk trade.]' This cartoon showedthree

elderly men in tails discussingthe issue,whilst one of the 'Right-Thinking' people

tells the others, 'What we need,my dear Sirs, is legislation to prevent our daughters 37 ftom reading the novelsthey haveKTitten.1 '. " This exposesthe irony at the heart of the debate:women were to be protectedfrom what they actually alreadyknew. For middle-classmen, daughterswere clearly a problematiccategory, breaking secrets they were meantto keep,including the secretthat they were not innocent.

One of these 'daughters' was Norah C. James,whose novel *

SleevelessErrand becamethe focus of legal and media attention.James worked for the publisherJonathan Cape as managerof their advertisingdepartment, and the critic and publishers' readerEdward Garnett's report on the novel called it 'a real diagnosis of the War generation'sneurotics. "' Eric Partridge,James's publisher, wrote an accountof the book's suppression:

The book was to have appearedon February21,1929, but on the previous evening,at about six o'clock, the two biggest exporting booksellershad their stock seized;at eight, two plain-clothesofficers cameto my flat and insisted that I shouldtake them forthwith to the office: no, they wouldn't wait till the morning. They removedall the copiesfrom 30 Museum Streetand noted the nameof every booksellerto whom the book had beendelivered. Next morning they lost no time in rounding up the book, both in London and the provinces: theremust havebeen a lot of telephoningdone from police-headquartefSthat The book fairly be have been before night ... may said to suppressed publication. On March lst, at Bow Street,I had to show reasonwhy the book should not be destroyed(you seewhere lies the onus of proof): this 1, or rather my counsel,failed to do.

The Times reportedthe Bow Streetproceedings, and a summaryof the novel was

given to the court by Mr. Percival Clarke, who was acting for the Director of Public

Prosecutions.Clarke told the court that:

The book itself was a novel of 239 pages.The story concerneda period of two days, and was told in the form of conversationby personsentirely devoid of decencyand morality, who for the most part were under the influence of drink, and who not only toleratedbut even advocatedadultery and promiscuousfornication. Filthy languageand indecentsituations appeared to be the keynote of the book. He (counsel)did not pretendto be a literary critic, but it seemedto him to be degradingthat sucha collection of obscenematter should be publishedby any respectablefirm. It was the aim of somewriters to passoff as literature matter which could only have a degrading,immoral influence, and which tendedto excite unhealth_vpassions; and to commanda market by writing daring and corrupt stories.46

The policy with regardto censorshipwas contradictoryand unevenso that Eric

Partridgewas not given the possibility of a secretcollusion betweenpolice and

publisherin which he agreedto withdraw SleevelessErrand from publication and it was prosecutedwith the maximum of publicity. 38

It was mainly through the efforts of the editor of The SundayExpress,

JamesDouglas, who publishedan article about Radclyffe Hall's The Well of

Loneliness on l8th August 1928under the headline'A Book That Must Be

Suppressed',that the law becameinvolved in this case." According to Sally Cline, he:

Called upon his readersto defendtheir country, to defendtheir religion, to protecttheir children and protect England's tradition of fine literature.He labelled homosexualitya plague,youth and children its victims, the British pressits scourge."

Employing a rhetoric of homosexualityas 'pestilence', 'plague', a 'leprosy of those lepers' which society had the task of 'cleansing' from 'its unutterableputrefaction', he famously said that he 'would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of

prussicacid rather than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the

soul. "' He endedby saying:

Let me warn our novelistsand our men of letters that literature as well as morality is in peril. Fiction of this type is an injury to good literature. It makes the professionof literature fall into disrepute.Uterature hasnot yet recovered from the harm done to it by the OscarWilde scandal.It shouldkeep its house in order. '0

Diana Souhami,in 77zeTrials of Radclyffe Hall, saysthat the male establishment

found the book disturbing. She arguesthat it:

Was not the stateof literature that disturbedthem. They did not care about literature. It was passionbetween women. They fearedits acceptanceif Radclyffe Hall was heard.They had their view of a woman's place and they intendedto legislateagainst it. "

However, the way in'which the debatetook place suggeststhat 'the stateof literature'

did bother,them as much as lesbianism.The Director of Public Prosecutions,Sir - Archibald Bodkin, wrote to the Home Secretary,Joynson-Hicks, that the book 'was

the more dangerousbecause of its literary character'ý' Its literariness,in other words,

gaveit a certainauthority.

The processesby which books becamebanned was accompaniedby a

rhetoric in which liter-ature,the body and the nation were tied up together.In general

debatesabout so-calledimmoral, indecentand obsceneliterature, the words filth,

poison, unsavoury,revolting, disgusting,pernicious and polluting were routinely 39 usedas threatsto the nation and its 'virility'. Although readingindecent literature was creditedwith the power to make onebehave immorally, not everyoneaccepted a simple relationshipbetween reading and behaviour.A. P. Herbert wrote to The Times to arguethat:

The majority of the populationare not readingbooks about successful sexual aberration:they are readingbooks, and seeingplays, about successful murders,robberies, and embezzlements,about charming crooks and attractive burglars.And if there is any substancein the view that the literature of wrongdoing hasa demoralizing effect upon popular conduct,we shouldbe suffering now from an unprecendentedwave of crime (which is not the case), and Mr. Edgar Wallace should be locked up (which would be a pity). 53

However, those who arguedfor, or against,the introduction of a censorfor literature on the groundsthat there was a censorfor films shareda similar rhetoric: that literature is somethingwhich the readeringests bodily, for good or ill. A letter to The Times suggestedthat:

One doesnot willingly eat food which causesindigestion or other organic complaints,but so little thought is so often given to the food which corrupts and clouds the mind. There is a wide difference betweenreading and many other subjects,and when readingof good literature is encouragedit hasa powerful edifying influence over the mind and characterof readers.

The letter receivedthis reply:

I haveno doubt that to the moral dyspepticmany things written today (and not only today) are thoroughly indigestible.I do not believe they can do any harm to a healthy appetite.Of course it is the sameas with food. But that some ... is fellows unfortunatepeople are easily upset no reasonwhy their55 normal should deny themselvescurry and lobster mayonnaise.

The questionappeared to be whether someliterature could poison the body or be

benevolent,even if shocking.Geoffrey Faberhad written to The Times,fearing that

free speechin literature was endangeredby the actionsof the Secretaryof State,who

spokeof his office 'as if it were an enginefor the moral regenerationof the people.'

Faberhad arguedthat the forces that make changesin moral ideasare the 'life-blood

of a free people'. 11isletter elicited this reply:

Theseforces may poison the life-blood of the people; or they may purify and enrich it. But, saysMr. Faber,without drawing any distinction, they ought to be allowed 'to find expressionin literature, and to enter the incessantbattle of ideaswhich is the continual salvationof the race.' Most certainly it is important that literature shouldenter the battle; but on which side?To foster and preservethe healthy, virile characterof the nation, on which the maintenanceof its greatnessultimately depends?or to inoculate the minds of 40

the people,and more particularly the young, with the poison of vice and. impurity? [My italics] "

Literature shouldbe on the side of national virility, not poisoningthe peopleand endangeringEngland. A literature which could poisonthe life-blood of the people, and concomitantlythe virility of the nation, was generallycontrasted with the healthinessobtained from the open-airlife found in the English countrysideand life. 5" writingsr) about this Given that a rhetoric of disallowed books as poisonwas deployedin argumentsabout them, Julia Kristeva's theoriesof abjection,in which sheargues that identity is derivedfrom abjectingmaterrial origins, can clarify the characterof the processby which the masculinity/virility of the nation and the national subjectis arrived at. Indecentliterature was written of in terms of poison and disgustand the needto expel it from the body of the reader,the body of the book, and thereforefrom the body of the nation in order to ensurea virility partly derivedfrom its feminine other. In Powers of Horror: An Essayon Abjection, Kristeva writes of the abject that it:

Has only one quality of the object - that of being opposedto L If the object, however,through its opposition,settles me within the fragile texture of a desirefor meaning,which, as a matter of fact, makesme ceaselesslyand infinitely homologousto it, what is abject,on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded,and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses."

One might understandthe '1' as England,carrying the preferredqualities of

Englishness,and bannedbooks as 'the jettisoned object', the not/I, the not/England. Although somebooks were abjectedbecause they led to the loss of certain meanings Englishness, Of nonethelessthey sharedsimilar qualities to nationally acceptabletexts. The Well of Loneliness,for example,in its deploymentof the country estateas metonymic for England valorisedEngland as rurally-basedand the heroine's desireis equally oriented toward England as it is toward lesbianism.The abjection of texts such implicated as this was in the constitutionof the acceptable'I' of Englandand its identity. Ultimately, the abject points to death,the corpseand their links with maternal origins, as the place of the final collapseof all meaning.Although the abject is 41 connectedto the 'improper and unclean', " it is 'not lack of cleanlinessor health that causesabjection but what disturbs identity, system,order. What doesnot respect borders, positions, rules.'" When the 'Pioneer Policewoman', Mary SophiaAllen, publishedher memoirs in 1936, shediscussed how policewomen,in 'an absolutely vital nationalneed', had policed shopsselling indecentliterature by deploying the trope of children corruptedby suchliterature 'with all that is lewd andp6isonous stirred up like noisomemud in their minds.' [My italics] " Her metaphoriccall on noxious 'mud' suggestssomething of the lack of order and boundariesthat the unformedfluidity of mud implies in contrastto the social order that hard, firm earth indicates.In Kristevan terms,this mud causedby indecentliterature disturbednational systemand order, and existedin contradistinctionto the valued national literature the

Newbolt Report spokeof as being native to the 'soil'. But if children were a category in needof protectionfrom indecentliterature, so too were the categoriesof 4schoolgirls','daughters, women and the working class.What precisely were they being protectedfrom? What characterisedthese censored texts?

A YoungGirl's Diary was restrictedto being read by professional people.So what disruptive powersdid this text contain suchthat someEnglish people,and in particular 'daughters',had to be protectedfrom its potentially corruptinginfluence? 62 The text dealswith layer upon layer of forbidden knowledges that the young girl hasto negotiateher way through to someunderstanding of sex and sexualacts, menstruation, childbirth, venerealdisease, prostitution and abortion, whilst simultaneouslywithholding from her family the knowledgethat sheactually ý possessesTherefore, shewrites to herself in diary form, a private rather than public form, consciousof the fact that sheis only ever writing to herself. For example,at 'Xmas', shewrites: 'I shan't write down all the things I got, becauseI've no time, beside and sI know anyhow.' " However, the irony of this writing is that in becoming a public documentit simultaneouslybecame supp ressed into a more private realm precisely becauseof the knowledgeit displayed.The knowledgereturns to her anonymousself, and to thosewho might treat her as an object of knowledgefor their 42 professionalpurposes, rather than circulating amonga readershipof similarly

(un)knowledgeablegirls. That a girl shouldnot have suchknowledges is madeclear by the textual attemptsto preserveher anonymity,and the extra-textualattempts to preserveother girls from readingthe publisheddiary. The extent of her sexual knowledgewas clearly threateningto a senseof what an English girl shouldbe: innocent of sexualknowledge, and her subjectivity defined by more powerful others than by herself or her peers.This writing girl exists in dissonancewith the social expectationsthat are laid upon her. It is partly also the very fact of her writing that is uncomfortable,since a girl shouldnot act/write with authority. Languageis problematicfor her. everythingin language,ultimately, has a secondmeaning, which can be relatedto sex, so that shedestroys language for her reader,reducing it to meaninglessness.She writes that her sisterDora:

Told me a greatdeal, especiallythe namesof certainparts, and about fertilisation, and about the microscopicbaby which really comesfrom the husband,and not as Hella and I had thought, from the wife. And how one knows when a woman isfmitpl. That is really an awful word. In fact almost every word hasa secondmeaning of that sort, and what Dora saysis quite true, one must be fearfully careful when one is talking. Dom thinks it would be bestto make a list of suchwords, but there are sucha frightful lot of them that one never could. The only thing one can do is to be awfully careful; but one soon getsused to it. Still it happenedto Dora the other day that shesaid to V.: I don't want any irdercourse.And that really means'the utmost gifts of love, ' so Mad. told her. But V. was so well-manneredthat he did not show that he noticed anything; and it did not occur to Dora until afterwardswhat she had said. It's really awfully stupid that every ordinary word should have such a meaning.I shall be frightfully careful what I say now, so that I shan't use any words with two meanings."

If all languagerelates back to heterosexualsexual acts, the girl makesit clear that she and her friends think of theseacts as strangelyabsurd. At the bottom of languagelies the absurdity of heterosexuality,and its 'otherness',The girls of this text function like a Bakhtinian laughing chorusundermining the pomposityof heterosexualmasculine culture, as the following extract shows:

June4th. We understandnow what Fathermeant the other day when he was speakingabout Dr. Diller and his wife and said: 'But they dont suit one anotherat all. ' I thoughtat the time he only meantthat it looks so absurdfor so tiny a woman to go about with a big strong man. But that's only a minor thing; the main point is somethingquite differenUM Hella and I look at all couples now who go by arm in arm, thinking about them from that point of view, and it amusesus so much as we are going home that we can hardly keepfrom laughing. 43

Girls were not meantto look at culture and laugh it into absurdityand meaninglessness.The prerogativeof looking and making knowledgeclaims lay with professionalwhite men, and this piece of writing was a challengeto the seriousness with which the girls shouldhave viewed men and heterosexuality.But it is an uncomfortablething when positionsare reversed:the professionalreader who expectedhis view of the world to hold authority is challengedby a writing subject who makeshim, like the girl's Father,an object to be looked at and examinedin a searchfor meaning.This is especiallyuncomfortable when meaningis made,only to be dissolvedin laughter.Even though the girl's sister beginsto act more seriouslyin refusing to discusssexual matters, the girl herself refusesto collude with patriarchal structuresof power since betweenfriends who shareequal power relations: There be forbiddings All I last 'Of can no ordersand ... said night was: course Mother hasforbidden you to talk to me about certain things ; do you call that a friendship?Then she said very gently: 'No, Rita, Mother hasnot forbidden me, but I recognisenow that it was thoughtlessof me to talk to you about thosethings; one learns the seriousnessof life quite soon enough.' I burst out laughing and said: 'Is that what you call the seriousnessof life? Have you really forgotten how screaminglyfunny we found it all? It seemsto me that your memory has beenaffected by the mud baths.' 66

Her analysisof 'orders and forbiddings' as only able to operatewithin unequalpower relationshipsis ironic given the social 'orders and forbiddings' which operatedaround the text itself. This highlights the 'girl' as a figure who should be orderedby powers aboveher and forbidden to speak. Here, the noisomemud which corrupts the young in Mary Allen's accountbecomes an explanatorymechanism for what the girl perceivesas her sister's muddled thinking, in which the absurdity of heterosexualityis the meaningful 'seriousnessof life'. But if her sisteraccepts that heterosexualityis serious,the girl doesnot, and this is anotherproblematic in the text. What makeslife meaningful for her and her best friend, Hella, is their sharedlove for their schoolmistress,Frau Professor Theyer. Recountinghow the school day felt long as they waited to visit her later, the girl wrote:

Still 2 hours, it's awful, Hella is coming to fetch me at 1/2 past3. In school today we kept on looking at one another,and all the other girls thought it must be somethingto do with a man. Goodness,what do we care about a man now! I'm able to write now: It was heavenly! We had to walk up and down in 44

front of her housefor at least 1/2 an hour, until at last it was 5 minutes past4. She We I don't know was so sweet to us ... talked of all sorts of things, what, only that I suddenlyburst out crying, and then shedrew me to her b- -, no, I can't write that abouther-, she drew me to herself and then I felt her heart beating! 67

The use of ellipsis in the writing suggeststhat behind the 'certain things' which can

be written of lies somethingso forbidden it can only be representedby a blank or an

erasure.Clearly, this erasurerepresents the forbidden eroticism of lesbianism.The

text of the diary abruptly endsas Hella divorcesherself from an interestin Frau

ProfessorTheyer, leaving the girl with somethingso unmentionableit cannoteven be

discussedwith her peers.

Evening. Hella may come;it will be splendid!Perhaps we shall try a little skiing. But,really Hella is a horrid pig; shesaid: 'All right, I'll come, if you'll promise not to be continually talking about Frau ProfessorTh. I'm very fond of her too, but you are simply crazy about her.' It's really too bad, and I shall nevermention her name to the othersany more. 68

This is the last entry, and the point at which writing stops,with the girl's

unmentionablecraziness, for anotherwoman.

Just as lesbianismis both displayedand erasedin this text, the girl's

writing, too, is madepublic only to be erased.Beyond the challengeof recognising

her as a speakingsubject, the text also suggestsother challengesto patriarchalculture.

If the fact of her writing threatens,so too do the things shewrites. She knows that in

a patriarchalsociety her brother receivespreferential treatment. She does not uphold

classboundaries, by being too fan-dliarwith the servants,and is reprimandedby her

father who seesthis fan-dliarityas a corrupting influence. Shemakes public what other

families keep private by writing of the scandalin which her brother is involved, and in

this way breaksthe pact of family secrecyand its respectability.However, given that

the rhetorical figure of 'the schoolgirl' was utilised in arguing both for and against

literary censorship,this particular schoolgirl's knowledgesaffronted both positions in

the debate.The 'schoolgirl'/ 'daughter' was called upon as someonein needof

protectionfrom obsceneand immoral literature and, conversely,as the figure that it

was unfair to make English Literature conforin to in termsof appropriatereading Both though, her She figure matter. positions, agreed0- on innocence. was a useful to 45 deploy, if, as Fischer and Dubois had stated,women's naturally perversesexual desireshad beenlet loose by the war. A return to the figure of the supposedlysexually innocentgirl who had not yet become'woman' might allow a new control of a generationof young girls coming to womanhood,who had not yet had their

'perversity' unleashed.However, this girl is clearly not sexually innoeent,and as suchmust be abjectedin order to maintain the identity of the 'innocent girV.

Girls were not the only speakingsubjects whose texts. came before the law in one way or another.Prostitutes, too, could be freely spokenabout as presentingsocial problems,but not speakfor themselves.'9 Sheila Cousin's To Beg I

Am Ashamed purportedto be the autobiographyof a lady prostitute.The family of this young woman included a clergyman,a university reader,a knighted cousin and a woman given an O.B. E. for her war service.The narrator is cultured, going to plays by $haw and Galsworthy, able to discussBums, Gibbon and JaneAusten, and living in a flat with 'books, a couple of goodishpictures and a piano with volumes of music.' " Her writing style is fluent, authoritativeand self-reflexive, and her ability to judge the quality of the picturesin her flat puts her into the Leavisite minority, on which

the discerningappreciation of art and literature depends:it is (apartfrom cases of the simple and familiar) only a few who are capableof unprompted,first- handjudgement. They are still a small minority, though a larger one [than previously], who are capableof endorsingsuch first-hand judgement by genuinepersonal response... The minority capablenot only of appreciating Shakespeare,Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances)but of recognising their latest successorsconstitute the consciousnessof the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time... Upon this minority dependsour power of profiting by the finest humanexperience of the past; they keepalive the subtlestand most perishableparts of tradition.

So, disturbingly, could the 'consciousnessof the race', the 'finest human experience' and the 'subtlest parts of tradition' be held by a prostitute, and indeeda prostitutewho mixes with 'pansies', lesbiansand thosewhose sexual activities crossracial barriers ?

This would go againstthe grain of all commonly held orderedEnglish social values, and indeed suggestsa problem hidden within a Leavisite view. This first-hand judgementof art and literature dependsnot upon any objective criteria, but instead 46 upon the personwho makesthe judgement. Only certain people'sjudgements count, and thoseof prostitutesdo not count whenjudging the value of arL ShannonBell, in Reading,Writing & RewTitingthe Prostitute Body,

arguesthat '[mlodemity through a processof othering hasproduced "the prostitute"

as the other of the other. the other within the categoricalother "wornan".' 72In this

way, the prostitute 'was producedas a negativeidentity by the bourgeoissubject, an

empty symbol filled from the outsidewith the debris of the modem body/ body

politic, a sign to women to sublimatetheir libidinal body in their reproductivebody-'73

Tracing a rhetoric which links the diseasedand polluting body of the prostituteto that

of the degeneratelesbian and also that of the mother, shedemonstrates the abjectionof

the prostitutefrom both a Kristevan and Freudianperspective. The figure of the

prostituteleads one to matemal origins which is the place of unboundariedbodies, and

where social and cultural order are not yet in place, so that meaningcollapses. She

representsFreud as:

The first to point out that the consciousmind of the male createsthe split betweenthe asexualidealized woman and the sexualprostitute as a defence againstthe unity of the sexualand the maternalin the unconscious."'

Arguing that Freud, in common with many other writers, describesthe prostitute as an

ambiguousfigure, Bell posits that for:

Freud the whore/mothersplit hasits origin in the OedipusComplex when a male child represseshis desirefor his mother and idealizesher. When the child realisesthat his parentsengage in the 'ugly sexualbehaviour of the rest of the world, ' the mother/whoredifference is collapsed:'the difference betweenhis is bottom they both do the mother and a whore ... not so very great, since at samething. ' Freud constructsboth an unconsciousunity of the female body (the image of the mother and whore as one) and a conscioussplitting of the unified image into a duality of female types:the maternaland the prostitute.75

In order for national sociai meaningto be made,the prostitutefigures both as a line of

defencefor men and a prohibition for women. For men, shefigures to defend them

from a lapseinto the meaninglessnesstheir associationwith the maternalentails, and

for women, shefigures to enforce the reproductivebody as opposedto the

'un(re)productive' body. 7' The heterosexualwoman's body should be caughtup in

reproductionfor the nation, whereasthe non-heterosexualwoman's body has a 47 sexuality which belongsto her rather than the nation, and as suchrepresents a national danger."'

However, English society, as viewed from the position of the

prostitute,is turned on its headby the prostitute speakingfrom the position of the

nationally unreproductive.To Beg I Am Ashamed,in deploying a speakingsubject

prostitute, disordersthe genderand sexuality relations of Englishness.The narratoris

the viewer and producerof knowledgeof men, reducingthem to a function of their

sexualdesires, by calling them 'my high-heel man' or 'a button-bootman'; and given

that theseclients are professionalmen, suchas clergymen,all culture which they

might possessby virtue of their educationand professionalposition is reducedto

nothing but their own sexualdesire. " This makesmen like women, in that they

becomenothing but their own perversesexualityý 9

Dialogically respondingto masculineviews of her, the narrator

redescribesboth herself and the propriety of an upper middle-classlifestyle. Her

mother 'found there was little romantic in being wife, cook and generalservant to a

man sheloathed'. " Orphanedas a young girl, her mother.

Cameinto a small income of her own and went to live, on her holidays, with guardianswho had a large and blank-facedhouse somewhere on the south side of London. They were respectablepeople, so respectablethat it was difficult to believe that they were really alive. The readingof The Times at breakfastwas like a secondkind of Sundayservice. "

The blanknessof the housemirrors the blanknessshe sees in English culture and the

respectabilityof marriage.She is positionedas having an inheritancewhich derives

from the English Home Countiesand its respectablemiddle-class Englishness, but the

text makesclear this inheritancecannot protect the narratorfrom 'degeneration'into

prostitution. Middle-classEnglish decencyand respectabilitycannot ensure its own

continuity through its children. However, the narratorrefuses the male-defined

subjectivity of the prostitute,arguing that: , I don't supposea doctor is expected,out of his surgery,to give free medical advice to his acquaintances.When he has put down his stethoscope,I imagine, he his becomes in sheds professionand a man.-Thc prostitute, the eyesof the ordinary male, never shedsher profession.For her, he believes firmly, there should be no off-duty hours. He pursuesher, in seasonand out of season,with his needs,as his women do with their contempt. 82 48

Having judged her professionagainst that of medicine, shethen goeson to claim that professionalability for herself.Asserting that 'the prostitutetoday needsto be half a psycho-analyst',she analyses her clients as:

Incapableof genuineemotion themselves;they needthe display of it desperatelyin others.So they must fight out a cobwebbedbattle with their own daydreamsover my helplessbody. Often enoughthey are puritans on a holiday from their conscience!'

But her analysisis more than that: it is also couchedin a literary languagedeploying suchmetaphors as 'cobwebbedbattles'. This literarinesslies alongside straightforward,short, authoritativeand dialogic sentenceswhich examinetheir own construction,such as 'I cannot be put upon. If you want my body, you must pay for it. However odd the adjective may sound,there is, to me, somethingclean about that."' This cleanlinessexists in contradictionto the term 'filth' which was applied to both suchbehaviour and suchliterature. The text refusesan associationof the prostitutewith the abject, and as suchbreaks with an English order which abjectsthe prostituteto ensurethe properly controlled sexualidentity of the 'Englishwoman'.

Sincethe text refusedto abject itself, its exclusioncame from outside,and its banning ensuredits exclusionfrom the national literature.

Like the young girl of the diary who breakswith her family secrecy, the this text breaks her by the sexual , prostituteof With classallegiance, revealing secretsof her middle-classclients, thosewho are held to be pillars of a community.

As such, shebrings thesecommunity underpinningsinto disrepute.Since

'respectability' was a key marker of that class,the loss of respectabilityentailed the subsequentloss of class.The two texts sharea way of undermining middle-class culture by revealing the secretswhich lie behind it, so that it losesits meaning.

The problem of the loss of meaningis also apparentin Norah C.

James'sSleeveless Errand. The two main charactersin this text, Paulaand Bill, are clear that the war has destroyedmeaning for them both. Seeingdeath so frequently, and at suchclose hand, Bill has stoppedbelieving in god, and in the nation as the 'land fit for heroesand all that bunkum!,. 15Paula has found that suffrage offers less, 49 than sheexpected. That the pair only meet by accidentcontributes to the generallack of belief in any meaningful force at work in human societyand activity. Paulahas decidedto kill herself becauseher lover has rejectedher, while Bill hasjust discovered the wife he thought so decent(because he met her at the tennisclub) is having an affair with anotherman. Newspaperreports about the trial involving this book would not allow the readerto believe that morality is a concernof thesetwo, but, in fact, they discussit and are also self-reflective about drinking and swearing.Talking about their generation,Paula tells Bill in despair:

We sneerat goodnessand decencywhenever we come acrossit. We're bored with peoplewho aren't bawdy. We call them prigs and prudesif they don't want to talk about copulationat lunchtime and buggeryat dinner. We despise people who don't swill down booze as-wedo. 86

But their generationpresents a challengeto the moral ideasof the previousone, -if Paulais clear that her and Bill's generationhas been made immoral by the influence of the one which waged the war, and shetells him regretfully. As a whole we don't seemto have any moral valuesleft at all - not much wonder, consideringthe war bangedevery pre-conceivedtheory to bits. What chancehad we of keepingour headswhen all aroundus we saw the extremes that are a part of it? Excessand intenseprivation, ruthlessdiscipline and loose living-, the highestawards made to men for the destructionof the enemy,and hangingthe murdererfor the sameaction of taking humanlife. Imprisoning men whoseconscience would not let them fight, and shoutingthat war was altogetherwrong, and must never again be allowed. The Church, too. What a failure! Crying from the pulpits for men to join up and help exterminatethe Germans,and readingfrom the Gospelscommands which said, 'Love your neighbouras yourself.' How could we keep our headsin that damnable contradictorybabel ?

Indeed,this text is an indictment of the generationresponsible for the prosecutionof

the war, and it is a matter of interestthat court reportsneglect this aspectof the text in

favour of one which accusesthe writer and publisher of immorality.

There are two themespresent in SleevelessErrand which refuse tropes

and figures of the post-warperiod as the nation attemptedto re-constituteitselL The

first is that of the English countryside,and the secondthat of the literate and literary

personholding the Leavisite 'consciousnessof the race. If the English countryside

was the figure usedto encouragemen to have somethingto fight for during the war, it upon the both the judged was also called after war as place one the war againsttý and the so location which could renew the health and virility of the nation. As such,it representedthe site where what the nation meantin the past and present,and what it

could mean in the future, was worked out. So, for example,Bill measuresthe

awfulnessof his brother's deathin the war againsta memory of the pair of them

playing as boys in a country Rectory garden.However, this sameEnglish countryside

cannotprovide enoughmeaning for Paulato continueher life. Arriving at the field on

the cliff edgewhere sheintends to commit suicide by driving her car over it, sheis

struck by its beauty:

The mist had vanishedfrom off the seaand the horizon lay a faint purple line in the distance.As shelooked ahead,the sky was suddenlysplit by a golden crack, through which the sunlight poured.The moment this happened,the birds awoke with startling suddenness.A thrush called richly from a tiny wood on her right. A lark shot upwards,its notesfalling in a cascadeof sound as it rose.Colour streamedback into the hills and treesand sky. Paula thought, 'God, it's so beautiful ! I'm glad I've seenit like this at the last.'

Whereasin other contextsthis form of beautyin English naturewould be meaningful,

in this text, even though Paulafinds it beautiful and is glad to have seenit, it is

meaninglessin that it only precedesdeath: she still commits suicide.The English

countrysidecannot guarantee enough meaning for Paula.In relation to the senseof

cultural despairshe identifies, and of which sheherself is a symptom,the countryside

is too impotent a force to counterthis despair.Neither can her immersion in literary

culture ward off death.A readerof 'JamesJoyce, Conrad,The Week-End Book, Edna H. G. Wells, Freud, Liam O'Flaherty besides host St. Vincent NEllay, and ... a of other names', like Sheila Cousins'sprostitute, she belonged to that Leavisite

minority who 'keep alive the subtlestand most perishableparts of tradition', and who

provide for the majority a way 'of profiting by the finest humanexperience of the

past'. " Clearly though, being dead,Paula was incapableof this. Literature, too, is an

impotent force in counteringher despair.Tlie most powerful tropesof the nation, its

literature and its countryside,were inadequatein preservingany meaningful life for

Paula.It is this, I would like to suggest,that presentedthe bigger challengefor the

post-warsociety than the filthy languageand immoral charactersthe text was

suppressedfor. Sincethe text makesboth the countrysideand literature abject,in that 51 they becomemeaningless and cannotprevent death, then it presentsa real challengeto re-imaginingthe nation. From where can the latter derive its identity if its land and literature cannotprovide an identity for Englandand Englishness?It seemsalmost inevitable that the book shouldbe banned,since by making the book itself abjectand excluding it from the nation, Englandcould continueto re-constituteits identity as

immersedin countrysideand literature.

Sharinga similarly problematicrelationship between countryside,

literature and morality, the three main bannedtexts which provided an enormous

amount of public debateabout censorshipwere JamesJoyce's Ulysses,burnt at

Folkestonein 1923,D. H. Lawrence's 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Radclyffe

Hall's The Well of Loneliness,famously tried in 1928.What do thesetexts reveal

aboutland and literaturethat make them antitheticalto Englishness?'0

In the caseof Ulysses,it must be remembered,the text was printed

abroadand written by a foreigner, an Irishman, so how could it challengea

reconstitutionof Englishness?I would like to arguethat the challengeto Englishness

lay in its narrativeform and thematic content.For a so.ciety which was attemptingto

re-makemeaning after the loss of national coherencethe war had entailed,a narrative

form which appearedmeaningless was a challengeto this project, but also its thematic

contentupset the grammarof the nation. So, for example,Buck Mulligan and Stephen

Dedalusdisturb order by sharinga handkerchiefwith which Buck 'cleans' his razor as

they gazeout to sea:

- Lend us a loan of your noseragto wipe my razor. Stephensuffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its comer a dirty crumpledhandkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorbladeneatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief,he said: - The Bard's noserag.A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost tasteit, can't you? He mountedto the parapetagain and gazedout over Dublin bay, his fair oakpalehair stirring slightly. - God, he said quietly. Isn't the seawhat Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother?The snotgreensea. The scroturntighteningsea.

It is not only the lack of clean boundariesbetween the dirty handkerchiefand razor

that is abject, but also the lack of boundarybetween vision and taste,such that the

colour of snoi, or snot itself, is almost savourable." More importantly, though, the., 52 suggestionthat bodily fluids might be appropriatelyelevated to becomean emblem of nationalliterature reduces literature itself to the level of the abjectby the associationof the two. Snot is a particularly abject bodily fluid: existing in a statebetween clear fluidity and firmness,it contradictsa boundarybetween wet and dry, betweenhard

and soft. But bodily fluids anyway presenta challengeto the notion of insideloutside,

the self and other, being neither one thing nor the other." If somenon-threatening

body parts are appropriateto literature, such as arms and legs, the scrotumis not,

belongingto the realm of the obscenebecause of its associationwith sexualactivity.

One of the striking themesin Ulysses is Dedalus'shaunting by his

deadmother. maternalorigins are ever-present,as is the presenceof the corpse- the final collapseof all meaning,as Kristeva argues.In the following, the corpseand

maternalorigins are bound together.

Silently, in a dreamshe had come to him after her death,her wastedbody within its loose brown graveclothesgiving off an odour of wax and rosewood,her breaththat had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.Across the threadbarecuffedge he saw the seahailed as a. greatsweet mother by the wellfed voice besidehim. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull greenmass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood besideher deathbedholding the greensluggish bile which shehad tom up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaningvon-ýiting. 9'

This corpsedoes not maintain a boundarybetween the living and the deadsince its

breathand its odour can invade the body of Stephen.He can inhale her odour such

that sheis inside him. However, shecan be projectedonto the viewed landscapein the

form of the sea,making a national landscape/seascapea place where the maternalis

inescapable.Her abjectioniý the landscape'sabjection: the bil e in her bowl is

equivalentto the searinged by the bay. The corpsealso destroysthe certainty of

gender,being in this stateneither masculinenor feminine. Stephen'smother's body

becomesan 'it' in death.If corpsesdo not uphold genderdistinctions, neither do they

maintain a boundarybetween human and landscape.In Ulysses,corpses leak into land so that:

The soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails, charnelhouses.Dreadful. Turning greenand pink, decomposing.Rot quick in damp earth.The lean old onestougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy.Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths.Of coursethe cells or whateverthey are go on living. Changing 53

about.Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.But they must breeda devil of a lot of maggots.Soil must be simply swirling with them. "

This particular view of corpsescounters a view English societywas propagatingabout the Unknown Warrior. This national hero, who was interred in WestminsterAbbey in

1920,stood in for all the war dead,and particularly thosewho had not beenburied, or thosewho had beenburied without any identification. As such,he was emblematic for a nation in mourning -a corpseof enormouscultural importance,since the actual corpsesimultaneously did not possessan identity and did possessone as 'unknown warrior'. Insteadof an individual or social identity, the corpsehad a national one. Out of death,and through him, national identity could be re-made.In him, the meaninglessnessof the corpseand the meaningfulnessof the nation could be set in dialoguein order to make the corpsebecome meaningful. Anxieties aboutwhether the war deadwere decomposingand dismemberedcorpses, or whether they were identifiable bodies,was haunting the post-war generation.The attempt to re- constitutethe nation becamecaught up in a desireto re-constitutethese dismembered masculinenational bodiesof the GreatWar. Writings about this particular corpsewere careful not to summonup imagesof decomposition,instead talking of the various corpsesfrom which the warrior was chosenas distinct and discrete 'bodies'. In 1929, the British Legion Journal wrote of the processby which the body cameback to England:

The Unknown Warrior was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day, November II th, 1920. Somewhere in the vicinity of Ypres there is an empty grave from whence, two days earlier, the poor body was removed to be brought home for last interment The this ... grave was opened secretly, and the body, being reverently taken out, was placed in a deal coffin and transported in a military waggon, by road from the misty plains of Flanders to Boulogne. 96

The 'empty grave' suggestsa distinct spacethat a body had occupied,a body that did not ooze into its surroundingslike the Joyceancorpse, so that when removedthe earth could collapsein on itself. A gap is left where a body had been.Ten yearslater, in

1939,another article in the British Legion Journal discussedthe choice of the Unknown Warrior. 54

It was the duty of six subalternsto selectone unmarkedgrave upon each battlefield. Sometimesthe grim little party stoppedbeside some solitary cross and startedtheir digging, sometimesthey approachedthose great forest-like clumpsof crossesand searchedamong those till they found one that was nameless.Six corpseswere soonlaid bare.What there was of thesewas well- preserved,for the French soil bearsthe quality of preservation."

If the 'body' of 1929had turned into a 'corpse' by 1939,then anxietiesabout its state were put to rest by the remarkablypreservative qualities of Frenchsoil, so that it could still be seenas a whole entity. Clearly, though, this was an important national questionin the interwar years,from the time it was mootedto bring a body back to

England soonafter the war, until 1939and the start of the next war. The Joycean focus on the decomposingcorpse could only upsetthe grammarof the nation, as it re-

mademeaning through exorcisingthe effects of the GreatWar.

In contrastto Joyce's refusal of conventionsof middle-classdecency is

Virgihia Woolf's embracingof it. SinceWoolf's writing is often describedas

similarly modernistto Joyce's and was not banned,it is interestingto comparethe

two. Woolf's characterand themes,on the whole, were 'nice'. Unlike Joyce, her

mainly upper-n-ýiddle-classcharacters do not do suchthings as lend eachother their

handkerchiefs,look at the snot, and then let their consciousnessroam aroundthe

subject.Although Virginia Woolf's writing in BetweenThe Acts, her novel of

interwar England,could be abject, it avoids this through a call on nation. At the

beginning,the charactersare discussingthe council bringing water to the village and

where the cesspoolis to be situated:

The old man in the arm-chair - Mr Oliver, of the Indian Civil Service,retired - said that the site they had chosenfor the cesspoolwas, if he heard aright, on the Roman road. From an aeroplane,he said, you could still seeplainly marked,the scarsmade by the Britons; by the Romans;by the Elizabethan manor house;and by the,,Vlough, whbn they ploughedthe hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars. A cesspoolfor the disposalof excretaand urine and as abject as snot could make the abject break out; however,it is containedby a referenceto British history. The

abjectionof the cesspoolis incorporatedinto the domesticand the landscapeso that its is meaning distinct as part of the homelinessof this history, and nothing leaks from its 55 bordersto disrupt this meaning.When built, the cesspoolwill be as plainly and clearly marked as the other changeson landscape.Kristeva suggeststhat: The is death I corpse cesspooland ... refuse and corpsesshow me what permanentlythrust asidein order to live. Thesebody fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands,hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death If dung ... signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse,the most sickeningof wastes,is a border that has encroachedupon everything."

It is the meaningmade by the nation that allows order to hold in Woolf's piece.

National history providesbordered, distinctly perceivablespaces on the landscape which containthe abject cesspool.The nation is simultaneouslyboth the meaningthat the corpse/cesspoolwould destroyand, in the face of this abjection,the nation is the meaningful identity that re-ordersborders. No suchnational meaningholds in Joyce's piece, which links the nation with the abjection of snot, and whoserepresentation of the decomposingcorpse cannot exorcise the effects of the GreatWar.

The other two texts dealing with the social effects of the GreatWar which provokedpublic debatewere Lady Chatterley's Lover and The Well of

Loneliness,and an analysisof thesetwo text follows. Lady Chatterley's Lover might well havebeen seen as a centraltext in the literature of a nation concernedwith

4virility', given that Lawrence's work glorified the phallus as a life-giving, reserrectionaryforce for a post-war society. "' However, it was only privately publishedin its entirety in 1928 in Florence,because Lawrence's publishers,Secker, turned it down. Although an expurgatedversion was publishedin Britain in the interwar period, the unexpurgatedtext was not publisheduntil the 1960s.Why was this so?What did it contain to upsetthe virility of the nation?

In 1932,the Archbishop of Canterburyspoke about the problematics of fiction, arguing that: The film and the novel were at the presenttime sex-obsessed.They could not escapefrom it; it was the universal theme.In the novel of old-fashioneddays ! he story of the people concerned,after going through various changes,ended in marriage.Now the story beganwith marriage,and then immediately some third personwas introducedwho brought in the complications of sex and the problem was set. It was a wholly artificial life conjured up by the imagination of writers, and he firmly believed it had no relationshipto the open-airand healthy life which he believedthe majority of peoplestill led. [My italics] "' 56

Lady Chatterley'sLover doesindeed begin with the marriageof Constanceand

Clifford Chatterley,and the introduction of Mellors brings in 'the complicationsof sex'. However much Constancelives her 'open-air healthy life', walking in the woods everyday,and however much Mellors, too, living in his isolated country

cottageand working out of doors breathesthis air, the pair are not inoculatedinto

sexlessnessby it, or mademoral in a nationally acceptableway. The text posits an

alternativemorality in which the countrysideguarantees and underpinstheir adulterous

cross-classrelationship which resultsin Constance'sillegitimate pregnancy.

However, in more hegemonicviews of the English Icountryside, this was not meantto

be its function. The open-air shouldhave upheld heterosexualmarriage relations, as

the Bishop suggests.

In many ways, Lady Chatterley's Lover is very 'English', employing

tropessuch as the country-houseas a vehicle for examining the state-of-the-nationin

order to diagnoseits lack of virility. The masterof the houseis deadfrom the waist

down after a war injury, and thereforecannot provide an active phallic masculinity for

the nation. It suggestsheterosexuality for women as the only way that their lives can

havemeaning and upholdsthe importanceof white racial identity for the nation.The

textually valorised Mellors hasa 'slim white back, 'slender white arms', 'pure,

delicate, white loins, and 'white, solitary nudity'. " Constancehas 'ivory-gleaming

legs'. "' Referring back to Kristeva's theory of abjection,in which identity is derived

from expelling the 'not I' from 'the I', it seemsthat the very Englishnessof the text,

in conjunction with its abjectionthrough censorship,help to createan identity for

Englandand Englishnessthat repudiatesso-called bad language,explicit descriptions

of sexualactivity and the breakingof classallegiances by women, and is both anti-

lesbianand anti-black. Mellors tells Constancethat:

'I thought therewas no real sex left: never a woman who'd really "come" naturally with a man: exceptblack women, and somehow,well, we're white men: and they're a bit like mud.' 104

It is this immersionin 'mud' that underminesthe virility of the nation, since the

national masculinebody cannotmaintain clear boundarieswithin the disordermud 57 implies, and.concomitantly the maintenanceof 'the race' relies on reproduction orderedin distinct racial categoriesby heterosexualwomen. For Mellors, lesbianism is an outrage against men's 'decency' that undermineshis social/sexualselL

Bemoaningthe lack of good sexualpartners, he tells Constance:

'Then there's the sort that puts you out before you really "come", and go on writhing againstyour loins till they bring themselvesoff againstyour thighs. But they're mostly the Lesbian sort. It's astonishinghow Lesbianwomen are, consciouslyor unconsciously.Seems to me they're nearly all Lesbian.' 'And do you mindT askedConnie. 'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really Lesbian,I fairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.' 'And what do you doT 'Just go away as fast as I can.' 'But do you think Lesbianwomen any worse than homosexualmenT V do ! BecauseI've sufferedmore from them. In the abstract,I've no idea. When I get with a Lesbian woman, whether she knows she's one or not, I seered. No, no ! But I wanted to have nothing to do with any woman any more. I wantedto keep to myself: keep my privacy and my decency.' "

On the basisof Mellors's evidence,one might think that England was fairly crawling with lesbiansin the interwar period and that one would have beenlucky to meet a heterosexualwoman. For Mellors, lesbiansare abject, representinga national degeneracyagainst which he works out his own version of Englishnessand morality.

In 1921,Parliament considered whether to extendthe law againstmale homosexualityto include actsbetween women. Speakersdebating this in the House of

Commonsdeployed a rhetoric aroundrace, nation and marriage.Mr Macquisten arguedthat the strengthof the nation dependedon outlawing lesbianism,saying that:

Thesemoral weaknessesdate back to the very origin of history, and when they grow or becomeprevalent in any nation or any country, it is the beginningof the nation's downfall. The falling away of feminine morality was to a large extent the causeof the destructionof the early Greciancivilisation, and still more the causeof the downfall of the RomanEmpire. "

Part of the problem of lesbianism,besides bringing about the nation's downfall, was

that it meantlesbians poached men's wives. He told the House:

Only tonight I was speakingwith a man whom I have known for a comparatively short time, and who told me how his home had beenruined by the wiles of one abandonedfemale, who had pursuedhis wife, and later some other misconducthappened with a male personwhich enabledhim to get a divorce. But for that he would have been shackledfor life to that abandoned person,who had forgotten the dictatesof Nature and morality. 107 58

Lesbianism,therefore, was a crime againstmen and marriageas much as againstthe nation. Colonel Wedgwood,agreeing that '[tlhis is very objectionablevice, felt that:

You cannotmake peoplemoral by an Act of Parliament.To call in the policemanto suppressa vice is the bestway to encouragethe knowledgeof that vice, and the spreadof it. This vice, in particular, is obviously one which cannotbe suppressedby law. "'

Sir E. Wild respondedwith the proviso that this was indeed 'a beastly subject', and that whilst it was an unwantedintrusion 'to pollute the Housewith details of these abominations',nonetheless it was a racial problem and had to be discussed:

This vice doesexist, and it sapsthe fundamentalinstitutions of society. In the first place it stopschildbirth, becauseit is a well-known fact that any woman who indulges in this vice will have nothing to do with the other sex. It debauchesyoung girls, and it producesneurasthenia and insanity. Anybody who is really interestedin the punishmentof the vice would desirethat the law shouldbe clothed with power which can only be exercisedif there be proper proof topt down a vice that must tend to causeour race to decline. [My italics] '

If, as a'well-known fact', women who indulged lesbian tendencieswould have nothing to do with the oppositesex, then the testimony of Mr McQuisten is doubtful.

The lesbianwife to whom he refers also 'misconducted' herself with a man. In addition, if, as was a 'well-known fact', lesbianismstopped childbirth, then Lieut-

Colonel Moore-Brabazonargued against legislation sincethe best way of dealing with the problem:

Is to leave them entirely alone,not notice them, not advertisethem. That is the methodthat has beenadopted in Englandfor many hundredyears, and I believe it is the best methodnow, becausethese cases are self-exterminating. They are examplesof ultra-civilisation but they havethe merit of exterminating themselves,and consequentlythey do not spreador do very much harm to society at large. "0

However, if Englandhad beennot noticing and not mentioning lesbiansfor many hundredyears, then how was lesbianismself-exterminating if lesbianshad a historical continuity within the nation?The debateposits lesbianism as dating back to the origins of history and as being a product of ultra-civilisation. It leadsto a distastefor relations with the oppositesex and an unhealthy,immoral interestin it. It doeslittle harm and

debauchesyoung girls and leadsto insanity. Ultimately, the amendmentwas not

passed,and lesbianismnot madeillegal, sinceit was felt that keepingit as a secretwas

the bestway to deal with the 'problem'. To bring it within the realm of the law would 59 tempt women who had never heardof such a thing into trying it. However,

Lawrence'snovel madethe secretpublic, and this was one reasonthat it was unpublishablein its entirety. Whilst in the 1932authorised British edition it was acceptableto liken black women to 'mud', it was not acceptableto publish Mellors's commentsabout lesbians,and the previously quoted extractsfrom Lady Chatterley's

Lover were excisedfrom the authorisededition. "'

Radclyffe Hall, too, in writing and having publishedThe Well of

Loneliness,made the secretpublic. An unruly 'daughter' of Englandherself,

Radclyffe Hall's heroine, StephenGordon, was also a literary representationof one of thesedaughters who found her war-work enabledher to meet other lesbians.The only child of landed gentry, Stephenlives in the country-house,Morton, of her parents.

Uke Lady Chatterley's Lover, this text also utilises the trope of the English country- houseas metonymic for the nation. Here, the heterosexualwoman fits into ihe house and English landscape;her potentially procreativeand matemalbody mirrors the landscapeshe inhabits as much as the landscapemirrors her. So while pregnantwith Stephen,Lady Anna Gordon:

Would sit with her needle-work dropped on her knees, while her eyes turned away to the long line of hills that stretched beyond the Severn valley. From her favourite seat underneath an old cedar, she would see these Malvern Ifills in their beauty, and their swelling slopes seemed to hold a new meaning. They were like pregnant women, full bosomed, courageous, great green-girdled mothers of splendid sons! Thus through all those summer months she sat and watched the hills, and Sir Philip would sit with her - they would sit hand in hand. 112

The narrativeslides from pregnancyto landscapeto hands.Her bodyand landscape arein union,and the sign of theheterosexual love betweenLady Anna andSir Philip is not in someexplicitly describedsex acts but in theunion of their hands.Their child, asan adolescent,understands something of theimbrication of heterosexualityand the countrysideas metaphoric of England: This love of theirshad been a greatglory; all herlife shehad lived with it side by side,but neveruntil it appearedto be threatened,did shefeel shehad really graspedits truemeaning - theserene and beautiful spirit of Mortonclothed in flesh,yes, that hadbeen its true meaning."' 60

The spirit of the country-houseand its groundsmanifests itself in the corporality of the love betweenher parents.-Their flesh is organically connectedto place.Thus far, the textual concernsare conservativeand acceptableto the grammarof the nation, but what threatensthe love of her parentsis the growing realisationthat their daughteris not like other girls, and her latent lesbianismis a threat to the country house/nation.

Stephendisrupts various momentsof heterosexuality.At garden parties,she was always a failure, and fared no better at the county dinner-parties:

They were long, thesedinners, overloaded with courses;they were heavy, being weightedwith polite conversation;they were stately,by reasonof family silver, aboveall they were firmly conservativein spirit, as conservativeas the marriageservice itself, and almost as insistentin sex distinction. 'Captain Ramsay,will you take Miss Gordon into dinnerT A politely crookedarm: 'Delighted, Miss Gordon.' Then the solemn and ridiculous procession, animals marching into Noah's Ark two by two, very sure of divine protection - male and female created He them! Stephen's skirt would be long and her foot might get entangled, and she with but one free hand at her disposal - the procession would stop and she would have stopped it! Intolerable thought, she had stopped the procession! 114

An English upper-classinheritance, with plenty of fresh air from hunting in the countryside,cannot prevent her from becominglesbian and stoppingthe processionof heterosexualitythat guaranteesthe continuity of the nation through reproduction.

StephenGordon will not reproduce,and is only attractedto women. Her first love,

Angela, is a married woman whosehusband is threatenedby their relationship.Lady

Anna Gordon is horrified by the situation and exiles Stephenfrom Morton. But if her parents'national heterosexualityis valorised,the heterosexualitybetween Angela and her husbandis not:

He climbed into bed with the sly expressionthat Angela hated- it was so Ph=! raphic. 'Well, old girl, don't forget that you've got a man about the you haven't forgotten it, have you TAfter which followed one or two flaccid embracestogether with much arrogantmasculine bragging; and Angela, sighing as she lay and endured,quite suddenlythought of Stephen.

This 'arrogant masculinebragging' suggeststhat heterosexualityis as much about languageas it is about the actionsof bodiesand their social implications. Given the

circumstancesof the book's receptionand prosecutionon the groundsof obscenityit is ironic that heterosexualityis pronounced'pornographic. Undermining this

authority to speakpublicly of lesbianismalso entailedundermining literature and its 61 place in re-imagining the nation. Part of the problematicsof The Well of Loneliness was that both the author and its protagonistwere acclaimedwriters: Radclyffe Hall had won both the Prix FeminaVie Heureuseand the JamesTait Black Memorial Prize for Adwn's Breed in 1926,and her heroine, StephenGordon, createda sensation with her first novel, The Furrow. In The Well of Loneliness,the representationof lesbianismis caughtup with literariness.When the court orderedthat the book be destroyed,James Douglas wrote in the Daily Fxpress that he was proud of the contribution his paperhad made to the ban. Describing it as an 'insidious perversion of the English novel', he carried on to statethat through its destruction,'English literature is the gainer and nothing but the gainer.' 116

After the legal appealagainst the book's destructionfailed, Radclyffe

Hall felt that both Englandand the ConservativeParty had betrayedher, and she briefly found socialism attractive.Addressing the SouthendYoung Socialistsin 1929, without what appearsto be the least senseof irony, shecalled up tropesof nation to tell them that:

Your party is young, courageous,virile, it hasjust arrived at the glory of manhood.Who defendedmy book within a few hours of the dastardlyattack in SundayExpress leapt defence? Daily Herald the - what paper to my the ... May you sweepthe country clean at the next electionand let somefreshair and sunshineinto England.If we cannothave a country fit for heroes,if that is too vast an aspiration,at least let us have a country whoseair is too pure for this presentgovernment to breathe.[My italics] "'

Rhetorically, sheturned the clean,fresh open-airof Englandwhich was meant to standin opposition to the perversionof. her book againstthe establishmentwhich bannedit, in the hope that it would choke them.

So what can bannedbooks tell us about the relation betweena re- ordered,post-Great-War England and its literature, preferredEnglish subjectivities,

and that which is abjected?How is the identity of interwar England derived from

disallowing certain speakingsubject positions and topics which mainly concernsex

and sexuality?Why were somebooks bannedin the interwar period, whilst others

were not? It seemsthat many of thesetexts were bannedbecause, although they used

generaltropes of England and Englishness,the way in which thesetropes were used 62 in effect challengednotions of Englishness.They appearedto exceedthe hegemonic e- view of what constitutedbeing English beyondthe limits that hegemonycould allow, and producedfeelings of disgustand horror in somereaders so that they came to be disallowed for the island either officially or unofficially as readingeýmatter nation and race.So, in order to reclaim the nation from the influence of the Great War and from fears that English culture was becomingferninised, the banningand restriction on readershipof certain texts helpedto form an official English literature which was heterosexual( as long as it did not describesex acts too readily); could supportthe virility of the nation; and attemptedto put troublesomedaughters back in their place in patriarchalhierarchy. The virility of the nation dependedupon a constructionof woman as reproductive,and as object rather than subject.The un(re)productive woman was abjected.The identity of England and Englishnesswas derived from abjectingall that was poisonousor polluting in English literature in favour of valorising the clean air of the English countryside.In the process,national literature was being formed through its relationshipto the non-national'other' of abjected books.That representationswere perceivedto be enormouslypowerful can be seenin the attention given to prosecutionsof representationsof practices,such as lesbianism, which were not in themselvesillegal. Theseprosecutions gave as much power to literary representationsas to actualbehaviours. The force of the law was marshalledin order to make literature conform to an image of 'England' and 'Englishness'into which national subjectswere not always legislated,as we have seenwith the caseof lesbianism.Therefore, literature can be seento be a crucial force in national imaginings and the project of national renewal.In the identification of categoriesof peoplein needof protectionfrom indecentliterature, it also identified them as dangerous to national endeavour.In this way, schoolgirls/daughtersrepresented a

categorywhich, unlesscontrolled, presenteda potential dangerto the virility of the

nation, whilst simultaneouslythey were identified as a categoryin needof protection. Through them, the twin concepts of national purity and national dangerplayed But themselvesout. if somepeople were dangerousto notions of England and 63

Englishness,others were not; and the next chapterturns to the popular writings of the white middle-classman, H. V. Morton, as he producesa national literature of the

'clean, fresh air' of the English countryside.

"Seized Novel Condemned:All CopiesTo Be Destroyed', The Times, 5 March 1929, p. 13. 2 Cate Haste, Rules of Defire: Sex in Britain World War Oni to the Present (London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 74. 3 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatismbetween the Wars (LA)ndon:Roudedge, 1991), p. 8. SusanKingsley kent, Gýnderand Power in Britaim i640-1990 (London: Routledge,1999), p. 279. Kent, p. 276. Kent, p. 294. 7 H. C. Fischer and E X. Dubois, SexualLife During the World War (London: FrancisAldor, 1937). 11Lord Alfred Douglas cited in Kent, p. 280. ' R. Brimlcy Johnson,Moral Poison in Modern Fiction (London: A. M. Philpot) [n.d. ) (1922?), p. 12. Johnson,pp. 14-15. Johnson,pp. 15-16. Johnson, p. 17. 13Henry Newbolt, The Idea of an English Association (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 4. '4 Constitution of the English Association cited in Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 (Oxford. ClarendonPress, 1983), p. 93. 15Newbolt, p. 10. Newbolt, p. 10. 17The Teachingof English in England (London: HMSO, 1921), p. 15. Baldick, p. 94. The Teachingof English in England, p. 13. The Teachingof English in England, p. 338. 21The Teachingof English in England, p. 22. 22The Teachingof English in England, pp. 252-253. 1 77wTeaching of English in England, p. 257 1 The Teachingof English in England, p. 3ý0. 1 The Teachingof English in England, p. 335. 2677te Teaching of English in England, p. 338. 27Frederick Hallis, The Law and Obscenity (London: DesmondHarmsworth, 1932), p. 14. Italics in original. 28Hallis, p. 15. 29GeorgeArmitage, BannedIn England.,An Examination of the Law Relating to Obscene Publications [n.p. ] (Wishart, 1932), p. 21. 30 Edward I BristowXce and Vigilance: Purity Movementsin Britain since 1700 (London: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), p. 225. 3' Bristow, p. 224. 32Wallace Smith, BessieCotter [1935] (London: William Heinemann, 1972). 33James Hanley, Boy (London: Boriswood,193 1). 34 Bernard Caustonand G. G. Young, KeepingIt Dark or The Censor'sHandbook (London: Mandrake Press,n. d. ) (19307), p. 59. 35E. M. Forster, Maurice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 36James Aston, (T. H. White), They Winter Abroad [ 1932] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969). 37Armitage, pp. 34ý35. 38 - 'IndecentBooks: Home Secretaryand Deputation', The Times, 6 March 1929, p. 11. 39 for See, example the Bishop of London's statementabout the difficult work of the Public Morality in 'Public Council Morality Council: Indecent Films and Books', Thý Times, 5 March 1931, p. 16. 64

40Anon., A YoungGirl's Diary: Prefaced with a Letter by SigmundFreud [19211(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936).All later entries for this text include italics and punctuation errors as in the original. " SeeAlec Craig, The Banned Books of England and other Countries: A Study of the Conceptionof Literary Obscenity (Westport: GreenwoodPress, 1977), p. 80. Other information about banned books can also be found in Anne Lyon Haight, Banned Books: Informal Notes on SomeBooks Bannedfor Various Reasonsat Various Timesand in Various Places (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1955),and Michael S. Howard, Jonathan Cape,Publisher. Herbert Jonathan Cape,G. Wren Howard (London: JonathanCape, 1971) has some discussionof the issuesfrom a publisher's point of view. ' Morris Leopold Ernst William Seagle,To The Pure A Study Obscenity Censor and .... of and the (London: JonathanCape, 1929), p. 100. 43shown in Bernard Caustonand G. G. Young, p. 44. Italics in original. ' Exic Partridge,The First Three Years:An Account and a Bibliography of the Scholartis Press (London: The Scholartis Press, 1930), p. 24. Partridge, pp. 24-25. 'Seized Novel Condemned:All CopiesTo Be Destroyed', The Times, 5 March 1929, p. 13. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness [1928] (London: Virago, 1997). Sally Cline, Radclyffe Halk A WomanCalled John (London: John Murray, 1997), p. 243. JamesDouglas cited in Cline, p. 243. JamesDouglas, cited in Cline, p. 243. Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Virago, 1999), p. 184. 52Archibald Bodkin, cited in Souhami, p. 217. 1 A. P. Herbert, 'Censorship of Books', The Times, 19 October 1928, p. 17. 1 Peggy Soden, 'Literary censorship', The Times, 22 October 1928, p. 15. sl W. W. Greg, 'A Literary Censorship', The Times, 24 October 1928, p. 12. -' H. I- Nolloth, 'The Bounds of Freedom', The Times, 23 October 1928, p. 12. In this context, 'inoculate' meansto infect a body with a living virus, rather than to protect that body through the introduction of a small amount of a virus. In this sense,Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to The Times in February 1917 to complain about harpiescarrying off lonely soldiers to their rooms and inoculating them with disease. See,for example, 'The Primate and Sex Fiction', The Times, 7 November 1932, p. 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essayon Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 1-2. Italics in original. 5'Kristeva, p. 2. 60Kristeva, p. 4. 61Mary S. Allen, Lady in Blue (London: Stanley Paul, 1936), p. 111. 62In this analysis, I am putting aside the question of whether this is the authentic diary of a girl, or a piece of fiction which elucidatespsychoanalytic theory, to treat it in the way that it is presentedto the readeras an authenticdocument. The numerousspelling mistakes,grammatical and punctuation errors in the text function to authenticateit as coming from a young person.The debateabout the authenticity of this diary is discussedby Julia Swindells in "'What's the use of books?" Knowledge, authenticity A Young History 55-66. 63 and Girl's Diary', Women's Review, 5.1 (1996). Anon., p. 84. 64 Anon. -, pp. 110- 111. 6s Anon., p. 12 1. 66 Anon., 144. 67 p. Anon., 264. 68 p. Anon., P. 271. 69 See, for example, G. M. Hall, Prostitution: A Surveyand A Challenge (London: Williams & Norgate, 1933), and discussionsabout prostitution from the point of view of its policing in Mary S. Allen, 7he Pioneer Policewoman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925) and Mary S. Allen, Lady In Blue (London: Stanley Paul, 1936). 11 Sheila Cousins, To Beg I Am Ashamed (London: George Routledge, 1938), p. 4. 71F. R. Leavis cited in Antony Easthope,Literary into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 3-4. 65

72Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing & Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 2. 7' p. Bell, p. 72. 7' Bell, p. 70. 75 Bell, p. 71. 7" Bell, p. 41. ' That heterosexualwomen could think of their pregnancies and children in national terms prior to the Great War can be seenin M. L Davies, ed., Maternity Letters From Working Women: Collected by the Women's Co-operative Guild [1915] (London: Virago, 1978). One woman wrote that our 'children are a valuable assetto the nation, and the health of the woman who is doing her duty in rearing the future race should have a claim upon the national purse' (p. 129), while anotherwrote that 'if to have in the future England, it be the we are going a race worthy of ... will not until nation wakesup to the need of the mothers of that future race' (p. 90). Although this might be seenas an exampleof a reversediscourse in which thesewomen usedthe rhetoric of childbearingfor race/nation in their own individual interests, a letter written to Marie Stopesin 1921 suggeststhe possibility that some women were proud of their achievementin reproducing for the nation. Mrs R. G. M., quotedin DeirdreBeddoe, Back to Home and Duty: WomenBetween the Wars 1918-1939(London: Pandora, 1989), p. 105, wrote to Stopessaying, '[w]hat I would like to know is how I can savehaving more I have children as think I done my duty by my country by having 13 children -9 boys and 4 girls and I have 6 boys little be 3 in May I [sic] alive now and a girt who will years old ... am please to tell you that I received one of those willow from the News the World for ten.' 78 plates of mothersof Cousins, p. 152. 79See, for example,Bernhart A. BauerlVoman (TVieBist Du Weib?): A Treatise on the Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology, and SexualLifie of Woman with an Appendix on Prostitution (London: JonathanCape, 1927).This was introduced as a volume for the medical, legal and educational professionsand the intention of the volume was to show 'how sex dominatesall her activities from the cradle to the grave' (p. 6). Bauer made the argumentabout 'woman' that '[s]he lives only for sex, and is essentially nothing but sex. It must be so if she is adequatelyto fulfill the great task of motherhoodwhich Nature hasassigned her' (p. 158).The way the title of the treatiseis configured suggeststhat there might be an inevitable decline for women into prostitution: an alarming prospect that suggestswomen's sexuality must be controlled to avoid this. "Cousins, p. 8. Cousins, p. 7. Cousins, P. 4. Cousins, p. 5. Cousins, p. 2. 85Norah. C. James, SleevelessErrand (Paris: Henri Babou & Jack Kahane, 1929), p. 106. 86James, p. 206. 87James, pp. 202-203. 88James, p. 215. " James, P. 72. 90Both Ulyssesand Lady Chatterley'sLover are now canonical texts, whereasno such statushas been accordedthe lesbiantext, The Well of Loneliness. - " JamesJoyce, Ulysses [1922] (London: The Bodley Head, 1960). p. 3. 92 The razor itself is an instrument usedin the production of the clean and proper male body. However, Mulligan's's razor cannot fulfill this function once contaminatedwith snot. 93 SeeElizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corp6real Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1994), pp 192-210for a discussionof t4e powers and dangersof bodily fluids. % Joyce, p. 4. 95Joyce, p. 137. 96 Herbert Jeans,'In Death's CathedralPalace: The Story of the Unknown Warrior', British Legion Journal, 9.5 (1929), 118. 1 E. E P. Tisdall, 'How They ChoseThe Unknown Warrior', British Legion Journal, 19.5 (1939), 141. the Virginia Woolf, Between Acts [1941] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 7. Kristeva, p. 3. Italics in original. "' D. H. Lawrence,Lady Chatterley's Lover [1928] (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1960). 66

'The Primate fiction', The Times November 1932, 8. and sex ,7 p. Lawrence,pp. 68-69. tO3Lawrence, p. 233. Lawrence, p. 212. Lawrence, p. 212. Italics in original. "'Criminal Law Amendment Bill', ParliamentmyDebates, 4 August 1921, p. 1799. ParliamentaryDebates, p. 1800. ParliamentaryDebates, p. 1801. ParliamentaryDebates, pp. 1802-1804. ParliamentaryDebates, pp. 1804-1806. SeeD. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterky's Lover (London: William Hcinemann, 1932), pp. 225-227 for the erasure. "' Hall, pp. 8-9. 113Hall, p. 82. 114Hall, p. 75. 'is Hall, p. 151. "" JamesDouglas, cited in Souhami, p. 213. 117Radclyffc Hall, cited in Souhami, p. 221. 67

CHAPTER TWO

H. V. MORTON'S PILGRIMAGES TO ENGLISHNESS

All the time the real adventuresare on the way to anywhere,they are in our headsand hearts,they lurk at the edgesof little English woods,and lie in wait on thosestraight roads of England which, beginning with the tramp of legions,have borne the weight of history for two thousandcrowded years. I think too that any man has done well if, on his returnftom ajourney, he can truthfully say : I have had an exciting time: I have met - myself

Why should a man travelling in searchof Englandhave had a goodjourney if he can

say at the end that he hasmet himself? Is it becausethe journey itself confersnational

identity on him? Or is it that his searchinevitably endswith finding Englandin himself

becausethe masculinesubject is the bestrepresentative of Englishness?For a man to

searchfor Englandand then find himself suggestsa clear identif ication of masculinity

with Englishness,and vice versa.What must this travelling man do in order to find

his masculinity as coterminouswith his national identity? This chapterasks to what

extent, and in what ways, Morton's discourseof the rural 'Englishness' as -defined masculineand 'Nature' as feminine, in order to examinethe hypothesisthat suchan

interwar discourseof the rural located Englishnessin a heterosexualbond betweena

masculinenational subjectand a feminine nature/landscape.

If part of the work undertakenby the act of banning 'poisonous'

literature was to promote a literature of clean,healthy England,then the work of H. V.

Morton constitutesan instanceof just sucha literature. Michael Bartholomewsuggests

'that Morton was among the most widely readinter-war writers, and therefore,was

one of the more influential shapersof the English peoples'image of themselvesand

their Country 2 Testimony for this View lies in his salesfigures. Although many

publishers' recordswere destroyedin the Blitz, making accuraterecords hard to come

by, Bartholomew hasestimated that by '1943 there were 29 editions of In Searchof

England and twelve of the companionvolume The Call of England in circulation. All his books through of went edition after edition ... one commentatorasserts that over a million copiesof In Searchof England were sold in Britain alone." So what can

Morton reveal aboutthe grammarof the nation? 68

When Morton hears'the call of England', or decidesto go 'in search of England', his starting/ leaving point is London. Setting off with belief that England is availableto his gaze,and that 'England is one of the easiestcountries to see' ', he leavesbehind the problematiccapital city, whi6 'no living man has seen'because it has 'ceasedto be visible since Stuart days'. ' The problem of locating Englishnessin.

London for Morton is one of both sight and race. London cannotbe seenin its entirety, but evenif it could thereis the tricky problem of the non-Anglo-Saxon inhabitantsfrom the coloniesand Jews.To find England, then, one hasto leave this degenerate,industrial, and racially impure urban space.Travelling aroundLondon

inevitably forces an acknowledgementof the presenceof the Other, the colonised

subjectsof the British Empire presentin the metropolis.Morton's visit to Limehouse

prompts thesemusings:

As I walked on through dark streets,it seemedimpossible that the restaurantI had left, with its elegantwomen, its discreetstring orchestra,its air of assured comfort and well-being, could exist in the same world with these gloomy avenues,like a slum in hell, through which shivering lascarsshuffled, hugging the shadows,while Chinamenpeered with mask facesand sharpeyes from dim doorways.... The squalor of Limehouse is that strangesqualor of the Eastwhich seemsto concealvicious splendour.There is an air of somethingunrevealed in thosenarrow streetsof shutteredhouses, each one of which appearsto be hugging its own dreadful little secret.''

Here, Englishnessis locatedin class:a visible, white middle classwhich goesto

restaurants.It is open,genteel, ordered, clean and comfortable:everything that the

abject shadowyworld of the Lascar and Chinamanis not. However, this Englishness

is also emphaticallymasculine: women are peripheral.As decorativebackground

objects,they passivelyform part of the cultural distinction - the discretion,comfort and eleganceof the restaurant.

Unable to use his penetrativevision to reveal the secretsof Umehouse,

Morton has to catch a bus 'back to England' from here,just as he doesafter a visit to

Berwick Street,where ' [ilf all the Jewsin Berwick Streetwould wear long false

beardsone day, it would be possibleto take a photographwhich any short-sighted

traveller would swearwas Jerusalem.' ' Similarly, a trip to PetticoatLane, which is

the Eastwithout flies or lepers,necessitates catching a 6pennyomnibus back to 69

England'.' Positioninghis readersas sharinga 'common racial heritage"', Morton that the 'average family hasdisappeared into suggests0 while city racial anaernia', racial survival dictatesa return to the countrysidein order to maintain Englandas 'a virile and progressivenation'. [My italics] " However, the virility of the nation is firmly rooted in a ferninised English soil. Arriving in Glastonbury,which Morton identifies as containing the roots of England,he sees'the pregnant dust of Avalon.

[My italics] Unlike London, Morton's rural spaceis visible, ordered,knowable and racially pure.This allows the inscription of an homogeneousEnglishness in the face of the problematicallydisordered and diseasedcapital city. Sitting on top of Pendleto

'survey' the view which encompassesboth urban and rural England, Morton describeswhat he seesin terms (respectively)of invisibility/ visibility and haziness/whiteness:

In the valley of smokeI could seelittle gasworks,little streetsof houses, mills, high stacks,now and then a puff of smokefrom the railway, sudden and white as a bursting shell, and reservoirsshining like silver spoonsin the haze.A grim panoramaof effect, mademore effective by the shadowyhigh Pennines Over hills fainter blanket outline of the ... . these -wasanother, of smokewhich suggestedthe distant, invisible chimneysof Leeds,Halifax, Huddersfield, and Sheffield. And the other side of this picture?To the left of me was old Lancashire - old England! The lovely greenvalley of the Ribble, boundedby the wild fells of Lancashireand the blue moors of Yorkshire, lay comfortably, little field againstlittle field, bridges,white threadsthat were roads,little white farms, church spiresamong trees."

Racial categories,it appears,are being projectedonto the landscape.The grim,

shadowy,'invisible' industrial landscapein which whiteness apppearsmomentarily

only to be then lost seemsto speakto anxietiesabout racial degenerationin the cities.

'Old England', however,offers a purity of vision in which uncontaminatedwhiteness

can be seen.Here, the presenceof greennessand bluenessdo not contaminatethe

whitenessof the roadsand farms: in this rural place, colour distinctions are firmly

maintained.There is no blending or blurring of colour blue doesnot blend into white

and changeit. NEscegenationis not a rural problem.

Identifying theinyths, of the origin of whiteness,Richard Dyer looks at

thoseof Aryan and Caucasian mountain origins. " Both thesesources of whiteness

suggestthat Europeansfirst camefrom high places.He arguesthat theseplaces have 70 certainvirtues which could be seento haveformed the white character.They include a certaincleanliness of air in which all things are clearly able to be seen,a greater nearnessto god, and the continual presenceof the whitenessof snow. Morton's occupationof the high ground of Pendlecan call upon suchmyths of origin. It gives him both the authority to speakfrom whiteness,a speakingposition of privilege, and also having that authority to legitimate the landscapeof 'old England' as white, whilst still maintaining his own whitenessas an invisible racial category.This white landscapeMorton finds himself in, however, is devoid of people.When peopleenter

Morton's rural landscapesthey are always gendered,but unlike Englishmen,

Englishwomenare in a difficult relation to Englishness.

In a rhetoric which valoriseswomen for the reproductionof more national subjects,Morton simultaneouslysuggests that women cannotever really be national subjectsthemselves. He finds himself thinking 'of great ladies lying in great bedswith their heirs, while the geniusof English history broodedhappily upon the scene.' " Thesechildren, though, are not the possessionof women, but of men, as

Morton makesclear when he says,'the first time a man seesa woman look at his child-something tremblesinside him. ' [My italics] " In his genderedgrammar of the nation, 'a lone man is transitory and a woman is permanent:she means a home and a whole lot more men': her womb guaranteesthe continuationof Englishness."

Women here are the conduit for nationhood,but only via the production of more men.

They are furthereddenied national identity by Morton's view of them as an

internationalcommodity that can be sold or traded.Although acknowledgingracial

differencesbetween men of different nationalities, in Wales Morton concludesthat

'Welshwomenare no different from the women of any other nationality'. " In

Ireland, he musesthat 'other nationscommit murder for women, but the Irish commit

murder for a potato patch'. " This slippagebetween nation and men, suchthat . 6nation'can standin for men, revealsthe masculinity of the nation. Conversely,the

opposition betweennation and women showsthe exclusion of women from the.

nation. The idea of women as commoditiescan be also seenin his view of London, 71 which is populatedby markets 'where you could sell an elephant,a werewolf, or your best 20The be by '[e]ach house second aunt' . suburbscan characterised the way containsthe samelounge hall, the sameJacobean dining-room suite, the same(to all appearances)dear little wife who, now that the weatherhas changed, goes out shoppingin a nutria coat.ý2 'This positioning of women as shoppersis no throwaway comment,but central to the formation of Morton's women. Shoppinghas two main implications for Englishwomen'ssubjectivity. Firstly, women do not really enjoy rural spaces:

- Women don't like solitary places.While an old soldier can settledown and make himself at home almost anywhere,a woman grows restlessand begins for It's 22 to sigh shopsand cinemasand crowds. only natural, after all ... . This desireto shopis, for Morton, troublingly paradoxicalsince 'to desire' implies a subjectivity, and it offendsMorton's logic and sensibility so much that women must be both restrainedand blamed.Secondly, women's uncontrolled shoppinghabits can be seento bring ruin to Englishmensince their fashionschange. Making men heroic and women absurd,he statesthat:

From the reign of Elizabethto the middle of the last century the whalersof Hull faced the perils of the Arctic seasin order to corsetthe women of England and to uphold the dignity of the crinoline.

However,just as the crinoline is no longer in use, so the industry is in decline in

Morton's time, but the actionsof theseheroic masculineHull whalersin over-fishing

the stock until they had destroyedthe industry do not bring forth any cutting remarks.

He is neither interestedin the history of women whalers,nor in the varied usesto

which whale productswere put, and from which men also benefited.One might

believe,from him, that the entire industry was organisedaround the production of the

whale-bonecorset. Women are also to blamefor the decline of the jet-carving

industry in Whitby, where in '1853a thousandmen were employed,but with the fashion, it changeOf unlessit 'revivesjet - and merits a revival - the working of it will becomeanother of England's deadhandicrafts. 2' The Birmingham gold industry,

too, has been '[sIlain by women all over the world'. " Morton ascribesenormous 72 power here to women, but it is surely a distastefor what he views as their unregulated desires,and an implicit call to regulatewomen more thoroughly.

Rachel Bowlby, in her work on shoppingand modernity, Shopping with Freud, examinesthe tensionsin the production and reproductionof the sub ect as consumer.The consumeris necessarily'feminised' in the process,since consumers are madepassive in order to persuadethem to consume.However, making a distinction betweenthe classicaland romantic consumer,Bowlby showshow masculinity can be recuperatedfrom this feminisation.The classicaland romantic modescorrespond respectively to:

The mature,masculine saver determined to avoid a loss and the infantile, feminine spender,unregulated in her desires.In terms of the forms of advqrtisingaddress, the first mode involves the suggestionof fears and needs. The buyer must identify himself as lacking and so purchasethe product in order to put things right or protect what is vulnerable.The secondmode is in the form of an invitation to pleasureor excess:to have or to be something more, somethingelse, somethingnew. "

Morton himself travelswith a shopping-listmentality of placesto visit, using his motor car, an item for which he haspresumably been a shopper/consumer.The rise of the useof the motor car could be seenas having destroyedolder crafts, suchas that of the blacksmith,but this occasionsno concernfor Morton. The presenceof the car in which he travels is naturalised,and is part of the logic of his genderedorder in which women's shoppingis dangerousand the implications of men's shoppingare made invisible. Morton's car, in enablinghim to visit rural placeswith ease,seems to make him more English. lEs possessionof a consumeritem that will take him to 'England' clearly hasmore value than the possessionof a nutria coat that will only take women out shopping again.

Thesepoints have certainimplications for women in Morton's discursive formulation of Englishness.If authenticEnglishness is to be found in the rural rather

than the urban,to position women as naturally wanting the urban in order to be able to

shopassociates them with degeneracy,un-Englishness, and the possibility of

miscegenation.Also, women's uncontrolleddesires, manifested in their whimsical

shoppinghabits which destroy men's jobs and the craft industriesof 'old England', 73

treacherousnessto ideals Englishness, suggestCP a certain social of characterisedas organic communitiesorganised around craft production.Women's unregulateddesires can lead to the destructionof Englishnessrather than its production.In the annihilation of material productsthat are English, women are also destroyingthe immaterial, cultural notion of 'England' that theseproducts signify.

Even so, it is in Morton's London that women are at their most uncontrollableand abject.Watching a streetfight betweena woman who has discoveredher husbandwith anotherwoman, insteadof censuringthe behaviourof the adulteroushusband, he is promptedto muse:

An uncontrolledwoman is as terrible as the spirit of vengeance.I watchedher and wonderedhow many calm women boil like this yet never spill over, never show it, never allow themselvesthe luxury of this. How many gentle women have this tiger hiddenin them?27

His answerseems to be, 'probably all women', and that it is.only ownershipand regulationby_men that preventsthe terrifying slide into non-femininegrotesqueness and vagrancy:

Dull, mercifully comatose,Nobody's Women drag themselvesabout the streets at night looking for a place to rest their unwantedbones. Sometimes you seethem creepinglike ghoulsround the galvanisedtins which the restaurantsput outsidein the streetsin the small hoursof the morning, digging into the foul rejectionsof other people's dinnerswith poor, claw-like fingers which once - who knows?- were lovely and white round the stem of a champagneglass. "

Why doesMorton appearto ignore the ideology of the domesticin which the woman in the home is romanticised,for he appearsto hate the housewife?

Alison light arguesthat the interwar period saw a redefinition of Englishnesswhich entaileda rejection of the heroic imperial male and a view of Englishnessas more feminine and thereforemore domestic," and Deirdre B eddoesuggests that 'the single most arrestingfeature of the interwar yearswas the strengthof the notion that woman's place is in the home.' '0 The simple answercould be that he is travelling,

stayingin hotels, and not often meeting peoplein their own homes.However, this would not explain the vehemenceof his anti-housewifestatements. Looking at the writings of Mrs Miniver in The Times,light arguesthat Mrs Miniver's columns representedi strain of thought in English middle-classlife which both suggestedthat 74

'it was private life that constitutedthe real andimportant life of the nation' and that Mrs Miniver home look like for to be ift. ' Home is made a good space women _3 presentedas woman's space,in which the Victorian paterfamiliasno longer has authority. Morton's writing seemsto respondto fears about the domesticationof

Englishness,and women's control of the home.What place for an 'old soldier?

Where is men's place and what sortsof masculinity are possible?If men cannotbe at home in domesticspace, what might outdoorsoffer masculinity?Morton's way of dealing with theseshifting historical difficulties seemsto be to show the dangersof uncontrolled women, to disallow women from his Englishness,and to show masculinity at its bestin the7countryside.

In contrastto Morton's women, his men are not in needof control and ownershipbecause when a man is unowned,when '[n]o woman ruffles his smooth life', it is then that English masculine'Good Form' can be achieved." It is in a state of rural solitude that an Englishmanbecomes most heroic: 'How much of Hamlet, how much of Quixote, how much of Robin Goodfellow is in him never appearsuntil a man finds himself alone in the country.' 33However, within Morton's rhetoric, a man neverdoes find himself alone in the country, becausehis masculinity is always counterpointedagainst a feminised,and often pregnantor matemal,natural landscape.

This femininity, though,is more easily controllable than that of women, sinceitcan be landscapedor farmed, for example,without talking back.

Morton organiseswhat he seesin his English travels into foundational categoriesof masculineand feminine, and cannotseem to envisagea non- heterosexualisedspace. lEs writings on 'cities' or 'cathedrals' thus frequently describethem as 'married' to eachother, or boundto-ether in someother heterosexual familial relationship. Land, too, or soil, can be pregnantwith, or a mother to,

Englishness.In a formulation which excludeswomen except as metaphor,Morton

endsIn SearchofEngland with a descriptionof his masculinelove for Englandas soil, as a summationof his searchfor 'England'. 75

The rich earthhad bome its children, and over the fields was that samesmile which a man seesonly on the face of a woman when shelooks down at the child at her breast. I went out into the churchyardwhere the greenstones nodded together, and I took up a handful of earth and felt it crumble and run through my fingers, thinking that as long as one English field lies againstanother there is somethingleft in the world for a man to love. "

However, in amongthis heterosexuallove-scene is a profoundly lesbianmoment in which one (feminine) English field lies againstanother one. No matter how hard

Morton tries to heterosexualiseEnglishness, the repressedwill return.

Dyer suggeststhat at the heart of white culture is an anxiety that 'white sex is queer sex.' " There are three sourcesfor this anxiety. Firstly, the idea that sex is 'inherently perverse'for white people." Imagined as they are as pure and transcendentof their bodies,to have sexualdesires and act upon them endangersthe purity of whitenessitselL Although the racial categoryof white relies on ' heterosexualityto ensureits reproduction,heterosexual sexual acts entail a loss of whiteness.Secondly, the worry that white sex is non-reproductivesex can link it to queersex. (Morton was writing as worries about the degenerationand extinction of the white race were debated.Other races,supposedly acting as their bodiesdictated and unableto control their bodily desires,were seento be overbreeding.) The third anxiety concernsthe discursivelinkage betweenwhiteness and death.Dyerargues that:

White identity is foundedon compelling paradoxes:a vividly corporeal cosmologythat most valuestranscendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of raceand the human race,an individual and a universalsubject; a commitmentto heterosexualitythat, for whitenessto be affirmed, entailsmen fighting sexualdesires and women having none; a stresson the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short a needalways to be everythingand nothing, literally overwhelmingly presentand yet apparently absent,both alive and dead."'

This linkage of death and whiteness can be most easily seen in Western culture's

veneration of the form of a dead white male body on a cross. This endlessly

represented body of Clýfist is paradigmatic of the white male subject: more than body,

it extends itself into spirit. Given that Morton's Englishness is also Xtian one might

argue against the extent to which Benedict Anderson suggeststhat the nation comes to

replace god in a secular society. 38After all, it is in a church graveyard that Morton 76 takesup his handful of earth, and his travelsassume that visiting'cathedralsis more important than, for example,shops.

The origins of Morton's Englandlie within a religious history. In a suggestion'that if a man were looking for the roots of England' he would find the roots of Church and Statein Glastonburyand he talks of the pregnantdust there:39

I hear the click and thrust of the labourer's spade in the earth, and it seems to me as each spadeful of Glastonbury soil falls on the mound that a spadeful of English history is stiffed; in the brown dust that flies over the trench I seem to see the faces of anchorites, saints, priests, and kings; and in this pregnant dust of Avalon is drawn two of the greatest epics that have come from the English mind: one is of the Holy Grail and the other of a wounded king. [My italics] 40 Having Call England prefaced 77ze of with a quotation from G. K. Chesterton - island like little book 'An a 41 Full hundred , of a tales..... between - Morton deftly signalsa relationship the geographicalnation space/place, writing and reading.If the island can be likened to a little book, so too can his book be likened to the island. Here one can seethe links betweenliterature and soil: literature comesout of the soil. So what the earth is pregnantwith is English history, which is a history of men, and literary epicsof the (male) English mind. However, theseare only brought to light by the penetrativethrust of the labourer's spadeinto this earth.Does this suggestthat Englishnesscan only be revealedthrough a metaphoricheterosexual act of penetration,in which a masculineEnglishman bodily relatesto a feminine soil?

Morton's Englishnesscertainly suggeststhis: he reachessatisfaction in this bodily relationship,to soil, running it through his fingers, or planting his feet in it, and this satisfactioncan be seento correspondto Dyer's argumentabout the sexuality of whiteness.The bodily satisfactionMorton derivesfrom touching earth is not sexually orgasmic,but sublimatedand transposedto the non-sexual.In this way, his whiteness is protected.Just as In SearchofEng .land endswith a final expressionof an

Englishmanrelating to English earth, so too doesThe Call of England.

And therewill come a time in any tour of Englandwhen most men from a city will feel that no matter how life disappointsthem therecan always be one thing worth while at the end of thejourney: the sight of the wind moving over their own wheatfield; the moon rising over their own home; the knowledgethat they havefought their way back to the country and haveplanted their feet in the splendidsanity of English soil. " 77

The sanity of his feminine soil is in sharpcontrast to the insanity of his shopaholic

Englishwomen.The femininity of earth is under masculinecontrol. The use of the word 'fought' herein relation to men returning to a rural spacemay suggesta certain nostalgiafor the trenchesof World War One, and a prior men's world that hasbeen lost in the post-wardomestication and ferninisationof Enalish culture and character.

Just as man roots himself in soil, so too doessoil root itself back into 'the heartsof men', making nationalisma warm thing in the face of internationalism,because, he asks,'[hlow can we achievea cold internationalismwhen to eachone of us thereis a little piece of the world so dearthat we would not exchangethe wide earthfor itT 4'

Again, women are excludedfrom this version of national identity as a bonding of man and earth,because women are internationalcommodities. However, the questionstill remains:if the soil is pregnant,who hasimpregnated her ?

Clues can be found in Morton's view of the 'pregnant dust' containing a masculinehistory and an epic literature madefrom an English mind. So who makes history and who makesliterature? Taking him to a cathedral,Morton explainsto an

American tourist he meetsthat men make history:

I tried to explain - leaving out all architecture- that thesegreat churches are the ums which hold the ashesof England's history. The dim aislesare sacredto a Pastwhich is the splendidmother of the Present,for in them are gatheredthe men whose lives shaped,through stressand storm, through the densedrive of arrows and the smoke of conflict, through a war of words, and through victories, and defeatsand lossesmore magnificent than gains,the destiny of the English people." In Ireland, 'sullen inferior watching a countrymanwith a pitchfork ... a memberof an race', Morton makesclear that the lack of a true novel of Ireland, and a properly national writer, ensuresthat the man will neverfind a representationalsubjectivity that will enablehim to becomereal. " Propernational literature lies in suchbooks as Izaak

Walton's 7he CompleatAngler and Gilbert White's The Natural History of

Selbourne,because, as 'unique creationsof the English mind', both writers have managedto make small things important and have painted 'an intimate portrait of ' themselves.' It is partly through this representa6onof themselvesthat their literature derivesits national identity. Just as Morton travels in searchof Englandand finds 78 himself, so too do thesemale writers achievea statuswithin English literature through a portrayal of themselves.Masculinity's representationof itself is national in a way that representationsof women are not. For Morton, Englishnessalso lies in the small rituals of daily life; so,for example,he believesthat no other nation setsa table as well as the English. However, it is membershipof a 'superior' race that enablesmen to representthemselves as national. Morton's Irishman will never quite achieveit, becausehis formulation of the Irish is that, essentiallyand inherently inferior, they are unableto producesuch a literature.The'English, though, are priorly constitutedto do such a thing.

If Englishmenmake literature and history, and Englishnessis formed out of an English masculinesubject's relation to a feminine soil, it is no surprisethat an historic English building which has becomea girls' school can no longer be a primarily 'national shrine'. The presenceof girls destroysthat possibility, in a way that boys at Eton would not:

Only in Englandperhaps could Battle Abbey becomea girls' school.Indeed it might seemto a foreigner one of the baffling inconsistenciesof English life that the place where the future of Englandwas changedshould be devotedto the educationof young ladies; for here,if anywhere,is a sacrednational shrine.But when you approachthe fine gatewayof Battle Abbey it is soon madeclear to you that Battle is a girls' schoolfirst and a national shrinea long way after. "

In Cornwall, however, in the margins of England, Morton seemsto lose the grammarof the nation. In this strangeliminal place,which is more like Celtic fairyland than England,his act of writing takeson major and consciousimportance.

Unusually, he tells the reader,'I am writing', as if the act.of writing can reconstitute him as English in face of a troubling, dreamy,lying, Celtic place which could destroy his Englishness.48 Indeed, all his journeys are concernedwith finding meaningthat the nation can provide. Here, his writing can be seenas such a journey. Morton's journeys have be I to understoodas symbolic rather than actual, basedas they are on ajoumey of the soul. In Searchof England describes how, when faced with his own possibledeath as an exile in Palestineand experiencinga 'religious moment', he took a vow that if he survived he would go 79 home in searchof England." His journeys then becomemeaning-creating experiencesin the face of deathwhere, for him, the nation can provide the meaning that deathwould destroy.As he journeys, he never againmeets death in contemporary time on English soil. The only deathsencountered have happenedin the pasthistory of England,so his contemporaryEngland exists in a timelessmoment which cannot be destroyed.Although I Saw Two Englands dealsWith the differences.between interwar Englandand an Englandabout to go to war again,these differences are minor in the sensethat internal changeis part of the greatcontinuity of Englandand

Englishness.Any historical changetakes place within the stability of the continuing reality of a geographicalplace imagined as a nation.The fact that Englandcan manifest itself as a discreteidentifiable placethrough historical changesis paradoxically testimonyto the fact of its timelesscontinuity. The Depression,for example,is not explicitly included in his narratives.Beyond that, we have to understandhis narratives as mythical rather than actual accounts,given that somejourneys are privileged as constituting 'A Journey, while othersare not. The journey that Morton embarkson prior to thý outbreakof World War Two, in order to glimpsewhat might be the secondpre-war England of his generation,is to Kent and Sussex,places which he sayshe has missedout in his previousjourneys. However, arriving in Canterbury,he tells the readerhe stayedthere threeyears before. So it would appearthat if the journey has no existencein writing, it hasno statusas 'a journey'. This implies that the writing of thejourney is deeplyimplicated in the secularpilgrimage to find

'England', just as the modem place of pilgrimage becomesStratford-on-Avon, the birthplace of a writer, rather than a religious shrine suchas Walsingham.In another timeless,ahistorical moment when Morton goesto Stratford 'on a real pilgrimage', it seemsto him that this is a place 'where you will meet Shakespeare'." In Morton's

England,writers and writing have an important national status.

Victor Turner's anthropologicalwork on pilgrimage, which Benedict

Anderson draws on, offers a framework through which Morton's journeys can be " understood. Analysing the statusof the pilgrimage, the pilgrim and the senseof 80

6communitas' which the journey produces, Turner identifies the pilgrim as being in a liminal space. Generally, pilgrimage is undertaken in performance of some previously made vow and the j oumey is undertaken voluntarily, often with some symbolic or ritual object. " The structure of pilgrimage iS'one in which the pilgrim leaves the familiar, moves through the unfamiliar, to return back to the familiar as a changed person. Indeed, Morton suggests that a good journey entails a man returning to say that he has met himself. This raises the question as to where he was whilstjoumeying if he was not meeting himself. Turner suggest that the pilgrim is in an ambiguous state, exiled from the familiar, and in transdion between two social positions: that which s/he came from, and that to which s/he is going. This liminal space is potentially dangerous as the existence of the pilgrim call s into question the whole normative order and the pilgrim is therefore potentially polluting. Without the status normative order bestows, allows the pilgrim, Morton, to be read as Everyman. This offers the masculine reader the possibility of imaginatively undertaking the same journey, and becoming part of the communitas, the friendship community in liminal space. However, the dangers liminality poses to established order must not be underestimated, Turner argues. Gender categories can be troubled. In liminal space, the non-human can be part of communitas, and this can be the earth/dirt with which the transitional person is often identified. Turner shows that liminality can be

is 5' This the force symbolised as a grave which also a womb . suggests something of of the heterosexualising imperative found in Morton's writings. In order to use the journey as a meaning-creating experience, order has to be re-established, and the illogic and disorder of the liminal banished, through the orderly writing of heterosexualsubjects and the wrenching of earth out of its associationswith dirt and deathto becomea meaningful womb. Turner saysthat as the pilgrim 'approachesthe holy holies of the symbolsbecome denser, richer, more involuted - the landscape itself is codedinto symbolic units packedwith cosmologicaland theologicalmeaning'

and the,pilgrim will touch the holy objectsthere. -54 It is precisely this touching of 81 holy English soil which ultimately Morton does,in actswhich give orderedmeaning

both to himself and to the earth.

In Morton's texts, we catch him in the act of composingthe nation in

the face of anxietiesabout masculinity and femininity, Jewsand colonial Others,the

urban and the rural. One might think of theseworks as text-bookswith instructions by for how to make the nation 'virile'. In his discursiveformulation, this is achieved

alreadyhaving a nation which hasan important historical andliterary past.By calling feet, on this past,the nation can be madeby national masculinemen who ýlant their or

someother part of their anatomy,into a feminine soil, which is pregnantand maternal itself back in which is the matrix of both the past and the future. In turn, this soil roots

the heartsof men, and becausethe rural is privileged as the site of authentic

Englishness,men becomeheroically and nationally masculinein this space.The soil is destiny pregnantwith English history, which hasbeen made by men forming the of the English people.True warmth lies in this national bond betweena masculine heterosexual subjectand a feminine soil. However, women are outsidethis pact of

Englishness,representing a 'cold internationalism'. As natural 'shoppers' they are

linked into an un-Englishurban degeneracy,and also, as more internationalistthan

men, women are in a precariousrelationship with Englishness. Morton's formulation of Englishnessinvolve, in the main, the The first articulation of two genderedand heterosexualizedconstitutive elements.

concernsmen and masculinity, and leadsthe presentthesis to examine,in the next

chapter,whether this national relation betweenmen and earthas a bond of

Englishnessis apparentelsewhere in literary and other interwar culture. The second

concernswomen and femininity, dealt with in chapterfive, and prompts the question

as to what relationshipwomen are allowed with national earth in other texts.

I H. V. Morton, The Call of England [1928] (London: Methcun, 1933), p. 3. 2 Michael Bartholomew, 'H. V. Morton's English Utopia', in RegeneratingEngland. Science, Medicine and Culture in Inter-War Britain, cd. by ChristopherLawrence and Anna-K. Mayer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), p. 28. 3 Bartholomew, p. 28. 4 Morton, 7he Call of England, p. 203. I H. V. Morton, In Searchof England [1927] (London: Metheun, 1930),p. 5. 82

' H. V. Morton, H. V. Morton's London: Being The Heart of London, 77ieSpell of London and 7he Nights of London in one volume [1925 and 1926] (London: Metheun, 1941), p. 335. Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 216. Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 12. 'Morton, In Searchof England, p. viii. Morton, In Searchof England, p. x. Morton, In Searchof England, p. ix. Morton, In Searchof England, p. 132. 13Morton, The Call of England, p. 140. 14Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). 's H. V. Morton, I Saw Two Englands: The Record of a JourneyBefore the War, and After the Outbreak of War, in the Year 1939 (London: Metheun, 1942), p. 20. 16Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 64. 17Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 50. " H. V. Morton, In Searchof Wales [1932] (London: Metheun, 1949), p. 87. 19H. V. Morton, In Searchof1reland [1930] (London: Metheun, 1961), p. 101. 20Morton, H. V. Morton's London, 0.43. 2' Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 195. 22H. V. Morton, In Searchof Scotland [ 1929] (London: Metheun, 1984), p. 222. Morton, The Call of England, p. 20. Morton, The Call of England, p. 85. 2sMorton, The Call of England, p. 196. ' Rachel Bowlby, Shoppingwith Freud (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 101. 2" Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 169. ' Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 232. 2' Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatismbetween the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991). 30Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: WomenBetween the Wars, 1918-1939 (London: Pandom, 1989), p. 3. 3'Light, p. 145. 32Morton, H. V. Morton's London, p. 171. 33Morton, The Call of England, p. 2. ' Morton, In Search of England, p. 280. 3' Dyer, p. 220. 36 Dyer, p. 220. 37 Dyer, p. 39. 3"1 use the terms, 'xtian' and 'xtianity' rather than the more familiar terms 'christian'and fichristianity', in order to problematisethe cultural authority which xtianity has. Christianity, as a term, has becomeso naturalisedas part of the 'English' order that it is hard to seeit anew. My use of 4xtian' and 'xtianity' representsan attempt to defamiliarise the terms, and their cultural hold. 39Morton, In Searchof England, p. 131. 40Morton, In SearchofEngland, p. 132. 41 Morton, The Call of England, tide page. 4' Morton, The Call ofEngland, p. 204. 43 Morton, In Searchof Ireland, p. 266. 44 Morton, In SearchofEngland, p. 224. 4s Morton, In Searchofireland, p. 126. 46 Morton, I Saw Two Englands, p. 143. 47 Morton, I Saw Two Englands, p. 98. 4" Morton, In Searchof England, p. 77. Morton, In Searchof Englandýp. 3. Morton, In Searchof England, p. 260. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1967) and Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974). 52Morton's car might be understoodas such a ritual object. I Turner, Dramas,Fields and Metaphors,P. 259. 83

'Tumer, Dranws, Fields and Metaphors,p. 210. 84

CHAPTER THREE

MEN-IN-EARTH: A TROPE OF ENGLISHNESS

That corpseyou planted last year in your garden/ Has it begunto sprout?

In this chapter,I want to return to the cultural significanceof the First World War in interwar literature,and investigatea recurrenttrope in literary and cultural figurations Englishness of at this time - that of the 'man-in-earth. In the last chapteron. the popular work of H. V. Morton, I delineatedthe ways in which his grammarof the nation suggestedthat Englishmen'snational subjectivity is formed out of a heterosexualrelationship in which a masculinenational subjecthas a metaphoric bodily relationshipwith the feminine soil of England.This relationshiprecalled the trench warfareexperience of World War One.Although women were involved in this war, doing suchjobs as ambulancedriving and nursing, and were thereforepresent in the war zone,the trencheswere an areaforbidden them.The trencheswere an entirely masculinespace, accessible only to the few women who cross-dressedand ' masqueradedas men. This nostalgictheme of men-in-earthoffered a re-inscriptionof a male homosocialityuntroubled by the postwarupheaval between men and women which suffrage,amongst other things, represented.Since women had not beenin the trenches,then to recall this experiencediscursively, and to posit national identity as relating to men in the trenches,was a way of excluding women from a national identity of which they could have had no memory.To make the trenchesa literary site of national identity formation is to allow women only a second-handrelationship to the nation. Even Flora Sandes,one of the cross-dressingwomen, agreedthat trench experiencewas the war experience,arguing that: If anyoneat home beginsasking me to describethe War I shall tell them to go into their back gardens,dig a hole and sit therefor anything from three days and nights to a month, in November,without a thing to read or do, and they canjudge for themselves...

The 'protactedperiods of immobility and lack of agency' for thosein the trenches suggeststhat although it was a masculinespace, nonetheless those who occupiedit ' were ferninised. If indeedEnglish manhoodhad beenfeminised by trench experience 85 this would help explain the force of the imperativeto renew the nation's virility through the trope.

However, this literar themeof men-in-earthwas not entirely new. .y Novels such as Kenneth Grahame'sThe Wind In The Willows (1908) usedthe trope to figure the,relations between different English classpositions, through the vehicle of 5 animals representingEnglishmen who inhabitatedburrows, or holes in the riverbank.

This book was continuouslyin print in the interwar period, selling approximatelyhalf- a-million copies.Grahame's account of the countrysideconfigures literature, rurality and heterosexualityin a closerelationship, similar to that in the work of H. V.

Morton. When Rat and Mole think back on their summer,it is couchedin termsof a book-chapter/pageant which showsthe awakeningof a feminine natureawaiting the arrival of the masculinein order that somethingshould be born and spring out of earth:

Sucha rich chapterit had been,when one cameto look back on it all! With illustrations so numerousand so very highly coloured ! The pageantof the river bank had marchedsteadily along, unfolding itself in scene-picturesthat in knew, if succeededeach other stately procession.... one as string-music had announcedit in stately chordsthat strayedinto a gavotte,that Juneat last was here.One memberof the companywas still awaited; the shepherd-boyfor the nymphsto woo, the knight for whom the ladies waited at the window, the prince that was to kiss the sleepingsummer back to life and love. But when meadow-sweet,debonair and odorousin amberjerkin, moved graciouslyto his place in the group, then the play was ready to begin. 6

By the time men went to war in 1914,the idea of men-in-earthas a trope of

Englishnesswas alreadyavailable to be called on and refigured under differing social conditions.It may be that sincethis trope was alreadypresent in discourseit affected cultural memory of the GreatWar so that trenchexperience came to be the privileged experiencethrough War which that the was re-imagined. . The trench experiencehad a profoundimpact on culture. War novels publishedafter the war, such as Tell England and Her Privates We, routinely showed the horrors of this form of warfare through the vehicle of the man-in-earth.Bourne, in

Her Privates We,returns after battle to his dug-out thinking that the 'world seemed extraordinarily empty of men, though he knew the ground was alive with them.' 7

Becoming 'almost indistinguisablefrom the mud in which they lived', deadand live 86 soldiersmingled in this samemud. 'The oozing and viscousmud of the trenches destroyedany senseof order in which men and objectscould be recognisedas distinct and discretefrom one another.Boundaries between the humanand non-humanbroke down, as did the boundariesbetween the living and the dead.Similarly, the boundary betweennationalities could not necessarilybe upheld. One of the patientsthat W. H.

R. Rivers treatedwas:

That of a young officer who was flung down by the explosion of a shell so that his face struck the distendedabdomen of a Germanseveral days dead, the impAct of his fall rupturing the swollen corpse.Before he lost consciousness the patienthad clearly realisedhis situation and knew that the substancewhich filled his mouth and producedthe most horrible sensationsof tasteand smell was derived from the decomposedentrails of an enemy.9

In the face of this disorder,language seemed to lose any meaning.In Her Privates We, Bourne'slfriend, Weeper,brings Bourne's injured and dying body back from battle to the trench, 'stumbling over the shell-ploughedground through thatfantastic mist, which moved like an army of wraiths'. " This landscape,which mixes reality andfantasy, in a way that the two becomeindistinguishable to the men inhabiting it, leadsto incoherence.As Weeperarrives in the trench with Bourne,he attemptsto tell the Sergeantwhat hashappened. The Sergeant'sresponse is: 'What are you gibbering abouff. " Those soldierswho sufferedmost from incoherence,and an inability to either uselanguage by retreatinginto silence,or to carry on living in a socially acceptableordered and meaningful way, were characterisedas suffering from 'war neurosis' or 'shell-shock'. " Those treating shell-shockedsoldiers reported that many of them had beenburied alive in earth,and this seemedto be a causalfactor in their illness. Two symptomsof shell-shockwere an inability to speakand obsessive behaviour.One soldier, who had not been buried, was describedby his physician:

In walking he must mark eachflagstone and touch eachpost. He had the impulse to count and to arrangethings in patterns;counting on his fingers or the panesof windows in the rooms and arranging them in setsof twos, threes, &C. .3

It appearshe was engagedin an obsessiveproject of reorganisingand categorisinghis world after having experiencedthe disorderof war. For some,treatment consisted of writing, with somemen writing under hypnotic suggestion.Doctors reporting to The 87

War Office were not convincedthat Freudiananalysis was a beneficial treatment,and

Dr. Hurst thought it 'dangerousin'setting up sexualideas'. " Sexualthoughts were clearly antitheticalto good national health.One soldier for whom hypnosishad not curedhis terrors, 'left his relatives and buried hinneýfin the heart of the country, where he saw no-one,read no papers,and resolutely kept his mind from all thoughts of war' [my italics]. " It is this metaphoricalmasculine 'burial' in the country as a cultural responsewithin generaldiscourse and literature to trenchwarfare that is the subjectof the presentchapter. For soldiers,it offered the possibility of re-imagining men as discrete,ordered subjects, and to re-imaginethe earth also as having a firm body, unlike trench and battlefield mud. Formulating the earth as substantialoffered a way of making meaningin the face of its loss from the war, given that earth appeared foundationalto the grammarof the nation.

However, it was not just soldicrs who were affected by war in this way. Families of the deadand non-combatantswere haunted,too, by the dismemberedmale body of the battlefields,and their desirefor the re-memberedmale body, the whole body, could be accommodatedwithin this trope. Although many families had wantedtheir deadreturned to them for burial, the War Office bad disallowedthis. To the distressof many families, it becameclear that the deadbodies belongednot to them, but to the War Office. JoannaBourke points out that, 'after the cessationof hostilities, the War Office retainedsignificant powersover the corpsesof deadex-servicemen and bereavedcivilians were forced to seeknew ways to lay their deadto rest.' 16Literature was one of thoseforms in which the deadwere laid to rest.

Jay Winter has describedhow alongsidemore obviously material 'sites of memory' of the dead,such as war memorialsand war cemeteries,literary texts also becameboth

'sites of memory' and 'sites of mourning'. " Writing itself bearsa particular relationshipto memory in that it has the power both to 'aid memory, to be memory'." In memorialisingthe dead,literature and writing obliquely brought the deadback to life by bringing them into the present. 88

Although this war-time relationshipwith earth was sharedby men of different nationalities,it becamea powerful trope of Englishnessin the interwar period.As such,it becamea vehicle to examinequestions about masculinity, femininity and the stateof the nation. Cultural evidencefor its power can be seenin the ritual surroundingthe burial of the Unknown Warrior in WestminsterAbbey in

1920.This masculinebody, which representednational identity without personal identity, was actually buried along with one hundredsandbags of Frenchearth. '9 It seemsas if the masculinebody alonecould not signify national identity without it being in a relationshipwith the earth.As the earth can symboliseboth tomb and womb, this literary trope also becamea way in which resurrectioncould be discussed: both the resurrectionof deadsoldiers, and the resurrectionof a previousEngland which thesewritings mourn. One questionobliquely articulatedby texts which utilise the trope of men-in-earthis whetherthe corpsecan be re-animated. The discovery the tomb Tutankhamen Luxor in 1923 of of at suggested0 its possibility, and may have contributedto the vogue for Egypt and Egyptian artefacts that it engendered.According to Robert Gravesand Alan Hodge:

Cambridgestudents staged an Egyptian rag, raising from the deadPhineas, the purloined mascotof University College, and awardinghim an honoraryBlue. A secrettomb (a subterraneanpublic lavatory) was preparedin Market Square, and undergraduatesappeared at the appointedhour, wearing towels like Egyptian slaves.At the cry of 'Tut-and-Kum-in', the deadPhineas arose. 'O

The previous year, 1922,Sir JamesFrazer's The Golden Bough: A St.ud Y in Magic and Religion had beenpublished. " This anthropologicalwork, which camefrom his work at Cambridge,was characterisedby Gravesand Hodge as 'a key book of the period', '2 and promotedwhat PageDuBois positedas 'the Cambridgeschool myth of the dying god who is sacrificed to the mother goddess." However, this dying god was also a resurrectinggod, which Frazerargued was a common myth throughoutthe world. It is possiblethat the work becameso popular becauseit arguedfor the universality of resurrectionin a culture which had many dead 'young gods'.

There were, in particular, two piecesof war writing which utilised the image of men-in-earthand that proved to have a profound impact on interwar culture. 89

Rupert Brookes'spoem 'The Soldier' talks of the Englishman'sdead body in a foreign field whosepresence makes a foreign spaceforever England:

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's somecomer of a foreign field That is for ever England.There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped,made aware, Gave, once, herflowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathingEnglish air, Washedby the rivers, blest by sunsof home.

This suggestsboth that the English masculinebody in earth is enoughto confer nationality on that earth,and that the earthitself neednot necessarilybe nationally is English prior to the presenceof the Englishman.However, the Englishman's body its itself madefrom a dust/earthwhich England gavebirth to, and nourishedthrough nationallandscape. 25 The secondpiece of war writing is an erotic descriptionof a live

Germansoldier's relationshipto earthfrom Erich Maria Remarque'sAll Quiet on the WesternFront:

From the earth,from the air, sustainingforces pour into us - mostly from the earth.To no man doesearth mean as much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deepin her from the fear of deathby shellfire, then sheis his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; sheshelters him and releaseshim for ten secondsto live, to run, ten secondsof life; receiveshim again and often for ever. Earth !- Earth I- Earth ! Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may flimt himself and crouch down. In the spasmof terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing deathof the explosions,0 Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surgeof new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streamsback through our handsfrom thee, and thy bury ourselvesin thee, and through the long minutes we, redeemedones, 26 in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips !.

This earth, with her folds, hollows and holes, suggestsa female body, addressedin a

sacredlanguage, with which the soldier hasa sexualrelationship. The spasmof

terror, and the bellowing explosive deathfollowed by a surgeof new life, could be as

much a description of orgasmas of being shelledand seekingrefuge. However, what

mostly comesacross from this piece is the senseof the enormoussexual importance

of earth-as-womanto the soldier. Remarquereceived many letters from English

soldiersand officers,who thought the novel accuratelydescribed their own war-time 90 experiences,both in terms of the outward experienceof warfare and the inner, more personal,experience. General Sir Ian Hamilton, Presidentof the British Legion, correspondedwith Remarque,praising the work, and in their correspondencethe latter told of how his readersfelt regenerated/resuffectedby his work. " This erotic relationshipwith earth was not uncommon.Theodore Van de Velde's Ideal MwWage, which, according to Cate Haste,'ran through forty-two editions with salesof 700,000 copiesin four years, 21,whilst statingVan de Velde's intention 'to keep the Hell-gate of the Realm of SexualPerversions firmly closed', " also assertedthat '[aln appreciablenumber of perfectly normal peopleexperience sexual stimulation in contemplatinga lovely landscape.930 Similarly, Rupert Brooke wrote a short story about a young man discoveringthat the war had begun,who realisesthat his love for

English earth correspondsto the romantic and sexualfeeling he hasfor a young woman, 'A-':

With a suddentightening of his.heart he realisedthat theremight be a raid on the Engli sh coast.He didn't imagine any possibility of it succeeding,but only of enemies, and warfare on English soil. The idea sickenedhim. He was immenselysurprised to perceivethat the actual earth ofEngland held for him a quality which he found in A-, and in a friend's honour, and scarcelyanywhere else,a quality which, if he'd ever beensentimental enough to use the word he'd have called 'holiness'. His astonishmentgrew as the full flood of 'England' sweptover him from thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessnessof a lover. [My italics] "

This relationshipbetween men, earth and resurrectioncarried on textually after World War One and provided a potent trope for a variety of writers, eventhose concerned with fanning and the condition of the Soil?2 So, for example, the project of G. C. Watson's 7he Soil and Social Reclamation is to renew the fertility of the earth in order to renew the virility of the nation. His rhetoric combinesa discussionof the condition of the soil as the skin of a body inextricably linked with the virility of the nation and national defence.The skin of the body must be kept fertile in order to securedefence through virility since ' the soil is the most powerful bulwark defence When is lost of of any country. that to a nation ... then that nation 33 disintegrates.t However, the stateof agricultural Englandis such that her defences have beenweakened by the neglectof the soil. Not enoughpeople are employedin 91 agriculture, compared to industry, he argues, although when the balance between employment in farming and industry favoured agriculture the nation was in a better state. Therefore, according to Watson, 'true patriotism and defence means love and care of the Soil., 34Interestingly, the use of the word 'love' suggeststhat it is not just a practical care that should be taken of the soil, but that the patriot should enter into an emotional relationship with it in order to secure the nation.

However, althoughminers are peoplewho have an intimate relationshipwith the earth,entering it daily, their relationshipto this national soil is problematic,and thus their own relationshipto the nation unstable:

To the miner, for instance,the soil is the 'overburden' of earth, somethingto be got rid of, which he must remove to recover the hidden 'wealth' below - of gold or other preciousmetal. 35

The actionsof their industrial ratherthan agricultural relationshipto soil meansthat they injure irreparably the skin of earth, and thereforenational defences.Perhaps they go 'too far' into earth.There is a region beneaththe soil, the chasmor the abyss, which seemsless able to be discursivelyrecuperated for the life of the nation, and is more connectedwith the deathof the underworld. Robert Graveswrote of miners he knew in the war asjoking with corpses,shaking hands with them, and generally making merry with the deadin what he felt to be a clearly inappropriatemanner.

Constructingthem as non-English,he wrote in Goodbyeto All That:

Of course,they're miners, and accustomedto death.They have a very limited morality, but they keep to it. It's moral, for instance,to rob anyoneof anything, excepta man in their own platoon.They treat every strangeras an enemyuntil he provesthemselves their friend, and then there's nothing they won't do for him. They are lecherous,the young onesat least, but without the false shameof the English lecher.

J. R. R. Tolkien sharesa similar attitude toward miners.Although his protagonist lives in earth,he clearly suggeststhat the readershould not imagine Bilbo Bagginsto shareany similarities with the miner, as it is a 'low' occupation." Bilbo doesnot actually have an occupation:he lives on inherited wealth. In writing The Hobbit or Thereand Back Again, Tolkien said that he:

Had a mind to make a more or lessconnected legend, ranging from the large level and cosmogenicto the of the romantic fairy story - the larger foundedon the lesser,in contactwith the earth, the lesserdrawing splendourfrom the vast 92

backcloths- which I could dedicatesimply: to England;to my country. [My italics] "

His war experienceas a signalling officer had beenboth trench-basedand hospital- based.At the end of the GreatWar, all but one of his close male friends were dead.

The impulse to write camefrom a feeling that therewas somethingwrong with industrial, mechanisedEngland. The right-wing Tolkien believedthat 'touching your cap to the Squire may be damn bad for the Squire but it's damn good for yoll.

Although The Hobbit or Thereand Back Again was not publisheduntil 1937,he had beenworking on it during the war. In his project of creating a mythology for England, the first line of the hobbit's story is: ' In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' 40

This hobbit-hole recalls the winding trenches,but rewritten with bourgeoiscomforts.

As such,it soundslike a soldier's trench fantasy of cleanliness,of the wide availability of food, and the chanceto wash and changeinto clean,dry clothes:

The door openedonto a tube-shapedhall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke,with panelledwalls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegsfor hats and coats- the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straightinto the side of the hill - The Hill, as all the peoplefor many miles aroundcalled it - and many little round doors openedout of it, first on one side and then on another.No going upstairsfor the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms,cellars, pantries(lots of these),wardrobes (he had whole rooms devotedto clothes),kitchens, dining rooms, all were on the samefloor, and indeedon the samepassage. "

However, the text makesclear that occupyingcomfortable spaceis not the answerto national problems.The inhabitant of this spacemust change,and it is through the journey of the hobbit/ Englishmanwho leavesthis hole in the ground,only to return to it transformed,that the difficulties about Englandand Englishnessthat Tolkien perceivedcan be examined.

Although hobbit society is partially tracedthrough matrilineal descent, and we are told about the mothersand grandmothersof various characters,there are no female charactersin this story. Tolkien seemsto have a problem inscribing femininity, first displaying it then erasingit. As he beginsto describeBilbo's mother, he 'The startsand stops: mother of our particular hobbit - what is a hobbit ?I suppose hobbits need somedescription nowadays; since they have becomerare and shy of the 93

Big Peopleas they call us."' The women are long dead,and femininity is in the past, while the male charactersact out theirjourneys and adventuresto reclaim a magical world for themselveswhich doesnot include the presenceof women. Part of Bilbo

Baggins's problem is that his home in the Shire is too comfortable.He is too smugly bourgeoisand far too domesticated,worrying about washing-upand dusting instead of taking on dragons. The domesticlife of the Shire hasferninised him; he wearsan apron and cleanshis mantelpiecedaily. However, the wizard, Gandalf, ensuresthat

Bilbo should reclaim someof the adventurousnessof his ancestors,and sendshim off with a party of dwarfs who want to reclaim their treasurefrom the dragon,Smaug.

Bilbo is worried aboutleaving home without enoughhandkerchiefs. Just asTolkien believeshe can induce a betterEnglish subjectivity in his readersby writing this mythology, Bilbo, too, is enabledto changethrough reading. He needsto adopt the subjectivity of a burglar in order to get the treasureback from Smaug,and knows how to to this from his reading: '[h]e had read of a good many things that he had never done Qf burglarious he had heard seenor ... . the various proceedings of, picking the trolls' pocketsseemed the least difficult. ' '3As he picks the pockets,he learns this new subjectivity which he puts to full use in his later adventures.Bilbo, however, is not a criminal burglar, but a good one who returnsto his friends their rightful property which is as much in the treasurethat Smaughas, as in that which is restoredto all at the end of the narrative.If Bilbo was a slighty cautiousdomestic individual at the beginning,by the end he is transformedinto a communally-mindedmasculine creature,deeply bondedwith the dwarfs he hasadventured with. Together, they have achieveda male homosocialityuntouched by homo-eroticismor homosexualityand untroubledby femininity or respectability." The Shire is now a place where the returninghobbit in his earth can provide a model of the heroic masculinity that Tolkien would like to provide for England. Bilbo can now describehimself as a resurrector, telling Smaug:'I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and drawsthem alive againfrom the water.9 45 94

If Tolkien's man-in-earthanti-modernist mythology for England excludedthe miner in the searchfor resurrection,so too did the modernistwriter, D.

H. Lawrence,even though he appearedto valorise the man-in-earth." His poem

'Ego-Bound' suggeststhe ego-boundman is:

pot-bound in the pot of his own conceit, and he can only slowly die.

Unless he is a sturdy plant. Then he can burst the pot, shell off his ego and get his roots in earth again, raw earth '7

In 1926,writing to Rolf Gardiner,who was engagedin the project of renewing the nation through community work, Lawrenceimagined a utopian spacethat England neededwhere therewould be: A heart darkness We'll have be of ... to establish some spot on earth, that will the fissure into the underworld, like the oracle at Delphos, where one can And then learn deep discipline always come to ... . one must set out and a - and learn dances from all the world, and take whatsoever we can make into our own. 48

Clearly, his utopian vision featuredboth a man with his roots in earth, and somegap or fissurein that sameearth, and yet the miner is not his preferrednational masculine subject.In fact, Gardinerworked with unemployedminers hoping to re-engagethem in an agricultural relationshipwith the soil.

Gardiner's EnglandHerseV. Venturesin Rural Restoration tells of his interwar work with agriculture and mythology, in which he hopedto createa new

England by setting up the Springheadcommunity in Dorset, and organisingvarious work-campswhere Englishmenwould learn a new relationshipto earth." Gardiner and Lawrenceinfluenced one another,and shareda common belief in the magnificenceand importanceof the phallusto the nation. Gardiner's community both ploughedto farm and ritually re-enactedploughing in public folk-dance displays,and he mountedpilgrimage walks for groupsof men to the CerneAbbas Giant. This representationof a man-in-earth,being cut from the chalk hillside, was (and is) notablefor its massiveerect penis.They introduceda 'Plough Monday' celebrationto 95

Dorsetwhere men with swordsmythologically killed anotherman and resurrectedhim through a ploughing action. However, Gardiner's aggressivelyphallic masculinity appearedto needno feminine earth:

The plough whoseneglect was deploredand whoseveneration we invoked by word and rite on Plough Mondays in the yearspreceding the war, has wrought a greatchange. But the plough is not only a giver of bread,the breakerand changerof the dead,inert land, it is the loosenerof fertility. "

11isview of the land recalls the Greek debateas to whetherthe woman's body had an active role in reproduction,or whethershe was merely the passivereceptacle for the man's seed.The dead,inert land of 'England HerseIf' is brought to fertility by the action of the plough/penis.The land hasno active part in reproduction.Plough is all:

Masculinity 'loosensfertility'. Gardiner's England,although it included a man-in- earth,was so masculinisedthat the feminine appearedbarely to exist, or existedas a frigid form which neededthe masculineto 'loosen' it. His elevation of the plough/peniswas matchedby a corresponding,decline in the femininity of both his earth and the culture he hopedto provide for England's renewal.Working with the belief that 'England must becomeagricultural again or die', Gardinerwrote of experimentswhere unemployedminers were placedin land-settlementschemes to learn rural, agricultural skills. " But:

The miner families loathedbeing transferredfrom their home environmentto a strangeunfamiliar district. The womenfolk in particular rebelledagainst transference,and their stubbornnessoften led to the return of the settler even after he had becomesuccessful on his holding. "

Clearly, accordingto Gardiner,the miner might just be recuperatedfor agricultural

England if it were not for the stubbornwomen they were allied with. Once again, women are problematicfor the nation. D. H. Lawrence,as a fellow ideologueof

Gardiner,also dealt with the miner and mining communititesin Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The country house,Wragby Hall, where Sir Clifford and Lady

Chatterleylive, is next to the Tevershall pit and village, which invade this English

houseby bringing in the smell of earth's excrementand blackeningit:

And when the wind was that way, which was often, the housewas full of the stenchof this sulphurouscombustion of earth's excrement.But even on 96

windlessdays the air always smelt of somethingunder-earth: sulphur, iron, coal or acid. And even on Christmasroses the smutssettled persistently, incredible, like black mannafrom the skiesof doom. 53

To Lady Chatterley,Tevershall 'sounded really more like a CentralAfrican jungle than an English village.' m It is a black and ugly place with 'blackenedbrick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharpedges, the mud black with coal- dust, the pavementswet and black'. 55To Sir Clifford, the miners are 'objects rather than men, parts of the pit rather than parts of life, crude raw phenomena,rather than human beingsalong with him. ' 5' Thesemen are not madeof the earthof England.

Instead,'iron and coal had eatendeep into the bodiesand souls' of the miners: 5'

Creaturesof anotherreality, they were elementals,serving the elementsof coal, as the metal-workerswere elementals,serving the elementof iron. Men not men, but animasof coal and iron and clay, Faunaof the elements,carbon, iron, silicon: elementals.They had perhapssome of the weird, inhuman beautyof minerals,the lustre of coal, the weight and bluenessand resistance of iron, the transparencyof glass.Elemental creatures,weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belongedto the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the seaand worms to deadwood. The anima of mineral disintegration!"

Suchelemental people cannot carry the burdenof representingEnglishness, because their bodiesdo not relateto English earth,nor can they representa racial whiteness, being contaminatedby blacknessand Africa; but perhapsmore importantly, they cannot.represent Englishness because they suggest disintegrationwithout resurrection.

A resurrectionis neededwithin Wragby Hall. It is threatenedwith destructionfrom the inside as much as it is threatenedwith contaminationfrom the black.pits outside.The war hasleft Sir Clifford deadfrom the waist down, unable to have children to provide an heir for Wragby Hall. Resurrectionof the body is a constanttheme throughout the text. Lady Chatterleywalks in the woods thinking to herself, 'Ye must be born again! I believe in the resurrectionof the body! ', as she wonderswhether to have a child by someoneother than he; husband." Sir Clifford hopesfor the return of his potency by tekindling his interest in the mines, and begins to feel, 'when he had his periods of energyand worked so hard at the questionof the mines, as if his sexual potency were returning."' However, the testimony of Mrs

Bolton, Sir Clifford's nurse/companion,made clear that there is no resurrectionfrom 97 the mines. Her husbandwas killed in an explosion at Tevershall pit, and although she kept expectin him back after his death,she tells Lady Chatterleythat 'it took me a "' thousandshocks before I knew he wouldn't come back, it took me years.

Similarly, Sir Clifford's body doesnot regain potency/resurrection:the pits cannot

provide this for him.

Englandis too split betweenindustrial and old, rural England. Potency

and resuffectionare not presentor possiblein either place.Dukes, a dinner-party

guestat Wragby, providesthe clue to the future:

Our old show will flop; our civilisation is going to fall. It's going down the down And believe bridge the bottomlesspit, the chasm.62 me, the only across chasmwill be the phallus! This landscapeis a ferninisedone with its 'chasm', and if civilisation shouldfall it will

be into the chasmof femininity which cannotguarantee the future of civilisation. The but '[t]he Kate Millett it, 'is future lies with masculinity, metaphor', as wittily puts . an 6-' unhappyone; in respectof penile length, the future hardly seems-promising. '

Mning is, perhaps,an activity that penetratestoo deepinto the earth, causinga chasm bridgeable by to appear-a bottomlesspit, only a phallus that will restorecivilisation. However, if the miner is one of the forces making this enormouschasm appear, how

doeshe managethis task?Could there be uncomfortablefears here that perhapsthe his working-classman, who is allied to the black African, hasan enormoustool at

disposal?This seemsto contmdict a preferredEnglishness where the masculine it subjectpenetrates only lightly into earth,mther than too deeplyý' Nonetheless, still

representsa bodily masculinity within landscapein the form of the phallusreconciling

the two Englands,in a metaphoricallandscape of the chasm*.Again, virility is

presentedas the force that will renew and resurrectEngland. This renewalvia

masculinepotency is not achievedthrough either the miner or the owner of the stately home/ England,but instead Lady Chatterley old through the penetrationof ,a 'country-looking girl', by Mellors, Sir Clifford's gamekeeper,who is an ex- 65 officer/gentlemanand agricultural worker, and as such can crossclass positions.

Their relationshipwould seemto provide new meaningto the term 'agricultural 98 worker', working as Mellors doesat his sexualrelationship with Lady Chatterley.

This, however,is not surprising given the textual messagethat in a 'tragic' and post- cataclysmicage meaning has to be re-madethrough an aggressiveheterosexuality that can compensatefor any previousloss of meaning.66 What this text doesis to shift the feminine countrysidewith which the man makesmeaning into the body of a woman which is 'country-looking'. When Connie looks in the miffor, she seesthat her

Breastswere rather small, and dropping pear-shaped.But they were unripe, a little bitter, without meaninghanging there.And her belly had lost the fresh, round gleam it had had when she was young, in the days of her Germanboy, who really loved her physically. Then it was young and expectant,with a real look of its own. Now it was going slack, and a little flat, thinner, but with a slack thinness.Her thighs, too, that usedto look so quick and glimpsy in their female roundness.,somehow they were going flat, slack, meaningless. Her body was going meaningless,going dull and opaque,so much insignificant substance.67

Her body only has meaning,or becomes'real', when it is heterosexuallyand physically loved, and her 'chasm' is bridged. After Mellors has madelove to her (if it can be thus called), she:

Wondered,just dimly wonderedwhy? Why was this necessary?Why had it lifted a greatcloud from her and given her peace?Was it real?Was it real?Her tormentedmodem-woman's brain still had no rest.Was it real? And she knew, if she gaveherself to the man, it was real. But if shekept herself for herself, it was nothing. She was old; millions of years old, shefelt. And at last, she could bear the burden of herself no more. She was to be had for the taking. To be had for the taking. "

Her prehistoricage signalsa concomitantlack of civilisation. Even though modem, sheis archaic,primitive and meaninglessuntil masculinity and heterosexualityconfer meaningon her. The future of England cannotrely on the modem woman becauseshe doesnot recogniseher archaicnature, but her archaicnature is also that which will preventEngland from having a civilised future. Either way, femininity by itself will not renew the nation. T. H. White future England lies concursthat the of 1-1) with masculinity, in his utilisation of the trope of man-in-earth.Born in 1906,he was still. a boy when the war ended,and had had no.direct experienceof warfare. In the 1930s,he publishedbooks with such suggestivenames as Earth Stopped,Gone to Ground,

England Have My Bones,and perhapsmore obliquely referring to a man-in-earth, I 99

The Sword in tfte Stone.These works combinedstate-of-England writings with the hunting, fishing, shooting genrewhich has had a long history in English literature.

Farewell Victoria, a novel which presenteda retrospectiveview of the Victorian era and its ending, showsa vicious view of miners as inauthentically English, through

Mundy, the protagonist: [He] he had beenbred the was a countryman,although among0 agriculturalists (who are the true blood of England and have for a hundredyears been cheated even of their small security; so that coalminers,and factory hands,and the brood whose b-loody vehicle is the motor bicycle, possessthe rights of brothers 69 citizens, while their are allowed to starve) ... . However, White's next novel, Earth Stoppedor Mr Marx's Sporting Tour, discarded the didactic tone of Farewell Victoria, to be written in the form of a spoof on the state of English politics and subjectivities.'0 The Mr Marx of the title finds himself at a shooting-partyin a country-housewher& he falls for Miss Mary Springwheat.She enjoys hunting, so Mr Marx suspendshis repugnancefor hunting in order to win her.

The eccentricgroup with whom they hunt includesa queerman called Pansy-The

Fairy Queen-, flappers,and various aristocrats.Together they arguethe various merits of socialism,capitalism, communism and free love. In this text, the earth which hasbeen stopped is metaphoricfor marriagenot taking place. Marriage is both duty to one's country and to the land, and like the fox who cannotgo to earth,neither can marriageassure the land if it doesnot take place.The narrative endsas a bomb is about to fall on the hunting-party's heads.

However, in his next work, Gone to Groun4 A Novel, the characters of the previous novel do indeed go to ground." Set in 1935,world-historical events overtakethem while out hunting. The end of the world hascome, and they are about to be bombed:

Whena round lid openedin the middle of thefield in which they were standing.It had a shining underside,like aluminium, and the turfgrew on top of it in a circle, as if it were a green iced cake. `2 - They escapedestruction by climbing into this 'dug-out', which, like Bilbo Baggins's fantasy home, soundslike a soldier's world:

At thefar end there was a sort of bar, with glassesof everyshape and colour; venetianporpoises supporting crimson dishesfor champagne,scandinavlan 100

troll-shapesofsmoky texturefor the longer drinks, alchemical crystal goblets, like bulbousaquaria, to cherish the viscousurbanity of encouragingbrandy. This end of the dug-out looked like a booth at a Fun Fair. 73

In this dug-out,characters find their patrilineageand literature.Both the Countessand the Professordiscover that their long-lost fathers are in this hole in the ground.

Whiling away the time until the outsideair is breathable,the group tell eachother stories.It is their immersion in earth which allows this; above ground they do not tell stories.This storytelling allows for a discussionon which storiescan be told. Does modem life allow for the telling of the supernatural/ghoststory or hasmodernity destroyedthe form? Linking storytelling and literature to the natural world, Pansy suggestthis is impossible.

In the old days we could think andjeel and love and exercise our imaginations. Later, we could only get into trains and motor cars and aeroplanes. We could only rush about the surface of the globe, scorning any velocity which rose to less than sixty miles an hour, hastening fruitlessly on unprofitable errands. Look at Jane Austen. In the old days, before nature had gone material, in the days when human beings moved in horse-drawn vehicles, and so had time to think, Jane Austen was read. But who would read her yesterday? What was her air speed, her oil pressure, her maximum revs. per minute? None, absolutely none. And so we didn't read her. Nature, the modern nature, didn't give us time. We had to have something snappy, something full ofpurple patches, which could be wo4fed and thrown away in spare halfhours, in afew minutes even, between our dashes in the Bentley or tMhe 0th. 74

Having said this, Pansychallenges the others 'to tell a ghoststory about a car or an affopl,w. 9 " Mr Spongetells a convincingly ghostly story about a friend of his,

Andy, who had flown in the RFC during the war. After the war he had committed suicide whilst flying, leaving a power chargebehind him sincethere is a 'principle of existence' which is not 'perishable'ý' As I have arguedbefore, this trope of men-in- earth offered the idea of resurrectionfor deadsoldiers to the culture that mourned them. This undergroundstory of the airman positeda continuity after deaththrough the 'less perishableprinciple of existence.' Given that two of the charactersfind their own mi ssingfathers in the dug-out, this trope also offers the possibility of finding the missing (they were undergoundafter all), and to find history in earth rather than above ' ground. Above ground,the group is oblivious to the history of the presentbecause its with hunting. But if be found in of obsession missing soldiersmight earth alona0 101 with both history and literature, that offers a possibility of their continuedpresence in history and literature.Indeed, the text seemsto arguenature is literature. Pansy's discussionsuggests their linkage, and within eachof the talesfrequent reference is madeto contemporaryand previous writers, such as GeorgeBernard Shaw,Compton

Mackenzie,Kenneth Graham(sic), JaneAusten, and Shakespeare.One fishing tale describesthe countrysidein which the hero is fishing.

[AIII the lambs were playing in the oppositefields: absolutelylovely. Thirteen or fourteen of them chargingup and down their specialpla Iground, whilst a nannie sheeplooked on, like a nursein a poem by Blake. 7,,

Here, it is literature which makesthe viewer perceivethe natural world. Literature constructsperception rather than natureconstructing literature. The world looks like

Blake said it did. White was obviously so taken by this extract that he also included it in England Have My Bones.

This text hasno resolution,in the sensethat the undergroundpeople come back into the air and createa new world, but endsrather with a story of Pan.

The ground abovemay be destroyedand unableto supportlife, and no-one knows The whether there is - in the words of E.M. Forster - 'panic and emptiness. ambiguousPan, 'the destroyerand the preserver', has the last words, and as such the text is open-endedas to whether Englandis destroyedor preserved."

England Have My Bones was written in the sameyear as Gone to

Ground. In the face of later eventsin White's life, the title turned out to be an irony.

During the SecondWorld War, he fled to Ireland to avoid fighting, leading his biographerSylvia TownsendWarner to comment '[slo much for the England of his bones'! "0 Written in the form of a diary, spanningthe year, 1934,that White spentin

the countryside,the title-page showsthe unattributedquotation:

'God keep my soul And England have my bones'.81

Believing that the real Englandis to be found in sporting activities performedby real

Englishmen,this journal mapsthe killing of various animals: snipe,pheasant, hare,

rabbit, weasel,fox, duck, goose,salmon and trout. Alongside this are the

descriptionsof pub games,and the new sport of flying. This is a celebrationof a 102 physically competentand non-intellectualmasculinity, constructed because, as White says,'in a shifting world, I want to know where I am', suchthat he can declare 'I am an Englishman,and I live in the shire.' " This Englishmanavoids the dangerof emotional relationships.'Falling in love', he states,'is a desolatingexperience, but not when it is with a countryside.' This relation to countrysideallows for belief in resurrectionagainst all known facts.

At Walter Lovell lived the ReverendJohn Mason,who believedhimself a new Elias and announcedthe secondcoming. His followers called the village Mount Sion. On the occasionof the end of the world they dwelt in tents, stood on top of a rise to watch the surroundingcountryside destroyed, sang, danced, jumped and franticafly clappedtheir handsto the soundof violin, pipe and tabor. The world continued,and sometime afterwardsMr. Mason left it. He prefacedthis event by prophesyinghis resurrectionafter three days.The succeedingvicar was forced to open his coffin, in order to prove that he was still there;yet the village continuedto affirm that he had risen,and that many had spokento him after death.

But if White is scathingabout the villagers, he nonethelessprovides a strangely illogical accountof his hunting activities as providing creationout of death.

When it is difficult to kill the thing, when skill and achievementcome into it, I find that the killing is worthwhile. You forget the deadsalmon in the ecstasy of creation: ou have perfectedsomething yourself, evenmore perfect than the deadfish. 'ý

Women, though are incapableof this very English form of killing and creation,death and resurrection,doing not sport but 'butchery. " As such,White's women cannot carry national identity in the way that his men do. Discussingarguments about fox- hunting, White makesa ridiculous 'spinsterin Bognor Regis' carry the argument againstfox-hunting. " In contrast,White makesa cult of the masculinebody when it is untaintedby intelligence: 'I don't like intelligence', he says,'I have never beenin love With an intellectual person.' " Sextoity and intellect are antitheticalfor White, as indeedare intellect and Englishness:a surprisingargument from a man who had a

First in English from Cambridge.The real man 'lives on true terms with the pleasures of his own body. ' "' This is somethingintellectuals and communistsare incapableof doing.

It is astonishingto seethe intellectuals,who know all about communismand the Europeansituation, trying to live their own lives, evenindoors. They lean againstthe mantelpieceat the wrong angle, and the fender slips, and bang goes one of the candlesticks- broken.They can't copeeven with their own centres 103

of gravity. I saw a presumably'modem' boy the other day, who was so little consciousof th6 position of his own body that he fell backwardsoff a chair while thinking of somethingelse.

The following passageabout Karl Marx's supposedincapacity for hunting reads ironically in the face of the knowledgethat White avoidedconscription in the Second World War.

How safe would Karl Mari have been,I wonder, walking in a line of guns. Would he havemooned along star-gazing,and left a loadedgun againstthe wall at lunch, and shot his own foot off climbing over a stile? It is uselessto retort with the obvious query about my averagesportsman's usefulness in economics."

But if the real Englishmaninhabits a country spacethat he falls in love with, a countrysidewhich can be apprehendedthrough English literature, then the sport of flying representsa difficult placefor English masculinity. This movement away from earth endangersthis particular masculinity, engenderinga sort of queerness.Flying is too modem.There is no historical literature to refer one's experienceto, and to constructit from, and the usual tropes of Englishnessdo not apply. Seenfrom above, 'Middlehampton was a pool of quicksilver towardsthe sun.

Towns ceaseto be horrible when you are well abovethem. ' 9' Masculinity hasto change,as one relatesto air and wind rather than earth.White's flying instructor remarks,

'Don't be so strong. No good being a strong man in the air. In bed, yes; but in ' 'If land like day, the air, no good at all. ... you acrosswind that on a windy you'll get a gust and go right over. Then where will you be?Where shall I be? 93 Both of us: gone to ---' The blanknessinto'which they might go is both ground/earthand death,but it could also representheterosexuality. The spacein which White and his instructor fly is one that demandsa light masculinity and one in which they mingle with clouds that White masculinisesin his descriptions.All varieties of cloud are called 'he' by White. " In

the air, thesemen are not strongheterosexuals relating to a feminine earth,but light

men relating to masculineclouds and wind: a more homosexualspace. Indeed of the

various male charactersthat float through thesejournal entries,Johnny the flying

instructor is the only one who is suggestedto be homosexual.After a flying lesson

and '[a]t tea Johnny spilled his cup over his trousersand said: "Down my legs again. 104

What a naughtygirl I am!" '" This descriptionof Johnny as a 'girl' mixed with the generalwetness of spilt tea suggeststhat Johnny doesnot maintain the firm, dry, clean and proper body of heterosexualmasculinity, dissolving insteadinto a wet girlishness.In this text, earth seemsto guaranteemen's heterosexualitywhilst leaving it for the air endangersit.

The Sword in the Stone,when published in 1938,was not thought of as a children's book as it is now. In this text the boy hero, Wart, who later becomes

King Arthur, is instructedby the magician Merlyn. Wart's educationfrom Merlyn is preciselythe sort of educationthat White had proposedin England Have My Bones.

This educationwould make men of boys by ensuringtheir competencein country crafts suchas fire-building: competencieswhich would preventintellectualism or communism.Besides learning hunting and sporting activities, part of Wart's training entails shape-shiffing,so he spendstime as a fish in water, a bird, and a badgerin earth.From a snakehe learnsthat history residesin earth. But Wart's knowledgeis incompletewithout him going to earth.In earthas a badgerhe meetsanother bachelor badgerwho instructshim: So Merlyn finigh Well, sent you to me ... to off your education. I can only teach you two things, to 4ig, and to love your home.These are the true end of philosophy. [My italics] "I

This unmarriedbadger/man-in-earth has been writing a treatiseon why Man is master of the animals.He sharesthis with Wart as 'just the thing to top off your education.

Study birds and fish and animals: then finish off with Man." As such, in earth, Wart comesto knowledgeof Man in a way that he has not in any other environment.It is through the conjunction and culmination of thesevarious knowledgesthat Wart is enabledto pull the sword from the stonethat proveshim the rightful King. This action, gives Wart masteryover heterosexuality,landscape and women, suchthat he can claim sovereigntyover the land: the sword representsa phallic penetration,and the stonerepresents a dangerous-to-menaspect of feminine landscape.

In a study of ancientrepresentations of woman, PageDuBois has analysedseveral aspects of ancient Greek representations,or metaphors,of the female 105 body: thoseof the field, furrow, oven, stoneand tablet. Theserepresentations still haveresonance in contemporaryculture. Arguing that' if earth is the mother, then the stonesof the earth are her bones' DuBois went on to statethat the:

Connectionwith the womb, with intercourse,with procreationis lessevident in the caseof stonethan in the metaphorsof earth and oven. Stonesare an extensionof earth,but they are hard and unyielding. A man cannotpenetrate a stone;he can f ill an oven or plough the earth.Stone is associatedwith virginity, as in Antigone's case,or with the end of fertility, as in Niobe's. Yet there is a desireto work stone,to make it yield, to force it into spacesnot of productivity but of receptivity[j 9'

'At the most generallevel', shesays, 'the metaphorof stoneseems to representan inversion of the fertile earth.' " Wart doesnot penetratethis stonewith his sword, but insteadremoves the sword from the stone.Since the stonehas obviously been previously penetrated,it hasyielded, otherwisethe sword could not be in the stone.

The fact that the swordhas becomestuck may speakto male fears of petrification in the face of women's sexuality. However, Wart, with all the knowledgehe has gained in earth,is able to havemastery over petrification. He can act heterosexuallywith earth/stoneand remain uncontaminatedby the interaction.It doesnot petrify him. His masculinity is not endangered,but ensured,by his relationshipto stone/earthsuch that he can becomethe supremefigure of national coherence-Ahe King. If he can overcomepetrification, then the earthmay subsequentlyyield fertility to him. The remarkablething about the sword in the stonestanding in for Englandis that England shrinks to stone-sizein this metaphor.

Similarly, in I Saw Two Englands, H. V. Morton suggeststhat at the outbreakof World War Two England shrinks,as peopleprepare to defend their own villages. He writes:

It comesto me that one of the most remarkablethings about this war is the quiet way England has ceasedto be a country or even a county for many of us, has become 1, thought England and a parish ... who once of as a whole, and was in the habit of going to Comwall or Cumberlandon the spur of the moment, have not left my parish for months. Neither do I wish to to so; my parish has becomeEngland. "O

Just as England shrinks to the size of the parish,paradoxically the parish itself

becomesenlarged in the sensethat it signifies not just itself but the whole of England. 106

I Geoffrey Household's masculine adventure, Rogue Male (1939), pushesthe two themesof a man-in-earthand a shrinking Englandto their ultimate conclusion.,"' The namelessnarrator buries himself in earthin an underground burrow where he can defend his safety, shrinking his universeto no more than a few feet in the soil. Although he becomesmore animal than humanhe still remainsan

Englishman.Ultimately he becomestrapped there by an agentof either Hitler or

Stalin, Major Quive-Smith, althoughthe text refusesto namewho his trapperis working for. The narrator's own masculinebody buried in English earthbecomes a metaphorfor the nation under attack.

As well as writing his story on paper when in earth, the narrator also writes acrossthe landscape,leaving the tracks of his woundedbody and erasing them, so they might be read as a text by his pursuers,who would then be misled in their interpretation.When Householddescribed his own writing style as using a pencil to 'drive a sort of pilot tunnel through the undergrounddarkness of the imagination', he showshow his view of writing and authorshipowes somethingto the trope of man-in-earth.Here, the masculinewriting hand penetratesunderground where the imagination is to be found. '0' Writing and landscapeare allied, but so, too, is readingallied to a penetrativerelationship. Writing off to his solicitor, the narrator

asksfor somebooks to be sentto him to passthe time in earth. What he wants, he

says,is 'meaty stuff which I could re-readthroughout the winter, peneimfing with

eachreading a little further into what the authoractually meantrather than what he

said.' [My italics] "' The narrator'smanipulation of the landscapein the building of

his earth, too, writes and erases;he changesthe landscapeto accomodatehis burrow,

digging and re-arrangingvegetation to hide it, suchthat his writing on landscapeis a

simultaneousact of producing and concealing.

What, though, might be producedor revealedin this writing? I would

like to suggestthat this writing showslinks betweenmasculine penetration of national

feminine earth and the act of writing itself, following the thesisof PageDuBois. She

arguesthat in the sixth and fifth centuriesB. C. writers startedto 'establish'anew 107 metaphoricalnexus -a link betweenintercourse and writing. The body of the woman, no longer the productive,parthenogenetic earth, is rather a blank surface,a tabula rasa,a field not for plowing but for inscription.' " SinceHousehold's narrator is writing on landscape,what can this text reveal aboutthe grammarof the nation and the imbrication of land, genderand writing?

Firstly, it revealsthe man-in-earthas not only metaphoricfor the entire nation, but also that this man is the potential saviour of Englandonce he resurrects himself from his earth.A centralclaim of the text is that in the courseof going to earth and writing abouthimself in this earth, the narratorcomes to self-knowledge.The knowledgeproduced by his writing-body-in-earthis that the narTatorhad in fact loved his f ianc6eand that he had previously intendedto kill 'the greatman' in order to avengeher death.Having discoveredthis, he decideshe must leave his earth in order to carry this out. To murder the great nian will supposedlyprevent the next war from taking place,and will thereforeprotect and secureEngland's future and all the relations of Englishness.

Household'sgrammar of the nation sharesmany similarities with that of Morton. The narratorhas a hatredof indoor donlesticity. After murdering his first pursuer/spyby pushinghim onto a live line at Aldwych underground,the narrator recalls 'the soundof his stepsand his screamand the hideous,because domestic, sound of sizzling. ' "This phrase'hideous, becausedomestic' suggestseither that domesticcooking is ironically counterpointedwith the horror of murder, or that domesticity itself is hideous.For the man who makesclear that his safety and comfort is to be found outdoors,one has to believe that it is the latter view which the narrator favours.After this murder he flees to Wimbledon Common to hide.

The Common turned out to be ideal. I spentthe night in a grove of silver birch where the fine soil - silver, too, it seemedto me, but the causewas probably the half-moon held the heat of the day. There is for me, no better '0' - resting place ... . Part of the problem of domesticity for the narrator is the presenceof women,just as women are a problem for him outdoors.Although romanticising his deadfianc6e,

other women he meetsare unpleasantand ruin the English countrysidefor him. 108

A hideousword - hiker. It has nothing to do with the gentle souls of my youth who wanderedin tweedsand stout shoesfrom pub to pub. But, by God, it fits thosebawling English-womenwhose tight shortsand loose voices are turning every beauty spot in Europe into a Skegnessholiday camp. "

Other women he writes of are a 'dry-faced spinster', 108a' bloodthirsty maidenlady' who 'had feet so massivethat, l could clearly seethem at two hundredyards - great broguedboats navigating a greensea', "" and a 'competentlittle bitch of seventeen'-."O Yet he describeshis deadfianc6e very differently.

Impulsive, spiritual, intelligent, all at such energy sheseemed to glow. A boy who saw suchthings told me that sometimesthere was a visible halo of light aroundher. To that I am insensible.But, as I rememberher, life extended beyond her body; neither touch nor sight could quite surely say - here she begins and here she ends.Her skin was not a surface;it was an indefinite glory of the palestrose and orangethat choseto mould itself to thosetense limbs. "'

This romantically apprehendedwoman is disembodied,beyond categorisingthrough touch and sight, a woman of spirit rather than materiality until one readsof her 'tense limbs'. Given the infrequencywith which limbs are usedto signify womanlinesswhen other body parts such as breastsor roundedhips can be deployed,this suggestsboth that the narrator's object of desireis not actually a woman at all. If the narrator is repulsedby live women, preferring the dead,the femininity of natureappeals to him. His love for land is prior to his love for his fiancee.When hunting the greatman he concealshimself under a 'mother tree' where he is brought back to life by the healing powersof this feminine tree. "' I-Iis flanc6e's limbs may have recalled the limbs, or branches,of this motherly tree.

Even though nature is ferninised,Englishness is derived though patriarchallines of inheritance.The aristocraticnarrator, who can trace his ancestry back fifteen generations,describes his English lineagewithout any referenceto his mother, or other women. Major Quive-Smith has a foreign father and an English governessmother, but his mother doesnot passon her Englishnessto him.

Shefelt socially inferior and morally superiorto his father -a horrid combination- and had tried to make her son a good little Briton by waving the Union Jack and driving in patriotism with the back of a hairbrush- with the natural result that his affection for his mother's country never rose higher than the point of contact. 109

The reader'isgiven to understandthat Quive-Smith's affection for his mother's country is through his bottom, as being the point of contact.There is an insinuation here that love of one's mother's country might be linked with homosexuality.

The narrativecontinually placesmen who celebratemanhood close to one another.Rogue Male calls upon the tradition of the imperial homo-erotic adventuresuch as the storiesof Rider Haggard,who metonymically assureshis readersthat a 'petticoat' is not to be found in his tales. "' The narratorof RogueMale seemsto think that the only good 'petticoat' is a dead 'petticoat'. The murder of his former flancde offers a kickstart to the narrative.It is her deaththat allows the narrator his adventures.Although he romanticisestheir relationship, one cannothelp but feel that sheprovides the motor force for him to engageintimately with other men. Her deathis a convenience.What sort of marriagewould have beenpossible for a man who found domesticity hideous?

The dangerof homo-eroticismis that it may threatento turn into homosexuality,but the narratormakes a clear distinction bet%yeenhis masculinity and that of the 'nancy'boy'. "' This allows him to admire the physiqueof a young boy guardwhilst still maintaining his own heterosexuality.Similarly the narratorand

Major Quive-Smith live in very closephysical proximity, closeenough to suggest homosexuality,but the thin layer of earth betweenthem through which they mediate their relationshipkeeps the barrier of heterosexualityin place. If we read this earth as feminine and representingwomen, we might understandthe position that women are culturally placedin as the thin layer which preventsmen from becomingtoo close.

Throughoutthe narrative men are placedin closeproximity. The narratorfinds himself inchesaway from men bathing nakedtogether in a river as he hides in a bush.

Stowing away on the ship back to England,a thin piece of metal separateshim from

the bathroomof the ship's captain,and finally Quive-Smith, who haspenetratively

'read' the narrator's tracks in the landscapeand thereforefound him, is separatedfrom

him in his hide by a few inchesof earth.Although he cannot seehim he has penetrated 110 what the author/narrator'actually meant'. He hasread the writing in the landscapeand found the narrator's burrow.

However, pushingthe trope of man-in-edithto its logical conclusion showsits limitations. Although in earththe narratorcomes to somepartial kind of self-knowledge,his position there is ultimately unsustainable.The burrow is becominga tomb becausehe is running out of oxygen. Stayingin earth cannot necessarilyprotect a man from homosexuality.Any other man is just as likely to come along and penetratethe earth-and-manwithout noticing the original man there.Hiding out in a muddy field, the narratormuses that if 'the owner of that vile field had been planting, he'd have stuck his dibber into me before noticing that I wasn't mud.' He hasto leave earth,and resurrecthimself. While earlier texts appearedto offer a relation with earth as a way of guaranteeinga man's heterosexualidentity, this text suggests its lack of a guarantee.However, it focusesmore on the necessityof resurrection.The narratormust resurrecthimself from the tomb which is his earth,in order to kill the greatman. He will murder the greatman as an act of revenge.This will supposedly preventthe next war from taking place, and will thereforeprotect and secureEngland and all the relations of Englishness.However, it will also allow the narrator to uphold

his heterosexualidentity. No longer will he be lying in earth close to Quive-Smith, or

vulnerableto a farmer's dibber, but insteadhe will be actively assertinghis

heterosexualityby focusing on his relationship with his fianc6e, suchthat he has to

avengeheT death. This text doesreflect somethingof the historical tensionand

uncertainty of the time just prior to World War Two. So, by the end of the interwar

period a formulation of Englishnessas man-in-earthappears more shaky, offering fewer certaintiesthan thosetextual formulations closerin time to the First World War.

In conclusion,the man-in-earthtrope of EnglishneSSrecalled the trench

experienceof World War One. In the re-formulationof the nation in the interwar

period, this trope simultaneouslyallowed the metaphoricalburial of the war deadand

their resurrection.The trope allowed the masculinebody to be re-memberedinto an

entire body after its disintegrationin the mud and disorderof the battlefields.The ill feminine earth it generallyposited was a stableearth, unlike that of the trench and battlefield mud. This offered coherenceand meaningto the incoherenceand loss of meaningthe war generated.The earth was particularly important in this, in that the nation was imagined as an earth-basedentity. When earthbecame disordered so. too did the nation, suchthat it neededre-ordering. Earth was profoundly important in national imagination and national subjectivity, suchthat the Unknown Warrior -a hugely significant nationalfigure - was buried in WestminsterAbbey with sandbags of earth. However, only certain men could be this national man-in-earthfigure. The miner was excludedbecause of his working-classposition, his links with the blacknessof the African and the fýct that he penetratedtoo far into earth.The preferred penetrationwas a light one - one that did not provoke the opening of a chasmor abyss which might threatenEngland. Going too far might lead into anotherplace where meaningwas lost. Given the ferninisation of earth, this meaninglessabyss could speakabout male fears of being lost in illimitable woman, and aboutthe dangersof being overwhelmedby femininity, or petrified by it, in heterosexualintercourse. An analysisof texts which use the trope of men-in-earthshows a relationshipbeing positedbetween masculinity, reading,writing, literature and earth, the book and earth, and history and earth.

1T. S. Eliot, 'The Burial of the Dead' in SelectedPoerns (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), p. 53. 2 For accountsof this seeDorothy Lawrence, SapperDorothy Lawrence: 77zeOnly English Wornan Soldier, Late Royal Engineers, 51st Division, 179th Tunnelling Company,B. E.F. (London: John Lane. The Bodley Head, 1919),Flora Sandes,An English Wornan-Sergeantin the Serbian Anny (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916).and Flora Sandes,7he Autobiography of a WomanSoldier: A Brief Record of Adventure with the Serbian Army 1916-1919 (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1927). 3 Sandes,7he Autobiography of a WomanSoldier, pp. 29-30. 4 SeeAnne Whitehead, 'Open to suggestion:Hypnosis and history in Pat Barker's Regeneration', Modern Fiction Studies,3.44 (1998), 674-694 (p. 692). 5 Kenneth Grahame,The Wind In The Willows [19081(London: Metheun, 1940). 6 Grahame,pp. 39-40. 7 Frederic Manning, (Private 19022)Her Privates We [1930] (London: ReadersUnion/Peter Davies, 1965), p. 1. I Manning, p. 202. 1 W. H. R. Rivers, 'The Repressionof War Experience, 77wLancet. 2 February 1918, p.. 174. 11Manning, p. 273. 11Manning, p. 273. 12War Office, Report of the War Office Enquiry Into "Shell-Shock" (London: HMSO, 1922), p. 3 and pp. 18-19.Naval officers reportedto The War Office that although sailors were in difficult aiid 112

frightening circumstancesin submarinesthey did not suffer from shell shock. Similarly, sailori being shelledin ships infrequently suffered.This suggeststhat a disorderedearth is more distressingthan a disorderedsea, and that cultural meaningsare basedon a certainorder on earth,whereas the seadoes not have to carry the burden of representingnational meaningsbecause it is alreadya place of instability. M. D. Edcr, 'Psycho-Pathologyof the War Neuroses', The Lancet, 12 August 1916, p. 267. War Office, p. 129. Rivers, pp. 174-175. JoannaBourke, Dismemberingthe Male: Men's Bodies,Britain and the Great War (Londory Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 211. 17Jay Winter, Sites ofMemory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Canto, 1998). '8 PageDuBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysisand Ancient Representationsof Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) p. 141. " Bob Bushaway,'Name Upon Name:The Great War and Remembrance'in Myths of the English, ed. by Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) p. 154. 20Robert Gravesand Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend,A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 [19401(London: Abacus, 1995), p. 126. 21James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion [19221(London: Macmillan, 1983). 22Graves and Hodge, p. 197. 23DuBois, p. 70. 24Rupert Brookes, 'The Soldier' in 1914-1918in Poetry, ed. by I- L Black (London- Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), p. 26. 23Indeed, attestationof the power of this trope is its appearanceacross a variety of genres:poetry, children's literature, novels, memoirs and the spy thriller. The following is an extract from Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent: Being an Account of the Author's Early Life in Many Lands and of his Official Mission to Moscow in 1918 [19321(London: Putnam, 1938), p. 121, and demonstratesthe routine way in which a discourseof men, earth and nation could be configured: 'As a chief Sir GeorgeBuchanan was delightful -a man in whom all thought of self was submergedin the highest conceptionof duty. He was worshipped by his staff, and, when he took his daily walk to the RussianForeign Office, his hat cocked on one side, his tall, lean figure slightly drooping under his many cares,every Englishmanfelt that here as much as the diplomatic precinctsof the Embassyitself was a piece of the soil of England.' 26Erich Marie Remarque,All Quiet on the WesternFront [1929] (London: The Folio Society, 1966), pp. 3940. 271- M. Remarque,letter to Sir Ian Hamilton, cited in 71e Penguin Book of First World War Prose, cd. by Jon Glover and Jon Silkin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 607. Rcmarquequotes his readersas saying: 'We have beenunable, because we did not know that our lethargy, our cynicism, our unrest,our hopelessness,our silence, our feeling of secessionand exclusion arosefrom the fact that the regenerativepower of our youth had beendissipated in the war. But now we will find the way, for you in your book have shown us the dangerin which we stand,the dangerof being destroyed by ourselves.But the recognition of a dangeris the first step towards escapefrom it. We will now find our way back, for you have told us what it was that threatenedus, and thereby it has become harmless.' 1 28Cate Haste, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain World War One to the Present (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 79. 2' Theodorevan de Velde, ideal Marriage: Its Physiologyand Technique [1928] (London: William Heinemann, 1944), p. 126. 30van de Velde, p. 39. 31Christopher Hassall, ed., The Prose of Rupert Brooke (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1956), p. 199. " The link betweenwar and soil can also be seenin Siegfried Sassoon'srecollection of Wilfred Owen who, while recovering at Craiglockhart, gave a paper there 'on the classification of soils, soil air, soil water, root absorption and fertility'. SeeGlover and Silkin, p. 341. Geoffrey Clement Watson, The Soil and Social Reclamatioij (London: P. S. King, 1938), p. 15. Watson, p. 19. 3SWatson, p. 1. -' Robert Gravescited in Glover and Silkin, p. 309. 37J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbil or Thereand Back Again [1937] (London: Unwin, 1988), p. 34. 1 Tolkien cited in Humphrey Carpenter,J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London, GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1977), pp. 89-90. 113

Tolkien cited in Carpenter,p. 128. Tolkien, p. 13. Tolkien, p. 13. Tolkien, p. 14. Tolkien, pp. 43-44. The term 'homosociality' comesfrom Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, BetweenMen: English Literature and Male Honwsocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Tolkien, p. 212. D. H. Lawrence,Lady Chatterley's Lover [1928] (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1960). D. H. Lawrence, 'Ego-Bound' cited in Linda Ruth Williams, D. H. Lawrence (Plymouth, Northcote House, 1997), p. 2 1. ' D. H. Lawrencecited in D. J. Schneider,'Alternatives to Logocentrism in D. H. Lawrence' in D. H. Lawrence, ed. by Peter Widdowsorý(London: Longman, 1992), p. 166. 49Rolf Gardiner, England Herself: Venturesin Rural Restoration (London: Faber & Faber,1943). 50Gardiner, pp. 84-85. Gardiner, p. 52. Gardiner, pp. 54-55. 53Lawrence, p. 14. '54Lawrence, p. 105. 35Lawrence, P. M. m Lawrence, p. 16. 57Lawrence, p. 166. '" Lawrence, p. 166. 5' Lawrence, -p. 87. ' Lawrence, P. 153. 6' Lawrence, P. 170. 62Lawrence, p. 77. 63Kate Millett, cited in Widdowson, p. 74. " Is this light penetrationlinked to an imagined English penile length which is moderate?Evidence for this moderatepenile length to representEnglish masculinity might be seenin the reaction of the governorsof the BBC, who, on seeingEric Gill's stone carving of Prosperoand Ariel over the entranceto BroadcastingHouse 'asked Gill to make the organsmore diminutive'. This is mentioned in Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). Similarly, the 1932 complaint from the Bishop of Salisbury to the Home Office that the 26 foot long 'indecent pubus' of the Ceme Abbas giant be made 'less objectionable' suggeststhe same.See A. Barnett, 'Bishop tried to cover up giant Penis' 7he Observer,5 March 2000, p. 14. Lawrence,Lady Chatterley's Lover, p. 6. Lawrence, p. 5. '7 Lawrence, p. 72. " Lawrence, p. 121. 69T. H. White, Farewell Victoria [1933] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945), p. 36. 70T. H. White, Earth Stoppedor Mr Marx's Sporting Tour (London: Collins, 1934). 7'T. H. White, Gone to Ground: A Novel (London: Collins, 1935). All italics as in original. 72White, Gone to Ground, pp. 6-7. 73White, Goneto Ground, p. 9. 74White, Gone to Ground, pp. 33-34. 75White, Gone to Ground, p.35. 76White, Goneto Ground, p. 77. ' Jay Winter suggeststhat acrossEurope approximately six million children were deprived of their fathers by the Great War (p. 46) and that since about half of the men killed had no known grave many carried on doubting that their loved oneswere actually dead(p, 3 1). 78White, Goneto Ground, P. 159. 79White, Goneto Ground, p. 258. ' Sylvia TownsendWarner, T. H. White: A Biography (London: JonathanCape with Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 124. "' T. H. White, England Have My Bones [1936] (London: Futura, 1981), title page.The quotation is from William Shakespeare,King John, iv. 3.10. 11White, England Have My Bones, p. 4. Italics in original. 81White, England Have My Bones, p. 22. 84White, England Have My Bones,pp. 40-4 1. Is White, England Have My Bones, p. 223. 86White, England Have My Bones,p. 224. 114

White, England Have My Bones, p. 238. White, England Have My Bones, p. 195. White, England Have My Bones, p. 196. White, England Have My Bones, p. 193. White, England Have My Bones, p. 196. 9' White, England Have My Bones, p. 120. '3 White, England Have My Bones, p. 100. ' White, England Have My Bones,pp. 155-159.These clouds, even though all are masculine, 'couple with eachother and breedoff-spring'. 93White, England Have My Bones, p. 138. 96T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone [1938] (London: Collins, n.d. ), p. 272. 97White, The Sword in the Stone, p. 275. DuBois, pp. 86-87. DuBois, p. 87. 100H. V. Morton, I Saw Two Englands: The Record of a Journey Before the War, and After the Outbreakof War, in the Year 1939 (London: Metheun, 1942), p. 288. '0' Geoffrey Household,Rogue Male [ 19391(London: Michael Joseph,1982). 102Geoffrey Household,Against the Wind (London: Michael Joseph,1958), p. 210. 103Household, Rogue Male, P.88. "DuBois, p. 130. 'o-'Household, Rogue Male, p. 62. '06Household, Rogue Male, p. 64. "7 Household,Rogue Male, p. 67. logHousehold, Rogue Male, p. 75. "Household, Rogue Male, p. 100. "0 Household,Rogue Male, pp. 172-173. ... Household,Rogue Male, p. 150. 112Household, Rogue Male, p. 17. "3 Household,Rogue Male, p. 155. 114 H. R. Haggard, King Solomon's Mines [1885] (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1958), p. 12. Italics in- original. "Household, Rogue Male, p. 2 1. " Household,Rogue Male, p. 104. 115

CHAPTER FOUR

ALL AT SEA

A seriousbook read at seamay possibly be ofgreater value morally than if read ashore.'

How is the readingof a book of more moral value at seathan on land?What happens

to the nationalmasculine subject who cannottouch earthbecause he is at sea?Does

this latter questionbear any relation to booksand their differing locationalmoral

values?In the interwar period, the questionof what sailorsread became a matter of

public discussion.In this chapter,I will argue that the debatesabout sailors' reading

habitswere actually a debateabout how to ensurethe Englishnessof the national

masculinesubject when he was unableto touch earthin the ways I have delineatedin

previouschapters. These debates about the readingmatter of sailorswere articulatedin

various pamphletspublished by the Seafarers'Education Service, at a conferenceat Cambridge,and in the national press.

On May 13th, 1929,the ManchesterGuardian headedup an article

about a sermonpreached by the Bishop of Durham with the words 'Authors "Sailing

Near The Wind": Dr. Hensonon Licentious Literature.' Through a metaphorof

sailing, this headlineneatly tied up the relationsbetween the dangersof sailing and the

dangerstpowersof literature. The report of Dr. Henson's.discussion of licentiousness

in literature showedsomething of the fragility of the boundarybetween the acceptable

and the non-acceptablewhen one getstoo 'near the wind' when at sea.The author is

likened to the sailor who goestoo far. Like the sailor, the author needsto navigatea

steadyline betweenthe acceptableand the unacceptable,that which is licensedand that

which exceedslicence. Dr. Hensonpleaded with his audience'as men and nations to

set themselvessteadily in their placesin the world to do what they could to strengthen

the forces which madefor a religious recovery.' ' This plea for steady'setting' carries

on the sailing metaphorby recalling the useof the word 'set' in the phrase'setting

sail'. As sails can be steadily set, so too can they be unsteadily set. 'Men and nations'

seemto be unsteadyin their setting, so that Dr. Hensonhas to plead for something 116 more steadyfor xtianity. Adjacent to this article is one which recountsthe banningof a woman from trawler voyages.Mrs Carter, who had alreadyaccompanied her husband on five fishing voyages,was told by the trawler's ownersthat their insurance companydisallowed women on trawlers. Reportedly, shewas no idle traveller, and on 'her last voyage donnedher husband'ssea clothing and was learning how to steer the trawler? Nonetheless,she was barred,and sailing was preservedfor masculinity.

If men could be responsiblefor setting a steadysail in national xtian interests,clearly women were unableto be called upon rhetorically to act nationally in a similar way.

Although seafaringwas seenas an exclusively masculineoccupation, it is masculinity which comesto be troubled when at sea.The dangersposed to men 'at sea' appearto fall into threeinterlinked categories:those of immorality, homosexuality and racial impurity.' Thesedangers threaten the grammar,or logical ordering, of a nation basedon the maintenanceof white heterosexualitythrough marriage,with a nationalmasculine subject having a relationshipwith a feminine earthwhich grounds both his Englishnessand his heterosexuality.

Inspired by the work of the Adult EducationMovement, the Seafarers'

Education Servicewas set up in 1920to promote educationfor sailors,but it also ensured,through researchand publishing, that the questionof sailors' morals and educationbecame a matterof public debate.5 Given that the Royal Navy was well provided with readingmatter through its Victualling Division, the SESconcentrated on the needsof the MerchantNavy, with the startling statementshown at the beginning of this chapterthat"A seriousbook readat seamay be of greatervalue morally than if read ashore'.That the Royal Navy provided books as victuals, or food, and the SESproposed that greatermoral value could be obtainedfrom them at sea,suggests that somethingmeasurable can be bodily ingestedby reading.

In the 1929pamphlet, Librariesfor the Merchant Navy, the SES presentedits project thus:

The vital importanceof the MerchantNavy to the life of our island is slowly being recognisedby the public. The seais a calling where aboveeverything thereis a needof high character.Nowhere is there greaterneed than in a ship of a senseof civic discipline. The sailor is a national representativewho goes 117

into the ports of the world and gives foreign peopletheir idea of Englishmen. Frequentlyenough in theseports their baserallurements are dangledbefore him, which are best resistedby minds disciplined by someintellectual interest. Nothing, we believe, can make a more solid contribution to the well-being of the seafaringpopulation than a nzoderateexpenditure on suchthings as-ships' libraries. [My italics] '

Readinggood books appearedto offer a diversion from immoral sexualactivity and to ensurethe correct Englishnessof the sailor as a national representative.The debate

slidesfrom national identity to the baserallurements of sexualactivity as an un-

English representationof national characterto libraries as supportfor correct

Englishness.Much. hinges on two words within this quotation: 'solid' and

'moderate'. In the fluid spaceof the sea,a 'solid contribution' can be madeto sailors'

well-being by 'moderateexpenditure'. If the seais a place of excess,instability and

licence, solidity can be founded on and guaranteedby moderation.To spend

immoderatelyon bookswould be to defeatthe purpose:sailors must learn moderation

in order to be properly national. Therefore, there must be no recklessspending on

stocking ships' libraries. All the written material emanatingfrom the SES

presupposesa Navy consistingof white Englishmenwho might enjoy readingthe

works of Shakespeare,John Buchan,Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard,and imperial

fictions. It is overtly to thesemen and boys that the work of the SESwas directed,

rather than, for example,Chinese or West African sailors.

JosephBristow's Empire Boys: Adventuresin a Man's World

providesan analysisof thesefictions and their relationshipto the formation of

masculineidentity. " IEs work tracesdebates about popular literature, boys' reading

and masculinity from about the 1880suntil the 1930s.Early debatesabout the 'penny

dreadfuls' drew upon metaphorsof dangerouswaters and ships to discussthese

issues.In 1887, B. G. Johnswrote about such literature in the Edinburgh Review,

suggestingthat 'the fountainheadof the poisonousstream is in greattowns and cities,

especiallyin London itself'. ' FreemanWills discussedthe dangersthat the ignorance

of working-classboys posedto empire:

Theseare the future electorswho will exerciseso much influence on the world's destiny.The constituentsof an imperial race,they ought to be educatedwith a view to-thepower they will wield. Every Englishmanought to 118

know somethingabout the dependenciesof England,as one of the heirs of sucha splendidinheritance; he should understandEnglish interests,something abouther commerce,her competitors,the productionsand tradesof other lands.He ought to know his country's historical as well as her geographical position. He cannot,with safety to the empire, be allowed to be so ignorant as to be unfit for his political trust, like looseballast in a vessel,liable, in any agitation that may arise,to roll from side to side and so to destroynational stability. [My italics] 9

Bristow himself is not immune from the useof sailing metaphors,claiming that the

adventurestory 'would take the boy into areasof history and geographythat placed '0 him at the toptof the racial ladderand at the helm of all the world' [my italics].

Bristow arguesthat the moral of many of theseimperial fictions is that 'sexual

temptationstands as the greatestsign of weaknessin men'; indeed,Kipling's Kim

reachesmanhood as he turns down the sexual advancesof the woman of Shamlegh.

If Kim could provide the messagethat masculinity is formed through resisting

women's sexuality,then other imperial fictions could provide an idea that the

landscapeof earth is coterminouswith women's bodies.So, for example,the heroes

of Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines play out their questacross the landscape

of a female body. " Travelling through Sheba'sBreasts down Solomon's Road they

arrive at a pubic triangle of mountainsknown as the Three Witches and penetratea pit

in the earthto find the treasurethey seek.The SES seemedinclined to shareKipling's

views on sexualactivity as weakness.However, discursiveand displacedsexual

activity in relation to the landscapewas clearly acceptable.

So what were the problemsthe SESidentified and soughtto solve?

For the SES,sailors fell into two categories:the older seamanwhose problems have

alreadybeen identified, and boys betweenthe agesof fifteen and twenty who were in

training. According to a CambridgeDean in F- M. Forster'sMawice, schoolboys

were officially not normal and thereforehad to be the objectsof regulationP This,

too, was the caseat sea.The task of the SESwas to ensurethat theseboys in their

passageto adult masculinity reacheda high standardboth morally and physically.

Their educationat seawas more difficult than that of boys on land sinceboys on land

were educated'in an atmosphereof tradition and of the robust commonsensewhich is

the heritage of Englishmenin the mass.' 14Problems posed to this correct growth to 119 masculinity without the presenceof a 'mass of Englishmen' were apparentboth aboardship and in foreign ports.Although the SEScoyly tried to avoid openly discussingimmorality on-boardship, it still flagged the issue:

In shipscarrying a number of boys, they will often sleepand messtogether; in othersboys will be in the forecastle.It is necessaryhere to make somebrief allusion to allegationsof corrupting, and immoral influences.Although there hasbeen some mention of thesein evidence,our deliberateconclusion is that there hasbeen a vast improvementin the last generation.The languageand conversationof the older men is no longer of a kind which was prevalentin the past, and we have been assuredthat a young fellow aboardship is no more " liable to contaminationnowadays than a boy of the sameage ashore.

In readingthis, no matter how much the SES wished to deny it, it can be seenthat

boys at seawere at risk of somemysterious 'contamination' from sleepingwith other

boys and hearingthe bad languageof older men. However, the problem of the boy in

foreign ports is given more seriousconsideration.

The problem of the boy who goesashore, especially in foreign ports, is difficult and serious.One of the most experiencedof all thoseengaged in training boys for the seathus describesit. 'A boy finds himself in a very narrow atmospherein his ship and when he gets ashorein a foreign port there are people who want to show him the vices of the natives. I often wonder how he keeps himself such ajolly good chap, but I am afraid many fall by the :wayside. ' 16

Clearly, the temptationsof native vices were more attractivethan repulsive,since the

writer wondershow these'chaps' manageto avoid them. These 'jolly good chaps'

reportedly complainedto the SESthat the work doneby the Institute of the Mission to

Seamenactually overdid entertainmentsof the 'virile' type for them. So the SES

arguedthat the Institute neededa spaciousroom where boys could read and be quiet,

and arguedthat 'if there were only one man in a port of the smallestkind willing to

offer hospitality to boys from ships,the SESmight well make arrangementsto keep

him suppliedwith a small library. ' " It seemsas if the homosexualityof the sailor

was an open secret:open to the extent that it could possibly be referredto through the

previously quoted 'brief allusion to allegationsof corrupting and immoral influences',

but closedenough to locate any vice abroadin 'natives', rather than in other

Englishmen,or indeedin British ports. But if the SESrecommended the use of

libraries to ensureofficial Englishnessin its men and boys, it did not discussthe way 120 in which the intellectual pursuit of reading,or the provision of books,could actually ensurethis. It took for grantedthat books were capableof doing this.

The enormouspowers attributed to books and readingwere more clearly delineatedelsewhere. In his introduction to the report on the position of the educationof boys at sea,Professor Clarke, an SEScommittee member, thought that books could bring sailors into a reproductiverelationship with nature,asking:

Does not the seafarer,then, sharewith the countrymanthe duty of reflecting upon an experiencegained in suchclose contactwith Nature, so as to fertilise it by his thought and fructify it in a philosophy ?"

Thesebooks potentially offered a relationshipwith a tamer 'nature' than the indifferent

'nature' sailorsfound at sea.Without reading,the experienceof natureat seacould not be fructified into a philosophy.How can literature ground the man at seain order that his heterosexualnational identity is secured?

The equationbetween reading and morality is further clarified by the work of Arnold Bennett.Bennett had beenin the British Government'sWar

PropagandaBureau in its literature and Art Department,and in 1918he becamethe

Director of British Propagandain France.As such,he had theorisedthe relations betweenthe perceivednational good,literature and its political effects. '9 Literary

Taste:How toform it, with detailed instructionsfor collecting a completelibrary of

EnglishLiterature was first publishedin 1909,but remainedin print in the interwar period. Here, Bennett attemptsto explain the mystery of literature,and obliquely arguesthat good literature could heterosexualisehis imaginary masculinereader But I No I will tell you what literature is! No -I only wish I could. can't. one can. Gleamscan be thrown on the secret,inklings given, but no more. I will try to give you an inkling. And, to do so, I will take you back into your own history, or forward into it. That eveningwhen you went for a walk with a faithful ýou hid friend, the friend from whom nothing - or almost nothing..... You were, in truth, somewhatinclined to hide from him the particular matter which monopolisedyour mind that evening,but somehowyou contrived to get on to it, drawn by an overpoweringfascination. And as your faithful friend was sympatheticand discreet,and flattered you by a respectfulcuriosity, you proceededfurther and further into the said matter, growing more and more confidential, until at last you cried out, in a terrific whisper- 'My boy, sheis simply miraculous!'At that moment you were in the domain of literatureýo

Just as literature can be thought of through the metaphorof a man's heterosexual

attractionfor a woman, so too, Bennett suggests,literature can communicate 121 heterosexualattraction to offiers.Bennett tells this readerwho is in love with the

&miraculousness'of a girt that:

You were producing literature. You were alive. Your eyes were unlidded, your ears were unstopped, to some part of the beauty and the strangenessof the world; and a strong instinct within you forced you to tell someone. It was not enough for you that you saw and heard. Others had to see and hear. Others had to be wakened up. And they werel It is quite possible -I am not quite sure - that your faithful friend the very next day, or the next month, looked at some other girl, and suddenly saw that she, too, was miraculous! The influence of literature ! 21

Literature seemsin this formulation to heterosexualise,and be the force which stops male homosocialityturning into male homosexuality.Instead of the male friends becomingclose through literature,literature turns their thouchtsand emotionsto heterosex.This view both supportsand extendsEve Kosofsky Sedgwick's.analysis of the male homosocialityof English literature'.In BetweenMen: English Literature and Male HomosocialDesire, shehighlights the ways in which such devicesas the structureof plot and the contentof literary texts display male bonding happeningover the body and soul of a woman; in other words, men bond homosocially through the vehicle of a woman. 22Whilst shefocuses on analysingthe workings of canonical texts by men, the way in which Bennettformulates literature and its effects suggests that literature itself can function as the 'woman' betweentwo men. As such,literature is constitutedas feminine, and allows men to bond homosociallyrather than homosexually.But if literature is feminine, what doesthe book as a material object signify? At sea,it appears,the book itself becomesa fetish object of Englishness.

We haveseen in ChapterTwo how Morton prefaces7he Call of

England with a quotationfrom Chestertonwhich likens England to an island, and the island to a book. 23Morton also proposesthat English literature is revealedas coming from the earth of England when a labourerthrusts his spadeinto earth and turns it over. For Morton's man to find Englandand becomeheroically masculinenecessitates that he shouldhave a bodily penetrativerelationship with feminine English earth.The

sailor, as a memberof this 'island race' to which the SESrefers, cannot touch the

earth of the island when at sea.In Morton's formulation of Englishness,masculine

national identity could not be guaranteedat sucha moment, and for the SES,too, the 122 sailor's national identity is imperilled at sea.But if an island is like a book, the reverse also holds: a book is like an island. Therefore, for the sailor, the possessionof a book

enablespossession of the body of the island. As such,the book comesto be a fetish

object, magically standingin for the island. However,just as Englishnessis not only

formed out of possessionof the island, so holding this fetish object is not on its own

enoughto re-makethe Englishnesslost at sea.How can one possessthe island

through the book and becomeheroically, masculinelyEnglish? If one thinks of the

literary contentof the book in the way that Morton does,then literature is part of the

earth of England. So the book as object provides the island, while the contentof this

object providesthe English earth.While holding this fetish object, the sailor hasin his

possessionboth island and earth.

To then readthis book is to go further into a relationshipwith

Englishness.Using a model of 'traditional nineteenth-centurybeliefs in meaningas

somethingthat hasto be prised from its container', the SES seemedto work with

Victorian rather than modernistideas. " JosephBristow suggeststhat, '[flor

Victorians, given the amountof philological researchthey undertook,the meaningof

meaningitself was akssociated with conceptsof depth or deep-rootedness(like the

roots of words).'"These views were not lost in the interwar period but can be seento

surfacerepeatedly in the commentariesoffered by a rangeof texts aboutthe powersof

reading.The narrator of Rebecca,for example,suggests that even in exile from

England,by reading one can be brought into a bodily relationshipwith it: when

readingold copiesof the Field, shecan actually 'breathethe air of England', and the "' Morton, 'smell of wet earth comesto [her] from thosethumbed and tatteredpages'. In too, in a prefaceto In Searchof England, writes that 'the smell of English meadows'

might be found in his book. " The narratorof RogueMale favours a method of

readingwhich he describesas 6penetrative'.He wants 'meaty' readingwhich allows

'penetratingwith eachreading. a little further into what the author actually meant'.

To readthe book, then, is to be able to have a bodily, penetrativerelationship to that

which one reads.As such,to read thesefetish objectsof English earth is to penetrate 123 them. Readingoffers the sailor anothermetaphoric way of being English when he is at sea.He hasthe island in the form of a book, the English earth in the form of its literary content,and by penetrativelyreading the book, he can metaphoricallybecome the masculineheterosexual national subjectthat Morton describeswhen he finds

'England'. This will only work when it is 'English Literature' that the sailor reads.

So far I have usedthe term 'fetish' to meana magical object of power, but bringing a Freudianperspective to bear can also explain somethingabout the powersof the book as fetish. Freud explainsthe fetish as both 'a token of triumph over the threat of castrationand a protectionagainst it. It also savesthe fetishist from becominga homosexual'." In this way, the earthy book fetish would appearto guaranteeheterosexual identity while 'penny dreadfuls', or similar reading,were not recommendedfor sailors.Licentious literature is seenas comina from water rather than earth.Bad literature was routinely spokenof as flowing like a poisonousstream through English cities, or running like an open sewer,so it could not ground the sailors' national identity by rooting it in earth.

The sailor, as someonewho is meant to guardnational interestsin terms of defenceor trade routes,guards the nation from outsidethe boundariesof the island and in the liminal spaceof the sea.'At sea' himself, the sailor guardsthe island from this threateningliminality which could destoynational order. Occupyingthis liminal spacethreatens a senseof Englishnessfounded on a relation to earth,but the sailor is at seaprecisely in order to protect this sameearth. Therefore the sailor is in an ambiguousposition; as national hero who protects,he also imperils the idea of

Englishnessas earth. Both sailors and the seacould representa dangerto ideasof the nation,just as much as somepieces of literature were perceivedto endanger

Englishness.Since the sailor is a potentially dangerouscharacter, who himself leaves the order of national earthfor the dangersof the sea,these dangers which imperil the morals of the sailor, more than any other national subjectýit was suggested,can be

amelioratedby the readingof seriousbooks. Perhaps the sailor needsto be

recuperatedbecause, firstly, he is in more dangerthan other land-basedEnglishmen, 124 suchas miners, but secondly,because he is more worthy in that he provides national protection.

The anxietiesexpressed within the hegemonicdiscourses of the SES concerningmasculinity, nation, sea/waterand sexuality are put to rather different, more unsettling, and sometimessubversive, ends in the following fictional works. In

E. M. Forster's Maurice,the seais able to eraseheterosexuality; David Garnett's77ze

Sailor's Return dealswith the subjectof how an English village can or cannot accommodatethe presenceof an African married to the returning white sailor of the title; andDaphne du Maurier's Rebeccauses the fi gure of the solitary woman sailor to signal Rebecca'srefusal of conventionalheterosexuality, and what the seawashes up to shoreas showingthe unnameablelesbian body divorced from all familial relationships.The work of the sailor/writer, JamesHanley, showshow being at sea can undermineall certainties,especially those concerning the 'natural' statusof England . E. M. Forster's Mawice is an interestingexample of what both homosexualityand literature could know in the period, but could not publicly speak.

Although Mawice was written in 1913,Forster worked on the text in 1919,1920 and again in 1932.It is theseinterwar revisionsof the novel which I believe entitle me to considerit as a novel of the period. In fact, it was only publishedafter his deathin

1971. Forsterbelieved it was unpublishable 'until my deathand England's' because of its homosexualcontent. "' Clearly, he saw homosexualityand Englishnessas antithetical.In his Terminal Note to the text, Forsterwrote:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have botheredto write otherwise. I was determinedthat in fiction anyway two men shouldfall in love and remain in it in the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sens6Maurice andAlec still roam the greenwood.I dedicatedit 'To a HappierYear' and not altogethervainly. Happinessis its keynote- which by the way has had an unexpectedresult: it hasmade the book more difficult to publish. Unlessthe Wolfenden Report becomeslaw, it will probably have to remain in manuscript.If it endedunhappily, with a lad dangling from a nooseor with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornographyor seductionof minors. But the lovers get away unpunishedand consequentlyrecommend crime. " 125

So how doesForster inscribe homosexualityso that Maurice and Alec can roam the greenwooddeep in the heartof an Englandwhich legislatesagainst such acts? The sea has a crucial rdle, as does 'abroad', where, againstconvention, Forster refusesto locate homosexuality.

The first chapterstarts with the young Maurice's last day at prep school,and the masterMr Ducie deciding to walk with him besidethe seain order to have 'a talk' 'a theme'ý' They together the beach Mr good on certain walk 0 on where Ducie drawsdiagrams in the wet sandto show Maurice what happensin heterosexual marriagerelations. After their talk had endedand they had moved on:

Mr Ducie stoppedand held his cheekas though every tooth ached.He turned and looked at the long expanseof sandbehind. 'l. never scratchedout thoseinfernal diagrams,' he said slowly. At the further end of the bay somepeople were following them, also by the edgeof the sea.Their coursewould take them by the very spot where Mr Ducie had illustrated sex, and one of them was a lady. He ran back sweatingwith fear. 'Sir, won't it be all rightT Maurice cried. 'The tide'll have covered them by now. ' 'Good Heavens God ' ... thank ... the tide's rising. It is this formal erasureof heterosexualityat the shorelineby the seathat beginsto allow homosexualityto be written in a fictional England.As the anthropologist,Mary

Douglasargues in Purity and Danger: An analysisof the conceptsofpollution and

taboo, 'all marginsare dangerous'and any 'structure of ideasis vulnerableat its

margins.' 34Therefore, if one idea of Englishnessis founded on it being relatedto the

clearly delineatedform of the island, its social structureneatly boundariedby water,

and its internal social relationsas ordered,the island and its orderedsocial relations

are dangerouslychallenged by the sea.Unlike land in general,the seadoes not stay

still. It may be conceptuallyimagined as fixed when in map form, but the actuality of

the seais that it moves backwardand forward, in and out of the island, disordering

any patternsmade on the sand.Unlike land, the seais not amenableto 'landscaping'.

Humanscannot change the patternof the seaand imposemuch human culture on it.

However, there is both power and dangerhere, as Forster recognised.Mary Douglas

arguesthat, although: 126

Disorder spoils pattern;it also provided the material of pattern.Order implies restriction;from all possiblematerials, a limited selectionhas been made and from all possiblerelations a limited set has beenused. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no definite patternhas been realised in it, but its potential for patterningis indefinite. That is why, though we seekto create order, we do not simply condemndisorder. We recognisethat it is destructive it has It both danger to exisfirip3 patterns;also that potentiality. symbolises and power. '

The disorderand uncontrollability of the seaare both dangerousto heterosexuality,as English to homosexuality order, and powerful as offering0 potential new patterns. Indeed, as Forster said, since 'Maurice was written therehas been a changein public attitudehere: the changefrom ignoranceand terror to familiarity and contempt'.36

Having removedheterosexuality through the seawashing away the diagramson the sand,Forster's discursivetask was to move homosexualityaway from the margins,inland to the greenwood,overcoming other obstaclesthat oppose Englishnessto homosexuality.So, for example,when Clive Durham declareshis love for Maurice at Cambridge,Maurice:

Was scandalized,horrified. He was shockedto the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, 'Oh, roW The words, the mannerwere out of him before he could recall them. 'Durham, you're an Englishman.I'm another. Don't talk nonsense.I'm not offended becauseI know you don't meanit, but it's the only subjectabsolutely beyond the limit as you know, it's the worst crime in the calendar,and you must never mention it again.Durham !a rotten notion " really -' [My italics] Here, Englishness is defined through an opposition to nonsense - language without meaning; is defined in a grammar which cannot accomodate Englishness and love between men; and is therefore 'beyond the limit' which definbs this same Englishness.

However, the call on Englishness did not protect either Clive or Maurice from homosexuality. They both knew of its existence, but it seemed to be elsewhere, part of some historical past and some other cultural tradition. After a Greek translation class, where the Dean had said 'in a flat toneless voice: 'Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks', Clive tells Maurice that the 'Greeks, or most of them, were that way inclined, and to omit it is to omit the mainstay of Athenian society. ' " This is a transformative moment for Maurice because he had 'never mentioned it to any living soul. He hadn't known it could be mentioned, and when

Durham did so in the middle of the sunlit court a breath of liberty touched him. ' 39 127

This talk of homosexualitybrings the greenwoodto Cambridge,in the sunlight and inspired by the 'breath of liberty'. Nonetheless,what Maurice knows in theory he finds hard to put into practice.It is not just Englishncssthat preventshomosexuality, but also the way that religion, medicineand the law are implicated in the orderingof heterosexuality,and the location of homosexuality'abroad' in countrieswhich have adoptedthe NapoleonicCode, such as Italy. However, in order to bring homosexualityinto deepEngland, Forster has to wrench it away from its associations with Greeceand the Greeksand find a way to associateit with a native Englishness- that of the greenwood.

Clive Durham is under pressureto many in order to producea family to inherit his country estate,Penge. Planning a trip to Greece/homosexuality,his mother arguesagainst it, asking Maurice to persuadeClive to visit America, since she believesGreece to be for play and America for reality. However, later, Clive doesgo to Greece,after he and Maurice have beenPlatonic lovers for many years,and while there,contrary to expectation,disavows homosexuality by becoming 'normal'.

Sitting in the theatreof Dionysus,Clive 'saw barren plains running down to the sea',

'he saw only dying light and a deadland. "' In Greece,the sterility he seesin both land and seareflects his view of homosexuality:

Well, he had written to Maurice at last. His letter wasjourneying down to the sea.Where one sterility touchedanother, it would embarkand voyagepast Sunium and Cythera,would land and embark,would land again. Maurice would get it as he was starting for his work. 'Against my will I have become normal. I cannothelp it. ' The words had been written. "

In this way, the conventionalassociation between Greece and homosexualityis undem-dned.For Clive, homosexuality'ssea-like formlessnessnow signifies not potential,but a sterile block to the marriageand children he beginsto desireto ensure continuity for his English estate.

A key biblical phrasefor Forsteris 'Male and female createdHe them', which appearsin both Howards End and in Maurice. 4' Mr Ducie explains'the mystery of sex' to Maurice. 44'He spokeof male and female, createdby God in the beginningin order that the earth might be peopled,and of the period when the male 128 and female receive their powers. ' 45Forster's attempt to undo the imbrication of heterosexuality, Englishness and religion led him to argue 'out of the mists of theology: Male and Female created He not them 0.4' By describing homosexuality as

religion, in a way that the two did not act in opposition to each other, enabled the

description of Maurice's boyhood desire as making 'a religion of some other boy. 947

Describing the homosexual young Clive as '[djeeply religious, with a living desire to

reach God and to please Him, he found himself crossed at an early age by this other 48 desire, obviously from Sodom' : .

He wishedChristianity would compromisewith him a little and searchedthe Scripturesfor support.There was David and Jonathan;there was even 'the disciple that Jesusloved. But the Church's interpretationwas againsthim; he could not find any rest for his soul in her without crippling it. 4'

So Clive parts with xtianity. But just as xtianity supportsheterosexuality, so too does

medicine.Maurice's neighbour,Dr. Barry, tells him medical 'facts' couchedin the

languageof the bible: 'I'm a medical man and an old man and I tell you that. Man that

is bom of woman must go with woman if the human race is to continue.' '0 Averse to homosexuality,Dr. Barry:

Endorsedthe verdict of society gladly; that is to say, his verdict was theolooical.He held that the depraved Sodom, 0 only most could glanceat and so, when a man of good antecedentsand p4ysiqueconfessed the tendency, 'Rubbish, rubbish!' was his natural reply.

Dr Barry cannotsee homosexuality in Maurice sincehe has good antecedentsand

physique.His medical view locatesit in criminal morbidity. But Maurice veers

betweenthe desireto be accommodatedwithin social life, thinking that it 'would be

jolly certainly to be married,and at one with society and the law', whilst also yearning

to be an outlaw in the greenwoodwith anotherman. 52The force of the law against

homosexualitycomes across strongly: Maurice fears being blackmailedand ruined

after sleepingwith Alec Scudder;men barely dareto speakto one anotherof their

homosexualdesire for fear of the law. If the law will not allow it, then Maurice

imaginesit in a spaceof lawlessnesssymbolised by the greenwood:

He was an outlaw in disguise.Perhaps among thosewho took to the greenwoodin old time there had beentwo men like himself - two. At times he entertainedthe dream.Two men can defy the world. 5' 129

At other times, he tries not to turn his head towards the greenwood.Unlike Morton's

Englishman,who, alone in the countryside,finds Robin Goodfellow in himself and becomesheroically English, Forster's greenwoodallows a place for men togetherto be homosexuallyun-English. The romantic English myth of Robin Hood and

SherwoodForest can allow this, since this version of Englishnessis basedon the

Merry Men having an outlaw statusat the sametime as being culturally Condoned.The fresh air and exerciseoffered to Maurice as a cure for his homosexualityare the very things which enableit. Ironically, natureallows the 'unnatural'.

The placesin which homosexualdesire is inscribedare marginal and connectedwith water, sincethe discursiveconstruction of landscapeis intimately connectedwith the representationof desire.In order to place homosexuality,a different nationallandscape has to be imagined. If Morton's landscapeis heterosexualised,then Forster'sis homosexualisedat the placeswhich recall the sea's erasureof heterosexuality.Clive and Maurice acknowledgetheir desirefor one anotherand becomePlatonic lovers as they leave Cambridgefor a trip to the fens.

Immersingthemselves in the deepwaters of a dyke, they experiencea perfect day in

their love, moving betweengrassy embankment and water. Theirs is a love deeply

connectedwith water- 'If Maurice madelove it was Clive who preservedit, and

causedits rivers to water the garden.' -5'Maurice's love seemsmore freely given,

without any heterosexualidea of outcome,whereas Clive takesthis love to turn it

metaphoricallyto somecapitalistic savingfor future profit in the form of a watered

garden.This posits aýdifferent model of heterosexualand homosexuallove, basedon

homosexualproduction and heterosexualreproduction. The waterspour from Maurice

while Clive doesnot reciprocate.Clive had madea vow never to act on his desirein a

physical way. In his desirefor children to continue his country estate,he endstheir

relationship.

,However, later Maurice and Alec Scudder,Clive's gamekeeper,

becomelovers. Alec falls for Maurice as a dinner party at Pengeis broken up by rain

leaking through the ceiling onto the piano. It is this water that enablesAlec's presence 130 in the drawing-room;as gamekeeper,it would not normally have beenhis place,but the indoor servantsneed help in moving the piano. The following night, Maurice leans out of his bedroomwindow while rain sprinkles his hair. In this liminal space,he surpriseshimself by calling out 'Come' into the darknessto somemythical lover of his own imagination.Alec Scudderis there watching him, and when on the following night Maurice again calls from his window, Alec doescome. 15They havea sexual relationshipwith eachother. Scudder,though, is due to emigrate:his ship leaves

soon.This occasionsconcern for the local clergyman, who 'should be glad to seethat

particular young man settledwith a helpmatebefore he sails.' " Sailing represents

somesort of dangerwhich can be avertedthrough pairing Scudderoff with a woman,

and xtianising him more thoroughly. Ironically, though, the dangerthe clergyman

wants to preventhas alreadyhappened. Scudder and Maurice have spentthe night

together,and Scudderdoes have a helpmateof a sorL Three of the servantsat Penge

have not beenconfirmed, but to the clergyman, 'Scudder is the seriouscase because I

have not had time to preparehim properly before he sails'. 5' In the end, Scudder

doesnot turn up to sail for Argentina, preferring insteadto make a life with Maurice.

In a formulation which excludesa relationshipwith earth,Maurice realisesthat:

They must live outsideclass, without relations or money; they must work and stick to eachother till death.But England belongedto them. That, besides companionship,was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes,but never their own souls. [My italics]

For 'men under that star', the traj ectory is upward, rather than down to earth: water

and sky signify rather than earth." In his platonic homosexuality,Clive is described

as taking Maurice upward: 'He led the belovedup a narrow and beautiful path, high

above either abyss.' " The word Tranian' that male homosexualsused for

themselves,after Edward Carpenter'scoining, means'heaven' and refers to the Muse

of astronomy,so perhapsit is no surpriseto seethat the skies signify more than earth

for the homosexualman. However, the final happy moment of two men falling in love

and stayingin it 'in the forever that fiction allows' occursin the marginal spaceof the 131 lakesideboathouse of Penge.This cross-class,on-land, beside-waterspace is where the lovers,Alec and Maurice, decidenever to be parted.

This knowledgethat homosexualityhad of its own construction through the imbrication of sea,water, and a trajectory upward toward the starsrather than down to earthwas a knowledgethat hegemonicheterosexuality also had, but only spokeof in code, as can be seenin the work of the SES.The English Uranian poetswrote of loving boys through a metaphoricrecourse to the sea,Greek mythology, the starsand planets.Horatio ForbesBrown's poetry collection, Drift, concerneditself with his love of boy sailors." Bradford's The New Chivalry and

Other Poents of 1918included a poem, 'The Kiss', which tells of a man and boy kissing for the first time on a beach;Fabian StrachanWoodley's 1921 'A Crown of

Friendship' tells of Uranian love thus:

Then - so near Was your loved presencethat my soul's still deeps Trembledto tempest;like a barqueI rode Helplessupon the wavesof that passionatesea 62

Given that the Uranians',practice was to be near boys, especiallyat placeswhere they were likely to seethem undressfor swimming, it is not surprisingthat the beach,sea

and water shouldfigure so prominently in their writings. So, for example, in his 1911

collection,A Garland of Ladslove, John Nicholson wrote:

There is a Pond of pure delight The paidophil adores, Where boys undressin open sight And bathersbanish drawers.63

But if the seashoresignified homosexuality,so too did the sailor.

JameýHanley's Boy ýrecountsthe tale of a young boy who runs away to seaonly to

be utterly debauchedby the experience.' He is homosexuallyraped by the steward,

forced to have sex with a prostitutewhile other sailors watch, catchesincurable

syphilis, and is murderedby the ship's captain. Hanley himself was a young sailor

who turned to writing of the sea,and was generally supposedto have written from

experience.The directors of his publishing company,Boriswood, were servedwith a 'unlawfully libel in the form summonsaccusing them of ... publish[ing] an obscene 132 of a book entitled BOY, againstthe peaceof Our Lord the King, His Crown and

Dignity, contraryto the Section8 of the Accessoriesand Abettors Act 1851.9 65

However, the casenever came to court, since the publishersdecided to plead guilty and pay a fine.

For sailors,the loss of land and the new relationship to the sea producesin them a subjectivity where national identity losesimportance. Hanley's collection of essayson the sea,Between the Tides, showshow going to seaentails a loss of certainty:

You will yourself away, you are no longer a person,only a tool You are gradually slipping away from your own, the last anchorage;you have become depersonalised;you are, in fact, nobody. You are something,a thing. 66

Not only doesthe sailor lose humanidentity, but the seaitself cannotbe known: 'The land in a mirror is only a reflection of itself, ' Hanley writes, 'but the seain a mirror remainsa thousandmiracles. "' Towns, cities and countries can be understood,but the seaholds secretsand is utterly indifferent to humanfeelings and aspirations.This seais figured in sucha way that it is impossible to have a wann loving relationship with it in the way that Morton loves the English earth.From the vantagepoint of the sea,all countriesbecome the same,so that there can be nothing specialabout England and Englishness:

Far countrieswere a vision, pure and beautiful, but time will soonrender them to the deadlevel of commonalty.All cities will be like your own, from which you have now lifted your common being, and all security, chan" ing it for the watery world, and all unrest and ceaselesscoming and going.

Insteadof a downward relationshipto earth, the sailor, like the homosexual, will look up in order to 'di vine position by sun and stars'." Nonetheless,the sailor who returns to land, but is no longer occupiedwith the sea, still presentsa threat to the orderedEnglish certaintiesfounded on eadMand.

David Garnett's The Sailor's Return dealswith the disorderthe returning sailor brings when he comesback into the spaceof the English village. "

From the start of the narrative,gender and race boundariesare troubled. William

Targett is returning to England with his 'negro' wife and child. In the opening passages,the readeris persuadedby the grammarof the narrative that this 'negro' is 133 actually a man, and is the father to Sambo,who has been smuggledashore in aI basket.In order to get to England by sea,since women and children were not allowed on board, a disguisewas necessaryfor Targett's wife, Tulip. However, she doesnot transformherself into a woman on safely reachingland when disguiseis no longer necessary,but insteadstays in an inn with her sailor husbandas if shewere a man accompanyinghim. The inhabitantsof Poole are fooled by her disguise,and shocked to discover sheis a woman. Her continuing masqueradeas a man, however, long after thereis logical reasonfor it, permits the text to make an oblique commenton the sexuality of sailors.Although officially heterosexualsince married, it is William

Targett who determinesthe moment when Tulip will 'becomea woman'; it is he who decidesto spendthe night with her as a man; and it is he whoseheterosexuality is questionablein the liminal spaceof the seaport.It is the decisionto move inland to

Dorchesterthat precipitateshis choice that Tulip shoulddon the clothesof an

Englishwoman,as if genderboundaries can be underminedbeside the sea,but should not be when deeperin the countryside.Nonetheless, when they settle in the public housethey buy with Tulip's money, it is William who managesthe 'feminine' side of householdwork:

But it must not be imagined that Tulip was idle. No indeed,she took off the fine clothesthat Targett had bought for her at Poole, and wearing nothing but her old sailor's jumper and a petticoat, worked all day, fetching and carrying, polishing the pewter mugs till they shonelike silver, and cooking the dinner, first laughable in though at shemade some mistakes that art... . But however hard shemight work, at the best it was but doing what shewas bid, whereasif shehad been an Englishwoman shewould have manageda whole province of the household,and taken it so completely off her husband'sshoulders that he would never need to know it had existed,and might all his life long believethat the bedsmade themselves each morning and changedtheir linen every Saturdayof their own accorC'

The reiterationof the word 'but' suggestssomething of the instability of genderand

race boundarieswithin the household.Tulip is notjust one thing, but also something

else: a woman who wearsa sailor'sjumper along with a petticoat, a woman who can

don the clothesof an Englishwoman,and yet still not be English. But if their

householdunsettles Englishness, the naming of the landscapethey inhabit orders

English heterosexualityand earth.The han-detin which they live is Maiden I 134

Newbarrow; the barrow, or earthwork, is feminine and virginal, not yet penetrated.

The next hamlet is Newbarrow Boys. Here, 'boys' emergefrom the barrow, out of earth,and attemptto destroythe Targetts. Genderdistinctions are inscribedwithin landscape;the earth,in the form of barrows, is feminine and producesboys.

Naming is an important activity sanctionedby the church.The village peopleare worried by the fact that Sambohas not beenbaptised, and that William and

Tulip's marriageis not namedas such and sanctionedby the church.A group of men set upon Samboshouting, 'Drown the little bastardin the stream,Jemmy. We won't have them breedingblack babiesin England."' Sambounsettles familial relations becauseof his race: he is neither one thing nor the other, and cannotbe neatly categorised.Does he exist within English familial relations or not? The aunt who remindsthe rest of the family that Sambo,is their nephewis told by VVrIlliam'ssister,

Lucy, that 'I don't think we havemuch reasonto call that little black boy a relative of ours'. " Realisingthat it would make their lives easierin the village if they were xtian,

William tells Tulip that sincethey are no longer in Africa, they will have to 'live accordingto the English religion':

He told her, too, that here in Dorset there was only one God; and that He had written a book in which He had set down the early history of the world, which was called 'The Holy Bible'. There was a secondpart of it, called 'The New Testament' which containedthe life of JesusChrist, Who was the Son of God by a virgin, and that.all our sins had been taken over by Christ, provided always that we believed in Him. '-'

In order to describethis religion to a Dahomeanwith a polytheistic cosmology,

William can only make xtianity soundridiculous. His own irreligiosity arisesfrom his

past as a sailor: he was 'by his habit of life naturally indifferent to religion'. " But,

ironically, the xtian churchbecomes the vehicle through which their family can be

legally harassed.Lucy wants her brother's disreputablehousehold out of her

neighbourhood,and is thought to be behind the letter which arrives from the brewery

giving notice on the leaseof the public house.Couched in the languageof xtian

morality, the brewer's letter reads:

It hasbeen brought to my knowledge that you are living with a woman to whom you are not married -a coloured woman. Very strong representations havebeen made to me by respectableresidents in Newbarrow and district 135

againstmy continuing to let premisesto a man of loose character.I may say I fully concurwith this view, and should never allow any of my tenantsto set a bad examplein mattersof Christian duty and morality to the villagers amongst live I however it is duty whom they ... consider that my to give you notice, as from next La4yday, unlessyou terminateyour unfortunateassociation with this femaleý'

In response,although having married in Dahomey,William decidesto marry Tulip in a xtian ceremony,and their secondchild, Sheba,born in England, is also baptised.

This pleasesMr Cronk, the clergyman,since it allows him to imagine himself as a missionary,'though one who had not to endurethe hardshipsof a tropical climate.' 78

Tulip tells William that Mr Cronk had alreadyfrightened her by suggestingthat Sambo could not be named 'unlesshe was washedin the church, and after that was done he would be as white as snow.And unlesswe had him washedwhite Sambowould be burnt in a fire with devils. 7' Thesextian threatslose their force when the couple marry and their children are baptised.However, this metaphoricwhitening through becomingacceptably xtian doesnot make them racially white, and so the villagers resortto threatsof other sorts:attacking the housewith fire, racist name-calling,and physical violence. Clearly, there is no place in England for the non-white xtian and the man who betrayshis race origins. Neighbours;suggest that 'our English girls aren't good enoughfor him' and that 'he must have picked up the habit abroad,and when once a habit getshold of a man there is never any breaking him of it. "' There is no happy resolutionfor this family in England.William is murderedby a boxer. Sheba, the black English-bornchild, dies and so 'no black babiesare bred in England'.

Samboreturns to Africa on his own sincethe ship's captain will not allow Tulip on board as sheis a woman. Strangely,she doesnot attempt to disguiseherself as a man in order to return to Africa with Sambo,Which suggeststhat her previous disguise was intimately connectedwith her husband'sdesire. Without money, Tulip returnsto the public housewhich hasnow beentaken over by anothercouple and lives there in

cast-off clothesas a drudge.No longer 'too saucy' and wanting 'a touch of the

whip', " 'she had learnedher station in life, and shedid her duty in it very well. ' 82

Neither the agentsof the one God of Dorset, nor the English villagers, can acceptthe

unsettlingpresence of the sailor and black woman in their midst. 136

If 77zeSailor's Return suggests0 that the masculinesailor who returns from the seawill unsettlegender and race distinctions of Englishness,Daphne du

Maurier's Rebeccais a text which dealswith the disturbanceprovoked by an unnameableand culturally unassimilablewoman's corpsewhich the seawashes up onto land. In this context,it is interestingto note Morton's visit to a battleshipwhere he is confrontedby a corpse.This he found an 'uncomfortable presence',because the dead sailor 'had ceasedto obey' and follow orders." Clearly, the corpsecan be used to signify somethingbeyond the boundariesof the laws of human culture to which it is no longer obedient.Du Maurier had problemsinscribing lesbiandesire whilst simultaneouslyromancing an EnglishAesswhich sherooted in the figure of a country- house,Manderley. Rebeccawas written in Egypt during the early yearsof her marriage,and 'Cairo' becamea key word for du Maurier to signify heterosexuality,

whilst the watery city, 'Venice', and 'Venetian tendencies',signified lesbian desire.

However, this imaginary placing of sexualitiesabroad became problematic when du

Maurier attemptedto work out the possibilities for a woman's autonomoussexuality

within an English context.

The novel asksthe question:if women's participation in the nation is

through heterosexualityand reproduction,then what happenswhen a woman desires

national identity but not heterosexuality?The womb is the site of the reproductionof

more national subjects,and the meansby which a nation can imagine its future.

However, possessionof a womb doesnot guaranteewomen citizenship or national

identity. It is through heterosexualrelationships with men that women get a second-

hand relationship with Englishness.Neither Beatrice, Max's sister who was bom at

Manderley,nor the narratorcan gain entry to ownershipof Manderley/Englandon

their own account.It is the narrator's modestsexuality, and the possibility that she

may bear a male heir to ensurepatriarchal succession, that allows her to occupy

Manderley/England,while the wilder_Rebecca,who tauntsde Winter with her

autonomoussexuality and the possibility that shecould bear a child which is not biologically his, The 'sepulchre', is Manderley is 0 endsup murdered. tomb, or that 137 also the womb of the narrator.8' Her dream of the boys shewill have to inherit

Manderleycomes to nothing: her womb is a tomb from which nothing resurrects,as is

Rebecca's.The heterosexualEnglishness of Manderley has no future; it can only be dreamedabout in its past glory. Similarly, the Englishnesswhich Rebeccaattempts for herself, in which she offers an outward show of conventional heterosexualityfor the de Winter family namewhilst enjoying her own sexualfreedom, leads her to a

watery tomb, a resurrectionand a re-interment.The body of Rebeccais figured as degenerate,having 'a certain malformation of the uterus ... Whichmeant shecould never havehad a child'. " Although on the surfacethe text appearsto be a

conventionalheterosexual romance, these non-reproductive wombs within it suggest

that Englishnessand heterosexualitymay both be deadforins, incapableof

reproduction.

The tomb, or crypt, and the idea of resurrectionare key symbolsin

Rebecca.The notion of encryptmentcan point two ways, and is particularly useful for

readinglesbian texts which often concealtheir lesbiancontent through cryptic textual

strategies.Firstly, it can be usedin relation to the namelesswoman's body entombed/

encryptedin place of Rebecca;but secondly,it can also be usedin relation to the idea

of encryptmentas secret,hidden writing. Just as a body is buried in the crypt, so too

is a secrethidden in the text. So howdo encryptmentand resurrectionfunction in

Rebecca?How doesthe text invite the readerto resurrector raise the corpseinto discourse?

There are two ways in which this happens.Firstly, the text saysthat

thereare forbidden knowledgeshidden in writing. Max de Winter tells the narrator

that thereis a certain type of knowledgehe prefersher not to have:

'Listen my sweet.When you were a little girl, were you ever forbidden to read certain books, and did your father put thosebooks under lock and key?' 'Yes, ' I said. 'Well then. A husbandis not so different from a father after all. There is a certain type of knowledge I prefer you not to have.9 116

Perhaps,too, an author is not so different from a father or a husband,preferring to

keep certain knowledgesfrom the reader.Some words are so forbidden that they may 138 not evenbe spoken,such as 'that frightful word of six letters' which the readeris meantto understandas 'murder'. " However, there was anothersix-letter word in du

Maurier's repertoirethat shehad difficulty with - 'Venice' - that which, for her, signified lesbianism.Writing to Ellen Doubledayabout her relationshipwith Mle.

Yvon in which they had loved eachother in 'every conceivableway', duMaurier says,'by God and by Christ if anyoneshould call that sort of love by the unattractive word that beginswith '12%I'd tear their guts out.' " Nonetheless,difficult things can still be inscribed. By shaking her 'bent nib',," Rebeccamanages to inscribe her non- acceptability,making a little blob of ink mar the white page.'0 In this way, the reader is given to understandthat the forbidden secretin the text might be discoverable.How

can it be decipheredand resurrected?

Secondly,the text tells the readerthat resurrectionis possible,and the

deadcan come to life. Englishnessitself, in the form of Manderley, is resurrected. Although 'house [t]here be the narrator saysthat the was a sepulchre... would no resurrection',she actually performsthis resurrectionby bringing Manderley to textual

life. " The novel startswith her dreamof the deadand abandonedhouse and garden.

Although it no longer exists,the narrative brings the readerto understandit as having

a presentreality although it hasbeen burnt down. Rebecca,too, is resurrectedand

brought back to life by the narrator'sinterest in her. The prophetically namedboat, 'Je

Reviens', in which Rebeccais entombedis brought up from the sea-bedand returns

her unfit sheis reburiedin the de Winter family crypt. By imaginatively forcing the

readerinto performing actsof resurrectionas the narratormakes them, a trail is laid

which invites the readerto perform an act of resurrectionon that which the text refuses

to do: that is, to raisethe other corpsein the crypt into discourseand to understand

what comesfrom the sea.

So how doesthe text encrypt a method by which the corpsemight be

resurrected?The readeris offered a characterwho standsbetween the living and the

deadin the form of the housekeeper,Mrs Danvers.She is constantlyreferred to as

having a white skull's face and a deadskull's face, and her voice and hand are lifeless 139 andcold. Various textual momentssuggest that one may be able to speakto the dead through Mrs Danvers.The naffator seesthe 'diabolical smile on her white skull's face' and remembersthat 'she was a living and breathing woman... madeof flesh and blood. Shewas not deadlike Rebecca.I could speakto her but I could not speak to Rebecca'." Much is hinted at through the figure of Mrs Danvers.She herself can perform an act of resuffection:for it is at her suggestionthat - the narratorwears the samefancy dressto the ball that Rebeccahad previously worn. In a shocking moment,all who seethe narratordescending the staircasealso seeRebecca. She providesinformation aboutRebecca to the narrator,telling her that heterosexual relationshipswere 'like a game' 9' to Rebecca,something which Max de Winter backs up by describingher as 'not even normal'. 9' He had 'found her out' five days after they were married, and shehad told him things about herself, things so shocking that he would never 'repeat to a living soul'. 9' Is it only the deadthat can bearthe burden of knowledge?Given thesetextual clues about Rebecca'ssexuality, and the descriptionof Mrs Danversas a 'black sentinel', one wonderswhat she might be guarding." What might escapefrom the crypt? At one level, the mystery of Rebeccais solved.Max de Winter nevFr loved her, she behavedbadly so he murderedher, and by a stroke of fortune he gets away with it. However, the readeris presentedwith no such neat solution with regard

to the body of the other woman in the crypt. When her body was washedashore, de

Winter had identified it as that of Rebecca,but when the real Rebeccais brought up

from the sea,no solution to the identity of this first body is offered. The narrative

makesno neat disposalof her by, for example,having somelong-lost family

fortuitously come to claim her. Just as the lesbianis seento be outsidepatriarchal

heterosexualfamilial relations,the corpsealso appearsto be detachedfrom any family

claim on her. Rebecca'sbody is interred with the body of the woman, and the reader

is left with the image of two deadwomen lying togetherin the crypt. Given that this

text invites actsof resurrection,this open ending allows a reading where the dangerousfi the lesbian be from image two gure of can resurrected this rp of woman 140 lying together.The naming of the corpseas 'a mistake, a ghastly mistake' suggests that not only was Max de Winter's first identification of her a mistake,but also that somehowthe woman herself is a mistake, wrong, perhapsnot a proper woman.

Terry Castle'swork on the discursiveappearance of the lesbian suggeststhat within homophobicWestern culture the lesbian first appearsas a discursivevoid in which sheis displayed.This display only happensin order that she can be discursivelyerased. There is a movementin which display and erasurehappen togetherso that this shaky discursivevoid is maintained.This is a useful theory for understandingthe unidentified corpse,because at the sametime that sheis displayed in the*crypt, sheis erasedthrough deathand unknowability. However, there is no textual triumph for either heterosexualityor lesbianism.The lesbianis erasedas sheis displayed.The heterosexualwombs that might have provided heirs to Manderley are non-reproductive.The English heterosexualitywhich getslived out after the fire at

Manderley happensin a dreary foreign exile. Englishnessbecomes displaced from place to text, so that only through readingold copies of 77zeField can the narrator actually breathethe air of England.

Thesefictional texts I have discussedpresent a discursiveworld in which both the seaand the sailor posedangers to heterosexualEnglishness. The sea and its marginal shorelineact to trouble or destroyheterosexuality, certainties of identity, and renderany national identity the sameas any other, suchthat Englandand

Englishnessbecome untenable. The sailor himself loseshis English relationshipto earth which groundshis heterosexuality,and becomeshomosexual or sexually profligate, so that when he returns to land he unsettlesrelations of Englishnessbased on strong genderand race distinctions.The sailor and the homosexuallook up to the sky rather than down to earth. Also, as Rebecca shows,the seacan wash up to shore somethingfar outside the possibility of assimilation into English ground, and even suggeststhat Eiiglishnessis not in a geographicalplace but insteadis only presentin text. Together, thesefictional texts show somethingof what can be known about 141 homosexualitybut not publicly said, what can be said but becomesbanned and what is deeply encryptedand yet clearly speaks.

Given the the dangersthe seaand the sailor can poseto the heterosexual,racially white grammarof the nation explains why the SESwas concernedwith the sailor's (im)morality, and how this might impinge on national identity. Seriousreading at sea,accessed through a moderateprovision of books for

sailors' libraries, was credited with greatermoral value than any reading done on land.

This was becauseboth the seaand the sailor threateneda national identity foundedon

earth. Sinceliterature could be credited with the power to heterosexualise,serious

readingcould preventmale homosociality sliding into male homosexuality.Beyond

that, the book itself as a fetish object offered the possibility of re-enactinga land-based

masculineEnglishness, by allowing the sailor a metaphoricallypenetrative relationship

with national earth.Thiswas seenas able to guaranteehis heterosexualEnglish

identity when he was unableto touch earth from the liminal spaceof the sea.

But if sailors were a categoryof national subjectwho could not

actually touch English earth,what of the category 'woman'? Morton's Englishness

locateswomen as troublesomesubjects within England. 'Naturally' disliking the rural

becauseof her predilection for shoppingand the:urban, what relationship can

'woman' have with an Englishnessfounded on a masculinelove of feminine English

earth?The next chapterexamines the relation betweenwoman and earth.

I Seafarers'Education Service, Seafarers' Education ServiceReport of Sub-Committeeson Boys at Sea (London: Seafarers'Education Service, 1931). p. 21. 1 'Authors "Sailing Near The Výind": Dr. Hensonon licentious Literature', ManchesterGuardian, 13 May 1929, p. 14. -' ManchesterGuardian, 13 May 1929, p. 14. 4 The phrase'all at sea' means'to be in a total muddle. In this way, it can be seento be linked with the disorderof mud, rather than the order firm earth is meantto guarantee. I From this point on The Seafarers'Education Service will be abbreviatedin the main body of the text as SES. 6 Seafarers'Education Service, Librariesfor the Merchant Navy (London: Seafarers'Education Service, 1929), p. 13. JosephBristow, Empire Boys: Adventuresin a Man's World (London: Harper Collins, 1991). B. G. Johns, cited in Bristow, p. 12. F. Wills, cited in Bristow, p. 19. Bristow, p. 21. Bristow, p. 141. Henry Ridcr Haggard,King Solomon's Mines [18851(Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1958). 142

13E. M. Forster, Maurice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 75. 14Seafarers' Education Service, Seafarers' Education Service Report of Sub-Committeeson Boys at Sea, p. 8. 15Seafarers' Education Service, Seafarers' Education Service Report of Sub-Committeeson Boys at Sea,p. 13. 16Seafarers' Education Service, Seafarers' Education ServiceReport of Sub-Conumnitteeson Boys at Sea, p. 14. 17Seafarers' Education Service, Seafarers' Education ServiceReport of Sub-Committeeson Boys at Sea, p. 25. Prof. F. Clarke, Educationand the Seafarer (London: Seafarers'Education Service, 1936).p. 11. SeeChris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1983), p. 87. " Arnold Bennett,Literary Taste: How toform it, with detailed instructionsfor collecting a complete library of English Literature [ 1909] (Harmondsworth: Pelican Special, 1938), pp. 16-17. Bennett, pp. 18-19. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, BetweenMen: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New YorL- Columbia University Press, 1985). ' H. V. Morton, The Call of England [1928] (London: Metheun, 1933), title page. 'Bristow, p. 157. Is Bristow, p. 157. Daphnedu Mauricr, Rebecca [1938] (London: Arrow, 1992), pp. 10-11. H. V. Morton, In Searchof England [1927] (London: Metheun, 1930), p. xi. Geoffrey Household,Rogue Male [19391(London: Michael Joseph, 1982), p. 120., Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: 7hree F-vsayson the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977), pp. 353-4. E. M. Forster quoted in R. N. Furbank's introduction to Maurice, p. 8. Forster, p. 218. Forster, P. 16. 13Forster, p. 20. ' Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Conceptsof Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 121. 3' Douglas, p. 94. Forster, p. 221. Forster, p. 56. 38Forster, p. 50. 39Forster, p. 50. 1 Forster, p. 104. 4' Forster, p. 104. Forster, p. 104. E. M. Forster, HowardsEnd [1910] (London: Edward Arnold, 1947), p. 222. Forster, Maurice, p. 18. Forster, Maurice, p. 18. 46E. M. Forster quoted in Furbank's introduction to Maurice, p. 9. ' Forster, Maurice, p. 27. 4' Forster, Maurice, p. 67. 49Forster, Maurice, p. 68. Forster, Maurice, p. 30. Forster, Maurice, p. 140. 52Forster, Maurice, p. 140. ' Forster, Maurice, p. 120. 'Forster, Maurice, p. 9 1. -" Scudderis aptly namedgiven the associationbetween water and homosexuality.A scuddcris a shower of rain. Forster, Maurice, p. 163. Forster, Maurice, p. 164. Forster, Maurice, pp. 208-209. Forster, Maurice, p. 9 1. 143

Forster, Maurice, p. 91. See Timothy D'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writing of English 'Uranian' Poelsftom 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledgc & Kegan Paul, 19170)for information on these poets. Fabian Strachan Woodley, in D'Arch Smith, p. 144. John Nicholson, in D'Arch Smith, p. 171. "James Hanley, Boy (London: Boriswood, 193 1). "s Summary-Report of the Police Proceedings against the Directors and the firm of Boriswood Ltd. in Regard to the book entitled 'Boy' written by James Hanley: Press Report from the Manchester Guardian 213.35. Presented to the British Library by Alec Craig. " James Hanley, Between the Tides (London: Metheun, 1939), p. 2. 'Hanley, Between the Tides, p. 10. " Hanley, Between the Tides, p. 4. '9 Hanley, Between the Tides, P. 4. 7' David Garnett, The Sailor's Return 1929] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964). 71Garnett, p. 24. 72Garnett, p. 124. Garnett, p. 152. 7' Garnett, p. 57. Garnett, pp. 57-58. 76Garnett, p. 57. 77Garnett, pp. 87-88. 78Garnett, p. 93. Garnett, p. 56. Garnett, p. 917. Garnett, p. 143. Garnett, p. 163. H. V. Morton, Blue Days at Sea and Other Essays 1932] (London: Metheun, 1935), p. 77. " du Maurier, p. 7. " du Maurier, P. 383. '6 du Maurier, p. 211. 87du Maurier, p. 315. ' Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (London: Arrow, 1994), pp. 221-222. du Maurier, p. 47. du Maurier, p. 37. du Maurier, p. 7. du Maurier, p. 251. du Maurier, p. 256. ' du Maurier, p. 283. '5 du Mauricr, p. 284. " du Maurier, p.,98. ' du Maurier, p.-296. 144

CHAPTER FIVE

WOMEN AND EARTH

To dig I cannot, to beg I am ashamed.

When Wart, the boy hero of ne Sword in the Stone, is in the badger's earth completing his educationhe is told that 'the true end of philosophy' is 'to dig, and to ' love your home.' It is woman's exclusion from 'digging' - and the resultant exclusionfrom national identity - that Sheila Cousinsobliquely refers to in the title of her bannedbook about prostitution, To Beg I am Ashamed.' Although the quotation primarily signalsan economicrelation, the use of this biblical referencecan also be interpretedto meanthat sincewomen are not allowed a 'digging' version of national identity, they will not beg for it, but will insteadfind anothersubjectivity to suit their purposes- in this casethat of a prostitute, an occupationwhich allows economic autonomy.The presentchapter examines literary texts which attemptto inscribe the difficult national relationshipbetween women and earth. Comparedto the number of texts which routinely configure men, nation and earth, there is a relative paucity of thosewhich deal with women-in-earth. However, the texts 1hatdo include this figure of a woman-in-earthutilise it to representmonstrosity, disorder and dismembering, ratherthan the orderedre-membering that the man-in-earthrepresents to national imaginings.

A novel publishedprior to the Great War, Bram Stoker's The Lair of the White Worm (1911), representsa woman-in-earth as monstrous.Like The Wind

in the Willows (1908), which madeavailable the trope of the man-in-earth,The Lair

of the White Worm, which dealt with English national and colonial identity before the

GreatWar, madeavailable that of the woman-in-earth.Lady Arabella March, the

shape-shiftingwoman who can changeinto the White Worm of the title, lives in a

housein Diana's Grove. Her crimes and monstrosity appearto lie in the fact of her

womanhood,and the possibility that her femininity might overwhelm masculinity. In

many ways, sheis a 'good' Englishwoman, in that she doesnot break with white 145 racial identity. Meeting a neighbourreturning from Africa, Lady Arabella is recognisedas a creatureof the swamp by the neighbour's African servant,Oolanga.

Although they are similarly abject, in that they crossthe boundariesof what constitutesthe humanby being formulated as both human and inhuman, human and animal, Lady Arabella doesnot team up with him as anotherswamp creature, but kills him. When he declareshis love for her, she laughs:

Lady Arabella was not usually a humorousperson, but no man or woman of the white race could have checkedthe laughter which rose spontaneouslyto hdr lips. The circumstanceswere too grotesque,the contrasttoo violent, for subduedmirth. The man a debasedand primitive specimenand of an ugliness which was siTply devilish; the woman of high degree,beautiful, accomplished.4

Oolanga'smaster gives her permissionto kill him, since 'the law doesn't concern itself much about deadnegroes. 5

When it becomesclear to her neighbours,and in particular Adam, that the White Worm herself must be killed, Adam's problem in carrying this-out is one of legality.

There were all sortsof legal cruxesto be thought out, not only regardingthe taking of life, even of a monstrosity in human form, but also of property. Lady Arabella, be she woman or snakeor devil, owned the ground she moved in, accordingto British law, and the law isjealous and swift to avengewrongs done within its ken.

Propertyownership, and the law concerningit, has more national importancethan a woman's life. It is hard to discover precisely what her ostensiblecrime is that

deservesthe deathpenalty. Although a property-ownerherself, the men of the

neighbourhoodseem to think that sheuses her feminine attractionsunfairly to entice

men into marriagein order to get their money. In other contexts,this is hardly a capital

crime. Sheis also suspectedof causingvarious strangegoings-on in the district, such

as sheep-worrying and wounding, the disappearanceof somepeople, and the deathof

a child. What seemsmore to irk the neighboursis that she is a woman, and when in

earth sheis at the height of her powers.' Her crime might be that evenwhen married

shewas uncontrollable, and that her own woman's body is foul. Perhapsher

manifestationas the White Worm is too phallic, too much occupyingmen's space.As

the phallic White Worm, sheenters a hole in the ground,and doesnot differentiate 146 herselfclearly enoughfrom masculinity in order to maintain her feminine difference.

As such,she could representthe awesomeparthenogenetic mother who can reproduce without the needof the male. Her male neighbours"stategy in the battle againsther is:

as we have to protect ourselvesand othersagainstfeminine nature, our strong game

will be to play our masculineagainst her feminine.' [My italics] ' To fight her is to

feminise her; to bring out her femininity, which can be overcomeby masculinity, is

their object. 0

Her housestands above a seriesof undergroundrooms, in the middle

of which is a deepwell-hole and it is through this hole that the Worm/Lady is reputed

to come and go. The descriptionof the well-hole seemsto speakto masculine

anxietiesabout woman's bodies,particularly anxietiesabout the vagina as an

illimitable, devouring space- perhapslike the chasmor abyssprevious writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, feared.' This 'black orifice' is surroundedby an 'extremely for '[qjueer [Ilike bilge slippery"' floor, notable the smell ... or a rank swamp' which arisesfrom it. " The smell makesAdam nauseous,and he:

Comparedit with all the noxious experienceshe had ever had - the drainageof war hospitals,of slaughterhouses;the refuse of dissecting rooms. None of thesewas like it, though it had somethingof them all, with, added,the sournessof chemical wasteand the poisonouseffluvium of the bilhc of a water-loggedship whereona multitude of rats had beendrowned.

Adam's solution to the problem of the Lady[Worin is to obtain masteryover her by

plugging the hole in earth.His reticenceto act againstthe property of another,no

matter how vile they may be, has a happy outcome.Lady Arabella puts the houseup

for sale,which enablesAdam to buy it, and as the rightful owner he feels free to plug

the hole. Gatheringmountains of. sand,he supervisesa group of workmen to fill it

with sandand dynamite.The hole, the Worm and Lady Arabella are so destroyedin

the resultantexplosion that there is no hope of her resurrection.Proper

heterosexuality,where men are men and women are women, triumph as the text ends

with Adam and his new bride departingon honeymoon.In order that heterosexuality

should be ensured,this woman in earth has had to be destroyed. 147

A post-GreatWar novel which also dealswith the relationsbetween earth and heterosexualityis E. M. Forster's A Passageto India, which utilises many of the themesfound in other works which deal with men-in-earth." This text, though,deals with the consequencesof women going to earth, and its motivating force is heterosexualityand its failure. Adela Quested.arrives in colonial India to seeif it would be possiblefor her to marry Ronny Heaslop. However, the consequencesof her going to earthin the Marabar Cavesmake that marriagean impossibility. The trip that Adela and Ronnie Heaslop',s mother, Mrs Moore, take to thesecaves by invitation of Dr. Aziz leadsto the accusationthat Aziz has rapedAdela. Ratherthan the social order that men-in-earthseem to produce,the entry of thesetwo women into the caves provokesrioting and civil unrest,as the Indian communities and English colonisers divide along racial lines over the questionof Aziz's innocenceor guilt.

As the group watchesdawn come over the Marabar I-Iills, the failure of sunriseto be magnificent is understoodthrough a metaphorof failed heterosexual marriage:

They awaitedthe miracle. But at the suprememoment, when night should have died and day lived, nothing occurred.It was as if virtue had failed in the celestialfount. The huesin the eastdecayed, the hills seemeddimmer though in fact better lit, and a profound disappointmententered with the morning breeze.Why, when the chamberwas prepared,did the bridegroom not enter with trumpetsand shawms,as humanity expects?The sun rose without splendour."

Part of the problem with the Indian city of Chandrapore,where the protagonistslive, is that it defiesexpectation, being devoid of culture and meaning:

There is no painting and scarcelyany carving in the bazaars.The very wood seemsmade of mud,,the inhabitantsof mud moving. So abased,so monotonousis everything that meetsthe eye, that when the Gangescomes down it might be expectedto wash the excrescenceback into the soil. Houses do fall, peopleare drowhedand left rotting, but the generaloutline of the town persists,swelling here, shrinking there, like somelow but indestructible form of life. [My italics]"

Chandraporebears a resemblanceto the monotonetrenches and their 'muddy' inhabitantswho live side by side with rotting corpses:a world that has renderedall human culture meaningless.Unlike the soldier of Rupert Brookes's poem, whose body consignedto earth can rendermeaning and order to that earth through its 148 presenceand make that foreign earth 'forever England', the women in this text cannot confer national order and meaning on this disordered,Indian, foreign earth.

The central moment is Adela and Mrs Moore's entry into the cavesof the MarabarHills. This earth is both humanisedand ferninised.The hills are formed where 'a group of fists and fingers are thrust up through the soil. ' " Outside

Chandrapore,when travelling toward the hills, the Englishwomennotice that:

Life went on as usual, but had no consequences,that is to say, soundsdid not echo or thoughtsdevelop. Everything seemedcut off at its root, and therefore infected with illusion. For instance,there were somemounds by the edgeof the ttiack,low, serrated,and touchedwith whitewash.What were these mounds- graves,breasts of the goddessParvati? The villagers beneathgave both replies. [My italics] 17

Without a rooting in soil, meaningis indeterminate.Nonetheless, this soil, like

English soil, provokesthe common questionas to whether the earth is tomb or nurturing womb (in the form of Parvati's breasts),and whether resurrectionmight come from earth.However, the Marabar Cavesthemselves are nothing: 'Nothing, nothing attachesto them', the readeris told, '[n]othing is inside them, they were

sealedup before the creationof pestilenceor treasure;if mankind grew curious and

excavated,nothing, nothing would be addedto the sum of good or evil. ' " For a

place which is 'nothing', it seemsa paradoxthat the women's visit should have such a

profound effect on all local society.

However, although the place is nothing, it is at the sametime

something%

There is little to see,and no eye to seeit, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes,and strikes a match. Immediately anotherflame risesin the depthsof the rock and moves toward the surfacelike an imprisoned spirit: the walls of the circular chamberhave beenmost marvellously polished.The two flames approachand strive to unite, but cannot,because one of them breathesair, the other stone.A miffor inlaid with lovely colours divides the lovers, delicate starsof pink and grey interpose,exquisite nebulae,shadings fainter than the tail of a comet,or the midday moon, all the evanescentlife of the granite,only here visible. Fists and fingers thrust above the advancingsoil - here at last is their skin, finer than any covering acquiredby the animals, smootherthan windlesswater, more voluptuousthan love. The radianceincreases, the flames touch one another,kiss, expire. The cave is dark again, like all the caves.

In thesecaves, it is a heterosexualrelation, figured through the union of difference in lovers, that is brought by air-flame and stone-flame about the male visitor strikinge) a

lb 149 match.It is a fleeting heterosexuality,one that cannotlast, but can only be re-triggered by the arTivalof the next masculinevisitor. The feminine visitor has a pathetically different effect. In this case,'the striking of i match startsa little worm coiling, which is too small to completea circle'. '0 The first cave they visit brings Mrs Moore to the point of madnessbecause of the 'terrifying echo' " which:

Beganin someindescribable way to undermineher hold on life. Coming at a moment when shechanced to be fatigued, it had managedto murmur, 'Pathos, piety, courage- they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.' If one had spokenvileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have beenthe same- 'ou-boum'. This is a very different effect from the revelation of somethingwhich exceedsthe voluptuouslove the male visitor produces.It is so distressingto Mrs Moore that she decidesto forgo the visit to a secondcave, sendingAdela in with Aziz and a guide.

As they walk up to the caves,Adela's mind is on her forthcoming marriage,and whether shecan make a satisfactoryone without love. Without thinking about the implications,.she asks Aziz how many wives he has.The questionappals and shockshim, so Aziz plungesinto a cave to recover his equilibrium. Adela, too, goesinto the cave, and a mysteriousmuddle follows. Entry into the caves,far from uniting them, divides them. Man and woman do not meet there,but the experience leadsto Adela running to a woman, and Aziz running to his friend Mr Fielding.

Insteadof entry to earth producing heterosexuality,it leadsthe couple, momentarily, to their own sex.Adela seemsto believe that Aziz has attackedher in the cave,and he is arrestedfor 'insulting' her. Believing in Azizs innocence,Fielding 'foresaw that

besidesbeing a tragedy,there would be a muddle' arising from the arrest." Adela's

going to earth in the cave, insteadof producing order, makesthing 'muddy'. Her

body cannotproduce the sort of order which re-membersthe masculinebody

destroyedin battlefield mud, but insteadonly producesmore disorderedand uncertain boundaries.

Relationsbetween people which have beenupset in the courseof the

arrest,trial and releaseof Aziz, are only finally repairedyears later in the third part of

the text, when Aziz hasleft British India for an Indian stateand where Fielding and 150 his wife visit him. Central to this is the Hindu festival of the birth of Shri Khrisna, and a display at the hour of his birth:

Three minutesbefore it was due, a Brahman brought forth a model of the village of Gokal (the Bethlehemin that nebulousstory ) and placedit in front of the altar. The model was on a wooden tray about a yard square;it was of clay, and was gaily blue and white with streamersand paint. [My italics] "

As Fielding and Aziz attempt a rapprochement,the god/child Khrisna is bom from this clay. However, as long as the earth they are on doesnot have its own national identity, the pair are unableto be friends while India is still colonised:the earthitself divides them, 'sending up rocks' to make them swerve apart. " Part of the problem with making meaningthrough this earth is that it has no prior national identity. The Eng barely their because combinationof glishwomen,who can represent own nation of their gender,and an earth which has no identity and can only provide nebulous literature, leadsto disorder. But if women in foreign earth cannotmake orderedsocial

meaning,what of women who try to go into English earth? Mary Webb's Gone To Earth was written during the Great War,

publi shedin 1917,and was characterisedby her biographer,Gladys Mary Coles, as

one of the most expressiveexamples of a literary art which showed'the tragic spirit of

thosewar yearswhen multitudes, slaughtered,were indeed "gone to eartW1.926

Webb's brotherswere in the trenches,and shewas disconcertedby her mother's

belief that the trencheswould protect them from harm. A naturemystic, and more of a

pantheistthan a xtian, Mary Webb wrote rural novels basedin Shropshire.Although

she died in 1927,Gone to Earth was in print during most of the interwar period,

partly due to StanleyBaldwin's interventions.As Prime Minister, Baldwin's views

were widely published,and he had already eulogisedauthentic England as rural.

Speakingat the Annual Dinner of the Royal Society of St Georgein 1924,he argued:

'[t]o me, England is the country, and the country is England', and his speech,in print

in both the 1920sand the 1930s,carried on to describethis England: "

The soundsof England,the tinkle of the hammero; the anvil in the country smithy, the comcrakeon a dewy morning, the soundof the scytheagainst the whetstone,and the sight of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that hasbeen seen in England since England"wasa land, and may be seen in England long after the Empire has perishedand every works in England has 151

ceasedto function, for-centuriesthe one eternal sight of England.The wild anemonesin the woods in April, the last load of hay being drawn down a lane as the twilight comeson, when you can scarcelydistinguish the figures of the horsesas they take it home to the farm, and above all, most subtle, most penetratingand most moving, the smell of wood smoke coming up in an autumnevening, or the smell of the scutchfires: that wood smokethat our ancestors,tens of thousandsof years ago, must have caught on the air when they were coming home.... "

Webb's rural writings appealedto Baldwin's notion of an authenticEngland. His secretaryhad given him Webb's PreciousBane for holiday reading, and Baldwin later wrote the introduction to its 1928 edition. 29However, his more powerful promotion of her novels was in a speechhe was invited to give to the Royal Literary

Fund Society in 1928.He praisedher work as 'of absolutely first-class quality', and quotedJ. M. Barrie's and John Buchan's opinions that Mary Webb was 'one of the three best writers of English today'."' His tribute appearedin newspapersthe following day, and ensuredthat all her novels remainedin print and that the public read her work.

Mary Webb wrote with a belief that:

The hero of a country story must be instinct [sic] with the countryside: it is in his very bones. So it must always be in a novel that attempts the interpretation of earth through character. For the dwellers in mountain and forest are under this burden, that they must unconsciously express those dumb masses and forces that have no other voice but theirs. No novel of the countryside can attain greatness unless it unij7es its character with the earth, half frustrate, half triumphal. [My itali4jS] 31

Her friend, the novelist and Member of Parliament,John Buchan,found that Gone to

Earih provoked a strong response'at a time when everything that concernedthe soil of England seemedprecious'? ' In his 1928introduction to Goneto Earth, Buchan wrote that the central character,Hazel Woodus, 'is at once the offspring of the mysteriouslandscape and the interpretationof it. ' " If sheis the interpretationof this particularly English landscape,it is a matter of interestthat the narrativekills her off while still not much more than a girl. Her age and genderseem to disallow her as an interpreterof the English landscapeand the earth appearsto have no spacefor her. As a young woman who is the quarry of men, the quarry of earth cannotoffer her safety: shewill always be a huntedobject. If Hazel dreadsthe quarry, it could be becauseof the ambiguity presentin the term, representingas it doesboth a place dug out of earth 152 as well as the object of the hunt. Ironically, Webb's unification of her characterwith the earth is frustratedrather than triumphant, for, although her heroine's countryside is metaphoricallyin her bones,she is not a man/heroand thereforebecomes tragic ratherthan ultimately heroic in the country.

The text dealswith the story of a young and free girl's movementinto womanhoodand heterosexuality,whilst repudiating the laws of man in favour of a morality which believesin the protection of all living things. Her most constant companionis a little fox-cub, Foxy, with whom she has her deepestrelationship. The themeof the possibility of Hazel Woodus's sexualfreedom under patriarchallaw is entangledwith the questionof fox hunting, Webb herself had grown up in a hunting family: the terrible noise the houndsmade at their meal-timescould be heardin her house,and storieswere told of the mythical Black Huntsmanand legendaryphantom houndscrossing the countrysideat night in searchof their prey. Like many women of her time, shefound hunting repugnant. Although the text attackshunting, in fact neither the fox nor the heroinereach earth. The narrative endswith the deathof both

Hazel and Foxy. Discovering that Foxy has escapedfrom safety while the Hunt is out, the pregnantHazel attemptsto find and rescueFoxy before the Hunt finds her.

However, being pregnant,Hazel cannot run.as fast as she needs,and holding the struggling cub in her arms shedoes not reachthe safety of earth before the houndsrip both her heterosexual,pregnant body and Foxy apart, and presumablyeat them. The ironic cry goesup: 'Gone to earth ! Gone to earth!'. " These last words of the narrativedo not meansafety in earthhas beenreached: earth hereis a metaphorfor death,and there is no resurrection.It seemsthat the grammarof the nation cannot female, body in accommodatethe presenceof a matemal earth. ý Just as The Lair of the White Worm and Goneto Earth concern themselveswith women's potential uncontrollability, even in marriage,David

Garnett's Lady Into Fox dealswith the particular problem posedby a married woman, Silvia Fox, gone feral. This tongue-in-cheektale of a woman turned vixen won both the JamesTait Black Memorial Prize and the HawthomdenPrize. The 153 woman as fox is lesstrustworthy than a dog, and smells bad. A partial solution to her

'rank odour' is arrived at through making her eat quantities of grapes." Her husband engagesin the task of trying to prevent her complete transformationto foxiness,and at first they managea life which resemblesthat of any other married couple, apartfrom the fact that his wife. is a fox in woman's clothes. He keepsher indoors, for fear that the Hunt will kill her, but she becomesmore fox-like, hunting and eating raw animals, and communicatingless with language.She desiresthe freedom of the open air, as he beginsto fear shewill contaminatehim and turn him into a beastalso. If she contaminateshim, all culture and civilisation will be'lost to the country-housethey inhabit. He allows her into a walled garden,but he discoversshe has dug a hole in the ground under the wall and is attemptingto go to earth. He pulls her out of the hole in the ground and fills it with stonesto prevent her re-entry. Nonetheless,she escapes him, and goeswild in the countryside,having a family of cubs with anotherfox. He finds her earth and becomesa sort of father to her cubs.This effects a resurrectionfor him, becausehaving felt hopelessabout his married life, he finds new meaningin it when his vixen/wife producesher cubs out of earth fýr him. However, the peaceful time the fox/woman-in-earthenjoys is short: the hunting seasonreturns. In a similar ending to that of GoneTo Earth, the vixen-wife leaps into her husband'sarms and both are mauled by the hounds.The wife dies but the husbandrecovers. Femininity, again, doesnot reach the safetyof earth. In 7he Radical Twenties:Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture -

John Lucas looks at the position of women in the after the Great War and maintains that few men in the period felt comfortablewith the new political powerswomen had gainedthrough enfranchisement,and that '[a] deepanxiety underlies or is to be found in much writing by men during this period, and one of the ways it showsis in the

depiction of women gone feral. "' Characterisingmen's writing about women as

showing them as feral when not familial, he arguesthat:

Silvia Fox gains her freedom and is eventually killed by hounds,hunted to her deathlike Hazel Woodus.But there is a difference. Garnett's tale suggeststhat lady-into-fox leadsinevitably to tragedy. Webb's novel, on the other hand, makesplain that Hazel's deathcomes about becausemen won't grant her her 154

freedom.Contented domesticity would in both caseshave avertedtragedy; but Goneto Earth doesat least outline how such domesticity is a kind of prison cage.Lady into Fox implies that the real prison cageis the feral naturein which women are trapped and from which they perhapscan't be freed, no matter how solicitous their menfolk happento be. '.'

How this 'contenteddomesticity' that Lucas suggestwould avert tragedycould be achievedis difficult to ascertainfrom his account.To whose 'contenteddomesticity' doeshe refer - men's or women's? Women are precludedfrom domesticcontentment, either on accountof their feral natureor becausedomesticity can never be equatedwith contentment.Perhaps it is men's contentmenthe refers to, and this could, presumably then, only ever be achievedwithout. the presenceof women. Nonetheless,as Lucas says,both texts sharea common discussionabout women and domesticlife.

It is possiblethat David Garnett's story owed somethingtO'Gone To

&ulh. David Garnett's father, Edward, was familiar with Mary Webb's work as publisher'sreader for JonathanCape. Both texts have similar thematic content: the fox as metaphorfor women's sexuality that is beyond the control of church or state, illegitimate pregnancyand birth, a distinction betweenthe civilised houseand garden with wild woods lying beyond, the hunt as a ghostly, threateningpresence, and ultimately the impossibility of woman-in-earth. However, thesetexts are not so similar as to renderLady Into Fox nothing but a parody of Gone To Earth. Lady Into

Fox is improbably fantastic and witty, whereasGone To Earth is more realistic and devoid of humour. Lucas explains the use of fantasy by Garnett as a way of not displeasingVirginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, since he could not publicly promote the view that the 'husbandwas opposedby a wife whose savage I unreasonablenessalone explained her desire for freedom. ' " Fantasy allows Garnett to 'register [his] claim to be a modem; and also it allows for the expression and probing of anxieties which in any other form would stand exposed as decidedly unmodem. ' 39

D. H. Lawrence's The Fox also probesanxieties about the relation

betweenwomen and earth.What if women should take over controlling earth's

fertility? In this short story, Lawrence suggeststhat the earth will only flourish where 155 thereis masculinity and heterosexuality,'and in consequencerenders an exclusively feminine relationshipto earth barren.The two women, March and Banford, run their smallholdingwithout the presenceof a man in what is hinted at as a lesbian relationship.On this land nothing flourishes: henswill not lay; the heifers run away; a fox keepstaking the chickens.This continuesuntil a soldier, Henry, returnsfrom the

war and providesa masculinecounterforce on the farm. One of his first statementsto

the women is that '[tlhere wants a man about the place'ý' The fox, whose arrival has

awakenedMarch's heterosexualdesire, becomes subsumed within the soldier through

their sharedmesmeric masculinity. Henry's hunting of the fox is paralleledby his

pursuit of March, but the relationship betweenBanford and March standsas a barrier

to Henry and March's marriage.Banford meetsa violent deathas the tree felled by

Henry fells her. Despite its indeterminateending, suspeildedbetween the small

holding and the colonies,with March and Henry sitting on a cliff gazing out to sea

thinking of their imminentmOveto Canada,the authorial voice makesclear that farming together fertility, women 0 cannotmake or meaning. Although neither March nor Banford attemptto go to earthin The Fox,

the useof the trope of the fox, as in previous narrativesin which-womenattempt to go

to earth, is striking. This suggestsa link betweenfox-hunting and a genderednational

identity. Both E. M. Delafield's 7he Diary ofa Provincial Lady and Jan Struther's

Mrs Miniver presenthunting as a routine topic of conversationwhich women tried to

avoid. Presumably,given the natureof thesesatirical piecesof writing, their readers

recognisedthemselves and their social activities in them, otherwisethe satirewould

not have worked. The rurally-basedprovincial lady, for instance,writes: lunch February 24th. - Robert and I with our Member and his wife. I sit next elderly gentleman who talks about stag-hunting and tells me that there is Nothing Cruel about it. The Stag likes it, and it is an honest, healthy, thoroughly English form of sport. I say Yes, as anything else would be a breath... 41 waste of . Hunting was not only a topic of rural conversation.,The Londoner, Mrs Miniver, was

also drawn into such discussions:

'And what,' said the Colonel, turning to Mrs Miniver, 'is your opinion of all theseblood sportsT 156

'I think they are indefensible, but irresistible,' she answered.She had found through long experiencethat this remark usually closedthe subject pretty quickly. It left very little to be said.

It is men in thesesatires who defend hunting as a national sport, but this is, perhaps, not surprisinggiven the way hunting is usedas a method for boys to becomenational men. Siegfried Sassoon'sMemoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man relatesthe entry into adult masculinity, through fox-hunting, of a young upper-classboy. " His national and masculineidentity is formed in opposition to the floralised, fussy interior of his aunt's houseand is supportedby his working-class groom who introduceshim to the

powersof hunting. Here, the Hunt has mastery over the rural landscape,riding

whereverit desiresin a ritual display of its English identity. Hunting can, indeed,be

seenas a performanceof Englishnessby the way it enactsgendered national relations.

Upper-classmen have domination over the rural, and chasetheir ferninisedquarry to

preventthe quarry from going to earth.The locational identity offered to masculinity

in earthis not similarly offered for femininity.

Two examplesof lesbian-authorednarratives which attemptto inscribe i a woman-in-earthare Sylvia TownsendWarner's Lolly Willowes or the Loving

Huntsman and Radclyffe Hall's short story, Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. In Warner's

text, the huntsmanis not a figure who pursueswomen for marriage, and in this way

shereverses the trope of the hunt Mary Webb useswhich makeswomen its object or

quarry." How doesthe Englishwoman,Lolly Willowes, go to earth, given that it

appearsthis spaceis reservedfor masculinity under the grammarof the nation?This is

a text that attemptsto lesbianiseEnglishness by undoing the relationsof male

homosocialitywhich are sanctionedby a xtian god, causingthe text to turn to Satanic

relations in order to inscribe lesbian desire.` If women officially derive Englishness

through heterosexuality,then the English lesbian is an oxymoron. How can the

nationally incoherent figure of the lesbianbe inscribed?How doesthe text go about

disturbing Englishnessenough to begin to inscribe anothersubjectivity for women

and lesbian desire?I would like to suggestthree main ways in which Lolly Willowes

disruptsEnglishness. Firstly, in terms of form': the plot configurations and 157 reconfigurationsundo the male homosocialityof Englishnesswhich supportsthe constructionof the Englishwoman'sheterosexual subjectivity. Secondly,in terms of characterization:authentically rural, homogeneousEnglishness is disruptedto make the village full of witches, warlocks and gender-bendingSatanists. Thirdly, in terms of locational politics: the text refusesto locate Englishnessin geographicalplace, but insteadlocates it in cultural value and in language.

Terry Castle summarisesEve Kosofsky Sedgwick's thesisfrom

BetweenMen: English Literature and Male HomosocialDesire thus: 46

Justas patriarchalculture hastraditionally beenorganized around a ritualized 'traffic' in women - the legal, economic,religious, and sexual exchangeof women betweenmen (as in the cherishedinstitutions of heterosexuallove and marriage)- so the fictions producedwithin patriarchalculture have tendedto mimic, or represent,the sametriangular structure.47

Kinship systemslie in an exchangeof women betweenmen, with marriage as the

-mostbasic form of gift exchange.Women are the gift, transactedbetween the men who give and take them, so that women are a conduit for a relationship betweenmen, rather than a partnerto it. So if women belong to men, this becomes.Laura Willowes's I problem. How can she disposeof herself within an EnglishC. kinship systemin which, on the deathof her father, she is passedbetween brothers, and in which even her young nephewbelieves he has the right to occupy the private spaceshe carves out for herselfin the village of GreatMop?

Formally, the text is split into three parts.The first is concernedwith

Laura Willowes's childhood and young adulthoodin the Dorset countryside.As her father's housekeeperin their country-house,Lady Place,he has no desireto give her away in marriagebecause her companyis convenientto him. When he dies, sheis disposedof betweenher brothers,as much a piece of family property as the furniture.

Moving to London to live with one brother's family to help with their girl children,

sheresists family attemptsto marry her off. At this point, sheresists marriage,, but not

the homosocialtriangle in which one brother gives her to the other.

The secondpart of the text is concernedwith Laura's attemptto

disposeof her own life as an older woman spinster,whereby it is through privacy M rather than political power that she seeksto escapeher oppressionas a woman. When her niecesare grown, she begins to live a secretlife in London and, significandy, through her senseof smell, which is sensualyet invisible to any onlooker, she experiencesan epiphanywhilst buying chrysanthemums.At this moment, her thoughtsand desiresturn not to men, but to women as occupying a glorious space where shemight find her freedom:

Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pearsin syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages.She thought of the woman who had filled thosejars and fastenedon the bladders.Perhaps the greengrocer'smother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard,rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinnedplums, a lean wiry old woman, standingwith upstretchedarms among her fruit treesas though shewere a tree herself, growing out of the long grass,with arms stretchedout like branches. It grew darker and darker; still sheworked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughsone after the otherý'

It is at this point that lesbiandesire begins to be inscribed.The shift in Laura's

imagination in which the woman working on the tree becomesa tree, suggeststhat the

quivering boughswhich the old woman strips could be anotherwoman. Against all

convention,an older woman is describedas beautiful, and a different erotic economy

is offered in which one woman views and touchesanother with pleasure.Out of this

imaginary scene,Laura decidesto move to the country on her own in order to know,

or become,this woman. In this, she attemptsto reconfigure the triangular

relationshipsin her life by putting herself in central place, and refusing men the power

to disposeof her. In Great Mop, shemakes a relationship with anotherwoman (her

landlady, Mrs Leak) central. Spendinglong days wandering through the countryside

and thinking back over the miserablelife shehas led, sheexperiences another great

changeby smelling cowslips. Through their scent,all her misery is released,and she

decidesthat her family is not to blame for the oppressivelife shehas lived and that:

If shewere to start forgiving sheneeds must forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe,the Old Testament,great-great aunt Salome and her prayer book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilisation. "

All thesethings are implicated in her oppressionas an Englishwoman.However, even

in GreatMop shecannot escape the patriarchalfamilý, as the secondpart of the novel 159 endswith the news that her nephew,Titus, sole male heir to Lady Place,has decided to come and live in the village with her.

The third part of the novel is concernedwith Laura's attemptto reconfigureher relationshipsby getting rid of Titus with the help of Satan.Titus has re-madea triangular relationshipby inserting himself betweenLaura and Mrs Leak.

This spoils both Laura's relationship with Mrs Leak, who will no longer talk to her, and her relationshipwith the land, as the 'spirit of the place' withdraws from her. To secureher freedom,all social relationshave to be shakenup, and the witches'

Sabbath,to which Mrs Leak finally invites Laura, is central to this. All classesfrom the village participatein a ritual in which the rules of English polite behaviourare jettisoned; heterosexualityalso no longer applies, since it doesnot matter whether one's partneris male or female, upper or lower class.Laura, who has never enjoyed dancingat County Balls with upper-classmen, finds it thrilling to dancewith a lower- classwoman. This rejection of heterosexualityalso appearsto lead to a rejection of classdistinctions:

Laura liked dancingwith Emily; the pasty faced and anaernicyoung slattern whom shehad seendawdling about the village dancedwith a fervour that annihilatedevery misgiving. They whirled faster and faster,fused togetherlike two sunsthat whirl and blaze in a single destruction.A strandof red hair came undoneand brushedacross Laura's face. The contact made her tingle from headto foot. She shut her eyesand dived into obliviousness- with Emily as a partnershe could danceuntil the gunpowderran out of the heelsof her boots."

Emily and Mrs Leak presentLaura to someonewhom shebelieves to be Satan.These two women give her as if a gift exchangein which they bond as women witches.This representsa reversalof the male homosocialbonding in which

Laura is given as a gift betweenbrothers. Moreover, this 'Satan' is neither particularly masculinenor English, even though he sharessimilarities with the old English god,

Herne the Hunter. At first glance,Laura thinks he looks like a Chinamanin his mask,

and his movementssuggest a certaineffeminacy:

Mincing like a girl, the maskedyoung man approachedher, and as he approachedthe othersdrew back and left her alone.With secretiveand undulating movementshe cameto her sideý' 160

However, his touch is repugnantto her, unlike the touch of Emily, and she leavesthe

Sabbath.After all the social relations of Englishnesshave beendisturbed, Satan helps

Laura to get rid of Titus, and the third part endswith the formation of a new triangular relationshipbetween Mrs Leak, Laura and Satan.All the old male homosocial relationsare also destroyed.So the first way in which lesbian desirebegins to be inscribedis through the destructionof English relations of male homosociality, so that

Laura and Emily can whirl and blaze into obliviousnesstogether, and women can bond with one another.The secondway that Englishnessis disturbed enoughto write the figure of the lesbianis through a refusal of dominant ideas of the rural as authenticallyEnglish. This is central to my third point: that the text refusesto locate

Englishnessin place,but insteadlocates it in language. Although the text doesnot use experimentallanguage, Laura's languagedoes shift, and the text is wry on the subject of naming and definition. The village namedGreat Mop, with all its connotationsof liquidly messy,feminine, domesticwork, is valorised abovethe genteelcountry-house, Lady, Place. In Great

Mop, a woman may becomegod-like: the living-room fire castsshadows so that

'[w1hen Mrs Leak smoothedher apron the shadowsolemnified the gestureas though

shewere moulding an universe'. " In Lady Place, a woman countsfor very little, unlessshe is ensuringpatriarchal inheritance through sons:here, sheis placed as a

'lady'. As a non-reproductivespinster, Laura cannot inherit that version of England.

But Laura is two people,in that the -narratorand Satancall her 'Laura', whereasher family refer to her as 'Lolly'. Thesetwo referentsare productive of different

subjectivitiesand in this way 'when Laura went to London she left Laura behind and

enteredinto a stateof Aunt Lolly'. However, the text makesclear that simple re-

naming will not achievefreedom for women, nor allow the lesbian to be 'written'.

Languagedoes not necessarilycorrespond to woman's reality, and the map and guide

book which haveled Laura to GreatMop are ultimately uselessto her in producing

knowledgeof the village. Shethrows them down a well in order to apprehendthe

village directly without any mediation through language.For Laura, it is notjust the 162

The goodsyard at Paddington,for instance- a savageplace! as holy and enchantedas it had ever been.Not one of thosemonuments and tinkerings of all the neat humannest-boxes in rows, Balham.and Fulham and the Cromwell Road - he saw through them, they went flop like cardhouses,the bricks were earth again,and the steel girders burrowed shrieking into the veins of the earth, and the deadtimber was restoredto the ghostly groves."

Englishnessis not locatedin a mythical countryside,but in the cultural relations played out through languageand discourse.Laura's salvation, and the possibility of inscribing lesbiandesire, thus lies in reconfiguring that which the nation values.In this way, Englishnessis destroyed,since it dependsfor its existenceon empire,

church,state, the architect of Apsley Terrace, and heterosexuality.By the end of the

novel, the nation is deadfor Laura, becauseit literally has no place, neither

geogýaphicallynor in the languagesystem. Being older than the nation, Satanis

witnessto this:

His memory was too long, too retentive; there was no appeasingits witness, no hoodwinking it with the present;and that was why at one stageof civilisation peoplesaid he was the embodimentof all evil, and then a little later on that he didn't exist. 59

Satanhas helped Laura to demolish the tropesof the virile nation of the'

kind we have seencelebrated by Morton, byacknowledging her as a human subject

with agency.Morton's women are not subj ects,but objects.The fact that a non-

reproductiveolder woman is valuable disruptshis grammarof the nation. As the Cromwell Road houses'go flop' when Satansees through them, so, too, do the

gender,class and race distinctions of Morton's England. There is no locating of the

countrysideas 'authentically English', and possessedby men becausewomen want

the urban for shopping.In fact, when Christmascomes, Laura finds the few things

availablein the village shopquite adequateas presents.Morton's valorisation of the

countrysideis underminedby Satan'svision, which helps Laura to understandthe city

as correspondinglyholy. Unlike Morton, Satanis uninterestedin regulating women;

he is indifferent to what Laura might do. She is neither obliged to maintain classand

race distinctions,nor to act heterosexuallyto pleasehim. Satan'searth is ungendered,

and his relationship to it non-possessive.This refusal of a masculinepossession of a

feminised earth, suchas Morton utilises, has correspondingeffects for women in this 163

Satanicworld-view. Divorcing national earth from femininity entailsa concomitant dissociationof women from conventional national and heterosexual'femininity'. This

Satancan be queerly imagined.At the village Sabbath,he ritually appearsin the form of a maskedhuman man, and the villagers are happy to conceiveof him as a mincing

Chinaman.But he is not the real Satan,only a performanceof him. The real Satanis far behind the mask, appearingto Laura variously in the guise of gamekeeper,

gardenerand gravekeeper,but still queerly refusingany categorisation.

By the end of Warner's text, the nation is deadfor Laura through

Satan'shelp. The narrative endswith her deciding to 'go to earth' and sleepin a ditch,

undisturbedby Satan,in the context of 'his satisfied but profoundly indifferent

ownership'. " Laura hasachieved this relation to earth by both refusing national

identification as an Englishwoman,by destroying the heterosexualgrammar of the

nation so that it no longer exists,and by becoming lesbian.

In Radclyffe Hall', s Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself, written in 1926, a

different is to the to to 61 Miss Ogilvy, textual move made enable woman go earth . who has always felt he rself to be 'queer', is helped by the war to become less queer.

Going to the capital to volunteer for the war effort, she finds herself 'quite at her ease,

for many another of her kind was in London doing excellent work for the nation. 9 62

The narrative starts as Miss Ogilvy's ambulance unit is being dismantled in Calais at

the end of the war. But if the war helped her to find herself, with her 'queer'

capabilities being nationally recognised, its end means a loss of self. As she returns to

London on the Dover train, '[t1he soft English landscape sped smoothly past: small

homesteads, small churches, small pastures, small lanes, with small hedges; all small

like England itself, all small like Miss Ogilvy's future. ' 63Whereas for Morton,

England only becomes small under the threat of the Second World War, for Miss

Ogilvy, peace means smallness. Her sisters try to persuade her to grow her cropped

hair because it would please the vicar and make her less odd in a 'small place'. 6' Like

many a returning soldier, she finds it hard to settle into feminine domesticity and so

her kit-bag heads for island the Devon, to try find packs 0 and off an off coast of and 164 herself again. Having never visited this island before, she is surprisedthat she

'remembers' a large cave on it. Her hostess,Mrs Nanceskivel, showsher the skull and bonesof someancient man, dug up when the hotel was sinking a well. The local doctor tells Mrs Nanceskivelthat the bones'ought to belong to the Nation'. " But if this man-in-qarthis a national treasure,Mrs Nanceskivelis clear that she doesnot want expertsin, digging up her island. However, the sight of the bonesinduces an

-inexplicably furious rage in Miss Ogilvy againstMrs Nanceskivel,and so Miss Ogilvy. takesherself off to her room, wondering if she is suffering from shell-shock.Her mind wandersoff into the island's ancient Past,where shefinds herself walking on the turf with 'a glorious senseof physical well-being' and a girl companionat her side. Miss Ogilvy now discoversthat she is actually a man, and the girl tells her that sheis 'surely the strongestman in our tribe'. 7The pair are in love, and go off into the cave, where:

Abruptly, he [Mss Ogilvy] set the -girl on her feet, and sheknew that her days of innocencewere over. And she thought of the anxious, virgin soil that was rent and sown to bring forth fruit in season,and she gave a quick little gaspof fear. I 'No no... ' she gasped.For divining his need, she was weak with longing ... be the terror love lay heavy her. 'No the to possessed,yet of on ... no she gasped. But he caughther wrist and she felt the great strengthof his rough, gnarledfingers, the great strengthof the urge that leapt in his loins, and again shemust give that pick gaspof fear, the while she clung close to him lest he should spareher. 6 I

It is hard, nowadays,to read this piece of purple proseas a straight piece rather than

as a satireon heterosexuality.But, nonetheless,this is a significant moment in which

Miss Ogilvy doesindeed 'find herself' again. If this appearsonly to have happenedin

a dream,the narrativemakes clear that sheactually was in the cave in presenttime,

sincethe story ends:.

They found Miss Ogilvy the next morning; the fisherman saw her and climbed to the ledge. She was sitting at the mouth of the cave. She was dead,with her handsthrust deepinto her pockets."

It is not a woman who has enteredthe earth through a cave, but a heterosexualman

who has gone in to 'rend the virgin soil' of his woman. It seemsthat possessing

masculinity in someform allows a woman to enter earth. But the last words are 165 unclearas to who hasactually been in the cave. Was it Miss Ogilvy as a man, or was it Miss Ogilvy as a lesbian?In the period, handsthrust deepinto pocketswere routinely usedas a sign to suggesta woman's inversion or lesbianism.Instead of finding herselfin the countrysidein the way that Morton does,by physically relating to earthas the culmination of the searchboth for himself and England,Miss Ogilvy finds herself by thrusting her handsin her pockets, and, even though dead,this signifies her lesbianism.Just as the corpsein Rebecca is simultaneouslydisplayed and erasedas lesbian, so, too, is the corpse of Miss Ogilvy. '0 Shemay haveentered earth, but doesnot live beyond that moment.

Given the variously genderedand sexualizedrelationships with earth that have beenpreviously outlined, it is a matter of interest that a lesbianshould have beenauthoritatively connectedwith practice in, and discussionsof, national earth.Eve I Balfour, the first presidentof the Soil Association, was both farmer and writer. Bom in the eighteen-nineties,she was encouragedin her ambitions by her aunt, Nora

Sedgwick,a principal of Girton Collegepand was one of the first women to qualify with a diploma in agriculturefrom ReadingUniversity. After qualifying, she started farn-ýingwith her'sisterand anotherwoman. Never married, throughouther life her

most important relationshipswere with other women. Becauseof her relationshipwith

Kathleen Carney,with whom shelived for fifty years until Carney's death, shehas

beenclaimed for lesbianhistory. "' Beside writing on agriculture and goil, Balfour

wrote three novels with her friend Beryl Heamdenunder the pseudonymHeamden

Balfour. Unlike her crime fiction, long out of print, her Living Soil: Evidenceof the

importanceto humanhealth ofsoil vitality, with special referenceto post-war

planning, became,according to RoseCollis, 'a huge success- it was reprinted nine "' times - and prompted an enormouslyenthusiastic international response. Attestationto the more generalinterest shown in it is the fact that the TimesLiterary

Supplement reviewed it. Basedon, and revised from, a pamphletEve Balfour wrote

in 1939, The Living Soil describesthe experimentsmade by herself and otherswith

earth fertility, compostingand farming from about 1910onwardS. 73 166

Someof the tropes she deploys in The Living Soil are simillarto those of other writers who deploy the man-in-earth.Dating the problematicsof soil erosion as arising from 1914,Balfour seemsto concur with other state-of-the-nationwriters that the First World War brought about profound social,* cultural and agricultural change.Her soil, too, seemsa place of death and resurrection.Humus gives soil life- giving nature:

Humusis 'a product of the decompositionof animal and vegetableresidues brought but it is far from about through the agency of micro-organisms' ... deadin the senseof having returnedto the inorganic world from which all life originally sprang.It is still organic matter, in the transition stagebetween one form of life and another.Once the inorganic passesinto the organic, and this is a constantprocess, it is subjectto continual changewithin the organic cycle, in forms life through it being the varieV4 the of which might pass almost endless.

Quoting a papergiven to the Farmers' Club in 1939 by Sir Bernard Greenwell, she masculinisesthe earthworm,recalling the trope of man-in-earth:

I am afraid very few of us realisewhat a good friend this little fellow is to the farmer, and if we can only increasethe population of the earthwormin the soil he will do a lot of our deepcultivation for us and aeratethe soil gratis.15

She also draws a distinction betweensoil and sub-soil: the level that one works with, and the level beyondthat. Her soil is an unstableand shifting thing, unlike the stable, non-changingearth previouswriters posit, and it is in an 'ever recurring cycle of birth, growth, reproduction,death, decay passingonce more into life'. " This could be seenas a 'queer' view in the sensethat it can tolerateuncertainties and instability in its categorisationof the world, not relying on the heterosexualgranunar of the nation.

that provides stableand genderedtaxonomies.

For Lady Balfour, national lack lies both in men and soil. The English

body is a lacking, sick body, as is the body of soil. Soil needsthe introduction of

good-quality humuswhich should penetrateearth, preferably by the horse-drawn 0 plough rather than any mechanicalone. Her solution to national lack is not to put the

man in earth,but to put the earthin man, because:

Society,like a house,does not start at ground level, but beginsquite literally beneaththe surfaceof our planet, within the soil itself. For out of soil are we fashioned,and by the productsof soil is our earthly existencemaintained. If it is from we destroyour soil - and not indestructible - mankind will vanish the earth as surely as has the dinosaur."I 167

Society,soil and peopleare co-constructed,each relying on the othersin a cycle of mutual dependency.Good-quality soil will produce good-quality food which will nourish the national body. Unlike other condition-of-England writers, 'virility' is not a key term for her. Instead,her concern is fertility - fertile soil which gives nourishing food to producehealthy bodieswhich are not necessarilyreproductive bodies. Neither men nor women should go to earth, but insteadearth should be returnedto earth through the introduction of compostedearth products.For Eve Balfour, the excesses of the nation lie in the wrong sort of tmarriage'. The introduction of industrial

chemicalsto land hasled to the depletionof soil fertility and sicknessin the national

body. Sheargues that this 'marriage of agriculture to a foreign partner,chemistry,

was a mistake.' 7" Given that we have seenMorton's Englishnessas a heterosexual

relation betweenman and earth, the use of the trope of marriageis apposite.Her

solution is one in which the 'marriage' of ungenderedsamenesses produces fertility

through the interactionsof soil and soil products.By implication, sheis arguing

againsta heterosexualisedconception of the relation of national masculinesubjects and

earth in favour of a homosexualisedearth/soil which will nourish the national body.

Since sheargues that everything - society, culture, knowledge, bodies and health - is ultimately basedon or comesfrom the soil, logically her homosexualisedsoil could

lead to a homosexualisednation which can toleratethe uncertaintiesinherent in an

unstableshifting earthfounding it.Without a stableearth founding the grammarof the

nation, the nation's heterosexualgrammar is upset.But, even though in Balfour's

formulation compostprovides health for the nation, within an eugenicistdiscourse that III ý' II arguesfor selectivebreeding in the national interest,compost becomes a metaphorfor

national destruction.'Compost' can presenta dangerto the nation. So, for example,

the §exologist,Magnus Hirschfield, discussed'the, common dread that racial crossing

will lead to the production of a "homologousracial composf'. '79 This would suggest

that Balfour's 'divorce' of earth from heterosexuality could also break down Iý- taxonomiesof race. 168

In conclusion,national identity was partly being recreateddiscursively through the trope of man-in-earthbut the paucity of texts which deal with women-in- earth suggestthat women could not be national figures. The exclusion of women from this version of national identity could be hypothesisedas productive of lesbian subjectivity, in that sincewomen could not be national, thosewomen who searched for a way of inclusion in national processeshad to find anotherfemale subjectivity that might allow them the authority to speakand make interventionsconcerning national earth space.That the woman who became]President of the Soil Association shouldbe a lesbianis notable,and possibleevidence for such a thesis.It appearsthat a t formation of Englishnessas man-in-earthis actually prcductive of lesbiansubjectivity

and discourse,in that women are actively excludedfrom that trope of Englishness.

Sinceit was an important national trope, this pushedwomen to a peripheralnational

place ratherthan a central one. Similarly, given that 'virility' was a key term in

nationalrenewal, with this virility enactedagainst and upon a generallyfeminised

earth,such a heterosexuallyformulated relationshipof the nation left women little

placeto be located.Earth was occupying a feminine spacewhich might havebeen the

discursiveplace women could occupy. If women attemptedtheir own relationshipto

earth, it was describedvariously as monstrous,impossible, destructiveand non-

reproductive.The only way it appearedthat a woman could go to earth was to destroy

Englandand the grammarof its nation in favour of lesbian identity. If earth was re-

formulated as homosexual,though, this could allow for the homosexualisationof the

nation and would allow for the emergenceof alternative sexualities.However, since

this was not the only discourseconcerning women, lesbiansand nation in the interwar

period too great a claim cannotbe madefor its power. Clearly, women were also

being discouragedfrom lesbianism,as somethinglike the trial of the publication of

Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness shows.The next chapterwill examinethe

fluctuations of the statusof the lesbianin relation to England and Englishness,by

discussingher contradictory positioning in national culture.

I Luke 16.3. 169

2 T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone [1938] (London: Collins) [n.d. ), p. 272. 3 Sheila Cousins, To Beg I Am Ashamed (London: GeorgeRoutledge, 1938). 4 Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm [1911] (Sussex:Pulp Publications, 1998), p. 91. 5 Stoker, p. 107. 6 Stoker, p. 133, 7 Stoker, p. 158. "Stoker, p. 135. ' Seemy discussionof Lady Chatterley's Lover in ChapterThree. "Stoker, p. 148. " Stoker, p. 110. "Stoker, p. 117. " E. M. Forster, A Passageto India [1924] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). 14Forster, p. 136. 's Forster, p. 9. 16Forster, p. 11. 17Forster, p. 139. "Forster, p. 124. Forster, pp. 124-125. Forster, p. 145. 21Forster, p. 145. Forster, p. 147. Forster, p. 172. Forster, P. 282. 2' Forster, p. 317. 26Mary Gladys Coles, The Flower of Lighs: A Biography of Mary Webb (London: Duckworth, 1978), p. 171. 2"Stanley Baldwin, On England [1926] (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), p. 20. 1 Baldwin, pp. 20-21. 2"Mary Webb, PreciousBane [1924] (London: JonathanCape, 1928). 3' Coles, p. 322. 31Webb cited in Coles, pp. 160-161. 32John Buchan cited in Coles, p. 180. 33Buchan cited in Coles, p. 118. 34Webb, Goneto Earth, p. 288. 35David Garnett,Lady Into Fox and A Man in the Zoo [1922 and 1924] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1%0), P. 12. 36John Lucas, The Radical Twenties:Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture (Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 1997), p. 71. 3" Lucas, p, 75. 3" Lucas, p. 75. 3' Lucas, p. 76. ' D. H. Lawrence, 77treeNovellas: The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain's Doll. [ 1923] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 97. "' E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady [1930] (London: Virago, 1984), p. 36. Italics in original. 42Jan Struther, Mrs Miniver [1939] (London: Virago, 1991), p. 13. Italics in original. ' Siegfried Sassoon,Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man [1928] (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). 44Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes or the Loving Huntsman [1926] (London: Virago, 1995). 4-'See Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexualityand Modern Culture (New Yorl-- Columbia University Press,1993). The chapter entitled 'Sylvia Townsend Warner and the counterplotof lesbian fiction' has provided a model for my reading of Lolly Willowes as a lesbian fiction through the example of Summer Will Show that Terry Castle provides. 46Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, BetweenMen: English Literature and Mate HomosocW Desire (New York-, Columbia University Press, 1985). '7 Castle, p. 68. ' Warner, p. 83. 170

Warner, p. M. Warner, pp. 192-193. 51Warner, p. 200. 1 Warner, p. 118, 1 Warner, p. 61. 1 Warner, p. 220. 11Warner, pp. 237-238. 1 Warner, pp. 57-58. 1 Warner, p. 199. Warner, pp. 230-23 1. Warner, p. 245. Warner, p. 247. Radelyffe Hall, 'Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself% in Women's Writing on the First World War, ed. by Agnes Cardinal, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). " Hall, p. 346. 63Hall, p. 343. Hafl, p. 347. Hall, p. 351. Hall, p. 352. Hall, p. 352. HaH, p. 356. Hall, p. 357. 7' See the discussion of the corpse in Rebecca in Chapter Four. 7' Rose Collis, Portraits to the Wall: Historic Lesbian Lives Unveiled (London: Cassell, 1994), pp. 139-156. 72Collis, p. 151. 73Evelyn Balfour, The Living Soil: Evidence of the Importance to Human Health of Soil Vitality, with special reference to Post-war Planning (London: Faber and Faber, 1943). ' Balfour, p. 18. 75Balfour, p. 113. Balfour, p. 18. 77Balfour, p. 13. ' Balfour, p. 192. 79Magnus Hirschfield, 'Racism (1938)' in Sexology Uncensored: the Documents of Sexual Sclence, ý ed. by Lucy Bland & Laura Doan, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 230.

1 -. 171

CHAPTER SIX

THE LESBIAN AND THE NATION

[Ajpoint has a position but not magnitude. In other words, if a given point were not in a givenplace it would not be thereat all. '

When the missionary in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr, Fortune's Maggot attempts

to give his 'convert' a mathematicslesson, his words inadvertently suggestan analogy

for the place of the lesbian within the nation: a lesbian cannot be accordedany

&magnitude'or mass,unless perceived within a specific location. Place, then, is

neededto confer substanceon the lesbian, as it has on those with other sexual

identities. But if national earth is associatedwith heterosexualmasculinity, feminine

heterosexualityassociated with domestic interiors and the urban, and water mainly

associatedwith masculine homosexuality, then where can the lesbian be placed within

the nation in order to becomesubstantial? Are there any ways in which the conceptof 'lesbian' doeshave a place in the grammar of the nation? If so, what or where might

that place be? Is it a geographicalplace? Sylvia Townsend Warner suggestsin Lolly

Willowes that England and the lesbian are categoriesthat cannot co-exist, but do other

texts suggestthe lesbian can be reconciled with England and Englishness?Following

the argumentin Lolly Willowes, is lesbianisin accordeda national dimension, not

through its geographicallocation, but instead through a cultural value within a

languagesystem? N1ight it then be possible that the lesbian has a rhetorical place rather

than a geographical one? If so, what writing strategiesare deployed in order to write

the lesbian into the nation? Informed by'theories of both narratives of nation and narratives of lesbianism, theseare the questionsthis chapter seeksto examine in order to further elucidate the conjunction of nation, sexuality and writing.

As I said in the introduction, Hobsbawm and Ranger have argued that there is a paradox in the formulation of the nation where its modernity is set againstits timelessness.They contend that'[mlodem nations generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotestantiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so "natural" as to require no other definition other than 172 self-assertion.' ' The lesbian sharesa similar quality with the nation in that sheis a hiddensubjectivity caughtbetween modernity and primitivism. The Parliamentary debatesabout criminalising lesbianism,discussed in ChapterOne, show that there was no clear and generally accepteddefinition of the lesbian,just as there was no clear definition of ýEngland' that was not contested.On the one hand, it was suggestedof lesbianismand lesbiansthat such 'moral weaknessesdate back to the very origin of history', whereason the other, '[tlhey are examplesof ultra-civilisation. ' If England had beennot noticing lesbianswho had nonethelessexisted for many hundredsof years,as Ueutenant-ColonelMoore-Brabazon stated in Parliament,they clearly had a historical continuity alongsidethat of the nation. ' If, as Bhabha says,we are obliged to forget that the nation is not naturally given, we are also obliged to forget that

nature' is not naturally given. So when Mr. Macquisten spokein the Commons debate,he arguedof the lesbianthat she'has forgotten the dictatesof Nature and morality'. ' But, if 'nature' can be forgotten, then its power to determinethe natureof woman is clearly not very forceful. As Wittig argues,'by its very existence,lesbian societydestroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a "natural group".'

By calling 'nature' into question,the lesbianalso calls the 'natural' statusof the nation into question. Therefore, when Homi Bhabhaasks '[w]hat might be the cultural and political effects of the liminality of the nationT, one answercould be that a subject position which expressesthe liminality of the nation is itself createdin the processof is lesbian! Bhabha narratingthe nation - and this subjectposition that of the argues that national narrativesinterpellate their subjectsthrough their discursiveaddress, so perhapsit is not surprisingthat in the processof narrating the nation that which has beenrepressed might also be expressed.Kristeva's argumentconcerning the derivation of identity through abjectionmaintained that this processof identity fonnation is never complete.Identity is always vulnerable to the destabilisingreturn of

the repressed,precisely becausewhat is abjectedis already an unwantedpart of the

identity. Not fully 'other', the abject always returns to remind us of its existence.In 173 order to keepidentity stableand intact, the abject hasto be continually re-repressed.

This would suggestthat the lesbian, once 'expressed'in national culture, would have to be re-repressedin order to maintain the heterosexualidentity of Englandand

Englishness.Veering betweenexistence and non-existence,she expressesthe

uncertaintyof cultural meanings.

Suggestingthat 'national narrativeis a site of an ambivalent

identification; a margin of the uncertaintyof cultural meaningthat may becomea space

for an agonisticminority position', Bhabhaprovides a potential way of understanding

the place of the lesbianin the nation. *'Occupying a spaceof 'uncertain cultural

meaning', shepublicly conteststhe natureof all meaningsthe nation provides.In

expressingnationally repressedterms, she showsthe limits of the nature of gender

and the limits of the nation as naturally given. So when Terry Castleargues that the

lesbian'has been"ghoste&' - or madeto seeminvisible - by culture itself', one might " ask. which aspectsof culture producethe lesbian as a ghost? Is it in part the national her 'a aspectsof culture which work to make appearas ghost effect ... elusive, vaporous,difficult to spot - even when sheis there, in plain view'?

In what ways might the lesbian -a figure both ghostly and yet also

condensingsome of the complexitiesof national identity - be inscribed?One writing

stategyadopted in order to write the lesbianinto the nation was to find a history within

Englandfor this subjectivity. In other words, the figure of the lesbian was rendered

substantialthrough an assertionof her continuity or longevity. I-Ike the nation, she

had always beenthere. The pioneer woman doctor, Mary Gordon, wrote one such

text: Chaseof the Wild Goose: The story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah

Ponsonby,'known as the Ladies of Vangollen. " Theseeighteenth-century 'Ladies'

had fled their native Ireland and were living in a Welsh border town. Arthur Ponsonby

had included extractsfrom the Ladies' diaries in his 1922English Diaries, and this

allowed Gordon to skirt the issueof their national identity by making immediate

referenceto Ponsonby'sbook in the foreword. In this way, the Ladies could be

claimed as part of English history, having a historical continuity with English women 174 who chooseto live togetherrather than marry. The first words of ChapterOne set up this continuity:

The two heroinesof this story, the Lady Eleanor Butler and Nfiss Sarah Ponsonby,have a remarkablehistory. They achievedfame at a stroke.They madea noise in the world which has never since died out, and which we, their spiritual descendants,continue to echo. "

The text immediately calls up: notions of history, past and present;ghostliness signalledthrough the call on the spiritual; and the contemporary'we', constituted through a similarity to the Ladies, obliquely signalling that this 'we' the text speaksto, the preferredreader, is a lesbian within a community of lesbians.As the narrative progresses,this becomesclearer when the narrator describesthe convenienceof the eighteenth-centuryterm 'romantic friendship' as protecting the Ladiesfrom others having full knowledgeof the relations betweenthem: 'And sinceno terrible scientific nameswere in existenceto describephenomena of the kind, the escapaderemained

romantic,to the entire peaceof the subjectsthemselves. ' 13However, at the sametime

as invoking her historical continuity, the call on 'terrible scientific names' still leaves

the lesbianas a 'ghost' or'echo' not a fully articulatedsubjectivity, sinceit only

suggestsrather than describeswhat is meant by this, and relies on the readerhaving

sexologicalknowledge to elucidatethe meaning.But if this readeris herself a lesbian,

then to read this text is to also produceherself as a 'ghost' or an 'echo', of the Ladies

themselves.The narrator and the Ladies conceiveof themselvesas ghosts,and appear

as apparitionsto eachother. The style of the first part of the narrative is one which

imaginatively reconstructsconversations between the Ladies, and the narrator

commentsthat:

In their tranquil talks their ideasseemed to coincide and fit together,and it was curious how they droppedthe artificial style of their day and education.In the spiritual company of many other unknown women, they were slipping forward into anothersocial epochof which they were entirely unconscious.

Just as the past can haunt the present,the past in which theseLadies exist is haunted.

by a future which is less.artificial and enablesthem to behavedifferently than they

would in their own epoch.Even though they are unconscious of the presentmoment 175 of the text, nonethelessthey are aware of their own ghostliness.Eleanor and Sarah discussthis:

'I havea feeling, Sally, that when we have gone away we may be ordered back to come here.' 'As ghostsT, 'Something of the kind. ' be lovelier haunt be 'Well, there couldn't a place to ... we should a sort of double ghost!' "

If the ghostundermines the logic of identity, then its doubling further underminesit.

The last part of the text dealswith the narrator's encounterwith the ghostsof the

Ladies, when sheappears as a ghost to them just as they appearas ghoststo her.

This is the irony of Chaseof the Wild Goose.Mary Gordon's use of the rhetorical figure of the ghostas enablinga dialogue betweenpast and presentundermines the literalisation of the lesbian.Instead, she is constructedas a historical haunting. In

1973,when'Elizabeth Mavor publishedher biography of the Ladies sheused the fact that Mary Gordon had deployedthe trope of the ghostto call Gordon's text 16 'aboundingin wild embellishments'. Lesbianismwas one such wild embellishment.

Mavor's prefacemakes clear that shebelieves the Ladies were certainly not sexually

active lesbians,but 'romantic friends'. In this way, the ghostthat the lesbianis in

culture guarantees her own textual dernise.Produced as a ghost,her own ghostliness

becomesthe reasonto deny her existence.

However, one aspectof the power of the ghost is that it can transcend

at oncethe limitations of gender(generically, ghostsare not genderedin the way that,

for example,dogs are genderedmasculine whilst cats are genderedfeminine), the

limitations of time,*and thereforethose of place. In both Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself

and Virginia Woolf's Orku?do, the protagonistsdefy easylocation in genderor time

systems,moving as they do through different historical periods. " As such, the

ghostly lesbian is a time-traveller- as sheis written, sheis erasedfrom her

contemporarymoment. This view of the lesbian as traveller, defying a stablelocation,

is reproducedin such literary criticism as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern

Memory, where he mentions 'middle-aged lesbiansin tweeds' as being a common

sight at railway stationsinterwar. " As this is his only referenceto lesbians,his own 176 literary criticism in this way reproducesan interwar notion of lesbiansubjectivity as occupyinga liminal space(the railway station), and circulatesit in 1970scriticical discourse.

Since the lesbian appearsto be liminal and ghostly within some

English history and literary criticism, it is perhapsnot surprisingthat the island motif figures strongly in writing which inscribes the lesbian, as it seemsto offer another spaceoutside of England and Englishness.Although in one senseanother island is always 'abroad, it is nonethelesswritten from an English perspective.So while it offers somepossibilities for registeringdifferent social relations, theserelations are still constrainedby their referenceto England and Englishness.Consequently, while the island of Storn and its castlein Vita Sackville-West's 7he Dark Island are

'curiously un-English, and its people 'rather foreign', the fact that it lies only a

couple of miles off the English coast ensuresthat its Englishnessis always in

dialogue with its foreignness." This is realisedby the constanttrips characterstake to

and from the metropolitan centre. Shirin, who is married to the 'Ranger of Storn',

hasher most intenserelationships with three other women in the text, and it is in these

relationshipsthat the lesbian sub-textemerges. '0 Her first relationship is with Mrs

Jolly, significantly an ex-prostitute,the landlady of the seasideboarding-house the

young Shirin visits yearly with her family. We have already seenin ChapterOne

ShannonBell's analysisof the discursivelinkage madebetween the body of the

prostituteand that of the lesbianý' This linkage allows the text to make indirect

commenton the advantagesof lesbian sex as opposedto heterosexualsex. When

visiting the island with Venn, who is due to inherit it, Shirin is thrown down on the

ground by him, as he demandsthat sheshould recount to him that sheis a 'dirty

worm of earth. " Her associationwith earth makesher 'dirty' rather than ennobled.

Telling her 'you look nice there on the ground, you look as though you belongedto

it', he attemptsto rape her. 23 Returning shockedto the boarding-house,she is

consoledby Mrs Jolly. In this obliquely lesbian passage,the latter massagesShirin's

body under the bedclothesas Shirin enjoyably shrinks, shuddersand undergoesa k 177 tremor which shakesher whole body. 2' Later, Mrs Jolly becomeshousekeeper on

Storn when Shirin has married Venn. But if Shirin has married, it is not at all for love of Venn but becauseof her desirefor Storn, and also to be brought into a relationship with Venn's grandmotherwho lives on the island. Meeting Madame,the grandmother,for the first time at sixteenis a pivotal moment in Shirin's life, as she discovers:

What depth is in This beautifid a and richness there women! ... old woman, and wicked and good, with a power of charm beyond reason, holds more danger and wickedness, beauty and goodness and wisdom in her than anyone I have ever met. 25

Shirin's marriageis not a way of ensuringheterosexuality, but more a way for women to be able to bond with one another.As the island is figured as woman - with the two breast-liketowers of its castle silhouettedagainst the sky and its secretwooded coves Shirin's and the 'sleepy sensualityof ... earth' mirroring own sensuality- then this marriagealso offers Shirin the possibility of a same-sexrelationship with the land/islandof Stom, whose photographshe has carried with her in a talismanic way

through her youth and young adulthood." Storn itself is that which shedesires, and

Venn is the conduit through which Shirin can form relations both with other women

and with feminine earth.This, however, is what Venn deniesher, by telling her on

their wedding night that Storn will never be hers, so there is no point in loving the for island. But if Venn forbids her desire land, he also forbids lesbian desirefor her

sculptor friend, Cristina, who comesto live on the island. Although dying himself, he

is determinedthat his deathwill not allow the women's relationshipto flourish and

murdersCristina in what is set up to look like a boating accident.A lesbian

relationshipbetween Shirin and Cristina is not explicitly realisedin the text; although

lesbianismis suggestedthrough Cristina's 'passionatedevotion' to Shirin. " On the

latter's first night on the island, at Shirin's suggestion,she plays a moonlit gameof

'It' with Shirin, Venn and their children. While none of theothers is able to catch

Shirin, Cristina is possessedby:

The determinationthat if anyonewere able to catch Shirin it shouldbe herself Venn. She'd be it to her and not safer with me, she thought ... ; then seemed that Shirin slackenedher pacea little, offering herself to be overtaken,and the 178

next moment the soft, warm, supple; breathing body was in her arms, bending backwards,while the eyes of Shirin laughed up into her own. "

Heterosexualityis dangerousin this text, whereaslesbianism offers safety.This is a highly chargedmoment for the adults, who seethis gameas symbolic of who can possessShirin and in which way. So, when Venn decidesto frighten Cristina by taking her sailing into dangerousseas, he thinks to himself-

If the boat upsetsin the gybe, then I shall know that Shirin minds about Cristina. I shall know that Cristina really caughtShirin, that night, as I have nevercaught her. The boat, for all Venn's symbolism, refusedto behavesymbolically: without any upsetting,she cameround perfectly though perilously, and resumedher reversedcourse towards Storn."

In this oblique way, the readeris told that Cristina, not Venn, is the one who 'has' Shirin. Lesbianismis textually hidden, and has to be teasedout of the languagein

which it is indirectly stated.The readerhas to ask of the text - what doesit mean that the boat did not 'behave symbolically'? The answeris that Cristina possessesShirin,

not Venn. In a circuitous manner,the text displays and erasesits lesbiancontent in

both the relationshipbetween Shirin and Mrs. Jolly, and that betweenCristina and Shirin.

This display and erasureoccurs even in one of the interwar texts in

which the lesbianis most clearly and unequivocally identified. Compton Mackenzie's

satireon lesbianlife, Extraordinary Women:77zeme and variations, set on the island

of Sirene,made air more important than earth as a locational signifier of subjectivity.

On the island, where 'many ordinary people of divers nationalities... let themselves

go on that air', 30 an Englishwomancomments that '[elverybody immoral in Sirene ic]. Can't help it dears' The sl It's the air. Dogs. People. poor .3' textual mingling of air and lesbianisminevitably producesan immoral subjectivity which is insubstantial,

unlike a masculineheterosexual subjectivity producedin conjunctionwith an earththat

confersmateriality. Even though the lesbiancharacters' emotional and sexuallives are ., madeexplicit within this text, the English lesbian,Rory, can only imagine

representingher love for Rosalbathrough an airy ghostliness:

And as Rory looked out of the window she saw walking along the clustered cypressesthe two white peacocksshe had bought to symbolizeherself and 179

Rosalba.The quality of their plumage gaveto them from whateverangle the suncaught it a lightnessthat humanity could not keep.Their tails trailed along the ground like smoke - no, hardly so opaqueas smoke,but like a creeping mist. The crestsupon their delicate and contemptuousheads glistened like thistledown.They seemedindeed all plumed with thistledown, thosevain imponderablebirds, thosewraiths steppingso delicately and contemptuously besidethe cypress-treesdarkly clustering. "Ah, look," Rory cried. "Look, dearest,there t are the white peacocks that will walk here alwa like our two ghosts,when perhapssometimes we are not togetherhere. " ',p

Again, the lesbiancouple is producedas a double ghost. If Rosalbais 'a portent', the '[o]f is Rosalba What boy-girl ? narrativevoice asks what the portent? signifies this ... What signifiesshe in the curve of a civilization? "' Without providing an answerto - this, it breaksin occasionallyto comment on the charactersand instruct the readeron how their actionsshould be thought of. So, for example,the readeris told of Rosalba that '[w]e have notedher lack of humour, her capacity for intrigue, her childish

vanity, her egoism,and her insincerity. t34The partial answerto what she signifies as

a lesbianis that shesignifies a narcissisticinsubstantiality devoid of any real

importance,and a wraith-like ghostliness,located in the margins of an(other)island.

This ghostliness recurs in other texts where the reader is directly called

upon to notice or comment on the lesbian. Naomi Royde-Sniith's The Island: A Love

Story, for example, introduces the apparitional figure of the lesbian girl in a marshy

landscape:35

If there had beenanyone to watch her as shemade her way along the dykes that chequeredthe marsh,the tall girl who moved so slowly towards the farm- housewould have seemedto walk waist-deepin the shimmerof heat that coveredthe surfaceof the earth as if with a layer of liquid steaM.31

Sincethere is no-one within this fictional landscapeto seethe ghostly figure of

Goosey,she is revealedto the readerbut not to other charactersin the text. 17Goosey

falls in love with Almond, a summerboarder at her family's farm, while seeingher in

a stateof undress.However, it is the readerwho is the first to have an intimate and

eroticisedvision of Almond's body and underwear:

It was so hot under the low roof that the girl who stood barefootedon the strip of carpetbeside the bed lookingat the ffilled cambric dressshe intended to put on, was using a towel to dry her foreheadand her armpits and the back of her neck under the knot of her dark hair, from the moisture that had gatheredthere while she slept. 180

Her stays -a small, ridiculous affair of pink satin - with ribbon bows and long pink laces and frills of imitation valenciennes, its two little suspendersdangling from each side of the short busks that clasped it, was flung the bed-rail her two black lisle-thread, 0 over with open-work stockings one on eachside of it. 38

The textual addressbrings the readerinto collusion with a lesbianeroticism before any of the textual charactersactually look at Almond. When Gooseyalso beginsto look at

Almond dressing,the textual addressfurther lesbianisesthe readersince the readeris brought into collusion with Goosey'slesbian gaze.In a ten-pagepassage involving torn lace and its repair, chemisestraps falling off shoulders'andfrail lace ripping under urgentfingers, Goosey'slesbian identity is built from an attraction to a middle- classextreme form of femininity.

Goosey'saunt, seeingthat 'there was somethinga little odd about the friendship"' betweenthe girls, is relieved to hear that Almond is due to get married because,as shetells her husband,jg1irls and girls is bad, Evan. I won't have it in my

house."' Almond doesmarry, but continuesthroughout her life to use and abusethe

lesbian love that Gooseyhas for her. As such, this is not the usual story of the

predatorylesbian, but more the story of the predatory married woman who lives off

lesbianenergy for her own ends.Even so, the text doesend with a happily married

pair watching the now old Gooseyon an oppositehill:

Grey againstthe glow on the hill-side there towered and waveredthe dim, gigantic, but unmistakeableshadow of the woman on the ridge behind the summit. The substancethat had seemeda bird when they were turned towards it was a monsternow that they faced its shade."

If Gooseybegins as a girl in shimmering heat, visible only to the reader,she ends as a

shadowymonster to the heterosexualmarried charactersand 'a public nuisance,one

of thosemiserable problems it was uselessto attempt to solve.' " In the opening

pages,it is the part of her below the waist. hidden by the heat, which cannot be seen,

whereasin the closing pagesshe is subsumedin the shadow/birdand monster so that

none of her is visible. In this way, it appearsthat the lesbian is better revealed

textually within the readingprocess, both to the readerand by the reader,than by the

other characters.So perhapsthe lesbian should be looked for within particular kinds

of literary inscription, rather than for her associationwith a particular place. 181

Somewriters quite clearly usedliterature to signal lesbianism.Mary

Gordonquotes a letter from the late 1790sin which Anna Sewardwrites to a friend of her visit with the Ladies.Describing them as the Shakespearean'Rosalind and Celia of real life', shewrote:

My destinedweek of elevatedsituation past, I soughtthe vale, and swiftly flew three days of high gratification, scenicand intellectual, with the charming Rosalindand Celia of this lovelier Arden.

Well over a hundredyears later Winifred Holtby and JeanMcWlliarn also correspondedwith eachother as Rosalindand Celia. An edited version of their letters was publishedin 1937,and included an incident where:

On a ship going to SouthAfrica in 1926Winifred met a Miss Grahamwho had beentaught by Jean.The two women held 'pleasantcommunion on the natureof our loves - as did thosecharming youths in the Platonic dialogue whosename I forget, but which is stagedin a gymnasium,with nice little boys cooling themselvesafter the games,and blushing at the mention of their lovers' names'.44

The tone of Winifred Holtby's words suggests,not that she and Miss Grahamare

discussingtheir mutual loves, who are gay men, but that 'our loves' signifies their

mutual love of women which includes a sexual elementsignalled through the boys'

'lovers' mentionedin Platonic literature. I In Mary Renault's 1939 Purposesof Love, Shakespeareis again called

upon to signify lesbianism.' At the nurses'pyjama party that Colonnaand Vivian

attendas a couple, Colonnaflirts with anotherlesbian, Valentine, by burlesquinga

scenefrom Romeoand Juliet. In Renault's work, whilst heterosexualcharacters can

reproduce,the ways in which lesbianor homosexualcharacters reproduce themselves

are literary, in that they write for posterity, and the ways in which the lesbian or

homosexualare signalledare literary. For the knowing readerany pention of Gautier

would haxe signalled this. In this period, a referenceto Gautier's Mademoiselledu

Maupin becamea codebetween literary lesbiancharacters in which they could

identify themselvesto one anotherý' Vivian'smale lover, Mic, whom other nurses

think of as a 'pansy, asks her: 'Do you know that conte of Gautier's about a man

who took possessionof another man's body for purposesof his own?" Seeing

Colonnanaked in the bath, Vivian quotesMarlowe's Edward the Second to her - 182

&sometimesa lovely boy in Dian's shape' - signalling both knowledgeof the homosexualityof the king, as well as rendering Colonna's lesbianbody partially intelligible. " After this literary signal, Colonna and Vivian start a sexualrelationship.

The single sex spaceof the nurses' home that convention had offered as productive of lesbianism,could not function in this way without the addition of literature to enable the charactersto flag their desiresto one another.Place on its own was not enoughto allow lesbiandesire. So, Vivian's gazeat Colonna's naked lesbianbody can only renderit intelligible through literature, as a boy in a woman's shape.Both the use of the national poet/playwright Shakespeare,and the use of Marlowe to give a homosexualhistory to England, subvert the heterosexualEnglishness which such

'great literature' was supposedto guaranteeto the nation, as we have seenin the chapteron bannedand restricted books.

Litemture figured, too, in law courts during oblique discussionsof lesbianism.The ManchesterGuardian reportedon the caseof the suicide of a 6rseff schoolgirl who had apparentlykilled when letters from her favourite woman teacherfailed to arrive. The court tried to make the girl's action, and the relationship betweenthe two, intelligible by calling on literature. In the coroner's summingup, he said:

We all know that when we were at school we had got heroes,and girls, I suppose,had got heroines.It might be a boy in an older class.You may rememberthe play 'Journey's End', in which a boy namedRaleigh has a hero in anotherclass called Stanhope,and later in life they meet in France.Of coursethat is only fiction, but it is a very good exampleof what doesoccur in real life. That may well have beenthe position of this young girl and Miss Lee. There is no doubt about the fact that shewas extremely fond of her. "

It seemsthe coroner could only understandthis emotional relationshipbetween by imagining he hasknown in fiction. That, too, to have beenthe women 0 men seems teacher'sproblem. In her correspondencewith the girl that was read out in court she

was askedwhat was meant by the following:

Your feelings for me and your mother cannot be contrasted.They standon different I holds in two planes ... can never approachthe position your mother your life. It must needsbe that other loves come into our lives. Think of David and Jonathan.In somespecial cases we must love one anotherespecially. We are to be classedas special ones.'0 183

To refer to one's homosexualitythrough the Biblical story of David and Jonathanwas routine in the period. The reiteration of the 'special' natureof the two and their love is overstated,and clearly the court found enoughambiguity in the letters to wonder, without directly articulating,it, whether this was inde6d a lesbianrelationship.

However, NEssLee's reply was that the extract only meant that they 'were extremely fond of one another and were friends'.

If lesbiansare ghostly and located within marginal spaces,such as islandsother than Britain, then their existencethrough literary referencesuggests they have a discursiverather than geographicallocation. Given the various cultural difficulties of writing the lesbianbecause of the lack of a clear way of articulating the her and lesbiandesire without calling upon a rhetoric which rendersher invisible, ghostly, or hidden behind masculinity, Radclyffe Hall's attempt in The Well of

Loneliness to inscribe a substantiallesbian within notions of Englandand

Englishnesswas daring.

In Placeson the Margin: Alternative Geographiesof Modernity, Rob

Shieldsargues that' the physical body and geographicalspaces are never entirely

separable."' Therefore, '[slites are never simply locations. Rather,they are sitesfor

someoneand of something."' This can be clearly seenin The Well of Loneliness.

Here, the heterosexualwoman fits into an English landscape:her potentially

procreativeand maternalbody mirrors the landscapeshe inhabits as much as the

landscapemirrors her. Lady Anna Gordon can look at landscapeand seeher own

pregnant,heterosexual body reflected back to her in a way which makesit

meaningful, as we have seenin ChapterOne. In this way, the English landscapeis a

site for heterosexuality.The lesbian is not in such a fortunate position with regardto

her bodily relationship to the land: sheis a 'blot' on the la4dscape,and as suchfeels

herself to standboth outsidethe peaceand beauty offered by the natural world and a relationshipto Englishnesswhich is mediatedthrough landscape.54 In Chapter Four,

I discussedhow placeson the margin allow the inscription of homosexuality,and

how the fluidity of water figures in this. After Lady Anna has exiled Stephenfrom 184

Morton, it is in a flat on the ChelseaEmbankment which overlooksthe river that.

Stephensets up housewith her old governess,aptly named Puddle,an allusion to water and through water to homosexuality.Puddle's homosexualityis obliquely referredto in her empathywith Stephen'ssituation, coyly describedas having

sufferedsimilarly in her youth. Outside their Chelseawindow:

A pale glint of sunshinedevoid of all warmth lay over the wide expanseof the river, touching the funnel of a passingtug that tore at the water like a clumsy harrow; but a field of water is not for the sowing and the river closedback in the wake of the tug, deftly obliterating all tracesof its noisy and foolish passing."

This river waterscapecannot be madefruitful like the earth-basedlandscape can. The

water can neither be sown nor harrowed, and any ploughing swiftly disappears.

Cultural tracescannot be left on this waterscape;neither is heterosexualmeaning

ascribedto it in the way that the Malvern Hills are likened to pregnantwomen and the

mothersof sons.However, Stephencan look out at the Thamesas a reflection of her

lesbianbody: a body which is not for the sowing sinceit is conceivedof as a body

with a sterile womb. Nonetheless,the lack of warmth in this waterscapesuggests that

Stephenhas not as yet found herself a place shecan inhabit comfortably as a lesbian.

The pale glint of sunshinedoes not touch the water, and although living in a lesbian

household,Stephen does not have a lover and this lack of warmth in the waterscapeis

a commenton her household.

StephenGordon is never fully sexually active with anotherwoman

whilst sheis living in England.Having been exiled from Morton, and then finding a

river location unableto allow the expressionof lesbian desire,it is on Teneriffe that

sheand Mary finally make love. But althoughTeneriffe is Spanish,the African quality

of its landscapeis brought to the fore, through constantmentions of the Africanness

of the night when they make love, as opposedto the day when they go to the hills.

Their first night there, as they walk by the sea:

Had a.quality of glory aboutit, the blue glory peculiar to Africa and seen seldomor never in our more placid climate. A warm breezestiffed the eucalyptustrees and their crude, haish smell was persistentlymingled with the thick scentsof heliotrope and datum, with the sweetbut melancholy scentof jasmine, with the faint, unmistakableodour of cypress." 185

In this landscapeof 'black, volcanic dust' "' where the frogs sing 'prehistoric love songs', Mary's skin loses its palenessand becomesbrown. " Indeed,when Stephen examinesher own hatedinverted body in the mirror, it is the fact of its whitenessthat marks its problematic.She wants to maim it becauseit is 'so white': its white racial identity seemsto disallow the expressionof inverted desire." However, on Teneriffe

Stephenand Mary seemto have slipped back in history to the more primitive, sensual crudenessthat Africanness hasfigured in Europeanthought. The colour of their bodiesapproaches that of the African, and the figure of Africa allows the expression of their sexuality.

Anne McClintock suggeststhat in Europeanculture 'sexuality itself had long beencalled "the African sin"' and that colonieshad becomea 'porno-tropic'

of Europeanfantasy. " Using various historical examplesof the associationbetween

Africa and sexuality,McClintock arguesthat, '[b]y the nineteenthcentury, popular

lore had firmly establishedAfrica as the quintessentialzone of sexualaberration and

anomaly'. 6' Contemporarywith Radclyffe Hall's life, theoriesabout homosexuality

were fraught with ambiguity. Rudi C. Bleys identifies how homosexualitycould be

represented:

As both a degenerativesyndrome awayfrom an original, heterosexualdrive, and a regressioninto an original "polymorpW' sexuality.A Darwinian perspectivewould pem-dtdocumenting how modem homosexualitycould be retracedto its "primitive" antecedents.Degeneration theory on the other hand, was conduciveto a nullification of "genuine" homosexualityin primitive contexts,for this was connectedexclusively to modem civilization as a symptom of decadence.

Playing with the idea of a primitive Africa which allows Mary and Stephennot to be

'divided', a dual impulse appearsin the text. If Stephenno longer has a divided self

by aligning her sexuality with Africa and making herself one with her sexuality, then

this is an uncomfortableposition for her. 6' On the one hand,the Africannessof the

landscapeallows Stephenand Mary sexuallove in a way that the English landscape

doesnot, but on the other, the text is troubled by the new 'Africanness' that this

attributesto Stephen,and clings to a white racial privilege in order to ensurethat the

modem invert shouldnot be mixed up racially with the African. 186

There are severalways the text reinscribesthese racialised distinctions.

Whilst the couple unite in the African night, by day they ride up to the mountains.

According to Richard Dyer, as we have seenin chaptertwo, mountainshold particular in the Westernimagination for White inboththe significance whiteness. genealogely Aryan and Caucasianmyths, posits an origin in mountainswhich determineswhite racial formation. Drawing on the argumentsof Martin Bemal, Dyer arguesthat:

Suchplaces had a number of virtues: the clarity and cleanlinessof the air, the vigour demandedby the cold, the enterpriserequired by the harshnessof the terrain and climate, the sublime, soul-elevatingbeauty of mountain vistas, eventhe greaternearness to God above and the presenceof the whitest thing on earth, snow. All thesevirtues could be seento have formed the white character,its energy,enterprise, discipline and spiritual elevation, and even the white body,'its hardnessand tautness(born of the battle with the elements, and often unfavourably comparedto the slack bodiesof non-whites),its uprightness (aspiring to the heights), its affinity with (snowy) whiteness.

It is possibleto read the geographicalmovements that Stephenand Mary undertakeon

Teneriffe, while they ascendthe mountainsby day and descendby night, as both a

movementto and from whiteness,as much as a descentinto a 'primitive' sexuality

and an ascentinto spiritual life. Snow-coveredTiede, the mountain they climb, is

describedas 'clothed in her crystalline whiteness.' `5 Down by the seais a sensual,

prehistoricAfrican landscapefull of crude smells. In the mountains,however, a

sovereigngaze over the landscapeallows them to sharein the scopicregime of white

heterosexuality,unencumbered by any crude primitivism. In this way, they journey

up and down through history and evolution. If their inversion is to be brought back to

Europe,it hasto appearwithout any taint of Afficanness or primitivism. When two

'negroes' studying at the Conservatoirecome to sing at a Parisianparty, the narrative

voice, although suggestingthey sharea similar queernesswith the invert,

simultaneouslymarks their differenceby describingLincoln as having'eyes [which]

had the patient, questioningexpression common to the eyesof most animals and to

those of all slowly evolving races.' " His brother, Henry, is describedas '[a] crude just force dangerousby drink, by animal ... a primitive rendered renderedoffensive civilization. ' 67This similar queernesscannot unite the groupsof 'negroes' and 187 inverts: their racial differencesconstitute a clear demarcationline betweenthem, which functions to divide them and to rescueonly one kind of queernessfor Englishness.

Krafft-Ebing,'s theories,which Stephenand her father had both read in the locked study, suggestsan historical evolutionary movementtoward monogamous heterosexuality,and it is this problematicwhich appearswhen Stephenand Mary return to their Parisianhome from Teneriffe. Are inverts primitive or civilized? Are they a part of evolutionary history? As soon as the two women make love, the questionof creationand sterility arises:

A strange,though to them a very natural thing it seemed,this new and ardentfulfilment; having somethingfine and urgent aboutit that lay almost beyondthe rangeof their wills. Somethingprimitive and age-oldas Nature herself,did their love appearto Mary and Stephen.For now they were in the grip of Creation,of Creation's terrific urge to create;the urge that will sometimessweep forward blindly alike into fruitful and sterile channels.That wellnigh intolerable life force.would grip them, making them a part of its own existence;so that they who might never createa new life, were yet one at such fountain living... momentswith the of ." At this point, the questionof reproductionenters the equationof relating nation to

lesbianism.Stephen has found a woman with whom she can have a sexual

relationship,but given the textual concernwith sterility and fruitfulness, how can this

relationshipmanifest itself in national culture and reproduction?Valerie Seymour

remarksto Stephenthat she 'had heard that in England many suchwomen had taken breedingdogs in the that '[djogs to breed.' to 0 country' and were very nice people From the beginning of Stephen'slife of inversion, dogs play an important part. When

Stephenthinks of the lifý shemight have with the housemaid,Collins, it is imagined

4evento the red china dogsthat stoodone at eachend of the high mantelpiece.' "' It is

watching the way Stephenplays with dogs in the gardenthat prompts her father, Sir

Stephen,to hide himself in his study to read UlriChs. His first understandingsof her

inversion are linked to her relationshipwith dogs.Later, it is through a dog-fight that

Stephenmeets Angela Crossby,her first adult love. Stephenherself is often likened to

a dog and Ralph, Angela's jealous husband,makes their dog, Tony, standin for

Stephen.He shoutsat Angela: 188

'But now you're forever racing off with that girl. It's all this damnedanimal's fault that you met herV He would kick out sidewap at the terrified Tony, who had lately beenmade to standproxy for Stephen. I

However, it is the dog, David, who signifies the most strongly. Mary finds him in Paris and brings him home to live with her and Stephen,and 'so it suddenlycame to passthat they who had lately been two, were now three.There were 72 Stephenand Mary - there was also David.' It becomesclear, though, that this nuclearfamily will not last, primarily becauseit is not heterosexual,and secondly becauseMary is representedas a fundamentally normal woman who needsa child.

Stephencannot provide heirs for her country estate,Morton, sinceDavid the dog does not sharetheir blood or soil. It is at the wedding of their Parisianservants that this becomesclear. "' Jean, it loved, Adele and the simplicity of ... they they married, and after a while they would carefor eachother all over again, renewing their youth and their love in their children. So orderly, placid and safeit seemed,this social schemeevolved from creation; this guarding of two young and ardentlives for the sakeof the lives that might follow after. A fruitful and peacefulroad it must be. The sameroad had beentaken by thosefounders of Morton who had raisedup children from father to son,from father to son until the adventof Stephen;and their blood was her blood - what they had found good in their day seemedequally good to their descendant.Surely never was outlaw more law-abiding at heart than this, the last of the Gordons."'

This profoundly conservativepassage pays homageto notions of blood and soil, and the patriarchallineage of Enilishness of which Stephencannot be part. Mary and

Stephenare outsidethis social schemeevolved from the creation story: Mary because shehas chosen to love an invert, and Stephenbecause she believes the womb of the invert sterile. For her, the feminine lover of the invert is capableof being heterosexual and having children, and so Mary's womb is a problem betweenthem.

Although Mary herself never speaksof her desirefor a child, people around her make referenceto the fact that under heterosexualcircumstances she would have one to occupy her time. Mary, 'so fruitful of passionyet so bitterly sterile', is tricked into believing that Stephenis having an affair with Valerie Seymourso that shecan be persuadedinto a heterosexualrelationship with Martin Hallam, an old friend of

Stephen'O This is representedas an act of nobility on the part of Stephen:to give up

Mary becauseshe cannot give her children or a respectablelife. However, what it will 1\

189 also do is allow Stephento return to Morton/ England.While sheis with Mary, Lady

Gordonwill not acceptthem there together,but Morton/ England is as much a part of

Stephen'sidentity as is her inversion. In this way, there is a recompensefor Stephen in giving up Mary. If Stephenhad not desiredboth national white identity and her privileged classidentity so much, her inversion would be more possible.These other

desiresindicate that sexuality is not a totalising mechanismin her identity. Clearly, her

sexualityis not ultimately privileged in her identity, but inflected by its racial, class

and national positioning. Therefore,the text doesnot attempt to destroyheterosexual

relationsof Englishness.Instead, it conservativelyupholds the idea of nation, and

with it the womb.

If dogs are people, as Valerie Seymour suggests,then many such

women havereconciled themselves to national life by breedingdogs in the country,

displacingnational reproductionfrom human wombs onto thoseof dogs.This will not

do for StephenGordon, who ultimately upholds patriarchal authority. She is a law-

abiding outlaw, who wants to be accomodatedwithin patriarchallaw rather than to demolishit. Her desirefor English identity conflicts tragically with her lesbian

sexuality,and the text is unableto write the lesbian into England. Stephen's lesbianismis her Englishness. sacrificed on the altar of 0 In addition to previously discussedtextual exclusionsand negationsof

the lesbian,however, there are texts which work to make the lesbianmore central in

national imaginings. Virginia Woolf's novel, Betweenthe Acts, for example, is

characterisedby a lesbian addressto its readershipthrough which a new

understandingof the nation is formulated. Publishedin 1941,Woolf's retrospective

look at England betweenthe two 'acts' of war is set in a village where the yearly ritual

of the pageantof English history is being performed outdoors.These ritual

performancesof Englishnessthrough a pageantwere common in the interwar years.

This particular pageanthas beenwritten, directed and producedby Miss La Trobe,

and the fact of her'liand deepstuck in herjacket pocket', the 'cigarette in her 76 mouth" and her 'abrupt mannerand stocky figure; her thick anklesand sturdy 190 shoes', "" all combine to signify her lesbianism,along with the mention of 'the actress who had sharedher bed and her purse'. "' Appearing in the village with little personal history attachedto her, Miss La Trobe:

Was always agog to get things up. But where did she spring from? With that nameshe wasn't presumablypure English. From the ChannelIslands perhaps?Only her eyesand somethingabout her always madeMrs Bingham suspectthat shehad Russianblood in her. 'Those deep-seteyes; that very squarejaw' reminded her - not that shehad been to Russia- of the Tartars Very little was actually known about her. "'

Despitethe ambiguity of her national status,it is nonethelessshe who directs the

revelationand performanceof English history. The pageantstarts with a young girl declaring'England am r, and covers various scenesfrom English history and

literature, suchas Chaucer'spilgrims going to Canterbury.'0 Again, the nation is

figured through literature.However, the pageantends not with literature, but with an

attemptto break down the distinction betweentext and reader,cast and audience,past

and presentthrough the use of mirrors. The entire cast hold up mirrors and reflective

surfacesto the audienceso that they should seethemselves as Englandin the present.

The effect is to shatterany coherentvision of presenttime, to 'shiver into splintersthe

old vision'. " If the purposeis to re-makeEngland, this is not achieved.All that is

caughtin this plethora of reflection of the presentis '[s]craps, orts and fragments'. 'Here There Then trousers Now face.' 133Prior a'nose ... a skirt ... only ... perhapsa to directing the cast to hold up mirrors, NEssLa Trobe has written a period of ten

minutesinto the play where nothing happens,intending the audienceto experiencethe

presentmoment as it is. However, unable to understandthe meaningof the silence,

they are not able to do this as Mss La Trobe had intended.The presentbecomes a

worryingly meaninglesstime that the audienceattempts to evade.The lesbianwho has

appearedfrom nowherein the village hasdirected a coherentunderstanding of the

national pastfor her audience,but has insistedthat the old vision is splinteredinto

fragmentsin the present.What to make of this lesbian direction and performanceof

national identity? Her arrival in the village seemsto be a metaphorfor the arrival of a

new subjectivity within Englandthat will destroythe prevailing and comfortable

accountof an older unified vision and yet still allow continuity within Englishness,a 191 subjectivity that is alien or'foreign' to older ideasof heterosexualEngland. The England lies in the difficulty continuity of 0 silenceand of the pageant'scontemporary moment.These moments are as much a part of the performanceof Englandas the more obviously historical parts, since under NEssLa Trobe's direction this ten-minute* silenceis integral to the pageantof England.

This problem of determining meaningis one the text plays with. The audiencecannot always read the meaningof the pageant,but they sharea common

theory that meaningresides not in the pageant,but in Nfiss La Trobe herself.They ask

themselvesafid eachother whether they get her meaning,not what the pageant

means." Sheis thus the origin and author of the meaning of this representationof

English history, and this placesa lesbian as central to the revelation of both historical

Englandand its newerform. One member of the audiencediscusses the local rector's, Mr Streatfield's, the summaryof play, saying: . He said shemeant we all act. Yes, but whose play? Ah, that's the question! And if we're left asking questions,isn't it a failure as a play? I must say I like feel if I to theatre, I've Or to sure go the that graspedthe meaning ... was that, perhaps,what shemeant? "

But just as Miss La Trobe's intentions can elude her audience,so too doesshe evade

them physically. Continually in hiding behind treesand bushes,she is the only person

not to be revealed.The castare revealedto the audience;the audienceis revealedto

itself through mirrors; but when Rev. Streatfield comesto speakafter the play has

ended,'La Trobe was invisible. "' Wanting: 'To lady ' He looked for proposea vote of thanks to the gifted ... round an object correspondingto this description. None such was visible. '... who wishes it seemsto remain anonymous' he paused.'And so He paused again. , It was an awkward moment. How to make an end?Whom to thank? Every soundin nature was painfully audible; the swish of the trees;the gulp of a cow; even the skim of the swallows over the grasscould be heard.But no one spoke.Whom could they make responsible?Whom could they thank for their entertainment?Was thereno-one? "

The questionof whether anyoneis behind the pageantto thank, or not, is especially

pertinent.When the audienceask themselveswhat Miss La Trobe means,there is an

ambiguity presentin the question.They are asking both what shemeans as author of

the pageantand what shemeans as a barely visible personwho is not quite revealedto 192 them. It is only in the ten-minute silence that sheis just glimpsedby Mrs Mayhew, who whispers: '[tlhere she is, behind the tree'! ' What might be signified by this absenceand silence?Terry Castleargues that: In homosexuality lesbianismhas been contrastwith male ... seldom prohibited or proscribedin so many words. Yet this seemingobliviousness should not deceiveus. Behind such silence,one can often detectan anxiety too severeto allow for direct articulation. "

The discomfort thý audienceexperiences at this moment might also be the discomfort' of a silencewhich could reveal the lesbianin their midst. They could thus be seento be asking what is it that Miss La Trobe signifies as a subjectivity not understoodfrom their heterosexualstýndpoint. Ironically, Miss La Trobe herself is troubled by what the pageanthas meant:

At last, Miss La Trobe could raise herself from her stoopingposition. It had beenprolonged to avoid attention.The bells had stopped;the audiencehad gone;also the actors.She could straightenher back. She could open her arms. Shecould say to the world, You have taken my gift! Glory possessedher - for one moment.But what had she given? '0

Shecannot answer her audience'squestion about what the pageanthad meant.

Neither.,it seems,can she answertheir questionabout what sheherself signifies. The

audiencecannot understand her, and the only place in which sheis more fully revealed

is to the readerby a narrative strategythat withholds someknowledge from the other

characters,but imparts it to the reader.While the textual characterssearch for NEssLa

Trobe, the readerknows where she is. Again, just as Gooseyin The Island is more

fully shown to the readerthan to the other characters,this suggeststhat somewhere

within the processof reading the lesbianmay be disclosed.After all, while Gooseyis

only seenas a shadow/monsterby the married couple who view her at the end of the

narrative,to the readershe is a completeperson whose life-story can be understood through her love for Almond.

How, then, might the lesbian,or lesbianism,come into existence

through reading?Arnold Bennett's descriptionof literature discussedin ChapterFour,

althoughappearing to proposethe fundamentalheterosexuality of literature,reveals

anxietiesabout this formulation. His writing style is.simultaneously authoritative

aboutliterature whilst undercuttingboth his own argumentand his authority to speak 193 and define it. Both avowing and disavowing, he says-ý'I will tell you what literature is! No -I only wish I could. But I can't. No one can. Gleams can be thrown on the secret,inklings given, but no more.' " If what constitutesliterature is a 'secret, it is

interestingthat he goeson to discusshow the secretof literature might be revealed

through the metaphorof men Walking togetherwith a secrethidden betweenthem.

There is somequality in literature which men keep as a secretbetween themselves,

and for easeof reference,Bennett's passageis repeatedhere:

That eveningwhen you went for a walk with a faithful friend, the friend from hid ! You in whom you nothing - or almost nothing .... were, truth, somewhat inclined to hide from him the particular matter which monopolisedyour mind that evening,but somehowyou contrived to get on to it, drawn by an overpoweringfascination. ' And as your faithful friend was sympatheticand discreet,and flattered you by a respectful curiosity, you proceededfurther and further into the said matter, growing more and more confidential, until at last you cried out in a terrific whisper 'My boy, sheis simply miraculous V At that momqntyou were in the domain of literatureý'

What might this secretabout literature be?What is hidden in Bennett'smetaphoric

descriptionof it? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has proposedthat English literature reveals

male homosocial desire,and that this would be on the edgeof slipping into the

dangerousspace of homosexualdesire if it were not for a homophobiawhich prevents

this and ensures,heterosexuality. Drawing on the work of Gayle Rubin, she argues

that 'it is the useof women as exchangeable,perhaps symbolic, property for the

primary purposeof cementingthe bonds of men with men' which provides a primary

plot device for English literatureý3 However, in Bennett's passage,'she' is both a

plot device in his narrativethat cementsthe bondsbetween men and the genderof

literature.What is revealedis more the desirebetween men, written of in a languageof

fascination,sympathy and flattery, where their emotionsare attunedto one another.

The woman is virtually non-existent.She is not desiring, or in any way active in the

narrative.'She' functions as that which preventsmale homosociality becoming

homosexuality,the third term in the erotic triangle of man/man/woman.Like the thin

layer of feminine earth in Geoffrey Household'sRogue Male which keepsa

boundarybetween the narrator and the Major, this 'she', this literature, keepsthe

boundaryof heterosexualityin place betweenthe two male friends. Bennett's passage 194 revealsthe hidden secretsof the extent of desire betweenmen, and the femininity of literature rather than its virility. If the repressedterms on which the nation is founded might allow the expressionof the lesbian subject,so, too, might the nationally repressedknowledge that literature is feminine play a part in the expressionof lesbianism.We have seena greatnational insistenceon the virility of national literature,but what if this literature was, in fact, feminine? What then happensto destabilisethe grammarof the nation?

When Terry Lovell arguedthat 'literary production is gender ambiguous',and suggested'that there is no strong associationamong the population at large, of creativewriting with "manliness" - quite the oppositein fact', shemade explicit one of the anxietiespresent in the 1921 Newbolt Report. "' This Report had notedthat one of the difficulties which faced the project of bringing about a national unity throughEnglish literature and languagewas that the really virile men of the

working classesdespised literature becauseof its associationwith the domesticand

feminine. " By avoiding this discussionabout the genderof literature, the report was

able to maintain that literature was, in fact, virile, even though writing had traditionally

takenplace within the feminine domesticspace rather than the public spacemore

traditionally associatedwith the masculine.As Terry Lovell says,'[nlovel writing is a

form of domesticproduction. Here, home and workplace have never been

separated."' A corollary of this is that '[flictional worlds havebeen largely restricted

to the spherewhich is conventionally and ideologically assignedto women, or for

which women are assumedto have a specialresponsibility - that of personal relations.' " This could help to explain the interwar rhetorical focus on literature as

arising from the national earth/landscapesince this is the arenaassociated with the

masculine.

Through referenceto the work of H. V. Morton, I arguedin Chapter

Two that the 'outdoors' was taken to equatewith masculinity, and'indoors' with the

domesticity of femininity. Morton's focus on the origins of literature in landscape 195 wrestsit away from its feminine,associations with the domesticspace of its production.This is an important rhetorical move for the project of making the nation virile. Sinceliterature was a prime force in this project, the nation could not have been mademore virile through a feminine literature. Femininity could not producevirility for the nation, sincethe fernininisation of national culture was seento be the problem that neededto be solved: literature neededto be seento be virile in order to bring its virility into the national project. Similarly, it had to be seenas national. Therefore,its derivationfrom the earth of Englandprovided literature with both English nationality and virility.

However, the Newbolt Report, sliding over the questionablestatus of literature as masculine,carried on to arguethat reading was an essentiallypassive processin which the readeris a tablet written on by the writer, and that reading can

even ensureor supportheterosexual married 'character'. The report arguedthat:

All readingis experience- an indirect form of experience,but a particularly powerful one, and for many minds the most varied and fruitful in the whole of life. The ordinary human destiny consistsof playing, fighting, marrying, managinga household,bringing up children, pursuing a lifelong vocation. All but kind tending habit theseare experience, of a 0 more towards than reflection. Book readingcannot re theseacts, but it can add almost infinitely to their effect upon character.9goace

So readingcan make the readerexperience the 'ordinary human destiny' of masculine

heterosexualityand then act it better.This 'ordinary human destiny' is marked as

masculinein that girls and 'fighting' are antithetical, and women did not generally

pursue'a lifelong vocation'. Implicit in the Report was an argumentthat writing

shouldonly cover normative masculinehuman experience,otherwise 'character' could

not be addedto the reader.This masculineheterosexuality exists in contradictionto

Newbolt's conceptof human mind as tablet:

Any written words, whether in books or periodicals, which are the result of a formative processin the mind of the writer, must make in their own degreea formative impressionupon the mind of the reader.If the reader's mind is the strongerthe impressionwill be slight, or very possibly negligible, but if the tablet to be impressedis soft and still undintedthe mark madewill be proportionatelydeeper and more lasting?' This ferninisation view of reading0 as passivesuggests that a certain of the reader occurs,since it is unlikely the readeris strongerthan the writer, given that the purpose 196 of readingis to 'have intercoursewith those whose view of life is deepestand most virile. ' "' It is in this bond, or relationship, betweenthe femininity of literature and the ferninisedreader that I would like to suggestlies a version of lesbianismat the heartof the renewalof the nation. Lesbianismcan be found in this model of reading wherea ferninisedreader relates to a feminine literature. But what featuresmight characterisethis relationshipbetween reader and literature?

Lynne Pearcehas arguedfor an understandingof 'the readeras lover', "' in which ' "the will-to-relationship" is the fuel of text-readerinteraction'. 102

Arguing that to draw on "the discourseof romance' as 'better suited to the model of text-readerrelations ... than a narrowly psychoanalyticarticulation of reading-as- desire', Pearcedemonstrates a way of understandingthe emotionsin play while

reading.'03 However, if one looks at theories of reading from the interwar period, a

different picture emerges.Here, emotionsare virtually forbidden and reading

presentedas a skill only acquiredthrough arduously demanding,and probably boring,

hard work. Might the possibility of an emotional lesbian relationshipdeveloping

betweenfeminine literature and feminised readerpresent a threatto national

heterosexualsubjectivity suchthat thesetheorists protest too much about the lack of

pleasurein reading?Is this why they instruct the would-be-readerof the difficult

processesinvolved? Foundedin 1889,the National Home-ReadingUnion aimed 'to assist

and guide the readertoward the best use of his or her faculties and the best methodsof

readingthe best books on any subject.' '041n 1910,the Union arguedthat: I The faculty of readingis not the samething as the love of books. It may be paradoxicalto say so, but the love of books may interfere with reading itself. ""

Readingwas meant to lead to sanity rather than the intoxication of desire.Therefore,

readingin war-time, the Union later implied, could be seenas a seriouspart of the war

effort:

Our thoughts,our hopesare with thosewho are in dangerfor their country. But in order that we'may help them to the best of our strengthand wisdom, we must keep our minds fresh and sane.And this rest from uselessworry we may find in reading somethingwhich is remote from the associationof the war."' 197

The view that reading could produce sanity was still apparentin the 1925first issueof thej ournal, TheReader, where the editorial statedthat 'the more good books are read, the greaterwill be the common.store of sanity and understanding.' "

In his readinginstruction manualfor girls -a nationally problematic group as we have already seenin ChapterOne - Coulson Kernahanwarns that, '[i]n poetry most of us have a first love and it is not always our destinedmate with whom we first think ourselvesin love. ' "' In casethe girt thinks there is a relationship betweenloving and reading,Kernahan problematises this possibility by pointing to the exampleof Robert Louis Stevensonand his good reading practicewhich the girl shouldemulate:

He set himself tasks,and toiled at them, as if reading up for an examination, taking notes,annotating, comparing passages,and sparinghimself nothing to masterhis subject. "'

Clearly, Stevensonwas not one of the 'slovenly' readersKernahan cautions against, who pleasurablyand delightfully 'skip, scamperthrough, or dip into a novel'. "0 If the girl is to derive any pleasurefrom this reading process,it should be manifest

within the family in the interestsof family unity. "' By reading aloud to her family and

educatingthem in the process,'she draws the home circle closer by sharedpleasures,

and so cementsfamily life. ' '" If readingnaturally drew a girl into the heterosexual

family, one might supposethere was no need to arguefor it, or to presenta reading

methoddevoid of pleasureas the privileged method of reading.This betrayssome

anxietiesabout what readingmay do to the girl: might it give her a pleasurewhich

leadsaway from familial heterosexualityand lesbianisesher through a bonding with feminine literature?

The year after CoulsonKernahan published The Reading Girl, Mrs

Coulson Kernahanpublished The Secretof Home Happiness,in which she devotesa

chapterto 'Reading in the Home'. She,too, arguesthat home reading of the right

books, rather than 'perni cious literature', 113can bring the family togetherand prevent

girls from becomingsilly, since girls 'are frequently led astrayby readingsickly love 114 stories- storieswhich stimulate a tastefor romanceat any cost.' Of course,reading 198 aloud in the family is an effective way of disallowing the girl her private thoughts about the text, or indeed any privacy. However, in her novel of 1919, Christopher and Columbus,Elizabeth von Arnim charts the failure of girls readingaloud to bring family unity. Orphanedtwins whose mother was English and father Germancome to live in war-time England with their maternal aunt and her husband,Uncle Arthur, who doesnot like foreigners,especially in his own home. The girls attempt to securetheir position in the household.One of the twins, Anna Rose:

Who was nothing if not intrepid, at first tried to soften his heart by offering to readaloud to him in the eveningswhen he came home weary from his daily avocations,which were golf. Her own suggestioninstantly projected a touching picture on her impressionableimagination of youth, grateful for a roof over its head,in return alleviating the tedium of crabbedage by introducing its uncle, who from his remarks was evidently unacquaintedwith them, to the best productionsof the great mastersof English literature. But Uncle Arthur merely staredat her with lack-lustre eyeswhen she proposedit, from his wide-legged position on the hearthrug,where he was moving money about in trouser-pocketsof best material. And later on she discoveredthat he had always supposedthe Faery Queen,and Adonals, and In he had heard intervals during his life, for he fifty Memoriam,names at was 115 and suchthings do sometimesget mentioned, were well-known racehorses.,

This passagesuggests that reading aloud within the family is itself part of an

unobtainableromance of familial unity. Part of the problem with obtaining this unity is

the mixed nationality of the girls.' 16Their Germanpatrilineage precludes their uncle,

who seeshimself as 'the most immensely British of anybody', from acceptingthis

offer, whilst his own version of being British - and more pertinently, English - repudiatesan intellectual life in favour of a sporting one. 117Von Arnim's view of

girls' readingproblematises those views advancedby the National Home Reading

Union and the Coulson Kernahans,by suggestingthat familial reading only

strengthensbonds which pre-exist.Like Morton's suggestionthat the English

landscapecan only be properly seenby thosewho are already constitutedas English,

this national home-readingcan only work when national genderrelations are already

in place.If not in place,they could bring the reading girl into a pleasurablelesbian

relationshipin which she bondswith feminine literature. This also suggeststhat

heterosexualityis an unstableform which has continually to reproduceitself, and that

for the heterosexualthere is always a dangerof sliding into homosexuality.This, 199 perhaps,is what the working-class man who reputedly feared for his virility whilst

readingliterature understood.Although Uncle Arthur's form of sporting middle-class

Englishnessis as much a block to national unity being achievedthrough English

literature as that of the workingo-classman who despisesliterature for its femininity,

his 'sportiness' doesnonetheless maintain his virility and his national identity, as does

his refusal of reading. It seems,then, that behind the theoriesof the Newbolt Report

and thoseof the National Home-ReadingUnion is somethingthat Uncle Arthur and

the working-classman know: that literature can ferninise the reader;that literature itself

is feminine; and that to readmay be to adopt a lesbian subjectposition in relation to the

text. Similarly, the Coulson Kemahans' texts appearto 'know' this, since they deal

with the potential dangersthe girl might face in reading by suggestingreading is not

pleasurable,and the bestway a girl should read is within the family to cementfamilial heterosexualbonds.

Henry Guppy, in his The Art of Reading (1929), consideredwhy

booksand readin are important to 'civilized' societies.He positedthat the purposeof 'is for immortality,, books bridue books to satisfy ... cravings that provide a to the past and the future, and that when reading in the presentmoment, the book has the

power 'to annihilate time and space'. " The way we have seenlesbian subjectivity to

be discursivelyformulated - as that of a ghostly time-traveller who spannedpresent

and pastwhich madeher an immortal, and her virtual obliteration in presenttime - sharedthe featuresof books and reading Guppy identified. Similarly, her lack of

nationallocation meantthat just as readingcould annihilate spaceor place, so too

could she.But if the lesbian is like the book and the act of reading, shealso shares the characteristicswith nation. . At the beginning of this chapter,I suggestedthat Bhabha's theoriesof

national narrative could provide a way of understandingthe position of the lesbian

with regardto the nation. According to him, the nation occupiesa liniinal space

becauseof its paradoxicalformation betweenmodernity and antiquity. The modernity

of the nation i's not in doubt; but its mythical ancientorigins are, and its fictional 200 antiquity and 'naturalness'have to be maintainedthrough a rangeof national discursiveaddresses. As we have seen,within this national addressthe. figures of the lesbianand of lesbianismloom. The Newbolt Report had to repressthe idea that

literature was genderedfeminine in order to make the nation virile, whilst reading

theory repressedthe idea that romantic"pleasuresmight be obtainedfrom reading.

Similarly, the anxiety within the Report as to whether the readerwas ferninisedwhilst

readingwas repressedbefore a full discussionabout the implications of this could talýe

place.However, hidden within this national addressis a lesbian relationship between

feminine literature and a ferninisedreader. In order that the pleasuresin this

relationshipshould not come into being, instruction manualson reading suggestedthe

correct way to read was to labour at it. As my analysisof the usesof literature show,

it was possibleto subvertthe heterosexualitythat English literature was meant to

guaranteeto the nation, by using that samenational literature to signal lesbianism.

Nonetheless,the way that English landscapewas formulated within

national literature worked to precludethe lesbianfrom being written into it. Since,as

we have seen,heterosexual masculinity was offered a rural, earth-basedlocational

identity, and heterosexualfemininity was offered an urban and domesticone, with

male homosexualitybeing enabledby both seý and water locations,there was little

national spaceleft in which the lesbiancould be situated.Her location in airiness

simultaneouslygave her a site for an identity, whilst precluding this, as air was not

figured as national in a way that both the rural and the urban were. The lack of a

nationaldimension to air meantthat this locational identity could not be national.

Therefore,in the processof narrating the nation, the lesbianwas producedas an

identity without a concretegeographical location..

In both Betweenthe Acts and the reading methodssuggested by the

Newbolt Report, the National Home-ReadingUnion and the Coulson Kernahans'

texts, the figure of the lesbian and lesbianismis hidden in national processes.She

appearsa's what Terry Castlecalls a 'ghost effect'. "' She is either erased,or revealed

only through conditionswhich are without materiality or substantiality- such as a 201 particular reading process,or within 'literature'. However, when one turns to literature to find her, only a ghost is revealed.But if, as I have argued,the paradoxical formulation of the nation is complicit in her construction,then there is an inevitability to her apparitionalappearance. If shemakes explicit the limits of the nation, and its fictive quality, then national addresscannot tolerate this undermining of its authority, and hasto repressher in order to salvageitself. The lesbian is a subjectivity which expressesin culture the repressedterms of the nation itself. Since sheexpresses the repressedterms of the ambiguity within national addressshe too must be repressed,in order that the nation should not be brought into disrepute.Therefore the simultaneous display and erasureof the lesbian,identified by Castle,happens in and through the processof narratingthe nation. In this way, her place within the grammarof the nation is securedthrough a rhetorical location rather than a geographicalone. Her

'magnitude', which I discussedat the beginning of this chapter,is indeed accorded through being assigneda place, but her ghostlinesswithin culture generally can be understoodby this being a discursiverather than a material one.

SylviaTownsend Warner, Mr. Fortune'sMaggot (London:Chatto &Mndus, 1927),p. 173. Eric Hobsbawrnand Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1983), p. 18. I 'Criminal Law AmendmentBill', ParliamentaryDebates, 4 August 1921,p. 1799,and pp. 1804- 1806. 4Parliamentary Debates, pp. 1804-1806. 5Parliamentary Debates, p. 1800. I MoniqueWittig, 77wStraight Mind and OtherEssays (New York- HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1992), p. 9. " Homi K. Bhabha,'DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the marginsof themodem nation' in Nation andNarration,ed. by Homi K. Bhabha(London: Routledge, 1990), p. 298. " Bhabha,P. 317. 'Terry Castle,The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (NewYork- ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1993), p. 4. Castle,p. 2. Mary Gordon,Chase of the Wild Goose:7he Story of LadyEleanor Butler andMiss Sarah Ponsonby,known as theLadies of Llangollen (Londoý:The HogarthPress, 1937). " Gordon, p. 17. "Gordon, p. 137. 14Gordon, p. 38. Gordon,p. 206. ElizabethMavor, 77ie Ladies of Llangollen:A Studyin RomanticFriendship (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1973). 210. ', p. I Virginia Woolf, Orlando[1928] (Harmondsworth- Penguin, 1993). PaulFussell, 7he Great War and Modem Memory (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, i975), p. 316. "' Vita Sackville-Wcst,71e Dark Island (London:The HogarthPress, 1934), p. 53. 202

7he Dark Island is a prefigurementof DaphneDu Maurier's Rebecca,and Du Maurier may well owe somethingto it. In both, the non-heterosexualwoman is murdered by drowning; both have a lower middle-classwoman marrying into landed gentry; both have this woman carrying a postcardor photographicrepresentation of Manderley/Storn with them throughout most of their lives prior to marriage. Both have housesin which the heroine sits on a window-seat gazing out to seafrom her bedroom and a housekeeperwho loves the Lady of the house.Both narrativesalso include a visit to a doctor in London, a scenein a coroner's court where the local landed gentry collude with patriarchal structuresof power, and both make clear that the woman'is an exile in her own home. Marriage cannot guaranteeeither of them a feeling of 'homeliness' within their country estatesbecause ultimately men own them. " ShannonBell, Reading, Writing & Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). See my discussion pp.46-47. Sackville-West, p. 76. Sackville-West, p. 78. Sackville-West, p. 90. Sackville-West, pp. 66-67. Italics in original. Sackville-West, p. 82. Sackville-West, p. 230. Sackville-West, p. 201. Italics in original. Sackville-West, p. 220. Italics in original. Compton Mackenzie, Extraordinary Women:77ieme and variations [1927] (London: Macdonald, 1953), p. 22. 31Mackenzie, p. 138. If 'everybody immoral in Sirene', their immorality also includes the loss of grammar,or logical order of language. 11Mackenzie, p. 88. "Mackenzie, p. 29. I Mackenzie, p. 83. 35Naomi Roydc-Smith, The Island: A Love Story (Leipzig: BernhardTauchnitz, 1931). I Royde-Smith, p. 12. 37The trope of the 'goose' recurs in lesbian fictions of this period. The title of Mary Gordon's Chase of the Wild Goose,could be read as saying if one looks for the lesbian she will not be found. Gooscy's namerecalls the nursery rhyme Goosey Goosey Ganderwho, significantly, wandersupstairs into 'my Lady's chamber' and throws out the man found there. Virginia Woolf's Orlando usesthe figure of a wild goosewhich flies overheadas Orlando arrives in the presentmomenL The gooseis associated,too, with Halloween, when the thostly dead can mingle with the living. In The White Goddess:A historical grammar ofpoetic myth [1946] (London, Faberand Faber, 1961),Robert Graves identifies the goosemonth as Oct 29 - Nov 25. At this time, the tame goosewas brought in from pastureto be fattenedup for the midwinter feast while the wild goosemourned the loss of their companionship. Royde-Smith, pp. 34-35. Royde-Smith, p. 84. Royde-Smith, p. 86. Royde-Smith, p. 285. Royde-Smith, p. 287. Gordon, pp. 189-190. RamJohnson, "'The Best Friend Whom Life has Given Me% Does Winifred Holtby have a place in lesbian historyT in Lesbian History Group, Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840-1985 (London: The Women's Press, 1993), p. 145. 45Mary Renault, Purposesof Love [1939] (London: Longmans, 1968). ' See, for example, Naomi Roydc-Smith, The Tortoiseshell Cat (London: Constable, 1925), p. 39. 47Renault, p., 19. ' Renault, p. 23. "Schoolgirl's Suicide: Teacher'sEvidence', ManchesterGwirdkm, 7 September 032, p. 3. so'Schoolgirl's Suicide: Teacher's Evidence', p. 3. " In a personalcommunication I had with Alison Oram, she noted that 'the special ones' was a phraseused in Germany at the time by a major gay male organisation and its journal, Der Eigene. One can only speculateas to whether Miss Lee was aware of this. 203

3' Rob Shields, Placeson the Margin: Alternative Geographiesof Modernity (London: Roudedge, 1991), p. 4. Shields, p. 6. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness [1928] (London: Virago, 1997), p. 102. Hall, p. tO9. Hall, p. 3 11. '7 Hall, p. 313. Hall, p. 311. Hall, p. 188. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Roudcdgc, 1995), p. 113. McClintock, P. 22. Rudi C. Bleys, The Geographyof Perversion: Male-to-Male SexualBehaviour outside the Westand the EthnographicImagination 1750-1918 (London: Cassell, 1996), p. 189. ' The lesbian lovemaking betweenStephen and Mary is implied by the now famous words 'and that night they were not divided'. SeeHall, p. 316. Richard Dyer. White (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 21. Hall, p. 313. 66Hall, p. 366. Hall, p. 367. Hall, p. 317. Hall, p. 413. Hall, p. 21. Hall, p. 151. Hall, p. 336. 73One could speculatethat by naming the country estateof Stephen's family 'Morton', Hall is providing a critique, tinged with admiration, of H. V. Morton's England. ' Hal I, p. 400. 7' Hall, p. 43 1. Virginia Woolf, Betweenthe Acts [19411(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 45. Woolf, p. 48. 78Woolf, p. 146. Somecritics argue that Miss La Trobc is modelled on the lesbian theatredirector Edith Craig, illegitimate daughterof Ellen Terry. SeeKatharine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell, 1998), pp 9-11. " Woolf, P. 45. 80Woolf, p. 58. Italics in'original. 8' Woolf, p. 128. 1 Woolf, p. 132. 81Woolf, p. 128. " Woolf, p. 67, p. 87 and p. 122. "Woolf, p. 139. "Woolf, p. 133. I Woolf, p. 135. 'Woolf, p. 125. " Castle, p. 6. "Woolf, p. 145. " Arnold BennettýLiterary Taste: How tofonn it, with detailed instructionsfor collecting a complete library of English Literature [1909] (London: Pelican Special, 1938), pp. 16-17. Bennett, pp. 16-17. Evc Kosofsky Scdgwick, BetweenMen: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 25. " Terry Lovell, 'Writing Like A Woman: A Question Of Politics', in The Politics of Theory: Proceedingsof the EssexConference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982, ed. by Francis Bark-er and others (Colchester University of Essex, 1983), p. 17. 's 71e Teachingof English in England (London: HMSO, 1921), pp. 252-253. " Lovell, p. 17. 97Lovell, p. 17. 204

Teachingof English in England, p. 336. Teachingof English in England, pp. 337-8. Teachingof English in England, p. 338. Lynne Pearce,Feminism and the Politics ofReading (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 6. `2 Pearce,p. 20. Pearce,p. 21. Italics in original. GeorgeRadford, The Faculty of Reading; The Coming of Age of the National Home Reading Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), p. 9. " Radford, p. 77. `6 M. I- Sadler, Reading in War Time (London: National Home-Reading Union, 1914), p.* 6. "'Editorial'. 7he Reader,1, (October 1925), p. 2. " Coulson Kcmahan, The Reading Girl: Sauntersin Bookland 4 Chats on the Choice of Books & Methodsof Reading (London: George G. Harrap, 1925), p. 39. " Kernahan, p. 106. 110Kernahan, p. 64. "I PennyTinkler arguesin Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazinesfor Girls Growing Up in England 1920-1950 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995) that popular magazinesfor girls also promoteddomesticated heterosexuality, and that if girls were naturally disposedtoward this then why did they needpersuading to. adopt such subjectivity. The unspokenanswer to her question is that familial heterosexualityis not natural. Kernahan,p. 133. Mrs. Coulson Kemahan, The Secretof Home Happiness (London: The Epworth Press/J. Alfred ( Sharp, 1926), p. 64. 114Mrs. Coulson Kernahan, p. 65. Elizabeth von Arnim, Christopher and Columbus [19191 (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 15-16. In this way, von Arnim prefigures Paul Gilroy's criticism of the centrality that Benedict Anderson gives to readingas conferring national identity. In There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), pp 44-45, Gilroy arguesthat there are limits to the powers of literature in accordingthe readernational citizenship. One cannot, for example,read one's way into becoming English. Other legal processesare also involved. 117 von Arnim, p. 16. "' Henry Guppy, 77wArt of Reading (Manchester. ManchesterUniversity Press, 1929), pp. 4-6. 119Castle, p. 2. 205

CONCLUSION

This thesishas concerned itself with three main researchquestions. Firstly, to what

extent did the dominant discourseof the rural in the interwar period define

Englishnessas masculineand Nature as feminine? Secondly,if women were excluded

from this discursiveheterosexual relationship, can it be seenparadoxically to have

openedup a spacefor alternativesexualitites to emerge;and if lesbianismwas an

instanceof the latter then what writing strategieswere adoptedin order to articulatea

relationshipbetween Englishness and lesbianism?Thirdly, what can censoredtexts of

the period reveal aboutthe relationsbetween such an English masculinenational

subject,the meaningand powersattributed to literature, and forbidden sexualitiesand

subjectivides?These questions were posedin order to test the hypothesisthat interwar hegemonipdiscourses of Englishnesslocated it as originating in the heterosexual

bond betweena masculinenational subjectand a feminine nature/landscape.

Discursively,this left little spacefor women to insert themselvesinto sucha cultural

formation of Englishness.However, a paradox of this heterosexualisingcultural

matrix may havebeen to give a voice to lesbian subjectivity; that is, if women might

not be English, could lesbiansbe? Thus, the relationshipbetween differently inflected

constructionsof 'books', 'the bucolic' and 'bodies' constitutesthe focus of the study.

The first chapterdealt mainly with the first of theseelements, and with

the third researchquestion, and comprisedan examinationof bannedand restricted

books.The Newbolt Report, as an indicator of the national importanceplaced on the

post-GreatWar renewalof the nation through English literature, arguedthat through

the study of a literature which was native to the soil, readerswould profit from

intercoursewith authorswho held a virile view of life. In this way, two key terms

were articulatedas fundamentalto national renewal- that of 'soil' or 'earth' and that of 'virility'. Although the Report arguedagainst the need for literary censorship,

censorship,nonetheless, did take place. In the processof banning, or restricting the

readershipof, certain books, Englishnesswas being constructedthrough a rejection of 206 texts which were deemedunacceptable for the national canon.Literature was called upon as a force to preserveand maintain the healthy, 'virile' characterof the nation.

An analysisof thesebanned texts and the rhetoric surroundingthem showedthat the virility of the nation was to be achievedand maintainedthrough valorising the English countrysideand abjectingmaternal origins. Literature of the healthy openair was to

provide a counterpointto an unhealthyand un-English obsessionwith sex that had

beencaused by the breakdownof order that the Great War had unleashed.The texts

which were subjectto censorshipthreatened to reveal the limits of the terms on which

the virility of the nation depended.In these,the statusof the open air and the rural

were challengedby their suggestionthat the open air, far from guaranteeing

heterosexualrespectability, could make one adulterouslyimmoral or lesbian,while the

rural myth was challengedby an argumentthat its force did not have enoughstrength

to make life meaningful.The respectabilityof the English middle-classfamily, too,

was challengedby being viewed from the perspectiveof the prostitute.From her

standpoint,middle-class men's healthy virility was underininedby revealing the

secretsof their hidden sex-lives.Also, the cultured and literate prostitutesignified a

refusal of proper class,race and sexualdistinctions, becauseof her mixing with

peoplewho miscegenatedand with homosexuals.An immersion in English literary

culture was not sufficient to preventher from becomingdisreputable, so the powers of

literature in maintaining Englishnesswere also undenninedin this way. In the process

of book censorship,a categoryof subjectwas unexpectedlyidentified as posing a Whilst in dangerto the nation - the categoryof schoolgirl/daughter. shewas seenas needof protection from indecentliterature, shewas also seento be one of the people

writing this sameliterature. As shewrote, sherevealed herself as beyondthe

nationally acceptablestereotype. Girls were not as innocent as their fatherswould

haveliked them to be, and the extent of their sexualknowledge threatened the

patriarchalrelationship between them. They revealedboth the absurdityof

heterosexualityand the possibility of love betweenwomen. Sincethe virility of the

nation was partly to be derived from ensuringwomen's heterosexuality,in order that 207 they shouldreproduce racially white bodies for England while also reproducingthe cultural valuesof Englishness,girls' views on heterosexualityand lesbianismposed a threat to the grammarof the nation. Books, then, were constitutedboth as a promise and a threat:they promisedthe textual valorisation of a particular model of

Englishness,but also threatenedto undermine this version.

ChapterTwo turnedto 'the bucolic', through an exampleof the clean and healthy,fresh-air literature of England,in order to explore the first research question,concerning the extent to which the dominant discourseof the rural defined

Englishnessas mpculine and nature as feminine. The works of H. V. Morton were

examinedto provide an analysisof how the grammarof the nation was fon-nulatedin a

nationally valorisedset of texts. Morton's pilgrimages to England and Englishness

positedthe nation and white, heterosexual,middle-class masculinity as coterminous.

Sincethe city family was seenas racially anaernic,and London as contaminatedby the

presenceof non-white peoplesand Jews, a return to the English countrysidewas

proposedas a way of ensuringEngland's continuation as a virile and progressive

nation. Morton's rural earthwas ferninised as pregnantand maternal,and Englishmen

were seento be at their most heroic when relating to this earth. Indeed,in

metaphoricallyheterosexual acts, Morton's journeys to find Englandculminate in his

bodily penetrativerelationship with this samefeminine earth. Sinceearth can be

figured as both tomb and womb, in Morton's grammarof the nation earth is wrenched

from its associationswith death,and death's attendantmeaninglessness, and

associatedwith a meaning-creatingwomb. From this womb was producedthe

literature and history of England,which in turn createdthe nation as a meaningful

entity. SinceEnglish literature and English history originated in earthand were

masculine,the meaningsthe nation madewere derived from masculinity. Although

feminine earth was national, women, however, were not national, but only the vehicle

through which Englishmenreproduced hist6ry, culture and more national bodies.

Women were a problem for England,being 'international' and more interestedin

urban pleasuressuch as shopping.In this way, they representeda force which must 208 be controllcd in the nationalinterest. Since their wfiimsical shoppinghabits could lead to the destructionof English craft industries,they neededto be containedin order to safeguarda notion of Englishnessas basedin organic communitiesorganised around craft production.Nonetheless, although Morton locatedwomen as belongingto the urban,even in this location they could representthe abject.Without men's control, they were likely to slip from their classand raceallegiances into a degeneracywhich no longer caredto maintain thesedistinctions. In Morton's Englandmen and boys could representthis England,but neither women nor girls could. His Englandwas most fully revealedat the point when an Englishmanbodily relatedto earth.lEs books,then, identified 'the bucolic' as an indispensableclement in, and arenafor, the constitutionof the masculinenational subject.

The third chapterbrought 'bodies' into much closerproximity with

'the bucolic', throughan investigationof the gendersof Englishnessand earth,and examinedwhether the ways in which Englishnessand earthwere formulatedworked to excludewomen from this discursiveheterosexual relation betweenmen and earth.

Here,the main argumentwas that the trope of the man-in-earthbecame an important cultural figuration of Enggglishness.Since it recalledthe experienceof trenchwarfare, and sincethe trenchesrepresented a war-zoneforbidden to women,the useof this trope excludedwomen from this versionof Englishnessas they could havehad no memoryof the trenchesto call on. Literary representationsof trenchwarfare highlightedthe break-downof the boundarybetween men and mud, betweenthe humanand the inhuman.This mud destroyedany senseof rational and logical order in the world, and often led to an incoherencein which languageitself also broke down.

However,the post-GreatWar metaphoricmasculine burial in the country,as a responseto the disorderthe trenchesrepresented, enabled a re-orderingof the world, suchthat men could becomediscrete subjects and earthcould becomefirm and distinct. Sinceearth was foundationalto the grammarof the nation, this formulation of earthas substantialoffered a way of re-makingnational meanings. In orderto be My national,a man had also to be in a loving, crotic relationshipwith earth.The figuration 209 of earthas both tomb and womb enabledan oblique discussionof the resurrectionof deadsoldiers. More than this, it also offered the possibility of the resurrectionof a pre-war Englandthat thesewritings moumed.

An analysisof a rangeof texts which utilised the trope of the man-in- earthshowed that not all men who went to earth could representEn (-,, jis hness.Miners were a catcgoryof men who threatencdthe nation through too deepa penetrationof earth.Below the layer of earthwhich was English lay a dangerouschasm of femininity which actedagainst the civilized virtues of Englishness.However, in the top layer of earth,both patrilineageand literature could be found. The associationof earth/natureand literature was so strongthat it was possibleto posit natureas literature,and vice versa.This trope found fullest expressionin RogueMale, where the masculinebody in earth was also a writing body, producingliterature from this sameearth. Here, the man-in-earth,once resurrectedfrom earth,could become

England'spotential saviour.However, the loss of a relationshipto earthendangered men's heterosexuality.Flying representeda dangeroussport for masculinityin that leavingearth for air enabledhomosexuality. While earthcould providea thin layer betweenmen to preventthem from becomingtoo close,womeh, too, could be culturally placedas a barrier betweenmen that preventedhomosexuality.

Women in thesetexts were variously erased,ridiculed or positionedas meaninolessunless heterosexual. Their presencein the countrysideruined the countrysidefor men.These particular formulations of women's connectionto the rural worked to excludewomen from this discursiveheterosexual relationship men were having with earth,and disallowedwomen a relationshipwith the place that was positedas the most authenticEngland. So, in the constructionof Englishness, masculinebodies needed to enter'the bucolic' by establishinga relationshipwith the earth,whereas feminine bodieswere excluded.

The fourth chapterturned to a different configurationof books, bodies and the bucolic to examinethe relationshipthat men or womenwere allowed with a differcrit form of nature- that of the sea- and investigatedthe powersattributed to 210 literatureat searather than on land. Readingbooks at seawas accordergreater moral value than the readingof bookson land. This was becausethe seaand the sailor posed dangersto the racially white, heterosexual,earth-based grammar of the nation. Even thoughthe seawas a placefor masculinity rather than femininity, it still troubled

masculinitythrough offering the possibilitiesfor sexualimmorality, homosexuality

and racial impurity. In foreign ports,the sailor was a nationalrepresentative of

England,but his sexualbehaviour there was in dangerof being profoundly un-

English.This was seento be amenableto correction throughthe provision of

shipboardlibraries. This chapterexamined how booksand readingwere creditedwith

the power of ensuringofficial Englishnessin the sailor, and argued,through an

analysisof Arnold Bennett'swork, that literature could be creditedwith the power to

heterosexualisethe reader.At sea,the book itself could becomea fetish object of

Englishnessin the unstableand licentious spaceof the sea.Books could groundthe

nationalidentity of the sailor by rooting it in earth,through the processof reading,

sinceearth could be seento be in the literary contentof the book.As the sailor

penetrativelyand bodily readthe book, he could act out anothermetaphoric way of beingEnglish while at sea,mimicking the penetrativerelationship to earththe land-

basedEnglishman discursively used to consolidatehis nationalidentity.

This chapterwent on to examinethe powersand dangersattributed to

the seaand the sailor in literary texts,and found that the seacould be creditedwith the

power to eraseheterosexuality in the liminal spaceof the shoreline.Watery, marginal

spaceswithin Englandwhich recalledthe sea'serasure of heterosexualitycould allow

the inscription of the homosexualsubject. For male homosexualityas much as for the

sailor, the trajectory was upwardstoward the starsrather than down to earth,such that

water and sky signified in a homosexualeconomy. For sailors,the loss of land and

new relation to the seaand starsproduced a subjectivity in which nationalidentity lost

importance,so the sailor who returnedto land could trouble the genderand race

distinctionson which the grammarof the Englandwas founded.However, England

and Englishncsscould be seento be as presentin text as in place,and at times more 211 present- and perhapsmore reliably present- within the text than in place.To read, therefore,could bring one into a bodily relationshipwith England.

Moreover,just as the earth was formulated as having a dangerously non-Englishspace deep beneath the earth's surface,so, too, did the seahave the power to washup from the deepsomething which was unassimilablein the grammar of Englishness.The seahad the capaýility to produce,consume and reveal the corpse, in all its meaninglessness.Since th& corpse would not obey the rules of national culture, it was beyondthe reachof Englishness.One literary instanceof sucha corpse was, I argued,a lesbian.In this way, this particular lesbianwas seento be outside nationalprocesses and nationally uncontrollable. The fifth chapterexplored more closely the dynamicbetween the feminine body and the bucolic, throughan examinationof the relationsbetween womenand earth,in order to analysethe ways in which women were disallowedthe versionof Englishnessas a bond betweennational subjectand earth.This was in orderto addressthe questionof whetherthis exclusionparadoxically opened up a spacefor alternativesexualities to emerge.Few texts includedthe figure of a woman- in-earth,but thosethat did usedthis figure to representmonstrosity, disorder and dismembering.This stoodin stark contrastto the orderedre-membering that the man-in- earthrepresented in the nationalimagination. VVhile the masculinenational body could confera nationalidentity on the foreign earthit entered,the body of the womancould do no suchthing. Sheprovoked civil disorderand makesthings 'muddy'. An analysis of a text, Lolly Willowes, in which a woman attemptedto go to earth,revealed that this was only possiblewhen Lolly refusednational identif ication as an Englishwoman and becamelesbian, and by the textualdestruction of the heterosexualgrammar of the nation, so that the nation no longerexisted. However, the attemptto write a lesbian going to English earthwas evenmore problematic.Possessing a form of masculinity allowed her to enterearth in orderto haveheterosexual sex with her female lover, who viewed her as a man. But the time in which this happenedwas ambiguous,spanning both the pastand the presentmoment of the text. The ambiguityabout the time in 212 which this happened- past or present- was mirrored by an ambiguity aboutwho actuallywent to earth-a man or a lesbian?Given that this lesbiandied immediately after enteringearth, shewas simultaneouslydisplayed and erased.

However, the work of Eve Balfour, first presidentof the Soil

Association,showed a way in which earth could be formulated without recourseto a hctcroscxualisingimperative. Her earthwas an unstable,shifting form in an endless processof interactionwith other earthproducts. This earthwas actively productive, but sinceher soil was homosexualisedrather than heterosexualised,this allowed the possibility of the homosexualisationof the nation, still foundedon earth,but not heterosexuallyso. This re-forrnulationof earthwould haveallowed for alternative sexualitiesto emerge,but sinceother disciplinary forces were also in operationin

English culture,its force was relatively weak. The last chapterturned its attentionspecifically to the waysin which booksconfigure the lesbianbody in relation to the bucolic, by looking at the writing ihe stategiesthat neededto be adoptedto articulatea relationshipbetween lesbianand the nation.Since earth was associatedwith masculineheterosexuality, feminine heterosexualityassociated with urbandomesticity, and water associatedmainly with masculinehomosexuality, where could the lesbianbe placedwithin the national landscapein orderto becomesubstantial? This chapterargued that the location which was accordedher, outsideof time and in air, worked to precludeher from having a nationallocational identity. However,one effect of the processesof narratingthe nation was to producea subjectposition which expressedto the nation the categoriesit had to deny in order to maintainthe ontological statusof Englandas 'real'. I argued this subjectpoiition was that of the lesbian.In thesetextual examples,she veered betweenbeing a nationaland a non-nationalsubject since the nation wascomplicit in her constructionas non-national.Even though literature appearedto 'ghost' her, some texts suggestedthat the lesbiancould be revealedthrough the processof reading.My analysisof interwar theoriesof readingshowed that a lesbianrelationship could be seento chamcterisethe relation betweenreader and text. In this way lesbianismwas 213 hiddenat the heartof the project of renewing the nation through literature.This gave her a rhetoricallocation in the grammarof the nation ratherthan a materialone, and that it from bond between would suggest0 was not women's exclusion the national man and earththat paradoxicallyproduced the lesbianas an alternativesexuality, but that shewas producedin the processof narrating the nation.

Narrativesof the nation showedthat Englandrelied on heterosexuality to maintainits classed,gendered and raced grammar. Homosexuality threatened class and racedistinctions in its refusalof heterosexualfemininity or masculinity.Just as middle-classMaurice Madean outlaw relationshipwith working-classScudder, so too did Lolly Willowes crossclass and racerelationships at the witches Sabbath.Xtianity could thereforebe seenas one of the conservativeforces within the grammarof the nationwhich worked to maintain heterosexualityin nationalinterests. English xtianity was alsoimplicated in the project of ensuringreproduction did not crossrace lines, as, could be seenin the way xtianity was usedto harassthe family of V.1illiam andTulip in 7he Sailor's Return.However, a return to a pre-xtian past could allow homosexualityby calling up older myths. Lolly Willowes's Satanwas modelledon the pre-xtiangod, Heme the Hunter,and Maurice andAlex mythically returnedto the pagangreenwood where men could be outlaws together.

One of the problemswith homosexualityfor the nation,it seemed, concomitantwith the refusalof conventionsof heterosexualitywas a repudiationof other nationaltaxonomies of raceand class.National heterosexuality,then, was a force which ensuredracial distinctions.Nonetheless, as RichardDyer suggestedin

White, whitenessfears that white sexis actually queersex, in that to act in a bodily sexualway underminesthe categoryof 'white' sinceit is conceivedof as category which transcendsthe body. To act sexually,then, is to 'queer' the categoryof whiteness.However, what this thesisreveals in its examinationof the relation betweenmen and earthis that this discursivesexual/erotic relation allowedfor the maintenanceof a whitenesswhich could be lost through actualheterosexual sex with women.In the grammarof the nation,feminine earthoccupied a more valorised 214 position than women did. Although women were associatedwith nature through their reproductivecapacities, nonetheless, their form of 'nature' was lessvalued than that of the rural landscape.The disallowal of a relation to this feminine earthfor women was one of the discursiveexclusionary practiceswhich ensuredmasculinity's identification with nation, and England's identification with masculinity. Similarly, the refusalto allow miners a matching relation to earth was anotherexclusionary practice which ensuredthe masculinity which representedEngland was both white and middle- class.

Just as not all forms of masculinity could representthe nation, so some forms of earth were excludedfrom this symbolic function. It was the topmost layer of

earthwhich was national; beyond that level lay a dangerousabyss which could

threatenthe nation, as it representeda primitive and uncivilised space.In the same

way that women were seenas a force which, unlesscontrolled, could posea dangerto

the valuesof civilisation, being primitive and barely civilised, so, too, did earth have

its own disruptive powers.I-Ae. women, on the surfaceearth was under control;

however,to delve too far into earth threateneda disruption of Englishnessand its

values.Nevertheless, as the work of Eve Balfour showed,there was nothing

inevitable about earth's constructionas in a heterosexualrelation to masculinity. Her

re-formulation of earth as an unstableshifting category,produced through a

'marriage' of earth afid earth products,suggested a way in which the grammarof the

nation could be homosexualised.In this relation of sameness,where earth and earth

productsinteract, a'new grammarof the nation could be proposedwhich would allow

for the homosexualisationof England.' Since masculinity's abjectionof its own

matemalorigins allowed it to claim itself as the origin of the nation through its

reproductiverelation with maternalearth -a union which producedthe literature and

history of England- then Balfour's earthwould threatenthis connection.Masculinity could not then claim itself to be the origin of the nation, if feminine earth was acting

parthenogeneticallyto producethe nation.This threatenedto makemasculinity

irrclevant in the grammarof the nation, and would causethe abject to breakout in the 215 form of the awesomeparthenogenetic mother who reproduceswithout the needfor men.

This thesishighlighted the importance of location for identity. If, as I have said in the introduction, JeremyPaxman, Judy Giles and Tim Mddleton conceivedof Englishnessas a 'state of mind', then this thesishas offered another view of Englishnessas embodiedand located.The locations accordedvarious identities had clear implications for their differing values in the nation, as some locationswere accordedgreater national value than others.Earth was accordedthe greatestvalue as a location for national identity. However, the 'island race', which occupieda position surroundedby sea,was threatenedby this samesea. Leaving

earthfor seaor air could threatenmasculinity's heterosexualidentity. In this way, the

grammarof the nation did offer a locational identity for homosexuality,but a far less

privileged and a non-nationalone than that which was offered heterosexuality.But if

rural earth offered a location for England and Englishness,so too did literature. Various texts suggestedthat England could be found as easily in the

pagesof a book as it could be found on land. Lolly Willowes arguedthat England

was not in geographicalplace but insteadin the cultural valuesin language. Consequently,the literary valuesfound in official 'English Literature' could function

as an alternativelocation for England and Englishness.The power attributed to

literaturein the grammarof the nation suggestedthat it had at times more importance

as England's location than the earth did. Nonetheless,its imbrication with earth, and

its derivation from earth,worked to attribute Englishnessto it. England and

Englishness,then, I would ultimately suggest,were located in text as much as

territory. In this suggestion,the work of Robert Colls, Philip Dodd and Alun

Howkins, discussedin the introduction, is extended.While they arguedthat the

interwar period was characterisedby a dichotomy betweenthe rural as a symbol of

authentic England and the urban as a lessersymbol of England, this thesishas shown

that not all rural locationscould confer national identity. Whilst rural earthcould

confer this on white middle-classmasculinity, neither watcrscapesnor airy locations 216 could, evenif they were rural. Femininity's exclusion from a relation to earth and rural-life complicatedthe dichotomy betweentown and country by showing how this division was gendered.A simple dichotomy betweenthe urban and the rural could not be upheld,because this equationis further complicatedby the argumentof this thesisthat Englandalso had anotherlocation in literature.This contentionexpanded the work of PeterBrooker and Peter Widdowson, who showedhow English literature was centralin shapinga version of rural Englishness,by revealing how literature's centrality worked precisely becauseit was a site of England.Textual interventions concerningthe nation were, therefore,a viable political project, and the disciplinary attentiongiven to English literature in the interwar yearsattested to this.

Now, as then, the nation is a site of contestation.As I was writing this conclusion,debates about what could be said about race during the run-up to the GeneralElection filled the media. One ConservativeM. P., John Townend, described the English as in dangerof becominga 'mongrel race'. This thesisis dedicatedto all identifications, thosemon 4, rels who refuseracial national and crossclass and gender categories.I eagerlyawait our meeting in that queermongrel spacethat Zulus call

Zonkiziziwe - the placewhere all nationsare welcome -a place that might be called home.

I The implication for the sexuality of national identity that Balfour's work proposesis perhapsone of the reasonswhy the Soil Association has had so little successin changing national agricultural policy over the last century. 217

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abraham,Nicholas and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, Vol.l: Renewalsof Psychoanalysis(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1994) Ackland, Valentine,For Sylvia: An Honest Account (London: Chatto & Windus/ The Hogarth Press,1985)

Allen, Jeffner, ed., Lesbian Philosophiesand Cultures (New Yorý. StateUniversity of New York Press, 1990)

Allen, Mary S., 7he Pioneer Policewoman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1925)

Allen, Mary S., Lady in Blue (London: Stanley Paul, 1936)

Anderson,Benedict, Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spreadof Nationalism [1983] (London: Verso, 1991)

Anderson, Perry, English Questions (London: Verso, 1992)

Anon., A YoungGirl's Diary: Prefaced with a Letter by SigmundFreud [19211 (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1936)

Anthias, Floya and Yuval-Davis, Nira, Racialized Boundaries: Race,Nation, Gender, Colour and Classin the Anti-Racist Struggle (London: Routledge, 1993) Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1998)

Armitage, Gilbert, BannedIn England: An Examination of the Law Relating to Obscene Publications [n.p. ] (Wishart, 1932) von Arnim, Elizabeth, Christopherand Columbus [ 1919] (London: Virago, 1994) von Arnim, Elizabeth, The Caravaners [19301(London: Virago,. 1989) Aston, James,(T. H. White), They Winter Abroad [ 1932] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969)

Aston, James,(T. H. White), First Lesson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)

Atkinson, Sir Edward Tindal, ObsceneLiterature in Law and Practice (London: Christophers, 1937)

Attridge, Derek, ed., The CambridgeCompanion to JamesJoyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990)

Backus,Margot G., 'Sexual Orientation in the (Post)lmperial Nation: Celticism.and Inversion Theory in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 15.2 (1996), 253-266

Bagnold, Enid, A Diary Without Dates [1918] (London: Virago, 1978)

Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed., Mapping the Nation (London: Verso, 1996) 218

Baldick. Chris, 77zeSocial Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987)

Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race,Nation, Class: AmbiguousIdentities (London: Verso, 1991)

Baldwin, Stanley, On England [ 19261(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938)

Baldwin, Stanley, Our Inheritance: Speechesand Addresses(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1928)

Baldwin, Sta; ley, An Interpreter of England (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939)

Baldwin, Stanley, The PreservationofAncient Cottages (London: The Royal Society of Arts) [n.d. ]

Balfour, Evelyn B., ne Living Soil: Evidenceof the Importance to Human Health of Soil Vitality, withspecial referenceto Post-war Planning (London: Faber and Faber, 1943)

Balfour, Evelyn B., 9,600 miles research tour through the U.S. A. in a station wagon 1953 (London: The Soil Association) [n. d.]

Balfour, Heamdon,Anything Might Happen (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933)

Barbera,Jack and William McBrien, Stevie: A Biography of Stevie Smith (London: Heinemann,1985)

Barker, Francis,Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley, eds, The Politics Of 7heory: Proceedingsof the EssexConference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982 (Colchester.University of Essex, 1983)

Barker, Francis,Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley, eds,Literature, Politics and Theory: Papersftom the EssexConference 1976-1984 (London: Metheun, 1986)

Bames, Djuna, LadiesAlmanack showing their Signsand their tides; their Moons and their Changes;the Seasonsas it is with them; their Eclipsesand Equinoxes,as well as a full Recordof diurnal and nocturnal Distempers:Written and illustrated by a Lady of Fashion (London: New York University Press,-1992) Bames, Djuna, Nightwood [1936] (London: Faber and Faber, 1963)

Barnett, A., 'Bishop tried to cover up giant penis' 77teObserver, 5 March 2000,14 Bartholomew, Michael, 'H. V. Morton's English Utopia', in kegenerating'England. 0 Science,Medicine and Culture in Inter-war Britain, ed. by Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000)

Bassnett, Susan,ed., StudyingBritish Cultures: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997)

Baudrillard, Jean,Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993) 219

Bauer, Bernhart A., Woman(Wie Bist Du Weib?): A Treatise on the Anatomy, Physiology, Psychology,and Sexual Life of Woman with an Appendix on Prostitution (London: JonathanCape, 1927)

Beauman,Nicola, A Very Great Profession: The Women'sNovel 1914-1939 (London: Virago, 1985) - Beaver, Patrick, ed., The Wipers Times: A CompleteFacsimile of the FamousWorld War One Trench Newspaper,Incorporating 77zeNew Church Times, 77zeKemmel Times, The SommeTimes, The B.E. F. Times, and The Better Times (London: Peter Davies, 1973)

Beddoe,Deidre, Back to Home and Duty: WomenBetween the Wars 1918-1939 (London: Pandora,1989)

Bell, David and Gill Valentine, eds,Mapping Desire: GeographiesofSexualities (London: Routledge, 1995)

Bell, Shannon,Reading, Writing & Rewriting the Pi-ostituteBody (Bloornirngton: Indiana University Press,1994)

Bennett,Arnold, Polite Farcesfor the Drawing-room (London: Lamley, 1900)

Bennett,Arnold, Literary Taste:How toform it, with detailed instructionsfor collecting a completelibrwy ofEnglish Literature [ 19091(Harmondsworth: Pelican Special, 1938) Bennett,Arnold, Booksand Persons:Being Commentson a Past Epoch 1908-1911 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919)

Bennett,Arnold, Buried Alive: A Tale of 77jeseDays (New York: GeorgeH. Doran) [n. d.]

Bennett,Arnold, Our Women:Chapters on the Sex-Discord (London: Cassell, 1920)

Bennett,Tony, OutsideLiterature (London: Routledge, 1990)

Benstock, Shari, Womenof the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940 (London: Virago, 1994)

Beresford, Egan, 7he Sink of Solitude: Being a seriesof satirical drawings occasionedby somerecent events[viz. the attacks by JamesDouglas in the "SundayExpress" on the novel "7he Well ofLoneliness" by Marguerite RadclyffeHall and its subsequent withdrawalfrom publication] performed by B. Egan, gent, to which is added a preface by P. R. Stephensen,gent, and a verse lampoon by several hands, etc (London: Hennes Press, 1928).

Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (London: Constable, 1965)

Bergonzi, Bernard, Readingthe Thirties: Textsand Contexts (London: Macmillan, 1978) Bergonzi, Bernard, Exploding English: Criticism, neory, Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 220

Berkman,Joyce Avrech, ' "I Am Myself It": Comparativenational identity formation in the lives of Vera Brittain and Edith Stein', Women's History Review, 6.1, (1997) 47-73

Bhabha, Homi K., ed., Nation andNarration (London: Routledge, 1990) Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995)

Birkett, Dea, Jella: A Womanat Sea (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992)

Black, E. L., ed., 1914-1918in Poetry (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979)

Blackwood, William, Literature and Nationality: An A&-h-esswith Hintsfor a Courseof Reading (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1912) Bland, Lucy, Banishing The Beast: English Feminism & SexualMorality, 1885-1914 (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1995) 0 Bland, Lucy and Laura Doan, eds, Sexology Uncensored.,7he Documentsof Sexual Science (Cambridge: Polity Press,1998)

Bleys, Rudi C., 7he Geographyof Perversion: Male-to-Male SexualBehaviour outside the Westand the EthnographicImagination 1750-1918 (London: Cassell, 1996) Bliss, Eliot, Saraband [19311(London: Virago, 1986)

Bliss, Eliot, Luminous Isle [19341(London: Virago, 1984)

Blondel, Natalie, Mary Butts: Scenesftom the Life: A Biography (New York, McPherson, 1998)

Bonnett,Alastair, WhiteIdentities: Historical and International Perspectives(London: Pearson,2000)

Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique ofthe Judgementof Taste (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1986)

Bourdieu, Pierre, Languageand Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press,199 1)

Bourdied, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press,1993)

Bourke, Joanna,Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies,Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996)

Bourne, Stephen,Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television 1896-1996 (London: Cassell, 1998) 1 Boyes, Georgina, 7he Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester:Manchester University Press,1993)

Bowen, Elizabeth, The Hotel [1927] (London: JonathanCape, 1950)

Bowlby, Rachel, Still Crazy After All TheseYears: Women,Writing and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1992) 221

Bowlby, Rachel, Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993)

Brace, CatherineS., 'Finding England Everywhere: Representationsof the Cotswolds 1880-1950' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bristol, 1997) Bradtke, Elaine, Truculent Rustics: Molly Dancing in East Anglia before 1940 (London: FLS Books, 1999)

Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects:Embodiment and SexualDifference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York, Columbia University Press,1994)

Bristow, Edward J., Vice And Vigilance: Purity Movementsin Britain since 1700 (London: Gill and Macmillan, 1977)

Bristow, Joseph,Empire Boys: Adventuresin a Man's World (London: Harper Collins, 1991)

Bristow, Joseph,"'Love, let us be true to one another": Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and "our Aqueous Ages"', Literature and ffivtory, 4.1 (1995), 27-49 British Council, British StudiesNow: Special Report, Looking Into England, 13 (2000)

Brodzki, Bella, and CelesteSchenck, eds, LifelLines: Theorising Women's Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1988)

Brooks, Peter, Body Work: Objectsof Desire in Modem Narrative (Cambridge:Harvard University Press,1993)

Brooks, Petpr and Paul Gewirtz, eds, Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press,1996)

Brophy, John and Eric Partridge, eds, Songsand Slang of the British Soldier: 1914-1918 (London: The Scholartis Press,1930)

Brown, Penny, The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Developmentin the Early TwentiethCentury (London: Macmillan, 1992)

Brown, W. 'Hypnosis, Suggestion,and Dissociation', British Medical Journal, 14 June 1919,734-736.

Buchan, John, The Three Hostages [19241(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953)

Buchan, John, The Causaland the CasualIn History (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1929)

Budgen, Frank, JamesJoyce and the Making of Ulysses [19341(Bloomington: Indiana University, Press, 1960)

Burgin, Victor, JamesDonald and Cora Kaplan, eds,Formations ofFantasy (London: Metheun, 1986)

Bushaway,Bob, 'Name Upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance',in Myths of the English, ed. by Roy Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press,1993) 222

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the SubversionofIdentity (London: Routledge, 1990)

Butts, Mary, Warning To Hikers [n.p. ] (Wishart, 1932)

Cardinal, Agnes, Dorothy Goldman and Judith Hattaway, eds, Women's Writing on the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999)

Cardus, Neville, ed., KathleenFerrier. A Memoir (London: Harnish Hamilton, 1969) Carpenter,Humphrey, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1977) Charles Carpenter,Humphrey, The Inklings: C. S. L ewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Williams and their Friends (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1978)

Carter, Erica, JamesDonald and Judith Squires,eds, SpaceAnd Place: Theoriesof Identity and Location (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993)

Castle,Terry, TheApparitional Lesbian:Female Homoserualityand Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,1993)

Castle,Terry, Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (New York: Columbia University Press,1996)

Causton,Bernard, and G. G. Young, Keeping It Dark or The Censor's Handbook. (London: Mandrake Press)[n. d. ] (1930?)

Chance,Janet, The Cost Of English Morals (London: Noel Douglas, 1932)

Cheyette,Bryan, Constructionsof 'The Jew' in English Literature and Society:Racial Representations,1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993)

Clarke, Prof. F., Educationand the Seafarer (London: Seafarer'sEducation Service, 1936)

Clephane,Irene, Towards Sex Freedom (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1935)

Cline, Sally, Radclyffe Hall: A WomanCalled John (London: John Murray, 1997)

Cloke, Paul and Jo Little, eds, ContestedCountryside Cultures: Otherness, Afarginalisation Rurality (London: Routledge, 1997) and 0 Cockburn, Claud, Bestseller: The Books That EveryoneRead 1900-1939 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972) Cockin, Katharine, Edith Craig (1869-1947):Dramatic Lives (London, Cassell, 1998)

Colls, Robert and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness:Politics and Culture 1880-1920 (London: Croom Heim, 1986)

Coles, Mary Gladys, The Flower ofLight: A Biography of Mary Webb (London: Duckworth, 1978) 223

Collis, Rose, Portraits to the Wall: Historic Lesbian Lives Unveiled (London: Cassell, 1994)

Compton-Burnett, Ivy, Pastorsand Masters [1925] (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972) Compton-Burnett, Ivy, More Womenthan Men [1933] (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974)

Corelli, Marie, Eyes of the Sea (London: Marshall Brothers, 1917) Cottingham,Laura, Lesbians lesbians are so chic...... that we are not really at all (London: Cassell, 1996)

Cousins, Sheila, To Beg I Am Ashamed (London: GeorgeRoutledge, 1938)

Craig, Alec, The Banned Books ofEngland and other Countries: A Study of the Conceptionof Literary Obscenity (Westport: Greenwood Press,1977) Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1992)

Dane,Clemence, Regiment of Women [19171(London: Virago, 1995) Dane,Clemence, Legend (London: William Heinemann, 1928)

Dane,Clemence, 7he Babyons:A Family Chronicle (London: William Heinemann, 1929)

Dane,Clemence, The Moon Is Feminine [19381(Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1970)

Dane,Clemence, The Arrogant History of White Ben [1939 1 (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1971)

Dangerfield, George,The StrangeDeath ofLiberal England (London: Constable, 1936)

Daugherty,Beth Rigel, 'The whole contention betweenMr. Bennett and Mrs. Woolf, revisted', in Virginia Wooýf-Centennial Essays, ed. by Elaine K. Ginsberg and Laura M. Gottlieb (Troy NY: Whitston, 1983)

Davies, Margaret Llewellyn, ed., Maternity Letters From Working Women:Collected 6y the Women'sCo-operative Guild [19151(London: Virago, 1978)

Delafield, E. M., The Diary ofa Provincial Lady [1930] (London: Virago, 1994)

Diamond, Irene and Gloria F. Orenstein,eds, Reweavingthe World: The Emergenceof Ecofeminism (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990)

Dick, Bernard F., The Hellenism of Mary Renault (Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press, 1972)

Dick, Kay, Ivy and Stevie: Ivy Compton-Burnettand Stevie Smith, Conversationsand Reflections (London: Duckworth, 1971)

Dickson, Lovat, RadclyffeHall at the Well of Loneliness:A SapphicChronicle (London: Collins, 1975) , 224

Dixon, W. Macneile, The Englishman (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938)

Doan, Laura, ed., Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Womenin the Twentieth Century Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1991)

Doan, Laura, ed., 77wLesbian Postmodern (New York- Columbia University Press, 1994)

Doan, Laura, Fashioning Sapphism:77ze Origins ofa Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,2001)

Dollimore, Jonathan,Death, Desire and Loss in WesternCulture (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press,1998)

Doolittle, Hilda, (H. D. ) The Gift (London: Virago, 1984)

Doughty, F. H., 'The Lost Art of Reading', The Reader,4 (1926), 182-185

Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Conceptsof Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1978)

Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols:Erplorations in Cosmology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978)

Doyle, Brian, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989)

DuBois, Page,Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysisand Ancient Representationsof Woman (Chicago:The University of Chicago Press,1988)

Duncan, Nancy, ed., Bodyspace:Destabilising Geographiesof Genderand Sexuality Routledge, 1996) (London: 0 Dworkin, Andrea, Scapegoat:The Jews,Israel and Women'sLiberation (London: Virago, 2000)

Dyer, Richard, White (London: Routledge, 1997)

Easthope,Antony, Literwy Into Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1991)

Easthope,Antony, Englishnessand National Culture (London: Routl edge, 1999)

Eder, M. D., 'Psycho-Pathologyof the War Neuroses', 77zeLancet, 12 August 1916, 264-268

Edwards, Paul, ed., Volcanic Heaven: Essayson WyndhamLewis's Painting and Writing (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press,1996)

Elbaz, Robert, 7he ChangingNature of the Self.ý A Critical Study of the Autobiographic Discourse (Iowa: University of Iowa Press,1987)

Eliot, T. S., SelectedPoems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961)

En. 1and, Jane,Red Earth (London: Cassell, 1926) 225

Ernst, Morris Leopold and William Seagle,To The Pure A Study Of Obscenityand the Censor (London: JonathanCape, 1929) ...

Evans,Martin and Ken Lunn, eds, War and Memory in the TwentiethCentury (Oxford, Berg, 1997)

Faraday,Annabel, 'Social definitions of lesbiansin Britain 1914-1939:"Subject to Query" ' (unpublisheddoctoral thesis, University of Essex, 1985)

Ferrier, Winifred, 7he Life of Kathleen Ferrier.ý By her sister (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955)

Fields, Kenneth, 'The Travel Books of H. V. Morton', Book and MagazineCollector, 58 (1989) 50-56

Fields, Kenneth, 'In searchof Morton's England', 7his England, (Winter 1991), 12-16

Finlayson, lain, The Sixth Continent: A Literary History of RomneyMarsh (New York: Atheneum, 1986)

Fischer, H. C. and E. X. Dubois, SexualLife During the World War (London: Francis Aldor, 1937)

Fitzroy, A. T., (RoseAllatini), Despisedand Rejected (London: C.W Daniel) [n.d. ] (19187)

Folkenflik, Robert, ed., The Culture ofAutobiography: Constructionsof Self- Representation(California: Stanford University Press,1993)

Forster, E. M., Howards End [ 19101 (London: Edward Arnold, 1947)

Forster, E. M., A Passageto India [1924] (Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1961)

Forster, E. M., Abinger Harvest [19.361(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967)

Forster, E. M., Maurice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)

Forster,Margaret, Daphnedu Maurier (London: Arrow, 1994)

Foucault,Michel, 'Of Other Spaces',Diacritics, (1986) 22-27

Foucault,Michel, 77teHistory of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990)

Franken, Rose, Twice Born [1935] (London: W. H. Allen, 1969)

Franks,Claudia Stillman, Beyond The Well of Loneliness: The Fiction of Radclyffe Hall (England: Avebury, 1982)

Frazer, JamesG., 7he Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion [1922](London: Macmillan, 1983)

Frederics,Diana, 'Diana: A StrangeAutobiography [19391(New York: Citadel, 1948) 226

Friedman, SusanStanford, ed., Joyce: The Return of the Repressed(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)

Friedrich, Ernst, WAR against WAR! [19241 (London: JourneymanPress, 1987)

Frese,Dolores Warwick and'Katherine O'B. O'Keefe, eds, The Book and the Body (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,1997)

Freud, Sigmund, On Sexuality: Three Essayson the Theory of Sexualityand Other IVorks (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977)

Frontain, Raymond-Jean,ed.,, Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture (New York: The Haworth Press, 1997)

Fuss, Diana, ed., Human, All Too Human (London: Routledge, 1996)

Fussell, Paul, 7he Great War and Modern Memory (New York. Oxford University Press, 1975)

Fussell, Paul, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Betweenthe Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1982)

Fussell, Paul, Killing in Verseand Prose and other essays (London: Bellew, 1990)

Garber,MarjorieXested Interests: Cross-Dressingand Cultural Anxiety (London: Routledge, 1992)

Garber,Marjorie, Dog Love (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1996)

Gardiner, Rolf and Heinrich Rocholl, eds, Britain and Germany:A Frank Discussion Instigatedby Membersof the YoungerGeneration (London: Williams and Norgate, 1928)

Gardiner, Rolf, England Herself. Venturesin Rural Restoration (London: Faber & Faber, 1943)

Gardner,Burdett, 7he LesbianImagination (Victorian Style): A Psychologicaland Critical Studyof "Vernon Lee" (New York- Garland, 1987) Garnett,David, Lady Into Fox (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922)

Garnett,David, Lady Into Fox and A Man in the Zoo [ 19221[1924] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960)

Garnett,David, The Sailor's Return [1929] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964)

Garnett, David, Great Friends: Portraits ofseventeenwriters (London: Macmillan, 1979) Gibbons, Stella, Cold Comfort Farm [19321(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994)

Gibbs, Linnea, JamesHanley: A Bibliography (Vancouver William Hoffer, 1980)

Gibbs, Philip, Ordeal in England: EnglandSpeaks Again (London: William Heinemann, 1937) 227

Giddens,Anthony, 7he Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality,Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) Cý Gilbert, Oscar Paul, Womenin Men's Guise (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1932)

Giles, Judy and Tim Middleton, eds, Writing Englishness1900-1950: An Introductory Sourcebookon National Identity (London: Routledge, 1995) Gilmore, Leigh, 'Obscenity, Modernity, Identity: Legalizing The Well Loneliness 0 of and Nightwood', Journal of History ofSexuality, 4.4 (1994), 603-624 Gilmore, Leigh, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women'sSelf-Representation (London: Cornell University Press,1994)

Gilroy, Paul, 7here Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987)

Gilroy, Paul, BetweenCamps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (London: Allen Lane The PenguinPress, 2000)

Glasgow,Joanne, 'Rethinking the Mythic Mannish Radclyffe Hall', in Queer Representations:Reading Lives, Reading Cultures, ed. by Martin Duberman(New York: New York University Press,1997)

Glendinning,Victoria, Vita: 7he Life of Vita Sack-ville-West(Hannondsworth: Penguin, 1984)

Glover, Jon and Jon Silkin, eds, 77tePenguin Book of First World War Prose (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1990)

Gordon, Mary, Chaseof the Wild Goose: 7he Story of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby.known as the Ladies of Llangollen (London: The Hogarth Press,1937)

Gore, Elizabeth, The Better Fight: The Story of Dame Lilian Barker (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965)

Goudge,Elizabeth, Island Magic (London: Duckworth, 1934)

Grahame,Kenneth, The Wind in the Willows [1908] (London: Metheun, 1940)

Grahn, Judy, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)

Graves,Robert and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End:A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939 L19401(London: Abacus, 1995)

Graves, Robert, 7he Mite Goddess:A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth [ 1946] (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) Greene,Graham, EnglandMade Me [19351(London: William Heinemann.&The Bodley Head, 1970) 228

Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender,Empire and the Cultures of Travel (London: Leicester University Press,1996)

Grier, Barbara, The LesbianIn Literature (Tallahassee:The Naiad Press,1981)

Griffin, Gabriele, ed., Outwrite: Lesbianismand Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1993)

Griffin, Gabriele and SonyaAndermahr, eds, Straight StudiesModifled- Lesbian Interventionsin the Academy (London: Cassell, 1997) Griffin, Gabriele, Heavenly Love?: Lesbian Imagesin Twentieth-CenturyWomen's Writing (Manchester:Manchester University Press,1993)

Griffiths, Morwenna, Feminismsand the Self.,The Webof Identity (London: Routledge, 1995)

Griffiths, Richard, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiastsfor Nazi Germany 1933-9 (London: Constable.,1980)

Grosz, Elizabeth, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1994)

Gubar, Susanand JonathanKamholtz, eds, English Inside and Out: 7he Placesof Literary Criticism (London: Routledge, 1993)

Gunn, Peter, VernonLee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964)

Guppy, Henry, 7he Art of Reading' (Manchester:Manchester University Press,1929) 1 Hackett,Alice Payneand JamesHenry Burke, 80 Yearsof Best Sellers 1895-1975 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1977)

Haggard, Henry Rider, King Solomon's Mines [1885] (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1958)

Haight, Anne Lyon, Banned Books: Informal Notes on SomeBooks Bannedfor Various Reasonsat Various Timesand in Various Places (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1955)

Halberstam,Judith, FemaleMasculinity (London: Duke University Press, 1998)

Hall, Gladys Mary, Prostitution: A Surveyand A Challenge (London: Williams & Norgate, 1933) - Hall, Lesley A., Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900-1950 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)

Hall, Radclyffe, 7he Unlit Lamp [1924] (London: Virago, 1981)

Hall, Radclyffe, A Saturday Life [ 1925 1 (London: Virago, 1987)

Hall, Radclyffe, Adam's Breed [1926] (London: Virago, 1985) 229

Hall, Radclyffe, The Well Loneliness [19281(London: Virago, 1997) of rý Hallis, Frederick, The Law and Obscenity (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932)

Hamer, Emily, Britannia's Glory: A History of Twentieth-CenturyLesbians (London: Cassell, 1996)

Hamilton, Cicely, William: An Englishman (London: Skeffington) [n.d. ]

Hamilton, Cicely, TheodoreSavage: A Story Of 7he Past, Or The Future (London: Leonard Parsons,1922)

Hamilton, Cicely, Modern England As SeenBy An Englishwoman (London: J. M. Dent, 1938)

Hamilton, Patrick, Impromptu in Moribundia [1939] (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1999)

Hamnett, Nina, Laughing Torso [19321(London: Virago, 1984)

Hanley, James,Boy (London: Boriswood, 1931)

Hanley, James,Ebb and Flood (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1932) Hanley, James,Broken Water. An Autobiographical Eýrcursion(London: Chatto & Windus, 1937)

Hanley, James,Between the Tides (London: Metheun, 1939)

Hanscombe,Gillian E. and Martin Humphries, eds, Hetero Sexuality (London: GMP, 1987)

Hanscombe,Gillian and Virginia L. Smyers, Writingfor their Lives: YheModernist Women1910-1940 (London: The Women's Press,1987)

Harman, Claire, Sylvia TownsendWarner: A Biography (London: Minerva, 1991)

Harman, Claire, ed., The Diaries ofSylvia TownsendWarner (London: Virago, 1995)

Harris, Bertha, 'The More Profound Nationality of their Lesbianism:Lesbian Society in Paris in the 1920s', in A Lesbian Feminist Anthology: AmazonExpedition, ed. by P. Birkby (Washington:Times ChangePress, 1973) and others 0 Hartley, C. Gasquoine, Woman's Wild Oats: EssaysOn YheRefixing OfAloral Standards (London: T. Wemer Laurie, 1919)

Hassell, Christopher, ed., The Prose of Rupert Brooke (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1956)

Haste, Cate, Rules ofDesire: Sex in Britain World War I to the Present (London: Pimlico, 1994)

Heinzelman, SusanSage and Zipporah BatshawWiseman, eds,Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism (London: Duke University Press,1994) 230

Hicks, William Joynson,Do We Need A Censor? (London: Faberand Faber, 1929)

Hill, Tracey and William Hughes,eds, ContemporaryWriting and National Identity (Bath: Sulis Press,1995)

Hobby, Elaine and Chris White, eds, What Lesbiansdo in Books (London: The Women's Press,1991)

Hoberman,Ruth, 'Masquing the Phallus: Genital Ambiguity in Mary Renault's Historical Novels', TwentiethCentury Literature, 42.2 (1996), 277-293

Hobsbawm,Eric and Terence Ranger,eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press,1983)

Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalismssince 1780: Programme,Myth, Reality (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1990)

Holden, Katherine, 'The Shadowof Marriage: Single Women in England, 1919-1939' (unpublisheddoctoral thesis, University of Essex, 1996)

Holmes, Colin, John Bull's lsland.ý Immigrants and British Society 1871-1971(London: Macmillan, 1988)

Holtby, Alice andJean McWilliam, eds, Winifred Holthy: Letters to a Friend (London: Collins, 1937)

Holtby, Winifred, The AstonishingIsland: Being A VeraciousRecord Of The ExperiencesUndergone By RobinsonLippingtree Mackintosh From Tristan Da Cunha During An Accidental Visit To Unknown Territory In The Year Of Grace MCMXM-? (London: Lovat Dickson, 1933)

Holtby, Winifred, Women (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1934)

Hope, Ronald, In CabinedShips at Sea: Fifiy years of the Seafarers'Education Service (London: GeorgeG. Harrap, 1969)

Hopkins, Chris, 'Sylvia TownsendWarner and the Marxist Historical Novel', Literature and History, 4.1 (1995), 50-64 Household, Geoffrey, The SpanishCave [19361(London: Longman Green, 1965)

Household, Geoffrey, RogueMale [19391-(London: Michael Joseph,1982)

Household, Geoffrey, Against the Wind (London: Michael Joseph,1958) Household, Geoffrey, RogueJustice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)

Howard, Michael S., JonathanCape, Publisher: Herbert JonathanCape, G. Wren Howard (London: JonathanCape, 1971)

Howard, Louise and Beryl Heamden,eds, What Country Women Use (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939) 231

Howkins, Alan, ReshapingRural England.,A Social History 1850-1925 (London: Harper Collins, 1991)

Hughes, Langston, The Ways of White Folks (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1934) Hull, Ethel M., The Sheik [1919] (London: Virago, 1996)

Hunt, Agnes, Reminiscences(Shrewsbury: Wilding, 1935)

Hunt, Agnes, This is Afy Life (London: Blackie, 1938)

Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith, eds, Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Ifekwunigwe, Jayne 0., ScatteredBelongings: Cultural Paradoxesof "Race", Nationand Gender (London: Routledge, 1999)

Inge, William Ralph, Lay 77toughtsQfA Dean (London:. G. P. Putnam's/The Knickerbocker Press,1926)

Ingram, Angela, "'Unutterable Putrefaction7and "Foul Stuff": Two "Obscene" Novels of the 1920s', Women'sStudies International Forum, 9.4 (1986), 341-356

Islam, Syed M., YheEthics of Travel: From Marco Polo to Kajka (Manchester. ManchesterUniversity Press,1996)

Jackson,Holbrook, The Fear of Books (London: The Soncino Press,1932)

Jacob,Naomi, Me: A Chronicle about other people [1933] (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1972)

Jacob,Naomi, ne Founder of the House: First of the Gollantz Saga [1930] (Essex: Piatkus, 1993)

Jacob, Naomi, 'That Wild Lie... ': Secondof the Gollantz Saga [ 1930] ( Essex: Piatkus, 1983)

Jacob,Naomi, BarrenMetal (London: Hutchinson, 1936)

Jacob,Naomi, Me - In War-Time (London: Hutchinson, 1940)

Jacob, Naomi, Me - and the Swans (London: William Kimber, 1963) James,Norah C., SleevelessErrand (London: The Scholartis Press,1.929)

James,Norah C., SleevelessErrand (Paris: Henri Babou & Jack Kahane, 1929)

Jarrett-Macauley,Delia, The Life of Una Marston 1905-65 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1998)

Jay, Karla and JoanneGlasgow, eds, LesbianTexts and Conteas: Radical Revisions (London: Onlywomen Press,1992)

Jay, Karla, ed., LesbianErotics (New York: New York University Press,1995) 232

Jeans,Herbert, 'In Death's CathedralPalace: The Story of the Unknown Warrior', British Legion Journal, 9.5 (1929), 118 A Jeater,Diana, 'Roast beef and ReggaeMusic: The Passingof Whiteness',New Formations, 18 (1992), 107-121

Jelinek, E. C., 'Disguise Autobiographies: Women MasqueradingAs Men, Women's StudiesInternational Forum, 10.1 (1987), 53-62

Jivani, Alkarim, It's Not Unusual: A History of Lesbian and Gay Britain in the 7"WentiethCentury (London: Michael O'Mara Books, 1997)

Joannou,Maroula, 'Ladies, Please Don't SmashThese Windows': Women'sWriting, Feminist Consciousnessand Social Change1918-1938 (Oxford, Berg, 1995)

Joannou,Maroula, ed., WomenWriters of the 1930s: Gender,Politics and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UniversityTress, 1999)

Johnston,Jill, LesbianNation: 7he Feminist Solution (New York: Touchstone, 1973)

Johnson,R. Brimley, Moral Poison in Modern Fiction (London: A. M. Philpot) [n.d. ] (19222)

Joyce, James, Ulysses [19221(London: The Bodley Head, 1960)

Jullian, Philippe and John Phillips, Violet Trefusis: A Biography including correspondencewith Vita Sackville-West (London: Methuen, 1986) Jusdanis,George, BelatedModernity andAesthetic Culture: InventingNational Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1991)

Kaplan, Caren,Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem, eds,Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms,Transnational Feminisms and the State (Durham and London: Duke University Press,1999)

Kelly, Andrew, Filming 'All Quiet On 7he WesternFront': 'Brutal Cutting, Stupid Censors,Bigoted Politicos' (London: 1. B. Tauris, 1998)

Kennard, J. E., Vera Brittain & Winifted Holtby: A Working Partnership (London: University Pressof New England, 1989) Kennedy, Margaret, The Constant Nymph [19241(London: Willarn Heinemann, 1945)

Kent, SusanKingsley, Making Peace:The Reconstructionof Genderin Interwar Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1993)

Kent, SusanKingsley, Genderand Power in Britain, 1640-1990 (Londoni Routledge, 1999)

Kersley, Gillian, Darling Madame:Sarah Grand and DevotedFriend (London: Virago, 1983)

Kernahan'.Coulson, 7he ReadingGirl: Sauntersin Bookland & Chatson the Choice of Books & Methods ofReading (London: George G. Harrap, 1925) 233

Kemahan, Mrs. Coulson, The Secret of Home Happiness (London: The Epworth Pýess/ J. Alfred Sharp, 1926)

Khan, Nosheen, Women'sPoetry of the First World War (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf,1988)

Kiberd, Declan, Inventing Ireland: 77zeLiterature ofthe Modem Nation (London: Vintage, 1996) . King, Peter, WomenRule the Plot: 77teStory of the 100 Year Fight to Establish Women'sPlace in Farm and Garden (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999)

Kisch, Erich Heinrich, The SexualLife of Womanin its Physiological, Pathological and Hygenic Aspects (New York- Allied Book Company, 1926)

Knowles, G., 'Books For Sailors', ManchesterGuardian, 2 September1932,16

Kri steva,Julia, Powers Of Horror: An Essayon Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press,1982)

Kristeva, Julia, Language: The Unknown,An Initiation into Linguistics (London: HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1989)

Kristeva, Julia, Nations Without Nationalisms (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)

Kruse, Juanita,John Buchan (1875-1940)and the Idea ofEmpire: Popular Literature and Political Ideology (Lewiston, Queenstonand Lampeter The Edwin Mellen Press,1989)

Langford, Paul, EnglishnessIdentifled. - Manners and Character 1650-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000)

Lawrence, D. H., England, My England [ 19221(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960)

Lawrence, D. H., ThreeNovellas: The Ladybird, The Fox, 7he Captain's Doll [1923] (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1960)

Lawrence, D. H., Lady Chatterley's Lover [19281(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960)

Lawrence, D. H., Lady Chatterley's Lover [1928] (London: William Heinemann, 1932) (expurgatedversion) Lawrence,Dorothy, SapperDorothy Lawrence: 7he Only WomanSoldier Late Royal Engineers,51st Division, 179th Tunnelling Company,B-E. F. (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1919)

Leavis, F. R.; 7he Great Tradition [19481(Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1962)

Leavi s, Q. D., Fiction and the ReadingPublic [ 1932] (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978) Lee, Vernon, Satanthe Waster:A Philosophic War Trilogy (John Lane The Bodley Head, 1920) 234

Lee, Vernon, The Handling of Words and other Studiesin Literary Psychology [ 19231 (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1927)

Lee, Vernon, A Vernon Lee Anthology (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1929)

Lee, Vernon, Arfadne in Mantua (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1930)

Leicester,Robert, The Hell of Comeliness (London: Cranley & Day, 1933) Leng, Flavia, Daphnedu Maurier: A Daughter's Memoir (London: Mainstream, 1995)

Leonardi, SusanJ., Dangerousby Degrees: Womenat Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists (London: Rutgers University Press, 1989)

Lesbian History Group, Not a PassingPhase: Reclaiming Lesbiansin History 1840-1985 (London: The Women's Press,1993)

Leslie, Shane,7he Cantab (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926)

Lesselier,Claude, ' Social categorizationsand construction of a lesbian subject', Feminist Issues,7.1 (1987), 89-93

Levi-Strauss,Claude, The ElementaryStructures of Kinship (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode,1969)

Lcvi-Strauss,Claude, Introduction to the Work ofMarcel Mauss (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1987)

Levitt, Dorothy, 7he Womanand the Car: A Chatty Little HandbookFor All Women Who Motor Or Who Want To Motor [19091(London: Hugh Evelyn, 1970)

Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatismbetween the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991)

Lilly, Mark, ed., Lesbianand Gay Writing (London: Macmillan, 1990) Lionnet, Francoise,Autobiographical Voices:Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1989)

Lockhart, Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce, Memoirs of a British Agent: Being an Account of the Author's Early Life in Many Lands and of his Official Mission to Moscow in 1918 [19321(London: Putnam, 1938) 1 Long, H. W., SaneSex Life & SexLiving: SomeThings that All SanePeople Ought to Know About Sex Nature and SexFunctioning; Its Place in the EconomyofL! fe, Its Proper Training and RighteousExercise (New York: EugenicsPublishing, 1937) Longworth, Philip, The Unending Vigil: A History of the CommonwealthWar Graves Commission1917-1984 (London: Leo Cooper in associationwith Secker& Warburg, 1985) 1

Lovell, Terry, ConsumingFiction (London: Verso, 1987)

Loxley, Diana, Problematic Shores:7he Literature of1slands (London: Macmillan, 1990) 235

Lucas, John, England and Englishness:Ideas offationhood in English Poetry 1688- 1900 (London: The Hogarth Press,1990)

Lucas,John, 'Discovering England: The View from the Train', Literature and History, 6.2(1997)37-55

Lucas, John, The Radical Twenties:Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture (Nottingham: Five LeavesPublications, 1997)

Lucia-Hoagland,Sarah and Julia Penelope,eds ýFor LesbiansOnly: A Separatist Anthology (London: Onlywomen Press,1988j

Lunn, Kenneth and Richard C. Thurlow, eds, British Fascism: Essayson the Radical Right in Interwar Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1980)

Lutwack, Leonard, TheRole ofPlace in Literature (Syracuse:Syracuse University Press, 1984)

Lymington, Viscount, Famine in England (London: The "Right"Book Club, 1938)

Lymington, Viscount, Alternative to Death: The Relationshipbetween Soil, Family and Community (London: Faber & Faber, 1943)

MacCarthy, Fiona, The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds (London: Lund Humphries, 1981)

MacCarthy, Fiona, Efic Gill (London: Faber and Faber, 1989) MacDonnell, A. G., England, Their England (London: Macmillan, 1933)

Mackenzie,Compton, Extraordinary Women:Theme and Variations [19271(London: Macdonald, 1953)

MacPike, Loralee, 'A Geography( of Radclyffe Hall's Lesbian Country', Historical Reflections,20.2 (1994), 217-242

MacPike,Loralee, 'Is Mary Llewellyn an Invert? The Modernist Supertextof The Well of Loneliness', in UnmanningModernism: GenderedRe-Readings, ed. by Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson(Knoxville: The University of TennesseePress, 1997)

McAleer, Joseph,Popular Readingand Publishing in Britain 1914-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)

Madge, Charles and Tom Harrisson, eds,Britain by Mass-Observation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939)

Mallory, William E. and Paul Simpson-Housley,Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse:Syracuse University Press,1987) ManchesterGuardian, 'Authors "Sailing Near The Wind": Dr HensonOn Licentious Literature', 13 May 1929,14 236

Mandler, Peter,'Against "Englishness": English Culture Limits to Rural C) and the Nostalgia, 1850-1940', Transactionsof the Royal Historical Society.Sixth Series. VII. (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1997)

Mannin, Ethel, Youngin the Twenties:A Chapter ofAutobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1971)

Manning, Frederic (Private 19022),Her Privates We [19301(London: Readers Union/PeterDavies, 1965)

Marcus, Laura, Autolbiographical Discourses:Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester. ManchesterUniversity Press,1994)

Martin, Robert K. and George Piggford, eds, QueerForster (London: University of Chicago Press,1997)

Massingham, H. J., Downland Man (London: JonathanCape, 1926)

Massingham,H. J., 77ieEnglish Countryside: A Survey of its Chief Features (London: B.T. Batsford, 1939)

Masson,Jeffrey, Dogs never lie about Love: Reflectionson the Emotional World of Dogs (London: Vintage, 1998)

Matless,David, 'SeeingEngland with Morton and Cornish: Trav el Writing and A Quest for Order', in 'A Land Fit For Heroes': Essaysin the Human Geographyof Inter-War Britain., ed. by M. Heffernan and P. Gruffudd (Loughborough: Loughborough University, Departmentof GeographyOccasional Paper No. 14,1988)

Matless,Dav id. "'The Art of Right living": Landscapeand Citizenship', in Mapping The by StevePile Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 1995) Subject,ed. and 00 Matless,David. 'Moral Geographiesof English Landscape',Landscape Research, 22.2 (1997), 141- 15 )5

Matless,David, Landscapeand Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998) du Maurier, Angela, Only the Sister: An Autobiography (London: Peter Davies, 1951)

du Maurier, Angela, 7he Little Less (London: Michael Joseph,1941)

du Maurier, Daphne,Rebecca [1938] (London: Arrow, 1992)

Mauss,Marcel, 7he Gift: The Form And ReasonFor ExchangeIn Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990)

Mavor, Elizabeth, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in RomanticFriendship (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973)

May, Geoffrey, Social Control of Sex Expression (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1930)

Maynard, Mary and June Purvis, eds, (Hetero)sexualPolitics (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995) 237

McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race,Gender and Sexualityin the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995)

Medhurst,Andy and Sally R. Munt, eds, Lesbianand Gay Studies A Critical Introduction (London: Cassell, 1997)

Melman, Billie, Womenand the Popular Imagination in the 1920s:Flappers and Nymphs (London: Macmillan, 1988)

Merck, Mandy, Perversions:Deviant Readings (London: Virago, 1993)

Merck, Mandy, In Your Face: Nine SexualStudies (New York: New York University Press,2000) 1

Mies, Maria and VandanaShiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993) Miller, J. Hillis, Topographies:Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)

Mirrlees, Hope, Paris: A Poem (Richmond: The Hogarth Press,1919)

Mohin, Lilian, ed., An Intimacy ofEquals: Lesbian Feminist Ethics (London: onlywomen Press,1996)

Montefiore, Janet,Men and WomenWriters of the 1930s: 7he DangerousFlood of History (London: Routledge, 1996)

Moore, Harry T., ed., Sex,Literature And Censorship: Essaysby D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann,1955)

Moran, Leslie J., Daniel Monk and SarahBeresford, eds, Legal Queeries:Lesbian, Gay and TransgenderLegal Studies (London: Cassell, 1998) Morrison, Toni and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, eds, Birth OfA Nation'Hood: Gaze,Script ' and Spectaclein the 0. J. SimpsonCase (London: Vintage, 1997) Morton, H. V., In Searchof England [19271(London: Metheun, 1930)

Morton, H. V., 7he Call ofEngland [19281(London: Metheun, 1933)

Morton, H. V., In Searchof Scotland [1929] (London: Metheun, 1984)

Morton, H. V., In Searchof Ireland [19301(London: Metheun, 1961)

Morton, H. Y., Blue Days at Seaand Other Essays 119321(London: Metheun, 1935)

Morton, H. V., In Searchof Wales [19321(London: Metheun, 1949)

Morton, H. V., What I Saw in the Slums. [n.p. ] Labour Party Pamphlet [n.d. ]

Morton, H. V., In The Stepsof The Master (London: Rich and Cowan, 1934)

Morton, H. V., In 7he Stepsof St. Paul (London: Rich and Cowan, 1936) 238

Morton, H. V., Through The Lands of the Bible (London: Metheun, 1938)

Morton, H. V., Ghostsof London [1939] (London: Metheun, 1952)

Morton, H. V., H. V. Morton's London: Being 7he Heart of London, 7he Spell of London and 7he Nights of London in one volume [1925 and 1926] (London: Metheun, 1941)

Morton, H. V., Middle East: A Record of Travel in the Countriesof Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Turkeyand Greece 119411 (London: Metheun, 1944)

Morton, H. V., I Saw Two Englands: 7he Record ofa Journey Before the War, and After the Outbreako ýf War, in the Year 1939 (London: Metheun, 1942)

Morton, H. V., Atlantic Meeting: An Account of Mr. Churchill's Voyagein H. M. S. Prince of Walesin August 1941, and the Conferencewith President RooseveltMich Resultedin 7heAtlantic Charter (London: Metheun, 1943)

Mosse, George L., Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and SexualNorms in Modern Europe (London: The University of Wisconsin Press,1985)

Mosse, George L., Nationalismand Sexuality: Respectabilityand Abnormal Sexuality in Modem Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985) 1 Mosse, George L., 7he ImageofMan: 77zeCreation ofModern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1996)

Mosse, George L., Fallen Soldiers: Reshapingthe Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1990)

Moult, Thomas,Mary Webb:Her Life and Work (London: JonathanCape, 1932)

Moylan, Michele and Lane Stiles, eds,Reading Books: Essayson the Material Text and Literaturein America (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1996)

Murphy, Graham,Founders of The National Trust (London: ChristopherHelm, 1987)

Namjoshi, Suniti, The Conversationsof Cow (London: The Women's Press,1985)

Newbolt, Henry, The Idea ofan English Association (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928)

Noakes, Lucy, War and the British: Genderand National Identity 1939-1991 (London: 1. B. Tauris, 1998)

Nitzsche,Jane Chance, Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythologyfor England' (London: Macmillan, 1980)

Oakesmith,John, Race & Nationality: An Inquiry into the Origin and Growth of Patriotism (London: William Heinemann,1919)

Oates,Caroline and Juliette Wood, A CovenofScholars: Margaret Murray and her Working Methods (London: FLS Books, 1998) 239

Okely, Judith and Helen Callaway, eds,Anthropology and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1992)

Oliver, Reggie,Out of the Woodshed.,A Portrait of Stella Gibbons (London: Bloomsbury, 1998)

Olorenshaw,Robert, 'Narrating the Monster. From Mary Shelley to Bram Stoker', in Frankenstein,Creation and Monstrosity, ed. by StephenBann (London: Reaktion Books, 1994)

Orage,Alfred Richard, 7he Art of Reading (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930)

Oram,Alison, 'Telling Storiesabout the Ladies of Llangollen:- The Constructionof Lesbianand Feminist Histories', in Re-Presentingthe Past: Womenand History, ed. by A. Gallagher,L. Ryan and others (London: Longman, 2001)

O'Rourke, Rebecca,Reflecting on The Well Of Loneliness (London: Routledge, 1989) Orwell, George,Coming Upfor Air [ 19391(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990)

Osborne,Peter and Lynne Segal,'Gender as Performance:An Interview with Judith Butler', Radical Philosophy,67 (1994), 32-39

Page,Norman and Peter Preston,eds, TheLiterature ofPlace (London: Macmillan, 1993)

Parker,Andrew, Mary Russoand others, eds, Nationalismsand Sexualities (London: Routledue, 1992)

Parkes,Adam, 'Lesbianism, History, and Censorship:7he Well of Loneliness and the SUPPRESSEDRANDINESS of Virginia Woolf's Orlando', Twentieth-Century Literature,40.4 (1994), 434-460

ParliamentaryDebates, 'Criminal Law Amendment Bill', 4 August, 1921,1799-1806

Parsons,Deborah L., Streetwalkingthe Metropolis: Women,the City and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000)

Partridge,Eric, 7he First Three Years:An Account and a Bibliography ofthe Scholartis Press (London: The Scholartis Press,1930)

Paxman,Jeremy, The English: A Portrait ofa People ("annondsworth: Penguin, 1999) Pearce,Lynne, ReadingDialogics (London: Edward Arnold, 1994)

Pearce,Lynne, Fem.inism and the Politics ofReading (London: Arnold, 1997)

Pearce,Lynne, ed., Devolving Identities: Feminist Readingsin Home and Belonging (Aldershot: Ashgate,2000)

Perry, C. R., 'In Searchof H. V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural Values in the First Age of British Democracy', TwentiethCentury British History, 10.4 (1999), 431-456 240

Phillips, Richard, Diane Watt and David Shuttleton,eds, De-centringSexualities: Politics and Representationbeyond the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2000)

Pitt-Rivers, George, Weedsin the GardenofMarriage (London: Noel Douglas, 1931)

Porter, Roy, ed., Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity Press,1993)

Powell, Violet, The Irish Cousins: 7he Books and Background of Somerville and Ross (London: Heinemann,1970)

Powys, T. F., Mr Weston's Good Wine [1927] (London: The Hogarth Press,1984)

Priestley, J. B., English Journey: Being A Rambling But Truthful Account Of What One Man SawAnd Heard And Felt And ThoughtDuring A Journey Through England During The Autumn Of The'Year 1933 (London: William Heinemann,1934)

Priestley, J. B., The BeautyofBritain: A Pictorial Survey (London: B. T. Batsford, 1935)

Prosser,'Jay, SecondSkins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York- Columbia University Press)

Quiller-Couch,Arthur, On the Art of Writing [19161(Cornwall: Fowey Rare Books, 1995) , Quiller-Couch,Arthur, On the Art ofReading [19201(Cambridge, Guild Books, 1953)

Radford, George,The Faculty ofReading: The Coming ofAge of the National Home Reading Union (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1910)

Radford Jean,'An Inverted Romance:The Well Loneliness Sexual Ideolog ', in of and OY The ProgressofRomance, ed. by JeanRadford (London: Routledge, 1986)

Rae, Isobel, 7he StrangeStory of Dr. JamesBarry: Army Surgeon,Inspector-General of Hospitals, discoveredon death to be a woman (London: Longmans Green, 1958)

Raitt, Suzanne,Vita and Virginia: 7he Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993)

Raitt, Suzanneand Trudi Tate, eds, Women'sFiction and the Great War (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1997)

Raitt, Suzanne,Alay Sinclair: A Alodern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Ramsay, J. G., England, This England.,In the StepsofJ. B. Priestley (London: Sinclair Stevenson,1993)

Raymond, Ernest, Tell England.,A Studyin a Generation (London: Cassell, 1924)

Rcmarque,Erich Marie, All Quiet on the WesternFront [ 1929] (London: The Folio Society, 1966)

Renault, Mary, Purposesof Love [1939] (London: Longmans, 1968) 241

Renault,Mary, The Friendly YoungLadies [19441(Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1970)

Renault,Mary, 77zePersian Boy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974)

De Reyes,Consuela, The WeddingRing of England (London: Wells Gardner,Darton) [n. d. ]

Richardson,Diane, ed., 7heorisingIleterose-xuality: Telling it Straight (Buckingham: Open University Press,1996)

Ringrose,Marjorie and Adam J. Lerner, eds,Re-imagining the Nation (Buckingham: Open University Press,1993)

Rivers, W. H. R., 'The Repressionof War Experience', The Lancet,2 February 1918, 173-177

Rogers,Ann, Secrecyand Power in the British State 1919-1989 (London: Pluto, 1997)

Rope, Henry Edward George,Forgotten England and Other Musings (London: Heath Cranton, 1931)

Ross, Sir Edward Denison, This English Language (London: Longmans, 1939)

Ross, Kristin, Fast Cars, CleanBodies: Decolonization and the Reorderingoffrench Culture (CambridgeMA & London: The MIT Press,1995)

Royde-Smith,Naomi, 7he TortoischellCat (London: Constable, 1925)

Royde-Smith,Naomi, The Island: A Love Story (Leipzig: BernhardTauchnitz, 1931)

Royde-Smith,Naomi, The Bridge (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932)

Rubin, Gayle, 'The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex, in Toward an Anthropology of Woman,ed. by Rayna R. Reiter (London: Monthly Review Press, 1975)

Ruehl, Sonja, 'Inverts and Experts: Radclyffe Hall and Lesbian Identity', in Feminism, Culture and Politics, ed. by Rosalind Brunt and Caroline Rowan (London: Lawrenceand Wishart, 1982)

Rule, Jane,Lesbian Images (London: Pluto Press,1989)

Ryden, Kent C., Mapping 7he Invisible Landscape:Folklore, Writing, and the Senseof Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,1993) Sackville-West,Vita, Heritage [1919] (London: Futura, 1984)

Sackville-West,Vita, Challenge [1924] (London: Willi4m Collins, 1974)

Sackville-West,Vita, 7he Edwardians [1930] (London: Virago, 1983)

Sackville-West,Vita, All PassionSpent [193 11(London: Virago, 1983) 242

Sackville-West,Vita, Family History [19321(London: Virago, 1986)

Sackville-West,Vita, The Dark Island (London: The Hogarth Press,1934)

Sackville-West,Vita, Saint Joan ofArc [1936] (London: Cardinal, 1990) Sackville-West,Vita, Knole.,Kent (London: The National Trust, 1956)

Sackville-West,Vita, No Signpostsin the Sea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965)

Saddington,Jenny, 'In Searchof Morton's England' (unpublishedmaster's thesis, University of the West of England, 1996) Sadler,Sir Michael Ernest,Reading in War Time (London: National Home-Reading Union, 1914)

Said, Edward, 7he World, the Text and the Critic (London: Vintage, 1991)

Salu, M. and R. T. Farrell, eds,J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essaysin Memoriarn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1979)

Samuel,Raphael, 7heatres ofMemory, Volume1: Past and Presentin Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994)

Samuel,Raphael, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (I"heatresof Memory, Volume 2) (London: Verso, 1998)

Sandes,Flom, An English Woman-Sergeantin the Serbian Army (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916)

Sandes,Flora, 7he Autobiography of a WomanSoldier: A Brief Record ofAdventure with the SerbianArmy, 1916-1919 (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1927)

Sassoon,Siegfried, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man [19281(London: Faber and Faber, 1999)

Scanlon,Joan, 'Bad language bad Lady Chatterley The Well', Critical 0 vs prose? and Quarterly,38.3 (1996), 3 -13 Schama,Simon, Landscapeand Memory (London: FontanaPress, 1996)

Scholes,Robert, The Riseand Fall of English: ReconstructingEnglish as a Discipline (London: Yale University Press,1998)

Seafarers'Education Service,An Experiment:A Record of work donefrom December 1919 to August 1921, by the Commissionon the Education of Merchant Seamen appointedby the World Associationfor Adult Education (London: Seafarers'Education Service, 1921)

Seafarers'Education Service,How to Runyour Library (London: Seafarers'Education Service) [n.d. ]

Seafarers'Education Service,Librariesfor the Merchant Navy (London: Seafarers' EducationService, 1929) 243

Seafarers'Education Service,Seafarers'Education ServiceReport ofSub-Committeeson Boys at Sea (London: Seafarers'Education Service, 19.31) Searle,Geoffrey Russell, The Questfor National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and British Political 7hought 1899-1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, BetweenMen: English Literature and Male HomosocialDesire (New York: Columbia University Press,1985)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies(London: Routledge, 1994)

Senator,H. and S. Kaminer, eds, Health And DiseaseIn Relation To Marriage And The Married State. Volume2 (London: RebmanCompany, 1905)

Shields, Rob, Placeson the Margin: Alternative GeographiesofModemity (London: Routledge, 1991)

Shilling, Chris, The Body and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993) . Showalter,Elaine, Hystories:Hysterical Epidemicsand Modem Culture (London: Picador, 1997)

Smith, Helen Zenna,Not So Quiet.... Stepdaughtersof War [1930] (London: Virago, 1988)

Smith, Stevie, Novel On Yellow Paper or Work it outfor Yourself [19361(London: Virago, 1980)

Smith, Stevie, 77zeHoliday [1936] (London: Virago, 1979)

Smith, Stevie, Over TheFrontier [ 1938] (London: Virago, 1980) 0 Smith, Sidonie,A Poetics of Women'sAutobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation(Bloomimgton: Indiana University Press,1987)

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds,DelColonizing the Subject: The Politics 6f Gender in Women'sAutobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1992)

Smith, Timothy D'Arch, Love in Earnest: SomeNotes on the Lives and Writing of English 'Uranian'Poetsftom 1889 to 1930 (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1970)

Smith, Wallace, BessieCotter [1935] (London: William Heinemann,1972)

Smithers,David Waldron, '77terefore,imagine... ': 77teWorks of ClemenceDane (Tunbridge Wells: The Dragonfly Press,1988)

Smyth, Ethel, Impressions777at Remaine& Memoirs. Volume 1 (London: Longmans Green, 1923)

Smyth, Ethel, ImpressionsThat Remained:Memoirs. Volume 2 (London: Longmans Green, 1923)

Smyth, Ethel, FemalePipings in Eden (Edinburgh: Peter Davies, 1933) 244

Smyth, Ethel, Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story For Dog Lovers (London: The Cresset Press, 1936)

Souhami,Diana, Gluck: Her Biography 1895-1978 (London: Pandora,1989)

Souhami,Diana, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (London: Virago, 1999)

Spain, Nancy, Why I'm Not a Millionaire: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1956)

Spiering, Menno, Englishness:Foreigners and ImagesofNational Identity in Postwar Literature (Amsterdam:Rodopi, 1992)

Spufford, Francis, I May Be SomeTime: Ice and the English Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)

Spurling, Hilary, Ivy: The Life of L Compton-Burnett (London: Richard Cohen, 1995)

Stanley,Liz, 7heAutolbiographical L 7he 7heory and Practice of Feminist Autolbiography (Man6hester.Manchester Univesity Press,1992)

Steedman,Carolyn, Past Tenses:Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History (London: Rivers Oram Press,1992)

Steedman,Carolyn, StrangeDislocations: Childhoodand the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (London: Virago, 1995)

Stanton, Donna C., ed., 7he FemaleAutograph: 7heoryAnd Practice OfAutobiography From 7he Tenth To 7he Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Still, Judith and Michael Worton, eds, Taxtuality and Sexuality:Reading 7heories and Practices(Manchester: Manchester University Press,1993)

Stimpson,Catharine R., 'Zero DegreeDeviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English', in Homosexual7hemes in Literary Studies,ed. by William Dynes (New York: Garland, 1992)

St. John, Christopher, Christine Murrell, M. D.: Her Life and Her Work (London: Williams and Norgate, 1935)

Stokes, Edward, The Novels ofJames Hanley (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1964)

Stoker, Bram, The Lair of the White Worm [1911] (East Sussex:Pulp Publications, 1998)

Stoler, Ann Laura, Raceand the Educationof Desire: Foucault's History ofSexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (London: Duke University Press,1995)

Stoller, Robert J., Perversion:7he Erotic Form ofHatred (London: Quartet Books, 1977) 245

Stopes,Marie C., WiseParenthood. ne TreatiseOn Birth Control For Married People [19181(London: G. P. Putnam, 1923)

Stopes,Marie C., Enduring Passion (London: G. P. Putnam, 1929)

Struther, Jan, Try Anything Twice [1938] (London: Virago, 1990)

Struther, Jan, Mrs Miniver [19391(London: Virago, 1991)

Surnmerscale,Kate, 77zeQueen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of 'Joe' Carstairs, FastestWoman on Water (London: Fourth Estate, 1997)

Swindells, Julia, ed., The UsesofAutobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995)

Swindells, Julia. ' "What's the Useof Books?" Knowledge, Authenticity and A Young Girl's Diary', Women's History Review, -5.1 (1996), 55-66 Sweetman,David, Mary Renault:A Biography (London: Chatto & Windus,1993)

Taylor, H. A., Jix ViscountBrentford. Being The Authoritative And Official Biography Of The Rt. Hon. William Joyson-Hicks,First Viscount Brentford OfNewick (London: Stanley Paul, 1933)

Taylor, Stephen,'The SuburbanNeurosis', The Lancet, 26 March 1938,759-761

The Teachingof English in England (London: HMSO, 1921) Thacker, Joy, WhitewayColony: 7he Social History of a Tolstoyan Community (Stroud: Joy Thacker, 1993)

Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies. VolumeL Women,Floods, Bodies, History (Cambridge:Polity Press,1987) 0 Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies.Volume II: Male Bodies: Psychoanalysingthe Mite Terror (Cambridge:Polity Press,1989)

Thody, P. M. W., Four Casesof Literary Censorship:An Inaugural Lecture (Leeds: Leeds University Press,1968)

Thomas, Edward, A Literary Pilgrim in England [19171(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)

Thomas, Donald, A Long Time Burning: The History ofLiterary Censorshipin England (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, 1969) Thompson, A. H., Censorshipin Public Libraries in the United Kingdom during the TwentiethCentury (Epping: Bowker, 1975) 0 Thompson, CharlesJohn Samuel,Mysteries of Sex: Womenwho posed as Men and Men who impersonatedWomen (London: Hutchinson, 1938)

Thompson, Flora, Lark Rise to Candleford:A Trilogy [ 1939,1941,1943] (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1973) 246

Tiltman, Madorie Hessell,Women in Modern Adventure (London: George G. Harrap, 1935)

Tiltman, Madorie Hessell,English Earth (London: GeorgeG. Haffap, 1935)

Tindall, Gillian, Countriesofthe Mfn& TheMeaning'qfPlace to Writers (London: The Hogarth Press,1991)

Tinkler, Penny, ConstructingGirlhood., Popular Magazinesfor Girls Growing Up in England 1920-1950 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995)

Tisdall, E. E. P., 'How They ChoseThe Unknown Warrior', British Legion Journal, 19.5 (1939), 141

Tolkien, J. R. R., The Hobbit or Thereand Back Again 119371(London: Unwin, 1988)

Travis, Alan, Bound and Gagged.,A SecretHistory of Obscenityin Britain (London: Profile Books, 2000)

Trefusis, Violet, Hunt the Slipper (London: Virago, 1983)

Trefusis, Violet, Broderie Anglaise (London: Methuen, 1986)

Trefusis, Violet, Echo (London: Methuen - Mandarin, 1989) Trevclyan, John, What the CensorSaw (London; Michael Joseph,1973)

Turner, Keith, Hello Sailors! - Library servicesfor British seamenyesterday and today (Wales: College of LibrarianshipWales, 1977)

Turner, Victor, The Forest of Symbols:Aspects ofNdembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1967)

Turner, Victor, Dramas,Fields and Metaphors: SymbolicAction in Human Society (Ithaca: Comell University Press,1974)

Tylee, Claire M., The.Great War and Women'sConsciousness: Images ofMilitarism and Womanhoodin Women's Writings,'1914-1964 (London: Macmillan, 1990)

Unwin, Stanley, The Truth About Publishing (London: GeorgeAllen & Unwin, 1926)

Valverde, Mariana, 'As if subjectsexisted: analysingsocial discourses',Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 28.2(1991), 173-'187

van de Velde, Theodore,Ideal Marriage: Its Physiologyand Technique [ 1928] (London: William Heinemann,1944)

Vicinus, Martha, ' "They WonderTo Which Sex I Belong": The Historical Roots of the Modem LesbianIdentity', in The Lesbianand Gay StudiesReader, ed. by Henry Abelove and others(London: Routledge,1993)

Vicinus, Martha, ed., LesbianSubjects: A Feminist StudiesReader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1996) 247

Wallace,Diana, Sisters and Rivals in British TVomen'sFiction, 1914-1939 (London: Macmillan Press,2000)

War Office, Report ofthe IVar Office CommitteeofEnquiry Into "Shell-Shock" (London: HMSO, 1922)

Ware, Vron, Beyondthe Pale: IVhite ftmen, Racismand History (London: Verso, 1992)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, Lolly lVillowes Or The Loving Huntsman [1926] (London: Virago, 1995)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, Afr. Fortune's Afaggot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, The True Heart [19291(London: Virago, 1978)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend,After the Death ofDon Juan [19381(London: Virago, 1989)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 7he Afaveumof Cheatsand Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend,Four in Hand.- A Quartet offovels, Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, SummerWill Show, 7he Corner 7hat Held Them [ 1926,1927, 1931,19481(New York: Norton, 1986)

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, T. H. lVhite: A Biography (London: JonathanCape with Chatto & Windus, 1967)

Warren, Karen J., ed., Ecofeminism:ftmen, Culture, Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1997)

Watt, D. C., ed., Hitler's Mein Kampf (London: Hutchinson, 1974) Watkins, Alfred, The Ley Hunter's At2nual: A Guide to Early Tracks [1927] (Well ingborough:Tumstone Press,1983)

Watkins, Alfred, The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds,,Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones [ 19251(London: SagoPress, 1970)

Watson,Geoffrey Clement, 7he Soil and Social Reclamation (London: P. S. King, 1938)

Waugh, Evelyn, DeclineAnd Fall [ 1928] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951)

Waugh, Evelyn, Vile Bodies [19301(London: Chapmanand Hall, 1965)

Waugh, Evelyn, A Handful of Dust [1934] (London: Chapmanand Hall, 1948) Webb, Mary, Goneto Earth [1917] (London: Virago, 1992)

Webb, Mary, SevenFor A Secret:A Love Story [ 1922] (London: JonathanCape, 1944)

Webb, Mary, PreciousBane [1924] (London: JonathanCape, 1928) 248

Webb,Mary, Poemsand The Spring OfJoy [19281(London: JonathanCape, 1939) of Weeks,Jeffrey, Sex,Politics and Society: The Regulation Sexuality since 1800 (London:Longman, 1989)

Wheelwright,Julie, Amazonsand Military Maids: WomenR%o Dressed as Men in the Pursuitof Life, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora,1989)

White, Chris, ed., Nineteenth-CenturyWritings on Homosexuality:A Sourcebook (London:Routledge, 1999)

White, T. H., Farewell Victoria [ 1933] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945)

White, T. H., Earth Stoppedor Mr Marx's Sporting Tour (London: Collins, 1934) White, T. H., Gone to Ground: A Novel (London: Collins, 1935) White, T. H., England Have My Bones [ 1936] (London: Futura, 1981)

White, T. H., The Sword in the Stone [1938] (London, Collins) [n.d. ]

Whitehead,Anne, 'Open to suggestion:Hypnosis and history in Pat Barker's Regeneration',Modern Fiction Studies,3.44 (1998), 674-694

Whitelaw, Lis, The Life and RebelliousTimes of Cicely Hamilton: Actress, writer, suffragist (London: The Women's Press,1990)

Widdowson, Peter, ed., Re-ReadingEnglish (London: Methuen, 1982)

Widdowson, Peter, ed., D. H. Lawrence (London: Longman, 1992) Widdowson, Peter,Literature (London: Routledge, 1999)

Wiener, Martin J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 18.50-1980 (Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1992)

Williams, David, Genesisand Exodus:A Portrait of the BensonFamily (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1979)

Williams, Keith and StevenMatthews, Rewriting the Thirties: Modernismand After (London: Longman, 1997)

Williams, Linda Ruth, A H. Lawrence (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997)

Williams, Raymond, 7he Countiy and the City [1973] (London: The Hoga4h Press, 1993)

Willy, A., L. Vander and 0. Fisher, EncyclopaediaofSexual Knowledge. VolumeII (London: Francis Aldor) [n.d. ] (1930?)

Winsloe, Christa, The ChildManuela [1934] (London: Virago, 1994)

Winter, Jay, Sitesof Memory, Sitesof Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge:Canto, 1998) 249

I Wittig, Monique, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992)

Wolfe, SusanJ. and Julia Penelope,eds, SexualPractice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)

Wood, Michael, In Searchof England. ýoUrneysinto the English Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin,2000)

Woods, Chris, Stateof the QueerNation: A Critique of Gay and LesbianPolitics in 1990sBritain (London: Cassell, 1995)

Woolf, Virginia, To the Lighthouse [19271(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) Woolf, Virginia, Orlando [19281(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993)

Woolf, Virginia, Flush: A Biography (London: The Hogarth Press, 1933)

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas [1929 and 19381(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992)

Woolf, Virginia, Betweenthe Acts [ 1941] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953) Woolf, Virginia, The London Scene:Five Essays [ 1975] (London: The Hogarth Press, 1982)

Wright, Helena, The SexFactor in Marriage: A bookfor thosewho are or are about to be m=ied (London: Noel Douglas, 1930)

Wright, Helena,Sex Fulfilment in Married Women (London: Williams and Norgate, 1947)

Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country: 7he National Past in ContemporaryBritain (London: Verso, 1985)

Wright, Patrick, The Village That Died For Englan& The StrangeStory of Tyneharn (London: Vintage, 1996)

7he YoungReader: Introductory CourseMagazine (London: The National Home- Reading Union, nos 1-6,1925-1926)

Yuval-Davis, Nim, Genderand Nation (London: Sage, 1997)

Zajovic, Stasa,ed., ZeneZa Mirl WomenFor Peace (Belgrade:Women in Black, 1995)