Traversing Gender in the Knot Garden's
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‘Sometimes I dream I am a boy... and then I am a girl again’: Traversing Gender in The Knot Garden’s ‘Schubert Scene’ Michael Graham To cite this article: Michael Graham, ‘“Sometimes I dream I am a boy... and then I am a girl again”: Traversing Gender in The Knot Garden’s “Schubert Scene”’, Assuming Gender 7:1 (2019), pp. 18-45. Published online: 30 April 2019 MICHAEL GRAHAM ‘Sometimes I dream I am a boy... and then I am a girl again’: Traversing Gender in The Knot Garden’s ‘Schubert Scene’ Michael Graham Abstract Michael Tippett’s third opera, The Knot Garden (1970), based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is possibly unique in its focus on the psychoanalytic scenario. During his life and career, Tippett was drawn consistently to the psychoanalytic theories of Jung, and Jungian themes such as the pursuit of individuation and the Collective Unconscious are integral to The Knot Garden’s action and conclusions. Nevertheless, in The Knot Garden, Tippett appears to treat certain Jungian precepts – particularly those relating to gender and sexuality – with considerable scepticism. Several of The Knot Garden’s characters, for instance, do not concord stereotypically with a classically Jungian position that mature gender identity is the inevitable result of archetypical and biological predispositions. Instead, Tippett’s unstable presentations of gender and sexuality appear to align more closely with the ideas of his analyst contemporary, Lacan, whose work undermines Jungian assumptions of heteronormativity and fixed identity. The Knot Garden features two young individuals, Flora and Dov, who are particularly distressed by their misalignment with prevailing standards of gender and sexuality. During the opera’s second act, these two characters share an evocative, interpolated duet of a Schubert lied, ‘Die liebe Farbe’. Afterwards, Flora tells Dov ‘sometimes I dream I am a boy... and then I am a girl again’, and Dov voices his empathy with Flora’s liminality. This paper argues that the intertextual implications and musical construction of The Knot Garden’s ‘Schubert scene’ amount to a critique of conventional Jungian wisdom on gender, and a prophetic vision of a world beyond Lacan’s ‘symbolic order’. The scene furthermore offers an insight into Tippett’s own struggles with gender and sexuality as a gay man in the mid- 22 MICHAEL GRAHAM twentieth century, along with his platonic, doomed relationship with the writer and musician Francesca Allinson. Keywords: Michael Tippett, The Knot Garden, Lacan, Jung, Schubert While numerous operas have been explored along psychoanalytic lines, Michael Tippett’s third opera, The Knot Garden (1970), based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is possibly unique in its focus on the therapeutic scenario itself.1 The Knot Garden depicts an extended group therapy session led by Mangus, a psychoanalyst and self-styled Prospero figure who is attempting to assist several individuals struggling with identity and relationship crises. Thea and Faber are a married couple experiencing difficulties owing to Faber’s philandering and Thea’s remoteness, who eventually reconcile after a period of experimentation. Flora, their adopted daughter and the main object of Faber’s indiscriminate desire, is an anxious adolescent. Mel and Dov, a black writer and white musician respectively, are a homosexual couple whose relationship is fracturing. Denise, Thea’s sister, is a self-righteous freedom fighter recently disfigured by torture, who eventually pairs up with Mel after shedding the more ‘masculine’ aspects of her personality. Juliet Mitchell’s observation that the prime concerns of psychoanalysis are ‘human sexuality and the unconscious’ also provides a succinct summation of The Knot Garden’s main interests.2 The opera’s eponymous garden setting, which shapeshifts in response to the onstage action and the characters’ emotions, offers a hermetic, surreal forum for Tippett to conduct arguably his most intensive exploration of ‘the age-old problem of to what extent gender, sex and love correspond’3 – a topic that continually fascinated him both in his 1 For further information on opera’s relationship with psychoanalysis, see Alexander Carpenter, ‘Towards a History of Operatic Psychoanalysis’, Psychoanalysis and History 12, no. 2 (2010), 173-94. 2 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Introduction – I’, in Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Rose (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 2. 3 Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth-Century Blues (London: Pimlico, 1991), 61. 23 MICHAEL GRAHAM personal life and his music. In the words of Meirion Bowen, The Knot Garden is the work in which Tippett chose to bring issues of gender and sexuality ‘absolutely into the limelight’.4 The opera offers an ‘explicit examination’ of such matters, particularly by the standards of its day, since it features some openly gay and bisexual individuals, and forces all of its characters to confront their sexual identities as part of their broader examinations of contemporary subjectivity.5 Given The Knot Garden’s premise, and that its composer’s general ‘view of art [...] was a strongly psychoanalytic one’,6 it would seem necessary to incorporate some form of psychoanalytic theory into any exploration of this work. In his life and career, Tippett was drawn especially to the theories of Jung: in his first book of essays, Moving into Aquarius, he describes himself as a ‘disciple of Jung’, and references to Jung’s ideas are scattered throughout many of his writings.7 Ian Kemp explains that, for Tippett, Jung’s teachings ‘illuminated not only personal emotional problems, but a wide range of philosophical, social, and artistic matters’.8 David Clarke suggests further that ‘Jung offers an extended theoretical system (a quasi-philosophical worldview, one might even say)’ for analysing Tippett’s aesthetic principles and compositional processes, and that the ‘affinities between composer and psychologist, [amount] in certain respects to a shared ideology’.9 Jungian individual and societal themes are particularly prominent in Tippett’s earlier works, such as his pacifist wartime oratorio A Child of Our Time (1944), and his mythological first opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1955).10 As Kemp notes, the latter work’s dream-like scenario, 4 Meirion Bowen, Michael Tippett, 2nd ed. (London: Robson, 1997), 246. 5 Ibid. 6 David Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Modern Times and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 14. 7 Tippett, ‘What Do We Perceive in Modern Art?’, in Moving into Aquarius (St Albans: Paladin, 1974), 85. 8 Ian Kemp, Tippett: The Composer and His Music (London: Eulenberg, 1984), 155. 9 Clarke, The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett, 14. 10 See Kemp, Tippett: The Composer and His Music, 149-79 & 209-77 for detailed analyses of these works. 24 MICHAEL GRAHAM archetypical figures and pairings, and emphasis on people attempting to achieve individuation – that is to say, self-understanding and a distinctive personality – mean that it ‘could hardly have been conceived without Jung’s insights’.11 Jungian theories are similarly integral to The Knot Garden: the opera’s overall exploration of individuation, for instance, is indicated by its Shakespearian epigraph, ‘... simply the thing I am / Shall make me live’, taken from All’s Well That Ends Well (4.3.272-3). Nevertheless, in the first of his operas set in modern times, Tippett appears to treat certain Jungian precepts – particularly those relating to gender and sexuality – with some scepticism. Several of The Knot Garden’s characters, for instance, do not concord stereotypically with the classically Jungian position, summed up by Anthony Stevens, that gender identity is merely the inevitable result of ‘our archetypical and biological predispositions’, and is ‘the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us’.12 Nor do they consistently or successfully project their desires onto ‘the opposite sex’ in the heteronormative fashion often assumed by Jungian ‘contrasexual’ thought. The Knot Garden, with its gender-troubled subjects, turbulent relationships, homosexual couplings, surprising partner swaps, and ambiguous, sometimes pessimistic conclusions, offers a far thornier and more nuanced exploration of contemporary gender and sexuality than The Midsummer Marriage, and might therefore perhaps be thought of as a difficult younger sibling to Tippett’s first, more straightforwardly Jungian opera from fifteen years earlier. It seems somewhat unsuitable, then, to explore this opera exclusively from the perspective of a psychoanalytic school of thought which, as Jung scholar Polly Young- Eisendrath acknowledges, has ‘rarely [...] treated [gender] seriously’, ties its arguments to ‘some biological and/or essentialist argument that women or men are “born that way”’, and 11 Kemp, Tippett: The Composer and His Music, 223. 12 Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 68. 25 MICHAEL GRAHAM presupposes heteronormativity, with ‘the two sexes imagined as opposites, as carrying complementary potentials’.13 At the beginning of her essay on gender and sexuality in Jung, Young-Eisendrath points towards an alternative psychoanalytic methodology that might prove useful to an investigation of The Knot Garden, when she quotes from Jacqueline Rose’s introduction to Jacques Lacan’s Feminine Sexuality: Sexuality belongs in [an] area of instability played out in the register