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96
ANDREW RADFORD
invention of “Hardy’s country” as a realm of enchanted, irreplaceable
specificity. Her female protagonists achieve what Hardy’s failing
fertility figures such as Henchard and Winterborne cannot: the expulsion
of foreign contaminants from “pure” Wessex territory.
However particularised questions of secret history might be in The
Crystal Cabinet, Butts repeatedly signifies how her plight mirrors that
of an entire dislocated generation burying its dead, reeling from a loss
of “station”; whose hallowed political traditions are engulfed by what
Butts thinks of as the corrosive cant of the masses. This is in stark
contrast to E. M. Forster’s mature and measured political declarations
in which he prioritises personal relations over pressing national
claims; his muted praise of a democratic impulse that generously
“admits variety” and “permits criticism” of ideological orthodoxies of
all kinds (Two Cheers 70). Butts’s literary endeavour to resuscitate a
“real England” becomes the salvaging of a social coterie whose most
gifted members have been unfairly deprived of their time-honoured
role and status.
VI
The key principle of Butts’s secret history is not simply a protofeminist
perception of a daughter exposed to the unfathomable mysteries
of a numinous bounded locality. Nor is it a clear-cut dramatisation
of the desperate battle between a landed patrician elect and a
socially mobile, yet aesthetically stunted bourgeoisie. What Butts
repeatedly returns to is the coding of English family as a peculiarly
problematic social institution whose pact with the elemental terrain of
Wessex is sullied by an impolitic or hasty marriage alliance, thus
becoming a source of generational dismay (see Old Country 93-134).
Thus the figure of a malign non-indigenous “pollutant,” such as
Kralin, acquires a nightmarish tinge in Butts’s writing, which warns of
“what will happen to the world if it decides to scrap its tradition & all
conscious continuity with it” (Journals 325).