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Excavating a Secret History: Mary Butts and the Return of the Nativist
tiny of Jane Harrison’s classical scholarship. This was “the profoundest
study” of Butts’s “adolescence—mystery cults from Thrace to
Eleusis. I remembered The Bacchae. There are my formulae, there my
words of power” (Journals 149). Virginia Woolf’s brisk 1922 summary
of Ashe of Rings as a “book about the Greeks and the Downs” (Woolf,
Diary 2: 209) implies Butts’s ability to seamlessly weave the grand
sweep and the utterly localised into the imaginative fabric of her
fiction. The irony here is that Butts’s explicit desire to “re-enter greek
religion & carry on where Jane Harrison left off” (Journals 346) is made
to serve a humourless and uneasy concept of racial memory. This
formulation not only stifles the sense of Englishness as irretrievably
mixed, as a synthetic product of “numerous” historical influences
(Young 89); but also negates the vivid panoramic vistas of ancient
civilisation afforded by Harrison’s comparative mythology.
Butts’s fictional recasting of her “homeland” conveys a scorn for
democracy that distinguishes the shrill nationalist rhetoric against
which Winifred Holtby rails in Women and a Changing Civilisation
(1934): “[t]he nation is defended as a traditional, instinctive unit,
something to which men feel themselves bound by blood and history
[…] Its appeal is to the emotion rather than the intellect” (Holtby 159,
163). The ecological and archaeological saga underpinning Butts’s
oeuvre, with its justification of a “great gentry” (DFT 196), Celtic
mysticism and purgative ceremonial ultimately promotes an illiberal,
even paranoid ideology that flatly refuses to grant the “stranger”
access to the august annals of Wessex lore.
NOTES
University of Glasgow
1 Today, outside the academy, Butts is best known for her frequently anthologised
short story, “Speed the Plough” (1921), which portrays a soldier with shell
shock and traumatic amnesia. For a trenchant appraisal of Butts’s complex depiction
of war trauma see Patterson, “Mary Butts.” Part of this chapter, which assesses
Death of Felicity Taverner, appears as “‘The Plan Behind the Plan.’”
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