The Chinese Garden (15 page)

In acute pain, Rachel saw their figures disappear under the dark leaves. Straining her eyes, she thought she could descry, every now and again, slight movements in the dark mat of branches and leaves. The ornamental ponds, though they could not actually be seen, were indicated by a small break in the density of the leaves and by lighter green of the trees and bushes that surrounded their moist shores, so there seemed to be two fairy circles on the dark carpet of the shrubbery. From the parapet outside her window where she was now leaning, Rachel thought she could see what she had never noticed before, a small pointed pinnacle, the top of the pagoda. They were there, walking round it, Chief prodding the soft wood, no doubt, with her shooting stick, Georgie looking with disgust at the boat in which she believed Rachel had witnessed and condoned, if not actually taken part in, perversities of whose nature she was even now largely ignorant. And Tarrant, what did he make of this expedition, of the dried fern in the boat, of the atmosphere of feverish curiosity and disgust?

It was almost dark now. The shadowy figures came out and locked the gate behind them. Next day, Rachel saw others, two of the estate men, and the boy with whom she had collected wood in the park, with barrows and tools. The garden was being destroyed.

                
Nature's polluted:

                
There's men in every secret corner of her

                
Doing damned wicked deeds.

Georgie Murrill's broken trust, monstrous though it was, could now at last be accepted in the light of this final, logical destruction of the garden – accepted as part of that adult world in which Rachel had never fully recognized that Georgie had her natural place. She could turn away from it now, almost with relief, to regard the problem of her own innocence. For she was not convinced that she was not guilty. She was assailed with a horrible doubt that she had in some way encouraged this nameless vice in Margaret and Rena by her own irreligious views and critical rebelliousness.

She could not trust her own armour against the forces which were moving in to the attack. Deeply soaked in the phraseology of the psalms, she sat alone in her study, her head in her hands, and repeated over and over again:

                
‘“Deliver me from mine enemies, O God: defend me

                
from them that rise up against me.

                
O deliver me from the wicked doers: and save me

                
from the bloodthirsty men.

                
For lo, they he waiting for my soul: the mighty

                
men are gathered against me, without any offence or

                
fault of me, O Lord.

                
They run and prepare themselves without my fault:

                
arise thou therefore to help me, and behold.”'

The truth slowly began to clear. The bitter lamenting of Rena in the infirmary still haunted Rachel's ears. She had loved Margaret, and that love was nothing but a dirty
device. Far more than technical innocence was involved. Primal innocence, the primal innocence of Traherne's orient and immortal wheat, was destroyed. What was whole had disintegrated. What had been perfect was irremediably stained. Rachel felt a bitterness against Margaret and Rena which strove within her against her sense of pity for their predicament. Her world had been a small one, but entire. If there was corruption, it had not appeared on the surface. If she could have advanced step by step into adulthood, her armour would have grown with her and protected her against later adversaries. But Bampfield was her armour and within it she lay naked like a white nut in its wooden shell. The walls of her fortress cracked, and in a moment she was beset.

Perhaps the bitterest thing of all was that no one came to her rescue. She was immediately cut off from her fellow prefects. She had no close friends among the girls. No one on the staff stood up in her defence. Her private coachings with Miss Naylor and Miss Burnett ceased, and she was told to work by herself for the time being. Even when she went out into the gardens, desperately tramping the lime avenues when the rest of the school was indoors, she was denied company, for the wood sheds were empty, and Punch looked away on the one occasion when she met her. She was hedged about with silence. Her study silence became a palpable oppression. She knew that she was left to prove her own innocence and felt betrayed by Bampfield itself, the setting of her misery and humiliation.

Death appeared as the one comprehending force, the one invariable and certain refuge. She realized, with awe, that he was always within call. Unable to reassemble from the ruins of her world a habitation in which to continue life, she decided to end it. She went about her business carefully. It
was the third day of her agony and she was no longer enervated by doubt.

She needed a rope. Her trunk was kept in her study, and with a rug and a cushion it passed for a divan. Inside was a substantial piece of box cord. She locked the study door, took out the rope and made an efficient noose and slip-knot. Behind the door were three pegs and to one of these she fixed the rope. She had to tie it with the noose nearly touching the peg, for she was tall, and the hooks had not been designed for this purpose. She then removed her school tie and undid the collar of her blouse. She put a chair against the door, mounted it, and slipped her head through the noose. Fortified by the noble words of the Stoic wife:
Paete, non dolet
(Paetus, it doesn't hurt), she leaned forward a little and the noose tightened round her neck. Like a bather taking a plunge, she jumped forward and kicked over the chair. She found herself standing, with the noose drawn tight, but no more than mildly constricting her. The peg, after all, was not high enough to accommodate her.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

                
For being not mad, but sensible of grief,

                
My reasonable past produces reasons

                
How I may be deliver'd of these woes

                
And teaches me to kill or hang myself.

S
HAKESPEARE

I
WONDER
now how it was that I recovered so quickly from this episode which brought me for a moment so close to death. For two days I had lived, virtually alone, while I searched myself to my depths to find the evil of which I was accused. The issue was one which must, I think, have driven me towards suicide in any case, but whereas, if I had indeed been guilty, I might well have made another and more successful attempt, I was now assured of my innocence; I felt the hands of Death himself had saved me, and some of the irony of that most ironic power entered into my soul, slipped easily like a lancet under my tortured skin, and relieved the agony.

I freed myself, untied the noose, and put it away in my trunk almost with affection. The absurdity, the scientific solecism, of having gone to all this trouble over slip-knots and pegs, without first finding out the drop necessary for my own height, struck me as exquisitely funny. I was keenly alive to the ludicrous. My own behaviour seemed as false and incongruous as Chief's sermons, and the impulse to destroy myself out of proportion to the circumstances, which were simply that an untrue accusation had been levelled against me. Truth was all that mattered. If Chief didn't
believe me, was I to kill myself for it? The truth remained the truth, even if no one on earth believed it. I turned back to the psalms which had been my sole comfort during these desperate hours, and read:

O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me: thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.

I copied it out very carefully and slowly in a commonplace book I kept at the time. Who it was that had searched me out and known me, I did not pause to consider. It could not have been God, since I did not believe in His existence. It may have been Truth, emerged from her well to spy out all my ways. When I had finished the reading and copying of this psalm, I went down to the prefects' room, and had tea with them in an embarrassed silence, broken only by orders to the fags, whose bright eyes darted from one to another of us solemn owls, and speculated no doubt on the responsibility which weighed upon our youthful shoulders. After tea, I took out the cards and suggested a game of bridge. The others were shocked at my frivolity and refused. I was relieved. I was only showing off, and what I really wanted was to have the cards to myself and play patience. I longed to have my mind made up for me, or at least confirmed in its secret decision, by the issue of a game. Should I go to Chief that night and take my stand on the truth, or not? I wanted the result of the cards (for my mind was in fact already made up) in order that I might regard it, if favourable, as a sign from heaven, or if unfavourable, as a challenge to my scepticism. So I played the games my father had taught me –
Les Huits
and
Senior Wrangler
. I really do not remember whether they came out or not. About an hour
after tea, I rose and left the prefects sitting in a shy and dignified silence, not knowing what to think of me or what to say to me. I suppose they took it for granted that I was guilty of at least aiding and abetting Margaret and Rena in this nameless and abominable vice. I walked resolutely to Chief's study and told her in a few words that I was innocent. She believed me, without further question.

In Chief's silence – in the long silence which covered that episode during the remaining year I spent at Bampfield – I grew aware of the nature of the innocence which I had affirmed confidently that night, and which was accepted so readily. For me, at last, exposed and quivering, lay the lie which ran through the whole school like a nervous system. I was proclaimed innocent. I was once more part of the body of Bampfield, which like myself was declared innocent, uncorrupted. A diseased limb had been lopped off – as I should have been excised had I been found guilty – and the body was whole again. To myself, I was not innocent. I was corrupted with knowledge. Nothing I read, nothing I witnessed, nothing I experienced, would ever again have for me the radiance, the purity, the perfection which the Chinese garden had symbolized for me. The whole regime was based on a falsehood, in which I was ineluctably involved.

Years later, many years, in fact, since I had seen it on one of my periodic visits, I found myself travelling by car quite near Bampfield, now no longer a school. As I drove, first one and then another familiar name appeared on the sign posts, Long Clare, Clare St Thomas, Colverton, Stoke, and then, suddenly – Bampfield. An extraordinary sensation of weakness came over me. I slowed up, wondered, and then drove on. As I left the lane and its signpost behind me, all the pain of this symbolic rejection of the place, the overt
acknowledgment that I would never again take the Bampfield direction, pressed palpably against my throat so that I could hardly breathe. It was as if that power whom I had cheated there had thrust out his hand to remind me of his presence, in a rough, almost uncouth gesture, recalling our old acquaintance. I drove on, and slowly there was rebuilt in my mind the picture of the garden, that thought had lengthened in my heart. Bampfield had destroyed it with bill-hook and fire, yet Bampfield itself was now ashes to me, and the Chinese garden arose again, like a phoenix.

                
Beauty, truth, and rarity,

                
Grace in all simplicity,

                
Here enclosed in cinders lie.

AFTERWORD

The period between the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's
The Well of Loneliness
, perhaps the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the event commonly accepted as the originary moment of the international gay and lesbian liberation movement, might be called the Dark Ages of lesbian literature. The notoriety of the trial and the ensuing public outrage led to a powerful and pervasive backlash against any explicit form of lesbian self-expression in literature, art, and the media over the next four decades. Nonetheless, any number of significant lesbian fictions were published in Britain and the United States during these years, even if most of them were quickly consigned to the realm of obscurity. For many years, Rosemary Manning's
The Chinese Garden
has been known to lesbian scholars as one such work from this apparently dark period; yet even within this relatively small circle of critics, the novel was more
known about
than actually known. After its initial publication in 1962 by Jonathan Cape in Britain and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States, the novel quietly went out of print—not, however, without gaining a few admirers, including the influential critic and author Anthony Burgess, a man not always kindly disposed to the lesbian novels and novelists of the 1960s. In 1984,
The Chinese Garden
made a brief reappearance, thanks to Brilliance Books, a small British gay and lesbian press; but despite this effort, the novel again vanished, ironically just before the first major wave of academic lesbian criticism and its reconstruction of the forgotten and obscured history of lesbian writing.

That the memory of Manning's novel stayed alive at all is thanks in great part to an entry in
The Lesbian in Literature
, a bibliography catalogued by Barbara Grier, the founder of Naiad Press, who earlier, under the pseudonym Gene Damon, was the book critic for
The Ladder
, the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization of the 1950s and 1960s.
¹
Grier's compilation was a guide for stalwart lesbian readers in search of texts reflecting their
lives and interests in a period when lesbians seemed, for all intents and purposes, invisible if not nonexistent. Tirelessly classifying any work that even remotely acknowledged female homoerotic desire, Grier ranked texts both qualitatively and quantitatively (through a code comprised of letters and asterisks) according to their respective degrees of lesbian representation.
The Chinese Garden
was listed as “A**,” indicating “major Lesbian characters and/or action” with “very substantial quality of Lesbian material” (xix, xx). As such, it was deemed worth a potentially arduous search of libraries and used bookstores in order to find it.

For most of the novel's history such a search would have been necessary. In an ironic twist,
The Chinese Garden
, because it received little academic attention and was difficult to obtain, remained obscure and, as a consequence, went almost completely unremarked in the major works of lesbian criticism of the 1980s and 1990s. The one important exception is Terry Castle's
The Apparitional Lesbian
. In elucidating her theory that, historically, “ghosting” the lesbian object of desire (i.e., disembodying her or otherwise making her unreal) has been one of the few ways in which female homoeroticism could be represented without proscription, Castle glosses Manning's novel, among others, as a work in which “diligent ghost-hunters will find much to ponder” (59). Ghost-hunters may now rejoice.

With the publication of the Feminist Press edition,
The Chinese Garden
is available once more. But because the paradigms of what we expect from a lesbian text have changed so drastically in the four decades since the novel first appeared, to reintegrate it into the canon of lesbian literature—not to mention the canons of women's writing and twentieth-century British fiction—requires a bit of recontextualization. Manning's novel is permeated with “corruption” and “evil” in the setting of a sadomasochistic girls' school redolent—at times, literally—of decay and decadence. Nor is the book free from a certain level of melodramatic emotionality, which is hardly surprising in a narrative concerned primarily with the feelings and actions of adolescent girls in the throes of sexual awakening. Yet for many readers
at the end of the century and the beginning of a new one, this does not present a very “affirming” or “positive” representation of lesbianism or nascent womanhood—which, understandably if sadly, has become the criterion by which many judge the intrinsic worth of any lesbian text.

Still, I would argue that
The Chinese Garden
is a valuable work, not merely for its artistic merit but also as a historical example of the state of lesbian and women's fiction in postwar Britain during a period of political and cultural transition, one that immediately preceded what has come to be known as the “Swinging Sixties.” Accordingly, I would suggest that this novel should be considered within the various contexts it intersects: those of the literary tradition at large, of British women's writing, and of the literature of lesbianism.

The Chinese Garden
is a powerful if often disturbing tale of forbidden desires between women and girls in a harsh and repressive homoerotic situation. The novel is set in the stultifying environment of an all-female boarding school run by an authoritarian and megalomaniacal headmistress and her staff during the 1920s. While the girls are forbidden any expression of love or sexuality between or among themselves, most of the staff, including Chief herself, are involved in a wide range of lesbian liaisons and intrigues. Accordingly, while homoerotic desire is pervasive, its very existence is unspeakable, and thus when Margaret, the school rebel, introduces a copy of
The Well of Loneliness
into this already unstable situation, it becomes the catalyst for a series of emotional and erotic explosions that threaten to undermine the hierarchies of authority upon which the school's philosophy—a curious one of making girls into “gentlemen”—is structured. In effect, to appropriate the Edenic metaphor Manning deploys throughout the narrative, Hall's novel becomes the forbidden fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge in a realm in which ignorance is, ironically, the order of the day. Rachel Curgenven, the protagonist and first-person narrator, finds herself caught in the middle of the crisis that follows, a not-so-innocent bystander who is reluctant to face the implications of her own desires. Torn among her dangerous attraction to Margaret, her infantile
romantic friendship with the sentimental and childish Bisto, and her ambition to seek and maintain the admiration of the staff, Rachel is prematurely forced into a realization of the adult world that will mark the further course of her life.

In exploring such issues as adolescent (homo)sexual awakening, divided loyalties, personal integrity, and the struggle of the individual against the authoritarian regime, Manning presents a damning indictment of pedagogical corruption—a matter which held highly personal implications. For most of her life, Manning was a teacher and, ultimately, the head of a girls' school, all the while hiding her own lesbianism from all but the women with whom she formed relationships. Manning knew first hand not only the difficulties of maintaining a double life—the revelation of which could destroy her career—but also the pain of schoolgirl desire and betrayal. In
A Corridor of Mirrors
(1987), Manning's second autobiography, published a year before her death, the author at last shed light on certain unresolved mysteries in the novel, matters still unspeakable in the 1960s that can now be told. Rachel's story is, in fact, Manning's own, and through it she demands our reconsideration of the complex issues surrounding the sexual education of girls and those incidents between teachers and students that we now deem sexual harrassment.

The Chinese Garden
as a Literary Novel

In “Pulp Politics” Yvonne C. Keller writes that two vastly different modes are discernible in lesbian fictions of the 1950s and early 1960s, namely pulp fictions and what she terms “literary lesbian novels” (18). The latter were those aimed for a “high-brow” (or even “middlebrow”) audience and, as their designation implies, were written as
literature
, per se.
The Chinese Garden
goes to great lengths to establish itself as an unmistakably literary novel connected to a much larger and continuous cultural tradition, as if to establish its legitimacy and seriousness at a time when lesbianism was all too often regarded as the stuff that pulps are made of.

The epigraphs that begin the book and each of its chapters are culled
from rather diverse sources (Virgil, Shakespeare, Traherne, Rilke, Lamb, and a few now-obscure Victorian poets), reflecting not only Manning's background as a classics mistress (which she ironically shares with her character Miss Burnett) but also the eclecticism of her personal tastes and influences. Like her protagonist Rachel, Manning as an adolescent sought solace and escape from an unhappy family situation through a consuming interest in the works of the Roman poets, and, in 1932, she earned a baccalaureate with second honors in classics from Royal Holloway College of the University of London.
²
But while Rachel imagines herself a latter-day Horace (or John Milton), she finds herself drawn into other myths and fictions deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination, even as these stories shape the plots that those around her seem determined to live out.

Milton sought in
Paradise Lost
, his epic retelling of the scriptural creation narrative, to “justify the ways of God to Man.” But Rachel, despite her Miltonic aspirations, falls far short of comprehending the ways of women and girls—ways that culminate in a fall, not only for Margaret but, in a sense, for all concerned. In the Genesis account, sin, shame, knowledge (both carnal and other), and mortality enter the perfect prelapsarian world in the midst of the idyllic setting of a garden and through the combined agencies of a serpent and a woman. Except for a shortlived conversion experience, Rachel rejects traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs; perhaps, as a result, she fails to comprehend the erotic temptations, as well as the potential for sin and damnation, rife in the little Eden that Margaret has discovered, the secret hiding-place that Rachel subsequently usurps. Instead, oblivious to the literal and symbolic decay of the former pleasure grounds, she naively invests it with the exotic romanticism of the Chinese tale represented on the familiar Blue Willow tableware—that of the lovers who are metamorphosed into birds and escape the parents who forbid their love. The story, in its translation into Western culture, takes on the sentimentality of the Victorians who cherished the plates that memorialized it. Love conquers all, but only at a high price: the lovers are free, but lose their humanness and, by extension, their embodied sexuality. Ironically, events that occur in
the Chinese garden will result in Margaret and Rena playing the roles of the forbidden lovers imprisoned by those who act in loco parentis; but there is no metamorphosis for the adolescent lesbians, only shame and ostracism. Not only are they cast out, but their Eden is destroyed by those playing the role of avenging gods.

Another “oriental” tale more deeply influences Rachel's romantic yet chaste fantasies about the garden: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan.” Rachel, with “Coleridge's poems under her arm, and ‘Xanadu' in her head,” slips away to the garden to indulge her romantic adolescent imagination—a frame of mind conducive to the poet's fantastic images of an exotic and resplendent never-never land created and presided over by the legendary Mongol emperor (125). Almost comically, she sees herself as Kubla Khan and the decrepit garden her Xanadu, called into being, like the poem's “stately pleasure dome” (1.2), by the decree of the poetic mind. Yet Rachel fails to understand the ramifications of the famous unfinished poem. As Paul Magnuson points out in
Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry
, things fall apart in Xanadu. The garden is not a natural one; rather, it reflects the order imposed on it by the artifice of the imagination that created it. Thus “the delightful dream is lost because order cannot be sustained” (Magnuson 39): for Coleridge “Alph, the sacred river” (1. 3) is an overwhelming force of nature, one that forces “a mighty fountain … / Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail” (11. 19–22). Rachel trivializes Coleridge's river by associating it with the stream that feeds the stagnant pond; just as she, in her inexperience, does not differentiate between a placid stream and a chthonic, primordial energy, she cannot perceive the power of unsanctioned sexual desire to unsettle and shatter the carefully maintained order of Bampfield. Coleridge's poem runs its unresolved course in the song of an “Abyssinian maid” that reflects the poem's earlier reference to a “woman wailing for her demon lover,” a phenomenon related by juxtaposition to the furious power of the river (11. 39, 16). This wailing is eerily echoed when Rachel, late in novel, hears the cries of Margaret and Rena, each in solitary
confinement awaiting her removal from the school, each wailing for her
demonized
lover (145). What Rachel fails to realize, as she reads Coleridge in the Chinese garden, is that just as “Kubla Khan” remains unfinished (the poet's reverie interrupted, or so he maintained, by the intrusion of the “person from Porlock”), so is her own self-absorbed dream world susceptible to the traumatic intrusion of the “real world.”

Disruption, foreshadowing the crisis to come, appears in the person of Margaret, who intrudes upon Rachel's reading of Coleridge's other famous unfinished poem, “Christabel.” This lengthy, quasi-Gothic verse narrative presents, in a highly fanciful medieval setting, the tale of Christabel, the only daughter of the widowed baron Sir Leoline. In the dead of night, Christabel discovers Geraldine, a damsel-in-distress, moaning in affliction outside her father's castle. Rescuing the girl, who is obviously of noble mien and who claims to be the victim of an abduction, Christabel furtively brings Geraldine into her own room and invites her to share her bed. Many hints are given in the poem to suggest that Geraldine is a lamia, a demonic vampirelike serpent-woman. The two sleep in each other's arms, and when they awake the next morning, Christabel is wracked with guilt and anxiety: “‘Sure I have sinned!'” she exclaims (1. 381); yet her sin is never actually made explicit. The two young women approach Sir Leoline, but Christabel, whose powers of speech have been curbed by the “spell” Geraldine has cast on her, can only hiss, snakelike, and stumble as her father embraces her erstwhile tempter. The poem devolves into nonconclusion as Christabel, now herself the damsel-in-distress, embarrasses her father with the seemingly inhospitable plea that he “this woman send away!' (1. 627).