The Chinese Garden (16 page)

Margaret, significantly, reveals herself to Rachel just as the latter reads the portion of the poem relating the prophetic dream—ultimately unheeded—of Bracy the Bard, in which a white dove is strangled by green snake. The symbolism of chastity ruined by temptation is obvious. Margaret's response to the poem is curious, both for what she does and does not understand: “‘It could have happened here, couldn't it? … I found a grass snake here in the
autumn, just like the one in the poem. Why do they look so evil? They're beautiful, yet they're evil.… Rachel, tell me why the most beautiful things are often evil?'” (129). In
Surpassing the Love of Men
Lillian Faderman has written extensively on the manner in which lesbianism, particularly in nineteenth-century male-authored literature, was regarded as the ultimate conjunction of beauty and evil.
³
But Margaret, although the social microcosm she inhabits would hardly consider her so, is quite innocent of the world and its judgments. She is puzzled by the symbolic conflation of evil and beauty as it is ascribed to snakes. She accepts—but surely does not comprehend the reason—that snakes are deemed evil, even though she sees their beauty. And as she reveals in her abortive attempts to discuss either Rena or
The Well of Loneliness
with Rachel, while she experiences the beauty of loving a member of one's own sex, she also understands that society—for reasons she finds inexplicable—proscribes it as an unspeakable evil.

Alhough Coleridge's poems fade into dreamlike inconclusiveness, events in the novel come to a horrifying close. A cruel pattern is in place, not so much as the result of design on the part of any single character but rather as part of a larger pattern at work in the universe—one that many would call fate.

The idea that random and unreflecting acts and words result in the seemingly accidental convergence of unstoppable forces is a salient factor in the novels of Thomas Hardy, one of Manning's favorite novelists. Manning was born in Weymouth, a town that plays a significant role in a number of Hardy's works, and, like her literary predecessor, drew much inspiration from the rural landscape and geography of their native Wessex, the ancient British kingdom that comprised most of present-day southwestern England. Bampfield is located in Devon, and, as is so often the case in Hardy's novels, the inanimate features of its setting take on personified qualities. The various elements of the garden reflect Rachel's distress, as well as her inspiration, and they are ultimately destroyed by the school's administration because the garden itself is “tainted” and “evil” as a result
of the “sins” that took place therein. Hardy's most significant influence on
The Chinese Garden
, however, resides in the daringness of its theme. Hardy went against the grain of Victorian propriety and reticence in his representation of sexual matters.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(1891) and
Jude the Obscure
(1895) inflamed public sentiment with their honest—and sympathetic—depictions of extramarital sex, illegitimate births, and marital infidelity.
⁴
While, by the early 1960s, lesbianism was increasingly present in British women's writing, it was generally obliquely presented and often unnamed. That Manning would write so pointedly about the social reaction against female same-sex love—and with direct allusion to Radclyffe Hall's then-notorious
The Well of Loneliness
—is evidence of a Hardy-like level of courage. Moreover, Manning published the novel under her own name when she was the head of her own school, a gesture that surely was not without calculated risks.
⁵

The Chinese Garden
in British Women's Writing

Born in 1911, Manning was a member of the generation of British women writers who came of age during the 1930s and reached the apex of their literary careers in the 1950s and 1960s. Her contemporaries included, among the more notable, Mary Renault, Rumer Godden, Barbara Comyns, Sybille Bedford, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Penelope Mortimer, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Iris Murdoch. This group is in many ways a disparate one, yet one in which several common threads can be detected, particularly their attempts to articulate the occluded erotic desires of women and girls. Following the literary trail blazed by Virginia Woolf (and, to some extent, Elizabeth Bowen), these women faced the challenge of creating narratives of women's lives in a world in which the traditional courtship plot was no longer the ideal and possibly no longer viable. The paradigmatic plot that begins with a young woman “coming out” in society (not, emphatically, in the neologistic queer sense of the term), passes through a period of conflict while she chooses the most suitable
suitor, and concludes with her marriage may have served the purposes of Jane Austen and her contemporaries well; it certainly continued to predominate throughout the Victorian era. But the combination of such factors as the rise of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British feminists and suffragists, fin-de-siècle decadence, and the advent of literary modernism—along with the various discontents of female writers and artists that Woolf articulated in
A Room of One's Own
(1929)—culminated in a need for new female-engendered plots.
⁶

For Manning and the women of her generation, the need for a new story to replace the courtship plot was further complicated by the devastation of two world wars, which annihilated a considerable portion of two consecutive generations of men. The shortage of marriageable men led to plots focusing on the lives of spinsters and, with increasing frequency, female friendships inside and outside of communities of women. Social and emotional interaction between women, whether in life or in fiction, frequently opens the door to homoerotic desire, as Virginia Woolf was thoroughly aware. In a 1931 speech to a women's group, Woolf predicted that “in fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge that [the imagination] is ready to bring me. But not now … because the conventions are still very strong” (xxxix). Surely the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall's
The Well of Loneliness
—the very book that causes so much trouble in
The Chinese Garden
—made clear to Woolf the consequences of any direct or compassionate fictional representation of lesbianism. Hall's emotive plea for a humane understanding of “inverts” (as medical sexologists then termed homosexuals) was met with hostility and sensational notoriety. British justice found
The Well of Loneliness
obscene and banned its sale in the United Kingdom, a ban that stayed in effect until 1949. Nor was legal prohibition the only form of censorship threatening Manning and her contemporaries; many mainstream publishers, fearing public outrage as much as prosecution, were hesitant to issue texts that addressed “forbidden” matters. Accordingly, for British women writers working in that fifty-year period that Woolf
foresaw (the end of which would coincide, aptly, with the prime of such authors as Angela Carter, Fay Weldon, Beryl Bainbridge, and Jeanette Winterson), any attempt to situate female homoeroticism in their narratives was, at the very least, a formidable challenge.

The 1961 lifting of the ban on
Lady Chatterley's Lover
(1928), D. H. Lawrence's sexually explicit novel of an adulterous interclass affair, effectively marked the end of stringent literary censorship in Britain even when the law relented the conventions were, as Woolf foresaw, “still very strong.” In “Notes from the Underground” Patricia Cramer observes that prior to the 1970s, the decade of fulminating women's and gay liberation, there were only “three characteristic endings” for homosexuals in fiction: “the ending in marriage and suppression of homosexual feelings … loneliness and ostracism … and suicide” (180). While Manning challenges these limitations in
The Chinese Garden
, the “three characteristic endings” nonetheless cast their shadows over the plot: In her overly ambitious and never-finished play, Rachel expresses her horror and disdain for the institutional confines of marriage, an idea Margaret echoes in their secretive talk in the chicken shed; yet Margaret and Rena are ultimately banished, and Rachel, “tainted” by their implications, experiences the isolation and ostracism and, as a result, attempts suicide.

As Manning and her contemporaries strove in the face of these challenges, each in her own way, to create new stories about women's lives and desires, they were also affected by the influence of a factor unknown, for the most part, to their predecessors. Although the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had been familiar to the intelligentsia since the early decades of the twentieth century, it was not until the period following the Second World War that the British mainstream had assimilated basic Freudian concepts. For many, though certainly not all, of these authors, Freud's writings on female desire, particularly those on hysteria and lesbianism, were highly problematic. In
A Corridor of Mirrors
(1987), Manning records that she was “repelled by a theory that has become a psychological cliche: that neuroses and indeed character traits in general are rooted entirely in
our infant life, in the treatment that we received from parents, siblings, nurses, teachers. I chose to ignore the partial truth of this, finding it repugnant to my pride” (3). Freud's female pre-Oedipal complex, while in many ways a more humane approach to female homosexuality than those maintained by the medical sexologists who preceded him, nonetheless presents lesbianism as a form of arrested development, one in which the female subject fails to make the necessary shift of love objects (i.e., from mother to father and, subsequently, male lover) in the transitions between childhood and adolescence. While some lesbians—and many feminist literary critics—have found this a useful paradigm for lesbianism, it has often provided the means by which to infantilize lesbians and to see them as lost, pathetic creatures perpetually in search of a mother-figure.
⁷

Fear of infantilization combined with fear of social ostracism, then, is at the heart of many narratives authored by Manning's generation. A brief examination of several notable works produced within a few years of
The Chinese Garden
reveals some highly suggestive similarities. Muriel Spark's
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(1961) relates the coming of age of a group of young women who, as students in an Edinburgh girls' school, come under the influence of a charming if irresponsible and megalomaniacal teacher. While the physically consummated relationships in the novel are all heterosexual, the underlying desires—indeed those that, in some cases, motivate heterosexual misadventures—are homoerotic in nature.
⁸
Rather than employing a traditional linear narrative, Spark relates the events through flashbacks (contrasting the characters' burgeoning womanhood with their prepubescent years under Miss Brodie's tutelage in the 1930s) and also through what might best be called “flashforwards,” in which the “Brodie set,” in early middle age at the beginning of the 1960s, continue to live in the shadow of the charismatic teacher, now long dead. The movement between past and present is also seen in
The Chinese Garden
, in which the omniscient third-person narrator who describes Rachel's schoolgirl activities shifts, often abruptly, even within the same paragraph, to the vastly more sophisticated, if pessimistic,
first-person voice of Rachel as an adult. We are, in effect, presented with two Rachels, and the contrast is nothing less than a Blakean dichotomy of innocence and experience, as the experienced Rachel delineates (and, it would seem, attempts to explain to herself) how the events of one school year made her the person she has become.
⁹

The concept of the divided self, which is apparent in this doubling of Rachel's character, had become almost a commonplace in women's literature, thanks to the writings of psychologist R. D. Laing, the influential Scottish psychiatrist who challenged, however inaccurately, many of the prevailing notions about the causes of schizophrenia. Nowhere is this so apparent as in Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
(1962), in which the protagonist, seeking to gain control over her life, separates the various aspects of it into entries in a series of notebooks. Lessing's novel shares with
The Chinese Garden
—and with Manning's autobiography
A Time and a Time
(1971), also a product of this period—a narrative self-analysis that borders at times on ruthlessness. Four decades later, such tellings may strike readers as excessive and solipsistic; yet such ferocious attempts to achieve knowledge are a historically important phase in the quest Woolf had foreseen: that which would allow women to tell the truth about their bodies and their desires.
The Golden Notebook
is also a disturbingly homophobic book, one that fears lesbianism as the ultimate female failure, the result of women being continually disappointed by the selfish and privileged behavior of men. Yet, perhaps not surprisingly, there is also a homoerotic girls' school story lurking in the background, as the protagonist fears that her daughter, who prefers the atmosphere of her school and the company of her teachers and the other girls to life at home with her mother, will lose her adolescent “new sexuality” (467).

In some sense, literary explorations of the homoerotic desires of girls (who, according to many psychological authorities, were merely going through a phase of polymorphous perversity that they would inevitably outgrow) are far “safer” than explorations of the homoerotic desires
of more mature women. Many, even now, would be reluctant to apply the dreaded “1-word” to the activities of girls undergoing the paroxysms of puberty—and, indeed, most female-authored fictions of the time,
The Chinese Garden
included, avoid the word as much as possible. The girl, however, is the mother to the woman, and, as if an analysis of adolescent female sexuality would provide the key to understanding that of the adult woman, plots involving the same-sex attractions, obsessions, fantasies, and desires of female adolescents seem to have become ubiquitous in women's writing by the beginning of the 1960s. In addition to those novels previously discussed, plots containing girls and young women experiencing same-sex erotic frissons (often in the context of a school or convent and often involving teachers or other older women as the subjects or objects of desire) can be found in Brigid Brophy's
The King of a Rainy Country
(1956) and
The Finishing Touch
(1963), Sybille Bedford's
A Favourite of the Gods
(1963) and A
Compass Error
(1968), Maureen Duffy's
That's How It Was
(1962),
The Microcosm
(1966), and
Love Child
(1971), Iris Murdoch's An
Unofficial Rose
(1962), Elizabeth Bowen's
The Little Girls
(1963) and
Eva Trout
(1968), Rumer Godden's
In This House of Brede
(1969), Olivia Manning's
The Camperlea Girls
(1969), and Beryl Bainbridge's
Harriet Said
… (1972).