The Chinese Garden (17 page)

Within a decade or two, adult women's desires of almost every variety would be quite openly discussed in literature. But, even in the early 1960s,
some
conventions, to paraphrase Woolf, were still very strong.

The Chinese Garden
in the Lesbian Literary Tradition

Manning's familiarity with her lesbian literary heritage is demonstrated through a number of well-deployed allusions within the text. Those to Radclyffe Hall's scandal-provoking
The Well of Loneliness
are evident. Others, recognizable only to the lesbian cognoscenti, might easily be lost on Manning's mainstream audience. The most significant of these are the references to Clemence Dane, the author of
Regiment of Women
(1917), and to
Mädchen in Uniform
, Leontine Sagan's 1931 German film based on Christa Winsloe's play
Ritter Nérestan
(1930), which in turn served as the basis for Winsloe's novel
The Child Manuela
(1933).

Regiment of Women
and
The Child Manuela
are landmark works in a major subgenre of lesbian literature, the homoerotic girls' school narrative.
¹⁰
Early in the novel we see a group of students in their evening recreation, “the younger children … huddled against their desks in the outer cold, reading dog-eared novels from the library—novels which told of midnight feasts, adorable games mistresses and unbelievable escapades out of school bounds” (20). The allusion (most likely to Angela Brazil's juvenile-oriented fictions) is ferociously ironic, juxtaposing the ideal with the girls' noxious reality in their spartan, unheated surroundings. Against such cheerful and innocuous fare, Dane and Winsloe posit a very different story, one that finds echoes in
The Chinese Garden
.

“‘Shakespeare has no monopoly on blank verse,'” Chief tells Rachel, rather perversely adding, “‘You know Clemence Dane's plays well enough, and that's blank verse of the first order'” (85). Present-day critics are unlikely to share this perception. That Chief assumes Rachel's familiarity with Dane's plays is, I believe, suggestive of a form of lesbian vernacular, even between teacher and student, that implies recognition without ever naming the shared—and taboo—inclination, what today might be called “gaydar.” In such cases, when acknowledgment of one's sexuality is not possible, allusions to lesbian icons—and the reaction of the other party to them—has often served as a means of identifying kindred spirits. And “kindred spirits,” as Castle has shown, were certainly of significance to Dane.
¹¹

Born Winifred Ashton, Dane was an actress, playwright, spiritualist, and, early in her life, a teacher in a girls' school.
Regiment of Women
, as Hamer has aptly observed, “is not a cheerful lesbian love story” (84). Rather, it is, in Dane's own words, the story of “the monstrous empire of a cruel woman,” schoolmistress Clare Hartill (1). Despite her apparent sadism, Clare is worshipped by her students and by the young novice teacher Alwynne Durand. It is only when Clare humiliates an adoring, oversensitive student and consequently drives the
girl to suicide that Alwynne breaks free of the older woman's power—and marries a man. Although there is much to suggest that Dane herself lived a relatively happy lesbian life with her long-time secretary, some recent lesbian critics have found
Regiment of Women
a homophobic text, which, to readers some eighty years on, it might well seem.
¹²
It was, nevertheless, “the first British novel … devoted wholly to [female sexual] variance” (Foster 257), and thus influential in the development of lesbian literature.

Although Manning does not directly allude to
Regiment of Women
, she makes a curious reference to Winsloe's work, the plot of which is similar to that of Dane's.
The Child Manuela
, like its more familiar film version, represents the fateful love of a student for her young teacher. Manuela von Meinhardis, the orphaned daughter of a Prussian army officer, is dispatched by her guardians to the confines of a severe, militaristic girls' school. Her sole source of solace is Fraulein von Bernburg, the only humane teacher among the faculty. Following a school play—Schiller's
Don Carlos
, in which Manuela plays the title role in male drag—she openly avows her love for her teacher. This act earns the opprobrium of the sadistic headmistress, who orders Manuela expelled. As a result, Manuela kills herself. For
Mädchen in Uniform
, however, Sagan filmed two endings: one that remained faithful to Winsloe's original, and an alternative denouement (historically the more familiar one to British and American audiences) in which a revolution of little girls (to appropriate the title of Blanche McCrary Boyd's book) saves the day.
¹³
Manning's direct reference to, presumably, the film version is nonetheless a relatively ambiguous one. Just before relating the details of Chief's self-styled church liturgy (which concludes, bizarrely enough, with her quoting Queen Elizabeth's speech from Dane's
Will Shakespeare
), the adult Rachel reflects, “We were not, despite the military nature of some of the discipline, ‘Mädchen in Uniform'” (101). The narrative goes on to explain that Bampfield allowed “startling breaches of rule in the interests of individuals,” and that “the ripe eccentricity of so many of those in authority over us” contributed to a “curious mixture of freedom and
restraint” (101, 102). Still, it is perhaps a tribute to Margaret's tenacity that her fate is not Manuela's tragic one, for she is punished as cruelly as Winsloe's heroine is. Yet if what Manning had in mind in her comparison was the “happy ending” version of Sagan's film, then it is so much more the pity that the girls of Bampfield lacked the courage to rise in defiance of the hypocritical injustice and homophobia perpetrated by a group of adult women who feared exposure of their own lesbianism.

In such an atmosphere,
The Well of Loneliness
becomes a lighted match to the powder keg of covert homoerotic desires. It chronicles the vicissitudes of Stephen Gordon, the only child of a wealthy peer who, having read the works of such sexologists as Havelock Ellis and Richard Krafft-Ebing, accepts his masculine daughter as an “invert” and treats her as he would a son. But the humane Sir Philip dies, and Stephen, despite her wealth, finds no acceptance from her mother or from the heterosexual world at large. While well intended, the novel is overly long, melodramatic, and relentlessly lugubrious. Regardless of its aesthetic shortcomings,
The Well of Loneliness
became an inspiration for several generations of lesbians who saw their reflection nowhere else in literature.
¹⁴

Hall's book was published when Manning, like Rachel, was a sixteen-year-old student. It was a cause célèbre from the outset, with the editor of the
Sunday Times
calling for its immediate suppression (in language that is ironically echoed in the reactions of Bampfield's staff): “I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul” (as quoted in Baker 223). The ensuing obscenity trial and appeal continued the controversy through the summer and fall of 1928.
¹⁵
Reviews and reports were, for the most part, “politely” vague about the book's subject matter, yet it seems fairly apparent that Rachel, who is not as sophisticated as she supposes, reacts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “privilege of unknowing” (23). When Margaret attempts to discuss press accounts of the book, Rachel falls back on the innocence that is in fact ignorance:
“I wondered then what all the fuss was about. It seemed an important book, but I could not see why. My technical knowledge of sex was too meagre to enable me to relate what little I knew to the reviewer's account of the novel” (96–97). Rachel subsequently falls back upon this ignorance in order to protect herself from the implicating knowledge of exactly what Margaret and Rena are up to—even though Margaret, who believes that Rachel alone among the Bampfield students will be sympathetic to her situation, makes several attempts to discuss the matter. But Rachel exists on the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, as shown in her triangulation with Margaret and Bisto at the outset of the novel. She deploys her boundary-crossings strategically—even if only subconsciously—and retreats into the safe if childish realm of feeding Willy, the “pet” rat, with the sentimental Bisto when Margaret's demands become too disturbing. Nor is Rachel's “unknowing” without purpose, for it effectively saves her from sharing the fate that befalls Margaret and Rena.

Aside from the disturbances that Hall's novel supposedly elicits at Bampfield, other provocative traces of
The Well of Loneliness
appear in
The Chinese Garden
. Early in the narrative, Rachel describes Margaret in a manner that recalls Stephen Gordon and, by extension, Radclyffe Hall herself: “[S]he did not look like a schoolgirl. She was tall and thin, with a lean, brown, saturnine face, hair cut as short as a boy's, and heavy, often furrowing brows over dark eyes. A passionate reader and an inspired talker, she lived a life balanced between bouts of taciturn isolation, buried in books, and extreme gregariousness” (22). When Chief is described later on, she seems merely an older version of the same (50–51).

Indeed, Chief would appear to be a character straight out of
The Well of Loneliness
. Her history in the V.A.D. (Volunteer Ambulance Drivers) during the First World War recalls that of Stephen Gordon and her colleagues, who felt that the war gave them the one opportunity in their lives to be part of a community of women like themselves. Nor were Chief and her associates without real-life counterparts. Barbara “Toupie” Lowther, the daughter of a peer and the inspiration
for Hall's story “Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself,” had organized a famous unit of women drivers.
¹⁶
The fact that this unit played an important role in
The Well of Loneliness
was much noted during the obscenity trial, and many “patriotic” Britons felt that the honor of these war heroines had been impugned by association with “prurience” in the novel. Consequently, Chief's honor—such as it is—is threatened as well.

It is easy for the Bampfield staff to blame
The Well of Loneliness
for the girls' “nameless vice,” as it deflects their own culpability (150). Manning's narrative is littered with clues regarding the lesbian intrigues of the various teachers, and Rachel becomes an inadvertent voyeur in the affair of Chief and Miss Burnett, even if she once again fails—or refuses—to comprehend what she sees. The reactions of the various staff members, as well as Rachel's retreat into ignorance, are demonstrations of the narrative phenomenon known as lesbian panic. Elsewhere, I have defined lesbian panic as

the disruptive action or reaction that occurs when a character … is either unable or unwilling to confront or reveal her own lesbianism or lesbian desire. Typically, a female character, fearing discovery of her covert or unarticulated lesbian desires … lashes out directly or indirectly at another woman, resulting in emotional or physical harm to herself or others. This destructive reaction may be as sensational as suicide or homicide, or as subtle and vague as a generalized neurasthenic malaise. In any instance, the character is led by her sense of panic to commit irrational or illogical acts that inevitably work to the disadvantage or harm of herself or others. (2–3)

Rachel's stance of ignorance—which surely contradicts her self-image of the budding intellectual—is, I would suggest, a mild form of lesbian panic. It stems from her own attraction to Margaret, a situation that is exacerbated not only by Rachel's guilt over the growing revulsion she feels towards Bisto's emotional demands but also by
Margaret's growing interest in the banal Rena and a confusing web of emotional attachments with various teachers. In effect, Rachel is pulled in all directions by a wide variety of homoaffectional—if not downright homoerotic—inducements. Her responses, then, are those of one caught in the crossfire and—given her youth and confusion—readily forgivable, for the main recipient of the resulting disadvantage or harm is really herself. It would be heroic if she were to rise to Margaret's defense, but, in practical terms, such heroism would also be utterly self-destructive and, furthermore, to no avail.

What is less forgivable, however, are the reactions of the staff. The extremes of severe discipline and utter laxness that shape the day-today life of Bampfield and the liaisons between the various mistresses would make it seem as if the school does not really exist for the purpose of teaching young women so much as for the purpose of creating an isolated lesbian microcosm in which Chief and her minions can pursue their amours without constraint. In light of the homophobia of society at large, the desire for such an separatist community is understandable, yet it does not take into consideration how it affects the girls whom these women are training, however
queerly
, to be “perfect English gentlemen.” While Bampfield may be an ideal lesbian training ground, the dangers of detection, particularly in light of the cultural reaction against Hall and her book and the stereotype of homosexuals as pederasts, make
overt
lesbianism the absolute taboo—indeed, so taboo that their “vice” must remain unnamed.

The discovery of Margaret and Rena naked in bed together makes that which was hidden all too obvious and, accordingly, all traces must be erased—including the garden, which is, as in scripture, the site of the original sin. The expulsion and destruction that ensue in the scriptural account are replicated in the vengeance demanded by the “Gud” whom Chief has created in her own image and likeness.

The Chinese Garden
as Autobiography

“To come out at the age of seventy … to come out of what, I ask myself?” (1). So Rosemary Manning began her second autobiography,
A Corridor of Mirrors
. To set the context for the events of her life, she begins by explaining her earlier reluctance to acknowledge her lesbianism: