The Chinese Garden (18 page)

There was my upbringing in an overwhelmingly masculine family, and there was my career. Though lesbians suffered no legal penalties [in Britain] as male homosexuals did, there was a strong prejudice against them … and an active unwritten law against their holding posts which brought them into contact with children and young people: it was generally believed (and this is so today) that most gay people are pederasts. (1)

Because Manning was a teacher and, eventually, the headmistress of a school, her apprehensions are quite understandable. They are also the foundation for much of what is said—and not said—in
The Chinese Garden
.

Manning's father was a respected physician, her mother a former nurse, “a late-nineteenth-century career woman” (
Corridor of Mirrors
10). The Mannings had three sons early in their marriage; in 1911, when May Manning was forty-four, she gave birth to her only daughter. The early influences on Manning's life were the masculine activities of her father and brothers. Eventually, she was sent to a boarding school for girls in Devon, a school that served as the model for Bampfield, where she stayed for six years. While she was at school, her parents' marriage disintegrated, and her father eventually abandoned his family to live, quite openly, with his mistress, a woman of mixed race. To escape the emotional and social ramifications of what amounted to nothing less than a scandal in late 1920s Britain—and to escape the trauma of her mother's hysterical responses to the situation—Manning turned to her studies. Indeed, as her earlier biography
A Time and a Time
indicates, she was a lifelong student of literature and the humanities, often to the detriment or exclusion of personal relationships.

Manning nevertheless persisted in a series of abortive affairs, at first
with men and women alike, but later with women only. A truly painful text to read,
A Time and a Time
reveals, perhaps unselfconsciously, the chronic depression that leads Manning not only to two suicide attempts but also to the almost willful destruction of her relationships and virtually any situation that offered the promise of happiness.
¹⁷
In spite of her personal unhappiness and her apparent inclination to ruthless self-dissection, Manning was able to successfully maintain a career in education while producing several novels and numerous children's books and becoming, in her own words, a “middle-class intellectual” (
Corridor of Mirrors
186).
¹⁸
Manning's life did not end tragically, however; she was, in a sense, someone who had spent a lifetime waiting for both women's and gay liberation to happen. In her sixties and seventies, she became increasingly outspoken on social issues and, as
A Corridor of Mirrors
demonstrates, a rational and eloquent survivor of decades of oppression and repression. She died quietly in 1988, at the age of seventy-six.

A Corridor of Mirrors
fills in a variety of gaps, not only those quite purposefully left out of her personal history in
A Time and a Time
but also a very crucial lacuna in
The Chinese Garden
. Of the novel she writes: “It was autobiographical, the most truthful book I have ever written about myself” (55). As previously discussed, Rachel remains strangely, almost unrealistically ignorant of sex and sexuality even after Margaret and Rena are caught in the act. While her feelings of betrayal over Georgie Murrill's revelations to Chief are understandable from an adolescent point of view, the teacher's actions seem reasonable enough, as Manning, herself as an educator (and, by extension, her adult narrator) would realize. Late in life, she finally felt free to reveal the true nature of Georgie's betrayal, which was, perhaps not surprisingly, the ultimate crime of which lesbian educators are all too frequently—and often all too falsely—accused:

When I was sixteen I fell deeply in love with my housemistress, whom I call Georgie Murrill. Chief herself was a lesbian and was having affairs with several members of the staff,
some concurrently. Those she cast off stayed on, a little army of devotees. Georgie Murrill was one of them. It was my misfortune that I should have felt for her far more than the usual schoolgirl ‘crush'.… It was unfortunate for me for two reasons: firstly because [her] mind was trivial and narrow.… Secondly, and far more importantly, she exploited me sexually.… I was woefully ignorant about sex and certainly far from being aware of my lesbian leanings. She subscribed to the general double standards of Bampfield whereby the pretence was kept up that every member of the staff was ‘normal'.… Georgie Murrill did boast of having a young man. At one moment she was pulling me into bed with her, and the next she was extolling the pleasures of her affair with Chief's red-headed nephew.… She was in fact using me to provide her with some of the sexual excitement she lost when Chief jettisoned her. Physically,… we did not get much further than cuddling and petting … but this aroused feelings I could not fully understand. It would have been better if she had gone the whole way and given me some experience of sex as enjoyable and productive of happiness, instead of behaving in a way that left me still ignorant, frightened of my overwhelming sensations, and burdened with inhibitions and fears which were to last me half a lifetime.

My affair with Georgie Murrill was very damaging and I have no forgiveness for her whatever. For this essentially untrustworthy, mean little personality I reserved one of the only bitter remarks in the novel: ‘Her cowardly desire to appear on the side of the angels led her to jettison the child she should have protected. I think it is for the Georgie Murrills of this world that the millstones have been reserved [63].' (
Corridor of Mirrors
62–63)

The “millstones” allude to the words to the oft-quoted scriptural injunction about exposing children to scandal: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones … it were better for him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck, and that he were drowned in depth of the sea” (Matthew 18.6). For Manning, though, the scandal of Georgie Murrill's conduct is not so much the sexual relationship between teacher and student as it is her deceptiveness and hypocrisy. The offense does not reside in the sexual act itself but rather in the lies and the shame that surround it, lies and shame that leave lasting scars.

Some will, no doubt, take exception to Manning's assertion that an honest and sexually fulfilling relationship between a teacher and student might be possible, not to mention useful. But that is beside the point. What is important to realize, if we are to understand the implicit message of
The Chinese Garden
at all, is that the evil and corruption that infiltrate Bampfield do not reside in the love between Margaret and Rena, in Rachel's feelings for Georgie or any other member of the staff, or in the influence of books such as
The Well of Loneliness
. Nor, for that matter, do they reside in the amours of Chief and her minions in and of themselves, but instead in the hypocrisy of those who deem love and desire between women evil and unnatural, even while they themselves engage in it, and who would inflict their own shame on others, the shame of what we have come to call the closet. It is a lesson which, some four decades after
The Chinese Garden
was first published, many have yet to digest.

Patricia Juliana Smith

Los Angeles, California

August 1999

Notes

1
. Because her reviews began in 1966, four years after the novel's publication, Grier did not review
The Chinese Garden
for
The Ladder
. (The reviews are collected in one volume as
Lesbiana: Book Reviews from the Ladder
.) She did, however, review Manning's first autobiography,
A Time and a Time
(see n. 17). Inexplicably,
The Chinese Garden
is not mentioned in
Sex Variant Women in Literature
, the redoubtable bibliographical reference authored by Jeannette H. Foster, Grier's mentor.

2
. For a detailed narrative of the familial disruptions of Manning's adolescence,
see A Corridor of Mirrors
(64–91). I would suggest that the name of the mysterious and seemingly decadent classics mistress in
The Chinese Garden
may well be an allusion to Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969), the lesbian author of a number of tartly satiric novels of manners who had herself earned a baccalaureate in classics from Royal Holloway in 1906, a quarter of a century before Manning.

3
. See Faderman (277–94). See also Bram Dijkstra on “decadent” lesbianism (152–59) and lamias and snake women (305–14) in fin-de-siècle art.

4
. Hardy was, moreover, responsible for one of the most curious representations of female homoeroticism in Victorian literature. In his
Desperate Remedies
(1871), an older woman lures her young maid into her bed, where she proceeds to kiss her and interrogate her as to whether she has ever been kissed by a man. This lengthy scene, although it precedes Freudian psychoanalytical theory by several decades, nonetheless contains numerous elements of Freud's concepts of lesbianism in particular and homosexuality in general, especially in its conflation of erotic and maternal desires, and in the oddity of the two women sharing the uncommon name Cytherea, an appellation of the goddess Venus. See Foster (93) and Faderman (172).

5
. In
A Corridor of Mirrors
, Manning writes that prior to her “coming out” in a television interview in 1980, “I had kept my lesbianism a secret all my life. I had not even spoken of it to more than one or two close friends, though it must have been known to most of my circle” (1). This statement,
I believe, is somewhat disingenuous. In 1965, Manning reviewed for
Arena Three
Frank Marcus's play
The Killing of Sister George
, which depicts the fall of a butch lesbian television actress as she is written out of her role in a popular soap opera. The magazine was produced by the Minorities Research Group (MRG), which, according to Emily Hamer, was “the first explicitly and dedicatedly lesbian social and political organization in Britain. The importance of the Minorities Research Group and its magazine
Arena Three
cannot be overstated. Even lesbians who did not support the MRG were affected by its existence—shades of
The Well of Loneliness”
(166). Hamer reports that in her review, “Manning could not get over the fact that [the play] was being performed, let alone to acclaim, given its subject-matter” (170). This would suggest that Manning was somewhat more open about her lesbianism—and that her “circle” was rather larger—than she maintains in her autobiography.

6
. This overview of the evolution of female-authored plots is, of necessity, a very simplified one. For one of the best extensive studies of what amounts to a paradigm shift in women's fictions, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis,
Writing Beyond the Ending
.

7
. For the most pertinent aspects of Freud's theories as they apply here, see his essays “Female Sexuality”
(Complete Psychological Works
21: 221–46), “Femininity” (22:113–17), and “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (18: 145–72). I have stated elsewhere my feelings about the overuse by feminist critics of the pre-Oepidal complex as a means of understanding lesbianism; see Smith (202, n. 26).

8
. For an analysis of the underlying homoerotic tensions in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, see Smith (84–92).

9
. Indeed, Rachel (speaking as the adult third-person narrator) makes a rather curious allusion to William Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience
in the scene in which Rachel first discovers the garden: “She entered an exotic world where she breathed pure poetry. It had the symmetry of Blake's tiger” (78). Whether the ambiguously placed “it” refers to the “exotic world” or the “pure poetry” she breathes is beside the point. What is significant is that Rachel, at this point still in the throes of naivete, connects
the garden not with an image from Blake's “Songs of Innocence” but rather with “The Tyger,” one of the “Songs of Experience.” Because Rachel's perception is filtered through the experience of her adult narrative persona, it can be seen as an ironic foreshadowing of the sexual knowledge that will originate from this site.

10
. On the lesbian girls' school hovel, see Martha Vicinus (600–22) and Corinne E. Blackmer (32–39). See also Alison Hennegan (5–16) for a comparison of
The Chinese Garden
with homoerotic British boys' school fictions.

11
. See Castle,
Noel Coward and Radclyffe Hall
(21–22, 99–101).

12
. For various views on Dane and her novel, see Foster (257–60), Faderman (341–43), and Hamer (84–88).

13
. On Winsloe's novel, see Foster (236–38); Foster first pointed out the parallels between
Regiment of Women
and
The Child Manuela
(259). Curiously, Louise, the tragic student in Dane's novel, like Manuela plays a male role (Prince Arthur in Shakespeare's
King John
) in an emotionally fraught school play. On the film
Mädchen in Uniform
, see Andrea Weiss (8–11).

14
. On the extraordinary ongoing influence of
The Well of Loneliness
in lesbian culture, see Hamer (94–117).

15
. The particulars of the trial are well documented and too complex to relate here. For detailed account of the controversy and trial, see Michael Baker (223–49) and Edward de Grazia (178–93).

16
. On Lowther, her war service, and her friendship with Hall, see Hamer (50–53) and Baker (125–27). The friendship ultimately ended, a casualty, for various reasons, of the trial.

17
.
A Time and a Time
was, for the early 1970s, a relatively frank lesbian autobiography. It was not, however, an unqualified success with lesbian audiences. Its relentlessly self-analytical and self-justifying tone, along with Manning's disdain for lesbian subculture, earned the book a scathing review from Barbara Grier in
The Ladder:
“[It] is boring, it is in bad taste, it isn't necessary.… [S]he goes through several women without much attempt to work out a relationship past the bedroom door.… I can't help wondering what would happen to her precarious balance (mentally) if some
friend simply pointed out to her the one glaring fact she has left out of her yawning autobiography, that she is self-centered to the point of having mental myopia” (
Lesbiana
, 282–83). While this review is needlessly ruthless—an attitude no doubt inspired by the extremes of the then-nascent lesbian identity politics that had little use for negativity or dissent within the ranks—Manning herself was eventually able to see the book's flaws. In
A Corridor of Mirrors
she writes that her life-long “inability to take myself quite seriously has remained, though you might hardly think so from reading this book. It disappoints me.… When I reread
A Time and a Time
recently, I thought it the funniest book I had ever written” (229).
A Corridor of Mirrors
is, by contrast, a compelling, unselfpitying, and often amusing chronicle of life as a British lesbian during the pre-liberation years.

18
. Manning's other novels are
Remaining a Stranger
(1953),
A Change of Direction
(1955),
Look, Stranger
(1960),
Man on a Tower
(1965), and
Open the Door
(1983); the first two were published under the pseudonym “Mary Voyle.” Her children's books include the Susan and R. Dragon series:
Green Smoke
(1957),
Dragon in Danger
(1959),
The Dragon's Quest
(1961),
Dragon in the Harbour
(1980); also
Arripay
(1963),
Boney Was a Warrior
(1966),
Heraldry
(1966),
The Rocking Horse
(1970), and
Railways and Railwaymen
(1977). Additionally, she edited medieval miracle plays, a selection of William Blake's poetry, and Charles Dickens's
Great Expectations
for juvenile readers.