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).
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 assume
s 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.
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