Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in "Lolly Willowes"

Abstract

had spent the afternoon field, of unusual form, for it was triangular (Warner, Willowes 141). The date is August 1922, the place is near the fictional village of Great Mop Buckinghamshire, and Laura is Laura Erminia Willowes (called by relatives), protagonist of Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel Willowes. Laura tramps around the field, turning savagely when she came to the edge, because escape from imperialist patriarchy, brother's family, has been foiled. Into Great Mop, an idyllic country village which Laura sought solitary independence, has come assuming nephew Titus. Dogging steps (Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait minute, and I'll come too [142]), Titus threatens to return Laura to her old employment of being Aunt Lolly (149)--that is, an aging spinster aunt residing London with patronizing brother and his family. With Titus's arrival, the green and pleasant land around Great Mop has become distinctly unpleasant, just as organized by an English social and sexual order as are the more obviously man-made environs of London that Laura sought to escape. Laura paces the boundaries of the in despair and rebellion (142), unable to envision solution that will free from the airless domestic spaces offered by the interlocking claims of class, gender, and presumptive heterosexuality. She finally calls out, No! You shan't get me. I won't go back. I won't.... Oh! Is there no help? (151). And into the novel sails Satan, figured here as a kind of black knight, wandering about and succoring decayed gentlewomen (211), to offer Laura the freedom of the manor exchange for commitment to witchcraft. Willowes is increasingly studied as Warner's academic profile rises, (1) but the events following the carefully showcased speech act above still puzzle critics and readers. Why should Satan respond to this wishful call, offering to dispatch Titus from Great Mop and guarantee Laura's safety? Why should she make pact with this masculine Master (210), when so much of the novel is about finding space where female sexuality is free from male control? (2) And why should this novel take such seemingly whimsical turn to the fantastic? A partial answer may be found that of unusual form Laura paces, for Warner's novel is commentary on the semiotics and politics of landscape as structuring agent subjectivity. The sentence begins as pure representation: country walks fields, however unsatisfying, do not arouse hermeneutic suspicion. Repeating the word the second clause, however, Warner balances it with form, alliteratively cinching together the natural field with its scientific meanings. In the final clause, another alliterated f for encourages the correlation between the natural and the abstract by giving the geometrical description, triangular. The language Warner uses enforces the connection between the material and the linguistic, engaging the purportedly material field semiotic system endowed with substantial organizational power. The landscape, like language, calculably structures reality instead of merely being. Thus Laura, tired, stumbl[ing], walk[ing] slowly, and bitter (141-43), is involved more than an agon with Titus; she struggles against of forms designed to subject bodily to their purposes. Reflecting character's inner conflict the setting is common literary practice, but Warner is not simply reflecting: she makes the landscape material presence, an agent Laura's struggle for place. (3) This moment, showcasing Laura's anxious, uncomfortable body, begins transformation from an individual struggling with particular set of familial conditions to an embodied subject (Grosz 22; emphasis omitted) whose agency is produced by relationship with spaces replete with ideological significance. Willowes is not only about disembodied ego escaping from sexually repressive conditions to reach an abstract freedom--as Laura had thought--but about whole classes of subjected bodies corralled by an ideology of place naturalized through historical and literary precedent. …