Footsteps of Red Ink: Body and Landscape in Lolly Willowes

Abstract

"Laura had spent the afternoon in a field, a field of unusual form, for it was triangular" (Warner, Lolly Willowes 141). The date is August 1922, the place is near the fictional village of Great Mop in Buckinghamshire, and Laura is Laura Erminia Willowes (called Lolly by her relatives), protagonist of Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1926 novel Lolly Willowes. Laura tramps around the field, "turning savagely when she came to the edge," because her escape from imperialist patriarchy, embodied in her brother's family, has been foiled. Into Great Mop, an idyllic country village in which Laura sought solitary independence, has come her assuming nephew Titus. Dogging her steps ("Where are you off to, Aunt Lolly? Wait a 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 in London with her 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 field "in despair and rebellion" (142), unable to envision a solution that will free her from the airless domestic spaces offered her 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 in exchange for her commitment to witchcraft. Lolly 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 a pact with this masculine "Master" (210), when so much of the novel is about finding a space where female sexuality is free from male control? (2) And why should this novel take such a seemingly whimsical turn to the fantastic? A partial answer may be found in that "field of unusual form" Laura paces, for Warner's novel is a commentary on the semiotics and politics of landscape as a structuring agent in subjectivity. The sentence begins as pure representation: country walks in fields, however unsatisfying, do not arouse hermeneutic suspicion. Repeating the word field in 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 in for encourages the correlation between the natural and the abstract by giving the field a geometrical description, triangular. The language Warner uses enforces the connection between the material and the linguistic, engaging the purportedly material "field" in a 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 in more than an agon with Titus; she struggles against a field of forms designed to subject her bodily to their purposes. Reflecting a character's inner conflict in the setting is a common literary practice, but Warner is not simply reflecting: she makes the landscape a material presence, an agent in Laura's struggle for a place. (3) This moment, showcasing Laura's anxious, uncomfortable body, begins her transformation from an individual struggling with a particular set of familial conditions to an "embodied" subject (Grosz 22; emphasis omitted) whose agency is produced by her relationship with spaces replete with ideological significance. Lolly Willowes is not only about a 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. …