History and Fantasy in The True Heart

Lucy Haenlein

doi:10.14324/111.444.stw.2018.08

Abstract

The essay argues that Warner’s 1929 novel The True Heart explores the possibility of feminist fantasy within the context of historical realism. It considers the pressures exerted on the protagonist Sukey Bond by the constraints implicit within historical, classical, and religious contexts, and looks in particular at the gender implications of the novel’s debt to Apuleius’s narrative of Cupid and Psyche. The essay compares the ideas of emancipation in The True Heart with those in its predecessor Lolly Willowes.

Highlights

Feminist fantasy creates a space where women are able to connect with their female power – that of the earth mother – and to realise their own potential, free from the constraints of the male city, as well as the structures of both classical myth and Christian doctrine
Warner articulates a concern with the obligations of the writer to historical realism in her 1940 lecture ‘The Historical Novel’: ‘There must, HISTORY AND FANTA SY IN THE TRUE HEART
The writer of the historical novel cannot escape the obligation of a period.’5 We can locate in The True Heart the collision of these two imaginative realms, the fantastic and the historical, with the English countryside being at once the potential site of female empowerment and self-realisation, and yet a materially and historically specific site of patriarchal oppression

Summary

Introduction

Feminist fantasy creates a space where women are able to connect with their female power – that of the earth mother – and to realise their own potential, free from the constraints of the male city, as well as the structures of both classical myth and Christian doctrine. In her reading of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s first novel Lolly Willowes (1926), ‘A Wilderness of One’s Own’, Jane Marcus demonstrates how the protagonist Laura Willowes enacts a feminist fantasy in which she escapes from the patriarchal city and reunites with the realm of nature and the earth mother.

Results

Conclusion