Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman
Sylvia Townsend Warner
BOOKS: BURIED TREASURE
Independent, The (London), Aug 13, 2004 by Clare Colvin
I first came across Sylvia Townsend Warner through her diaries. I had picked them up out of interest in her Dorset village, where I lived as a child. The writing was such a delight that I searched out her novels, republished by Virago. After the Dorset-based Lolly Willowes, she set off on imaginative journeys - to revolutionary Paris, 18th-century Spain and the South Seas. Mr Fortune's Maggot is an imaginative tour de force, for Warner had travelled no nearer Polynesia than Paddington library. The relationship between the Rev Fortune and his sole convert, Lueli, is delicately balanced. Fortune's erotic feelings for the boy are sublimated into a desire to instruct him. The theme, that we can never love anything without messing it about, works on different levels - as a satire on colonialism, a feminist critique and a lament for civilised man's inability to live for the moment.
Clare Colvin's novel `The Mirror Makers' is published by Arrow
Footsteps of red ink: body and landscape in Lolly Willowes
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2003 by Jennifer Poulos Nesbitt
"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.
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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. Up to this point in the novel, Laura has perceived her battle for what might be called "a room of her own" only in terms of gender, and her attempts to change her place have been grounded in the logic of sexual equality. She has thus tacitly endorsed the narratives of colonization that undergird her struggle because she has not theorized or historicized the interlocking spatial politics maintaining gender roles as part of an imperialist territorial Englishness. Thinking insularly, Laura confines her politics to domestic concerns, and her critique of domesticity as a justification for domestic politics extends only as far as England's border. In the scene recounted above, her dawning realization that sexuality is also an issue alerts her to the complexities of England's spatial logic. Laura also realizes that she cannot simply reverse this complex logic because it is embedded in the spaces she inhabits and in her psychological and historical experience of those spaces. Escape is impossible, but negotiation is possible, as Laura discovers. Thus, as the plot of Lolly Willowes progresses, England's spaces are also replotted in response to Laura's broadening political perspective. By revealing setting as a sign system saturated with political meanings rather than being natural and "meaningless," Warner situates Laura's individual quest for a space of her own within an ethical engagement with the geographies of imperial domination. Although the novel begins with Laura's search for her own space, Warner finishes the narrative with a formal demonstration of a more expansive, geopolitically sensitive landscape for social change.
"An existence doled out": passive resistance as a dead end in Sylvia Townsend Warner's 'Lolly Willowes.'
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Bruce Knoll
Sylvia Townsend Warner begins with her first novel, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman, written in 1926, to break down the dualism between aggressiveness and passivity. This dualism is couched in terms of a masculine versus a feminine approach to life, neither of which Townsend Warner accepts, because the masculine/feminine opposition in the novel is a creation of patriarchal society. J. Lawrence Mitchell notes, "As a group, men do not fare very well in Lolly Willowes" (54), and neither do any masculine values. Townsend Warner extends this duality to the prevailing social structure of London in and around the time of World War I. London society is centered on the masculine ideal, which is portrayed as an aggressive, destructive force. Such an arrangement allows only a passive role for the female characters of the novel. Townsend Warner does not accept this as the only possible social organization, and through Laura Willowes, her protagonist, she works out a solution which is neither a feminine passivity nor a masculine aggressiveness, but an assertiveness that falls between the two extremes. This is Townsend Warner's own feminist response. In the context of Lolly Willowes it leads to the formation of a new dialectic, of which the outcome is separatism.
Laura's response to her environment is certainly not aggressive, but neither can it be described as merely passive resistance. She does assert herself at certain key points in the novel. She leaves the safe but stifling environment of her family, against all their attempts to persuade her to stay, and later she must make the same choice to withdraw from her adopted family in the town of Great Mop, where she has chosen to live after leaving London. These choices place Lolly Willowes outside the mainstream of traditional plotting, although feminist authors have long resisted such "traditional" methods with varying degrees of subtlety and success.
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In his Reading for the Plot Peter Brooks traces the evolution of plots from "the picaro's scheming to stay alive" to "a more elaborated and socially defined form . . . [of] ambition" (39). He further discusses this evolution from ambition to the satisfaction of desire, where desire becomes a driving force, as in a motor or engine. But his study stops short of any detailed discussion of more recent developments in feminist literature. Any "scheming to stay alive," as well as any standard form of ambition and desire, especially desire metaphorically described as engine-like, is out of place in Lolly Willowes. The essential aspect of the plot is Laura's development from a passive-resistant "feminine" character to one of assertiveness. Without this development she cannot achieve her goal of an autonomous existence.
Lolly Willowes is comprised of three sections. As a child at Lady Place, the ancestral home of the Willowes family in Somerset, Laura learns what is expected of a girl, but also learns to remain passive in the face of those rituals of childhood which would teach her to be subordinate. As an adult at Apsley Terrace, her eldest brother's flat in London, she meets strong pressure to conform, and must assert her own need for independence. Finally, in her later years at Great Mop, she achieves success, but only after overcoming the most subtle forces of social conformity she has yet faced. All three geographical locations play a part in developing Laura's character, and all three present her with obstacles.
Laura begins her life in the climate of her conservative family at Lady Place as the youngest of three children to Everard Willowes. Her two siblings are older brothers, Henry and James.(1) Laura's mother is weakened by her birth and never fully recovers. As a result, she plays little part in Laura's development, and Laura grows up in a household dominated by her father and brothers.
Unlike Laura, her brothers are both educated and eventually assume professional careers. But from her anonymous beginnings Laura learns only the feminine social skills that society requires. She is expected to perform certain domestic feminine duties while submitting to her brothers' protection. She is still young when her brothers are old enough to be away at school, and her mother admonishes them upon their return to
|play nicely with Laura. She has fed your rabbits every day while you have been away at school. But don't let her fall into the pond. . . .' When Laura went too near the edge of the pond one or the other would generally remember to call her back again. (9)
The proscription against falling into the pond can also be read as a proscription against immersing herself in nature. Already as a young girl, Laura is steered away from that force which is most important to her feminine character.
The games in which Laura engages with Henry and James are also telling events in her socialization. Although they did teach her to throw and catch a ball,
when they played at Knights or Red Indians, Laura was dutifully cast for some passive female part. This satisfied the claims of honour; if at some later stage it was discovered that the captive princess or the faithful squaw had slipped away unnoticed . . . it did not much affect the course of the drama.
http://www.townsendwarner.com
