A geography of ghosts: The spectral landscapes of Mary Butts

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 335-357

  Matless, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Geography; Ghosts; Mary Butts; Spectrality

Indexed keywords

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY; LANDSCAPE; SPECTRAL ANALYSIS;

EID: 55349132401     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1474474008091331     Document Type: Article

References (226)

1. D. Livingstone, The geographical tradition (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), pp. 349-50.
2. H. Speier, 'Magic geography', Social research 8 (1941), pp. 310-30, quotation p. 313
3. Speier was a Jewish émigré political sociologist who left Germany to join the Graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Between 1942 and 1948 Speier carried out US government service, including for the State Department, before joining the Rand Corporation as head of their Social Science Division.
4. M. Summers, The geography of witchcraft (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927), pp. 184-5
5. M. Summers, The history of witchcraft and demonology (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926).
6. For a more consciously sober enquiry into witchcraft in a specific geographical historical context (sixteenth century Essex), carefully mapping events and prosecutions, see A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A regional and comparative study (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).
7. M. Summers, The gothic quest (London, The Fortune Press, 1968), p. 412
8. first published 1938.
9. E. A. Reeves, The recollections of a geographer (London, Seeley, Service and Co., 1916), pp. 190-1.
10. Ibid., p. 208.
11. Relevant cultural histories include: J. Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British society between the wars (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000)
12. A. Owen, The place of enchantment: British occultism and the culture of the modern (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004)
13. A. Owen, The darkened room: Women, power and spiritualism in late nineteenth century Britain (London, Virago, 1989)
14. A. Owen, 'Occultism and the "modern" self in fin-de-siecle Britain', in M. Daunton and B. Rieger, eds, Meanings of modernity (Oxford, Berg, 2001), pp. 71-96
15. R. Luckhurst, The invention of telepathy (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002)
16. W. de Blecourt, R. Hutton and J. La Fontaine, Witchcraft and magic in Europe: The twentieth century (London, Athlone, 1999)
17. M. Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit visions, metaphors, and media into the twenty-first century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006).
18. P. Buse and A. Stott, 'Introduction: A future for haunting', in P. Buse and A. Stott, eds, Ghosts: Deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history (London, Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1-20, quotation p. 1.
19. Ibid., p. 3
20. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx (London, Routledge, 1994)
21. S. Freud, 'The "uncanny", in S. Freud, Art and literature: The Pelican Freud library volume 14 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), pp. 339-76.
22. For a fine reflection on spectrality in recent music, through the work of the Ghost Box label and others, see S. Reynolds, 'Haunted audio', The Wire 273 (November 2006), pp. 26-33.
23. Buse and Stott, 'Introduction', p. 5.
24. Ibid., p. 3.
25. Ibid., p. 9.
26. D. Punter, 'Introduction: Of apparitions', in G. Byron and D. Punter, eds, Spectral readings: Towards a Gothic geography (London, Macmillan, 1999), pp. 1-10, quotation p. 4.
27. R. Luckhurst, 'The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the "spectral turn"', Textual practice 16 (2002), pp. 527-46.
28. Luckhurst, 'The contemporary London Gothic', p. 534.
29. Ibid., p. 528.
30. Ibid., p. 536
31. cf D. Pinder, 'Ghostly footsteps: Voices, memories and walks in the city', Cultural geographies 8 (2001), pp. 1-19.
32. Luckhurst, 'The contemporary London Gothic', p. 542.
33. See also R. Luckhurst, '"Something tremendous, something elemental": on the ghostly origins of psychoanalysis', in P. Buse and A. Stott, eds, Ghosts: Deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history (London, Macmillan, 1999), pp. 50-71.
34. Here Luckhurst explores the 'ghostly origins of psychoanalysis', suggesting that 'what haunts Freud is haunting itself, both in its transgressive structure and in the many contemporaneous psychologies fully imbricated in ghosts, ghost-hunting and other communications outside recognized channels' (p. 52). Luckhurst discusses Freud's own anxious writings on the occult, noting Derrida's discussion of the occult as 'an exemplary instance of liminal anxiety' for psychoanalysis (p. 56), but suggests this may have been less about fear of association with pseudo-science than worry that occult thinkers, especially in England the Society for Psychical Research (for whom Freud wrote a paper in 1912), may have been more orthodox and rigorously close to dominant orthodox psychology, from which Freud was being marginalized. Luckhurst argues that Freud sensed something about the ghostly which could add to psychoanalysis: 'In this, Freud is like many of his fin-de-siécle contemporaries, who underwent the strange experience of working with a de-mystificatory positivism that actually helped produce a disturbing, remystified and occulted supplement that exceeded "rational" science' (p. 65). Mary Butts' writing sought in part to offer contemporaneous dramatizations of such argument.
35. C. Barnett, 'Deconstructing context: Exposing Derrida', Transactions of the institute of British geographers 24 (1999), pp. 277-94, quotation p. 285.
36. Kneale notes Barnett's arguments in his essay on the horror writing of H. P. Lovecraft, suggesting that while 'contextual, historicist readings of Lovecraft' are not 'worthless', we might instead 'read his work as literature - rather than as biography or history, once removed'
37. J. Kneale, 'From beyond: H. P. Lovecraft and the place of horror', Cultural geographies 13 (2006), pp. 106-26, quotation p. 108.
38. Rather than deconstructing context, however, Kneale seems here only to reinstate a crude opposition of the historical/biographical and the literary. Barnett himself similarly ends falling back into distinction when concluding that 'a geography of texts must be premised upon movement, spacing and difference, rather than upon place, identity and containment', 'Deconstructing context', p. 290.
39. Buse and Stott, 'Introduction', p. 1.
40. J. Wylie, 'The spectral geographies of W. G. Sebald', Cultural geographies 14 (2007), pp. 171-88
41. C. Nash, 'Visionary geographies: Designs for developing Ireland', History workshop journal 45 (1998), pp. 49-78.
42. Also see D. Dixon, 'A benevolent and sceptical enquiry: Exploring 'Fortean Geographies' with the Mothman', Cultural geographies 14 (2007), pp. 189-210.
43. J. Lowerson, 'The mystical geography of the English', in B. Short, ed., The English rural community (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 152-74, quotation p. 171.
44. Freud, 'The "uncanny"', p. 340.
45. M. Butts, The crystal cabinet (Manchester, Carcanet, 1988)
46. first published 1937.
47. N. Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the life (New York, McPherson, 1998)
48. see also N. Blondel, 'Mary Butts', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
49. A selection of Butts' journals appears in N. Blondel, ed., The journals of Mary Butts (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002).
50. On Butts' writings see also C. Wagstaff, ed., A sacred quest: The life and writings of Mary Butts (New York, McPherson, 1995)
51. R. R. Foy, Ritual, myth, and mysticism in the work of Mary Butts (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 2000)
52. P. Wright, 'Coming back to the shores of Albion: The secret England of Mary Butts (1890-1937)', in P. Wright, On living in an old country (London, Verso, 1985), pp. 93-134
53. P. Wright, The village that died for England (London, Faber and Faber, 2002), pp. 95-108
54. J. Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British women modernists and the national imaginary (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003), esp. chapter 4, 'Mary Butts' England'
55. M. Hamer, 'Mary Butts, mothers, and war', in S. Raitt and T. Tate, eds, Women's fiction and the great war (Oxford, Clarendon, 1997), pp. 219-40
56. J. Rose, 'Bizarre objects: Mary Butts and Elizabeth Bowen', Critical quarterly 42 (2000), pp. 75-85.
57. Editions of key works by Mary Butts discussed in this essay are as follows: Ashe of Rings, in M. Butts, Ashe of Rings and other writings (New York, McPherson, 1998), pp. 1-232
58. Armed with madness (London, Penguin, 2001)
59. Death of Felicity Taverner, in M. Butts
60. The Taverner novels (New York, McPherson, 1992 - edition also includes Armed with madness)
61. Warning to hikers, in M. Butts
62. Ashe of Rings and other writings (New York, McPherson, 1998), pp. 267-96
63. Traps for unbelievers, in M. Butts
64. Ashe of Rings and other writings (New York, McPherson, 1998), pp. 297-332
65. '"Ghosties and Ghoulies": Uses of the supernatural in English fiction', in M. Butts, Ashe of Rings and other writings (New York, McPherson, 1998), pp. 331-64.
66. The Macedonian and Scenes from the life of Cleopatra are collected in M. Butts
67. The classical novels (New York, McPherson, 1994).
68. C. Bagg, 'Foreword', in M. Butts, Crystal cabinet, p. v.
69. Wright, 'Coming back', p. 96.
70. Ibid., p. 104.
71. J. Weston, From ritual to romance (New York, Doubleday, 1957).
72. On the influence of Harrison and Weston on Butts see Foy, Ritual, pp. 51- 8.
73. On Harrison see M. Beard, The invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000).
74. For an excellent essay on Butts' relation to such material in her 'adventure of the sacred', and the ways in which this connected to 1920s modernism, see R. Blaser, '"Here lies the woodpecker who was Zeus"', in Wagstaff, Sacred quest, pp. 159-224, quotation p. 165.
75. Of Butts' complex engagement with the Grail in Armed with madness, Blaser explores how she 'tests the symbol' through its various uses and properties (p. 171)
76. and presents Butts as pursuing, along with writers such as William Carlos Williams, a 'relational imagination' of place (p. 162).
77. On Butts and Crowley see Blondel, Mary Butts, pp. 102-6
78. Foy, Ritual, pp. 96-7
79. and Butts' own descriptions in Blondel, Journals, pp. 184-7.
80. Crowley is the subject of A. Owen, 'The sorcerer and his apprentice: Aleister Crowley and the magical exploration of Edwardian subjectivity', Journal of British studies 36 (1997), pp. 99-133.
81. Garrity, Step-daughters, p. 189, also pp. 221-4
82. also Blondel, Mary Butts, pp. 83-4.
83. Garrity, Step-daughters, p. 189.
84. See also A. Radford, 'Defending nature's holy shrine: Mary Butts, Englishness, and the Persephone myth', Journal of modern literature 29 (2006), pp. 126-49.
85. Garrity, Step-daughters, p. 219
86. also Blondel, Mary Butts, pp. 308-11.
87. Felicity is discussed in the context of Butts' wider approach to the supernatural in B. O'Brien Wagstaff, 'The effectual angel in Death of Felicity Taverner', in Wagstaff, Sacred quest, pp. 224-42.
88. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 363.
89. Butts would also send out a questionnaire to various writers on their supernatural experiences in January 1935, a project for a possible collection, which came to nothing; see Blondel, Journals, p. 442.
90. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 363.
91. Ibid., p. 305.
92. Ibid., p. 306.
93. Ibid., p. 363.
94. Ibid., p. 364.
95. Ibid., p. 337.
96. Ibid., p. 345.
97. Ibid., p. 338.
98. Butts' one formal ghost story, 'With and without buttons', is discussed below. Of contemporary writers Butts also praises E. M. Forster, 'whose special sensibility, curiosity and faith makes him indifferent to any ultimate distinction between pagan and Christian supernatural values' (p. 361)
99. and May Sinclair's Uncanny tales, then recently reissued.
100. The latter (billed as Uncanny stories) are the starting point of Glover's essay 'The "spectrality" effect in early modernism', in A. Smith and J. Wallace, eds, Gothic modernisms (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001), pp. 29-43
101. and are the subject of Seed's essay in same volume, '"Psychical" cases: Transformations of the supernatural in Virginia Woolf and May Sinclair', pp. 44-61.
102. M. Butts, 'The art of Montague James', The London mercury 29(172), February 1934, pp. 306-17.
103. Extracts are collected in S. K. Hall, ed., Twentieth-century literary criticism, volume 6 (Detroit, Gale Research Company, 1982), pp. 206-8.
104. Quotations here are given page references for the latter collection first, and then Butts' original article; pp. 207, 307.
105. Butts, 'Art of Montague James', pp. 207, 307-8.
106. Ibid., pp. 207, 312.
107. Ibid., pp. 208, 317.
108. Butts, Traps for unbelievers, p. 312
109. Blaser, 'Here lies...', p. 187.
110. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 337.
111. Ibid., p. 337.
112. Ibid., p. 336.
113. Ibid., p. 358.
114. Ibid., p. 333-4.
115. Ibid., p. 339.
116. Ibid., p. 338-9.
117. Ibid., p. 354
118. as with Harrison, Butts was influenced by Gilbert Murray's work on Greek religion.
119. For recent geographical discussion of the Celtic see D. C. Harvey, R. Jones, N. McInroy and C. Milligan, eds, Celtic geographies (London, Routledge, 2002).
120. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 353.
121. Ibid., p. 354-5.
122. In December 1933 Butts reviewed nine books in The Bookman under the title 'Magic of person and place'; see below.
123. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 335
124. see also Blondel, Journals, pp. 370-3 for Butts' October 1931 account of her 'Personal experiences of supernormal perception'.
125. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', pp. 350-1.
126. Ibid., p. 349.
127. Ibid., p. 342.
128. Butts is here praising Scottish and Border poems and Thomas the Rhymer.
129. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 349.
130. Ibid., p. 350.
131. Ibid., p. 349-50.
132. Garrity, Step-daughters, p. 229
133. Wright, 'Coming Back', p. 117.
134. P. Nash, Dorset: A shell guide (London, Architectural Press, 1936), p. 10
135. Nash's book includes a watercolour of Badbury Rings, p. 20.
136. Butts, Crystal cabinet, p. 266
137. Blondel, Mary Butts, pp. 113-4
138. notes a poem written in her early twenties, 'On Badbury Rings', and a magical 1922 visit there with friends.
139. Butts, Crystal cabinet, p. 265.
140. Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', p. 357.
141. Page references here are given to the story's appearance in the collection M. Butts, With and without buttons (Manchester, Carcanet, 1991), pp. 85-99.
142. The story also appears in M. Butts, From altar to chimney-piece: selected stories (New York, McPherson, 1992), pp. 22-38.
143. 'With and without buttons' was first published posthumously in 1938 in Last Stories. From a journal entry on 23 October 1932 discussing the draft of an essay on 'Use of the supernatural', it would appear that the story was completed before the essay, but the two evidently developed together
144. Blondel, Journals, p. 403.
145. Butts sought to dedicate the story to M. R. James (with whom she had correspondence in 1922), and her journal for 21 September 1932 included a draft of a letter to James: 'I've at last managed to write a ghost story myself which should come out soon - in The Adelphi or something like that - anyhow in a book - and given any quality it may have it owes to your influence, I want to be allowed to dedicate it to you'. Butts says that if she does not hear from James she will assume a dedication is in order; Blondel notes that the journal does not mention any response from James. The story was eventually published without a dedication
146. Blondel, Journals, p. 401.
147. Butts, 'With and without buttons', p. 86-7.
148. Ibid., p. 85.
149. Ibid., p. 88.
150. Ibid., pp. 86-7.
151. The narrator states that the point of this power is 'that it shall have nothing to do with sex. We could have made him make love, to either or both of us, any day of the week', p. 87.
152. Butts, 'With and without buttons', p. 88.
153. Ibid., p. 87.
154. Ibid., p. 93.
155. Ibid., p. 96.
156. Ibid., p. 85.
157. Butts, Crystal cabinet, p. 150.
158. Ibid., p. 152
159. allusions to ghosts also come when a ghost of a suicide girl who saw her lover hang is said to walk the sand-hills, p. 161
160. or when the dining room, the last room untouched after her father's death, is described: 'at any time one might meet one's father's ghost', p. 159.
161. Butts, Crystal cabinet, p. 192.
162. See also Butts' description of an encounter with a male 'full size figure I wish I could forget' at Sennen in March 1935: 'I had, I think, been repeating a psalm, and there was a protection round me'
163. Blondel, Journals, p. 445.
164. Blondel, Mary Butts, p. 288.
165. For a reverent appreciation of Butts in Sennen, see D. Hope, 'Mary Butts, fire-bearer', in Wagstaff, Sacred quest, pp. 21-4.
166. Hope's essay was first published in 1937, after Butts' death, as number 1 in a 'Sennen Pamphlet Series'; this would seem to have been the first and last pamphlet.
167. See also Harcourt Wesson Bull's memoir, 'Truth is the heart's desire', in the same volume, pp. 53-88
168. including a possible meeting with Butts' ghost at Sennen soon after her death, p. 80.
169. Blondel, Journals, p. 444
170. also quoted in Blondel, Mary Butts, p. 290.
171. Butts, Crystal cabinet, p. 251.
172. Butts writes in her journal on 12 March 1933 of the strength of the sun in a Cornish early spring: 'No longer can one say "England" here'
173. Blondel, Journals, p. 420.
174. On the imaginative geographies of Cornwall see E. Westland, ed., Cornwall: The cultural construction of place (Penzance, Patten Press, 1997)
175. P. Payton, Cornwall - a history (Fowey, Cornwall Editions, 2004)
176. A. Hale, 'Whose Celtic Cornwall? The ethnic Cornish meet Celtic spirituality', in D. C. Harvey et al., eds, Celtic geographies, pp. 157-70;E
177. Westland, 'D. H. Lawrence in Cornwall: Dwelling in a precarious age', Cultural geographies 9 (2002), pp. 266-85.
178. Quoted in Blondel, Mary Butts, p. 287.
179. Blondel, Journals, entries for 11 December 1932, p. 407
180. and 7 January 1933, p. 410.
181. See Blondel, Mary Butts, pp. 365-7, pp. 407-10.
182. The reputation of St Hilary and Walke was furthered when the church was the object of physical attack by a Protestant sect in August 1932. On Walke see D. Allchin, Bernard Walke: A good man who could never be dull (Abergavenny, Three Peaks Press, 2000)
183. C. Phillips, 'Mystical geographies of Cornwall', University of Nottingham PhD thesis, 2006.
184. Blondel, Mary Butts, p. 291.
185. Blondel, Journals, p. 468, entry for 29 January 1937.
186. Williamson, editorial note at the beginning of M. Butts, 'The magic of person and place', The Bookman, vol. 85, December 1933, pp. 141-3, quotation p. 141.
187. Butts, 'Magic of person and place', p. 141.
188. Ibid., pp. 141-2.
189. Ibid., p. 142
190. Hencken was an American archaeologist who moved to live in Cornwall
191. his The archaeology of Cornwall and Scilly (London, Methuen, 1932) was the first major orthodox professional archaeological work on the subject.
192. Blondel, Journals, entries for 29 January 1932, p. 379, and 1 February 1932, p. 380. Notwithstanding Butts' own unconventional 'morals', the latter would seem a straightforwardly negative comment.
193. Blondel, Mary Butts, pp. 394-5.
194. Blondel, Journals, p. 467
195. entry for 9 January 1937.
196. Butts, Death of Felicity Taverner, p. 249.
197. Ibid., p. 259.
198. In The crystal cabinet a parallel narrative of the magic of dwelling place liable to erosion shapes Butts' story of Salterns and its subsequent 1923 sale and break up for development into 'the maggot-knot of dwellings that was once my home' (p. 16): 'Place I shall never see again, now they have violated it, now that body has been put to vile use, such uses as men from cities do to such places as these; such uses as its own people do not know how to prevent' (p. 15).
199. Butts, Death of Felicity Taverner, p. 343.
200. Ibid., p. 344.
201. Ibid., p. 346.
202. Ibid., p. 356
203. Boris addresses Felicity's ghost on p. 358.
204. Butts, Death of Felicity Taverner, p. 364.
205. Wright, 'Coming back', p. 124.
206. Ibid., p. 122.
207. Ibid., p. 119
208. see also Wright, Village
209. Radford, 'Defending'. Garrity, Step-daughters, pp. 196-201 discusses Warning to hikers, including Butts presenting the country as a feminized landscape violated and prostituted by modernity.
210. Butts, Warning to hikers, pp. 294-5.
211. On Butts' evocation of green see Wright, 'Coming back', p. 109.
212. On forms of green see P. Bishop, The greening of psychology (Dallas, Spring Publications, 1990).
213. Foy, p. 93, would seem to misread this passage on lack of bird-song as an anticipation of Rachel Carson. The motif of harp sounds from wind in trees also accompanies the terror of a mock-sacrificial scene at a thinly disguised Badbury Rings in Ashe of Rings, helping to protect heroine Vanna from her attacker Peter as she lies on the stone in the centre of the ring, Butts, Ashe, p. 189.
214. The phrase 'The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, serpent-haunted sea' appears in James Elroy Flecker's 1913 poem 'The Gates of Damascus'. Butts also quotes this in her journal for 12 September 1918
215. Blondel, Journals, p. 104.
216. Other parts of the poem are quoted in her journal for 26 October 1917
217. Blondel, Journals, pp. 89-90.
218. Wylie, 'Spectral geographies', p. 184.
219. See for example Butts' journal for 1 February 1930, where she writes at length on the possible components of a 'science of mysticism'
220. Blondel, Journals, pp. 341-3.
221. Blondel, Journals, p. 444
222. entry for 2 March 1935
223. the same entry records acquiring an ashtray with her sign of the zodiac, and an encounter with a ghost at Sennen; Christianity had not entirely taken over her mythic imagination.
224. For a parallel case of Christian nature theology by a strikingly parallel figure see D. Matless and L. Cameron, 'Devotional landscape: ecology and orthodoxy in the work of Marietta Pallis', in M. Conan, ed., Sacred gardens and landscapes: Ritual and agency (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007, pp. 263-294).
225. Hazelgrove, Spiritualism
226. Owen, The darkened room.