SOURCE: Knoll, Bruce. “‘An Existence Doled Out’: Passive Resistance as a Dead End in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes.” Twentieth Century Literature 39, no. 3 (fall 1993): 344-63.

[In the following essay, Knoll perceives Lolly Willowes as a novel that explores the dualism between male aggression and female passivity.]

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.

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.

(10)

There seem to be several operatives at work in these games. She is certainly learning the role she must assume as she grows older by being “cast for some passive female part,” a “captive” and “faithful” role. Secondly, she does resist by “slipp[ing] away unnoticed.” The lack of attention given her withdrawal only reinforces the idea that she can do as she pleases without affecting the activities of others. This forms a significant part of her character as opposed to the masculine approach which Townsend Warner rejects because this approach too often requires the use and control of others, with or without their consent. The places to which Laura retreats are also important: she seeks “the company of Brewer [the gardener] in the coachhouse or Oliver Cromwell the toad, who lived under the low russet roof of violet leaves near the disused melon pit” (10). These hint at the drawing power that nature has over Laura, which she long ignores.

Another of her brothers' games also serves to illustrate Laura's passivity, and her bonding to nature. They tie her to a tree, only to be “so much carried away by a series of single combats for her favour that they forgot to come and rescue her” (10). In this case Laura simply sits until her father discovers her later that evening “singing herself a story about a snake” (10). She waits for rescue, accepting the symbolic bonds of the feminine role but evidently content in her immersion in the imagery of nature. If she had not been tied to a tree, or been able to amuse herself with stories of snakes, she would have probably slipped away again.

Townsend Warner's use of a snake here is interesting not only for its image as a goddess figure and a subtle introduction to the supernatural, but also for its meaning as a regenerative symbol. An old skin of passive resistance is growing around Laura the child. She will have to slough off this skin to emerge outside the passive/aggressive duality which she has had forced on her.

Representative of Laura's interest in nature is her study of herbs for both food and remedies. She finds information in books and is helped by her nurse, Nannie Quantrell. When she attempts to make a broth of mugwort to “clear the blood” (18), she does so without really knowing the proper procedure, since Nannie herself was not certain how to prepare it. To test this, she gives some to her brothers, who promptly become sick. Although the sickness was not the intended result, it is difficult to avoid reading it as a revolt against the male domination of the household. This is the first hint Townsend Warner gives us that passive resistance may not be enough to satisfy Laura. In no other instance do Laura's concoctions harm anyone, and it is significant that she does not try the brew herself.

In spite of her subordinate position, Laura's life at Lady Place is happy. But as she grows into young adolescence she encounters more flagrant attempts to make her conform to the socially acceptable character of a young woman. Though Laura does not wish to change, and has already begun to build a pattern of resistance, she does in some measure “accept the inevitable. Sooner or later she must be subdued into young-ladyhood.” (12). But Laura never does allow herself to become “subdued,” even though she goes through the motions. She can see through all the “uproar and fuss of ‘coming-out’—which odd term meant, as far as she could see, … going in” (12).

The household at Lady Place is dominated by Laura's father, especially after Mrs. Willowes's weakness following Laura's birth. When Mrs. Willowes dies, Laura's youngest brother James returns from his studies in Europe and takes over many of the responsibilities of running the family business, a brewery, from his father. None of the men now at Lady Place know much about bringing up a young woman, which is a positive turn for Laura, who is assured freedom from the interference of a feminine training.

Laura refuses to take any part in entertaining suitors. Although she is growing into young womanhood, she shows no interest in any male companionship other than the ties of home. Any companionship she may have needed in this respect is taken care of by her father. With the loss they both feel at the death of Mrs. Willowes, Laura and her father grow very close. Along with the familial love that is evident between them, there also seems to be a subtle sexual attraction:

One of her earliest pleasures had been to go with Everard to the brewery and look into the great vats while he, holding her firmly with his left hand, with his right plunged a long stick through the clotted froth which, working and murmuring, gradually gave way until far below through the tumbling, dissolving rent, the beer was disclosed.

(18)

But any sexual motive may have ended for Laura when “Everard fed Laura with the preserved cherries out of the drawing-room cake. Laura soon became very sick, and the stable boy was sent off post-haste … to summon the doctor” (10-11). The fact that cherries are used to make Laura sick may seem to indicate her rejection of sexuality, although these are forces with which Laura will again come into contact several times later in the novel.

Many feminist critics have argued that a woman protagonist should reject heterosexuality. As Elaine Showalter points out, “In their lives and in their books, most feminist writers expressed both an awareness of, and a revulsion from, sexuality” (30). But Showalter also finds that “their theories of the transcendence of sexual identity, like Woolf's theory of androgyny, are at heart evasions of reality” (318), and similarly Townsend Warner does evade reality in her novel by turning from a realistically based novel to the supernatural.

Before Laura makes this transition however, she must spend nearly two decades in London. When Laura is in her late twenties, her father dies, leaving the operation of the brewery to his youngest son, James, who with his wife, Sybil, moves into Lady Place. Laura does not stay with them, but is sent to London to live with Henry and his wife Caroline at Apsley Terrace. She is not consulted about the move, nor does she raise any objections. Laura's only concern is that her brother's family's plans will be upset. “‘Of course,’ said Caroline, ‘you will come to us’” (3). In other words, Caroline might have said, “Of course you will do what is practical, what is expected of you and of us. You will submit to social expectations.” As Laura matures, she finds those “social expectations” to become more and more onerous. But it is just such a passive acceptance of life in which Laura has been trained.

The tone of the novel makes clear that Laura takes no consolation from the possibilities London offers. Compared to the advantages of country living, the city is not described in pleasant terms. Ice is mentioned for the first time in the novel as Laura listens to “the rock and jar of skates” (26). Henry's household functions as a smooth machine; everyone has her place and duties. His attitude toward women has already been described: he apologizes to his father for the sex of his firstborn and “observed gloomily that daughters could be very expensive now that so much fuss was being made about the education of women” (20). “Laura, introduced as a sort of extra wheel, soon found herself part of the mechanism, and interworking with the other wheels” (26, emphasis added). The imagery of machinery is a device effectively used by Townsend Warner as she develops the forces that come to bear on Laura. In Brooks's analysis machinery, and the power and energy with which it is associated, is decidedly masculine.

Not only does Laura have to adjust to a machine-like existence, but she also loses her name. Fanny, Henry's eldest daughter, could not pronounce Laura's name as a child, calling her Lolly instead. In London, this name is consistently used by the other family members as well.

Laura seems to adapt easily, but her twenty years at Apsley Terrace will teach her well of the type of society into which she is initiated. Images that were absent from Lady Place now are at the forefront: “iron noises … yesterday's ashes … wood smoke … the automatic noise of the carpet-sweeper, and … the irregular knocking of the staircase brush against the banisters” (27). The noises and imagery of woods and gardens are replaced by the noises of schedules and machinery. She finds herself drawn into the schedule of Apsley Terrace, and is fatigued by “regular days and regular meals” (28). Even the persons of Henry and Caroline are described in terms consistent with city imagery: “Henry was like a wall, and Caroline's breasts were like towers,” images of impenetrability and immutability (45). In London she will be thrown fully into the patriarchal social order, and her childhood strategy of passive resistance will fail.

Laura sees soon after her displacement how this order has affected her sister-in-law:

She was full of practical good sense, her advice was excellent, and pleasantly bestowed. [She was] a good wife, a fond and discreet mother, a kind mistress, a most conscientious sister-in-law.

(29)

But “none of these qualities [made] Laura feel at ease with her” (29). Caroline's religion (which Townsend Warner also depicts as a trait of the patriarchal order) works its way into every corner of her life. Just as Caroline does what Henry expects of her, she does what she believes religion requires of her. When Laura nurses her during a bout of influenza, she finds Caroline's linens arranged in “beautiful orderliness. … ‘We have our example,’ said Caroline. ‘The graveclothes were folded in the tomb’” (29). Townsend Warner writes of Caroline as though she were already dead, and of Laura as the paradigmatic angel in the house.

Caroline is very much controlled by Henry, who is the personification of masculine London culture. She not only submits to this control but does her part to perpetuate it: “His household had been well schooled by Caroline in yielding gracefully, and she was careful not to invite guests who were not of her husband's way of thinking” (31).

Henry's insistence on controlling his family members brings up the issue of power. Nancy K. Miller has noted this issue in what, to Freud, was the repressed content of female fantasies. But whereas Freud considered the result of this repression to be erotic fantasies, Miller believes

The repressed content … would be, not erotic impulses, but an impulse to power: a fantasy of power that would revise the social grammar in which women are never defined as subject; a fantasy of power that disdains a sexual exchange in which women can participate only as objects of circulation.

(41)

Of course, the issue in Lolly Willowes is not one of “erotic impulses,” but it certainly is an issue of power.² Caroline is essentially powerless, and in London so is Laura. She is an “object of circulation” in the sense that she is seen as a helper in her brother's house, not unlike the way in which one of her suitors thought of her as a prospective wife.

For the most part Laura acquiesces to the rule of her brother. It is not a harsh rule, though it leaves no room for any opinion or behavior other than that strictly sanctioned by society. But when Henry and Caroline attempt to find a marriage partner for Laura, she finds an opportunity to test her assertiveness. The men they invite as possible suitors are generally from Henry's social circle, who would certainly have embraced “[Henry's] way of thinking” (31). Laura sees in them

clean-shaven men with bristling eyebrows … suavely concealing their doubts of her intelligence and her probity. Their jaws were like so many mousetraps, baited with commonplaces. They made her feel shy and behave stiffly.

(31)

Since Laura shows no interest in any of these men whom they feel suitable, Henry and Caroline invite an associate more “for pity's sake, and but to tea at that” rather than to dinner (32). Although Mr. Arbuthnot seems to appeal to Laura, she plays with him and turns the whole courtship into a comedy. Henry hardly considers him the best choice, but Laura finds she can talk to him easily about “climbing Welsh mountains and gathering parsley fern” (32). Mr. Arbuthnot's ideas of marriage could hardly appeal to Laura. His wife would be on the same level as a servant:

His aunt, Lady Ross-Price, always tried to get servants from the Willowes establishment, for Mrs. Willowes trained them so well. Mr. Arbuthnot supposed that Mrs. Willowes would be equally good at training wives.

(32)

Laura most likely ascertains this sentiment, but whether she does or not she clearly has no plans for encouraging Mr. Arbuthnot. As he warms to the idea of Laura as a wife, she wrecks the whole set-up by

her response to his statement that February was a dangerous month. ‘It is,’ answered Laura with almost violent agreement. ‘If you are a were-wolf, and very likely you may be, for lots of people are without knowing, February, of all months, is the month when you are most likely to go out on a dark windy night and worry sheep.’

(32)

She continues to “amuse herself with a surprisingly vivid and terrible picture of Mr. Arbuthnot cloaked in a shaggy hide and going with heavy devouring swiftness upon all-fours with a lamb dangling from his mouth” (33). Of course Laura's response horrifies Henry and Caroline, and they drop all further plans to find a match for her.

The image of a werewolf serves to strengthen the eventual turn to the supernatural in the novel. But it illustrates Laura's view of the oppressive London social context, which she would have to accept were she to marry. Her rejection of this milieu includes her final rejection of sexuality. Just as important is its use for unfolding the Satanic imagery which will become more central in the third section of the novel.

During Laura's stay at Apsley Terrace she becomes more aware of the difference between the life she is living and the one she desires. The family's tightly scheduled summer vacations seem to underscore this difference. They usually end when Laura's nieces need to return to school, but even when “the children had grown too old for school, the habit had grown too old to be broken” (41). The family's vacations take place in the country, and Laura hates the return to London. Not only is the school season starting, but “there was also another reason [for their return]. The fallen leaves, so Henry and Caroline thought, made the country unhealthy after the second week in September” (41).

The imagery of autumn and fallen leaves pervades Laura's spirit throughout the novel. Even back in London Laura is affected by the season. At first she blames her malaise on the remembrance of her first autumn in the city, after her father's death, but she can no longer feel the acuteness of that loss; there must be another reason. It becomes clear to her that it is the season itself that makes her feel so

restless and tormented. … It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘Now! Now!’ it said to her; and no more. … She compared herself to the ripening acorn that feels through windless autumnal days and nights the increasing pull of the earth below.

(42)

As Laura's yearning for a more natural setting quickens, Townsend Warner contrasts this with the changes that have come over Sybil, James's wife. Upon her husband's death she had moved to London, bringing her son, Titus. The change in Sybil summarizes the opinion Laura has of the differences between London and Lady Place.

How strange it was that Sybil should have exchanged her former look of a pretty ferret for this refined and waxen mask. … Sybil in her house at Hampstead must have spent many long afternoons in silence, learning this unexpected beauty, preparing her face for the last look of death. … Which, what, was the real Sybil: the greedy agile little ferret or this memorial urn?

(50)

Townsend Warner presents the process of urbanization as one of moving from life to death.

The description of Sybil as a “memorial urn” is placed specifically by Townsend Warner just at the point where Laura has made her decision to leave London—as if in confirmation of this decision. Such retreats are well-used plot devices in feminist fiction, and are flights not only from masculine values but toward a feminist utopia, which however is all too often a dystopia.³ Elaine Showalter in her discussion of feminist novels in the period of 1880 to 1910 notes that “feminist utopias were not visions of primary womanhood, free to define its own nature and culture, but flights from the male world to a culture defined in opposition to the male tradition” (4). The depiction of such flights continues well into the twentieth century:

One detects in this generation clear and disturbing signs of retreat: retreat from the ego, retreat from the physical experience of women, retreat from the material world, retreat into separate rooms and separate cities.

(240)

It is easy to dismiss such withdrawal as a death wish. But in too many instances women were already trapped in a living death, a condition which Townsend Warner protests. However, in focusing on the goal of this flight we too easily dismiss the process—Laura's development of an assertive response to her problems.

Nonetheless, we must ask at this point whether or not Laura's flight from London, and in fact from all society, is really a death wish. Feminist authors are often criticized for their use of the retreat from masculine social values. It is not my intention to reject this criticism, but rather to remind the reader of the context, which here is of death from which one flees.

The images that Townsend Warner has already presented represent death as a cyclical phenomenon. The snake (about which young Laura sang to amuse herself) represents the shedding of skin as well as a rebirth. The dead leaves of autumn, a symbol which appears throughout the novel, are not only a symbol of death but also remind us of rebirth in the spring. But in London the cycle has stopped. Sybil's death is final. As Townsend Warner makes clear, she may have been a “greedy agile little ferret” when Laura last saw her at Lady Place, but at least she was alive. In London she has joined Caroline in Christ's tomb. There will be no cycling back to life. If we must read Laura's flight as a death wish, we must then ask which death Laura preferred, the death represented by flight, with the possibility of rebirth, or the finality of death represented by Sybil and Caroline. It is clear that a flight represents to Townsend Warner an awakening rather than a death wish. With Laura's decision to leave, “she felt as though she had awoken, unchanged, from a twenty year slumber” (49). Sybil's presence only increases Laura's dissatisfaction with city life, which to Laura is obviously an oxymoron. Seeing Sybil transformed into a “memorial urn” is the final touch to Laura's apprehension of London as an ultimate death which must be fled.

The force that draws Laura back to nature pervades a small shop Laura visits while on an errand for the family. During these excursions she usually spends some time in buying flowers or fruits for herself as well. In this particular shop, she is overcome with memories of the countryside.

She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves.

(46)

In this whimsical mood Laura buys a map and guidebook to the Chilterns region of England, and decides that she must go to live in these mountains. Her choice is spontaneous; she is drawn inexplicably to the area, as she was to the small shop.

Telling her family about her plans to move to a small town called Great Mop is the most assertive step Laura has to take. Her brother's reaction is predictable: silence at first, then attempts to dissuade her. “Lolly!” he says. “I cannot allow this. You are my sister. I consider you my charge. I must ask you, once for all to drop this idea. It is not sensible. Or suitable” (56).

Laura refuses to be dissuaded. She does not try to make a defense against Henry's arguments or those of the rest of his family. In fact, she does not argue at all, or try to force anyone else to see her point of view. Her nephew Titus is the only one who feels any enthusiasm for her plans. Although Laura is adamant, her intended separation is difficult. But it is only natural that the pain of separation (death) be a necessary step to rebirth.

Although with her move to Great Mop it would seem that she has achieved a personal autonomy and a closeness to nature, her greatest tests are still to come. Her transition to life in the country is slow. Using the guidebook to the Chilterns, she traces her way throughout the region and eventually becomes intimately acquainted with it, especially the darker woods.

At this point Laura is caught between two worlds. Each day she plans a new route to walk, always keeping a journal of her daily efforts.

In the evening, as she looked at the map and marked where she had been with little bleeding footsteps of red ink, she was enchanted afresh by the names and the bridle-paths, and, forgetting the blistered heel and the dissatisfaction of that day's walk, planned a new walk for the morrow.

(61)

There is clearly imagery of pain here, of separation from her old familiar ways and adjustment to new ones. Yet the “bleeding footsteps” certainly also indicate an infusion of herself, her spirit and her very life, back into her beloved earth and nature.

In time she throws the guidebook away, having become thoroughly familiar with her new home. She slowly grows to realize how the patriarchal society of London had enslaved her spirit; but along with her condemnation of masculinity she condemns all aspects of male culture:

She was changed, and knew it. She was humbler, and more simple. She ceased to triumph mentally over her tyrants. … There was no question of forgiving them. She had not, in any case, a forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by [her family alone]. If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt Salome and her prayer-book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace and half a dozen other useful props of civilisation. All she could do was to go on forgetting them.

(81-82)

Laura's choice of forgetting rather than forgiving is important in the development of an assertive approach to her problems. Forgiveness connotes a certain power or status the forgiver has over the offender, and Laura rejects even that power.

With this rejection we see the tremendous split between the male and female ethics in Townsend Warner. For her, all that is associated with urban civilization is male, and consequently evil. In opposition she sets up nature as a female ethic completely outside the patriarchy in which she had grown up. Townsend Warner “has created a world of trees and given her heroine to the forest as heartily as other authors give them in marriage” (Jane Marcus 148). This change to a female ethic also involves a switch in the traditional roles of God and Satan, the latter being used to represent nature. Although God and the church are not strongly implicated in London society itself, they are connected with the social order as Townsend Warner sees it. In contrast to the masculine role the church plays, Satan takes the part of the feminine. The characterization of Satan is in opposition to his traditional role as well. He is a wise, understanding, and gentle protector: not at all the evil creature depicted in the Christian scriptures. More important, he gives Laura a sense of autonomy, without constant intrusion and control.

The first test of her new-found independence (and a reminder of her previous feelings of enslavement) comes with the arrival of Titus. He plays an important part in the development of Laura's character, not because his dominance is of the blatant style of Henry, but rather because he presents a more subtle threat to her life at Great Mop. The threat is more dangerous because of its subtlety, since to Laura he does not appear as a remnant of the masculine culture that she has fled.

Titus had always been enthusiastic about Laura's plans to move to the country. When the rest of the family refused to take her seriously, Titus was willing to discuss her aspirations, asking questions and offering suggestions. Although she had hoped for a visit from her family, especially Titus, she is unprepared for his decision to remain.

She walked up and down in despair and rebellion. She walked slowly, for she felt the weight of her chains. Once more they had been fastened upon her. … And with their weight, she felt their familiarity, and the familiarity was worst of all. … For she wanted, oh! how much she wanted, to be left alone for once.

(83-84)

Laura had in fact been left alone for some time before Titus came to visit her, but the strength of the desire for solitude betrays how strongly Titus reminds her of the chains of dependency in which she had been trapped in London, and how little she now misses them. In Titus's presence “she was the same old Aunt Lolly, so useful and obliging and negligible” (88). In this way Titus not only serves as an obstacle to her but emphasizes how much she had hated her London role and how unaware she was of that hatred. Great Mop was meeting her needs quite satisfactorily.

In Titus's presence Great Mop can no longer meet those needs. His unsuitability to Great Mop is not in anything he does but in his character itself. As Titus stays on, “the spirit of the place withdrew itself from her. The woods judged her by her company, and hushed their talk as she passed by with Titus” (87). One of his negative characteristics is his sexuality, which is described very early in Titus's life. When he is introduced as a baby, he “sprawl[s] his fat hands over his mother's bosom” (21), clearly an image of sexuality and dominance. These traits are evident in his approach to Great Mop. Marcus writes:

We see him through objects and eyes of others—‘He left his pipe and tobacco pouch on the mantlepiece. They lay there like the orb and sceptre of an usurping monarch.’ He is oblivious to [Laura's] pain at his presence and insinuates himself into the hearts of the villagers, as Lolly gets angrier. His love of the country horrifies her: ‘He loved the countryside as though it were a body,’ and bask[s] in the ‘green lap’ of the country.

(155)

Not only does Titus love the country “as though it were a body,” he also expects Laura to mother him. When Laura unknowingly enlists the aid of Satan to get rid of him, he comes to her for help against all the annoyances with which the Devil plagues him. When Sybil had informed Laura of Titus's impending visit, she wrote, “I feel quite reconciled to this wild scheme of Tito's, since you will be there to keep an eye on him. Men are so helpless. Tito is so impracticable” (85). Obviously Sybil expects to resurrect Laura's childhood role of caretaker. At one point Titus appeals to Laura: “There will be all sorts of things I shall remember to ask you to do for me. I can't remember them now, but I shall the moment the car starts. I always do” (121). Laura finds that the social conventions from which she has fled can reach over long distances.

These conventions are not present in the relationship Laura experiences between herself and her new master. Nature's first act of communication with Laura comes in the form of a storm. Although Laura sleeps through the storm, she is subconsciously aware of it and awakes the next morning with “an odd feeling of respect for what had happened, as though it had laid some command upon her that waited to be interpreted and obeyed” (75). The storm, though seen in terms of a command, implies a relationship of reciprocity. Here she must do the work of interpreting, whereas in London she was much more of a lackey to her brother's commands, which required no thought on her part. Her relationships in London, as well as those between Henry and the other members of his household, were not in any sense reciprocal.

By this point in the novel Townsend Warner has woven threads of the supernatural into a realistic, even mundane setting. But these threads and the turn to the supernatural have an important purpose—they serve not only to turn the novel away from a realistic setting, which Showalter interprets as an evasion of reality, but also to bring an element of instability into the plot. Such a device is at least as old as the Gothic novel. David B. Morris, in his analysis of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, although illustrating a different device, makes an important point about the introduction of instabilities in plotting:

While absurd by the standards of realist fiction, such instabilities also serve to call into question received ideas of character and of social relations. In The Castle of Otranto, [certain destabilizing] conventions … reflect a narrative principle … which challenges the concept of a world where everything and everyone is unique, marked by intrinsic differences, possessing a singleness which makes them exactly and only what they appear.

(304)

Townsend Warner does not argue against Laura's uniqueness, but there is certainly more to her character than her outward appearance. She is not “exactly and only” what she appears, a quality which would tend to categorize her in a role defined by social convention. And it is indeed the author's intention to “call into question received ideas of … social relations.” With this shift away from realism Townsend Warner protests the pre-defined roles of men and women, as does Laura by moving outside their conventionality.

This construction also allows the author to introduce mystic elements, culminating in Laura's decision to become a witch, with much less of a jolt than would be expected in an otherwise realistic novel. Townsend Warner has already drawn Laura inexplicably to the area, and will further show that it was Satan himself who had called her. Her utopia, or dystopia, will have its own rules far removed from those by which Laura spent her first fifty years. But even within this more conciliatory enviornment Laura has not achieved her final goals. She will be more strenuously tested at Great Mop than she was either at Lady Place or at Apsley Terrace.

After her pact with Satan, and his earnest of a little kitten, which has somehow gotten into her locked rooms, she notices a subtle change in her landlady's attitude toward her. Within a few days Mrs. Leak invites her to a Sabbath, and she sees virtually the whole town of Great Mop in attendance. It is here that Laura experiences her greatest trial. She approaches the Sabbath with excitement, but as the activities progress, she begins to compare the Sabbath with the balls and tea parties she attended as a young woman.

A familiar discouragement began to settle upon her spirits. … Even as a witch, it seemed, she was doomed to social failure, and her first Sabbath was not going to open livelier vistas than were opened by her first ball.

(103)

Retreating to the edge of the party, she takes refuge in the shelter of the woods. The dancers make several attempts to bring her back to the revelries, but each time she resists. Finally she simply walks away, to spend the night in the woods by herself, returning home at dawn.

Her failure to become actively involved in the witches' Sabbath represents to Laura the utter failure of her goal to get back in touch with nature, to put London behind her once for all, and to succeed in her new vocation as a witch. She feels she has rejected Satan after all he has done for her. Yet one more time she has not conformed. But Townsend Warner has subtly created a society which Laura does not recognize. Though it is society Laura has fled, she fails to realize the subtle similarity between Great Mop and London. Both had attempted to force Laura into a standard role, and what Laura mistook for a failure was in fact her most important success.

How much Laura's character has developed is best illustrated by the approach of one of the dancers at the Sabbath. He is wearing a mask and tries to seduce her to stay. His seduction is sexual, which insults Laura, but more important for the development of Laura's assertiveness is his resemblance, in the mask, to a young girl:

The narrow eyes, the slanting brows, the small smiling mouth had a vivid innocent expressiveness. It was like the face of a very young girl. Alert and immobile the mask regarded her. And she, entranced, stared back at the imitation face that outwitted all perfections of flesh and blood. It was lifeless, lifeless!

(108)

As Laura looks back on the false face, comparing the Sabbath to her first ball, she cannot help seeing in this mask the position she herself had occupied as a young girl. Her passivity was not only insufficient, but lifeless. Here it is not the flight from society that is a death wish, but the seductive opportunity to remain passively resistant, as society expects.

What Laura realizes through this Sabbath is that she must assert herself, that she must not remain passive. “If she had asserted herself and gone home” when her instinct had told her it was time to leave, “this odious and petty insult would never have happened. But she stayed on, deferring to a public opinion that was not concerned whether she stayed or went” (108).

But still, Laura does not recognize this as a triumph of any kind. Rather, stricken with doubts, she “wondered if, having flouted the Sabbath, she were still a witch, or whether, her power being taken from her, she would become the prey of a healthy and untroubled Titus” (111). It is in seeing herself as “prey” that she recognizes the position into which she had been placed in London. But Satan sees the value in what she has done, and continues to work in her behalf, setting up numerous devices to rid her of Titus's presence. After an ignominious defeat by a nest of wasps, Titus gives up and decides to leave Great Mop.

Laura is imposed upon to accompany Titus to Wickendon, where he can catch a train back to London. She sees him off and, finding some time before she can ride back to Great Mop, she buys herself lunch and wanders the back alleys of the town in search of a quiet place to eat.

This walk gives her a chance to reflect on the changes that have occurred in her life. Since the witches' Sabbath she has had a chance to accept the fact that she will not fit into the social life of Great Mop. She has become completely at ease with her country life. She is fully assimilated to the country, much more in contact with the earth, physically and spiritually, so that she finds the iron benches on her path something “to deter her” (122): not only do they prevent her contact with the earth, but the iron imagery harkens back to her London days.

Her walk brings her to a neglected grassy plot, where she is met by a gardener. At first annoyed by the intrusion, she finds him to be none other than Satan, come to talk with her. In this setting his character is revealed to be much more like that of Artemis. Marcus comments:

It seems natural that a woman who is hunted as prey wishes to escape to the wilderness to join Artemis, the huntress, divine protectress of women and animals, who also has the power to kill the assaulters.

(136-37)

Satan's conversation suggests images of both huntress and protectress to Laura. She realizes he has been hunting her most of her life. Furthermore, in her own mental world he has “killed her assaulters.” As he speaks to her she imagines how

Not one of the monuments and tinkerings of man could impose on the satanic mind. The Vatican and the Crystal Palace, and all the neat human nest-boxes in rows, Balham and Fulham and the Cromwell Road—he saw through them, they went flop like card-houses, the bricks were earth again, and the steel girders burrowed shrieking into the veins of the earth.

(124)

She recognizes the safety she has found in Satan, and their meeting allows Laura to explicate her own experience as a woman. “Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependent upon others, and their dependence so soon becomes a nuisance” (126). Here we see Townsend Warner's rejection of passivity as an alternative to masculine aggressiveness. Passivity leads only to dependence, then to nuisance, and finally to the living death which Laura had fled.

Laura's conversation reveals much about the life she had previously led. She seems more sad than angry. She says:

‘When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded. … There they were, … listening to men talking together in the way that men talk and women listen. … Nothing for them except subjugation and plaiting their hair. … But they must be active …’

(126-27)

Townsend Warner's solution to masculine aggressiveness is now completely developed. Laura has achieved her autonomy, though Townsend Warner has put her through many years of “subjugation” before she could succeed. She has achieved “a life of her own, not an existence doled out … by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day” (129), but a living, and activity for the soul as well as the body.

By the novel's end, Laura finds this activity. She has achieved this without resorting to the traditional male responses of control, domination, and aggressiveness, which Townsend Warner sees as antithetical to life. She has not overcome, controlled, or dominated anyone. She has forced no one to conform to her standards, but neither has she accepted the standards of others. Her choice can be seen as hers alone. She does not upset anyone's plans, nor does she require the services of another to realize her aims.

Laura's refusal of standard goals is illuminated by Miller's questioning of the implausible actions of the princess in Madame de Lafayette's 1678 La Princesse de Clèves:

Should the heroine's so-called “refusal of love” be read as a defeat and an end to passion—a “suicide,” or “the delirium of a presieuse”? Or is it, rather, a bypassing of the dialectics of desire, and, in that sense, a peculiarly feminine “act of victory”?

(39)

There can be no doubt at the end of Lolly Willowes that Laura has “bypassed the dialectics of desire” and struck out in her own way. It is not a perfect solution, in that Laura is effectively cut off from all others. This aspect of the novel still remains problematic. In Laura's flight, has she replaced the aggressive/passive duality with a new masculine/feminine one that precludes all social contact? Can there be any community into which Laura will fit?

Though there is certainly a strong tradition of community in feminist literature, the disturbing rejection of all human contact is also present. Female separation from men is at least understandable, but Townsend Warner allows Laura no community of any kind. Although this topic cannot be treated in depth here, it is worth mentioning that in much of the feminist literature of the early decades of the 1900s it seems that women “gave in and despised themselves for giving in” (Showalter 245). Germaine Greer has noted this tendency toward self-hatred, and how difficult it is to form any sort of community among women who “cannot love each other in … easy, innocent, spontaneous way[s] because they cannot love themselves” (13-14). Woolf notes this feeling as well when she writes,

And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women.

(115)

Within the context of Lolly Willowes Laura certainly finds very few women she can like. From the time of her move to London, where she first has any real contact with other women, she finds no one she can relate to; they have all accepted the value structures that she is trying to escape. She does indeed escape these structures, but her success must be considered qualified.

Townsend Warner is more successful in later novels in developing a sense of community among women. But here Laura is effective in achieving her intent through neither aggression nor passivity, but by simply asserting her need for autonomy. Once she finds this autonomy, she does not return to any of the masculine values she left behind. Where she could have tried to overcome nature, she chose instead to merge with it. The contrast is most easily seen in the different ways she and Titus adjusted to Great Mop. Titus immediately “insinuated himself into the hearts of the villagers” (Marcus 155), whereas Laura allowed nature to claim her.

Laura's lesson is twofold. She learns under which circumstances she must assert herself without falling back into the safe but deadly passive role assigned to women. But she also learns how to let nature claim her—not a totally passive act, for by opening herself up to nature, whose influence reached her even in London, she allowed herself to be transformed from the passive child to the assertive adult. Although Townsend Warner's answer may not be the final one, she shows us a way to approach life, which lies not in attempting to control our environment, or in passively accepting it, but rather in understanding its terms, and allowing ourselves to be transformed. Laura eventually lives with her world rather than against it, and certainly not accepting it at the cost of her own life.

Notes

1. Although there is no direct association between Henry and James and the American novelist, Townsend Warner did attach a great importance to the names she chose, and it is therefore difficult not to read a correspondence. This importance is most evident in The True Heart, a “re-telling of the story of Cupid and Psyche, but as the original was not generally recognized, a great deal of ingenuity in transposing names and characteristics from Apuleius to Victorian England was wasted” (Claire Harman 85).

2. It is important to note that while power is an issue, it is only something Laura wishes to escape. She does not want it for herself, for to have power would make available to her a method of dealing with her problems that she sees as masculine.

3. See Nan Bowman Albinski. Women's fiction does not fall easily into such categories as utopian and anti-utopian. Albinski, however, demonstrates the important fact that many feminist novels which sought a utopian existence for their heroines only depicted a world in which women could not find their own place in a society dominated by men. In this sense, Lolly Willowes is dystopian, in implying that within society there can be no utopian ideals for women.

Works Cited

Albinski, Nan Bowman. Women's Utopias in British and American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Greer, Germaine. “The Ideal.” British Feminist Thought: A Reader. Ed. Terry Lovell. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990. 11-20.

Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London: Chatto, 1989.

Marcus, Jane. “A Wilderness of One's Own: Feminist Fantasy Novels of the Twenties: Rebecca West and Sylvia Townsend Warner.” Woman Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Susan Merrill Squier. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984. 134-60.

Miller, Nancy K. “Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction.” PMLA 96 (1981): 36-48.

Mitchell, J Lawrence. “‘The Secret Country of Her Mind’: Aspects of the Novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner.” PN Review 8 (1981): 52-56.

Morris, David B. “Gothic Sublimity.” New Literary History 16 (1985): 299-319.

Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women From Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Townsend Warner, Sylvia. Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman. 1926. In Four in Hand: A Quartet of Novels. Introd. William Maxwell. New York: Norton, 1986.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, 1957.