Mary Butts's "Unrest Cure" for The Waste Land - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Jennifer Kroll

While Armed with Madness, like The Waste Land, gives a fair portrait of "psychic sickness," it goes one step beyond, in that it simultaneously points toward a number of cures for this condition. One potential cure is suggested through the portrayal of Ross, whose Taoist simplicity(15) and close connection to nature seem to inoculate him against this "dis-ease." Even Scylla, who is herself frequently associated with nature, expresses her admiration and envy for this man who "never want[s] anything that he [does] not get," never wants anything but "something to eat and drink, to embrace and paint" (AM9). "Wherever he touched it life grew," we are told. "Plants and dogs and children. Eggs hatched. And men? They were there to make him laugh. If they found rest in him, he was indifferent as Nature, and in general as kind" (109).

Ross is, as Scylla says, a "very sensual man"(44). Throughout, Butts's novel seems to propose sensuality and soulful sexuality as antidotes to the "dis-ease" of modernity. It especially stresses the curative power of sexual relationships between men and women. Early in Armed with Madness, while the men are trying to solve the water shortage problem at Tollerdown cottage, they discover a mysterious grail-type object in the well, "shrunk by drought, yielding nothing but dead hedgehogs" (15). This cup is removed with a fishing spear, a symbolic act since, in Weston's From Ritual to Romance, cup and spear together represent heterosexual union. Shortly afterward, Picus, who has been feeling unwell, is restored to health. "We got over there," Felix tells Scylla and Carston,

and found Picus saying he was ill and Clarence doing all the work. As usual. So, after tea with soda water, I went down in the bucket. The others hung on to the windlass and Picus strolled out. Got a fishing spear with him, because he said high hedgehogs aren't things to handle. . . . I raised that cup along with the corpses. We were looking at it, and Picus began to whistle. You must hear him whistle; it's like Mozart. Said he was perfectly well again. (19)

After the finding of the cup, rains come pouring down: "For an hour it rained, through sheet lightning and thunder like a departing train, the hills calling to one another" (19). During this rejuvenating rainstorm, Picus and Scylla make love for the first time, beginning a relationship that will evolve into the successful marriage depicted in a later novel, Death of Felicity Taverner (1932).

Armed with Madness thus overtly connects sexual practice, health, and landscape conditions. This connection, as Butts must have noticed, is also present in The Waste Land. Here, though, descriptions of sterile and repulsive sexual encounters are mirrored in descriptions of an unrelievedly barren and grotesque landscape. No grail is found, no healing rainstorm occurs. Inscribed on the land is a parade of Freudian images suggesting aversion toward and fear of female sexuality. Critics Robert Alter and Wayne Koestenbaum have identified images of the Freudian vagina dentata in other Eliot poems of the same period (Alter 35-37; Koestenbaum 116). The Waste Land itself contains numerous images of mouths, caves, pits, wells, doorways, and churches, and continuously beckons us to come and look into these orifices to see just how barren and horrifying they are. We are made to gaze into a "decayed hole among the mountains" (line 386), the "doors of mudcracked houses" where "red sullen faces sneer and snarl" (345-46), and an "empty chapel, only the wind's home" that "has no windows" (389). We cannot help but recognize in the "dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit" (339) a grotesque and frightening image of female sexuality. Nor can we avoid associating this grotesque mountain mouth with the mouth of the woman named Lil from "A Game of Chess," whose husband urges her to purchase false teeth, saying, "You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set/ . . . I swear, I can't bear to look at you" (144-46).