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

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Jennifer Kroll

In light of Freud's association of vermin and small animals with children, the poem's images of hollow spaces filled with bones and rats become interpretable as nightmare images of pregnancy and female reproductivity. The "little low dry garret, / Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year" (194-95) becomes a vagina/womb-like space. We see an image of grotesque childbirth in the passage that reads: "A rat crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank" (187-78). The connection between women, vermin, and childbirth becomes perhaps most intriguing in a passage from "What the Thunder Said" where "bats" (flying rodents) are given "baby faces":

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. (378-85)

The downward movement of these bats is something like a grotesque reenactment of childbirth. The witch-like woman here, with her "long black hair," seems responsible for the motion of these bats, as well as for the frightening sound of "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells," which evoke female reproductive spaces.

In Armed with Madness, bats and a rat appear, early on in the story, while Scylla is entertaining Carston on the patio (5). The appearance of such animals is not alarming here, however, since they are simply a natural part of a quietly fecund setting:

So they ate together; an eatable meal, fresh-tasting wine, and the inevitable whisky after. A rabbit crossed the lawn. A rat came under the verandah and stole a piece of bread. Two bats flew in. . . . Nothing went on happening: the delicate quiet waited on them. (13)

Just as the significance of bats and rats is altered in the landscape of Butts's novel, so too is the significance of a witch-woman's presence. When we are first introduced to Scylla, Felix, and Ross, the three together are described in positive terms as a witch figure. Sitting out on the shoreline, conspiring over the arrival of Carston, these three become "a triple figure, like Hecate the witch, amused, imaginative" (6).(16)

Armed with Madness counters The Waste Land's uniformly bleak vision, both through offering such alternative readings for Eliot's figures of the grotesque and through descriptions of a dual-natured landscape, both lovely and grotesque. Heavily influenced by the thought of Blake and Nietzsche and very much attracted to Taoism, Butts typically depicts a world characterized equally by forces of dissolution and regeneration.(17) Armed with Madness constantly illustrates her notion that "in the world there is a fifty-fifty deal of pleasure and grief" (AM55), and that thus "the best [artistic] work cannot be made up wholly from [images of] the ugly and unsound" ("Selections" 171). When Felix, Scylla, and Ross are first introduced, they are "lying out naked on a rock-spit which terminate [s] their piece of land." "The sea at the moment," we are told, "was something for the men to swim in, an enormous toy" (AM5). Later, however, the same sea, in a more violent mood, sinks a ship, and Felix, who works with the rescue team, is traumatized by a vision of "twenty-three dead men," "singularly drowned with their wounds shewing - where the fish gnawed" (101). In the opening sequences of Armed with Madness, the Taverner land is depicted as simultaneously "marvelously noisy," and so silent that "[n]ot many nerves [can] stand it" (3). About the Taverners' two closest neighbors we are told that "the fisherman was a gentleman, and a fine carver in wood. The shepherd was a troglodyte. He came home drunk in the moonlight spinning round and yelling obscene words to the tune of old hymns" (4). The Taverners, who themselves want "everything and nothing," are "equally friends with both" the Dionysian shepherd and the Apollonian fisherman (4).