Armed with questions: Mary Butts's sacred interrogative

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Bradley W. Buchanan

Yet the narrator assumes that Clair herself bears some if not all of the responsibility for the liaison that has made Clair herself into the objectified, inexplicable "other woman." She asks Clair: "This man. Where did you know him? How did you impose yourself on his virtue?" (207). By the end of the story, Clair herself has taken on some of the same predatory qualities as Paris, the enigmatic, hypnotic, and deathlike city for which she has become the human representative. At first Clair seems to be what Roslyn Reso Foy describes as "the authentic initiate" who "represents the sacredness of nature and its curative supernatural mysteries" and "acts as an instrument of healing for the wounded societies in which most of Butts's characters are caught up" (8). According to Foy, this "initiate," who is usually female in Butts's fiction, "is at once healer, sacred priestess, earth goddess, lover and daimon/demon." Yet what Clair has been initiated into, of course, is death, and Butts is not fully willing to idealize this transformation, perhaps partly because, as "After the Funeral" ends up demonstrating, death reproduces the powerlessness, objectification, and marginality that women experience all too often in their lives.

We see another example of this unhappy reality in Butts's 1932 novel Death of Felicity Taverner, the sequel to Armed with Madness. Death of Felicity Taverner is a sort of whodunit, in the sense that Scylla, Felix, Picus, and Boris try to deduce who is responsible for the death mentioned in the novel's title. The prime suspect is Nick Kralin, the dead woman's husband. Kralin is a Russian emigre who, as Foy puts it, "takes on the role of evil incarnate and ... symbolizes all that is wrong with twentieth-century society" (82). Kralin wants to turn the Taverners' land into a resort for his own financial gain, evincing a greed that was apparently also to be found in other expatriate Russians who, finding themselves penniless in Western European cities like Paris, sold their family heirlooms to keep body and soul together. Butts's close relationship with Sergei Maslenikoff, a homosexual designer whom Butts described as both self-centered and charming, may have given her a certain sympathy for such people, but her frustration at Maslenikoff's sexual unresponsiveness and materialism was occasionally intense. His complex personality fascinated and frustrated Butts for years, largely because he, like Kralin, is "incapable even de s'incliner devant Dieu" (Taverner 205). (15) Although Maslenikoff is the obvious model for Boris, the White Russian emigre who foils Kralin, it is not too difficult to imagine him also hovering behind the villain of Butts's novel. (16)

Interestingly, Kralin is consistently associated with questions and interrogations of the sort Butts has previously portrayed in a neutral or even positive light. We read, for instance, the following description and comment: "From one grey finger on Felicity's roof rose a question-mark of smoke.--That's the library fire. Kralin must be back." (341). Although he is the focus of much personal anger and suspicion, Kralin is clearly also the symptom of a much broader climate of uncertainty and skepticism that Butts is deploring. The narrative questions about Kralin's guilt ("What did Kralin know?" [204]) become by-now familiar interrogations about divinity and human nature: "God had said, 'Be to the whole creation: who had obeyed him. Had man? Kralin did not know and would not have cared, did not the question sometimes nag at him. Was he himself? He did not know, or if he had a self to know" (214). Picus discusses Kralin's character in philosophical terms, posing the same cosmic questions that Butts reproached Bloomsburyans for failing to address: "Nick Kralin's answer is that there's no answer. If you asked him the meaning of meaning, he'd answer 'no meaning at all"' (177).