"Brightness falls": magic in the short stories of Mary Butts

Studies in Short Fiction, Fall, 1999 by Roslyn Reso Foy

As a great admirer of the ghost stories of popular writers of her times, particularly M. R. James, Butts senses the reality of supernatural influences in stories like "With and Without Buttons," and especially in "Mappa Mundi" from Last Stories, in which a young American boy in Paris completely disappears, leaving only a shadow of himself to haunt those who understand the underworld of Paris. (6) Like many of her stories, it is a cautionary tale, a parable warning those unfamiliar with what she terms "the other side of the shadows" to be careful of their footing in this city of "profound reserves." In this sense Butts is what Frank Baker calls a "psychic writer" (Baker 146), always exploring two worlds, both very much a reality to her and her characters. As she was later to explain in Traps for Unbelievers, magic "has something to do with a sense of the invisible, the non-existent in a scientific sense, relations between things of a different order: the moon and a stone, the sea and a piece of wood, women and fish" (Traps 25).

The desire to wield magical power generally comes from a female character, one who is at once woman and goddess. Butts's search for this goddess capable of affecting change is, in effect, a quest for the storehouse of racial memories. Through these memories the character moves easily between two worlds, rending the veil separating them. The interconnection of racial memories and numinous forces allows the character to call up her goddess heritage at any given moment. One example of such magic appears in "Widdershins," a curious story from Several Occasions that pretends to have a world-wounded, over 40, male mystic as its central figure. Butts's narrator tells us that Dick Tressider was a martyr of reality who "needed" magic but did not understand that "what he wanted was magic." He has a desire to hold on to the "moment of pure being, the co-ordination of power," but he is not quite able to pull it off: "What he wanted to happen was for some man to say a word of power which should evoke this state, everywhere, not by any process, but in the twinkling of an eye. This is magic" (Altar 193). Dick has been a soldier and has seen what happens to "civilized man"; his longing is sincere, and he manages to have an out-of-body experience on his way to visit his friend Daphne, but his desire seems somewhat forced, too self-conscious, and he is frustrated and unsuccessful in his quest.

The word widdershins is a variation on withershins, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "a direction opposite to the usual, the wrong way"; "in a direction contrary to the apparent course of the sun (considered as unlucky or causing disaster)." Interestingly, "Widdershins" was first published in Ford Madox Ford's Transatlantic Review in March 1924 under the title "Deosil." This word, a variation of deasil and in direct opposition to widdershins, is defined as "righthandwise, towards the right ... in the same direction as the hands of a clock or the apparent course of the sun (a practice considered auspicious by the Celts)." (7) The title's change to one of opposed meaning by the time it appears in Several Occasions in 1932 suggests that Butts had a change of mind about Dick Tressider's journey. Dick is ineffective and tries far too hard to induce a state that comes naturally to a female with mythic origins.