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

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

By willing a change, the sisters perform a kind of magic. They invoke the powers of their sex, from witches to goddesses, and succeed in proving to Trenchard, and--surprisingly--to themselves, that these forces exist in the real world. It is a will to power, what they identify early in the story as "the power women sometimes want to have over men, the pure, not erotic power, whose point is that it shall have nothing to do with sex" (24).

The secret power of women is also the focus of "Brightness Falls." Taking her title from a song by Thomas Nashe ("Adieu; farewell earth's bliss," from his play Summer's Last Will and Testament), Butts manipulates the various interpretations of Nashe's song examining the transience of human life and pleasures. She further suggests a "fall" from the air of something supernatural and otherworldly. Butts's male narrator begins, "There is no head or tail to this story, except that it happened. On the other hand, how does one know that anything happened?" (203). These comments set the tone for the entire story where we are never exactly certain what takes place. Here Butts's male narrator struggles with the relationship between men and women and claims that ultimately men "hang together against our women, and not wholly from rational reasons. All one finally discovers is that, when they urge us, the loveliest and wisest become all one with the slut" (203).

Max is married, happily it seems, to Parmys, and he states that "over our marriage there was some occult link" (204),

   [l]ike a separate quality--detached. It gave us some strange moments, which
   were perhaps our best. It was like a place, slightly to the right or left
   of where you are going, that marches with you; that is occasionally lit up
   from inside. (205)

However, this link, which ignites their passion initially, begins to worry Max when Parmys tells him it is the "key" to their love. From this point on, we know that Parmys is witch and goddess; she loves "chinese balls" and "witch balls" and claims to see herself and whoever is with her when she looks into them, knowing there are places "about like that." Parmys's interest, however, focuses on her moon goddess friend Cynthia, with whom she spends her evenings dancing and going to parties in the "eye of the world" (206).

Cynthia, of course, is one of the identities of the goddess Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, the moon, unmarried women, and chastity. Her parallel on the dark side of the moon is Hecate, and by using the name Cynthia and identifying her as a "queen and huntress" (211), Butts invites associations that indicate the uncertainty between good and evil. Parmys and Cynthia lead a secret life that Max can neither understand nor penetrate. Their relationship is surrounded by mystery, and as Max explains to the narrator, they are "overspiritualized women," and he believes them to be mixed up in some form of witchcraft, "spells, magic; all women's occupations" (204). Max admits that his "mind is not sufficiently trained to examine and explain" these sorts of things, and, as a result, he has, in a way he cannot comprehend, failed her. We come to understand that Parmys is shielding Cynthia from some inadvertent action Cynthia has taken with a strange character called Dr. Corandel, identified as hunting Cynthia. Parmys feels compelled to protect and care for Cynthia in spite of "all her high manners" because Cynthia is "innocent of heart" (210).