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Curing the ‘Dis-Ease’: An ecocritical reassessment of reactionary politics and ecological prescience in the work of Mary Butts (1890–1937)

In 1927 the neglected English modernist Mary Butts observed that T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) drew a 'parallel' with her novel Armed with Madness (1928). While both texts have as their foundation the Arthurian grail quest, Butts believed that Eliot was working on its 'negative side' (Butts 2002: 263-4). Inspired by the anthropological findings of Sir James G. Frazer (1890; 1922), Jane Ellen Harrison (1903; 1912) and Jessie L. Weston (1920), both writers melded Greek mythology with medieval English legend, Nietzsche's Dionysian visions, and pre-modern nature-worshipping religions to develop their experimental literary styles, reviving ancient wisdom to link 'contemporaneity with antiquity' (Eliot 1923: 177). Just as Eliot recognised 'the immense panorama of futility and anarchy' that was 'contemporary history' (ibid), so Butts's novel refers to 'a sense of broken continuity, a dis-ease' that could be felt 'everywhere' (Butts 1928: 9). Whereas Eliot merely depicts the ills of post-war society, however, Butts's Taverner novelssuggest possible cures, by exploring nature's regenerative potential as an antidote to this 'dis-ease' of modernity. 1 By placing Eliot on the 'negative side' ofthe Sane Grail, Butts implies her own therapeutic agenda. According to Levi-Strauss (1978: 17-18) 'mythical thinking' originated 'to play the part of conceptual thinking', and just as mythology facilitated understanding of the physical universe in pre-modern societies, so Butts and Eliot utilised the myth of the holy grail to illuminate their own mysterious realm: a barren milieu of spiritual emptiness and postwar neuroses, littered with 'broken images' and 'dead tree[s)' (Eliot 1922: lines 22-23). In the traumatic aftermath of the Great War, 'hysteria' previously regarded as an exclusively female condition -was diagnosed in men for the first time. At the same time, religious belief diminished apace and with it the need for a strict moral code: without the promise of heaven or threat of hell, Butts poses the question 'Why be good anymore?' (Butts 1932b: 305). Meanwhile, man's relationship with the natural world was also irrevocably altered, as scientific and technological advances were deployed to control and offset the unpredictable potencies of the weather, wildlife, land and the sea (Butts 1932c). Furthermore, according to Butts, 'just as nature was passing out of the lives of a great many men'due to industrialisation and the increasingly urban locus of mass employmentthere began instead a 'cult of nature' that replaced the common man's genuine contact with the earth and understanding of the elements with (what Butts regarded as) an essentially false worship of the countryside (ibid). These writers diverge in terms of the perspective and genius loci of their writings, with Butts using the restorative potency of her birthplace in an attempt to challenge and ultimately heal the defeated landscape of Eliot's urban ills. Inspired by anthropological revelations, Butts and Eliot shared a literary grail quest, seeking the restoration of order leading to the regeneration of a desolate landscape and desperate humanity. However, while Eliot sought to impose