The Chinese Garden

by Rosemary Manning

  Still, I would argue that The Chinese Garden is a valuable work, not merely for its artistic merit but also as a historical example of the state of lesbian and women’s fiction in postwar Britain during a period of political and cultural transition, one that immediately preceded what has come to be known as the “Swinging Sixties.” Accordingly, I would suggest that this novel should be considered within the various contexts it intersects: those of the literary tradition at large, of British women’s writing, and of the literature of lesbianism.

  The Chinese Garden is a powerful if often disturbing tale of forbidden desires between women and girls in a harsh and repressive homoerotic situation. The novel is set in the stultifying environment of an all-female boarding school run by an authoritarian and megalomaniacal headmistress and her staff during the 1920s. While the girls are forbidden any expression of love or sexuality between or among themselves, most of the staff, including Chief herself, are involved in a wide range of lesbian liaisons and intrigues. Accordingly, while homoerotic desire is pervasive, its very existence is unspeakable, and thus when Margaret, the school rebel, introduces a copy of The Well of Loneliness into this already unstable situation, it becomes the catalyst for a series of emotional and erotic explosions that threaten to undermine the hierarchies of authority upon which the school’s philosophy—a curious one of making girls into “gentlemen”—is structured. In effect, to appropriate the Edenic metaphor Manning deploys throughout the narrative, Hall’s novel becomes the forbidden fruit of the tree of sexual knowledge in a realm in which ignorance is, ironically, the order of the day. Rachel Curgenven, the protagonist and first-person narrator, finds herself caught in the middle of the crisis that follows, a not-so-innocent bystander who is reluctant to face the implications of her own desires. Torn among her dangerous attraction to Margaret, her infantile romantic friendship with the sentimental and childish Bisto, and her ambition to seek and maintain the admiration of the staff, Rachel is prematurely forced into a realization of the adult world that will mark the further course of her life.

  In exploring such issues as adolescent (homo)sexual awakening, divided loyalties, personal integrity, and the struggle of the individual against the authoritarian regime, Manning presents a damning indictment of pedagogical corruption—a matter which held highly personal implications. For most of her life, Manning was a teacher and, ultimately, the head of a girls’ school, all the while hiding her own lesbianism from all but the women with whom she formed relationships. Manning knew first hand not only the difficulties of maintaining a double life—the revelation of which could destroy her career—but also the pain of schoolgirl desire and betrayal. In A Corridor of Mirrors (1987), Manning’s second autobiography, published a year before her death, the author at last shed light on certain unresolved mysteries in the novel, matters still unspeakable in the 1960s that can now be told. Rachel’s story is, in fact, Manning’s own, and through it she demands our reconsideration of the complex issues surrounding the sexual education of girls and those incidents between teachers and students that we now deem sexual harrassment.

  The Chinese Garden as a Literary Novel

  In “Pulp Politics” Yvonne C. Keller writes that two vastly different modes are discernible in lesbian fictions of the 1950s and early 1960s, namely pulp fictions and what she terms “literary lesbian novels” (18). The latter were those aimed for a “high-brow” (or even “middlebrow”) audience and, as their designation implies, were written as literature, per se. The Chinese Garden goes to great lengths to establish itself as an unmistakably literary novel connected to a much larger and continuous cultural tradition, as if to establish its legitimacy and seriousness at a time when lesbianism was all too often regarded as the stuff that pulps are made of.

  The epigraphs that begin the book and each of its chapters are culled from rather diverse sources (Virgil, Shakespeare, Traherne, Rilke, Lamb, and a few now-obscure Victorian poets), reflecting not only Manning’s background as a classics mistress (which she ironically shares with her character Miss Burnett) but also the eclecticism of her personal tastes and influences. Like her protagonist Rachel, Manning as an adolescent sought solace and escape from an unhappy family situation through a consuming interest in the works of the Roman poets, and, in 1932, she earned a baccalaureate with second honors in classics from Royal Holloway College of the University of London.2 But while Rachel imagines herself a latter-day Horace (or John Milton), she finds herself drawn into other myths and fictions deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination, even as these stories shape the plots that those around her seem determined to live out.

  Milton sought in Paradise Lost, his epic retelling of the scriptural creation narrative, to “justify the ways of God to Man.” But Rachel, despite her Miltonic aspirations, falls far short of comprehending the ways of women and girls—ways that culminate in a fall, not only for Margaret but, in a sense, for all concerned. In the Genesis account, sin, shame, knowledge (both carnal and other), and mortality enter the perfect prelapsarian world in the midst of the idyllic setting of a garden and through the combined agencies of a serpent and a woman. Except for a shortlived conversion experience, Rachel rejects traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs; perhaps, as a result, she fails to comprehend the erotic temptations, as well as the potential for sin and damnation, rife in the little Eden that Margaret has discovered, the secret hiding-place that Rachel subsequently usurps. Instead, oblivious to the literal and symbolic decay of the former pleasure grounds, she naively invests it with the exotic romanticism of the Chinese tale represented on the familiar Blue Willow tableware—that of the lovers who are metamorphosed into birds and escape the parents who forbid their love. The story, in its translation into Western culture, takes on the sentimentality of the Victorians who cherished the plates that memorialized it. Love conquers all, but only at a high price: the lovers are free, but lose their humanness and, by extension, their embodied sexuality. Ironically, events that occur in the Chinese garden will result in Margaret and Rena playing the roles of the forbidden lovers imprisoned by those who act in loco parentis; but there is no metamorphosis for the adolescent lesbians, only shame and ostracism. Not only are they cast out, but their Eden is destroyed by those playing the role of avenging gods.

  Another “oriental” tale more deeply influences Rachel’s romantic yet chaste fantasies about the garden: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Rachel, with “Coleridge’s poems under her arm, and ‘Xanadu’ in her head,” slips away to the garden to indulge her romantic adolescent imagination—a frame of mind conducive to the poet’s fantastic images of an exotic and resplendent never-never land created and presided over by the legendary Mongol emperor (125). Almost comically, she sees herself as Kubla Khan and the decrepit garden her Xanadu, called into being, like the poem’s “stately pleasure dome” (1.2), by the decree of the poetic mind. Yet Rachel fails to understand the ramifications of the famous unfinished poem. As Paul Magnuson points out in Coleridge’s Nightmare Poetry, things fall apart in Xanadu. The garden is not a natural one; rather, it reflects the order imposed on it by the artifice of the imagination that created it. Thus “the delightful dream is lost because order cannot be sustained” (Magnuson 39): for Coleridge “Alph, the sacred river” (1. 3) is an overwhelming force of nature, one that forces “a mighty fountain … / Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst / Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, / Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail” (11. 19–22). Rachel trivializes Coleridge’s river by associating it with the stream that feeds the stagnant pond; just as she, in her inexperience, does not differentiate between a placid stream and a chthonic, primordial energy, she cannot perceive the power of unsanctioned sexual desire to unsettle and shatter the carefully maintained order of Bampfield. Coleridge’s poem runs its unresolved course in the song of an “Abyssinian maid” that reflects the poem’s earlier reference to a “woman wailing for her demon lover,” a phenomenon related by juxtaposition to the furious power of the ri
ver (11. 39, 16). This wailing is eerily echoed when Rachel, late in novel, hears the cries of Margaret and Rena, each in solitary confinement awaiting her removal from the school, each wailing for her demonized lover (145). What Rachel fails to realize, as she reads Coleridge in the Chinese garden, is that just as “Kubla Khan” remains unfinished (the poet’s reverie interrupted, or so he maintained, by the intrusion of the “person from Porlock”), so is her own self-absorbed dream world susceptible to the traumatic intrusion of the “real world.”

  Disruption, foreshadowing the crisis to come, appears in the person of Margaret, who intrudes upon Rachel’s reading of Coleridge’s other famous unfinished poem, “Christabel.” This lengthy, quasi-Gothic verse narrative presents, in a highly fanciful medieval setting, the tale of Christabel, the only daughter of the widowed baron Sir Leoline. In the dead of night, Christabel discovers Geraldine, a damsel-in-distress, moaning in affliction outside her father’s castle. Rescuing the girl, who is obviously of noble mien and who claims to be the victim of an abduction, Christabel furtively brings Geraldine into her own room and invites her to share her bed. Many hints are given in the poem to suggest that Geraldine is a lamia, a demonic vampirelike serpent-woman. The two sleep in each other’s arms, and when they awake the next morning, Christabel is wracked with guilt and anxiety: “‘Sure I have sinned!’” she exclaims (1. 381); yet her sin is never actually made explicit. The two young women approach Sir Leoline, but Christabel, whose powers of speech have been curbed by the “spell” Geraldine has cast on her, can only hiss, snakelike, and stumble as her father embraces her erstwhile tempter. The poem devolves into nonconclusion as Christabel, now herself the damsel-in-distress, embarrasses her father with the seemingly inhospitable plea that he “this woman send away!’ (1. 627).

  Margaret, significantly, reveals herself to Rachel just as the latter reads the portion of the poem relating the prophetic dream—ultimately unheeded—of Bracy the Bard, in which a white dove is strangled by green snake. The symbolism of chastity ruined by temptation is obvious. Margaret’s response to the poem is curious, both for what she does and does not understand: “‘It could have happened here, couldn’t it? … I found a grass snake here in the autumn, just like the one in the poem. Why do they look so evil? They’re beautiful, yet they’re evil.… Rachel, tell me why the most beautiful things are often evil?’” (129). In Surpassing the Love of Men Lillian Faderman has written extensively on the manner in which lesbianism, particularly in nineteenth-century male-authored literature, was regarded as the ultimate conjunction of beauty and evil.3 But Margaret, although the social microcosm she inhabits would hardly consider her so, is quite innocent of the world and its judgments. She is puzzled by the symbolic conflation of evil and beauty as it is ascribed to snakes. She accepts—but surely does not comprehend the reason—that snakes are deemed evil, even though she sees their beauty. And as she reveals in her abortive attempts to discuss either Rena or The Well of Loneliness with Rachel, while she experiences the beauty of loving a member of one’s own sex, she also understands that society—for reasons she finds inexplicable—proscribes it as an unspeakable evil.

  Alhough Coleridge’s poems fade into dreamlike inconclusiveness, events in the novel come to a horrifying close. A cruel pattern is in place, not so much as the result of design on the part of any single character but rather as part of a larger pattern at work in the universe—one that many would call fate.

  The idea that random and unreflecting acts and words result in the seemingly accidental convergence of unstoppable forces is a salient factor in the novels of Thomas Hardy, one of Manning’s favorite novelists. Manning was born in Weymouth, a town that plays a significant role in a number of Hardy’s works, and, like her literary predecessor, drew much inspiration from the rural landscape and geography of their native Wessex, the ancient British kingdom that comprised most of present-day southwestern England. Bampfield is located in Devon, and, as is so often the case in Hardy’s novels, the inanimate features of its setting take on personified qualities. The various elements of the garden reflect Rachel’s distress, as well as her inspiration, and they are ultimately destroyed by the school’s administration because the garden itself is “tainted” and “evil” as a result of the “sins” that took place therein. Hardy’s most significant influence on The Chinese Garden, however, resides in the daringness of its theme. Hardy went against the grain of Victorian propriety and reticence in his representation of sexual matters. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) inflamed public sentiment with their honest—and sympathetic—depictions of extramarital sex, illegitimate births, and marital infidelity.4 While, by the early 1960s, lesbianism was increasingly present in British women’s writing, it was generally obliquely presented and often unnamed. That Manning would write so pointedly about the social reaction against female same-sex love—and with direct allusion to Radclyffe Hall’s then-notorious The Well of Loneliness—is evidence of a Hardy-like level of courage. Moreover, Manning published the novel under her own name when she was the head of her own school, a gesture that surely was not without calculated risks.5

  The Chinese Garden in British Women’s Writing

  Born in 1911, Manning was a member of the generation of British women writers who came of age during the 1930s and reached the apex of their literary careers in the 1950s and 1960s. Her contemporaries included, among the more notable, Mary Renault, Rumer Godden, Barbara Comyns, Sybille Bedford, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, Olivia Manning, Penelope Mortimer, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Iris Murdoch. This group is in many ways a disparate one, yet one in which several common threads can be detected, particularly their attempts to articulate the occluded erotic desires of women and girls. Following the literary trail blazed by Virginia Woolf (and, to some extent, Elizabeth Bowen), these women faced the challenge of creating narratives of women’s lives in a world in which the traditional courtship plot was no longer the ideal and possibly no longer viable. The paradigmatic plot that begins with a young woman “coming out” in society (not, emphatically, in the neologistic queer sense of the term), passes through a period of conflict while she chooses the most suitable suitor, and concludes with her marriage may have served the purposes of Jane Austen and her contemporaries well; it certainly continued to predominate throughout the Victorian era. But the combination of such factors as the rise of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British feminists and suffragists, fin-de-siècle decadence, and the advent of literary modernism—along with the various discontents of female writers and artists that Woolf articulated in A Room of One’s Own (1929)—culminated in a need for new female-engendered plots.6

  For Manning and the women of her generation, the need for a new story to replace the courtship plot was further complicated by the devastation of two world wars, which annihilated a considerable portion of two consecutive generations of men. The shortage of marriageable men led to plots focusing on the lives of spinsters and, with increasing frequency, female friendships inside and outside of communities of women. Social and emotional interaction between women, whether in life or in fiction, frequently opens the door to homoerotic desire, as Virginia Woolf was thoroughly aware. In a 1931 speech to a women’s group, Woolf predicted that “in fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge that [the imagination] is ready to bring me. But not now … because the conventions are still very strong” (xxxix). Surely the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—the very book that causes so much trouble in The Chinese Garden—made clear to Woolf the consequences of any direct or compassionate fictional representation of lesbianism. Hall’s emotive plea for a humane understanding of “inverts” (as medical sexologists then termed homosexuals) was met with hostility and sensational notoriety. British justice found The Well of Loneliness obscene and banned its sale in the United Kingdom, a ban that stayed in effect until 1949. Nor was legal prohibition the only form of
censorship threatening Manning and her contemporaries; many mainstream publishers, fearing public outrage as much as prosecution, were hesitant to issue texts that addressed “forbidden” matters. Accordingly, for British women writers working in that fifty-year period that Woolf foresaw (the end of which would coincide, aptly, with the prime of such authors as Angela Carter, Fay Weldon, Beryl Bainbridge, and Jeanette Winterson), any attempt to situate female homoeroticism in their narratives was, at the very least, a formidable challenge.

  The 1961 lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D. H. Lawrence’s sexually explicit novel of an adulterous interclass affair, effectively marked the end of stringent literary censorship in Britain even when the law relented the conventions were, as Woolf foresaw, “still very strong.” In “Notes from the Underground” Patricia Cramer observes that prior to the 1970s, the decade of fulminating women’s and gay liberation, there were only “three characteristic endings” for homosexuals in fiction: “the ending in marriage and suppression of homosexual feelings … loneliness and ostracism … and suicide” (180). While Manning challenges these limitations in The Chinese Garden, the “three characteristic endings” nonetheless cast their shadows over the plot: In her overly ambitious and never-finished play, Rachel expresses her horror and disdain for the institutional confines of marriage, an idea Margaret echoes in their secretive talk in the chicken shed; yet Margaret and Rena are ultimately banished, and Rachel, “tainted” by their implications, experiences the isolation and ostracism and, as a result, attempts suicide.