'The Knight's Move': Fluidity of Identity and Meaning in Mary Butts's Armed with Madness

Citation

Anderson E (2007) 'The Knight's Move': Fluidity of Identity and Meaning in Mary Butts's Armed with Madness. Women: A Cultural Review, 18 (3), pp. 245-256. https://doi.org/10.1080/09574040701612379

Abstract
This article analyses the work of a modernist writer, Mary Butts, who has recently begun to receive significant critical attention after decades of neglect. The focus of the article is Armed with Madness, Butts's most stylistically innovative and complicated novel. In this novel, Butts constructs a narrative where shifting meanings constantly entice the reader to interpret the text as an ongoing quest for meaning just as the characters undertake an exploration of the Grail legend. Mary Butts creates ritual and myth in order to re-connect her characters with the sacred and to alleviate the distress that follows the trauma of the First World War. However, in Armed with Madness the elements of her mythmaking project are unstable; meanings are elided as metaphors shift, characters inhabit various roles and the value inherent in the Grail/cup fluctuates. The quest for the meaning of the Grail is not merely a cerebral adventure, but an enfleshed activity, carried out in the bodies of the characters, as lovers and adventurers, in both their creative and destructive behaviour. I advance a reading of key characters in the novel, Scylla and Clarence, that emphasises their unstable and shifting identities primarily in terms of gender and desire. Scylla articulates a dynamic relationship with the landscape that is central Butts's view of sexuality and the land as sacred. Rather than seeing Clarence as an outcast - a view advanced by some critics - I argue that he is a crucial character, an integral part of the Grail adventure and the triangulation of desire in the novel. Clarence's location in Mary Butts's wider project of shifting meanings provides a crucial exploration of the liminal zone. Finally, this article examines the way the ambiguity of Butts's work extends from characters and objects to her use of language.

Keywords
Mary Butts; landscape; ritual; Grail; sexuality; gender; language; modernism; time; theory of relativity; palimpsest

Journal
Women: A Cultural Review: Volume 18, Issue 3