Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Rebecca K. Hahn

“[…] a writer who stubbornly resists categorisation” (209). As Maxwell recounts, Warner’s first short story “My Mother Won the War” was published in The New Yorker in 1936. He adds that, “Over the next four decades The New Yorker published one hundred and fifty-four stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and nine poems” (“Sylvia Townsend Warner and The New Yorker” 44). Numerous other short stories have been included in collections, together with stories previously published in The New Yorker. Many more remain undiscovered in the Sylvia Townsend Warner archives.1 Warner also wrote seven novels,2 four volumes of poetry,3 a biography of T.H. White (1967), numerous newspaper articles, a great number of letters,4 and in addition translated Marcel Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve (1954) into English (1957). Although Warner published a considerable amount of literary work during the modernist era, she was never considered part of the literary canon of her time. Her indifference towards literary norms and expectations has posed a challenge for her critics who would like to assign her work to a specific genre and/or establish her as a writer of a movement. They have propounded different explanations for her absence from the canon and the lack of critical interest in her work. Claire Harman, for example, argues that “[…] the author’s name eludes recognition precisely because her oeuvre is so tremendously varied and, as a result, difficult to classify” (Garrity, Step-Daughters of England 147). Jane Marcus, who concurs with Harman, maintains, “Warner’s neglect is due in large measure to the fact that she was both a lesbian and an active member of the British Communist Party” (148). Jane Garrity believes that “[Warner’s] marginalization […] has at least as much to do with her narrative style itself, which consistently employs the props of traditional storytelling” (148). Warner was neither considered a modernist, nor a so-called ‘“writer of the 1930s”’ although, ostensibly, she resembles these writers in many aspects (Montefiore 143). As Janet Montefiore writes,

      A publicly identified Communist and a distinguished writer of fiction and poetry, Warner is […] very close to the canonical “Auden Generation” male writers in terms of her class, culture and education; but like so many other women writers of the thirties, she belongs to the wrong sex and the wrong generation (she was born in 1893) – to be counted as a “writer of the 1930s” by the historians. (143)

      Montefiore’s claim is still very accurate, although considerable effort has been made to re-evaluate the literary canon of the 1930s.5 Montefiore adds, “Moreover, the ironized traditional forms which she [Warner] chose to write in – lyric poems and a pastiche of Crabbe, short stories and historical novels set in unpopular periods – do not fit standard perceptions of thirties writing” (143). Warner not only ignores the conventions of the 1930s literary scene but also remains indifferent to the literary or stylistic conventions of the time. In line with Montefiore’s assessment, Robin Hackett writes that

      Warner also seems to have lived the wrong kind of life to have been embraced by scholars of British modernism, left history, or feminist politics. She lived in London in the 1920s, was friends with Bloomsbury’s David Garnett and Steven Tomlin, once had lunch with Virginia Woolf, and later became friends with Leonard Woolf. But after the mid-1930s, Warner lived rurally and wrote about rural people, while modernism is often defined as exploration of urban lives and mechanization. (85–86)

      Montefiore and Hackett both agree that Warner does not conform to the commonly held views about writers of her era. Apart from the fact that Warner was female, she was slightly too old to be considered a writer of the 1930s. Moreover, she did not show enough interest in the London literary scene and society, and in other London writers and intellectuals, to be grouped together with other modernist writers. Furthermore, her writing did not fall into the traditionalcategories of modernist writing. Ellmann puts forward the following reasons why Warner was not considered part of the Modernist canon:

      Although Warner constantly experiments with form and content – her later novels subvert the convention of the hero, as well as the expectation of a climax and an ending, while her poetry shows a prosodic versatility akin to Auden – her grammar and sentence structure remain too orthodox to count as ‘modernist’. (Ellmann, “The Art of Bi-Location” 83)

      Like Montefiore, Ellmann sees the reason for Warner’s exclusion from the canon in the author’s style – she is convinced that most critics think that Warner simply lacks the “verbal complexities of Joyce” (83). Ellmann is highly critical of the categories that have defined and continue to define modernist literature and writes: “A further reason of Warner’s neglect in the academy is the long-standing over-valuation of experimental Modernism” (83). Ellmann welcomes the fact that these categories are slowly becoming less rigidly defined and observes that “[in] recent years the stranglehold of Modernism has begun to loosen, enabling a wider range of writing and writers to re-emerge, especially women and minorities” (83). She firmly believes that “[t]he term ‘modernism’ has long since outlived its usefulness, having condemned many talents to obscurity” (“Sylvia Townsend Warner” 18). Like Ellmann, Garrity believes that Warner should be included in the modernist canon since “[her] fiction, far from conventional or conservative, frequently melds satirical fantasy, social realism, allegory, and literary allusion – always with a convoluted eye towards subversiveness” (Step-Daughters 148). The following chapters examine the seemingly subversive elements in Warner’s short stories and show that they may indeed have a different quality altogether. Wachman further highlights the fact that Warner’s writing essentially blurs the lines of demarcation:

      Warner’s estrangement from the dominant ideology is crystallized in these narratives’ matter-of-fact crossings of borders that are generally assumed to be impassable: the incest taboo [“A Love Match”], the line between the human species and others animals [The Cat’s Cradle Book], the distinction between the material and the supernatural [Kingdoms of Elfin]. What all this crosswriting of borders does is to blur rather than to cross the lines between genders, sexualities and species: not just hierarchies but boundaries themselves are made ridiculous. (Lesbian Empire 45)

      Wachman suggests that the literary works in question do not necessarily seek to reverse or deconstruct (hetero-) normative value systems and/or boundaries. Rather than contesting them, Warner’s stories subtly expose their absurdity.

      The reviews as well as the literary criticism, including Wachman’s assessment, all revolve around Warner’s lack of desire to conform to any standard or norm; either in terms of style, or content. They all confirm Maxwell’s humorous remark about Warner’s oeuvre – that her novels must be a “work of a secret society” and that an “affiliated sub-secret society” must have written the short stories.

      The Queer Lolly Willowes Way: Drifting Away from Normativity

      To Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “paranoid readings” are driven by the desire to expose “truths”, dominant ideologies and hegemonic structures in texts and other cultural phenomena. She writes, “[…] paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se – knowledge in the form of exposure” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 138). In her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You” (1997, revised and reprinted in Touching Feeling 2003), an essay “[…] in which she diagnoses current research in the humanities with a pathological need to find ‘meaning’ in everything, and make knowledge explicit”, Sedgwick discusses “paranoid readings” and considers “reparative” ways of engaging with texts (Bauer 40). In this context, she highlights the parallels between paranoid readings and what Ricoeur terms the “hermeneutics of suspicion”, an approach favoured by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud which is marked by a strong distrust of given structures. Sedgwick suggests that little benefit can be gained by repeatedly querying how a text and other cultural, political, and historical phenomena address, for example, hidden homoerotic desires, criticise capitalism, or question other norm-enforcing structures. She maintains that it is much more beneficial to concentrate on the intricacies of a text and allow for surprises than to paranoically search for systemic oppression. The authors of the special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, entitled Queer Theory without Antinormativity (May 2015), discuss similar questions. Like Sedgwick, the