Journal of Modern Literature

In a journal entry for 1 October 1929, the novelist Mary Butts (1890–1937) proposes that the creative artist is better equipped to excavate imaginatively the obscure sources of myth, magic, and ritual than the school of armchair anthropologists epitomized by Sir James Frazer. The mythic figure that imbues her most compelling fictions is Persephone, whose procreative potential and capacity for cultural renewal touches the lives of Vanna in Ashe of Rings (1925), Scylla in Armed with Madness (1928), and Felicity in Death of Felicity Taverner (1932). Butts's female fertility figures resonate with a topography full of precious and imperilled residues that appeal in various ways to the historical and sacrosanct identity of a nation, a jealously guarded iconography of what it means to be "English." However, in fashioning her modern Persephones, Butts cannot avoid promoting a racial politics that is ultimately paranoid, punitive, and anti-Semitic.