All posts tagged queerness

Lucia’s Progress by E.F. Benson (1935)

‘Mrs Lucas, as I need not remind my readers, is the acknowledged leader of the most exclusive social circles in Tilling, a first-rate pianist, and an accomplished scholar in languages, dead and alive.’
(from an embarrassingly gushy article about our heroine in the Hastings Chronicle)

‘That’s the best of Tilling,’ cried Georgie enthusiastically, throwing prudence to the sea-winds, and leaning out of the window. ‘There’s always something exciting going on. If it isn’t one thing it’s another, and very often both!’
(The Tilling worldview)

‘But you are all adorable,’ she cried. ‘There is no place like Tilling, and I shall come and live here for ever when my Cecco dies and I am dowager.’
(The Contessa Faraglione on a flying visit to Tilling, delighted to hear a digest of all the latest gossip)

Diva felt she would burst unless she at once poured her interpretation of these phenomena into some feminine ear…
(Tilling’s undying need to gossip)

‘Can’t we give them all something new to jabber about?’
(Tilling’s eternal need for novelty, for the next new thing)

‘Lucia’s Progress’ is the fifth book in the Mapp and Lucia series of novels by E.F. Benson.

Tilling

It starts exactly where book 4 concluded, with Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas having moved from her previous ‘kingdom’ (the provincial village of Riseholme) to the town of Tilling on the South Coast (closely based on Rye on the Sussex coast where Benson himself lived). A little surprisingly, Lucia moved into a cottage a quarter of a mile out of town, named Grebe, while her loyal lieutenant, her companion in gossip and companion in playing Mozart duets on the pianoforte, ‘Georgie’ Pillson, moved into a cottage in the centre of Tilling named Mallards Cottage.

Cast

We are swiftly introduced to all the characters we’d met in the previous novels, namely:

  • Emmeline Lucia Lucas – self-styled Queen of Tilling, owner of ‘the silvery laugh which betokened the most exasperating and child-like amusement’, possessor of ‘black bird-like eyes’
    • Grosvenor, her dour parlourmaid
  • George ‘Georgie’ Pillson aka Georgino
    • Foljambe – Georgie’s peerless parlourmaid, who has married Mapp’s chauffeur, Cadman
  • Elizabeth Mapp who is now married to Major Flint, becoming the Mapp-Flints who call each other Benjy-boy and Girly – since returning from honeymoon in France she has taken to dropping little French phrases into her conversation
  • Major Flint, now Flint-Mapp – owners of a great walrus-moustache
    • Withers, her maid
  • Irene Coles, the lesbian painter, always described as ‘quaint’
    • Lucy, Irene’s six-foot maid
  • The Reverend Kenneth Bartlett, the vicar – speaks a humorous combination of Irish and Scottish accents
  • his wife Evie, speaks very fast
  • Mr Algernon Wyse – rich, owner of a huge Rolls Royce; there’s a running joke about this, that they use it to go everywhere, even when it’s only a question of driving the hundred yards from their house to Mallards; but that it’s always getting stuck in the narrow, bendy, cobbled streets of Rye and spends more time backing up and doing ten-point turns than it does travelling in a straight line 🙂
  • Mrs Susan Wyse previously Poppit, fat, with her ‘her plump round face’
    • Figgis – their butler
    • Isabel Poppit – Susan’s grown-up daughter by her first marriage, now ‘a Yahoo’, living permanently in an unplumbed shack among the sand-dunes
  • Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow – ‘always spoke in the style of a telegram’
    • Paddy, her dog
  • Mr. Wyse’s sister, the Contessa Emilia Fariglione, nicknamed Faradiddlione
  • Mammoncash – Lucia’s rather crudely named stockbroker (sounds like a character from one of Ben Jonson’s citizen comedies)
  • Mr Worthington, the butcher
  • Mr Twistevant, the greengrocer
  • Woolgar & Pipstow’s – the estate agents
  • Spencer & Son – the plumbers

Mysteries

Characteristically, the narrative starts with Lucia walking onto Tilling for a game of bridge at Miss Mapp’s which is described at some length, along with the contemporary debates about which form of bridge to play, auction bridge, contract bridge, or versions the characters have thought up.

But the really characteristic thing is the mysteries. Because what the Mapp and Lucia novels are about is the way the slightest wrinkle in town gossip (well, among this small community of ten or so main characters) triggers reams of speculation and second-guessing.

Mysterious behaviour, odd goings-on, trigger the obsessive generation of theories, speculation, discussion, gossip, the gathering and weighing of evidence, cudgeling of brains, ‘a flood of conjectures’, ‘intrigue beyond measure’, ‘plots and counterplots’, and so on. And the comedy is in the comic disproportion between the utterly triviality of these small-town incidents and the vast amount of mental effort the characters put into analysing every aspect.

Who wears the trousers?

For example, Miss Mapp and Major Flint haven’t been married long so all their guests spend all their time noting the tiniest detail of their behaviour and pondering ‘who wears the trousers?’ Is it Elizabeth calling her husband Benji-boy and making him go to church on Sunday, or is it the Major, nipping off half-way through the game for an illicit nip of whiskey?

Where is Georgie?

As if that wasn’t enough, there is an even bigger mystery which is, Where is Georgie? He hasn’t been seen for weeks, so all the other characters puzzle over the mystery and propound a variety of theories, from the banal (he needs a new toupee, he’s had dental work which needs to settle) to the preposterous (he’s left the country, his parlour-maid has murdered hum and buried his body in the garden).

But the more they talked, the less they could construct any theory to fit the facts…
(Diva and Elizabeth chewing over Georgie’s absence)

In the event the mystery is solved fairly easily: turns out Georgie has had a bad attack of shingles on his face and neck and so has grown a beard to cover it. From this simple basis develop a series of schemes and plans. Once Lucia has penetrated Georgie’s defences and ascertained the facts, she invites him to come and stay with her at Grebe, out of the public eye, although this requires a special operation, with their respective servants forming a kind of protective shield between the door to h is house and Lucia’s car, so Georgie can scuttle out unseen. But he is glimpsed in the car and this triggers a flood of speculation.

Once Georgie is ensconced at Lucia’s, she becomes convinced that he will look more handsome with the beard as a permanent fixture, but trimmed to a point like a 17th century grandee in a portrait by Van Dyck. At which point there is still one more challenge which is that Georgie (famously) wears an improbably auburn toupee whilst this beard of his has come out snowy white. It’s another reason he’s been hiding, because it shows his age. So Lucia suggests he has it dyed the same colour as his hair, although this has to be handled with tact because Georgie fondly imagines no-one has noticed that he wears a dyed toupee.

Lucia’s 50th birthday

But there’s more. It’s coming up to Lucia’s 50th birthday and she is afflicted with a mid-life crisis. What, really, has she achieved in her life, apart from play hundreds of piano duets with Georgie, teach the local ladies the principles of callisthenics, make hundreds of sketches of the view of the marsh behind her house, and give occasional lectures about Elizabethan literature or the Age of Pericles? Precious little.

‘It isn’t the years that give the measure of one’s age, but energy and capacity for enterprise. Achievement. Adventure.’

So the opening chapter finds her mulling over what a middle-aged woman should do with her life? The examples that spring to mind are an interesting bit of social history:

Women seemed to be much to the fore: there was one flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, but Lucia felt it was a little late for her to take up flying: probably it required an immense amount of practice before you could, with any degree of confidence, start for New York alone, two or three thousand feet up in the air.

Then eight others were making a tour of pavilions and assembly rooms in towns on the South Coast, and entrancing everybody by their graceful exhibitions (in tights, or were their legs bare?) of physical drill; but on thinking it over, Lucia could not imagine herself heading a team of Tilling ladies, Diva and Elizabeth and Susan Wyse, with any reasonable hope of entrancing anybody.

The pages of reviews of books seemed to deal entirely with novels by women, all of which were works of high genius. Lucia had long felt that she could write a marvellous novel, but perhaps there were enough geniuses already.

Then there was a woman who, though it was winter, was in training to swim the Channel, but Lucia hated sea-bathing and could not swim. Certainly women were making a stir in the world, but none of their achievements seemed suited to the ambitions of a middle-aged widow.

Lucia the investor

Then comes the moment of revelation which triggers a key storyline through the novel. She is inspired by the story of a canny lady investor on the Stock Exchange.

Lucia turned the page. Dame Catherine Winterglass was dead at the age of fifty-five, and there was a long obituary notice of this remarkable spinster. For many years she had been governess to the children of a solicitor who lived at Balham, but at the age of forty-five she had been dismissed to make way for somebody younger. She had a capital of £500, and had embarked on operations on the Stock Exchange, making a vast fortune. At the time of her death she had a house in Grosvenor Square where she entertained Royalty, an estate at Mocomb Regis in Norfolk for partridge shooting, a deer forest in Scotland, and a sumptuous yacht for cruising in the Mediterranean; and from London, Norfolk, Ross-shire and the Riviera she was always in touch with the centres of finance. An admirable woman, too: hospitals, girl-guides, dogs’ homes, indigent parsons, preventions of cruelty and propagations of the Gospel were the recipients of her noble bounty. No deserving case (and many undeserving) ever appealed to her in vain and her benefactions were innumerable. Right up to the end of her life, in spite of her colossal expenditure, it was believed that she grew richer and richer.

Lucia realises how much she could help Tilling if only she was richer; she would become a patron and sponsor of all sorts of events but to do this she needs money which is why the story of Dame Catherine Winterglass is so inspiring. So Lucia turns to the City pages of the newspaper and takes the City Editor’s advice to invest in shares in a gold mine named Siriami.

As so often, Lucia’s actions start a fashion, for the others (Elizabeth, Diva, Major Flint) in various ways discover that she is investing and sending regular telegrams to her broker in London, and, after the inevitable wave of mystery and guesswork, they start doing the same and everyone starts reading the Financial Post.

A wave of stock market speculation passes through Tilling (well, the three or four characters which the narrative describes as Tilling). As soon as everyone else has bought shares in Siriami, Lucia lets it be known that she has sold all her holdings and moved into railways, buying ‘Southern Prefs’, triggering agonising from the other characters about whether to follow suit or stay firm with the goldmine. And then daily bursts of euphoria, or despair, depending on whether their holdings have gone up or down.

Like George’s beard, the stock market theme becomes a recurring theme for the rest of the narrative.

The municipal elections

Elizabeth Mapp is concerned that her husband, Major Flint, is not doing enough with his life. Every morning he catches the tram out to the golf course where, more likely than not, he is soundly beaten by the vicar. So Mapp conspires for him to enter, except that… One afternoon as she is explaining to him all the issues facing the town and what their policies ought to be, the Major makes the simple observation that she is so much better at expressing their positions that she ought to run!

Anyway, the Major told Lucia about his plans at her 50th birthday party and this set Lucia thinking… There she was worrying what a 50-year-old lady should do with her life, and here was the perfect solution: she should run for the council too!

Battle lines are swiftly drawn for the two women hold diametrically opposing policies. Mapp has the lower middle-class dislike of the working class, the petty bourgeois resentment of every penny of tax she pays. He watchword is Economy.

‘Benjy-boy and I both feel very strongly–I believe he mentioned it to you last night–that something must be done to check the monstrous extravagance that’s going on. Tout le monde is crippled by it: we shall all be bankrupt if it continues. We feel it our duty to fight it.’

While Lucia takes the liberal position of the better off and comfortably affluent i.e. I ought to pay more tax to help the poor and unemployed.

‘Rates and taxes are high, it’s true, but they ought to be ever so much higher for the sake of the unemployed. They must be given work, Georgie: I know myself how demoralizing it is not to have work to do. Before I embarked on my financial career, I was sinking into lethargy. It is the same with our poorer brethren. That new road, for instance. It employs a fair number of men, who would otherwise be idle and on the dole, but that’s not nearly enough. Work helps everybody to maintain his–or her–self-respect: without work we should all go to the dogs. I should like to see that road doubled in width and–well in width, and however useless it might appear to be, the moral salvation of hundreds would have been secured by it. Again, those slums by the railway: it’s true that new houses are being built to take the place of hovels which are a disgrace to any Christian town. But I demand a bigger programme. Those slums ought to be swept away, at once. All of them. The expense? Who cares? We fortunate ones will bear it between us. Here are we living in the lap of luxury, and just round the corner, so to speak, or, at any rate, at the bottom of the hill are those pig-sties, where human beings are compelled to live. No bathroom, I believe; think of it, Georgie! I feel as if I ought to give free baths to anybody who cares to come and have one, only I suppose Grosvenor would instantly leave. The municipal building plans for the year ought to be far more comprehensive. That shall be my ticket: spend, spend, spend!

‘Cost what it may we must have no more slums and no more unemployment in our beloved Tilling. A Christian duty.’

Striking that the same basic division/binary/opposition applies to modern politics in 2025, namely one party wants to tax more in order to spend and invest and rebuild and improve people’s lives, while the other party wants to cut back on spending, let the unemployed or rebuilding look after themselves. The bienpensant comfortably off, liberal middle class versus the squeezed and resentful lower middle class.

The Tillingites take sides so that:

the feuds of the Montagus and Capulets were but a faint historical foreshadowing of this municipal contest.

Lucia and Elizabeth are both surprised when Irene organises a march through the town, wearing a helmet like Britannia and followed by four ragged girls carrying a huge canvas banner painted with a portrait of Lucia, and the legend in gold letters ‘Vote for Mrs. Lucas, the Friend of the Poor’ with, following behind them, four ragged boys carrying another banner painted with a hideous rendering of Elizabeth and the strapline: ‘Down with Mrs. Mapp-Flint, the Foe of the Poor’. Very entertaining for the good people of Tilling, though outrageous to Elizabeth.

Like all the little incidents and excitements which form the overall ‘plot’, this one doesn’t take long to resolve itself. Only a few days later the election is held, there are seven candidates for two places on the local council, and Lucia and Elizabeth come joint last.

For several weeks or so the bitterness lingers on and members of both camps cut each other in the street, the friendly bridge games at Mr and Mrs Wyse’s are abandoned, social life (well, among the ten or so people we’re concerned with) grinds to a halt. And then, just as suddenly, it’s alright again. Lucia bumps into Elizabeth in the doorway to the fishmonger’s and speaks quite politely and Elizabeth doesn’t want to appear ungracious, and so civilities of a sort are restored, and the group bridge evenings resume with more vigour than ever.

Is Georgie gay?

Irene is a lesbian so she totally gets that Georgie is gay, even if he doesn’t know it himself:

‘Georgie, I adore your beard. Do you put it inside your bedclothes or outside? Let me come and see some night when you’ve gone to bed. Don’t be alarmed, dear lamb, your sex protects you from any frowardness on my part. I was on my way to see Lucia. There’s news. Give me a nice dry kiss and I’ll tell you.’
‘I couldn’t think of it,’ said Georgie. ‘What would everybody say?’
‘Dear old grandpa,’ said Irene. ‘They’d say you were a bold and brazen old man. That would be a horrid lie. You’re a darling old lady, and I love you.’

His hobby is petit point, a kind of delicate embroidery. He is very vain about his toupee and, in this novel, takes great pains to shape and dye his beard. To accompany the beard he takes to wearing a dashing blue cape and comes to think of himself as:

the professional jeune premier in social circles at Tilling, smart and beautifully dressed and going to more tea-parties than anybody else.

Not overtly gay, then. But very camp. At the climax of the narrative Georgie marries Lucia. But there’s no sense whatsoever that they sleep together, it’s more a question of sympathetic temperaments. Many a gay man has been married.

Elizabeth is forced to leave Mallards

Elizabeth wasn’t joking when she said raising taxes was all very well for the likes of Lucia, who seemed to be lucky with her investments and blessed with money. Lucia’s reading of the Stock Market is shrewd and she seems to be continually winning. Whereas Elizabeth sold quite a lot of her government stock to buy shares in the Siriami mine and so is horrified to learn that it’s only just being developed and likely won’t pay any dividends for two years or more.

On learning this, she confesses to Benji-boy that they probably need to move. We knew from previous books that Elizabeth routinely augmented her scanty income by letting out her house, Mallards, for 3 or more months of the year. Now, she tells Benji, they’ll probably have to let it for 6 months, maybe for a whole year. It’s a secret but of course, when the hawk-eyed inhabitants of the town see her popping into the town estate agents, Woolgar & Pipstow’s, tongues begin to wag in the usual way.

And once it becomes common knowledge, Lucia makes her move. She’s always wanted to live in Mallards, right in the centre of town (it’s always seemed improbable to me that she would ever have accepted exile to a cottage so far outside the centre of things). So now she writes Elizabeth a letter, high-mindedly claiming to write in a spirit of philanthropy and charity, to offer Elizabeth £2,000 for the freehold of Mallards and throwing in the freehold of the Grebe in exchange. This offer, of course, makes Elizabeth furious but she is forced to accept.

In fact there’s some comic business whereby both ladies hold out till the last minute until they’re both simultaneously overcome with anxiety that the deal might collapse, and so Lucia sends a note by hand saying she’ll increase her offer to 1,000 guineas (a guinea being a pound and a shilling, or £1.05) while Elizabeth sends a note by her servant saying she will accept a mere £1,000. The note carriers pass each other by and the recipients open them at the same time leading to even more confusion and bad feeling.

Is Elizabeth pregnant?

Coinciding with her reluctant decision to move, are the fast-spreading rumours that Elizabeth might be pregnant. One by one the suspicious Tillingites detect signs and indications and, as usual, cogitate them to death. Her green dress seems to have been let out several inches! She exudes a positive glow of maternal happiness! Major Benjy swanks around like a father-to-be! Dr Dobbie’s car is seen parked outside Mallards! Not, really, very obscure indicators. Mr Wyse’s sister, married to an Italian count and so titled the Contessa and living in Italy, writes to Elizabeth with wise advice and nutritional honey.

Without ever officially announcing it, her pregnancy slowly makes Elizabeth the queen of their set and also, somehow, more youthful, compared to the childless 50-year-old, Lucia.

Except that she isn’t pregnant at all, and knows it. She never said as much, let out the dress because she was getting fatter. If Tilling people draw their own conclusions it’s none of her business, she contemptuously thinks.

Lucia’s housewarming lunch

So the deal is done, the documents are signed, and Mallards becomes Lucia’s home, while Elizabeth sadly packs up all her belongings and moves into Grebe, a quarter of a mile outside town.

Once Lucia has emptied, completely cleaned and redecorated Mallards, she holds a housewarming lunch. As she tours her beloved old house and sees how Lucia has gutted it and repainted and decorated everywhere, Elizabeth is appalled and upset (‘a searing experience’, my dear) – not least by the way the other Tillingites admire Lucia’s bright new design and deprecate the way it used to be, all dingy and dusty.

Anyway, Elizabeth decides to regain everyone’s attention by demonstrating that she is not pregnant by putting on a deliberate display of scampering up and down the stairs. Not by actually telling anyone, that would be too obvious and direct. Just giving a strong hint, which all the other characters go off and gossip about among themselves.

A bad smell and archaeology

The next exciting development is that Lucia and some of her guests, notably Georgie, notice a strong bad smell emanating from the bowels of the house, maybe because they were piles of lumber in the basement which Lucia has had cleared out and thrown away. There’s comedy when it turns out the man from the drainage company and the man from the gas company (who she contacts) are brothers, on jokey terms with each other. Their teams dig up the pipes, discover it’s gas, and fix the pipe.

But not before they’ve uncovered bits of terracotta and what looks like a pipe which could be described as a flue – which sets Lucia fantasising that maybe Mallards is built on the site of a Roman villa! She hires some workmen to extend the hole the gas men dug to become far wider, in the process digging up Elizabeth’s asparagus patch, much to the latter’s disgust.

Lucia becomes obsessed, moving all the guides about stocks and shares off her study table and replacing them with books about the Romans in Britain, borrowed from the London Library. From these books of archaeology she learns to label different levels of ‘the dig’ from A to D, optimistically hoping that level D will turn up the Roman remains.

On one level all the Mapp and Lucia novels consist of just two elements: 1) assemble the cast of middle-class gossipy ladies, and 2) deploy a series of fads and enthusiasms and describe the comic consequences as each one arrives, causes untold ructions among the cast, then is dropped in favour of the next one. As Major Flint accurately describes the result:

‘First it’s one thing and then it’s another, and then it’s something else.’

Or as the narrator later comments:

This haycock of inflammatory material would in the ordinary course of things soon have got dispersed or wet through or trodden into the ground, according to the Tilling use of disposing of past disturbances in order to leave the ground clear for future ones…

Anyway, Lucia’s fantasies about discovering a Roman villa, or even temple, are, of course, dashed. She is very excited by a fragment of tile with the letters S.P. stamped on it, fantasising that the whole tile would have spelled SPQR… until another similar tile is found, this time whole, with the word SPENSER spelled out and Georgie reluctantly reminds Lucia that Tilling’s local plumbers is Spenser and Son.

Elizabeth, furious at the way Lucia is queening everybody, has her own spiteful interpretation:

‘Lucia finds it difficult to grow old gracefully: that’s why she surrounds herself with mysteries, as I said to Benjy the other day. At that age nobody takes any further interest in her for herself, and so she invents Roman Forums to kindle it again. Must be in the limelight…’

And is given some very funny lines, ridiculing Lucia to Diva for finding the Parthenon in the gooseberry bushes, and so on. What kills the whole obsession is her disappointment over a piece of beautiful ancient glass which is dug up from the lower layers of the trench, ‘a piece of some glass vessel, ewer or bottle’ bearing the letters Apol! Surely these are short for Apollo, confirming her belief that the Roman building wasn’t just any old villa but a temple!

In her haste she has broadcast the importance of the dig and its findings far and wide and so is flattered when a journalist from the Hastings Chronicle turns up and interviews her. Unfortunately, on the Friday before the Saturday when the Chronicle comes out, throwing herself with renewed vigour into the work of beavering away with her trowel in the bottom of the trench, Lucia discovers the other part of the glass bottle she’d found and discovers it bears the letters inaris, making the whole word spell Apollinaris. I had to Google this to discover that ‘Apollinaris’ was a branded mineral water from Germany which was fashionable and popular between the wars. The relic she thought would prove she lived above a Roman temple and would make her one of the great archaeologists of the age, turns out to be an old mineral water bottle.

On the spot the entire fantasy collapses in ruins. She abandons it completely. She dashes off a telegram to the editor of the Hastings Chronicle telling him to cancel the feature they were planning and that the dig has been suspended, then tells her workmen to throw all the junk and lumber back into the hole and fill it in and tread it down. Finito!

But she hadn’t reckoned with newspaper printing schedules. Next morning she is horrified to wake up and discover the Chronicle has written her initial casual remarks to their journalist into an extensive and grand-standing interview. She is horrified to discover the dig blazoned on the hoarding of the town newsagents and when she goes in with a view to buying up the whole stock, discovers it has already sold out. She is rung up by other London newspapers and discovers that they’ve contacted a leading expert at the British Museum who wants to come down and assess the discoveries as soon as possible.

There’s nothing for it but to brazen it out in the true Queen Lucia way, turn down all offers, say the findings aren’t yet complete, and then go seek solace by sharing her woes with her old comrade-in-arms Georgie, who is his usual combination of warm sympathy and secret Schadenfreude. In the High Street she spins plausible lies to Diva and ‘quaint’ Irene, the lesbian painter who has a pash for Lucia, is always ready to defend her no matter what. And so she considers the whole thing, like everything that happens, in the mock heroic form of a military campaign:

Lucia walked pensively back to Mallards, not displeased with herself. Irene’s dinner-bell and her own lofty attitude would probably scotch Elizabeth for the present, and with Georgie as a deep-dyed accomplice and Diva as an ardent sympathiser, there was not much to fear from her.

Drunk at the Wyses’

Elizabeth’s ongoing resentment at being forced to move from her family home, with the added ludicrousness of the archaeology furore, means that the Wyses’s bridge party, planned for that evening, was always going to be a fraught affair. What makes it worse is Susan Wyse miscalculates and invites two guests too many with the result that:

  1. There is not enough food or drink to go round, with the comedy result that Elizabeth gets a glass full of bubbles but no actual champagne, and the scraggy wing of the chicken instead of the tender breast, increasing her sense of outrage.
  2. Bridge is played by 4 players, so 8 guests divide neatly into two games. But ten guests mean two guests have to be left out and there is a little fracas about who will be excluded from the evening’s entertainment. The guests draw cards for it, and the losers are the Major (who has helped himself to a few too many cocktails) and Lucia.

But the highlight of the night is Major Flint getting very drunk, sitting out the bridge in a spare room with Lucia, and injudiciously placing his hand on her knee as he tells her how unhappy old Elizabeth is, specially at being dislodged from her house with its window from which she could watch all the going-on of the town.

At which point Elizabeth, having finished one round of bridge, throws open the door and Benjy withdraws his hand like a shot but Elizabeth has seen it. Elizabeth decides he and she have had enough and storms out taking the humiliated Major. But on the walk back to Grebe with Elizabeth, he was drunk enough to stand in the street stopping traffic under the pretence of being a plain-clothes policeman… until a real policeman comes along, at which point the Major informs him that Mrs Lucas is a ‘stunner’ and starts singing ‘Queen of My Heart, till dragged off by Elizabeth. All of this is witnessed first-hand by the vicar on his way back from the church, who tells his wife, who the next morning tells everyone she meets in the High Street, so soon the story is all over the town.

Next day Elizabeth tells Diva about the hand-on-knee situation, which she gleefully repeats to all and sundry, the latest gossip about man-hungry Lucia!

Contessa Faraglione

Mr Wyse’s sister, English but married to an Italian count and so titled the Contessa Faraglione, makes a flying visit of two nights to her brother. This has the effect of pausing the narrative and allowing Benson to summarise all the comic incidents to date, as the Contessa is briefed about all the town gossip, and falls about in peals of laughter, hence her quote:

‘But you are all adorable,’ she cried. ‘There is no place like Tilling, and I shall come and live here for ever when my Cecco dies and I am dowager.’

The organ donation

So, after a few days during which social intercourse was completely paralysed, Lucia determined to change the currents of thought by digging a new channel for them.

And so the narrative moves onto the next episode. I think the Tilling church organ was already being repaired but Lucia, after having a play of it with Georgie operating the pedals, has a brainwave, and decides she can use some of the money she’s made from her wise investments by paying for a complete renovation of it.

And so she makes a grand donation, at first anonymously and then, when not enough people guess it’s from her, letting the veil of secrecy slip. But then she starts to have imperial fantasies. She points out to the vicar that the completion of the renovation will more or less coincide with the annual confirmation of the young folk of the parish by the Bishop. How about combining the two? Lucia would invite the Bishop, and other municipal worthies, to lunch at Mallards, then they could process in formal wear, to the church, conduct the service which would be accompanied by the brand new and sonorous organ!

And this is what happens. Lunch at Mallards with the Bishop (tres intime: just the Padre and his wife and the Bishop and his chaplain) goes well. The Mayor and Corporation join them for a formal procession to the church, all maces and scarlet robes. After the Bishop solemnly blesses the organ, Lucia has negotiated that she (on keys) and Georgie (on pedals) could perform her own transcription of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (her own favourite piece to perform on the piano) for organ before slipping with false modesty back into the congregation to be followed by the professional organist performing Falberg’s famous tone-poem ‘Storm at Sea’.

This is helped, in a comic mock heroic kind of way, by the advent of an actual storm, with the sky clouding over, then lightning and thunder at all the right moments right above the church, then the storm moves on and the piece finishes and the service ends, and everyone is invited back to Mallards. The sun has come out and quickly dries off the rainshower and Lucia’s garden party for the Bishop and Mayor and Corporation and all her friends and many other Tillingites is a triumph!

What’s more, having grasped how to handle the press, Lucia has invited a reporter from the Hastings Chronicle and happily gives him a tour of her home, shows a few choice finds from the archaeological dig (some broken teracotta pots which she claims are antique ‘Samian ware’) and is rewarded by an extensive feature in the paper which makes Elizabeth Mapp even more furiously jealous.

Meeting everyone next day in the High Street, Lucia instantly senses that her friends are jealous and backbiting, so she goes out of her way to flatter each of them in turn. What an expert she is!

August moves

August comes and the inhabitants, as is their tradition, all rent out their houses at a profit and move to smaller habitations for the duration. Airbnb 90 years ago. Elizabeth and Benji-boy move to a small bungalow close to the sea, close to one moved into by the vicar and Evie.

The plague of munificences

Lucia embarks on an impressive campaign of charitable donations. She confides in Georgie that her year of investments has made her some £8,000 or profit, a very tidy sum in those days. Having donated a £1,000 to the church organ, she now sets about other donations, aiming to become a sort of ‘fairy godmother’ to dear little Tilling. These include paying for a new operating theatre at the local hospital, paying for a new roller for the Tilling Cricket Club. In return she collects a clutch of prestige positions. She is co-opted onto the board of the local hospital. She is made a member of the Church Council. She is elected President of the Tilling Cricket Club and then, when she donates money to have the entire pitch dug up and returfed, of the local Football Club too, which (improbably) uses the same pitch during the winter.

The sports involvements trigger straightforward comedy because neither she nor Georgie know the difference between a bat and a ball or have any idea about football. But they learn quickly enough. He rivals (Diva, Evie and mostly Elizabeth) seethe with jealousy. She becomes infuriated that the Hastings Chronicle publishes a string of articles all with headlines starting ‘Munificent Gift by Mrs Lucas of Mallards House…’ before going on to give the details of yet another generous donation. Elizabeth mocks the way the house which was always ‘Mallards’ to her has been transformed into ‘Mallards House‘. It’ll be Mallards Palace before you know it, she mocks.

Flooding: Lucia to the rescue

September brings unusually intense storms, the sea walls are breached and the cottage rented by Elizabeth and Major Flint is flooded under a foot of water. The nearby residence of the vicar is a foot or two higher up so they go round there to eat but it isn’t a long-term solution. But as soon as she hears about it, Lucia rides to the rescue. She has Grosvenor (her maid) ring up the Mapp-Flints and invite them to come and stay in their old house. Gnashing her teeth, Elizabeth is forced to accept, which gives Lucia the opportunity to play the gracious lady of the manor, handing over spare bedrooms to the couple.

Next day there are renewed floods and this time it’s the vicar who is rendered temporarily homeless. Georgie kindly offers to take the vicar in at Mallards Cottage while Lucia rearranges her rooms, again, so as to find a spare room for the vicar’s wife, mousey little Evie. Elizabeth is all sweetness and politeness to Lucia’s face, but to Benjy confides how she loathes the way she is playing Lady Bountiful.

But worse is to come because while she is there, Lucia takes a call from the Mayor who pops round and says a member of the council has had to take sick leave and so would she consent to be co-opted onto the town council, without requiring an election. Lucia is all modesty but of course says yes.

Lucia’s rise, Lucia’s progress, feels like it can barely get any higher.

Wedding bells?

During the fortnight of the unexpected guests, Lucia insists that both Georgie and the vicar take dinner at her house, along with Elizabeth and the Major, so they get used to spending dinner and the evening together. After a fortnight the floods recede and the guests return to their rented bungalows, but Georgie continues the habit of coming for dinner and then spending every evening in companionable silence, as he does his embroidery and Lucia quietly reads her classics.

After a while the same thought dawns on both of them. This is really quite friendly and companionable. Lucia reflects that her position in the town would be strengthened if she had a spouse to back her up. The thought of taking that role swells Georgie’s sense of importance. Yes. Should they get married? And so, one quiet evening, after making a couple of failed attempts, Georgie finally clears his throat and asks:

‘Lucia, I’ve got something I must say, and I hope you won’t mind. Has it ever occurred to you that–well–that we might marry?’

Now a couple of books earlier in the series, a misunderstanding about matrimony had arisen between the pair, to both of their horror and embarrassment. But now… now Lucia calmly accepts the conversational gambit but points out there are a number of things they’ll have to consider first. Then Georgie leaves to go back to his place (Mallards Cottage, right next door) and the issue is parked for the night. I.e. there is no panic, no rush, no anxiety.

They have a businesslike meeting at which both agree the trickiest issues are 1) what to do with Georgie’s beloved possessions and 2) how to reconcile the positions and relative dominance of their two servants, Grosvenor and Foljambe. Oh and Lucia insists on no public caresses and kisses which make Mapp and Major Flint so embarrassing. (Nobody mentions sex, of course, and they will sleep in separate bedrooms. It would be nice to think it was to be an utterly chaste companionable marriage.)

At first Lucia conceives of the wedding itself as being as private as possible like Charlotte Bronte’s who didn’t even tell her own family she was getting married. But Georgie soon persuades her that she owes it to her public position as the Leading Citizen of Tilling to put on a good show, to invite the Bishop to preside and have a grand wedding party. And so it is.

The ceremony was magnificent, with cope and corporation and plenty of that astonishing tuba on the organ. Then followed the reception in the garden-room and the buffet in the dining-room, during which bride and bridegroom vanished, and appeared again in their go-away clothes, a brown Lucia with winter-dessert in her hat, and a bright mustard-coloured Georgie.

Elizabeth not only seethes with resentment but makes a series of wild speculations about where they’re going on their honeymoon. But as Lucia and Georgie climb into her car after the party is over, nobody knows that they are heading… back to Riseholme, their original home, setting of the first 3 Lucia novels, and site of so many victories.

La vita nuova

The wedding must have happened in September/October time. The narrative jumps to May of the next year. On a lovely morning Lucia and Georgie promenade round the town. They listen to the sound of the organ she had restored playing over the town. They admire the new steps she has had put in from the church down to the road, along with the neat handrail. These steps pass the terrace of almond trees she paid to have planted. They bump into Elizabeth who can’t help being ‘crabby’ about the almond trees which she insists look shrivelled. The happy couple ignore her and Georgie reflects that Lucia’s diary for the rest of the day include going to see Tilling play cricket on the new pitch she paid for, then she has a class of girl-guides in the garden-room at half-past four, followed by a meeting of the Governors of the Hospital at six, then at 7.30 she presides at the annual dinner of the cricket club. She has surely reached the acme of social success.

But no. Because that evening she knocks and enters Georgie’s room to tell him that the Corporation has met (in her absence) and nominated her Mayor of Tilling! The novel ends beautifully on the evening of the Saturday after she’s made her decision to accept, on the evening when of a dinner and bridge party to which she’s invited le tout Tilling, in a scene where she calls Georgie into her bedroom and displays an impressive array of hats, asking him which one she should wear on the many formal occasions when she won’t wear the full mayoral uniform and headdress. And together the happy couple make a happy choice.

Lucia’s progress is complete.

Wagner references

The novel contains a steady trickle of references to Wagner and his operas, just enough to be funny in the mock heroic way of comparing the trivialities of Tilling life with the epic gestures of Wagner’s gods and heroes.

  • When Lucia blows through an organ pipe, ‘A lovely tone,’ she said. ‘It reminds one of the last act of Tristan, does it not, where the shepherd-boy goes on playing the cor anglais for ever and ever.’
  • Lucia was standing in the trench with half of her figure below ground level, like Erda in Wagner’s justly famous opera. If only Georgie had not dyed his beard, he might have been Wotan.
  • Lucia took a couple of turns up and down the garden-room. She waved her arms like Brünnhilde awakening on the mountain-top.

Credit

‘Lucia’s Progress’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1935. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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Posted by Simon on November 19, 2025

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RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology @ the Barbican, version 2

This is a huge, stunning, world-bestriding and often very challenging exhibition. Its 250 photographs (and some films and video installations) cover the subject of women and the environment, providing a wide-ranging survey of the multiple ways the planet is being exploited and degraded, how women too often bearing the brunt of environmental destruction, and the scores of ways women artists and activists are fighting back, often creating a sense of female community in the process – hence the punning title of the show which is designed to promote the work of re-sisters, in the realms of social politics and art.

Huge volume of material

It’s a challenging exhibition to get your head around because the curators interpret the notion of environment in such a wide way as to bring together a huge variety of specific instances and examples of environmental degradation, each one of which is like reading a Sunday supplement feature. You could say it’s like reading about 50 serious magazine articles in a row i.e. quite demanding on your ability to process facts and figures. But it’s challenging in other ways, which I list below.

Environmental stories

Firstly, it’s about such a huge subject, the industrial-scale destruction of the environment, which comes in such a huge variety of forms and prompts some pretty big and scary thoughts.

Eyes and Storms #1 by Simryn Gill (2012)

Some of the subjects, such as vast open-cast mining in places like Australia or Namibia (in photo series by Simryn Gill and Otobong Nkanga), or the catastrophic impact of oil extraction in the Ogoniland area of southern Nigeria (depicted in the photos of Zina Saro-Wiwa), I knew about already.

Similarly, the ruinous pollution of the world’s oceans, as conveyed in a video given a room of its own, A Draught of the Blue by Minerva Cuevas (2013) is a topic I feel I’ve been reading about for years.

But other subjects were completely new to me, such as the ruinous extraction of sand from places like the Mekong Delta in Vietnam (photos by Sim Chi Yin); or the impact of oil extraction in Azerbaijan. Although I knew about Azerbaijan’s historic importance, going as far back as the First World War, I don’t think I’d seen pictures of the area and its culture as evocative as the series of photos on display here by Chloe Dewe Matthews.

From the series Caspian: The Elements by Chloe Dewe Matthews (2010) Courtesy of the artist

I don’t think I’d come across the word extractivism before, which the curators define thus:

‘Extractivism is the exploitation, removal or exhaustion of natural resources on a massive scale. Rural, coastal, riverine, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by mining and other extractive industries, resulting in severe negative consequences on local livelihoods, community cohesion and the environment.’

There was lots and lots of new information about numerous aspects of environmental destruction to be read, understood and processed.

Women as victims

The curators move on to claim that environmental destruction or ‘ecocide’ particularly targets women, and especially women from Indigenous communities, and they’ve chosen exhibits and stories to back up this claim. Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, is quoted as saying:

‘In this era of deepening ecological crisis, we are proud to present RE/SISTERS which interrogates the disproportionate detrimental effects of extractive capitalism on women and in particular Global Majority groups.’

The curators claim there is a direct link between men’s degradation of the planet and men’s oppression of women. They are part of the same oppressive system. They call for the same kinds of resistance.

Straight men as culprits

Because the exhibition asserts (repeatedly) that the environmental crisis is caused by men, that it derives from male capitalism, from a male colonial and imperial mindset, from masculinism and white supremacism, from male-led multinational corporations, all of which are underpinned by patriarchal, masculinist, cis-heterosexual ideologies.

In the 80 or so very wordy, very theory-laden wall labels and picture captions, the curators claim that only men run ‘the mechanical, patriarchal order that is organised around the exploitation of natural resources’ and deploy the ‘masculine cultural imperialism’ that underpins it.

‘Terms such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Anthropocene act as cultural-geological markers that make clear that the violent abuses inflicted upon our ecological processes are inherently gendered, and shine a light on the toxic combination of globalised corporate hegemony and destructive masculinities that characterise the age of capitalism.’ (Catalogue page 16)

‘The violent abuses inflicted upon our ecological processes are inherently gendered’ and that gender is male.

‘Ecofeminist scholars have long critiqued feminised constructions of “nature” while challenging patriarchy, the masculinism of capitalism, and colonial abuses against nature, women and marginalised communities.’

And:

‘Caycedo’s photographs of rivers and waterfalls are remixed into pulsating, fractal, perception-shifting images that invite the viewer to reflect on the fluidity of bodies of water, which consistently resist the phallogocentric logic of extraction.’

The exhibition is based on notion of:

‘the connections between patriarchal domination and the violence perpetrated against women and nature’

The notion that the ongoing destruction of the environment, ravaging of nature, destruction of ecosystems and disruption of traditional ways of life of Indigenous peoples around the globe is a distinctively heterosexual male practice, with which women have no share or responsibility, is obviously controversial and debatable. It may be true in many aspects, and certainly when viewed through the exhibition’s strongly feminist lens, but surely some women somewhere are a bit involved in the capitalist extractive system, buy products, run companies, benefit from consumer capitalism?

Can the destruction of the earth really be blamed on just one gender? That’s what the curators are claiming. Along with the idea that only by overthrowing male power can the world be saved:

‘Critical of the term “revolution”, in 1974 the French ecofeminist Françoise D’Eaubonne proposed the term “mutation”, which, she argued, would enact a “great reversal” of man-centred power. This grand reversal of power does not imply a simple transfer of power from men to women, instead it suggests the radical “destruction of power” by women – the only group capable of executing a successful systemic change, one that could liberate women as well as the planet.’

Women as political resisters

But women aren’t just victims, no feminist would leave it at that. The curators move on to give lots of examples of the way women as individuals or groups are fighting back against all this ecocide. They are, in the curators’ words, practicing ‘a radical and intersectional brand of eco-feminism that is diverse, inclusive, and decolonial’.

I also found this theme challenging to get my head around because the examples of women’s resistance were so varied. For example, there are two big sections devoted to the anti-nuclear weapons protests led by women in the 1980s, one in the UK, one in the US (as documented by American photographer Joan E. Biren). The UK one was the women’s camp at Greenham Common airbase.

Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp: Embrace the Base action 12/12/1982 by Maggie Murray (1982) © Maggie Murray / Format Photographers Archive at Bishopsgate Institute Courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

I worked my way along the wall of photographs from the camp’s heyday and the display case of posters and leaflets and badges and was a bit confused. I suppose this is an early example of women very consciously organising as women to resist an obviously destructive technology, but it felt different from protesting the environmental degradation of the mines or oil pollution or ocean pollution. OK, the nuclear missiles imported into the base threatened nuclear armageddon but…It felt slightly askew from the theme of the environment.

Not only that, it felt very old and a bit, well, clichéd. Greenham has been trotted out in umpteen different contexts, in anti-war exhibitions I’ve been to or shows about the 1980s or about political art and, well, it feels like trotting out a tired old favourite. Better to have had much more up-to-date and specifically environment-focused content.

Third World resistance

This was highlighted, somehow, by the series of photos in the same room by Poulomi Basu’s who has been documenting the activities of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army who are fighting, with actual guns, against the activities of mining companies in south central India and the Indian security forces. Women take a lead role in the group and are depicted looking very warrior-like. But this obviously jarred with the message that conflict is somehow a very male creation, which emanated from the Greenham Common display.

Untitled from the series Centralia (2010 to 2020) by Poulomi Basu

It was also at odds with the other striking exhibit in the same room, which is a series of black-and-white documentary photos taken by Pamela Singh of the Chipko movement of women from the villages of the Garhwal Hills in the Himalayas in Uttarakhand, northern India. These protesters took to peacefully embracing trees to save them from state- and industry-sanctioned loggers.

Chipko Tree Huggers of the Himalayas number 4 by Pamela Singh © Pamela Singh Courtesy of sepiaEYE

According to the curators, these women ‘became emblematic of an international ecofeminist movement eager to showcase the subordination of women and nature by global multinationals while underscoring women’s environmental consciousness.’

Women artists

So far I’ve given the impression that this is a very political exhibition, and it is, and movements such as Greenham Common or the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army or the Chipko treehuggers are obviously collective movements or organisations which brought women together to achieve social and political goals.

However, this is an art exhibition in an art gallery and half or more of it has a significantly different feel from the early sections I’ve been describing with their factual, documentary feel.

Interwoven from the start are works by all kinds of artists who interpret the subject of the environment in the widest possible way and generate a very wide range of environment and protest-themed art. So in the early sections about mining and ‘extractivism’ are hung huge long flowing abstract fabrics by Carolina Caycedo.

Installation view of ‘Multiple clitoris’ by Carolina Caycedo (2016) (Photo by the author)

These, we are told, are part of her multidisciplinary project Be Dammed, which critiques the ‘mechanics of flow and control of dams and rivers’ to address ‘the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impact of extractive, large-scale infrastructural projects’.

These specific hangings are part of a series titled Water Portraits (2015 to the present), printed on silk, cotton or canvas and portray the water that carves through the long, narrow chasm known as Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), a canyon in the Iguazú Falls, on the border between Argentina and Brazil.

Now this is conceptually challenging because how are we meant to understand these lovely, colourful, semi-abstract hangings (there are 3 or 4 hanging from the ceiling throughout the show) as in any way really ‘resisting’ the activities of mining companies. They obviously don’t, or not in the same way that the Greenham women or the tree huggers were carrying out ‘direct action’ and explicit protest.

These kinds of works exist purely in the realm of art and art galleries, a realm which is, above all these days, extremely conceptual and intellectual. What I mean is Caycedo’s work is the result of a deep training in modern art and in turn triggers lengthy commentary from the art curators.

It’s a different world and a different type of discourse from that surrounding the political activity of Greenham and the huggers, which itself felt very different from the opening sections about the mining of oil and sand and ore.

What I’m getting at is there’s not just a lot of stuff and stories to read and process, but that they are drastically different types of information, from the kind of engineering stuff about extraction, to the rather nostalgic politics of the 1980s anti-nuke protests, through to something like this, what you could call traditional contemporary art, which asks to be processed and assessed partly for its ‘political’ intent, maybe (addressing ‘the privatisation of waterways and the social and environmental impact of extractive, large-scale infrastructural projects’) but also as works of art i.e. how you react to the size and shape and pattern and design, the fabric and the way it hangs in space. Whether you like it.

This requires activating a different part of your brain, a more floaty open receptive part, than the bit which had just been reading about mining techniques, or the bit which is activated by nostalgic photos from the 1980s.

Art about women’s bodies

But that’s not all. As the name of the work suggests, Multiple Clitoris is also saying something not just about women’s politics but about women’s bodies. According to the curators, Caycedo’s fabrics evoke ‘the feminist, orgasmic energy of our “corporeally connected aqueous community”‘ and are an example of the importance women artists give to their bodies.

It’s a truism of healthcare that women are more aware of, and take better care of, their bodies than men do. This is reflected in much contemporary art where women artists, and especially consciously feminist women artists, often take their own bodies as their subject, finding endless material in reflecting on and depicting their own or other women’s bodies.

This gender difference in attitudes stands out to me, in so many of the art exhibitions I’ve visited, because I’m a typical bloke and think of my body as a dumb machine which I use to carry around my mind, which is the thing which interests me. I consider my body boring. Not so many many many feminist artists.

Thus it is that, as the exhibition develops, the idea of organised political resistance which we encounter in the first few rooms develops into the idea that women’s bodies are themselves somehow a force of resistance or sites of resistance.

Whenever you go to an exhibition of women’s art you are going to read about ‘the male gaze’ and women’s attempts to escape, evade it and reclaim their own bodies, not as objectivised objects for male pleasure, but as the vehicles for their own perceptions and thoughts, to do with as they please. To reclaim ‘agency’ over their bodies.

And so it is that on the upper floor of the show that the visitor comes to a room devoted to feminist body art i.e. women artists who get naked, paint themselves, carry out performances naked, and so on. A good example is ‘Immolation’ from the series ‘Women and Smoke’, where, in the dim distant past of 1972, performance artist Faith Wilding got naked in the Californian desert, painted her body, set off smoke bombs and had herself photographed by artist and photographer Judy Chicago.

Immolation from Women and Smoke. Fireworks performance Performed by Faith Wilding in the California Desert by Judy Chicago (1972) © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo courtesy of Through the Flower Archives Courtesy of the artist; Salon 94, New York; and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

The curators explain that:

‘In Immolation Chicago captures the performance artist Faith Wilding sitting cross-legged in the desert, enveloped in orange smoke. This work referenced the ongoing Vietnam War, the self-immolation of Buddhist monks, and similar acts by people in the United States, who were setting themselves alight to protest the war and advocate for peace, while the orange smoke alludes to Agent Orange, the herbicide that was sprayed to devastating effect in Vietnam.’

Women’s bodies and nature

I’ve always been confused by the disagreement among feminists themselves as to whether women – because their bodies are designed to conceive and bear children and they have historically done most if not all of the child care – are uniquely nurturing and caring and, therefore, have a kind of mystical understanding of Mother Nature unavailable to men. Or whether that’s a load of patronising, sexist, stereotyping garbage cooked up by the heteropatriarchy to keep women in their place.

The great universe of feminist thought seems to contain both, completely opposed, points of view. This exhibition seems to lean towards the women-as-nurturing and close-to-nature view. Here’s another example. I include the curator’s commentary in full.

Nature Self-Portrait #5 by Laura Aguilar (1996)

‘For Laura Aguilar, photography was instrumental in visualising her identity, and in the mid-1990s she began creating powerful black-and-white nude self-portraits in nature. In contrast to the heteropatriarchal settler-colonial tradition of landscape photography, Aguila’s portraiture homes in on her identity as a large-bodied, working class, queer Chicana woman. Mirroring the natural forms of the rocky desert landscape of the American Southwest, in her Nature Self-portrait series, Aguilar inserts herself into a “racially stratified landscape” to become a boulder or perform as a tree. As Macarena Gomez-Barris notes, Aguilar seems to want us to “trespass into the territory that feminists have long considered taboo by considering a profound relationship between the body and territory, one that provides a possibility for ecology of being in relation to the natural world. In that sense, her self-portraits provide a way to foreground modes of seeing that move away from capitalism, property and labour altogether, into a more unifying relationality that allows for haptic and sensuous relations with the natural world.” Ultimately, by affiliating her body with the natural beauty of the landscape, Aguilar’s work both empowers and transcends the various categories of her identification.’

Of this specific photo they say:

‘In these works, Aguilar photographs herself resting beside large boulders that seem to echo her curvaceous bodily form. Facing away from the camera, and folding inward, her body emulates the cracks and dents of the boulders while the shadows cast from her body intensify the affinity with the stones before her. In a sense she has “grounded” herself in a landscape that oscillates with “the largeness of her own body”.’

Nature Self-Portrait #5 by Laura Aguilar (1996) © Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016

The sequences of photos of women taking their clothes off and painting themselves in natural settings could be considered as the kind of entry level of the women-and-nature theme. However, some of the artists here have gone one step further to play with the idea of women turning into nature or natural objects; certainly moving beyond the merely human. Here’s what I mean:

The Body Covered with Straw by Fina Miralles (1975)

‘Fina Miralles’s conceptual photo-performance works from the 1970s embody a return to a profound relationship with nature. As she wrote in 1983 following a transformative five-month journey travelling through Argentina, Bolivia and Peru: “I am abandoning bourgeois culture and embracing Indigenous culture. The World Soul, Mother Earth and the protective and creative Pachamama.” Read through this lens, Miralles’s series Relating the Body and Natural Elements, in which the artist cocoons herself in straw, as seen here, or surrenders her body to sand or grass until she disappears, her body merging with the land, illustrates Donna Haraway’s concept of “becoming with” and offers a metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging the illusion of separation – the erroneous belief that it is somehow possible to exempt ourselves from earth’s ecological community.’

Relationship: The Body’s Relationship with Natural Elements. The Body Covered with Straw by Fina Miralles (1975) Courtesy of MACBA

The most striking variation on this theme of women-as-nature is the series of photos by Tee A. Corinne, titled Isis, where she photoshopped large close-up photos of a woman’s vulva into traditional landscape compositions so as to create surreal, disturbing (and beautiful?) juxtapositions.

Isis in the Woods by Tee A. Corinne (1986)

The curators explain that landscape painting has not only long been historically dominated by men, but in its very conception contains the idea of land ownership, precisely the kind of capitalist-colonial mindset which has brought the earth to the brink of ruin. So these ‘vulva landscapes’ are a way of subverting the male tradition of landscape painting and reclaiming it. They’re certainly about as in-your-face as the women-as-nature theme can be.

It is typical of the curators that they can’t explain the purpose of this kind of women’s art without taking a pop at  the men’s equivalent. I was saddened that they have a go at Land art which I love and have always thought of as promoting the value of walking through unsullied nature, leaving environmentally friendly, transient works, like a circle of stones. But, alas, Land art has mostly been created by men and so, in the eyes of the curators, is invalid:

‘In contrast with much Land art, which has staged large-scale and controlled interventions into the natural environment predominantly by men, the ecologically oriented works presented here by women artists place the body in communion with the land.’

Anyway, to go back up a couple of levels, my overall point is that all these women stripping off in the desert have brought us a long, long way from the highly factual documentary items which opened the show and recorded actual political resistance to open cast mines or oil exploitation in Nigeria, to tree felling in India or the deployment of nukes to Britain.

Taking photos of yourself naked in the woods or superimposing the image of a vulva onto landscapes is obviously a different register of information: it’s a different kind of subject matter, treated in a different way, to be processed with a different part of the mind.

It was this continual switching of subject matter, approaches, tones and registers which I found so challenging and exhausting about this exhibition. Which explains why, having read my way through the extensive wall captions on the ground floor, I realised I needed a break. I walked out of the gallery and spent five minutes staring out over the grey Barbican pond at the church of St Giles Cripplegate, trying to let all this information and babel of concepts soak in, before going back in to tackle the 12 further rooms on the first floor.

Other-than-human

Up here, on the first floor of the show, the curators arrive at the idea of the animals who live in these destroyed environments. In fact animals and wildlife in general are surprisingly absent from the exhibition. Maybe wildlife is excluded because the focus is overwhelmingly on women as the endangered species in this narrative.

When plants and trees, animals, birds and fish do crop up, it’s under the slightly odd terms of ‘other-than-human entities’, ‘other-than-human organisms’, ‘other-than-human habitats’, ‘other-than-human communities’ and so on.

The only exhibit which actually focuses on all the animals we’re driving to extinction is a film, ‘Ziggy and the Starfish’ by Anne Duk Hee Jordan (2018) which, characteristically, isn’t about pollution or extinction, but the curators’ number one subject, which is gender and sexuality. The curators turn animals into symbols of the kind of gender-fluid, anti-binary type of sexuality we are all nowadays meant to admire:

‘Taking its name from Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous, extraterrestrial rock star persona that musician David Bowie personified in the early 1970s , Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s sculptural video environment that houses the film Ziggy and the Starfish (2018) celebrates the fluidity of marine sexuality. The film pictures the sexual exploits of various ocean creatures with an exuberance and playful excitement, recalling the earlier work of the French photographer and filmmaker of marine life, Jean Painlevé. The effects of human-made climate change on the hydrosphere have become a key factor impacting the reproductive lives of marine animals, and by focusing on this aspect of the ecosphere Jordan underscores our deep entwinement with our fellow earthly inhabitants. In response to the present ecological crisis, the work offers a portal into the vivid world of our nonhuman cohabitors and looks to their colourful erotic lives as an example of how not only to think against binary dualisms, but to desire the seductively plural.’

Referring to other life forms on earth as other-than-human, defining them solely in terms of the species that is destroying them, feels like an odd conceptual strategy. I doubt whether the feminist curators would like being referred to as other-then-men.

The rights of ice

The theme of the non-human reaches a kind of logical conclusion with Susan Schuppli’s film reflecting on ‘the right of ice to remain cold’, as advocated by the Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Conceptually mind-bending though this sounds, in reality it is a lament for the global warming-triggered melting of sea ice of a pretty conventional, David Attenborough kind.

Queer art

It is axiomatic of contemporary art that the only good man is a gay man, preferably Black. Toxic heterosexual white men have been oppressing women and destroying the planet for centuries so what we need is the opposite; gay Black men. So it is that a handful of men were allowed into this exhibition about women resisters, on the strict condition that they are gay.

This reminded me very much of the last big exhibition I came to here, the ‘Masculinities’ exhibition where, after a sustained and prolonged rubbishing of white heterosexual men, the ideal of masculinity held up by the curators was the writer James Baldwin, American, Black and gay. Same mentality here: white heterosexual men bad; Black gay (ideally American) men good.

Looking for ‘Looking for Langston’ by Ada M. Patterson (2021)

‘Looking for “Looking for Langston” by Ada M. Patterson is both inspired by and directly references Isaac Julien’s eponymous 1989 film, which offers a meditation on the life of the queer poet Langston Hughes and the wider cultural scene of the Harlem Renaissance in 1920s New York. As the title of the work suggests, Patterson, whose quest to learn more about the film ended in failure, constructs her own response that borrows from Hughes’s poetic imaginary as well as fragments she’s gleaned about Julien’s film. The result is a surreal and phantasmagoric exploration of Blackness and desire, using symbols such as the sailor and the sea to explore the fluidity of queerness. Patterson’s film also incorporates allusions to the histories of colonialism extant not only in Barbados (the artist’s birthplace and where this film was mostly shot) but also in Hughes’s United States and Julien’s United Kingdom. The film pays homage to these forebears, connected through oceanic bodies, legacies of Blackness and queerness, and the forever speculative pursuit of desire.’

Looking for ‘Looking for Langston’ by Ada M. Patterson (2021) Courtesy of Maria Korolevskaya and Copperfield

Personal favourite

A lot of the photography, especially the documentary photography, was good, very professional, but didn’t really pull my chain. My favourite image from the whole exhibition was this:

Mud by Uýra (2018)

‘Uýra is an indigenous artist, biologist and educator from Brazil who works in and around the riverine communities of the Amazon region. In these photo-performances, Uýra transforms into multi-species characters, fluidly merging the human and non-human by adorning herself with organic matter. Borrowing from the aesthetic language of drag, and its ability to disrupt the stasis of gender-normativity, Uýra exuberantly shows how other binaries, such as the one between human and nature, can also be understood to be fluid states that are performatively constructed. As an educator, Uýra also uses her works as pedagogical tools to uncover different forms of knowledge about the land that have been suppressed by the logic of Western extractive capitalism. In doing so, the works call for a material and spiritual restoration of the ravaged ecologies to which we belong.’

Lama (Mud) by Uýra (2018) Courtesy of the artist

Last word

Although I of course understand what the curators are getting at, and wouldn’t dispute the claims that women, especially in the developing world, often suffer most from the rapacious activities of multinational extractive corporations and of environmental destruction in general.

(It’s such a sweeping claim, it’s difficult to see how you’d even start to gather the evidence for the other side of the debate. I guess you’d start by pointing out that plenty of countries have or have had women leaders; plenty of multinational companies are run or staffed by women; plenty of women benefit from the products of all this extractivism e.g. cars, airplane flights, cheap clothes, cheap food, digital gizmos, that kind of line of argument).

But granted the truth of a lot of what the curators say, nonetheless, I still think I fundamentally disagree with their premises or, rather, I approach the whole situation from a different, more totalising angle.

For me it is blindingly obvious that it’s not heterosexual white men, it’s humans who are the problem. Whether they’re men or women, gay or straight, white or Black, from the developed or the developing world, humans everywhere are degrading and destroying the environments and ecosystems they live in.

I can see that the curators have a gallery to fill and so need clear, strong propositions to hang their exhibitions on. I appreciate that they are women, and feminists, so naturally see the environmental crisis through their personal and professional biases, through the ‘lens’ of their title. I can understand that women artists, even contemporary ones, might be considered overlooked and under-represented and so an exhibition which pulls together works from half a century by 50 or more women photographers and artists a) redresses the balance b) promotes the specifically womanist point of view and c) creates a sense of community and continuity between them. I think I do understand where this is all coming, and the sizeable merits of a feminist exhibition like this.

But, in my opinion, trying to portray all men as capitalist villains and all women as heroic resisters is not only patronisingly simplistic, it misses the bigger, more obvious point: that it’s people, people of all genders and skin colours who are destroying the world, the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians every bit as much as the wicked white Eurowesterners.

By trying to exempt women from any blame and cast them either as tragic victims or heroic resisters, I think the exhibition seeks to hide a bigger, bleaker truth: If you want to overthrow something, it isn’t the subset of issues to do with the cis-heteropatriarchy or white Western neo-colonialism, it isn’t one particular gender who you can pin everything onto – you should be trying to overthrow the tyranny of Homo sapiens over all the organisms of the world. We have to abolish ourselves.

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by Simon on October 8, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 8, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/10/08/re-sisters-a-lens-on-gender-and-ecology-the-barbican-2/