(Update: This is an expanded version of the original post that I’m including in my series on Scottish SFF, under the title ‘Road to Glasgow 2024’, in the run-up to the WorldCon in Glasgow in August)
This is the fourth instalment – and again it is very much work in progress rather than finished argument – in an occasional series about novels from the interwar period (I will be adding an overall rationale and index to the individual posts in due course). So far this series has included Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as SF Text, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm as SF Text, and Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year as SF Text. As of now, I’m changing the scope from SF to SFF, which is an abbreviation signifying science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction, with the implication that these are inherently related forms of literature that are best thought about both collectively and individually at the same time (i.e. we don’t need to restrict ourselves to linear or binary modes of thinking). Given that the main protagonist of The Corn King and the Spring Queen turns herself into a snake at one point, describing the novel as fantasy is not controversial in any way even though it was probably conceived of as historical fiction at the time of publication. Mitchison had established herself in this field during the 1920s through her distinctive blending of modern idiom with the settings of classical antiquity. At five years in the writing, The Corn King and the Spring Queen may be seen as the culmination of Mitchison’s early work and the first of her three major novels of the 1930s – I’m intending to write series entries for the other two, We Have Been Warned (1935) and The Blood of the Martyrs (1939), in the future. It should also be noted that Mitchison went on to write the beautiful fantasy Travel Light (1952), which is lovingly referenced in Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s multiple-award-winning This is How you Lose the Time War (2019), and the SF classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman in 1962, as well as other SFF works.
Her early fiction had a fantasy element: set in the classical Greek or Roman periods but incorporating socialist and feminist politics alongside magic and characters transforming into animals. As Janet Montefiore observes, ‘Because the ancient world knew a sexual freedom unparalleled even in the relatively emancipated Britain of the 1920s and 1930s, and was also remote enough to demand a great deal of imaginative invention, her pioneering historical novels could use their classical settings to explore sexuality in society in ways that sometimes resemble utopian science fiction’ (Montefiore 163). We can explicitly link this speculative impulse to Marie Stopes – whose own SFF novel Love’s Creation was, as I discuss in the blog linked above, an influence on Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – through Mitchison’s crusading support of birth control, which had a personal and political dimension as expressed in her 1930 pamphlet, Comments on Birth Control:
Intelligent and truly feminist women want two things: they want to live as women, to have masses of children by the men they love and leisure to be tender and aware of both lovers and children; and they want to do their own work, whatever it might be […] they insist – as I think they should – on having both worlds, not specializing like bees or machines. (qtd Calder 95)
The fictional expression of this position of wanting to have both worlds, or, rather, the work of autobiografiction in which she worked through the contradictions that enabled her to come to this position, was The Corn King and the Spring Queen. This was written over the five years between 1925 and 1930, in which Mitchison ‘bore two children, lost one, had a passionate love affair, travelled widely alone and with companions and was generally exposed to challenging ideas and encounters’ (Calder 97). Politically, this period included the General Strike of 1926 and the global financial crash of 1929. By the time the novel was published, Mitchison had become a member of the Labour Party. The point is not to read the novel biographically but as imaginative autobiografiction in which Mitchison reveals to herself the mechanisms and thought processes by which she was able to move beyond the cultural limitations of her rather grand and privileged upbringing. For example, during the course of the novel, Mitchison’s alter-ego Erif Der finds herself unexpectedly ‘bitterly and deeply ashamed’ (270) after one of her sister-in-law’s retainers, Murr, kills himself because he was afraid of what she might do to him. In particular, she is ashamed because she refused to sleep with him when he wanted it. The point being not that women should always sleep with men when they want it, but that she feels ashamed for simply dismissing the idea out of hand because of his class position relative to hers. It is the experience of this shame which opens Erif Der’s understanding of the need for new patterns of living in relationship to the people and ultimately leads to her establishing a tradition of the oppressed at the end of the novel, so that there is a model for social revolution available to common people. Having worked out her feelings in this fictional form, her perspective was liberated from contextual continuity with the upper-class outlook of her family and she consequently wrote and campaigned from what might be termed a ‘transcultural’ outlook, geared towards the values of a future yet to be realised rather than trapped in the gradual decay of the Victorian social order (which cast its shadows very deep into the twentieth century).
The novel marks a change from her earlier fiction, also set in classical antiquity, in that the protagonist Erif Der (red fire backwards) has an agency that previous heroines of hers don’t because she is simultaneously queen, witch and priestess. As Jill Benton notes, Mitchison read Marx and Freud while writing the novel which can be seen as a counter to the modernism of Eliot and Joyce, in which she asks ‘what there was for her, for her female hero, and for women in general in primitive king worship, in socialist revolution and in theories of the unconscious’ (Benton 64). And as a result, according to Benton, ‘The Corn King and the Spring Queen links all stages of Western history with the curve of the female Bildungsroman. Women are not absent in history; they generate it’ (65). On one level, there is an aspect of fertility rite to this as reflected in the roles and scene which gives the novel its title, in which as Spring Queen, Erif Der, has to wait passively in the centre of the field which the Corn King, Tarrik, is ploughing and which culminates in her running at the last second between the oxen and jumping over the ploughshare as the last furrow tears apart the place where she has been sitting. There is an obvious element of sacrifice and sexual submission in this scene but, in the next depiction of this kind of rite, a ceremony in which Erif Der’s father acts out the role of the Corn Year, she cuts his throat and kills him signifying a decisive break from patriarchy – the mechanisms of which are laid bare in great detail by Mitchison – and enabling the novel to move on to a larger scale as it forces her into exile.
Fantasy is often criticised for featuring royal or imperial protagonists, as though all that is at issue in culture is the question of who is represented. However, another approach to royal protagonists in general, and to Mitchison in particular, would be to consider The Corn King and the Spring Queen in the light of the anarchist tradition of fantasy writing from Hope Mirrlees and Mervyn Peake through to Michael Moorcock and Ursula le Guin – as recently discussed in James Gifford’s excellent A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (2018), which I reviewed here – where the power of the protogonists, symbolic or otherwise, is a means of depicting conscious human agency. It is Mitchison’s tendency to show subjectivity determining material conditions rather than the other way round (or in other words her tendency to show how moral values shape the material configuration of society) which leads Montefiore to group Mitchison with liberal feminists such as Winifred Holtby and Storm Jameson rather than Marxists of the period. However, Mitchsion’s radical potential surely lies – to paraphrase Gifford’s discussion of Le Guin – in both ‘the liberation of the subject’ and the ‘radicalisation of society’ (see Gifford 73). The Corn King and the Spring Queen is not just an amazing, huge (720 pages in my battered Virago paperback edition) novel about female agency and bodily autonomy in a utopian world of free love, but it also about art and practice, social revolution and the class struggle, and the complex relations between a peripheral and ostensibly less-civilised society such as Marob with classical Greece in general, as well as with Sparta, gripped by revolution and war, and the decadent court of Ptolemy in Alexandria. Not only do these relationships map on to Mitchison’s various contemporary concerns ranging from the influence of Lenin to the nature of the relationship between her native Scotland with its domineering neighbour, England, but they also give the novel an intersectional dimension which is contemporary to the 2020s. Tarrik, Erif and her brother Berris are always othered as barbarian Scythians because nobody ‘civilised’ has ever heard of Marob and so there always a complex interplay of class, ethnic and gender identity in the novel. In this sense, I think Mitchison is a writer who was always ahead of her time, which is finally in the process of arriving, so that we can see how genuinely significant her novels are. (This is presumably why Benton was so excited about Mitchison in the early 90s because she realised that her novels anticipated the third wave feminism that was emerging at that time).
Since writing this post, my chapter, ‘“She had her hand on the plow”: Shame, Uncertainty and Transformation in The Corn King and the Spring Queen’, which provides a more detailed reading of the novel and its context, has been published in James Purdon’s edited collection Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). In this chapter, I argue that The Corn King and the Spring Queen reflects Mitchison’s desire to push on from the equal voting rights for women achieved through the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 in pursuit of a much more fundamental transformation of gender roles within society.
The title of my chapter is taken from a passage relatively early on in the novel in which Mitchison’s protagonist, Erif Der, is described as having ‘her hand on the plow’.[i] This phrase refers to the biblical verse of Luke 9:62, featured variously in gospel songs and the culture of the US Civil Rights movement. Significantly, the verse was also cited by the American suffrage activist Alice Paul in relation to her decision, after the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920 (which gave women the vote), to keep campaigning for a further amendment to enshrine equal rights for women in the US Constitution: ‘when you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row’.[ii] Likewise, Mitchison’s argument in The Corn King and the Spring Queen is that it is not enough for Erif to have a hand on the plow, or for women to have the vote in Britain: only by keeping control of the plow and using it to reconfigure the field, or society, can full freedom be achieved.
It was only in 2023, while teaching an MA class on fiction of the 1930s that I realised that another of the novels I have written about in this series on interwar SFF, Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) – which is the most popular individual post on this blog – also includes a sentence describing its protagonist, Flora Poste, as having her hand on the plow or plough, as it is spelt in this case: ‘However, her hand was on the plough, and she would not turn back, because, if she did, Mrs Smiling would make a particular sort of face, which in another and more old-fashioned woman would have meant: “I told you so”’ (Gibbons 1938: 50). I’m guessing the phrase, or plays on it, will also be found in other novels from the 1920s and 1930s. Returning to my chapter on Mitchison, I also discuss The Corn King and the Spring Queen in relation to her later non-fiction book, The Moral Basis of Politics (1938). As I argue, this book can be read alongside two other major books written in the same year – Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas and Ethel Mannin’s Women and the Revolution, which I’ve blogged about here – concerned with analysing the everyday practices of patriarchy of which fascism was seen as just one, albeit the most extreme, manifestation. Taken together these three books, and their authors’ fictional output of the period, outline and start to fill in the details of a different model for anti-patriarchal politics with connections to the SFF writing of the period, which I hope to write more about in due course.
[i] Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (London: Virago, 1983), 66
[ii] Quoted in Peter Dreier, The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (New York, NY: Nation Books, 2012), 149
Works Cited
Jill Benton, Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, (London: Pandora, 1992).
Jenni Calder, The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison (London: Virago, 1997).
Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938).
James Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism and the Radical Fantastic (Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2018).
Naomi Mitchison, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (London: Virago, 1983).
Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History (London: Routledge, 1996).
Prospective Cultures 