Feminist Manicheanism: Rebecca West's Unique Fusion

53 FERGUSON MOIRA FERGUSON FEMINIST MANICHEANISM: REBECCA WEST'S UNIQUE FUSION Rebecca West has long been upheld as an early and consistent advocate of women's rights, a literary standard-bearer for the feminist cause. Yet a closer inspection of West's actual attitudes and overriding world view — if it does not dash this assumption— reveals that her espousal of independent womanhood may have resulted more from her self-centered moral convictions than from a desire for social equality. Rebecca West first came to public attention in 1912 as an intrepid militant feminist, sprung full-blown from the head of Hera. She established herself immediately as a spirited political journalist and a groundbreaking, inconoclastic literary reviewer. 1 Although she has never forsworn her early commitment to feminism (in the sense of an ideology which practices as well as advocates the political equality of women), she has tended to see history and human affairs less in a theoretical framework and more in terms of individual personalities. In this respect, she breaks ranks with those contemporary feminists who see the oppression of individual women as the result of institutionalized societal structure. The moral and political base of West's writings originates in the traditional Scottish educational system and church. She was raised in Edinburgh— that spiritual confluence of Calvinism and theology and the Scottish Protestant ethic— where the sharp contours of Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, and St. Giles Cathedral dominate the physical and philosophical landscape.1 The main feature of Scottish services shortly before Rebecca West's birth in 1892 was the denunciation from the pulpit of penitents for whose immoral transgressions guilt and atonement were demanded.3 To this day in Scotland, though less than one-quarter of the population attends church, John Knox's theocracy, with its unswerving moral censure and Sabbatarian discipline, still survives. Once a year, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland meets to discuss secular and ecclesiastical matters which, by its definition, include gambling and travel, better housing and responsibility for colonial people, and the challenge of communism.4 In an autobiographical piece written in 1939, West reveals herself as a revitalized John Knox who updates theocracy with just a hint of the pleasure principle, ultimately to be withdrawn. She finds life unlovable "by all logical criteria ... I take it as as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful frankly to use pleasure as a test of value." But, she argues, if pleasure is not recognized 54 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW as a reasonable standard, either chaos will ensue or human beings will live for pain. Cruelty then, "the root of all other vices," will predominate.5 Cruelty, she states, is an instinct which comes so soon after birth— before love, before anything positive— as to be indistinguishable from an innate condition. Thus she expresses original sin and Calvinist tenets in psychological terms. Greed, in this framework, is cruelty seeking an instrument. Competition becomes necessary to perpetuate an unavoidable cycle, while the subjection of women "serves no purpose whatsoever except to gratify the desire for cruelty both in women and in men." Recognition of this cruelty necessitates "freedom of speech and the arts . . .as a practical measure toward human survival. It is also necessary that the artist . . . should be free to anatomize the spirit, so that we can comprehend the battlefield that is this life, and which are the troops of light and which of darkness."6 Bringing hope, art becomes the solitary life-giver since the subjection of women, because of inevitable (innate) cruelties, cannot be eliminated. Women and men play different roles in this Manichean universe. "Abuse," she claims in an article written in 1931, "is rained on the female sex."7 The deleterious attitude of men toward women's work and sexuality results from men's realization that "women express in life a force which is opppsed to the force that men represent." She goes on to say, "Men have a disposition to violence; women have not. . . . This conflict is biased, in the case of men, in favour of the will to die. . . . Men understand, even when they do not sympathise with it...