- Counterfeit Perversion:Vita Sackville-West's Portrait of a Marriage
I. Sackville-West's Portrait
A standard formula in criticism of autobiography is to contrast autobiography as accurate recording of a self to autobiography as a slippery mask. Critics easily pinpoint early criticism, such as Philippe Lejeune's or Elizabeth Bruss's work, which sensibly equates the genre with an historical account of the self, a record of subjectivity, and a truthful presentation of facts. Those equations posit autobiography as the literary genre most closely linked to experiential fact, citing a reader's expectation of truth and understanding of contract.1 In contrast, by analyzing the role of textual construction (often through a realization of the influence of gender on presentation of the self), autobiography's shifting "I"—created, mirroring, and doubling—becomes apparent. Leigh Gilmore's "mark of the I," Paul De Man's "revolving door," Jean Starobinski's "double deviation," and Susanna Egan's "mirroring" all metaphorically represent the shifting textual "I." Authenticity of the self, it seems, when it depends upon a text, can never be secure.
Gilmore's work on trauma bridges these two standard polarities when she theorizes autobiography as "characterized less by a set of formal elements than by a rhetorical setting in which a person places herself or himself within testimonial contexts as seemingly diverse as Christian confession, the scandalous memories of the rogue, and the coming-out story in order to achieve as proximate a relation as possible to what constitutes truth in that discourse" (3). The autobiographer writes a self in terms of that "discourse," seemingly historical and truthful, with the self necessarily fictionalized to fit the available "rhetorical setting." Usually, one would suspect, an autobiographer would choose a discourse that allows him to express himself most fully. When that supposition [End Page 124] is not fulfilled, I will argue, autobiography becomes impossible to read as a transparent text. Counterfeit, the text uses a rhetoric that belies that self, even while clothing itself in language of authenticity. Vita Sackville-West's memoir, Portrait of a Marriage, is one such text, using rhetoric so blatantly antagonistic to the self that Sackville-West resorts to splitting the self. Partly, this splitting is caused by internalized expectations of gender. The rhetorical settings Sackville-West uses are made up, in her case, both of expectations of her gendered role and of terminology emerging from sexology. She clothes both rhetorical settings in language of authenticity with two results: the expectations place her in a role that actively precludes her thinking through a self-positioning that would take her out of her gendered role as married wife. The terminology, that of the new science sexology, allows her to justify herself outside of the family dynamics of morality.
A background chronology of events before Sackville-West writes the Portrait clarifies her position within these rhetorical settings. She is the only child of Lionel and Victoria Sackville-West; the family is an aristocratic one. If Vita had been a son, she would have inherited Knole, the family home and lands. In 1913, she marries Harold Nicolson, a diplomat, who, after the war, is instrumental in constructing the League of Nations. Her parents, wishing for a more prestigious marriage for their daughter, do not withhold their approbation; they permit a restricted correspondence between the two but refuse to allow any engagement. Sackville-West is young—nineteen when Nicolson proposes (he is seven years older). She continues to attend balls, tennis parties, dinners; he is away doing diplomatic work. He gets leave only at six-month intervals, leaves that sometimes are delayed, to her distress. As Victoria Glendinning clarifies in her biography of Sackville-West, both have same-sex sexual relations with others before they marry, without, it seems, any confusion or contradiction to the relationship between them (47-48). When they do marry, his work continues to keep them apart, whether he is in Paris, Constantinople, or London. In the first four years of their marriage, they have three sons, the second born dead. After four years of marriage, in late 1917, Nicolson believes he may have contracted venereal disease and believes that he might have given it...