ailing as it does to
look back in time, western society seems increasingly stranded
— a present which makes little sense without the resonance
of the past to give it depth, without those elements found buried
here, in the multiple hidden recesses of the culture itself. But
the narratives of history are sites of continuing debate and any
rewriting of the present must involve revisiting the past. Such
self-reflection and self-awareness provide the starting point
for an ethical aesthetic, one of generosity, respect and inclusion,
reaching out to the silenced voices of both past and present worlds.
In this article I discuss the work of two women who, by striving
to disinter and embody those voices lost in the shadowy past,
promote this aesthetic in their work. Davies seeks to haunt and
change her readers with the voices of the dead, Guidi responds
to Davies by producing her own haunting fragments. Despite the
huge differences in their approaches — Davies is a historian
and a novelist committed to realism, Guidi, an experimental writer
and director who rejects the invisible fourth wall of realist
drama — they are linked by a profound ethical concern for
the dispossessed.
Neither Davies nor Guidi seeks to grasp the
past in any entirety but each, in her own way, gestures towards
it, leading reader and spectator to read the moment, to create
her own story. History unsettles because of this indeterminacy.
Its attention being divided between its many protagonists, it
cannot satisfy the reader's anxious desire for individual shape,
for meaning, and completion. In Davies's stunning description
of historical 'samples', we glimpse Walter Benjamin's angel of
history turning towards us out of the gathering darkness, momentarily
arrested in hallucinatory brightness, yearning to speak but muffled
by the weight of the victors' stories. This transcendent figure
cannot speak clearly: there are always gaps in the documentary
evidence, and most of all in the silenced histories of the powerless.
The titles of both Davies's 1998 Unbridled
Spirits and In My Mouth, Guidi's dramatic
response to Davies (Cambridge, 5/2/2000; 10/3/2000), refer to
the scold's bridle or brank, an instrument of torture specifically
designed to silence women. The brank was a heavy iron cage, enclosing
the head, from which protruded a metal bar reaching almost down
the woman's throat, sometimes with spikes on all sides to pierce
and tear the inner mouth and tongue. Often brightly coloured to
accord with the carnival gaiety associated with the occasion,
the weight of the brank smashed the wearer's teeth, could break
the jaw and cause continuous vomiting.
For Davies it is a fearsome emblem both of
patriarchal power and of the extraordinary courage of those women
who knowingly risked — and wore — it, refusing to be
silent. For Guidi, it provides a monstrous visual testimony, demonstrating
the dehumanising impact of an insistence on submission and silence.
The brank serves as the cornerstone of Davies's history and the
culminating image of Guidi's three-part performance, In
My Mouth. I missed the first phase, performed outside in
the fierce cold of early December, in which women of the past
had appeared mistily, seen only at a distance, expressing themselves
through the body. Located first inside a house and then shifting
focus to a church, the second and third phases explored the slow
emergence and silencing of the speaking female subject over differentiated
space and time — past and present.
Phase 2 —'The House'
Within the beautiful sterility of Cambridge's
Kettle's Yard House, at the heart of that traditional bastion
of gender, class and national privilege, Guidi's first vivid tableaux
re-enacted the female struggle for expression, tableaux that held
for a moment and then dissolved back into darkness before the
spectators' eyes. The spectators were escorted through the house
by narrow torch light, the single beams lighting up sections and
throwing others into darkness in a dramatic illustration of the
act of perception, winding through the house, shaping and discovering
spaces. The individual figures were rooted within the fixed space
of the house while we, the spectators, moved slowly around them:
up to the attic, then down and out into the churchyard, and finally
on into the church.
The production summoned up the difficulty
of knowing anyone or anything properly, as characteristic actions
were illumined then fell into shadow, and new ritualled actions
appeared. A woman was caught in the beam, opening and closing
a drawer in an old dresser, shaking dust from a nightgown then
folding it away again, free-form jazz playing in the background.
Her trance-like movements continued after the prying spectators
had continued onwards into the house, sliding past living statues
to encircle an open space in which several women, with little
connection with each other, were scattered. Neat thin twins sat
neatly on a huge white sofa, a powerful woman in an unfastened
wedding dress slumped silently over a grand piano, a dark woman
with a handbag peered down from the darkened upper level, a beautiful
blond woman in an evening dress sat to the side. The framing and
control of this domestic space produced a dreamlike sense of unreality:
exploring the house at snail's pace, we were forced to stop and
look as it opened and closed around us, images slipping in and
out of shadow like the fragments of history itself.
Everywhere the torch beams went revealed women
trying to find a place to move within the spatial constraints
of what is, after all, a museum. Squeezed into a tiny space at
the top of the stairs, one woman shuffled painfully forward; serving
food quietly behind three men, the twins engaged in brief and
secret dance movements; the men looked impassively forward until
one of them took out a child's karaoke machine and sang in a rich
counter tenor, then all three suddenly ate a boiled egg each.
He stopped and silence returned. The music was profoundly unsettling.
These individual moments were so carefully orchestrated that such
triviality seemed to heighten, not relax, their solemnity. Taking
the place of the woman who had peered downwards while we were
below, we watched the woman in the wedding dress that didn't fit
and wasn't fastened, struggling in the one clear, fully lit place
to veil herself, jerking in dervish movements. One wondered if
this was the only space accorded to the bride. Almost as a response
to the unspoken question, an old woman, as dignified as a figure
in a old Flemish painting, painfully twisted on a wooden bench,
measuring her coffin.
I have not accorded these women the names
given to them in the programme because it seemed to me at the
time that they only made sense after the event. While it was happening
all one saw was youth, age, rebellion, intense solitude or intense
intimacy (the twins), struggle and, everywhere, female silence.
In one memorable tableau, Murray (as George Fox) sat to one side
of the room and sang a folk song while the old woman lay opposite,
prostrate on the floor and another lay parallel with her on a
wooden bench. A third, the woman whom we met first shaking out
the dusty nightgown, slowly closed the door of a further room
and the figures slid back into darkness. These meticulously lit
spaces and these controlled images summoned up the sparse interiors
of Vermeer.
Guidi said that she did not want to feel limited
to reproducing direct links with individual figures and, released
from personality, her individual figures attained a luminous abstraction.
The still interiors provided the necessary contrast to the wilderness
outside the house. We followed the woman in the evening dress
out under the moon and the leafless trees of the churchyard, finally
arriving in the church where a woman entered wearing the brank.
By now the eye was so attuned to simple beauty that this monstrous
thing resembled a great sucking spider feeding on her face, leeching
out her very human identity. This image enacted not only the silencing
of the woman but the pathological projections of twisted men such
as the historically real Thomas Edwards, a man whose obsession
with a moral 'gangrene' he associated with women and the lower
classes revealed a diseased element within him. In this performance,
the control did not falter and the image was left within the building.
When we emerged from the church, the performers stood scattered
and still among the trees as if they were the real, and we only
the transitory, figures in this half-lit landscape.
It is hard to describe the effect of this
performance. My daughter was profoundly affected by its eerie
beauty, detecting a sense of dread that made the closing appearance
of the brank horribly inevitable. Although the allusion to Unbridled
Spirits (which I had not read at that point) was plain
if you had read it, there was no need to do so. Guidi herself
did not want to be dominated by the story so she chose not to
read Davies's novel, Impassioned Clay, until after
the first two phases of In My Mouth. The performance
stood alone in its strangeness like the half-connected fragments
of history itself.
History and fiction: past and present,
spirit and flesh
| 'Dust and ashes', so you creak
it, and |
| I lack the heart
to scold. |
| Dear dead woman, with such
hair too |
| — what's
become of all the gold |
| Used to hang and brush
their bosoms? |
| I feel chilly
and grown old. |
| (Browning, 'A
Toccata of Galuppi's') |
Davies's Impassioned Clay (reviewed
by Barbara Prys-Williams in NWR No. 47) is itself a response to
Unbridled Spirits. Unable to let go of the women's voices
she had uncovered in her research, Davies describes the haunting
novel she produced in the following year, as the 'daughter' of
that history, a single narrative providing the wholeness lacking
in the bleak stretches of the past. By stressing the spirit and
the flesh respectively Davies's titles neatly indicate the differing
foci of the two books, one recovering the past through disembodied
words that survived the savagery of the brank, the other presenting
the physical irruption of the past into the present in the form
of a mutilated skeleton.
Discovering the personal story of Hannah the
protagonist, Olivia gradually recognises herself in the recreated
body of the early Quaker, recovering her words just as the medical
artist, Alex, reconstructs Hannah's lost face. This division between
past and present, between flesh and spirit, highlights the problems
of an age characterised by, as Davies puts it in Impassioned
Clay, 'the death of the sacred' (p.87). Where the voices
of the past were silenced through physical violence, in the present
they are lost by a system which leeches them of meaning, turning
all to the cash nexus. It is thus significant that at the end
of the novel Olivia should choose to return her disinterred ancestor
to the earth, claiming that 'meaning was within and private. It
must be whispered between friends or lovers like seditious secrets
which, if overheard, would be exposed as delusion' (p.87).
Words in the present need to be spoken in
intimacy to have meaning — Olivia has left the Friends and
discovered the beauty of a woman called Faith. The passionate
ethics of religious truth are replaced by those of the body, transferred
to the complex and various world of sexual identity. The physical
recovery of the past in a secular world risks its transformation
to mere meat, flesh without spirit as the personal is subjected
to an assessing acquisitive gaze. This is what Olivia rejects:
'I did not want to tell a soul about Hannah. If Hannah were to
be published, she would be lost to me' (p.87). What would be 'published'
would, of course, be the simple intimacies of Hannah's words.
Lacking in formal education, such voices did not filter out the
personal from their testaments which makes them both more valuable
and more vulnerable to appropriation. History becomes a fixed
heritage, removed from the present, a television pageant in which
the spectators are cut off from a fluid, dangerous and various
past.
Phase Three: 'Ecstasy'
This seems to have been one of the motives
behind the staging of the third phase of In My Mouth,
'Ecstasy' (11/3/2000), which concluded the inward movement of
the questing eye, moving from the exclusions of the outside, to
the constraints of the domestic interior and finally to the ecstatic
invasion of the centre of power in the church (St Columba's Church,
Cambridge) itself. Here the performance exposed the distribution
of power built into the spatial organisation of the church interior
by moving into the forbidden spaces of pulpit and altar, and —
refusing the sober model of decorum required by the authorities
— by dancing over the aisles and clambering over the sacred
places. Throughout the shadow play on the ceiling abstracted the
individuals from their rushing, flowing movement. Everywhere there
were fainting, shifting figures, the white dresses of the twins
almost luminous in the half light. Nothing could be more unlike
the deadly pageant of heritage.
As the audience, we were immediately complicit
in this subversion for, rather than coming in through the main
door, we entered through the vestry, and, rather than looking
towards the altar from a lowly position in the pews door, we stood
by the altar and looked to the back of the church. Out of darkness
came glimmers of light: to one side, the tenebrous shape of a
man in dark clothing carrying and manipulating the white-clothed
body of a woman could be made out through a stained glass window.
No detail could be seen. Then the glorious purity of David Sheppard's
voice floated up through the nave and soft lights revealed women
straining through the fretwork at the back of the church, each
in a separate carved space, each different in dress and motion.
Their voices broke through the arches, peeling out, competing
with each other.
Guidi based her real and imagined characters
on those from Davies's Impassioned Clay, and turned
to her description of the raving ecstasies of early Quakers for
her inspiration, stressing their vigour and passion:
The methods of both sexes were
aggressive and provocative. Church service interruption, buzzing
and screeching at the minister and subsequent mayhem, with lynchings,
mob-violence and arrest ... Quaking, foaming at the mouth, stripping
off, standing with a clay pot or dust and ashes on the head
... Plain-dress Quaker women, hair falling down loose or cropped
like a man, hurled stools and bawled down ministers. (Unbridled
Spirits, p. 229)
The confusion was given order in two ways:
firstly through patterned sound, whether music (cello, violin,
saxophone, organ) or human voice (shouting, preaching, silence,
and singing, speaking, whispering) and secondly by the fleeting
appearance and disappearance of individuals in different parts
of the church.
The first to emerge was Steinunn Knutsdottir
as Isabel Clarke, Hannah's lover and the labourer in Impassioned
Clay. She stumbled over the pews, calling out a confused
message about angels, climbed the pulpit, conducted counter-tenor
and cello with a quill and laughed delightedly at her writing.
Two men, Shepherd and Jonathan Heawood as early Quaker leaders,
James Naylor and George Fox respectively, wrestled in the aisles
with Fox denying the physical delight espoused by Naylor. From
the pulpit, a woman read the Bible, ecstatically aware of speaking
the words of God. The church and the audience was traversed with
a quiet, delighted reader of the Bible, while a woman strained
voluptuously at the church entrance, crucified in ecstasy. As
Naylor sang of the coming of Heaven on Earth, Alex Alderton as
his lover, Martha Simmonds, sang of deliverance from temptation,
slowly approaching him, until finally they came together in a
passionate embrace. Meanwhile Isabel was speaking, falteringly,
desperately, delightedly in the pulpit, turning away nervously,
shyly, returning to speak and finally her hesitating confusion
about the angels became clear: as the second angel emptied the
bowl of anger, the sixth sounded the trumpet of joy and the connections
between these two divine acts meant that, for her, there could
be no way of dissociating them.
Then David Murray as Davies's twisted priest
Lyngard (based on Thomas Edwards) strode purposefully forward
over the pews and the repression began. As woman sang of the breaking
of chains and Fox stood proclaiming that there was no difference
between man or woman bathing in the light of the Lord, the ugly
metal of the brank was forced into the women's mouths one after
the other and, silenced, they were forced into the pews. The church
became still, the audience moved from altar to the conventional
entrance and, looking back to the empty altar we saw Fox, standing
alone amongst the pews, speaking of Christ the Alpha and Omega
before the women turned, their faces distorted with the bridles,
and darkness and silence returned.
Conclusion
In transcribing her women's voices Davies
demonstrates her deep familiarity with the turns and cadences
of the period, introducing the particular melodies of their speech
as well as their meanings. Similarly Guidi seeks to incorporate
the variousness of the past. Both Guidi's and Davies's favourite
character is Isabel, the labourer, the 'clod of clay with a face'
who, by learning to read and write, discovers her voice and awakens
to love in the process. In 'Ecstasy' her role is that of the awakening
spirit, she who was excluded in the past. By lovingly recreating
her Cheshire voice within the text, Davies makes a further point
about exclusion, allowing not only class and gender but regionality
to be recognised as silenced elements in the reductive history
of a nation-state whose favoured subjects compose a tiny elite
— male, English, educated, propertied — drawn exclusively
from the centre of power that is also the traditional place of
Cambridge. In this context it is entirely appropriate that Davies
should have envisaged her powerful voice of resistance, Hannah
Jones, not only as an ecstatic and assertive female, but as escaping
the restrictions of home, as bisexual — and Welsh.
The Welsh links go further. Davies is a deeply
respected novelist and historian who describes herself as 'Welsh
to the marrow'. Guidi set up ELAN
(European Live Arts Network) ten years ago and — save
when she is travelling or being the Judith E. Wilson Fellow in
Cambridge — has worked in Wales ever since. ELAN collaborated
closely with Pembrokeshire ironmongers, Peterson Studios, who
made the branks — which were based on one in the National
Museum of Wales.
The Welsh connections between these two brilliant
women might thus be rooted in their connections to the geographical
space of the country, but I would like to make a stronger claim:
that the attention to the marginal which characterises their work
has (or should have) special resonance for the Welsh with their
legacy of fiery, conflicted Nonconformity. Davies and Guidi's
complex conversation, about history, fiction, drama and music,
also provides a timely warning to those who attempt to construct
too simple a narrative of Welsh identity, of writing, or of drama,
one which, by seeking to define a single ideal form, risks silencing
variety in a flattened mimicry of the centre.
Both art and history raise questions of perception
and interpretation, encouraging us to choose difficulty over ease
if we wish to remain human. Disinterring the past throws uncanny
shadows into the present, ones that, hidden in the margins, colour
and shape our lives. In the end does it matter if the creation
is a realist map of a life or a mural of juxtaposed fragments?
After all the arch realist, George Eliot, loved Flemish painting
more than that of her own day. Words beget images that tell us
of the past; the eye rakes the embers to make it flare to life.
Mapping the fractured 'difficult world' of modern America, another
attentive student of the marginal, Adrienne Rich — a lesbian,
Jewish, communist American with Welsh ancestry — puts this
same point:
| I promised to show you a map
you say but this is a mural |
| then yes let it
be these are small distinctions |
| where do we see it from is
the question. |
| (Adrienne
Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World,
II) |
