M. A. Newton Sexual Trauma, Psychosis, and Betrayal in Antonia White’s

Catholic Pedagogical Practices

White’s introduction to Catholicism began at age seven. Under her father’s jurisdiction, who converted from the Church of England⁴⁷ to Catholicism, and between ages nine and fifteen (1908-1914)⁴⁸ was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, Surrey as a full boarder. In the year that Frost in May is published, White’s feelings about religion are weighing heavily on her mind. Shortly after her first novel’s publication, she writes in a diary entry dated 10 September, 1933, ‘I feel “if only”… if only I could make up my mind once and for all about religion’ (24). White readdresses this thought in a list of likes, hates, and wants in a diary entry dated 30 December, 1934, under the heading ‘What I would like to happen’: ‘To be clear once and for all of the Catholic Church’ (33). In Frost in May, White’s mixed feelings towards Catholicism are depicted in the fictional counterpart to the Sacred Heart, The Convent of the Five Wounds in Lippington.

As Nanda and her father approach Lippington’s front door on her first day, they ‘waited several minutes before the flap behind the grill blinked up and down. After much rattling of chains and bolts the door was opened’ (White 16). Nanda observes the ‘stretch of white-washed walls and red-tiled floor’ that complement the statue of Our Lord at the end of the corridor dressed in ‘white robes wearing a red, thorn-circled heart on his breast like an order’ (16). The vision of this corridor is one that strikes Nanda as ‘bare’ and ‘clean’ (16). This setting foreshadows Nanda’s doubts about the spiritual landscape of Catholic culture. On the one hand, the corridor is symbolically sterile and confining and yet, on the other hand, it alludes to the sacrificial blood of Christ and the colors of the Crusaders.

Nanda is quickly introduced to Catholic pedagogy. Outline of Catholic Pedagogy (1915), a textbook written by Michael J. Lochemes for the instruction of Catholic students and teachers, offers insight into Catholic pedagogy in the early decades of the twentieth century. The fundamental principles of a true education include the doctrines of ‘(1) The origin and nature of man, (2) The end and purpose of his existence, (3) Man’s original condition, and (4) Man’s fall and its consequences’ (4). I propose that Frost in May follows this pedagogical trajectory with a particular focus on (4), corresponding to Nanda’s experiences at Lippington, including her fateful transgression that leads to her dismissal.

At first, Nanda is a congenial student who stays close to the Catholic tenet that ‘whatever man does in this life must be done with a view to his life hereafter. A deep sense of duty must guide him in all his actions’ (Lochemes 8). Nanda finds that ‘being good was surprisingly easy; there seemed so little time to be anything else’ (White 48). Indeed, for being ‘Very Good’ Nanda receives a ‘pale blue card’ and anticipates securing the enviable ‘pink ribbon’ that brings with it special privileges. However, Nanda observes one nun, Mother Frances, who seems to be watching her very closely. Nanda suspects that the nun’s intention is to remove her exemption, which encourages Nanda to behave ‘more exasperatingly well’ (48). Despite Nanda’s exemplary performance of virtue, Mother Frances finds fault: ‘You’re obstinate, you’re independent … spiritual pride is your ruling vice. One of these days, if you’re not careful, you’ll be setting up your own conceited little judgment against the wisdom of the Church, which is the wisdom of God himself’ (49). These words would have had an emotional impact on Nanda a few weeks earlier, but they are suppressed as Nanda bites her lip and finds that she ‘was growing a hard little protective shell’ (49). Thus, in the very course of Nanda’s stubbornness, she simultaneously defies Catholic pedagogy and acknowledges the acute observation made by Mother Frances.
Nanda does not feel the calmness she emits on the surface. Nanda is also on her best behavior at the beginning of her stay at Lippington to impress her father, Mr. Grey, who ‘had always demanded a high standard of quietness and obedience’ (50). Nanda is no stranger to behaving in a manner that pleases her father, and yet he also encourages her to develop her intellectual qualities: ‘No one could trip Nanda up on the difference between Corinthian and Ionic columns. Mr. Grey had taught her to distinguish between these on her first visit, at the age of five, to the British Museum’ (29). Mirroring White’s experiences, Jane Dunn remarks in Antonia White: A Life (2000) that, for Cecil Botting, joining the Catholic Church was like joining an intellectual elitist spiritual establishment because it showed just how clever he was (37). Mr. Botting, like his alter ego, Mr. Grey, vicariously projects this intellectualism on to his daughter. In her epistolary text, The Hound and the Falcon (1983), White recalls that her father, fervently non-religious prior to his own conversion, ‘was so intellectually and morally convinced that he would have made any sacrifice rather than not follow his light … convinced … that the Catholic claims were unanswerable’ (153). In the same text, White describes her father as ‘a devout, but rigoristic man with no understanding of people unlike himself. He centred everything on me, trying to force me into an exact replica of himself. I adored him, feared him and was never at ease with him. Remember this in my exaggerated fear of “loving” authority’ (82).

On a superficial level, in Frost in May, Mother Frances appears to respect Mr. Grey’s wishes that Lippington incorporate his intellectual requests, and she is acutely aware of Nanda’s intellectual prowess. However, Mother Frances’s agenda is that Mr. Grey’s requests should serve to humiliate Nanda and, to a certain degree, her parents, too, as new converts. Moreover, Mother Frances seems intent on providing Nanda with a Catholic education that also seems to double as a means to an end via punishment. In order to humiliate Nanda, and thus educate her on the nature of humility, Mother Frances does not hesitate to take full advantage of a situation she considers to be unconducive to Lippington’s spiritual practices. For example, when a schoolmate of Nanda’s, Mildred, is selected to take charge of Nanda, Mildred’s unhappiness at the prospect is shown in her ‘wriggling’. Mother Frances reminds Mildred that such behaviour is unacceptable and proceeds to reflect upon the type of school that teaches dramatic ‘reeling and writhing and fainting in coils’ (23). When asked by Mother Frances to what book this scene alludes, Nanda is quick to reply, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (24). A scene that brings to mind images of Lewis Carroll’s conger-eel⁴⁹ in the mock-turtle’s story, Nanda perceives this answer as her ‘first triumph’, but it is spoilt by Mother Frances’s enforcement of an earlier wake-up time for Mildred because ‘Nanda’s father wants [Nanda] to have a cold bath every morning. So she’ll have to be up a quarter of an hour before the others’ (24). Ironically, Mr. Grey’s infiltration of Lippington’s practices with borderline Draconian rituals betray Mother Frances’s own vision of what being a Catholic convert entails, thus making Mr. Grey a rather suitable example of a successful Catholic convert.

At the root of the nuns’ rigid spiritual practices is a specific Christian paradigm, which is evident in methods commonly employed in convents in the first half of the twentieth century. The girls are at war according to a higher moral imperative: They are manufactured to become ‘soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship and ridicule and ingratitude,’ as Mother Radcliffe states (118). Part of the girls’ indoctrination is to subject themselves to unpalatable processes of self-regulation and self-sacrifice. For example, as a soldier of Christ, Nanda needs to sleep on her back with her arms crossed over her chest in case she should be called upon in her sleep. An anonymous nun in black glasses who emerges from the shadows reminds Nanda that ‘If the dear Lord were to call you to Himself during the night, you would be ready to meet Him as a Catholic should’ (35). Later, Father Parry, on one of his ceremonial visits, tells the girls, ‘Ever since the day of your birth you have been dying; every hour of play or study brings you a little nearer to the end of your life. A good Catholic should live constantly in the spiritual presence of death’ (100). Father Parry goes on to encourage the girls to imagine themselves on their death beds in the throes of agony with devils and angels fighting for their souls, the corrosion of their bodies and the judgement of God upon their souls (101). Nanda retires to bed that night ‘to dream that Theresa Leighton was lying dead in Our Lady’s Chapel, wearing her first Communion dress and a gilt paper crown. As she looked at her, a worm came out of Theresa’s mouth and Nanda woke up shrieking’ (101).

Lippington’s spiritual practices become increasingly stressful for Nanda, exacerbated by her attempts to navigate what she perceives to be growing injustices to which she is subjected, even though she initially refuses to let this show. Instead, she concentrates on the sufferings of the Venerable Margaret Clitherow in the sixteenth century, who faces torture for treason against Queen Elizabeth I for converting to Catholicism and hiding Catholic priests in her house: ‘“As she lay on the scaffold,” she read stubbornly, “with a smile of heavenly patience on her face, the executioners lowered an heavy oaken door on to her prostrate form. On this door they piled a mass of great weights, and, to cause her still more exquisite torment, they” … but the rest of the passage was obscured by a fog of tears’ (44). In actuality, this embellished description provided by White is not found in Lives of the English Martyrs by Edwin Hubert Burton and John Hungerford Pollen (1914); nonetheless, an interesting comparison can be drawn between Margaret Clitherow’s experiences and Nanda’s growing anxiety and sense of injustice with regard to Lippington’s spiritual methods as a recent convert to Catholicism.

According to Burton and Pollen’s account in Lives of the English Martyrs, the Venerable Margaret Clitherow ‘so gladly suffered loss and death, in order to help in keeping the faith alive in England…. Can we doubt that her sufferings and death have won for her prayers a “power and passion to deliver hearts from the prison-house” of heresy?’ (Burton and Pollen 188). When Margaret learns of the Catholic faith in 1574,⁵⁰ she decides that its doctrine of the ‘Christian duty in truth and sincerity’ is more inspiring than ‘to serve the world vainly’ in the Protestant church (189). Consequent to her change in faith and the desire to attend the Catholic Church, it is brought to the attention of a prior ecclesiastical parish that Margaret has not been attending. Indeed, Margaret is at the time already in prison for heresy, heavy with child (190). When she is released, she engages in Clandestine Catholic operations, visits the graves of previous York martyrs for the cause who had been executed in 1582, and welcomes living priests to her house. Soon, Puritan⁵¹ Elizabethan penal laws against Catholic priests and those who support them become ‘more strictly enforced’ (193). However, Margaret is prepared to go to the gallows for her faith. Continually under surveillance, she is eventually found to be hiding a Catholic priest and is imprisoned on 10 March, 1586. She is judged on the 14^th and 15^th of the same month. Margaret refuses to plead guilty against an offence to the Queen. A Protestant preacher, Wigginton, ‘solemnly warned him that he ought not ‘either by God’s laws or man’s, to judge her to die upon the slender witness of a boy’ (195). So, the judge proclaims that Margaret should undergo the following judgment:

You must return from whence you came, and there in the lowest part of the prison, be stripped naked, laid down, your back upon the ground, and as much weight laid on you as you are able to bear, and so continue three days without meat or drink, except a little barley bread and puddle water, and the third day be pressed to death, your hands and feet bound to posts, and a sharp stone under your back. (195-196)

When Margaret lays upon the ground,

the door was laid upon her and her hands were tied to two posts. After a few more

questions answered by the martyr with meek firmness, weights were laid upon the
door, and after fifteen minutes of intense agony her soul passed ‘with marvellous
triumph into the peaceable city of God, there to receive a worthy crown of endless
immortality and joy’. The last words she was heard to speak were: ‘Jesu! Jesu!
Jesu! have mercy on me!’ (198)
Similar to Margaret’s physical and spiritual plight, Nanda perceives herself in the arms of an unjust law, made more painful because she, like Margaret, is a convert who yearns to be received into the arms of God. Nanda particularly relates to the weight of the oaken door being placed on Margaret because, in the very religion for which Margaret is martyring herself, a huge weight also lies on Nanda’s soul. Nanda is not able to reach the end of Saint Clitherow’s sufferings as she is overcome by emotion; tears spring to her eyes that cloud her vision and prohibit her from rejoicing in the saint’s ‘triumph’ in death as she anticipates entrance into the city of God. Unlike Margaret, though, Nanda has doubts as to whether she is worthy enough to be admitted into God’s arms. These doubts, as I will illustrate momentarily, soon become a self-fulfilling prophecy in her identification with Eve as being responsible for the fall of man.

Maternal Devouring

Just as Eve first eats the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which thus unleashes feelings of love and hate, this scene translates into a Freudian interpretation of Nanda’s situation in relation to the mother-daughter relationship in the pre-Oedipal phase of the Oedipus complex. Permeating through Frost in May is a complex sadomasochistic (pre)Oedipal structure that fuses opposing instincts of life and death on one level and love and hate on another in the child’s relationship with its mother. This is first evidenced in interconnecting motifs of food and maternity. On the one hand, these motifs highlight Nanda’s consumption of food at the convent as an all-consuming process of symbolic maternal devouring. On the other hand, food becomes an indicator of Nanda’s growing sense of injustice in her witnessing of acts of hypocrisy at Lippington.

Catholic teachings at Lippington that focus on a combination of physical and psychical suffering serve to instill both fear and love for God into Nanda. As Margaret is only allowed ‘barley bread and puddle water’ prior to meeting God, food is an essential feature of Nanda’s Catholic indoctrination towards higher moral ideals and her own preparation for meeting God. Nanda is often served unpalatable meals. Her first meal ‘consisted of stewed meat and rice, cabbage drowned in vinegar, and sweet tea, already mixed with milk’ (White 27). Nanda feels ‘sickened’ at what is set before her but soon learns that not consuming this unappetizing meal could lead to mortal sin. Nanda knows that three things lead to mortal sin: ‘grave matter, full knowledge, and full consent’ (77). Thus, in order to be accepted into Lippington as a true Catholic, Nanda endeavors to be extra scrupulous. This includes the mortification of her sensory pleasures as a demonstration of her piety, for example, by taking second helpings of ‘particularly nasty cabbage’ and dowsing her rhubarb with salt; these are actions that are looked upon approvingly by the nuns (79).

From a Freudian perspective, the lack of nourishing food provided by the nuns suggests the presence of the ego-ideal and Nanda’s super-ego. (The ego-ideal is the ideal nature to which the subject is to conform upon emergence out of the Oedipus complex. Nanda’s super-ego functions to internalise the ego-ideal.) As Freud explains in ‘The Dissection of the Psychical Personality’ (1933), the ego-ideal, i.e., ‘educators, teachers [and] people chosen as ideal models’ take the parents’ place, and their expectations for continued moral behaviour—established by the subjects’ imagos⁵² in the earlier narcissistic phase of pre-Oedipal relations—are internalised by the subject (80). What is revealed in Nanda’s consumption of food, from a Freudian perspective, are deeper pre-Oedipal issues analogous to the act of alleviating anxiety. In other words, Nanda’s consumption of food at the convent revives earlier sexual anxieties in relation to her first love object, her mother. It is a problematic position that sets up the mother, like Eve, as a daughter’s awakening to carnal sin and love and hate through the consumption of food. Recognised as the dominance of the id (instinctual drives) in Freudian terms, the aim is for the little girl to become fearful of her biological mother and recognise her mother’s weakness as representative of the id and thus the inferior of the two sexes; this enables an easier turn to a stronger male authority who will function as the ego-ideal. In Nanda’s case, the nuns functioning as the ego-ideal epitomise their subservience to a higher male authority, God.

In ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), Freud states that the first sexual contact the little girl has is with the mother’s breast. He finds that ‘the very surprising sexual activity of little girls in relation to their mother is manifested chronologically in oral, sadistic, and finally even in phallic trends directed towards her’ out of fear of being destroyed by her (Freud 237). At face value, two observations can be made: 1) the breast represents a source of nourishment for the little girl that can also become threatening; and 2) the breast is a point of sexual contact that arouses sexual excitation but is also a natural but difficult part of the little girl’s psycho-sexual development. As broached in Chapter One, what pushes a little girl into the arms of her father, in contrast to a little boy’s psycho-sexual development, are feelings of hatred for her mother. These feelings give rise to feelings of guilt, which is the precursor for the development of the super-ego. Nonetheless, a persistent sense of anxiety is present as the little girl tries to accommodate contradictory feelings that are simultaneously at play. As Freud later asserts in relation to the female condition in ‘Femininity’ (1933), ‘the fear of being poisoned is also probably connected with the withdrawal of the breast. Poison is nourishment that makes one ill’ (152).

Freud presents an interesting theory that revolves around a paradoxical situation to move the little girl out of traumatic pre-Oedipal relations into another equally traumatic situation in the Oedipus complex proper in which her incestuous sexual aims for the father are thwarted. Freud makes it clear that the mother is the child’s original seducer, thus causing sexual trauma. Stated more plainly, in a Freudian reading, it may have been knowledge of this seduction, coupled with penis envy, which fuels feelings of deep resentment in Nanda. According to Freud, at the heart of a little girl’s anxiety and resentment is her fear of being forsaken by her mother because the little girl has attempted to rob her mother of what will enable her to take her mother’s place and possess the much-desired penis. This situation leads to paranoia because, coupled with attachment problems in the oral phase, the girl feels, unconsciously, that she will be ‘devoured’ by her mother (186). For Nanda in Frost in May—mirroring White’s situation—her pre-Oedipal relations with her biological mother are intrinsically connected to her symbolic relationship with her replacement mother figure in the guise of the nuns. In the process of consuming the nuns’ food, Nanda’s sadistic impulses resurface and are essentially introjected⁵³ as an act of masochistic self-punishment, due to unconscious guilt associated with her desire to rob her mother of the much-desired penis that then led to fears of being devoured by the primary love object, the mother.

In ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), Freud observes that ‘if pain and unpleasure can be not simply warnings but actually aims, the pleasure principle is paralysed—it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug’ (159). In other words, a problem arises if two instincts, the one for life (libido) and the one for death (destructive) act as opposing forces, constituting a fusion of sadomasochism in the destructive instinct’s ‘will to power’, which drives a person’s unconscious desires (163). For example, Freud writes, ‘The [masochistic] wish to be beaten by the father comes from the sadistic-anal phase’ that follows ‘the fear of being eaten up by the totem animal (the father)’ (165). Despite Freud’s focus on the little girl’s desire to give her father a child, he purports in an earlier work, ‘Female Sexuality’ (1931), a stronger pre-Oedipal connection that girls have to their mothers than had previously been assumed. After reiterating his earlier position of a child’s attachment to the opposite sex in the throes of the Oedipus complex (184), he also states that ‘analysis has shown that where the attachment to the father was peculiarly strong it had been preceded by a phase of equally strong and passionate attachment exclusively to the mother…. A woman may remain arrested at the original mother-attachment and never properly achieve the proper change-over to men’ (185). This view is modified in ‘Femininity’ (1933): The girl’s first fear is being eaten up by her mother, who is then replaced by a more powerful authority, the father.

Earlier, in The Ego and the Id (1923), Freud developed a hypothesis that the ego, or the ‘I’, is situated between two opposing forces, which, although with different aims, serve the same function: to obtain mastery over the ego. The id, representative of what Freud terms the ‘pleasure principle’, i.e., the instincts that demand immediate gratification pertaining to food and libido, and which seek to avoid pain or displeasure, attempt to engineer the primitive aspects of the ego and ignore any external restraints put upon it. Acting as a moral prohibitor, the super-ego is an internalised conscience that is modeled on the subject’s ego-ideal that attempts to live up to the external moral restraints imposed on it on the basis of the production of morals stemming from an unconscious sense of guilt that becomes manifest in the ego: ‘The normal, conscious sense of guilt (conscience) … [is] based on the tension between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal and is the expression of a condemnation of the ego by its critical agency’ (50-51). If the ideal ego fails to live up to its ego-ideal, neurosis can ensue. As I will describe, the weaning process symbolically carried out by the nuns may be unconsciously interpreted as an act of persecution by Nanda—irrationally so from a Freudian perspective—that leads to neurosis.

One particularly interesting aspect about the onset of neurosis attached to the ego’s failure to live up to its ego-ideal as described by Freud is its connection with anxiety. As illustrated in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), the function of the id is in its primitive drive to, for example, avoid pain, which will occur in relation to the loss of an object. However, according to Freud, this is something very different from the experience of anxiety: ‘Pain is … the actual reaction to loss of object, while anxiety is the reaction to the danger which that loss entails and, by a further displacement, a reaction to the danger of the loss of object itself’ (107), initiated by the ego as ‘loss of perception of the object’ (106). Freud distinguishes between a real anxiety when a person is faced with a known danger and neurotic anxiety when a person is faced with an unknown danger (100). However, both these types of anxiety are directed from an axis point deriving from fear connected with a danger of losing an object, for example, having a stranger, like the nuns, replace the mother (105).

Freud places much emphasis on the necessary antagonistic role of the breast as a contributing factor to a child’s sexual trauma and developing anxiety. His emphasis on the literal breast as a child’s first point of intimate contact with the mother, however, instead of being emblematic of the feeding relationship with the mother, accentuates his need to place the mother as the source of sexual arousal in the child in the auto-erotic phase of her psycho-sexual development. However, he also confesses to not evaluating the mother-daughter relationship beyond that. In ‘Female Sexuality’ (1933), Freud observes how, ‘Our insight into this early, pre-Oedipus, phase in girls comes to us as a surprise, like the discovery, in another field, of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization behind the civilization of Greece’ (226). While he finds that the little girl is dominated by aggressive oral and sadistic impulses directed at her mother out of fear of being killed by her (237), but he then reverts to his earlier theories in relation to castration, penis envy, and real sexual arousal.