The Paradoxical Notion of Sexuality in Antonia White’s Frost in May

At the cross-section of Freudian and religio-cultural ideas in the early decades of the 20^th century, I will briefly examine the paradoxical notion of sexual expression in relation to the construction of the self-as-artist in British writer Antonia White’s (1899-1980) autobiographical novel, Frost in May (1933). As a Catholic modernist artist, White sought to create a rupture in the religio-cultural framework by reasserting the body in literature using sexually provocative language, thus questioning religious axioms and the privileged status of the intellect in a culture in which sexuality was under scrutiny.

Pertinent to my examination is the problematic representation of sexual trauma. What I perceive to be an unconscious representation of oedipal relations between White and her father, Cecil Botting, may mask a real experience of sexual trauma, which is complicated by White’s deliberate denouncement of the need to tame her sexuality. This complication exposes a paradox: White’s bold discourse is already inscribed within a religio-cultural framework that functions within the parameters of both Catholic and psychoanalytic patriarchal discourses through the mechanisms of confession. These mechanisms serve to simultaneously liberate and silence victims of sexual abuse in their writing.

In Frost in May, White depicts a young, romantic convert

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called Nanda Grey, who resides and is educated at Lippington Convent between the ages nine and 14. While at Lippington, Nanda tries to behave in a way a good Catholic should, but she feels subjected to a series of seemingly hypocritical rules and futile punishments from both the nuns at the convent and her father, Mr. Grey. The combination of religious and paternal restraints imposed upon Nanda leads her to rebel by sexually revisualizing herself in the writing of a novel.

Nanda’s creation of the novel is of special interest. She describes a very provocative scene: besides a giddy and frivolous time spent at balls flirting with admirers, Nanda’s heroine has an ambivalent attraction to the hero; she is both repulsed by and attracted to an ugly character with “penetrating eyes,” who practices black magic, writes poetry, takes drugs, and wears elaborate silk dressing gowns (Frost, p. 202). The hero is destined to end up in a Trappist monastery, but the novel is discovered prior to Nanda’s writing in this momentous event, and Nanda is expelled. The subject matter in the novel prompts Mr. Grey’s disgust to the extent that he no longer wishes Nanda to call him “Daddy” (Frost, p. 215). In this one agonizing moment, Nanda is rejected by the person she both fears and idealizes more so than anyone else. The nuns add salt to the wound by informing Nanda that they have noticed “a hard little core of self-will and self-love … that needs to be broken completely and reset before it can be at one with God’s will” (Frost, p. 219). One might argue that a heroine receiving “a kiss of burning passion on her scarlet mouth” (Frost, p. 202) in the arms of an admirer during a waltz is hardly wicked enough to warrant such responses from her father and the nuns, but this episode marks a turning point in Nanda’s life: her relationship with her father, with God, and also with her own sense of identity, was never to be the same again.

Nanda’s creation of the novel mirrors White’s own experiences at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where White’s own partially-completed novel is discovered by the nuns and, unforgivably so, by her father as an act of spiritual treachery against the Catholic Church, which results in her dismissal from the convent and crippling bouts of writer’s block. Incidentally, although White does not reveal this in her novel, she later learns that the nuns were willing to take her back, but her father kept this hidden.

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While the discovery of her novel is a traumatic event for White, I propose that it is no accident that it remains unfinished in Frost in May because it reflects upon White’s own assertion of the right to express herself sexually and autonomously in her writing in a culture in which sexual expression is suppressed. However, writing nearly 20 years after her time at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, White is then forced back into her feminine role as the scarlet woman. In writing Frost in May, White has, perhaps unconsciously, perpetuated the stereotypical vision of Eve’s daughters by those in the Catholic Church as the weaker sex: giddy, frivolous, and men’s seducers. This view is somewhat perpetuated in traditional psychoanalytic theory, although with subtlety.

From a Freudian perspective, the scene involving Nanda’s flirtations with her admirers in Frost in May might correspond to an unconscious representation of oedipal relations between White and her own father: White sexually pines after her father—a pining that is displaced onto God by a devout woman—in an unconscious effort to symbolically recover the lost penis that has been taken away by her mother (the nuns). This oedipal fantasy scene, moreover, is pushed through normalizing processes via punishment from the super-ego; after all, White is reprimanded for her treacherous act of writing such material. Interestingly, during White’s years spent in Freudian analysis, she acknowledges her own oedipal desires that may have become manifest in her novel and yet are unfulfilled. She states, “I couldn’t have had intercourse with [my father] … because presumably apart from morals … he didn’t want it” (White, Diaries 1926-1957, 1991, p. 140).

Furthermore, White is attracted to men who secure her oedipal attachment to her father:

[Carroll, White’s psychoanalyst] says the same characteristics appear in every man to whom I am attracted—the strong homosexual element, the fear of castration manifesting itself either in impotence or in over violent sexuality … sexual intercourse in which one or the other is frightened, frigid, or disappointed; a period during which I consciously or compulsively knot all the strings and try to provoke disaster; disaster which brings acute humiliation,

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sadness, sense of excitement, almost triumph.

 (Diaries, p. 114)

At this juncture, I would like to raise an important question: how do we navigate our way through reading an autobiographical novel like Frost in May that seems to paradoxically testify to and yet testify against the suppression of female sexuality? On one hand, White aspires to a literary modernist attempt at female sexual liberation as a war waged on suppressed sexuality in a dominant Catholic culture. On the other hand, we may simultaneously be witness to a discourse derived from a real physical and emotional trauma that could easily be passed off as a Freudian oedipal confession. This trauma may also be the catalyst that leads to White’s debilitating episodes of writer’s block.

Consider the possibility that in Frost in May, White is unveiling Nanda’s hero as a sexual criminal who not only follows Christian ideals in the Catholic Church with absolute conviction but who is also able to utilize Freud’s Oedipus complex theory to cover her tracks and, thus, get away from his crime. Sexual abuse in White’s childhood has been discussed in literature on her life and work. For example, White’s biographer, Jane Dunn, suggests that White’s relationship with her father was “unhealthily close,” but she is also adamant that there was no hint of sexual impropriety on Botting’s part. Dunn further claims that White would have mentioned it; after all, White was very candid about her sexual sadomasochistic fantasies, whippings, and masturbatory habits (Dunn, Antonia White: A Life, 2000, pp. 214-215).

I cannot deny that White does not openly make a direct claim of sexual abuse herself. Nonetheless, due to prevailing notions of Freud’s Oedipus complex in White’s era of writing, psychoanalysts’ frequent conclusions pertaining to the unreliability of their patients’ claims of sexual abuse effectively transformed their patients’ desires via mechanisms of confession. This should come as no surprise. These mechanisms of confession are not dissimilar to the methods employed by the Catholic Church for the purpose of moral improvement. Yet, what may have been driven back into White’s unconscious, as well as into the darkest recesses of a larger cultural consciousness, is that an immoral crime has been committed. White’s characters are incognizant players in an unconscious

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performance by White to expose this immoral crime.

White’s feelings for her father remained ambivalent throughout her life, and it was not until 1940 that she began to have a less tenuous relationship with the Catholic Church. During 1940 and 1941, White engaged in a lengthy and intense correspondence with Peter Thorp, a previously lapsed Catholic himself. On February 7, 1941, White tells Thorp, “I understand now the words of St. Bonaventure which I repeated automatically for years: ‘Transfix me with the most joyous and healthful wound of Thy love’” (The Hound and the Falcon, 1983, p. 81).

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