In Precious Bane (1924), Mary Webb explores the potential of traditional ways of seeing to enable the renaturing of landscapes depleted and increasingly denatured by normalized exploitative capitalist farming practices. Webb does not unquestioningly celebrate tradition, as is apparent from the ambivalent representation of Beguildy, or the cruelty of Huglet and Grimble. Nevertheless, the novel challenges the post-Enlightenment hierarchical opposition between a supposedly rational modernity, and the allegedly ignorant superstition of those whose lives are still structured around traditional ways of understanding the world. This distinction has often been central to the promotion of what Karl Bell calls the "mythification of the modern." Bell has in mind the uncritical assumption that all things modern are a source of progress, especially when, as is often the case, the modern is understood to mean a world dominated and structured by instrumentalism and laissez-faire capitalism. In Precious Bane, the provisional and "mythopoeic" qualities of both traditional beliefs and practices and different versions of rural modernity are explored through the fraught relationships between Prue Sarn, the first-person narrator; her atheist brother Gideon (who rejects tradition, and fully embraces modern laissez-faire capitalism); and the cunning-man Beguildy (who exemplifies tradition).
White, Simon J. Davies, Owen
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of English and Modern Languages
Year of publication: 2019Date of RADAR deposit: 2018-03-23