Mary Butts's "Unrest Cure" for The Waste Land.(Critical Essay) From: Twentieth Century Literature | Date: January 1, 1999| Author: | COPYRIGHT 1999 Hofstra University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

The author compares T.S. Eliot's 'Waste Land' and Mary Butts' 'Armed with Madness.' While both novels invoke Arthurian mythology, Butts moves beyond Eliot's cynicism in her exploration of the potential cures for the wasteland inhabitants. Her characters indulge sexual and spiritual connection with each other and the natural world, and seek release from chaos in the creation of quests.

In 1928, Lost Generation writer Mary Butts published Armed with Madness, a novel that utilized Arthurian grail-quest mythology to comment on the conditions of modernity. She was, of course, not the first ...