Mary Butts and ‘Belief in Belief’ in Traps for Unbelievers and Supernatural Stories

Mary Butts is an outlier among the writers discussed in this book because of her deep-felt religiosity and equally deep-felt scepticism towards modern expressions of unbelief. Yet, of all these figures, she was the most knowledgeable in the contemporary literature of unbelief and the only writer to mention ‘rationalist press stuff’ explicitly in a work of fiction.⁠ This chapter argues that Butts made her own contribution to this literature in the form of Traps for Unbelievers (1932), a study of the error made by modern unbelievers when they insist on ‘truth’ as the minimum requirement for belief. It then moves on to Butts’s own ‘strong’ understanding of belief in belief and examines the working out of this concept in novels and short supernatural stories from the late 1920s and 1930s. Butts suggests that a weakening in the human belief system left by the failure of Christianity needed to be compensated for by a strengthening elsewhere. This chapter argues she used her fiction as a testing ground for possible sources of new conviction and for the nature and degree of belief that could be borne by modern fiction and, by extension, the modern world at large.