Lesbians and Lepidoptera: why The Duke of Burgundy thrills butterfly lovers
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Version 0 of 1. Lepidopterists are fluttering with excitement over a new film The Duke of Burgundy, and not just because of its billing as a lesbian arthouse Fifty Shades of Grey. The Duke of Burgundy is Britain’s second-most endangered butterfly, and butterflies are a visual motif in the film. I haven’t seen it yet (I’m hoping my Butterfly Conservation membership card might qualify for a discount), but the butterflies that enter the trailer at 23 seconds and regularly thereafter are all dead specimens, mounted in mahogany boxes. In this way, Lepidoptera are routinely pressed into service in culture to signify creepy or deviant behaviour, from John Fowles’s The Collector (whose protagonist progresses from imprisoning dead butterflies to kidnapping women) to the moth in The Silence of the Lambs. But butterfly lovers are not dismayed by The Duke of Burgundy because its all-female universe at least reflects one overlooked truth: contrary to stereotype, many great butterfly obsessives have been women. Writer-director Peter Strickland has obviously done his research because his butterfly professor is called Cynthia (the scientific name of the painted lady), and she brings to mind Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian gentlewoman and libertine who rebelled against her narrow upbringing and travelled the world in pursuit of butterflies. When she succumbed to a heart attack, butterfly net in hand, in Trinidad, her collection of 22,000 butterflies was bequeathed to Norwich’s Castle Museum with a padlocked black box, which her will stipulated must not to be opened until 35 years after her death. When distant relatives and museum curators – with admirable restraint – duly opened it in 1978, they discovered diaries that frankly detailed Fountaine’s doomed romances, exotic lovers and eventual companionship with a much younger man, as revealed by this entry from a butterflying foray near Damascus: “When we were alone and no one else could see us under the hood, Neimy kissed me repeatedly on my hands and arms, and as I felt in a thoroughly ‘loose’ mood that day, I raised no particular objection to his doing so.” Not quite S&M, but it would make another lovely film. Brown is the new green The three most important planning battles that currently imperil British wildlife have one feature in common. At Lodge Hill, Kent, the country’s best nightingale site is threatened by 5,000 homes. At Rampisham Down in Dorset, rare species of fungi are set to be obliterated by a solar farm. And the only known habitat in the world for the wonderfully named horrid ground-weaver spider – Radford Quarry, Plymouth – is to be covered in new houses. All three locations meet the official definition of a brownfield site, but are richer in wildlife than almost every slice of greenbelt in the country. We are all familiar with the brownfield-good, greenbelt-bad development mantra, but we urgently need better protection for environmentally important “brown” fields. Green and brown is not black and white. The tractor factor If you’re pootling along a country lane on 9 March and the world seems to be flashing by more quickly than usual, you will be right: on this day the speed limit for tractors rises from 20mph to 25mph. This is because transport ministry boffins hilariously imagine that an extra 5mph (plus a modest increase in permitted trailer weight) will “create over £57m a year in deregulatory savings for the farming industry” by bringing us up to the standard EU tractor speed limit. Oh, how I adore David Cameron and George Osborne’s global race! Banishing years of the dastardly French getting their wheat safely into the barn 93 seconds ahead of the poor British farmer. Personally, I’ll miss being stuck behind a tractor at 20mph. One of the joys of the countryside is being forced to slow down. |