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This section provides a general introduction to Lawrence’s writing. Lawrence was prolific and it is not possible here, or desirable, to give equal weighting to everything he produced. The sub-sections that follow are necessarily synoptic. They draw attention to his work in a range of genres. The commentary focuses on specific works in order to indicate Lawrence’s main preoccupations, and examines the development of certain constant themes. Attention will be given to texts with an acknowledged cultural importance, but which seldom give rise to critical consensus. Part II also begins to identify specific critical issues and concerns. The intention here is not to provide new interpretations but to rehearse the relationship between Lawrence’s ideas and contexts and his texts. When it is relevant, reference is made to Part I where the personal and social background to composition and publication is signalled, and to Part III where the critical debates inspired by the work are introduced.
The major novels, some of which attracted controversy when they were first published, and some of which were available at first only in expurgated versions (that is to say, not with the text that Lawrence intended) will be represented in this section. These include: The Rainbow (1915) which was suppressed by court-order in Britain, Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). The other novels are also discussed individually. Although they traditionally figure less prominently in surveys of Lawrence’s work than the novels of the war years or his final novel, they contribute something crucial to a broad understanding of the oeuvre. The Trespasser (1912), The Lost Girl (1920) and the unfinished Mr Noon (Part I, 1934; Part II, 1984) are important examples in this respect, alongside texts that are currently attracting more diverse critical attention than has been the case; for instance, Lawrence’s ’Mexican’ novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926). Artistic collaborations between Lawrence and others which produced significant work are also acknowledged, principally The Boy in the Bush (1924) written with the Australian writer M.L. Skinner. There is some concentration on the novellas, and the short stories will be represented, with specific reference to ’The Prussian Officer’ (1914), ’England, My England’ (1915) and The Woman Who Rode Away’ (1925), each of which heads up a collection of short fiction, and which, among others, represent significant landmarks in Lawrence’s artistic development.
Discussion of Lawrence’s poems will similarly focus on familiar collections such as Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), in which he celebrated his marriage, and later works such as Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), and Pansies (1929) which represent different aspects of his personal philosophy, itself continually under revision. The early plays
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will be represented by texts which share thematic concerns with the prose, notably The Daughter-in-Law (1913; 1965) and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914). The latter relates in essentials to ’Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911), regarded by many as one of Lawrence’s most effective short stories.
There is some coverage in Part II of Lawrence’s non-fiction, principally the essays, and the ways in which they draw attention to his main interests with special reference to his ambitions for the novel form, his engagement with America culture, psychoanalysis and literary criticism. Other concerns, his theorization of conflict, for example, and his social commentary, are highlighted with the critical focus on how and where these interests inform the work.
(a) THE EARLY WRITING
a (i) Plays ,-,
A Collier’s Friday Night was written in 1909 (published 1934). It anticipates Lawrence’s third novel, Sons and Lovers, particularly in its representation of a strong mother-son bond which is heightened in the presence of the despised husband and father, a miner. The play takes place in the miner’s home, minutely delineated in the stage directions. The second act introduces the mother’s rivalry with her son’s friend Maggie, an early version of Miriam Leivers (Sons and Lovers). The play, with its autobiographical elements, is of a period with the short stories ’Goose Fair’ (1910) and, more significantly, ’Odour of Chrysanthemums’, begun in 1909 and itself a fictional prefiguration of the play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd which was written in draft form by 1910. This period also produced The Daughter-in-Law (reworked as fiction in ’The Last Straw’ [original title ’Fanny and Annie’] in the England, My England collection of short stories). These texts show Lawrence drawing on his experience of home life and the life of the mining community he knew so well. The plays are naturalistic and, if nothing else, show Lawrence’s skill in dialogue and the rendering of dialect speech. In the ’Midlands’ plays, powerful and compelling human dramas are enacted in environments which perfectly support them, as in Sons and Lovers. The plays demonstrate Lawrence’s responsiveness (as in the fiction) to the particular challenge of his form. The Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, reviewing A Collier’s Friday Night, reminds the reader of the short-sightedness of the literary establishment in its
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cursory treatment of Lawrence as a playwright. He recognizes that the play is an early piece of writing but argues, ’Had Lawrence got the encouragement the play called for and deserved, England might have had a great dramatist’ (New Statesman 28 July 1934).
While they draw on Lawrence’s sense of his community these plays are primarily about the acute family tensions, and in particular the relationships between men and women, which Lawrence would continue to explore in a range of genres. Nevertheless, it was as a result of their powerful rendition of working-class life that they enjoyed a revival in 1965 at the Royal Court Theatre (Roberts 1986). After the ’Chatterley trial’ in 1960 [131] Lawrence’s cultural value was high, if not for reasons he would have anticipated, and in the 1960s the working-class themes of the plays had an audience. The Merry-go-Round (written in 1910) and The Married Man (written in 1912) did not attract the critical interest of the plays that got to the Royal Court, nor did The Fight for Barbara (written in 1912) which is set in Italy. Touch and Go, written in 1918, returned to the Midlands for its setting. Lawrence had the highest hopes for his ’Biblical’ play, David, written in 1925, but he was disappointed by the reviews of the 1927 production.
Critical interest in Lawrence’s plays has been relatively slight. When F.R. Leavis published his first influential monograph on Lawrence (1955), his interest was in Lawrence as a novelist, although he set a chapter aside for the short fiction [126]. Other critics followed suit, even where they disagreed with Leavis’s judgements. Keith Sagar (1985) writes that Lawrence’s fortunes as a dramatist were finished by 1913, and he makes a distinction between the early and the later writing for theatre which supports Sean O’Casey’s response to Lawrence’s work:
The later plays were occasional, out of the mainstream of Lawrence’s creative effort. The early plays were not. If [John Millington] Synge could make genuine dramatic tragedy out of the culture and speech of the Aran Islands, why could not Lawrence out of the culture and speech of the Nottinghamshire coalfields^
But as some qualification, based on the content of the most successful plays (as ’literature’), Sagar adds:
All the plays he had yet written except the ’impromptus’ had been on the same theme, the emasculating effect of an over-possessive mother on her sons. It seems that Lawrence could only tap this vein of dramatic energy and authenticity at this one point, the point where the life of that mining culture coincided with his own
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rawest autobiographical concern. He could not have written many more variations on that theme. In any case, the writing of Sons and Lovers had enabled him to shed that particular sickness, and write FINIS under that stage of his life from which the colliery plays had drawn their life-blood. …… ,. . .; .
<.<?xrrst ’v<ra; odo’ •••-.-. (Sagar 1985: 61)
(ii) The White Peacock
In the introduction to G.H. Neville’s memoir of his friend, D.H. Lawrence, the critic Carl Baron suggests that The White Peacock (1911) shares significantly in the main preoccupations of the more widely read, more critically acclaimed, later works: ’It seems to me that The White Peacock expresses pressures, needs and psychological patterning in imaginative form in direct line with his later handling of those same patternings when realities and experiences had taken the place of needs and fantasies’ (Neville 1981: 2). This encouragement to see in the first novel an adumbration of the maturer writing is fair. In fact, The White Peacock sets the standard for Lawrence’s writing to follow, absorbed as it is in questions of relationships. Lawrence told Jessie Chambers [10] that he intended to exploit the ’two-couples’ structure learned from George Eliot which he does here, and not for the last time. Possibly, he also learned from Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss (1860) that he could draw imaginatively on his Midlands location and an English provincial culture, but Eliot is not Lawrence’s only precursor. Michael Black draws attention to this sense of a tradition in his study of Lawrence’s early fiction:
The literary ancestors [of George, Lettie et al. in The White Peacock] might be George Eliot’s pairs of young people in Middlemarch, or jj Tolstoy’s pairs in Anna Karenina; or one might see George Saxton I as a failed version of Hardy’s Gabriel Oak … More strikingly, the strong rustic pair at the farm (George, Emily) set against an overbred pair from a cultivated drawing room (Lettie and Cyril) may remind the reader of Wuthering Heights – Lettie’s wilfulness and charm and her disastrous choice are very like Catherine Earnshaw’s. But from the beginning Lawrence is in his own world, and what he owes to his models is a minor matter compared with what he has to say on his own.
VW „;••. < -,;..;; . ,.,.• : .;.,,;.) i , i. ..^ -. . ,u. „ . ..- (filack 1986. 47)
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It is his strategic development of this distance from the novel tradition which is interesting, and which continues throughout Lawrence’s writing life.
The White Peacock is alone among Lawrence’s novels to exploit a first-person narrator. Cyril Beardsall, well-educated, erudite and recognizably the Lawrence-figure in the book, operates clumsily as ’omniscient’. Cyril/’Sybil’ sees everything but is largely outside the action, an insubstantial, sterile figure, close friend of the robust young farmer, George Saxton. Cyril’s other significant male friendship is with the philosopher-gamekeeper, Annable. A gamekeeper will figure again, notoriously, in Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Annable (’a devil of the woods’, 146), who ’trespasses’ in the narrative of The White Peacock with his story of the love of Lady Chrystabel, is an interesting precursor of Oliver Mellors.
In the chapter called ’A Shadow in Spring’, Annable’s tale begins the familiar Lawrentian theme of ’devouring women’ who are the destroyers of good men. He abuses a screeching peacock which he and Cyril encounter in the churchyard, arguing that the bird represents the soul of woman and that he should consequently enjoy wringing its neck (148). A woman, he announces, is ’all vanity and screech and defilement’ (149). The basis of this misogyny is not long concealed from Cyril who learns how Annable’s Lady Chrystabel, after a short spell of marriage, grows indifferent to what he calls ’the pride of my body’ (150). Preferring images of men gleaned from poetry, popular romances and paintings, she becomes ’souly’ (151), and Annable decamps, disguising himself as a servant, to become a shadowy adventurer haunting the columns of society gossip. It is in this context, too, that the attractions of the male body surface, consolidating and confirming the force of other aspects of the narrative. Cyril is bidden to feel Annable’s biceps as proof of his bodily pride: ’I was startled. The hard flesh almost filled his sleeve’ (150). By the end of this section an emphasis on touch has developed and an unconscious sympathy is expressed between the two men, which looks ahead to the bond suddenly forged between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich in the ’Gladiatorial’ chapter of Women in Love, and which expresses itself in their spontaneous grasping of hands. This is Cyril and Annable:
Ay,’ said I, rising. I held out my hand from the shadow. I was
startled myself by the white sympathy it expressed extended towards
him in the moonlight. He gripped it, and cleaved to me for a
moment, then he was gone.
••’<•• (WP 151; emphasis added)
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Cyril, after this expression of ’white sympathy’, walks into the woods to touch the ’budded gentleness of the trees’ and to feel the caress of the Velvet fingers’ of the larches (152). He remembers Annable in the chapter called ’A Poem of Friendship’, first as he watches George drying himself after a swim, and then as he is in turn dried by his friend. This episode establishes the importance of male friendships in Lawrence’s writing, and is frequently taken as an example of the homoerotic which is both present and resisted in Lawrence:
… he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman.
(WP 222-3; emphasis added)
The idea behind this passage, and others in the novel which dwell on the body masculine, is reworked notably in Women in Love (1920) and Aaron’s Rod (1922), and reappears in much of the writing. The critic Tony Pinkney, however, cautions against reading this passage solely as privileging the love between men as a theme in the book, arguing that one of the Utopian insights in the novel turns on the pleasure value of labour – the young men have worked the fields together for weeks and have formed an attachment based on their shared work which has its ’objective correlative’ in this scene of George drying Cyril (Pinkney 1990: 15-16). As Pinkney suggests, in ways reminiscent of the first pages of The Rainbow, a continuity between the workers and the land which is worked is maintained, where the pleasure of ’labour’ is not yet the ’toil’ of the alienated worker. Even so, the reference to women that George might not fear, indicates the potential for oppositional sexual politics which underpins The While Peacock. Annable’s story, for example, establishes a loathing of the ’over-conscious’ woman who operates from an ideal (151). The destiny of Lettie, in this novel, provides an analogous model of feminine bad faith. Lettie resists the sensuous aspect of George, or the sensuous aspect of her attraction to him, choosing to privilege her social rather than her sexual self (this dichotomy is established in The White Peacock}. By the end of the novel,
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she has married the bourgeois Leslie Tempest who serves social systems rather than himself, and she embraces motherhood as her vocation in a social rather than a ’vital’ sense (compare The Rainbow’s Anna Brangwen who, in childbearing, enjoys ’her riches’). Lettie’s choice is that in submitting to her social self she has chosen ’to ignore her own self … ’escaping … the responsibilities of her own development’ (284). It is his particular treatment of these themes, developed in considerable detail in The White Peacock, which establishes Lawrence’s difference from his literary predecessors, and his modernity.
(iii) The Trespasser
Lawrence’s next novel was altogether different in its content, structure and mode of language. He owed it to his meeting and friendship (1908-
12) with Helen Corke when he became a school-teacher in Croydon [12]. The Trespasser (1912) is a significantly revised version of The Saga of Siegmund’ written in 1910. It is by Lawrence’s own admission a juvenile work, and he quickly tired of it. His harsh judgement on the book was that the style was too self-consciously poetic, but that even so, it ’[ran] to seed in realism’ (Letters I: 184). This authorial view need not obscure what is valuable in the book. If it occupies a minor position in the oeuvre it is, nevertheless, a novel which is underpinned by ideas of relevance to later work, and some excellent writing.
The Trespasser has its origins in the story of the tragic relationship between Helen Corke and her married lover who took his own life after they had shared a brief holiday in Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. Corke gave Lawrence access to her ’Freshwater Diaries’ which describe the final days of the relationship, and she spoke to him at length about their emotional legacy. However, while it is the case that Lawrence draws heavily on Corke’s accounts it is erroneous to regard the novel purely as a re-telling of someone else’s story. Lawrence submitted the material offered by Corke to the dictates of his own creative intelligence, and wrote also in the light of his own immediate successes and failures with women [10]. His emerging theories of sexual and metaphysical conflict between men and women are tested as he charts the tension between Helena, in love with the musical, creative, man but not desirous of sex, and Siegmund who recognizes the intensity of her reelings and so cannot accept her repudiation of his body. The novel is unlike much of the early work in the intensity of narrative concentration on the central relationship – although descriptions of the family Me of Siegmund and his wife, Beatrice, are often acknowledged to be among the best writing in the book. Although it demonstrates signi-
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ficant narrative control, therefore, it is a flawed work, nowhere more so than in Chapter XIII where Lawrence introduces, rather too selfconsciously, the figure of Hampson, a mouthpiece for Lawrence’s views on the oppressive love, for exceptional men, of women whose pursuit of love is confined to an ideal. Helena is one of Lawrence’s much despised ’dreaming women’ (Sons and Lovers’ Miriam Leivers is another, so too is Lady Chrystabel). As commentators often point out, a vicious parody of Helen Corke also occurs late in his writing career in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in Oliver Mellors’ catalogue of difficult women (LCL
200).
The narrative structure of The Trespasser is of interest because of the ways in which it shows Lawrence again both exploiting, and distancing himself from, a novelistic tradition. This is something he will continue to do, increasingly self-consciously, as an artist. The clue rests in Lawrence’s description of his ’idyll’. It is essentially an island story, where the remoteness, the complete otherness, of the island to which the lovers retreat is reminiscent of literary romance. The narrative is crudely punctuated throughout with references to the Ring cycle operas of Richard Wagner (to make the point about a doomed relationship, Lawrence has the lovers occasionally dub themselves ’Siegfried’ and ’Sieglinde’, and makes continual reference to the symbolism of the operas Tristan und Isolde and Die Walkure). The island is the space where romantic love can notionally blossom, in contrast to the dreary suburbs. The return to realism occurs where the narrative deals principally (and highly skilfully) with Siegmund’s unhappy family life and the ordinariness of his domestic environment. The plot of a man who walks out on his family is revisited much more confidently in Aaron’s Rod, where the hero succeeds in making the break.
Part of The Trespasser’s significance lies in the attempt to write a romance and to subject romantic love to an extended critique. This is not only about Lawrence’s sense of literary history. It is also a result of his developing thought on male-female relations, which has its strongest representation in the depiction of Helena as in love with the idea of love, but resistant to sexual realities. She witholds herself. Siegmund is the focus for the novel’s sympathetic treatment of masculine feeling (if feeling can be gendered) and the (literally) deadly results of sexual fear. Many readings of The Trespasser concentrate on the destruction of the man by the woman’s sexual squeamishness, although, as we might expect with Lawrence, the issue is not that simple. Not for the last time in a novel Lawrence associates the misuse, or misdirection, of sex with death in his analyses of human action.
-Dg^S”
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(iv) Sons and Lovers
Of this first phase of Lawrence’s writing career – the phase that is, with a few important exceptions, clearly autobiographical – Sons and Lovers (1913) is the work most acknowledged to have an enduring significance. It is characterized by some extremely accomplished writing which demonstrates in Lawrence a maturity and a confidence that is superior to the overall achievement of The White Peacock and The Trespasser, even while these novels show his promise with the form. The relationships between individuals are now consistently subtly observed (the Morel’s marriage; the exchanges between each parent and each child; Mrs Morel’s measured interaction with her neighbours), and operate within the novel’s chief themes. Lawrence makes commanding use of dialogue and dialect and arguably improves on Edwardian realism. In addition, specific episodes stand out because of the memorable power of the writing (for instance, Morel’s expulsion of his pregnant wife from the house, and her subsequent reverie, in ’The early married Life of the Morels’; Mrs. Morel’s trip to London to nurse William, and the return of his body to Bestwood in ’Death in the Family’). The book shows both what Lawrence had learned from the novels read in his youth, and the emergence of his particular voice and style.
Sons and Lovers begins, like many Victorian novels of the provinces, with a description of place. It evokes an English Midlands landscape marked since the seventeenth century by the production of coal and identified with the social changes wrought by the industrial revolution. In particular it highlights the influence of powerful private companies which, in sinking large mines and erecting miners’ dwellings, produced the contours of the modern pit community (SL 9-10). The description which begins Sons and Lovers can be compared with the opening paragraphs of the autobiographical essay, ’Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’ (Phoenix: 133-40), with its description of the worked country, where Lawrence invokes some literary models: ’… the life was a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton and Fielding and George Eliot’ (135).
The Morel family are of this community, but Mrs Morel’s aspirations lead her on occasion to challenge its dominant values. The novel charts her best efforts to direct her sons away from the mine into jobs marked by, in her view, a respectability (and income) beyond the pit and pit culture. From the start her character is identified as ’superior’ and antagonistic to her husband and his interests which she resists throughout her marriage. Part I of the book deals with the tensions in the family
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caused by the oppositionality of Mr and Mrs Morel, and shows Mrs Morel’s success in winning the hearts and minds of her children, and in particular her sons, from her husband whose family status is eventually reduced to that of a minor nuisance. One of Lawrence’s most mature achievements is to represent the contempt in which Morel is held by his family as a result of his periods of resistance (which include drunken violence) towards a wife he barely understands. These occur, however, alongside homely cameos which show him to be selfsufficient, attractively absorbed by his work and the comforting routines of his day and week, even as he is, finally, defeated by his wife’s disaffection. Despite (or, perhaps, through) his crude attempts at regaining patriarchal control, and his representation often as marginal, a great deal of narrative sympathy is, in fact, set aside for Walter Morel who is, ultimately, scared of his highly strung, sharptongued wife. As in A Collier’s Friday Night [36], however, the main focus is on the bond between mother and sons, against this strangerfather; and ultimately on the rivalry for the heart of the artist-son (Paul) between the mother and the son’s sweetheart.
Part II deals with the young adulthood of Paul Morel, the developing artist, up to the death of his mother. It charts his sexual relationships with women, first with Miriam Leivers and then with the more mature, married, Clara Dawes. The development of these relationships has to be seen in the light of Paul’s love for his mother and his inability to have unproblematic relationships with other women while his love for her remains his principal emotional commitment. It is not surprising, given the popularity at this time of the ideas of the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, that Sons and Lovers was immediately received and reviewed as a ’Freudian’ novel. Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex was in circulation, and many readers interpreted Sons and Lovers as a fictional account of the idea given the vivid representation of the mother-father-son triangle at the heart of the book, with its implications for Paul Morel’s emotional life while his mother lives. At the time of publication, Lawrence had to contend with reviews of the novel that developed this interpretation. (See, for instance, Alfred Kuttner, in Draper 1970: 76-80) [134-8]. A growing preoccupation with selfconsciousness (as a ’theme’ rather than a ’style’) can also be seen as a tendency in this novel. Paul Morel strives for self-definition first as an artist, then as a man. In the closing lines of the book, he achieves a sense of individual self-hood, free at last from the women in his life (mother, lovers) who have, up to that point, defined him. (Similarly, James Joyce’s Bildungsroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
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1916, made the figure of the artist, and the development of an artistic consciousness, central to the work.)
The autobiographical elements of Sons and Lovers are easy to identify: as we have seen, Lawrence went through phases of genuine dislike for his father, and contempt for what were perceived to be his limitations. Lawrence loved his mother, was ’on her side’, and cared deeply about what she thought of him as a man and an artist. The family lost Lawrence’s vigorous elder brother to illness when he was a young man. Jessie Chambers was used badly by Lawrence towards the end of their long association. In addition, Lawrence had an affair with an older married woman, Alice Dax, and Lawrence and his sister tended their sick mother in her last days [6-13]. The book is not, however, purely autobiography. While Lawrence drew on what he knew best (as he did not always with The White Peacock and less so in The Trespasser], he was also* stepping out into the new territory of abstract thought. The interesting questions are not concerned ultimately with autobiographical detail, but rather with Lawrence’s developing reference to oppositionality – the nerve-worn relations between men and women which would also mark his later novels. This is evident in the description of the differences between the young Gertrude Coppard, later Mrs Morel, and Walter Morel when they first meet:
He was so full of colour and animation, his voice ran so easily into comic grotesque, he was so ready and so pleasant with everybody. Her own father had a rich fund of humour, but it was satiric. This man’s was different: soft and non-intellectual, warm, a kind of gambolling.
She herself was opposite. : < •. .;•• :• .:;>•• v. .= f, –
. •, • <.••*>„ , v;.t.,v:; ;:i; , (SL17)
This oppositionality is ultimately disastrous. It is not the positive foundation for necessary self-sufficiency that was beginning to characterize Lawrence’s thought about relationships.
Throughout their marriage, Mrs Morel attempts to offset her rapid disillusion with her husband by living through her sons in whom, in the absence of other possibilities (of education, of employment) she must find herself. Hence this summary in the chapter called ’Strife in Love’:
William had brought her his sporting trophies. She kept them still: and she did not forgive his death. Arthur was handsome, at least a good specimen, and warm and generous, and probably would do
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well in the end. But Paul was going to distinguish himself. She had a great belief in him, the more because he was unaware of his own powers. There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise. She was to see herself fulfilled.
(SL 222; emphasis added)
This vicarious mode of living is reserved for intelligent women in the book. Mrs Morel and Miriam Leivers are similar in the extent to which both live through Paul’s achievements, which is how they become rivals. Theirs is a likeness, however, to which both are necessarily blind. Neither ends up with Paul. If they found a way to share him, then, given the language of self-dispersal and absorption in the narrative, nothing, in fact, would be left of him. The jilting of Miriam and the death of his mother are the events which give Paul ’release’ (Chapter XIV). In ’Strife in Love’, strife is evident between Paul and Miriam, as we might expect; between Paul and his mother principally when she perceives Miriam as a rival; and between Paul and his father where the father is rival – the latter says of mother and son, finding them in an embrace, ’”At your mischief again <?•”’ (252).
Several details in the narrative align Mrs Morel and Miriam. Neither is easily capable of ’revelling’, as Paul calls it in ’Strife in Love’ (226); both women are clever and aspirational. Of the young Gertrude we are told, ’She loved ideas, and was considered very intellectual’ (17), while Paul’s first intimacies with Miriam are about books and learning. Miriam is dangerously close, however, to the ’dreaming women’ so despised in The White Peacock and The Trespasser; and possibly Mrs Morel’s transformation into the practical manager of her family, together with her immersion in the small but crucial domestic economies (her liberty is as broad as her housekeeping money allows), preserve her from that fate. If her sons are clever, or talented, that is enough. Some of the novel’s imagery, however, expresses the similarity of Miriam and Mrs Morel. At Miriam’s house, Paul pulls some berries and leaves from a bowl saying that if she wore them in her hair she would resemble a witch or priestess, never a reveller. On returning home, he makes a gift to his mother of the berries and leaves (226-8). A ’priestess’, subtly pagan, Miriam might draw his soul out of him (231-2). This fear of a man’s loss of self in love occurs again, notably in the strife between the lovers in Women in Love. Elsewhere, Miriam is a muse – ’She brought forth to him his imaginations’ (241). These are Paul’s versions of Miriam, and on the whole they are versions of herself which she does not recognize. He might berate her for her soulfulness
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but when she approaches him physically – ’She put her two hands on his sides, and ran them quickly down’ (227) – he recoils. As long as she loves him ’absorbedly’ (227), he cannot risk himself in her hands ’She did not seem to realise him in all this. He might have been an object. She never realised the male he was’ (227). She becomes, in effect, a threat and he fears the effect of her touch on him: ’”You switch me off somewhere, and project me out of myself. I am quite ghostish, disembodied”’ (232). The point is not Miriam’s feeling for Paul, but how he interprets her effect on him. ’Strife in Love’ deals with, among other things, modes of knowledge. Towards the end of the chapter, for example, are descriptions of Paul’s understanding about the nature of his relationship with his mother, but how he knows, i.e. ’instinctively’ (251), is crucial. This points towards a later developed use in Lawrence of the language of the ’blood’, and the shift to the body as the locus of the unconscious (instinctive knowledge), which characterizes much of the later writing. The theme of mothering would continue to get his attention but by the early 1920s Lawrence was publishing books in which he railed against oppressive mother-love, hinting at the negative emotional effects on men.
Just before the publication of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence wrote a ’Foreword’ which was not, by his own admission, intended for publication (SL 465-73). It can be read today as a draft piece, in which Lawrence begins to explore some of the ideas which will surface in other, longer discursive texts [98-111]. It begins in quasi-Biblical style, exploiting the language of the Gospel of St John which furnishes Lawrence with some dual concepts – the Word and the Flesh – and with which he sets out an extremely obscure analysis of contemporary relations between men and women. He asserts the primacy of woman (470), and articulates an idea which was close to his heart at this time – the need for a creative man to have a supportive woman at his back. If the relation between man and woman is good, argues Lawrence (in the first eighteen months of his relationship with Frieda Weekley [13]), man is ’re-born’ of woman (472). This underlines Lawrence’s ideal of ’marriage’ at this time. If, on the other hand, the relation between them is flawed, there is no proper connection, and man wastes himself, while woman (seeking elsewhere for fulfilment) makes lovers of her sons. The final paragraph of the Foreword warns of the dangers of becoming a ’son-lover’ – this is the part of the text which does speak to the novel’s concerns – and how this blocks the son from achieving a fulfilling (creative) relation with a woman who is not his mother.
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Further Reading
The plays have attracted little sustained critical attention, and the principal study is still Sylvia Sklar’s The Plays of D.H. Lawrence (1975) see also Sagar and Sklar in Keith Sagar (ed., 1982). Ian Clarke has written on The Fight for Barbara (in Preston and Hoare, eds, 1989), and recommends Raymond Williams’ introduction to Three Plays in a Penguin Books edition of 1969. Four critical items on Lawrence’s plays are collected in Jackson and Brown Jackson (eds, 1988:203-16), and Roberts (1986) includes a chapter on A Collier’s Friday Night at the Royal Court. John Worthen contributes a chapter on Lawrence as a dramatist in Fernihough (ed., 2001). Black (1991) has written a detailed commentary on the early fiction. Spilka (ed., 1963) includes a descriptive account of the plays by Arthur E. Waterman who concludes that, apart from Touch and Go, the plays are merely ’the hedgings of the other forms’. General studies of the novels, of which there are many, usually address the earliest fiction synoptically with Sons and Lovers given more focused treatment than The White. Peacock and The Trespasser. Kermode, for example, touches on the first novels (and, briefly, the plays) in the ’prologue’ to his study (1973). Worthen gives the early fiction more extensive treatment (1991b), and Pinkney (1990) examines their relation to modernism in his first two chapters. Bell (1992) begins his study with an examination of the narrative styles and language themes in the first three novels. Leavis (1955) dealt with The White Peacock and The Trespasser as ’lesser novels’ but felt that Lawrence had turned a corner with Sons and Lovers. Tedlock (1963) discusses the early fiction in his chapter, ’Early Patterns of Revolt’, and (in Tedlock, ed., 1965), the sources and early criticism of Sons and Lovers. Raymond Williams shows how much is achieved in the language of the early writing, and the importance of this in Sons and Lovers (Williams 1970). Essays and articles on the early fiction are too numerous to be listed here. Of the first novels, Sons and Lovers is awarded singular book-length treatment as in Salgado (1969), Draper (1986), Harvey (1987), Murfin (1987), Finney (1990), Black (1992) and Rylance (ed., 1996) – Rylance has also written recently on the sources and intellectual contexts of all three early novels (2001). Widdowson (ed., 1992) brings together some interesting pieces. The Freudian debates on Sons and Lovers emerge in Tiverton (1951), Weiss (1962) and Stoll (1968), although discussions about Lawrence, psychology and psychoanalysis go well beyond critiques of his third novel [134-8].
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(b) THE ’SERIOUS ENGLISH’ NOVELS
(i) The Rainbow
The Rainbow (1915) has its genesis in the years immediately preceding the Great War, It was suppressed within two months of its publication in Britain and the publisher, Methuen, was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The novel had been printed only after considerable revision and rewriting on Lawrence’s part, and went through a number of drafts, identified first as ’The Sisters’. Altered, it became ’The Wedding Ring’ which, like ’The Sisters’, anticipated much of the content of Women in Love. Finally The Rainbow was published despite certain reservations about Lawrence’s uses of language, and ’sexual morbidities’ (R 484; a judgement echoed by T.S. Eliot in After Strange Gods), reservations which would surface again in Lawrence criticism.
The Rainbow is Lawrence’s first properly modernist novel. In a radically new language it established Lawrence’s ’impersonal’ aesthetic (this is what he meant when he called the novel ’a bit futuristic’ [Letters II: 182]). In it, he re-presented character, addressing the continuity of human experience in the generations of the Brangwen family at Marsh Farm, and the movement towards individuation in the figure of Ursula Brangwen, the modern woman, who would also appear in Women in Love (1920). As Women in Love, so The Rainbow showed Lawrence’s developing interest in unconscious functioning, although what he understood by ’unconscious’ was very different from the defining concept of Freudian psychoanalysis. Although Lawrence shared with Freud an interest in the instinctive life, he repudiated what he knew of the scientist’s theories. Indeed, the novels which came after Sons and Lovers showed the direction of Lawrence’s thought about relations between men and women in ways •which challenged popular ’Freudism’. These are books where sex is often linked with death, but where it is also a means of self-renewal, the idea of the re-birth of the self which lies at the heart of Lawrence’s personal philosophy. Women’s experience is often central in his writing, and Lawrence is open to the charge of misogyny directed at many of the male modernists, but as Marianne DeKoven remarks, ’This masculinist misogyny … was almost universally accompanied by its dialectical twin: a fascination and strong identification with the empowered feminine’ (Levenson ed., 1999:174). It is possible to think this of Lawrence who both celebrated and railed •i&a^Hrai.tixs^af^c-n..? v-c ; ;nj vrs«-!W.tat«9:ritij’i«iHtsaai>i:»«sK4:«,-w*
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against the feminine, but who, as shall be seen, acknowledged the centrality of a female principle at work in his own writing.
Lawrence’s treatment of issues of self and sexuality came to operate increasingly in terms of a highly self-conscious primitivism (for example in The Lost Girl, and less successfully in The Plumed Serpent), prior to his description of ’phallic-consciousness’ in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In The Rainbow, he undercuts the imperatives of an historical consciousness by substituting a contrasting mythic dimension which underpins characters’ experiences. As we shall see, the Brangwens are presented first in an unacknowledged ’prologue’ which recalls Genesis in its emphasis on the generational and the cyclical nature of existence (Lawrence exploits Biblical imagery throughout this novel). In the first pages a way of living and being is foregrounded, from which the modern individual is ultimately alienated. There is no ’voice’ (no specific register) attached in the beginning to the timeless Brangwen figures, but the separate wills and allegiances of the men and women depicted are distinguished by the directions in which they look – the men to the land, the women beyond, although their lives accommodate both directions. The depiction of these men in the fields and the women at home is not ’realist’. It is one aspect of a mythic mode of writing which, in later work, approaches a highly specific primitivism. As Cristopher Nash notes, with reference to a German tradition, in Lawrence ’myth (like religious music and dance) is the communal expression not of a morality but of the primal, ecstatic energies of nature acting in the people, the Volk’ (Nash 1980). It is perfectly clear, in reading The Rainbow (and later The Plumed Serpent), how this observation is borne out. Further, the ’prologue’ in its impersonal scope and scale anticipates the importance and centrality of modernist explorations of time (historical, mythic and personal) which are central to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses, for example.
In Lawrence’s ’mythical’ mode, then, the mythic signifies a kind of understanding which is different from analytical, over-conscious, modern ratiocination. This is to recall a phrase, ’the mythical method’, which is T.S. Eliot’s, from his essay ’Ulysses, Order, and Myth’ (1923). It addresses James Joyce’s ’epic’, a ’high’ modernist narrative in which episodes from Homer’s epic The Odyssey provide a structure for the modern story which deals with a highly specific present, the wanderings of two (conventionally unheroic) Dubliners through their city on the day and night of 16 June 1904. Eliot – who was often critical of Lawrence [119; 124-5] – approves of Joyce’s combination of the traditional and the contemporary, and celebrates his extremely self-
conscious use of myth to order and control the chaotic banalities of the present. Lawrence and Joyce are in fact often viewed as antithetical Lawrence disliked Joyce’s ’self-conscious’ mode of writing, and he did not use myth as a structuring principle in the same way – yet both are central, because of their differences, to an understanding of modernism.
So, Lawrence is not ’manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ in order to make ’the modern world possible for art’ in ways that Eliot found represented in WB. Yeats and Joyce in particular. Instead, he institutes a personal mythopoeic (mythmaking) style which draws (in The Rainbow’) most often on Old Testament parallels when these seem to suggest models, modes or images of human consciousness. To take an instance, the death by water of Tom Brangwen (Chapter IX, ’The Marsh and the Flood’), recalls the Biblical Flood which, like the Creation, is one of Lawrence’s favourite tropes. The point, nowever, is not the use of a Biblical or mythic parallel to structure a narrative about events happening in the present. The idea works poetically, by association: the fact is that Tom Brangwen is to all intents and purposes (psychologically) pan of the flood (the ’wave’ of experience). At the time of his death his individuation is not complete, as it cannot be at this point in the novel. This idea, this model, occurs as early as 1911 in a context not intended for publication, demonstrating the power of the metaphor for Lawrence: ’When we die, like rain-drops falling back again into the sea, we fall back into the big, shimmering sea of unorganised life which we call God. We are lost as individuals, yet we count in the whole’ (Letters I: 256). This vision of impersonality persists even in the novel’s ’prologue’ in reference to undifferentiated life as the ’wave which cannot halt’ (R 9; emphasis added). It is a description which anticipates the intense and accumulative mode of repetition that characterizes the book’s narrative language, of which the description, ’the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men’ (10), often serves as a kind of shorthand. Acknowledging The Rainbow’s linguistic strangeness compared with anything he had written before, Lawrence called it ’a novel in a foreign language I don’t know very well’ (Letters I: 544). To return to the example of Tom Brangwen’s drowning, and to reinforce the point about Tom’s place in ’the whole’, it can be said that Ursula is, in contrast, the only Brangwen in the novel who possesses, by the end, an individuated consciousness: she is not any longer, or at least not in the same way, part of ’the wave’.
The Rainbow, as I have said, is Lawrence’s first modernist novel. The Brangwens have, for generations, farmed the same area of the NottsDerby border, the part of England where Lawrence was born and grew
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up, but he is not evoking his background in the same spirit as he did in Sons and Lovers: he said of his new project, ’It is all analytical – quite unlike Sons and Lovers, not a bit visualised’ (Letters I: 526). By the end of The Rainbow, the strong sense of mythologised ’tribal’ identification which begins the ’saga’ has given way, in the figure of Ursula Brangwen, to modern(ist) individuation. It is bycharting Ursula’s transformation as a result of her emotional experiences, and the development of her private and public personas towards a clear sense of her identity, that Lawrence finds a way of raising questions about selfhood which are so fundamental to exploratory modernist writing, but in a linguistic and philosophical mode which is highly idiosyncratic.
How does this process of raising and resolving questions of selfhood unfold^ The Rainbow represents a continuation of Lawrence’s exploration of sexual and family relationships, with the emphasis again on marriage. The novel describes the experiences of members of three generations of the Brangwen family as they grow up, establish themselves in adult relationships, and give way to the next generation. Tom Brangwen, farmer, inheritor of Marsh Farm (he it is who will die in the flood), is the focus of the first generation given specific treatment in the novel. His marriage is to an outsider, Lydia Lensky, a widowed member of Poland’s displaced gentry who has a revolutionary background. Dispossessed and alone in England, she makes him the stepfather to the toddler Anna whom he brings up as his own, alongside the children from his marriage. This marriage is the first extended means in the novel by which Lawrence examines the development of feeling in contexts where the key players have no cultural common ground. It is a study in the positive and negative powers of practically wordless communication, and of stasis, and introduces Lawrence’s extensive and sophisticated critique not of the institution of marriage, which does not interest him, but of the idea of marriage as a means of relating to the ’untranslatable’ other while keeping the self apart and alive.
In the next generation, Anna’s romance with, and marriage to, her cousin Will Brangwen provides the means of her break from the enclosed family community of Marsh Farm. Much of the narrative emphasis shifts to Will, an awkward, self-conscious youth now re-defining himself in his newly married context. An autodidact, he is passionately committed to the forms of early English church architecture, a willing student of Victorian revivals of Renaissance painters, and a craftsman in his own right. If Tom Brangwen is ’nature’, inseparable from his native soil and community, Will Brangwen is ’culture’, more alienated than Tom from his home ground. Lawrence makes him a draughtsman,
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a conservator of church furniture, a drawing master – an artisan who balances successful moments of unconscious creativity with hours of frustrated over-conscious labour. In some powerful episodes (the chapters Anna Victrix’ and ’The Cathedral’) Will and Anna continue Lawrence’s examination of married love as necessarily oppositional (see ’Study of Thomas Hardy’, chapters VI and VII), until Anna all but exits the narrative except as the continual, and willing, bearer of children. Will and Anna are the parents of Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the ’women in love’ of this novel’s sequel.
Ursula is the primary focus of The Rainbow’s third generation. As he had with Tom and Anna, the first father-daughter couple, Lawrence represents the closeness of the girl’s relationship with her father in her infant years, and the necessary move away from his values and authority later. Perhaps representing a shift in himself towards greater sympathy for fathers, Lawrence also heightens, in The Rainbow, the oppressive maternalism of Anna as Ursula reaches adolescence and adulthood and begins the struggle for her own voice. Lawrence puts Ursula through a range of experiences, familial, sexual and professional, so that her responses are often formed in opposition to conventional social mores. Depictions of sexual encounters were cited as reasons for The Rainbow’s suppression in Britain with a particular frisson caused by ’Shame/ a chapter which charts the passage of Ursula’s sexual love for her school-teacher, Winifred Inger. The language of other episodes with her lover the soldier Anton Skrebensky (including in the context of his time in South Africa against the Boers, discussions about service to nation and empire which Ursula reviles) also caused consternation and censure. Ursula’s experiences, however, add up to more than the sexual. A ’new woman’, she enters a university college and ’the man’s world’ where she works as a school-teacher, at first optimistic before a dissatisfaction with unheroic realities takes hold of her. Her destiny is shaped by the terms of Lawrence’s criticism of English society at the time and, by testing certain ’roles’ within it, Ursula suffers. However, it is her vision of spiritual recovery, which goes beyond the personal to embrace a collective experience, that closes the novel.
The conclusion is concerned with Ursula’s breakdown and recovery after the end of her relationship with Skrebensky, and the last paragraphs of the book, with their intense poetic power, describe the regeneration of her spirit evoked by the image of the rainbow, which also stands for Lawrence’s commitment to his new form of writing. The final chapter, also called ’The Rainbow’, describes Ursula at home in Beldover convinced in her heart that she is pregnant with Skrebensky’s child. In a striking description, which is about false
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consciousness, she writes a deeply penitent letter to Skrebensky in which she offers herself to him as a dutiful wife, in repudiation of her former desires for self-fulfilment. She believes this, at the time of writing, to be sincere: ’This was her true self, for ever’ (R 449). Waiting for his reply, she slips out of the house intending to walk, and encounters in a rough field a group of horses. The powerfully poetic narrative makes this encounter transformative, and it lies at the heart of the chapter. The horses appear to menace Ursula. They operate as a group surging before and behind her as she labours in a panic to escape what becomes their oppressive sphere of influence. Their massive bodies, full of power, opposing her, correspond to the immense weight she feels pressing on her heart as she enters her moment of transition, which could also be called her moment of individuation: the narrative calls her ’a stone, unconscious, unchanging, unchangeable, whilst everything rolled by in transience, leaving her there’. After this, her ’final isolation’ (454) is emphasized. Dazed, traumatized, she makes her way home and falls into a delirium: the child is lost (this has been about the birth of the self, not progeny). Her delirium is a necessary twilight for Ursula. More generally, it provides the space in which she repudiates the world (including family, Beldover, England) which has produced her, judging it ’unreal’. This recognition prepares the way for her rebirth, or the rebirth of a self glimpsed in the anticipatory imagery of the breaking husk and germinating seed: ’There was a space between her and the shell’ (456). The old, or ’bygone’, world is the husk; the new shoot is Ursula reborn. Coming round from her delirium she is judged fit enough to watch the world from her window, and her own rebirth, or ’liberation’, expands to characterize a new ’cultural’ germination which encompasses the colliers, women and children she sees ’walking each in the husk of an old fruition’ (457). Over the hideousness of the new development of houses and estates, and the
1’ obsoleteness of the church-tower (a church also dominates the skyline of the book’s ’prologue’), she sees a rainbow forming, recognizing it as
;. a sign of the regeneration she has herself experienced, that the blighted population will also undergo: ’they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration’ … ’new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination’ (459). It is in this positive and visionary spirit that the novel ends. The language of this ’rebirth’ is highly and powerfully metaphorical in the way it concludes Ursula’s experience. But what notion of the self is Lawrence here developing1?
To understand this it is necessary to go back a few years to an important letter of 5th June 1914 written by Lawrence to his editor and mentor, Edward Garnett [15; 124]. In a debate about characteriza-
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tion, Lawrence offers a new view of the self (and of the novel form). He announces his disinterest in ’the old-fashioned human element which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent’, and describes instead an emphasis on ’that which is physic – non-human, in humanity’ (Letters II: 182). As Lawrence develops his theme in this letter, he rejects versions of the self based on ’the old stable ego of the character’ (183). If Lawrence is, at some point, to throw out psychological realism, with what will he replace it”? His statement to Garnett is a signal that his characters might not in the future (and certainly not in The Rainbow] be constructed according to existing orthodoxies relating either to a ’moral scheme’ social expectation – or to current theories of personality and the operations of the psyche. Verbalising his idea at length, perhaps for the first time, he suggests to his friend that, regarding the representation of personality in fiction:
There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (183)
This is a statement about the impersonal nature of the self and from this point we are aware of the centrality of impersonal forces (most often relating to feeling, for instance, attraction and repulsion, rather than the usual commonplaces of love and hate) motivating Lawrence’s characters – it is thus a statement of Lawrence’s awareness of his departure from dominant modes of literary characterization. The letter is a crucial document in Lawrence studies.
At the start of the 1914-18 war, Lawrence also wrote his ’Study of Thomas Hardy’, which is discussed in a later section of the present volume [99-101]. As we shall see, the ’Study’ is less about Hardy the novelist (Lawrence admitted this, and it was not published as a work of criticism in his lifetime), than it was about Lawrence’s developing philosophy, or ’metaphysic’ as he was now prepared to call the novelist’s Vision’. He had begun to articulate his thought to Garnett, and to other friends, in letter form. In 1913 he had also written the important Foreword to Sons and Lovers [47], In the ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ he creates parables – extended metaphors – to describe the spirit of artistic creation. In a language of oppositions and symbols he argues that the mind is a ’male’ principle, and ’flesh’ a female principle, and for art to succeed as art in a ’living sense’, as ’supreme art’, the two must be in a
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state of true relation (his metaphor is ’marriage’), not imbalance. Developing alongside this thought are statements on ’true’ marriage as a metaphysical partnership (an idea explored in The Rainbow – see Tom’s speech in Chapter V, ’Wedding at the Marsh’). These ideas come together when he looks ahead to an art ’which knows the struggle between the two conflicting laws [law of man and law of woman], and knows the final reconciliation, where both are equal, two-in-one, complete’ (STH 128). At this time it is quite clear that the art form most likely to be transformed by this process, and this understanding, is the novel. The Rainbow was revised in the light of these ideas (see Kinkead-Weekes 1968).
While metaphors of regeneration had been part of Lawrence’s discursive writing since his unpublished Foreword to Sons and Lovers, and had sustained the philosophy that gave rise to the final version of The Rainbow, his next novel was to be much more relentless in its critique of a broken-down culture, instituting a forgetting of the possibilities of The Rainbow’s final chapter and to some extent a dismantling of ’the earth’s new architecture’ (R 459).
(ii) Women in Love
Women in Love (1920), like The Rainbow, developed from ’The Sisters’ as Lawrence rewrote and revised. There was a time when he entertained the idea of reprinting The Rainbow as Women in Love ’Vol. I’, alongside the new novel, a detail which shows the extent to which the books developed from a single project. However, these novels are not identical in their modes of thought or language. In the ’Foreword’ to Women in Love – written in 1919, after the completion of the novel, and first printed to publicize the book in America – Lawrence identifies the novel’s war-time provenance, showing it to have been four years in the writing. He says, ’it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself. I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’ (W 485). With his mind on the recent past, Lawrence also records his publishers’ fears of prosecution, remembering the example of The Rainbow.
So Women in Love was first published in America in 1920 by Thomas Seltzer – a publisher who had a long association with Lawrence – as a private (limited) edition for subscribers. It was published in England the following year incorporating, on the insistence of the publisher, Martin Seeker, many changes to the text only some of which Lawrence authorized. Seltzer also admitted to making changes but even so,
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Lawrence was almost prosecuted for the content of Women in Love in America in 1921. While the novel sold, it produced other threats of prosecution, notably from people who recognized themselves in Lawrence’s characters.
Women in Love continues from The Rainbow the story of Ursula Brangwen and introduces for extended narrative treatment her sister, Gudrun. Ursula is now a teacher at a local grammar school, living in Beldover with her parents. Gudrun, a sculptress with a growing reputation, has returned home to take a break from the metropolis. These are the ’women in love’ of the title. Ursula forms a relationship with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, the Lawrence-figure in the novel. Through him, Lawrence voices theories of education and social reform, and articulates views about redemptive relationships between men and women, and between men. Gudrun enters into a relationship with Gerald Crich, friend to Birkin, a ’Napoleon of industry’ (64) whose family owns the local colliery. The first chapters of the book range between the Midlands landscapes which characterized The Rainbow and fashionable London. These locations give Lawrence an opportunity to depict many facets of a dying culture, although his critique extends beyond England as he takes his characters onto the Continent for the novel’s deadly conclusion. Against a background of actual and symbolic landscapes he establishes the complex personal lives of his characters and the psychodramas which play out between them – with implications which extend beyond the personal and individual to the cultural.
Women in Love is a novel underpinned by violence. Where The Rainbow concluded with a vision of growth Women in Love enacts, in its language and themes, Lawrence’s vision of death (of the self, of community). The reader is invited to contemplate the end of culture as a relic of history, and the psychical and spiritual breakdown in individuals which accompanies it. The trauma which splits the psyche, and which has its counterpart in the death of the world, splits it into a number of ’little’ deaths: the death of the mind, the death of the body, and the death of the soul. It is a feature of Women in Love, and of the pattern of contradiction which underpins it, that life and death-instincts lie in such close proximity that they become uncannily interchangeable, and nowhere is this clearer than at the level of the book’s language (see Ragussis 1978, Ingram 1990 and Bell 1992). Rupert Birkin, for instance, who so often preaches about the real value of life, adds, by the quantity and weight of his words, to the book’s morbidity: he says to Ursula, ’I should like to be through with it – I should like to be through the death-process’ (186).
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i Much of the book’s force lies in the ways in which language is tested at the level of meaning. Quite familiar definitions are subject to surprising reversals as the speaking subjects find their positions and assumptions challenged by sceptical interlocutors. Birkin, for instance, tries to deprive the word ’love’ of its usual meanings because it has come to him to seem limited and limiting. His language often conjoins sex and death as impulses with a shared basis in love-feeling. Indeed, it is the recurrence of a lust for violence against both the self and other which marks the book even while Birkin and Ursula, in particular, argue for modes of life which are personally and collectively fulfilling. When Hermione Roddice, initially Birkin’s lover, hits out at him in the act which ends their unsatisfactory relationship (in ’Breadalby’), her murderous impulse is described as a Voluptuous consummation’. She acts against him in a ’delirium of pleasure’. In her calculated attack on his body, in which she achieves a kind of freedom, we are told that ’A thousand lives, a thousand deaths mattered nothing now, only the fulfilment of this perfect ecstasy’ (105). In this statement, crucially, Hermione’s will-to-murder transcends the limits of her personal misery, and it is this extra-personal impulsiveness which is present at subterranean levels in all the characters. The fantasy of annihilation which Hermione enacts is reproduced in the significant relationships in the novel thereafter. It is an indication of their collective dis-ease of psyche and spirit.
Hermione’s murderous climax has a counterpart in the sex between Gerald (youthful slayer of his brother) and Gudrun (whose counterpart in Norse mythology slew her husband). The attraction of these two is mediated from early on in the language of death and predation. In ’Death and Love’, where Gerald arrives in Gudrun’s bedroom with the mud of the graveyard clogging his boots, we are presented with the symbolic murder of Gudrun which perversely rouses her to almost maddening degrees of consciousness. In their ’love-making’, the ’terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation’. Bringing her his ’bitter potion of death’ (344), Gerald leaves her oxymoronically ’destroyed into perfect consciousness’ (345, emphasis added). He finds renewal in Gudrun’s ’murder’, but this renewal is deathly: his postcoital sleep is like a death – he is ’mindless’ and ’remote’ (346) where Gudrun, in opposition, is completely physically awake, tortured by her consciousness of consciousness, by the extremity of her wakefulness.
The chapter called ’Water Party’ provides another graphic instance of Gerald’s association with death. With his sister and the doctor drowned in the lake, Gerald cannot resist the attraction their place of
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dying holds for him. Alongside their actual deaths (which gives them a value, according to Birkin, that they did not hold in life), Gerald’s symbolic death is now enacted in his desire to return into the infinity of water to ’save’ them, long after their chances of life have passed. In diving, he has, like a figure from myth, ’gone out of the world’ (181). Hence the significance of his statement to Gudrun on his return to the surface: ’”If you once die,” he said, ”then when it’s over, it’s finished. Why come to life againi There’s room under that water there for thousands’” (184). With these words Gerald questions the Lawrentian insistence on renewal. His death-wish, demonstrated here by his continual return to the under(water)world, and his violent destiny (death by water/ice), are fulfilled in the chapter ’Snowed Up’ where the terms of his death include ’murder’ and ’sleep’. He dies under the brilliant light of the moon which illuminates forms starkly and relentlessly for him, as it had for Ursula in the chapter ’Moony’ when she too sought the darkness.
The chapter entitled ’Sunday Evening’ is a strange interlude in the novel, and practically forms a dissertation on death. More important than Ursula’s complete indifference to the human tragedy of ’Water Party’ (an indifference which is in keeping with Birkin’s impersonal philosophy that a sentimental concentration on any aspect of human experience is an obscenity), are the ways in which ’death’ is positively opposed to the experience of mechanical, quotidian, existence in the course of the chapter. It is in a description of Ursula giving herself up to a meditation on ’death-experience’ that a sense is communicated of the ’awful nausea of dissolution set in within the body’ (192) which goes beyond the personal: ’it was the same in all countries and all peoples’ (193).
The beginning of ’Sunday Evening’ (193-4) supports any reading that wishes to identify the dissociation of the (alienated, modern) individual from living (and lived) reality. Each of the encounters which give the novel its complex structure draws attention in a variety of ways to the issue of psychic disintegration that accompanies Ursula’s reverie in this chapter. The onus is on the reader to regard this disintegration, this death or arrest of the self, as having the widest possible reference. When Birkin utters the following words to Ursula in ’Water Party’, he has in mind not his immediate world but the conditions of contemporary Western culture: There is life which belongs to death, and there is life which isn’t death. One is tired of the life that belongs to death our kind of life’ (186, emphasis added). It is one of those statements or observations in the narrative which begin in relation to the individual but which point also to a crisis in humanity. Prior to Hermione’s attack
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on Birkin, for instance, the people gathered have been discussing social issues; in ’Moony’, Birkin and Ursula fall into a disgreement about democracy; at the wedding of Laura Crich, and later in the mountains, they discuss the relevance of ’nation’, and the decline of the West. Gerald, who as a social being represents imperial, regional and industrial mastery; mastery of men, women, and of a landscape, dies in a mountain wilderness. In the chapter ’Continental’, the talk is of Englishness and England as ’a great actual unreality now, an aggregation into unreality’ (395). At every juncture, then, the desperate conditions of their culture are debated by the traumatized individuals whose experiences structure the book.
While Women in Love represents an immense (and timely) cynicism with regard to concepts like ’nation’, Birkin concludes the novel with a statement of desire for brotherhood, for community. This contradiction of his frequent theme of individual integrity is part of the point. From the beginning, he has been caught between a set of unreconcilable desires: he is an educator, yet he despises social principles; he desires brotherhood, yet he insists on the sanctity of the individual; he is attracted to the idea of extinction, yet insists on a ’metaphysic’ of renewal with regard to the self. Throughout, he has been the most verbal of the key characters, yet often argues for silence. He tests out his hypotheses most usually on Ursula who parries and argues equally relentlessly, and frequently exposes the contradictory nature of his desires and speeches. Towards the end of ’Water Party’, in touch with desire, he becomes critical of his relation to language, associating it with a kind of death: ’”I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing but a word-bag” he said in triumph, scorning his other self. Yet somewhere far off and small, the other hovered’ (188). This shortlived revelation is one example of many that represent a preoccupation with language, its limitations and self-expression in Women in Love.
Despite their shared provenance the linguistic modes of The Rainbow and Women in Love are not identical. Both novels show Lawrence’s language-sense at work operating most effectively perhaps at a barely conscious level, appropriately enough when his theme is the subterranean aspects of human functioning. While critics whose concentration is on Verbal consciousness’ (486) may not always agree in their interpretation of the text in hand, they will most usually agree to the centrality of questions of language in Lawrence [149-55]. In the Foreword to Women in Love (485-6) Lawrence makes reference to the resistant reader of his work at the level of language, or style. He had The Rainbow in mind as an example of the negative reception his work had already received, and he evokes it again: ’In point of style, fault is often found
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with the continual, slightly modified repetition’ (486). His next description refers, obviously, to the sexual: ’every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-andfro, which works up to a culmination’ (486, emphasis added). Crucially, however, his principal topic here is language, not sex. Speaking metaphorically, he provides a profile, a suggestion, of the life of the language of Women in Love.
This instance points to a ’frictional’ aesthetic – which is called elsewhere in his commentaries on his work ’the tension of opposites’ (CP
348). This idea of necessary conflict to a significant degree directs his thought and its centrality needs to be noted. Naturally, it produces variations. The stylistic differences between, particularly, The Rainbow and Women in Love need to be understood as the different expressions of Lawrence’s ’metaphysic’, his personal philosophy which the novel form is to realize. In particular, the ’frictional’ style of Women in Love, with its often over-conscious and highly verbal human subjects, can be set against the vast sweeps of narrative language in The Rainbow (where human feelings are not so intensely verbalized), and the use of rhythmic repetition foregrounded by ’the wave which cannot halt’ (R 9), which signifies generation and the particular linguistic mode of that book (these modes of language are examined in Becket [1997]).
More specifically, Women in Love develops Lawrence’s language theme by allowing a particular concentration on the short-comings of verbal expression, most especially where notions of the self, and selfresponsibility, require articulation. Many of the dialogues between Ursula and Birkin combine this concentration on self and self-definition with representations of the shortfalls of language (see Bonds 1987; Bell 1992). Women in Love is a highly verbal novel and, as many critics have noted, Lawrence’s most ’dialogic’ fiction (for an explanation of this term, and its applications, see Bakhtin 1981; also Fleishman in Brown [ed.] 1990). It is a central text for literary critics who seek to establish in Lawrence a modernist emphasis on language while underlining his difference from his contemporaries. In the book, it is given to Birkin, who is not a poet or any kind of artist, to utter the rather awkwardly expressed sentiment that ’words make no matter, anyway’ (W 250). This surfaces in the middle of an argument with Ursula on the nature of the love between them, each accusing the other of egocentricity the conversation itself being a product of the damaging self-consciousness that each seeks to escape. This conflict, representative of their oppositionality, persists even through periods of mutually felt tranquillity which are, nevertheless, temporary. At the end of ’Moony’, their positions are dichotomized and the principal area of
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conflict between them is defined: ’He said the individual was more than love, or than any relationship’… ’She believed that love was everything’ (265).
Numerous variations of this conflict are played out between them. Most contentious is Birkin’s ideal of the impersonal ’equilibrium’ between lovers that he first expresses at length to Ursula in the chapter called ’Mino’. This ideal continues to inspire her scepticism and, on occasion, derision, as she interprets his words as a demand for her subservience, even while he seems to praise her right to equality and personal freedom. Birkin, identified by some of the novel’s earliest reviewers as Lawrence’s mouthpiece, is often shown to be in a state of verbal confusion in these encounters. A man who hates his own metaphors (40), he continues to fall back on a highly conscious mode of metaphorical speech which usually gets him into trouble (29; 148). Frustrated with the language available to him, he argues for a condition of loving Ursula where there is ’no speech … no terms of agreement’ (146), and yet continues to force his theories into speech so that she can exploit his obvious difficulties. The parallels with Lawrence are manifest: he has been criticised for trying to force that which resists verbal expression into language, yet this is the paradox that he clearly, .1 as an artist, enjoys.
i; So it is, in Women in Love, that any critique of personal relations
A developed by Lawrence depends on representations of conflict which
return us inevitably to questions of language, meaning and the contexts
for speech. That the novel is the appropriate forum for debates on the
self, where the central issues inevitably dovetail into issues of language,
is represented in the Foreword: ’This struggle for verbal consciousness
should not be left out in art. …It is the passionate struggle into conscious
. being’ (486).
;* Critical appraisals of Lawrence’s work frequently include reference
to his constant and detailed revisions to show him incorporating new
ideas, often not fully-formed but in process. The Rainbow and Women in
Love, although they share a point of origin, have been aligned by critics
with different discursive texts, most usually because of their highly
individual treatment of specific themes and, as has been acknowledged,
L. their different modes of language. Hence, the important place of ’Study
r of Thomas Hardy’ in many critical assessments of The Rainbow. A series
•: of essays constitute ’The Crown’ (partially published in Lawrence’s
I venture with Murry and Mansfield called Signature [1915] [18];
~ complete in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, 251-
306). A philosophical text, it supplements, and in part revises ’Study
of Thomas Hardy’, and was written as Lawrence developed Women in
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Love (see Kinkead-Weekes 1968). Lawrence was more pessimistic about his own prospects, and had a more pessimistic social vision, after the reception of The Rainbow and during the writing of ’The Crown’. Still emphasizing an oppositional life-death dynamic (underpinning creativity, human relations and social change), the narrative of The Crown’ nevertheless gives great weight to ’corruption’ and ’disintegration’. The ’flux’ and ’horrible seethe of corruption’ (RDP 295) get expression in the vision of European decline (moral, spiritual, political) in Women in Love. Indeed, Rupert Birkin echoes the sentiment in ’The Crown’ that ’We may give ourselves utterly to destruction. Then our conscious forms are destroyed along with us, and something new must arise’ (RDP 294). This is perhaps why Gudrun and Loerke survive the end of Women in Love; the artists who recognize in each other sadistic, destructive, non-attachment and who seem to drive themselves into impersonal and violent states (yet Ursula and Birkin, with his dreams of brotherhood, survive too).
Any assessment of the direction Lawrence’s thought was taking, particularly towards the close of the Great War, also needs to take account of the gradually diminishing significance of marriage in his personal philosophy, and the language of his revised ideas on malefemale relations and same-sex desire. Male friendships are central to the excised Prologue to Women in Love (W 489-506). Here, ’Prologue’ refers to a projected first chapter of the novel eventually rejected by Lawrence. The Prologue’s significance to critics lies in part in the exploration which it represents of the relationship between Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, and in particular Birkin’s suppression of his love for Gerald and the forced shift of his sexual feelings onto women (see Cavitch 1969). It also helps to explain Hermione’s feelings for Birkin in the published novel. The first paragraphs establish the importance of the ’abstract isolation’ of the mountain landscape where the events of Women in Love are concluded. The rest of the chapter is marked by an intense, exploratory style in the service of a series of ideas which remain relevant to the published novel. The figure of Birkin is used to raise questions about the extremity of cultural and personal dissolution which signifies the historical moment. This is intimated in the passages concerned with education and, more broadly, the work of ideology: ’What should a man add himself on to4- – to science, to social reform, to aestheticism, to sensationalism^ The whole world’s constructive activity was a fiction, a lie, to hide the great process of decomposition, which had set in’ (496).
Against this broad-brush attempt at social critique, Lawrence juxtaposes Birkin’s highly specific sense of his own emotional dissolution.
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Much of the Prologue – in its representation of the troubled relationship between Hermione and Birkin, where hostilities operate largely but not exclusively at subconscious levels – focuses on the model of the cerebral woman out of touch with her sexual self. As Birkin examines his use of Hermione, Lawrence familiarly juxtaposes the language of sex and death explaining, in his own terms, the sexual failure, the hatred and fear of sex, which he perceives in repressive Western, and specifically at this time northern European, culture. In this context, there is an important shift in the narrative as it turns to the promise of the male body for Birkin, examining the tension between attraction and resistance which many readers have taken to be autobiographical.
The letters and the non-fiction represent a change of attitude towards love between men on Lawrence’s part in the years of writing Women in Love. The concentration on same-sex desire in the Prologue is altered in the published novel to Birkin’s final statement of belief in ’eternal union with a man’ (481), a belief which has been intensified by his non-sexual encounters with Gerald (’In the Train’; ’Man to Man’; ’Gladiatorial’). Lawrence’s opinions are marked by the tension between a tendency in his writing to associate homosexuality and dissolution (Dollimore 1998), and the clear pleasure which his writing takes in the male body and speculation about a higher form of love between men than between women and men (see Williams 1993). So it is that guilt at homosexual love in the Prologue is the strongest element, while heterosexual desire is singled out, no less so in the novel itself, as participating in the destruction of the self which Birkin fears so much. The beginning of the chapter ’Man to Man’ (199-201), for instance, is a dissertation on overbearing womanhood which begins with a statement against coupledom as a betrayal of self-sufficiency. It is a theme to which Birkin returns in ’Moony’, this time with Ursula as a cynical and interrogative auditor. What surfaces is a refusal, or inability, to settle the questions about self-sufficiency to which desire gives rise.
Typically, none of the contradictions in the novel are resolved. Given the repressions of the Prologue it can be no surprise that Loerke, the bisexual artist, is associated with corruption, with the rat and the sewer (428). His redeeming feature might be that he is also represented as isolated, complete in himself (450; 452), but this description is in harness to the more insistent descriptions of Loerke’s degeneracy. To Birkin and Gerald, Loerke comes to represent the extremity of corruption that women in particular seek. To Gudrun, he represents eventually the death of her world (452) which she embraces. In them, Lawrence writes the inverse of the relationships he has described up to that point: a bisexual man and a heterosexual woman agreeing to a degree of
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proximity because of the absence of romantic love between them (458-
9). The two artists in the book announce the near-death of the world; both are associated with corrosiveness and see the world as ’distorted, horrific’ (451). These are the terms which they tacitly agree to share: their mutual recognition of the end of lived culture (in their discussions, they polarize ’art’ and ’life’), and the corresponding knowledge each has of the other as profoundly detached from the social world. In its evocation of the death of the self, and the death of the world, Women in Love, which Lawrence considered calling ’Dies Irae’ (’Day of Wrath’, Letters II: 669), is a powerful document of British modernism. •»
(iii) The Lost Girl, Mr Noon, Aaron’s Rod
The Lost Qirl (1920) began as Lawrence’s attempt at an English novel of provincial life written at an ironic distance from those by his contemporaries, Arnold Bennett (1867-1931, whose work includes Anna of the Five Towns [1902] and the Clayhanger series) and John Galsworthy (1867-1933, whose work includes the Forsyte novels). The period of composition of The Lost Girl, however, in the end straddled the writing of The Rainbow and Women in Love. It was put to one side in 1913 as ’The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’, and not taken up for seven years when Lawrence rewrote it. The experience of writing The Rainbow and Women in Love in the interval was telling. If the beginnings of The Lost Girl are in what Virginia Woolf calls in ’Modern Fiction’ the style of the Edwardian materialists, its revision demonstrates the effects of Lawrence working through the Brangwen books and his ’theory’ of the novel, which anticipates some of his central themes to come. Unlike The Rainbow and Women in Love the tone of The Lost Girl is frequently satirical.
The novel describes the fortunes of Alvina Houghton, a middleclass girl born and brought up in Woodhouse, based on Lawrence’s home-town of Eastwood. Tired of the limitations of her provincial life, Alvina challenges her family’s expectations both in her decision to work
– she becomes a maternity nurse – and in her relations with men. Her way out of Woodhouse, and England, is made possible by her marriage to Ciccio, a peasant from a village in the Abruzzi mountains, and one of the artistes in a touring ’Red Indian troupe’ called Natcha-Kee-Tawara, who perform in the local theatre. They leave wintry England for Italy, and the simpler, harder life of the peasant farmer. History overtakes them, however, and the book ends on the eve of Ciccio’s departure for the army and his promise that, on his return from the war, they will start a new life in America.
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It has been noted that Alvina has a representative function in as much as she shares the dilemmas of Lawrentian women (like Kate Leslie in The Plumed Serpent, and the rider in ’The Woman Who Rode Away’), who are ’drawn to primitivist solutions’ (Bell 1992: 137). Ciccio is laconic and uncultivated compared to the worthy but unexciting bachelors who have previously had claims on Alvina. Impersonal desire moves in him rather than romantic love or sentimental attachment, and it is this quality which makes him attractive to Alvina. The book is another step in Lawrence’s examination of the sexual relations between men and women. In Ciccio, it also introduces the figure of the self-assured, non-intellectual male who gratifies his sexual needs and thereby, controversially, brings about the transformation of the ’modern’ woman. John Worthen comments on this, calling the novels which precede The Lost Girl ’exploratory and painstaking’, in contrast to this new style of writing which is ’brash, often comic, polemical and offensive’ (Worthen 1991b).
This description also serves Mr Noon. The Lost Girl is marked by a more self-conscious intrusiveness on the part of the author than has been the case before, and of which the unfinished Mr Noon (written in
1920-1 and never revised for publication), with its satirical tone and ironical direct address to ’dear reader’, provides a more extreme example. This, as critics have noted, gives Lawrence a chance to show contempt towards the fault-finding reader. Meanwhile, over-conscious (and also highly defensive) attempts at irony are an aspect of Lawrence’s overt play with the novel form (which exploits his awareness of a tradition). We cannot know what Lawrence would have done with Mr Noon had he returned to it for purposes of revision. As it stands, the text is marked by extensive authorial intrusion which, when it remembers, makes points about what novels are and do. Regarding plot, Part I of Mr Noon shares the Midlands location of The Lost Girl, where the hero, Gilbert Noon, leads a desultory existence as a school-master engaged in a halfhearted love relationship. Part II (unfinished) is based on Lawrence’s first travels with Frieda Weekley [13]. In this section of the book Mr Noon’s elopement with Johanna provides another opportunity to examine relationships in contexts which challenge the sentimental love ideal.
Of the post-war novels, Aaron’s Rod, in Lawrence’s own estimation of it, concluded some of the business of The Rainbow and Women in Love. It does so by challenging the centrality in both those books of different forms of love relationship between men and women, giving rise to the emphasis in Aaron’s Rod on the solitary male and the advantages of ’singleness’. This is more about actual solitude and separation than
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about the (more ’metaphysical’) movement towards individuation which characterises The Rainbow. In Aaron’s Rod, marriage is no longer seen as the defining relationship between men and women, and its limitations are spelled out in the character of Aaron Sisson as husband and father. The novel begins with Aaron’s decision to leave his wife and children and his work at the colliery, and to earn his living by his flute. He does, in short, what The Trespasser’s Siegmund is unable to do. His encounters with a metropolitian bohemian set in London introduce him to a maverick thinker, called Rawdon Lilly, who spouts most of the over-conscious philosophy in the book. From London, Aaron travels (like Alvina Houghton and Gilbert Noon) to Italy where he becomes, briefly, the lover of a married woman (see the chapter called ’The Marchesa’), but this relationship only allows him to replay his grudges and anxieties about women. In the end the promise of genuine change is only ushered in when his flute is destroyed by a terrorist’s bomb.
This book articulates Lawrence’s bitterly felt rejection of marriage, which is one of the reversals marked by his writing at this time. Such a reversal probably had its roots in his personal experience, and it becomes central to his developing philosophy of the self, represented in this instance by Aaron Sisson’s quest to find himself free from the obligation to feel according to an established relationship: in this respect the book, like Mr Noon, examines the authentication of feeling. Aaron’s relationships are marked by a hostility towards the sentimental. The book is full of encounters and these form the basis for conversations about personal, social and political revolution, and in particular the tension between love and resistance, dependency and independence.
Rawdon Lilly is Lawrence’s mouthpiece in Aaron’s Rod, which is his first attempt at a political novel. The book concludes with Lilly telling Aaron about the need for a ’superior man’ to lead people to a better kind of humanity. Lilly’s vision of a superior leader is more messianic he evangelizes – than about political authority. His concluding words in the novel are on the ’power-urge’ which runs parallel to the ’loveurge’ as the principal motivating impulse in human history. One phase of history (impelled by the ’love-urge’, which has produced democracy as well as empire) is passing, to be superseded by a new phase (of war and, paradoxically, of eventual renewal), the era of the ’power-urge’. The figure of Aaron – as musician – and his flute illustrate how ideas about creative energy lie at the heart of this philosophy. When, at the end of the novel, the flute is destroyed Lilly assures Aaron that he need not worry – Aaron’s rod will grow again, ’”It’s a reed, a water-plant you can’t kill it”’ (AR 285). This is the promise of regeneration in the book. In the chapter called ’Words’, Lilly defines the ’love-urge’ as the
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harmful impulse to intervene in the destiny of others – it impels a lover, or a radical (the anarchist’s bomb shows a desire to intervene). The ’love-urge’ becomes a ’horror’, hence the world war, and the political upheaval which Lawrence witnessed in Italy, for instance, as the Fascists grew in strength. The ’power-urge’, on the other hand, describes the impersonal primordial force that Lawrence attempts to dramatize as positive in The Plumed Serpent – here, in Aaron’s Rod, it is called ’selfcentral’ (298) in opposition to any creed which depends on identification with something beyond the self (a God, a nation). In terms of sexual politics this philosophy is familiarly repressive: the ’power-urge’ insists on submission in women to the impersonal authority of visionary men. The Plumed Serpent goes further than Aaron’s Rod in exploring this aspect of the ’power-urge’, in its fantasy of the messianic male.
Aaron’s Rod is usefully read alongside the books on the unconscious, in particular Fantasia of the Unconscious, which argues for self-sufficiency in men who become independent of over-bearing figures enabling then to charge a high rate of emotional interest, in particular mothers and wives. So it is that the ’serious English’ novels end with an injunction to be true to an ’integral unique self – ’Your own single oneness is your destiny. Your destiny comes from within, from your own selfform’ (AR 295). The ’greater soul’ is male: by the end of the book, ’coupledom’ has been found wanting and Lilly’s words provide Aaron with a new model of masculine kinship.
Further Reading
It would be a hard task to disprove the claim that most critical writing on Lawrence’s major fiction has concentrated on The Rainbow and Women in Love, and it is not practicable to describe here the many studies on these works and the other ’serious English’ novels, particularly the great number of articles and essays in literary periodicals. Listed below, then, is a selection, and the reader is referred to the Bibliography. General studies of the fiction address the novels of the war period as Lawrence’s most achieved and important writing. These include Leavis (1955), who was one of Lawrence’s most consistent champions. Spilka (1955) and Hough (1956) go further afield than the novels, and show the influence of Leavis. The next two decades produced a number of closely argued critiques where the general trend (there are significant exceptions) is to divide work into discrete discussions of individual books. Influential studies of Lawrence’s imagination, style and thought include Vivas (1960), Moynahan (1963), Ford (1965), Clarke (1969), Miko (1971), Sanders (1974), Beede Howe (1977). More recent assessments
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of The Rainbow and/or Women in Love – either within ’surveys’, or within books which examine a particular critical concern (history, language, modernism, or sexuality) – include Miko (1971), Worthen (1979; 1991b), Ebbatson (1982), Holderness (1982), Sagar (1985), Bonds (1987), Whelan (1988), Edwards (1990), Hyde (1990), Ingram (1990), Pinkney (1990), Ross (1991), Bell (1992), Becket (1997), Williams (1993; 1997). Useful volumes of essays include Spilka (ed., 1963) with essays by Marvin Mudrick and Mark Schorer; Miko (ed., 1969) with essays by Mark Spilka, Eliseo Vivas, Julian Moynahan, George Ford and Alan Freeman. Colin C. Clarke edited theMacmillan Casebook Series volume on The Rainbow and Women in Love (1969). Bloom (1988) edited the Modern Critical Interpretations series volume on Women in Love. Baker (1983) is a monograph on Aaron’s Rod. Jackson and Brown Jackson (eds, 1988) prints essays by Jack F. Stewart, Joyce Carol Oates and Lydia Blanchard; Preston and Hoare (eds, 1989) include essays by Mark Kinkead-Weekes (who also has an important essay on The Rainbow in Kalnins, ed., 1986), and John Worthen. More recently Brown (ed., 1990) and Widdowson (ed., 1992) draw together some interesting and authoritative material.
(c) NEW GROUND: THE NOVELS AFTER 1922
(i) Kangaroo, The Boy in the Bush
Lawrence wrote Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush (with M.L. Skinner) as a result of his visit to Australia in 1922 [23], The Boy in the Bush is a re-written version of Skinner’s ’The House of Ellis’ based on her brother’s experiences in North-West Australia. Lawrence’s novel is set in 1882 and tells the story of Jack Grant who arrives in Fremantle from Bedford, England, but is transformed by his sojourn in the Australian wilderness and his dream of establishing his own community. The novel represents a search for a new mode of living (BB 341-2).
Kangaroo is a novel in which issues of political belief are explored in relation to Lawrence’s further thoughts on love, power and how they define manliness after Aaron’s Rod. It was written at a time when Lawrence was translating the Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga (1840-
1922), whose stories (many of which were translated by Lawrence as Mastro-Don Cesualdo [1923], Little Novels of Sicily [1925] and Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories [1928]) deal with the hard life of the Sicilian peasant, a disenfranchised figure. Lawrence had also witnessed the rise
69
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i*. iik*WfciJ} Baa*** i
D.H. LAWRENCE
of Fascism in Italy, and the effects of the struggle between competing ideologies prior to Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922. Kangaroo foregrounds political ambitions and contests in relation to two self-styled leaders of men who hold opposing views. The principal figure, called Benjamin Cooley (nicknamed ’Kangaroo’), is a charismatic leader of a right-wing group of disaffected war veterans (’Diggers’), and much of the book concerns his attempts to win the heart and mind of a travelling philosopher-poet, Richard Lovatt Somers. The other is a socialist called Willie Struthers who also woos Somers, offering him the chance to edit a people’s newspaper and gain influence that way. A key question is how Lawrence balances a concern for the social with his interest in the individual, and also the extent to which his views are under revision
– not only those on relations between men, but also in the way he addresses ’democracy’ and revolutionary change. Lawrence’s voyage to Australia is marked by moments of disillusion about how people live: as we have seen, in Ceylon he grew impatient with Buddhist culture (about which he was quite ignorant); crossing the South Seas, he made disparaging comments about Pacific cultures. Although impressed by the landscape, ambivalence about contemporary Australian culture also marks his relatively short stay there [21-4].
As a political novel, Kangaroo gives expression to Lawrence’s frequently articulated suspicion of idealism. The leaders of men in Kangaroo are distinguished publicly by their political affiliations, and privately by their views on the brotherhood of men. The attraction of Richard Lovatt Somers for Benjamin Cooley and Willie Struthers is, in the first place, that he has written essays on democracy. A conversation between Struthers and Somers reads as if Lawrence were talking to himself in preparation for one of his longer essays on social and political organisation. Struthers’ assertion that ’the socialistic and communal ideal is a great ideal, which will be fulfilled when men are ready’ (K 196)
• shifts rapidly to his paraphrasing of the main idea in Somers’ writing ’You want a new bond between men. – Well, so do I, so do we’ (196) ’ and he argues for solidarity between working men against middle-class interests. The interview concludes with his attempt to persuade Somers to edit a twice-weekly Labour newspaper to appeal to the Australian heart (200). Somers interprets Struthers’ position on brotherhood negatively as a modern version of Walt Whitman’s ’Love of Comrades’ (197), and his scepticism becomes central to this novel’s exploration (and eventual rejection) of ’mateship’ as a form of the ’blood-brotherhood’ first expressed by Birkin in Women in Love (see K 104-7). Familiarly, the rejection of this brotherhood ideal signals Lawrence’s fear of the consequences where, in a relationship, the integrity of individuality is
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abandoned: the relativity of human love for Lawrence is always displayed in the natural propensity of lover and beloved as individuals to react, resist and repel as well as to attract. Genuine personal and, he argues, cultural and political, disaster occurs ’when human love starts out to lock individuals together’ (198).
Later in Kangaroo we are offered an account of Kangaroo’s attraction to Somers manifested in his overbearing embrace of the poet-philosopher and a declaration of love. Kangaroo’s supporters view him as Australia’s saviour. Jack Callcott tells Somers that he follows Kangaroo because he hates the thought ’of being bossed and messed about by the Old Country, or by Jew capitalists and bankers, or by a lot of labour bullies, or a Soviet’ (188). The question in the novel, however, is less whether Somers will subscribe to this, with Kangaroo as ’the big boss of Australia’ (187), than on Somer’s perception of Kangaroo’s feelings for him as a ’lieutenant’. Kangaroo’s declaration of love for him in fact stimulates a revulsion in Somers due to his sense of his ’particular self being overlooked in Kangaroo’s passion for a man of ideas to carry his cause further.
So far the discussion has concentrated on the feelings of men for men, and the grand designs of men’s imagination and aspiration. Compared with the novels which precede it, Kangaroo is much less interested in sexual relationships between men and women. When this theme is raised the focus is on the Somers’ marriage and that of their neighbours, the Callcotts. The state of the marriage between Harriett and Richard Lovatt Somers is established at the book’s beginning. The chapter ’Harriett and Lovatt at Sea in Marriage’ is a notable instance of authorial intrusion. It provides a short dissertation on modern marriage and describes the sources of conflict in the Somers’ relationship, with a particular emphasis laid on the distribution of power within marriage.
Critics sometimes agree that Lawrence’s writing is most interesting when it is most flawed. Kangaroo is flawed perhaps most obviously in its structure, but also in the ease with which it gives itself up to verbiage (at one point the narrator addresses us sardonically, ’I hope, dear reader, you like plenty of conversation in a novel: it makes it so much lighter and brisker’ [282]). On several occasions in the narrative, Somers is subject to the diatribes of Kangaroo and Struthers. Most often, this gives the effect of Lawrence (in Somers) listening to, and sometimes rejecting, sometimes adding to, the principal tenets of many of his own essays. This is also true of Aaron’s Rod and shows the centrality of ’the novel of ideas’ to Lawrence at this time. In Kangaroo, this is evident in the chapter called ’Bits’ where Somers goes off on a ’thoughtadventure’ (279) about the need to live from the ’central self. ’Bits’
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addresses the social theme in Lawrence when it acknowledges the alienation of human subjects from their environment, but goes further in articulating a more elusive idea about the fragmented self – ’The people of this terrestrial sphere are all bits. Isolate one of them, and he is still only a bit. Isolate your man in the street, and he is a rudimentary fragment (281). Lawrence has returned here to the central observation of the ’Words’ chapter of Aaron’s Rod (and his articulation of the development of the self in Fantasia of the Unconscious), in Lilly’s description to Aaron of the self ’developing bit by bit, from one single egg-cell which you were at your conception in your mother’s womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die – if then’ (AR 295). The development of the self here parallels the development of the body, and can be understood as the ’single oneness’ (295) to which the individual must be true. The ’man in the street’ in Somers’ meditations has lost the capacity of identification with his ’self-form’ (AR 295) and is in consequence a ’fragment’, a ’bit’ (of a social system). These observations develop alongside the analysis of Kangaroo’s fitness to be a leader of men. Kangaroo’s heresy, to Somers, is his desire to represent a multitude, that which is more than himself. Somers imagines him as a queen-bee, with the other bees clustering around him, which in Lawrence becomes a gross image. As long as he needs the ’hive’, and wants to serve the ’hive’, Kangaroo represents the superannuated ’love-urge’ discussed in Aaron’s Rod. Lawrence’s preference, articulated in the last lines of ’Bits’, is for a more impersonal mode of non-attachment which he attempts to place at the heart of his exploration of political and religious power and leadership in The Plumed Serpent.
\”/ – •– – .
The Plumed Serpent (1926) describes a contemporary revolution in religious form and feeling based on the imagined revival of a MesoAmerican Quetzalcoatl cult. Its principal focus is on a middle-aged Irishwoman, Kate Leslie, who travels to Mexico having tired of Europe. She soon loses interest in her fellow expatriates, and is drawn to a military General, Don Cipriano Viedma and a revolutionary, Don Ramon Carrasco, leaders of the revived cult of the god Quetzalcoatl (the plumed serpent). The novel charts the pattern of Kate’s revulsion from, and attraction for, the language and spectacle of the cult with its emphasis on manly dignity and blood-sacrifice. Her entry into the old religion comes finally with her apotheosis into Malintzi, consort of Cipriano (also the ’living Huitzilopochtli’), whom she has married.
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With Don Ramon (the ’living Quetzalcoatl’) they form the first trinity of the blood, uniting ’light’ with ’dark’ blood which are the conditions, argues Lawrence, for cultural regeneration. Kate’s transformation signifies the death of her modern self. Throughout, Cipriano has insisted that she sheds her ’European’ self-assertiveness, and subjugates herself to ’the old mode of consciousness’ (PS 415). This mode has a great deal to do ultimately with his sexual power over Kate.
After a long period in the cold – many readers find its treatment of what used to be called ’leadership’ themes objectionable – The Plumed Serpent is enjoying something of a revival. The critic F.R. Leavis confessed that he found it difficult to get through and calls it ’the least complex of all Lawrence’s novels’, inferior in form and content to those that preceded it. He uses Lawrence’s terms to criticize Lawrence: ’The evoking of the pagan renaissance strikes one as willed and mechanical’ (Leavis 1955: 79). More enthusiastically, L.D. Clark, in the only booklength study of this novel, announced that ’two things save the book from the author: Lawrence’s profound sympathy with the land he was writing about, and his uncanny skill at synthesizing form and setting and symbol’ (Clark 1964: 13). Lawrence arrived in Mexico [25] at a time of political instability but his primary interest was not in contemporary events. The novel deals with the imagined revival of preColumbian religious consciousness led by men of high social and military status, and it is Lawrence’s endeavour to invent a pre-Conquest sensibility in his characters which has proved most problematic to recent critics of the novel. Marianna Torgovnick, writing on literary and artistic primitivism, notices in Lawrence’s version of ’the primitive’ a reaffirmation of the power of Western models of self and other, and notes, too, how the primitive female in his writing is ’degenerate’ while the primitive male is ’lordly’ (Torgovnick 1990: 159-74). Certainly ’lordship’ is practised on the women in the novel who are the focus for misogynistic judgements. The poor Mexican women are represented as lazy, and bestial (’Casa de las Cuentas’). Dona Carlota, Ramon’s wife, ’pure European in extraction’ (155) opposes the revival of the old religion viewing it as a heresy. On her death-bed, Cipriano abuses her – ’stale virgin, you spinster’ (347) – for what he regards as her denial of herself to Ramon’s vision, and wishes her dead. Teresa, Ramon’s new wife is an object of contempt initially to Kate because of her ’harem’ characteristics (397), although Kate is soon called on to revise her own idea of her sexual self. Sex between Kate and Cipriano anticipates that of Connie and Mellors (Lady Chatterley’s Lover) in the idea of a superior man who controls woman’s sexual pleasure, educating her to despise ’conscious satisfaction’. She must learn the value of ’impersonal’ sex,
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’different from the beak-like friction of Aphrodite of the foam’ (422). The metaphor of ’beak-like’ selfish women will return in Lady Chatterley ’s Lover. Cipriano ultimately insists on Kate’s submission: as ’Malintzi’ she has some status, as a white woman she must learn surrender.
Primarily because of its treatment of ’lordship’ themes, and the idea of a revolutionary male community, critics have been drawn to compare The Plumed Serpent with Kangaroo. Male bonding in The Plumed Serpent is organized in the revivalist cult of the Men of Quetzalcoatl. The idea of charismatic leadership is explored in the figure of Benjamin Cooley in Kangaroo, and earlier in Rawdon Lilly (Aaron’s Rod] who lectures Aaron Sisson on the necessity of submitting to a superior leader of men. While Lawrence keeps that idea for development here, the Quetzalcoatl revival, with its religious basis, allows him to make the theme of political idealism, and fidelity to political solutions, supplementary to the seductions of creating a church.
In a distortion of his previous emphasis on community, The Plumed Serpent indeed represents the considerable attractions to Lawrence of cultishness, in particular in its rituals and theatre (the cult has its own language in the ’hymns’ of Quetzalcoatl). The devolution of power onto men who perceive themselves as gods is chilling. Cipriano has a fanatical interest in the physical and moral well-being of his men, putting them through a disciplined regime of drilling and dance, where the dance is the medium of a new consciousness in the dancer. And he executes men – blood-sacrifice at the altar of Quetzalcoatl in an episode which literalises Lawrence’s homage to the ’life-blood’.
To what extent do the Mexico and New Mexico essays contribute to an understanding of this writing1?- In an essay written in 1928 called ’New Mexico’ Lawrence compares his considerable experiences as a global traveller and is uneqivocal about the superiority of New Mexico and the South-West in its capacity to touch something in him which he eventually calls ’religious’ (Phoenix 142-4). This religious connection is suggested to Lawrence, as so often, by dance. In a language which recalls descriptions in The Plumed Serpent, he writes of Native American dancing he had seen, ’Never shall I forget the utter absorption of the dance, so quiet, so steadily, timelessly rhythmic, and silent, with the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth’s centre, the very reverse of the upflow of Dionysiac or Christian ecstacy’ (145). His praise, indeed his wonder, rapidly turns to a celebration of the male voice, ’the wonderful deep sound of men calling to the unspeakable depths’ (145). Lawrence had arrived in a landscape in which he could experience the religious – in ’New Mexico’ ritual supersedes sex in his theorising of primary sensual experience. The dance is consistently an event where
a new consciousness is experienced in the individual or, in the later writing, by a community.
The main opposition in The Plumed Serpent is the extremity of the contrast between mechanistic modern ’white’ consciousness (Kate, Owen, Villiers) and the Men of Quetzalcoatl. Lawrence may be in search of an alternative, a more impersonal, ’unconscious’ mode of being in his evocation of a pre-Columbian culture. When he reinvents the Mexican myths, and represents them, however, he heightens their violence. ’Blood’ has finally superseded ’psychology’ in Lawrence’s fiction.
(iii) Lady Chatterley’s Lover ,T
Lawrence supervised the private publication of his last novel in Florence in 1928 once it became obvious that his publishers would not take the risk. It was quickly banned in England and America. In England, when an unexpurgated version was finally published thirty years after his death, it resulted in the prosecution of Penguin Books (1960) under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959. The publisher was acquitted [27;
131]. ’Pornography and Obscenity’ (1929) and ’A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ (1930) constitute further statements about the disastrous effects of sexual fear, and the latter gives some account of the difficulties experienced in self-publishing.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover returns to the Midlands, where the newly married Lady Constance (’Connie’) Chatterley lives with her husband, Sir Clifford, at Wragby Hall. Months after their marriage he is confined to a wheelchair by injuries received on the battlefield and paralysed from the waist down. As the marriage stagnates, she deceives him by having an unsatisfactory affair with his friend, Michaelis, a playwright, but finds this, and her other friendships, empty. She then falls in love with Oliver Mellors, Clifford’s gamekeeper, and the novel concentrates on her ’re-birth’ as a result of their sexual experience. A child is conceived and, scandalously, Connie abandons Clifford to the good offices of his motherly housekeeper, Mrs Bolton, while the lovers, in temporary separation until the scandal dies down, plan to build a new life together abroad. The theme of committed love between members of different social classes is not new in Lawrence, and neither is the theory of selfrenewal through positive sexual experience. The novella, The Virgin and the Gipsy (1925; published 1930), for instance, rehearses the main themes which Lawrence develops in the earlier versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, called The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane.
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In an essay called ’The State of Funk’ written in 1929, Lawrence states, in very simple terms, his criticism of the ’Victorian’ prudishness about sex which oppressed him as a boy and young man:
fU’!’ Accept the sexual, physical being of yourself, and of every other -i , creature. Don’t be afraid of it. Don’t be afraid of the physical •!ir.i functions. Don’t be afraid of the so-called obscene words. There is .:X-4: nothing wrong with the words. It is your fear that makes them
i’i.) bad, your needless fear.
(Phoenix II 570)
These sentiments, and the assertion of ’the natural warm flow of common sympathy between man and man, man and woman’ (569) underpin much of Lawrence’s later writing on sex, and the essay usefully concentrates on some terms which help to clarify Lawrence’s concerns, at least towards the end of his life. In particular it underlines the reasons for Mellors’ persistent reference to sex using the ’common’ words. ’Desire’, in this essay, is a negative term (it is ’rampant’, ’lurid’) alongside the more positive ’sympathy’ (569). ’Warm-heartedness’ and ’compassionateness’ resonate positively, reminiscent of ’tenderness’, the single word which was the projected title of what became Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ’Warm-heartedness’ finds its way into Mellors’ vocabulary as he lectures Lady Chatterley (’It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy’ [LCL 206]), and voices Lawrence’s theme that an ignorance of self in relation to sexuality contributes to cultural, as well as personal, ’dissolution’.
At first glance the principal paradox about Lady Chatterley’s Lover is that in it Lawrence, by setting out to talk about sex, does precisely the thing he apparently most despises. In the first half of the book, he sets up a series of sterile conversations which take place between Clifford and his forward-thinking friends on men, women and sex. It is part of Lawrence’s point to contrast the painful self-consciousness of these conversations with the discussions between Mellors and Connie. However, one of the risks to the novel’s seriousness must surely lie in Mellors’ remarks to his penis, ’John Thomas’, conducted in the dialect that Lady Chatterley more often than not finds ridiculous: Tell lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an’ th’ cunt o’ lady Jane! -’ (210). For some readers this extensive verbalization is awkward in part because of all Lawrence’s protestations against having ’sex in the head’, his phrase for describing an over-conscious concentration on sex (F&P 129: for the most extensive discussion of this see Williams 1993). To what extent does the gamekeeper, the ’natural man’, have ’sex in the head’
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despite Lawrence’s best efforts to make it otherwise, and to what extent is he the antidote to the problem^ In other words, is this the book where Lawrence, against his best intentions, submits to his own version of ’sex in the head’, or does the novel in fact constitute a complex critique of the ’modern’ tendency, as Lawrence sees it, to reduce sex to a level where it is merely the scratching of some libidinal ’itch’4- This is a complicated question which has to do, in the first instance, with the relation in Lawrence’s writing between sex and language.
The focus is, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, on the regenerative aspects of sex (Connie, with Mellors, is ’reborn, woman’). The emphasis is still on phallic power as transformative, last explored by Lawrence in novel-form in The Plumed Serpent. As in that book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover subscribes to a fantasy of female orgasm and its effects – for Lawrence, the potential of sex to revivify the self is manifested only where modern ’mental consciousness’ (F&P 68) is shed (in women) for something more unconscious. The little ’deaths’ of orgasm are central to the process of Connie’s rebirth. A language of violence is developed – ’It might come with the thrust of a sword in her softlyopened body, and that would be death’ (173) – but the brutality of Women in Love, for instance, where the languages of sex and death are often interchangeable, is displaced by the enactment of regeneration which dominates descriptions of sex in the later book.
Lawrence had written his essays on the novel genre by the time of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In Chapter 9, however, he allows himself to give the reader a small reminder of its real value:
And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.
(LCL 101)
It is the higher form of the novel which is properly revelatory, he now argues. With ’proper handling’ it deals in and with the deepest experiences of the spirit and psyche. This passage on the promise of his chosen form occurs in a context where Lawrence underlines his particular distance from a novelistic tradition. Lady Chatterley finds herself absorbed in listening to Mrs Bolton’s gossip about Tevershall, the village, and its inhabitants. Clifford, too, shows himself to have an
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appetite for the details of people and their lives which Mrs Bolton with relish imparts. However, ’[i]t was more than gossip. It was Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more, that these women left out’ (100). Mrs Bolton’s gossip, which runs to ’volumes’, proves to be masturbatory according to Lawrence’s lexicon: it ’excite[s] spurious sympathies’, is ’mechanical’ and ’deadening to the psyche’ (101). It constitutes a kind of pornography, akin to that provided by popular fiction which is ’humiliating’ and appeals to the public’s vices (101). Gaskell, Eliot and Mitford perhaps constitute an over-conscious aesthetic. It is fascinating that Lawrence evokes, in this instance, women writers, and then prepares the ground to develop the distance between his use of the novel and their practice.
There are many other references in this novel to the status and value of the work of art which are often made obliquely through a criticism of the ’maker’. The focus is not so much on the artist figure who occasionally succeeds, unsupervised and untutored (this is, on occasion, the experience of Will Brangwen or Paul Morel), but more on a stifling self-consciousness manifested in Michaelis as dramatist or Clifford Chatterley who also writes. They are the mediocre players. Lawrence’s spat with high modernism is evident in the occasional side-swipes at his eminent contemporaries: Connie’s dismissal of the French writer Marcel Proust (A la recherche du temps perdu, 1913-27) in a tone which is reminiscent of Lawrence’s discursive style, is a case in point, ’He doesn’t have feelings, he only has streams of words about feelings. I’m tired of self-important mentalities’ (LCL 194). These are the poles of fictional practice which Lawrence as maker must transcend: the mediocrity, or ’pornography’, of popular fiction versus the ’self-important mentality’ (to Lawrence, no less pornographic) of high modernism. As it is, Lady Chatterley’s Lover bravely (some might say disastrously) plays with the seriousness of form. At the end of the novel, for example, Mellors is unexpectedly located in epistolary mode. The book ends with the text of a letter which he writes to Connie, in which Mellors alternates between a kind of folk wisdom (’A man has to fend and fettle for the best’) and the emancipatory discourse which characterizes some of Lawrence’s essays: ’Whereas the mass of people oughtn’t even to try to think – because they can’t. They should be alive and frisky, and acknowledge the great god Pan’ (300). Finally, the sex-language debate is evoked – ’so many words, because I can’t touch you’ (301) – a privileging of the tangible which has dominated since the book’s beginning.
Implicated in the rebirth of the self in this novel is the regeneration of England, and the engine of that regeneration is ’phallic-conscious-
ness’, evolved in Lawrence’s terms out of ’blood-consciousness’(F&P
183). The impotence of Clifford Chatterley as a member of the ruling class is symbolic of the impotence of his culture. Its salvation lies in the ’natural’ man. Some of the last essays, ’A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and ’Pornography and Obscenity’, take up the arguments of the novel proposing that only revolutionary changes in attitudes to sex can make possible any kind of positive revolution in the culture.
Further Reading
Selected reading relevant to the whole body of novels has been indicated in previous ’Further reading’ sections, to which can be added Humma (1990) on the later novels. Monographs dedicated to single novels are less common than critical surveys. There is relatively little published on The Boy in the Bush although Partlow and Moore (eds, 1980) includes an essay by Charles Rossman. For a detailed discussion of Kangaroo and its contexts the most extensive study is Darroch (1981). Worthen discusses its form (1979). Rick Rylance considers it in the context of Lawrence’s political fiction in Brown (ed., 1990). Heywood (ed., 1987) includes an essay on allusion in Kangaroo by Peek. The first full-length study of The Plumed Serpent is Clark (1964). Torgovnick examines Lawrence’s primitivist aesthetic in The Plumed Serpent in her comparative study (1990). Chong-wha Chung discusses dualism with reference to The Plumed Serpent and, briefly, The Boy in the Bush, alongside the other novels in Preston and Hoare (eds, 1989). L.D. Clark, in the same volume, includes The Boy in the Bush and The Plumed Serpent in his discussion of the ’pilgrimage novels’. Rossman (1985) examines the contexts for the New Mexico and Mexico writing, and Kinkead-Weekes discusses the ’decolonising imagination’ in The Plumed Serpent and other New Mexico texts in Fernihough (ed., 2001). Some critics compare and contrast the three versions of the Lady Chatterley novel (Sanders 1974), as does Worthen (1991b). Squires (1983) and Britton (1988) are also interested in its origins. Squires and Jackson (eds, 1985) brings together a range of essays and different approaches to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The first extended feminist critique is from Millett (1969) with a ’reply’ from MacLeod (1985). Smith (ed., 1978) includes an essay by Spilka. Book-length studies with discussions of this novel and others include Moynahan (1963), Daleski (1965), Williams (1997), Bell (1992).
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(d) POETRY
To date, reference is most often made to The Complete Poems edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, which itself refers to collections published by Heinemann as well as a range of other printed and manuscript sources. De Sola Pinto and Roberts bring together key prefaces, introductions and forewords to his volumes of poetry by Lawrence. It is not possible here to examine all of Lawrence’s poetry in the kind of detail it deserves and so the focus will be on three of his books – Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) and Pansies (1929) – and some prefaces. His public life began properly, as we have seen, with the publication of poems in the English Review edited by Ford Madox Hueffer [11]. After that, the books are Love Poems and Others (1913), Amores (1916), Look! We Have Come Through!, New Poems (1918), Bay (1919), Tortoises (1921) Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Collected Poems (1928), Pansies, Nettles (1930). Last Poems was published posthumously in 1932, edited by Richard Aldington [16]. Identifying Lawrence and James Joyce as the twin cardinals of modern writing Aldington risks a comparison which the contemporary reader might like to review: ’The great difference … is that Joyce’s writing is founded on the conception of Being, and Lawrence’s on the conception of Becoming’ (CP 593).
In a preface called ’Poetry of the Present’, written at the conclusion of the Great War for the American edition of New Poems, Lawrence praises Walt Whitman’s ’sheer appreciation of the instant moment’ (183). It is an interesting judgement, and it is not the last time that Whitman figures centrally in Lawrence’s discursive writing (see Studies in Classic American Literature] [104-8]. In ’Poetry of the Present’, Whitman’s value to Lawrence lies in what is perceived to be his disregard of both the past and the future as the proper focus for poetry. ’Eternity’, the ’forever’ which is both past and to come and which is so often evoked in poetry is, argues Lawrence, merely ’an abstraction from the actual present. … The quivering nimble hour of the present, this is the quick of Time’ (183). The key-word in Lawrence’s poetics at this point, then, is ’present’ as the only point of origin (of thought, of the self) to which we have unmediated access. Any critique of Lawrence’s writing which includes an assessment of his thematisation of time, or indeed of the self, needs to take this concentration on the instant, the present, very seriously. It underpins much that is central in his ’metaphysic’.
’Poetry of the Present’ has a sense of urgency about it. In it Lawrence finds many formulations for describing over and over again the richness
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of the instant. He is drawn rapidly into a language of mobility and impermanence. He begs to be saved from anything ’fixed, set, static’ (182), asking, in terms which have an oxymoronic resonance, for ’the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now’ (183). In comparison with many of his modernist contemporaries, this ahistorical emphasis on present-time is part of his writerly specificity. Central to his apprehension of ’the Now’ is Lawrence’s use of metaphor. A common image in his writing for the instant, the present moment, is the ’running flame’ (182) which persists in its continuous changeability. A flame cannot be anatomised into its constituent parts; it has a free-form immediacy which makes it a good image for Lawrence to exploit as he casts the fluidity and mobility of the present into language; into new poetic forms.
Towards the end of ’Poetry of the Present’ he collapses his concentration on time into his concentration on questions of the self, because his insights into the poetic treatment of the present are central to his representations of continually changing selfhood in the poetry and fiction. Perhaps because of its clarity on these questions the critic Holly Laird calls ’Poetry of the Present’ ’one of Lawrence’s few significant statements on poetry’ (Laird 1988: 238).
Laird, in a lengthy and detailed study of the poems, emphasizes the centrality of self to his poetic project. In this context, another term becomes central. ’Life’, for Lawrence, in many ways eludes definition: we recognize it in the living but cannot say what it is, except by taking refuge in metaphor. Descriptions of biological functioning offer merely classification, taxonomies which are continually subject to revision: ’If we try to fix the living tissue, as the biologists fix it with formalin, we have only a hardened bit of the past, the bygone life under our observation’ (182). The life of the self, then, for Lawrence is utterly mobile – at its most available it is located in the senses, but it has no history, having something of the quality of the instant moment in its passing presentness, in its immediacy and elusiveness, in its relation to the living. In a slight conceptual shift, Lawrence, using a familiar metaphor of unchartered territory, brings time and self together as subjects for poetic treatment: ’One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly recognized: ’the immediate, instant self (185). We could add, then, that his interest is in the self in time.
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(i) Look! We Have Come Through!
Look! We Have Come Through!, in its range of styles and deployment of certain vocabularies, provides a strong sense of Lawrence’s rich poetic practice, and of the developing direction of his thought. As many critics have noted, it is a volume which can be read as accomplished autobiographical reflection and poetic abstraction: perhaps it narrows the gap between them. It has its origins in a turbulent and transitional period of Lawrence’s life, after the death of his mother and includes the beginning of his relationship with Frieda Weekley and their marriage [10-13].
The book is contemporaneous with important discursive work like ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ and The Rainbow, as well as the first Italian writing and a host of shorter works. The temptation is .often to relate the written works to the immediate experiences of the writer (and Lawrence’s personal experiences lie very close to the surface in most of the poems in Look! We Have Come Through!). However, a concentration on the developing ’metaphysic’, aside from ’the life’, is at least as interesting. Lawrence may be seen developing and revising his thought. As we might expect from works like ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ and The Rainbow, much in Look! We Have Come Through! deals with the relations between men and women and Lawrence’s theorization of marriage. The ’argument’ to the volume is autobiographical, with its description of a man (for ’protagonist’ read ’author’) who leaves his native territory for stranger lands – ’terra incognita’ is a metaphor Lawrence often used
– with his new love, a married woman, who leaves her children for this new relationship. It is quite possible to wonder how ironic Lawrence is being in his description of the pattern of conflict and reconciliation between these two figures which is resolved only when ’they transcend into some condition of blessedness’ (CP 191).
Look! We Have Come Through! is comprised of interrelated groups of texts, although critics do not always agree on the constitution of these groups. Laird (1988) and Kinkead-Weekes (1996) both discuss groupings of poems within the book. Kinkead-Weekes notes the dialogic nature of the collection, observing that ’The poems begin to read one another more complexly than each reads in itself (Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 359). His groupings reflect this. Laird identifies the group of ’rose’ poems and a ’night’ sequence, as well as a sequence of elegies as Lawrence deals with failed relationships, and sequences which turn on new and married love respectively (Laird 1988). Lest anyone suspect that the volume is plainly and simply a celebration of the union of man and woman, many of the poems express reservations, identifying the myth of wholeness
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which surrounds affirmations of ’married’ or committed love. ’Bei Hennef’, for instance, sets up the principal emotional relationship, as Kinkead-Weekes notes, in interactive terms (’call’/’answer’; ’wish’/ ’fulfilment’), but ends by questioning the completeness of the relationship by drawing attention to the lovers’ suffering in spite of their union (CP 203). This is resonant of the sense in The Rainbow of the limitations of married love, even where marriage is represented as the principal form of personal, spiritual and emotional fulfilment. By the time Women in Love appears, the argument is expressed in a ’starry’ and ’cosmic’ language which says that, particularly for Rupert Birkin, one-to-one is not enough, while Ursula is depressed by the thought of ’others’ intervening in her relationship. So marriage is still an important frame of reference in Women in Love, but not without reservations. Reference to ’the balanced, eternal orbit’ in ’Both Sides of the Medal’ (236) in some measure foreshadows the language of Women in Love where Birkin takes refuge in a series of celestial metaphors in order to explain his position to an increasingly sceptical Ursula. Such scepticism is not so significantly a part otLook! We Have Come Through!. The idea of a relationship being sustained by necessary proximity, which means necessary distance (in emotional terms), resounds in the pointedly titled poem, ’Wedlock’, where the survival of the self (and, therefore, the survival of the relationship) depends on the recognition that although the lovers are happily together ’you are not me’ and ’I am never you’ (248).
Lawrence always found himself at the mercy of timorous publishers and editors, and some of the material in Look! We Have Come Through! gave these cause for alarm. The assumption most usually was that he wrote principally about sex, whereas Lawrence could legitimately protest that his real subjects -language, the birth of the self where sex is a resource not an end, the present – were overlooked by publishers’ readers whose immediate fears blocked their understanding. In ’Manifesto’, the point is very much the self-sufficiency of the lovers: as in ’Wedlock’, ’real liberty’, argues the poem, is that ’we shall have each our separate being’ (266). Descriptions of the body in ’Manifesto’ are in the service of a philosophy of the self, and a developing philosophy of singleness which, paradoxically, does not depend on the denial of relationship with another but on the maintenance of self-identity within the relationship. Whatever ’self is for Lawrence, it is elusive or, rather, it eludes language, so that many of these poems bear witness to the struggle to express a value (selfhood) which can be felt more easily than it can be described, even poetically.
’New Heaven and Earth’ (256) draws on ideas present in ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ which were in process in earlier work like the Foreword
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to Sons and Lovers. Lawrence deploys an old pun on ’trespassing’ to describe a passing away as the old self disembarks from the old life into the new. Resurrection imagery combines with images of conflict and the familiar Lawrentian idea of the destruction of the old giving way to the birth of the new. The ’terra nova’ discovered by the T of the poem recalls the imagery of ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ as the traveller fetches up on an unknown shore. In Part VII of the poem it is clear that the speaker has been suddenly transformed by unconsciously touching the woman who is already familiar but not ’known’ to him, and this touch is the means of his deliverance from ’death’ to ’life’. More powerful than sight, touch will recur in Lawrence’s writing. In this poem it is, along with blindness (the triumphant speaker in the final lines of ’New Heaven and Earth’ is ’sightless’), a central trope for non-cerebral knowing. It also provides a clue to the ’feeling’ nature of Lawrence’s language which indicates the presence always of values, barely quantifiable moments, of which language – poetic language can give only a sign. So, in focusing on a moment when a woman is touched, Lawrence both is, and is not, writing about sex. As so often in his writing, key issues – language, self-renewal, the importance of the present moment – dovetail.
(ii) Birds, Beasts and Flowers ,
Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923) is often cited as a transitional work. Gilbert (1972) sees it as mediating, in its principal themes, much that the critical and travel writing also contained. Laird (1988), in discussing the volume, refers to Studies in Classic American Literature, also 1923. In her analysis, Laird draws attention to the play with genre in Studies, highlighting in Birds, Beasts and Flowers Lawrence’s preference for the fable form over the epic, and gives much of her discussion over to the structure, composition and chronology of the volume (Laird 1988:133,
136-9). Interestingly, in terms of Lawrence’s relation to his modernist peers, she introduces her discussion with a brief comparison of Birds, Beasts and Flowers – with its treatment of the mythic, the present and the transition from an ’old’ consciousness to a ’new’ (also a preoccupation of Studies in Classic American Literature] – and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. She is careful to address the differences of poetic vision, but her comments throw light on Lawrence’s relation both to tradition and to literary modernism: ’Eliot’s disintegrated world in which a poetpriest, Tiresias, appears at the periphery, exiled, resembles that of Lawrence. In Eliot, however, we hear a more Arnoldian reverence for
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tradition – and greater despair. In Lawrence, the Carlylean vein flows with passionate rage’ (129).
The ’prefaces’ to each section of Birds, Beasts and Flowers – usually thought of as prose poems because of the quality of their language, metaphoric mode and the synoptic, multi-layered thought – were prepared for the Cresset edition of the volume (1930). ’Flowers’ (CP
303) introduces the mythic dimension of some of the poems in the volume, as in the Persephone myth through which is figured the passing of an old consciousness into a new. In ’Reptiles’ (348), Lawrence articulates – or re-articulates – one of the most central tenets of his ’metaphysic’: ’Homer was wrong in saying, ”Would that strife might pass away from among gods and men!” he did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away – for in the tension of oyposites all things have their being – (348, emphasis added). This necessary tension gets expression in the polarities of light and dark, mind and blood, north and south, which informs much of the thought in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. The ’cross-wise cloven psyche’ described in ’Tortoise Shell’ (356) relates to the dissertation on the cross in the first essay on the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne in Studies in Classic American Literature (SCAL
90-1), the symbol which expresses the division in man between blood and ’blood-knowledge’ and its opposite, mind (’spiritual consciousness’). This kind of correspondence suggests that Lawrence’s instruction to the reader of Studies in Classic American Literature holds good for the reader of Birds, Beasts and Flowers – ’You must look through the surface … and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness’ (SCAL 89).
(iii) Pansies
’Introduction to Pansies’ (CP 417-21) explains the structure of the volume: ’It suits the modern temper better to have its state of mind made up of apparently irrelevant thoughts that scurry in different directions, yet belong to the same nest’ (417). In the ’Foreword’ (423-
4) he is more forthcoming about the appropriateness of poetry for these ’thoughts’ (Pansies/Pewse’es) because he wishes them not to have the ’didactic element’ of prose (423). Back to the ’Introduction’, and in describing the genesis of the poems he typically challenges the ’natural’ distinction between mind and body: each poem is a ’true thought, which comes as much from the heart and the genitals as from the head’ (417). This is a quality he had spotted and admired in Whitman
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in Studies in Classic American Literature (SCAL 180). The material in the ’Introduction’ about the need for the mind to accept ’obscene’words is much more relevant to Lady Chatterley ’s Lover than to Pansies (although Pansies was seized by the police) [27].
It is fair to say that there is no principal organizing theme to Pansies, as Lawrence confirms. Some, like ’How Beastly the Bourgeois Is’, ’The Oxford Voice’ and ’The Middle Classes’, demonstrate his anti-bourgeois stance, and underlying the point about the assumption of superiority is the old idea of a polished surface concealing a rotten interior which extends to culture and society more broadly. ’Leave Sex Alone’ and ’The Mess of Love’ return to the ’sex in the head’ theme (discussed in Fantasia of the Unconscious), which is given extensive treatment in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ’Ego-Bound Women’ is also an echo from that novel, while ’Elderly Discontented Women’ continues to worry at (or about) the condition of ’modern’ women. Other poems examine social systems
– ’Democracy’, ’Wages’ – questioning the ability of social organization to keep man alive and, more often, in The Root of Our Evil’, The Ignoble Procession’, ’Money Madness’ and ’Kill Money’, for instance, baulking at the ’perverted instinct’ (487) of capitalism. ’Dies Irae’ and ’Dies Ilia’ take up themes of great phases of evolutionary change resulting in the old systems being superseded (at best) by a new consciousness. Some of the ’pansies’ seem valedictory, others speak, as promised, to an instant of reflection. >n
i: ,-v;
’ Further Reading
Laird (1988) examines the representation of Lawrence’s key ideas in relation to the self within the body of poetry. This study can be usefully contrasted with Gilbert (1972), Murfin (1983), Mandell (1984), Lockwood (1987) and Ingram (1990) who examine Lawrence’s language and imagery, his texts and contexts, his relation to a tradition, and the development of his ’metaphysic’ in the poetry. Bannerjee (1990) is useful on sources. Sagar (1985) includes chapters on Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and Pansies, Nettles, Last Poems in the context of a larger study which examines creative processes in Lawrence. Katz-Roy (1992) also considers the language of the last poems. Perloff (1985) discusses Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Hebe R. Mace examines the form of Lawrence’s poetry in Jackson and Brown Jackson (eds, 1988). Pollnitz writes on the ’dark god’ in the poetry in Kalnins (ed., 1986); R.P. Draper writes on poetic language and imagery in Heywood (ed., 1987); Tom Paulin discusses the challenge of ideological commitment versus aesthetic freedom expressed in the poetry in Preston and Hoare (eds, 1989); Helen Sword
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provides a survey of the main themes in Fernihough (ed., 2001). Among an earlier generation of critics, Hough (1956) takes issue with the view of Lawrence’s poetry expressed in Blackmur (1954). Marshall (1970) awards the poetry book-length treatment.
(e) THE NOVELLAS
Alongside the short story, the novellas, or shorter novels, provide Lawrence with an alternative form for the further development of the ’metaphysic’. In his study of Lawrence’s fiction, Frank Kermode (1973) concluded that in his writing ’Eternity inheres in the productions of time; it is achieved in the life of the individual consciousness. All Lawrence’s temporal projections … are therefore, in the last analysis, allegories of personal regeneration, rather than historical prophecies’ (138-9). If Lawrence had never written novels, poetry or plays, or philosophy, the body of short fiction and novellas would constitute an organic and coherent oeuvre, and Kermode’s words would remain as fitting. The novellas comprise The Captain’s Doll (1923), The Fox (1920;
1922), The Ladybird (1923), St Mawr (1925), The Princess (1925), The Escaped Cock (The Man Who Died) (1928; 1929), and the posthumously published forerunner to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930).
In The Captain’s Doll, ’personal regeneration’ is glimpsed as a possibility only after the sceptical rejection of romantic love on the part of Hepburn, the captain of the title. Similarly, The Ladybird institutes a discussion on the word ’love’, with Count Psanek echoing Birkin’s dissatisfaction with the available definitions in Women in Love. Using the curious threesome of Basil, Daphne and the Count, Lawrence combines the mythic and the uncanny in a tale where the ’collapse’ of the ’old self of the woman results in a kind of bondage to (or possession by) the otherworldly figure of Psanek, and the promise of an eternal encounter in the underworld. A variation on the isolated threesome and uncanny attraction-revulsion is developed in The Fox. This story charts the relationship of two women, Banford and March, attempting self-sufficiency on an isolated small-holding. The division of labour in this ’family’ reflects the traditional gendered roles, with Banford maintaining the house and March, described as resembling a ’graceful, loose-balanced young man’ (CSN 136; F 8), seeing to the work out of doors. The homestead does not thrive, however, and in particular the women are bothered by the nocturnal evil of a fox. Encountering it, March finds that she cannot destroy it as a countryman might, and
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instead it ’possesses’ her, demon-like. After this, a young man, Henry Grenfel arrives at the house (’to March he was the fox’ [143; 14]), and he begins to erode the friendship between the women. By his ’possession’ of March, he manipulates her into agreeing to marry him and, in a deliberate tree-felling, he murders his rival, Banford. The tale ends with Grenfel and March waiting to embark for Canada. The conflict between them is described in terms of Grenfel’s insistence that she gives up her independent will to live as his mate, set against her struggle to keep her self-consciousness awake.
St Mawr was begun after Lawrence’s first visit to Mexico [25], and after a very brief return to England. It draws on his experience of the American South-West, and what was for Lawrence a new imaginative territory. In S; Mawr the focus is on a woman who finally repudiates
• male companionship and sex in an attempt to contact the ’sacred sex’ in herself. The first time a body of Lawrence’s work was most thoroughly examined, the critic F.R. Leavis [126] compared St Mawr, which he called a ’dramatic poem’, with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, very much to Lawrence’s advantage:
St Mawr seems to me to present a creative and technical originality more remarkable than that of The Waste Land, being, as that poem is not, completely achieved, a full and self-sufficient creation. It can hardly strike the admirer as anything but major.
(Leavis 1955: 225)
Leavis tries to give a sense of St Mawr’s representative value to the ’Lawrentian’ in terms of the achieved relation between fiction and philosophy, or ’metaphysic’. His is also a reminder that the narrative deals as surely with the degeneration of Western civilization as Eliot’s poem. St Mawr starts with a modern marriage. Lou Witt – who, at the novella’s conclusion will ’ride away’ to a less self-destructive destiny than her counterpart in the short story, ’The Woman Who Rode Away’ ’ – is married to Rico, one of Lawrence’s over-conscious males (an artist, he is cosmopolitan and brittle). This is another narrative where a woman rejects an orthodox commitment (to a man, to family), and removes herself from the ’factional’ relationships which have so far defined her, of which the language speaks: the marriage is ’a strange vibration of nerves, rather than of the blood. A nervous attachment, rather than a sexual love. A curious tension of will, rather than a spontaneous passion … This attachment of the will and the nerves was destructive’ (CSN 279; STM 24).
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We are told in the beginning that Lou, young and rich, ’had had her own way so long, that by the age of twenty-five she didn’t know where she was’ (276; 21). This metaphysical dislocation is redeemed in part by the presence of the stallion, called St Mawr, which she acquires for Rico. As Rico and the horse are in a continually antagonistic relation to each other, the significance of St Mawr in the narrative is principally his significance to Lou as a counter to the ’null’ world she inhabits. In the figure of the stallion is invested an energy, a vigour, which is literally ’reined in’. Central to the narrative is Lou’s awakening to the spirit of evil, inspired by the sight of Rico trying to control St Mawr from the saddle as the sensitive animal panics and rears, unnerved by the sight of a dead snake underfoot. She thinks later of people ’thrown backwards, and writhing with evil. And the rider, crushed, was still reining them down’ (341; 78-9).
As Frank Kermode (1973) notes, the main characters in St Mawr have a ’doctrinal’ function, something which extends to the grooms, Phoenix who is Indian, and Lewis who is Welsh, as well as to Lou’s mother, Mrs Witt. The latter delivers powerful statements about the death of feeling in the modern world, statements which are bound up with her own reflections on death in a world where the living are already ’dead’. The narrative ranges between the open spaces of the American South-West and the comparative littleness and sterility of industrial, social England, as Lawrence develops his critique of modern civilization. The book draws to its close in a discursive mode which reflects on the present: And every civilization, when it loses its inward vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stables of metallic filth’ (CSN 422; 151). The book ends with Lou’s affirmation of her isolation from men, and her removal to a ranch in pioneer country where personal regeneration might be possible.
Lou’s destiny, which is predicated on a rejection of ’modern social life’ (406; 137) arrived at through her rejection of modern sexual experience, can be contrasted with the destiny of the Christ-figure in The Escaped Cock (The Man Who Died}. Among Lawrence’s last works, this narrative deals with the return of Christ from the tomb, and the parallel awakening of his sexual self in an encounter with a priestess of Isis, who conceives a child. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this tale is much more about ’phallic consciousness’ as the principal antidote to a crippling self-consciousness, than it is about sex. And, also as in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (and indeed in StMawr), personal rebirth is established as the necessary prefiguration to cultural rebirth (in those stories of
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England and America). The Escaped Cock is another move into a mythic and religious, rather than an historical, mode: the ’man who died’ encounters the priestess who serves ’Isis in Search’, scouring the world for the fragments of the disarticulated body of Osiris: ’she must gather him together and fold her arms round the re-assembled body till it became warm again, and roused to life, and could embrace her and could fecundate her womb’ (CSN 577). As usual in Lawrence, sex serves the ends of psychic, spiritual, personal and cultural regeneration. John Worthen is right when he states:
It is the final paradox of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and ’The Escaped Cock’ that they should … be the most religious of Lawrence’s fictions: the ones in which he most consistently used sex as an example, an opportunity, a metaphor and a myth.
(1991b: 119-20)
So is the idea of ’marriage’ to a god more effectively achieved in The Escaped Cock, as a genuine expression of Lawrence’s philosophy, than in the over-conscious mode of The Plumed Serpent, where the principal idea of rebirth and cultural regeneration is submerged under the crudely doctrinal £ [72-5].
The Princess (1925) is another New Mexico story, written just after St Mavcr and contemporaneous with revisions to The Plumed Serpent. After her father’s death, a British heiress, Dollie Urquhart (’The Princess’ as her father has always called her), is at a loose end. In her late 30s, and Virginal’, she arranges a break at the Ranch del Carro Gordo with her companion, Miss Cummins, equally Virginal’. The Princess is on a desultory search for a husband now that her father has gone. Only the Spanish-speaking Mexican mountain-guide, Romero, attracts her, and she arranges for him to take her and Miss Cummins deep into the
. Rocky Mountains, on a longer trek than the usual tourist jaunts. Miss Cummins is forced to turn back once her horse suffers an injury, but
, the Princess and Romero press on to Romero’s cabin, several days’ ride away. They make a simple camp as the cold closes in. Overnight, the Princess has a dream of the oppressive snow burying her, and she wakes, freezing. Allowing Romero to warm her, the narrative dramatizes her ambivalence towards his ’annihilating’ sensual presence (CSN 462; STM 188). In the morning her antagonism grows, especially in the face of Romero’s evident pleasure at her submission. When she articulates her dislike of sex, and repudiation of him, he throws her clothes into the icy river to strand her, and rapes her. This incarceration and abuse continues until towards the end of the week two horsemen
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approach the cabin, and Romero is killed in a gunfight. The point of the story lies in the Princess’s ’willed’ attraction to Romero which develops alongside her denial of the life of the body. The language applied to her throughout is of an otherworld figure – she is like a ’changeling’, never ’at home’ in company, without vivid connection to those close to her, even Miss Cummins who is, throughout, merely an employee. The Princess’s fastidiousness is interpreted as a denial of life and, like Banford in The Fox, she is punished by the impersonal violence of the man, reflected in the impersonal contours of the ’primitive’ landscape.
Further Reading
F.R. Leavis (1955) granted The Captain’s Doll and St Mawr their own chapters. Other monographs on the fiction that include consideration of the novellas include Spilka (1955), Widmer (1962), Moynahan (1963), Sagar (1966; 1985), Cavitch (1969), Cowan (1970) and Ruderman (1984). Material in edited collections includes Daleski, in Gomme (ed.,
1978), Blanchard (1978), Gilbert (1985), Turner (1986), Devlin (1988), McDowell (1988) and Kinkead-Weekes (2001). Conveniently collected in one volume (Jackson and Brown Jackson 1988) are essays by different critics on The Fox (Draper), The Virgin and the Gipsy (Guttenberg) and The Escaped Cock (Cowan). A great deal of material is published in periodicals.
(f) THE SHORT STORIES
Lawrence is one of the key short-story writers of the modernist period. The three major collections are identified respectively by their inclusion of The Prussian Officer’ (1914), ’England, My England’ (1915; 1922) and The Woman Who Rode Away’ (1925; 1928). The stories that constitute the collections are central to an understanding of Lawrence’s major preoccupations, such as his exploration of the relationships between men and women; the instinctive life; the realization of self awareness; the examination of cultural, as well as personal, dissolution and the related critique of Western civilization as misdirected in its pursuit of ideal values; the multi-directional exploration of mythic and religious themes. As ’fables’ they draw attention to Lawrence’s highly successful handling of the form and demonstrable authorial control. At their best each is a finely crafted text, which synoptically and directly apprehends much that is dealt with in more exploratory fashion in the
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novels in particular, although it would be erroneous to view the short stories as ’rehearsals’ for the longer projects.
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) is Lawrence’s first collection of short stories. Draper (1970) prints a contemporary review which states shrewdly: ’Here are twelve short stories from Mr D.H. Lawrence’s pen – all brilliant, all superhuman, and at the same time whuman’ (81). It is a judgement which echoes Lawrence’s statement to Edward Garnett that what interests him is ’that which is physic – non-human, in humanity’ (Letters II: 182). ’The Prussian Officer’ describes first the relentless bullying of an orderly by his captain, and then the effects on the young soldier, called Schoner, of his revenge taken when he murders his tormentor. While there is a sexually sadistic element to the story that many critics have noted, this does not dominate the narrative which rather explores at length the violence that each man does to himselfIn doing violence to the other. At the tale’s beginning the officer is a mechanism: he functions as a soldier rather than a living man, and when he notices the capacity for living in Schoner he finds the recognition of it insufferable. Lawrence employs imagery which he may have learned from the Italian futurists [15] to communicate the crisis in the officer at the level of self, and the language describes an impersonal violence which recalls episodes in The Rainbow. When the officer strikes the cowed and startled Schoner he finds the experience is paradoxically both satisfying and self-destructive: ’Deep inside him [the officer] was the intense gratification of his passion, still working powerfully. Then there was a counteraction, a horrible breaking down of something inside him, a whole agony of reaction’ (8). When the bullied Schoner can take no more, and finds relief in the unpremeditated murder of the officer, he takes flight. Dazed by the violence which he has expressed, he suffers both the death of the spirit and, finally, literal death. The other side of love, for Lawrence, is not hate, but this death of the soul in conflict with the other. After he has received a kicking from the officer, the abused Schoner, a victim, is ’inert’, he submits to his own ’nullification’, he is ’disintegrated’ (10). Reality and unreality change places as he begins to feel his existence only in the shadows: he no longer has ’his living place in the hot, bright morning’ (11). His murder of the officer – in the act itself – is a kind of release from his new condition of ’mechanical obedience’ (13). As with Gerald Crich in Women in Love, the end of Schoner’s pain is achieved in his absorption by the distant mountains which he sees as he dies: ’he wanted to leave himself and be identified with them’ (20).
The narrative language dramatizes Lawrence’s thesis that the death of culture (degenerate European modernity) is indistinguishable from
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the death of the ’living’ self. The officer may be a mechanism, dead to himself, because of his place in the military establishment which works against life (and in this he shares the condition of The Rainbow’s Anton Skrebensky), but the story is not about ’militarism’. Revising ’The Prussian Officer’ in 1914, however, Lawrence, revolted by the war, turned it into a fable about a culture in ’recoil’ from itself.
Lawrence did not intend ’The Prussian Officer’ to head up the collection, although few of the remaining stories in this volume have its narrative power, linguistic control and symbolic tightness. ’Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (the main theme of which he reworked in his play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd) [36], however, has long been considered exceptional. It is written in the mode of domestic realism in which Lawrence excels. Elizabeth Bates, a wife and mother, waits for her collier husband to return from his day in the mine. He is late. The children come home, the evening closes in, the tea threatens to ruin and so the incomplete family sit down in the shadows to eat. Elizabeth is sure her husband is in the public house. With the children in bed, she goes to make enquiries of his mates, barely suppressing her sense of indignity at having to ask where he is, to discover that no-one has seen him leave work. She returns home, having alerted others to his absence, and waits with her mother-in-law for his return. It transpires that there has been a fatal accident at the pit. The body is brought back to the house for the women to lay out as is the custom, in the parlour. Chrysanthemums have been a minor, symbolic presence in the narrative, accompanying the stages of Elizabeth’s waiting. Their symbolic value to her is revealed in the answer she gives to her little girl’s comment that the flowers her mother has tucked into her apron are beautiful:
Not to me. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.
(PO 186)
In the parlour with the body is the ’cold, deathly smell of chrysanthemums’ (193-4). The women together wash and clothe the body, the mother grief-stricken but Elizabeth is at some level arrested. Facing the dead, she comes to understand the difference between her conception of Bates as her husband, and father of her children, and what he ’is’. Death restores the truth to her that ’they had denied each other in life’ (198). The conclusion is closer to the view in ’Study of
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Thomas Hardy’ that a ’balanced’ relation is necessary between the sexes, than to the more personal solutions of Sons and Lovers, for instance. The spectacle of the dead man enables Elizabeth to understand the extent to which her marriage was a social arrangement, and as such an encounter between strangers, and that there has been no unconscious connection between them – this is the meaning of ’denial’ in her meditation. Accompanying this realization is the scent of the flowers in the room. The concentration is not on an unhappy marriage as, in Lawrence’s terms at this time, it was no ’marriage’ at all. In the battles between husband and wife Elizabeth was fighting him, not fighting for herself. The point of the story lies in the distinction. It is her encounter with the dead that forces the woman to choose life in the final lines of the narrative, ’which was her immediate master’ (199). Another collection, England, My England and Other Stories, was first published in America in 1922 (publication in Britain was two years later). In the same year, Lawrence published Aaron’s Rod and Fantasia of the Unconscious for which he had high hopes. The Neve York Times published a review of England My England which identified the ’sex war’ as its organizing theme:
For one reason or another, through one set of circumstances or another, there is a conflict, open or concealed, between the protagonists, man and woman, of nearly every tale. And in practically «’ii all of them it is the man who is the victim, the terrorized and :s dominated, weakly submissive, struggling or defiant.
(Draper 1970: 188)
As with his other collections, most of the stories in this volume had appeared in print elsewhere, in magazines and periodicals. Half of the stories were written during the Great War, a turbulent period for Lawrence not least because of the suppression of The Rainbow in 1915. The others are just post-war, so that most belong to his ’Cornwall’ period [19], apart from The Primrose Path’ which preceded it. It is interesting to consider the stories written more or less alongside Women in Love.
’England, My England’, begun in 1915, starts with a marriage and ends with the death of the protagonist in the war. The marriage between Egbert and Winifred deals with an attraction across social classes. With the arrival of children, the alienation of Egbert within the family begins (here is an echo of Will Brangwen’s alienation in The Rainbow [EME 11]). His habitual carelessness as one of life’s amateurs means that, in an accident which is partly his fault, his young daughter
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is maimed and made lame. The family closes against him and, against expectation, he finds them ’unreal’ – which means that the active emotional life he experienced as a young husband has gone. Disastrously, he takes refuge in the suddenly more ’real’ mechanism of military life when he joins up to become a soldier. There is no spiritual rebirth for Egbert: he is killed by a German shell. The story in part allows Lawrence to show European culture – ’German militarism’ and ’British industrialism’ (28) – as degenerate and deathly, and in Egbert’s literal death is expressed the death of feeling which Lawrence extends to his culture. The final episode – Egbert’s death – shows war to be far from heroic.
If ’England, My England’ deals in part directly with the war, others like ’The Blind Man’ expoit the highly personal effects of conflict. In that story an injured veteran, blinded in Flanders (46), learns to live at an instinctive level which is simply less available to the sighted. ’The Blind Man’ and ’Hadrian’ are both powerful fables about the transforming effects of touch over sight, and show how ’unconscious’ knowledge of others is gained through the immediacy of touch which cannot lie. Maurice Pervin’s disability, in ’The Blind Man’, is revelatory to him. Because he must ’feel’ his surroundings he finds a new, immediate world opened up to him as a result of his disability, and ’wanted no intervention of visual consciousness’ (54). When he forces Bertie Reid, his wife’s cousin, to touch his sightless eyes and battle scar, Reid cannot take the naked knowledge of the man which is suddenly available to him. Pervin, on the other hand, rejoices in the knowledge that he gains through touching Reid’s face: ’”Oh, my God,” he said, ”we shall know each other now, shan’t wei We shall know each other now”’ (62), but Reid, unused to such unmediated, and unasked for, closeness, is ’broken’ (63). This is a subtle story which turns on Lawrence’s suspicion of the visual, the primacy of sight in Western understanding, and he substitutes another sense. New modes of consciousness are explored in other contexts which turn on touch, and proximity, as in ’The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’ which examines the terms of the new-found love between a doctor and a young woman whom he rescues from drowning.
Other stories in this collection, like ’Tickets Please’, ’Samson and Delilah’ and ’The Last Straw’ are finely observed realist tales drawing on Lawrence’s knowledge of Midlands working-class life. ’Tickets Please’ charts the ’subtle antagonism’ between John Thomas and Annie who work on the tramway. John Thomas has a reputation as a ’ladies man’ of which Annie is fully aware, but she allows herself to be courted by him and they enjoy a period of real companionship until Annie’s
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interest in him becomes more personal – ’she did not want a mere nocturnal presence’ (39). Alarmed by her new interest, John Thomas, to her great surprise, jilts her. The rest of the tale deals with Annie’s revenge. With Nora, and the other women who work on the trams, who have all ’walked out with’ him, Annie conspires to trap their former beau in a room (’outside was the darkness and lawlessness of war-time’ [40]). Taunting him to choose one of them, the forced encounter degenerates rapidly into real violence against John Thomas: ’Strange, wild creatures, they [the women] hung on him and rushed at him to bear him down’ (43). Scared, but emboldened by defiance, he chooses his chief tormentor, the jilted Annie, who is deeply disturbed and angered by his audacity. In creating this feeling in her, he has ’won’ the struggle between them. The ’lawlessness’ of wartime, reflected in the behaviour of the women, has not defeated the ’phallic’ hero, John Thomas.
The theme of the attractiveness of sensual men is continued in The Last Straw’ which describes the return of a woman formerly in service to her home-town, where she intends to marry her first-love, a workingman. Her ambivalence about his worth to her, when she does return, is resolved only after he is accused by an angry mother – a crude countrywoman – of getting her daughter, Annie, pregnant. Fanny, a ’superior’ woman, decides to stay with Harry as if his sexual irresponsibility makes possible her desire for him. Harry’s mother is delighted that Fanny has not dropped her son, as Fanny is a woman with a legacy of £200 and some savings. Unlike other of Lawrence’s women, Fanny experiences a ’prompting’ more than an awakening (see The HorseDealer’s Daughter’). The story is comic, and slightly satirical.
The Woman Who Rode Away’ is the title-story in a third, and very different, collection published in 1928 which contains frequently satirical stories written over the preceding four years. Most of the stories were placed elsewhere before being included in this volume, which was not conceived organically. As in other works, many of them draw on Lawrence’s acquaintances and are often critical – ’Smile’, The Border-Line’, ’Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’ and The Last Laugh’, for example, are satires written with the character of John Middleton Murry in mind; and Two Blue Birds’ and The Man Who Loved Islands’ satirize the novelist, Compton Mackenzie. Some, like ’Glad Ghosts’, were requested for other anthologies – Lady Cynthia Asquith commissioned this story for a collection of ghost stories, but settled for The Rocking-Horse Winner’ when the content of ’Glad Ghosts’ presented problems. ’Sun’ is a curious fable about a woman’s sexual transformation as she takes the sun for a lover.
In The Woman Who Rode Away’ (1925), a white woman leaves her marriage to a much older man (this is the destiny preserved for The Princess’, Lawrence’s near-contemporaneous short novel [90]), and her remote home in the Sierra Madre mountains, in search of the ’Chilchui’ Indians and the romantic adventure that they represent. Indifferent to her family’s insistence that she stay on the ranch, she rides alone into the mountains where eventually the encounter about which she has fantasized takes place. She submits to being taken by Chilchui men to a remote settlement where, over a period of months, she is stripped of her quotidian identity, drugged and prepared for sacrifice. The story ends in the seconds before her death as the priest waits for the moment when the rays of the winter sun shine through a phallic column of ice which hangs in the mouth of the sacrificial cave: Then the old man would strike, and strike home, accomplish the sacrifice and achieve the power’ (WWRA 71).
This story has for a long time been central to debates about Lawrence’s misogyny, in large part because of the voyeuristic pleasures of the text in descriptions of the woman’s imprisonment and preparation for sacrifice, particularly in the face of her willingness to suffer any number of bodily humiliations: she is pawed and watched over until her dehumanization and objectification is complete. In a highly influential reading, Kate Millett, in her book Sexual Politics, concludes that this narrative, as pornography, glorified in the ’death-fuck’ (Millett
1969: 292 [143]). More recently, critics have been willing to reassess The Women Who Rode Away’ in ways which increasingly emphasize the parallels between the woman and the tribe as marginal. As Sheila Contreras puts it in a recent article:
The white man has metaphorically stolen the sun from the Chilchui, who must now reclaim it through the body of a white woman, the commodity of exchange between male cultures. The symbolic rape of a white woman reverses the white man’s colonial rape of the Chilchui world.
(Contreras 1993-4: 99)
As in The Plumed Serpent, the white woman’s submission is central to the tale’s logic. Her whiteness, as well as her sex, matters. Mid-narrative, the white woman is contrasted with the native women in the dance: ’Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of woman’ (60). In this
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way Lawrence represents his agitation at ’nervous conscious’ modern women, set against the ’impersonal passion’ of the others. :i:;,!>’if SMJ
Further Reading
F.R. Leavis (1955) commits a chapter to ’The Tales’, as does Hough (1956). The first full-length study of the short fiction is Widmer (1962) and many of his contemporaries make some reference to the short fiction in their assessments of Lawrence (Moynahan 1963, Ford 1965). More recent book-length studies on specific works include Cushman (1978) on the genesis of The Prussian Officer collection. Harris (1984), Thornton (1993) and Kearney (1997) are studies of the short fiction. Michael Black (1986) writes at length on the early short stories with reference to their place within Lawrence’s oeuvre, and to the evolution of ideas, and styles, that they represent. Surveys tend to give some attention to the short stories (e.g. Worthen 1991). Mara Kalnins and Clyde de L. Ryals write on the short fiction in Jackson and Brown Jackson (eds) (1988). These titles are in addition to the innumerable articles and essays on individual stories.
(g) DISCURSIVE WRITING ”
Lawrence’s output included a vast corpus of discursive writing principally, but not exclusively, in the form of essays. Like the Foreword to Sons and Lovers (1913) [47] these were not always intended for publication, although most are now in fact available. This writing represents extended debates (like ’The Crown’) as well as discrete, shorter pieces. The essays represent a mode of writing in which Lawrence could state his personal philosophy in contexts supplementary to the fiction. The discursive writing, which is always exploratory, is often highly metaphorical as Lawrence animates the relation between ’thought’ and ’poetry’, both of which are creative initiatives.
(i) ’Art and the Individual’
The earliest extant whole piece of discursive writing is significantly on aesthetics and on what Lawrence terms ’Aesthetic Interest’. This essay, ’Art and the Individual’, originated as a talk given to a group of his friends in Eastwood in 1908. It represents a wide-ranging introduction to the principal criteria of aesthetic judgement in which Lawrence
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displays his credentials as a young intellectual. The talk draws on much of the reading he has done as a student, including his reading of European literature and philosophy, and on contemporary critical material and reviews. Crucially, Art and the Individual’ shows a feeling for language that underpins much of Lawrence’s mature fiction and poetry. It does so in a brief meditation on words and the limitations of language:
It is Art which opens to us the silences, the primordial silences which hold the secret of things, the great purposes, which are themselves silent; there are no words to speak of them with, and no thoughts to think of them in, so we struggle to touch them through art…
(STH 140)
The essay concludes that an appropriate response to culture, in the individual, is the result of self-education.
(ii) ’Study of Thomas Hardy’
It is generally acknowledged that Lawrence’s ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ (written in 1914 and published posthumously), communicates more about Lawrence’s fledgling political and aesthetic philosophies than it does about Hardy’s writing, although his comments on The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) andjude the Obscure (1896), for example, are full of insight. Lawrence read Lascelles Abercrombie’s book, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (1912), having announced ’I am going to do a little book on Hardy’s people’ (Letters II: 198). As a work of literary criticism, it was a project which he was invited to undertake and which, although he did not pursue it (as a book) into print in his lifetime, he found compelling. It should not be taken either as Lawrence’s last word on Hardy or the European novel, or his last word on his philosophy of art. It is an unfinished document. As one commentator has noted, the sequence of chapters that we are most familiar with in the ’Study’ is not necessarily that which Lawrence intended. Furthermore, ’[wjhat we have is a set of draft chapters; some of them are drafts of the same chapter, or attempts at saying similar things, and some do not lead on from the previous chapter’ (Black 1991: 148). As a work-in-progress, it ran parallel to his completion of The Rainbow – Daleski (1965) and Kinkead-Weekes (1968) draw attention to the importance of ideas in ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ to an understanding of the ’metaphysic’ of that novel [49-56; 133], In common with other key examples of Lawrence’s discursive writing, then, ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ provides
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a useful sketch more than a polished literary critical endeavour. That he altered the title as the book developed to ’Le Gai Savaire’, which has a Nietzschean suggestiveness, underlines the extent to which what began genuinely as a critique of Hardy’s writing had become, in process, something much more personal and self-reflective. He certainly discovered things at this point about his own ’characterization’ from Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s fictional characters begin to figure in the third chapter of the ’Study’ and almost immediately they are tested against Lawrence’s model of self-preservation and self-value: ’all of them are struggling hard to come into being’ (STH 20). As literary criticism, it becomes at points a comparative study of Hardy and Tolstoy which concludes with Lawrence’s unmasking of novels that, even while appearing to expose the sinister mechanisms of social control in destroying free individuals like Tess Durbeyfield and Anna Karenina, sustain the dominant ideology – society triumphs.
The meditation at the heart of ’Study of Thomas Hardy’, however, deals with the creative possibilities of conflict, either within the individual (the artist), or between individuals (usually between men and women). Creative conflict is described in this work as the inevitable opposition between ’male’ and ’female’ principles that co-exist within the individual. Religious and artistic creativity is theorized according to this model of conflict, which Lawrence elsewhere (in the context of poetry), calls ’strife’ (CP 348) [85]. Developed alongside this exploratory meditation is a debate on human relations, men and women, and in particular the idea of an achieved balance between male and female principles (represented by the metaphor of ’Law’ and ’Love’), as a means of enabling the individual self, reborn, to ’come through’ (see Look! We Have Come Through!) [82]. This finds expression in the revised The Rainbow, where it informed (and developed from) Lawrence’s meditation on marriage. ’Study of Thomas Hardy’, then, is an idiosyncratic investigation of a number of themes: aesthetic, metaphysical and personal. Occasionally, Lawrence represents contemporary concerns as a means of talking about the sexes, as in the chapter entitled ’Still introductory: about Women’s Suffrage, and Laws, and the War, and the Poor, with some Fancyful Moralising’, but his interest is not really in social reforms.
’Study of Thomas Hardy’, we must remember, comes out of the early period of World War I. Much of Lawrence’s thought at this time is crystallized in his anti-war sentiments. He pathologizes conflict in many of these early statements in ways which have their echoes in the fiction. In the ’Study’, he warns of ’men in whom the violence of war shall have shaken the life flow and broken or perverted the course,
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women who will cease to live henceforth, yet will remain existing in the land, fixed and at some lower point of fear or brutality’ (STH 17). Lawrence employs martial metaphors to describe the struggle, the fight, not for the victory of king and country, but of the self. Hence, his philosophy of individual integrity can be seen to sharpen itself against the whetstone of European conflict. It is in this very particular context that ’the unknown’, which is positive, and the ’void’, which is negative, gain an established position in Lawrence’s lexicon.
By the end of the ’Study’, the birth of the self out of strife is related to phases of human consciousness – so that sometimes Lawrence is talking in global terms about culture and destiny, and sometimes about the personal and individual. Although this thought informs the writing which ran immediately parallel to ’Study of Thomas Hardy’, other ’aesthetic’ issues are foregrounded which are of equal significance in the writing to follow. Lawrence arrives at a confident description of artistic consciousness famously summed up in his often-quoted assertions that ’It is the novelists and dramatists who have the hardest task in reconciling their metaphysic, their theory of being and knowing, with their living sense of being’; and ’the metaphysic must always subserve the artistic purpose beyond the artist’s conscious aim. Otherwise the novel becomes a treatise’ (STH 91). With these words, Lawrence established his sense of the great potential, yet to be realized, of the novel form.
(iii) ’The Crown’
The ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ was followed in 1915 by ’The Crown’ which Lawrence attempted to publish in the form of six essays in a little magazine, started up by himself, Murry and Mansfield, called Signature [18]. It failed, and Lawrence only succeeded in publishing the whole text in 1925, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. ’The Crown’, like ’Hardy’, employs dualistic imagery and, at times, becomes difficult and contradictory. Nevertheless, it introduces for extensive development many of the terms that Lawrence worked into Women in Love, and shows the extent of his thought on modern culture as ’disintegrative’ and marked from the inside by ’corruption’ [56-65]. The work as a whole embodies a difficult philosophy through which the effects of the war can be detected, accompanied by some hope of regeneration: ’We may give ourselves utterly to destruction. Then our conscious forms are destroyed along with us, and something new must arise’ (RDP 294; emphasis added). The emphasis on the necessity of destruction is difficult to take but it is
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the antidote to different forms of ’nullity’ posited elsewhere in the essay. ’Disintegration’, ’corruption’, ’reduction’and ’dissolution’ are the key terms of the piece.
(iv) Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
It is a stated hostility in Lawrence to the popularity of Freud among his contemporaries which begins the first book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921). Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) is less concerned with Freud (although, with Jung, Freud is cited as an influence in the ’Foreword’), and is more obviously exploratory and metaphorical. On what, then, is Lawrence’s scepticism of psychoanalysis founded^ He is the first to admit that he has not read Freud. Frieda Weekley and her circle are most usually credited with introducing him to psychoanalysis: ’I never read Freud, but I have learned about him since I was in Germany’ (Letters II: 80). Had he wished to study it, Lawrence, a linguist, could have read Die Traumdeutung (1900) in the original, but anyway had access to The Interpretation of Dreams in translation, and other texts were becoming available. Among his friends in Britain could be counted Freudian analysts, principally David Eder (they met in 1914), who translated Freud into English, and Barbara Low. Lawrence also discussed psychoanalysis with Ernest Jones who wrote on child psychology. In 1919, in Italy, Lawrence felt inspired to take up the topic: ’I am going to do various small things – on Italy and on psycoanalysis [sic] – for the periodicals’ (Letters III: 426-7), to express ’something definite in place of the vague Freudian Unconscious’ (Letters IV: 40). Both books, but especially Psychoanalysis, are intent on retrieving the idea of ’the unconscious’ from the Freudians.
The reviews of Psychoanalysis and Fantasia were not universally positive, although John Middleton Murry praised Lawrence’s project (Draper 1970: 184-7). It is some time since Lawrence has been taken seriously as a reader of Freud, and yet his engagement with the psychoanalytic is not too surprising. He shared Freud’s interest in the instinctive life. Possibly he read into Freud’s scientism a betrayal of that instinctive life. Freud, very early on in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, is dismissed as a clinician, at the very worst ’the psychiatric quack’. There is a suggestion of Jekyll and Hyde in ’the psychoanalytic gentleman’ who moves through the previously unchartered terrain of the mind only to dwell in a subterranean ’cavern of dreams’, where he finds, ’a huge slimy serpent of sex, and heaps of excrement, and a myriad repulsive little horrors spawned between sex and excrement’ (F&P 203).
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Where Freud developed a language for the psycho-sexual dramas of infancy, and unconscious processes, Lawrence displayed a complete intolerance of his methodology: ’Psychoanalysis, the moment it begins to demonstrate the nature of the unconscious, is assuming the role of psychology’ (204).
The two books on the unconscious, then, set out to challenge what Lawrence most resented in psychoanalysis as he understood it – the absolute adherence to the Cartesian distinction of mind and body in Freud’s thought (this is the ’cogito ergo sum’ of the French philosopher Rene Descartes [1596-1650]). In Pansies, it is claimed ’I am, I don’t think I am’ (CP 474). In anti-Cartesian mode, then, Psychoanalysis and Fantasia give the fullest expression to Lawrence’s psycho-biology, a physiology of emotional feeling – a genealogy of the unconscious. Central to Psychoanalysis, in particular, is the confidence with which Lawrence locates non-deliberate, instinctive, ’knowledge’ in the sensual body, continually resisting what he perceives to be the psychoanalytic concentration on mind. This insistence gives rise to the materialist philosophy of the ganglia and plexuses, the important sites of feeling of ’consciousness’ argues Lawrence – which are ambivalently present in the body. Knowledge of the world and of the other (not-self), is established in these centres of consciousness in the chest and abdomen, the solar plexus and the cardiac plexus. It is from such centres, and from the life-blood, Lawrence argues, that individuals act: ’bloodconsciousness … is the very source and origin of us’ (183). Paradoxially (in language), this is the Lawrentian ’««conscious’.
The phrase ’blood-consciousness’ occupies a central place in Lawrence’s lexicon. It has often been taken to have racial meaning, where ’blood’ is given more weight than ’consciousness’ in the construction. At the time of writing Fantasia, however, Lawrence’s emphasis was on the ’life-blood’ as the bodily centre of ’unconscious’ feeling and functioning. Individuals act, he argues, from the blood before they act from the mind. ’Mental consciousness’ is the domain of the social self, rather than the sensual self. In the chapter of Fantasia called The Lower Self Lawrence develops his ’elemental’ model. It is a chapter which resorts to his familiar language of binary oppositions: moon/sun, night/ day, dark/light, blood/mind, male/female. Social functioning is understood in these terms: to wake from night into day is to travel from the blood and the darkness (the ’source’ of us) into the light, but at the end of the day there is a return from ’mental consciousness and activity’ to ’the darkness and elemental consciousness of the blood’ (183). Unlike Freud, Lawrence’s primary interest is not pathology, but he argues that a perversion (an over-development) of the ’upper consciousness’,
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principally in women, leads to ’modern’ self-consciousness and a perversion of sex (188-9). This model lies behind the characters of Kate Leslie (The Plumed Serpent} and the Princess (The Princess}. In both texts, as we have seen, this emphasis on ’the darkness and elemental consciousness of the blood’ (183) acquires an objectionable racial dimension.
This interest in the roots of consciousness persists in Lawrence after the books on the unconscious – this is demonstrated in the discursive writing of the American period. Later, in 1927 he favourably reviewed The Social Basis of Consciousness by Trigant Burrow, a psychologist who had broken away from Freud’s ideas in certain particulars. Much of Burrow’s work deals with social as well as individual behaviour. In the text read by Lawrence, Burrow shows what seems to the reviewer to be a pleasing concentration on group analysis (and groupconsciousness) over and above the privately negotiated relationship of analyst/analysand in a one-to-one clinical context. Although elsewhere Lawrence writes at length on the integrity of the individual, he must always balance this emphasis with an idea of a sympathetic community. As usual, we learn more about Lawrence than about the book under review, and in particular about his views on communality (as opposed to ’society’, which is negative). Burrow’s preference for group therapy represents a creative situation which appeals at this time to Lawrence once he has cast the idea in the light of his own assumptions.
Hence, Burrow moves Lawrence to express that which lies at the foundations of many of his own statements on egocentricity versus community. In the review, he articulates his own reservations about the ’self-conscious phase of [man’s] mental evolution’ (Phoenix 378) which produces repressive social systems (ideals). Lawrence despises the idea of social expectations which mould the subject at the level of the unconscious; he objects to the idea that ’Freudism’ returns ’cured’ and well-adjusted people back to a society which has its orthodoxies firmly in place. The analyst, who restores the subject to ’normality’, polices positively dissenting individuals. As Lawrence puts it, ’Individuals rebel: and these are the neurotics, who show some sign of health’ (380).
(v) Studies in Classic American Literature
The essays on American literature, with their concentration on unconscious levels of creativity and resistance (’Never trust the artist. Trust the tale’ [SCAL 8]), have been described as psychoanalytic studies of literary texts (Wright 1989). This is despite Lawrence’s evident
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scepticism of Freudian psychoanalysis [102] – and it is not ’Freudian’ readings that Lawrence suggests. Studies in Classic American Literature offers a highly idiosyncratic critique of a body of texts; poetry and fiction. It also shows Lawrence attempting to theorize a culture with which, at the time of publication, he was newly acquainted.
The essay on Benjamin Franklin is the first ’case study’ that properly opens the volume and it helpfully and clearly enables Lawrence to set out his stall. Franklin’s injunctions to his fellow Americans offer them the spectre, argues Lawrence, of ’the ideal self produced by a social morality, albeit a worthy morality. Hence Lawrence’s satire on the maxims of Benjamin Franklin and on his ’creed’. The cultivated and rational man defined by Franklin as the ideal is only part of the story for Lawrence, and probably the worst part: Franklin, with his social programme for the new America, ’says I am nothing but a servant of mankind’. In contrast insists Lawrence, ’I am absolutely a servant of my own Holy Ghost’ (SCAL 25). The integrity of the individual to be an individual is threatened by the social programme.
Crevecceur mirrors Franklin when he demonstrates a need to regulate and control nature. Crevecceur’s fantasy of nature, of the new American farmer and his relation to the soil, is a ’predetermined fancy’ (35), argues Lawrence. Where much of Crevecceur’s writing comes from ’blood-knowledge’, however, that is the ’tale’ speaking over the ’artist’:
You can idealize or intellectualize. Or, on the contrary, you can let the dark soul in you see for itself. An artist usually intellectualizes on top, and his dark under-consciousness goes on contradicting him beneath. … Crevecceur is the first example (31).
That last comment puts Franklin in his place. In both examples Franklin and Crevecceur – idealism is the problem and the obstruction to knowledge, but because Crevecceur is (despite himself) an artist (30) a kind of truth emerges out of his text that he cannot repress for all his embracing of Franklin’s kind of rationalism in concert with his own sentimentalism. In Crevecceur, then, comes Lawrence’s first example of the principal creed of Studies in Classic American Literature, that ’Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day’ (8). Franklin might privilege ’eternal’ truths, as he also believes in the ’immortal’ soul; but the artist shows truth to be relative and contingent – and in Lawrence’s terms, alive.
The essays on Fenimore Cooper take a slightly different direction. They begin by stating the impossibility of ’reconciliation’ between
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Native, and white, Americans. In the Leatherstocking novels, Lawrence sees a model of ’wish-fulfilment’ – his term – in the posited bloodbrotherhood of Natty and Chingachgook, an ideal which, he argues, shows a real ignorance of history. It is an ’evasion of actuality’, ’a sheer myth’ (57). This is so because Cooper has not understood that processes which are bigger than the individual have to be worked through before old antagonisms can be transcended:
! To open out a new wide area of consciousness means to slough the
i old consciousness. The old consciousness has become a tight-fitting
:! prison to us, in which we are going rotten.
( You can’t have a new, easy skin before you have sloughed the
’) old, tight skin. ,. t»r *.-,*.’,«,..„..
0 .17-r,.,/)»</”,; ’,-•:>•• (SCAL 57-8)
•1 Ti K 4.’•<•>;><?.’;<•< Wfi;:
The whistle-stop critique of the Leatherstocking novels shows that Lawrence now has his theme. Where Cooper’s vision is big, with its new morality and the myths of the ’new world’ which it seeks to create, Poe is different. All interior, Foe deals with ’the disintegration-processes of his own psyche’ (70). The essay ’Edgar Allan Poe’ can usefully be read alongside ’The Lower Self chapter of Fantasia of the Unconscious.
Reading ’Ligeia’, Lawrence offers a psychoanalysis of Poe which employs the language of Fantasia (SCAL 73-4). ’Ligeia’, with its overconscious ’anatomizing’ style, is a tale about the perils of Volition’ in love; of the insistent human will which works against the real ’living’ self. Ligeia’s intensity (recalling Poe’s ’earnestness’), underlines the reductiveness of the ’will-to-love’ and the ’will-to-consciousness’ (81), hence the emphasis in Lawrence’s interpretation on the disastrous effects of her (and Poe) craving the sensations of love (77). This same ’meretricious process’ (83), which characterizes Poe’s style as well as his plots, dogs ’The Fall of the House of Usher’ with its emphasis on the wilful identification of one lover with another, at the cost of their self-sufficiency.
If Poe palpably glorified his ’sickness’ in art, Nathaniel Hawthorne enables Lawrence further to peel away the surface in order to uncover the ’symbolic meaning’ (89). In his reading of The Scarlet Letter Lawrence expresses himself again in polarities presented first in Fantasia: he describes his dualism of ’blood-consciousness’ and ’mind-consciousness’ [103], and says that in America lip-service is paid to the spontaneity of the ’blood’ (as in the nature writing of Crevecoeur), but that this is meretricious in such a ’mental’ culture. The Scarlet Letter’s Dimmesdale, for instance, despises the life of the body but, worse, when he trans-
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gresses with Hester he makes a bed-fellow of one of his ’spiritual brides’ (96). His self-disgust, expressed in his scourging of his body, is a masturbatory impulse to Lawrence (96), as is his acknowledgement and acceptance that he and Hester have offended social laws. The elevation of moral purity to a creed, combined with the impulse to dismantle the foundations of this creed, is a tendency which Lawrence believes he recognizes in American culture: Hawthorne simply offers a ’parable’ in illustration (89). Hester is able to work against the spiritual aspirant in Dimmesdale through sex because both believe that sex is sinful this, argues Lawrence, is their folly. Her outward humility conceals her pleasure in victory, and in this she is a version of Ligeia. Vengeful, she works with Chillingworth, who is ’mind’ not ’spirit’, to bring the pure Dimmesdale down. Her daughter, Pearl, stands for modern overconscious woman, to take revenge on men in her time.
The remaining essays on novelists, Dana and Melville, focus on impersonal and inhuman forces figured most effectively in terms of the sea. In Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and Melville’s Tyyee, Omoo and Moby Dick, Lawrence finds writing which addresses the elemental, natural forces that his work, in its way, seeks to privilege. Their books give Lawrence a chance again to attack idealism, always mentally derived, and to privilege an impersonal mode of consciousness (Melville’s ’dream-self, for instance [142]). However, it is only in the reading of Whitman that Lawrence’s reader is given anything like a sense of the closing of the great division between mind and body that so absorbs his attention and which eludes, he argues, the other American writers.
Whitman is a poet whom Lawrence admired from his earliest days, with some significant reservations. The essay which concludes Studies in Classic American Literature weaves its argument around one major theme to which other discussions are then related: the morality of the work of art. Whitman succeeds best when his art is ’moral’, when sympathy ’with’ does not become sympathy ’for’ (we are back to the integrity of feeling). Lawrence states:
The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is moral.
But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake. ^._,;…_-_•_
,V : (SCAL 180)
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Of Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson and Melville, Lawrence says: ’they give tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy. Hence the duplicity which is the fatal flaw in them, most fatal in the most perfect American work of art, The Scarlet Letter.’ (180). In Whitman, in contrast, Lawrence finds, from among the American writers who absorb his attention, a genuinely radical and iconoclastic thinker. He does not necessarily agree with Whitman’s formulations – about ’Democracy’, or the ’love of comrades’ (178) to which Lawrence refers sceptically in Kangaroo [70] – but he finds in his work some acknowledgement of the value of extreme experience: Whitman writes of ’the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity’ (179). The singular achievement of Whitman in relation to his fellow writers, and an American tradition, is his work’s refusal to reinforce the values of inherited ideals. Lawrence’s essay appears to be highly critical of Whitman when he is perceived to be caught up on a fixed idea (mental allegiance), and only relents where poetry becomes the vehicle of radical and resistant thought. Whitman’s importance also lies in his ability to see the soul (self) in terms of the ’flesh’ – ’belly’, ’breast’, ’womb’ (180). As this foregrounds Lawrence’s religious and artistic impulses it is fitting that the Whitman essay concludes the book. In the American books, the old morality has given way to a new vision.
(vi) Essays on the Novel
’Art and the Individual’ anticipates Lawrence’s extensive writing on fiction, and in particular, the function and value of the contemporary novel. This is the case in ’The Future of the Novel’ (1923; originally called ’Surgery for the Novel – Or a Bomb’), ’Morality and the Novel’, ’The Novel’, ’Why the Novel Matters’, The Novel and the Feelings’ (all written in 1925), alongside more tightly focused responses to particular writers, such as the essay on John Galsworthy, completed in
1927.
The first half of ’The Future of the Novel’ represents Lawrence’s dislike of the self-reflexive, linguistically self-conscious, experimental fictions of some of his ’high modernist’ contemporaries, with Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) singled out for particular criticism. However, Lawrence also finds in popular fiction an equally undesirable form of self-consciousness from that to be encountered in the ’avant-garde’ writing of his contemporaries. He deals derisively with the romantic westerns of Zane Grey,
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and best-selling writers who, in their sensationalism, appeal actually to banal orthodoxies of feeling. He is satirical, for instance, about ’Sheik heroines with whipped posteriors, wildly adored’ (STH 153). Both high modernism and popular fiction represent, for Lawrence, then, puerile and insensitive uses of the novel form which is still, he argues, in its infancy (we remember the high hopes he had for the novel in ’Study of Thomas Hardy’). It is in the course of articulating his resistance to a number of tendencies in modern fiction that he promotes the idea of an unselfconsciously ’philosophical’ fiction, to which condition, we must assume, his own writing aspires:
It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split. … So the novel went sloppy, and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again, in the novel. And we get modern kind of gospels, and modern myths, and a new way of understanding.
(154; emphasis added)
Art and thought should dovetail in the novel for ’newness’, not novelty.
Lawrence’s preoccupation with questions of genre, and principally the novel form, is occasionally foregrounded in his fiction. In Kangaroo, in the chapter called ’Bits’, a debate about the function of the novel is combined with reflections on the self: ’Now a novel is supposed to be a mere record of emotion-adventures, flounderings in feelings. We insist that a novel is, or should be, also a thought-adventure, if it is to be anything at all complete’ (K 279). In lady Chatterley’s Lover, too, Lawrence meditates on genre, examining how ’properly handled’, the novel can direct the flow of ’sympathetic consciousness’, although it can also pervert this flow and ’glorify the most corrupt feelings’ in the hands of a bad artist (LCL 102) [77].
In ’Morality and the Novel’ the responsibility of the writer of fiction, argues Lawrence, is to remain true to a sense of shifting values that constitute human feeling, rather than reinforcing myths about the dominant status, in fiction, of one value over another. Consequently, he insists:
All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between two people who amount to anything. If the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love, tenderness, sweetness, peace, then he commits an immoral act: he prevents the possibility of a pure relationship, a
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pure relatedness, the only thing that matters: and he makes inevitable the horrible reaction, when he lets his thumb go, towards hate and brutality, cruelty and destruction.
(STH 173)
Lawrence himself, it must be said, was not above putting his thumb in the pan (he had just finished the over-conscious and dogmatic The Plumed Serpent}. The metaphor of balance in this passage combines with an image of strife, of opposition, central to the expression of the same idea in other contexts (the ’Reptiles’ section of Birds, Beasts and Flowers, The Crown’ and ’Study of Thomas Hardy’). If a novel deals effectively with ’true’ and ’vivid relationships’, then that novel is ’moral’ (174).
Originally called ’The Modern Novel’, but published as ’The Novel’, this essay of 1925 continues the defence of a ’relational’ aesthetic which is expressed in the earlier pieces: The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Whyi Because it is so incapable of the absolute’ (179). To explain this position, Lawrence provides examples of novels that fail, on his terms, through an insistence on a number of indirectly stated general principles (absolutes) that are seen to direct characters’ destinies; this is a didacticism which is sustained and reinforced by the novelist (he discussed this in Studies in Classic American Literature [104]). These principles are most often recognizable as aspects of a dominant ideology, a morality or social code – an ideal. However, as he shows in Studies in Classic American Literature, the artist’s ’under’ consciousness, in the novel, will usually work against repressive orthodoxy.
Published posthumously, ’Why the Novel Matters’ and The Novel and the Feelings’ reinforce Lawrence’s sense of the importance of the novel defined less in ’literary-critical’ terms and more in relation to his personal aspirations for the form: he claims, The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel . . . about manalive’ (195). Consistently, his view is that depictions of false consciousness show up in the novel better than in any other kind of writing. In The Novel and the Feelings’, articulating this notion of false consciousness, Lawrence polarises knowing (’education’) and feelings in order to identify a crisis in modernity which has forced these values apart. For the artist, this crisis becomes a matter of language. Lawrence’s statement ’We have no language for the feelings’ (203) is at the heart of his hopes for his own novels. «.,, ,,;…, …,,. ,.•…,…..,.^ ..,„•..
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Further Reading
The most extensive commentary on the ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ and related discursive writing occurs in Black (1991). This provides a useful examination in chapter by chapter analyses of the metaphors and modes of argument employed by Lawrence in the early essays. Much of the work done by Black shows continuity in Lawrence’s thought at the level of language, where coherence might not be thought to exist. Ellis and Mills (1988) also concentrate on the exploratory writing and the development of Lawrence’s thought. Heywood (1987) discusses the psycho-physiological writing as do, with different emphases, Ellis (1986), Hayles (1982; 1984) and Vickery (in Salgado and Das [eds] 1988). Ebbatson and Delavenay also contribute chapters on Lawrence’s thought to Heywood (ed., 1987); see also Ebbatson (1982). Schneider (1984) examines the writing which seeks to take issue with FreudBecket (1997) examines metaphor as a mode of understanding in Lawrence’s books on the unconscious. Gordon (1966) considers Lawrence as a literary critic. Ellis and de Zordo (1992) re-present several decades of responses to Lawrence’s non-fiction. Hough (1956) includes a section on The Doctrine’, a phrase taken up much later by George Zytaruk in Balbert and Marcus (eds, 1985). As always in Lawrence criticism, these book-length studies and chapters supplement a wealth of writing published in journal articles.
(h) TRAVEL WRITING
Lawrence is a writer who continually subjected his environment – in Italy, for example, or Mexico – to imaginative analysis. He had a real curiosity about cultures other than his own but his best ’travel’ books are multi-layered meditations which take ’place’ as a starting point and go out in many directions. From 1912 his dissatisfaction with England was expressed in extensive journeys abroad and, after 1919 he settled for long periods in Italy and America, with some experience of other continents [21-7]. Apart from many detailed essays and articles on diverse cultures, the principal travel books are Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927) and Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932). The present discussion will concentrate on the Italian books.
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(i) Twilight in Italy
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The heart of Twilight in Italy consists of seven essays about the people and community of Lake Garda (’On the Lago di Garda’, TI 103-226). Most closely observed, as so often in Lawrence’s fiction, is the figure of the peasant most mythologized, perhaps, in the study of the ’halfdiabolic’ Pan-like ’II Duro’ (TI 173-8). Many of the encounters described in Twilight reinforce the essential ’strangeness’ which persists between the traveller and the native ’folk’. This lack of a common ground is behind the compulsion and the constraint in the wonderfully observed encounter, for example, between Lawrence (’I’) and the old spinner woman in ’The Spinner and the Monks’. The narrator comes across her as he leaves the darkness of the village church of San Tommaso for the sunlit terraces outside, but lingers, finding her absorption in her work attractive. He sees in her presence confirmation of his distance from her reality, and her indifference to his. Later, the narrator notices two monks somewhere below, walking in their ’wintry’ garden. In the twilight, they seem to him to occupy the place where day and night meet. Such encounters and visions are understood metaphorically as well as actually: they illuminate Lawrence’s dualistic thought, the ’two principles’ which he also articulated in ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ [99]. The ’neutrality’ of the twilight, for instance, enables the narrator to think through the different values, or properties, to him of ’day’ and ’night’ consciousness. These are some of the first terms in his thought which would translate into the major works of fiction. The fifth essay in the series, called ’The Dance’, also anticipates details in the writing of dance as a transformative experience, particularly in The Rainbow and Women in Love, but in ’On the Lago di Garda’ it is enough for Lawrence to note the unconscious dimension of experience (in instinctive action) which is at the heart of spectacle.
Earlier in the volume, in ’The Lemon Gardens’, the language is similar to that of the Foreword to Sons and Lovers [47] in its emphasis on the symbolism of the flesh and the Word, and the language of principles, ’Infinites’, to describe cultural and social process. Such interventions show the extent to which ’travel writing’ is a modest description of the metaphysical speculation undertaken in the ’Italian’ texts. These formulations describe Lawrence’s philosophy of self-regeneration through vital experience, and inform his observation that the cost of over-conscious, ’modern’ civilization (’the mechanising, the perfect mechanising of human life’ [TI 226]) is the destruction of the ’Self, as evident here as in his ’home’ culture (discussed in the Brangwen novels). So, in part, what is revealed in Twilight in Italy are some of the terms of
Lawrence’s developing philosophy of the instinctive, intuitive, life set against his version of the ’horror’ (225). His visions of Italy helped him to formulate a language in which to translate this particular experience.
(ii) Sea and Sardinia
Sea and Sardinia (1921) is a much more conventional travel book than either Twilight in Italy or Sketches of Etruscan Places. Lawrence left England for Italy the second time in 1919, and lived there before setting off in 1922 for America, to which he would travel by going east, via Ceylon and Australia [21-7]. His brief excursion in January 1921 from his home in Taormina, Sicily, to Sardinia provided a diversion from Aaron’s Rod, which he was concluding. He travelled with Frieda Lawrence (the ’queen-bee’, or ’q-b’, of the narrative), and describes vividly their preparations to leave, under the shadow of Etna, and the day-to-day details of their journey, arrival, sojourn and departure. Sea and Sardinia demonstrates Lawrence’s skilful attention to particulars which is also an aspect of his literary realism, especially in the ’East-wood’ fiction. The narrative concentrates less on predictable tourist spots and more on the minutiae of chance encounters and environments – peering through the condensation on train windows to fathom the cause of a delay, or the liberating hills and valleys of the drive to Nuoro, for example. Most often we see the land through its effect on Lawrence, the narrator as ’revived’. It is a short-lived, but personal, odyssey. Although there are passages which reflect on the condition of post-war Italy through encounters with individuals (’To Terranova and the Steamer’ and ’Back’), Lawrence makes little direct reference to the political crises of liberal Italy (Mussolini’s march on Rome would take place in 1922), although turning points in Aaron’s ’ Rod are described with reference to local conflict.
(iii) Sketches of Etruscan Places
In 1925, Lawrence left New Mexico for the last time [27] and settled for a while just outside Florence. Sketches of Etruscan Places (published posthumously as Etruscan Places] was the result of Lawrence’s tour, with his friend Earl Brewster, to the Etruscan sites of Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci and Volterra [27]. He quickly polarizes, in this writing, the will-to-power of ancient Roman culture with the spontaneity and vitality that he perceived in the iconography, art and simple architecture
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of the Etruscans. The book is an imaginative ’inhabiting’ of the religious and domestic values of a fundamentally sensual, anti-intellectual people, closer in spirit perhaps to that which Lawrence hoped to discover in the Native American cultures of his Mexico and New Mexico writing. The contrast between the agrarian Etruscan and the militaristic Roman cultures has its contemporary counterpart in Lawrence’s representation of the easy-going Tuscan peasants (in a continuation of Lawrence’s rustic idealism), and the provincial fascists. On his last brief trip to London Lawrence had visited the British Museum, interested in the Etruscan artefacts. In Italy, looking at the tombs, he found himself imagining a culture which acknowledged the life of the body in ways that spoke to his immediate concerns in writing about the contrasting sterility of ’civilized’ post-war England. His ’Etruscan’ book is contemporaneous with the latter stages of the composition otLady Chatterley’s Lover, and the two volumes illuminate each other in their dissatisfaction with ’mental conscious’ modernity, and the development of Lawrence’s theme of ’phallic consciousness’. In Sketches of Etruscan Places, an animated and sensual life is expressed in the values which Lawrence ascribes to the symbolic phallus (’lingam’) and arx (womb) which are represented in stone at the entrance to tombs for men and women respectively (’Cerveteri’)
fc And perhaps in the insistence on these two symbols, in the etruscan world, we can see the reason for the utter destruction and annihilation of the etruscan consciousness. The new world wanted to rid itself of these fatal, dominant symbols of the old world, the old physical world. The etruscan conscious was rooted, quite blithely, in these symbols, the phallus and the arx. So the whole consciousness, the whole etruscan pulse and rhythm, must
4 be wiped out.
(SEP 20)
So it is that, in his detailed discussions of the representations of men, women and animals on these tombs, Lawrence finds, perhaps because he needs to find, a ’profound belief in life’ which gets a special restatement in his last writing.
Further Reading
’ Twilight in Italy and Sketches of Etruscan Places in particular are discussed together or individually in L.D. Clark (1980), Meyers (1982), Ellis and Mills (1988), De Filippis (1989 and 1992), Black (1991) and Kalnins
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and Donaldson (eds, 1999). Janik (1981) and Tracy (1983) discuss Lawrence’s travel literature, and Hostettler (1985) considers the travel books in relation to the fiction. A great deal of related material is published in literary journals.
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