THE LEADER-FIGURE
IN 'rHREE NOVErs BY D. H. LA1ŒENCE:
A SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY
Thomas O. Piper
l\
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/
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1
Thomas O. Piper
THE LEADER-FIGURE IN THREE NOVEIS
BY D.H. LAWRENCE:
A SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY
Department of English
I·jaster of Arts Degree
lbis study examines the idea of leadership in D.H. LaWorence's
work, emphasizing the importance of its origin during the Great tiare The
novels have been selected from three distinct periods in Lawrence's career.
t~omen
in Love is analysed within the historical context of the Great War,
and is seen to reveal the basic thematic pattern which recurs in the later
novels: the idea of the degeneration or death of civilization under the
reign of industrialism, and the hope for its regeneration or rebirth in
the person of the leader, and in the forro of a new social order. In
Kangaroo, Lawrence interprets the condition of post-war Europe in terms
of the disillusion of his own war experience; but in The Plumed Serpent
he dramatizes his vision of social rebirth in a mythical New World setting
in which it is divorced from the social realities in which it was conceived.
The idea of the leader is ultimately seen as a secondary but significant
motif of the Lawrentian novel.
.'
THE LEADER-FIGURE
IN THREE NOVErs BY D.H.
LA~lBENCE:
A SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGlCAL STUDY
by
Thoma.s O. Piper
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Gra.duate Studies a.nd Research in
partial fulfilmenl:. of the requ1rements for the degree of' f'Ë.ster of Arts
Emglish Department
McGill University
Hontrea.l.
1
{
€)
Thomas O. Piper
1971
•
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
PREFACE
.. . .... . • • • •
• • •
i
• • • • • •
1
IN LOVE • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
9
• • • • • • • •
Coopter
I.
II.
III.
IV.
THE BACKGROUND TO THE THREE NOVELS
l~OI1EN
KANGAROO
40
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
50
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Bibliography
•
29
• • • • • • • • • • • • • •
'fHE PLUHED SERPENT
CONCLUSION
Notes
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
60
PREFACE
The figure of the leader which is one of the Most prominent
themes in D. H. Ia.wrence's career emerges during the period of the Great
War and continues unti1 his return to Europe in the final years of his lire.
The co1lapse of traditiona1 social values which the Great War represented
for Lawrence 1ed him to severa1 artistic 3Xp1orations of the possibi1ities
of new social forms which might permit a better equ111brium of the psychic
forces at work in huma.n nature. "The. war", Lawrence wrote, "finished me
1
it was the spear through the side of al1 sorrows and hopes." 1 It shook
Lawrence's faith in Ehgland and in civilization itself, and lad him to
8.
desperate reassessment of his nineteenth-centuxy heritage. Lawrence came
to be1ieve that he was witnessing the dea.th of nineteenth-century Europe,
and he awaited the out come of the war with quite mixed emot1ons for the
fate of the older c1vi11zat1on. "It 's a damnable uncomfortable love",
Lawrence wrote of h1s attitude in t,he wo:rds of Rupert B1rk1n in Women
~,
.!!!.
"like a love for an aged parent who suifers from a compl1cation of
d1seases, for wh10h there is no hope." 2
The Great War was the f1rst geneml European conflict aince the
Napo1eon1c Wars, and Lawrence took 1t to be a cru cible of the social forces
which had transformed Europe in the interim. Lawrence' s concept1on of the
~.'
'.'"
1 For the sake of convenience, the notes have been inserted at the
end of the text,
p~.
,54-59.
i
ii
foIe of the Great War as a culmination of forces in nineteenth-century
history is essentially the same as that of the historian, Carlton
Jo H. Hayes
1
Each of the developments here indicated -- "science," secularization, industrialization, liberalism, Mu'xism, nationalism
-- had originated before 1871, some of them several generations
before: and it was only because they wer.e pretty fully matured
and producing joint effects that the generation of materialism
from 1871 to 1900 stands out as marking a grave religious
crisis which bas continued to the present day and which poses
the fundament&l question whether EUrope or Western civilization
can endure if eut off from its historic Christian roots. 3
As Iawrence conceived the Great N'ar to be the decisive uprooting, by the
forces which Hayes designates as "materialism", of Europe from its Christian past, he began to conceive its rebirth on a new religious basis. In
the same letter in which he had written, "The war finished me", Iawrence
describes his "crUcifixation" and "resUJ:Tection" in the five months since
the outbreak of the war. He concludes the letter, "There is my autobiography -- written because you asked me, and because being risen from the dead.,
l Imow we shall come through, rise again, and walk healed and whole and
new in a big inheritance, here on earth." 4 Iawrence expresses a similar
faith in a new covenant between man and the earth at the end of The Bainbow,
in which mankind bas been allegorically lost on an ark in a deluge in search
of a new world.
In the search for an organizational principle which could fom
the cornerstone of this new world, or for what Lawrence later ter.med a
"new bond between men", .5 the lead.el.'-figure occupies a strategic role. When
the deluge of the war had subsided, and mankind had not yet reached the
shores of a new world, Iawrence' s hopes tumed to the image of a man who
•
could lead. 1t there. This new development had already been foreshadowed in
Women
~!2!!.,
in the fom of a newspaper article
1
"There must arise a man
who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to
iii
•
',:",
life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness." 6
Iawrence :r:ecognized that the social transformation which he
envisioned could only occur on the basis of a psychological transformation
of mankind, and he began to conceive the problem as the quest for a mutual
commitment in the form of a mystic "pledge". Rupert Birkin, Iawrence's
spokesman in Women
~~.
prophesies the moment of the realization of such
a "pledge" in terms which enable us to discern the intimate connection of
the quest for the leader in Lawrence's work with the quest for the liberation of the unconscious c "It is a f'ulf'Ulment -- the great dark knowledge
you can 't have in your head. It ls dea.th to oneself -- but it is the coming
into being of another." 7 Elsewhere, Birkin envisions an idea.l condition of
psychological equillbrium which could result from the stabilization of the
forces released at such a moment , "... a state of free proud singleness,
which accepted the obligation of the permanent connection with others, and
with the other, submits to the yoke and leash of love, but never forfeits
its own proud individual singleness." 8
In Lawrence' s work the quest for this commitment focuses simul-
taneously on two levels, , On the personal and inteZllersonal level, it is the
quest for absolute commitment of one man to another. On the social level,
it ls the quest for a commitment to an ideal of social organization which
is capable of realizing the vital human possibilities which have been denied
in the existing social orcier. The
narra;bt~s usua.lly
embody this quest and
its success or failure in the relation of a single bharacter to the leaderfigure of ea.ch novel and the social ideas which they represent.
It is the p\nl>0se of this study to examine the leadership theme
•
in three novels which represent three distinct periods of Lawrence' s career
and approaches to the theme. Each will be considered within its social and
historical context, and within the context of the informaI psychological
iv
schemes which are provided. by Iatn"ence's other Rritings from the sarne
periode The length of the consideration of each novel will be proportlonate
to i ts complexity and importance in Iawrence' s work. Women.!!!.
~
ws
written in Engl.a.nd during the Great tiar. It is the most complex of the
novels, and ns Rritten during a fo:r:ma.tive perlod of Iawrence's ca.reer; it
will therefore require the most intensive analysis, and will provide the
basis for a conceptual frame-work within which its successors can be viewed..
Ka.nga.roo ws written in Australia, but its political content really belongs
to post-war Europe and to Iawrence' s Continental or ltalian period. It is
the novel in which the theme of the leader emerges into central importance
for the firat time.
~
Plumed. Serpent belongs to Iawrence's New World
period, and within the political setting of the Mexica.n Revolution. It is,
in reality. an anticlimax to the quest for salvation in the figure of the
leader in Iawrence's work, the novel in which his ideal receives lts most
eJ.aborate statement onl;r after he has abandoned. all rea.listlc hope of its
reallzation.
(For the sake of convenience, the notes have been listed. at
the end of the text) •
•
CHAPl'ER ONE
THE BACKGROUND TO THE THREE NOVEIS
A consideration of the. idea of the leader in Women
in Love
.
must begin with the rea.lization that the novel is in a very profound sense
a war novel. In a letter written in the fall of 1916, Iawrence mentions
that his wife Frieda ha.d suggested the title ~.B!:,!, 1 which is an
appropriate description of the mood and circumstances in which it
'HaS
com-
posed. The Great War was Europe' s first full-scale industrial wa.r -- the
wax
in which the nation-states of Europe fought a war of production on
the1r "home-fronts" as weIl as a wa.r of destruction on their "foreignfronts". It involved an unprecedented mobilization of total populations and
extensions of governmental controls over
se~~ors
of domestic life which
were hardly less severe tha.n those exercized over mi11tary sectors.
Iawrence 's own experience of the wa.r
'HaS
on the "home-front", but his ambi-
tion in his portrait of the industrial leader, Gerald Critch, ooy be gleaned
from his remarks about a poem which describes the experience of an o%dinary
soldler on the "foreign-front" :
The war is drea.dful. It is the business of the arlist to follow
i t home to the heart of the individua.l fighters - not to talk
in amies and nations and numbers -- but to track it home -home -- their wa.r and it's at the bottom of almost every Eng11shman's heart -- the wax -- the des1re for ~ -- the!!!! to var
-- and at the bottom of every German's."
•
Since England and Germany were the foremost industrialized countries of
Europe, and since Iawrence was an Engllshman who had a Ge:r:ma.n wife, the
1
2
reader will not be surprised to find that Lawrence's portrait of the industrial leader in Women in Love is one of an Englishman who is clothed in
German philosophy and ffiyth.
In 1916, as Lawrence composed Women in Love, the Great War was
about to move into its final and decisive phase.
During that year, we should
remember, it was by no means obvious or inevitable that the Great War wou Id
not be a limited one with a negotiated peace.
There were, however, premo-
nitions on both the English "home-front" and on the "foreign-front" of the
spirit of unlimited war which was about to engulf Europe in the following
years.
When we recall the beginning of the composition of Women in Love in
the spring of 1916 corresponded almost exactly with the German offensive at
Verdun and the conclusion of its composition corresponded with the ascension
of Lloyd George, we can appreciate the historical importance of the book.
The Battle of Verdun, which the Germans called the Materealschlacht, or the "Battle of Materials," was an event of momentous significance in modern European history, and it may be taken as a symbol of the
new character of warfare which was to emerge on the Western Front in 1916.
Denis de Rougemont, whose insights into the essential identity of love and
war' are far closer to Lawrence's than those of a conventional military
historian, considers the Battle of Verdun to have been the first instance
of "total war" in the West:
The whole face of war was th us changed with the introduction
of the material and unhuman methods employed at Verdun. For
as soon as war, from having been merely military, becomes a
"total war", the destruction of armed resistance means the
wiping out of the whole live might of the enemy -- the work
men incorporated in factories, the mothers who are begetting
future soldiers, in short, the whole of the 'means of production", things and persons lumped together. 3
As he wrote in 1916, Lawrence could see that the Great War had elimina.ted
the distinction between man and matter just as surely as the distinction
between soldier and worker, and this awa.reness is reflected. in his por-!.,
-.,
•.
trait of the industrial leader, Gerald Critch -- which is, in effect, a
prophecy of the phenomenon of "total wax".
There was, however, an equally ominous portent of the spirit of
"total war" on the English "home-front" as Iawrence wrote in Women
4:!!.~,
which was the emergence of IJ.oyd George into national prominence. An indication of this spirit may be gleaned from a statement made by IJ.oyd George
~ ..
in a press conference in the autumn of
draft of the novel,in which he
d~~lares
1916, as Iawrence wrote his final
it his mission to eradicate "the
defeatist spirit which ms working from foreigfi quarters to bring about an
inconclusive peace and which appeared to find an echo even in some responsible quart ers in England, Il and concludes that "The fight must be to the
finish to a knOckout. If 4 In a letter wr1tten also in the autumn of 1916,
Ia.wrence provides an instructive contrast to this conviction. After having
declared his faith in the "real decency" of Asquith and his intentions,
Iawrence turns to the subject of IJ.oyd George and the prospects for peace :
l wish to heaven l might be allowed to discuss peace with
the country this winter. l am sure we could still save life
and hope. But let the priDie""TIin"""ISter be changed, let the
IJ.oyd George and Carson fools come in and one can only leave
the comtry (when it ~ pOSSible) forever, having left it in
one 's heart already. If' it were possible to spaak in the
country this l'linter, l'le could save the living germ, l am sure,
But it is our last chance. Failing this, one can only flee
from the Schaos and the orgy of ugly disintegration which is
to come.
IJ.oyd George 's statement does not, of course, apply to Iawrence specifically, but Iawrence was in a position at the time which put a very personal
construction upon such statements. Because of his outspoken resistance to
t..,
the war and the fact that he had a German wife, Iawrence was the object of
•
considembl.e suspicion and harrassment, as he indicated in his fictional
reconstruction of this period of bis life, the"Nightmare!' chapter of K'angaroo;
4
•
and. Iawrence took IJ.oyd George to be the symbol, if' not the agent. of the
abuses of his personal liberty. It is evident that Iawrence also took his
personal mistreatment to be symptomatic of the coercive methods and aims
which had, in the reorganization of British industry, begun the previous
year when IJ.oyd George was charged with the newly created Ministry of Ifunitions. By means of special legislation, the Minister exercised wbat one historian describes as an "almost dictatorial control" 6 over the economic
lire of the country in order to sustain the mechanized war.f'are on the
continent.
IJ.oyd George was giving England its first taste of a "wareconomy", and. we should remember this as we consider the ca.reer of the
1ndustrial leader, Gerald Critch, and his mission to translate his conception of the equivalence of production and power into concrete social terms.
If we recall that the gradua1 decline in the prestige of Herbert Asquith
and the gradua1 rise in the prestige of IJ.oyd George:- was the most salient
feature of Eng1ish political lire in 1916, and if we recall tbat l{omen
~
!!l
was completed in December of 1916, the month of the fall of Asquith 's
gove:rnment, then Gerald Critch 's vision acquires special historical significance :
These white lettera on all the wagons he had seen since his
first chi1d.hood, and it was as if he had. never seen them,
they were so familiar, and so ignored. Nowat last he saw
his own name written on the wall. Now he had a vision of
power. So many wagons, bearing his initial, running a1l over
the country. He saw them as he entered London in the train,
he saw them at Dover. So far his power ramified ••• His
vision had suddenly crystallized. Suddenly he had conceived
the pure instrumentality of mankind ••• .As a man a12 of a
knire : do es it eut wel1 ? Nothing e1se mattered. "/
However Iawrencews portrait of Gerald Critch is indebted to biographical
•
detai1s !rom the lire of Thomas Barber and persona1 detal1s '!rom his friendship with Middleton Mur.ray, its main inspiration comes !rom England's wa.r
5
•
leader, IJ.oyd George, whom Iawrence took to be the very inca.ma.tion of the
spirit of mechan1zed wax.
"
",,'
The yea.rs which followed the composition of Women
.!!!~,
more-
over, l'lere to prove that "IJ.oyd Georgeism" was not an isolated phenomenon.
The ascension of Clemenceau's government in France and the defeat of the
Reichstag npeace-Resolution" in 1917 marked the emergence of governments
which were also determined to pursue the wa.r to a military conclusion, either
by virtue of the suspension or the outright disappropriation of the constitut10nal prerogativeS of their respective legislatures. The fall of Asquith
and the ascension of IJ.oyd George marked for Iawrence the death of Cld
England, and the beginning of a "love-and-hate" vendetta with his country
and with the institutions of parliamentary democracy which lasted until the
end of his lire, and in Women
m
~
l will examine the initial appearance
of these themes in Iawrence's work.
Kangaroo belongs to the post-war period of European history and
to the Continental or ltalian period of Ie.wrence's ca.reer. The Australian
setting of the novel is misleading, since Iawrence has in effect, gra.:fted
the social atmosphere of post-war Europe and the political affairs of postwar Italy onto an Australian landscape. An indication of the mood in which
whis novel was undertaken is T. E. Iawrence' s description of his own disillusion at the prospect that post-war Europe would settle back into its prewar routine of power politics :
•
t'le were bound together, because of the sweep of the open places,
the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which
we worked. It seemed like morning, and the moming freshness of
the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas
inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. lie lived many
lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves a.ny
good or evil : yet when we achieved and the new world l!.dawned,
the old men came out again and. took !rom us our victory, and
rema.de it in the likeness of the former world they knew.Youth
could win, but had not leamed to keep, and was pitiably weak
against age. lie stammered that we had worked for a new heaven
6
and a n§w earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their
peace.
The failure of the post-wax ara either to restore the old European order
or to build a new omer kept alive the same hopes and fears in I.e.wrence,
and caused him in Kangaroo, to give an artistic interpretation of his postwar experience on the Continent in terms of his experience in England during the wax.
The principal feature of this interpretation is the reappearance of I.e.wrence' s Russia.n friend. S. S. Kotelia.nsky, and of the outlines
of their scheme for the foundation of a utopian colony, in the person of
"Ka.nga.roo" and his social philosophy. I.e.wrence gives a simple description
of his ambitions in a letter written during the wa.r
1
nIt is to be a colony .
built upon the real decency which is in each member of the community. A
..
,
community which ls established upon the assumption of goodness in the members, instead of the assumption of badness." 9 It is noteworthy that
I.a.wrence uses the same phrase, "rea.l decency", for his faith in the goodness of human nature as he does for his faith in the good intentions of
Herbert Asquith as a politica.l leader, since in the problematic "Nightma.re"
chapter of Kangaroo he seems to identif,y his premonitions of the betrayal
of Kangaroo's political movement with his memor,y of Lloyd George's betrayal
of Old England.
In any case, these figures reappear in a politica1 atmosphere
which is recognizab2t;-:i that of Continental Europe in the period from
Versailles to Locarno. The failure of the peace settlement to restore
stable political or economic conditions to Europe either in the domestic
or international spheres kept alive the prospect of revolution. I.e.wrence
•
had witnessed such an upheaval in Italy and we should recall as we consider
Willie Struthers and Jack Calcott -- who are, respectively, representatives
7
of socialist and fascist movements -- that as Kangaroo was written in the
~.
,il
•
summer of 1922, there was reason to expect that such events would be repeated elsewhere.
~
Plumed Se;pent belongs to Law.rence's New World periode In
this novel, Lawrence uses the historical setting of the Mexican Revolution
to stage a mythical dxama in which the figure of the leader bas become divorced from social realities and transformed into the priést-king of a
personal religion. For the sources of this transformation in Lawrence's
work, the reader must look not to historical circumstances but to Lawrence's
studies in anthrop ol ogy , archaeology, and psychology.
One of the results of the failure of the Great War to realize
Lawrence's hopes for a new social order was a tendency for him to redirect
his apocalyptic visions toward a mythical lost world. This theme first
emerges clearly in Lawrence 's work during his Italian sojeurn, but it draws
on readings which he had begun during the war, the most important of whicb
were Freud and Jung, Frobenius and Thomas Belt, F.razer, Tylor, and Jane
Harrison. Lawrence had begun to construct the idea. of a prehistoric lost
civilization which had been universal in scope and had been ruled by a
priesthood who had a universal esoteric knowledge. The civilization had
disintegrated during the Glacial Period; i ts knowledge had been lost, but
vestiges of it rema.ined in "symbolic fonns", 10 sucb as ritual and mythe
The idea. of the mythical lost world is first announced in Fantasia
Unconscious and. occupies a prominent place in Birds, Beasts
~
2!:!2h!
Flowers. In
many of the poems of the latter volume, Iawrence divines the presence of
the
•
"~~st
world" by divining the presence of ancient Mediterranean deities
and those of the mystery religions in
~eatures
of the Italian landscape. A
poem entitled "Cypresses" contains the germ of the idea which inspires
Plumed Selôpent ,
~
8
For· oh, l know, in the dust where we buried
The silenced races and all their abominations
We have buried so much of the delicate magic of lire • • • •
They say the fit survive,
But l invoke the spirits of the lost,
Those that have not survived, the darkly lost,
To bring their meaning back to lire aga.in, .
Which they have taken away.
And wrapt inviolable in soft cypress trees,
Etruscan cypresses.
Evil, what is evil ?
There is only one evil, to deny lire
As Rome denied Etrur1a
And mecha.nical America ~lonteczuma. still. 11
During this period, the idee. of the rebirth of the mythica.l lost world
becomes a variation on the Iawrentian apocalypse, and is transformed into
the idee. of the vengeance of the ancient races and their gods on the civilizations which have overrun them -- the Etruscans on the Romans, the Celts
on the English, the Aztecs and the "Red Indians" on America. There are
suggestions of this theme beneath the surface of Kangaroo, but it is not
until The Plumed Sexpent that the leader figure is made a incarnation of
the spirit of the "old gods". The vision which inspires
~
Plumed Serpent
is stated succinctly in the essay entitled. "Aristocracy" :
There will form a new aristocracy, irrespective of nationality,
of men who have reached the sun. Men of the sun, whether Chinese or Hottentot or NOrdic, or Hindu, or Esquimo, i f they
touch the sun in the hee.vens, are lords of the earth. And in
the coming era they will rule the world; a confrater.nity of
the living sun, ma.king the spectres of financ1al internationalism and industr1al internationalism pale upon the hee.rth .
of the earth. 12
When Iawrence found. no basis for his hopes in the Mexiœn Revolution, he
turned to the materials of new world mythology and constructed the figure
of a new aristocrat who would lead by his example an uprising of all of the
"silenced races" of the world. The result is lawrence 's final and most ela-
•
borate statement of his leadership ideal, the one which expresses the most
conviction but has perhaps the least power to convince.
9
CHAPrER TWO
tYONEN JN LOVE
l
On the'soc:3al plane, Gerald Critch is a personif.ication of the
force of industrialism in late nineteenth-centur,y England and its raIe in
the destruction of the traditional values of agra.:rian England. I f we are to
understand the historlca.l forces which are operative in this phenomenon in
Women
1:!! 2!.
we should see the novel against the back-drop of the compa-
nion volume which preceded it,
~
Bainbow. The motif of industrial power
is continued from -The Ba.inbow into t.romen in love
- in the same manner as the
.~
motif of marital love, although it has secondary importance in each. The
central event in both novels is the death of a Patriarch of Old England,
which introduces a rather obscure mythlcal motif of the vengeance of the
son against the father, and endows the force of industrialism with a taint
of mythical guilt.
In The B:Linbow, Tom B:r:a.ngwen ls the Patria:rch of agrarlan
England, a representative of the patriarchal "blood-intimacy" 1 of an agrarian civilization which bound men in mutual responsibility to one another
and to the earth, whose symbol is the Marsh. The bibliœl allegory of ~
•
Bainbow provides the key to the significa.nce of Tom Bmngwen' s death in
~
Rainbow and it parallels the death of Thomas' ,Critch in Women·.!!!. ~.
Tom Brangwen is Noah, the Patriarch, and his death _corresponds to the Flood.
10
'
G
,
)
..
...~
His good son, Fred, is like Japheth and Shem. The Marsh is his inheritance,
Fred restores it after the Flood, and lives there in the pure "blood-conscious-
'"
ness" of his father, in service to the natural order of creation. "Uncle Tom",
the bad son, is like Ham. His character and ca.reer make better allegorical
than realistic. sense, but it is certain that his relationship to his father
is perverse and unnatural, and this taint extends to all that he
tOl1~es
or
breeds. His strange performance at his father's funeral is possibly even
meant to implicate him mythically in the death of his drunken and unconscious
father in the same manner in which Ham was implicated in the violation of his
drunken and unconscious father :
Only aftenrards Ursula, flitting betloleen the currant busheS.
down the garden, salol her Uncle Tom standing in his black clothes,
erect and fashionable, but his fists lifted, and his face distorted, his lips curled back from his teeth in a horrible grin,
like an animal lolhich grimaces lolith torment, lolhilst his body
panted quick, like a panting doges. He was facing the open distance, panting and holding still, then panting ra,pidly again,
but his face never changing from its almost bestial look of
torture, the teet~ aU shololing, the nose wrinkled up, the eyes
unseeing, fixed.
.
In any case, Uncle Tom leaves the Marsh and becomes a rnagnate of
industry; he enslaves and corrupts both man and nature, because the ourse of
Canaan is on aIl he produces. Whether or not Lawrence specifically intends
the implication that the curse on industrialism derives from the same unnatura.l motive as the act lolhich produces the curse on Ham' s offspring, he certainly intends the implication that the mechanical servitude bred by the
industrial social order is a perversion of the natural order lolhich his father
represented. In this figurative sense, he is quite guilty of the death of· his
father.
The relationship betloleen Gerald and his father Thomas Critch is
•
parallel to the relationship of Uncle Tom to Tom BrangH'en in Women
.!!!. .!2!!
and the key to Lawrence's conception of the historical role of industrialism
)<
11
in the transformation of 19th century England. Thomas Critch is representative
of an intemed.iate stage in this transformation, which is an unstable combination between the old and new forces. Critch is a second generation industrialist who conceives of his role within the tems of traditional social organ!zation, and attempts to construct the relationship of the industrial manager
and his workers in the image of the paternal benevolence and filial devotion
which is the ideal of an
o~er
civilization. He conceives of all social rela-
tionships as within the fremework of religious sanctions, and dispenses with
the problem of an inherent conflict of interests between owners and workers
by the expedient of refusing to recognize any motive in human conduct but
Christian charity. trIithin the sanctions of these religious ideals t the elder
Critch attempts to adapt the productive force of industrialism to rational
social aims and moderate social goals. His concern is for the social benefits of wealth, a secure livelihood and social position for himself, and of
gradual increase of the proportion of fruits of production for his workers.
The gradual death of Thomas Critch is one of Lawrence's parables
of the death of Old England at the hands of the princip le of industrialisme
The crucial event in Thomas Critch 's life, and. figuratively; in the historj'
of industrial England, is the outbreak of violence between workers and. soldi ers on his property, which follows the general closure of the cœl-mines
decreèd. by the association of owners. In the figurative sense', this event
marks the beginning of his illness and is the cause of his death, for i t
forces upon him the recognition that industrialism has created. new princip les
of social organization which are incompatible with his tradional values.
lfuen, as a prelude to his renovation of the mining industry, Gerald installs
•
electric power in the old Nanor House at Shortlands, the Critch family estate, ~
he deals an analogous death blow to the civilization whose values his father
had tried. to maintain. His reorganization of the industry, which corresponds
12
to his father's decline in health, is in a very important sense the triumph
of the spirit of the workers' rebellion, although it is a defeat of the workers
themselves.
Gerald represents the complete triumph of the spirit of industria-
lism, once it has been unleashed from aIl traditional social and religious
restraints.
In the enacbment of this triumph, or in the apotheosis of the
principle of mechanism onto the status of its own rationale and its own end,
which Lawrence terms the "godhead of the great productive machine, ,,;3 Gerald
Critch shares the mythical guilt of Uncle Tom in The Rainbow.
He is twice
explicitly compared to Cain, another Old Testament violator of taboo who
suffered exile under a patriarchal curse, and there are very striking
similarities between the fantasies he confides to Gudrun Brangwen while his
father is dying, and the passage previously quoted which describes Uncle
Tom's conduct at his father's funeral:
"Best to dance while Rome burns, since it must burn, don't you
think?" he said. She was rather taken aback. But gathering
herself together, she replied: "Oh, better to dance than wail,
certainly" -- "So l think" -- And they both fel t the subterranean
des ire to let, to fling away everythtng, and lapse into a sheer
unrestraint, brutal and licentious.'
.
This suppressed demoniac urge is later identified with a suppressed des ire
for revoIt and vengeance which is a characteristic component of the leadership'
theme in Lawrence's work:
"He even triumphed in it.
death, ev en he most recoiled in horror.
He somehow wanted this
Still he would deal it, he would
triumph through death." 5
In the apotheosis of the mechanical in the late 19th century
•
industrialism Lawrence dtscerns a struggle between complementary tendencies:
an egalitarian tendency, or for "equality in the Godhead, ,,6 whose ultimate
logic is socialism, and an authoritarian tendency, to make one man the "God
ft
of the machine," 7 whose ultimate logic was the kind of monolithic control
13
of national economies exercised by the wartime goverrunents of Europe. Both
forces l'lere equa.lly prominent in European political life in 1916, when Women
in ~ was nitten, and was to become even more pronounced in
Il
1917, l'lhen
IJ.oyd Georgeism" triumphed in the countries of the West, and "Bolshevism"
also triumphed in Russia. Tc Iaw:rence, both represented the apotheosis of
the princip le of mecha.nism. The only difference which he recognized was one
between a mechanical organization based on absolute subordination or one
based on absolute equality. Gerald. Critch is an incarnation of the ides. of
mechanical subordination. Gerald rejects the traditional Christian
attit~de
of his father as weak and servile, and the new socia.list attitude as anarchic.
The subordination'Jof all men to the will of one man for one purpose is
8
"functionally necessary. 11
By "translating the mystic word harmony into
the practical
WOlit
organization," 9 Gerald translated his father's Christian
ideal of patriarchal benevolence and filial devotion into the quasi-military
ideal of autbority and obedience, but no religious fervor is lest. Industria,l;"
ism has merely replaced a religion of love with a religion of power.
This religion, like any other, entails i ts own cosmology, which
can be viewed in microcosm in the chapter entitled "Coal-Dust," in the
scene in which Gerald. forces his mare to hold wh en it tries to boIt before
an oncoming train. Gerald 's explanation of his action provides us with the
basic terms for understanding the cosmology implied in his ethic of production :
"A horse has got a will like a man, though i t has got no mind, strictly. And
if your will isn 't mster, then the horse is mster of you. And this is a
thing l can't help. l can't help being mster of the horse •. " 10 To Gerald,
the organizational princip le of the cosmos is a funda.menta,l antagonism
between the human will and nature. Since he conceives the supreme function
•
of the human will to be the domination of the natura,l and the supreme function
of the mind to be to serve the will, it follows that the moral perfection of
14
mankind -- which Gerald undertakes with a zeal characteristic of religious
reformers -- requires the suppression of aIl impulses of mind and will which
are inapplicable by this end. Self-discipline and the discipline of others
are thus combined in the aspiration to demonstrate that "Man's will was the
only absolute." 11 It is by this logic that Gerald 's doctrine of the "pure
instrumenta lity" of nature leads quite naturally to the "pure instrumenta lity
of mankind." 12
Iawrence 's port:ra.it of Gerald Critch is, in fact, a veiled port:ra.it
of a military leader and a personification of the force of militarisme In
addition to his friend Middleton Murry, the model for this portrait was
Major Thomas Barber, the owner of the coal-mines near the town of Ea.stwood
which was Lawrence's childhood home, who had taken a commission in the army
during the war. 13 Lawrence could not, of course, have portrayed a military
leader in such an unfavorable light in 1916. A year before, Lawrence 's
previous novel The 1ainbow had been suppressed, probably quite as much on
account of its unfavorable portrait of a soldier in the Boer war, as
Lawrence's biographer Harry T. Moore suggests, as for its alleged "obscenity," 14
and even in the form in which it was wrH,ten it was not published in England
until nearly two years after the end of the war.
Gerald Critch 's career as "Soldier, explorer, and Napoleon of
Industry" 15 links him to the past of Major Barber and Lawrence 's character,
Anton Skrebensky, and identifies him with the expansionistic ventures of the
industrial nations of Europe -- especially of England and Germany -- in
Africa in the end of the nineteenth-century. It is quite significant, for
example, that the first of the intellectual discussions of Women
•
1:!!. le!!
occurs on the subject of the psychological 'hasis of race, nationality, and
commercial activity. 16 Lawrence discerned that England 's wartime nationalism
was the culmination of the spirit in which industr1alism had been born,
which was strong enough in late nineteenth-century Europe to have inspired
15
the historian Carlton J. H. Hayes to entitle his survey of this period,
"A Generation of Materialism".
II
In order to understand in depth the psychological level of the
career of the industrial leader, Gerald Critch, it will be necessary to
examine it within the context of the
p~ychology
and scheme of values provi-
ded by the novel and by Iawrence 's essay, "The Crown". In the person of
Rupert Birkin, Iawrence's main spokesman in Women
.!!!.
Love, and in "The Crow" ,
Iawrence has in fact provided the materials from which it is possible to
constru~
a model of his leadership ideal. It will be first necessary to
examine Birkin 's character and his ideas, and his relatioriship with Gerald,
and proceed to a brief comparison of the developments of their respective
love affairs. Such an examination will reveal two fundamentally different
"ego-to-other" orientations : in Birkin, an ideal orientation which combines
absolute mutual commitment with absolute individual integrity; and, in
Gerald, an orientation which combines mutual est rangement with the annihilation of individual integrity.
Birkin is engaged in a wholesale "revaluation of aIl values",
which is motivated by an utter disillusionment with traditional ideals of
personal and social life. He begins in a condition of voluntary intellectual
exile from ma.nkind. His determination to "stare straight at this lite we 've
brought upon ourselves and rejected, absolutely smash IIp the old idols of
ourselves," 17 causes him to regard humanity with a pessimism which is
•
nearly absolute. It is a "dead tree~', and. a "tree of lies", 18 which must
be eradicated in order to clear the way for a new creative growth. The need
for the survival of civilization.-- indeed, of mankind itself -- is not even
16
a self-evident value to Birkin. He is ready to consider man as a mere phase
in a cosmic evolutionary process, and even to weI come the Great Wav with Old
Testament fervor as a cosmic wrath against the human pestilence. It must be
remembered that Birkin does not exempt himself from this censure of mankind
"I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a
huge lie is less thell a small truth. Humanity is less, far less tha.n the
individual, beca.use the iIidividual may sometimes be capable of truth, and
humanity is a tree of lies," 19 Ursula. correctly disce:rns in Birkin a disillusioned "Salvator I1undi" 20 whose revulsion from huma.nity is not a denial
of life or a refusaI of commitment to others, but a denial of illusion and
a refusaI of false commitments. In Birkin's search for a private truth which
ca.n be the basis for a nelf commitment to another human being and to mankind
we may dis cern the germ of an ideal of leadership and social organization
which does not emerge explicitly until later
novels,~but
which will provide
us with a scheme of values against which we ca.n mea.sure Gerald Critch's
failure.
Birkin's problem cr,ystallizes into the question of the possibility
of psychological death and rebirth in the return of consciousness to its
primo:rdial sources, It is expressed very succintly in one of Birkin 's
speeches to Ursula : "There is life which belongs to death, and there is
life which isn't death.One is tired of the life which belongs to death,
our kind of life, But whether it is finished, God knows, l want love that
is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes
into the world." 21 The basic psychologica.l terms of the Iawrence 's
conception may be understood in the context of Birkin's speculations on the
•
"two rivers" of consciousness in tvomen in ~, those contained in Iawrence 's
first important essay on the unconsciou~, "The Crown, Il which was written
in London the year before Iawrence pegan lvomen
.!E.~.
Birkin distinguishes
17
two urivers tl of the psyche : the first is the "silver river, U that of personal volition, or ordinary xational consc1ousness which runs on the level of
personal identity and social interaction. The second is the "black river,"
or subter.ranean river, an ultimate source of human motivation which is
impersonal and contains the undercurrents of psychic interaction beneath the
crust of social convention. Birkin makes the quest for the possibility of
rebirth a problem of the return of consciousness to this nellspring, in
order to discover the destructive and creative potentialities of the
unconscious. The urge for the sur.render of self to the unknown source entails
the annihilation of personal consciousness and volition : "In the flood, when
the mind and the Imown world is drowned in darkness -- everything in darkness -- everything must go -- there must be the deluge."
22
Lawrence sketches an almost identical conception of the poles of
the psyche into a personal cosmology in his first important essay on the
unconscious, "The Crown," which was written in London the year before he
--
began Nomen in Love. Lawrence pictures the Lion and the Un:i:com who battle
for the CrOlm of creation as
representati~e
of the process of "creation-a.nd-
destruction" which forms the very d.rama. of cosmic emanation. The Lion and
the Unicorn are equivalent to the "black river" and the "silver river" in
Nomen
!!l~.
They are the polarities of universal organic pro cess which
fuse the cosmic forces with those in the human psyche. The princip le image
with which Lawrence pictures this process is that of two cosmic waves, or
the waves of the "two etex.nities." 23 The wave of light Iawrence identifies
with personal consciousness, asexua.l love, and evolutionary growth, whereas
the wave of darkness is identified with the impersonal sources of consiousness, sexual passion, and the primordial origins of life. The self, like the
1
cosmos, exists in either of two temporal phases. 'fhe "flux of dissolution"
is the separation of the ,raves which is tendency towa.:rd death of the self
18
which envisions no possibility of rebirth, and which is accompanied by the
illusion of the absoluteness of the self. The "flux of creation" is the meeting of the waves, the union of the two opposites which is at once a clash
and. an embrace :
Il
It is only the perfect meeting, the perfect interpenetra-
tion' into oneness, the kiss, the blow, the tlolO-in-one, that is timeless and
absolute." 25 In this moment of consummation, there is mutual death and
rebirth of each absolute into the other, and there is a simultaneous
struggle and union in which the princip le of pola.rities itself is an
absolute : "The consummation comes from perf'ect relatedness." 26
Birkin •s revaluation of personal and social values ends with a
vision of his reconciliation with mankind which he ca.lls "ultimate marriage," 27
which is the equivalent of the "flux of creation" in "The Crown." It is
clear from Birkin' s reflections on this theme and from Iawrence' s use of the
simila.r term "Consumma.te Marriage," 28 in:·his "Study of Thomas Hardy," that
this conception is intènded as an expression of an ideal relation of the
individual to society as well as of one person to another. The conception
of "ult1ma.te marriage" in lofomen in
~
translates the metaphysica.l imagery
of "The Crown" into concrete terms of personal psychology, just as the
parallel development of the love affairs of Rupert Birkin with Ursula
Brangwen and Gerald Critch with Gudrun Bra.ngwen translates the ":rlux of
creation" and. the "flux of corruption" into concrete d:œma.tic tems.
Iawrence 's ideal of "ultimate marriage" is also described by Birkin as a
"star equilibrium"
29
: lia pure balance of two single human beings -- as
the stars balance each other." 30 It is in reality a form of what might
be ca.lled "bisexua.l marriage," since it attempts t.-o construct the same
•
"perf'ect relatedness" between man and man as between man and woman •
In Birkin 's love affair with and marriage to Ursula Bra.ngwen
we ma.y discern a movement toward the rea.lization of the vision of "ultimate
19
marriage" which corresponds to the "flux of creation" in "The Crown. 1t From
the beginning it is Birkin's conviction that the liber.ation of the spontaneous
and creative potentialities of mBXÙcind depends on a frank acknowledgement of
the daemonic and the perverse. Birkin 's intellectual exile from mankind is
in reality a struggle for purgation. He conceives it to be the task of the
intellect to sound the depths of the "black river" within the self, and to
abolish from his personal and social relations all of the false goda of
Europe 's nineteenth-century heritage in order to
envi~e
a world vThich
will bear anything but the "Dead sea fruit" 31 of war. Birkin rej:ects
romantic love as a personal and social value, as a "process of subservience,"
32
or as a passion for mutual effacement which precludes genuine
moral independence. He also rejects marriage as a mere institution, as a
fom of ltég01sme à" deux," 33 or a social convenience which precludes genuine union. The fulfillment of the vision of "ultimate ma.:rriage" is
approached only after a period of hesitatian and doubt, since Birkin fears
the loss of his identity by virtue of emotional absoJ:ption in a romantic -'
passion, and Ursula fears the loss of hers by virtue of intellectual
domination. There is even a period of purgation before Birkin t s decision to
marry Ursula during which they are both bed-ridden with a siclmess, "the
knowledge of the imminence of death" 34 which is certainly more metaphysical
than physical.
The symbolic key to the cathartic release from the power of the
daemonic over consciousness which Lawrence conceives to be a precondition
for the uconsummation of union" is to be found in the events of the chapter
entitled "The Excurse." Ursula. accepts Birkin 's wed.ding rings, but throws
•
them in the mud, and when Birkin offers them ta her again, they are
reconciled. This pro cess is repeated in the sexual consummation of their
relation upon their engagement : "He knew her darkly, with the f'ullness of
20
of dark Imowledge. New she would know him, and he too would be liberated • • • •
They would give each other this sta.r-equilibrium which alone is freedom."
35
Another revelation of the nature of this rebirth cornes during the night
passage :from England to the ContinentJè which is similar to the vision of
the personal covenant with uhich The Rainbow concludes : "In Ursula the
sense of the unrealized world ahead triumphed over ever,ything. In the midst
of this profound darImess, there seemed to glow on her heart the effulgence
of a paradise urUcnown and unrealized. Her heart was full of the most
wonderful light. golden like the warmth of day, a light uhich
~ras
not shed
on the world, only on the unIcnown paradise towa.rd.s '!-rhich she '!-ras going." 36
Ursula 's intimation is confirmed in the Tyrol at the end of the
novel. Here the catharsis oceurs; purgation, or the death of the self which
is the condition of rebirth, is symbolized geographically by the transition
of Birkin and Ursula across the Alps into ltaly. This is the realization of
IB.wrence 's ideal of "ultimate marriage" in which we I?RY dis cern an ideal
relation not only between man and
troma.n°."° "but
between man and man t and the
individual and society. It is IB.lf.renCe'S ideal of the harmony of opposites,
the pj;!l:fect equilibrium which confines union with separateness, and
absolute dependence with absolute independence. In terms of Birkin's "two
rivers" of consciousness, such an ttultimate marriage" depends upon an
interflow of the "silver river" and the "black river" within each and
between both or all. In terms of "The Crown", the struggle of the Lion
and the Unicorn for the crown is not won by either principle. The principle
of perfect polarity. or the tension of simultaneous nattraction-and-repulsion"
of the struggle itself, is triumphant. As a result, the preservation of the
equilibrium within each and the preservation of the equilibrium between both
•
or all are the same process; and in the sarne sense, the obliteration of one
principle by the other is both a 105s of individual integrity and Union.
21
The relationship of Birkin to Gerald Critch is the nexus of the
psychological forces which are the object of this study. Their relationship
moves towa.rd the possibility of an "ultimate marriage" between man and man
which is analogous to that whieh Birkin conceives between man and woman, and
fails. This failure reveals the psychological basis of Lawrence's condemnation of the phenomenon of industrialism and the figure of the industrial
leader. The relationship of Birlcin and Gerald begins with Birkin's question
to Gerald, "What do you live for?". 37 Both men are solita:r::yt exiles from
the social world which is the realm of the other, by virtue of their awareness of the impossibility of realizing the deepest of human nèeds; . within
the confines of a lire defined by social convention, and of the need for
some deeper justification for existence. The ambivalent current of attraction
and repulsion which defines their relationship, "the strange enmity between
the two men that was near to love," 38 is precisely an awareness of their
common predicament and their separate needs for radically different solutions.
Lawrence makes their comparative fates the test of the "ego-to-other"
orientation which they chose, and the values and views of the world which
these imply.
Birkin's ideas of social organization are analogous to his
ideas of marriage, and his offer of a
II
pl edge" to Gerald is analogous to
his proposal to Ursula. Birkin's criticism of the ideal of both the traditional Christian and utopian socialist conceptions of society 1 as sentimental
hlli~
and hypocritical views of
nature which diminish individual moral
independence, is analogous to his criticism of romantic love. His ideas of
the utilitarian
•
con~eption
of life is analogous to his idea of marriage as
a social institution, and is summarized in his conjugation of the verb
"to eat" : "I eat, thou eatest, he eats, we eat, you eat, they eat" -and what then?,,)9
He begins with the rejection of mere individualism
22
and of economic virtues of work, acquisition, and competition as viable
bases of social organization. His revaluation of social values, however,
goes far deeper : it uproots the established deroocratic ideals of nineteenthcentury civilization. He attacks the very idea of equality which in the
basis of the traditional democratic conception of society, in both its
liberal and socialist foms. Birkin rejects the ideas of equality and
inequality, in fact, as a false frame of reference. He claims that the
real realm of freedom is the right to uniqueness, and that a social oroer
must be based on the recognition of the princip le of "pure difference"
among men : "But I, myself', who am myself, what have l to do with any
other man or woman? In the spirit, l am as separate as one star is from
ano'êher, as dif'ferent in quality and quantity. Establisha state on that.
One man isn It any better than another, not because they are equal, but
because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of oornparison. Il
40
This princip le , which Birkin also calls the "intrinsic dif'ference
between human beings," 41 is quite fundamental to Ia'h'Tence's personal and
social ideal, and it is the basis of the "pledge" which Birldn offers to
Gerald. Gerald' s refusaI is the key to his failure. He cannot coromit
himself' to Birkin because he cannot accept mutual freèdom as a basis for
mutual responsibility : "He knew that Birkin could do without him -- could
forget and not suf'fer." 42 Birkin proposes the idea of the pledge because
he believes that it is fruitless not to acknowledge a psychological bond
of which both of them are aware; it is the means by which he hop es to purge
the pond of intimacy from corruption by resentment and fear, and establish
a creative interflow between the "two rivers." This possibility is
dramatized in the Japanese wrestling match into which Birkin initiates
••
Gerald, which occurs on the evening of his first proposaI to Ursula, and
ls in fa ct its precise counterpart. The ritual form and significance of
23
this scene c1ear1y adwnbrate the possibi1ity of a kind of "male marriage,"
whose "oneness of strugg1e" and "physica1 intelligence" 43 promise once
again the kind of unitY of opposites which is pictured in "The Crown." 'fhe
c1asp of hands at the end of the match is a significant moment in the nove1
because it is Gera1d's last chance to be rescued from the self-destructive
force of solipsism :
And Gerald' s hand c10sed warm and sudden over Birkin' s, they
remained exhausted and breath1ess, the one hand clasped c1ose1y
over the other. It was Birkin lfhose hand, in swift response, had
c10sed in a strong, warm c1asp over the l:iand of the other.
Gera1d's clasp had been sudden and momentous. The normal
consciousness, ho~rever, was retuming. Birkin could br~he
almost natura11y again. Gera1d ' s hand slow1y withdrew.
Gerald 's inabi1ity to make the tl p1edge" to Birkin signifies an inability to
make a conscious acknow1edgement of the daemonic within; and consequently,
he is destroyed by it, rather than purged from it. In his relationship with
Birkin, there is the same internaI struggle which occurs during the final
stages of Thomas Critch's i1lness : "the real activity was this ghostly
wrestling with death in his own soul." 45 It is a struggle which Gerald, of
course, 10ses. The "mechanica1 certainty" 46 which enables Gerald to have
faith in the omnipotence of the human mind and will render him incapable
of entering into human relationship which has a basis other than mutual
strugg1e for domination or mutual enslavement. The material conclusion of
the choice which Gerald makes in his refusa1 of his pledge is his own
,
,
destruction. The demonstration of this process occurs in the second half
of the novel in Gerald 's re1ationship to Gud:run Brangwen. Iawrence
demonstrates that Gerald's refusaI to make a commitment to 1ife in fact a
commitment to death -- for figuratively, Gerald dies of a lire commitilted;:oo
•
anything but the idea of power. Gerald Critch's love affair with Gudrun
Brangwen is a dramatization of the princip le which Iawrence stated in "The
Crown" : "Any :mdividual who will triumph, in love or in war, perishes." 47
It is a movement toward the condition which is temed in "The Crown" the
24
C
•
. ,"
~,
"flux of cor:ruption" and the "consummation of reduction. Il Just as in social
terms Lawrence demonstrates that the apotheosis of the utilitarian conception
'f
of man leads to the "pure instrumentality of mankind, Il he demonstrates in
psychological terms that the logical conclusion of the impulse to reduce aIl
that is natural to a condition of inert matter is suicide. In this respect,
Ial-rrence ,~s dramatization of the process by which the passion for "sensation
within the ego" leads to "ultimate reduction," 49 is quite close to the
process which Denis de Rougemont asserts to be the key to the myth of
Tristan and Isolde -- ·'Amors par force vos demeinel" ("u,ve dominates you
by force") -- the consummation of which is death. 50 The relatiCllship of
Gerald and Gudrun from its beginning until its culmination in the Tyrol
develops like a series of quasi-mythical rites toward the realization of a
daemonic pledge. lfuen in their first personal encounter Gerald Imocks
Gudrun' s sketchbook into the r<!a.rsh toward Birkin 1 s mythical underground
river, IIthe bond was established between them'!
51 It is later sealed when
their provocation of a caged rabbit, named "Bismark," releases a daemonic
cruelty and rage in l'1hich Gudrun is claved and the rabbit is nearly killed
"There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both. They were
implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries. 1t 52
There is a premonition of the nature of the "bondit or "league"
in the chapter entitled "lfater-Party", when just after Gerald first kisses
Gudrun, while his sister and her male companion drown together in the
reservoir. The position of the corpses when they arediscovered is quite
significant : "Diana. had had her arms around the neck of the young man,
choking him. Il 53 There is a remarkable similarity between this event in
Ifomen in Love and a passage which describes the psychology of war in "The
Crown" :
And still, as far as there is anY passion in war, it is the
25
passion for the embrace with death. The desire to deal death
and to tru~e death •. The enemy is the bride, whose body we will
reduce with rapture of agony and wounds. He are the bride-groom,
engaged with him in the long, voluptuous embrace, the giving of
agony, the arising and the using of the slàw unwilling transport
of misery, the soaking in of day after of wet mud, in penetration
of the heavy, sOrdid, unendurable cold, on and on to the climax,
the laceration of the blade, like a frost through the tissue
blasting it. 54
O
l
f:
'rhis passage enables us to link the themes of war and love in Gerc:Lld Critch 's
character and career, and to comprehend the "logic
of the imagery which
fixes him in the I.e.wrentian "flux of corruption." The mud and the frost -the cold, l'fet depths of the Narsh and the cold, arid heights of the Alps -are the images of the separation of the Lion and the Unicorn which entails
the perversation of instinct into bestial passion and of
~nd
into sterile
fixity.
The prophecy contained in the drowning scene is realized when
the relationship of Gerald and Gudrun reaches its climax in the Tyrol in
the final chapters of the novel. An excellent gloss on Gerald's death in
the Alps is the exchange between Gudrun and Ursula which occurs immediately befora the latter's departure for ltaly. Gudrun say.s, ''l've gone no
fu:rther thah love yet." Ursula thinks, "Because you never have loved, you
can 't get beyond it." 55 The basis of the relationship has been a mode of
domination and sUbmission, which eliminates the reciprocal flow of the
;"',
I,é.~ntian
L/
psychic polarities within each and among both. Gerald 's death
in the Alps is the "objective correlative" of the psychological process
which Lawrence demonstrates in macabre terms when Gerald makes love to
Gudrun in order to rid himself of the realization of the "omnipotence of
death"
•
56 which was the result of his father's death : "Into her he poured
aIl his pent-up darkness and corrosive death; and he was whole a.ga.in • • • •
and she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of
death." 58
26
Such is the inevitable result of Gerald's choice to beld.éve tha.t
"he had no master in death. Il 59 The absoluteness of the ego, in Gerald's case,
is an illusion whiuh is preserved by the perversion of the need for others
into the pa.ra.sitic forro of domination. In the chapter entitled "Continental,"
Lawrence dxamatizes the moment when this relationship reaches its final
impasse, in the scene in which Gerald. and Gudrun look out the window together
at the valley in the Alps which Lawrence ca.lls "the navel of the world." 60
In view of its crucial importance in psychologica.l development of their
relationship, it is worth quoting at considerable length :
Gerald bent above her and was looking out over her shoulder.
Already he felt he was alone. She was gone. She was completely
gone, and there was icy vapour round his heart. He saw the blind
valley, the great cul-de-sac of snow and mountain peaks under
the heaven. And there was no way out. The terrible silence and
cold and the glamorous whiteness of the dusk wrapped him round,
and she remained crouching before the window, as at a shrine,
a shadow.
"Do you like it?" he a::;ked in a voice tha.t sounded detached
and foreign. At least she might acknowledge he was with her. But
she only averted her soft, mute face a little from his gaze. And
he knew tha.t there were tears in her eyes, her own tears, tears
of her strange religion, that put him to nought.
Quite suddenly, he put his band under her chin and lifted
her face to him. Her dark blue eyes, in their wetness of tears,
dilated as if she was startled in her very soule They looked at
lim through their tears in terror and a little horror. His
light blue eyes were keen, small-pupilled and unnatural in their
vision. Her lips parted as she breathed with difficulty.
The passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the
ringing of a bronze bell, so strong and unflawed and indomitable.
His knees tightened to bronze as he hung above her soft face,
whose lips parted and whose eyes dilated in a strange violation.
In a grasp of his hand her chin was unutterably soft and silken.
He felt strong as winter, his hands were living metal, invincible
and not to be turned aside. His heart rang like a bell clanging
inaide him.
•
He took her up in his arms. She was soft and inert, motionless.
All the while her eyes, in which the tears had not yet dried,
were dilated as if in a kind of swoon of fascination and helplessness. He was super-humanly strong and unflawed, as if invested
with super-natural force.
He lifted her close and folded her against him. Her softness,
27
her inert, re1axed weight 1ay against his own surcharged,
bronze-1ike 1imbs in a heaviness of desirabi1ity that wou1d
destroy him if he were not fu1fi11ed. She moved convulsive1y,
recoi1ing away from him. Ris heart went up 1ike a f1ame of ice,
he c10sed over her 1ike steel. He wou1d destroy her rather than
be denied. 61
The "cul-de-sac" of the valley of snow is mirror of the "cul-de-sac" of
their re1ationship, and the whiteness and sti11ness of the Tyrolean 1andscape, which for Birkin and Ursula had symbo1ized an atmosphere of purgation
and rebirth, are for Gerald and Gudrun symbo1ic of steri1ity and death.
The
figure, "nave1 of the wor1d," for setting of the final portion of the nove1
has likewise a double connotation: for Birkin and Ursula the "nave1 of the
world" is a passageway to Southern Europe, and signifies the possibi1ity
of reunion of mind and f1esh by virtue of a return to a vital source; for
Gerald and Gudrun, it signifies the threat of final severance from the
vital source of consciousness, which is the resu1t of the disunion of mind
and flesh which occurs in the cu1tivation of "sensation within the ego."
Gera1d's death is Lawrence's c1imactic statement of the Nemesis
of industria1 power.
Lawrence considered that the Great War was a "flux of
corruption" into which it had p1unged a11 of Europe, and he dramatizes this
process in the chapter entitled "Snowed Up."
When Gudrun decides to 1eave
Gerald for the artist, Loerke, Gerald is faced with the rea1ization of the
consequences of the choice he had taken in the passage quoted above:
that
his need for abso1ute domination is in rea1ity a form of abso1ute dependence,
and that the 10ss of its object means his own destruction.
If Lawrence's
prophecy of the demise of the indus trial social order was premature, his
understanding of the psycho10gy of its destructive potentia1ities is neverthe1ess astute.
The re1uctance to re1inquish the hope of a social rebirth
which will cause the theme of the leader to reappear "in Lawrence's postwar
work is foreshadowed in Birkin's return to the Tyrol to view the body of his
28
dead friend, and in his reiteration of his faith in the idea of the
1)
"p1edge" in the conversation with Ursula. which conc1udes the nove1 :
"Having you, l ca.n live a1l my 1ife lüthout anybody e1se,
any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, rea11y happy,
l wanted eterna.1 union with a man too : another kind of love, Il
he said • • • •
"You can't have it, because it's fa1se, impossible," she
said.
"I don 't "believe. that," he answered. 62
The same apoca1yptic extremes of hope and despair for mankind which Iawrence
envisioned in his portraits of Rupert Birkin and Gerald Critch re-emerge
six years later in Ka.nga.roo.
CHAPTER 'l'HREE
lCANGAROO
The primar,y
irnportan~e
of Kangaroo in Lawrence's work is the
emergence of the leadership theme into full prominence. In Aaron's
~,
Lawrence'had extended his explorations of the psychology of the man-to-man
relationship
in his study of Aaron Sisson and Rawdon Lilly, and given it
central importance for the first time. The novel ends with the following
interchange :
"And whom shall l submit to?" he said.
"Your soul will tell you," replied the other.
,In Kapgaroo. these worc1s become the point of departure for a new quest, in'
which the man-to-man relationship is once again central, but clea.rly
transfonned into the q uest for personal and social rebirth by means of
commitment to a leader. The narrative embodies this quest and its failure
in the relationship of the central character, Richard wvat Somers, to the
t'Wo leader figures of the novel and their political movements.'
The moral ambiguities in which Richard Somers is involved in
his search for a commitment can be understood within the framewok provided
by an examination of the refinements on his concepts of psychic polarity
which Lawrence made in the period between the composition of Women
~ ~
and Kangaroo. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the
•
Unconscious, Lawrence sketched the
o~t1ines
of an informaI system of
unconscious motivation and communication from a conceptual model of the
29
30
•
human nervous system. The basic polarities represented by the Unicorn and the
Lion have been preserved, but have now been specifically designated as forces
of the "unconscious," and have been delineated with considerably greater
clarity.
The basis of I.a.wrence's "system" is the concept of the interraction
between the "cerebral" and "vertebral" spheres of consciousness. The cerebral
sphere of consciousness was for I.a.wrence a static princip le , the sphere of
what he ca,lled the "ideal," or mental, which had the power to force the
motivational sphere of consciousness into fixed forms. The vertebral
consciousness was the dynamic princip le of human motivation, the sphere of
what Iawrence called the "passional" or "affective." lUthin this sphere,
he distinguished positive and negative poles, the love-motive and the powermotive, which he located in dual centres of the lower nervous system. The
love-motive, in Iawrence's scheme, is the force exerted by the sympathetic
nervous system, with its centre in the solar plexus. It is the urge of the
self to union with the external world, to make "I am" a wholly inclusive
statement. The contrary force, the power-motive, Iawrence located in the
lumbar ganglion, the cent.re of the voluntary nervous system. It is the
urge of the self to assert its separateness, to make "I am" a wholly
exclusive statement. The terms of this basic polarity correspond to
affirmation and negation, or attraction and repulsion, and by means of a
kind of intuitive communication between the lower centres which. Lawrence
oolls "vital magnetism," 1 they constitute the dynamic currents in human
relations.
On the basis of this scheme it is possible to see that
•
Lawrence's ideals of the fulfillment of individual identity. of the mutual
relationship of man to man, and of the individual in society, are once
again the same ideals and that they are united in the q uest for the
31
leader in Ka.ngaroo. The parable of the Unicorn and the Lion has been
transla.ted into K"angaroo as the parable of the Ka.ngaroo and the
~iger,
2
but the struggle is the same, and through the figure of the leader i t has
been enlarged into a metaphor for the struggle among social forces to
achieve an equilibrium ldthin the social organism. In these terms, it is
a struggle to realize a new form of social organization in which the
individual and the mass of mankind are transformed and fulfilled in the
intuitive communication between a leader and the people. In accordance
with his basic psychological scheme, Lawrence distinguishes two basic
tendencies of unconscious communication between the leader and the people. 3
The love-motive, or the downward, sympathetic flow is the democratic
tendency, which Lawrence finds is dominant in such leaders as Lincoln,
Gladstone, and loJ'ilson. The power-motive, or the authoritarian tendency,
which he finds dominant in Caesar and Napoleon, consists in the exaction
of an upwa:r::d flow of obedience. As an example of the perfect equilibrium
of the two tendencies, Lawrence mentions the relationship of the leader
of the great sperm l>lhales to his herd. The achievement of such a social
equilibrium would mean the simultaneous realization of the integrity of
the individual and his union with maW{ind.
In Kanga:t'Oo, tVillie Struthers and the socialist movement
represent the establishment of a balance between the unconscious love
and power motives under the tutelage of the cerebral consciousness. His
ideal, in both the personal and social realms, is fraternal love on the
basis of common interest. Struthers is, above aIl, a political tactician
animated by a political problems. He is the incarnation of practical
•
intelligence, bent on filnding workable means to
realizabil.è~;
ends •
Stru-chers is a passionate and idealistic man; his emotional and imaginative
strength, however, is all-lays directed by an intellectual consciousness
.32
of the need to work towaxd visible goals. His ethical ideal is the familiar
socialist principle of the dignity and equal value of aIl work, and his
goal is the construction of a society, by means of the political instrument
of the universal basic wage, in which this princip le will,be the "new bond
between men". 4 He envisages a religion of the people, from which the old
patriarchal god of the race has been banished, in which the egalitarian
princip le of fraternal love is absolute. Struthers has a controlled awareness
of both the love and power motives in human affairs. Although his goal is
the elimination of class divisions and the pOlier-motive in society, he
recognizes the existence of c!ass divisions, and he accepts the necessity
of class struggle and the utilisation of class hatred in the attainment of
this end. It is a matter of indifference to him whether it is attained in
the immediate future by violent and revolutionary means or in the remote
future by graduaI reform, because his sole concern is to make the best
political uses of present circumstances, and his consciousness never
deserts the realm of the attainable and the known. Somers is drawn toward
Struthers and his movement because, on the one hand, Struthers' popular
socialism go es deeper than the cerebral restrictions characteristic of
!abor movements, such as the materialistic and theoretical considerations
Somers finds characteristic of unionism and Marxism. Yet, on the other
band, Somers believes that social oxganization is impossible on the basis
of a bond no deeper than work or fraternal love. The most powerful appeal
of Struthers for Somers is the appeal of his own cerebral conscience,
whose visible representative is tfilliam James, or uJaz, n who counsels
him to doubt the wisdom of yielding to the forces represented by
e·..,
l~aroo
and his movement. The irony is that Struth ers principal attraction is the
logic of his political position, yet Somers accepts neither logic nor
politics as sufficient solutions to human problems. On both the personal
33
and social levels, Struthers asks for no commitment beyond friendship and
'~!,'
•
~L'~'
no satisfaction beyond the
cama~erie
of common interest and dedication
toward a common ideal. He envisions no transformation of human nature. In
the final analysis Struthers and his movement represent the h:i.gqest
possibilities of a humane reconstruction of social life which Somers can
imagine under the aegis of cerebral consciousness and frater.nal love.
Y~ngaroo
and his Diggers movement represent the possibilities
of the dissociation and imbalance of the love and power motives when they
are released from the guidance of the cerebral consciousness. Whereas
Somers' intellect is drawn toward Struthers and the socialists, the real
force of his natural and unconscious attraction and revulsion is towaxd
Kangaroo and the Diggers. Kangaroo is the patriarchal principle. Personal
allegiance to him and institutional allegiance to his movement both require
a bond deeper than work or brotherhood -- they require an absolute
commitment. Kangaroo professes this commitment to be perfect and absolute
male love. He believes love to be the sole and supreme motivational force
in mankind, and even in the cosmos. His idea of his messianic social mission
is expressed in his parable of the ant and the anthills, echoing a familiar
Iawrence theme. 'rhe world, Kangaroo claims, 15 under the reign of the
Judas-principle of mechanical servitude, and needs a saviour to awaken
its suppressed natural warmth from the cold and mechanical170utines in
which it bas been fixed. Kangaroo's utopian ideal is in essence a
secularized Christianity. which revives a quasi-religious conception of
social organization akin to the union of the church and state in the
person of the Czar which animates Doestoevsky's most fervent expressions
of faith, There is, of course, a difference; Kangaroo's secular faith
•
will be directed toward mortal life, This wise and benevolent patriarchy
would be sustained by the force of pater.nal love, or "generous power," 5
34
Kangaroo's aim is the emancipation of the love-motive from aIl
restrictions of the cerebral consciousness; men l'lou1d 1earn obedience to
interna1 nfleds, and be freed from obedience to any fixed or permanent
cerebral impositions on the instinctua1 1ife in the form of dogmas or
ideo1ogies. Kangaroo's utopia of fond and protective paterna1ism is neither
authoritarian nor ega1itarian. He has no faith in the abi1ity of the mass
of the population to know its own interests or choose its own leaders
to execute them, and proposes the virtua1 e1imination of education as a
social institution. Control would be exercised
from above, but in the fom
1
of a dovmward sympathetic flow toward the populace on the part of the
leader, rather than a voluntary withdrawal ,into an authoritative distance
in orcier to impose his separate will. In fact, Kangaroo disavows the
existence of a power-motive in human affairs just as vehement1y as he
does the necessity for cerebral control. He is the paterna1 animal who is
inexplicably furnished l'lith a materna1 pouch for his chi1dren, the
Abrahams' Bosom of innocent, asexual parental love. He is also an
intellectual whose intellectua1ism is as esoteric and disengaged from
worcily actualities as trlill Brangwen 's aestheticism in The Iainbow, and
a politician with no program but an evange1ism which aspires to conquer
the world by sheer emotional effusion. He is, of course, Lawrence himself
in
one of his many masks, and a spokesman for many ideas which Lawrence
could take quite seriously even while he l'las capable of quite serious
recognition of their impossibility.
Kangaroo and his movement, however, contain the other pole
of the Lawrentian unconscious as we1l. It is represented by Jack Callcott
•
Kangaroo 's loyal fo1lower, and the returned soldiers who are the ra.nk
and file of his organization. The Digger movement holds a very precarious
equi1ibrium between the Unicorn and the Lion, since the leader and his
35
•
followers are in fact polar opposites, and are personifications of instinctual
force in the process of overthrowing rational restr.aint. Jack Callcott is
the incarnation of the power-principle. He is violent and authoritarian
both in character and creed. He conceives a reconstruction of society
in tems of military organization, military discipline, and military
justice. He is the revolutionary and conspiratorial side of the movement,
to which Kangaroo is sublimely indifferent, and his attention is fixed
on the seizure of political power. Somers is
drawn toward Callcott by
the distrust of democr.atic institutions which he learned from the Great
Ivar. IUthin the contex·c of post-war European politics Callcott 's convictions
a~c:!_~wrence
-- both rational and irrational -- are comprehensible,
precedi~
have heard them from the Italian Fascisti in the yea.rS
.
must
the
,;
Harch on Rome. The inclination to view parliamentary democraeyas weak
and degenerate, to view the general insecurity of international finance
as a premonition of the collapse of the European middle classes, and of
the whole superstructure of the liber.al state along with them; and to
seek political salvation in the principles of nationalism and authority
-- to aIl of these Lawrence's Italian experience had made him sensitive long!
before they were to become a general European menace in the decade af'ter
his death. Kangaroo and Jack Callcott, although polar opposites, share
a single important conviction. If' politics in the modem nation-state is
conceived as the perpetuaI redistribution of equilibrium among a plur.ality
of organized interests, both advocate the abolition of the political
princip le itself. This ideal of what Karl Popper terms the "closed society,"
l'1hich is characteristic of utopian political visions, is part of the
•
attraction of the Diggers movement for Somers, and the socialist
movement as weIl. But the promise of the Diggers movement to realize a
solution beyond the political is far more attractive to Somers. It is the
36
•
promise of a transformation of the quality of social life itself by seeking
deeper psychic reots than conventional motives of political interest and
conventional programs for the redistribution of wealth. The struggle
to realize a "new life-formn 6 is for Somers the voice of the unknown, and
the calI to an absolute commitment. The commitment, however, is
amb~ous.
It l'Tavers between commitment to a paternal leader whose ideal of absolute
devotion to his followers iz protective love, and a fraternal follower
whose ideal of absolute devotion to his leader is disciplined violence.
The Unicorn and the Lion, Dostoevskian saintliness and Nussolinian barbarism,
are the polarities of the unconscious which the Digger movement cannot
hold in equilibrium.
The ambivalence of motives within Somers and within the Digger
movement is the key to the motif of betrayal and revenge which accompanies
Somers 1 refusaI of allegiance to Kangaroo. On both the personal and social
levels, the betrayal consists of the premonition of an eruption of the
power-motive in a daemonic forme For Iawrence, the power-motive and
revenge are phallic motives. In K.a,ne;aroo and elsewhere Iawrence distinguishes
between two modes of violence and revenge. In its pure and natural form,
and when it brings death which envisions rebirth in a higher form, it is a
noble motive. The tiger and the eagle in "The
Crown,'~
and the blood-sacrifices
in the name of the primo:rdial gods in The Plumed Serpent are symbolic of
this noble motive. In its impure and perverted form, it is mere death and
destruction which envisions no rebirth and serves no higher creation. It is
then an ignoble
mo~ive,
and the bullfight in
•
for which the hyena and the wlture in "The Crown"
~
Plumed Serpent are symbols.
The revelation of both the psychological motive for the personal
"betrayallt of Kangaroo by Somers and of the psychological mechanism by
which his political movement is "betrayed" into the perverse and the
37
•
daemonic is the function of the Chapter entitled "Nightmare," ii'hich focuses
with varying degrees of precision, aIl of the polarities at work in the
leadership quest. The chapter describes two versions of the phallic man,
and of England. The natura.l phallic man, and the Dld England in which the
spirit of the ancient goals had survived, are represented by John Thomas
and his fann. The daemonic phallic man, and industric:.l England, are
represented by Lloyd George. The ascension of Lloyd George was for Somers
the betrayal of Old England, the final triumph of the perversion of
natura,l force into the daemonic horror of mechanized war. The plight of
Somers in Cornwall during the war is representative of the plight of the
natuml man: he is either harrassed like a criminal or isolated like a
par~.
The key events of this chapter, the eviction of Somers from the
farm and his final medical examination, are almost parables of the
betrayal and crucifixion of the phallic pride which was the heritage of the
ancient gods. Somers' unkept vow to return to Cornwall, and his determination
to redeem his manhood, constitutes his obligation to the dark God which
prevents commitment to Kangaroo.
The "Nightmare" chapter follows the decisive scene in which
Somers refuses to give Kangaroo a pledge of love like a Freudian "return
of the repressed." It illuminates the unconscious dimension of the scene
and establishes the psychological l1nk to the chapter entitled "A Row in
Town," which implicates Somers in Kangaroo's death by virtue of the
Freudian principle that the wish is the deed. From the beginning there
had been a suggestion of an ambivalence toward. Kangaroo on the part of
Somers for deeper than mere
•
sk~ticism
about the feasibility of his
political ambitions, which is very weIl summarized in Somers' phrase
"Jehovah-l:l.ke kindliness," 7 for Ka.nga.roo' s chara.cter and creed. On the
one hand, the relationship of Somers to Kangaroo may be viewed as a
.38
•
conscious progression toward a decision to reject the commitment of perfect
male love towam. Kangaroo. It my also, on the other hand, be viewed as a
progression towam. the revelation of an unconscious motive. It is true that
Somers has an acute awareness of the unseemliness of Kangaroo's role as a
God
of Mercy and the deficiencies of his religion of light; he resists the
absorption of his individuality into a conglomerate of mss emotion, and
he is skeptical of the political godliness which inspires Kangaroo's
attempt to be all solutions to aIl factions. But in their crucial encounter,
Somers'repetition of the accusation that Kangaroo aspires to be Jehovah
and of the challenge to Kangaroo to acknowledge an "understanding deeper
than love" 8 signals the resurgence of an unconscious motive which do es
not surface until his "nightmare.· .. Behind the God of 11ercy who is true
to those who are tme to his religion of light, Somers had sensed the
presence of a God of t{rath who is false to those who are false to him.
Kangaroo's religion of light yields to a vision of the Celtic darkness,
with its unconscious bonds of mutual suspicion, betrayal and vengeance
which had characterized Somers' attitude toward Lloyd George during the
war.
Somers senses in Kangaroo and his movement a potential mster
and a mob which would be a repetition of his experience of the Great War.
IIDamn his love," Somers thinks, IIHe wants to force me." 9 AlI of Somers'
repressed rage for the indignities he suffered under the institutionalized
hysteria of the war, and above aIl for the denial of his manliness, are
focused into his relationship with
Kanga~o.
His flight from Kangaroo is
above aIl a flight from an unwelcome discovery about himself -- that the
•
volcano of vengeance is active in him and capable of uncontroDa.ble eruption
and that he is capable of betrayal. Kangaroo's contention, on his deathbed, that Somers has killed him by the refusaI of his love has a profound
39
•
unconscious logic which Lawrence recognizes by entitling the chapter
which contains their deathbed dialogues "Ka.nga.roo is Killed." There 1s a
significant psychological sense in which the catastrophe of the chapter
entitled "A Row in Town" is the f'ulfillment of the unconscious prophecy
contained in that refusal, which was an eruption of an uncontrola:ëd
daemonic force because the unconscious power-motive had been unacknoWlè~gëa.
In terms of Lawrence' s inf'ormal social psychology, the outbreak of
meaningless violence which results in Kangaroo's death occurs by the
same process. The phenomenon of "mobism," 10 the social perversion of the
power-motive, as distinct from revolution, which is its noble expression,
is the result of a failure of leadership to direct the vertebral
consciousness in which a social,movement has its origins. The intuition
which precedes Somers' nightmare, whatever its objective basis in Ka.nga.roo's
character, has a larger truth in the context of the novelr for Kangaroo,
in the end, is betrayed by his own refusal to admit the existence of the
power-motive in men. In the final analysis Rangaroo leaves the problems which
it poses in a state of only partial resolution. Lawrence has made virtually
no attempt to dif'ferentiate Richard Somers as protagonist from his own
role as a narr.ator. Is the irresolution of the novel's narrative problems
of character motivation and social analysis, in °t.he end, the mztrror for
Lawrence's own irresolution or the meaning of his own pessimism for
humanity, which arose from the experience of the Great Ivar? However obscure
the motive and meaning of the disillusion with which the leadership quest
concludes in Kangaroo, the disillusion itself is strong and unmistakeable.
This novel provides a striking contrast to the next l shall consider, in
•
which there is a new confidence, but a loss of artistic vitality •
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PLUJolElD SERPENT
The Plumed Se;yent is I.a.wrence's final exploration of the
leadership theme. At once the most elaborate in general design and the
least complex in psychological penetration of his leadership novels, it
gradually leaves the realm of realism for a ritual development which
enacts wOOt L. D. Clark describes as a "spiral progress toward union" 1
of the social organism in the person of the leader.
The firet third of the novel, which is set in Mexico City,
is based on I.a.wrence's experiences during his travels in Hexico, primarily
during the spring of 1923, and approaches a realistic style in Hs
observations of Mexican life and landscape. The most important of these
are the description of a bu1lfight in I1exico City, which I.a.wrence attended
with his wife Frieda and his American friends Witter Bynner and Spud
Johnson, who became Owen Rhys and Bud Villiers;
2
and a description of a
luncheon par~y at the home of Zelia Nuttal, who became r~. ~orris. 3
In the section of the novel which is set in r1exico City, and primarily
in these two scenes, Lawrence char.acterizes the social and political
atmosphere of Mexico in the early 1920's, and superimposes the political
developments which occured during his third Mexican trip in the \iinter
of 1924, surrounding the ascension of President Calles, who is called
•
"Montes" in
~ Plumed Serpent. 4
I.a.~ce's
representation of the political life of the
Mexican Revolution has the familiar features of what Birkin called the
40
41
•
"life which belongs to death" and of the imminent degeneration :.into the
tlflux of corruption" and "mobism." It reflects Iawrence 's disillusion with
the established political conditions both in America and Mexico, l'lhere he
found nothing but the same forces which he felt had destxoyed Old England
and led Europe into the Great War: "The negation which is the life-breath of
materialism, ,,5and "the hate of the materialist have-nots for the materialist
haves: they are the Anti-Christ." 6 There is even a hint of regret for the
demise of the "1oose , patriarchal generosity" 7 of Old Hexico -- for the
aristocratie traditions of the colonial and ecclesiastical l1exico of the
Conquistadors. In the programs of President Hontes, whose sole ambition is
to raise Nexico from poverty and ignorance, and his ineffectual efforts to
maintain his government in the face of threats from factionalism within
and American expansion without, Iawrence pictures once again the inadequate
nature of political solutions.
There is, however, a new racial component to these old themes.
The "life which belongs to death" towal."d which the Revolution moves is
asserted to be a tendency of the degeneration of the Hexican race: "lfuenever
a Nexican cries Yl:Y!,' he ends up with muera'. • • • l think of aIl the
l1exican Revolutions, and l see a skeleton walking ahead of a great namber
of people, waving a black banner with
~ ~
Muerte written in large
white letters." 8 In accol."dance with his tendency to use marriage and
coition as symbols of social and historical events, Iawrence conceives
the union of the Indian and Spanish races to have been a kind of "false
marriage" which conceived a characterless race which need.s to be reborn.
As Toussaint puts it, "at the moment of coition, either the spirit of the
•
father fuses with the spirit of the mother, to create a new being with
a soult or else nothing fuses but the germ of procreation." 9 The
Nexican race is pictured. as an imminent "flux of corruption" which is the
42
•
victim of its own "lust of resentment" for the humiliation of the conquest 1
"The heavy, blood-eyed resentment of men who have never been able to win
a soul for themselves, never been able to win themselves a nucleus, an
individual integrity out of the chaos of passions and potencies and death." 10
Such scenes as the bullfight in Mexico City and the torture of the bird
at the lakeshore in the chapter entitled, "Home to Sayula," as well as
the bandit murders and the lawlessness of the Mexiœn amies, are all
instances of the Lawrence's conception of futile and. puxposeless violence
which :oesults from the perversion of revenge into "mobism."
Kate 's journey from Mexico City to Sayula in The Plumed
Se;pent corresponds to Lawrence's own journey from Mexico City to Chapala
at the end of' April, 1923, where he wrote the f'irst d:r:af't of the novel
in the next two months. The transition from the valley of fvlexico to the
mountains is a transition from a realistic to a mythical setting, and it
likewise signifies a change in the sources upon which Iawrence drew f'or
the composition of' the novel. Although the transitional portion of the
novel contains striking descriptions of Mexican rural lite, once the new
plot of the religion of Quetzlcoatl begins to unfold, Lawrence has turned
f'rom his own eXperience to his antiquarian studies. In particular, he
seems to have transferred to the setting of the village and the lake
at Chapala his observations of the ruins of' the Aztec shrine at Teotihuacan 11
and there are elements of' the new religion of' Quetzlcoatl which are probably
taken from his observations at the Aztec museum in Mexico City. 12 The
festive scenes of ~ Plumed S:e;pent, hOl'leVer, seem to draw on his
observations of the Indians of the southwestern United States, especially
•
on the Hopi Snake Dance and the Corn Dance of the Santo Domingo Pueblo,
both of which Iawrence describes in Ms travel book, Mornings Ë! Mexico.
The most important sources for
~
Plumed Se;pent, however,
43
were literary. William York Tindall's investigations have revealed the
~;,
•
"
importance of Lawrence's acquaintance with the anthropologist Zelia Nuttal
and her work, Fundamental Principles of Old !!È.
~ t~orld
Civilizations,
and furthermore of his access to her library, 13 Lawrence was pursuing the
same mythical themes which ha.d attracted him in the anthropological
readings which he had begun during the war. in works on the Pre-Colombian
civilizations of Nexico and later, Mexican history: Prescott 's Conquest
of Nexico. Thomas Balt 's N'aturalist in Nica.ra.gua. Adolph .Bandeleer's
The Gilded
~.
BernaI Diaz 's Conquest of r1exico. Humboldt 's
~
des
Cordillères, and de Lora and Pinchon' s The Hexican People: Their Struggle
for Freedom; also, several volumes of the Anales deI Ivluseo Nacional of
Nexico, and possibly Louis Spence 's
and
~ ~
The Gods of Mexico.
14
~
!1ythologies of Ancient f1exico
Regardless of the specifie content
which Lawrence derivad from these works, it seems clear that when the
political situation of the I1exican Revolution could not provide him with
rea.listic substance for his apocalyptic hop es , Lawrence tumed to sources
from his travels and readings in order to construct a personal mythology.
tfuen the action of the novel has been transferred to Sayula.,
it gra.d.ua.lly assumes more of a ceremonial than a plot structure. L. D. Clark,
in his study of The Plumed Serpent. has observed that the three main
characters of the novel, Kate. Don Ramon and Don Cipriano, are "not
recognizable as fictional transformations of certain acquaintances," 15
but there 1s an important sense in which they are not even recognizable as
fictional characters. The character of Kate is given a certain definition
and certain roots in a past history. but Don Ramon and Don Cipriano are
•
almost purely ceremonia.l figures. Al1 three are, in fact, quite recognizable
as Lawrence's alter egos.
For the first time, Lawrence approaches the moral ambiguities
44
involved in the commitment to the idea of "ultimate mr.ria.ge" in the person
of the leader through the medium of a femle character. ln this respect,
Kate has a role in the plot of The Plumed Sezpent analogous to that of
Somers in Kangaroo, but in character she is quite close to Ursula in tiomen
~
IDve, with her hesitation toward Birkin. Kate 's ambivalence tm'lard Mexico
and Don Ramon's revolution, and her relationship with Don 1è.mon 's two wives,
furnish the basis of the plot structure which bonds together the ceremonial
occasions of the novel, and her decision to remain with Don Ramon and Don
Cipriano in the end holds the key to the fulfillment of Iawrence' s religious
vision. Kate's internal struggles are the principal means by which Iawrence
preserves anY sense of critical detachment from the events at Sayula. But
for a large portion of the final two-thirds of the novel, as Don Ramon writes
the hymns and designs the ·emblems of his new religion, announces them to the
world, and finally carries out his ceremonial revolution, we have the
impression that in the person of Kate we are witnessing the preparation of the
script and stage properties, then the rehearsal, and finally the performance
of an elaborate theatrical conception which abandons not only all the
conventions of novelistic development, but aIl relevance to the world we
know as it progresses. In Don Ramon who writes his hymns at Sayula, determined
to "keep free from the taint of politics,"
16 as his follower the Hen of
Quetzlcoatl read them in the villages and convert the populace, it is not
difficult to imagine Iawrence writing in Chapala in a mode of self-dramatization
which bas been dissociated from all realis1dc hopes for social renewal.
In
~
Plumed Sezpent, Iawrence returns to the sarne dra.ma of
social forces which he had portrayed in his English novels, but he finds
•
them in a Mexican setting and invents the political savioœ:, Don Ramon, as
a
~ ~
machina to rescue Mexico from death at the bands of the forces
of materialism in the "flux of cor:ruption." f.Iexico avoids the fate of
45
Birkin 's hop es for Gerald Critch and Somers 1 hopes for Kangaroo 's political
movement, in effect, by means of an act of faith on Iawrence 1 spart; and
the reconstruction of civilization on a new religious basis which had first
envisioned during the war is now dramatized in a setting in which the
dis illusion of the l'laris aftermath can be avoided.
The Plumed SeZEent is the novel of Iawrence's later work which
contains his most significant reinterpretation of his nineteenth-century
Christian heritage. The Christian religion of The Plumed SeZEent is, of
course, Mexican Catholicism. Iawrence, however, rewrote nearly aIl he saw
and read in the image of his own internaI. struggles, and the figures through
which the theme of Mexican Catholicism is dramatized are familiar ones in
the Iawrentian novel. Both Don Famon and Don Cipriano are rebels a.ga.inst
Mexican Catholicism which, by Iawrence's interpretation of Mexican history,
had apparently degenerated from the time ·of the age of the conquistadors
into a matriarchal religion. Iawrence's objection to Catholic
liaS
~Briolatry
that,' in the terms of his essays on the unconscious, i t was an alliance
of the cerebral consciousness with the love-motive, which did not permit
pride in the flesh. Don Famon rebels against the love of his wife, Dona
Carlotta, because her love l'las "nearly aIl will," 17 or emotion directed
by intellect. Don Cipriano's renunciation of his ambition to become a
priest and of his god-father, the Bishop, and his devotion to Don Ramon
is likewise based on the need to emancipate the flesh from this psychological
bondage. His explal"..ation affo:rds an instzuctive contrast to Somers' refusaI
of his pledge to Kangaroo: "lfuen l grew up, and my godfather could not
compel me to believe, l was very unhappy • • • But Ramon compels me and
that is very good. Il 18 Somers had said, "na.mn his love, he wants to force
me," but in
:!'h!. Plumed Serpent Iawrence has given up his intellectual
inhibitions about the male "pled.ge" and has placed them rather in the
46
hesitation of the female character, Kate.
The rejection of the matriarchal spirituality of.the religion
of the Lamb is not a novelty in Lawrence's work, and it is possible to
dis cern in The Plumed Serpent a return to the same struggles which occupied
Lawrence in the relationships between Paul Morel and Miriam in Sons and
Lovers, and Will and Anna Brangwen in The Rainbow.
The religious attitude
by which they are supplanted is indicated in Don Ramon's attitude of prayer:
'~e
took off his clothes, and in the darkness thrusts his clenched fists
upwards above his head, in a terrible tension of stretched upright prayer." 19
In Lawrence's religion of phallic pride, Don Ramon is the god of vengeance
who overthrows the matriarchal religion by destroying the idols of Mary,
Jesus, and the saints in order to inaugura te his revolution.
Lawrence even
rewrites the myth of the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus to fit the
outlines of his religion of vengeance.
Don Ramon is betrayed by a former
servant to his enemies the Knights of Cortes, who are the political arm of
the Catholic Church.
In place of a Christ who submits to crucifixion and
begs forgivenêss for his persecutors, however, Lawrence gives.us one who
survives an attempted assassination and takes vengeance on his persecutors
in an ancient Aztec blood-sacrifice.
design of
~
The irony is that the nearly theological
Plumed Serpent and its liturgical development place it much
closer than any of Lawrence's other novels to the spirit of the Christianity
which he had renounced more than fifteen years earlier, as such a phrase
as "And deliver ~
i!:2!!!
man's automatism" 20 in Kate's prayer to her soul
may serve to indicate.
The new religion of Quetzlcoatl is a celebration of the ideal
of perfect polarity which we have examined in Women in Love and Kangaroo,
for which Lawrence's new symbol is the union of the Eagle and the Snake in
the "plumed Serpent" of the title.
The idea of union of polarities are
repea.ted in Don Iamon 's hymns, in such images as the Sky and Earth, the
·'Ii'_
..
i.m-.:
~
•
Sun and Moon, the Moming Star and the Evening Star, Da.y and Night. Don
Ramon's prophecies of the rebirth of the old gods become prophecies of
the regeneration of the earth: "Man crea.tes a god in his own image, and
the gods gxow 0J.d along with the man that made them. But stoms sway in
hea.ven, and the god-stuff sways high and angry. over our hea.ds, Gods die
with men who have conceived them • • • Ye must. be bom. again. Even the
21
gods must be bom. again."
The institutionalization of Don Ramon 's
new religion at Sayula is the fomation of the "centre ~f a new world" 22
and is intended to make the rebirth of r'lexico an example to
"Initiators~'
of aIl of the races of the earth to overthrow their established social
orders in the name of their prlmeval gods, and to unite to fom a "Natural
Aristocracy of the loforld" to replace ·~he reign of "international pestilence. ,,23
The ceremonial apotheosis of Don Ramon, Don Cipriano, and Kate into the
ancient gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl, in particul.ar,
is to be an announcement of the new millenium:
"Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl, with
you, First Nan of Huitzlopochtli, and perhaps your wife,
First lioman of Itzpapalotl,' ;could we not meet, with sure
souls the other aristocrats of the world, the First ~ân
of lvotan and the First lofoman of Freydal, First Lord of
Hemes, and the lady of Astarte, the Best-Born of Brahma,
and the Son of the Grea.test Dragon? l tell you, Cipriano,
then the earth might rejoice when the First Lords of the
t'lest met the ~t Lords of South and East, in the Valley
of the Soul."
Such passages as these, even when the1r function in conveying what
L. D. Clark calls the "anagogical meaning" 25 of the novel is recognized,
must lea.ve the critical reader rather incredulous.
The idea of "marriage" is once a.ga.in central in Iawrence' s
•
ambition to "bring the grea.t opposites into contact and into unison." 26
In
~
Plumed Sexpent Lawrence has erected his vision of the idea.l polarity
48
of man and man, and man and woman into a phallic
s
recon~ruction
of the
Christian Trinity which is centered in the transfigured patriarchal leader,
Don Iamon. According to Don Ramon 's plan, the parties to the new TrinitY
are aven to be represented by idols which will replace their former Christian
counterparts in· the l1exican Cathedra.ls. The union of Don Iamon and Don
Cipriano is dra.ma.tized in a ceremony lihich is similax to realistic seenes
in other of Lawrence's novels, such as the Japanese wrestling scene in
tolomen in !ove, and the scene in l'lhich Lilly rubs Aaron with oil in Aaron' s
Rod. This pledge is conceived as a kind of the original uncorrupted races
of Mexico. The Spanish race of the conquistadors, and the unconquered
Aztecs. This occurs in the person of Don Ramon, who is of nearly pure
Spanish blood, through a ceremonial union with Don Cipriano, who 1s pure
Indian, and a personification of the primeval force of "the old, supreme
phallic mystery" 27 and the "god-demon Pan." 28 The "ultimate marriage"
of man to woman is adumbrated in the rema.rriage of Don Iàmon to Theresa,
but is only envisioned at the end of the novel in Kate's decision to remain
in Nexico as Don Cipriano' s bride, in which l'le may imagine a commitment
which will issue in her transfiguration into Malintzi, a reborn Aztec
goddess.
The Plumed Serpent has a rather problematic status in
Lal'lrence's work. Mark Spilka's characterization of the achievement of
the novel as the realization of a "static vitalism," 29 seems to swnmarize
the objections of Lawrence's detr,actors. Both the fom and the content of
Lawrence's celebration of his personal religious vision have strained the
sympathies of some of his most ardent admirers. It is necessary to concur
•
with Lawrence's critics that the ceremonial figures and the ceremonial
and rhèt.orical elaboration of the work disqualify it as an aesthetic
success by the criteria which we ordinarily apply to the cha.ra.cter and
49
plot of a novel; but i t is also necessary to insist on the profound
seriousness of Iawrence's ambitions in
~
Plumed Serpent, and on the
book' s importance in Iawrence' s total work. Tindall has stressed the personal
significance of the novel for Iawrence, noting that upon contact with the
remains of the native civilizations of the New World, Iawrence's "ideals
began to revive" and that "in Hew Mexico he found at last that union of the'
religious and the primitive for which he had sought." 30 As Iawrence wrote
in a letter to l'liddleton Murry, he had encountered the "animistic religion"
which he considered to be "the only live one. u 31 tfuether or not Iawrence' s
new conviction was prompted by an intimation that his ill-health would soon
end his travels,· it is impossible to say -- but there seems to be no
question that the conviction was genuine. It resulted in his most inspired
statement of his leadership ideal, but also the work which is
pe~ps
least capable of communicating the force of its inspiration, because it
is least rooted in social realities. Iawrence realized this later, when
referring specifically to
~ ... Plumed
Serpent, he wrote to an American
friend that "the leader of men is a back number;" 32 but there is an
important sense in which he had realized i t long before, when he undertooIt
a reinterpretation of his experience of the. Great War which had abandoned
all relevance to the social circumstances in which the idee of the leader
had received its original inspiration.
CONCLUSION
This study has sought to isolate an important theme -- the ide a
of the leader -- in D. H. Lawrence's work, and to examine its social and
psychological ramifications in three novels.
~
Women in Love, which was written
during the Great War, has provided the basic historical context and scheme
of values within which both Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent have been viewed.
Lawrence's portrait of the in~strial leader, Gerald Critch,
in Women in Love is in effect an imaginative reductio ad absurdum of the
moral and intellectual assumption entailed in the 19th cent ury industrial
social order, Lawrence saw that its apotheosis of the utilitarian conception
of man had led not to the preservation of individuality, but to the reduction
of the individual to a merely functional significance; and fur thermore , that
its apotheosis of the idea of "reason" had irrational motives and irrational
effects, since it had erected means into the status of ends, or accomplished
what Lawrence called the ''pure instrumentality of mankind."
Traas.lated into
the concrete terms of social organization, it had become the determination to
eliminate from the natural world, both within man and w~thout, anything
that the mind cannot understand and will cannot domina te.
If Gerald
Critch's ideas and ambitions seem exaggerated beyond the proportions usually
assigned to character by the realistic novel, we should remember that the
Great War had revealed extremes of human nature which were also quite beyond
the proportions assigned to character by the realistic novel.
o·
Like Dostoyevsky's
''Man Who Lived Underground," Lawrence perceived that mankind's "Crystal
Palaces" are erected on irrational foundations; and moreover, he specified
50
51
the irrational content to be a hidden motive for destruction, both of self
and others. The figure of Gerald Critch presents the
cli~
of the soois,l
transformation t-rhich Lawrence had traced from the Na,poleonic t'iars to the
Boer tvar in The Rainbow. 'rhe Great l'J'ar was to Laurence both the fulfilment
and the Nemesis of the "religion of great productive machine" which had
begun under the auspices of utilitarian doctrine; and the mobilization of
the mass societies of Europe for their own destruction seemed to him merely
the ultimate conclusion of their mobi1ization for the war against the earth
lfhich ha.d begun one hundred: years earlier.
In Kangaroo and
~
P1umed Serpent Lawrence returned to the
ideal of lea.dership which he had constructed in his portrait of Rupert
Birkin in Ifomen 1l! Love in order to interpret the affairs of post-war
Europe and the 11exican Revolution in terms of his experience of the Great
Ivar. Philip Rieff', a conservative Freudian who takes a rather sceptical
attitude tOl'lard Lawrence 's apocalyptic quest, bas made an observation which
will illuminate the nature of Iawrence's achievement in these two novals :
"LlIee the faith of those for whom faith means mainly a continuing capa rit y to
b~Üi~v~
in the possibility of finding themse1ves, not in finding something
beyond the exercise of seeking, Lawrence's personal religion is aIl going to
church and never getting there." 1 The process of artistic exploration which
Rieff' terms "the exercise of seeking" is quite evident in Kangaroo.
Lawrence drama,tizes the betrayal of his own utopian hopes for a social
order which is capable of more than a merely political solution for human
problems, and identifies his premonitions of the failure of the
revolutionary movements of the post-war period with his personal experience
•
of the Great Ivar and his memory of the "betrayal" of Old England by the
phenomenon of mechanized war. lbe result is a work of tremendous artistic
forces, but of equal intellectual obscurity.
In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence returns once again to the Great
t~ar.
l'lhen the theme of the revenge of the ancient gods upon the mechanical
social order of the European conquerors is announced by the miraculous
"birih" of a messenger of Quetzalcoatl in the lake at Sayula, Iawrence
returns explicitly to problem which he had formulated in liomel!;
whether or not all of the "flowers" of beauty are "flowers of
1!l
love
dissolution'~
which are born like "sea-born aphrodite" in the "process of destructive
creation. ,,2 In ~ Plumed Serpent, however, the issue ia no longer even
problematic; this is the novel in which Ia.wrence finally reaches the church
and celebrates his personal religion there. The mode of the quest has been
translated into a ceremonial mode of self-dramatization which draws on
the ideas which Lawrence had formulated in .. the anthropological studies
he had begun during the war, rather than his personal experience.
A final evaluation of the leadership wheme in these novels must
begin with the recognition that as a novelist Iawrence's strengths were
often his weaknesses. Kangaroo contains a phrase which illuminates the
pro cess of artistic exploration which is responsible for both : the
"thought-adventures." :3 Iawrence's novels depart in several directions
intellectual, psychological, social -- at once and seldom find a set of
common coordinates, because I.a.wrence was several people at once and would
never settle for an internal consensus at the expense of silencing any of
the principals to his internal controversies. When the Iawrentian novel
approaches or realizes artistic unity, it do es so in the dimension of
mythical intuition rather than idea of realistic description of character
and action. Unlike Joyce, for example, Iawrence rarely had sufficient
ariistic patience or even desire to make all of. these cohere into a singl~
unified expression. If Lawrence' s "thought-adventures, Il therefore, were
53
often nomadic, it is because he refused the weIl constructed novel as a cartiographical guide; but with almost equal consistency he discovered territo1"lJ
of the imagination previously unmapped by the English novel. This is both
the weakness and the strength of l'lomen
~ ~
and Kangaroo. Their urgency
and irresolution make them far truer to Iawrence' s own experience than the
rhapsodie elaborations of the same themes which constitute the major portions
of The Plumed Se;pent. In the final analysis, it is the disillusion which
ends the quest for the leader of men in
l~omen
in
~
ànd Kanga:roo which
make them Iawrence 's most profOlmd explorations of the leadership theme.
The rainbow, which reappears in the final pages of Kangaroo, is the symbol
which Iawrence formulated before he left England. for the
fulfiliaent:~
of
mankind's historical destiny and the individual's personal destiny alike.
In his essay on Hardy, Iawrence called these the "Reconciliation of Love
and Iaw" and "Consummate Narriage. 1I For Iawrence the realization of the
vital potentialities within the social organism, or the reunion of mankind
with the earth, and the realization :',of the vital potentialities within the
individual organism were indeed the same process -- but they were realized
in the reunion of man with woman. In the last years of:'his life, after his
retunl to Europe this became once aga,in the predominant theme of Iawrence 's
work. The search for the leader with vrhich he was so consistently preoccupied
during his travels wa,s the pursuit of a fa,lse rainbow, but nevertheless an
important phase in the development of the Iawrentian novel.
NOTES
PREFACE
1. David Herbert Ie.wrence, The Collected I.ettersf ed. Harry T. Hoore
(New York, 1939), l, p. 309.
2. Ie.wrence, Women
~ ~ (New York,
1960), p. 386.
3. Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism
1941), p. 135.
-
1
1&71-1900 (New York,
4. Ie.wrence, I.etters, l, p. 310.
5. Iawrence, Ka.np;a.roo (New York, 1960), p. 199.
6. Iawrence, lQomen
la~,
p. 48.
7. Ial'l:rence, lvomen
~~,
p. 36.
8. Iawrence, Nomen in
~,
p. 247.
CHAPTER ONE
THE BACKGROUND TO THE THREE NevEIS
1. Iawrence , Ietters , l, p. 480.
2. Iawrence, Ietters, l, p. 295.
3. Denis de Rougemont,
~ ~ ~ Tvestem tQorld (New York,
1956), p. 265.
4. Quoted in AJ.f'red F. Havighurst, 'lWentieth Century Britain (New York,
1962), p. 125.
•
5. Iawrence, Letters, l,
p. 407 •
6. David Thompson, Europe Since Napoleon --(New York,' 1951), p. 540.
55
7.
Iawrence, toJ'omen !!!~, pp. 214-215.
8.
Thomas E. Iawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (London, 1926),
pp. 22-23.
9.
Iawrence, Letters, l, p. 307.
10. Iawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
(New York, 1960), p. 55. - -
Fantasia --..;;.;.;;.;;;..;.;=.;==
of the Unconscious
11. Iawrence, The Complete Poems, ed, Vi vian de Sola Pinto and Ivarren Roberts
(New York, 1964), l, p. 298.
12. Iawrence, "The Crown", Reflections .2!! the Death of
(Bloomington, 1963), p. 240.
~
Porcupine
CHAPTER TWO
WOMEN IN lOVE
Tmt Ra.1nbow (New York, 1943), p. 2.
1.
Iawrence,
2.
Iawrence, The ~inbow, p. 236.
3.
Iawrence, l>l'omen in Love, pp. 219-220.
4.
Iawrence,
5.
Iawrence, toJ'omen
!E.
6.
Iawrence, t'Tomen
1!!. Love, p. 219.
7.
Iawrence, liomen in 1J;)ve, p. 215.
8.
Iawrence, loJ'omen
2:!l Iove, p. 219.
9.
IalITenCe, liomen
~
Love, p. 220.
10. Iawrence, l>l'omen
~
Iove, p. 131.
~lomen
in Love, p. 219.
1J;)ve, p. 314.
11. Iawrence, liomen È!. Iove, p. 216.
12. Iawrence, toJ'omen 1!!. Love, p. 215.
13. Harry T. Moore, The Life
pp. 214-217.
~
toJ'orks of D.H. Iawrence (London, 1951)
14. Harry T. Hoore, The Intelligent Heart : The Story
(New York, 1954), pp. 199-203. .
15. Ia.wrence, 1oJ'omen in Iove, p. 51.
16. Iawrence, loJ'omen
.:!:!!~, p.
22.
2!
D.H. Iawrence
56
17. le.wrence, t'1omen
1!!. ~,
pp. 118-119.
1!! ~,
pp. 118-119.
20. I.a.wrence, N'omen in
21. le.wrence,
t~omen
22. Ia.wrence, N'omen
46.
1e!!,
18. le.wrence, Vlomen in
19. le.wrence, t'1omen
p.
~t.
p. 122.
in love, p. 178.
~~,
p. 36.
23. Ia.wrence, "The Crown" , Reflections, p. 17.
24-. I.a.wrence, "~e Crown", Reflections, p. 37.
25. le.rTrence, "The Crown" , Reflections, p. 37.
26. Ia.wrence, "The. Crown", Reflections, p. 26.
27. Ia.wrence, Women
~~,
p. 51.
28. le.wrence, "Study of Thomas Hardy", Selected Literary Criticism,
ed. Antony BeaI (New York, 1966), p. 227.
29 .le.wrence , Vlomen
30. le.wrence,
~ ~,
~lomen ~~,
p. 311.
p. 139.
31. Ia.wrence, tfomen
in~,
p. 118.
32. le.wrence, i'lomen
1!!. ~,
p. 139.
~,
p. 34-5.
33. le.wrence, Vlomen in
34-.
Ia.wrence, tfomen
.!!!
35. le.wrence, Women in
IDve, p. 138
~,
p. 311
36. Ia.wrence, l'1omen
in~,
P. 379
37, Ia.wrence, Women
in~,
p. 50
38. le.wrence, Women'y!
~,
p. 28
39, Ia.wrence, Women in love, P. 48
•
4-0, Ia.wrence, Women in
~,
Pp. 96-97
4-1. Iawrence, l'lomen in
~,
p. 201
4-2. le.wrence, t'1omen . in love, P • 198
4-3. le.wrence, t'1omen
B!. ~, p.
263
57
44.
I.a.wrence, Ifomen in Love, p. 212.
45. I.a.wrence, Women
in~,
p. 318.
46. I.a.wrence, Women
in~,
p. 213.
47.
I.a.~rrence ,
"The Crown" , Reflections, p. 32.
48. I.a.wrence, "The Crown" , Reflections, p. 58.
49. I.e.wrence, "The Crown" , Reflections, p. 43.
50. De Rougemont, pp. 49-41.
--
51. Iawrence , . Wonien·in love, p. 114.
52.
I.a.wrence, Ivomen
53. I.e.wrence, Ifomen
54.
2:!!. ~, p. 234.
in~,
p. 181.
I.a.wrence, "The Crown", Reflections, p. 70.
55. I.e.wrence , t'lomen 1:!!. Love, p. 430.
56. I.e.wrence, lfomen
in~,
p. 314.
57. I.a.wrence, Ifomen in love, p. 370
58.
I.a.wrence, l.J'omen in love, p. 342.
59. I.e.wrence, l.J'omen in love, p. 314.
60. Iawrence, t'lomen 1:!!.
~,
p. 391.
61. Iawrence, l>1omen in love, pp. 391-392.
62. I.e.wrence , l.J'omen in love, p. 473.
CHAPTER THREE
KANGAROO
•
1.
Iawrence, Psychoanalysis
Unconscious, p. 27.
2.
I.awrence, Kf!.ngaroo , pp. 112-115.
3.
Iawrence, Kangaroo, pp • 304-309.
4.
I.e.wrence , Kanm!:roo, p. 199.
~
the Unconscious
Fantasia.
2! ~
58
5.
Iawrence, Ka.ngaroo, p. 96.
6.
Iawrence, Ka.ng,aroo, p. 110.
7.
Iawrence, Kanga.:roo, p. 109.
8.
Iawrence, Kangaroo, p. 213.
9.
Iawrence, Kanga.roo, p. 212.
10. Iawrence, KangarOO, pp. 269-270.
CHAnER FOUR
.m PLIDiED SERPENT
2! the
1.
L. D. Clark, The ~ Night
2.
tVilliam York Tindall, D. H. Iawrence and Susan his Cow (New York,
1939), pp. 114-116.
Body . (Austen, 1964), p. 127.
3. Clark, p. 47.
4.
Iawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York, 1952), p. 74.
5.
Iawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 208.
6. Iawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 155.
7.
Iawrence, 'Ehe Plumed Serpent, p. 36.
8.
Iawrence,
9.
Iawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 132.
~
Plumed Se;pent, p. 60.
10. Clark, pp. 26-27.
11. Tindall, p. 114.
12. Tindall, pp. 114-116.
13. Tindall, pp. 114-117; Ï'Ioore, The Intelligent Heart, p. 315.
14. Clark, p. 29.
15. lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 254.
•
16. lawrence, 'Ehe Plumed Serpent, p. 310 •
1 '1. Iawrence, The Plumed Se;eent, p. 203.
59
18. Iawrence,
~
Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 168.
19. Iawrence,
~
Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 102.
20. Iawrence, The Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 54;"
21. Iawrence, The Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 324.
22. Ie.wrence,
~
Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 244.
23. Iawrence, The Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 241.
24. Clark, p. 89.
25. Ie.l'tt'ence , The Plumed Serpent, p.
l~18.
26. Iawrence, The Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 308.
27. Iawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. 311.
28. Iawrence, 'rhe Plumed SeFl?ent, p. 311.
29. ItIark Sp ilka., The
p. 210.
~
Ethic of D. H. Iawrence (Bloomington, 19.95),
30. Iawrence, Ietters, II, p. 811.
31. Iawrence, Ietters, II, p. 1045.
CONCLUSION
1.
Phillip Rieff, ~ Triumph of ~ Therapeutic
Freud (New York, 1968), p. 217.
2.
Ie.wrence, t~omen in Love, p. 164.
3.
Iawrence, KangarOO, p. 155.
~
of Faith After
60
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY WORKS
BY DAVID HERBER!' LAtvRENCE
Aaron's Rod. New York, 1961.
The Bo~ in the Bush. Middlesex, 1963.
The Collected Letters, edited by Harry T. Moore. 2 volumes. New York, 1962.
The Complete Poems, edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts.
2 volumes. New york, 1964.
Kangaroo. New York, 1960.
Lady Chatterley's Lover. New York, 1964.
The
~~.
New York, 1968.
Mornings in Mexico. London, 1927.
Movements in European History. London, 1921.
~
Plumed Serpent. New York, 19.52.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious r Fantasia of the Unconscious.
New York, 1960.
The Rainbow. New York, 1943.
Reflections
~
the Death of
~ and Sardinia. New York,
~
Porcupine. Bloomington, 1963.
1963.
Selected Litera;y Criticism, edited by Antony BeaI. New York, 1966.
~
and Lovers. New York, 1958.
The Trespasser. Middlesex, 1960.
The White Peacock. Middlesex, 1950.
Women in
~.
New York, 1960.
61
SECONDARY to[OOO
Aaron, Faymond,
!
Century of Total Ivar. Boston, 19.54.
Black, C. E. and Helmreich, E. C., Twentieth-Century Europe. New York, 1966.
Chambers, F. P., The Ifar : 1914-1918 :
Fronts. New York, 1939.
!
History of
~
Political and Civilian
Clark, L. D., The ~ Night of the Body, Austin, 1964.
Falls, Cyril, The First l'lorld IVar. New York, 1950.
Freeman, Hary, D. H. Iawrence :
!
Basic Study of
.ill&
Ideas. Net-T York, 1955.
Havighurst, Alfred F., Tnentieth-Century Britain. New York, 19~.
~aterialism
Hayes, Carlton J. H., A Generation of
-
-
Hough, Graham, The Dark ~ :
A Study
: 1871-1900. Nen York, 1941.
--
of D. H. Iawrence. London, 1956.
Iawrence, Thomas E., Seven Pillars of !'lisdom. Iondon, 1926.
Ieavis, F.
R.,
D. H. Iawrence, Novelist. umdon, 1926.
t'loore, Harry T., The Intelligent Heart : ~ Story of D. H. Iawrence.
New York, 19.54.
_ _ _ _ _ • ~ Life and T'lorIœ ~ D. H. Iawrence. tondon, 1951.
Popper, Karl, The
~
Society and
~
Enemies. Princeton, 1950.
Rieff, Phillip, The 'l'riumph of the Therapeutic :
New York, 19b8."
de Rougemont, Denis, Love
~;the
~
of Faith After Freud.
Ivestenl Ivorld. New York, 1956.
Spilka, Ï"Jark, The Love Ethic of D. H. Iawrence. Bloomington, 1955.
Thompson, David, Europe Since Napoleon. New York, 1957.
Tindall, l"illiam York, D. H. Iawrence and Susan his Cow. New York, 1939.
Vivas, Eliseo, D. H. Iavrrence :. The failure and Triumph of Art. Bloomington,
1960.