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“The Woman Who Rode Away”: D. H. Lawrence’s Cul-de-Sac

1984; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 10; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1984.0021

1913-4835

Laurence Steven,

American and British Literature Analysis

“ T H E W O M A N W H O R O D E A W A Y ” : D. H. L A W R E N C E ’ S C U L - D E - S A C LAURENCE STEVEN Laurentian University < < rr-i -Lhe Woman Who Rode Away” 1 has divided its critics into two distinct camps. There are, on the one hand, those critics who read the story in Lawrence’s terms, as a fable symbolizing the annihilation of the egodominated or “white” consciousness of Western civilization through the sacrifice of its representative, the modern American woman, on the altar of the blood conscious primitive tribe. According to Lawrence, and critics such as F. R. Leavis, Graham Hough, John Vickery, L. D. Clark, and James C. Cowan,2 this sacrifice will allow a vital connection with the cosmos to be manifested. On the other hand, R. P. Draper, Kate Millett, and David Cavitch3 are appalled by what they see as the exploitation and murder of the woman. For them, Lawrence’s “fable” is a smokescreen which allows him to vent his hatred of women. Charles Rossman sums up this position: the realistic aspects of the tale conflict with the superimposed myth . .. to reveal Lawrence’s subconscious intentions as simply the destruction of a symbolic female. Lawrence has vented his personal animus, projecting it in terms of a religious myth to lend it a specious objectivity and, hence, personal and public acceptability.4 Although in general agreement with Rossman’s reading of the story, I wish to look more closely at how the woman is victimized, in a quite similar fashion, by both her husband and the Indians. This examination reveals that the white consciousness, far from being symbolized by the woman, as Lawrence would have us believe, is manifested, ironically enough, in her husband and the Indians. In the latter part of the paper I attempt to account for this inversion which makes Lawrence, through the Indians, the the perpetuator of that very consciousness he is so adamant about annihilat­ ing. In certain of his non-fiction works Lawrence has diagnosed the problem he evinces in “The Woman Who Rode Away” ; and the clearest guideline for understanding the story is to “trust the tale.” Read without preconcep­ tions, the tale reveals that an ego-dominated, ideal consciousness is anti­ thetical to full, creative life. We see this most clearly in the woman’s vicE n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x , 2, June 1984 timization, but also in the art of the tale — in the muddled authorial tone, and in the programmatic writing which is more reminiscent of Hollywood recipes than creative genius. If we maintain our predilection for accepting Lawrence’s ostensible sym­ bolism we can agree with E. W. Tedlock, Jr., that “Lawrence is explicit about the meaning of his parable”5 in the following quotation: Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of woman. The sharpness and the quivering nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again. (569) Certainly Lawrence is being explicit here about what he believes the tale means but the meaning he offers just does not answer to the facts. The problem throughout is that the woman is simply not a convincing symbol of highly-bred white womanhood. As Kingsley Widmer rightly notes, “the somnambulistic American seems decidedly underbred rather than overbred, and quite lacks the ‘intensely personal and individual nature’ that the story demands and claims to negate.”6 To be a sufficient symbol of white con­ sciousness the woman’s character, her will, would have to be developed more fully, yet if it was so developed it would be hard for us to accept her almost willing submission to the Indians. By depriving his protagonist of a character, Lawrence avoids the complications a truly independent woman might have brought to the story; he also falsifies his ostensible symbolism. The husband, on the other hand, is an appropriate symbol of white con­ sciousness. And the civilization he represents is not one that is, in Hough’s words, “almost willing to perish that a new kind of life may come to birth in the world.” 7 Certainly, the world he inhabits, and has helped to create, is dying or dead but in no way is he willing to perish. He simply adapts himself: Her husband was never still. When the silver went dead, he ran a ranch lower down, some twenty miles away, and raised pure-bred hogs, splendid creatures. At the same time, he hated pigs. He was a squeamish waif of an idealist and really hated the physical side of life. He loved work, work, work, and making things. His marriage, his children, were something he was making, part of his business, but with a sentimental income this time. (547-48) The power to adapt combined with idealism has a great potential for destruction. And this combination, manifested in the husband, is a suitable symbol for a civilization which exploits natural and human resources and when they run out adapts itself, finds new resources. Of course this is a road to eventual destruction but it is cloaked under ideal labels; labels which are familiar to us in terms such as Gross National Product or higher 210 standard of living. And Lawrence sees through these ideals; he knows what this process leaves behind: in his battered Ford car her husband would take her into the dead, thrice-dead little Spanish town forgotten among the mountains. The great, sun-dried dead church, the dead portales, the hopeless covered market-place, where, the first time she went, she saw a dead dog lying between the meat-stalls and the vegetable array, stretched out as if for ever, nobody troubling to throw it away. Deadness within deadness. (546-47) Hough interprets this scene in a manner worthy of comment: The little Spanish town is dead, for it represents an alien civilization, unable to keep alive among the blank ferocious hills. The Church is dead because it represents a rootless and alien faith. The whole scene exists powerfully in its own right; but it is also a grim symbol of Western civilization withering amid the terrifying powers of nature with which it has no living connection.8 The point here — which Hough clearly misses — is that this scene repre­ sents only the wreckage that Western civilization leaves in its wake. Western civilization, as seen through the husband, is not withering but is adapting itself to continue its exploitative life. Granted, the husband is not in con­ nection with nature, but neither is he dying of his lack of connection. He has securely isolated himself from nature, created his own little paradise: “the walled-in, one-storey adobe house, with its garden inside, and its deep inner veranda with tropical climbers on the sides” (546). The town is used by Western civilization and its death is the result of such use. So with the woman. Her husband “admired his wife to extinction” but “morally he swayed her, downed her, kept her in an invincible slavery” (547). To him she is simply a possession without any being of her own: “He was jealous of her as he was of his silver-mine: and that is saying a lot” (547). Because he keeps her in an “invincible slavery,” confines her in the prison of their “walled-in” house, treats her as a thing instead of a person, it is no wonder that her “conscious development had stopped mys­ teriously with her marriage, completely arrested” (547). He has “kept his spell over her” (548), kept her a “dazed woman” in a “stupor of subjected amazement” (547). Of course the husband is not consciously manipulating her, he does not want to drain her of life, “He was a man of principles, and a good husband” (547) ; but still she loses her being. Similarly, the husband would feel the silver-mine was good for the Mexicans, it would provide jobs, increase their standard of living. Unfortunately, the mine makes people dependent on it and when the silver runs out the town dies. The will of the husband, based on ideals, good principles, manifests death for those around him. 211 We see, then, that if the white consciousness of Western civilization is to be annihilated it is the husband who should undergo annihilation. Lawrence, however, makes the woman the sacrifice. But she is clearly only a victim who has been sacrificed on the altar of her husband’s will. How, then, can her literal sacrifice on the altar of the Indians be seen as an annihilation of white consciousness? It is the same process being repeated. Lawrence simply changes the idealistic labels. The Indians are given religious ritual and myth to adorn the same process of exploitation. If the husband maintains his egodominance by keeping his wife in moral subjection, the Indians are to receive even more power by killing her. There will be no new world once the knife falls. The main consequence, according to the myth, will be a certain transfer of power from the white husband to the Indians. There will be no vital connection with the cosmos, despite what the created myths say; there will only be new masters looking for new victims: for a power that is gained by sacrifice will have to be kept by sacrifice, which means victims will be found. They are essential to the system. It is surprising how similar the Indians and the husband appear once we look beyond Lawrence’s ostensible symbolic pattern. They are both very adaptable. The husband can take a loss and emerge powerful on a hog ranch. The Indians also know how to deal with problems: “ ‘They’re so far from everywhere, the government leaves ’em alone. And they’re wily; if they think there’ll be trouble, they send a delegation to Chihuahua and make a formal submission. The government is glad to leave it at that’ ” ( 549)■ The description of the husband implies impotence and, as a contrast, the Indians are said to be “darkly and powerfully male.” In neither case, how­ ever, is sexuality manifested. The maleness of each appears only as power achieved at the expense of the woman. While the husband dotes on his wife and never quite gets over “his dazzled admiration of her” (547), he is simultaneously “downing” her, stripping her of her being. The Indians, likewise, put the woman on a pedestal. They strip her, “fumigate” her, costume her. But at the same time they imprison her and drug her, force her to “succumb to their vision” (574). Contrary to their myths of connection with nature and their insistent rituals, the Indians are as separated from the terrifying forces of nature as the husband in his “walled-in” paradise. The Indian valley is a Shangri-La: And the track curved round and down, till at last in the full blaze of the mid-morning sun, they could see a valley below them, between walls of rock, as in a chasm let in the mountains. A green valley, with a river, and trees, and clusters of low flat sparkling houses. It was all tiny and perfect, three thousand feet below. Even the flat bridge over the stream, and the square with the 212 houses around it, the bigger buildings piled up at opposite ends of the square, the tall cottonwood trees, the pastures and stretches of yellow-sere maize, the patches of brown sheep or goats in the distance, on the slopes, the railed enclosures by the stream-side. There it was, all small and perfect, looking magical, as any place will look magical, seen from the mountains above. The unusual thing was that the low houses glittered white, white-washed, looking like crystals of salt, or silver. This frightened her. (558-59) Lawrence has moved his woman from one manufactured paradise into another. And both have the glitter of silver about them. This parallel structure of the husband and the Indians can be seen poten­ tially as rather subtle irony on Lawrence’s part. Certainly, the sinister men­ tion of the silver, so obviously a reference to the husband, suggests that Lawrence is quite aware of the Shangri-La façade and sees the similarities we have just noted. On one level, at least, Lawrence is satirizing sentimental romantics, like the woman, who idealize the Indians, seeing them as living in a valley paradise enveloped in mystery and wonder. On another level, however, he insulates his Indians from the satiric attack which should logi­ cally follow their comparison with the husband by giving them a vision which justifies their actions. And the vision he gives them is his own. The vision is one of vital connection with the cosmos; a connection which is prevented by a dominant ego-consciousness. Under the influence of the drugged drink the woman experiences this vision : Afterwards she felt a great soothing languor steal over her, her limbs felt strong and loose and full of languor, and she lay on her couch listening to the sounds of the village, watching the yellowing sky, smelling the scent of burning cedar wood, or pine wood. So distinctly she heard the yapping of tiny dogs, the shuffle of far-off feet, the murmur of voices, so keenly she detected the smell of smoke, and flowers, and evening falling, so vividly she saw the one bright star infinitely remote, stirring above the sunset, that she felt as if all her senses were diffused on the air, that she could distinguish the sound of the heavens, as the vast belts of the world-atmosphere slid past one another, and as if the moisture ascending and the moisture descending in the air resounded like some harp in the cosmos. (565-66) This passage, moving easily from the particular to the cosmic, is very vivid and contrasts positively with the insistence and compulsion experienced throughout much of the rest of the story. Unfortunately, its validity is undercut by the fact that it is a drug-induced vision and especially when we know it is only a preliminary to the woman’s death. Under these circum­ stances her experience of the vision becomes gratuitous. We wonder why Lawrence did not kill her and have done with it; for by now we are recog­ 213 nizing that it is not actually the Indians victimizing the woman but Law­ rence himself. He tries to shift the blame onto her by saying she represents ego-conscious womanhood and Western civilization, a conclusion the tale proves false. The husband’s ethos is clearly the target, but Lawrence attacks the symptom rather than the cause of the disease. I think it is clear that Lawrence was not completely conscious of what he was doing; the power expended attempting to validate the life of the Indians argues this very strongly. But when we understand the symbolic pattern the tale reveals, and when we see Lawrence unsuccessfully attempting to impose another pattern on the story, we conclude that there is a degree of conscious personal motivation in Lawrence’s sacrifice of the woman. Granted, Lawrence does say that the woman, when with the Indians, “knew she was a victim; that all this elaborate work upon her was the work of victimizing her.” With one gesture, however, he absolves the victimizers of any responsibility and characterizes the woman as a masochistic thrillseeker by saying, “she did not mind. She wanted it” (577). While we may accept that the woman idealizes the Indians, it is rather harder to accept that she wants to be victimized. She is, in fact, in the only real act of will we ever see on her part, riding away from just such victimization in hopes of finding wonder. Lawrence is imposing this masochistic character trait onto the woman from the outside; it is not something which would rise naturally from her character as it has been developed. He probably intends this will­ ing acquiescence in her victimization to be seen as the logical conclusion of her desire “to visit the Chilchui Indians — to see their houses and to know their gods” (554), because, as Lawrence says elsewhere: The truth of the matter is, one cannot go back. Some men can: renegade. But Melville couldn’t go back: and Gauguin couldn’t really go back: and I know now that I could never go back. Back towards the past, savage life. One cannot go back. It is one’s destiny inside one.9 Consequently, the woman’s desire to “go back” is judged by Lawrence as “a foolish romanticism more unreal than a girl’s” (549). He will show her the consequences of such foolishness by having the Indians cut her heart out. It is obvious, however, that Lawrence shares the woman’s desire to “go back.” His sympathy with it can be seen, to some degree, in the early scenes where the aridity of the woman’s life with her husband makes us applaud her decision to ride away into a wondrous, primitive world. Yet this sym­ pathy is never allowed to surface fully later on; Lawrence is frustrated and angered by his recognition that a return to a more meaningful past is im­ possible and, as the story proceeds, he vents his anger on the woman. The mixture of emotion is registered in the strange double attitude the Indians 214 have toward the woman: “[the old Indians] gave off a feeling of almost fatherly solicitude. Yet their dark eyes, brooding over her, had something away in their depths that was awesomely ferocious and relentless” (566). Lawrence’s confusion of attitude has a larger manifestation in the struc­ ture of the tale. On the one hand we have the woman graphically discover­ ing that she cannot go back; on the other we have the young Indian who had “been in Mexico City; and also in the United States. He had worked as a labourer, building the roads in Los Angeles. He had travelled as far as Chicago” (566). As well as being a jarring interruption of the fable mood, this episode makes us wonder why this “conscious” Indian is allowed to “go back.” We suspect that Lawrence has transported himself into the action in the figure of this Indian in order to be sure the Indians deliver the myths correctly and that the woman gets the point. Our suspicion is ludicrously confirmed in the exchange with the woman after the young Indian has expounded the myth: “But,” said the white woman, “ I don’t shut out the moon — how can I?” “Yes,” he said, “you shut the gate, and then laugh, think you can have it all your own way.” (575) The language of this last phrase is nowhere near that of a primitive Indian but rather closer to that of D. H. Lawrence arguing with Frieda. Lawrence, determined to have it all his own way with the woman, violates the symbolic structure of the story and disregards his own insights and teaching. The result is a sense of compulsion which, in attempting to force the issue, betrays the author’s personal confusion and frustration. Frieda Lawrence makes a statement worth quoting at this point: “ In his heart of hearts I think [Lawrence] always dreaded women, felt that they were in the end more powerful than men. Woman is so absolute and undeniable. Man moves, his spirit flies here and there, but you can’t go beyond a woman.” 10 This sentiment is seconded by Janice H. Harris: Generalizing from the women he had loved — his mother and Frieda — [Lawrence] believed that all women possessed in their being a strong certainty of self, a robust and energetic awareness of identity which he himself lacked. That this robustness threatened him is clear. . . . This feeling of threat reaches a peak during his leadership period.11 These statements have a certain validity in terms of Lawrence’s life and work. His conflict with his spiritually domineering mother, though purged somewhat by the writing of Sons and Lovers, carried over into his relation­ ship with Frieda. This conflict, combined with his vehement response to the war (the blatant manifestation of mechanized humanity), left Lawrence, 215 in the early and mid-twenties, increasingly more frustrated. As Charles Rossman says: Frustrated, embittered, powerless, angry, and dependent for much on assertive and self-conscious women, Lawrence needed some enemy to grapple with, perhaps even as the means for saving his sanity. Women, of the “intensely personal and individual” kind, to recall Lawrence’s description of the woman who rode away, became that enemy for a period lasting until the mid-Twenties. Such women are the real scapegoats in Lawrence’s work.12 In this story we clearly see the Indians regarding the woman as something totally other than themselves and also as “inimical.” They see her as a threat, and well they might; she is the raw resource that created her hus­ band’s power. Indirectly, then, she is very powerful. But only indirectly. She is only a source of power for those who exploit her; first and foremost she is a victim. Lawrence seems to see only the potential for power that she represents. As a living human being she does not exist. Significantly, he does not even name her, and we have seen that she has been given very little character. Like the husband and the Indians, Lawrence treats her as a thing. The Indians, and indirectly Lawrence, kill her, not to destroy white consciousness and make a new cosmic connection, though this is the justi­ fication offered, but simply to gain power for themselves. Lawrence’s per­ sonal motivation becomes clear in the last line of the story: “The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race” (581). Although Lawrence’s personal motivation manifests itself in a desire to kill the woman and take her power, it is misleading to see this as the final significance of the story. The actual enemy in Lawrence’s work is the white consciousness of the West which strips people of their autonomy and turns them into objects. Lawrence’s personal history with domineering and selfconscious women provided him with symbols of this consciousness. We must remember, however, that the women are only, as Rossman says, scapegoats. As Lawrence’s frustration with Western civilization grows, his hatred of women increases, whether they deserve it or not. Women come to embody an idea; as creatively realized individuals they cease to exist. In the art of the leadership period Lawrence manifests, ironically, the very exploitative, white consciousness he hates so deeply. How and why this inversion came about, and how it affects the fiction is worthy of some comment. Lawrence’s response to mental consciousness was not always so singlemindedly violent. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he acknowledges the role of the mind: True, we must all develop into mental consciousness. But mental consciousness is not a goal; it is a cul-de-sac. It provides us only with endless appliances 216 which we can use for the all-too-difficult business of coming to our spontaneouscreative fullness of being. It provides us with the means to adjust ourselves to the external universe. . . . This is the use of the mind — a great indicator and instrument. The mind as author and director of life is anathema.13 A comment by F. R. Leavis is useful at this point: Lawrence is insisting that thought, which necessarily involves mental consciousness, is indispensable. But he insists at the same time that the thought demanded by life is not an affair of the mental consciousness alone — or rather that vital mental consciousness is neither apart in the individual human being, separated off, nor dominating, initiating and controlling.14 If the mental consciousness is indispensable in “the all-too-difficult business of coming to our spontaneous-creative fullness of being” why, we ask, did Lawrence set out to dispense with it in “The Woman Who Rode Away” ? An observation made in Lawrence’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe may shed some light on the problem: Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe’s ‘morbid’ tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to disintegrate, because the old white psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass. Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process. . . . For the human soul must suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if ever it is to survive.15 I believe that what we are witnessing in Lawrence’s leadership period is the gradual breaking down of his “old white psyche.” This is a process of dis­ integration, and, as Lawrence says, is a necessary process if we are to survive. We must be able to consciously recognize how the problematic psyche works if we are ever going to be able to remedy the problem. This is also, then, a potentially dangerous process since the mental consciousness will inevitably be conducting any analysis we undertake. And the mental consciousness is a cul-de-sac. To quote Lawrence again: The brain is, if we may use the word, the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a creative flux into a fixed cypher. It prints off, like a telegraph instrument, the glyphs and graphic representations which we call percepts, concepts, ideas. It produces a new reality — the ideal. . . . Ideas are the dry, unliving, insentient plumage which intervenes between us and the circumambient universe, forming at once an insulator and an instrument for the subduing of the universe. The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a creative reality.16 217 We can see, from this, the danger of relying on mental consciousness to provide solutions to the problems it can help us discern. The most it can offer is an ideal; a static, uncreative concept. And even if we turn, then, to the unconscious, the spontaneous-creative life of the blood, we must be very careful not to let the mental, ideal consciousness be our guide in this direc­ tion. For if it does act as guide we will inevitably find only an “inverted reflection of our ideal consciousness.”17 This is what occurred in “The Woman Who Rode Away.” Through his perceptive analysis of the old psyche in such diagnostic major fictions as Women in Love Lawrence recognized how completely the psyche of West­ ern civilization was tyrannized by the mind. He saw how completely sepa­ rated we were from the vital cosmos, how life had come to be determined by ideals and abstractions, how the universe had become a colossal mechan­ ism, shorn of its mystery. These perceptions spurred him to action. We must remake our connections with the cosmos, we must get back the mystery, we must renounce abstraction and ideal. The insistence and compulsion which contributes strongly to the failure of much of Lawrence’s fiction during his leadership period betrays the problem. Lawrence had idealized “mystery” ; the connection with the vital cosmos had become a “concept.” His passionate and emotive fervour, what Leavis calls his “almost infallible sense for health and sanity,” 18 was increasingly in the grip of his mental, ideal consciousness. And, as Lawrence says, “this motivizing of the passional sphere from the ideal is the final peril of human consciousness. It is the death of all spontaneous, creative life, and the substitution of the mechanical principle.”19 This lack of spontaneous creativity is certainly apparent in “The Woman Who Rode Away.” Nowhere do we find the penetrating psychological in­ sight characteristic of Lawrence’s finer stories (“Odour of Chrysanthemums” comes to mind) ; insight which is the result of the writer being totally engaged, both mentally and emotionally, with his material. Instead we find scenes which are distinctly mechanistic and programmatic, which work toward achieving a thrill rather than an insight into human experience. The following is an example: Some signal was given, and the dance below stopped. There was now absolute silence. She was given a little to drink, then two priests took off her mantle and her tunic, and in her strange pallor she stood there, between the lurid robes of the priests, beyond the pillar of ice, beyond and above the dark-faced people. The throng below gave the low, wild cry. Then the priest turned her round, so she stood with her back to the open world, her long blonde hair to the people below. And they cried again. (580) If this were typical Lawrence he would not be studied as a major creative 218 writer. This scene borrows the program used by H. Rider Haggard in his popular adventures such as She. And H. Rider Haggard, though an enjoy­ able writer of exotic adventure, and one who occasionally makes provocative observations, does not command the total reader involvement which Law­ rence normally demands. It is probably because he usually demands such involvement that many competent critics have been led to see this story as a powerful success. They have approached the story with Lawrence’s reputa­ tion before them and seem to have assumed that it will reflect the kind of seriousness and profundity that have built that reputation. Consequently, they have accepted Lawrence’s symbolic values and have thereby blinded themselves to the actual symbolism and to the inferiority of much of the writing, when compared to his best. F. R. Leavis, for example, speaking of the Haggardesque scene in the cave at the close of the story, says: “The tense barbaric tableau within the cave, all eyes fixed on the fang of ice hanging at the entrance (the last red beam of the sun will in a moment strike it and strike through), makes a perfect close.”2 0 This scene is cer­ tainly the perfect capping ingredient in a recipe which has produced many Hollywood box office successes, but in fiction which purports to deal with serious problems of modern civilization a recipe is simply not an adequate response. It is the imposition of a static concept onto the problematic situa­ tion from the outside rather than the creative evolution of insight from within the situation; and the imposition means that the problems have not actually been dealt with at all. Consequently, the movement of “The Woman Who Rode Away” is actually no movement. The mental, ideal consciousness controls the direc­ tion Lawrence is taking and the result is that we sacrifice one tyranny for another. As Isaiah Berlin has noted, “any attempt to explain human con­ duct in terms of, or to dedicate human beings to the service of, any abstrac­ tion, be it ever so noble — justice, progress, nationality . . . always leads in the end to victimization and human sacrifice.” 21 At the end of the story we realize, if we have not been hypnotized by the repetitious drumming and dancing, the drug-induced cosmic connection, or the false symbolical value that is insisted upon, that it has all been a spell, a conjuring trick, and that we are still on the slab of stone of our minds, still annihilating the passionate and spontaneous side of life, still caught up with our white consciousness. Lawrence has written himself into a cul-de-sac. NOTES 1 The Complete Short Stories (London: Heinemann, 1955), 11, 546-81. References to this story will be followed by page numbers in parentheses. 2 F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955); Graham Hough, The Dark Sun (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959); John Vickery, “ Myth and Ritual in the Shorter Fiction of D. H. Lawrence,” Modern Fiction 219 Studies, 5 (Spring 1959); L. D. Clark, Dark Night of the Body (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964); James C. Cowan, D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970). 3 R. P. Draper, D. H. Lawrence (New York: Twayne, 1964) ; Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon Books, 1969) ; David Cavitch, D. H. Lawrence and the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 4 Charles Rossman, “Myth and Misunderstanding: D. H. Lawrence,” in TwentiethCentury Poetry, Fiction, Theory, ed. Harry Garvin, Bucknell Review (Fall 1976), P- 975 E . W. Tedlock, Jr., D. H. Lawrence — Artist and Rebel (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963), p. 180. _« 6 Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), p. 33. 7 Graham Hough, The Dark Sun, p. 146. 8 Ibid., pp. 141-42. 9 Studies in Classic American Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 144. 10 Frieda Lawrence, "Not I,But the W in d ...” (London: Heinemann, 1935), p. 57. 11 Janice H. Harris, “D. H. Lawrence and Kate Millett,” The Massachusetts Review, 15 (i974). 52712 Charles Rossman, “Myth and Misunderstanding: D. H. Lawrence,” pp. 100-01. I am generally indebted to Rossman’s examination of Lawrence’s relationship to women as it appears in his life and art. See also Rossman’s essay “D. H. Lawrence and Women,” D. H. Lawrence Review, 8 (Fall 1975), 255-328. 13 Fantasia of the Unconscious/Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 249. Hereafter cited as Psychoanalysis. 14 Leavis, Thought, Words and Creativity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 2315 Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 70. 16 Psychoanalysis, p. 247. 17 Ibid., p. 212. 18 Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, p. 70. 19 Psychoanalysis, pp. 210-11. 20 Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, p. 275. 21 Isaiah Berlin; as quoted in Allen Wheelis, The Moralist (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), P. 32. 220 ...