Chapter 6

Lawrence’s Underworld

I

You promised to send me violets – have you forgot? White ones and blue ones from under the orchard Hedge? You said you would be my You would not Persephone has passed through the town, fasten- -ing her girdle-knot.1

Until recently, many major studies of Lawrence’s fiction had passed over The (1920) in faintly embarrassed silence.2 This unmerited and unfortunate neglect is all the more startling given the intellectual daring with which Lawrence manipulates the Demeter-Persephone myth as a partially concealed pattern shaping his narrative into a ritual sequence.3 Lawrence’s

1 D. H. Lawrence, Manuscript I version of ‘The Almond-Tress’. Quoted in Gail Porter Mandell, The Phoenix Paradox: A Study of Renewal Through Change in the ‘Collected Poems’ and ‘Last Poems’ of D. H. Lawrence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 28. 2 As Ann L. Ardis notes, ‘The Lost Girl has had the dubious distinction of being the lost text in Lawrence’s canon, even though it is the only book for which Lawrence received a major award during his lifetime’. See Modernism and Cultural Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 80. See also Ardis, ‘Delimiting Modernism and the Literary Field: D. H. Lawrence and The Lost Girl’ in Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900-30, ed. by Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (London: Macmillan, 2000). The consensus of opinion until the 1980s had been that The Lost Girl ranks among Lawrence’s least successful fiction. See D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. by R. P. Draper (New York, 1970). In letters to friends, Lawrence seems at times excited about writing The Lost Girl. In general, he stressed competence of writing and financial potential through sales to ‘the Meredithy public’ rather than art or theory. Even though The Lost Girl is the least acclaimed of Lawrence’s texts today, it won the James Tate Black prize of 100 pounds in 1921. See also M. Elizabeth Sargent, ‘The Lost Girl: Re-appraising the Post-War Lawrence on Women’s Will and Ways of Knowing’, in D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England, ed. by George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 176-192. 3 For more sympathetic and incisive accounts of The Lost Girl and its mythical references see Virginia Hyde, ‘“Lost Girls”: D. H. Lawrence’s Versions of Persephone’, in Images of Persephone: The Persephone Myth in Western Literature, ed. by Elizabeth T. Hayes (Florida: University of Florida Press, 1992), pp. 99-119; Donovan, After the Fall; Anja Viinikka, From Persephone to Pan: D. H. Lawrence’s Mythopoeic Vision of the Integrated Personality (Turku, Lawrence’s Underworld sources for the myth range from the cool Pre-Raphaelite seductress in D. G. Rossetti’s Proserpine to seminal turn-of-the-century studies of comparative religion by Frazer, Harrison and Gilbert Murray. Lawrence’s first explicit references to the works of the ‘Cambridge School’ date from 1913.4 ‘When you can’, Lawrence wrote to a friend in 1913, ‘lend me books about Greek religions and rise of Greek Drama, or Egyptian influences – or things like that – I love them’.5 In a letter to Bertrand Russell on 8 December 1915, Lawrence remarked that he had been looking at both Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) and Totemism and Exogamy (1910).6 Lawrence’s preoccupation with the burgeoning science of anthropology confirmed and enlarged many of his own independent intuitions. His responsiveness to this subject was not arbitrary or unique; rather it revelled in the contemporary interest generated not only by the mammoth third edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough, but also by publications specifically on Greek religion and drama coming from the Cambridge Ritualists or those reacting to them with corrective theories.7 In 1916, Lawrence read Gilbert Murray and

Finland: Turun Yliopisto Julkaisuja, 1988); Jill Franks, ‘Myth and Biography in Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Lost Girl’, D. H. Lawrence Review, 30 (2001), 29-44. 4 D. H. Lawrence, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, p. 234. Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual was published in the popular Home University Library in 1913. Lawrence read it a few months before his acquaintance with H. D. began, and he was strongly taken with its insight ‘to see art coming out of religious yearning’ (Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, pp. 90, 114). Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual begins with a description of an Athenian theatregoer and describes the Athenian drama in its religious function (pp. 10-15). Lawrence responded positively to Harrison’s thesis that ritual may be understood as a ‘bridge’ between life and art. (pp. 205-7). These emphases may have emerged from Gilbert Murray’s Euripides and His Age (1913), which shares Harrison’s theories about Greek theatre. Murray wrote a widely read history of Greek literature (1897) and several very popular studies propounding models of Greek religion conceived in affiliation with Harrison: his introduction to Euripides (1902), translations with notes of the Hippolytus and the Bacchae; Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912); and Euripides and His Age (1913), in the Home University Library series. 5 D. H. Lawrence, Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, p. 114. 6 Unfortunately, Lawrence does not give any hint as to which of the three possible and, on points, quite different editions of The Golden Bough he was reading. 7 The twelve-volume third edition of The Golden Bough was published between 1911 and 1915. Robert Ackerman discusses the writing of the Cambridge Ritualists during 1912-14 as the ‘years of achievement’ which saw the publication of Harrison’s Themis (1912), containing an essay by Gilbert Murray, ‘Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy’, and her Ancient Art and Ritual; Cornford’s From Religion to Philosophy (1912) and The Origins of Attic Comedy (1914); Murray’s Four Stages of Greek Religion, Euripides and His Age, and his essay ‘Hamlet and Orestes’ (1914); plus Arthur Bradley Cook’s Zeus (1914). See Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York: Garland, 1991), pp. 118-19. Ackerman’s account tends to underestimate the sheer range of writing between 1909 and 1914 that proposed theories about ritual drama. Among these are William Ridgeway’s The Origins of Tragedy with Special Reference to the Greek Tragedians (1910) and The Dramas and Dramatic Dances of the Non-European Races in Special Reference to Greek Tragedy (1914), and Farnell’s The Cults of the Greek States (1896-1914). The latter two writers fiercely contest

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