Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle
68 | Spring 2017 Special Issue: Transgressing Borders and Borderlines in the Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence Guest Editors: Shirley Bricout and Christine Zaratsian
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1817 ISSN: 1969-6108
Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes
Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2017 ISBN: 978-2-7535-6516-6 ISSN: 0294-04442
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and François Hugonnier
Introduction Shirley Bricout and Christine Zaratsian
Digression/Revision as transgressive creative process
From Marching to Walking: Transgressing in "The Prussian Officer" and "The Thorn in the Flesh" Elise Brault-Dreux
"Odour of Chrysanthemums": Absent-Presence and Textual Genetics Elliott Morsia
Redefining borders as structures of resistance: modernist experiments
Reining in Expectations in "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter": A New Version of the Pastoral Shirley Bricout
A Reluctant Awakening: Transgression and the Sleeping Beauty Motif in D.H. Lawrence's "The Thimble" Maria Casado Villanueva
Liminality: departing from sexual choices
Transgression in The Fox Jacqueline Gouirand-Rousselon
Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories Susan Reid
Kay Boyle on D.H. Lawrence
"Rest Cure" Kay Boyle
D.H. Lawrence's Ghost: Rest, (E)motion, and Imagined Transatlantic Modernism in Kay Boyle's "Rest Cure" Anne Reynes-Delobel
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Bibliography
D.H. Lawrence: A Bibliography Shirley Bricout
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Foreword
Linda Collinge-Germain, Michelle Ryan-Sautour, Gérald Préher and François Hugonnier
1 We are pleased to present this Special Issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English on “Transgressing Borders and Borderlines in the Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence” proposed by Guest Editors Shirley Bricout and Christine Zaratsian. Specialists of D.H. Lawrence, the Guest Editors propose not only articles on Lawrence’s stories, but also a short story inspired by Lawrence’s life and writing style as well as commentary upon it. They include in this issue a very elaborate bibliography on Lawrence’s short story writing which will no doubt be of service to those conducting research in the field. We sincerely thank them for their proposal and for the meticulous and efficient editorial work they conducted in preparation of this issue.
AUTHORS
LINDA COLLINGE-GERMAIN JSSE Director of Publication
MICHELLE RYAN-SAUTOUR JSSE Editor
GÉRALD PRÉHER JSSE Associate Editor
FRANÇOIS HUGONNIER JSSE Editorial Assistant
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Introduction
Shirley Bricout and Christine Zaratsian
1 D. H. Lawrence wrote over sixty short stories of which five volumes were published during his lifetime. Most of the stories first appeared in magazines, and in some cases were to be extensively rewritten before further publication in a collection under a new title. Given Lawrence’s renowned achievements as a novelist, the short stories have long been treated as a minor art overshadowed by his longer fiction. In his 1978 study entitled D. H. Lawrence at Work, Keith Cushman remarks that Lawrence often wrote the short stories to earn short-term money to support himself and his wife. Indeed in his letters, besides mentioning the on-going financial negotiations with his publishers, Lawrence often laments his shortage of money as for instance when he writes from Italy in 1913, “I haven’t got much money left. The cheque from the New Statesman hasn’t come yet – yet it will eventually wander here I suppose” (Letters 2: 79). Nevertheless Cushman also reflects on how the succession of revisions of the short stories, whether for a magazine or for publication in a collection, disclose Lawrence’s emergence into maturity as a writer. Similarly, in their respective introductions to the Cambridge editions of the Prussian Officer and other stories and The Vicar’s Garden and other stories, John Worthen and N. H. Reeve concur to stress “his extraordinary development as a writer of fiction between 1907 and 1914, and his growing mastery of the short-story form” (Reeve xvii).
2 Indeed, the short story as genre fitted Lawrence’s preoccupations with depicting the characters’ growing self-awareness and its consequences; in fact the author took the genre seriously, finding within its confines the means to convey his maturing vision of human relationships while his writing gained in intensity and his experimentation with language became more accomplished, building up to a consummate conjunction between form and content. This is why “The Prussian Officer stories” in particular can be said to have marked a turning point in the author’s career, since as Andrew Harrison puts it: Where the realism of [“Daughters of the Vicar”] was concerned with exploring the social contexts of the lives of its characters, [“The Prussian Officer,” “England, My England,” “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” and “The Blind Man”] all hinge upon some change of consciousness in them. We might say that the later tales are all
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structured around a modernist epiphany, or a moment in which the characters gain some insight into their own lives. (12)
3 Lawrence’s career as a short story writer opened with “The Prelude” which was published in 1907 in The Nottingham Guardian under the name of his friend Jessie Chambers. Providing an interesting cue, the title of this very first piece already points to the in-between territory where the artist crosses the border between nothingness and creation. Moreover, Lawrence tested and transgressed literary norms by blurring the limits of shorter fiction which developed into novellas, long short stories or short novels, a range Pierre Tibi expounds upon in his Aspects de la nouvelle. In April 1924, on the day he sent “The Border-Line” to his agent Curtis Brown, Lawrence encapsulated his approach to writing shorter fiction in a letter to his American editor Thomas Seltzer: “I am busy doing a few short stories – I wish they’d stay shorter. But they are the result of Europe, and perhaps a bit dismal” (Letters 5: 23).
***
4 This special issue aims at bringing into focus the patterns of transgression which map out borders and borderlines as well as in-between territories in D. H. Lawrence’s shorter fiction. The characters he stages within the boundaries of the stories evolve along patterns of harmony and discord which lead them to transgress limits as they “seek that invisible and promised territory, that country that does not exist but that [they bear in their] dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond” (Kristéva 5). This aim implies addressing Lawrence’s personal contribution to renewing the short story as genre; indeed his numerous rewritings, which gave more prominence to symbolic realism and increased the dynamics of polarized tensions, point to an engagement with experimentation on which the very compression required by the short story destined for publication in magazines and/or collections had a strong bearing, while his consistent beginnings in medias res and open endings signal a beyond to the borders of the text itself. The Lawrentian text may be in fact a “differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces” (Derrida 69). Where the interaction with biographical elements and/or editorial demands come into play, this “beyond” raises, among others, the issue of the autonomy of the short story.
5 Borders and borderlines are demarcations originally indicating a division in spatial terms. As they signal separations and distinctions, which can be geographical, political, social, linguistic or sexual, etc., they “determine perceptions of people, dividing between known and unknown, us and them” (Yndigegn 33) and thereby hinge upon the ideas of protection and vulnerability. The transgression of borders and borderlines fosters dynamics which upset the status quo while transgression itself comes at a moment of crisis around which the plot and the structure of the short story revolve (Tibi 51). In her arresting study entitled Borders, Borderlands and Frames, Mae Henderson reminds us that “‘to transgress’ literally translates as ‘to step across’” (2). As borders are drawn to protect, she pursues by suggesting that “breaking down structures of resistance [...] also concerns the modifying of limits in order to transform the unknown or forbidden (metaphorical borderlands) into inhabitable, productive spaces for living and writing” (2). Transgressing borders and borderlands is therefore an act of empowerment. Thus, given that the borderlines regulate the interaction with the
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other, the “interplay between physical and mental borders” (Yndigegn 34) also functions to build self-identity, a recurrent issue in Lawrence’s works.
6 Among the features of his writing, Lawrence’s characteristic use of dualisms further paves the way to transgression. Indeed he pits opposites one against the other to intensify emotions and physical sensations, and to stage transgression that “break[s] down structures of resistance.” Thus the plots unfold against a framework of antitheses: North and South, heat and cold, (as in “The Prussian Officer”), individual man and group (“The Thorn in the Flesh”), the split between our mental and sensual being (“The Thimble”), male and female polarities (in The Fox and “The Border-Line”), the threshold between life and death (“The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” and “Odour of Chrysanthemums”).
7 As will be shown in the articles of this special issue, D. H. Lawrence’s stories broach the question of identity and self-fulfillment as the characters seek to transgress the limits imposed by social norms, military orders and gender constructs. The short stories focus on this moment of crisis when the characters find themselves in an in-between territory. As they “step across” the borders, they experience a liminal state which is characterized on the one hand by openness to new experiences and to the Other, and on the other hand by indeterminacy and ambivalence. Liminality – a term coined by ethnologist Arnold van Gennep from the Latin limen meaning “threshold” – is a period of transition which opens the way to something new.
8 Following up on these definitions, the contributors discuss how the short story as genre is particularly appropriate to narrate such transgressions and depict the subsequent liminal state the characters experience. The first part of the volume, entitled “Digression/Revision as transgressive creative process” addresses the departure from writing conventions and from original versions of a short story, as the dynamics the transgression fosters reach out to a symbolic beyond.
9 In her engaging essay “From Marching to Walking: Transgressing in ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’,” Elise Brault-Dreux shows how Lawrence transgresses the margins of narration and the limits of a “markedly bounded genre” in order to reach creativity. The study highlights how the digression from marching to walking can be understood as a means for the soldiers portrayed in the stories to transgress military norms in order to regain freedom as they walk away from the military community. Thus staged in a short-story, itself “a sort of literary march dictated by writing conventions,” walking, read as a transgressive-digressive stride, becomes a metaphor for creativity.
10 Also examining Lawrence’s creative process, Elliott Morsia opts for a genetic approach in “‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: Absent-Presence and Textual Genetics” to question the autonomy of texts. He explores the mysterious boundaries between absence and presence in the story and explains how its climax represents an end to writing in Lawrence’s mind, as the writing process takes the author across a textual borderline. Building on previous critical research, Morsia deftly argues that the revisions made for editorial reasons actually curb the tensions and drama of the short story, while the reworking of the ending which introduces the dead collier’s body conjures up how writing endings was a constant dilemma to Lawrence, a finished work being “the dead material remainder” of his creative life.
11 The second category of articles, “Redefining borders as structures of resistance: modernist experiments,” broaches aesthetic pursuits from transgression to re-creation,
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reaching beyond the borders of the short story through the evocation of the pastoral and the fairy-tale.
12 Foregrounding the transgression of modes, in her article “Reining in Expectations in ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’: A New Vision of the Pastoral,” Shirley Bricout reveals how, by hinting at a bygone pastoral ideal that lies beyond the borders of the text, Lawrence subverts the conventions of the pastoral mode in order to create a new modernist vision. Commenting on the story’s open ending and epiphanic denouement – typical modernist devices – she explains how “boundaries are blurred and redefined in order to map out a sacred territory” where a meeting between a man and a woman can flourish into love.
13 The thought-provoking essay “A Reluctant Awakening: Transgression and the Sleeping Beauty motif in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Thimble’” also points to the transgression of modes and the encounter of the sexes as a transcendental experience. Here Maria Casado Villanueva comments on the intertextual dialogue she finds between “The Thimble,” an earlier version of The Ladybird, and fairy tales such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “Beauty and the Beast,” stories based on epiphanic revelations. She contends that fairy tale motifs embedded in Lawrence’s story endow it with new meanings stemming from the tales’ “evocative symbolism and the mythical meanings they encode,” the motif of the awakening woman suggesting that personal boundaries need to be transgressed in order for the couple to find fulfilment.
14 The third part, “Liminality: departing from sexual choices,” focuses on the limits of human experience and on the borderland harboring ambivalence.
15 In her suggestive essay “Transgression in The Fox,” Jacqueline Gouirand-Rousselon relies on a Freudian reading of the story emphasizing its oneiric dimension. She considers March, one of the three protagonists, as someone on the border between dream and reality, between consciousness and absence of consciousness. The article shows how this liminal state, characterized first by indeterminacy then by openness to another form of sexual fulfilment, is induced by the figure of the shaman, the fox, which will unsettle the status quo, the homogeneousness of the same-sex relationship she shares with Branford, in order to radically re-establish a more conventional male- female relationship.
16 Sue Reid’s “‘Between Men’: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories” also studies the erotic triangle in this collection of short stories, focusing on homoerotic or homosocial tendencies in the male characters and placing them in connection with biographical elements such as Lawrence’s tormented friendship with John Middleton Murry. Reid reappraises the (homo)erotic passages of the collection and reads the liminal state prolonged by the title story’s unresolved ending as a reflection of Lawrence’s own crisis point as a husband and friend.
17 Finally, this special issue is concluded with a short story written in 1931 by an American writer, Kay Boyle, and brilliantly introduced by Anne Reynes-Delobel. The story is a thinly-veiled reference to the last months of D.H. Lawrence’s life in the south of France. Kay Boyle deftly captures the essence of Lawrence’s nature as the “invalid,” and conjures up the memory of the “black blank mines” of his childhood, the memory of the war, the memory of his father, crossing geographical, temporal, and affective borders, by exploring the ideas of rest and motion. This impressive work reveals how important Lawrence’s life and work were, even at the time of his death. Lawrence did transgress borders and borderlines throughout his life and work. What better way of
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illustrating D.H. Lawrence’s short stories than including an American short story writer’s work, as if to prove that poetic creation is boundless and universal.
***
18 All the articles highlight Lawrence’s dual vision, more specifically in his short stories in which he is constantly illustrating a genre and subverting it, using literary tradition and departing from it, criticizing deathlike attitudes and emphasizing rebirth. The short stories are then endowed with a mythopoetic dimension which enables “the text [to] overrun the limits assigned to it” (Derrida 69). Therefore, just as the characters reach out from their insularity to explore a geographic or symbolic beyond, the short story may no longer be self-contained but transcend its own borders. This volume is not meant to give an exhaustive idea of Lawrence’s treatment of the short story. Rather, it could be seen as an attempt to show how Lawrence’s short stories depict climactic, epiphanic moments of revelation, cathartic experiences in which the reader is led along, beyond boundaries, to cross genetic, generic, sexual and social borderlines, thus bridging the poetic gap that qualifies aesthetic creation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cushman, Keith. D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of The Prussian Officer Stories. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1978. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “Living On.” Deconstruction and Criticism. Ed. Harold Bloom. Trans. James Hulbert. London: Continuum, 2004. Print.
Harrison, Andrew. D. H. Lawrence: Selected Short Stories. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008. Print.
Henderson, Mae. Borders, Borderlands and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1995. Print.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Léo Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Print.
Lawrence, D. H. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, June 1913 – October 1916. Eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Print.
---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume V, March 1924 – March 1927. Eds. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Print.
Reeve, N. H. Introduction. The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories, by D. H Lawrence. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvii-xxxvii. Print.
Tibi, Pierre. “La Nouvelle: Essai de compréhension d’un genre.” Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan 18 (1995): 9-78. Print.
Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. 1960. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.
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Yndigegn, Carsten. “Projections-Transmissions between Spatial and Mental Borders.” Borders and Borderlands in Contemporary Culture. Eds. Aoileann Ní Eigeartaigh and David Getty. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006. Print.
AUTHORS
SHIRLEY BRICOUT Shirley Bricout is a member of the post-doctoral research group based at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) devoted to British Literature and Art. The translation into English of her first book was released in 2015 under the title Politics and the Bible in D. H. Lawrence's Leadership Novels at the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. It is honored with a foreword by Keith Cushman. She has contributed articles and book reviews to Les Etudes Lawrenciennes (Paris X), Les Etudes britanniques contemporaines (Montpellier 3) and to The Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (Nottingham, UK).
CHRISTINE ZARATSIAN Christine Zaratsian is Professeur Agrégée (University Lecturer) at Aix-Marseille Université in France. She is a member of the LERMA, a research group of Aix-Marseille Université. She has published several articles and book reviews on D.H. Lawrence in Etudes Lawrenciennes, Les Editions du Temps, Les Presses Universitaires de Provence and e-rea. She is the author of a book on D.H. Lawrence’s symbolism: Le Phénix, mode essentiel de l’imaginaire chez D.H. Lawrence (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1998).
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Digression/Revision as transgressive creative process
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From Marching to Walking: Transgressing in "The Prussian Officer" and "The Thorn in the Flesh"
Elise Brault-Dreux
1 A few months before Lawrence wrote “The Prussian Officer” and “The Thorn in the Flesh” (both written in 1913) he and Frieda undertook a walking tour across the German, Austrian and Italian borders. In 1956, the critic Mark Schorer accurately notes that the settings of Lawrence’s stories (referring more specifically to “The Prussian Officer”) “follow upon the march of his feet”1 (Kearney 113).
2 Starting with Lawrence’s personal experience, this article actually seeks to address the issue of marching, walking and crossing the lines in both stories, each one staging a young submissive soldier who is first physically constrained by the military “march” and, who after an act of transgression and crisis when he assaults his superior, “walks away.” The various forms of marching or walking therefore appear as definitions and redefinitions of the soldiers’ position regarding their community and society at large. The soldiers’ being in the ranks, on the borderline, or outside the ranks, turns out to be highly dependent on whether they are “marching,” “walking away,” “stumbling” or “plodding.”
3 Fed by his “antipathy to German militarism” (Kinkead-Weekes 76), Lawrence successfully leads the reader in a peculiar stroll, caught within the limits of what Pierre Tibi calls “un genre fortement borné” (23).2 The tension that stems from the narrated facts themselves is coupled with one deriving from the course of transgressive and digressive characters in the un-digressive genre of the short story. This tension between thematic expansion and generic restriction is to some extent a translation, at another level, of Pierre Tibi’s conception of the short story as the coalescence of the linear temporality of the novel with the spatiality of poetry (Tibi 14-15): the facts that narratively delineate, following the soldiers’ steps, have to fit within the textual space of the stories.
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4 To broach the issue of how an un-digressive genre stages digressive transgressive characters, I propose to analyse first how both stories stage the discipline of marching with the community, and then how both soldiers perform a transgressive (and subversive) rite of passage as they walk away from the community. The sense of closure at the end of both stories where the soldiers are both caught in a dead end is, as we will see eventually, combined with the poetic openness of a previous experience of the beyond.
The Discipline of marching with the community
5 But for a long analepsis which gives an inkling of the causes of the tension, the whole story of “The Prussian Officer” takes place during a military march through the forest, towards mountains. “The Thorn in the Flesh” begins with Bachmann, a young soldier who is writing to his mother, and very soon the sergeant summons the company to march. They will march, rhythmically, to a moat of water.
6 The military march is stereotypical enough for the readers to picture it without being provided with too many details – an economy of words that actually suits the genre. Unlike walking, which takes countless forms and paces and rhythms, etc., marching is a specific mode of displacement which does not involve private but social men3 who march in the ranks and follow codified rules.
7 The march is first and foremost collective, as the opening paragraph of “The Prussian Officer” renders with no reference to individuation: “They had marched more than thirty kilometres since dawn […]. And towards the mountains, on and on, the regiment marched” (PO 1),4 or later, “the company turned up the hill” which reads as an echo to the “sheep [that] huddle together under this fierce sun” (PO 11). Their bodies are likewise not singled out when reference is made to “the feet of the soldiers,” “their hair,” “their shoulders” (PO 1). A little later, when the scene is focalized through the Prussian officer’s consciousness, one reads that the soldiers march in “common subjection” (PO 12). The army then allows no individual transgression, nor any variation: “And the march continued, monotonously, almost like a bad sleep” (PO 10) and “Now they were to march to the attack in such and such a manner” (PO 16). In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” the barking sergeant summons the company “to ranks” and moves forward “marching rhythmically” (PO 23). Just as they later climb mechanically, the soldiers march like automatons, all going in the same direction. The Prussian officer’s position during the march, on horseback, above the ranks and trotting before them, reveals the strict hierarchy: “the officer was always aware of the tramp of the company behind, the march of the orderly among the men” (PO 2) – his ability to point out one among the several soldiers is a first hint at their unsettling special bond. Yet, such discipline, massive as it may appear by the sounds the reader imagines may be produced by the rhythmic tramp, by the collective movement forward, is subtly debunked by the use of the epithet “little”: “soldiers were moving in a little swarm” (PO 16), “the little company moved forward” (PO 23) and at the end of “The Thorn in the Flesh,” when Bachmann is caught, “the little procession went down the stairs” (PO 38). If, in the first example quoted, “little” may also be suggesting the focalizer’s distant empirical observation, its use also clearly belittles the potential grandeur of the battalion and what it may traditionally evoke. Such reduction of the grandeur of the march in favor of a promotion of its mechanical discipline makes it a mere monotonous
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exercise that constrains the soldier’s body. In being forced in the discipline of the most un-transgressive march, the body in the end exceeds its own limits, transgresses its normal physical abilities. Rosemary Davies, in 1984, devotes an article on “heat” in “The Prussian Officer” and declares that “the heat is associated with the valley through which the men are marching” (269). The orderly is actually suffering from heat and intense thirst. Moreover, while like the other soldiers his “feet grew hotter” and “sweat ran through [his] hair” (PO 1), he also suffers from “bruises” (1). The first occurrence of “bruises,” in the second paragraph of the story, is introduced by what comes close to free indirect speech: What were they after all but bruises! He had looked at them, as he was getting up: deep bruises on the back of his thighs. And since he had made his first step in the morning, he had been conscious of them, till now he had a tight, hot place in his chest, with suppressing the pain, and holding himself in. There seemed no air when he breathed. But he walked almost lightly. (1)
8 The character’s self-persuading attempt to belittle the bruises’ seriousness at the beginning of the quote is immediately after deflated by the narrative voice which gives an inkling of their depth, omnipresence and suffocating effect. The reader here also understands that the bruises have not been caused by the march, but by some event, still unknown to the reader, that precedes it. Marching with these bruises thus takes a punishing dimension, which, when read retrospectively, is the ultimate torture of the officer’s bullying. In the morning, before the march, “[the soldier’s] limbs, his jaw, were slack and nerveless” from being bullied, and yet “he would have to move his inert body and go on.” “He seemed to be a mass of inertia” (PO 9) but “slowly, economically, he got dressed and forced himself to walk” (10). He then “plodded uncomplainingly” (10), and “at the start, he had determined not to limp” (1). In thus being forced to march, the orderly is actually forced to inflict suffering upon his own self, to be the actor of his own torture: his awareness that “plodding” and “limping” are still not “marching” intensify the physical suffering into a sense of shame and fear. The two occurrences of almost the same phrase, “the long agony of marching” (10) and “the long agony of the march” (20) – where the active “ing” verb form significantly disappears in favor of the more static notional “the march” – reverberate the agony on the surface of the text: the repetition pages apart translates both the textual and physical persistence of agony.
9 In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” the suffering caused by marching derives from Bachmann’s sensation of suffocation: “Bachmann, one of the inner file of four deep, marched in the airless ranks, half suffocated with heat and dust and enclosure” (PO 23). Like in “The Prussian Officer,” the heat is suffocating. And the claustrophobic physical organization of the march somehow traps Bachmann, thus unable to step aside. He is caught within the boundaries of the marching troop. If the reader is, like Bachmann, given a little respite soon after with “he marched with his usual ease, being healthy and well adjusted,” (s)he is immediately after told that such ease is made possible because of the disconnection between the soldier’s mind and body, a disconnection without which he could not go forward: “his body went on by itself […], his body worked by a kind of mechanical intelligence” (PO 23).
10 This introductory linear progression in each story creates a form of mounting suspense, both on the textual and narrative levels. The reader and the soldiers feel, on different levels, a tension, and march together: where are the battalions leading each soldier to? And where is the text leading the reader? The effet de réel thus introduced is,
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in each case, strengthened by details about the setting.5 In “The Prussian Officer” temporal and spatial elements introduce the story: They had marched more than thirty kilometers since dawn, along the white, hot road where occasional thickets of trees threw a moment of shade, then out into the glare again. On either hand, the valley, wide and shallow, glittered with heat; dark- green patches of rye, pale young corn, fallow and meadow and black pine woods spread in a dull, hot diagram under a glistening sky. But right in front the mountains ranged across, pale blue and very still, snow gleaming gently out of the deep atmosphere. (1)
11 The march has started in the margins of the narration, in a pre-text that opens the text back: “They had marched” thus gives depth to the narrated events, inscribes the events to come in a process whose beginning precedes the text. If “thirty kilometers” then brings in a realistic detail, space is then evoked in terms of time – “occasional thickets,” “a moment of shade,” “then […] again” – thus suggesting a slight departure from realism and a step into the poetic. Contrasting lights coexist with color nuances in an omnipresent immediate heat which itself contrasts with the remote coldness of the snowy mountains: once again, the profusion of various details contributes to an effet de réel and, at the same time, outlines a highly poetic picture. Such coalescence brings in Pierre Tibi’s theory of the short story as the coalition of the narrative linearity of the novel with the spatiality of poetry. Though, according to Tibi, the short story is not the genre of the effet de réel, one may propose that here the latter is a starting point. The introductory march in the first sentence sets into motion what Tibi calls a “parcours narratif” (15): the text is starting its march (or more accurately its walk). The reader is thus dragged by the narration into a somewhat realistic setting which soon enough becomes a “spatial order” (Tibi 14) for poetic elaboration.
12 The opening of “The Thorn in the Flesh” likewise shows concern with realistic details, notably with the reference to “the houses of the city of Metz” and: Among the fields by the lime trees stood the barracks, upon bare, dry ground, a collection of round-roofed huts of corrugated iron, where the soldiers’ nasturtiums climbed brilliantly. There was a tract of vegetable garden at the side, with the soldiers’ yellowish lettuces in rows, and at the back the big, hard drilling-yard surrounded by a wire fence. (PO 22)
13 This description fixes the limits of the immediate setting with well-defined solid lines (“tract,” “rows,” “fence”). Yet at the same time Lawrence weaves into it a clear poetic dimension with assonances, alliterations and long sentences. The text then opens up generically from prose to poetry and structurally with the proleptic subverted allusion to Bachmann climbing not as brilliantly as the nasturtiums. Once in the ranks, the soldiers then march “out of the wire-fenced yard to the open road […] pass[ing] in a single file down a path among trees” (PO 23). Their march, while it evokes codified constraint and solid reality, evolves in a “mysterious” setting (“All was silent and green and mysterious,” 23): “Occasionally a puff of mysterious wind made the flowers and the long grass that crested the earthworks above bow and shake as with signals of oncoming alarm” (23). The setting, stamped by the soldiers’ feet, acquires a symbolic foreboding dimension.
14 In the opening of both stories, the syntagmatic flow – which combines the linear progression of both the marchers and the text – catches in its course a paradigmatic poetic intensity. In that sense Lawrence’s work fits the lines of Pierre Tibi’s theory of the short story as a complex alliance of both axes.
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15 So, from the onset of both stories, the march bears the seed of something beyond, some experience outside the limits of its ranks – and of its prosaic genre. Both narrative texts, in opening up poetically and not without tension and suspense, subtly prepare the reader for upcoming thematic transgressions.
Transgressive rites of passage: walking away from the community
16 “The Prussian Officer” and “The Thorn in the Flesh” both revolve around a moment of crisis which stages two soldiers’ transgressive actions as they physically assault respectively the Prussian officer and the barking sergeant. Such crisis is the outcome of previous excessive pressure, fear and shame.
17 Bachmann, in “The Thorn in the Flesh,” first feels fear by proxy when watching another soldier climb the ladder against the “slightly sloping wall-face” (PO 24). As he apprehensively identifies with the climbing figure, knowing that his turn will soon come, he starts feeling physical symptoms of fear (“his bowels turned to water,” 24). His fear of heights soon turns into a fear of actually showing such physical symptoms: from a mere feeling (“a great, sick, melting feeling took hold of him”), to an anxious hypothesis (“If once it melted all his joints and his belly he was done”), melting is intensely felt, first metaphorically (“he was melting weaker and weaker, in a horror of fear and lack of control, melting to fall”), before shamefully materializing (“His water had run down his leg,” 25). Bachmann is then reified when dragged over the edge “like a sack” and the previously marching soldier is submissively animalized when he “grovel[s]” “on his knees” (25). The escalating suspense at the moment of his climbing, mixed with an ensuing “deep shame and ignominy” (25), leads to a critical moment of transgressive release when the markedly shameful Bachmann brutally hits the sergeant who thus falls over the ramparts. The blow is instinctive, involuntary as, we are told, Bachmann “felt his forearm hit the face” (26). But later, when he reports the facts to Emilie he says: “‘It was an accident – but –’. And he grasped at the cherries” (28) – a hesitation that seriously questions the accidental nature of the altercation. Humiliation has caused the accident.
18 In a more complex fashion, the orderly’s fatal assault of the officer in “The Prussian Officer” is likewise triggered by fear and humiliation. The long analepsis delineates for the reader the ambiguous and perverse connection between both men, paradoxically drawn to each other. Yet, this complex connection evolves into an intensifying form of bullying. The officer first strikes metonymically with a glove, then just as metonymically, with his belt, and then he kicked “again, and again” (PO 7). The succession and mounting intensity of the blows and kicks are all the more disturbing since they are subtly narrated as almost uneventful events. They somehow occur in the course of the narration as apparently normal consequences of the officer’s awkward passion for the young soldier – this is mainly due to the blurring of the extradiegetic narrative voice with the Officer’s: “At last he slung the end of a belt in his servant’s face” (6), and the officer’s feeling of relief is betrayed by “at last.” The recurrent kicks will then be the cause of the “bruises” referred to at the beginning of the story when the young soldier is forced to march. The end of the explanatory analepsis takes the reader back to the march. The orderly “plodded on uncomplainingly” (10), forced to stay in the ranks and to move on, while “it gave him a pain in his head to walk” (11) –
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physical suffering is intellectualized and thus translates the traumatic effect of bullying. Not even marching but merely “walking” is painful. The individual, and not just the soldier, is now affected.
19 The orderly then feels “flashes” through his body as the officer, in an obvious dominant position on horseback, draws nearer and orders the young soldier to fetch something to drink for him. The ensuing scene pictures the soldier’s running very heavily downhill with his “military boots.” Synecdochic references to the army, the boots constrain the soldier’s movements: they block the individual’s transgression of the collective. The soldier’s feet are trapped in the ranks. Yet, at that point the reader is given an inkling of the subject’s division: “outside” he obeys mechanically, while “inside” is the accumulation of his young energy and life. Such tension is conveyed immediately after when he comes back, “plod[ding] quickly back uphill” (PO 13) with the oxymoronic “plodded quickly.”
20 He then again “plods,” “tramp[s] towards his officer” and “stumble[s] forward” (PO 14). His previous enforced painful marching has evolved into a laborious telluric forward movement, forced down by weighty boots. But after a moment of extreme tension when the officer perversely drinks his beer before the exhausted, bruised, thirsty soldier, such restraining heaviness suddenly changes into the weightlessness of an assaulting jump: “He jumped, feeling as if he were rent in two by a strong flame” (14). The orderly leaves the ground and attacks the officer then, literally breaking his face and neck (“he shoved back the head of the other man, till there was a little ‘cluck’ and a crunching sensation,” 15).
21 Both stories, then, are built around a similar moment of crisis with each humiliated soldier physically assaulting his superior. And the soldiers’ relief felt at the moment of transgression is soon translated in their escape as they each “walk away.” Each soldier actually leaves the tracks imposed by the military march: transgression thus involves digression.
22 The eventual relieving nature of walking away had been previously foreseen on the first page of “The Prussian Officer,” after the officer has violently kicked the soldier: “It had made him sick to take the first steps, and during the first mile or so, he had compressed his breath, and the cold drops of sweat had stood on his forehead. But he had walked it off” (1). “Walk” here functions as a resultative verb through whose action “it” (a blurred reference to suffering) is cancelled. While in truth he is here actually marching in the ranks, his perception of it as “walking” is in fact enough to reduce the aching. After the assaults, the relief by walking is more obvious. Though differently, at different paces, they both run away, thus escape in the most primitive fashion.
23 In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” immediately after the assault, Bachmann follows another soldier’s injunction – “you’d better clear” (PO 26): And with immediate instinctive decision he started to walk away from the spot. He went down the tree-hidden path to the high road where the trams ran to and from the town. In his heart was a sense of vindication, of escape. He was leaving it all, the military world, the shame. He was walking away from it. (26)
24 With no plan of action, he walks away, leaves the place, crosses the lines defined by the battalion. While marching constrained his feet in a definite perimeter, he now walks outside the boundaries, quite randomly (“But where was he going?” 27). Though he knows that he is heading to Emilie – his sweetheart – this appearance of random progression, after transgression, magnifies a sense of relief and sudden freedom. Later,
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when he tells Emilie about the event, he concludes with “I ran off” (28) – thus bringing in the idea of hasty departure but also, with “off,” that of an ending, of a definite and irretrievable transgression.
25 In “The Prussian Officer,” the post-assault escape is much more delayed. The orderly sits and looks, from a distance, at the soldiers who “were to march to the attack in such and such a manner” (16). His own attack has already taken place and was dictated by no “such and such […] manner.” Though at that point still motionless, he experiences the transgressive assault as a passage: “For him a change had come over the world. But for the rest it had not – all seemed the same. Only he had left it. And he could not go back” (16). He then grows aware of the necessity of his escape6 and mounts the officer’s horse. Shortly after, he falls from the horse and remains on the ground for a while, semi- conscious. When he comes to his senses again, he walks away: Struggling to his feet, he lurched away. He went on walking, walking, looking for something – for a drink. His brain felt hot and inflamed for want of water. He stumbled on. Then he did not know anything. He went unconscious as he walked. Yet he stumbled on, his mouth open. (PO 18)
26 Unlike Bachmann who shows a sense of lightness and energy as he moves forward, the orderly here struggles. The repetition of “walking” and “stumbled,” as well as the mimetic rendering of the occurrences of his thoughts (first “something,” only then determined after the dash by “a drink,” as an afterthought or a delayed understanding) give a metapoetic value to the passage: the text stumbles on, painfully moves forward. The struggling prosody is therefore narratively efficient.
27 If, traditionally, walking may sometimes be apprehended as a form of “quest” (De Certeau 155) or an initiatory rite (Le Breton 166), in both stories, it rather corresponds to its reversed principle – the soldiers are escaping. In both cases, the transgression – the assault and the escape – is readable as a subversive rite of passage. While in the case of a traditional rite of passage the individual joins the community who ceremoniously accepts him, here the passage is subverted into an exit from the group. The soldiers’ respective act of courage (thus seen by the reader) is not rewarded by a promotion inside the community but by instant marginalization – both chosen and culturally integrated – from it. After the attack, the orderly in “The Prussian Officer” feels that “he could not bear contact with anyone now […]. He could not get away from the sense of being divided from the others” (16). And Bachmann, hiding in Emilie’s bedroom, is physically marginalized. When there he hears the soldiers singing at night, he thinks: “But he himself was removed from it now […]. He waited in concentration in another world” (33). So, transgression of disciplinary marching leads to a marginalization from the community: to remain a comrade, one must march within the boundaries of the ranks. But unlike a normal criminal who is and feels excluded from the social group, here both assailants experience this marginalization as a deep relief. Interestingly enough, in “The Thorn in the Flesh,” if Bachmann eventually does not kill the sergeant, the latter’s foot is seriously harmed. In thus injuring the sergeant, Bachmann has destroyed all possibilities for the sergeant to ever “march” again in the ranks, with his community.7 He has pushed his superior outside the ranks, forced his irreversible marginalization.
28 In each story, the experience of relief, more or less directly consequential to the transgressive assault, is narratively translated by an experience of the unknown where each soldier passes into the beyond. In “The Prussian Officer,” right after the killing,
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the village and the white-towered church was small in the sunshine. And he no longer belonged to it – he sat there, beyond, like a man outside in the dark. He had gone out from everyday life into the unknown and he could not, he even did not want to go back. (16)
29 A little later, after his fall from the horse and before he starts walking away, “now he had got beyond himself. He had never been here before. Was it life, or not-life?” (18). The end of the march and the assault are more than a transgression of the community’s codes. They give way to a transgression of the limits of the self and even of life. “He was outside” is repeated twice immediately after this quote. At that point, the orderly frees himself, somewhat ecstatically (Widmer 9) from the constraints of the march, of the community and of the officer’s perversion. Off the tracks, he has passed beyond all this, with no other specific purpose than that of escaping oppression.
30 In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” when hiding in Emilie’s room, Bachmann likewise experiences a passage: “He was going to leave this land, this life. Already he was in the unknown” (PO 30). In both stories then, the soldiers, now individuals, have fled from the all too well-known, for all too organized and codified, tracks of the march towards an unknown whose nature they do not seem to really be concerned about. What matters is to have escaped, to have transgressed beyond the limits of the known. In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” the passage is coupled with a much more explicit experience of renewal, in Bachmann’s sexual intercourse with Emilie. Made possible by the escape, so a consequence of it, this sexual act is lived as a rebirth: he is “restored and completed” (PO 34) and his pride – so smashed by the shameful experience of climbing – is now recovered.
31 The end of both stories, though staging inner freedom and liberation from constraints after moments of digression (walking away) and transgression, rests on a sense of narrative closure.
A Dead end
32 Despite the walking digressions and transgressive actions, both soldiers are, at the end of each story, caught either by death or the army: the central movement of opening ends on one of narrative closure. If “The Prussian Officer” starts with the ghost of a pre-text, therefore a sort of open beginning (“They had marched”), its end is what Pierre Tibi defines as a “verrouillage maximum” with the main protagonist’s death (24). After his final escape walk, “He stood still” and then “He lay still” (PO 20): no further physical and narrative digression is now possible. Transgressions have been staged within the bounds of the story, but the diegesis itself cannot transgress the final limit of the text.
33 In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” the protagonist does not die but is found out hiding by the army. This dead end was earlier foreshadowed when Fraulein Hesse asked him what he was planning to do: “‘I don’t know,’ he said, grasping at more cherries. He had come to an end” (PO 28-9). She further insists on the impossibility of his continuing transgressive walk when she tells him: “But you can’t walk over the frontier in a night” (29). Though, as we saw, in Emilie’s room he has passed towards a liberating unknown, Bachmann nonetheless remains caught in an impasse. And the first sign he is given about his being caught back by the army is interestingly enough given to him by the sounds of “voices and a tramping of feet. His heart gave a great leap, then went still.”
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This quickly interpretable sound is then shortly after heard by Emilie, downstairs: “she heard the tramp of feet” (37). The textual resonance mimics the amplifying threatening sound and renders the mounting tension. The synecdochic reference to the battalion by the “tramping of feet” once again gives prominence to the rigidity, monotony and lack of individuation in and of the march. Bachmann’s instant interpretation of the rising sound shows his awareness that he is about to be caught again within the ranks of the march. The soldiers enter the house, “they all tramped across the hall” (38), still not individualized. Then “the Baron marched swiftly upstairs,” with more speed and lightness, yet still “marching,” and not running or walking. Thus marching, the Baron clearly sides with the army against Bachmann. And quite significantly, the latter is found “bare footed” (38) in Emilie’s room, freed from the constraining marching boots and unfit for marching. The reader understands that the previously alarming “tramping of feet” was in fact produced by a mere two “common soldiers” and a lieutenant – this gives an idea of the heavy symbolic weight of the army: the sound of three mere pairs of feet acquires a whole symbolic resonance.
34 Very calmly, for rich with his resurrecting and liberating experience in Emilie’s bedroom, Bachmann – or rather “only the shell of his body” – eventually follows them. He is back in the march: The lieutenant gave the order to march. The little procession went down the stairs with careful, respectful tread, and passed through the hall to the kitchen […] Then the little file of men passed out into the courtyard. he Baron stood in the doorway watching the four figures in uniform pass through the chequered shadows under the lime trees. Bachmann was walking neutralized, as if he were not there. The lieutenant went brittle and long, the two soldiers lumbered beside. They passed out into the sunny morning, growing smaller, going towards the barracks. (PO 38)
35 Undifferentiated from the others by his “uniform,” Bachmann is caught again in a military procession whose movements are dictated and ordered (“order to march,” “respectful tread”). And in this final scene, within the bounds of the marching battalion, the previous transgressive actions and digressive walk are somehow cancelled by a succession of four “passing” (“through” and “out”) “towards the barracks” – as though Bachmann were physically forced into a backward cancelling passage. But Bachmann, though in uniform, is not marching but walking, “walking neutralized” – absent, nullified, too much changed by the escape and sexual intercourse that his body can merely mimic the march but not incarnate it. By contrast, the soldiers embody it much too heavily as they “lumber” close to him.
36 The Baron’s focalization on Bachmann’s leaving the stage of his emancipation gives the passage a very visual, almost filmic, dimension. Bachmann and the soldiers growing smaller complete the story, quite traditionally, with a closed ending. Narration marches towards its end, inviting the reader’s eye to follow the marchers on their predetermined tracks.
37 In each story then, the soldier is eventually caught by and in the march for one, by death for the other. But the man has escaped when he walked away. The narrative dimension of the short stories follows the march of the soldiers, takes them to the final closure of the text: the reader is taken to the orderly’s death and to Bachmann’s final capture. Yet, the escape of both men, as individuals who have experienced the beyond in their digression and transgression, somehow also escapes narrative linearity. Their
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experience of the unknown is not possibly narrated (and is thus interestingly qualified with a negative prefix “un”) but only alluded to – in the periphery of the narrated text.
38 In a passage quoted above which depicts the orderly’s final walk in “The Prussian Officer,” meaning is not conveyed by semantic precision, but by a stumbling prosody: “He went on walking, walking […]. He stumbled on. Then he did not know anything. He went unconscious as he walked. Yet he stumbled on, his mouth open” (18). The paratactic succession of short sentences, linked to one another by somewhat awkward “then” and “yet” (not really semantically justified), mimic the soldier’s mental exhaustion as he walks on. This is more interestingly coupled with a shift into an impossibility to narrate: the orderly no longer has any knowledge, nor any consciousness – an experience that cannot possibly be rendered with words, but by negative terms (“he did not know anything” and “unconscious”). This incapacity (deliberately sought by Lawrence) to put words on the experience of his final walk, he himself reveals with “his mouth open,” unable to tell. After a brief moment of energy somewhat regained, “he thought he was walking wonderfully swiftly and was coming straight to relief – or was it water?” – the distance between mind and walking body makes assertion impossible. The ending interrogation (whose dash marks a moment’s hesitation or even a blank) clearly questions the possibility of the previous supposition (“thought”). Nothing is stated. Words refer to something potentially beyond. Shortly after, the orderly finds himself in the midst of a surrounding radiant night: “During the night the lightning fluttered perpetually, making the whole sky white. He must have walked again” (PO 19). This unexpected epistemic modality gives “walking” an uncertain, or even somewhat oneiric, dimension. Walking – already “unconscious” in the quote above – has become uncertain, ungraspable, unsayable. In this sense, it has transgressed the limits of narration.
39 In “The Thorn in the Flesh,” when Bachmann walks away right after the physical assault, the lightness he then experiences is likewise rendered beyond the mere narration of the facts: So he turned along by the river to the public gardens. Beautiful were the heaped, purple lilac trees upon the green grass, and wonderful the walls on the horse- chestnut trees, lighted like an altar with white flowers on every ledge. Officers went by, elegant and all coloured, women and girls sauntered in the chequered shade. Beautiful it was, he walked in a vision, free. (PO 26)
40 The freedom he feels after his departure from the “march” contaminates his focalization on the others’ stroll: “officers” do not march but “go by,” and girls are “sauntering.” The lightness actually pervades the text with alliterations (liquid and others in [g] and [w] for instance), and nature is given a transient immaterial aspect with the image of the “altar,” and at the same time a pregnant impressionistic immediacy with the juxtaposition of various colours (“purple,” “green,” “white,” “all coloured”): a sense of space is given prominence over time. And the recurring syntactic inversions which topicalize the adjectives (“beautiful” and “wonderful”) are quite traditional poetic devices that draw the reader’s attention to the texture of the text. Thus constrained, the syntax somehow impedes the definite linearity of the narration – just as the sauntering impedes that of the march. Here, the poeticity of the scene suggests that Bachmann has passed into the lightness of walking. So, the transgression from the march is here suggested in the margins of the narration, in its poetic dimension: the sounds of the signifiers, the simile, the syntactic dislocations, and the
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unsayable (“a vision”) all partake of a transgressive process as they make meaning exceed the narrative limits of what Tibi calls “un genre fortement borné.”
41 In both “The Prussian Officer” and “The Thorn in the Flesh,” marching is like an initial situation, almost a literary pretext, or at least a frame, from which each soldier will depart in a transgressive digression. Likewise, on the textual level, the narration (and the effet de réel that traditionally goes along with it) is a basis, a sort of literary march dictated by writing conventions. But once the transgressions achieved (the assaults and the escapes), allusions, poetic references to some unknown beyond, to some unsayable experience, suggest a form of transgression which may read as a textual analogy to the soldiers’ walking away from their community. In that sense, the writing in this un- digressive genre is actually much more akin to walking than marching. Walking, that is going forward freely, is rhythmed by hesitations, turns, escapes and circumvolutions. Michel De Certeau, in L’Invention du quotidien, quite clearly exposes the analogy between walking and writing: Walking states, suspects, tries, transgresses, respects, etc. the lines it “speaks.” All these modalities are at stake, changing at each step, and divided in proportions, successions and types of intensity that vary according to the moment, the route and the walker (my translation).8
42 In both of Lawrence’s short stories, the recurrence of sentences starting with “But” is one instance among others of these countless hesitations, stammers or stumbling. “But” brings the narration further in its “parcours,” while it both interrupts and draws links, contradicts and adds arguments, highlights a point and cancels the previous one – like a succession of steps in a stroll.
43 There is in walking then a sort of multidimensionality absent from marching and which relates it to the combination of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes in writing – and even simply physically, walking combines the horizontality of progression with the necessary verticality of standing. Walking, as it is staged and exploited by Lawrence in both stories as a means of transgressive and digressive escape, then, here acquires a metatextual quality as it somehow reads as a demetaphorisation of writing: walking, for both transgressive soldiers, is creative. As both were previously merely following the tracks, the lines, they found and freed themselves as individuals when they escaped from the march and walked away. Likewise, the creative dimension of Lawrence’s writing in both stories is his ability to transgress the prosaic genre in bringing into it a poetic dimension – in bringing spatiality, depth, into the linearity of the marching narration. So in fact, the un-digressive genre does not so much contain the digressive transgressive protagonists as a theme as it inscribes their digressive transgressions in the very texture of the writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cushman, Keith. “D.H. Lawrence at work: from ‘Vin Ordinaire’ to ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’.” Journal of Modern Literature 5.1 (February 1976): 46-58. Print.
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---. D.H. Lawrence at Work – The Emergence of the Prussian Officer Stories. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. Print.
Davies, Rosemary. “From Heat to Radiance: D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’.” Studies in Short Fiction 21 (1984): 269-271. Print.
De Certeau, Michel. “Marches dans la ville.” L’invention du quotidien. 1. L’art de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1980. 139-164. Print.
Kearney, Martin F. Major Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence – A Handbook. New York and London: Garland, 1998. Print.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.
Lawrence, D.H. “The Prussian Officer.” The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1983. 1-21. Print.
---. “The Thorn in the Flesh.” The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1983. 22-39. Print.
Le Breton, David. Eloge de la Marche. Paris: Métailié essais, 2000. Print.
Schorer, Marc. Introduction. Poste Restante: A D. H. Lawrence Travel Calendar. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1956. 1-18. Print.
Tibi, Pierre. “La Nouvelle : Essai de Compréhension d’un Genre.” Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan 18 (1995): 9-78. Print.
Widmer, Kingsley. The Art of Perversity, D.H. Lawrence’s shorter fictions. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1962. Print.
NOTES
1. See “Introduction,” Poste Restante, edited by Harry T. Moore. 2. “A markedly bounded genre.” 3. Keith Cushman makes the distinction between the “social man” and the “private man” in his analysis of “The Thorn in the Flesh” (“From ‘Vin Ordinaire’ to ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’” 54). 4. PO will be used as the abbreviation for The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. 5. The setting has been defined by both Keith Cushman and Martin Kearney as “expressionistic” (Cushman, The Emergence of the Prussian Officer Stories 172; Kearney 123): the setting reverberates the soldiers’ emotions and own impressions. 6. “He must go, or they would overtake him” (PO 16). 7. “He fell into the water. But it gave him a bad shock, and smashed his foot on the side of the moat” (PO 33). 8. "La marche affirme, suspecte, hasarde, transgresse, respecte, etc. les trajectoires qu’elle ‘parle.’ Toutes les modalités y jouent, changeantes de pas en pas, et réparties dans des proportions, en des successions et avec des intensités qui varient selon les moments, les parcours, les marcheurs." (150)
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ABSTRACTS
Cet article aborde la question de la marche, de ses dérivés, ainsi que de l’évolution de ses diverses manifestations sémantiques à travers « The Prussian Officer » et « The Thorn in the Flesh ». Dans ces deux nouvelles, les deux jeunes soldats désertent la marche militaire (et les exercices militaires). Ils font ainsi l’expérience d’un rite de passage alors que chacun agresse physiquement son supérieur et fuit la marche militaire – qui contraint la progression dans un périmètre géographique, physique et hiérarchisé – en partant en courant (le mode de fuite le plus primitif), puis en marchant, passant au-delà des limites rigides et physiquement astreignantes de l’exercice codé. Ils marchent ainsi, en hâte et non sans douleur, en quête d’une vitalité authentique et, après une courte expérience d’aliénation salvatrice, se retrouvent finalement pris dans une impasse malheureuse. L’article s’interroge sur la façon dont ce mode de dé-placement au sein du texte, au-delà de la simple ambition de produire un récit réaliste, participe à la construction d’une tension. Ce dé-placement se reflète également dans le rythme et la sinuosité de la prose et, sur un mode métatextuel, dans les relations que le texte entretient avec le genre de la nouvelle : la prose de Lawrence ne suit pas les « lignes » de ce que l’on attend généralement d’un texte en prose mais elle réfléchit formellement la transgression et la fuite des soldats. En d’autres termes, ce trait non-digressif qui est propre à la nouvelle, associé à la dimension paradigmatique de la poésie, d’une certaine manière cadre, contraint et, à la fois, rend possibles les digressions transgressives sociales et physiques. La conclusion tente de faire converger la prose lawrencienne et la marche des soldats autour de la notion de créativité. Auteur et soldats, en transgressant les limites des genres littéraires et de la marche militaire, ont produit l’un des nouvelles, les autres leur propre sens de liberté.
AUTHORS
ELISE BRAULT-DREUX Elise Brault-Dreux is Maître de Conférences at the University of Valenciennes in France. She has published several articles on the work of T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and, especially, D.H. Lawrence, in Etudes Lawrenciennes, The D.H. Lawrence Review, Etudes britanniques contemporaines, etc. She is the author of a book on D.H. Lawrence’s poetry: Le “Je” et ses masques dans la poésie de D.H. Lawrence (Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014).
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"Odour of Chrysanthemums": Absent-Presence and Textual Genetics
Elliott Morsia
1 Though Lawrence’s novels have undoubtedly overshadowed his short fiction, the stories have had their own admirers from the start, particularly “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” Ford Madox Ford famously accepted the story, along with “Goose Fair,” both of which were subsequently collected in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914), for the English Review in December 1909 and declared Lawrence a “genius” after reading just the opening page of the former story (See Ford 70-71, reprinted in Nehls 106-21). F. R. Leavis, despite titling his famous study D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, also declared that, “of the shorter forms of prose fiction—short story and longer tale— Lawrence is surely the supreme master. His genius manifests itself there with an authority of original power, and an astonishing maturity, from the start” (77). According to Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate, Leavis’s discussion of Lawrence’s stories “remains one of the finest accounts of Lawrence’s tales” (104). What is worth highlighting in the above quotation from Leavis, however, is its emphasis upon the “maturity” of the stories. While Keith Cushman and Victor Schulz also praise the story as a “masterpiece of short fiction,” these critics are representative in championing the final version of the story, which emerged following heavy revisions completed by Lawrence in July and October 1914 and which are read in a biographical context as evidence of Lawrence’s own emergence into maturity.1
2 In an iconic early essay on “Lawrence’s Early Tales,” J.C.F. Littlewood concurred with Leavis’s suggestion that Lawrence first achieved artistic “maturity” in his short fiction, but refined this argument by suggesting it was Lawrence’s revisions of 1914 that constituted the “breakthrough” moment. Littlewood fleshes out this point by comparing a handful of early and late versions of scenes from stories in the Prussian Officer collection (focusing on “Daughters of the Vicar,” “The Thorn in the Flesh” and “Odour of Chrysanthemums”) and by holding up The Rainbow as a high-tide marker of artistic maturity. On “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” while conceding that the first
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published version of 1911 contains “the vivid, first-hand portrayal of the miner’s world,” Littlewood suggests that, in the “last few pages,” the story “collapses into an unfelt conclusion of weak moralising-cum-psychologising” (120). Littlewood suggests, by contrast, “the grafting on of the new ending [in 1914] seems entirely successful” and “comparison of the two versions makes the reader feel that in the second the author discovered the meaning that had always been waiting to be found in the story” (123).
3 As with the majority of critics who have considered the story after him, Littlewood’s analysis focused on the story’s ending, in which its protagonist, Elizabeth Bates, confronts the dead body of her husband, Walter, who is carried home at night having suffered a fatal accident at work in the local pits. According to Littlewood, Elizabeth’s new “intuition of the ‘other’ reality of the other person” in the 1914 climax to “Odour of Chrysanthemums” provides a unifying key to the story and is “of the essence of Lawrence, and in the central line of his development,” repeating an insight “first realised [by Lawrence] in the Tom Brangwen part of The Rainbow” (123-24).
4 Discussing the earlier revisions made by Lawrence between 1910 and 1911, in preparation for the story’s publication in the English Review in June 1911, under the new editorship of Austin Harrison, James T. Boulton deploys a very similar argument to Littlewood: The focus of the writer’s attention has notably shifted from the beginning to the end; from, that is, the evolving situation in the Bates’s house in which the circumstantial details of the mother and children awaiting Bates’s return are central, to the adult emotions associated with the preparation of the dead man’s body for burial. Lawrence’s relative immaturity in the story printed here is manifest; the revisions recorded in the textual apparatus equally testify to his growth in self-criticism. (8)
5 Disparaging an early version of the story as immature, Boulton, like Leavis and Littlewood, praises the supposed maturity of the later versions, which have apparently sloughed off “circumstantial details.” Though Boulton does differ from Littlewood in suggesting that “Lawrence comes closer to employing the adult emotion of maternal love as a unifying principle for the entire action” (11, my italics), as opposed to a perception of otherness, both critics focus exclusively on the story’s ending, disparaging the early parts as peripheral, and champion Lawrence’s revisions as providing a more “mature” expression. It is worth remarking upon the liminal position of the early scenes in traditional critical accounts of the story. These scenes are seen as representative of early versions of the story, which are commonly defined by their apparent absence of maturity. While critics suggest this lack is subsequently filled in, in the story’s compositional history, by the later rewritten conclusion, the perception of absence is itself a projection on the critic’s part arising from a prior knowledge of the final or “mature” version of the story, as collected in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, which knowledge is brought to bear retrospectively on the earlier versions.
6 Keith Cushman, who provides the most detailed study of the story, which he describes as “a moving statement about the human condition,” likewise suggests “the successive versions are one of the best available mirrors of [Lawrence’s] artistic and emotional growth during his first years as a writer,” and argues “the successive revisions of the original story—in connection with Lawrence’s biography—allow us to date with some precision the moment a central Lawrentian belief assumed its mature form. The culmination of the story is one of the starting points for the Lawrence of The Rainbow, Women in Love, and the 1920s” (Emergence 47, 76). Again focusing exclusively upon the
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story’s “culmination,” Cushman sides more with Littlewood’s interpretation than Boulton’s, arguing Elizabeth’s response to her husband’s body provides “a lesson in human isolation” and a “revelation of our irredeemable loneliness” (Cushman, Emergence 69). 2 However, pushing the external biographical lens through which Lawrence’s revisions of “Odour of Chrysanthemums” have consistently been read to something of an extreme, Cushman also suggests that “Mrs. Bates’s reverie in successive versions of the tale is conditioned by Lawrence’s own feelings about his parents as he grew older” and, furthermore, that in the final 1914 version of the story, having eloped with and later married Frieda Weekley in the meantime, Lawrence has apparently “passed beyond the personal question of his mother and father to express an insight into man’s fate” (Cushman, Emergence 55, 69). The borderline between biographical and fictional realms is too rigid here, as one is read off against the other, and it is also unclear why “human isolation” or “man’s fate” should represent less personal or biographical questions for Lawrence.
7 Rounding off this trend when reading “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and its revisions then, in the Cambridge edition of the Prussian Officer collection, John Worthen has suggested “Lawrence’s short stories allow us to see him revising, transforming and frequently transcending his early work; the history of the stories […] is also the history of Lawrence’s remarkable development as a writer between 1907 and 1914” (xix). While, more recently, in an introduction to The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories (2009), which presents early and draft versions of stories, including “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” N. H. Reeve echoes Worthen by suggesting “this volume demonstrates, as no other brief collection of Lawrence’s work could, his extraordinary development as a writer of fiction between 1907 and 1914, and his growing mastery of the short-story form” (xvii).
8 Before moving on to discuss the story itself, it is worth repeating the following observation by Howard J. Booth on the general topic of “maturity”: Critics have not questioned sufficiently the model for interpreting the early life and work that Lawrence himself first laid down. Heavily teleological, the claim is that a “real” Lawrence emerged […] This narrative is organised around a breakthrough, or series of breakthroughs, that allowed the “mature” Lawrence to emerge […] An “advance” in terms of relationships is linked to a breakthrough in writing, where an outdated interest in late nineteenth-century forms of writing gives way to a more modern writing-style. (37)
9 As in the present essay, Booth challenges this influential narrative by considering early versions of Lawrence’s stories on their own terms and for their own merit, rather than as merely subservient to the “final” version. In this respect, I would highlight the usefulness of genetic criticism more generally in opening up Lawrence’s manuscripts and processes of writing to new interpretation; genetic criticism, which treats text as process as well as product, has been developing ideas for the study of manuscripts and writing processes (on their own terms) for many years.3 Genetic criticism also raises some fascinating questions regarding the borderlines of a text: are there definite borderlines between texts? Can texts be autonomous? Even if you can trace the genesis of a written document, how do you trace the genesis of an idea? While genetic study clearly transgresses any such boundaries between texts, these boundaries are themselves made permeable by the temporal dimension of textual process (composition and production). Ultimately, these questions allow us to consider parallels between the content (absent-presence) and the form (the borders of a text)
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and I return to this point at the end when considering the ways in which writing an ending represented both a dilemma and a potential relief for Lawrence.
10 Venturing into the textual genetics of “Odour of Chrysanthemums” in the remainder of this essay, I begin by outlining the story’s history of composition and go on to discuss the ambiguous borderline between absence and presence in the early parts of the story. I believe this dynamic provides the dramatic heart of the story and is in fact jeopardised by Lawrence’s 1910-11 revisions, which were requested by his editor at the English Review (Harrison).
The Composition and Alternative “Versions” of “Odour of Chrysanthemums”
11 As Worthen and Reeve supply detailed accounts (see bibliography), I will just provide a brief outline of the story’s compositional history, which officially begins December 9, 1909, when Lawrence sent an early version to Ford Maddox Ford at the English Review, though it was most likely written the previous month, in November (Letters 1, 147). Page proofs for the English Review were then prepared by March 10, 1910, and from this point up until April 1911, Lawrence revised the story using the proofs on more than one occasion: rewriting the ending twice, and, following the request of Harrison, the magazine’s new editor, cutting “5 pages” of material, predominately from the early parts of the story (Letters 1, 172). Lawrence began revising the story again in July 1914 when working on proofs for The Prussian Officer and Other Stories and extensively rewrote the ending once more, before making a further and final set of revisions in October 1914, at which point the story’s much altered ending was once again revised.
12 As for the story’s extant materials, with reference to Roberts and Poplawski’s bibliography of Lawrence and to the Cambridge editions, these can be divided into five levels: (1) a six-page holograph fragment forming the conclusion to an early version of the story (Roberts E284a), published as “Appendix I” in The Prussian Officer (201-05) and later labelled “Version One” by Reeve; (2) twenty-seven corrected proof sheets for the English Review, with a further eight pages of holograph corrections and insertions (Roberts E284c), published in The Vicar’s Garden in two forms: with the pre-revision text as “Version Two” (75-99) and the post-revision text as “Version Three” (101-21); (3) a thirty-nine page fair copy of the heavily revised English Review page proofs, completed by Louie Burrows in April 1911 (Roberts E284b) and containing hundreds of errors and alterations which Lawrence subsequently adopted and revised, which forms part of the textual apparatus in The Prussian Officer; (4) the corrected page proofs of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (Roberts E326.6), which contains the July 1914 version of the ending, published as an “Appendix” in The Vicar’s Garden (211-16) and assigned as “Version Four” by Reeve; (5) the first edition of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (Roberts A6a), containing subsequent revisions completed in October 1914 (i.e. “Version Five”).
13 Regarding such material from a “genetic” perspective, I would point out that the Cambridge edition of Lawrence sometimes produces the misleading impression that alternative “versions” of Lawrence’s work stem from entirely “separate processes of creation” (Clark xxv)—a term L.D. Clark uses to describe different versions of The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In fact, there is usually a great degree of
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continuity between alternative “versions” and Lawrence tended to rely directly upon earlier drafts while writing: revising and rewriting some sections of his work (often on numerous occasions), while leaving others intact. This is indeed the case with “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” as discussed in detail below. Lawrence cut and condensed certain sections in the early parts of the story when revising from 1910 to 1911. However, despite these alterations, much of the opening four-fifths of the story remained intact throughout the various phases of revision up to and including 1914. Similarly, though Lawrence rewrote the story’s ending at least half a dozen times between 1909-1914 (the English Review page proofs alone contain three different versions of the ending), there are still points where the ending can be “tagged together” across alternative versions: points where the versions overlap, despite extensive rewriting.
14 Discussing the story itself in the remaining sections of this essay, I refer to the alternative versions using the published texts in the Cambridge editions. While I endeavour to make clear which text or version is under discussion throughout, as a general guide allusions to The Vicar’s Garden refer to earlier drafts (1910-11) whereas references to The Prussian Officer correspond to the later versions (1914). Finally, while the essay mostly compares separate versions of particular passages, on occasion I have provided a synoptic transcription, using strikethroughs to indicate deletions (deletion) and bold font to indicate insertions (insertion).
Child’s Play
15 According to the readings of Cushman, Schulz and others, aside from the imperious climax, “Odour of Chrysanthemums” consists of well-crafted prose depicting domestic colliery life in a conventional realist manner.4 In the narrative, however, Elizabeth Bates and her two young children, Annie and John, await the arrival of their father, a local miner, whose return from work becomes increasingly overdue and whose absence hence becomes increasingly pressing. Critics also praise the story’s subtle symbolism. The opening paragraph, for example, provides a deft account of industrialisation. The fields are “dreary and forsaken” and “flames like red sores” rise from the “ashy” sides of a nearby pit-bank (Brinsley Colliery). A “small locomotive engine, Number 4,” appears in the opening line and comes “clanking, stumbling” down the line with “slow inevitable movement” (The Vicar’s Garden 77), thus symbolising the spread of industrial power. Nevertheless, a colt, which the train startles “from among the gorse,” is still able to outdistance the engine “at a canter” (77). Finally, the use of chrysanthemums is also highlighted in relation to the Bates’s marriage. Towards the beginning of the story, Annie gazes in wonder at a chrysanthemum tucked into Elizabeth’s apron-band and the mother explains her apparent hatred for the flowers, in lines which go virtually unrevised, as follows: “‘it was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his coatbutton-hole’” (The Vicar’s Garden 84; The Prussian Officer 186). Symbolising the end of the unhappy marriage, when the men carry Walter’s body into the parlour towards the end of the story, a vase of chrysanthemums is knocked to the floor and smashes.5
16 Besides these concessions, the main body of the story is quickly passed over by the majority of critics, who treat it as subsidiary to the conclusion and praise Lawrence’s cuts to and condensation of the early parts. As mentioned already, Boulton describes
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the mother and children’s activities at home in this section of the story as “circumstantial detail.” Mara Kalnins also suggests “the superiority of the 1911 version […] over the early 1910 text” because Lawrence has apparently pared away “superfluous detail in the early part of the tale” (471-72), while Cushman likewise argues “the detail is lovely, but it distracts from the central situation” (Emergence 57).
17 Against this consensus, I believe the early parts of the story establish an intricate network of objects and features that are central to the drama, involving a general interplay and evoking an ambiguous ontological borderline between absence and presence, which energise the story. Of first note in this respect are the railway lines themselves, which are alluded to numerous times and stretch “down from Selston” and “up […] to Underwood” (The Vicar’s Garden 77). The railway lines connect various locations and provide a network for local activities, trafficking miners between neighbouring towns and the pit. The tracks also provide Elizabeth with signals about the status of local activities and she gazes at them for this specific reason on more than one occasion in the story. Also relevant is the proximity of the tracks: the Bates’s “small cottage” is “squat beside the great bay of railway-lines,” there are a set of steps leading down “from the cinder-track to the threshold of the house,” and these steps are themselves made out of “old sleepers” (The Vicar’s Garden 77).
18 The intimate connection between the Bates dwelling/family and the railway lines is further developed in one of the first episodes in the story as we discover that a second engine, which approaches down the track and comes to a halt just “opposite the gate,” is actually driven by Elizabeth’s father, who leans down from the driver’s seat to receive a cup of tea. In the ensuing dialogue we learn of Elizabeth’s absent husband, Walter, as her father recounts a tale of Walter bragging in a local public house; the father concludes, “I’ve repented the day I ever let you have him” (The Vicar’s Garden 80). Other features which emphasise the Bates’s networked location include a “large bony vine,” which scrambles over the cottage “as if trying to claw down” the roof, and “a tree-hidden brook course” at the bottom of the garden, which offers another point of transit at the rear of the cottage (The Vicar’s Garden 78). As a result of these features then, the story’s opening represents the boundaries between inner and outer, private and public, and absence and presence as almost disturbingly permeable.
19 Besides symbolising the Bates’s marriage, chrysanthemums also function as a kind of network in the story and likewise draw our attention towards the ambiguity between absence and presence. Firstly, the story’s title (“Odour of Chrysanthemums”) renders these flowers (at least partly) symbolic, which means that their presence as ordinary objects within the narrative produces an immediate play between these different levels: abstract signified, material signifier, contingent object. Perhaps more intriguingly, the flowers also cross boundaries within the narrative. “Dishevelled pink chrysanthemums” (The Vicar’s Garden 78) are noted as growing in the back garden in the opening pages of the story, when Elizabeth goes to fetch John, and the flowers follow the pair back towards the house as John picks and scatters them along the garden path. As Elizabeth then pushes some “into her apron band” (79) before the pair return indoors, the chrysanthemums are implicitly present throughout the subsequent action inside and we are reminded of this fact later on, when, as mentioned, Annie spots them in her mother’s apron and Elizabeth scolds her for doting on them by remarking on the presence of chrysanthemums throughout her troublesome marriage.
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In doing the latter, Elizabeth adds a further temporal and memorial dimension to the flowers, loading them with baggage from the past.
20 This tracing of the past in present objects and, inversely, the construction of the present out of the past, occurs elsewhere in the early parts of the story as well. John’s clothes, for example, “too thick and hard,” were “evidently cut down from a man’s clothes” (The Vicar’s Garden 78). Besides indicating the family’s penurious condition as stressed by previous critics (old clothes must be recycled), this detail also evokes the absence/presence of the boy’s father, presumably the “man” who previously wore the cloth in his own clothes. Similarly, the father is evoked in the boy himself later on, when Elizabeth reflects on her son as an amalgamation of his parents: John was “very much like herself,” yet he also “had his father’s brutality” (81).
21 The children’s activities in the early version of the story are also richly suggestive and further evoke the absent father. Before dinner, John sits carving a piece of wood into the shape of a tram, “meaning a little truck such as is used down pit” (The Vicar’s Garden 81). This pastime draws the reader’s attention back to the father, a miner, and may also anticipate John’s own future employment, thus further identifying John with Walter. These points recur in the children’s games after dinner. In the first game, “gipsies,” John uses “a pair of the father’s stockings” (The Vicar’s Garden 85) as an imaginary dinner item, while in the second, he demands they play at “pit” and proceeds to lie under the sofa “on his side as his father had taught him,” pretending to hack at a wall while Annie “dragged up a little box on wheels […] loading a wagon” (85-86). Unbeknown to them, while their father asphyxiates in the pit, the children are imaginatively recreating his environment in their own living room.
22 Before moving on to consider the ways in which Lawrence’s revisions jeopardise these significant features, I will consider another aspect of the story that particularly warrants discussion: the intense emotional sensitivity of the female characters, particularly Elizabeth. While the children play at “pit,” the mother sits “all this time” making a singlet (a garment for her husband) and, as she does so, “her anger wearied itself of pacing backwards and forwards like an impotent caged creature” (The Vicar’s Garden 86). The intensity of emotion blurs the distinction between interiority and exteriority as mind, feelings and bodily activity are tightly interwoven and shuttle back and forth; the characterisation of an emotion as a physical creature is also a staple of the story.
23 Once Annie arrives home in the early stages of the story, she, her mother and her brother are left solely awaiting Walter’s arrival in order to begin eating the dinner which Elizabeth has already prepared. As a result, the tension of expectation becomes increasingly potent: “the mother let loose, now, the silent anger and bitterness that coiled within her. She said little, but there was the grip of ‘trouble,’ like the tentacle of an octopus, round the hearts of the children” (The Vicar’s Garden 82). With encouragement from Annie, the three eat dinner alone and the activity provides some respite. Likewise, after dinner, Elizabeth proceeds to clear the table and commences sewing because, “actively engaged she could endure, but as she sat still her fury seemed to sway like fighting imps within her, and to break out of her control” (85).
24 Sensitive to this pressure, Annie also begins “almost feverishly chattering” as “anything was better than the clouds of silence that would settle on them” (85). She also suggests playing a game with her brother: feeling “almost unequal to the struggle with the pressure of the trouble” and “in childish dread of abnormal states, in terror of
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an approaching climax, she forced herself to play” (85). After the children finish their games and Elizabeth begins to read them a bedtime story, silence itself becomes menacing as a noise outside provides an interruption and “the old silence woke up” and “bristled in the room, till two people had gone by outside” (86).
25 “Odour of Chrysanthemums” provides a deft dramatization of absent-presence and the longer Walter is absent from the scene, the more the tension ratchets up. Elizabeth, who gazes obsessively at the clock, provides a running commentary on the agonising passage of time; besides the clock itself, other signals of lateness deciphered by Elizabeth include the lighting of the “yellow lamps […] along the highway” and the traffic of the miners: “the men trooping home, fewer now, and fewer” (The Vicar’s Garden 81).
“Like a phantom”
26 Having outlined the general interplay between absence and presence in the early version of the story, I now want to consider the nature of Lawrence’s cuts and revisions for the English Review. One of the most noteworthy alterations concerns the children’s games, which are almost entirely cut. Lawrence inserts the following passage in its place: While, for an hour or more, the children played subduedly, intent, fertile of invention, united in fear of their mother’s wrath and in dread of their father’s homecoming, Mrs Bates sat in her rocking-chair making a “singlet” (The Vicar’s Garden 109)
27 Whereas in the earlier version the details of the children’s games are richly suggestive in evoking the absent father, following Lawrence’s revision we receive the following matter-of-fact report: “the children played.” Likewise, while in the early version Annie resorts to play as a coping mechanism in response to the intense tacit pressure, here Lawrence offers a more immediate and reductive explanation: the children were “united in fear of their mother’s wrath and in dread of the father’s homecoming.”
28 This alteration marks a pattern in Lawrence’s 1910-11 work on the story, as, under the influence of Harrison’s editorial requests, the domestic activities are curtailed and explained-away, which detracts from the dramatic tension deriving from a more subtle absent-presence in the early version. Consider the following post-revision passage as the children are taken up to bed in the 1911 text: The children had their hands and faces wiped with the flannel. They were very quiet. When they had put on their nightdresses, they said their prayers, the boy mumbling. The mother looked down at them, at the brown silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck, at the little black head of the boy, and her heart burst with anger, at the father, who caused all three such distress. The children hid their faces in her skirts, for comfort. (The Vicar’s Garden 109-10)6
29 The use of parataxis in this quite dense descriptive passage seems to enact the tension of the narrative in the accumulative flow of the syntax. While some of the details are somewhat ornate (“the brown silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck”), the syntactic rhythm, which switches between short and long sentences and presents a plurality of commas and details, encourages the reader on and intimates a blind dependency between the mother and children. However, a rather reductive
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explanation is again provided as the mother’s heart “burst with anger, at the father, who caused all three such distress.”
30 By contrast, compare the above extract with the earlier version of the same passage in the 1910 text: The children had their hands and faces wiped with the flannel, and were undressed on the hearthrug. They were very quiet. When they had put on their nightdresses, they kneeled down, and the girl hid her face in her mother’s lap, and the boy put his face in his mother’s skirt at the side, and they said their prayers, the boy mumbling. She looked down at them, at the brown silken bush of intertwining curls in the nape of the girl’s neck, and the little black head of the boy, and in front of her eyes shone love and pity, and close behind pity stood anger, with shadowy hate, like a phantom, and scorn, glittering and dangerous; all these on the darkened stage of the mother’s soul, with pity and love in front. The children hid their faces in her skirts, and were full of comfort and safety, and they prayed to her, for she was the God of their prayers. Then she lighted the candle and took them to bed. (The Vicar’s Garden 87)
31 Here, the syntactic features highlighted above (long and short sentences, plural details, parataxis) are more proliferate and heighten the drama of the narrative. The specific units excised by Lawrence in the later version increase the sense of dependency between the mother and children, which is more overbearing in the earlier version. For example, the children, pressing their faces against the mother, pray “to her, for she was the God of their prayers.” Furthermore, rather than posit the absent father as a direct object-cause, Walter remains an absent presence in the earlier version, which places more emphasis upon the volatility of the mother’s emotions: “close behind pity stood anger, with shadowy hate, like a phantom, and scorn, glittering and dangerous.” In the earlier version, the mother’s soul is characterised as a “darkened stage” with psychoanalytical staging: “shadowy hate” lingers “close behind” love and pity. Her emotions seem to figure the absent husband, whose shadowy presence on the “stage” of the story is also like a “phantom.”
32 Polishing away some of this tension and volatility, Lawrence’s revisions produce a less dramatic and perhaps more conventional realist text. Consider the following passage in the early version of the story, which comes immediately after the above extract, as Elizabeth returns downstairs: When she came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension of expectancy. The mother took up her sewing and stitched for some time without raising her head. Meantime her anger was accumulating. She broke the spell sharply at last, and looked up. It was ten minutes to eight. She sat staring at the pudding in the fender, and at the saucepan to the inside of which bits of dried potato were sticking. Then, for the first time, fear arrived in the room, and stood foremost. The expression on her face changed, and she sat thinking acutely. (The Vicar’s Garden 87)
33 Here, the syntactic features highlighted in the previous passages are on display once again, along with numerous present participles (“sewing,” “raising,” “accumulating,” “staring,” “sticking,” “thinking”), which enact the feverish tension of the scene within the syntax. The “tension of expectancy” is tangible and Walter’s absence is neatly projected into the emptiness of the room. Elizabeth is also keenly aware of the uneaten and untidied remainders from dinner: “the saucepan to the inside of which bits of dried potato were sticking.” This passage allows us to revisit the features outlined in the previous section of this essay as domestic activities again serve as a form of distraction (“the mother took up her sewing”), Elizabeth’s obsessive record of time again
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contributes towards the accumulating tension (“ten minutes to eight”), which becomes “sharp” and “acute,” and the characterisation of an emotion as a physical creature again feeds into the emotional intensity, as “fear arrived in the room, and stood foremost,” which juxtaposes neatly with the non-arrival of her husband.
34 Compare the above passage with the revised 1911 version: When Mrs Bates came down, the room was strangely empty, with a tension of expectancy. She took up her sewing and stitched for some time without raising her head. Meantime her anger tinged with fear. (The Vicar’s Garden 110)
35 Under pressure to cut, Lawrence again clips the richly suggestive details from the earlier version; even the apparently innocuous alteration of the more ambiguous pronoun “she” to the proper noun “Mrs Bates” seems to suggest an imposition of determinacy and economy. On the question of economy, it is worth pointing out that, though Ford Maddox Ford famously branded Lawrence a “genius” on the basis of the earliest (1909) draft of “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” Austin Harrison, who took over the editorship of the English Review from Ford in 1910, was a far more business-minded editor and often requested writers shorten their work in order to facilitate the magazine’s profitability (see Vogeler). Along with the removal of present participles, these revisions render the scene more static. However, the most reductive alteration to this particular passage concerns Elizabeth’s emotions, which, rather than arrive in the room like an unexpected guest, become a “tinge.”
36 Before moving on to consider, briefly, the story’s conclusion, I will offer one final example on the effects of Lawrence’s revisions for the English Review, with a passage taken shortly after the above extract. Having “thrown down” her sewing, Elizabeth steps outside to seek her husband and the 1911 text reads as follows: The night was very dark. In the great bay of railway-lines bulked with trucks there was no trace of light, only away back she could see a few yellow lamps at the pit- top, and the red smear of the burning pit-bank on the night. She hurried along the edge of the track, and, crossing the converging lines, came to the stile by the white gates, whence she emerged on the road. Then the fear which had led her shrank. (The Vicar’s Garden 110)
37 Containing the same syntactic features outlined above, this passage produces a compulsive rhythm whereby the reader, like Elizabeth, is “led” along. However, consider the ways in which these features were reduced down from the following, longer and more intense version in 1910: The night was very dark. In the great bay of railway-lines where the black trucks rose up obscurely there was no trace of light, only away back could she see a few yellow lamps at the pit-top, and the red smear of the burning pit-bank on the night. She could see the street lamps threading down hill beyond the railway and the field, shining large where the road crossed the lines, and tangling like fireflies in a blur of light where she looked straight down into Old Brinsley. She hurried along the edge of the track, stepping carefully over the levers of the points, and, crossing the converging lines, came to the stile by the great white gates near the weighing machine, whence she emerged on the road. Then the fear which had led her by the hand unhesitating loosed its hold, and shrank back. (The Vicar’s Garden 88)
38 As in the previous example, the most reductive revision concerns the active emotion, fear, and its effects upon Elizabeth. While, in the later version, fear is vaguely described as having “led her” along and then “shrank,” its characterisation in the earlier version is much more emphatic: “the fear which had led her by the hand unhesitating loosed its hold, and shrank back.”
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Climax, Death, Writing an Ending
39 As the work of previous critics demonstrates, a detailed discussion of the concluding passages to “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” which Lawrence heavily rewrote on numerous occasions, warrants an essay in itself. However, while the present essay is more concerned with the main body of the narrative, having reassessed the earlier version of the story, it is important to highlight the ways in which the dramatic tension stemming from the interplay between absence and presence anticipates and provides an internal dramatic context for the conclusion, in which Walter finally returns.
40 In the short “Foreword to Women in Love,” in which he remarks that “the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions,” Lawrence famously concludes by suggesting that “every natural crisis in emotion or passion or understanding comes from this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination” (Women in Love 485-86). The crisis in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” concerns the “tension of expectancy,” and does indeed work “up to culmination.” In the early version of the story, Annie, in her “childish dread of abnormal states,” anticipates the “terror of an approaching climax” (The Vicar’s Garden 85) and, in terms of the story’s internal drama, the return of Walter provides Elizabeth’s agonizing anxiety with a release, which comes about through the attainment of certainty, regardless of Walter’s fate. When Walter’s mother finally arrives at the Bates’s cottage “at a quarter to ten” and obscurely moans “Whatever shall we do, whatever shall we do!” and “I don’t know […] I don’t know” (The Vicar’s Garden 92), Elizabeth’s anxiety reaches a limit-point and she asks the following question: “Is he dead?” she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently, though she felt a slight flush of shame at the ultimate extravagance of the idea. The question sufficiently startled the old lady, almost brought her to herself. (The Vicar’s Garden 92, 113; The Prussian Officer 191)
41 It is worth noting that, although Lawrence inserted an extra clause in 1914, this passage effectively went unaltered throughout the various phases of writing. Though her heart swings “violently” at the suggestion, Elizabeth desires the release of a definitive answer above all and the story’s climax provides this shortly afterwards as the miners appear, carrying her husband’s body.
42 Another point of interest for this essay, which relates to the “genetic” approach to Lawrence’s writing, is the writerly context of the story’s climax. That is to say, the story’s climax also represents an end to writing. The story’s ending represents the point at which Lawrence’s process of writing ends, crossing a textual borderline to become a fixed product. However, by revisiting the story, and the story’s ending in particular, Lawrence repeatedly re-opened the text.
43 It is a well-known fact that Lawrence had a tendency to rewrite his work, regardless of the genre, from short poems or short stories to long novels, and he often did so on numerous occasions, as in “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” However, Lawrence’s tendency to rewrite endings in particular is less commonly observed, though I believe it relates to a problematic feature of “finished” works, which is that they are traditionally regarded as unified, self-sufficient, and complete, hence the common use of organic analogies like “maturity.” While Lawrence often made use of organic metaphors himself, it is also true that, as a writer, he consistently resisted and undermined concepts of unity, self-
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sufficiency, and completion; not only in his cultural critique of monumentality and the West, but also in his fiction, where stasis is commonly associated with death, and the universe is often figured as a creative flux.7
44 Writing an ending represented a significant dilemma for Lawrence, who was forced to resolve the creative flux of his own processes of writing into static textual objects, hence his apparent disdain for his own published books, which he seems to have regarded as the dead material remainder of his creative life.8 It is worth pondering the significance of the dead male body in relation to this point, which forms a concluding object of contemplation not only in the interrelated play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (whose narrative parallels “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and is therefore often discussed in connection with the story), but also in Lawrence’s iconic novel Women in Love, at the climax of which Birkin reflects at length on Gerald’s body; the latter scene originally formed the conclusion to Women in Love and was also heavily rewritten by Lawrence on numerous occasions.9
45 Traditional biographical readings of Lawrence and of Lawrence’s manuscripts are partly responsible for the lack of attention paid by critics to the writerly significance of death and endings. Cushman does point out some important literary contexts for the climax to “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” including J. M. Synge’s play “Riders to the Sea,” which appears to represent a direct and influential literary inter-text.10 However, while Cushman notes that “the young Lawrence” praised Synge’s play and suggests it “also influenced the composition of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’” he ultimately argues that, “nevertheless the main creative impulse came from Lawrence’s own experience” (Cushman, Emergence 50).11 Rather than interpret Lawrence or the story as an absolute autobiographer/y, biography should instead be treated as another inter-text, alongside literary texts; Stanley Sultan has convincingly argued as much in the essay “Lawrence the Anti-Autobiographer.” In this respect, it is worth pointing out the striking coincidences in Lawrence’s allusions to “Riders to the Sea.” He first mentions having read the play (and wanting to read more by Synge) in a letter to Blanche Jennings on 1 November 1909 (Letters 1, 142), the precise time at which he is likely to have first written “Odour of Chrysanthemums.” Similarly, Lawrence’s next allusion to the play, in which he describes it as “about the genuinest bit of dramatic tragedy, English, since Shakespeare” (Letters 1, 261), comes in a letter to Sallie Hopkin on 26 April 1911, just a few weeks after he finished rewriting the story for the English Review, which suggests he may have reread it for this purpose.
46 Notions of a writer’s “maturity” or of a “mature” literary work fit within a New Critical literary ontology, where writers have a defined oeuvre, of mature and immature or best and worst works, and where each work is itself treated as a complete and distinct (aesthetic) object. Within this ontology, drafts represent incomplete, immature and, ultimately, inauthentic objects and serve therefore as evidence of artistic “growth” towards maturity. However, genetic or compositional criticism offers a different literary ontology, in which the “finished” work or text, as product, exists on a continuum with the “unfinished” work or text, as process.12
47 Lawrence saw “Odour of Chrysanthemums” in “finished” form when it was published in the English Review in 1911. Hence, when he came to revise the story in 1914, Lawrence was in a sense gazing at the corpse of his own work. While it may seem perverse to cross the ultimate borderline between life and text, Elizabeth’s reassessment of her relationship with Walter in the rewritten endings (of July and October 1914) can also be
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read within a context of writing, as both character and author re-read their past from a point of completion: “the horror of the distance between them was almost too much for her—it was so infinite a gap she must look across” (The Vicar’s Garden 216; The Prussian Officer 199).
48 Rewriting the story’s climax in July and October 1914, Lawrence introduced the eventual final line, in which Elizabeth “winced with fear and shame” from death, “her ultimate master” (The Vicar’s Garden 216; The Prussian Officer 199). This recoil from the stasis of endings, as from a cruel master, echoes Lawrence’s own resistance to endings, as discussed above. However, endings also provide a relief, and Elizabeth’s climactic relief, having resolved her agonising uncertainty, can be compared to the writer’s own relief when finally resolving the uncertainty of a process of writing. In this respect, Lawrence introduced a highly noteworthy repetition during the same late phase of writing. In the early 1910 version of the story, after Elizabeth and her mother-in-law finish washing Walter’s dead body, the first sentence of the subsequent paragraph is simple: “At last it was finished” (The Vicar’s Garden 98). 13 Lawrence never altered this sentence when subsequently rewriting the story’s ending and, in 1914, he repeated it when writing the concluding paragraph, which begins with the identical line.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Authorized King James Version of The Bible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.
Booth, Howard J. “Same-Sex Desire, Cross-Gender Identification and Asexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction.” Études Lawrenciennes 42 (2011): 36-57. Print.
Boulton, James T. “D. H. Lawrence’s Odour of Chrysanthemums: An Early Version.” Renaissance and Modern Studies 13.1 (1969): 4-48. Print.
Bushell, Sally. Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 2009. Print.
Clark, L. D. Introduction. The Plumed Serpent. Ed. L. D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. xvvi-xlvii. Print.
Coroneos, Con, and Trudi Tate. “Lawrence’s tales.” The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 103-18. Print.
Cushman, Keith. D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of the Prussian Officer Stories. Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1978. Print.
---. “D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Making of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Journal of Modern Literature 2.3 (1971-1972): 367-92. Print.
Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, eds. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2004. Print.
Ford, Ford Madox. Portraits from Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. Print.
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Kalnins, Mara. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: The Three Endings.” Studies in Short Fiction 13.4 (1976): 471-79. Print.
Lawrence D. H. The First “Women in Love.” Eds. John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.
---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume 1, September 1901-May 1913. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979. Print.
---. “’The Bad Side of Books’: Introduction to a Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald.” Introductions and Reviews. Eds. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 73-78. Print.
---. The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Print.
---. Studies in Classic American Literature. Eds. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.
---. The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
---. Women in Love. Eds. David R. Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print.
Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1955. Print.
Littlewood, J. C. F. “Lawrence’s Early Tales.” Cambridge Quarterly 1.2 (1965-1966): 107-24. Print.
Nehls, Edward. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. Vol. 1. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1957. Print.
Reeve, N. H. Introduction. The Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambidge: Cambridge UP, 2009. xvii-xxxvii. Print.
Rivers, Bryan. “‘No Meaning for Anybody’: D. H. Lawrence’s Use of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Fir Tree in the Original Version of Odour of Chrysanthemums (1910).” Notes and Queries 61.1 (2014): 114-16. Print.
Roberts, Warren, and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.
Schulz, Victor. “D. H. Lawrence’s Early Masterpiece of Short Fiction: ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28.3 (1991): 363-71. Print.
Sultan, Stanley. “Lawrence the Anti-Autobiographer.” Journal of Modern Literature 23.2 (1999-2000): 225-48. Print.
Vogeler, Martha S. Austin Harrison and the English Review. Columbia: Missouri UP, 2008. Print.
Worthen, John. Introduction. The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. xix-li. Print.
NOTES
1. See Cushman, Emergence 47-76, and Schulz 363-371, who argues “the author’s main objective in this story is to explore the widow’s complex response to her husband’s death” (366). 2. Schulz qualifies this reading, however, by suggesting the story’s climactic lesson “in human isolation” is not a universal one but is relevant to these particular “unsuitable spouses” (367). Furthermore, Schulz suggests the story ends on a positive note, with “Mrs. Bates turning away from the irreparable failure of her married life toward a vague hope of finding fulfilment as a
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mother” (368). Incidentally, Mara Kalnins has provided an extremely similar reading to Cushman in “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: The Three Endings” (1976). 3. As Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden discuss in their introduction to Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes (2004), traditional Anglo-American manuscript studies have “tended to be pragmatic and not theoretically self-conscious, to consider textuality and intention as unproblematic, and to see the manuscripts exclusively in relation to the subsequent published work” (4-5). 4. Cushman describes the opening paragraphs, specifically, as “a brilliant, closely written descriptive set piece, carefully designed to establish the tone and mood of the story, to put the reader immediately into its imaginative world—and to produce a shock of recognition in an editor” (Emergence 51); the latter point is in reference to Ford’s apparent emphatic acceptance of the story. 5. For Schulz, this episode also symbolises the start of a new and more hopeful phase in Elizabeth’s life (368). 6. Incidentally, for the English Review text, Lawrence completely cut the brief episode in which Elizabeth reads a story to the children, which is specified as Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Fir Tree.” Rivers discusses the potential significance of this reference. 7. On monumentality, see Lawrence’s “Foreword” to Studies in Classic American Literature (379-86). 8. See, for example, Lawrence’s “‘The Bad Side of Books’: Introduction to A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Edward D. McDonald” in Introductions and Reviews (73-78). 9. See The First Women in Love (443). 10. Another noteworthy inter-text for “Odour of Chrysanthemums” is the depiction and dressing of the dead body of Christ in the gospels, which Cushman also alludes to. 11. This is partly a reference to the real deaths of Lawrence’s uncle James, who died in a mining accident before Lawrence’s birth, and his older brother Ernest, who died of pneumonia and erysipelas in 1901 and whose body, like Walter in “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” was brought home and placed in the Lawrences’ parlour. However, Cushman also suggests Lawrence’s own parents “are the real prototypes of Walter and Elizabeth Bates” (Cushman, Emergence 49) and, as discussed, relates Lawrence’s revisions of 1914 to his marriage to Frieda Weekley as well. 12. For a fuller discussion of these alternative literary ontologies see Sally Bushell’s chapter “A Philosophy of Composition” in Text as Process (215-38). 13. The phrase is reminiscent of Jesus’s last words related in John 19.30: “It is finished.”
ABSTRACTS
Cette étude génétique de “Odour of Chrysanthemums” transgresse une frontière textuelle tangible en se penchant sur les procédés d’écriture de Lawrence à travers les nombreuses versions de la nouvelle écrites entre 1909 et 1914. L’article réexamine la composition et la réécriture de la nouvelle en mettant en lumière des éléments du corps du récit peu étudiés que l’interaction générale entre l’absence et la présence dynamise pourtant. Ce thème se concentre autour de la figure absente de Walter Bates, un mineur local dont la famille ignore le décès survenu dans un accident mortel sur son lieu de travail et dont le corps est ramené chez lui au point culminant du récit. Les réécritures de Lawrence, effectuées entre 1910 et 1911 à la demande de Austin Harrison, le responsable de la publication pour The English Review, touchent en fait au drame inhérent au récit et non au retrait des détails ou des digressions. Cet article se conclut par
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la lecture des nombreuses fins envisagées par Lawrence au regard du contexte biographique en abordant la nature problématique des fins et des frontières « ultimes » chez Lawrence.
AUTHORS
ELLIOTT MORSIA Elliott Morsia completed his PhD in 2017 after having been an AHRC-sponsored PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. His dissertation was entitled D.H. Lawrence and Genetic Criticism: Fictional Processes from 1913-1925. He received the Marjorie Thompson award for outstanding academic achievement from Queen Mary, University of London in 2012. He has previously published “A Genetic Study of ‘The Shades of Spring’” in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (vol. 3, no3, 2014, 152-178); his recent article on “The Composition of ‘The Depressed Person’” was published in Textual Cultures (vol. 9, n°2, 2015, 79-99).
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Redefining borders as structures of resistance: modernist experiments
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Reining in Expectations in "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter": A New Version of the Pastoral
Shirley Bricout
1 “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” introduces siblings on the brink of profound disruptions in their financial situation. Owing to their father’s mismanagement of his fortune, three brothers are at a crossroads, each resolving to face the new life set before them which involves leaving the family farmhouse and their occupation as horse-dealers. At odds with their resignation, their sister’s transgressive behaviour emphasizes her plea for a freely chosen future even if it implies taking her own life. Eventually becoming further acquainted with the local doctor, who saves her from drowning in a pond, offers the young woman an alternative to suicide.
2 Originally entitled “The Miracle,” the short story was revised several times over the years which led up to its publication under its present title in The English Review in April 1922. Later the same year, it was included in the collection England, my England which was published in the United States. Written against the backdrop of the war, several short stories in the collection address both the personal and social upheaval brought about by the conflict while all disclose nostalgia for a by-gone England, “the myth of Britain as it was before industry came to change it” (Delany 78). Formally the short story genre befitted Lawrence’s interest in depicting the moment of crisis and its resolution by foregrounding the characters’ coming to awareness and self-discovery. Crisis in the short story, as Pierre Tibi explains, “is located at the junction of two temporal segments – the circumstances which lead to it and the consequences which may derive from it.”1 The stories zero in on the tensions that the characters are confronted with when they struggle to achieve self-fulfillment.
3 My contention is that in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” Lawrence explores the dynamic potentialities of the pastoral in order to fashion a modernist version of the mode which suits his views on self-fulfillment in a changing world. He ventures to conjure up the rural myth which combines idealized country life with a sense of Englishness without actually thematizing it as he does in his novel The Rainbow for
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instance. From the outset of the short story, the crisis is thus pitted against a subtly intimated pastoral ideal, “each only-just-vanished period [having] its pastoral values located in an idyllic recent past when things were less problematic than in the present” (Gifford 9). Pointing to the ties between conventional pastoral and the past in his seminal study, Raymond Williams analyses eighteenth and nineteenth century works from the period of enclosures where “an ordered and happier past [is] set against the disturbance and disorder of the present” (45). Parliamentary enclosures were introduced on arable land, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to delineate fields so that they were managed by landowners throughout the year. Before this policy, the land was communal and fields were entrusted to individual cultivators during the growing and harvesting seasons. Therefore the fields or portions of land were enclosed with hedges or fences to trace the limits of legal rights and to prevent common grazing. Though the practice had started in the twelfth century and peaked in the sixteenth, “parliamentary procedure,” as Williams puts it, “made this process at once more public and more recorded” (97) and was felt to shape a modern England. Williams notes: there is a sense in which the idea of the enclosures [...can] become an element of that very powerful myth of modern England in which the transition from a rural to an industrial society is seen as a kind of fall, the true cause and origin of our social suffering and disorder. (96)
4 Inequalities and also, as Williams arrestingly shows, the weakening of a genuine sense of community (102-103) fostered nostalgia. Consequently, the pastoral literature of the time, for example George Crabbe’s The Village (1783), was a means to focus on “the recognition, even the idealisation, of ‘humble’ characters, in sympathy, in charity and in community” (130). Indeed, the pastoral mode conveys “an idealisation, based on a temporary situation and on a deep desire for stability” (45).
5 To begin my study of “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” in this respect, I would like to argue that a pastoral ideal lying beyond the boundaries of the text is repeatedly conjured up through the introduction of the characters in order to fashion tensions which denounce the siblings’ unsought circumstances. Thus the characters’ loss of agency is aestheticized thanks to the dialectics set to work between an idealized former rural world and present conditions. I would like to focus on how pastoral conventions are formally subverted when oppositions and hierarchies are upset to convey the brothers’ subservient acceptance of change. Then I intend to show how, conversely, the sister’s attempts to gain control over her life imply drawing new borderlines. A few key features of the landscape apprehended through modernist shifts in point of view contribute to drawing such personal and somewhat symbolic boundaries. Finally looking at other narrative forms of transgression, such as parody, I intend to examine how the doctor’s intervention disrupts these personal boundaries and inscribes the characters’ new expectations founded on budding love in a shifting territory mapped out in Lawrence’s own version of the pastoral.
6 The short story’s beginning in medias res strongly conjures up an unmentioned past during which economic and industrial transformations brought about painful personal mutations. Since the characters are caught in the middle of a desultory conversation about their plans, the opening of the unframed story “points to a ‘pre-text,’ simultaneously negating itself as a beginning and redefining the opening as an intrusion into an already fictional world” (Reynier 52). The incipit of “The Horse- Dealer’s Daughter,” which briefly states the situation (“The morning post had given the
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final tap to the family fortunes, and all was over” 137), introduces the crisis to be resolved while the circumstances which lead to it are first confined to the “pre-text” before being eventually alluded to in a brief analepsis recounting the farm’s decline (142).
7 The depiction of the Pervin brothers’ demise draws heavily on their former trade as horse-dealers. The title of the short story which names the family’s occupation orients the reader’s expectations towards an orderly structure where the animal realm is submitted to man thereby ensuring a dichotomy between subject and nature. Labor establishes man’s power over land and animals while enforcing pastoral stability. However, intent on portraying the “queer jumble of the old England and the new” that he expands on in his essay “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside” (289), Lawrence upsets such conventional hierarchies in order to narrate checked personal expectations and the loss of agency.
8 The brothers’ subjection to the outcome of their financial mishaps, also linked to intrusive mechanization, is articulated through pervasive animal imagery. Joe’s prospect is “to marry and go into harness. His life was over, he would be a subject animal now” (“The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” 138). He moves about “in a real horsy fashion” (139). But he desperately attempts to retain some command over an animal by contemptuously throwing a scrap of bacon-rind to his cowering dog. His brother Fred Henry faces a distressing truth knowing that “he was an animal which controls, not one which is controlled. He was master of any horse, and he carried himself with a well- tempered air of mastery. But he was not master of the situations of life” (138). And the youngest brother, Malcolm is “a young man of twenty-two, with a fresh, jaunty museau” (139).
9 The animal, in Lawrentian vocabulary, often carries laudatory undertones of primitivism and a return to the unspoiled spontaneity of life. Lawrence’s novella St Mawr is a case in point. Indeed, the eponymous stallion, though domesticated, is nevertheless endowed with the cosmic vitality that men have lost to modernity. Lou, on seeing St Mawr, experiences an epiphany because of such potency: “But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse’s body had split some rock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried” (30). Similarly, Lawrence celebrates the horse in his essay Apocalypse stating that “far, far back in our dark soul the horse prances. He is a dominant symbol: he gives us lordship: he links us, the first palpable and throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potency” (101).
10 By contrast in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” the tied-up draught-horses lack such vitality; their haunches swing and rock “in a motion like sleep” (138). Just as the movement of the farm horses led off up the lane is said to show “a massive, slumbrous strength, and a stupidity which held them in subjection” (138), the term “stupidity” is also used to qualify the brothers: Joe’s bearing is “stupid” and Malcolm grins “fatuously” (137, 139). Although Fred Henry is pictured as “an animal which controls,” the primitive impulse which is suggested by the comparison loses much of its agency when the character has to submit to his fate. Therefore the animal imagery resorted to in these portrayals acquires a depreciative value when it is set against conventional pastoral hierarchy. Owing to this dialectic mode of writing, the equine imagery turns into an organizing motif which unsettles pastoral stability. In this way, for the Pervins, the loss of their job goes hand in hand with their loss of agency. No longer subjects, they have become the objects of their economic times. Their overall sense of
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dispossession and loss of maleness as well as self is further conveyed through the way household belongings that they are about to lose are endowed with anthropomorphic traits. Indeed, the breakfast table is “desolate,” the mahogany furniture “looks as if it were waiting” (137). In addition to the human-animal hybridity embedded in the text, anthropomorphism mirrors the reification of the men.
11 The irony resulting from the liminal position between the human and the animal realms voices a more general critique of spreading mechanization and dramatically changing circumstances of country people. “While,” as Susan Reid puts it, “the pastoral genre usually explores and ultimately reinforces difference” (106), such irony may pertain to an anti-pastoral mode in so far as the stark reality of the countryside world is brought to the fore. The disruption of country life together with the loss of rural trades and livelihoods is articulated through the subversion of pastoral conventions. Lawrence was to express this concern about country life in Lady Chatterley’s Lover when he wrote of the mining industry, “The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, it is mechanical” (156). Connie Chatterley is positioned as a reader to whom the pastoral presents an idealized picture of the countryside but she is also made to become aware of its fallacy: Connie, belonging to the leisured classes, had clung to the remnants of the old England. It had taken her years to realise that it was really blotted out by this terrifying, new and gruesome England, and that the blotting out would go on till it was complete. (156)
12 As Paul Delany puts it, “assuming a radical opposition between the ‘human’ (pastoral) and industrial worlds, [Lawrence] ruled out any evolving mediation between the realms of nature and technique” (87). Thus by transgressing pastoral conventions Lawrence finds an artistic expression to articulate his uncompromising attitude to industrialization. It also enables him to foreground the effects of the new circumstances on the characters while keeping explicit descriptions of their causes beyond the borders of the text and contributing in this way to the economy of the short story.
***
13 That the narrative should focus on the woman’s fate underscores the gender issues at stake. The story can be read as the sexual awakening of a young woman who so far has conformed to socially constructed gender roles that resonate also in the pastoral concept of the family as a functional hierarchy. During her brothers’ conversation, Mabel is only seen to attend sulkily to household chores. In fact, as far as she is concerned, the family collapsed well before the siblings had to contemplate going their separate ways. Indeed, her mother’s death followed by her father’s remarriage and bankruptcy brought on what Martin Kearney calls “her life of drudgery” (159).
14 In keeping with the equine tropes prompted by the brothers’ trade, the imagery used to describe Mabel is restricted to the animal allowed in the house, that is “the classic avatar of fidelity, the domesticated dog, [which epitomizes] ‘the appropriate relationship between masters and subordinates’” (Rohman 7). Unlike the equine tropes which are authored by an omniscient narrator in the short story, the canine tropes originate in the male characters’ gaze on the woman; Mabel’s impassive face is indeed
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likened to a bull-dog’s “as her brothers called it” (137). This difference in point of view has a bearing on the symbolic potential of the terrier curled up in front of the fireplace. Indeed, though the dog is male (“his haunches”), its subservient cowering triggers the vilifying use of the female “bitch” (138). A further instance makes it clear that Mabel is targeted by the insult: She folded the white table-cloth, and put on the chenille cloth. “The sulkiest bitch that ever trod!” muttered her brother. But she finished her task with perfectly impassive face. (sic 141)
15 Mabel’s portrait is therefore also fashioned thanks to the blurring of boundaries between species but the aim here is to highlight the stark realities of the rigid hierarchy at stake. That is why her silence takes on a particular poignancy. Indeed, beyond the borders of the short story lies the violence of silencing as the woman is subjected to social constructs. Under her brother’s gaze she is also objectified since they “had talked at her and round her for so many years” (139). She further endures the yoke of poverty, conforming to what is expected of her, “keeping the home together in penury for her ineffectual brothers” (142). In addition to the somber picture of a woman’s lot, the subversion of pastoral romance points to more pragmatic realities when the brothers’ dealings with the female servants are said to have resulted in the birth of “illegitimate children” (142).
16 Mabel’s identity formation is central to the short story and to Lawrence’s critique of economic interests subjecting the self. She retains the family’s former “animal pride” (143) in its primitive and vitalistic sense which endows her with emotional intelligence. Therefore thanks to her stubborn silence she is paradoxically the first sibling to find a means to gain agency since she firmly believes that “she would always hold the keys of her own situation” (143). The “non-verbal ways” in which her emotional intelligence is conveyed illustrate what Elizabeth Wallace celebrates as Lawrence’s “skill at portraying the growth of consciousness in inarticulate men and women” (112). Mabel’s silence is indeed her means of resistance as she “seeks that invisible and promised territory, that country that does not exist but that [she bears in her] dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond” (Kristéva 5). In a desperate bid to dismiss the conventional available options, such as going to live with her sister, the resolute but secretive woman believes that this beyond lies in death. Tending her mother’s grave, she physically isolates herself from the life she has come to hate: “She felt immune from the world, reserved within the thick churchyard wall as in another country” (143). Indeed, in order to keep control over her fate, Mabel redefines her own new boundaries thanks to a ritual she performs in the graveyard when she reverently undertakes to wash her mother’s grave. In his arresting study, Jeffrey Meyers underlines the solemnity of the act writing that “she ritualistically carries shears, sponge and scrubbing brush to the graveyard and prepares for her own death” (347). I would further argue that the ritual defines Mabel’s temenos – from the Greek τέμενος – a sacred space marked off for communion with her late mother. However, while preparing her future in this holy sanctuary, she is conjuring up images of maternal comfort from the past as “she decides to return to the elemental womb of her mother by drowning herself” (Meyers 347). So although Mabel belongs with “apparently simple and unsophisticated characters of low social status [who] are the vehicle for the writer’s exploration of complex ideas about society” in pastoral literature (Gifford 9), her lot and contemplation of suicide fashion her rather as the antithesis of the pastoral female.
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17 The depiction of her inner turmoil generated by the conflicting prospects between the personal and the social also disrupts at one point the chronological narration. A brief nostalgic summary of the family’s past circumstances is conveyed from Mabel’s point of view and gives the reader some insight into the “pre-text” by conjuring up an irretrievable affluent life. The text reads: “The stables had been full of horses, there was a great turmoil and come-and-go of horses and of dealers and grooms. Then the kitchen was full of servants. But of late things had declined” (142). The very name of the Pervins’ house, called “Oldmeadow,” hints at tradition and stability. This on-going transgression of the borders of the short story becomes the aesthetic means by which to narrate conflicting expectations. What remains to be assessed is how a return to the pastoral is negotiated.
18 Though most critical studies of the story focus on the rescue from the pond, the scene in the graveyard marks in many respects a first turning point in the short story. Indeed, it focuses solely on Mabel and the doctor called Fergusson, the brothers’ fate being already dealt with. Furthermore, the reader’s expectations about Mabel’s fate appear to be confirmed in so far as death is the way out she contemplates. However some features of the landscape already harbour suggestions of a different outcome. The churchyard wall which stands as a protective boundary for Mabel is in fact quite low and anybody tending a tomb is in full view of passers-by, therefore Mabel’s endeavor is entirely symbolic and personal; indeed, privately mapping out her own temenos is a means to fulfill her individual self. At this point a dramatic shift in point of view gives prominence to the doctor whose house stands nearby. This agent of an alternative to suicide casts his eyes on the young woman and in doing so undermines the stability of the boundaries she has drawn. Parallel to such formal disruptions in point of view, the semantic field of the eyes and gaze develops. The text reads: “glancing across the graveyard with his quick eye he saw the girl at the task at the grave. She seemed so intent and remote, it was like looking into another world [...] He slowed down as he walked, watching her as if spellbound. She lifted her eyes, feeling him looking. Their eyes met. And each looked away again at once. (142-143, my emphasis).
19 The occurrences will be repeated, thus, as Meyers has noted, the “four eye-meetings – in house, graveyard, pond and house – [...] provide a thematic structure and mark the progress in their love” (346). The semantic field of eyes and gaze conveys a rhythmic attraction-repulsion pattern throughout the second part of the short story (see McCabe 67). The formal experiments with point of view are thus thematized semantically while Mabel’s efforts at defining new boundaries are dramatically linked to such shifts.
20 A brief portrayal of the young doctor positions him as similarly leading a miserable life. “Nothing but work, drudgery, constant hastening from dwelling to dwelling among the colliers and the iron-workers. It wore him out, but at the same time he had a craving for it,” the short story reads (144); he is “a slave to the countryside” (143). The doctor’s rounds concerned with workers in the mines and factories bear witness to “the new England.” On this particular day, he too has crossed a boundary linked to his vocation. Indeed, he is his own patient since he is suffering from a cold. One of the Pervin brothers makes fun of the doctor’s liminal position: “‘It’s a knock-out, isn’t it,’ said Joe, boisterously, ‘if a doctor goes round croaking with a cold. Looks bad for the patients, doesn’t it?’” (140). The doctor’s vulnerability which momentarily divests him of his professional status heralds his eventual role as a lover.
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21 Both the suicide attempt and the rescue are entirely depicted from the doctor’s point of view. Indeed, Mabel’s intentions are only guessed at thanks to this witness’s vantage point from the path: Roving across the landscape, the doctor’s quick eye detected a figure in black passing through the gates of the field, down towards the pond. He looked again. It would be Mabel Pervin. His mind suddenly became alive and attentive. Why was she going down there? He pulled up on the path and stood staring. (145)
22 When he reaches the pond though, he is fully aware of the border between life and death that this expanse of water forms and that Mabel is in the process of crossing. His entering the water is depicted with an accumulation of terms from the semantic field of decay and death (“dead cold,” “rotten clay” 145) later elaborated on when he reaches the house (“smell of the dead, clayey water,” “was mortally afraid” 147). Also, the doctor watches as the surface of the water seems to reach up over different parts of his body as if it were coming to meet him, rising about him rather than the other way round: “The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen” (145). So he too risks crossing into death. Such shifts in perspective together with the evocation of murky waters and foul smells fashion a parody of a rescue scene; indeed, the prosaic features undermine the portrait of the hero since they enhance the doctor’s reluctance to enter the pond. Pragmatic considerations – the fact that he can’t swim and that he is afraid of falling into the water – further undercut the intimation of conventional pastoral romance.
23 Nevertheless, the doctor becomes the one agent who reverses Mabel’s fate. As George H. Ford argues, the scene “involves first a descent, a figurative dying […] and afterwards an ascent or resurrection in which the man and woman discover a new strength and a fresh appreciation of life’s joys” (107). After experiencing a near death, Mabel crosses borders back from “water to firm land, from death to life, from isolation to conjunction, from despair to delight, from indifference to passion” (Meyers 349). Thus, when the doctor saves Mabel, he alters her expectations, transforming the end into a beginning, her symbolic death and subsequent resurrection opening new prospects. The reader is also led to adjust his expectations since the resuscitation scene followed by the revelation of sensual attraction and love all point to romance. Thomas McCabe suggests that the rhythm of the short story accelerates in the final fireside scene: “The long rhythm of the story line is progressive, moving forward into closer and closer relationship. But a dynamic to-and-fro rhythm, defining the struggle between death and life, will and desire, man and woman, pulses within that larger rhythm” (68). While attraction and repulsion alternate, again the semantic field of the eyes and gaze develops as the lovers draw together: “Eyes are the dominant image bearing new life,” writes McCabe. “From the graveyard [Mabel’s eyes] sent fresh strength into the doctor, who left with a vision of those portentous eyes to fascinate him. After the rescue her eyes again touched life in him, as they put mind and will to sleep” (68).
24 Yet, the reader’s own expectations are flouted since his experience of pastoral romance is on the verge of breaking down again when realistic descriptions of smelly wet clothes and matted hair together with insights of the doctor’s doubts undermine the traditional pastoral mode. Answering the question “Did you dive into the pond for me?” (147) the doctor owns up to the fact that he unintentionally fell into the water, casting himself more as an anti-hero, indeed as a parody of a hero. In this way, the meeting of the antithesis of the hero and heroine parodies conventional pastoral
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romance in order to pave the way for a more modernist stance which articulates Lawrence’s view on the relationship between a man and a woman confronted with an evolving society. “The parodic and interrogative registers that would later epitomize the tenor of late modernist dissent” (Reid 101) build a new narrative space where Lawrence can explore his ideal relationship between the sexes. Transgressions of conventional norms carried out through parody together with irony are the linguistic means to articulate such a non-verbal experience. The apparently banal verbal exchange about the rescue, which participates in such parody, reconfigures the relationship in a new sacred territory, a newly mapped out temenos where the balance between the sexes that Lawrence so firmly believed in can be achieved.
25 Thanks to the doctor, Mabel has experienced spiritual rebirth, an awakening of her essential self ready for love. Reciprocating the move, she tries to save Fergusson and bring him to join her in sacred communion. Just as he was drawn into the pond, so is he drawn into a relationship which transgresses his professional approach to the rescue: “He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind had shrivelled and become void” (150). Internal point of view reveals that he is bewildered and even terrified at being involved in a love affair. However this paradox pertains to Lawrence’s endeavour to depict a return to the primeval. As the doctor stands on the brink of a new relationship, he becomes aware of his deep pure self and thus learns to discard his existence devoid of primitive impulses. In his essay “Morality and the Novel” Lawrence argues that struggle and pain are part of the process and are necessary for the sacred relationship to flourish: Each time we strive to a new relation, with anyone or anything, it is bound to hurt somewhat. Because it means the struggle with and the displacing of old connexions, and this is never pleasant. [...] Each must be true to himself, herself, his own manhood, her own womanhood, and let the relationship work out of itself” (174).
26 In spite of his pain and terror, Fergusson senses Mabel’s own awakening as he looks at, then touches her “wild, bare, animal shoulders” (148). Her shoulders which are exposed despite the blanket she is wrapped in reveal the primitive vitalistic self previously alluded to through her “animal pride” (143). Fergusson, who resuscitated her by the pond, is being rescued in turn as he feels “she had the life of his body in her hands, and he could not extricate himself. Or perhaps he did not want to” (148). Thus as McCabe comments, the action swings from the world of death to life, from the world of the daily self controlled by the will to the essential self controlled by desire, and climaxes in an ever-adjusting balance between the worlds of the lovers, each separate and other, who touch and draw apart. (68)
27 The relationship calls upon what Lawrence acknowledges as the deep centers of the self combined with the ideas of duality and balance between the sexes. In Women in Love, Birkin articulates this belief whereby male and female are together and apart, “two single equal stars in balanced conjunction” (151). While love fosters self-fulfilment, the bonding process takes place in a newly mapped out temenos which harbors the sacred primeval connections that man and woman had lost. On the level of the narrative, this space is shaped thanks to the tensions between the conventional pastoral mode and its modernist rewriting conveyed through disruptions, parody, irony, and at times an anti- pastoral vein. Therefore, the fashioning of a borderland also heralds a return to an idyllic primitive state where the unspoiled spontaneity of life is retrieved. It is nevertheless a “return in difference, not a repetition in identity” (Barthes 218) for it
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introduces a new version of the pastoral where stability is precarious though in a salutary way. Indeed, according to Lawrence, stability stifles the dynamic vital centers of man and woman while precariousness guarantees a constant search for balance; it ensures a dynamic relationship. Again in Women in Love, Birkin explains, “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other – for ever. But it is not selfless – it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity – like a star balanced with another star” (152). Thus, the transgression of narrative norms is the writer’s means to unsettle constraining stability and to find new modes of meaning.
28 The open ending of the short story is similarly riddled with precarious meanings. It introduces a sense of promise, nevertheless it is the promise of redemption from a former torpid state through the coming together of a man and woman in love. The story seems to be conclusive for the characters are granted self-revelation and fulfilment, however the down-to-earth realities that the dialogue foregrounds at the end still convey both Mabel’s and Fergusson’s struggle, so the reader remains unresolved as to his conclusions. “And my hair smells so horrible. [...] And I’m so awful, I’m so awful,” Mabel cries out. To which he answers “with that terrible intonation which frightened her almost more than her horror lest he should not want her” (152). The end is only a beginning for them.
***
29 Taking a firm stance against traditional forms of writing, Lawrence believed that “destruction is part of creation” (Kangaroo 150). Accordingly in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” his formal experiments which include shifts in point of view, parody and irony all point to a resolutely subversive approach to writing which enables him to convey his modernist vision of a changing world.
30 The short story as a genre lends itself to the narration of the fragment of a life positioned at a moment of crisis. As we have seen, the lack of framing of “The Horse- Dealer’s Daughter” significantly conjures up a “pre-text” telling of happier circumstances before the crisis. This pre-text pertaining to the pastoral mode “bring[s] a number of assumptions into the mind of the reader” (Gifford 5) that the modernist narrative experiments will unsettle. Thus, the ongoing transgression of borders that the short story features undermines the conventional pastoral in order to find new meanings so as to convey the ineffable experience of redemption through love and desire. The original title “The Miracle” heralded an epiphanic dénouement from the start; thanks to the assumptions brought up by profession and kinship mentioned in the present title, the reader’s expectations are reined in before being raised again when boundaries are blurred and redefined in order to map out a sacred territory where an authentic relationship between man and woman can flourish according to the Lawrentian ideal.
31 The “spareness” of the short story which characterizes the genre (Tibi 45) amplifies the tensions between the conventional and the subversive. Owing to this dialectic mode of writing, a new version of the pastoral is articulated where characters can experience a vital, primeval relationship while the short story itself is turned into a dynamic open space.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays in Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Print.
Crabbe, George. The Village: A Poem, in Two Books. London: J. Dodsley, 1783. Print.
Delany, Paul. “Lawrence and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit.” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Keith Cushman and Michael Squires. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 77-88. Print.
Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Ford, George H. Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D.H. Lawrence. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1965. Print.
Kearney, Martin. The Major Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence: A Handbook. New York: Garland, 1998. Print.
Kristéva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia U P, 1991. Print.
Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1980. Print.
---. “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter.” England, My England and Other Stories. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1990. 137-52. Print.
---. Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1994. Print.
---. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1993. Print.
---. “Morality and the Novel.” Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1985. 169-76. Print.
---. “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside.” Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2004. 285-294. Print.
---. The Rainbow. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Print.
---. St Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2002. Print.
---. Women in Love. Eds. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasley. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1987. Print.
McCabe, Thomas H. “Rhythm as Form in Lawrence: ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” PMLA. 87.1 (1972): 64-68. JSTOR. Web. 15 April 2015.
Meyers, Jeffrey. “D. H. Lawrence and Tradition: ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’.” Studies In Short Fiction. 26.3 (1989): 346-51. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 15 April 2015.
Reid, Susan. “Idylls of Masculinity: D. H. Lawrence’s Subversive Pastoral.” New Versions of Pastoral: Post-romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition. Eds. David James and Philip Tew. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 2009. 95-106. Print.
Reynier, Christine. Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Rohman, Carrie. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York: Columbia U P, 2009. Print.
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Tibi, Pierre. “La Nouvelle: Essai de Compréhension d’un Genre.” Cahiers de l’Université de Perpignan 18 (1995): 9-78. Print.
Wallace, Elizabeth. “The Circling Hawk: Philosophy of Knowledge in Polanyi and Lawrence.” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Keith Cushman and Michael Squires. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 103-20. Print.
NOTES
1. My translation. The original reads, “[...La crise] est située à la jointure de deux segments temporels – les circonstances qui y conduisent, les conséquences qui, éventuellement, en découlent” (51).
AUTHORS
SHIRLEY BRICOUT Shirley Bricout is a member of the post-doctoral research group based at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) devoted to British Literature and Art. The translation into English of her first book was released in 2015 under the title Politics and the Bible in D. H. Lawrence's Leadership Novels at the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. It is honored with a foreword by Keith Cushman. She has contributed articles and book reviews to Les Etudes Lawrenciennes (Paris X), Les Etudes britanniques contemporaines (Montpellier 3) and to The Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (Nottingham, UK).
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A Reluctant Awakening: Transgression and the Sleeping Beauty Motif in D.H. Lawrence's "The Thimble"
Maria Casado Villanueva
1 Lawrence’s short stories reflect his intricate (and ever-evolving) ideas on interpersonal relationships and on the tensions between man, society and nature.1 Often, the treatment of such conflicts relies on the evocation of fairy tale plots and characters, as well as elements of the fantastic. The use of mythical and fairy tale patterns becomes consistent from the publication of England my England in 1922 onwards (Cushman 30) and culminates in his later narratives in what has been termed Lawrence’s “fabular style” (Padhi 1985). Part of Lawrence’s literary ethos is to oppose the effects of a tendency towards idealistic romanticism which hinders the individual’s search for an authentic experience. Thus, fairy tale resonances are often accompanied by the subversion of well-known plots and symbolism through parody or transformation.
2 An early example of this practice can be found in the short story “The Thimble” (1917), written in 1915 and published in The Seven Arts two years later. Lawrence would eventually rework it into the novella The Ladybird (1923), more sophisticated both in terms of plot and character development, as well as in the philosophical concepts inscribed in it. The shorter version was considered of little value by the author himself and, for a long time, it was left out of all anthologies and mostly ignored even by scholars who have specialised in Lawrence’s short narratives (see Widmer and Thornton).2
3 This article is an attempt to restate the value of “The Thimble” and approaches the story as illustrative of different patterns of transgression recurrent in Lawrence’s work. First of all the story exemplifies some of the ways Lawrence’s narratives challenge the conventions of literary traditions by combining features of the modernist short story with elements of the fairy tale, since it is my view that “The Thimble” can be read as both appropriating and subverting plotlines and imagery reminiscent of “Sleeping
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Beauty” and other Western fairy tales. It also analyses the suitability of this practice for articulating Lawrence’s idea that transgression into the intimate space of the Other is essential to reach self-regeneration, an idea which is also recurrent in many of his later narratives. Indeed, as we shall see, in “Sleeping Beauty” curiosity and subsequent disobedience are necessary to trigger change; in “The Thimble,” Mrs. Hepburn’s fears overpower this curiosity for the Other and she is reluctant to transcend her narcissistic sense of self-sufficiency. The thimble emerges as a central symbol of her attempts to protect herself from any intrusion into the domain of her intimacy, intrusion which proves essential to grow into a life of sincere emotional commitment.
Lawrence’s transgressive uses of enchantment
4 “The Thimble” narrates the encounter of the Hepburns, a married couple reunited after a long separation during World War I. It describes Mrs. Hepburn anxiously waiting hours in her London apartment before her husband’s return after a ten-month absence with his face disfigured by a war injury. The story renders her evolution from a life governed by the cult of physical beauty to an acceptance of the inconsistencies and shadows of the human condition.3 This process evokes motifs of the fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty” while also possessing undertones of “Beauty and the Beast.” The extent to which fairy tale subtexts were consciously used in “The Thimble” is difficult to determine; however, the themes of sleep and awakening emerge as articulating allegories for the denouement of the story, and the thimble seems to create a contrast with the motif of the pricked finger of “Sleeping Beauty.”
5 It has recently been argued that the story can be read as an “anti-romance” which satirizes the convention of romance literature while, to a certain extent, also articulating the wartime ideology embraced by the genre (Iwai par. 9). A similar ambivalence applies to its relation with the fairy tale. The deployment of fairy tale structures and symbolism combines with a critical attitude towards some of the values that inform these narratives. The process of fairy tale literarization has often emphasized a conservative vision of romance and obscured mythical and social meanings ingrained in older versions of the narratives (Warner 169). Resulting from these embellishing transformations, many tales offer a conformist, cliché-ridden understanding of human relations which is at odds with Lawrence’s complex appraisal of what the union of men and women should be. At the time of writing “The Thimble,” Lawrence seems to endorse the idea of an equalized commitment: the perfect union between man and woman requires mutual transgression into the other’s soul.
6 Nevertheless, since many of Lawrence’s narratives are accounts of epiphanic awakenings rendered through an allegorical enactment of the myth of resurrection, the plot and imagery of “Sleeping Beauty” become central in a number of them. Through this motif, Lawrence also explores those dimensions of transgression which bring about individual and social change. Often, characters need to transcend their own fears and limitations or the social conventions that suffocate them in order to free themselves. Like in “The Thimble,” the encounter with the other, namely the other sex, always emerges as a necessary catalyst for such a change. Paralyzed characters, often described as “spellbound,” can only be freed through spiritual communion with that other. In some cases, however, this development is thwarted, suspended or leads to
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ambiguous resolutions where the ideas of love and regeneration are closely linked to notions of suffering and death.
7 In “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” (1922), for example, only love can lead Dr. Fergusson out of the dream-like state of aboulia that weighs him down. The process requires of him to step into deadly waters to be reborn and accept the darker dimensions of human nature. “The Princess” has also been regarded as a parodic refashioning of “Sleeping Beauty” exemplifying the protagonist’s inability to overcome her strait-laced upbringing and awaken to sexual desire.4 The motif is also deployed with great irony in “The Lovely Lady,” where Cecilia transgresses the limits of the ethical to rescue her sleepy cousin from his wicked mother’s spell-like influence. It also recurs in longer narratives: already in his 1912 novel The Trespasser, the character Helena is referred to as one of those “dreaming women” whose desire “was accomplished by a real kiss” (23). The novella St. Mawr (1925) has been analysed as illustrative of “The Sleeping Beauty example apologue” (Trebisz 59-61) and “an inversion of the tale of the enchanted princess who awakens only with the kiss of a prince” (Barker 76). Similarly, the basic structure of The Fox (1922) has been read as a re-elaboration of the same tale (Wolkenfeld 375).
8 “Sleeping Beauty” is a narrative of ancient origins mostly known through the literary versions of Charles Perrault (1697) and the Brothers Grimm (1812-15), and Lawrence probably became familiar with it through his childhood readings (Farr 195).5 In the most popular accounts of the tale, a princess, not heeding her parents’ advice, pricks her finger with a distaff and sleeps a one hundred-year sleep until Prince Charming wakes her up with a kiss or, in Perrault’s chaste version, with his sole presence. Although the linearity of “Sleeping Beauty’s” basic plot is distorted and its symbolism transformed in “The Thimble,” a number of elements in Lawrence’s story still recall this well-known tale. “Sleeping Beauty” has been regarded, among other things, as the story of an “interruption in time” (Goldberg 476), a long period of slumber which marks a transformative transition in the protagonist’s life. In “The Thimble,” a period of lethargy is also presented as a turning point in the narrative and the descriptions (sometimes ironic) of this interval abound in fairy tale imagery. During the months previous to the encounter with her husband, Mrs. Hepburn was physically immobile and confined to bed since she fell seriously ill with pneumonia. She spent her illness and convalescence in her bedroom in a castle in Scotland far from the social turmoil of her London life and had “thought, thought very much.” This period of introspection “lay between her and her previous life like a dark night, like a great separation” (“The Thimble” 191).
9 The image of the lady lying in the room of a remote castle in the far north of the country resonates with fairy tale allusions and the distance and isolation evoke the briar-thicket which surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s palace during her century-long seclusion. Psychoanalytic readings of this fairy tale associate the protagonist’s slumber with a phase of introversion necessary for personal growth. Indeed, Bruno Bettelheim interprets this period as a seemingly passive “turning inward” essential for psychological development. The intensity of the “mental processes” taking place at this stage deprives the person of the energy required for external action, and gives the false impression of them “sleeping [their] life away” (225).
10 This also seems to be the case for Mrs. Hepburn. The insights gained during her retreat make her aware of the meaninglessness of her previous life. The catalyst for such
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realization is the war breaking out and, as an epitome of the destruction that it brings about, the wound which results in the disfiguration of her husband’s face. Mrs. Hepburn had married him shortly before he was called up for duty, fascinated by his appearance and distant allure, but the shallowness of their relationship is emphasized by the fact that she still thinks about him as Mr. Hepburn.
11 Her first name is never mentioned either and social roles emerge as essential for her self-perception. Her life has the quality of a ritualized performance: “she knew it was expected of her that she should create an impression of modern beauty” and she shows a growing dissatisfaction with a part which “at the bottom […] bored her” (“The Thimble” 192). A sense of amusement is derived from looking at her own life in terms of fairy tale romance but she regards the role she plays with cynical distance. Normally “She was always humorously ironical when she found herself in these romantic situations” (192). Looking at her own reflection while being helped to get dressed for her husband, she painfully realizes how unprepared she is for the part she will need to play this time. The reality of war, the disfiguring accident and her own illness have shattered the fragile balance of her illusory existence, allowing a glimpse into the frightening unknown: Suddenly she realized that she knew nothing of the man she had married, he knew nothing of her. What she had of him, vividly, was the visual image. She could see him, the whole of him, in her mind’s eye. She could remember him with peculiar distinctness, as if the whole of his body were lit up by an intense light, and the image fixed on her mind. But he was an impression, only a vivid impression. What her own impression was, she knew most vividly. But what he was himself: the very thought startled her, it was like looking into a perilous darkness. All that she knew of him was her own affair, purely personal to her, a subjective impression. But there must be a man, another being, somewhere in the darkness which she had never broached. (191, emphasis in the original)
12 Unable to “conjure up” again the glossy memory of her husband, Mrs. Hepburn’s gained awareness of the superficiality of her remembrances is described in terms which remind the reader of a broken spell: she has a “visual image […] fixed on her mind,” nothing but a “subjective impression.” The immobile representation of Mr. Hepburn echoes the characters of Sleeping Beauty’s entourage, frozen in time with their princess. Thus, the mere notion of a real person emerging in all his darkness is terrifying and annihilating for, like a mirror cracking in front of her, it is “something that would annul her own image of herself” (191). She had built that image upon an illusion of complete independence from everything and everyone, of “utter self- responsibility” (191) which had shielded her from true emotional commitment like an enchantment. Mrs. Hepburn’s considerations at this point are a prelude to the awakening which must ensue from the imminent encounter: she will have to transgress the boundaries of her sense of restrained self-sufficiency and be prepared to let her husband trespass on her well-kept private domain.
13 Significantly, Vladimir Propp, in his seminal structuralist analysis of folk tales, mentions transgression (or violation) as a function working as a catalyst for plot development (27-28). The effects of transgression in these narratives are paradoxical: On the one hand, they may have a “normative function” when resulting in “punishment and rehabilitation,” thus asserting social conventions and practices. On the other hand, transgression may also lead to social transformation and the recognition of alternative “modes of behavior” (Stephens 985).
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14 In fairy tales, we find many instances of female characters facing socially enforced prohibitions aimed at curtailing their sexuality at the inception of womanhood, as is the case of “Sleeping Beauty,” where the interdiction is related to the motif of the Forbidden Chamber, present in those tales where a female protagonist is allowed to explore her surroundings freely with the exception of a specifically prohibited room. This motif is evidence of the ambivalent nature of transgression: such proscription is inexorably not respected and often brings about a form of misfortune combined with some frightful or awe-inspiring revelation. Related to the notions of “curiosity, cunning and confinement,” the forbidden room “represents the symbolic locus of knowledge that threatens to destabilize authority. This knowledge is often sexual in nature, and always transgressive” (Conrad 371).
15 Both in Perrault and the Grimms’ versions of “Sleeping Beauty,” the protagonist felt the urge to explore an unknown wing of the castle despite her parents’ attempts to protect her, and the search leads her to prick her finger with the distaff. Such development towards sexual knowledge is interrupted by the curse which keeps her asleep, and reinitiated with the intrusion of another character in the domain of the princess’s intimacy, the prince who kisses her.
16 In “The Thimble,” transgression is also key to the characters’ personal development. Mrs. Hepburn, aware of the fears which paralyze her, knows she will have to step beyond the limits of her conventional existence, face her disfigured husband, dare to explore her intimate feelings towards him, and let him step into her life even if this destroys her deceptive impression of independence. However, in this story, the confinement preceded the search, and Mrs. Hepburn’s pursuit in the anxious minutes before the encounter, although redolent of sexual meaning, possesses radically different connotations, as we shall see. While she sits apprehensively on the sofa “nervously, yet quite calm, almost static” and “in a sort of after death” (“The Thimble” 93-4), her fingers unconsciously dig between the cushions.
17 Bettelheim underlines how Sleeping Beauty’s search, her expedition into the unknown, is rich in “Freudian symbolism” (Bettelheim 232). In the Brothers Grimm’s version, the girl, “after climbing up a narrow, winding staircase in the tower, [...] ended up in front of a little door with a rusty old key in its lock. As she turned the key, the door burst open to reveal a tiny little room, in which an old woman was sitting with her spindle, busily spinning flax” (Grimm 163). The vertical movement up the stairs towards the tower, the key penetrating the keyhole and the distaff pricking the flesh all have phallic associations. The sexual coming of age and the loss of virginity are both suggested by the bleeding.
18 Lawrence’s description of Mrs. Hepburn’s actions while waiting for her husband, far from evoking sexual intercourse, points at female sexual self-exploration during her search: Her hands began to move slowly backwards and forwards on the sofa bed, slowly, as if the friction of the silk gave her some ease […] her right hand came to the end of the sofa and pressed a little into the crack, the meeting between the arm and the sofa bed. Her long white fingers pressed into the fissure, pressed and entered rhythmically, pressed and pressed further and further into the tight depths of the fissure, between the silken, firm upholstery of the old sofa, whilst her mind was in a trance of suspense (“The Thimble” 194).
19 Abbie Garrington’s study on touch and the tactile in modernism conceives the haptic as a typically modernist mode of perception, and one which allows to articulate
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tangentially implicit meanings. Specifically, she reads Lawrence’s representation of touch as a “corrective to what the author views as a specious valorisation of the visual sense” (156). In the contact between skin and cloth (and later the metal of the thimble she discovers), Mrs. Hepburn seems to find a reassuring fastness at a moment when her impressions of reality, the aforementioned “visual image[s]” of her mind, are crumbling. Nevertheless, this substitute of human contact does nothing but sink her again into spiritual slumber. The development of the Sleeping Beauty plot is thus subverted since this exploration represents a further retreat into dreamy contemplation.
20 In this search, the symbolism of “Sleeping Beauty” is reversed, the upward movement being replaced by Mrs. Hepburn’s downward dive into the depths of the sofa. The crack in the sofa, far from being phallic, is a symbol of the feminine. Although masturbation, as a form of rebellion against a socially imposed heterosexual-reproductive regime, could be interpreted as transgressive, in this context it appears to be portrayed as a desperate attempt on the part of the protagonist to maintain her illusion of autonomy threatened by the arrival of her husband. Her sexual desire is outbound yet fruitless. This seems to be the view that Lawrence endorses in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), where this form of self-pleasure is deemed futile and even pernicious, in contrast with genuine intimate intercourse. “The great danger of masturbation lies in its merely exhaustive nature,” Lawrence writes. In absence of the reciprocal “give and take” involved in the sexual encounter, masturbation results only in “loss.” Energy is released but not returned, and the unchanged body remains “a corpse.” The heterosexual relationship may be mutually destructive, says Lawrence, but this outcome is preferable to the “null effect of masturbation” (119).
21 Bettelheim explains in similar terms the tendency to recoil from potentially harmful experiences as presented in “Sleeping Beauty”: “Narcissistic withdrawal is a tempting reaction”; “but, the story warns, it leads to a dangerous, deathlike existence” if assumed as a form of escapism. This is the symbolic warning he reads behind the sleeping spell cast over everyone surrounding the princess, for “the world becomes alive only to the person who herself awakens to it” (234).
22 What Mrs. Hepburn encounters at the end of her descent is a thimble, an object conceived of precisely to shield the finger from being pricked by a needle. The phallic symbolism of the distaff in “Sleeping Beauty” is substituted by the feminine concavity of the object in question. Lawrence’s condemnation of this narcissistic attitude is further developed through the scornful treatment of Mrs. Hepburn’s indulging reverie: through the contemplation of the thimble, Mrs. Hepburn falls deeper in a dream of decadent sentimentalism. Once again, in the same way she fell in love with her husband, she is dashed by the object’s appearance, even if its authenticity is dubious. The thimble, an obvious symbol of “separation-producing superficiality” (Steven 244), further represents the convention of romantic love, within which Mrs. Hepburn relapses to avoid facing a harsher but genuine experience. Thus, she fantasizes about the aristocratic “bygone woman” who had worn the thimble and, on seeing the old date engraved on it, she “trembled with the thought of [an] old romance” (“The Thimble” 195).
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Into the unknown and beyond mortality
23 In “The Thimble,” the couple’s encounter progresses from awkward small talk to physical contact and is described in terms of an evolution from slumber to awakening. In line with the vindication of physicality that Garrington’s study foregrounded, the act of joining hands (like the kiss in “Sleeping Beauty”) has a regenerative power, and the scene culminates with an image of revival.
24 Initially, the presence of Mr. Hepburn accentuates his wife’s existential disorientation and she keeps burnishing the thimble as if attempting to invoke the genie of an idealized past. At the sight of his wound, she loses grip on reality. She becomes aware of the conventionality of language itself, which emerges as distorted, “disfigured” like the mouth that produces it, and as a precarious substitute of real experience (“The Thimble” 196). A torpor envelops her like a placenta, an image coherent with her previous attempts to journey back into the womb. Simultaneously, she feels spurred by the need to be, like a baby, delivered into the world: “All she was, was purely accidental. […] She was sick in the thin, transparent membrane of her sleep, her overlying dream-consciousness, something actual but too unreal.” (195-6).
25 Unlike Prince Charming, Mr. Hepburn also needs to be rescued, and he demands of his wife to get over her trance-like state. Awakening ensues: “She lowered her eyelids, and for a second she sat erect like a mask, with closed eyes, whilst a spasm of pure unconsciousness passed over her. It departed again, and she opened her eyes. She was awake” (197). Bettelheim explains that in “Sleeping Beauty” “the spell of narcissism” is broken by the kiss, which awakens the “undeveloped womanhood” of the princess. The maiden needs to become a woman for life to continue (234). Similarly, Mr. Hepburn states that both he and his wife are “helpless babies” who should respectively grow into a “man” and a “woman” (“The Thimble” 199) but the thimble still stands in the way of their development as a symbol of restrictive conventionality. Mrs. Hepburn agrees to hand it to her husband when he asks for it in a scene sarcastically evocative of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). Wendy, awkwardly gives Peter a thimble instead of a kiss when she realizes that he, the eternal child, is not ready to comprehend the meaning of love: “Surely you know what a kiss is?” [Wendy] asked, aghast. “I shall know when you give it to me,” [Peter] replied stiffly, and not to hurt his feeling she gave him a thimble. (32)
26 Mr. Hepburn will finally throw the thimble through the window, a gesture which signals his ultimate refusal to submit to an existence based on mere convention.
27 The scene of the encounter between beautiful Mrs. Hepburn and her deformed husband also echoes the literary fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” published by Mme Leprince Beaumont in 1756. Significantly, Maria Tatar has reflected on the filmic versions of this tale produced after World War II in these terms: “[it] became a kind of foundational story, a point of departure for thinking about courtship and romance for a generation healing itself from the wounds of war” (90). “Beauty and the Beast” provided a darker version of Prince Charming and articulated female fear in face of the unknown sexual other at a time when the love and marriage models offered by other classical fairy tales were no longer valid. This happened in a context when, like in “The Thimble,” marital crises were common, women had often married men they hardly knew, and many returned soldiers were transformed by the trauma of their experiences.
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28 Furthermore, the personal drama playing against the backdrop of World War I enlarges “The Thimble’s” significance. Jae-Kyung Koh’s study on Lawrence and the war highlights the author’s capacity to put “the colossal horror of the war” into a wider and more constructive context. He regards it as an unavoidable part of an infinite “cycle of destruction and creation” necessary for cultural and individual evolution (18). Mr. Hepburn’s gained awareness of mortality places him in a liminal realm between life and death. He is both Beast and Prince Charming, embodying simultaneously the obscure dimension of the human condition and the power of restoring life. Disfigured, he has come back from the dead, transgressing another forbidden threshold, in search of the resurrecting power of human love to encourage his wife to see beyond appearances. Mr. Hepburn returns from his near-to-death experience with a gained knowledge about the emotional vulnerability of the human condition which needs to be acknowledged, and the strength to awaken to a new life is obtained through total commitment to the other.
29 “Sleeping Beauty” works as a productive subtext in Lawrence’s narratives probably because the tale’s mythic and utopian message resonates more clearly, even in its literarily stylised and transformed versions, than in other tales similarly altered.6 Thus, although many critics acknowledge that a patriarchal discourse informs the most popular versions of the tale for they condemn female curiosity and assign women a passive role, Jack Zipes also states that: “Sleeping Beauty” is not only about female and male stereotypes and male hegemony; it is also about death, our fear of death, and our wish for immortality. Sleeping Beauty is resurrected. She triumphs over death. As the eternal brier rose, she rises from the dead to love and to fulfil her desires. The rising from the dead is an uprising, an attack on the borders of mortality. After her uprising, Sleeping Beauty will know how to avoid danger and death […]. Once awakened, Sleeping Beauty is the knowing one, and we know too. (215, emphasis mine)
30 The hopeful message of “The Thimble” is toned down by Mrs. Hepburn’s tentative attitude, by the earlier ironical treatment of this character and by the story’s open- endedness which is at odds with the characteristic happy ending of fairy tales. Whether the Hepburns truly manage to overcome the barriers that separate them from each other remains unclear, but the references to “Sleeping Beauty” highlight the author’s belief in the possibility of individual resurrection.
The Bounded Text Outbound: Challenging Genre Conventions7
31 It has been aptly argued that the transformation of “The Thimble” into the longer and more complex novella The Ladybird entailed a loss of the sense of personal intimacy contained in the brief story. The latter shows a more “cerebral” and “philosophic” approach to the topics discussed in a way which attempts to “universalize, and mythologize, the experience of ‘coming through’ to authentic life” (Steven 243, 252). Nevertheless, it seems also true that reading “The Thimble” as a text which interacts with the narrative of “Sleeping Beauty,” with its mythic resonances, opens it up to a more universal meaning without it losing that impression of intimacy. The re- elaborated The Ladybird is saturated with esoteric allusions and assimilated ideas from Germanic literature and philosophy (Scott 161) which obscure the references to the
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fairy tale and its underlying plot. The intertextual bond, which is more overt in “The Thimble,” serves the similar purpose of expanding the meaning of the text beyond the limits of realism. This is a practice which places this and many other short stories by Lawrence in an unusual position in the context of modernism.
32 The modernist short story has been regarded as a response to the experience of modernity reflecting an appraisal of the self as “fragmented” and “dehumanized” (Head 8). These narratives tend to assert individual conscience and reflect its struggles to fit in a world in quick and perpetual movement. “The Thimble” shows a characteristically modernist preference to replace external action by the process of the psyche, and its plot revolves around an inner moment of crisis, which James Joyce termed “Epiphany” (211). Seen in this light, the modernist short story seems to share very little with the fairy tale, apart from its limited extension. Nevertheless, short story critics have also highlighted the intrinsic ability of short fiction to evoke its earliest origins, found in folk accounts and legends, as well as to renew seemingly basic literary material (Shaw vii, March-Russell). It has also been argued that the use of fairy tales by modernist authors goes beyond an experimental combination of genres since it can be seen as part of the active appropriation of literary tradition inherent in the modernist project (Martin 7).
33 D. H. Lawrence skilfully exploits this evocative quality of the short story in his fiction and thus, what seem to be “slice of life” modernist stories driven by an interest in psychological inquiry could be read as part of a larger project to create narratives apt to encompass the experience of the modern individual on a wider scale. At a moment when many Western fairy tales had become too mingled with the conventions of popular romance, Lawrence attempts to restore their value and relevance for his contemporaries, and “The Thimble” emerges as an early and illustrative instance of this practice.
Conclusion
34 “The Thimble” exemplifies how fairy tale references enrich the meaning of Lawrence’s stories by virtue of their evocative symbolism and the mythical meanings they encode. For Lawrence, fairy tales provide underlying archetypal plots which endow his realistic rendering of modern experience with a universal dimension. “The Thimble” can be interpreted as preluding Lawrence’s later directions towards more obvious uses of myth while articulating the author’s frame of mind without the need to resort to explicit philosophical references. Through the intertextual dialogue it establishes with “Sleeping Beauty,” this story illustrates Lawrence’s conviction that the transgression of personal and socially established boundaries is key to inner and communal development and, even if the story is inconclusive, the encounter of the sexes is presented as a transcendental experience which brings about physical and spiritual regeneration.
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Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions. London: Macmillam, 1985. Print.
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---. Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. 1921/1922. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Print.
---. The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird. Ed. Dieter Mehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.
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MacDonald, Robert H. “Images of Negative Union: The Symbolic World of DHL’s ‘The Princess’.” Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979): 269-93. Print.
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Matthews, Brander. The Philosophy of the Short Story. New York: Longmans & Green, 1901. Print.
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Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blond. On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. London: Chatto and Windus, 1994. Print.
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NOTES
1. This article is based on research made for my doctoral thesis “Enchanting and Disenchanted Narratives: Fairy Tales and Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence” at the University of Santiago de Compostela. 2. Lawrence would write to his bibliographer, Edward McDonald: “There was a first (not very good) story, called ‘The Thimble,’ appeared in some out of the way American magazine —can’t remember its name—would rather like ‘The Thimble’ to disappear into oblivion —but confess to it” (Letters 5:104). 3. The female protagonist of “The Thimble” was conceived as a “character sketch” of his friend and writer Cynthia Asquith (Scott 1978, Steven 1986, Harris 1984), who went through a similar experience when her husband Herbert Beb Asquith returned from the war with a wounded face. Peter Balbert, in his exploration of the network of biographical references which inform Lawrence’s The Ladybird, points at the fact that Lady Asquith is often portrayed as the “prototypical dreaming and beautiful woman, mired in an unfulfilling and disturbingly ‘modern’ sex life that receives Lawrence’s full measure of scorn for its essential lack of passion” (Balbert 128). This is also true for the fictionalized Mrs. Hepburn. Nevertheless, whereas Cynthia “tolerantly accept[ed]” her portrayal in “The Thimble,” she refused to recognize herself in the main character of The Ladybird, where sexual references become more explicit and the plot revolves around the extramarital romance between Daphne and Count Psanek (129). 4. See Vickery, Cowan and MacDonald. 5. In a letter to Blanche Jennings Lawrence refers to Jacob Grimm as a “pal of [his]” (Collected Letters 53). 6. The role that Mr. Hepburn requires of his wife is also in consonance with the mythic substratum of “Beauty and the Beast,” concealed in the better known literary and filmic accounts. Christina Bacchilega underlines Beauty’s virtue and determination as the qualities which allow her to change the beast into a person: “Ancient and clearly related to our ability to produce new life, this belief in women’s transformative power has been reduced within patriarchal ideology to the popular ‘kiss a frog’ motif,” she writes (78). 7. I have used here Julia Kristeva’s term “the bounded text,” which is also the title of her seminal 1966 article on intertextuality.
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ABSTRACTS
Cette étude prend pour objet l’une des nouvelles de Lawrence les moins présentes dans les anthologies, “The Thimble” (1915), qui illustre différents schémas de transgression récurrents dans l’ensemble de son œuvre. En envisageant la nouvelle en tant que réécriture du conte de fée classique de « la Belle au Bois Dormant, » un motif fréquent dans les œuvres postérieures, notre approche souligne les mérites de cette nouvelle souvent réduite par les critiques et par l’auteur lui-même au rang d’ébauche de la nouvelle plus tardive The Ladybird. S’appuyant sur des interprétations psychanalytiques et mythologiques du conte de fée, cet article examine comment le motif de la Belle au Bois Dormant se déploie dès lors dans “The Thimble” afin de symboliser une évolution du sommeil spirituel vers une prise de conscience existentielle qui s’énonce dans plusieurs récits lawrenciens postérieurs. De ce point de vue, la notion de transgression, l’une des fonctions du conte identifiées par Vladimir Propp dans son ouvrage fondateur sur les contes folkloriques (1928), se révèle également cruciale au niveau de la progression de l’intrigue dans la nouvelle de Lawrence. Dans « la Belle au Bois Dormant, » la curiosité et la désobéissance qui en découle sont nécessaires pour qu’un changement s’opère ; dans “The Thimble,” Mrs Hepburn inverse une telle progression et se montre peu disposée à transcender son sens narcissique d’autosuffisance. Le dé à coudre émerge en tant que symbole primordial de ses efforts pour se protéger de toute intrusion de son intimité, intrusion qui se révèle essentielle pour vouer sa vie à un engagement émotionnel sincère. Enfin, l’étude explore comment, grâce au dialogue intertextuel établi avec « la Belle au Bois Dormant, » “The Thimble” transgresse les frontières du genre. Lawrence associe les caractéristiques de la nouvelle moderniste à la richesse symbolique du conte de fée conférant ainsi au récit une texture propre. Ainsi, “The Thimble” peut être lu en tant que conte de fée moderne qui répond à l’ambition mythopoétique de l’auteur de créer un corpus de récits archétypes pour le vingtième siècle.
AUTHORS
MARIA CASADO VILLANUEVA Maria Casado Villanueva is Associate Professor at the University College of South East Norway. Her research has focused on the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence, and the interplay between fairy tales and the modernist short story.
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Liminality: departing from sexual choices
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Transgression in The Fox
Jacqueline Gouirand-Rousselon
1 D. H. Lawrence had just finished Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious and rewritten a number of short stories when he “put a long tail” to The Fox, adding the two dreams, the killing of the fox and of Banford. These changes took place between December 1921 and February 1922. To The Fox and The Ladybird, The Captain’s Doll was added, the three novellas being collected in one book published in
1923. Their aesthetic quality may have been one of the reasons for publishing them in one volume. “So modern, so new, a new manner,” Lawrence wrote to Seltzer. The Fox is the longer and different version of a shorter tale written in November 1918 at Hermitage (Berkshire) and cut for magazine publication in The Dial (1919). At the end of the first version of the novella, Henry held both women in his power after his marriage to March.
2 In spite of the obvious differences in tone, atmosphere and social classes between these tales, the similarities are striking. All three are illustrations of what Lawrence called “Adventure in consciousness,” a double process of individuation and union with the source of all life, an adventure which will be doomed if the individual evolves only in the way of separation and isolation instead of cultivating the true consciousness, that of the deep and vital instincts. In Lawrence’s view, when the repressed has been incorporated into consciousness, the life-giving power of the phallus, which gives rise to the illumination of the “I” by the dark sun of the unconscious, must be restored. The function of the shaman is to restore that life-giving power of the phallus, the vital flow between the two separated poles of the woman’s psyche. The virile privilege assigned to shamanistic powers is almost universal. Henry (The Fox) as well as Count Dionys (The Ladybird) are intruders who bring about necessary disorder. They belong to another sphere of reality that Bataille defines as “the heterogeneous” and transgress the other order “the homogeneous.” Sexual transgression is therefore a means of empowerment according to Bataille’s definition of eroticism that he placed in the “heterogeneous” sphere. Eroticism is a force that takes us violently away from the world of well- organized objects and well-defined objectives, from the world of projects and of reason, allowing us to discover joy and pain much stronger than those experienced in day-to- day reality. Therefore, eroticism understood as a form of transgression unsettles the
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status quo. Each story of the collection is built on the repetition of a triangle, consisting of a woman who is spiritually and sexually hibernating, so to speak, and two other characters, one standing for civilization and the social order (Banford in The Fox) and the other, the guide or shaman, who is associated with a fetish. He initiates the quest for a sacred reality, unknown and inaccessible to reason, even hostile to reason. The relationship between the so-called shaman and the fetish is ambiguous, particularly in Henry’s case, since his complete identification with the fox gives the animal the status of a double fetish, which partly accounts for its being killed. In both cases – whether the thimble with a beetle in green stone at the top (The Ladybird) or the fox is concerned – the fetishes must be disposed of before the man can intervene. March, the central character of The Fox, is alienated in so far as her fixation on Banford prevents her from opening herself to desire, whose voice rises above the imposed and accepted blindness of convention. She waits for an awakening, a promise of fulfilment, a rebirth. D. H. Lawrence’s reflections when he was creating his hibernating heroines are encapsulated in his essay Fantasia of the Unconscious: We either love too much or impose our will too much, we are too spiritual or too sensual. This is not and cannot be any actual norm of human conduct. All depends, first, on the unknown inward need within the very nuclear centres of the individual himself, and secondly on his circumstances. (42, emphasis added)
3 The Fox is no virgin land to explore. Many interpretations of the text have been provided, from the most popular to the most revisionist ones. The attacks on this war novella have been as numerous as the critics’ commentaries and revaluations over the years. As will be shown, the murder of Banford, the utmost transgression – that of the biblical law “Thou shalt not kill” – probably explains why it is the only tale which has given rise to such literary controversy. At the same time, The Fox remains one of Lawrence’s finest stories because of the reader’s access to the innermost emotions and intensity of the experience although it is difficult to follow Lawrence’s celebrated piece of advice: “Don’t trust the artist, trust the tale.” The analysis of both the sexual and biblical transgressions as means to free the other might be a capital approach to the novella.
4 In his fiction, Lawrence primarily aims at recreating a pre-rational universe. In this respect, The Fox is an interesting example to consider. What he proposes is the restoration of balance between the sexes through reassertion of the male principle through which, according to him, flows the driving power of the life force, that most of the critics “have read as a call for male domination in sexual relationships” (Renner 265). In The Fox, as in other stories, what is at stake is the withering of sexuality in our culture, and Lawrence is bent on searching for the causes of this crisis and trying to find solutions via his fiction.
5 The sense of the sacred is always vivid and intense with regard to what concerns sexuality. In Mayoux’s terms, “sexuality is only redeemed if it is sacralised and it can only be so in a universe delivered to the sacred, in which personality is reintegrated.”1 According to Lawrence’s understanding of psychoanalysis, Freud associates sexuality and the sacred. Furthermore only transgression can be a means to have access to the sacred as Foucault asserts: Profanation in a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred, is this not more or less what we may call transgression? In that zone which our culture affords for our gestures and speech, transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a
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way of recomposing its empty form, its absence through which it becomes all the more scintillating. (30)
6 Lawrence firmly believed that in our civilization, the spontaneous consciousness of the universe is destroyed. A civilization whose main function is a deep malaise entailing the malaise of the individual confronted with a fundamental difficulty: that of accepting the other in his or her difference. The Fox is a striking illustration of this. In their quest – conscious or unconscious – for a fecund union, the main actors of this story only face failure, suffering and death. The imposition of power (male or female), the workings of the will, the driving force of eroticism and subversion generate hells of the characters’ own making.
7 Lawrence was certainly aware of the role women might play during the war but his realization of this fact did not prevent him from feeling that women had pursued their independence too far (Letters 2: 425). When Henry comes back to the farm, which should have been his at the end of the war (it used to be his grandfather’s), the place is occupied by two women, a couple with homosexual characteristics. He exclaims, “I thought my grandfather still lived here. I wonder if he is dead?” (The Fox 14). Henry seems to be here to take his revenge on independent women. Shortly after his arrival, he observes “There wants a man about the place,” which provokes Banford’s immediate reaction: “Take care what you say […] We consider ourselves quite efficient” (The Fox 17). Let us note the ambiguity of Henry’s declaration. He does not only allude to the control of the farm, but to the control of the sexual arena. It is obvious that the male rival sets in motion the main action of the story.
8 Banford runs the farm with March, her companion. She has an economic hold on March since she provided the money to buy the farm. Money is power and power is potency. Banford’s appropriation of the farm, which Henry should have inherited, had already heralded her appropriation of March. The unnatural couple March constitutes with Banford amounts to a break in the symbolic process since the girls have introduced sexual non-difference in the symbolic chain – it is a form of transgression of social norms. Indeed, unconsciously, Banford has created a closed world, completely isolated from the larger world of contemporary England. This utopian world is cut off from normal exchanges between men; this is a world in which money has lost its ordinary dimension of circulation and exchange. Money only retains the other dimension, that of an entity, of a treasure which helps the girls to survive (“They were living on their losses” 9). The degrading effect of Banford’s power parallels the decrease in the girls’ income. Their relationship – they probably came together out of pressing emotional needs – is thus altered. “They were apt to become a little irritable with one another,
tired by one another” (9). 9 March has chosen to be “the man about the place,” taking men’s responsibilities and dressing like a man most of the time. Banford is not only hemmed in by the fences and hedges of her property but by manners and conformity. She is the vestal taking care of their home, sticking to the woman’s role. She hates nature, she is afraid of intruders, tramps, “someone who could come prowling around” (12). At the beginning, she welcomes Henry but very soon resents the boy’s lower-class intrusion. One of them plays the part of the husband, the other that of the wife, probably an ambiguous “Oedipal camouflage” accounting for the oral masochism at work in the story.2 What is important as far as the couple is concerned is that difference is left out, the nature of their relationship being based on fusion which entails stagnation. Stagnation prevails in
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the girls’ world (see the name of the village pub: “The Swan”).3 An atmosphere of non- life pervades the farm: sterility prevails among the animals (the fowls suffered from strange illnesses and refused to lay eggs, the heifer could not give birth to her first calf, the fox was a demon). Since the war, the fox was threatening their enterprises and deeply disturbing their daily lives, a dangerous intruder that they had to get rid of. The Manichean frame presented by Lawrence is set up when the fox intrudes into their world.
10 Lawrence undoubtedly rediscovers certain mythologies in The Fox and by introducing the fox as a fetish or totem he restores vibrant animism. He is persuaded that “the primary way to get vitality in our existence is to absorb it from living creatures lower than ourselves” (Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine 359). The fox is pernicious and demonic (he is a transgressor in the way that “transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage,” Foucault 34). Foucault’s definition helps posit the fox as a fetish, a means to cross the line, to achieve a liminal position. Indeed, he threatens the girls’ undertakings; they try to get rid of the animal but the task is not easy. His function is subversive insofar as he threatens order but as this apparent order amounts to disorder, he is the vital link between the world of appearances and the world of “pristine consciousness,” curious, intelligent, free, beautiful, instinctive, associated with mysterious animal life; he careers with “a strange and fiery brush” in a mythic space (the wood). His organic relation to the cosmos makes him a messenger of mysteries. Moreover, he can be considered as an unconscious sex totem and probably a depository for man’s (or woman’s) external soul. In Chinese tales or legends, the role of the fox is to serve as a mirror to men’s thoughts, to reveal their most secret desires and to make them conscious of the responsibility of their actions, a second consciousness in a way (see Frazer). The fox becomes the totem animal for March, despite her pursuing him as a hunter.
11 March is the most ambiguous character in the story. Her ambiguity is hinted at, at the very beginning: she looks like a man but her face is “not a man’s face” (The Fox 8), she wears a cap but her hair is pushed under her cap; a physical ambivalence paralleled by an ambivalence of feelings playing a significant role in the dramatisation of the story. The symbolic meaning of her name (“March” in the sense of borderland) accounts for her ever being on the border between dream and reality, consciousness and absence of consciousness. Her state is revealed by phrases such as “so odd and absent in herself,” “half-watching, half musing. It was a constant state” (10) but most particularly, “It was a question whether she was there actually present or not.” Lawrence hints at her dissatisfaction, but at the same time, he suggests some obscurity inherent in her personality, her often being in the shade, “in a recess.” Her unconscious desire to remain “locked up” is revealed by her physiognomy: “Her mouth rather screwed up” (10), “she primmed up her mouth tighter and tighter” (15). She is an interesting example of resistance to the real world. Her crossed legs are a sign of her refusal of sex. Both women fear the life-force and recoil from the facts of life. Not only are intruders feared but all intrusion is outrage.
12 March’s indulgence in dreams reveals to what extent she experiences inner division. Indeed, she has to take refuge in a corner to escape temporarily from the inner turmoil she experiences otherwise. The text reads: “Hidden in the shadow of the corner she need not anymore be divided in herself, trying to keep up two planes of consciousness”
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(18). And when she goes to the woods, “it was a question whether she was there, actually conscious, present or not” (10). March’s inner division results in alienation. When she ventures into the mythic space of the wood, she is likely to meet the man of the woods, but she encounters the fox instead. Her first meeting with the fox becomes an inverted hunt. Before the encounter she is described as falling into a kind of daydream: “her inner mind took no notice of what she saw […] she was always lapsing into this odd rapt state” (10). In this mythic space, man or woman can “lapse back into darkness and unknowing.”4 This is how March feels when she pursues the fox. Her rational consciousness is suspended. She becomes “a strange soft vibration on the air, going forth unknown and unconscious, seeking a vibration of response.”5 When she is ready for the hunt, twilight surrounds her. She is herself in this twilight state “offered unwittingly to the rape that will surprise [her]” (Barthes 190): “She lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox. He was looking up at her. His chin pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. And he knew her. She was spell-bound” (The Fox 10).
13 The biblical meaning of knew establishes the knowledge as sexual. The meeting is essential for March to discover rebirth thanks to an alternative form of sexuality, or as Vasse puts it, “The event of the encounter always brings more or less the advent of the ‘subject’ of which the carnal bodily birth is a metaphor.”6
14 The discovery of the incarnate carnal self should then be achieved, for “the body locates a truth forever perverted by mind and culture” (Pease 139). The repetition of “knew” (The Fox 16) in the episode cannot be overlooked: “She knew he knew her.” An actual revelation, a possession of which she is not aware at once, takes place “her soul failed her […] She struggled, confusedly she came to herself.” It is the intrusion of fantasy in the totally new experience invading her life. When the fox looks at her, she feels herself exposed; her struggle corresponds to “her sexuality straining to emerge from latency into expression” (Renner 252).
15 March, who is closed to speech, will be penetrated by the demonic: “She was possessed by him […] she felt him invisibly master her spirit” (The Fox 11). In the fiery sunset of August, she has heard the call in the darkness and has experienced the inner vision of the fox which, once she has met him, triggers a hypnotic state, a kind of trance that “makes her heart beat to the fox, the fox” (11). Before the arrival of the actual male, Henry, March is attracted to the wood, unconsciously looking for the fox. Months later her female sympathy is revealed in her eyes: “so, she went with her great startled eyes glowing” (11). At the same time she is disturbed, feeling “discomfort and gloom in all her physique” (12). The encounter with the fox has given birth to her awareness of male sexuality even though she becomes aware of it in a deep primal sense. She becomes prey to a driving force, both dangerous and indispensable, as she has the feeling she is losing balance and sinking into that unknown, that surprising and fascinating state of erotic transgression. The minute Henry intrudes into the girl’s claustrophobic world, March “sat, staring at the fire” (13). All the signs of the expectancy of the birth of desire are present in the story as the erotic atmosphere builds up.
16 Henry appears at night and he is totally identified with the fox by March. “But to March he was the fox” (14). The earlier influence of the fox on March is immediately re- awakened “[…] already under the influence of his soft modulated voice, March stared at him spell-bound.” Importantly, Henry’s voice is first mentioned as attracting March, the voice being a paramount element of the sex-drive and described as an erogenous
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zone by Lacan. From now on, on the conscious level as well as on the unconscious, the images of the fox and the intruder coincide. (“Soft” connected with March’s sensations becomes a key word in the text.)
17 The association of the two (man and animal) in March’s unconscious is particularly important in March’s first dream. The text reads: That night March dreamed vividly. She dreamed she heard a singing outside […] suddenly she knew it was the fox singing. […] He seemed near, and she wanted to touch him. She stretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared. (20)
18 This is a typical Freudian dream, condensing the figures of the fox and Henry, the threat, embodied by both, and the possible object of desire. This dream is a disguised enactment of the sexual intercourse, the fox’s tail being phallic and the female mouth providing a metaphor for woman’s sex organ. The pain March feels in the dream is a displacement for the pleasure she expects to discover but cannot confess.7
19 March later tries to avoid the “taunting knowing sharp leap out of [Henry’s] eyes,” those keen eyes of his which seem to incorporate the very substance of her being, but she can’t avoid the caress of his voice which not only relaxes but generates jouissance: “She felt for a minute that she was lost—lost—lost. The word seemed to rock in her as if she were dying […] A swoon went over her as [Henry] concluded […] She seemed to be in his power” (25, emphasis added). Henry is the agent chosen by Lawrence who gradually achieves the virility required to dominate March. At the beginning he is called “the boy” or “youth” and is often compared to a puppy or a cub in quest of a home rather than a woman, but he soon becomes conscious of his male destiny: “It was a kind of darkness he knew he would enter finally” (53). The relationship predator/prey is established from the start; indeed Henry is described as “[a] huntsman in spirit” (24). Henry feels that he will have to catch her “as you catch a deer or a woodcock” (23). Is the idea of Henry’s omnipotence derived from Lawrence’s reading of James Frazer, especially the conception of the primitive hunter who mimes his action in his imagination that Lawrence staged when Henry kills the fox totem, conquers March’s soul and makes her submit to his will?
20 March’s heterosexual nature slumbering beneath the lesbian surface is released from its entombment by the insistent force of his desire for her. Yet March’s senses are actually aroused when she is confronted with the dead fox. The mystery of the other sex suddenly emerges (“incomprehensible,” “out of her range,” “wonderful”). Here are shown the workings of the unthinkable desires likened to “the great cosmic principle” of equilibrium, manifest between killer and killed, male and female, light and dark expounded on in Fantasia of the Unconscious.8 Sexual connotations make it clear that she unconsciously faces (and desires) penetration, a major sensual experience to which she has been given full emotional response, the revelation of radical otherness. March, who has gradually accepted the reality of her sex drives, refuses to bring them to light to exteriorise them, to provide them with a meaning, hence the abundant display of metaphors in the text. The novella seems to be built on a real cult of images; in fact, images tend to the economy of meaning, whereas words produce it, since in Stoltzfus’s terms, “Desire implicates the subject but it is language that names him” (44). That is
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why March, Henry and Banford do not speak at all, speak but little or improperly. That is why they fail to express their feelings.
21 Indeed, in spite of their gradual attraction and March’s adherence to the newly- discovered universe represented by Henry, both fail to express their inner turmoil as the conflict is intensified in the triangle, for Banford embarks on a battle of wills with Henry. It takes time for Banford to realize the danger of Henry’s presence because she is not able to detect the instinctive force of the male in him. It becomes impossible for March not to transgress the values established by Banford whose calls to order addressed to March become more and more numerous. When Henry tries to kiss March’s face, “Banford’s voice was heard calling fretfully, crossly from upstairs” (33). After the revelation of radical otherness in front of the dead fox, March withdraws again, under Banford’s influence. March’s constant oscillations from Banford to Henry and her change of attitude provoke the intrusion of hatred into “the triangle.” Violence is inevitably brought into play and carried to its climax. A subtle battle of wills takes place in the invisible. All compromise is excluded in the subversive climate created by the protagonists’ fear, lack of comprehension and intolerance.
22 When Henry, deeply frustrated by Banford’s insulting words and arguments against him (“‘I shouldn't expect you would [understand],’ said Banford, with that straying, mild tone of remoteness which made her words even more insulting” 35), is rejected from “the triangle,” some force pushes him out of the house. His killing the fox puts an end to a sort of fascination, a necessary catharsis in the dramatic conflict he is subjected to. Sacrificing the fox prevents Banford from being sacrificed at this stage of the story.
23 The recognition of the obstacle generates the necessary energy required to get rid of it. Henry is soon determined “to get the thorn out of his life” (59). The whole episode of the tree-felling is the episode of Banford’s death. She dies because she refuses to hear Henry’s warning, placing herself at the very place of her execution. She refuses to move because she cannot conceive that the phallus-tree might touch her. When she is given the alternative of speech, she answers by means of denial and derision: “‘Who, me, mind myself?’ she cried, her father’s jeering tone in her voice” (65). This tree is meant by Lawrence to be phallic in the common sense of the term. Though Henry would like her to disappear, Banford’s death is not, in fact, related to him but to the tree. It is not a personal force but an impersonal force which brings about her destruction. “Do you think you might hit me […]” “No, it’s just possible the tree might […]” (65) “I am afraid it’s killed her.” (66)
24 The male triumphs over the two females, one being destroyed, the other mastered. Henry has won. He is no longer obsessed by Banford’s possessive domination. It seems as if a “thorn was drawn out of his bowels” (66). This is what a “macho” reading of the scene might suggest. The imaginary phallus seems to be “everlasting.” Yet, the utmost transgression has taken place, that of taking a life. Henry has proved that he hunts as a killer, killing Banford with the same force of will that he exhibited with the fox, the two living creatures standing in his way. The murder enables him to transgress March’s female to female relationship with Banford and to establish a male to female one.
25 Henry wants to marry March, but for the amorous Henry, the discourse of the man in rut is substituted. Henry wants to dominate March, “to veil her woman’s spirits as Orientals veil the woman’s face” (69). In spite of their loving each other, Henry and
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March have to fight the war of the invisible line between union and division in their selves, whose singleness can only blossom when disparities are accepted.
26 The strain they experience deprives them of the opportunity to reach salvation. They are faced with “the awful mistake of happiness.” In Lawrence’s vision, as is revealed in most of his fiction, sexual transgression is often necessary because it leads to transfiguration for the couple (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, among other novels, is a striking example). The couple formed by March and Henry, in spite of a glimmer of hope manifested at the end of the story, fails to reach transfiguration. Doubt is cast in the last lines of the text: “And her eyelids drooped with the slow motion, sleep weighing them unconscious. But she pulled them open again to say: ‘yes I may’” answering Henry’s: “you’ll feel better once we get over the seas.” (71). Their fulfilment is delayed because they are under influence, dominated by all sorts of taboos which urge them to lavish on their surroundings some sectarianism as severe as the intolerance they inflict on themselves. Their difficulty to verbalize is another pitfall on their road to happiness as there is no love that goes without speech. The numerous repetitions of negative terms (“nothingness,” “a goal […] there was none,” “the failure was almost catastrophic,” “failure became a little more ghastly,” “bad to worse,” “the worse the failure,” “the horrible abyss of nothingness, “the bottomless pit” 68-69) present in the coda are not only a means for Lawrence to impregnate the reader with his critique of the spiritual ideal woman which makes it difficult for her to submit to man’s will. They become incantatory to express March’s reaching for happiness and her failure to achieve it since she confronts an abyss, a bottomless pit. What is at stake is her reaching for truth, the quest for the truth of the speaking subject. Thus the quest for her “true” self located within the unconscious sexual body is at the core of the story.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bachelard, Gaston. L’eau et les rêves. Paris: Joseph Corti, 1942. Print.
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London : Vintage, 2002. Print.
Bataille, George. “Erotisme.” Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. 10. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Print.
Bergler, Edmund. The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism. New York: Greene and Straton, 1949. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. New York: Cornel University Press, 1977. Print.
Frazer, James. Totemism and Exogamy. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1967. Print.
Lawrence, D.H. Complete Poems. Eds Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1964. Print.
---. Fantasia of the Unconscious. London: Heinemann 1923. Print.
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---. The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird. 1922. Ed. Dieter Mehl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Print.
---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, June 1913 – October 1916. Eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Print.
---. Phoenix. London: Heinemann, 1936. Print.
---. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.
Mayoux, Jean Jacques. Préface. D. H. Lawrence : Poèmes. Paris: Aubier, 1976. Print.
Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
Renner, Stanley. “Sexuality and the unconscious: Psychosexual drama and conflict in The Fox.” D.H. Lawrence Review 21.3 (Fall 1989): 245-273. Print.
Stoltzfus, Ben. Lacan and Literature: Purloined Texts. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Print.
Vasse, Denis. La chair envisagée. Paris: Seuil, Séries/Psychanalyse, 1988. Print.
NOTES
1. The original reads : “La sexualité qui n’est rédimée que si elle est sacralisée et qui ne peut l’être qu’à l’intérieur d’un univers rendu au sacré où la personnalité se réintègre” (Mayoux 38). 2. See Edmund Bergler’s thesis The Basic Neurosis: Oral Regression and Psychic Masochism. 3. This bird is hermaphrodite at a symbolic level, see Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves. 4. Letter to Ottoline Morrell, December 8th 1915. “Let your will lapse back into your unconscious self, so you move in a sleep, and in darkness, without sight or understanding […] to lapse back into darkness and unknowing. There must be deep winter before there can be spring.” 5. D.H. Lawrence, “We Need one another,” Phoenix 191. 6. My translation. The original reads, “L’évènement de la ‘rencontre’ ressortit toujours peu ou prou à l’avènement du sujet, dont la naissance charnelle est la métaphore” (Vasse 69). 7. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence follows Freud when he claims that dreams must be read backwards. 8. For another illustration of polarized attraction see Lawrence’s poem “Love on the farm.” (Complete Poems 42-43).
ABSTRACTS
D.H. Lawrence réécrit The Fox en 1922, après avoir ajouté les deux rêves de March, la mort du renard et celle de Banford, à une version plus courte et différente, publiée dans un magazine en 1919. The Fox, l’une des nouvelles les plus louées, a donné lieu à des interprétations diverses et à des polémiques sans fin, dues essentiellement à la transgression extrême, celle de la loi biblique, le meurtre d’un être humain. L’histoire nous offre d’autres formes de transgressions, certaines
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nécessaires, car elles constituent le socle de la vision lawrencienne. Dans sa fiction, Lawrence aspire avant tout à recréer un univers pré-rationnel, à nous faire découvrir les abîmes de la vie, instinctive et émotive, en restaurant en l’homme l’intégrité du primitif. La sexualité, en déclin dans notre culture, ne peut être sacralisée qu’à l’intérieur d’un univers rendu au sacré où la personnalité se réintègre, le rituel initiatique joue alors un rôle majeur. Henry est le shaman qui est le médiateur à une conversion indispensable pour March, personnage ambigu que la fixation sur son amie Banford empêche de s’ouvrir au désir. Après le renard qui déclenche chez March la transgression érotique nécessaire à cette conversion, c’est Henry, identifié à son fétiche, qui, après l’avoir tué, le remplace dans la vie sexuelle et psychique de March. Cette transgression, promesse de transfiguration et d’une forme de salut pour le couple Henry/March, ne remplit pas son rôle. Si Eros rode dans The Fox, du phallique, il ne reste que la parade. Les constantes oscillations de Banford à Henry, les changements d’attitude de March provoquent l’intrusion de la haine dans le « triangle ». La violence portée à son apogée et une bataille subtile de volontés dans cette communauté, broyeuse d’identités où personne, finalement, ne domine, créent un climat subversif, excluant tout compromis. Henry trouvera l’énergie nécessaire pour se débarrasser de l’obstacle : Banford, qui se place sur le lieu même de son exécution. Henry et March sont condamnés à vivre de l’agonie de leurs « affects » malgré la faible lueur d’espoir perçue dans la fin ouverte de la nouvelle.
AUTHORS
JACQUELINE GOUIRAND-ROUSSELON Jacqueline Gouirand-Rousselon is honorary senior lecturer at the University of Lyon II. Besides her contribution of more than fifty articles to newspapers, periodicals and collective works on D. H. Lawrence, Charles Dickens, William Golding, Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys, she has translated The Trespasser (Editions Julliard, 1988) and The Rainbow (Editions Autrement, 2002) into French. She is also the author of a biography of Frieda Lawrence entitled Frieda Von Richthofen, D.H. Lawrence’s Muse (Autrement, 1988) written in French. Jacqueline Gouirand-Rousselon also organized the celebration of Lawrence’s centenary in Lyon from January 15th to February 14th 1986, providing the public with lectures, film projections and an exhibition of some of Lawrence’s manuscripts and original paintings lent by Nottingham University.
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Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories
Susan Reid
1 D. H. Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, first published in 1928, was drawn together from heterogeneous sources: some of the thirteen stories presented in the 1995 Cambridge Edition were written specifically for commissions (“Glad Ghosts,” “The Rocking Horse Winner” and “The Lovely Lady”) and others seemingly to keep their author amused (Letters 4: 564), perhaps even maliciously so (“The Border-Line,” “The Last Laugh” and “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman”).1 The impetus for the collection came from the publisher Martin Secker, who “proposed it specifically with a view to bridging over the gulf between ‘The Plumed Serpent,’ now two years old, and the next Lawrence novel, which may be a little way off” (WWRA xlv). Secker’s notion that Lawrence’s short stories of the 1920s bridge a liminal space between novels is one that has become a commonplace of Lawrence criticism. Influenced perhaps by Lawrence’s complaint to Secker that these were “rather hard stories to put together” (Letters 6: 197), critics have proved reluctant to address The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories as a collection or to assess its contribution to Lawrence’s oeuvre.2 However, in the spirit of Lawrence’s oft-quoted advice to “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (“The Spirit of Place” 8), this essay considers how several of these tales extend beyond the bounds of the conventional “marriage plot” to explore the consequences of marital transgression. While Women in Love (1920) sought to open up marriage to the possibilities of “another kind of love” between men, which is subsequently explored in the so-called leadership novels Aaron’s Rod (1922) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence’s short stories of the 1920s focus instead on the rivalry between men in triangular relationships with a woman.3
2 If the presentation of relationships between the sexes in Lawrence’s fiction written in the 1920s has presented his critics with difficulties and even embarrassment by putting forward certain notions of masculinity and male mastery, then this is particularly the
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case with The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. N. H. Reeve acknowledges “None of That!” as a shocking story involving gang rape, suicide and “homoerotic display” that “many of Lawrence’s admirers rather wish had been left unwritten” (205).4 However, it was the title story that drew the full force of Kate Millett’s feminist critique, which reads as its “central vignette a picture of human sacrifice performed upon the woman to the greater glory and potency of the male” (292). The potency – and impotency – of the male is indeed a key concern of this story, and others in this collection, I will argue, but in more complex ways than Millett suggests. In The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, the triangular relationships between the sexes, which are a recurrent feature throughout Lawrence’s fiction, are refocused on marital infidelity and particularly on the relationship between the cuckolded husband and his seeming rival. According to Eve Sedgwick, “‘To cuckold’ is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man” (49). As the following discussion will show, the sexualisation of bonds between men is strongly suggested in several of The Woman Who Rode Away stories, even in cases where the enactment of cuckoldry is imaginative rather than real, for instance in the title story and in “Sun.”
3 Noel Polk has asserted that cuckolds are “the defining figures of modernist fiction [...], men for whom all things sexual and personal are universally problematic” (154) and so, in this respect, Lawrence contributes to a broader current within modernism that includes James Joyce and William Faulkner. Yet, as Lawrence’s biographers have observed, the position of the cuckold was also particularly personal, not least because he shared “the same position with regard to [his wife] Frieda as Clifford Chatterley with regard to Connie” (Ellis, Death and the Author 79). The largely unsympathetic portrait of Connie’s cuckolded husband in Lawrence’s final novel is remarkable if one reads Clifford, as David Ellis does, as a self-portrait of Lawrence himself. But, to some extent, Lawrence has prepared us for his apparent acceptance of the cuckold’s role when his largely autobiographical protagonist Gilbert Noon forgives Johanna’s infidelity in the Alps (in a scene based on a real-life episode involving Frieda and Harold Hobson in 1913): “he liked Stanley—he had liked him all along: so why pretend to hate him now? And he believed people must do what they want to do” (Mr Noon 277).
4 By contrast, however, Lawrence’s short stories of the 1920s are much less resigned to marital infidelity and they wrestle with a wider range of possible responses. For instance he seems unforgiving, particularly of the husband’s rival, in four stories informed by Frieda’s affair with his friend John Middleton Murry in 1923. In this cluster of stories – “Smile,” “The Border-Line,” “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” and “The Last Laugh” – written soon afterwards in Spring 1924, the writer mounts an aggressive defence of the cuckold by deploying the “manly” types of “the fighting Celt” in “The Border-Line” and the “energetic” miner of “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” (WWRA 78, 109). These tales are discussed in the first part of the essay as a prelude to understanding the more imaginatively disguised interactions between men in the slightly later stories. My subsequent reading of “The Woman Who Rode Away” explores the male kinship structures underpinning the story and the extent of authorial identification with the unnamed woman. Finally, “Sun” points towards Lawrence’s reconciliation with his role as a cuckolded husband and hints at what he later described as “phallic rather than sexual regeneration” (Lady Chatterley’s Lover 328).
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Between Lawrence and Murry
5 In 1913, when Lawrence eloped with Frieda, he cast her abandoned first husband, Ernest Weekley, as “an unutterable fool [... who] is altogether acting the maniacal part of the ‘mari trompé’” (Letters 2: 51). But a decade later, when Lawrence found himself in a similar position, he enacted a similar role. The four tales that follow the title story in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories have been interpreted as revenge narratives by the “mari trompé” directed against the cuckold’s rival, a thinly veiled John Middleton Murry. In all four, according to James C. Cowan, “Murry is cruelly punished: he is mercilessly ridiculed in ‘Smile’ and ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’ and killed off in ‘The Border-Line’ and ‘The Last Laugh’” (45). As Keith Cushman explains, “The stories date from a particularly difficult period in the Lawrence-Murry relationship” and so “The biographical context is important” (195). The full circumstances are explained in Ellis’s biography of Lawrence’s last decade (Dying Game), but, in short, Lawrence suspected that Frieda had embarked on an affair with Murry after she returned to Europe alone in August 1923 and while he remained on a separate continent until December 1923. Recently discovered letters from Lawrence to Frieda shed further light on their marital crisis (Worthen and Harrison). “Written to a spouse, they are cold letters,” as Michael Squires and Lynn K. Talbot observe, which also convey Lawrence’s ambivalence and irritation towards his wife: “Contributing to his acerbic mood is a lingering sense of betrayal” (19-20). Squires and Talbot conclude that “The separation became a split; in some ways it became permanent” (17): a statement that applies as much to the Lawrence-Murry relationship as it does to that of Lawrence and his wife.
6 When writing Women in Love, Lawrence may have contemplated the sort of relationship with Murry that Birkin desires with Gerald, so Murry’s affair with Frieda was a betrayal of Lawrence by both parties.5 But Murry seems to have borne the brunt of Lawrence’s vengeful feelings (in writing at least) and the damage to their relationship was terminal. Despite Lawrence’s subsequent invitation to Murry (among others) to join him in New Mexico in January 1924, which Murry refused, their relationship was effectively over. A border-line had been crossed that is imaginatively explored in the aptly named story “The Border-Line,” which Lawrence began in the spring of 1924. But Lawrence’s feelings for Murry may also have transgressed the borders of normative heterosexuality, in ways that Birkin describes in the suppressed Prologue to Women in Love: “This was the one and only secret he kept to himself, this secret of his passionate and sudden, spasmodic affinity for men he saw. He kept this secret even for himself […] He never accepted the desire, and received it as part of himself. He always tried to keep it as part of himself” (WL 505). We might understand Birkin’s “secret” feelings in relation to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s nuanced paradigm, discussed below, of “a continuum between homosocial and homosexual – a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted” (1-2).6 To what extent, then, does sublimated desire between men feature in Lawrence’s revenge narratives?
7 Lawrence’s letters to Frieda during their separation in 1923 make both veiled and overt references to Murry which clearly vilify him as a “type” who is overly intellectual and sentimental: “inside workers – Murry etc – give us nothing comparable” to “the courage and physical beautiful skill” of the performers that Lawrence sees at Barnum’s Circus in Los Angeles and he repeatedly warns his wife not to “harp on emotional personalities”
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(Worthen and Harrison 13, 15; emphasis in original text). These “emotional, sentimental” (WWRA 91) traits are instantly recognisable in the characterisation of Philip, the second husband of Katharine Farquhar in “The Border-Line,” who (like Murry) “had gone through the war as a journalist, always throwing his weight on the side of humanity, and human truth, and peace” (WWRA 81). Philip survives the war, unlike Katharine’s first husband Alan, because, the narrative asserts: “The old male pride and power were doomed. They had fallen in the war. Alan with them. But the emotional, sentimental values still held good” (WWRA 91). Initially, when Alan goes missing in the war never to return, Katharine finds Philip “an inexpressible consolation”; “he caressed her senses, and soothed her, and gave her what she wanted,” but: Then, gradually, a curious sense of degradation started in her spirit. She felt unsure, uncertain. It was almost like having a disease. Life became null and unreal to her, as it had never been before. She did not even struggle and suffer. In the numbness of her flesh she could feel no reactions. Everything was turning into mud. (WWRA 81)
8 This passage echoes a direct reference to mud in Lawrence’s letter to Frieda of 19 September 1923 when he writes: “What I really want to do is to make a change in the human direction, from this Christian-materialistic mud-flux, back to a much bigger, older, also newer, religious direction” (Worthen and Harrison 15). This is another thinly veiled reference to Murry, the real-life model for Philip, who was engaged in writing The Life of Jesus (1926), while his antithesis in “The Border-Line” is aligned with a pagan ancestry: “Alan Anstruther, that red-haired fighting Celt [...] had a weird instinctive conviction that he was beyond ordinary judgment” (WWRA 78).
9 Alan is one of a series of representatives of “the old male pride and power,” who “expected the tides of the modern world to recede around him” (WWRA 91, 79) and are thus identified by Lawrence with the ancient peoples of the world: the Celts, the Native American and Mexican Indians, the Etruscans, and the descendants of Pan. Alan is also a partial self-portrait of the red-haired author, who makes another appearance at the beginning of “The Last Laugh,” as Lorenzo “grinning like a satyr” (WWRA 122). Here, as Lee M. Jenkins points out, Lawrence is clearly associated with the figure of Pan: “the pagan God who dies at the birth of Christianity who ‘keeps on being re-born, in all kinds of strange shapes’” (85). In “The Last Laugh,” the Murry character Marchbanks, who although beautiful “like a faun” becomes “A sort of faun on the Cross” (WWRA 123), is tormented and finally killed by Pan / Lawrence: Marchbanks gave a strange, yelping cry, like a shot animal. His white face was drawn, distorted in a curious grin, that was chiefly agony, but partly wild recognition. He was staring with fixed eyes at something. And in the rolling agony of his eyes was the horrible grin of a man who realises he has made a final, and this time fatal, fool of himself. (WWRA 137)
10 In “The Border-Line,” Alan, like Pan, comes back from the dead to wreak his fatal revenge on Philip and, we assume, on his wife, whom he leads into the woods at the end of the story and presses against “a great pine-tree”: “crushing her in the last, final ecstasy of submission, squeezing from her the last drop of her passion, like the cold white berries of the mistletoe on the tree of life” (WWRA 98).
11 Alan’s treatment of Philip is couched in similarly erotic terms. Philip’s “uncanny love for Alan” (WWRA 79) prefigures the terrible return of his predecessor as a ghost in his bed. In an early version of the story, Katharine slips into bed to comfort Philip and is
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pushed out of bed by “two hands cold and strong as iron” (Lawrence, “The Border- Line” 388). But Lawrence later revised this passage so that Katharine leaves Philip alone with Alan’s ghost: “It was for the two men to work out destiny between them” (WWRA 95). As Ellis observes, the revised scene takes a decidedly “peculiar” turn (Dying Game 164) and it is difficult not to read this as homoeroticism, particularly as a ghost would conventionally be portrayed as a disembodied spirit. Indeed the use of a Gothic device seems a convenient mask for the exploration of transgressive desire: “He lay on top of me!” cried Philip, rolling his eyes inwards in horror. “He lay on top of me, and turned my heart cold, and burst my blood-vessels in my chest.” Katharine stood petrified. There was blood all over the sheets. She rang the bell violently. Across the bed stood Alan, looking at her with his unmoving blue eyes, just watching her. (WWRA 95)
12 Further, as Ellis also observes, Lawrence transfers to Murry / Philip the effects of his own fatal tuberculosis (Dying Game 163), although we might also note the similarities to the actual death from TB of Murry’s wife, Katherine Mansfield, which Murry witnessed in January 1923. Indeed, in the preceding story “Smile,” Lawrence satirises Murry’s inadequacy during Mansfield’s final illness7 – “He ought, of course, to be sitting by Ophelia’s bedside. But Ophelia didn’t want him” (WWRA 72) – and the hypocrisy of his mourning for her: “Mea culpa! he howled at himself. And even as he howled it, he felt something nudging him in the ribs saying to him: Smile!” (WWRA 75).
13 But we might also interpret the blood that accompanies Alan’s visitations to Philip as a symbolic form of “Blutbrüderschaft” that unites the two men in death. After all, Gerald’s inability to respond to Birkin’s offer of “Blutbrüderschaft” in Women in Love was based partly on Lawrence’s direct experience of Murry (Women in Love 206). 8 Additionally, the Gerald-Birkin relationship may also draw on Murry’s unrequited love for Gordon Campbell in 1914-5. Much of what we know about the intensity of Murry’s feelings for Campbell comes from a letter which he did not send for thirty-seven years. Before finally sending it to Campbell, Murry copied it into his journal noting underneath: “A strange, pathetic letter. It would (I fear) be called ‘homosexual.’ But I never had one atom of physical feeling for Gordon; nor he (I am sure) for me” (qtd. Kaplan 24). “Towards the end of this long letter,” Sydney Janet Kaplan notes, “Lawrence’s influence intrudes” (24): We might have pulled off some great things together, but you were divided – perhaps I was divided too. Perhaps we came together, too late [...] I can hear Lawrence say that it would only have been possible between a man and a woman. I don’t think so. It would have been possible for us, had you been other than you are. (qtd. Kaplan 24)
14 Indeed, this sounds a lot like Birkin remonstrating with Gerald’s corpse and with Ursula about his unrequited desire for “another kind of love” (Women in Love 481), a triangular relationship with a man as well as with a woman. And although Lawrence may never have seen Murry’s letter, he certainly shared his friend’s confidences when Lawrence nursed Murry in February 1915 – an episode which in its turn is described in homoerotic terms in the “Low-water Mark” chapter of Aaron’s Rod (1922).
15 As Kaplan points out, largely concurring with Mark Kinkead-Weekes (377, 488), there is no evidence of any transgression of the (notional) line between heterosexuality and homosexuality in Lawrence’s relationship with Murry, or between Murry and Campbell, but she rightly points to Sedgwick’s concept of a continuum of “homosocial desire” that has been radically disrupted by patriarchal power structures (Kaplan 25). Sedgwick
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draws on the work of Gayle Rubin to conclude that the “obligatory heterosexuality” built into male-dominated kinship systems such as heterosexual marriage also restricts the possibilities for male bonding through homophobia (3). As Rubin states, “The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals, is [...] a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women” (180; qtd. Sedgwick 3). Kaplan notes that the operation of homophobic taboos “in Murry’s case is particularly relevant,” since “his journals reveal considerable defensiveness whenever the subject of homosexuality arises such as his comment in 1953 [...] that ‘homosexuality is a closed and alien world to me, who am in every fibre of my being heterosexual’” (25). Such remarks occur much later in Murry’s life, of course, and betray an earlier “innocence” that, as Beatrice Campbell observes, “might at the present time be difficult to understand” (qtd. Kaplan 24; Campbell was writing in 1963). The deterioration in the relationship between Lawrence and Murry in the 1920s may be in part a consequence of their growing awareness of homosexuality and resulting protestations against it – witness, for example, Lawrence’s famous letter about “people like” Francis Birrell, Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes (Letters 2: 319) – although at the same time their famous disputes about “betrayal” retain something of the rhetoric of jilted lovers.
16 In “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” even as Lawrence parodies Murry’s habit of finding wives through his journalism (as was the case with Mansfield and his second wife, Violet Le Maistre, whom he married in 1924), he seems unable to resist insinuating himself as part of an erotic triangle. The desperate woman’s husband is a miner, with whom Lawrence is vicariously associated through his father, and who is equally implicated in Jimmy’s reckless commitment to the woman he barely knows. And so the story ends: The other man! In some subtle, inexplicable way, he was actually bodily present, the husband. The woman moved in his aura. She was helplessly married to him. And this went to Jimmy’s head like neat whisky. Which of the two would fall before him with a greater fall?—the woman, or that man, her husband? (WWRA 121)
17 That Jimmy equally desires the “fall” of both wife and husband has a certain symmetry with Alan’s revenge on both his wife and her second husband in “The Border-Line.” We might extrapolate from this that Lawrence felt equally betrayed by Murry as by Frieda by the events of 1923. These stories seem to harbour lingering regrets that Murry did not follow through on his “love” for Lawrence – as in the fictional case of Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin – and that he lacked the courage to explore his own impulses. Indeed the recurrence of these themes from Women in Love in the later story “The Woman Who Rode Away” suggests that the relationship between Lawrence and Murry was far from resolved.
Lawrence, Murry and “The Woman Who Rode Away”
18 Murry seems not to have recognised himself in any of the stories in The Woman Who Rode Away or at least he refrains from acknowledgement. However, Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (1931), which Murry published in short order after Lawrence’s death, is in many senses another act of revenge framed as a “story,” as well as a remonstrance over the corpse of his sometime friend that has some resonance with the closing scene of Women in Love. Here Murry does comment on “The Border-Line,” largely by redirecting attention through a comparison with “The Captain’s Doll,” but
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concludes that “Lawrence’s hatred is diverted to the unfortunate Philip who has dared to supplant him” (345; emphasis added), where the undesignated “him” seems to conflate Lawrence the author with the fictional Alan. Murry’s critique of “The Woman Who Rode Away” is predicated on a similar assumption that Lawrence “identifies himself with the sacrificers”: This imaginative self-persuasion that human sacrifice is lawful in a man who is so tender that only by an immense effort he can bring himself to shoot the vermin on his ranch, is a sickening perversity. We do not blame Lawrence for his tenderness – God forbid! – we condemn him for allowing his imagination to violate it. This is horrible. This seeming courage is a supreme cowardice; it proceeds from a refusal to accept one’s own nature, and to take the consequences. This licence to the imagination to commit the extremity of horror is given only by a soul that is sick unto death, and seeks release by self-laceration. (Son of Woman 339)
19 This internally contradictory reading implies, through its language of “death” and “self-laceration,” rather more complicated identifications of Lawrence with the woman of his story, while Murry (albeit unconsciously) also highlights the story’s dialogue with a Christian discourse of bodily sacrifice that Lawrence associated with Murry, as the preceding discussion of “The Border-Line” has shown. If Murry inadvertently points to an alternative reading of Lawrence’s imaginative licence in “The Woman Who Rode Away,” to what extent does the unnamed woman represent aspects of Lawrence and/or Murry? And to what extent, then, might the woman’s “sacrifice” represent sublimated homoerotic desire and its suppression within the male-dominated kinship systems outlined by Rubin and Sedgwick?
20 As Neil Roberts observes, Lawrence’s heroines “are at once other to the author and his representatives” (101). Roberts stresses that he “use[s] the word ‘heroine’ deliberately,” because the pursuit of what he calls a “journey of dangerous desire” entails “the determination to travel beyond the boundaries of the known, and to face the risks such a journey entails” (100). The journey in “The Woman Who Rode Away” is itself the destination, a liminal state perpetuated by the story’s unresolved ending that evokes a suspension rather than a cessation of being – since, as Judith Ruderman among others has pointed out, the reader is left to assume that the woman is sacrificed “for the dénouement is not shown” (111). Lawrence manifestly shared something of this state of suspended being during the period of his estrangement from Frieda in 1923. As Squires and Talbot observe, “Wrestling with his uncertainty, Lawrence addresses the contested space that surrounds and confounds him” (26), as his letter of 14 September 1923 to Frieda attests: Sometimes I feel one might as well go on drifting about and wondering over it all. Then again I feel one ought to put a peg in the middle of it, and hitch on to a new life. I don’t know. I feel I don’t much care whether I go to Mexico to look for a ranch, or to sea in a ship to look for nothing. Life’s queer anyhow. And one is very reluctant to nail down a purpose [...] Is there much point, after all, in having a “home” anywhere? (Worthen and Harrison 14)
21 Like the heroine of “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Lawrence has reached a crisis-point of purposelessness and nothingness and homelessness, at least in part because of the dual betrayal by Frieda and Murry. More surprisingly, perhaps, a similar feeling of limbo inspired the title of Murry’s autobiography Between Two Worlds (1936), which frames his life story with a quote from Matthew Arnold – “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” And yet a similar perception of division in Murry’s personality is precisely what Lawrence captures in his
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characterisation of Gerald as a captain of industry trapped as a cog within his own machine.
22 The “foolish romanticism” that overcomes the woman at the beginning of her story (WWRA 42) echoes something of Birkin’s suggestion to Ursula that “‘One needn’t see. One goes one’s way. In my world it is sunny and spacious [...] And we will wander about on the face of the earth [...] and we’ll look at the world beyond just this’” (Women in Love 362). But the woman’s decision to ride away to the Chilchui country has a darker tinge: she has heard rumours of “human sacrifice” and yet “she was not afraid, although it was a frightening country” (WWRA 42, 44). She seems intent, too, on travelling beyond this world: “‘Surely there is something wonderful! It looks so like nowhere on earth: like being on the moon’” (WWRA 41, emphasis in original text). And, sure enough, once the woman is riding away with the Indians towards their secret haunt, “It seemed to her they were climbing to the roof of the world. Beyond against heaven were slashes of snow” (WWRA 49). This description chimes strongly with Gerald’s fatal ascent in the Alps: “Always higher, always higher [...] He only wanted to go on, to go on whilst he could, to move, to keep going, until it was finished. He had lost all his sense of place” (Women in Love 473). Imaginatively, the woman takes the place of both Lawrence/Birkin and Murry/Gerald, but what then is the reader to make of her (assumed) death?
23 While Gerald’s suicide is sometimes interpreted as an enactment of the death wish underlying western culture, as exemplified by the mass slaughter of the First World War, the woman feels that she is dead even before she rides away.9 Even before the woman rides away she apprehends the “Deadness within deadness” of her environment and even before she meets the Indians we are told that: “She lay wrapped in her blanket looking at the stars, listening to her horse shivering, and feeling like a woman who has died and passed beyond” (WWRA 39, 44). When questioned, the young Indian identifies the woman symbolically in an echo of her own feelings of having “died and passed beyond”: “Why am I the only one that wears blue?” “It is the colour of the wind. It is the colour of what goes away and is never coming back, but which is always there, waiting like death among us. It is the colour of the dead. And it is the colour that stands away off, looking at us from the distance, that cannot be near to us. When we go near, it goes further. It can’t come near. We are all brown and yellow and black hair, and white teeth and red blood. We are the ones that are here. You with the blue eyes, you are the messengers from the far-away, you cannot stay, and now it is time for you to go back.” (WWRA 64-5)
24 Blue clothing, and blue eyes, recur as a thematic link between seemingly disparate stories throughout this collection, which begins with the blue dresses of the rivals in “Two Blue Birds” and culminates with the “lovely blue silk wrap” of the eponymous “The Lovely Lady” (WWRA 265). But more importantly in this particular tale, the woman is the only person who wears blue, which is “the colour of the dead.” In a clash between cultures, the “‘Indian got weak, and lost his power with the sun,’” the young Indian tells the woman, but the implication is that white culture is already dead because of a bankruptcy of values: “‘White men don’t know what the sun is. They never know’” (WWRA 61-2).
25 The woman has traded imprisonment under the jealous eye of her husband for imprisonment by the Indians and so, as Judith Ruderman acutely observes, “she leaves one slave condition for another” (112).
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She was a prisoner in her house and in the stockade garden, but she scarcely minded. And it was days before she realised that she never saw another woman. Only the men, the elderly men of the big house, that she imagined must be some sort of temple, and the men priests of some sort. For they always had the same colours, red, orange, yellow, and black, and the same grave, abstracted demeanour. (WWRA 57)
26 Having exchanged one form of male captivity for another, then, the unnamed woman seems to exemplify what the anthropologist Gayle Rubin describes in her landmark article of 1975 as “The Traffic in Women.” Although Rubin addresses the oppression of women through the rites of heterosexual marriage within patriarchal capitalist society, where the woman is exchanged as “a gift” between men that cements social bonds, we might also read this as a ritual that sacrifices women’s autonomy and that in Lawrence’s story is transmuted into a blood sacrifice which is all about the rivalry between Indian men and white men. As the young Indian explains to his captive: “‘The Indian says, he will give the white woman to the sun, so the sun will leap over the white men and come to the Indian again’” (WWRA 65). As is often noted, despite the phallicism of the story’s final scene – set within the “orifice of the cave” with its “great, dripping, fang-like spoke of ice,” where the naked woman is confronted by “powerful men in the prime of life” who “were almost as naked as she was” and who wield “flint knives” (WWRA 69-70) – this is not a sexual consummation, but rather, I would argue, a transfer of power between men. Significantly, most of her captors’ few questions concern her marital status – “‘Usted es Señora? You are a married lady? [...] With a family? [...] Where is your husband?’” (WWRA 46, italics in original text) – and in contrast to captivity narratives like Edith Maude Hull’s The Sheik (1919), “there was nothing sensual or sexual” but instead “ a terrible glittering purity that was beyond her” (WWRA 52).10
27 Millett, writing five years before Rubin, however, famously saw only the repellent sexual and racial politics of the story, and above all a repellent “masculinism” that assumes Lawrence’s complicity in the power structures he depicts. However, within this story we might also perceive a subversive narrative of authorial self-identification with the woman – and/or of the woman with Murry – which suggests instead a sublimated homoeroticism that is also suppressed by the male-dominated kinship structures that Rubin describes. Indeed, the stories within the collection repeatedly question concepts of male “mastery.” For instance, the opening story, “Two Blue Birds,” depicts another variant of a slave narrative of “the young master and his secretary. He dictated to her, she slaved for him and adored him” (WWRA 5). Again this is not a sexual relationship – at least there is “Nothing you could call adultery” (WWRA 5) – for which the wife, who has her own “gallant affairs,” implicitly takes her husband to task: “for taking so much from her [his secretary] and giving her nothing” (WWRA 17). Similarly, the eponymous protagonist in “The Man Who Loved Islands,” like the “young master” of the first story, is ruined by fawning staff, who ultimately disappoint and disturb him: The Master himself began to be a little afraid of his island. He felt here strange violent feelings he had never felt before, and lustful desires that he had been quite free from. He knew quite well now that his people didn’t love him at all. He knew that their spirits were secretly against him, malicious, jeering, envious, and lurking to down him. He became just as wary and secretive with regard to them. (WWRA 159)
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28 In the context of the story collection, then, the repeated interrogations of male mastery render the ambiguous final sentence / paragraph of the title story even more unsettled and unsettling – “The mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race” (WWRA 71). Indeed the assertion of “must,” at the end of a text whose meanings have been uncertain throughout, has the effect of undercutting the concept of “mastery” and of questioning the necessity for white male supremacy to be perpetuated. Importantly, too, other stories in the collection, including the opening tale “Two Blue Birds” and “The Man Who Loves Islands” (that Lawrence insisted to Secker should not be omitted), comment on the sublimation of male sexual desire to socially constructed concepts of power.
29 While the “young master” of “Two Blue Birds” refrains from sex with his secretary, in “The Man Who Loved Islands” the “Master” succumbs to the daughter of his housekeeper on his second island, but only out of “a kind of pity”: It was the automatism of sex that had caught him again. Not that he hated sex. He deemed it, as the Chinese do, one of the great life-mysteries. But it had become mechanical, automatic, and he wanted to escape that. Automatic sex shattered him, and filled him with a sort of death. He thought that he had come through, to a new stillness of desirelessness. Perhaps beyond that, there was a new fresh delicacy of desire, an unentered frail communion of two people meeting on untrodden ground. (WWRA 164)
30 The subsequent trajectory of the story becomes an overt critique of the island-owner’s goal of “desirelessness,” which drives him to flee from his lover and their child to a third, much smaller, island, where he dies (or so the reader is left to assume) amidst its untrodden / virgin “whiteness” (WWRA 173). Both “Two Blue Birds” and “The Man Who Loved Islands,” based on another of Lawrence’s male friends, the writer Compton Mackenzie, deal with a waning of male sexual desire. By contrast the visual phallicism of the closing scene of “The Woman Who Rode Away” and of “Sun,” discussed briefly below, suggests a lingering male desire which is fulfilled vicariously through a female heroine.
Conclusion: Male desire in “Sun” and Lady Chatterley’s Lover
31 “Sun,” the second story in the collection, is an uncanny double both of “The Man Who Loved Islands” and also of “The Woman Who Rode Away.” It begins with another image of a mechanical relationship, between Juliet and her husband Maurice (based on the collection’s publisher Martin Secker and his wife Rina): “in their two lives, the stroke of power was hostile, his and hers. Like two engines running at variance, they shattered each other” (WWRA 19). And like the woman who rode away, Juliet “permitted herself to be carried away,” in her case to Italy, where she gives herself to the sun, “exulting that at last it was no human lover” (WWRA 21). But her desire for a human lover is awakened when she sees how a peasant responds to her naked body: “the fierce stirring of the phallus under his thin trousers: for her. And with his red face, and with his broad body, he was like the sun to her, the sun in its broad heat” (WWRA 30). By contrast, when Maurice arrives unexpectedly from New York to find his wife taking a sunbath he is abashed: “Maurice, poor fellow, hesitated and glanced away from her, turning his face aside” (WWRA 32). But neither Juliet nor the peasant has the courage to act on
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their mutual desire and so her rekindled sexual desire finally transfers to her husband, although her final thoughts remain with the peasant: She had seen the flushed blood in the peasant’s burnt face, and felt the jetting, sudden blue heat pouring over her from his kindled eyes, and the rousing of his big penis against his body—for her, surging for her. Yet she would never come to him— she daren’t, she daren’t, so much was against her. And the little etiolated body of her husband, city-branded, would possess her, and his little, frantic penis would beget another child in her. She could not help it. She was bound to the vast, fixed wheel of circumstance, and there was no Perseus in the universe, to cut the bonds. (WWRA 38)
32 Lawrence’s paean of praise to the penis in “Sun” anticipates his final novel, which in its second version was titled John Thomas and Lady Jane in reference to the male and female genitals it lovingly describes (particularly the “phallos,” see for example Lady Chatterley’s Lover 209-10). But more specifically, Lawrence’s identification with the thwarted desires of his heroines in “Sun” and in “The Woman Who Rode Away” prefigures his championing of Lady Chatterley and her lover in his final novel. Although Juliet is largely based on Rina Secker – who probably did act on her desires for other men – there are also elements of Frieda, and it is likely that both women influenced the characterisation of Connie Chatterley. Aptly, too, it was Rina who introduced Frieda to Angelo Ravagli, who soon became her lover and then her husband following Lawrence’s death. As Lawrence confronted his own impotence during the writing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his belief in male friendship seems also to have waned, even as his appreciation of the male body seems to have intensified. Lawrence’s desire for “another kind of love” between men may have been sparked by Murry and then kindled by Fenimore Cooper as a dream of “immortal friendship [...] A stark, stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex,” but his short stories of the 1920s suggest that it may also have been his complex relationship with Murry that finally killed this dream of “a new relationship” (Studies in Classic American Literature 59-60).
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---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II, June 1913 – October 1916. Eds. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Print.
---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume IV, June 1921 – March 1924. Eds. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.
---. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume VI, March 1927 – November 1928. Eds. James T. Boulton and Margaret Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.
---. Mr Noon. Ed. Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Print.
---. “The Spirit of Place.” Studies in Classic American Literature. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1971. 7-14. Print.
---. The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
---. Women in Love. Eds. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Print.
Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 1990. Print.
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. London: Virago, 1977. Print.
Murry, John Middleton. Between Two Worlds. The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry. New York: Julian Messner, 1936. Print.
---. Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence. London: Jonathan Cape, 1931. Print.
O’Sullivan, Vincent, and Margaret Scott, eds. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield 1922-23. Vol 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.
Polk, Noel. Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. Print.
Reeve, N. H. “Review of Patrick R. Query, Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing.” Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 3.3 (2014): 202-205. Print.
Reid, Susan. “Idylls of Masculinity: D. H. Lawrence’s Subversive Pastoral.” New Versions of Pastoral. Eds. David James and Philip Tew. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009. 95-106. Print.
Roberts, Neil. D. H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Print.
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Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157-210. Print.
Ruderman, Judith. Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Print.
Squires, Michael and Lynn K. Talbot. “The Crisis of 1923: Five Newly Discovered Letters From D. H. Lawrence to Frieda.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 3.1 (2012): 17-28. Print.
Worthen, John. “The First Women in Love.” D. H. Lawrence Review 28.1-2 (1999): 5-27. Print.
Worthen, John and Andrew Harrison. “Further Letters of D. H. Lawrence.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 3.1 (2012): 7-16. Print.
NOTES
1. The Cambridge Edition of The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (hereafter referenced in the body of the essay as WWRA) includes two stories, “The Rocking Horse Winner” and “The Lovely Lady” that were previously collected in the posthumous volume The Lovely Lady, published by Secker and Viking in 1933 (WWRA xx1-xxii). “The Rocking Horse Winner” had previously been published in Harper’s Bazaar and in The Ghost-Book, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith (both 1926) and an abridged version of “The Lovely Lady” appeared in The Black Cap, also edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith (1927). 2. For instance, Keith Cushman considers that “The Woman Who Rode Away seems something of a random gathering, lacking the focused intensity” of the two earlier collections, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) and England, My England and Other Stories (1922) (193). 3. For a reading of male intimacy in The Plumed Serpent see for example Reid. 4. Nonetheless, Patrick R. Query is the most recent of a handful of critics to attempt a reassessment of this story in his book reviewed by N. H. Reeve, who suggests instead that “A more straightforward reading might focus on Lawrence’s fascination with homoerotic display” (205). 5. As discussed below, Frieda told Murry that Lawrence based the character of Gerald on him (Murry, Between Two Worlds 411). 6. Although a few critics (see particularly Meyers) have used such passages to argue for Lawrence’s homosexuality, there is no firm basis for this assumption. See further discussion below. 7. Murry was shocked by his wife’s withdrawal to the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau in October 1922, but at this late stage in her life, the dying Mansfield wanted more than her husband had to offer. Writing to invite him to “come over here to work for Gurdjieff,” she asked, in terms which resonate with Lawrence’s portrait of Murry as Gerald, “Do you like that old mechanical life at the mercy of everything? And just living with one little tiny corner of yourself?” (O’Sullivan and Scott 311). 8. Murry claims he did not recognise himself in Gerald Crich until Frieda pointed this out to him much later (Murry, Between Two Worlds 411). 9. See Laird for an analysis of Gerald’s death as suicide. For illuminating discussions of Gerald Crich’s death in the context of the war, see Worthen and Cole. 10. For an overview of captivity narratives see Ruderman 111.
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ABSTRACTS
Après avoir abordé les liens matrimoniaux dans ses grands romans The Rainbow (1915) et Women in Love (1920), D. H. Lawrence se tourne vers le thème de la transgression dans le mariage qui confère une certaine cohésion à ses écrits des années 1920, notamment au recueil The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (1928). Malgré la primauté de la nouvelle éponyme, ce recueil de nouvelles boudées par la critique littéraire met en scène des relations triangulaires entre deux hommes et une femme qui brouillent les limites de l’hétérosexualité normative. En effet, certaines nouvelles, telles que “The Border Line” et “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” dépeignent une rivalité sexuelle entre hommes qui suggère comment, selon l’ouvrage phare Between Men d’Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The ultimate fantasy of sharing the same woman allows for the closest possible transference of libidinal energy between the two men short of actual sexual relations” (151). Noël Polk voit dans les maris trompés “the defining figures of modernist fiction [...] men for whom all things sexual and personal are universally problematic” (154). Lawrence place également la problématique sur un plan à la fois universel et personnel, puisque, comme le fait remarquer David Ellis, il se trouvait dans la même situation à l’égard de Frieda sa femme que le personnage Clifford Chatterley à l’égard de la sienne (79).
AUTHORS
SUSAN REID Susan Reid is the Editor of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (since 2013), Reviews Editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (since 2008), and Co-editor of three volumes of Katherine Mansfield Studies (2010–12) and the essay collection Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2011). Since completing her PhD thesis on “D. H. Lawrence and Masculinities” (University of Northampton, 2008), she has published several articles and book chapters on D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.
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Kay Boyle on D.H. Lawrence
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"Rest Cure"
Kay Boyle
1 "Rest Cure"1
2 He sat in the sun with a blanket about him, considering, with his hands lying out like emaciated strangers before him, that today the sun would endure a little longer. Certainly it would survive until the trees below the terrace effaced it, toward four o’clock, like opened parasols. A crime it had been, the invalid thought, turning his head this way and that, to have ever built up one house before another in such a way that one man’s habitation cast a shadow upon another’s. The whole sloping coast should have been left a wilderness with no order to it, stalked and leafed with the great strong trunks and foliage of these parts. Cactus plants with petals a yard wide and yucca tongues as thick as elephant trunks were sullenly and viciously flourishing all about the house. Upon the terrace had a further attempt at nicety and precision been made: there his wife had seen to it that geraniums were potted into the wooden boxes that stood along the wall.
3 From his lounging chair he could reach out and, with no effort beyond that of raising the skeleton of his hand, finger the parched stems of the geraniums. The south, and the Mediterranean wind, had blistered them past all belief. They bore their rosy topknots or their soiled white flowers balanced upon their thick Italian heads. There they were, within his reach, a row of weary washerwomen leaning back from the villainous descent of the coast. What parched scions had thrust forth from their stems now served to obliterate in part the vision of the sun. With arms akimbo they surrounded him: thin burned Italian women with their meager bundles of dirty linen on their heads. One after another, with a flicker of irritation for his wife lighting his eye, he fingered them at the waist for a moment, and then snapped off each stem. One after another he broke their stalks in two and dropped them away onto the pavings beneath his lounging chair. When he had finished off what plants grew within his reach, he lay back exhausted, sank, thin as an archer’s bow, into the depths of his cushions. “They kept the sun off me,” he was thinking in absolution. In spite of the garden and its vegetation, he would have the last drops of sun. He had closed his eyes, and there he lay looking straight ahead of him into the fathomless black pits of his lids. Even here, in the south, in the sun even, the coal mines remained. His nostrils were sick with the smell of them
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and on his cheeks he felt lingering the slipping mantle of the English fog. He had not seen the mines since he was a young man, but nothing he had ever done between would alter them. There he sat in the sun with his eyes closed, looking into their depths.
4 Because his father had been a miner, he was thinking, the black of the pits had put some kind of blasphemy on his own blood. He sat with his eyes closed looking directly into the blank awful mines. Against their obscurity he set the icicles of one winter when the war was on, when he had spent his twilights seeking for pine cones under the tall trees in the woods behind the house. In Cornwall. What a vision! How beautiful that year, and many other years, might have been had not it been for the sour thought of the war. Every time his heart had lifted for a hillside or a wave, or for the wind blowing, the thought of the turmoil going on had beset and stricken him. It had lain like a burden on his conscience every morning when he was coming awake. The first light moments of day coming had warned him that despite the blood rising in his body, it was no time to rejoice. The war. Ah, yes, the war. After the mines, it had been the war. Whenever he had believed for half a minute in man, then he had remembered that the war was going on.
5 For a little while one February, it had seemed that the colors set out in Monte Carlo, facing the Casino, would obliterate forever the angry memories his heart had stored away. The great mauve, white, and deep royal bouquets had thrived a week or more, as if rooted in his eyes. Such banks and beds of richly petaled flowers, set thick as thieves or thicker on the cultivated lawns, conveyed the wish. Their artificial physiognomies masked the earth as well as he would have wished his own features to stand guard before his spirit. The invalid lifted his hand and touched his beard. His mouth and chin, he thought with cunning satisfaction, were marvelously concealed.
6 The sound of his wife’s voice speaking in the room that opened behind him onto the terrace roused him a little as he sat pondering the sun. She seemed to be moving from one long window to another, arranging flowers in the vases, for her voice would come across the pavings, now strong and close, now distant as if turned away, and she was talking to their guest about some sort of shrub or fern. A special kind, the like of which she could find nowhere on the Riviera. It thrived in the cool brisk fogs of their own land, she was saying. Her voice had turned toward him again and was ringing clearly across the terrace.
7 “Those are beautiful ones you have there now,” said the voice of the gentleman.
8 “Ah, take care!” cried out his wife’s voice, somewhat dimmed as though she had again turned toward the room. “I was afraid you had pierced your hand,” she said in a moment.
9 When the invalid opened his eyes, he saw that the sun was even now beginning to glimmer through the upper branches of the trees, was lolling along the prosperous dark upper boughs as if in preparation for descent. Not yet, he thought, not yet. He raised himself on his elbows and scanned the sky. Scarcely three-thirty, surely, he was thinking. The sun can’t be going down at once.
10 “The sun can’t be going down yet awhile, can it?” he called out to the house.
11 He heard the gravel of the pathway sparkling and spitting out from under the soles of their feet as they crossed it, and then his wife’s heels and the boots of the guest struck and advanced across the paving stones.
12 “Oh, oh, the geraniums--” said his wife suddenly by his side.
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13 The guest had raised his head and stood squinting up at the sun.
14 “I should say it were going down,” he said after a moment.
15 He had deliberately stepped before the rays of it and stood leaning back against the terrace wall. His solid gray head had served to cork the sunlight. Like a wooden stopper, thought the invalid, painted to resemble a man. With the nose of a wooden stopper. And the sightless eyes. And the creases when he speaks or smiles.
16 “But think what it must be like in Paris now,” said the gentleman. “I don’t know how you feel, but I can’t find words to say how grateful I am for being here.” The guest, thought the invalid as he surveyed him, was very conscious of being a guest--of accepting meals, bed, tea, society--and his smile was permanently set beneath his nose.
17 “Of course you don’t know how I feel,” said the invalid. He was looking sourly up at his guest. “Would you mind moving out of the sun?” As the visiting gentleman skipped out of the way, the invalid cleared his throat, dissolved the little pellet of phlegm which had leaped to being on his tongue so as not to spit before them, and sank back in his chair.
18 “The advantage--or rather one of the advantages--of being a writer,” said the visiting gentleman with a smile, “is that he can settle down wherever the fancy takes him. Now, a publisher--”
19 “Why be a publisher?” said the invalid in irritation. He was staring again into the black blank mines.
20 His wife was squatting and stooping about his chair, gathering up in her dress the butchered geraniums. She said not a word, but crouched there picking them carefully up, one by one. By her side had appeared a little covered basket, and within it rattled a pair of castanets.
21 “I am sure I can easily turn these into slips,” she said gently, as if speaking to herself. “A little snip in the right place and they’ll be as good as new.”
22 “You can make soup out of them,” said the invalid bitterly. “What’s in the basket,” he said, “making a noise?”
23 “Oh, a langouste!” cried out his wife. She had just remembered. “We bought you a langouste, alive, at the Beausoleil market. It’s as lively as a rig!”
24 The visiting gentleman burst into laughter. The invalid could hear him gasping with enjoyment at his side.
25 “I can’t bear them alive,” said the invalid testily. He lay listening curiously to the animal rattling his jaws and clawing under the basket’s lid.
26 “Oh, but with mayonnaise!” cried his wife. “Tomorrow!”
27 “Why doesn’t Mr. What-do-you-call-him answer the question I put him?” asked the invalid sourly. His mind was possessed with the thought of the visiting man.
28 “I’ve asked him why he was a publisher,” said the invalid. What a viper, what a felon, he was thinking, to come and live on me and not give me the satisfaction of a quarrel! He was a not a young man, thought the invalid, with his little remains of graying hair, but he had all the endurance and patience of a younger man in the presence of a master. All the smiling and bowing, thought the invalid with contempt, and all the obsequious ways. The man was standing so near to his chair that he could hear his breath whistling through his nostrils. Maybe his eyes were on him, the invalid was thinking. It gave him
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a turn to think that he was lying there exposed in the sun where the visitor could examine him pore by pore. Hair by hair could the visitor take him in and record him.
29 “Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the gentleman. “I’m afraid I owe you an apology. You see, I’m not accustomed to it.”
30 “To what?” said the invalid sharply. He had flashed his eyes open and looked suspiciously into the publisher’s face.
31 “To seeing you flat on your back,” said the gentleman promptly.
32 “You covered that over very nicely,” said the invalid. He clasped his hands across his sunken bosom. “You meant to say something else. You meant to say death,” said the invalid calmly. “I heard the first letter on your tongue.”
33 He lay back in his chair again with his lids fallen. He could distinctly smell the foul fumes of the pits.
34 “Elsa,” he said, as he lay twitching in the light, “I would like some champagne. Just because,” he said, sitting up abruptly, “I’ve written a few books doesn’t mean that you have to keep the truth about me to yourself.”
35 His wife went across the terrace, leaving the two men together.
36 “Don’t make a mistake,” said the invalid, smiling grimly. “Don’t make any mistake. I’m not quite finished. Not quite. I still have a little more to write about,” he said. “Don’t you fool yourself, my dear.”
37 “Oh, I flatter myself that I don’t,” said the gentleman agreeably. “I’m convinced there’s an unlimited amount still to come. And I hope to have the honor of publishing some of it. I’m counting on that, you know.” He ended on a playful note and looked coyly at the invalid. But every spark of life had suddenly expired in the ill man’s face.
38 “I didn’t know the sun would be off the terrace so soon,” he said.
39 His wife had returned and was opening the bottle, carefully and without error, with the end of her pliant thumb. The invalid turned on his side and regarded her: a great strong woman whom he would never forget, never, nor the surprisingly slim crescent of her flexible thumb. All of her fingers, he lay thinking as he watched her, were soft as skeins of silk, and tied in the joints and knuckles by invisible satin bands of faintest rose. And there was the visiting gentleman hovering about her, with his oh-let-me-please-Mrs.- oh-do-let-me-now. But her grip on the neck of the bottle was as tenacious as a snake’s. She lifted her head, smiled, and shook it at their guest.
40 “Oh, no,” she said, “I’m doing beautifully.”
41 Just as she spoke the cork flew out and hit the gentleman square in the forehead. After it streamed a geyser of purest gold.
42 “Oh, oh, oh,” cried the invalid. He held out his hands to the golden spray. “Oh, pour it here!” he cried. “Oh, buckets of it going! Oh, pour it over me, Elsa!”
43 The color had flown into Elsa’s face and she was laughing. Softly and breathlessly she ran from glass to glass. There in the stems played the clear living liquid, like a fountain springing upward. Ah, that, ah, that, in the innards of a man, thought the invalid joyfully! Ah, that, springing again and again in the belly and heart! There in the glass it ran, cascaded in needlepoints the length of his throat, went whistling to his pulses.
44 The invalid set down his empty glass.
45 “Elsa,” he said gently, “could I have a little more champagne?”
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46 His wife had risen with the bottle in her hand, but she looked doubtfully at him.
47 “Do you really think you should?” she asked.
48 “Yes,” said the invalid. He watched the unbelievably pure stuff flowing all over his glass. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Of course, I should.”
49 A sweet shy look of love had begun to arch in his eyes.
50 “I’d love to see the langouste,” he said gently. “Do you think you could let him out and let me see him run around?”
51 Elsa set down her glass and stooped to lift the cover of the basket. There was the green armored beast lifting its eyes, as if on hinges, to examine the light. Such an expression he had seen before, thought the invalid immediately. There was a startling likeness in those small audacious eyes. Such a look had there been in his father’s eyes: that look, and the long smooth mustaches drooping across the wee clefted chin, gave the langouste such a look of his father that he exclaimed aloud.
52 “Be careful!” said Elsa. “His claws are tied, but still--”
53 “I must have him out,” said the invalid. He gripped the langouste firmly about the hips. He looks like my father, he was thinking. I must have him out where I can see.
54 In spite of its shackles, the animal contrived to wave his wide pinions in the air as the invalid lifted him up and set him on the rug across his knees. There was the same line of sparkling dew-like substance pearling the langouste’s lip, the same weak disappointed lip, like the eagle’s lip, and the bold suspicious eye. Across the sloping shoulders of the beast lay a sprinkling of brilliant dust, as black as coal dust and quite as luminous. Just as his father had looked coming home at night, with the coal dust showered across his shoulders like a deadly mantle. Just such a deadly cloak of quartz and mica and the rooted roots of fern. Even the queer blue toothless look of his father about the jaws. The invalid took another deep swallow of champagne and let it seep quietly through his flesh and blood. Then he lifted his hand and stroked the langouste gently. You’ve never counted, he was thinking mildly. I’ve led my life very well without you in it. You better go back to the mines where you belong.
55 When he lifted up the langouste to peer into his face, the arms of the beast fell ludicrously open as if he were seeking to embrace the ailing man. He could see his father very well in him, coming home with the coal dirt all over him in the evening, standing by the door that opened in by halves, opening first the upper half and then the lower, swaying a little as he felt for the latch of the lower half of the door. With the beer he had been drinking, or the dew of the Welsh mist shining on his long mustaches. The invalid gave him a gentle shake and set him down again.
56 I got on very well without you, he was thinking. He sipped at his champagne and regarded the animal upon his knees. As far as I was concerned you need never have been my father at all. Slowly and warily the wondrous eyes and the feelers of the beast moved in distrust across the invalid’s lap and bosom. A lot of good you ever did me, he was thinking, as he watched the langouste groping about as if in darkness; he began to think of the glowing miner’s lamp his father had worn strapped upon his brow. Feeling about in the dark and choking to death underground, he was thinking impatiently. I might have been anybody’s son. The strong shelly odor of the langouste was seasoning the air.
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57 “I’ve got on very well without you,” he was thinking bitterly. From his wife’s face he gathered that he had spoken aloud. The visiting gentleman looked into the depths of his glass of champagne.
58 “Don’t misunderstand me,” said the guest with a forbearing smile. “I’m quite aware of the fact that, long before you met me, you had one of the greatest publics and following of any living writer--”
59 The invalid looked in bewilderment at his wife’s face and at the face of the visiting man. If they scold me, he thought, I am going to cry. He felt his underlip quivering. Scold me! he thought suddenly in indignation. A man with a beard! His hand fled to his chin for confirmation. A man with a beard, he thought with a cunning evil gleam narrowing his eye.
60 “You haven’t answered my question,” he said aggressively to the visitor. “You haven’t answered it yet, have you?”
61 His hand had fallen against the hard brittle armor of the langouste’s hide. There were the eyes raised to his and the canny feelers lifted. His fingers closed for comfort about the langouste’s unwieldy paw. Father, he said in his heart, Father, help me. Father, Father, he said, I don’t want to die.
NOTES
1. A short story by Kay Boyle from Fifty Stories, copyright ©1980 by Kay Boyle. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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D.H. Lawrence's Ghost: Rest, (E)motion, and Imagined Transatlantic Modernism in Kay Boyle's "Rest Cure"
Anne Reynes-Delobel
1 Written in the months following D. H. Lawrence’s death, “Rest Cure” narrates a fictional episode in the English writer’s final days in Vence, France, in early 1930. Not only the story’s main theme (the writer dying and his fear of death) but also its startling imagery and particular texture unmistakably indicate the influence – even fascination – Lawrence exerted on the younger American poet and writer Kay Boyle (1902-1992). Lawrence was among the first modern writers Boyle began to read as a teenager in Saint Paul and Cincinnati, and continued with unabated interest after she moved to New York and then to France in the early 1920s. Around the time she was writing her first novel, Process, studying Lawrence’s work seems to have helped shape her conception of the creative imagination. In a letter written in Le Havre in December 1923, she expressed her enthusiasm for Evelyn Scott’s recent novel Escapade in ontological terms by describing its affinities with the emotional intensity and clear- sighted vision of Lawrence: “She has gone deeper than Lawrence […]. This is the utterness of reality and truth. […] Her words do not have to be exotic and strange, because the emotion behind them is more expressed than her expression. She does not leave out words or play with adjectives – she is real. […] It makes everything worthwhile” (Letters 69). In the following weeks, Boyle also read Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature which, as she stated years later in her autobiography, encouraged her to pursue a career in writing: “[…] these essays, read and reread, gave me a singular courage as they signaled to me a new and quite ruthless way of thought” (Geniuses 144).
2 It has become almost a critical commonplace that Boyle’s fiction has a Lawrentian quality, a distinct filiation with Lawrence’s poetry and prose. In the most detailed analysis to date, D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996), Leo Hamalian has
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examined the way Boyle reacted, in her writing, to the dynamic aspects of the English author’s creativity, especially his emphasis on “blood-knowing” or “blood consciousness” as an act of connection, and his use of animal imagery to suggest the forces of impulse and resistance that determine interaction between material bodies. Hamalian’s study focuses on Boyle’s prose fiction of the 1930s, a decade which saw the publication of her finest novels, such as Year Before Last (1932) and Death of a Man (1936), some of her best short stories, including “The White Horses of Vienna” (1935), and the two critically-acclaimed novellas The Crazy Hunter and The Bridegroom’s Body (1940). However, Lawrence’s influence can also be felt in Boyle’s experiments in poetry of the end of the 1920s which mark her transition from early imagist verse to lyric, intensely dramatic open-form compositions. As Hamalian has pointedly remarked, the most important thing Boyle learned from Lawrence was that “poetry and fiction came from the same well” (102). The poems she dedicated to her fellow poets Emanuel Carnevali, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and Harry Crosby clearly demonstrate how much she relied on the interrelatedness of poetry and prose as an instrument for liberating language.
3 Lawrence’s views of empty consumerism and uncontrolled capitalism must also have confirmed Boyle’s resolve to escape the crudity of American life. In protest against a trend described by Waldo Frank as “the clamped dominion of Puritan and Machine” (164) that had separated national cultural identity from imagination and increasingly threatened to render the intellect irrelevant, she chose expatriation for France in June 1923, at the age of twenty-one. However, physical relocation to Europe was not an escape from questions of American identity. Taking her cue from Ezra Pound, Boyle saw expatriation, and most particularly expatriate writing, as a paradoxically privileged space for a dialectical interrogation of “Americanness” whose goal was to provoke literary and social change.
4 “Rest Cure” provides an intriguing example of the way she managed to channel her emotional response to Lawrence’s death into a story which is both a tribute to his poetics and a way to legitimate the search for a new language that would facilitate a more immediate contact with life. The protagonist, a hardly-veiled reference to Lawrence, stands as a figure of authorial energy at the center of a web of personal and intertextual references which construct an imaginary of transatlantic circulation and exchange destabilizing the relationship between local, national, and international identities. The story moves from a binary to a dialectical understanding of the difference between rest and motion, thus introducing a dynamic interplay among other binary opposites, and unsettling temporal and spatial boundaries. This process both emphasizes and complicates the role of emotion in opening up a space necessary for the coming of the Other and the invention of the new. At stake is the grounding of the text in a trans-subjective, collective project whose objectives I will delineate by briefly examining the social context of literary production.
American late modernism in transatlantic dialogue
5 “Rest Cure” was first published in April 1931, in the first issue of Story, a little magazine edited by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley in Vienna.1 Burnett was friends with Eugene Jolas, the editor of the Paris-based international magazine transition, and with Bill Bird, the founder of Three Mountain Press in Paris in the early 1920s. Bird was also in charge
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of the European offices of the Consolidated Press Association and it is in this capacity that he sent Burnett to Vienna to take charge of the CPA office there. Boyle was friends with Jolas, Bird, and Burnett whom she had met or worked with when she lived in Paris in 1927-29. From the start, “Rest Cure” was therefore part of a modernist transatlantic print culture characterized, as Eric White has convincingly argued, by its reliance on an imaginary of place resulting in textual spaces which “served as self-consciously fabricated focal points, multimedia nodes which carried transnational aesthetic debates into and from specific communities, circulating internationally over vast distances, in relatively short periods of time” (210). While Paris, London, or Vienna were the constructed geographical nodes where modernist writers and artists clustered in the 1920s, little magazines and small press publications were the constructed literary spaces forming the loose, contingent, and unstable cartography of the modernist transatlantic.
6 By the early 1930s, Kay Boyle was a regular contributor to several literary press editions and border-crossing magazines. In 1926, she fell in love with the poet Ernest Walsh who edited an exile magazine in the south of France. Though married to a Frenchman, she began an affair with Walsh and assisted him with the editing of This Quarter until his premature death from tuberculosis in the fall of 1926. This experience was the main inspiration for Year Before Last, a novel written around the same time that Boyle was writing “Rest Cure.” Walsh was intent on making This Quarter the space where young writers could experiment with an imaginary of distant America. A staunch admirer of William Carlos Williams’s cultural “localism,” he encouraged new modes of writing that looked at the American experience from a variety of perspectives with a view to rediscovering the “local.” In helping blur the boundaries between “local,” “national” and “international,” Walsh gained prominent stature in Boyle’s transatlantic imaginary. His ailing but resilient figure haunts her poems of 1928-31, and is also intricately embedded in the text of “Rest Cure,” beneath that of Lawrence. In 1927, Boyle, who had been friends with Williams since the time she was working as the assistant to Lola Ridge in the New York offices of Broom, wrote an enthusiastic review of In the American Grain (1925) for transition which had succeeded This Quarter. Years later, in Being Geniuses Together, she paid further homage to the intense relationship and exchange at the heart of the collaborative network that infused transatlantic modernism.2
7 Among Boyle’s expatriate friends were also Harry and Caresse Crosby, a flamboyant couple and the owners of the Black Sun Press (1924) who published Boyle’s first collection of short stories in 1929. In 1930-31, Caresse Crosby also published Boyle’s translations of novels by René Crevel, Joseph Delteil, and Raymond Radiguet under her own imprint Crosby Continental Editions. While her friendship with the Crosbys provided Boyle with material for her fourth novel, My Next Bride (1934), it also facilitated her acquaintance with D. H. Lawrence’s work and personal circumstances. In the spring of 1929, seeking a commercial publisher for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence and Frieda called on the Crosbys in Paris. Although Harry Crosby was unimpressed by Lawrence’s novel, Black Sun published his short novel The Escaped Cock as a limited edition in September 1929, three months before Harry committed suicide in New York.3 Boyle, who had by then become close friends with Caresse, must have heard of – if not read – this resurrection story by Lawrence.
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8 The expatriate milieu in France also played a significant part in the conception of “Rest Cure,” although in the haphazard manner which characterized communication and exchange among literary exiles. What makes “Rest Cure” such an appealing story comes in part from its seeming truthfulness. Though the name of Lawrence is never mentioned, details about the main character’s appearance and condition clearly point to the novelist and poet in the final stage of his illness. The man who is simply called “the invalid” is sitting on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. His pale complexion and wasted body clearly evoke a patient in a very advanced stage of consumption. Another detail would have made it easy for members of the Anglo- American community to identify the invalid as D.H. Lawrence. The English writer’s death, on the second day of March 1930, was widely covered in the American, British and European continental press. One incident in particular was circulated by the Paris editions of two American newspapers. It was said that an American sculptor named Jo Davidson had gone to Vence to visit Lawrence in the hope of having him sit for a head and that the novelist was not very happy with the result which he found “mediocre” (Nehls 450-51). While it was true that Davidson visited Lawrence in the Ad Astra sanatorium, the rumor had it that he broke into the sickroom when the patient was much too ill to be disturbed. This anecdote had a crucial influence on the conception and writing of “Rest Cure”; not only did it provide the event which makes up the story’s main plot, but it also enabled Boyle to create a space filled with so highly-charged energies that they complicate the relationship between rest and motion.
Energy, intensity, regime
9 Before his wife returns from the market with a live lobster in her basket and a “visiting gentleman” at her heels, the invalid has been brooding for a while over the early descent of the sun in the winter sky. Confined to his chair by illness, he revisits painful emotional territory, exposing disparate, invisible spaces that disturb spatial and temporal coordinates, and establish a new imaginary geography. The sight of the setting sun brings back painful memories of his unhappy childhood in England where his father worked at the colliery: “Even here, the south, in the sun even, the coal mines remained. His nostrils were sick with the smell of them and on his cheeks he felt lingering the slipping mantle of the English fog.” In an attempt to block out the unwanted image of the coal pits, he tries to think back of happier days in Cornwall, only to remember that they were darkened by the war: “Every time his heart had lifted for a hillside or a wave, or the wind blowing, the thought of the turmoil going on had beset and stricken him.” Through the process of mental association, the image of the artificial flowerbeds in Monte Carlo comes to superimpose itself on the “vision” of the elemental landscape of Cornwall, which brings the character back to his present state and his growing anguish about the approaching darkness. In an outburst of powerless rage, he viciously breaks off his wife’s potted geraniums. Partial contiguities and differences link with separate, incomplete elements in space and time. The rationale of the association between one diegetic thread and another is immediately felt by the reader to be based on these displaced metonymies. Yet, the reference to Cornwall also subtly anticipates the later development of the story by establishing a metaphorical connection with the primitive. The evocation of the character’s response to the Cornish landscape (“The first light of day coming had warmed […] the blood rising in his body”) reflects Lawrence’s notion that some landscapes have the power to alter consciousness
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and reawaken latent “blood consciousness.” As Jane Costin has demonstrated in an article which reassesses the importance of Cornwall in Kangaroo (1923), Lawrence’s stay in Zennor in 1915-17 was an important step in his maturing the link between consciousness, place, and the primitive, an endeavor that eventually led to his journey to America and Mexico.
10 In “Rest Cure,” the intertextual allusion to primitive “place” and “soil” prepares the reader for the most dramatic event in the story when the invalid, who has been goading his wife’s guest, an unwelcome English publisher, suddenly asks that the lobster she has purchased at the market be released. Setting the creature across the rug on his lap and looking at it closely, he is suddenly stricken by its resemblance to his long-dead father: There was the green armored beast lifting his eyes, as if on hinges, to examine the light. Such an expression he had seen before, thought the invalid immediately. There was a startling likeness in those small audacious eyes. Such a look had there been in his father’s eyes: that look, and the long smooth mustaches drooping across the wee clefted chin, gave the langouste such a look of his father that he exclaimed aloud.
11 The composite nature of the “green-armored beast” with his “eagle’s lip” and black, luminous “deadly mantle” conjures up the vivid, cryptic imagery of the Book of Revelation.4 Yet, the apocalyptic tenor is immediately deflected by the “ludicrous” comparison in the next paragraph: “When he lifted up the langouste to peer into his face, the arms of the beast fell ludicrously open as if he were seeking to embrace the ailing man.” The description of the animal remains in unresolved suspension between ironic perplexity and spiritual anguish. Nonetheless, what emerges from the text is the idea that the creative energy of the imagination depends directly on contact with the primitive and on continuity with other forms of life. The primeval nature of the sea creature supersedes the differences between human and non-human, religious or pagan categories, and engages the reader with another form of emotional logic based on the gradual concentration and intensification of “image-thinking.”
12 In accelerated motion, the invalid is taken on a downward journey into the soulless underground where his father had been forced to descend: “[…] as he watched the langouste groping about as if in darkness; he began to think of the glowing miner’s lamp his father had worn strapped upon his brow.” The memory of his father “[f]eeling about in the dark and choking to death underground” conveys violent rejection: “I got on very well without you, he was thinking. He sipped at his champagne and regarded the animal upon his knees. As far as I was concerned you need never have been my father at all.” This process culminates in the complete interpenetration of human and natural, illusion and reality. After another outburst against his visitor, the invalid finds himself clutching the lobster’s “unwieldy paw” for comfort: “Father, he said in his heart, Father, help me. Father, Father, he said, I don’t want to die.”
13 The last invocative, incantatory sentences of the story provide a perceptive insight into Lawrence’s interpretation of Revelation as the pursuit of the “great down direction,”5 a physical-psychical experience made possible by symbols whose “value is dynamic, emotional, belonging to the sense-consciousness of the body and soul, and not simply mental” (Apocalypse 48). The lobster symbol draws the reader down a spiral of descent into a space where the character’s conflicting, contradictory impulses erupt with poignant intensity. Sensory contact with this creature of an archaic world brings back the long-suppressed memory of a father whose figure is both disowned and called forth
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in fervent prayer. At the close of the story, what returns with all the power of the repressed in the character’s psyche is the symptom of an unresolved conflict which is left suspended, like a phantom, in an interminable unresolved present.6
14 The downward movement of the story grounds the representation of emotion within the transient fluxes of bodily activity. It opens up the space of “the immediate present” in which there is, as Lawrence argues in “Poetry of the Present” (1919), “no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished […] nothing crystal, permanent” (13). It also connects to Lawrence’s view of rest as the lowest energy regime: “There is no such thing as rest. For a thing to us at rest is only a thing travelling at our own rate of motion: or, from another point of view, it is a thing moving at the lowest rate of motion we can recognize” (Study of Thomas Hardy 60). In “Rest Cure,” this idea is emphasized through the contrast between the invalid’s almost complete stasis and the euphoric flowering of emotional, imaginative, and perceptual responses. A measure of the positive value of these inertial forces is conveyed through the character’s boundary- transgressive openness to another form of life, and, conversely, through his cantankerous outbursts against his guest. The latter, though he bears the brunt of the invalid’s ferocious temper, is not merely a hapless victim. The mechanical quality of his superficial, business-minded over-politeness precludes the shaping of the intersubjective climate in which mutual recognition and reconciliation thrive. His sly refusal to answer the invalid’s question (“Why be a publisher?”) denies the writer the possibility of a literary conversation, and reduces him to a state of childish impotence.
15 This form of covert violence may also be implied in the title of the story which obliquely alludes to the treatment devised by Philadelphia neurologist S. Weir Mitchell in the second half of the 19th century. The cure aimed at restoring overwrought patients to mental and bodily health through a strict regimen of food and enforced bed rest. The experience proved particularly taxing on active, intellectual women who were prohibited from reading or writing, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Virginia Woolf famously emphasized in their fictional accounts of the rest cure.7 In casting a male writer in the role of the female hysteric, Boyle’s story points out the arbitrariness of gender and sexual constructs while harking back to two of its most obvious modernist antecedents. Investigating the relationship between stasis and physiological experience, Boyle affirms, in typical Lawrentian fashion, that writing is bound up with the body and with interpersonal communication. Yet, while she acknowledges the experiential import recorded in the pursuit of the downward direction, she seems to be suggesting the limitations of our human knowledge of revelation.
To the limit… and beyond?
16 The best way to approach the question of revelation in “Rest Cure” is through an analysis of the figures of speech. The impression of familiarity initially felt by the invalid at the sight of the lobster is conveyed through an unambiguous analogical association. However unexpected – or preposterous – the image, its meaning is simple enough to grasp: “There was the same line of sparkling dew-like substance pearling the langouste’s lip, the same weak disappointed lip, like the eagle’s lip, and the bold suspicious eye. Across the sloping shoulders of the beast lay a sprinkling of brilliant dust, as black as coal dust and quite as luminous.” As the character further engages in recollection, however, embittered feelings start to erupt: “You’ve never counted, he
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was thinking mildly. I’ve led my life very well without you in it. You better go back to the mines where you belong.” All of a sudden, he starts talking aloud to his father, as if oblivious to the presence of his wife and their guest: “‘I’ve got on very well without you,’ he was thinking bitterly. From his wife’s face he gathered that he had spoken aloud. The visiting gentleman looked into the depths of his glass.” This sudden outbreak of submerged emotional tensions attracts closer attention to the sequence of signifiers operating homologically and homophonically throughout the story (“fathomless black pits of his lids,” “black blank mines,” “clawing under,” “shackles,” “groping in darkness,” “hard, brittle armor,” “unwieldy paw”8). The sequence keeps charting the route into the invalid’s conflicting desires until it ultimately condensates into a metaphoric bond occurring in the imaginary: “His hand had fallen against the hard brittle armor of the langouste’s hide. There were the eyes raised to his and the canny feelers lifted. His fingers closed for comfort about the langouste’s unwieldy paw. Father, he said in his heart, Father, help me.” At his moment of crossing or transgression, the ailing man is faced with radical primordial loss. In other words, in just a few sentences, the story moves from the baroque bizarreness of the “Portrait of the Writer’s Father as a Lobster” to a phantasmatic, impossible-to-embody thrust toward the unattainable Other. The final sentence opens up a translational space “where everything returns to deep being,” as Blanchot has described in The Space of Literature: But in imaginary space things are transformed into that which cannot be grasped. Out of use, beyond wear, they are not in our possession but are the movement of dispossession which releases us both from them and from ourselves. They are not certain but are joined to the intimacy of the risk where neither they nor we are sheltered any more, but where we are, rather, introduced, utterly without reserve, into a place where nothing retains us at all. (140)
17 The metaphoric transformation (from incongruous lobster into lost father into unreachable otherness) interrogates the possibility of a crossing “beyond” by taking the language of representation to the sacrificial point which is, Blanchot writes, “the infinite trace of absence.”
18 While Boyle shared Lawrence’s belief in “experience” or “sense-awareness” through images as necessary for emotional connection, she was also influenced by the form of metamorphosis of the visible into invisibility pursued by René Crevel in his novel Babylon, the first chapter of which she translated for Black Sun Press around the time she was writing “Rest Cure.” “What is death?” demands a little girl in the opening line of Crevel’s book. By way of an answer, the story takes the reader into a vertiginous spiral by which the familiar is estranged and can never be refamiliarized again.9 The anguish of transmogrification fuels the imaginary process linking death, from the start, to the movement of the artistic experience. Boyle used this technique in her experimental poem “Landscape for Wyn Henderson” (1931) which mourns the death of her lover Ernest Walsh: No cradle where to rock the head The worms came through and riddled it The snails strung slime birds carried off what plumes of it To garnish rump No spinet left the flax to iron Remains the Cave the Rock the Tree Were not for you the avalanche the Cave turned mad with fire For you the Rock to shape your hand for you the Tree to shelter
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I saw the snails curl up like lead I saw the worms expire. (Collected Poems 50, emphasis added)
19 In “Rest Cure,” the act of dying (symbolically evoked through the invalid’s experience of the dying sun) is also closely associated with the activity of language and imagination, but neither clarifies the other. As Blanchot writes: “This is revelation where nothing appears” (198).
Of lobsters and specters
20 “Rest Cure” introduces the reader to a form of orphic experience which stresses Boyle’s intimate knowledge of the process of dying as well as her will to inscribe the figure of the dying poet as a powerful intermediary in the literary process. As any reader familiar with Boyle’s life and work will notice, the story is closely related to Year Before Last (1932), the novel that she started to write during the time she composed “Rest Cure,” and to the poems she wrote as a tribute to Walsh after he died of consumption in Monte Carlo in October 1926. In the last ten months of his life, Boyle lived with Walsh, first in Grasse and then in the Riviera hinterland. This experience gave Year Before Last its autobiographical angle. At the end of 1930, Boyle returned to live in Villefranche-sur- Mer with her second husband, Laurence Vail. Anecdotally, yet intriguingly, Vence, where Lawrence died that same year, is situated halfway between these two locations.
21 The invalid writer in “Rest Cure” shares several traits with the main characters in Year Before Last. His sense of alienation from the Mediterranean landscape echoes Hannah’s impatience with the “cramped and wary sea” at Fréjus or Monte Carlo. Conversely, his nostalgic wish that the place be restored to its pristine wilderness (“The whole sloping coast should have been left a wilderness with no order to it, stalked and leafed with the great strong trunks and foliage of these parts”) reflects her wonder at the luxuriance of the southern vegetation. The description of the invalid’s bodily gestures, sensations, and reactions also proves Boyle’s familiarity with disease and impending death from the time she was nursing Walsh in the final stage of his illness, as well as her capacity for emotional empathy: “[…] the invalid cleared his throat, dissolved the little pellet of phlegm which had leaped to being on his tongue so as not to spit before them, and sank back in his chair.” Another important episode in the novel is reworked in the story. After a severe hemorrhage, Martin Sheehan agrees to see an English doctor who mechanically advises him to go to a sanatorium. Exasperated by the doctor’s lack of emotional response, the young man asks for a cigarette and a glass of champagne, and petulantly retorts: “It’s no mountain vista or eggs or milk that can work the miracle now. Something else might heal me, but if you’ll pardon me, sir, it’s nothing a doctor could do. It might be done by America restored to the Indians, or an entirely new race of men sprung up, or enough good books written out of the austere spirit of people who do not falter and conform.” (Boyle, Year Before Last 203; my emphasis)
22 His staunch belief in the integrity of art provides an oblique reading into the invalid’s personality.
23 The reference to Year Before Last reveals a close-knit web of intertextual references. The novel contains several allusions to poets, writers, and editors who were committed to the discovery of a new language for American literature. The passage mentioned above contains a loosely-quoted extract from William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain.
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“The poet in Italy” is Emanuel Carnevali, the Italian-American poet who worked as a co-editor to Poetry magazine in Chicago in the early 1920s before he was diagnosed with encephalitis and had to return to Italy where he was dying a slow death in a public hospital in Bazzano. Walsh’s figure also haunts “A Christmas Carol for Emanuel Carnevali” (1927), “A Confession to Eugene Jolas” (1928), “A Valentine for Harry Crosby” (1929), and “The United States” (1928), a poem addressed to Williams. In “Dedicated to Robert McAlmon,” the persona seizes upon the notion of “blood- consciousness” to gently chastise her addressee for having forgotten his connection to place. “What good did your blood do you?” she asks him before dreaming up landscape as the space where contact with the phenomenal world is renewed and celebrated in such a way as would certainly have appealed to the author of The Escaped Cock: It would be a good thing to return out of the cold now the seams in the ice cracking wide the wild heart whoring the hard eye warming to the nest of an oriole hanging like iron grapes in a pine Talk of the afternoon you found a young goat and brought it home in your arms with its legs dangling and its muzzle pressed cool and wet on your face Eyes beckoning a sail off the cold plains that lie like priests’ gowns discarded and the priests themselves in their white skins lost in the music of the waves. (Collected Poems 36)
24 These references cast an interesting light on Boyle’s overall project in “Rest Cure.” By conjuring up the figure of D. H. Lawrence and inscribing it at the core of a web of real and imaginary interpersonal exchanges, the story points out Boyle’s modernist belief in the sanctity of art and the figure of the artist-genius. At issue was the possibility to benefit from the functioning of the symbolic capital of genius associated to the name of Lawrence. In utilizing the English writer, Boyle draws a line of connection between the literary experimentations of the younger generation of American modernists and Lawrence’s innovative aesthetics. At the same time, by portraying the artist as a childishly spiteful invalid engaged in conversation with a live lobster, Boyle gives a twist to the rhetoric of individuality and genius. The constant oscillation between the binaries of feminine and masculine, static and mobile, hysteric and balanced, transgresses the traditional, masculinist, gendered characterization of the artist-figure.
25 Furthermore, Boyle’s story invites the reader to reimagine modernism in a way that allows for much more transnational participation. In advance of the Téléphone-homard imagined by Salvador Dalí around 1936-38, she invites the reader to an investigation of a sub-surrealist form of the “wireless imagination” advocated by André Breton. She also anticipates Beckett’s baroque fulgurations in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) in which the main character, Dante Belacqua, is horrified to discover that the lobster he has purchased for his dinner must be boiled alive. Beckett’s tormented Belacqua – named after a character in the Divine Comedy who refuses to leave Purgatory – is yet another avatar of the writer-figure portrayed in “Rest Cure.” Neither present nor absent, dead nor alive, it hovers like a ghost, ready to haunt future textual spaces. This spectral quality of the text underlines late modernist writers’ anxieties about issues related to the notions of origin and formal mastery. It also emphasizes their interest in curious cultural interactions and random gathering of material in the shaping of a new reader. 10
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***
26 More than merely an occasional piece inspired by Lawrence’s death, “Rest Cure” provides a spectrographic view of Boyle’s ragged, unfinished transatlantic imaginary. Its energy comes from the fruitful tension with Lawrence’s poetics. The English writer’s emphasis on the hidden physical-emotional pattern that makes life and art was instrumental in shaping the younger writer’s approach to the literary process. However, by drawing representation towards the point where it undergoes impossibility, Boyle precludes the possibility of revelation. Instead, she invites us to penetrate into an orphic space where the writer is engaged in the “pure movement of dying,” thus making sure that we will remain haunted by his ghostly presence and by the sense of urgency of his task.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Authorized King James Version of The Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print.
Beckett, Samuel. More Pricks than Kicks. London: Chatto and Windus, 1934. Print.
Blanchot, Maurice. L’Espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955; The Space of Literature. Translated with an introduction by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Print.
Boyle, Kay. Collected Poems of Kay Boyle. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 1991. Print.
---. Kay Boyle. A 20th Century Life in Letters. Ed. Sandra Spanier. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Print.
---. Being Geniuses Together, 1920-1930. With Robert McAlmon. Revised with supplementary chapters by Kay Boyle. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Reprint, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1984, with a new afterword by Kay Boyle. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Print.
---. “Rest Cure.” Fifty Stories. New York: New Directions, 1980. 30-38. Print.
---. Year Before Last. 1932. New York: Virago Press, 1986. Print.
Costin, Jane. “Lawrence’s ‘Best Adventure’: Blood-Consciousness and Cornwall.” Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012). Web. 13 June 2017. DOI : 10.4000/lawrence.95
Crevel, René. Babylone. Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1927. Print.
---. Mr. Knife, Miss Fork. Translated by Kay Boyle. Illustrated with nineteen original photograms by Max Ernst. Paris: Black Sun Press, 1931. Print.
Frank, Waldo. Our America. New York: Boni&Liveright, 1919. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The New England Magazine 11.5 (January 1892): 647-57. Print.
Hamalian, Leo. “Kay Boyle: Venus Agonistes.” D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Press; London: University Associated Press, 1996. Print.
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Hamalian, Linda. The Cramoisy Queen. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Print.
Lawrence, D.H. “Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse by Frederick Carter.” Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Maria Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 45-56. Print.
---. Kangaroo. [1923]. Ed. Bruce Steele, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
---. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and A Propos of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
---. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume IV, June 1921-March 1924. Eds. Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.
---. “Poetry of the Present.” 1919. The New York Evening Post Book Review. Poetry Number (19 June 1920): 1, 13. Print.
---. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York; Thomas Seltzer, 1923. Print.
---. Study of Thomas Hardy. 1914. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Print.
Nehls, Edward. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 1925-1930. Vol. 3. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1958. Print.
Stiles, Anne. “The Rest Cure, 1873-1925.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. 16 June 2017.
Walsh, Ernest. “Editorial.” This Quarter 1 (April 1927). Print.
White, Eric. Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print.
NOTES
1. Boyle’s contribution was considered by several critics the best contribution to this inaugural issue of Story magazine. It was also selected by Edward O’Brien for his Best American Short Stories of 1931. Two years later, in 1933, it was collected in Boyle’s collection of short fiction, The First Lover and Other Stories published in New York by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. 2. For instance, she wrote of Bill Bird, Ernest Walsh, and Robert McAlmon (who co-edited the magazine Contact with Williams in the United States in 1920-21 and founded Contact Editions in Paris in 1923): “these three men had one enduring thing in common and that was their commitment, as selfless as a woman’s, to the work of other men” (Geniuses 172). 3. On the subject of D.H. Lawrence’s relationship with the Crosbys, see for instance Linda Hamalian (59-61 and 78-79). 4. “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority” (Authorized King James Version, Rev. 13, 1-2). 5. As defined by Lawrence in his famous letter of 18 June 1923 to Frederick Carter: “For my part, I should like to see the end of the Return. The end of the Little Creation of the Logos. A fresh start, in the first great direction, with the polarity downwards […]. The great down direction […].” (Letters 461).
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6. The choice of the lobster as the instrument for this downward journey may have been inspired to Boyle by the passage in Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which Clifford Chatterley is compared to a lobster “with a hard, efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior” (110) to stress his allegiance to the “weird,” soulless “Age of the Machine” sprung from industrial capitalism. In associating the lobster with the figure of the invalid’s father, a poor collier, Boyle reverses the perspective: “the mechanized man” “feeling about in the dark and choking to death underground” is the victim of progress but also a potential source of regeneration. 7. Gilman was treated by Weir Mitchell in the spring of 1887, an experience she reworked and gave expression to through the Gothic imaginary in her semiautobiographical short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf associates the rest cure with social convention and control: “Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion” (Woolf 125). Dreading the cure at Bradshaw’s “country house,” Septimus commits suicide by jumping out of a window. 8. I thank Linda Collinge-Germain for pointing out the curious homophony between “paw” and “pa.” 9. “Au-dessus des têtes, sortie de la soupière comme Vénus de l’Océan, et aussi digne fille d’un potage banal que la plus belle des déesses, de l’insaisissable écume des mers, la suspension jette ses ombres de danseuse ridicule, et, des jupes de cette ballerine, tombe, en guise de lumière, une méchanceté verte.” (Crevel, 12) 10. For a fascinating investigation of modernist “spectralities,” see for instance Jean Michel Rabaté’s The Ghost of Modernity, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996.
ABSTRACTS
“Rest Cure” (1931) est une nouvelle écrite par l’écrivaine et poète américaine Kay Boyle (1902-1992) peu après la mort de D. H. Lawrence. Si Boyle n’avait jamais rencontré l’auteur de Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, elle connaissait bien son œuvre en prose et ses poèmes. “Rest Cure” indique des affinités surprenantes avec la poétique de Lawrence, notamment sa conception dialectique et transgressive de la différence entre mouvement et stase. Pourtant, sur la question de la Révélation, Boyle s’éloigne de l’écrivain anglais. Cet article propose d’explorer ces différences et similitudes. L’objectif est de jeter un éclairage sur la nature collective et trans- subjective de l’imaginaire transatlantique de Boyle.
AUTHORS
ANNE REYNES-DELOBEL Anne Reynes-Delobel is an Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University (AMU). She is a member of LERMA EA 850 (Laboratoire d’études et de recherche sur le monde anglophone). Her research interests include transatlantic modernism, and European avant-garde and modernist movements. With Mary Ann Caws, she has co-authored Glorieuses modernistes : Art, écriture et
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modernité au féminin (Presses de l’Université de Liège, 2016) She currently serves as the President of the Kay Boyle Society (an MLA and SSAWW affiliate).
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Bibliography
Journal of the Short Story in English, 68 | Spring 2017 111
D.H. Lawrence: A Bibliography
Shirley Bricout
I. Short stories and novellas by D. H. Lawrence
a- 1910-1929
1 Title. First edition. Standard scholarly edition(s).
2 The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. London: Duckworth, 1914. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Ed. Antony Atkins. Oxford UP, 1995. Print. Contains “The Prussian Officer” (first appeared in the English Review and in Metropolitan in 1914 as “Honour and Arms”), “The Thorn in the Flesh” (first published in the English Review as “Vin Ordinaire” in 1914), “Daughters of the Vicar” (a version appeared in Time and Tide in 1934 as “Two Marriages”), “A Fragment of Stained Glass” (English Review 1911), “The Shades of Spring” (first appeared in the Forum in 1913 as “The Soiled Rose”), “Second Best” (English Review 1912), “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” (Smart Set 1914), “Goose Fair” (English Review 1910), “The White Stocking” (Smart Set 1914), “A Sick Collier” (New Statesman 1913), “The Christening” ( Smart Set 1914), “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (English Review 1911; later adapted into a play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd). The Cambridge edition also includes Appendix I “Odour of Chrysanthemums Fragment” and Appendix II “Two Marriages.”
3 England, My England and Other Stories. New York: Seltzer, 1922. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Ed. Bruce Steele. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. Print. Contains “England, My England” (English Review 1915), “Tickets, please” (Strand 1919), “The Blind Man” (English Review 1920), “Monkey Nuts” (Sovereign 1922), “Wintry Peacock” (Metropolitan 1921), “Hadrian” (appeared as “You Touched Me” in Land and Water in 1920), “Samson and Delilah” (English Review 1917), “The Primrose Path,” “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” ( English Review 1922; in its draft stage was known as “The Miracle”), “The Last Straw” (Hutchinson’s Story Magazine 1921 entitled “Fanny and Annie”).
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The Cambridge and Penguin editions provide a selection of Uncollected Stories 1913-22: “The Mortal Coil” (Seven Arts, 1917) “The Thimble” (Seven Arts 1917), “Adolf” (Dial, 1920), “Rex” (Dial 1921) and an appendix “England, My England,” 1915 version.
4 The Ladybird, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll. London: Secker, 1923. Print. The Captain’s Doll: Three Novelettes. New York: Seltzer, 1923. Print. The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird. Ed. Dieter Mehl. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. These editions contain three novellas: The Fox (periodical publication in an earlier version in Hutchinson’s Story Magazine in 1920, revised and published in installments in the Dial in 1922), The Captain’s Doll (loosely based on “The Mortal Coil”), The Ladybird (a later version of “The Thimble”). The Cambridge edition also provides Appendix I “Ending of the First Version of The Fox” and Appendix II “The Fox: Hermitage and Those Farm Girls.”
5 St. Mawr. New York: Knopf, 1925. Print. St. Mawr Together with The Princess. London: Secker 1925. Print. St. Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Ed. Brian Finney. London: Penguin 1997. Print. These editions contain St. Mawr, and “The Princess” (first published in installments in the March, April and May 1925 issues of the Calendar of Modern Letters). The Cambridge and Penguin editions also add “The Overtone,” Appendix I “The Wilful Woman” and Appendix II “The Flying Fish.”
6 Glad Ghosts. London: Ernest Benn, 1926. Print.
7 The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. London: Secker 1928. London: Penguin, 1970. Eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print. Contains “Two Blue Birds” (Dial 1927), Sun (New Coterie 1926), “The Woman Who Rode Away” (first published in the Dial in two installments in 1925), “Smile” ( Nation & Anthenaeum 1926), “The Border-Line” ( Hutchinson’s Magazine and Smart Set 1924), “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman” (Criterion 1924), “The Last Laugh” ( The New Decameron IV 1925), “In Love” (Dial 1927), “The Man Who Loved Islands” (first published in the Dial in two installments in 1927, and collected only in the American edition of The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, Knopf 1928, and not in the Penguin 1970 edition), Glad Ghosts (first published in installments in the Dial 1926), “None of That.” The Penguin edition also contains “A Modern Lover” and “Strike-Pay.” The Penguin and Cambridge editions also include “The Rocking Horse Winner” (Harper’s Bazaar 1926, also compiled in The Ghost Book: 16 New Stories of the Uncanny, edited by Lady Cynthia Asquith, Hutchinson, 1926), “The Lovely Lady” (first collected in Cynthia Asquith’s The Back Cap: New Stories of Murder, Hutchinson, 1927). The Cambridge edition provides additional material with Appendix I “Sun: Variants,” Appendix II “‘The Border-Line’: Early Manuscript Version,” Appendix III “‘The Last Laugh’: Lawrence’s revisions in MS,” Appendix IV “‘More Modern Love’: Manuscript Version of ‘In Love,’” Appendix V “‘The Man Who Love Islands’: First Manuscript Version,” Appendix VI “‘Glad Ghosts’ Lawrence’s Manuscript Revisions,” Appendix VII “‘The Lovely Lady’: The Black Cap Version” and Appendix VIII “A Pure Witch.”
8 The Escaped Cock. Paris: Black Sun Press, 1929. Print.
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b- Posthumous collections
9 The Virgin and the Gipsy. Florence: Orioli, 1930. Print.
10 Love Among the Haystacks and Other Pieces. London: Nonesuch, 1930. New York: Viking, 1933. Print. Contains “A Reminiscence by David Garnett,” “Love Among the Haystacks,” “A Chapel Among the Mountains,” “A Hay Hut Among the Mountains” (the latter two being travel pieces), “Once.”
11 “Adolf” and “The Fly in the Ointment.” Young Lorenzo: Early Life of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Ada Lawrence and G. Stuart Gelder. Florence: Orioli, 1932. Print.
12 The Lovely Lady and Other Stories. London: Secker, 1933. Print. Contains “The Blue Moccasins” (Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial 1928) “The Lovely Lady,” “The Man Who Loved Islands,” “Mother and Daughter” (New Criterion 1929), “The Overtone,” “Rawdon’s Roof,” “Things” (Bookman 1928), “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”
13 A Modern Lover. London: Secker, 1934. Print. Contains “Her Turn,” “A Modern Lover,” “New Eve and Old Adam,” “The Old Adam,” “Strike Pay” (Saturday Westminster Gazette 1913), “Witch à la Mode” (Lovat Dickson’s Magazine 1934), and also Mr. Noon.
14 The Tales of D. H. Lawrence. London: Secker, 1934. Reprinted in 2 volumes, St Clair Shores: Scholarly Press, 1972. Print. Contains all the short stories published between 1914 and 1931.
15 Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann, 1936, 1961. London: Penguin, 1978. Print. Contains “Adolf,” “A Dream of Life” (published as “Autobiographical Fragment”), “The Flying Fish,” “Miner at Home” (Nation 1912), “Mercury,” (Atlantic Monthly 1927), “Rex” (Dial 1921), and “The Undying Man.”
16 Stories, Essays and Poems. Ed. Desmond Hawkins. London: Dent, 1939. Reprinted as D. H. Lawrence’s Stories, Essays and Poems. London: Dent, 1967. Print.
17 A Prelude, Thames Ditton: Merle Press, 1949. Print.
18 The Portable D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Diana Trilling. New York: Viking, 1947. New York: Penguin, 1977. Print. Contains “The Blind Man,” The Fox, “The Lovely Lady,” “The Princess,” “The Prussian Officer,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “Tickets, Please.”
19 The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, 1955. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 3 vols. Print.
20 The Short Novels. London: Heinemann, 1956. 2 vols. Print. Contains The Captain’s Doll, The Fox, The Ladybird, “Love Among the Haystacks,” “The Man Who Died,” St. Mawr, The Virgin and the Gipsy.
21 St. Mawr and the Man Who Died, New York: Random House, 1959. Print.
22 Four Short Novels. New York: Viking 1965. New York: Penguin 1976. Print. Contains The Captain’s Doll, The Fox, The Ladybird, “Love Among the Haystacks.”
23 Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. London: Heinemann, 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Print.
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Contains “Delilah and Mr. Bircumshaw,” “Fly in the Ointment,” “Lessford’s Rabbits,” “A Lesson on a Tortoise,” “The Mortal Coil,” “Once–!” “A Prelude,” and “The Thimble.”
24 Three Novellas: The Fox, The Ladybird, The Captain’s Doll. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Print.
25 Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Print. Contains: “Love Among the Haystacks,” “The Lovely Lady,” “Rawdon’s Roof,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” “The Man Who Loved Islands” and “The Man Who Died.”
26 The Mortal Coil and Other Stories. Ed. Keith Sagar. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Print. Contains “The Mortal Coil,” “A Chapel and a Hay Hut among the Mountains,” “Adolf,” “Delilah and Mr. Bircumshaw,” “A Fly in the Ointment,” “Her Turn,” “Lessford’s Rabbits,” “A Lesson on a Tortoise,” “The Miner at Home,” “New Eve and Old Adam,” “The Old Adam,” “Once –!” “A Prelude,” “Rex,” ‘The Thimble” and “Witch à la Mode.”
27 The Princess and Other Stories. Ed. Keith Sagar. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Print. Contains “The Princess,” “The Blue Moccasins,” “A Dream of Life” (“Autobiographical Fragment”), “The Flying Fish,” “The Man Who Was Through with the World,” “Mother and Daughter,” “Mercury,” “The Overtone,” Sun, “Things,” “The Undying Man,” “The Wilful Woman.”
28 St. Mawr and The Virgin and the Gipsy. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Print.
29 The Collected Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence. London: Heinemann, 1974. 3 vols. Print.
30 The Escaped Cock. Ed. Gerald Lacy. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Print.
31 Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. London: Penguin 1996. Print. Contains “A Prelude” (Nottinghamshire Guardian, 1907), “A Lesson on a Tortoise,” “Lessford’s Rabbits,” “A Modern Lover,” “The Fly in the Ointment,” “The Witch à la Mode,” “The Old Adam,” “The Miner at Home,” “Her Turn” (Saturday Westminster Gazette, 1913), “Strike-Pay,” “Delilah and Mr. Bircumshaw” (Virginia Quarterly Review, 1940), “Love Among the Haystacks,” “Once –!” “New Eve and Old Adam.” The Cambridge edition also provides Appendix I “‘Two Schools’ Fragment,” Appendix II “‘Delilah and Mr. Bircumshaw’ Fragment,” Appendix III “‘Burns Novel’ Fragments.”
32 The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories. Eds. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones, and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. Contains “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” “Things,” “Rawdon’s Roof,” “Mother and Daughter,” “The Escaped Cock,” “The Blue Moccasins,” Appendix I “‘The Escaped Cock’: Early Versions, Appendix II “‘The Man Who Was Through with the World,” Appendix III “The Undying Man,” Appendix IV “The Blue Moccasins: Early Versions,” Appendix V “The Woman Who Wanted to Disappear.”
33 Selected Stories. Ed. Sue Wilson. London: Penguin, 2007. Print. Contains “Love Among the Haystacks,” “The Miner at Home,” “The White Stocking,” “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “New Eve and Old Adam,” “Vin Ordinaire,” “The Prussian Officer,” “England, My England,” “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” The Blind Man,” “Adolf,” “The Last Straw,” “Sun,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” The Man Who Loved Islands” and “Things.”
34 Vicar’s Garden and Other Stories. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge, UP, 2009. Print. A collection of manuscripts and other early versions of some of D. H. Lawrence’s short
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stories, as well as stories which have never been published before. Contains “The Vicar’s Garden” (written 1907), “The Shadow in the Rose Garden,” “A Page from the Annals of Gresleia” (1907), “Ruby-Glass” (1907), “The White Stocking,” “‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ Version 2” (1910), “‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ Version 3” (1911), “Intimacy” (1911), “The Harassed Angel” (1911), “Vin Ordinaire” (1913), “‘The Blind Man’ Version 1” (1918), “‘Wintry Peacock’ Version 1” (1919), Appendix “The July 1914 ending of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums.’”
35 The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of D. H. Lawrence: Three Novelettes – “Glad Ghosts,” “The Man Who Died,” and “The Border-Line” – and Five Short Stories of the Macabre and Unusual. Milton Keynes: Leonaur, 2009. Print. One of a series of collected “supernatural and weird fiction” of writers in English. The “Five Short Stories of the Macabre and Unusual” are “Smile,” The Last Laugh,” Sun, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”
II. Other works in chronological order
36 Title. First edition. Standard scholarly edition.
37 The White Peacock. London: Heinemann, 1911. Ed. Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Print.
38 The Trespasser. London: Duckworth, 1912. Ed. Elizabeth Mansfield. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Print.
39 Love Poems and Others. London: Duckworth, 1913. D. H. Lawrence: The Poems. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. 2 vols. Print.
40 Sons and Lovers. London: Duckworth, 1913. Eds. Helen Baron and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.
41 The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. Written 1914. First performed 1916. The Plays. Eds. Hans- Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 2 vols. Print.
42 The Rainbow. London: Methuen, 1915. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print.
43 Twilight in Italy. London: Duckworth, 1916. Twilight in Italy and Other Essays. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.
44 Amores. London: Duckworth, 1916. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
45 Look! We Have Come Through! London: Chatto and Windus, 1917. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
46 New Poems. London: Secker, 1918. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
47 Bay: A Book of Poems. London: Beaumont, 1919. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
48 Touch and Go. London: C. W. Daniel, 1920. Print. First performed 1973. (see The Plays)
49 Women in Love. Privately published 1920. London: Secker, 1921. Eds. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print.
50 The Lost Girl. London: Secker, 1920. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981. Print.
51 Movements in European History. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1921. Ed. Philip Crumpton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print.
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52 Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious. New York: Seltzer, 1921. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.
53 Tortoises. New York: Seltzer, 1921. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
54 Sea and Sardinia. New York: Seltzer, 1921 (this first edition included eight pictures in colour by Jan Juta). Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.
55 Aaron’s Rod. New York: Seltzer, 1922. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print.
56 Fantasia of the Unconscious. New York: Seltzer, 1922. Print. (see Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious)
57 Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Seltzer, 1923. Eds. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
58 Kangaroo. London: Secker, 1923. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.
59 Birds, Beasts and Flowers. New York: Seltzer, 1923. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
60 Mastro-Don Gesualdo, by Giovanni Verga. New York: Seltzer, 1923. London: Dedalus, 1999. Print.
61 The Boy in the Bush. London: Secker, 1924. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Print.
62 Little Novels of Sicily, by Giovanni Verga. New York: Seltzer, 1925. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. London: Heinemann, 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Print.
63 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Philadelphia: Centaur Press, 1925. Ed. Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print.
64 The Plumed Serpent. London: Secker, 1926. Ed. L. D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print.
65 David. London: Secker, 1926. Print. First performed 1927. (see The Plays)
66 Mornings in Mexico. London: Secker, 1927. Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays. Ed. Virginia Hyde. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print.
67 Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories, by Giovanni Verga. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. London: Penguin, 2000. Print.
68 Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Privately published in Florence, 1928. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. Ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. The First and Second Lady Chatterley novels. Eds. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.
69 The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence. London: Mandrake Press, 1929. Ed. M. Levy. London: Cory, Adams & Mackay, 1964. Print.
70 The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence. London: Secker, 1928. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
71 Pansies. London: Secker, 1929. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
72 Pornography and Obscenity. Criterion Miscellany 5. London: Faber & Faber, 1929. Print. (see Late Essays and Articles)
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73 Nettles. London: Faber & Faber, 1930. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
74 Apocalypse. Florence: Orioli, 1931. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980. Print.
75 Etruscan Places. London: Secker, 1932. Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays. Ed. Simonetta de Filippis. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print.
76 Last Poems. Florence: Orioli, 1932. Print. (see D. H. Lawrence: The Poems)
77 The Fight for Barbara. Argosy 14.91 (1933): 68-90. Print. First performed 1967. (see The Plays)
78 A Collier’s Friday Night. London: Secker, 1934. Print. First performed 1939. (see The Plays)
79 The Married Man. Virginia Quarterly Review 16 (Autumn 1940): 523-47. Print. First performed 1997. (see The Plays)
80 The Merry-go-round. Virginia Quarterly Review Christmas Issue (Winter 1941). Print. First performed 1973. (see The Plays)
81 Mr. Noon. Part I. A Modern Lover. New York: Viking, 1934. Phoenix II. Parts I and II. Ed. Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print.
82 The Escaped Cock. Ed. Gerald Lacy. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Print.
83 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. James T. Boulton, George J. Zytaruk, Andrew Robertson, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979-2001. 8 vols. Print.
84 Quetzalcoatl. Written 1923. Introd. Louis Martz. New York: New Directions, 1995. Ed. N. H. Reeve. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. Print.
85 Paul Morel. Written 1911–12. Ed. Helen Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print.
86 Introductions and Reviews. Eds. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.
87 Late Essays and Articles. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 2 vols. Print.
III. A selection of studies of the short stories
88 Abolin, Nancy. “Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’: The Reality of Touch.” A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959. 215-30. Print.
89 Adelman, Gary S. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle: An Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’.” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1964): 8-15. Print.
90 Alexandre-Garner, Corinne. “The Captain’s Doll ou le ravissement de la langue.” Études Lawrenciennes 8 (1992): 21-34. Print.
91 ---. “‘The Man Who Loved Islands’; ou l’effacement de la trace.” Études Lawrenciennes 2 (1988): 91-106. Print.
92 Amon, Frank. “D. H. Lawrence and the Short Story.” The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore. U of Oklahoma P, 1953. 222-34. Print. [Studies “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”]
93 Anderson, Walter E. “‘The Prussian Officer’: Lawrence’s Version of the Fall of Man Legend.” Essays in Literature 12 (1985): 215-23. Print.
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94 Appleman, Philip. “One of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Autobiographical Characters’.” Modern Fiction Studies 2 (1956-7): 237-38. Print. [Focuses on “The Shades of Spring.”]
95 Aquien, Pascal. “Le visage et la voix dans ‘The Lovely Lady’.” Études Lawrenciennes 2 (1988): 71-80. Print.
96 Baim, Joseph. “Past and Present in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘A Fragment of Stained Glass’.” Studies in Short Fiction 8 (1971): 323-26. Print.
97 ---. “The Second Coming of Pan: A Note on D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Last Laugh’.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Autumn 1968): 98-100. Print.
98 Baker, P. G. “By the Help of Certain Notes: A Source for D. H. Lawrence’s ‘A Fragment of Stained Glass’.” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 317-26. Print.
99 Balbert, Peter.” Courage at the Border-Line: Baider, Hemingway and Lawrence’s The Captain’s Doll.” Papers on Language & Literature 42.3 (2006): 227-63. Print.
100 ---. “Freud, Frazer, and Lawrence’s Palimpsestic Novella: Dreams and the Heaviness of Male Destiny in The Fox.” Studies in the Novel 38.2 (2006): 211-33. Print.
101 ---. “From Panophilia to Phallophobia: Sublimation and Projection in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” Papers on Language and Literature 49.1 (2013): 37-69. Print.
102 ---. “Pan and the Appleyness of Landscape: Dread of the Procreative Body in ‘The Princess’.” Studies in the Novel 34.3 (2002): 282-302. Print.
103 ---. “Snake’s Eye and Obsedian Knife: Art, Ideology and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (1985-86): 255-73. Print.
104 ---. “Scorched Ego, the Novel, and the Beast: Patterns of Fourth Dimensionality in ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’.” Papers on Language and Literature 29.4 (1993): 395-416. Print.
105 ---. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Ladybird: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and the Incremental Structure of Seduction.” Studies in the Humanities 36.1 (2009): 15-49. Print.
106 ---, and Phillip L. Marcus, eds. D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Print [A section deals with The Ladybird and St. Mawr.]
107 Baldeshwiler, Eileen. “The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 443-53. Print. [Discusses “The Blind Man” and “The Christening.”]
108 Banerjee, Ria. “The Search for Pan: Difference and Morality in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 37.1 (2012): 65-89. Print.
109 Barker, Anne Darling. “The Fairy Tale and St. Mawr.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 20.1 (1984): 76-83. Print.
110 Barrett, Gerald, and Thomas L. Erskine. From Fiction to Film: D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking- Horse Winner.” Encino and Belmont: Dickenson 1974. Print.
111 Barry, Peter. “Stylistics and the Logic of Intuition: or, How Not to Pick a Chrysanthemum.” Critical Quarterly 27 (Winter 1985): 51-58. Print.
112 Beauchamp, Gorman. “Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Explicator 31 (1973): item 32. Print.
113 Becker, George. D. H. Lawrence. New York: Ungar, 1980. Print. [Includes a section giving an overview of the main short stories.]
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114 Becker, Henry. “‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: Film as Parable.” Literature/Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 55-63. Print.
115 Bentley, Greg. “Hester and the Homo-social Order: An Uncanny Search for Subjectivity in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 34-35 (2010): 55-74. Print.
116 Bergler, Edmund. “D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox and the Psychoanalytic Theory on Lesbianism.” A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959. 49-55. Print.
117 Betsky-Zweig, Sarah. “Floutingly in the Fine Black Mud: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse- Dealer’s Daughter’.” Dutch Quarterly Review 3 (1973): 159-65. Print.
118 Birgy, Philippe. “‘The Victim and the Sacrificial Knife’: Lawrence’s Transatlantic Fantasies in ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Journal of the Short Story in English/Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 61 (2013): 33-48. Print. http://jsse.revues.org/1372 Web. 14 March 2017.
119 Black, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, a Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986. Print.
120 ---. Lawrence’s England: The Major Fiction, 1913-20. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Print. [A chapter is devoted to “England, My England.”]
121 ---. “Lawrence’s Language of Metaphor: St. Mawr as source.” Études Lawrenciennes 19 (1999): 81-96. Print.
122 Blanchard, Lydia. “D. H. Lawrence.” Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Vol. 5. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Englewood Cliffs: Salem Press, 1981. 1788-1794. Print.
123 ---. “Mothers and Daughters in D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow and Selected Shorter Works.” Lawrence and Women. Ed. Anne Smith. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978. 75-100. Print. [Deals with “Mother and Daughter” and St. Mawr.]
124 Blayac, Alain. “Guerre et guerres dans ‘England, My England’.” Études Lawrenciennes 2 (1988): 17-36. Print.
125 Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers: D. H. Lawrence. Bromall: Chelsea House, 2001. Print.
126 Blythe, Hal, and Charlie Sweet. “Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” The Explicator 60.3 (2002): 154. Print.
127 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. “St. Mawr, A Passage to India, and the Question of Influence.” D. H. Lawrence Review 13 (1980): 134-49. Print.
128 Booth, Howard J. New D. H. Lawrence. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. Print. [Contains a chapter devoted to Lawrence’s late short stories.]
129 ---. “Same-Sex Desire, Cross-Gender Identification and Asexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction.” Études Lawrenciennes 42 (2011): 36-57. Print.
130 Boren, James L. “Commitment and Futility in The Fox.” University of Kansas City Review 31 (1965): 301-04. Print.
131 Boulton, James T. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: An Early Version.” Renaissance and Modern Studies 13.1 (1969): 4-48. Print.
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132 Brault-Dreux, Elise. Le “je” et ses masques dans la poésie de D. H. Lawrence. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014. Print. [Traces parallels between Lawrence’s poems and St. Mawr and “The Man Who Died,” passim]
133 Brayfield, Peg. “Lawrence’s ‘Male and Female Principles’ and the Symbolism of The Fox.” Mosaic 4.3 (1971): 41-51. Print.
134 Breen, Judith P. “D. H. Lawrence, World War I and the Battle Between the Sexes: A Reading of ‘The Blind Mind’ and ‘Tickets, Please’.” Women’s Studies 13 (1986): 63-74. Print.
135 Bricout, Shirley. “Bankruptcy in ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 4.2 (2016): 139-42. Print.
136 ---. “Le sacrifice du langage dans ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ de D. H. Lawrence.” Études britanniques contemporaines 42 (2012): 37-50. Print.
137 Brown, Christopher. “The Eyes Have it: Vision in The Fox.” Wascana Review 15.2 (1980): 61-68. Print.
138 Brown, Keith. “Welsh Red Indians: D. H. Lawrence and St. Mawr.” Essays in Criticism 32 (1982): 158-79. Print.
139 Butler, Gerald J. “‘The Man Who Died’ and Lawrence’s Final Attitude towards Tragedy.” Recovering Literature 6.3 (1977): 1-14. Print.
140 Carriker, Kitti. Created in Our Image: The Miniature Body of the Doll as Subject and Object. Bethlehem: Lehigh UP, 1998. Print. [Discusses The Captain’s Doll.]
141 Carter, Courtney M. “Journey Toward the Center: A Jungian Analysis of Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” D. H. Lawrence Review 26.1-3 (1995-96): 65-78. Print.
142 Chua, Cheng Lok. “Lawrence’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’.” Explicator 37.1 (1978): 23-24. Print.
143 Clark, L. D. “Lawrence’s ‘Maya’ Drawing for Sun.” D. H. Lawrence Review 15 (1982): 141-146. Print.
144 Clausson, Nils. “Practicing Deconstruction, Again: Blindness, Insight and the Lovely Treachery of Words in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’.” College Literature 34.1 (2007): 106-28. Print.
145 Cluysenaar, Anne. Introduction to Literary Stylistics: A Discussion of Dominant Structures in Verse and Prose. London: Batsford, 1976. Print. [Analyses “The Blind Man.”]
146 Conde, Silvestre, and Juan Camilo. “‘A Lesson on a Tortoise’ and D. H. Lawrence’s Earliest Crisis of Social Identity.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 7 (1994): 47-54. Print.
147 Consolo, Dominic P., ed. “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1969. Print. [A collection of essays on this one short story.]
148 Contreras, Sheila. “‘These were just natives to her’: Chilchui Indians and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 25.1-3 (1993-94): 91-103. Print.
149 Core, Deborah. “‘The Closed Door’: Love Between Women in the Works of D. H. Lawrence.” D. H. Lawrence Review 11 (1978): 114-31. Print. [Also deals with The Fox.]
150 Coroneos, Con and Trudi Tate. “Lawrence’s Tales.” The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 103-18. Print.
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151 Cowan, James. D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve U, 1970. Print. [Discusses “The Border-Line,” “The Flying Fish,” “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” “The Last Laugh,” “The Man Who Died,” “The Princess,” “Smile,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
152 ---. “D. H. Lawrence’s Dualism: The Apollonian-Dionysian Polarity and The Ladybird.” Forms of Modern British Fiction. Ed. Alan W. Friedman. Austin: Texas UP, 1975. 73-99. Print.
153 ---. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Princess’ as Ironic Romance.” Studies in Short Fiction 4.3 (Spring 1967): 245-51. Print.
154 ---. “The Function of Allusions and Symbols in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’.” American Imago 17 (1960): 241-53. Print.
155 ---. “Lawrence and Touch.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18.2-3 (1985-86): 121-37. Print. [Argues how touch is a medium to communicate empathy in “You Touched Me.”]
156 ---. “Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Explicator 27 (1968): item 9. Print.
157 ---. “Phobia and Psychological Development in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Torn in the Flesh’.” The Modernists: Studies in Literary Phenomenon: Essays in Honor of Harry T. Moore. Eds. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven. London: Associated UP, 1987. 163-70. Print.
158 Craig, David. The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1974. Print. [Includes comments on The Captain’s Doll, “Daughters of the Vicar,” St. Mawr and “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
159 Crick, Brian. The Story of “The Prussian Officer” Revisions: Littlewood Amongst the Lawrence Scholars. Retford: Brynmill Press, 1983. Print.
160 Crowder, A.B., and L. Crowder. “Mythic Intent in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’.” South Atlantic Review 49.2 (1984): 61-66. Print.
161 Crowley, Cornelius. “Living On, Desired Ends: The Poetics of Travel in Four Lawrence Stories.” Études Lawrenciennes 36 (2007): 9-29. Print. [Focuses on “The Border-Line,” “England, My England,” Sun and “Things.”]
162 Crump, G. B. “The Fox on film.” D. H. Lawrence Review 1 (Autumn 1968): 238-44. Print.
163 ---. “Gopher Prairie or Papplewick?: ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’ as Film.” D. H. Lawrence Review 4 (1971): 142-153. Print.
164 Cushman, Keith. “The Achievement of England, My England and Other Stories.” DHL The Man who Lived. Eds. Robert B. Partlow Jr. and Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980. 27-38. Print.
165 ---. “‘A Bastard Begot’: The Origins of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Christening’.” Modern Philology 70 (1972): 146-48. Print.
166 ---. “Blind, Intertextual Love: ‘The Blind Man’ and Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’.” D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors. Eds. Dennis Jackson and Keith Cushman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. 155-66. Print.
167 ---. D.H. Lawrence at Work – The Emergence of the ‘Prussian Officer’ Stories. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. Print.
168 ---. “D.H. Lawrence at Work: from ‘Vin Ordinaire’ to ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’.” Journal of Modern Literature 5.1 (February 1976): 46-58. Print.
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169 ---. “D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Making of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Journal of Modern Literature 2.3 (1971-1972): 367-92. Print.
170 ---. “D. H. Lawrence at Work: ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (Spring 1975): 31-46. Print.
171 ---. “Domestic Life in the Suburbs: Lawrence, the Joneses and ‘The Old Adam’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 16 (1983): 221-34. Print.
172 ---. “Ghosts and Fighting Celts in “The Border-Line’.” Études Lawrenciennes 23 (2000): 93-107. Print.
173 ---. “‘I am going through a transition stage’: ‘The Prussian Officer’ and The Rainbow.” D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (Summer 1975): 176-97. Print.
174 ---. “‘I wish that story at the bottom of the sea’: The Making and Re-Making of ‘England, My England’.” Études Lawrenciennes 46 (2015). Web. 14 March 2017. DOI: 10.4000/ lawrence.235
175 ---. “Lawrence’s Use of Hardy in ‘The Shades of Spring’.” Studies in Short Fiction 9 (Autumn 1972): 402-04. Print.
176 ---. “The Making of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The White Stocking’.” Studies in Short Fiction 10 (1973): 51-65. Print.
177 ---. “The Making of ‘The Prussian Officer’: A Correction.” D. H. Lawrence Review 4 (1971): 263-73. Print.
178 ---. “A Note on Lawrence’s ‘Fly in the Ointment’.” English Language Notes 15 (1977): 47-51. Print.
179 ---. “The Serious Comedy of ‘Things’.” Études Lawrenciennes 6 (1991): 83-94. Print.
180 ---. “The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Lady and the Gamekeeper.” D. H. Lawrence’s Lady: A New Look at Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Eds. Michael Squires and Dennis Jackson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. 154-69. Print.
181 ---. “The Young Lawrence and the Short Story.” Modern British Literature 3.2 (1978): 101-12. Print;
182 ---, and Earl G. Ingersoll, eds. D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. Print. [Contains a chapter devoted to “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
183 ---, and Michael Squires, eds. The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. Print. [Contains a section on The Captain’s Doll and The Fox.]
184 D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction, special issue of the D. H. Lawrence Review 16.3, 1983. Print.
185 Daalder, Joost. “Background and Significance of D. H. Lawrence’s The Ladybird.” D. H. Lawrence Review 15 (1982): 107-28. Print.
186 Daleski, H. M. “Aphrodite of the Foam in The Ladybird Tales.” D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Study of the Major Novels and Other Writings. Ed. A. H. Gomme. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. 142-59. Print.
187 Dataller, Roger. “Mr. Lawrence and Mrs. Woolf.” Essays in Criticism 8 (1958): 48-59. Print. [Discusses revisions in two stories: “The Prussian Officer” and “The Thorn in the Flesh.”]
188 Davies, Rosemary. “D. H. Lawrence and the theme of rebirth.” D. H. Lawrence Review 14 (1981): 127-42. Print.
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189 ---. “From Heat to Radiance: The Language of ‘The Prussian Officer’.” Studies in Short Fiction 21 (1984): 269-71. Print.
190 ---. “Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Studies in Short Fiction 20 (1983): 121-26. Print.
191 ---. “‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ again: A Correction.” Studies in Short Fiction 18 (1981): 320-22. Print.
192 Davis, Patricia. “Chicken Queen’s Delight: D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox.” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 565-71. Print.
193 Dawson, Eugene W. “Love Among the Mannikins: The Captain’s Doll.” D. H. Lawrence Review 1 (Summer 1968): 137-48. Print.
194 De Filippis, Simonetta. “Eros and Thanatos in D. H. Lawrence’s Amerindian Tales.” Études Lawrenciennes 23 (2000): 7-23. Print.
195 ---, and Nick Ceramella, eds. D. H. Lawrence and Literary Genres. Naples: Loffredo, 2004. Print. [A section is devoted to romance in some of the short stories, in particular Sun, another offers a reading of “Odour of Chrysanthemums.”]
196 Delany, Paul. “‘We shall know each other now’: Message and Code in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’.” Contemporary Literature 26 (1985): 26-39. Print.
197 ---. “Who was ‘The Blind Man’?” English Studies in Canada 9 (1983): 92-99. Print.
198 Delavenay, Emile. D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work, the Formative Years, 1885-1919. London: Heinemann, 1972. Print. [Discusses “The Blind Man,” “The Christening,” “England, My England,” “Love Among the Haystacks,” and “The Shades of Spring.”]
199 ---. “D. H. Lawrence and Sacher-Masoch.” D. H. Lawrence Review 6 (Summer 1973): 119-48. Print. [Discusses “The Shades of Spring.”]
200 Denny, N. “The Ladybird.” Theoria 11 (1958): 17-28. Print.
201 Devlin, Albert J. “The ‘Strange and Fiery’ Course of The Fox: D. H. Lawrence’s Aesthetic of Composition and Revision.” The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies. Eds. Gāmini Salgādo and G. K. Das. London: Macmillan, 1988. 75-91. Print.
202 Dexter, Martin. “D. H. Lawrence and Pueblo Religion: An Inquiry into Accuracy.” Arizona Quarterly 9 (Autumn 1953): 219-34. Print.
203 Díez-Medrano, Conchita. “Breaking Moulds, Smashing Mirrors: The Intertextaul Dynamics of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Lovely Lady’.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 9 (1996): 91-103. Print.
204 ---. “Fictions of Rape: The Teller and the Tale in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘None of That’.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 32.4 (1996): 303-13. Print.
205 ---. “Narrative Voice and Point of View in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Samson and Delilah’.” Essays in Literature 1 (Spring 1995): 87-96. Print.
206 Doherty, Gerald. “The Art of Survival: Narrating the Nonnarratable in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” D. H. Lawrence Review. 24 (Autumn 1992): 117-26. Print.
207 ---. “D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox: A Question of Species.” D. H. Lawrence Review 37.2 (2012): 1-21. Print.
208 ---. “The Greatest Show on Earth: D. H. Lawrence’s St Mawr and Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.” D. H. Lawrence Review 22.1 (1990): 5-20. Print.
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209 ---. “The Third Encounter: Paradigms of Courtship in D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction.” D. H. Lawrence Review 17 (1984): 135-51. Print. [Discusses “The Virgin and the Gipsy” and The Fox]
210 ---. “A ‘Very Funny’ Story: Figural Play in D. H. Lawrence’s The Captain’s Doll.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18.1 (1985-86): 5-17. Print.
211 Draper, R. P. “The Defeat of Feminism; D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Studies in Short Fiction 3 (Winter 1966): 186-98. Print.
212 ---. D. H. Lawrence. New York: Twayne, 1964. Print. [Refers to “England, My England,” “Hadrian” The Fox, “The Man Who Died,” “The Man Who Loved Islands,” “The Princess,” “The Prussian Officer” stories, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” “Things,” “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” and to “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
213 ---. “D. H. Lawrence on Mother-Love.” Essays in Criticism 8 (1958): 285-89. Print. [Discusses “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”]
214 ---. “The Sense of Reality in the Work of D. H. Lawrence.” Revue des Langues Vivantes 23 (1967): 461-70. Print. [On “Love Among the Haystacks.”]
215 Dufour, Françoise. “‘Sun’: Nouvelle, essai ou poème ?” Études Lawrenciennes 2 (1988): 59-70. Print.
216 Earl, G. A. “Correspondence.” Cambridge Quarterly 1.3 (1965): 273-75. Print. [Discusses “Daughters of the Vicar.”]
217 Ebbatson, Roger. “‘England, My England’: Lawrence, War and Nation.” Literature and History 9.1 (2000): 67-82. Print.
218 Edwards, Duane. “The Objectivity of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Southern Humanities Review 39.3 (2005): 205-22. Print.
219 Eggert, Paul, and John Worthen. Lawrence and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. [A chapter is devoted to St. Mawr.]
220 Ellis, David, and Ornella de Zordo, eds. D.H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments. Mountfield: Helm Information, 1992. 4 vols. Print. [In vol. 3, this collection of previously published articles is devoted to most of the short stories.]
221 Emmett, V. J., Jr. “Structural Irony in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Connecticut Review 5 (1972): 5-10. Print.
222 Engel, Monroe. “The Continuity of Lawrence’s Short Novels.” D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Spilka. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 93-100. Print. [About The Captain’s Doll, The Fox, The Ladybird, St. Mawr.]
223 ---. “Knowing More Than One Imagines: Imagining More Than One Knows.” Agni 31-32 (1990): 165-176. Print. [Draws parallels between Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and “The Blind Man”.]
224 Englander, Ann. “‘The Prussian Officer’: The Self Divided.” Sewanee Review 71 (Autumn 1963): 605-19. Print.
225 Faderman, Lillian. “Lesbian Magazine Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century.” Journal of Popular Culture 11 (1978): 800-17. Print. [Discusses The Fox.]
226 Fadiman, Regina. “The Poet as Choreographer: Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’.” Journal of Narrative Technique 2 (1972): 60-67. Print.
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227 Fambrough, Preston. “The Sexual Landscape of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Princess’.” CLA Journal 53.3 (2010): 286-301. Print.
228 Faustino, Daniel. “Psychic Rebirth and Christian Imagery in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 9 (1989): 105-108. Print.
229 Fernihough, Anne, ed. The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. [Sections are devoted to “The Prussian Officer” and to an overview of the short stories and novellas]
230 Ferretter, Luke. The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence’s Religions. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print. [Traces how Lawrence expresses his own religious beliefs in “The Escaped Cock,” St. Mawr and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
231 Fiderer, Gerald. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’: The Phallic Christ.” American Imago 25 (Spring 1968): 91-96. Print.
232 Finney, Brian. “D. H. Lawrence’s Progress to Maturity: From Holograph Manuscript to Final Publication of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories.” Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975): 21-32. Print.
233 ---. “The Hitherto Unknown Publication of some D. H. Lawrence Short Stories.” Notes and Queries 19 (1972): 55-56. Print. [Mentions “The Blue Moccasins,” The Fox, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and “Smile.”]
234 ---. “Introduction.” The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. xiii-xxxiii. Print.
235 ---. “A Newly Discovered Text of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Lovely Lady’.” Yale University Library Gazette 49 (1975): 245-60. Print.
236 ---. “Two Missing Pages from The Ladybird.” Review of English Studies 24 (1973): 191-92. Print.
237 ---, and Michael Ross. “The Two Versions of ‘Sun’: An exchange.” D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (1975): 371-74. Print.
238 Fitz, L. T. “‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ and The Golden Bough.” Studies in Short Fiction 11 (1974): 199-200. Print.
239 Ford, George H. Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965. Print.
240 Foster, Jane. D. H. Lawrence: Symbolic landscapes. Kent: Joe’s Press, 1994. Print. [Highlights Lawrence’s symbols in many of the short stories, as well as the major novels.]
241 Fowles, John. “The Man Who Died’: A Commentary.” Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings. Ed. Jan Relf. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. 228-40. Print.
242 Fox, Elizabeth. “André Grenn’s ‘The Dead Mother’ and D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking- Horse Winner’.” Études Lawrenciennes 39 (2009): 151-62. Print.
243 ---. “Mirroring in ‘The Prussian Officer’: Lacanian Reflections in Lawrence.” Études Lawrenciennes 34 (2007): 59-76. Print.
244 Franks, Jill. Islands and the Modernists: The Allure of Isolation in Art, Literature and Science. Jefferson: McFarland, 2006. Print. [A section deals with “The Man Who Loved Islands.”]
245 ---. Revisionist Resurrection Mythologies: A Study of D. H. Lawrence’s Italian Works. New Yok: Peter Lang, 1994. Print. [Includes remarks on “The Man Who Died,” Sun, and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
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246 Freije, George F. “Equine Names in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” CEA Critic 51.4 (1989): 75-84. Print.
247 Friedman, Alan W. Forms of Modern British Fiction. Austin: Texas UP, 1975. Print. [A chapter is devoted to The Ladybird.]
248 Fulmer, O. Bryan. “The Significance of the Death of the Fox in D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox.” Studies in Short Fiction 5 (Spring 1968): 275-82. Print.
249 Gamache, Lawrence B., and Ian S. MacNiven, eds. The Modernists: Studies in Literary Phenomenon: Essays in Honor of Harry T. Moore. London: Associated UP, 1987. Print. [A chapter is devoted to ‘The Thorn in the Flesh.”]
250 Game, David. D. H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire. London: Routledge, 2016. Print. [Sections trace Lawrence’s engagement with Australia in “The Vicar’s Garden,” “The Primrose Path” and St. Mawr.]
251 Garcia, Reloy, and James Karabataos, eds. A Concordance to the Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1972. Print. [A word index to Lawrence’s short stories and novellas.]
252 Gavin, Adrienne. “Marginalization and Colonization: Literary Criticism of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories.” Études Lawrenciennes 23 (2000): 135-48. Print.
253 Gidley, Mick. “Antipodes: D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” Ariel 5 (1974): 25-41. Print.
254 Gilbert, Sandra. “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metapohr in Modern Literature.” Critical Enquiry 7 (1980): 391-417. Print. [Discusses The Fox.]
255 ---. “Potent Griselda: The Ladybird and the Great Mother.” D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. 130-161. Print.
256 Giles, Steve. “Marxism and Form: D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts. Ed. Douglas Tallack. London: Batsford, 1987. 49-66. Print.
257 Goldberg, Michael. “Dickens and Lawrence: More on Rocking-Horses.” Modern Fiction Studies 27 (Winter 1971-2): 574-75. Print.
258 ---. “Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: A Dickensian Fable?” Modern Fiction Studies 15 (Winter 1969): 525-36. Print.
259 Gomme, A. H., ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Study of the Major Novels and Other Writings. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. Print. [Sections are devoted to “England, My England,” to The Ladybird and to The Fox.]
260 Gontarski, S. E. “Christopher Miles on his Making of ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’.” Literature/Film Quarterly 11 (1983): 249-56. Print.
261 ---. “Mark Rydell and the Filming of The Fox.” Modernist Studies 4 (1982): 96-104. Print.
262 Good, Jan. “Toward a Resolution of Gender Identity Confusion: The Relationship of Henry and March in The Fox.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18.2-3 (1985-86): 217-27. Print.
263 Goodheart, Eugene. “Lawrence and Christ.” Partisan Review 31 (Winter 1964): 42-59. Print. [Discusses “The Man Who Died.”]
264 ---. The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963. Print. [Discusses The Fox, “The Man Who Died,” St. Mawr and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
265 Goodman, Charlotte. “Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and the Victimized Child.” Modern Language Studies 10.1 (1979-80): 43-51. Print. [Traces similarities between “The Author
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of Beltraffio” and “England My England,” and between “The Pupil” and “The Rocking- horse Winner."]
266 Gouirand-Rousselon, Jacqueline. “D. H. Lawrence after a phallic Christ: The Resurrection into Touch in ‘The Man Who Died’.” Études Lawrenciennes 23 (2000): 45-59. Print.
267 ---. “Passages: from hibernation to Awakening (March in The Fox). The Phallic Parade and Woman in Question.” Études Lawrenciennes 17 (1998): 121-37. Print.
268 ---. “Power, Will and the Phallic Order in The Fox and The Ladybird.” Études Lawrenciennes 40 (2008): 119-32. Print.
269 Granofsky, Ronald. D. H. Lawrence and Survival: Darwinism in the Fiction of the Transitional Period. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Print. [Sections are devoted to The Captain’s Doll and The Ladybird novellas and to the stories of England, My England.]
270 ---. “Illness and Wellness in D. H. Lawrence’s The Ladybird.” Orbis Litterarum 51.2 (1996): 99-117. Print.
271 ---. “A Second Caveat: D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox.” English Studies in Canada 15.1 (1988): 49-63. Print.
272 ---. “Survival of the Fittest in Lawrence’s The Captain’s Doll.” D. H. Lawrence Review 27.1 (1997-98): 27-46. Print.
273 Gregor, Ian. “The Fox: A Caveat.” Essays in Criticism 9 (1959): 10-21. Print.
274 Greiff, Louis K. “Bittersweet Dreaming in Lawrence’s The Fox: A Freudian Perspective.” Studies in Short Fiction 20 (1983): 7-16. Print.
275 ---. “Variations on a Theme by D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ as Experimental Cinema.” Études Lawrenciennes 23 (2000): 109-114. Print.
276 Grenander, M. E., ed. Helios: From Myth to Solar Energy. Albany: State U of New York P, 1978. Print. [A section is devoted to Lawrence’s last stories, with a particular focus on Sun.]
277 Grmelová, Anna. “The Captain’s Doll: Aspects of D. H. Lawrence’s Politics and the Comic Mode.” Prague Studies in English 22 (2000): 153-160. Print.
278 ---. “‘The Prussian Officer’ in the Context of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction.” Brno Studies in English 24 (1998): 141-146. Print.
279 ---. The Worlds of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction. Prague: Karolinum, 2001. Print.
280 Gunnarsdottir-Campion, Margret. “The ‘something-else’: Ethical Ecriture in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” D. H. Lawrence Review 36.2 (2011): 43-71. Print.
281 Gurko, Leo. “D. H. Lawrence’s Greatest Collection of Short Stories – What Holds it Together.” Modern Fiction Studies 18 (1972): 173-82. Print. [Discusses the aesthetic value of the novellas.]
282 Gutierrez, Donald. “The Ancient Imagination of D. H. Lawrence.” Twentieth Century Literature 27 (1981): 178-96. Print. [Traces hylozoistic concepts in St. Mawr.]
283 ---. “Getting Even with John Middleton Murry.” Interpretations 15.1 (1983): 31-38. Print. [Discusses “The Border-Line,” “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” and “The Last Laugh.”]
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284 ---. Lapsing out: Embodiments of Death and Rebirth in the Last Writings of D. H. Lawrence. London: Associated UP, 1980. Print. [A section focuses on “The Virgin and the Gipsy” but the study also includes discussions of “The Man Who Died.”]
285 Guttenberg, Barnett. “Realism and Romance in Lawrence’s ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’.” Studies in Short Fiction 17 (1980): 99-103. Print.
286 Haegert, John W. “D. H. Lawrence and the Aesthetics of Transgression.” Modern Philology 88 (1990): 2-25. Print.
287 ---. “Lawrence’s St. Mawr and the De-Creation of America.” Criticism 34 (1992): 75-98. Print.
288 Halperin, Irving. “Unity in St. Mawr.” South Dakota Review 4 (1966): 58-60. Print.
289 Harris, Janice Hubbard. “Insight and experiment in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction.” Philological Quarterly 55 (1976): 418-35. Print.
290 ---. “The Many Faces of Lazarus: ‘The Man Who Died’ and its Context.” D. H. Lawrence Review 16 (1983): 291-311. Print.
291 ---. “The Moulting of The Plumed Serpent: A Study of the Relationship Between the Novel and Three Contemporary Tales.” Modern Language Quarterly 39 (1978): 154-68. Print. [The relationship with St Mawr in particular]
292 ---. The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984. Print.
293 Harrison, Andrew. D. H. Lawrence: Selected Short Stories. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008. Print. [Provides a background for the writing of the short stories together with a selected bibliography for each.]
294 Hendrick, George. “Jesus and the Osiris-Isis Myth: Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’ and Williams’s The Night of the Iguana.” Anglia 84 (1966): 398-406. Print.
295 Herzinger, Kim. D. H. Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915. London: Associated UP, 1982. Print. [Refers to “England, My England.”]
296 Hildick, Wallace. Word for Word: The Rewriting of Fiction. New York: Norton, 1965. Print. [A section is devoted to “Odour of Chrysanthemums.”]
297 Hinz, Evelyn J., and John J. Teunissen. “Savior and Cock: Allusion and Icon in Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’.” Journal of Modern Literature 5.2 (1976): 279-96. Print.
298 Hirsch, Gordon D. “The Laurentian Double: Images of D. H. Lawrence in the Stories.” D. H. Lawrence Review 10.3 (1977): 270-76. Print.
299 Hoffman Frederick J. and Harry T. Moore, eds. The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Oklahoma: U of Oklahoma P, 1953. Print. [A section gives an overview of Lawrence’s short stories.]
300 Hollington, Michael. “Lawrentian Gothic and ‘the Uncanny’.” Anglophonia 15 (2004): 171-84. Print. [Discusses the short stories written between 1924 and 1928.]
301 Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Duckworth 1956. Print. [Discusses The Captain’s Doll, “England, My England,” The Fox, “Hadrian,” “The Man Who Died,” “The Princess,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” St. Mawr, “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
302 ---. “Lawrence’s Quarrel With Christianity: ‘The Man Who Died’.” D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Spilka. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 101-11. Print.
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303 Howard, Daniel F. A Manual to Accompany the Modern Tradition: An Anthology of Short Stories. Boston: Little & Brown, 1968. Print. [Introduces “The Prussian Officer.”]
304 Hudspeth, Robert N. “Duality as Theme and Technique in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Border- Line’.” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (Autumn 1966): 51-56. Print.
305 ---. “Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: Isolation and Paradox.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Autumn 1969): 630-36. Print.
306 Humma, John B. “Lawrence’s The Ladybird and the Enabling Image.” D. H. Lawrence Review 17 (1984): 219-32. Print.
307 ---. “Melville’s Billy Budd and Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’: Old Adam and New.” Essays in Literature 1 (1974): 83-88. Print.
308 ---. “Pan and ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Essays in Literature 5 (1978): 53-60. Print.
309 Hyde, Virginia. The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992. Print. [Discusses the influence of the Bible and Christian beliefs throughout Lawrence’s works.]
310 Iida, Takeo. D. H. Lawrence as Anti-rationalist: Mysticism, Animism, and Cosmic Life in His Works. Tokyo: AoyamaLife, 2012. Print. [A section traces parallels between St. Mawr, ‘The Escaped Cock,’ and Child of the Western Isles, another contrasts animism and Christianity in St. Mawr.]
311 Ingram, Allan. The Language of D. H. Lawrence. London: Macmillan, 1990. Print. [Refers to “England, My England” and to St Mawr.]
312 Inniss, Kenneth. D. H. Lawrence’s Bestiary: A Study of His Use of Animal Trope and Symbol. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Print.
313 Iwai, Gaku. “Wartime Ideology in ‘The Thimble’: A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence.” Études Lawrenciennes 46 (2015). Web. 13 March 2017. DOI: 10.4000/lawrence.236
314 Iyer, Pico. “Lawrence by Lightning.” American Scholar 68.4 (1999): 128-33. Print. [Studies “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
315 Jackson, Dennis and Keith Cushman, eds. D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. Print. [Sections are devoted to “The Blind Man,” to St. Mawr and to “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
316 ---, and Fleda Brown Jackson, eds. Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Print. [A section deals with “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.”]
317 Jenkins, Stephen. “The Relevance of D. H. Lawrence Today: A Study of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society 2.1 (1979): 15-16. Print.
318 Jones, Bethan. “Depravity, Abuse and Homoerotic Desire in Billy Budd and ‘The Prussian Officer’.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 42 (2016): 47-72. Print.
319 ---. “Disappearing Tricks: Comedy and Gender in D. H. Lawrence’s Late Short Fiction.” New D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Harold Booth. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009. 130-47. Print.
320 ---. “Strife, Consummation and Consciousness in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and ‘The Prussian Officer’.” Études Lawrenciennes 31 (2005): 135-50. Print.
321 Jones, Lawrence. “Physiognomy and the Sensual Will in The Ladybird and The Fox.” D. H. Lawrence Review 13 (1980): 1-29. Print.
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322 --- and Paul Simpson-Housley. “The Dualistic Landscapes of St. Mawr.” Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society 4.3 (1988-89): 31-40. Print.
323 Joost, Nicholas, and Alvin Sullivan. D. H. Lawrence and the Dial. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970. Print. [An account tracing how thirty of Lawrence’s works appeared in twenty-five issues of the Dial.]
324 Junkins, Donald. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Winter 1969): 210-13. Print.
325 ---. “‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: A Modern Myth.” Studies in Short Fiction 2 (Autumn 1964): 87-89. Print.
326 Kalnins, Mara, ed. D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986. Print. [A section is devoted to “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
327 ---. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’: The Three Endings.” Studies in Short Fiction 13.4 (1976): 471-79. Print.
328 ---. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Two Marriages’ and ‘Daughters of the Vicar’.” Ariel 7.1 (1976): 32-49. Print.
329 Karl, Frederick R. “Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’: The Crusoe Who Failed.” A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959. 265-79. Print.
330 Katz-Roy, Ginette. “Tel un poisson dans l’eau: du léthal au foetal dans ‘The Flying Fish’.” Études Lawrenciennes 1 (1986): 59-72. Print.
331 ---. “La Transgression des frontières dans l’œuvre de D. H. Lawrence.” Dissertation, Institut du Monde Anglophone Paris III, 1995. Print.
332 Kay, Wallace G. “Women in Love and ‘The Man Who Had Died’: Resolving Apollo and Dionysus.” Southern Quarterly 10 (1972): 325-39. Print.
333 Kearney, Martin F. Major Short Stories of D.H. Lawrence – A Handbook. New York: Garland, 1998. Print. [Discusses “Daughters of the Vicar,” “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “The Prussian Officer,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Shadow in the Rose Garden.”]
334 ---. “Spirit, Place and Psyche: Integral Integration in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” English Studies 69.2 (1988): 158-62. Print.
335 Kegel-Brinkgreve E. “The Dionysian Tramline.” Dutch Quarterly Review 5 (1975): 180-94. Print. [A study of “Tickets, Please.”]
336 Kendle, Burton S. “D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Misunderstood Gulliver.” English Language Notes 2 (1964): 42-46. Print. [Discusses Swift in “The Man Who Loved Islands”]
337 Kennedy, Andrew. “The Myth of Rebirth in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’.” Excursions in Fiction. Ed. Andrew Kennedy. Oslo: Novus, 1994. 124-30. Print.
338 Kiely, Robert. “Power of the Working Class in Lawrence’s Fiction.” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Keith Cushman and Michael Squires. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 89-102. Print. [Discusses all the works, including the short stories, related to the mining community.]
339 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “The Gringo Señora Who Rode Away.” D. H. Lawrence Review 22.3 (1990): 251-65. Print.
340 ---. “Re-dating ‘The Overtone’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 25.1-3 (1993-94): 75-80. Print.
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341 Koban, Charles. “Allegory and the Death of the Heart in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Studies in Short Fiction 15 (1978): 391-96. Print.
342 Koh, Jae-Kyung. D. H. Lawrence and the Great War: The Quest for Cultural Regeneration. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print. [Sections are devoted to The Fox and St. Mawr.]
343 Kramp, Michael. “Gypsy Desire in the Land: The Decay of the English Race and Radical Nomadism in ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 32-33 (2003-4): 64-86. Print.
344 Krishnamurthy, M. G. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Literary Criterion 4 (Summer 1960): 40-49. Print.
345 Kunkel, Francis L. Passion and the Passion: Sex and Religion in Modern Literature. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975. Print. [A section is devoted to “The Man Who Died.”]
346 Lacy, Gerald. “Commentary.” The Escaped Cock. Ed. Gerald Lacy. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. 121-70. Print.
347 Lainoff, Seymour. “The Wartime Setting of Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’.” Studies in Short Fiction 7 (Autumn 1970): 649-51. Print.
348 Larsen, Elizabeth. “Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’.” The Explicator 40.4 (1982): 38-40. Print.
349 Lawrence, D. H. “‘The Man Who Was Through with the World’: An Unfinished Story by Lawrence Introduced by John R. Elliott, Jr.” Essays in Criticism 9 (1959): 213-21. Print.
350 Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto & Windus, 1955. Print. [Discusses “Daughters of the Vicar,” “England, My England,” The Fox, “Hadrian,” “Fanny and Annie,” “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” “Mother and Daughter,” “The Princess,” St. Mawr, “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
351 ---. “Lawrence and Class: ‘The Daughters of the Vicar’.” Sewanee Review 62 (Autumn 1954): 535-62. Print.
352 ---. Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1976. Print. [A chapter is devoted to The Captain’s Doll.]
353 Ledoux, Larry V. “Christ and Isis: The Function of the Dying and Reviving God in ‘The Man Who Died’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 5 (1972): 132-48. Print.
354 Lee, Brian S. “The Marital Conclusions of Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ and Lawrence’s ‘England, My England’.” University of Cape Town Studies in English 12 (1982): 19-37. Print.
355 Levin, Gerald. “The Symbolism of Lawrence’s The Fox.” CLA Journal 11 (1967): 135-41. Print.
356 Liddell, Robert. “Lawrence and Dr Leavis: The Case of St. Mawr.” Essays in Criticism 4 (1954): 321-27. Print.
357 Link, Viktor. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ in the Light of Compton Mackenzie’s Memoirs.” D. H. Lawrence Review 15 (1982): 77-86. Print.
358 Littlewood, J. C. F. D. H. Lawrence: 1885-1914. Harlow: Longman, 1976. Print. [Includes remarks on “Daughters of the Vicar.”]
359 ---. “Lawrence’s Early Tales.” Cambridge Quarterly 1.2 (1965-1966): 107-24. Print. [Comments on “The Prussian Officer” stories.]
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360 Lucas, Barbara. “A Propos of ‘England, My England’.” Twentieth Century 169 (1961): 288-93. Print.
361 Lucente, Gregory L. The Narrative of Realism and Myth: Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981. Print. [A section is devoted to “The Man Who Died” and Women in Love.]
362 Lusty, Natalya, and Julian Murphet, eds. Modernism and masculinity . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print. [A chapter is devoted to The Fox.]
363 Macadré-Nguyên, Brigitte. “Stripping the Veil of Familiarity from the World: D. H. Lawrence’s Art of Language in ‘The Border-Line’.” Études Lawrenciennes 44 (2013): 169-86. Print.
364 MacDonald, Robert H. “Images of Negative Union: The Symbolic World of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Princess’.” Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979): 289-93. Print.
365 ---. “The Union of Fire and Water: An Examination of the Imagery of ‘The Man Who Died’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 10 (1977): 34-51. Print.
366 Mackenzie, D. Kenneth. “Ennui and Energy in England, My England.” D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Study of the Major Novels and Other Writings. Ed. A. H. Gomme. Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978. 120-41. Print.
367 ---. The Fox. Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1973. Print.
368 Macleod, Sheila. Lawrence’s Men and Women. London: Heinemann, 1985. Print. [Includes an analysis of the major short stories]
369 Magill, Frank N., ed. Critical Survey of Short Fiction. Englewood Cliffs: Salem Press, 1981. 7 vols. Print. [A section from vol. 5 is devoted to Lawrence.]
370 Marks III, W. S. “D. H. Lawrence and his Rabbit Adolf: Three Symbolic Permutations.” Criticism 10.3 (1968): 200-16. Print. [Finds parallels between Paul Morel, “Adolf” and Women in Love.]
371 ---. “The Psychology in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’.” Literature and Psychology 17 (Winter 1967): 177-92. Print.
372 ---. “The Psychology of the Uncanny in Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Modern Fiction Studies 11.4 (1965-66): 381-92. Print.
373 Marshall, Timothy. “Claiming the Body: ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’ Death, the Great War and the Workhouse.” D. H. Lawrence Review 32-33 (2003-4): 19-35. Print.
374 Martin, Dexter. “The Beauty of Blasphemy: Suggestions for Handling ‘The Escaped Cock’.” D. H. Lawrence News and Notes (February 1960). Print.
375 Martin, W. R. “Fancy or Imagination? ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” College English 24 (1962): 64-65. Print.
376 ---. “Hannele’s ‘surrender’: A Misreading of The Captain’s Doll.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18.1 (1985-6): 19-23. Print.
377 Matterson, Stephen. “Another Source for Henry? D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 5 (1992): 23-25. Print.
378 Maybury, James F., and Marjorie A. Zerbel, eds. Franklin Pierce Studies in Literature. Rindge: Franklin Pierce College, 1982. Print. [A chapter is devoted to “England, My England.”]
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379 McAra, Catriona, and David Calvin, eds. Anti-tales: The Uses of Disenchantment. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Print. [A section is devoted to dystopian elements in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “A Suburban Fairy Tale” by Katherine Mansfield.]
380 McCabe, Thomas H. “The Otherness of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 19.2 (1987): 149-56. Print.
381 ---. “Rhythm as Form in Lawrence: ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” PMLA 87.1 (1972): 64-68. Print.
382 McCollum, Laurie. “Ritual Sacrifice in ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’: A Girardian Reading.” D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds. Eds. Keith Cushman and Earl G. Ingersoll. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. 230-42. Print.
383 McDermott, John V. “Faith and Love: Twin Forces in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 18:1 (1988): 6-8. Print.
384 McDowell, Frederick. “‘The individual in his pure singleness’: Theme and Symbol in The Captain’s Doll.” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Keith Cushman and Michael Squires. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 143-58. Print.
385 ---. “‘Pioneering into the Wilderness of Unopened life’: Lou Witt in America.” The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies. Eds. Gāmini Salgādo and G. K. Das. London: Macmillan, 1988. 92-105. Print.
386 McGinnis, Wayne D. “Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chysanthemums’ and Blake.” Research Studies (Washington State University) 44 (1976): 251-52. Print.
387 McKenna, John. “Using the Lens of Keirsian Temperament Theory to Explain Character and Conflict in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 34-35 (2010): 25-40. Print.
388 Mehl, Dieter. “‘Never was such a man for crossing frontiers’: A Gap in ‘The Border- Line’.” Études Lawrenciennes 32 (2005): 21-36. Print.
389 Mellen, Joan. “Outfoxing Lawrence: Novella into Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 17-27. Print.
390 Mellown, Elgin W. “The Captain’s Doll: Its Origins and Literary Allusions.” D. H. Lawrence Review 9 (1976): 226-35. Print.
391 Merivale, Patricia. Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969. Print. [Comments on Lawrence and the Pan Myth in “The Last Laugh,” “The Overtone,” and St. Mawr.]
392 Meyers, Jeffrey. “D. H. Lawrence and Tradition: ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’.” Studies In Short Fiction 26.3 (1989): 346-51. Print.
393 ---. “Katherine Mansfield, Gurdjieff, and Lawrence’s ‘Mother and Daughter’.” Twentieth Century Literature 22 (1976): 444-53. Print.
394 ---. “‘The Voice of Water’: Lawrence’s ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’.” English Miscellany 21 (1970): 199-207. Print.
395 Michelucci, Stefania. Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence. Trans. Jill Franks. Jefferson: McFarland, 2002. Print. [Devotes a section to “The Prussian Officer,” and also to islands.]
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396 ---. “The Violated Silence: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” Beyond the Floating Islands: An Anthology. Eds. Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Bassnett. Bologna: U of Bologna, 2002. 128-34. Print.
397 Millard, Elaine. “Feminism II: Reading as a Woman: D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr.” Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts. Ed. Douglas Tallack. London: Batsford, 1987. 133-57. Print.
398 Modiano, Marko. “‘Fanny and Annie’ and the War.” Durham University Journal 83 (1991): 69-74. Print.
399 Monaco, Beatrice. “Lurid Colour in D.H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” Études Lawrenciennes 40 (2008): 183-200. Print.
400 Moore, Harry T., ed. A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959. Print. [Sections are devoted to “The Blind Man,” “The Man Who Loved Islands” and The Princess.]
401 Morsia, Elliott. “A Genetic Study of ‘The Shades of Spring’.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 3. 3 (2014): 153-78. Print.
402 Moss, Gemma. “A ‘Beginning rather than an end’: Popular Culture and Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 4.1 (2015): 119-39. Print.
403 Moynahan, Julian. The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963. Print.
404 ---. “Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands: A Modern Fable.” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (Spring 1959): 57-64. Print.
405 Naugrette, Jean-Pierre. “Le mythe et le réel: lecture de ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Études Lawrenciennes 1 (1986): 7-27. Print.
406 ---.“Le renard et les rêves: onirisme, écriture et inconscient dans The Fox.” Études anglaises 37 (1984): 142-155. Print.
407 Neill, Crispian. “D. H. lawrence and Dogs: Canines and the Critique of Civilisation.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 4.1 (2015): 95-118. Print. [A study of “Rex.”]
408 Nelson, Jane. “The Familial Isotopy in The Fox.” The Challenge of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Keith Cushman and Michael Squires. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990. 129-42. Print.
409 Nicolaj, Rina. “‘The Escaped Cock’: A Story of the Resurrection.” Études Lawrenciennes 14-15 (1996): 119-31. Print.
410 Norris, Nanette. “1914: Two Sides to War: ‘England, My England’ and ‘Vin Ordinaire’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 39.1 (2014): 97-108. Print.
411 O’Faolin, Sean, ed. Short Stories: A Study of Pleasure. Boston: Little & Brown, 1961. Print. [A section is devoted to “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.”]
412 Osborn, Marijane. “Complexities of Gender and Genre in Lawrence’s The Fox.” Essays in Literature 19 (1992): 84-97. Print.
413 Padhi, Bibhu. “Lawrence’s Ironic Fables and How They Matter.” Interpretations 15.1 (1983): 53-59. Print. [Focuses on “The Man Who Loved Islands,” “The Princess” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”]
414 ---. “Lawrence, St. Mawr and Irony.” South Dakota Review 21.2 (1983): 5-13. Print.
415 ---. “‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and Lawrence’s Vision of the New World.” University of Dayton Review 17 (Winter 1985-86):. 57-61. Print.
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416 Panajoti, Armela, and Marija Krivokapić, eds. Narrative Being vs. Narrating Being. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. Print. [A section focuses mainly on “England, My England,” The Man Who Loved Islands” and “The Shades of Spring.”]
417 Partlow, Robert B. Jr., and Harry T. Moore, eds. DHL The Man who Lived. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980. Print. [A chapter is devoted to the collection England, My England and Other Stories.]
418 Paxton, Nancy. “Reimagining melodrama: ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’ and the consequences of mourning.” D. H. Lawrence Review 38.3 (2013): 58-76. Print.
419 Peek, Andrew. “Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia,’ Hermione Roddice and ‘The Border-Line’: Common Romantic Contexts and a Source of Correspondence in the Fiction of Poe and Lawrence.” Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society 2.2 (1980): 4-8. Print.
420 Penrith, Mary. “Some Structural Patterns in ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy.” University of Cape Town Studies in English 6 (1976): 46-52. Print.
421 Phillips, Steven R. “The Double Pattern of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” Studies in Short Fiction 10 (1973): 94-97. Print.
422 ---. “The Monomyth and Literary Criticism.” College Literature 2 (1975): 1-16. Print. [Studies “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.”]
423 Piccolo, Anthony. “Sun and Sex in the Last Stories of D. H. Lawrence.” Helios: From Myth to Solar Energy. Ed. M. E. Grenander. Albany: State U of New York P, 1978. 1166-74. Print.
424 Pilditch, Jan, ed. The Critical Response to D.H. Lawrence. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print. [A collection of previously published essays dealing with The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Fox together with “The Woman Who Rode Away” (see Draper), “The Princess” (see Cowan) “Odour of Chrysanthemums” (see Schulz) and St. Mawr (see Winn), see also Gurko.]
425 Pinion, F. B. A D. H. Lawrence Companion: Life, Thought and Works. London: Macmillan, 1978. Print. [Gives an overview of the background and thematic content of the short stories.]
426 Pinkney, Tony. D. H. Lawrence and Modernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. Print. [A chapter is devoted to Englishness in works including “England, My England,” and refers to myth in “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
427 Poplawski, Paul. Language, Art and Reality in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr: A Stylistic Study. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996. Print.
428 ---. “Lawrence’s satiric style: language and voice in St. Mawr.” Lawrence and Comedy. Eds. Paul Eggert and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.
429 ---. “St. Mawr and the Ironic Art of Realization.” Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality. Ed. Paul Poplawski. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. 93-104. Print.
430 ---, ed. Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Print. [Contains a section on St. Mawr and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
431 Prasuna, M. G. “Writing ‘like’ a Woman: An Analysis of The Fox by D. H. Lawrence.” International Journal of English and Literature 4.4 (2013): 181-83. Print.
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432 Preston, Peter. “Narrative Procedure and Structure in a Short Story by D. H. Lawrence.” Journal of English Language and Literature (Korea) 29 (1983): 251-56. Print. [An analysis of “Things.”]
433 ---, and Peter Hoare, eds. D. H. Lawrence and the Modern World. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. Print. [A section is devoted to The Fox.]
434 Pritchard, R. E. D. H. Lawrence: Body of Darkness. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1971. Print. [Refers to “England, My England,” The Fox “The Man Who Died,” “The Prussian Officer” stories, “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
435 Pugh, Bridget. “Lawrence and Industrial Symbolism.” Renaissance and Modern Studies 29 (1985): 33-49. Print. [A study of symbols in the “England, My England,” “The Virgin and the Gipsy” and “The Woman Who Rode Away” stories.]
436 Radu, Adrian. “Masculinity, domination and the Other in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Prussian Officer’.” British and American Studies 21 (2015): 93-99. Print.
437 Ragachewkaya, Marina. “The Logic of Love: Deconstructing Eros in Four of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories.” Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012): 105-28. Print. [Studies “The Blind Man,” “Love Among the Haystacks,” “Second Best,” and “The White Stocking.”]
438 Ragussis, Michael. “The False Myth of St. Mawr: Lawrence and the Subterfuge of Art.” Papers on Language and Literature 11 (1975): 186-97. Print.
439 Raina, M. L. “A Forster Parallel in Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” Notes and Queries 211 (1966): 96-97. Print.
440 Ramadier, Bernard-Jean. “Dubious progress in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’.” Journal of the Short Story in English/Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 35 (2000): 43-54. Print.
441 Reeve, N. H. Reading Late Lawrence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. [Includes discussions of “Glad Ghosts,” “Sun,” “The Lovely Lady” and “The Blue Moccasins.”]
442 ---. “Two Lovely Ladies.” English 49.193 (2000): 15-22. Print. [A reading of variant texts of the short story “A Lovely Lady.”]
443 Reinhold, Nathalya. “‘Going for Lawrence for feeling’: A Study of The Princess.” Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012): 203-14. Print.
444 Relf, Jan. Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. Print. [Includes a section on “The Man Who Died.”]
445 Renner, Stanley. “The Lawrentian Power and Logic of Equus.” D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors. Eds. Dennis Jackson and Keith Cushman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. 31-45. Print. [Traces parallels between St. Mawr and the play.]
446 ---. “Sexuality and the Unconscious: Psychosexual Drama and Conflict in The Fox.” D. H. Lawrence Review 21.3 (1989): 245-73. Print.
447 Rivers, Bryan. “Flattened Primroses: Discarded Floral Symbolism in an Early Manuscript Version of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Notes and Queries 58.1 (2011): 120-22. Print.
448 ---. “‘No Meaning for Anybody’: D. H. Lawrence’s Use of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Fir Tree in the Original Version of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1910).” Notes and Queries 61.1 (2014): 114-16. Print.
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449 ---. “Winter-Crack Trees: Botanical Symbolism and D. H. Lawrence’s 1914 Revisions of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Notes and Queries 59.3 (2012): 411-13. Print.
450 Rohman, Carrie. “Ecology and the Creaturely in D. H. Lawrence’s Sun.” Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 2.2 (2010): 115-32. Print.
451 Rose, Shirley. “Physical Trauma in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 16 (1975): 73-83. Print. [Parallels are drawn between most of Lawrence’s short stories]
452 Rosenbaum, S. P., ed. English Literature and British Philosophy: A Collection of Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. Print. [A section is devoted to “The Blind Man”]
453 Ross, Charles. “D. H. Lawrence and World War I or History and the ‘Form of Reality’: The Case of ‘England, My England’.” Franklin Pierce Studies in Literature. Eds. James F. Maybury and Marjorie A. Zerbel. Rindge: Franklin Pierce College, 1982. 11-21. Print.
454 Ross, Michael. “Ladies and Foxes: D. H. Lawrence, David Garnett, and the Female of the Species.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (1985-6): 229-38. Print.
455 ---. “Lawrence’s Second Sun.” D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (1975): 1-18. Print.
456 ---. “The Mythology of Friendship: D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and ‘The Blind Man’.” English Literature and British Philosophy: A Collection of Essays. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. 285-315. Print.
457 ---. “Running The Fox to Earth: Strategies for Raising Questions Beyond Gender.” D. H. Lawrence Review 29.3 (2000): 59-60. Print.
458 Rossi, Patrizio. “Lawrence’s two ‘Foxes’: A Comparison of the Texts.” Essays in Criticism 22 (1972): 265-78. Print.
459 Rossman, Charles. “Myth and Misunderstanding D. H. Lawrence.” Bucknell Review 22.2 (1976): 81-101. Print. [Studies “England, My England,” “The Princess,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
460 Roussenova, Stefana. “Crossing Borders in St. Mawr.” Études Lawrenciennes 32 (2005): 109-22. Print.
461 Roux, Magali. “Emotions and Otherness in D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican Fiction.” Études Lawrenciennes 43 (2012): 215-35. Print.
462 Ruderman, Judith. D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership. Durham: Duke UP, 1984. Print. [In addition to the “leadership novels,” also includes passages devoted to “England, My England,” The Fox and “Hadrian,” St. Mawr, “The Virgin and the Gipsy” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
463 ---. “The Fox and the ‘Devouring Mother’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 10 (1977): 251-69. Print.
464 ---. “Lawrence’s The Fox and Verga’s The She-Wolf.” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 153-67. Print.
465 ---. “The New Adam and Eve in Lawrence’s The Fox and Other Works.” Southern Humanities Review 17 (1983): 225-36. Print.
466 ---. “Prototypes for Lawrence’s The Fox.” Journal of Modern Literature 8.1 (1980): 77-98. Print.
467 ---. “Tracking Lawrence’s ‘Fox’: An Account of its Composition, Evolution and Publication.” Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980): 206-21. Print.
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468 Ryals, Clyde de Loache. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’: An Interpretation.” Literature and Psychology 12 (1962): 39-43. Print.
469 Ryan, Kiernan. “The Revenge of the Women: Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’.” Literature and History 7 (1981): 210-22. Print.
470 Sagar, Keith. The Art of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966. Print. [Sections deal with “The Flying-Fish,” The Fox, “The Man Who Died,” “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” St. Mawr, Sun and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
471 ---. “‘The Best I Have Known’: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘The Shades of Spring.” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (Winter 1967): 143-51. Print.
472 ---. Life into Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Print. [A biographical approach to Lawrence’s works.]
473 Salgādo, Gāmini, and G. K. Das. The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies. London: Macmillan, 1988. Print. [A chapter looks at the publication and revisions of The Fox while another examines the St. Mawr character Lou Witt.]
474 San Juan, E. Jr. “Textual Production in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” DLSU Graduate Journal 12 (1987): 223-30. Print.
475 ---. “Theme versus Imitation: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 2 (1970): 136-40. Print.
476 Sargent, M. Elizabeth. “Thinking and Writing from the body: Eugene Gendlin, D. H. Lawrence, and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Writing the Body in D. H. Lawrence: Essays on Language, Representation, and Sexuality. Ed. Paul Poplawski. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. 105-18. Print.
477 ---. “The Wives, the Virgins and Isis: Lawrence’s Exploitation of Female Will in Four Late Novellas of Spiritual Quest.” D. H. Lawrence Review 26.1-3 (1995-96): 227-48. Print.
478 Scheff, Doris. “Interpreting ‘Eyes’ in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr.” American Notes and Queries 19 (1980): 48-51. Print.
479 Scherr, Arthur. “Trust and Betrayal in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’.” Explicator 67.4 (2009): 291-94. Print.
480 Scherr, Barry. “‘The Prussian Officer’: A Lawrentian Allegory.” Recovering Literature 17 (1989-90): 33-42. Print.
481 Scholtes, M. “St. Mawr: Between Degeneration and Regeneration.” Dutch Quarterly Review 5 (1975): 253-69. Print.
482 Schorer, Mark, ed. The Story: A Critical Anthology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1950. Print. [A section is devoted to “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.”]
483 Schulz, Victor. “D. H. Lawrence’s Early Masterpiece of Short Fiction: ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Studies in Short Fiction 28.3 (1991): 363-71. Print.
484 Scott, James B. “The Norton Distortion: A Dangerous Typo in ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 21.2 (1989): 175-77. Print.
485 Scott, James F. “Thimble into Ladybird: Nietzsche, Frobenius, and Bachofen in the Later Work of D.H. Lawrence.” Arcadia 13 (1978): 161-76. Print.
486 Secor, Robert. “Language and Movement in ‘Fanny and Annie’.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 395-400. Print.
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487 Seidl, Frances. “Lawrence’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’.” Explicator 32 (1973): item 9. Print.
488 Shaw, Valery. The Short Story. A Critical Introduction. Harlow: Longman, 1992. Print. [Broaches Lawrence’s story-telling techniques referring to “Daughters of the Vicar,” “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” and “Tickets, Please.”]
489 Shields, E. F. “Broken Vision in Lawrence’s The Fox.” Studies in Short Fiction 9 (1972): 353-63. Print.
490 Siegel, Carol. “Floods of Female Desire in Lawrence and Eudora Welty.” D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors. Eds. Dennis Jackson and Keith Cushman. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. 166-84. Print. [Deals with “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
491 ---. “St. Mawr: Lawrence’s Journey Toward Cultural Feminism.” D. H. Lawrence Review 26.1-3 (1995-6): 275-86. Print.
492 Simpson, Hilary. D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Print.
493 Sinzelle, Claude. “Skinning the Fox: A Masochist’s Delight.” D. H. Lawrence and the Modern World. Eds. Peter Preston and Peter Hoare. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989. 161-79. Print.
494 Sklenicka, Carol. D. H. Lawrence and the Child. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991. Print. [Discusses “England, My England,” “The Escaped Cock,” “The Fly in the Ointment,” “A Lesson on a Tortoise” “The Old Adam,” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”]
495 Slade, Tony. D. H. Lawrence. London: Evans, 1969. Print. [Discusses “Daughters of the Vicar,” The Fox, “The Man Who Died,” “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “Tickets, Please,” “The Virgin and the Gipsy,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
496 Smith, Anne, ed. Lawrence and Women. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978. Print. [Discusses St. Mawr.]
497 Smith, Bob L. “D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr: Transposition of Myth.” Arizona Quarterly 24 (Autumn 1968): 197-208. Print.
498 Smith, Duane. “England, My England as Fragmentary Novel.” D. H. Lawrence Review 24 (Autumn 1992): 247-55. Print.
499 Smith, Julian. “Vision and Revision: ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’ as Film.” Literature/Film Quarterly 1 (1973): 28-36. Print.
500 Snodgrass, W. D. “A Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way to Live.” D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Spilka. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 117-26. Print.
501 Sobchack, Thomas. “The Fox: The Film and the novel.” Western Humanities Review 23 (Winter 1969): 73-78. Print.
502 Spender, Stephen, ed. D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, Poet, Prophet . London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. Print. [A section refers to St. Mawr, “The Princess,” and to “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
503 Spilka, Mark, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1963. Print. [Sections are devoted to “The Blind Man,” The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird and St. Mawr, and to “The Man Who Died.”]
504 ---. “Lawrence’s Quarrel with Tenderness.” Critical Quarterly 9 (Winter 1967): 363-77. Print. [Mentions the story “In Love.”]
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505 ---. “Ritual Form in ‘The Blind Man’.” D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Spilka. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 112-16. Print.
506 Squires, Michael, and Dennis Jackson, eds. D. H. Lawrence’s Lady: A New Look at Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985. Print. [A chapter is devoted to “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
507 Štefl, Martin. “The ‘Idea’ of the Self: Narrated Identities in D. H. Lawrence’s (Short) Fiction.” Narrative Being vs. Narrating Being. Eds. Armela Panajoti and Marija Krivokapić. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 54-72. Print. [Focuses mainly on “England, My England,” The Man Who Loved Islands” and “The Shades of Spring.”]
508 Stephanides, Stephanos, and Susan Bassnett, eds. Beyond the Floating Islands: An Anthology. Bologna: U of Bologna, 2002. Print. [Devotes a chapter to “The Man Who Loved Islands.”]
509 Steven, Laurence. “From Thimble to Ladybird: D.H. Lawrence’s Widening Vision.” The D H Lawrence Review18.3 (1986): 239-53. Print.
510 ---. “‘The Woman Who Rode Away’: D. H. Lawrence’s Cul-de-sac.” English Studies in Canada 10 (1984): 209-20. Print.
511 Stevens, Hugh. “Sex and the Nation: ‘The Prussian Officer’ and Women in Love.” The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Anne Fernihough. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. 49-65. Print.
512 Stewart, Jack. “Expressionism in ‘The Prussian Officer’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18.2-3 (1985-6): 275-89. Print.
513 ---. “Eros and Thanatos in Lawrence’s ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’.” Studies in the Humanities 12 (1985): 11-19. Print.
514 ---. “Flowers and Flesh: Color, Place and Animism in St. Mawr and ‘Flowery Tuscany’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 36.1 (2011): 92-113. Print.
515 ---. “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.” D.H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments. Vol. 3. Eds. David Ellis and Ornella de Zordo. Mountfield: Helm Information, 1992. 515-525. Print.
516 ---. “Lawrence’s Ontological Vision in Etruscan Places, ‘The Escaped Cock’ and Apocalypse.” D. H. Lawrence Review 31.2 (2003): 43-58. Print.
517 ---. “Totem and Symbol in The Fox and St. Mawr.” Studies in the Humanities 16 (1989): 84-98. Print.
518 Stewart, John I. M. Eight Modern Writers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963. Print. [Discusses The Captain’s Doll, “Daughters of the Vicar,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
519 Stiffler, Dan. “Seeds of Exchange: St. Mawr as D. H. Lawrence’s American Garden.” D. H. Lawrence Review 25.1-3 (1993-4): 81-90. Print.
520 Stoltzfus, Ben. Lacan and Litterature: Purloined Texts. Albany: State U of New York P, 1996. Print. [Sections are devoted to “The Escaped Cock” and to “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”]
521 ---. “Lacan’s Knot, Freud’s Narrative, and the Tangle of ‘Glad Ghosts’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 32-33 (2003-4): 106-18. Print.
522 ---. “‘The Man Who Loved Islands’: A Lacanian Reading.” D. H. Lawrence Review 29.3 (2000): 27-38. Print.
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523 Stovel, Nora F. “D. H. Lawrence and ‘The Dignity of Death’: Tragic Recognition in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’ ‘The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd,’ and Sons and Lovers.” D. H. Lawrence Review 16 (1983): 59-82. Print.
524 Strychacz, Thomas. “‘What I don’t seem to see at all is you’: D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox and the Politics of Masquerade.” Modernism and masculinity. Eds. Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 179-95. Print.
525 Sutherland, Romy. “From D. H. Lawrence to the Language of Cinema: Chaste Sacrifices in ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’.” Études Lawrenciennes 44 (2013): 241-51. Print.
526 Tallack, Douglas, ed. Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts. London: Batsford, 1987. Print. [Several sections deal with St. Mawr.]
527 Tallman, Warren. “Forest, Glacier and Flood. The Moon. St. Mawr: A Canvas for Lawrence’s Novellas.” Open Letter 3rd series, no.6 (1976): 75-92. Print.
528 Tanner, Tony. “D. H. Lawrence in America.” D. H. Lawrence, Novelist, Poet, Prophet. Ed. Stephen Spender. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973. 170-96. Print. [Refers to St. Mawr, “The Princess” and to “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
529 Tarinayya, M. “Lawrence’s ‘England, My England’: An Analysis.” Journal of the School of Languages 7 (Winter 1980-1): 70-83. Print.
530 Tartera, Nicole. “Criss-cross Borderlines in the Wilderness: St. Mawr, The Princess, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Études Lawrenciennes 32 (2005): 123-34. Print.
531 ---. “St Mawr, de l’humour à la satire; ou les facettes de l’esprit lawrencien.” Études Lawrenciennes 6 (1991): 53-68. Print.
532 Tedlock, E. W., Jr. D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel, a Study of Lawrence’s Fiction. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1963. Print. [Discusses “The Blind Man,” “The Border- Line,” The Captain’s Doll, “The Christening,” “Daughters of the Vicar,” “Goose Fair,” “Hadrian,” “Her Turn,” “In Love,” “Jimmy and the Desperate Woman,” “Love Among the Haystacks,” “The Lovely Lady,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and “The Virgin and the Gipsy.”]
533 Temple, J. “The Definition of Innocence: A Consideration of the Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence.” Studia Germanica Gandensia 20 (1979): 105-18. Print.
534 Templeton, Wayne. “Resisting Evaluation: Canonization and ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Journal of the Short Story/Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 21 (1993): 79-94. Print.
535 Thompson, Leslie M. “The Christ Who Didn’t Die: Analogues to D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Died’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 8 (1975): 19-30. Print.
536 Thornton, Weldon. D. H. Lawrence: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993. Print.
537 ---. “‘The Flower or the Fruit’: A Reading of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘England, My England’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 16 (1983): 247-58. Print.
538 ---. “A Trio from Lawrence’s England, My England and Other Stories: Readings of ‘Monkey Nuts,’ ‘The Primrose Path” and “Fanny and Annie’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 28.3 (1999): 5-29. Print.
539 Toyokuni, Takashi. “A Modern Man Obsessed by Time: A Note on ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 7 (Spring 1974): 78-82. Print.
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540 Travis, Leigh. “D. H. Lawrence: The Blood-Conscious Artist.” American Imago 25 (1968): 163-90. Print. [Discusses “Daughters of the Vicar,” “The Princess,” and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
541 Trebisz, Małgorzata. The Novella in England at the Turn of the XIX and XX centuries: H. James, J. Conrad, D.H. Lawrence. Wrocław: Wydawn Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1992. Print.
542 Turner, Barnard. “Chasing Strange Gods in ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Études Lawrenciennes 22 (2000): 107-30. Print.
543 Turner, John. “The Capacity to Be Alone and Its Failure in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 16.3 (1983): 259-89. Print.
544 ---. “The Perversion of Play in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 15.3 (1982): 249-70. Print.
545 ---. “Purity and Danger in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’.” D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986. 139-71. Print.
546 Urbano, Cosimo. “The Evil that Men Do: Mark Rydell’s Adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox.” Literature/Film Quarterly 23.4 (1995): 254-61. Print.
547 Vichy, Thérèse. “L’ironie dans ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’.” Études Lawrenciennes 6 (1991): 69-81. Print.
548 Vickery, John B. “Myth and Ritual in the Shorter Fiction of D. H. Lawrence.” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (Spring 1959): 65–82. Print. [Refers to St. Mawr.]
549 Viinikka, Anja. From Persephone to Pan: D. H. Lawrence’s Mythopoeic Vision of the Intergrated Personality. Turku: Turun Yliopisto Julkaisuje, 1988. Print. [Deals with “The Overtone” and St. Mawr.]
550 ---. “‘The Man Who Died’: D. H. Lawrence’s Phallic Vision of the Restored Body.” Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (1994-5): 39-46. Print.
551 Villanueva-Casado, Maria. “Modernism and the Disenchantment of Modernity in Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence.” Anti-tales: The Uses of Disenchantment. Eds. Catriona McAra and David Calvin. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 285-94. Print. [Focuses on dystopian elements in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “A Suburban Fairy Tale.”]
552 Vivas, Eliseo. D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. London: Allen & Unwin, 1960. Print. [Discusses, “Daughters of the Vicar.”]
553 Vowles, Richard B. “Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’.” Explicator 11 (1952): item 14. Print.
554 Wadsworth, P. Beaumont, ed. ‘A Prelude’ by D. H. Lawrence: His First and Previously Unrecorded Work, with an Explanatory Foreword Dealing with its Discovery. Thames Ditton: Merle Press, 1949. Print.
555 Wallace, Jeff. D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. [Sections are devoted to The Fox and St. Mawr.]
556 Ward, Jason M. The Forgotten Film Adaptations of D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories. A Brill e- book, 2016. Print. DOI: 10.1163/9789004309050 [Studies the fluidity of the texts in relation to film adaptations focusing more particularly on “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.”]
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557 Wasserman, Jerry. “St. Mawr and the Search for Community.” Mosaic 5.2 (1972): 113-23. Print.
558 Watkins, Daniel P. “Labor and Religion in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’.” Studies in Short Fiction 24.3 (1987): 295-301. Print.
559 Watson, Garry. “‘The fact, and the crucial significance, of desire’: Lawrence’s ‘Virgin and the Gipsy’.” English 34 (1985): 131-56. Print.
560 Weiner, S. Ronald. “Irony and Symbolism in ‘The Princess’.” A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1959. 221-38. Print.
561 Weiss, Daniel A. Oedipus in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1962. Print. [Broaches the Oedipus motif in “The Prussian Officer” stories and “The Man Who Died.”]
562 West, Anthony. D. H. Lawrence. Denver: Swallow, 1950. Print. [Discusses “The Border- Line”]
563 West, Ray. Reading the Short Story. New York: Crowell, 1968. Print. [Discusses ‘The Blind Man.”]
564 Wheeler, Richard P. “‘Cunning in his overthrow’: Give and Take in ‘Tickets, Please’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 10 (1977): 242-50. Print.
565 ---. “Intimacy and Irony in ‘The Blind Man’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 9 (Summer 1976): 236-53. Print.
566 Whelan, P. T. “The Hunting Metaphor in The Fox and Other Works.” D. H. Lawrence Review 21.3 (1989): 275-90. Print.
567 Wicker, Brian. The Story-Shaped World: Fiction and Metaphysics, Some Variations on a Theme. 1975. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print. [Refers to “The Man Who Died,” St. Mawr and “The Woman Who Rode Away.”]
568 Widmer, Kingsley. The Art of Perversity, D.H. Lawrence’s shorter fictions. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1962. Print.
569 ---. “Birds of Passion and Birds of Marriage in D. H. Lawrence.” University of Kansas City Review 25 (Autumn 1958): 73-79. Print. [Discusses “The Blue Moccasins,” “Two Blue Birds,” and Wintry Peacock.”]
570 ---. “D. H. Lawrence and the Art of Nihilism.” Kenyon Review 20 (1958): 604-16. Print. [Deals with “The Prussian Officer” stories and “The Man Who Loved Islands.”]
571 ---. “Lawrence and the Fall of Modern Woman.” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (Spring 1959): 47-56. Print. [Discusses “None of That” and “The Princess.”]
572 Wiehe, R. E. “Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’.” Explicator 20 (1961): item 12. Print.
573 Wilde, Alan. “The Illusion of St. Mawr: Technique and Vision in D. H. Lawrence’s Novel.” PMLA 79 (1964): 164-70. Print.
574 Willbern, David. “Malice in Paradise: Isolation and Projection in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 10 (1977): 223-41. Print.
575 Williams, Linda R. Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Print. [A critical approach through the eyes and the gaze, passages are devoted to “The Blind Man.”]
576 ---. “‘We’ve been forgetting that we’re flesh and blood, Mother’: ‘Glad Ghosts’ and Uncanny Bodies.” D. H. Lawrence Review 27.2-3 (1997-8): 233-54. Print.
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577 Wilson, K. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’: Parable and Structure. English Studies in Canada 13.4 (1987): 438-50. Print.
578 Winn, Harbour. “Parallel Inward Journeys: A Passage to India and St. Mawr.” English Language Notes 31 (1993): 62-66. Print.
579 Wolkenfeld, Suzanne. “‘The Sleeping Beauty’ Retold: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Fox’.”Studies in Short Fiction 14.4 (1977): 345-52. Print.
580 Woo, Jung Min. “Sun: The Bible ‘written in a kind of foreign language’.” Études Lawrenciennes 34 (2007): 111-24. Print.
581 Wood, Paul. “The Cost of Liberation: Sexual Politics in Lawrence’s ‘Tickets, Please’.” Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (1992-93): 105-08. Print.
582 ---. “The True Cause of Dollie Urquart’s Fall: Complementary Interpretations of Lawrence’s ‘The Princess’.” Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (1996): 18-26. Print.
583 Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. Print. [Broaches the question of homosexuality in “The Prussian Officer.”]
584 Worthen, John. “Short Story and Autobiography: Kinds of Detachment in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Fiction.” Renaissance and Modern Studies 29 (1985): 1-15. Print. [A discussion of “The Prussian Officer” stories.]
585 Wright, Terry. D. H. Lawrence and the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print. [Discusses “The Escaped Cock.”]
586 Wulff, Ute-Christel. “Hebl, Hofmannsthal and Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” D. H. Lawrence Review 20.3 (1988): 287-96. Print.
587 Yamin, Cai. “Industrial Corruption: The Main Culprit for the Relationship between Husband and Wife in ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’.” Canadian Social Science 3.4 (2007): 14-18. Print.
588 Yanada, Noriyuki. “‘The Virgin and the Gipsy’: Four Realms and Narrative Modes.” Language and Culture 20 (1991): 121-46. Print.
589 Young, Jane Jaffe. D. H. Lawrence on Screen: Re-Visioning Prose Style in the Films of “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” Sons and Lovers, and Women in Love. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Print.
590 Zaratsian, Christine. Le Phénix, Mode Essentiel de l’Imaginaire chez D. H. Lawrence. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997. 2 vols. Print. [Traces alchemy symbolism in Lawrence’s works.]
591 Zytaruk, George J. “‘The Undying Man’: D. H. Lawrence’s Yiddish Story.” D. H. Lawrence Review 4 (1971): 20-27. Print.
IV. Bibliographies
592 Cowan, James. D. H. Lawrence: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings about him. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1982. Print.
593 Iida, Takeo, ed. The Reception of D. H. Lawrence Around the World. Fukuoka: Kyushu UP, 1999. Print.
594 Mehl, Dieter, and Christa Jansohn, eds. The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Europe. London: Continuum, 2007. Print.
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595 Mikriammos, Philippe, ed. D. H. Lawrence: Le Serpent à plumes et autres oeuvres mexicaines. Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011. Print. [Lists all the translations of Lawrence’s works into French including translations of the short stories.]
596 Poplawski, Paul, ed. D.H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1996. Print.
597 Preston, Peter. A D. H. Lawrence Chronology. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. Print.
598 Roberts, Warren, and Paul Poplawski. A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print. [Lists the first editions of Lawrence’s works, the main reviews that appeared at the time and the subsequent seminal studies.]
599 Sagar, Keith, ed. A D. H. Lawrence Handbook. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1982. Print. [Includes a select bibliography of studies of Lawrence’s works, a checklist of his readings, a glossary of Nottingham dialect and an identification of places in Lawrence’s fiction.]
AUTHOR
SHIRLEY BRICOUT Shirley Bricout is a member of the post-doctoral research group based at the University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) devoted to British Literature and Art. The translation into English of her first book was released in 2015 under the title Politics and the Bible in D. H. Lawrence's Leadership Novels at the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. It is honored with a foreword by Keith Cushman. She has contributed articles and book reviews to Les Etudes Lawrenciennes (Paris X), Les Etudes britanniques contemporaines (Montpellier 3) and to The Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (Nottingham, UK).
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