The Plumed Serpent: D. H. Lawrence's Transitional Novel

by

Freda R. Hankins

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the

College of Humanities

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

April 1985 : D. H. Lawrence's Transitional Novel

by

Freda R. Hankins

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. William Coyle, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

Chairperson

Date

ii ABSTRACT

Author: Freda R. Hankins

Title: The Plumed Serpent: D. H. Lawrence's Transitional Novel

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 1985

The life and the philosophy of D. H. Lawrence influenced his novels. The emotional turmoil of his life, his obsession with perfecting human relationships, and his fascination with the duality of the world led him to create his most experimental and pivotal novel, The Plumed Serpent. In The

Plumed Serpent Lawrence uses a superstructure of myth to convey his belief in the necessity for the rebirth of a religion based on the dark of antiquity; coupled with this was his fervent belief that in all matters, sexual or spiritual, physical or emotional, political or religious, men should lead and women should follow. Through a study of Lawrence's life and personal creed, an examination of the mythic structure of The Plumed Serpent, and a brief forward look to Lady Chatterly's Lover, it is possible to see The Plumed

Serpent as significant in the Lawrencian canon. Though didactic and obscure at times, the novel is an important transitional work.

iii Table of Contents

Page

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1: Lawrence's Dualist Philosophy ...... 8

Chapter II: Symbol and Myth ...... 19

Chapter Ill: Valley of Blood, Column of Blood ...... 28

Conclusion ...... 40

Works Cited ...... 44

Works Consulted ...... ' ...... 48

iv Introduction

David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 at Eastwood, a mining village near Nottingham; he was the son of a collier. Until his death in 1930 at the age of forty-four, Lawrence remained a wanderer, searching for perfection in human relationships, and producing in the course of his life twelve novels, numerous books of poetry, several critical treatises, a number of short stories, and three short travel books.

Despite his productivity, Lawrence was a deeply troubled and enigmatic writer, living out in his novels and his own life the domestic battles staged by his parents in the coal town of his childhood. His most successful novels

(, , , and Lady Chatterly's Lover) are set in industrial England, but he never, until his death in Vence, France, stopped looking for another place, a better land whose tropical climate would . drive out the dark dampness of the mines.

Lawrence's best novels contain language that is powerfully lyric and brilliantly descriptive- the language of a poet writing prose; even the best works are often marred by passages of didacticism, and the worst are more pedagogy than prose. The "strongest element in his constitution ... was what

Katherine Mansfield called 'his eagerness, his passionate eagerness for life'"

(Stewart 486), and it is this passion that saves even the weakest novels.

1 2

Lawrence saw himself as both prophet and pilgrim, destined to show the true way to non-believers.

His stature depends not merely on his inspiration, which

presented him perpetually with contradictory convictions and

bewildering sequences of ideas in brilliant quasi-logical

concatenation, but upon his belief that all this broken and

many-faceted material could be recomposed in consciousness,

so that eventually he should hold out to us in his hands the

perfected crystal of a visionary truth. (Stewart 487)

Although Horace Gregory states that Lawrence is "an heir of the Romantic tradition in English literature" (xvi) whose most obvious predecessor was

Thomas Hardy, his major novels show many departures from tradition, and as his career gained ground his work became increasingly innovative and complex. His first novel, The White Pea-c_ock (1911), is an apprentice work, but one that contains hints of the poetic vision and complex sexual convictions more fully expressed in later books.

The Trespasser (1912), although it contained the theme of "extreme sexual preoccupation entangled with extreme sexual frustration" (Stewart 492), is less impressive. Lawrence's next book, Sons and Lovers (1913), is a " vivid evocation of one English working class home at the end of the 19th century"

(Stewart 493) and established Lawrence as a professional writer, although poverty and censorship difficulties plagued him the rest of his life. Sons and

Lovers has Lawrence's own early life as its setting, and consequently is real and convincing; many critics feel it to be his finest novel.

The Rainbow (1915) is loosely connected with Women in Love (1920); 3

Lawrence originally intended only one long novel to be called The Sisters.

It deals with Lawrence's most important theme of relationships between men and men and men and women; it is also based in the coal-mining towns of England that Lawrence knew from his childhood. Women in Love shows

Lawrence moving further into the exploration of the female psyche and into a realm where assertion of the will and conscious, deliberate sexual enjoyment became "alike sins" (Stewart 506). In Sons and Lovers, The

Rainbow, and Women in Love Lawrence reveals his belief in the inherent polarity of male/female relationships, a polarity which had its final expression in The Plumed Serpent.

Although Aaron's Rod (1922), the first of Lawrence's power-oriented novels, begins in industrial England, the action shifts to Italy, primarily because

Lawrence was in Italy at that time. When Lawrence describes the English working class, he is on familiar ground and his prose is vigorous; but even though the descriptions of Italian cities are striking, Lawrence was unable to write successfully about the upper classes that he attempted to portray ·· in Aaron's Rod, so that the descriptive paragraphs appear like small, sparkling gems in a coal scuttle. Aaron's Rod is further marred by the sort of didactic preaching that renders much of The Plumed Serpent ineffective.

In Aaron's Rod Lawrence reveals his own disgust for women's implacable will; the leader-follower relationships in Aaron's Rod anticipate the ultimate /king and sacrificial victim of The Plumed Serpent.

Rawdon Lilly of Aaron's Rod becomes Richard Lovat Somers of

(1923), Lawrence's Australian-based novel of the power struggle between men and women. In Kangaroo, as in Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent, the 4

" love-mode is exhausted and the power-mode must be sought and obeyed"

(Stewart 548). Kangaroo and Aaron's Rod point the way to The Plumed

Serpent, the ultimate power novel, in which Lawrence attempted to fully define the battle between the sexes and to resolve it in mythical terms.

By 1925, when The Plumed Serpent was finally published, Lawrence was firmly established as a professional writer but was still plagued by censorship problems and beset by difficulties in his private life. Lawrence still had difficulty finding publishers, fought openly with his wife, satirized estranged friends in savage, semi-comic stories, and depended on the kindness of strangers for money. The Plumed Serpent evolved from a disturbed, nearly insane period in Lawrence's life and did not add significantly to his popularity as a writer.

William York Tindall, who made the first study of Lawregce's sources for

The Plumed Serpent, called the book " by far his best novel as well as the outstanding example of primitivism in our time" (D. H. Lawrence and Susan

His Cow 113). As Harry T. Moore stated, the critical consensus is that The

Plumed Serpent is "at once Lawrence's most ambitious attempt in the area of the novel and his most notable failure" ("Vision and Language" 69).

Other critics were less generous. H. M. Daleski felt that although The

Plumed Serpent was organically developed, "Lawrence's attempt . .. to assert a 'male' metaphysic in order to 'justify himself' is disastrous" (251-2). E. W.

Tedlock, Jr. found the " formal religious development ... embarrassingly pseudo-poetic, preachy, and posturing" (192).

F. R. Leavis stated that "The Plumed Serpent is an attempt to prove, in imaginative enactment, that the revival of the necessary religion is 5

possible" ( 69). Lawrence was a highly intuitive, visionary writer, looking for an expression of perfection and universal truth which he believed could be found in the ancient patterns of myth and pantheistic religion .

. According to Mircea Eliade, "the main function of myth is to determine the exemplar models of all ritual, and of all significant human acts . . . . A true myth describes an archetypal event in words" (410, 413). In myth, polarity both exists and is reconciled. Opposites are perfected and the paradox resolved. Myth transcends superficial logical experience and is " from its very beginning potential religion" (Cassirer 87).

The meaninglessness of logic, the dualism and the archetypal nature of myth had a strong appeal for Lawrence, who was only peripherally concerned with logical consequences and much concerned with discovering some new way to reconcile male/female polarity. Further, in many of the ancient rituals with which Lawrence was familiar, the " motif of a primordial pair: sky (male) and earth (female) is fairly common" (Eiiade 51).

The concepts of the primeval couple, the cosmic duality of earth and sky, flesh and spirit attracted Lawrence. With the use of myth to give his own beliefs structure and coherence, Lawrence sought to show the crystal of perfection that once existed and could exist again. "The earth . . . was, in the earliest of religious experience or mythical intuitions, 'the whole place' in which man found himself" (Eiiade 245), while the sky symbolizes

" transcendence, power and changelessness simply by being there. It exists because it is high, infinite, immovable, powerful" (Eiiade 39).

Lawrence, although possessed of unusual vision and insight, needed the concreteness of myth and ritual in his prophetic novel; as Carl Jung stated, 6

"Vision is a genuine primordial experience which requires related mythological imagery to give it form" (104).

As the dominant symbol in The Plumed Serpent, embodies all the Lawrencian dogma: duality, vitality, ritual submission to a higher being, and worship of the blood. The image of Quetzalcoatl arose from

Lawrence's attempt to define the presence of the dark god he felt vital for spiritual and physical love. It sprang, moreover, from his need to "eradicate values designated 'female' and based on 'love' and to institute a new system designated 'male' and based on 'power'" (Simpson 115). Although the religion of the new Quetzalcoatl is "meant to be a reforming of [the] primitive vital energies Kate [Leslie] senses in " (Apter 171), it is essentially a phallic cult.

Kate Leslie, the heroine of The Plumed Serpent, is a strong-willed, resourceful, and pragmatic woman. Although Lawrence u~es magic, spells, and powerfully ritualistic scenes that give texture and complexity to the novel, the myth and fantasy are not enough to convince either Kate or the reader that such a vibrant, resolute woman would voluntarily succumb to the pseudo-religious practices of the Quetzalcoatl cult.

The Plumed Serpent is a pivotal book in the Lawrencian canon; it is the last of his power-struggle novels and the last that uses myth as a controlling symbol. As such the book merits consideration. Perhaps while exorcizing his own demons in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence discovered the dark gods to be darker than he suspected and the abyss below even more unfathomable. At any rate, he "pulls up. His next, his last hero is not small and dark and chthonic. He is large and red-faced and a gamekeeper. And he 7

is famously far from believing that a woman must renounce the seething, frictional, ecstatic Aphrodite of the foam" (Stewart 559).

Though imperfect in many respects, The Plumed Serpent is, from a biographical point of view, an important work because it represents a crisis in Lawrence's personal life and a shift in his philosophy. He did not abandon his belief in male dominance, but he merged it with a new tenderness and concern for female sexuality. His dream of a primitive utopia, his obsession with male dominance, and his fascination with archetypal myth were purged, liberating him to create his masterpiece, Lady Chatterly's Lover. The Plumed

Serpent is, therefore, an important transitional work .

• Chapter I: Lawrence's Dualist Philosophy

To understand D. H. Lawrence's work, it is first necessary to understand the nature of his personal philosophy of sex and religion; dualism is central to that philosophy.

Lawrence felt that duality was the underlying force in life, an all-pervading principle. Men and women were symbolically opposed forces, like light and dark, eagle and dove, tiger and lamb, or lion and unicorn. Although H. M.

Daleski states that "what distinguishes Lawrence's position from most dualist philosophies is his insistence that the contending forces must retain their separate identities" (21), it seems that separate was not equal.

The resolution between the two opposing forces should not come from a fusing of the two, but from a balance in which neither side is stronger than the other. In Twilight in Italy Lawrence states the eternal polarity that should exist:

The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. The lion eternally

shall devour the lamb, the lamb eternally shall be devoured. Man

knows the great consummation in the flesh, the sensual ecstasy,

and that is eternal. Also the spiritual ecstasy of unanimity, that

is eternal. But the two are separate and never to be confused.

To neutralise the one with the other is unthinkable, an

abomination ....

8 9

The two Infinites, negative and positive, they are always

related, but they are never identical. They are always opposite,

but there exists a relation between them. (80-2)

Each individual contains both positive and negative forces and becomes both lion and lamb. When a relationship exists between a man and a woman, the reconciliation is doubled, for not only the male/female polarities but also the internal polarities of each individual must be balanced.

Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, which is only peripherally about Hardy and mainly about Lawrence's own theories, contains a lengthy discussion of the essential duality of men and women. H. M. Daleski has compiled a simplified table of the qualities that Lawrence assigns to men and women:

Male Female

Movement Stability

Change Immutability

Activity Permanence

Refusal of Sensation Submission to Sensation

Knowledge Feeling

Spirit Flesh

Mental Clarity Sensation

Light Darkness (30-1)

Although Lawrence himself identified with "Being" rather than " Doing" and with the feminine principle in general, he was strongly conscious of himself as a male. The eternally warring dualities within himself created a tension that reveals itself in Lawrence's work and in his own life. He " had a preoccupation with phallic power" (Simpson 134) and, in spite of his own 10

feminine tendencies, or perhaps because of them, assigned to his female characters those qualities that implied submission and acceptance.

That the two opposing forces, men and women, should strive equally for a balance, a reconciliation in the flesh, was an important part of Lawrence's theory of the ideal relationship; theory was not practice, however, and the male principle was actually endowed with more power than the female.

" Phallic consciousness" was the essence of masculinity, but Lawrence created no feminine equivalent. The scales were always tipped in favor of the male, in spite of Lawrence's suggestion of equality.

The importance of the sexual act is apparent in Lawrence's novels and in his non-fiction. The consummation "epitomizes the sort of unity Lawrence sought in a dualistic universe" (Daleski 39). As Lawrence stated in "Love":

The love between a man and a woman, when it is whole, is dual.

It is the melting into pure communion, and it is the friction of

sheer sensuality, both. In pure communion I become whole in

love. And in pure, fierce passion I am burned into essentiality.

I am driven from the matrix into sheer separate distinction. I

become my single self, inviolable and unique, as the gems were

perhaps once driven into themselves out of the confusion of

earths. The woman and I, we are the confusion of earths. Then

in the fire of their (our?) extreme sensual love, in the friction

of intense, destructive flames, I am destroyed and reduced to

her essential otherness. It is a destructive fire, the profane love.

But it is the only fire that will purify us into singleness, fuse

us from the chaos into our own gem-like separateness of being. 11

All whole love between man and woman is this duality, a love

which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness,

and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual

gratification of being burnt down, burnt apart into separate

clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness. ·

(Phoenix, 154-5)

By 1918, when he wrote Aaron's Rod, Lawrence had expanded his philosophy of sex to include a glorification of the phallus and its power.

The strength of the masculine principle lay in the phallus; once again,

Lawrence failed to provide a female equivalent. The force of the masculine phallic principle is obvious in certain moments in Aaron's Rod:

And now his desire came back. But strong, fierce as iron. Like

the strength of an eagle with the lightning in its talons.

Something to glory in, something overweenfng, the powerful

male passion, arrogant, royal, Jove's thunderbolt. Aaron's black

rod of power, blossoming again with the red Florentine lilies and

fierce thorns. He moved about in the splendour of the male

passion-power. He got it back, the male godliness, the male

godhead. (301)

If, in books like Aaron's Rod (and later, Lady Chatterly's Lover) Lawrence glorifies the phallus, he loathes the clitoris, making a "categoric distinction between clitoral and vaginal " (Simpson 138). In order for his female characters to submit to masculine, phallic power, they must renounce the

"seething, frictional Aphrodite of the foam" (Stewart 559), the " beaklike friction" (Plumed Serpent 422) of clitoral orgasm and become passive, 12

awaiting the vaginal orgasm that only the male could provide. The revulsion

that Lawrence felt for clitoral orgasm, a "selfish hoarding of voluptuous

satisfaction" (Apter 168), stemmed from his intense dislike for what he

believed were the willful aspects of a woman's pleasure. According to

Lawrence's doctrine of sex, if one's own pleasure is of primary concern, that concern isolates the individual and eliminates the meaning of sex.

By 1918, Lawrence believed firmly in the necessity for women to submit to the phallic power, to submit to the superior male. In Aaron's Rod, Lawrence speaks through the man, Lilly:

And, of course there must be one who urges, and one who

is impelled. Just as in love there is a beloved and a lover: the

man is supposed to be the lover, the woman is the beloved. Now,

in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit,

but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority.

Not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep,

deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and

pride . . .. The woman must now submit - but deeply, deeply,

and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep,

unfathomable free submission. (345)

Accordingly, sex was an instrument willful women used to gain power over men. Submission and passivity should lead to a merging of selves that would be impossible if the woman were to seek her own pleasure. Orgasm is desirable for Lawrencian women, but only when supplied by the man's phallic power. 13

The resistance by willful, questing women to the soul-absorption inherent

in submission to phallic power is a persistent theme in Lawrence's novels and stories and in his personal life. Mark Spilka states that Lawrence viewed marriage and courtship as a " fight to the death - or to new life" ("Lawrence's

Hostility" 194). In 1918 Lawrence wrote to Katherine Mansfield about Frieda, his wife:

In a way, Frieda is the devouring mother. It is awfully hard,

once the sex relation has gone this way, to recover. If we don't

recover, we die. But Frieda says I am antediluvian in my positive

attitude. I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence

to a man, and he must take this precedence. I do think that

men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without

turning around to ask permission or approval from their women.

Consequently, the women must follow as it were

unquestioningly. I can't help it, I believe this. Frieda doesn't.

Hence our fight. (Selected Letters 155)

About Frieda, a strong, determined woman, Lawrence asked, " How to make that proud . . . romantic lady acquiesce of her own indomitably free will? How indeed to break a woman's will?" (Spilka, "Lawrence's Hostility" 192).

Lawrence was never able to break Frieda's will; nevertheless, she remained married to him ahd influenced his conception of female characters. Lawrence filled his books with expressions of his " need to burn out the pride and prudency" of domineering women (Kermode 155). Kate in The Plumed

Serpent, the white woman of ";· Connie Chatterly, and Ursula in Women in Love were treated with varying degrees of hostility by 14

Lawrence; he identified more closely with, and treated more gently, those women who chose submission. In Women in Love, first published privately, in 1920, Ursula and Birkin have the following exchange:

" Why should a horse want to put itself in the human's power?"

asked Ursula. "That is quite incomprehensible to me. I don't

believe it ever wanted it:'

" Yes it did. It's the last, perhaps highest love-impulse: resign

your will to the higher being;' said Birkin.

" What curious notions you have of love;' jeered Ursula.

"And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition

inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly.

With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to

perdition:' (132)

The· passive acceptance of man's superiority, his ability to provide the woman with the "petite morte" of orgasm, should lead ultimately to a harmony of spirit, and the desired melding of maleness and femaleness.

It is not coincidental that Lawrence's images of death and sex are startingly similar.

According to Lawrence, " Death . . . is not only a kind of 'utter and absolute dark; a 'silence; a 'sheer oblivion; a 'silent sheer cessation of all awareness; but also a form of sleep in which there is a hint of lovely oblivion, the 'sleep of God; in which the 'world is created afresh .. :" (Panichas 118).

When one carefully reads Lawrence's description of the honeymoon of Anna

Lensky and Will Brangwen in The Rainbow, one can see the similarity to a description of death: 15

As they lay close together, complete and beyond the touch

of time or change, it was as if they were at the very centre of

all the slow wheeling of space and the rapid agitation of life,

deep, deep, inside them all, at the centre where there is utter

radiance, and eternal being, and the silence absorbed in praise:

the steady core of all movements, the unawakened sleep of all

wakefulness. They found themselves there, and they lay still,

in each other's arms; for their moment they were at the heart

of eternity, while time roared far off, forever far off, towards the

rim. (145)

More significant, and more didactic, is the discussion in Women in Love between Ursula and Birkin about the necessity for sensuality:

" But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?"

she asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.

" In the blood;' he answered; "when the mind and the known

world is drowned in darkness - everything must go - there

must be the deluge.... You've got to lapse out before you can

know what sensual reality is.Iapse into unknowingness, and give

up your volition:' (36-7)

The rightness of such communion in the blood, even with its overtones of death, is an important part of Lawrence's philosophy of sex, death, and rebirth. He wrote in a letter to Ernest Collings in 1913: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true" (Selected Letters 46). 16

The symbolic death that occurred through the total submission to the

power in the blood was not an end to life; Lawrence wrote, "I think a man

is born twice: first his mother bears him, then he has to be reborn from the

woman he loves" (Moore, Life and Work 86). Death, then, always implies the

assurance of rebirth; the work of Lawrence was an assertion of life in death.

Sigrid Undset noted that Lawrence preached "his own gospel of a new and

saving kind of abandonment, a dark and mystical communion of the blood

which is just as much the expression of the human instinct of death and

destruction as of the will to life" (54).

In the Lawrencian , death is not to be feared, but is the " prelude to

solar rebirth. Departure and return, the pattern of most ancient myths, as

Joyce and Mann also discovered, is a way to fulfill our deepest wishes"

(Tindall, The Later D. H. Lawrence xvi). Lawrence himself ex.pressed the calm

acceptance of death in "Shadows":

And if toni·ght my soul may find her peace

in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,

and in the morning wake like a newly opened flower,

Then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

(Complete Poems 726)

The presence of God is crucial in Lawrence's view of death and rebirth, but his dualism (or perhaps pluralism) extends to his religious tenets; for

Lawrence, " One god had as much right to exist as another, and the dark ones were as genuinely divine as the bright. Perhaps (since Lawrence was so specially sensitive to the quality of the dark godhead, and so specially gifted to express it in art), perhaps even more divine" (Huxley 72). Although 17

any god would do for his purposes, Lawrence believed that " true love between

the sexes is a creation of the Dark God, the physical sympathy between two

bodies" (Auden 49). Lawrence believed this, and wrote about the importance

of the dark gods in a letter to Willard Johnson:

Why don't you jeunesse let all the pus of festering sex out of

your heads, and try to act from the original centres. The old,

dark.religions understood. "God enters from below;' said the

Egyptians, and that's right. Why can't you darken your minds,

and know that the great gods pulse in the dark, and enter you

as darkness through the lower gates. Not through the head. Why

don't you see again the unknown and invisible gods who step

sometimes into your arteries and down the blood vessels to the

phallos, to the vagina, and have strange meetings there? .. . turn

again to the dark gods, which are the dark promptings and

passion-motions inside you, and have a reverence for life.

(Selected Letters 205)

Lawrence felt the old, dark religions to be so strong and the dark gods so powerful that to him organized Christi~mity appeared lifeless and insipid.

As James C. Cowan states in D. H. Lawrence's American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth:

A church which, in the modern secular state, becomes merely

the instrument of faction, of propaganda, and of

self-congratulation may satisfy very well the chauvinistic

requirement for a Sunday pantomime of weekday patriotism and

business ethics; but it is hardly likely to help one coordinate 18

the spirit and flesh, conscious and unconscious into a self, far

less to relate that self to others in a meaningful whole. (35)

Christianity had no place in the communion of the blood, the eternal struggle toward truth realized through sensuality. So " Lawrence ...

(attempted) to counter the staleness of a worn-out religious tradition with the vitality of a dynamic religious experience" (Cowan 37). In The Plumed

Serpent, Lawrence revived a dead god from one of the old, dark religions, infused him with both traditional and invented qualities, and tried again, for the last time, through the use of ancient patterns and myths, to reconcile

.the eternal conflicts between men and willful, questing women. Chapter II: Symbol and Myth

By 1922, when D. H. Lawrence finally arrived in Taos, New Mexico, his "quest

(for) a place that should be at once a home and his symbol of unity" was well under way (Tindall, intro to The Plumed Serpent v). When war broke out in 1914, Lawrence and Frieda, his wife of only a few weeks, were trapped in England. Lawrence had a horror of the war, a repulsion for the specter of "humanity lacerating itself" (Moore, Life and Works 112), and began to look for actual places that would express his personal philosophy. "He projected his feelings onto 'England; and when the actual England failed to become what he desired, he continued to explore his own reality by projecting it onto other countries, other places" (Cavitch 3).

Unable to leave England because of the war, Lawrence railed against the destruction and evil of war and began to search instead for a new place

"where creative souls could protectively live together in harmony and independence" (Cavitch 33). This Utopia was to be composed of twenty or so hardy individuals who would move to an uninhabited island as soon as the war was over. The colony was to be called "Rananim;' a word Lawrence found in a Hebrew song written by his friend S. S. Koteliansky.

Although some of his friends, including Katherine Mansfield, ridiculed the

Rananim project, Lawrence believed in the possibility of a Utopia for sympathetic beings; the Rananim colony never materialized, but Lawrence

19 20

continued his search for a new way of life. He finished The Rainbow in 1915, and wrote about that novel's message:

The older world is done for, toppling on top of us: ... it's no use

the men looking to the women for salvation, nor the women

looking for sensuous satisfaction in their fulfillment. There must

be a new world. (Collected Letters 422)

Through the help of Lady Cynthia Asquith, the Lawrences were able to obtain passports in 1915; however, Lawrence became ill with a bronchial inflammation and was also seriously hampered by lack of funds, so the proposed trip to America was cancelled. Lawrence remembered 1915 as

"marking the end of everything creative in Western civilization" (Cavitch 59).

Unfortunately, Lawrence was forced to remain in Cornwall for another two years and in England until 1919.

The years in Cornwall were difficult for Lawrence. Harry Moore wrote that

the war, the suppression of The Rainbow in November 1915, and

his quarrels with various friends had made Lawrence more

cynical, bitter, and lonely, and more contemptuous of public

opinion. (Life and Works 125)

Lawrence was unable to obtain work in the national service, publishers were reluctant to even look at his work, he didn't get along well with his Cornish neighbors, and he was desperately poor. Nevertheless, Lawrence continued to plan Utopias, and to dream of leaving England.

The 1915 passports had been invalidated, but the Lawrences obtained new passports in 1919. Lawrence left England in November 1919, and returned only for brief visits. From 1920 to 1922 he travelled through Italy, Sicily, 21

Sardinia, Ceylon, and Australia; however, he repeatedly returned to the idea that only in America could he find the crude vitality and power that would reflect his inner vision. Although Lawrence was repelled by the creeping industrialization in America, he was inevitably drawn to the sensual landscape of the wilderness and most especially to the untamed nature of the primitive American Indians.

In 1918-19, Lawrence published eight of the twelve essays assembled in

Studies in Classic American Literature. These essays, dealing with writers from

Benjamin Franklin to Walt Whitman, show Lawrence's continued interest in the vigor he felt -must exist in America. He read and wrote about Cooper,

Poe, Hawthorne, Dana, and Melville. The articles did not laud everything

Lawrence saw in American life and literature. "The essays on Poe and

Hawthorne bring Lawrence to an extended judgement against the Magna

Mater in American life, whose chaotic love destroys the male, who has lost his sexual leadership" (Cavitch 94). He praised Whitman, however, because

Whitman speaks of self-fulfillment through manly love, and Lawrence wanted to believe that " hope for future civilizations" (Cavitch 99) lay in

Blutbruderschaft. Both Lawrence and Whitman felt that the change in sensibilities was destined to occur in America.

By 1919, Lawrence had made a profound study of the New World spirit; he had a sense, through his readings, of the New World's "still unextinguished primitivism ... providing him with some understanding of a community based on older forms and, in some cases ... deepening his own sense of

'darkness'" (Moore, "Vision and Language" 62). The Indians became for 22

Lawrence "images of the sensuality which white men have repressed in their natures" (Cavitch 100).

Although Lawrence was fascinated by the primitive, savage nature he believed existed in the New World, he was dissuaded from going to America by Amy Lowell, who was convinced that Lawrence had a false view of the country and would be disappointed. He wavered in his decision for three years while he wandered the globe, searching for the sort of male bonds and free spirit which he expected to find expressed in the lives of primitive peoples.

In 1922, Mabel Dodge Stern, a wealthy American woman who had read parts of Sea and Sardinia (Lawrence's account of a ten-day excursion in

Sardinia), wrote to Lawrence, offering him a place to stay if he would come and write about Taos. Characteristically, he vacillated, but finally arrived in New Mexico in late 1922.

According to Harry Moore,

Lawrence's New Mexico years were spent partly in the hysterical

atmosphere of Mabel (Dodge Stern) Luhan's ranch, usually full

of captive and quarreling celebrities and arrivistes, or in escapes

from this atmosphere - escapes to the near-by mountains, to

Old Mexico, once even to Europe. (Life and Works 193)

The period from 1922 to 1923 was marked by extreme personal chaos;

Frieda had returned to London and become involved with Middleton Murry, whose wife, Katherine Mansfield, had died. Lawrence felt alienated, disconsolate, and betrayed. His single trip to Europe during this time was to fetch Frieda; the couple eventually were reunited in London. 23

Lawrence returned to New Mexico in 1924. His internal turmoil was reflected in the strange, almost preternatural Southwestern landscapes. The fiction he wrote at this time was also other-worldly, weird, and peopled with love slaves, revived gods, ghosts, specters, isolated Indian tribes, and a deepening sense of fatality, a darkening gloom.

His travel writings from this period show a different side of Lawrence from that he presented in the stories and novels. , Lawrence's sparkling account of his life and travels in Mexico, reveals that while

Lawrence appreciated the rawness and vitality of the country, the country alone could not function as an adequate symbol in his novels. Mexico provided Lawrence with the excitement and unexpected beauty of a primitive setting that he needed as raw material - "a place which might represent the object of his dreams - the primitive, unworn, redblooded" (Undset 57).

The recreation of the myth of Quetzalcoatl answered the need for a new religion to express Lawrence's blood consciousness, dualism, and his own conception of sex and love.

Lawrence was looking for a myth potent enough to transform the wasteland of contemporary life (Cowan 64). The rise of the Quetzalcoatl cult in The Plumed Serpent, the major novel to come out of Lawrence's chaotic

American pilgrimage, is an attempt to replace the old systems of myths with something synthesized from both new and old orders.

Lawrence had studied and understood the animistic gods of the New World

Indians. William York Tindall, in his exhaustive study of Lawrence's sources, wrote that Lawrence had read Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Belt's Naturalist in Nicaragua, Bandelier's The Gilded Man, Diaz's Conquest of Mexico, 24

Humbolt's Vues de Cordilleres, several volumes of the Anales del Museo

Nacional of Mexico, and Lewis Spence's Gods of Mexico. Most significant in his reading was Mrs. Zelia Nuttall's Fundamental Principles of Old and New

World Civilizations, which has as its theme the ancient cults of sky and earth, including that of Quetzalcoatl. Lawrence was also familiar with the works of Frazer and Harrison (Tindall, "The Plumed Serpent" 180).

"Animism, polarity, and the dances of Taos account for much of the cult of Quetzalcoatl. But Lawrence shows acquaintance with the Aztec myths, which he improved in the light of his understanding" (TindalL "The Plumed

Serpent" 179). Mrs. Nuttall's book, with its emphasis on above/below symbolism, appealed to Lawrence in principle; he then adapted the basic ideas of polarity and dualism to suit his artistic needs. In the Lawrencian version of the myth, Quetzalcoatl is the life-giving union of sky and earth

(like Osiris), _the divine bird-serpent, whose bloody rituals are intended to show an increasingly mechanistic society that "their lives depend not upon technology but upon their sympathy with the dark sun" (Clark 113). Lawrence was fascinated by the Indian conception of the dark sun at the center of the universe, a darkness that implies a fundamental malevolence in Nature.

Worship of the blood was important in Lawrence's invented religion; " The idea that the human blood is such a mystical source of power and warmth, the- saving fluid, occurs naturally to men who are fighting against an ice age and anything that depresses vitality" (Undset 61). Thus, a return to the blood-sacrifices of Quetzalcoatl and the powerful ancient rituals might forestall or even push back the encroachment of white man's industrialized civilization. 25

There is some debate over whether or not the god-king Quetzalcoatl, in

his earlier manifestations, was a bloody ruler or a peaceful god. According

to Lafaye, ten years after the 1536 invasion of Corte's and the subsequent

Inquisition in which Aztec priests were annihilated as an organized body,

an incipient renaissance of the ancestral polytheism became

evident. Because of the surveillance of the missionaries, it often

took the form of furtive, clandestine activities, such as the

sacrifices made every twenty days to celebrate a new month.

(20)

Torquemada considered Quetzalcoatl a demon, "as thirsty for human blood

as the other divinities of ancient Mexico" (Lafaye 172). Motolinfa, one of the

first twelve Franciscans to arrive in Mexico in 1524, devoted a chapter in

his Historia de los Indios de la Nueva Espana to the ritual human sacrifices offered in honor of Quetzalcoatl (Lafaye 140).

Sacrifices, animal or vegetable, were offered to the gods in many primitive cultures. Often the intended victim was treated with deference and respect and was allowed to exercise royal power for a day. The sacrifices assured the success of the crops or the continued prosperity of the land. Frazer noted that " in Egypt, a human victim was annually sacrificed to prevent the failure of the crop, and a belief is implied that an omission of the sacrifice would have entailed a recurrence of that infertility which it was the object of the sacrifice to prevent" (515).

These ritual sacrifices were often directly related to harvest time, crop planting, or the start of a new year - all times of regeneration. There were

" human victims offered by the Mexicans to promote the growth of the maize 26

(and) at a Mexican harvest festival a () was placed between

two immense stones, balanced opposite each other, and was crushed by

them as they fell together" (Frazer 506).

At times the sacrificial victim became an actual, living representative of

the maize and the regenerative power implicit in Creation. In ancient Aztec

practices, a girl " representing the goddess of the new maize . .. was

beheaded. Sixty days later, at the conclusio~ of the harvest, there was

another sacrifice" (Eliade 343). According to Frazer, the female representative

of the corn " had her face painted red and yellow in token of the colours of

the corn, and she wore a paste board mitre summounted by waving plumes"

(515).

The gods to whom the primitive cultures offered the sacrificial victims

also " represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable

life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from·

the dead" (Frazer 341). It is possible to see the vengeful, bloody Quetzalcoatl

as one with Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis - dying and reviving gods whose potency was often bolstered by sacrificial victims. A failing, impotent

god could not assure prosperity in the land or fertility in the field.

In The Plumed Serpent, a prophetic and visionary novel from a tumultuous

period in Lawrence's life, "the Mexico to which Kate Leslie comes is in a state of degeneration and near-chaos" (Stewart 552). The failure of to uplift and enhance life, coupled with his own personal crises, his revulsion for mechanization, his belief in blood consciousness, his feeling for the necessity of male supremacy, and the strange, untamed world of the Mexican

Indian led him to plan the resurrection of Quetzalcoatl. Lawrence saw the 27

" reconciliation of all opposites in the principle of the living QuetzalcoatL

'The Lord of the Two Ways: As chief god of the new worship, Quetzalcoatl symbolizes the union of male and female qualities singly represented by

Cipriano ... and Kate" (Cavitch 183). Chapter III: Valley of Blood, Column of Blood

The Mexico into which Lawrence thrusts Kate Leslie symbolizes both the

depravity and inhumanity of an industrial society and the primitivism that

he felt existed in the New World. Although the main purpose of the book

was to show the possibility for rebirth through the revival of the Quetzalcoatl

myth, the novel is also filled with vivid pictures of Mexico, especially the

decadence of .

Chapter I, "Beginnings of a Bullfight;' is not only the horrifying tale of

a middle-aged widow trapped in the awful spectacle of a bullfight, but also

an example of Lawrence's unique style, which masterfully combines

• metaphor and realistic dE:tail. Although The Plumed Serpent is not a travel

book, its opening chapter captures the terror and fascination a foreign

woman might feel at the overwhelming brutality and senselessness of a

bullfight in Mexico City.

In the opening pages, Kate's instincts are sound: she felt "that sudden

dark feeling, that she didn't want to go" (11). Pressed into the outing by her

zealous companions, she "felt she was going to prison" (12). The bullring

itself, a "concrete-and-iron amphitheatre" (12), represents a trap to Kate; it

symbolizes also the trap of a modern, mechanized society that builds such

sterile edifices, into which the mob of "fattish town men in black tight suits

28 29 and little straw hats ... men like lost mongrels" (13,16) rush in order to vicariously savor the violence missing in their mundane lives.

The city Mexicans at the bullfight react like multitudes of rats herded into a too-small cage. Kate feels the "city-bred inferiority complex" (17) of her fellow spectators, an inferiority complex that makes them "all the more aggressive, once it is roused" (17). The danger inherent in the mob is hidden under a certain dullness, a deliberate slowness that is characterized by the bull, which is both victim and victimizer, an animal at once unwitting and dangerous.

As the bullfight begins, the bull runs out "blindly ... probably thinking he was free. Then he stopped short, seeing he was not free, but surrounded in an unknown way. He was utterly at a loss" (19). This animal is Lawrence's symbol for the fat, city Mexicans who have no true sense of purpose, who are herded to and fro by their oppressive industrialized society. Even when the hapless bull kills a picador's horse, it does so "rather vaguely, as if not quite knowing what to do" (20).

Quite naturally, Kate is disgusted; "her breeding and her natural pride were outraged" (21). Kate shows her will and strength for the first time and announ<;:es her decision to leave alone. Clearly, at this point she has had enough of the civilization that she finds in Mexico.

As she attempts to leave, Kate is delayed by a torrential rainfall. As she waits for the downpour to abate, she muses:

She was afraid more of the repulsiveness than of anything. She

had been in many cities of the world, but Mexico had an

underlying ugliness, a short of squalid evil ... She was afraid,

she dreaded the thought that anything might really touch her

in this town, and give her the contagion of its crawling sort of 30

evil. But she knew that the one thing she must do was to keep

her head. (26)

In spite of her fear, Kate felt that "Mexico lay in her destiny almost as a doom.

Something so heavy, so oppressive, like the folds of some huge serpent that seemed as if it could hardly raise itself" (29).

Mexico is represented by the serpent, a recurrent image in The Plumed

Serpent. The serpent is "symbolically ambivalent" (Wheelwright 134), and traditionally symbolizes death, but more importantly to Lawrence, "stretched out straight, the serpent becomes a phallus symbo!izing the reproductive power of (the) Godhead" (Wheelwright 134). The phallus is the "snake of the body" (Wheelwright 135). The omnipresent duality of the serpent is an effective symbol for the vitality, primitive energy, and potential for rebirth, coupled with a death-like heaviness, that Lawrence saw in Mexico.

In Kate's first visions of Mexico, she is aware of the "dark undertone, the black serpent-like fatality all the time" (45). Later, after her disastrous experience at the bullfight, Kate contemplates her return to England and thinks that she " felt like a bird round whose body a snake had coiled itself.

Mexico was the snake" (68). Kate finds Mexico bitter, with " horror and ... death rattles" (66). She feels about her stay in Mexico that

Superficially Mexico might be all right .. .. The sun shone

brilliantly every day. And big bright flowers stood out from the

trees. It was a holiday.

Until you were alone with it ... . There was a ponderous,

down-pressing weight upon the spirit: the great folds of the 31

dragon of the , the dragon of the Toltecs winding around

one and weighing down the soul. (55)

Kate finds even the people reptilian, with "something lurking snake-like"

(84), and "could not look at the stones of the National Museum in Mexico without depression and dread. Snakes coiled like excrement, snakes fanged and feathered beyond all dreams of dread" (85).

The deluge at the bullfight is symbolically significant, for it announces the appearance of Don Cipriano, Kate's rescuer and spiritual guide out of the mindless brutality and concrete hell of Mexico City and into the new ways of the Quetzalcoatl cult.

The snake represents the potential for rebirth in Mexico, but is also significantly allied with Don Cipriano (and in conjunction with Quetzal, the bird, with Don Ramon). Cipriano is "representative not only of the dark gods of the story's revival, but ... (is) a somewhat Nietzschean ubermensch, a bridge towards a better future - in any event, a supremely vitalistic figure"

(Moore, " Vision and Language" 64).

Don Cipriano has a "quiet, silent unobtrusiveness" (26), with eyes that are "dark, quick, with (a) glassy darkness" (26). Kate feels relief mingled with fear when Cipriano helps her escape the bullring. She is aware of his naivete and his gloom, but she is fascinated by his snake-like, obsidian eyes, " like black jewels, that you couldn't look into, and which were so watchful" (20).

Moreover, Cipriano is intensely male and suggests the lurking power of the phallic serpent. Kate recognizes the power in the man even before she is aware of his link to the Quetzalcoatl cult: 32

There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the

intensity and crudity of the semi-savage. She . could well

understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya

imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this ·

man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins.

That was what it was, the heavy-ebbing blood of powerful

reptiles, the dragon of Mexico. (74)

Kate's horror of Mexico extends to a horror of Cipriano, although she is fascinated by his hard, glittery eyes and powerful magnetism. In one of the more improbable leaps of logic in the noveL Cipriano suggests that

Horror is real .... Get used to it that there must be a bit of fear,

and a bit of horror in your life .... The bit of horror is like the

sesame seed in the nougat, it gives the sharp wild flavour. It

is good to have it there. (249)

Kate eventually learns, in "Huitzilopochtli's Night;' the depth of that horror, for Cipriano's strength " lies in the blood, and, if need be, in blood sacrifice"

(Cowan 104).

For Don Ramon, the eventual avatar of QuetzalcoatL Kate feels a certain

" fascination tinged with fear" (74). Don Ramon is "inscrutable .. . impassive ... yet his eyes brooded and smoldered with an incomprehensible, unyielding fire" (7 4). He is able, because of the inner strength of Quetzalcoatl which he possesses, to inspire and move the Indians in the village. His presence is instantly felt; the men seem to sense his power and force. In the chapter, " Lords of the Day and Night;· Ramon walks through a crowd 33 of workers, and " they worked the quicker for having seen him, as if it gave them new life" (182).

As the living Quetzalcoatl, Ramon combines the bird, Quetzal, and the snake, Coati - female and male, spirit and flesh. He is both strength and tenderness, supposedly uniting the two opposing forces in a paragon of

Lawrencian virtue. When Ramon prays to his gods, he is at first " powerful ... erect" (181) and then, the prayer completed, his " body relaxed into softness"

(181). The prayer stance itself symbolizes the unity of bird and snake.

According to Cowan, " Ramon ... must invoke both the snake of the earth and the bird of the air. Hence, in his proud, upright prayer, the right hand is upraised to receive the bird of the spirit, and the left hand hangs at the side to receive the snake of the flesh" (116).

When Don Ramon speaks of physical love and the need for' female submission, he is reflecting Lawrence's own philosophy of male supremacy.

Ramon speaks eloquently of the negative powers of the will and says, " If

I marry a woman of the Anglo-Saxon or any blond northern stock, she will want to ravage me, with the will of all the ancient white demons" (287).

According to Ramon and Lawrence, the female and male wills collide when either side decides to struggle for supremacy. However, this is not quite true, for at this stage in the formation of Lawrence's philosophy of men and women, he still believed strongly in the necessity for female submission.

" What Kate is supposed to have learned (from Ramon and Cipriano) is an old Lawrencian lesson, that the ruin of Europe arises from the sexual demands of women, their ignorance of the truth that their fulfillment lies not in sexual satisfaction but in submission" (Kermode 116). 34

Ramon and Cipriano both wear the white clothes and sandals of the

peasants; Ramon wears a serape with scarlet fringe and "round his shoulders

went the woven snake, and his head was through the middle of the blue,

woven bird" (20). The brilliant serape symbolizes the religion of Quetzalcoatl, while the peasant clothes emphasize a belief in the " blood-unison of man"

(433). The belief that " man is a column of blood: woman is a valley of blood"

(433) is crucial to understanding the oneness in blood, the complete

communion in blood, that was made possible, in Lawrence's mind, through the revival of Quetzalcoatl. The possibility for hope, a renaissance in the soul, existed only through recognition of, and submission to, the

blood-unison of the new religion, the "primeval oneness of mankind" (433).

There was to be no other path to salvation, only the

renewal of the old, terrible bond of the blood-unison of man,

which made blood-sacrifice so potent a factor of life. The blood

of the individual is given back to the great blood-being, the god,

the nation, the tribe. (437)

"The Quetzalcoatl religion is meant to answer the question ... What is worth more than (Kate's) independence and individuality?" (Apter 170). The problem with Kate and her position in the new pantheon is that "she could not submit" (433). Although the opening sections of The Plumed Serpent show the grime and depravity of modern Mexico City, they also show that

Kate is trying to establish a way of life for herself in some world. She leaves the materialistic modern life in Mexico City and goes to a tiny, crude Indian village in the heart of Mexico. Her quest for herself and her own happiness isolates her in a country which she cannot understand, but which fascinates 35 her. Her search makes her " in certain respects, a later version of Ursula

Bran gwen of The Rainbow and Women in Love, a questing woman who seeks emancipation in union" (Moore, "Vision and Language" 64).

Kate therefore becomes a woman mentally seduced into the Quetzalcoatl revival by a " longing which she cannot understand, and ... is subsequently thrust . .. into a dark, enchanted atmosphere by a lover" (Apter 159). Ramon and Cipriano try to make Kate into a living goddess, a vegetation goddess, or symbol of the rebirth and regeneration of the new religion. She is initially accepting, even proud of her role, but becomes more questioning as the book proceeds, recognizing that the religion, like its snake/ bird symbol, is both fascinating and repulsive.

Kate is willing in the abstract to submit to the dark gods; her momentary acceptance of the loss of individuality implicit in the Quetzalcoatl religion is true to Lawrence's view of the cult itself, but complete submission would have been unacceptable to a woman like Kate Leslie. Lawrence created a strong, resourceful woman in the image of when he created

Kate, and her attempts at submission are more Lawrence's desire to impose his personal philosophy on the character than a realistic reaction from that character.

In the men of Quetzalcoatl, Kate discovers true maleness, "yet her willful singleness prevents her from submitting to it, and thus realizing her womanhood" (Apter 160), at least in typical Lawrencian terms. Kate knows that "sex itself was a powerful potent thing ... the one mystery" (162), and it is to this mystery and the union of the blood that Kate cannot submit.

Her refusal to surrender "totally to the greater mystery of sex becomes 36

aggression toward Ramon and Cipriano; her refusal to submit to their

purpose is .. . correlated with her inability to retain her mystic sensibility"

(Apter 165). Although she marries Cipriano in a quasi-religious ceremony,

she refuses to have a civil ceremony performed and is reluctant to embrace

the total union that Lawrence suggests exists in a true blutbruderschaft;

she complains to Cipriano, "you treat me as if I had no life of my own . ... But

I have" (386). Kate, even after her nominal marriage to Cipriano, " would

always be a good deal alone" (436).

Kate allows herself to be drawn into the cult of Quetzalcoatl; her role is that of Malintzi, a goddess of fertility whose name Lawrence probably drew from the Nahautl "Malinalli, meaning 'grass' or 'herb'" (Ciark 72). Indeed,

Kate/Malintzi wears the green dress of the Bride of Huitzilopochtli, after tirpiano has become the living Huitzilopochtli, god of war. Kate's attitude toward her role becomes casual, even flippant, as the novel progresses. Kate tells Teresa, Don Ramon's wife, that she is going away and the two women discuss the dresses intended for the goddesses:

" Would you rather have the green (dress)?" Kate asked. " Have

it if you would. I am going away:'

Teresa glanced up at her quickly.

" The green is for the wife of Huitzilopochtli;' she said, as if

numbed.

" I can't see that it matters;' said Kate. (451)

It becomes apparent that, given the bloody rites of Quetzalcoatl and

Huitzilopochtli, Kate/Malintzi is destined for the sacrificial altar, like the white woman in " The Woman Who Rode Away:' That story was written 37 between drafts of The Plumed Serpent and should be considered a companion piece to the novel (Kermode 118). In that story,

the modern consciousness, embodied in a white woman,

surrenders to the aboriginal god-stuff of America to prepare the

way for a new flowering of the human soul. While in The Plumed

Serpent, the yielding woman becomes a living member of the

new pantheon, in " The Woman Who Rode Away;' she submits

to a sacrificial death which . . . will appease the sun's anger ...

draw the moon from the hands of the modern white female will

into a new response to the male luminary, and recreate heaven

and earth. (Clark 41)

In " The Woman Who Rode Away;' the life-giving force of blood sacrifice is carefully explained by one of the young Indians, who says, " When a white woman sacrifice herself to our gods, then our gods will make the world again and the white man's gods will fall to pieces" (328). The men of Quetzalcoatl destroy the images and icons of Christianity and wait, like the Indians in

"The Woman Who Rode Away;' for a suitable time and victim to bring back the old ways. The sacrifice in " The Woman Who Rode Away" takes place in the winter, on the shortest day of the year; the sacrifice will bring on the new year, and a rebirth of the earth in spring. Similarly, the final chapters of The Plumed Serpent take place as Kate is contemplating Christmas in

London, the snow and the melting darkness of the winter solstice.

The white woman of the short story has no will left; her eventual death would bring peace and resurrection, but only after her complete surrender to the dark gods. This surrender is perhaps Lawrence's solution to the 38

"problem of the questing woman" (Tindall, Intro. to "The Woman Who Rode

Away" 229), but Kate is never able to give up her individualism, her ego;

Kate's will, as Lawrence has depicted it, is stronger than her desire for union or completion, either sexual or metaphysical.

Lawrence's revulsion for willful women is graphically presented in The

Plumed Serpent; Kate may have saved her life by refusing to submit totally to the men of Quetzalcoatl, but in Lawrence's view at this time, she condemned herself to a solitary existence. Kate came dangerously close to annihilation, for according to the Lawrencian doctrine, death is the ultimate union, the ultimate communion in the blood. Near the end of the novel, Kate contemplates her ambivalence:

It was as if she had two selves, one, a new one which belonged • to Ciprano and Ramon, and which was her sensitive, desirous

self: the other hard and finished, accomplished, belonging to

her mother, her children, England, her whole past. This old

accomplished self was curiously invulnerable and insentient,

curiously hard and "free:' In it she was an individual and her

own mistress. The other self was vulnerable and organically

connected with Cipriano, even with Ramon and Teresa, and so

was not "free" at all.

She was aware of a duality in herself and she suffered from

it. She could not definitely commit herself, either to the old way

of life, or to the new. She reacted from both. The old was a

prison, and she loathed it. But in the new way she was not her

own mistress at all, and her egoistic will recoiled. (446) 39

Kate's denial of total submission and death indicates her refusal to participate in the regenerative process that could save modern society, for

" In the process of death . . . Lawrence sees the death of the old, knowing self, and the birth of a new man" (Panichas 180). The ending of "The Woman

Who Rode Away" is pure racial mastery, the triumph of phallic power, " the mastery that man must hold, and that passes from race to race" (339). The ending of The Plumed Serpent is as ambiguous and ambivalent as Kate is herself. Conclusion

The Plumed Serpent, though a brave experiment by a novelist always troubled by inner devils, remains equivocal and unsettling. The novel is plagued by questionable logic, excessive didacticism, and a blind adherence to the sort of leader-follower, one up one down relationships that Lawrence was later to disavow.

Lawrence succeeds in evoking his dark gods in the noveL but the darkness is still that of the mines he remembered from childhood. Even in the darkness of Mexico there is the obliteration, oblivion, and faintly muffled sound of a mining disaster. "Although he ran off to the hot, bright places of the world, the Mediterranean fringe and Mexico, his spirit returned at times to the cold, damp Nottinghamshire mines where his former schoolfellows were laboring in the broken darkness" (Moore, Life and Work 92). Perhaps the collier's son was never able to shake off the pall of the mines.

According to some critics, the novel is further marred by needlessly illogical metaphysics. As Cowan states, "The brilliance of Lawrence's symbolic conception notwithstanding, most critics perceive a failure in coherence between the realistic and metaphorical modes of the novel" (117). In other words, the fully-realized, vital character that Lawrence created with Kate

Leslie would not have been seduced by the specious logic and mystical polemics of the Quetzalcoatl cult.

40 41

Although Lawrence believed that a resolution between the inimical male and female forces was both possible and desirable, the strength of the antagonistic characters in The Plumed Serpent makes such a resolution improbable. According to Cowan, "The contradiction between positive and negative values makes impossible the reconciliation of opposites" (120).

Lawrence's personal turmoil undoubtedly contributed to the confused philosophy in the novel and also to the ragged, inconsistent style. "The book gives the effect of his not being fully engaged. The evoking of the pagan renascence strikes one as willed and mechanical; at any rate, it is monotonous and boring" (Leavis 71), a criticism possibly explained by

Hough's assertion that in The Plumed Serpent Lawrence abandoned the method of a novelist for that of an "amateur mystagogue, and the result is the windy emptiness of the Quetzalcoatl hymns and the dressed-up absurdity of what the protagonists know to be kind of a charade" (129). The realization that the protagonists of The Plumed Serpent are sentient beings is, however, an acknowledgment of Lawrence's ability to create vivid, realistic characters.

According to L. D. Clark, Lawrence agonized over the ending to The Plumed

Serpent "more than he usually did over a conclusion" (47). He revised the final scenes several times, ending with Kate's "You won't let me go;' only in the corrected galleys of October 1925. The closing scene is unsatisfactory, due largely to the ambivalence and ambiguity of Kate's non-decision, and obviously indicates the uncertainty that Lawrence felt for his solution. Kate's implausible, equivocal decision to remain in Mexico only after she pleads for Cipriano to force her to stay "suggests rather a failure in Lawrence to 42

convince himself that the conquest would ever have been achieved" (Leavis

73).

To the end of the novel Kate remains a skeptical, searching woman whose acceptance of the mystical aspects of the Quetzalcoatl religion is far less certain than her physical attraction to the men of Quetzalcoatl. Although

Kate enjoyed her physical unio·n with Cipriano, she could not finally submerge herself in the disconcerting fascination of Mexico, nor was she able to match the earnest intensity with which the men of Quetzalcoatl viewed their cult.

In order to survive," the mythical Quetzalcoatl religion needed blind, mute followers, disciples who were able to realize themselves only through the rituals of the church. Kate Leslie was far from mute and blind; Lawrence, even though he created the character, was unable to make his heroine submit completely to the dangerous rituals and self-abnegation inherent in the cult of Quetzalcoatl.

By 1928, however, Lawrence had completed Lady Chatterly's Lover, " the story of the reawakening and regeneration of a woman - not in a mass hypnosis group - but as an individual" (Moore, " Vision and Language" 70).

In that novel, Lawrence shows that a resolution between the "valley of blood" and the "column of blood" is possible, abandons the mythical superstructure that he employed in The Plumed Serpent, and writes his most phallic, lyrical novel. In a letter to Witter Bynner (13 March, 1928), Lawrence rejected the political, power-oriented mode, and anticipated the new tenderness of Lady

Chatterly's Lover: 43

On the whole, I agree with you, the leader-cum-follower

relationship is a bore. And the new relationship will be some

sort of tenderness, sensitive, between men and men and men

and women, and not the one up one down, lead on I follow, ich

dien sort of business. (Selected Letters 276)

To the end of his life, D. H. Lawrence was a man who saw "only unquestioned good in the gift of being alive in the flesh" (Stewart 486), who was never afraid to attempt new ways to reveal his conception of truth and perfection. The Plumed Serpent is valuable as a pivotal novel in the turbulent career of one of the foremost lyrical writers in the English language; if it is tentative, ambiguous, and equivocal, perhaps it is because "a great work of art is like a dream: for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is always ambiguous" (Jung 104). Works Cited

Apter, T.E. "Let's Hear What the Male Chauvinist is Saying:' Lawrence and

Women. Ed. Anne Smith. London: Vision, 1978.

Auden, W. H. " Some Notes on D. H. Lawrence:' Critics on D. ff. Lawrence. Ed.

W. T. Andrews. Coral Gables: U ofMiami P, 1971.

Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale UP, 1944.

Cavitch, David. D. ff. Lawrence and The Third World. New York: Oxford UP,

1969.

Clark, L. D. Dark Night of the Body. Austin: U of Texas P, 1964.

Cowan, James C. D. ff. Lawrence's American Journey: A Study in Literature

and Myth. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve P, 1970.

Daleski, H. M. The forked Flame: A Study of D. ff. Lawrence. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1965.

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York: New American

Library, 197 4.

Frazer, James. The New Golden Bough. New York: New American Library,

1964.

Gregory, Horace. D. ff. Lawrence: Pilgrim of the Apocalypse: A Critical Study.

New York: Grove, 195 7.

Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. ff. Lawrence. New York:

Macmillan, 1957.

44 45

Huxley, Aldous. "D. H. Lawrence:' The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Ed.

Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,

1953.

Jung, C. G. The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton:

Princeton UP, 1966.

Kermode, Frank. D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking, 1973.

LaFaye, Jacques. Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe. Trans. Benjamin Keen.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976.

Lawrence, D. H. Aaron's Rod. 1982. New York: Viking, 1965.

--- Collected Letters. Ed. with lntro. Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking, 1962.

--- Lady Chatterly's Lover. 1928. New York: Penguin, 1981.

--- Mornings in Mexico and .Etruscan Places. London: , 1956.

--- Phoenix. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann, 1961.

--- Sons and Lovers. 1913. New York: Viking, 1958.

--- The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Viking, 1964.

--- The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl). lntro. W. Tindall. 1925. New York:

Knopf, 1963.

--- The Plumed Serpent. New York: Penguin, 1981.

--- The Rainbow. 1915. New York: Penguin, 1984.

--- The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Diana Trilling. New York:

Farrar, Straus, Cudahy, 1958.

--- "The Woman Who Rode Away:' The Later D. H. Lawrence. lntro. W.

Tindall. New York: Knopf, 1959.

--- Women in Love. 1920. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. New York: Knopf, 1956.

Moore, Harry T. D. H. Lawrence: His Life and Works. New York: Twayne, 1964. 46

---"The Plumed Serpent: Vision and Language:' Critics on D. H. Lawrence.

Ed. W. T. Andrews. Coral Gables: U. of Miami P, 1971.

Panichas, George A . "Adventure in Consciousness: The Meaning of D. H.

Lawrence's Religious Quest:' Critics on D. H. Lawrence. Ed. W. T. Andrews.

Coral Gables: U of Miami P, 1971.

Sagar, Keith. " Lawrence and Freida: the Alternative Story:' D. H. Lawrence

Review. 9 (1976): 117-25.

Simpson, Hilary. D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois P,

1982.

Spilka, Mark. The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence. Bloomington: Indiana UP,

1955.

--- " On Lawrence's Hostility to Willful Women: The Chatterly Solution:'

Lawrence and Women. Ed. Anne Smith. London: Vision, 1978.

Stewart J. I. M. Eight Modern Writers. London: Oxford UP, 1973.

Tedlock, E. W. Jr. D. H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel: A Study of Lawrence's

Fiction. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1963.

TindalL William York. D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow. New York: Columbia

UP, 1939.

--- "The Plumed Serpent." The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Ed.

Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,

1953.

Undset, Sigrid. " D. H. Lawrence:· The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Ed.

Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry T. Moore. Norman: U of Oklahoma P,

1953.

Vickery, John. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1973. 47

Wheelwright, Phillip. The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of

Symbolism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1959. Works Consulted

Fontenrose, Joseph. Python - A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins.

Berkeley: U California P, 1959.

Green, Eleanor H. "Lawrence, Schopenhauer and the Dual Nature of the

Universe:' South Atlantic Bulletin. 42.4 (1977): 84-92.

Inniss, Kenneth. D. H. Lawrence's Bestiary. Paris: Mouton, 1971.

Meyers, Jeffrey. "The Plumed Serpent and the :' Journal

of Modern Literature. 4 (1974): 55-72.

Moore, Harry T., ed. A. D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Carbondale: Southern

Illinois UP, 1959.

Rowland, Deryl. Animals With Human Faces - A Guide to Animal Symbolism.

Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1973.

Vickery, John E. "The Plumed Serpent and the Reviving God:' Journal of

Modern Literature. 2 (1972): 503-32.

Willis, Roy. Man and Beast. New York: Basic Books, 197 4.

48