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 The Plumed Serpent: 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 gods 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 (Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, 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 god/king and sacrificial victim of The Plumed Serpent. Rawdon Lilly of Aaron's Rod becomes Richard Lovat Somers of Kangaroo (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.