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 Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories Susan Reid Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1834 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2017 Number of pages: 115-132 ISBN: 978-2-7535-6516-6 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Susan Reid, « Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 68 | Spring 2017, Online since 01 June 2019, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/1834 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories 1 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 Journal of the Short Story in English, 68 | Spring 2017 Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories 2 forward certain notions of masculinity and male mastery, then this is particularly the 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). Journal of the Short Story in English, 68 | Spring 2017 Between Men: Male Rivalry in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories 3 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.