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i

THE LAURENTIAN IDIOM IN
AMERICAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

BY
Lalit Mohan Upadhyaya

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1993

ABSTRACT

THE LAURENTIAN IDIOM
IN

AMERICAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

BY

Lalit Mohan Upadhyaya

This dissertation explores the relation between D. H.

Lawrence’s WW (1923) and

American literary and cultural studies until the appearance
of Richard Slotkin's Beggng;atign_1hzgggh_yiglgngg (1973).
These years are marked by a clash of various critical
ideologies vying for supremacy in the interpretation of
American literature and culture. Among these critics, D. H.
Lawrence’s is the only voice not committed to an established
school of criticism. However, despite the highly
unconventional nature of his essays, he creates a lasting
impression on the criticism of this period. This study
examines the intuitions and insights controlling his
critical idiom, and also the factors responsible for
American critics incorporating, not only his ideas, but even
his methods in their writings.

This work consists of an introduction, three chapters,
and a conclusion. The introduction underlines the special

relation in which D. H. Lawrence stands with America--its

literature and culture. Chapter one starts with a survey of
the critical preoccupations of the first two decades of the
twentieth century. It discusses D. H. Lawrence's work
against the background of the challenges hinted at by these
critics and addressed by D. H. Lawrence himself, and
concludes with an analysis of Lawrence's own critical
method. The second chapter documents and accounts for the
intrusion D. H. Lawrence's pronouncements made in the
critical writings on American Renaissance literature and
culture. The third chapter examines some key American
literary and cultural texts, and their affinity to the
Laurentian critical idiom. The conclusion sums up the
relevance of D. H. Lawrence's ideas on narrative, history,
and culture, by placing them in the context of explorations

being carried out in these areas at present.

Copyright by
Lalit Mohan Upadhyaya
1993

Dedicated to the memory of my parents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When I look back on the beginning of this study, I am
reminded of a young graduate student writing his first Ph.
D. dissertation at the University of Allahabad, India on the
non-fiction prose writings of D. H. Lawrence. While working
on my chapter on D. H. Lawrence's reaction as a critic to
American literature and culture, I was struck by the way
American criticism most enthusiastically embraced this
foreign voice in its interpretation of American literature
and culture. This was in 1965; at this point, the only
major critics who had responded directly to Lawrence’s call
for a radically different approach toward the
reinterpretation of American literature were R. W. B. Lewis,
Richard Chase, and Leslie A. Fiedler. Since then, Lawrence
has grown into an important voice in American critical
studies, and my earlier belief that American critics might
tend to incorporate more and more of his insights in their
assessment of their literature and culture has been
sufficiently vindicated.

This background to the present study is only to
emphasize the difficulty I face in acknowledging my debt to
all who have, either directly or indirectly, contributed to

the making of this work that has gone through such a long

vi

 

period of gestation. I give to my dissertation committee
the most credit for their help, guidance, and encouragement
during the period this work was in progress. Hy director,
Professor Michael R. Lopez, with his penetrating questions
on American Renaissance literature in the context of
Lawrence’s criticism, and his confidence in my ability to
successfully complete this project has not only been a
source of inspiration but also a source of strength.
Professor Roger K. Heiners' intellectual rigor and passion
combined with his humanity always stimulated me. Professor
James E. Seaton's comments on American culture helped me
give final shape to my sometimes half-formed ideas on the
subject. Professor William E. Johnsen's fresh insights in
some of D. H. Lawrence’s works opened up new possibilities.
All these bore my sometimes unusual demands on their time
and patience with admirable cheerfulness, and I can not
thank them enough. This work would never have been possible
without their encouragement and help.

Professor Victor N. Paananen, our Department
Chairperson, was instrumental in helping me surmount the
many problems I encountered in the early stages of my stay
in East Lansing. Both Professor J. Ludwig, with his
infectious good humor and perceptive remarks on chapters of
my dissertation, and Professor Barry Gross, with his
encouraging comments on my overall performance, gave me the
incentive I might otherwise have lost. I would fail in my

duty if I do not express my grateful thanks to them. I also

vii

thankfully acknowledge the assistance I received in my study
of American culture from Professor James L. McClintock,
Director American Studies Program in the Department of
English. Lorraine Hart, Graduate Secretary in the
Department of English, was always there to solve problems I
thought were insurmountable. With her unbounded energy,
patience, and cheerfulness, she guided me through knotty
administrative situations I often found unnerving. Her
contribution in seeing me through the last stages of my
dissertation has been invaluable, and she deserves my
unqualified gratitude and thanks.

David Gann, Graduate Assistant in English, Southwest
Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri devoted
long periods of untiring effort in giving the manuscript its
final shape. I also thank Duane Bedell, Supervisor English
Department Computer Lab, Southwest Missouri State
University, for his assistance.

Finally, I express gratitude to my family, my wife
Sushila, and children Vivek, Cindy, and Haulshree, for
putting up with my often unpredictable demands on their time
and patience. They were, as always, an unlimited source of

strength, and I am thankful to them all.

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
America and D. H. Lawrence....... ..... ......1

CHAPTER ONE
Toward New Standards........................9

CHAPTER TWO
Studies and American Critics...............55

CHAPTER THREE

The Laurentian Idiom in American
Literary and Cultural Studies............122

CONCLUSION
D. H. Lawrence: Text, History, and
cu1ture0000000OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO0.00.188

BIBLIOGRAPHYOOO...OOOOOOOOOOOOOO0.00.00.00.000000194

ix

INTRODUCTION

AMERICA AND D. H. LAWRENCE

When D. H. Lawrence appeared on the American scene with
his §tudiEs_in_Qlas§i§_AmEricen_Literature in 1923. American
criticism was at the crossroads. Questions about America's
literary and cultural heritage which had challenged some of
the great minds in the post-revolutionary period were being
discussed and debated afresh by the intellectuals of the new
century. To these young intellectuals, the closing years of
the nineteenth century were a period wallowing in rigid
gentility and inflexible conventionality. Van Wyck Brooks,
Lewis Mumford, Paul Elmer Moore, Irving Babbit, Stuart Pratt
Sherman, H. L. Mencken, and Waldo Frank were some of the
leaders of this intellectual ferment, and represent this new
spirit of change and dissent. These minds tried to explore
new directions not only in art, literature, and politics,
but also in the quality of American cultural life as a
whole. Herbert Croly's Ihg_£19m1§g_9£_5mgzi§gn_Lifig (1909),
John MaCY’s TDE_§Dirit_2f_AuericaD_Literature (1913). Van

Wyck Brooks' Amerioals_92minszgfzass (1915). and Waldo
Frank’s Quz_Amg;ica (1919) laid the foundation of this sense

of adventure which reached its climax during the years

around World War I. Richard Ruland, in Ing_3ggisggygzy_gf

1

2
American_Literature. traces the course of the warring
ideological platforms during this period, culminating in the
arrival of T. S. Eliot with his "Tradition and the
Individual Talent (1917), of D. H. Lawrence with his Studies
in_giessie_5metieen_Litetstute (1923), and of William Carlos
Williams with his 1n_tne_duetiesn_§tein (1925). Ruland

characterizes this period as an attempt to forge "new pasts
for a new present" (167). Paradoxically, however, while T.
8. Eliot, with his predilection for Europe and its age-old
cultural traditions, renounced the country of his birth he
thought lacked cultural cohesiveness, D. H. Lawrence,
disgusted with the very tradition Eliot embraced as an
alternative, undertook the role of a "midwife” facilitating
the birth of "the unborn homunculus" (Studies 4), he
suspected lay hidden in classic American literature.

As a writer, D. H. Lawrence's relationship with America
begins as early as the year 1911 when his second novel The
White_£eseeek was published first in America by Duffield,
even before it appeared in England one year later.1 Lawrence
was intimate with the American intellectual climate of his
time through his association with Suett_Set, Seyen_Atts, and
Ine_pisi.2 Between him and Waldo Frank there was a long and
lively correspondence. Especially during the Great War,
Lawrence’s preoccupation with America was at its peak.

Again and again, in his letters, he associated the new
continent with a place of refuge, his Benenim. Lawrence had

been an enthusiastic reader of American literature as early

3
as his school days.3 However, what intrigued Lawrence
during the War years was that, despite the presence of a new
voice in American classic writers, America was moving in the
same direction as the culture of Europe. Lawrence
visualized America as capable of creating a potentially
vital, organic, and living cultural tradition. While the
unease of the American intellectuals bordered on a sense of
frustration, D. H. Lawrence's was characterized by a sense
of unfulfilled promise of the American experiment. He set
himself to diagnose the source of this failure in the essays

on American literature he began writing during the war in

1917. essays later published as §tudiss_in_glassis_5msrican
Literature in 1923.

Lawrence's essays contain a rather unconventional, and,
in certain respects, highly personalized response to
American literature. This accounts for the mixed reception
they received when they appeared in 1923. For the British
public of his time, D. H. Lawrence was simply a highly
controversial figure. Even as a novelist, recognition came
very slowly to him in England. Lawrence was very severe in
the indictment of the land of his birth, and was shocked to
see the extent to which he dreaded "the tightness of
England” (Huxley, Letters 106). He found that over England,
"like the grey skies, lies the doom of the dark moral
judgement and condemnation and reservation of the people”
(120); he abhorred the ”beastly, tight, Sunday feeling which

is so blighting" (124) in England, a country he described as

4
a "mud bathos" (512). The English critics, therefore,
except for writing some critical reviews of his American
essays, largely ignored them. The first full-length study
of D. H. Lawrence's writings came not from an English
critic, but from the American Herbert J. Seligman who
published his slender volume nt_nt_Legteneet_Au_Anetiesn
Interpretatien in 1924. Disparaged and censured for his
dark philosophy in his own country, from across the Atlantic
Lawrence was felicitated for offering America wisdom
”unique, lyrical yet penetrating." Seligman thanked
Lawrence for warning Americans against the machine, "the
finest flower of Gerald Crich’s impotence" (55), and for

speaking to America in a way relevant to the American
situation through Eantasia_of_the_nuoonsgious and
2sx2heanalxsis_and_the_nngonseiouso According to Seligman.

Lawrence ”criticized the amoralism of psychoanalysis by
which it had been made an instrument of American
materialism" (56).

While Seligman's views may be considered too worshipful
and adulatory to be sound literary criticism, they do
underline two important facts about D. H. Lawrence:
Lawrence’s ceaseless engagement with America, American
literature, and American thought throughout his literary
career and America's willingness to listen to his voice.

D. H. Lawrence's confrontation with American literature and
culture, compared with other critics of the first two

decades of the twentieth century, is marked by greater

5

freshness, incisiveness, and articulation. Like these
critics, Lawrence also attempts to define a past relevant to
the beginning of a new cultural awareness commensurate with
the urges and aspirations of a new people. For him,
however, the true American past does not reside in the
surface manifestations of American culture, but lies buried
deep in the unconscious of the classic American writers.
Therefore, the past that can usher in a new present needs to
be explored from deep inside their unconscious promptings.

His essays are, therefore, closely related to his books
on the unconscious he published in 1921-1922. In these he
enunciates his view of the unconscious, not as a storehouse
of repressions but as the very source of human creativity.
This is a view different from that of Freud. Lawrence is
also indifferent to Jung’s archetypal collective
unconscious. Although the Jungian theory was influential in
the myth-ritual approach to mythography, Lawrence's emphasis
on the personal unconscious as a myth-making faculty is
close to the view of myth developed later by Leslie Fiedler
and other myth critics. These critics follow Lawrence's
emphasis on the interaction of the unconscious with the
"Spirit of Place.” Lawrence considers the unconscious
confrontation of classic American writers with the
”different vital effluence, different vibration, different
chemical exhalation, different polarity with different
stars" (Studies 12) to be the source of American myths.

These critics are one with Lawrence in their belief that

6

whatever was repressed by the pressure of social conventions
expresses itself unconsciously in a text and is a source of
myths. These myths are not always racial, communal, or
universal, but products of a specific creative moment.
D. H. Lawrence belongs to the tradition of Romantic
visionaries, and for him the metaphor for the commodified
world of today is ”cerebral consciousness," as opposed to
”blood consciousness," or the unconscious. This quality
symbolizes the whole, the unique, and the pristine in us.

The apparently ahistorical approach of D. H. Lawrence
to culture is closely related to his romantic concept of
history. He is very close to Giambattista Vico’s
anti—rationalistic theories of human development. For
Lawrence, too, myth is history because it is the imaginative
representation of historical events and movements. It
articulates the cultural processes that often lie hidden
under the weight of historical events. The history of
America and its culture, according to D. H. Lawrence, can be
best recreated from its literature. This literature does
not, as today's "graphic or scientific history" does, "shut
out the strange, vast, terrifying reality of the past," as
the ”charming cosiness of a garden shuts out the great
terror and wonder of the world." It articulates the ”great
motions from the soul of mankind” (Meyements x-xii).

Lawrence arrived in America with his Studies_in_giessie
Anetiesn_Litetetute at a fortuitous time. America was ready
to hear new voices in the interpretation of its history and

7
culture. In an America being slowly transformed from a
comparatively homogeneous culture into a heterogeneous
society, Lawrence’s emphasis on "wholeness" achieved not
through compromise and conciliation but through conflict
between antithetical forces was what America needed.
Although Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman had all emphasized
this difference between the American culture and the
European culture, it needed to be reiterated; Lawrence
performed this task.

The present work attempts to highlight the main
concerns of the Laurentian critical idiom with a view to
explore the affinity between D. H. Lawrence and American
criticism that followed the appearance of his essays on
classic American literature. Because of its very personal
nature, the Laurentian critical idiom defies precise
definition. Not allied with any critical school, it is
inspired by the intuitions and perceptions available only to
an artist. It is precisely this quality which rendered his
criticism so valuable to American critics in their
exploration of new ways to perceive their literature and

culture.

 

 

NOTES
1- Armin Arnold. in WW (London: The

Linden Press, 1958), presents a factual account of D. H.
Lawrence’s relations with America.

2. An exhaustive account of D. H. Lawrence's association
with these periodicals, especially with the Diei, is to be
found in Nicholas Joost and Sullivan AIVin..QI_HI_LAHI§n§§
end_the_niei (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1970).

3. D. H. Lawrence' s boyhood friend, Jessie Chambers,
recalls in her memoirs (

London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1965) that as early as his
school days, Lawrence had read Fenimore Cooper' s Ine_Lsst_et
the_ugniesns and Tue_£etntiudet, "with its impression of the
expanse of level lake and silence" (94). He read and liked
Emerson's Bessys and "became wildly enthusiastic over
Thoreau’s Walden. Jessie Chambers recalls Lawrence's
telling her one morning about Thoreau’s essay, ”The Pond,”
and Thoreau's building a hut in the woods beside the pond:
"It was a still, sunless morning, with a breeding light over
the landscape and the atmosphere he [Lawrence] conveyed in
his description seemed to tally perfectly with the
particular morning” (101). She remembers Lawrence telling
her that Whitman's Leeyes_et_§tess was "one of his great
books" (91).

CHAPTER ONE

TOWARD NEW STANDARDS

In the very beginning of §tudies_in_sla§sic_5merican
Literature, D. H. Lawrence strikes a note familiar to

American literary and cultural studies for more than a
century:

We like to think of the old-fashioned American
classics as children's books. Just childishness,
on our part. The old American art-speech contains
an alien quality, which belongs to the American
continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, as
long as we insist on reading the books as
children's books, we miss all that. (7)

It is unlikely that Lawrence was familiar with Sidney
Smith's disparaging question, ”Who reads an American book?"
Smith had, a century earlier, dubbed American writers a
"scribbling brotherhood,” in their infancy with ”neither
history, nor romance, nor poetry, nor legends, on which to
exercise their genius, and kindle their imagination"
(Ruland, Tne_uetiye_nuse 154-155). It surprises us today
that this indictment was repeated in almost identical terms
by a famous American, T. 8. Eliot, as late as 1919, in a

review article on QamDridge_nist9rx_2f_Amerigan_Literature=

It is inevitable that any work on American
literature should contain a good deal of stuffing.
The fault is not in the lack of material so much
as in its lack of cohesion. There could be
written a very cohesive account of American

9

10

Puritanism, with its interesting transition to

Transcendentalism: but this would be a history not

of American but of Boston literature, and it would

turn out to be not so much a history of the

Brahminical canon or Boston literature as of

Boston society. (236)
Eliot does not deny American writers their genius, but like
Smith, he does bemoan their "starved environment,” and the
"defect of society in the larger sense." He finds their
"world" as "thin" and "not corrupt enough. Worst of all, it
is second hand: it is not original and self dependent--it is
a shadow" (238).

The question of a literature characteristically
American had occupied the national mind ever since the
Revolution that gave birth to a new nation independent of
England, the mother country. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century, two distinct schools of criticism had
emerged: one searching for an American literature and
culture as distinct from the continental culture, and
another continuing to interpret the national literature as
an appendage to and extension of the European, and more
especially the British, tradition. The nationalist and

internationalist debate frequently was an ongoing

battleground in the critical warfare waged in this century
in the pages of the W. the Mantis;

Beyieg, and the Whig_3eyieu, to name only the leading
periodicals of the day. Benjamin T. Spenser in Ine_guest

rer_nstieneiity states that the intensified campaign for a

national literature continued unabated during this century

i

 

‘

11

because of the emergence of periodicals devoted mainly to
literary criticism, and also because of the "influx from the
continent of a nationalistic and relativistic critical
theory which encouraged writers to express their own time or
indigenous tradition rather than the universal Reason" (74).
However, even before this debate on national literature
reached its climax in the 1840s, Royall Tyler, though
largely influenced by the English Restoration comedy, had
urged his readers, as early as 1789, to accept his plays
primarily for their use of native material. Charles
Brockden Brown, in his preface to Edger_fiuntiey, in 1802,
was also aware of the special appeal his use of "the
incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western
wilderness," had for the "native America" (Ruland, The
netiye_nuse 64). Edward Tyrell Channing, writing in the
fiertn_5tientie_3eyieg in 1816, made a strong appeal for
national independence in literature by condemning blind
imitation of foreign models, not only British, but even
those from classical antiquity. This habit resulted, "in
many cases, to make what is foreign, artificial, and
uncongenial, the foundation of a man's literary habits,
ambition, and prejudice.” It is not possible, continued
Channing, "that a man, thus trained and dependent, should
not lose all self respect and come to think everything
vulgar at home" (Ruland, The_netiye_uuse 89).

The two most prominent names challenging Americans to

declare their intellectual and cultural emancipation are

 

 

12
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. They added a new
dimension to the idea of intellectual freedom by addressing
themselves to the creation of an American mind aspiring for
an ever-expanding intellectual horizon. Emerson, in ”The
American Scholar,” his Phi Beta Kappa address at Cambridge
in 1837, while accepting the value of the past, warned the
nation that each age "must write its own books: or rather,
each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an
older period will not fit this" (49). Whitman in his 1855
preface to Leeyes_et_§ress shares Emerson's faith and
exultantly declares that the United States "themselves are
essentially the greatest poem” (411). He is, however, not
so sanguine in 1871 in his peneerstie_yistes. He does
accept that in the material realm the country had made great
progress, but finds that what ”has filled, and fills today
our intellect, our fancy, furnishing the intellect therein,
is yet foreign." Whitman finds the models of literature
imported from other lands, "ultramarine, have had their
birth in courts, and bask'd and grown in castle sunshine"
(474). America, Whitman laments, "is singularly unaware
that the models of persons, books, manners, etc.,
appropriate for former conditions and for European lands,
are but exiles and exotics here.” No wonder, he says,
"America has yet morally and artistically originated
nothing" (478). He finds the United States "ignorant of its

genius, not yet inaugurating the native, the universal, and

13
the near still importing the distant, the partial, and the
dead" (490).

Emerson and Whitman attacked the traditional and
conventional standards behind the literary, intellectual,
and cultural climate of the age. William Charvat, in The
W. suggests that even
in the area of literary criticism during the early part of
the nineteenth century the standards that defined a critic's
role were out of tune with the needs of a new age. Charvat
traces the roots of the "genteel" tradition in American
thought in the latter half of the century to the role that
the early nineteenth century had prescribed for the critic.
The critic's role, this age believed, was to be the "watch
dog of society." Literature "must not condone rebellion of
any kind against the existing social and economic order,”
and should "not contain anything derogatory, implicitly or
explicitly, to religious ideals and moral standards.” It
should be optimistic," and "should not condone philosophical
pessimism or skepticism." It should concern itself with
”the intelligible, not the mystical and obscure," and it
should be "social in point of view, not egocentric” (7-23).
Charvat observes that some of these notions ”changed or
disappeared when romanticism came to dominate the times, but
others have remained typically American, and have been basic
in the main currents of American Criticism" (7). A survey

of the main trends of American criticism in the nineties of

 

 

14

the last century and in the beginning of the present shows
that many of these beliefs were dominant during these years.

Floyd Stovall points out the irony that after the Civil
War, "which assured our political unity, our cultural unity
began to disintegrate." Instead of articulating a new
cultural idiom, this age elevated Longfellow, Holmes, and
Lowell, who pleaded for ”the continuation of European
culture," to the "stature of Olympians." They were followed
closely by William Dean Howells. Stovall considers them to
be the "founders of the genteel Tradition" (8). In his
critical writings, William Dean Howells prescribed truth,
morality and optimism--three basic tenets of idealism--to be
the controlling tenets of American culture. In ”Criticism
and Fiction," Howells emphasizes morality in art, but his
measure of morality remains vague and undefined. His
principal enemy is naturalism which he considers immoral
because of its tendency to use only the gloomy and the
dreary in life as the substance of art. Howell's standards
of judgement are all continental. In much of what he says,
his principal inspiration and support come from Senor
Valdes' views on naturalism as illustrated from what the
latter says about Flaubert's hedeme_fieyery. Howells, by his
emphasis on the smiling at the cost of the gloomier aspects
of life, fastens the act of creation to a partial,
fractional, and fragmented morality: ". . . for though it is
not the business of art to preach morality, still I think

that resting on a divine and spiritual principle, like the

15
idea of the beautiful, it is perforce moral" (Howells 33).
With this limited view of morality, his concept of truth in
art was bound to be equally circumscribed. Howells
considers Jane Austen as the supreme artist because she is
honest with her material: "Realism is nothing more and
nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and
Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English
novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness" (38).
It is not surprising that with his emphasis on optimism as a
supreme virtue in art, Howells pays such a tribute to Jane
Austen and her country-house comedies. Howells’ conformist
stance is nowhere more evident than in a statement like
this:
The tests are very plain and simple, and they are
perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the
passions, and exalts them above the principles, it
is poisonous: it may not kill, but it will
certainly injure: and this test will alone exclude
an entire class of fiction, of which eminent
examples will occur to all. (47)
E. K. Brown characterizes the 19th century criticism of
Howell and his school as "a tea-table conception of the
range and spirit of literature" (145). It is against such
an attitude that the new century directs its revolt.

Henry Hay points out in W
that this tradition was still thriving in the twentieth
century. Referring to the dinner held in honor of Howells
on March 3, 1912, May says that the dinner was "really a

testimonial to the unity, excellence and continuity of

American nineteenth century civilization." It affirmed the

16
country's allegiance to the three cardinal principles of the
existing civilization: "first, the certainty and
universality of moral values: second, the inevitability,
particularly in America, of progress: and third, the
importance of traditional literary culture" (6). Jay B.
Hubbell also remarks that the beginning of the new century
was in fact a continuation of the old, and that ”the
nineteenth century, we may say, came to its end not in
December 1900, but in August, 1914, with the outbreak of the
First World War" (155). However, both May and Hubbell have
failed to grasp the complex nature of the two decades that
preceded the outbreak of the War by characterizing them
merely as a continuation of the earlier decades. Peter Conn
rightly suggests that ”the years from the turn of the
century to the First World War were among the most eventful
in American history." This period was marked by a ”profound
internal dialectic, a conflict between tradition and
innovation, between control and independence, between order
and liberation," best summarized by the manner in which
Henry Adams characterizes himself in the ”Teufelsdrockh”
chapter of WW (1906)--a
”Conservative Christian Anarchist." This underscores the
complex nature of the age, and serves "as an epigraph to the
cultural history of the period" (1). Henry May's allusion
to the continuation of the nineteenth century American
culture through a belief in its cardinal tenets does

represent the traditional profile of the period, but

17
underneath this apparent complacence simmered a
disenchantment with the establishment.

This non-conformist aspect of the age was, however,
slow to emerge, as is clear from John Macy’s Ihe_Spirit_et
Ameriesn_Litersture. At the time of its publication in the
year 1908, this work was hailed as a landmark inaugurating a
new epoch in the study of American literature. Macy
himself, in his foreword, claims to be radically different
from the earlier literary historians, and criticizes them as
"subservient to an ideal of encyclopedic completeness and
traditional values" (vi). Despite his claim to transcend
traditional lines, Macy remains transfixed to the idea of
American literature being "a branch of English literature,
as truly as are English books written in Scotland or South
Africa" (3). He declares that the ”American spirit in
literature is a myth, like American valour in war, which is
precisely like the valour of Italians and Japanese,” because
the ”dominant power is on the British Islands, and the
prevailing stream of influence flows west across the
Atlantic" (5, 7). He brushes aside the place of Herman
Melville in the American tradition by dismissing flehy_piek
merely as ”a madly eloquent romance of the sea" (16).
However, Macy does concede that ”in the course of a century
a few Americans have said in memorable words what life meant
to them. Their performance, put together, is considerable,
if not imposing" (17). After thus analyzing the general

characteristics of American literature, we can only wonder

18
why Macy was surprised that American writers wrote “about
everything except American life" (13). Barrett Wendell's A
Litersry_fiistery_et_hneries_(1900) is another example of the
narrow confines to which American literature had been
consigned by the academic historians. Wendell identifies
American literature with the literature of New England, and
gives even Whitman, Poe and Melville a minor place in the
American literary canon. Fred Lewis Pattee, in ”A Call for
a Literary Historian,” says that Wendell's ”bulky” work
should have been called "A Literary History of Harvard
University, with Incidental Glimpses of the Minor Writers of
America” (Foerster, Beinterpretetieh 5).

In contrast to these half-hearted attempts to break
through the stalemate in literary studies, the appearance of
Irving Babbitt's WW (1908)
inaugurates one of the more forceful critical movements of
the day--New Humanism. Babbitt saw, as Matthew Arnold had
seen in the England of his time, the decline of the
classical spirit as the main source of the cultural malady
stifling the emergence of a genuine American culture. The
New Humanists were justified in their disenchantment with
the disintegrating ethical and moral values in an age of
expanding industrialization and urbanization: their target
of attack was emotionalism and the cult of the individual as
represented by nineteenth-century Romanticism. It is true,
C. I. Glicksberg remarks, that "in an age of violent

dissension, of disintegrating values, where nothing is

19
certain and men wander lost in a forest of confusion, the
austere emphases of Humanism" appeared to show promise.
However, their philosophy was soon challenged as "a diluted
brand of religion smuggled back into a skeptical scientific,
despiritualized world" (”Two Decades" 234). The new
humanist faith in the classical virtues of balance and
discipline is best expressed in Babbitt's insistence on
trein_yitsi, the vital check. Frederic I. Carpenter points
out the weaknesses in the New Humanist manifesto. They
“emphasized selection rather than humanity--classical
culture rather than human sympathy." They rejected, ”the
indecorous elements of the broadly humanistic past,” and
"sought to establish a strict cultural tradition, just as
latter day puritans had rejected the unknown God to
establish a strict moral tradition." Carpenter goes on to
say that humanism "recaptured some of the religious
enthusiasm and logical rigor of old Puritan theology" (438-
439). This should not surprise us because the Humanists
believed that "the most important part of the American past
was New England Puritanism” (Hoffman Ihe_Iuehties 165).
Another reason for their identification of American culture
with the Puritan heritage was that "they were much concerned
over the presence and the exercise of a moral will, and the
Puritan will most nearly represented it in the American
tradition" (166). It is not easy to accept Norman
Foerster’s claim that the New Humanists carried out the

program of Emerson and Lowell because of the farmer's debt

20

to Plate and the latter's to Dante (Ameriesn_§ritieism 235).
We can, indeed, see the relation between Lowell and the new
Humanists, but they hardly have any similarity with
Emerson's program. It is true that Babbitt makes use of
Emerson, as Richard Ruland observes, as an ally, and
considers Emerson's acceptance of the material world as his
most enduring mark. But Babbitt also sees in Emerson a
representative of the Rousseauistic cult of the ego and
criticizes Emerson for his refusal to acknowledge the dual
nature of man (Rediseeyery 33). Babbitt criticizes
Emerson’s "Transcendental Mysticism." Rene Wellek, in
”Irving Babbitt, Paul More, and Transcendentalism," remarks
that, although Babbitt drew from Emerson, "not only some of
his favorite slogans, but, I think, much of his basic scheme
of the mind and soul of man," he suspected Emerson of
”Rousseauism, of undue optimism, unwarranted trust in the
goodness of man and particularly of the common man" (193-
195). As George Santayana was to observe in "The Genteel
Tradition at Bay," the New Humanists reinstated a belief in
a ”supernatural human soul and in a precise divine
revelation” (137), and thus continued rather than abolished
the concept of ”moral integrity and its shadow, moral
absolutism, which were always a chief part of the genteel
tradition in America" (Santayana 139).

George Santayana used the term, "genteel tradition," as
the source of America's cultural and intellectual poverty in

his famous address, "The Genteel Tradition in American

21
Philosophy,” at the University of California in 1911.
Unlike Babbit, Santayana established no distinct school of
American thought, and, in essence, no two minds could be so
much in variance in their assessment of the contemporary
intellectual and cultural climate. Santayana emphasized a
search within the American situation for a living culture
and found in the "genteel tradition" a spurious philosophy
because it fails to inspire and express ”the life of those
who cherish it" (Santayana 37). On the contrary, Babbitt
found nothing within the country to inspire a cultural
revival and recommended a return to the ancient classical
past. E. K. Brown’s comment that "for a Harvard and
Princeton Professor to appeal from the ways of his
contemporaries, not to the standards of Emerson and Whitman
or that of Franklin and Jefferson, but to that of Sophocles
and Homer is to beat the empty air" (145), best summarizes
the Humanist fallacy.

George Santayana's indictment of American culture stems
from his belief that it had become a cozy, complacent,
self-satisfied, smug and unquestioning perpetuation of
colonial thinking nurtured and nourished by Puritanism, on
the one hand, and Anglo-Saxon literary conventions and
patterns of thought on the other. Because of this
predicament, "what has happened is that the hereditary
philosophy has grown stale, and the academic philosophy has
caught the stale odor from it" (Santayana 37). It was

Santayana's California address that gave birth to the term

22
”genteel tradition,” a term traditionally used by future
critics in disapprobation and disparagement of all that has
been wanting in American culture and literature. However,
as Howard Mumford Jones observes, ”the genteel tradition,
which has been more often traduced than analyzed, was a
necessary major phase in the development of American
culture," because it signified ”an operative fusion of
idealism and the instinct for craftsmanship which dominated
high culture from 1865 to 1915, and which infiltrated the
culture of the middle class." Jones believes that it was
our ”cultural norm,” and was a "central principle of
aesthetic values, philosophy, upper class religion and
higher education." Jones remarks that this tradition was
also "consonant with a renewed admiration for important
aspects of European culture, particularly British
literature.” It was a many-sided movement, because its
”idealism was at once moral, aesthetic and philosophical
(W 216) -

It was the "genteel tradition” that counteracted,
according to Jones, some unsavory aspects of American art
and literature before the Civil War. The defects include
the ”weaknesses of American romanticism," which tends to
emphasize "loftiness of purpose rather than perfection of
workmanship.” This overaccentuation of ”inspiration" at the
expense of technique, Jones remarks, makes Emerson
”aphoristic," Irving ”diffuse," and Lowell ”subject to

learned whim.” Hawthorne never touches "the pitch of

23
perfection of Seeriet_Letter again." Thoreau has ”unity of
tone, rarely unity of structure." Melville pads N2h¥.fli§h
with ”chapters the ordinary reader wishes away," and Whitman
moves toward the ”uncertain diction of his prose,” and
”equal uncertainty of his aesthetic judgement" (217). Jones
attributes to the genteel tradition the rise of American

music, architecture, sculpture and painting through such

works as William Cary Brownell's £reneh_1reits, £reneh_Art

and Eistorian_£ro§e_nasters (222)- Jones is right when he
says that "the genteel tradition sought to know and

acclimatize the best that had been thought and said in the
world” (259). Robert P. Falk agrees with this view in ”The
Literary Criticism of the Genteel Decades: 1870-

1900,” and says that "it is unjust to hold that the genteel
tradition in criticism urged an escapist program or a
priestly withdrawal in the academy or the drawing room."
According to Falk, it showed that ”the frictions of an
increasingly industrialized and stratified society might be
assuaged by a literature” that, without losing its
"authenticity which a realistic and analytic method could
bring, still upheld a broad standard of ethical and
aesthetic decorum" (qtd. Stovall 154). However, our
experience with the cultural and intellectual history of the
world shows that compromises, though often aimed at
expediency, tend to generate their own steam in their
struggle to achieve permanence. The compromise sought by

the genteel generations in the last century was no

24
exception, and showed signs of perpetuating itself. It was
against this tendency that Santayana and others in the new
century reacted so vociferously.

The United States of the new century, ready to end its
period of apprenticeship, was a different country than it
had been before, and was ardently searching for a new
dialectic to define its cultural, intellectual and literary
heritage. In a more direct statement of his perplexity at
the character of the new age, Henry Adams wrote to Elizabeth
Cameron in 1915:

Seventy-Seven all told, and I've outlived most
things at that. As far as I can see, I've
outlived the world too, and have nothing to go on
looking for. I've outlived at least three quite
distinct worlds since 1838, but this last one
exploded ten years ahead of my calculated time,
and caught me unexpectedly. (Qtd. Stovall 159).
Henry James, after twenty years' absence, returned to his
country of birth in his 61st year with a desire to reassess
his past. From what he writes in Ihe_Amerieeh_Seene (1907),
he obviously failed to recognize its new face. His comments
do not appear to be any different from what they were in
1879 when he wrote his study of Hawthorne. In heutherne,
James wrote of the United States as a country where history
has left a ”thin and impalpable a deposit" (10): in
Hawthorne’s journals he discovers "the image of the crude
and simple society in which he lived," and even suggests

that it was unfortunate that Hawthorne was an American and

not a European:

25

If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a
young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the
same cast of mind, the same habits, his
consciousness of the world around him would have
been a very different affair: however obscure,
however reserved, his own personal life, his sense
of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been
almost infinitely more various. The negative side
of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in
his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might,
indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost
ludicrous: one might enumerate the items of high
civilization, as it exists in other countries,
which are absent from the texture of American
life, until it should become a wonder to know what
was left. No State, in the European sense of the
word, and indeed barely a specific national name.
No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no
aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no
diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no
palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country
houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor
ivied ruins: no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little
Norman churches: no great Universities nor public
schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow: no
literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no
political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor
Ascot! (34-35)

This observation and catalog of the "appalling" negative
side of American life is only further reinforced in his
comments after the later visit. After visiting the
Independence Hall in Philadelphia, James writes:

The collective consciousness, in however empty an
air grasps for a relation as intimate as possible,
from which it may more or less have proceeded and
around which its life may revolve--and its dim
desire is always, I think, to do it justice, that
this object or presence shall have had as much as
possible an heroic or romantic association. But
the difficulty is that in these later times, among
such aggregations, the heroic and romantic
elements, even under the earliest rude stress,
have been all too tragically obscure, belonged to
smothered, unwritten, almost unconscious private
history: so that the central something, the social
peiht_de_repere, has had to be extemporized rather
pitifully after the fact, and to consist of the
biggest hotel, or the biggest common school, the

26
biggest factory, the biggest newspaper office, or,
for climax of desperation, the house of the
biggest billionaire. These are the values
resorted to in default of higher, for which some

coloured rag or other the general imagination,
snatching its chance, must dress its doll. (The

Amsrisan_§eene 290‘291)

James' shock and indignation at the new America he saw
is not surprising. Various forces were at work to transform
the America of the last century. The first among these was
the rise of the United States as a colonial power after the
Spanish-American War of 1898-1899. This meant a greater
self-confidence in the country's position in the world and
the attendant desire to express it in the easiest form--
wealth and ostentation. The population grew from about 75
million in 1898 to almost 100 million in 1917. Within these
years about 15 million aliens, 1.25 million of whom came in
1907 alone, arrived in the country, and by 1910, one-seventh
of the population was foreign born. This gave an entirely
new complexion to what until now had been characterized as
American culture. The accelerated pace of technological
development, leading to greater centralization put the
country at the threshold of a new era.

In the face of this transmutation, what the country
needed was not the compromise attempted by the genteel
generation, but a new paradigm of culture. In this quest
the age turned its barbs against Puritanism and its baneful
influence on the American mind. Frederic I. Carpenter is
right in pointing out that Santayana's identification of
Puritan theology, rather than of an attitude of mind, with

27
the genteel tradition was a mistake. Carpenter says that
Santayana failed to distinguish between the two halves of
Puritan history: historically, the genteel tradition
”derived only from the conservative half of the Puritan
religion,” which led to its later decadence, while "the
Puritanism of early New England had included a liberal, and
even radical, element (428-429). However, as Carpenter
himself concedes, Santayana was not oblivious to the value
of the transcendental revolt against the forces of
conservatism. Santayana accepts that transcendentalism
”embodied, in a radical form, the spirit of Protestantism as
distinguished from its inherited doctrines: it was
autonomous, undismayed, calmly revolutionary" (Santayana
43), but he also says that Emerson left no system, and that
he was "detached, unworldly, contemplative" (45).
Santayana's view of Emerson is, however, not surprising.
During these years, Emerson was considered primarily as the
prophet of transcendentalism. Santayana believes that Walt
Whitman is "the one writer who has left the genteel
tradition entirely behind," and in him a foreigner like
himself finds ”not the polite and conventional American
mind, but the spirit and the inarticulate principles that
animate the community, on which its own genteel mentality
seems to sit rather lightly.” Although in Whitman,
Santayana says, ”Bohemia rebelled against the genteel
tradition: but the reconstruction that alone can justify

revolution did not ensue." This is why, Santayana says

28
Whitman's work "is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or
rather many beginnings, that might possibly grow into a
noble moral imagination, a worthy filling for the human
mind” (47-48).

Richard Ruland. in W
Litersture, argues that Santayana's identification of the

New Humanists with the genteel tradition was not entirely
accurate:

Both could be called 'custodians of culture,’ but
the cultures being championed differed greatly.
Both could be described as ethically oriented, but
the refined propriety of the nineteenth-century
school hardly suggests the searching psychological
and cultural analyses of the Humanists or the
coherence or philosophical depth of their
position. The genteel critics were conservative
in that they defended the status quo by upholding
the literary and moral codes which maintained
commercial stability. As defenders of this
cultural situation, they were assured of its
sympathetic support. The conservatism of the
Humanists, on the other hand, wrenched them
violently from the scientific and humanitarian
civilization of the time. They were more
properly, reactionary, and the position they
assumed left them with few contemporary allies.
(12).

The humanists failed because the American tradition
they sought to build was a very thin one, and, as Ruland
observes, "there is perhaps no better illustration of the
past being used selectively than the literary criticism of
Irving Babbit" (22). Paul Elmer More's critical work, on
the other hand, shows greater promise. He is "more
consciously searching for an American tradition," but he
does so only within ”those values central to his humanistic

position" (33). This conservatism was attacked by the

29

younger critics like Van Wyck Brooks, H. L. Mencken,
Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Paul Rosenfeld, William
Carlos Williams, and Waldo Frank. It is significant that
even Stuart P. Sherman, who started as an ardent Humanist,
soon moved away from the basic beliefs of the humanist
manifesto.

The struggle to discover a genuine American tradition
was taken up most vigorously by Van Wyck Brooks, through his
search for a ”usable past,” in hmeriesis_§emihg_er_hge

(1915). Wraith (1918). and ”The Literary

Life in America" (1921). Unlike the New Humanists' rather
quiet entry into the American literary scene, Brooks and the
younger generation of critics arrived with a belligerent
manifesto of scathing indictments of American culture. The
short-lived periodical, The_Seyeh_Arts, founded by James
Oppenheim and Waldo Frank, served as their platform for some
time. Their intellectual orientation can be best summed up
in the call issued by Romain Rolland in the opening number
of The_Seyen_hrts. Romain Rolland challenged America to
build a new cultural edifice unencumbered by outworn modes
of thought:
The diverse personalities that compose your States
must dare to express themselves, freely,
sincerely, entirely, in art . . . . Above all,
dare to see yourselves: to penetrate within
yourself--and to your very depths. Dare to see
true. And then, whatever you find, dare to speak

it out as you have found it. (qtd. Vitelli
xxii-xxiii)

30

Lawrence, after he had finished writing his essays on
American literature, also issued a similar injunction in the
December 15, 1920 number of the Neu_3epuh1ie. Lawrence,
perhaps one of the earliest writers to include in the
American tradition the native American psyche as manifested
in the ancient civilization of the New World, told Americans
to "take up life where the Red Indian, the Aztec, the Maya,
the Incas left it off.” The responsibility, Lawrence says,
"for the producing and the perfecting of this life form
devolves upon the new American." Only this "new American”
can meet the challenge:

It is time he accepted the full responsibility.

It means a surpassing of the old European life-
form. It means a departure from the old European
morality, ethic. It means a departure from the
old European emotions and sensibilities. The old
emotions are crystallized forever among the
European monuments of beauty. There we can leave
them, along with the old creeds and the old
ethical laws outside of life. Montezuma had other
emotions, such as we have not known or admitted.
We must start from Montezuma, not from St. Francis
or St. Bernard. ("America, Listen to Your Own"
90-91)

Van Wyck Brooks. in W. found in

American culture a continuing antithesis between the
"highbrow" and the "lowbrow":

On the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite
unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory
(’high ideals'), on the other, a simultaneous
acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between
university ethic and business ethic, between
American culture and American humour, between Good
Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry
and pavement slang, there is no community, no
genial middle ground. (17-18).

31
What Brooks sees in the America of his times had already
been observed by Matthew Arnold in 1888. Arnold commented
that as England is divided into "Barbarians, Philistines,
and Populace, America is just ourselves." The only
difference, Arnold found, was that in America there were
neither "Barbarians” nor ”the Populace.” This leaves the
"Philistines for the great bulk of the nation" (79-80).
Brooks attempts to create the foundations of a new culture
for America. Arnold had said that "we in England have to
transform our civilization, so America has hers still to
make" (Arnold 79).

Brooks’ "usable past” was an attempt to create this
very culture out of the "vast Saragossa Sea--a prodigious
welter of unconscious life, swept by ground-swells of
half-conscious emotion" (Amerieeis 100). Matthew Arnold
remarks that ”the human problem there is as yet solved in
the United States most imperfectly: a great void exists in
the civilization over there: a want of what is elevated and
beautiful, of what is interesting" (Arnold 181). This view
is clearly echoed in Brooks’ analysis of the American
cultural ethos. His program of discovering a "usable past"
involved the use of literary history in the criticism of
American literature, and, as Howard Mumford Jones points
out, this interplay between literary history and literary
criticism is fundamentally valid, because whenever ”literary
history abandons evaluation, it becomes archaeological and

dry: whenever literary criticism neglects history, it grows

32
absolute and inhuman” (W
118).

However, Brooks’ attempts to discover a living past for
American culture and literature remain essentially
traditional and conservative despite the revolutionary
flavor he seeks to impart his interpretations. The
similarity between Arnold and Brooks mentioned earlier was
no mere coincidence. Jones is right in his comment that
”even amid the iconoclasms of his earlier volumes," Brooks
remains an "American Arnold, and in his later, more
historical work, though his style is no longer Arnoldian,
his standards have become traditional and conservative"
(119). Edmund Wilson remarks that in his early criticism,
”which exasperated us with its gloomy and negative
presentation of the American cultural and intellectual
scene," but ”did confront us with a "sense of national
failure,” his standards "of judgement were not infrangible.
In his later work, The_Eieuering_et_Neu_Ehgiend, we suddenly
find him "chortling, beaming, and crooning in a manner
little short of rapturous," over those very writers like
Lowell, Longfellow and Emerson whose weaknesses "he had so
unflinchingly brought to our notice,” in hmeriee;s_§emihg_er
Age ("Mr. Brooks’” 452).

In spite of its shortcomings, Brooks’ criticism, by
attempting to discover within American literature writers
who have something to say to us, by accounting for the

failure of the American tradition, and by exhorting the

33
American writer to create an environment in which literature
could flourish, succeeded in emphasizing an American past as
against the kind of tradition which the New Humanists were
recommending--the classical past giving sustenance to the
national culture. The main problem with Brooks is his
almost total rejection of the American past and his equating
it with Puritanism and the culture of the pioneer. This
tendency to condemn everything in the American past
culminates in the publication of giyiiizstien_in_the_united
Ststes (1922), a collection of essays by thirty eminent
Americans edited by Harold E. Stearns. The editor
characterized the American culture by the "sharp dichotomy
between preaching and practice," its "emotional and
aesthetic starvation," and the absence of ”heritages or
traditions to which to cling except those that have already
withered in our hands and turned to dust” (vi- vii).

Waldo Frank describes Qur_hueriee (1919), in his later
volume Rediseeyery_et_hueriee (1929), as the integration of
the critical work being done in the early years of the
century. It was, Frank claimed, "projected by the vision of
an artist who was moved to create a world in which he could
go on living." He attempted in Qur_hmeries to form a usable
past and "from the analysis of background to distil an
energy for the future" (319). This work indeed imparts a
new dimension to American cultural studies by relating our
cultural tradition to the spirit of the continent, ”a land

with a shrieking rhythm," whose ”physiography bears the

34

stamp of titanic struggle” (Qur_hmeries 5-6). In the
earlier writings on American culture, the primordial nature
of the American continent had either gone almost unnoticed,
or had always been perceived only in terms of what the early
European settlers had made of it. Before Frank’s book was
published, D. H. Lawrence’s essay, ”The Spirit of Place,"
had already appeared in the English_3eyiey of November 1918
(The_Symheiie_heehing 5). Lawrence’s plea was to consider
the American continent, not as a place found ready-made by
the Pilgrim Fathers as a refuge from the oppression of
Europe, but as a homeland with ”some subtle magnetic or
vital influence inherent in every specific locality,” which
”keeps the inhabitant stable" (20), and gives the race its
peculiar quality. D. H. Lawrence, in a letter to Waldo
Frank on September 15, 1917, wrote about this spirit of the
American continent, what Frank was to call its "shrieking
rhythm”:

There is a quality in your sky, a salt in your

earth, that will, without the agency of man,

destroy you all, and procreate new beings--not

men, in our sense of the word.-- Oh, for a

non-human race of man! (Moore geiieeted_Letters

524-25)

Frank gives his reason for the colonization of America:
”Primarily America was colonized because the spiritual
energy of the middle ages had passed its bloom and was
transmuting into the reactive channels of material growth "

(Qur_hneriee 13). D. H. Lawrence, in the 1918 version of

his essay ”The Spirit of Place," offers the same idea

35
imaginatively when he writes that with the Renaissance, the
magnetism that kept Europe together during the middle ages
broke down and ”Europe fell directly into the polar unison
with America. Europe and America became the great poles of
negative and positive vitalism.” Lawrence continues:
And it was on the wings of this new attraction
that Europe discovered America. When the great
magnetic sway of the medieval polarity broke, then
those units which were liberated fell under the
sway of new vital currents in the air, and they
were born helplessly as birds migrate, without

knowing or willing, down the great magnetic wind
towards America, towards the centrality in the New

World. (WW 21)

Lawrence explains the movement of Europe towards
America, not conditioned by the conscious human will as is
often thought, but as "prior to all knowledge and all
option" (21). Thus, while Frank’s understanding of the
American culture is based on his belief that from the very
beginning ”America has had no tradition, no articulation
outside of the industrial revolution which threw it into
being” (Qur_hmeries 14), Lawrence’s paradigm of American
culture underlines a positive urge present under its
apparent idealism and materialism--an unconscious urge
towards the fulfillment of an inner inspiration which
transcends the mere exercise of the human will.

As Gorham Munson points out, Waldo Frank’s Qur_hmeries
"had a powerful negative argument about our culture" (65),
and we can place it in the mainstream of criticism created

by Brooks, H. L. Mencken, Randolph Bourne, and the New

36
Humanists. Alan Trachtenberg considers Waldo Frank as ”one
of the most versatile and complex of the cultural critics,”
who used the figure of the pioneer in a "broad metaphoric
sense” of a "self-willed creature” single-minded in his
pursuit of material wealth (grities_et_§uiture 119). Frank’s
discussion of the American writers centers around their
tendency to perpetuate the pioneer spirit. Frank considers
Emerson a failure, although he concedes that Emerson ”had
the equipment of a true cultural leader. He had vision, he
had considerable mental power, he had the genius of
aspiration." But his books "are vague, his instances remote
. . . . The true motif of Emerson is an hysterical plea,"
because ”his works are essentially discards from weakness”
(Qur_hmeries 69). Frank’s assessment of Emerson, for whom
”the gesture of human aspiration was a transcending leap
away from all that was mortal-human" (70), is, however, too
extreme and has been questioned by modern scholarship.

Like all other culture critics of the period, Frank
also identifies American culture with the New England
puritan tradition and concludes that its supremacy resulted
in "the practical convergence of Puritan and pioneer":

From their ways and their problems, they construed
a culture. Puritanism was at last articulate. It
could therefore serve throughout America as the
rationale for pioneering. America was a nation of
frontiers. New England only could supply a
complete philosophy to meet its needs. In its
moralities, its gospels, its seats of learning,

its cultural decorations, New England fitted”
(75).

37
This proclivity to equate American culture with New England
literary tradition has been sharply attacked by Lawrence
Buell who says in ”The New England Renaissance and American
Literary Ethnocentrism," that "Puritan-legacyism might be
nothing more than an artifact of the researcher’s wishful
hope to break through to a unified theory of American
culture" (410).

However, Waldo Frank was perhaps one of the earliest
critics to include Jews in his rubric of American culture,
only to find that they also had been infected with the virus
of materialism under the ready made pioneer culture they met
in the United States (78-79).1 Frank’s association of
America with the "Land of Buried Cultures," is also a
significant attempt to push the American culture back to the
Red Indian.

Speaking of the Mexican inhabitants of Peublo,
Colorado, which the United States acquired from Mexico in
1848, Frank finds them devoid of the pioneer spirit, because
each one of them "became attached to his soil and loved it,
and drew pleasure and drew beauty from it." This proves
that he was not an ideal pioneer, who must be "forever ready
to move on, must have more ’serious’ ambitions" (95): this
is the reason "he alone had won a certain culture from the
arid soil of that high country," and also because he met the
Indian "and learned from him. Much of what is beautiful in
Mexican life has its clear source in the ancient Indian

cultures” (96). Thus we find Waldo Frank discussing the

38
American culture both in terms of time and place. One
wonders if it was Frank’s close association with Lawrence
that led him to emphasize this concept of America as not
only a national entity but also a place with its own
peculiar vibrations.

This short survey of American literary criticism in the
first two decades of the twentieth century highlights the
conflicting critical approaches to American literature and
culture which set the stage for the various trends that were

to pervade critical endeavors for many years to come.
Russell J - Reising in W
W has classified these theories.

"according to methods and assumptions," into three major
schools: (1) "Puritan origin and historical theories" of
Perry Miller, Yvor Winters and Sacvan Bercovitch, (2)
"Cultural Theories" of Lionel Trilling, R. W. B. Lewis,
Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler and Leo Marx and (3) "Self
Reflective theories" of Charles Feidelson, Richard Poirier
and John Irwin. Reising, however, excludes "frontier
theories" and "psychological theories" as distinct
categories, because "while insights gained from both
approaches have influenced all other ’schools’, they have
not generated a tradition of studies" (5). This is a rather
facile generalization: in all cultural and literary theories
of the period succeeding the early decades these two
approaches have been quite significant and do represent a

distinct school. Critics like Lewis Mumford in The_§eideh

39
Dex, William Carlos Williams in Tn_the_hmerieeh_grein,

Ludwig Lewisohn in Expressien_in_hneries, and Richard

Slotkin in Begsneratien_Threugh_!ielenee have used these

approaches as their basic methodology.

Reising’s main quarrel with these critics is that they
"narrow the American canon and discourage us from viewing
literature as a form of social knowledge or behavior" (6).
Another attack on these critical theorists stems from their
belief in something called ’American literature’. Reising
does not believe that "there is a ’thing’ one can call
American literature." American literature ”does not exist
in the abstract. It does not offer itself to our scrutiny.
It does not present itself in or as a unified phase or
tradition in American writing” (10). What has been called
American ”exceptionalism" has met with the sharpest rebuke
from some contemporary critics. William C. Spengemann in A
uirrer_ter_huerieenists has advanced a strong plea for the
classics of American literature to be read in the context of
English literature:

As poems, novels or plays, they belong to a genre:
and as products of a certain time, they belong to
a period in literary history. Observations about
their subjects, themes, and techniques similarly
must be made, not on the assumption that these
details are representative of, or unique to, the
culture in which the works were written but in the
light of some wider knowledge about the employment
of analogous subjects, themes, and techniques in
other literatures. (26)

Spengemann, however, concedes that the "literature of

the United States in English is an American literature, to

40
be sure, and ought to be studied as one." He only
prescribes that this literature should be studied in
conjunction with other literatures. A sound proposition as
far as the study of American literature is concerned, but,
as he himself admits in the words of Columbus, ”the farther
one goes, the more one learns" about the "terra incognita"
known as American literature (27).

It is this "terra incognita” which D. H. Lawrence set
himself to explore when he started writing his essays on
American literature in 1914, and published their revised
version as W in 1923-
Alan Trachtenberg says that culture critics of the early
part of the twentieth century--Van wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank,
Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford and others--were responsible
for revaluing the American literary tradition:

With the help of D. H. Lawrence’s Studies_in
WW (1923). [they] opened
the entire field to the reconsideration that gave
rise to the present study of American literature
and culture in colleges and universities . . . .
The change they hoped for most, however, was
intellectual and moral, a change in consciousness,
in culture. (11-12)
D. H. Lawrence of all the critics of this period studies
American literature primarily as an expression of the
American cultural situation. When he declared, in a letter
to Edward Garnett in the autumn of 1912, that he ”was no
critic at all” (Huxley, Letters 75), Lawrence was in fact
dissociating himself from the kind of academic criticism

that indulged in ”critical twiddle-twaddle about style and

41
form, all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analyzing
of books in an imitation-botanical fashion," which he found
"mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon." For Lawrence,
literary criticism ”can be no more than a reasoned account
of feelings produced upon the critic by the book he is
criticizing," the "touchstone is emotion, not reason."
Lawrence believes that "a critic must be emotionally alive
in every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in
essential logic, and then morally very honest” ("John
Galsworthy” 539). Lawrence’s emphasis on the moral purpose
of art--the exploration of a new awareness, a new morality--
by discovering "a perfected relation between man and his
circumambient universe" ("Morality and the Novel" 527),
brings him very close to moral criticism. He wrote in his
essay on Whitman that ”the essential purpose of art is
moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and
recreation. But moral. The essential function of art is
moral," but he also declared that this morality is a
”passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality
that changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the
blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake" (Studies
180). Lawrence believes that art should portray man’s
passionate struggle to "rip the old veil of a vision across,
and find what the heart really believes in" (Fentesis 9-10),
and thereby reject a morality which insists on a partial

mechanical state of being by providing the artist with ”a

42
metaphysic of self-justification, or a metaphysic of
self-denial" ("Study of Thomas Hardy” 479). We, therefore,
find Lawrence emphasizing a dual responsibility for the
artist: to create a new awareness through a new morality of
perfected relationships, and also to help destroy these
forms and monuments of dead beliefs which hamper the new
life from taking roots. With his belief in a personal
rather than an abstracted morality, Lawrence combines his
moral stance with his essentially romantic beliefs. F. R.
Leavis remarks that this essentially romanticized concept of
morality is what distinguishes Lawrence from other moral
critics and his ”critical thought is immensely more subtle
and deep-going than Arnold’s, the other great critic who
challenges a basic critical function for the word ’moral’"
("Genius as Critic" 414).

The critical method Lawrence was to use is first
employed in his essay, "Study of Thomas Hardy,” written in
1914, about three years before he started writing his
American essays. It is not always remembered that the basic
urge for writing both the Hardy essay and Studies comes from
Lawrence’s disgust with European civilization. The culture
of Europe, he believes manifests its worst phase in the
outbreak of the 1914 war. Lawrence is opposed to the war
because it represented a "horrible, obscene ideal process,"
culminating in ”a ghastly and blasphemous translation of
ideas into engines, and men into cannon fodder" ("Education

of the People” 658). Through his essay on Hardy, and later

43
through his analysis of American literature, Lawrence was
attempting an approximation of art with the civilization of
which it is a product. This approach also accounts for the
formal attributes of his critical writings which, especially
in his American essays, received severe critical censure.
Lawrence, from the very nature of his critical persuasion,
was an impressionistic critic. Not aligned to any specific
critical creed, Lawrence was criticized for imposing his own
often unfamiliar, even exotic, concepts about life and art
on American literature and culture. Edward Shanks,
reviewing Studies for the Lenden Mereury, reacted vehemently
against Lawrence’s use of the personal equation in a work of
literary criticism:
Mr. D. H. Lawrence’s book is not strictly a work
of criticism. He has taken several American
authors from Benjamin Franklin to Walt Whitman,
and has used them as excuses for propounding that
peculiar dark philosophy of his which seems to be
the theme of his all later work. I do not
understand that philosophy, and I make no pretence
understanding it. In his novels it acts as a
mist, now distorting and now terribly magnifying
the persons of the tale, and has thus its
aesthetic uses. But presented thus direct, it is,
to me at any rate, simply incomprehensible: and I
cannot discuss it, for I do not even grasp the
beginning of it. (662)

Conrad Aiken, though he accepts that the book is "here
and there lighted with an extraordinary fine bit of
perception, beautifully given,” condemns Lawrence for his
assumption that ”anything he says, no matter how he says it
(and he tries perversely to make his saying of it as

aggressively and consciously and peculiarly naked as

44
possible), will be important.” Aiken assails Lawrence for
his ”astounding recklessness with language," and observes
that ”logic, in his hands, achieves monsters--fantastic
structures grow, ascend, throng the universe, and disappear
into the intense inane, in the twinkling of an eye" (482).
The_Tines_Literery_Suppiement, in an anonymous review,
attacked Studies as "bohemian,” and Lawrence’s emphasis on
"blood" in poor taste (461). In a review of the Studies
published in £uhiie_Ledger of November 17, 1923, Robert E.
Spiller condemned it as worthy of nothing more than being
thrown "gently into the fire," characterized Lawrence as
”antichrist” appearing in the guise of a critic of American
literature, found his work ”tame and conservative," and
wrote that what Lawrence says are things that "the driest of
students of American literature have been expounding in
discourses and hammering over desks for at least a decade,
if not longer" (Spiller 6-8). The last observation, coming
from a critic of the stature of Spiller, is rather
surprising, because Lawrence’s was perhaps the most radical
and least reactionary of interpretations that American
criticism had seen to date.

It is clear from the above critical abuse hurled at
Lawrence’s work that the main attack was directed against
the impressionistic nature of his criticism in which, as
Charles I. Glicksberg observes, all judgment "resides in the
critic himself.” The critic becomes the "sole arbiter, and

his appreciations and appraisals are conditioned, mutatis

45
mutandis, by his temperament, his sensibility, his taste."
Such a critic records "the adventure of his soul among works
of art, his immediate feelings and sensations." As a
result, the impressionistic critic is inclined to be
"subjective, personal, provocative, scattering his ideas and
’impressions’ broadcast, without regard for the hobgoblin of
consistency.” Glicksberg gives the example of such
impressionistic critics as James Gibbons Hunekar, H. L.
Mencken, William Crary Brownell, whose criticism has the
"tendency to obsolescence.” However, when we see the extent
to which D. H. Lawrence’s criticism penetrated the
discussion of American literature we have a critic who
rises, what Glicksberg considers, ”above the level of
judicial academic studies or rank impressionism” (hmerieen
Literery_§ritieism 16-20). Kenneth Dauber says that modern
American criticism begins with "a grand tradition of
impressionism," and although it has long been criticized,
there "is good reason to rehabilitate it, for at its best it
is a pre-theoretical recognition of the non-objectivity of
the text" (57). Dauber confines his survey of American
impressionistic criticism to Brooks only, and does not
mention D. H. Lawrence in his "grand tradition," but what he
observes about Brooks applies more pertinently to Lawrence,
who went further than Brooks in reviving "our relationship
to works which had become fixed as monuments," by

"substituting himself for the works." Dauber considers such

46
a substitution as "a fundamental Derridean position,“
because such criticism keeps the meaning of the work alive:
Since meaning is not embodied in the written but
is a function of writing, of the discourse
proceeding between writer and critic, energetic
substitution, because it keeps discourse active,
keeps meaning alive. (57)

Robert C. Pierle comments directly on D. H. Lawrence’s
impressionistic criticism, and says that Lawrence’s
rejection of ”disinterestedness, a concept which since the
time of Matthew Arnold has been the sine_gue_nen of nearly
all literary investigation," imparts his criticism the
"spontaneity of reaction, which is responsible not only for
the worst moments in his criticism but for the best as well”
(334).

Through American literature, Lawrence was attempting a
journey into American culture, a presence uppermost in his
mind during the war years as a place of refuge away from
England. In Europe, Lawrence felt, "the living part is
overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it.
So that life which is still fertile must take its departure,
like seeds from a dead plant." He wanted to ”transplant"
his life to America where there still was "a hope of a
future. He wished "to grow towards that future," away from
the "decomposition" of Europe (Huxley, Letters 382).
America was Lawrence’s Bensnim (500). Lawrence was
disappointed that Americans had ignored the great promise of
their own culture, and wrote to Waldo Frank that they had

”studied the European world too much," and their "own world

47
too little.” This has made Europeans exclaim, "those
Americans are such children!" Lawrence disagreed, and since
he believed he had really read their literature, he was
inclined to consider Americans "so old," the "very painted
vivacity of age- ’--P_ourrie_mnt_d_'_etre_muze some Franohnan
said seventy years ago, about America--U. S. A., that is"
(524-525).

It is this intense involvement with America, American
literature, and American culture that renders Studies, as
Richard Ruland observes, "an American book, right down to
its completion during Lawrence’s stay in New Mexico, and its
subsequent impact on the critical thought of the last twenty
years-~an impact which shows no sign of subsiding" (The
Rediseeyery 178). Edmund Wilson included the complete text
of Studies in his anthology. mm. with
these introductory remarks:

The W have
shots that do not hit the mark and moments that
are quite hysterical: but they remain one of the
few first rate books that have ever been written
on the subject. To an American, American
literature is a part of his native landscape, and
so veiled with associations that he cannot always
see what the author is really saying. D. H.
Lawrence has here tried to do what it would be
difficult for an American to do: read our books
for their meaning in the life of the western world
as a whole. (906)

David J. Gordon, commenting on the rather unorthodox
critical medium Lawrence adopts for his essays, observes

that the "flexible, freewheeling form of critical essay,”

developed by Lawrence enabled him to "pass naturally beyond

48
a concern for art proper and to emphasize its relation to
the civilization of which it is a vital expression" (3). It
is this unorthodox approach that makes Frederick J. Hoffman
say. in WW1
neeede, that Studies may better be called, ”Studies in
Laurentian Responses to the Reading of Classic American
Literature.” This happens because "in almost every detail
the insights are Laurentian and worthwhile for their
revelation, not of the American past but of the Laurentian
present." Hoffman concedes that, although the "American
past gains from the exchange," this gain can "hardly be
measured or evaluated." Like many other critics of
Lawrence’s work, Hoffman also finds fault with Lawrence’s
not being well informed about the "prevailing academic or
scholarly forms of ordering the subject" (160). This,
however, is a quality that accounts for the freshness of and
abiding interest in his evaluation of American literature
and culture.

D. H. Lawrence’s work, despite its highly personalized
commentary on American literature and culture and the
intensely impressionistic approach to its subject, is marked
by a critical methodology which incorporates within itself
the diverse, often contradictory and poorly assimilated,
analytical approaches American critics follow during the
early years of the century. As already mentioned, Lawrence
with his emphasis on morality in literature displays the

humanist bias for the moral element in art. He also

49
continues Brooks’ crusade for a "usable past," but with a
difference. He considerably extends the province of this
past by emphasizing the symbolic and the mythopoeic in
American literature.

Although as a young man Lawrence had read Emerson and
admired him, later, like many of his American
contemporaries, he also found Emerson listening ”to one sort
of message and only one. To all the rest he was blank."
Lawrence points out that Emerson knew only the
"smooth-shaven Gabriel, But as far as we remember, there is
Michael too . . . . Ashtaroth and Ammon are gods as well,
and hand out their own credentials” (”Review of hmeriedns by
Stuart P. Sherman" 317). Lawrence is disappointed in
Emerson’s idealism, and excludes him from his study of
classic American literature. Excluding Emerson, Thoreau,
and other New England writers from the classic canon and
substituting them with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur,
Cooper, Dana, and Melville was Lawrence’s way of proclaiming
a new canon in the study of American literature. Although
like all selections, his selection is also made with the
purpose of illustrating his thesis, Lawrence, by including
these lesser figures in his examination of classic American
literature, does help extend the canon which had become
frozen for a long time. Lawrence extends the usable past
into a territory excluded earlier from serious
consideration. Stanley Edgar Hyman rightly considers

Lawrence’s book as one of the two best books "erecting a

50
usable past for the creative writer,” the other being
William Carlos Williams’ Tn_The_Amerieen_§reih, published in
1925, and "much influenced by Lawrence’s" work (96).
Lawrence himself discerned the similarity, and wrote in his
review of Williams’ work, in 1926, that Williams emphasizes
the local rather than the national in American letters:
"Nationality in letters is deplorable, whereas the local is
essential. All creative art must rise out of a specific
soil and flicker with a spirit of place" (Pheenix 334). It
is not easy to accept Horace Gregory’s remark in his
introduction to Th_the_hmerieeh_§rein that Williams’ work
does not resemble Lawrence’s. Lawrence admires Williams for
recreating a new America, "the still unravished bride of
silences. The great continent, its bitterness, its brackish
quality, its vast glamour, its strange cruelty." Williams
exhorts Americans to discover this America, and savor the
”powerful, unyielding breath of the Americas, which Columbus
sniffed, even in Europe, and which sent the Conquistadores
mad.” Americans must forget the political entity known as
America, ”a gruesome sort of fantasy," while "the unravished
local America still waits vast and virgin as ever, though in
process of being murdered" (335).

This emphasis on the local, rather than the national,
in interpreting the usable past is the foundation of
Lawrence’s interpretation of American literature. Donald E.
Pease considers Lawrence’s work as a plea to use the "spirit

of place” as a "revitalizing ingredient for American

51
culture.” Lawrence, according to Pease, through his
American essays forges "a visionary compact with the
continuing goals, purposes, and aspirations of these figures
from America’s past." He emphasizes ”positive freedom” as
opposed to "negative freedom," the "desire to be merely free
from a variety of constraints, whether of European tyrants,
constrictive legislation, or, more pervasively, the past
itself" (6). Pease summarizes the singular contribution of
D. H. Lawrence to the study of American literature and
culture:
In studying the classics of American literature,
Lawrence attempted to make a cultural entry into
the modern world. Whereas Eliot and Pound turned
away from modern America for traditional, Old
World values alienated from it, Lawrence returned
to modern America with his vision of the living
tradition from America’s premodern past. The
founders of America’s tradition, Lawrence believed
had already found a way to transform the purely
negative freedom at work in a modern existence
into a more endurable form of liberty. In
recalling what remains to be made of the vision of
her classics, Lawrence felt himself called to an
alternative experience of the modern world. (7)
Russell J. Reising, although he places Lawrence among
the self-reflective theorists of American literature and
culture, does concede that Lawrence anticipates two major
tenets of New Criticism: the language of paradox and the
intentional fallacy (164). Among all the critics of the
period before the war, Lawrence is perhaps the only one
recognizing, what Eric Gould calls the ”numinous in
literature." Lawrence believes in ”the logocracy of

writing, in the text establishing the dominance of writing

52

as expression, yet struggling with its limitations at the
same time” (13). American classics articulate this very
struggle, and, fall in the category of myth, because
Lawrence shows that "it is the nature of language that
determines myth and not the reverse" (12). Reising,
however, embraces a rather limited view of Lawrence’s
approach, and says that it is merely indicative of his
reading of American literature as "a slippage bordering on
cultural schizophrenia” (165). Reising, consequently, jumps
to this conclusion: "Since the author’s expressed meaning
cannot be trusted, Lawrence’s theory denied the historicity
of a particular writer reflecting a specific historical and
social situation." Reising acknowledges that Lawrence’s
belief in "the American unconscious is a new historical
development,” but he also says that in Lawrence "the tension
that the unconscious registers is finally more a static
opposition than a dynamic historical construct” (166).
Obviously, Reising does not take into account Lawrence’s
belief in history as "great motions from within the soul of
mankind" (heyements xii). Reising’s view of history is
confined to "the impingement of modern economic and
political forms on modern life” (167).

The Laurentian critical idiom is essentially romantic
and is firmly entrenched in his highly personalized concept

of the unconscious. Lawrence’s American essays are

contiguous with W (1921)
and EeDteeie_ef_the_uneeneeieue (1922). the two works on

53
psychoanalysis he was writing while engaged in the
interpretation of American literature. He found both the
Freudian and the Jungian unconscious too intellectually
conceived to provide a true insight into the intricacies of
the individual psyche. For Lawrence, the unconscious
exemplified "that essential unique nature of every
individual creature, which is, by its very nature,
unanalyzable, undefinable, inconceivable." It cannot be
conceived because it can ”only be experienced, in every ‘
single instance. We call this aspect of human personality
the unconscious exactly because it is inconceivable
(Esyeheeheiysis 211). Closely allied with his concept of
the unconscious, is his belief in history as a cyclic
process underlying the story of cultures. The Laurentian
critical idiom as he applied it to American literature and
culture, therefore, is a romantically conceived method which
incorporates his beliefs about the unconscious, about
history, about myth, and about the nature of language and
symbol. Within this critical paradigm Lawrence discusses
American literature as the most significant expression of
American culture. The following chapters explore the
presence of this method in his essays on American literature
and present an account of the new ways of looking at
American literature and culture that these essays provided

the critics who come after D. H. Lawrence.

54
NOTES

1. D. H. Lawrence’s letter to Waldo Frank written on July
27, 1917 is very close to what Waldo Frank was to write
about Jews: ”The best of Jews is, that they they truth from
untruth. The worst of them is, that they are rather slave-
like, and that almost inevitably, in action, they betray the
truth they KDQH. and fawn to the powers that be. But they
KDQH the truth. Only they must cringe their legs and betray
it. The material world dominates them with a base kind of
fetish domination. Yet they finer the truth all the while"

(Moore. W 520) -

CHAPTER TWO

STUDIES AND AMERICAN CRITICS

The period between 1913 and 1921 is the most prolific
in D. H. Lawrence’s literary career. In addition to his
three major novels-—Sehs_ehd_Leyers (1913), The_3sihheg
(1915) and flemeh_ih_Leye (1920), in which he searched for a
way out of the impasse created by the claims of conventional
morality and fixed ideas on the individual, he also wrote
most of his non-fictional and polemical writings. In all
these writings, Lawrence articulates his quest for the
autonomous individual--one capable of striking a balance
between the passionate life of the body and the demands of
the human community. Although Lawrence has often been
castigated as a devotee of the flesh and the primeval human
instincts, he attempts simply to affirm the spontaneous by
seeking to eliminate the dualism of mind and impulse. This
antinomy, he believes, has infested the Western civilization
from the time of the Renaissance, and is the chief source of
the malady that afflicts modern man. The essays later
published as etudiee_in_Qleeeie_Amerieen_Litereture. his
most significant contribution to literary criticism, were

originally written between the years 1917 and 1918. They

55

56
were revised in 1920, and again in 1922-23, immediately
before their publication.

Lawrence’s genius as a literary critic is one with his
genius as a creative artist. In his novels and poems, he
strove to explore life, which he believed consisted in an
ever-widening quest for the wholeness of the individual as
against his imprisonment in the narrow confines of the
subjective self. In his critical and polemical writings,
Lawrence confronted a work of art not on the basis of the
superficial interpretation pre-conceived abstractions lend
to it, but by facing art as a whole man alive.

D. H. Lawrence started writing his essays on American
literature after a feverish search for a concrete
manifestation of the world of his dreams where mankind is
not constantly shunted between the demands of the flesh and
the mind. His journeys took him to all parts of Europe, to
Ceylon, to Australia and later to the United Sates, in what
he called a ”kind of running away" (Huxley, Letters 556).
Catherine Carswell says that this was because he needed
"absolutely to run from the world he knew and to see the
world he did not know. It was his initial quest to see if
the two ends of humanity might not be brought together"
(248). Mark Schorer attributes his travels to his search
for a Behenim "that pre-Jeffersonian community of congenial
and creative and cooperative persons,” capable of creating
"their own society, outside the destructive pressures of

society at large" (293). In England, Lawrence saw the old

57
rural England being overwhelmed by the ugliness of
industrial life: science and materialism were killing the
wonders of spontaneous living. "The real tragedy of
England, as I see it," he observes, “is the tragedy of
ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England so
vile" ("Nottingham and the Mining Countryside" 137). His
interest in the New World and his decision to write his
essays on American writers was a direct result of, what John
Lehman calls, his quest to seek symbols which would bring
out in bold relief the inadequacy of living through mind and
mind alone (151). Among the peasants of Italy and Sardinia,
in the "sensuous spiritual voluptuousness” of the East
(Huxley, Letters 545), in the wild wastes of Australia, and
among the Indians of New Mexico, his quest was always the
same. Aldous Huxley views his travels as "at once a flight
and a search." He was searching for some society "with
which he could establish contact,” and for a world in which
"the times were not personal and conscious knowing had not
yet perverted living.” It was, therefore, "a search and at
the same time a flight from the miseries and evils of a
society into which he had been born, and in which, in spite
of his artist’s detachment, he could not help feeling
profoundly responsible” (Huxley, "Introduction" Letters
xxvi).1 Lawrence’s letters reveal the restlessness of his
spirit, "the restless changes of place, which become at last

pathetic: and the hopes and despairs, the half-wistful

58

returns and savage outbursts of a lonely an disappointed
rebel" (Iimee_Litererx_§upplement xlv)-2

Lawrence’s travels resulted in his travel writings of
this period: Tgiiight_ih_1teiy (1916), Introduction to
Hemeire_ef_the_zereign_Leeien (1921) and See_end_§erdinia
(1921). hernings_ih_nexiee was published later in 1927. Of
these, Tuiiight_ih_1teiy is the most significant. This is
his first book-length work of non-fiction and only such work
written between 1915 and 1920. Here, Lawrence, for the
first time, expounds those beliefs which form the basis of
much of his work immediately preceding and during the period
he was busy writing his essays on American literature.
Among these are: "The Crown" (1915),3 "Study of Thomas

Hardy" (1914), "The Reality of Peace" (1917), "Education of

the People" (1918). 2exeheeDelxeie_and_the_nneeneeieue
(1921). Eantaeie_ef_the_nneeneeieue (1922). and "Democracy"

(circa 1923).4 In 1921, also came Meyemehts_ih_£urepesn
Histery, which presents Lawrence’s view of history and

explains his rejection of the old world of Europe as an
exhausted wasteland. This work also epitomizes Lawrence’s
belief in the New World as the source of realizing the
untapped sources of life still available to us.

”Study of Thomas Hardy," D. H. Lawrence’s first
important venture in literary criticism,5 establishes him as
a critic who never separates art from life. The purpose of
art is to express a new awareness, a new morality,

consisting in a new relatedness, "a perfected relation

59

between man and his circumambient universe" (”Morality and
the Novel" 527). The word "perfected” is important here,
because a work of art does not recreate merely the reality
it represents: it creates a more intense, more profound, and
more lasting vision of which quite often the artist himself
may not be aware. It is here that the "unconscious” comes
into play. Lawrence discusses this almost undefinable
relationship between the artist and his subject in Van
Gogh’s painting of the sunflowers. More than representing
the sunflowers as tangible objects, Van Gogh ”reveals, or
achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and
the flower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time.”
His painting is not an exact represention of the sunflower
itself, because "we shall never know what the sunflower
itself is. And the camera will yisuuiize the sunflower far
more perfectly than Van Gogh can." Lawrence believes that a
work of art, therefore, tells the truth ”only in the
much-debated fourth dimension. In dimensional space it has
no existence" (527). In his essay "The Crown," Lawrence
further explores this "wholeness” born out of consummation
through ”relatedness." The purpose of art is to arrest
these consummate moments. True art strives forever not to
ossify these supreme moments into the frigidity of ideals,
but keeps the balance between them ”trembling and
oscillating" (529).

Lawrence writes in his essay on Whitman that "the

essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not

6O

decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The
essential function of art is moral.“ But this morality is
"a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality
that changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the
blood first. The mind follows later in the wake” (Studies
180). All true art, therefore, portrays man’s passionate
struggle to "rip the old veil of a vision across, and find
what the heart really believes in" (Tentesie_er_the
Dmeeneeieue and W 9-10) -
These supreme moments of creative fulfillment are
unattainable if the artist blindly adheres to ”a metaphysic
of self-justification, or a metaphysic of self-denial”
("Study of Thomas Hardy" 479), and applies it to the world
of human relationships. All art must create a new awareness
by emphasizing a new morality of perfected relationships.
In this way alone can art destroy these forms and monuments
of dead beliefs which hamper the new life from taking
roots.6

The Hardy essay is an example of D. H. Lawrence’s
quarrel with post-Renaissance Europe and the modern
civilization in which the real ”self" is all but obliterated
by the monolith called society. This essay sets the stage
for Lawrence’s assessment of American literature and
culture. In Thomas Hardy, characters who desire to break
through ”the hide-bound cabbage going rotten at the heart,"
and to "sprout into the unknown" by promoting ”the vast,

uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of

61
life itself, surpassing human consciousness” are always
thwarted by "a smaller system of morality, the one grasped
and formulated by the human consciousness” (406-419).7 In
fact, Lawrence found this tendency in all British and
European fiction--a quest for creating a homogeneous world
in which the artist forces the individual to seek
reconciliation with other individuals, groups, and
ultimately society itself or be destroyed. In Tuiiight_in
Tteiy, Lawrence traces this movement of European culture
from spontaneity to self-consciousness. As the Lawrences
walk through Bavaria and the Austrian Tyrol into Italy, the
roadside painted wooden figures of the crucified Christ
change each time by the vision of the carver. In Bavaria,
the Christ is a Bavarian peasant with ’broad cheekbones and
sturdy limbs,” having "the meanness of the peasant, but also
with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its soul
to the circumstance" (6). The Bavarian soul is the soul of
an artist expressing a mystical comprehension of the blood
and senses. Here the mind "is a suffusion of physical heat,
it is not separated, it is kept submerged" (9). Toward
Austria and the southern slopes of the Alps, the Christ is
detached, "he meditates half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows
lifted in strange abstraction, the elbow resting on the
knee” (13). In Austria, the Christ figures portray, not the
Bavarian ruggedness, but a Viennese elegance: the
"blood-knowledge" of the highlander is decimated by the

coldness of intellect. Lawrence’s Hardy essay and other

62
writings of this period, therefore, initiate the critical
method he adopts in W.
Not all critics are in agreement with D. H. Lawrence’s

amalgamating his literary criticism with his beliefs on the
contemporary human condition. Rene Wellek remarks that in
Lawrence’s hands "literary criticism breaks down. Lawrence
simply allegorizes books, destroys the content of a book, or
the pattern of a writer’s mind, and uses these allegories to
expound his own ideology." Wellek accuses Lawrence of
applying to books his "scheme of sexual psychology, combined
with the scheme of history, which is not just primitivism
but a utopia of rebirth." Lawrence, according to Wellek,
discusses characters ”without any regard to their function
in a book, simply as human beings living today when he
examines for their morals and asks for right behavior in a
situation abstracted from the book" (603-604). Wellek’s
criticism sounds very similar to the severe critical censure
Lawrence’s work was subjected to when it first appeared in
1923.8 Wellek also belittles Lawrence’s use of "overt and
latent meaning" as a critical method and says:

This sense of the double bottom, of the subtext,

the latent meaning . . . is an old idea in

criticism: well known to the Schlegels, prominent

in such diverse unrelated critics as Dobrolyubov

in Russia and De Sanctis in Italy, and used by

Engels in his famous letter to Balzac. (602)
Obviously, Wellek criticizes Lawrence for not subscribing to

any specific school of criticism, and employing a critical

method which relies heavily on Lawrence’s interest in sexual

63

psychology and his ”wide reading in prehistory,
anthropology, and philosophies of history (in Forbenius,
Jane Harrison, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and many
others)” (603). As if anticipating such an attack on his
criticism, D. H. Lawrence himself had declared in a letter
to Edward Garnett in 1912 that he was "no critic at all"
(Huxley, Letters 75). He was, perhaps, aware that despite
his strong views about the nature and function of criticism,
he did not qualify as an academic critic acceptable to the
literary establishment. Lawrence believes that literary
criticism can not be a science because it must reflect the
”feeling” a work of art produces upon the critic. An
"emotionally educated" critic "feels the impact of a work of
art in all its complexity and its force." Such a critic
must himself "be emotionally alive in every fibre,
intellectually capable and skillful in essential logic, and
then morally very honest."9 Even Wellek recognizes in
Lawrence’s reply to Arnold Bennett’s criticism of his
work,10 Lawrence’s defence of a "loose organic form."
Wellek observes that Lawrence’s statement is "the rejection
of the well-made novel and the concept of unique fluid form
and indeterminable character," and it sounds like a defense
of the ”innovations that could loosely be called modernism"
(600-601).

However, in the course of time, D. H. Lawrence, in
spite of his unconventional critical pronouncements, has

been acknowledged as a critic with unusual insight.11 After

64
the publication of David J. Gordon’s nt_flt_Lsurenee_ss_s
'Literery_gritie (1966), Lawrence has been established as a
critic with unusual perception. According to Peter Bien,
Gordon’s work vindicates "the moral stance that governs
Lawrence’s criticism.” Bien points out that Lawrence is no
more viewed as a critic relying only on his instincts and
his ”dark philosophy," but as following a systematic
critical methodology capable of creating deeper insights in
a work of art. Peter Bien sees two principles combined in
"the single theoretical position that underlies the many
ideas which appear unsystematized in Lawrence’s diverse
critical writings." The first is "the attention to
wholeness that produces his conception of art” as an ideal
”vehicle communicating a state of being." The second is
Lawrence’s belief in an 'ever-readjusting duality that
produces both his conception of what art is, actually, and
his practice as a workaday critic" (127—133).

It is not surprising, therefore, that even a critic
like Michael J. Colacurcio, who is not in total agreement
with the kind of criticism Lawrence himself and American
critics who followed him in the 1960s and 19703 wrote, is
forced to acknowledge that recent years have proved that
”Lawrence’s insights can be translated into very respectable
scholarly prose but also that they can motivate and guide
the most impressively detailed sorts of historical research"
(488). Colacurcio, however, finds Lawrence’s view of

"unconscious" or the "symbolic" placed against the

65

“unconscious and the rhetorical,” raising ”some very thorny
problems about the critical status of meanings which do, on
the supposition, pass into a work as psychic (and beyond
that, cultural) symptoms rather than as conscious verbal
signs” (494). Colacurcio’s comments on the problematic
nature of the ”symptomatic and symbolic" criticism are
mainly based on E. D. Hirsch’s belief that, before we try to
unravel the writer’s unconscious impulses behind a work of
art, we must place it in its historical context and discover
the writer’s intended meaning at that historical moment:
”Permanent meaning is, and can be nothing other than the
author’s meaning" (Hirsch 216). The question of authorial
intention, however, has been thorny. On the other side,
stand W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley who profess that
“the design or intention of the author is neither available
nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a
work of literary art" (468). When Lawrence says that we
”must look through the surface of American art, and see the
inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is
all childishness" (Studies 89), he becomes one of the
earliest critics to comment on the "intentional fallacy."12

Since Lawrence’s concept of validity in criticism
depends not so much on the intellectual but on the emotional
make-up of the critic, it is necessary to explore Lawrence’s

views on the human personality to understand his critical

method- Lawrence was writing WW
uneeDeeieue (1921) and W (1922)

66
almost the same time he wrote his essays on American
literature. These two books constitute Lawrence’s polemical
attempt to "denigrate Freudian psychoanalysis and at the
same time to systematize the philosophy of the unconscious
he had been advancing in his fiction” (Hinz 251).

Lawrence found the Freudian unconscious too
intellectually conceived, and thus reduced to a mere
breeding ground for cruelty, lust and complexes. Lawrence
objected to such statements by Freud which declared that the
unconscious by itself had no independent existence, whose
existence ”we are obliged to assume-- because, for instance,
we infer it in some way from its affects but of which we are
not directly aware” (neg_1ntreduetery_Leetures 94). Freud
reaches his "unconscious," not as an autonomous faculty, but
by contrasting it with the ”conscious." He defines it as a
quality composed of the whole body of man’s repressions: ”We
obtain our concept of the ‘unconscious,’ therefore, from the
theory of repression. The repressed serves us as the
prototype of the unconscious" (The_£ge_end_the_1d 12). D.
H. Lawrence, on the other hand, repudiates the "gagged,
bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes, faecal
inhibitions, dream monsters" Freud parades in the name of
the unconscious. Lawrence’s unconscious is "not a shadow
cast from the mind,” but "the spontaneous life motive in
every organism." The unconscious is "that essential unique

nature of every individual creature, which is, by its very

67

nature, unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable"
(Wins (200-211) -13

D. H. Lawrence is not alone in pointing out the gaps in
the repression theories of Freud. C. G. Jung had already
commented on the limited implications of the Freudian
unconscious as "denoting the state of repressed or forgotten
contents," which has "a functional significance thanks only
to these." Jung, therefore, recognizes the independent
existence of the "personal unconscious.” However, Jung’s
agreement with Lawrence ends when he characterizes it as a
”more or less superficial layer of the unconscious,” and
subordinates it to the "collective unconscious," a ”deeper
layer" which is not "individual but universal" (Jung 3-4).
Lawrence’s concept of the unconscious is opposed to Jung’s
who emphasizes the collective at the expense of the personal
and the individual, and "dodges from his university gown to
a priest’s surplice" (Lawrence, rentesis 13). Lawrence,
therefore, blames Jung for turning the concept of the
unconscious into a religious and mystical phenomenon, and
demoting it to the level of an abstraction rather than
aligning it to the source of creative fulfillment in the
individual.14 To label Lawrence’s view as an ”affirmation
of the irrational" (Cowan 16), therefore, is an
oversimplification more of complex notion. D. H. Lawrence’s
is an affirmation of the integrity of the human psyche, a
bold attempt to save us from further alienation and

68
reification imposed by a culture struggling under the
tyranny of a divided consciousness.

It is in this frame of mind that D. H. Lawrence
initiates his examination of American literature and culture
in W with the opening
essay "The Spirit of Place.” L. D. Clark describes this
essay as ”a symbology of being,” which is "best anchored in
the deepest perceptions of place" (The_uiheeh_nistsnee 181).
Lawrence in his travel books written during this period was
intrigued by the extent to which place shaped and influenced
individual perceptions. His letters of this period show
that the spirit of the American continent was what attracted
him the most.15 He wrote to Catherine Carswell in January
1917: "I don’t know why I go to America--except that I feel
all right in going there. One instinctively takes one’s
way, and it is all right. I feel we shall get off" (Moore,
Letters 498). Lawrence is convinced that the Pilgrim
Fathers were motivated by a similar unconscious prompting
when they left for the New World. They persuaded themselves
to heiieye that "they came in search of freedom of worship,”
but, Lawrence says, "England had more freedom of worship in
the year 1700 than America" (Studies 9). The Pilgrims,
therefore, forced an idea to cover up an instinctual urge of
moving to the New World because ”the world fears a new
experience more than it fears anything. Because a new
experience displaces so many old experiences." The world,

Lawrence believes, "doesn’t fear a new idea. It can

69
pigeon-hole any idea. But it can’t pigeon-hole a real new
experience" (7). The Pilgrim Fathers also forced themselves
not to hear the ”invisible winds” rising within their
unconscious selves carry them "as they carry swarms of
locusts." They also refused to acknowledge "that invisible
magnetism" of the spirit of place as it "brings the
migrating birds to their unforeknown goal." They simply
treated the New World as a place of refuge. Lawrence
characterizes this unconscious urge as "IT," and says:
That’s why the Pilgrim Fathers came to America,
then: and that’s why we come. Driven by IT. We
cannot see that invisible winds carry us, as they
carry swarms of locusts, that invisible magnetism
brings us as it brings the migrating birds to
their unforeknown goal. But it is so. We are the
marvellous choosers and deciders we think we are.
IT chooses for us, and decides for us. Unless, of
course, we are just escaped slaves, vulgarly
cocksure of our ready-made destiny. But if we
are living people in touch with the source, IT
drives us and defédes us. We are free only so
long as we obey. (13)
Instead of relating to this unconscious urge as promptings
inaugurating a new experience heralding ”positive freedom,”
they imposed on their pilgrimage a negative meaning--"to get
away from everything they are and have been" (Studies 9).
Lawrence, therefore, believes that American literature
and culture should not be interpreted merely "in terms of
likeness and oneness" with the literature of Europe. It
acquires an "alien quality” because it is the expression of
a new "race ides" in which the European "race experience is

surpassed and exceeded," an encounter actuated by the

unconscious yearning for a "change in the way of experience,

70

a change in being" (The_Synheiie_nesning 16-17).
Unfortunately, Lawrence says, this craving remains
unrealized because it is always throttled by the ”conscious
American motive," of "breaking away from all dominion." In
commissioning the American ideal of democracy primarily as
”the tool with which the old master of Europe, the European
spirit, is undermined," and finally destroyed, American
culture has perpetuated a "negative ideal of democracy" and
failed to discover "the deepest whole self of man, the self
in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness." Lawrence
exhorts students of American literature and culture to rip
through this "false dawn” of American consciousness (Studies
13-14). He advises them unravel the ”unborn homunculus” (6)
by pulling the "democratic and idealistic clothes off
American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body
of IT underneath" (14).17

This emphasis on the individual attaining a selfhood
known to the individual alone is the basis of Lawrence’s
concept of community--the living fraternity born out of the
vitality of relationship, rather than out of a psyche torn
between the demands of inherited ideas on the one hand, and
those of spontaneity, on the other. Raymond Williams
remarks that the "instinct of community" was "vital” in the
thinking of Lawrence, ”deeper and stronger, he argued, than
even the sexual instinct” (205). In his essays on American
literature, he is searching for a community growing out of

such vital relationships emerging through a living

71

discourse. A community needs a place to grow in freedom,
and the Pilgrim Fathers appeared to have been driven exactly
to such a place--one untouched by, what Lawrence considers,
the decadence of old Europe. History provided America the
opportunity to revitalize Europe by offering it an
alternative culture based on a new relatedness between them
and the New World. However, since they were always haunted
by the burden of their European past, they floundered.
Their desire to break away from Europe rather than to move
forward toward a new freedom, led them to establish a
culture which partook much of Europe’s decadence. Van Wyck
Brooks comments approvingly on Lawrence’s analysis of
American cultural impasse:

It is because America is still unformed that

Americans tend to be overborne in Europe paying an

exaggerated tribute to the forms of others. Here

lies the grain of truth in D. H. Lawrence’s

statement that America is a ’spirit homeland’ not

yet a ’blood homeland’....Doesn’t any sort of
transplantation condemn them [Americans] still

further to a surface existence? (£rem_e_flriteris
Hendbeek 62)-

Donald E. Pease, too, agrees with Lawrence’s analysis
of American culture. In his examination of American
literature and culture of the 19th century, Pease quotes the
following excerpt from Studies:

Men are free when they are in a living homeland,
not when they are straying and breaking away. Men
are free when they are obeying some deep, inward
voice of religious belief. Obeying from within.
Men are free when they belong to a living,
organic, heiiegiug community, active in fulfilling
some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not
when they are escaping to some wild west. The
most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.

72

Men are freest when they are most unconscious of
freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains,

always was. (Studies 12)

Following Lawrence’s interpretation, Pease attempts to
discover in Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville and Poe
"forms of cultural agreement more lasting than the mere
opposition to a past sanctioned by the Revolutionary
mythos." He comments that this mythos ”produced citizens
who believed in nothing but opposition--to family,
environment, cultural antecedents, and even their former
selves." These writers "devised” in their work "visionary
compacts.” While the "Revolutionary mythos sanctioned a
notion of negative freedom, keeping the nation’s individuals
separate from one another," these writers "sanctioned terms
of agreement from the nation’s past--capable of bringing
together nation’s citizens in the present” (ix-x). The
thesis is clearly Lawrence’s, who characterizes ”the rhythm
of American art-activity” as a "dual” process: a
"disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness" and
the ”forming of a new consciousness underneath” (Studies
70). This process, Lawrence knows, is an excruciating
process: ”It is the shifting over from the old psyche to
something new, a displacement. And displacements hurt.
This hurts. So we try to tie it up, like a cut finger. Put
a rag round it” (Studies 8).

In classic American literature--in the works of
Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Fenimore

Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry

73
Dana, Jr., Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman--D. H. Lawrence
traces this process of culture formation.

Benjamin Franklin, Lawrence discovers, contributes the
least in creating a genuine American culture. His emphasis
on the perfectibility of man is Franklin’s effort to convert
the "forest" of man’s soul into "a neat back garden. And
we’ve all got to fit into his kitchen garden scheme of
things” (Studies 16-17). Richard D. Mills comments that
Lawrence’s "wild soliloquy" about Benjamin Franklin shows
that he "did not know Franklin at all" (143). Mills
mentions that recent scholarship has presented "the most
complete presentation of the man, certainly mirrored the
theme of versatility and indicated the vastness of
Franklin’s amazing career” (143). Mills’ comment on
Lawrence’s essay, however, is one-sided, because Mills
ignores Lawrence’s admiration for Franklin’s "sturdy courage
first of all, then his sagacity, then his glimpsing into the
thunders of electricity, then his commonsense humour.” All
these, Lawrence considers, "qualities of a great man," but
Franklin could never "become more than a great citizen”
(Studies 19). He remained until the end a pioneer, trying
to ’cultivate’ the land, instead of confronting it in its
naked rawness. He failed to relate with the great diversity
which the New World presented to the American. Lawrence
quotes from Franklin’s observations about Indians who he

visited to settle some dispute:

74
And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to
extirpate these savages in order to make room for
the cultivators of the earth, it seems not
improbable that rum may not be the appointed

means. It has already annihilated all the tribes
who formerly inhabited all the seacoast. (qtd. in

Studies 21)

Lawrence comments that Benjamin Franklin "in his
sagacity, knew that the breaking of the old world was a long
process." In the "depths of his own underconsciousness [he]
hated England, [he] hated Europe, [he] hated the whole
corpus of the European being." However, without going
through a ”gradual shedding," which is a ”long and
half-secret process" (Studies 25-26), Franklin wanted to be
an American. Robert B. Sayre’s comments that Franklin
"translated” life as a series of "dramatic sense ’acts,’
roles to some degree thrust upon him but also consciously
selected and therefore open to whatever interpretations he
wished to make of them” (23). Sayre’s belief is very
similar to what Lawrence has to say about Franklin. We
never see the real Franklin, because, as Phillip Abbott
observes, he always appears as a "hustler," and "appearance
is really the only persona that Franklin ever reveals" (32).
Abbot’s portrayal of Franklin substantiates the kind of
community Franklin’s practical wisdom would provide for the
rising nation:

The hustler views society at large as a
huge,powerful but lumbering giant that can be
tricked and fooled. Society (or at least basic
aspects of it) is exploitative and hypocritical.
This belief provides the hustler with his

rationalization for his own activities . . . .
Betrayal or deceit is one of hustler’s basic

75
fears. I think this concern produces a peculiar
conception of community for the hustler, and a
particular style of political activity as well.
(35)

This "theoretic and materialistic concept" of
relationships that Franklin sees as the basis of the new
society, according to D. H. Lawrence, renders Franklin "in
the main a recreant European” (Studies 26). Echoing D. H.
Lawrence, Key Seymour House summarizes Franklin’s message to
Americans: "Work, you free slaves, work" (170).

Franklin, in Lawrence’s mind, serves not as an example
of the dual rhythm of American art-activity, but as the
"apotheosis of the ego." It is the ego, Lawrence believes,
is our "unconscious undoing," because it assures us that
"which we are is absolute. There is no adding to it, no
superseding this accomplished self. It is final and
universal. All that remains is thoroughly to explore it”
(”The Crown" 391). From Benjamin Franklin, the "real
practical prototype of the American,” Lawrence moves to
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who, because of his
idealization of labor and his belief in the sweetness and
purity of nature, strikes Lawrence as the "emotional”
prototype (Studies 29) of the American.

After a long period of obscurity,18 Ludwig Lewisohn
resurrected the almost forgotten Letters_rrem_eh_hmeriesn
Earner, and wrote an introduction to Letters, published in
1904, for the first time after the eighteenth century.

Lawrence’s admiration for Crevecouer goes to the extent to

76
of discovering in him a spirit very much like his own. It
is not as the earliest singer of the American dream, as
Lewisohn saw him, that ”the French-born American author was
a predecessor for Lawrence (Clark 274). Lawrence found in
Crevecouer the first symptoms of the American psyche
searching for a new meaning in the American landscape--a
landscape waiting to be translated into a new culture.
Crevecouer does ”not put NATURE in his pocket, as Benjamin
put the Human Being" (Studies 30). The artist in
Crevecouer, ”intellectualizes on top, and his dark
under-consciousness goes on contradicting him beneath."
This internal dialectic raises him into an artist, "Franklin
isn’t anything" (31). Crevecouer’s engagement with the
American Spirit of Place helps him confront the multifaced
challenge American culture faced in its struggle to shed its
negative quest to be "masterless" and move toward a positive
act of creation. Although at times he listened to the
"sweet-and-pureness" of Nature, Crevecouer recognized
diversity and conflict. Lawrence cherishes those moments in
Crevecouer when he sings in "the voice of the artist in
contrast to the voice of the ideal turtle" (30-32).

This emphasis on the diverse and complex nature of the
process of culture formation, almost absent from the
discussion of American literature and culture of his
contemporaries, is Lawrence’s lasting contribution to a
proper understanding of the dilemma America has faced and is

still facing. The spirit of the land demands a recognition

77

of diversity, but this urge is always hampered by our
obsession with preconceived ideals of oneness and
conformity. Crevecouer, despite his idealization of the
American landscape, could discern a new spirit in the new
continent. True to his credo of "saving the American tale
from the American artist” (Studies 9), Lawrence perceives in
Crevecouer’s Letters the idealist putting over ”a lot of
stuff about nature and the noble savage and the innocence of
toil, etc., etc. Blarney!”- However, when Crevecouer the
artist enters with ”glimpses of actual nature, not writ
large," and describes the lower forms of natural life like
"insects, snakes and birds, he glimpses in their own
mystery, their own pristine being. And straightway gives
the lie to Innocent Nature" (Studies 31). Lawrence admires
this quality in Crevecouer in the American farmer’s
description of the fight between a swallow and a wren for
the possession of their nest, and also his letter, "On
Snakes: and on the Humming Bird.” Commenting on
Crevecouer’s description of the fight between the two birds,
Lawrence wrote in the original version of his essay:

This event Crevecouer watches with full delight.

He takes no sides and feels no pangs. We can

imagine Franklin, in a similar case, applying

justice. But Crevecouer only delights in the

little living drama, watching the mysterious
nature of birds asserting itself in arrogance and

pugnacity- (W 48-49)
It is this evocation of the spirit of conflict, rather

than the idealization of the harmony, purity, and sweetness

of the natural world, that Lawrence admires in Crevecouer.

78
Crevecouer’s question, "Where did that little bird learn
that spirit of injustice? It is not endowed with what we
term reason" (W 34-35).
convinces Lawrence that the artist in Crevecouer was capable
of breaking through the straitjacket of ideas and had the
capacity to marvel at nature’s mystery and mindlessness--its
otherness-

Lawrence bears a special relation to Crevecouer’s
letter on the hummingbird.20 Their similar perception of
the spirit of the new continent is symbolized by the
hummingbird. The presence of this spirit makes Lawrence
wonder why, despite such examples of artists in classic
American literature whose art-speech unconsciously
establishes a spontaneous relationship with the new land, we
have failed to penetrate the veneer of imitative idealism
that lies so thick on the surface. In addition to the
hummingbirds, Lawrence sees in Crevecouer’s description of
the fight between two snakes his ability not only to
perceive but also to articulate and welcome the eternal
opposition between irreconcilable forces that manifests
itself in creation. It is this consciousness, rather than a
blind quest for conformity, that alone can lead to
spontaneous human relationships in a culture teeming with
irreconcilables. Lawrence was the first critic to discover
the singer of the American dream in his new role as a
catalyst of a new consciousness, articulating the conflict

of dream and reality. Following D. H. Lawrence, James C.

79
Mohr criticizes the over-simplified view of Crevecouer as
idealizing American society, and observes:
[In Crevecouer] the larger pattern is almost
circular and involves not simply the fulfillment
of social ideals but their failure as well. The
idyllic image of America which Crevecouer develops
during the first eight letters of his book becomes
the dream against which the intensity of later
disillusionment is measured. (355)

Lawrence, in his essay on Benjamin Franklin, quoted
Franklin as saying that it was "the design of providence to
extirpate these savages in order to make room for the
cultivators of the earth" (Studies 21). This is one extreme
of the American attitude to the Red Indian. The other
extreme Lawrence finds illustrated in the last letter of
Crevecouer. In this letter Crevecouer admires their ease,
decency, and simple manners, and romanticizes them.

Lawrence believes that Crevecouer does so because he is
”determined to know the savage way of life, to his own
nindis satisfaction. So he just faked the last Letters. A
sort of wish-fulfillment" (Studies 36). However, Lawrence
misunderstands Crevecouer’s use of the Red Indian by calling
it overintellectualized.

E. A. Rapping is closer to the truth in his remark that
Crevecouer employs the Indian, not to ”represent a real
opinion, ”but as a fictitious model of relief," and ”as a
contrast in his treatment of America" (718). In fact,
Crevecouer, like Lawrence, sees the salvation of the new

culture in moving west, away from the center of

civilization.21 What made Lawrence look westward toward

80
America during the war was exactly what Crevecouer was
searching for by moving toward the western frontier during
the revolutionary turmoil in America. Richard Slotkin
explains Crevecouer’s proclivity for moving westward in
terms Lawrence would approve:
Crevecouer employs this chapter as the ultimate
characterizing stroke in his portrait of the
American farmer. His response to the evils of
civilization is not to withdraw behind the hedge
of civilization: rather his sufferings determine
him to move still more deeply into the land. The
solution to the problems and distresses of living

in a wildness America is, not a return to Europe,
but a move outward to a frontier less trammeled by

Europe and civilization. (Begeneretien 264)
Slotkin quite succinctly supports Lawrence’s thesis that

American culture, because it finds the promptings of its
dark unconscious so uncomfortable, must not turn back to
Europe for succor, but should instead delve deeper into the
true American psyche, represented by the American wild.
Charles Feidelson, Jr., in Symheiism_shd_hmeriesn
Litereture, considers symbolism as ”one of the most
sophisticated movements in literary history," a mode of
expression already being employed by the nineteenth-century
American writers. However, Feidelson traces the roots of
symbolism mainly to the puritan "sensibility" and puritan
”methodology" (4). Lawrence is the first critic who
discovers the symbolic mode in Crevecouer, a writer not
within the puritan tradition. Crevecouer, Lawrence says,

though "affecting a naive simplicity, [is] in reality most
sophisticated" (The_§xmbelie_neening 54)-

81
Like Lawrence’s own, Crevecouer’s art-speech creates
"The greatest symbolic language of mankind, greater than any
esoteric symbolism." Making a distinction between ”the
art-symbol or art term [which] stands for a pure experience,
emotional and passional, spiritual and perceptual, all at
once," and ”the authorized symbol [which] stands always for
a thought or an idea, some mental concept" (18-19), Lawrence
attributes to Crevecouer the same unconscious process of
symbol creation Marcus Bewley later discovers in
Crevecouer’s description of a caged negro. Following
Lawrence, Bewley discovers in Crevecouer a writer to whose
age symbolism meant nothing, but who could still "slip the
leash of the external limitations imposed by the objective
data it describes, and, rising to a high imaginative level,
live in the mind with essentially symbolic life which is
intrinsically related to the facts it records." Giving
examples from Crevecouer’s letter on the negro, Bewley, as
Lawrence did, emphasizes the unconscious artist in
Crevecouer working on his description. Bewley’s distinction
between the two kinds of symbolism is typically Laurentian:
But Crevecouer was creating a symbol without
knowing it. It is not the fact that arrests us,
but the way he recreated in language. The
language is not merely in touch with the immediate
tragedy: it has its roots in a reality that was
vaster than Crevecouer was consciously aware of.
From the implicitly ironic interplay between his
polite and measured prose reflecting the illusion
of external order in the universe, and the
hideous, torturing fact of the caged negro, there
open the richest symbolic perspectives. This kind

of symbolism, so deeply immersed in the reality of
human experience, is worth more, it seems to me,

82

than a symbolism which is only interested in

intellectual method, and whose roots are cut off

from life. (105-106)

It is through Benjamin Franklin and Crevecouer that
D. H. Lawrence reaches James Fenimore Cooper, and locates in
his works too the same tension between the conscious and the
unconscious artist that American literary criticism was to
explore later as a distinguishing mark of American
literature. One of the earliest critics to make a serious
effort to bring the Red Indian within the gambit of American
literary and cultural tradition, Lawrence equates the native
American with the "daimon, or demon, of America." In the
"desire to extirpate the Indian," on the one side, and the
”contradictory desire to glorify him," Lawrence finds the
distinguishing feature of the American relationship to this
spirit of place (Studies 41). While Franklin, who had no
trace of the artist in him, had "a specious little equation
in providential mathematics: Rum + Savage = 0” (40), the
artist in Cooper weaves a "wish fulfillment" fantasy around
the Red Indian, "some strange atonement: expiation and
oneing" (43).
In Cooper’s White novels, Heueusrd_heuhd, Eye

Effinghem. Tbe_§px. and The_£ilet. Cooper is pro-occupied
with the conscious American obsession with the inherited

ideals of democracy and equality. These novels, in
Lawrence’s view, are "only historically and sardonically
interesting." Cooper’s characters in these novels "are all

pinned down by some social pin, and buzzing away in social

83
importance or friction, round and round on the pin” (48).22
They never become real human beings. This is the Cooper of
"Notions of the Americans,” who believes that the
"literature of England and that of America must be fashioned
after the same models." Cooper writes:
The second obstacle against which American
literature has to contend is in the poverty of
materials. There is scarcely an ore which
contributes to the wealth of the author, that is
found here, in veins as in Europe. There are no
annals for the historian: no follies (beyond the
most vulgar and common place) for the satirist: no
manners for the dramatist: no obscure fictions for
the writer of romance: no gross and hardy offences
against decorum for the moralist: nor any of the
rich artificial auxiliaries. (773)
In Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, however, Lawrence
is the first critic to discover evidence that Cooper was not
aware, as most American writers are not, of the infinite
creative power lying dormant in the artist’s unconscious
self. This power of the unconscious, which links the artist
to the spirit of place, more than counterbalances, according
to Lawrence, the apparently overwhelming poverty of material
Cooper and other American artists often complained about.
By discovering this unknown quality in Cooper, D. H.
Lawrence inaugurated a new chapter in the appreciation of
Cooper’s writings. Cooper was not regarded highly as an
artist before Lawrence wrote his essays on American
literature. Armin Arnold, in The_Symheiie_heenihg, quotes
from a talk by T. S. Eliot at the University of Washington

on July 9, 1953, in which even Eliot, a severe critic of

Lawrence, concedes:

84
Cooper has suffered, like Walter Scott, from being
read in early youth, and by many people never read
again: it remained for D. H. Lawrence who
discovered Cooper later in life, to write probably
the most brilliant of critical essays on him.
(62)

In their introduction to a selection of Cooper
criticism, George Dekker and John P. McWilliams observe that
"appreciation of Cooper’s achievement couldn’t get very far
until it found a critic of Romantic genius who was in touch
with Freud on the one hand and with Crevecouer on the
other.” D. H. Lawrence’s essays are "revolutionary in their
reading of Cooper as proper stuffed shirt," who "at deepest
and largely unconscious levels, was a symbolist poet
expressing the racial myth of America." According to these
critcs, Lawrence’s essays have been more influential in
reawakening "serious interest in Cooper than any other
critical study,” both because of "their own direct impact on
non-specialist readers and through their patent influence on
such widely read critics as Henry Nash Smith, Leslie
Fiedler, and R. W. B. Lewis" (48-51).

The misunderstanding about Cooper’s stature as a
classic in American literature stemmed mainly from critics
like Mark Twain, Frank Norris and Yvor Winters who attempted
to place him in a realistic tradition. Edmund Wilson
remarks that Twain’s essay, "Fenimore Cooper’s Literary
Offenses" and Norris’ "An American School of Fiction?" both
”miss the point about Cooper." The Leatherstocking Tales,

according to Wilson, "have nothing to do with either Mark

85

Twain’s or Norris’ kind of realism." He believes that
Lawrence appreciates Cooper better when he treats his
novels, not as ”a picture of actual life, but a kind of
romantic myth like the stories of Poe, Melville, and
Hawthorne" (The_Sheek 581). Stanley Edgar Hyman criticizes
Yvor Winters’ efforts "to establish Cooper as a realistic
writer, defending the factual accuracy of such things as the
feats in the Leatherstocking Tales." Hyman supports D. H.
Lawrence belief that "the only possible basis for treating
Cooper with any seriousness is as a mythmaker” (58-59).
Leslie Fiedler accepts Lawrence’s ”immensely illuminating”
interpretation of Leatherstocking tales as ”the simplest
kind of wish-fulfillment fantasies" (Lexe_end_nesth
196-197). A. N. Kaul attributes the truth in Lawrence’s
assessment of Cooper to "his usual apocalyptic insight”
(137).23 Michael Colacurcio is right in considering
Lawrence’s study of Cooper as a "classic” example of his
influence on American criticism:

Lawrence’s judgement that the most significant

meanings of the Leethersteehihg series arise not
so much from the conscious thematic implications

of the individual works as from the epic sweep or
mythic progress of the whole project has become
something like dogma. 4 (492)

Key Seymour House comments that D. H. Lawrence’s essay
on Cooper has been helpful because of Lawrence’s ”ability to
sense that the process of character formation was
complicated. Old forms had to be sloughed even while a new

man was forming himself underneath" (7). This remark

86

captures the true spirit of Lawrence’s essays. His main
concern in his survey of American literature, as already
emphasized, is not to attempt their critical evaluation on
traditional lines, but to find in them these positives that
give a new meaning to human relatedness. L. D. Clark
observes, in "Lawrence and the American Indian," that
Lawrence through ”the symbolic configuration of white man,
red man and spirit of place" was visualizing a new community
(315), which had no option but to lay the foundation of the
future American culture on the principles of diversity.
Lawrence believes that "the lovely American landscape is the
pure landscape of futurity: not of our present factory-
smoked futurity, but of the true future of the as yet
unborn, or scarcely born, race of Americans” (The_Syuheiie
Meshing 111). Lawrence identifies Cooper’s literary efforts
with this new cultural and historical enterprise. In Cooper
American literature glimpses the first clear evidence of the
roots of a new community emerging--a community founded on a
new historical paradigm, on a movement from old age to youth
rather than progressively from youth to old age:

The Leatherstocking novels create the myth of this

new relation. And they go backwards, from old age

to golden youth. That is the true myth of

America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and

writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual

sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.

It is the myth of America. (Studies 60)

Lawrence, in all his writings of this period, attempts

a reconciliation between birth and death, ecstasy and pain,

creation and corruption. In the Cooper essay, when Lawrence

87

declares that the "essential American soul is hard, isolate,
stoic, and a killer” (68), he is hinting at the emergence of
a culture not trying to impose its own image on others
through the assimilation of "the grinning, unappeased
aboriginal demons,” because the ”white man’s spirit can
never become as the red man’s spirit. It doesn’t want to.
But it can cease to be the opposite and negative of the red
man’s spirit," by opening out ”a new great area of
consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit
too." This is possible only by sloughing through the old
consciousness which has ”become a tight-fitting prison to
us, in which we are going rotten” (56-58). Following
Lawrence closely, David W. Noble remarks that Lawrence’s
interpretation was "at once exact, poetic, and inimitable"
delineation of the myth of America in Cooper who, ”it would
appear, is aware that the myth is of European origin," but
"in his unconscious self he also knows that the myth must be
transformed to answer the demands of history. The myth is a
prisoner of time: it is a prisoner of the historical culture
which gave it birth." The new myth, therefore, Noble
believes, instead of creating a world of harmony, must play
a different drama in the newly-discovered Eden--a drama
that depends on "disharmony” (420-421).

Edgar Allan Poe’s contribution to the formation of the
emerging American culture, in Lawrence’s opinion, is of a
different nature. Poe ”has no truck with Indians or Nature.

He makes no bones about Red Brothers and Wigwams," and is

88
"absolutely concerned with the disintegration processes of
his own psyche" (Studies 70). Almost twenty years before
the publication of Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edger_hiisn_zeer_h
gritieei_siegrephy (1941) which seriously discussed Poe as
an artist, D. H. Lawrence was shedding a new light on Poe’s
place not only in American literature but also in the
formation of the new American culture. It is in the context
of Lawrence’s own preoccupation during this period to
reconcile death and pain into an ecstasy that his acute
insight in Poe’s art can be fully appreciated. Artists like
Poe and Baudelaire, according to Mary Freeman, exploit this
technique as "a literary stock-in-trade." Lawrence,
however, considers Poe’s kind of "romantic sensationalism,"
this "gratification from incongruity," a destructive rather
than a creative process (74). Lawrence believes in the
coming together of opposites to create a sense of wholeness.
In his earlier comments on Poe’s art in his essay, ”The
Crown," noticing that Poe’s desire of identification of love
leads to disintegration, Lawrence observes:
And then, when a man seeks a woman, he seeks not a
consummation in union, but a frictional reduction.
He seeks to plunge his compound flesh into the
cold acid that will reduce him, in supreme sensual
experience, down to his parts . . . . His
cruelty-lust is directed almost as much against
himself as against his victim . . . . He is
immersing himself within a keen, fierce, terrible
reducing agent. This is true of the hero in Edgar
Allan Poe’s tales, "Ligeia," or "The Fall of the
House of Usher.” The man seeks his own
sensational reduction, but he disintegrates the

woman even more, in the name of love. In the name
of love, what horrors men perpetrate, and are

applauded! (W 394) -

89
Love in Poe is not only ”terribly obscene,” but is
also ”a frictional, destructive force” (Studies 73). In
him, "the mystic, spontaneous self is replaced by the
self-consuming ego." In this reductive process, the
individual becomes "a unit of will rather than a unit of
being." Love is reduced to ”an electric attraction rather
than a communion between self and self." The man becomes "a
lodestone, the woman is the soft metal. Each draws the
other mechanically." They both press one another
"intolerably till one is bound to disappear: one or both"
(WW 118-119) .

Richard Swigg says that Lawrence’s remark, in his
review of her_hsueieer, concerning the later Mark Twain’s
"bitter, almost mad-dog aversion from humanity" (Rheenix
238), is equally applicable to Poe (Swigg 192). In a way
both Lawrence and Poe were seeking to free their characters
from the hold of consciousness. David Halliburton says
that, in this attempt, Poe’s characters undergo a series of
changes, and this "process fulfills the requirements of a
Laurentian lapsing out through which the energies of being
are released from the hold of consciousness." This results
in the ”sloughing off [of] inessential ties--those of
family, for example--the lapsing individual moves toward
membership in a more essential unit, the primal couple"
(273). Greatly influenced by Lawrence’s reading of Poe,
Halliburton is, in fact, repeating what Lawrence considered

to be the substance of Poe’s largely negative, but

9O
indispensable prelude to any creative endeavor that would
encourage the movement of American culture toward a new
beginning. Poe accomplished the thankless task of breaking
down the old white psyche before a new relationship could
emerge:
Poe had a pretty bitter doom. Doomed to seethe
down his soul in a great continuous convulsion of
disintegration, and doomed to register the
process. And then doomed to be abused for it,
when he had performed some of the bitterest tasks
of human experience, that can be asked of a man.
Necessary tasks, too. For the human soul must
suffer its own disintegration, consciously, if
ever it is to survive. (Studies 70)
This is an extraordinary tribute, especially because it
comes at a time when, despite J . H. Ingram’s attempts to
rehabilitate Poe in his W
ehd_Qpihiens (1900), Poe’s literary reputation had not
recovered from the damage inflicted by Rev. R. W. Griswold’s
memoir.

However, it took almost a decade for Lawrence’s essay
on Poe to penetrate American literary criticism. Allen
Tate, in his address before the Poe Society of Baltimore in
1949, comments that "D. H. Lawrence was no doubt right in
describing as vampires his [Poe’s] women characters: the men
soon to join them as ’undead,’ have by some defect of the
moral will, made them so” ("Our Cousin, Mr. Poe" 42). Mario
Praz is another early critic to acknowledge the value of

Lawrence’s interpretation. Commenting on the similarity

between Poe and Baudelaire, Praz observes:

91
The tales of Poe, as D. H. Lawrence observed, are
always a symbolical, mythological translation of
the same thirst for unrealized love . . . and of
the desire for that complete fusion with the
beloved being which ends in vampirism. It is a
nervous ecstasy, which becomes localized in actual
genuine obsessions--the eyes of Ligeia, the teeth
of Berenice, a yearning for the absolute knowledge
which 53incides with annihilation and death"
(145).

Closely following Lawrence, Henry Levin comments that
Poe’s works are a good study of what Lawrence called the
"demonic side” of American literature. Levin agrees with
Lawrence’s description of Poe as an adventurer into vaults,
cellars and underground passages of the human mind (The
seuer_er_sieehhess 154). Richard Swigg almost repeats
Lawrence’s thesis on Poe’s contribution to the
disintegrative process as a necessary phase in the cultural
regeneration the new continent was seeking. Describing
Poe’s tales as "assertions of individualism" (191), Swigg
believes they "carry us directly to the psychological and
artistic dilemmas which, in less obvious ways, hinder the
attempts of Hawthorne, Melville, and Cooper to sustain an
authentic moral stability in their differing arts” (190).
Swigg also agrees with Lawrence’s emphasis on the symbolic
significance of Poe’s tales which substitute "patterns of
arabesque deadness in place of the real mysteries of life
and spontaneity," and seek to find "health by traversing the
pathways of disintegration" (195). Herold Kaplan, who

discusses the nineteenth-century American literature

primarily in its cultural context, on lines suggested by

92
Lawrence, characterizes Lawrence’s essay on Poe as
"particularly rare and valuable" (113), because it
articulates the emergence of ”a new myth of America," which
strips away the old consciousness so that "the new man in a
new skin takes on life" (119).

In moving from Poe to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Sesriet_Letter, D. H. Lawrence rejoins the main currents of
classic American literature: "a disintegrating and sloughing
of the old consciousness" and the ”forming of a new
consciousness underneath" (Studies 70). When Lawrence
comments that the ”blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knew
disagreeable things in his inner soul,” but ”was careful to
send them out in disguise" he was not condemning Hawthorne
as a liar or a hypocrite, an accusation often hurled at
Lawrence’s interpretation. He was, in fact, underlining
the predicament all artists, including himself, face when
they tend to be overwhelmed by their own conscious persona,
and thereby fail to hear the promptings of their unconscious
as contained in their "art speech.” It is perhaps this
misunderstanding of Lawrence’s comment that has been
responsible for the rather slow penetration of his views in
in Hawthorne criticism. Lydia Blanchard observes that
although "Lawrence’s central position in Cooper and Whitman
studies is well established, his influence on our
interpretation of Hawthorne is more recent, "because critics
have read The_Seeriet_Letter "with different generic

expectations, seeing the text as romance or novel rather

93
than satire." Blanchard mentions critics like Harry Levin ,
James Mellows and Richard Harter Fogle who see the novel
merely as a study of original sin, a story of human weakness

and sorrow (169-170). In his recent work, gentexts_rer

14.1!0q,1.'!1 yr ' 3 '0 I, ‘.,e 91 '0 : e- Oe:.,;::

shd_uiesure_ih_hmeriesn_Litereture, Milton R. Stern comments
that "conservative Hawthorne’s choice of vocation . . .
influenced his narrative technique." Hawthorne, in choosing
to become a writer of romances, "challenged the priorities
of his society.” Because he did not follow a ”manly"
vocation, ”he felt a psychological displacement, a
withholding of allegiance.” Therefore, Hawthorne’s ”triple
citizenship in the realms of his vocation, his ideology, and
his utopia was a source of psychic disruption, a citizenship
in which Hawthorne constantly belonged somewhere else”
(ix-x). In substance, Stern discovers the same "duplicity"
that Lawrence finds in Hawthorne’s fiction.

Lawrence is quick to see in Hawthorne’s novel "not
a pleasant pretty romance," but "a sort of parable, an
earthly story with a hellish meaning" (Studies 89). He
finds Dimmesdale committing the sin of "self-watching,
self-consciousness. The sin, and the doom. Dirty
understanding” (Studies 91). Dimmesdale’s conduct "is a
form of masturbation." He is out to "get a mental grip on
his body. And since he can’t quite manage it with the mind,
witness his fall--he will give it what for, with whips. His

will shall Tush his body" (96). Lawrence sees Hawthorne,

94

the unconscious satirist in him, not aiming at eliciting
sympathy for the exaggerated suffering of Dimmesdale, but a
conduct to be ridiculed. However, the conscious artist in
Hawthorne appears to be sympathetic to Dimmesdale’s torment
as a form of atonement. Lawrence, therefore, pulls
Hawthorne’s novel out of its limited context as an attack on
Puritanism, and places it into its wider cultural context.

Perhaps the best part of Lawrence’s essay on Hawthorne
is his analysis of Hester’s character, not as Hawthorne’s
conscious artistry portrayed it, but as she is within her
unconscious self. Lawrence underlines her ”demoniacal
self-will,” not her humility, and her basic aversion from
both lover and child, not her profound sacrifices for them.
This renders The_Seeriet_Letter, an unconscious satire, "the
most colossal satire ever penned," of nineteenth-century
American life. ”Hester Prynne,” according to Lawrence, ”is
the great nemesis of woman. She is the KNOWING Ligeia risen
diabolic from the grave. Having her own back.
UNDERSTANDING" (Studies 90-95). This is possible only
because Dimmesdale has lost his manliness by offering his
beliefs to her.26

Lawrence had touched on this theme of relationships as
the basis of culture formation in his essays on Cooper and
Poe. In the Leatherstocking Tales, Judith represents ”the
dark, fearless, passionate" woman, and Hetty the ”frail and
innocent . . . white lily" kind of woman. Judith tries to

master the "quiet, reserved, unmastered Deerslayer," who

95
refuses to be mastered (67). It is this contest of wills
between the sexes, Lawrence believes, that characterizes
today’s man-woman relationships. Instead of nourishing each
other’s identity, and entering into a genuine relatedness,
the clash between sensuality and spirituality goes on until
it reaches fatal proportions in the stories of Poe. Here,
"it is pushed to extremes in a battle of wills between the
lovers” (74). The "thwarted will," returns "for vengeance
on life" (81), as a vampire to feed on the living.

D. H. Lawrence has often been accused of treating women
as inferior to men. However, Mary Freeman points out that
"women in Lawrence’s life and books are not quenched
inferior beings, but usually energetic, often clever, always
vital persons, equal matches for Lawrentian males. In many
cases they dominate the men around them” (198). It is true
that Lawrence makes a distinction between men and women.

But this distinction is not the same as between two egos.

It is, rather, between two autonomous individuals, and
serves as the basis of a true relationship. Today,
according to Lawrence, man-woman relationship is reduced to
”a terrific struggle and conflict of the two oppopsing egos
or individualities . . . the inevitable result of trying to
snatch an intensified individuality out of the mutual flame"
(”. . . Love Was Once a Little Boy" 445). Lawrence believes
that our education continues to "make the sexes alike,
destroying the original individuality of the blood, to
substitute for it this dreary individuality of the ego”

96

(454). This separateness between men and women, Lawrence
says, is because of ”greater and greater abstraction from
the physical, towards a further and further physical
separateness between men and women, and between individual
and individual" ("Men Must Work and Woman as Well" 589).
Because Lawrence’s view on women can easily be
misrepresented, it is not easy to read his essay on The
Seeriet_Letter as a feminist tract. However, Lydia
Blanchard says that Nina Baym, in her "seminal book," The
W (1976). reads W
in relation to gender problems, and her findings are
"consistent with Lawrence’s identification of the central
issues in the novel." Baym, like Lawrence, believes that
"Dimmesdale’s offense is to have repudiated patriarchal rule
by acknowledging Hester’s matriarchal dominion.” Hawthorne’s
world, according to Baym, consists of "strong women and weak
men." Although Baym agrees with Lawrence’s view of
Dimmesdale’s behavior as ”hypocritical," she does not
subscribe to Lawrence’s assessment of Hester. Blanchard,
however, observes: "These differences are clearly important,
but less important than the belief Baym and Lawrence share
that Hawthorne writes as a feminist with secular, gender
related, and political concerns" (170-172).

With Richard Henry Dana’s Tue_1eers_flerere_the_hestr
D. H. Lawrence enters the romance of the sea. James M. Cox

is surprised that Dana’s work could ever "have been chosen

97

by D. H. Lawrence to appear in his extremely select list of
classic American literary works." Cox remarks that Dana
is largely ignored as an American writer even today and "of
the thousands and thousands of items on American writers and
writing, only four or five are devoted to him." The
obscurity in which Dana had fallen was mainly because he
came to be ”associated with the genteel tradition” (55-56).
Also, the revival of Melville, for which Lawrence was mainly
responsible, led to Dana being overshadowed (57). However,
Cox laments that, despite Lawrence’s success in
rediscovering Dana, whatever struck Lawrence about him in
his ”arresting chapter--and his treatment of Dana, like his
treatment of every writer in his remarkable book, is
arresting--no longer strikes anthologists" (55).27

Lawrence’s essays on Dana and Melville show that
in these two writers "the human relationship is no longer
the chief interest. The sea enters as a great protagonist"
("The Two Principles," The_Symheiie_heening 175). Lawrence
interprets Dana’s work as the beginning of the great
American experience of trying to establish rapport with the
sea, after artists like Thomas Hardy, Tolstoi and Verga in
the Old World and American writers in the New world had
failed to establish a passionate relationship with the soil,
Dana’s attempt was both ”the greatest trial. And the most
vivid failure”-- a great trial because Dana "turned to the
sea, the naked mother," and an equally great failure because

he also aimed at knowing the sea and forgot that "KNOWING

98

and BEING are opposite, antagonistic states. The more you
know, exactly, the less you are, the more you are, in being,
the less you know" (Studies 115-116). Lawrence traces this
tension between being” and "knowing" in Dana’s style also, a
style both ”great and hopeless, the style of a perfect
tragic recorder.” However, Lawrence pays an unusual tribute
to Dana by quoting from his work more extensively than from
any other author he discusses in Studies. The flogging
scene in Dana’s narrative is considered pivotal by many
critics. But most critics read in this scene an urgent call
for the reform in the condition of seamen, especially the
abolition of flogging. Lawrence, however, looks at this
scene differently. He considers Dana, the idealist,
struggling with his other persona--the typical sailor who
"understood spontaneous passional morality, not the
artificial ethical” (128). Despite Dana’s idealism,
Lawrence admires his marvellous act of mediation between the
reader and the natural elements:

Dana’s small book is a very great book: contains a

great extreme of knowledge, knowledge of the great

element.

And after all, we have to know all before we can

know that knowing is nothing.

Imaginatively, we have to know all, even the

elemental waters. And know and know on, until

knowledge suddenly shrivels and we know that

forever we don’t know.

Then there is a sort of peace, and we can start

afresh, knowing we don’t know. (Studies 138)

To D. H. Lawrence also must go the credit of

rediscovering Herman Melville whose Moby Dick was dismissed

as simply ”a mad eloquent romance of the sea" by John Macy

99
(16), and whose writings were completely ignored by Van Wyck
Brooks who excluded Melville when he called ”Thoreau,
Emerson, Poe and Hawthorne as possessions for ever"
(Ameriee;s_geming;er;hge 44). Lawrence begins his study of
Herman Melville by characterizing this grossly underrated
writer as ”the greatest seer and poet" (139) of the sea in
his essay on Typee and ghee. Although himself criticized
for recommending a return to primitivism, it is significant
that Lawrence finds Melville’s quest to discover a primitive
paradise in the two novels as doomed from the very
beginning. Melville was trying to enact unconsciously "a
rebirth myth,” not knowing that "one cannot go back . . . .
Melville couldn’t go back....Back towards the past, savage
life. One cannot go back. It is one’s destiny inside one"
(Studies 144). Melville’s anguish is a byproduct of the
same psychic chasm Lawrence discovers in other American
writers: in his soul, Melville was "proud and savage," while
”in his mind and will he wanted the perfect fulfilment of
love" (150). Richard Chase accepts Lawrence’s analysis of
Melville’s anguish, but comments that it is "somewhat
limited by Lawrence’s own preoccupations.” Chase observes:
"It serves, however, to remind us of the personal anguish
that underlay Melville’s flights of thought and imagination-

-the anguish of a powerful need for love which he never

found” (HermezLHelJLille 8) -

100
In ghee, however, Lawrence discovers Melville’s
obsession with the ideal diminishing. Here lies the
fascination of this work:
Perhaps Melville is at his best, his happiest, in
ghee. For once he is really reckless. For once
he takes life as it comes. For once he is the

gallant rascally epicurean, eating the world like
a snipe, dirt and all baked into one henne_heuehe

(Studies 148-149).

Newton Arvin endorses Lawrence’s opinion of dues
(nermsn_heiyiiie 62). In all writings of Melville, Lawrence
discovers the same tension he found in other American
artists. In the "darkness of his soul,” Melville was "proud
and savage,” but in his conscious will "he wanted the
perfect fulfilment of love: he wanted the lovey-doveyness of
perfect mutual understanding" (Studies 150).

D. H. Lawrence’s essay on nehy_nieh starts with a
categorical declaration that the white whale is a symbol and
even Melville did not know what it symbolized. This view
synchronizes with Lawrence’s general attitude toward the
symbol as "a complex of emotional experience whose power is
to arouse the deep emotional self, and the dynamic self,
beyond comprehension" (”Introduction to The_prsgeh_er_the
Apeeeiypse" 296). However, in the Melville essay Lawrence
attempts an extended analysis of the nature of Melville’s
symbolism. In doing so, Lawrence again underlines the
duality of American art: superficially, Mehy_piek is a
fantastic sea romance, but symbolically it makes us aware of

the doom that awaits the over-conscious and intellectualized

101

white psyche. Lawrence sees uehy_nieh as a struggle between
the white whale, "the deepest blood-being,” our "deepest
blood-nature.” The Pequod, ”the ship of the white American
soul" is a "symbol of this civilized world of ours” (Studies
169). When the ship goes down, it takes with her "Negro and
Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good,
business-like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank the lot of them"
(169-170). Lewis Mumford, who published The_§eiden_ney in
1926 and his full-length study of Melville’s writings in
1929, is the first important American critic who follows
Lawrence’s interpretation in his own writings on Melville.
Mumford observes that it was Lawrence who first pointed out
that ”NQDY_DiQK is one of the first great mythologies to be
created in the modern world," and, instead of being a mere
sea romance or a whaling story, as previously believed, it
is a ”battle between the blood-consciousness of the white
race and its own abstract intellect, which attempts to hunt
and slay it” (fiermeh_ueiuiiie 132). Mumford, very much like
Lawrence, views Moby Dick as "the external force of Nature
and Destiny," and not ”the kindly, milk-fed Absolute, in
which all conflicts are reconciled and all contradictions
united into a higher kind of knowledge” (The_§eiden_psy
74-75).

Lawrence gives a detailed analysis of two chapters--
"The Grand Armada,” which Lawrence calls "the most

stupendous chapter," and "The Cassock," the "oldest piece of

phallicism in all the world’s literature" (Studies 163-164).

102
H. P. Vincent points out that ”ninety percent of Melville’s
readers miss entirely the meaning of ’The Cassock’." Vincent
adds that before the full significance of this chapter can
be properly explained, "one must accept D. H. Lawrence’s
recognition of it as one of the greatest pieces of
phallicism in all literature" (328). Eric J. Sundquist
remarks that Lawrence’s view that NQhY_Di£K is an "assault
on the last phallic being of the white man" may be one of
the many ”plausible readings," and concedes that even
"Melville might have taken it that way” (145). Lawrence
demands a special critical aptitude in the reading of fishy
high, a recognition of two separate yet artistically
integrated strains:
As a soul history, it makes one angry. As a sea
yarn, it is marvellous: there is always something
a bit over the mark, in sea yarns. Should be.
Then again the masking up of actual seaman’s
experience with sonorous mysticism sometimes gets
on one’s nerves. And again, as a revelation of
destiny the book is too deep even for sorrow.
Profound beyond feeling. (Studies 157)

H. Bruce Franklin, in ”hehy_pieh: An Egyptian Myth
Incarnate,” comments on Melville’s presentation of the Whale
as more and more ”qualified and equivocated even more," and
says that "this equivocation lies at the heart of Mehy_pieh,
partly because the heart of uehy_piek is the central mystery
in a world of mysteries." Explaining Melville’s use of the
Egyptian myth of the struggle between Osiris and Typhon,
Franklin identifies Ahab with Osiris, the sun god, and

comments on "the symbolic identity of the storm and the

103

whale,” the 'pre-adamite' leviathan, representing the dark
forces of nature which our mind has always considered
malignant and tried to destroy (53-98). Although different
in details, Franklin’s interpretation does follow Lawrence’s
belief that Melville’s work is ”a book of esoteric symbolism
of profound significance" (Studies 168). A. N. Kaul quotes
Lawrence’s view of Melville as an apt description of
Melville’s struggle as an artist:

Melville had to fight, fight against the existing

world, against his own very self. Only he would

never quite put the knife in the heart of his

paradisal ideal. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen,

love should be a fulfilment, and life should be a
thing of bliss. That was his fixed ideal. Fata

Morgana. (Studies 148)

A. N. Kaul remarks that Lawrence’s interpretation of
Melville’s writings is equally helpful in understanding the
”singular absence of the earlier hopefulness” in Melville’s
work after NQDY_DIQB- Kaul comments that even if we do not
follow "D. H. Lawrence in interpreting the Pequod as the
’symbol of this civilized world of ours,’ it is true that
the tales which follow its catastrophe are the tales of a
civilization that has floundered” (275).

It is this ship of American civilization, according to
D. H. Lawrence, that Whitman salvages by tracking down Moby
Dick, and finally capturing it: "The pure sensual body of
man, at its deepest remoteness and intensity, this is the
White Whale. And this is what Whitman captures" (The

Syuheiie_heehihg 259-260). However, the shadow of the
Pequod, with her souls in possession of "their ego and their

104
will” and ”the machine-manipulating body" (Studies 171),
busy with its mechanical chores, is hard to shake off, and
still pursue Whitman. Lawrence is critical of this
Whitman--the Whitman of ”Post-Mortem effects,” the prophet
of "merging," bent upon "shuffling identities” in order to
turn one into all and all into one, “all helplessly hurtling
together into one snowball" (Studies 171-172).

Gay W. Allen remarks that Lawrence’s savage attack on
Whitman’s ”mystical doctrine was wholly new in biography and
criticism of him" (52). Roy Harvey Pearce supports
Lawrence’s interpretation, and says that perhaps Whitman
himself felt the same way about his poetry as Lawrence.
Pearce gives examples from Whitman’s 1960 revision of his
poems to show how correct Lawrence was when he said that
Whitman mentalized his poems (105-106). Lawrence says that
Whitman’s desire for merging takes him to woman, ”always
wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or
other," and when woman becomes inadequate, Whitman sings of
man merging with man in comradeship.

Whitman’s greatness, Lawrence finds, ultimately rests
on the "last steps" he took and looked over "into death.”
It is as a poet of death that Whitman is important:

Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life.
A very great post-mortem poet, of the transitions

of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet
of the soul’s last shout and shriek, on the

confines of death- Auree_mei_le_deluue- (Studies
176-179).

105
Leslie A. Fiedler, after examining the views of critics like
Van Wyck Brooks and Vernon L. Parrington on Whitman,
discovers that it was D. H. Lawrence alone who objectively
commented on Whitman’s poetry and reached the right
conclusion. Lawrence saw in Leeues_et_§ress, ”beneath the
official enthusiasm and Fourth-of-July Americanism that wear
out too soon, a profound and complete involvement with
death.” It is this Whitman, Fiedler says, of the ”dusky
demon," who "Lawrence first clearly perceived, that seems
least equivocally attractive to the recent reader"
("American Literature" 179).

The Whitman Lawrence pays tribute to, therefore, is the
poet who ”was the first to smash the old moral conception
that he soul of man is something ’superior’ and ’above’ the
flesh. Even Emerson, Lawrence says, maintained this
"tiresome superiority" of the soul, and Melville also could
not get over it. Whitman was "the first heroic seer to
seize the soul by the scruff of her neck and plant her down
among the potsherds.” Whitman told the soul to "stay in the
flesh, Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in
the breast and womb . . . stay where you belong." This is
Whitman’s message of the ”Open Road,” the soul travelling in
"no known direction even. Only the soul remaining true to
herself in her going." On this "Open Road," Whitman forgets
love and remembers sympathy, not sympathy fer, as he felt
earlier, but sympathy uith. Whitman’s earlier message of

merging depends on his "partaking of the passion which was

106
in the soul of the negro slave.” The poet of the Open Road,
on the other hand, says:
I will not take over his wounds and his slavery to
myself. But I will help him fight the power that
enslaves him when he wants to be free, if he wants
my help, since I see in his face that he wants to
be free. But even when he is free, his soul has
many journeys down the open road, before it is a
free soul. (Studies 180-184)

Perhaps Leslie Fiedler fails to see these two different
Whitmans of Lawrence’s conception in his essay ”Images of
Walt Whitman" (1955). Fiedler says that Lawrence found in
Whitman "a final failure of nerve" (Ah_End_te_Tnheeenee
159). In fact, Lawrence’s essay rises to its final
crescendo in its evocation of Whitman’s message of a new
dream, of a new relationship. In Poe, Crevecouer, Cooper,
Hawthorne, Dana, and Melville, the schism between the
unconscious dream and conscious art failed to initiate a new
cultural paradigm. In Whitman, this dichotomy is finally
resolved, giving birth to a new vision for mankind. Like
the phoenix (Lawrence’s metaphor for true rebirth--life
rising out of its own ashes), Whitman, too, reaches the
”edge of Death,” but once ”purified of MERGING, purified of
MYSELF,” Whitman comes alive with "the exultant message of
American Democracy, of souls in the Open Road, full of glad
recognition, full of fierce readiness, full of the joy of
worship, when one soul sees a greater soul." Whitman’s
final message remains: "The only riches, the great souls"

(Studies 186-187). Lawrence’s Studies reach full circle

with the Whitman essay. He enters the classic American

107

literature believing "there is a new voice in the old
American classics" (7), and makes his exit not before he
discovers this new voice in Whitman.28

The above is largely a factual account of the extent to
which American critics incorporated the views of D. H.
Lawrence in their interpretation of American literature and
culture after the appearance of Studies_in_§isssie_hneriesn
Litersture. American critics welcomed D. H. Lawrence’s
assessment of American writers, because he identified new
areas of significance for these critics to explore. He
transformed the American past from the simple tale of
settling a new continent and establishing political and
social institutions to a place where an intense drama of the
complexity of human relationships was being played. The
challenge classic American writers faced was to codify this
ongoing quest for a relevant cultural paradigm. Lawrence
admires these writers for meeting this challenge. By
emphasizing our cultural ”ambivalence” in such areas as
human relationships, Lydia Blanchard observes, "Lawrence
seems to have found, in our classic American writers the
grounds for a continued mining of practical truth"
(171-172). Milton R. Stern, commenting on Lawrence’s
questioning of Hawthorne’s commitments observes that ever
since the appearance of Lawrence’s Studies, "modern
commentators have found that the questions remain a rich
source of critical inquiry" (n. 2, 16). The next chapter

seeks to explore the extent to which the Laurentian critical

108
idiom penetrates some of the significant literary and
cultural texts that appeared after the publication of

StudieLiLuleeeiLAmerieaLLiterature.

109
NOTES

1. The cult of the exile has become a familiar phenomenon
in the twentieth-century literary revolution. Graham Hough
observes: "Biographically speaking it is a revolution of
expatriates and exiles: and this is so before and quite
apart from the enforced exile brought about by revolution
and by war. It is an age of arbitrary migrants and
displacements. Henry James, in this as in other ways, is
the father of much in modern Anglo-American letters. Eliot
follows him in turning his back on the American scene and
ultimately adopting English nationality. Pound’s active
years were spent in London, Paris and Rapallo, and he was
never again in his own country until he re-entered it in
tragic and problematical circumstances after the last war.
Joyce deliberately elects a career of ’silence, exile and
cunning’, has no other theme but Dublin, yet writes of it in
memory, from Trieste, Zurich and Paris. Lawrence after
writing one great novel straight out of his native
experience spends the rest of his life in restless wandering
over the world, in search of somewhere to settle” (Tmege_snd

- . (London:
Duckworth, 1960: 67-68).

2. Knud Merrild recalls a conversation with D. H. Lawrence
in which the latter said: "Who knows, perhaps I am the
offspring of some sea-faring Dane who settled in England.
Not so far back either. Perhaps that is also the
explanation for my great wanderlust.“ Lawrence added: "We
are, most of us who use the English language, water people,
sea derived. Like those terrible yellow-bearded Vikings who
break out of the waves in beaked ships. The sea-born
people, who can meet and mingle no longer: who turn away
from life to the abstract, to the elements, the corrosive
vast sea.” (WW- London:
Routeledge & Kegan Paul, 1964: 94). Here Lawrence comes
very close to describing Melville’s life and writings.

3. ”The Crown," the first essay in

et_e_29reupihe, was originally written for the short-lived
periodical, The_Sigueture, started by Lawrence and Middleton
Murry in 1915. The first three sections of this essay
appeared in the only three numbers issued. The entire essay
was published ten years later in Berieetieus. The probable
date of its writing can be discovered by Lawrence’s note
prefixed to the essay in the 1925 volume saying that the
”War was already twelve months old and had gone pretty
deep," when the essay was written--sometimes around August
1915. This essay is the final expression of the ideas
Lawrence had formulated in Tuiiight_in_1teiy. In "The
Crown,” he develops the theme of "conflict" as a means to
final fulfillment both in the individual and in the society
more confidently. The idea that "wholeness" consisted not

110

in identity or compromise and conformity, but in eternal
conflict between opposites--the Lion and the Unicorn (the
Tiger and the Lamb of Twilight in Italy), was also repeated
in the essay "The Two Principles," published in the English
Beyieu (June 1919) as number eight of the
hmerieeh_Litereture, but not included in that volume when it
appeared in 1923: "We know that in its essence the living
plasm is twofold. In the same way the dynamic elements of
material existence are dual, the fire and the water. These
two cosmic elements are pure mutual opposites, and on their
opposition the material universe is established. The
attraction of the two, mutually opposites, sets up the
revolution of the universe and forms the blazing heart of
the sun. The sun is formed by the impinging of the cosmic
water upon the cosmic fire, in the stress of opposition.
This causes the central blaze of the universe. (The
Symheiie_heenihg, ed. Armin Arnold. Arundel: Centaur Press
Limited, 1962: 180-181).

4. The concept of polarities or opposites which, Lawrence
says, are always in opposition with each other are named
under these pairs in these writings: Blood-Mind,
Darkness-Light, Father-Son, Female-Male, Flesh-Spirit,
Isolation-Union, Jehovah-Jesus, Law-Love, Night-Day,
Mother-Father, Subjective-Objective Centers, and
Unconscious-Conscious. Lawrence was so deeply involved in
formulating his ideas at this time that his American essays
in their earlier version are steeped in an almost
quasi-mystical Laurentian jargon. In the above-mentioned
writings of this period the concept of polarity is expressed
in these terms. In Tuiiight_ih_1teiy, Lawrence speaks of
the true consummation as two-fold: ”The infinite is twofold,
the Father and the Son, the Dark and the Light, the Senses
and the Mind, the Soul and the Spirit, the self and the
non-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and the Lamb.
The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in
Selflessness. By great retrogression to the source of
darkness in me, the Self, deep in the senses, I arrive at
the Original, Creative Infinite. By projection forth from
myself, by the elimination of my absolute sensual self, I
arrive at the Ultimate Infinite, Oneness in the Spirit.
They are two Infinites, twofold approach to God. And man
must know both" (80-81). In "The Crown," the theme of
"conflict" as a means of consummation in the individual is
developed more confidently. The Tiger and the Lamb are
replaced by the Lion and the Unicorn: "The crown is upon the
perfect balance of the fight, it is not the fruit of either
victory. The crown is not the prize of either combatant.
It is the reiseh_d;etre of both. It is the absolute within
the fight. And those alone are evil, who say, ’The lion
shall lie down with the lamb, the eagle shall mate with the
dove, the lion shall munch in the stable of the unicorn.’
For they blaspheme against the rsisen_dietre of all life,

111

they try to destroy the essential, intrinsic nature of God.
(£heenix.II 373-374)

5. The only two critical essays written by Lawrence earlier
were: "Review article on Sesrgien_£eetrye_ifiii;ifiiz' for
Rhythm and another on "German Books: Thomas Mann" for Blue
Beyieu, both in 1913.

6. Lawrence has often been accused of his "dark" philosophy
and of subverting art to prophesy. He indeed believed that
no great art is possible without a new moral vision to
uphold it. He wrote in the foreword to Sentesis_er_the

: ”And finally, it seems to me that even art is
utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a
metaphysic. The metaphysic or philosophy may not be
anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite
unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that
governs men at all time, and is by all men more or less
comprehended, and lived. Men live and see according to some
gradually developing and gradually withering vision. This
vision exists also as a dynamic idea or metaphysic--exists
first as such. Then it is unfolded into life and art. Our
vision, our belief, our metaphysic is wearing absolutely
threadbare. We have no future: neither for our hopes nor
our aims nor our art. It has all gone gray and opaque."
(Eanteeie_ef_the_uneeneeieue and
uneenseieus. London: Heinemann, 1961: 9-10)

7. In his discussion on Thomas Hardy’s The_3eturn_et_the
nstiye, Lawrence divides Hardy’s characters in three groups.
The first group consists of those who achieve "a more or
less distinct individuality," such as Sergeant Troy,
Wildeve, de Stancy, Fitzpiers, and Jude, "all passionate,
aristocratic males, doomed by their very being, to tragedy,
or to misfortune in the end." The second set constitutes
characters like Manston, Farmer Boldwood, Henchard, and Alec
d’ Urberville: this group succumbs before the weight of
convention, and ”in more primitive times, would have formed
romantic rather than tragic figures” (Rheeuix 434-438). In
Lawrence’ s words, these two groups constitute the
aristocratic characters of Hardy. For these, Hardy had a

’ ' , but he always condemns them because
of his adherence to a strict social code. As against these
characters, Hardy invents his ”undistinguished, bourgeois or
average being with average or civic virtues" (438), who
always succeeds in the end--characters like Gabriel Oak,
Clym Yoebright, and Angel Clare. Lawrence, in this essay,
is enunciating his definition of true tragedy--in
Shakespeare and Sophocles--as against the modern tragedy
which relies on a ready-made metaphysic to be blindly
applied to the human situation. The terms ”conscious" and
”unconscious,” the idealizing faculty and the creative

faculty in atudiee_in_dleseie_Auerieen_Litereture are

112

characterized as Love and Law, Male and Female in the Hardy
essay. Lawrence says that despite their genius, artists
like Hardy, Flaubert, and Dostoievsky fail to achieve a
reconciliation of the two. They, instead, show the two in
conflict and arrange one to vanquish the other. Lawrence’s
rendering of this phenomenon of reconciliation is highly
imaginative. He says that great art is born when the two
”clasp hands, a moment, male and female, clasp hands and are
one, the poppy, the gay poppy flies into flower again: and
when the two fling their arms about each other, the
moonlight runs and clashes against the shadow: and when the
two toss back their hair, all the larks break out singing:
and when they kiss on the mouth, a lovely human utterance is
heard again--and so it is” (Rheenix 516).

8. See Chapter One pp. 43-44.

9. In his essay on Galsworthy, Lawrence sums up his
critical creed in what H. Coombes considers "the finest
brief statement on the nature of criticism that we have”
(Litersture_snd_gritieism. London: Chatto 8 Windus, 1958:
10-13). According to Lawrence: "Literary criticism can be
no more than a reasoned account of the feelings produced
upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism
can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too
personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values
that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not
reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere
and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical
twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this
pseudo-scientific classifying and analysing of books in an
imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly
dull jargon . . . . A critic must be able to feel the
impact of a work of art in all its complexity and its force.
To do so, he must be a man of force and complexity himself,
which few critics are. A man with a paltry, impudent nature
will never write anything but paltry, impudent criticism.
And a man who is emotionally educated is rare as a phoenix.
The more scholastically educated a man is generally, the
more he is an emotional boor . . . . More than this, even
an artistically and emotionally educated man must be a man
of good faith. He must have the courage to admit what he
feels, as well as the flexibility to know what he feels

. A critic must be emotionally alive in every fibre,
intellectually capable and skilful in essential logic, and
then morally very honest" (Rheehix 539).

10. In his letter to J. B. Pinker on December 16, 1915,
Lawrence wrote in reply to Arnold Bennett who had criticized
Sens_shd_Leyers for its poor construction: "Tell Arnold
Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for
novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is
not a copy of other books has its own construction, and what

113

he calls faults, he being an old imitator, I call
characteristics" (Harry T. Moore (ed). The_Seiieeted

. Vol I, New York: The Viking
Press, 1962: 399).

11. F. R. Leavis, as early as 1932, observed about Lawrence
that "the qualities that made him incapable of self-
deception made him the finest literary critic of his time"
("D. H. Lawrence and Professor Irving Babbit," Scrutiny, I.
(Dec. 1932): 276). Later, in 1937, Leavis called Lawrence
"the finest literary critic of our time--a great literary
critic if there was one” ("The Wild, Untutored Phoenix,"
Serutihy, VI. (Dec. 1937): 352). Martin Turnell, writing
for Quhiih_3eyieu in 1948, compared Lawrence and T. 8. Eliot
as critics: ”WW and
Sheenix are not simply great criticism: they show that
Lawrence, with his immense emphasis on life, possessed
incomparably the most powerful personality among modern
European critics and that from an artistic point of view his
criticism is satisfying in a way that Mr. Eliot’s is not"
(Quoted by Robert Wooster Stallman (ed) in The_§ritie;s
Nutsheeh, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1950: 169). Father William Tiverton praises Lawrence’s
"acutely critical intellect, especially as seen in his
literary criticism,” and also ”the penetration of Lawrence’ 8
insight into the quality of others’ writing" (Qt_flt_Lsurenee

end_numen_zristehee, London: Rockliff, 1951: 6,12).

Stephen Spender discovers in Lawrence’ s condemnation of
"cerebral modern writer" an entirely new vision: "Lawrence,
besides opening my eyes to a world that was not just
potential literature, also seemed to challenge my own
existence, my mind and my body. I felt the force of his
criticism of his contemporaries and did not feel that I

myself was spared" (flerid_flithin_flerid, London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1951: 97).

12. David J. Gordon, in his remarks on Lawrence’s comments
on Poe, is the first to mention Lawrence’s understanding of
this concept: "The aesthetic critic will as a rule try to
show how the style and form of a work support, or fail to
support, the author’s apparent intention. Lawrence seems to
ignore this procedure (seems not to ask himself, for
instance, whether Poe’s inorganic imagery and mechanical
rhythms or Verga’s abrupt transitions have artistic
relevance), because he is hostile to the apparent intention.
But he understands it perfectly well, and when and insofar
as he can discover an intention of which he does approve, he
will relate form and style to it" (37).

13. Frederick Hoffman in ”Lawrence’s Quarrel with Freud,"
(WWW- Baton Rouge. Louisiana:
Louisiana University Press, 1957: 151-176.) gives a detailed
analysis of Lawrence’s relationship with Freudianism.

114

However, Evelyn J. Hinz in ”The Beginning and the End: D. H.
Lawrence’s 2exeheanelxeis and Fantasia." (DelheueiLBexieu.
Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer 1972: 251-265) convincingly proves.
that Hoffman is mistaken in discussing these works as if
there were no significant difference between the two. In
fact, while Psyeheeneiysis is an example of Lawrence’s
"poetic methodology" or "archetypal approach" to the
unconscious, Eehtesis represents his ”empirical" or
"analytic" approach (252). This difference is significant,
because nowhere else does Lawrence try to give his concept
of the unconscious a scientific foundation: it always
remains an archetypal term representing that part of man
which our industrial and scientific culture has either
rejected as our animal nature or ignored completely by
overemphasizing the mind or "will" as the mainspring of
human action. It is true that Lawrence himself seems to be
overemphasizing "blood” in one of his early letters to
Ernest Collins in January 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. The
intellect is only a bit and a bridle . . . . All I want is
to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling
intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not" (Moore, The
W. Vol I: 179)- However.
by the time he wrote his American essays, Lawrence, through
his Hardy essay and other writings of the period, had
developed a more balanced view of "blood consciousness,” and
had learnt to use the unconscious as that part in us without
which we are incomplete and can be overwhelmed by the
tyranny of the self.

14. Lawrence, therefore, is indifferent to Jung’s
archetypal ”collective unconscious.” Here, he is, in fact,
closer to Freud who allows the personal unconscious an
independent existence. Lawrence, however, takes strong
exception to Freud’s finding "the serpent of sex coiled
round the root of all our actions" (Lawrence, Beyeheehdiysis
197). Lawrence, contrary to Freud’s sole emphasis on sexual
impulses, subordinates it to the greater impulse of
creation: "It is the pure disinterested craving of the human
to make something wonderful, out of his own head and his own
self, and his own soul’s faith and delight, which starts
everything going. This is the prime motivity, and the
motivity of sex is subsidiary to this: often directly

antagonistic" (Eehtesie 12).

15. Lawrence’s attraction for America has a strange
ambivalent angle to it. His attraction rests on the
isolation of America from the European context--a new
landscape infused with a spirit of place. Lawrence, on the
other hand, is repelled by its materialism. In his American
essays, Lawrence is attempting through American literature

tesucscdefhthlaiWsAWeAWBC 1CfdMTdUV.W.Mb.k$..mu.hmnwmmeuml.m~bwh

115

to show that a reconciliation of these two opposite poles of
existence can be attempted, only sometimes with limited
success. This was the time when Lawrence was preoccupied
with reconciling and absorbing decay in an acceptable view
of life. It is in this context that Lawrence’s seemingly
self-contradictory attitude toward America can be better
comprehended. In the same letter (November 7, 1916) which
describes Americans ”as a rule rather dreadful," Lawrence
expresses his wish to go to a country in which he could ”
feel the new unknown," and this place he thought was
America, "where the skies are not so old, the air is newer,
the earth is not tired" (Moore, Letters: 481). A few months
later, on February 12, 1917, Lawrence wrote again to Lady
Cynthia Asquith: "I feel the War won’t be so very much
longer. The skies have reeiiy fallen. There is no need of
any more pulling at the pillars, New earth, new heaven, that
is what one must find. I don’t think America is a new
world. But there is a living sky above. America I know is
shocking. But there is a living sky above it. I must go to
America as . . . soon as ever I can" (501). Writing to
Waldo Frank on September 15, 1917, Lawrence gave the best
expression to the love-hate relationship he harbored toward
America, the "last word of obscene rottenness contained
within an entity of mechanized egoistical will" (524-525).
But America’s spirit of place, Lawrence believed, will still
create a new world.

16. In ”The Crown," in the essay, "The Two Principles"
(meant to be part of Lawrence’s American essays but excluded
from the final version of the Studies), in the original
draft of the essay, "The Spirit of Place (

: 15-31), in "The Education of the People" (1918),
and in his works on the unconscious, Lawrence understands
the universe as a living organism with its own system of
vital circuits perennially drawing the individual psyche
within its matrix. Lawrence conceives the discovery of
America in the following terms, almost completely controlled
by the "spirit of place" rather than by our conscious will:
After the removal of the Empire [the Roman Empire] to the
east a new circuit began, a circuit of Rome and Treves, or,
better, of Italy and Germany. There is, and has been, since
the break of the old Roman-African circuit, a natural and
inevitable balance between Rome and Germany . . .

England, France, and even Spain lay within the great
German-Italian circuit of vital magnetism, which subsisted
all through the Middle Ages. We can see Spain caught in
another influence, from Africa again, and Germany influenced
from the great Slavonic field . . . . But the main polarity
of Europe, from the time of Diocletian to Renaissance, lay
between Italy and Germany. About the time of the
Renaissance, however, this circuit exhausted itself, as the
Italian-African circuit had been exhausted a thousand year

116

before. Italy suddenly scintillated, and was finished in
her polar potentiality. The old stability of Europe was
gone, and the old circle of vital flow was broken. It was
then that Europe fell directly in polar unison with America.
Europe and America became the great poles of negative and
positive vitalism . . . . And it was on the wings of this
new attraction that Europe discovered America. When the
great magnetic sway of the medieval polarity broke, then
those units which were liberated fell under the sway of new
vital currents in the air, and they were born helplessly as
birds migrate, without knowing or willing, down the great
magnetic wind towards America, towards the centrality of the
New World. So the first individuals were caught up and
swept overseas in the setting of the great current. They
had no choice because the influence which was upon them was
prior to all knowledge and all option" (The_Syuheiie_nesning
20-21). What Lawrence says about this unconscious urge to
move is very close to Thoreau’s explanation for his
unconscious westward ”sauntering," in the essay "Walking":
”I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an
evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus
consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of
the race: but I know that something akin to the migratory
instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in some instances,
is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them
to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were
seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, . . . that
something like the rurer which affects the domestic cattle
in the spring . . . affects both nations and individuals,
either perennially or from time to time" (Thereeu_flritihgs.
Vol V. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1968: 218-219):
Italics mine.

17. ”Education of the People," an essay Lawrence wrote for

o and ”Democracy," both written,
according to Armin Arnold, about the same time Lawrence was
writing his American essays ( c

DI_HI_LQ!IED_§_§BQ_AEEI12§
122), but published for the first time by Edward D. McDonald
in Rheenix in 1936, contain what Lawrence believed was the
kind of democracy he hoped America to inaugurate. The new
democracy he visualized was not based on the "Law of
Average,” but on the essential spontaneity of the
individual, "when men become their own decent selves again"
("Democracy," Rheehix 699-718). This essay is the basis of
his criticism of Whitman’s idea of democracy in Studies.
Raymond Williams observes that in Lawrence’s description of
modern society the "continuing key words" are "mechanical,
disintegrated, amorphous." These, in fact, describe the
"effect of the industrial priorities on individuals and on
the whole society. It is this condition of mind, rather
than industry as such, which is seen as having led to the

ugliness of an industrial society" (Suiture_end_Seeiety
201). It is this condition of mind which render the

ansbbe.PrtLetfrq lhOAPtHeprthhetld 1§bF119Atamwaii

117

democratic ideals of equality and fraternity to imply
"consanguinity.” Lawrence says: ”Let every man be himself,
purely himself. And then, in the evil hour when you do
start to compare, you will see the endless inequality
between men . . . . Men are not equal, neither are they
brothers. They are themselves. Each one is himself, and
each one is essentially, starrily responsible for himself

. . . . No person is responsible for the being of any other
person. Each one is starrily single, starrily self-
responsible, not to be blurred or confused" ("Education of
the People” 603). Raymond Williams, commenting on
Lawrence’s concept of democracy as expressed in these
essays, remarks that ”Lawrence wrote nothing more important"
than his essay on democracy, and adds that although, "at
first sight, this looks like, not democracy, but a kind of
romantic anarchism," Lawrence asks and requires answers to

question we often ignore (Suiture_ehd_Seeiety 208-209).

18. Along with Dana, Crevecouer owes the resurrection of
his American reputation to a large extent to D. H. Lawrence.
Originally published in England in 1782, Letters_rrem_en
was received enthusiastically in England
primarily as a source of information on America. It was
translated in French, German and Dutch as early as 1784.
However, in America the volume received little attention,
except for some of its sections appearing occasionally in
periodicals until the nineteenth century. F. B. Sanborn
remarks that "so little was this once famous Frenchman
known" that when Professor Wendell of Harvard wrote his
History of American Literature, "he did not know the date of
his birth, the particulars of his career, or the titles of
his French books, and could only quote from a poor English
edition of less than a quarter part of his writings” ("The
’American Farmer’: St. John de Crevecouer and His Famous

letters (1735-1813)" (WW
andjiegreuhx. XXX. 3. 1906: 258).

19. In the final version of the essay, published in
Studies, Lawrence prefers a mocking tone as opposed to the
balanced arguments of the first version: "The American
Farmer watched this contest with delight, and no doubt
loudly applauded those little rascals of wrens. For in the
Land of the Free, the greatest delight of every man is in
getting the better of the other man" (Studies 32-33). Armin
Arnold, in his introduction to Symheiie_heeuing, explains
the reason for many of the essays in the final version using
a ”hysterical tone," as opposed to the "more objective and
more impersonal style” of the original versions: "Lawrence
was living at Lobo Ranch near Taos. His violent hate
against Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan was at its peak: he was
in a state of extreme nervous tension resulting in almost
insane outbursts against his wife, his friends, his animals,

t

2....tcaIWhFChcthtttxiwCSdtObSJmPfbehpPsm

Zumfmmmnm

118

on America as a whole. This is reflected in version 3 of
the essays" (6).

20. It is obvious from Lawrence’s poem ""Hummingbird,"
written in 1920 and first published in heu_3euuhiie 1921,
that he was directly inspired by Crevecouer’s word-painting
of the bird. Crevecouer describes the quickness of speed
and the bright plumage of the bird: ”their flight is so
rapid, that you cannot distinguish the motion of their
wings. On this little bird nature has so profusely lavished
her most dazzling colours: the most perfect azure, the most
perfect gold, the most dazzling red, are for ever in
contrast, and help to embellish the plumes of his majestic
head. The richest palette of the most luxuriant painter
could never invent anything to be compared to the variegated
tints, with which this insect bird is arrayed . . . when it
feeds, it appears as if immovable though continually on the
wing: and sometimes, from what motives I know not, it will
tear and lacerate flowers into a hundred pieces: for strange
to tell, they are the most irascible of the feathered tribe"
(Letters 178-179). This mystery and unexplained
irascibility of the bird tempts Lawrence to associate it
with the primordial landscape of America, back into "some
other world/ Primeval-dumb, far back/ In that most awful
stillness, that only gasped and hummed,/ Hummingbirds raced
down the avenues." The spirit of America is contained in
the bird: "Before anything had soul,/ While life was a heave
of matter, half inanimate,/ This little bit chipped off in
brilliance/ And went whizzing through the slow, vast,
succulent stems" (geiieeted_£eeus Vol II. New York:
Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1929: 245). Crevecouer is
mystified by this enigma of nature, and wonders: "Where do
passions find room in so diminutive a body? They often
fight with the fury of lions, until one of the combatants
falls a sacrifice and dies" (Letters 179). Lawrence’s
poetical speculations attempt an answer to Crevecouer: ”I
believe there were no flowers then,/ In the world where the
humming-bird flashed ahead of creation./ I believe he
pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak./
Probably he was big/ As mosses, and little lizards, they
say, were once big./ Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying

monster” (toiletted_£eeme 245)-

21. Paul Delany describes Lawrence’s state of mind during
the war years in Cornwall: "In Cornwall, Lawrence was still
under the spell of his boyhood fantasies about life on the
frontier and his urgent desire to remove himself from
war-torn England. A faith in the coming ’mystic
transubstantiation’ of America helped him endure his present
plight: critical as he was of America, he believed that even
its excesses were making a contribution to a fundamentally
positive development" (308-309).

119

22. Eric J. Sundquist, quoting from D. H. Lawrence’s essay
comments that Lawrence’s, sometimes ”overblown,”
observations do point to the basic fact that the work, apart
from being a "fierce social satire,” is also "an absorbing
exhibition and defence of Cooper’s own psychologies and
social tastes, tastes which inform the most pressing
questions posed by the settlement of America" (Heme_ss
“‘1'. 4, 9' , tl'. ‘ ‘r. 9'8 I x !‘ “l! ‘I Q
Amerieen_Litereture. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979: 2). Robert E. Spiller, once a
severe critic of Lawrence’s, agrees with Lawrence’s
comments in his essay on Hemeusrd_fieund and says that
Lawrence ”does a wonderful job of interpreting the book that
Cooper intended to write" (
Time. New York: Hinton, Balch 8 Co., 1931: 173).

23- A- N. Kaul in W
Seeietx__in_uineteenth:_centun_£ietien

(New Haven & London:
Yale University Press, 1963), is deeply indebted to Lawrence
in his interpretation of 19th-Century American literature,
and finds that the Leatherstocking Tales "attempt to
recreate the myth which history was supposed to validate but
which in reality it had violated from the outset" (120).

24. The only disagreement is about Lawrence’s
interpretation of some details such as the order of the
Leatherstocking Tales. Commenting on Natty’s starting from
old age and moving toward youth in the Leatherstocking
series, Lawrence writes: ”The Leatherstocking novels create
the myth of this new relation. And they go backward, from
old age to golden youth. That is the true myth of America.
She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin.
And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a
new youth. It is a myth of America” (Studies 60). This
reading of Leatherstocking Tales had been ignored before
Lawrence pointed out that it was significant in the reading
of Cooper (See Allen M. Axelrad, "The Order of the
Leatherstocking Tales: D. H. Lawrence, David Noble, and the
Iron Trap of History." Amerieeh_Litereture. Vol 54, No 2,
May 1982: 189- 211). Axelrad, though he disagrees with
Lawrence’s opinion, concedes that most of the ”scholars
follow the Lawrence chronology" (189). Warren S. Walker
characterizes Lawrence’s essay as "provokingly wrongheaded,
and at time in error about factual data,” but acknowledges
that it has been "highly influential in setting a new trend
in Cooper studies" (Semes_£ehimere_geeper. New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1962: 124). Henry Seidel Canby does not agree
with D. H. Lawrence’s view that Cooper displays a struggle
between a disintegrating white civilization and some dark
spirit of land symbolized by Cooper’s red men. Canby
believes the struggle is inside Cooper himself, and is a

symbol of escape (Siessie_hmerieehs. New York: Russell 8
Russell, 1959: 141). Canby, however, forgets that Lawrence

120

also asserted that through his myth Cooper attempted ”an
evasion of actuality“ (Studies 55).

25. Daniel Hoffman in Ree_Eee_Eee_£ee_Eee_Eee_Eee (New
York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1972) quotes T. S. Eliot’s

comments on Poe made in 1948. Eliot confined the appeal of
Poe’s stories only to those who were “just emerging from
childhood," and said: ”That Poe had a powerful intellect is
undeniable: But it seems to me the intellect of a highly
gifted young person before puberty. The forms that this
lively curiosity takes are those in which a pre-adolescent
mentality delights: wonders of nature and of mechanics and
of the supernatural, cryptograms and ciphers, puzzles and
labyrinths, mechanical chess-players and wild flights of
speculation. The variety and ardor of his curiosity delight
and dazzle, yet in the end, the eccentricity and lack of
coherence of his interests tire" (x-xi).

26. Mark van Doren agrees with Lawrence’s view of Hester as
not being "deficient in the mysterious powers belonging to
her sex. D. H. Lawrence found these powers terrible in
Hester, and supposed them so destructive of Dimmesdale that
he died hating her." However, Doren does not agree with
Lawrence that Hawthorne was unconscious of this: "Hawthorne,
a profounder psychologist, did not so protest against the
might he recognized. He recorded it as true, and let it

work" (Nethehiei_Heutherne. New York: William Sloane
Associates, 1949: 155).

27. James C. Cox, unlike many writers on Dana who have
treated IHQ.Y§§I§.E§IQI§.LD§.M§§L purely as a 333 yarn,
follows Lawrence closely in declaring the work "in a
profound way an autobiography." Cox praises Lawrence for
his insight in analysing the flogging scene: "It is just
here that Lawrence is very helpful--because he goes against
the grain of so much that has been and still may be written
about the book. For Lawrence, it is not the flogging, but
the idealism of Dana and John the Swede that is offensive

. . . . The great strength of Lawrence’s vision is that it
arrests us at the verge of our usual academic mistake of
subjecting ourselves to the anti-slavery conscience. For
Dana, that ideal is primarily rooted in experience: for us,
it is primarily imposed by history . . . . To see just how
good Lawrence is on Dana, one has merely to see how the very
people who would most deeply disagree with his easy approval
of flogging nonetheless wind up complaining of Dana’ s
idealism on other counts" (Reeexeriug_Litereture_e_Leet
ureund1_Eeeaxe_in_Amerieen_Autebiegreth- Baton Rouge 1
London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989: 61-62).

28. Perhaps no other American artist was so constantly in
Lawrence’s mind as Walt Whitman. In many of his writings he

121

gave Whitman more than a passing reference: in "Democracy"
(Rheehix 699-718), Lawrence criticizes Whitman for defining
democracy as the ”Law of the Average," with an emphasis on
the principle of identity. In his Preface to the American
edition of Neu_£eems (Rheenix 218-222), Lawrence praises
Whitman for creating a poetry which is a ”reservoir" of "the
quick of the universe," of "the pulsating, carnal self,
mysterious and palpable" (220). In the review of Stuart P.
Sherman’s hmerieehs (Rheehix 314-321), Lawrence criticizes
Sherman for misrepresenting Whitman’s true ideal of
democracy (319). Much has been written about Lawrence’s own
proximity to Whitman as an artist. One of the earliest
critics to do so was Frederick Schyberg. In his work on
Whitman originally published in 1933, Schyberg draws a
parallel between the two artists (fleit_flhitueh (New York,
1951: 321-326). Homer K. Nicholson, Jr., in his
unpublished dissertation, "O Altitude: A Comparison of the
Writings of Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry Miller”
(Vanderbilt University, 1957), discusses the relationship
between these three writers: "All three are discontented
with the established literary forms and regard them as
outworn and now merely conventional, incapable of
communicating any new or real experience . . . . They are
similarly distrustful of standard logic and rationalization
. . . . They are most concerned with the interpersonal
relations of man to woman and man to man . . . . Charges of
obscenity have been levelled at all three of these"
(Wm- XVII (1957): 2614)- A more
detailed treatment of the affinity between Lawrence and
Whitman is contained in James E. Miller, Jr., Karl Shapiro,

and Bernice Slote. WWW
Treditieh (University of Nebraska Press, 1960).

CHAPTER THREE
THE LAURENTIAN IDIOM IN AMERICAN LITERARY AND CUBTURAL

STUDIES

The last chapter traced the widespread approval
American writers gave to D. H. Lawrence’s assessment of
American literature and culture by incorporating many of his
ideas in their own examination of classic American writers.
This happened because the period after World War I was a
period marked by the intermingling of the traditional and
the modern in all walks of life. In literary criticism,
too, there was an urge to establish new ways to investigate
issues traditionally confronted by developing a critical
rhetoric capable of initiating a dialogue between the
nation’s past and its present, and capable of rephrasing the
cultural concerns of a rapidly transforming national
landscape.

D. H. Lawrence gave American literature the dignity of
a world literature by comparing it favorably with French and
Russian literatures. This recognition did not only impart a
higher status to our national literature, but also posed a
new challenge for American critics. D. H. Lawrence suggests
that new American criticism was in need of new standards of

judgement for assessing the nature and purport of a

122

123
literature which can no more be dismissed as a mere
extension of European literature. Like Alexis de
Tocqueville, who gave a new language to students of American
history and political institutions in the nineteenth-
century, D. H. Lawrence’s essays were highly influential in
creating a new critical method for an emerging generation of
critics.

Vincent B. Leitch characterizes these critics as "New
York Intellectuals." These critics were all born around
World War I and in the late 1930s. They formed a close
association through the Pertisen_3eyieu, and "maintained a
distinctive critical project into the early 19703" (80).
They include Richard Chase, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin,
Philip Rahv, Leslie Fiedler, Richard Poirier and others.
Although many of these, one way or another, share the same
concerns about American literature as D. H. Lawrence, some,
like Richard Chase, Leslie Fiedler, and Richard Poirier,
have a closer affinity with him in their critical methods
and ultimate critical concerns.

Significantly, Edmund Wilson, "older by more than a
decade,” than these critics served as their "model" (81).
It is more than likely that it was because of Wilson’s
critical stature, leadership, and appreciation of D. H.
Lawrence’s work that Lawrence gained the kind of
significance he ultimately did for this generation. In the
twenties, Lawrence’s stature as a significant voice in

American criticism was still a matter of serious

124
controversy, and most of the academic critics were reluctant
to accept him as belonging to the mainstream of American

criticism. It was Edmund Wilson who included the full text

of W in his anthology.
The_Sheeh_er_3eeegnitien. The praise Wilson reserves for

Lawrence’s work as "one of the few first rate books that
have ever been written on the subject," clearly charters a
course for this younger generation of critics to follow.
Wilson recognizes a new voice and a new language in these
essays, and comments that Lawrence’s essays encourage an
American, ”for whom American literature is a part of his
native landscape, and so veiled with associations that he
cannot always see what the author is really saying,” to read
American literature in a way "it would be difficult for an
American to do." D. H. Lawrence, Wilson says, "read our
books for their meaning in the life of the western world as
a whole" (906). Although Wilson does not subscribe to the
Laurentian belief in the unconscious, and his criticism
leans heavily toward the social and the political, for both
Wilson and Lawrence literature’s true significance lies in
its cultural context.

F. O. Matthiessen in Amerieeh_3ensisssnee (1941) also
emphasizes the value of literature as a cultural phenomenon.
Both Edmund Wilson and Matthiessen are closer to Marxist
criticism and New criticism, but they both are aware of and
admire D. H. Lawrence’s contribution to creating a new

critical method for the interpretation of American

125
literature. William E. Cain traces the importance of
critics like Van Wyck Brooks, John Macy, Irving Babbit, Paul
Elmer More, and Stuart Sherman who were at the forefront of
establishing the significance of American Renaissance
literature in the mainstream of the country’s literary
tradition, and who significantly influenced Matthiessen as a
critic. However, Cain observes that even more than these
critics, ”the key text in the modernist recasting of
American literary history is D. H. Lawrence’s Studies_in
Qiessie_hmerieen_Litersture" (1923)." Cain underlines
Lawrence’s "exotic eloquence," in emphasizing the ’double
meaning," ”symbolism,” and "subterfuge" in American writing.
This new critical language "freighted with dark mythical
overtones and symbolic majesty," according to Cain,
"dramatically assisted in the collaborative modernist effort
to reinvent American literature." This language, combined
with New Criticism, emerging in the late twenties, and
gaining momentum in the thirties, Cain believes, "gave the
exacting analytical techniques," American criticism was
looking for (135-136). Frederick C. Stern is another
Matthiessen scholar who confirms Lawrence’s influence on
Matthiessen: he notes that it was D. H. Lawrence who was
instrumental in pointing out characteristics that
established American literature as distinct from English
literature (23). Matthiessen quotes Lawrence in support of
what he himself thought about Hawthorne, Melville, and

Emerson. Matthiessen, although he does not admire Whitman’s

126
poetry to the same extent as D. H. Lawrence, is reminded of
Lawrence’s distinction between the poetry of the present and
poetry of the future in his assessment of the poet:
The dichotomy that we observed in both his diction
and his content expresses again in the contrast
between Whitman’s actual and ideal selves.
Tocqueville foresaw his problem when he observed
that the poet of democracy, having given up the
past, thus ran the risk of losing part of the
present in his excessive preoccupation with the
future destinies of mankind. Lawrence’s
distinction between the poetry of the future and
the poetry of the present is likewise partly
relevant. Lawrence held that the first may
possess the crystalized perfection of things to
come, whereas the second, lacking this, seeks to
catch the present in all its confusion, and is
’plasmic.’ (651)
Matthiessen joins D. H. Lawrence in criticizing Whitman for
his failure to save "his poems of ideal democracy and
perfection” from the "barrenness of abstraction." It is
only when ”he remained the instinctual being who found no
sweeter fat than stuck to his own bones," Matthiesen
observes, that Whitman created "the lasting image of the
common man” (651).

As a creative writer himself, Lawrence understood the
plight of the writer caught in the grip of what Tony Pinkney
calls, "transcendental classicism." In a study of the
novels of D. H. Lawrence, Pinkney considers him "a
modernist, counter modernist, and meta-modernist," and
categorizes his novels as "classic examples of modernism
because of polemical challenges to [classicism’s]
orthodoxies." Outside his novels, Lawrence waged war

against these ”orthodoxies" through his emphasis on

127
"blood-consciousness," but he also knew that despite
constant attacks from cultural forces, such as Romanticism,
Realism, and Modernism, classicism has an "uncanny ability
to metamorphose even its enemies into its own mirror image,
conceding certain surface mutations as the necessary price
for its deep-structured survival in changed social
conditions." D. H. Lawrence was consistently engaged in
examining to what extent 'transcendentalist culture" could
"insidiously" always ”draw back into its own orbit" even
textual forces like modernism and realism which "appear to
confront it head on" (3-4).

Himself a novelist, Lawrence was personally engaged in
facing this ever-present challenge to creative imagination.
His attempt in W is to
explore this very struggle in American writers--a challenge
they encounter with varying degrees of success and failure.
In the words of Aidan Burns, the artist in Lawrence was
trying to reconcile two contradictory situations: the self
"seen on the one hand as dependent upon its social
relations, and on the other as a natural entity more often
than not frustrated and destroyed by the social milieu into
which it is thrown" (7).

We see, therefore, that D. H. Lawrence’s criticism of
classic American literature has an element of
contemporaneousness about it. He discusses the writers of
the American Renaissance as examples of "modernism,” as if

they were his contemporaries. Lawrence presents the best

128
answer to the American self-consciousness of the last
century about the absence of the kind of literary, cultural,
and social conditions conducive to the production of great
art. By analysing the genius of these artists through the
medium of conscious and unconscious intentions, D. H.
Lawrence buries this myth of poverty of materials for ever.
In addition, he also helps in the establishment of those
other premises of American literary tradition which render
it as one of the most creative and complex the world has
seen. This quality also accounts for the gradual seeping in
of the Laurentian critical idiom into much of what was
written about the nineteenth-century American literature
subsequent to the appearance of his essays. It is this
quality of his criticism which is responsible for the
attempts of many later critics to imbibe the spirit of
Laurentian critical idiom in their writings.

The artist in D. H. Lawrence is continually ”engaged in
the Modernist struggle to resurrect the word through
transcoding, subverting, and extending the bounds of
possibility" (Hyde 117). This is as much true of his
critical method in Studies_ih_Qiessie_hmerieeh_Litersture as
it is of his art as a novelist. Lawrence’s literary career
begins at a time when there was intense speculation about
the nature of language as a mode of discourse. Although
many critics of Lawrence’s essays have accused Lawrence of
criticizing American writers for running away, or for

escapism, his essays are, in fact, a recognition of the

129
almost impossible task these writers faced in articulating
their experience through the finite medium of language. In
these writers Lawrence discovers the typical modernist
exasperation of an artist’s struggle with the inadequacy of
language in expressing real consciousness. Lawrence himself
wrote about this predicament faced by an artist in his

Foreword to flemen_in_Leye (1913):

Man struggles with his unborn needs and
fulfilment. New unfoldings struggle up in torment
in him, as buds struggle forth from the midst of a
plant. Any man of real individuality tries to
know and to understand what is happening, even in
himself, as he goes along. This struggle for
verbal consciousness should not be left out in
art. It is a very great part of life. It is not
superimposition of a theory. It is a passionate
struggle into conscious being. (Rheenix II 276)
D. H. Lawrence’s own experience, therefore, of the
challenge language poses in the projection of the artist’s
innate self helps him develop his critical medium. It also
helps him explain the reason why the nineteenth-century
American writers, despite reaching ”the pitch of extreme
consciousness," still "refuse everything explicit and always
put up a sort of double meaning,” and "revel in subterfuge"
(Studies 4). Commenting on Lawrence’s attitude toward the
nature of artistic discourse, Dianne S. Bond says that in
his belief in the "unequivocal domination" of the "tale"
over the ”artist," there are ”revealing parallels between
Lawrence’s pronouncements and our contemporaries writing

about deconstruction"1 (1-2).

130

Closely allied to Lawrence’s pronouncements on language
are his statements on the nature of symbolism and its
distance from allegory. Lawrence’s introduction to
Frederick Carter’s unpublished work The_nrsgen_et_the
Apeeeiypse was later expanded as Assesiypse, his last
non-fiction prose work published posthumously. hpeesiysse
contains Lawrence’s most exhaustive statement on the nature
of the symbol. In a symbol ”we don’t have to look for a
meshing, as we can look for a meaning in an allegory,
because allegory is narrative and descriptive in nature
using images to express certain definite qualities." These
images almost always serve "a moral or didactic purpose."
Lawrence uses this distinction to elucidate the nature of
myth. Like allegory, myth also is a ”descriptive narrative
using images," but never an argument. It precludes all
didactic and moral intentions: ”Myth is an attempt to
narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is
too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul" (Rheenix
295-296).2 Lawrence discovers the highest expression of the
mythopoeic nature of American literature in James Fenimore
Cooper and Herman Melville, because both were unconscious of
the myth they created. Cooper, in Leatherstocking Tales,
suspends his conscious pursuit of the idea of democracy that
haunted him in his White Novels. Instead, the unconscious
artist in him creates in the figures of Natty and
Chingachgook the myth of a new relationship, "the inception
of a new humanity" (Studies 65). Likewise, when Melville

131
created the "old, hoary, monstrous” White Whale, Lawrence
doubts "if even Melville knew exactly“ what it symbolized:
"He is warm-blooded, he is lovable, he is lonely Leviathan,
not a Hobbes sort." This fabulous mythical creature is
created by the Melville who, for once, ”ceases to be an
American." Forgetting his audience, Melville "gives us his
sheer comprehension of the world,” and his work “commands a
stillness in the soul, an awe” (Studies 153-154).

Lawrence’s critical method in his assessment of
American literature, therefore, emphasizes the mythopoeic
dimensions of American literature, because of its innate
propensity for symbolism as a perceptual mode. Lawrence’s
influence on the development of myth and symbol criticism in
American studies has been widely recognized. Lewis Mumford,
like Lawrence an avid student of American culture, is one of
the earliest to acknowledge Lawrence’s influence. As early
as 1926, Mumford recognized the significance of the emphasis
Lawrence places on the symbolic nature of American
literature. Mumford endorses Lawrence’s recognition of the
dual nature of American art-activity, and writes that he
believes, "as Mr. D. H. Lawrence has well said," that the
nineteenth-century American writers ”reached a verge. They
stood between two worlds.” Their experience, on the one
side, ”enabled them to bring the protestant movement to an
end,” and on the other, it was their ”organic break with
Europe’s past that made the American to go on” (The_§eideh

Dex 44)-

132

The first major assessment of nineteenth-century
American literature as predominantly an expression of
symbolism comes with Charles Feidelson’s Symheiisn_snd
Ameriesh_Litersture (1953). Unlike later critics, Feidelson
makes no mention of D. H. Lawrence within the body of his
epoch-making study of American letters. In his
bibliographical note, he does list D. H. Lawrence’s Studies
as one of the works on American literature that ”directly
influenced" his work, and serve as its ”context" (Symheiisn
220). As already mentioned in the last chapter, Lawrence
locates the preponderance of the symbolic mode in American
literature even before the writers of the American
Renaissance--in the LELL2I§_QI_H§£LQI_§LI_lth_d§
ureueeeuer. Edmund Wilson is credited by Feidelson as the.
first critic to note "the affinity between mid-
nineteenth-century American writing and the symbolist
aesthetic that produced modern literature" (Symheiisn 4).
However, both Edmund Wilson and Feidelson associate
symbolism merely with a literary device--"aesthetic"--
associated with Puritanism. Opposed to this limited
significance of the symbol, is D. H. Lawrence’s view that
treats the symbol essentially as a powerful medium of
compressed thought that cuts through the prison house of
language, and allows art to express a true relatedness
unhampered by the primacy of ”ideal” over the "instinctual--
the wellspring of a living culture. When D. H. Lawrence

declared in 1923, that American writers "refuse everything

133
explicit" and "revel in subterfuge" (Studies 4), and should,
therefore, be considered even more modern than a modern
writer like Sherwood Anderson, he was thinking of symbolism
less as an artistic device and more as a fervent expression
of the true essential self. Sherman Paul, in his review
article on Feidelson’s work, criticizes this very narrowness
of Feidelson’s interpretation of symbolism. The way Sherman
Paul defines American symbolism is closer to D. H.
Lawrence’s belief. According to Paul, American romanticism
was not romantic in ”the rather limited sense of personal
expression that Feidelson gives to the term." It was a more
comprehensive quest for the "symbolic, seeking a solution to
the duality of the Cartesian tradition” (189).

Feidelson’s remarks on Nathaniel Hawthorne emphasize
the same ”dichotomy" D. H. Lawrence discovers in Hawthorne.
Lawrence’s essay on Hawthorne’s The_Seeriet_Letter
significantly starts with Lawrence’s wondering why Hawthorne
called his novels "romances." He concludes that "blue-eyed
darling Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner
soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise" (Studies
89). Feidelson also begins his discussion of Hawthorne on a
kindred note, and reaches nearly the same conclusion:
"Unable to feel any confidence in the reality of the
subjective, and unable, despite the long effort of his
notebooks, to come to grips with the solid earth, Hawthorne
evolved his conception of the ’romance’" (Symheiisu 7). If
we replace the suhieetiye of Feidelson with the Laurentian

134
uneenseieus, both critics imply that Hawthorne’s art is
what, Feidelson considers, "the natural outcome of this
theoretical indecisiveness." This ”indecisiveness," in
Feidelson’s words, is what accounts for Hawthorne’s
"allegorical method." Because Hawthorne ”never fully faced
the problem of knowledge which his own situation raised.”
He took recourse to the allegorical method, instead of the
symbolical, because it is ”in the nature of allegory, as
opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute
reality" (8). In the words of Lawrence, Hawthorne
suppressed ”the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning"
(Studies 89). As a result, instead of creating a myth of
America, as Cooper helped create, Hawthorne created a
"marvelous" allegory, one of the "greatest allegories in all
literature," with its "marvelous undermeaning! And its
perfect duplicity" (106).

Feidelson is close to Lawrence in attributing
Hawthorne’s allegorical method to the split in Hawthorne’s
personality induced by "eighteenth-century reason at work on
an antirational sensibility" (Symheiism 16). In Studies,
Lawrence explains this duplicity as "the insanity of
mental-spiritual consciousness" (101). This state is
responsible for ”subverting the blood-conscious spontaneity"
(92). Because D. H. Lawrence does not discuss Emerson, it
is not easy to examine to what extent Lawrence would have
agreed with Feidelson in the latter’s discussion of Emerson

who is bracketed with Melville as the "two who ran the gamut

135
of possibilities created by the symbolistic point of view”
(120). However, Feidelson’s statement that "Melville
assumed the ambient idea that Emerson made explicit" does
explain Emerson’s view of symbol ”as a problem of knowledge"
(120), a view Lawrence does not share. Lawrence sees the
symbol as a unit of feeling, essentially a cultural
construct transcending the finite boundaries of what is
termed knowledge in the ordinary sense.

Eugene Goodheart, in ”Lawrence and American Fiction,"
discusses the relation between D. H. Lawrence and such
American writers as Edward Dahlberg, Sherwood Anderson,
Henry Miller, Norman Mailer and Bernard Malamud. In
Goodheart’s opinion, between Lawrence and these writers, "it
is not so much a question of influence as it is of affinity”
(154). This statement is equally applicable to Lawrence’s
and Feidelson’s relationship.

However, when we come to another study of American
literature from the standpoint of language and style,
written more than a decade after Feidelson published his
work on symbolism, we discover that Lawrence grows into a
definite influence. Richard Poirier, in h_flerid_£iseuheres
WW (1966).
acknowledges the main theme to be its struggle to discover a
satisfactory form through which to relate the self to the
environment. This struggle is what Lawrence also emphasizes
in his own work. Poirier has been criticized for allying

himself too openly with Lawrence’s theories of American

136
literature. Michael J. Colacurcio is surprised that Poirier
is not aware that "anything dangerous or subversive is
happening” when he is ”reactivating Lawrence’s vision and
giving his reputation a lift'I (488). The basic assumption
underlying Colacurcio’s fear that Lawrence’s influence can
be ”dangerous” and "subversive” is because of Colacurcio’s
aversion to what he characterizes as the "symbolic and
symptomatic" criticism. In such kind of criticism, he
believes, ”both by implication and omission, s11 officially
codified constructs of national belief, definition, or
destiny are excluded from serious consideration" (500).
Colacurcio is voicing the oft-repeated attack that
Lawrence’s interpretation reduces American literature to a
literature of "escapism." Colacurcio’s view of style is
very narrow when he says that the use of the Laurentian
idiom in a work on style "seems strange for, though
Lawrence’s book is ’stylish’ enough, we do not remember it
as being about style itself in any significant way" (489).
Carolyn Porter is another critic, who, in Seeihg_end_fieing
(1981), follows Colacurcio by criticizing Lawrence for
attributing to American writers the desire to "get away” as
their basic inspiration (xiii). Although she includes R. W.
B. Lewis, Richard Chase, and Irving Howe also as
perpetuating this "ahistoricism," Richard Poirier gets
special mention because of his more emphatic reference to
the desire of American writers trying through their style to

free themselves "from the pressures of time, biology,

137
economics, and the social forces which are ultimately the
undoing of American heroes and quite often of their
creators" (5).

Poirier’s work is the first to relate D. H. Lawrence’s
interpretation to Lawrence’s own struggle as an artist,
trying to break through the constraints of language to
attain selfhood so crucial to artistic integrity. Poirier’s
very perceptive 1966 remarks about Lawrence are today a
commonplace in Laurentian criticism, but the first ever
attempted by an American critic in the context of Lawrence’s
criticism of American literature. Before quoting Lawrence’s
preface to fleueu_ih_Leue, Poirier succinctly summarizes the
inspiration behind the Laurentian critical idiom:

The critic who offers the most help is D. H.
Lawrence in StudieLithleeeiLAmerieen
Literature, probably the crucial study of American
literature. Such a claim can be justified even
though the book manages to ignore Emerson, Mark
Twain, and Henry James. It illustrates how a work
of critical genius can cover a subject even while
neglecting large areas of it. The explanation, in
this instance, is that Lawrence was himself by
temperament an "American” writer working within
the conventions of English literature. He was not
only responsive to the main lines of force in
American literature: he himself accelerated them.
In Lawrence, with a degree of consciousness never
attained by any American writer, are the
struggles, difficulties, and tensions that went
into the writing of the best American books. So
much did he feel these tensions that perhaps his
clearest expression of them comes when he is
talking not about American writing at all, but
about his own. Thus in describing what he is
trying to do in flemeh_ih_Leue, he speaks of that
novel as an effort to find a mode of expression
for ideas that are struggling into a life whigh
language, and only a language, can give them.

( 3 7)

138

Poirier extends the application of the Laurentian idiom
to those nineteenth-century literary figures Lawrence had
not included in his study--Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain. In
his treatment even of the twentieth-century American
writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner,
Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Dreiser, he follows the lead
Lawrence provides by applying the Laurentian critical idiom
to their work. In the heroes of Dreiser, Wharton, and
Fitzgerald, Poirier discovers an anxiety about surrendering
themselves to powers that ultimately destroy them.
Similarly, D. H. Lawrence attributes this anxiety to
characters in writers like Thomas Hardy, John Galsworthy,
Arnold Bennett, and Thomas Mann. Poirier believes that the
heroes created by these American writers, instead of
welcoming the vision of the self joining the formative
process of nature, try to define it and are destroyed in the
process.

Both Charles Feidelson and Richard Poirier apply
Lawrence’s views on language as an expression of the
challenge artistic medium poses to the act of creation in
their own assessment of American classics. The other
significant element in Lawrence’s critical credo is the use
he makes of his beliefs on the unconscious in his criticism.

D. H. Lawrence, as already mentioned, disagrees with
both Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung in his interpretation of
the unconscious. He believes that the unconscious if

applied to literature in the shape it is presented by Freud

139

can only result in a body of criticism establishing literary
texts as expressions of nothing more than repressed sexual
desires. Lawrence’s view of the unconscious attempts to
restore to literature the quality he considers the most
significant--cultural expression embodying the aspirations
of a people in quest of new experience. The Laurentian
unconscious, as Leo Bersani points out, is the artists’s
struggle to give meaning to a culture’s unformed ”needs and
fulfillment,” a struggle that is not meant to reduce "art as
a vehicle of truth," but as a perennial source of continuing
the cultural dialogue art must produce if a new vision is to
be explored (113). This emphasis on the unconscious, and
his romantic emphasis on feeling against reason, is the
chief source of Lawrence’s being attacked for his
'irrationalism.” Critics find him, as a novelist, suffering
from irrational fears, and say that his novels read as
allegories of this state.4

The early attacks on Studies_in_gisssieuhueriesn_
Litereture also were mainly inspired by Lawrence’s
controversial position in the world of ideas, especially his
emphasis on ”blood" as opposed to ”mind." Frederick
Hoffman’s comment on Lawrence as a ”fresh, original, and in
many ways a naive reader, not especially concerned with--and
not very well informed about--prevailing academic or
scholarly form of ordering the subject,” was followed by
Hoffman’s dismissing Lawrence’s essays as merely a "Study in

Laurentian Responses to the Reading of Classic American

140
Literature" (The_Tuenties 160). Leslie A. Fiedler, who was
later to employ much of Lawrence’s critical method in Less

snd_Qeeth_in_the_hmeriesn_neyei, criticizes Hoffman’s view
in W (1960) =
"To me Lawrence’s book is by all odds the most committed,
wickedly apt appraisal of our past I know, the nearest thing
I have ever encountered to what our classics must come to be
in use if they are to remain alive" (159).

The early manifestations of the use of Freudian
unconscious in American criticism justify Lawrence’s
antagonism to the Freudian interpretation of the unconscious
as a repository of repressed desires. The application of

the Freudian unconscious to American writers resulted in

such works as Van Wyck Brooks' WW

(1920) and Joseph Wood Xrutch’s WM
genius (1926). Both these Freudian biographies focused

primarily on the lives of the authors under review, and both
chose to employ the Freudian concept of repressed childhood
experience as the guiding principle of their critical
method. Their judgment could not have been different. They
pronounce both these writers as victims of alienation,
struggling against repressed instincts. Expressien_in
Amerieu (1932) by Ludwig Lewisohn is another example of the
early use of Freudianism. Lewisohn presented both Emerson
and Thoreau unsympathetically as undersexed, and considered
Melville as suffering from intense mother fixation. Walter

Sutton’s remark about Lewisohn that ”his eccentricity of

141
judgment” and ”simplified Freudian ideas are often relevant
to the lives of American writers, but he fails to use them
as tools of literary criticism” (25), best summarizes the
weaknesses of this kind of narrow psychoanalytical approach
toward literary texts. Freud was to continue exerting a
powerful influence on American critics for many more years,
as illustrated by the use of his ideas in such prominent
critical texts as W by
Leslie A. Fiedler.

As opposed to these early American critics, D. H.
Lawrence employs psychology in Studies_in_uiessie_hnerieen
Literature, not to pry into repressed childhood instincts of
American writers, but to explain their alienation by their
failure to use the unconscious creatively in their efforts
to explore human experience toward relatedness leading to
”wholeness” of body and spirit. Lawrence’s understanding of
the human psyche was not as private as most critics tend to
believe. Daniel J. Schneider, in Dt_flt_Leureheer_The_hrtist
ss_£syeheiegist, has pointed out Lawrence’s impressive
familiarity with thinkers like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert
Spenser, Edward Carpenter, William James, and theosophists
such as James M. Pryse and Helen Blavatsky. Gestalt
Psychology, however, was the most important immediate single
source in giving the final shape to his ideas on human
personality. Mary Freeman observes that Lawrence’s emphasis

on relatedness is, "not only suggestive of, but in many

142

cases illustrative of the Gestalt psychologist’s viewpoint.
Particularly is this true in his emphasis on emergent
individuality" (129).5

It is this positive and unifying perspective on human
psyche, rather than the divisive emphasis on the human
unconscious as a disease to be rationally analyzed and
controlled, which we find expressed, not only in his novels,
but also in his American essays and other non-fictional
writings. Despite his emphasis on the personal unconscious,
D. H. Lawrence enunciates, what Elizabeth Brody Tenenbaum
calls, his proposal for a "communal rather than individual
achievement as man’s primary goal” (195). Lawrence
identifies the literature and culture of the New World with
a novel experiment toward the attainment of true
”relatedness." This accounts for the application of his
concept of the human personality in his examination of its
literature. His revolt against Europe’s alienated culture
led him to seek reprieve in America where he hoped there was
still a possibility of an impassioned and community-oriented
culture. Philip Rieff believes that Lawrence’s psychology
was an attempt to release man from his "inwardness."
Lawrence saw in modern psychoanalytical theories "yet
another turning of man in upon himself, worse than
religiosity, precisely because it aspired to a scientific
discipline of inwardness" (31).

D. H. Lawrence’s use of psychology and his emphasis on

the symbol as a vehicle of creating a meaningful cultural

143
experience is akin to such works as Ernst Cassirer’s, The
EhilQEQRhY_QI_§Ynh9112_EQIn (1923) and Lanuuede_and_uxtn
(19%).“ c. G. Jung's Qn_the_Reletien_ef_Analxtieel
zsyeheiegy_te_2eetry, first delivered as a lecture to the
Society for German Language and Literature in Zurich in May
1922, and Maud Bodkin’s Arehetypei_2stterns_in_2eetry
(1934). These critics usually get credit for the emergence
of myth criticism in America. However, it was the "turn to
primitive or mythic consciousness--to "blood consciousness"
as opposed to abstract "mental consciousness" in D. H.
Lawrence’s terms," according to Vincent B. Leitch, that
”formed an essential background for the rise of myth
criticism" (116). Arnold L. Goldsmith believes that myth
criticism in America is marked not by ”an attempt to
evaluate literature but to explain its inner significance,"
and is perhaps ”the most interesting development in modern

American criticism." He includes not only D. H. Lawrence’s

WW but also his

W as important influences
on the critics attempting mythic interpretation of American

culture (146-147). Lawrence himself was influenced by
Friedrich Nietzsche’s The_Sirth_er_Trsgedy (1872) and Sir
James Frazer’s The_Seiden_neugh (1890) in his attraction for
myth as the principal source of our living relationship with
the universe.

W is the first
work of literary criticism which employs myth as the primary

144

tool in evoking the complex reality of American literature
and culture. Howard Mumford Jones also believes that the
use of unconscious to interpret history comes with D. H.
Lawrence and Waldo Frank (The_Theery 148). Morris Dickstein
comments that it was D. H. Lawrence who "was quick to grasp
mythic and psychological patterns in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne
and Melville," and showed that "the quasi-mythic patterns of
American romance are closer to popular fiction than to the
European novel of social realism" (49). Dickstein’s comment
clearly signifies, on the one hand, the relation between
Lawrence’s interpretation and American cultural reality and,
on the other, the independence of American literary
tradition from Europe as visualized by Lawrence. It is
interesting to note that, as recently as 1990, Susan Manning
of Newnham College, Cambridge, England finds D. H.
Lawrence’s critical approach in Studies_in_§iessie_hneriesn
Litereture "as one of the most suggestive approaches" to
establish that "nineteenth-century Scottish and American
literatures embody certain styles, subjects and
preoccupations which characteristically distinguish them
from English literature of the same period" (vii-viii).

The number of critics who deserve the most attention in
their application of the Laurentian critical idiom in their

interpretation of American literature roughly extends from
R. W. B. Lewis in The_hmerieeh_hdem (1955) to Richard

Slotkin in Regeneratienjnreuehlielenee (1973). It
includes such names as Richard Chase in The_hmerieen_neyei

145

shd_1ts_Trsditieh (1957), Henry Nash Smith in yirgin_Lehds
Ihe_amerieaD_ueet_ee_§ynbel_end_uyth (1950). Marius Bewley
in ,- a ;, 7.5: ., a... , ,-. ._:;' “A; -.,, \. ;
(1959), Leslie Fiedler in Leye_ehd_pesth_in_the_hmeriesn
Neuel (1960). and Leo Marx in The_neehine_in_tne_uerden1
TR2hnQlQQY_dnd_Lhe_£dfi§9£dl.1§£d.1fl.hflfi£i§d (1954)- James

L. Machor singles out these works as ”important texts whose
publication dates bracket a time period which includes most
of the work done since American literary studies first
emerged as a designated area of inquiry." All, in their
”emphasis on the new, the unique, or the renewed, imply an
effort to identify both a literature and culture which is
characteristically American." Machor continues that each of
these writers, therefore, produces "a criticism which
unifies cultural history and literary analysis," and they
all, like William Carlos Williams Th_the_hmeriesn_§rsin

(1925), are conscious of the "sense of place,” a phrase D.
H. Lawrence used in §tudiee_in_tleeeie_Amerieen_Litereture.
"which appeared two years before [Williams’ book] becomes
the controlling aspect of American consciousness." Finally,
Machor adds, all discover “an initial disparity between idea
and reality in the confrontation between the American
landscape and the artists/historical figures studied”
(99—107).

Vincent B. Leitch rightly associates most of these
critics with the development of "sociological mode of myth

criticism which proved a great boon to the developing field

146
of American studies,” because these texts added to the
knowledge of American literature and culture ”by unearthing
distinctly American archetypes." However, what Leitch does
not mention is that all these critics, to a great extent, by
their own admission, were indebted to Lawrence’s emphasis on
the symbolic significance and mythic dimensions of the
classic American literature. It is against the background
of D. H. Lawrence’s essays on American literature that these
critics succeeded in, what Leitch characterizes as,
"elevating the history of native literature in a grand
manner that no other school or movement following the Great
Depression ever approached” (131). Lawrence’s strong
aversion to read American literature merely as an expression
of "a conscious motive," a search for the negative ideal of
democracy" (Studies 14), leads him to delve deeper with his
critical method, and helps him explore ”the forming of a new
consciousness underneath” (70).

D. H. Lawrence admires James Fenimore Cooper’s art
because it produces "the very intrinsic--most American” (69)
in the Leatherstocking series--"a myth, not a realistic
tale” (66). On the other hand, he admonishes Nathaniel
Hawthorne for relapsing into allegory. Hawthorne, despite
being the great artist he is, freezes supreme moments of
mythic consciousness into the rigidity of an allegory.
Although the ”greatest allegories in all literature” (106),

The_Seeriet_Letter, succeeds only in creating characters

like ”pure-pure young parson Dimmesdale" and ”the beautiful

147
Puritan Hester,” who hug their sin in secret, and gloat over
it, and try to understand." Hawthorne’s story, therefore,
remains simply "the myth of New England" (93-94). The
Leatherstocking tales, on the other hand, create "the myth
of [a] new relation," the "new nucleus of a new society, the
clue to a new world epoch," and ”a great release in a new
world, a new moral, a new landscape” (60). Vincent Leitch
observes that the tendency of early myth criticism, because
of its desire of "retrieving buried archetypes" was toward
allegorical interpretation "as practiced by platonic
exegetes and scriptural hermeneutics.” He commends the
"special interpretative enterprise" of critics like Leslie
Fiedler and Richard Chase which "tempered somewhat the
tendency of myth criticism to spiritualize or allegorize
literary texts.” Leitch gives the example of William Troy,
who, in ”A Note on Myth," written in the late thirties,
”prefigured an American project of myth criticism dependent
on allegorical interpretation” (131). It is in this context
that Lawrence’s emphasis on the mythopoeic element in
American literature is extremely valuable because it opens
an entirely unexplored area of significance for American
criticism.

Before proceeding to an examination of the presence of
Laurentian critical idiom in American critical texts, it is
worthwhile to examine to what extent his method, which
Colacurcio characterizes as "passionate impressionism,"

stands the test of "somewhat rationalistic but absolutely

148
crucial hermeneutic distinction between ’intentional’ and
’symptomatic’ meaning.” Colacurcio, following E. D. Hirsch,
remarks that "before we can know what a work ’reveals,’ even
in relation to the psyche of an individual writer," we must
necessarily ”develop some adequately historical sense of
what it could possibly have been intended to ’mean’,”
because all literature is ”a complex of intention designed
rationally to communicate between an individual writer in
history and an audience, also in history.” Colacurcio gives
Cooper’s example, and remarks that we can understand "what
COOper’s psyche ultimately expressed in the relation
between Natty Bumppo and the Great Serpent," only if we are
aware of what Cooper thought about "Natty’s Moravian
Christianity." Likewise, our understanding of what
”American literature tells us about the American soul" can
only follow "some very detailed analyses of a very long list
of literary works, each with a very specific (i.e.
historical) intention-life of its own." No "symptomatic"
meaning, Colacurcio believes, is possible by applying an
"easy ’symbolic’ formula" (494-496).

Lydia Blanchard, on the other hand, believes that the
"power of Lawrence’s insights" gives his criticism of
American literature "a strong methodological base."
Blanchard, too, accepts Hirsch’s philosophy of textual
interpretation as significant, but, unlike Colacurcio,
Blanchard does not consider Hirsch’s views invalidating

Lawrence’s critical method. On the contrary, she finds

149
D. H. Lawrence and E. D. Hirsch treading common ground in
their views on the nature of literary texts and their
interpretation. Both D. H. Lawrence and E. D. Hirsch agree
that it is genre that controls the writer’s purpose, that
the ”valid goal of interpretation is consensus," and that
criticism aims to "illuminate meaning and to apply that
meaning to life" (159). Lawrence’s views on the nature of
literary criticism and the responsibility of a critic have
already been mentioned. "Literary criticism," Lawrence
says,"can be no more than a reasoned account of the feelings
produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing."
Although a man of sharp intuitions, Lawrence as a critic
insists on a "reasoned account" of a reader’s reactions to a
text. Also, a critic has to be "an artistically and
emotionally educated man,” although with "the flexibility to
know what he feels." A critic "must be emotionally alive in
every fibre, intellectually capable and skilful in essential
logic, and then morally very honest" (”John Galsworthy"
372).

In "The Spirit of Place," first essay in Studies,
Lawrence "identifies the mistake in genre that has kept many
readers of American literature from valid interpretation"
(Blanchard 163). Lawrence writes:

We like to think of the old-fashioned American
classics as children’s books. Just childishness
on our part. The old American art-speech contains
an alien quality, which belongs to the American
continent and to nowhere else. But, of course, so

long as we insist on reading the books as
children’s tales, we miss all that. (Studies 7)

150

Lawrence’s essays discuss authors employing such diverse art
forms as essay, autobiography, fiction and poetry. He
traces a commonality of interest in these writers because,
”like Hirsch, he understands genre in terms of common
elements in a limited group of historically related texts"
(Blanchard 163). We might add the example of Lawrence’s
foreword to his essays to further strengthen Lydia
Blanchard’s argument. Here Lawrence explains the basis of
his examining American literature as a historically potent
voice in world literature reaching ”the pitch of extreme
consciousness," which even the ”furthest frenzies of French
modernism or futurism have not yet reached"(4).7

D. H. Lawrence, therefore, establishes what may be best
characterized as thematic criticism, a kind of criticism
which informs the criticism of many critics who come after
him. These critics are primarily concerned with
representative plots, themes and characters as they relate

to the spirit of the American continent. The earliest among

these is R. w. B. Lewis in W

W (1955) -
D. H. Lawrence builds his essays around the dialogue that

takes place between "two blankly opposing morals, the
artist’s and the tale’s." This dialogue is a reflection,
not only of the cultural moment within which the artist
operates, but also of the kind of historical moment the
artist aspires for. It is this continuing dialogue and the

ability of the artist to reconcile the two opposing forces

151
that determine the course a culture ultimately charts for
itself. R. W. B. Lewis’s Adamic figure provides one string
of this dialogue:

Every culture seems, as it advances toward
maturity, to produce its own determining debate
over the ideas that preoccupy it: salvation, the
order of nature money, power, sex, the machine,
and the like. The debate, indeed, may be said to
be the culture, at least on its loftiest levels:
for a culture achieves identity not so much
through the ascendancy of one particular set of
convictions as through the emergence of its
peculiar and distinctive dialogue. (Similarly a
culture is on the decline when it submits to
intellectual martial law, and fresh understanding
is denied in a denial of further controversy.)
Intellectual history, properly conducted, exposes
not only the dominant ideas of a period, or of a
nation, but more important, the dominant clashes
over ideas. Or to put it more austerely: the
historian looks not only for the major terms of
discourse, but also for major pairs of opposed
terms which, by their very opposition, carry
discourse forward. The historian looks, too, for
the coloration or discoloration of ideas received
from the sometimes bruising contact of opposites.
(1-2).

Lewis’ comments on the critical philosophy he follows
in writing The_hmerieen_hdem are quite revealing. His work,
Lewis believes, shows the "relation between idea and story."
This is because "the narrative art inevitably and by nature
invests its inherited intellectual content with a quickening
duplicity,” and in the process it shapes "ideas with
restless ambiguity," an "ambiguity" which proves that the
”experience of the aims and the values of an epoch is apt to
be more complex and even more painful than the simple
statement of them: and narrative deals with experience, and

not with propositions” (3). As mentioned earlier, although

152
D. H. Lawrence is not the first critic to emphasize the "two
blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s' in a
work of art, he is, nevertheless, the foremost critic to
apply this method of "saving the American tale from the
American artist" (Studies 8-9) to the literature of the New
world, inaugurating a new critical trend in American
literary and cultural studies.

D. H. Lawrence does not emphasize the Adamic figure in
American literature on the same lines as Lewis does.
However, in his essay on Cooper, Lawrence articulates the
image of ”the very intrinsic-most American” in the person of
Deerslayer. He is "a man who turns his back on white
society," and who ”keeps his moral integrity hard and
intact. An isolate, almost selfless, stoic enduring man,
who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white"
(Studies 69). Lewis later quotes these words of Lawrence’s
in his Chapter, "The Here in Space: Brown Cooper, Bird" (The
hmerieen_hdsm 104). Lewis’ Adam, the epitome of the new
American personality, is also ”an individual emancipated
from history,” one who is ”happily bereft of ancestry,
untouched and undefiled by usual inheritances of family and
race." This individual stands ”alone, self-reliant and self
propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the
aid of his own unique and inherent resources" (5).

What we discover in Lewis, therefore, is his use of the
Adamic hero to explore the main tendencies in American

literature on the lines suggested by Lawrence’s Studies. The

153

essentials of his method have already been examined. His
discussion of Fenimore Cooper’s work is another example of
his affinity with the Laurentian method. Lewis comments on
Cooper’s "more wishful generation," and moves on to remark
on Cooper’s shifting "consciously away from a semi-
historical authenticity." Cooper’s early novels represent
his ”romantic posturing at midstage,” Lewis writes, but soon
he moves "toward a sort of sustained fantasy, in many
respects much mere authentic: a recreation in story of the
dream-legends of his contemporaries.” Lewis is discussing
the Leatherstocking Tales which reach "the peak of that
development" in Deersisyer. He does not conceal his debt to
Lawrence for his own typically Laurentian estimate of
Leatherstocking Tales, especially that of Deersieyer: "My
own high relative estimate coincides with the one expressed
by D. H. Lawrence,” because "I agree with Lawrence in seeing
the novel as the culmination of a process which exemplifies
the American myth. Lawrence’s words seem to me at once
exact, poetic, and inimitable" (The_hmerieen_hdsn 102-103).9

The critical manifesto of Richard Chase in The_hmeriesn
Neyei_end_its_Treditien (1957) is different from that of
R. W. B. Lewis. Chase shares with Lawrence the awareness
that before criticism can gainfully address the challenges
posed by a meaningful confrontation with American
literature, it has to locate American literature within an

acceptable generic scheme. As already pointed out,

Lawrence, in his essay, "The Spirit of Place," deplores the

154
tendency to treat American books as children’s books, and
immediately proceeds to establish them as serious literature
in the symbolist mode. Chase attempts the same within the
critical stance adopted by Lawrence. Chase places the
American fiction in the tradition of ”Romance,” while the
English fiction, Chase believes, falls in the category of
"Novel." Chase, like D. H. Lawrence, comments that
literature is essentially the language of culture.
Consequently, American fiction is an expression of "the
contradictions,” and not "the unities and harmonies of our
culture." It articulates the ”polarities, Opposites, and
irreconcilables," which are the essence of the American
cultural experience. The American novel, therefore, is
different from the British, which "gives the impression of
absorbing all extremes, all maladjustments and
contradictions into a normative view of life." Chase
observes:

The English novel, one might say, has been a kind
of imperial enterprise, an appropriation of
reality with the high purpose of bringing order to
disorder. In contrast, as Lawrence observed in
his W. the
American novel has usually seemed content to
explore, rather than to appropriate and civilize,
the remarkable and in some ways unexampled
territories of life in the New World and to
reflect its anomalies and dilemmas. It has not
wanted to build an imperium but merely to discover
a new place and a new state of mind. Explorers
see more deeply, darkly, privately and
disinterestedly than imperialists, who must
perforce be circumspect and prudential. The
American novel is more profound and clairvoyant
than the English novel, but by the same token it
is narrower and more arbitrary, and it tends to
carve out of experience brilliant, highly wrought

155

fragments rather than massive unities. (The
AmerieeLNmLel 4-5)

Words such as ”explore,” ”deeply," ”darkly," "privately,”
and "disinterestedly," clearly suggest D. H. Lawrence’s
belief in the aboriginal spirit of the New continent, just
as "appropriate and civilize," ”order," "imperium," and
”massive unities" represent Lawrence’s Europe, slumbering in
"idealistic halfness" (Studies 13).

Chase discovers in D. H. Lawrence’s essays the
explanation for the contradictions Alexis de Tocqueville
diagnosed in American culture. The "Americanness' of
American literature, according to Chase, is the "version of
the contrariety" or, "as [Lawrence] said, ’duplicity’ of the
American literary mind." Chase summarizes Lawrence’s
central position in his assessment of American literature:
”Lawrence was thinking of an inherent conflict between
’genteel’ spirituality and a pragmatic experientialism which
in its lower depths was sheer Dionysian or ’Indian’ energy
and violence" (The_hmerieen_ueuei 9). He goes on to
acknowledge the relevance of the Laurentian method, "in the
reassessment of the American past and a consolidation of
knowledge and opinion about it." This method, Chase
believes, "may be described variously as historical,
cultural, or mythic." Chase praises Lawrence’s work as
having the "advantage of being written by a sympathetic but
critical foreigner," and rightly believes that ”history has
fully justified the critics involved in this first period of

156

reassessment and consolidation [Van Wyck Brooks and his
contemporaries]" (n. 44-45). Chase’s discussion of James
Fenimore Cooper’s novels is based, as most studies of Cooper
were by this time, on Lawrence’s mythic interpretation of
Leatherstocking Novels.10

Richard Chase does not completely endorse Lawrence’s
view of Hawthorne’s The_Seeriet_Letter, and says that
Lawrence only "states a partial truth" when he characterizes
Hawthorne’s novel as an allegory. However, Chase ultimately
finds it difficult to sustain the view that Hawthorne was
creating a myth, and concludes that neither "in The_Seeriet
Letter nor elsewhere did Hawthorne ever make up his mind
whether he approved of [the] loss and submergence" of the
”emotion involved in the abandonment of the Old World
cultural heritage which had given human emotions a sanction
and a manifold significance." On the one side, "Hawthorne
had enough passion to make us feel the sadness and chill of
the New World," and, on the other, Hawthorne, the Puritan
conventionalist, permits himself a sigh of relief and
rationalizes it." (76-77). In Lawrence, we encounter this
very Hawthorne, rendered colorful by Lawrence’s language:
”That blue-eyed darling, Nathaniel knew disagreeable things
in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in
disguise" (Studies 89). Lawrence comments: ”Just listen to
the darling. Isn’t he a master of apology? Of symbols too.

His pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the time" (95).

157
Lawrence’s emphasis on American literature relying
primarily on allegory and symbol to reconcile the
contradictions inherent in the American mind is again the
yardstick Chase applies to his discussion on Melville. With
such close affinity to Lawrence, it is not unexpected that

in comparing Hawthorne and Melville, Chase revises his

earlier estimate of The_Sesriet_Letter as displaying

"several mythic archetypes" (W1 79) -
Although Chase had renounced his association with myth

criticism when he wrote his study of American novel, he can
not help but return to the Laurentian premise of treating
Melville’s hehy_pieh as a myth and Hawthorne’s novel an
allegory. Chase observes that, despite Hawthorne’s
admiration for ”English and German romantic literature, his
mind was formed pre-eminently by allegorists like Bunyan and
Spenser and by the rationalistic mentality of the eighteenth
century.” This was the reason "Hawthorne felt no impulse to
transmute his inherited Calvinism into a new view of life."
Melville, on the other hand, "felt strongly the impulse to
participate in the romantic, Promethean attempt to recreate
knowledge and discover undiscovered truths” (81). In his
introduction to heiyiiie, a selection of essays on the
novelist, Chase agrees with Lawrence’s belief that Melville
fails to achieve in Types the maturity he displays in fishy
Disk and even in uses (8). This, in Lawrence’s words, is
because, in Tyuee Melville was looking for "a paradisal

ideal," a life "of continuous bliss,“ a "fixed ideal. Fata

158
Morgana," and forgets "there is no paradise. Fight and
laugh and feel bitter and feel bliss: and fight again.
Fight, fight. That is life” (Studies 140-141).

Richard Chase disavows myth criticism in The_hmerieen
ueyei_ehd_its_Trsditien, because its "rigidity and formal
abstractness" renders "a very biased view of American
literature.” Myth critics, according to Chase, know only
”late” works of the author in question--Merhie_zeun and not
TheJearleLietter. W. and not We]:- Because
of this selective emphasis they tend to ignore works which
"are radically involved with the dilemmas of their time, and
which draw too directly on the reality and the moral
contradictions of human experience." These critics have an
”exaggerated opinion" of works that ignore this "involvement
and promise the immanence of grace, of final harmony and
reconciliation, in a world whose contradictions it seems no
longer possible to bear.” Indirectly, Chase is endorsing
the opinion D. H. Lawrence expresses in his discussion on
The_Sesriet_Letter and MQhY_Di£k: for D. H. Lawrence, real
myth involves the onward march of the integral soul and does
not aim at the resolution of contradictions. Chase almost
echoes the Laurentian belief in the nature of American
literature, when he says that "it pictures human life in a
context of unresolved contradictions--contradictions which,
for better or for worse, are not absorbed, reconciled or

transcended" (245).11

159

David Lodge finds a striking similarity between D. H.
Lawrence and Mikhail Bakhtin in their views on the nature of
the novel. Bakhtin considers Dostoevsky as a writer who
best illustrates the "dialogic, or, in an alternative
formation ’polyphonic’" nature of prose literature (17).
Bakhtin says that the greatest quality of the novel form is
the "possibility of employing on the plane of a single work
discourse of various types, with all their expressive
capacities intact, without reducing them to a common
denominator" (200). It is this quality which distinguishes
the novel from epic, lyric, and, tragedy, which, Lodge
observes, ”seek to establish a single style, a single voice,
with which to express a single world view" (17). Wayne
Booth, in his introduction to Bakhtin’s work, says that the
”one grand literary form that is for Bakhtin capable of a
kind of justice to the inherent polyphonies of life is ’the
novel’" (Erehieus xxii). D. H. Lawrence conceives the role
of the novel in similar terms--as an expression of the

shimmer of life in law:

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that
really determines our lives. And here lies the
vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It
can inform and lead into new places the flow-of
our sympathetic consciousness, and can lead our
sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead.
Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal
the most secret places of life: for it is in the
pessiehei secret places of life, above all, that
the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and
flow, cleansing and refreshing. (118)

Lawrence’s practice as a novelist conforms so closely

to what Bakhtin considers the ”dialogical" nature of the

160
fictional discourse that Avrom Fleishman brackets both
together in his essay, "Lawrence and Bakhtin: Where
Pluralism Ends and Dialogism Begins.“ Fleishman observes
that both ”the complaints of yesterday’s New Critical
formalists against Lawrence’s fiction,” as well as "the
humanistic defence mounted by F. R. Leavis and his
followers,” seem to be outmoded today. What can best serve
Lawrence criticism is to explore "untapped resources in the
novelist by means of Bakhtin’s genuinely new insights”
(109).

The emphasis on ”contrariness" as the essence of
American experience, as expressed in its literature and
culture, placed by D. H. Lawrence, R. W. B. Lewis and
Richard Chase leads our discussion directly to Marius
Bewley’s The_Eeeentrie_nesigh (1959). Bewley is close to D.
H. Lawrence’s views on symbolism in American literature. He
continues the Laurentian trend by exploring the difference
between the English and American novel, and the latter’s
struggle "to find a new experience and discover how to put
that experience into art.” This experience for the American
writer involved confronting the "deepest tensions" to
unravel the mystery of the American soul. As a result,
”establishing the American identity" turns put to be
”extremely elusive” (17). Bewley, however, credits
Parrington's MinturrentLiDJmerieanJDeueht for
introducing this concept in American criticism. His own

concept of tension, he thinks is closer to Lionel Trilling’s

161
essay, ”Reality in America." However, the way Trilling
words his idea of tension reminds us of Lawrence:
A culture is not a flow, nor even confluence: the
form of its existence is struggle, or at least a
debate--it is nothing if not a dialectic . . . .
It is a significant circumstance of American
culture, and one that is susceptible of
explanation, than an unusually large proportion of
its notable writers of the nineteenth century were
such repositories of the dialectic of their
time--they contained both the yes and no of their
culture, and by that token they were prophetic of
the future. (qtd. Bewley 22)
D. H. Lawrence’s essay on Whitman best articulates the need
for tension in the creation of a viable cultural moment.
Whitman, according to Lawrence, does attempt to provide a
"doctrine of life” when he sings of "sacrifice," “sympathy,"
”allness,” ”one identity," ”love," and "merging.” But these
songs offer simply a "morality of salvation," not a
”morality of real living.” Whitman, the ”Savior,” is not
the great American poet, because, like the Europeans, he
fails to move "beyond the morality of salvation." However,
in his later poetry, unlike the European artists, Whitman,
the great.poet, conveys ”the American heroic message," not
to ”cry for some God beyond for salvation,” but to travel
along ”the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown,
keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to
her, accomplishing nothing but the journey . . . the soul in
her subtle sympathies accomplishing herself by the way"
(Studies 181-182)-

Richard Chase and Marius Bewley both share Lawrence’s

belief in tension as a source of cultural regeneration, but

162
for Bewley the tension was consequent to a struggle to close
the split in the American experience. American art attempts
to discover a unity that, "for the artist especially, almost
sensibly was not there." Bewley ascribes this condition,
unlike Lawrence, to the ”deprivations of American society”
(18). However, he also believes that at a "vital point
within the given work of art,” these "divergent energies
reverse themselves towards a moment of creative balance or
harmony, at least for the duration of our response" (23).
Richard Chase, on the other hand, fully endorses Lawrence’s
concept when he comments that the best in American novels
"achieves their very being, their energy and their form,
from the perception and acceptance not of unities but of
radical disunities" (The_Auerieeh_heyei 6-7).

The presence of D. H. Lawrence in the works of above
American critics disproves Michael Colacurcio’s conclusion
that until the appearance of Leslie. A. Fiedler’s Leye_ehd
neeth_in_the_huerieeu_fleyei in 1960, D. H. Lawrence ”was
around, of course, but his views did not seem to be taken
with complete seriousness." It is evident that American
criticism started paying attention to the Laurentian voice
from the very time it announced that the American experience
in literature and culture was a novel venture unparalleled
in the history of art and ideas. Colacurcio, however, is
right when he observes that since the appearance of Leslie
Fiedler’s work, "a school of Lawrence" has finally emerged,

and "Lawrence’s well known, often maddening, and verifiable

163
series of literary and cultural epsreus are now part of the
received critical wisdom." Colacurcio comments that
although no "consensus" on the views of Lawrence has been
reached, it is evident that not only “Lawrence’s insights
can be translated into very respectable scholarly prose but
also that they can motivate and guide the most impressively
detailed sorts of historical research.“ This helps Lawrence
develop into "a fact to be dealt with" (488). Colacurcio

treats the following works as directly inspired by

Lawrence's essay. A_Wer1d_u1sewhere_The_Eleee_ef_Style_in
Amerieeh_iitereture (1966) by Richard Poirier, Sins_et
Eathers_newtherDeLs_£syehelegieel_Tnemes (1966) by Frederick
c. Crews. Tbe_Beturn_ef_the_Yenishiud_Amerieen (1968) by
Leslie h. Fiedler. The_Bemenee_in_Amerieai_Studies_in
ueeuer1_Eee1_nautherne1_nelyille1_end_lemes (1969) by Joel
Porte, 1: up-, a - ° .1 i::; I .u: .o
culturei_fiistery (1971) by Quentin Anderson, and

Beueneretien_Threugh_Yielenee (1973) by Richard Slotkin
(437).

  

In Leslie Fiedler, American criticism for the first
time confronts an "American" D. H. Lawrence. Richard Chase,
in "Leslie Fiedler and American Culture," comments on
Fiedler’s striking affinity with D. H. Lawrence both in
style and temperament. Fiedler’s literary criticism,
according to Richard Chase, is couched in an idiom very
close to Lawrence’s Studies. Fiedler’s style is "rapid and

witty: it is richly made, if occasionally pedantic.” His

164
"cultural and literary judgements are sometimes profound and
sometimes merely scintillating." His conception of
literature is also very Laurentian as evidenced by his
belief in the ’contextual’ value of literature, "its
relation to cultural, historical and psychological
realities" (8). This definition of literature brings him
very close to Lawrence’s concept of valid and meaningful
criticism. Fiedler’s distaste for "mere textual analysis,”
a criticism he characterizes as "higher remedial reading
which an age of lapsing literacy perhaps demands," results
in the birth of WWI-
Fiedler describes his work in his preface to the first
edition as "a literary rather than a scientific work, a
labor of love rather than of patience,” and a work which
seeks ”the kind of validity which depends not on
faithfulness to ’fact’ but on insight and sensitivity to
nuance" (n.p.). Fiedler’s words bring to mind D. H.
Lawrence’s criticism of textual criticism as "the critical
twiddle-twaddle about style and form . . . pseudo-scientific
classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical
fashion” (”John Galsworthy" 539). However, Chase comments
that Fiedler himself "is pretty duplicitous," and beneath
his "public pose" of the "shocking and notorious” Fiedler,
he remains a "run-of-the-mill Ph. D. candidate." Despite
these idiosyncracies in Fiedler, Chase does admit that
Fiedler’s work "is the latest and, with all its faults, one

of the best of the books that have devoted themselves, since

165
the appearance of Lawrence’s Studies_in_§iessie_hnerieen
Literature," to unmask the American authors" (9-10).

In his preface to the first edition of Leye_ehd_nesth
ih_the_hmerieeh_neyei, Fiedler describes his criticism as
”thematic rather than strictly historical, selective rather
than exhaustive," aimed at examining ”the duplicity” with
which the themes of love and death are treated by American
writers. Fiedler considers D. H. Lawrence "closest to the
truth" about American books, writing about them with ”an
appropriate passion and style." Fiedler frankly confesses
his debt to "the pages of that little book," where he found
"confirmation" of his own "suspicions that it is duplicity
and outrageousness which determine the quality of those
American books ordinarily consigned to the children’s shelf
in the library (n.p.). D. H. Lawrence’s two critical
concerns--"saving the American tale from the American
artist,” (Studies 9) and placing American literature in the
proper genre rather than insisting on "reading the books as
children’s tales" (7)--are Fiedler’s primary motivations
also. These concerns are related to the Laurentian belief
in literature as an expression of culture. In exploring the
cultural context of American literature based on the
Laurentian premise of discovering the split in the American
mind, Fiedler’s work receives general approbation. Richard
Chase says that it is "a powerful indictment of our culture
and of modern culture in general," and reveals ”the

diminution in modern culture of the possibilities and

166
resources of human life in its fullness.” This results from
"the subversion and denial of character, temperament, and
the passional self" ("Leslie Fiedler and American Culture"
16). The other area of main concern to Fiedler is the
”depth-psychological and anthropological." Here Fiedler is
indebted to Freud and Carl Jung in using concepts of ”the
conscious and the unconscious, the Oedipus complex, the
archetypes, etc." (Leye_shd_nesth n.p). It is in this area
Fiedler has encountered the severest criticism. Chase
believes that his use of psychoanalysis "has to make its
theme stick and it has adequately to define the nature of
the American novel," which Fiedler reduces to "merely a
chronicle of nihilistic despair titillated up with a
misplaced eroticism." Fiedler’s preoccupation with this
”reductive" approach results in ”a constant tailoring of the
facts to fit the thesis," which he pushes so "insistently
into the foreground." This results in Fiedler’s often
”hiding from both us and from himself,” his main concern--
the criticism of a culture losing sight of its true self
("Leslie Fiedler and American Culture” 13-16).

Irving Kristel refers to the "most agitated polemics,
the most shrill repudiation and denunciation" Fiedler’s work
received, but does not agree with those critics who accuse
the Freudian premises of the book for its weaknesses.
Kristel, however, does concede that ”it could not have been
written, and certainly would not be as good as it is, if

Lawrence had not previously produced his book." Kristel,

167
however, avoids characterizing Fiedler’s exploration of "the
unhappy conscience and unhappy consciousness of modern man"
in American literature as a Laurentian concern. Instead, he
calls it ”Hegelian” (505-509).

Although R. W. B. Lewis, in "Gothic Criticism and
American Fiction,” accepts Fiedler’s work as "ground-
breaking," he criticizes "several contradictions“ in
Fiedler’s argument. One of them is the suggestion that
American fiction grows out "of a series of failures which
turned it toward the aberrant, the preposterous, and the
vindictive." But Fiedler, surpringly, "goes on to deplore,
resent, or neglect later American fiction in which the
elements of perversity, absurdity, and revenge are lacking"
(614). This weakness in Fiedler’s work results from his
dependence on the Freudian psychology as a critical tool to
encompass the discussion of the whole range of American
culture. In contrast, Richard Poirier who relies mainly on
the Laurentian thesis comments meaningfully on later
American writers also.

Robert German Davis also finds Fiedler’s psychological
perspective ”as quite limited and his judgements as negative
and restrictive." His method, according to Davis, in the
early section of WW. helps
him make ”freshly inventive references" to European
literature, but when Fiedler shifts to the New World and has
"exchanged castles for forests, papal inquisitors for red

Indians, the development seems at once more monotonous and

168

less coherent." Davis’s objection to Fiedler’s Freudian
psychoanalytical method is the same as D. H. Lawrence’s,
when he says that we can not ignore what ”depth psychology
has taught us about the unconscious mechanisms which are
partly responsible for imaginative creativity" (ll-13).12

We see, therefore, that the two strains in Leye_shd
Deeth_ih_the_hmerieen_nsyei--the Laurentian and the
psychoanalytical--do not merge as successfully as one would
wish in creating a convincing portrait of American writers.
Fiedler writes a brilliant book, but, in the words of
Richard Chase, although an "eloquent book," it remains
”long, richly allusive, shamelessly cribbed, genuinely
original, narrowly conceived," leaving the impression that
Fiedler’s chief concern merely "is an impish desire to
joggle middle-class complacencies" ("Leslie Fiedler and . .
.” 9). Willard Thorp objects to Fiedler’s ”slam-bang style"
with which he discusses the people in his novels and carries
out the "Jungian analyses of their lives and their
characters" in a manner that he does not appear to be
talking ”about persons in novels who, their creators
thought, resemble people." This, Thorp rightly comments, is
owing to the fact that "characters and situations are
discussed in terms of anima and animus, projection and
shadow, archetype and myth, Oedipal situations and
Sesehyisterinsest" (5). Similarly, John Raleigh objects to
Fiedler’s use of "a kind of amateur brand of sociology sun

sex, or, rather, sex sum sociology" (549). In his comment

169

on Fiedler’s book, Benjamin DeMott characterizes the author
as "The Negative American” for his Freudian belief ”that all
American writers are so afraid of sex that they dash off to
a wilderness of homoeroticism and self-slaughter." On the
other hand, DeMott appreciates Fiedler’s concern in Leye_end
Qeeth_in_the_hnerieen_neyei with "the loss of humanity, the
self, wholeness" (203-204), concerns characteristically
Laurentian.13

Leslie A. Fiedler’s The_Beturn_et_the_yshishing
huerieeh (1968), is the culmination of the evaluation of
American culture with the American geography as the

controlling feature in its development. Works such as Henry

Nash Smith's WWW
Myth (1950) and Leo Marx's W

W (1964) more
directly discuss this theme. Richard Slotkin in

."‘!:'_ 9! !'-°!V° ‘! . 9‘ 91!. 'fi. 9 Q; L!" t!

EIQDLIQI_1§QQ:1§§Q (1973) follows later, and is closest to
Lawrence in assessing the importance of American frontier as
the chief element in the emergence of American literature
and culture.

D. H. Lawrence’s emphasis on the Spirit of Place as "a
great Reality” (Studies 12), recreates American geography as
the catalyst of American culture in a manner not attempted
before. Although the importance of American frontier in
American studies was pointed out by Frederick Jackson

Turner’s "The Significance of the Frontier in American

170
History," read before the American Historical Association at
Chicago as early as 1893, the frontier was always discussed
as a place of confrontation and ultimately assimilation by
the ever-expanding American culture. D. H. Lawrence’s work,
as John Seelye observes, gave the study of American frontier
a "new impetus.” Turner’s frontier is the ever-expanding
extension of American institutions at the cost of the
annihilation of the "savage” in what he called the war
between "savagery and civilization” (187). In this war
between the "Garden and the Desert” (yirgih_Ldnd 174-183),
as characterized by Henry Nash Smith, the whole emphasis
again is on the assimilation of the "savage” into
civilization. Smith accepts, in his Preface to the 1970
reissue of yirgin_Lehd, that in 1950 he had failed to
"realize that there is a continuous dialectic interplay
between the mind and its environment" (VIII).

It is this dialectic pattern that D. H. Lawrence
explores in his essay on Cooper when he observes that the
artist in Cooper realized that "there can be no blood-mixing
of the two races, white and red," and if he attempted this
assimilation, "he kills ’em off" (Studies 64). The same is
this dialectic Fiedler emphasizes in The_3eturn_et_the
genishing_hmeriesn. Mark Royden Winchell observes that
Fiedler believes that the west "refers neither to a region
nor to a direction, but our encounter with the savage
other.” Fiedler also, like Lawrence, says that "once the

Indian has disappeared as a mythic presence in the American

171
imagination," American culture will lose one its vital
components (36). Michael J. Colacurcio is very emphatic in
characterizing this period as purely Laurentian in Fiedler’s
development as a critic:

In The_3eturn Fiedler seems to have gone all way
with Lawrence. Here it is not only a question of
similarity of spirit or program, or of close
dependence in the case of an individual writer,
such as Cooper: here there is a rewarding and an
elaboration of what is probably the fundamental
Lawrentian judgement about the unique and
inevitable meaning of American mythology based on
a unique and inevitable condition of American
experience. (496)

Colacurcio goes to the extent of interpreting the entire
meaning of Fiedler’s work in the "Lawrentian epigraph” (496)
from Lawrence’s essay on Cooper prefacing Fiedler’s work:
"The moment the last nuclei of Red Life break up in America,
then the white man will have to reckon with the full force
of the demon of the continent" (Studies 55) . Another
characteristically Laurentian pronouncement in the Cooper
essay, perhaps borne out by Lawrence’s own American
experience, best sums up Fiedler’s own position:14

When you are actually in America, America hurts,
because it has a powerful disintegrative influence
upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning
unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it
persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides,
until the white men give up their absolute
whiteness. America is tense with latent violence
and resistance . . . . Yet, one day the demons of
America must be placated, the ghosts must be
appeased, the Spirit of Place atoned for. Then
the true passionate love for American soil will
appear. As yet, there is too much menace in the

landscape. (Studies 56)

172

While discussing the Laurentian idiom in connection
with the development of frontier theories in American
culture, one cannot escape being struck by the increasing
use made of Hector St. John de Crevecouer’s Letters_rren_sn
Ameriesn_rsrmer as a point of departure in analysing the
dialectic between the two poles of American cultural
experience. As pointed earlier, this long-neglected
eighteenth-century writer, after being forgotten for more
than a century, was finally resurrected from obscurity and
raised to the dignity of a classic in American literary
canon by D. H. Lawrence. Unfortunately, Henry Nash Smith,
in The_yirgin_Lshd, attributes to Crevecouer only one side
of the American cultural experience--that of the “garden,"
the "agrarian philosophy"--later represented by Thomas
Jefferson. Later, Leo Marx in The_heehine_in_the_§srdeh
credits Lawrence with pointing out through Crevecouer that
”only the ’spirit of place’ really can account for the
singular voice we hear in American books." Leo Marx,
however, distorts Lawrence’s observations as "derisive,"
because Marx mistakenly concludes that in Lawrence’s mind
Crevecouer was merely a "Child-of-Nature-sweet-and-pure.'
Marx attempts to raise Crevecouer’s Letters to ”mythic
magnitude," by discussing their "moral geography" which
"forms a neat spatial pattern.” Crevecouer creates a
"compelling triptych that figures an implied judgment upon
all the conditions of man which may be thought to exist

between the savagery of the frontier on one side and the

173
court of Versailles on the other" (heehihe 111-112). Marx,
in fact, only reiterates the opinion already expressed by
Lawrence.

Lawrence comments on the "mythic” quality of
Crevecouer’s vision succinctly in the earlier version of his
essay on Crevecouer. Commenting on the farmer’s stories
about hornets, wrens, and swallows, Lawrence observes that
they have "a mythical or legendary quality which attracts
us." Lawrence parallels these episodes with those narrated
by Herodotus who ”sees with the dark sensual eyes, in the
division of otherness.” Lawrence believes that ”Crevecouer
sees birds, not in their ’little singing angel’ aspect of
modern sentiment. He has the more ancient vision. He sees
their dark, primitive, weapon like souls" (The_Synheiie
Meshing 59-60).

In Slotkin’s BeueDeretien_Threuuh_Yielenee. the
affinity between American criticism and D. H. Lawrence
reaches its high water mark. Colacurcio describes Slotkin’s
work as "a slowed-down. well-documented, and altogether less
fanciful version of Lawrence’s argument about the ’demon of
the continent and about the discovery and failure of the
religion of nature” (497). Slotkin’s dichotomy between
"Moira” and "Themis," between "the unconscious and the
conscious," the "dream or impulse and the rational idea,"
the "inchoate desire and the knowledge of responsibility,"
and the "gratification-world presided over by the mother,

and the world of laws or reasons ruled by the father”

174
(Regenerstien 11), though derived from Jung, nearly
approximates the Laurentian polarity between the Dark and
the Light, the Senses and the Mind, Love and Law, Spirit and
Flesh, Female and Male. Slotkin’s affinity with D. H.
Lawrence is indisputably clear when he applies his
archetypes to the American situation.

D. H. Lawrence attributes to European culture its
unflagging devotion to throttling the mythopoeic and
nurturing the mind in the name of progress. This is the
inherited cultural matrix, Slotkin believes, as Lawrence
does, the settlers brought to America. They possessed "a
mythology derived from the cultural history of their home
countries," which could only be "responsive to the
psychological and social needs of their old culture"
(Regenerstien 15). In the Laurentian dialectic, American
culture attempts ”to slough the old American consciousness
completely," and "to grow a new skin underneath," and this
creates the "true American, who writhes and writhes like a
snake that is long in sloughing" (Studies 58). This attempt
at ”sloughing” in Slotkin’s terms is ”regeneration," the
"attempt to destroy or cut through the conventionalized
mythology to get back to the primary source of blood-
knowledge of the wilderness, the ’Indian’ mind, the basic"
(Regeneratien 17)-

While Lawrence’s essays unravel this confrontational
paradigm chiefly in American Renaissance literature, Slotkin

extends the Laurentian idiom to the very origins of American

175
literature and culture. Slotkin traces this process in the
colonial War Narratives (1625-1685). The dual nature of
American art activity that Lawrence discovers in later
literature, finds a more tangible representation in
Slotkin--between the Puritan and the Indian. In the Indian,
the Puritans saw ”a darkened and inverted mirror image of
their own culture, their own mind," but in their attempt to
impose their will on the Indian, they saw the Indian
cultures as ”the devil’s city on a hill,” and proceeded to
”capture the devil’s city and turn his demons to good men
(if not angels)" (Begsneretien 57).

Slotkin analyses the Puritan experience on the same
terms as Lawrence analyzed later American literature and
culture. Lawrence observes that the story of American
literature shows the extent to which the ”world fears a new
experience more than it fears anything. Because a new
experience displaces so many old experiences." The
"shifting over from the old psyche to something new” is a
”displacement," and "displacements hurt. This hurts. So we
try to tie it up, like a cut finger. Put a rag around it”
(Studies 7-8). Slotkin discusses Thomas Morton’s The_hey
Ehgiish_gehesn (1637) as an example of the extent to which
the Puritan-Indian dichotomy haunted the colonial mind.
Morton’s attempts to regard his own colony of Merrymount ”as
the fountainhead of that erotic energy, to which all the new

and old worlds might have recourse," led Bradford in 91

Eiymeuth_fiiehtetieh to characterize Morton as "a demonic

176
emissary of atheism, lechery, paganism, and democracy."
Bradford’s characterization of Morton as the "Lord of
Misrule is no figure from a comic masque but a proto-Satan
ruling a tribe of resurrected satyrs and primitive demons"
(Regeneretien 61-64). In the Captivity Narratives, although
the "Indians become the instruments of God for the
chastisement of his guilty people,” the American mind gets
further polarized. The "garden“ in Captivity Narratives, "a
small, cultivated plot, protected from the encroaching
wilderness by a stiff ’hedge’ of religious dogma and
rigorous government" (99), symbolizes the polarizing
principle. Like the myth of the Leatherstocking in the
post-colonial America, the search for a hero in
eighteenth-century produced a frontier hero in Daniel Boone.
Largely because by now the settlers felt less threatened by
the wilderness, they did treat the landscape with ”more
realism, denying neither its harshness nor its beauty"
(181), but their confrontation with tbe environment is still
marked by ambiguity rather than by open-hearted desire for
communication.

Slotkin’s chapter on the Leatherstocking myth is
prefaced by a Lawrence quote from Studies on "the myth of
essential white America" (466). Later, commenting on
Cooper’s divided allegiance, as D. H. Lawrence does, Slotkin
finds that in The_£ieneers there is a "formal ambivalence,"
not only owing to Cooper’s "hasty writing and defective

worksmanship,” but mainly because of "different mythological

177

antecedents, Indian and European," which ”prove to be the
sources of the central conflict” (486). Slotkin discovers
in Cooper’s portrayal of the American character in
peersisyer "embodiments of ambivalences or problems, rather
than of clear and simple truths" (506), rendering, as
Lawrence put it, all relationships for Deerslayer "silent,
reserved, across an unpassable distance" (Studies 68).

Unlike D. H. Lawrence, Slotkin does not discuss The
Seeriet_Letter as the central text in his analysis of
Hawthorne. Instead, he concentrates on Nawthorne’s shorter
fiction, such as "Young Goodman Brown” and ”Roger Malvin’s
Burial.” Slotkin’s preference is mainly because in his
shorter fiction Hawthorne builds the theme of wilderness
directly by bringing his heroes in contact with the "dark
denizens of the woods and the dark thoughts of the hidden
mind." Hawthorne’s stories, in Slotkin’s analysis,
definitely reveal the same ambivalence D. H. Lawrence finds
in The_Seeriet_Letter. Hawthorne’s tales, according to
Slotkin, are "both critiques of and participation in the
Puritan myth of the wilderness" (Regeneretien 476-477):
Lawrence chartacterizes Hawthorne as ”a master of apology,"
whose ”pious blame is a chuckle of praise all the while"
(Studies 95) -

Slotkin, in his discussion of Melville’s uehy_pieh,
recognizes Lawrence’s contribution in characterizing the
White Whale as the "doom of ’white civilization,’" resulting

from "the western theology of idealism, by our devotion to

178
material progress, and by our exploitation or repression of
natural and human (particularly sexual) forces and
impulses." In describing Melville’s work as a
"cosummatory," rather than "the romantic, or
conventionalized myth,“ Slotkin emphasizes the
inscrutability of the true myth which does not "evoke a
response of recognition or identification” (Regenerstien
550). D. H. Lawrence goes a step further in his comment
that he doubted "if even Melville knew exactly” what the
White Whale symbolized (Studies 153). Slotkin too singles
out "The Grand Armada" chapter in hehy_pieh for special
mention in analysing the nature of man-whale relationship:
D. H. Lawrence describes this as "the most stupendous
chapter" in the novel (Studies 163).

Slotkin’s work is significant in as much as it draws
its chief inspiration from D. H. Lawrence’s emphasis on the
confrontation of American culture with the spirit of the
American continent. Despite writers like Crevecouer,
Cooper, Melville, and Whitman, we fail, because of our
inability to obey "some deep, inward, voice of religious
belief” in our search for ”a living, organic, believing
community, active in fulfiling some unfulfilled, perhaps
unrealized purpose” (Studies 12). However, when Slotkin
writes of Whitman’s poetry, he adopts a rather limited view
of the American cultural aspirations. Lawrence disagrees
with Slotkin that Whitman’s greatness lies in his attempt to

create "both a race of unquestioned superiority and a race

179
closely resembling the idealized primitive man of Rousseau"
(Regeneretien 277). For Lawrence, Whitman’s greatness lies
in his breaking through all fixed ideals and giving us the
image of "souls in the Open Road” (Studies 187).

What attracted American critics the most in D. H.
Lawrence’s essays is his emphasis on the inability of
American literature and culture to establish a proper
rapport with the spirit of the New World. James L. Machor
traces the development of American literary and cultural
studies in ”Tradition, Holism, and the Dilemmas of American
Studies." In his opinion, William Carlos Williams’ Th_the
hmerieen_§reih (1925), a work that closely resembles D. H.
Lawrence’s Studies, is responsible for the renewed interest
in the appraisal of American literature and culture.
Lawrence himself wrote a highly favorable review of
Williams’ work as a record of "truly American heroes,”
because it highlights "not the ideal achievement of great
men of the New World, but the men themselves, in all the
dynamic explosiveness of their ener " (Sheenix 334-335).
Williams, like D. H. Lawrence, saw the Old World
consciousness producing characters like Frydis, Columbus,
Cortez, and Ponce de Leon, who confront the new landscape
with their customary rapaciousness. Even Cotton Mather,
George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, portrayed as heroic
in history, fail, in the eyes of Williams, because each
refuses to encounter the spirit of the new place as a whole

man alive and labors under a ready-made ideology (143-203).

180
We see, therefore, that Machor, in crediting Williams for
the birth of American literary studies, makes clear the role
D. H. Lawrence plays in their growth and development.
Machor characterizes this new development as emphasizing
”the new, the unique, or the renewed," implying "an effort
to identify both a literature and culture which is
characteristically American.” The new movement produces "a
criticism which unites cultural history and literary
analysis," and is motivated by ”the desire to find the nexus
of literature and culture in America, both past and present”
(100). These elements describe not only the nature of the
period that followed the appearance of D. H. Lawrence’s
essays, but also the main inspiration behind them.

Huck Gutman believes that Americans betray an extreme
"possessiveness" toward their national literature and
culture, and voices from abroad ”might well remedy this
situation, and remind--or teach--American scholars what is
most lively, most idiosyncratic, most important, in the
culture they claim as their own" (8). In the nineteenth

century, America heard the voice of Alexis de Tocqueville’s

in Demeereey_in_hueries (1835-1840): in the twentieth, it

was D. H. Lawrence's in Ween
Litersture (1923). They both performed the task that,

according to Leslie Berlowitz, is the "most important in
American culture." It has to be "captured again and again"

to "avoid the simplification of ideology and extremism"

181
(xvi). D. H. Lawrence sucessfully builds a bridge between
the American, not the European, past and American present.
He thereby helps American criticism grasp the essential
pattern and intrinsic meaning of American culture and

civilization.

182
NOTES

1. Dianne s. Bonds in W
.LdWIQDGQ- (Ann Arbor/ London: U. M. I. Research Press, 1987)
says that, although Lawrence makes ”relatively few explicit
remarks about language," his novels and his critical works,
especially WW. do
present Lawrence’ s "theory" of language, and much of what he
writes appears so close to modern theories of language and
communication. Bonds offers the following excerpts for
comparison: i. "The curious thing about art-speech is that
it prevaricates so terribly, I mean it tells such lies
. . . . And out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth
. . . . The artist usualy sets out--or used to--to point a
moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other
way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s
and the tale’s. Trust the tale. The proper function of a
critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it"
(D. H. Lawrence). ii. "The deconstruction of a text does
not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by
the careful teasing out of warring forces within the text
itself. If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive
reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal
dominion of one mode of signifying over another" (Barbara
Johnson). iii. "To do this [to deconstruct a Freudian text,
or to see how it deconstructs itself] is not to trust Freud
the man but to give oneself maximum opportunity to learn
from Freud’s writing by supposing that if this powerful and
heterogeneous discourse is at one point operating with
unjustified assumptions, these assumptions will be exposed
and undermined by forces within the text that a reading can
bring out” (Jonathan Culler). iv. "Every work of art
adheres to some system of morality. But if it be really a
work of art, it must contain the essential criticism on the
morality to which it adheres . . . . The degree to which
the system of morality, or the metaphysic, of any work of
art is submitted to criticism within the work of art makes
the lasting value and satisfaction of that work” (D. H.
Lawrence). v. "Great works of literature are likely to be
ahead of their critics. They are there already. They have
anticipated explicitly any deconstruction the critic can
achieve" (Miller, "Deconstructing the Deconstructors"). vi.
"The value and force of a text may depend to a considerable
extent on the way it deconstructs the philosophy that
subtends it” (Jonathan Culler). Significantly, Charles
Feidelson. Jr-. whose WW
(1953) is the first major work to discuss nineteenth-century
American literature as symbolistic, has also been shown as
having close affinity with post-structuralism by Barbara
Foley in "From New Criticism to Deconstruction: "The Example
of Charles Feidelson' 8 WW "

. Spring 1984: 44-64. Feidelson’s study,
acording to Foley, "enacts a thoroughgoing application of

183

New Critical linguistics and epistemological principles to
the examination of literary history." Foley observes that
"implicit in the New Critical stress upon formal autonomy is
a valorization of linguistic self-reflectivity"(45). In
view of this remark, D. H. Lawrence’s statement that "the
curious thing about art-speech is that it prevaricates so
terribly" (Studies 8) links him with post-structuralism
through his belief on ”the self-reflectivity" of language.

2. In Apeeeiypse, Lawrence’s interpretation of Beyeistien
is influenced by James Pryse’s s

W
(New York, 1910). Pryse writes that the Revelation was so
heavily veiled with symbols because the church would never
have accepted such an esoteric document that the writer
canceled the real message under the most extraordinary
symbols (4). D. H. Lawrence expresses similar views in
hpe_eiypse (New York: The Viking Press, 1932) about the
writer of Reyeietieh: "To them a thought was a completed
state of feeling awareness . . . . This should help us
appreciate that the oracles were not supposed to say
seomething that fitted plainly in the whole chain of
circumstances. They were supposed to deliver a set of
images or symbols of real dynamic value, which should set
the emotional consciousness of the enquirer, as he pondered
them, revolving more and more rapidly, till out of a state
of intense emotional absorption the resolve at last formed:
or, as we say, the decision was arrived at" (81).

3. Eugene Goodheart goes a step further in his comments on
Lawrence’s affinity with the American spirit as evidenced in
American fiction: "The American novel does not need to know
Lawrence to want the freedom of fluid identity. Nor does it
need to learn from Lawrence the risks of vertigo and of
self-dissolution that a fluid identity incurs. Rather, in
knowing Lawrence, it knows itself. Lawrence is an
incarnation of American consciousness, a re-enactment of the
greatest of American dramas: the European becoming American.
W is itself a fable of
American Literature" ("Lawrence and American Fiction” 137).
Goodheart quotes Edward Dahlberg who believes that Lawrence
influenced American writers, not only through his creative
work, but also through Studies which marked the first
serious criticism of American literature: "Before Lawrence
American books on the poetasters in the American wilderness,
Anne Bradstreet, the pamphleteer-versifier Freneau and the
gothic dunciad Brockden Brown, came from the dreariest
academic scriveners. There was not a critical volume from
which one could quarry a truth until Lawrence’s Studies
which seeded the work of Sherwood Anderson, Allen Tate, Hart

Crane, William Carlos Williams’s Tn_the_hmerieeh_drein and

Josephine Herbst’s The_Huuter_er_Qeyes" (qtd. Goodheart
137).

184

4. some of these works are: The_Art_ef_the_§elf_in_ni_nl
Lsyrenee by Marguerite Beede Howe (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1977), vv
' ’ by Gavriel

Ben-Ephraim (London: Associated University Presses, 1981),

O D —=- _ or' D e. 7. e f!’ 10, so {ever :~
by Colin Clarke (London: Routeledge E Kegan Paul, 1969),
' r. ,.:W -;c 1‘ yo! '2!- 2 e 0 ° 9‘ 0111-. ‘
iSSS_iSiS by Emile Delavenay (Calbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press. 1972). and tenfliet_in_the_Neyels_ef
Qr_flt_Lsyrenee by Yudhishtar (Edinburgh: Oliver 8 Boyd,
1969).

5. Mary Freeman comments on Lawrence’s deep insight in
describing ”life’s consummate moments in his novels,
stories, and poems," and says that, in his essays and
criticism, he undertook "the far more ambitious task of
accounting for them.” In his ”impatience," however, he
tried to accomplish within a short period "explorations of
experience" not possible to be worked out ”under scientific
discipline even in decades." Therefore, these "speculative
eventures beyond the frontiers of knowledge are intuitions."
These deserve serious consideration, because they
”anticipate, as do the insights of particularyly sensitive
men of any age, the emerging concepts of his time." His
concept of the unconscious "parallels quite independently,
the recent conclusions of psychology” (127-128). Walter
Sutton credits I. A. Richards for combining psychology and
literary criticism for the first time in EI1D9121§§_Q£

' (1924). He also believes I. A. Richards
was the first critic to emphasize "the unified nature of
literary experience . . . in keeping with Gestalt
psychology” (4). However, as already discussed, D. H.
Lawrence was already using psychology in criticism when he
started writing his American essays in 1918. The only
difference is that, unlike others who used psychology as "a
concern for scientific method and discipline” (Sutton 4),
Lawrence used it to explore intuitively the mainsprings of
human creativity, and thereby to emphasize the value of
literature as a communicable experience. Like Lawrence, I.
A. Richards, in the chapter "Psychological Theory of Value"
in Erineiules_ef_Literary_uritieism. emphasizes the purpose
of art as the reconciliation of opposites or discordant
qualities.

6. Ernst Cassirer, according to David Bidney, considers
”the mythical symbol, not as a representation concealing
some mystery or hidden truth, but a self-contained form of
interpretation of reality. In myth there is no distinction
between the real and the ideal: the image is the thing and
hence mythical thinking lacks the category of the ideal"

("Myth. Symbolism. and Truth-" Myth_aud_Literature1

185

9entemuererY_Theery_and_£reetiee- John B- Vickery (ed)-
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966: 7).

7. By locating American literature within a generic scheme,
Lawrence was establishing the American canon which had been
subject to gross misconceptions for a long time. As late as
1945, Robert Lawson-Peebles writes in "Dean Acheson and the
Potato Head Blues or, British Academic Attitudes to America
and Its Literature, ”when the English poet Charles Tomlinson
went to Cambridge, "he noticed that his tutors seemed to be
unaware of the existence of American literature.” When
Marcus Cuniffe started teaching the subject at Manchester
University in the 1950’s, ”his request for books was refused
by the university librarian on the grounds that ’we don’t
want book-of-the-month club stuff here’" (26).

8. Lawrence’s essay, ”The Two Principles," intended to be
number eight in Studies, but not included in the final
version, was meant to be an introduction to his essays on
Dana and Melville. Although concerned mainly with his
philosophy of creation in general, this essay does spell out
his concept of all life as a dialectic between two opposing
principles epitomizing living as an eternal conflict. This,
according to Lawrence, is the story of culture too.

Lawrence explains culture as a process of two "life
elements“ coming together "within the living plasm,” but
then there is the "seething and struggling of inscrutable
life-disintegration,” and what remains behind is the being

"within the intangible life-plasm” (The_Symheiiu_Meening
167-168).

9. R. W. B. Lewis points out the following words D. H.
Lawrence wrote expressing his high opinion of Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales as exemplifying this "new
relationship": The Leatherstocking tales create the "myth of
a new relation," because "they go backwards, from old age to
golden youth." This, Lawrence presents as the myth of
America, which "starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an
old skin.” But there is a "gradual sloughing of the old
skin, towards a new youth" (Studies 60).

10. Richard Chase is himself conscious of his close
affinity with the critical method employed by Lawrence in
his essay on Cooper and the great value of Lawrence’s essay
in Cooper criticism: "Opinion about Cooper during the last
twenty years, when it has been interesting at all, has had
to be in one way or another an elaboration or revision of
Lawrence" (Ameriesh_neyei n. 44). Chase’ 3 comments on
Cooper are basically "an elaboration or revision of
Lawrence," but what is more important is Chase’s complete
agreement with Lawrence’s critical method.

186

11. According to Richard Chase, the novel reflects "the
whole illuminating cultural context" by not attemping a
reconciliation but by pointing out its contradictions. D.
H. Lawrence’s high estimate of the novel is also, because,
by its very nature, the novel is "incapable of the absolute
("The Novel” 104), and, therefore, “if you try to nail
anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or
the novel gets up and walks away with the nail” (”Morality
and the Novel" 528). Later, in 1960, Richard Chase is again
reminded of the debt American criticism owes to D. H.
Lawrence. Commenting on Leslie A. Fiedler’s

Chase observes that
Fiedler’s "laboriously” arrived "conclusion, presented as
his own," that the great American authors, especially Mark
Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville, were 'duplicitious," was
repeated by Fiedler without admitting his debt to Anerieen
heyei_end_1tsyTreditien. Acknowledging his own debt to D.
H. Lawrence, Chase writes that even he in Amerieeh_heyei_ehd
Its_Treditieu was aware that he was "merely echoing what had
been made clear many years before by such critics as Newton
Arvin, D. H. Lawrence, Philip Rahv, and Malcolm Cowley"
(”Leslie Fiedler and American Culture" 9-10). Incidentally,
Lawrence was the first among these critics to advance the
idea of ”duplicity" in 1923. Philip Rahv published his work
after 1932, Newton Arvin’ s work on Hawthorne did not appear
till 1929, and Malcolm Cowley’s first significant work,

W. was not published
until 1934.

12. Here we are reminded of D. H. Lawrence’s belief in the
unconscious as ”the spontaneous life motive in every
organism," and not the negatively conceived unconscious of
Freud which, according to Lawrence, was nothing more than
"gagged, bound, maniacal repressions, sexual complexes,
faecal inhibitions, dream monsters," which, despite our
attempts to "repudiate" them, "ate our souls and caused our
helpless neurosis" ( s

200-208). Marcus Cunliffe, in "Love, Death, and Mr.
Fiedler," points out that by simply following a "broad
Richardsonian-Walpolian division,” Fiedler delineates
man-woman relationships in American novels. He finds the
female characters "either angels (the common 19th-century
model) or bitches (the dominant 20th-century model), either
santimonious or depraved” (75). D. H. Lawrence also had
characterized women in American literature as "dark and
light.” For example, in his essay on Cooper, Lawrence finds
”Judith, dark, fearless, passionate, a little lurid with
sin," while Hetty is "blond, frail and innocent." However,
Lawrence’s distintion, here, as well as in his essay on
Hawthorne, is not based on the sexual repressions of

their creators as on the division within the artists between
their unconscious impulse to create a living character and

187

their conscious manipulation of their characters in creating
an ideal person (Studies 67-68).

13. D. H. Lawrence dissociates himself from both the
Freudian and the Jungian unconscious in his myth criticism,
Feidler, however, like Maud Bodkin before him, tries to add
the personal dimension--”signature"--or that element in a
work which represented the writer’s personal unconscious
through which the collective archetype expresses itself in
his essay, "Archetype and Signature" in 1952. According to
Eugene Goodheart, this distinction did not help Fiedler much
in overcoming the problem he wanted to. Goodheart says that
there "is a split in Fiedler’s attitude towards myth,"
dividing ”the literary critic and the social critic.” All
literature, Goodheart says, is a product of "the dialectic
between the mythic pattern (the archetype) and the personal
idiosyncratic imagination of the artist (the signature)."
Despite Fiedler’s recognition of this distinction, in actual
practice, he "is apparently not interested in the signature
of the artist" ("Leslie Fiedler" 42-43).

14. When we compare the Fiedler of Leye_ehd_neeth with the
Fiedler of The_Beturn, we cannot but observe his greater
appreciation for D. H. Lawrence’s method, especially
Lawrence’s employment of the Red Indian as a metaphor for
the aboriginal spirit of America. Fiedler, commenting on
D. H. Lawrence’s failure to discuss such works as Edgar
Allan Poe’s W and Melville’s
"Benito Cereno," wrote in 1960 that Lawrence "prefers his
savages, Noble and Ignoble alike, Red rather than Black, and
has written a history of our fiction with No Negroes
Allowed" (Leye_snd_2eeth 400m). The view of Lawrence as
fascist and anti-feminist is not new to Lawrence critcism,
and it’s not within the scope of our present study to enter
in this controversy. However, Fiedler’s appreciation, in
The_Beturn, of Lawrence’s use of the Red Indian as a
metaphor for the Spirit of Place, an element the white man
refused to encounter as a "whole man alive," clearly
indicates Fiedler’s better appreciation of Lawrence’s point
of view. It is in the ability of the White Spirit to react
creatively to the complex and diverse environment the New
World presents that the success or failure of the American
experiment depends.

CONCLUSION:

D. H. LAWRENCE: TEXT, HISTORY, AND CULTURE

As an epilogue to the preceding chapters, it is
worthwhile to examine the extent to which D. H. Lawrence’s
beliefs on the nature of text, culture, and history have
stood the test of time. Although Lawrence was widely read
in anthropology and was a keen student of history, he was
neither a trained anthropologist nor historiographer in the
modern scientific sense. Like his literary criticism, his
views on history and culture are informed mainly by the
intuitions of an artist. His essays on American literature
and other critical writings focus primarily on the relation
of narrative to the historical and cultural moment that
produces it, and raise two significant questions: first,
whether there is a rigid boundary separating literary
criticism and criticism of culture and history, and, again,
whether history is only an economic, social, and political
reality to be reconstructed only out of texts which address
themselves specifically to these issues, or should literary
texts be considered equally valid communicants of historical
and cultural truths.

These concerns have become more and more important in

recent years. The way these questions are being answered

188

189
explains the confidence American criticism placed in D. H.
Lawrence’s unique but highly unconventional critical

approach. It is not likely that we can agree today with the

kind of response Martin Green had for Studies_in_§iessie
Ameriesh_Litereture even two decades after the publication

of Lawrence’s work. Green remarked in 1965 that, despite
its "brilliance," Lawrence’s work fails as literary
criticism, because of his preoccupation with "American
society, American psychology, American morality, American
spirituality,” and also because, in doing so, Lawrence
offers ”evidence for all this from the literature.” Green,
however, remarked that ”this is a genuinely literary but not
a critical way of treating literature" (15). For Green,
therefore, there is a definite schism between literary
criticism and historical and cultural matrixes.

The increasing interest in novel as an art form in
recent years coincides with renewed interest in Lawrence’s
views on the novel--its nature and scope. Lawrence’s essay,

"Why the Novel Matters," provides the title to flhy_the_neyei

WM. papers collected from Neyels.
h_zerum_eh_£ietieh, founded in 1960, and proceedings of its

conference held under the presidency of David Lodge. In his
presidential address, Lodge comments that D. H. Lawrence’s
views on the novel, the title of whose essay "flies like a
banner over our conference,” can help us ”resolve the
humanistic and post-modern debates on the novel’s role and

significance." Lodge, referring to Lawrence’s essay the

190
"Novel," says that "this apologia for the novel was hardly
likely to have been known to Bakhtin, but it anticipates his
theory in a remarkable way," particularly in the ”polemical
opposition it sets up between the novel and the canonized
genres of tragedy and lyric poetry” (152-155).

The years following Lawrence’s essays have also
witnessed an increasing preoccupation with the role language
plays in narrative. As the foregoing chapters attempt to
explain, D. H. Lawrence, by emphasizing the text’s silences
as more relevant than its explicit import, points toward the
complex role language plays in discourse. Lawrence’s
recognition of this phenomenon anticipates in a more general
way the growing interest in the interpretation of discourse
as a mode of articulating historical and cultural paradigms.
Pierre Macherey comments on this process:

What is important in a work is what it does not
say. This is not the same as the careless

notation ’what it refuses to say,’ although that
would in itself be interesting: a method might be

built on it, with the task of meesurihg_siiehees,

whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. But rather
this, what the work cannot say is important,
because there the elaboration of the utterance is
carried out, in a sort of journey to silence.
(87)
Similarities between Lawrence’s critical pronouncements and
of contemporary critics on deconstruction have been
mentioned earlier. A new sensitivity to language and its
complexities, as emphasized by D. H. Lawrence, is also

evidenced today in the efforts to redefine the nature of
historiography in the context of language. Tn_The_niseeurse

191
eh_Lsnguege, Michel Foucault warns us not to overplay "the
positive multiplicatory role" of historical discourse
without accounting for its "restrictive, constraining role”
(224). Foucault interprets history of culture as a study of
power conflict, not in the realm of economy or politics, but
in the operation of feelings and instincts permeating all
social relations. Like Lawrence, Foucault is also
influenced by Nietzsche, in his belief that historical
events do not represent finality. Foucault describes his
cultural paradigm as "genealogical," and believes that such
a system relies on searching for ”beginnings” rather than
”origins." "Origins” encompass causes, while "beginnings"
imply differences. True history is concerned, according to
Foucault, with differences and not with positivistic
rationalization of causes ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
144).

In D. H. Lawrence’s conception, literary narratives
speak for the history of a culture. Modern historiography,
Hayden White observes, opens up new visions by abolishing
the distinction between fact and fiction, because history
”is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist
tries to make sense of it" (Trepies 98). White writes: ”To
raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite
reflections on the very nature of culture and, possibly, on
the very nature of humanity itself” (”The Value” 1).
However, despite his belief in the relevance of literary

theory in historiography, White differs from Lawrence in his

192
faith in the basic coherence of historical phenomenon as
expressed in discourse. Dominick LaCapra is closer to
Lawrence’s belief in the dichotomy inherent in discourse.
For LaCapra, the search for coherence in narrative results
in an impasse. Narratives, LaCapra believes, express
internal tensions that challenge the supremacy of the given:
”One such process is precisely the interaction between the
desire for unity, identity, or purity, and the forces that
contest it” (60). The basic principle underlying the
Laurentian method is similar: "Never trust the artist.
Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save
the tale from the artist who created it" (Studies 8).

These modern theories are a result of painstaking
research and scientific speculation, and are distinguished
by their intellectual rigor and highly polemical nature. It
is a great tribute to D. H. Lawrence that even this highly
specialized body of knowledge, exploring the relation
between literary criticism, culture, and history
substantiates the validity of Lawrence’s intuitions and
insights. When American criticism so eagerly appropriated
the Laurentian idiom in its survey of American literature
and culture, it was only responding to the need of
discovering new areas of emphasis Lawrence’s insights
offered it. Contemporary developments in criticism have
shown that this confidence was well-founded.

The attitude of today’s critic toward American

literature is best summed up in Cathy H. Davidson’s work on

193
the American novel. Davidson, writing on the rise of
American novel, comments that texts are histories. However,
the history she means is not ”Universal History," but,
perhaps, history in Laurentian terms, "great, surging
movements which rose in the hearts of men" (neyements
xi-xii). These texts, according to Davidson, are "not only
susceptible to varying interpretation, but require them."
They not only struggle against ”rational reduction to an
ostensible message but are inimical to the whole
prioritizing of the rational over the ’wisdom of the human
heart’” (260). The extent to which D. H. Lawrence’s voice
can be heard in today’s discourse on American culture is
best exemplified by a text book for Junior classes, a
W. by David Schuman
and Bob Waterman. The writers employ Lawrence’s essay, "The
Spirit of Place," as the basis of their argument to warn
young Americans not to pigeon-hole any idea and to welcome
new experience. This belief, although reiterated in the
past, was seldom presented in the form D. H. Lawrence
presents it--an American experience flavored by the American

soil.

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