D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing

Colonialism in His Travel Writing and Leadership Novels

Eunyoung Oh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135921774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossingbuilds upon developments within postcolonial theory to argue for a reconsideration of the concept of "spirit of place" in D. H. Lawrence's travel books and "leadership" novels – works that record Lawrence's various encounters with racial and geographical "others." Exploring his relationship to colonialism, Dr. Ohshows how Lawrence's belief in different "spirits" belonging to these disparate places enables him to transcend the hierarchies between metropolis and colony, between civilized and "primitive" worlds.

Chapter One

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

Lawrence’s journey to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New and Old Mexico was not only a search for a new world but also a process of verifying his (sometimes idealized and abstract) notion of “spirit of place” in reality.¹ Through his diverse encounters with Italian peasants, Ceylonese, English subjects of the new settler nation, American and Mexican Indians, he could materialize his idea that “[e]very continent has its own great spirit of place” (Studies, p. 12).² Frieda Lawrence also testifies to her husband’s interest in place in a letter written just before they went to Mexico: “Lawrence wants to go to Mexico, he thinks he might write his American novel there—You [Adele Seltzer] know he would like to write a novel of each continent—if possible” (Letters, IV, p. 385). My aim in this chapter is to read Lawrence’s travels and his travel books through colonial and postcolonial perspectives as part of colonial (and also postcolonial) discourse, rather than as romantic and lyric expressions of his travels. This reading demands examining the way in which he, as a post-war traveler and self-exile, responded to and recorded the places that he visited—places represented in his travel books as the Lago di Garda, Sardinia, Mexico, Southwestern America, and Etruria. Through this reading, I will show how Lawrence’s conception of “spirit of place,” which embraces “difference” and “otherness,” becomes substantiated as a postcolonial metaphor.

To understand Lawrence’s travels and his travel writings in relation to the issue of colonialism, we need to see the confusions and anxieties that Lawrence, as a British traveler, faced, particularly in colonial frontiers such as Ceylon, Australia, the American Southwest, and Mexico. Achsah and Earl Brewster remember in D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence that, during his sojourn in Ceylon, Lawrence was deeply concerned with racial differences—to use Lawrence’s word, the different blood consciousness of a different place. Lawrence was not happy there, but he believed that his repulsion to the place and black strangers was caused by the different spirit of the place: “My being requires a different physical and psychic environment: the white man is not for this region: it is for the dark-skinned, whose flow of blood consciousness is vitally attuned to these different rays of the sun.”³ Lawrence’s description of Ceylon in his letters, as I showed in my Introduction, reveals how his idealized understanding of “spirit of place,” especially at this early stage of his travels, ironically co-exists with his physical repulsion to the “voluptuous” and “sensuous” naked people.

Unlike Ceylon with its black naked people and tropical climate, Lawrence felt a sense of freedom in Australia, a white settler dominion of the British crown. He enjoyed, as a whole new experience, the nature and the landscape of Australia, a place which is relatively free from “[t]he great spiritual freight that weighs so heavily in Europe” (Letters, IV, p. 256). However, his sense of freedom did not last long since the spirit and the landscape of Australia did not allow Lawrence to approach and appropriate them, as shown in his “troubled” description of the Australian bush in Kangaroo: “It [the bush] was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, … he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for?”⁴

Whereas Ceylon and Australia, for Lawrence, were “a sort of dream or trance,” as he notes in his essay “New Mexico,” the Southwest of America as a place was a totally different experience: “it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development” (Phoenix, p. 142). But, after his first meeting with Apache Indians, which happened in September 1922, he had to adjust his ideal vision of the Red Indians, mostly influenced by James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” novels. His sense of elation presented in “America, Listen to Your Own,” written before he came to America, intriguingly contrasts with his confusion at the first encounter with the American Indians recorded in “Indians and an Englishman”⁵:

Americans must take up life where the Red Indian, the Aztec, the Maya, the Incas left it off. They must pick up the life-thread where the mysterious Red race let it fall. They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes and Columbus murdered. There lies the real continuity: not between Europe and the new States, but between the murdered Red America and the seething White America. (Phoenix, p. 90)

I shall never forget that first evening when I first came into contact with Red Men, away in the Apache country. It was not what I had thought it would be. It was something of a shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses. (Phoenix, p. 95)

Of course, it took time for Lawrence’s feeling about and vision of the Red Indians to adjust and for him finally to see them not through Cooper’s idealized and distanced perspective but through his own—personally much more attached—perspective. For Lawrence, American and Mexican Indians were people who simultaneously gave him a clue for a future society and constantly tested his sense of superiority as a white European male. It is no wonder that the essay “New Mexico,” which can be read as a manifesto of his life in America, declares his sojourn in America as one of the most significant experiences in his life.

Despite his sense of liberation from civilization, however, the spirit of America that white Americans emanated, along with a risk of American Indians’ assimilation to it, pushed Lawrence to more fundamentally “primitive” places than the American Southwest. As an alternative to white America, Mexico fully charged Lawrence with an apocalyptic vision of the New World. In a letter sent from Chapala in Mexico to his mother-in-law in Germany, he explains a part of the motive that stimulated him to write The Plumed Serpent:

Yet Mexico is very interesting, a strange folk. Most are pure Indians, dark like the people in Ceylon, but much stronger. The men have got the strongest backbones in the world, I believe. They are half civilized, half wild. If they only had a new faith, a new hope, they would perhaps be a new, young, beautiful people. But as Christians they don’t get any further, are inwardly melancholy, live without hope, become suddenly cross, and don’t like to work…. And I find that wonderful, they are so little attached to money and possessions, here in America, where the whites are attached only to money and possessions. But not the peons. (Letters, IV, p. 452)

For Lawrence, Mexico was a significant place where he seriously attempted to experiment with his own version of politics and religion. At the same time, Mexico was also a place, like Ceylon, that confused him due to the gap between his idea of a New World and his actual contact with black strangers. Particularly in Mornings in Mexico and The Plumed Serpent, his sense of superiority as a civilized white man and his sense of repulsion to the white civilization are constantly in conflict or tension.

Although Lawrence traveled around the globe, Italy was the foreign country that he visited most often during his lifetime. Lawrence’s three travel books, Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Etruscan Places (1932)— all, in fact, of his travel books except for Mornings in Mexico (1927)—are based on his personal trips to Italy, which happened before and after his sojourn in America.⁶ When Lawrence says in a letter written in the Lago di Garda, “[a]ll I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not” (Letters, I, p. 503), it seems that Italy, for Lawrence, was the only available country at that time (before his concern with primitive society went beyond Europe) that made possible his honest response to his own blood without intervention of mind. In other words, Italy represents what is absent and deficient in England and English people’s life, as Lawrence observes:

The Italians here sing. They are very poor, they buy two pennorth of butter and a pennorth of cheese. But they are healthy and they lounge about in the little square where the boats come up and nets are mended, like kings. And they go by the window proudly, and they don’t hurry or fret. And the women walk straight and look calm. And the men adore children—they are glad of their children even if they’re poor. I think they haven’t many ideas, but they look well, and they have strong blood. (Letters, I, p. 460)

After the nerve-breaking experience of the war in England, when Lawrence finally settled down at Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, it is likely that he felt a sense of relief that he had escaped from industrialized Northern Europe: “I must say I like this place…. It isn’t quite like Europe. It is where Europe ends: finally.”⁷ (Letters, III, p. 488).

Regardless of the sense of freedom he felt in southern Italy, one might ask, if both Italy and England are part of Europe, then how is it possible to apply the paradigm of the colonized and colonizer to Lawrence’s travel books? Probably this is the main reason that most readings of Lawrence’s travel books have not been concerned with the issue of colonialism. Critics rather have highlighted either “its lyric richness”⁸ in Twilight in Italy or “the sensuous quality of Sea and Sardinia.”⁹ Del Ivan Janik, emphasizing “the constant tension between two ‘infinites’” as its central theme, brushes off racial and political issues embedded in Twilight in Italy: “Lawrence’s view is ultimately apolitical; it is the view of the artist, the immediate observer. Despite Lawrence’s description of the book in his letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, the role of ‘race’ in Twilight in Italy is not central.”¹⁰ Janik is quite right in pointing out that Lawrence was not especially concerned with the details of actual politics. But he too easily dismisses the fact that Lawrence struggles with the whole structure of Western civilization; considering that Western civilization has been sustained on the basis of industrial/colonial expansion, how could Lawrence’s view be apolitical in dealing with its governing structure?

Reviewing the scholarship on Victorian and modern travel writing, Joanne Shattock states that “[t]he most fruitful time for travel writing in the twentieth century was, by general consensus, the period between the wars.”¹¹ This statement is proved by Paul Fussell’s work entitled Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), which Shattock praises as “[t]he single most significant contribution to the study of twentieth-century travel writing.”¹² Fussell deals with Western travel writing from 1918 to 1939, which mostly registers the fantasies of flight and freedom that dominated the social atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s. The disastrous experience of the war triggered people’s desire to escape from modern, industrialized cities to primitive, sun-bleached places. Fussell even mentions the “psychological” effect of the climate, especially the British weather. It seems after the war, Fussell says, that the cold and foggy weather of England symbolically rendered its social climate and was seen by the imaginative and sensitive, like D. H. Lawrence, as intolerably “stuffy” and finally “uninhabitable.”¹³ Interestingly enough, Fussell regards Lawrence as “the vanguard of the British Literary Diaspora, the great flight of writers from England in the 20’s and 30’s.”¹⁴

War intensifies the innate Philistinism of the British especially, D. H. Lawrence thought. There is no doubt that he was put upon more than most during the war, and hardly any British civilian could equal him in intensity of perception, emotional violence, and the conviction that he had been deeply wronged. Yet for all his special white-hot outrage, Lawrence’s experience in wartime England and his almost continuous flight from it thenceforth—he returned only three times for brief visits—are emblematic of the behavior of many others propelled on their post-war travels as if by a wartime spring tightly compressed.¹⁵

In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan reviews “the British Literary Diaspora” in terms of “[t]he modernist critical tradition of conceptualizing exile as aesthetic gain.”¹⁶ Unlike Fussell who creates a canon of modern travel writing centering around “an elite group of British, male writers between the two World Wars,” Kaplan criticizes the ideology of modernist aesthetics by which the “historically generated subject becomes mystified and dehistoricized.”¹⁷ Fussell’s description of Lawrence as a postwar travel writer shows an example of what Kaplan condemns as “mystified and dehistoricized” rendering of modern travel literature. Like other critics, Fussell emphasizes Lawrence’s unrivalled instinct for the spirit of place: “Lawrence’s signature is his acute, almost neurotic, sense of place…. His sense of place makes him like no other writer.”¹⁸ But he dismisses political and racial contexts that not only Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” but also the complicated motives behind his self-exile imply. Fussell hardly pays attention to the fact that, as a post-war traveler, Lawrence’s journey to foreign lands has something to do with his apocalyptic concern—a search for a new world—beyond his personally disastrous experience of the war. Consequently, Fussell’s reading of Lawrence’s travel writing presents Lawrence as an impulsive and talented traveler, rather than as a beleaguered exile.

Not only as a “post-war” traveler but also as a self-exile, Lawrence’s journey to colonial frontiers is different from nineteenth-century European explorers in that his journey did not intend either to explore or to exploit Europe’s colonies. His journey rather features an escape from all mechanisms and systems that Europe represented. This is the context in which we can read Lawrence’s travel writing as a modernist text of a self-exile, rather than as a Victorian colonialist travelogue. Nonetheless, one might ask, is Lawrence’s search for a new world free from colonial implications and assumptions of the West? If his journey is different from that of nineteenth-century white explorers, how is it different? Mary Louise Pratt’s study, which explores the relation between nineteenth-century travel writing and colonialism, helps us to answer these questions. Examining nineteenth-century European travel writings (mainly about Africa), Pratt categorizes Western travel writing of the last century as “manners-and-customs descriptions,” the so-called “scientific, information-oriented branch of travel writing,” and “dramatic (sentimental) travel writing.”¹⁹ Pratt focuses on the fact that most European travel writing effaces people—Europeans as well as colonized others—and instead foregrounds the landscape of the colony. She comes to see, through her postcolonial reading of these landscape travel writings, the way in which landscape description of nineteenth-century travel writing pretends to be neutral, informational, and scientific, while hiding its desire for exploration/exploitation of the landscape:

The explicit project of these explorer-writers, whether scientists or not, is to produce what they themselves referred to as “information.” Their task, in other words, was to incorporate a particular reality into a series of interlocking information orders—aesthetic, geographic, mineralogical, botanical, agricultural, economic, ecological, ethnographic, and so on. To the extent that it strives to efface itself, the invisible eye/I strives to make those informational orders natural, to find them there uncommanded, rather than assert them as the products/producers of European knowledges or disciplines.²⁰

Significantly, Pratt debunks this seemingly “neutral” description of the colonial landscape and argues that it ultimately aims to measure the possibility for the landscape’s future as a colony: “In scanning prospects in the spatial sense—as landscape panoramas—this [imperial] eye knows itself to be looking at prospects in the temporal sense—as possibilities for the future, resources to be developed, landscapes to be peopled or repeopled by Europeans.”²¹

Unlike Pratt’s description of European travel writing, Lawrence’s travel books do not seem to fit into these categories that Pratt has set. This might be because Lawrence’s travelogues, mostly written in the 1920s, do not fall within the “high” season of Western imperialism, the Vic...