Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence

Indians, Gypsies, and Jews

J. Ruderman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137398826
• eBook ISBN: 9781137398833
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence is a wide-ranging examination of Lawrence's adoption and adaptation of stereotypes about minorities, with a focus on three particular 'racial' groups. This book explores societal attitudes in England, Europe, and the United States and Lawrence's utilization of cultural norms to explore his own identity.

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Introduction: D. H. Lawrence and the Racial Other

D. H. Lawrence has for decades been excoriated at worst, and dismissed at best, by many literary critics and the general public alike – branded with the terms colonialist, misogynist, and racist (not to mention pornographer). Bertrand Russell, among others who knew Lawrence personally, seemed to add the imprimatur of insider knowledge when he commented, only ten years after the Second World War, that his erstwhile friend ‘had developed the whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it’, and that Lawrence’s theories about ‘blood consciousness’ had ‘led straight to Auschwitz’.¹ In the feminist movement of the next two decades, such critics as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett were outraged by their own readings of Lawrence’s views on women, and the countervailing views of the ilk of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer only added fuel to that fire.

In recent years, however, deeper understandings of Lawrence – aided by the extensive, three-volume Cambridge biography and the authoritative Cambridge editions of the works – have nuanced the critical approaches to this writer, with the result that his complexity as a human being has emerged in sharper relief, to counter the one-dimensional views of him promulgated in earlier times. This is not to say that Lawrence’s misguided opinions or stereotypical attitudes toward the other (whether defined in racial, gender, or religious terms) have been whitewashed, or that the earlier views of the critics, whether negative or positive, have been disregarded. Rather, Lawrence’s opinions and attitudes are now examined from a greater variety of frameworks, including the opposing positions to be found within the works, in productive dialogue with each other, and the importance of travel in Lawrence’s confrontation with otherness.²

Certainly Lawrence’s seeking out of travel opportunities around the world, as he looked for a new place to settle, and his first-hand experiences with other countries and cultures, influenced his attitudes toward otherness as much as did his upbringing in England, whether strengthening or counteracting his earlier conceptions. Eastwood, a small (population 4,363 in 1891) coal-mining town of the English Midlands, was divided by class in his childhood years but not by religion or ethnicity. For example, even as late as 2001, the percentage of Jews in Broxtowe, which includes Eastwood, was only one-tenth of 1 per cent, or about 12 people (and in the whole of England in that year, only one-half of 1 per cent, mostly in London). Lawrence encountered somewhat more variety – what we today call diversity – in the big city of Nottingham eight miles away, where he attended college, and where the population of 239,743 in 1901 contained 675 foreigners.³ London, where he began to enjoy recognition under the mentorship of Ford Madox Hueffer (later, Ford), expanded his horizons even further. But Lawrence’s rootlessness could not be contained within England, and it gained purchase in his twenties with the severing of ties to home and homeland as he was freed by his mother’s death and impelled toward travel abroad by the uncongenial English environment of the First World War.⁴ The last line of Sons and Lovers – ‘He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly’ (SL 464) – applies to the author as well as to his fictional self, Paul Morel. The humming town that Lawrence would travel to would be Venice and Vence, Metz and Mexico City, Taormina and Taos, to name but a few of the many places Lawrence visited in the short span of his adult life between his 1912 escape to Germany and Italy with Frieda and his death at the age of forty-four in 1930. The institution of the passport in 1915, and Lawrence’s difficulty in obtaining one during the war, made further travel outside of England impossible for him until the war’s end. When he left (returning for only brief visits during the rest of his life), Lawrence was, in Paul Fussell’s words, at ‘the vanguard of the British Literary Diaspora, the great flight of writers from England in the 20’s and 30’s’ – a diaspora facilitated by the strength of the pound against continental currencies.⁵

Lawrence’s travels reinforced and widened his inherent interest in otherness and identity, an interest often centered on race. It is useful to take a moment to review the significance of travel for conceptions of race as grounded in earlier times. Curiosity about non-Europeans became prominent in the eighteenth century, stimulated by the accounts of European explorers, traders, and missionaries. Travel literature was extremely popular in this period: in fact, says Wim Willems, in his study of the Gypsy, ‘whoever wanted to know something about other peoples and cultures would resort first of all to consulting this source of information.’ These accounts would often distinguish the ‘savage’ from the ‘civilized’:

The heart of the matter was determining what place all these peoples occupied in nature’s great chain of being. Had the savage peoples become bogged down in an early phase of development? If so, then the task at hand was to find out what could be done to help them along until they became civilized. Ethnographers and natural scientists developed the scientific methods of comparison and classification necessary to impose order on their observations. These interpretations, however, were coloured by classical notions of beauty, middle-class virtues (moderation, honour and hard work), and by national myths and symbols, all of which paved the way for conceptions about superior and inferior peoples. Enlightened thought in terms of moderation and order, it must be said, tended to reject everything that was considered to be primitive. Only within the Romantic literary tradition would the idea of the noble savage create a stir.⁶

By Lawrence’s birth in the late nineteenth century, the ‘genuine attempt to understand the basis, nature and significance of difference’, as David Mayall puts it,⁷ had hardened into a theory of racial hierarchies and boundaries.

The present study rests on the assumption that an approach to Lawrence informed by perspectives from history and cultural studies will add to the conversation and prove instructive on several counts. By setting Lawrence in his context(s) I intend to reveal important currents of thinking in his own times: their origins and influences. I hope both to counteract a common view that he was idiosyncratic in his extreme statements and to suggest some surprising ways in which he deviated from the norms of cultural stereotyping. I also intend to indicate how Lawrence’s personal circumstances combined with societal influences to shape the writer he became, especially in the ways he incorporated race into his works.

In concentrating on socio-cultural contexts I do not mean to downplay the art of Lawrence’s writings. As Lionel Trilling said in 1970, ‘To perceive a work not only in its isolation, as an object of aesthetic contemplation, but also as implicated in the life of a people at a certain time, as expressing that life, and as being in part shaped by it, does not . . . diminish the power or charm of the work but, on the contrary, enhances it.’⁸ I don’t quite agree with the last part of Lawrence’s remark, in his essay ‘The Spirit of Place’ (1923), that an artist is ‘usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters’ (SCAL 14). Surely telling the truth of the day is not all that matters, particularly to those who relish the aesthetic aspects of literature (which includes this writer). But how much richer the experience of reading a work if one can understand it better through examining the culture in which it was created.

One might equally take as a motto for this book another statement from ‘The Spirit of Place’, this one from the first version of that essay (1918–19): ‘We have thought and spoken till now in terms of likeness and oneness. Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness’ (SCAL 168). Neil Roberts, in his study of Lawrence’s travels and engagement with cultural difference, states that ‘the term “otherness” . . . is used in contemporary critical discourse with a confusing variety of meanings, but it is essential when writing about matters of race and cultural difference.’⁹ It is certainly essential when writing about Lawrence, since this author not only used the term over and again in his travel writing and elsewhere, but considered it critical for healthy relationships between man and woman and man and nature as well as between white person and racial other. That is, the single, isolate self should not be mingled and merged with another, lest it lose its identity and integrity (in the root meaning of that word as wholeness). Having earlier explored that concept from a psychological perspective,¹⁰ I now investigate not only Lawrence’s respect for the ‘sacred mystery of otherness’ (SCAL 238) but also his more than occasional frustration with and actual distaste for racial difference.

To Roberts, ‘[o]therness in Lawrence’s use invariably has positive and optimistic connotations’, and he quotes from Lawrence’s first (1918–19) version of an essay on de Crèvecoeur as proof of his assertion:

The pure beauty of the sentiment here lies . . . in the deep, tender recognition of the life-reality of the other, the other creature which exists not in union with the immediate self, but in dark juxtaposition. It is . . . knowledge in separation. (SCAL 199)

But Lawrence’s actual portrayal of otherness is often quite conflicted, and the opposite of tender, as Roberts would agree; and the meaning of the word separation when applied to him is a sometimes dizzying combination of valuation of the otherness of the other; a sense of an immutable boundary between self and other; and a deep distrust, even dislike, of the other.

Amit Chaudhuri, too, in D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’, states that Lawrence’s conception of otherness is one of unknowable difference – ‘the impossibility of essentializing or “knowing” the other’¹¹ – and yet his quotation from Lawrence’s essay on Whitman seems to refute that key point: for when Lawrence, criticizing Whitman for his desire to merge with everyone, says that neither he nor ‘Walt’ is a ‘little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Eskimo’ (SCAL 151), there is no detectable irony in that description. To paraphrase Lawrence on another point, in an essay on the ‘morality’ of the novel (STH 172), the Eskimo has been nailed down by the stereotype and cannot walk away. My grounds for taking issue with the informative studies of both Chaudhuri and Roberts lie in their notion, as Roberts expresses it, that ‘the unknown for Lawrence remains unknown: the experience of otherness is not a progressive translation of the unknown into the known, a kind of cognitive consumption, but an extended awareness of the mystery of the not-self.’¹² In spite of and along with denigrating the desire for knowledge of the other, Lawrence was quite capable of characterizing the racial other in ways that suggest he thought he possessed such knowledge.

Contextualizing Lawrence within his era helps to explain why and how his ideas about the other were so often expressed in racialized terms. The reasons why race theory became dogma in England and elsewhere in the nineteenth century vary with the commentators’ emphases, but taken as a whole, as David Mayall recounts, they include wars and mutinies in the colonies, ‘imperial expansion overseas, industrial growth, class conflict and fears of racial degeneration at home, international competition and the spread of nationalism, and the key place held by science and especially comparative anatomy’. Race thinking filtered down into the general population – abetted by higher literacy rates and better communications technology, among other factors – and became accepted as fact by majority and minority populations alike. Racial categories and hierarchies were extended by the Social Darwinists and eugenicists and ‘legitimized, reinforced, repeated, popularized and confirmed’ everywhere: in academia and politics, in entertainment and the educational system, in the anthropological societies and the pages of novels. Mayall remarks that it is of ‘paramount importance’ that such ideas ‘were simply accepted, were not seen as morally or intellectually unacceptable, and became the basis for analysis of peoples, events and situations. . . . The idea, from Robert Knox, that race was everything, an explanation of all human affairs, was commonly believed and widely absorbed, even amongst those who would not have considered themselves to be racist.’¹³ D. H. Lawrence is one who would undoubtedly not have considered himself racist, though today’s readers are sure to wince at such characterizations in his writings as ‘the curious, reptile apprehension which comes over dark people’ (in The Plumed Serpent [PS 134]) . . . that is, if they have not already refused to engage this writer deemed ‘colonialist’ until fairly recently.

Lawrence’s consciousness of racial otherness was expanded during his college years through his readings in Schopenhauer, among other authors. His childhood friend Jessie Chambers reports that during Lawrence’s second year at Nottingham University College (circa 1907) he read The Metaphysics of Love and ‘was vehemently of Schopenhauer’s opinion that a white skin is not natural to man, and had a fierce argument with my brother who disputed the statement that “fair hair and blue eyes are a deviation from type”. Lawrence said pointedly: “For me, a brown skin is the only beautiful one.”’ But Chambers goes on to note that Lawrence added, in reference to Schopenhauer’s remark that everyone desires what is most beautiful, ‘That’s just the trouble, though. I see what is most beautiful, and I don’t desire it.’¹⁴ Lawrence not only did not desire the dark skin (or so he said), he could be repelled by it. In late December 1910 he wrote a chatty letter to his then-fiancée, Louisa ‘Louie’ Burrows, in which he evidenced strong discomfort in the presence of people of color, alongside an equally strong fascination with them:

At the petit danse last night there were three Asiatics from India. They are extraordinarily interesting to watch – like lithe beasts from the jungle: but one cannot help feeling how alien they are. You talk about ‘brother men’: but a terrier dog is much nearer kin to us than those men with their wild laughter and rolling eyes. Either I am disagreeable or a bit barbaric myself: but I felt the race instinct of aversion and slight antagonism to those blacks, rather strongly. It is strange. (1L 215)

The language of this letter discloses common views of the dark other as animalistic, uncivilized, and alien. Barbarism when unconnected to a dark race was another matter, however: less than eighteen months later, Lawrence ran off to Germany with the married Mrs Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, an older woman with three children and wife of one of Lawrence’s Nottingham University College professors. Exhilarated by his new-found passion, he wrote to his mentor and editor of Sons and Lovers, Edward Garnett, ‘F. wants to clear out of Europe, and get to somewhere uncivilized. It is astonishing how barbaric one gets with love. . . . I never knew I was like this’ (1L 424–5). Soon again he was writing to Garnett, ‘Here, in this tiny, savage little place [Icking, near Munich], Frieda and I have got awfully wild. I loathe the idea of England, and its enervation and misty miserable modernness. I don’t want to go back to town and civilization’ (1L 427). It would not take long before Lawrence would connect the wild energies of passion with the exotic dark other and tie both ideas to the salvation of humankind in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the First World War and its aftermath.

As soon as he could leave England Lawrence did so – he was ope...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: D. H. Lawrence and the Racial Other
• 2 Lawrence and the ‘Jewish Problem’: Reflections on a Self-Confessed ‘Hebrophobe’
• 3 An ‘Englishman at Heart’? Lawrence, the Jews, and the National Identity Debates
• 4 ‘Doing a Zion Stunt’: Lawrence in his Land(s) of Milk and Honey
• 5 Lawrence and the Indian: Apprehending ‘Culture’ in the American Southwest
• 6 Lawrence’s Caravan of Gypsy Identities
• 7 (Ad)dressing Identity: Clothing as Artifice and Authenticity
• 8 Cleanliness and Fitness: The Role of the Racial Other in Conceptions of Health
• 9 Crossing or Enforcing the Border: Purity, Hybridity, and the Concept of Race
• Appendix. Race vs. Ethnicity: The Case of the Gypsies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index