I.
Although not published until November of 1920, Lawrence completed his sixth novel - The Lost Girl - 100 years ago this month (May 5th).
In letters, he repeatedly describes the work as quite proper and expresses his hope it might actually be a popular success. Perhaps that's why, for me, it's the most boring of all his fictional works and one I hardly ever return to. If only Alvina had been morally lost, then maybe it would hold more interest.
Although not published until November of 1920, Lawrence completed his sixth novel - The Lost Girl - 100 years ago this month (May 5th).
In letters, he repeatedly describes the work as quite proper and expresses his hope it might actually be a popular success. Perhaps that's why, for me, it's the most boring of all his fictional works and one I hardly ever return to. If only Alvina had been morally lost, then maybe it would hold more interest.
Still, her decision to marry an Italian and "move towards reunion with the dark half of humanity" [1], is something we might discuss ...
II.
Exogamy and the idea of interracial relationships always fascinated Lawrence and there are many instances to be found in his work of wealthy white women running off with Mexicans and dark-skinned gypsies, etc.
Thus it is that in The Lost Girl - which Lawrence had at one time thought of calling 'Mixed Marriage' - we are presented with the tale of Alvina Houghton, daughter of a widowed Midlands draper and fleapit theatre owner, who decides to throw in her lot with Ciccio, a travelling performer from southern Italy:
"His skin was delicately tawny, and slightly lustrous. The eyes were set in so dark, that one expected them to be black and flashing. And then one met the yellow pupils, sulpherous and remote. [...] His long, fine nose, his rather long, rounded chin and curling lip seemed refined through ages of forgotten culture." [2]
Fleeing with Ciccio to the Old Country, Alvina abandons her life in Woodhouse and enters a new world of desire ...
III.
Now, of course, contemporary readers in England, many of whom are used to thinking of themselves as European and who regularly fly off for long weekends all over the Continent, will ask what's the big deal about this: is there really any significant difference in terms of culture and ethnicity between an Englishwoman and an Italian?
Probably not.
However, when Lawrence was writing - despite many centuries of mixing and mingling between peoples of different blood and opposing spirit - there remained, in his view, a gulf in existence and in being between two essential European types: "The dark-eyed, swarthy, wine-loving men from sunny lands" and the Germanic peoples, "born of the northern sea, the heavy waters, the white snow, the yellow wintry sun, the perfect beautiful blue of ice" [3].
And, crucially, at the beginning of the 20th-century, it wasn't just Lawrence who thought along these lines, separating ostensibly white Europeans into distinct races. In the United States, for example, Italians, particularly from the south (and especially from Sicily), were still regarded in some quarters as racially suspect; i.e., if not black exactly, then not-quite white either. Italians were sometimes refused entry to schools, cinemas, even churches and were invariably described in the press as wops and regarded as innately inferior.
In the Southern states, they even found themselves subject to shocking violence; in March 1891, for example, when Lawrence would have been six years old, eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans, resulting in a serious diplomatic incident that brought the US and Italy to the brink of conflict. As one commentator on this incident notes: "The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation." [4]
I suppose the key point is that racial categories are mostly the product of cultural mythology, rather than biology: whiteness - like blackness - is a political designation rather than a natural fact. And whilst Lawrence fetishistically exploits these categories for an erotic rather than a racist motive, we should still be alert to the dangers of so doing.
Exogamy and the idea of interracial relationships always fascinated Lawrence and there are many instances to be found in his work of wealthy white women running off with Mexicans and dark-skinned gypsies, etc.
Thus it is that in The Lost Girl - which Lawrence had at one time thought of calling 'Mixed Marriage' - we are presented with the tale of Alvina Houghton, daughter of a widowed Midlands draper and fleapit theatre owner, who decides to throw in her lot with Ciccio, a travelling performer from southern Italy:
"His skin was delicately tawny, and slightly lustrous. The eyes were set in so dark, that one expected them to be black and flashing. And then one met the yellow pupils, sulpherous and remote. [...] His long, fine nose, his rather long, rounded chin and curling lip seemed refined through ages of forgotten culture." [2]
Fleeing with Ciccio to the Old Country, Alvina abandons her life in Woodhouse and enters a new world of desire ...
III.
Now, of course, contemporary readers in England, many of whom are used to thinking of themselves as European and who regularly fly off for long weekends all over the Continent, will ask what's the big deal about this: is there really any significant difference in terms of culture and ethnicity between an Englishwoman and an Italian?
Probably not.
However, when Lawrence was writing - despite many centuries of mixing and mingling between peoples of different blood and opposing spirit - there remained, in his view, a gulf in existence and in being between two essential European types: "The dark-eyed, swarthy, wine-loving men from sunny lands" and the Germanic peoples, "born of the northern sea, the heavy waters, the white snow, the yellow wintry sun, the perfect beautiful blue of ice" [3].
And, crucially, at the beginning of the 20th-century, it wasn't just Lawrence who thought along these lines, separating ostensibly white Europeans into distinct races. In the United States, for example, Italians, particularly from the south (and especially from Sicily), were still regarded in some quarters as racially suspect; i.e., if not black exactly, then not-quite white either. Italians were sometimes refused entry to schools, cinemas, even churches and were invariably described in the press as wops and regarded as innately inferior.
In the Southern states, they even found themselves subject to shocking violence; in March 1891, for example, when Lawrence would have been six years old, eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans, resulting in a serious diplomatic incident that brought the US and Italy to the brink of conflict. As one commentator on this incident notes: "The New Orleans lynching solidified a defamatory view of Italians generally, and Sicilians in particular, as irredeemable criminals who represented a danger to the nation." [4]
I suppose the key point is that racial categories are mostly the product of cultural mythology, rather than biology: whiteness - like blackness - is a political designation rather than a natural fact. And whilst Lawrence fetishistically exploits these categories for an erotic rather than a racist motive, we should still be alert to the dangers of so doing.
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), letter number 1985, to Compton MacKenzie [10 May 1920], p. 521.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 160.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 44.
[4] Brent Staples, 'How Italians Became "White"', The New York Times (12 Oct 2019): click here to read online.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 160.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 44.
[4] Brent Staples, 'How Italians Became "White"', The New York Times (12 Oct 2019): click here to read online.
Dear Stephen…I couldn’t let your piece pass by without a few comments…for me it would be like bumping into someone you know and ignoring them.
ReplyDelete[Before I comment though, I’d like to say I have a special interest in The Lost Girl, so if you detect bias you are probably right].
The Lost Girl is considered one of Lawrence’s lesser works, and so often ignored or skipped over, but I think it deserves better. I have read it more than once, and I find something strangely lyrical in its “boringness”…. the sad inevitable business failures of Alvina’s father, the awful niceness of life in Woodhouse, (Eastwood), which seems to want to trap Alvina forever in a round of hope and disappointment. The Plumed Serpent on the other hand, (which you cite), is for me too overheated, often unreadable in its long intense rants. And then there are the two heroines, Alvina in LG, casting around, unsure what she is looking for, much more convincing and appealing than Kate’s aimless almost fatalistic wandering, and final fascination and surrender to the man-god Don Cipriano. Of course one novel is set in midlands England and the other in fiery Mexico, so you should expect different temperatures
But both Alvina and Kate will inevitably be subjected to another heat and intensity, Lawrence’s favourite, that of the old gods of the places they eventually find themselves in, in Kate’ case, the ancient Mexican god Don Cipriano manifests…and Alvina, who, partly through the unfathomable dark intensity of Ciccio, and then eventually on arrival in the wild mountains of his homeland… savage, cold, with a sense of ancient gods who knew the right for human sacrifice. [LG 386] - receives her dose too.
And this is where I drop my mask. My novel, A Sense of Ancient Gods, (2018), [a quote, as you can see from LG], is a biographical fiction of those very events in December 1919 ‒ Lawrence and Frieda’s brief stay in a remote icy-mountainous village on the edge of the wild Abruzzo – which inspired him to rewrite a novel he had started before the war, The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, and which would become The Lost Girl. The last three chapters set in the village are virtually autobiographical.
As I have written elsewhere, this village, (real life Picinisco), was where my grandfather came from, and so I can identify with Lawrence’s descriptions, with the melancholy yellow-eyed Ciccio and poor old Pancrazio, manifestations in a way of the dark brooding mountains and ancient gods of the place, all of which emerges in my novel. It is always a wonder to me how Lawrence, in the space of only ten days, was able to get under the skin of such a place, but that, I suppose, is genius.
Now, after my rant, I would like also to respond very quickly to what was really the essence of your piece – otherness. Being of Italian blood and background - …sulphureous and remote…curling lip refined through ages of forgotten culture – I could write a whole thesis about it, but I won’t. But I do remember as a child always this struggle for identity, especially when I was sent off to prep school in the late fifties - close enough to the war for all the anti-Italian prejudices to be readily available and encouraged, and consequently where lots of little “lynchings” took place. There was though in our midst an Italian who was treated differently, (and which highlighted another sort of prejudice - class). He was the young Duke of Aosta, close heir to the now defunct Italian throne, of fair hair and complexion, and so welcomed on board. What chance did the dark-haired black-eyed son of an Italian ice cream manufacturer have in a sea of victors, of sons of army officers, of lords and royalty? But one survives.
Anthony Pacitto
Thanks Anthony, for taking the time to post these remarks.
DeleteI do rather like the idea of lyrical tedium and would agree that very often it's the (supposedly) lesser works that have the most to offer today (in the same way that, for example, unpublished notes and fragments often fascinate more than the finished text).
Did I cite The Plumed Serpent? I suppose I did (indirectly); that's not one of my favourite novels by Lawrence either. But it's a philosophically important work, in a way that The Lost Girl is not (for me at least - obviously the latter resonates in a deeply personal manner for you).
Anyway, I'm glad you survived childhood struggles around the issue of identity and many congratulations on the book.
I'm writing another post at the moment that might interest - on the case of Sacco and Vanzetti (with which I'm sure you'll be familiar); hope to publish it in the next day or two.
Yes I am familiar with Sacco and Vanzetti, but look forward to your post. I also remember a pop song about them I think I heard in Italy, but am not sure...It started like this.."Here's to you Nicola and Bart..."
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