In his short novel St Mawr, Lawrence examines a young woman's erotic and pagan fascination for a golden-red stallion, with brilliant black eyes. The horse challenges her to find something within herself that can answer to his own four-legged combination of virility and divinity and from their first encounter Lou is transfixed, transfigured, and turned-on:
"She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. Then she stroked his shoulder, and then the hard, tense arch of his neck. And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her ... So slippery with vivid, hot life! ... Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in."
What exactly is Lou Carrington thinking of here? When Lawrence writes of this primal experience flooding into her female soul, what conclusion are we invited to arrive at other than this is essentially a carnal form of knowledge? I don't believe I'm being crassly reductive or offering a provocatively crude interpretation to insist on this fact. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-horse love affair in St. Mawr (as elsewhere in his work) and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of writing. The reason that he stresses the potent and dangerous maleness of the horse is because there is an unspoken desire for penetration.
But Lou would be right to be worried by the prospect of such. For as Bodil Joensen once warned in an interview, being fucked by a horse is always a risky business, even for those who are experienced in the practice. For not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick and suddenly thrust when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse's penis swells considerably and this can cause serious - if not fatal - internal damage.
Of course, having said this, Lou doesn't simply have the hots for St. Mawr. When she touches his body she feels herself brought mystically into connection with another world and another way of being; the horse answers to her need for some sense of religious wonder, as well as her desire for sexual fulfilment. When St. Mawr looks at her from out of the everlasting darkness, Lou feels he has uncanny authority over her and that she must worship him like some splendid god or demon.
In comparison, she finds her human relationships trivial and superficial; including her relationship with Rico, her husband, who is himself horse-like in his sensitivity, but forever "quivering with a sort of cold, dangerous mistrust" and fear that he attempts to mask with an anxious form of love and a clever niceness that is slowly driving Lou insane and into the hooves of St. Mawr.
In comparison, she finds her human relationships trivial and superficial; including her relationship with Rico, her husband, who is himself horse-like in his sensitivity, but forever "quivering with a sort of cold, dangerous mistrust" and fear that he attempts to mask with an anxious form of love and a clever niceness that is slowly driving Lou insane and into the hooves of St. Mawr.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Lou abandons Rico and runs off with her horse dreaming of a time to come when men might regain their animal mystery and nobility and become-centaur.
- D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (CUP, 1983).
