Volume 7, Number 2 (2025) [1]
I.
There are, of course, many ways of reading D. H. Lawrence.
But it seems to me that the real battle now is between those who like to revere his writings from a mythopoetic perspective - i.e., an interpretive approach which looks for connections between his work and those archetypal narratives known as myths - and those who prefer to fuck Lawrence up the arse [2] and defamiliarise his texts in a queer and/or perverse manner.
The first kind of reader - and they have traditionally been dominant within Lawrence scholarship - whilst conceding that there are closely observed realistic elements in his work, like to celebrate his ability to transfigure these elements via a mythopoetic imagination and thereby provide us with a glimpse into the fourth dimensional realm of Being.
The second kind of reader - and I'm one of a small but increasing number of such within the world of Lawrence studies - whilst conceding there is symbolic truth and metaphorical meaning in his work, prefer to celebrate his decision to climb down Pisgah and keep his feet firmly planted on the flat earth, providing us with his own form of what Bataille termed base materialism: formless, filthy, and heterogeneous.
For the first type of reader, Lawrence will always be a priest of love communing with ancient gods and channelling primal forces, so as to impose some kind of order and value on a secular modern world. For the second, he's more the king of kink [3], exploring the world of fluid sexuality and peculiar paraphilias, making the known world strange and always caught up in a process of becoming-other.
II.
Choosing between
mythopoiesis and queer defamiliarization [4], ultimately depends on whether you think of Lawrence as a red-bearded visionary and defender of religious faith in a disenchanted world, or a radical opponent of moral rationalism and the metaphysical dualism that it rests upon; is he searching for wholeness, or is he a believer in the ruins?
While traditionalists favour mythopoiesis in order to promote his prophetic genius, readers on the LGBTQI+ spectrum often find queer defamiliarization more useful for accompanying Lawrence on the thought adventures via which he tested the limits of selfhood (particularly in relation to questions of sex and gender).
III.
In practice, what does all this mean?
Well, it means, for example, that when distinguished Lawrence scholars still susbcribing to a mythpoeic approach read the short novel St. Mawr (1925), they immediately speak of sacred symbols and animal archetypes.
John Turner, for example, although primarily wishing to discuss the sardonic aspects of the above tale, can't help insisting that what Lawrence sought beneath the mockery was "a myth that would marry the old and the new, in such a way as to [...] enrich the visionary power of the eye and re-establish religious connexion with the cosmos" [5] and that the female protagonist, Lou Witt, is on a savage pilgrimage to find "a holy place in which the self in its full depth may be known, experienced and integrated" [6].
And Michael Bell, in a short piece titled 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', says that St. Mawr "belongs among those mythic tales [...] in which the balance of realism to mythopoeia shifts towards the latter" [7]. This, I suppose, is true enough. But surely we are not obliged as readers to shift accordingly and we can discuss the horse as a horse and not as a symbol with mythic significance; and surely we are entitled to claim that the new awareness that the red-golden stallion with his big, black, brilliant eyes provokes in Lou is zoosexual in nature, rather than onto-theological.
For although Paul Poplawski claims that there is a "relative lack of sexual content" [8] in St. Mawr, I would argue now - much as I did back in 2006, in a paper on the question of why girls love horses [9] - that St. Mawr is, in many respects, far more transgressive than Lady Chaterley's Lover (1928).
For whilst in the latter book Lawrence wishes to radically challenge class divisions, in St. Mawr he challenges the distinction between human and animal by envisioning a love affair between a woman and a horse, which, whilst not explicit in its depiction - there are no sexual acts as such - is fully eroticised nonetheless. Here, for example, is a description of their very first encounter:
"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!
She paused, as if thinking, while her hand rested on the horse's sun-arched neck. Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in." [10]
What exactly is Lou thinking of here?
Personally, I think it's clear that when Lawrence writes of an 'ancient understanding' flooding into her female soul this is a form of carnal knowledge. And I don't think this is a crassly reductive or obscene interpretation, as some critics would protest. Rather, I think that Lawrence is deliberately flirting with the possibility of a human-animal sexual relationship in St. Mawr - as he does elsewhere in his work - and that this passage is an overtly bestial piece of fantasy writing.
Lou may not be Bodil Joensen [11], but she's the closest to such in Lawrence's queer fictional universe ...
Notes
[1] The JDHLS (2025) is published by the D. H. Lawrence Society (Eastwood, Notts.) and edited by Jane Costin. The cover shows an original artwork by Lewis Weber of Nottingham High School. For details on the DHL Society (and how to join), visit their website: click here.
[2] Deleuze famously speaks of approaching an author from behind and buggering them in order to inseminate them with strange new ideas and in this way produce monstrous offspring. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 6.
[3] See my post titled 'D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink' (19 July 2018), in which I list an A-Z of paraphilias, perversions, and fetishistic behaviours that can be found in his work: click here.
[4] Defamiliarization - or, to use the original Russian term, остранение (ostranenie) - is an artistic technique of magically making ordinary objects in the everyday world appear new and as if seen for the first time. It was coined by the formalist Viktor Shklovsky in an essay of 1917. It has been utilised and adapted by many different artists and thinkers and has now become an important component of queer theory.
See, for example, Helen Palmer, Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), in which she explores how we might radically reimagine this concept in order to affirm deviant, errant, and alternative modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory.
[5] John Turner, 'Drift and Depth: the Sardonic in St. Mawr', in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), p. 52. Note the dated - slightly affected - spelling of the word connection.
[6] Ibid., p. 53.
[7] Michael Bell, 'Lawrence's Horse Sense', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 140.
[8] Paul Poplawski, 'Less is Mawr: Revisiting Lawrence's St. Mawr', JDHLS, 7. 2 (2025), p. 80.
[9] I'm referring to the essay 'Equus Eroticus: Why Do Girls Love Horses?', written in 2006, presented at Treadwell's Bookshop (London) in March 2007, and published in The Treadwell's Papers Vol. 3: Zoophilia (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), pp. 87-117.
Without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I would suggest that this text might be seen as seminal for those who are now discovering the notion of queer defamiliarisation and/or perverse forms of materialism.
[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'St. Mawr', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Penguin Books, 1997), p. 30.
[11] Bodil Joensen (1944-1985) was a Danish porn star who ran a small farm and animal husbandry business. She gained public notoriety for her many films in which she engaged in sex acts with animals, including horses, although she warned in an interview that being fucked by a horse is always a dangerous affair, particularly for those inexperienced in the practice; for not only can these powerful creatures bite and kick, or suddenly thrust and flare when excited, but at orgasm the glans of a horse will swell considerably and this can cause serious (if not fatal) internal damage. In this same interview (1980), she explained how she had developed a special technique to allow penetration without the risk of vaginal tearing.
