Illustration by Efrat Dahan
I.
An academic journal [1] has rejected the following short essay:
On D. H. Lawrence's Dendrophilia
In an attempt to move beyond established parameters, this short essay examines the perverse materiality of Lawrence's relationship with the botanical world. It affirms dendrophilia not merely as a form of sexual deviance, but as a formal mechanism through which Lawrence facilitates amorous contact with the otherness of the arboreal environment.
Lawrence is often situated within the paradigms of vitalism and panpsychism. But such taxonomies often obfuscate the more radical and disturbing dimensions of his work. For far beyond the therapeutic frameworks of nature-immersion and forest bathing, Lawrence delineates a queer ontology of compulsion and, in this context, the tree transcends its status as a mimetic symbol of life to become a literal and figurative object of desire. As a nonhuman entity, its resinous allure facilitates a form of sexual communion that systematically transgresses heteronormative boundaries.
In the pornographic imagination, 'wood' is frequently employed as a crude metonym for male arousal. Lawrence, however, specifically via the figure of Rupert Birkin, reclaims the term's material density. Birkin's forest delirium in chapter VIII of Women in Love serves as a seminal text for Lawrentian dendrophilia, characterized by the categorical rejection of human intimacy in favour of a birch tree's tactile specificity; "its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges" (WL 107).
This represents a more radical eroticism than the mere instrumentalisation of nature seen, for example, in Fortune and Wells's novel A Melon for Ecstasy (1971). Whereas the protagonist of the latter, Humphrey Mackevoy, requires the artificial modification of the botanical body to simulate human anatomy, Birkin seeks a communion predicated on the tree's alien nature. In other words, Lawrence eschews the anthropomorphic impulse that would reduce the tree to a vaginal substitute; instead, he insists on the tree as an autonomous object-in-itself. Birkin, the amorous male subject, does not seek to master the natural environment, but to be penetrated by its "raw earth-power" (MM 159) and to deposit his seed in the "folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves" (WL 108). This is a sexual communion defined not merely by tenderness, but by a deadly serious longing for ecstatic, inhuman contact and involves violent struggle as much as sensual delight.
The specific parameters of Lawrentian dendrophilia are further elucidated through his visceral repudiation of Ben Hecht's Fantazius Mallare (1922). For despite this work's controversial reputation and Wallace Smith's explicit illustrations of a man enjoying coition with a tree, Lawrence dismissed the novel as "crass" and "strained" (IR 215). His critique was not born of moral prudery, but from a fundamental ontological divergence: Lawrence argued that Smith failed because, unlike Beardsley, he lacked a sense of malicious irony; "to be really wicked he'd see that even a tree has its own daimon, and a man might lie with the daimon of a tree" (IR 215).
In other words, Lawrence's aversion to Smith's artwork again stemmed from its reductive anthropomorphism. By imposing a distinctly all-too-human female form on the tree, Smith transposed a transgressive encounter into a tedious heteronormative cliché. For Lawrence, the erotic charge of the tree resides exclusively in its non-humanity. To "nestle against its strong trunk" (PFU 86) is to engage with an object that is "fierce and bristling" (MM 158), whose "root-lust" (PFU 86) does not mirror human emotion but rather challenges the human subject to reorganise their life in relation to the tree's own onto-botanical reality.
This erotic fascination is grounded in a form of object imperative, wherein Lawrence frames his encounter with an American pine, for example, not as a romanticised union, but as a meeting of two lives that "cross one another, unknowingly" (MM 158). This facilitates a materialist union; "the tree’s life penetrates my life, and my life, the tree's" (MM 158).
Lawrence's prose adopts an increasingly somatic register when describing this interaction - one which Rupert Birkin describes as a "marriage" (WL 108). In 'Pan in America', he speaks of "shivers of energy" crossing his "living plasm" (MM 158), suggesting a biological and erotic osmosis where the man becomes "a degree more like unto the tree" (MM 159). The "piney sweetness is rousing and defiant" and the "noise of the needles is keen with aeons of sharpness" (MM 158). This is not the language of pastoral bliss; it is the language of a "primitive savageness" (MM 159) that Lawrence seems to find particularly stimulating. To borrow Graham Harman's concept of the withdrawn but irresistible object, the tree's "resinous erectness" (MM 159) acts as a black sun, radiating a gravitational force that holds birds, beasts and dendrophiles in its orbit.
Lawrence, then, moves beyond botanical observation or even a chaste form of tree worship, activating "doors of receptivity" that allow the "relentlessness of roots" (MM 159) to fundamentally restructure the internal architecture of human being. His dendrophilia ultimately points toward a perverse and pantheistic sensuality that complicates the traditional boundaries of religious and erotic experience. Lawrence's desire to venerate arboreal being is inseparable from his (Birkinesque) desire to nakedly rub against young fir-trees that "beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles" (WL 107), etc.
By situating this engagement beyond the historical paradigms of domestic or recreational intimacy, Lawrence effectively posits a third category of desire: the pursuit of bliss via the non-human. Rejecting, as mentioned earlier, the mimetic reductions of the artificial vagina, Lawrence reconfigures the tree as a site of profound paraphilic contact. This vision moves sex beyond the procreative or banally pleasurable, allowing readers to conceive of his phallic philosophy as a passionate ontological encounter with responsive vegetation. [2]
For me, this decision taken by the editor on the advice of two anonymous reviewers [3], is disappointing to say the least; as is the accusation that my text lacks nuance, misunderstands Lawrence's language, and fails to see that his dendrophilia is actually just a repressed expression of same-sex desire.
Of course, rejection is all part of the game and, ultimately, every writer has to accept this. However, I'd like to offer a modest (but robust) defence of the essay and attempt to explain some of its finer theoretical points; not by way of launching a formal appeal or seeking the support of someone to intervene on my behalf, but more as a piece of rhetorical pushback (hopefully not too soured with grape juice).
II.
Essentially, the thousand-word text was an attempt to make an original and provocative contribution that veers away from the cosy and conventional literary traditions of Lawrence scholarship - such as vitalism or pastoralism - and engages with the visceral, transgressive character of his prose. The essay also aimed to subvert the green readings that would place Lawrence's work within a network of environmental moralism; by boldly reframing Lawrence's relationship to trees as paraphilic, we move the conversation from eco-mysticism to perverse materialism.
And by making a clear distinction between the instrumentalisation of nature and Lawrence's object-eroticism, suggesting that the tree's otherness is the source of Birkin's desire, the essay aligns Lawrence with recent developments in European philosophy, thereby disrupting the tired heteronormative/homoerotic binary that dominates Lawrence studies. It suggests a queer ontology where the human/non-human boundary is the primary site of sexual tension.
Further, the work - if I do say so myself - displays a certain degree of linguistic and critical wit, uniquely connecting well-known Lawrentian texts, like Women in Love, with more obscure cultural references - such as Fantazius Mallare and A Melon for Ecstasy - as well as Graham Harman's philosophy, thus providing a rigorous intellectual framework for what might otherwise be dismissed as an eccentric reading.
III.
Ultimately, of course, the reviewers' rejection stems from a fundamental clash between my object-oriented reading of Lawrence's perverse materialism and their traditional humanist framework. It's not that they fail to understand the work; rather, they understand it all too well - and do not like it. And so they fall back on a gatekeeping strategy that reinforces established biographical and linguistic nuances over radical theoretical interventions.
It was said that I had conflated the terms dendrophilia and paraphilia and that this was problematic. Actually, however, the problem is that the reviewers prefer to define dendrophilia via a standard etymological lens; i.e., simply as a love of trees rooted in Lawrence's documented life and his arboreal writings.
But I'm using the term in a wider, more critical and clinical sense to suggest a non-symbolic sexual communion and highlight the libidinal character of Birkin's desire. It's not that I'm being careless or clumsy with language, it's a deliberate theoretical move. Whether it works or not, is, of course, open to debate.
Moving on, we arrive at the (predictably reductive) idea that Birkin's dendro-floraphilia is actually a repressed (and/or displaced) form of same-sex desire; that when he rubs against the trees he is actually thinking of Gerald and that the tree is thus merely a human substitute, rather than an autonomous object-in-itself with its own allure.
To be clear: I'm not overlooking or denying Birkin's attraction to Gerald (or, indeed, Ursula), I'm simply not interested in these all-too-human desires and relations. I'm more concerned with taking Lawrence's demonology and dendrophilia seriously. Clearly, however, these are things my critics prefer to leave vague: the latter is the love whose name they dare not speak.
IV.
How, then, might we summarise this conflict of opinion?
Clearly, the editorial board of the journal in question tends to favour research grounded in archival evidence and historical context. My essay probably seemed too speculative for a forum that still prioritises Lawrence's intent and his complex relationship with human sexuality over modern queer or object-oriented readings (indeed, it was probably foolish and mistaken on my part to submit it in the first place).
Sadly, the rejection of the essay reflects an all-too-common tension in academic peer review between radical theoretical intervention and traditional scholarly maintenance. I wouldn't say the editorial board is cowardly or even particularly conservative, it's more a case that they are operating in a very different world with different rules to the "unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge" [4], that Nietzsche speaks of and in which Lawrence challenged us to do our thinking.
Thus, whilst they wish to preserve the historical and biographical authenticity of Lawrence's work and safeguard his reputation as an author; I want to corrupt and destroy everything (not least of all journals that operate as academic echo chambers).
Notes
[1] Out of professional courtesy, the title of this journal has been omitted.
[2] The following books by D. H. Lawrence were referenced in the text (as IR, MM, PFU, and WL):
-- Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
-- Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
-- Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious / Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
-- Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
[3] Again, out of professional courtesy - and because this is not a personal issue - the name of the editor has been omitted.
[4] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Penguin Books, 1990), I. 23, p. 53.
