Don't Let D. H. Lawrence Rub You Up the Wrong Way

D. H. Lawrence beach towel by Asok Mukhopadhyay

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If there is one modern author guaranteed to rub a lot of readers up the wrong way, it's Mr. D. H. Lawrence; the man who puts the friction in fiction. But, amusingly, he also takes every opportunity to do the same with his own characters as well, as illustrated in the following three scenes, drawn from  across the body of his work ...


I. Cyril and George in The White Peacock

In this, Lawrence's first novel, there's a famous pond swimming scene involving Cyril Beardsall and his friend George Saxton. The latter, who is already half-undressed by the water's edge, invites Cyril to fetch a towel and to join him. Eager to comply, Cyril does as he was instructed and then quickly strips off.

They plunge into the icy water and enjoy the "vigorous poetry of action" [222], Cyril pursuing George and eventually catching hold of him. Having being caught, George surrenders and floats on his back besides his friend, looking up and laughing, "and his white breasts and belly emerged like cool buds of a firm fleshed water flower" [see note 222:19 on p. 386].   

When they exit the pond, the two young men admire one another's nakedness and indulge in a bit of frottage:

"We stood and looked at each other as we rubbed ourselves dry. He was well proportioned, and naturally of handsome physique, heavily limbed. [...]
      As I watched him, he stood in white relief against the mass of green. He polished his arm, holding it out straight and solid; he rubbed his hair into curls, while I watched the deep muscles of his shoulders, and the bands stand out in his neck as he held it firm. [...]
      He saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me aainst him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman." [222-23]


II. Jack and Mabel in The Horse-Dealer's Daughter

Our second scene is taken from one of Lawrence's best-known short stories and also involves a natural pond, two wet bodies, lots of rubbing, and the fetishistic presence of a towel ...

Mabel Pervin is a disturbed (and disturbing) 27-year-old woman with the face of a bulldog and a profound desire to join her dead mother. One afternoon, as dusk was beginning to fall and having attended her mother's grave, Mabel walks to a nearby pond. Unbeknown to her, however, she is being watched by a young doctor, named Jack Fergusson:

"There she stood on the bank for a moment. She never raised her head. Then she waded slowly into the water.
      He stood motionless as the small black figure walked slowly and deliberately towards the centre of the pond, gradually moving deeper into the motionless water, and still moving forward as the water got up to her breast. Then he could see her no more in the dusk of the dead afternoon." [145]

Instinctively, Jack runs to help; that is, to fish her out, not to gently hold Mabel under and thereby assist with the suicide. Rather bravely, considering he couldn't swim and already had a bad cold, he ventures slowly into the pond: "The cold water rose over his thighs, over his loins, upon his abdomen. The lower part of his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element." [145]

After one horrible moment when Jack loses his balance and goes under the water himself, he is able to grasp hold of Mabel's clothing and pull her out of the clutches of the pond. She is close to death, but he manages to resuscitate her. Then, wiping her face, he wraps her in his overoat and carries her home, laying her down on the hearthrug in front of the fire. She was breathing and semi-conscious, but not yet fully in the world.

Fetching some blankets from upstairs, Jack warms them before the fire: "Then he removed her saturated, earthy-smelling clothing, rubbed her dry with a towel, and wrapped her naked in the blankets." [146] It's at this point that the tale takes a typically queer Lawrentian turn. For Mabel takes his actions as a sign that he loves her:

"She shuffled forward on her knees, and put her arms round him, round his legs, as he stood there, pressing her breasts against his knees and thighs, clutching him with strange, convulsive certainty, pressing his thighs against her, drawing him to her face, her throat, as she looked up at him with flaring, humble eyes of transfiguration, triumphant in first possession.
      'You love me,' she murmured, in strange transport, yearning and triumphant and confident. 'You love me. I know you love me, I know.'
      And she was passionately kissing his knees, through the wet clothing, passionately and indiscriminately kissing his knees, his legs, as if unaware of everything." [148]

Readers who are interested in knowing how this tale concludes can click here. The point is: be careful whom you choose to save and rub dry as such acts of intimacy can sometimes be misinterpreted (however innocent your intentions and even if you're a doctor upholding the Hippocratic Oath). 


III. Joe and Yvette in The Virgin and the Gipsy

Finally, we come to our third scene: a terrible flood at the vicarage that drowns the repulsive figure of Granny, but merely soaks to the skin the virginal Yvette and her saviour, the gipsy Joe Boswell ...

"The first wave was washing her feet from under her [...] She was barely conscious: as if the flood was in her soul. [...] Yvette felt herself gone in an agonising mill-race of icy water, whirled, with only the fearful grip of the gipsy's hand on her wrist." [69-70]

Somehow, miraculously, they get from the garden to the house; the water still heaving around their legs. Yvette manages to climb the stairs; "like a wet, shuddering cat" [70] and only when on the relative safety of the landing does she become aware once more of the sodden gipsy coughing his guts out.

They seek additional safety from the rising waters in one of the bedrooms. Worried that she'll die of the cold he orders her to take her clothes off and get into the bed. Yvette is clearly unconvinced of the necessity of this and says she prefers to stay sitting on one of the chairs. But the gipsy is insistent: "'No!' he cried. 'No! Take your things off and I rub you with this towel.'" [72]

(As readers will have gathered by now, in the Lawrentian universe there's always plenty of dry towels at hand.)

Then the gipsy decides to strip and rub himself dry also:

"Coughing, shuddering violently, he pulled up his jersey hem and wrestled with all his shuddering, cold-racked might, to get off his wet, tight jersey.
      'Help me!' he cried, his face muffled.
      She seized the edge of the jersey, obediently, and pulled with all her might. The garment cam over his head, and he stood in his braces.
      'Take your things off! Rub with this towel!' he commanded ferociously [...]
      And like a thing obsessed, he pushed himself out of his trousers, and got out of his wet, clinging shirt, emerging slim and livid, shuddering in every fibre with cold and shock.
      He seized a towel, and began quickly to rub his body [...] Yvette dimly saw it was wise. She tried to get out of her dress. He pulled the horrible wet death-grippin thing off her [...]
      Yvette, naked, shuddering so much that she was sick, was trying to wipe herself dry. [...]
      With his towel he began to rub her, himself shaking all over, but holding her gripped by the shoulder, and slowly, numbedly rubbing her tender body, even trying to rub up into some dryness the pitiful hair of her small head.
      Suddenly he left off.
      'Better lie in bed,' he commanded, 'I want to rub myself.'" [72-3]
      
  By now, his towel is wet and bloody, so he borrows hers. Then, at her request - "'Warm me!' she moaned, with chattering teeth" [74] - he climbs into bed with her and holds her naked body tight against his own: "The vice-like grip of his arms round her seemed to her the only stable point in her consciousness." [74] This, eventually, calms them both down "and gradually the sickening violence of the shuddering, caused by shock, abated, in his body first, then in hers, and the warmth revived between them" [74].

Do they have sexual intercourse? Who can say: though they do both pass away into what might very well be a post-coital sleep (or what Lady Chatterley's lover, Oliver Mellors, describes as the peace that comes of fucking).

When she wakes up, he has gone, leaving behind him nothing but a filthy blood-stained towel and "a great sodden place on the carpet" [76] where his wet clothes had been lying. She's a little disappointed at first, but wise enough to realise it was for the best.  


Afterword

Frottage - for readers who don't know - is not some kind of fancy French cheese (though it is derived from a French verb, frotter).

It is, rather, a term used within the fetishistic world of paraphilia to describe the act of rubbing any part of the body against the body parts of another and may be performed either naked or clothed, wet or dry. Individuals may engage in frottage either as foreplay in anticipation of penetrative sex, or as a form of sensual pleasure in and of itself. When frottage involves direct genital stimulation, it is sometimes referred to as GG rubbing.

Readers should also note that non-consensual rubbing up against strangers (such as on a crowded tube train) is frowned upon within the frottage community and they use the term frotteurism to distinguish this illicit pleasure from their own erotic activities.   

Finally, towel fetish is a genuine fetish, though not very common. In the above scenes, towels clearly play a significant role in the action and it wouldn't be outrageous to suggest that the self-confessed priest of love had a thing for absorbent fabrics used to dry naked wet bodies.     

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Horse-Dealer's Daughter', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy, in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

All page references given in the post refer to these editions.

As Bees to Wanton Boys

Garth Knight: The Last Honey Bee (2010)

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Any entomophiles thinking of reading D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911), should be warned that it opens with a very disturbing scene involving the narrator, Cyril Beardsall, and his friend George Saxton:  

"'I thought,' he said in his leisurely fashion, 'there was some cause for all this buzzing.'

      I looked, and saw that he had poked out an old, papery nest of those pretty field bees which seem to have dipped their tails into bright amber dust. Some agitated insects ran round the cluster of eggs, most of which were empty now, the crowns gone; a few young bees staggered about in uncertain flight before they could gather power to wing away in a strong course. He watched the little ones that ran in and out among the shadows of the grass, hither and thither in consternation. 

      'Come here - come here!' he said, imprisoning one poor little bee under a grass stalk, while with another stalk he loosened the folded blue wings.

      'Don't tease the little beggar,' I said. 

      'It doesn't hurt him - I wanted to see if it was because he couldn't spread his wings that he couldn't fly. There he goes - no he doesn't. Let's try another.'

      'Leave them alone,' said I. 'Let them run in the sun. They're only just out of the shells. Don't torment them into flight.'

      He persisted, however, and broke the wing of the next. 

      'Oh dear - pity!' said he, and he crushed the little thing between his fingers.'" 

Although Cyril is clearly made uncomfortable by George's will to knowledge - an often lethal lusting for intellectual understanding and an exercise of power that combines curiosity and cruelty - he doesn't physically intervene on behalf of the young bee, tormented (unsuccessfully) into flight and then casually crushed between fingers.

Perhaps, subconsciously, Cyril harbours a fear of insects (entomophobia); or maybe he has a secret crush fetish and derived a certain perverse pleasure from watching his brutish friend squash the little bee, despite asking George not to tease the poor creature. I've no evidence to support either suspicion; nor do I know, as some commentators have suggested, if Cyril is full of (homoerotic) admiration for George's masculine indifference to suffering:

"Then he examined the eggs, and pulled out some silk from round the dead larva, and investigated it all in a desultory manner, asking of me all I knew about the insects. When he had finished he flung the clustered eggs into the water and rose, pulling out his watch from the depth of his breeches' pocket.
      'I thought it was about dinner-time,' said he, smiling at me."

But in the queer fictional universe created by Lawrence, aka the priest of kink, anything is possible ...  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-2.

Interestingly, in a poem originally published under the title 'Song' in 1914, but composed before the summer of 1908 - i.e. at the same time he'd have been working on an early version of The White Peacock - Lawrence again plays with the idea of a black and amber field bee that has only just left the hive and is creeping and stumbling about in the warm spring sun, as it attempts to unfold its heavy little wings. See 'Flapper' in The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 16-17. Or click here to read the version that appeared in Poetry (December, 1914).

Field bees, for those who don't know, are worker bees - the smallest and most numerous members of a hive - which are old enough to leave the nest in order to search for pollen, nectar, and water. 

For a related post to this one on insect fetish (with specific reference to melissophilia), please click here.

D. H. Lawrence: A Tale of Two Kitties

I. The Death of Mrs Nickie Ben

For cat lovers, there's a very distressing scene early on in D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock (1911). Cyril, the narrator of the story, and his sister, Lettie, are out walking in the woods and fields surrounding the local reservoir, when the latter suddenly lets out a cry:

"On the bank before us lay a black cat, both hind-paws torn and bloody in a trap. It had no doubt been bounding forward after its prey when it was caught. It was gaunt and wild; no wonder it frightened the poor lapwings into cheeping hysteria. It glared at us fiercely, growling low."

Whilst Lettie stands looking on and lamenting the cruelty of man, Cyril takes action:

"I wrapped my cap and Lettie's scarf over my hands and bent to open the trap. The cat struck with her teeth, tearing the cloth convulsively. When it was free, it sprang away with one bound, and fell, panting, watching us."

This is no anonymous stray cat, however. This is a creature known to Cyril: Mrs Nickie Ben, who belongs at Strelley Mill, the home of his friend George Saxton. And so he wraps the poor creature in his jacket and carries her there. 

Unfortunately, however, she is too badly injured to be saved, one of her paws having been broken: "We laid the poor brute on the rug, and gave it warm milk. It drank very little, being too feeble." Even the presence of her mate, another fine-looking black cat, doesn't rouse her. And besides, he seems indifferent to her suffering: 

"Mr Nickie Benn looked, shrugged his sleek shoulders, and walked away with high steps. There was a general feminine outcry on masculine callousness."

George decides to put the cat out of her misery. His preferred method of doing so - and the quickest - is to "'swing her round and knock her head against the wall'", but Lettie protests. And so he decides to drown her: "We watched him morbidly, as he took a length of twine and fastened a noose round the animal's neck [...]"

George smiles as he walks to the garden pond and then drops "the poor writhing cat into the water, saying 'Goodbye, Mrs Nickie Ben'". Vile deed done, he hauls the cat out, amused by the grotesque character of the corpse.

He then buries her in a shallow grave, commenting to Cyril and Lettie: "'I had to drown her, out of mercy [...] If the poor old cat had made a prettier corpse, you'd have thrown violets on her.'"

II. Lady Chatterley's Pussy

Interestingly, there's another black cat who also comes to a sticky end in Lawrence's final novel. In chapter six of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Connie goes for a walk in the woods - as she often did on one of her bad days. The sound of a gun shot nearby startles her out of her vague indifference to her surroundings.

Going to investigate, she hears the sound of a man's voice, followed by the sound of a child sobbing. The thought that someone might be ill-treating the latter rouses Connie's anger: "She strode surging down the wet drive, her sullen resentment uppermost. She felt just prepared to make a scene."

It was the keeper - Mellors - and a little girl, wearing a purple coat and moleskin cap. The latter was crying, to the irritation of the former: "'Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!' came the man's angry voice", though, not surprisingly, this only  made the child wail louder. 

Connie marches up to them, with her dark blue eyes blazing, demanding to know what's going on. He salutes her ladyship, but with a faint smile all too like a sneer on his face and he tells her - in broad vernacular - that she'd best ask the child, not him, what the problem is. And so Connie turns to the "ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten", saying: "'What' is it, dear?'" with conventionalised sweetness of tone.

     

The child, however, continues to sob; violently, but also self-consciously. In the end, Connie bribes her with a sixpence. This placates the brat and enables her to speak: "'It's the - it's the - pussy!'"

It turns out that the keeper - her father - has shot a poaching cat: a big black cat, that now lies stretched out and bleeding amongst the bramble. Connie is repulsed by the sight and she turns on her soon-to-be lover and tells him it's no wonder the child was upset.

She tries to further reassure the child (whilst secretly disliking the spoilt, false little female), before escorting her home to her grandmother, leaving Mellors to dispose of the dead moggie in a manner undisclosed.


III.

Whether these two scenes reveal anything of import about Lawrence's views on black cats, cruelty, and sexual politics is debatable.

But what they do demonstrate is that there's more than one way to kill a cat and that underlying all of Lawrence's fiction is not so much a naive or innocent vitalism, but a fascination with violence and death and the part these things play in life as a general economy of the whole. In other words, Lawrence's philosophy is a form of tragic pessimism - but a pessimism of strength.   

 

See:

D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 12-13.

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 58-59.