Victoria Vives as a Priestess of Isis
Photo by Robert Domondon (2017)
I.
As readers of Lawrence, we are intimately familiar with Ursula Brangwen and Constance Chatterley. Indeed, we know the latter not only from top to bottom, but inside and out in pornographic detail.
Arguably, however, the most intriguing woman in the Lawrentian universe is the unnamed and rarely discussed priestess of Isis, who performs such a crucial role in Part II of The Escaped Cock (1929). And so I thought it important to say something of her here ...
II.
The woman of Isis is twenty-seven years of age. Educated and intelligent, she's also very beautiful, with wondering blue eyes, dusky-blonde hair, and white-gold breasts. But she remains a virgin, however, for the "bud of her womb had never stirred" [145].
This is despite the fact that she grew up in a world of powerful and fascinating men. The only child of a Roman commander who served with Mark Anthony, the latter had "sat with her many a half-hour, in the splendour of his great limbs and glowing manhood". His attempts to seduce her were in vain, however, for whilst she had felt "the lovely glow of his male beauty and amorousness bathe all her limbs and her body [...] the very flower of her womb was cool, was almost cold, like a bud in shadow of frost" [144].
The woman of Isis had also known Julius Caesar, but, again, had "shrunk from his eagle-like rapacity" and much preferred older men who were happy just to talk with her and had no expectation that she would "open like a flower to the sun of their maleness" [144].
Remote, dreamy, and sexually unresponsive, the woman of Isis awaits a special type of man; one who has died and risen and is full of that other kind of beauty; "the sheer stillness of the deeper life"; a man who could touch her "on the yearning quick of her womb" [147].
Thus, retiring with her widowed mother to Sidon - an ancient city on the Mediterrranean coast of Lebanon - the woman of Isis built a pink and white temple dedicated to the goddess at her own expense. Here she has served as a priestess for seven years, dressed in a saffron-yellow mantle worn over a white linen tunic, with a pair of gilded sandals upon her ivory-white feet.
Her mother, meanwhile, took care of the day-to-day business of the small estate on which the temple and a villa, set amongst the olive trees, was built. She also oversaw the slaves, which is just as well, as the woman of Isis professes no interest in their activities, finding them invariably repellent as a class: "They were so imbedded in the lesser life, and their appetites and their small consciousness were a little disgusting" [148] to her.
On one occasion, she watches with noble indifference as one of her young male slaves beats and rapes a half-naked slave girl. Nevertheless, despite her coldness, her cruelty and contempt for inferiors, she can give an excellent (erotic) massage, as the man who died discovers to his great joy:
"Having chafed all his lower body with oil, his belly, his buttocks, even the slain penis and the sad stones, having worked with her slow intensity of a priestess [...] suddenly she put her breast against the wound in his left side, and her arms round him [...] and she pressed him to her, in a power of living warmth, like the folds of a river." [159]
II.
In an early manuscript version of Part II of The Escaped Cock, Lawrence provides a few more details about the woman of Isis, some of which contradict the final published version, though not in any significant manner (for example, her age is given here as twenty-six, not twenty-seven).
What is emphasised above all, is the extent of her learning: she was tutored as a child and young woman by a Greek philosopher, and whilst she often spoke Syrian or Latin, she always thought in Greek:
"Her Greek had taught her logic and history, and also poetry, and since she was small, she had liked to speak with men" about these things. But she found these men too worldly for her tastes and they "cared little for the gods" [216]. Thus she did not wish to be touched by any of them (much to her father's irritation). Indeed, the girl who would become the woman of Isis was not keen on any physical contact:
"True, her slave women bathed and annointed her. But their touch was dumb and voiceless, like the touch of linen, or the touch of polished wood. It came no further than the skin. But the touch of men would go much deeper, and would soil her subtlest privacy." [217]
She is defiantly chaste and even at twenty-six has the "same delicate virgin belly" [217] as the goddess whom she serves. And she knows herself - not in a philosophical sense, so much as in a gynaecological manner; she's womb-conscious in the same way that male protagonists in Lawrence's fiction are often said to be phallically conscious:
"She never confused an outside thrill or a suffusion of surface excitement with the other, the soft expanding joy of the womb [...] She was a woman of the old world, skilled in her own sensations. [...]
The woman, skilled in Isis and the lore of Isis, knew her womb in lotus-bud, knew it deep, deep under the waters, knew its mystery, its curved, down-bent head, its uncoloured virgin petals, its thick, strong, softly-massive heart of golden adhesive fecundity. Dark-green like a water-snake, submerged like a root, obscure and even fearsome, the deep lotus-bud of the shadowy womb." [219]
I don't quite know what to make of a passage like this - and it seems that Lawrence doesn't expect most (if any) of his readers to understand it either: "This is Isis lore, which Isis women forever will understand, and only they." [220]
See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Escaped Cock', in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Part II, pp, 141-63. See also Appendix I (c) Part II: early manuscript version, pp. 216-30.
