Der det er kvinne er det svane
I.
Perhaps my favourite sequence of poems by D. H. Lawrence is inspired by the Leda myth and playfully imagines the queer idea of a modern woman giving birth to a baby that is part-human, part-bird:
Won't it be strange, when the nurse brings the new-born infant
to the proud father, and shows its little, webbed greenish feet
made to smite the waters behind it? [1]
That certainly would be strange: one might even think it ludicrous and quite impossible.
The poet insists, however, that, far-off, at the core of space and the quick of time, swims a wild swan upon the waters of chaos. A great white bird who will one day return amongst men with a hiss of wings and a sea-touch tip of a beak in order to frighten featherless women and stamp his black marsh-feet on their white and marshy flesh [2]:
And in the dark unscientific I feel the drum-winds of his wings
and the drip of his cold, webbed-feet, mud-black
brush over my face as he goes
to seek the women in the dark, our women, our weird women whom he treads
with dreams and thrusts that make them cry in their sleep. [3]
II.
Normally one would regard this purely as poetic fantasy. But I strongly suspect that Lawrence intends us to take his vision seriously and that he passionately believes in an occult theory of maternal impression - i.e., the belief that a powerful psycho-physiological force exerted on a pregnant woman may influence the development of the unborn baby.
As a medical theory of inheritance seeking to explain the existence of birth defects and congenital disorders, maternal impression has long been discredited and should not be confused with the empirically validated genetic phenomenon of maternal effect.
To be absolutely clear: the mother of Joseph Merrick was not frightened by an elephant during her pregnancy! Or, if she was, this did not leave a monstrous imprint on the gestating foetus. And just because a mother-to-be is feeling blue, this will not result in her child being marked with depressive tendencies.
The fact that Lawrence believed in this sort of thing is made clear in a letter written to Bertrand Russell, in December 1915, whilst engaged in reading Sir James Frazer whom, he reported, confirmed his already established belief in blood-consciousness as something not only independent of mental consciousness, but superior to it.
Via sexual intercourse, says Lawrence, he can establish a blood contact with a woman: "There is a transmission, I don't know of what, between her blood and mine, in the act of connection." And then he adds the following paragraph which is crucial to our discussion here:
"Similarly in the transmission from the blood of the mother to the embryo in the womb, there goes the whole blood consciousness. And when they say a mental image is sometimes transmitted from the mother to the embryo, this is not the mental image, but the blood-image. All living things, even plants, have a blood-being. If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman, and is transferred to the foetus, probably without intervention either of nerve or brain consciousness."
"And this", concludes Lawrence, "is the origin of totem: and for this reason some tribes no doubt really were kangaroos: they contained the blood-knowledge of the kangaroo" [4].
As one commentator notes:
"It is difficult of course to take such ideas any more seriously than Lawrence’s solemn pronouncements upon the importance of the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion to the health of human blood-knowledge, or his earnest belief that tuberculosis is caused by love. Yet we must at least pay attention when Lawrence himself indicates that an idea or principle is of vital significance to him." [5]
That's a true and fair thing to say. It's also important: for by paying attention to what Lawrence says about maternal impression we find a new way of reading numerous scenes in his work; one wonders, for example, if Ursula might have given birth to a centaur if she hadn't miscarried ...
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Won't it be strange -?', Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 380.
[2] I'm paraphrasing here from several of the poems in the Leda sequence found in Pansies, including 'Swan', 'Leda', and 'Give us gods'. See Poems, ibid., pp. 378-80.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Give us gods', Poems, ibid., p. 380.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, letter to Bertrand Russell (8 December 1915), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 469-71. I wish there was someway of knowing Russell's reaction when he first read this letter, or how he replied to it (if he ever did).
[5] Chris Baldick, 'D. H. Lawrence as Noah: Redemptions of the Inhuman and «Non-Human»,' essay in L'inhumain, ed. André Topia, Carle Bonafous-Murat, and Marie-Christine Lemardeley (Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), pp. 47-55. Click here to read online.
For a sequel to this post, on swan maidens, click here.
