7 Apr 2020

As Bees to Wanton Boys

Garth Knight: The Last Honey Bee (2010)


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.



11 comments:

  1. George's wicked, bumpkin-ish behaviour is well observed. It is a telling moment. This is mere idle curiosity rather than 'will to knowledge'. Cyril's mother is astute in calling George "an unlicked cub", whose mother has "spoiled" him rotten.
    George pays heavily for his crimes against nature - as humanity is for its own such heinous crimes now.

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    1. What are these 'crimes against nature' of which you speak?

      Historically, this has been used as a legal term in the English-speaking world to identify certain acts and forms of sexual behaviour considered unnatural and/or blasphemous (masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, etc.), but one assumes you're probably borrowing the term from Keith Sagar who (laughably) attempted to redefine it in line with his own ecomoral aesthetics.

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    2. Keith Sagar's use, in the title of his important masterpiece, 'Literature and the Crime Against Nature', is the one referred to. That other use is pretty much confined/consigned to past history, and is virtually unknown and unused these days,surely.

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    3. And the crimes referred to are the horrendous exploitation and ill-treatment of animals, resulting in the release of deadly zoonotic diseases into the human population.

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  2. But there is a culture of cruelty in the countryside (one stoutly defended by the bumpkinish Countryside Alliance), and which is supported by members of the public who buy calves milk and meat.
    It is George's tragedy to be stuck in his insensitive state of "loathsome. . .callousness and brutality" (his sister, Emily's words). Schubert is tuneless to him - he is that sleepy and "stupid"!
    Lettie might have made "a man" of him, had sufficient interest in her aroused. But she is shallow and wears fur.
    Like our 'leader', Boris, he is "bos - bovis; an ox". He keeps half his "senses asleep - half alive". One can see him as a beater at a grouse or pheasant shoot. Or a Defra hired-assassin or bounty-hunter, paid to murder badgers in the night. Little surprise he ends up an alcoholic horse-dealer disparaged by his wife.



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  3. And, yes, any attribution of 'homoerotic' interest on Cyril's part in George's masculine qualities surely comes from a misreading and misunderstanding.
    Ubiquitous gay propoganda may have affected/influenced some folks' critical faculties.

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    1. Similarly, heteronormative assumptions and homophobia may have affected your own thinking, alas.

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  4. Ha, ha! Yeesss! Heteronormative assumptions, no doubt! With a soupcon of homophobia. Not to mention a massive heroic fearless allegiance to the truth?!

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    1. It is, surely (well! to a Lawrentian, at any rate), that which one knows and believes to be incontrovertibly and overwhelmingly the case - in all one's being.

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    2. As Bosie famously said to his father ...

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