Depigmentation: Notes on How Schopenhauer, D. H. Lawrence, and Frances Cress Welsing Constructed Whiteness

Schopenhauer, D. H. Lawrence, and Frances Cress Welsing 

 

Forced into a strange world, Caucasians are almost an abnormality; 

analogous to white mice, or at the very least grey horses. 

 

 

I. 

 

The tragic case of Jason Arday is unfortunate for many reasons - not least because it gives reactionary morons the opportunity to sneer at those with an interest in critical race theory and how whiteness as a conceptual identity is constructed and functions within modern society as a cultural and political norm. 

 

This is not an area of research with which I'm overly-familiar. But it does interest and, from what little I have read, it seems to me that there's a good deal of fascinating (and important) work being carried out. 

 

Indeed, if I were a postgrad student today looking for an idea to develop into a doctoral thesis, I would be tempted to examine how Schopenhauer's thinking on skin colour influenced later authors, including D. H. Lawrence, and how it relates also to pseudo-scientific theories to do with race, such as the one advanced by the American psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing in 1970. 

 

Without attempting to provide a detailed proposal for such a project, I'd like to briefly touch on one or two points here that might be central to the above ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Seeking to explain why it is that blonde-haired, white-skinned persons are physically drawn to dark-haired, brown-skinned people - a sweeping claim asserted without any empirical or statistical evidence to support it - Schopenhauer develops a speculative evolutionary theory rooted in his own philosophy of the will (i.e., the unconscious drive he posits as underpinning all reality). 

 

His argument is that sexual attraction is no more a free personal choice than anything else in this life and that it rests upon the instinctive desire not only to procreate, but to ensure that biological deviations from the original human type are balanced out in the offspring. As he believes whiteness to be an example of such a deviation - almost an abnormality - it is perfectly natural, therefore, that white people seek out partners of colour. 

 

Schopenhauer concludes his thinking on that exotic plant that is the white man by insisting that in no region of the world is the latter indigenous - "not even in the vicinity of the pole" - and that consequently "a white man has never originally sprung from the womb of nature, and that thus there is no such thing as a white race, much as this is talked of, but every white man is a faded or bleached one" [1]. 

 

 

III.

  

One of the people most influenced by this line of thinking was the young D. H. Lawrence, who would go on to develop his own (idiosyncratic and slightly crackpot) racial philosophy in which whiteness is viewed not only as an unattractive skin tone, but a malevolent form of ideal being responsible for the destruction of the natural world and the triumph of money and machinery. 

 

According to his former girlfriend Jessie Chambers, Lawrence was obsessed with Schopenhauer's work in the period he was writing what would become his debut novel, The White Peacock (1911). She may have been the one to borrow a copy of the German philosopher's essays from the local library, but it was Lawrence who read and re-read the book and left annotations in the margins. 

 

And one day, as she recalled in her memoir published five years after Lawrence's death, whilst arguing with her and her brother on the subject, Lawrence declared that "white skin is not natural to man" and that therefore, for him, "a brown skin is the only beautiful one" [2]. 

 

As Laura Ryan says, for Lawrence "dark-skinned peoples were closer to the 'blood-consciousness' he prized, while whites, too much consumed by their minds and anaesthetised by the deadening mechanisation of the industrial world, were doomed" [3]. 

 

This is an idea that Lawrence holds on to in one form or another throughout his life and writing career; we find it in the early novel Women in Love (finished in 1916 but not published until 1920); we find it in the mid-period novel The Plumed Serpent (1926); and we find it in his final novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

In the latter, for example, during an extraordinary rant about the women he has known, Mellors tells Connie that the only modern women who "'really 'come' naturally with a man'" are black women - although, as he then adds, black women don't ultimately appeal to him as they seem "'a bit like mud'" to his white sensibility [4]. 

 

This echoes what Lawence also told Jessie many years before - namely, that while he finds blackness beautiful, he doesn't automatically desire it; in other words, he could separate attraction and aesthetic appreciation [5]. 

 

 

IV. 

 

I'd like now to show how Schopenhauer's writings on human pigmentation connect to the idea of whiteness as a mutation or genetic deficiency in the work of Frances Cress Welsing ... 

 

If Lawrence's racial philosophy can be described as idiosyncratic and slightly crackpot, then Welsing's pseudo-scientific ideas to do with melanin set out in her 1970 essay 'The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism' [6], can fairly be characterised in far harsher terms. 

 

An expanded version of the above was later included in her controversial collection of essays, The Isis Papers (1991), where she asserts that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation and that racism, therefore, is a defensive reaction on behalf of defective albino mutants long-ago expelled from Africa to the biological superiority of people with high levels of melanin [7]. 

 

I kind of wish I was making this up - and some readers will think I am making this up. Unfortunately, that's not the case: these claims were not part of some outrageous satire, but made in all seriousness. Welsing also suggested that the human immunodeficiency virus was a form of biological warfare unleashed on the black majority by white people and that the latter were also responsible for drug use and homosexuality amongst African Americans. 

 

All of this feels quite a long way from Schopenhauer and yet, as we saw earlier, his philosophy does at times lend support to such thinking. Like Welsing, for example, Schopenhauer argues that black is the authentic colour of humanity and that whiteness is a biological deviation from such. 

 

However, Schopenhauer viewed this loss of colour purely as a physiological effect shaped by climate rather than a genetic deficiency and his scathing critique of whiteness as an identity tied to ethnonationalism [8] has more in common with later critical race theory than to Welsing's racial essentialism which (thankfully) plays no part in mainstream debate today [9]. 

 

Ultimately, Schopenhauer and contemporary theorists agree that building an identity around skin colour - black or white - is ultimately foolish and even Lawrence quickly realised after spending time in Harlem and reading black fiction that the negro is just another modern, urban American very little different from the white man and that even his most cherished illusions concerning "the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery" [10] are a lot of stuff and nonsense. 

 

 

V. 

In sum - and to return to where I began - I think the argument made by black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and yes, Jason Arday, that racism is not a black issue but a white problem, is a strong one which deserves serious critical consideration. 

 

In other words, the gaze needs to be shifted from the victims of racism to the creators and beneficiaries of racial hierarchies. I know that many white people are made uncomfortable by terms such as white privilege and white bias and often don't wish to see how whiteness operates as an unspoken, invisible norm against which all other races are judged. But, frankly, that awkwardness can't be helped and shouldn't be apologised for. 

  

Notes 

 

[1] The crucial passage by Schopenhauer in which he considers human complexion, is located in the section of The World as Will and Representation titled 'The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes' (Vol. III, Book IV, Chapter XLIV). 

      Click on the link provided to read online courtesy of Project Gutenberg, who have based their EBook on the three-volume sixth edition of Schopenhauer's classic study trans. R. B. Haldane and John Kemp (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909). Schopenhauer's text originally appeared in German as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818-19). An expanded second volume was added in 1844.

 

[2] See Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 111. This memoir was originally published in 1935 by Jonathan Cape Ltd (London). 

 

[3] Laura E. Ryan: 'You are white - yet a part of me': D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (PhD thesis submitted to The University of Manchester, 2019), p. 39. 

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 204. 

      As Laura Ryan (2019, pp. 39-40) says, this exchange "illustrates Lawrence's othering of the black female as simultaneously representative of the 'real sex' both he and Mellors prize and a kind of degraded sexuality". In other words, in just one short statement Lawrence manages to both praise and denigrate "the presumed ultra-sensuality of black women", thereby betraying his ambivalence on the racial question (and romantic ideas of primitivism) more widely. 

 

[5] That seems (on the surface at least) a rather non-Lawrentian thing to do - something that enforces the mind/body split that he elsewhere seeks to overcome. 

 

 [6] This essay can be found in The Black Scholar, Vol. 5, Issue 8 (1974), pp. 32-40 (published online 14 April 2015). 

 

[7] Melanin is the natural bodily pigment that gives colour to skin, hair, and eyes.  

      I'm not a biological anthropologist, but I know a man who is and he tells me that lighter skin pigmentation is actually an advantageous evolutionary mutation allowing adequate synthesis of vitamin D by early human populations who had migrated out of Africa into regions with much less sunlight. 

 

[8] Schopenhauer famously hated tribalism and nationalism, even though he still maintained  Eurocentric, deeply racist beliefs that Africans were intellectually inferior that were very much in line with the pervasive biases of 19th-century European philosophy. 

 

[9] Just to be clear on this point: whilst the Cress Theory examines whiteness, it does so from a completely different perspective to contemporary CRT. The former relies on the belief that race dictates behaviour and is biologically determined. In contrast, the latter relies on the understanding that race is a fictional, legal, and political category - something socially determined but not essentially fixed - that was invented in the 17th and 18th centuries by the ruling class in order to justify slavery and colonialism.  

      Further, contemporary studies also focus on institutional advantages and systemic biases (i.e., questions to do with power) rather than the physical presence or absence of melanin. 

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, Flight, by Walter White, Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, and In Our Time, by Ernest Hemmingway', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 308.

 

  

Sniffing Out Otherness: D. H. Lawrence and His Racially Sensitive Nose

D. H. Lawrence and his nose: described rather unkindly by 

Mabel Dodge Luhan as 'podgy, almost vulgar' [1] 

 

I.  

 

In a recent post [2], I mentioned how the sense of smell was very important for D. H. Lawrence. 

 

Indeed, without saying as much, one gets the impression that, like Nietzsche, he located his own peculiar genius in his hypersensitive nose, the nostrils of which formed "the great gate from the wide atmosphere of heaven to the lungs" [3] - and you thought them merely two small holes!

 

For Lawrence, our sense of smell is rooted in the lower centres of the body - the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion - and the shape of the nose depends on "the direct control of the deepest centres of consciousness" [4]. It is not simply determined by an interplay of anatomical structure, genetics, and evolutionary adaptation to climate. 

 

Lawrence - in case you hadn't noticed - doesn't have much time for conventional scientific descriptions of the body and its organs. And he would have hated and despised the modern quest for a perfect nose involving the cosmetic surgical procedure known as rhinoplasty. 

 

For better or for worse, Lawrence would have advised people to keep the hooter they've been blessed with - be it short and snub, long and beaky, high and arched, or thick and squat. For the nose reveals one's true character; that is to say, "it almost inevitably indicates the mode of predominant dynamic consciousness in the individual" [5] and the primary centre from which they live.        

 

If Lawrence had his way, not only would there be human excrement piled up in the streets (either don't ask, or see the post linked to in note 1 below), but kissing would be replaced by nose rubbing, as the latter involves "a more sensitive and a deeper sensual salute" [6] than the mere pressing of lips.   

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, one of the things that Lawrence used his heightened sense of smell for was to sniff out the racial otherness of the passenger sitting next to him on public transport. 

 

In one of his more contentious and controversial passages, Lawrence writes that if "an Arab or a negro or even a Jew" [7] sits down next to him on the train, then that individual is not known to him in a way that a middle-class white Englishman is known: 

 

"As he sits next to me, there is a faint uneasy movement in my blood. A strange vibration comes from him, which causes a slight disturbance in my own vibration. There is a slight odour in my nostrils. And above all, even if I shut my eyes, there is a strange presence in contact with me." [8] 

 

Lawrence being Lawrence, however, he rather likes this - arguing that it allows for a real thought-adventure beyond mere knowing and understanding. And so, rather than simply insulate himself from contact with racial otherness, he affirms the disturbance of his blood and admits that something vital passes from the stranger; "because, after all, there is some peculiar alien sympathy between us." [9]  

 

 

III.  

 

Lawrence's view of race is, then, by no means simple and straightforward. It is, as sympathetic critics like to say, nuanced (by which they mean full of contradictions and inconsistencies). 

 

Despite a misconception that still lingers in some quarters, Lawrence certainly wasn't a conventional racist, even if he subscribed to an essentialised form of racial mysticism that celebrated primitivism on the one hand and what used to be called exotic otherness on the other. As he once told Jessie Chambers, for him, white skin is unnatural and ultimately only black is beautiful (even if not personally desirable to him) [10]. 

 

Having said that, Lawrence often expresses "shock, disgust and disappointment" [11] when he actually encounters people belonging to different cultures or ethnicities - especially "when a people or culture proved insufficiently primitive or different" [12] for the purposes of his philosophy. 

 

It's one thing discovering that Apaches have "an unbearable sulphur-human smell [...] that takes the breath from the nostrils" [13], but it was even more upsetting for Lawrence - the savage pilgrim - to discover "sameness where otherness was to be expected" [14]. 

 

Thus, when he reads fiction written by African Americans or visits Harlem in NYC - "that dismal region of hard stone streets" [15] - it is disconcerting to find that the black man is just another modern, urban American very little different from the white man apart from the colour of his skin. 

 

"One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul, the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awfulness and with mystery" [16], writes Lawrence, but that becomes impossible when one actually comes into contact with people of colour (or when one's nose is blocked).  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Mabel Dodge Luhan, Lorenzo in Taos (Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), p. 49. 

 

[2] The post I'm referring to is titled 'On D. H. Lawrence and the Human Stink' (23 Aug 2026). 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 100. 

 

[4] Ibid. 

 

[5] Ibid., p. 101.

 

[6] Ibid. To be fair, Lawrence may have a point here; the traditional Eskimo greeting - often mischaracterised as mere nose-rubbing - is an intimate gesture where family members and/or loved ones press faces in order to inhale and familiarise themselves with each other's scent. 

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'On Being a Man', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 214. 

 

[8] Ibid., p. 215. 

 

[9] Ibid. 

 

[10] This conversation between Lawrence and Jessie Chambers is recalled in her memoir - D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 111.

 

[11] Laura E. Ryan: 'You are white - yet a part of me': D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (PhD thesis submitted to The University of Manchester, 2019), p. 40.  

      Dr Ryan's fascinating work in this area has significantly helped shape my thinking in this post - particularly section III - and I look forward to reading her newly published book D. H. Lawrence and Black Modernism: Transatlantic Influence and Confluence (Bloomsbury, 2026). I am also delighted to be contributing an essay on Lawrence's proto-punk sensibilities to a forthcoming collection she is co-editing (with Dr Jo Jones) for Edinburgh University Press. 

 

[12] Ibid. 

 

[13] D. H. Lawrence, 'Indians and an Englishman', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 116. 

 

[14] Laura E. Ryan: 'You are white - yet a part of me': D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance (2019), p. 43. 

 

[15] D. H. Lawrence, 'Review of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, Flight, by Walter White, Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, and In Our Time, by Ernest Hemmingway', in Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 308. For a lively discussion of Lawrence's visit to Harlem, see the Introduction to Laura E. Ryan's, 'You are white - yet a part of me' (pp. 27-28). 

 

[16] Ibid. 

 

She Was Only a Farmer's Daughter ... Notes on the Case of Miriam Leivers

Heather Sears as Miriam Leivers in 

Sons and Lovers (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1960)

 

I.

 

The farmer's daughter is a stock character and comic stereotype drawn from the pornographic imagination. A fresh-faced country girl, often barefoot and with straw or ribbons in her hair, she likes to wear a short sundress or a halter top and is usually portrayed as both faux-naïf and sexually curious.

 

Bawdy jokes and stories about the farmer's daughter and her willingness to be seduced by any passing stranger - much to the fury of her father [a] - can be traced back to the medieval period, if not earlier; there are, for example, numerous ballads about valiant knights falling in love with comely farm girls and even the Vikings enjoyed hearing quasi-pornographic tales of love among the haystacks [b]. 

 

 

II. 

 

Interestingly, however, the farmer's daughter is often portrayed quite differently in works of literature; take the case of Miriam, for example, in D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) ...

 

Sixteen-year-old Miriam is depicted as an intelligent girl keen to escape her dreary life on the family farm. A voracious reader, she dreams of belonging to the world of culture and higher education and is resentful of the expectation that she will eventually marry and settle down, accepting her fate as a farmer's wife, tending the pigs [c]. 

 

Lawrence describes her as a romantic soul, inclined to religious mysticism, who imagines herself as a princess trapped in the body of a farm girl. Not only does Miriam consider her brothers brutes, but she doesn't hold her father in particularly high esteem for desiring a simple life in which his meals are served on time. 

"She hated her position as swine-girl [...] She could not be princess by wealth or standing. So, she was mad to have learning whereon to pride herself [...] Learning was the only distinction to which she thought to aspire." [d]

Whilst not sexy in the stereotypical manner, dark-eyed Miriam nevertheless had a quiveringly sensitive kind of beauty that combined elements of shyness with wildness. The protagonist of the novel - Paul Morel - is (unsurprisingly) keen to fuck her. He watches her closely as she moves around the farmhouse kitchen in a strange, dreamy almost rhapsodic (but acutely self-conscious) manner, wearing an old blue frock.

Unfortunately, Miriam is one of those spiritual women who thinks sex as something low and beastly - more a dutiful vicar's daughter, than a farmer's daughter, alas, or like "one of the women who went with Mary when Jesus was dead" [184], as Lawrence puts it.  

 

She's happy for Paul to teach her algebra and help improve her French, and she might even exchange a few kisses, but she isn't interested in taking him as a lover: 

 

"The slightest grossness made her recoil almost in anguish [...] perhaps because of the continual business of birth and begetting which goes on upon every farm, Miriam was the more hypersensitive to the matter, and her blood was chastened almost to disgust of the faintest suggestion of such intercourse." [198] 

 

Eventually, after years of frustration and increasing bitterness, it all becomes too much for Paul and he sends Miriam a rather cruel letter on her twenty-first birthday, in which he calls her a nun; i.e., one incapable of accepting love in the physical sense (and rendering him incapable of giving such). 

 

Naturally, Paul's words wound her deeply and, perhaps, puzzle her also; after all, she was only a farmer's daughter ... [e]     

 

 

Notes

 

[a] I suppose I first became aware of the angry farmer and his daughter trope via Carry On Camping (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1969), where the latter is played by Patricia Franklin (and the former by Derek Francis). 

 

[b] See the essay entitled 'Male Bedpartners and the "Intimacies of a Wife"', by David Ashurst in Masculinities in Old Norse Literature, ed. Gareth Lloyd Evans and Jessica Clare Hancock, (D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 183-202. Ashurst discusses a tale involving an erotic encounter between two foster-brothers and a farmer's daughter on p. 191.

  

[c] For a discussion of female dissatisfaction with the world of the farm, see the post entitled 'Desperate Farmwives' (22 July 2023): click here. 

 

[d] D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 174. Future references to this edition of the novel will be given directly in the post.

[e] Readers will probably be aware that Sons and Lovers has an autobiographical aspect; that the platonic relationship beween Paul and Miriam is (to some extent) based on Lawrence's own sexless relationship with the farmer's daughter Jessie Chambers. 

      In the winter of 1909, having been romatically fixated with her for eight years, Lawrence finally made a move, informing Jessie that, because he loved her, it was inevitable they would eventualy fuck - which they did, in the spring of the following year, consummating their relationship on several occasions (usually outdoors among the flowers and dead leaves). Unfortunately, it was, writes John Worthen, "an awful experience for them both", resulting in shame and regret all round.

      For full details of the relationship between Lawrence and the farmer's daughter, see Worthen's D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005). The line quoted is on p. 79.  

May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1911 - 1917)

Edith A. Cubitt: Children Dancing Round a Maypole (c. 1900) 

Watercolour drawing (commissioned by Ernest Nister)

vam.ac.uk

 

 

1 May 1911

 

After his advances to Agnes Holt in the autumn of 1909 had come to nothing - not even a handjob - Lawrence convinced Jessie Chambers to become his lover. 

 

In the two years that followed, finally free from the bonds of chastity, Lawrence actively pursued several women - or bed bunnies as he referred to them - in the hope of further sexual experience; "years of enforced virginity had given way to a kind of compulsive arousal" [1].

 

One of these women was the lovely Louie Burrows, to whom he wrote on May Day 1911:

"I would sell birthrights and deathrights for an embrace of thee, Louisa: toss 'em out of the window, poetic powers, perceptivity, intellect - pouf: for a few kisses and a tight clasp." [2]

 

 

1 May 1912 

 

Lawrence has now met and fallen in love with a woman whom he believes to be the most wonderful in all England. 

 

Unfortunately, Frieda Weekley is married with children. Still, that doesn't deter either of them from beginning an illicit affair and on May Day 1912 he writes a letter in which he expresses his anxiety and guilt - but also his commitment to the relationship - having arranged to effectively elope with her to Germany:

"I feel so horrid and helpless. [...] And what was decent yesterday will perhaps be frightfully indecent today. [...] 

      What time are you going to Germany, what day, what hour, which railway, which class? Do tell  me as soon as you can [...] I will come any time you tell me - but let me know.

      You must be in an insane whirl in your mind. I feel helpless and rudderless, a stupid scattered fool. [...] I would do anything on earth for you [...] but I don't like my feeling [of] presentiment. I am afraid of something low, like an eel which bites out of the mud, and hangs on with its teeth. I feel as if I can't breathe while we're in England." [3]

 

 

1 May 1913

 

Although he and Frieda are now an established item, Lawence is still thinking back to his (mostly sexless) relationship with Jessie - and doing so with increased bitterness. In a letter to Edward Garnett, he writes:

 

"It's all very well for Miss Chambers to be spiritual - perhaps she can bring it off - I can't. She bottled me up till I was going to burst. But as long as the cork sat tight (herself the cork) there was spiritual calm. When the cork was blown out, and Mr Lawrence foamed, Miriam said 'This yeastiness I disown: it was not so in my day.'" [4]  

 

It's always surprising how explicit Lawrence was with his sexual metaphors. Reading this, however, makes one wonder whether Jessie (or her fictional alias of Miriam) had a fear of semen and/or the act of ejaculation? In other words, was her intense disgust-response to male sexual activity rooted in a genuine phobia, or was it merely a consequence of her moral beliefs and idealism? 

 

Either way, this would explain (in part at least) why she was so bitterly ashamed of having allowed Lawrence to fuck her; it was as if he had "dragged her spiritual plumage in the mud" [5]. 

 

 

1 May 1915

 

American readers will probably know that William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901 at the Pan-American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York.

 

English readers will probably ask: So what? 

 

Well, it turns out that Lawrence was fascinated by this event and much amused by a song (of anonymous origin) that was written about the shooting and Czolgosz's execution in the electric chair. On May 1st 1915, he enclosed the lyrics to the song in a letter to the English author Eleanor Farjeon (presumably at her request) [6]. 

 

 

1 May 1916 

 

In a letter to his Freudian friend Barbara Low - a founding member of the British Psychoanalytical Society - written from his cottage in Cornwall, Lawrence expresses his complete dismay with the world at war:

 

"I would write to you oftener, but this life of today so disgusts one, it leaves nothing to say. The war, the approaching conscription, the sense of complete paltriness and chaotic nastiness in life, really robs one of speech." [7]  

 

Of course, having said that, Lawrence then goes on (at some length) to speak of the local flora, his work on what he still at this time calls the second half of The Rainbow, and the current state of his health: "I was very well, but have been seedy again these few days ..." [8] 

 

But mostly he complains of the utter nausea he feels for humanity; "people smelling like bugs, endless masses of them, and no relief: it is so difficult to bear. [...] I feel I cannot touch humanity, even in thought, it is abhorrent to me." [9]. 

 

Still, it is from such nausea and violent anti-humanism that great art is born and the greater health discovered. For as Lawrence says: One sheds one's sickness in books.

 

 

1 May 1917

 

Today, of course, when we are all supposed to stand with Ukraine and wear a little blue and yellow ribbon or badge in solidarity, to say anything positive about Russia is almost taboo. But in May 1917 Russia was, for many people, the country that held out the greatest promise. 

 

And so it is that Lawrence writes to his Russian-born friend S. S. Koteliansky:

 

"I feel that our chiefest hope for the future is Russia. When I think of the young new country there, I love it inordinately. It is the place of hope. We must go, sooner or a little later. [...] Send me a Berlitz grammar book, I will begin to learn the language - religiously." [10]

 

Notes

 

[1] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 252.  

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 264. 

[3] Letters, I. 388-89. 

      It should be noted that this letter was actually written on April 30th, 1912, and not May 1st, but I'm using a little artistic and historical license for the sake of the post.

 

[4-5] Letters, I. 545. 

      This letter has been dated by the editor as 2 May 1913. It is mostly famous for the following boast made by Lawrence: "I know I can write bigger stuff than any man in England." [546]. 

[6] See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 332.

[7-9] Letters, II. 602. 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. III, ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson, (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 121. 

 

 

The second part of this post - May Day with D. H. Lawrence (1921 - 1929) - can be read by clicking here.

The Man and the Dreaming Woman: Notes on D. H. Lawrence's The Witch à la Mode

Cover of the Blackthorn Press 

Kindle edition (2014)

I. Opening Remarks

'The Witch à la Mode' was one of Lawrence's earliest short stories, though it remained unpublished in his lifetime.*

First written in 1911, under the title 'Intimacy', it anticipates his second novel, The Trespasser (1912), and the character of Winifred Varley was, like the character Helena, based on the Croydon schoolteacher Helen Corke, whom Lawrence had met in the winter of 1908/09 and eventually developed feelings for; feelings stronger than friendship and other than the deep affection that she claimed to have for him.

Indeed, even in 1911, whilst engaged to Louie Burrows, Lawrence continued to make sexual demands upon Helen. Unfortunately, she continually knocked him back, frustrating his desire and stultifying his passion, leaving him ironic and bitter towards her.

'The Witch à la Mode' is born out of this sexual frustration and sardonic anger; when Lawrence finally came to the realisation that she would never be physically responsive to him and never want more than a kiss goodnight.

In a letter written in January 1910, Lawrence complained of Jessie Chambers (the prototype of Miriam in Sons and Lovers and to whom he had been unofficially engaged for several years): "She refuses to see that a man is male, that kisses are the merest preludes and anticipations, that love is largely a physical sympathy ..."

This could just as easily have been said of Helen Corke and the female characters in his fiction based upon her. As Elizabeth Mansfield notes: "He [Lawrence] came to think of Helen Corke as one of the 'Dreaming Women' whose 'passion exhausts itself at the mouth'". Ultimately, Helen offered Lawrence what Winifred Varley offers Bernard Coutts; an intense spiritual relationship rather than a physically fulfilling one.

Some critics have rather lazily suggested that Winifred was frigid. Others, like Howard Booth, have suggested we might think of her as a romantic asexual; the kind of woman, as Oliver Mellors would say, who loves everything about love, except the fucking, and who only agrees to sex, if at all, as a kind of favour.     

However, it's equally possible that, like Helen Corke, Winifred was a repressed lesbian or a bisexual who attempted to walk on neutral ground but was ultimately more drawn to her own sex than to men - even whilst many men were fatally attracted to her.** 


II. The Tale

"When Bernard Coutts alighted at East Croydon", writes Lawrence, "he knew he was tempting Providence." And so it proves ...

But Coutts is a man of desire whose spirit exulted in living dangerously and loving fate in all good conscience; a man who is roused by the electric blue sparks of a tram car and who excitedly greets the stars overhead.

He arrives at Laura Braithwaite's house. Laura is a young widow and a friend of his. Coutts has just returned from the Continent. Laura enquires about his fiancée, Constance, waiting for his return up in Yorkshire. She also asks him about Winifred, with whom, clearly, he has had a thing. Laura informs Coutts that Winifred is due to visit, having been invited to do so. Sure enough, at about half-past seven, she arrives - awks!

"When she entered, and saw him, he knew it was a shock to her, though she hid it as well as she could. He suffered too. After hesitating for a second in the doorway, she came forward, shook hands without speaking, only looking at him with rather frightened blue eyes. She was of medium height, sturdy in build. Her face was white, and impassive, without the least trace of a smile. She was a blonde of twenty eight, dressed in a white gown just short enough not to touch the ground. Her throat was solid and strong, her arms heavy and white and beautiful, her blue eyes heavy with unacknowledged passion." 

Both parties blush upon seeing one another. However, any momentary discomfort caused by the situation is soon forgotten as Coutts, an agalmatophile, has his attention seized by a pair of alabaster statues, two feet high, standing before an immense mirror hanging over the marble mantelpiece in the drawing room:

"Both were nude figures. They glistened under the side lamps, rose clean and distinct from their pedestals. The Venus leaned slightly forward, as if anticipating someone's coming. Her attitude of suspense made the young man stiffen. He could see the clean suavity of her shoulders and waist reflected white on the deep mirror. She shone, catching, as she leaned forward, the glow of the lamp on her lustrous marble loins."  

This, I think, is an astonishing passage, and I'm surprised it receives no comment in the explanatory notes provided by the Cambridge editor, or, indeed, by Howard Booth who is always looking to queer the circle, so to speak, and explore a range of non-normative sexualities. His suggestion that Winifred is asexual deserves consideration, but seems to be based on pretty flimsy evidence as far as I can see, whereas this passage provides compelling evidence of Coutts's statue fetishism.

Indeed, one might suggest that the main reason Bernard is so fascinated by Winifred is because of the solid whiteness of her figure and impassivity. In other words, she is statue-like and her unnaturalness is a consequence of this, rather than her sexual orientation (or absence of such). This is why, for example, when Winifred entertains the other guests by playing her violin, Coutts can't help looking from her to the Venus figure, until intoxicated by his own pervy pygmalionism.  

Anyway, let us return to the tale ...

Having left the party at Laura's house, Bernard and Winifred stroll together, hand-in-hand, but having immediately fallen back into the same dynamic of love and hate: "He hated her, truly. She hated him. Yet they held hands fast as they walked." They arrive at her house and she asks him in.

Whilst washing his hands in the bathroom, he thinks of Constance and, although he loved her, he realises that she bores and inhibits some vital part of him. Winifred, on the other hand, herself being intense and unnatural, allows him to become who he is: i.e., just as queer as she.

Indeed, Winifred insists on his exceptional nature and is "cruel to that other, common, every-day part of him" - the part that can contemplate married life, for example; "she could not understand how he could marry: it seemed almost monstrous to her: she fought against his marriage".    

Ultimately, Winifred rather frightens Coutts. He sees the witch in her and realises that were they to attempt a life together the result would not be good: "'You know, Winifred, we should only drive each other into insanity, you and I: become abnormal.'"

His main concern is that Winifred only wants to use him as a kind of human orbuculum in which to see visions and reflections of life, but doesn't care a fig for him as a man of flesh and blood (which is a bit rich coming from him if, in fact, I'm right about his agalmatophilia).

Inevitably, they embrace and kiss in a typically Lawrentian manner (i.e. one marked with a shocking degree of violence). But that one kiss is enough for Winifred: her passion ebbs unnaturally. And Coutts is left feeling profoundly frustrated in a state of epididymal hypertension: "His whole body ached like a swollen vein, with heavy intensity, while his heart grew dead with misery and despair."

He had wanted, like Pygmalion, to bring her to life with a kiss; to set her pulse beating and blood flowing. But Winifred had remained defiantly statuesque. Unable to ignite her sex, Coutts (accidently) kicks over a lamp and sets the room ablaze instead.

Howard Booth says this final incident sees Bernard "burnt not by [his] passion but by the very lack of desire [in Winifred]". I'm not sure I quite agree with that, but I do agree that Lawrence seems to be coming down firmly on the side of conventional married life.

For having saved Winifred from the flames, Coutts abandons her in order to achieve the (hetero)sexual maturity that he had earlier confessed he (instinctively) wants; i.e., to become a good husband and father, growing fat and amiable in domestic bliss.
 

Notes

* Lawrence first wrote the story - then called 'Intimacy' - in 1911. He revised it in 1913, changing the title to 'The White Woman', and subsequently, following slight further revision, to 'The Witch à la Mode'. It was first published in Lovat Dickson's Magazine in June 1934 and was included in the posthumous collection A Modern Lover, published by Martin Secker in October of that year. It can be read online as an ebook thanks to The University of Adelaide: click here.   

** Neutral Ground was the title of Helen Corke's novel, published in 1933, that attempted to delineate a point on the sexual spectrum somewhere between hetero and homosexuality where she felt most comfortable locating herself. Elizabeth Mansfield tells us that in a letter written to Lawrence's biographer Harry T. Moore, Helen "defined Neutral Ground as 'an honest attempt to deal with the problem of a Lesbian temperament'". 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Witch à la Mode', Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 54-70. All lines quoted are from this edition of the text.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Intimacy', The Vicar's Garden and Other Stories, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 123-38.

D. H. Lawrence, letter to Blanche Jennings (28 Jan. 1910), in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. 1 (1901-13), ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 153-54.

Elizabeth Mansfield, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence's The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 18.

Howard J. Booth, 'Same-Sex Desire, Cross-Gender Identification and Asexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s Early Short Fiction', Études Lawrenciennes 42  (2011), pp. 37-57.  Click here to read online.