WORLDS OF STYLE
6043
St. Mawr
is a kind of gathering of the motifs we have so far been
considering in classic American literature and which are to some
extent defined in Lawrence's
Studies,
published over a year before,
in 1923, but written within the period dating from 1917. Lawrence's
immersion in American literature is everywhere evident in the story.
The heroine, Lou Witt, living in England with her mother and married
to an Australian named Rico, chooses, like many American heroes
and heroines before her, to disassociate herself from a polite society
and from a marriage, both parodied in the opening pages, and to
find renewal in the wilderness. She retreats to the New Mexican
desert, there to find a spirit "that wants her." The geographical
movement of the story has obvious historical and literary precedents:
from old to new worlds, from England (the "close, hedged-and–
fenced English landscape. Everything enclosed, enclosed to stifling")
to Mexico (where "The great circling landscape lived its own life"),
from a land without the opportunities proffered by unfilled space
("Not a space, not a speck of this country that wasn't humanized,
occupied by the human claim") to a landscape for which "man
did not exist." But before this geographical evocation of two worlds,
Lou has already contrived them in her imagination and has done so
in a manner which, again, suggests a classic feature of American
literature: when she first sees St. Mawr, an equestrian Moby Dick,
a domesticated Big Ben, the horse "seemed to look at her out of
another world." While imagining this "other" world, she can, like
Thoreau, or Faulkner's heroes, or Hemingway in his sporting or
hunting stories or Melville's Ahab, think of those around her in
hierarchies that appeal not to social institutions but rather to the
mysterious powers potent but thwarted in animal life. Lewis, the
groom, thereby becomes elevated above her husband Rico, by "the
aristocracy of invisible powers, the greater influences, nothing to do
with human society."
Lou's effort to promote the secret powers of St. Mawr within
the context of English mannered society can only find a voice in the
first half of the story that is largely destructive and satiric. The burden
of this satiric effort
is
at first carried mostly by her mother, Mrs.
Witt. Her ironies are full of a self-loathing which Lou recognizes as
a doomed alternative to the deadening social chic of her husband.
