RICHARD POIRIER
But once St. Mawr has revealed himself in Texas as no more than
a fawning stud, Lou finds in the landscape of New Mexico, in some–
thing no human being has tamed, a further call not merely to criticism
of human society but to potencies beyond it. She tries to imagine for
herself some creative alternative both to society and to the ironic–
satiric treatment of it in which she had joined Mrs. Witt while both
were entrapped within the terms and vocabularies of a social set. In a
sense
St. Mawr
includes within itself the two attitudes toward existent
environments which I've located in American literature: the one
imitative, often satiric, often critical, but essentially submissive, in
being merely corrective, to the necessary reality of established society;
the other creative, daring, often ridiculous in the effort to express a
creative ideal of alternative environment where the self can unite its
powers with presumably harmonious natural forces.
Where Lawrence is most English in the story
is
in the degree to
which even at the end he finds it necessary to be skeptical of the
possibilities Lou is affirming. The skepticism expresses itself most
noticeably in his never consorting fully with her tendencies as a
symbolist: he himself never confirms the importance she assigns to
St. Mawr or to the New Mexican landscape. Whatever support her
symbolisms receive from his writing or from
his
narrative voice is in
the marvelous beauty of his descriptions.
If
she is a symbolist, he
more accurately displays what Gertrude Stein meant by remarking
that "Description is explanation": the power and magnificance of
landscape and of animal life is precisely, so Lawrence implies, that
it is
not
available as metaphor. Lawrence's place in the book
is
a
clarified version of Melville's in
Moby Dick
when it comes to his
subscribing to the symbolist tendencies of the central character.
Skepticism of this kind, however, need not and does not modify the
grandeurs of description in which Melville and Lawrence like to
indulge. The admiration of the writers in both cases goes not to the
possible accuracy of a symbolist perspective but only to the heroic
nobility of incentive behind it, its creative responsiveness to the things
of
this
world.
In the tradition of American romantic literature, Lawrence
values the redemptive power of imagination even when its particular
exertions are preposterous. The effort, the struggle to change the
