WORLDS OF STYLE
world, to alter even the laws of nature here, as in Emerson and in
all
of James, brings rewards only to the imagination and to the con–
sciousness of participants and witnesses, rewards without any practical
benefit or visible objectification. The struggle may
be
with the alien
forces in nature that Emerson did not feel it necessary to acknowledge
so fully as did Melville, but it is also with those inheritances of
old thinking, of old formulas and of language itself which Emerson
continually laments, with no illusions that it
is
ever possibly fully
to escape from them.
While most of what I would call the American aspects of
St. Mawr
are altogether implicit, Lawrence seems anxious almost
to signal the similarities (and differences) between himself and
Emerson in the interpolated story of the New England woman. The
story testifies to the historical frequency as well as to the Americanness
of the situation in which Lou finds herself at the end of
St. Mawr.
The woman's story suggests, for one thing, that the struggle of the
heroic self for a congenial environment involves no simple geo–
graphical movement from the civilization of Europe to the wilderness
of America. The old world has so efficiently claimed for itself the
civilized areas of the new that the woman must move still further
into the continent in search of harmony with natural rather than with
social forces. With her husband, a man as unbelieving a witness to
the spiritual benefits of the enterprise as
is
Mrs. Witt, the New
England woman moved to the ranch, bringing to that wilderness a
"New England belief in a world ultimately all for love," and an
assurance that she can find confirmation of
this
belief in "nature."
Trying like Deerslayer paradoxically to bring civilization to a wilder–
ness which is also her retreat from civilization (she tries to introduce
water taps and to exterminate the rats), she
is
quite explicitly defined
by Lawrence as someone trying to create or to "build" a world in the
face of savagery. Though she fails ("she could not even keep her
speech") she represents for Lawrence the positive virtue of effort,
of struggle for its own sake, against the killing extremes of system,
on the one side, and, on the other, the lowest stages of savage creation.
"And all the time," Lawrence writes in a voice which has none of
the ironic tinge it usually carries in
this
story, "man has to rouse
himself afresh, to cleanse the new accumulations of refuse. To
win
