WORLDS OF STYLE
647
from the crude wild nature the victory and the power to make
another start, and to cleanse behind him the century-deep deposits
of layer upon layer of refuse: even of tin cans."
As
in American
literature, even the best efforts of the characters in Lawrence's fiction
bring no practical benefits. Success is inward and invisible, an
expansion of consciousness in the self. That this expansion on the part
of the hero might ultimately have some renovating effect upon
society
is
a hope more pronounced in Lawrence than in any American
book that comes to mind, including Faulkner's
The Bear.
But some
such renovation is implicit, in the very degree to which American
writers strive in their styles, as Lawrence does, to be "poets," "liberat–
ing gods" of the confined consciousness of the reader.
St. Mawr
is an astonishing feat in varieties and modulations
of style precisely because Lawrence is so anxious to show how nearly
impossible it is to be freed of those organizations of language, literary
and S()cial, within which human consciousness has chosen to define
itself. He gives far greater proportionate attention to his characters'
existence in language than to their sexual existence. At the end of
St. Mawr
it is made perhaps needlessly clear by the very name of the
ranch-Las Chivas, or she-goats-and by the insistence on the pre–
sexual horror of the savage landscape that Lou and her mother are
paying a heavy human and psychological price, as do all similar
American heroes, for their rejections and choices of environment.
Lawrence's irreducible Englishness is most apparent, however,
in making Lou's situation significantly unlike that of any comparable
American hero: at the end, communing with the landscape from
which "stillness speaks," she is still not alone and must herself enter
into human converse. Mrs. Witt is with her, is given indeed the
final lines of the story. Thus at the very end Lou is forced into
dialogue, into some definition of her inward state that makes some
sense to the older, socially adept, practically minded woman. "Free–
dom" in Lawrence, for Lou as for Birkin, who tries to make sense
of himself to Ursula at the end of
Women in Love,
"freedom" means,
as he puts it, "freedom together." In this modification on the theme
of retreat and solitude, Lawrence exposes his American tendencies to
certain elemental biological and social realities that English fiction
never completely eludes even in this century. There is in Lawrence
