RICHARD POIRIER
no evasion of these realities either by allowing the hero to define
himself in soliloquy, rather than in dialogue, or by a self-annihilating
claim to Oneness or Allness. Whatever his characters express, even
in talk to themselves, carries in its sounds some telltale mark of social
place and history, some element of the established environment against
which they and the book are still struggling at the end. Some of
Lawrence's most grotesquely conventionalized types are allowed to
pay verbal court to the Laurentian virtues, but their sounds, over–
stuffed with chic or "thinking" or academicism, betray them, as when
Hermione delivers her classroom lecture in
Women in Love,
when
Cartwright phrases his admiration for the god Pan, or when Laura
talks to Lou about St. Mawr and about the "very few people one
can talk
really
simply with."
The extraordinary degrees of modulation in the story, requiring
altogether as much attention as would any comparable work of ,poetry
like
The Waste La'nd,
is meant even at the very end to show that
Lou cannot wholly escape the environment she has left behind her
in Europe. Her final speech has in it the tainted sounds of the
fashionableness and literariness we have heard in Laura and Cart–
wright:
"Very well, daughter. You will probably spend your life keep–
ing to yourself."
"Do you think I mind! There's something else for me, mother.
There's something else even that loves me and wants me. I can't
tell you what it is. It's a spirit. And it's here, on this ranch. It's here,
in this landscape. It's something more real to me than men are, and
it soothes me, and it holds me up. I don't know what it is, definitely.
It's something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will wear me
down sometimes. I know it. But it's something big, bigger than men,
bigger than people, bigger than religion. It's something to do with
wild America. And it's something to do with me. It's a mission, if
you like. I am imbecile enough for that!-But it's my mission to
keep myself for the spirit that is wild, and has waited so long here:
even waited for such as me. Now I've come! Now I'm here: Now
I am where I want to be: with the spirit that wants me.-And
that's how it is. And neither Rico nor Phoenix nor anybody else
really matters to me. They are in the world's back yard. And I am
