WORLDS OF STYlE
649
here, right deep in America, where there's a wild spirit wants me,
a wild spirit more than men. And it doesn't want to save me either.
It needs me.
It
craves for me. And to it, my sex is deep and sacred,
deeper than I am, with a deep nature aware deep down of my sex.
It saves me from cheapness, mother. And even you could never do
that for me."
Mrs. Witt rose to her feet, and stood looking far, far away, at
the turquoise ridge of mountains half sunk under the horizon.
"How much did you say you paid for Las Chivas?" she asked.
"Twelve hundred dollars," said Lou, surprised.
"Then I call it cheap, considering all there is to it: even the
name."
Mrs. Witt's deflationary remark
is
occasioned by her perception
of the floundering repetitiveness, the school-girl vagueness by which
Lou expresses a yearning which Lawrence in any case wants us to
recognize as a commonplace of American literature. By now the
reader compassionately knows that the failings
in
Lou's speech are
a sign of her heroic struggle, in which Lawrence shares, for "verbal
consciousness." Her verbal situation is made explicit in an earlier
passage describing Mrs. Witt's:
The visible world, and the invisible. Or rather, the audible and
the inaudible. She had lived so long, and so completely, in the visi–
ble, audible world. She would not easily admit that other, inaudible.
She always wanted to jeer, as she approached the brink of it.
At a similar "brink," Lou refuses to become merely the social satirist;
she takes the risk of showing herself vulnerable and entrapped, as
under the circumstances she must be. Like the New England woman
and like other heroes of her nationality, she is trying to do something
in itself impossible: to live only within the freedom of that reality
which her own consciousness has created:
And if it had been a question simply of living through the eyes,
into the
distance,
then this would have been Paradise, and the little
New England woman on her ranch would have found what she was
always looking for, the earthly paradise of the spirit.
But even a woman cannot live only into the distance, the
beyond. Willy-nilly she finds herself juxtaposed to the near things,
