A queen, they'll say,
Has slept unnoticed on a forgotten hill.
Sleeps on unknown, unnoticed there, until
                    Dawns my insurgent day.

—“On That Day,” New Poems (1918)

To the demon, the past is not past.

—MS: Discarded Foreward to Collected Poems (1928) (Printed in Appendix I of Complete Poems II 850)

I

D. H. Lawrence's deep and painful love for his mother is one of the best known facts of literary biography. He was himself utterly candid about its nature and effects, writing to Rachel Annand Taylor as Mrs. Lawrence lay dying in 1910, “We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct. … It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal” (Collected Letters I 69). Readers of Sons and Lovers and the powerful elegies and mother poems for Lydia Beardsall Lawrence may surmise how fervently her son hoped by writing them both to “shed his [oedipal] sickness”¹ and to pay her a lasting tribute. The young Lawrence acknowledged his mother as muse, fostering his writing and painting. He knew that, perhaps because of her anguished attachment to him, she had opened his ears to life's secrets. Comparing her to the Holy Ghost in his poem “The Inheritance,” he declared that her own ghost had “sent [him] a cloven fire / Out of death.” It consecrated him to art.

                    [You] left me a gift
Of tongues, so the shadows tell
Me things, and the silences toss
Me their drift.

(“The Inheritance,” Complete Poems I 108)

After the publication of moving portraits of her in Sons and Lovers (1913), Love Poems (1913), Amores (1916), and New Poems (1918), Lawrence let it be thought that the spell cast upon him by his mother's image had been broken. Thus, in his Preface to Complete Poems (1928), which appeared two years before he died, he explained that “the crisis of volume I is the death of the mother, with the long haunting of death in life” (Complete Poems 28). Conceding the presence of poems for Lydia Lawrence even in the sequence written for his wife Frieda, Look! We Have Come Through, he nevertheless declared that thereafter there was “a big break” in theme, “a new cycle” (Complete Poems 28). His words promoted the critical notion—still extant—that “after he had shaken off his mother-attachment by writing Sons and Lovers,” he “grew ‘into a separate existence which cannot be interpreted in terms of Mrs. Lawrence’” (Fr. William Tiverton, quoted in Moore 52).

Lawrence scholars disagree on the subject of Lawrence's absorption in his mother, either in life or in art, during his later career.² My own view is that Lawrence's oedipal fascination persisted and that he wrote about his mother with open passion or with a malice born of it until he died. I am not, however, primarily concerned in this essay with establishing the endurance of Lawrence's oedipal feeling or with studying its broader psychological forms of expression in the fictions, for that has been done most persuasively already by scholars such as Daniel Weiss,³ Graham Hough, and Judith Ruderman.

Instead, I should like to analyze Lawrence's repeated use of a trope from folklore to express complex feelings about his mother: the tale (and central image) of Sleeping Beauty from the Grimms' story “Briar Rose.” It came to him not only by fond reading of Grimm (and probably Perrault) but also, doubtless, through the popular Victorian tradition of Sleeping Beauty paintings and poems with which, as a young “Pagan” student of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, Lawrence was familiar. I shall argue here that Lawrence chose to treat his mother as a Sleeping Beauty for both emotional and artistic reasons; that in thus rendering her story, he began to shape his philosophy of the “baptism of fire in passion” (Sons and Lovers 318) necessary for true human fulfillment; and that the haunting image of Lydia Lawrence, asleep on her death-bed in Sons and Lovers and the mother poems, is the master-drawing of which the forms of so many sleeping women in Lawrence's art are variations. Through analysis of its content and connotations, one gains a richer sense of D. H. Lawrence as a man and as a writer.

II

Lawrence wrote to Louie Burrows as his mother lay dying, “I wish we could turn into storks or swans, like fairy tale folk” (Boulton 78). One year earlier in 1909, while he was teaching at the Davidson Road School in Croydon, he had written to a confidante, Blanche Jennings, “I am alone at Rottingdean, and it is dark outside, and the sea is still, and there is only Grimm's Fairy Tales in the room, besides the Church Magazine, and although Grimm is a pal of mine, yet I do not want him tonight, so I'm going to write to you …” (Collected Letters I 53). Lawrence's letter to Blanche Jennings indicates that he had chosen to read the Grimms' Tales with some intensity even before he knew of his mother's illness. He had been reading them during a first separation from her. The thematic and stylistic influence of the Tales may be specifically seen in “Goose Fair” (published in the English Review in February 1910) with its echoes of “The Goose Girl.” But the Tales themselves probably drew Lawrence for emotional as well as literary reasons. His cry to Louie Burrows: “I wish we could turn into storks or swans” betrays the fear that made him long like “fairy tale folk” to be transmogrified: to lose his human shape and fly from grief.

The fairy tale world of the Grimms' is one of shifting appearances, imbued with refuges from the sort of instinctive terror Lawrence was experiencing as his mother slipped from life. Long afterward, he recalled his rootlessness then, so like that of a Grimm protagonist, who, robbed of a crucial relationship, must seek new identity in a cosmos that is full of wonder but has been abruptly rendered threatening and incoherent: “From the death of my mother, the world began to dissolve around me, beautiful, iridescent, but passing away substanceless till I almost dissolved away myself. …”⁴ In the Tales, of course, it is often separation from the mother that both imperils the child and prompts the use of strength, charm, and intelligence to win back recognition and security. Frequently, the Grimms' protagonist possesses one signal attribute—too often beauty in girls, cleverness in boys—that acquires magical powers and restores the lost kingdom of the child's emotional stability.

It is probable that the destruction of Lawrence's oedipal dream of living in “a pretty house” (Sons and Lovers 352)—a fairy-tale house?—with his mother alone, resulted at first not only in despondency but also in the perfervid, confused rushes at sexual union he made with Helen Corke and Louie Burrows, as in the hostility with which he discarded Jessie Chambers. By his domineering wit, with his appealing need, he attempted, like the speaker in “Hymn to Priapus,” to use the sexuality of other women to extinguish his dead mother's poignancy. His elopement with Frieda Weekley—herself a baroness/“princess” “asleep” in a loveless marriage—began the initiation of what some psychologists call “Oedipal Resolution”⁵ for Lawrence. It was never, I think, completely accomplished. But like the child-protagonists in Grimm, Lawrence brought to his predicament a “magic” peculiarly his own: his artist's gifts. And although he had many subjects, a central theme exercised his imagination.

That theme was the Grimms' rendering of the tale, old in folk-lore,⁶ of a young royal maiden, beloved particularly of her father, who is cursed to sleep for a hundred years until the kiss of her destined prince awakens her. Lawrence probably read not only “Briar Rose” but also Perrault's courtly version, “La Belle au Bois Dormant.” Both stories emphasize the princess' age—fifteen—when she falls asleep; the displacement of her father's, by her prince's, love; the bravery of the prince, who destroys murderous brambles to reach her; and, especially, her beauty, radiant in the death-like sleep. The psychosexual logic of “Briar Rose” seems transparent to the post-Freudian reader; and to the sensitive Lawrence, in 1910, struggling with his own sexual desire, jealous of his father, and obsessed with his mother's nature and relation to himself, its symbolism must have been almost equally logical and compelling.

For “Briar Rose” is manifestly about personal through sexual development. And, despite its title, it is almost as concerned with the prince's maturation as with Sleeping Beauty's. (Perrault's added emphasis on the prince's story would have provided Lawrence with an even fuller allegory about male/female initiatory rites.) Sleeping Beauty's passage from childhood to girlhood and womanhood is the tale's underlying subject. The happy but uneventful years subsequent to the curse that establishes her destiny—which is not to be “an ideal aristocratic lady”⁷ but a human being—mark Sleeping Beauty's childhood. The princess' age and her loss of blood when pricked by the spindle suggest menstruation. The tower to which she climbs, the womb-like room in which she is pricked, imply sexual experience. The sleep from which she is roused is her own virginity. Described as also participating in shared rites of passage, the prince exercises great courage and strength in destroying the “briars” of his future wife's sexual indifference and her self-absorption. His kiss is the emblem of masculine communion with the feminine: both a claim upon, and a confirmation of, Briar Rose's womanhood.

By its perpetual youth, grace, and passivity, the figure of Briar Rose casts an erotic spell. The prince has sought her out to begin with, both as an act of competitive daring—other princes have failed to cut through the thicket—and because he hears that she is “wondrously beautiful.” Therefore at the heart of “Sleeping Beauty” is a meditation on the meaningful image of woman asleep; unawakened yet by life, by eros, and consequently pure and alluring in her remoteness: “There she lay, so beautiful that he could not turn his eyes away; and he stooped down and gave her a kiss. But the moment he kissed her she opened her eyes and awoke and smiled upon him” (Grimm 240). When Sleeping Beauty smiles, it is in recognition of the complementary vitality of the male destined to be her mate. In that way, the tale is also about the proper perpetuation of humankind. Sleeping Beauty's father—and in Perrault, the prince's mother as well—must yield place to the child from another kingdom in search of a spouse with whom to have a family. Therefore, on one level “Briar Rose” is an antioedipal tale. But most especially it celebrates the joy of romantic passion, for Grimm, and particularly Perrault, emphasize the loveliness of the princess' body when the prince first sees it.

In Perrault that loveliness has a holy aura, heightened by Sleeping Beauty's deathlike stillness. “La Belle au Bois Dormant” was popular in Lawrence's childhood as reading for beginners in French and in Andrew Lang's unfaithful, abbreviated English translation.⁸ Gustave Doré's fanciful, widely-known illustrations (1867) underscored the harshness of the prince's quest through a thorny wilderness as well as the bright charm of Sleeping Beauty's face. Perrault's version, indeed, differs from Grimm's in creating a religious undercurrent for the text so that when the prince at last reaches Sleeping Beauty, he sees the perfect woman, or, to use Lawrence's words about Mrs. Morel before her marriage in Sons and Lovers, a woman “perfectly intact” (9). In Perrault, the tale's oedipal content is also more prominent than in Grimm, for Sleeping Beauty's broken-hearted father must die before her prince comes, and it is he who prepares her marriage bed:

The King … caused the princess to be carried into the finest apartment in his palace and to be laid upon a bed all embroidered with gold and silver.

One would have taken her for a little angel, she was so very beautiful; her cheeks were carnation and her lips were coral. Her eyes were shut, but … she was not dead. … Her bright beauty had somewhat in it divine.⁹

(70)

Furthermore, Perrault's addition to the tale of elements from an ancient version called in one rendering “Perceforest”¹⁰ supplies a second oedipal motif in the prince's regard for his mother, an ogress who kills herself when she cannot disrupt his marriage. His profound grief for her is ultimately assuaged only by his wife's beauty and their happiness as parents; that is, by the realization that passion is divinely sanctioned and biologically imperative but should never be incestuous.

Life had provided Lawrence with an array of remembered images of his mother; folklore would give him the trope of “Sleeping Beauty” upon which to graft them. But the culture of his day provided that trope as well. In his enthusiasm for the poetry of Tennyson, Swinburne, and Pre-Raphaelites like Rossetti, and through his apprenticeship in painting, the young Lawrence was doubtless well-acquainted with the Victorian iconographic tradition, visual and verbal, of sleeping princesses. The Romantic fascination with medieval iconography, transmitted by Tennyson in the Idylls, in word-portraits like “Mariana” and in the settings and chivalric protestations of “The Princess,” had its full flowering among the Pre-Raphaelites. Lawrence may have seen the originals or copies of paintings like Millais' “Ophelia,” Ford Madox Ford's “The Corsair's Return,” and D. G. Rossetti's “Dante's Dream on the Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice.” In each canvas, the languidly composed figure of a sleeping, dead, or dying woman (behind whom one imagines the marble effigies on medieval sarcophagi) is presented as erotic;¹¹ in fact, Rossetti's dead Beatrice is kissed alive by the symbolic figure of Love. The magical kiss, needed and either withheld or bestowed, was throughout the tradition a crucial element borrowed from folklore. Among poems known to Lawrence in youth, it appeared particularly in Rossetti's House of Life sonnets, where the tribute of the kiss marks the sleeping woman's “queen-heart in sovereign overthrow” (Rossetti, “Supreme Surrender,” The House of Life VII, Ballads and Sonnets 180).

Fascination with the Sleeping Beauty tale was current to such an extent during Lawrence's childhood that Henry James's story “Flickerbridge”—written a few years before Sons and Lovers—became a comment upon it as well as a compliment to Sir Edward Burne-Jones's “Briar Rose” panels, installed at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, in 1891. Burne-Jones's series, widely circulated in reproductions, is a culmination of painterly absorption in the image of maidens, sleeping or dead, before whose lyrically sculpted form men worshipped. If Lawrence knew the series, as is certainly possible, he would have been impressed with its dreamlike evocation of suspended life; for Burne-Jones, afflicted by his separation from a newly-married daughter, could not bring himself to paint the scene of the kiss (Tintner 147-148).

Tormented by loss upon his mother's death, however, it was precisely that scene from Grimm, Perrault, and the Victorian poetic and painterly tradition that Lawrence chose to depict. Or, rather, he chose, no doubt, to evoke a moment in his own life with the rich assistance of these inherited metaphors. For in Sons and Lovers, the dead Mrs. Morel becomes Sleeping Beauty; and Lawrence/Paul, kissing her in what is both farewell and an acknowledgment of passion long suppressed, is unable to awaken her:

She lay raised on the bed, the sweep of the sheet from the raised feet … like a clean curve of snow, so silent. She lay like a maiden asleep. With his candle in his hand, he bent over her. She lay like a girl asleep and dreaming of her love. … Her face was young, her brow clear and white as if life had never touched it. … She would lift her eyelids. She was with him still. He bent and kissed her passionately. But there was coldness against his mouth. He bit his lips with horror.

(399)

That, unlike Briar Rose, the really dead Mrs. Morel cannot awake to that new life Mrs. Lawrence subconsciously longed for with her son, accords with the antioedipal character of the Sleeping Beauty trope. Yet his necessary failure as “prince” (he thought of himself as her “prince” killing the dragons [Nehls 181]) to rescue his mother from deprivations finally summarized by her death, depressed Lawrence profoundly. During the years in which he wrote and rewrote Sons and Lovers, completed the mother poems, and alarmed a sympathetic but impatient Frieda by talking about Oedipus and seeing visions of Mrs. Lawrence, he tried to rid himself of unreasonable guilt toward his mother. His mode of defense against her pervasive image was to invoke it in art, returning again and again to the conceit of the failed kiss and to the figure of a sleeping woman.

III

Lawrence uses “Sleeping Beauty” as an essential subtext in Sons and Lovers. It appears throughout in the novel's theme, events, and imagery. His famous letter explaining the book as the story of “sons” “select[ed] … as lovers” by their mother and so kept from fully loving other women isolated the oedipal suffering in which not only her sons but Mrs. Morel is caught. Its language repeatedly insists that this story is one of bondage:¹² a woman, fixed in mismarriage; her sons, fixated on her. “That thing of mystery and fascination, a lady,” Mrs. Morel waits as if “buried alive” for her “release” into emotional fulfillment, a release which death differently provides (9, 5, 379). Her “sleeping soul” is so attuned to her son Paul's that, when her first “knight,” William, dies, she instinctively looks to him to “make the world glow … for her” (73, 79, 47). Even though all outside her house is “old,” “grimy,” “hideous,” like the threatening underbrush in Perrault, Mrs. Morel is lovingly associated with that hortus conclusus, her garden: “another land” full of the madonna lilies, pinks, and chrysanthemums which, in Victorian art, appear often in conjunction with idealized but shut-in women (320).¹³ She is to her sons a “Queen,” and her regality, despite the disempowerment thrust upon her by marriage, poverty, and physical frailty, is well-defined, even as it is in the mother poems (52). (Indeed, one cannot but wonder in this connection whether Lawrence did not get his title Sons and Lovers from John Ruskin, who enjoins in Sesame and Lilies—in his chapter “Of Queens' Gardens”—that women should be “queens to [their] lovers; queens to [their] … sons” [172]). The major thrust of the novel presents Mrs. Morel waiting, like Sleeping Beauty, for her completion, but her “prince,” her son, cannot provide it:

She looked brave and rich with life, but as if she had been done out of her rights. It hurt the boy keenly, this feeling about her that she had never had her life's fulfillment: and his own incapability to make up to her hurt him with a sense of impotence, yet made him patiently dogged inside.

(66)

Thus, if Lawrence described a “split”¹⁴ between sexual and spiritual love in her sons, he also shows one in their mother. For although Mrs. Morel says she has “never had a husband—not really,” Lawrence/Paul declares her the only woman in the novel (besides the ultimately awakened Clara) who has experienced the necessary “baptism of fire in passion,” has “been there,” and is consequently not “a dormant woman” (213, 318, 317). It is in terms of the Sleeping Beauty trope that Lawrence hands his mother the victory of which Jessie Chambers complained; for, unlike Jessie/Miriam, she has “go[ne] on and ripen[ed]” into vitality, wifehood, motherhood, after a genuine sexual awakening that is only deficient because it takes place with an unsympathetic partner (317). Yet, what Mrs. Morel still longs for is what Perrault's princess—or Grimm's, living happily ever after—enjoyed: a soul-mate. The novel shows that Paul, who calls her his “Little Woman,” is her true soul-mate (242). But time and fate have made him her son rather than her husband. Therefore, there is in Mrs. Morel as well as her son that “split” between intellectual and sexual bonding which Lawrence describes from Sons and Lovers on (and which he often explains in terms of sleeping well, not sleeping, sleeping alone, sleeping together: variations of a trance-like state recognized as emotionally descriptive).

The “Sleeping Beauty” trope defines other lives in the novel. “Quick” and “vigorous,” Lawrence/Paul, who, sleeping with his mother as a child, gives her “faith,” serves as partial prince-rescuer to the remaining “sleeping” women of the book (322, 67). With Miriam, who sees herself in fairy-tale images as a “princess,” not a “swine-girl,” he climbs a “winding staircase” to the “broken top of [a] tower” where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned after a lascivious marriage cost her her throne (143, 168). During her climb to a height which reflects the intensity of her love for Paul, this wind lifts Miriam's skirt in a prefigurement of the loss of virginity which pains rather than enriches her and leaves her “somnambule” (274). Before kissing her at one point, however, Paul tells Miriam—using appropriate imagery from Perrault and the Pre-Raphaelites—“Your face is bright like a transfiguration” (289). Yet it is Clara, who, despite being married and a feminist, remains disengaged, “only half-alive,” that Paul fulfills sexually if not emotionally (317). And in the passages devoted to Clara, Lawrence makes sustained use of the “Sleeping Beauty” trope.

So, Clara's “dumb” loveliness, her creamy skin and golden hair, her “eternal look” of destiny and Paul's feeling that “she had to be awakened” all point to her as a type of Sleeping Beauty (310, 331, 317). In a conversation between Clara and Paul about love, Lawrence underscores this relation:

“Did you love Baxter when you married him? …

“I thought I did—more or less. I didn't think much about it. And he wanted me. I was very prudish then.”

“And you sort of walked into it without thinking?”

“Yes. I seemed to have been asleep nearly all my life. …”

“When did you wake up?”

“I don't know that I ever did, or ever have—since I was a child.”

“You went to sleep as you grew to be a woman? … And he didn't wake you?’

“No; he never got there,” she replied, in a monotone.

(274)

Clara's association with red clay, red earth, the roses in her hat and her red carnations that “smashed,” seem like “splashed drops of blood” translate her into the menstrual woman, prepared for participation in the mature rites of sex (311). After her union with Paul, she is no longer the “fine figure in marble” that her frigidity once made her (269). Yet despite her intellectual resemblance to Mrs. Morel—for Clara can be cool, direct, witty, and “talk Nottingham”—and despite her passionate “baptism,” Clara never attains the rank of “still queen” (“On That Day,” Complete Poems 176) or Sleeping Beauty, which Lawrence assigns to Mrs. Morel uniquely.

It is Mrs. Morel's figure that concentrates the diffused rays of that queenly image, her corpse on its bed in the “empty” house (akin to Briar Rose's dormant castle) that Lawrence celebrates (399). Unable to give his mother the integrated love she craved in life, Paul Morel actually gives her death instead. Having done so, he is startled by the revivification of her virginal-seeming beauty, for though “cold,” “still she dreamed her young dream” (400). Paul's “horror” when his kiss does not awaken her—emblematic of the taboo that dictates his failure as her “prince”—keeps him from kissing Mrs. Morel again. But the life experience, fusing with the literary/painterly metaphors of his youth, kept his dead mother's image in Lawrence's mind. He wrote after Mrs. Lawrence's burial, “I've a tent by day / Of darkness whereon she sleeps on her perfect bed” (“The Shadow of Death,” Complete Poems 133). The constancy of the image and its increasingly ghoulish character helped, I think, to turn Lawrence against his mother. After Sons and Lovers, his sleeping beauties become ever more dangerous to the beholder.

IV

Lawrence's marriage cycle Look! We Have Come Through contains at the heart of “Hymn to Priapus,” a poem about sex as a cure for (oedipal) neurosis, the old vision of his mother's deathbed:

My love lies underground
With her face upturned to mine
And her mouth unclosed in a last long kiss
That ended her life and mine.

(Complete Poems 198)

In Sons and Lovers, Mrs. Morel's mouth is “unclosed” because her jaw falls slack in death. “Hymn to Priapus,” however, envisions Mrs. Lawrence as a kind of Lizzie Siddal, mistress and later wife of D. G. Rossetti, with whose dead body Rossetti buried the House of Life sonnets. His mother's face, “upturned” to him (as Rossetti imagined Lizzie's), and his mother's mouth “unclosed” (as Lizzie's is in Millais' portrait of the dying Ophelia) are memorials of the erotic kiss the Lawrences probably never exchanged in life yet exchanged in art. Different from the life-giving kiss in “Sleeping Beauty,” however, the kiss in “Hymn to Priapus” is an ending. Indeed, the mother's need for the kiss destroys her son's life.

This poem, like others—“Monologue of a Mother,” “Troth with the Dead,” “At a Loose End,” “Listening”—depicts the “darkness” of a female's will that enervates her male beloved's. Sleeping on, “buried away in the dark” (“Troth with the Dead,” Complete Poems 114) she “dreams [his] dream for [him]” so that he cannot act. Thus begins in Lawrence's art the trope of Sleeping Beauty fixed in willful sleep, a sleep which, as the trope develops, becomes either sexual hostility or indifference, or inexperience or narcissism, challenging the vital powers of the male. Even as the thorns round her castle may be interpreted as Sleeping Beauty's defensive rootedness in her own life, the lure of her waiting body represents a trap for an ineffectual “prince.”

Citing the Sleeping Beauty as “a popular subject throughout the Victorian age,” Nina Auerbach observes that “as a type of female power, both dormant and revealed, [she] seems to contain in herself both victim and queen, the apparent passivity of the one modulating imperceptibly into the potency of the other” (41). Auerbach's description suits many Lawrence heroines of whom the “exquisite … little virgin” of “The Princess” is especially typical (“The Princess,” Complete Short Stories II 476). Arrogantly asexual and consequently “in a sort of stupor” (500) and “exceedingly still” in her “princeless world,” (479) Lawrence's Princess is the savage reworking of his picture of Mrs. Morel. With her “arched nose like a proud old Florentine portrait” (479), she resembles Lawrence's mother, whose memorable feature was a “delicately shaped,” aquiline nose (Nehls, I 9) Attracting the dark Romero by her somnolent sexuality, she is associated with the image of Mrs. Morel, lying on her sheets “like a clean curve of snow”: “[The Princess] was asleep. She dreamed it was snowing, and the snow was falling on her through the roof, softly, softly, helplessly, and she was going to be buried alive” (503). But like the “cold, detached” wife of “Odour of Chrysanthemums” who thus somehow prepares her husband's death,¹⁵ the “mad” (487) Princess retains her separateness after lovemaking so that Romero is taken and killed.

This theme of the annihilating power of sleeping women persists throughout Lawrence's work until its conclusion. In The Rainbow, for example, it is expressed when Ursula rejects Skrebensky after he has been the means of awakening her “into the original immortality.” Because “her soul [begins] to run by itself,” he has a “cold feeling of death” (Rainbow 451, 456). The wife in “Samson and Delilah,” “closed in silence” against a hated husband; the “somnambule” feminist of “The Overtone,” whose hatred of men is “a weight on her heart” (Complete Short Stories II 421; III 753); the unawakened wife in “Sun,” who turns against her husband—all are types of the Sleeping Beauty and dangerous to men. As Lawrence complicates the trope, male suffering before the distant, hateful, or unattained woman becomes in itself a kind of sterile sleep or death. In order to prevent it, spellbound women like the wife in The Woman Who Rode Away are frequently subjected to violence; so the unawakened sleeper in that story is knifed through her heart as a vampire.¹⁶

Like a painting at the end of a corridor containings its own reflections and reinterpretations, the scene of Mrs. Morel on her death-bed helped to generate Lawrence's philosophy of sexual tenderness. In the lovemaking of aristocratic Constance Chatterley and her humble Mellors, the awakening of the sleeping woman is said to “close” the man's “wounds” (John Thomas and Lady Jane 237). At the center especially of the B-text of Lady Chatterley—John Thomas and Lady Jane—are the simple bed in the cottage in the wood and the deprived woman kissed into consciousness by the magic of sexual feeling: all a revision at the close of Lawrence's life of the story of Mrs. Morel. By keeping his mother “in the throne of [his] eyes” (“Everlasting Flowers for a Dead Mother,” Complete Poems 227) as a frequent subject, by imparting a mythic resonance to their love through the use of the fairy tale, Lawrence did indeed serve his mother as a “queen.”

The death-bed image, however, was envisioned to the end with ambivalence. Thus, it appears in the macabre “Smile,” in which an emasculated husband stands over his estranged wife's body in the convent to which she has retreated because she “wanted her own will”:

He was terrified when the door opened, and he saw the candles burning round the white bed, in the lofty, noble room. … He saw the dead, beautiful composure of his wife's face, and instantly, something leaped like laughter in the depths of him. …

(Complete Short Stories II 583)

The husband's laughter in “Smile” is manic levity akin to Paul Morel's before he administers a killing overdose to his mother, and it originates from desperate impotence. But the “beautiful composure” of the sleeping corpse recalls Grimm, Perrault—and Lawrence's early portrait of his mother in “The Bride”:

My love looks like a girl to-night,
          But she is old. …
She looks like a young maiden, since her brow
          Is smooth and fair;
Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed,
          She sleeps a rare,
Still, winsome sleep, so still, and so composed.

(Complete Poems I 101)

Not long before he died, Lawrence paid his mother a last tribute in the poem “Spirits Summoned West.” Although he had again and again deplored her fastidiousness and railed against her possessiveness in prose and verse that declared her “wrong,”¹⁷ he now bade her spirit come to him in Taos. Unashamedly oedipal, the poem sees Mrs. Lawrence as unflawed and once again the “gentle” woman from his childhood “who loved [him].”¹⁸ Here, in the last words he addressed to her, Lawrence's mother becomes Sleeping Beauty, restored to her virginity again by her son, who claims her in art as her rightful prince:

Come back to me now.
Now the divided yearning is over;
Now you are husbandless indeed …
Now you are disemburdened of Man and a man
Come back to me. …
Come back then, mother, my love, whom I told to die.
It was only I who saw the virgin you
That had no home.
The overlooked virgin,
My love.

(Complete Poems I 411)

Notes

1. Lawrence's justification of the writing of Sons and Lovers (Collected Letters I 234).

2. In a sympathetic study of the mother poems in Acts of Attention, for example, Sandra M. Gilbert marvels that Lawrence “seems [in them] to have accomplished a kind of self-psychoanalysis,” mastering the emotions caused in him by his mother's life as well as her death (60). Ross C. Murfin projects this vision of closure so completely that he declares Frieda Lawrence “the last woman to whom [Lawrence] addresses any poetry” (43) even though at least one poem to Lydia Lawrence, written as late as 1923, figures in the Collected Poems (1928). Earlier critics like Graham Hough and Daniel Weiss are more perceptive, extending the period of Mrs. Lawrence's influence well into his middle years. Judith Ruderman in D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother declares that “Lawrence's work throughout his career … shows evidence of unresolved pre-oedipal conflicts beneath the oedipal overlay” (8) and that “Lawrence's letters and literature … underscore the importance of the ‘devouring mother’ figure for understanding D. H. Lawrence's life and art” (186).

3. Weiss's Oedipus in Nottingham still seems the seminal interpretation of Lawrence's relationship to his mother. Mark Spilka in The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence calls Sons and Lovers “the matrix for all of Lawrence's future work” (29) and associates Paul with Mrs. Morel, Lawrence with his mother, in mutually nutritive vitality.

4. Discarded Foreword to Collected Poems (1928), copied from MS. and published in Complete Poems II 851.

5. See, for example, Bruno Bettelheim 111-116 passim. Bettelheim's analysis of the story of “Sleeping Beauty” as well as his discussion of the oedipal complex (passim) bear clear comparison with Lawrence's behavior and self-image as a youth.

6. Elements of “Sleeping Beauty,” particularly the magic sleep, go back to Homer. The essential story of the king's daughter who is awakened from a hundred-year sleep by a prince who breaks through a hedge surrounding her castle is categorized as Type 410 in Antii Aarne's The Types of the Folk-Tale. It appears in various versions throughout world literature. Elements of the tale like the Faeries' Gifts, the Spindle, and the Kiss are also categorized in Aarne's Motif-Index of Folk Literature.

7. I borrow Jack Zipes' phrase from his discussion (with which I partly disagree) of Perrault's Sleeping Beauty as passive “femme civilisée” bred to be totally submissive to her husband (24). Even in Perrault (contra Zipes), Sleeping Beauty's sexuality is clearly represented in the “couleurs vives de son teint” (“rosy complexion”) whereas the wit she displays when awakened makes her not the passive but the energetic participant in her own wooing. In Perrault as well as in Grimm, Sleeping Beauty's identity as woman transcends her role as princess. Lawrence, however, seems to have perceived—and played upon—both those emblematic functions in his own treatment of sleeping women.

8. Lawrence was proficient in French by his twelfth year, particularly enjoying tales like Daudet's Tartarin de Tarascon. It is hard to believe he would not have read Perrault in both languages, for Lang's influence as a translator was widespread as was the réclame of Doré's illustrations of the French text.

9. I quote Lang's translation in The Blue Fairy Book but prefer to think that Lawrence read Perrault primarily in French. Lang does not adequately convey Perrault's description of the prince's near-religious reverence for Sleeping Beauty. Because her face, he says, “avait quelque chose de lumineux et de divin”:—a divine light—he approaches her trembling and falls upon his knees: “il s'approcha en tremblant … et se mit à genoux” (32). It is that light and his own reverence that Lawrence conveys in the mother poems as in Sons and Lovers.

10. Geneviève Massignon comments that “Perrault's ‘Sleeping Beauty’ seems closer to the anonymous fourteenth century Catalan versified narrative of … ‘Brother of Joy and Sister of Pleasure’; the adventure of Troylus and Zellandine in the sixteenth century novel Perceforest; the tale ‘Sun Moon and Talia’ in Basile's Pentamerone” (93). Bettelheim discusses the heightened oedipal motif of Perceforest (235). The violence (including rape) with which Sleeping Beauty is treated in these earlier versions has an uncanny resemblance to that shown Lawrence's sleeping women in angry later fictions like “The Woman Who Rode Away.”

11. Bram Dijkstra (61-62) observes that nineteenth-century painting often portrayed “the fairy tale of the sleeping beauty … as symbolic of woman in her virginal state of sleep” and that this permitted the Victorian male viewer to enjoy “sensual arousal by a woman who appeared to be safely dead, and therefore beyond actual temptation” (61-62).

12. See Judith Farr for discussion of this theme (14-16).

13. See Susan Casteras 87.

14. In his letter to Edward Garnett, 14 November 1912 (Collected Letters I, 161).

15. Complete Short Stories II 300. In “Odour of Chrysanthemums” the story of the Morels is revised. The miner father is killed at pit, and his pregnant wife, her former love for him ended by his drinking, discovers “grief … pity” and even awe in washing his naked body (301). The miner's “utter, intact separateness” (300) in death reminds Elizabeth that he was not merely a husband and father but a separate personality whose rights she had denied. Thus, the husband of “Odour by Chrysanthemums” is one of Lawrence's male “sleepers,” “withdrawn” because of the antipathy of the female (301).

16. This vehement and macabre tale about a simple-minded white woman who pays for sexual indifference to her husband by being imprisoned, dosed with emetics, stripped and handled by strange men, turned into a drug addict and finally executed for wanting to “have it all [her] own way” (575) marks the crazed nadir—or zenith?—of Lawrence's treatment of unawakened women.

17. Lawrence's admission to Frieda—“I would write a different Sons and Lovers now; my mother was wrong, and I thought she was absolutely right”—is well-known (Not I But the Wind … 57). The antioedipal essays in Fantasia of the Unconscious together with his dismissal of his mother's very real misfortunes in “Return to Bestwood” illustrate how hard Lawrence tried, I think, to relax the hold of her image upon him.

18. Lawrence always expended considerable effort in the arrangement (and rearrangement) of his poems for publication. “Spirits Summoned West” is the penultimate poem in Collected Poems, although it is much stronger—and finer—than the shrill “American Eagle” that concludes the volume. This may have been an effort at concealing the continued emotional importance to Lawrence of his mother. His earlier volumes—Amores (1916) and New Poems (1918)—had each ended with a poem to Mrs. Lawrence.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Woman and The Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Aarne, Antii. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1932-1936.

———. The Types of the Folk-Tale: A Classification and Bibliography. Trans. Stith Thompson. New York: Franklin, 1971.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Boulton, James J., ed. Lawrence in Love: Letters to Louie Burrows. Nottingham: U of Nottingham P, 1968.

Casteras, Susan P. Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987.

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Farr, Judith, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Sons and Lovers.” Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1970.

Gilbert, Sandra M. Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1972.

Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun. New York: Macmillan, 1957.

Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm. The Complete Fairy Tales. Trans. Padraic Colum. New York: Pantheon, 1944.

Lang, Andrew. The Blue Fairy Book. New York: McKay, 1934.

Lawrence, D. H. Collected Letters. Ed. Harry T. Moore. 2 vols. New York: Viking, 1962.

———. Complete Poems. Ed. Vivian De Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts. 2 vols. New York: Viking, 1967.

———. Complete Short Stories. 3 vols. London: Heinemann, 1955.

———. John Thomas and Lady Jane. 1972. New York: Penguin, 1977.

———. Sons and Lovers. 1918. Ed. Julian Moynihan. New York: Viking, 1968.

———. The Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Massignon, Geneviève, ed. Folktales of France. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968.

Moore, Harry J. The Intelligent Heart. New York: Farrar, 1954.

Murfin, Ross C. The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.

Nehls, Edward. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. Vol. I, 1885-1919. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1957. 3 Vols.

Perrault, Charles. Contes de ma mère l'Oye. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Ballads and Sonnets. Boston: Roberts, 1882.

Ruderman, Judith. D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother. Durham: Duke UP, 1984.

Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies. Philadelphia: Rodgers, n.d.

Spilka, Mark. The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955.

Tintner, Adeline. The Museum World of Henry James. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1986.

Weiss, Daniel. Oedipus in Nottingham. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1962.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1983.