Although D. H. Lawrence has always had some strong supporters among academic feminists and, in the last few years, has gained in this area, the predominant opinion among feminist literary critics is that his writing exemplifies misogynist discourse. The critics promoting this view of Lawrence often concede that some sympathy with the feminist movement of his time is apparent in his work up through The Rainbow, but after that they see what has been called a “turn against women” and, more specifically, a turn against feminism.¹ That Lawrence was interested in feminism early in his career and familiar with the work of important early feminist theorists, such as Olive Schreiner, is common knowledge. It is also well known that, as Hilary Simpson has shown in considerable detail, Lawrence rejected several ideas popular with feminists of his time, notably that women should be given access to the political process. What is less evident but can be demonstrated through attention to his short novel, “St. Mawr,” is that despite his opposition to many key ideas of the feminism of his times, at least one stream of Lawrence's thought continued flowing congruent with a developing trend in feminism until it reached conclusions that, in many ways, anticipate the separatist philosophy that is a major branch of late twentieth century cultural feminism.

A problem that immediately arises in trying to assess Lawrence's relationship to feminism is that there is not and never has been one coherent philosophy that could be called feminism, rather, as long as there have been feminists there have been different varieties of feminism, different feminisms.² The differences in feminisms go beyond idiosyncratic variations in personal belief systems. While all feminists believe that women should not be oppressed because of gender, most have somewhat different ideas about how resistance to patriarchal oppression should be enacted. But what most theorists have recognized as the two most prominent feminist philosophies are what are now referred to as “cultural feminism” and constructionism.³ The constructionists believe that both differences between men and women, and the hierarchic values these differences are assigned, are culturally and socially constructed. Constructionist feminists tend to emphasize differences between women and to focus on the inflection of gender by conditions of ethnicity, race, and class. Although, like Lawrence, I am reluctant to identify myself as belonging wholly to any politicized group, I consider myself close enough to being a constructionist to speak of “our” beliefs. We distinguish between sexual/biological difference and gender/behavioral difference,⁴ and we are skeptical about the idea that men and women by nature differ from one another in more than obvious physical ways. To us gender identity is a politically necessary fiction for women at this time; since we are oppressed as a group we must fight oppression as a group. Most of us believe it is possible to work for change within established structures, even though those structures appear to be controlled by men, because most of us have faith in the possibility of useful dialogue with men.

To a number of cultural feminists such positions can seem male-identified and too compromised to result in significant change in the condition of women. Cultural feminists tend to emphasize commonality between women, as exemplified by separate women's cultures, and their difference from men. The term “cultural feminism” is somewhat misleading because both groups usually value bonds between women and the women's cultures that generally exist at the margins of patriarchies. Often described as essentialists by their detractors, cultural feminists also believe that women are innately different from—and superior to—men. Among the traits that they generally attribute to woman's nature are: collectivism, nonviolence, intuition, and fluidity of thought. Characteristically interested in mother-daughter relations, they see the hope for change in reaching back to a maternal power or essence that is obscured by patriarchy. The radical and visionary feminist aspects of “St. Mawr” may be hard for us to recognize because academic feminists tend to be constructionist rather than cultural feminists.

Lawrence, on the other hand, had many more beliefs in common with current cultural feminists than with constructionists. In text after text, Lawrence insists upon and naturalizes differences between men and women. This attribute of his work has been excoriated by some feminist critics, but Lawrence's essentialism seldom, if ever, involves a deliberate devaluation of what he sees as woman's nature. Instead, he frequently celebrates women as spiritual and intuitive outsiders to mainstream culture who are thus able to criticize incisively society's sterile and reductive rationalism. It seems that Lawrence's women so often ride away because they are less suited by nature than men to conform to the dictates of our misnamed and misguided civilization. One might argue that Lawrence never has more in common with cultural feminists than when he singles out Lou Witt Carrington as the only character in “St. Mawr” whose intuition makes her not only recognize but also know how to respond to the “swollen rottenness” of our current social structures that dominate the earth, corrupting indigenous peoples and destroying nature (80). In attempting that argument, I will begin by looking at the response Lou chooses and locating it in relation to some feminist beliefs and practices.

In trying to place “St. Mawr” in relation to feminisms past and present, one encounters problems raised by the complexity of what is possibly the most extreme form of feminist counter-cultural formation: the separatist community. The feminist separatist community can be broadly defined as one in which women and their female (and sometimes prepubescent male) children live apart from men by choice for what might loosely be called political reasons to distinguish such communities from traditional religious ones, but which in many cases the separatists themselves call spiritual reasons. Because feminist separatism proceeds from the idea that women are categorically better off apart from men, separatists are more likely to be cultural than constructionist feminists, although some prominent constructionist theorists, including Monique Wittig, support separatism.⁵ As early as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian novel Herland and as recently as today, separatist women's communities have been associated with cultural feminist values. But up until fairly recently separatism was better described as a fantasy or a personal practice than a movement. Most historical studies of feminist separatism in the United States locate its beginning as a movement in the early 1970s.⁶

From its beginnings the separatist movement has also been a movement for lesbian liberation, in fact, the most comprehensive collection of writings on separatism is entitled For Lesbians Only. Given Lawrence's many pronouncements against homosexuality this might seem to create a gulf between the separatists' values and those promulgated by his texts, but only if one ignores the elision of women-centered values and lesbianism in many radical feminist and separatist writings. For example, in her much anthologized essay, “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism,” Bonnie Zimmerman discusses the difficulty of defining lesbianism in terms of sexual desire or practice, referring to both Adrienne Rich's popular “expanded” definition according to which all “’woman-identified experience’” is placed on a “’lesbian continuum’” and Lillian Faderman's claim that all relationships in which “’women's strongest emotions and needs are directed toward each other’” are lesbian, even though “’sexual contact … may be entirely absent’”(121-122). Lesbianism, which had in Lawrence's time been primarily associated with gender inversion and androgyny was thus reimagined by many late twentieth-century feminists as the ultimate womanliness. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, an important part of the early 1970s women's movement of self-definition was the “re-visioning, in female terms of same sex desire as being the very definitional center of each gender” so that “women who loved women were seen as more female”(36). While separatism has always been a marginalized position within both feminist and lesbian identity politics, some insight into the subtle connections made in early 1970s mainstream feminism between feminism, lesbianism, and female separateness may be gained by looking at the content and structure of the one of the most highly influential feminist texts of the period. Our Bodies, Ourselves. Under the topic heading “Rediscovering Our Separateness,” the women describe separation from spouses and families as a necessary part of self-discovery. Interestingly the section on celibacy directly precedes the section on lesbianism. This seems significant not because it may be read as implying in a heterosexist way that lesbianism is a sort of nonsexuality, but because volitional celibacy is described as a means through which women free “psychic energy” and begin to understand themselves (22, 77-78). Here a note like Lawrence's can be perceived, and it sounds out even more strongly in this passage from Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology that Sidney Spinster quotes in tracing the evolution of the separatist movement from its earliest communist phase to emphasis on individual spiritual journey: “It is Crone-logical to conclude that internal separation or separatism, that is paring away, burning away the false selves encasing the Self, is the core of all authentic separations” (110-11).

In “St. Mawr,” Lou Carrington, the protagonist, struggles with the problems of a culture that Lawrence identifies as sterile because it is male-dominated and consequently purely intellectual and narrowly logical. When her mother, Rachel Witt, says, “Man is wonderful because he is able to think,” Lou replies, “Their thinking seems to me all so childish: like stringing the same beads over and over again. Ah, Men! They and their thinking are so paltry” (60). The novel does posit a better maleness prior to the time it depicts. The stallion St. Mawr emblematizes this lost world of spiritually and physically rich masculinity. Rachel calls him the “one last male thing in the museum of this world” (97; emphasis Lawrence's). But in her own times men appear completely corrupted by technology and capitalist/materialist culture, “little male motor cars” (97). While Lou and her husband, Rico, are shown to be in many ways alike, he is much more deeply complicitous with society because he has much more to gain from it. Lou is “staggered … to find that he takes it absolutely seriously. His career!” (117). The novel's two more intuitive and natural men, the grooms Lewis and Phoenix, are ultimately revealed as “childish,” the former drawing his creed from fairy tales and legends he heard in boyhood, the other always yearning to lose himself in a car, a movie, or an ice-cream soda (136). Even a horse can recognize that, in these times, “nobility had gone out of men” (84).

In contrast, Lou and her mother have majestic presence. Rachel Witt is described as resembling “a potent, well-dressed demon” (and one needs to keep in mind the positive value Lawrence assigned to the demonic self), she is “like one of the fates,” appears as a “matchless Amazon,” and “a queen, as far as she wished” (24, 57, 93, 101). But Rachel is no silent iconic figure for truth. Her ability to deliberately deconstruct the social performances of those around her makes her gaze “weapon-like” (25). Although Lou's thinking is characterized as “dim” because it is young-womanly, it allows her a profound apprehension of authenticity and value (30, 84). The knife-edged perceptions of her mother, cutting through all social pretense suggest that Lou can mature into a similar sort of wise woman, drawing on what the goddess-oriented feminism derived from Mary Daly's work calls “crone logic.” Communication between the mother and daughter is always productive, it helps them both gain insight. Within the novel, as within cultural feminist movements of our own time, having woman-centered values means respecting animals and the ecological balance, opposing war and all violence that is not clearly in self-defense, resisting consumerism, rejecting the use of sex as entertainment, and insisting upon a moral purpose for art. The more Rachel and Lou confide in each other, the more they reinforce such values in each other, as is dramatized in their discussions of St. Mawr.

The positive valuation of the bonds between the mother and daughter is emphasized by the impossibility of their connecting with the women in the novel who accept the male world and are in complicity with its values. The flirtatious and suggestively named Manby sisters present a particularly marked contrast. On an excursion, Flora Manby plays up to the men by saying, “I consider these days are the best ever, especially for girls. … I read all through H. G. Wells' history, and I shut it up and thanked my stars I live in nineteen-twenty odd, not in some other beastly date when a woman had to cringe before mouldy domineering men” (74). This pert parody of a feminist stance is corrected by the vision of true independence offered by the mother and daughter. A moment later, Rachel Witt rejects the assistance of one of the young men in the party and the narrator remarks, “He might as well have caught the paw of a mountain lion protectively.” While the Manbys consider themselves girls, Lou and Rachel are clearly women. The Manbys lean on men and accept definition by them. They demonstrate a pretty gratitude for male favor. Lou has a comic vision of Rico as a modern Priapus surrounded by nymphs modeled on the young noblewomen of their set. “He would go round the orchard painting lifelike apples on the trees, and inviting nymphs to come and eat them. And the nymphs would pretend they were real” (114). This is all modern man seems able to offer women. Lou says, “I feel so unreal, nowadays, as if I too were nothing more than a painting by Rico on a mill-board” (115). But then she goes on to throw off his falsifying definition of her and makes her own way in a new world.

The successful resolution of Lou's quest for a new, more vital way of life depends upon her ability to let go not only of the male dominated culture that surrounds and stifles her, but also of the men in her life who might seduce her back into compliance. Her mother, as an imperfect but promising representative of atavistic matriarchal values, helps break Lou free. Rachel Witt is a complex character who can easily be misunderstood if our reading of her is reductively structured by her association with death, most prominent during her funeral watching stage, and her own understanding of “her nature [as] a destructive force” (100). Another sort of reading would come from seeing her according to feminist traditions of representation. As Eve Tavor Bannet points out:

Where traditional and Jungian writings dichotomized the Great Mother (into the life-giving earth mother and the terrible devouring mother, for instance), feminists have shown that such dichotomies are only artificially differentiated aspects of the Mother and that they belong together. In feminist writings, the Great Mother once again combines opposites: she is both womb and tomb, both beneficent and devouring. … Both maternal and spiritual, both mother and virgin, she is both the weaver of children and clothes and the weaver of songs and fates. She is both the transformer of food and the transformer of consciousness, both potter and pot, both wise woman and witch.

As mother figure Rachel Witt can be read as analogous to the Arizona landscape which is repeatedly feminized in the text. Phoenix first moves Lou to dream of escaping to the desert when he describes “where the canyon go, the crack where it look red,” and Lou envisions, “dark, heavy mountains holding in their lap the great stretches of pale, creased, silent desert that still is virgin of idea, its word unspoken” (86). Mother and daughter are frustrated in their attempts to reach through the men “A world dark and still, where language never ruffled the growing leaves, and seared their edges like a bad wind” (104). But the “canyon-passage” is “like an open gateway out of a vast yard” (145), and through that opening Lou passes into a close communion with the sources of life. Here she rediscovers herself as “one of the eternal Virgins, serving the eternal fire” (139). And Rachel Witt, sitting at “the mouth of the little canyon” and seeing “a world not of men … could not fail to be roused” (156). One might note the implicit comparison here between masculine culture and the domesticated landscape and between female separateness and the wild country, and also that Lawrence's position is far from the masculinist insistence that the virgin land must be subdued and cultivated by men. Instead, he insists on mother earth's powerful resistance.

If the character Rachel Witt stands in for Woman, transhistorical femaleness in union with Nature and its sacred essence, Lou Witt Carrington is presented as a variation on the modern woman, a speaking and thinking subject of her times. It is in her characterization that Lawrence's radicalism on feminist themes is most fully displayed in the story. Lou might most succinctly be described as a deviant subject, and as Jennifer Terry has argued, deviant subjectivity can be a source of feminist empowerment. Terry points out that while Foucault correctly reveals the centrality of the concept of sexual deviance to “the narrative history of the normal,” the deviant voicing her own marginal narrative has been placed in a speaking position that allows her to call into question the dominant discourse; “Like the subject of feminism, deviant subjects are inside and outside of the ideology and history of heterosexuality, engaging in the construction of a genealogy of survival” (70-71). It is in this spirit that Lou articulates what we would now call separatist ideas. She stresses the legitimacy of her attitudes through historicization, but with a difference—“I'm the harem type, mother: only I never want the men inside the lattice” (55). She appropriates and resignifies Jesus's words, describing herself as “not yet ascended to the Father” but declares, “Noli me tangere, homine!” emphasizing that her movement toward the holy will specifically entail resisting intimacy with men and will culminate in habitation of “a valley that life has not entered yet,” the locus of her mystical restoration to virginity (120). Later she explains that she will become a Vestal who worships not the Apollonian mind of man, but the mother earth (139). As in the familiar feminist dictum that the personal is political, Lou generalizes her deviation from traditional femininity into a philosophy, based both on what she perceives as laws of nature and on her response to her position as a subject in history. “It seems to me men and women have really hurt one another so much, nowadays, that they had better stay apart till they have learned to be gentle with one another again” (122). Her own experience as a woman becomes central to the novel's critique of society and prescription for reconstruction of the world, and in that experience, men “don't count” (153).

When Lou settles at last into her isolation in nature, she calls out to her mother to join her. This conclusion anticipates both the modernist feminist dream of women's community and the theories behind actual late twentieth century separatist communities. With this book, Lawrence seemingly has gone as far as it is possible to go into cultural feminism, taking essentialism to its most extreme conclusions. Once we recognize that, we might also see his last books anew, not, as they are usually seen, as attempts to reintegrate women into his vision after their displacement to peripheral roles in the so-called leadership novels, but rather as attempts to envision a world in which men, despite their difference from women and their consequent distance from nature, can still play an important role.

Notes

1. For some influential studies arguing for negative development in Lawrence's attitudes about women see Hilary Simpson, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism; Cornelia Nixon, Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women; and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Sexchanges.

2. Many theorists and metatheorists of late twentieth century feminism have made this point but perhaps none more strongly than Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl with their authoritative anthology of feminist writings entitled Feminisms, which is organized around controversies in literary women's studies.

3. For some useful discussions of differences between cultural and constructionist feminism see: Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism Versus Postructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory”; Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; and Jane Gallop Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory. A perspective interestingly complicated by consideration of various movements within feminism in France is provided by the essays in Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky's Revaluing French Feminism and in Alice A Jardine and Anne M. Menke's Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France.

4. Since the publication of Butler's Gender Trouble constructionist feminists have increasingly begun to question even the distinction between gender and sex, with many deciding as Butler does that “perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender: indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all” (7).

5. Monique Wittig ends her essay, “On the Social Contract” with a call to feminists to leave heterosexual society in order to end their forced definition by its terms, “For to live in society is to live in heterosexuality” (40).

6. For a well documented discussion of the development of feminist separatism in the United States see Sidney Spinster, “The Evolution of Lesbian Separatist Consciousness.”

Works Cited

Alcoff, Linda. “Cultural Feminism Versus Postructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.” Signs 13 (1988): 405-36;

Bannet, Eve Tavor. “The Feminist Logic of Both/And.” Genders 15 (1992): 1-20.

The Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Fraser, Nancy, and Sandra Lee Bartky. Revaluing French Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. Sexchanges. Vol. 2 of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.

Jardine, Alice A, and Anne M. Menke, eds. Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women in post-68 France. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

Lawrence, D. H. St. Mawr and Other Stories. 1925. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Nixon, Cornelia. Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Simpson, Hilary. D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. Northern Illinois UP, 1982.

Spinster, Sidney. “The Evolution of Lesbian Separatist Consciousness.” For Julia Penelope. London: Onlywomen P, 1988: 97-121.

Terry, Jennifer. “Theorizing Deviant Historiography.” Differences 3.2: 55-74.

Warhol, Robyn R., and Diane Price Herndl. Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory. New Brunswick: Rutgers U P, 1991.

Wittig, Monique. “On the Social Contract.” 1989. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston, Beacon, 1992: 33-45.

Zimmerman, Bonnie. “What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism.” 1981. Feminisms.: 117-137.