SOURCE: Stewart, Jack F. “Totem and Symbol in The Fox and St. Mawr.” Studies in the Humanities 16, no. 2 (December 1989): 84-98.

[In the following essay, Stewart discusses the fox in “The Fox” and the stallion in “St. Mawr” as totemic images.]

Reading D. H. Lawrence's “The Fox” (1923) and “St. Mawr” (1925), one is first struck by vivid animal presences and then by the paradox that these presences are mediated by language.¹ As images, the fox and the stallion are overcharged with a surplus of power that seems to challenge a socially constituted consciousness. The unconditioned life-force in these male animals is transmitted to human female receivers, who are thus initiated into blood-consciousness or visions of dark gods, and whose sensitive awareness makes them transmitters, in turn, of the writer's vision to the reader.

In “The Fox,” two young women are living together and running a farm at the end of the First World War. March responds with irrational rapture to a fox that has been robbing the hen-roost, while her companion, Banford, regards it simply as a marauder to be exterminated. In “St. Mawr,” Lou Carrington, a “bright young thing” of the twenties who is dissatisfied with her life and marriage, responds with equal rapture to a stallion. Gazing into St. Mawr's “demonish” eyes, she becomes possessed with a vision of real vitality; she buys the stallion for her effete husband, Rico, who sees it as either an adjunct to his own sterile self-display or a menace to be castrated or shot. These vital creatures are demonic in the eyes of a repressive society that idealizes war and seems bent on self-destruction. In his attack on that society and its false values, Lawrence focuses on the otherness of animal consciousness, its fullness, its oneness with the source, its phallic aliveness.

Lawrence's wide reading in anthropology had a significant impact on his quest for a primitive consciousness. While he devoured such works as Tylor's Primitive Culture and Frazer's The Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy, he sought not so much facts and knowledge as a way to recapture the animistic experience. In “The Fox” and “St. Mawr,” Lawrence expresses a state of primitive animism, with overtones of totemism—animism being “[an] idea of pervading life and will in nature” (Tylor 287), and totemism the interaction of human beings with animals or objects having symbolic powers (Frazer 1:3).

In “Pan in America” (1924), Lawrence describes a “pantheistic sensuality” that involves a “living relatedness with a pine-tree and through it with the cosmos” (Phoenix 24-26). The pine tree also appears as a phallic image in “The Fox,” where “the dark crests of the pine trees against the blood-red sky” (117) form an animistic background, and in “St. Mawr,” where the “passionless, non-phallic [or pre-phallic] column[s]” of the pine trees “flare up orange-red [at sunset] … [with] dark, alert tufts like a wolf's tail …” (144). These syntagmatic images of pine trees and foxes, “pine-trees and wolves,” pine trees and serpents reinforce the animistic link between wild creatures and a primitive source of power. Lawrence's animism involves a sense of mystic participation,² for the pine tree (like fox and stallion) “gives out life, as I give out life. Our two lives meet and cross one another, unknowingly: the tree's life penetrates my life, and my life the tree's” (Phoenix 25).

For Lawrence, empathy with nature does not mean an atavistic loss of self so much as a recharging of atrophied centers of being through contact with a simpler, more sensual order. “The primary way, in our existence, to get vitality,” he writes, “is to absorb it from living creatures lower than ourselves” (Phoenix II 469). Lévy-Bruhl describes a network of participations that seems to connect all living things. The effect of ritual initiation is that “[the] mind does more than present [the] object … it possesses it and is possessed by it. It communes with it and participates in it, not only in the ideological, but also in the physical and mystic sense of the word. The mind does not imagine it merely; it lives it.” Initiation thus creates “a veritable symbiosis” between clan members and their totem: “participation in [the totem] is so effectually lived that it is not yet properly imagined” (Natives 362). This primitive state resembles that in which the fox “possess[es] the blank half of [March's] musing” (“Fox” 118). It sinks into her psyche, and the inner/outer distinction between its vivid physical presence and its “totemic” image in her mind dissolves. Thus the mysterious force that is in the fox works its magic on and in March through a kind of mystic participation.

From the beginning, fox and stallion are related to a demonic world and embody destructive/creative powers. The fox has an assurance of being that makes him invulnerable to March and Banford. Through the serpent image he is ambivalently linked with vitality or evil: “He slid along in the deep grass; he was difficult as a serpent to see” (116). Like an embodied spirit, he seems to have psychic powers: “He was looking up at her. His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spellbound—she knew he knew her. So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her. He knew her, he was not daunted” (116). Biblical rhetoric reinforces the aura of supernatural power: “For he had lifted his eyes upon her. … She did not so much think of him: she was possessed by him” (117). The fox's “knowledge” of her is the manifestation of March's own libido projected onto the fox. In the fox she encounters an unknown part of herself. In her animistic reveries, “[she] was not conscious that she thought of the fox. But whenever she fell into her half-musing, when she was half-rapt and half intelligently aware of what passed under her vision, then it was the fox which somehow dominated her unconsciousness …” (118).

Critics have applied the terms “totem” and “totemic image” to Lawrence's fox and stallion (see below). But to anthropologists this usage would not be strictly accurate. “A totem,” according to Frazer, “is a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between him and [it] an intimate and altogether special relation” (1: 3; my italics). Frazer distinguishes between “the clan totem,” “the sex totem,” and “the individual totem” (1: 3-4), but blurs these distinctions by treating the first term as generic; [pi163]³ he also finds it impossible to distinguish clearly between totemism and fetishism (2; 572).

In a famous letter to Bertrand Russell (December 1915), Lawrence announces: “I have been reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Totemism and Exogamy.” He then proceeds to articulate his own concept of blood-consciousness out of these readings in primitive anthropology, and goes on to illustrate “the origin of totem”: “If a lizard falls on the breast of a pregnant woman, then the blood-being of the lizard passes with a shock into the blood-being of the woman … probably without intervention of either nerve or brain consciousness” (Letters 2: 470; my italics). Similarly, when March encounters the fox, she is “spellbound,” “possessed,” and “[feels] him invisibly master her spirit” (116, 117).

In January 1916, Lawrence (who was living in Cornwall) asked Lady Ottoline Morrell to bring him “one or two books … anything really African, Fetish Worship or the customs of primitive tribes” (Letters 2: 510-11). That Spring he read Tylor's Primitive Culture, finding it “a very good substantial book,” and preferring it to Frazer's Golden Bough. Tylor defines totemism as the system of dividing tribes into clans, “the members of [which connect] themselves with … and even [derive] their mystic pedigree from some animal, plant, or thing …” (2: 234). Fetishism, closely linked with Animism, involves a “doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through, certain material objects” (Tylor 2: 144). In its simplest form, fetishism is “a belief in the real presence of a spiritual being in a material object” (2: 151).

Lawrence's fox and stallion, considered in relation to their female perceivers, have fetishistic as well as totemic overtones. Norris, referring to Nietzsche, Freud, and Lawrence, describes fetish formation as a psychological process in which “a libidinal deficiency … requires compensation. The human organism generates substitutions that always take the form of symbolic objects or fetishes. These acquire their symbolic value because libidinal energy is attached (cathected) to them, and they thereby assume phallic significance, that is, they come to stand for desirability itself” (9). This displaced “economy” is clearly relevant to the construction of subject-object relationships between March and the fox, and Lou and the stallion—suggesting an element of Freudian fetishism in Lawrence's characters.

Totemism refers to “a class of objects, generally a species of animals or plants” (Frazer) that must be propitiated, while fetishism refers to a “doctrine of spirits embodied in … material objects” (Tylor). Totemism might be related to archetypal symbolism, whereas fetishism deals with objects that are generally metonymic and manipulable. Yet strict distinctions are hard to draw and aspects of totemism and fetishism are combined in Lawrence's use of animal symbols. One should remember that Lawrence, who learned much from Frazer and Tylor, read anthropology not as a scientist but as an intuitive artist, trying to recover for himself man's lost sense of oneness with the cosmos and with other living creatures. As a writer, he drew eclectically on such concepts as animism, totemism, fetishism, and mana, wherever these stimulated, or coincided with, his own intuitions and predispositions.

In totemism, “the identity of the human individual is often sunk in that of the animal” (Durkheim 282) and this is particularly true of March, who “lapses into the odour of the fox.” Her first dream (126) expresses the magic and menace of Eros through transformations of the “totemic” image, which is associated with the underworld (demonic “singing”), fertility (bright yellow corn), and ritual or sexual initiation (the fiery touch upon the mouth). Several critics identify the fox as a totem: Vickery goes furthest in seeing the tale in terms of “totemic myth” and “totemic form” (79-82); Widmer speaks of “the red totemic image,” “fox totem,” and “totemic fox of passion” (59, 60, 62); Fulmer more cautiously regards the fox as “semi-totemic.” “Instead of being a clan totem”—as in Frazer's generic definition—the fox, according to Fulmer, is “an unconscious sex totem and probably a depository for [March's] external soul” (276).[pi164]⁴ But a “sex totem,” as defined by Frazer, is “common either to all the males or to all the females of a tribe [exclusively]” (1: 4). Thus the term does not seem relevant to the isolated and sexually ambivalent March. [pi165] While Vickery and Fulmer regard the fox as March's totem, Tedlock (116-17) and Boren (303) see it as Henry's. A number of critics agree that the image is in some ways totemic—Sobchack, for instance, calls it “a totem of male power and sensuality” (77).⁵ Wolkenfeld, however, challenges the anthropological paradigm:[pi166] “What emerges as the critical crux,” she argues, “is Lawrence's success in frustrating patterns of totemic myth with a psychological story of the mating game” (345). In practice, Lawrence combines an intuitive sense of totemism with Freudian psychology, to construct a symbol that reverberates on various levels.⁶

Primitive mentality does not consider spirit and matter as separate entities to be reconnected by means of symbolism—it sees the one as participating in the other. In this sense, mana, which Codrington defines as “a force altogether distinct from physical power,” is the energy of the totemic image: it resides in the object and cannot be dissociated from it, although it is transferable by “contagion.”⁷ The more vitally alive a creature or person is, the more mana he will possess and potentially transmit. The fox haunts the hinterland of March's soul and generates disturbing images there. She comes alive when she recognizes the mana of the fox, then transfers her response to Henry. “He was identified with the fox—and he was here in full presence. She need not go after him any more” (124-25).

Whereas the passive March is “invisibly master[ed]” by the fox, Henry has a mana of his own, which seeks to master that of the animal. Even before he stalks the fox, Henry begins to hunt down March with his sexual will. Lawrence's narrator expounds primitive hunting (130-31) in a way that closely parallels Lévy-Bruhl's comment that “[it] is an essentially magical operation, and in it everything depends, not on the skill or strength of the hunter, but on the mystic power which will place the animal at his mercy” (235-36). Henry exerts a kind of “mesmerism” over March, and “burn[s] with [the] sudden power” of mana, which has been described as a kind of electrical charge. He sees the girl stooping in the twilight, and “a fire like lightning [flies] down his legs in the nerves” (131); he concentrates on mastering her will, and “it seem[s] to her fine sparks came out of him” (132). The night on which he kills the fox, Henry develops the heightened perceptions of a primitive hunter. His stealth and cunning as he “peer[s] through the darkness with dilated eyes” (146) outmatch those of the fox. To see it gliding snakelike through the darkness, he has “[to gather] all his vision into a concentrated spark” (146). Normally, the totemic animal must not be killed, although in exceptional cases “[a man] may kill and eat the animal … for the very purpose of identifying himself with it more completely” (Frazer 4: 6).⁸ After he shoots the fox, Henry inhales the odour that March had lapsed into, and the fox's mana enters into him. The ancient hunters developed a similar “mystic identification” with their prey. Killing had ritual significance, for the animal's mana gave the hunter strength, agility, swiftness, or courage.

In outfoxing the fox, Henry incorporates its vital cunning and phallic energy into his own foxlike presence. In destroying it, he replaces the fetishized object in March's unconscious, focussing her libidinal drive on himself. Henry now emanates the irresistible aura that her “dream-fox” had for March. Her inchoate yearning for union with the fetishized fox (a yearning that is clearly taboo) can now be satisfied only through the man. He is the human embodiment of the mana that so vividly drew her to the animal. Her response to the “demonic” animal alone, however, released those forces in her unconscious that are now cathected onto him.

The shooting of the fox and its display by flashlight are followed by March's second dream, in which she must find something soft to line Banford's coffin. “And in her dream-despair all she could find that would do was a fox-skin. … And so she folded the brush of the fox, and laid her darling Jill's head on this, and she brought round the skin of the fox and laid it on the top of the body, so that it seemed to make a whole ruddy, fiery coverlet …” (148). Lawrence would have read in Tylor about “the North American Indian [who worships] his medicine-animal, of which he kills one specimen to preserve its skin, which thenceforth receives adoration and grants protection as a fetish” (2: 233). Thus Henry offers to have “a lovely fur” made for March from the fox's skin, but she rejects this dead token. Instead, her libido transposes the life-giving and life-destroying powers of the fetish, the latent content of her dream signifying that her own erotic life requires Banford's death.⁹

This startling dream is followed by a ritual immersion in the physical presence of the fox, that has strongly phallic overtones. March goes into a kind of trance as she ritualistically strokes the dead animal. “White and soft as snow his belly: white and soft as snow. She passed her hand softly down it. And his wonderful black-glinted brush was full and frictional, wonderful. She passed her hand down this also, and quivered” (148). This is her way of participating in the phallic forces arrested in frozen form before her.

March's ritual stroking of the dead fox—like Lou's stroking of the live stallion—induces a trance-like state. Baird links the “orgiastic emotion” aroused by the totem with “a superior manifestation of ‘dream content’ in symbolic form” (61). In “The Fox,” these elements are conjoined, so that the reader observes the formation of a psychosexual symbol in the character's unconscious. March discovers the otherness of animal consciousness, just as Birkin discovers “the utter, mindless sensuality” of the African Fetish in Women in Love. She is marked by the odor and blood of the fox, signifying her initiation into blood-consciousness. Later she sees “the fox's skin nailed flat on a board, as if crucified” (149), an image that symbolizes the crucifixion of vital instincts by a repressive, life-denying society.

The image of the crucified fox parallels that of the crushed snake, whose dead body causes the stallion to rear and throw its rider in “St. Mawr.” The stallion itself is a primitive symbol of vital energy and otherness:

The wild, brilliant, alert head of St. Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world. … [T]he large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question … and his great body glowed red with power. … Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark … [his] great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question, and containing a white blade of light. … He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him. … The horse was really glorious: like a marigold, with a pure golden sheen, a shimmer of green-gold lacquer, upon a burning red-orange. … And she went and laid her hand on the slippery, life-smooth shoulder of the horse. He, with his strange equine head lowered, its exquisite fine lines reaching a little snakelike forward, and his ears a little back, was watching her sideways … like a cat crouching to spring.

(“St. Mawr” 30-34)

Many components of this symbolic cluster are also present in “The Fox.” Mutual motifs include questioning, brilliant eyes that radiate power and menace; fire, sun, heat, lightning, and red-gold color; demonism, lordship, or godhead; ritual worship; direct contact with the life-source or with a pre-conscious, prehistoric, primordial world; ambivalent potential for vitality or evil; the snake and the cat; mystic participation with a “living background.”

As with the fox, several critics call the stallion a totem (see Vickery 79; Widmer, “Demonic Heritage” 22; Smith 208; Barker 80-81; Levy 286). Barker, for instance, regards St. Mawr as “the totemistic revelation of the non-human, untamable spirit” (80). But the concept of totemism in the novel has not gone unquestioned. Cowan (91) criticizes Vickery's use of the term “totemic animal” on the grounds of Frazer's definition of a totem as “a class of objects … a species of animals or of plants” (my italics). Lawrence considered horses, as a species, to be archetypal symbols of potency, but St. Mawr, as his name suggests (see Brown), is a unique animal whose image encompasses a far wider range of symbolic associations.

Norris objects to totemic interpretations of a psychological, rather than anthropological, kind: “Reading St. Mawr, the stallion,” she writes, “merely as a Freudian totem of the absent father, a symbolic displacement of all the phallic potency lacking in the modern young men, risks distorting his circular symbolic function by giving him a specifically anthropocentric reference” (175). Reading in what she calls “the biocentric tradition,” in which a horse is a horse and not an archetype or “universal symbol,” Norris wishes to retrieve St. Mawr's “paradoxical function [as] a self-referential metaphor” (174). While the primary import of St. Mawr is preconscious vitality, a strictly biocentric interpretation is reductive of his significance as a conductor of “universal” primitive forces. Lawrence's animal symbols are first-and-foremost self-referential, but their glowing physical presence fuses with, rather than defuses, a transcendent dimension supplied by projections and figurative associations.

Formally, “St. Mawr” is one of Lawrence's most controversial works—the poles of critical debate were marked out early by Leavis (for the affirmative) and Hough (for the negative)—and critics also disagree about the modality of the central symbol. Some regard it as limited—“too obvious and unmotivated” (Hough); “turgidly exaggerated” (Cavitch); “sufficiently simple” at first, then unmasked as an “illusion” (Wilde). Others regard it as irreducible—“an incarnation of the transcendent and immanent mystery of being” (Cowan 91); a symbol that “cannot be reduced to a fixed meaning” but is “meant … to evoke more than credulity will bear” (Goodheart 57, 59); “the living reality of something we are normally aware of only as ghosts and shadows” (Sagar [1985] 266). Again, some critics focus on the material concreteness and immediacy of the image, calling into question its symbolical status—Lerner asks whether St. Mawr “does not quite simply possess rather than symbolise what Lou is seeking” (190)—while others emphasize its symbolic role in mediating mythic and transcendent vision (Cowan, Widmer, Goodheart, Sagar).

The primitive symbol, according to Baird, fuses an autotype fashioned from experience in the personal unconscious with an archetype from the collective unconscious (18). The autotype may be derived from a reversion to blood-consciousness that provides the experiential core of the symbol. But autotype and archetype both issue from “the deep passional soul” (Lawrence), so that the primitive symbol is simultaneously an expression of, and a passing beyond, the self—a challenge to self-overcoming. The autotype, when combined with its archetype, fuses personal experience with sources that have been lost or buried under the detritus of a dying culture. In the primitive symbol, a vital circuit is established between pre-verbal feeling and verbal expression. This circuit animates Lawrence's own creative rhythms. Like “the creative, spontaneous soul” itself, the symbol “sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us.”¹⁰

The key to the literary symbol is fusion. According to Baird, “the creator of genuine art forms his symbol by the act of fusing an aggregate of symbolic materials” (65). Similarly, for Lawrence, “a complex of emotional experience is a symbol. And the power of the symbol is to arouse the deep emotional self, and the dynamic self, beyond comprehension. Many ages of accumulated experience still throb within a symbol. … Some images, in the course of many generations of men, become symbols, embedded in the soul and ready to start alive when touched …” (Apocalypse 49). One such archetypal symbol is the stallion: “far back in our dark soul the horse prances. He is a dominant symbol: he gives us lordship: he links us, the first palpable and throbbing link with the ruddy-glowing Almighty of potency: he is the beginning even of our godhead in the flesh. And as a symbol he roams the dark underworld meadows of the soul” (Apocalypse 101-02). The nexus of stallion—fire—darkness—potency—lordship—godhead—immanence—transcendence is fully expressed in the concrete symbol of St. Mawr. Such sacramental/animal symbols forge a link with “the religion of primitive animism” (Baird 61). Thus the snakelike stallion “get[s] his [life] straight from the source,” “burning like a flame fed straight from underneath” (“St. Mawr” 61-62).

The primitive symbol communicates life more intensely by accumulating correlative images and fusing them with an archetype. This relates to Charles Baudouin's theory of the multiplistic symbol as “an imaginative construction, consisting of associations radiating in various directions, but unified by the unconscious selective process of a dominant desire” (cited in Baird 185). In creative practice, sensuous immediacy is transformed by “the passionate struggle into conscious being” (Lawrence) so that the symbol “acts as a focus for the interest, the libido, of both consciousness and the unconscious” (Aldrich 93).

The primitive symbol in Lawrence involves a reintegration of personal with transpersonal life. Thus fox and stallion become overcharged images: their meaning is immanent, yet not merely self-referential (as Norris would have it). The sensory level is incorporated in the mystic participation of the characters, yet exceeded by a multiplicity of references. Through their sheer presence, the eponymous animals come to function as symbolic supplements of a lost vitality. March's “heart beat to the fox, the fox,” and for Lou the stallion is a “lightning-conductor” to the primordial world. The meaning of such symbols cannot be fixed, because it resides in active responses rather than abstraction, and reaches beyond conscious understanding to intuitive and instinctual modes of being. “Allegory can always be explained: and explained away,” says Lawrence. “The true symbol defies all explanation. … The mind knows … in part and parcel, with full stop after every sentence. But the emotional soul knows in full, like a river or a flood” (Apocalypse 142).¹¹

The polemical “tail” Lawrence appends to “The Fox” works against its primitive animism, while Lou's “vision of evil” is overdetermined to the point of allegory. But the symbols of fox and stallion are potentially unlimited in range, as suggested by the conflated imagery of the two tales and the mystic conjunction of flames and fountain in “St. Mawr.”¹² For Lawrence, “Symbols are organic units of consciousness with a life of their own … [whose] value is dynamic, emotional, belonging to the sense-consciousness of the body and soul, and not simply mental” (Apocalypse 48). Unlike metaphor, the symbol is not a straight line connecting two points, image and referent, but a planetary system circulating around a nucleus. In Apocalypse, Lawrence speaks of “the old pagan process of rotary image-thought. Every image fulfills its own little cycle of action and meaning, then is superseded by another image” (95). Thus symbolic thinking leaps from point to point within the system, suffusing the whole, and returning to recharge itself at the center. A chain reaction links images to form a symbolic nexus. As the reader responds to the system, he reactivates the life of the symbol, freely re-discovering and extending it.

Lawrence's symbols are oriented by “contagion” to a world of primitive vitality. Durkheim observes that “the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol are closely united in our minds; the result is that the emotions provoked by the one extend contagiously to the other” (251). This effect works best “when the symbol [signifier] is something simple … while the thing [signified] … is difficult to hold in the mind …” (251). The focus must first be on a sensory object capable of radiating complex signification. Durkheim shows how religious emotions become associated with totemic symbols. Similarly, March's erotic desires and Lou's spiritual yearnings become cathected onto fox and stallion, respectively. The varying dimensions of reality, dream, and ritual surrounding the fox, and the elaborate structure of primitive motifs surrounding the stallion, give these symbols their plurisignificance.

Lévy-Bruhl observes that “[primitive] perceptions are made up of a nucleus surrounded by a layer of varying density of representations …” (44). This pattern is equivalent to that of the symbolic constellation in literature. Primitives think in complex, undifferentiated wholes, rather than in systematically connected units. This resembles the way symbolic clusters work in “The Fox” and “St. Mawr,” where each image participates in “a synthetic whole” (Lévy-Bruhl 45) exceeding the sum of the parts. An imaginative response to Lawrence's symbols will approximate the “polysynthetic” quality of primitive perception (Lévy-Bruhl 45).

Durkheim (212) cites Andrew Lang on “the belief in a sort of consubstantiality of the man and the animal” in totemism. In the primitive symbol, likewise, signifier and signified participate in a kind of consubstantiality. Widmer, applying a similar concept to Lawrence, notes an interaction between “ordinary fact” and “transcendent subjective meaning,” whereby physical and spiritual not only coexist but interanimate each other. Widmer does not tackle the question of how a person becomes consubstantial with an object, as March's libido or her image of Henry become consubstantial with the fox; but he makes the Freudian claim that the object “becom[es] a figure of representation or displacement for the most fundamental desires” (60). Widmer equates “ultimate awareness” with “the fullest immediacy” in Lawrence's animal symbols—thus closing the supposed gap between signifier and signified, that has led to divergent critical interpretations. The primitivist symbol combines a concrete individual life-form with the totemic qualities of an archetype. It incarnates a complex meaning, which depends on it and cannot be extrapolated from it.

As a creative artist, Lawrence believed in the power and pervasiveness of symbols. Vierkandt's suggestive and descriptive types of representation (Boas 79) are fused in what Vivas calls the constitutive symbol, “a symbolic form by means of which the world is apprehended” (276). For Vivas, “there is an interanimation between [the constitutive symbol] and the thing or process it symbolizes, a kind of permeation so that for us the world is … grasped not only through the symbol but in the symbol also” (279). The first step in conveying the constitutive symbol is to saturate the reader with the aura of a living presence. A full response to symbolic language will then break down barriers between the phenomenal world, in which foxes can be shot or stallions castrated, and the noumenal world, in which they can become “a settled effect in [the] spirit.”

The ultimate effect of Lawrence's symbols is to revitalize the unconscious: in this sense they reconstitute a lost world in which inner and outer, visual and visionary, combine. But the symbolic charge remains within the object, that is, within a physical existence mediated by concrete language, and within a sensory/imaginative response that would be dissipated by abstraction. Constitutive symbols, as developed by Lawrence, draw on primitive animism and a kind of mystic participation. When such symbols are interpreted, there is always a surplus of affectivity that cannot be rationally encompassed, for they are ultimately “beyond elucidation” (Vivas 281) and appeal directly to the dynamic centers of the imagination.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Anthropology and British Modernism Session, MLA Annual Convention, New York, December 29, 1986.

2. Lévy-Bruhl, who posits a mystic participation between clan members and their totem, writes: “The prelogical mind does not objectify nature … It lives it rather, by feeling itself participate in it …” (Natives 129-30). Todorov (240-45) criticizes Lévy-Bruhl's concept, but this does not affect Lawrence's pantheistic cultivation of “a vivid relatedness … [with] the living universe” (Phoenix 27).

3. Tylor criticizes Frazer's “use of the self-contradictory term ‘individual totem’” (2: 235).

4. Here Fulmer follows Vickery, who states: “For Nellie [March], the fox, her totem, contains what Frazer calls the external soul, that projection of one's life drives into the objective world …” (82).

5. Jan Good, in a Freudian analysis, sees the fox as having “a dual symbolic function, representing a positive force (the masculine element in Henry) as well as a negative force (the masculine phallus within March's psyche which must be killed)” (220).

6. Vickery goes so far as to assert: “What is contingent and fortuitous in the realism of the narrative pattern becomes necessary and inevitable in terms of the totemic myth” (82).

7. Draper speaks of the fox's having a “mesmeric influence” and a “mana [that] is also transferable” (188).

8. For Vickery, the killing of the fox “reflects that part of the totemic myth in which the divine animal is solemnly sacrificed as part of an annual rite” (80-81). This interpretation, however, does not seem to fit the fictional context.

9. March's second dream has given rise to much commentary: see Greiff's essay and notes.

10. “Foreword to Women in Love,” Women in Love (485).

11. Lawrence's statement agrees with romantic theory, in which “the meaning of the allegory is finite, that of the symbol is infinite, inexhaustible; or again: meaning is completed, ended, and thus in a sense dead in allegory; it is active and living in the symbol” (Todorov 206).

12. The stallion “lift[s] his lovely naked head, like a bunch of flames … like the summit of a fountain” (St. Mawr 64). Cf. Shelley's Neoplatonic image of “the burning fountain” in “Adonais” and Lawrence's essay, “The Two Principles,” in which cosmic energies spring from a fusion of fire and water.

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Cavitch, David. D. H. Lawrence and the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Codrington, R. H. The Melanesians: Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore. 1891. New Haven: HRAF, 1957.

Cowan, James C. D. H. Lawrence's American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth. Cleveland, Ohio: Case Western Reserve University, 1970.

Draper, R. P. “The Defeat of Feminism: D. H. Lawrence's The Fox and ‘The Woman Who Rode Away.’” Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1966): 186-98.

Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Trans. Joseph Ward Swain. 1915. New York: Free, 1965.

Frazer, J. G. Totemism and Exogamy: A Treatise on Certain Early Forms of Superstition and Society. 4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1910.

Fulmer, O. Bryan. “The Significance of the Death of the Fox in D. H. Lawrence's The Fox.” Studies in Short Fiction 5 (1968): 275-82.

Good, Jan. “Toward a Resolution of Gender Identity Confusion: The Relationship of Henry and March in The Fox.” D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (1985-86): 217-27.

Goodheart, Eugene. The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Greiff, Louis K. “Bittersweet Dreaming in Lawrence's ‘The Fox’: A Freudian Perspective.” Studies in Short Fiction 20 (1983): 7-16.

Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961.

Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

———. “The Fox.” Four Short Novels. 1923. New York: Viking, 1965. 111-79.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: Volume II: June 1913-October 1916. Ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

———. “Pan in America.” Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. 1936. New York: Viking, 1968.

———. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking, 1970.

———. St. Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

———. Women in Love. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. 1955. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973.

Lerner, Laurence. The Truthtellers: Jane Austen, George Eliot, D. H. Lawrence. London: Chatto, 1967.

Levy, Michelle Frucht. “D. H. Lawrence and Dostoevsky: The Thirst for Risk and the Thirst for Life.” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1987): 281-88.

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. How Natives Think. 1926. Trans. Lilian A. Clare. New York: Arno, 1979.

Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and Lawrence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: Life into Art. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Theories of the Symbol. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom. 1871. 6th ed. 2 vols. London: Murray, 1920.

Vickery, John B. “Myth and Ritual in the Shorter Fiction of D. H. Lawrence.” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (1959): 65-82.

Vivas, Eliseo. D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1960.

Widmer, Kingsley. The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence's Shorter Fictions. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.

———. “Our Demonic Heritage: D. H. Lawrence.” A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959. 13-27.

Wilde, Alan. “The Illusion of St. Mawr: Technique and Vision in D. H. Lawrence's Novel.” PMLA 79 (1964): 164-70.

Wolkenfeld, Suzanne. “‘The Sleeping Beauty’ Retold: D. H. Lawrence's ‘The Fox.’” Studies in Short Fiction 14 (1977): 345-52.