SOURCE: Granofsky, Ronald. “Illness and Wellness in D. H. Lawrence's The Ladybird.” Orbis Litterarum 51, no. 2 (1996): 99-117.

[In the following essay, Granofsky asserts that the metaphor of illness and wellness and the focus on parent-child relationships in “The Ladybird” tend to overpower Lawrence's interest in the themes of dependency and power.]

“… a wound stimulates the recuperative powers.”

—Nietzsche, Preface to The Twilight of the Idols

D. H. Lawrence's Ladybird novellas, “The Fox,” “The Captain's Doll,” and “The Ladybird” (1923), form part of a well-documented effort by Lawrence to shift the focus of his fictional world from marriage to leadership, from love to power. In fact, one may construe a particular passage in “The Fox” as Lawrence's farewell to the world of the Brangwensaga, particularly its optimistic expression in The Rainbow. After a long meditation upon the subject of happiness from the perspective of a peculiarly Lawrentian narrative voice—in this instance part way between an omniscient narrator and the presumed thoughts of Nellie March—we are told that women's goal of happiness in life is like the elusive pot of gold at the foot of a rainbow: “But the end of the rainbow is a bottomless gulf down which you can fall forever without arriving …” (69).¹ There is near-universal agreement that Lawrence's departure from the concerns of the Brangwensaga coincides with a noticeable decline in the quality of his fiction, but whether the connection is causal or not remains a matter for debate. In my view, there is a causal link but one that is more complex than a simple shift in interest would suggest. Lawrence is not, as T. S. Eliot once suggested he was, “a writer who had to write often badly in order to write sometimes well” (viii). He is, rather, a writer who had occasionally to give way in his work to his own personal needs—to shed his sicknesses, in Lawrence's own memorable phrase—in order to achieve the depth of psychological realism he was after. The biographical layer in the fiction is often a great asset, but during the phase of his writing career that the Ladybird novellas represent, that is, the transition to the leadership works, and even more so in the leadership works themselves, the personal needs at times control the writing and throw it askew from Lawrence's own intended purpose.² In brief, what I believe happens with Lawrence's attempts to alter the direction of his fiction in the early 1920s is that, in his genuine if sometimes ugly efforts to redefine the hierarchical organization of English society in terms of vitalism and leadership, he succumbs to a digression into parent-child relations that is fatal to his own enterprise. In the three novellas as a group, one may observe a narrative strategy gone awry in such a way that makes both the focus and the relative failure of the leadership works more comprehensible than they have been.

In “The Fox” and “The Captain's Doll,” the digression into parent-child concerns is triggered when Lawrence uses associations with food in his vitalistic redefinition of class. A careful examination of the events of “The Fox” reveals the curious fact that most of the confrontation scenes occur during mealtime. When Henry Grenfel first announces to Banford that he and March are to marry, for instance, the communication causes Banford to “put down her knife, out of her thin, delicate fingers, as if she would never take it up to eat any more” and to turn aside from her plate, “as if the sight of the food on the table made her sick” (34). In general, Henry is far better able to deal with the crises that occur as a matter of course on a farm than are the two women who run it, not only because of his gender—something we might expect from the Lawrence of this period—but also because of his high ranking on the scale of Lawrentian vitality. Jill Banford's jeering remarks about his lower-class behaviour serve merely to underscore the story's point that while traditional class consciousness may determine who has the better manners at the tea table it cannot possibly determine who will survive and who will not, nor who is best suited to lead, who to follow. Wishing to use food as an element in a story of survival of the fittest in order to suggest that health (including sexual health) is possible only with the aid of male leadership, Lawrence cannot prevent the motif from sliding over into a pattern of pre-oedipal concerns that interferes with that very suggestion. The fact that Henry is so much younger than March serves Lawrence to drive home the point that mastery is not a matter of age (or social standing); it is a matter of vitality. Nevertheless, Henry goes to great lengths to invert the parent-child implications of his relationship with March. He sweeps aside March's objection that she is old enough to be his mother: “‘What is age? What is age to me? And what is age to you! Age is nothing’” (25). Even in his own mind, he must insist that “[h]e was older than she, really. He was master of her” (23).

In “The Captain's Doll,” we have an Alexander Hepburn who attempts to live up to his given name by vigorously climbing a Tyrolean glacier and otherwise displaying a physical presence that succeeds in charming the equally vital Hannele, who exhibits her own physical prowess in an erotic bathing scene. As in “The Fox,” pre-oedipal concerns emerge primarily if covertly through imagery of food and eating. In the Tyrolean mountain valley that is a central setting in the novella, food and eating metaphors are pervasive and yet almost unnoticeable given the sexual comedy Lawrence is enacting. In this upper valley full of raspberries, bilberries, black berries and cranberries, the water is an “insatiable” force that bites into the rock and otherwise resembles “a beast of prey” (129). Before the scene shifts to Austria and the Tyrolean Mountains, the eating/food associations have been primarily connected to Hepburn's wife, who enters the story as a customer anxious to purchase and to possess Hannele's Alexander doll. Informed that this little, elderly-seeming lady is her lover's wife, Hannele “looked up really astonished. She had thought it might be an acquaintance—perhaps his aunt—or even an elder sister.—“‘But she's years older than you,’ she added” (93). In fact, the difference in age between the Hepburns is slightly less than that between Henry and March in “The Fox.” In both stories, the woman is about ten years older than the man, but in “The Captain's Doll,” the motherly qualities are attached to the obstructing rather than to the desirable female, making it possible for Lawrence to purge those qualities from his story in a more emphatic fashion than was the case in “The Fox,” where Banford's death is only in part a symbolic act of matricide and where March continues at the end to resist Henry's leadership. Mrs Hepburn dies in a very convenient fall out of her hotel-room window, leaving her husband financially independent. Nevertheless, the male protagonist will never feel safe from the maternal bond that is potential in any heterosexual relationship he engages in until he somehow proves his priority. Hepburn's climb of the glacier definitively spells defeat for the forces of the “devouring mother,” since the glacier, with its “great tongue,” its “great fangs and slashes of ice” that bite “into the flesh of the earth” (132 & 133), is the ultimate symbol in “The Captain's Doll” of the threat of being eaten, of being reincorporated into the maternal womb of one's origin.³

Since Lawrence's relationship with his own mother was so intense, biographical comparisons are inevitable and in their place. Although Rosemary Reeves Davies has argued that “[t]here is very little evidence that Lawrence in infancy and early childhood enjoyed a warm relationship with his mother” (224), there can hardly be a doubt that he felt a lifelong dependency upon his mother and other maternal figures which he fought against bitterly. The role of Lawrence's sometimes severe illnesses in such a relationship was crucial, for they both increased his dependence upon his mother and exaggerated the effort required to gain a measure of independence from her. A juxtaposition of the familiar letters to Ernest Collings and Edward Garnett, respectively, in which Lawrence expresses, on the one hand, the realization that he can do nothing without a woman at the back of him and his candid admission, on the other hand, that he had a horrendous time “weaning” himself from his mother when he was twenty-two years old (Letters 1: 503 & 527) tends to support Judith Ruderman's contention that the pre-oedipal relationship is “more important to an understanding of [Lawrence's] works than the heterosexual, genital love relationship for which they are commonly known” (11). Ruderman argues persuasively that Lawrence's “ambivalence toward the ‘devouring mother’ was the prime motivating factor behind the works of his leadership period” (174). In my opinion, Ruderman's perspective is most useful insofar as it sheds light on the tangled and obscure origins of Lawrence's grudge against women as it manifests itself in his fiction, particularly in the leadership fiction and the works of the early twenties transitional to the leadership works. It is Lawrence's reluctance to come to terms with his own compulsion for control in male-female relations that throws a spanner into the works of his attempts in the three novellas (but particularly in “The Ladybird”) to link the unnatural life of a woman in need of sexual liberation to the collective need in society for male leadership.

The oddly indecisive endings of “The Fox” and “The Captain's Doll,” their countenancing of a ruthless elimination of inconvenient women, are marks not only of Lawrence's changing sexual ideology but also and less noticeably of a doomed narrative strategy that is meant to connect the new version with the older view of life. The cracks of an incomplete integration remain visible in all three companion stories if one knows where to look. In the following analysis, I intend to show where the cracks are in “The Ladybird,” the novella of the three that is the least successful on its own terms and that is closest to the leadership works both in theme and style.⁴ “The Ladybird” had, for Lawrence, “more the quick of a new thing,” as he wrote in May 1923 to John Middleton Murry (Letters 4:447) precisely because it anticipated the direction he had embarked upon in writing Kangaroo a few months earlier.

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Metaphors of illness and curing came readily to the pen of D. H. Lawrence. In a letter dated 3 August 1915 to Lady Cynthia Asquith, the model for “The Ladybird”'s Lady Daphne, Lawrence speaks of English society as “an active disease, fighting out the health,” but he takes solace in the belief that “it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away” (Letters 2: 375 & 376). In Fantasia of the Unconscious, where Lawrence, more extensively than anywhere else, develops his theory of illness (Jones 9 et passim), Lawrence argues in his Nietzschean vein that “love and benevolence” are the wrong medicine for what ails the modern world, for they “are our poison, poison to the giver, and still more poison to the receiver” (80). In a missive to S.S. Koteliansky written at the time of the composition of the three novellas, he speaks of his own “winter influenza” and suggests that Europe is “a dead dog that died of a love disease like syphilis” (Letters 4: 114). In “The Ladybird,” Lawrence not only portrays a sick society in need of healing but also and more subtly suggests the means by which the individual and the culture might survive. Nothing could reinforce Lawrence's notion of a natural aristocracy more than the dramatization in a character like Count Dionys Psanek of a charismatic strength that lends power and vitality even to a man very seriously wounded in combat and confined as a prisoner of war. However, in the metaphor of illness and wellness we also witness a self-subversion unintentionally encoded by the author, as his deep anxieties regarding the “devouring mother” tend to displace the exploration of social hierarchy with a concern about male dependency on woman through the very imagery meant to promote a redefinition of the former. In short, the social gives way through the subversive workings of metaphor to the domestic, the adult to the infantile, and the sexual to the nurturing and traditionally female acts of feeding or tending the ill.

Lawrence uses Count Dionys to denounce the English class system and to argue that there must be a new hierarchy of vitalism to take its place for the sake of the very survival of Western culture. Certainly Lawrence abhors the English class system, which he was able to persuade himself was largely responsible for his parents' bitter quarrels. In another August 1915 letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, Lawrence writes: “‘… there are aristocrats and plebeians born, not made. Some amongst us are born fit to govern, and some are born only fit to be governed. …’ But it is not a question of tradition or heritage. It is a question of the incontrovertible soul” (Letters 2: 379).⁵ However, as it turns out, the real issue is certainly not in “The Ladybird,” social hierarchy at all; it is vitality and the familial hierarchy of parent and child. A sickly and frail Lawrence wants to deny, in effect, that physical wellness is a necessary mark of vitality. In an odd reversal which, I believe, we can best understand in light of Lawrence's childhood experiences of illness and maternal tending, the severely wounded male protagonist in the novella heals himself even while ministering to a woman who is sickly but certainly in no way dangerously ill. In this way, Lawrence is able to assure himself that the care he received when ill as a boy at the hands of his mother and continued to receive in periods of sickness as an adult at the hands of his wife in no way diminished him as a man. The alternative strategy of one man tending another is tried out, of course, in Aaron's Rod.

At the opening of “The Ladybird,” we meet three characters who are, in one way or another, damaged in the chest at a time in history that, in Lady Beveridge's words, “is like a great sickness - like a terrible pneumonia tearing the breast of the world” (163). The war is very real, the “beast of prey” equivalent of the fox and glacier in the companion novellas, yet a clearer example of an author magnifying through metaphor a personal ailment into a universal condition is hard to imagine. Nevertheless, the types of chest problems that afflict the three characters are significantly diverse. The “pierced heart” of the martyr-like Lady Beveridge has suffered the pain of countless swords, but there always seems room for another, and she, like the true Christian she is, will continue to love her enemies (157). Her wounds suggest the chest as a metaphorical site of injury, while her daughter is threatened with consumption and Dionys has taken a bullet through his upper body. Illness, like food, can represent both the struggle for survival and a dependency in the parent-child relationship. Certainly, in Lawrence's own case, his youthful illnesses became defining moments in his relationship with his mother even as his devoted care for her in her final sickness in some way represented an inversion in that dependency that finally helped to liberate him as far as he was ever liberated. Similarly, Lawrence's male protagonists in this transitional period of writing, once they fall into the inevitable preoedipal pattern of dependence, must liberate themselves through some kind of inversion of primacy if only on a symbolic level. Examples include Alexander Hepburn's climb of the glacier in “The Captain's Doll” and the foreigner Ciccio in The Lost Girl taking Alvina Houghton with him back to his native Italy, where she becomes the foreigner.

The treatment that Lawrence accords Lady Beveridge in “The Ladybird” is interestingly ambiguous. From one point of view, she is meant to represent a passé and ultimately destructive ideal of Christian love and charity (much like Mr Crich in Women in Love). She, rather than Basil, is Dionys's “true antitype,” guilty of “Nietzschean crimes” (Scott 165). Yet she is also the recipient of a measure of the narrator's sympathy when he associates her with a doomed social system and, through the Virgin Mary imagery, with the Mary beetle that ironically comes to symbolize the power of the “natural” aristocracy: “But during the last years of the war power slipped out of the hands of her and her sort … Then it seemed as if the many swords had gone home into the heart of this little, unyielding Mater Dolorosa. The new generation jeered at her” (157). Although Lawrence patently wishes to contrast Lady Beveridge's Christian caritas with the Count's doctrine of power, his chest wound obviously links him with the English aristocrat and her pierced heart. The difference is that although they are both European aristocrats, only the Count is supposedly aristocratic in the double sense, according to his birth and his vitality. Lawrence muddies the waters somewhat by making him a count rather than, say, a farmer like Henry Grenfel; however, it is clearly his vitalism that is to “cure” Daphne and point the way to a regenerated Europe and not his aristocratic title, which he now values at nought.

It is, indeed, the younger woman, Lady Beveridge's daughter, Daphne, in whom Lawrence—and Dionys—are really interested. She and the Count engage in what amounts to a mutual curing of illness. She visits the recovering prisoner, whom she initially tries to forget “as one tries to forget incurable things” (167), and does little services for him as he convalesces. Dionys's effect on Daphne initially is very similar to the significance the fox has for March at the beginning of “The Fox,” when the thought of the animal persistently “came over her like a spell” (12). Daphne would like to forget the disturbing presence of Dionys, but “[s]he never forgot him for long. He seemed to come into her mind suddenly, as if by sorcery” (169). The Count, almost from the first solicitous of Daphne's health despite his own discomfort, “cures” her in Lawrentian fashion before he leaves for Austria after the Armistice. As James C. Cowan suggests, it is evident “[t]hat [Daphne's] sickness is intended to be generalized as that of the modern world …” (35). However, the pre-oedipal associations that illness held for Lawrence because of his sickly childhood get in the way of his attempts to revise the traditional hierachies of his society through the symbolic implications of the Count's ministrations.⁶ He fails in his determined effort to use the concept of health as part of a displacement of the determinant of hierarchy from class to vitality in what he intends as a serious solution to Europe's post-war malaise.

The first indication we have of a pre-oedipal concern interfering with an effort to redefine hierarchy involves the presentation of Dionys as a dependent child. In Lady Daphne's initial visit to him, he is described as “small as a boy” (159), and Lady Beveridge later characterizes him as having “[s]omething of the terrible far-awayness of a child that is very ill and can't tell you what hurts it” (163). It troubles the Count that, as he says to his benefactress, “I complain like a child, and ask for things. I feel I have lost my manhood for the time being” (171). He has told Daphne that his hands hurt and has asked her rather indelicately if he may use her hair as a bandage. In this way, the illness metaphor running through the novella becomes firmly connected to the question of sexuality. But illness, like food, carries inevitable overtones for Lawrence of a relationship in which sexuality is inappropriate. Ruderman has argued that Lady Daphne, by continually emphasizing Dionys's small nature, employs “the trick of the ‘devouring mother,’ who thwarts her child's attempts at independence” (80). But Dionys's severe wounding, like Daphne's illness, is meant to symbolize the moribund state of Europe. Given Lawrence's identification of his own disease with the state of his culture—the emotional basis of the story—the undermining of the political agenda of the novella by the complicated associations related to illness in Lawrence's life is inevitable. The sexual competition we eventually see between Dionys and Daphne's husband, Basil, two wounded men in need of healing, in a sense comes down to a question of which one of them can reverse the mother-child dependency on Daphne first or most effectively. Basil, in the end, simply capitulates and is satisfied to occupy a regressive state of pre-pubertal love vis-à-vis Daphne.

“The Ladybird” is replete with literal or metaphoric mother and child figures, although no children actually appear. Dionys has left a wife and children behind in his homeland, Daphne has given birth to a stillborn child, and Lady Beveridge has lost two sons. For that reason, she is called a “Mater Dolorosa” on the very first page, an allusion which temporarily helps to get Lawrence from his compulsion to his intended critique of Christianity and the traditional aristocracy. The ladybird itself is a “Marienkäfer,” “[t]he beetle of Our Lady,” Dionys explains (209).⁷ Dionys asks Daphne to replace his mother in the business of the shirts. It irks this Bohemian aristocrat that he is reduced to wearing hospital-issue clothing. At home, his mother had always sewn for him, “[a]nd after her, my mother's sister who was the head of my house.” It was never his wife (174). And now Dionys wishes Daphne to sew shirts for him. Even though the two eventually become lovers, then, Dionys puts Daphne here in the place of his mother, not that of his wife.

It is significant for the mother-child paradigm in the story that the singing which brings Daphne to Dionys's bedroom—a “thin thread” (213) that, as Sandra Gilbert points out, relates to the sewing motif in the story and places Dionys curiously in the position of Ariadne in the mythological intertext of the tale (150)—seems something of a reversion to childhood for the Count, who is about to be sent back to his home country. It is a “crooning to himself the old songs of his childhood … in a small, high-pitched, squeezed voice …” (212). Like the cooings of an infant, the words are incomprehensible to Daphne, but she finds them soothing. In effect, the Count's imaginary regression to childhood has brought the childless Lady Daphne to him. Such a threatened maternal primacy must be combatted, however, and, in a far too obvious and crude reversal of Basil's worship of Daphne, Lawrence has Daphne kneel at Dionys's feet in worship. He now feels that he will be master of the life to come. “Father of the soul that would come after” (216), certainly not a child. The inversion is but a culmination of what Lawrence has been carefully developing throughout the novella. Carefully, but not carefully enough.

It turns out that Dionys is singing a song of his country about a swan who became a woman because she wished to marry a human hunter: “Then in the night one night the king of the swans called to her to come back, or else he would die. So slowly she turned into a swan again, and slowly she opened her wide, wide wings, and left her husband and her children” (215). It seems rather odd for Lawrence to insert at this point in his story the tale of a female who must reverse a happy transformation she has undergone. For he is about to suggest that Daphne is going to be changed by Dionys's love forever in a positive way. Furthermore, on the purely realistic level of the story, it is Dionys who is about to return to his home country, not Daphne to hers. In vitalistic terms, he is the king, not her husband, Basil. Lawrence's writing is confused at this point. However, the key to the passage, I believe, is the information that the swan king will die without the ministrations of his female.

Gilbert views “The Ladybird” as a good example of Lawrence's ambivalence toward female power. She has argued that we see in Lawrence, as in other male artists of his time, “a defensive movement toward devaluation of the female” along with “an acknowledgment of the male subject's dependence on female, and specifically maternal, power” (139). The swan story in Dionys's seductive song leads Gilbert to suggest that, in addition to the Greek myths upon which Lawrence was obviously drawing in his novella, he may also have had in mind a Grimm fairy tale by the name of The Six Swans, for Gilbert, “a story about female power” (148). There are, indeed, a number of parallels between “The Ladybird” and The Six Swans, particularly the motif of sewing shirts to bring about a cure.

In the Grimm story, a witch leads a disoriented king out of a forest in return for his taking her daughter as his queen. The king has six sons and a daughter from a previous marriage, and (justifiably) not trusting his new wife, he hides them in a forest abode to which he can find his way only with the help of a magic ball of yarn given to him by a wise woman. The wicked queen discovers the children, of course, and turns all of the boys into swans by sewing magical shirts that she throws over them. The daughter escapes, however, and learns that she may restore her brothers by sewing six shirts of asters over six years, during which time she must not utter a word. A second king discovers her in the forest at her task, and, because of her great beauty, he marries her. The central test in the tale involves the silence the queen must maintain when, at each successive birth of a son, the king's own evil mother abducts the child and accuses her of cannibalism. The obligatory six years expire on the day the heroine is to be executed for infanticide. Her brothers come flying to her as swans, she restores them with the shirts she has sewn, and she denounces her wicked mother-in-law (Grimm 182-85).

It is evident, I think, that Gilbert underplays the negative associations connected to female, especially mother, figures in the Grimm tale. The story ends with the king ordering the gruesome execution of his own mother, who “was tied to the stake and burned to ashes” (Grimm 185). Certainly, as Gilbert says, Lawrence was “[h]aunted by female primacy” (150), but she gives him more credit, I feel, than he deserves for finding a resolution that involves an ultimate acquiescence in the power of the mother (Gilbert 161). The fictional project of the Ladybird novellas and related writing, Lawrence's almost desperate construction of a theory of vitality completely removed from generation, argues against a positive resolution. In “The Ladybird” specifically, Dionys's singing the song of the swan king suggests both Lawrence's confusion of purpose and his readiness, as in the two companion novellas, to envision the destruction of “blocking” mother/wife figures. Dionys's “illness” allows the sickly Lawrence to identify with the otherwise vital Bohemian aristocrat and to argue that strength is spiritual; his literal and metaphorical swan song before he leaves England obliquely suggests the resentment towards the childlike dependency that such illness willy nilly calls to mind through associations with evil mother figures and their demise. Lawrence's oedipal paradigm has become more complex since Sons and Lovers. Daphne must play the part of Dionys's mother by sewing shirts for him precisely in order that she may be defeated as a powerful mother figure, a prerequisite to Dionys's acceptance of her as a lover. Her kneeling at his feet after the swan song, then, ridiculous as it may be as a piece of social realism, indicates the compulsions driving the story.

Illness and its cure in “The Ladybird” are the self-subverting elements in a much broader development of power inversions as Lawrence becomes involved in a genuine attempt to envision a way out of the cul-de-sac he believes European civilization has entered. Beyond the obvious emotional compensation involved in a denial of apparent weakness, the endorsement of various forms of inversion becomes the scaffolding for Dionys's building up of an argument for a social inversion, even revolution as part of an entire cultural reform involving but not confined to political power. Lawrence envisions such a reform in part through a Nietzschean advocacy of paganism over Christianity.

Lawrence's critique of Christian culture in “The Ladybird” takes the form of belittling Lady Beveridge's traditional virtues, hope, faith, and charity (e.g. “‘Then we can hope, dear’” [161]), but is more extensively developed through pagan imagery, as the name “Dionys” suggests. At one point, Dionys invokes a hammer of destruction that (along with the setting at Thoresway) suggests Thor's hammer in Nordic mythology.⁸ Generally, Dionys's pagan God of destruction is the principle opposed to Lady Beveridge's Christian God of kindness.⁹ Sometimes, though, the associations surrounding Dionys are ambiguous enough to be taken as either Christian or pagan, as in his temptation toward the end of the story to “take the soul” Daphne offers him into an underworld that is called both Hades and hell (216). But from the Christian perspective, the gift of the thimble with its apple-green stone and its snake suggests the temptation of Eve, which, in Lawrence's Blakean inversion of Christian values, is viewed positively. In Lawrence's version of the Genesis story of the Fall, the Satanic figure offers a salvation rather than damnation. Dionys, who claims at one point that “‘I have a devil in my body, that will not die’” (169), offers Daphne the secret knowledge of his society, and his presence certainly ends Basil's “heaven on earth” (183). Dionys's armorial ladybird leads at one point in the narrative to a discussion of the Egyptian scarab (from which Dionys claims it descends) and thus to Fabre's idea that “‘the beetle rolling a little ball of dung before him, in a dry old field, must have suggested to the Egyptians the First Principle that set the globe rolling. And so the scarab became the symbol of the creative principle …’” (209). As H. M. Daleski points out, the juxtaposition of snake and ladybird on Daphne's thimble prefigures the union of serpent and bird in the Quetzalcoatl of The Plumed Serpent (146), the most developed if disturbing of Lawrence's utopias. Lawrence, in short, rejects Christian salvation for his society and offers in its place both a Blakean view of positive damnation within the Christian framework and, outside that framework altogether, a pagan principle in which creation incorporates its opposite, the concept of corruption and decay (the dung rolled by the beetle).

Dionys's attack on European civilization goes beyond religion, of course. He indicates even at an early stage in his recovery a desire for a social revolution by suggesting that “‘We should all have new names now. I thought of a name for myself, but I have forgotten it. No longer Johann Dionys. That is shot away’” (166). The narrator has already informed us that Daphne is really “Artemis or Atalanta rather than Daphne” (161). Once again, however, pre-oedipal obsessions get in the way of a social critique. Indeed, Davies cites Erich Fromm in suggesting that the snake and other dangerous animals can be symbols of the mother in dreams of people “who have failed to achieve a warm relationship with their mothers” (222).

In viewing the way in which the argument for “the aristocratic principle” is set forth in some of Lawrence's writings but most specifically in “The Ladybird,” Kingsley Widmer pinpoints what he considers to be “a serious contradiction in Lawrence's thought and a fundamental incoherence in his art. The dark hero is emphatically ‘the outsider.’ From where, then, his sense of power and authority? It comes … most importantly from the ‘Kingdom of Death,’ for he is ‘King of Hades.’” Widmer goes on to ask a very good question: “Can the demonic outsider be a figure of social authority? Not, surely, if he is to remain the outsider, the rebel, the force of seduction and flame …” (49, 50).

While I agree that there is both contradiction and incoherence in the thought promulgated in “The Ladybird,” I believe that Widmer has erred in taking Dionys's notion of class, “the aristocratic principle,” in the traditional sense. If the evidence of this volume of novellas is to be taken into account as I suggest it must, Lawrence, at this stage in his career, wants to transcend conventional notions of class and to define merit on biological and spiritual superiority. This attempt may or may not be any more palatable than supporting an elite landed aristocracy, but the two are clearly not identical. That Lawrence in “The Ladybird” chooses as his main characters figures from the traditional ruling class (Lord and Lady Beveridge, Lady Daphne, Count Dionys) or from the political (if relatively impoverished) political establishment (Basil Apsley)¹⁰ makes Widmer's reading understandable. But from the two companion novellas one gets the strong impression that traditional notions of class are a false basis for the new Lawrentian hierarchy. Indeed, even in “The Ladybird” we clearly see the deleterious effects of class consciousness, most particularly in Daphne's fascination with the dependents at Thoresway and her inability to breach the chasm of class between herself and them (211).

Where I would place the contradiction is in Dionys's argument that he and people like him should wield power “‘[n]ot as a hereditary aristocrat, but as a man who is by nature an aristocrat … [I]t is my sacred duty to hold the destiny of other men in my hands, and to shape the issue’” (202). Elsewhere, in the essay “Aristocracy,” for example, Lawrence argues that the natural aristocrat is the one with more vitality than others: “One man is, in himself, more, more alive, more of a man, than another.” Hereditary aristocracry is “bunk” and must give way to the biologically-sanctioned natural aristocracy: “the whole of life is established on a natural aristocracy,” which also resides in those people who are able to provide “life,” “release in us the fountains of our vitality” (475, 477).¹¹ This accords with one of Lawrence's definitions of power in “Blessed Are the Powerful,” where he writes that “power is the setting of life in motion” (438). Dionys insists, however, that he cannot fulfil his duty as a natural aristocrat “‘till men willingly put their lives in my hands’” and that will only occur when “‘men who are really living … come beseeching to put their lives into the hands of the greater men among them’” (202), an idea Lawrence himself states clearly in a 1918 letter to Cecil Gray (Letters 3: 262). So, according to the “logic” of the argument in “The Ladybird,” those choosing the leader will be high on the scale of vitality to begin with, the “really living.” Their criterion for the leader is someone who can create vitality. But since they cannot choose him (or her?) unless they themselves are vital to begin with, why do they need such a leader, and where does this leave the non-vital people? There is, of course, a subtext here directed toward Daphne. On the interpersonal level, Dionys is suggesting that at a certain point Daphne will put her life in his hands and that it will be because of the vitality within her, and she does. And when she does, as we have seen, it is a culmination in a subversive subtextual effort to invert the dependency of child upon mother, the pre-oedipal bond.

In the end, the journey toward leadership as the means by which to ensure a transformation of society founders upon the shoals of a compensatory individual transformation. Dionys feels that things are happening in his own soul (199); Daphne becomes “different” after Dionys's love. The ending rings false perhaps because we sense that even in personal and interpersonal terms things have advanced only from the pre-oedipal concerns of dependency to an oedipal triangle that is but a poor retelling of the Pluto-Persephone myth.

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For a man with health as delicate as D. H. Lawrence's was throughout his short life, the temptation to seek compensation through identification with robust fictional protagonists is obvious and understandable. Though there are “weakling” characters in his fiction, many of his protagonists are normally healthy, and some are able to exert themselves physically to an unusual degree. One almost gets the feeling that Lawrence is anxiously gloating in a scene like the one in Kangaroo where Richard Lovat Somers stands over the massive frame of the wounded and dying Kangaroo as if the proto-fascist exponent of love, though apparently modelled on a man Lawrence met in Australia (Darroch 61), were Frieda in drag.¹²

When one turns to the novellas of The Ladybird volume, one finds a remarkable thing in terms of Lawrence's portrayal of robust protagonists. There seems in all three to be a displacement of the key issue of survival onto a totemic object that in some ways stands in for the male protagonist. Through this method and other means, Lawrence can test the survivability (and thus the vitalism) of the protagonist through a proxy and avoid putting him at risk. That survival is what is at stake is indicated, among other things, by the motif of extinction in all three novellas. As Ruderman has noted, by 1921, the year the three novellas were written, animals had become “the controlling principle” in Lawrence's fiction (184). Lawrence portrays the animals in these stories as being at risk of extinction (the fox), or under threat by modern technology (the mare and her foal swerving from the advance of the motor car in “The Captain's Doll” [127-28]), or associated with an extinct civilization (the ancient Egyptian scarab beetle of “The Ladybird”). The device of the totemic animal is not enough, however, to create a sense of security and independence in the male protagonists of these tales.

What the motif of illness and wellness in “The Ladybird” has in common with the motif of food in its two companion novellas is the narrative suppression of an intolerable feeling of dependency on the part of a male at a time of vulnerability (hunger, poverty, illness), a feeling that would inevitably recall the powerless childhood dependence on the mother. The Ladybird novellas are clearly a crucial ideological stepping stone to the sexual politics of The Plumed Serpent. By examining closely the failed narrative strategy involved in their production we can better see just what went wrong when the Lawrence of The Rainbow and Women in Love turned his attention away from marriage and toward leadership and male ascendancy. Leo Gurko's characterization of the three works as “the supreme staging ground for Lawrence's ideas at a turning point in his life” (182) may be a trifle exaggerated, but certainly these novellas are crucial to any understanding of Lawrence's “turn” from marriage to leadership.

Notes

1. I have made this point more extensively in an article entitled “A Second Caveat: D. H. Lawrence's The Fox,” on page 61.

2. By “transitional works” I mean, apart from the three novellas in the Ladybird volume that were written in late 1921 and published in 1923, The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod (1922), various short stories, poems, and non-fictional work such as Movements in European History (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). The leadership period proper begins, in my view, with Kangaroo (1923) and includes, of course, such works as “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925) and The Plumed Serpent (1926). A salient feature of the transition is Lawrence's exploratory attempt to adapt his older vision to his new inspiration. In the leadership works themselves, there is a palpable commitment to the leadership ideal and a writing that is more partisan and less exploratory.

3. For a full discussion of the role of food and survivability in The Captain's Doll see my article “Survival of the Fittest in Lawrence's The Captain's Doll,” forthcoming in The D. H. Lawrence Review.

4. Over the years, most commentators on the story have agreed that it is not as successful as The Fox or The Captain's Doll, although the reasons put forward for the judgment differ considerably. Julian Moynahan, for example, considers it an ambitious failure and stylistically ugly (178). Colin Clarke suggests that it is one work among several in which Lawrence denies his own most genuine perceptions (111). R. E. Pritchard dismisses it as “not worth serious or extensive discussion” (143). More recently, Laurence Steven has compared The Ladybird to the short story it developed from, The Thimble, and found the former wanting in that it abandons the successful realistic depiction of post-war England of the latter when it introduces into the story the figure of Count Dionys (248). There have been a few dissenting voices, however, including, as one might expect, F. R. Leavis, who devoted over ten pages largely to the defence of the novella in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (64-75). Joost Daalder argues that Lawrence was not trying to describe English society in naturalistic terms in The Ladybird; he was attempting to depict and was largely successful in creating a “symbolic, mythical world” in order to come to terms with death and with his separation from Frieda (107, 124-25). The Lawrence of Daalder's article, however, comes across as something of an esoteric crackpot. John B. Humma, both in his initial article and in his later book, argues that The Ladybird is, to quote the article, “almost entirely successful on its own terms” (219), primarily because of its “extensive organization of metaphorical undermeaning” (220) that Humma calls “the enabling image.” My own view is that The Ladybird is successful if success means anticipating Lawrence's next major phase of writing. But since that phase itself is largely a failure, the “success” of the novella is a very relative one indeed.

5. In The Captain's Doll, the narrator exclaims at one point, “Deep, deep is classhatred, and it begins to swallow all human feeling in its abyss” (128). We may compare the following statements on class: first, from “Autobiographical Sketch”: “Class makes a gulf, across which all the best human flow is lost” (595); second, from Lawrence's review of Trigant Burrow's The Social Basis of Consciousness: “And the last great insanity of all, which is going to tear our civilization to pieces, the insanity of class hatred, is almost entirely a ‘normal’ thing, and a ‘social’ thing” (381). The internal quotation marks in the letter to Cynthia Asquith mark where Lawrence is imagining what he would like Bertrand Russell or Murry to say - things he clearly believes in himself.

6. Lawrence Jones has written of Lady Daphne's illness: “The malaise, an over-development of the spiritual self at the expense of the sensual self, is, as so often in Lawrence, a result of maternal training.” Jones goes on to expound Lawrence's theory of illness as expressed in various essays, including Fantasia and the 1923 essay on Edgar Allan Poe, where an overbalance of sympathy or love in an individual is seen as damaging to the chest (9).

7. Although the Egypt theme is important in The Ladybird, Daalder's claim that Our Lady here refers not to the Christian Mary but to the pagan Isis is untenable (121).

8. Perhaps Lawrence was thinking here of Madame Blavatsky's description in The Secret Doctrine of Thor's hammer as “the magic weapon forged by the dwarfs against the Giants” (2: 99), thus suggesting a David-and-Goliath-like inversion in the prevailing power structure. In the contemporaneous Movements in European History, Lawrence uses the image of the hammer to describe the force that destroyed the Roman order: “… the Hunnish force was only the black hammer which smashed up the already broken Roman world, it did nothing towards building up a new world” (64). It should be noted that this was in the year 375, a few scant decades after the adoption of Christianity by Emperor Constantine.

9. The Christian-pagan opposition I am suggesting in no way, of course, undermines the notion put forward by Kingsley Widmer and James C. Cowan, among others, that Lawrence is opposing a Nietzschean Dionysian principle to an Apollonian one in the person of Basil. The two oppositions are developed simultaneously, but only the Christian-pagan one is useful to my argument regarding hierarchical inversions. On the less mythical plane of representation, the conflict in philosophy and in Daphne's person is between the creeds of Lady Beveridge and Count Dionys. The hammer may have Nietzschean overtones as well, since the alternate title to The Twilight of the Idols is “How to Philosophise with the Hammer.”

10. Basil's character is based loosely upon the son of Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister during the early part of the war (Moore 200). Asquith was made first Earl of Oxford and Asquith, but can hardly be said to belong to the hereditary aristocracy.

11. In a well-known letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan dated 10 April 1922, Lawrence writes “I believe in the divine right of natural aristocracy …” (Letters 4: 226). In “Aristocracy” there is a passage that may serve as a gloss on the extreme reaction of Dionys to being put in the sun by Daphne. For the greatest aristocrat, “the aristocrat of aristocrats,” according to that essay, is closest to the sun (483).

12. The man was Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal. Davies also notes the feminine qualities of Kangaroo when Somers imagines himself “nestling” on Ben Cooley's “ample, beautiful ‘tummy,” in the words of the novel (Davies 229).

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