SOURCE: Kearney, Martin F. “Spirit, Place and Psyche: Integration in D. H. Lawrence's ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.” English Studies 69, no. 2 (1988): 158-62.

D. H. Lawrence's ‘savage pilgrimage’ took him from England to Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia and North America. Each location's spirits of place were experienced first hand, duly recorded, and appear in the author's works as real presences that greatly influence his characters. In ‘Spirit of Place’, written sometime between August 1917 and June 1918 and later revised for Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Lawrence states that ‘every great locality has its own pure daimon’ (TSM 20). He continues, ‘There is, no doubt, some peculiar potentiality attaching to every distinct region of the earth's surface over and above the indisputable facts of climate and geological condition. There is some subtle magnetic or vital influence inherent in every specific locality’ (20). Lawrence later embellished this idea in his work on American fiction:

Every continent has its own great spirit of place … Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars. Call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality.

(SCAL 12)

Another major reality for Lawrence was the existence of a subtle interchange between the vital effluence of spirit of place and man. To illustrate how place conveys this vital effluence to man, Lawrence compares it with the telegraph.

If we can understand the sending of wireless messages from continent to continent, can we not much more readily understand that the unthinkably sensitive substance of the human intelligence could receive the fine waves of vital effluence transmitted across the intervening space, could receive, and, as in a dream, plainly comprehend?

(TSM 23)

This idea led to further exploration of spirit of place and its effect upon man's psyche, which resulted in Lawrence's philosophical-psychological treatises what he facetiously terms his ‘pollyanalytics’—Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious (1920) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921).

Fantasia, by far the more important of the two studies, contains Lawrence's ‘metaphysic’, upon which much of his art is dependent. This pollyanalytic handbook is, in fact, the result of Lawrence's attempt to determine his philosophy as it is expressed in his fiction and poetry.

A major premise of Lawrence's pollyanalytic is that of man's fourfold psyche. In Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious Lawrence states that ‘the diaphragm really divides the human body, psychically as well as organically’ and that there are ‘two planes of primary consciousness—the lower, subjective plane and the upper, objective plane’ (228). The lower plane is divided into two halves and corresponds to darkness, subjectivity and the sensual aspects of man's being and consciousness. Likewise, the upper plane is twofold, but it corresponds to light, objectivity and spirituality. These two levels of the psyche form a North-South polarity—and Arctic-Tropic dichothomy—and therein lies the focus of this examination: to illustrate how Lawrence employs spirit of place as a correlative of these horizontal planes and, subsequently, as a vehicle for character development and thematic expression.

Lawrence's apprehension of this North-South geographical-psychical dichotomy is essential in the context of this examination. Harry T. Moore notes:

He [Lawrence] had always appreciated the landscapes of the north: The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers are full of them, presented as the writers of the Romantic movement saw them, vibrant and living and always affecting the human beings in the midst of them. But his experience with southern settings brought about a change in Lawrence, and he gradually became angered over what had been done to the landscapes of industrial regions.

(160)

These ‘southern settings’ refer to Lawrence's early visits to Italy, which impressed him immensely. The beautiful scenery, unscarred by the industrialism so evident in England, and the warm climate were more than merely agreeable to Lawrence; they became all but indispensable. As early as 1912, Lawrence wrote a friend:

I can't bear to be in England when I am in Italy. It makes me feel so soiled … No, I don't believe England need be so grubby. What does it matter if one is poor, and risks one's livelihood, and reputation? One can have the necessary things, life, and love, and clean warmth. Why is England so shabby?

(Letters [The Letters of D. H. Lawrence] 67)

This negative attitude toward England's materialism, rigid class structure, hypocritical moral code and industrialization only grew more intense with time.

Lawrence came to see England's industrialism as a dehumanizing force that reduced the spirit of man and the land. Six months before his death in 1930, he wrote, ‘I dread and hate the north, it is full of death and the most grisly disappointment’ (CL [The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence] 1200). In England, both mankind and countryside Lawrence found obscene, for he revered life. That is another reason why he liked the southern regions of Italy: the people seemed alive. The modern world had not yet made inroads to all parts of Italy, so many of the people were unself-conscious and spontaneous in their actions. In fact, he viewed Italy as ‘one of the few places in the world where spontaneity had not been completely destroyed’ (Michaels-Tonks 23). As for the modern world's effect on the northern regions of Europe, in particular England and Germany, Lawrence wrote, ‘The North has all gone evil—I can't help feeling it morally or ethically. I mean anti-life’ (CL 1141).

Living in Gargnano, Italy, from September 1912 to May 1913, Lawrence began to synthesize his ideas about man's consciousness. He felt strongly about ‘blood-knowledge’ and believed that it played a large role in man's psychic being—even though it is opposite to man's intellect. In the famous letter of January 17, 1913, to Ernest Collings, he notes that the power of the blood is in essence his religion (95). His idea about the blood would become in time an essential part of his philosophy wherein he balances blood-knowledge and ‘mind’-knowledge. For Lawrence the blood-knowledge stems from man's lower plane of primary consciousness and corresponds geographically to Southern regions such as Italy, which are warm and exude a life-force. In opposition to this Southern pole of consciousness is the upper or Northern plane, which equates geographically to Northern regions like England and Germany that, in Lawrence's view, are cold and anti-life. Whereas the Italians seem a warm, living people fully in touch with their sensual unconscious natures that stem from their lower plane, Lawrence perceives the northern people as mental, mechanical units that run purely from the will of their upper plane. In short, Lawrence sees northern folk as divorced from their lower plane, wherein lie their vital centers of the senses and the emotions—centers that keep man in touch with his blood and body.

In a further parallel of intellect with the geographic North and blood-knowledge with the geographic South, Lawrence writes:

The sun is anti-thought. Thought is made of shade. In the bright sunshine no man thinks … the sun … melts thought away, and sets the blood running with another, non-mental consciousness … In the grey shadow the northern nations mould themselves according to a few ideas, until their whole life is buttoned and choked up.

(Phoenix 131-132)

So it is that Lawrence places the conscious mind in the cold life-denying region of the upper plane of consciousness, in the geographical Northern region, while he assigns the unconscious and premental knowledge to the living, warm, lower, Southern plane. Subsequently, the landscapes and settings that contain spirits of the upper and lower planes of consciousness are often Arctic and Tropic, respectively, or have a direct correlation with the Arctic and Tropic. Such is the case with Lawrence's short story “The Man Who Loved Islands”.

A favorite of his, this tale is a tour de force of Lawrence's ability to integrate landscape, character, and pollyanalytics into a single thematic statement. Spirit of place plays such a significant role in this story that it might be considered the cohesive factor that unifies these diverse elements. The story concerns an Englishman named Cathcart, who desperately wants an island all his own whereon he can make his own world. In the course of the story, Cathcart has three such islands; however, none are to this satisfaction. He initially tries to tame an island that is four miles in circumference. He brings sixteen men and women to the island to perform the necessary daily work. He then walks around the island dressed completely in white and is referred to ironically by his lackeys as the Master. A kind man, Cathcart is a perfectionist who sees everything in the conscious light of the ideal: he wants everyone happy and everything perfect. However, a host of malevolent forces on the island and the conniving workers, who take advantage of Cathcart's impractical nature, cause him to move to a second island.

Of course, Cathcart's will-to-be-separate from the rest of humanity and his belief in the ideal world of the perfectionist indicate that he is primarily of the upper plane of consciousness. His move to this second, smaller island, to which he brings only five of the former workers, illustrates his further self-imposed isolation and denotes further movement away from the warm, southern lifeforce of his lower plane. Now this island is not a ‘world’, as the former had been, but is regarded by Cathcart as a kind of refuge from the world. He is happy for a time on this island until he enters a disastrous affair with his housekeeper's daughter, Flora. In that this relationship is based wholly on wilful, mechanical sex, Cathcart's disgust returns for himself and all humanity. He feels even more distanced from himself, for he consciously had entered the relationship hoping to experience one of the great life-mysteries but subsequently has been unable to break out of his arctic plane. Feeling nothing but contempt for himself, Cathcart leaves the second island for the last island, which is ‘a few acres of rock away in the north’ (CSS [The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence] 738), where he will live alone.

Cathcart's solo move to this solitary northern island marks his final movement away from his lower plane's life-flow, for he effectively is marooning himself in the icy region of his upper plane. As he looks over the barren landscape, he thinks:

He had never a tree, not even a bit of heather to guard. Only the turf, and tiny turf-plants, and the sedge by the pool, the seaweed in the ocean. He was glad. He didn't want trees or bushes. They stood up like people, too assertive. His bare, low-pitched island in the pale blue sea was all he wanted.

(CSS 740)

His subjective response to this lifeless situation is one of satisfaction in his isolate condition that stems from his arctic plane. Then comes winter.

Until the arrival of winter's polar force, Cathcart had been existing in his willed isolation and had retreated farther and farther into this life-denying region. Any kind of contact with life, be it sheep, seals or even a cat, disgusted him. He found the letters of the brass label upon his paraffin stove obscene because they reminded him of speech, so he tore off the label and obliterated all lettering that he found in the cabin. Then, he awakes one morning and finds:

It had snowed. He got up and opened his door, and shuddered. Ugh! How cold! All white, with a dark leaden sea, and black rocks curiously speckled with white. The foam was no longer pure. It seemed dirty. And the sea ate the whiteness of the corpse-like land. Crumbles of snow were silting down the dead air.

(CSS 744)

… His house was a cell faintly illuminated with white light. He realised the snow was walled outside his window. He got up, in the dead cold. When he opened his door, the motionless snow stopped him in a wall as high as his breast. Looking over the top of it, he felt the dead wind slowly driving, saw the snow-powder lift and travel like a funeral train.

(CSS 744-745)

But his island was gone. Its shape was all changed, great heaping white hills rose where no hills had been, inaccessible, and they fumed like volcanoes, but with snow powder. He was sickened and overcome.

(CSS 746)

Cathcart's initial subjective response to this spirit of arctic anti-life is to recoil from his upper level; he is terrified and his life-force urges him to try and escape. However, Cathcart soon accepts his impending death. His upper plane of consciousness forms a connection with the northern life-denying spirit, a spirit that has been kin to his primary nature for years, and the story ends with another snowstorm imminent.

Frederick Karl notes that ‘a northern type, Cathcart must, like Gerald Crich, perish through the iciness of his own heart’ (272). This idea might be expanded pollyanalytically: the warm heart-blood of Cathcart's life-force located in this tropical plane is frozen by the extension of his arctic plane into the southern region, wherein lie the roots of his life-force. Indeed, through Lawrence's use of the arctic life-denying spirit of place on the third island where Cathcart is brought face-to-face with his own primary center of consciousness, Cathcart's long-denied warm and life-excluding center—his lower plane of consciousness—under numbing and crushing arctic ice finally and forever is sealed. When viewed in this manner, the full thematic significance of Cathcart's dissolution comes to the fore: his fatal and unnatural migration away from life-sustaining forces of nature becomes an effective correlative of the protagonist's psyche that is achieved by Lawrence's consummate integration of philosophy, place and psychology.

Works Cited

Karl, Frederick. ‘Lawrence's “The Man Who Loved Islands”: The Crusoe Who Failed’. A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale, 1959.

Michaels-Tonks, Jennifer. D. H. Lawrence: The Polarity of North and South—Germany and Italy in His Prose Works. Bonn, 1976.

Moore, Harry. The Priest of Love. New York, 1974.

CL The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Harry T. Moore. New York, 1962.

CSS The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence, 3 vols. New York, 1980.

Letters: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Aldous Huxley. New York, 1932.

Phoenix: Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward McDonald. New York, 1980.

PU Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, in ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’ and ‘Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious’. New York, 1977.

SCAL Studies in Classic American Literature, New York, 1977.

TSM The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of ‘Studies in Classic American Literature’. Ed. Armin Arnold. London, 1962.