The frontiers are not east or west, north or south,
                                                  but whenever a man fronts a fact. …

—Henry David Thoreau

The stories in The Prussian Officer [The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories] surround, so to speak, Lawrence's two earliest novels, being written in a wide span of time (1907-14) which begins with The White Peacock and ends after Sons and Lovers. The stories, even more than the novels, constitute valuable evidence of the artistic and ideological evolution of the writer, which they allow us to follow step by step.¹

The fact that the stories belong to different creative moments is reflected in a noticeable and inevitable heterogeneity of form, style, and content, even though there are also recurrent elements, especially the strong emphasis conferred upon places, which play a very important role. Compared to The White Peacock, Lawrence sometimes demonstrates a better knowledge of how to utilize place to catalyze reactions and revelatory behaviors of the characters, or to objectify the themes and paradigmatic oppositions present in the stories.

As in the first novel, in some of the stories of The Prussian Officer, the escape from the “jungle” and the consequent search for a “garden” carries with it the consecration of certain places and the introduction of ritualistic elements, which, however, are different from those in The White Peacock.² In that novel, as we have seen, places belong to two principal categories: those of “us,” of similar souls who isolate themselves in a congenial environment, removed from life's necessities, and those of “others,” whose rituals, such as parties, conform to the social code and are often utilized to illuminate distances and oppositions between characters. This distinction does not appear as clear-cut in The Prussian Officer, where, in the first place, moments of happy isolation in the “garden” are missing, and in the second place, the rites of conviviality, in general, are not occasions for getting together, but only catalysts for latent conflicts of thresholds and insurmountable boundaries, or evidence of the violence and brutality which the individual hides underneath a fragile surface of civility.

This is true of the title story, where the captain's meals are occasions for sadistic persecution of his own attendant, and abuses of power. Provocations for this persecution originate from a “hunger” which is never recognized, his obsessive physical desire for the young soldier. The soldier, in his turn, is entirely possessed by another passion, also largely unconscious: hatred of his persecutor which assumes an essentially physical character, becoming eventually an aversion not to the person but to the flesh of the captain, so that a paradoxical reciprocity is established in their relations.³ The ritual of meals, rendered more rigid by the hierarchical relationship between the two men, for awhile “covers” and keeps under control the tension between them. But later it explodes into violence on a convivial occasion, which is, not coincidentally, celebrated in the woods. The attendant, who has stoically borne the physical violence of his captain, cannot resist the “desire” excited by the sight of the captain's throat while he is drinking a tankard of beer, and, taken over by an uncontainable ecstasy, jumps on the other, strangling him.⁴ Once he has broken the rules of ritual, man turns into a beast.

Voracity is again associated with animality, though in a different manner, in “Goose Fair.” In one of the central scenes, Lawrence uses the ritual of mealtime to contrast the figure of the irresponsible father (who feigns indifference about the fire which broke out at the family factory, indirectly attributing fault to the future son-in-law) to that of the daughter, serious, sensitive and determined to confront the situation. If the failure to eat together symbolizes the latent conflict between the two characters, the contents of their meal—the steak which the one greedily devours and the coffee which the other sips—indicate their respective natures.⁵

Unlike these two stories, wherein the consumption of food is used as evidence of the tensions between the two antagonists, in others, the meal is evidence, as in The White Peacock, of insuperable social and psychological distances. In “The Shades of Spring,”⁶ Syson's arrival at the farm during the family dinner is seen as an intrusion, and he himself feels out of place in a spot where he had once belonged but from whence he estranged himself by frequenting others: “[the farmer] assumed that Syson was become too refined to eat so roughly” (PO [The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories] 102). In order to safeguard family intimacy and appease the laws of hospitality, a compromise is reached—“We'll give Addy something when we've finished” (PO 102)—arising from the hybrid situation of once-belonging felt by the protagonist.

In other stories as well, Lawrence uses places to represent the extraneousness felt by a character in a social environment different from his own. In “Daughters of the Vicar,” the bourgeois ritual of inviting visitors to supper becomes the source of interminable misery for the miner Alfred, who minds not so much the impossibility of dialogue with the vicar and his wife, as their subtle manifestations of hostility, their sense that their “territory” is being invaded by an intruder. He is an object of scorn for both of them; he is oppressed by a sense of being out of place which his hosts sadistically exacerbate.⁷ He has such a total experience of disorientation that his union with Louisa (the vicar's daughter) would be impossible if she, vice-versa, did not manage to orient herself immediately in his territory—“their fixed routine of life. … It was all so common, so like herding. She lost her own distinctness” (PO 72)—and make herself friendly so that she can be welcomed by her future mother-in-law.

The use of social meals as a circumstance which mandates the observance of the rules of the “code” reaches its highest dramatic intensity in “The Christening,” where Lawrence uses with consummate skill the potential inherent in a situation—baptism of an illegitimate son—which constitutes a kind of social paradox, inasmuch as it is the (obligatory) celebration of public shame. He lingers pitilessly on the minutiae of every gesture of preparation for the convivial ritual, a source of acute suffering for family members, and at the same time the litmus test of the veiled rancor and petty jealousies which separate them:⁸

Miss Rowbotham kept a keen eye on everything: she felt the importance of the occasion. The young mother … ate in sulky discomfort …, Bertha … scorned her sister, treated her like dirt.

[PO 176]

The only cohesive factor in the family is the religiosity of the father, a kind of biblical patriarch who has sacrificed himself to reach a bourgeois social status (symbolized by the residence he constructed, Woodbine Cottage),⁹ but who is not enslaved, in the circumstance, by bourgeois conventions:

An' let this young childt be like a willow tree beside the waters, with no father but Thee, oh God. Ay, an' I wish it had been so with my children, that they'd had no father but Thee.

[PO 178-79]

Instead of a contested birth, the ritual of social eating occurs in its opposite form, a death in the family, in the story “Odour of Chrysanthemums”: here, the kitchen in which the mother and sons eat their meals is a place where they daily confirm their alliance against “the intruder,” the father. His unusual lateness (this time due to his death in the mine) offers an occasion for the mother to vent her accumulated rancor—“it is a scandalous thing as a man can't even come in to his dinner. … Past his very door he goes to get to a public house, and here I sit with his dinner waiting for him” (PO 185)—rancor which gives way, when the corpse is brought to the house, to a feeling of quasi-religious respect for the flesh she once loved: “[she] put her face against his neck, and trembled and shuddered” (PO 197). Many effects of this story, like the previous one, arise from the introduction into the same place, a domestic interior,¹⁰ of two opposites: everydayness and the near-religious solemnity of encounters with the two great “thresholds” of existence, birth and death.

Another element of difference between the stories and The White Peacock is the almost total absence in them of those genteel rites which in the novel called attention to the organic world, in particular, to its flowers. Even when present in The Prussian Officer, they are not agents of harmony between like souls or of communion with place, but contribute, as do mealtimes, to bring out elements of separation or lack of communication, or to evoke specters of the world of dreams belonging to a past by now irremediably buried.¹¹ In “The Shadow in the Rose Garden,” the place of Poetry, laden with flowers and perfumes, produces the melancholy voluptuousness of the memory: “[she came] at last to a tiny terrace all full of roses. … She felt herself in a strange crowd. It exhilarated her, carried her out of herself. She flushed with excitement. The air was pure scent” (PO 125). The garden is soon transformed into a nightmarish place when she meets the man she had loved before her marriage, now pathetically demented:

She could see his shape, the shape she had loved with all her passion: … fixed, intent, but mad, drawing his face nearer hers. Her horror was too great. The powerful lunatic was coming too near to her.

[PO 127]

A variation on this theme appears in “The Shades of Spring,” where the romantic rite of two ex-lovers walking in the woods does not revitalize the intimacy of the years past, but crudely emphasizes their present alienation. This modification of the sentimental situation also suggests a different relationship to the environment. The “expropriation” of the woods suffered by Syson¹² contrasts with Hilda's decisive “appropriation” of them (“she … was always dominant, letting him see her wood,” PO 105, emphasis mine) after being engaged to a gamekeeper.

Accompanying the gradual devaluation of floral rites in this collection is the gradual acceptance of the world of nature, blood and sex. In “The Shades of Spring,” Hilda, after showing Syson “her” woods, leads him to the gamekeeper's cabin, scene of their intimate meetings, and, in this circumstance, of a double ritualistic ceremony. First, she confirms her complete union with nature by putting on “a cloak of rabbit-skin and of white fur” (PO 107), then sucks the bee poison out of her fiancé's arm, giving him, as she says, “the reddest kiss you'll ever have” (PO 111).

Another bloody rite occurs in “Second Best,” where it assumes the character of a true initiation to the mysteries of nature. Here the protagonist Frances, forced to give up her bourgeois dream of marriage, accepts the reality of a farmer-suitor and confirms her decision to belong completely to him and his world through the offer of a defenseless mole which she kills to demonstrate an unconditional acceptance of the brutal “logic” of nature.¹³ This bloody, pagan rite contrasts with the bourgeois one of engagement to her first lover who, opting for society instead of nature, makes an existential choice opposite to Frances'.

In tying herself to a farmer who is also tied to a certain place, Frances has crossed a threshold. In that act we find the crucial moment of this and other stories in which the most important developments of the plot call attention to movements from one place to another or the crossing of a certain boundary. Examples include the stream which separates the area where the two sisters live from the cultivated fields in “Second Best,” the gate of the Quarry cottage and the ivy hedge which surrounds the property of the vicar in “Daughters of the Vicar,” the institutionally closed threshold of the garden—“the garden isn't open to-day” (PO 124)—in “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” and the gate that blocks access to the road through the woods in “The Shades of Spring.”

The boundaries around a given place signify the jurisdiction within which the laws of that place are valid, laws which can appear strict to the point of intolerance, especially when they involve military discipline and when they are imposed upon “naturally sensitive” people, as in the case of the two soldiers who appear in “The Thorn in the Flesh” and “The Prussian Officer.” In both stories, the space where the protagonist is confined is completely separate from the outside world, perceived by him through olfactory, visual, and auditory sensations which generate a very acute desire for the “outside,” and exacerbate the protagonist's intolerance of the absurd tests which the “code” (or the brutality of those who use it sadistically) imposes:

Through the moving of his comrades' bodies, he could see the small vines dusty by the road-side, the poppies among the tares fluttering and blown to pieces, the distant spaces of sky and fields all free with air and sunshine. But he was bound in a very dark enclosure of anxiety within himself.

[PO 23]

The young soldier in “The Thorn in the Flesh” flees from the place of his shame and humiliation (he had wet his pants while climbing up a ladder on a dangerously high wall) to seek refuge in another (his fiancée's room) where he finds redemption as a man through sexual relations with her.¹⁴ In “The Prussian Officer,” the high, uncontaminated mountains sharpen the protagonist's desire for freedom and render the captain's vexations more intolerable. After killing the captain, his dominant impulse is to run towards the mountains: “straight in front of him, blue and cool and tender, the mountains ranged across the pale edge of the morning sky. He wanted them—he wanted them alone—he wanted to leave himself and be identified with them” (PO 20)—an impulse made unrealizable by his loss of consciousness and his disorientation in the woods, a place which, after having symbolized the uncontrollable world of instinct, now becomes a labyrinth without exit and therefore the objective correlative of the soldier's flight without hope.¹⁵

Although his wandering in the forest ends in death, in the gothic story “A Fragment of Stained Glass,” the endless flight of the two lovers in the snow-covered forest signifies the positive result of contact and reciprocal knowledge. Nevertheless, the forest itself becomes a game of paradigmatic oppositions somewhat similar to that in “The Prussian Officer”: the contrast of the dark green vegetation with the cold whiteness of snow, but especially with the decorated fragment of stained glass from the church, represents the conflict between the dark world of instinct and a vague yearning for transcendence or at least a “liberation,” which, in the desperate situation of flight in both stories, becomes identified with death itself.¹⁶

In some sense these two stories are at the opposite extreme from The White Peacock, not only in that they offer the woods as a nightmarish “nocturnal” image, opposite to the idyllic image in the novel, but also and especially because they show “the other face” of isolation: the place of flight from the world becomes a labyrinth in which one gets lost and can even die. By cutting ties with the external world, one makes the irreversible choice to become an “outlaw.” The “garden” of refuge can transform into a place of exile or a distressing prison, which is exactly the experience presented by The Trespasser.

Notes

1. On the difficulty of arranging the short stories and the early novels chronologically, see John Worthen, “Short Story and Autobiography: Kinds of Detachment in D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction,” Renaissance and Modern Studies 29 (1985), pp. 1-15. For an analysis of the genesis of the collection see Brian H. Finney, “D. H. Lawrence's Progress to Maturity: From Holograph Manuscript to Final Publication of The Prussian Officer and Other Stories,” Studies in Bibliography 28 (1975), pp. 321-32, and John Worthen's introduction to The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, CUP, Cambridge 1983, pp. xix-li. See also Keith Cushman, D. H. Lawrence at Work: The Emergence of the ‘Prussian Officer’ Stories, Harvester, Sussex 1978; Janice H. Harris, The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Rutgers UP, New Brunswick 1984; and Michael Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, Macmillan, London 1986, pp. 111-49 and 188-256.

2. A mythical-ritualistic reading of The Prussian Officer, focused mostly on the material that Lawrence took from recent studies in anthropology and in particular from his reading of The Golden Bough by James G. Frazer, is undertaken by John B. Vickery, “Myth and Ritual in the Shorter Fiction of D H. Lawrence,” Modern Fiction Studies 5 (1959), pp. 65-82, republished with updates and revisions in The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough, Princeton UP, Princeton 1973, pp. 294-325.

3. On the paradoxical relationship between the officer and his attendant see Gary Adelman, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle: An Analysis of D. H. Lawrence's ‘The Prussian Officer,’” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1963), pp. 8-15; Ann Englander, “‘The Prussian Officer’: The Self Divided,” Sewanee Review 71 (1963), pp. 605-19; and Serena Cenni, “Psico-narrazione e monologo interiore in ‘The Prussian Officer’ e ‘The Fox’,” in Comellini and Fortunati (eds), D. H. Lawrence cent'anni dopo, cit., pp. 29-46.

4. “And then he saw the thin, strong throat of the elder man moving up and down as he drank, the strong jaw working. And the instinct which had been jerking at the young man's wrists suddenly jerked free” (PO 14).

5. Her father continued to eat for a few moments, then he said: ‘Have a chop—here's one!’ … Lois was insulted, but she gave no sign. She sat down and took a cup of coffee, making no pretence to eat” (PO 139).

6. The story presents the same triangle (the noble savage, the well-mannered citizen, and the femme fatale) upon which many Lawrencean works focus, beginning with The White Peacock. However, it should be emphasized that here the protagonist Hilda makes a life choice opposite to Lettie's, and from that choice she draws a greater “sovereignty” than Lettie's, which extends to all spaces, both inside and outside. On the affinities between “The Shades of Spring” and The White Peacock, see Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, cit., pp. 122-29.

7. “Mr. Lindley kept a special tone for him, kind, indulgent, but patronising. Durant took it all without criticism or offence, just submitting. But he did not want to eat—that troubled him, to have to eat in their presence. He knew he was out of place. But it was his duty to stay yet awhile” (PO 79, emphasis mine).

8. The celebration of the two rites (the bourgeois tea and the Christian baptism) reunite members of the family and the priest around the domestic hearth, which becomes a place, not of union between family members, but of a series of conflicts, from which the story draws its dramatic structure. These conflicts reveal two oppositions: between convention and the sacred, and between convention and nature. The first is shown in the image of the water for the baptism, paradoxically “placed … there among the tea-things” (PO 177), and in the contrast between the father's prayers, as he blesses the baby's entry into the world, and the empty formulae of the ritual baptism celebrated by the clergyman; the second is shown in the antagonism which separates Hilda, the intellectual of the family, fierce guardian of social dignity, from the girl-mother and her brother, the latter is a completely instinctive miner who scornfully refuses the falsity of the rite and the hypocritical purchase of sweets from a bakery, whose boy is the very father of the child.

9. “There was a difference between the Rowbothams and the common collierfolk: Woodbine Cottage was a superior house to most, and was built in pride by the old man” (PO 176).

10. In “Odour of Chrysanthemums” the domestic interior seems to be the only “humanly” inhabitable space, since the external environment is a dark “mechanical forest” full of deafening noises where one can easily get lost or imprisoned, like the woman at the beginning of the story, “insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge” (PO 181). On the image of man and nature, victims of a mechanized universe, immersed in an atmosphere of death, see Keith Sagar's comments in The Art of D. H. Lawrence, CUP, Cambridge 1966, pp. 14-15, and Claudio Gorlier's essay, “Uccidere il porcospino. Ipotesi sui racconti di Lawrence,” Il Verri 17 (1980), pp. 37-49.

11. In “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” the flower which attracts the daughter by its beauty and the intensity of its perfume, is violently refused and pushed away by the mother because it is an incarnation of a spent life, wasted next to her husband: “No. … Not to me [do they smell beautiful]. It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk he'd got brown chrysanthemums in his buttonhole” (PO 186).

12. Worthen, “Short Story and Autobiography: Kinds of Detachment in D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction,” cit., pp. 9-11, points out the origins of Syson's failure in his idealization and sentimentalizing of the surrounding environment, which renders him unable to participate in real life, which he perceives only through a kind of “stained glass.”

13. “‘Why, would you like me to kill the moles then?’ she asked, tentatively, after a while. ‘They do us a lot of damage,’ he said, standing firm on his ground, angered. … And the next day, after a secret, persistent hunt, she found another mole playing in the heat. She killed it, and … took him the dead creature” (PO 119-20).

14. On the liberating effect which their sexual relationship has on both partners, see John Worthen, “The Roles of Women: ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’ and ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums,’” in D. H. Lawrence, Edward Arnold, London 1991, pp. 32-41.

15. Jack F. Stewart, “Expressionism in ‘The Prussian Officer,’” D. H. Lawrence Review 18 (1985-86), pp. 275-89, proposes an interesting reading of the story, pointing out close links between the man-universe relationship and expressionist painting and emphasizing that “Lawrence's imagery presents a distorted, hallucinatory world, seen through a consciousness stripped of volition and reeling from sunstroke, thirst, and emotional trauma. Themes of regression and disintegration are intrinsic to expressionism: they may be linked either with regeneration … or with annihilation” (p. 276).

16. In “A Fragment of Stained Glass” the decision to cut ties with the world is possible only by an escape to the woods, where the lovers can “join the outlaws” (PO 94). The woods, however, even though they are a necessary passage for achieving liberty, are inhabited by dark and uncontrollable forces which make them intolerable for man: “I will not sleep in the wood, … for I am afraid. I had better be afraid of the voice of man and dogs, than the sounds in the woods” (PO 93). And the dark terrors are justified and explained by the end of the story, which presents the two lovers awakened by the approach of wolves. The epilogue supplied by the external narrator, “they lived happily ever after” (PO 97) rings clearly as an ironic homage to the conventions of fable.