The war on women has been going on for quite
awhile, with new battles at the forefront of each generation, it seems. The
arts have also been participatory in the war, with certain victories from
previous generations buried in public amnesia (The Dinner Party, for example).
Yet within previous generations there lies useful wisdom. Coming up now on the
centennial of its publication, DH Lawrence’s The Lost Girl has much to offer
those for whom thought is not anathema.
Although Lawrence’s reputation is smeared with the
superficial slur of being all smut, though actually of The Lost Girl is quite the contrary. Lawrence’s text concerns itself with the
compassionate rendering of the female protagonist, Alvina Houghton, with the
bulk of the novel’s attention going to seven years of Alvina’s life as she experiences what it is to be age
thirty. Although Lawrence’s England of a hundred years ago is
quite of the time with its generous awareness of such prosaic concerns as gas-lamps,
the expectation of women to ally themselves in a domestic partnership of some
sort has not really changed. Lawrence’s text has
numerous examples of “old-maids” as secondary characters, and their fate of
being “on a shelf” denotes a social
position as being expendable.
Lawrence has too true an eye to lump
these unmarried women into one character type, and while their social position
is symbolic, each character has an individuality that nonetheless makes her
recognizable. Additionally, each of these women serves to paint Alvina in
deeper chiaroscuro; for example, toward the last third of the novel, Effie Tuke goes into labor and her speeches state Lawrence’s thesis of the
paradox that confounds modern women then and now:
“ ‘ Oh, but so many things happen
outside one’s imagination. That’s where
your body has you. I can’t imagine that I’m going to have a child ---[…] Oh,
but there isn’t one bit of me wants it, not one bit. My flesh doesn’t want it.
And my mind doesn’t—yet there it is![…] You don’t understand! I want to be
myself. And I’m not myself. I’m just torn to pieces by Forces. It’s
horrible---[…] But I hate life. It’s nothing but a mass of forces. I am
intelligent. Life isn’t intelligent. Look at it this moment. Do you call this
intelligent? Oh—Oh! It’s horrible! Oh --! ( 287-297)”
Ironically,
by this time in the novel and in her life, Alvina has made friendships “with
the few women who formed the toney intellectual elite of this northern town”
(287), which Lawrence
calls:
“that curious female freemasonry
which can form a law unto itself even
among most conventional women. They talked as they would never talk before men,
or before feminine outsiders. They threw aside the whole vestment of
convention. They discussed plainly the things they thought about—even the most
secret—and they were quite calm about the things they did—even the most
impossible” (287).
Lawrence posits here an alternative to the dire
circumstances facing unallied and unmarried women in the possibility of
community, or a sub-society created of like-mindedness. Although Lawrence does not openly
acknowledge the atavistic archetype of a female collective, the communication
between the female characters in the novel functions as the transmission of
this wisdom.
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| DH Lawrence |
Lawrence’s
protagonist, Alvina, encounters a number
of men, most of whom are given social sanction; nonetheless, though Alvina’s
eyes we see these men as symbolic characters, each recognizable to the modern
eye, and each justifiably repellant. If Lawrence’s
work is to suffer further castigation, it ought to be for these portraits, for
the male characters have their camouflage removed and they exist not only as
physical beings, but as individually offensive people. Alvina’s suitors are
paraded through the novel, each a self-satisfied rooster, with the awful climax
assuming the form of Dr Mitchell who:
“had a large practice among the
poor, and was an energetic man […]fifty-four years old, tall, largely-built […]
he laughed and talked rather mouthingly […]he was rather mouthy and
overbearing”(264), but who has a solid social status , a large house, and an
attitude of “ imperious condescension”(269).
Alvina
eventually cannot hide her feelings of revulsion, and in the form of another
female character passes down the
observation “You never know what men will do till you’ve known them. And then
you need be surprised at nothing, nothing […]”(282). Albeit the quality of this
testimony positing men as erratic, unstable personalities, the joke is in the
turn-about, for the long-held misogynist cliché of women as reliable only in
their temperamental behavior.
Lawrence’s
text deserves further attention. In his canon, it is the honesty and
physicality of men that is most worthy of female alliance, not their social
trappings; a lesson well worth modern thought, especially in a culture of
global consumerism. Lawrence’s
women are drawn with compassion, even those he unabashedly finds socially and
intellectually repugnant—a feat not seen
often enough any where. Lawrence
arms his women with their own power, and this needed lesson is worth
remembering.
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