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FREUD, FRAZER, AND LAWRENCE'S PALIMPSESTIC NOVELLA: DREAMS AND THE HEAVINESS OF MALE DESTINY IN "THE FOX" Author(s): PETER BALBERT Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 38, No. 2 (summer 2006), pp. 211-233 Published by: Studies in the Novel, University of North Texas Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533753 . Accessed: 30/09/2013 05:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Studies in the Novel, University of North Texas is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in the Novel. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions FREUD, FRAZER, AND LAWRENCE'S PALIMPSESTIC NOVELLA: DREAMS AND THE HEAVINESS OF MALE DESTINY m THE FOX PETER BALBERT either "You -D. H. Lawrence, or you believe don't." of the Unconscious Fantasia "If in the present work I have dwelt at lengthon trees..." -Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough "There a man wants -D. As any cumulative index of articles and H. citations about the place." The Lawrence, on Lawrence's Fox work suggests, no shortfiction by him has received as much sustained consideration by critics through theyears as The Fox. This voluminous criticism encompasses a wide variety of subject material and methodology, including a range of opinion concerning such topics as the open-ended conclusion of the novella, the relevance of the purported models for the major characters, and the success of thework as fictional art.l Surprisingly little attention has centered on the subtle reiteration and development in imagery and motivation that inform the characterizations of March, Banford, and Henry. This relative disregard of thematic pattern and stylistic repetition explains theperplexity and discomfort of many commentators over the uncertain of ending the work, as March and Henry nervously contemplate their decision to leave England and travel across theAtlantic. There exists no in-depth and linear study of The Fox that attempts Studies University to analyze in the Novel, organized patterns of Lawrence's Volume 38, number 2 (Summer of North Texas. All rights to reproduction techniques and doctrines 2006). Copyright ? 2006 in any form reserved. This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions by the / BALBERT 212 as coherent preludes to the necessarily anticlimactic tone of the final scene.2 Similarly, there has been little effort to relate themajor revisions and radical lengthening of the firstversion (1918) into the novella (1921) to the changing state of Lawrence's own doctrinal vision within that period-an ideological realignment connected to thevolatile context of Lawrence's marriage toFrieda and to his vulnerable emotions in those "nightmare" years during an especially difficultperiod inhis life. Perhaps themost significant area of neglect involves the lack of relevant biographical and intertextualmaterial on Lawrence's personal and aesthetic preoccupations as he moves from the unambiguous and tightlyresolved tale to themore ambitious novella.3 When Lawrence began redrafting The Fox in the late fall of 1921, he had just completed final revisions on Fantasia of the Unconscious. That often dyspeptic and exhortatory volume of "pollyanalytics" {Fantasia 65) offers an elaboration of Lawrence's theories about such topics as sexuality, parenting, education, marriage, and the unconscious; thework is integratedby Lawrence's pervasive interest in the strugglebetween emotion and intellect that has preoccupied Western culture for centuries. At the center of his argument is a highly charged and cranky attack on Freudian theory. Lawrence asserts, in effect, that Freud dangerously rationalized erotic life and thus seriously underestimated the visionary and religious stimulus in human beings, a primal motivation that Lawrence insists must function irrationally, erotically and above ail-preeminently over the intellect. Philip Rieff eloquently described the oppositional stakes forty years ago: "Lawrence knew intuitively, if not historically, that reason defends mainly against impulse, and against what he considered the legitimate and undeniable power of love" (iii). Because of Lawrence's outspoken emphasis on instinct and on the existential primacy of the five senses, it is no surprise that he held Frazer's The Golden Bough in high esteem, given thatmonumental work's unpsychoanalytical inquiry into primitive habits, beliefs, and rituals, all part of a broad and impressive scholarship by Frazer that involved him in a complex and detailed outline of myths, symbols, and taboos enacted in a variety of pre-industrial societies.4 Lawrence maintains that"knowledge must be symbolical, mythical, dynamic," and that "symbols must be true from top to bottom" {Fantasia 113). He firstread The Golden Bough in the fall and winter of 1915-16, and he referred to it in the newly added Foreword toFantasia of theUnconscious (62) as a major on his own influence visionary As perspective. he began sustained work on revisions of The Fox, he recently had read his friendBarbara Low's be ok on Freudian theory,and her study did little tomodify his contempt for doctrine. psychoanalytical Lawrence's adaptation of elements in Frazer's study of magic, taboo, and superstition often is recognizable in the novella, and ? regard itas a serious oversight by critics thatFrazer's direct influence on Lawrence's Fox."5 work has not been acknowledged sufficiently in studies Yet the undisguised antagonism to Freud evident inFantasia This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions of "The of the D.H.LAWRENCE / 213 Unconscious provides the special dividend of enabling readers of The Fox to witness the operative universality of Freud's theories about the unconscious playing itselfout against thedogmatically un-Freudian intentionof Lawrence, for the novelist sounds convinced that the symbologies in his fiction primarily reflect his familiarity with the research of such archetypal primitivists as Frazer, Blavatsky, and Jung. Thus when salient aspects of Lawrence's life and marriage are engraved on a foundation of Lawrencian doctrine that for him is consciously supported by Frazer and unconsciously illuminated by Freud, the result is a kind of palimpsestic fiction, as the various inscriptions of influence on Lawrence compete for priority in this dense and revealing work. (See also Gay 528.) The evidence for these strands of influence emerges at different points in the novella, and theirvisibility is particularly prominent in the two dream sequences complicate and experienced enhance by March, the multi-textured when Frazer, Freud, resonance and of Lawrence's Fantasia art. The opening pages of The Fox quickly emphasize the unnatural and decreative results of the farming that is so earnestly and awkwardly managed by March and Banford. Through a combination of bad luck, inexperience, and incompetence, the young women encounter a series of unfortunate events that undermine the fertilityof their land and livestock and thereby harm the prospects for theireconomic survival. The sudden death of thegrandfather, the untamable wildness of the heifer, the chickens' obstinate refusal to lay eggs all seems out of rhythmand recourse even before we learnmuch about these landowners who attempt an independent life in a difficult and traditionally masculine domain in themale-decimated countryside of England at the end of thewar. Lawrence stresses the gender inversion and sexual displacement early in thework, as if somehow the women's ill fortune is related to their presumption of unorthodox roles. March pointedly is described as "the man about the place" and Banford "did not look as if she would marry" (7). Yet for all the unconventionality of theirhousehold arrangement, Lawrence employs his familiar imagery of procreative blackness to suggestMarch's potential for the instinctual, creative depths thathe praises inFantasia of theUnconscious as the "fathomless blackness" (101) of the eye. He reiterativelymentions that March's "eyes were big and wide and dark" (8), leading to his more directive comment about her unfulfilled passion and repressed needs, that "there was something odd and unexplained about her" (8). For Lawrence, such qualities of inexplicability, strangeness, and unknowability remain the signature of the creative soul: "To know is to lose. When I have a finishedmental concept of a beloved, then the love and friendship is dead... .To know is to die" {Fantasia 108).6 The farm stands isolated on "the edge of thewood" (9), and from inside the dark and deep border often emerges a fox that is described as a "demon" and "serpent" (9) for the vicious and stealthymanner it attacks the fowl that This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 214 / BALBERT comprise the working economy of the farm. This picture of the adjoining forest as metaphoric domain as well as literal sanctuary reflects the engrained primitivism of the novella that is influenced by Lawrence's reading of Frazer and articulated inFantasia of theUnconscious as his unqualified belief in the "subjective science" thatwas "taught esoterically in all countries of the globe" and then "remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth story" (62-63). In this context of demonism and magic, Frazer refers in The Golden Bough to the custom in ancient England of burning foxes in seasonal festivals of exorcism, and among theBritish Celts the burning is an attempt "to break the power of witchcraft" and thus "greater would be the fertilityof the land" (761-62). Frazer furtherexplains that the foxes and other wild animals were consigned to the flames because "they were believed to be witches who had Druidical taken the shape of animals for their nefarious purposes" (762). March and Banford do not require archetypal justification to seek out themarauding fox, but themythic implications of serpent and forest alert the reader that rational explanations will not be sufficient to explain themystical grip of instinct and emotion that informskey moments of the novella. This sense of the fox as a devilish and demonic presence in their lives is created by the inexperienced and hysterical perspective ofMarch and Banford, who feel the animal's underworld ambience more than they calmly understand the situational normalcy of its predatory behavior. One of themajor themes in the novella will be whether March can distance herself from the range of typological associations related to the fox, and (as a later contingency) whether she can separate Henry from thatpersistent identificationwith the fox that informsher preoccupations with thisboy-man. It is here thatelements of Freudian symbology begin to emerge in themulti-layered textureof the fiction, as the unconscious signposts merge with Lawrence's appropriations of regional and totemic primitivism. From the first time thatMarch sees the fox, her awareness appears sublimatingly sexual and-more precisely-projectively phallic, with her mesmerized awareness of thewhite tip of its brush, with her intense concern with its ruddy, snake-like shadow in the deep grass, and with her awkward and mannish use of a long rifle thatpredictably proves impotentwhen she uses it in the hunt for the fox. Lawrence's imaginative use of Frazer's detailed research establishes an additional meaning for the fox that is relevant toMarch's psychology and emotional development. The fox resembles what Frazer describes throughout The Golden Bough as the corn-spirit-that is, the fox as the symbolic incarnation of successful germination and of a bountiful agricultural season. But the fox must die for theharvest tobe complete (Frazer 518). The psychosexual theories of Freud retain viability beyond the documented influence of Lawrencian doctrine and Frazer's primitivism. Here the emphasis on the tail ("brush") of the fox inMarch's thoughts recalls the totemic terms of Frazer's analysis of a ritual in Bourgogne while it also illustrates the rites of manhood practiced by an entire village: "The last sheaf [of corn] represented the fox. Beside it This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE / 215 a score of ears was left standing to form the tail, and each reaper, going back some paces, threw his sickle at it. He who succeeded in severing it, 'cut off the fox's tail' and a cry of 'you cou cou' was raised in his honor" (Frazer 518). As an elusive and natural spirit of procreation thatMarch both respects and reviles, it is difficult to avoid the sexual significance of thepresence of the fox inher isolated and frustrated life.When she looks at him, "he was not daunted" (10), for he embodies theLawerencian "otherness" that as yetMarch cannot accept, the unknowable passion she cannot engage. She is hypnotically drawn to a part of the fox's body that in its length and bushy prominence seems most male in its full extension: "She saw his brush held smooth like a feather, and saw his white buttocks twinkle" (10). March's attraction to the fox (and soon to Henry) is played off numerous times against thepersistent and whining sounds of Banford's voice beckoning her to return: "At last she became aware that Banford was calling her" (10). March is torn constantly between the urgent, choric calls of Banford and themagnetism of the fox or of Henry-as-fox. The desperation in Banford's call will increase proportionally as March becomes more entrenched in the otherness represented firstby the animal, then by the and man-as-animal, then by Henry-as-man. From themoment Henry enters the cloistered world of thesewomen, two integrated factors are reiterated by Lawrence as structural and ideological principles of organization early in thework: Banford insists on seeing Henry as boyish and inconsequential, and March-through a transparent process of displacement and repression-identifies him with the fox. But the Freudian patterns here are no more essential than Frazer's research, for Frazer is precisely relevant about the history of the procreative and phallic potential implicit in the unexpected appearance of Henry, whether he is perceived as fox or corn spirit: The the corn-spirit with an animal is analogous to the a passing of stranger. As the sudden appearance a stranger near the harvest field or threshing floor is, to the primitive mind, to identify him as the spirit of the corn from the cut or enough escaping threshed corn, so the sudden appearance of an animal issuing from the cut corn is enough to identify it with the from his ruined corn-spirit escaping two identifications are so analogous home. The that they can hardly be in any attempt to explain disassociated them. (537-38) identification identification of of him with The Fox reveals Lawrence's palimpsestic effort to fictionalize the process of association and identification described by Frazer, as the novelist embroiders the primitive elements with intentional intrusions of his own doctrine, and with unconscious patterns of motivation and meaning that emerge regardless of his intent. Although Freud was not uninterested in the historic importance of Frazer's expository work, he was more eager to speculate in depth on the This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 216 / BALBERT psychosexual reasons for the rituals outlined in The Golden Bough. Freud's theoretical assertions about the structure and significance of dreams often prove illuminating in the specific case; here they offer a special applicability in terms of an "identification" thatMarch obsessively ponders in her dream? like state: "Wild beasts are as a rule employed by thedream-work to represent passionate impulses of which the dreamer is afraid, whether they are his own or those of other people" {Interpretation of Dreams 445). Freud furtherand famously insists-with open acknowledgement of Frazer's contribution-that such symbolism amounts to "a form of representation recalling totemism. It might be said that the wild beasts are used to represent the libido, a force dreaded by the ego and combated by means of repression" (445).7 But soon March's repressions will take her from an obsession with the fox to a mesmerized belief in the representation of Henry-as-fox, and this transition also has credible basis indream theory: "It often happens, too, that thedreamer separates off his neurosis, his 'sick personality,' from himself and depicts itas an independent person" (445). Despite Henry's social inexperience and sexual immaturity,he impresses his female hosts (and the reader) with his skills at detailed observation. His firstextended contemplation ofMarch's demeanor ismore curious than erotic, as he ponders quizzically the repressed look she conveys with her tightknot of dark hair,man-like clothes, and receptive eyes-an odd combination of elements capped offwith the unwieldy rifle in her hand. March's perspective on him is unequivocal, as she confirms the syndrome of projection and repression defined by Freud: "But toMarch he was the fox... .The boy was to her the fox, and she could not see him otherwise" (14). His rootlessness and independence are summarized in his military enlistment after he ran away from his grandfather. Such deracination and pluckiness early in his life have provided him with a talent for grasping opportunity and for valuing the virtue of hard work. March perceives littleabout these qualities during theirfirstencounter. Her immediate sense thathe resembles the fox permits her to relax and to repress the human sexual threatand allure he embodies forher. By reductively signifyinghim as the fox, she avoids (for a time) the full implications of his presence as a man, as Lawrence typically conveys the sensual significance of his appearance for March by means of shadow imagery and of the "lapsing-out" that signals the presence of sexual desire: "There in the shadow of her corner she gave herself up to a warm, on her... relaxed .Hidden peace, in the shadow almost of her like the spell sleep, accepting corner.. at last lapse .she could that was into the odour of the fox" (18). In Freudian terms,March's daydreams "benefit by a certain degree of relaxation of censorship" permitted by the dreamer in a process of "secondary revision" {Interpretation 530). Her lapse "into theodour of the fox" illustratesFreud's view that "the wishful purpose that is at work" in theproduction remains the common but deceptive "phantasy" (529) adapted from childhood memories of passion without disruption or consequence. This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions For D.H.LAWRENCE / 217 March this phantasy is, in effect, of the bodily rescue and courtship of an adult woman without the undertaking of risk and disruption that realmarriage There requires. also a more exists reason primitive for the use of shadows as themetaphor that leadsMarch into intimations of her sexual desire. As Frazer evocatively describes thehabits and beliefs of earlier civilizations, he explains how "some believe people a man's soul to be in his shadow," and-as we recall how Henry's view of the fox's shadow will be crucial in his killing the animal "a warrior's strengthwaxed and waned with the depth of his shadow" (222). In The Fox the crucial and catharticmeetings between March and Henry occur within the shadows produced by encroaching evening. It is during the deeper darkness ofMarch's sleep thatLawrence begins to chart the full implications of her needs March's and cautions. first dream resonates as a fusion of material from Frazer and Freud, and it also bears the imprintof Lawrence's central notions about the demands of the organic self. In it she responds for once not to the beckoning calls of Banford but towhat she believes are the tempting, inscrutable sounds of the fox ("singing outside, which she could not understand" 20), an animal shaped in the long and lean design of phallic imagery, and with the color and kind of Frazer's famous and totemic subject ("he was very yellow and bright, like corn" 20). She tries to touch him and he responds with a swipe of the "brush across her face" (20). Lawrence deploys the phoenix-like metaphor of flame that throughout his work indicates the painful but necessary forging of thenew soul: "And it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with great pain" (2).8 The dream-work insists on what March's receptive senses unconscious and what Lawrence's vision always mandates: there will be strong consequences in her instinctual attraction to the fox, consequences thatFreud believes are reflectedduring thedreams of women inwhich so often "the female genital orifice is [represented] by themouth" with the tail often functioning as phallic "while the fur stands for the pubic hair" {Interpretation 394, 118). When March first sees the fox not only does she note "his brush held smooth like a feather," but she also "saw his white buttocks twinkle" (10). That the fox's brush is both phallic in shape and positioned on the buttocks of the animal, and thatMarch palpably experiences the fox's assault on her mouth in thedream-such a configuration of shape, organ, and sensation is fully explicable in termsofmeaningful transpositions thatoften occur in dreams: instance of a transposition of this kind is the replacement of the genitals of unconscious by the face in the symbolism usage thinking. Linguistic follows the same line in recognizing the buttocks ['Hinterbacken,' literally as homologous to the cheeks, and by drawing a parallel between back-cheeks'] the 'labia' and the lips which frame the aperture of themouth. {Interpretation One 422) This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 218 / BALBERT Although March "awoke with the pain" of this dream encounter, in the morning "she only remembered it as a distant memory" (20). This lack of retention so soon after a disruptive dream is indicative of the intensity of resistance March's to its repressed significance, and it also reflects Lawrence's defiant and stubborn stance that "most dreams are purely insignificant,and it is a sign of a weak and paltry nature to pay any attention to themwhatever" extensive discussion of dreams in {Fantasia 178). Much of Lawrence's Fantasia of theUnconscious relies on a reductive andmechanically "digestive" theory of dream-prompting, as he unpersuasively emphasizes thatwhat the dreamer ate for dinner and how his organs interacted in the body hold major clues to the source and substance of respective dreams. Freud does not dismiss the occasional relevance of physical initiatorsof the unconscious, but he is famously dogmatic on the issue of interpretability, maintaining without exception that "every dream reveals itself as a psychical structurewhich has a meaning and can be inserted at an assignable point in themental activities of waking life" {Interpretation 35). While Lawrence demonstrates his own resistance to this seminal notion of psychoanalysis, it is likely that some willed disingenuousness on his part explains the adamance of his position. For instance, just a few weeks before Lawrence composes March's dream for the firstversion of The Fox in 1918 (it is virtually unchanged in the 1921 novella), he describes his own luminous dream to an importantbenefactor, Lady Cynthia Asquith: I dreamed, I had been to some big, crowded also, such a funny dream. When fair somewhere-where to sell, on booths and on the floor-as I things were was coming back down an open road, I heard such a strange crying overhead, in front, and looking up, I saw, not very high in the air above me, but higher than I could throw, two pale spotted dogs, crouching in the air, and mauling a bird that was crying loudly. I ran fast forwards and clapped my hands and the dogs started back. The bird came falling down to earth. It was a young blue all over like a peacock's peacock, But itwas not much hurt. A woman neck, very lovely. It still kept crying. came running out of a cottage not far be all right. So I went my way. That off, and took the bird, saying itwould dream is in some oblique way or other connected interpret it. {Letters III 247-8) Surely Lawrence protests too much, given the with I can't your aura-but accessible nature of what Freud calls the dream-work, "the process by which the latentdream thoughts were transformed into the manifest dream" {New Lectures Introductory on Psychoanalysis 17). The young and sensitive Lawrence, praised and supported extravagantly by his doting mother for his blue eyes and special gifts, here embodied as a proud but vulnerable peacock under assault by the dogs of England, rescued by a mother-substitute who cannot stay with him-the whole vignette, in effect, textured so thatLawrence the artist is both participant (as the peacock) and observer (as the artist). His assertion of ignorance becomes This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE / 219 all themore transparentwhen he sends off the cathartic letterto a titledwoman who often has intervened in his life to protect him from themaulings by friends, antagonistic publishers, and government bureaucrats. Filled with energy and confidence about his role on the farm,Henry uses his insights about the natural landscape and his skill at hunting to shoot a wild duck that theproud male brings to thewomen "as a great addition to the empty larder" (21). After this demonstration of his practical value to the ineffective farmers, he brings up his concerns about finding lodging in the village. March appears flexible toBanford's suggestion thathe remain with them at the farm, and she accepts the prospect of his residence only by reducing him again to the totem of the fox as she recalls the sensual and "forging" aspects of her dream: "March felt the same sly, taunting,knowing spark leap out of his eyes as he turned his head aside, and fall into her soul, as it had fallen from the dark eyes of the fox. She pursed hermouth as if in pain, as if asleep too" (21). Banford remains acquiescent to this temporary arrangement only by ignoring, through displacement, the sexual threathe presents to her relationship with March. She continues to diminish hismanhood by pretending thathis presence is inconsequential, that the innocence of his youthmakes him tolerably gender neutral: "It's no bother ifyou like to stay. It's like having my own brother here for a few days. He's a boy like you are....No, of course you're no trouble. I tell you, it's a pleasure to have somebody in thehouse besides ourselves" (22). Henry now concentrates his attention onMarch, feeling sexually drawn to her but in the subtleways thathis timiditycannot acknowledge as erotic: "Her dark eyes made something rise in his soul, with a curious elate-excitement, when he looked into them, an excitement he was afraid to let be seen, itwas so keen and secret" (23). It is at thispoint thathe realizes how much he loves the farm, and then (sequence is crucial here) he thinks of marrying her as an available practical strategy,of tracking her down in the relentlessmanner thata capable hunter employs instinct and skill to capture his prey. Henry understandably relies on the language of the huntsman to organize the energy of his love-life, but what remains more significant is his relative lack of conscious awareness of any sexual dimension in his connection to March. He emanates a calm virginity in his temperament and demeanor even as he functions as a practiced killer with a gun. Such paradoxical qualities of inexperience and power inform the logic and metaphor he uses to justify his initialmotivation formarriage. "And itwas as a young hunter thathe would bring down March as his quarry, tomake her his wife" (24). When Henry asks March tomarry him, she responds negatively at first, with precisely the "tomfoolery" phrase he predicted when he contemplated her likely denial of his proposal. When she continues to object to the awkward and precipitous nature of his offer,he touchesMarch for the first time, "with his mouth and chin" on her neck, and she is described as "killed" (26). This This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 220 / BALBERT moment is crucial for initiatinga new movement toward recognition in her that will develop slowly through a series of meetings between March and Henry. What is killed amounts to her unbroken identification of him as the fox, her reliance on a reverse anthropomorphism that has served to camouflage her awareness of the normative sexual presence he can provide in her life. The choric "calling" by Banford then intervenes again, and they both carry logs into the house in obedience to her insistent voice. The unspoken tensions mount while the three characters read quietly, and March begins to lapse-out as she hears the fox singing in thehouse. Unconsciously aware of the attention Henry to her, directs she represses her consciousness of Henry-as-man by entering furtherinto the instinctualdrowse and blurting aloud the identification of Henry-as-fox. March utters the exact words of identity-"'There he isV she cried involuntarily, as if terribly startled" (31), in a virtual dream-state during which she has condensed the salient facts of her dream of the corn-foxwith the visual identification of Henry-as-fox, a process exacerbated by the previous touch fromhim thatresembles the touch in thedream. March's dual experience of what Freud denotes as displacement (Henry-as-fox) and condensation (the dream reduced to verbal utterance) is discussed inThe Interpretation ofDreams in terms thatalso suggests how the vividness of her "picture" of Henry "under the edge of the lamplight" (30) becomes the immediate stimulus ofMarch's abrupt exclamation. Finally March can use her dream-thought to state out loud, concretely, the association thatbedevils her {Interpretation 375). During his second meeting with March, Henry insists that she grant him an answer to his marriage proposal. Again, he kisses her neck and cheek, and again "Banford's voice was heard calling" (33). Then Henry, as if he begins to sense the power of Banford to interferewith his plans, enacts the movements and drama in March's dream with eerie correspondence: "He kissed her on themouth with a quick brushing kiss" (33). The forgingprocess continues as she gives her "yes" to the proposal while the kiss-in the fashion of Lawrence's phoenix metaphor-"seemed to burn through her every fiber" (33). Henry recognizes March's wavering under Banford's influence. With his manhood thus assaulted, he takes the long gun, his one reliable instrument of self-definition, and he stalks out to kill the fox. His intention here is not only to kill the animal: in the act of killing the fox, he realizes that he can obliterate March's persistent identification of him as the fox. This important first recognition by Henry of what needs to be done (the second will be the killing of Banford) is followed by credible evidence of his own increasing maturity. Lawrence asserts Henry's growth in telltale phrases of alienation and discontent that sound suspiciously similar to thewriter's own perspective in thebitter days during and shortlyafter thewar. The passage also recapitulates some of the images and tone of thedream-letter toLady Asquith: As he stood neighboring under cottage, the oaks up of the wood-edge he heard the dogs from the the hill, yelling and startlingly, and the suddenly This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE / 221 the answer. And dogs from the farms around barking suddenly was was to him England little and tight, he felt the landscape constricted even in the dark, and that there were too many dogs in the night, a noise like a fence of sound, like the network of English making hedges wakened it seemed nettingin theview. (39) Henry's talent as a hunter should not be underestimated, for he has predicted everymove of the fox, an anticipatory precision in him that is part of the iroay of his actual resemblance to the fox with respect to both his vulpine features and in his slymanner of perception. When he shoots the fox he holds it lengthwise by its long brush as he shows the appendage to his fianc?e. It is this scene of trophy-display (except for a briefmoment laterwhen Henry leaves by train) that concludes March's Henry-as-fox correspondence. The fox is dead and so is the imposition by March of a false identity forHenry. Recall Frazer's emphasis on the symbolism of holding up the fox's tail as the community's signature of victory over the animal and the forces it represents, for in thatprimal gesture "the greater would be the fertilityof the land" (762). March and Henry move closer to the consummation of theirvery human and fertile passion, and the clearest signal ofMarch's progress resides in another graphic dream. In thismorbid second dream, March does not encounter the fox, but she does deal with the death of Banford, who is pictured in her coffin because comprehends, with a heavy dose of guilt, that the end of the fox also signifies the end of her relationship toBanford. The identification Henry of the leads to a relevant interpretationinwhich Freud's dream-work sequence of the unconscious enhance the evidence of Lawrencian doctrine. metaphors March places a fox skin over the body of Banford and the brush of the fox directly under her head. (See Kinkead-Weekes 689.) "And the coffinwas the rough wood-box inwhich the bits of chopped wood were kept in the kitchen, by the fire" (40); on the symbology of placing a cover on Banford that is surrounded by the remnants of shatteredwood, thereare Freud's assertions that indreams an overcoat, of any kind, "can very often be interpretedwith certainty March as a genital organ, and, moreover as a man's" and that "wood seems, from its imagistic connections, to stand in general for female material" {Interpretation 391; see also New Introductory Lectures 23-24). The solemn interment of Banford inMarch's dream, amid remnants of wood and the coverlet as male organ, becomes a displaced gesture of antagonism that March's conscious self cannot face; that is, the apparent solicitude of honoring a corpse (in thegesture of covering it), scarcely conceals the latentmeaning of March's repressed anger about her womanly liaison with Banford, a relationship now in pieces and overwhelmed by the dominant presence of male genitalia, embodied behind Banford by the brush and above her by the covering skin. Unlike the firstdream, when "she only remembered it as a distantmemory" (20), March This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 222 / BALBERT is upset when she awakens after her sense of anger and loss experienced in the coffin-dream. Her more intense reactions following this second dream make sense in the context of Freud's view thatwhen a dreamer imagines the death of a beloved "and is at the same time painfully affected.. .themeaning of such dreams as the content indicates, is a wish that theperson in question may die" {Interpretation 282). Even Lawrence finds agreement with Freud on the urgency of dreams that reveal "something [that] threatens us from theworld of death," for he also acknowledges that "a dream may become so vivid that it arouses the actual soul. And when a dream is so intense that it arouses the soul-then we must attend to it" {Fantasia 194). March will now attend to her aroused soul by feeling the fox's body in an intense interlude of Lawrencian communion. With Henry-as-fox virtually dead toMarch, and with Banford's influence on her temporarily diminished, March can now touch the fox's brush and feel not Henry but the profound "otherness" of another creature: "White and soft as snow his belly: white and soft as snow. She passed her hand softlydown it. And his wonderful black-glinted brush was full and frictional,wonderful. She passed her hand down this also, and quivered" (41).9 The dramatic extent of her wonder in this scene seems to justifyHenry's rumination that "partly she was so shy and virgin" (41-42), and such virginitymay suggest-despite the nearly unanimous assumption by critics of the presence of active lesbianism the limitsof her relationship with Banford. (See also Lessing, Kinkead-Weekes 691, and Harris 167.) March's sensual excitement over the lingering "soft" but "frictional" touch indicates her awareness that "the fox was a strange beast to her, incomprehensible, out of her range" (41) but also conveys the possibility of her sexual awakening and the impulse for a passionate connection to Henry. But Banford undercuts his stature by revealing his lack of sufficient preparation for the forthcomingmarriage. Watching her trudgeup the hill with an obsequious March toowilling to carry theheavier groceries, Henry begins to understand the extent towhich she remains a problem for the implementation of his wedding plans. But later he overhears March, for the first time, respond to Banford's effectively cynicism and feels "again irresistibly drawn to her,... a secret thread between him and her" (47). His rumination remains one of themost interestingpassages of psychosexual revelation in all of Lawrence's fiction: He He He hoped hoped he could he could hoped he might under her tunic. His touch her soft, creamy cheek, her strange frightened face. look in to her dilated, frightened dark eyes, quite near. even put his hand on her bosom and feel her soft breasts as he thought of that. He heart beat deep and powerful sure of her soft woman's breasts under her tunic....It seems to him...that so much softer, tenderer, more they were lovely and lovable, shut up in that tunic, than were Banford's breasts, under her soft blouse and wanted to make This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE chiffon dresses. The Banford would For all her frailty and fretfulness, have little iron breasts she could have / 223 he said to himself. tiny iron breasts. (47-48) The superb mimicry of the refracted narration, with its repetitive simplicity and elemental captures language, the exact texture of Henry's uninformed contemplation of sexual proximity.Yes, there is intimate interest inMarch here, ismore but the tone of desire of an adolescent's masturbatory view of a woman's body, almost childlike in itspre-phallic and prurient curiosity,with voyeurism and melodramatic fantasy replacing mature lust and passionate attraction.The rating systemHenry uses to compare the bodily assets ofMarch and Banford bespeaks his general unfamiliarity with women's breasts, and the adjectives employed in the comparison might easily apply to the various delectability of food in two competing restaurants.Yet Henry conveys accurate insight about the potential excitement of unleashing March's repressed heterosexuality and about the inherentdanger posed by Banford. When a confidentHenry enters the room, he senses thatMarch is aligned again with him after her angry disagreement with Banford. In the alternating symmetries and repetition-with-variation of thisnovella, Henry must perceive March's otherness in theway that she earlier experienced this element of transcendence in the fox: "She was another human being" (49), and with thatessential knowledge, so entrenched inLawrence's doctrine of the "unknown" and Freud's notion of mature love, comes the awesome realization to this boy-man that soon he must make love toMarch and take charge of the direction of theirmarriage. The recognition comes with a heavy price: "and strangely, suddenly he felt a man, no longer a youth. He felt a man, with all a man's grave weight of responsibility. A curious quietness and gravity came over his soul. He felt a man, quiet, with a littleof the heaviness ofmale destiny upon him. She was soft and accessible in her dress. The thought went home in him like an everlasting responsibility" (49). The prospect of her accessibility, and of the phallic testing to come, frightens him with its importance and inevitability. But Henry at least feels buoyed by his recognition that he has reached the edge of manhood. When Banford again asks March to do her bidding, Henry confidently asks March to deny the favor. He makes the request toMarch with "so much tenderness and proud authority" (51)-in effect,with that elusive combination of sensitivity and strength that confirms his developing maturity. As Banford begins to cry, a concerned March wishes to intervene, for she has just "thought of Banford in thewood-box for a coffin" (49). Henry patiently explains toMarch that it is appropriate to let Banford cry.When he picks up a rug (recall the coverlet in the second dream) and asks March towrap herself in it,thepsychoanalytical implications ofMarch's dream have encompassed Lawrence's artistic intuition: a man has offered March the man's symbol of the overcoat, and "she obeyed" (54). Now in the third scene in the cycle, March can feel the otherness not of the fox, not of Henry-as-fox, This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 224 / BALBERT but of Henry. She recognizes the intrinsic ability in him to help remove her from the choric call of Banford thatrings throughout thenovella. She can now respond to thatdifferent sound from the transcendent unknown: "And then she felt the deep, heavy, powerful stroke of his heart, terrible, like something from beyond. Itwas like something from beyond, something awful from outside, signaling to her. And the signal paralyzed her. It beat upon her very soul, and made her helpless. She forgot Jill [Banford]" (52). Henry's "saving" presence in her lifemust end for a while when he joins his regiment.March senses her immediate susceptibility to thewill of Banford, and as the trainmoves slowly away Henry seems tometamorphose (inMarch's eyes and on thepage) into thefigure of the fox: "Only his face was fixed in her mind: the full, ruddy,unchanging cheeks, and the straight snout of a nose, and the two eyes staring above" (57). This relapse inMarch's perspective is later confirmed in the rejection lettershe sends him. In it she reveals an inability to understand the galvanizing nature of his otherness-not realizing the very terms of her complaint amount towords of praise in Lawrence's visionary lexicon, which so privileges theunknowability of the soul: "You are an absolute stranger tome, and it seems tome you will always be one" (57). The rejection ofHenry initiates in him the next step in his recognition of Banford's danger: he now knows thatnot only is she the problem, it is clear that shemust be eliminated. Unlike themore indecisive and over-deliberate youth sketched earlier in the work, he goes straight tohis officer and impressively wins approval for a leave. The freneticbicycle trip thathe completes is a major undertaking in the rustic countryside, covering sixtymiles in four hours. He is aided in the effortby an adrenalin-rush of anger stimulated byMarch's demeaning letterand by his awareness thatBanford must not prevail. In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence devotes several pages to a metaphor that describes the human body as a bicycle, "and our individual and incomprehensible self as the rider thereof (97). It is therider's essential responsibility to listen to thedriving force of his soul and move in thedirection of "his truedynamic psychic activity,"which is "true to the individual himself, to his own peculiar soul-nature" (98). Henry stays true to his soul from the moment he sits on thebicycle, and all through the strenuous tripand theepisode of Banford's death. Justbefore Henry chops down the tree,Lawrence describes him as "perfectly still," for "in his heart he had decided her death. A terrible force seemed in him, and a power thatwas just his" (64-65). Both this eerie stillness and Henry's emotional resolve are justified by Lawrence inFantasia as he writes of the pregnant pause in the soul before the "whole self speaks," a moment when the soul "collects itself into pure silence and isolation...the mind suspends itsknowledge and waits. The psyche becomes strangely still" (155). As Henry chops down the treewith all the power, precision, and will thatmandates its felling, he reaches his most impressive stature in the novella, This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE / 225 as "his form seemed to flash up enormously tall and fearful" (65). At this point he embodies all his potential attributes of strengthand imagination; "the world seemed to stand still" (65) as he emerges from youth intomanhood. He becomes for Lawrence, if only in this one scene, the graphic illustration of his doctrine that "only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements and become purely himself {Fantasia 76). It is an effective and justified hatred thatHenry brings to the killing of Banford, and in Lawrence's prescriptive psychology, he is broadly acting on the just dictates of his soul: "The only rule is do what you really impulsively wish to do. But always act on your own responsibility, sincerely. And have the courage of your own strong emotion" {Fantasia 92). Amid the impulsive furyof his act also exists thepoised shrewdness evident when he asks Banford tomove away from the area of the tree's possible fall. He knows she will not listen to him, and his futile request protects him from any alleged malicious motive or act of negligence. Henry's killing of Banford embodies a more abrupt, brutal, and equally efficient stalking of prey than his tracking of the fox over the several minutes he requires to implement his single-minded shooting of the animal. Part of what makes Banford's death so shocking is that itreflectshow successfully Henry has compressed all his instinctual power and hunter's knowledge into a murderous objective that is carried through in a matter of seconds, a span of time sufficientfor him to attain the "maximum self described inFantasia. In the stark reality of the novella, Henry already has primed himself for thekill during the controlled passion of his bicycle trip, and itonly remains for him to encounter the fortuitousbut strangely inevitable circumstances of the nearly fallen tree. There is a further irony in the scene that confirms Lawrence's enthusiastic reading of Frazer, who outlines the ancient belief in the animate lifeof trees; such a credo is similar to the vitalism displayed by Lawrence inhis entire chapter about the souls of trees inFantasia of the Unconscious, a work Lawrence proudly calls his "tree book" (86). Frazer writes: "Trees are endowed with shades or souls, and whoever fells one of themmust die on the spot, or at least live an invalid for the rest of his days" (129). Frazer also quotes another scholar who uncovers the old belief that a tree may give a "kind of shriek.. .or groan.. .that may be heard a mile off when it is felled (130). In Lawrence's fictionalized appropriation of these taboos, it is the human embodiment of anti-life energy that is killed on the spot rather than the destroyer of the tree; the shriek emerges not from the tree-which was dead before itwas felled-but fromBanford's beloved March, who "gave a wild shriek thatwent far,fardown the afternoon" (65), as shewitnesses a death that resolves her own doubts about commitment with terrifyingfinality. Not all her doubts, to be sure. Henry wins and marries her, but "he had not yet got her" (66). As the novella's coda insists, instead ofMarch accepting the principles in Fantasia of the Unconscious that "waiting and following" the lead of herman "is inevitable, that itmust be so" (199), she has elected to This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions / BALBERT 226 strive forwhat Lawrence in The Fox regards (with unqualified sexism) as the willful dead-end for any relationship: an attempt by thewoman to energetically seek "happiness for herself and thewhole world" (69). Lawrence's narration, reproducing the perspective of March, claims that a fatigued March "would never strain for love and happiness any more" and that "she would leave her destiny to theboy-But then theboy" (69). The reiterative and dismissive noun of "boy" is the same termBanford used to diminish his stature. Itmakes understandable sense thatMarch cannot fully yield to him, that she cannot "give herself without defenses and become submerged in him," forMarch commits Lawrence's version the unpardonable of sin, is not man and Henry enough to combat it: "She wanted to see, to know, to understand' (69). As so asserts Lawrence with essentially characteristic he wants chauvinism, the wife to follow the husband, who is described as "the pioneer who goes on ahead, beyond her" {Fantasia 199). March compromises the simplicity of such a prioritywith her own more equitable desire "to be alone: with him at her side" (69). After her intense entanglement with Banford, she is tempted to let her own convictions lapse with Henry and thus yield to his notions of precedence ("there was such rest in the boy," 70), but in the end he remains forhermore boy thanman. March correctly senses thathe lacks the force and maturity thatmight make her accede to theLawrencian concept of marriage: "she would have the reins of her own life between her own hands. She would be an independent woman to the last" (70). As now and March Henry Lawrence's through at this impasse, arrive doctrine rather the narration-clearly than Henry's adds that "she would not sleep: no never" (70). stalemate them by moving across the ocean: refracted conviction-regretfully Henry hopes to solve their "He waits to go west. He was aching almost in torment to leave England, to go west, to takeMarch away" (70). Henry momentarily resembles the pioneering male inFantasia of the Unconscious who "wants to break away through the old world into the new" (198). He also sounds a lot like the angry Lawrence of 1921, who carries a similar antagonism his about own country: "I do so want to get out-out of England-really out of Europe....I feel caged somehow-" {LettersHI 312-13) March may follow him west, but not with confidence in their relocation or pride in her husband's ability to control their fate. Henry has not established what Lawrence requires as the basic requirement "Make her know she's got to believe you stand for. But before you can do for the man in any marriage: in you again, and in the deep purpose that, you've got to stand for some deep purpose" {Fantasia 198). This work concludes so tentatively because its ending directly reflects both the lack of purposeful direction inHenry, and the lingering regrets and guilt feltbyMarch over thedeath of Banford. Recall that Lawrence revised the 1918 storyof "The Fox" into the novella just days after finishing revisions ofFantasia of theUnconscious, with itsfinal pages focusing on the extreme importance of themale's "deep purpose." A lingering question This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions / 227 D.H.LAWRENCE remains: why would Lawrence write a substantial fiction that concludes with such discomforting stasis, with such an unefficacious assertion by Henry of doctrines so central to Lawrence's vision? Any consideration of that issue requires some investigation of Lawrence's life and marriage during the years between 1917 and 1921. In October of 1917 the Lawrences suffered a brutal indignity when British authorities, who suspected them of espionage, searched their cottage in Cornwall; the next day, on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence, they were expelled from the region. In themonths before this unsettling eviction, an already preoccupied Frieda experienced bouts of anger, depression, and jealousy during interludes of loneliness while Lawrence spent extensive time working in the fields with his close friend,William Henry Hocking, and often visiting with a young American, Esther Andrews. Biographers have speculated about a possible affair during thesemonths between Frieda and Cecil Gray, a music critic and composer as well as a devout admirer of Lawrence's wife; such a liaison seems likely in lightof the vulnerability of Frieda's position in 1917, the ease of opportunity for such intimacy given Lawrence's frequent absence, and the evidence of numerous disagreements between Lawrence and Gray after the alleged intimacy. (See Kinkead-Weekes 404-05 and Meyers 206-07.) Frieda was temperamentally unguarded with Lawrence about her extra-marital conquests (e.g., a proud confession about Hobson in 1912), and perhaps Lawrence's later affairwith Rosalind Baynes in the summer of 1920 reflects, in part, a declaration by him of the freedom to respond in-kind to his knowledge of Frieda's infidelity. When theArmistice was signed in 1918, Frieda's concerns about the welfare of her children,mother, and Germany were exacerbated by the public celebrations over her home country's defeat and by the strained relations with Lawrence during the previous eighteen months. To Lawrence's considerable displeasure, Frieda did not accompany him in lateNovember on another trip toLondon, preferring to remain at theHermitage. By December 10,Lawrence returned toMountain Cottage alone, where he finished the first version of The Fox\ a later draft of this short tale (compressed even further)would be in 1920. (See also Ruderman published in Huchinson's Story Magazine "Tracking Lawrence's Fox") Mark Kinkead-Weekes persuasively argues that this 1918 short version of the The Fox was directly influenced by Lawrence's disputes with and separation from Frieda (484). Kinkead-Weekes regards this first version of The Fox, composed by Lawrence amid considerable personal and marital turmoil, as "far less aggressive" than the later novella (484), for neither Banford nor the fox is killed, and Banford even helps to facilitate the planning for thewedding ofMarch and Henry. But Lawrence's capable biographer ignores the most important sense in which this tale is more aggressive than the longer 1921 work. In 1918 a betrayed and angrily This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions / BALBERT 228 motivated Lawrence feltno doubt thathis character,Henry, can prevail. Itwas as ifLawrence's accumulated discontent with Frieda, combined with his own changing vision about male-female relations, is crystallized in a shortfictional work that in its very brevity still contains all the assertive and unequivocal language about Henry's demeanor and decisiveness that are lacking in the more ambitious novella threeyears later. The strengthand confidence evident in the voice of Henry and the narrator stand out in theirunambiguous authority in this 1918 version: "March felt the same knowing, domineering spark leap out of his eyes..." (43); "He knew he could make her obey his will" (45); "Without knowing, she obeyed him" (47); "But she did what he wanted" (47); "Both women were at his mercy" (47); "The women were at his mercy" (47). Kinkead-Weekes remains correct, however, about the important direction of the tale, in which Lawrence stresses the need of "powerful malehood to make its counterpart fully female....'The Fox' privately rebukes, in imagined assertion of maleness and its value, thewoman who breaks orbit" (484-485). The Henry Grenfel of the novella lacks the confidence in his "maleness" that Lawrence had assigned to him in 1918. Three years later,when the Lawrences returned to Italy and Fontana Vecchia in the fall of 1921, he was greeted with a litany of bad news. There were changes demanded by publishers for references inWomen In Love because ofHeseltine's continued threatof legal action, rejection notices on Lawrence's manuscript of Aaron's Rod, excerpts fromSea and Sardinia published without his knowledge or permission, and disappointing reviews of Psychoanalysis and theUnconscious. By mid-October Lawrence's understandably embattled mood was informinghis work in termsof his writing's doctrinal emphasis and narrative tone. He finished revising Fantasia of the Unconscious, adding a petulant Foreword that is often witty but pervasively belittling of his readers, and inwhich the typingof the gender roles ofmale-leader and female-follower becomes even more emphatic in revision. After he finished themajor changes toThe Fox during thenext fewweeks (byNovember 5th), he favorably received the invitation fromMabel Dodge to go west and visit Taos, New Mexico. By November 16th he finished revising the short tale into the novella, but that productive fewweeks may have been affected by Lawrence's discovery of still another of Frieda's affairs. This most recent speculation (dating to 1990) on Frieda's sex life involves rumors about intimacy between her and a young man of twenty-four, Peppino D'Allura, which relevant evidence and circumstance suggestmight have taken place between October 21 and December 15-corresponding precisely to the period of Lawrence's creation of the tentatively-concluding novella of The Fox immediately after the ideologically unequivocal revisions of Fantasia of the Unconscious. (See Kinkead-Weekes 653-64.) Might not the uncertainty and at the end of the novella reflectLawrence's fictionalized expression fatigue of persistent failure-now bitterly corroborated by Frieda's latest betrayal-to This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE / 229 convince his wife of her need to support him loyally and without any threat to the "passionate purpose" of his work? Might itnot also reflecthis growing intimations, spurred by his chronic chest congestion and near-fatal flu in 1919, of his own inability to satisfyFrieda inbed? There exists compelling evidence thatLawrence's total impotence dates from an illness inMexico in 1925, but might not a weakened Lawrence have faced periodic intimations of this problem in earlier years?10 And finally,might not the anger and frustration of his relationship with Frieda in the fall of 1921 inform the portrait of Henry Grenfel's fearful contemplation of sex with robustMarch? Or perhaps the intimations are even more dramatic. The tepid passions at the end of The Fox might also reveal, in the inevitable manner of theFreudian unconscious, and in the context of his increasing attention after the war to themes of male leadership and Blutbruderschaft, over-fond recollections of his friendship with William Henry Hocking enacted not far from the setting of The Fox. It is interesting thatwhen Henry is first aware of the sexual configuration ofMarch's body, its appeal to him is phrased in an unfeminine metaphor that recalls expressions of admiration by Lawrence of the youthful demeanor and physicality ofHocking: "her figure, like a graceful young man's, piqued him" (23).n Speculation has persisted for years over whether any sexual episode actually occurred between Lawrence and Hocking, and I tend to agree with Kinkead-Weekes's judicious and fair-minded discussion that such a consummated connection was unlikely. But few critics dispute the strong homosexual elements in Lawrence's inclinations, and such an affinity in him returns this essay towhere itbegan: to a concept of dream interpretation that must take precedence over Lawrence's asserted disbelief in such a probing process. In a letter to Katherine Mansfield in 1919 (between the first and second versions of The Fox), Lawrence writes: said you were cross with me, that I repulsed you. I'm sure I didn't. of getting Jack and you and F. and me in a square seems Jack. But you I am sure of-I was ever since Cornwall, save great-especially Frieda The complication for Jack-and if you must go his way, and if he will never really come our But things will resolve themselves. I dreamed such a vivid dream way-well! of you last night. I dreamed you came to Cromford, and stayed there.... It was looked at the stars and they were night, and very starry. We different. All were different, and I, who was looking for he is rising now, was very puzzled you, because by these Then thick, close brilliant new constellations. suddenly we saw one planet, so beautiful, a large, fearful, strong star, that we were both pierced by it, for a second. Then I said, "That's Jupiter"-but I felt that itwasn't possessed Jupiter-at least not the everyday Jupiter. the constellations to show Orion, Ask on one's Jung or Freud soul. I wish itwas about it?Never! spring for us all. It was {Letters HI a star that blazed 343) This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions for a second 230 / BALBERT disapproval of psychoanalytic methodology once again remains unconvincing in light of the accessible clues in the dream.What must emerge from the dream is the announcement of his frustrating failure to convince Lawrence's Katherine and JackMurry of the viability of the close male friendship that Lawrence depicts inWomen in Love and several other fictions, a theme he will develop more fully in the leadership novels of the 1920s. That "beautiful, large, fearful, strong star" that "pierces" and "possesses" both Katherine and Lawrence sounds very much like the coded expression of a sexual fantasy about themale thirdpartymentioned elsewhere in the letter. Later still, "Ask Jung or Freud about? Never!" There is no reason to ask them anything, but not for the reason Lawrence asserts. Like thepalimpsestic textureof The Fox, the evidence of influence,doctrine, and desire remains inscribed nomatter how many erasures, revisions, his life and art. or protestations Lawrence makes on the rich text of TRINITY UNIVERSITY NOTES 1 For an excellent summary of various perspectives on this novella by a wide range of the most persuasive and critics, see the balanced discussion by Harris 163, 284-85. Among 176-77, Moynahan 196-209, and admiring discussions of The Fox are Leavis 256-65, Hough Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence 48-70. For the critical opinion that variously regards the work as or unconvincing, see Gregor incoherent, mean-spirited, 163-70, Ford 101-02, 10-21, Harris 186-98, Rossi 265-78, Draper and Millett 265 provide what In addition, against women. and Allen 109 as specifically Davis 565-71, and Wolkenfeld 345-52. Simpson 70-73, Davis, I feel to be reductive readings of thework as an unqualified attack while Harris properly acknowledges Gurko 178-82, Moynahan, in The Fox, the approaches of emphasizing mythic dimensions these critics do not deal with the pervasive influence of Frazer on thework, or with the totemic patterns of primitive belief that inform much of Lawrence's organization of the story. There exists no psychoanalytical treatment of the work except for a short essay by Bergler, and his criticism is exclusively concerned with establishing (too simply, inmy view) a formulaic reading of what he regards as a prototypical lesbian relationship between March and Banford. 2 Among the critics who consider the important ambivalence of the ending, see Brayfield 'The Fox' and Verga's 'The She Wolf" 53 41-51, Fulmer 75-82, and Ruderman, "Lawrence's 65. 3 For an intelligent and focused discussion of the "nightmarish" aspects of these years for Lawrence, see Delany 265-380 and Squires and Talbot 173-249. But themost sustained and brilliant achievement in integrating Lawrence's life and work is unquestionably by Kinkead in the relevant section (346-673) of his comprehensive volume of biography. Although Weekes I take occasional issue in this essay with some of his conclusions, my admiration for his brilliant and thoroughly professional scholarship is unqualified; I trust it is evident inmy own analysis of The Fox how much I have benefited by themany rich areas for investigation that his research stimulated me to undertake. 4 For a more extensive consideration of Lawrence's views on the instinctual imperative and on his notions of "otherness" and "the unknown," see Balbert, "Lady Chatterley's Lover to The Deer Park" and "Pan and theAppleyness of Landscape." See also Letters II470. 5 Impressive exceptions here are Vickery, "Myth and Ritual" 79-82 and Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence 52. See also Vickery's Literary Impact (322). This content downloaded from 128.114.163.7 on Mon, 30 Sep 2013 05:07:15 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions D.H.LAWRENCE / 231 6 On this issue of Lawrence's frequent use of blackness leading to transcendence, and its relation to his style and ideology, see Balbert, "Scorched Ego," "Ten Men," and D. H. Lawrence 193-98. (chapters two and five). See also Lawrence's "Morality and theNovel" 7 Freud and Lawrence are in surprising agreement about the totemic and erotic terror that is often embodied in dreams of wild animals. Lawrence discusses a nightmare about horses in and concludes The Rainbow with a vignette of Ursula's dream-like experience with the Fantasia, horses. He describes a male's relevant dream as evidence that "the great sensual male activity is the greatest menace" dream (Fantasia 9) for the dreamer, and it is reasonable to see March's of the fox as a female variant of that pattern. 8 See Daleski's use of the flame metaphor. I discuss still unsurpassed study of Lawrence's theLawrencian concept of "forging" in chapter one ofD. H. Lawrence. In relation toLawrence's graphic imagery of the elongated brush and its position near the anus, I am not unaware of the fascination both with anal eroticism, especially in The Rainbow ample evidence of Lawrence's and Women in Love, and with the resonant symbology of the "signifying" buttocks, memorably the prominent brush of an employed in his essay, "Adolph," a short work that also emphasizes animal. But against the conceivable argument that I have psychoanalyzed March's dream as if she were a real person rather than a fictional character, I call attention to the significant extent to which Lawrence's characteristically prophetic and "intrusive" art militates against such a danger; that is, Lawrence's visionary beliefs often graphically intrude on the individuality of his characters, permitting excellent critics of his work (such as Kinkead-Weekes, Ruderman, and Vickery) the galvanizing liberty of the kind of dream analysis I undertake in this essay. Since an orthodox psychoanalytical approach to images inMarch's dreams sheds at least as much light on the obsessions of the novelist as on the fictional character, such interpretive methodological "doubling" remains a welcome byproduct of any well-integrated, psychobiographical on Lawrence's life and art. 9 This passage offers striking resemblance in its tone, phrasing, and meaning and intimate awareness of Connie Chatterley of the "otherness" of Mellors and of beauty of his phallus. 10 This issue of Lawrence's sexual difficulties is examined more fully inBalbert, speculation to the awed the frictive "Scorched 399-401, Kinkead-Weekes 577, Meyers 204-07, 331-32, and Spilka 70-95. There is a compelling fact in Henry's recent history that contributes to his palpable immaturity, and it is involvement in the war. He mentions that he just engrained in a pathetic aspect of England's came "from Salonika really" (15), and as noted in the admirably meticulous "Explanatory Notes" apparatus of the novella, this Greek port "was the scene of a rather futile Allied expedition in 1915. Between October 1916 and the end of the war, 600,000 men, 200,000 of them British," were interned at Salonika by a Bulgarian army that, other than enforcing this internment, had no other significant participation in the war (239). Henry also mentions that he "hadn't heard for three or four years" anything about his grandfather, a period of time that corresponds to the internment at Salonika (14). Thus the young man's role in the war was static, limited, and conspicuously lacking in combat or travel experience, and thus provided little opportunity to develop any confidence in the masculine authority that is often the byproduct of the varied challenges accumulated as a solider. It is as if time has stood still for him at a critical point in his post-adolescent maturation, and it is then that he encounters March and Banford. 11 For more detailed accounts, speculative as well as factual, of Lawrence's relationship with William see Kinkead-Weekes 379-81, Meyers 213-14, and Delany Henry Hocking, 309-15. Ego," WORKS CITED Allen, Walter. The Short Story inEnglish. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1981. in Sexual Identity and Baibert, Peter. D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essay Feminist Misreading. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. ?. "From Lady Chatterley's Lover to The Deer Park: Lawrence, Mailer, and the Dialectic of Erotic Risk." Studies in theNovel 22.1 (1990): 67-81. ?. "Pan and theAppleyness of Landscape: Dread of the Procreative Body in "The Princess." Studies in theNovel 34 (2002): 282-302. 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