Men, women and beasts: D.H. Lawrence on animals

I

In a famous letter of January 17, 1913, the young Lawrence exalted animal instinct over human reason: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.”  He was fascinated by animals and birds, and many of his essays, novels, poems and stories have animals in their titles and major scenes.( 1)   He tested the truth of all writing by emphasising the centres of feeling in his heart and guts, and stating “I must feel it here .”  As his hero Lord Byron asked of great literature: “is it not life , is it not the thing ?”

Comparisons of human beings to animals are usually degrading and enemies are called “dirty dogs” or “filthy swine”.  But Lawrence considered animals superior: he liked non-human creatures best.  He thought that men and women are miserable when they repress their true sexual feelings; that always-alert animals express intense emotions, and can teach us how to act spontaneously and acknowledge our sexual impulses.  He believed that humans should live as intensely as animals and learn from them to make “weird, wordless” feral screams.  The tubercular invalid repeatedly, and perhaps too insistently, emphasised passionate experience and sexual rather than intellectual understanding. 

Lawrence’s animals play an important part in his work by acting like his fictional heroes.  They also explain, by analogy, the behaviour and motives of his human characters.

His ideal heroes are sensual primitive men, dark-skinned and violently alive.  In a striking image in Aaron’s Rod that recalls his own turbulent marriage to Frieda von Richthofen, he compares sex in marriage to “two eagles in mid-air grappling, whirling.”  He identifies with animals, penetrates their consciousness and imagines their mysterious inner life.  By portraying their visceral ferocity, he offers new insights about how animals think and feel.  In his first novel, The White Peacock, the gamekeeper Annable exclaims, “Be a good animal, true to your instincts.”  But animals don’t always provide the answer to human dilemmas and often lead to violent conflicts.

II

In the early 1920s Lawrence spent two years on his ranch in the high Rocky Mountains of New Mexico that brought him into close, and sometimes cruel, contact with domestic animals.  His reverence for animals deserted him, and contradicted his usual reverence and awe, when they did not obey.  When riding his horse Azul (Blue), whose hide was later made into a shoulder bag owned by Dorothy Brett, Lawrence was absolutely fearless, never fell off, and always had courage and willpower.  But his neighbour Rachel Hawk criticised his riding.  She told me that he was selfish, rode too fast and did not consider the strain on the horse’s legs when going downhill.  She thought he should have been thrown and taught a lesson, but he never lost control.

Lawrence was furious when his black cow Susan and his dog Pips followed their natural instincts and refused to listen to their master.  Susan often escaped into the mountains and he had to ride Azul out to search for her.  Though he liked to complain about Susan and exaggerate the trouble she caused by delaying the milking until nine at night, he always knew where to find her.  He also paid gentle tribute to her (with a sly hint at his relations with Frieda): “She knows my touch and she goes very still and peaceful, being milked.  I, too, I know her smell and her warmth and her feel.  And I share some of her cowy silence, when I milk her.”

When Lawrence’s little, black, snub-nosed, French bull terrier Pips went into heat and became “sex alive”, she ignored his commands and ran off with a big Airedale.  He thought she had “appropriated” his emotions, felt betrayed and was horrified by her indiscriminate love-making.  He finally found the dog, cursed her and screamed, “so there you are you dirty, false little bitch,” then struck her with all his might and knocked her to the floor.  Pips ran out of the cabin and into the snow, but Lawrence caught up with her.  She refused his orders to come home; he kicked her and hurled her to the ground.  His Danish friend prevented him from doing more harm to the dog, and they almost came to blows.  Lawrence’s brutal treatment of Pips echoed his physically violent quarrels when trying to dominate Frieda.  He couldn’t control Susan and Pips in real life, but converted his frustration and rage into heroes who tame the animals in his fiction.

Lawrence repeated his credo about animals in his late, intriguingly titled essay “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine” (1925): “The primary way, in our existence, to get vitality is to absorb it from living creatures lower than ourselves.”  His description of the spiny beast reflected in the moonlight, its devilish quality, awkward movement, odd resemblance to a beetle and bear, ungainly size and disgusting nature is his most brilliant evocation of a primeval creature that both attracted and repelled him:

The animal had raised all its hairs and bristles, so that by the light of the moon it seemed to have a tall, swaying, moonlit aureole arching its back as it went.  That seemed curiously fearsome, as if the animal were emitting itself demon-like on the air.  It waddled very slowly, with its white spiky spoon-tail steering flat, behind the round bear-like mound of its back.  It had a lumbering, beetle’s, squalid motion, unpleasant. . . . He slithered podgily down again, and waddled away with the same bestial, stupid motion of that white-spiky repulsive spoon-tail.  He was as big as a middle-sized pig: or more like a bear.

III

Lawrence’s works spark to life when animals appear and dominate the scene.  His fictional characters often come into conflict with animals when they try to connect with them and enter their worlds or fail to absorb their vitality and knowledge.  At the end of The Rainbow (1915), the wild horses threatening Ursula Brangwen represent her deepest emotional and sexual feelings, which she lacked in her love affair with the mechanical and domineering soldier Anton Skrebensky.  During a thunderous rainstorm, their iron shoes intensify the sound and power of the animals: “She was aware of the great flash of hoofs, a bluish, iridescent flash surrounding a hollow of darkness.  Large, large seemed the bluish, iridescent flash of the hoof-iron, large as a halo of lightning round the knotted darkness of the flanks.  Like circles of lightning came the flash of hoofs out of the powerful flanks.”  Confined in a wild wood, Ursula can’t escape and is threatened by the mad stampede: “Cruelly, they swerved and crashed by on her left hand.  She saw the fierce flanks crinkled and as yet inadequate, the great hoofs flashing bright as yet only brandished about her, and one by one the horses crashed by, intent, working themselves up. . . They stirred, they moved uneasily, they settled their uneasy flanks into one group, one purpose.  They were up against her”—and represent strength and danger.  

Ursula is both frightened and ecstatic; she is afraid of them, but also wants to join the herd and absorb their power.  The experience is orgasmic, greater than what she had experienced with her lover: “Her heart was gone, her limbs were dissolved, she was dissolved like water.  All the hardness and looming power was in the massive body of the horse-group. . . . She sat there, spent, time and the flux of change passed away from her, she lay as if unconscious upon the bed of the stream.”  The intense equine encounter reveals that her affair with Anton Skrebensky was a miserable failure.  The vital experience teaches her that he “had never become finally real.  In the week of passionate ecstasy he had been with her in her desire, she had created him for the time being.  But in the end he had failed and broken down.”  She miscarries his child, and receives his cablegram informing her that he’s married another woman and sailed to India.

But she is rewarded and illuminated at the end of the novel with a sight of the rainbow.  This symbol of human potential, which grows out of her negative experiences just as the rainbow comes after the flood, includes all the essential elements of the novel: the soil, dances, harvest, love and especially the rampaging horses: “The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven.”  The regenerative vision releases her emotions, and promises the sexual fulfillment and emotional salvation she eventually achieves in Lawrence’s sequel Women in Love .

IV

Women in Love (1920) has four superb animal scenes—with horse, cat, Highland cattle and  rabbit—that express the major themes of Lawrence’s best novel.  The conflict in the “Coal-Dust” chapter was inspired by Count Vronsky’s careless destruction of his mare Frou-Frou during a steeplechase, which foreshadows the abandonment of his lover Anna Karenina, who commits suicide in her novel.  In Lawrence’s book the coal-mine owner Gerald Crich cruelly forces his high-bred Arab mare to confront the mechanical colliery train at a railway crossing as Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen observe him with horrified fascination.  Gerald’s treatment of the terrified horse symbolises his exploitation of the workers in his mines and his strong-willed domination of Gudrun: “The mare did not like it.  She began to wince away, as if hurt by the unknown noise.  But Gerald pulled her back and held her head to the gate. . . . ‘The fool!’ cried Ursula loudly.  ‘Why doesn’t he ride away till it’s gone by?’ ”  The mare continues to revolt as Gerald shows off his power and retains control: “Suddenly her fore-feet struck out, as she convulsed herself utterly away from the horror.  Back she went and the two girls clung to each other, feeling she must fall backwards on top of him.  But he leaned forward, his face shining with fixed amusement, and at last he brought her down. . . . It made Gudrun faint with poignant dizziness, which seemed to penetrate to her heart.”  

As Gerald digs in his spurs and the mare starts to bleed along her flanks, Gudrun (unlike her sister), is riveted by the violent spectacle and has an orgasmic swoon: “Gudrun looked and saw the trickles of blood on the sides of the mare, and she turned white.  And then on the very wound the bright spurs came down, pressing relentlessly.  The world reeled and passed into nothingness for Gudrun, she could not know any more.”  She participates in the horrific episode, and is both attracted to and excited by the demonic rider and frightened horse.

In the second episode Rupert Birkin invites Ursula to tea and explains his almost impossible-to-achieve ideal, star-like love: “What I want is a strange conjunction with you,” he said quietly, “not meeting and mingling—you are quite right:—but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings: –-as the stars balance each other.”  At the same time Rupert’s cat Mino (short for the Italian Micciotto, a big tom cat) assumes the dominant role with a wild female cat that’s come in from the woods.  Effectively repeating “crouching-crouched,” “fluffy,” “statelily” and “wild”, Lawrence writes: 

A crouching, fluffy, brownish-grey cat was stealing up the side of the fence.  The Mino walked statelily up to her, with manly nonchalance.  She crouched before him and pressed herself on the ground in humility, a fluffy soft outcast, looking up at him with wild eyes that were green and lovely as great jewels.  He looked casually down on her.  So she crept a few inches further, proceeding on her way to the back door, crouching in a wonderful, soft, self-obliterating manner, and moving like a shadow.

He, going statelily on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of her face.  She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience.

Ursula asks, “why does he do that?” and calls Mino a horrid bully.  Rupert then justifies the cat’s behaviour that is so like his own: “He is not a bully.  He is only insisting to the poor stray that she shall acknowledge him as a sort of fate, her own fate: because you can see she is fluffy and promiscuous as the wind.  I am with him entirely.  He wants superfine stability.”  Mino teaches the reluctant Ursula how Rupert thinks she should behave, and at the end of this lesson in male dominance and female submission they declare their mutual love.

In the third scene Gudrun and Ursula boldly sing, dance and try to enchant with “voluptuous ecstasy” an audience of shaggy, horned and dangerous cattle.  Lawrence sparks the animals to life with sharply observed details: “On the left stood a little cluster of Highland cattle, vividly coloured and fleecy in the evening light, their horns branching into the sky, pushing forward their muzzles inquisitively, to know what it was all about.  Their eyes glittered through their tangle of hair, their naked nostrils were full of shadow.
. . . ‘I’m frightened,’ cried Ursula, in a pathetic voice, watching the group of sturdy, short cattle, that stood with their knees planted, and watched with their dark, wicked eyes.”  The sisters could not rescue the Arab mare, but Gerald and Rupert suddenly appear, cry out and frighten off the cattle—another impressive proof of male superiority and strength.

Then, to outperform Gerald, Gudrun charges the beasts like a toreador: “in a sudden motion, she lifted her arms and rushed sheer upon the long-horned bullocks, in shuddering irregular runs, pausing for a second and looking at them, then lifting her hands and running forward with a flash, till they ceased pawing the ground, and gave way, snorting with terror, lifting their heads from the ground and flinging themselves away, galloping off into the evening, becoming tiny in the distance, and still not stopping.”  Assuming the dominant role and taking on their power, Gudrun frightens the frightening bullocks and makes them, almost magically, disappear.  Gerald asks, “Why do you want to drive them mad?”  He warns her that they can be nasty when provoked and tells her that they gored a cow to death the other day.  She defiantly boasts that she’s not afraid of him or his cattle.  To express her triumph, she slaps Gerald’s face with the back of her hand (as Mino had slapped the female cat), and he threatens to strike the last blow against her.

Gerald’s younger sister Winnie has a pet black-and-white rabbit, named Bismarck for the powerful chancellor who united Germany after the 1871 victory in the Franco-Prussian War.  But the traditionally gentle creature is the fiercest of all the four animals, and the only one that wounds the humans.  Gerald warns Gudrun that this strong rabbit is a fearful kicker and awful scratcher.  When they approach the cage, it “exploded in a wild rush around the hutch.”  When Gudrun lifts it up, it “lunges wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears.”  In their struggle, her wrists are badly scored by the claws of the beast and, as if absorbed from the animal, “a heavy cruelty welled up in her.”  Gerald, remembering his bloody mare, now shares her cruelty and her blood. 

As Gerald tames the powerful and explosive rabbit with a sharp blow on the neck, it tears his arm with a final convulsion, then cowers and skulks under his arm. Gerald’s face gleams with a triumphant smile as he rescues Gudrun from the rabbit just as he’d saved her from the horned cattle.  The rabbit’s scream seems to have “torn the veil of her consciousness . . . and she knew she was revealed.”  They compare their sexually suggestive red gashes on their white skins, and are bound together by the bloody wounds and by the “obscene recognition” of what will become their destructive love affair.  Gerald tames the horses, cattle and rabbit in the same way as he plans to dominate Gudrun.   He and Rupert Birkin use animals to teach the sisters to submit to male power, and their resistance leads to violent conflict.  All four emotionally intense animal scenes paradoxically repel and also unite the lovers.

V

In Lawrence’s collection of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1922)—a series of intense visual perceptions of creatures from elephant to mosquito that reveal their inner being and essential nature—he connects a fish, snake, tortoise and bat to human feelings.  In “Fish” he first describes and identifies with the swimmer, then pulls it out of the water and condemns himself, with Christian imagery, for killing it.  Directly addressing the submarine fish, he calls it “Aqueous, subaqueous, / Submerged / And wave-thrilled.”  The fish has colour, “water wetly on fire in the grates of its gills,” as the oxygenated water flows in and out of its flashing scales and the fish’s “curvetting bits of tin in the evening light.”  It knows fear when the fierce pike threatens, but manages to escape the peril and has the watery “element under one, like a lover.”  

Though the fish swims in shoals it remains forever apart.  But its greatest enemy is the poet Lawrence.  Angling in an Austrian lake, he “suddenly pulled a gold-and-greenish lucent fish from below” and sees the “horror-tilted eye” of the captured creature.  He feels guilty, but while handling it he absorbs the fish’s power and proves his superiority to it.  Finally, in a rather far-fetched comparison, he connects the dead fish to the crucified God.  The Greek word for fish, 

ICHTHUS, is an acronym that stands for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.”

In “Snake” Lawrence, torn between hostility and reverence, contrasts the vitality of the serpent with his own shameful behavior.  His narrative opens with a dramatic meeting near the smoking Mount Etna in Sicily, the most active volcano in Europe: “A snake came to my water-trough / On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, / To drink there.”  But Lawrence surrenders ownership of the water, and waits for the snake to drink first and finish peacefully.  The snake, absorbing subterranean power, “trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down / over the edge of the  stone trough. . . . Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth.”  Lawrence then explains his motives—cowardice, perversity, humility and fear—for not killing the venomous golden reptile.  Well-watered, the snake withdraws into the sexually suggestive “horrid black hole” in the earth wall.  Roused at last Lawrence, keeping a safe distance, throws a log at the snake but misses him, and stares with fascination at his “convulsed undignified haste.”  He immediately regrets his accursed “educated” behaviour, and thinks of the albatross killed by the sailors in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner . Lawrence feels he’s missed his chance to connect with the king of the underworld, the lord of life, and must expiate his petty reaction.  In the conflict between thought and action, the snake brings out the worst and then the repentant best in him.

The title and tone of “Tortoise Gallantry” are ironic as Lawrence compares the sexual drives of man and reptile.  The tortoise, in fact, is not at all gallant but brutally direct in his sexual assault.  He grabs the female’s vulnerable crinkled leg, and drags her toward him in cold blood and with an awful persistency.  Yet he’s the doomed one who fails to break out of his silent isolation and—like an ideal Platonic union—complete his “partial being.”  As the female, perhaps unaware of his intentions, slowly moves away, he’s “driven against her with a bang, like a bird flying in the dark against a window.” Driven by a mysterious inner force, the “Stiff, gallant, irascible, crooked-legged reptile” (its rhythm echoing Robert Burns’ “Wee, sleekit, cowrin tim’rous beastie”) is forced to crash roughly against her.  Lawrence connects the human to the lowly tortoise and, since they share the same drives and desires, sympathises with its plight.

In the contemplative “Bat”, Lawrence at sunset observes the flying monsters above the Arno River and beneath the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.  At first, he mistakenly thinks they are swallows, and the late discovery that the “serrated wings against the sky” are bats gives him a fearful shock.  The bats, associated with rats, rabies, blind men, werewolves and vampires, swooping madly with vindictive squeals, arouse “an uneasy creeping in his scalp”. In a brilliant simile, he notes that bats have “Wings like bits of umbrella”, which flap as they open and close.  Lawrence is repelled by them, “Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags / And grinning in their sleep.”  He concludes, surprisingly, with an obscure allusion to the cultural differences in East and West: “In China the bat is a symbol of happiness.”  In Chinese fu , the word for bat, has the same sound as the word for happiness—though Asian bats may be equally repellent.  Lawrence behaves shamefully with the fish and the snake, identifies with the sexually frustrated tortoise and exorcises his fear of the bat.

VI

In Lawrence’s story “The Fox” (1922), as the title suggests, the animal has a realistic and symbolic role.  Two lesbians, Banford and March, are running a farm just after the war.  But their cattle and hens are unable to reproduce, and a demonic fox carries off the fowl.  March, the more masculine but less dominant woman, tries to shoot the fox, but cannot kill him when the animal stares her down in mystical-magical eye-to-eye combat: “she lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox.  He was looking up at her.  His chin was pressed down, and his eyes were looking up.  They met her eyes.  And he knew her.  She was spell-bound—she knew he knew her.  So he looked into her eyes, and her soul failed her.”

Into this troubled ménage comes the spellbinding, foxy-looking Cornish soldier, Henry Grenfel (the surname of a poet killed in the war).  He intrusively declares “there wants a man about the place”, moves in and makes himself useful.  The fox, meanwhile, continues to dominate March’s unconscious, to represent and reveal (with the biblical meaning of “knew her”) her sexual desires.  On the night Henry arrives she dreams that the fox “bit her wrist, and at the same instant, as she drew back, the fox, turning round to bound away, whisked his [phallic] brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain.”

Grenfel enters into a subtle battle both to wrest the male role from March and to win her from Banford.  He kills the fox, his rival, absorbs its feral power and hangs the pelt upside down.  Like the scene with the rabbit Bismarck, the lovers come together and experience excitement through the sexual power of the animal.  March, as if stroking her lover, reenacts her sexy dream about the fox: “She passed her hand down [its belly].  And his wonderful black-glinted brush was full and frictional, wonderful.  She passed her hand down this also, and quivered.  Time after time she took the full fur of that thick tail between her hand, and passed her hand slowly downwards.”  Later that day Grenfel expresses his power by nailing the fox, as if crucified, to a board.

When he departs to complete his military service, March writes that she cannot marry him after all.  Imitating the fox that killed the hens, the foxy soldier plans to kill his sexual rival.  Grenfel gets leave, returns to the farm and fells a dead tree—the symbol of the lesbian relationship—which falls on Banford and kills her.  Grenfel then marries March, but their sexual struggle continues.  Like Rupert Birkin, he wants her to surrender herself completely and become submerged in him.  When she refuses to do so—for she is still emotionally bound by her lesbian connection to Banford—he bitterly thinks “that he ought to have left her.  He ought never to have killed Banford.  He should have left Banford and March to kill one another.”  The memory of the dead Banford seems more powerful than that of the dead fox, and has a greater effect on March than her physical union with Grenfel.

VII

In Lawrence’s last book, the posthumously published Apocalypse (1931), he writes of the mystical horse: “he roams the dark underworld meadows of the soul . . . the symbol of surging potency and power of movement. . . . The red horse is choler: not mere anger, but natural fieriness, what we call passion.”  His novella St. Mawr (1925) focuses on the titular horse, which means “great” in Welsh, and which changes the heroine’s life.  Lawrence gives the stallion all the powerful and passionate apocalyptic qualities.  The earthy Mexican-Indian Phoenix and the animal-like Celtic groom Lewis are intimately connected to St. Mawr.  The Anglos—the American Louise Witt and her Australian husband Rico— are alienated from and hostile to the stallion.

St. Mawr is “a handsome bay horse with his clean ears pricked like daggers from his naked head as he swung handsomely round to stare at the open doorway.  He had big, black, brilliant eyes, with a sharp questioning glint, and that air of tense, alert quietness which betrays an animal that can be dangerous”—like the Highland bulls and the rabbit Bismarck.  The stable-hand assures Lou that the horse is quiet.  Though he was raised as a stud, for some inexplicable reason he “don’t seem to fancy the mares”.  The man then confesses that St. Mawr has been in two fatal accidents: he bashed in a young fellow’s skull and crushed a groom against the stall.  But his power, vividness and intensity excite rather than alarm Lou.  He represents to her “the echoes of another darker, more spacious, more dangerous, more splendid world than ours, that was beyond her.  And there she wanted to go.”  Animals, as always in Lawrence, get their “lives straight from the source [and have] the wild thing’s courage to maintain itself alone and living in the midst of a diverse universe” that is not their own.

The crucial scene takes place when St. Mawr throws and injures Rico: “Lou watched the glossy, powerful haunches of St. Mawr swaying with life, always too much life, like a menace. . . . At that moment St. Mawr exploded again, shied sideways as if a bomb had gone off.”  Rico, thoroughly unnerved, tugs at the reins viciously and “pulls the horse over backwards on top of him.”  Lou screams and hears the crash of the falling horse: “Then she saw a pale gold belly, and hoofs that worked and flashed in the air, and St. Mawr writhing, straining his head terrifically upwards, his great eyes starting from the naked lines of his nose.  With a great neck arching cruelly from the ground, he was pulling frantically at the reins, which Rico held tight” –like Gerald Crich who held the frantic horse in front of the passing train.  Rico’s accident is caused by the horse’s fear of a dead gold-and-yellow adder, the same color as his “pale gold belly.”  Rico, refusing to release the rearing horse, is kicked in the face by St. Mawr and wants to shoot him.  But the horse is fortunately saved from the threat of execution or gelding.  Transported by Lou from his native habitat in England to the primeval Rockies in America, he is sexually aroused, and “followed at the heels of the boss’s long-legged black Texan mare”. Toward the end of  St. Mawr , Lewis and Phoenix, who’ve absorbed the wild qualities of the horse, have replaced him in Lou’s emotional life.  When Lewis denies her and Phoenix withdraws from her, St. Mawr, who almost killed Rico, becomes Lou’s vital guide.  She finally settles for isolation in the remote heights and tries, for the first time, to live.  

VIII

The pheasant scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), the greatest moment in the novel, portrays the most gentle and effective emotional lesson.  It provides a tender contrast to Connie Chatterley’s life with her husband, the impotent and imperious Sir Clifford.  It portrays the main themes of the novel—love, passion and maternity—as well as the nurture and slaughter of the birds, which exist, like the miners in the pits and soldiers in the war, to be used up as soon as they reach maturity.

At first the broody hens sitting on the eggs “almost broke Connie’s heart.  She, herself, was so forlorn and unused, not a female at all, just a mere thing of terrors.”  She offers the hens a bit of corn feed, but “they would not eat it.  Only one hen pecked at her hand with a fierce little jab, so Connie was frightened.”  When the chicks are born, they stand for “Pure, sparky, fearless new life!  New life!  So tiny and so utterly without fear!”  Once again “she felt so acutely the agony of her own female forlornness.  It was becoming unbearable.”

When the protective mother hen fiercely pecks at her again, Clifford’s gamekeeper Oliver Mellors shows her the way to handle them by suggesting both sexual exploration and the birth of an infant: “slowly, softly, with sure gentle fingers, he felt among the old bird’s feathers and drew out a faintly-peeping chick in his closed hand.”  He hands the chick to her, she admires it, and weeps for her tragic unfulfilled longing and childless life.  Both Connie and Mellors are sexually aroused by this poignant experience.  The pheasants excite him, allow him to perceive her desire, and embolden him to touch the lady of the manor.  He takes her inside his hut, undresses her and touches her responsive naked body as he had touched the hens: his sure “hand softly, softly, stroked the curve of her flank, in the blind instinctive caress.”  He sleeps with her and her sexual rebirth coincides with her maternal desires.  

The novel acknowledges Connie’s sexual desires and approves of her love for her husband’s servant.  It also goes beyond their love to consider all the sterilising forces that are opposed to the lively pheasant chicks: the effects of war, the horrors of industrialism, the decayed state of English civilisation, the rigidity of the class structure.  It proposes the possibility of vital connections between men and women, the need for a radical change in consciousness, the self-affirmation and triumph of life in opposition to the destructive forces of the modern world.  As sex transcends class through “the democracy of touch”, Connie’s sexual relations change from secular, adulterous and contraceptive with her previous lovers to sacramental, marital and procreative with Mellors.

Lawrence was both at ease and uneasy with the natural world.  He knew what was swarming under water and slithering beneath the ground, knew the thingness of animals and the feelings they evoked.  He had a palpable wonder, a sensuous understanding of creation, an ability to identify with all manner of creatures.  Always alert and perceptive, he sees animals in a new way.  By closely observing minute details, he makes them come alive and become familiar.

Note 1. These titles include, in order of publication: “Goose Fair,” The White Peacock , “Wintry Peacock,” “Monkey Nuts,” Birds, Beasts and Flowers, “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” “The Fox,” Kangaroo , “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” The Plumed Serpent , “Two Blue Birds” and The Escaped Cock .  Lawrence’s symbol, stamped on the cover of his books, was the phoenix, a magical bird rising from its own flames and resurrected after death.  

Jeffrey Meyers has visited all the places where Lawrence lived and travelled: Nottingham and Cornwall, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Ceylon, Australia, Tahiti, New Mexico, Old Mexico, Majorca, Spain and Bandol, France.  He’s published a biography of Lawrence and three other books about him.

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