CHAPTER 47
D. H. Lawrence
Reading the Bible Differently
The Bible is obviously a key element in Lawrence’s work. Born in 1885 to a pious, well educated, nonconformist mother, who had switched allegiance from the Wesleyan Methodism of her family to the more liberal Congregationalism she encountered on settling in Eastwood two years earlier, he grew up with a profound, almost encyclopedic, knowledge of the sacred texts. He would entertain friends at all stages of his life with impromptu performances of his favorite biblical episodes: the Chambers family, for example, who provided his second home as a young man, were treated to a dramatic rendition of Pharaoh hardening his heart against Moses (Nehls, 1957–9, I, pp. 47–8), David Garnett remembered Frieda and Lawrence enacting Judith and Holofernes in Mayrhofen in 1912 (ibid.), and H.D. would record in her novel Bid Me to Live how Rico (the Lawrence character) played God (his favorite role) to Frieda’s growling serpent and Richard Aldington’s Adam in an elaborate charade enacted at their London house in 1917 (H.D., 1984, pp. 111–12). Not just because of his beard but because of his strong personal presence and sheer religious intensity, comparisons with Christ followed him throughout his life (Ellis, 1998, p. 528). His spiritual journey would take him a long distance from the passionate Christian faith of his youth, which he abandoned at the age of twenty-one while at college in Nottingham (Worthen, 1991, pp. 174–5), but it would never remove from his mind the powerful imprint of the Bible.
The Bible, in Harold Bloom’s terms, was Lawrence’s most important precursor-text, the book that first inspired his imagination and against the influence of which he constantly struggled (Bloom 1973). It was through biblical images that he developed his own independent religious thinking. “Bible religion,” as Paul Morel tells Miriam somewhat irreverently in one of his many letters to her in Paul Morel, the first draft of what was to become Sons and Lovers, is “a heap of rag-bag snippings … which you cut your coat from to fit you just as you please” (PM, p. 93). And this, it could be argued, Lawrence himself proceeded to do, weaving his literary work from what remained of the Bible after his critical “snipping.” Because of this, I suggest, he risks alienating both those who love the Bible as it is and therefore resent the imaginative freedom with which he treats it, and those who hate it, shying away from anything so directly religious. For Lawrence, in his own words, remained “passionately religious” long after he had abandoned orthodox Christianity (L, II, p. 165).
Looking back at the end of his life at the fixed and literal way in which he had first been taught to read the Bible, Lawrence claimed to have come himself to “resent” the Bible:
From earliest years, right into manhood, like any other nonconformist child, I had the Bible poured every day into my helpless consciousness, till there came almost a saturation point. Long before one could think or even vaguely understand, this Bible language, these “portions” of the Bible were douched over the mind and consciousness till they became soaked in, they became an influence which affected all the processes of emotion and thought. (A, p. 59)
One of “the real joys of middle age,” however, was “coming back to the Bible” and reading it alongside “modern research and modern criticism,” putting it “back into its living connexions” with other ancient civilizations and learning to read it differently as “a book of the human race, instead of a corked up bottle of ‘inspiration’ ” with a fixed meaning (A, pp. 59–60).
How Lawrence made this long and sometimes painful journey is a complicated story, of whose intertextual elements it is only possible to provide a brief sketch here before proceeding in the following two sections to explore two of the most significant biblical motifs in his work: a fascination with the story of Adam and Eve and their supposed Fall, and an identification with the figure of Christ, first with his crucifixion and suffering and then (in his later work) with his resurrection. The first motif demonstrates his increasingly critical treatment of the traditional Christian interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis, which tends to deplore Eve’s curiosity (linked in particular with the wickedness of all flesh, the reason for God proceeding to destroy most of his creation), while the second displays an ongoing grappling with what Lawrence saw as an overemphasis in theology on the divinity of Jesus as Word at the expense of his humanity as incarnate flesh.
A propensity among Lawrence’s early admirers to portray him out of context as a unique if flawed genius, encouraged perhaps by his own penchant for covering over all traces of influence, has tended to obscure how widely read and well informed he was. Virginia Hyde, however, has demonstrated his familiarity with medieval and renaissance iconographical traditions surrounding both Adam and Christ (Hyde, 1992), while Robert Mongomerie and Daniel Schneider have traced his philosophical development (Schneider, 1986; Montgomery, 1994). Less well established is his early familiarity with Higher Criticism of the Bible through his reading of secularists such as Robert Blatchford and modernist theologians such R. J. Campbell, both of whom he discussed with the Reverend Robert Reid, the minister of Eastwood Congregational Church, who not only taught him Latin but took a personal interest in his spiritual progress (L, I, pp. 36–7). Reid himself, like many leading Congregationalists, was quick to accept the findings of higher criticism (Chadwick, 1970, II, p. 105), preaching a series of sermons on the early chapters of Genesis while Lawrence was still a member of his congregation, arguing that the later patristic doctrine of the Fall should not be allowed to override the biblical account of Adam and Eve’s growth in knowledge and moral awareness (Masson, 1988, pp. 171–2). The liberal Congregationalist Campbell, in his exposition of The New Theology, was similarly critical of doctrines such as the Fall, which he believed to be based upon a misreading of the book of Genesis, “a composite, primitive story … in existence as oral tradition long before it became literature” whose “narrative says nothing about the ruined creation or the curse upon posterity” (Campbell, 1907, pp. 54–5). In Blatchford too Lawrence would have found an explanation of the documentary hypothesis about the different strands of Genesis (Blatchford, 1904, pp. 37–8). Renan’s Life of Jesus, a celebration of an altogether human Christ misled into claiming divinity for himself, also occupied a prominent place in the development of the young Lawrence as of the young Morel, who is portrayed passing through “the Renan … stage” in Sons and Lovers (SL, p. 267).
Another significant element in Lawrence’s rejection of the traditional Christian interpretation of Genesis was probably provided by Edward Carpenter, the late Victorian guru of sexual liberation, a section of whose book Civilization, Its Cause and Cure (1889) is entitled “The Fall and the Return to Paradise,” a theme that recurs in Lawrence’s own painting, poetry and fiction (Delavenay, 1971, p. 63). The most powerful model, however, for Lawrence’s strong revisionary reworking of the Bible would have been Nietzsche, whom he appears to have discovered in the winter of 1908–9, working his way through many volumes of the Levy translation of the complete works as they were published from 1909 to 1913 (Burwell, 1982, p. 69). Human, All Too Human, along lines to be followed by Lawrence in Apocalypse, distinguishes between what Nietzsche calls “an affirmative Semitic religion, the product of a ruling class,” to be found in “the older parts of the Old Testament,” and “a negative Semitic religion, the product of an oppressed class,” exemplified in the New Testament (Nietzsche, 1994, p. 93). The Anti-Christ even includes a comic retelling of the opening chapters of Genesis in which God creates man out of sheer boredom and feels threatened by Eve’s desire for knowledge before finally giving up on the vast majority of the race and deciding to drown them (Nietzsche, 1968, pp. 176–7). Nietzsche, like Lawrence, distinguishes between Christianity, the dogmatic religion founded by St Paul, and the charismatic figure of Jesus himself. It is the followers of Christ who are blamed for the “anti-natural castratation of a God into a God of the merely good” (ibid., p. 138). Jesus himself, according to Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra, had he lived longer (as Lawrence would permit him in The Escaped Cock), “would have learned to love the earth” (Nietzsche, 1961, p. 98).
Other contributors to the way in which Lawrence learnt to read the Bible differently were theosophists such as Madame Blavatsky, J. M. Pryse, and Frederick Carter. Reading the Bible for Blavatsky is a matter of reading between the lines in order to detect traces of an older strand of sacred wisdom now lost. The early chapters of Genesis may on the surface, or “exoterically,” appear to describe “a temptation of flesh in a garden of Eden,” which God curses. “Esoterically,” however, according to Blavatsky, God “regarded the supposed sin and FALL as an act so sacred, as to choose the organ, the perpetrator of the original sin, as the fittest and most sacred symbol to represent that God” (Blavatsky, 1970, I, pp. 375–6). Blavatsky herself doesn’t celebrate the phallus as much as Lawrence, regarding not only the Fall but Creation itself as a descent from spiritual existence. Lawrence clearly distanced himself from her teaching, finding much of The Secret Doctrine “not quite real,” but he did “glean a marvellous lot from it” when he read it in 1917 (L, III, p. 150). He would also make creative use of the theories of her followers Pryse and Carter on the book of Revelation while working on such esoteric works (in every sense) as The Symbolic Meaning, The Plumed Serpent, and Apocalypse (Wright, 2000). None of these thinkers, of course, were accepted precisely in their own terms, but they served both to stimulate and to shape some of elements of Lawrence’s own creative reworking of the Bible, in particular his understanding of Adam and of Christ.
Adam and Eve Re-Enter Paradise
Variations on the story of Adam and Eve recur in Lawrence’s writing from his earliest poetry to his last fiction. The early poem “Renaissance,” for example, of 1909, presents Jessie Chambers as Eve and Haggs Farm as paradise, with the young Lawrence as Adam learning to embrace his animal nature, to acknowledge the whole valley “fleshed like me” (CP, p. 38). In the sequence of poems published in 1917 as Look! We Have Come Through! Lawrence again celebrates his recapturing of paradise, this time with Frieda. Now, however, he makes bolder changes to the biblical narrative. In a reversal of roles from Genesis 3, for example, in “Why Does She Weep,” it is the two lovers
who walk in the trees
and call to God “Where art thou?”
And it is he who hides. (CP, p. 231)
Another poem of this sequence, “Paradise Re-entered,” like the painting of “Eve Regaining Paradise” that Lawrence produced a decade later, has the exiled lovers pass through the “flames of fierce love” back into the “sinless being” from which they were unfairly discarded, successfully storming “the angel-guarded / Gates of the long-discarded / Garden.” They defy conventional morality with Nietzschean confidence, returning to a prelapsarian state “beyond good and evil” (CP, pp. 242–3). A number of poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers of 1923 continue this theme: “Figs,” for example, deplores Eve’s original embarrassment about her nakedness, developing the one-sided biblical exchange between Eve and God, in which He curses her while she merely makes excuses, into a much more complex dialogue in which a number of sexually mature and liberated women mock their creator’s narrow morality (CP, p. 284).
Adam and Eve also recur in Lawrence’s prose, several passages in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), and Studies in Classic American Literature lamenting a fall, as Lawrence sees it, from intuitive spontaneity into mental self-consciousness about sex. Perhaps the most powerful of these occurs during a discussion of The Scarlet Letter when Lawrence insists that the significant change after the theft of the apple was in the attitude of the two lovers:
They wanted to KNOW. And that was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, they had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves. And they felt uncomfortable after. They felt self-conscious. So they said, “The act is sin. Let’s hide. We’ve sinned.”
No wonder the Lord kicked them out of the Garden. Dirty hypocrites. (SCAL, pp. 90–1)
Here even God seems to have come round to Lawrence’s view that it is not sexuality as such that is sinful but a prurient self-consciousness about it. The biblical references in these polemical works are clearly designed to subvert repressive attitudes to the body that Lawrence attributes to Christian misreading of the book of Genesis.
Similarly subversive references to Eden in Lawrence’s fiction are perhaps more engaging than his openly polemical prose, because they function as a mode of discovery, probing the original story to reveal something genuinely new. Even in the early novels the biblical story of the Fall is developed not merely to make a point but to uncover something more complicated, less easily reducible to paraphrase. A chapter title in The White Peacock (1911), for example, advertises “The Fascination of the Forbidden Apple” but the whole point of this novel is that its characters lack the courage to follow Eve’s rebellion against God’s prohibition on this fruit. The first person narrator Cyril Beardsall complains to his friend Emily, “You think the flesh of the apple is nothing, nothing. You only care for the eternal pips.” He encourages her therefore to “snatch your apple and eat it” while she can (WP, p. 69). As one of the characters confides to Cyril, it is the Bible that is identified as the source of their nonconformist inhibitions; her husband metaphorically “wallows in bibles,” she laments, even “when he goes to bed. I can feel all his family bibles sticking in my ribs as I lie by his side” (WP, p. 316).
The adulterous lovers of Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser (1912), based upon the tragic experiences of his friend Helen Corke, make a brief but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “trespass” against the most famous of the commandments. A short sojourn on the Isle of Wight momentarily lights up the world for the guilt-ridden hero Siegmund, “as if I were the first man to discover things: like Adam when he opened the first eyes of the world” (T, p. 90). The identification of the two lovers in this novel with Adam and Eve is both reinforced and complicated by references to the long poem Adam Cast Forth by Charles Doughty, which Lawrence had sent to Jessie Chambers on its publication in 1908 with instructions to note especially the passage “where Eve, after long separation, finds Adam,” who “tells her to bind himself with vine strands, lest they be separated again by the Wind of God” (L, I, p. 95). In Doughty’s poem the wind is part of God’s anger and punishment for their sin, but for Lawrence it represents a repressive and destructive morality that prevents the lovers from reaching fulfillment. For a while the mere thought of escape makes Siegmund feel reborn, as if “the womb which had nourished him in one fashion for so many years, was casting him forth” (T, p. 49). The significance of Doughty’s poem is here reversed, suggesting the possibility at least of the novel’s Adam being cast forth not from paradise but to it. The tragedy in this novel is that the lovers fail to sustain their rebellious courage. There are times when they walk hand in hand through their paradisal island celebrating the beauty of creation. “It is good,” says Helena, echoing the Creator in Genesis 1, “it is very good” (T, p. 108). But Siegmund cannot escape the ingrained feelings of guilt that force him first to return home and finally to hang himself. Lawrence succeeds in rewriting Helen Corke’s Wagnerian tragedy in terms derived from Genesis only to the extent that he characterizes the lovers as Adam and Eve in at least wanting to recapture paradise.
Sons and Lovers (1912) can be seen to chart Lawrence’s continuing rebellion against conventional Judeo-Christian morality through further use of imagery from Eden. In turning from Miriam, who offers him sex as a dutiful sacrifice, to Clara, who rejects the notion that it makes them “sinners,” Paul Morel sees himself as recovering his “old Adam.” He continues to tease Clara, imputing to her whole sex a taste for guilt: “I believe Eve enjoyed it, when she went cowering out of Paradise” (SL, p. 358). Edward Garnett characteristically cut from the manuscript Paul’s development of this biblical episode, so important in all Lawrence’s early writing: “And I guess Adam was in a rage, and wondered what the deuce all the row was about – a bit of an apple that the birds could peck if they wanted to” (SL, p. 358). To preach so didactically such a rebellious message was to court the rejection of his readers, already scandalized enough by the relative sexual explicitness of the novel. The “Foreword to Sons and Lovers” was equally unpublishable at the time, urging its readers to embrace the female flesh in rebellion against the patriarchal Word. The Word, Lawrence argues, tries to make “the pip that comes out of the apple, like Adam’s rib, … the mere secondary product, that is spat out.” But it is the maternal pip, which is “responsible for the whole miraculous cycle” (SL, p. 470). Here, as in Study of Thomas Hardy, Lawrence protests strongly against male employment of the Bible to suppress women.
In The Rainbow (1915) it is significantly the women who lead the rebellion against patriarchal religion. When Will Brangwen attempts to represent the Genesis account of the creation of woman from Adam’s rib, Anna objects to his making her “like a little marionette, … like a doll” in comparison to his Adam, who is “as big as God.” “It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man’s body,” she continues, “when every man is born of woman” (R, p. 162). Later, during their visit to Lincoln Cathedral, Anna undermines Will’s “gothic ecstasies,” playing the role of “the voice of the serpent in his Eden” by drawing attention to the human qualities of the individual figures of Adam and Eve (189). For a while their daughter Ursula and her lover Skrebensky promise to effect a return to paradise denied to her parents. Their kisses, for example, are described as “their final entry into the source of creation,” passing for a moment “into the pristine darkness of paradise” (R, pp. 450–1). They also dance naked and unashamed, like the prelapsarian Adam and Eve, on the South Downs. Ursula, however, has to wait until Women in Love (1920) to find a more worthy Adam in the shape of Birkin, also given to wandering naked among the flowers and to pontificating about the book of Genesis. There is a terrible fall from innocence, he explains, in Hermione’s false kind of knowledge, which he traces back to Eve, who chose the wrong fruit from the wrong tree (WL, pp. 41–4).
It is not until Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in fact, that Lawrence portrays a fully successful fictional return to paradise. In The First Lady Chatterley Constance makes this very clear, telling Parkin as she weaves flowers into his body-hair, “We are Adam and Eve naked in the garden” (FLC, p. 174). That the lovers are to be seen as regenerate versions of Adam and Eve is also evident in the final version of the novel, the manuscript of which has the two lovers very self-consciously acting the parts of Adam and Eve as they weave flowers around each other’s bodies. Mellors even addresses Constance as Eve in this passage of the manuscript, labeling his land “Paradise” (LCL, p. 360). The fact that Lawrence removed these explicit references to Genesis in the final version of the novel may indicate that he wanted his characters to appear more human than mythical to his readers, opting for greater realism over symbolic meaning. But it is clear that they remain, at one level at least, descendents of Adam and Eve rediscovering paradise.
Divorced from their artistic context in this critical condensation of Lawrence’s reworking of these biblical figures, Lawrence’s continual redeployments of Adam and Eve may appear programmatic, offending against his own insistence that the novel, unlike “didactic Scripture,” should not “nail anything down” to a fixed meaning (STH, pp. 150–4). The gospels, he thought, were “wonderful novels” but written “with a purpose,” while he counted Genesis as one of the “greater novels” in the Bible because less obviously didactic (STH, p. 157). As Jack Stewart argues, however, in relation to Paul Morel’s expressionist transformation of the burning bush from the book of Exodus in his painting of trees in sunset, avant-garde, modernist art of the kind Lawrence and his character produce involves projecting their “changing sexual, religious and aesthetic passion” onto commonplace objects and familiar biblical material in order to create new and constantly evolving artistic meaning (Stewart, 2005, p. 172). There is clearly a consistent rebellion against Christian orthodoxy running through all Lawrence’s versions of the loss and recovery of paradise but they are by no means identical. The symbolic figures of Adam and Eve assume different significance, operating on different literary levels, in each particular context.
Christ Crucified and Risen
If Adam, the first man, is a figure with whom Lawrence often identified, it is Jesus, the Risen Adam, who can be seen to have occupied the most prominent place in Lawrence’s religious imagination. Sometimes, as with Nietzsche, it seems as if he resents the fact of Christ’s priority as the precursor-poet with whom it is impossible to compete. In Lawrence’s earlier writing it is mainly the crucified victim on whom he focuses. Increasingly, however, in the latter part of his career, it is the Risen Lord who plays a more important role. Having discovered a medieval bestiary depiction of a “Phoenix Rising from the Flames” along with an explanation of its traditional association with the resurrection in Katharine Jenner’s book Christian Symbolism (Jenner, 1910, p. 150), Lawrence famously reproduced the image on the cover of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, much to the dismay of his publisher Orioli, who complained that it looked like “a pigeon having a bath in a slop basin” (Nehls, 1957–9, III, p. 186). It has since, of course, been permanently associated with Lawrence for a whole generation of readers through its reproduction on the cover of the Penguin edition of his novels.
Lawrence’s fiction initially highlights the human aspect of Jesus. “It would be cruel to give up the resurrection,” Paul Morel explains to Miriam in the first version of Sons and Lovers, “yet the Christ-man is so much more real” (PM, p. 111). The rejection of this novel by Heinemann in July 1912 ironically produced a savage example of Lawrence’s tendency to see himself in the role of the crucified Jesus. “Why,” he asks,
was I born an Englishman … why was I sent to them. Christ on the cross must have hated his countrymen. “Crucify me, you swine,” he must have said through his teeth. It’s not so hard to love thieves also on the cross. But the high priests down there – “crucify me, you swine.” (L, I, p. 422)
Lawrence, as he recounted in his essay “Christs in the Tirol,” had encountered many depictions of the crucified Christ on his travels with Frieda across the Alps into Italy that summer. He expresses a clear preference for the more realistic examples, miserable though they often seem and “in need of a bit more kick,” over the more baroque examples with “great gashes” and “streams of blood” found on the other side of the Brenner pass (TI, p. 46). In a fictional version of this tour in Mr Noon, Gilbert finds a one-sided “dark mysticism, a worship of cruelty and pain and torture and death” in these figures (MN, p. 138), shocking Johanna (the Frieda-figure) by inviting one of them down from the cross and offering him a drop of Dunkels (MN, p. 202).
Such emphasis on suffering had appeared totally appropriate to Lawrence during the Great War, when his letters and poems were full of references to the crucifixion. “The War finished me,” he wrote to Cynthia Asquith in January 1915, “it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes” (L, II, p. 268). One of his most powerful poems of protest at the war, published a few months later, “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?,” presents Jesus as a reluctant soldier, who has dreamt of love but is forced to kill (CP, pp. 741–3). Other writing around this time, however, displays a more critical dialogue with the figure of Jesus. In Study of Thomas Hardy, for example, he continually takes issue with Christ’s teaching, complaining rather pedantically that lilies, far from taking no care for the morrow, lay down stores of food for the continuation of the natural cycle (STH, p. 7). Even the commandment to love one’s neighbor, he objects, can simply encourage self-pity. He relents, however, when it comes to Christ’s injunction to be born again, which he sees as fundamental to all human development (STH, p. 40).
This dialogue with Jesus overflows into the text of The Rainbow, most famously in Ursula’s interior monologue in chapter 10, where she negotiates her relationship with Jesus. The focus of her meditation is not “the actual man, talking with teeth and lips, telling one to put one’s finger into His wounds” but a more “shadowy,” other-worldly and mystical figure. Like Lawrence, she engages with particular sayings of Jesus, such as his reply to the rich man in St Mark’s Gospel (10:25): “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into heaven.” Such hyperbole, she concludes, cannot be taken literally, so she commits herself to “the non-literal application of the Scriptures” (R, p. 258). She becomes increasingly critical of conventional Christian attitudes to the body encapsulated in Christ’s refusal to allow Mary Magdalen to touch her, to which she offers a direct challenge:
Why shall I not rise with my body whole and perfect, shining with strong life? Why, when Mary says: Rabboni, shall I not take her in my arms and kiss her and hold her to my breast? Why is the risen body deadly, and abhorrent with wounds? (R, p. 262)
The manuscript of the novel contains an even bolder challenge to orthodox Christianity when Ursula subjects the Sermon on the Mount to similarly severe interrogation, objecting in turn to being “the light of the world,” to possessing eternal treasure, to taking no thought of her raiment and to not casting her pearls before swine. “Is not my body holy,” she asks, “and my flesh more precious than pearls” (R, p. 629). She then engages with the parable of the house built upon sand, launching into a diatribe against the Church as a prime example of such a precarious building before envisaging a time when Jesus,
whole and glad after the resurrection … shall give himself to the breasts of desire and shall twine his limbs with the nymphs and the oreads, putting off his raiment of wounds and sorrows, appearing naked and shining with life, the risen Christ, gladder, a more satisfying lover than Bacchus, a God more serene and ample than Apollo. (R, pp. 629–30)
The fact that these passages were omitted from the published version of the novel shows that even Lawrence recognized that Britain was not yet ready for Jesus the lover. It was not yet ready, of course, even for the self-censored version of the novel, as the suppression of the novel by court order in November 1915 would prove.
The motif of the risen Christ refusing to be bound by conventional limits on his sexuality recurs in much of Lawrence’s writing from this point on. The Jesus of “Resurrection of the Flesh,” for example, a poem written in 1915, removes all “heavy books of stone” that prohibit his enjoyment of Mary Magdalen’s body (CP, pp. 737–8). Johanna for her part refuses in Mr Noon to play the role of “a weeping Magdalen” (MN, p. 129), resolving instead to take “sex as a religion” and administer the “cup of consolation” to any man in need (MN, p. 139). In “The Ladybird,” the first version of which was written in 1915 and envisaged as a story about resurrection (L, II, pp. 418–20), Daphne’s husband returns from the war shrinking like Christ from all forms of touch, kneeling before his wife and kissing her feet. In apparent dramatization of the celebrated Nietzschean contrast between Dionysus and the Crucified, however, she prefers to play Magdalen to her new lover Dionys (FCL, pp. 192–3). Another short story, “The Overtone,” possibly stemming from this time although not published until a decade later (Kinkead-Weekes, 1996, pp. 75–80), has its heroine make a similar rebellion against conventional Judeo-Christian morality, coming to the similarly Nietzschean conclusion that “if the faun of the young Jesus had run free, seen one white nymph’s brief breast, he would not have been content to die on a cross” (StM, p. 15).
Lawrence’s opposition to Christianity became significantly more outspoken as the likelihood of publication (after the banning of The Rainbow) receded. Old Mr Crich, for example, in Women in Love, originally part of the same project as The Rainbow but continually revised and not eventually published until 1920, functions as a grotesque example of the kind of sentimental concern for the poor and subservient that Lawrence, like Nietzsche, now associated with Christianity. Rawdon Lilly in Aaron’s Rod, begun in 1917 but not published until 1922, pronounces himself similarly “sick of Christianity” (AR, p. 78), preaching his new gospel of heroism and power to Aaron in the final two chapters of the novel. The Christian ideals of love and service, “the beastly Lazarus of our idealism,” he explains, are a corpse beyond hope of resurrection: “By this time he stinketh – and I’m sorry for any Christus who brings him to life again” (AR, p. 281).
Lawrence’s writing of the early 1920s maintains this hostility to traditional Christian ideals, most notably perhaps in “The Evangelistic Beasts,” four poems that play subversively with the animal symbols attached to the authors of the gospels. “St Matthew” in particular prides himself on his down-to-earth masculinity, regretting Jesus’s desire to be “not quite a man” and asking himself to be put “down again on the earth, Jesus, on the brown soil / Where flowers sprout” (CP, p. 331). “St John” is presented altogether unsympathetically as the formulator of the metaphysics associated with the Logos (CP, pp. 328–9). Fantasia of the Unconscious, to the scandal of its first readers in the Adelphi (Ellis, 1998, p. 135), mocks Jesus’ claim not to desire domesticity, advising him to be “man enough … to come home at tea-time and put his slippers on,” thus avoiding inclusion among the world’s “failures” (Fant, pp. 98–101). Quetzalcoatl and The Plumed Serpent both involve complex ceremonies in which the worship of Jesus is replaced by a new religion built upon ancient Aztec rituals. A passage in Lawrence’s Mexican Notebook still recognizes Jesus as “one of the Sons of God” but by no means the only one (Ref, p. 185). Similarly, Ramon, the prophet of this new Mexican religion, insists that “the Most High has other divine Sons than Jesus” and even “divine Daughters” (Q, p. 175).
The Risen Christ plays an increasingly important role in Lawrence’s writing after his remarkable recovery from illness in Mexico in 1925. He also appears in “The Resurrection,” a painting of 1927, sporting an identifiably Lawrentian beard, and is described in a letter as “stepping up, rather grey in the face, from the tomb, with his old ma helping him from behind, and Mary Magdalen easing him up towards her bosom” (L, VI, p. 72). Lawrence’s most sustained fictional treatment of the Risen Christ, of course, is The Escaped Cock, whose title was inspired by a children’s toy model of a white rooster escaping from an egg, which he and his Buddhist friend Earl Brewster saw in a shop window on their Etruscan pilgrimage in 1927. It was Brewster, apparently, who suggested it would make a good title: “The Escaped Cock – A Story of the Resurrection” (Ellis, 1998, p. 356). The original short story, when it first appeared in The Forum, was actually entitled “Resurrection” on the front cover, while the revised novella appeared posthumously as The Man Who Died. It is, in Lawrence’s own words,
a story of the Resurrection, where Jesus gets up and feels very sick about everything, and can’t stand the old crowd any more – so cuts out – and as he heals up, he begins to find what an astonishing place the world is, far more marvellous than any salvation or heaven – and thanks his stars he needn’t have a “mission” any more. (L, VI, p. 50)
In the novella itself “the man who had died” (who is never actually named) initially repeats the Noli me tangere of St John’s Gospel but comes quickly to recognize “that the body, too, has its … life” (EC, pp. 53–4), a lesson reinforced in part II of the novella, in which the priestess of Isis gradually heals his scars and brings his wounded body back to life. This involves restoring, to him as to the healed Osiris, a fully functioning phallus, thus enabling a distinctly new and shocking sense to his claim, “I am risen!” (EC, p. 144).
The resurrection of the flesh in this physical sense, of course, is the central theme of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, most conspicuously in the second version of the novel, John Thomas and Lady Jane, in which Tommy Dukes connects the neglect of the flesh in years of Christian asceticism with the gospel accounts of the risen Jesus refusing to be touched. This sparks off a long meditation by Lady Constance on the meaning of Jesus’ words, with the suffering of men like her husband, maimed by the war, who “had all been crucified” and were now living in “the strange, dim, grey era of the resurrection … before the ascension into new life. … They lived and walked and spoke, but theirs was still the old, tortured body that could not be touched” (JTLJ, p. 69). Lawrence would express similar views in the essay “The Risen Lord” in 1929, criticizing the churches of his day for preaching “Christ crucified” at the expense of “Christ risen in the flesh! … and if with hands and feet, then with lips and stomach and genitals of a man” (Phoenix, pp. 571–5). In this second version of Lady Chatterley Dukes’s similar view that men should “rise up again, with new flesh on their spirits … and a new fire to erect their phallus” prompts Lady Constance to ponder what “a man with a risen body” might be like (JTLJ, p. 72). Mellors, in this context, becomes a figure not only of Adam but of a risen Christ fully endowed with all that becomes a man.
Lawrence famously described the Bible as “a great confused novel” (STH, p. 169), prompting later critics to apply that epithet to his own work (Kennedy, 1982, p. 220). Kennedy contrasts Lawrence’s unsystematic borrowing from the Bible with the more controlled use of mythical structure to be found in Joyce. It is a comparison that Lawrence himself, who complained bitterly about the “old fags and cabbage-stumps of quotations from the Bible … stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness” in his modernist rival, would have challenged (L, VI, pp. 507–8). Readers, of course, will have their own views on which of these writers is the more systematic in his use of the Bible and which the more “dirty-minded.” But what should be apparent even from this brief sketch of Lawrence’s work is how important the Bible, in particular the figures of Adam and Christ, remained for him long after he took to reading it very differently from the way in which he had been first taught.
References
Lawrence
All references to Lawrence’s work, unless otherwise stated, are to the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, published by Cambridge University Press, using the following abbreviations:
A: Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, 1980.
AR: Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, 1988.
CP: The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 volumes. Heinemann, London, 1962.
EC: The Escaped Cock, ed. Gerald M. Lacy. Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1978.
Fant: Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971.
FCL: The Fox/The Captain’s Doll/The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, 1992.
FLC: The First Lady Chatterley. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.
JTLJ: John Thomas and Lady Jane. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.
L: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James Boulton and others, 8 volumes, 1979–2000.
LCL: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires, 1993.
MN: Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, 1984.
Phoenix: Phoenix, The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward McDonald. Heinemann, London, 1936.
PM: Paul Morel, ed. Helen Baron, 2000.
PS: The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, 1987.
Q: Quetzalcoatl: The Early Version of “The Plumed Serpent,” ed. Louis L. Martz. Black Swan Books, Redding Ridge, CT, 1995.
R: The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, 1989.
Ref: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, 1988.
SCAL: Studies in Classic American Literature. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971.
SL: Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, 1992.
StM: St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, 1983.
STH: Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, 1985.
T: The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield, 1981.
TI: Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, 1994.
WL: Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, 1987.
WP: The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, 1983.
Other References
Blatchford, Robert (1904) God and My Neighbour. Clarion Press, London.
Blavatsky, Helena P. (1970) The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, 2 volumes. Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, CA.
Bloom, Harold (1973) The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Burwell, Rose Marie (1982) “A Checklist of Lawrence’s Reading,” in Keith Sagar, ed., A D. H. Lawrence Handbook. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 59–110.
Campbell, R. J. (1907) The New Theology. Chapman and Hall, London.
Chadwick, Owen (1970) The Victorian Church, 2 volumes. Adam and Charles, London.
Delavenay, Emile (1971) D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter. Heinemann, London.
Doughty, Charles (1908) Adam Cast Forth. Duckworth, London.
Ellis, David (1998) D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
H.D. (1984) Bid Me to Live. Virago, London.
Hyde, Virginia (1992) The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology. Pennsylvania State University Press, Philadelphia.
Jenner, Katharine Lee (1910) Christian Symbolism. Methuen, London.
Kennedy, Andrew (1982) “After Not So Strange Gods in The Rainbow,” English Studies 63, 220–30.
Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1996) D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Masson, Margaret (1988) “The Influence of Congregationalism on the First Four Novels of D. H. Lawrence,” PhD dissertation, Durham University.
Montgomery, Robert E. (1994) The Visionary Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Nehls, Edward, ed. (1957–9) D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, 3 volumes. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1961) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968) Twilight of the Gods/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1994) Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Pryse, James M. (1910) The Apocalypse Unsealed. John M. Watkins, London.
Schneider, Daniel J. (1986) The Consciousness of D. H. Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence.
Stewart, Jack (2005) “Forms of Expression in Sons and Lovers,” in John Worthen and Andrew Harrison, eds, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers: A Casebook. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Worthen, John (1991) D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wright, T. R. (2000) D. H. Lawrence and the Bible. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.