Self and Otherness in D.H. Lawrence's "The Woman Who Rode Away". Dialogism vs Solipsism E-Book

Mansour Khelifa

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: Departing from the belief that humanity has been perverted by idealism, Lawrence engages in a lifelong struggle in order to save modern society from decay and madness. Throughout his work, he tries to draw our attention to empirical experience as opposed to abstract theorising, and awaken our sensuous mode of being in distinct polarisation with our mental consciousness. He likes to point out the many marvels of the living world. For Lawrence, humanity’s salvation depends on, among other things, the healthy, physical relationship between man and woman. In “The Woman Who Rode Away” Lawrence dramatises the relation between two diametrically opposed cultures: the Western and the Amerindian. The story of the woman who escaped from her ranch at once highlights and subverts the preconceived ideas about the Red Indians’ “savage” (48) culture and cult. Yet, in filigree, the narrator of the story subtly arouses the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” and awe by conferring respectability on the white woman’s self-sacrifice for the sake of the Red Indians’ sun. In a masterly “tour de force,” Lawrence uses this highly dramatised narrative to serve his own overarching assertion that Western civilisation, as a universal ideal, has no future. The White Man’s Burden as an imperialist predicament has turned the world into a nightmarish place prone to global warfare and strife. The only escape from this deadly situation seems to lie in the dialectical interchange with other different cultures, different but not inferior, which might vitally contaminate and even rejuvenate decadent Western civilisation.

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 “The Woman Who Rode Away”:

Dialogism vs. Solipsism

(By courtesy of the English Studies Series).

Mansour Khelifa, University of Sousse

Departing from the belief that humanity has been perverted by idealism, Lawrence engages in a lifelong struggle in order to save modern society from decay and madness. Throughout his work, he tries to draw our attention to empirical experience as opposed to abstract theorising, and awaken our sensuous mode of being in distinct polarisation with our mental consciousness. He likes to point out the many marvels of the living world.

For Lawrence, humanity’s salvation depends on, among other things, the healthy, physical relationship between man and woman. In “The Woman Who Rode Away”[1] Lawrence dramatises the relation between two diametrically opposed cultures: the Western and the Amerindian. The story of the woman who escaped from her ranch at once highlights and subverts the preconceived ideas about the Red Indians’ “savage” (48) culture and cult. Yet, in filigree, the narrator of the story subtly arouses the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” and awe by conferring respectability on the white woman’s self-sacrifice for the sake of the Red Indians’ sun. In a masterly “tour de force,” Lawrence uses this highly dramatised narrative to serve his own overarching assertion that Western civilisation, as a universal ideal, has no future. The White Man’s Burden as an imperialist predicament has turned the world into a nightmarish place prone to global warfare and strife. The only escape from this deadly situation seems to lie in the dialectical interchange with other different cultures, different but not inferior, which might vitally contaminate and even rejuvenate decadent Western civilisation.

The story of “The WWRA” unfolds under the paradoxical signs of desperation and expectation, repulsion and attraction, Thanatos and Eros. Pricked by the impregnable loftiness of the nearby mountains where the no less impenetrable Indian tribes of Chihuahua live, the white woman’s wilful determination to probe the unknown otherness becomes overpowering.

The short story relates the tragic adventure of an American woman in her mid-thirties who relinquishes the comfortable monotony of her married life (her two children, her husband, her religion, her wealth) and sets out to experiment and seek something new, verging on the uncanny, little knowing that she is on her way to meet her own fate at the hands of the Chilchui Indian priests– a fateful, sacrificial death offered the Amerindians’ Sun. The tale points to the morality that the spiritual ennui, caused by an unfulfilled idealism from which the white woman seems to suffer, must be atoned for by its polarised opposite, i.e. the physical death and annihilation of the ambitious American woman through a ritual of immolation.

In an illuminating text about the genesis of novelistic discourse, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) focuses on the “struggle between tribes, peoples, cultures and languages” that has informed the burgeoning fictional “word” and representation:

During its germination and early development, the novelistic word reflected a primordial struggle between tribes, peoples, cultures and languages–it is still full of echoes of this ancient struggle. In essence this discourse always developed on the boundary line between cultures and languages. The prehistory of novelistic discourse is of great interest and not without its own special drama. (132)