words by Jocelyn Howarth
D. H. Lawrence explored the theme of existentialism across three short stories, through three different characters: a woman who abandons her life as a wife and mother to ride into the South American wilderness; a man who isolates himself from society on various small islands; and a freshly resurrected Jesus Christ. All dissect the relationship between the physical and the spiritual existence of being human, each story measured and pensive in its tone.
Lawrence’s short story The Escaped Cock (or The Man Who Died) reimagines the path of Christ after he dies on the cross and is buried in the cave. The story is split into two halves. Part One begins with Christ regaining consciousness in his tomb. Despite wishing in the darkness that he had remained dead, his body moves to help him rise and exit the tomb. This is a total separation of the man’s body and spirit; it is also the first example of the body triumphing over the mind, the perseverance of the physical which becomes detached from the mental. Viewing the world as someone no longer burdened with the purpose of Christ, the man is initially disgusted by humanity, feeling suspended between the world he has returned to and the world he was meant to join. He realises that he will always be associated with the purposes he once had. Now he has died for that purpose, he is relieved of it, and is seemingly left with nothing: “For in the tomb he had slipped that noose which we call care” (p. 39). He has been awakened to the seemingly purposeless existence of most of humanity, and cannot grasp it. Lawrence takes the reader back and forth between the old Christ and the new Christ, conveying his internal struggle through the man’s distress, which contrasts significantly with his simple physical existence in the peasant’s home.
Part Two introduces the reader to a priestess who worships the goddess of healing and motherhood, Isis. The goddess is poised in a position of searching for her husband, Osiris—god of fertility, life, resurrection, and the afterlife—and the priestess likewise is waiting for the right man whom she can open herself to. When Lawrence’s version of Christ happens upon the priestess’s temple to Isis, he seeks refuge there for one night, but ends up remaining for longer, drawn to the priestess for reasons unknowable to himself. While in Part One, his mind was detached from his body, it appears now that time has allowed him to join his physical and mental identities, and the bodily scars he suffers from being nailed to the cross are also scars affecting his soul and his mind. The priestess’s touch of love and care, like the goddess Isis, heals the lingering physical and emotional pain of those scars. When the priestess becomes pregnant, the man must flee to escape arrest, but he does so with a fulfilled heart and renewed sense of purpose, a purpose that is his own, not bestowed on him by a greater being. In Part Two, Lawrence explores the theme of love and legacy; the man’s spirit is settled and no longer lost because he has created a child through love, connecting him to the rest of humanity.
The Woman Who Rode Away examines the dehumanisation caused by a modern, capitalist society. Lawrence presents a woman whose husband sees her as a commodity, an asset, a tool in his belt to further his perceived success. From the woman’s perspective, her development as a person halted as soon as she was married: “her husband had never become real to her, neither mentally nor physically” (p. 46). Upon hearing about the Native Americans—referred to as ‘Indians’ in this short story—who reside in the mountains far away from her, she feels it is her destiny to “wander into the secret haunts of these timeless, mysterious, marvellous Indians of the mountains” (p. 48). Lawrence paints the Native Americans as mystical, other-worldly people whose lives centre around the nature they reside in. The woman, who is a victim of the capitalist system that has stunted her existence, perceives a freedom in the Native American tribes, and rides away from her home to find them. In return, the Native American men who find her also see her as other-worldly; they do not appear to desire her nor wish to attack her as she expects, but instead treat her as something foreign, though there is evident hate in their eyes. It does not instil much fear in her, however. She is focused on her inner self, having felt a “great crash at the centre of herself, which was the crash of her own death” (p. 51). Once she has ridden away from her life, she is aware of her own death occurring repeatedly. Lawrence explores the woman’s disconnect from herself as a result of the oppressive society she has been forced to live in, and relates her escape to the nature she is surrounded by while looking for the Native Americans. As the Native Americans worship nature with such intensity, all their rituals and habits revolve around this worship; their very way of life is defined by the natural world. The woman, who represents the destruction of this way of life as a microcosm for the oppression of materialism, becomes a sacrifice for one of these rituals. In accepting her fate as a sacrifice, she liberates herself from capitalist societies and gives herself back to nature. His descriptions of the landscape rich and impressive, Lawrence is emphasising the benefit of the naturally existing world over the man-made one to the human spirit.
In The Man Who Loved Islands, a man makes increasingly desperate attempts to escape society by buying small islands to live on with a limited number of people. His first island runs smoothly, but in his quest to quell conflict, everyone treats each other with the utmost politeness and, since there are no deeper connections being made, they soon begin to dislike each other. He is making no profit from the work of his labourers, so he sells the island and moves to a smaller one, taking a few of his labourers with him. There, he lives “without desire, without ennui” (p. 412), however, he angers himself when he succumbs to the “automatism of sex” (p. 414) with one of the women who works on the island. When she falls pregnant and births their daughter, he is disgusted by what he has done, and flees to a third, smaller island, completely alone, in great contrast to Lawrence’s depiction of Christ, who is fulfilled by this same situation. On this third island, he exists amongst nature. He comes to dread the approach of humans, and allows his mind to “turn soft and hazy, like the hazy ocean” (p. 419). This is an extension of Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away, connecting the body to nature, however Lawrence takes a different perspective, isolating the man from people entirely, whereas the woman had the company of the Native Americans. His passive, unfeeling existence turns miserable when the weather worsens as winter arrives, and he suffers daily to shovel snow and maintain his own body. Eventually, he is overcome by the weather. Each island is a microcosm for natural life stages: the experience of meeting new people, the experience of finding love and having a child, and finally the experience of death. The man, however, does not find satisfaction or fulfilment in any of these stages. He simply becomes more and more numb and averse to them, his body acting on instinct while his mind is disgusted, and through this Lawrence challenges what a person’s purpose in life is, and if the path many people take is the right one.
These stories work well to be read as a trio, although all can be read independently with equal impact. The Woman Who Rode Away will resonate with the most people, defying the capitalist structures we are all victim to and allowing the woman to reconnect with the earth’s natural structures, therefore liberating herself. It is not necessary to be a Christian, nor to even know much about the Bible or Jesus Christ, to enjoy The Escaped Cock story, for Lawrence keeps the story simple to allow for the complexities of the soul and spirit to thrive. The Man Who Loved Islands is perhaps the hardest to dissect while being the easiest to read. Whilst Lawrence’s messaging may be elusive, this does not take away from the quality of the story, which is again kept relatively simple, as with its language, to allow for the inner discontent of the man to be at the forefront. Across all three stories, Lawrences steers his messages using the natural cycles of the earth, emphasising the inevitability of nature’s triumph over people and the importance of nature in people’s existence.
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Jocelyn Howarth holds a BA in English and Creative Writing and an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway University of London. She specialised in fantasy fiction, exploring the characterisations and roles of women in fantasy for her dissertation, while also crafting her own stories. As a writer and aspiring author, Jocelyn avidly reads across a wide range of genres to inform her creative projects and enjoys writing monthly reviews for Zimmer. Based in Manchester, her spare time is spent walking in various nature parks, bouldering at the local climbing centre, and going to the theatre in the city.