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Beyond Odd Women and Old Maids: D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, Decadent Heroines, and the Challenge to Modern Tragedy

Richard A. Kaye

Résumé

Critics generally have viewed D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl (1920) as a vexing fictional work that, with its resemblance to the fiction of Arnold Bennett and Compton Mackenzie, seems to eschew the modernist experiment that Lawrence had boldly embarked on in his other fiction of the period. Yet the story of Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a struggling Midlands draper and an “odd woman” who seems to reject marriage, only superficially follows the examples set by these writers. Rather, the novel’s heroine, with her ten suitors and her restless need to dominate her lovers, echoes the aspirations of the turn-of-the-century Aestheticist movement and resembles more the heroines of Decadent fiction, with their indomitable, insatiable erotic requirements. Furthermore, in rejecting the social realm that is so crucial to realist fiction of the period, Lawrence rejects the idea that unmarried women face a tragic personal dilemma.

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  • 1 The Lost Girl has an unusual compositional history. As Mark Kinkead-Weekes makes clear, Lawrence be (...)

1D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl (1920) is among the least critically discussed and appreciated of the writer’s works of fiction and arguably one of the least understood.1 The story of Alvina Houghton, who emerges from a constricted upbringing in the Midlands town of Woodhouse, briefly works as a nurse, courts and then fends off nine suitors, thriving for awhile among a visiting troupe of circus-like performers, until she finds some happiness with a young Italian and then moves with him to Naples, where they marry, proved baffling or disturbing to early reviewers and to some recent critics. While it is the only work by Lawrence to have received a literary prize during the author’s lifetime (the James Tate Memorial Prize), early commentary about the novel was mixed or hostile, partly owing to the novel’s evident investment in a realist technique of accumulative detail in the vein of Compton MacKenzie and Arnold Bennett – the latter of whom privately praised the novel – but also because of its heroine’s fitful, ornery, and insubordinate sexuality.

2Among those panning the novel was Virginia Woolf, who, writing of The Lost Girl in the Times Literary Supplement, negatively compared it, because of its excess of social facticity, to Bennett’s fiction. Although she did praise what she called its “Tolstoyan” concentration of effect, she lamented that while “sex” would seem to be “the magnet to which the myriad of separate details would appear,” the “picture of life in Woodhouse was built up; and sex disappeared” (795). Katherine Mansfield, assigned to review the novel for the Athenaeum, fell ill and did not complete her review, although in a letter she shared her fury at the work’s “doctrine of mindlessness,” by which she seems to have meant its romantically profligate heroine (182-4). The reviewing assignment was passed on to her husband, John Middleton Murry, the journal’s editor, who complained that

Mr. Lawrence’s own grasp of the central theme of his story, of the peculiar attraction which held Alvina and Ciccio together, despite an ecstatic hatred that would have sufficed to separate a hundred ordinary lovers for ever, may possibly be profound; but he does not convey it to us. He writes of characters as though they were animals circling around each other; and on this sub-human plane no human destinies can be decided. Alvina and Ciccio become for us like grotesque beasts in an aquarium, shut off from our apprehension by the misted glass of an esoteric language, a quack terminology. (836)

3Mansfield and Murry’s low estimations of the novel would seem to dovetail around a sense that Alvina’s erotic nature is animalistic and lowly, a surprisingly prudish conception that nonetheless reminds us that even forward-thinking critics of Lawrence’s time could baulk at the novelist’s depiction of female erotic desire.

  • 2  Asked if he believed if one had to choose between the fiction of James Joyce and Lawrence given th (...)
  • 3 The exchange followed the publication of a new edition of The Lost Girl with an introduction by Sie (...)

4Even sympathetic critics of the novel have tended to perceive its heroine as simply transgressing against provincial morality. What Alvina breaks from in The Lost Girl, writes George Ford, is “only a set of small-town conventions,” a view that obscures Alvina’s intra-psychic struggles, carnal yearnings, and need for domination in her romantic relationships (72). More recently, Jane Eldridge Miller has argued that The Lost Girl fails to register fully or sympathetically the social realities facing the so-called “odd women” who inhabit its heroine’s world. The novel, Miller argues, ultimately offers a damagingly gendered conception of male and female social roles and devolves into “incoherence.” That The Lost Girl continually has frustrated readers in part may lie in the fact that it is one the least ideologically dogmatic fictional works by Lawrence, a point underscored by the novelist Saul Bellow when, in an 1963 Paris Review interview, he referenced The Lost Girl as a work in which Lawrence’s “sexual theories” were held in check.2 Yet the novel has continued to divide critics over its fundamental meaning, as was evident in a 2005 exchange between the novelist Benjamin Kunkel and the critic Lee Siegel in The New York Review of Books. Siegel saw the “transfiguring capacity of the imagination” as a central theme while Kunkel discerned a “remarkable celebration of the permanent mutual solitude of husband and wife,” a curious estimation given that Alvina's marriage to Ciccio at a Scarborough Registrar’s office is followed by days of anxiety and worse for Alvina when the couple move to Italy (“At moments she hated him. He seemed to want to crush her forever,” 336). Some eight months after their wedding, Ciccio enlists in the war effort.3

Unmarried women

  • 4 “Nelson’s series of 7d modern writers is very good—get H. G. Wells’ Kipps,--only sevenpence” Lawren (...)

5At the outset of The Lost Girl, Lawrence frames his heroine’s dilemma in 1913 in terms of the vexing pre-war social problem that in his novel The Odd Women (1893) George Gissing had used to express the problem facing his female protagonists. Gissing’s novel concerned a pair of sisters, Alice and Monica Madden, who are left financially bereft when their father dies. They become friends with two independent women who try to help them live independently outside of marriage daring, Mary Barfoot and Rhoda Nunn. As we shall see, these independent-minded women choose to sacrifice conventional personal fulfillment for the greater cause of a women’s movement for financial sustenance outside of marriage. (It is is likely that Lawrence read Gissing’s novel around 1915 if not before.4)

6The term “odd women” harked back to W. R. Greg’s 1864 article “Why Are Women Redundant?” in the National Review, in which Greg had recommended emigration as well as an acceptance of the reality that less affluent married couples might find themselves in impoverished circumstances. Lawrence introduces the issue with a flurry of querulous questions:

A calm year of plenty. But one chronic and dreary malady: that of the odd women. Why, in the name of all prosperity, would every class but the lowest in such a society hang over-burdened with Dead Sea fruit of odd women, unmarried, unmarriageable women, called old maids? Why is it that every tradesman, every schoolmaster, every bank manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more old maids. Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower middle classes, give birth to more girls than boys? Or do the lower middle-class men assiduously climb up or down, in marriage, thus leaving their true partners stranded? Or are middle-class women very squeamish in their choice of husbands? (1-2)

  • 5 In her 1983 book The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich made an updated twentieth-century argument s (...)

7Facetiously describing a frenzy of anxiety about the state of “old maidenhood” that afflicts a range of lower – and middle-class women and their worried relatives, the narrator’s mock concern represents less an acknowledgement of “odd women” as a serious social problem than a kind of rebuke of the Edwardian problem novel offered by Mackenzie and Bennett. Thus Lawrence largely downplays the economic aspect of a situation in which “surplus women,” must find jobs in the absence of husbands, a scenario in which, in Gissing’s schema, the collapse of the traditional Victorian family leaves women stranded and, in effect, foments modern feminism.5

8Lest we miss the narrator’s wearily omniscient contempt for the idea that unmarried women represent a burning social issue, the narrator explicitly raises the question of whether Alvina’s predicament had tragic implications: “However it be, it is a tragedy. Or perhaps it is not” (2). The “perhaps” is a tip off that Lawrence’s heroine will not allow – or escape – the grim calculus. As we shall see, Lawrence’s skepticism about the supposedly tragic nature of the social phenomenon of women going unmarried echoes but also caustically diverges from Gissing’s novel, which had named and diagnosed the problem in dire economic terms. For Lawrence the problem was not simply Gissing’s naturalist stress on financial necessity but Victorian fiction’s marriage plot itself, now rendered dire in Gissing’s London of filthy, fog befouled streets.

9“I’m terrified of my Alvina, who marries a Cicio,” wrote Lawrence to Compton MacKenzie in May 1920.

  • 6 Lawrence originally named Alvina’s lover and husband “Cicio” before he renamed the character “Cicci (...)

I believe neither of us has found a way out of the labyrinth. How we hang on to the marriage clue! Doubt if it’s really a way out – out my Alvina, in whom the questing soul is lodged, moves towards reunion with the dark half of humanity. (III, 521)6

10That Lawrence claimed to be “terrified” of Alvina is telling. Arguably the most puzzling aspect of the novel is the heroine herself. On the one hand, as Theresa Thompson notes in a discussion of The Lost Girl and eugenics, Alvina is in “many ways the ‘new woman’ stereotype” whose journey also parallels “stereotypical romance stories about good but fallen women.” In this sense, Alvina superficially resembles the heroine of Grant Allen’s controversial, best-selling novel The Woman Who Did (1895), the protagonist of which, Herminia Barton, refuses to marry her lover although she shares his bed and gives birth to his child. Yet, as Thompson points out, in marrying Cicio, Alvina “abandons England for Italy and so becomes ‘lost’ to romance and new woman plots” (119). Yet Alvina’s character cannot be explained through plot alone. One of the striking aspects of the novel is the way in which Alvina’s romantic entanglements repeatedly, regardless of the novel’s plot, seem to be the source of intense psychic and erotic power over men.

A femme fatale?

  • 7 Lawrence relation to turn-of-the century Aestheticism and Decadence, while out of the scope of this (...)

11With a heroine who for most of the novel pursues several men not so much out of financial necessity as out of a recondite psychological need to woo and conquest, one duplicated in each new romantic encounter, The Lost Girl not only looks askance at Gissing’s problematizing of “odd women” but evokes the female protagonists in a range of fictional works related to the Aestheticist and Decadent movements.7 The pleasure she often takes in courting, dominating, and then abandoning her various suitors, her repeated preoccupation with the idea of surrendering to prostitution, and her fascination with the dark, underground world of the colliers, all suggest a kind of recalcitrant femme fatale of the Midlands.

12Lawrence introduces the idea of Alvina surrendering to prostitution only to dismiss such a solution as inimical to her fundamental nature:

But it needs a certain natural gift to become a loose woman or a prostitute. If you haven’t got the qualities which attract loose men, what are you to do? Supposing it isn’t in your nature to attract loose and promiscuous men! Why, then, you can’t be a prostitute, if you try your head off: nor even a loose woman. Since willing won’t do it. It requires a second party to come to an agreement.

Therefore, all Alvina’s desperate and profligate schemes and ideas fell to nought before the inexorable in her nature. And the inexorable in her nature was highly exclusive and selective, an inevitable negation of looseness or prostitution. Hence men were afraid of her – of her power, once they had committed themselves. She would involve and lead a man on, she would destroy him rather than not get of him what she wanted. And what she wanted was something serious and risky. Not mere marriage – oh dear no! But a profound and dangerous inter-relationship. As well as ask the paddlers in the small surf of passion to plunge themselves into the heaving gulf of mid-ocean. Bah, with their trousers turned

up to their knees, it was enough for them to wet their toes in the dangerous sea. They were having nothing to do with such desperate nereids as Alvina. (61-2)

13Much about Alvina’s psychology and her social conditions is telegraphed in these sentences. Alvina’s sexual requirements, while transgressive in their way, cannot be accommodated by the time-honored transgression of prostitution, which is not so much rejected by the narrator (speaking on Alvina’s behalf) on moral grounds as for practical reasons – namely, that Alvina lacks the qualities that attract “loose men.”

14Noting that the novel’s originality partly lay in having a heroine courted by ten men, Peter Balbert points to the complex psychology of sex in the novel, with its repeated references to its heroine’s fascination with – and temptation towards – prostitution. Indeed, Alvina is described at one point in Lawrence’s novel as a kind of “sacred prostitute” who ponders prostitution as a solution and who must submit, prostitutionally as it were, to her Italian lover Ciccio, a submission, that as Balbert observes, satisfies some intense psycho-erotic need on her part but also risks her self-obliteration. “In her yielding to Ciccio sexually and maritally,” writes Balbert, “she may have given away more of her self than she could afford” (398). In this sense, the novel’s conclusion, in which Ciccio goes off to fight in the First World War, frees Alvina from having to take full measure of her submission to marriage, although (thinking outside the compass of the novel) that pause may be short-lived. As the editor of the Cambridge edition of The Lost Girl, John Worthen, notes, a relatively small numbers of Italian males died in the First World War

15In The Lost Girl Lawrence not only critiques the anxious naturalism of Gissing’s The Odd Women, he fashions a heroine with affinities with the anti-heroines of Decadent literature such as that of the French Symbolist writer Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1883) and Octave Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des Supplices (The Torture Garden, 1899). At the same time, in allowing his heroine to exercise her erotic will with multiple men, Lawrence shapes a story that resists the terms of tragedy that Gissing affirmed in The Odd Women, with its casualties and survivors of the brutal marriage market. It is not clear that Lawrence was familiar with these works of fiction. What is clear, however, is that his “decadent” female protagonists, characters such as the death-courting heroine of the story “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925) and Gudrun of Women in Love (1920) harbored affinities with such fictional figures.

16In highlighting Alvina’s social dilemma as an “odd woman” or “old maid,” the novel critiques and even spoofs Victorian and Edwardian models as well as navigates a new fictional path, one dependent on tropes familiar from turn of the century Aestheticist and Decadent movement in which femmes fatales prevailed. A number of critics have seen such tropes as inherently misogynistic, part of a nineteenth-century cultural landscape in which women were represented as inherently animalistic. The point has been articulated variously in Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Female Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986), Joseph Kestner’s Mythology and Misogyny: The Social Discourse of Nineteen-Century British Academic Painting (1989), and Patricia Matthews’s Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art (1999). Matthews argues that the destabilization of gender fixities so evident in French Symbolist painting served to confirm a conservative point of view on gender identity, so that such figures as the poète maudit, the androgyne, and the hermaphrodite were exalted as fundamentally masculine and therefore impervious to a despised femininity. Beyond – or because of – its links to Decadent texts, The Lost Girl suggests, too, the altered terms for a twentieth-century understanding of modern tragedy. For in equipping its woman protagonists with nihilistic, psychologically vexed traits, as femme fatales seek out psycho-sexual arrangements in which they can dominate men, much of Decadent literature hampers the usual terms of tragedy.

Aestheticism, Decadence, Domination

17In a passing comment on The Lost Girl in her 1967 essay “The Pornographic Imagination,” Susan Sontag came close to identifying the radical sexual ideas informing the novel, at least within an English tradition. Discussing the French writer Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (1954), a work in which a beautiful fashion photographer willingly submits to a range of erotic humiliations in a chateau outside of Paris. Sontag comments:

O’s quest is neatly summed up in the expressive letter which serves her for a name. “O” suggests a cartoon of her sex, not her individual sex but simply woman; it also stands for a nothing. But what “Story of O.” unfolds is a spiritual paradox, that of the full void and of the vacuity that is also a plenum. The power of the book lies exactly in the anguish stirred up by the continuing presence of this paradox Pauline Réage raises, in a far more organic and sophisticated manner than Sade does with his clumsy expositions and discourses, the question of the status of human personality itself. But whereas Sade is interested in the obliteration of personality from the viewpoint of power and liberty, the author of The Story of O is interested in the obliteration of personality from the viewpoint of happiness. (The closest statement of this theme in English literature: certain passages in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl) 56.

18In citing “certain passages” in the novel Sontag may have been thinking of those parts of The Lost Girl in which Alvina imagines an alternate life for herself, what L. D. Clark has called Alvina’s periodic “symbolic fantasy” of “escape from the degenerate everyday world” (198). What Sontag indirectly touches on, I would suggest, is the genealogy that links Réage to Lawrence.

19Early reviewers of The Lost Girl were cognizant of the debt the novel owed to a late-nineteenth Aestheticism and, indirectly, to literary Decadence. In a notice entitled “The Quest for Beauty,” a reviewer of the novel in the Observer lamented what he or she saw as the baleful influence of aestheticism:

It is easy to forget that Mr. Lawrence’s chief preoccupation is beauty; yet it is as true of him as it was of Beardsley, another artist whose search led into byways rarely explored without danger to the explorer and disgust [to the observer […] [Lawrence’s] obsession is quite different from that of such an author as Swift. Whose real preoccupation was truth, and who was also led to handle things generally left untouched […] Mr. Lawrence never gives the whole of anyone; for he who is preoccupied with beauty is doomed not to find the truth. (5)

20As John Worthen notes, Lawrence not only read this review, he seems to have embraced it, putting the following words into the mouth of his fictional alter-ego, the writer Gilbert Noon, in Mr. Noon:

Now my critic in the Observer of December 1920 says I am out on the quest of some blotched lily of beauty, some fleur du mal, like the defunct Aubrey Beardsley. We live and learn, and I am very pleased indeed to shake hands with the outre-tombe Monsieur Beardsley. On the other hand I am told I am not like Swift. I am not on the search for truth. So the infernal Dean can call me a Yahoo if he likes. I parade with my spangled lily down the avenues of time. (118)

21Later, Gilbert will return to this review, declaring that the

critic who says that I am on the search for beauty rather than truth may be right. He can read this book and make certain. He says I am Aubrey Beardsley rather than Swift. So that all you have to fear, gentle reader, is some exquisite tail-piece to Salome. (152)

22Of course, Beardsley was not only a hero of the turn-of-the-century Aestheticist enterprise in Britain but a notable figure within the Decadent movement. His black-and-white illustrations for works such as Oscar Wilde’s Salome arguably were less about “beauty” per se than the depiction of outrageous, bawdy erotic scenarios. His drawings, many of the more pornographic of which were not exhibited publicly, typically featured highly stylized male and female genitalia.

23That Lawrence would upend the Observer’s moralizing conception of his writing suggests the novelist’s at least partial identification with turn-of-the-century Aestheticism and Decadence. In identifying so strongly with Beardsley – and by extension with other lily-spangled members of the Aestheticist and Decadent movements – the novelist intensified his critique of the truth-seeking procedures of late-nineteenth century naturalists such as Gissing and, in France, Emile Zola. One of the fundaments of Decadent writing, particularly in France, was its conscious reaction against literary naturalism as a dreary, pseudo-scientific enterprise hostile to beauty. That critique originates with Théophile Gautier’s famous preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) and continued with J-K. Huysmans’ A Rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), a central text of the Decadent movement and a deliberate salvo launched at Zola’s literary naturalism as well as, in its seeming anti-populist, aristocratic disdain for the masses, against Zola’s progressive political agenda.

24It was the femme fatale, sometimes in the form of a dazzling and perverse dominatrix, that was featured in much of nineteenth-century Decadent literature and art, particularly in France. Rachilde (the nom de plume of Marguerite Eymery) fashioned one of the more memorable of such figures in her novel Monsieur Vénus, as did Mirbeau in The Torture Garden, with its sadistic, often hysterical central character, Clara. Rachilde’s novel focused on a noblewoman, Raoule, who seduces a working-class florist and seeks to empty him of his “masculine” traits.

Indifferent to the workman’s low birth while abandoning herself to an imaginary affair, Raoule was dreaming of the flesh her fingertips had touched, and, with half-closed eyes, this descendant of the Vénérandes was drowning in a delightful languor. Her memory no longer provided the means of arousing her conscience. The shame she had felt before the man she had the audacity to provoke to coarseness was succeeded by a mad admiration for the instrument of pleasure she longed for. She was already enjoying the man; she had already made him her prey; already, perhaps, she was taking him out of his miserable surroundings, in order to idealize him in the spasms of absolute possession. (279)

  • 8 In Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, the figure of Clara is an even more aggressive dominatrix. She del (...)

25This is surely more psychologically and sexually resolved and determined an attitude on the heroine’s part than what one finds in The Lost Girl, where Alvina is almost convulsively wavering in her need to surrender to and dominate her male suitors. Like Raoule, Alvina is drawn to lower-class men, although she can hardly be said to be “indifferent” to their low birth. Unlike Rachilde’s heroine, Alvina frequently is repulsed by lower-class men, a trait she shares with Ursula in The Rainbow (1915), who is terrified by the “power of the mob,” while in Women in Love that terror is concentrated (for Birkin) on the “seething masses of the miners,” as it is for Lilly in Aaron’s Rod (1922) and for Somers in Kangaroo. (1923).8 Moreover, in depicting Raoule as acting out her erotic needs and fantasies in the absence of any evident social restriction or impediment, Rachilde allows her heroine to escape the judgment of society that, until the very last pages of The Lost Girl, bedevils Lawrence’s Alvina.

George Gissing’s The Odd Women and Lawrence’s Critique of Literary Naturalism

26By the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, many Victorian observers fretted about a surplus of single women. Some forty-four percent of all British females over forty had not married, raising the question of how they would survive financially. Taking this social problem seriously, The Odd Women depicts “useless” females, independent-minded but living precariously because of a low supply of eligible men and because they believe eros is a trap. In addition to depicting women who must marry out of social necessity and without passion, Gissing narrates the challenges facing the charismatic feminist leader Rhoda Nunn, who sees romantic love as an impediment to the cause of women. She rails against novelists for fomenting idealizations of romance:

“Love– love– love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists? They won’t represent the real world; it would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many woman and men fall in love?” (82)

27Rhoda’s speech is a meta-fictional rejection of the romantic idealism of nineteenth-century British fiction centered on the marriage plot. Living out her anti-sex, anti-romance philosophy, Rhoda rejects an affluent bachelor to pursue her pro-woman program of stoical abstinence.

28Elizabeth Gaskell already had imagined a female-centric community of voluntarily unattached women in Cranford (1853), but the community of women that coalesces in The Odd Women is motivated by harsh materialist necessity. At one point, Rhoda’ s followers celebrate a recent success and enter a London street – until their exuberance is interrupted by the jarring laughter of a prostitute. Outside of reproduction, men are increasingly expendable in Gissing’s tale. Yet while a grim naturalist logic determines much of the novel, lending unequivocal assent to Rhoda’s choices, Gissing concludes with a striking visionary arrangement, in which an all-female makeshift family freely takes on the task of raising the baby girl of a comrade who has died in childbirth.

29In The Lost Girl. Lawrence expresses his sense of the exhaustion of such fictional scenarios. As Michael Bell remarks of the novel’s relation to the fiction of Arnold Bennett, Lawrence “constantly uses the forms of nineteenth-century fiction to focus the experience of his characters in a way that is parodic without quite being satiric” (137). Parody often takes the form of a meta-fictional dismissal of – but then a truce with – a supposedly tired genre, the bildungsroman or novel of development. After Alvina has moves to London to work as nurse, the narrator muses: “Surely enough books have been written about similar circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina’s six months in Islington,” and then, with an Edwardian novelist’s doggedness for detail, goes on to do precisely that.

30Along with the need to critique provincial English life in the Midlands is the familiar Lawrencian scenario of escape into an alternative universe. In The Lost Girl, the troupe of performers Alvina joins represents an emphatic reprimand of the constricted world of Woodhouse, with its various old maid and “odd women,” none of them, tellingly, as financially desperate as the women in Gissing’s novel. “There was not only the continual activity,” we learn of the troupe.

There were the artistes. Every week she met a new set of stars-three or four as a rule. She rehearsed with them on Monday afternoons, and she saw them every evening, and twice a week at matinees. James now gave two performances each evening – and he always had some audience. So that Alvina had the opportunity to come into contact with all the odd people of the inferior stage. She found they were very much of a type: a little frowsty, a little flea-bitten as a rule, indifferent to ordinary morality, and philosophical even if irritable. And they had always a certain fund of callous philosophy. Alvina did not like them – you were not supposed, really, to get deeply emotional over them. But she found it amusing to see them all and know them all. It was so different from Woodhouse, where everything was priced and ticketed. (118)

31Notable here is an emphasis on Alvina’s relationship to the troupe not being dependent on mere sociability – “She did not like them” – but, rather, on a dynamic beyond, separate from, and more vital than sociability. The make-shift, rootless, carnavalesque counter-world of the troupe – a genuine counter-culture – is especially important given its relation to what I would call the novel’s refusal of the tragic. At the same time, Lawrence’s investment in a heroine of Decadent traits allows the novelist to disengage from the forms of tragedy of realist fiction.

Tragic Refusal

32Raymond Williams’ classic 1966 study Modern Tragedy may be instructive in understanding Lawrence’s critique of Gissing’s version of naturalism and the dilemma of “odd women.” Williams was writing in explicit dissent from George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy (1961), where Steiner had argued that, with a few exceptions (the theatre of Racine and that of Bertolt Brecht) traditional tragedy became impossible with the Enlightenment, the world-view of which was that all problems could be rationally resolved. Suffering and injustice were caused by the exploration of social inequities and the disastrous rule of oppressive tyrants.

33Against Steiner’s argument that tragedy had become unachievable in modern drama and fiction – indeed unimaginable – Williams argued for tragedy as deeply connected to modern revolutionary change and the disappointments that revolutions inevitably foment. For Williams, Lawrence was a central literary artist in the history of tragic forms but someone who radically misunderstood tragedy. Williams contrasts Lawrence with Tolstoi, who, Williams claims, set his fiction in “real societies.” Anna Karenina ends tragically, according to Modern Tragedy, because the Russian novelist calibrated the actual costs of Anna’s transgression within an actual upper-class social milieu, whereas Lawrence consigns the happily adulterous Connie and Mellors of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to an essentially asocial realm.

34Yet The Lost Girl complicates and even refutes this argument that it alters the usual terms in which Lawrence’s literary trajectory is viewed. Lawrence allowed Alvina to enter a counter-society of circus performers as he imagines a satisfying, impromptu sphere where bourgeois values have no purchase, evoking Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), with his idealized circus world that serves as an antidote to soul-destroying, mechanized industrialization. In The Lost Girl, this counter-cultural sphere is not simply a natural realm that lies outside of society. Thus The Lost Girl resists representing “odd women” and “old maids” in the terms of modern tragedy, rendering Miss Frost as comic figures. At the same time, the novel offers what might be called the very obverse of tragedy: the visionary.

35At another point in The Lost Girl Lawrence once again offers a metafictional commentary, this time on the problem of the “tragic” nineteenth-century fictional heroine. The overseer of the performing troupe, Madame, quizzes Alvina on Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina and of Hardy’s Sue Bridehead:

“I am practical impractically,” she stumbled over words. “But your Sue now, in Jude the Obscure — is it not an interesting book? And she is not always too prac-tically prac-tical? If she had been impractically practical she could have been quite happy. Do you know what I mean? — no. But she is ridiculous, Sue: so Anna Karénine. Ridiculous both. Don’t you think?” (145)

36When Alvina presses her, Madame explains:

“Why did they both make everybody unhappy, when they had the man they wanted, and enough money? I think they are both silly.” (145)

37Unlike so many nineteenth and early twentieth-century heroines who transgress, and who die or spectacularly fall, Alvina is, insistently, “lost,” not doomed. And she is not “lost” in some conventional sense. She is lost to other entities (her family, her friends, her lovers, her country, and possibly her husband). This losing of so much in the name of desire in order to gratify the self's psychological and erotic requirements underlines the novel's allegiance to Decadence and the female protagonists of Decadent literature, in which tragedy is not an issue because the social realm, so crucial for tragedy in both Steiner and Williams’ critical schema, has been eliminated as a controlling determinant of the self.

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Bibliographie

Anonymous Reviewer, Observer, Review of The Lost Girl (December 5, 1920).

Balbert, Peter. “Ten Men and a Sacred Prostitute: The Psychology of Sex in the Cambridge Edition of The Lost Girl.Twentieth-Century Literature (Winter 1990): 381-402.

Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Clark, L. D. “Making the Classic Contemporary: Lawrence’s Pilgrimage Novels and American Romance,” in D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World. Eds. Preston, Peter and Hoare, Peter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Ford, George. Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Norton, 1965.

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Lawrence, D. H. Introductions and Reviews. Eds. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

—. The Lost Girl. Ed. John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 1981.

—. Mr. Noon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

—. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume II, 1913-1916. Eds. George J. Zytarul and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

—. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Volume III, 1916-1921. Eds. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Miller, Jane Eldridge. “From Insurrection to Incoherence in D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl. D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 43, No. 1/2 (2018), 44-65.

Mansfield, Katherine. The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield. Ed. J. Middleton Murry. New York: Knopf, 1940.

Miller, Jane Eldridge. “From Insurrection to Incoherence in D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl. D.H. Lawrence Review, vol. 43, No. 1/2 (2018), 44-65.

Murry, John Middleton. ‘The Decay of Mr. D.H Lawrence.” Athenaeum (Dec 17 1920).

Rachilde. Monsieur Vénus, trans. Madeleine Boyd, in The Decadent Reader. Ed. Hustvedt, Asti. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969.

Thompson, Theresa Mae. “Crossing Europe: Political Frontiers in Lawrence’s The Lost Girl,” in Windows to the Sun: D. H. Lawrence’s “Thought Adventures.” Eds. Ingersoll, Earl and Hyde, Virginia. Madison/Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.

Woolf, Virginia. Review of The Lost Girl. Times Literary Supplement, (December 2, 1920), 795.

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Notes

1 The Lost Girl has an unusual compositional history. As Mark Kinkead-Weekes makes clear, Lawrence began a version of the novel in 1912 but set it aside, leaving it in Germany, and then did not have access to the original manuscript until February of 1920, the year he completed it, probably hastily. The novel was published in 1920. Originally a narrative fragmented entitled “Elsa Culverwell,” it would then form a part of a work called The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, an early version of The Lost Girl.

2  Asked if he believed if one had to choose between the fiction of James Joyce and Lawrence given the oppositional terms in which their work is generally discussed, Bellow replied, “No. Because I don’t really take Lawrence’s sexual theories very seriously. I take his art seriously. So I have little use for the Lawrence who wrote The Plumed Serpent and great admiration for the Lawrence who wrote The Lost Girl.” “The Art of Fiction: Saul Bellow,” Paris Review, Issue 36, Winter 1966.

3 The exchange followed the publication of a new edition of The Lost Girl with an introduction by Siegel. Siegel views the novel as a “masterpiece” not of “form but of feeling and perception,” a distinction that undoubtedly would have struck Lawrence as a false one and as alien to his entire aesthetic. “An Exchange on The Lost Girl,” New York Review of Books, June 23, 2005

4 “Nelson’s series of 7d modern writers is very good—get H. G. Wells’ Kipps,--only sevenpence” Lawrence wrote to May Holbrook on February 16, 1909. “Then get something of G. Gissing, and the others.” (116). As the editor James T. Boulton points out in his footnote for this sentence, the only Gissing novel then in print in “Nelson’s 7d,” a popular library of red-clothed volumes, was Gissing’s The Odd Women.

5 In her 1983 book The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich made an updated twentieth-century argument similar to that implicit in Gissing’s novel. According to Ehrenreich, the feminist movement of the 1970s arose from the new economic insecurities facing women owing to men fleeing the nuclear family. In Ehrenreich’s telling it was not women who abandoned the nuclear family but men, who were drawn to the 1960s and 1970s Playboy culture celebrating bachelorhood.

6 Lawrence originally named Alvina’s lover and husband “Cicio” before he renamed the character “Ciccio.”

7 Lawrence relation to turn-of-the century Aestheticism and Decadence, while out of the scope of this article, is a complex one. With a figure such as Oscar Wilde, Lawrence seems to have been ambivalent and hostile. In a 1915 letter to David Garnett expressing a “dreadful sense of repulsiveness” at Garnett’s homosexual friends, he nonetheless declared, “I myself never considered Plato very wrong, or Oscar Wilde.” (320)

In a favorable 1925 review of British writer Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh, Lawrence wrote that the novel “does not ‘date’ as do Huysmans’s books, or Wilde’s, or the rest of them […] Frederick Rolfe was a fantastic figure of the ‘nineties, the ‘nineties of the Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Simeon Solomon, and all the host of the godly. The whole decade is now a little ridiculous, ridiculous decadence as well as ridiculous pietism.” (Introductions and Reviews, 239)

8 In Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, the figure of Clara is an even more aggressive dominatrix. She delights in witnessing theatrical flayings, vivid crucifixions and many sadistic games, all of them set in exquisitely designed and groomed gardens, with much of the narrative given over to surrealist effects. A good deal of the novel entails Clara explaining the beauty of torture to her male companion. In the novel’s final scenes, Clara achieves a hysterical orgasm and passes out in exhaustion, only to begin again a few days later.

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Richard A. Kaye, « Beyond Odd Women and Old Maids: D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl, Decadent Heroines, and the Challenge to Modern Tragedy »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 52 | 2021, mis en ligne le 07 avril 2021, consulté le 20 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/2328 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.2328

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Auteur

Richard A. Kaye

Richard A. Kaye is an associate professor at the City University of New York. His areas of interest include Victorian Literature and Culture, the History of the Novel, Literature of the Fin de Siècle, Modernism, World War I Literature, Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and Visual Culture. He is the author of The Flirt’s Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction (Virginia, 2002) and the forthcoming Voluptuous Immobility: St. Sebastian and the Decadent Imagination (Columbia); He is editing a collection of essays on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. He has published articles on Thackeray, the Brontës, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens in various American journals. He is now the Editor of the D.H. Lawrence Review.

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