homosexuality, utopian socialism, and primitivism.
In all of this, however, it may be Tönnies's opposition of archaic community to modern society that is most useful in characterizing Lawrence's social perspective and his relationship to non-European culture. In Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft(1887), Tönnies elaborates the distinction between rural and city life-one that begins in the West with Plato-in sharp detail. The original rural community is organized around the household economy, customary cooperation, and an art that is organically related to the life of the artist. The urban society that succeeds it, though with elements of community remaining, depends upon deliberative trade, calculation in business, and contractual agreement, industry based on the productive use of capital, and the self-evident validity of science. Though dispassionate in tone, Tönnies's writing -725- reveals an unmistakable sympathy for the rural communities disappearing around him.
Moreover, Tönnies draws an important related distinction between two kinds of will. Natural will 'is the psychological equivalent of the human body.' It is inseparable from activity; inherited and organic in growth; sensuous and artistically creative; attributed to common people; and female in gender. Rational will, by contrast, 'is the product of thinking itself' and possesses reality only with reference to the thinking subject. It is situated prior to activity for better control; conceptually dominated by an image of the future; tool-oriented and mechanical; attributed to the educated classes; and, finally, male in gender. Besides the obvious similarity between this perspective and Lawrence's, Tönnies remarks that since the male artist must have access to natural will, he may appear effeminate-as Lawrence knew he did-to others.
Tönnies's particular elaboration of this distinction is important for the modern period precisely because of its ambiguity. Though adapted to a large extent from earlier political economy and from Marx, his work nicely fits primitivist utopian models and was to be taken up by Nazism as well. It could be turned with equal zeal in egalitarian and authoritarian directions. Lawrence always demonstrated a sympathy for the workers and a hatred of the hereditary and commercial elite. Lord Chatterley, impotently bound to his mechanized wheelchair and to his lifeless, spiritualized writing, is Lawrence's most vicious portrait of that elite. But Lawrence had little regard for democracy in practice; his critique at times closely followed that of Plato's Republic. In general, he turned his longing for community in the authoritarian direction. Though briefly intrigued by Bertrand Russell and his democratic socialism-they planned both revolution and a lecture tour together-Lawrence insisted that only 'a body of chosen patricians' and an elected, patriarchal «Dictator» could guide the community he envisioned.
The opposition of organic community to mechanical society, like that of natural to rational will, appears throughout Lawrence's work. It is central to his criticism of modern England and of modern Europe as well. In the first chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature, he writes: 'Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose… Men are freest when they are unconscious of freedom.' His first sustained treatment of the theme is The Rainbow, but the distinction is also important to this novel's sequel, Women in Love, where the -726- mechanical transformation of the mines initiated by Gerald Crich leads inexorably to Crich's icebound death in the Alps. Subsequent novels, based on Lawrence's travels, reinscribe the distinction in ethnographic terms. Italy, Australia, America, and Mexico each become a phase of his search for a new organic community.
Lawrence's life in England between 1912 and 1917, however interrupted by travel in Germany and Italy, made him feel increasingly persecuted by the government. In addition to his association with socialists in Eastwood, Lawrence had married a German woman of aristocratic background (her cousin, Manfred von Richthofen, was the Red Baron, the most famous German pilot of the First World War). Lawrence was also a known pacifist; he openly opposed England's war effort and the nationalist jingoism surrounding it. On top of everything else, Sons and Lovers gained Lawrence a certain notoriety for its sexual explicitness. The Rainbow was suppressed by the government six weeks after publication in 1915. Lawrence and Frieda retreated to the coast of Cornwall, where they were harassed as possible spies by government officials. Lawrence also endured a number of medical examinations for military service (documented in the «Nightmare» chapter of Kangaroo) that, despite his chronic illness, granted him an ambiguous draft status. Believing that authorities were forcing him out of the country, he embarked on the extended periods of travel abroad that Catherine Carswell called his 'savage pilgrimage.'
Lawrence had once thought about writing a novel for every continent; he was convinced of the formative influence of geography on the consciousness of a people. 'Every continent has its own spirit of place,' he wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature. 'Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland.' This sense of place is important to all of Lawrence's fiction, and often it is modernity's mechanical transformation of place that produces the emotional emptiness he diagnoses. In the novels written after he traveled to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, America, and Mexico, this sense of place acquires an ethnographic scope. Now, it is peasant life in Italy or the mythic heritage of the Aztecs in Mexico that holds the promise of renewed community and natural will.
Lawrence was generally disappointed by his travels. Rarely did a new place live up to, or alter, his expectations. Kangaroo, for example, ends with the inevitable turn away from human inadequacies toward the aboriginal flora, recalling similar gestures in The White Peacock or -727- Women in Love, which are set in Nottinghamshire. In Mexico, however, Lawrence went one step further. Out of a dizzying melange of Aztec creation myths, contemporary Mexican politics, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky, and a Congregationalist hymnal, he produced a syncretic fantasy about the resurgence of natural will and organic community in a fraternal cult centered around the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl. The Plumed Serpent is Lawrence's only fully realized picture of what the recreation of organic community in the modern world would entail, and it is significantly set far from Eastwood amid the phallic mysteries of an archaic brotherhood.
While the cult of Quetzalcoatl replaces the Christian cross of spiritual love with a drumming sensuality, Lawrence also finds in the stories of Quetzalcoatl (the Morning Star) and rival brother Huitzilopochtli (or Tezcatlipoca) another version of the irresolvable tension present in the Christian trinity. The Aztec belief in Quetzalcoatl's return to reestablish his reign on earth informs the story, which ends in ritual human sacrifice and Kate's decision to remain, in thrall, with Cipriano. It has often been claimed that Lawrence, to the relief of many readers, repudiated the hero worship and authoritarianism of The Plumed Serpent in a letter of 1928: 'On the whole I agree… the leader-cum-folower relationship is a bore.' But subsequent letters make it clear that he retained an allegiance to Quetzalcoatl and his high priests-'Yes, I am all for Lucifer, who is really the Morning Star'-to the end of his life.
Today the novels of D. H. Lawrence occupy a more tenuous position in the canon of English literature than they did a generation ago. But his work prompted sharply divided critical judgment from the beginning. Sons and Lovers made Lawrence's early reputation, but it is also his most conventionally realistic novel. Though many saw The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover as important, even revolutionary books, the first was confiscated on publication for obscenity, the second found no publisher willing to take it for several years and suffered from the threat of libel, and the third was treated as pornography. Lawrence's antiwar, anti-English opinions certainly contributed to the ill will of the government and the fear of publishers, but many writers-from Ford Madox Ford to Ezra Pound-at one time or another agreed with the guardians of good taste about the outrageousness of his language and ideas. -728-
The novels of the latter part of Lawrence's career received a generally poor response from the critics and the public, and his status declined somewhat in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism (as did Nietzsche's) and T. S. Eliot's attack in After Strange Gods (1934). But there was a renaissance of critical interest during the 1950s, led by F. R. Leavis, and Lawrence was newly annointed in the 1960s as a prophet of untrammeled sexuality and spontaneity. Kate Millett's treatment of Lawrence in Sexual Politics (1969) marked a turning point of sorts. Going beyond Simone de Beauvoir's earlier feminist appraisal, Millett's chapter on Lawrence was a denunciation all the more damaging for its precision and insight. After Millett, Lawrence's presentation of sexuality seemed more than ever like vulgar kitsch, his understanding of women undiluted chauvinist fantasy. In certain ways, Lawrence never recovered from the attack. But the question of his homosexuality has been more insightfully explored since Millett by Jeffrey Meyers and others, and a fair number of contemporary essays have addressed Lawrence's notions of language, identity, and race. The new, scholarly Cambridge edition of Lawrence's works is a significant contribution to the task of reappraisal.
Lawrence's novels have often been divided into three major phases-with Lady Chatterley's Lover as a sort of coda at the end. The White Peacock, The Trespasser, and Sons and Lovers all derive from Lawrence's early life in Eastwood; The Rainbow and Women in Love, begun as one novel called 'The Sisters', from Lawrence's early life with Frieda and his rejection of England during the war; and the last group, including what has been called the
