“The Desire to Despair:  Undermining 
Freud in D. H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr”

by Thomas J. Tobin

	D. H. Lawrence, in the foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious, penned the following:
If I try to write down what I see--why not? If a publisher likes to print a book--all right. And if anybody wants to read it, let him. But why anybody should read one single word if he doesn’t want to, I don’t see. Unless of course he is a critic who needs to scribble a dollar’s worth of words, no matter how. (10)
With this in mind, I now turn to a critical interpretation of Lawrence’s psychological views as expressed in his creative works, because, as Lawrence elsewhere said, “This pseudo-philosophy of mine. . . is deduced from [my] novels and poems, not the reverse” (Fantasia 9).
	Lawrence wrote St. Mawr in 1924, a year after the publication of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, his answers to Freud. During the period 1922-1925, Lawrence also wrote nine other long works of poetry and fiction, but none of his stories epitomizes the spirit of his non-fiction works as does St. Mawr.
	St. Mawr, as a text, uses the words “desire” and “despair” frequently. Indeed, the characters in St. Mawr each have their say about the nature of the individual mind, and its role in male-female relationships. In this manner, then, we can see how Lawrence, whose theories about the mind and interpersonal relationships somewhat resembled those of Freud, uses St. Mawr to put his own theoretical subtleties to the test in the personæ of Mrs. Witt, Lou, Phœnix, Lewis, and the horse St. Mawr.
	In my presentation, I plan to show how Freud’s death instinct is translated into the desire to suffer--to despair--which surfaces in St. Mawr in the thoughts and actions of the six main characters named above (including the horse). This desire to despair is necessary, argues Lawrence in Fantasia of the Unconscious, in order for the self to come to terms with its place in the cosmos. To make this desire clear in St. Mawr, I argue, Lawrence discusses the individual mind, its role in interpersonal relationships, and the futility of both of these modes. In so doing, Lawrence attempts to make plain to his readers what Freud thought to be hidden: the conflicting desires of Thanatos and Eros--death and self-preservation. 
	A severely hacked version of Lawrence’s argument in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious might sound like this: a person’s consciousness is divided, with the affective, first consciousness residing in the navel, and the cognitive, secondary consciousness in the brain. Lawrence posits that there is some vital energy, which he likens to electricity, which flows between these two centers of consciousness, between a mother and a child, and between an adult and the environment. These circuits must be fully established in order to maintain a balance of vital energy in, among, and around individuals (this is also, by the way, why Lawrence railed against masturbation--a spending of energy without a return).  
	For Lawrence, the first relationship which develops between human beings is one of spirit, not of intellect. The essential human spirit in the navel forms connections between a child and its mother sympathetically. In a letter to J. M. Murray dated 30 September 1924, he asserted that “every woman hopes her BABY will become the Messiah” (Letters 2:811). The reason, Lawrence continues, that such interpersonal flow of vital energy is not ultimately fulfilling is that “It takes a man, not a baby” (811), which suggests that love between two people is only a shadow of a more complete relationship. This shadow relationship of the primary centers of cognition can be illustrated in three pairings in St. Mawr: Lou and the horse St. Mawr, Lou and her husband Rico, and Mrs. Witt’s relationship to the groom Lewis.
	Lou finds, in St. Mawr, that she has a desire to learn what the spark in St. Mawr’s eye really is. It is described as “a lurking afterthought. . . a dangerous, half-revealed resentment, a diffused sense of hostility” (28). Lou wants to have the “animal sense” of St. Mawr, because she is so bored with the social commonplaces of her fiancé Rico. This much is made plain, both in the text of St. Mawr, where Lou discusses the merits and faults of men’s minds, as compared with the spirits of animals:
“Yes mother!--But what is real mind? The old woman who knits the most complicated pattern? Oh, I can hear all their needles clicking, the clever men! As a matter of fact, mother I believe Lewis has far more real mind than Dean Vyner or any of the clever ones. . . . I don’t want intimacy, mother. I love St. Mawr because he isn’t intimate. he stands where one can’t get at him. And he burns with life. And where does his life come from, to him? That’s the mystery. (60)
Against such plain, unfettered animus, Lou’s own fiancé Rico stands little chance of being held in any esteem by her, and indeed, St. Mawr accomplishes a symbolic victory over Rico when St. Mawr crushes Rico’s leg in a fall (76). Lawrence supports my reading of the purity of St. Mawr’s animus in Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he describes the horse:
But the horse’s eye is bright and glancing. His curiosity is cautious, full of terror, or else aggressive and frightening for the object. The root of his vision is in his belly, in the solar plexus. And he fights with his teeth, and his heels, the sensual weapons. (61)
Thus, we can see that through her admiration for St. Mawr, Lou has already despaired of finding fulfillment in interpersonal relationships. Lou’s desire then turns to the horse’s free spirit, but becomes sublimated into a relationship between the self and all of nature--what Lawrence himself likened to the god Pan.	
	At dinner, the characters in St. Mawr discuss what the Great God Pan might have been like, and one of the guests surmises that “he was he God that is hidden in everything. In those days you saw the thing, you never saw the God in it: I mean in the tree or the fountain or the animal. If you ever saw the God instead of the thing, you died” (65). This death, Lawrence argues, is merely a way of explaining the ineffable, the sublimation of the self into the cosmos. The horse St. Mawr is, because of his animal nature, closer to the Great God Pan than is man, who is “thwarted, insulated by a whole set of india-rubber ideals and conventions, till every form of perversion and death-desire sets in” (Lawrence, Psychoanalysis 244). Thus, the natural Thanatos instinct we find in Feud is labeled as perverse and unnatural by Lawrence.
	Lawrence’s identification of the horse with Pan also carries over to St. Mawr’s groom, Lewis. While on a journey together, Mrs. Witt asks Lewis to marry her, in the hopes of finding out the secret to his “real mind” that Lou had alluded to. A relationship between the two ought to work out well, but there is something primal and wild in Lewis, which shows itself in his story of the belief in the fairy folk (107-8). Such connection to the land, Lewis asserts, was once common, and elevated man to a higher state of being. Lawrence couches this philosophy in an allegorical story of the fairies, because the highest relationship, that between self and cosmos, is finally ineffable. Mrs. Witt, far from being able to understand Lewis’ refusal of her proposal, tries to explain it to herself in personal, social, and economic terms, and comes up with nothing (112).
	Baruch Hochman, in his study of Lawrence entitled Another Ego, sees this as the failure of Mrs. Witt’s desire to both have “men answer [her own] needs,” and at the same time “to submit and succumb to the strong male” (152). Hochman has obviously not read Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, or he would have seen that the relationship fails because Lewis is connected already--to nature--on a higher plane than that of Mrs. Witt’s desired interpersonal relationship. She simply can’t compete with the All, with Pan.
	If Lewis shares a connection to Pan, then his counterpart, Phœnix, is even more perfectly in tune with the land. Because Phœnix is an American Indian, he is often described as distant, “in his own silence” (51). Because the American landscape, especially that of the Southwest, holds more promise of establishing the self-cosmos connection, the novella ends up there, with all of the main characters retiring to a ranch in New Mexico, ostensibly for a change of scenery, but ultimately--for Lou, at least--to find a new Self, with a capital “S.”
	Daniel Dervin posits that this identification with the landscape is the result of Lawrence’s own “transposing his origins onto strange soil,” by which “he transforms them into a new vision of sexuality beyond the wasteland of his society’s and of his own past” (130). In Dervin’s view of the self/cosmos relationship, the sexual element is never relinquished. I disagree with such a simplification of the transformation process. Dervin is correct in asserting that Lawrence sublimates his own self, his “origins,” onto the New Mexico landscape, but it is not a sexual revelation, but one which transcends interpersonal and social issues. Indeed, Dervin’s conclusion that “along with the self, the cosmos must also be rebuilt” (130-1) is still valid, but this rebuilding must be accomplished through despairing to find fulfillment in anything but a surrender of the self to the cosmos--complete transcendence. It is this transcendence that Lawrence hints at in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, when he says that “If, however, the unconscious is inconceivable, how do we know it at all? We know it by direct experience. We know the sun” (211). If this connection with the world outside the self is not clear enough, Lawrence later elaborates: “The whole of life is one long, blind, effort at an established polarity with the outer universe, human and non-human; and the whole of modern life is a shrieking failure. It is our own fault” (245).
	This “shrieking failure” is finally, the despair to which we must desire if we are ever to find a higher satisfaction, says Lawrence. The fairy stories of Lewis, the knowing of the sun at an elemental level have been lost to modern society, and must be regained, somehow. Lou searches within, in her fiancé Rico, in the horse St. Mawr, each time coming closer to despairing of all these, until she finally finds transcendence in the New Mexico landscape.
	Janice Harris sees Lou’s search within and without as a continuation of Lawrence’s earlier fiction writings, what Harris terms “leadership tales.” In this light, Harris posits that “the masculine gain in asserting self and the feminine gain in losing self disappears as Lou’s search helps her recognize her human need to find and lose self” (193). Such a reading is incomplete, in that Harris focuses only on the relationship of self to self; in this there is not only not a dynamic flow, as the Lawrence of Fantasia of the Unconscious would argue must be present for fulfillment, there isn’t even an attempt to find fulfillment outside of the self. Instead, I believe, Lawrence bases his conclusions in St. Mawr on his archetypal relationship between the self and the cosmos--micro- and macrocosm--as the perfection of consciousness. He deviates from the dualism of Freud’s Thanatos/Eros concept in the ending of St. Mawr: the horse disappears from the narrative, and is replaced by the landscape of New Mexico.
	After the characters arrive in America, St. Mawr disappears from the novella. We are told that he survived the trip to the U. S., but he is no longer useful, having been supplanted by the land itself--the thing for which the symbol of the shine in his eyes stands. 
	Indeed, Lawrence ends St. Mawr with a description of the previous occupants of the ranch, and their struggle to master the land. The very end of the novella is a description of the process by which Nature, Pan, the All, has taken back the ranch, overgrowing it with flowers and weeds, carving it up with the wind. The story does not end with Lou’s final realization of the possibility of communion with the cosmos, because it has already happened. There is no character called Lou by the end of the story, only a paean to the land, and to the soul of it inherent in the clouds:
 The same [despair took hold of the previous owner] when a couple of horses were struck by lightning. 
. . . The rivers of fluid fire that suddenly fell out of the sky and exploded on the earth near by. (147)
Here, finally, Lawrence returns to the idea of the electric circuit which completes all life, now in its most powerful and perfect form. The lightning even supersedes the animus of the horse, which it kills; it is pure life, pure force, pure “awful splendor” (148).
	To conclude, Lawrence takes many of Freud’s essential principles, and parcels them out into different circuit-relationships, the highest of which--a symbiosis between the self and the non-self--has an almost Zen flavor of world-renunciation or world-becoming. The instinct toward annihilation which we find in Freud is, for Lawrence, not really an instinct for death itself, but a yearning for the clearing away of egoistic, interpersonal, and social  interference to the circuit between the living cosmos and the living individual. It is this loss of the knowing self (lower-case “s”) in a reconstitution of the experiential Self (upper-case “S”) on a higher plane that marks Lawrence’s novella St. Mawr as an undermining of Freud’s principles.

Works Cited
The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Harry T. Moore. 2 vols. New York: Viking, 1962.
Dervin, Daniel. “A Strange Sapience” : The Creative Imagination of D. H. Lawrence. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1984.
Harris, Janice Hubbard. The Short Fiction of D. H. Lawrence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1984.
Hochman, Baruch. Another Ego: The Changing View of Self and Society in the Work of D. H. Lawrence. 1st. ed. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina, 1970.
Lawrence, D[avid] H[erbert]. Fantasia of the Unconscious. 1923. Rpt. in Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Phœnix edition. London: William Heinemann, 1961.
---. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. 1923. Rpt. in Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Phœnix edition. London: William Heinemann, 1961.
---. St. Mawr and Other Stories. 1925. The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence. 8 vols. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Vol. 6.