Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence: Indians, Gypsies, and Jews

By J. Ruderman

Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence is a wide-ranging examination of Lawrence's adoption and adaptation of stereotypes about minorities, with a focus on three particular 'racial' groups. This book explores societal attitudes in England, Europe, and the United States and Lawrence's utilization of cultural norms to explore his own identity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781137398833

Book preview

Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence

Also by Judith Ruderman

JOSEPH HELLER

WILLIAM STYRON

D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE DEVOURING MOTHER: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership

Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence

Indians, Gypsies, and Jews

Judith Ruderman

Duke University, USA

© Judith Ruderman 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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First published 2014 by

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To my family

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

1 Introduction: D. H. Lawrence and the Racial Other

2 Lawrence and the ‘Jewish Problem’: Reflections on a Self-Confessed ‘Hebrophobe’

3 An ‘Englishman at Heart’? Lawrence, the Jews, and the National Identity Debates

4 ‘Doing a Zion Stunt’: Lawrence in his Land(s) of Milk and Honey

5 Lawrence and the Indian: Apprehending ‘Culture’ in the American Southwest

6 Lawrence’s Caravan of Gypsy Identities

7 (Ad)dressing Identity: Clothing as Artifice and Authenticity

8 Cleanliness and Fitness: The Role of the Racial Other in Conceptions of Health

9 Crossing or Enforcing the Border: Purity, Hybridity, and the Concept of Race

Appendix. Race vs. Ethnicity: The Case of the Gypsies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the work of the many D. H. Lawrence scholars worldwide who have maintained an allegiance to Lawrence through his years of marginalization in academe. Their publications and presentations have enriched the field of Lawrence studies, and I have learned much from them. These scholars are too numerous to name, but I hope they know that their colleagueship across great distances has been for me an invaluable source of encouragement and gratification. Special thanks go to all the editors of the more than 45 volumes of the authoritative Cambridge University Press editions of Lawrence’s works and letters – a massive undertaking – as well as to John Worthen, David Ellis, and the late Mark Kinkead-Weekes for their richly-detailed, three-volume Cambridge biography. These scholarly editions have greatly aided all researchers in Lawrence studies. I also thank the anonymous readers of my manuscript, whose comments and criticisms led to a better book than I could have produced without their critical eye.

Special recognition must be accorded to the late James C. Cowan, founding editor of the D. H. Lawrence Review, who turned down my first submission in the 1970s but generously sent a comprehensive response about how I could improve the paper and resubmit. Jim was unfailingly supportive of my work, as he was to other Lawrence scholars and would-be scholars over many years – not only in his efforts for the Review but also by his co-founding of the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America. We all owe him a debt.

Closer to home, I salute the many librarians at the Duke University Libraries whose unfailing assistance enabled my research for this book; I am lucky to be at an institution with such dedicated and gracious professionals. As well, Deborah Jakubs, director of the Libraries, granted me the use of a comfortable carrel in which to write, after my retirement as Vice Provost at Duke University. The two Duke Provosts with whom I had the honor to work, John Strohbehn and Peter Lange, supported my attendance at international D. H. Lawrence conferences, where I was able to test my ideas in front of a community of scholars. I appreciate that support as well as the collegial environment in administration that they fostered, and that I enjoyed for so many years as Vice Provost.

Finally I thank the generations of Duke University undergraduates who have joined me in the study of D. H. Lawrence, and who have grappled as I have with the complexity of Lawrence’s ideas and attitudes. Their openness and intelligence have never failed to inspire.

Earlier versions of Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 6 appeared, respectively, in the D. H. Lawrence Review 23 (Summer/Fall1991); D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl Ingersoll (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2003); D. H. Lawrence: History, Literature, Culture, ed. Michael Bell, Keith Cushman, Takeo Iida, and Hiro Tateishi (Kokusho-KankoKai Press, 2005); and ‘Terra Incognita’: Lawrence at the Frontiers, ed. V. Hyde and E. Ingersoll (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010).

List of Abbreviations

The writings of D. H. Lawrence(Cambridge University Press editions)

1

Introduction: D. H. Lawrence and the Racial Other

D. H. Lawrence has for decades been excoriated at worst, and dismissed at best, by many literary critics and the general public alike – branded with the terms colonialist, misogynist, and racist (not to mention pornographer). Bertrand Russell, among others who knew Lawrence personally, seemed to add the imprimatur of insider knowledge when he commented, only ten years after the Second World War, that his erstwhile friend ‘had developed the whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it’, and that Lawrence’s theories about ‘blood consciousness’ had ‘led straight to Auschwitz’.¹ In the feminist movement of the next two decades, such critics as Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett were outraged by their own readings of Lawrence’s views on women, and the countervailing views of the ilk of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer only added fuel to that fire.

In recent years, however, deeper understandings of Lawrence – aided by the extensive, three-volume Cambridge biography and the authoritative Cambridge editions of the works – have nuanced the critical approaches to this writer, with the result that his complexity as a human being has emerged in sharper relief, to counter the one-dimensional views of him promulgated in earlier times. This is not to say that Lawrence’s misguided opinions or stereotypical attitudes toward the other (whether defined in racial, gender, or religious terms) have been whitewashed, or that the earlier views of the critics, whether negative or positive, have been disregarded. Rather, Lawrence’s opinions and attitudes are now examined from a greater variety of frameworks, including the opposing positions to be found within the works, in productive dialogue with each other, and the importance of travel in Lawrence’s confrontation with otherness.²

Certainly Lawrence’s seeking out of travel opportunities around the world, as he looked for a new place to settle, and his first-hand experiences with other countries and cultures, influenced his attitudes toward otherness as much as did his upbringing in England, whether strengthening or counteracting his earlier conceptions. Eastwood, a small (population 4,363 in 1891) coal-mining town of the English Midlands, was divided by class in his childhood years but not by religion or ethnicity. For example, even as late as 2001, the percentage of Jews in Broxtowe, which includes Eastwood, was only one-tenth of 1 per cent, or about 12 people (and in the whole of England in that year, only one-half of 1 per cent, mostly in London). Lawrence encountered somewhat more variety – what we today call diversity – in the big city of Nottingham eight miles away, where he attended college, and where the population of 239,743 in 1901 contained 675 foreigners.³ London, where he began to enjoy recognition under the mentorship of Ford Madox Hueffer (later, Ford), expanded his horizons even further. But Lawrence’s rootlessness could not be contained within England, and it gained purchase in his twenties with the severing of ties to home and homeland as he was freed by his mother’s death and impelled toward travel abroad by the uncongenial English environment of the First World War.⁴ The last line of Sons and Lovers – ‘He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly’ (SL 464) – applies to the author as well as to his fictional self, Paul Morel. The humming town that Lawrence would travel to would be Venice and Vence, Metz and Mexico City, Taormina and Taos, to name but a few of the many places Lawrence visited in the short span of his adult life between his 1912 escape to Germany and Italy with Frieda and his death at the age of forty-four in 1930. The institution of the passport in 1915, and Lawrence’s difficulty in obtaining one during the war, made further travel outside of England impossible for him until the war’s end. When he left (returning for only brief visits during the rest of his life), Lawrence was, in Paul Fussell’s words, at ‘the vanguard of the British Literary Diaspora, the great flight of writers from England in the 20’s and 30’s’ – a diaspora facilitated by the strength of the pound against continental currencies.⁵

Lawrence’s travels reinforced and widened his inherent interest in otherness and identity, an interest often centered on race. It is useful to take a moment to review the significance of travel for conceptions of race as grounded in earlier times. Curiosity about non-Europeans became prominent in the eighteenth century, stimulated by the accounts of European explorers, traders, and missionaries. Travel literature was extremely popular in this period: in fact, says Wim Willems, in his study of the Gypsy, ‘whoever wanted to know something about other peoples and cultures would resort first of all to consulting this source of information.’ These accounts would often distinguish the ‘savage’ from the ‘civilized’:

The heart of the matter was determining what place all these peoples occupied in nature’s great chain of being. Had the savage peoples become bogged down in an early phase of development? If so, then the task at hand was to find out what could be done to help them along until they became civilized. Ethnographers and natural scientists developed the scientific methods of comparison and classification necessary to impose order on their observations. These interpretations, however, were coloured by classical notions of beauty, middle-class virtues (moderation, honour and hard work), and by national myths and symbols, all of which paved the way for conceptions about superior and inferior peoples. Enlightened thought in terms of moderation and order, it must be said, tended to reject everything that was considered to be primitive. Only within the Romantic literary tradition would the idea of the noble savage create a stir.⁶

By Lawrence’s birth in the late nineteenth century, the ‘genuine attempt to understand the basis, nature and significance of difference’, as David Mayall puts it,⁷ had hardened into a theory of racial hierarchies and boundaries.

The present study rests on the assumption that an approach to Lawrence informed by perspectives from history and cultural studies will add to the conversation and prove instructive on several counts. By setting Lawrence in his context(s) I intend to reveal important currents of thinking in his own times: their origins and influences. I hope both to counteract a common view that he was idiosyncratic in his extreme statements and to suggest some surprising ways in which he deviated from the norms of cultural stereotyping. I also intend to indicate how Lawrence’s personal circumstances combined with societal influences to shape the writer he became, especially in the ways he incorporated race into his works.

In concentrating on socio-cultural contexts I do not mean to downplay the art of Lawrence’s writings. As Lionel Trilling said in 1970, ‘To perceive a work not only in its isolation, as an object of aesthetic contemplation, but also as implicated in the life of a people at a certain time, as expressing that life, and as being in part shaped by it, does not . . . diminish the power or charm of the work but, on the contrary, enhances it.’⁸ I don’t quite agree with the last part of Lawrence’s remark, in his essay ‘The Spirit of Place’ (1923), that an artist is ‘usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters’ (SCAL 14). Surely telling the truth of the day is not all that matters, particularly to those who relish the aesthetic aspects of literature (which includes this writer). But how much richer the experience of reading a work if one can understand it better through examining the culture in which it was created.

One might equally take as a motto for this book another statement from ‘The Spirit of Place’, this one from the first version of that essay (1918–19): ‘We have thought and spoken till now in terms of likeness and oneness. Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness’ (SCAL 168). Neil Roberts, in his study of Lawrence’s travels and engagement with cultural difference, states that ‘the term otherness . . . is used in contemporary critical discourse with a confusing variety of meanings, but it is essential when writing about matters of race and cultural difference.’⁹ It is certainly essential when writing about Lawrence, since this author not only used the term over and again in his travel writing and elsewhere, but considered it critical for healthy relationships between man and woman and man and nature as well as between white person and racial other. That is, the single, isolate self should not be mingled and merged with another, lest it lose its identity and integrity (in the root meaning of that word as wholeness). Having earlier explored that concept from a psychological perspective,¹⁰ I now investigate not only Lawrence’s respect for the ‘sacred mystery of otherness’ (SCAL 238) but also his more than occasional frustration with and actual distaste for racial difference.

To Roberts, ‘[o]therness in Lawrence’s use invariably has positive and optimistic connotations’, and he quotes from Lawrence’s first (1918–19) version of an essay on de Crèvecoeur as proof of his assertion:

The pure beauty of the sentiment here lies . . . in the deep, tender recognition of the life-reality of the other, the other creature which exists not in union with the immediate self, but in dark juxtaposition. It is . . . knowledge in separation. (SCAL 199)

But Lawrence’s actual portrayal of otherness is often quite conflicted, and the opposite of tender, as Roberts would agree; and the meaning of the word separation when applied to him is a sometimes dizzying combination of valuation of the otherness of the other; a sense of an immutable boundary between self and other; and a deep distrust, even dislike, of the other.

Amit Chaudhuri, too, in D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’, states that Lawrence’s conception of otherness is one of unknowable difference – ‘the impossibility of essentializing or knowing the other’¹¹ – and yet his quotation from Lawrence’s essay on Whitman seems to refute that key point: for when Lawrence, criticizing Whitman for his desire to merge with everyone, says that neither he nor ‘Walt’ is a ‘little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Eskimo’ (SCAL 151), there is no detectable irony in that description. To paraphrase Lawrence on another point, in an essay on the ‘morality’ of the novel (STH 172), the Eskimo has been nailed down by the stereotype and cannot walk away. My grounds for taking issue with the informative studies of both Chaudhuri and Roberts lie in their notion, as Roberts expresses it, that ‘the unknown for Lawrence remains unknown: the experience of otherness is not a progressive translation of the unknown into the known, a kind of cognitive consumption, but an extended awareness of the mystery of the not-self.’¹² In spite of and along with denigrating the desire for knowledge of the other, Lawrence was quite capable of characterizing the racial other in ways that suggest he thought he possessed such knowledge.

Contextualizing Lawrence within his era helps to explain why and how his ideas about the other were so often expressed in racialized terms. The reasons why race theory became dogma in England and elsewhere in the nineteenth century vary with the commentators’ emphases, but taken as a whole, as David Mayall recounts, they include wars and mutinies in the colonies, ‘imperial expansion overseas, industrial growth, class conflict and fears of racial degeneration at home, international competition and the spread of nationalism, and the key place held by science and especially comparative anatomy’. Race thinking filtered down into the general population – abetted by higher literacy rates and better communications technology, among other factors – and became accepted as fact by majority and minority populations alike. Racial categories and hierarchies were extended by the Social Darwinists and eugenicists and ‘legitimized, reinforced, repeated, popularized and confirmed’ everywhere: in academia and politics, in entertainment and the educational system, in the anthropological societies and the pages of novels. Mayall remarks that it is of ‘paramount importance’ that such ideas ‘were simply accepted, were not seen as morally or intellectually unacceptable, and became the basis for analysis of peoples, events and situations. . . . The idea, from Robert Knox, that race was everything, an explanation of all human affairs, was commonly believed and widely absorbed, even amongst those who would not have considered themselves to be racist.’¹³ D. H. Lawrence is one who would undoubtedly not have considered himself racist, though today’s readers are sure to wince at such characterizations in his writings as ‘the curious, reptile apprehension which comes over dark people’ (in The Plumed Serpent [PS 134]) . . . that is, if they have not already refused to engage this writer deemed ‘colonialist’ until fairly recently.

Lawrence’s consciousness of racial otherness was expanded during his college years through his readings in Schopenhauer, among other authors. His childhood friend Jessie Chambers reports that during Lawrence’s second year at Nottingham University College (circa 1907) he read The Metaphysics of Love and ‘was vehemently of Schopenhauer’s opinion that a white skin is not natural to man, and had a fierce argument with my brother who disputed the statement that fair hair and blue eyes are a deviation from type. Lawrence said pointedly: For me, a brown skin is the only beautiful one.’ But Chambers goes on to note that Lawrence added, in reference to Schopenhauer’s remark that everyone desires what is most beautiful, ‘That’s just the trouble, though. I see what is most beautiful, and I don’t desire it.’¹⁴ Lawrence not only did not desire the dark skin (or so he said), he could be repelled by it. In late December 1910 he wrote a chatty letter to his then-fiancée, Louisa ‘Louie’ Burrows, in which he evidenced strong discomfort in the presence of people of color, alongside an equally strong fascination with them:

At the petit danse last night there were three Asiatics from India. They are extraordinarily interesting to watch – like lithe beasts from the jungle: but one cannot help feeling how alien they are. You talk about ‘brother men’: but a terrier dog is much nearer kin to us than those men with their wild laughter and rolling eyes. Either I am disagreeable or a bit barbaric myself: but I felt the race instinct of aversion and slight antagonism to those blacks, rather strongly. It is strange. (1L 215)

The language of this letter discloses common views of the dark other as animalistic, uncivilized, and alien. Barbarism when unconnected to a dark race was another matter, however: less than eighteen months later, Lawrence ran off to Germany with the married Mrs Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, an older woman with three children and wife of one of Lawrence’s Nottingham University College professors. Exhilarated by his new-found passion, he wrote to his mentor and editor of Sons and Lovers, Edward Garnett, ‘F. wants to clear out of Europe, and get to somewhere uncivilized. It is astonishing how barbaric one gets with love. . . . I never knew I was like this’ (1L 424–5). Soon again he was writing to Garnett, ‘Here, in this tiny, savage little place [Icking, near Munich], Frieda and I have got awfully wild. I loathe the idea of England, and its enervation and misty miserable modernness. I don’t want to go back to town and civilization’ (1L 427). It would not take long before Lawrence would connect the wild energies of passion with the exotic dark other and tie both ideas to the salvation of humankind in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the First World War and its aftermath.

As soon as he could leave England Lawrence did so – he was open to all invitations for travel, from old friends, new acquaintances, and fans he had never met. His expatriate American friend Earl Brewster, a Buddhist, encouraged Lawrence in 1922 to stop in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on his way to Australia; Lawrence responded to Brewster about the prospect of visiting this country: ‘It sounds lovely, the coloured, naked people. . . . ’ Clearly Lawrence was intrigued by what he imagined as the primitivism of these eastern natives; but he had already decided to head west instead, to Taos and the Indians ‘and an old sun magic’ (4L 154). He was not naïve about such encounters, recognizing ‘the difficulty of entering into the thoughts and feelings of another race’, a subject he spoke of at length to Brewster before that friend left Europe.¹⁵ Lawrence would repeat this notion in 1925 in his review of a novel by a British convert to Islam, when he spoke of the obstacles to identifying ‘with a man of another race, of different culture and religion’ (IAR 245).

In fact, Lawrence often expressed a firm belief in the intrinsic separation of the races, the source of those difficulties in rapprochement. In a letter of 1924 he wrote that ‘the great racial differences are insuperable’ (5L 66). That same year he published an essay called ‘On Being a Man’, in which he both elaborated on this point and qualified it. The relevant passage from this essay not only summarizes Lawrence’s view of racial difference, and surfaces his particular prejudices; it simultaneously advocates the ‘thought-adventure’ of encountering the other and enlarging the self through engagement with difference. Here Lawrence emphasizes that his reaction to the other is visceral, not mental: if ‘an Arab or a negro [sic] or even a Jew’ takes a seat next to him on a train, he experiences ‘a faint uneasy movement in [his] blood’. A black man emits a disturbing vibration as well as ‘a slight odour’. Lawrence cannot fully relate to such a person: ‘I am not a nigger and so I can’t quite know a nigger, and I can never fully understand him.’ He enumerates three options open to him: labeling the man ‘Nigger’ and letting it go at that; trying to figure the man out as if a Black were like any other individual; or admitting the disturbance in the blood and either insulating himself from it or allowing it to continue. The second part of the third option seems the most preferable to the author: ‘This slight change in my blood slowly develops in dreams and unconsciousness till, if I allow it, it struggles forward into light as a new bit of realisation, a new term of consciousness’ (RDP 214–15).

Howard J. Booth, quoting this provocative passage in full in his 1998 essay on Lawrence, psychoanalysis, and race, sees three problems in Lawrence’s account. First, though scornful of ‘fixing’ the black man with a single term, Lawrence nonetheless proceeds to engage in stereotyping: for example, slipping into the use of the word ‘nigger’, he refers to the odor of the black man. Second, the encounter is useful only so far as it serves as an experience for the observer, not because it reveals anything meaningful about the observed. Third, the phrase ‘or even a Jew’, says Booth, ‘suggests that Jews are somehow less racially different from those of European descent than the other races mentioned while simultaneously fixing American and European Jewry as other’. Not surprisingly, the editors of Vanity Fair magazine in America, where the essay was published, changed ‘nigger’ to ‘negro’ (still without capitalization) and removed ‘or even a Jew’.¹⁶ I would add to Booth’s comprehensive analysis that this encounter so intriguing to Lawrence contains a truth that the chapters to follow in this study will explore: the fact that ‘what I am and what I know I am’, to quote Lawrence from his essay (RDP 215), is very much connected to the otherness of those on the train. Identity ‘is not the opposite of, but depends on, difference’, says Kathryn Woodward in her book Identity and Difference. In response to Lawrence’s remark about the ‘unmistakable change in the vibration of [his] blood and nerves’, Woodward would agree that disruptions in traditional centers of identity lead to new formulations of who a person is; and, of course, a person ‘is’ different people depending on the setting and the social role required or permitted.

Woodward further notes that ‘identity formation’ occurs on the global and national level as well as on the local and personal level.¹⁷ Robert Berkhofer, in his 1978 study The White Man’s Indian, remarks that white Americans used ‘counterimages of themselves to describe Indians and counterimages of Indians to describe themselves’.¹⁸ This creation of a ‘negative reference group’ was a tool used during the push to acquire Indian land and hardened into stereotyping. David Mayall quotes Willy Guy, another researcher into the Gypsies (in this case, the Czechoslovakian Roms): ‘In an important sense the study of [Gypsies] is worthwhile not so much for its own sake but for what it reveals about the nature of the societies in which they lived and still live.’¹⁹ The same could be said about any study of the Jews.

I have chosen to concentrate on these particular identities – Indian, Gypsy, and Jew – because Lawrence had a great deal to say about them, throughout his writings and over the course of his life. Lawrence would have seen many similarities between and among the Indians, Gypsies, and Jews even if he put a different spin on those likenesses. All three groups have been called ‘tribes’, for example.²⁰ For Lawrence, tribal identity had a special meaning, for Indians and Gypsies in particular offered him a notion of an organic community as refuge and hoped-for salvation from the fragmentation of modern industrialized and commercialized living. However, society can easily hold the opposite view of tribes. Lawrence, like many others, seemed to believe that Jews are not (and cannot be) truly English; he might well have applied to them (if he had had it at his disposal) the term ‘radical alterity’ employed by Janet Lyon in later decades to characterize the negative view of the Gypsies’ ‘fabled insularity’ as breeding habits that are ‘anti-statist or anti-Christian or just plain criminal’.²¹ The Jewish sense of community focused on Palestine at this time was of import to Lawrence only as it was of utility to him.

In addition to their purported tribalism, other descriptors and experiences have connected Indians, Gypsies, and Jews through the years. All three groups have been seen as black, whether by heredity or habit, and all have been considered ‘problems’ that the majority populations need to address for the health of the nation. All have been persecuted for their otherness, with forms of discrimination including but certainly not limited to segregation in ghettos and on reservations, as well as in government schools. The extreme act of persecution is extermination, of course, whether in concentration camps – the fate of Jews and Gypsies, among other groups deemed degenerate by the Nazi regime – or on the plains.²² At the same time, the very otherness of these groups has also been praised, especially in the Romantic period. Gypsies and Indians have served as cult figures of a sort; and even the often denigrated Jew has been seen as ‘a figure who is more noble than reprobate’.²³

Because of such commonalities, these groups have functioned as reference points for each other, in both academic circles and the popular imagination. Deborah Nord notes parenthetically that Gypsies are ‘often compared to Native Americans’, although she gives scant evidence.²⁴ As for Indians and Jews, a common belief in the seventeenth century was that the Indians of the New World had descended from the lost tribes of Israel, scattered many centuries earlier.²⁵ In the present, Rachel Rubinstein’s 2010 study called Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination emerged, she says, from ‘convergences of critical vocabularies across Native and Jewish studies scholarship’. Rubinstein lists some of these commonalities: ‘cultural and national autonomy and sovereignty; problems of identity, authenticity, and definition; homeland, diaspora, and transnationalism; linguistic and cultural rupture and creative renewal and revival’.²⁶ But the greatest evidence of what we might call race conflation occurs between the Gypsy and the Jew: in fact, one can hardly open a book about the Gypsies that does not compare them to the Jews.

The connections between Gypsy and Jew are much greater than a centuries-old history of persecution (Gypsies, as well as Jews, were expelled from Spain in 1492) or use of the word gentile for someone outside the group. Comparing Gypsies to Jews, whether in passing or in an expository way, has a long tradition. Since at least the seventeenth century, scholars have linked Gypsies to Jews in order to explain Gypsy origins and dispersion around the world. In these readings, the Gypsies, like Jews, are culturally one people, a single race, no matter where they reside. Incapable of assimilation, they are at home nowhere and wander the earth. Thus, their greatest desire is for a homeland of their own. Indeed, the Zionist movement that attracted Lawrence for his own purposes appears in a novel in our time composed by a Gypsy, as a source of inspiration for the creation of a Gypsy state. In Ronald Lee’s 1971 work Goddam Gypsy: An Autobiographical Novel, the protagonist, Yanko, has a conversation with his friend Jimmy in a bar:

‘To hell with Canada, Long Live Romanestan.’

   Jimmy looked at me, only half understanding. He had heard of the proposed Gypsy state, a parallel to Israel, to be set up by the United Nations at the insistence of Gypsy leaders in Europe, educated men like me, who had found that they had no place as Romanies in their countries of birth . . .²⁷

Some, including Gypsies themselves, have even posited a common ancestry with the Jews: that they are actually one people, perhaps half-siblings, with the Jews descended from Isaac and the Gypsies from Ishmael.²⁸ According to Deborah Nord, George Eliot made a Gypsy–Jew connection but also a firm separation in her novel Daniel Deronda, which Nord contrasts to Eliot’s poem The Spanish Gypsy. Eliot turned ‘from Gypsy to Jew [says Nord] in order to imagine a triumphant and, to her mind, fully modern resolution to the problem of the alien’. In contrast to the Gypsies, ‘tragically cut off from their past and tradition and thus unable to forge a salutary future’, as Nord puts it, Eliot ‘saw the Jews as a people tied fortuitously to history and text and, therefore, as worthy creators of a modern state’.²⁹

Comparisons between Gypsies and Jews occurred especially often in George Eliot’s era; the commentator who, in 1867, said the Gypsies are ‘as distinct a people as the Jews’ made a typical observation of the time.³⁰ Summarizing some printed materials of the 1870s through the 1890s, George Behlmer reports: ‘Both races had been driven from their homelands; both remained culturally homogeneous, although widely scattered; and both seemed to draw strength from persecution. Yet Gypsy unity was all the more remarkable, [famous explorer Richard] Burton and his fellow scholars maintained, because it had been preserved without benefit of religion or wealth.’³¹ (We note in Behlmer’s summary an important ‘yet’: the familiar association of Jews not only with their religion but also with their money, a factor that in this line of thought differentiates them from Gypsies.³²) Book reviewers in that century also made connections between these two races. When George Borrow wrote about his experiences with Spanish Gypsies in The Zincali, several reviews included references to Jews. In Brussels a writer complained that Borrow had not adequately explained the persistence of this people and their customs throughout the centuries: in fact their origin as one people, similar to the case with the Jews, explained the longevity. Several of the reviewers in England also drew parallels with the Jewish people in the diaspora.³³ It should not escape mention in the context of reviews of Borrow’s works that Lavengro, which surged in popularity in Lawrence’s time (sixteen editions were published between 1893 and 1914), begins with the fleeting presence of an old Jewish peddler (a ‘travelling Jew’) who, upon observing the boy Lavengro, asserts that he has ‘all the look of one of our people’s children’.³⁴ In this way, Borrow, like his reviewers, drew a Gypsy–Jew parallel.

Lawrence exploits the longstanding Gypsy–Jew connection for his own purposes in The Virgin and the Gipsy. His interest in these two peoples, as well as in Indians, was personally and professionally productive, and his knowledge of them came from various sources. The Gypsy camped literally near Eastwood and figuratively in the British imagination; this figure occupies prime property in Lawrence’s novella but takes residence in many other of his works as well. The intrigue of the American Indian was stimulated by Lawrence’s childhood exposure to James Fenimore Cooper and the popular traveling ‘Show Indians’, and it led him ultimately to accept an invitation to New Mexico; over the course of almost four years in North America he observed Indians in the United States and Mexico and wrote fiction and essays in which Indians figure prominently. As for the Jews, some of Lawrence’s best friends (and publishers) were Jewish, to use the cliché, and he had closer associations with real-life Jews than he certainly did with real-life Gypsies or Indians. In spite of – sometimes because of – this closeness, his attitudes toward the Jew are more negative, and also more complex, than those he held about the other two groups. Comparing and contrasting these attitudes across populations reveals how Lawrence both adopted and adapted the common perceptions of his day, perceptions that lingered from earlier eras.

Of course, as my earlier quotations from Lawrence suggest, he held strong opinions about other groups, including but not limited to Blacks, Asians, and Irish; references to those others will surface when they seem relevant to or especially illuminative of attitudes toward Indians, Gypsies, and Jews. Gender roles and issues will also come into play in this study, for they too are connected to the main subject at hand, the formation of personal and national identities by reference to the other. Because Lawrence lived in a time when race and nation were inextricably entwined, and the terms often interchangeable, we must forsake our twenty-first century conception of the term race as a narrower as well as scientifically outdated notion and put ourselves into Lawrence’s framework; he complicates the connection for many reasons, not the least of which is that he was both in and out of ‘Englishness’. All in all he serves as a good lens through which to explore aspects of identity formation: not only the identity of the nation, and of Lawrence himself, but also the identities of the minority populations he encountered.

Nomenclature and punctuation

In a book about race, the author’s terminology demands explanation. I will put the word ‘race’ in quotation marks only on occasion, as an intermittent reminder (as if that were needed) that this was a term of the times, controversial by today’s lights even though still in common parlance. Various classifications supporting theories of race have by now long been discredited: measurements of cranium size and nose shape, for instance, along with typing by skin color, have been tossed into the dustbin called pseudo-science. The Nazi rationale for extermination of groups of people on racial grounds showed the extremes to which race science could be put, and modern approaches to the subject have substituted the interpretation of race as a social construct rather than an inherent basis for differentiating among peoples, much less in a hierarchical manner. This is not to say that biological differences do not exist, but rather that peoples can be grouped together in a variety of ways depending on the markers we choose: for example, anti-malarial genes (or the absence of same) would classify Swedes with Xhosas rather than with, say, Italians; and sorting by lactase or fingerprint patterns would place the Swedes with the Fulani of Africa or the Ainu of Japan, respectively.³⁵

Lawrence’s inconsistency in his use of terminology is evident in The Plumed Serpent, where the Mexicans are called a race in many places throughout the novel, yet the narrator also declares that Mexico is not a nation, and not a race, but rather a people (PS 76). This is but one example of the fact that although the desire to classify is fundamental for understanding other and self, the labels affixed to others are variable and unstable: definitions of race have varied over time and with the user, overlapping, as Lawrence demonstrates, with such categories as ethnicity, nation, and class.³⁶ Such overlapping can be found in the scholarly literature too. Throughout his 1977 article on ‘ethnic psychology’ in Lawrence’s shorter fiction, James Scott addresses the ‘ethnic and racialistic assumptions underlying all [Lawrence’s] fiction’. Along with these two terms, which are treated as synonyms, Scott employs others: ethnocentric, ethnology, and culture. As a fuller example of loose terminology, he uses the phrase ‘racial signatures’ for the ‘specifically ethnic distinctions between Celt and Saxon, German and gypsy, Bohemian and Jew’.³⁷ It is not a criticism of Scott to point out that any distinctions between all these words are thereby blurred by his easy substitutions of one