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COPYRIGHT 2006 Southern Illinois University
"To achieve his own soul's wholeness and integrity is the life-work of every man."
D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious
"Things might not be immediately discernible in what a man writes and in this sometimes he is fortunate, but eventually they are quite clear."
Ernest Hemingway, to the Swedish Academy
"So exact is the resemblance of the manikin to the man, in other words, of the soul to the body. ..."
James Frazer, The Golden Bough
I
Sustained commentary on D. H. Lawrence's The Captain's Doll essentially began more than fifty years ago with F.R. Leavis's extolling and extensive essay on the novella, which he first published amid his innovative series of Scrutiny articles on Lawrence and then reprinted with revisions in his pioneering, full-length study of the writer in 1955.1 Leavis views the work as a supreme example of Lawrence's genius at demonstrating "a sure rightness of touch in conveying the shifts of poise and tone that define an extremely delicate complexity of attitude" (D. H. Lawrence: Novelist 197). Such praise for the subtle changes in character development and narrative perspective in this fiction reflects nothing less than "the range of a truly great dramatic poet" (198), and his strong endorsement of The Captain's Doll has evolved in the academic community into the consensus judgment--with which I agree--of Lawrence's considerable success in this short novel. While later critics find many reasons for praise of its achievement, they generally convey minimal support for Leavis's confident formulation of its central theme, which he defines as Hannele's "education sentimentale" during her affair with Captain Hepburn, a process concluding with a "denouemont" that amounts to her "tacit recognition of her own deepest desire or need" (202-03) to accept finally the distinctly partisan terms for marriage proposed by her lover.
In no way does Leavis's discussion ignore or underestimate the impressive wit, energy, and independence manifested by the Countess, even comparing aspects of her strength and feistiness to the intriguingly similar traits in Lawrence's talented and often uncompliant wife. (2) But he still regards Hannele's capitulation as dramatically credible in the context of her recent love-life and as admirably consistent with Lawrence's visionary doctrines in the postwar years. Much of the criticism after Leavis variously questions the persuasiveness of Hannele's acquiescence to Hepburn's demands, disagrees with the implications of Lawrence's sexual politics, or counter-asserts the ultimate primacy of Hannele's corrective influence on the Captain. (3) The latter approach has strong support in recent years, as it offers a clear if not wholly convincing way to understate the praise for a brilliant novella that presents an uncomfortable problem for many readers today: the work is unapologetically infused with a patriarchal ethic that finally achieves a strong measure of victory in its dramatized battle between the sexes. Many critics search for grounds to praise the novella by somehow denying the fact of its masculinist bias. Among the most extreme versions of invested attempts to diminish the authority of Hepburn and enhance the stature of Hannele, the late Mark Spilka wonders if the Captain killed his wife to eliminate the major complication of his passionate connection to the impatient Countess. (4)
Related to this growth in revisionist discussions of the work is the increasing tendency to emphasize its comedic aspects, an approach that often highlights a comment made by Lawrence, in a letter written by him as he nears completion of the novella, that The Captain's Doll is "a very funny long story" (Letters IV 109). (5) Despite interesting attempts to buttress this letter with analyses of allegedly humorous moments in the work, Lawrence's comment must be examined from the perspective of the fiction's more pronounced texture of pained reflection on doctrinal and personal issues of high importance to him. Lawrence's famous admonition to trust the tale and not the novelist must take precedence over his circumstantial musings about intentionality and effect. He uses the wording "very funny" in the same letter in which he announces his struggle to find a satisfactory conclusion for The Captain's Doll; as I later note in this essay, an interlude of an awkward and comic argument between characters may provide an agreeable option to facilitate the ending of this fiction, but in no way should it be regarded as stipulative of the primary tone in the work.
As Leavis's essay suggests in its meticulous reading of the intonations of dialogue and the resonance of symbols and themes, Lawrence's novella in many ways recapitulates relevant issues of pain, suffering, and dominance reflected in his volatile marriage to Frieda; similarly, as Mark Kinkead-Weekes so carefully outlines in his biographical research, The Captain's Doll also embodies Lawrence's ideological shifts from the 1915-18 period to the "leadership" phase of his career after the war. The excessive search for comedic elements also deflects attention from the heavy weight of postwar malaise that Lawrence documents in the novella with a persistence and poignancy not yet acknowledged in the abundant criticism on the work. While it is true that Hannele establishes an ur-feminist counter-voice that is formidable enough to spar effectively with the masculinist doctrines channeled through Hepburn, Leavis's fundamental insistence a half-century ago about the persuasive art of Hannele's "education" may be politically incorrect today, but it remains an accurate reading of this impressive and not so funny fiction.
It is not a case, however, of a confident Captain overwhelming his woman with the word-made-flesh. In my reformulation of Leavis's approach, Hepburn must manifest the courage to recover his manly pride so he can convince himself and Hannele of the winning authority of his message of male-primacy on love and marriage. No critic has sufficiently focused on this crucial process of the reconstruction of Hepburn's ego and energy. (6) It is a transformation best understood first in the light of the emotional changes and idiosyncrasies of the major characters, and then in the context of Lawrence's adaptation of a well-known Scandinavian mythology to frame key aspects of the symbolism and action in the novella. In Studies in Classic American Literature, a work that he is still intermittently revising as he writes The Captain's Doll, Lawrence provides, in effect, a concise explanation for his deft integration of theme and technique in the novella: "True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul" (65). Thus it is the careful anatomy of Hepburn's "integral soul" that must precede the evocation of the myth, as Lawrence initiates the depiction of the Captain's "onward adventure" with a tour de force of Aristotelian technique to start the novella.
II
The opening scene of The Captain's Doll is over ten pages long, and Lawrence choreographs its intersecting movements of exits and entrances by imposing a strict unity of time, place, and action. This lengthy vignette, enacted as a form of witty parlor drama, functions not only to establish the relevant circumstances of Hepburn and Hannele's relationship, but also to suggest the dominant emotions of depression and anger that inform the characterizations, respectively, of the two lovers who are the central actors in the work. Lawrence constructs these initial pages with scrupulous attention to precise detail and delicate nuance, as even a casual gesture, passing remark, or decorous object in the room conveys valuable signals about the current status of their affair. The novella abruptly begins in medias res, as a defiant and preoccupied Hannele does not even bother to lift her head from her adjustments on the completed doll, only "curtly" (75) acknowledging the presence of her friend, Mitchka; Hannele's focus is directed at gleefully dressing the little manikin that she has created as an ingenious form of revenge for Hepburn's pattern of inattention to her awkward status as his mistress and for his persistent lack of formulated plans for their future. Indeed, her delight in such professional handicraft extends to her momentary use of the doll to ridicule, in Mitchka's presence, the proud Captain with whom she is so intensely involved: by ceremoniously holding the doll "head downwards" with its "arms wildly turned out" (75), she reveals Hepburn's body in a conspicuously undignified posture that mockingly reveals his private anatomy to the reader and to her gossipy friend. As this scene later confirms, Mitchka emanates--in a marvelously oxymoronic phrase--"a roguish coyness" (75), amounting to an odd blend of erotic assertiveness combined with a nagging fear about her vulnerable position as a close friend of an outspoken German woman who is the paramour of a Scottish captain in the occupying British army. As for Mitchka's lover, the awkwardly ignored Martin--an attractive and defeated officer manifesting a firm military demeanor--it is noteworthy that "one could see the war in his face" (77). Thus appears the first explicit reference in the novella to the lingering, destructive effect of the Great War on the men who survived. In this sense, Lawrence's short novel serves as a reminder that "the lost generation" remains as applicable to the winning and losing soldiers stationed in the Rhineland in 1921 as it more famously applies to the expatriots and artists on the Left Bank of Paris so memorably recalled by Hemingway. This novella conveys a wider scope of socio-cultural authority than is generally acknowledged, as it dramatizes the lingering damage to the personal life and the inevitable fracturing of the emotional stability occasioned by the First World War. (7)
Mitchka may have an aristocratic title but she has become neurotic in her excessive anxiety over the unpredictable or the unfamiliar: she feels discomforted by what she alleges is Hepburn's strange and indefinable difference from other men, a quality in his temperament that agitates her to the point of unwarranted fear. The aura of mystery in the Captain is even embodied architecturally by the isolate location of his attic apartment and adjoining roof, which "seemed high, remote, in the sky" (78). This quality of his self-imposed distancing and aloofness and its accompanying traces of chronic indecisiveness and perplexity represent for Hannele a major aspect of his sexual allure, an attractive inscrutability that she contemplates several times in the work. In his essay "Love Was Once A Little Boy," written in 1925 and briefly cited by Leavis in his discussion of The Captain's Doll, Lawrence asserts a view of human character that might suggest why Hannele's passion for him is based on her accurate perception of his unorthodox demeanor: "If we were men, if we were women, our individualities would be lonely and a bit mysterious" (342). The Countess will be variously enraged and charmed by Hepburn's often inexplicable motivation, peculiar moodiness, and disturbing incapacity for action, but she will never lose her essential infatuation with him.
Hepburn is unusually late in his return to the apartment, and Hannele is angry about his tardiness as well as the increasingly tense and unresolved nature of their affair. In a superb, two-minute interlude that demonstrates Lawrence's skill in dramatizing the intricacies of emotion by capturing her silent gestures and random movements, Hannele now reveals the intensity of her connection to the Captain even as she provides evidence of her accumulated discontent:
She went to the table and looked at his letter-clip with letters in it and at the sealing wax and his stamp-box, touching things and moving them a little, just for the sake of contact, not really noticing what she touched. Then she took a pencil, and in stiff Gothic characters began to write her name--Johanna zu Rassentlow--time after time her own name--and then once, bitterly, curiously, with a curious sharpening of her nose: Alexander Hepburn. (78)
Note the surfacing of her unselfconscious possessiveness, tinged with cutting vindictiveness--all reflected in her purposeful displacement of the objects she touches. There also exists that reality about her love-life that she cannot deny: Hannele's passionate feelings for Hepburn are emphasized in her compulsive need for physical contact with the items that belong to him. Even the words she writes reveal her inability to get beyond the ego-defenses of her own anger. Again in "Love Was Once A Little Boy," Lawrence writes admonishingly of humanity's all too common habit of relying on "the dreary individuality of ego" (341), and Hannele documents this inclination as she inscribes her own name "time after time," and then (only "once" and "bitterly") the name of...
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