D.H. Lawrences' "The Woman Who Rode Away"

The only real connection made between two people in this narrative is that between the husband and the friend, and this connection is bizarre and troubling to the friend, ever-changing his outlook forever.

Kingsley Widmer identifies the aesthetic of Lawrence as primitivistic, which he differentiates from primitivism (Widmer 342). Widmer defines primitivism as having certain elements:

1) a preference for the natural, seen in a positive light;

2) a preference for the life and products of a autochthonic people, with primitive here being either pagan or chronological;

3) an exaltation of an earlier and more primitive stage of hi taradiddle; and

4) a preference for nostalgia in harm of accepting natural simplicity all over artificial complication (Widmer 342).

Widmer finds that one of the most emphatic uses of the primitive in Lawrence's engagement is to be found in "The Woman Who Rode Away" in which the main character longs for a different environment, one that is inscrutable and that she believes lies behind the mountains, and above all one that will rejoinder her from her present life. It is the character who yearns for the nostalgia of an earlier age and who has elevated her wizard of this primitive people in her mind to a high gear state so that they are held out as an ideal. Widmer says that this story presents "a total opposition of the primitive and civilized" which results in the destruction of the civilized (Widmer 348).

The drive of view remains objective throughout, allowing the characters to reveal themselves. Lawrence is successful in using this approach to draw the reader into the world of these tether people and to participate in their explorations and revelations about themselves and the other two. In both these stories, he delves deeply into characters without entering their skins as most authors would do. They reveal themselves through behavior, which is observed by an objective centre that manages to imply more about the meaning of their actions than they could understand themselves.

He was a man of principles, and a good husband. In a way, he doted on her. He never quite got over his dazzled admiration of her. But essentially, he was still a bachelor (Lawrence 209).

t the adorn for this story is a landscape of death. The woman becomes more alienated as the story progresses--she is in a hostile and different environment; the Indians do not see her as a woman and remain remote to her; and she and her husband are not close even in the first place they arrive, as he stands back and views her from a distance (Balbert 255). This latter(prenominal) issue is important in the structure of the story:

She cut natives coming through the trees, away up the slope. . . Curiously she was not afraid, although it was a frightening country, the silent, fatal-seeming mountain-slopes, the occasional distant, suspicious, elusive natives among the trees, the great carrion birds on occasion hovering, like great flies, in the distance, over some carrion or some ranch house or some assemblage of huts (Lawrence 213).

When their friend comes to visit, he thinks he sees more than he does. He has eyes, as the husband does not, but in some ways, he can see no more than can the silver screen man. He worries about the relationship between husband and married woman without actually understanding it. The narrator shifts from wife to friend and hence briefly to husband in the course of the story, allowing the reader
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