Horses, Women, Storms and More: The Dialogics of the Human and Non-Human in St. Mawr
Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: This article explores the contending languages of the natural world and humans in Saint Mawr, one of Lawrence’s short novels. The Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, the polyphony of different world outlooks and perspectives, may shed light on how Lawrence tries to give a voice to the symbolized and anthropomorphic animals and natural phenomena (storms, life of the plants at the ranch, etc.) to enhance his view of the inseparability of our unconscious and of vast nature.The voices artistically given to a horse and to the powerful element of water (which Lawrence singles out as the predominant one in his essay “The Two Principles”) in St. Mawr paradoxically debunk the voices of deficient humans. The dialogic nature of the spatial and temporal characteristics of the text, or chronotope, may hint at the post-Romantic ecological thinking, for which the mind does not simply attend to the mystical in nature, but also moves away from the aesthetic to the ethical relationship with the environment. St. Mawr also incorporates C.G. Jung’s vision of a horse, thus complicating the dialogic construction of meaning with Lawrence’s ecological and Jungian mystical motifs.
Source: Études Lawrenciennes
Author: Marina S. Ragachewskaya
Institution: Minsk State Linguistic University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4200564919