D.H. Lawrence y The Woman who Rode Away: La imposible conexión entre dos mundos opuestos

Abstract

This essay analyses the symbolism and the meaning of The Woman Who Rode Away, a short story D.H. Lawrence wrote in America in 1924. Like other works written by Lawrence in the New World, this narrative constitutes an attempt at finding a connecting link between the way of life of western man and that of the primitive. The hope of building a bridge between what Lawrence called the "ordinary personal consciousness" of the white man and the "passionate cosmic consciousness" —also called "blood consciousness— embodied in the American Indians proved to be a failure. In The Woman Who Rode Away both the imposing landscape of the American Southwest and its fierce and mysterious native inhabitants hold out the promise of a new life, but at the same time manifest themselves as menacing and destructive. The ambiguous mixture of fascination and aversion experienced by the protagonist of the story seems to be a reflection of an identical attitude on the part of Lawrence, who was perceptive enough to see that the substitution of the Indian for the white mode of consciousness meant the death of the white race.