Question

Give an account of the journey of the woman to the village of the chilchui tribe?

Answer 1

Answer:

In the summer of 1924, between the composition of the two versions of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence wrote three stories that were profoundly influenced by his Mexican and New Mexican experiences: ‘St Mawr’, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and ‘The Princess’. The last two of these stories narrate journeys that epitomise, to the most extreme degree, the perils of cultural difference and of the desire that drives the white protagonist to encounter it. The heroine of one story is sacrificed by a tribe of Mexican Indians; the other heroine is raped by a ‘Spanish’ New Mexican guide (whose ethnicity, like that of Don Ramon in The Plumed Serpent, is, however, ambiguous) and becomes at least temporarily deranged.

Explanation:In the summer of 1924, between the composition of the two versions of

The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence wrote three stories that were profoundly

influenced by his Mexican and New Mexican experiences: ‘St Mawr’,

‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and ‘The Princess’. The last two of these

stories narrate journeys that epitomise, to the most extreme degree, the

perils of cultural difference and of the desire that drives the white

protagonist to encounter it. The heroine of one story is sacrificed by

a tribe of Mexican Indians; the other heroine is raped by a ‘Spanish’

New Mexican guide (whose ethnicity, like that of Don Ramon in The Plumed

Serpent, is, however, ambiguous) and becomes at least temporarily

deranged.

I use the word ‘heroine’ very deliberately. These stories can be, and

certainly have been, considered as misogynist fantasies. Apart from the

fates of the heroines, the narrative tone adopted towards them is often

derogatory. The element of misogyny in them is an aspect of their

scandalous power. As I have remarked several times in this study, the

protagonists of Lawrence’s New World fiction are invariably female,

and I have suggested that this is because the encounter between European consciousness and the indigenous other is partly an imaginative

recapitulation of the relationship between his ‘paleface’ mother and

‘aboriginal Englishman’ father. Resentment against the mother and an

associated, more generalised anti-feminism infiltrate and colour the

ostensibly quite different ideological impulse, especially in ‘The Woman

Who Rode Away’, to represent the ‘historically based aspirations and

claims on the present’1

of indigenous peoples at the expense of the white.

But Lawrence’s struggle against the feminine was also, of course, a strugg