The Plumed Serpent is a 1926 novel by D. H. Lawrence. Set in Mexico, it was begun
when the author was living at what is now the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos
in U.S. state of New Mexico in 1924, accompanied by his wife Frieda and
artist Dorothy Brett. Lawrence wanted to call the book "Quetzalcoatl", after the
Aztec god of that name, but his publisher Knopf found the name strange
and insisted on "The Plumed Serpent", a title Lawrence disliked. An early draft
of the book, different enough to be considered a distinct work, was
published under the title "Quetzalcoatl" in 1995. Critics have seen The Plumed
Serpent as having political or fascist overtones, and as expressing Lawrence's
fears about the decline of the white race and belief in women's submission to
men. Plot
The novel has a contemporary setting during the period of the Mexican
Revolution. It opens with a group of tourists visiting a bullfight in Mexico
City. One of them, Kate Leslie, departs in disgust and encounters Don Cipriano,
a Mexican general. Later she meets his friend, an intellectual landowner Don
Ramón, and travels to Sayula, a small town set on a lake. Ramón and Cipriano
are leading a revival of a pre-Christian religion and Kate becomes drawn into
their cult. Reception
Several critics have found a political and even fascist dimension to The Plumed
Serpent. Literary critic Harold Bloom observes in his The Western Canon that
Lawrence was writing as a "rather weird political theorist" in the book and
calls it a "Fascist fiction" inferior to The Rainbow and Women in Love, while
Anne Fernihough calls the novel "stridently ideological". Marianna
Torgovnick writes that the book "has been charged with protofascism" and that
it "states its racialised theses quite clearly at times. It posts Lawrence's
views, derived from theories circulating within his culture, of the fall and rise
of races based upon energy and power. Lawrence's fear is specifically the fear
that the white race will be supplanted". She believes that the book "advocates
women’s slavelike submission to men and surrender of the drive toward orgasm"
and that its "overblown prose" makes it easy to reject.
Cultural critic Philip Rieff writes that The Plumed Serpent is "a novel of pagan
religiosity, raising the possibility of converting a Western woman to a
primitive Indian cult." Rieff believes that in his "imaginative rehabilitation"
of Aztec ritual, Lawrence "rightly understands sun dancing as an imitation
— or a dramatic representation — performed in substantiation of the
divine concern with the human being", but concludes that The Plumed Serpent is
an embarrassment even to Lawrence's admirers. However, novelist William S.
Burroughs stated, in response to dismissive comments about Lawrence by
Leslie Fiedler, that he was very influenced by the book. Literary critic
William York Tindall called The Plumed Serpent "a great metaphor for a feeling
about reality." Professor Louis L. Martz writes that The Plumed Serpent, in its
"combination of prose and poetry, its mingling of narrative and description
with songs and hymns, lyrical sermons and eloquent authorial ruminations,
along with its frequent use of occult symbols" resembles the Bible. Martz
finds the work a success in its own terms so long as it is "read as a novel
of prophecy, with all the abrupt shifts of tone and technique that prophecy
manifests". Cultural critic William Irwin Thompson
writes that the book shows that Lawrence misunderstood the religion of ancient
Mexico. Standard editions
The Plumed Serpent, edited by L.D. Clark, Cambridge University Press, 1987,
ISBN 0-521-22262-1 The Plumed Serpent, ed. by L. D. Clark
and Introd. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics 1995
ISBN 0-14-018812-6 The Plumed Serpent, Edited with an
introduction by Ronald G. Walker, Penguin English Library, 1983
Quetzalcoatl, edited by Louis L Martz, W W Norton Edition, 1998, ISBN
0-8112-1385-4 – Early draft of The Plumed Serpent
See also Polytheistic reconstructionism
References External links
Völkisch Organicism and the Use of Primitivism in Lawrence’s The Plumed
Serpent