The Plumed Serpent

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 to demonstrate that the "Female Warrior" replaces Christ and oversees the "new religion" (64) in the play. Perhaps the most persuasive essay in the Major Barbara collection is J. Percy Smith's. For Smith, Major Barbara is Shaw's "problem play," much as Measure for Measure is Shakespeare's. Smith analyzes the possible sources of Major Barbara—the legend of the Christian saint Barbara and Euripides's The Bacchae—and concludes that at the end of Act 2 the play is "approaching near to Euripidean tragedy" (151). The other essays in George Bernard Shaw's 'Major Barbara' also offer helpful insights. J. L. Wisenthal asserts that Major Barbara, like Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, insists on a marriage of contraries. Both Shaw and Blake stress "the necessity of accepting and combining good and evil, heaven and hell." Moreover, both writers reveal that hell is "as necessary as heaven in our imperfect world" (101). In "Shaw's Moral Vision," Alfred Turco, Jr. claims that Shaw's overwhelming "drive for affirmation" meant that he was unwilling to confront his deepening opinion that "the 'abyss of moral horror' admits of no transcendence, that the breach between heaven and hell is absolute, that the resulting separation is the human condition" (130-31). And Stanton B. Garner, Jr. perceptively traces Shaw's interest in disillusionment and its consequences, observing that the disillusionment in the final act of the coherent, "streamlined" Major Barbara is a "liberation, and a theatrical one at that" (164). A strong point of the collections is that they include by now wellestablished discussions of Pygmalion and Major Barbara, such as those of Bentley and Bellow, while also providing some of the best quality criticism of very recent years. Both sets of essays are thorough and offer rich mines of thought. Both volumes are highly recommended. Glenda A. Hudson California State University, Bakersfield THE PLUMED SERPENT D. H. Lawrence. The Plumed Serpent. L. D. Clark, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. $49.95 THE PLUMED SERPENT is one of the most puzzling of D. H. Lawrence's novels, a work infrequently admired even by Lawrence admirers. Readers generally agree on only one thing, that The Plumed Serpent is flawed, faulting it for different, often contradictory 518 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 reasons. Some profess not to understand the mystical religion the novel invokes. Others claim they understand the religion but still object, primarily because they find its focus on power and leadership a prelude to fascism. Feminist critics dislike the demands made on the novel's heroine (a criticism that others say gives insufficient attention to Kate Leslie's very real strengths). Still other readers argue that the language of The Plumed Serpent is turgid, the characters wooden, the plot improbable. Of those who defend the novel, L. D. Clark has mounted the strongest case, and his 1964 study, Dark Night of the Body, remains the single most important consideration of The Plumed Serpent yet undertaken. Clark was a logical choice to edit the Cambridge edition; Cambridge and the reading public have been wellserved . Clark's introduction restates many of the arguments of the 1964 study. Like most readers of the leadership novels, Clark sees The Plumed Serpent as propaganda, a plea for a new religion that will rescue modern men and women by returning them to a more primitive world: "only a revival of the primitive religious consciousness can save mankind" (xxvi). The introduction to the Cambridge edition provides a good summary of the pertinent biographical and historical context for The Plumed Serpent and of Clark's reading of the novel in Dark Night of the Body. Clark observes that while The Plumed Serpent contains many weaknesses, its strengths outnumber them; that these strengths include Lawrence's evocation of landscape and symbol; that the novel presents an important theme of the later Lawrence—woman in search of self. The introduction also explores the connections between The Plumed Serpent and its earlier version, "Quetzalcoatl," and—following the pattern of other Cambridge editions—discusses the novel's publishing history, revisions, and reception. The introduction is well-done, as is, for the most part, the...