Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence

6. Leaving Our Sureties Behind: Lawrence’s Rhetorical Play with Gender Roles

6 Leaving Our Sureties Behind Lawrence’s Rhetorical Play with Gender Roles Introducing D. H. Lawrence’s essays “Matriarchy” and “Cocksure Women and Hen-sure Men” to readers of The Gender of Modernism, Bonnie Kime Scott argues that Lawrence, writing at the tail-end of his so-called leadership phase, advocates a “male position of power” within the context of natural gender roles to which women, threatening mothers all, are invited to submit themselves.1 Female characters in Lawrence’s post-Rainbow career, she writes, are forever bowing down to “male loins”; indeed, the “phallus may be Lawrence’s ultimate character.” There is little in Scott’s appraisal to surprise readers of this feminist anthology. The lineage of her remarks can be traced back to earlier feminist attacks—Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) and Cornelia Nixon’s Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn against Women (1986) come to mind—on Lawrence’s patriarchal stance, phallic fictions, and regressive ideologies . Granted the overall tenor of Scott’s argument, however, much rides on how we interpret one brief, almost throwaway, comment: “Formally, these essays scintillate with tense humor and are masterful as written performances, so much so that they seem more like ironic textual play than argument” (221). Scott specifies “Formally,” as if to distinguish that from what Lawrence really means to say. But would not a playfully ironic Lawrence impair the ability of anyone to tell whether he is an advocate of male power or just ‘being rhetorical ’? Why should so much textual play not overload and collapse his claims to authority? Scott does reinforce “Formally” with all kinds of caveats: “masterful” loads his irony with a symbolic weight of masculinist presumption; “tense” implies that Lawrence’s play must be of a peculiarly anxious sort, perhaps more suited to a playground bully than to a lighthearted tease; and “seem” takes ironic play out of the realm of serious possibility before ironic play has even been posited. The cumulative effect of these caveats is significant. One might argue , with much justice, that ironic play does not necessarily negate the effects of male power. Say I make this remark to female students in my classroom (roughly restating one version of Lawrence’s thesis in “Cocksure Women”): 10 Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence “I think that men should take back the power they have lost to women”! I would intend that remark ironically; I do not mean that at all; and my students, knowing me, would probably take the remark in that spirit and laugh. Nonetheless , they might also think “that’s the kind of thing only a man would say.” At that point, they would have grasped the possibility that the authority of an ironic statement depends less on what it says than on the larger social context within which it is uttered. Scott seems to be suggesting something like this in her introduction to Lawrence: the fact that Lawrence might be ironic weighs less in the balance than the fact that it is Lawrence being ironic; the fact that Lawrence might not ‘mean’ what he says is outweighed by the very act of his speaking within a social context of gender imbalances, in which an ironic call for male power might have the effect, regardless of intent, of augmenting male power. Unpacking the force of Scott’s remarks, however, suggests that the contrastive relationship she tries to draw between Lawrence’s argument and his ironic textual play requires a more complicated formulation. Scott’s own argument erases that contrast: she ends her critique of Lawrence with the thought that he might be ironic, then hedges that ‘argument’ with just enough textual play to at once reduce its potentially disruptive force and preserve it as a kind of virtual, or shadow, argument. She posits irony, and withdraws the position, all at the same time. The effect of this strategy reveals much about how rhetorical practices of the sort she (hesitantly) imputes to Lawrence really function. Scott is actually pursuing several arguments in several interrelated discursive fields. One, overt but truncated, has to do with technical issues about how readers apprehend ironic statements. Another, tacit but much more persuasive, places those issues within the “masterful” discourses of male power: Scott is acknowledging a history of feminist interpretation and banking on her readers’ knowledge of it in order to enforce limits on how far irony can take Lawrence away from his masculinist paradigms. How ironic can a masterful Lawrence actually be...