American D. H. Lawrence

THIS COMPACT VOLUME of intelligent, well-focused criticism manages to remain both historicist and revisionist in its ambition and organization. Lee Jenkins largely succeeds in her admirable attempt to “read D. H. Lawrence as a non-American who, in one period of his career at least, wrote American literature.” She refers here, of course, to the two visits to America in the 1920s, during which he lived and wrote primarily in Taos, New Mexico, along with several multi-day trips to Mexico and the surrounding Rocky Mountains. In the process of her integrated discussion of Lawrence’s art, friendships, and doctrine, Jenkins persuasively “calls in question the still dominant domestic definition of the English Lawrence and the integrity of nation-based traditions, British and American.” In Jenkins’s more fluid and adaptable approach to the customary classifications, she further argues, in effect, that Lawrence’s American writing remains “bypassed in the transnational circuits of contemporary scholarship.” While she does not exactly locate Lawrence within the politicized arena today of the New Americanists and their outspoken disapproval of the country’s alleged sins of imperialism, classism, sexism, and eco-savagery, Jenkins still manages to situate his work closer to those contemporary paradigms than to its long-accepted placement in the “now superannuated and ideologically suspect processes of national-canon formation that defined American literary studies in the post–World War I decade of its inception.”

Jenkins’s major contribution is to demonstrate how Lawrence—in Studies in Classic American Literature, in several poems primarily from Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and in three short fictions—manages in such visionary art to anticipate central tenets of current scholarship that reject the three iconic premises of Americanist critical approaches that have dominated the academy for decades after the publication of Studies in Classic American Literature in 1923: notions of the Virgin Land and the American Adam, of the courageous errand into the wilderness, and of the “myth and symbolist” mode of interpretation. In the process of rescuing Lawrence from such a long-established hermeneutics, she illuminatingly documents the struggles for primacy among New Americanists, transnationalists, traditional American Studies advocates, and eclectic modernists, with Lawrence relevant in each category but belonging to none of them exclusively. While it is evident that Jenkins prefers the Lawrence that she can establish within the interpretive range of the New Americanists and the transnationalists, she usually remains relatively balanced and undogmatic in her sensitivity to the complex issues of influence, meaning, and doctrine in Lawrence’s prolific work.

The central text in Jenkins’s study understandably is Studies in Classic American Literature, a work she deems important not just as brilliant and unorthodox criticism, but also as quintessentially “American” in its precocious anticipation of revisionist critics today, in which “American literature is understood not as a world apart, but as part of a larger world.” It is in this context that she reaches some intriguing conclusions. Jenkins acknowledges the common view that Studies in Classic American Literature does define and analyze what Lawrence regards as the “classics” of American literature, a term he uses in its “literal and symbolic meaning as a national literature”; but she further asserts counterintuitively that his study is ultimately concerned with the “decomposition of a national narrative in the American classics.” Such a perspective turns Lawrence’s resonant phrase and seminal concept of “the spirit of place” right on its head, as she reveals how it also partakes of a less insular “continental quality”—one that is “anathema to the national spirit.”

In her liberating discussion of Studies in Classic American Literature she attempts to absorb Lawrence’s art and doctrine into the “wide contours of a transnationalism by non-Americans who write American literature.” While she is not always successful in this reconstruction of Lawrence as a New Americanist, Jenkins remains provocative and energetic in her range of interpretations. She is especially incisive in her brief but trenchant comments on Lawrence’s treatment of The Scarlet Letter, explaining how the implications of his blunt...