This article was published in Journal of DH Lawrence Studies Volume 7, No. 2 (2025), pp. 165-169

 

ABSTRACT

This article, one of an invited multi-author series of short articles on the topic of horses in D. H. Lawrence, uses a focus on horses in the 1923-25 Mexican novel The Plumed Serpent to develop an entirely new perspective on this most controversial of his works. It has been criticised, ever since its publication, as fascistic, misogynist and fantasist. Of late a few critics have, whilst acknowledging these criticisms, commended its anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and environmentalism. This article argues that a focus on the novel’s animals – and on horses in particular (the ways in which they resist, cooperate, and are killed) – indicates the mode in which the novel should be read: one which forbids any aggregate moral calculus or definitive assessment of aesthetic meaning in the novel, but which tracks the nature of lived experience, and which holds the reader open to a realm beyond, and contextualising, all human meaning – the animal other.

 

THEY RESIST

On approaching their boat, which cannot reach the shore due to the Lake Sayula’s shallow sill, Kate dismounts her donkey and wades, whilst Cipriano:

‘rode his black Arab to the water. It sniffed, and entered with delicate feet into the warm shallows. Then, a little way in, it stood and suddenly started pawing the water, as a horse paws the ground, in the oddest manner possible, very rapidly striking the water with its fore-foot, so that little waves splashed up over its black legs and belly.’

Cipriano gently encourages the horse on:

‘He lifted the reins and touched the creature with his spurs. It jumped, and went half-stumbling, half-dancing through the water, prettily …

Then again it stood still, and suddenly, with a rapid beating of its fore paw, sent the water hollowly splashing up, till its black belly glistened wet like a black serpent.’ (PS 324 all page references are to this text unless otherwise stated)

Cipriano and Kate, amused and charmed, speculate on his reasons: “It likes to be wet—who knows?” (324). But the scene is not over when the horse and Cipriano finally reach the boat. On returning to the shore with a soldier, “the black horse, male and wilful, insisted on stopping to paw the waters and splash himself, with a naïve, wilful sort of delight” (325).

Unlike the Arab mare at the level crossing in Women in Love (WL 110-13), this Arab is given his head. Whereas the mare is prevented from running away, the stallion is allowed, for a time, to go nowhere at all. This is not just a matter of Kate and Cipriano recognising the horse as “a real living creature with a life of its own”, in contrast to a boy, elsewhere in the novel, being described as failing to recognise this in the bird he is stoning (218). Nor is it a mere interruption to their journey, or to the novel to which it is apparently irrelevant. It is in its irrelevance to the plot, that its significance to the novel lies.

The stallion’s play-time intervenes between Kate and Cipriano’s first sex and their “Marriage by Quetzalcoatl” that evening (320; 329-31). These are spiritually weighty, narratively transformational activities, related to the purpose of the boat trip – to witness the creation of robes for Ramón, Cipriano, and the anticipated new goddess (321-23). Kate is being woven into the cult, but, as Cipriano had earlier observed: “Navajo women, when they weave a blanket, leave a little place for their soul to come out, at the end: not to weave their soul into it … finished … It has no interest any more” (234). The novel weaves the pattern of Quetzalcoatl, but leaves many places for Lawrence’s soul to come out: for Kate and Ramón to doubt; for laughter in the joy of a moment; and for real animals, who play no part in the cult, to interrupt its business and its psychological flow. Elsewhere a snake and a bull have a similar effect (424-5, 431-2). Still more than human doubts, animals constitute the existential wild card of the novel. And whereas a mythologised version of a snake is co-opted to the cult as its eponymous god, horses remain distant from it.

 

THEY COOPERATE

This distance doubtless exists in part precisely because of the close and prominent association, in Mexico, between horses and humans (the narrator’s observation that “the skeleton, and the skeleton on horseback, is the idol of the first week in November” suggests the interchangeability of the two positions) (261). The cult reaches for, and names its hours after, only wild animals (359). By the same token, domesticated animals are freest from assimilation at the symbolic level (the novel’s few mentions of the horses of the Apocalypse assert their irrelevance [15, 418]), whilst having the greatest opportunity to resist humans at the pragmatic level, as earlier the stallion does, and as a bull later does when he protractedly refuses to enter a boat (431-2). Moreover, the narrative seems fascinated by human-horse relationships as manifestations of achieved (as opposed to the cult’s aspirational) union between human and animal, observing how: “The milkman … sitting unmoved on horseback … delivered bowls of milk from the can in front of him, and then, on horseback like a monument, took his supper” (231). The hyphenisation of “horse-soldiers” (299, 304) emphasises the connection, as “soldados a caballo” (from Pilar Giralt’s 1980 translation [339], and presumably Lawrence’s own Spanish vocabulary) does not. Cipriano is admiringly described as sitting “close upon the horse as if he and it belonged to one birth” (424).

Accordingly, the novel laments the gradual replacement of the horse by the car: “Sayula also had that real insanity of America, the automobile. As men used to want a horse and a sword, now they want a car” (112). When Kate “went across the courtyard, that was littered with horse-droppings, to the car”, the reader may recall Ursula at Southwell: “She stood in the old yard of the inn, smelling of straw and stables and petrol” (304; WL 312). But whereas in Women in Love petrol-driven futurity helps to lift Ursula out of her childhood, in The Plumed Serpent’s Mexico it is associated with encroaching American modernity, and regretted.

 

THEY ARE KILLED

Yet the post-conquest Mexican compact between horse and rider had long been unilaterally broken when horses became what Owen calls “old wrecks here to finish them off” as “part of the game” that is the bullfight (16). One of the horses at the fight, of which Kate sees the opening, “stood with that feeble monumentality of a milk horse, patient … while his master delivered the milk”, anticipating the milk horse seen later, who may in due course take his place (rather as the bull in the arena alongside him anticipates the bull who later tries to refuse the journey presented to him) (18). His passive stasis in the face of what he does not know will be his death is the opposite of the vivacious stasis of the stallion, just as his sexualised goring (“his rear was still heaved up, with the bull’s horn working vigorously up and down inside him”) contrasts the stallion’s potency (18).

When Kate first sees the “horsemen” at the opening of the event, she sees only the second part of that compound (14). It is only later that, “in a pang of alarm, Kate noticed that the horse was thickly blindfolded with a black cloth. Yes, and so was the horse on which sat the other picador” (15). When each horse is up-ended by the bull (the picador injures the bull who then attacks the horse), the unity of horse and man is ruptured as the riders flee. Just as the narrative recognises the stallion as “a real living creature with a life of its own”, so it does of these horses: “The old horse, in complete dazed amazement, struggled to rise, as if overcome with dumb incomprehension” (15). When the great Spanish mock epic is invoked, implicitly likening the horses to Don Quixote’s Rocinante, this is not done in order to mock them as individuals, but to deflate the Spanish heroics of the bullfight per se: “The bold picador shoved forward his ancient steed”; “O shades of Don Quixote!” (18, 15).

Kate senses that her traumatised response to the bullfight and its rape-like goring of the horse is, and is hated as, connected to her womanliness: “Call that manliness! … thank God a million times that I’m a woman,”; “She felt, moreover, that they both hated her just  because she was a woman” (18, 20, 26, 28). Her later participation in a male-dominant cult has not the slightest impact on her revulsion towards animal cruelty – and, in general, violence towards animals is more consistently disapproved of by the novel than is violence towards humans. This is partly because, unlike some humans, they pose humans no threat in the novel, but also – crucially – because they offer an escape from the purely human. This is true in a particular way of horses, precisely because of their close mutual relationship.

 

CONCLUSION

Horses in The Plumed Serpent, then, offer humans the benefits of cooperation, relationship, resistance to totalising religious narratives, resistance to the anthropocentrism that discards them when they outlive their pragmatic function, and the example of spontaneous, narratively under-determined, deeply embodied joy. They do so insofar as they are individually able, and insofar as either the characters or narrator stop to recognise them. This occurs to a significant degree, affecting the ontology as well as the ethics of the novel. A focus on horses makes clear the extent to which the novel honours the veering of human experience by tracking what we may infer to be changes in Lawrence’s own consciousness as he wrote (from religious seeking, to celebration of physical joy, and back again, amongst many other modes). The reader must acknowledge these changes, or else risk mischaracterising, dismissing or condemning the novel as the finished sarape that the novel gives no indication of trying to be. The novel reaches beyond the human far more successfully than does the cult itself, in part due to horses’ agency, as they manifest their will to joy, their cooperativeness, and the vileness of their dispatch.