Abstract
Lawrence's vision of a new world was at one time synonymous with America. The First World War had caused a chain reaction in his sensitive mind, which terminated in his deep distrust of all that the elderly statesmen of his time stood for; it produced in him a strong desire to "sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony … which is established upon the assumption of goodness in the members, instead of the assumption of badness." In a letter that he wrote to Mark Gertler in 1918, he expressed his new feeling in strong words. The unnamed woman in Lawrence's Mexican tale, "The Woman Who Rode Away," would seem to ex press her feeling about her own kind of family- and society-bound existence in almost the same language. It is not difficult to see Lawrence's own private urges and aspirations reflected in that woman's yearning for the timeless mysteries which lurk. as she believes, among the wild Chilchui Indians. "The Woman Who Rode Away" is the expression in a fictional form of Lawrence's vision of the "new world." In this paper I have tried to define, through an analysis of the tale. the essential nature of that vision.
Recommended Citation
Padhi, Bibhu
(1985)
""The Women Who Rode Away" and Lawrence's Vision of the New World,"
University of Dayton Review: Vol. 17:
No.
3, Article 8.
Available at:
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/udr/vol17/iss3/8
