Susan Haris
Independent Researcher
Volume III, Number 1, 2017 I Full Text PDF
Abstract
The paper analyses St Mawr (1925) as a modernist text with a strong animal character. Lawrence infuses the eponymous horse with an identity based on physical description and a subjectivity based on his troubled past; but do they constitute an agency that can grant him perpetual subjecthood? In assessing the relationship between the protagonist and St Mawr, the paper explores the animal identity vis-à-vis other animal identities, and situates it in a context of attitudes towards animals and Nature in the early decades of modernism. Does it achieve selfhood? Or is it yet another instance of personifying, doomed to survive only in the richness and depth of an allegory?
Keywords: St Mawr, Rousseau, animal identity, subjectivity