Peter Balbert
Trinity University, USA
Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Ladybird: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and the Incremental Structure of Seduction
The wide variety of perspectives on The Ladybird includes strong opinions on its fictional and doctrinal achievement that range from the unequivocally laudatory to the unapologetically demeaning. They include methodological approaches that variously focus on its artistic and philosophical inheritances, literary influences and relevant echoes of other writers, ethnic and archetypal resonances, intertextual significance and visionary continuities, as well as mythic overtones and biographical correspondencies. Amid this wealth of valuable scholarship, there remain two interrelated areas that require more in-depth consideration. First, the acknowledged resemblances of Cynthia Asquith to Lady Daphne, and of Basil, Lady Beveridge, and the Earl to respective Asquith family members--such a panoply of roman a clef has not received an integrated discussion that can illuminate the tone and technique of this fiction and the nagging issues in Lawrence's turbulent life with Frieda during that memorable autumn of the work's composition in 1921. Second, Lady Daphne is provocatively stimulated and meticulously seduced by Psanek in a manner that has implications both for the organic structure of this novella and for the copulatory proclivities and amorous passions of the Daphne-Cynthia prototype. Psanek's prolonged and clever siege on Lady Daphne's proud and disconsolate womanhood encompasses important Lawrencian notions about sexual intercourse and masturbatory evasion; it also includes remarkably explicit material on the writer's symbolic and clinical distinctions between vaginal and clitoral orgasm--a preoccupation that circumstances in his own marriage have made especially urgent and obsessive.