The Plumed Serpent
The Plumed Serpent is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published by Martin Secker in 1926. It was begun when the author was living at what is now the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos in U.S. state of New Mexico in 1924, accompanied by his wife Frieda and artist Dorothy Brett.[1] The original working title of an early draft was "Quetzalcoatl", a reference to the cult of the plumed serpent in Mexico.
Plot
The novel has a contemporary setting during the period of the Mexican Revolution. It opens with a group of tourists visiting a bullfight in Mexico City. One of them, Kate Leslie, departs in disgust and encounters Don Cipriano, a Mexican general. Later she meets his friend, an intellectual landowner Don Ramón, and travels to Sayula, a small town set on a lake. Ramón and Cipriano are leading a revival of a pre-Christian religion and Kate becomes drawn into their cult.
Reception
Literary critic Harold Bloom writes in his The Western Canon (1995) that Lawrence was writing as a "rather weird political theorist" in The Plumed Serpent,[2] while Anne Fernihough calls the novel "stridently ideological".[3] Marianna Torgovnick writes that The Plumed Serpent, "states its racialised theses quite clearly at times. It posts Lawrence's views, derived from theories circulating within his culture, of the fall and rise of races based upon energy and power. Lawrence's fear is specifically the fear that the white race will be supplanted".[4]
Standard editions
- The Plumed Serpent (1926), edited by L.D. Clark, Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-22262-1
- The Plumed Serpent (1926), ed. by L. D. Clark and Introd. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, Penguin Twentieth Century Classics 1995 ISBN 0-14-018812-6
- The Plumed Serpent (1926), Edited with an introduction by Ronald G. Walker, Penguin English Library, 1983
- Quetzalcoatl (1925), edited by Louis L Martz, W W Norton Edition, 1998, ISBN 0-8112-1385-4 – Early draft of The Plumed Serpent
References
- ↑ Taos Summer Writers Conference
- ↑ Bloom, Harold (1995). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books. p. 408. ISBN 1-57322-514-2.
- ↑ Fernihough, Anne (2001). Fernihough, Anne, ed. The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 9. ISBN 0-521-62617-X.
- ↑ Torgovnick, Marianna (2001). Fernihough, Anne, ed. The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 46. ISBN 0-521-62617-X.
External links
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