The Plumed Serpent

Mexico and Blood Consciousness

Lawrence wrote The Plumed Serpent during his years of expatriate wandering in the early 1920s, when he had finally left England for good and was searching, with a restlessness that was also a method, for a civilization that had not been destroyed by industrialism and rationalism. He found in Mexico something that excited and appalled him simultaneously: a country in which pre-Christian religious forces seemed still alive, in which the body had not yet been entirely subordinated to the mind, and in which the political situation offered a kind of laboratory for his ideas about power, leadership, and the relationship between the individual and something larger than themselves.

The novel’s central figure is Kate Leslie, a widowed Irish woman of forty, who arrives in Mexico initially as a tourist and is drawn into the orbit of Don Cipriano and Don Ramón — a military man and an intellectual who are jointly leading a movement to revive the ancient Aztec religion and displace Catholicism from Mexico. The movement, whose deity is the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, is political, religious, and explicitly anti-democratic: it replaces the ballot box with the authority of the leader who embodies the divine principle, and it replaces Christian individual salvation with a form of collective renewal through submission to the ancient god.

Kate’s experience of this movement — her resistance to it, her partial seduction by it, her eventual qualified acceptance of it — is the novel’s subject. Lawrence does not simply endorse the Quetzalcoatl revival; he shows Kate’s objections to it, her discomfort with its demands, her awareness of what is being given up as well as what is being gained. But the novel’s sympathies are broadly with the movement’s critique of liberal modernity, and this is where the political difficulties that have surrounded it since publication become most acute.

The Landscape as Argument

Whatever one makes of the novel’s politics, The Plumed Serpent contains some of the most extraordinary landscape writing in English fiction. Lawrence’s Mexico — the lake of Sayula, the volcanoes, the heat of the high plateau, the quality of the light at different hours — is rendered with an intensity that amounts to a philosophical argument about the relationship between environment and consciousness. The Mexico of this novel is not backdrop but protagonist: it does something to Kate, and through Kate to the reader, that rational analysis cannot do.

Lawrence’s description of the Aztec rituals, the hymns to Quetzalcoatl, the physical experience of participating in a religious practice that engages the body as well as the mind — these sections are the novel’s most controversial and its most genuinely original. Lawrence is trying to render, from the inside, what it might feel like to participate in a non-Christian religious consciousness, and the attempt, whatever its limitations, is more serious than anything comparable in English fiction of the period.

The novel’s resolution, in which Kate accepts a place in the movement despite her reservations, has never satisfied readers who want Lawrence to acknowledge more fully the political implications of what he is endorsing. But Lawrence was never primarily a political thinker; he was a writer of bodies and landscapes, and The Plumed Serpent, for all its difficulties, is a body-and-landscape novel of the first order.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Lawrence’s most visually extraordinary and most politically troubling novel — essential reading for understanding the full range and the full contradictions of his work.