Courage at the Border-Line: Balder, Hemingway, and Lawrence's The Captain's Doll

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2006 by Balbert, Peter

It is not a case, however, of a confident Captain overwhelming his woman with the word-made-flesh. In my reformulation of Leavis's approach, Hepburn must manifest the courage to recover his manly pride so he can convince himself and Hannele of the winning authority of his message of male-primacy on love and marriage. No critic has sufficiently focused on this crucial process of the reconstruction of Hepburn's ego and energy.6 It is a transformation best understood first in the light of the emotional changes and idiosyncrasies of the major characters, and then in the context of Lawrence's adaptation of a well-known Scandinavian mythology to frame key aspects of the symbolism and action in the novella. In Studies in Classic American Literature, a work that he is still intermittently revising as he writes The Captain's Doll, Lawrence provides, in effect, a concise explanation for his deft integration of theme and technique in the novella: "True myth concerns itself centrally with the onward adventure of the integral soul" (65). Thus it is the careful anatomy of Hepburn's "integral soul" that must precede the evocation of the myth, as Lawrence initiates the depiction of the Captain's "onward adventure" with a tour de force of Aristotelian technique to start the novella.

II

The opening scene of The Captain's Doll is over ten pages long, and Lawrence choreographs its intersecting movements of exits and entrances by imposing a strict unity of time, place, and action. This lengthy vignette, enacted as a form of witty parlor drama, functions not only to establish the relevant circumstances of Hepburn and Hannele's relationship, but also to suggest the dominant emotions of depression and anger that inform the characterizations, respectively, of the two lovers who are the central actors in the work. Lawrence constructs these initial pages with scrupulous attention to precise detail and delicate nuance, as even a casual gesture, passing remark, or decorous object in the room conveys valuable signals about the current status of their affair. The novella abruptly begins in medias res, as a defiant and preoccupied Hannele does not even bother to lift her head from her adjustments on the completed doll, only "curtly" (75) acknowledging the presence of her friend, Mitchka; Hannele's focus is directed at gleefully dressing the little manikin that she has created as an ingenious form of revenge for Hepburn's pattern of inattention to her awkward status as his mistress and for his persistent lack of formulated plans for their future. Indeed, her delight in such professional handicraft extends to her momentary use of the doll to ridicule, in Mitchka's presence, the proud Captain with whom she is so intensely involved: by ceremoniously holding the doll "head downwards" with its "arms wildly turned out" (75), she reveals Hepburn's body in a conspicuously undignified posture that mockingly reveals his private anatomy to the reader and to her gossipy friend. As this scene later confirms, Mitchka emanates-in a marvelously oxymoronic phrase-"a roguish coyness" (75), amounting to an odd blend of erotic assertiveness combined with a nagging fear about her vulnerable position as a close friend of an outspoken German woman who is the paramour of a Scottish captain in the occupying British army. As for Mitchka's lover, the awkwardly ignored Martin-an attractive and defeated officer manifesting a firm military demeanor-it is noteworthy that "one could see the war in his face" (77). Thus appears the first explicit reference in the novella to the lingering, destructive effect of the Great War on the men who survived. In this sense, Lawrence's short novel serves as a reminder that "the lost generation" remains as applicable to the winning and losing soldiers stationed in the Rhineland in 1921 as it more famously applies to the expatriots and artists on the Left Bank of Paris so memorably recalled by Hemingway. This novella conveys a wider scope of socio-cultural authority than is generally acknowledged, as it dramatizes the lingering damage to the personal life and the inevitable fracturing of the emotional stability occasioned by the First World War.7