The Woman Who Rode Away: Short Story

by D.H. Lawrence

A dispirited, unnamed woman decides to leave her ordinary and unfulfilling life to ride out into the lands of the Chilchui Indians and get in touch with their spiritual and ancient ways. While her quest brings physical danger, it also becomes a journey of deep self-discovery and self-acceptance.

D.H. Lawrence’s writing often reflects upon the degradation of humanity in a modern, industrialized society. This short story and its main character—who is presented to the reader without any true identity—provide another powerful commentary by Lawrence on the dehumanizing effects of modern culture.

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Genres: Short Stories

25 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 14, 2013

About the author

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism, and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H._Law...

Reviews

[Tom]

A "California Girl" who at thirty-three is married to a man twenty years older than her and who views her as another commodity of his capitalistic projects. After fifteen years of marriage with two children she is starting to feel her life is walled in and stifled. They are living together in the back end of nowhere in a desolate sterile scarred valley with closed abandoned silver mines bordering the verdant mountains of a remote tribe of Mexican Indians called the Chilchuis. This unnamed woman finds herself with a body becoming stouter and a mind that ceases intellectual growth. She is in a state of mental and physical stagnation. She becomes intrigued with the idea of primitivism and thinking it thought provoking and intellectually stimulating to visit this remote tribe of Chilchuis and get “to know their gods.” She literally just rides away one day and goes off into the mountains alone. She meets on the way three of the native Chilchui Indians who take her up into the mountains to their village. Little does she know that for years the Chilchui have waited for a white female sacrificial victim to appease their gods. Lawrence has the Chilchuis ask if the woman will “bring her heart to the Chilchui.” Her affirmative response convinces the Chilchuis that she was sent in fulfillment of their prophecy. She is stripped of her western clothing and imprisoned and drugged for several months. At the dawn of the winter solstice, four Chilchui lay her on a stone altar and hold her legs and arms. At her head, with knife poised and one eye on the sky, an old priest figure waits for the moment to strike.

In a very sly yet canny literary way Lawrence depicts the metaphorically figurative rape of a white woman symbolizing the actual white man's colonializing rape of the Chilchui world.

[Shivani A Pillai]

This story presents Lawrence at his best: as a writer who torments the mindscapes of his readers without the slightest mercy. But, towards the end, his style is so addictive, that you're left wanting more, despite the ordeal.

[Sanjay Chandra]

This is a story in the backdrop of conflict between the local Indians and American whites. A married woman, possibly unhappy in the boundaries established by her husband, living in the wilderness of silver mines, decides to be adventurous when the husband has gone out for a business trip. She falls in the hands of the Indians, who use her as a sacrifice to regain their own land.

[Emilie]

Bloody hell

[Annabelle Skerten]

This is what My Year of Rest and Relaxation thinks it is but could neverrrr be. Been feeling a calling recently to uproot my life and live in a drugged up haze in a cave, especially if my sacrifice would mean healing the world. “Then she could actually hear the great stars in heaven, which she saw through her door, sparkling in their motion and brightness, saying things perfectly to the cosmos.”