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"Strangely Jumbled": Attitudes Toward the Native Other in Melville's and D. H. Lawrence's Captivity Narratives

DH. Lawrence was a magpie. Anything colorful enough to catch his eye might go into the building of a story: friends and people he met in passing, their conversations, their houses, their landscapes, their desires, and any of their private feelings that he might detect.1 Lawrence incorporates all these items into his fictional captivity narrative, “The Woman Who Rode Away.”2 Written in 1924 soon after he had traveled down the west coast of Mexico, the story begins in the Mexican landscape that Lawrence encountered on that trip, but the secret mountain village where the woman is held captive by supposedly Mexican Indians is in fact a Pueblo Indian village, with its houses and dances meticulously described, uprooted from the United States and transported south. Of particular interest for Melville and Lawrence scholars alike is the link that Lawrence provides between two sites he knew from the real world, the fictional woman’s home and her place of captivity. He links them through a scene lifted from Typee, a landscape familiar to Lawrence only from Melville’s fiction. Perhaps that scene brought along with it further Melvillean elements that appear in Lawrence’s story, such as the idea of the otherworld journey, cultural cliches about tribal practices, concepts of both the ailing and alien body, experiences of interracial touching and gazing, and, above all, a deeply ambiguous attitude toward the natives that the protagonist encounters. Furthermore, Lawrence interrogates the genre of the captivity narrative in general and Melville’s story in particular, as well as his own penchant for romanticizing the native Other. Both Typee and “The Woman Who Rode Away” involve a quest-like flight from a familiar but imprisoning environment toward a land of tribal