Theresa Mae Thompson
Valdosta State University, USA
Contingent Go(o)dness: Moral Philosophy in D. H. Lawrence's St. Mawr and The Escaped Cock
Lawrence wrote St. Mawr (1925) and The Escaped Cock (published as The Man Who Died in 1929) during the same general time frame as he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover. Like Lady Chatterley's Lover, these works explore the individual's struggle to inhabit an authentic set of moral principles in an essentially (for Lawrence) immoral world. Both St. Mawr and The Escaped Cock use the motifs of death and resurrection to convey the contingent nature of moral goodness if, a priori, we can agree that moral goodness is demonstrated by the choices we make. Iris Murdoch wrote, in 1967, that "[a] moral philosophy should be inhabited." Her essays on the problem of defining moral action-written in the political climate preceding and following the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and Great Britain's 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover-offer a useful gloss for explicating the contingency of the moral philosophy that shapes the moral selves of Lou, in St. Mawr and The Priestess of Isis, in The Escaped Cock. Murdoch's perspective emphasizes how social and cultural contexts restrict one's ability to develop or inhabit any authentic moral self. The contingency of making authentic moral choices, and therefore truly inhabiting a moral self, resonates in the death and resurrection motifs of St.Mawr and in The Escaped Cock.