‘Something Stood Up in my Soul’: D. H. Lawrence in Taos

D.H. Lawrence, like many of the artists affiliated with Taos’ modern little art colony, was invited there by Mabel Dodge Luhan to ‘see and feel and wonder’ the ‘essence’ of Taos and ultimately put it ‘between the covers of a book.’ Although Lawrence was leery of the highbrow’s fascination with Taos’ unique peoples and places, he nonetheless formally incorporated elements of the ‘Taos mystique’ into the work he produced while living there. In the novelette St. Mawr, which sympathetically portrays the wanderings of a cosmopolitan American woman who flees the ghastly modern metropolis of London, Lawrence details her discovery of ‘something else’ in the vital and otherworldly wilds of New Mexico. Although his protagonist is certain that she has found a final resting place in the gorgeous country in and around Taos, Lawrence’s inconclusive ending intimates that even at the far peripheries of the modern world-system, she can’t and won’t escape its soul-sucking reaches.