D.H. Lawrence was long a controversial literary figure largely because of his attention to sexual issues in his works. One of his more neglected works is a short story entitled "The Woman Who Rode Away," a story in which the author contrasts a view of the primitive with the modern world and evokes a sense of deeper meaning through ancient sexual rituals. The story has power because of the mysterious nature of both the main character and her motivations and the ancient world to which she aspires, the world of an Indian tribe hidden behind the mountains. In this story, Lawrence deliberately leaves his characters somewhat sketchy and vague in order to emphasize their larger role as types, as representatives of different cultures and different times.
Kingsley Widmer identifies the aesthetic of Lawrence as primitivistic, which he differentiates from primitivism:
The primitivistic is the aesthetic employment in the twentieth-century arts of primitive materials and forms in ways which are significantly antithetical to the values of primitivism. Instead, the widespread primitive materials and methods in the modern arts must be understood as a sophisticated artifice for presenting amoral explorations of experience (Widmer 342).
Widmer defines primitivism as having certain elements:
1) a preference for the natural, seen in a positive light;
2) a preference for the life and products of a primitive people, with primitive here being either cultural or chronological;
3) an exaltation of an earlier and more primitive stage of history; and
4) a preference for nostalgia in terms of accepting natural simplicity over artificial complication (Widmer 342).
Widmer finds that one of the most emphatic uses of the primitive in Lawrence's work is to be found in "The Woman Who Rode Away" in which the main character longs for a different environment, one that is mysterious and that she believes lies behind the mountains, and a...