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. In his "The Blind Man," the third-person omniscient point of view is used, with the narrator maintaining at all times an objective distance that is in keeping with the story's analysis of the frailty and sadness of human relationships which in their own way are carried on in a darkness as deep as that encountered by the blind man. This story is also character driven and involves a series of relationships among the three principal characters, relationships that have a history but that are changing in the immediate time of the story because of the blindness of the husband who has returned from the war, the experience of the wife in coping with this change, and the sudden acceptance of an old friend of the wife who had previously been disliked and even banned by the husband. The only real connection made between two people in this story is that between the husband and the friend, and this connection is bizarre and troubling to the friend, changing his outlook forever.
Kingsley Widmer identifies the aesthetic of Lawrence as primitivistic, which he differentiates from primitivism (Widmer 342). Widmer defines primitivism as having certain elements:
1) a preference for the natural, se...