Lawrences The Horse Dealers Daughter versus a Soap Opera :: essays research papers

D.H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" could be described as a story in which boy meets girl. Its plot, on the surface, resembles that of any number of traditionally romantic pastorals: a country boy saves a country girl from drowning, sees something in her that he never saw before, and, at the end of the story, proposes marriage. In this day, this story would get made into a soap opera, and would be called ?Mabel?. This story deals with everyday soap life and has the thick plot that only soap can hold a candle to. In this story, the horse dealer's daughter is a young woman named Mabel, who has recently discovered that her family has lost all its money, her brothers can go off and make their own way in the world, but Mabel has nowhere to go. There are a few options open to her -- going to live with a sister, becoming a servant -- but she has run her family's household ever since her mother's death and none of these options are acceptable to her. Her third option is introduce, while Mabel is cutting the grass around her mother?s grave. This option is what brings the soap form dry and boring, to a matter of ?life and death?, going to her mother literally, through death, rather than just figuratively through a sense of unity with the departed one. This is also the part when the man, who is Dr. Jack Fergusson, comes in and sweeps her off of her feet. Now logic would tell us that the reason Jack felt free to undress Mabel was that he is a doctor. Doctors do not look at naked women in the same way as, for example, a lover would, there is absolutely no reason to believe that he has ever looked at Mabel lustfully, or even lovingly, before. But Lawrence seems to argue that by plucking the doomed Mabel out of the water, by bringing her back into the world, Jack has assumed responsibility for her. The most traditional way for a young unmarried man to assume responsibility for a young unmarried woman is to marry her. Consequently Mabel assumes that Jack must love her, since he has brought her back to the world of the living and purports to take care of her. The fact that he has removed her clothes (as a husband would) only seals their compact.