Judith Ruderman: Race and Identity in D. H. Lawrence, Indians, Gypsies and Jews

• Ginette Roy

Judith Ruderman’s book focuses on three types of “racial others”, two of which – the Gypsies and the Jews – have rarely been studied before in relation to D.H. Lawrence. Though it is a dense scholarly book including an 88-page-long critical apparatus, it reads easily. The unifying theme of its nine chapters, which might read as a series of separate articles, is Lawrence’s racial thought. In her long introduction, Ruderman, after stressing Lawrence’s many contradictions, carefully situates his argument for an intrinsic separation of the races and his tendency to stereotyping in the ideological context of the time. It is a period “when race and nation were inextricably entwined”. She acknowledges that there are other figures of ethnic otherness in Lawrence, but her justification for choosing to study these three groups together is that a notion of organic community, if not of tribal structure, has often been attached to all three of them. She points out that there are even hypotheses of a common ancestry of Gypsies and Jews. Ruderman prudently discusses the tricky use of the terms “race” and “people” and shows Lawrence’s own hesitations in relation to them.