Essay 01: DH Lawrence's Cocksure Women and Hensure Men
In the enigmatic tapestry of literary legacies, DH Lawrence stands as a titan of expression. His greatness cannot be confined to the realms of fiction as it extends into the labyrinthine corridors of essays—gems often overlooked by the casual reader. Amidst the grandeur of his novels and poems, Lawrence's essays shimmer like hidden treasures, waiting to be unearthed by the intrepid seeker. Yet, how many among us have delved into the depths of his musings beyond his famed literary works?
His essays, far from the dry and academic connotations often associated with the genre, pulsate with Lawrence's unmistakable vitality and raw honesty. We will be publishing some of them here in the coming weeks and starting with a light one. The remarkable thing about his essays is that they defy categorisation, refusing to be shackled by the constraints of formalism. Instead, they emerge as vibrant reflections of the man himself—personal, spontaneous, and unapologetically authentic. To label them mere "non-fictional prose" is to do them a disservice; they are living, breathing entities, each a testament to Lawrence's disdain for convention and his embrace of the colloquial and spirited.
Among these treasures lies "Cocksure Women and Hensure Men," a provocative exploration into the complexities of gender identity and societal expectations. Yet, like so many of Lawrence's essays, it has languished in obscurity, awaiting its moment to captivate the minds of readers hungry for intellectual stimulation and literary adventure. As we embark on this journey into the heart of Lawrence's thought, let us shed our preconceptions and embrace the untamed spirit of his prose. For in the Lawrentian world, every word is an invitation to liberation, beckoning us to cast aside the chains of convention and embrace the boundless possibilities of the human experience.
In the tantalising world of human dynamics, where gender roles dance upon the stage of societal norms, Lawrence emerges as a provocative voice, challenging conventional wisdom with this essay. Delving into the intricacies of gender identity, his essay transcends the mundane and ventures into the realm of the controversial, beckoning readers to question their preconceptions and explore the complexities of masculinity and femininity. With the precision of a master wordsmith and the audacity of a cultural iconoclast, Lawrence invites us on a journey of self-discovery, where certainties crumble and new insights await those brave enough to traverse the uncharted territories of gender relations. Strap in, for Lawrence's words are not just ink on paper; they are a call to arms, challenging us to challenge ourselves in the pursuit of understanding.
It seems to me there are two aspects to women. There is the demure and the dauntless. Men have loved to dwell, in fiction at least, on the demure maiden whose inevitable reply is: Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir! The demure maiden, the demure spouse, the demure mother — this is still the ideal. A few maidens, mistresses and mothers are demure. A few pretend to be. But the vast majority are not. And they don't pretend to be. We don't expect a girl skilfully driving her car to be demure, we expect her to be dauntless. What good would demure and maidenly Members of Parliament be, inevitably responding: Oh, yes, if you please, kind sir! — Though of course they are masculine members of that kind. And a demure telephone girl? Or even a demure stenographer? Demureness, to be sure, is outwardly becoming, it is an outward mark of femininity, like bobbed hair. But it goes with inward dauntlessness. The girl who has got to make her way in life has got to be dauntless, and if she has a pretty, demure manner with it, then lucky girl. She kills two birds with two stones.
With the two kinds of femininity go two kinds of confidence: there are the women who are cocksure, and the women who are hensure. A really up-to-date woman is a cocksure woman. She doesn't have a doubt nor a qualm. She is the modern type. Whereas the old-fashioned demure woman was sure as a hen is sure, that is, without knowing anything about it. She went quietly and busily clucking around, laying the eggs and mothering the chickens in a kind of anxious dream that still was full of sureness. But not mental sureness. Her sureness was a physical condition, very soothing, but a condition out of which she could easily be startled or frightened.
It is quite amusing to see the two kinds of sureness in chickens. The cockerel is, naturally, cocksure. He crows because he is certain it is day. Then the hen peeps out from under her wing. He marches to the door of the hen-house and pokes out his head assertively: Ah ha daylight! of course! just as I said! — and he majestically steps down the chicken ladder towards terra firma, knowing that the hens will step cautiously after him, drawn by his confidence. So after him, cautiously, step the hens. He crows again: Ha-hal here we are! — It is indisputable, and the hens accept it entirely. He marches towards the house. From the house a person ought to appear, scattering corn. Why does the person not appear? The cock will see to it. He is cocksure. He gives a loud crow in the doorway, and the person appears. The hens are suitably impressed, but immediately devote all their henny consciousness to the scattered corn, pecking absorbedly, while the cock runs and fusses, cocksure that he is responsible for it all.
So the day goes on. The cock finds a tit-bit, and loudly calls the hens. They scuffle up in henny surety, and gobble the tit-bit. But when they find a juicy morsel for themselves, they devour it in silence, hensure. Unless, of course, there are little chicks, when they most anxiously call the brood. But in her own dim surety, the hen is really much surer than the cock, in a different way. She marches off to lay her egg, she secures obstinately the nest she wants, she lays her egg at last, then steps forth again with prancing confidence, and gives that most assured of all sounds, the hensure cackle of a bird who has laid her egg. The cock, who is never so sure about anything as the hen is about the egg she has laid, immediately starts to cackle like the female of his species. He is pining to be hensure, for hensure is so much surer than cocksure.
Nevertheless, cocksure is boss. When the chicken-hawk appears in the sky, loud are the cockerel's calls of alarm. Then the hens scuffle under the verandah, the cock ruffles his feathers on guard. The hens are numb with fear; they say: Alas, there is no health in us! How wonderful to be a cock so bold!
And they huddle, numbed. But their very numbness is hensurety.
Just as the cock can cackle, however, as if he had laid the egg, so can the hen bird crow. She can more or less assume his cocksureness. And yet she is never so easy, cocksure, as she used to be when she was hensure. Cocksure, she is cocksure, but uneasy. Hensure, she trembles, but is easy.
It seems to me just the same in the vast human farmyard. Only nowadays all the cocks are cackling and pretending to lay eggs, and all the hens are crowing and pretending to call the sun out of bed. If women today are cocksure, men are hensure. Men are timid, tremulous, rather soft and submissive, easy in their very henlike tremulousness. They only want to be spoken to gently. So the women step forth with a good loud sock-a-doodle-do!
The tragedy about cocksure women is that they are more cocky, in their assurance, than the cock himself. They never realise that when the cock gives his loud crow in the morning, he listens acutely afterwards, to hear if some other wretch of a cock dare crow defiance, challenge. To the cock, there is always defiance, challenge, danger and death on the clear air, or the possibility thereof.
But alas, when the hen crows, she listens for no defiance or challenge. When she says cock-a-doodle-do! then it is unanswerable. Cock-a-doodle-do! and there it is, take it or leave it! And it is this that makes the cocksureness of women so dangerous, so devastating. It is really out of scheme, it is not in relation to the rest of things. So we have the tragedy of cocksure women. They find, so often, that instead of having laid an egg, they have laid a vote, or an empty ink-bottle, or some other absolutely unhatchable object, which means nothing to them.
It is the tragedy of the modern woman. She becomes cocksure, she puts all her passion and energy and years of her life into some effort or assertion, without ever listening for the denial which she ought to take into count. She is cocksure, but she is a hen all the time. Frightened of her own henny self, she rushes to mad lengths about votes, or welfare, or sports, or business: she is marvellous, out-manning the man. But alas, it is all fundamentally disconnected. It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency — suddenly, because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation to her basic henny self, and she realises she has lost her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!
This essay was written in 1928 and was published in the Forum in January 1929.