The Light Is Different There: Stained Glass in Taos and Beyond

Abstract

This essay reads two of the works Lawrence wrote during his Taos, New Mexico phase, the novella “The Woman Who Rode Away” (composed 1924) and the poem “Autumn at Taos” (composed 1922), in light of his engagement with stained glass. These texts evolve the metaphorics and syntax of stained glass that Lawrence first developed early in his career, in the short story “A Fragment of Stained Glass” (1911) and The Rainbow (1915), where he imported the visual grammar of stained glass―vivid color filtered and tempered by opaque, black lead-lines―into prose. The filtering activity of stained glass works, in these early texts, a metaphor for relationship, in which the self softens and tempers as it abuts on others. On the other hand, in Taos, where the quality of the light in the natural and human-made environments differs from that of his native land, his texts take up, instead of the filtering, the projecting activity of stained glass, the way it can throw color and shape far beyond the pane. I consider especially the projecting, penetrating activity worked by eyes in “The Woman Who Rode Away,” and by the sun in that novella and in “Autumn at Taos alike,” to reveal a mechanism central to Lawrence’s trenchant exploration of the vulnerability of interaction with unfamiliar cultural and physical places.