It is now clear that the ‘primitive’ motif in Lawrence, as an outgrowth of his ontological theme, is highly ambivalent both in its aetiology and in its meaning. This ambivalence is crucial in the period up to about 1926 during which Lawrence's preoccupation with the primitive became a central concern. His wartime experience in Britain, including the difficulty in having his major works published, was clearly a strong motive in his desire to travel as soon as it was possible for him to do so. He continued, among other concerns, to digest the meaning of the war for European life in a number of works in which the central figures leave Britain or even Europe. But, of course, the ‘foreign’ theme was already a central symbolic motif in The Rainbow; and his literary use of travel, as it culminated in the writings associated with Mexico and the American South West, is partly a development of this symbolic representation of otherness t In his travels he was seeking a form of life which, in some sense, he already possessed. He travelled around the world in search of a ‘world’ and this creates a significant ambiguity as to the ‘world’ of his fiction.

This double aspect of the primitive motif points to the central crux embodied in the primitivist preoccupation of this period: to what extent is it an intrinsic development of Lawrence's fundamental ontological vision and to what extent is it rather a distortion arising from the rhetorical difficulties already evident in Women in Love and then exacerbated by the post-war bitterness and isolation?