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Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist.
Hemingway began his writing career as a reporter. Journalistic writing.When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing the underlying themes. His style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction,
Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
Works
Main article: Ernest Hemingway bibliography
The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Islands in the Stream (1970, posthumous)
The Garden of Eden (1986, posthumous)
True at First Light (1999, posthumous)
"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time (1925). The first of Hemingway's stories to feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—"Indian Camp" is told from his point of view.
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct
Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage."( ^ "It has been a savage enough pilgrimage these last four years" Letter to J. M. Murry, 2 February 1923.) his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical(In fiction, canon is the material accepted as "official" in a fictional universe.) "great tradition" of the English novel. Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature.
His works :
Novels
Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Short stories The Captain's Doll, The Fox, The Ladybird, Odour of Chrysanthemums, The Princess, The Rocking-Horse Winner, St Mawr, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Woman who Rode Away.
"Tickets, Please" is one of the short stories in the collection England My England, published in 1922. It is a simple anecdote told in deceptively simple language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence indian camp : http://jsse.revues.org/769 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Camp

Abouddahab, Rédouane. “ ‘Indian Camp’: Nick Adams et l’entre-deux.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 67 (1996): 90-98.

"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time (1925). The first of Hemingway's stories to feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—"Indian Camp" is told from his point of view.
To make their stories attractive to readers, authors usually map out their writings with climactic events, organized in such a way as to create a reality effect for the readers to believe that their metaphorical representations of the world and the men who live in it are plausible and that the actions they describe follow one another in a chronological course of time.
If Hemingway’s simple prose gives the impression that his short stories can be easily understood, his plots do not follow a classical pattern of events. His prose is not built on a framework punctuated by an ever-changing wheel of fortune. Hemingway’s short stories seem to describe life as it is, but they do not search to reconcile the discordant events of life. They simply present life: most of the time anti-climactic

However, if Hemingway were merely describing life’s meaningless events, he would not be the author he is known to be. As Dorothy Parker said: “The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it” (Parker 461). The apparent simplicity of Hemingway’s prose and the anti-climactic stories he tells, veil symbolical and “fundamentally poetical narratives” (Abouddahab) in which the questions he asks are those which have been tormenting men ever since Eve took a bite of the tree of knowledge’s forbidden fruit.

Assuredly, Ernest Hemingway’s short stories encompass many levels of understanding. A variety of meanings the reader might miss if she or he only analyzes their first diegetic layer. For, as Hemingway’s short stories are often told through an external third person narrative voice which, being cut off from involvement in the story, seems solely to be serving as dispensing information, one could decide to apprehend this author’s narratives as neutral descriptions of the outer world. In other words, as Hemingway’s writing contains no evaluative terms to indicate his own personal judgment, one could mistakenly decide to rely only on the reality effect produced by this author’s short stories to understand their meaning.
However, even if it seems that Hemingway’s neutral descriptions only serve to describe the outer world, seemingly with no structural role in the unfolding of the narrative’s truth, one will come to realize, on the contrary, that they are elements essential to the creation of the poetical dimension of this author’s short stories, a poetical structure through which one is to discover Hemingway’s desire to reveal the individual’s odyssey through life, or, in the case of “Indian Camp,” the beginning of a young boy’s symbolical journey through existence. Hence, as one will see through the study of “Indian Camp,” the discordant events of life Hemingway seems to describe stand as the different metaphors constituting the writer’s organized poetical narrative, revealing the whole, or what Lacanian psychoanalysis defined as the real,1 from which man is born but has to exit if he wants to ex-sist.

The first part of “Indian Camp” describes Nick Adams, his father, Uncle George, and two Indians crossing a lake to reach an Indian camp where Nick’s father, Dr. Adams, is to help an Indian woman to have her baby. Reading the first paragraphs of this short story, one could easily say that they are but a description helping to create a plausible context for the understanding of the story. However, more than a simple description, Hemingway invites the reader to see the opening part of “Indian Camp” as the dramatization of a rupture suggestive of the passage from the physical world to a symbolical one. By depicting Nick Adams, his father, and Uncle George crossing a lake, then a beach, a meadow, a wood… to reach the Indian camp, the narrator underlines that those characters have been symbolically separated from the world they know, though, by describing this scene through Nick Adams’s eyes only, the narrator insists on the fact that it is mainly through the vision of a child that he is to depict this moment of rupture.

To signify the rupture Nick is to experience, or the beginning of the poetical journey the latter is to accomplish, the narrator creates what one could call a mirror structure between the world of Nick, his father and uncle, and the Indian camp, a mirror structure the reflective aspect of the lake establishes. In the same way as Alice passes through the mirror in Through the Looking Glass, Hemingway brings Nick to enter a world which resembles his, stripped of its disguise of modernity: the Indian camp’s aspect, as one may imagine, being devoid of the modern world’s attributes. Indeed, from the moment Nick, his father, and Uncle George arrive at the Indian camp (after having crossed the lake in rowboats), the narrator insists on the primitive aspect of the place, pointing out, for example, that the Indians are living in shanties which have no electricity, as implied, for instance, by the description of “an old woman standing in the doorway [of the shanty] holding a lamp” (84). The narrator also emphasizes this rudimentary appearance by suggesting the shanty’s lack of hygiene, underlining its terrible odor : “the room smelled very bad” (ibid.). However, more than understanding the contrast between the world of the Adamses and the Indian camp as a way to describe “the origins of a bitter racial conflict between Native and white American” (Strychacz 61), or to announce the representation of “a male to male rivalry, white male against Indian male” (Lovell Strong 30), this opposition is to be regarded in terms of its symbolic significance.
The use of repetitive sounds and structures is also revealing of Nick’s break with his world or the state of ignorance in which this separation leaves him. For example, by saying: “Nick and his father got in the stern of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row” (83), and then: “Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George” (ibid.), the narrator highlights the limit Nick Adams is confronted with when trying to say what is happening: the parallel the narrator draws between the structures of those sentences showing that Nick, unable to see beyond what is taking place, can merely describe the repetitive actions the other characters are depicted carrying out.
Hence, more than just expressing a notion of rupture, by suggesting Nick Adams’s state of ignorance, Hemingway brings the reader to imagine the symbolical limit this child character will have to go beyond in order to advance in his discovery of the Indian world, which is the mirror of his own. As Rédouane Abouddahab has explained in his study of “in-betweenness” in the story, where he considers diegesis and discourse as two closely interconnected planes:
“Indian Camp” immediately places us on a limit (“shore”) and makes us perceive through the use of repetition, the urgency of a punctuation, a scansion. From the outset, indeed, begins a play on assonance and on repetition whose very persistence is the sign of the anguish [Nick] is to soothe [...]. (Abouddahab 91)

The atmosphere of mystery Hemingway creates around Nick’s trip to the Indian camp also participates in highlighting the latter’s state of ignorance as to the knowledge his odyssey is to unfold. Indeed, starting from the first line of this short story, Hemingway describes Nick and his father and uncle getting into two boats, rowed by Indians, with no indication as to where they are going. It is not until the fourth paragraph, when Nick is described asking his father where they are heading, that we learn they are going to an Indian Camp. The description of the prevailing darkness also helps to feed this mysterious atmosphere. By setting the beginning of this story at night, Hemingway underlines Nick’s, his father’s and uncle’s incapacity to find their way to the Indian camp without the Indians’ help. The narrator also emphasizes this incapacity by adding a mist to the obscurity, making it quite impossible for them to know where they are. Thus, Nick can only hear “the oarlocks of the other boat quite ahead of them in the mist” (83). Furthermore, by multiplying the number of places through which his characters pass: “the lake shore,” “the river,” “the beach,” “the meadow,” “the woods,” “the logging road,” and by enumerating the various directions they take through the use of prepositions such as: “up,” “from,” “to,” “into,” “on,” “along,” “around,” “out,” Hemingway gives the impression that the path leading to the Indian camp is a labyrinth through which only the Indian characters can find their way. This difficult access to the Indian camp suggests that it is a protected, secret place and the dogs which come running to bark at the characters, like Cerberus guarding the entrance to Hades, add to the secrecy of the place.
As Rédouane Abouddahab has noted, crossing the lake corresponds to crossing the symbolical limit between the conscious and the unconscious, gaining access to the Other Scene, where the subject’s truths, dramatized through metonymic displacements and metaphoric substitutions, are linked to the radical and fundamental reality of sexuality and death (Abouddahab 91). Through the description of Nick Adams’s symbolical journey, the narrator stages the moment when a man first experiences the sign of his human condition, a moment when confronted with the swan-song of his mortal destiny, he will have to make a choice: he can either let himself be attracted to the perspective of going back to when he was not, or when he had not yet undergone the separation from the world of his origins, or he can decide to live, i.e. to symbolically go through that rupture over and over again in order to exit the real from which he was born, i.e. to ex-sist.
As soon as Nick, his father, and Uncle George are represented in the Indian shanty, the narrative focuses solely on the Indian woman’s body and her screaming, and on the way the other characters react to this “audible sight.” If Nick’s father and the different Indian male characters are, each in their own way, trying to deny the terror this scene evokes, the narrator shows that Nick cannot but see and hear the Indian woman and the fundamental “knowledge” her body and her screaming are symbolical of.
As with the crossing of the lake, the trip to the Indian camp, and the camp itself, through the image of the Indian woman’s body, the text signifies, once again, the dimension of the real. Or, through the description of this female body in labor, Hemingway symbolizes the place where the mysteries of man’s existence are kept, a place from which man is separated once he is born, obliged to live with this primeval loss. The different occurrences of the verbs indicating the woman’s screaming, i.e. the inarticulate sounds she produces: “She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty,” “Just then the woman cried out”(84), remind one both of this painful primeval separation and of the limit before which man stands when he tries to decipher the significance of that split. The characters, however, are described trying hard to ignore that significance. Hence, the men are sitting in the dark and smoking “out of range” of the screams, while Nick’s father is described as shielded by his scientific knowledge.

Indeed, from the moment they are in the shanty, the narrator presents Nick’s father concentrating solely on the preparation of the room for the Indian woman’s operation. Through this presentation, the narrator suggests not only the doctor’s professionalism, but also, on a symbolic level, the imprisonment his science as a doctor constitutes. Dr. Adams does not waste a second. When he is described explaining to his son what he is doing, it is while waiting for the water to heat, or while washing his hands: “While [the water] was heating he spoke to Nick” (84), “While his father washed his hands very carefully and thoroughly, he talked” (85). Nick’s father is depicted as an automaton carrying out the surgical procedure to the letter, not worrying about anything else: neither the screaming of the Indian woman nor the reactions of his son. For Nick’s father, the screams of the Indian woman “are not important” (84). They only indicate that the woman is in labor and that she needs care. Paradoxically, his science as a surgeon seems here to be but the trompe l’œil of his fundamental ignorance. Although he knows what to do to deliver this woman’s baby, he seems incapable of understanding the symbolical meaning this scene carries. In other words, his scientific knowledge appears to be a phantasmic phallus significant of a power he is devoid of.
In parallel with the presentation of Dr. Adams’s scientific knowledge preventing him from hearing the Indian woman’s screams or the understanding they are significant of, the narrator specifies, as we have just seen, that the men of the village have “moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise [the Indian woman] made” (84). This relevant remark not only reveals that they are trying to avoid the sound of the woman’s screaming, but that they are trying to repress the significance it is symbolic of by trying to hide in the darkness, sucking at their pipes as an infant would at his mother’s breast. This image, if not announcing the ineluctable separation of a mother and her child at the moment of birth, reveals the passage from man’s alleged innocence to the knowledge the screams of the Indian woman signify.
Contrary to the men fleeing from the noise, or his father whose science prevents him from hearing it, Nick cannot but hear and watch the Indian woman, his father having wanted him to attend the operation. As Nick’s father is represented unaware of the woman’s screaming, the narrator describes him thinking he can make his son watch this birth through the prism of his medical eyes. Hence, from the moment they enter the shanty, Dr. Adams explains to his son what this woman is going through and, while operating on her, describes to him the different stages of the surgical procedure. Paradoxically, by describing Nick’s father doing so, the narrator highlights the protective attitude the latter has towards his son, a protective attitude he also points out right from the beginning of the short story by describing Nick's father putting his arm around his son while in the boat. Hence, as the recurrent expression “Nick’s father” implies, more than a doctor, this character has to be seen above all as a father. However, the narrator, by depicting Nick’s father bringing his son to witness the Indian woman’s operation, suggests that this father is perfectly incapable of preventing his child from seeing and hearing what he has learnt, through his medical science, to repress: the “dying mementos” of man’s mortal destiny.

By placing Nick Adams in the immediate presence of a body “ ‘in labor,’ ” the narrator signifies the moment when the child, whose personality is not yet constructed, is confronted with the wholeness of the real from which he comes, or with the necessary understanding of his condition: this child, a writer to be, is to see the physical if not the symbolical whole/hole from which flow the mysteries of existence. After the image of the body of the Indian woman, the synecdoche that constitutes this woman’s hole, in other words her vagina, symbolizes the wholeness of the real but also the hole that the signifier has left empty, significant of the primeval separation the subject is to undergo when he or she starts ex-sisting. And even if Nick is, after a while, unable to look at the Indian woman’s body, the basin he holds for his father is but the metonymical reminder of this primeval separation. As Rédouane Abouddahab has noted, “the basin Nick holds for his father, receptacle into which are thrown the undesirable signifiers of jouissance, can then be apprehended as the signifier of the fathers’ gaping fault : BAY/SIN” (Abouddahab 94). Indeed, as this critic has brought to light, in Hemingway’s narratives, the real fathers are guilty of not being the adequate avatar of the symbolical father, who is universal and unique, efficiently structuring the real and naming the holes of existence.
“Indian Camp” reveals the contradictory reactions man may have when confronted with the knowledge of his fallible condition. On the one hand, the text sketches the men hiding in the dark and Nick’s father performing his task, denying the screams of the Indian woman with his medical jargon, on the other hand, it describes Nick, especially in the beginning, unable to repress the naked truth he is witnessing. However, if Nick seems to be the only character incapable of blocking out the Indian woman’s screams, the silence of the Indian husband lying wounded on the upper bunk of the shanty, seems also to be revealing of man’s incapacity to ignore or to transcend what those screams are significant of. Not only by representing the Indian husband keeping silent, but by emphasizing this palpable silence, opposing it to the screams of his wife, Hemingway suggests that this man is unable to pierce the real in order to ex-sist. Or, to be more precise, because the Indian husband is hurt and has to lie on the upper bunk, he cannot but witness the scene which is taking place in the lower bunk. A scene, as one may imagine, which is all the more significant for the Indian husband as he is, at least theoretically, the father of the baby to be born. As such, he is a powerless, tragic witness of a global truth whose meaning he cannot grasp and it is his powerlessness which leads him to commit suicide by cutting his throat. Through this tragic act, the story highlights the tragic consequences man’s drives may have. Because the Indian husband could not go beyond the real as dramatized in this scene, he remained the toy of his own drives or death instincts that convey one’s desire to return to an inorganic state.

Through the last part of this short story when Nick and his father are crossing the lake again, the narrator reveals that both characters have reached the threshold of an understanding: Nick hearing for the first time the swan-song of his mortal destiny, his father comprehending he is incapable of preventing his son from hearing that terrible sound. Hence, when on the boat going back Nick asks his father questions about the meaning of what he has just witnessed, the father cannot truly answer them. The reader is presented with Nick’s passing questions while his father’s answers become shorter and shorter throughout their brief dialogue. Furthermore, if Nick and his father are depicted sitting together in the boat taking them to the Indian camp, the father’s arm around his son, in the final scene, on their way back, they are significantly separated as Nick is sitting “in the stern,” while “his father [is] rowing” (87). This scene, taking place at dawn, clearly shows Nick’s passage from innocence to the awareness and recognition of his original selfhood. Nick has indeed found his own response: “In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die” (ibid.)
This short story as well as all his others are but the different metaphors created by Hemingway to make do with the real. If man cannot grasp the wholeness to which he belongs, artistic creation permits the writer to metaphorically expose the hole at the core of existence and at the same time cover it with original words and images. Through the image of the bass “jump[ing], making a circle in the water” (ibid.), Hemingway symbolizes his power as an artist to signify the real on a poetical level. Even if man is the prisoner of Chronos, he can, through the art of fiction, act upon the temporal dimension of which he is a captive. Hence, contrary to some authors for whom writing is the representation of reality, Hemingway’s narratives are organized poetical wholes in which the fundamental drives are transformed into words, keeping him safe from being sucked in by the real.
Tickets please http://jsse.revues.org/532 "Tickets, Please" is one of the short stories in the collection England My England, published in 1922. It is a simple anecdote told in deceptively simple language; a young inspector of the tramway system seduces all the conductresses on the Midlands line. One of them, Annie, eventually falls for him on a special occasion, but she wants more than a flirtation. As she becomes more and more possessive, the young man lets her down and picks up another girl: Annie then decides to take revenge. As all the other conductresses more or less consciously bear a grudge against the seducer, they set a trap for him; one evening they manage to attract him into their waiting-room at the depot where they molest him. The girls' pretext for harassing him is to make him choose one of them for his wife: eventually he spitefully chooses Annie who, far from being proud and contented, falls prey to conflicting feelings. Freed at last, the inspector walks away alone in the night while the girls leave the depot one by one "with mute, stupefied faces" (346)1
The girl conductors are "fearless young hussies" (335) who bravely face the dangers of the tram journeys and the male passengers' advances; as such, they belong to a different class of women whose job is exceptional: "This, the most dangerous tram-service in England, as the authorities themselves declare, with pride, is entirely conducted by girls". (335) Such a positive and indirectly self-congratulatory statement is immediately tempered with the grimly humorous description of the girls, tranformed into hybrids:
In their ugly blue uniform, skirts up to their knees, shapeless old peaked caps on their heads, they have all the sang-froid of an old non-commissioned officer. (335)
One of Lawrence's key-words—ugly3—is used here to describe the devalued official uniform worn by the girls, just as the word is repeated to stigmatise the industrial landscape crossed by the tram in alliterative phrases ("long ugly villages," "last little ugly place of industry," 334). Resembling transvestites in their ugly uniforms, the conductors retain only a bawdy sort of feminity with their "skirts up to their knees." They are the drivers' fit counterparts; the latter are "men unfit for active service: cripples and hunchbacks" (334) who compensate for their physical deficiencies by taking foolish risks while others, effeminate, "creep forward in terror." (335) Excessive prudence or rashness betrays their deep imbalance, a defect reinforced by the chaotic rhythm of the syntax in the long opening paragraphs of the short story. They lack the "sang-froid" which characterizes the girls, as if they might just as well swap jobs with them. A parallel can be drawn between the drivers' loss of manhood and the conductresses' loss of womanhood. Lawrence makes it clear that the price to pay for social progress is the loss of gender differentiation: the girls assume a new authority, which turns them into sham soldiers ("non-commisioned officer," 335) with a masculine, sailor-like behaviour: this roving life aboard the car gives them a sailor's dash and recklessness. What matter how they behave when the ship is in port? Tomorrow they will be aboard again. (336)
Annie Stone is one of them and her name, which is evocative of a hard, mineral substance, is in keeping with her inflexible, adamant way of asserting her brand new soldier-like authority. Lawrence ironically insists on the girl's commitment to her job through tapinosis, referring to the Greek battle of the "hot gates": "The step of that tram-car is her Thermopylae." (335) In order to show the ambiguity of the relationship between men and women, the young inspector John Thomas Raynor is introduced as a central device to the meaningful melodrama that gradually develops. "A fine cock-of-the-walk he was": the young man's numerous conquests make him an object for scandal; always on the lookout for "pastures new," he considers himself as the proprietor of the girl conductors ("his old flock," 340). This vocabulary aims at revealing his simplistic approach to his relationship with his subordinates; he is reduced to a shallow figure of a man, meant to embody a male-dominated system that gives women the outward attributes of authority within the limits of the tram car and under man's supervision. Annie's personality is more complex; she has two faces, a superficial one on board the tram and a deep, instinctive one outside the system. Impervious to one another in the first half of the short story, the two identities then begin to overlap. As a conductor she takes her job seriously, which increases her natural shrewishness and consequently she first adopts the same attitude with John Thomas Raynor as with the other male passengers: "Annie [...] was something of a Tartar, and her sharp tongue had kept John Thomas at arm's length for many months" (336), before allowing a gradual complicity, both intimate and distant to develop between them:
In this subtle antagonism they knew each other like old friends, they were as shrewd with one another almost as man and wife. (337)

There is a drastic change of attitude between Annie-the-conductor and the girl who has a night off and goes alone to the November fun fair. Despite the "sad decline in brilliance and luxury," (337) many people are there for entertainment, and the general illusory, transient atmosphere of the event is indicated by the expression "artificial wartime substitutes" (337), describing ersatz coconuts. In an environment whose hostility is suggested by the expressions "drizzling ugly night" (337) and "black, drizzling darkness" (338) introducing and closing the fun fair scene, the place, for all its shabbiness, is a fit place for a love encounter; furthermore, "To be at the Statutes without a fellow was no fun." Lawrence explicitly links the change of place with the change of rules which at the fun fair define the status of men and women; the latter resume their traditional passive attitude, whereas men assert their long-established economic superiority. Annie is no longer the woman in charge; she has left her uniform to don her best clothes, more appropriate in this place where it is advisable to observe a ritualistic form of behaviour to be in "the right style" (337), which is in fact an intimation of submissiveness. The new quality of the relationship between Annie and John Thomas is emphasized by the repetition of "round"; like the world, "The roundabouts were veering round"5, and the fair, despite its sham, allows a re-enactment of the real positions of men and women in society:
John Thomas made her stay on for the next round. And therefore she could hardly for shame repulse him when he put his arm round her and drew her a little nearer to him, in a very warm and cuddly manner. (337)
John Thomas's permissive attitude, accepted by Annie as a matter of course, is an implicit denial of the reality of the social progress giving women authority and autonomy. The conformist rules at the Statutes Fair are those of the society of that time: men pay for women, thus resuming in civil activities the domination temporarily handed over to women in the tram service. In their Dictionnaire des symboles, Chevalier and Gheerbrandt see the conductor as a figure of the impersonal self, both a judge and a sanction whose function evokes strictness and clockwork precision, while the ticket suggests a give and take deal.6 In that symbolical reading, the title "Tickets, Please" announces the girls' deep desire for real reciprocity in their relationship with men; in the reality of their daily routine aboard the tram, because they embody regulation, the conductors' "peremptory" request is their "ticket" to respect and consideration. As a conductor, you are handed the ticket whereas as a merry-go-round rider you have to hand over the ticket or token. On the Dragons, Annie is completely passive because she has no direct part in the exchange; her partner pays for the round and hands the ticket over, thus buying the girl's complaisance: "John Thomas paid each time, so she could but be complaisant."
The lovers are not mere anecdotal characters: they are given significance by Lawrence's irony and use of onomastics. Like Annie, the inspector's function and name mark him out; he has authority over the girl conductors, he has "clean hand[s]" (337) unlike the miners, and he is neither a cripple nor a hunchback, unlike the drivers, which makes him desirable. As for his name —John Thomas Raynor— the reader's attention is attracted by the first part of it with reference to Lady Chatterley's Lover,8 where the same "John Thomas" is used by Mellors to designate his penis. Fully exploited in the novel, the sexual connotation of the name is used here to suggest that the young inspector is only a regressed predecessor of the game-keeper and his natural, blooming phallus, which is confirmed by the author's spelling out that the young man is "always called John Thomas, except sometimes, in malice, Coddy" (336). The explicit nickname given to the ladykiller is a diminishing alteration of "codpiece" in order to minimize the phallic identity of the character. Yet, John Thomas wants to keep his status of object of desire and as Annie becomes more and more possessive, he shies away from further involvment in a love story; after the parallelism of the first feelings ("Annie liked John Thomas," "John Thomas really liked Annie") comes divergence: "She did not want a mere nocturnal presence," "John Thomas intended to remain a nocturnal presence" (339). The girl wants to go beyond superficial sexual gratification to reach a complete relationship reconciling the diurnal and nocturnal phases of human personality: "Annie wanted to consider him a person, a man; she wanted to take an intelligent interest in him, and to have an intelligent response." To use Lawrentian terminology, Annie is then developing her "knowing-self," i.e., her conscious ego, and by developing the latter, she causes her instinct for possession to grow: "The possessive female was aroused in Annie". That desire is similar to that of Hermione in Women in Love, as Birkin has it: "You want to clutch things and have them in your power"9 and it is linked with the repetition of the name of the fair in which the norm refused by John Thomas is inscribed; "The Statutes" connotes law, regulation, code, and more precisely marriage, which remains unspoken up to the dialogue between the man, Annie, and Muriel Baggaley:
“Come on, John Thomas! Come on! Choose!” said Annie.
“What are you after? Open the door,” he said.
“We shan't—not till you've chosen!” said Muriel.
“Chosen what?” he said.
“Chosen the one you're going to marry,” she replied. (342)
In the central scene at the Statutes, Lawrence gives John Thomas enough rope to hang himself: on the horses, the inspector's mount bears the name of "Black Bess," the mare that carried Dick Turpin10 to York, where he was hanged, and in English as in French, hanging evokes marriage. On the other hand, by entering the girls' room, he unconsciously walks into the lion's mouth and becomes the conductresses' plaything ("he was their sport," 343) and their prey: in that scene, the parts of the cat and the mouse, as portrayed in a famous poster of the time11 are reversed: first "at bay", the man is compared to an animal: "He lay [...] as an animal lies when it is defeated" / "he started to struggle as an animal might." (343) Their will for revenge sets free deep forces in the girls: "Wildfire", evoking the final burst of violence, was the name of Annie's horse. The adjective "wild" is repeated five times in the short sentences used to describe the physical assault against John Thomas ("wild creatures," "in a wild frenzy of fury," "wild blows," "their hair wild," "the wild faces of the girls," 343) to stress the young women's metamorphosis and to throw a different light on the scene. In the physical assault against John Thomas, staged like a hunt, a dream scene can be read between the lines, the Freudian Other Scene, in which the girls' unconscious desire to own the man, to "hold" him12, emerges. Annie's desire has been frustrated ("she had been so very sure of holding him," 339) and changed into manifest aggressivity. What the text shows us really is an aggravated date rape: an over-confident victim willingly walking into a self-set trap, a gang of aggressors, mounting tension in the dialogues and the final breaking loose of instincts.
Symbolically, there are five girls13 besides Annie (six is a number also evoking union and revolt) who outnumber the man inspector and relish their revenge; but they dominate John Thomas by force of numbers and paradoxically it is Annie who breaks the unity of their group --thus allowing their victim to regain control, to have the last word-- by forcing him to answer the obsessive question. Having regained his status as subject, the man chooses Annie and so marks her out as his favourite enemy, as if the relationship of a man and woman in a couple could only end in struggle, as if the only fit rhyme for wife were strife.14Thus the dialogue between Annie, John Thomas and Laura Sharp finds a justification:
“tha's got to take one of us!”
“Nay [...] ” he said [...] “I don't want to make enemies.”
“You'd only make one,” said Annie.
“The chosen one,” added Laura. (342)

The war emphasizes the dubious quality of the technical and social progress that the story exposes; the first world war sets the background of the three main scenes, denouncing and amplifying man's inability to find an agreement in a pacific way and to use technical progress for the benefit of mankind. The backlash or after shock of the event is to give rights to the weak which had hitherto been refused to them; for Lawrence, this social progress is dubious: instead of promoting order and harmony, it causes degeneration and regression by altering natural relationships between people. The girl conductors have been contaminated by the superficial order of social progress and the disorder it finally brings about; socially promoted by their job, Annie and her likes are only able to play their part fully while on the tram; in the general outside movement of society, men remain in control, as the scene at the Statutes shows. Because she is more proud, more possessive and also harsher than the other girls, Annie Stone inspires them to revolt against John Thomas, both the emblem and instrument of alienating progress.

By allowing the obscure, unbridled forces that characterize the outside ("Outside was the darkness and lawlessness of wartime," 340) into their well-protected, "cosy" world, the women, who have already lost their natural specificity through their uniforms and function, lose it now through violence. Changing genders is a regression underlined by Lawrence through the use of "strange" (343) and "strangely" (343) to describe the girl conductors and the glare in their eyes, and the use of "unnatural" and "supernatural" to qualify the strength they derive from their number.