Early on in D.H. Lawrence’s short story “Monkey Nuts” we see two protagonists, Joe and Albert, loading hay at a station as part of their military duty, presumably toward the end of World War I. On the third day of work, the perceived antagonist, a land army girl named Miss Stokes, arrives with her horses and a load of hay. Playful, but cool, banter ensues, as Miss Stokes sizes up the young Joe and the playful corporal, Albert, who is seventeen years Joe’s senior.
Albert, she determines, is full of “loose attitudes,” (casual). She can’t read Joe, but develops a fondness for him from looks alone, narrowing in on his half-averted face and his “quiet, tender-looking form.” Shortly after their first encounter, she invites him to meet her after work at the station, an invitation he ignores. Her note is signed “M.S,” which later she sardonically tells them stands for “Monkey Nuts.” This slang seems to be a veiled reference to something, but nothing one can really extrapolate anything from, other than it’s Miss Stokes's attempt to be playfully self-deprecating. Her invitation is the first in trying to gain an upper hand on Joe, and her language is clinical and controlling. There’s demand in her provocation.
After leaving the local circus one night, we get our first peek into Joe’s uncertainty about his feelings for Miss Stokes, when Miss Stokes tells him that she hadn’t seen him at the circus, when he knew “fatally,” that she had. Strange word choice; it could mean fatally that his hopes of being in a relationship with a woman were dashed, but it’s unclear. But it’s Joe’s lack of self-actualization on display here, and his uncertainty about his own feelings that make him angry. When Miss Stokes insists that they walk home together, he blurts out to Albert: “She bain’t [sic] my choice.” But on that night and several nights after, Miss Stokes forces Joe to go walking with her, and each night he returns back to the barracks he shares with Albert more sullen than previous nights.
After a few of these “sullen” nights, Albert follows Joe up to his bed, and watches him undress. He prods Joe to tell him what’s wrong, even laying “...his arm across the shoulders of the young man. Joe seemed to yield a little toward him.” He tries to get Joe to confess why he doesn’t like Miss Stokes, but only convinces him to let him take his place during the nightly walk with her. Albert as her new walking companion upsets Miss Stokes, and their collective rejection of her ultimately results in her leaving, never to return.
Though most of the story seems to center around Joe’s confusion surrounding his closeted sexuality, Albert and Miss Stokes also have their own motivations and desires. Albert, simply, wants to move in on Miss Stokes and claim her as his own, but we can’t reconcile this with his light sexual proclivities toward Joe. He’s 40 and perceived as unwed, and his flirtations with Miss Stokes are awkward and uncomfortable. “He became self-conscious, lifted his chin, walked with his nose in the air, and whistled at random. So they went down the quiet, deserted gray lane. He was whistling the air: ‘I’m Gilbert, the filbert, the colonel of the nuts.’”
Chet DeFonso, Associate Professor at Northern Michigan University, writes in his paper “The Great War and Modern Homosexuality: Transatlantic Crossings”
“World War I had a deep impact upon the development of gender relationships in the Western World, and was especially significant in the way that it fostered the development of homosocial and homosexual identities among its participants. Many men and women who were involved in the war effort formed profoundly deep emotional and physical same-gender relationships. Observers and participants alike have attested that World War I encouraged a kind of incipient “gay solidarity” among some of its survivors—for example the British war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen, as well as the German-American Henry Garber, founder of the first American gay rights organization in the 1920s.”
World War I was the era in which our protagonists play out their disorienting dance. But who is Joe's choice? There appears to be some hints about sexual identity and though debated by some scholars, some think D.H. Lawrence was bisexual, and this story seems to explore these different proclivities. The biographer Brenda Maddox wrote in her book D.H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage that he was “a hypersensitive man unable to bring together the male and female counterparts of his personality,” which this story seems to do a great job of exemplifying. Lawrence seems to be working out his own unresolved split here — Joe carrying the confusion, Albert carrying his unresolved desires, and Miss Stokes carrying the demand for resolution that gets rejected. Yet all these explorations aren't explicit, only hinted at, leaving us to enjoy the multitudes we all contain.
© 2026–present C. Nightjar. All rights reserved.