She argued that The Plumed Serpent was the novel that most fully expressed Lawrence's ideal of female behavior, according to which the "woman must renounce personal love" and abdicate all pride and will. Millett described the novel as homoerotic. She considered its "consecration scene" an example of the "symbolically surrogate" scenes of pederasty in Lawrence's novels. She suggested that the novel was deservedly neglected, criticising Lawrence's "protofascist tone", "fondness of force", "arrogance", and "racial, class, and religious bigotries." She maintained that the novel showed his search for triumph in politics and other areas of life, and that it records his invention of a religion of "male supremacy", with its prose celebrating "phallic supremacy". She described Leslie as a "female impersonator". The English professor Marianna Torgovnick suggested that the novel "advocates women’s slavelike submission to men and surrender of the drive toward orgasm" and suffered from "overblown prose". She considered it, like Lady Chatterley's Lover, vulnerable to Millett's criticism. Torgovnick saw The Plumed Serpent and Lawrence's story "The Woman who Rode Away" (1925) as sharing an interest in "extremes of experience", and found both similar to the work of writers such as Bataille, and the dramatist Antonin Artaud, in their emphasis on human sacrifice. She wrote that The Plumed Serpent "has been charged with protofascism", adding that it "states its racialised theses quite clearly at times. It posts Lawrence's views, derived from theories circulating within his culture, of the fall and rise of races based upon energy and power. Lawrence's fear is specifically the fear that the white race will be supplanted". She characterised it as being, like Aaron's Rod, part of a phase of Lawrence's career during which he was suspicious of and hostile towards women. L. D. Clark described The Plumed Serpent as "perplexing". He suggested that the work was both open to misinterpretation, and "a flagrant piece of propaganda", intended by Lawrence as a "new gospel to mankind." He believed that it suffered from faults such as "careless language", "wearisome repetitions", and the "confusion of practical with artistic ends"; he considered its "prophetic aspirations" a fault as well. However, he considered the novel redeemed by, "Lawrence's profound sympathy with the land he was writing about, and his uncanny skill at synthesizing form and setting and symbol." He argued that Lawrence was influenced by Blavatsky, and that his use of "bone symbolism" resembled Blavatsky's in The Secret Doctrine (1888).