217-] English Literature
D. H. Lawrence
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Written
works
Novels
Lawrence
is best known for his novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and
Lady Chatterley's Lover. In these books, Lawrence explores the possibilities
for life within an industrial setting, particularly the nature of relationships
that can be had within such a setting. Though often classed as a realist,
Lawrence in fact uses his characters to give form to his personal philosophy.
His depiction of sexuality, seen as shocking when his work was first published
in the early 20th century, has its roots in this highly personal way of
thinking and being.
Lawrence
was very interested in the sense of touch, and his focus on physical intimacy
has its roots in a desire to restore an emphasis on the body and rebalance it
with what he perceived to be Western civilization's overemphasis on the mind;
in a 1929 essay, "Men Must Work and Women As Well," he wrote:
"Now
then we see the trend of our civilization, in terms of human feeling and human
relation. It is, and there is no denying it, towards a greater and greater
abstraction from the physical, towards a further and further physical
separateness between men and women, and between individual and individual....
It only remains for some men and women, individuals, to try to get back their
bodies and preserve the other flow of warmth, affection and physical unison.
There is nothing else to do." Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and
Other Prose Works by D.H. Lawrence, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New
York: The Viking Press, 1968), pp. 589, 591.
In
his later years, Lawrence developed the potentialities of the short novel form
in St Mawr, The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Escaped Cock.
Sons
and Lovers
Lawrence’s
first two novels, his first play, and most of his early short stories, including
such masterpieces as Odour of Chrysanthemums and Daughters of the Vicar
(collected in The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories, 1914), use early
experience as a departure point. Sons and Lovers carries this process to the
point of quasi-autobiography.
Sons
and Lovers depicts Eastwood and Haggs Farm, the twin poles of Lawrence’s early
life, with vivid realism. The central character, Paul Morel, is naturally
identified as Lawrence; the miner-father who drinks and the powerful mother who
resists him are clearly modeled on his parents; and the painful devotion of
Miriam Leivers resembles that of Jessie Chambers. (Lawrence had resumed contact
with Chambers in the autumn of 1911 and shared with her an early version of a
book that was, ultimately, about their shared experience. Though pained by the
manner in which Lawrence depicted her and her relationship with him, she
provided extensive comments that spurred Lawrence to make revisions and finish
the novel.) An elder brother, William, who dies young, parallels Lawrence’s
brother Ernest, who met an early death. In the novel, the mother turns to her
elder son William for emotional fulfillment in place of his father. This
section of the original manuscript was much reduced by Garnett before
publication. Garnett’s editing not only eliminated some passages of sexual
outspokenness but also removed as repetitive structural elements that
constitute the establishment of a pattern in the mother’s behaviour and that
explain the plural nouns of the title.
When
William dies, his younger brother Paul becomes the mother’s mission and,
ultimately, her victim. Paul’s adolescent love for Miriam is undermined by his
mother’s dominance; though fatally attracted to Miriam, Paul cannot be sexually
involved with anyone so like his mother, and the sexual relationship he forces
on her proves a disaster. He then, in reaction, has a passionate affair with a
married woman, Clara Dawes, in what is the only purely imaginary part of the
novel. Clara’s husband, Baxter, is a drunken workingman whom she has undermined
by her social and intellectual superiority, so their situation mirrors that of
the Morels. Though Clara wants more from him, Paul can manage sexual passion
only when it is split off from commitment; their affair ends after Paul and Baxter
have a murderous fight, and Clara returns to her husband. Paul, for all his
intelligence, cannot fully grasp his own unconscious motivations, but Lawrence
silently conveys them in the pattern of the plot. Paul can only be released by
his mother’s death, and at the end of the book he is at last free to take up
his own life, though it remains uncertain whether he can finally overcome her
influence. The whole narrative can be seen as Lawrence’s psychoanalytic study
of his own case, a young man’s struggle to gain detachment from his mother.
The
Rainbow and Women in Love
During
World War I Lawrence and his wife were trapped in England and living in
poverty. At this time he was engaged in two related projects. The first was a
vein of philosophical writing that he had initiated in the “Foreword” to Sons
and Lovers and continued in “Study of Thomas Hardy” (1914) and later works. The
other, more important project was an ambitious novel of provincial life that
Lawrence rewrote and revised until it split into two major novels: The Rainbow,
which was immediately suppressed in Britain as obscene; and Women in Love,
which was not published until 1920. In the meantime the Lawrences, living in a
cottage in remote Cornwall, had to endure growing suspicion and hostility from their
rural neighbours on account of Lawrence’s pacifism and his wife’s German
origins. They were expelled from the county in 1917 on suspicion of signaling
to German submarines and spent the rest of the war in London and Derbyshire.
Though threatened with military conscription, Lawrence wrote some of his finest
work during the war.
It
was also a period of personal crisis. Lawrence and his wife fought often; she
had always felt free to have lovers. Following a 1915 visit to Cambridge, where
he met Bertrand Russell, Maynard Keynes, and other members of the Cambridge
secret society known as the Apostles, Lawrence began to question his own sexual
orientation. This internal conflict, which was resolved a few years later, is
evident in the abandoned first chapter of Women in Love.
In
The Rainbow, the first of the novels of this period, Lawrence extends the scope
of Sons and Lovers by following the Brangwen family (who live near Eastwood)
over three generations, so that social and spiritual change are woven into the
chronicle. The Brangwens begin as farmers so attached to the land and the
seasons as to represent a premodern unconsciousness, and succeeding generations
in the novel evolve toward modern consciousness, self-consciousness, and even
alienation. The book’s early part, which is poetic and mythical, records the
love and marriage of Tom Brangwen with the widowed Polish exile Lydia in the
1860s. Lydia’s child Anna marries a Brangwen cousin, Will, in the 1880s. These
two initially have a stormy relationship but subside into conventional
domesticity anchored by work, home, and children. Expanding consciousness is
transmitted to the next generation, Lawrence’s own, in the person of their
daughter Ursula. The last third of the novel describes Ursula’s childhood relationship
with her father and her passionate but unsuccessful romantic involvement with
the soldier Anton Skrebensky. Ursula’s attraction toward Skrebensky is negated
by his social conventionality, and her rejection of him is symbolized by a
sexual relationship in which she becomes dominant. Ursula miscarries their
child, and at the novel’s end she is left on her own in a convalescence like
Paul Morel’s, facing a difficult future before World War I. There was an
element of war hysteria in the legal suppression of the book in 1915, but the
specific ground was a homoerotic episode between Ursula and a female teacher.
Lawrence was marked as a subversive writer.
Women
in Love takes up the story, but across the gap of changed consciousness created
by World War I. The women of the title are Ursula, picking up her life, still
at home, and doubtful of her role as teacher and her social and intellectual
status; and her sister Gudrun, who is also a teacher but an artist and a free
spirit as well. They are modern women, educated, free from stereotyped
assumptions about their role, and sexually autonomous. Though unsure of what to
do with their lives, they are unwilling to settle for an ordinary marriage as a
solution to the problem. The sisters’ aspirations crystallize in their romantic
relationships: Ursula’s with Rupert Birkin, a university graduate and school
inspector (and also a Lawrence-figure), Gudrun’s with Gerald Crich, the
handsome, ruthless, seemingly dominant industrialist who runs his family’s
mines. Rupert and Gerald themselves are deeply if inarticulately attached to
each other. The novel follows the growth of the two relationships: one (Ursula
and Rupert) is productive and hopeful, if difficult to maintain as an
equilibrium of free partners. The other (Gudrun and Gerald) tips over into
dominance and dependence, violence and death. The account is characterized by
the extreme consciousness of the protagonists: the inarticulate struggles of
earlier generations are now succeeded at the verbal level by earnest or bitter
debate. Rupert’s intellectual force is met by Ursula’s mixture of warmth and
skepticism and her emotional stability. The Gerald-Gudrun relationship shows
his male dominance to be a shell overlying a crippling inner emptiness and lack
of self-awareness, which eventually inspire revulsion in Gudrun. The final
conflict between them is played out in the high bareness of an Alpine ski
resort; after a brutal assault on Gudrun, Gerald wanders off into the snow and
dies. Rupert, grieving, leaves with Ursula for a new life in the warm symbolic
south, in Italy.
The
search for a fulfilling sexual love and for a form of marriage that will
satisfy a modern consciousness is the goal of Lawrence’s early novels and yet
becomes increasingly problematic. None of his novels ends happily: at best,
they conclude with an open question.
Short
stories
Lawrence's
best-known short stories include "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". (The Virgin and the Gypsy was published as a novella after he
died.) Among his most praised collections is The Prussian Officer and Other
Stories, published in 1914. His collection The Woman Who Rode Away and Other
Stories, published in 1928, develops the theme of leadership that Lawrence also
explored in novels such as Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent and the story Fanny
and Annie.
Poetry
and nonfiction of D.H. Lawrence
The
fascination of Lawrence’s personality is attested by all who knew him, and it
abundantly survives in his fiction, his poetry, his numerous prose writings,
and his letters. Lawrence’s poetry deserves special mention. In his early poems
his touch is often unsure, he is too “literary,” and he is often constrained by
rhyme. But by a remarkable triumph of development, he evolved a highly
spontaneous mode of free verse that allowed him to express an unrivaled mixture
of observation and symbolism. His poetry can be of great biographical interest,
as in Look! We Have Come Through! (1917), and some of the verse in Pansies
(1929) and Nettles (1930) is brilliantly sardonic. But his most original
contribution is Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), in which he creates an
unprecedented poetry of nature, based on his experiences of the Mediterranean
scene and the American Southwest. In his Last Poems (1932) he contemplates
death.
No
account of Lawrence’s work can omit his unsurpassable letters. In their variety
of tone, vivacity, and range of interest, they convey a full and splendid
picture of himself, his relation to his correspondents, and the exhilarations,
depressions, and prophetic broodings of his wandering life. Lawrence’s short
stories were collected in The Prussian Officer, England My England, and Other
Stories (1922), The Woman Who Rode Away, and Other Stories (1928), and Love
Among the Haystacks and Other Pieces (1930), among other volumes. His early
plays, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914) and The Daughter-in-Law (performed
1936), have proved effective on stage and television. Of his travel books, Sea
and Sardinia (1921) is the most spontaneous; the others involve parallel
journeys to Lawrence’s interior.
Poetry
Lawrence
wrote almost 800 poems, most of them relatively short. His first poems were
written in 1904 and two of his poems, "Dreams Old" and "Dreams
Nascent", were among his earliest published works in The English Review.
It has been claimed that his early works clearly place him in the school of
Georgian poets, and indeed some of his poems appear in the Georgian Poetry
anthologies. However, James Reeves in his book on Georgian Poetry, notes that
Lawrence was never really a Georgian poet. Indeed, later critics contrast
Lawrence's energy and dynamism with the complacency of Georgian poetry.
Just
as the First World War dramatically changed the work of many of the poets who
saw service in the trenches, Lawrence's own work dramatically changed, during
his years in Cornwall. During this time, he wrote free verse influenced by Walt
Whitman.[40] He set forth his manifesto for much of his later verse in the
introduction to New Poems. "We can get rid of the stereotyped movements
and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those
artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to force our
utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit […] But we cannot positively
prescribe any motion, any rhythm."
Lawrence
rewrote some of his early poems when they were collected in 1928. This was in
part to fictionalise them, but also to remove some of the artifice of his first
works. As he put it himself: "A young man is afraid of his demon and puts
his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him."[41] His
best-known poems are probably those dealing with nature such as those in the
collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers, including the Tortoise poems, and
"Snake", one of his most frequently anthologised, displays some of
his most frequent concerns: those of man's modern distance from nature and
subtle hints at religious themes.
In
the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I
came down the steps with my pitcher
And
must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.
(From
"Snake")
Look!
We have come through! is his other work from the period of the end of the war
and it reveals another important element common to much of his writings; his
inclination to lay himself bare in his writings. Ezra Pound in his Literary
Essays complained of Lawrence's interest in his own "disagreeable sensations"
but praised him for his "low-life narrative." This is a reference to
Lawrence's dialect poems akin to the Scots poems of Robert Burns, in which he
reproduced the language and concerns of the people of Nottinghamshire from his
youth.
Tha
thought tha wanted ter be rid o' me.
'Appen
tha did, an' a'.
Tha
thought tha wanted ter marry an' se
If
ter couldna be master an' th' woman's boss,
Tha'd
need a woman different from me,
An'
tha knowed it; ay, yet tha comes across
Ter
say goodbye! an' a'.
(From
"The Drained Cup")
Although
Lawrence's works after his Georgian period are clearly in the modernist
tradition, they were often very different from those of many other modernist
writers, such as Pound. Pound's poems were often austere, with every word
carefully worked on. Lawrence felt all poems had to be personal sentiments, and
that a sense of spontaneity was vital. He called one collection of poems
Pansies, partly for the simple ephemeral nature of the verse, but also as a pun
on the French word panser, to dress or bandage a wound. "Pansies", as
he made explicit in the introduction to New Poems, is also a pun on Blaise
Pascal's Pensées. "The Noble Englishman" and "Don't Look at
Me" were removed from the official edition of Pansies on the grounds of
obscenity, which wounded him. Even though he lived most of the last ten years
of his life abroad, his thoughts were often still on England. Published in
1930, just eleven days after his death, his last work Nettles was a series of
bitter, nettling but often wry attacks on the moral climate of England.
O the
stale old dogs who pretend to guard
the
morals of the masses,
how
smelly they make the great back-yard
wetting
after everyone that passes.
(From
"The Young and Their Moral Guardians")
Two
notebooks of Lawrence's unprinted verse were posthumously published as Last
Poems and More Pansies. These contain two of Lawrence's most famous poems about
death, "Bavarian Gentians" and "The Ship of Death".
English
writer D.H. Lawrence’s prolific and diverse output included novels, short
stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, and
literary criticism. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon
the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, Lawrence
confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human
sexuality and instinct. After a brief foray into formal poetics in his early
years, his later poems embrace organic attempts to capture emotion through free
verse.
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 he called his
“savage pilgrimage.” At the time of his death, his public reputation was that
of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E.M. Forster, in an
obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, “The
greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.” Later, the influential Cambridge
critic F.R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral
seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical “great
tradition” of the English novel.
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