(20) D. H. Lawrence as a Critic, Novelist, Poet, and Short Story Writer.

T h e  T w e n t i e t h  C e n t u r y

[see "Background for Topics 12-27..."]

 

D ( a v i d )  H ( e r b e r t )  L a w r e n c e  ( 1 8 8 5 – 1 9 3 0 )

L i f e :

- b. in a Midlands mining village

- a struggle btw his parents:

(a) father: a miner; coarse, and sometimes drunken

(b) mother: self-consciously genteel, fought to lift her children out of the working class

- after the death of an elder brother became the centre of his mother’s emotional life: frustrated his relationships with women

- married Frieda von Richthofen (1879– 1956), went to Ger. x but: returned to En. with the approach of the WW I:

(a) troubles with authorities: F.’s Ger. orig., his objection to the war

(b) a ban on his next novel The Rainbow: suppressed of indecency

(c) => a sense of the forces of modern civilisation arrayed against him

- searched restlessly for a tolerable community to live in: lived in Ita., Austria, Mexico, and Fr.

- died of TBC in Fr.

W o r k :

= some 15 novels, many poems, short stories, sketches, and miscellaneous articles

< working-class background:

(a) vivid evocations of a working countryside

(b) evocations of the mechanical rhythms, the monotonies, and the economic and spiritual deprivations of industrial En.

- preferred the rural to the industrial, and the instinctual to the intellectual

C r i t i c i s m :

- had little understanding for the narrative experiments of Joyce & co.

“Study of Thomas Hardy” (written 1914):

= only marginally an appreciation of H.

- defines essential maleness and essential femaleness = an ‘antinomy’ btw the principles of ‘Law and Love’:

(a) Man = the embodiment of Love

(b) Woman = the embodiment of Law

(c) => form the 2 complementary parts of a living human whole

- sees the future for the human race in a sexual and spiritual coming together

Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922):

= his most Freud-inspired tracts:

(a) theology of the fulfilled and fully integrated personality

(b) emphasis on the liberation of sexuality from inherited social repression

- sets new definitions of the essential dynamism of the personality

- further develops the ideological and critical base for his later fiction establ. already in his “Study of Thomas Hardy”

“Surgery for the Novel — or a Bomb?” (1923):

= an essay

- the purged novel form should use no abstractions and present the reader with ‘new, really new feelings’

“Why the Novel Matters” (1925):

- the novelist should be conc. with life as a whole, ‘Life with capital L’, and ‘Man alive’

- the novelist = superior to the saint, the scientist, the philos., and the poet

“Morality and the Novel” (1925):

- the novel should reveal ‘true and vivid relationships’

- the novel = a moral work

The Man who Died (1927 – 28):

= an erotic fantasy about the resurrected Christ

- forges Christian images and metaphors into new shapes

- secularises the idea of Holy Spirit, the interrelationships of life and death, and death and resurrection

- sexualises the biblical language of possession and enthusiasm

- rejects formal relig. x but: remains fascinated by the underlying mysteries, tropes, and patterns of Christianity

N o v e l s :

(a) early period:

- publ. his 1^st group of poems, short stories, and novels

- regarded a promising young writer on his way to become a pop. Georgian novelist

- began in a relatively conventional style and treatment

The White Peacock (1910):

= his 1^st novel

> received with respect

The Trespasser (1912)

Sons and Lovers (1913):

= his 1^st really distinguished novel

- semi-autobiog.: contrasts paternal coarseness and vitality x maternal refinement and gentility

- the mother gives up the emotional life with her husband and turns to her sons with a possessive love

- contrasts ill-matched parents, clinging mothers x releasing lovers, town x country, mining x farming, working x walking, etc.

> later realises he has misjudged his father’s genuine vitality, though distorted by civilisation, for mere coarseness

(b) mature period:

- his war against the world of timid convention begins with the suppression of The Rainbow

- cannot explain his attitude and lit. technique in a simple expository prose: becomes often irritatingly and vaguely rhetorical when trying to talk about his ideas x explains himself only by performing and a direct projection in art

- believes the dark forces of the inner self should not be destroyed by the rational faculties x but: brought in a harmonious relation with them

- presents his worldview with orig., an uncompromising honesty, a poetic sense of life, and a keen ear and a piercing eye for nature and people  forces the reader to share his vision

- his mature work = a record of his explorations of human individuality and of all hindering or possibly fulfilling it

x but: essentially an artist = not his preaching about life’s meaning x but: his rendering of life in his art matters

- his response to life, esp. to the problems of human relationships, comes from the deepest recesses of his being => assaults the deepest recesses of our being with a challenge going beyond that normally asserted by a work of art

The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920):

= his masterpieces, orig. conceived as a single novel The Sisters

- symbolic and dramatic poems in prose:

(a) combines psychological precision x intense poetic feeling

(b) combines surface realism in a sense of time, place, and a brilliant topographical detail x high poetic symbolism both of the total pattern of action and of incidents and objects within it

(c) => produces a richly episodic, carefully wrought, and cumulative overall effect

- conc.: the relationship btw humans and their environment, btw the generations, btw man and woman, btw instinct and intellect, and the marriage relationship

- the marriage = a struggle (inspired by his own relationship with his strong-minded wife)

- associates the true human freedom with the untamed might of nature rather than with a repressive will: the characters denying their unconscious, natural, and sexual energies bring about personal or symbolic disasters:

(+) Ursula Brangwen’s ecstatic experience when confronting the apocalyptic horses in The Rainbow

(+) Rupert Birkin’s resurrection when walking naked through the long grass in Women in Love

(─) Gerald Crich, the son of a colliery owner, conceives the ‘will of man’ as ‘the determining factor’, and dies in an Alpine snowdrift in Women in Love

(─) a flood purges the stuffy hypocrisies of the world in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1930)

ad The Rainbow:

- focus: the evolving perceptions of 3 generations of a single family

- set at the Brangwen family farm divided from a mining village by a canal

- the M members of the family mystically linked by a ‘blood-intimacy’ to the fertility of the soil they till and to that of the animals they tend

ad Women in Love:

- focus: the characters’ smooth movement through the stratified E society

- set in a far more contained period of time

- distinguishes btw nature x anti-nature, freedom x control, and instinct x will

- abandons the regular narrative linearity in favour of charged, symbolic, even epiphanic incidents

=> explores a fragmenting world x but: looks neither nostalgically back to a lost pre-industrial ‘blood-intimacy’ x nor confidently forward to a new social order

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928):

= his final large-scale fictional experiment

- set in an En. crushed and emasculated by war

- criticises materialism, intellectualism, and priggism

> publ. in a unexpurgated form only in 1960

(c) late period:

- tries to give a symbolic fictional form to his own problems and preocc.

- explores the ideas of human liberation in a discourse as much psycho-sexual as political

- introd. a newly enlightened and emboldened élite: a revitalised social ethic in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent

= symptomatic of his own rejection of his roots and his restless search for new landscapes and new bases for social relationships

Aaron’s Rod (1922):

- conc.: the struggle for leadership in marriage as well as in politics

Kangaroo (1923):

- set in Australia

- conc.: the rise and the failure of an Australian proto-fascism based on M-bonding

The Plumed Serpent (1926):

- set in the revolutionary Mexico

- conc.: the redemptive potentiality of an Aztec blood-cult of dark gods

Travel Sketches:

= in their way as impressive as his novels

- combines symbolic incident x concrete reality and interprets each in terms of the oth.

Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932)

S h o r t  S t o r i e s :

- conc.: the restrictions of the middle-class conventional live x the forces of liberation = often repres. by an outsider, a peasant, gypsy, worker, or a primitive of some kind

- recurring themes: the distortion of love by possessiveness, gentility, or a false romanticism x the achievement of a living relation btw a man and a woman against the pressure of prejudice

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914)

England, My England and Other Stories (1922)

The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird (1923)

The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories (1930)

“The Odour of Chrysanthemums”

P o e t r y :

Form:

- the ‘stark, bare, rocky directness of statement’ = the only true poetic expression in an age of disillusion and cultural fragmentation imposed by the war

- his own poetry ‘direct’ and intense

- not the ‘obvious form’ or the subject make poetry x but: the ‘hidden emotional pattern’

Content:

- subject: most frequently derived from an observation of nature

- at home with cosmic images (as no oth. E writer except for W. Blake has ever been), with the universe, and with all the elemental in the Individual and Nature

- at constant war with the mechanical / artificial and with the constraints of civilisation

Tortoises (1921)

Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923):

- incl. his best poetry: concentrated, stark, and unrhymed

- attempts to feel himself into the life of an animal or to identify with the intensity of life he observes in growing and moving things

- attempts to become familiar with x but: never to domesticate, the exotic

Pansies (1929):

- seeks the tightness of thought

- L.: ‘a real thought, a single thought, not an argument, can only exist easily in verse’

Nettles (1930)

“Figs”:

- the fruit veers btw the culinary, the botanical, the symbolical, and the sexual

“Cypresses”:

- the cypresses of Tuscany hold the dark secret of the dead Etruscans

“Tortoise Shout”:

- a M tortoise screams as it mounts a F: stands for all life crying out in pain or ecstasy

- a Sydney kangaroo looks wistfully around: repres. the distinctive quality of the Australian nature, both human and animal

“Snake”:

- the poet watches a drinking snake: emotions of honour, fear, gratitude, and mystery

- frightens the snake away: a new sense of guilt, at once ‘literary’ and primitive

- incl. an allusion to ‘the albatross’, perhaps S. T. Coleridge’s

D r a m a :

= somewhat static explorations of working-class life

A Collier’s Friday Night (written ca 1909, publ. 1934)

The Daughter-in-Law (1912)

The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914):

- the only to receive a London performance

> received a favourable review by G. B. Shaw