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CRITICISM
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The aim of this section is to consider a range of critical responses to the work of D.H. Lawrence. Consequently, the views of his contemporaries and early commentators (which included T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry and Rebecca West, among others who are now less well remembered) will be represented and placed in context, together with the views of more recent critics. Since his death Lawrence’s general significance has altered considerably
– both the work and the man have sustained the extremes of positive and negative reaction. In the 1930s T.S. Eliot (a critic as well as a poet) was largely responsible for the dominant view of Lawrence as a flawed, undisciplined writer with questionable values. Critic F.R. Leavis, however, taking issue with what he came to view as Eliot’s distortions, very successfully re-positioned Lawrence as a creative genius who offered a body of work and, crucially, directions for living. Highly influential in the 1950s, Leavis inspired many to re-read Lawrence. In
1960 the trial and acquittal of Penguin Books at the Old Bailey for the publication of an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover further sustained Lawrence’s reputation as a social prophet [27; 75]. While counterviews were offered to this championing of Lawrence and his ’human’ values, on the whole his positive profile survived until the 1970s when Kate Millett’s feminist analysis of his sexual politics (1969) forced a re-think, and inspired further distinctive and wide-ranging responses. In the next two decades there followed biographical studies and ambitious editorial projects, and literature which drew in the main on feminist, Marxist and psychoanalytic scholarship: if Lawrence’s perceived values were still an issue, the focus was also more strictly on textuality and, occasionally, the historical. Bearing in mind the vast body of Lawrence criticism, this section of the Guide offers a synopsis of its main directions. Where, in the 1950s and 1960s, the emphasis tended to be on the novels, and principally on The Rainbow and Women in Love, latterly a great deal more interest has been shown in the short fiction, poetry, plays and travel writing. Lawrence is a writer who, as we shall see, has engendered some extreme responses both during and after his lifetime, and who is certain to continue to inspire critical debate.
(a) LAWRENCE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES
Contemporary reviews of Lawrence’s work are usually interesting and informative, if not quite in ways that the reviewer might have intended.
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Anyone interested in Lawrence might find it useful to examine the character and drift of reviews that accompanied or immediately followed the publication of, not least, the novels (Draper reprints a broad selection of these in D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage [1970]). Responses to Sons and Lovers, for instance, acknowledged new strengths in a young writer, now properly launched on his career, strengths which had not been sustained in The White Peacock and The Trespasser (although Lawrence’s rejection of the psychoanalytic interpretations of Sons and Lovers, typified in the response of Alfred Booth Kuttner, has already been noted [44]). Lascelles Abercrombie, whose poetry had appeared alongside Lawrence’s in Edward Marsh’s volume Georgian Poetry, noted the poetic power of this third novel in his review for the Manchester Guardian (Draper 1970: 67-8), drawing attention to the author’s skills of characterization despite manifest flaws of structure and execution. In the New York Times Book Review, Louise Maunsell Field praised Lawrence’s realism and, like many, made a point of identifying Mrs Morel as a compelling figure (Draper 1970: 73-5).
Two years later Lawrence could not have been fully prepared for the negative reviews of The Rainbow which contributed to the processes that resulted in the book’s destruction in England [19; 49]. Among many, Robert Lynd of the Daily News, and James Douglas writing in Star (Draper 1970: 91-2; 93-5) condemned it, Douglas seeing in Lawrence a repulsive irreverence for life and an inexplicable scepticism towards the central moral values of the day. The main problem was sex: to Lynd the book is ’a monotonous wilderness of phallicism’ (92) while Douglas feels distaste at the ’hard, stiff, pontifical worship of the gross’ (93) and in recommending the book’s ’isolation’ (94) he recommends its suppression. Much later, in 1932, abridged editions of an equally controversial book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, were reviewed but commentators, among them VS. Pritchett (287-8) and Henry Hazlitt (289-92), were able to denounce both censorship in general, and the particular treatment meted out by several hands to Lawrence’s text.
It is perhaps no surprise that Lawrence – who found for himself that writing for newspapers could pay quite well – often took a dim view of critics’ motives and, if many of his comments are believed, viewed critics (and most particularly reviewers) as hacks spinning a few words in return for coin. He most usually encountered printed criticism of his own work in reviews – in national papers within Europe and America, and in the cutting-edge literary periodicals of the day although critical studies were published in his lifetime. In America, in
1924, Herbert Seligmann published D.H. Lawrence: An American
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Interpretation. Interestingly, Lawrence maintained contact with him and trusted his judgement – Seligmann reviewed Lady Chatterley’s Lover positively (Letters VII: 27). Literary surveys of contemporary literature would generally include Lawrence and he was also the subject of articles: ’Somebody sent me the first sheet of the N [ew] Y [ork] Tribune with Stuart P. Sherman’s article on me. It amused me rather. But a beard is a thing that cultivates itself: if you’ll let it. I must get the second leaf, and see what he says about St Mawr’ (Letters V: 272) – to explain, Sherman’s article was called, strangely, ’Lawrence Cultivates His Beard’. So Lawrence was not always combative in the face of professional criticism, and he supported Edward McDonald’s endeavours to compile a complete and detailed bibliography of his work, which was published in 1925 as A Bibliography of the Writings of D.H. Lawrence (’It seems to me wonderfully complete, and alive: marvellous to make a bibliography lively’ [Letters V: 272]).
Towards the end of his life his letters show him putting a great deal of energy into locating manuscripts and typescripts of his works because he now recognized their value as part of his legacy to Frieda Lawrence, who was clearly going to outlive him. If he knew this, Lawrence must have realized the part critics would play in establishing his cultural value. Lawrence was, too, a literary critic himself, and his essays on the novel in particular have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, a high status in twentieth-century literary studies [104; 108]. His singular vision for his own writing dominates his responses to others’ work, formally and informally, so that on many occasions his commentaries on the writing of his contemporaries approaches self-criticism (in the best sense).
In May 1927 Lawrence wrote to Richard Aldington thanking him for a copy of his short ’homage’, D.H. Lawrence: an indiscretion and offering idiosyncratic comment on it. Insomuch as this is not a memoir (in 1950, Aldington satisfied that need with Portrait of a Genius, But …), it differs from most of the other books produced about him by Lawrence’s friends. In the ten years or so after his death high numbers of memoirs and reminiscences were published (by the Brewsters, Brett, Carswell, Chambers, Corke, Dodge Luhan, Ada Lawrence, Murry et al.) [30]. The novelist and journalist Rebecca West attempted to summarize Lawrence’s lasting importance as a writer in an extensive obituary which was published as a volume by Seeker in 1930. She begins by recording her disappointment at the press obituaries which preserve the crassest myths about their subject, and quotes extensively from an anonymous piece in the Times Literary Supplement which, she finds, does some kind of justice to Lawrence’s vision and achievement. An
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anecdote, based on her personal experience of Lawrence, obliquely compares him to Dante and St Augustine, and she concludes that his novels – which she regards as written in a highly personal symbolic mode that makes their meaning often difficult to grasp – achieve an unsurpassed proximity to ’truth’, even when they are flawed. Of Women in Love, she writes:
u he cannot tell his story save by the clumsy creation of images that
.!;-.• do not give up their meaning till the book has been read many
k times. But even these struggles are of value, since they recall to
-v one the symbolic nature of all thought. Knowledge is but a
•:i translation of reality into terms comprehensible by the human
*»a mind, a grappling with a mystery. None undertake it with the
(Si courage of Lawrence unless they very greatly care. .:,., (West 1930: 39)
Of another ’failure’, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she declares: ’He laid sex and those base words for it on the salver of his art and held them up before the consciousness of the world, which was his way of approaching creation’ (40). Her choice of works to refer to here are interesting, as they were among the least acknowledged by Lawrence’s contemporary commentators. West is insightful in her account, as she anticipates the critical response that would follow, decades later, to these controversial texts. E.M. Forster was similarly positive about Lawrence’s achievement in the face of negative criticism from T.S. Eliot in particular; and Arnold Bennett, with whom Lawrence had had a few spats, also mounted a spirited defence of his work.
Lawrence had worked hard to succeed in an American market after the disastrous reception of The Rainbow in Britain [19; 49-56], and so it is not surprising that the first detailed studies of his writing came out in America. In Britain, the first notable full-length commentary was John Middleton Murry’s book, Son of Woman, published in 1931, shortly after Lawrence’s death. As most of the later biographies of Lawrence make clear, implicitly or explicitly, Murry was seen by Lawrence’s allies and champions as barely suitable to publish a major work of criticism on his ’friend’ [20]. However, the fact of his association with Lawrence made it seem to the reading public that he wrote with authority about this difficult and rebellious figure who was associated primarily with some highly unorthodox views about sex. Lawrence’s reservations about Murry’s conservatism were not widely known outside their circle, and Murry was, anyhow, well respected nationally as a critic and man of letters. •
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Son of Woman (which T.S. Eliot reviewed positively in the Criterion) certainly added weight to the tendency to read Lawrence’s oeuvre as principally autobiographical, and much of Murry’s critical energy is expended in diagnostic episodes which emphasize the crippling effect of his mother’s love for Lawrence, and the subsequent difficulties he experienced in relationships with women. Murry starts his book with excessive praise of Fantasia of the Unconscious and brings his familiarity with that work to bear on his readings of the fiction and poetry. He addresses the writing as symptomatic of the life; how Lawrence worked out his problems or fantasies usually around the issues of masculinity and power. Of Women in Love, a novel which Murry reviewed negatively (’turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end’ [Draper 1970: 169]), he offers an interpretation with which many feminist critics, decades later, might be in some agreement:
To annihilate the female insatiably demanding physical satisfaction from the man who cannot give it her – the female who has thus annihilated him – this is Lawrence’s desire. To make her subject again, to re-establish his own manhood – this is the secret purpose of Women in Love. In imagination, he has his desire. He creates a sexual mystery beyond the phallic, wherein he is the lord; and he makes the woman acknowledge the existence of this ultra-phallic realm, and his own lordship in it. He triumphs over her in imagination, but not in life. •. .-im..• -• ’ •••. •nV!U(O,y.>l
.•••• ; . (Murry 1931: 118)
So it is that Murry both anticipates interesting debates about sexuality and power in Lawrence and manages to settle a few old scores by emphasizing what he perceived to be Lawrence’s rigid mania for theorizing sexual relations around his own inadequacies. Murry also, it might be noted, since he chooses to write in part about Lawrence’s representation of women, had strong feelings for Frieda Lawrence which were brought to some kind of resolution immediately after Lawrence’s death (Ellis 1998: 534). Murry then, is one of the few of Lawrence’s important critics to have had a significant, long-term involvement in his life and relationships which made impartiality quite impossible, but that does not exclude the occasion of insightful commentary.
Probably because he took exception to Murry’s version of Lawrence, Aldous Huxley (who satirized Murry in his novel Point Counter Point [1928] where Lawrence also appears as the character Rampion) sought to be corrective in the introduction to his edition of Lawrence’s letters published in 1932. Murry’s representation of Lawrence, argued Huxley,
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was largely ’irrelevant’ because it overlooked the fact that Lawrence required evaluation principally as an artist, ’and an artist with a particular kind of mental endowment’. Huxley’s importance to early Lawrence criticism is in large part his resistance to the predominance of the biographical approach. He was interested in the philosophical parameters of Lawrence’s thought and acknowledged his value as a thinker. Huxley’s introduction to the letters is couched in terms that Lawrence probably would have approved. He is the first commentator properly to represent Lawrence’s preoccupation with ’modes of being’. Huxley also hints at Lawrence’s dissatisfaction with the Cartesian split of mind and body in Western thought, describing this in terms of his subject’s ’mystical materialism’ with its insistence on the necessity of the ’resurrection of the body’, which is also the rebirth of the self, through sensitive contact with the external world. He quotes at length from a document which was to become central to readings of Lawrence thereafter, the letter about character in the novel written to his mentor, Edward Garnett, on 5 June 1914 (Letters II: 182-4) [54]. Lawrence’s position, Huxley asserts, which is brilliant and radical, explains the ’strangeness of his novels’, but he is not afraid to point out that many of those novels, often in their language, fail – or are at the very least flawed. He refers to modes of expression in Lawrence, with some justification, as having ’certain qualities of violent monotony and intense indistinctness’ (Huxley 1932), but his sense of Lawrence’s lasting contribution to the development of the modern novel as moral is uppermost.
T.S. Eliot was the next major figure to pass judgement on Lawrence, notably in his limited representation of Lawrence’s motives and values (in a comparative context) in the series of lectures published as After Strange Gods (1934). Lawrence’s defenders frequently alight on the hostile remarks made by Eliot here and reprint them out of context, so that the negative judgements are presented at a remove from Eliot’s attempts to establish exactly how Lawrence is a valuable and important writer: important despite – or perhaps because of – his position as one ’wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution’ (Eliot 1934:
59). According to the criteria promoted by Eliot in After Strange Cods, Lawrence is a writer who misdirected his talent because he could not overcome the disadvantages of his birth and education: the criticism of his ’insensibility to ordinary social morality’ (59) communicates more about Eliot than Lawrence. Despite the acknowledgement of his literary significance it is Eliot’s negative commentary on Lawrence which is remembered and repeated and it was Eliot, a highly influential
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critic, who carried much of the Establishment with him against Lawrence in the 1930s and later. F.R. Leavis, as he championed Lawrence, and even while he respected Eliot as a critic, would write most forcefully against Eliot’s judgements – in his first book-length study of the novels he refers to ’the insistent leading part played by Eliot in retarding the recognition of Lawrence’ (Leavis 1955: 18). Eliot failed to identify the Nietzschean Lawrence who was positively in favour of the revaluation of all values. Instead, he identified a ’sick’ vision divorced from the ’tradition’ which Eliot valued so highly. Lawrence produced other conflicting responses at the time Eliot was writing: some associated him with proto-fascism, while others read him as accommodating the values of the Left (for a discussion of Lawrence’s impact which was written in the 1930s, see William York Tindall 1939: chapter 6).
Eliot’s dominance of the critical scene after Lawrence’s death is a fact. Less influential judgements at this time came from Horace Gregory, Pilgrim of the Apocalypse: A Critical Study of D.H. Lawrence (1933), and Stephen Potter, D.H. Lawrence: A First Study (1930). Also of this period is TindalPs critical study of Lawrence’s attempts to establish his ’private religion’, D.H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (1939). However, this is a period when ’English studies’ is relatively young and the methodologies of literary criticism itself under close scrutiny. In John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism (1941) the critical practice of T.S. Eliot is discussed alongside that of LA. Richards (whose book Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment [1929] includes Lawrence’s poem ’Piano’ among its texts for analysis), and William Empson (author of Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]). Although those given consideration by Ransom did not all welcome the description of ’New Critic’ as a generic term, the appellation is associated with a mode of close reading and a concentration on literary language which challenged the dominance of earlier kinds of historical analysis. American scholars who became associated with New Criticism – not always unproblematically – include Cleanth Brooks (The Well-Wrought Urn [1947]), Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and Yvor Winters, like their British counterparts, politically conservative. In 1935 their contemporary, R.P. Blackmur, wrote an authoritative criticism of Lawrence’s poetry (’expressive form’) judging it difficient in formal rigour and, as we have seen, Eliot had similar misgivings. Nevertheless, out of the broad ’church’ of these approaches emerged, in the English academy, F.R. Leavis, and it is to Leavis, and his profound effect on the critical estimation of Lawrence, that we must turn.
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^ (b) F.R. LEAVIS AND THE 1950s
Leavis was identified from the 1930s with the Cambridge-based literary journal Scrutiny and he lost no time in writing critically, cognizant of Murry and Eliot, about Lawrence’s positive contribution to English literature. He writes as a self-confessed admirer, insistent about Lawrence’s ’genius’ and contemporary significance. In doing so, he was moving counter to T.S. Eliot’s version of an ’heretical’ Lawrence (in After Strange Gods), viewed as incapable of effective cultural analysis because of his partiality, insufficiently educated to be a custodian of meaning, and negatively anti-tradition. Aside from a considerable number of essays and commentaries, Leavis’s principal and influential defence of Lawrence came in 1955 with a full-length study, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. Although he returned to Lawrence in Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in D.H. Lawrence (1976), it is the volume of 1955 which is acknowledged to have had the most impact in its positive reassessment of Lawrence’s fiction. For an understanding of the terms in which Leavis attempted to establish his version of a literary tradition in English writing, with specific emphasis on the novel, it is useful to turn to The Great Tradition (1948), and in particular the synoptic first chapter of that book.
It is in the context of looking for signs of literary greatness in an individual writer after Conrad (about whom Lawrence himself, incidentally, had reservations) that Leavis places so much emphasis on Lawrence’s fiction. His praise is given in the most glowing terms: ’he was, as a novelist, the representative of vital and significant development’ (Leavis 1948: 35); ’He is a most daring and radical innovator in ”form”, method, technique. And his innovations and experiments are dictated by the most serious and urgent kind of interest in life’ (36). Building his argument, Leavis quotes at length from letters to Edward Garnett in which Lawrence comes close to expressing what are perceived to be central aspects of his personal philosophy and abiding aesthetic principles. These are letters on which later critics have barely ceased to draw.
Leavis was also keen to demonstrate a high degree of responsiveness to Lawrence’s language. D.H. Lawrence: Novelist would transform the way Lawrence was received for at least a generation with the emphasis often on the uniquely creative power of Lawrence’s prose. Although capable of acknowledging a capacity in Lawrence for ’jargon’ and the occasional failure of artistry, if not vision, Leavis saw an integrity which he could only praise in the most elevated terms: Lawrence’s ’supreme vital intelligence is the creative spirit – a spirit informed by an almost
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infallible sense for health and sanity’ (1955: 81). In moral understanding, Leavis argues, Lawrence is unsurpassed. His readings of the novels also institute a new order, or hierarchy, of value within the oeuvre: the Brangwen novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, are reassessed and placed high among Lawrence’s achievements, technically more radical than Sons and Lovers with which Leavis deals rather as a necessary preliminary to more impressive, more profound, writing to come. In the 1930s and 1940s the Brangwen novels had not been rated particularly highly – the suppression of The Rainbow and the accompanying judgements had left their mark, and the influential Murry had been very negative about Women in Love – but these books become central to Leavis’s evaluation of Lawrence’s ’poetic’, and he won a new readership for them. While he had the authority he was at liberty to consign The Plumed Serpent and early works like The White Peacock and The Trespasser to a back shelf. Of the novellas and short stories he considered St Mawr to have exceptional qualities. Readings of St Mawr and Women in Love had appeared in Scrutiny in a series called The Novel as Dramatic Poem’, a context which throws into relief Leavis’s sense of Lawrence’s technical mastery.
Leavis, who also highlighted the importance of Lawrence’s writing on Englishness, class (see his analysis of ’Daughters of the Vicar’) and ’the malady of industrial civilization’ (82), was keen to underline Lawrence’s value as a cultural critic, seeing in his work a profound and extended commentary on the spiritual (and social) crises of the era (if he was a ’prophet’ it was inasmuch as his warnings about a degenerate civilization had been proved by the Second World War to be worth taking seriously). Hence, Lawrence was for Leavis a writer of great moral intelligence, but largely, it has been argued (especially as Leavis’s influence has declined), because he seemed to confirm the critic’s view of the world. As Michael Black perceptively notes when writing about the impact of the 1955 volume:
The Lawrence who emerges [in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist] is Leavis’s Lawrence. Given what had been written and accepted about Lawrence until then, it was a positive transformation, indeed an apotheosis; nonetheless it is also an appropriation, as any very distinctive criticism is likely to be.
(Black 1995: 18)
The partiality of this assumption in Leavis that Lawrence’s writing expressed ’life values’ was not authoritatively challenged, in literary criticism, for some time.
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Other monographs on Lawrence published in or just after the year of D.H. Lawrence: Novelist include Mary Freeman’s D.H. Lawrence: A Basic Study of His Ideas (1955). Freeman acknowledges the Scrutiny articles by Leavis, and cites Stephen Spender in The Creative Element (1953), among others, as offering equally important insights. Interested in the hostility directed at Lawrence in the 1930s, Freeman’s study includes a chapter on Lawrence and fascism which focuses in part on his relationship to Italian futurism. In a chapter which considers Lawrence’s stated views and representations of Jews, women, of democracy and leadership, she argues that attempts to link Lawrence’s pronouncements doctrinally with European fascism (a view of Lawrence which still has some currency) are misguided. Elsewhere, Freeman develops her analysis of Lawrence’s relationship to modernist avant-gardes and the intersection of aesthetic and social topics: class and capital, modernity and revolution, ’dissolution’ and ’resurrection’. She anticipates others in giving some attention to the expository writing including ’The Crown’.
Mark Spilka’s more thematic emphasis in The Love Ethic of D.H. Lawrence (1955) has had greater influence than Freeman, as has Graham Hough’s The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence (1956), which felt itself to be in the shadow of Leavis’s strong defence of Lawrence published the year before. Spilka, discussing the fiction, concentrates on a religious impulse in Lawrence’s writing identified in the vital transformations undergone by, or arrested in, his principal characters as a result of their interactions with others. Like Leavis, he regards Lawrence as being in possession of an affirmative moral philosophy in which the regeneration of the arrested individual is always at stake. That Spilka (more in the spirit of New Criticism than Hough), chooses in part to concentrate chapters on the imagery and meaning of The Rainbow and Women in Love shows some sympathy with Leavis’s rehabilitation of these works. There is also some implicit acknowledgement in Spilka’s position of Murry’s earlier assessments of a religiosity in Lawrence, and Spilka is comfortable with the idea of a ’prophetic’ Lawrence who can teach the sensitive reader a moral value (see discussion of Moore below). Hough, writing as Spilka is not, from Cambridge (Leavis’s home ground), acknowledges the territory won by Leavis in discussions of Lawrence and commends his work in particular on The Rainbow and Women in Love. The organization of his study shows an interest in Lawrence as a poet as well as a writer of fiction (the dramatic work is still, at this time, getting little serious critical attention). Of significance is Hough’s decision to give a section of his book over to what he calls ’the doctrine’.
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In an assessment of ’Fiction and Philosophy’ The Dark Sun attempts to show how far these categories overlap in the prose. As many commentators will do after him, Hough quotes from the preface to Fantasia of the Unconscious to show their joint significance to Lawrence: ’even art is utterly dependent on philosophy: or if you prefer it, on a metaphysic.’ This final part of Hough’s book attempts to trace the principal areas of Lawrence’s Weltanschauung, concluding that the thought was ’virtually complete’ by 1923 with Studies in Classic American Literature and the two books on the unconscious, and that most of what came later was re-statement with little useful revision. The dominant tone of Hough’s critique is defensive, writing against perceived vulgarizations of Lawrence’s thought with a sense being conveyed that, even in 1956, Lawrence was in fact largely unread:
Criticisms of Lawrence are commonly criticisms of his psychology, his morals or his politics; and these are all indeed open to criticism. But such attacks must remain partial and inconclusive unless it is seen how all these particular doctrines arise from a few central ideas.
%J ;- (Hough 1956: 223)
’;•.! , •
What follows is a sense of Lawrence, which owes much to Leavis, as the originator of a highly idiosyncratic philosophy based on the ’willto-live’ (’Certainly [Lawrence] is a vitalist… but it is hardly appropriate to use modern analytical terminology at all’ [224]). Lawrence’s thought is variously referred to as ’pantheism’, ’animism’ and elsewhere his ’materialist’ concentration is underlined. What is interesting in Hough’s critique is the evident problem posed by Lawrence’s terms, by his language, although Hough does not focus on the way that language is a central theme, in Lawrence’s writing (fictional and discursive). His reading, however, as it unfolds, continually exposes the difficulties posed by Lawrence’s main modes of expression. With less emphasis than this might suggest on Lawrence’s relationship to his medium, Hough’s intention is to delineate the main ideas, and so he concentrates on the ’blood’, on Lawrence’s dualism and his ’oppositionaF thinking, on relationships, community and the individual. He concludes with a section on ’The Quarrel with Christianity’ (see also Fr. William Tiverton, D.H. Lawrence and Human Existence [1951]) which examines Lawrence’s analysis of different kinds of love, Platonic, Romantic, Christian. An emphasis on Lawrence’s ’power to show’ asserts the value of the ’prophetic’ tendency in his writing (which dominated thought on Lawrence in the 1950s).
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• Hough’s study is comprehensive, which is where its main virtue lies, and he is among the first, if not the first critic, to examine the relationship between the fiction and the discursive writing in a detailed way. There are omissions. Like Leavis, and most of his contemporaries, he dismisses The Trespasser (unhappily for Hough it has ’the secondhand poetry of the woman’s magazine’ [34]), while he is not overly impressed, either, with The Lost Girl. However, The Dark Sun provides, on the whole, a measured survey of the oeuvre – drawing a great deal on the material available in Phoenix, and keeping the autobiographical aspects of Lawrence’s literary production in view – and it complements Leavis’s more influential study.
In the post-war period, much of Lawrence’s writing was re-issued in Britain and America, which both suggested and created a larger audience than the pre-war readership, and the 1950s figure significantly in the history of the reception and criticism of his work. In particular, the tendency for critical biography continued, derived from the academy rather than from the community of Lawrence’s friends and acquaintances who, in the main, published their reminiscences before the war. In 1951, Harry T. Moore’s The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence was published, followed by The Intelligent Heart in 1954 (revised and re-issued as The Priest of Love in 1974). Moore, in The Life and Works, provides a conclusion to which the next decade of critics and commentators – Leavis among them – would remain largely faithful. ’Literature’, announces Moore, ’is the autobiography of humanity’(246). Moore:
The important writer, the truly creative man who works from internal compulsion, comprehends in his vision the elements that make up the different departments of life, and in expressing them and their impact upon mankind, he uses the medium of fable. Whether the fable takes the form of the epic, the drama, or the novel will depend on which of these is the living form of the age, as the novel is of ours. The important thing is that the fable presents experience in the fullest and richest way.
(Moore 1951: 246)
Here, Lawrence’s belief in the novel as ’the one bright book of life’ finds its echo.
Following Huxley’s example, Moore (in 1962) continued his work by publishing The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence. In 1957, Edward Nehls began the publication of his three volume D.H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, dedicated to Frieda Lawrence Ravagli (she married again), and bearing her Foreword. Nehls’ work, which is still an
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extremely useful resource, presents and contextualizes selections from Lawrence’s letters alongside excerpts from a range of memoirs by people from all phases of his career. In her Foreword Frieda Lawrence suggests that the young generation who had passed through the years of the Second World War were more ready to read and re-read Lawrence, more open to his warnings about a self-destructive civilization in need of regeneration, than his audience a generation earlier. Certainly, the 1950s was a decade that made all sorts of extra-literary claims about Lawrence’s work. There was a vast increase of critical material published at this time, compared with the pre-war period (see A D.H. Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore [1961]), and a great deal of energy was directed into the preservation of accurate biographical and bibliographical records. This activity was largely, but not exclusively, confined to Britain and America.
(c) RADICAL LAWRENCE
As a response to the emergence of a considerable audience for Lawrence, as well as a thriving critical and academic interest in America and Europe, Penguin Books took the decision to publish an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, giving rise to the obscenity trial in London in 1960 [75]. There had been legal action in America the year before, indeed, the case against Penguin Books in Britain was one example of several proceedings against the publication of the novel in other parts of the world. In English law Lawrence’s was the first novel to be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act (1959). The prosecution concentrated on representations of sexual acts and the use of verbal ’obscenities’. Witnesses for the defence included critics and intellectuals – Graham Hough, Helen Gardner, Vivian de Sola Pinto and Richard Hoggart among them (Leavis did not participate) – as well as distinguished writers like Rebecca West and E.M. Forster. Rebecca West was able in court to represent the novel in allegorical terms:
Here was culture that had become sterile and unhelpful to man’s deepest needs, and he [Lawrence] wanted to have the whole of civilization realizing that it was not living fully enough, that it would be exploited in various ways if it did not try to get down to the springs of its being and live more fully and bring its spiritual gifts into play. The baronet [Sir Clifford Chatterley] and his impotence are a symbol of the impotent culture of his time; and the love affair with the gamekeeper was a calling, a return of the
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;•; soul to the more intense life that he felt when people had had a ,-;:”;, different culture, such as the cultural basis of religious faith. -at (Rolph 1961: 67)
,*?
The acquittal of Penguin Books was no great surprise. The interest stimulated by the trial guaranteed a new audience for the book and ushered in a decade in which Lawrence’s cultural value was high, and in which popular movements could appropriate him in their rejection of an certain stifling orthodoxies. If in the 1950s the volume of critical writing on Lawrence increased dramatically, from 1960 (not only, it must be said, as a result of the Chatterley trial) a ’Lawrence industry’ took off. A great deal of Lawrence’s discursive writingwas made available in a reprint of Phoenix and the publication for the first time of other material in Phoenix II and The Symbolic Meaning(tarfy versions of the essays in Studies in Classic American Literature}. Apart from the ready availability of the prose, The Complete Poems, edited ty Vivian de Sola Pinto and E Warren Roberts, was published in 1964. la 1965 (the year of the Royal Court revivals [37]) Heinemann brougkt out (unfortunately without introduction or commentary) The Complete Plays of D.H. Lawrence. For a more minority interest, Mervyn Levy edited a volume, The Paintings of D.H. Lawrence (1964). There was still clearly a market for reminiscences which enjoyed something of a revival with E.W. Tedlock’s Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Corresponlmce published in
1961.
At this time, even though the dominance of Leavisite thought on Lawrence’s value and oeuvre was largely unchallenged, interpretative variations were offered. Book-length studies in this vein include Eliseo Vivas’s study, D.H. Lawrence-. The Failure and Triumph if Art (1960), with its concentration on the form and organization of the novels. Like Leavis, Vivas acknowledges the elusiveness of the principles of organization in a work like Women in Love, and much of the time his readings set out to show the complex interrelation of imageryand event which produces the formal contours of each text. Vivas also afceres to Leavis’s notion of a shifting scale of artistry throughout the mvre, so that The Rainbow and Women in Love still constitute the ’triumphant’ achievements of the title of his book in contrast to the flawd performances represented by the others (Sons and Lovers is an exception among the novels, but is not regarded as a work of maturity). However, Vivas is less persuaded than many by the consistently affirmative, even visionary, version of Lawrence created and sustained by Itavis and consequently his study shows a greater willingness to examine a negative power in Lawrence.
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Eugene Goodheart in his study of Lawrence’s ’utopianism’ (achieved by the intersection of ’art’ and ’idea’), The Utopian Vision of D.H. Lawrence (1963), criticizes a naivety in Lawrence for confusing the visionary with the ethical. Like Kingsley Widmer in The Art of Perversity (1962) and E.W Tedlock Jr., in D.H. Lawrence: Artist and Rebel (1963) Goodheart points to this fundamental problem in Lawrence:
When Lawrence converts his vision into doctrine and turns prophecy into moral prescription, he betrays a confusion about his achievement. The visionary habit is alien to the moral life, because it refuses to accommodate itself to anything different from it.
(169)
He also seeks to correct Leavis’s denial of a properly European context for Lawrence: ’[i]n the effort to reveal the revolutionary implications of Lawrence’s utopianism both in his art and in his thought, I go against the prevailing tendency, most significantly exemplified by ER. Leavis, to confine Lawrence within English ethical and artistic traditions (1, emphasis added). In underlining the importance of bringing Nietzsche and Freud to bear on readings of Lawrence, Goodheart anticipates the direction of much criticism to follow.
These analyses had the self-confidence to acknowledge and explore ambiguity and contradiction in the fiction and discursive writing, and to make examination of the reliance in Lawrence’s thought on contrasting principles (of deathliness as much as of ’life’) a feature of writing about him. In his book The Forked Flame (1965), H.M. Daleski draws attention to ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ for a reading of the major novels, and in particular Lawrence’s insistence on a model of dualistic thought based on ’two principles’ in productive tension, or opposition, as providing the underlying grammar of his ’metaphysic’ [99-101]. Acknowledging the importance of Daleski’s thesis, and concentrating on the language of the drafts which were to become The Rainbow and Women in Love, Mark Kinkead-Weekes similarly draws on ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ (and ’The Crown’) although to different ends. KinkeadWeekes emphasizes the exploratory nature of language in Lawrence. His ’Art’
must contain a dialectic of opposites, a real conflict in which both sides are allowed to assert themselves fully, and the scales are never weighted. Furthermore it must both Be and Know – must contain, as it were, a continual ’systole’ and ’diastole’ of poetry and analytic
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•”. prose, exploration and understanding. Most of all, the Supreme ’.) Art must move through thesis and antithesis to try to see beyond.
(Kinkead-Weekes 1968: 384-5)
The emphasis in this influential essay is to demonstrate the validity of the main claim with close reference to Lawrence’s practice. ’The Crown’ is evoked in part as a re-statement of the central argument of ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ although in places, as in the sub-section called The Flux of Corruption’, negative terms must come to the fore creatively. Disintegration (’corruption’) and consummation, argues KinkeadWeekes, are represented in the novels in a dialectical relationship in
, order that Lawrence can imagine regeneration (his personal symbol was the phoenix). As always with Lawrence issues of language are central. Kinkead-Weekes asserts that ’the word ”corruption” itself carries no overtones of judgement’ and he quotes from ’The Crown’: ’”Destruction and Creation are the two relative absolutes between the opposing
’I infinities. Life is in both”’ (397).
Colin Clarke is less convinced that ’Life is in both’. His study, River of Dissolution (1969), emphasizes the dark side of rebirth in Lawrence now located in the tradition of English Romanticism. With particular reference to the language of Women in Love he draws attention to the prevalence of images of decay and disintegration in the processes which lead to renewal. He pursues the internal logic of these images of decay and corruption, and directs the critical emphasis to the centrality of destruction in Lawrence’s personal philosophy. Clarke is less interested than his predecessors in Lawrence’s general cultural position than in the grain of his philosophy and the expression of his ’metaphysic’. Although he had his detractors, in the 1960s (and beyond) it was no heresy to insist on the ’darker’ side of Lawrence’s writing.
(d) LAWRENCE AND PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM
Freud described the formation of the subject in terms of the psychosexual dramas of the family based on the child’s rivalry with a parent. Initially in agreement, C.G. Jung departed from Freud’s ideas directing his attention towards ’analytical psychology’ and studies of the personality, developing ideas, among many, of ’archetypes’ and the ’collective unconscious’. Lawrence acknowledges debts to both Freud and Jung in the Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious, slightly playing down his rejection of Freud in the earlier book, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
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[102-4]. Critics have long found in Lawrence’s work echoes of Freudian themes, and this has resulted in ’Freudian’, or more broadly, psychoanalytic, readings of specific texts.
Lawrence’s resistance to this kind of reading is well-documented even though he appropriated Freud’s terms and developed his own vocabulary to describe ’unconscious’ functioning. He hated reviews of his work which sought to understand them in terms of popular Freudianism (in particular Alfred Booth Kuttner’s reviews of Sons and lovers in New Republic, 1915 [Draper 1970: 76-80], and in 1916 in the Psychoanalytic Review [Salgado 1969: 69-94]) [44]. Murry claimed in Son of Woman, and elsewhere, that Lawrence’s writing on psychology was about the most significant thing he had achieved, and argued, furthermore, that psychoanalysis was the starting point (but only this) for many of Lawrence’s perceptions: in a review of Fantasia he noted that ’The language and conceptions of the psycho-analysts were useful to [Lawrence] sometimes in giving expression to his own discoveries; but his discoveries were his own’ (Draper 1970: 186).
Frederick J. Hoffman wrote the first extensive discussion about Lawrence’s reception of Freud’s ideas, and more broadly the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, in his book Freudianism and the Literary Mind (1945). Hoffman finds Lawrence at least acknowledging the general significance of Freud to his contemporaries, even while his opposition to a psychoanalytic mode of understanding was everywhere apparent in his discursive writing. Hoffman’s main chapter on Lawrence, called ’Lawrence’s Quarrel with Freud’ (my emphasis), suggests that his objections operate principally at a doctrinal level, which is to miss the point about Lawrence’s attack on Freud’s terms, that is, the language of psychoanalysis and its insistence on the locus of the unconscious ’in the head’ (this aspect of Lawrence’s departure from Freud is at the heart of both Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious). However, many of Hoffman’s conclusions are astute, and he rightly draws attention to Lawrence’s favourable reception of Trigant Burrow’s book, The Social Basis of Consciousness with its emphasis on the social group rather than the individual (Lawrence’s review is reprinted in Phoenix, 377-82) [104].
A later study, Daniel A.Weiss’s book, Oedipus in Nottingham (1962), offers a Freudian analysis of Lawrence. In it attention is focused on the posited Oedipal crisis which underpins Sons and Lovers and, indeed, the later novels, as a problem which Lawrence fails to resolve in himself. As the title suggests, Weiss’s study tends to be diagnostic. The psychoanalytic theme, however, was developed later by David Cavitch in. D.H. Lawrence and the New World (1969). Cavitch draws attention to the
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importance of the discounted ’Prologue’ to Women in Love and concludes, by an analysis of Birkin’s feelings for Gerald Crich, that an exploration of Lawrence’s sexuality is at the heart of the novel. In the final version of Women in Love, argues Cavitch, Birkin’s sensations are given to Gudrun in her relationship with Gerald (and later Loerke), and this ’shifts the atmosphere of perversion on to heterosexual relations, alleging them to be hopelessly complicated by homosexual ambivalence’ (68). In the Prologue Gerald’s crisis is due to his denial of ’manly love’, while Birkin ’tormented’ (66) has at least learned to acknowledge his feelings. Gerald’s rejection of Birkin’s version of blood brotherhood, and his death
– which represent to Cavitch ’the failure of the homoerotic ideal in Women in Love’ (75) – explain Lawrence’s ambivalent attitudes towards women in the later novels [56-65].
Generally, the tendency in the earlier psychoanalytic criticism is to seek out Freudian correspondences or variations. A range of interesting studies also focus on the genealogy of the unconscious in Lawrence’s discursive and fictional writing in contexts which more broadly examine the relationship of literature and science. Daniel Schneider (1984), concerned with influences on Lawrence when he discusses dreams in Fantasia of the Unconscious, cites Piaget, Freud and Jung. Others concentrate on the psycho-biology articulated by Lawrence in the books on the unconscious and elsewhere (it is worth looking at The Symbolic Meaning [1962] in this context). Useful studies include Evelyn Hinz’s ’The Beginning and the End: D.H. Lawrence’s Psychoanalysis and Fantasia (1972) which contrasts the ’scientific mode’ of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious with the ’archetypal mode’ of. Fantasia of the Unconscious. Working in a similar area, Patricia Hagen considers Lawrence’s language and non-analytic modes of understanding in ’The Metaphoric Foundations of Lawrence’s ”Dark Knowledge”’ (1987). With an interest in a ’materialist’ Lawrence are Katherine Hayles’ ’The Ambivalent Approach: D.H. Lawrence and the New Physics’ (1982) and ’Evasion: The Field of the Unconscious in D.H. Lawrence’(1984), as well as David Ellis, ’Lawrence and the Biological Psyche’ in D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays (1986), and Christopher Heywood in ’”Blood-Consciousness” and the Pioneers of the Reflex and Ganglionic Systems’, published in D.H. Lawrence: New Studies (1987). It is also worth turning to James Cowan’s D.H. Lawrence’s American journey: A Study in Literature and Myth (1970). These studies focus on the ’doctrine’ and on Lawrence’s terms, that is to say, on his idiosyncratic (and paradoxical) mimicry of scientific exactness. They may not constitute psychoanalytic readings of Lawrence, but they offer detailed responses to his writing on ’psychology’, directly related to the problem of ’knowledge’ in his work.
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More recently, Linda Ruth Williams has combined a psychoanalytic
approach with feminist film theory to examine gendered identity in
Lawrence in her book Sex in the Head. Like some of the earlier studies it
has a diagnostic foundation – ’Lawrence … likes the wrong things,
writing and looking against-himself (Williams 1993: 149) – but the
result is a fresh reappraisal, using theories of the gaze, of Lawrence’s
sexual politics. While some critics have a more polemical purpose, like
\ Angela Carter in ’Lorenzo as Closet Queen’ (1982), most, like Judith
Ruderman in ’The Fox and the Devouring Mother’ (1977), Judith Arcana
I in ’I Remember Mama: Mother-blaming in Sons and Lovers’ Criticism’
I (1989) and Carol Sklenicka (1991), attempt to combine Freudian and
j some post-Freudian perspectives with close reading in a deliberately
! objective way. A related study by Ruderman, D.H. Lawrence and the
Devouring Mother (1984), considers the theme of masculinity in the
writing of the 1920s. It can usefully be read alongside Schneider’s study
of the same year. Margaret Beede Howe concentrates on Lawrence’s
| play with the concept of personality in The Art of the Self in D.H. Lawrence
(1977) which, with a different inflection is also the case in Daniel
Albright’s comparative study Personality and Impersonality: Lawrence,
\Woolf and Mann (1978). This shifting of the perspective inwards is
countered by Anne Fernihough’s ’The Tyranny of the Text: Lawrence,
Freud and the Modernist Aesthetic’ (1990), which historicizes
Lawrence’s conflict with Freud in the context of literary modernism.
Finally, Deleuze and Guattari (1984) celebrate Lawrence as a ’de-
oedipaliser’ by means of an analysis of the radical metaphoricity of his
language.
Evidently, much of Lawrence’s critical writing can be viewed as ’psychoanalytical’ even while he eschews the psychoanalytic as a literary approach. Elizabeth Wright (1989) makes this valuable point in her discussion of Lawrence’s critique of American writing and culture in Studies in Classic American Literature, the text where he makes his claims for ’art-speech’ (duplicitous and elusive, ’out of a pattern of lies art weaves the truth’ [SCAL 8]). Lawrence, we remember, persisted in regarding American literature and tendencies in American culture in terms of psychic drama: ’There is a ”different” feeling in the old American classics. It is the shifting over from the old psyche to something new, a displacement. And displacements hurt’ (SCAL 7-8) [104-8].
Michael Ragussis (1978) also cites Lawrence’s critique of the American writers and the comments on ’art-speech’, but he underlines the centrality of Lawrence’s comments not simply to the act of reading but to writing as well, exploring in his study the idiosyncratic ’artspeech’ of Women in Love (see ’Lawrence and Language’ [149]). He begins
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his study by situating Lawrence as a psychoanalytic critic in spirit, despite the suspicion of Freud. He makes the valuable point that both Freud and Lawrence, independently, use the phrase ’verbal consciousness’ as each struggles to bring his philosophy into language. Referring to Lawrence’s often quoted dictum that ’one sheds one’s sicknesses in books’, Ragussis suggests that
/hi; Lawrence … imagines this curative process to be like the ”talking •f. it cure” of psychoanalysis, which posits as a cure the coming into .rer, full consciousness, and thereby a freedom to direct one’s own r/,”fi destiny, through the articulation, to the analyst and to oneself, of •;•!*> one’s deepest emotions and thoughts. Freud and Lawrence even
use the same term – ”verbal consciousness” – to describe this
process.
(Ragussis 1978: 4)
Ragussis also reminds us that the post-structuralist thinker, Jacques Lacan, Freud’s principal re-interpreter whose work on language and the subject has influenced a generation of literary theorists, and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur who has worked on metaphor, link the unconscious with language in ways which enable productive re-readings of Lawrence. ’Lacanian’ analyses have produced, and continue to produce, interesting responses to his work.
(e) LAWRENCE AND SOCIETY
Lawrence wrote on social issues in essays like ’Democracy’ (1919; 1936) and ’Education of the People’ (1936) (RDP 63-83; 87-166) as well as his prefaces and introductions (in, for example, Movements in European History). His political novels, Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, even Lady Chattertey’s Lover, test out ideas of social reform but ultimately give expression to a scepticism with regard to the political over and above the personal. F.R. Leavis had argued strenuously that the existence of ’class-feeling’ in Lawrence was in harness to his larger theme of life, lived, over and above a specific social interest: in this context he raises a comparison of his achievement with that of George Eliot. Much of the value of The Rainbow, asserts Leavis in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, resides in the broad-brush analysis which it offers of contemporary civilization. For Leavis, Lawrence evokes in the ’great’ novels an irrefutable kind of Englishness and irrefutable truths about community, and he does so because of his own formation: ’Lawrence knows
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and renders … what have been the conditions of his own individual development; to be brought up in the environment of a living tradition
– he is recording, in his rendering of provincial England, what in the concrete this has meant in an actual civilization’ (Leavis 1955: 107). Leavis, at this level, is reading The Rainbow as a novel about England, or more specifically a certain vision of Englishness. The partiality of that vision, or what it leaves out, is not examined by Leavis. A useful comparison can be made with Raymond Williams’ exploration of Lawrence and English culture, and the ways in which his reading is subtly different from Leavis’s retrieval of a humanist agenda in Lawrence. Williams, a leading exponent of Marxist literary criticism in the British academy (Marxism and Literature, [1977]), originator of cultural materialism, discusses Lawrence’s fiction in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970) and has influenced subsequent studies of Lawrence, quite recently Tony Pinkney’s examination of Lawrence’s modernist credentials (1990). Williams is more interested than Leavis in the external conditions which affect changes in the subject and, thereafter, literary representation (see Culture and Society, 1780-1950).
Writing in Keywords (1976) about ’community’, Raymond Williams draws attention to a dynamic term characterized by its positive use:
Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.
(Williams 1976: 76)
This exploration of meaning and the sublest of distinctions here uncovered bears directly on Williams’ reading of Lawrence as the first novelist in English effectively to conjoin his own language with that of his characters: this has everything to do with the reference his writing makes to Lawrence’s social origins. In Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Williams draws attention to the anti-industrial ethos in Lawrence, aligning him with the nineteenth-century intellectuals Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold. In his book, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, he continues to argue for Lawrence’s importance in the context of almost three generations of writers in whose hands the novel form represents ’the exploration of … the substance and meaning of community’ (Williams 1970: 11). Beginning his volume with a critique of Dickens, Williams identifies
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a period in which what it means to live in a community is more uncertain, more critical, more disturbing as a question put both to societies and to persons than ever before in history. The underlying experiences of this powerful and transforming urban and industrial civilisation are of rapid and inescapable social change; of a newly visible and conscious history but at the same time, in most actual communities and in most actual lives, of a newly complicated and often newly obscure immediate process. These are not opposite poles: they are the defining characteristics of the change itself. People became more aware of great social and historical changes which altered not only outward forms – institutions and landscapes
– but also inward feelings, experiences, self-definitions.
(Williams 1970: 12)
This description of social and economic change, and of a corresponding alienation at the level of individual consciousness, which for Williams applies from around the 1840s, recalls Lawrence’s description in The Rainbow that, ’About 1840, a canal was constructed across the meadows of the Marsh Farm…’ (R13). A description of modernization, this is a point in the text which indicates a significant alteration in narrative tone (and social relations). It directs attention to ’public’ ’official’ history aside from the intimate community consciousness which has represented the Brangwens up to this moment of major change (and the narrative will move from the inclusiveness of community to the new condition of alienated individual consciousness, finally achieved with Ursula’s story) [49-56]. The way this novel maps the shift from an agricultural to an industrial society, foregrounded here, is also noted by Leavis. The Rainbow, however, with its origins in a time of particular social crisis, comes to signify for Williams a new form in the novel: one that represents ’the experience of community … and then of its breakdown’ (Williams 1970:178). He traces, in the changing language of that novel, a shift between two kinds of reality which he relates to Lawrence’s sense of the pressures wrought by social change:
The given reality of men and women is the experience and the method of the early chapters, and then under pressure – the pressures of altering ways of life, economic and social and physical ; changes – such a reality, radical and irreducible, has to be made or found; it is not given. It is then made and found – attempted to be made and found – in certain kinds of relationship: physical certainly but physical mainly as a discovery of being, of spirit. Other people drop away. They become increasingly irrelevant to this intense
and desperate effort. Just because the reality is no longer given and that loss is explicit; a social system, industrialism, has destroyed given reality by forcing people into systematic roles – the new reality, that which in its turn is irreducible and radical, has to be fought for – the strain and the violence are obvious.
(Williams 1970: 178)
In that book’s sequel, ’[effective community has gone’ … ’Women in love is a masterpiece of loss’ (180, 182). This is the basis of the significant position held by Lawrence in Williams’ critical history of the novel form.
The feeling of, or perhaps for, community that is indicated in these statements has its finest expression for Williams in Lawrence’s early work, principally in ’Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and other short stories roughly contemporary with it, as well as in the first three plays and Sons and Lovers. What Williams appears to value highly in these is the vernacular, a shift in narrative language ’to the colloquial and informal from the abstract and polite’ (173). What is at stake here is a representation of a social vision; the individual relationships expressed in the writing are not separable from the experience of community that underpins, even creates, them. For Williams this continues to be the case in Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where post-war England defined by familiar class inequalities and iniquities, is the community in which radical, more positive, relationships than those of mechanistic modernity have to be formed. The alteration of ’outward forms’ as not separable from the transformation of ’inward feelings’, to use Williams’ terms, is Lawrence’s principal theme. However, for many critics Lady Chatterley’s Lover fails to remain true to the political consciousness which, from the outset at least, it seems is going to determine that novel. Principally, they argue, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel about class, but the way in which personal relations are resolved in the book actually show Lawrence in flight from political realities and resorting to a sexual ’philosophy’ in such a way which ignores the imperatives of history (Lawrence, who saw his book as ’defiant’, answers in ’A Propos otLady Chatterley’s Lover’ that ’if the lady marries the gamekeeper – she hasn’t done it yet – it is not class spite, but in spite of class’ [LCL 334]). Unconvinced, Graham Holderness in D.H. Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction (1982) and Scott Sanders, D.H. Lawrence: the world of the major novels (1974), perceive in statements like this a troubling resistance in Lawrence to his own evident consciousness of the politics of class, which Williams does not fully debate. In a wideranging analysis of Lawrence’s ’literary dissidence’, Drew Milne
140
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discusses these critical perspectives in detail but perceives in Lawrence a much greater sense of hesitancy towards the Tightness of his philosophy of ’sexual transcendence’ than these earlier critics acknowledge. More in keeping with Peter Scheckner (1985), he identifies a genuine self-questioning at work in Lawrence’s writing and urges some greater recognition of ’the extent to which the novels are critical of sexual solutions to the political problems represented in the novel [Lady Chamrley’s Lover}’ (Milne 2001: 212).
Graham Holderness is less inclined to see the achieved results of dialectical process in Lawrence. Quite apart from the ideological blindspots of LadyChatterley’s Lover, for him the ’mythic’ and the ’historical’ are self-consciously opposed values which are set up particularly problematically in The Rainbow. Holderness argues convincingly and cogently that the vision of the folk working the land at the opening of The Rainbow – the writing which is often referred to as the novel’s ’prologue’ – is mythic in a facile sense, disturbingly anti-real. An ’alternative to history’ is represented which, in its denial of genuine conflict (between social classes; between man and nature) is a sham. Holderness disagrees that the ’prologue’ is a sketch of pre-industrial England with any basis in actuality, calling it, rather, a strategic ’distortion of history’ on Lawrence’s part. If the relationship or connection between the community and the land (referred to metonymically as ’Marsh Farm’) is to be perceived as ’organic’, it is so in order to establish a contrast with the mechanized civilization of the pit town (at the end of the novel) and the alienated workers which populate it. However, for Holderness, the pastoral ideal of the ’prologue’ and the promise contained in the rainbow (as symbol for the regeneration of industrial England), are both fictions which show Lawrence ignoring the crisis of history out of which, in 1914, he writes. This interpretation (which owes something to Williams) forcefully exposes the deluded spirit of Leavis’s humanism, and the distance from history which his reading (at least of The Rainbow) actually represents. If Holderness has produced ’ the principal sceptical reading about the nature of the social vision in ’ Lawrence’s work, he can usefully be read alongside Peter Scheckner’s later study, Class, Politics and the Individual (1985) and Tony Pinkney’s D.H. Lawrence (1990).
Mark Kinkead-Weekes is less exercised than Holderness by the lack of historical reference in the representation of the first generations of Brangwens in The Rainbow, and insists on its status as an historical novel (Kinkead-Weekes 1989: 121). He shows, in part to refute Holderness’s argument (by means of opening quotations from Karl Jaspers and Georg Lukacs), how Lawrence constructs the private histories of
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the Brangwens – including the minor characters – around specific historical events. These comprise education acts, domestic legislation and related social change; specific effects of the Industrial Revolution (in Nottinghamshire); the introduction of the automobile and its impact on the country; changes in levels of prosperity and aspiration across social classes; female emancipation and the ’new woman’. History in Lawrence, according to Kinkead-Weekes, is everywhere available in the attention paid to this kind of detail, but underpinning the ’historical’ is an ’archetypal’ vision, directly related to the main principles of the ’metaphysic’. Without this understanding, he argues, much is lost.
(f) LAWRENCE AND FEMINIST LITERARY CRITICISM
Some of the most developed and influential political critiques of Lawrence are the product of feminist literary criticism and, latterly, include work in the broad area of gender studies. Under scrutiny has been the representation of women in Lawrence’s writing, and the specific implications of his sexual politics. This emphasis gave rise to influential arguments in the early 1970s which sought to unmask his misogyny, and to draw attention to the oppressive operations of patriarchy in his work. Feminist literary and cultural criticism is diverse and draws on a number of traditions. In attending to Lawrence, feminist critics since 1969 have successfully challenged the complacency of decades of Lawrence criticism, and subjected Lawrence’s work to some of its most rigorous tests. Within feminism, of course, a range of views co-exist.
Sheila MacLeod introduces her book, Lawrence’s Men and Women (1985), with a personal observation:
Since the early 1970s feminists have been attacking Lawrence as the epitome of sexism and his theories of sexuality as male-centred and insensitive or dismissive towards women. I have scarcely been able to find a woman in the 1980s who has a good word to say for him. ….,, . ,,,,…
n .,; ;r.; .:.,,;-./; !,. ..:•. (MacLeod 1985: 11)
Her comments bear witness in part to the success of that rare thing, the best-selling work of literary criticism: MacLeod’s principal target throughout her book is Kate Millett, author of a highly influential study,
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D.H. LAWRENCE
Sexual Politics (1969), which, alongside chapters on Henry Miller, Norman Mailer (who replied with a ’defence’) and Jean Genet, includes a chapter on D.H. Lawrence. Both these studies will be examined later in this sub-section. First, however, it is important to explore the context of feminist readings of Lawrence prior to Millett’s forcible book, and to get a sense of the main arguments. In doing so, it is fair to note that Lawrence is a writer about whom few readers actually feel indifferent, and that feminist scholarship has succeeded most in stimulating energized debates about the ’doctrine’ and the work.
Lawrence stated, in a letter to Edward Garnett about The Rainbow, that it showed ’woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’ (Letters II: 165). This need not be taken as a sign of his support for the feminist politics of his time, but rather as an indication of his idiosyncratic approach to the relations between men and women (defining and defined by their culture) which increasingly concerned him in his writing. A great deal more is at stake for Lawrence in the phrase ’becoming individual’ than the issue of votes for women, equal representation and fair pay. Sexual metaphors predominate in the discursive writing: the abstract ’male’ and ’female’ principles in the early exploratory prose give way to a more coherently expressed sexual ’metaphysic’ which is at the heart of his explorations of masculinity, selfhood, marriage, for example. And increasingly, the ’woman question’ that absorbs Lawrence is articulated in terms of sexual violence (’The Princess’, The Plumed Serpent, ’The Woman Who Rode Away’). His exhortations to husbands and wives in Fantasia of the Unconscious (see the chapter called The Lower Self), have irritated numberless readers, as has the tone of his return to the themes of mothers and mothering and the education of children (he insists that the sexes should be kept apart). The ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ had included a chapter on suffrage (and the pointlessness of women having the vote – at best, a collusion with patriarchy), but the later essays like ’Women Are So Cocksure’ (Phoenix), ’Ownership’, ’Master in His Own House’, ’Matriarchy’ and ’Cocksure Women and Hensure Men’ (Phoenix ”’ II) are more aggressively critical about aspirational ’modern’ women.
In The Second Sex [Le Deuxieme Sexe] (1988), French novelist and essayist Simone de Beauvoir, writing about myths of the feminine in literature, includes a section on Lawrence called ’D.H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride’. It is an argument which gets considerable restatement in the 1970s. Through extensive quotation of Fantasia of the Unconscious, and with reference to the novels (principally Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Plumed Serpent), de Beauvoir finds Lawrence rediscovering the traditional bourgeois conception of sexual relations
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wherein ’Woman should subordinate her existence to that of man’ (1988: 250). Her conclusion is that, ’It is once more the ideal of the ”true woman” that Lawrence has to offer us – that is, the woman who unreservedly accepts being defined as the Other’ (254). This conclusion is reached via a close examination of the various stages of Lawrence’s thought on women and men with particular attention paid to his antiCartesianism, his philosophy of marriage and the ’psychophysiology’ of the books on the unconscious. Where de Beauvoir’s response is a reaction to Lawrence’s discourse it focuses on the phallocentricity of his thought and language – hence the title to the piece. Hers is an interesting and sharply observed critique which usefully parallels the essay earlier in her book – although she does not make the connection more explicit than their co-incidence in the volume – of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Kate Millett’s reading of Lawrence in Sexual Politics is in many respects a restatement of de Beauvoir’s insights but it constitutes a much more thorough reading of the fiction than de Beauvoir’s study permitted, and it asserts straightforwardly the assumption in Lawrence of the relationship in his culture (which he reproduces) between sex and power. Millett concurs with critics who provide a Freudian explanation of Sons and Lovers but her assessment of that novel is most concerned with the nature of power which gets expression in Paul Morel’s relationship with, in particular, Miriam. The transition to a male supremacism is then traced in The Rainbow and Women in Love. However, it is Aaron’s Rod, in Aaron’s rejection of women and his return to a superior form of masculine friendship offered by Rawdon Lilly, which represents a much more open statement of Lawrence’s ’fraternalism’ than Women in Love. Millett’s reading shows the self-assuredness of Lawrence’s anti-egalitarianism (which in Aaron’s Rod is articulated through Lilly). It is the political model offered by that book (of the superior man having a real responsibility for his culture and himself, not permitted by democracy) which makes possible the idea of ’messianic’ male supremacy. Its formation continues in Kangaroo, argues Millett, and in The Plumed Serpent where religious and political ideologies dovetail. Millett’s view of that novel’s heroine, Kate Leslie, that she is a ’female impersonator’, could be said of many of Lawrence’s heroines. The point is that in The Plumed Serpent a dubious substitution is performed: ’Through the device of the heroine, Lawrence has found a vehicle to fantasize what seems to be his own surrender to the dark and imperious male in Cipriano’ (284). What Millett arguably resists in her reading of the novels is an acknowledgement of the ambitious objectives which Lawrence had for the novel form, and his sense of his
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own novels’ frequent failure. However, it is to the short story, ’The Woman Who Rode Away’, that she most memorably turns, and provides one of the best-known readings of the text which inevitably comes to stand as a comprehensive criticism of its creator.
In her interpretation of the sexual politics of ’The Women Who Rode Away’ Millett makes Lawrence the proper object of feminist hostility by showing what ’phallic-consciousness’, foregrounded by de Beauvoir, really means. The climax of the tale is the ritual murder by tribal priests of the white woman [96]. Millett:
The act here at the center of the Lawrencean sexual religion is
– coitus as killing, its central vignette a picture of human sacrifice
i performed upon the woman to the greater glory and potency of
the male. But because sexual potency could accomplish little upon
a corpse, it is painfully obvious that the intention of the fable is
! purely political.
(Millett 1969: 292-3)
Not only does Lawrence link sex and death but his tale enjoys the enactment, the spectacle, of man’s power over woman. R.P. Draper (1966 [1988]), writing earlier than Millett and with Lawrence’s style principally in mind, typically overlooks the political, and comments on the ’orgasmic effect’ of the last scene in ’The Woman Who Rode Away’, suggesting its importance as a precursor of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Man Who Died’ (written, says Draper, after Lawrence’s animosity towards feminists had lessened!). With the focus on equivalences, Draper’s conclusions are not to be reconciled with those of de Beauvoir and Millett but, it could be argued, in all three a judgement is passed without proper accommodation of Lawrence’s sense of the difficulty of his task if that is to be viewed as an attempted revaluation of sexual values. Sheila MacLeod makes a play for balance and intends to be corrective in her study (1985). ’Men’, ’Women’ and ’Marriage’ are the organizing principles of that book which concentrates on the fiction. MacLeod’s analysis of The Woman Who Rode Away’ self-consciously addresses Millett’s persuasive but, in some quarters, controversial interpretation.
With an eye on Lawrence’s cherished theme of resurrection, MacLeod calls this tale a ’modern fertility myth’ (145) and aligns it with The Man Who Died’ (also called The Escaped Cock’). Like Millett she sees the woman, who remains nameless, as symbolic, but she argues that her journey is a ’religious quest’ (141) and in ’losing’ herself she paradoxically ’finds’ herself. MacLeod draws attention to the woman’s desire
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for freedom from a marriage and family life which has seemed to arrest her spiritual development. Sexual identity, she argues, is that which is being rejected by the woman, so that a mythic identity – free from the ordinary demands of her sexualized existence – may be taken on:
Contrary to Kate Millett’s claim in Sexual Politics, there is no evidence here of the white male fantasy that dark-skinned men are inordinately attracted to white women. It is repeatedly stressed that the Indians find the woman sexually repulsive. Something quite other is happening: one of the last vestiges of her identity, the double pride in her whiteness and the power of her sexuality, is being shed.
(MacLeod 1985: 140)
The radical aspect of the tale in MacLeod’s view resides in the depiction of a female Christ-figure who combines the sacrificial imperative with a concept of (self-) salvation: she is the female equivalent of ’the man who died’. It is in arguing this point that MacLeod seeks to accommodate the central aspects of Lawrence’s personal philosophy to do with notions of rebirth (of the self). Her account therefore attempts a greater responsiveness to Lawrence’s stated aims than Millett’s, but the text supports both readings. Millett grounds her interpretation more obviously than MacLeod in questions of class, gender and race, where MacLeod’s assessment of the Lawrencean subject is based more on her apprehension of Lawrence’s ’symbolic meaning’. MacLeod is perhaps happier to read Lawrence in, and on, his own terms but Millett’s scepticism remains an important, influential and pervasive counter-voice.
As the survey of critical writing provided in Part III of this Guide. shows, most book-length studies until 1969, largely but not exclusively in an Anglo-American intellectual tradition, ignore gender. Thereafter, studies of the representation of women in Lawrence are not necessarily feminist in approach. Many return to well-worn critical themes such as Lawrence as son/lover using fiction in order to work out a troubled sense of mothering. Carol Dix (1980), having asserted that hers is a personal rather than ’academic’ response, seeks, rather ineffectively, to counter Millett’s influential position, mounting a defence of Lawrence by arguing that he offers as many positive views of women as negative. Hers needs to be read in tandem with other more exploratory and expansive studies. Hilary Simpson’s D.H. Lawrence and Feminism (1982) examines the historical contexts for the development of Lawrence’s attitudes, and feminist reassessments, and can also be usefully read
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alongside Cornelia Nixon’s Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn against Women (1986) which returns to the treatment of masculinity, sex and power in the later writing. Peter Balbert, in D.H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, (1989) strikes a counter-note.
Anne Smith’s edited collection Lawrence and Women (1978) brings together diverse essays on the theme of gender relations. Smith’s introductory essay follows the biographical imperative and assumes that when Lawrence writes about women he seeks ’his own sexual identity’ (10). Drawing heavily on the correspondence, she strives to illustrate Lawrence’s preoccupation with male-female relations, latterly in terms of his marriage. Most of the essays in this volume show a concentration on the fiction. Faith Pullin writes on the representation of women in Sons and Lovers, while Lydia Blanchard examines mother-daughter relations in The Rainbow and some of the shorter works. Mark KinkeadWeekes’ ’Eros and Metaphor: Sexual Relationship in the Fiction of Lawrence’ ([1969] reprinted from another source), concentrates on the language of sexual description in episodes from Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover to show Lawrence’s awareness of ’process’ in terms of both sexual and Verbal consciousness’. This is not an example of feminist literary criticism, but of criticism, like much in Smith’s book, which shows a concentration on men, women and sex in Lawrence. Also in this volume, Philippa Tristram examines the polarization of life and death as ’male’ and ’female’ principles in the Brangwen novels and Aaron’s Rod, drawing on Freud and Psychoanalysis and the. Unconscious and fantasia of the Unconscious. T.E. Apter offers a reading of The Plumed Serpent which can be usefully aligned with later critiques of Lawrence’s sexual politics and primitivism. Harry T Moore’s ’Bert Lawrence and Lady Jane’ is an overly defensive response to Millett’s ’distortions’ (180) and ’misreading’ (181) which does not provide an effective counter-argument. Mark Spilka’s ’On Lawrence’s Hostility to Wilful Women: The Chatterley Solution’, argues that Lawrence’s accommodation of ’tenderness’ and vulnerability as an aspect of Mellors’ ’maleness’ is an antidote to old ideas of aggressive masculine dominance in his writing.
Linda Ruth Williams’ more recent study Sex in the Head (1993) productively alters the tenor of the debate about Lawrence’s sexual politics by combining it with a critique of the politics of ’looking’, largely in the fiction (see ’Lawrence and Psychoanalytic Criticism’ [134]). Her book theorizes a palpable ambivalence in Lawrence’s thought about sex by bringing feminist film theory to bear on the convergence in Lawrence of stated hostilities both to ’modern’ women
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and to modern(ist) visual culture – he was notably critical of cinema which he thought of queasily as a masturbatory pleasure – and focuses on the apparently contradictory fondness for spectacle in his narratives. (The other principal monograph on the visual in Lawrence, with very different theoretical foundations from Williams’ study but worth highlighting here, is Keith Alldritt’s The Visual Imagination of D.H. Lawrence [1971]).Williams has also written the ’Writers and their Work’ series volume on Lawrence (1997) in which she argues that, in his desire to ’identify’ and perhaps ’police the boundary between the sexes’ (67) he shares one of feminisim’s aims. This is a typically refreshing view from a critic who ’theorizes’ Lawrence more successfully than most. She too eventually turns to ’The Woman Who Rode Away’ drawing attention to the fact that the story is as much about the deferral of desire than its accomplished ends: the narrative concludes in the moment before the woman is executed having dwelt in detail on the elaborate preparations made for her sacrifice. Drawing on Freud, Williams therefore reads the tale as enacting the ’”foreplay” of suspense’ (106): it is an ’exercise in perversity’ (107) either in terms of the woman’s action in inviting and embracing her spectacular destruction (which is masochism), or through the writer’s delight at detailing her humiliation (which is sadism).
So it is that gender remains a key issue for Lawrence critics. Alongside book-length critical studies, a vast number of essays and articles have been written around the broadest issues of Lawrence’s ’sexual polities’: from analyses concerned with the re-invention of Lawrence as a liberationist after the Chatterley trial to more theoretically challenging assessments of specific texts and tendencies in his writing. Feminist criticism, in its diversity, continues to intersect with other theoretical approaches, historical, psychoanalytical, post-structuralist, in its assessments of Lawrence.
(g) LAWRENCE AND LANGUAGE
Prior to 1970, there is a tendency in criticism to draw attention to issues of narrative technique and problems of style in evaluations of Lawrence’s craft, particularly with reference to the fiction. Since then, several studies have taken more than a sideways glance at those idiosyncrasies of style and expression which have prompted extreme responses to what is a highly personal lexicon, as the ’metaphysic’ is articulated and Verbal consciousness’ (W 486) attempted. Mid-century Dorothy Van Ghent (1953), in a comparative study, acknowledges Lawrence’s
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radical writing practice in Sons and Lovers. Comparable commentaries include Roger Sale’s essay, ’The Narrative Technique of The Rainbow’ (1959), Frank Baldanza’s essay, ’D.H. Lawrence’s Song of Songs’ (1961), and Dorrit Cohn’s comparative study which begins with a short piece of textual analysis of a passage from The Plumed Serpent (1966) but in fact concentrates more on Lawrence’s contemporaries. Daleski (1965) and Kinkead-Weekes (1968), in writing about the ideas that underpin the ’metaphysic’, inevitably acknowledge both the strangeness and the importance of Lawrence’s principal modes of expression – for instance Kinkead-Weekes draws attention to the exploratory forms of Lawrence’s language, when he refers to ’a continual ”systole” and ”diastole” of poetry and analytic prose, exploration and understanding’ (KinkeadWeekes 1968). For neither of these critics can the fiction be properly understood without recourse to the ideas, and the language, of the discursive writing, in particular ’Study of Thomas Hardy’ and ’The Crown’, while reference is also made to the ’quasi-Biblical’ language of the Foreword to Sons and Lovers which many critics find awkward and impenetrable [99; 101; 47]. Of course, Lawrence was concerned early on to find his own voice and a style which suited the substance of what needed to be said, but he is also important as a writer who makes language a major theme, especially in the novels.
A useful study of Lawrence’s language in this context is Michael Ragussis’s comparative work, The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition (1978) (see ’Lawrence and Psychoanalytic Criticism’ [134]). His principal chapter on Lawrence concentrates with great attention to detail on the life of particular words and phrases in Women in Love (words which amount to a ’new vocabulary’), noting the extent to which Lawrence makes individual words mean differently according to their place and context in the narrative. The philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenologie de la perception [1945]) and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, provide some of the intellectual background to Ragussis’s work. To support his argument he examines Lawrence’s discursive writing on the novel form, highlighting Lawrence’s anxiety about the gulf which he perceives to have opened up between fiction and philosophy in the modern novel, and his reading of the classic American texts where Lawrence formulates his views on ’art-speech’. ’Art-speech’ is the phrase to which Ragussis then returns in his critique of the language – and the language theme – of Women in Love. He discusses a tendency in Lawrence’s language use which is predicated on the movement of a range of meanings (often opposing meanings) through single words as
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Lawrence deploys and redeploys them in a variety of contexts. It is in
this sense, he argues, that
Women in Love constructs a new vocabulary, so that when the reader first sees these words he realizes that he is to learn their meaning and to proceed. What is baffling about this novel’s vocabulary is that it seems deliberately to defy our educative powers. The reader is more surprised, not when he sees a fairly common word like ’inhuman’ used in a special way, but rather when the word is repeated later and he realizes that it now has an additional, and sometimes antithetical, meaning. It is, in short, a vocabulary that seems not to respect our understanding of vocabulary.
(Ragussis 1978: 179)
So it is that Ragussis helps to draw attention not only to a highly personal lexicon in Lawrence’s writing but, within that, to the drama of meaning contained in single words – words like ’inhuman’ and ’love’, for instance, which take on a life of their own in Women in Love. Through a concentration on the play in Lawrence with definitions, Ragussis is able to claim that ’Lawrence … gives a Saussurian test of difference, suggesting that words attain meaning, not through the notion of similarity, but difference’ (183). His study brings together a range of useful observations based in the first instance on structuralist perceptions and supported by close reading.
Avrom Fleishman (1985) acknowledges the positive contribution of Ragussis in his critique of St Mawr which begins with a statement about the otherwise parlous condition of critical writing on Lawrence’s style:
A nonspecialist coming to D.H. Lawrence studies must be moved by the intensity with which his ideas are debated but surprised at how little is made of his stylistic achievements. When attention is paid, it is usually to deride or defend the universally acknowledged badnesses – the purple passages, the swatches of slack dialogue and careless narration, the lapses into self-indulgent vituperation
(Fleishman 1985: 162)
As the title of the piece indicates (’He Do the Polis in Different Voices: Lawrence’s Later Style’), Fleishman is interested in demonstrating the polyphonic quality of the prose writing of the later 1920s via an understanding of Lawrence both as a polyglot and a translator – he translated the Sicilian writer, Giovanni Verga between 1922 and 1927, a detail
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which Fleishman privileges [23; 69]. Stressing the importance of the
discourse theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic, Fleishman
produces a reading of St Mavcr in which, it is argued, ’Lawrence manages
an extended construction in what Bakhtin calls ”dialogized hetero-
glossia”, the interchange and opposition of competing languages or
linguistic registers’ (169). The work cited to produce this reading is
Bakhtin’s ’Discourse in the Novel’ in The Dialogic Imagination (1981).
In the rhetorical analysis which ensues, Fleishman produces a sense of
multiple linguistic registers at work in the text and seeks to relate
Lawrence’s search for a ’new language’ (169) to the crises of his historical
, moment. This approach to Lawrence’s language is continued in David
: Lodge, ’Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin: D.H. Lawrence and dialogic
fiction’ (1985), and in Fleishman’s later essay ’Lawrence and Bakhtin:
Where Pluralism Ends and Dialogism Begins’ (1990).
•;. Rhetorical analyses of Lawrence’s writing which stress opposition-
; ality and ambivalence are often indebted to the influence and insights
.• of post-structuralist thought about language. Gerald Doherty is a critic
;•: who argues for Lawrence as embodying a deconstructive sensibility
c after the philosopher Jacques Derrida, and, with the linguistic mobility
••/ of Women in Love, he becomes ’an ardent deconstructor of logocentric
•• modes of completion and closure’ (Doherty 1987: 477). Another article
reads The Rainbow in the same tradition (Doherty 1989), stimulated by
;• a particularly Lawrentian take on the ’metaphysics of presence’. For
• some, the emergence of a deconstructive Lawrence might seem difficult I to sustain, or Lawrence himself might seem to disappear under the .: claims that it is in the anticipation of a post-structuralist response to
• language that his importance lies. Even so, it is unnecessary to argue ; that such perspectives have nothing to offer the reader of Lawrence.
. They may in fact profitably help to shift the critical emphasis away from the biographical, life-to-art, approach which has dominated Lawrence studies.
Diane Bonds describes her analysis of Lawrence’s language as characterized by the ’deconstructive operation’ (1987: 1) inasmuch as she . concentrates (like Ragussis and Fleishman in intention, if not quite in ,:’. approach) on the oppositional play of meaning in Lawrence. Drawing on the literary-philosophical work of theorists Barbara Johnson and J. Hillis Miller, Bonds makes claims for the ’self-deconstructive’ and ’selfinterrogative’ characteristics of Lawrence’s prose, and links the existence of a ’theory’ of language in Lawrence to his treatment of self-hood. Bonds’ study draws attention to what she calls ’differential’ models of language and the self, which contradict the logic of Lawrence’s stated interest (in the discursive writing) in ’organic’ models, both of self and
language. Hence, for instance, writing of the beginning of The Rainbow (i.e. the ’prologue’ which for Graham Holderness is weakly quasi-mythic (’Lawrence and Society [138]), while for F.R. Leavis it constitutes a fine evocation of ’traditional country life’), the claim is made that
the relations of the Brangwen men and women mirror two alternate theories of the linguistic sign, one in which the sign is viewed as a unity of signifier and signified (the symbolic conception of the sign) and one in which the sign is viewed as a signifier that has its significance in its relation to other signifiers (the differential conception of the sign).
(Bonds 1987: 56)
She uses this conceptual model (which refers to the language of structural linguistics) to argue that ’The Rainbow sets up considerable resistance to the differential conception of the sign (and of language and of reality)’ (56). The accompanying analyses of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love pursue the idea of a ’differential metaphysic’ (93) with considerable attention to the textual detail of each work. The paradox of language which underpins her argument is Lawrence’s exploration of the fact that ’language might be said both to liberate the self (from what Lawrence calls ”the unconscious” into conscious being) and to imprison it’ (7). For all her concentration on the relation between self (mind) and ’reality’ (or ’world’), Bonds does not overtly explore Lawrence’s reaction against Cartesian idealism, a question that later critics, also with an interest in Lawrence’s language, have taken up. Aidan Burns, in Nature and Culture in D.H. Lawrence (1980) – his title reflects another dominant binary structuring Lawrence’s thought
– is also interested in the relation of self and language in the novels. He concludes his book with this observation:
Th&danger in the use of the language of transcendence arises when we assume that because we can find limits to any conceptual framework in which we try to grasp the self, we can therefore do without any framework at all. This is a mistake. For the self is only found, indeed is only constituted, in language, even in a language it transcends. … there is no archimedean point outside society or outside language to which we can escape. The relative ones we have are the only ones there are and they form the conditions in which political and social life become possible.
(Burns 1980: 122)
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That the self is constituted in language engages Michael Bell, whose study of Lawrence (1992) is less preoccupied than Bonds with bringing theories of language to bear on Lawrence, in preference to seeing if an appropriate way of reading Lawrence will emerge out of his evident concern with language and its limitations in his writing. Bell’s D.H. Lawrence: language and being also emphasizes the importance of German thought – Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche – in a consideration of the fiction. Like most recent assessments of Lawrence’s language, Bell’s study cites the now familiar comments in Studies in Classic American Literature on ’art-speech’ and acknowledges the difficulties of writing about Lawrence’s ’struggles’ with language. In the introductory comments which precede his detailed analysis of the linguistic modes of the key works, Bell outlines the philosophical understanding which informs his reading of the texts and the ’metaphysic’, and explains the importance, in the first instance, of Heidegger:
Like Lawrence, Heidegger had a powerful vision of a pre-metaphysical mode of being which he struggled to express in modern terms, even though it was part of his point that it could not be so translated. And part of the outcome, as with Lawrence, was to give him a heightened sensitivity to the relative nature of our own habitual world. Heidegger’s term ’world’ is the philosophical equivalent of the constantly modulating and relational representation of ’external’ existence in Lawrence’s fiction. In the Heideggerean, as in the Lawrencean, conception there is no external world separable from human being in the world … The special term ’world’ denotes a radical opposition to Cartesian dualism; an opposition which does not merely differ but offers a comprehensive aetiology of that dualism. Overt philosophising would distract from, and undermine, the holism of Lawrence’s presentation of states of being but his presentation subsumes an ontological understanding every bit as subtle and comprehensive as Heidegger’s.
(Bell 1992: 10)
*!
^
Hence Bell’s title ’language and being’. What he refers to as Lawrence’s ’ontological’ theme (an emphasis on ’states of being’ explored in relation to the external ’worlds’ of each book) is not always successfully accommodated, so Bell argues, by the narrative language of the fiction: indeed in the later writing The Plumed Serpent, especially, can be seen as an inadvertent parody of the attention to ’world’ subtly achieved in the travel writing, for example, of the same period. The issue here, then, is language and the novel form (and often its failure), that is to say, its
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suitability or adaptability to Lawrence’s philosophy of self and place. In his attempt to understand Lawrence on Lawrence’s own terms (something we noted with MacLeod [1985]), Bell produces an account of the fiction that makes useful observations about how language enacts (creates) the central relationship between self and world. He concludes that this is either beautifully achieved (The Rainbow] or disastrously over-conscious (The Plumed Serpent).
Other critics in the 1990s who have developed the Heideggerean, and other philosophical, parallels with Lawrence include Anne Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (1993), which demonstrates common ground in the thought of Lawrence and Heidegger on the work of art (Fernihough also conducts here the most extensive recent debate on authority in her chapter on Lawrence and fascism); Robert E. Montgomery who, in The Visionary D.H. Lawrence: Beyond philosophy and an (1994), examines Lawrence alongside Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heraclitus and Boehme; Fiona Becket, D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997), which is an examination of metaphor as a mode of understanding in Lawrence. These studies concentrate on the fiction and the discursive writing. Allan Ingram, in The Language of D.H. Lawrence (1990), moves away from obvious philosophical parallels but usefully contrasts the style of Lawrence with his modernist contemporaries, and revives the question of form. In the same year, John B. Humma turns his attention to rhetorical issues, again in the fiction, with Metaphor and Meaning in D.H. Lawrence’s Later Novels (1990).
Shorter-length studies than these attempt a concentration on genres apart from the fiction, seeking effectively to dovetail questions of language and other areas of theorized debate, or revisiting important discussions around issues of narrative, style and knowledge, a key term in Lawrence. Michael Squires examines ’Recurrence as a Narrative Technique in The Rainbow’ (1975) and returns to the issue of narrative strategies in ’D.H. Lawrence’s Narrators, Sources of Knowledge and the Problem of Coherence’ (1995). Garrett Stewart explores Lawrence’s ontological themes, and his chosen terms, in ’Lawrence, ”Being,” and the Allotropic Style’ (1975). Catherine Stearns examines ’Gender, Voice, and Myth: the Relation of Language to the Female in D.H. Lawrence’s Poetry’ (1987), while Hagen (1987) considers Lawrence’s use of metaphor. Jack F. Stewart focuses on Lawrence’s most dialogic novel in ’Dialectics of Knowing in Women in Love’ (1991). With a different emphasis, David J. Gordon considers discourses of desire in ’Sex and Language in D.H. Lawrence’ (1981). These studies indicate the extent to which considerations of Lawrence’s language cross over into other debates. So vast is the quantity of recent criticism on Lawrence, and
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indeed with a focus on language, that this highly selective synopsis can at best provide only a snapshot of the work in the field.
FURTHER READING
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The Reception of D.H. Lawrence Around the World (1999) provides extensive analytical and bibliographical coverage of the reception of Lawrence since the 1930s in Europe, America, Australia and Asia. This book is a useful point of departure for anyone interested in the study of Lawrence globally.
General
The purpose of Part III of this volume is to introduce some of the main developments in the criticism of the works of D.H. Lawrence, from the responses of his contemporaries to the present-day. His work has produced such a high level of commentary internationally that the best that can be hoped for in a guide of this kind is to signal certain areas of debate in order that the interested individual can pursue a particular direction from an informed position. It remains to give some further indication of studies which seek to map Lawrence thematically and historically, aside from the critical approaches already signalled in this volume. Occasionally, early studies of Lawrence provide an overview of the contemporary critical reception with the result that presentday readers can gain a sense of who valued what, and when – the introduction to Gregory (1933) is a case in point and, slightly more extensive, is Beal’s chapter ’Lawrence’s Reputation and Critics’ in D.H. Lawrence (1961). Mark Spilka (1963) also provides a summary of critical attitudes in his introduction to a volume which offers representative analyses from the 1950s, a decade characterized, he suggests, by ’the best criticism on Lawrence … much of it by younger men influenced by Leavis, or schooled in the New Criticism and pushing onward’ (13). Harry T. Moore (1974) offers a briefer synopsis of the reception of Lawrence (646-9). More recently, Dennis Jackson and Fleda Brown Jackson’s ’D.H. Lawrence’s Critical Reception: An Overview’, in their edited collection, Critical Essays on D.H. Lawrence (1988), is extremely thorough and deals with criticism both chronologically according to decade and conceptually. This is supplemented by a more detailed project, D.H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments, edited in four volumes by David Ellis and Ornella de Zordo (1992), which prints a range of reviews and evaluations, bringing a diverse body of material usefully together. Peter Preston’s ’Lawrence in Britain’ (in lida 1999) deals with the critical history chronologically. Older resources have certainly not outlived their usefulness, and Lawrence scholars have long turned to R.P. Draper’s edition of D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (1970) and to Keith Sagat’sA D.H. Lawrence Handbook (1982). More recently, Takeo lida’s
Companions, chronologies and journals
There are many books which bring together essays from critics representing different approaches and critical traditions. In the present study reference has been made to Spilka (ed.) D.H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963), Kalnins (ed.) D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays (1986) and Heywood (ed.) D.H. Lawrence: New Studies (1987) among others. More recent volumes on Lawrence include Peter Widdowson (ed.) D.H. Lawrence (1992) which brings together in one volume some authoritative studies written over several decades; and Anne Fernihough (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence (2001) which contains new essays in the field, any of which can supplement the relevant ’Further Reading’ sections of the present book. Useful general studies relating to the period include The Context of English Literature 1900-1950 edited by Michael Bell (1980) and The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999) edited by Michael Levenson, as well as Levenson (1984). James MacFarlane and Malcolm Bradbury (eds) have produced a detailed introduction to the period m Modernism 1890-1930 (1976). Useful additional reading about Lawrence in relation to specific kinds of modernist experimentation includes Chapter 1 of Allan Ingram’s The Language of D.H. Lawrence (1990); A. Walton-Litz in Balbert and Marcus (eds, 1985); Henry Schvey in Heywood (ed., 1987).
Every monograph, essay and article will not fall neatly into the categories of critical history outlined in Part III. There are excellent comparative studies, for instance, that incorporate discussions of Lawrence alongside other writers, as well as studies which focus on textual history such as the task of editing Lawrence. Recently, useful aids to research have also emerged which supplement the established bibliographies, calendars and chronologies, and among these can be counted Paul Poplawski’s The Works of D.H. Lawrence: A Chronological Checklist (1995) and D.H. Lawrence: A Reference Companion (1996). Journal publication also continues, not least with The D.H. Lawrence Review (U.S.A.), and the Paris-based Etudes Lawrenciennes both of which acknowledge areas of current research with special ’themed’ issues (see Bibliography).
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General context
In addition to publications which are dedicated to the study of Lawrence, other related publications are useful. Certain anthologies, for instance, contain helpful material for the study of the period, providing essential historical and contextual information. Of particular relevance are Patricia Waugh’s Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature (1997) which focuses on modernism and related areas of interest, as well as Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds) Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998). Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism (1990) presents excerpts from Lawrence’s writing on men and women, as well as indicating useful contexts for his work.
General theory
Again, vast numbers of books, from ’Introductions to’ to ’Readers’, offer ways into contemporary literary theory, of which those listed below and in the Bibliography are representative. Anne Jefferson and David Robey (eds) Modern Literary Theory. A Comparative Introduction (1988), Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory (1995) and Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997) provide good inductions to literary and critical theory. Elizabeth Wright’s Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice (1989) is an excellent introduction to psychoanalytic literary theory which makes reference to Lawrence but also ranges more broadly. It can be read alongside Anthony Elliot’s Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (1994). Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Mary Eagleton, Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996), and Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism (1997) edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, are among many accessible introductions to feminist literary theory. For an introduction to literature, history and social criticism see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977), Terry Eagleton, Marxism and ’ Literary Criticism (1976) and John Brannigan, New Histoncism and Cultural Materialism (1998). It is hoped that these texts will usefully supplement the reading suggested in this Guide, although the list is far from exhaustive. } :, •.;.-•-,;• .v:.,.} ’: ’• •• ; i’,-’ ’.’ ’•’••’•’&•’••’<”•
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CHRONOLOGY
1885 David Herbert Lawrence born, Eastwood, Notting-
hamshire.
1891-8 Beauvale Board School.
1898-1901 Scholarship to Nottingham High School
1901 Clerk, Haywood’s medical supplies factory, Nottingham.
Friendship with the Chambers family, and Jessie , . Chambers. Death of Ernest Lawrence.
1902-5 .. Pupil-teacher at the British School, Eastwood.
1905-6 •’ V Uncertificated teacher at the British School, Eastwood.
1906-8 ’ Nottingham University College.
1907 Wins Nottinghamshire Guardian short story competition
• with A Prelude’.
1908-11 .., , School-teacher at Davidson Road School, Croydon, Surrey.
1909 c Poems and short stories in the English Review. Support of •; Ford Madox Hueffer and Ezra Pound. Friendship with
Helen Corke (to 1912).
1910 /.’• Ends betrothal to Jessie Chambers. Death of Lydia
Lawrence. Engagement to Louisa Burrows (ends 1912).
1911 ,”.(;. ; The White Peacock. Relationship with Alice Dax (ends ,.; ,K: 1912). Resigns post as school-teacher due to illness. Friend-
•i! .•••’..”» ship with Edward Garnett.
1912 Meets Frieda Weekley. The Trespasser. Germany. Italy.
1913 *(’A..i ,;r. Love Poems and Others. Sons and Lovers. England. Friendships •’…’.Hv’j: with John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield.
1914 ,i! ’//’Marries Frieda Weekley. Friendships with Richard
Aldington, Catherine Carswell, Hilda Doolittle, E.M. Forster, Amy Lowell, S.S. Koteliansky, Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell. The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. The Prussian ,.,:,.V -, Officer and Other Stories.
1915 ’i.’ Quarrel with Russell. Signature with Murry and Mans-
field. The Rainbow suppressed. Friendships with Dorothy Brett, Mark Gertler, Aldous Huxley. Cornwall.
1916 Twilight in Italy. Amores. Medically examined twice and i • declared unfit for military service. Relations strained with
Murry and Mansfield.
1917 Friendship with William Henry Hocking. Expulsion from Cornwall. Look! We Have Come Through!.
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CHRONOLOGY
1918 Third medical examination. Neve Poems.
1919 Bay. Italy. Friendships with Norman Douglas, Reggie Turner and Maurice Magnus.
1920 Sicily. Italy. Friendship with Rosalind Baynes. The Lost Girl ”. (wins James Tait Black Memorial prize). Women in Love.
1921 Sardinia. Movements in European History. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Tortoises. Sea and Sardinia.
1922 Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, South Seas, America •– (New Mexico). Aaron’s Rod. England, My England and Other .•>•• Stories. Fantasia of the Unconscious. Friendships with M.L.
Skinner (Australia), Witter Bynner, Willard Johnson, Knud Merrild (America). With Mabel Dodge Sterne. Taos.
1923 s»’ America and Mexico. England. The Ladybird, The Fox, The
Captain’s Doll. Studies in Classic American Literature. fi; Kangaroo. Birds, Beasts and Flowers.
1924 Mexico (with Brett). Kiowa Ranch. The Boy in the Bush >;?:« (with M.L. Skinner). Death of Arthur Lawrence.
1925 jj? Lawrence nearly dies: tuberculosis. England. Italy. The Us; Princess. St Mawr. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and ,1 Other Essays.
1926 • Relationship with Brett. England. Italy. The Plumed Serpent. •,u» David.
1927 ,»J Mornings in Mexico. Lawrence tours Etruscan sites.
1928 The Escaped Cock (The Man Who Died) [first part] The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Collected Poems. Switzerland. France.
1929 Pansies seized by police. Thirteen paintings by Lawrence seized from Warren Gallery, London. The Escaped Cock (The Man Who Died) [second part]. Spain. Germany. France.
1930 Nettles. Lawrence dies, Vence (France).
Posthumous publications include:
1930 Assorted Articles. The Virgin and the Gipsy. A Propos of’Lady
:.s Chatterley’s Lover’. Love Among the Haystacks and Other
;>, Pieces. Apocalypse.
1932 .; Sketches of Etruscan Places. Last Poems.
1933 .; The Fight for Barbara.
1934 ;, A Collier’s Friday Night, A Modern Lover [inc. Mr Noon, (part
1)].
1936 •: . Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence.
1964 The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence.
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CHRONOLOGY
1968 Phoenix II Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works
by D.H. Lawrence. ( ,; ,., i ,. -./
1984 Mr Noon [part 2]. ”’ ’ ”’””’ ” ””’* ’
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