D.H. Lawrence's position within modernism

1885 – 1930

Sons and Lovers
 * Different author than Joyce, Woolf. They try to put something in their fiction to add some order. He stands somewhere between traditional realism and modernism. In his novel Women in Love he’s a modernist author. He was the son of a miner and grew up in this world, but had nothing in common with working-class. Was very sensitive child. He lived among workers but didn’t belong to them. Paul Morel is Lawrence himself.
 * He became a teacher, he was self-educated in literature and philosophy. He ran away to Germany with Freide von Richthofen, the wife of a professor at Nottingham.

=Lady Chatterley’s Lover= - Was banned, basic language, passionate relationship. People didn’t like reading about sex in main stream novel.
 * Novel about the fight Mrs. Morel leads first with her husband and later to gain and keep love of her sons. Paul resists her efforts by his relationship to sensitive Miriam, and later to the passionate Clara. At the end of the novel, after her death he only waits to go after her. In the last paragraph he turns to lights of Nottingham and steps towards life and future. There are strong autobiographic features. He started writing it when his mother was still alive and finished it at time when he eloped with his wife Frieda.
 * He was familiar with Freud’s theories, but his main effort in the book is to orient himself in situation he didn’t understand.
 * Fresh and immediate, he later wrote a collection of poems which is already mature. Here he’s still immature, on his mother’s funeral he revealed to his former lover that he couldn’t love her truly, because he loved his mother as a “lover.”
 * There are many views on the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Morel. In the 60s the sympathy was rather on his side. In the feministic 70s on her side but it was never until Lawrence was obsessed by it for his whole life. Later he felt he didn’t show his father well and started almost hate his mother.
 * He left his family in Nottingham and never came back. His later works have sources in his travels along Mexico, Australia etc.
 * Autobiographical novel. He had such a mother and father. She is better educated, for him she was mysterious at the beginning. She was very proud. Later discovered his wild dancing lessons, and drinking.
 * She called him a drunk, he called her a liar. In the past it was not acceptable, pg. 30 Mrs. Morel is locked out, very down, in her egotism, she can’t see anything else but her problem. But suddenly she notices something – according to his poetry, she is uprooted, frozen ego – she focuses on herself only. In the passage she melts together with the lilies, cosmos, starts, transcendent individuality x reality. After this she doesn’t feel depressed anymore. At one with the world, identical with eco feminism – one line of feminism.
 * She vicariously lives her life through her son, with her they become complete strangers. Morel is happy at home when he works. When he works, he talks about his work. She always suffers with children – she involves them into her suffering. She didn’t recognize his otherness, that he really was an individual. She only tried to change him. She criticize Gyps and later on William criticizes her himself to and says he is fond of her in the evening when he’s with her but he doesn’t miss her when they are parted. He cannot break from the bond to his mother. William later develops pneumonia and dies.
 * Parabolic death – because he’s in conflict and that there’s no way out. She replaces him with Paul, instead of her husband. He wants to spend all his life with her. He is friendly with the Leivers family of Willey farm. He falls in love with the shy Miriam, her rich world consists of books, nature and religion– sensitive, spiritual, connected with nature. She encourages his art. Mother is interested only in outcomes of his art. When he wins a prize. He’s very critical to Miriam when she smells flowers etc. He says she is afraid of manifestations of life, he cannot touch her either, it is painful. So he is cruel to her, he turns away from her and becomes involved with Clara Dawes. A married woman.
 * Lawrence glorifies when you manage to transform yourself and realise your individuality from reality. He glorifies the recognition of the otherness of your partner. Searches for transcendence, glorifies love in its transcendent strength.
 * Pg. 166 Away he went.... – the relationship between Paul and Miriam we see through Paul’s vies. He says she makes him only spiritual but he’s afraid of physical contact. He was split between the spiritual and the sexual part. Mrs. Morel knows that with Clara Paul would be connected only sexually and she will take his spiritual part for herself.
 * After love-making Paul breaks up with Clara. He can’t be with her as the whole being. The act of love with her is the highest state, it is the communication with the cosmos. His mother blocks his emotional development. He is in great tension. He can’t solve it.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">pg. 229 – I can’t bear it ... – a long kiss between Paul and his mother
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Development of Paul as a painter – he gets the prizes for the pictures – realistic, then paints a woman in factory, then switches to different technique (impressionism – pg. 166)
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Meanwhile, Mrs. Morel is ill with cancer and she suffers heavily, at last, Paul and his sister Annie put an overdose of morpheme in her milk. Paul resist the urge to follow her into the darkness and with a great effort turns towards life.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The narrator starts at present – Gertrude and Morel, her son and little daughter at some feast, husband is not at home. Poverty and sadness. Evening – she waits for husband when sewing. Now the narrator looks into the past and speaks about Morel’s relationship from the beginning. She is from a good family, educated, and proud. She meets him at a dance, he attracts her with his roughness. It’s new for her. A world she doesn’t know. After the wedding she learns that the house they live in isn’t their own, but she’s afraid of speaking about it with him. They don’t talk with each other. When the first son is born, she turns to him and forgets the husband. She earns things about him she didn’t know before. The world is only masculine. Traditional roles – miner goes after work to pub. Women wait at home, taking care about children. But Gertrude is not as other miners’ wives, she‘s not on their side. They are not her friends and she doesn’t care.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">pg. 20 At last Mrs. Morel despised her husband... She tried to force him to face things. He could not endure it – it drove him out of his mind.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">pg. 21 a scene when he cut the boy’s hair “I could kill you, I could!” she said.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The 1st time they’re talking about parting ‘ when he comes back drunk after his whole day trip with Jerry. She says she won’t leave him to let him live the way he wants and because of the children “The house is filthy with you” “Then get out of it – it’s mine.” ... “No,” she said loudly, “you shan’t have it all your own way, you shan’t do all you like.” “Go!” “I should be only too glad.” – it’s when they struggle for the first time. He hits her when she is pregnant with the third baby.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">pg. 34 – he woke up early and had some time for his own, and so did she. He brought her a cup of tee to bed and made her drink it up, he tried to take care of her. Tried to show his good sides when the time for the child came. She had a boy, that day. Walter was very sick at work, he was too tired when he got home. She was ill, the boy was nothing to him, “he stood at a loss what to say next He was tired, and this bother was rather a nuisance to him, and he didn’t quite know where he was” – pg. 40. “He wanted to kiss her but he dare not. She half wanted him to kiss her, but could not bring herself to give any sign.”
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">William goes to London. He got a very good job. He comes home only for Christmas. When Will. is away, Paul gets all of his mother's attention. He’s physically weak, not suited for hard work. He likes painting etc. He has to look for a job and is depressed by it – pg. 103 “He would have suffered much physical pain rather than this unreasonable suffering at being exposed to strangers, to be accepted or rejected.”
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Emotional relations are exaggerated in the sense of expressionism.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He celebrated his vision of the natural, whole human being.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He contrasted it with the artificiality of industrial society with its dehumanization of life and love.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">His novels were misunderstood and attacked because of their frank treatment of sexual matters.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> The Rainbow, 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Women in Love

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Twin novels, perhaps his best one. About Ursula Brangwen made him famous:

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> The White Peacock, 1911 
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He focuses on good and bad ways of love, on possibilities and borders of marriage. In his time it was considered erotic picantery. He had difficulties describing sexual experience in words even if he could describe other physical feelings brilliantly.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Sometimes he speaks clearly and directly, sometimes is unclear. Symbolic and gestural. He remains a problem so far. He revolutionarily changed our attitudes to body and its connection to thinking. At his time sermonizing and didactic tone in literature was not in fashion. After his death there were many extremes in appreciating his work. He was a man of extreme solutions, this pointed in some ways to nazism.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> The Trespasser, 1912 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Mother and Daughter 
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Women in Love was written in 1916. The Rainbow in 1915. This book was unfavorably received and copies were destroyed by the police. Couldn’t be published until 1921. His serious treatment of sexual themes outraged the public morals. Others called the book a loathsome study of sexual depravity. If he had lived to a normal age, he would probably be a revered literary figure. Like Hardy he would have found himself wealthy, had film rights from Sons and Lovers etc.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Why the Novel Matters  - a poetic essay. Stating the belief in the awareness of both body and mind. He separates everything into two categories - the alive and the dead. He declares himself superior, because life is for him the only important thing.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">A short story written in 1928 just two years before Lawrence’s death.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">A rather cruel story. Each character, in a different way, will probably suffer. However, no single character is very likeable. The relationship between mother and daughter is the most important in the story. Like most relationships in Lawrence, it is based upon power. Lawrence also shows how the younger woman is pulled out of the power of the female and towards that of the male. But the real mastery of Lawrence in this story is shown by the way he moves the reader between the thoughts and feelings of the various characters without making any one of them particularly attractive.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">'''+ viz. Lawrence’s Poetry '''