DH LAWRENCE

(1885-1930)

BACKGROUND

  • *British*
  • "DH"
    • David Herbert
    • born 9/11/85
    • 4th child
  • English coal-mining town (Eastwood, Nottinghamshire)
  • Father:
    • Arthur John Lawrence
    • struggling coal miner
    • mean drunk
    • poor education (uneducated)
  • Mother:
    • Lydia (Beardsall) Lawrence
    • former schoolteacher
    • smarter than his father
  • childhood:
    • frail child
    • poverty
    • bickering parents
  • **battles between his parents
    • --> mixed feelings about his mother
    • --> DHL strong attachment to his mother (Oedipal)
      • --> failed relationships with women AND
      • --> characterization
  • mother:
    • middle-class values, strict moral behavior
  • father:
    • working-class values, earthiness
    • (*primitive & instinctual*)
      • see STOCK characters below
  • scholarship to Nottingham High School
  • Nottingham University (graduated at 22)—teacher
  • odd jobs to pay way: clerk in surgical supply store
  • 1910:
    • euthanized his mother (overdose of sleeping medication)
    • seriously ill himself (TB)
  • teacher before writer (Stephen King)
  • 1912:
    • met & eloped (1 month later) with married German aristocrat, Frieda von Richthofen Weekley
      • she abandoned her 3 small children & husband (Ernest Weekly, professor at Nottingham University)
      • to Bavaria
        • (travel the world, restlessness)
        • –see Stephen Crane
  • 1914:
    • married Frieda (after her divorce)
    • traveled the globe, battled, but self-discovery
    • why he traveled, trying to find place to live w/o industrialization
  • 1917:
    • officially expelled from Cornwall

BACKGROUND

  • 1st novel:
    • The White Peacock (1911)
      • after the death of his mother, same year
      • *introduces 2 STOCK DHL characters:

2 STOCK DHL characters:

  • 1) the overly intellectual, civilized individual
  • 2) the more primitive, sensual man who rejects middle-class values & deplores the destruction of nature by industrialization
  • Sons and Lovers (1913):
    • autobiographical fiction novel
    • @ a writer trying to break free from his possessive mother & establish his own identity
  • The Rainbow (1915):
    • 3 generations of the Brangwen family
    • rural England of late 1800s
  • Women in Love (1920):
    • sequel to The Rainbow
    • more on the Brangwens
    • search for ideal relationships
      • between men & women
      • AND
      • between men & men (homosexuality—Oscar Wilde)
  • Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
    • banned around the world (pornographic)
    • wealthy married woman’s affair with gardener on her estate
  • accused of being a German spy
    • (spoke out against WWI)
    • --> was not allowed to leave the country (emigrate) due to his TB
  • censorship trials:
    • pornography
    • obscenity
    • (censorship today on music, movies)
  • Stephen Crane:
    • TB
    • restlessness, frequent moving

    •  

     

    ** TUBERCULOSIS **

    • Elizabeth B. Browning
    • HG Wells
    • Katherine Mansfield
    • DH Lawrence
    • George Orwell
    • John Keats
    • Stephen Crane

THEMES

  • self-discovery
    • (problem of his times)
  • relationships between men & women
    • misogyny
    • feminism?
  • male-male friendships =
    • sacred, inviolable
    • (homosexuality???)
  • primitive unconscious:
    • “a dark reality buried in the body, where consciousness, individuality, and sexuality absorbed in the nonhuman source of life” (CA)
  • “blood knowledge”:
    • through mother or sex

 

 

  • ** the exploration of the primitive & sexual in human nature
  • ** revolts against
    • Puritanism of Victorian Age (see Hawthorne)
    • mediocrity
    • social norms (see Kate Chopin)
    • the dehumanization of an industrial society

THEMES

  • causes of dehumanization =
    • Industrial Revolution
    • World War I
  • cures for dehumanization =
    • sex
    • primitive subconscious
    • nature
  • Nietzsche: “superman”
  • Freud: unconscious, desires, Oedipal Complex
    • “…a seat of consciousness in man other than the brain and the nervous system: "There is a blood-consciousness, which exists in us independently of the ordinary mental consciousness."
    • For Lawrence, the tragedy of modern life was that "the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness, and that will has gone over completely to the mental consciousness and is engaged in the destruction of blood-being or blood-consciousness." In this letter, as in the novels and poems he wrote at the time, Lawrence stressed the importance of the male-female "sexual connection" in rousing the blood-consciousness of the individual. "Blood knowledge comes either through the mother or through the sex," he declared. Lawrence formulated these ideas systematically in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, along with his theories about male-female relationships and the nature of women.” (CA)

STYLE

  • *SUBJECTIVITY*
    • (Joyce, Woolf, DHL)
    • inner character
      • to capture the exact feelings produced by immediate experience
      • (“immediacy” of feelings & experience)
    • more conventional style
  • simple language
    • = artistic purity
  • conventional style
    • in an age of experimentation
  • “magic realism”
  • sexual explicitness

 

  • STOCK CHARACTERS:
    • overly intellectual character (woman—his mother)
    • sensual primitive man (man—his father)
  • SETTINGS:
    • often used Eastwood as his setting
    • ironic juxtaposition of nature & industrialization

 STYLE

  • GENRES:
    • NOVELS
    • ESSAYS
    • SHORT STORIES:
      • influence of RL Stevenson, R. Kipling
    • POETRY:
      • 1st collection 1913
      • keen observations of nature & animals
      • simple language,
      • artistic purity
        • --> grandeur & dignity
    • CRITICAL ESSAYS:
      • Studies in Classical American Literature (1923)
      • original critical essays
      • Melville, Hawthorne, JF Cooper, Poe
    • PAINTINGS:
      • expressionist
      • religious themes, symbols, allusions

LINKS LINKS