Theme: modernism in american literature contents: introduction chapter the early twentieth century literature (1901-1939). Modernism

David Herbert Lawrence

1885-1930

David Herbert Lawrence explores the world of love between men and women and the cultural, historical and natural forces that bear on the fulfillment of human potential. A brilliant, imaginative, and emotional writer, Lawrence portrays characters sympathetically, as victims of an inhibiting society, and nature as symbolic of what is vital and nurturing in life.
D.H. Lawrence, an English novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and playwright, was born on 11 September in a poor family of a coalminer in the village of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in central England. He was the fourth child of a miner and an ex-schoolteacher. In 1898 at the age of thirteen he entered Nottingham High School winning a scholarship. Leaving school at sixteen he became a clerk for a short time. In 1906 he entered the training department of the Nottingham University College and after graduating from it was appointed as a teacher to an elementary school in Croydon, near London, where he began writing poems and short stories. Like that of many other writers his literary career started with writing highly charged love poetry. In 1913 appeared Lawrence’s first book of poems Love Poems and Others.
The conflict between his mother, who had been a schoolteacher and had written poetry, and his father, a crude and uneducated miner, made Lawrence feel keenly the tension between the gentler world of imagination and art and the world of physical labour. The tempestuous relationship with his violent father and passionate bonding with his refined, socially ambitious mother shaped much of his later work. In his writing Lawrence often contrasted the physical side of love with the passionless, intellectualized side. While his mother was clearly an early inspiration, he also wrote about his father with gentles, as in the semiautobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913). His mother kept her delicate son from strenuous stint in the mines. But her close intimacy with her son produced a powerful bond that warped his post adolescent development and delayed his emergence into full personal and artistic freedom.
In 1911 his first novel The White Peacock came out, and Lawrence decided to devote himself to literature.
In 1912 Lawrence met Frieda von Richthofen, the young wife of one of Lawrence’s Nottingham professors and mother of three children. The two fell in love instantly, left for Germany together and began a nomadic life together. Their relationship was intensely intimate but often troubled, and Lawrence based much of his fiction on this lifelong love. The couple was married in July 1914, when Frieda’s divorce became final. This was a stormy marriage from the first and inspired Lawrence’s volume of poems Look! We Have Come Through! (1917). During World War I Lawrence and his wife lived in London and at Greatham. Disillusioned with England and its narrow-minded rejection of his works with the pictures of sexual creativity Lawrence and his wife Frieda von Richthofen left the country for good in 1919, thereafter returning to England only for brief periods. Sea and Sardinia (1921) was a quick, joyous, unconventional record of a journey.
His second novel was the Tresspasser (1912), then the novel Sons and Lovers (1913), his first major work and semi-autobiographical account of his early life and the ambiguous relations he shared with his parents, which established him as a mature writer.
At the end of 1914 he published a book of short stories called The Prussian Officer, and in 1915 – the novel The Rainbow. Lawrence often suffered from censorship and public condemnation. The Rainbow was banned in England as obscene, and even his literary friends did not appreciate this strikingly original work. In 1916 appeared a travel book Twilight in Italy. The Lost Girl (1920) was an attempt to give the public what he believed it wanted. It won him the James Tait Memorial Prize and was followed by Aaron’s Rod (1922). Women in Love, which had been completed in 1917 but rejected by the London publishers was issued late in 1920. Women in Love is the deeper and more bitter than The Rainbow. It was a product of World War I, a period that strengthened Lawrence’s nightmare vision of humanity on the brink of collective suicide. Then followed Cangaroo (1923), a novel written and set in Australia, the result of his extensive travelling. The Plumed Serpent came out in 1926, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his last novel was written in Italy and published privately in 1928. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not legally published in its entirety until 1959. This booked was banned for its sexual explicitness, strong language, and detailed descriptions of sexual relationship and was not published in its complete form in England and the United States until over thirty years later. In this novel Lawrence tells the story of a love affair between an aristocratic lady and a game keeper in order to show the importance of the physical as well as the emotional side of human relationships. It contains explicit descriptions of the sexual awakening of its heroine. More permissive times have lessened the shock of its erotic realism. This book did much to expand the range of published material, for courts ruled that it is art and therefore justified in depicting love explicitly. Today it is regarded as a frank and vivid portrayal of a relationship based on passion and is respected as one of the twentieth century’s greatest literary works.
Lawrence’s nonfiction, fiction, and poetry all are characterized by strong physical descriptions and by sensitivity to the world of nature. One volume of poems is titled Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923); other collections include Tortoises (1921), Pansies (1929), and Nettles (1930).
Ill health and disillusionment with England caused Lawrence to travel the world, seeking a hospitable climate. The Lawrences visited and lived in Italy, Sicily, Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, New Mexico, and the South Pacific. Many of this localities and cultures provided Lawrence with inspiration for books. He had contracted tuberculosis while living in primitive conditions in Mexico.
He spent the winter 1929-1930 at Bandol and in February went to a sanatorium in France. Death finally claimed him at Vence on the French Riviera. He died at the age of forty-four of tuberculosis on March 1, 1930. His ashes were eventually taken to his ranch above Taos, New Mexico.
David Lawrence is classed among English modernists, though he did not deny the necessity of the plastic development of characters and the plot. What places him among modernists is Freud’s conception of an individuality and the theory of subconsciousness which he supported and propagated in his novels.
Disappointed with social life, Lawrence sought escape in the world of nature. He firmly believed that the evils of an unjust and corrupt society could be mitigated if men and women found warmth and happiness in love. The sufferings brought upon lovers by a cruel social law or, more often, by the clash of their conflicting – wills, by the hatred and revolt that sometimes go hand in hand with love are the main subjects of Lawrence’s novels.
Since World War I the philosophical outlook of most English writers has been deeply influenced by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis, as developed by Freud, is the apotheosis of the individual, the extreme of intellectual anarchy. It affected the works of D. H. Lawrence very much.
He was also the first writer who openly wrote about marriage and relationship of sexes. He intruded into the sphere of intimate life, breaking the prejudices of the time. However, realistic picturing of the life is characteristic of Lawrence’s novels: truthful pictures of the life of miners in Sons and Lovers; the description of St.Philip’s school in The Rainbow, beautiful and fascinating descriptions of nature in The White Peacock; atmosphere of family life in The Lost Girl.
Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers is largely autobiographical. It principally chronicles the war for Lawrence's soul between his mother and Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s first love. The main hero Paul Morel, a poet and painter, like the author himself, has been brought up in a working class home. Thus the book, set in a coalmining community similar to D.H.Lawrence’s birthplace, is based on his own experience and is a semi-autobiographical account of his early home life and the ambiguous relations with his parents – an obsession and the claustrophobic relationship with his mother and hatred he felt for his father. Life at Eastwood offers nothing to a vital, unambitious man like Paul’s father, except the pit and the pub. To his wife, with her intelligence and her longing for refinement, it offers only the chapel and the hope of getting up into the middle class – through her children if not through the disappointing husband. This is Paul Morel’s heritage, and the neurotic refusal of life engendered in him is the direct result of his parents’ failure. And the parents’ failure is the direct result of the pressures of an inhuman system.
Paul’s mother has one passion in her life – a passion for her sons; first for the eldest, then the second. Paul is urged into life by the reciprocal love of his mother. But when he comes to manhood, he fails to fall in love because his mother is the strongest power in his life. Lawrence shows the feelings and passion of Paul's mother. First it was motherly love to her little son. She cared about him, defended him from the cruelty of her husband and from hard work in the mine. She wants him to become a painter, she is so glad when he is successful in study and work. But she is very jealous and she demands the same love to herself from him. Meanwhile Paul comes into contact with a sensitive girl Miriam. She is timid and self-conscious because she loves him, and with a prophetic insight fears that he will go beyond her limitations. Paul is angry with her emotional intensity because it already begins to constitute a claim on him. Strongly drawn to Miriam, he cannot and will not give himself to her; he wants to be safe. Miriam fights with Paul’s mother for the possession of his soul. But mother gradually proves to be the stronger of the two, because of the tie of .their blood. Paul realizes that he cannot really love Miriam, but he does not know why. He does not clearly recognize the power of his mother. It is true that he returns to his mother, but he thinks that he is still faithful to Miriam, that she still holds him in the depths of her soul. Miriam wants a completely committed love with faithfulness, tenderness and understanding – qualities that Paul cannot give. Yet her possession of his soul comes to matter less and less. His mother wins the fight for his soul. His mother is “the chief thing to him, the only supreme thing”. He said about Miriam to his mother, “No, Mother – I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you. ...I could let another woman – but not her. She’d leave me no room, not a bit of a room –“. And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly. Another woman comes into his life. Clara comes to work at the factory where Paul is employed, and her husband also works there. Clara is different from Miriam. She is independent, emancipated and experienced. The development of their relations is wholly without any tender glow. But his mother is not displeased; she thinks that he is getting away from Miriam, and that he is growing up.
When Paul is severely hurt by Clara’s husband and pneumonia follows, his mother nurses him, and he again returns safely to his mother’s care. But his safety is clouded by his mother’s illness; it is a fatal cancer. Paul is prostrated with grief. Clara leaves Paul because she realizes that her husband has more dignity than Paul.
His last effort with Miriam fails. They meet again, with all the old tension. She suggests marriage, and in a scene of tortured, enigmatic confusion Paul rejects it. He says: “You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And I should die there, smothered.” Lawrence’s exposition of the novel closes with these words: “He is left in the end naked of everything, with him drift towards death.”
Lawrence’s work has been the subject of violent argument. On the one hand, it was praised to the skies, on the other, it was reviled as immoral. The truth of the matter is that Lawrence was one of the first among English writers to be absolutely outspoken on questions of love and relations between men and women while the element of social protest in Sons and Lovers is not strong.