DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE

DAVID HERBERT LAWRENCE

Being, a novelist I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the

philosopher and the poet who are all great masters of different bits of man alone, but

never of the whole hog" - Lawrence stated in Phoenix II. His awareness of being an artist

is related to a feeling, which places the novelist on the most important position from the

point of view of the interrelation between total man - spirit, body and feeling - and the

novelist.

Despite the fact that Lawerence's name is connected with his least successful

novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as some critics admit, yet, he is accepted as one of the

greatest novelists. However, he rejected the "well - made novel", the fluidity of the

characters' thoughts and modern novelists' preoccupation with unimportant things: "Did

I feel a twinge in my little toe, or didn't I? Asks every character of Mr.Joyce or of Miss

Richardson or of Mr. Proust" (Phoenix). Instead of boring characters Lawrence wanted to

create living characters that should be related to nature and other items of

Lawrence's propensity for morality and emotion at the level of criticism is

extended at the level of his novels. The relation between the novel and morality is

connected with the author's capacity of reflecting reality: morality is "that delicate, for

ever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumbiant universe" while

"the immorality lies in the novelist's helpless, unconscious predilection".

As a novelist Lawrence is considered "a deliberate innovator in his method", yet

he remains in part traditional despite his interest in sex and the psyche. Lawrence's

modernism consist in his making use of stream of consciousness as a modern technique.

In the spirit of his contemporary age he directs his interest towards "another center of

consciousness... beyond thought", which is darkness, irrationality, senses. His

philosophy is built up on the opposition light - darkness, which becomes the opposition

between order and chaos, law and love, male and female and leads to Freudian

psychology. According to Andrew Sanders, Lawrence's new philosophy, like Freudian

psychology, is centered male the concept of welling, subterranean male consciousness

and on the libertation of sexuality from inherited social repression". Lawrence's work is

woven round the concept of love.

Love is the perfect feeling, which helps the novelist establish a new direction in

his novels starting from instinct to the intellect, trying to cultivate the spirit from the point

of view of the body. The previous oppositions suggest a struggle between male and

female and make love also take the form of a constant opposition since it is annihilating

and self - constructing at the same time; this self annihilation aims at regeneration.

With Lawrence, the concept of love implies three progressive moments beginning

with a total frustration and dissatisfaction in Sons and Lovers which is centred on the

son's oedipal attachment to his mother. In Women in Love the balance is achieved, yet

without completeness and the last moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover shows calmness

and reconciliation. Incompleteness and lack of satisfaction suggest a movement without

ending, they represent the elements generating reiteration.

Sons and Lovers is considered an autobiographical novel and Lawrence's most

popular work; it was published in 1913, the year of his mother's death. The author

describes the life of a working - class family starting with the marriage of Arthur Morel

who is a miner, with a woman from a higher social class. This incompatibility between

Mr. and Mrs. Morel leads to the breaking off of their relationships. Yet, the novel is

centred on Paul, the middle son of the family, it deals with his growing - up and also

with his struggle to rise out of his father's social stratum; this struggle is becked by his

mother. Paul is also a representative of his generation "caught in the web of modernity"

.

On another hand the relation between Mrs. Morel and her son steps across the borders of

a common relation mother - son, being especially close in proportion with the increasing

alienation between the parents. From that point of view the novel is suited to psycho-

analytical approach, to Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud,

Oedipus "destiny moves us only because it might have been ours - because the oracle

laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. " Freud states that the main

source of pleasure for the male infant - seen as a mass of impulses, as aggressive - is his

mother. Therefore his father is considered a rival that he wants to remove, but he

identifies with his father in order to repress his development, or which leads to

homosexuality or to impotence, physical or psychological.

In Sons and Lovers Mrs. Morel turns from her husband who is not able to answer

her needs and desires, to her sons who become a kind of substitute lovers. The childern's

innate Oedipal tendencies are encouraged by their mother who makes them see their

father as a failure. Their father's brutality causes William and Paul to defend their

mother, estranges them from their father's influence and kills masculinity bt virtue of the

process of effeminisation. There is an inner struggle between their normal sexual

instinct's and their actual evolution led by their mother's needs. It is getting more

dangerous since it is accompanied by the obsession with death materialised in William

case.

Finney states that one of the major themes is the gradual awakening of Paul to the

deadly effects of his oedipal fixation on his mother. The penultimate chapter called The

Release, shows how Paul comes to reverse the oedipal desire to kill the father by

administrating an overdose to his mother. One could say that he has finally learnt to

direct his anger outwards to its source". His gesture symbolises his wish to return to

normality.

The second part of the novel is built on the contrast between sacred and profane

love embodies by Miriam and Clara and ends with Paul's split consciousness between

two voices representing "Eros and Thanatos", between his dependence on women and his

fear of being extinguished by them". Miriam is the spiritual partner and resembles so

much his mother that the latter accuses Miriam of wanting to take her place. Miriam

Leivers is seen as an intellectualist woman and her virginity is associated to Paul's

"virginal intellectual" - as Pinkey states. She is also assigned a rapid emotionalism

through epithets like "surcharged", "intense", "rhapsodic", "mystical".

While Paul appears a victim of his generation and his society, Miriam is a victim of

Paul's. On the other hand Clara is used by Paul as an escape in one of his overwhelming

moment - his mother's death - and she promises him an earthly relationship, a

connection with life.