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Ghent University

Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

2008-2009

D. H. Lawrence as a Modernist Didactic Definer of ―the Natural Man‖: a Confrontation of The White Peacock, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and His Later Short Stories

with His Nonfictional Writings.

Supervisor: Paper submitted in partial fulfilment

Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor of the requirements for the degree of ―Master

in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Engels-Nederlands‖

by Sarah Rubbens Rubbens 2

LIST OF CONTENTS

0. Introduction ...... 5

1. D. H. Lawrence's Life in His Fiction ...... 8

1.1 A Brief Overview of D. H. Lawrence's Life ...... 8

1.2 Some Random Autobiographic Elements in His Fiction ...... 13

2. D. H. Lawrence as a Modernist ...... 17

2.1 A Short Definition of Modernism in England and the General Context of the

Beginning of the 20th Century ...... 17

2.2 Modernism in Lawrence's Nonfiction ...... 21

2.3 Modernism in Lawrence's Fiction ...... 33

2.3.1 Modernism in The White Peacock? ...... 34

2.3.2 Lady Chatterley's Lover as a Modernist Novel ...... 38

2.3.3 His Short Stories as Examples of Modernism ...... 40

3. D. H. Lawrence as an Educator for His Readers: Pouring the Philosophical Ideas of His

Nonfiction into His Fiction ...... 43

3.1 The Didactic Quality of Lawrence's Nonfiction ...... 45

3.1.1 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious ...... 45

3.1.2 Fantasia of the Unconscious ...... 50

3.1.3 Lawrence's Essays...... 55

3.1.4 His Last Philosophical Work: Apocalypse ...... 61

3.2 How Lawrence Didactically Adopted His Philosophy in His Fiction .... 64

3.2.1 Philosophy in The White Peacock ...... 65

3.2.2 Philosophy in Lady Chatterley's Lover ...... 71

3.2.3 Philosophy in Lawrence's Short Stories...... 73

4. D. H. Lawrence as a Definer of Masculinity and Femininity ...... 75 Rubbens 3

4.1 Gender Issues in Lawrence's Nonfiction ...... 76

4.2 Gender Issues in Lawrence's Fiction ...... 81

4.2.1 Gender in The White Peacock ...... 82

4.2.2 Gender in Lady Chatterley's Lover ...... 83

4.2.3 Gender in Lawrence's Short Stories ...... 85

5. Conclusion ...... 88

Works Cited...... 90

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without some people this dissertation would not have become what it is now. First of all, I would like to thank Professor Dr. M. Demoor, to whom I turned for advise. She has supervised the proceedings of my dissertation and has given me useful suggestions how to improve my style. Thanks also to Ruben De Baerdemaeker, assistant in the department of English literature, because he has been a great help by suggesting which books might be useful for the secondary bibliography. I would like to thank the librarians of the department of Philosophy and English literature. Finally, I am also grateful to my mother for reading many pages, and for listening.

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0 Introduction

David Herbert Lawrence, better known as D. H. Lawrence, was an author who marked the transition between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, as he lived from 1885 until 1930. He is categorized among the modernists, for he expressed new ideas in literature which often turned him into a controversial author. The Norton Anthology of English Literature introduces Lawrence as constantly at war with the mechanical and artificial, with the constraints and hypocrisies that civilization imposes. Because he had new things to say and a new way of saying them, he was not easily or quickly appreciated. Although his early novels are more conventional in style and treatment, from the publication of The Rainbow the critics turned away in bewilderment and condemnation. (2243-2244)

The critics' negative opinion of Lawrence's work from The Rainbow onwards, can indeed be seen in the reaction to Lawrence's later work, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, of which the second version was unpublishable by the usual channels. David Ellis explains Lawrence's urge to write this second version, in which ―the descriptions were as explicit as he could make them‖, as follows: Real frankness, [Lawrence] must have decided, was impossible within the confines of 'polite' language and he therefore made use of cunt, fuck, shit, piss – words very rarely read in his time and usually only heard in hostile or aggressive contexts. One or two of these had made a fleeting appearance in the first version but they were now used without restraint.(Ellis VI) Apart from the controversial language he used, his subject material was also unusual for his time because of the theme of adultery. As David Ellis explains, also a lot of famous novels of the nineteenth century took this as a theme, ―but in those the adulterous relationship was not across a class divide and in any case the results were eventually unhappy.‖ (Ellis IX) Lawrence tried to avoid the usual channels of publishing by having his controversial book printed in Florence in 1928, for which he wrote a third and final version.

Apart from being labelled as a modernist writer, Lawrence can also be seen as an educator for his readers. He claimed that he wrote ―from a deep moral sense‖, ―regarding himself quite as much as a teacher as an entertainer‖, which turned him into ―[a] writer in the nineteenth century mould‖ (Ellis XII). With respect to the educative content of Lawrence's work, David Ellis spots an evolution in his career, for ―[t]he fervour with which he accepted the responsibilities of the novelist Rubbens 6 as teacher increased as he grew older and serves (...) to acquit him of merely wanting to excite his readers in Lady Chatterley's Lover‖. (Ellis XII-XIII). Moreover, Lawrence disapproved of pornography and considered sex to be deeply serious, because sexuality as a healing force against the artificial aspects in modern society is the major theme in his prose, more implicitly in his earlier work like The White Peacock, and more explicitly in his later work. His readers he tried to teach the power of liberation from ―the deadening restrictiveness of middle-class conventional living‖ (Norton Anthology 2244). This can especially be seen in his negative stance towards the way in which the middle-class suffocated the living, natural and spontaneous relationships between men and women.

The first chapter of the dissertation will present a short introduction to Lawrence's life, more specifically focusing on those aspects in his life that are reflected in his work. In the second chapter, I will investigate to a deeper extent to which degree Lawrence may be called a modernist, by comparing his first, and more conventional novel, The White Peacock, with his most notorious last novel Lady Chatterley's Lover and some of his later short stories, like ―Sun‖ and ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖. By leaving out the works of his middle period, this dissertation only aims to give a general impression of the evolution in his career, without being all- embracing. The reason for focussing on his later works, is that those were written at a time when Lawrence was already more developed in his stance towards the world he lived in. Hence, they more clearly illustrate his personal philosophy and didactic solutions to the aches of the modern time. Then, the third chapter will deal more specifically with those didactic aspects in his nonfictional and fictional work, namely his defence of ―intuition‖, ―the dark forces of the inner self, that must not be allowed to be swamped by the rational faculties but must be brought into a harmonious relation with them‖ (Norton Anthology 2244). Thus, the third chapter will discuss Lawrence as a didactic definer of freedom, inveighing against tradition and provinciality and highlighting the instinctual in people, mostly invoked by nature. Finally, the fourth chapter will get a closer look on how Lawrence constructed gender roles within his vitalistic philosophy. This chapter will focus more deeply on some of his ideas on sexuality and marriage. Some of his feminist opponents will be given a mouthpiece, and their claim that Lawrence was a misogynist will be pondered.

As such, this dissertation will try to provide an identification of D. H. Lawrence as a didactic modernist, who was concerned with the technological and social developments of his days: Rubbens 7 modernization and changing gender relations. By confronting his fiction with his nonfiction, I will investigate how Lawrence saw these developments as problematic and which social, religious and psychological solutions he suggested to regenerate ―a rotten, idealistic machine-civilisation‖ (Pykett 133). Thus, by illustrating Lawrence's didactic and philosophical depths alongside his modernist characteristics, the entire dissertation is constructed around the idea that modernists can be constructive and didactic as well, and that they are not singularly focussed on scepticism and the destruction of old values. In other words, I will try to conclude that Lawrence was a genuine modernist according to the definition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature: ―Trying to be true to the new skepticisms and hesitations, the modernists also attempted to construct credible new alternatives to the old belief systems.‖ (1838)

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1 D. H. Lawrence's Life in His Fiction

In order to get a better understanding of Lawrence's work, it is interesting to take a quick glance at his life. As Anthony Burgess (1986) has stated: Lawrence is always in his work and is irremovable: any survey of his writings has to be a survey of his life (...) His heroes are always himself, just as his heroines are always the women in his life. But when one speaks of the Laurentian 'self', one never means an easily recognised unity. (9) Therefore, before turning to some autobiographic aspects in his work, I will first give a brief overview of Lawrence's life.

1.1 A Brief Overview of D. H. Lawrence's Life

For this section, I have read several biographies, D. H. Lawrence. A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers (1990), Flame into Being. The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess (1985), and parts of D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 by John Worthen (1991), together with Barbara Ann Schapiro's (1999) introductory chapter of D. H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life, ―Lawrence's Biography‖.

D. H. Lawrence was born in a proletarian milieu, as the son of Arthur Lawrence, a miner in Eastwood who spoke a thick dialect and had never received an education. His mother, Lydia Beardsall – whose surname is also Cyril's in The White Peacock – descended from a middle-class background and was more cultivated, speaking standard English and having taught at a private school. Anthony Burgess (1985) defines their infatuation for each other and ensuing marriage as follows: [S]he fell for his physique. He was big, muscular, bearded, and fell in his turn for her gentleness, delicacy, aura of a refined world far away from his. The gods of genetics like to work through the attraction of opposites. It was a disastrous marriage, but it produced D. H. Lawrence. (14) On top of his parents' physical and educational dissimilarities, there was also a behavioural and religious discrepancy between the two: Lydia being refined, pious and a product of a Methodist background, eventually growing more attracted to the more intellectual Congregationalism; Arthur being a drunkard whose life was devoid of abstract ideas, ―not even the vague theological ones of the Congregationalist chapel‖ (Burgess 14). Rubbens 9

This Congregational church exerted a great influence on the young Lawrence, who went to Sunday school and services at the Congregational Chapel. Yet, even though this type of Protestantism had put its emphasis on freedom of conscience, it did not prevent Lawrence from rejecting its dogma violently at the age of sixteen. As Jeffrey Meyers (1990) notes, ―[Lawrence] felt that the meek and mild doctrines of Christianity had somehow emasculated the passive sons of Eastwood‖ (27). Lawrence puts it in his letters as follows: ―From earliest years right into manhood, like any other nonconformist child I had the Bible poured every day into my helpless consciousness‖ (quoted from Meyers 27).

Nevertheless, Congregationalism also contributed positively to his personality: ―individualism, enthusiasm, a sense of responsibility and a self-confident, didactic, prophetic and crusading spirit‖ (Meyers 28). If we acknowledge that Lawrence was a prophetic writer who tried to spread his philosophy throughout his writings – which I will further discuss in the third section – his religious education undoubtedly exerted an important influence on the writer he was to become.

Lawrence's youth was crucial in defining his conception of gender roles. As his mother, Lydia, was quite the opposite of his father, Arthur, Lawrence came to see sensuality, wholeness, warmth, a less articulate nature, and exuberance as male qualities, whereas he associated untouchableness, detachment, reserve and rationality with femininity. Also Jeffrey Meyers claims that Lawrence combined characteristics of both his parents: the refined and artistic bourgeois traits from his mother; ―the intuition, vitality, zest for life, love of nature, defiance of authority, scorn for materialism and rejection of conventional values‖ from his father. (Meyers 19). According to John Worthen (1991), Lawrence longed for being a man simple, sensual and whole: one who loved, and who was loved, physically and undemandingly in a way which he found, in his adolescence, more characteristic of his father than of his mother, and of men than of women. (158) Nevertheless, Lawrence's urge to be a physically loving man was constantly countered by his fear of exposure, his shame of bodily expression and his emotional detachment, which Worthen sees ―as the most traumatic aspect of his young life‖ (Schapiro 14). The combination of these qualities, which he inherited or learned from his mother, with the emotional frankness and passion in his novels, clearly illustrates the paradoxes of Lawrence's psychic life. According to Anthony Burgess, he was a boy taking ―the side of the mother‖, while ―the poet in him had to respond to the simple, sensuous, passionate nature of the father‖ (14). So, as a result of his home situation, Lawrence was Rubbens 10 a boy-man who was ―caught between his habitual, torturing detachment, and his passionate longing for attachment‖ (Worthen 158). According to Schapiro, Lawrence's fiction therefore ―offers an exceptionally candid view of the often contradictory needs and desires that drive human affective life‖ (15).

As a teenager, D. H. Lawrence caught pneumonia, and although his mother vigilantly nursed him back into health, his condition remained tubercular during the rest of his life, causing him to die at the age of forty-four. While his mother took care of him, they entered into a very close relationship, ―which some might regard as morbid‖ (Burgess 17). It was even so close that ―Lawrence was taught by his mother to hate and fear his father‖ (Meyers 25). His mother stimulated his feminine side which would contribute to his skills as a novelist, for ―it gave him an astonishing insight into women and enabled him to create a brilliant series of female characters‖ (Meyers 26). Lawrence has described his bond with his mother in one of his letters: I was born hating my father: as early as ever I can remember. (...) This has been a kind of bond between me and my mother. We have loved each other, almost with a husband and wife love, as well as filial and maternal. We knew each other by instinct. (...) We have been like one, so sensitive to each other that we never needed words. It has been rather terrible, and has made me, in some respects, abnormal. (quoted from Meyers 25)

Another person of major importance in his life was Jessie Chambers, with whom he got acquainted around 1901. She is represented in The White Peacock as Emily Saxton, who also lives in a farm. He developed an important friendship with her, and it was through her that he became familiar with the farm life and its natural productive rhythm, which would become a major theme in his philosophy and literature. Jessie Chambers was the first person that made him aware of his ambivalence and made him experience his relationship with his mother as an obstacle for some other part inside his psyche, namely the urge to become a man and outgrow his boyish phase – as already mentioned above. As Anthony Burgess notes: He loved the darkness of innocent sleep with his mother, as well as the windy sunlit openness of the farm. Jessie could have turned him into a man, but he wanted to remain his mother's boy, even going so far as to refuse to shave when his young beard began to sprout. (18)

Jessie Chambers was also important for the launching of Lawrence's literary career. It was she who sent three of his poems and the story ―Odour of Chrysanthemums‖ to Ford Madox Hueffer, Rubbens 11 a writer himself and the editor of The English Review. Hueffer detected quality in Lawrence's work and through him Lawrence met the modernist Ezra Pound. Hueffer also read the manuscript of The White Peacock, Lawrence's first novel, and recommended it to Heinemann, who accepted the book and published it in 1911. Although Hueffer, better known under his post-war degermanicised name Ford Madox Ford, praised Lawrence for his ―genius‖, he also found a lot of careless structure and outdated style in this book, stating that it had ―every fault that the English novel can have‖ (Burgess 20). Burgess accounts for Hueffer's reaction by pointing out that Hueffer had been influenced by the great French stylists, who were working on fictional technique. This was an influence which the more provincially educated proletarian Lawrence lacked. Therefore, in Lawrence's first novel, Hueffer deplored what he saw as carelessness, repetitiveness, a truckling to narrative tradition and a disdain for modernist devices. He saw that first novel as little more than a mediocre piece of Edwardian fiction. Except, of course, for the 'genius' (Burgess 21).

After his mother's death in 1910, Lawrence's mental condition was severely impaired and he was struck by tuberculosis, which made it impossible for him to remain in England as a teacher. He then decided to turn entirely to the writing profession. Yet, he believed that he could not earn a living by writing alone and he made some arrangements to teach in Germany. Therefore, he consulted Professor Ernest Weekley, his former French teacher who had connections in Germany and had married a German wife Emma Maria Frieda Johanna von Richthofen. Lawrence fell in love with her, they eloped together to Munich and eventually to an Austrian town. These journeys contributed to his travel books and caused him to develop a growing anti-British attitude. According to Anthony Burgess, this had a lot to do with Lawrence's ―failure to force his fellow-countrymen to read him‖ and with Weekley's refusal to divorce Frieda. (Burgess 38). Eventually, the divorce went through and Lawrence and Frieda got married in July 1914, a few weeks before the Great War broke out. Soon, their opposing natures were revealed, which Anne Smith (1978) claims to be ―vital to the equilibrium of their relationship‖ (36). Smith even connects the opposition between Lawrence and his wife as a breeding ground for Lawrence's later ―emphasis on polarity‖, which I will discuss with respect to his philosophy in chapter 3 (36).

Lawrence suffered tremendously under the war, as he saw it as ―a demented defection from a great salvatory principle, the one implied in his poems and novels: man belonged to the cosmos and was fulfilled through his natural instincts, of which love was the greatest‖. (Burgess 62). Lawrence blamed industrialism, as ―a vast mechanical complex which was now destroying [man]‖ Rubbens 12

(Burgess 62). During the war, Lawrence tried to spread his philosophy, but he did not manage to earn a living by these writings, which the audience considered to be too ―visceral‖, as Burgess calls it (62).

During the war, The Rainbow was taken down by the Daily News as a ―monotonous wilderness of phallicism‖ and the puritans had taken it to court. This in turn, led to the stigmatization of Lawrence as an obscene writer and the prohibition to publish ―anything under his own name until the war was over and lesser obscenities forgiven‖ (Burgess 69). Irritated by the English reception of his work The Rainbow, Lawrence and Frieda went as far west as they could, to Cornwall, where they met John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, and the four of them became friends.

After the war, he proceeded with his pilgrimage, which Burgess calls ―a search for old cultures which had not yet been wounded or quelled by industrialism‖ (83). This brought him to the Mexican Indians and later on to Italy, where Lawrence learned to engage in the Mediterranean hedonism, or as Burgess concludes: ―it may have been good for Lawrence to have his puritanical earnestness assailed after a bad time in which his nerves had been strung to breaking‖ (103). This feeling may have been heightened by seeing the male nude statues in Florence, which to Lawrence were as embodiments of ―the self-assertiveness of unspoilt pre-industrial man‖ (Burgess 103). He continued his journey to Sardinia, which gave birth to one of his best travel books, Sea and Sardinia, and some of the impressions he had of Italy return in his later short story, ―Sun‖, which will be dealt with later on in this dissertation.

Lawrence and Frieda continued their journey to Australia, which inspired him to write Kangaroo. He ended this novel in Taos of which the unspoilt pre-industrialism made him feel at ease. On his return from New Mexico to Europe in 1925, Lawrence revisited his native Midlands. Again confronted with industrialism, from which he had been excluded during his travelling, he gave vent to his loathing in Lady Chatterley' Lover, which was to become his last novel.

In the winter of 1929, Lawrence's health was alarmingly poor. As Aldous Huxley has written to his brother: ―He hasn't written a line or painted a stroke for the last 3 months. Just lack of vital strength‖ (quoted from Burgess 195). He finally left the sanatorium to die in a villa in the French Vence, where he was buried in March 1930, only to be taken to Taos for reburial a year later, in a memorial chapel. Richard Aldington describes this new burial place as situated Rubbens 13

on the slope of the Rockies just behind his ranch and almost shadowed by the great pine tree. It is a 'peaceful oblivious place' such as he desired, where in the hot months the bees hum in the many flowers, a jay calls harshly, the wind hisses softly through the pine- needles, and in the afternoons there come the crash an roar of thunder. (quoted from Burgess 197)

1.2 Some Random Autobiographic Elements in His Fiction

As Stanley Sultan (1999) has stated, we should not overestimate the autobiographic degree of Lawrence's fiction, for until his death Lawrence has taken a lot of material that was alien to his own life as well. Rather than being part of an ―autobiographical project‖ his novels are merely characterised by ―the casual use(...) of autobiographical material‖ (Sultan 246). Hence, Lawrence's fiction ought not to be reduced to autobiography: To the end of his short life, he persisted in the relationship which he established when young between his life experience and his art: not to write fictional autobiography but to use himself as so much more material for fiction. (Sultan 248)

So, a lot of themes that are implied in Lawrence's prose, can be traced in his life and some of his characters share features or viewpoints with Lawrence as a human being, not just the author of fictional stories. In The White Peacock, the I-narrator Cyril Beardsall – whom Stanley Sultan calls Lawrence's ―facsimile‖ – is expressing a viewpoint that can be compared to Lawrence's, namely that people should adopt a natural lifestyle (Sultan 228). Therefore Cyril admires the woodkeeper Annable, who echoes Lawrence's opinion about raising children: ―natural as weasels – that's what I said they should be – bred up like a bunch o' young foxes, to run as they would‖ (The White Peacock 190). Lawrence also implicitly draws a parallel between him and Cyril, because the latter is born in the same month as Lawrence: I was born in September, and love it best of all the months.(...) The mornings come slowly. The earth is like a woman married and fading, she does not leap up with a laugh for the first fresh kiss of dawn, but slowly, quietly, unexpectantly lies watching the waking of each new day. The blue mist, like memory in the eyes of a neglected wife, never goes from the wooded hill, and only at noon creeps from the near hedges. (The White Peacock 106) The references to the ―woman married and fading‖ and to the ―neglected wife‖, and Cyril's preference for the temperate and slow nature of this woman, may be autobiographical as well, for as the Norton Anthology states, ―Lawrence was aware from a young age of the struggle between his Rubbens 14 parents, and allied himself with his mother's delicacy and refinement, resenting his father's coarse and sometimes drunken behavior‖ (Norton 2243). Indeed, Cyril Beardsall lives with his mother and sister, without a father, which may be seen as an illustration of Lawrence's contempt for his father, which he felt as an adolescent. As Anthony Burgess notes: The Beardsalls are the Lawrences freed from the eldest Lawrence, who is dying far away from them with his kidneys shot to pieces through drink. Lawrence, who is Cyril in the book, had dreamt of a cottage and thirty shillings a week, living with his mother and helping with the housework when not painting and reading Shelley. (23)

The uncommon fondness of his mother, as well as her jealousy towards other women in her son's life are taken as a theme in Sons and Lovers. This Oedipal dimension finds an opposite in the short story ―Mother and Daughter‖, where it is the daughter who is imprisoned in an unhealthily close connection to her mother, with whom she eventually severs the ties, by choosing for a man.

It was only later, after he had written The White Peacock, that Lawrence started to ―appreciate his father's vitality‖ (Norton 2243). This is illustrated in Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which the gamekeeper Mellors, who represents the idea of vitality, may be seen as an biographic mirror for Lawrence's father, and thus as an autobiographic mouthpiece for Lawrence, who had been developing an admiration for a life full of vitality. As David Ellis (2007) writes in his introduction to the novel, the similarities between Lawrence and Mellors are that they are both born into the industrial proletariat, and they have both become educated afterwards, which makes them both ―operate successfully in middle- or upper-class society, without ever feeling at home there‖ (Ellis VIII). Ellis further mentions the two unnamed women who are described in chapter 14 as past connections to Mellors, who equally disappointed Lawrence in his youth, namely Jessie Chambers and Helen Cork. Cyril describes both women as anti-physical, platonic human beings, as a result of which he had started to loath them: We were the most literary-cultured couple in ten counties. I held forth with rapture to her, positively with rapture. I simply went up in smoke. And she adored me. The serpent in the grass was sex. (...) She just didn't want it. She adored me, she loved me to talk to her and kiss her (...) But the other she just didn't want. And there are lots of women like her. And it was just the other that I did want. So there we split. (...) Then I took on with another girl (...) She loved everything about love, except the sex. (...) I loathed all that. I wanted a woman who wanted me, and wanted it. (LCL 176) Rubbens 15

Nevertheless, David Ellis also mentions differences between Lawrence and Mellors, for by the time Lawrence was writing this novel, he had stopped to be sexually active, which again finds a autobiographic equivalent in the character of Clifford Chatterley, who returns from the war ―with the lower half of his body, from the hips down, paralysed for ever‖ (LCL 1). Ellis puts forward that Lawrence may rather have identified with Tommy Dukes, ―who admits to being sexually inactive but continues to believe that the phallus is the only bridge to the future‖ (Ellis IX).

Apart from his father's vitality, D. H. Lawrence also adopted a respect for the local dialect which his father spoke, the Derbyshire dialect. Very much like his respect for his father's vitality, his respect for the local dialect came later in his life. So, although his mother had taught him to speak a refined English, he later managed to learn the dialect as well. His respect for the dialect found an outlet in his poetry, as well as in his later fiction. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, the gamekeeper Mellors speaks a dialect. This is of course not surprising, as Mellors is representative of the vitality and natural spontaneity that Lawrence associated with his father. On the other hand, in his earlier prose, like for instance The White Peacock, he did not yet fully respect the dialect, as it is spoken by the mother who is beating her children: ―I canna mange 'em, I canna,‖ said the mother mournfully. ―They growin' beyont me – I dunna know what to do wi' em. An' niver a' 'and does 'e lift ter 'elp me – no – 'e cares not a thing for me – not a thing – nowt but makes a mock an' a sludge o' me.‖ (193) This slightly disrespectful attitude is compatible with Lawrence's earlier preference for his mother's refined and restrained nature. As such, Lawrence's first novel resonates a rather snobbish vision, in which even the farming neighbour of the Beardsalls [the Saxons], based on the the Chambers family, are purged of bucolic grossness, and also their dialect, in order to be fit company for Cyril an Lettice and their 'little mother'. (Burgess 23, my additions)

As already mentioned in the previous chapter on his life, the cataclysm of the Great War had a great impact on Lawrence, feeding his hatred towards industrialism. This is reflected in his later novels like The Rainbow, as Burgess situates it in the character of Ursula: ―Hatred sprang up in Ursula's heart; If she could she would smash the machine. Her soul's action should be the smashing of the great machine‖ (The Rainbow, quoted from Burgess 75). It is a conviction that is present throughout his entire last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not in his first one, The White Peacock, proving that it is a later evolution in his work: Rubbens 16

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. (Lady Chatterley's Lover 1)

A year after his death in 1930, Lawrence found his final burial place in a memorial chapel in Taos, a ―'peaceful oblivious place' such as he desired‖ (Richard Aldington, quoted from Burgess 197). This atmosphere is indeed breathing the atmosphere which Lawrence was searching for throughout his life, and which he had been trying to convey in his writings. He has been a man who constantly felt at unease with the ugly industrialized atmosphere of his native town and prophesied a life embellished by nature and love, a natural love.

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2 D. H. Lawrence as a Modernist

Lawrence certainly was quite controversial, for he dared to utter new ideas that had not been enunciated before. As Anthony Burgess (1986) writes in his biography of Lawrence: It was not until about 1934 that I began to know about Lawrence. What my father's generation, which was also Lawrence's, called dirt I and my schoolfellows thought of as liberation. Those were great days for the young who looked for sex in books, and they can never be recovered in an age of permissiveness. Literature was the way into a forbidden world. (...) [W]e heard there were three modern works which said too much about sex and in consequence had been banned by the British state. These were The Well of Loneliness, Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses. (1-2)

All three of these books defy the conventions of decency, for they contain either sexual inversion, as in the case of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, or sexually explicit scenes, as in Lawrence's and James Joyce's novels. Consequently, Burgess calls each of these books modern. It is obvious that Ulysses is a modernist novel, characterised by stylistic and thematic novelties, but to which extent can we call D. H. Lawrence a modernist? I will try to answer this question in this chapter. Before turning to Lawrence as a modernist, I will first give a brief definition of modernism in England and draw an overall picture of the context at the beginning of the twentieth century.

2.1 A Short Definition of Modernism in England and the General Context of the Beginning of the 20th Century

In the modernist cultural era, with, according to Michael Levenson (1999), its peak between 1910 and 1925, a lot of little magazines were published as a way of creating a forum for new vibrating ideas. As Michael Soto (2001) argues, these modernist ideas were ―self-consciously break[ing] with the past and actively seek[ing] new forms of expression‖ (Modernism). In an effort ―to make it new‖, modernist authors tried to ―[change] our conception of literature and its relation to society‖ (Modernism). This craving for newness was considerably influenced by the trauma of World War I, which may be seen as ―a great engine of modernism‖ because it had shattered the old values (Norton 1840).

The modernist period in England was a time when continental avant-garde movements, like futurism and cubism, were introduced to the British art scene. This helped to create a form of Rubbens 18

British modernism, which was advocated by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and which they baptised ―vorticism‖. Teresa Prudente is aware of the vorticist indebtedness to futurism. She defines the Italian futurists as artists who were not only concerned with movement and technology, but who also criticized ―the concept of art seen as mimesis, which led, in their opinion, to a still representation of life (...), and which was no longer able to reproduce the kaleidoscopic modern experience‖ (Prudente, Modernist Journals Project). Therefore Futurists rejected the Romantic and Realistic traditions, and abolished ―the old and narrowing linguistic conventions‖ (Prudente, MJP). Instead of these came a new conception of literary language: ―casual disposition of nouns, use of the infinitive verbal tense, abolishment of adjectives, adverbs and punctuation, attention to the graphic disposition of the text‖ (Prudente, MJP).

A lot of the futurist characteristics are echoed in the vorticist movement. An example of such a similar characteristic, apart from the love of technology and the machine, is vorticism's reaction to Victorian and Romantic art, which was believed to strive for verisimilitude and sentimentality. As Carolyn Tilghman (2007) notices, the ―celebrated fragments, hard lines, angles and unusual juxtapositions [aimed at] depict[ing] the experience of modernity‖, as opposed to the ―Victorian and Romantic conceptions that art should represent the natural world or revel in a sentimental one‖ (3). Vorticism wanted to avoid mimesis by highlighting the imagination. Similarly, the modernist novel tried to avoid any kind of Victorian realism, because it could only be a ―materialist externality‖ that could not give a genuine realistic depiction of the world (Norton 1840). The modernist novel refused to believe ―that the world, things, and selves were knowable, that language was a reliably revelatory instrument, that the author's story gave history meaning and moral shape‖ (Norton 1838). According to Lyn Pykett (1995), this modernist attitude entailed ―paradox, ambiguity (...) and the disappearance or dispersal of the integrated individual human subject‖ (10). So, the modernist novel can be seen as bathing in an atmosphere of scepticism towards the knowable quality of the world and the people. Modernist novelists do not convey the world as ―some given, fixed, transcribable essence‖, but rather as a shattered entity that can only have a multitude of subjective perceptions: Reality existed, rather, only as it was perceived. Hence the introduction of the impressionistic, flawed, even utterly unreliable narrator – a substitute for the classic nineteenth-century authoritative narrating voice, usually the voice of the author or some close substitute. (...) Reality and its truth had gone inward. (Norton 1838-1839) This subjective and inward perception of reality is technically realised by the ―stream of consciousness‖, which is the character's ―interior flow of thought‖ and which most often reflects Rubbens 19 existential doubts and scepticism towards belief, towards ―the knowable solidity of the world‖ and towards ―language as a tool of knowledge‖ (Norton 1839).

Carolyn Tilghman (2007) also points to the difference between futurism and British modernism. According to her, an avant-garde movement like futurism is mass-orientated, whereas a modernist movement like vorticism is not. By declaring vorticism's indebtedness to Nietzsche, Tilghman draws attention to the vorticist loathing for the ―mob‖, as opposed to the mass-orientation of the avant-garde: unlike other avant-garde artists such as Marinetti, who embraced the ―mob‖ and proposed a collapse of the distinction between art and popular culture,(...) Lewis was openly scornful of the public’s ability to appreciate good art. (...) Lewis’ overriding scorn for the masses and his ideas about the innate superiority of the individual artist demonstrated his indebtedness to the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch who would transcend the frailties and stupidities of ordinary human beings. (4) Lewis tried to free his art conception of populism. He believed that modern art ―had nothing to do with 'the People'‖; he saw modern art as ―the art of the Individuals‖ (Tilghman 10). He found democracy inept to create strong individuals, for he saw it as a pattern that ―homogenized desire for the purpose of mass consumption, rendering people whose ideas, values, and personalities were standard issue, while they existed under the illusion that they were individuals‖ (Tilghman 11).

The Norton Anthology of English Literature compares this modernist attitude of superiority towards the masses to the aesthetic movement. It was a movement of the late nineteenth century with an ―insistence on 'art for art's sake'‖, that ―assaulted middle-class assumptions about the nature and function of art‖ and ―helped widen the breach between writers and the general public, resulting in the 'alienation' of the modern artist from society‖ (Norton 1827).

The modernist era is most typically characterised by a ―rapid pace of social and technological change‖, such as the spread of electricity, cinema, radio and better transportation systems, creating a ―globalized space and accelerated time‖ (Norton 1828-1829). These new conceptions of space and time, together with World War I, ―disrupted the old order, upended ethical and social codes, cast into doubt previously stable assumptions about self, community, the world, and the divine‖ (Norton 1828). Thomas Hardy can be situated at the end of the Victorian Age and the beginning of the new age, and his poem ―The Darkling Thrush‖ is claimed to mark ―the demise of a century of relative conviction and optimism, and [to] intimat[e] the beginnings of a new era in Rubbens 20 its skeptical irresolution, its bleak sense of the modern world as 'hard and dry'‖ (Norton 1828). This skepticism towards old conceptions and the proposal of a new and often startlingly pessimistic vision on the world was typical of modern intellectuals like Sigmund Freud, Sir James Frazer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Freud's psychoanalysis changed ―how people saw (...) rationality, the self, and personal development‖ and it explained human behaviour as essentially negative, because it is determined by the negative unconscious (Norton 1828). Frazer introduced an equally revolutionary vision, albeit in the field of religion. With his Golden Bough (1890-1915) he is considered to have imposed a challenge on religious doctrine: ―Western religion was now decentered by being placed in a comparative context as one of numerous related mythologies, with Jesus Christ linked to 'primitive' fertility gods thought to die and revive in concert with the seasons‖ (Norton 1829). This challenge to religion was supported by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, since he had already ―declared the death of God, repudiated Christianity, and offered instead a harshly tragic conception of life: people look 'deeply into the true nature of things' and realize 'that no action of theirs can work any change'‖ (Norton 1829).

Modernist writers took those changes in society as a theme in their work. According to The Norton Anthology, their reactions were often negative because these modernist writers felt that they lived in an increasingly unstable and inhospitable world, especially reinforced by World War I and the nineteenth century positivism. Therefore, they often tried to reintroduce solid values embodied by their own personal religion: Because scientific materialism and positivism, according to which empirical explanations could be found for everything, were weakening the influence of organized religion, many writers looked to literature as an alternative (Norton 1829) According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, such writers were William Butler Yeats – who marked a shift from Romanticism to a more sceptical modernism – and to a lesser extent T. S. Eliot. They both deplored the state of the world in which previously solid beliefs were fading, although they did not go as far as to approve of the Victorian attitudes towards social life and religion. Therefore, they looked for a suitable philosophy. Yet, there was a difference between Yeats and Eliot: although they both deplored the ―aspects of cultural decay in the Western world‖ and sought for ―spiritual peace‖ through ―religious revelation‖, Yeats was more of a Romantic in his admiration for mysticism than the anti-Romantic Eliot was (Norton 2288). As Robert E. Montgomery (1994) states Rubbens 21

Eliot regrets that Yeats had to put together a philosophy out of 'folklore, occultism, mythology and symbolism, crystal-gazing and hermetic writings' (...) [and] that [he] was not able to arrive 'at a central and universal philosophy' like Catholicism. (228) Thus, some modernists were eager to find solid values so as to make the world less inhospitable, but they were divided on how to do this: by romantically seeking for myths and ―fabricat[ing] an individual religion‖ like Yeats did, or by turning to an existing religion like Eliot did (Montgomery 225).

So, to cut it short, what united the modernists first of all was their repugnance against the Victorian rigid social and religious conventions – because they had seen that those conventions were not able to prevent a world war. Secondly, the modernists were driven by an artistic urge to exclude any kind of superficial and absolute realism in favour of the internalisation and multiplication of reality. Thirdly, they felt an individualistic aversion to the mob. And finally, they all depicted the birth of a new, more technically advanced age. However, the modernists were also diversified in the way they depicted modern times. Some enthusiastically embraced social and technological novelties, like the vorticists; others tried to think up a system of values in a world which seemed bleak to them, like for instance W. B. Yeats or T. S. Eliot. The Norton Anthology of English Literature briefly alludes to this modernist diversity: ―[t]he modernist drive to 'make it new' – in Ezra Pound's famous slogan – thus arises in part out of an often ambivalent consciousness of the relentless mutations brought by modernization‖ (Norton 1830).

2.2 Modernism in Lawrence's Nonfiction

This section will try to investigate to what extent the modernist characteristics that are discussed in the previous section may be found in Lawrence's nonfiction. I will first discuss Lawrence's negative reaction to modern time with its warfare, nationalism, militarism, capitalism, modern technology, mechanization and rationalization. Then, I will point to the fact that this antagonism resulted in a feeling of individualism in Lawrence's mind. Thirdly, this section will prove that his sceptical attitude towards modern society was followed by his own personal formulation of a regenerating solution and philosophy, just as it was the case in Yeats's writings. Fourthly, I will detect and discuss some instances of how Lawrence lashed out at Victorian conventions, which he saw as too optimistic because of their lack of any form of epistemological Rubbens 22 scepticism. And finally, this chapter will conclude with Lawrence's self-positioning as a modernist writer, namely a ―Georgian‖.

In a modernist way, Lawrence felt estranged in a world that he saw as shattered. He believed that the beauty in it had vanished and that humans had become hostile to each other, resulting in warfare. He loathed war, nationalism and militarism, and preached a spontaneous life, in touch with nature. He expressed his hate towards the modern world in his letters, in the midst of the Great War: I am no longer an Englishman, I am the enemy of mankind. The whole of militarism is so disgusting to me (...). I hate humanity so much, I can only think with friendliness of the dead. They alone, now at least are upright and honourable. For the rest – pfui! (The Letters 365-366) Lawrence felt anxious about the modern world because he associated it with money, materialism, technology, mechanization and rationalization through science. In his essay ―The State of Funk‖ he predicted that a change was about to come, and he hoped that this would make life ―more spontaneous, more vital, less basely materialistic‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 136). In Apocalypse, he deplored ―the death of the great gold dragon [entailing] that gold fell from glory and became money‖ (128). He linked this death of the gold dragon with the death of ―life itself‖ and with the fading of the ―red, racing bright blood [which] was the supreme mystery‖ (Apocalypse 128). Lawrence celebrated the old cultures of ―the Aegean and Etruscan Warriors‖ because they were still in touch with the ―supreme mystery‖ and with ―life itself‖ (Apocalypse 128). Likewise, in the essay ―Making Love to Music‖, Lawrence expressed his admiration for the life style that was conveyed in the ―paintings on the walls of Etruscan tombs‖, because they ―seem to have a strong feeling for taking life sincerely as a pleasant thing‖(Sex, Literature and Censorship 112). In the Etruscan dance, he did not find the narrowing rational morality of his contemporary time, but a tribute to a free life with an unhindered sexuality: ―there was a phallic symbol everywhere (...). Being part of everyday life, there was no need to get it on the brain, as we tend to do‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 113). As a result, he deplored his own rational culture that lacked any kind of admiration for sexuality and the mystery of life, because it explained away the myth. Hence, he rejected

[a]ll that science has taught about fire (...), [because] H2O is not water, it is a thought-form derived from experiments with water. Though-forms (...) do not make our life. Our life is made still of elemental fire and water. (135) Rubbens 23

He considered the world as a bleak place where children were brought up as rational adults, lacking any kind of spontaneity or natural feeling. This ―spiritual‖ education turned the child into a kind of ―Satan‖, and caused Lawrence to end up having no hope any more for the future and to state how despicable modern man had become: And how you deserve your own poison-gases! How you deserve to perish in your own stink. It is no use contemplating the development of the modern child, born out of the mental- conscious love-will, born to be another unit of self-conscious love-will: (...) a Satan's own seraphic self-consciousness (...). Once we really consider this modern process of life and the love-will, we could throw the pen away, and spit, and say three cheers for the inventors of poison-gas. (Fantasia 162)

This hate towards humanity resulted in the at times unsocial behaviour, which he preached in his writings. Towards the end of his life, when his vitality started to dwindle, he wrote this letter, expressing his love for the truthful essence of nature: [P]eople are most exhausting. I like them all right at a little distance, if they will leave me alone – but I don't want to talk to them any more. (...) What is there to say any more, to ordinary people at least? It is lovely to be alone, especially when the sun shines. (The Letters 784) This is the modernist awareness and cultivation of the chasm between the 'I' and the rest of the world: ―One must live quite apart, forgetting, having another world, a world as yet uncreated‖ (The Letters 344).

This attitude of separation from the mass of people, which he saw as the mob, may also be found in his second psychology book, Fantasia of the Unconscious. In this book, he adopted an anti-democratic viewpoint, since he considered it more suitable to let the mob be uneducated and be governed by some intellectual leaders that should be obeyed at all time: [M]en must be prepared to obey, body and soul, once they have chosen the leader. (120) Men have to choose their leaders, and obey them to the death. And it must be a system of culminating aristocracy, society tapering like a pyramid to the supreme leader. All of which sounds very distasteful at the moment. But upon all the vital lessons we have learned during our era of love and spirit and democracy we can found our new order. We wanted to be all of a piece. And we couldn't bring it off. Because we just aren't all of a piece. (191) Rubbens 24

By voicing these thoughts, Lawrence put himself on a pedestal above the masses, and considered himself to be a thinker who could figure out what was best for humanity and who was entitled to conceive of a new political model, not any longer democratic, but aristocratic or hierarchic.

However, with his hateful stance towards the modern capitalistic, mechanized and scientifically rational world and with his unsocial attitude towards humanity, Lawrence also combined a sense of hope for regeneration, for a restored union among the people. It seems that he adopted one of Shakespeare's wisdoms: ―I must be cruel only to be kind‖. He violently confronted people with his viewpoints, because he wanted them to live ―in essential truthfulness‖, and to turn relationships into the essential values of their lives. He dreamt of creating ―a new well-shape[d] life out of the smashed mess of the old order‖ (The Letters 368, my correction). As a prophet of love, he always tried to come up with a solution to humanity's stupidity and overruled his desperate aggressiveness: ―I thought I'd better turn over a new leaf, and start a new chapter. The intention of the last chapter was to find a way out of the vicious circle. And I ended in poison-gas‖ (Fantasia 163). Therefore, he suggested the creation of a new order as his own personal cure, to help ―the working men‖, for whom he felt both pity and contempt, since they were both victims of the system, and collaborators in this system (The Letters 300-301). According to Jae-kyung Koh (1999), Lawrence's cure against the mechanized rationality of his modern industrial society is a return to the wisdom of ―the forgotten past‖, which implied ―re-establishing contact with (...) the 'unknown' part of the psyche‖ (177, 179). Consequently, Koh highlights the importance of sexuality in Lawrence's personal philosophy, since it is the part of our psyche that is able to act as a subversive force to the ―normalising pressure‖ in ―a mechanized and regimented modern society‖ (Koh 182). Koh even equals Lawrence's answer to modernity with Foucault's, since they both saw sex as a ―vitalistic force to subvert anti-vital mental consciousness‖ (Koh 182). This vision is similar to Joyce Wexler's (2004), who claims that ―Lawrence use[d] the extremity of sex to escape limits‖ and to end ―the nightmare of materialism‖ (179).

This suggestion of a new order was not devoid of any religiosity: although he criticised the Church, Lawrence did manage to maintain a personal religious feeling. So, on the one hand, Lawrence felt, in a modernist way, that the common Christian values were insufficient in a modern world, because they could not keep this quickly evolving world from degenerating. For instance in his last philosophical work, Apocalypse, he even blamed Christianity for the fear and weakness of modern man, because it deliberately tried ―to destroy all might and all lordship, and leave the people poor, oh, so poor! Poor, poor, poor, as the people are in all our modern democracies‖ (71). Rubbens 25

The reason for this poverty of being lay in Christianity's disregard of the dual nature of mankind as both loving and overpowering: ―The human heart needs, needs, needs splendour, gorgeousness, pride assumption, glory and lordship. Perhaps it needs these even more than it needs love‖ (Apocalypse 71). According to Lawrence, the reason for Christianity's disregard of the human dual nature was caused by its morality. In one of his reviews, Lawrence criticized the moralism in the Christian religion, because it ignored the human instinctive vitality and wish to overpower others: the Catholic Church has fallen into the same disaster as the Protestant: of preaching a moral God, instead of Almighty god, the God of strength and glory and might and wisdom: a 'good' God, instead of a vital and magnificent God. The Catholic Church in the cities is as dead as the Protestant Church. (Introductions and Reviews 358) Nevertheless, on the other hand, somehow Lawrence did not discard all religiosity, since he came up with his own personal creed, to make up for his feeling of estrangement in the modern world. His personal creed is a religious feeling of physical union with the cosmos; it is a more instinctive ―faith‖: And I do think that man is related to the universe in some ―religious‖ way, even prior to his relation to his fellow man. And I do think that the only way of true relationship between men is to meet in some common ―belief‖ – if the belief is but physical and not merely mental. I hate religion in its religiosity. (The Letters 688) Only in the country, among peasants, where the old ritual of the seasons lives on in its beauty, is there still some living, instinctive ―faith‖ in the God of life. (Introductions and Reviews 358) This is an attitude which aligns him with W. B. Yeats. As I have mentioned in chapter 2.1, Yeats and Eliot were quite different from the vorticists in their attitude towards modernization and the machine. They both sought for a philosophical cure for the machine-age. However, it was only the more Romantic Yeats who proposed his personal mythology, and not Eliot, who turned to Catholicism. Like Yeats, Lawrence created his own philosophy, which in his case was based on a natural life style in harmony with the cosmos, and on obedience to one's unconscious will, one's natural instincts, by forsaking rationality. We need not go so far as Robert E. Montgomery (1994) by stating that Lawrence was a ―pure Romantic‖ writer because he shared the Romantics' ―apocalyptic intention‖, in which the imagination works as ―the organ of revelation‖: ―[Lawrence] wants nothing less than a new revelation or vision that will renew the world‖ (7-9). As a matter of fact, this philosophical quest for a new personal vision can as well be called a modernist quality, resonating the ―make it new‖-exclamation of the modernist Ezra Pound. And although a writer's visionary style may lend a Romantic quality to his writings, he may make up for this by taking up a Rubbens 26 modern scepticism. This is what both W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence have done. As The Norton Anthology of English Literature states, Yeats managed to mediate ―between contending aspects of himself – late-Romantic visionary and astringent modern skeptic‖ (2021). In the same way, Lawrence may be called a modernist, because he was able to combine a modernist scepticism with a personal revelation of a philosophy, which Montgomery calls ―an apocalypse in the Romantic sense‖ (Montgomery 230). This personal philosophy is didactically put forward in his work, which I will discuss to a fuller extent in chapter 3, and it shows that the modernists could combine their scepticism with a constructive force: proposing a solution to the bleakness of the modern world.

So far, I have proved that Lawrence can be seen as a modernist writer if one considers his negative reaction against the modern time he lived in, his individualistic separation from the mass of people, and his personal philosophical solution for a regeneration of society. To this list, we can add Lawrence's vicious attack on the Victorian scientific paradigm, such as nineteenth-century positivism and the optimistic belief in a reality that is knowable. In his Fantasia, Lawrence formulated his individualistic feeling of anxiety caused by conventional nineteenth-century reasoning. He aggressively addressed the reader, who was seated on his own globe and who did not hear the music in the same way as Lawrence did. Whereas the reader might have been hopefully looking forward to the regeneration of society after the first World War, Lawrence maintained his modernist scepticism towards this idealism, which he saw as outdated and Victorian: Sit you like Watts' Hope on your own little blue globe, and I'll sit on mine, and we won't bump into one another if we can help it. You can twang your old hopeful lyre. It may be music to you, so I don't blame you. It is a terrible wowing in my ears. But that may be something in my individual atmosphere (...). Certainly I never hear the concert of World Regeneration and Hope Revived Again without getting a sort of lock-jaw, my teeth go so keen on edge from the twanging harmony. (Fantasia 73) That he considered the reader's hope as typical of the nineteenth century, may be deduced from his reference to the Victorian painter, George Frederick Watts (1817-1904). Lawrence identified the reader with the figure ―Hope‖ in one of Watts's paintings, where Hope is an allegorical ―female figure‖ that is ―seated atop a globe‖ while ―clasping a lyre‖ (Fantasia, Explanatory notes 223). In Lawrence's ears, the hopeful and optimistic words of restoration after the war, which are symbolized by the melody of the lyre, sounded like a terrible noise, since they did not propose a true systematic solution to the problems in society, but rather displayed a naïve hope. Lawrence communicated his modernist scepticism about the continuation of Victorian values in a society which, in his opinion, urgently needed change. Consequently, it is this unsocial and individualistic Rubbens 27 critique on the mob's blind and Victorian optimism, combined with his awareness of the problems in a mechanized and scientific society, that have to be seen as underlying motives for writing down his own personal and philosophical solutions in Fantasia of the Unconscious.

His modernist scepticism about Victorian ideologies and certainties found an outlet in his appreciation for Einstein's Theory of Relativity. After Freud, Nietzsche and Frazer – all mentioned in chapter 2.1 – Einstein was the scientist who completed the modernist revolution in science and the human conception of the world. Einstein did not only had a great impact on science – since he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 – he also influenced Lawrence, who ―was particularly attracted to the theory for its apparent refutation of the absolute‖ (Fantasia, Explanatory notes 222). Lawrence testified to this appreciation in Fantasia of the Unconsious: We are all very pleased with Mr Einstein for knocking that eternal axis out of the universe. The universe isn't a spinning wheel. It is a cloud of bees flying and veering round. Thank goodness for that, for we were getting drunk on the spinning wheel. So that the universe has escaped from the pin which was pushed through it (...): now that the multiple universe flies its own complicated course quite free, and hasn't got any hub, we can hope also to escape. (72) I feel inclined to Relativity myself. I think there is no one absolute principle in the universe. I think everything is relative. (191) Immediately, he drew a parallel between the universe and humanity, by claiming that human thought was relative as well, being devoid of any general law. This entails that people often do not fully understand each other, since individual words, related to individual thoughts, are no general or absolute truths, but only relative: We won't be pinned down either. We have no one law that governs us.(...) There is no straight path between you and me, dear reader, so don't blame me if my words fly like dust into your eyes and grit between your teeth, instead of like music into your ears. (Fantasia 72) This scepticism of language is typical of the modernists, and is linked to their epistemological scepticism. As I have mentioned in the introduction to modernism, in chapter 2.1, the modernists refused to believe ―that the world, things, and selves were knowable [and] that language was a reliably revelatory instrument‖(Norton 1838). Likewise, Michael Lackey (2006) describes how ―literary modernism represents a shift from substance to relational models of truth‖ (268). Lackey aligns Lawrence with both Friedrich Nietzsche and Virginia Woolf, who all ―recognize that the world is not some sacred hieroglyph waiting to be decoded‖, but that we have projected coherence Rubbens 28 and meaning onto the world (281). Lackey calls this the Continental tradition in philosophy, which sees concepts as relative: ―concepts are human creations that evolve in relation to the community of language users. Therefore, what the world is in and of itself is simply an incoherent idea‖ (Lackey 267). As a genuine modernist, Lawrence doubted the existence of a coherent reality, and he was convinced of the subjective perception of reality. As such, he saw the world as a shattered entity, ―a multiple universe‖ that resembled ―a cloud of bees‖ that could not be captured in a unanimous definition (Fantasia 72). In his essay ―Introduction to Pansies‖, he described how people conceive of reality: ―It suits the modern temper better to have its state of mind made up of apparently irrelevant thoughts that scurry in different directions. (...) We prefer it (...) to those solid blocks of mental pabulum (...) in (...) a heavy book‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 128-1219). So, for Lawrence, as for any other modernist, the perception of reality is multiple and has gone inward as some kind of subjective, disordered and hazy stream of thoughts, the so-called stream of consciousness.

This scepticism of the absolute truth-value of language or symbols is also shown in his last review, ―Eric Gill's 'Art Nonsense'‖, and in his last philosophical writing, Apocalypse. In his review of Eric Gill's essays, Lawrence criticized Gill's inclination to define subjective terms: Why oh why will people keep on trying to define words like Art and Beauty and God, words which represent deep emotional states in us, and are therefore incapable of definition. Why bother about it? (Introductions and Reviews 358-359) In his Apocalypse, Lawrence praised the biblical story, ―Apocalypse‖, for its ―pagan process of rotary image-thought‖ and ―curious image-association‖, as opposed to ―the modern process of progressive thought‖, which tried to reach a conclusion in a nineteenth-century positivistic way (Apocalypse 95-96). Lawrence considered the pagan process of thought as a more valuable process because it did not forsake subjectivity or relativity: ―every image will be understood differently by every reader, according to his emotion-reaction‖ (Apocalypse 95). Jack Stewart (2003) describes the influence of pagan cyclic thought on Lawrence as a ―dialogical contact with otherness that generates new thinking‖, which may be seen as a modernist answer to conventional thinking (163). He sees this pagan influence reflected in Lawrence's style that ―draws on the unconscious and depends on the surfacing and association of images‖ (Stewart 167). It is a vitalistic style that is attuned to the ―rhythms of life‖ and that uses ―animistic imagery‖ to dramatize how ―feeling transforms perception‖, and thus how people are not driven by rationality but by their feelings (Stewart 170). Hence, Lawrence considered it as a merit that the old ―emotional‖ way of thinking was less exact than the modern ―mental‖ way of thinking and that it was devoid of objective Rubbens 29 rationality and causality, which left a place for individual emotion to construct a perception of reality: the emotional consciousness of man has a life and movement quite different from the mental consciousness. The mind knows in part, in part and parcel, with full stop after every sentence. But the emotional soul knows in full, like a river or a flood. (...) Modern men (...) are nearly all half dead, modern women too. (...) They are proud of their own emotional impotence. (Apocalypse 142) As a modernist, he celebrated the idea of circularity and multiplicity in the pagan thinking, because it entailed a greater freedom and subjectivity: Our idea of time as a continuity in an eternal straight line has crippled our consciousness cruelly. The pagan conception of time as moving in cycles is much freer, it allows movement upwards and downwards, and allows for a complete change of the state of mind. (Apocalypse 97) This scepticism towards the conception of reality as linear is a viewpoint which Lawrence shared with the modernist philosopher Henri Bergson, who was also criticizing nineteenth-century positivism. As Robert B. Hass (2005) points out : Our [positivistic] scientific knowledge is thus not an accurate representation of immutable physical law but rather a set of imposed constructs that explain the physical world in the most practical and efficient manner possible. To Bergson, in order for us to understand the real nature of existence, we must develop our intuitive faculties and shed the impulse to fix in static form those realities that are constantly in flux. (58) Bergson's refusal of positivism can also be traced in his modernist theories of language. He found fault with the generalizing character of words, and therefore saw them as too rigid and objective carriers of subjective and fluctuating information. Thus, Bergson and Lawrence were both modernist in their scepticism of nineteenth-century positivism – which considered the world as an objectively knowable whole – and of the way in which language can express the multiplicity of reality, which they saw in a constant cyclical flux.

Apart from his nonconformism towards Victorian optimism and positivism, Lawrence also had a revolutionary view on love, doing away with the conventional rules that society stuck to. This revolutionary, free conception of love, reverberated in his letters. About a man who could not choose between two women, Lawrence wrote: Perhaps he is very split, and would always have the two things separate, the real blood connection and the real conscious or spiritual connection, always separate. For these people Rubbens 30

I really believe in two wives. I don't see why there should be monogamy for people who can't have full satisfaction in one person. (The Letters 323) Charles Hatten (2008) calls this the ―modernist impulse to break with the sexual and cultural norms of the Victorian age‖ (168).

This nonconformism is an aspect in Lawrence's writings that has been alluded to by some critics, like for instance Anne Fernald (2003), who claims that Lawrence's opposition to conventional political language, systematic argument, and dogmatic belief finds its clearest expression in "Pornography and Obscenity‖.(...) Rather than argue against the censors, Lawrence satirizes their fidelity to "mob-meaning" (185) In this essay Lawrence has indeed written in disapproval of the reluctance of the mob towards sexual openness. He deplored that the mass did not experience sex openly, but rather stigmatised it as dirt, thereby degrading it as a ―dirty little secret‖ which did not differ from ―the excrementory functions in the human body‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 207, 205). Lawrence saw that, as a result, the mob, which insisted on purity in public, brought sexuality to the underworld and turned it into pornography. It is this pornographic aspect that, according to Lawrence, laid a veil of secrecy over sex, which resulted in ―the vice of self-abuse, masturbation‖ (210). He considered this to be dangerous, as there was no ―reciprocity‖, nor ―creation‖ – as in the case of ―sexual intercourse between two people‖ – but only ―self-enclosure‖ (210, 211, 217). Lawrence proposed a solution to this problem: ―Away with the secret! (...) The only way (...) is to come out quite simply and naturally into the open with it‖ (213). As such, he preached a sort of sexual revolution that nourished the natural ―sex-flow‖, completely directed against the moral conventions of the nineteenth century, by which the grey mob continued to be influenced: The grey elderly ones belong to the last century, the eunuch century, the century of the mealy-mouthed lie, the century that has tried to destroy humanity, the nineteenth century. All our grey ones are left over from this century. And they rule us. (215-216) So, as a genuine modernist, Lawrence wished to free the new generation from the established conventional and suffocating (Victorian) ideas.

Thus far, through his negative reaction against his contemporary time, his personal solution for the shortcomings of this time, his individualism and his inveighing against Victorian values, we can implicitly derive from his nonfiction that Lawrence was a modernist. But he also explicitly aligned himself with those modernists whom Virginia Woolf labelled as 'Georgians'. Woolf described the shift in literature between the Edwardians and Georgians around 1910, and was an Rubbens 31 ardent supporter of the Georgians. In her essay ―Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown‖, she noticed how – in 1910 – ―human character changed‖, which brought along ―a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature‖ (320-321). This general change in the Georgian's thinking and in their approach to literature, has to be seen as a rejection of Mr. Bennett's realistic style, in favour of ―telling the truth [which] is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition‖ (Woolf 335). Thus, the Georgians were eager to write ―against the grain and current of the times‖, and more specifically against the literary method of the Edwardians, who would rather describe the outer appearance of the house than Mrs. Brown's inner character (Woolf 335). It is this attack on the realistic and traditional Edwardians that Virginia Woolf enthusiastically advocated: ―we are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature‖ (337). Also D. H. Lawrence expressed his appreciation for the Georgian style of writing: ―Georgian Poetry is a good goose, her egg is much appreciated, and I hope she will live for ever‖ (The Letters 411). And like Virginia Woolf, he attached great importance to the description of the character's inner perception of the world: ―As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern.‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 137). This concern is expressed somewhat differently in his essay ―The Novel‖, in which he claimed that ―the novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained (...) [b]ecause it is so incapable of the absolute‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 64). Thus, for the modernist Lawrence, who favoured an epistemological scepticism, in a good and artistic novel ―everything is relative to everything else‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 64). This entails that there should be no absolute, conventional or rational morality – since this is not true to the individual and unconscious experience of reality – but only a nonconformist philosophy that remains faithful to ―the passional inspiration‖, the ―flames of sex‖ burning within the individual author (Sex, Literature and Censorship 65,80). This attitude led Anne Fernald (2003) to call Lawrence an ―outsider‖, who ―attack[ed] the mainstream‖ and ―rise[d] from out of the masses‖ (197). In other words, Lawrence supported what Woolf was preaching: to write ―against the grain and current of the times‖, by not being conventional or moralising any more (Woolf 335).

Similarly, in his review ―The Georgian Renaissance‖ of the anthology Georgian Poetry 1911-1912, which contained one of his poems as well, Lawrence advocated Georgian poetry, for he saw it as a refreshing poetry that had the ability to build up something new out of the fearful ruins of the past: The nihilists, the intellectual, hopeless people – Ibsen, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy – represent the dream we are waking from. It was a dream of demolition. (...) But we are awake again, our lungs are full of new air, our eyes of morning. (...) And behold, out of the ruins leaps the Rubbens 32

whole sky. It is we who see it and breathe in it for joy. God is there, faith, belief, love, everything. We are drunk with the joy of it, having got away from the fear. In almost every poem in the book comes this note of exultation after fear, the exultation in the vast freedom.‖ (Introductions and Reviews 201) In this excerpt, Lawrence acknowledged the importance of smashing everything to pieces in order to build it up again in a new, refreshing and liberating way. Therefore he appreciated the intellectual nihilists like Nietzsche, Hardy and Flaubert, who respectively demolished ―Christian Religion as it stood‖, ―our faith in our own endeavour‖ and ―our belief in love‖ (Introduction and Reviews 201). Only after this deconstruction, the scales could drop from the people's eyes, causing them to feel joyfully free of dogmas, and to seek new values in life, like for instance the belief in the natural passions and the relativity of everything. According to Lawrence, the Georgian poets were the prophets of this liberating feeling, causing them to be ―essentially passionate poets‖ whose poetry marked ―the return of the blood‖, which was ―quick, healthy, passionate blood‖, and the belief in love as a new religion (Introductions and Reviews 203). He aligned himself with these modernist poets who celebrated physicality, by ecstatically describing his own hand as something purely physical: ―I am full of awe for this flesh and blood that hold this pen‖ (203). Likewise, as a Georgian modernist, he also embraced the relativity of everything, especially the belief in one God, and opted for ―loving‖ as a new, more natural and liberating religion: I worship Christ, I worship Jehovah, I worship Pan, I worship Aphrodite. (...) I want them all, all the gods. They are all God. But I must serve in real love. If I take my whole passionate, spiritual and physical love to the woman who in return loves me, that is how I serve God. (Introductions and Reviews 204)

In conclusion, we may infer from Lawrence's nonfiction that he was a modernist, since he showed an epistemological scepticism of a superficial realism, attacked the conventional Victorian conventions and separated himself from the mass of people. Among the two possible modernist reactions to the technological changes, he did not choose the reaction of the vorticists, who celebrated the machine. Like the other camp, to which Eliot and Yeats belonged, he did not love his contemporary time, with its capitalism, mechanization and rationalization; and like Yeats he suggested his own philosophy as a remedy for the growing pains and bleakness of society.

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2.3 Modernism in Lawrence's Fiction

In Lawrence's poetry, Anthony Burgess (1986) detected a modernist prose flavour which puts Lawrence in the category of the modernists, gaining respect from the established modernist poet Ezra Pound and the editor of The English Review, Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford): Probably without knowing it, Lawrence the poet had, in his impatience with technique, rushed straight into modernism, giving his poems the prose flavour that both Hueffer and Pound knew was necessary to the process of killing (...) tired romantic rhythms, 'poetic' inversions, second-hand emotions. (20)

However, when looking at Lawrence's prose style, we are confronted with a poverty of modernist innovations. When comparing Lawrence's prose style to Joyce's, Burgess initially thought more highly of Joyce, whom he saw as a more spectacular modernist: Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. (...) Having discovered Joyce, I was not at first eager to read Lawrence. The style of such books of his as were available in the public library [Lady Chatterley's Lover not included] was not immediately attractive. (4, my addition)

It is only after Burgess had started to become familiar with the viewpoints in Lawrence's prose, that he was ―free to read him seriously‖ and to appreciate him as an anti-bourgeois ―Natural Man‖, using ―organic rhythms‖ to prophecy the death of ―Western industrialism‖ and ―bourgeois Christianity‖ (Burgess 6-7). The cure which Lawrence announced was a return to a more natural and anti-intellectual life, ―the life of the loins and the instincts‖ (Burgess 6). Burgess aligned the modernist Ernest Hemingway with Lawrence, because he considered them both as anti- intellectualists that revolted against the past age of optimism and scientific positivism. Nevertheless, Burgess never stopped acknowledging that Lawrence's prose style was more old- fashioned than Hemingway's. Therefore, we may claim that Burgess considered Lawrence to be a modernist in an ideological, rather than in a stylistic sphere.

Yet, regarding Lawrence's prose style, Violeta Sotirova (2006) has discovered an evolution towards a larger modernist complexity. She perceives two distinct types of ―free indirect style: a monologic variety that encloses us within one person's consciousness; and a dialogic one that sets people and viewpoints in interrelation‖ (Sotirova 468). She considers the second type as more Rubbens 34 complex because it tends to be more ambiguous, as a result of which ―a unanimous interpretation‖ is impossible (Sotirova 470). More importantly, Sotirova links the monologic variety of free indirect discourse with a more acute ―presence of the narrator‖, whereas the dialogic type is ―evocative of spoken discourse‖ that is characterised by ―the absence of authorial intrusions‖ (477, 483). This absence of authorial authority is typical of modernist prose because it displays an epistemological scepticism, as mentioned in chapter 2.1. Thus, when Sotirova claims an evolution towards the second type, we may read this as an evolution towards a more modernist style.

Lydia Blanchard (1991) too discovers a modernist style in Lawrence's prose, which causes her to refute Allan Ingram, who assumes that ―Lawrence, using language intentionally to convey a strong sense of mission, is not interested in the play with language that distinguished other Modernist writers‖ like Conrad, Joyce and Eliot (784). According to Blanchard, Lawrence's prose does engage in language play. However, the examples she lists are few: ―Mr Noon or The Lost Girl‖ (784). So, in general, Lawrence's style is not very modernist when compared to for instance James Joyce, but there are nevertheless some stylistic clues to his modernism.

In this chapter, I will discuss the modernist characteristics of Lawrence's prose, more particularly his first and last novel, and his later short stories. I will do this by investigating his modernist ideas, and not by focussing on his style, for as Burgess has already remarked, Lawrence's prose style was not as innovative as other modernists'. The only stylistic exception may be his last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, which will be dealt with in chapter 2.3.2.

2.3.1 Modernism in The White Peacock?

Before going into detail into Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock, it needs to be said that it is not a typical example of his fiction. As a beginning author, he was still in search of a style. As such, this book has not earned the higher status of his later, more mature works. He was aware that he was still in search of his own style at the time. In his letters he admitted: ―I was very young when I wrote the Peacock – I began it at twenty. Let that be my apology.‖ (The Letters 6). He had felt inclined to utter this apology, in reaction to the reception of the book: ―The publishing of the book has brought me very little but bitterness. A good many folk have been hostile.‖ (The Letters 12). And he was more positive about his later fiction, a feeling which he expressed in a letter to one Rubbens 35 of his friends: ―Paul Morel [which was later to be called Sons and Lovers] is better than The White Peacock or The Trespasser.‖ (The Letters 60). Nevertheless, Ford Madox Hueffer assessed the novel positively and sent the manuscript to William Heinemann, who published it afterwards, in 1911, when Lawrence had just taken his teaching certificate at Nottingham University College. This was the beginning of his writing career.

As I have stated in one of the previous paragraphs, Lawrence's prose style was not remarkably modernist, certainly not in The White Peacock. As the introduction to the novel states, it is an ―over-controlled‖ book that ―refuses to allow us to escape the vision of its narrator‖ (29). This is not a modernist writing style, since the modernists did not want to give the impression that reality could be fully represented by a single authoritative viewpoint. On the contrary, a typical modernist novel would put forward an unreliable narrator, whereas in The White Peacock we are inclined to trust Cyril's perception of reality, since it is not contrasted with any other viewpoints in the novel. It seems as if he is the omnipresent narrator who hovers over the story world, and who does not even actively participate in it: he is the only one who does not marry and whose outward appearance is not described. An evidence of the trustworthiness of Cyril's perception of reality is the fact that his perceptions seem to elicit general philosophical truths: Cyril does not for a moment doubt whether they are true or not. In the following excerpt, his philosophical insights are directly brought into connection with his perceptions by means of a dash, which brings them on an equal level of trustworthiness: I looked across at the lighted windows of Highclose. (...) The sky was glittering with sharp lights – they are too far off to take trouble for us, so little, little almost to nothingness. All the great hollow vastness roars overhead, and the stars are only sparks that whirl and spin in the restless space. The earth must listen to us (...). Here on our earth is sympathy and hope, the heavens have nothing but distances. (262) According to the introduction to The White Peacock, the lack of modernism in this novel is due to Lawrence's unfamiliarity with Freud and truly modernist music and art around 1910: ―As much, perhaps, as W. B. Yeats, he was an artist who had to grow out of the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 21). Consequently, Lawrence began his writing career with novels that did not yet ―confront their heroes with a modern world which they find impossible to accept, as T. S. Eliot was confronting J. Alfred Prufrock‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 21).

On the other hand, The White Peacock is modernist in the way in which reality has gone inward. The realistic descriptions of the village Nethermere, with its natural beauty, are only Rubbens 36 superficially realistic. On a deeper level, they represent the emotions that are felt by the focaliser, which lends a symbolist depth to the novel. As such, the novel shows the ―parallels between human life and the natural world‖ and ―Lawrence is thus always interested in more than simple description‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 15). Joyce Wexler (2004) sees this symbolism ―as a response to the period's epistemological crisis‖, namely that there is not only one outward reality, but that there are multiple inward realities (165). Since epistemological scepticism was typical of the modernists – as explained above – we can deduce from Wexler's claim that modernism and symbolism are connected. Hence, when we detect a symbolist style in The White Peacock, this may be seen as a modernist quality: reality has gone inward. Also The Norton Anthology of English Literature notes that Lawrence's style combines a ―surface realism‖, consisting of ―brilliant topographical detail‖, with high ―symbolism‖ (2244). It is this symbolism that adds a psychological depth to his stories, and thus presents a reality as it is inwardly perceived. Likewise, in his poetry and in his travel sketches ―he seizes both on the symbolic incident and on the concrete reality, and each is interpreted in terms of the other‖ (Norton 2245). In The White Peacock this style is reflected in sensory perceptions like light, colours, warmth and music. Also the weather and nature, with its seasons and animals, play an important role. In the following excerpt, the atmosphere in nature surrounding Cyril Beardsall reflects the gloomy and reproachful atmosphere in the Beardsall's house after the mother has received a letter from her dying husband, the father who abandoned his family years ago: Autumn set in, and the red dahlias which kept the warm light alive in their bosoms so late into the evening died in the night, and the morning had nothing but brown balls of rottenness to show. (75) Later on in the novel, Cyril tries to counter the atmosphere of death around his deceased father's bed, and as he directs his senses to nature, his perception changes, both seeing light and feeling warmth. This is representative of Lawrence's vitalistic philosophical solution to the bleakness of his time and his refusal to focus on death and the stifling atmosphere inside houses. He was a man of nature and vitality, who conveyed an inward perception of reality through natural symbols of warmth and light: It was not true, that sad, colourless face with grey beard, wavering in the yellow candle- light. (...) That yellow blaze of little sunflowers was true, and the shadow from the sun-dial on the warm old almshouses – that was real. The heavy afternoon sunlight came round us warm and reviving; we shivered, and the untruth went out of our veins, and we were no longer chilled. (85)

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So, in terms of its style, we may consider The White Peacock to be an ambivalent story, situated on the verge of modernism: it does not yet indulge in epistemological scepticism, since its narrator is trustworthy, but the symbolism of the novel also proves that reality has gone inward, which is a modernist characteristic. With respect to its content however, we may fully accept that the novel is modernist, since it is anxiously directed against the modern evils of capitalism and industrialism, which are dominant in Derbyshire. They are seen as a threat to ―Nethermere‖, the village of which the name already predicts that the natural life in ―Nethermere‖ will soon be ―never more‖, but only ―an old religion, that we have lost‖ (188) : But outside the valley, far away in Derbyshire, (...) on every hand the distant hooters and buzzers of mines and ironworks crowded small on the borders of the night, like so many strange, low voices of cockerels bursting forth at different pitch, with different tone, warning us of the dawn of the New Year. (333) That capitalism is unhappily forcing its way into George's life as well, is reflected in his relationship with Meg: after the inheritance ―George and Meg felt themselves to be people of property. The result, however, was only a little further coldness between them‖ (359).

At the same time, the novel is also modernist in its critiques on Victorian social conventions and its stifling, dogmatic belief in Christianity. According to Cyril, Christianity cannot give a solution to the bleakness of the age: ―The church (...) is rotten‖ (210). Cyril even compares priests to the peewits who ―add their notes to the sorrow‖ and who are ―more black than white, more grief than hope‖ (219). The novel also highlights the importance of breaking old social conventions, such as the necessity to marry within one's social class. By focussing on the love connection between Lettie, an educated bourgeois lady, and George, a crude and uneducated farmer, the novel states that love should not be captivated by restricting social conventions. Hence, when George does not marry Lettie, but someone of his own class whom he loves less, the novel claims this – apart from his decision to stop farming – to be the reason for his downfall.

Thus, the analysis of The White Peacock substantiates what Burgess claimed: that Lawrence's viewpoints were more modernist than his prose style. The White Peacock is not yet fully modernist in its style, but we can see it as a modernist novel with respect to its content. The novel criticizes modernity with its industrialization and rising capitalism, as well as the Victorian rigid social standards and the Victorians' dogmatic Christian belief.

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2.3.2 Lady Chatterley's Lover as a Modernist Novel

Lady Chatterley's Lover certainly was Lawrence's most notorious novel, as it transgressed against the rules of decency of his days, taking sexuality as its main theme, and using a multitude of indecent words. As it was seen as improper, Lawrence has taken up his moralising weapons in defence of the novel: I am in a quandary about my novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's what the world would call very improper – I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I've gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is. (The Letters 682-683) He could not understand the public opinion regarding this novel, and felt himself an outcast, which is a characteristic of the modernist writer: ―too much stupid fuss over Lady C. Why so much fuss over simple natural things? They ought to censor eggs, as revealing the intimate relations of cock and hen. Though they don't necessarily – so there!‖ (The Letters 752). His feeling of being an outcast was directly stated in a letter from 1923, after returning from Mexico where he had felt more at ease: ―I think what I would like best would be to go back to Mexico. If we were a few people we could make a life in Mexico. Certainly with this world I am at war.‖ (The Letters 572). In order to have his controversial novel published nevertheless, and avoid the restrictions in England, he brought it to Florence, where it was printed in 1928: ―and the printer doesn't know a word – where ignorance is bliss! Where the serpent is invisible!‖ (The Letters 709).

The controversy was certainly caused by Lawrence's explicitly erotic style, which can be seen as a modernist inveighing against a too conventional writing style. By using taboo-words, that would later be called ―four-letter words‖, in combination with dialect, Lawrence tried to introduce an innovative style in literature: ―Tha's got the nicest arse of anybody. It's the nicest, nicest woman's arse as is! (...) An' if tha shits an' pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.‖ (LCL 196). According to Jack Stewart (2003), Lawrence adopted this ―eroticized style‖ because he considered it as the ―language of the unconscious‖ that could express the human ―emotive vibrations‖ and hence ―the personal knowledge‖, which was not objective but subjective (Stewart 171-172). Similarly to Stewart, Judith Plotz (1994) already earlier claimed that Lawrence was using these ―plain raw English four-letter words in moments of sexual tenderness‖, because they could ―convey the same 'soft, intimate knowledge' as the sexual tenderness (Plotz 17). Indeed, also in his nonfictional writings, Lawrence alluded to the importance of a genuine language, that did not Rubbens 39 degrade sexual matters as dirty. As I will elaborate in chapter 3.1.3 – the chapter on the didacticism in his essays – Lawrence detested the way in which sex was banned to the underground pornographic spheres of secrecy and dirt. This is voiced by the character Duncan Forbes, who is acting as a supervisor of society: In fact, the more dirt you do on sex, the better they like it. But if you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. (LCL 234) As a solution to society's prudish stance towards sexuality, Lawrence advocated a free use of sexual words that were taboo in rational society. So, by using this subjective and erotic style Lawrence not only broke in a modernist way with tradition in literature, but he more specifically illustrated his modernist answer to the rational society: that we should abide by our unconscious feelings, rather than by our rational thoughts.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is not only modernist in its style, but also in its contents. Like The White Peacock, Lawrence's last novel is an attempt to criticize a modern, capitalist and industrial society, with its ―cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all‖ (125). Lawrence connected technology with the devil: ―it was astounding, the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry‖ (92). This is also reflected in the characters, because the character who saves Connie Chatterley, Mellors, is the opposite of her husband Clifford, who is like a ―lobster of the modern, industrial and financial world‖ because he has ―a hard, efficient shell of an exterior and a pulpy interior‖ (94). Indeed, Clifford is a rich mine owner and an inventor of machines, such as for instance his mechanized wheelchair. Symbolically this chair fails to work properly, for which reason Mellors has to push it. So, Mellors is representative of everything that counters modern society. He is a natural and vitalistic man, who has to fix the damage Clifford has done to Connie, because she ―was really completely stranded‖ (94).

Obviously, and as we expected, Lady Chatterley's Lover is more modernist than Lawrence's first novel, for it combines a modernist style with a modernist content. We can rightly claim that Lawrence's last novel represents his adult style, whereas The White Peacock was still in search for an appropriate style to convey his uncomfortable stance towards a modernized society. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel that does not any longer solely rely upon a symbolist style to illustrate the inward perception of reality and its modern ugliness – as it was still the case in The White Peacock – but it uses the erotic language of the body. Rubbens 40

2.3.3 His Short Stories as Examples of Modernism

The two short stories I will deal with in this dissertation, ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ (1924) and ―Sun‖ (1928) are centred around similar circumstances: a woman feels unhappy with her civilized life and decides to seek her salvation in nature. In both stories, the women's unhappiness is caused by their stifling relationships with husbands that are not physical. The two stories are also similar because they contain modernist characteristics. In a first instance, they both criticize the modern, industrial and capitalist civilization and the coldness of the city. Secondly, they both display the longing for individuality and isolation from the masses, which is typical of the modernist elitist attitude. And finally, both stories react against Victorian positivism by arguing that the world cannot be understood objectively. They illustrate this by means of symbols that turn reality inwardly and lend the world of the story an unrealistic flavour.

To begin with, ―The Woman Who Rode Away ―, shows us the life of an unnamed woman who is unhappy due to the war, the industrial society and its capitalism. To the woman, this all comes across as ―[d]eadness within deadness‖ (The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories 39). Amit Chaudhuri (1998) is aware of this modernist element in ―The Woman who Rode Away‖, as this story shows Lawrence's profound sense of the social displacement that characterises the modern world. He lived in a world that was characterized by the growth of ―metropolitan cities‖ and witnessed how people were ―on the move‖(Chaudhuri 24). As he liked to lash out at modern metropolitan cities, he was interested in people who had ―removed themselves from the centre of [these] societies to some obscure outpost on a remote continent‖ (Chaudhuri 24). Chaudhuri calls ―The Woman who Rode Away‖ a record of ―a quest for 'truth' in primitive societies‖ and she claims that the main character in the story is based on the American Mabel Sterne, who had moved to Mexico (24). Indeed, this story shows how nature is stronger than the mines once the woman has cut the ties with her society and has set off ―riding astride on her strong roan horse‖: ―the water was running freely in the little stream that had fed the now-abandoned mine‖ (43). She has decided to go to the living place of the wild Indians, because she is fascinated with ―old religions and mysteries‖ that seem more true to her than the religion of the Western civilization (42). Also from the apotheosis of the story, we may deduce Lawrence's preference for pagan cultures, because the Indians are able to reassert their religion by sacrificing a white woman. So, we can call this story modernist in the solution it offers to bleak modernity, by turning to old and pagan societies.

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Similarly, we may perceive the same modernist attack on the metropolitan lifestyle in the story ―Sun‖. In this story, Juliet abandons her life in New York and her husband for a while to regain some energy in Sicily. The city is mostly associated with tensions, unnaturalness and coldness, whereas Sicily is a place that bathes in the sun: ―She knew well enough the vast cold apparatus of civilization, and what contact with it meant‖ (The Princess and Other Stories 127). That this meant nervousness to her, is explained somewhat later in the story, when her husband comes to visit her in Sicily and sees himself confronted with a wholly different woman: ―not that nervous New York woman‖ (135).

Secondly, both stories illustrate the typical modernist longing for individuality and severance from the masses. In ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ the woman's interest to head for the isolated living space of the Indians is aroused by what a young man says: ―Ah, everybody lives in London or Paris or New York‖ (42). Consequently, her pleasant thoughts of loneliness are conveyed by the narrator: ―Indeed the loneliness was like a drink or cold water to one who is very thirsty. And a strange elation sustained her from within.‖ (44). In a similar way, the story ―Sun‖ shows the positive effect that social isolation has on Juliet. Because she has chosen for a natural lifestyle under the sun, rather than a social one in the city, ―[h]er heart of anxiety, that anxious, straining heart, had disappeared altogether‖, because over her came ―a feeling of detachment from people‖, that were ―so un-sunned‖ (122).

Finally, both stories are examples of the modernist epistemological scepticism, that was directed against the Victorian positivistic belief in a straightforward reality. In ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖, we can detect a strange, unrealistic flavour, which has to be seen as a reaction against a realistic style and its lack of multiplicity and inwardness of reality. Just like in The White Peacock, this inwardness can be found in the symbolist style, because for instance the complexion of the flowers gives away the woman's psychological condition: ―But she had to sit down and rest, she was so weary. And she saw the bright flowers shadowily, as pale shadows hovering, as one who is dead must see them‖ (50). Also Stephen Jones (1998) detects an unrealistic atmosphere in the story, because it breathes an atmosphere of ―wonder, mystery, otherness‖ (29). This symbolist style is also present in ―Sun‖, where Juliet's longing for the sun is a symbol for her inward condition, her yearning for a man's physical affection: ―So the desire sprang secretly in her, to go naked to the sun‖ (118). Related to the theme of epistemological scepticism, is the doubt that language can express the truth. This is put forward in ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖, where the woman is impressed by the Indian kind of knowledge, because it seems more real than the western Rubbens 42 knowledge, which is based on words: ―But with him too she felt that everything real was unsaid. Perhaps it was unspeakable‖ (57).

Thus, an analysis of Lawrence's fiction indicates that he was a modernist for several reasons. One of the most important reasons is the fact that he scathed the modern, industrial and capitalistic society, which made him feel inclined to present characters that sought isolation from this modern society in nature and a natural life style. Moreover, his fiction rejects the Victorian ways of thinking, because of the overall presence of an epistemological scepticism towards realism, often resulting in a symbolist style.

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3 D. H. Lawrence as an Educator for His Readers: Pouring the Philosophical ideas of His Nonfiction into His Fiction

D. H. Lawrence was more than a novelist alone. He was interested in psychology and sexuality, philosophy, religion and science. Being widely-read on all of these fields, he tried to construct his own philosophy, which not only found an outlet in his nonfiction, but also in his fiction. In this way, he was pouring an educative value into both of these categories, for he was a writer with a mission, trying to put his very personal religious dimension in his art, which he himself calls ―a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect‖ (Introduction to Psychoanalysis, xxi). As I have put forward in my general introduction, the thesis of this dissertation is that Lawrence may be seen a modernist who didactically suggested an own personal philosophical solution to the bleakness of the modern age in which he lived. In the previous section I have fully discussed why we can call Lawrence a modernist, and I have only touched upon his personal philosophy. Therefore, in this third chapter I will further elaborate on the philosophical, didactically constructive dimension in both his nonfiction and his fiction.

The reason I have chosen to discuss both Lawrence's fiction and his nonfiction, is that it is vital to get a grip on his nonfictional writings in order to understand his fiction to a fuller extent. In fact, Lawrence himself pointed to this relationship in his ―Foreword‖ to his philosophical and psychological book Fantasia of the Unconscious: This pseudo-philosophy of mine – pollyanalytics, as the respected gentleman might say – is deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The novels and poems come unwatched out of one's pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These ―pollyanalytics‖ are inferences made afterwards, from the experience. (65) By saying this, Lawrence has reversed a statement by one of his reviewers, ―the respected gentleman‖ John Weaver, who had claimed that theory precedes fiction. Lawrence also derived the word ―pollyanalytics‖ from Weaver, to refer to his philosophy. As the Cambridge edition explains, ―the word is formed from 'Pollyanna', the excessively optimistic character in the novel Pollyanna (1913) by Eleanor Porter‖ (217). As such, Weaver considered Lawrence's philosophy as too optimistic, and as having lost all sense of reality and rationality.

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John Harrison (2000) agrees with Lawrence's statement when he concludes that the imagination of fiction precedes the formulation of theories, because it is the imagination which has creative energy: ―the imagination, operating dynamically in the fiction and largely beyond the conscious control of the intellect, creates the substance and forms from which the doctrine is subsequently deduced" (44). For Lawrence this creative energy was located in our unconscious and therefore it was more true in its nature than mental processes of theory-constructing.

Also Robert Montgomery (1994) has taken Lawrence's statement into account while writing The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, in which he investigates the philosophical influences on Lawrence, ranging from Nietzsche to Schopenhauer, so as to aim at a better understanding of his fiction: ―A truly unified view will have to penetrate to the ground of unity between the fiction and philosophy, to see them as twin products of the same consciousness‖ (3). Indeed, according to the reviewer of this book, Daly Macdonald (1996), Montgomery is adopting Lawrence's vision, as ―he is only echoing Lawrence's 'The Future of the Novel', which he has already quoted: 'It seems to me it was the greatest pity in the world, when philosophy and fiction got split' (p. 3)‖ (Macdonald 465).

Likewise, the introduction to both books mentions that there is a double connection – or one in two directions – between the fiction and the theory. As Lawrence himself had claimed, his fiction certainly was the basis for his later formulation of his philosophy in his nonfiction, but this nonfiction also ―lays a psychological and philosophical groundwork for the novels and essays which were to follow‖ (Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Fantasia, xx).

Acknowledging the interaction between Lawrence's fiction and nonfiction, this section will first explore the didactic quality of his nonfiction, before analysing some of his fiction. His views regarding philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology, education or the upbringing of children, and religion will be discussed. Chapter 3.1 will do this by relating Lawrence's views with Freud's, Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's. In chapter 3.2, I will apply this to his fiction.

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3.1 The Didactic Quality of Lawrence's Nonfiction

3.1.1 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious

The two psychology books that Lawrence published in 1921 and 1922, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, were meant as a response to the psychoanalytic criticism of his novel Sons and Lovers, for these critiques had read his book ―in apparent confirmation of the Freudian theories of the Oedipus complex and the incest motive‖(Intro to Psychoanalysis and Fantasia, xxv). As Andrew Harrison (2006) notes: Lawrence's primary motive in writing the books was to attack what he understood to be Freud's version of the unconscious, replacing it with an account that located the unconscious in the physiology of the nervous system. (255) Thus, Lawrence tried to inveigh against the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the Freudian inclination to consider incest as a natural motive underlying human behaviour. He directly referred to the Freudian theory in his title of the first book Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. As the introduction to this book states, Lawrence had meant the book to be ―an alternative account based not on scientific enquiry or clinical treatment but on his own intuition, experience and insights‖ (xix). It is these insights which I will discuss in the ensuing section.

The general insight that Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious tries to convey is that idealism and exact science cannot provide a true solution for the neuroses in which people get entangled. The entire book is a plea for irrationality, or as Anthony Burgess (1986) notes: [Lawrence] did not understand rational argument, or even wish to: it was a kind of weak concession to reality, which had to be approached through visceral conviction and not the pale reductions of ratiocination. (54-55) According to Lawrence, Freud belonged to this sphere of reductional ratiocination, and the entire argument of the first book is directed against psychoanalysis and its incest theory: We are now in the last stages of idealism. And psychoanalysis alone has the courage necessary to conduct us through these last stages. (...) And this brings us finally to incest, even incest-worship. Why? Because incest is the logical conclusion of our ideals, when these ideals have to be carried into passional effect. (14)

As can be gathered from the above quotation, Lawrence did not only disapprove of the idealism and objective scientific nature of the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, he also considered Rubbens 46 it to be immoral. Already in the first chapter with the well-chosen title, ―Psychoanalysis vs. Morality‖, Lawrence ironically lashed out at the immorality of the Freudian scientists, and at the uncritical attitude with which they were welcomed by the masses: Psychoanalysis is out, under therapeutic disguise, to do away entirely with the moral faculty in man.(...) We are in for a debâcle. (...) [Freud] was seeking for the unknown sources of the mysterious stream of consciousness. (...) Horrid stream! (...) [H]e stepped out of the conscious into the unconscious. (...) He came back with dreams to sell. (...) Nothing but a huge slimy serpent of sex (...). The analyst promised us that the tangle of complexes would be unravelled. (...) Once all the dream-horrors were translated into full consciousness, they would sublimate into – well, we don't quite know what. But anyhow, they would sublimate. (...) [W]e accepted this sublimation process without further question.(...) Now the analyst found that a complex did not necessarily vanish when brought into consciousness [and that] a complex [like the incest-craving] could not be regarded as the result of an inhibition. (...) This is the moral dilemma of psychoanalysis. (...) If the incest-craving is not the outcome of any inhibition of normal desire, if it actually exists and refuses to give way before any criticism, what then? What remains but to accept it as part of the normal sex- manifestation?(8-10, my additions) It is this Freudian approval of the incest-craving – so as to avoid the neurosis that results from the inhibition of this natural and normal incest-craving – that Lawrence utterly disagreed with. This is also what the Freudian Adrian Stephen (1923) concluded to be Lawrence's insights after having read his psychology: The fact is that Mr Lawrence has been seriously disturbed by the immorality of psycho- analysis. He holds that if what Freud says were true, the logical outcome would be the encouragement of incest. To escape neurosis, incest would be a duty, and the only way to avoid this painful conclusion is by a study of the real nature of the unconscious. (quoted from Intro to Psychoanalysis and Fantasia, l-li)

Indeed, as Adrian Stephen noted, in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Lawrence began this critique on Freud by putting forward his own conception of the unconscious, to which the incest motive did not belong: One thing, however, psychoanalysis all along the line fails to determine, and that is the nature of the pristine unconscious in man. (...) [W]hen the analyst discovers the incest motive in the unconscious, surely he is only discovering a term of humanity's repressed idea of sex. (...) That is, it is nothing pristine and anterior to mentality. It is in itself the mind's Rubbens 47

ulterior motive. (...) And the incest motive is in its origin not a pristine impulse, but a logical extension of the existent idea of sex and love. (11-12) As such, Lawrence did not define the Freudian unconscious as the true unconscious, the pristine unconscious, which was not mental or rational. According to Lawrence, the Freudian unconscious, like the incest-craving, was actually a repressed mental consciousness, whereas the true unconscious was something deeper, ―in which all our genuine impulse arises‖; he saw it as ―the fountain of real motivity‖ (12). It is a ―blood-consciousness‖, which Peter Balbert (1990) explains to be a ―sexual impulse‖ that is ―emotional rather than rational, for it is tied to certainties of instinct and to confidence about the senses‖ (69).

This conception is partly borrowed from the Jungian disciple Tringant Burrow, who ―became increasingly critical of orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis‖ (Intro to Psychoanalysis xxxii). Lawrence may also be seen as a Jungian disciple, since he may never have read any of Freud's texts, but according to Bruce Steele's introduction to the two books, it is certain that he has read Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in the English translation Psychology of the Unconscious, a title which inspired him to write his own first psychology book. While doing this, he felt himself supported by Burrow's ideas, for it was Burrow (1926) who later redefined the Freudian idea of the unconscious. In Burrow's view, sexuality did not belong to the unconscious, as it did in the Freudian theory, which claimed that ―nervous disorders are the substitutive manifestation of a repressed sexual life‖ (Burrow 210). Burrow asserted that this sexuality was not part of the unconscious, but rather in itself ―a replacement for the organic unity of personality arising naturally from the harmony of function that pertains biologically to the primary infant psyche‖ (Burrow 210). So, for Burrow, the true unconscious was the infant psyche, which he called the ―preconscious‖ (210). Burrow (1918) further disagreed with Freud by stating that the revolt against incest is instinctual, and thus part of the unconscious, the preconscious of the infant. Hence, he argued against the Freudian assumption that the incest-awe is merely an interdiction that is imposed by society, and that the urge to engage in incest is a natural result of our unconscious. In his paper, ―The Origin of the Incest-Awe‖ – which was to exert an influence on Lawrence –, Burrow (1918) separated our primary unconscious, which is subjective and biological, from our secondary conscious, which is objective and psychological, and to which sexuality belongs. He then considered the incest-awe to be the subjective reaction resulting from an affront to an inherent psychobiological principle of unity (...) [I]ncest is not forbidden, it forbids itself. It is the protest of our organic morality. (246-48) Rubbens 48

Lawrence's ideas of the unconscious and of the incest-revolt as a manifestation of this unconscious, which is the instinctual first consciousness of the infant, are similar to Burrow's. However, although he thought along the same lines, Lawrence did not entirely borrow Burrow's opinions to outline his own ideas, for – as Steele's introduction to both books notes – Lawrence derived a lot of his theories from ancient knowledge, such as for instance the Hindu chakras, which are ―the spiritual centres from the Sanskrit Upanishads‖ (Intro to Psychoanalysis, xxxvii). He put religion before objective science, and did not want to depend on the mind, for ―[k]nowledge is always a matter of whole experience‖ (17). He noted that one could get at a definition of the unconscious, if ―science abandons its intellectualist position and embraces the old religious faculty‖ (17). Thus, he forsook modern medical science and lent a mystic atmosphere of ―anatomical nonsense‖ to his description of the locations of the pre-mental consciousness (Intro to Psychoanalysis, xxxvi).

Lawrence somewhat vaguely located this true, pristine unconscious in ―the first nucleus of the ovule‖, since he considered the foetus to be non-cerebral, and yet as the possessor of its own ―individual consciousness, having its own single purpose and progression‖ (19). He further claimed in an anti-scientific way that the unconscious ―lies beneath the navel of the folded foetus‖, because it is there that the association with the parent body is situated (20). Beneath this navel, in the abdomen, lies the great centre which he called the ―solar plexus‖, and which he defined as ―[t]he sympathetic center of unification, or at least unison‖ between the mother and child (23). Apart from this solar plexus, he also distinguished ―the great voluntary center‖ which arouses ―the sense of antagonistic freedom‖, and which is the source of the infant's inclination towards independence (24).

On top of the lower plane of the subjective unconscious which he located in the abdomen, he also distinguished a second plane, the upper plane, which is the objective unconscious, lying in the thorax. The diaphragm marks the division between these two planes, which both have a polarity between a sympathetic and a voluntary centre. The upper plane contains a polarity between the positive pole of the cardiac plexus, from which ―flows out that effluence which we call selfless love‖, and the negative pole that is ―passionally discriminative‖ (34). It is a polarity between union with and separation from the beloved, just like in the lower plane of the abdomen, which is the creative and ―devouring darkness‖(32). Yet, this lower plane also contrasts with the more spiritual upper plane of the loving heart that has a ―perfect knowledge of the beloved‖, an ―objective Rubbens 49 knowledge‖ of the ―unsurpassable gulf‖ between the self and the beloved (34-35). Lawrence morally concluded his train of thought by claiming that On both planes of love, upper and lower, the two modes must act complementary to one another, the sympathetic and the separatist. (...) The goal of life is the coming to perfection of each single individual. This cannot take place without the tremendous interchange of love from all the four great poles of the first, basic field of consciousness. (36)

The great apotheosis of Lawrence's first philosophical psychology book is his proposal of a moral solution to the problem of neuroses. This solution lies in the ―understanding of the true unconscious‖ that he tried to offer to his readers. It is an understanding of the fact that ―love is a thing to be learned‖ and that we must all try to establish the ―four powerful circuits possible between two individuals‖ to perfection (41). We must not let our mental consciousness – our mind – interfere with our spontaneous and dynamic primal consciousness, because ―[m]entality, being automatic in its principle like the machine, (...) begins to affect life. (...) It is the end of life‖ (42). We must make our ―spontaneous will‖ – which originally is ―a purely spontaneous control-factor of the living unconscious‖ – react against ―this automatism, this degradation from the spontaneous- vital reality into the mechanic-material reality‖ (42). Only then can we escape neuroses according to Lawrence.

John Harrison (2000) links this idea of the cultivation of the true life, which is the ―instinctive, spontaneous, physical, purely organic, unconscious, and non-intellectual life, which has no purpose other than its own efflorescence, its fullness of being" to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Freud (33-34). For Nietzsche, the essence of the true self lies in the physical aspect of suffering; for Schopenhauer the essence of life lies in the aimless – and therefore unconscious – ―Will‖; and for Freud the essence is situated in the equally non-intellectual ―notion of desire, which is what makes us human subjects but is an unhuman process which is deaf to meaning and cares for nothing but itself" (Harrison 46). On top of these similarities, Harrison also detects originality in Lawrence's theories, for Lawrence invested the Flesh – the instinctive life force – with creativity and "universal significance" (47). As such , Lawrence may be seen as someone who believed in the positive and constructive forces of the unconscious, whereas other theorists focussed on the destructive side of our instincts.

After this analysis of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, it is clear that Lawrence has put a didactic thread throughout his philosophical story of the human soul. He concluded his argument Rubbens 50 with a strong moral thesis: that people should abide by their primal unconscious, their spontaneous deeper soul, rather than to their deadening and stifling mind, and that they should learn to love, not with the mind, but with their spontaneous unconscious. He also convincingly defended himself against the ridiculing critiques of reviewers who found his philosophy an unsound and too suggestive system that would ―derationalize man (...) [and] lead us all into the jungle‖ (Intro to Psychoanalysis, xlviii). He did this by situating himself within an ancient theosophical, philosophical and biological tradition: ―And even this is not mysticism – no more than the ancient symbols used in botany or biology‖ (39). He even went further in his defence by preaching the collapse of the exact sciences, because mentality is limited. Thus, he clearly stated his didactic purpose: ―We profess no scientific exactitude, particularly in terminology. We merely wish intelligibly to open a way‖ (32).

That this didactic and moral attitude had its effect and that it was honoured for its credibility, is proved by the positive reviews his book got: ―Lawrence, because he is a poet, sees deeper and more clearly than Freud and Jung‖; ―[he] directs attention to the need of bringing into fruitful interaction the discoveries of Freud (...) and our moral ideas in general‖ (Intro to Psychoanalysis, xlix)

3.1.2 Fantasia of the Unconscious

The second book of his two philosophical and psychological books, Fantasia of the Unconscious, is a continuation of the first, as it deals with the same discontentment Lawrence felt towards the modern world, and the way people had turned off their unconscious, sensuous, intuitive and spontaneous deeper mode of being. He aptly put this into words in one of his letters to his friend Jack Murry in 1923: ―I think you understand Fantasia (...) all right. It's I – because the sense of doom deepens inside me, at the thought of the old world which I loved – and the new world means nothing to me.‖ (The Letters 575)

Meanwhile Fantasia also differs from Psychoanalysis, since it is broader in its themes, taking the first book as a mere introduction by recapitulating this book's major theme of the consciousness in chapter three. As Lawrence had claimed in his ―Foreword, an Answer to Some Critics‖ to the second book, the influences for this book were to be embedded in the broad context of Rubbens 51

all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Herakleitos down to Frazer and his Golden Bough, and even Freud and Froebenius. (62) This broad influential background is also acknowledged by critics, who nevertheless point at the creativity and originality with which Lawrence used them. As Erwin Steinberg (2001) notes: Lawrence's pattern was not to accept any one else's models, paradigms, or orthodoxies, traditional or revolutionary, but rather to take from anywhere and everywhere factual details from the real world, bits and pieces of theories, superstitions, aspects of the personalities of people whom he knew, to support his own theories. (91) As such, Lawrence's second psychology book illustrates his very personal vision, more particularly by applying his divisions of the primal conscious to his idea of sexuality, a solid marriage and a good upbringing of children. He continued to attack Freud and put forward his own idea of the unconscious which does not harm the social-political welfare, contrary to the incest-permission in the Freudian psychoanalytic theory. In this chapter I will investigate what Lawrence's own social ideas concerning sexuality and education were (I will explore his ideas concerning marriage in chapter 4). I will also try to highlight Lawrence's didactic intent.

One of the main topics in Lawrence's second psychology book is sexuality, which he defined in terms of the divisions of the unconscious. He began to outline sexuality at its primary stage, during puberty, which he called ―the hour of the stranger‖ and ―the first hour of true individuality‖ (Fantasia 133). He chose this terminology because it reflects the beginning of a more public life, when the adolescent tries to transgress the boundaries of the family and starts to have ―friends and enemies‖, whereas he only had ―playmates‖ before puberty (Fantasia 133). Lawrence explained this shift by the awakening of four extra dynamic centres: the hypogastric plexus and the sacral ganglion, which belong to a deeper plane, and the cervical plexus and cervical ganglion, which belong to an upper plane. These centres were ―in a kind of dream-automatism‖ during the first twelve years of a person's life. As a result of their awakening, ―sex comes into active being‖ and ―the two seas of blood in the two individuals (...) clash into a oneness‖, which entails that ―the blood is changed and renewed‖ (Fantasia 134-135).

Lawrence considered this newness as a ―craving for new (...) collective activity. That is, for a new polarised connection with other beings, other men.‖ (Fantasia 135). In a moral tone, Lawrence warned his contemporaries against considering the sexual consummation as an aim on its own right. We – or rather men in Lawrence's opinion – should aim at the ―commingling of many‖, Rubbens 52 and not on the ―commingling of sex‖, in which ―we are alone with one partner‖ (Fantasia 137). As such, Lawrence brought his description of sexuality to a higher moral and social level, urging mankind to make a good choice between the ―belief in man's creative, spontaneous soul, and man's automatic power of production and reproduction‖, by avoiding the latter to become dominant (Fantasia 137). Nevertheless, he pleaded for an balanced choice: Assert sex as the predominant fulfilment, and you get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert purposiveness as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you drift into barren sterility, like our business life of today, and our political life. (Fantasia 138) In general, Lawrence experienced sexuality as a dynamic force, which should be kept alive by not explaining away ―the mystery‖, because ―[t]o translate sex into mental ideas is vile, to make a scientific fact of it is death‖ (Fantasia 139-140). Lawrence postulated that humankind was driven out of Paradise because Eve ―became aware of her own womanhood‖ when biting the apple, and not because she had sinned. Hence, the true evil lies in bringing ―our sex into our head ― (Fantasia 117)

Lawrence was anxious about the rule of ideas or rationality on more than one field: not only did he want to expel rationality on the sexual domain, but also on the educational domain. He argued that society should change its educational system. Children should not be taught how to read and they should not be educated in elementary schools, but they should be given a practical education in workshops of skilled labour for boys, and domestic workshops for girls. For Lawrence, everything else was superfluous, as ―[a]ll that they have learnt in their heads has no reference at all to their dynamic souls‖ (Fantasia 115). A mental education keeps individuals from developing their own dynamic and spontaneous unconscious. As such, he recognised the ―danger of a helpless, presumptuous, newspaper-reading population‖, which cannot indulge in active occupations, but falls victim to the disease of mental activity (Fantasia 115). Therefore, his plan for society was that of an uneducated human race, that is free, and chooses only a few leaders that are ―increasingly responsible for the whole‖, for responsibility only ―lies like torture on the mass‖ (Fantasia 120).

Having discussed education within the larger context of society, Lawrence further elaborated on what a proper education should be within the confines of the family life. He expressed his idea of a proper connection between mother and son by stating that a woman should not start to project her adult love unto her son, but that she rather ought to live quietly after having reached her ―point of fulfilment‖ with her husband (Fantasia 147). She should not impose her will onto her child and see him as her new spiritual lover, since this ―stimulates the child into a Rubbens 53 consciousness which does not belong to it (...) and rob it of its own spontaneous consciousness and freedom‖ (Fantasia 143). The danger Lawrence saw in the spiritual love-connection between mother and son was that it neglects the ―lower centre (...) of sensual, manly independence‖, since the relationship between the parent and the child can never be sexual: ―All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. What sex-instinct there is in a child is always adverse to the parents.‖ (Fantasia 142,144). Because the lower sensual centre is stifled by the spiritual nature of the mother-son connection, which is situated on the upper plane, the son, in whom ―the deeper sensual centres are aroused‖, cannot find a ―polarised connection with another person‖ (Fantasia 145). This turns him into ―an introvert‖, because his ―mind becomes full of sex‖: ―It means that the activity of the lower psyche and lower body is polarised by the upper body‖ (Fantasia 146). Lawrence found fault with this, as he stated that sexuality should be situated in the lower planes of our unconscious, in our ―non-mental blood-consciousness‖ (Fantasia 185). The result of this problematic family environment is that the son will enter into a marriage of which the sexual part will prove empty in comparison to ―that other loveliest thing – the poignant touch of devotion felt for [his] mother‖ (Fantasia 151). The pedagogical solution that Lawrence proposed was ―to leave of loving‖ because the love-ideal suppresses the dynamic independence of the child: ―Oh parents, see that your children get their dinners and clean sheets, but don't love them.‖ (Fantasia 163).

This conception of the spiritual bond between mother and child, is a viewpoint that Lawrence borrowed from Schopenhauer. It was Schopenhauer who separated the father and mother in terms of respectively instinct or rationality, by noting ―that will stems from the father and intellect from the mother‖, which is a conviction that Lawrence translated as his attraction to the father's "will" or zest for living and the physical aspect of life, opposed to the "intellectual" propensities of the mother, which are ultimately seen as destructive to the artist's ability to create. (Brunsdale 127-128) As such, in Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence attacked the mother's intellectual and conscious influence on the child and preferred a more vitalistic and unconscious input in education.

As may be deduced from this account of his philosophic argumentation in Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence continued to take up the didactic stance of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. He warned against the wrong – because conscious – perception of sexuality and against the rational upbringing of children, and he even proposed a new form of society. He also attacked the spiritual love-bond between the parent and the child, because it keeps the child from growing up as a dynamic person, who is able to live in harmony with his deeper unconscious. Anne Rubbens 54

Fernald (2003) experiences this didacticism as a kind of political engagement: ―Lawrentian conversation offers a model of political engagement—on the part of both author and reader‖ (184). She claims that his aim was to ―provoke a response‖ by using two tactics: ―coercion and alienation‖ (184). An example she mentions is his use of a ―daring rhetoric—both risky and confrontational –― already in the opening lines of his Fantasia: "The generality of readers had better just leave it alone" (Fantasia 11). By this ―generality of readers‖ he intended the group of rationalist readers that failed to understand that ―language itself—especially the language of reason—is part of the problem [of presenting knowledge]‖ (Fernald 190, my addition). He confronted them with a mystical conception of the world, by sneering at contemporary science and by ―present[ing] his argument as unformed and a bit disorganized, [which he saw as] part of the mythology of inspiration and genius‖ (Fernald 190). Is is those tactics that didactically force the individual engagement to rise up against ―the greater evil: boredom and conventionality‖ (Fernald 185).

To defend his own ―subjective science‖, which was sometimes the object of negative critiques that denounced it as too mythical or magical, Lawrence aligned his philosophy with the wisdom in the old Egypt and Greece: I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established on data of living experience and sure intuition. (...) Our objective science of modern knowledge concerns itself only with phenomena (...) in their cause-and-effect relationship. I have nothing to say against our science. It is perfect as far as it goes. But to regard it as exhausting the whole scope of human possibility in knowledge seems to me just puerile. Our science is a science of the dead world. (...) I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms (...) once had (...) a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life. In our era this science crumbled into magic and charlatanry. But even wisdom crumbles. (Fantasia 62-63) This defence of the didactic and philosophical value of his second psychology book is reminiscent of his first book. As a result, also the fairly appreciative reception of the second book is similar to that of the first book, since Fantasia was for instance pronounced a work of intelligence: ―a criticism of the modern world‖ and ―a book to keep at hand and re-read‖ (Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Fantasia liii). These positive critiques emphasize the didactic value of his Fantasia.

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3.1.3 Lawrence's Essays

Lawrence considered his two psychology books as the apt and definite expression of his personal philosophy: ―the definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man‖ (Fantasia of the Unconscious 65). As Steele's introduction to these books states, they ―were for him a final attempt to express what he had earlier called his 'philosophy', of which (...) the various essays – some surviving, some now lost – were by-products‖ (xxxix). In this section I will discuss how some of his essays – as well as his letters – can be considered as by-products of these books.

In his letters, Lawrence adopted the same stance towards rationality as in his philosophical books. He showed his anxiety about how the passions were overshadowed by modern man's rational mind: And the tragedy (...) is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness, and that your will has gone completely over to the mental consciousness, and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood- consciousness, (...) which is only death in the result. (Letters II 470)

This anxiety about rationality caused him to adopt a didactic stance in his letters, which is another example of the similarity between Lawrence's letters and his psychology books. In the letter he wrote in response to a book which did not ―thrill‖ him because of its too cerebral ―would-be‖ character, he moralistically insisted that the youth should radically change its attitude towards sexuality: Why don't you jeunesse let all the pus of festering sex out of your heads, and try to act from the original centres? The old, dark religions understood. ―God enters from below,‖ said the Egyptians, and that's right. (The Letters 556) This idea is also one of the main topics in his second psychology book, Fantasia of the Unconscious, and is largely inspired by Schopenhauer, whose ―Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe‖ frankly conveys that sex is the ―Brennpunkt‖, which means that it ―forms the central essence of everything that exists in the phenomenal universe‖(Brunsdale 121). As such, in his letters, Lawrence continued what – according to Anne Fernald – he had been doing in Fantasia: ―making sex and sexual impulses central to human experience‖ (Fernald 188).

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Lawrence also explored this conviction in some of his essays on sexuality. In ―Sex Versus Loveliness‖ he defended sex as a mysterious ―living beauty‖, and he claimed that these mysteries neither ought to be explained – which was something science tried to do – nor ought to be hated like the capitalistic modern society did: Science has a mysterious hatred of beauty, because it doesn't fit in the cause-and-effect chain. And society has a mysterious hatred of sex, because it perpetually interferes with the nice money-making schemes of social man. So the two hatreds made a combine, and sex and beauty are mere propagation appetite. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 122) In this way, he inveighed against the idealism of science – a point of view already defended – and against the coldness of the modern society that hated sex because one can have ―only partial control‖ over it (124). In the same essay he also gave vent to his critiques of Freudian Psychoanalysis, which he had already mentioned in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. In this essay, his critique is directed against the Freudian negative stance towards the human intuitions, whereas Lawrence considered the spontaneous flow of the unconscious and sexual desire as the most valuable faculty in human life: What for example could show a more poisoned hatred of sex than Freudian psychoanalysis? - which carries with it a morbid fear of beauty, 'alive' beauty, and which causes the atrophy of our intuitive faculty and our intuitive self. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 122) Having overthrown all the objections to sex, Lawrence concluded his essay by mentioning the creativity that is kindled by sex, which is reminiscent of what he had alluded to in Fantasia, namely that sexuality is able to arouse a public purpose in man: ―No man works so well and so successfully as when some woman has kindled a little fire in his veins. No woman does her housework with real joy unless she is in love.‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 127)

Likewise, in ―Pornography and Obscenity‖ and in ―... Love Was Once a Little Boy‖ he remained faithful to what he had expressed in Fantasia, namely that sex should not be explained or mentally conceived of: This is what happens to many of those who become seriously 'free' in their sex, free and pure. They have mentalised sex till it is nothing at all, nothing at all but a mental quantity. And the final result is disaster, every time. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 214) It's Don Juanery, sex-in-the-head, no real desire, which leads to profligacy or squalid promiscuity. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 98) In ―Pornography and Obscenity‖, Lawrence also metaphorically presented sex as ―the fountainhead of our energetic life‖ that was threatened by either idealism and demystification, or by taboo (214). Rubbens 57

As such, he blamed both the scientists who killed the dynamic nature of sex, and the prudish ―grey elderly ones‖ who – by preaching purity – banned sex to the underground pornographic spheres of secrecy and dirt, which eventually resulted in masturbation (213). His modernist inveighing against these ―grey elderly ones‖, who adhered to the nineteenth century morals, was new in comparison to his two psychology books, but in general, the essay and Fantasia follow one similar train of thought: a didactic argumentation to keep sex alive as a mystic, irrational, dynamic and creative flow between two individuals, whose instincts are more worthy and true than their conscious thoughts.

According to Lawrence, these conscious thoughts were most often conventionalised and law-influenced, and thus, they were not individual but mob-related. In his essay ―Pornography and Obscenity‖ he dualistically opposed ―mob-meaning‖ to ―individual meaning‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 197). For Lawrence, the vast majority of mankind was almost entirely possessed by the mob-meaning and was not clever enough to distinguish both meanings, for the public was ―controlled from the outside, by the trickster, and never from the inside, by its own sincerity‖(199). This idea is reminiscent of his educational ideas in Fantasia, in which he had proposed not to mould the masses through education, because this imposed mental, anti-individual knowledge on their minds. He went on to defend individuality against the mob, for he acknowledged the ―great pleasure‖ that is aroused when ―a word comes to us in its individual character, and starts in us the individual responses‖ (198). In this way, he pleaded for an individual reception of ―the so-called obscene words‖, as the individual who judges these words will be able to put the mob's rejections aside and acknowledge the sincerity of these words: The first reaction is almost sure to be mob-reaction, mob-indignation, mob-condemnation. And the mob gets no further. But the real individual has second thoughts and says: am I really shocked? (...) No, (...) not for all the law in the world. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 199) This dualism between the mob-reaction and the individual reaction can be seen as analogous to the distinction Lawrence made in his two psychology books: the conscious versus the unconscious. In these two books he defended the unconscious as a natural dynamic power which was not rationally and legally influenced like the conscious was. Hence, when, in his essays, he was defending the individual way of living as more natural, creative and dynamic, against the mob-lifestyle, which he portrayed as prudishly stifling and deadening through its rationality, then this may be read as a defence of the unconscious against the conscious. Thus, in both his essays and his psychology books, Lawrence, who claimed that ―every man is more made up of unconscious intentions than of Rubbens 58 conscious ones‖, was the defender of the individual power of the unconscious (Sex, Literature and Censorship 200).

In ―The State of Funk‖, Lawrence further elaborated on the reason why he believed the individual unconscious to be more virtuous than legal conscious restraint and the capitalist system, which only ―hurts our good nature more than we can bear‖: I do not believe that people would be villains, thieves, murderers and sexual criminals if they were freed from legal restraint. On the contrary, I think the vast majority would be much more generous, good-hearted and decent if they felt they dared be. I am convinced that people want to be more decent, more good-hearted than our social system of money and grab allows them to be. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 138) This excerpt displays Lawrence's optimistic belief in humanity and its original unscathed nature, which is only later perverted by the capitalist and idealistically constraining system. This is a belief that is analogous to Rousseau's and which forms the basis for Lawrence's entire philosophy. It is also present in his philosophical magnum opus, the two psychology books, which plead for a non- mental education for children – because such an education stimulates their individual unconscious – and warn against the constraining system.

It should be noted that the individuality that Lawrence was advocating, was not just any kind of individuality. As he explicitly made clear in another essay, ―... Love Was Once a Little Boy‖, we should distinguish between ―the individuality of the blood‖ and ―the individuality of the ego‖, and it is the former which he defended: It is a pity we have insisted on being individuals only in the communistic, semi-abstract or generalised sense: as voters, money-owners, free men and women: free in so far as we are all alike. (...) Our education goes on and on, on and on, making the sexes alike, destroying the original individuality of the blood, to substitute for it this dreary individuality of the ego. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 96-97) He deplored the condition of the modern man and woman, who were considering themselves to be equal individuals. Lawrence disapproved of this vision, because it was irreverent towards the natural distinction between the sexes, and because it entailed the complete destruction of ―the true desire-stream‖ which needs the individual man to be ―a different pair of shoes‖ than the individual woman (99, 96). So, men and women should be distinguished from each other, in order to keep the unconscious dynamic power of the blood intact, and to block the deadening, dehumanising and demystifying influence of the conscious ego: Rubbens 59

[I]f I am nothing but an ego, and woman is nothing but another ego, then there is really no vital difference between us. Two little dolls of conscious entities, squeaking when you squeeze them. And with a tiny bit of an extraneous appendage to mark which is which. (...) [T]he modern woman [is] a finished-off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 103-104) As such, in its focus on individuality and how it relates to the sexes, the essay ―...Love Was Once a Little Boy‖ has to be seen as an elaboration on ―Pornography and Obscenity‖. Moreover, it is a by- product of Lawrence's psychology books, because it makes the same distinction between the positively-valued unconscious and the negatively-valued conscious.

That Lawrence's essays were by-products of his didactic psychology books, cannot only be seen in his views – as I have pointed at in the previous paragraphs – but also in his didactic writing style. This style consists of imperatives and the pronoun 'we', which both tend to involve the reader to a larger extent, and natural metaphors, which lend some kind of natural acceptability to his arguments. In the following two paragraphs, I will give some examples of the didactic style in Lawrence's essays.

Firstly, an example of the pronoun 'we', as well as of an imperative that urges the reader to change his negative opinion of the so-called obscene words, which are linked to sexuality, can be found in the essay ―Introduction to Pansies‖: What is obvious is that the words in these cases have been dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental associations. The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. (...) Well, then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job. (...) We must accept the word arse as we accept the word face, since arses we have and always shall have. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 130-131) It is remarkable how Lawrence preferred using imperatives each time he was evolving towards a conclusive remedy for the problems he had been discussing throughout the essay: ―The remedy is, of course, (...): lift off the taboo‖ (133). Lawrence even used a sequences of imperatives as a rhetorical device, to put urgency in his argument, as he did in his essay ―The State of Funk‖, in which he pleaded to put an end to the terrible state of funk in which the modern society was caught: Accept the sexual, physical being of yourself, and of every other creature. Don't be afraid of it. Don't be afraid of the physical functions. Don't be afraid of the so-called obscene words. (...) Conquer the fear of sex, and restore the natural flow. Restore even the so-called obscene Rubbens 60

words, which are part of the natural flow. If you don't, if you don't put back a bit of the old warmth into life, there is savage disaster ahead. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 142) It is not surprising that this is the final paragraph of the essay, for it is endowed with a stupendous rhetorical force, didactically aiming at the reader. It is especially in these lines that Lawrence showed his rhetorical skills, as if he were a preacher of the old, natural style of living that had to save a modern society from its downfall.

Secondly, examples of natural metaphors can be detected in all of his essays, for he was a defender of a more natural style of living. So, when he used these metaphors, it was both for their didactic effect – for what comes across as natural, also comes across a indisputable – and for the beauty in nature he wanted to portray. An instance of the indisputableness of nature can be found in ―... Love Was Once a Little Boy‖: Desire is a living stream. If we gave free rein, or a free course, to our living flow of desire, we shouldn't go far wrong. (...) Desire itself is a pure thing, like sunshine, or fire, or rain. (...) It is my flow of desire that makes me move as the birds and animals move through the sunshine and the night (...) not shut outside of the natural paradise. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 99). In this essay, Lawrence further described the necessity of the sexual desire of the man and the woman to flow together, like two streams that are spontaneously confluent, which is a natural phenomenon, and therefore a moral goal for people. He even extended the metaphor, to account for the importance for men and women to maintain their blood-individuality: But is is never himself that meets and mingles with herself: any more than two lakes, whose waters meet to make one river, in the distance, meet in themselves. The two individuals stay apart, for ever and ever. But the two streams of desire, like the Blue Nile and the white Nile, from the mountains one and from the low hot lake the other, meet and at length mix their strange and alien waters, to make a Nilus Flux. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 95) As such, Lawrence compared the individuals with two lakes that remain separate, while he described their sexual desires as streams that come from the lakes, and that are able to flow together. With this extended metaphor he visualised the importance of duality, which he detected in the entire cosmos, in both humans and stones: ―Everything that exists, even a stone, has two sides to its nature. It fiercely maintains its own individuality, its own solidity. And it reaches forth from itself in the subtlest flow of desire. (...) And we, men and women, are the same as stones ‖ (100). In another essay, ―Love‖, he described the duality of the love between a man and a woman with the metaphor of the rose, which he saw a a perfect instance of equilibrium. As such, he considered Rubbens 61 mankind to be a rose with ―a dual passion of unutterable separation and lovely conjunction‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 59). This description of polarity as a vital element in the cosmos, was a principle that Lawrence had already discussed in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. In this book he had been analysing the sympathetic and voluntary centres of the unconscious that cause the polarity between respectively a union with and a separation from the beloved. In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence even metaphorically linked those centres to the sun and the moon: [T]he sun is the great sympathetic centre of our inanimate universe. (...) [T]he moon is the other pole, cold and keen and vivifying, corresponding in some way to a voluntary pole. (...) The moon is the clue to our earth's individual identity. (Fantasia 169-170) When applying the metaphor of the lake and stream to those centres or poles, we would have to associate the sympathetic centre with the stream of desire and the voluntary centre with the lake, which is the person's individuality. So, through the use of these natural metaphors, Lawrence's essays do not only have the same convincing didactic quality of his psychology books, but also convey the same dualistic way of thinking.

3.1.4 His Last Philosophical Work: Apocalypse

That Lawrence was a writer who was largely influenced by religion, has been claimed by many critics, like for instance Erwin Steinberg (2001): [Lawrence] sought and in some way used a variety of books which either dealt directly with various religions or showed in the process of telling their story how religion functioned within certain cultures. (...) Lawrence saw himself as a religious person, indeed, a religious writer. (96) As a result of his strict Congregationalist upbringing, he thoroughly got acquainted with the Christian religion. Although this left a noticeable mark on his thinking and writing, he turned against Christianity in and after his adolescence and embraced the older pagan myths and philosophy, which is something he attested in his letters: ―I have been wrong, much too Christian in my philosophy. These early Greeks have clarified my soul. I must drop all about God. . . . I shall write out Herkleitos‖ (Letters II 364-365). It is from Heraclitus that Lawrence borrowed the idea of 'duality', which was to become vital in his writings, for he saw everything ―in a continual flux of opposition‖ (Kalnin, Introduction 14). His inclination to go back to pagan times even brought him to the Egyptian civilization, which he came to see as superior to the Greek philosophy. As Mara Kalnin's ―Introduction‖ to his Apocalypse states, Lawrence had started to see the Greek Rubbens 62 philosophers as too rationally obsessed with ―the Logos‖, and he considered the old Egyptians capable of ―the great down direction, away from the mind‖: Lawrence believed that the movement in 'the great down direction' would end the domination of the Logos, the Word, and would restore the balance between the spiritual and sensual planes of existence that Greece, Rome and Christianity, with their emphasis on the spirit and the mind, had destroyed. (Introduction 7) All this pondering on religiosity is expressed in Lawrence's last work, Apocalypse. It is a criticism on Christianity and an embracing of pagan myths, more particularly of their organic symbiosis with the entire cosmos and their acceptance of man as a dual being, driven by both his nature to love and his nature to overpower others. In this chapter, I will try to point at a didactic content in Lawrence's most important religious work, Apocalypse, by showing how he aimed at convincing the reader of the wrongs of Christianity.

Although Lawrence's Apocalypse is characterised by repetition, we can mainly divide the work into three parts. Lawrence started by lashing out at the Bible and Christianity, which covers the first five chapters. Then, he began to explain the imagery in the biblical Apocalypse as pagan, which covers the bulk of the book. In the last chapter he returned to where he had begun his train of thought, with a final devastating critique on Christianity. Already in this cyclical structure we can notice some didactic power, for his exposition of the pagan nature of a biblical story is enclosed by an initial and a final destruction of Christian principles.

His critique on Christianity may be compared to Nietzsche's, as both Mara Kalnins and Jeffrey Meyers claim his indebtedness to Nietzche. As Meyers (1988) states in a review: ―Lawrence was certainly influenced by Nietzsche's negative attitude toward Christianity,(...) emphasis on body, instinct, and heredity against mind, reason, and consciousness‖ (697). Indeed, already in the first chapter of his Apocalypse, Lawrence attacked the too rational character of the Bible exegesis and the lack of emotion and imagination whereby the biblical content was crammed into children's minds: ―Not only was the Bible verbally trodden into the consciousness, like innumerable foot- prints treading a surface hard, but the foot-prints were always mechanically alike, the interpretation was fixed, so that all real interest was lost.‖ (59). By using a style full of imagery, like the comparison with ―foot-prints‖ in the previous citation, Lawrence tried to vivify his viewpoint towards the reader, which broadened his didactic impact.

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In her introduction to Apocalypse, Mara Kalnins (2002) further specifies Lawrence's negative attitude towards Christianity: ―Like Nietzsche before him, Lawrence criticised Christianity's emphasis on renunciation, love and equality, because he felt it (...) ignored the deep impulse to power in mankind‖ (23). In the third chapter, Lawrence elaborated on what can be seen as an ever-recurring element in his philosophy: dualism. He fundamentally saw man as a dualistic being, both individual and collective, and claimed that Christianity only focused on our strong individual side by preaching renunciation, love, morality and self-realisation, whereas it forsook our urge to be powerful. He saw the power-urge as the collective side of our nature, because it naturally came into being ―[a]s soon as two or three men c[a]me together‖, causing men to become ―heroic‖ and ―have their best collective being‖ (68). As such, he noticed that the love-preaching Gospels had naturally and inevitably been superseded by the Apocalypse, which brought homage to power:

And so there crept into the New Testament the grand Christian enemy, the Power-spirit. At the very last moment, when the devil had been so beautifully shut out, in he slipped, dressed in Apocalyptic disguise, and enthroned himself at the end of the book as Revelation. (67).

By presenting the rise of the Apocalyptic story as a natural consequence of our dualistic human nature, he lent credibility to his attack on love-preaching Christianity. This credibility again served his didactic aim.

As may be expected from the initial four chapters of his book, in which Lawrence disapproved of ―Pure‖ Christianity's single focus on love, he started to defend the Apocalyptic story in the Bible for its power-spirit in the rest of his Apocalypse. In a long and detailed historical textual analysis, he pointed to the pagan contents of the Apocalypse. He considered these pagan elements as more dynamic than ―the little petty personal adventure of modern Protestantism and Catholicism alike‖, because those religions were ―cut off from the cosmos‖ and focused on ―morality instead of cosmic splendour‖ (75). He enthusiastically agreed with the pagan awareness of dualism, ―namely, the moist and the dry, the cold and the hot, air (or cloud) and fire‖ (82) and consequently deplored that Christianity and modern science overruled this pagan awareness as ―Urdummheit”. That Lawrence was emotionally involved in his argumentation can be deduced from his empathic style, sometimes eagerly using exclamation marks: ―Urdummheit, or primal stupidity, is the state of all mankind before precious Homer, and of all races, all, except Greek, Jew, Roman and – ourselves!‖ (87). Mitzi Brunsdale (1978) notes that Lawrence inherited this subjectivity form Schopenhauer, turning him into a ―subjective and essentially emotional‖ artist and philosopher (129). This subjectivity is what Robert E. Montgomery (1994) calls Lawrence's ―creative imagination‖ which is Rubbens 64 at work both in his fiction and in his nonfiction: ―his didactic and expository works (...) exploit the imaginative resources of language to communicate to the feelings as well as to the intellect‖ (3). So, throughout the entire analysis of the biblical, though originally pagan story, Lawrence tried to convince the reader of the valuable content of pagan philosophy not only by taking up the position of a widely-read intellectual who was familiar with all the important civilizations in the world, but also by using an empathic and personal style, which appealed to his contemporaries.

Finally, Lawrence concluded his didactic plea against Christianity with his proposal of a solution, as he did in all of his philosophical works. He even used the same rhetorical techniques as in for instance some of his essays, with the use of imperatives and the first plural pronoun:

Let us give up our false position as Christians, as individuals (...). What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen. (149)

The last sentence resonates as if it were a sentence from a manual, addressing the reader who just needs to follow the instructions. These can be summarised in one line with what he has stated throughout his entire career as a philosopher: put aside Christianity, science and rationality to be able to indulge in a pagan style of living, as a whole being that is united with the cosmos.

3.2 How Lawrence Didactically Adopted His Philosophy in His Fiction

As may be derived from the analysis of D. H. Lawrence's nonfiction in chapter 3.1, his philosophical viewpoints can be roughly summarised by the following words: irrationality, vitality, physicality, polarity and pagan religiosity. Throughout his entire life, the philosopher in D. H. Lawrence fought against mentality, the ―Logos‖, consciousness, rationality and objective science, because this all represented for him the coldness of the machine. He turned to ancient, pagan myths because these were in touch with the cosmos and were able to acknowledge the fundamental polarity in the universe and in mankind: a polarity between positive and negative, sympathetic union and voluntary separation, sun and moon, the vital lower plane of the unconscious and the more spiritual upper plane of the unconscious. These myths did not focus on man's rationality, but on his spontaneity, vitality, physicality, passions, instincts, which are all encompassed by the true pristine unconsciousness. Lawrence stressed the positive, constructive and creative forces of our Rubbens 65 instinctive unconscious. Therefore, he advocated that all our actions should be directed through this passionate unconsciousness: we should not love with the mind, but with our spontaneous instincts; sexuality ought not to be explained, but mysteriously felt by our unconscious; education should not be situated on the intellectual and conscious field, but on the vital, practical and unconscious field. Thus, Lawrence's philosophy is a didactic plea for a life led by the instinctive vitality and not by the mind; a plea for a return to a natural state that is unscathed by rationality, conventionality or the machine age.

As I have already mentioned in the introduction to the third chapter, we cannot see Lawrence's philosophy separated from his fiction: the two go hand in hand and influence each other. For this reason Lawrence should be seen as a prophetic artist, which is acknowledged by Robert E. Montgomery (1994):

We will have to recognize, with Mark Spilka, that ―the custom to divide D. H. Lawrence into aesthetic and prophetic halves‖ prevents us from seeing that his creative work is ―as prophetic and didactic, in its own way, as his sermons and pronouncements‖ (11). (3)

The following chapters will investigate in which ways Lawrence's creative work – and more precisely his fiction – has managed to deliver a prophetic and didactic message that resembles the message in his philosophical work.

3.2.1 Philosophy in The White Peacock

The first novel that Lawrence wrote was already a way of putting his philosophy into a fictional form. This made Anthony Burgess (1986) communicate his appreciation for The White Peacock and defend it against critiques or indifference:

It is a very mature novel and, despite Ford Madox Hueffer's implied strictures, not without subtleties of form. It is even an important novel, but nobody saw that when it first appeared. I am not sure that many see it now. (26)

To convey his philosophical insights in The White Peacock, Lawrence made use of the narrator Cyril Beardsall, who is very similar to Lawrence himself, which I already alluded to in chapter 1.2, and which Lawrence himself confirmed: ―the gamekeeper Annable was necessary to Rubbens 66 the novel because 'otherwise it's too much one thing, too much me'‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 27). The narrator Cyril is characterised in the introduction as ―the person of (...) insight‖.

One of the insights that is conveyed through Cyril is that ―people can and should create relationships and perhaps even communities outside conventional social forms‖, which implies the reign of nature over culture (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 30-31). Cyril overlooks the world of the novel, and expresses his admiration for for instance the gamekeeper Annable:

his magnificent physique, his great vigour and vitality, and his swarthy, gloomy face drew me. He was a man of one idea: – that all civilisation was the painted fungus of rottenness. (...) He was a thorough materialist – he scorned religion and all mysticism. He spent his days sleeping, making intricate traps for weasels and men, (...) or doing some amateur forestry. ―Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct,‖ was his motto. (The W. P. 208)

So, Cyril's admiration for the woodkeeper is a result of Annable's unusual lifestyle, which is devoid of any conventionality. He has chosen a life in nature, bringing up his children like animals that are in touch with nature and living with an uneducated woman, who has no lady-like characteristics. That he has succeeded in raising his children like animals is explicitly described in the scene where Annable's son is looking at his father's dead body, buried by the rocks that have killed him: ―Sam put his face against his father's and snuffed round him like a dog, to feel the life in him.‖ (The W. P. 216). The novel describes the reason why Annable has chosen this kind of life: he had been married to a lady, Crystabel, but she had become ―souly‖ by reading French novels and by choosing for a poet instead of Annable with whom she had refused to have children and whom she had begun to see as ―her animal‖ (The W. P. 212). As a result, Annable has grown sour and has started to despise the cultivated society, and with it all ladies because they display the vanity of the peacock.

Nevertheless, this life in nature has not satisfied Annable, for he dies in a tragic accident that is very likely to be suicide. If it was Lawrence's philosophy that an instinctive life is better than a cultural life, then why did Annable not feel happy? When we apply Lawrence's philosophy to Annable's suicide, his unhappiness might have been evoked by his disbelief in mysticism and his superficial materialism. Living in unison with nature and the cosmos was a right choice, but Annable should have combined this with a reverence for the mysticism in the cosmos, the mystery of its beauty, instead of seeing it as pure materiality. Another Lawrentian explanation for Annable's unhappiness, might be that he has not lived according to the polar nature that rests in all human Rubbens 67 beings, like it exists in the entire cosmos: that we have a sympathetic and a voluntary centre. After his separation from his beloved lady Crystabel, Annable has only lived up to his voluntary centre of separation from other people, even from his wife and children with whom he has not felt a loving union. He has thus forsaken the sympathetic pole of his unconsciousness, and has banished the sun out of his life, only leaving place for the voluntary centre that is represented by the moon and the colour black: ―He was an impressive figure massed in blackness against the moonlight, with his arms outspread.‖ (The W. P. 213). Annable starts to be aware of his tragic mistake in life after a conversation with Cyril. In this conversation, Annable gives away that he has never forgotten his peacock, the proud and cultured lady Crystabel. He even claims that ―it wasn't all her fault‖ that it did not work between them, whereto Cyril replies that she was a ―white peacock‖ (The W. P. 213). Her whiteness stands in a polar relationship with Annable's present blackness, which symbolises that the light, the sun, has disappeared out of his life. By defining lady Crystabel as a white character, Cyril makes Annable aware of his mistake in life: he has banned the sympathetic pole of the sun and light entirely, whereas he should have found a balance between the pole of separation and of union.

According to Robert Montgomery (1994) the reason for Annable's decline is his failure to integrate ―the physical and the mental, for man is inescapably both‖ (59). Montgomery claims that Lawrence could not conceptualize this integration of the physical and the mental – or of nature and culture – because of his ―Schopenhauerian view of the mental‖ (59). Schopenhauer states that life is ruled by the will. It is a natural force, which is ―simply a will to live‖; ―it is irrational, blind, terrible‖ and it is physical since ―[m]y body and my will are one‖ (Montgomery 50-51). To Schopenhauer, culture or the mental categories of love and beauty are an illusion:

There is no Platonic ladder reaching from the sexual to divine love. There is only the will's overmastering need to live, against which the higher aspirations of the individual count for nothing. (...) Beauty too is an illusion, whose only purpose is to draw the man to the woman and hold him to her long enough to reproduce. (Montgomery 54)

Likewise, for Schopenhauer reason or thought, which are mental too, are not as rich as the ―world of feeling‖, which is the world of the natural and instinctive will (Montgomery 56). Only the will is primary, whereas thoughts are secondary: ―[r]ational knowledge merely reproduces in concepts what has already become known through the body‖ (Montgomery 56). Thus, for Schopenhauer only the body with its senses counts, and man would even ―be better of without reason‖ (Montgomery 56). According to Montgomery, Lawrence shared this Schopenhauerian incapability to unite the Rubbens 68 human will with the reason, which Montgomery sees as the reason for Annable's tragedy: by only following his will, his instincts, he has neglected an elemental part of being human, namely our mental thirst for culture, because ―man is inescapably both physical and mental‖ (Montgomery 59). However, I do not think that Montgomery's assumption is correct. As I have observed in chapter 3, Lawrence's philosophy is entirely dedicated to the propagation of an instinctive life, completely devoid of the rationality of the mind. The reason for Annable's decline cannot thus be his incapability to unite the physical instinctive faculties with the rational capacities, since this goal is never expressed in Lawrence's philosophy. So, in my opinion it is rather Annable's inability to be true to the vital duality of union and separation, which is indeed – as I have explained in the previous paragraph – one of the basic principles in Lawrence's philosophy, that causes his unhappiness and eventual suicide. Therefore, the reason for Annable's suicide has certainly got nothing to do with what Anthony Burgess superficially claims to be the reason: ―after having delivered his philosophy (...) he has not much else to do except be wiped out (...) so that we can better concentrate on the central figure, George Saxton‖ (Burgess 23).

The most important tragic character in the novel is indeed George Saxton, a farmer's son at Nethermere, and a close friend to the narrator Cyril Beardsall. The turn of George's life is the most important element in the novel that helps to illustrate Lawrence's philosophy: that one should live in harmony with one's instinctive feelings and with nature. This is what John Harrison (2000) calls Lawrence's ―profound and instinctive feeling of identification between the individual and the entire cosmos" (40). Anthony Burgess sees this stress on nature reflected in the myriad descriptions of wild flowers in The White Peacock: "this novel (...) is brilliantly particular in its evocation of the English countryside‖ and in the way it tried to compete with Thomas Hardy, who had claimed to ―know a million billion wild flowers‖ (Burgess 25). In the beginning of the novel, George happily lives on the farm, united with the ―bucolic surroundings‖, as Robert Montgomery calls the English countryside (56). Only there, he can be who he really is: ―George came out with us, coatless, hatless, his waistcoat all unbuttoned, as he was‖ (The W. P. 276). It is also in this scenery that Lettie Beardsall, a cultured lady whom George is in love with, is able to perceive her instinctive nature through her cultivated veneer: ―Lettie was (...) bending over the flowers, stooping to the earth like a sable Persephone come into freedom‖ (277). Thus, the natural scenery brings her closer to George's free spirit and for a moment, she even wishes to abandon her unnatural lifestyle: ―Don't you wish we were wild – hark, like woodpigeons – or larks – or, look, like peewits?‖ (The W. P. 278). George replies that they can live a free life, but her rational thoughts intervene with her feelings, and she Rubbens 69 impels him to be rational like she is, by using the verb 'to know': ―You know we can't – you know as well as I do‖ (The W. P. 278). Eventually, George is forced by the financial circumstances to leave the farm. He marries Meg, who owns an inn, and he starts to work in the inn, secluded from nature. It is this retrieval from nature that causes him to lose his vitality and that eventually leads to his downfall through alcoholism. On this field, the introduction to the novel draws the right conclusion: that George's downfall is caused by his insistence to lead a more cultivated life – he even engages in politics – in which he cannot find his niche, because he is a man with an ―animal vitality‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 23).

In order to put forward nature as the dominant force in life, and not culture, Lawrence did not realistically depict the social and political life. The introduction to the novel acknowledges this by pointing to the ―very narrow social setting‖ and to the fact that ―even a coal strike becomes subject to nature's power‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 25). As the introduction mentions, the setting of the novel, ―Nethermere‖, is modelled after Eastwood, but without ―a reservoir supplying industry, or the real-life collieries‖ (25). Thus, Nethermere is ―a recreated landscape‖ that is depicted as a magical place, ―an extraordinarily isolated place‖(13-14). More particularly, by means of the abundance of descriptions of nature and its magnitude, the novel shows the importance of nature and a natural lifestyle to the characters:

There the daffodils were lifting their heads and throwing back their yellow curls. (...) I wished I had their language to talk to them distinctly. Overhead, the trees, with lifted fingers shook out their hair to the sun, decking themselves with buds as white and cool as a water- nymph's breasts. I began to be very glad. (The W. P. 220-221)

Thus, ―[t]he human beings' yearnings for that frail wildness, that simple naturalness, is made explicit‖ (―Intro‖ to The W. P. 15).

The end of the novel clearly illustrates Lawrence's philosophy, since the final scene is situated in nature. George's brother-in-law is working on the cornfield as a young, passionate, life- honouring man who has not let culture interfere with his natural lifestyle. By saying ―You ought to be like that‖, Cyril confronts George with how he used to be, and with who he has become: an alcoholic who cannot recollect himself anymore and feels a complete indifference towards life (The W. P. 410). He even alludes to death as the only salvation: ―the sooner I clear out, the better‖ (The W. P. 410). Cyril cannot understand this, which reflects Lawrence's unwillingness to contemplate Rubbens 70 death during life: ―We were all uncomfortably impressed with the sense of our alienation from him. He sat apart and obscure among us, like a condemned man.‖ (The W. P. 410). This vitalistic reluctance to think of death was typical of Lawrence, and it was also one of the reasons for which he abandoned Christianity, which was too much focussed on Christ's crucifixion and death. Erwin Steinberg (2001) has found the same vitalistic opposition to death in Lawrence's later novel, The Rainbow:

"But why," he asks, "the memory [at Easter] of the wounds and the death? Surely Christ rose with healed hands and feet, sound and strong and glad?" He continues, "The Resurrection is to life, not to death. . . . Is this not the period of manhood and of joy and fulfilment, after the Resurrection?" (The Rainbow, pp. 261-62). (Steinberg 106)

Linked to the novel's reverence to a vitalistic life in harmony with nature, is the focus on a physical and sensuous life, as opposed to a rational life. A lot of excerpts in the novel allude to the deeper values of the irrational physical power. Therefore, much of the information about relationships is left implicit, and the reader has to deduce this from bodily gestures, like for instance the dance which unites Lettie and George on a physical, instinctive field, which Schopenhauer would have called the field of the will:

After a few steps she fell in with him, and they spun round the grass. It was true, he leaped, sprang with large strides, carrying her with him. It was a tremendous, irresistible dancing. (...) At the end, he looked big, erect, nerved with triumph, and she was exhilarated like a Bacchante. (The W. P. 102)

Thus, although Lawrence's first novel was not yet fully modernist in its style, it did already convey his entire philosophy, albeit often implicitly. In his philosophical work, which was published about ten years later, he explicitly wrote down the insights that were already woven into The White Peacock. Therefore, his first novel should be seen as a defence of a natural and vitalistic lifestyle, in harmony with one's instincts and with the polarity of one's unconsciousness.

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3.2.2 Philosophy in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

That Lawrence was aware of a philosophical layer in Lady Chatterley's Lover, may be derived from one of his letters, in which he defended this novel: I believe in the phallic consciousness, as against the irritable cerebral consciousness we're afflicted with: and anybody who calls my novel a dirty sexual novel is a liar. It's not even a sexual novel: it's phallic. Sex is a thing that exists in the head, its reactions are cerebral, and its processes mental. Whereas the phallic reality is warm and spontaneous and – but basta! You've had enough. (The Letters 710) It is obvious that this is a literal repetition of the ideas that he had expressed in his two psychology books, as studied in chapters 3.1.1 and 3.1.2. Even the style of his letters is reminiscent of that in his philosophical work, where he would begin to set up a line of thought, but would abruptly break it off, so as to do what he preached: banning the untrue nature of reason and words, by saying ―basta!‖.

That Lawrence indeed illustrated his philosophy in Lady Chatterley's Lover, is stated by Peter Balbert (1990), who deduces the focus on the instinctive blood-consciousness, or phallic consciousness, from the compulsive sex in the rain by Connie and Mellors or from their ritual game of genital flower decoration. Characters do what they must, as their instincts demand satisfactions that are beyond easy rational understanding. (70)

Balbert notes that Lawrence shows how sex should not be conceived of, namely by means of the character Clifford Chatterley, who is responsible ―for a crass instrumentalizing of love and sex‖ because of his ―cold suggestion that his wife be impregnated by another man‖ (Balbert 73). As such, Clifford does not follow his instinctive phallic consciousness but conceives of sex as an act of procreation, and nothing more. Therefore, Clifford is presented as someone who is guided by his cerebral consciousness, since his phallic consciousness is muted, which is symbolized by his being ―paralysed‖, ―from the hips down‖ (LCL 1)

Lawrence mainly tried to illustrate his philosophy by means of a contrasting technique: he opposed Clifford's cold rationality to the gamekeeper's sensual vitality. That the vitalistic Mellors is an important character in the illustration of Lawrence's philosophy, is also emphasized by Charles Burack. As Charles Burack notices, the novel can roughly be divided among two parts, separated by Rubbens 72

Mellors' introduction in Connie's life. Burack (2005) calls the first part the ―mortification phase‖ and the second part the ―vivification phase‖, which respectively focuses on leading ―readers away from dead things‖ and leading them ―toward living things‖ (Burack 14,17). The fact that Connie's evolution towards sexual liberation takes place gradually proves that Lawrence wanted to make his philosophy conceivable to the reader. Therefore, we can call him a didactic writer.

The part of Connie's life before her acquaintance with Mellors is representative of how people ought not to live according to Lawrence. As a young woman, she engaged in mental love affairs in which ―the actual sex-thrill‖ was of minor importance when compared to ―their minds and their mental excitements‖ (LCL 4). Also in her marriage with Clifford Chatterley, she is at first deeply interested in his fictional stories that the narrator debunks as ―meaningless‖ and ―true to modern life‖, which conveys Lawrence's loathing for modern life (LCL 11). Moreover, the narrator also negatively defines their relationship as modern: ―Connie and he were attracted to one another, in the aloof modern way‖ (LCL 11). This modern style of their relationship is situated ―in his mind and hers‖, implying that ―bodily they were non-existent to one another‖ (LCL 13). Already quite soon, the reader is made aware of some void in Connie's life, because ―a restlessness was taking possession of her like madness. (...) It trilled inside her body, in her womb‖ (LCL 14). This restlessness cannot be made up for by Michaelis, who becomes Connie's sexual lover. The reason for the failure of their romance is Michaelis' inability to make his sexual desire flow together with Connie's: ―And he lay there in his own isolation‖ (LCL 13). As I have mentioned in chapter 3.1.3, Lawrence had pleaded for this in his essay ―... Love Was Once a Little Boy‖ by using the metaphor of the two rivers that flow together. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, this flowing together is symbolized by the simultaneous orgasm, which is significantly not obtained between Connie and Michaelis.

It is only after Connie's acquaintance with Mellors that the voids in her life are gradually filled. He is the first man in the novel – and more generally in her life – who truly looks Connie in the eyes. The eyes are an important motif in Lawrence's fiction, because they are associated with physicality and emotions. They communicate the characters' passions unawares, as a mirror that reflects their unconsciousness. Because Mellors looks into Connie's eyes, he is the first to see the void in her life: ―a dissatisfaction had started in her. Clifford did not notice (...) But the stranger knew‖ (LCL 56). The role of visual perception is also emphasised in a later scene, where Connie looks at the gamekeeper while he is washing himself. The sight of his body, ―naked to the hips‖, comes to her as ―a visionary experience‖ that gives a ―shock of vision in her womb‖ (LCL 55-56). Rubbens 73

As I have already analysed in chapter 3.1.1, in his two psychology books Lawrence associated the lower body – and hence the womb – with the pristine unconscious. Thus, when Connie senses a shock in her womb, her sexual instincts are roused and she begins to have a revealing experience, which all modern people should have according to Lawrence. This visionary experience is made more tangible when she makes love to Mellors. Throughout their several love encounters, she gradually overcomes her rational resistance against his lower social background – and his dialect – and she starts to hate ―all the men of [Clifford's] sort who defrauded a woman even of her own body‖ (LCL 59). Thanks to Mellors, Connie finds the power to inveigh against Clifford's life style, and she refuses to live with him any longer:

Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really wakened to life. But so many people, like your famous wind- machine, have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses. (LCL 207)

Thus, with Mellors' help, Connie has been able to find true happiness in her life. The prospect of their living together on a farm with a child that is born as a fruit of their natural love for each other is the ideal which Lawrence less concretely advocated in his nonfiction: a vitalistic life in harmony with nature and one's natural instincts. As such, this sexually explicit novel has become the didactic writing that Lawrence wanted it to be: ―an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 226).

3.2.3 Philosophy in Lawrence's Short Stories

With respect to the philosophy in Lawrence's short stories, I may be short by referring to his other fiction, in which both a natural and a physical life were emphasized. Firstly, both in ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ and in ―Sun‖, we are able to detect a plea for a vitalistic life in harmony with nature, since both women venture out in a more natural surrounding to find true happiness.

Secondly, both stories express the importance of a physical and sensuous life, instead of a rational and civilized life. The woman in ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ leaves her husband behind because he ―hated the physical side of life‖, which is quite similar to the situation between Connie Chatterley and her husband (40). Likewise, the female protagonist in ―Sun‖ experiences the same problem in her relationship, which causes her to see her husband as ―a worm that the sun has never seen‖ (121). Both women find the physical side of life in the ―Natural Man‖, as Anthony Rubbens 74

Burgess has called this type of man (Burgess 6). Both the Indians in the former story, and the peasant in the latter story are examples of masculine prowess and physical strength. They are men that live in correspondence to their deeper unconsciousness, unhindered by rationality.

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4 D. H. Lawrence as a Definer of Masculinity and Femininity

The time at which D.H. Lawrence wrote was not only technologically innovative, but there were a lot of social changes as well. People started living in different ways than before: cities were expanding economically and ―people crowded into [these] cities‖ (Norton 1829). On top of this, the position of women was changing, as it is noted in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Already from the Married Woman's Property Act in 1882, married women were permitted to own property, and by the end of the nineteenth century women were gradually admitted to universities. The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the militant action by the suffragettes, women who claimed the right to vote in a violent way, ―which included boycotts, bombings, and hunger strikes‖ (Norton 1830). These actions resulted in a new political identity for women, since women of twenty-one and over were given suffrage in 1928. Just as the anxiety about the modernization was given an outlet in the literature of the time, so was the reaction to the new gender balance written down: ―[t]hese shifts in attitudes toward women, in the roles women played in the national life, and in the relations between the sexes are reflected in a variety of ways in the literature of the period‖ (Norton 1830). Also Lyn Pykett (1995) is aware of the role that the gender crisis played in the modernist literature of the beginning of the twentieth century. Pykett notices that modernist novelists like Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf were engaged with ―the fundamental themes of the late-Victorian dissolution‖, characterised by a ―crisis of gender definition‖: ―what precisely was meant by the term 'man' or 'woman'‖ (15-16). Pykett claims that many writers were anxious about the ―New Woman‖, who was conveyed as the ―self-directed‖ and ―mannish‖ opposite to the tender, emotional and ―motherly (...) womanly woman‖ (17-18). The anxiety was aroused because the New Woman was ―a profound threat to established culture‖ (Pykett 20).

Reflective of the spirit of his time, Lawrence's writings also deal to a large extent with the relation between men and women, as he considered it to be one of the most important problems with which modern humanity was faced: ―it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.‖ (The Letters 118). Also John Harrison (2000) considers this topic as a vital thread running through both Lawrence's fiction and nonfiction: Lawrence envisaged contemporary male-female relationships as a total failure and saw the exploration and the establishment of a new relation between men and women as the critical issue of the age, and as such central to both his theory of being and his literary mission. (35- 36) Rubbens 76

Lyn Pykett (1995) calls this stance a typical example of modernist "degenerationist thinking" (29). She claims that there were two tendencies of modernist thinking in the aftermath of the Darwinian evolutionary theory. Those two tendencies answered differently to the question "whether modern European society was progressing or declining" (27). Pykett relates this to the two ways in which the New Woman was represented: as a "highly evolved type" – in the case of a progressing society – or as a "freakish sport of nature" – in the case of a declining society (25). She categorizes Lawrence as a pessimist who could only perceive a degenerative society, and who was opposed to the feminist renovationist thinking. So, Pykett sees Lawrence's revolt against the modern, emancipated woman as a part of his revolt against a modern – in his opinion degenerating – society. For this reason, she emphasized the likeness between the modernist Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence: Like many other writers in the 1920s (including D. H. Lawrence), (...) Lewis reversed the renovationist discourse of the feminists, and advocated the redefined and regenerated manly man, or a return to male/masculine values (...) as the one thing needful to resolve the crisis of the present, to return woman to womanliness and a restricted feminine sphere, to halt the creeping feminization of culture, and to reverse the degenerationist trend. (Pykett 53)

In the following two chapters I will investigate in which ways Lawrence defined gender roles in both his fiction and his nonfiction. I will confront his visions with the reaction of some feminist critics and I will try to estimate whether he has to be seen as a misogynist or not.

4.1 Gender Issues in Lawrence’s Nonfiction

For Lawrence, marriage, in which he deeply believed, had to be well-balanced. As he wrote in one of his letters, marriage ought to be ―two-sided‖, based on two pillars: ―I do love, and I am loved. I have given and I have taken – and that is eternal. Oh, if only people could marry properly; I believe in marriage‖ (The Letters 49). Thus, in the field of love, Lawrence pleaded for equality in marriage.

Nevertheless, he also defined gender roles as polar entities that should be each other's opposites and complements in marriage. He considered the male role as the active and rational part, the one that also played a role in public life, whereas he defined the female role as more passive, emotional and domestic. His attitude towards the suffragettes and other women who wanted to Rubbens 77 attain public goals in life was quite conservative. He deplored the abolishment of traditional gender roles in modern society, because it was forsaking ―the natural mode‖ or ―the old flow‖ (Fantasia 127). In Fantasia of the Unconscious, he criticized the unnatural reversal of traditional gender roles and connected it with a critique on Christianity, which he saw as an anti-natural religion: Now in what we will call the 'natural' mode, man has his positivity in the volitional centres, and woman in the sympathetic. In fulfilling the Christian love ideal, however, men have reversed this. Man has assumed the gentle, all-sympathetic rôle, and woman has become the energetic party, with the authority in her hands. (...) So that the male acts as the passive or recipient pole of attraction, the female as the active, positive, exertive pole, in human relations. Which is a reversal of the old flow. (...) The dynamic polarity has swung round. (Fantasia 127) He pleaded for a restoration of a married life in which the husband would venture out in active life during the day and would come home to the wife's world in the evening, which is ―the world of love, of emotion, of sympathy‖ (Fantasia 130). Only after man has ―been man enough‖ during the day, he ought to come home and ―sit under the spell of his wife‖ (Fantasia 130). As such, for Lawrence there should be a balance in marriage, and each sex should have its own territory, while having respect for the other's: Of course there should be a great balance between the sexes. Man, in the day-time, must follow his own soul's greatest impulse, and give himself to life-work and risk himself to death. (...) But again, no man is a blooming marvel for twenty-four hours a day. (...) And it behoves every man in his hour to take off his shoes and relax and give up himself up to the woman and her world; Not to give up his purpose. But to give up himself for a time to her who is his mate. (Fantasia 130)

Nevertheless, as it may be gathered from the previous excerpt, Lawrence's attitude to the wife's world was ambivalent. He not only claimed that a husband should come home in the evening and respect his wife's realm, which is described as a positive realm of ―emotional positivity‖, but he also adopted a condescending attitude towards the wife's domestic life (Fantasia 129). This condescension may be deduced from his description of the working man during the day as ―a blooming marvel‖, whereas the wife is seen as someone who puts the husband under her spell. She is not described as someone heroic, but rather as a someone to whom a husband is indebted, as ―it behoves every man (...) to give up himself for a time to her who is his mate‖ (Fantasia 130). Her lack of heroism is contrasted with his heroism during the day, which is entirely cut off from the wife's realm: ―It is not woman who claims the highest in man. It is a man's own religious soul that Rubbens 78 drives him on, beyond woman, to his supreme activity. For his highest, man is responsible to God alone‖ (Fantasia 129). Lawrence aligned masculinity with leadership and femininity with submissiveness: And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal to yours, to make her, in her own soul, believe in your goal as the goal beyond. (...) Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you (...) Then, how wonderful the nightfall is! (Fantasia 199)

This may be read as a sort of misogynist attitude, but we should also keep in mind that Lawrence saw men and women as polar opposites, both of equal importance, because otherwise the poles would not be poles any more, and the battery would not be able to work. As Lyn Pykett illustrates, Lawrence was not a misogynist, since he recognized and respected the important role of women in society. Without women men would be incomplete: ―the crucial role of completing the male‖ (130). So, when we look at his impression of women within his philosophical system of polarity, we should note that he truly respected women, but that he did not want them to be similar to men in for instance the participation in public life, just like he did not want men to be similar to women. For this reason he was no supporter of suffrage or political careers for women, nor of effeminate men: But it is all a fallacy. Man, in the midst of all his effeminacy, is still male and nothing but male. And woman, though she harangue in Parliament or patrol the streets with a helmet on her head, is still completely female. (...) The compass is reversed. But that doesn't mean that the North pole has become the South pole, or that each is a bit of both. (Fantasia 129) Moreover, Lawrence defined both men and women in terms of positivity, albeit that they were fundamentally different: ―In love, woman is the positive, man the negative. (...) In knowing and in doing, man is positive and women negative.‖ (Fantasia 127). So, according to Lawrence, in a well- balanced marriage love is introduced by the wife and the money is earned by the husband. They are equally important, but in other fields, and they should not usurp the other one's domain, but live in a respectful and natural polarity, like day and night, sun and moon: Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And men will never understand the sacredness of feeling of woman. Each will play at the other's game, but they will remain apart. (Fantasia 131) Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers. (Fantasia 136) Rubbens 79

[T]he blood of woman is dynamically polarised in opposition, or in difference to the blood of man. (Fantasia 186)

This vision of difference between feminine and masculine experience is what Patrick McHugh (1993) equates with the vision of the second wave of feminism, namely the French feminism, that reacted against the first wave of feminism. McHugh summarizes the opposition between the two waves of feminism as follows: They [the traditional feminists like Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett] held forth as feminism's goal equal opportunity to inhabit traditionally masculine positions of power and privilege, but did not challenge the nature of that power and privilege. They never addressed the questions, or pursued the politics, that have occupied a more recent generation of feminists [which are the French feminists like Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray]: how must basic social institutions change not only to allow women access, but to reflect women's experience. (chapter 2, my additions) According to McHugh, Lawrence was like the French feminists, since he described women's experience as totally different from men's experience, and did not want to equal women with men. Nevertheless McHugh also claims that, although Lawrence respected the feminine experience, he was himself a supporter of the masculine physicality and ―sexual prowess‖, which can again be considered as a chauvinistic viewpoint (chapter 2). With respect to this chauvinism, McHugh perceives an evolution in Lawrence's prose: although Lawrence remained aware of the fundamental difference between the sexes, he increasingly wanted women to become submissive to men, or to be ―supportive, complementary‖ (chapter2). Also James Cowan ―highlights [Lawrence's] belief in male dominance‖ (Harrison 1994, 273). This attitude may also be found in the excerpt I already quoted from Fantasia: ―And you'll have to fight very hard to make a woman yield her goal to yours‖ (199).

Thus, unlike the French feminists, Kate Millett (1970) does not accept that women and men can never be equal because they experience the world differently. This leads her to critique Lawrence in that she cannot accept that he has often prefaced ―the world female‖ with ―queer‖ or ―weird‖ (Millett 243). If she were able to read this as a respectful attitude towards women's own experience, which men cannot fully understand, she would not lash out at Lawrence. So, it seems that Millet is blinded and prejudiced by Lawrence's insistence on male dominance, which causes her not to see his full philosophy: the belief in a fundamental polar difference between the sexes.

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The argumentation that Lawrence decided to put forward to justify his claim that the ―blood‖, the instinct, of women fundamentally differs from that of men, was the natural difference between the cock and the hen. Whereas they are the same subjects – for they are both fowls – they are ―two very different objects‖: ―He never thinks of her for a moment, as if she were a cock like himself, and she never thinks for a moment that he is a hen like herself‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 91). Consequently, Lawrence opted for the same natural attitude in human society: ―I can vote, she can vote, I can be sent to prison, she can be sent to prison (...). As subjects, men and women may be equal. But as objects, it's another pair of shoes‖ (90). He demanded that the two individual objects ―stay apart, for ever and ever‖, just like two separate lakes, and that the ―original individuality of the blood‖ be maintained (95,97). Only then – when the mystery of the blood- individuality or integrity of the object is maintained – can the desire between the sexes be kept alive: we shall have to say to every man: 'Be Thyself! Be Desirous!' – and to every woman: 'Be Thyself! Be Desirable!' (...) It means, be true to your own integrity, as man, as woman: let your heart stay open, to receive the mysterious inflow of power from the unknown. (Sex, Literature and Censorship 100-101) Hence, as he claimed in the essay ―Cocksure Women and Hensure Men‖, ―the tragedy of the modern woman‖ is that she ―becomes cocksure, but (...) is a hen all the time‖: ―It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 118). She will become aware of the fact that ―she has missed her life altogether‖, and has acted against her nature (119). This anxiety of modern women is also expressed in his last philosophical work, Apocalypse, in which he blamed ―the Logos‖ – the rationality – to have spoiled modern women: ―Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold‖ (126). So, Lawrence passionately advocated the fundamental difference between gender roles in marriage.

On top of the gender roles in marriage, Lawrence also clearly defined the gender roles in the children's education. The gender contrasts between active-passive and ratio-emotion are also inserted in education, as it is mainly the father who ―by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in the child the centres of resistance and independence‖, which are ―the deeper centres, the sensual centres‖ (Fantasia 90). Hereby, he balances the mother's influence, which is focussed on spiritually ―bring[ing] up her child from the lovely upper centres only‖, which makes the child ―all gentle, all tender‖ (Fantasia 90). Unlike his views on marriage, Lawrence here Rubbens 81 claimed that men and women may sometimes take up each other's role in education, to balance an influence that is too single-poled: ―given a mother who is too generally hard or indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate sympathy and the refined discipline (...) of the upper mode‖ and since ―so few mothers have any deep bowels of love (...) the father must give delicate adjustments, and above all, some warm, native love from the richer sensual self‖. (Fantasia 91)

Also in the education at schools, girls and boys should be kept separate, as for Lawrence there existed an insurmountable difference between the sexes that ought to be respected: ―boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature‖ (Fantasia 131). Lawrence was afraid that the intimacy between boys and girls ―makes neuters‖, because ―[l]ater on, no deep, magical sex-life is possible‖ (Fantasia 119). Not only should they be kept separate, but they should also be educated according to their natural endowments: girls should be trained in domestic skills and boys in more active outdoor skills. Similarly, in his essay ―...Love Was Once a Little Boy‖, Lawrence deplored the state of the educational system of his modern age: ―Our education goes on and on, on and on, making the sexes alike, destroying the original individuality of the blood, to substitute for it this dreary individuality of the ego‖ (Sex, Literature and Censorship 97).

4.2 Gender Issues in Lawrence’s Fiction

As argued in the previous chapter, Lawrence showed a respect for the fundamental difference between men and women in his nonfiction, and he seriously advocated the division between the sexes in all social fields, ranging from the household to education. On the one hand, he claimed that women ought to be submissive to men, oriented towards the domestic sphere, and representative of the sympathetic centre of emotions and love. On the other hand, men were born to be the leaders, to lead a public life and to represent the volitional centre of action and independence. Although some critics argue that Lawrence was disrespectful towards women and accuse him of male chauvinism, we should keep in mind that this chauvinism did not end in a misogynist attitude: Lawrence respected women, albeit in a polar relationship with men. In this chapter, I will discuss how Lawrence conveyed these gender insights in his fiction.

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4.2.1 Gender in The White Peacock

In The White Peacock Lawrence opposed two couples. On the one hand, there is Lettie, who is married to the rich industrialist Leslie. On the other hand, there is George, who is married to a wealthy woman, Meg. The financial situations for Lettie and George are similar, but it is only George who undergoes a tragic downfall. As I have claimed in chapter 3.2.1, this is partly caused by the fact that he has exchanged his former natural life-style as a farmer for a money-driven life at the inn. But a more important reason may be the reversed gender polarity between Meg and George: Meg is dominant, whereas George is submissive, which is reflected in the contrast between her opulent costume and his ruffled garments : Meg had grown stouter, and there was a certain immovable confidence in her. She was authoritative (...) She wore a handsome dress of dark green, and a toque with opulent ostrich feathers. As she moved about the room she seemed to dominate everything, particularly her husband, who sat ruffled and dejected, his waistcoat hanging loose over his shirt. (394) In Lawrence's opinion, this is an unnatural situation, which suffocates the instinctive man that George used to be: an anti-bourgeois ―Natural man‖ – as Anthony Burgess calls this type of character in Lawrence's fiction (Burgess 6). So, the reason for George's alcoholism may be found in the perversion of what Lawrence considers as the healthy polarity between men and women: the husband as dominant, and his wife as a domestic and submissive supporter of his activities in public life. This balance brings happiness in both Leslie's and Lettie's lives: At home he was unfailingly attentive to his wife and his two children. He had cultivated a taste for public life. (...) His name was fairly often seen in the newspapers. As a mine owner, he spoke with an authority on the employment of labour, on royalties, land-owning and so on. (370) Like so many women, she seemed to live, for the most part contentedly, a small indoor existence with artificial light and padded upholstery. (...) feminine caution kept her from stepping over the threshold. (371) Hence, the fruitful relationship between Lettie en Leslie illustrates Lawrence's belief in the naturalness of male authority and female submissiveness.

That this viewpoint does not go hand in hand with a misogynist attitude is claimed by Robert Montgomery (1994): Lawrence's ―sympathy is extended as much to the woman as to the man‖ (55). As I have claimed in the previous chapter on Lawrence's nonfiction, he did not see the gender poles in a hierarchic relationship, but defined them both positively, albeit in different ways. Rubbens 83

This may also be detected in The White Peacock, for instance in the scene where Cyril, Emily and Lettie keep a mother from beating her children: Up and down went her long arm like a windmill sail. I ran and held it. When she could hit no more, the woman dropped the pan from her nerveless hand, and staggered, trembling, to the squab. (...) Emily hushed the children, while Lettie hushed the mother, holding her hard, cracked hands as she swayed to and fro. (192) As it may be observed in this excerpt, Cyril, who is the narrator, intervenes in a more aggressive and active way than Emily and Lettie, who are physically passive and more emotionally involved in the situation. Both attitudes, the energetic and the loving – respectively belonging to the more masculine volitional centre and more feminine sympathetic centre – were given equal importance by Lawrence. He was aware of the fact that both poles needed each other.

So, in short, Lawrence adopted the gender views of his nonfiction to The White Peacock, since the novel highlights the gender polarity and the necessity of not reversing the poles. At the same time, the novel does not convey a misogynist attitude.

4.2.2 Gender in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

As we may deduce from Lady Chatterley's Lover – a novel which centres on the birth of a woman's sexuality and sensual freedom – Kate Millett (1970) was wrong when she stated that Lawrence saw it as his mission ―to revoke the minimal freedom women had so far achieved under the sexual revolution‖ (Millett 279). I would rather argue that he wanted women to be free, but according to his philosophy: people – women as well as men – can only find genuine freedom if they listen to and respect their natural instincts. Lawrence deplored the fact that modern women did not obey their natural instincts, and that they tried to adopt more masculine instincts of independence and activity. Therefore, Lawrence turned Connie into a character that can only experience peacefulness after she has been able to turn off her ―modern-woman's brain‖ (LCL 100). Her ―modern female insistency‖ even frightens Mellors, and it is therefore the major obstacle in attaining a happier life with a powerfully masculine man (LCL 75). In this way, we have to see Connie Chatterley's evolution to freedom: she initially feels imprisoned in a life with Clifford, who cannot overpower her, and she can only be 'freed' by feeling Mellors' masculine, though tender and sensual power, to which she gradually succumbs: Rubbens 84

Though a little frightened, she let him have his way, and the reckless, shameless sensuality shook her to her foundations, stripped her to the very last, and made a different woman of her. (...) Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. (218) So, that a man takes the lead in Connie's journey towards freedom does not have to be seen as a misogynist element, since it is simply a vital element in Lawrence's social philosophy that women are the non-active pole, as pointed out above.

In its emphasis on Connie's liberation, Lady Chatterley's Lover is thus not a misogynist novel. This is acknowledged by Mark Spilka, who detects a respectful attitude towards Connie in her personal journey to ―regeneration‖, which consists of a denial of ―the mental life‖ (quoted from Smith 202). The male character Mellors helps Connie to attain her goal, by means of his masculine physicality and his respectful, tender attitude: when Connie sees him washing himself, ―she receives the 'shock of vision in her womb‖ by which her own bodily consciousness is first roused‖ (Spilka, quoted from Smith 203). Later on, it is his tenderness to her, for instance his ―sensual adoration‖ of her body that causes her to express her love for him in a sensual, non-mental way (Ibid. 205). This ―mutual assertiveness‖ is the key to Connie's happiness and freedom, which is tellingly illustrated by the fact that she ―dances naked in the rain‖ (Ibid. 206). Connie even explicitly refers to her gained freedom, in the free indirect style: what had he done to herself, Connie, but give her an exquisite pleasure and a sense of freedom and life? He had released her warm, natural sexual flow. And for that they would hound him down. No no, it should not be. (LCL 234-235)

Mark Spilka also understands Lawrence's emphasis on gender polarity, based on a submissiveness of women, and he also claims that Lawrence was able to combine this vision with a respectful attitude towards women. Spilka sees this attitude reflected in some of the male characters in Lawrence's novels: they go to great lengths to win the respect of the woman they love, and they try to attain a ―balance‖ in the relationship (195). This balance is what I have already alluded to for several times, by using the term ―polarity‖: the balances (...) – the polarities which Millett denies – seem to me genuinely achieved, the assent and respect freely given and fairly won (...) [These elements are] the finest testimonies we have of Lawrence's liking for – and profound respect for – women. (Spilka, quoted from Smith 195) According to Spilka, Lady Chatterley's Lover illustrates how Lawrence had found a respectful solution to get women ―to acquiesce of [their] own free will‖: not by ―sexual cannibalism‖ as in Rubbens 85

―The Woman Who Rode Away‖, but by ―tenderness‖ (quoted from Smith 198). In the tender, but male character of Mellors, Lawrence had found ―the courage (...) to offer nurturing love (...) without losing his maleness‖, which was ―a healthier sense to compete with a woman's powers‖ than the sexual cannibalism in other stories (Spilka, quoted from Smith 209).

So, we can rightly claim that Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel that depicts how a better life for both sexes may look like. The fact that Connie finds happiness with the Pan figure Mellors instead of with Clifford or Michaelis, who both resemble Lawrence's prototype of the modern man that urged women to be active, clearly illustrates Lawrence's point: men should occupy the active role – albeit in a tender way. This was the only way to make women sink into ―the centre of all womanhood‖ (LCL 117). Meanwhile, the focus on Connie's liberation indicates that Lawrence was not a misogynist or male chauvinist who saw women as objects.

4.2.3 Gender in Lawrence's Short Stories

According to Kate Millet (1970), Lawrence's short story ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ breathes an atmosphere of sexual politics: ―it is intensely obvious that the intention of the fable is purely political‖ (292-293). She derives this from the fact that Lawrence uses many sexual metaphors – such as ―the knife for the penis‖ – that connect ―sex to war‖, and that turn the fable into a story of ―sexual cannibalism‖ (Millett 292-293). So, she sees it as warfare against emancipated women.

Nevertheless, not every reaction to ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ was negative. This can be deduced from Lydia Blanchard's review on Peter Balbert. According to Blanchard (1990): Balbert's readings are always interesting and often show a Lawrence more in line with a feminist agenda than one might expect. For example, Balbert's demonstration that "The Woman Who Rode Away" is a study of intercultural conflict, rather than of misogyny, challenges many feminist objections to Lawrence's primitivism. (609) Also Mark Spilka disagrees with Millett's claim that it is a misogynist story about female acquiescence, because ―the wom[a]n never wholly acquiesce[s]‖, which is symbolized by the fact that ―the knife never falls‖ (quoted from Smith 197).

In my opinion, we actually have to interpret the story as a part in Lawrence's general warfare against a society that he saw as too rational and unnaturally modernized. In that way, he also Rubbens 86 rejected unnatural men who subjected themselves to a capitalist or industrial regime, as for instance George in The White Peacock. Hence, we may claim that The White Peacock and ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ complement each other by respectively emphasizing that men and women ought to act in harmony with their natural instincts.

Indeed, when we closely investigate the plot of ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖, we can claim that this story punishes those who did not manage to live according to their instincts. Lawrence blames both the woman and her husband and punishes them both by letting her be sacrificed by the Indians, who masculinely claim their ―powerful physical presence‖ (The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories 59). If on the one hand her husband had been a vitalistic physical man, who had taken physical leadership, she would not have felt the necessity to venture out. If on the other hand she had not tried to change her life by ignoring her female role of submissiveness and domesticity, she would not have been sacrificed as well. Therefore, this story is an illustration of Lawrence protest against ―the individual independence of women‖, which he saw as the disease that had contaminated so many modern women: Her kind of womanhood, intensely personal and individual, was to be obliterated again, and the great primeval symbols were to tower once more over the fallen individual independence of woman. The (...) nervous consciousness of the highly-bred white woman was to be destroyed again. (The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories 60) Lawrence put forward the Indian society as the opposite of his modern society with its independent woman. The Indians are the primeval example of a perfect gender polarity because the Indian ―men are the fire and the daytime‖ and the Indian ―women are the spaces between the stars at night‖ (Ibid. 61).

―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ was one of Lawrence's short stories that marked his personal journey towards a balanced picture of the relationship between the sexes: female passivity and submissiveness versus masculine activity and dominance. In a way, we may consider Lady Chatterley's Lover as Lawrence's solution to the tragic ending of this short story: Connie Chatterley is saved by a vitalistic physical man who stimulates her female instincts. Thus, in the character of the gamekeeper Mellors, Lawrence has come up with the same physical and natural masculinity as that of the Indians in his short story, with the difference that he has characterised Mellors as a tender lover, devoid of the Indians' barbaric nature.

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Also ―Sun‖ can be seen as a transitory story. This is due to the fact that the protagonist, Juliet, does not choose for the masculine and vitalistic peasant in the end. She is still caught in the web of conventions, which is woven by her marriage to a man who lacks a physical outspokenness. This obedience to the social convention of marriage that lacks vitality is debunked in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which can therefore be seen as a further developed story in Lawrence's oeuvre. So, ―Sun‖ is a transitory story of a modernist writer that only gradually did away with stifling, social conventions.

Nevertheless, also in ―Sun‖ an important change has taken place: even though Juliet does not break with Maurice, her womb has opened itself to the warmth of the sun. This implies that she is able to live according to her unconscious lower body or her vitalistic instinctive passions. These newly aroused feelings are even transmitted to her husband when he comes to visit her in Sicily: He glanced at her again and again, with growing desire and lessening fear. 'No!' he said (...) No, I don't think you can go back.' And at the caressive sound of his voice, (...) her womb- flower began to open and thrill its petals. (The Princess and Other Stories 137) This shift in her husband's instinctive passions is what causes her to remain faithful to him, and to suppress her passions for the vitalistic peasant. Moreover, it is also the peasant's passivity – which Lawrence saw as a deficit for genuine masculinity – that inhibits Juliet from beginning a relationship with him, since she obeys her role of female passivity: ―And she knew the peasant would never come for her, he had the dogged passivity of the earth. (...) [S]he would never come to him – she daren't, so much was against her‖ (The Princess and Other Stories 142). This illustrates that Lawrence also emphasized female submissiveness in ―Sun‖.

Thus, both ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ and ―Sun‖ clearly illustrate Lawrence's vision of a perfect gender balance on the field of submissiveness and dominance, which he also communicated in The White Peacock and Lady Chatterley's Lover. However, one main difference between his short stories and Lady Chatterley's Lover is that he did not yet manage to liberate the female characters in the short stories as much as he did with Connie Chatterley: the woman in ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖ is sacrificed and Juliet in ―Sun‖ remains faithful to her husband, although he can not make her as passionately or instinctively free as the more masculine peasant. For this reason, Lady Chatterley's Lover may be considered as Lawrence's magnum opus because in this novel he had finally come to his fully developed and respectful gender views: that a woman's liberation and submissiveness go hand in hand.

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5 Conclusion

As we may conclude from this dissertation, D. H. Lawrence did not only attack the technological and social changes in his time – such as modern technology, capitalism and the changing gender relations – but he also proposed his own philosophical solution to these modern problems. In a modernist way, this personal solution was also directed against the old belief systems of the Victorian age, such as the stifling social conventions, the dogmatic religiosity and the naïve dominance of positivism in science. Therefore, his philosophy consisted of a return to a pagan and less rationalist way of thinking and to a free and natural life in harmony with the cosmos. For Lawrence this natural life entailed that men and women ought to abide by their instinctive, unconscious and vitalistic sexuality. Moreover, Lawrence also emphasized that this regeneration of sexuality and the unconsciousness could only be achieved if women and men did not reverse their gender poles.

This dissertation has also pointed to the didactic and modernist similarity between Lawrence's philosophical nonfiction and his fiction. In all of his works that are analysed in this dissertation, we can detect a modernist attitude in combination with a didactic solution to the modern life style. We should therefore interpret his fiction as a concrete illustration of the philosophy in his nonfiction. In for instance Lady Chatterley's Lover, the fact that Connie expects a baby from Mellors, for whom she feels a natural and instinctual love, and the prospect of their living together on a farm, both illustrate Lawrence's vitalistic philosophy. Moreover, Lawrence's fictional characters often express the ideas of his nonfiction: Cyril in The White Peacock, and Mellors or Tommy Dukes in Lady Chatterley's Lover share his philosophical viewpoints.

Nevertheless, we should note that there are differences between his fiction and his nonfiction. It is obvious that his fiction lacks an explicitly didactic address to the reader, whereas his nonfiction often uses imperatives and pronouns like 'we' or 'you'. Notwithstanding this didactic difference, both his fiction and nonfiction use natural metaphors, like the sun, to make his message more conceivable and didactic. Also his fiction is mutually divergent, with a more explicitly didactic and modernist content in his later works. For instance in his first novel, The White Peacock, the solution that Lawrence offers to the bleakness of the age remains more implicit – by stressing George's downfall due to his unnatural life – whereas it is more explicitly present in Lady Chatterley's Lover, in which the sexual explicitness more directly illustrates Lawrence's vitalistic philosophy. That Lawrence's last novel was more didactically valuable than his first novel can also Rubbens 89 be seen in his own evaluation of Lady Chatterley's Lover as ―an honest, healthy book, necessary for us today‖, whereas he was not very proud of his first novel (Sex, Literature and Censorship 226). Moreover, his first novel is more stylistically modernist than his last one: in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence unconventionally used four-letter words and an erotic language to illustrate his vitalistic philosophy, immediately directed against the coldness and rationality of modernity, whereas in The White Peacock he was still looking for a personal style that could convey his modernist loathing for rationality.

This dissertation has also detected a similarity between Lawrence's fiction and his nonfiction with respect to how he constructed gender roles. All of his works illustrate his emphasis on the fundamental and instinctive polarity between the two sexes: the female submissiveness and domesticity as opposed to the male dominance and activity in public life. Yet, it was not until in his last novel that he managed to fully combine his respect for women with his idea of gender polarity, as he had done in his nonfiction: in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the female protagonist's submissiveness goes hand in hand with her liberation. This was not yet the case in The White Peacock, which does not yet have a female protagonist, nor in the short stories ―Sun‖ and ―The Woman Who Rode Away‖, which still solely focus on a woman's submissiveness. Therefore, also in the field of gender, Lady Chatterley's Lover may be considered as a more developed work when compared to his earliest novel and even to his later short stories.

So, by comparing a selection of D. H. Lawrence's fiction with his nonfiction in multiple fields – autobiography, modernism, philosophy and gender – this dissertation has come to an overall picture of D. H. Lawrence: he was a didactic modernist who took it as his task to redefine the gender roles. In a didactic way, he tried to offer social, religious and psychological solutions for the quickly changing time in which he lived and which he considered as bleak and hostile. We may therefore conclude that Lawrence was a modernist in the definition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature because he managed to achieve the right balance between a negative pole – his modernist scepticism – and a positive pole: his personal vision of a regenerated world and humanity. This positive pole even lent him a remarkable position among renowned thinkers, which caused some of his contemporary reviewers to praise him as a visionary writer that was able to see ―deeper and more clearly than Freud and Jung‖ (Intro to Psychoanalysis, xlix). That this visionary power had a considerable magnitude is confirmed by the fact that Lawrence nowadays still manages to interest readers and scholars. D. H. Lawrence's philosophical and literary voice continues to live on long after his death. Rubbens 90

Works Cited

Primary Reading

Lawrence, D. H.. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lawrence, D. H.. Introductions and Reviews. Ed. N.H. Reeve and John Worthen. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lawrence, D. H.. Lady Chatterley's Lover. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2007. Lawrence, D. H.. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lawrence, D. H.. Sex, Literature and Censorship. Essays by D.H. Lawrence. Ed. Harry T. Moore. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1955. Lawrence, D. H.. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol. II. Ed. George T. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Lawrence, D. H.. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Ed. Aldous Huxley. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1932. Lawrence, D. H.. The Princess and Other Stories. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971. Lawrence, D. H.. The White Peacock. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982. Lawrence, D. H.. The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories. Ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Secondary Reading

Books:

Burack, Charles. D. H. Lawrence's Language of Sacred Experience: the Transfiguration of the Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Burgess, Anthony. Flame into Being. The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence. London: Abacus, Sphere Books Ltd, 1986. Ellis, David. Introduction. Lady Chatterley's Lover. By D. H. Lawrence. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2007. v-xix. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume F: The Twentieth Century and After. New York/London: Norton and Company, 2006. Rubbens 91

Introduction. The White Peacock. By D. H. Lawrence. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982. 10-33. Kalnins, Mara. Introduction. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. By D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 3-38. Levenson, Michael (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge UP, 1999.

Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence. A Biography. New York/London: Alfred A Knopf Inc./Macmillan London Ltd., 1990. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1970. Montgomery, Robert E..The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pykett, Lyn. Engendering Fictions: The English Novel in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Edward Arnold, 1995. Schapiro, Barbara Ann. D. H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life. New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 1999. Smith, Anne, ed. Lawrence and Women. London: Vision Press Limited, 1978. Steele, Bruce. Introduction. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. By D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press, 2004. xix-liv. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Articles:

Balbert, ―Peter. From Lady Chatterley's Lover to The Deer Park: Lawrence, Mailer, and the dialectic of erotic risk‖. Studies in the Novel 22 no. 1 (1990): 67-81. Brunsdale, Mitzi M.. ―The Effect of Mrs. Rudolf Dircks' Translation of Schopenhauer's 'The Metaphysics of Love' on D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction‖. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 32 no. 2 (1978): 120-129. 6 March 2009 Burrow, Tringant. ―Psychoanalysis in Theory and in Life‖. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease lxiv no. 3 (1926): 209-24. Burrow, Tringant. ―The Origin of the Incest-Awe‖. Psychoanalytic Review v no. 3 (1918): 243-54. Chaudhuri, Amit. ―Familiar Estrangement‖. Times Higher Education Supplement 1329 (1998): 24- 24. Rubbens 92

Fernald, Anne E..‖'Out of It': Alienation and Coercion in D. H. Lawrence‖. Modern Fiction Studies 49 no. 2 (2003): 183-204. Harrison, John R.. ―The Flesh and the Word: the Evolution of a Metaphysics in the Early Work of D. H. Lawrence‖. Studies in the Novel 32 no. 1 (2000): 29-48. Hass, Robert Bernard. ―Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry‖. Journal of Modern Literature 29 no. 1 (2005): 55-75. 7 November 2008 Jones, Stephen. ―Speaking Volumes: The Woman who Rode Away‖. Times Higher Education Supplement 1329 (1998): 29-29. Koh, Jae-kyung. ―D. H. Lawrence and Michel Foucault: a Poetics of Historical Vision‖. Neophilologus 83 (1999): 169-185. Lackey, Michael. ―D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love: A Tale of the Modernist Psyche, the Continental 'Concept', and the Aesthetic Experience‖. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20 no. 4 (2006): 266-286. McHugh, Patrick. ―Metaphysics and sexual politics in Lawrence's novels‖. College Literature 20 no. 2 (1993): 83-98. 21 April 2009 . Plotz, Judith. ―Secret Garden II; or Lady Chatterley's Lover as Palimpsest‖. Children's Literature Association Quarterly 19 no. 1 (1994): 15-19. Prudente, Teresa. ―Italian Futurism and English Vorticism‖. The Modernist Journals Project for students and scholars of modernism. 6 November 2008 Sotirova, Violeta. ―Charting Stylistic Change: D. H. Lawrence's Handling of Point of View‖. English Studies 87 no. 4 (2006): 466-489. Steinberg, Erwin Ray. ―D. H. Lawrence: Mythographer‖. Journal of Modern Literature 25 no. 1 (2001): 91-108. Stewart, Jack. ―Lawrence and the Creative Process‖. Style 37 no. 2 (2003): 160-176. Sultan, Stanley. ―Lawrence the Anti-Autobiographer‖. Journal of Modern Literature 23 no. 2 (1999/2000): 225-248. 18 March 2009 Tilghman, Carolyn. ―Lewis in Contention: Identity, Anxiety, and the London Vortex‖. South Central Review 24 (2007): 2-22. University of Texas at Tyler. 7 November 2008 Rubbens 93

Wexler, Joyce Piell. ―Sex Isn't Everything (But It Can Be Anything): The Symbolic Function of Extremity in Modernism‖. College Literature 31 no. 2 (2004): 164-183.

Reviews:

Blanchard, Lydia. Rev of D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, by Peter Balbert, and: States of Estrangement: The Novels of D. H. Lawrence, 1912-1917, by Wayne Templeton, and: D. H. Lawrence: Modes of Fictional Style, by Bibhu Padhi. Modern Fiction Studies 36 no. 4 (1990): 608-611. Blanchard, Lydia. Rev. of Rethinking Lawrence, ed. Keith Brown, and: Metaphor and Meaning in D. H. Lawrence's Later Novels, by John B. Humma, and: The Language of D. H. Lawrence, by Allan Ingram, and: Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre- War Novels of D. H. Lawrence, by Nancy Kushigian, and: D. H. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance, by James C. Cowan. Modern Fiction Studies 37 no. 4 (1991): 781- 785. Harrison, Andrew. ―D.H. Lawrence Today: Old Issues and New Editions.‖ Rev. of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, by D.H. Lawrence. Studies in the Novel 38 no. 2 (2006): 250-260. Harrison, Andrew. Rev. of Lawrence: Self and Sexuality, by James C. Cowan. Studies in the Novel 36 no. 2 (2004): 272-274. Hatten, Charles. Rev. of Radical Modernism and Sexuality: Freud, Reich, D. H. Lawrence and Beyond, by David Seelow. Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 no. 1 (2008): 166-168. Macdonald, Daly. Rev. of The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, by Robert E. Montgomery. The Modern Language Review 91 no. 2 (1996): 464-465. 6 March 2009 Meyers, Jeffrey. Rev. of Pillar of Flame: The Mythological Foundations of D. H. Lawrence's Sexual Philosophy, by Barbara Miliaras, and: Domestic Disharmony and Industrialization in D. H. Lawrence's Early Fiction, by Marko Modiano, and: Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence by Colin Milton, and: Memoir of Maurice Magnus, ed. Keith Cushman. Modern Fiction Studies 34 no. 4 (1988): 695-699. 18 March 2009

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Internet sites:

Modernism. Ed. Michael Soto. 2001. Trinity University. 17 November 2008