CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE THE LAUGH OF ACHIEVED BEING A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE WHITE PEACOCK AND WOMEN IN LOVE A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Sharron Kollmeyer Cox May, 1983 The Thesis of Sharron Kollmeyer Cox is approved: Dr. Philip Handler, Chairman California State University, Northridge ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Behind every student there are people who know the student first as daughter, wife, mother, or friend. To those people in my life, especially Hap and Shirley Kollmeyer, Skip, Shane, Robbie, Alice, Kathy, Barbara, Ilene, and Margie, I wish to express my gratitude. I would also like to thank Dr. Philip Handler, my committee chairman, for his interest in and knowledge of my subject; his on-going encouragement is responsible, in large part, for the completion of this project. Further, I wish to acknowledge the help of Dr. William Anderson whom I have had the privelege of working with over the last three years. Taskmaster though he may be, he exemplifies the word mentor. Finally, my special thanks go to Dr. Robert Noreen for his guidance, his insistence on excellence, and his time. I believe that I would rather have him like something - anything I have done - than anyone else I know. iii For my parents and in memory of Sanford Emil Klemme, my grandfather, who first taught me reverence and compassion for the natural things of this world, and who, like DHL, clung ferociously to life. iv To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness. For, being himself of a different order, he inhabited a universe different from that of common men - a brighter and intenser world, of which, while he spoke, he made you feel. He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of a man who had been at the brink of death and to whom, as he emerges from the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and mysterious .•• A walk with him in the country was a walk through that marvelously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of his novels. He seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. Aldous Huxley v TABLE OF CONTENTS APPROVAL . ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • . iii DEDICATION . iv TABLE OF CONTENTS • . vi ABSTRACT . • vii INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER I. "It's Got Every Fault •.• But" .•• 7 II. "To Take Two Couples and Mark Out Their Relationship" • • • • • • . 39 III. "The Profoundest Experiences in the Self". • 73 CONCLUSION • 103 ENDNOTES ••• • 106 BIBLIOGRAPHY • 111 vi ABSTRACT The Laugh of Achieved Being A Comparative Study of The White Peacock and Women in Love by Sharron Kollmeyer Cox r-taster of Arts in English The White Peacock is D. H. Lawrence's first novel and as such has generally been ignored by critics. It contains, however, what is quintessential in Lawrence's work and, in fact, possesses a striking similarity to Lawrence's masterpiece, Women in Love. This paper argues for the recognition of The White Peacock's worth ip_ the canon of Lawrence's work. The argument is presented in three chapters. The first chapter is an explication of The White Peacock which defines the novel's strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are found in Lawrence's originality, perception, intensity, and obvious love of language. Weaknesses include vii Lawrence's handling of point of view, characterization, plot, and symbolism. Chapter Two establishes the relationship between The White Peacock and Women in Love. Each novel presents Lawrence's major thematic preoccupations --reverence and compassion for the things of the natural world, the horror of industrialism, and the need to learn to love. In each novel Lawrence uses similar landscapes and characters. In each novel Lawrence also employs similar technical devices such as parallelism, foreshadowing, and imagery formulated from nature. Chapter Three critiques Women in Love in relation to the critical problems found in The White Peacock. Again, point of view, characterization, plot, and symbolism are considered. This time, however, Lawrence was successful with each of these. Indeed, Women in Love is the expression of an artistic genius in control of his craft. viii INTRODUCTION Near the end of his short life D. H. Lawrence wrote: ••• (my novels) are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and waits - like a god with a twenty lira ticket - and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles ••. that's what my books are not and never will be ... whoevef reads me will be in the thick of a scrimmage. This scrimmage often originated from the intensely personal approach Lawrence took to novel writing. He saw the novel as neither an artistic rendering of a prescribed form, nor as the mere retelling of a story, either wholly invented or given new life through invention. Rather he saw the novel as an ''adventure of the mind." 2 Although he wrote for twenty years, sometimes poetry, essays, travel books, or philosophical tracts, he became and remained primarily interested in the novel. His purpose was always the same: he sought to convey the idea that not art but the quality of the lived experience was his greatest concern. He was fond of saying, "my motto is Art for my sake." 3 In a letter, written in 1915, to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who he was to later bitterly satirize as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, he comments on how sadly he sees Van Gogh, for whom, creating Art for one's sake was never enough: But best of all, if he could have known a great humanity where to live one's animal would be to create oneself, in fact, be the artist creating a man in,living fact (not like Christ, as he wrongly said) - and where the art was the final expression of the created animal or man - not the be-all and being of man - but the end, the 1 2 climax. And some men would end in artistic utterance, and some wouldn't. But each one would create the work of art, the livifg man, achieve that supreme art, a man's life. One can hardly imagine a more personal approach. ·Lawrence's critical reputation has been built posthumously around what are considered his best novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Consequently most studies of Lawrence begin with Sons and Lovers and ignore the earlier work. It is true that like most writers, Lawrence had to learn to write. It is also true, that in his particular case, he used his early novels for this purpose. They are, therefore, often unsure and flawed. But they are more than that. The early novels, The White Peacock in particular, demonstrate Lawrence's originality, his eloquence, and his ability. Stephen Miko, in discussing the early novels, says in Toward Women in Love that the first novels present "evidence of a search for the most fundamental kinds of consistency, a basic search for coherence." 5 As interested as Lawrence was in the novel form, as intensely as he wanted to create that supreme art, a man's life, during this period Lawrence struggled with both the form and with his life. This paper argues that a comparative study of two of Lawrence's first five novels, The White Peacock published in 1911, his first and least well known novel, and Women in Love published in 1920-1921, his fifth and most critically acclaimed novel, provides us with a new appreciation of his earlier work, 3 for uneven and imperfect as The White Peacock may be, it still contains what is quintessential in Lawrence's work. This study also argues that consideration of the critical problems found in The White Peacock yields an understanding of what Lawrence needed to correct before he could write Women in Love. Although Lawrence necessarily changed and grew as an artist, his basic concerns both in matters of form and content remained the same. As he worked to solve the critical problems he encountered while writing The White Peacock, he placed a new emphasis on the importance of unconscious motivation not found in his earlier work. This not-withstanding, study of his first novel, especially in relationship to Women in Love, provides an understanding of Lawrence's distinctive characteristics as a novelist. The argument will be presented in three chapters. The first chapter will examine The White Peacock. The primary purpose of this chapter will be to explicate the critical problems of the novel. These problems include: Lawrence's unskilled use of the first person narrator, his sketchy unbelievable characterization, his unstructured plot, his literary pretentiousness, and his forced symbolism. Chapter Two of the thesis will establish a relationship between The White Peacock and Women in Love. Both novels parallel each other in a number of ways. Each of the books is the story of two couples and their attempts to establish permanent relationships. Both novels are set, 4 for the most part, in the Derbyshire countryside and mining towns. The White Peacock presents, for the first time, many of Lawrence's major themes later to be amplified in Women in Love: the necessity of a connection with the physical non-human world, the belief in nature as healer, the horror of the blight of industrialism, and the belief that one needs to "learn to love." A further link between the two novels is established by Lawrence's use of elemental symbols (e.g., the moon), of light and dark imagery, of parallelism, of foreshadowing, and his use of nature (e.g., his knowledge of the things of the countryside) in both books.