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D. H. Lawrence (1885--1930). Life. David Herbert Lawrence was born at a mining village in Nottinghamshire.
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Life • David Herbert Lawrence was born at a mining village in Nottinghamshire. • His father was a coal-miner with little education; but his mother, once a ,school teacher, was from a somewhat higher class, who came to think that she had married beneath her and desired to raise the cultural level of her sons so as to help them escape from the life of coal miners. • The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunk father and the re- fined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly presented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913).
As a boy, Lawrence was quiet, clever and rather religious. He won a scholarship to Nottingham High School at the age of 13. He also showed his talent in painting. After High School, be went to work as a pupil teacher for a few years, and then he went on to take a teacher-training course at Nottingham University College for two years. After completing it, Lawrence began to work as a regular teacher. • While teaching, Lawrence began writing novels and poems. His first novel, The White Peacock was published in 1911. Lawrence gave up teaching after his mother's death and his own suffering from a serious illness. The first version of Sons and Lovers was written in this period.
In 1912, Lawrence went to see his former French teacher, Professor Weekley, at Nottingham University College, in the hope of getting a job as an English lecturer in a German University. At Weekley's house, Lawrence met Frieda, the Professor's wife, who was the daughter of a German baron, mother of three children. They fell in love and eloped to the continent. They got married in 1914 after Frieda had been divorced. • During the First World War, Lawrence was suspected as a spy and watched by the police because of his anti-war attitude and his wife's German origins. His important novel, Rainbow, was published in 1915, but was banned as a danger to public morality.
When the war was over, the Lawrences left England for Italy. He traveled far and wide, from Italy to Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, the South Seas, America, Mexico and back to Eng- land, Italy, and finally died of tuberculosis in the south of France. During all these years of wandering about, Lawrence kept on writing. With strong endurance of pain and enormous power of creation, he produced a large number of poems, stories, travel books, critical essays, and several novels.
Literary Career • Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, and perhaps, he is the greatest from England proper and from a working-class family. During his life long literary career, he had written more than ten novels and several volumes of short stories. Besides being a great novelist, Lawrence is also a proficient poet, a combative essayist, an atmospheric travel-writer, and a prolific literary correspondent. Furthermore, he extends his talents to book-reviewing, translation, philosophical discourse and painting. But it is in the novels that his true greatness lies, and on them that his reputation rests.
His novels • Lawrence began his novel writing in his early twenties. • The White Peacock, in 1911 • The Trespasser (1912 The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), are generally regarded as Lawrence's master- pieces;
Points of View • 3. 1 A Strong Reaction Against the Mechanical Civilization As a working-class boy, Lawrence was brought up in hardship. In his opinion, the bourgeois industrial revolution, which made its realization at the cost of ravishing the land, had started the catastrophic uprooting of man from nature. As a matter of fact, the whole Western world had become wretched picture of death or the living death of physical paralysis after the First World War.
3. 2 Ideas About Nature Lawrence cherished a passionate love for the beauty of the natural worlds for be had possessed, in his special way, a sense of the earth, of nature, of the soil in which human nature is rooted. To revive the natural instincts of men and women, and to establish an ideal community of human life on earth, Lawrence strongly advocated a return to nature, to a primitive way of life. Lawrence's ideas about nature are very close to primitivism; they are essentially a kind of mysticism of earth, which holds that nature is the darker, more spacious ,more energetic, and more stolen- did world, and that man can derive energy,
3. 3 Views on Psychology • Lawrence was One of the first novelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. He believed that the healthy way of the individual's psychological development lay in the primacy of the life impulse, or in another term the sexual impulse, Human sexuality was, for Lawrence, a symbol of Life Force; any kind of conscious or self-conscious repression of the life impulse would cause neurotics or splitting personality in one's natural psychological development. That explained why Lawrence would stretch the theme of his novel psychologically into the irrational recesses of the self where the divine life impulse Stirred with unpredictable motions.
3. 4 The Idea of Balance or Polarity • Lawrence was an idealist. In all his life, he had been seeking the idealistic human relationship between man and woman. To him, balance, not dominance, is the best guiding Principle in the relationship between man and woman, husband and wife. • Thus. Lawrence expressed, in his novel, the paradox that each human being was at once separate and yet a part of a whole, independent yet interdependent, a lone individual yet a social being. The centre of man's experience must be a perfect union with a woman in an ultimate marriage, then, a union with a man as a necessary supplement to that marriage.
Some Characteristics of His Novels • 4. 1 Lawrence, the Novelist • Success or failure, Lawrence was a controversial writer. • Today, Lawrence is regarded by many Western critics as one of the greatest and most original novelists, but unlike other experimental novelists such as J. Joyce or V. Woolfe (, Lawrence is not concerned with radical innovations of prose techniques. Instead, the innovative nature of his novel lies in how to trace the psychological development of the protagonist. By combining psychic exploration with social criticism, he has made an important contribution to the advancement of the English psychological novel.
4. 2 Keen Criticism of Society • Lawrence is a novelist who writes with a mission to diagnose the evils of society and suggest cures. • His central preoccupation is the awareness of desolation of mechanical civilization and its destruction of man's spontaneous feeling. In his novels, Lawrence not only exposes the full hideousness of the industrial landscape, but also the wretched and meaningless life of the working people.
4. 3 Human Relationships--Chief Concern • Like E. M. Forster, Lawrence, in his novel writing, is chiefly concerned with human relationships, and with the relation of the self to other selves. He probes into various aspects of relationship --the relationship between man and his environment, the relationship of man to God and to nature, the relationship between parent and child, the relationship between man and woman, the relationship between instinct and intellect, and the proper basis for the marriage relationship. In his opinion, the most important relationship is the one between man and woman. He holds that the only way of saving the decaying civilization is through a rearrangement of personal relationships and a return to nature.
4. 4 Frank Discussion of Sex ' • By presenting the psychological experience of individual human life and of human relationships, Lawrence has opened up a wide new territory to the novel. But the writer's dilemma is that although those intimate feelings of love, sexual impulse and death can be passionately experienced by individuals-they can hardly articulate precisely in words without offending the authorities and middle-class readers who are narrow and bigoted m conventional moral ideas. • To break the taboo, Lawrence advocates an absolute freedom of expression, especially Sexual expression.
4. 5 Style • 1.Conventional elements • Lawrence is not a remarkable technical innovator in the novel; he is quite happy to accept the existing form of the novel with those conventional elements like story, plot, setting and characters. • 2. In technique • In technique, his artistic tendency is mainly realism and naturalism, which combine dramatic scenes with an authorial commentary. 3. The realistic feature The realistic feature is most obviously seen in its detailed portraiture. With the working-class simplicity and directness, Lawrence can summon up all the physical attributes associated with the common daily objects; for Lawrence has a keen ear and a piercing eye for every kind of vitality and colour and sound in nature and people.
4. The psychological aspects In presenting the psychological aspects of his characters, Lawrence is concerned with the most intimate feelings, those it is hardest to put into words without distortion. To express this nearly inexpressible feelings, which had been tried previously only by some poets, Lawrence makes use of poetic imagination and symbolism in his writing.
The Rocking—Horse Winner • Setting: one upper—class family • characters: Paul, his mother, his uncle and others. • Plot: • Beginning: whispers of “much more money” • Climax: Paul wants to be a lucky man to change their house’s whisper and tries to give his mother’s more money so that he can get his mother’s love. • End: Paul’s death in misery.
Theme: money cannot buy mother’s love. Love can not be bought by money. • From this novel, the readers will understand that the pursuit to money distorts the valuable affection between mother and son, the mother cannot love her son, the son is willing to buy love by money. Mother is not the source of love but the cause of her son’s tragedy. • The novel’s structure: • Part I: (paragraph 1 to 40 … the boy saw she did not believe him; or, rather, that she paid no attention to his assertion. This angered him somewhat, and made him want to compel her attention)
The story’s beginning: there is too many whispers in the house. The son wants to know the reason why they don’t have their own car. His mother told him they are all not lucky. • Part II: (from Para 41 to more than ever… So Uncle Oscar signed the agreement… more than ever! More than ever!) • The story’s climax, money didn’t make his mother satisfied, on the contrary the whispers are louder: more than ever! This makes Paul work hard to get more money. • Part III: the rest of the story, Paul’s tragedy.
