David Herbert Lawrence

(1881-1930)

- known as a novelist, short story writer,

poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic
and painter
- also considered to be one of the finest
travel writers
- his name is connected to the rebirth of the
novel of sensibility/ sensuality
- critics place his creation in the current of
feeling and perception
- he was also called a belated Romanticist
placed in the middle of modern civilization
- by Romanticism is meant: a special state of
mind, a typical predisposition to use
imagination and poetic symbolism in
order to depict certain situations of life
- Lawrence was considered to be a
rebellious spirit, a sensitive creator who
believed in individuality
- he insisted on the utter necessity of
faithfulness to one’s true self
- he decided to disregard moral taboos and
to speak about everything that is human
- like J. Joyce, Lawrence was severely
criticized because of his uninhibited desire
to explore previously unexplored sides of
life
 Life
- he was born at Eastwood,
Nottinghamshire, as the fourth of the five
children of the family

- his father was a miner, his mother an ex-

schoolteacher
- he attended Nottingham High School for 3
years
- at the age of 15, he abandoned education
temporarily and worked in a surgical
factory
- he won a scholarship to Nottingham
University, to study for a teacher’s
certificate
- he taught for 2 years, but serious illness
forced him to give up teaching in 1910
- he eloped with Frieda, the wife of his
former professor at Nottingham, who was
 6 years older, married, and had 3 young
children
- they only got married in 1914, after
Frieda’s divorce

- they had a stormy marriage, moved

frequently
- lived for a while in Metz, Germany,
Frieda’s hometown
- travelled extensively to Australia,
Germany, Italy, Sri Lanka (Ceylon),
United States, Mexico, France
- during WW I, the couple lived in Cornwall
- the writer and his wife were forced into
exile
- in 1929 he exhibited in London 25 of his
paintings, which were considered hideous,
pornographic and a few of the paintings
were confiscated, the exhibition closed
- Lawrence was forbidden to exhibit in
Britain again
 - he died of tuberculosis in Vence, France,
in 1930, on March, 2
- in 1935 he was exhumed and cremated, his
ashes were taken to Taos, New Mexico and
enterred in a small chapel amid the
mountains
- in 1932, A. Huxley published his letters

Work
- The White Peacock (1911)
- The Trespasser (1912)
- Sons and Lovers (1913)
- The Rainbow (1915)
- The Lost Girl (1920)
- Women in Love (1920)
- Aaron’s Rod (1922)
- Kangaroo (1923)
- The Boy in the Bush (1924)
- The Plumed Serpent (1925)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
- The Escaped Cock (1929)
 - The Woman Who Rode Away and Other
Stories (1928)
- Love Among the Haystacks and Other
Stories (1930)
- more short stories, essays, articles, poems,
plays, travel books

Sons and Lovers

- Lawrence wanted to make people take the
trouble to confront their own hidden
selves, in order to free themselves from
complexes and pains:

As a novelist I feel it is the change inside the

individual which is my real concern…My
field is to know the feelings inside a man, and
to make new feelings conscious. What really
torments civilized people is that they are full of
feelings they know nothing about; they can’t
realize them, they can’t fulfill them, they can’t
live them. And so they are tortured. It is like
having energy you can’t use – it destroys you.
And feelings are a form of vital energy. (The
State of Funk)

- Sons and Lovers made Lawrence

unanimously accepted as an original talent,
although it was fiercely criticized for being
offensive and immoral
- the novel marked an important turning
point in his career
- he used complex narrative techniques
and explored the consciousness of the
protagonists
- he stated in a letter, dated October 1910:

…a novel – not a florid prose poem, or a

decorated idyll running to seed in realism.
- Lawrence combined the artistic description
of working-class life with the suggestion of
the individual’s subjective dilemma
determined by inner torments
- the novel is an autobiographical one, but
also a psychological case-book
- it also is a climax in imaginative literature
- it has the form of a Bildungsroman that
centers around the growing personality of
Paul Morel, from childhood to young
maturity
- the novelist relied on an intense life
experience
- he depicted the working-class background
- the novel is deprived of idyllic shades
- the family relationships in the novel rely
on the classical Freudian complex: love
and domination by the mother, hatred of
the father
- the plot is simple and straightforward,
watching the chronological evolution of
events
 - yet the novel is much more than a simple
family chronicle: it centers on the young
man’s emotional development, his
gradual emancipation from a strong
sense of possession
- the fundamental conflict between the
Morels affects the relationship between
mother and sons, and the sons’
unsuccessful struggle to establish
natural manhood
- the exaggerated sense of possession is
reiterated with Miriam; this emphasizes
that the main offense against life is the
failure to respect the complete
individuality of a person:

‘…you’re always begging for things to love

you’, he said, ‘as if you were a beggar for
love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn to
them – ’
‘…You don’t want to love - your eternal and
abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t
positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb
as if you must fill yourself with love, because
you’ve a shortage somewhere.’

- Paul’s relationship with Miriam fails

because of his mother’s aversion to her,
and because of her own exaggerated sense
of possession
- Paul is constantly torn between love and
hatred; this leads to the break of their
relationship
- as opposed to Miriam, the cerebral girl,
Clara is passionate, sensuous
- Paul fails to discover true fulfillment in his
love as well
- the writer suggests a solution: Paul’s
quitting the ‘darkness’ of his home and his
walking ‘to the city’s phosphorescence’
- the main idea that goes through the novel
from one end to the other: human
personality is torn between passion and
intellect and may fail to achieve
psychological balance, may ultimately be
crushed
- the novel is full of a very rich imagery
- the flower symbolism helps to define the
characters’ inner drives and specific
behavior
- the images of stars and constellations and
the streaming moonlight, a vast torrential
force suggest the power which disturbs
human beings
- the moon is a symbolical permanence in
Lawrence’s novels; it suggests the
mysterious relationship between
darkness and light – two metaphorical
areas in the human psyche
- dichotomy darkness – light also revealed
in the opposition between work in the mine
and life outside the coal pits, contrast
 between conscious experience and inner
drives
- Mr. Morel is associated with primitive
inclinations and little intellectual
sophistication, but also with virility and
life
- the universe created in the novel is
constantly dichotomized between positive
and negative values

Conclusion
- the writer does not propose the annihilation
of the dark forces within, but the wise
balance within the individual
- this explains the rich symbolic and
metaphoric substratum in his prose
- he insists on the reconciliation between
feeling and thought: feeling and intellect
should be given equal chances
- in his work he endeavored to awaken his
fellow-beings to new feelings
- the major conflicts of his protagonists
derive from the clash between personal
needs and social background
- Lawrence was not appreciated at his real
value during his lifetime by the majority of
writers and critics, and was accused of
vulgarity, obscenity, even pornography
- Conversely, E.M. Forster considered him
the most important contemporary writer
- A. Huxley too appreciated his work, as a
proof of respect he collected and published
many of his letters.
 Green
D.H.L.
The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.
She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.

Self-Pity
I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Humming Bird
 
I can imagine, in some otherworld
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and
hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.
 
Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent
stems.
 
I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead
of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his
long beak.
 
Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long
telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.

Piano
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the
tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who
smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter
outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano
our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The
glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a
child for the past.