David Herbert Lawrence

Lawrence, David Herbert (1885-1930), English novelist and poet, the author of novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters, ranked among the most influential and controversial literary figures of the 20th century. D.H. Lawrence was first recognized as a working-class novelist showing the reality of English provincial family life and—in the first days of psychoanalysis—as the author-subject of a classic case history of the Oedipus complex. In his more than 40 books he celebrated his vision of the natural, whole human being, opposing the artificiality of modern industrial society with its dehumanization of life and love. His novels were misunderstood, however, and attacked and even suppressed because of their frank treatment of sexual matters.

Lawrence was the fourth child of a north Midlands coal miner who had worked from the age of 10, was a dialect speaker, a drinker, and virtually illiterate. Lawrence's mother, who came from the south of England, was educated, refined, and pious. The difference in social status between his parents was a recurrent motif in Lawrence's fiction.

The most significant of his early fiction, Sons and Lovers (1913), which was in large part autobiographical, deals with life in a mining town. The book depicts Eastwood and the Haggs Farm, the twin poles of Lawrence's early life, with vivid realism. The central character, Paul Morel, is naturally identified as Lawrence; the miner-father who drinks and the powerful mother who resists him are clearly modeled on his parents; and the painful devotion of Miriam Leivers resembles that of Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s devoted friend. An older brother, William, who dies young, parallels Lawrence's brother Ernest, who met an early death. In the novel, the mother turns to her elder son William for emotional fulfillment in place of his father. When William dies, his younger brother Paul becomes the mother's mission and, ultimately, her victim. Paul's adolescent love for Miriam is undermined by his mother's dominance; though fatally attracted to Miriam, Paul cannot be sexually involved with anyone so like his mother, and the sexual relationship he forces on her proves a disaster. He then, in reaction, has a passionate affair with a married woman, Clara Dawes, in what is the only purely imaginary part of the novel. Clara's husband is a drunken workingman whom she has undermined by her social and intellectual superiority, so their situation mirrors that of the Morels. Though Clara wants more from him, Paul can manage sexual passion only when it is split off from commitment (обязательства); their affair ends after Paul and Dawes have a murderous fight, and Clara returns to her husband. Paul, for all his intelligence, cannot fully understand his own unconscious motivations. Paul can only be released by his mother's death, and at the end of the book, he is at last free to take up his own life, though it remains uncertain whether he can finally overcome her influence. The whole narrative can be seen as Lawrence's psychoanalytic study of his own case, a young man's struggle to gain detachment from his mother.

In 1912 Lawrence eloped to the Continent with Frieda Weekley, his former professor's wife, marrying her two years later, after her divorce. Their intense, stormy life together supplied material for much of his writing. The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921)—perhaps his best novels—explore with frank openness the sexual and psychological relationships of men and women. The search for a fulfilling sexual love and for a form of marriage that will satisfy a modern consciousness is the goal of Lawrence's early novels and yet becomes increasingly problematic. None of his novels ends happily: at best, they conclude with an open question.

Lawrence led a troubled life in England during World War I because of his wife's German origin and his own opposition to the war. Tuberculosis added to his problems, and in 1919 he began a period of restless wandering to find a more healthful climate. From 1926 on Lawrence lived chiefly in Italy, where he wrote and rewrote his most notorious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which deals with the sexually fulfilling love affair between a member of the nobility a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley) whose upper-class husband, Clifford Chatterley, has been paralyzed and rendered impotent, and her husband's gamekeeper (forester) Oliver Mellors. This novel is about Constance's realization that she cannot live with the mind alone, she must also be alive physically. The contrast between mind and body can be seen in the dissatisfaction each has with their previous relationships: Constance's lack of intimacy with her husband who is "all mind", and Mellors' choice to live apart from his wife due to her "brutish" sexual nature. These dissatisfactions lead them into a relationship that builds very slowly and is based upon tenderness, physical passion, and mutual respect. As the relationship between Lady Chatterley and Mellors develops, they learn more about the interrelation of the mind and the body; she learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act and he learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love.

Privately published in 1928, Lady Chatterley's Lover led an underground life until legal decisions in New York (1959) and London (1960) made it freely available—and a model for countless literary descriptions of sexual acts. The book was defended by many eminent English writers. Lawrence had always seen the need to relate sexuality to feeling, and his fiction had always extended the borders of the permissible. In Lady Chatterley's Lover he now fully described sexual acts as expressing aspects or moods of love, and he also used the colloquial four-letter words that naturally occur in free speech.

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