英美文学选读学习笔记 D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) 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 have her sons well educated so as to help them escape from the life of coal miners. The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunken father and the refined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly sented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913).

Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, and, perhaps, the greatest from a working-class family. During his life-long literary career, he had written more than ten novels, several volumes of short stories and a large number of poems.

Lawrence began his novel writing in his early twenties. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), is a remarkable work of a talented young man, acutely observant of nature and delighting in story. His second novel is The Trespasser (1912). Its theme is about the failure of human contact and the lack of warmth between people, which are to be further explored in his later novels. Lawrence was recognized as a prominent novelist only after he published his third novel, Sons and Lovers.

The following two novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), are generally regarded as his masterpieces. Symbolism and complex narrative are employed more richly in these works than in the earlier ones. The Rainbow is a story about the three generations of the Brangwen family on the Marsh farm. The first part is about the marriage and life of Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow. They have a deep and loving understanding of each other in spite of the utter foreignness between them. They can also communicate with the mysterious natural world. Their relationship is sented as the model one in the novel. The second part of the novel is about Anna Lensky, Lydia's daughter by her first husband, and Will, Tom's nephew. They have physical passion for each other; but, in Lawrence's words, "their souls remain separate." Their relationship is fraught with conflicts, and their marriage fails to achieve the final fulfillment of the older generation. The last part of the novel deals with Ursula, the eldest daughter of Will and Anna, who carries the story on into the third generation. This part of the novel traces Ursula's life from childhood through adolescence up to adulthood. At the end of the novel, Ursula is left with much experience behind her, but still "uncreated" in face of the unknown future. In this novel, Lawrence illustrates a terrible social corruption that accompanies the progress of human civilization. In Lawrence's opinion, the mechanical civilization is responsible for the unhealthy development of human personalities, the perversion of love and the failure of human fulfillment in marital relationships. In reading the novel, the reader often feels the threatening shadows of the disintegration and destructiveness of the whole civilized world which loom behind the emotional conflicts and psychological tensions of the characters. As a matter of fact, it is the first time for Lawrence to make a conscious attempt to combine social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing.

As its  implies, Women in Love is a novel about two pairs of lovers, around whom a series of episodes are dramatically sented. The two heroines are Ursula Brangwen and her younger sister Gudrun; and the two chief male characters are Gerald Crich, a young coalmine owner, and Rupert Birkin, a school inspector. At the opening of the story, Ursula and Birkin strike an immediate kinship with each other, while Gudrun is attracted by Gerald's physical energy. The rest of the novel is a working out of the relationships of these four through interrelating events and conflicts of personalities. After a series of ups and downs, Birkin and Ursula have reached a fruitful relationship by maintaining their integrity and independence as inspaniduals and decided to get married in the end. But the passionate love between Gudrun and Gerald experiences a process of tension and deterioration. As both of them have let their "will-power'' and "ideals" interfere with their proper relations, their love turns out to be a disastrous tragedy. Women in Love is rich in its symbolic meanings. Gerald Crich, an efficient but ruthless coalmine owner, who makes the machine his god and establishes the inhuman mechanical system in his mining kingdom, is a symbolic figure of spiritual death,  resenting the whole set of bourgeois ethics. Whereas Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, who fights against the cramping ssures of mechanized industrialism and the domination of any kind of dead formulas, is sented as a symbolic figure of human warmth, standing for the spontaneous Life Force. Women in Love is a remarkable novel in which the inspanidual consciousness is subtly revealed and strands of themes are intricately wound up. The structural pattern of the book derives from the contrast between the destinies of the two pairs of lovers and the subordinate masculine relationship between Birkin and Gerald. The two sisters, the two male friends, and the two couples are closely paralleled in ideas, actions and relations so that each is corresponding to and contrasting with the other. Thus, Women in Love is regarded to be a more profoundly ordered novel than any other written by Lawrence.

In the novels of his later period, Lawrence deals more extensively with themes of power, dominance, and leadership; the relationships that men form with one another, rather than with women, are also under exploration. By portraying, in Aaron's Rod (1922), a disillusioned man who attempts to save his integrity by running away again and again from his wife and children, Lawrence tries to show that every man is a sacred and holy inspanidual whose integrity should never be violated or dominated. Kangaroo (1923), which is written out of Lawrence's trip to Australia, gives a rich portrayal of the Australian life and scenery; but the subject is about the struggle  for leadership in marriage as well as in politics. The Plumed Serpent (1926), set in Mexico, shows that Lawrence tries to give symbolic fictional form to his occupation with the concept of "blood consciousness," a mystical religion of instinct, which is the product  of  his lifelong search for a new exssion of life's meaning. In Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence has returned to his early subjects and background of Nottinghamshire. By senting an old romantic story about a dissatisfied aristocratic lady who deserts her half-man, half-machine husband to find love with a man of nature, Lawrence not only condemns the civilized world of mechanism that distorts all natural relationships between men and women, but also advocates a return to nature.

Lawrence turns his eyes outward to human society in his short stories. He is not only telling a story, but also using them to expose the bankruptcy of the mechanical civilization and to find an answer to it. Irony, humor and wit are the characteristic features of many of the stories. St. Mawr, The Daughter of the Vicar, The Horse Dealer's Daughter, The Captain's Doll, The Prussian Officer, and The Virgin and the Gypsy are generally considered to be Lawrence's best known stories.

Lawrence is also a proficient poet. He began his poetry writing very early and wrote quite a large number of poems in his whole career. His poems fall roughly into three categories -- satirical and comic poems, poems about human relationships and emotions, and poems about nature. Lawrence does not care much about the conventional metrical rules; what he tries to do in poetry is to catch the instant life of the immediate sent. In several of his best animal poems, Lawrence reveals the sheer unknowable otherness of the non-human life.                                             

Lawrence was discovered to be an important playwright in 1968 with the efforts of Peter Gill who staged three plays known as "the Lawrence trilogy" at the Royal Court. These three plays:  A Collier's Friday Night (1909), The Daughter-in-Law (1912) and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyed (1914), have in common the typical working-class environments set in Nottinghamshire. The main conflict is between the ignorant, drunken and brutish father or husband and the weary, frustrated mother or wife who tries to find emotional fulfillment in her children. What the plays focus on is the direct and violent emotions of the main characters in times of crisis in their married life. The plays are sented with a higher degree of objectivity and detachment than the novels by Lawrence.

In his writings, Lawrence has exssed a strong reaction against the mechanical civilization. As a working-class boy, Lawrence was brought up in hardship. From his early time, Lawrence underwent a social dislocation which made him sensitive to the deadness of bourgeois civilization that caused the distortion of personality, the corruption of the will, and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passions of man. 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. Those profit-seeking capitalists frenziedly worshipped the filthy materialism and made use of the mechanisms of matter to inflict their exploitative will on the workman, the society and the earth. Under this mechanical control, human beings were turned into inanimated matter, while the inanimated matter should be animated to destroy both man and earth. It is this agonized concern about the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence's writing.

Lawrence was one of the first novelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. He believed that the healthy way of the inspanidual's psychological development lay in the primacy of the life impulse, or in another term, the sexual impulse. Human sexuality was, to Lawrence, a symbol of Life Force. By senting the psychological experience of inspanidual 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 can be passionately experienced by inspaniduals they can hardly articulate cisely in words without offending the authorities and middle-class readers who are narrow and bigoted in conventional moral ideas. To break the taboo, Lawrence defiantly makes a deliberate use of those "four-letter" words in his novels, especially in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence declared that any ression of the sexual impulse based on social, religious, or moral values of the civilized world would cause severe damages to the harmony of human relationships and the psychic health of the inspanidual's personality. And this frank discussion of sex in his novel is the chief reason why Lawrence had been accused of pornographic writing.

Lawrence's artistic tendency is mainly realism, which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary. And 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. In senting the psychological aspects of his characters, Lawrence makes use of poetic imagination and symbolism in his writing. By  using sets of natural images as poetic symbols to embody the emotional states of the characters and to illustrate human situations, Lawrence endows the traditional realism with a fresh psychological meaning. Through a combination of traditional realism and the innovating elements of symbolism and poetic imagination, Lawrence has managed to bring out the subtle ebb and flow of his characters' subconscious life.