The Age of D.H. Lawrence
DH Lawrence made remarkable contributions to the 20th century novel
Mention THREE main factors that influenced his mind and career
1)The emancipation of women :
The English society, even in the early years of the twentieth century. was
radically different from what it had been during the reign of Queen Victoria.
Various factors may be enumerated to account for this change. We may first
refer to the emancipation of women. Women had always been confined to the
four walls of the house. The great Victorian poets and writers including Lord
Tennyson had glorified this confinement. But the spread of education and a
gradual tendency towards democratisation prepared a general climate in the
country in which a strong movement for the liberation of the women could be
launched. They were allowed and encouraged to go in for higher education and
in the first decade of the twentieth century a strong plea was made to grant them
the right to vote as well. The Christian Socialists F.D. Maurice and Charles
Kingsley struggled for the higher education of women. In 1906, the question of
women suffrage became a political issue.
2)Loss of faith:
The Victorians, by nature, were a complacent set of people and abhorred any
violent shake-up of their established beliefs. So, somehow, they reconciled their
scepticism with their faith and declared that whatever was, was right. But in the
latter half of the nineteenth century a comparative study of the various religions
conducted by the German philosopher Max Muller and other contemporary
religious scholars shattered the false notion of the superiority of Christianity,
and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution threatened the very basis of the
Christian faith. Thus people gradually came to lose their faith in God and
religion.
3)The influence of Freud :
The psychological theories propounded by Freud and later by Jung and Bergson
brought about a revolutionary change in the assessment of human behaviour.
Freud affirmed that the unconscious plays a very significant role in shaping
human conduct. As a matter of fact, a man's actions might be motivated by
forces of which he might himself be totally unaware. The nineteenth century
psychiatrists had drawn a very firm line between the normal and the abnormal.
This line completely disappeared as a result of the new discoveries of Freud. It
was discovered that both the normal and the abnormal displayed certain
neurotic symptoms.
Economic and social changes :
In the Victorian age, England had been gradually changing from an agricultural
country into an industrial one. Small feeder industries rapidly grew around a
big factory till we got an industrial complex. The last decade of the nineteenth
century saw the almost final breakdown of the agricultural way of life and
economy. But the process of Industrialisation and urbanisation had some
problems.The towns suffered from over-crowding. The atmosphere there was
usually polluted .A large number of people lived in slums in almost inhuman
conditions. Their children were mostly uncared for.