D. H. Lawrence
(1885--1930)
Life
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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 upclimbing 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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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;
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Points of View
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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,
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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.
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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
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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.
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4. 3 Human Relationships--Chief Concern
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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.
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4. 4 Frank Discussion of Sex '
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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.
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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
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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)
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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.
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