Abstract
The writer who accepts Nature as the arbiter of the norm is still under the necessity of determining how to interpret that norm, how to apply it concretely to the various complex problems of life and the relationship of the individual to society. Generally speaking, the literary naturalists adhered to a conception of man that was not only unflattering but painfully restrictive. By portraying him as the end-product, if not victim, of the interacting forces of heredity, instinct, and environment, they reduced him to unheroic dimensions.
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References
Simone de Beauvoir shrewdly draws a correlation between a writer’s attitude toward woman and his ethical outlook, his Weltanschauung, his vision of the self. “When he describes a woman, each writer discloses his general ethic and the special idea he has of himself; and in her he often betrays also the gap between his world view and his egotistical dreams.” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953, p. 252.) Applying this principle to the case of D. H. Lawrence, she argues invidiously that for him “woman serves as a compensating myth, exalting a virility that the writer was none too sure of.…” (Ibid., p. 250.)
Anthropology reveals that among civilized as well as primitive people the sphere of the sacred embraces that of sexuality. It is sex that liberates and rejuvenates, it is sex that triumphs over death. The sacred “emanates from the dark world of sex and death, but it is the principle essential to life and the source of all efficacy.” (Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred. Translated by Meyer Barash. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1959, p. 151.) And among the Chinese Taoists, according to Joseph Needham, it was quite natural, “in view of the general acceptance of the Ying-Yan theories, to think of human sexual relations against a cosmic background, and indeed as having intimate connections with the mechanism of the whole universe.” (Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China. Cambridge: The University Press, 1956, II, p. 146.)
Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958, p. 117.
Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962, p. 249.
Rilke, too, recognizes the intimate relationship that obtains between creativity and sex. “And in fact artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and desire, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1934, pp. 28-29.
Eliseo Vivas, D.H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1960, p. 58. Attempts have been made to interpret Lawrence as potentially homosexual, the victim of an Oedipal fixation, the extreme religious mystic, all of which tends to overlook his emphatic insistence on sexual fulfillment. For example, Aldous Huxley associates Lawrence’s gospel of released sexuality with John Humphrey Noyes’ doctrine of male continence, the practice of the Adamites, the technique of bodily union without the culminating orgasm or coitus reservatus. Nothing could be wider of the mark. Lawrence never believed in or recommended such a practice; he believed unreservedly in the healthy, consummated orgasm.
The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Edited by Aldous Huxley. London: William Heinemann, 1932, p. 361.
Ibid., p. 362.
Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science. New York, Evanston, and London: Harper & Row, 1963, p. 25.
“The determination to use subject matter that he did use certainly involved a moral choice, but given that subject matter, Lawrence as an artist had a right to draw on all the resources of language to express it.” Frederick A. Pottle, The Idiom of Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946, p. 203.
“The wife in Lawrence’s view of her in Fantasia is reduced to a bed companion and a domestic.” Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963, p. 115.
See Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955.
“In pure communion I become whole in love. And in pure, fierce passion of sensuality I am burned into essentiality.… It is a destructive fire, the profane love. But it is the only fire that will purify us into singleness.…” D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix. Edited by E. D. McDonald. New York: The Viking Press, 1936, p. 154.
J. Middleton Murry, in his book on D. H. Lawrence, had discovered a streak of perversity in Lawrence’s work. He later modified his opinion without abandoning it. “Not that his preoccupation with the sexual relation between man and woman is in itself perverse. Quite the contrary. The sexual relation is the one of most fundamental importance to human life. But the kind of sexual relation which Lawrence frequently exhibits as crucial in his novels is vitiated by abnormality, in the positive sense: it is without universal validity.” (J. Middleton Murry, Love, Freedom and Society. London: Jonathan Cape, 1957, p. 65.) A more cogently reasoned, dialectically balanced, but nonetheless distorted interpretation of Lawrence’s views on love and sex is given in Kingsley Widmer’s The Art of Perversity. He holds him guilty of subordinating the necessary and enduring social and moral values of the community to his religion of Eros: the erotic absolute. “Lawrence centers on the erotic moments, the extreme and passional eruptions, because, given his perspective, he can do nothing else.” (Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity, p. 157.) The result is that he produced “erotic melodrama.” (Ibid., p. 157.)
Strangely enough, one critic complains that Lawrence portrays love in a curiously abstract fashion. Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover “offer us, paradoxically, relations between men and women of an almost totally cerebral kind; their sense of themselves and of each other is a nightmare of mental awareness.” (John Bayley, The Characters of Love. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1960, p. 24.) While his novels describe the yearning for instinctive and uncomplicated simplicity and spontaneity of feeling and roundly condemns those characters who suffer from exacerbated self-consciousness, the distinctions Lawrence draws, according to Bayley, are themselves intellectual constructions. The phallic consciousness he affirms “seems a hyper-intellectual, hyper-aesthetic affair.…” (Ibid., p. 25.) One psychoanalytic critic who is opposed to sublimation in any of its social or moral forms, calls Lawrence “that paradoxically conservative philosopher of sexuality.” (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959, p. 181.)
D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. New York: The Viking Press, 1960, pp. 214–215.
Ibid., p. 215.
Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 206–207.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 773.
Tastes change. Lawrence’s crusade was posthumously vindicated. In a jury trial in London in 1960, Penguin Books received legal permission to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover without expurgation. The result of this decision was a prompt buying up in London of all the available copies of the unexpurgated edition.
D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix, pp. 173–174.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 185. Lawrence was shocked by Ben Hecht’s Fantazius, repelled by its sensationalism and its “bad-boy” language. “Really, Fantazius might mutilate himself, like a devotee of one of the early Christian sects, and hang his penis on his nose-end and a testicle under each ear, and definitely testify that way that he’d got such appendages, it wouldn’t affect me. The word penis or testicle or vagina doesn’t shock me. Why should it? Surely I am man enough to be able to think of my own organs with calm, even with indifference. It isn’t the names of things that bother me; nor even ideas about them. I don’t keep my passions, or reactions or even sensations in my head. They stay down where they belong. And really, Fantazius with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious individual with a dominant idea. One wants to say: ‘Ah, dirty little boy, leave yourself alone.’ “ The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, p. 557.
D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix, pp. 161–162.
D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1949, pp. 146–147.
Ibid., p. 162.
Ibid., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., pp. 316-317.
Ibid., p. 335.
Ibid., p. 335.
D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1949, p. 35.
Ibid., p. 35.
In The White Peacock, Cyril had reflected how ready a woman is “to disclaim the body of a man’s love; she yields to him her own soft beauty with so much gentle patience and regret; she clings to his neck, to his head and his cheeks, fondling them for the soul’s meaning that is there, and shrinking from his passionate limbs and his body.” D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock, p. 309.
D. H. Lawrence, The Trespasser, p. 68.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 108.
Ibid., p. 109.
The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, pp. 76-77.
In her remarks on D. H. Lawrence’s method of presenting the sexual encounter, Marghanita Laski declares: “We must assume that Lawrence’s intention was to write truthfully about love-making and not to follow popular convention, and it is therefore surprising that he apparently takes ecstasy in love-making to be the rule and not a rare exception. It is possible that he thought that ecstasy in love-making should be the rule for his hero; but the singularities of his writing, about love-making as about ecstasy, must lead one to wonder whether, at least by the time he came to write Sons and Lovers, he had ever known satisfactory love-making.” Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962, p. 153.
Lawrence at this point strikingly resembles the Russian religious mystic, V. V. Rozanov, who held that sexuality is the identifying mark of the godless man. “The connection of sex with God—greater than the connection of the mind with God, greater even than the connection of conscience with God—is gathered from this, that all a-sexualists reveal themselves also as a-theists.” V. V. Rozanov, Solitaria. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky. London: Wishart & Co., 1927, p. 103.
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922, p. 275.
Ibid., p. 340.
Ibid., p. 447.
Ibid., p. 448.
In “Sons and Lovers Reread,” Malcolm Muggeridge charges that Lawrence, the inspired prophet of the sexual revolution, was impotent. “There would seem to be little doubt that Lawrence was impotent, or suffered under some physical disability which gave him a ludicrously excessive sense of the importance of a sexual fulfillment he was constitutionally incapable of ever experiencing.” Malcolm Muggeridge, The Most of Malcolm Muggeridge. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, p. 215.
D.H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod. London: Martin Secker, 1922, p. 106.
Ibid., p. 106.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 171.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 177.
Ibid., p. 309.
Ibid., p. 311.
Dorothea Krooke, a philosophical critic who is a fervid admirer of Lawrence’s religious humanism, puts her finger on the major weakness of his conception of sexual love. “The Man Who Died (along with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and perhaps The Woman Who Rode Away) is most nearly free of violent, destructive conflict, springing from the clash of incorrigibly self-centred natures, which in most of Lawrence’s previous works, from Sons and Lovers to The Plumed Serpent, is treated as an essential and natural part of the sexual relation. It is there exalted in the name of various Lawrencian dogmas—the mystery of the difference of the sexes, the inviolable selfhood of the self, the passion for aloofness of the male self on the one side, for ‘merging’ and loss of self of the female on the other; but the religious man will have no difficulty in recognizing in these dogmas the features of fear, pride and self-love, but chiefly fear.” Dorothea Krooke, Three Traditions of Moral Thought. Cambridge: The University Press, 1959, p. 284.
Marvin Mudrick, “The Originality of The Rainbow,” in Mark Spilka (ed.), D.H. Lawrence. Eng’ewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hail, Inc., 1963, p. 33.
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid., p. 88.
Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 147.
Ibid., p. 233.
Ibid., p. 234.
Ibid., p. 235.
Ibid., p. 321.
Ibid., p. 442.
Lady Ottoline Morrell, the friend of many literary men, kept a salon in London and later in the country, to which were invited the lions of the season. She was cruelly satirized by Aldous Huxley in Crome Yellow as Priscilla Wimbush. She is portrayed as the deadly female intellectual in Women in Love as Hermione Roddice. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey. New York and Chicago: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968, II, 5.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922, p. 45.
In D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition, Emile Delavenay examines the similarities of ideas between Edward Carpenter’s writings and those of D. H. Lawrence during the early years of the latter’s career as a novelist. These parallels are carefully documented and suggest, on the basis of internal evidence alone, that the younger man derived many of his beliefs from books by Carpenter. Delavenay also adduces copious data to show that Lawrence knew these books by Carpenter, had discussed them with friends, and had read them. Carpenter, a homosexual, a friend of Havelock Ellis, did not conceal his sexual anomaly. Instead he labored to enlighten the public on this complex question of social ethics. An eloquent and persuasive propagandist in behalf of this cause, he invoked scientific principles to dispel a prejudice based solely on ignorance. It is from Carpenter that Lawrence gained his insight into the homoerotic character of experience. The Rainbow was about to be prosecuted because it contained a Lesbian scene. Lawrence withdrew from publication the “Prologue” he had written for Women in Love in 1916. Lawrence was nevertheless accused of advocating the practice of homosexuality. Carpenter, a forceful spokesman in the movement for sexual freedom, preached the acceptance of the body and its instincts and recommended sexual intercourse al fresco. Lawrence absorbed many of these influences. “In many ways the novel [Women in Love] appears to be an illustration of the ideas expressed in Love’s Coming of Age.” (Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1971, p. 97.) Birkin, for example, Ursula’s lover in Women in Love, is sexually ambivalent, endowed “with the gift to love both male and female and to awaken love in them both.” (Ibid., p. 102.)
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, pp. 226–227.
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., p. 166.
Ibid., pp. 499-500.
Brigid Brophy, Don’t Never Forget. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966, p. 102.
The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, p. 43.
In a letter written in 1913 Lawrence proclaims his belief “in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge.” Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 773.
Ibid., p. 708.
Ibid., p. 720.
Ibid., p. 773.
See E. W. Tedlock, Jr., The Frieda Lawrence Collection of D.H. Lawrence Manuscripts. Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1948, pp. 20–27.
Kate Millett unmasks Lawrence as a talented sexual politician whose celebration of “phallic consciousness” is an astute device for transforming “masculine ascendancy into a mystical religion.…” (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1970, p. 238.) She maintains that “the scenes of sexual intercourse in the novel [Lady Chatterley’s Lover] are written according to the ‘female is passive, male is active’ directions laid down by Sigmund Freud. The phallus is all; Connie is ‘cunt,’ the thing acted upon, gratefully accepting each manifestation of the will of her master.” (Ibid., p. 240.)
André Malraux, “D. M. Lawrence and Eroticism,” in From the N.R.F. Edited by Justin O’Brien. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958, p. 196.
The Trial of Lady Chatterley. Edited by C. H. Rolph. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1961, p. 20.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ludwig Marcuse, Obscene. Translated by Karen Gershon. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1965, p. 234.
Ibid., p. 235.
See footnote 14.
David Holbrook, The Quest for Love. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1965, p. 202.
Ian Gregor and Brian Nicholas, The Moral and the Story. London: Faber and Faber, 1962, p. 239.
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1973). D. H. Lawrence and the Religion of Sex. In: The Sexual Revolution in Modern English Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9548-5_8
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