1

D.H. Lawrence as a psychological novelist with

references to the major novels of Lawrence:

The early 20th century witnessed British Empires transition from

free competition to monopoly capitalism. In that ear of rapid
social and technological change leading to increasing life
complexity and psychological displacement, people in western
society began to question the basis of their hitherto convictions.
In the meantime, the contradictions between the imperialist
countries grew into such great tension that it soon led to the
outbreak of World War I (1914-1918). This Great War shattered
people’s fundamental cornerstone of edifice on which their
convictions were built, profoundly altering people’s conception of
rationality, religion, country and morality etc., causing a paschal
crisis. Affected by new perception held of the world and our place
in it, a new group of writers tried to communicate their fears and
opinions through unique new writing style. The disillusionment
of the new century led them to seek for new ways and means of
revealing the truth of life. D.H. Lawrence, then, was in an ideal
position to witness the farcical polarities of that time: the
prosperity of science and the decay of morality; the abundant of
material life and void of spiritual life.

David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet,

and essayist, was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England,
on September 11, 1885. Though better known as a novelist,
Lawrence’s first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his
poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since
had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the
Atlantic. His early poems reflect the influence of Ezra Pound and
Imagist movement, which reached its peak in the early teens of
the twentieth century. When Pound attempted to draw Lawrence
into his circle of writer-followers, however, Lawrence decided to
pursue a more independent path.

CC-2.1
 2

He believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and

true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his
best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and
animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the
puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon society.
Lawrence was a rebellious and profoundly polemical writer with
radical views, who regarded sex, the primitive subconscious, and
nature as cures to what he considered the evils of modern
industrialized society. Tremendously prolific, his work was often
uneven in quality, and he was a continual source of controversy,
often involved in widely-publicized censorship cases, most
famously for his novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”(1928). His
collections of poetry include “Look! We Have Come
Through” (1917), a collection of poems about his wife; “Birds,
Beasts, and Flowers” (1923); and “Pansies” (1929), which was
banned on publication in England.

Lawrence's hardscrabble, working-class upbringing made a

strong impression on him, and he later wrote extensively about
the experience of growing up in a poor mining town. "Whatever I
forget," he later said, "I shall not forget the Haggs, a tiny red brick
farm on the edge of the wood, where I got my first incentive to
write." As a child, Lawrence often struggled to fit in with other
boys. He was physically frail and frequently susceptible to illness,
a condition exacerbated by the dirty air of a town surrounded by
coal pits. He was poor at sports and, unlike nearly every other
boy in town, had no desire to follow in his father's footsteps and
become a miner. However, he was an excellent student, and in
1897, at the age of 12, he became the first boy in Eastwood's
history to win a scholarship to Nottingham High School. But at
Nottingham, Lawrence once again struggled to make friends. He
often fell ill and grew depressed and lethargic in his studies,
graduating in 1901 having made little academic impression.
Reflecting back on his childhood, Lawrence said, "If I think of my

CC-2.1
 3

childhood it is always as if there was a sort of inner darkness,

like the gloss of coal in which we moved and had our being."

In the summer of 1901, Lawrence took a job as a factory

clerk for a Nottingham surgical appliances manufacturer called
Haywoods. However, that autumn, his older brother William
suddenly fell ill and died, and in his grief, Lawrence also came
down with a bad case of pneumonia. After recovering, he began
working as a student teacher at the British School in Eastwood,
where he met a young woman named Jessie Chambers, who
became his close friend and intellectual companion. At her
encouragement, he began writing poetry and also started drafting
his first novel, which would eventually become “The White
Peacock”.

“The White Peacock” & “The Trespasser”

In the fall of 1906, Lawrence left Eastwood to attend the

University College of Nottingham to obtain his teacher's
certificate. While there, he won a short-story competition for "An
Enjoyable Christmas: A Prelude" which was published in the
Nottingham Guardian in 1907. In order to enter multiple stories
in the competition, he entered "An Enjoyable Christmas: A
Prelude" under Jessie Chamber's name, and although it was
published as such, people soon discovered that Lawrence was its
true author.

In 1912, Lawrence published his second novel, “The Trespasser”,

a story based on the experiences of a fellow teacher who had an
affair with a married man who then committed suicide. Around
the same time, Lawrence became engaged to an old friend from
college named Louie Burrows.

CC-2.1
 4

“Sons and Lovers”

However, in the spring of 1912, Lawrence's life changed suddenly

and irrevocably when he went to visit an old Nottingham
professor, Ernest Weekley, to solicit advice about his future and
his writing. During his visit, Lawrence fell desperately in love
with Weekley's wife, Frieda von Richthofen. Lawrence
immediately resolved to break off his engagement, quit teaching,
and try to make a living as a writer, and, by May of that year, he
had persuaded Frieda to leave her family. The couple ran off to
Germany, later travelling to Italy. While travelling with his new
love, Lawrence continued to write at a furious pace. He published
his first play, “The Daughter-in-Law”, in 1912. A year later, he
published his first volume of poetry: “Love Poems and Others”.

Later in 1913, Lawrence published his third novel, “Sons and

Lovers”, a highly autobiographical story of a young man and
aspiring artist named Paul Morel, who struggles to transcend his
upbringing in a poor mining town. The novel is widely considered
Lawrence's first masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest
English novels of the 20th century.

In most early analysis of the Oedipus complex presented in

Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”, the influence of the father was not
as equally discussed as the impact from the mother in its
importance and decisiveness. However, the neglect of the father’s
role in the oedipal relation is vital and is worthy of mention,
because the major factor for the passing of the Oedipus complex-
castration anxiety, consists in the involvement of the father. In
“Sons and Lovers”, Paul’s failure in forming normal relationships
with either Miriam or Clara is mainly attributed to two reasons:
one is his own psychological immaturity, which is the major
factor; the other is the block from Mrs. Morel.

Psychoanalytic readings of “Sons and Lovers” by D. H. Lawrence

frequently discuss Paul Morel’s psychology in terms of the classic
Oedipus complex, because the intimate nature of his relationship
with his mother is so complete that he finds the quality of love he

CC-2.1
 5

can give to and receive from other woman deficient and

unsatisfying by comparison. Owing to this reason, there are
different views on the novel’s conclusion, with some believing that
Paul is at last moving towards an independent adult existence,
and others contending that he is an emotional derelict drifting
towards death out of a desire to remain with his dead mother.

“The Rainbow”& “Women in Love”

Lawrence and Frieda von Richtofen soon returned to England,

and in 1915 he published another novel, “The Rainbow”, which
was quite sexually explicit for the time. Critics harshly
condemned “The Rainbow” for its sexual content, and the book
was soon banned for obscenity.

In 1919, with the First World War finally ended, Lawrence once
again departed England for Italy. There, he spent two highly
enjoyable years travelling and writing. In 1920, he revised and
published “Women in Love”, which he considered the second half
of “The Rainbow”. He also edited a series of short stories that he
had written during the war, which were published under the title
“My England and Other Stories” in 1922.

The psychological relationship between men and women in

“Women in Love” is more like a fight than a friendship. Birkin
finds the old ideals, dead as nails. There only remains this perfect
union with a woman, in man-woman relationship, a sort of
ultimate marriage. It is a relationship of separateness-in-union. It
is a permanent bond which leaves the individual eternally
independent. One must forget and turn one's eyes away from the
world. He must live quite apart in a world of isolation to which he
is wedded by birth. The different relationships in the novel are
founded on the psychodynamics of opposition, on the idea of
death and life, and death-in-life, and the characters move entirely
in terms of these two impulses, their conflicts and their embraces
developing out of their allegiance to one or the other. Psychology
of love is, of course, Lawrence's focus, for he wishes to say that in

CC-2.1
 6

modern life we use love for death-purpose more frequently than

we do for life-purpose. The psychology is further dramatized in
the theme of a struggle between Will and Being. Will is the
integration of the drive of ego toward power, toward domination.
Being is the integration of life forces in total and complete self-
responsibility. Its historical embodiment lives in the future.

“The Rainbow” can be read as an experiment in the

speleology of the human psyche, with Lawrence here the explorer
of those depths which Freud was attempting to probe at the same
period. The narrative arc of the novel “The Rainbow” provides the
scaffolding upon which Lawrence explores a wide range of
philosophical and psychological questions, such as the
relationship between spirituality and sexuality, industrialization
and nature, and personal freedom and society. Ultimately,
however, “The Rainbow” is about yearning for truth and beauty in
a messy world.

“Lady Chatterley's Lover” & Final Works

Having fallen ill with tuberculosis, Lawrence returned to Italy in

1927. There, in his last great creative burst, he wrote “Lady
Chatterley's Lover”, his best-known and most infamous novel.
Published in Italy in 1928, “Lady Chatterley's Lover” explores in
graphic detail the sexual relationship between an aristocratic
lady and a working-class man. Due to its graphic content, the
book was banned in the United States until 1959, and in
England until 1960, when a jury found Penguin Books not guilty
of violating Britain's Obscene Publications Act and allowed the
company to publish the book.

As one of the pioneers of modern psychological fictions,

Lawrence explored human nature through frank discussion of
sex, psychology and religion. He has a gift of seeing the
changeless nature of human beings beyond the changing
circumstances of day-to-day life. Having a strong interest in
psychological revelation, he puts emphasis on the description of

CC-2.1
 7

characters’ irrational psychological activities to reveal human

nature. The idea of unconsciousness, new subtleties of
psychological approach, or new delicacies of presentation or
description not only opened a new country for the novelist, but
also provide theoretical support for modern literature. Sigmund
Freud was the first person to scientifically explore the human
unconscious mind and recognized the influence of unconscious
drives in shaping behaviour. The centre of Freudian Psycho-
analysis is the supremacy of sex. Sex is the motivating factor
behind all human actions. Freud divided psyche on mind into
three strata- Id, Ego and Super-ego on the conscious-
subconscious, and unconscious.

Finally, in addition to coming to know the nature of unconscious,

Lawrence experiments with different paths for putting us back in
touch with it. These include what could be called Lawrence’s
‘tantra’—the exploration of sexuality in a way of entering into
contact with the life mystery. 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 is, to Lawrence, a symbol of Life Force. Through
presenting psychological experience into individual human life
and human relationships, and exploring the personalities of his
characters, Lawrence has opened up a new territory in the
writing of novel. This is clearly shown in “Women in Love”, “The
Rainbow”, “Sons and Lovers” and other novels as well that these
are typical of this kind of writing.

CC-2.1
 8

Works Cited

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1005.276&rep=r
ep1&type=pdf

"Heros Psychology In Sons And Lovers English Literature Essay."

UKEssays.com. 11 2018. All Answers Ltd. 04 2019
<https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/heros-psychology-
in-sons-and-lovers-english-literature-essay.php?vref=1>.

http://www.ijelr.in/3.1.16B/409-416%20TYAGI%20PALLAVI.pdf

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/d-h-lawrence

https://wenku.baidu.com/view/0b69e5cba1c7aa00b52acb1e

http://hamandista.com/essays/lawrence-treatment-modern-psychology/

https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/221

CC-2.1