D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts, Friday, Session A

Erdmute Wenzel White

Purdue University USA

Beyond utopian Impulse: D. H. Lawrence and Anna von Richthofen

Some of Lawrence's most tender and graceful letters are addressed to his mother-in-law, baroness Anna von Richthofen. Lawrence turns to her in times of marital crisis and restless thinking. While he does not blame Frieda for the incivilities of modern erotic life, his letters to Anna record plaintive demands and unleash withering outbursts against his wife, modern woman, and western culture. It is in these letters, written in his fervent German, that he seems to find clarity of mind and emotional repose.

This paper will explore the relationship between Lawrence and his aristocratic German mother-in-law, a relationship with a strong erotic undertow of its own, and Lawrence's yearnings to find in the older woman the tonic of motherly love. The letters offer a telling background to Lawrence's life. They also chronicle compelling, underlying stylistic information.

John Worthen

Nottingham UK

Back to Basics: Frieda von Richthofen and Karl von Marbahr

One of the most significant figures in the early biography of Frieda von Richthofen-Weekley-Lawrence-Ravagli has been the German aristocrat and soldier Karl von Marbahr, who appears in the books by Moore, Lucas, Maddox, Byrne, Gouirand-Rousselon, Squires and Talbot, Jüngling and Roßbeck and others, as well as playing a considerable role in E. W. Tedlock's compilation Frieda Lawrence: Memoirs and Correspondence (London 1961: New York 1964). Tedlock and Moore singled out Marbahr as a man who had crucially been in love with Frieda before she met Ernest Weekley: Tedlock quoted the introduction to one version of Frieda's memoirs actually written to her old friend, in which she remarked 'You understood me so well'. Byrne's biography, however, described Marbahr as 'earnest, fretful, and plodding'. Who was right?

I have now worked through the early correspondence of Frieda, her friends and family; and this work – going back to back to the roots of Frieda's early life and loves – has uncovered a great deal both unexpected and extraordinary. In my paper I shall be giving a definitive answer to a question no-one has asked before: who really was Karl von Marbahr?

Andrew Harrison

Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

The White Peacock and Lawrence's "entrance into the jungle of literature"

Lawrence's transformation from teacher to professional writer between 1909 and 1912 was facilitated by the support of his friends and the strong advocacy of Ford Madox Hueffer, Edward Garnett, and various influential figures associated with Hueffer's journal, the English Review. Yet, his "entrance into the jungle of literature" (i. 222) also entailed a persistent struggle on Lawrence's part to transform the nineteenth-century literary tradition he inherited; to tone down his own tendency towards melodrama and sentimentalism; and to understand and target his writings towards the expectations of the advanced London literary set. This paper will consider the compositional history of The White Peacock as it reveals Lawrence's formation as a professional writer; it will provide a reading of the novel which stresses its author's concerted attempt to lay claim to a specific literary culture and identity.

Allen R. Dyer

East Tennessee State University Johnson City, USA

Lawrence and the Metaphors of Illness

Lawrence says, "One is ill because one doesn't live properly—can't. It's the failure to live that makes one ill . . ."This is exactly the sort of metaphor Sontag suggests we ought to reject, the sort of metaphor that blames and shames and stigmatizes the victim. Yet Lawrence's insightful "can't" may belie the cant Sontag struggles to get beyond. Surely living a romantic, impoverished life does not cause tuberculosis. With all we know about biological determinism, people should not be blamed or feel responsible for their cancers, and we know enough to realize that it is a virus that causes AIDS. Yet Lawrence anticipates and insists that we look at forces beyond our awareness. Science now acknowledges that illnesses have multiple determinants, and the author helps us understand disease is not entirely reducible to biological causes. Medical science in the 21st century is now better prepared to appreciate the bio-psycho-social and even spiritual aspects of illness and may even be able to appreciate the psycho-neuro-immunological aspects of that complexity in a way that is faithful to spirit of Lawrence's experience and insights.

Judith Ruderman

Duke University, USA

D. H. Lawrence's Dis-Ease: Examining the Symptoms of "Illness as Metaphor"

Susan Sontag's 1978 essay called "Illness as Metaphor" suggests a useful approach to one aspect of Lawrence in/and his times. Sontag's premise is that an illness, particularly one whose cause and/or cure is unknown, may accrue a constellation of meanings about personal and national character in a given era. That is, a medical condition is as much an historical lens as any other cultural component.

The illness I place under the microscope, tuberculosis, was a signal disease for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lawrence "expressed" his ailment, and illness in general, obliquely through metaphors for the ills of his society; thus, his characters and his language are frequently disease-ridden. In turn, the Establishment reacted to Lawrence's subversive works in terms of disease, thereby revealing "illness as metaphor" in another, complementary (but surely not complimentary) sense.

Examining tuberculosis as cultural marker leads—via Lawrence's view on the cause of TB (in his essay on Poe)—to a brief diagnosis of a present-day medical issue, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (M. S. B. P.), and hence to an updated take on the "devouring mother" in particular and contemporary Western cultural concerns in general.

Sue B. Walker

University of South Alabama, USA

Lawrence said in a letter in 1912, "I am quite certain that when I have been ill, it has been sheer stress and nerve strain which have been let go in my lungs" (qtd. Myers 75). Thomas Couser, in "Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting" shows that "when the subjects of lifewriting are afflicted by sufficiently serious illness or disability, those conditions find their way into the texts (including letters). Illness is an important aspect of D.H. Lawrence's life. This paper will attempt to assess its impact on his life and work. Lawrencehad T.B. for most of his wife, and the exacerbations of his disease can be seen as occurring at significant times and serve as an important autopathography that takes into account the vicissitudes of tuberculosis.

Lawrence was a sickly baby and child who remained home with his mother until he was seven. He had severe pneumonia when he was sixteen and left his job never to return. He had another illness when he was twenty-five and left his teaching job permanently. This was probably his first major episode of T.B., and he continued to have recurrent bouts of the disease until his death in 1930. These events occurred at times of crises in his life and were associated with conflict and depression and will be examined as autopathography.

Lawrence had a hemorrhage from his lung in 1925 immediately after finishing The Plumed Serpent when he was planning to return to England. This episode occurred at a time of conflict that represented a giving up without a consequent drive for renewal. A second hemorrhage prevented his return to England, but he made the journey home in 1926. He wrote Lady Chatterly's Lover at this time, producing three versions before publishing the novel in 1928. This novel may be understood as an attempt to reassure himself about his views in Heideggerian terms on being / Being, but he was unable to write his way back to health. He had lost his will to live and was ready to embark on the Ship of Death.

Peter Balbert

Trinity University, USA

Thirteen Ways of Looking at The Ladybird: D. H. Lawrence, Lady Cynthia Asquith, and the Incremental Structure of Seduction

The wide variety of perspectives on The Ladybird includes strong opinions on its fictional and doctrinal achievement that range from the unequivocally laudatory to the unapologetically demeaning. They include methodological approaches that variously focus on its artistic and philosophical inheritances, literary influences and relevant echoes of other writers, ethnic and archetypal resonances, intertextual significance and visionary continuities, as well as mythic overtones and biographical correspondencies. Amid this wealth of valuable scholarship, there remain two interrelated areas that require more in-depth consideration. First, the acknowledged resemblances of Cynthia Asquith to Lady Daphne, and of Basil, Lady Beveridge, and the Earl to respective Asquith family members--such a panoply of roman a clef has not received an integrated discussion that can illuminate the tone and technique of this fiction and the nagging issues in Lawrence's turbulent life with Frieda during that memorable autumn of the work's composition in 1921. Second, Lady Daphne is provocatively stimulated and meticulously seduced by Psanek in a manner that has implications both for the organic structure of this novella and for the copulatory proclivities and amorous passions of the Daphne-Cynthia prototype. Psanek's prolonged and clever siege on Lady Daphne's proud and disconsolate womanhood encompasses important Lawrencian notions about sexual intercourse and masturbatory evasion; it also includes remarkably explicit material on the writer's symbolic and clinical distinctions between vaginal and clitoral orgasm--a preoccupation that circumstances in his own marriage have made especially urgent and obsessive.

Marina S. Ragachewskaya

Minsk State Linguistics University, Belarus

Love discourse and love rhetoric in D. H. Lawrence's short stories

D. H. Lawrence's short stories are a complex fictional and linguistic reality. And though their thematic field lies within rather broad dimensions of human psyche, or what Weldon Thornton calls 'psychic texture', there are still a lot of undiscovered mysteries concerning Lawrence's highly elusive and subtle use of language in relation to love and sexuality. Many of the writer's short stories have an underlying love conflict - driving, or predetermining the whole plot. In some texts, Second Best for example, language appears as a secondary necessity.
The all-seeing 3d person narrator, however, is doomed to use it and to be forever within the "boundedness" of linguistic limitations. In this case, Lawrence's ingenious discovery is in use of a much broader 'love discourse' than that of words, gestures and looks.
This love discourse encompasses the landscape and animals, and metaphoric language of motions, mimicry, corporeality signs, etc. And the love rhetoric appears just the right tool in disguise, powerful enough in the art of persuading another human soul. But in the story mentioned, a love conversation does not have to sound like one – for an observer, it might sound as something about nothing.
In other texts, such as The Prussian Officer, love takes a somewhat perverted form. However, Lawrence convincingly demonstrates this very power of persuasion – no matter for the better of for the worse – acting with the help of various other rhetorical techniques: psychoanalytic portrayals and grounds for psychoanalytic interpretation, body language and mental states. "Shadows" in rose gardens and ghost-like voices walk the fictional space of Lawrence stories fulfilling, as the paper will argue, the very purpose of any rhetorical discourse: to persuade and touch the human soul. So, indeed, "the way we think about love is conditioned by the way we talk about love...and more so by the way others talk to us about love".