DHLRC
D.H. Lawrence Research Centre

D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Friday Session B

Holly J. Mell

University of New Mexico, USA

The Light within the Darkness: A Reading of 'Pomegranate'"

In his poem, "Pomegranate," D. H. Lawrence uses symbolic imagery and mythological associations to explore the deeper fears in the human psyche. A familiar fruit grown throughout Italy evokes life, death, and the human heart. The foreboding image of the fissure, a reference to the female reproductive organs, suggests both the darkness of death and the light of possible rebirth. The association of the pomegranate with the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone evokes the motif of a journey through the underworld that parallels the cycle of the seasons. The speaker of the poem uses these symbols to lead the audience toward the concept of embracing fear in order to explore life and inspiration.

This paper was selected as the best short essay written by a high school student for a Taos Festival competition in 2006. To supplement her reading, the author will present pictures of Taos and the Lawrence Ranch, where the poet was living when he finished Birds, Beasts, and Flowers, the volume in which "Pomegranate" appeared. Ms. Mell is grateful to the International Conference and the Friends of D. H. Lawrence for making her visit to Eastwood possible.


Christopher Pollnitz

University of Newcastle, Australia

Annotating the 'Weird Rigging' of Lawrence's Poems: Did His 'Ship' Return to Eastwood?

The paper discusses annotations for the Cambridge edition of Lawrence's Poems. When Tom Marshall shaped The Psychic Mariner around Lawrence's ship symbolism, he left one answer only to the question: does the Lawrence's verse return to Eastwood? The poems voyaged away from the birthplace, into the cosmic deeps of 'The Ship of Death'. In Rhyming Poems, the paradoxically stationary 'ship' of 'Discord in Childhood' is rooted in Eastwood, and the ballads are embedded in regional dialect, but other poems reflect the shift to south London. In Look! We Have Come Through!, revised in 1917, Lawrence evolved a style of anthropological allusion. In Birds, Beasts and Flowers, the chosen focus is iconography in 'St Luke' and the armorial seal in 'The American Eagle'. While a return to Eastwood roots is discernible in the diction of Pansies, the volume also evidences Lawrence's interest in contemporary science and ancient Mediterranean myth. In Last Poems, the use of ancient history and myth reveals Lawrence voyaging to Egypt, Crete and Delphi. Establishing the coordinates of the allusions redraws Marshall's map for this last and 'longest journey', which has cosmic and historical bearings.


Carrie Rohman

University of Pittsburgh, USA

"'Not the measure of creation': The Limits of Human Epistemology in D. H. Lawrence's 'Fish'"

At the beginning of Lawrence's poem, "Fish," this aqueous other is framed as a being that has no differentiated consciousness, no sexual desire, and no knowledge of the metaphysical. The elemental fish is contrasted with the nerve-conscious, intersubjective human. But at the poem's halfway mark, the narrator shifts into a consideration of the process of naming and describing non-humans. Ultimately, the narrator "left off hailing" the fish, whose creator is other than his own. This moment is notable since it signals the Western rationalist subject naming its epistemological limit and relinquishing a position of mastery and autonomy typically articulated along species lines.

This paper examines the way Lawrence's poem acknowledges the radical alterity of the fish and further analyzes how the piece offers a rare poetic indictment of man's sacrificial relationship to non-humans. I further contextualize this poem alongside Lawrence's other animal poems which should be valued not only because they call into question what Derrida has recently discussed as the "abyssal limit of the human," but also because they narrate the very tension between abjecting, confronting, and recuperating the animal that characterizes modernism's ambivalent engagement with the discourse of species.


Howard J. Booth

University of Manchester, UK

D.H. Lawrence, William Morris and the Radical Tradition

The paper will make the case for examining Lawrence's relationship to political, rather than only religious, dissent. It sees Lawrence in terms of a line of socialist writing on art, work and social change. Looking at William Morris and late Lawrence, the particular focus is on the two surviving versions of Lawrence's 1927 review of Walter Wilkinson's The Peep Show and 'A Dream of Life' (called 'Autobiographical Fragment' in Phoenix and Late Essays and Articles).


Takeo Iida

Kurume University, Japan

D. H. Lawrence and Mary Webb: Intuitive Writers

In the past Lawrence scholarship, English nature mystic writer Richard Jefferies was sometimes referred to in establishing closeness between Lawrence and the 19th century author of The Story of my Heart. However, another English nature mystic writer Mary Webb (1881-1927), Lawrence's contemporary novelist, has hardly been mentioned in relation with his works. Comparing the two novelists' works, it will be found that there is a strong affinity between them as contemporaries. Three common features will be indicated between them: firstly they are both essentially intuitive writers; they deeply intuit vital life of nature. Secondly they struggled against the Victorian moral tendency to suppress sexuality. For them sexuality is not what should be hidden but what should be admitted as part of humanity.  Thirdly they were trying to overcome a class barrier by marriage of two characters who represent the working class and the middle class respectively. These three features will be examined in this paper. In the discussion Lawrence's essay Fantasia of the Unconscious, some poems, novels (Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover) and Webb's novel, Gone to Earth will be taken up.


Maria Ollivere

Royal Holloway, UK

Foaming Ecstasy: Wyndham Lewis and Lawrence's travel writing

Wyndham Lewis's response to the work of D. H. Lawrence is, undoubtedly, symptomatic of his own cantankerous intolerance for primitivist ideologies. His critique of Lawrence's travel sketches centers on an essential dislike of what amounts in Lewis's view to a spiritual tourism of sorts, embodying yet another of the many false solutions to the cultural dilemma of their time.

This paper will focus on the less obvious influence Lawrence's work had on Lewis, and on how the latter developed a dynamic of negation and differentiation against Lawrence's widely popularized philosophy that helped consolidate his individual critical standpoint. Beyond the better known judgments Lewis issued against Lawrence's spiritualism we find Lewis's later texts, where parodies of Lawrence's style and stance are crucial for Lewis's broader critique to effectively asserts itself.

I suggest an underlying reliance on the Lawrencean ethic becomes increasingly evident as Lewis's moves from the open debate of his cultural commentary in the late 1920s, to the more sedate spirit of later fiction. Finally, I will explore how the critical neglect of Lewis's travel writing has prevented the crucial similarities and genuine congeniality between these two authors to surface, bringing one of contemporary criticism's most solid assumptions to task.


Kumiko Hoshi

Ichikawa City, Japan

Visual Representation of Light and Darkness in Women in Love: Lawrence and Rembrandt

Visual representation of light and darkness in Women in Love (1920) shows some resemblance to such representations in the paintings by Rembrandt, a master of light and shadow. It is true that light and darkness frequently serve as the most significant metaphors in most of Lawrence's works. What seems to be peculiar to Women in Love is, however, that the relation between light and darkness is particularly emphasised whenever they are presented. Not only in this novel but also in his essays written about the same time, such as Study of Thomas Hardy, The Crown, and Twilight in Italy, does Lawrence devote much space to this issue. For instance, in Study of Thomas Hardy, especially in a chapter entitled "The Light of the World," Lawrence discusses in detail the relation between light and darkness in paintings by artists, such as Rembrandt, Turner and Botticelli. Concerning Rembrandt's representation in particular, Lawrence states: "where the light falls upon our darkness, there we are: that I am but the point where light and darkness meet" (STH 83). This description reminds us of Rembrandt's self-portraits, which are characterized by the technique called "chiaroscuro" (the Italian word for "lightdark"). By using this technique in his paintings, Rembrandt makes the subjects stand out in the darkness. What should be noted is that Women in Love has quite a few scenes in which characters, like the subjects in Rembrandt's self-portraits, are brightly illuminated. This paper will focus on the way in which Lawrence visually portrays light and darkness in Women in Love with reference to Lawrence's statements about Rembrandt in Study of Thomas Hardy. The comparison will come to reveal Lawrence's own view on the relation between light and darkness, a view in which light and darkness are considered to be relative.


Jim Phelps

University of Zululand, South Africa

Gerald Crich and Repression

Gerald Crich most prominently embodies, both as an individual character and a representative phenomenon, the negative, destructive pole in the dualistic structure of Women in Love. There is an ambiguity, however, in the presentation of his character, and the actions that flow from it, which, if examined, reveals the complexity and roundedness of the critique of the social and economic conditions he personifies. In focusing too narrowly on his destructiveness, criticism has tended to overlook his positive potentiality, which is sympathetically portrayed. Without an adequate sense of what Gerald could have been, and why, and what the causes were in the defeat of his positive potential, not only has the tragic force of Gerald's downfall been underestimated, but the full impact of the novel has not been fully grasped. The paper, in exploring the way the novel shows how Gerald was repressed as a child, argues for new emphases in the interpretation of the novel and its critique of, and insight into, the complex nature of modernity.


Kyoko Kay Kondo

Chiba University of Commerce, UK

The Influence of Eastern Initiatory Rites in Women in Love

In his essay 'Ars Erotica or Scientia Sexualis?: Narrative Vicissitudes in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love' Gerald Doherty makes some persuasive claims about the impact of an oriental 'Ars Erotica' in Women in Love. Some of his claims, however, are more persuasive than others, and this paper offers some revision and expansion of his argument by incorporating into the discussion 'The First Women in Love' which has become more readily available to readers since Doherty first presented his case. Comparison with The First Women in Love reveals that the 'Excurse' chapter was first written for the published novel, Women in Love, and closer textual comparison shows that Lawrence scattered some vocabulary associated with 'Eastern mystery rituals' for 'initiates' in earlier chapters in order to prepare readers for the new chapter, 'Excurse.' This modifies Doherty's claim that Lawrence applied all the techniques of 'Ars Eotica' in this single chapter.

 

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