D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Monday Session I

Abbey L. Allen

Dartmouth College, US

Uprooting Nature and Ourselves: An Ecocritical Perspective of the Poetry of D.H. Lawrence

Perhaps the most significant of the Industrial Era's revolutions was the one in which humans transformed their understanding of themselves in the context of the natural world. Lawrence recognized that humans illusory physical separation from nature was creating a psychological separation as well; for Lawrence, one of the crises of the twentieth century was a matter of the human mind displaced from its natural body, of the modern conception of identity. Lawrence's loss of the landscape of his youth informed this awareness and ultimately impelled a lifetime quest to recreate a place in which the modern conception of identity could be redefined in its natural context.

In selected early poems, essays, and biographies, I am exploring the development of Lawrence's ideology from an ecopsychological perspective of childhood. I hope to give flesh to the idea that, unlike the majority of Westerners of his and our time, Lawrence the man and writer was inseparable from the natural world, and he felt it his calling to persuade fellow men to rediscover their lost roots and to psychologically reconnect with the earth, with home. In a letter to Edward Garnett in 1913, published in volume one of Letters, Lawrence wrote: I think I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people. The want is actually a psychological need to reconnect with nature. For Lawrence, this need manifested itself in the ecotopia-unattainable, the fantasy-memory of youth in thefields and forests of Eastwood.

Fiona Becket

University of Leeds, UK

D H Lawrence and Ecological Selfhood

This paper extends debates on nature in Lawrence in the direction of green thinking and attempts to examine the validity of the notion of ecological selfhood in relation to selected poetry, fiction and discursive writing. Part of a longer project, this paper nevertheless aspires to present here a coherent sense of the place of Lawrence within green cultural critique, and to reread some of his works in the light of contemporary literary environmentalism. In doing so it also hopes to place some notions that have developed beyond modernist literary studies under a form of positive pressure, properly to assess their usefulness in approaching a canonical writer who is not infrequently invoked in debates about human/nature relations. In part this is an extension of debates about Lawrence's anti-Cartesian 'metaphysic'; it also, more specifically, throws into relief ethical questions about how the human subject stands in relation to non-human 'world'. It is one way of re-thinking certain recurrent dichotomies that surface repeatedly in Lawrence studies, but it is hoped that this framework of green cultural critique also enables a fresh approach to the writer and the work.

Carl Krockel

Seoul National University, South Korea

Modernists at War: Lawrence and T.S. Eliot

In my paper I will explore how the early debates regarding English Modernism were rooted in the experience and memory of the war. Eliot's description of Joyce's (and by implication, his own) "mythic method" as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility which is contemporary history," helped to establish a reading of their Modernism as a triumph over the trauma of war. In a world where language had lost touch with experience, whether in political speeches, press reports or in people's everyday life, their work promised an alternative world in which language at least reached out towards an ordered, meaningful experience. Lawrence's language was dismissed by Eliot as a form of emotional demagoguery – "rotting, and rotting others".

I will focus my counterargument on the first version of Lawrence's Women in Love. Previously the novel had been placed at 1922 on the calendar of Modernism, on the tail of Ulysses and The Waste Land in 1921. However we can place Lawrence's 1916 version alongside the first British reactions of protest to the war. If, then, The First "Women in Love" represents the first Modernist response to the war in its fully developed state, it follows that we can reconfigure the history of Anglo-American Modernism which followed the war.

I am not concerned with the 'settling of old scores', rather I wish to draw attention to the fundamental affinities between Lawrence and Eliot, in terms of their experience of history, and in their imaginative response to it. I will argue that, like The First "Women in Love", The Waste Land did not represent a mastery over the immense panorama of futility that is history, but a traumatised submission to it. Consequently, we can look at the rise to cultural dominance of Eliot's Modernism in the Twenties in a different light. Ulysses and The Waste Land were regarded by contemporaries as the twin columns that could support a renewed post-war, Modernist culture. Meanwhile the 'turgid' ravings of Women in Love, to quote from John Middleton Murry's review, were regarded as a symptom of the age, not its cure. But what if both texts are symptoms of the age? Then the "Age of Eliot", founded on a text which is more a document of psychiatric abreaction than a poem that continues a classical tradition, is built upon a presumption, not the achievement, of mastery over history.

Margaret Storch

Framingham State College, USA

Outsider or cultural chameleon? Lawrence's true self

It is acknowledged that matters of self and identity may be problematic in Lawrence. His visit to Cambridge in 1915 was a pivotal episode in his life. Russell, Keynes and others recognized and admired his artistic talents. Yet Lawrence was reluctant to be absorbed into the elite culture that was prepared to welcome him and to support his literary productions.

A working-class young man with a semi-illiterate father, Lawrence broke into a sophisticated upper-class world through his distinction as a novelist. Women in Love and other writings demonstrate how successfully he integrated the mores and style of that world, as he did those of other cultures, such as the Central-European/Germanic he encountered through Frieda, and those of Mexico and New Mexico

Lawrence felt compelled to remain an 'outsider,' in his own and John Worthen's sense. Yet he was also a cultural chameleon, absorbing and adopting the quality several disparate cultures as he travelled and lived in different regions of the world. He stated that he belonged to no social class, but motifs in his work suggest he was drawn to the upper class and the exotic through the female. Returning to the setting of his early life in Lady Chatterley's Lover, he resolves some of the conflicts arising from early relationships.

Peter Preston

D. H. Lawrence Research Centre, The University of Nottingham, UK

Scribbling on Catherine: Murry vs. Carswell

During the decade after 1930 there was a steady flow of memoirs of Lawrence by his friends, acquaintances and members of his family, a dozen of which had appeared by 1935. They range from brief considerations to full-length biographies, and taken together they reveal an intense competitiveness, as their authors claim a more intimate relationship, a special knowledge or an authoritative understanding of Lawrence's life and work. In one case, however, the publications led to a more direct confrontation – that between John Middleton Murry and Catherine Carswell. Murry's objections to Carswell's adverse comments on his Son of Woman (1931) led to the withdrawal of Carswell's own book, The Savage Pilgrimage (1932) and its reissue in a revised form. The Manuscripts and Special Collections Department at the University of Nottingham holds a copy of The Savage Pilgrimage annotated by Murry, and this paper will explore what can be learned from Murry's pencilled comments about the nature of his objections to Carswell's remarks. Furthermore, correspondence between Carswell and Murry, also held at Nottingham, throws light not only on Lawrence's relationships with both authors, but also on the interactions between Lawrence's immediate circle of friends and on his reputation in the 1930s.

Victor Vargas

USA

Telling an Eastern fable: Lawrence's perineum, the literary initiate, and the novel as the guru's mantra

D. H. Lawrence notes in his letters during the writing of Women in Love, a novel that thematically appropriates Kundalini and Tantra yoga, that he envisioned a structure through which the British novel would be distributed in a closed-off initiatory type scheme. The transmission of literary knowledge that Lawrence envisioned resembled that of the Guru's imparting of the mantra to the initiate.

This concern with a typology of initiation seems to become a paramount theme in his late works, including The Plumed Serpent.

Beyond literary concerns, Lawrence also came to advocate a very Kundalini-inspired conception of the body politic ("a new age with a downward return to the great dark centres, past the diaphragm and the navel, where was to be found the throne of power and the scepter of rule").

Working from Leela Gandhi's notion in "Postcolonial Theory" that the movement from East to West involved processes of textualization, I want to propose the idea that Lawrence, instead of "appropriating" the Eastern body or its spiritual practices through new literary genres and processes of textualization (such as with WB Yeats during his "Indian Phase" and Christopher Isherwood, both of whom instituted the form of the yogi autobiography) instead sought yogic schemes by which the Western form or body itself would take shape. Of course, it should be noted that Lawrence's idea of what was Eastern esoteric was very much by way of the Western-led Theosophical society. I will be working from those Lawrentian scholars of Eastern esoteric influences- Gerald Doherty, Thomas Miles, Chaman Nahal, Charles Burack. I will also be considering the interesting notion proferred by Wolfgang Iser on the sensory affect of modernist literary practices as it relates to Lawrence's technique in the above mentioned novels.

C. Ravindran Nambiar

Kerala, India

Lady Chatterley's Lover as a Tantric Testament of Love

I feel that Lady Chatterley's Lover has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. Doris Lessing writes, after "rereading the novel many years and some loves later, the great sex scenes have lost their power" (Introduction to Penguin Classic edition). Though she praises the novel here and there, the impression she gives is that it is an anti-war novel written by a "sex-obsessed writer". She adds, "so many weltering aggravating emotions were at work in this very ill man as he wrote and rewrote Lady Chatterley's Lover". It is unfortunate that the novel is seen by her in the light of "weak chest", family quarrel, "clitoral orgasm", etc. The whole novel is packed with wisdom; oriental wisdom, perhaps. Mellors and Constance simply represent the male and female energy through which the sublime enlightenment is achieved. Sex in the novel is a kind of ladder to attain purification (what Lawrence calls "chastity) and elevation, finally achieving pure consciousness (sat-chit-ananda). "I love this chastity", says Mellors. The lovers help the readers in realizing a cosmic awareness. In her search to discover the mystery behind Mellors, Connie stumbles upon "three books on India". This must be related to the scene in which Mellors is sitting with his face "motionless in physical abstraction, almost like the face of Buddha. Motionless and in the invisible flame of consciousness"." I love in a higher mystery", says Mellors at the end of the novel. He also said earlier that "I've been in India", and Lawrence adds, "if the man had been in India for four or five years, he must be more or less presentable". It should be taken as a symbolic statement. A look at the novel in the light of Tantric philosophy, with the help of Anand K. Coomaraswamy, Henrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, and some of the great writers in India on sex and Tantrism, is the thrust of my paper.