D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive
Paper Abstracts Sunday Session G
Jung Min Woo
Korea University, South Korea
Death, the end of experience or an experience?
Is death the end of experience or an experience?
In Lawrence's Last Poems, death, the return to the primal womb, silence and eternity is not a concept based upon the duration of time; it is a mythical and symbolic time span which starts at here-and-now without setting the final line. Perhaps the eternity of death may be an experience, not the end of experience. Death is the starting point where one enters the world of eternity. Death, the entering into the eternity, for Lawrence, is a sojourning experience, whose impact and duration are not necessarily confined to the rational sense of reality but to the flow of mind which Lawrence adopted and developed throughout his life.
In this respect, the aesthetic of returning to the primal womb, death, silence and finally resurrection is 'a travelling' toward the hidden consciousness, 'terra incognita', 'the unknown region of mind'. Death is still a journey, for the end is unknown and oblivious. Thus he says it is 'the longest journey' which may never end, and 'nothing matters but the longest journey'. Death, like life, perhaps resembles the circle of Yin and Yang, or the Mexican Indian's weaving, or the Etruscan death art, which has no end but gives a passage into the unknown. The difference between life journey and death journey lies in that the former is the voyage to waken linguistic consciousness while the latter pursues non-linguistic Being, 'Silence'. It is a remarkable turning point for a writer whose duty is to use words to invent the Wittgensteinean 'language game' that frames 'forms of life'. By 'murmuring' – composing the death poems – he seems to test the writer's task which excludes his individual language from public communication and brings about the aura of silence in words.
Helen Baron
University of Hull, UK
'Helen Corke's The Light of Common Day'
Helen Corke's relationship with Lawrence from 1909 to 1912 is well known, from the CUP edition of The Trespasser and the CUP publication of her autobiography, In Our Infancy, which covered her life from 1882-1912. But she wrote a second volume of autobiography, covering her life from 1913 to 1952, which has remained unpublished. What can this unpublished work tell us about her own career and development as well as her reflections on her relationships with Lawrence himself and with Jessie Chambers?
Bethan Jones
University of Hull, UK
Return of Returns: Lawrence's Recreation of Eastwood in his Late Essays and Fragments return, late, dream, life
This paper discusses late texts such as 'A Dream of Life', in which Lawrence engages in an imaginative recreation of Eastwood. In this fragment he 'Etruscanises' his home town, offering a futuristic vision of the places and people portrayed. I will also consider 'Hymns in a Man's Life', 'Return to Bestwood' and other related late works.
Divya Saksena
Middle Tennessee State University, USA
"A much bigger thing than passion" - D. H. Lawrence's Women and Love in the Postcolonial Classroom "Love is a much bigger thing than passion, and a woman much more than sex." D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Edward Garnett, 2 June 1912
This paper bases itself on D. H. Lawrence's belief in the capacity of individuals to overcome fragmentation through love in order to negotiate their relationships within multiple interpretative communities. Reviewing too his personal achievement in doing so, it will examine his experience of women and love, from his mother to friends like Jessie Chambers, Louie Burrows and Blanche Jennings, to his wife Frieda Weekley. It will show how his writings between 1905 and 1913 reflect his perception of women and the role these particular women played in his artistic development as a writer, at least up until the publication of Sons and Lovers. In particular it will draw upon 15-plus years of teaching Lawrence in undergraduate programs in India and the United States from the postcolonial perspective. Why does Lawrence continue to survive as a favorite writer for students? How does he create and occupy what Homi Bhabha calls the "third space" that "displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom?" In response, I contend that Lawrence in a large part remains un-read and that there is a need to return to his non-fictional writings, to follow his arguments in entirety, as he made them. Yes, he is an advocate of gender differences. This is not to deny his belief in equality of opportunity to people of different sexes. It is, rather, to emphasize his warning against equality of expectations from separate individuals who are essentially different, not only in gender but also in their capacity to achieve an aesthetic and thereby moral response through their own instincts and emotions. To this end, I have frequently used Lawrence's non-fiction writing to trace the trajectories of his developing artistic imperatives. Rarely does one find so confessional and honest a writer, or one so willing to share generously his thoughts and ideas with others even in his private correspondence. Along with the abundant references to his mother Lydia Lawrence, this paper will therefore examine in some detail the letters he wrote to Jessie Chambers, Louie Burrows and Blanche Jennings—the primary feminine and/or amatory influences in his life before the all-encompassing experience of his love for Frieda Weekley. All these women (with his sister Lettice Ada Lawrence and friend Edward Garnett) were to a considerable extent instrumental in assisting Lawrence's struggle to articulate his own experience of love as well as his concept of love. Through them, he was ultimately able to write about the emotion with critical insight in Sons and Lovers, with confidence in Women in Love and with courage in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Years ago as a rookie teacher still finishing my M.Phil at Delhi University, India, I was given Lawrence's Sons and Lovers to teach as a 'special assignment.' None of the senior male professors at the college wanted to teach a mixed-gender class a text with that "dirty-sounding" title. And what the men wouldn't do, their women colleagues didn't want to touch with the proverbial bargepole. Since then I nearly always got the Lawrence unit—that is, Sons and Lovers—with the Honors undergraduates. While the concern of "Is it a dirty book?" or "Why was he banned?" faded over time, the students still tended to approach the book with trepidation. When I left Delhi University in 1998, I had taught the novel to several groups of seniors at a women-only college. Moreover, as a woman who actually requested the Lawrence unit instead of the "safe" ones like Joseph Conrad or E.M. Forster, I was soon an established Lawrence freak. For the students, however, now it was not trepidation, but indignation at the alleged mistreatment, even brutality, meted out to the women characters in Lawrence's novel. Going by their readings in postcolonialism and by radical feminist interpretations of Lawrence's work, the young women in the class would angrily begin to dismiss him as rabidly anti-feminist, as they would Paul Morel. Yet Sons and Lovers remained for every class a prime favorite, not only to read but also to write on for the final examination. Regardless of their ideological indoctrination or politicizing, my all-women classes never failed to succumb to the Lawrence magic with words. Since I encouraged, sometimes even compelled them to read Lawrence's other writings, they eventually distinguished the fine line of difference between the real-life Lawrence and his fictional alter-ego Paul Morel. Gradually their initial concern: "Was he really like that with real women?" morphed into the question "What was he really like with real women?"
In the summer of 2005 in Delhi, some of my former students met up with me and quite naturally, the talk turned to our Lawrence classes. As determined professionals, they had chosen financial independence and careers instead of the traditional option of marriage. In the context of postcolonial urban India, they now constituted a new kind of east-west hybridity, a "third space" of their own. I casually asked if reading Sons and Lovers had put them off love and relationships. Surprisingly.
Elizabeth Sargent
University of Alberta, Canada
Alt Dis (Alternative Discourse), D. H. Lawrence, and the Teaching of Writing
Lawrence scholars may be unaware of the way in which Lawrence's nonfiction has been used in the field of Writing Studies as a major example of Alt.Style or Alt Dis (Alternative Discourse)--or what Winston Weathers' classic text on the subject (An Alternate Style: Options in Composition, 1980) refers to as "Grammar B." Weathers focuses particularly on Studies in Classic American Literature to show how Lawrence "circles and probes; lists and repeats; truncates the paragraph; plays with words; double-voices by way of the questions/answers of an ongoing interior dialogue . . . " to convey the intensity of his convictions. Indeed, according to Weathers,"Lawrence uses Grammar B to communicate more than thesis and demonstration; he uses alternate style to communicate his own energy, involvement—less to make us agree with him, more to provoke us into dealing ourselves with the literary/cultural issues he raises. For Lawrence, the alternate style is one of display/stimulation—in contrast with Grammar A's proposition/proof."
But the attention of writing specialists to Lawrence's essays didn't end with the release of Weathers' book. Indeed, composition scholars are still pointing to Lawrence's nonfiction as a possible model for alternative forms of academic writing. Toby Fulwiler's College Writing (2002) uses Lawrence's work as an example of double-voice and collage. And, while serving as Associate Director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard, Gordon Harvey published a short piece suggesting that Lawrence's nonfiction should be studied by first-year students: I have students compile, based on the semester so far and my comments on their essays, a list of qualities that make for persuasive essay writing. These usually include sticking to a single thesis; not repeating oneself; having a clear and tight progression of thought; supplying concrete facts and evidence for claims; being calm, trustworthy, and fair (e.g. by making balanced concessions to other viewpoints and qualifying ones' position); maintaining a consistent and serious tone; and writing in a way that doesn't call attention to itself and especially not to one's mood or personality. Lawrence's prose . . . doesn't follow these rules. And yet one is irresistibly drawn along by it. . . . Lawrence's prose arguments get much of their power from forbidden sources—from being nonreasonable and nontransparent. (236-37).
More and more specialists in the teaching of writing are working to change our thinking about academic discourse. For example, building on Weathers and Stewart's argument that our current default paradigm for "good" writing—"thesis statement, supporting generalization and examples, conclusion"—might in fact be shielding us "from insights which another, less rigid paradigm, might generate," Patricia Bizzell, Helen Fox, and Christopher Schroeder challenge the hegemony of current paradigms of academic discourse in Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy (2002) by arguing that new forms of writing "make possible new forms of intellectual work."
Composition scholars are thus creating a climate in which Lawrence's nonfiction may be read differently—not least as part of a tradition of developing and using certain powerful strategies and effects of the alternate style for all of our thinking (disjunction, juxtaposition, crots, lists, labyrinthine sentences, fragments, double-voice or polyphony, repetitions and refrains, collage or montage, orthographic schemes and foreign words, language variegation, synchronicity). It's one thing to be using such strategies in a novel, but according to Weathers "Lawrence moved the alternate style into a prestigious forum—that of literary criticism." So necessary to Lawrence's thinking was his characteristic circling and probing, his "pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination," that he couldn't limit it to fiction alone.
By a close examination and discourse analysis of one short essay ("On Being Religious"), I hope not only to illustrate Lawrence's remarkable skill at Grammar B/Alt Dis, but to also help us imagine an academy in which all the devices, voices, and strategies of the verbal arts were available to scholars and taken seriously as forms of thinking; an academy in which we were able to use (and mix, as needed) all imaginable genres (poetry, drama, fiction, creative nonfiction, letter, interview, collage, mosaic, segmented essay, business memo, meander, loop, lab report) in order to do our work. To Lawrence, it was obvious that there were certain kinds of thinking we could not do, certain questions we could not explore, using traditional forms. And if an alternative discourse, style, or structure is needed to do the intellectual work we most need and want to do (and that our field most needs), then we need to draw on Lawrence's expertise.
Megan Tarquinio
State University of New York, USA
Dark Heart of Etruria: The Etruscan Essence of Lady Chatterley's Lover
The critical core of Lady Chatterley's Lover is infused with Etruscan elements that have previously evaded analysis. In this essay, pivotal scenes in the novel will be shown to parallel frescoes from the tombs of Tarquinia. Furthermore, a myriad of symbols will be unearthed as the novel is examined through the paradigm of Lawrence's Etruscan travels. Other topics include the scarlet aesthetic and Mellors as Lucumo.
Susan Reid
University of Northampton, UK
"His recoil from the world was complete": the angelic body of Lady Chatterley's Lover
This paper will explore the notion of an imaginative return to Eastwood in Lady Chatterley's Lover. However, rather than a retreat from the perceived extremism of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence's final novel would seem to represent the culmination of both his "recoil from the world" and his vision of the divine male; not a triumphant return to the body, perhaps, but its ultimate transcendence in the evocation of Oliver Mellors as a "pure masculine angel".
This paper will address the apparent conflict in Lawrence's last two novels between an avowed ethics of sexual difference and a sexless, disembodied ideal, similar in some respects to the "angel" which haunts Luce Irigaray's Ethics of Sexual Difference. Consideration of some key moments in The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover will highlight the inherent contradictions of divine manhood, the implications of becoming "more than a man". In situating the source of sexual difference outside the body, in the divine, does Lawrence heal the mind/body split or merely reinforce the transcendence of the mind? An increasing emphasis on sex, the body and the female divine during the drafting of these texts may suggest that Lawrence was aware of a possible imbalance, but to what extent are notions of both body and female nevertheless absorbed and/or excluded? Indeed, to what extent does the angelic male body represent a retreat from heterosexuality into a male angelic order? In summary, the key question for this paper is whether Lady Chatterley's Lover achieves "recoil" into a new world of sexual difference or merely a return to a male gendered transcendence of the mind.
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