D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Sunday Session H

Keith Sagar

D H Lawrence Research Institute, UK

'Two Risen Lords: A Source for The Escaped Cock'

'Those of us who have written on the genesis of The Escaped Cock have assumed that when we have discussed Lawrence's long and growing concern with resurrection, and the impact of his visit to the Etruscan tombs, we have said all that needs to be said. We were wrong.'

Theresa Mae Thompson

Valdosta State University, USA

Contingent Go(o)dness: Moral Philosophy in D. H. Lawrence's St. Mawr and The Escaped Cock

Lawrence wrote St. Mawr (1925) and The Escaped Cock (published as The Man Who Died in 1929) during the same general time frame as he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover. Like Lady Chatterley's Lover, these works explore the individual's struggle to inhabit an authentic set of moral principles in an essentially (for Lawrence) immoral world. Both St. Mawr and The Escaped Cock use the motifs of death and resurrection to convey the contingent nature of moral goodness if, a priori, we can agree that moral goodness is demonstrated by the choices we make. Iris Murdoch wrote, in 1967, that "[a] moral philosophy should be inhabited." Her essays on the problem of defining moral action-written in the political climate preceding and following the British Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and Great Britain's 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover-offer a useful gloss for explicating the contingency of the moral philosophy that shapes the moral selves of Lou, in St. Mawr and The Priestess of Isis, in The Escaped Cock. Murdoch's perspective emphasizes how social and cultural contexts restrict one's ability to develop or inhabit any authentic moral self. The contingency of making authentic moral choices, and therefore truly inhabiting a moral self, resonates in the death and resurrection motifs of St.Mawr and in The Escaped Cock.

John Baker

University of Westminster, UK

Teaching Lawrence: A Tutor's Perspective

Between January and March 2007, I taught a course entitled 'D. H. Lawrence: Sex, Politics and Society', which I had designed myself, to a class of third year undergraduates at the University of Westminster.

Each year at Westminster a tutor is asked to design and deliver a third year course on a topic of their own choice, which is known as the 'Special Author/Topic' module, and I was asked to do this in the 2006-7 academic year. This talk will focus on this experience and what it taught me about teaching Lawrence at university level.

The twelve-week course covered four of Lawrence's major novels – Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover – one of his short novels, St Mawr, several short stories, some poetry and a play, The Daughter-In-Law. Assessment took the form of one essay and an exam, both equally weighted. The talk will cover a range of pedagogical issues connected with Lawrence, including the vexed questions of approaching Lawrence's 'sexism' and 'racism' in class, the relevance of Lawrence's work to the contemporary reader, the usefulness (or otherwise) of biography to the student, and the use of criticism. It will also focus on some problems I encountered and my solutions to them, as well as the students' feelings about their own experience, as expressed through anonymous class monitoring. I also plan to make reference to the students' performance in assessment, once details become available.

I hope that this discussion of my experiences will be of interest to others who either teach Lawrence at undergraduate level or are considering doing so at some time in the future.

Elizabeth Mathias

St John's University Jamaica, N.Y.

Teaching Lawrence in Sicily: An Ethnographic Laboratory

D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived at "Fontana Vecchia" in Taormina, the seaside town in eastern Sicily , for over two years. The couple visited Palermo and Lawrence gave detailed descriptions of both areas in his travel account, Sea and Sardinia (1921). The author attended the marionette theatre and ended his travel account with a striking description of Sicilian folk theater.

Teaching a one month long summer course, "Sicilian Culture" for American college students in Messina Sicily in June, 2004 gave me the opportunity to use Sea and Sardinia as the primary textbook for my class of eighteen women. The town spaces of Messina, Taormina and Palermo served as our open air classroom and ethnographic laboratory. The class was a great success. Students responded well to the opportunity for such freedom, as they retraced the steps of an esteemed author, seeing places and people through his eyes, comparing his and their own experience and writing about it all in their field notebooks. According to the students the class had the exciting atmosphere of a "treasure hunt." Each student read Sea and Sardinia, then, using the Sicilian sections of the work as the guide, kept a detailed personal field diary in a spiral notebook. Each recorded Lawrence's observations about places, people and things, and each wrote about her own observations, taking account of how things had changed since l921. Some students sketched to illustrate their experiences. Most reported Lawrence's feelings, spoke of their own feelings and sometimes argued with Lawrence. I collected the field notebooks each Monday, evaluated them and wrote suggestions about how to improve the work,. I tried to return the notebooks to the students the next day. Among the places each student re-visited were the cliff descent to the Taormina railroad station, the town squares, and local industries active in Lawrence's day, the lime pits and kilns, and the lemon processing factory. In Palermo students attended a performance of the Marionette theater at the International Museum of Marionettes, Antonio Pasqualino. Luckily the show was similar to that described by Lawrence. It enacted an episode from "Orlando Furioso" with its clashing puppet knights ferociously battling the Moors.

Bringing Lawrence's work alive in the students world in this ethnographic way could be done by any teacher and it could add another vital dimension to teaching his work. A professor would not necessarily need to take the class to the locations described by Lawrence. Tools such as videotapes, photographs, or commercial films could be used.

Akane Ide

Japan

After Familiar Gods: D. H. Lawrence, an Englishman at Home; Focusing on the Dance in Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lawrence based his description of most of the dances in his works on his own experiences in other countries. In his essay "New Mexico", he says that New Mexico had changed him forever. It indicates that his stay in America was a major turning point in his life. During his stay in New Mexico, he started up a correspondence with Rolf Gardiner, and his concern over English folk dance had risen noticeably. His relationship with Gardiner must be one of the cues for Lawrence to return to cultural origin. He was said to have felt a deep aversion for England, however, he seemed not to lose Englishness in himself. As an example, in his essay "Indians and an Englishman", it appears that he keeps an identity as an Englishman. This paper is going to examine Lawrence's patriotic notion through the dance in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Moreover, his paintings that depict naked bodies seem to be relevant to Lady Chatterley's Lover. Dance Sketch (1928) and some other paintings show "dance". The function and significance of the dance in Lady Chatterley's Lover is also going to be studied by including the consideration to those paintings.

Julika Griem

Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany

Geography and Anatomy in Lady Chatterley's Lover

In recent research, D.H. Lawrence's notorious inconsistency has been reconsidered as an effect of a restlessly travelling spatial imagination, linking the rooted and the exiled, the English and the cosmopolitan Lawrence. My paper will pursue this exploration of the author's imaginary geographies in three texts driven by a quest for "the third rare place where a man might meet a woman" ('The Man Who Loved Islands'). In a first step the latter story as well as "The Woman Who Rode Away" will be examined as transgressive journeys through clearly gendered spaces and places: Staging a set of British isles and the American West as topographical backgrounds to act out the topological archetypes of the circle and the line (S. Michelucci), Lawrence in the end subjects both his protagonists to a chronotope offering entropic annihilation instead of exoticist revitalization. In contrast to this dystopian outlook, Lady Chatterley's Lover at a first glance seems to be promising a more utopian spatial fantasy. Here, the leitmotif of the snow is replaced by the image of the flame, and the hut in the woods grants at least a temporary shelter to the Lady riding away to meet a man with a penchant to hide in insular settings. The gamekeeper's hut, however, offers no dialectic closure but remains a problematic heterotopia. In his last novel Lawrence returns to a third place which proves to be a slippery site oscillating between geography and anatomy, between two different narrative modes: Due to the novel's narrative economy of secrecy Lawrence manages to suggest a language revealing his heroine while saving her lover from being ravished by the power of words.

Nick Thomas

University of Nottingham, UK

Servants and Masters: The Lady Chatterley Trial and the 1960s

The Lady Chatterley's Lover Obscenity Trial of 1960 was a cause celebre that not only tested the new Obscenity Act (1959) but which has been identified as one of the key moments of 1960s liberalisation. The decision by Penguin's owner, Allen Lane, to publish the previously banned text by D H Lawrence provoked intense discussion on issues of obscenity, the motivations for previous decisions to ban various titles, and the paternalistic attitudes to censorship exposed by the Prosecution's case. Yet the historiographical view of this trial, and particularly its meaning and impact, is curiously contradictory: on the one hand it is seen (by Marwick, for instance) as exemplifying a move away from Victorian values that had been a long-term feature of social change which reached its zenith in the 1960s, but on the other hand the decision to allow the publication of the book has been identified (by, among others, Allen Lane's biographer, Jeremy Lewis) as encouraging or even creating social change, especially attitudes to sex. Perhaps even more surprisingly, strikingly little research has been conducted into the validity of these positions. This paper will explore the problems posed by these seemingly irreconcilable positions and will suggest some possible solutions for discussion.