D.H.Lawrence's view of men and women relationship in a selection of his novels.

D.H.Lawrence's view of men and women relationship in a selection of his novels. By Sally Atef

"The great living experience for every man is his adventure into the woman. The man embraces in the woman all that is not himself, and from that one resultant, from that embrace, comes every new action."D.H.Lawrence.

 Figure 1: D.H.Lawrence's women in love

Who is D.H.Lawrence? How was the English novel in his age? Who was it influenced by? What was the relationship between his literature and that of Dorothy Richardson? How was he influenced by the relationship between man and woman in his writings?

D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930):

    David Herbert Lawrence was an English poet, playwright, novelist and literary critic. He was born in Eastwood Nottinghamshire in England. His father was a coal miner and his mother was a teacher in a public school. David was the fourth child of his parents and his childhood was a series of sufferings. There were always family disputes between his mother and his drunkard father. David's health was affected by the polluted environment in his town because of the coal mine in it. 

  Figure2: D.H.Lawrence

      He was educated in Beau Vale Board School for about seven years. He was a very brilliant student as his mother firmed the love of reading in his soul. Then he was given a scholarship to study at Nottingham high school when he was twelve. In 1901 he worked as a factory clerk then as a student teacher at the British School in London where he met Jessie Chambers who became his close friend and encouraged him to write his first poetry. After getting his teaching certificate, he became a teacher in an elementary school in London.

      In 1910, his mother developed cancer so he wrote his famous novel "Sons and Lovers"(1913) as an expression of his love to her. In 1911, he stopped teaching as he had a sever case of pneumonia. Despite his illness, he continued writing his poems and essays. On 2^nd March 1930 , he died after a long suffering with illness in Vence , France aged 44 years old.

       D.H.Lawrence left a great literary heritage including poems, novels, critical essays, short stories and paintings. Lawrence wrote about 800 poems. His famous pomes are: "Dream old" and "Dreams Nascent" in 1904 which were his first poems and classified him as a Georgian poet. Another famous poems by Lawrence are: "The End"," In a Boat"," A Love Song"," Silence" and" A Winter's Tale"

      D.H.Lawrence also wrote significant novels such as: "Sons and lovers"(1913),"The Rainbow" (1915), "women in love" (1920) and "St.Mawr "(1925). He also wrote many critical essays as:"Studies in Classic American Literature" (1923).Of his most well known short stories one can mention: "The Fox" (1922), "The ladybird" (1922) ,"The Captain's Doll" (1923) and "The Princess" (1924).

The 20th century novel and the characters and factors that affected it:

      The 20^th century witnessed many changes in the style of writing. One of these changes is what is called interior monologue which was first introduced by May Sinclair in 1918 in an essay on Dorothy Richardson’s attempt to eliminate ‘the wise all-knowing author’ from her novel sequence" Pilgrimage"( Andrew Sanders ,1994). Then it was adapted by the Irish novelist James Joyce(1882-1941) in his famous novel "Ulysses" (1922).In this style of writing the reader can not find a plot nor a clear theme but (s)he can wander inside the mind of the character and know its feelings and thoughts. In" Finnegan's Wake" (1939), Joyce used new type of language and new forms of the words. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was also influenced by this style of writing in his novel"Mrs. Dalloway "(1925) which expresses the sufferings of the heroine Mrs. Dalloway who is preparing for a party that night and wondering in streets and remembers her last life when she was young." To the lighthouse" (1927) begins by presenting a family in Scotland on holiday in September 1910 and the son wants very much to go by boat to the lighthouse but the father refuses and the novel ends with the family in the same house ten years later. (Robert, Gwyneth&G.C Thornely, 1954).   

  Figure3: Ulysses

       William Golding (1911-1983) he appeared as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists.his writings differ from those of Yeats, Jones, or Orwell he did not present ancient myths but he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes.( Sanders ,1994:595-596).

        Another change was the appearance of many women writers such as Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Doris Lessing (1919), Margaret Drabble (1939) and Sylvia Browne (1936). Those novelists wrote about their lives and problems.

       Science fiction novels were also one of these changes which can be defined as stories based on developments in science or technology either existing developments or fictional developments of the future (Robert, Gwyneth&G.C Thornely, 1954 : 162).

       It is very important to mention here that there were many factors to produce these changes such as : the world war I(1914-1918) , the world war II (1939-1945) and dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ,Japan in 1945 , The Cold War (1947-1991) and the collapse of colonialism. 

Figure4: a crying Japanese child after dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki      

       There were also some thinkers whose thoughts accelerated these changes as: Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his student Jung (1875-1961) and Max Planck (1858-1947).

The intellectual relationship between his literature and that of Dorothy Richardson:

     According to Richardson (1873-1957) the interior monologue is a narrowly clumsy misnomer and a novel should move away from Romance to realism. Her "Pilgrimage" was a sequence of twelve novels published between 1915 and 1938 and she recommended that the reader should read it as a whole unit. It is noteworthy that her sentences did have neither strict syntax nor formal reference to an exterior world they are dissolved and form themselves into new and ambiguous shapes. (Sanders ,1994:519).  

  Figure5: Dorothy Richardson

         D.H.Lawrence saw that the serious novel should get itself out of its consciousness and should not use abstractions. He considered the 20^th century novel ,in his essay Morality and the Novel, as' the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered’ and said that if a novel expressed true relationships , it was a moral work. (Sanders ,1994:519-520).

        Lawrence saw that the writer's goal is to show how the individual self view is influenced by conventions of language, family and religion and to express how the relationships between people change constantly.

The relationship between man and woman in D.H.Lawrence's novels:

"I shall always be a priest of love." D.H.Lawrence.

        D.H.Lawrence seems to show women as equivalent to nature. At the first sight he presents what it seems to be a perfect model of the couple in which both partners give body and soul at the first sight. He appears as rejecting of modern women.His main heroines as: Gudrun, Ursula, Miriam and Teresa are independent women rejected by the others unless they abandon their ideas and adapt the hero's values. (Plain&sellers2007).

        In "Sons and lovers"(1913), he writes about his relationship between him and his mother. The hero, Paul Morel lives near Nottingham which was his town. The main theme of the novel is Paul's relationship with his mother. He loves her and needs her to help him at the same time he should be independent to be a true man. Here Lawrence shows how daily life of his characters influences them as Paul's father's job as a miner affects his life and Miriam's is influenced by her life in a farm. (Robert, Gwyneth&G.C Thornely, 1954 :147).  

  Figure6: Sons and lovers

       In "The Rainbow" (1915), he shows that relationship between man and woman is growing and changing through time. It is about three couples that represent three generations: Lydia and Tom, Anna, Lydia's daughter, and Will and Ursula and her lover Anton. The first couple Lydia and Tom love and understand each other and Lawrence says about that couple "there was an inner reality, logic of soul which connected her with him". The second couple is Anna, Lydia's daughter, and Will, Tom's nephew, they have passion for each other but their "souls remain separated" as Lawrence said. The third couple is Ursula and her lover Anton. Each tries to force their own wishes on the other.    

        "Women in love" (1920) shows two couples the women are sisters and the men are close friends. Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. The four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women.