Lawrence, D. H.

1885–1930

British Novelist and Poet

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence ranks as one of the great modernist authors and a key influence on the “lost generation” of American writers of the early twentieth century. His provocative novels, questioning Victorian cultural assumptions prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic, heralded the death of the protective and powerful Victorian father figure and the appearance of a more ambiguous post–Victorian picture of masculinity and male sexuality.

Born in Nottinghamshire, England, Lawrence grew up amid the strife of his parents' unhappy marriage, and the tensions between his miner father's working-class sensibilities and his mother's more genteel background dramatically shaped his portrayals of gender. Lawrence depicts this gendered conflict in the autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1913). Protagonist Paul Morel's father symbolizes sensuality and passion (in opposition to dominant Victorian constructions of middle-class manhood emphasizing self-control and emotional reserve), whereas his controlling mother and obsessively chaste girlfriend Miriam represent social ambition and religious fervor. Paul struggles, and ultimately fails, to develop a masculine identity that balances these competing elements. Lawrence's linked novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), which focus on gender tensions and domestic relationships in the Brangwen family, continue to use battles between strong-willed women and weak men to explore the problem of combining strength and emotional expression into a modernized model of manhood.

Lawrence's representations of demanding women, often portrayed as vampire-like, have spurred psychoanalytic readings of his life and fiction. Drawing on Freudian concepts of the Oedipus complex, these analyses focus on the inability of Lawrence and his fictional characters to separate themselves from strong mother figures and achieve an independent masculinity. His consistent portrayal of men who are unable to achieve healthy relationships with women, some scholars suggest, may also point to latent homosexual or homoerotic tendencies.

Lawrence's treatment of gender was also the product of its historical context. Most of his novels were written during and after World War I, which inaugurated changes in gender roles in both the United States and Britain. As men went off to war, women filled their places in offices and factories on the home front. This shift, occurring alongside agitation for women's suffrage, heralded a change in power structures on both sides of the Atlantic. Thus, Lawrence's work reflects not only personal anxieties, but also broader male concerns about a loss of social, political, and sexual power—and the consequences of this loss on definitions of masculinity. Lawrence's articulation of this social and sexual alienation influenced the work of the lost generation, a group of expatriate writers—including the Americans Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—whose novels, like Lawrence's, often involve a protagonist searching for a stable masculine identity in the chaotic modern world.

Only in his later works does Lawrence come close to resolving the conundrum of masculinity, emotion, and power. In Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Constance Chatterley [Page 267]rejects her invalid husband and finds fulfillment with the groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors. Significantly titled Tenderness in its draft form, this controversial novel replaces the overbearing female of Lawrence's earlier works with a strong but nurturing male figure capable of a relationship that is both sexual and emotional.

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