Transcript D.H. Lawrence - Phillipsburg School District

D.H. LAWRENCE
1885-1930
Introduction
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A novelist, playwright, poet and artist
Themes of:
 love,

sex, and cultural decay
novels and poetry explore:
 social
ills created by the Industrial Revolution
 role of sexuality in human relationships.
 dialectic between man and woman
a
relentless struggle for possession and dominance
Biography
Part I:
Biography
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Born David Herbert Richards
Lawrence on September
11 ,1885
Eastwood a small mining
village near Nottingham.
Father worked in the mine, but
was charming and attracted a
woman of a higher class
Father eventually turned to
drink
the mother fought to get the
children good educations

Did not want the children to
follow in their father’s
footsteps
Education, Marriage…
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Lawrence eventually won a scholarship to Nottingham
School, and then Nottingham University
1908 began teaching in London
Eloped to Germany with Frieda von Richtofen.

Several factors:
his books’ being banned,
 Frieda’s German identity during the time of war
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Distant relative of German fighter-ace Manfred von Richtofen:
 aka “The Red Baron”
Brought public suspicion
Lawrence was accused of being a spy
Did not fight in WWI, but was still horrified by it

Saw western civilization bent on destruction
Post-War

Leaves England
 Begins
traveling the world:
 Italy
 Australia
 Mexico
 France
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Eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico
1930 dies in Vence, France
Novels and Controversy
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Several novels are banned by the censors:
 The
Rainbow
 Women in Love
 Lady Chatterley's Lover
 Charged
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 Not
(but acquitted) with obscenity
Explicit sex scenes
Using banned four-letter words
Inappropriate relations between a working class male and an
aristocratic female.
“fully” published in USA or UK until the 1960s
Philosophy
Part II:
“Priest of Love”
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sense of mission to address people’s deepest needs

His Letters:
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e. g. 1913, "I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the
want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people" (Letters I:
511).
“I do write because I want folk - English folk - to alter, and have more
sense” (Letters I: 544).
“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as
being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds.
But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always
true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.”
 “The blood also thinks, inside a man, darkly and
ponderously. . .”
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Mind vs. Blood
•
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“The brain is. . . the terminal instrument of the dynamic
consciousness. It transmutes what is a certain flux into a
certain fixed cypher. . . The mind is the instrument of
instruments; it is not a creative reality.” (Psychoanalysis
and the Unconscious p.247)
“For the blood is the substance of the soul, and of
the deepest consciousness. It is by blood that we
are: and it is by the heart and liver that we live and
move and have our being, are one and undivided.
(Apropos 111)
Western Civilization

dissatisfaction with Western civilization
 too intellectual and dehumanized;
 Promotes a new awareness of self and connection with
Nature.
 Industrialized
 Balance
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between Blood and Mental consciousness;
modern – “We always want a ‘conclusion,’ an end.”
Primitive –having mythical and symbolic
consciousness.
“The odour of chrysanthemums”
Part III
“The Odour of Chrysanthemums”
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Themes:
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passion and self-discovery
Atypical of Modernist works:
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Lawrence explores elemental emotions and the human imperfections that keep people
from understanding one another.
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The self-centered and alienating nature of many human relationships;
The “otherness “of people:
 seeing others as they are and letting them be who they are; the reaffirmation of life.
Summary:
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Elizabeth Bates:
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the wife of a mine worker
grows more and more angry when her husband does not return home from work
later, viewing his dead body, she reflects on a marriage in which neither knew the
other.
Elizabeth: Characterization
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“Her face was calm and set, her mouth was closed with
disillusionment”
many of her expressions are bitter (“she laughed bitterly”).
Examine the moment when Elizabeth breaks off a few of the
chrysanthemums and holds them “against her face”
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What does this gesture tell us?
why does she later disparage the flowers when her daughter
notices them in her apron pocket?
What do they remind her of?
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“the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown
chrysanthemums in his buttonhole”
Elizabeth’s Reaction
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confronts her husband’s dead body
different emotions and responses she displays:
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Elizabeth is being pulled apart by various feelings, but she has little to say:
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On the surface, Elizabeth seems harsh and uncaring
Worried that she is not acting in the proper way: “strove to weep and behave as her
mother-in-law expected. But she could not, she was silenced”.
In contrast to her mother-in-law who has plenty to say:
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she attempts to “get some connection,”
then later “shudders”
she experiences “fear and shame,” and at the same time, “grief and pity”.
“He went peaceful, Lizzie—peaceful as sleep. . . . Ay—he must ha’ made his peace”.
cries for her son and talks about how much she loved him.
What is Lawrence saying here about marriage, honesty, and respect for
differences?
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How can people best show love for others?
to what extent is Elizabeth to blame for the rift between herself and her husband?
Elizabeth’s disconnection with Human
Relationships
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Elizabeth vs. her father
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Father approaches in a “cheery, hearty fashion,”
met with a “brief censure”
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jumps to the (wrong) conclusion that her young son, John, is up to no good, and that he is
“sulky” and “taciturn” with her.
Elizabeth vs. her husband’s co-worker
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She never would go into “Prince of Wales”, although she knew her husband might be
there. (2322)
relationship to her children and others:
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She didn’t expect her father’s care and help. (2318)
Elizabeth vs. her husband
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Elizabeth is disturbed—perhaps rightfully so—that he is marrying so soon after the death of her
mother.
She “wouldn’t think of brothering” Mr. Rigley to look for husband. (2323)
Elizabeth vs. Herself:
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Only ponders her own identity and the failure of her marriage after her husband’s death
Elizabeth’s Isolation/Failure of the
Marriage
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dissatisfied with her marriage.
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She kept judging her husband’s “indifference” to all but himself as a drunkard
since their wedding ceremony.
“what a fool I’ve been, what a fool! And this is what I came here for, to this
dirty hole, rats and all, for him to slink past his very door.”
In life, Elizabeth and her husband never tried to comprehend each other:
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“what a separate stranger he was to her….Each time he had taken her, they
had been two isolated beings, far apart as now”
“ she had never seen him, he had never seen her, they had met in the
dark….Whereas he was apart all the while, living as she never lived, feeling as
she never felt.”
“She had denied him what he was-… And this had been her life, and his life.”
“She was a mother- but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife.…how
awful he must have felt it to be a husband.”
The Failure of the Marriage
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The children were the only link:
 did
not truly unite them:
 “they
are my business”, as she said. At last, only the
children belonged to life,
 “this dead man had nothing to do with them.
 He and she were only channels through which life had
flowed to issue in the children.“
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Finality
 “She
saw this episode of her life closed. They had
denied each other in life.”