THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Lawrence’s first fictions are less oracular. They are rooted both in what he later saw as the provisionality of his
own early sexual experience and in his East Midlands working-class background. He was amongst the first English
novelists to have profited from the effects of the late-Victorian Education Acts which enforced the provision of free
elementary education for the poor; he was amongst the last to have benefited from a provincial self helping, hymnsinging,
richly Bible-centred Chapel-culture. Throughout his work, too, the mechanical rhythms, the monotonies, and
the deprivations (both economic and spiritual) of industrial England are contrasted with vivid evocations of a working
countryside that survives, if scarcely competes, with its machine-scarred urban counterpart. For Lawrence, the direct
inheritor of Romantic prejudices against machines, the rural admonishes the industrial much as the instinctual takes
precedence over the intellectual. In the semi-autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913) the contrasts around which the
novel is built are not simply those of ill-matched parents, of clinging mothers and releasing lovers, but also those of
town and country, mining and farming, working and walking. At the opening of The Rainbow (1915) the Brangwen
family farm, divided from the sprawling mining village by a canal, seems to be on ‘the safe side of civilization’ and
the male members of the family are mystically linked by a ‘blood-intimacy’ to the fertility of the soil they till and to
that of the animals they tend. The controlling images and the reiterated metaphors of both The Rainbow and of its
successor, Women in Love (1920), stress a distinction between nature and anti-nature, between freedom and control,
between instinct and will. In Women in Love Gerald Crich, the son of a colliery owner and the efficient masterer both
of his men and of animal resistance, conceives of a world in which ‘the will of man was the determining factor’,
where ‘Man was the arch-god of earth’ with a will that was ‘the absolute, the only absolute’. As his fiction develops
Lawrence increasingly associates true human freedom with the untamed and often unacknowledged might of nature
rather than with a repressive will. Those who are seen to ‘do the dirty on life’ by denying their unconscious, natural or
sexual energies bring about personal or symbolic disasters. Ursula Brangwen confronting apocalyptic horses at the
end of The Rainbow or Rupert Birkin walking naked through the long grass at Breadalby in Women in Love are
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enriched, intense, ecstatic, and resurrected. By contrast, Gerald Crich wills his unbending life to an end in an Alpine
snowdrift and a flood fortuitously purges the bitter and stuffy hypocrisies of the world of The Virgin and the Gipsy
(1926).
The central achievements of Lawrence’s career as a novelist, The Rainbow and Women in Love, reflect and echo
what are assumed to be natural or psychical rhythms and currents. Certain passages in both novels (such as in the
pressurized description of Lincoln Cathedral in the former or the car journey in the chapter called ‘Excurse’ in the
latter) may burst unwelcomely into adjectival over-ripeness or may simply provoke derision, but the overall effect of
the two novels is richly episodic, carefully wrought, and cumulative. The Rainbow deals with the evolving perceptions
of three generations of a single family. Its ‘sequel’ Women in Love, which first outgrew then grew out of the originally
arched scheme for a single novel, spans a far more contained period of time. In it Lawrence abandoned regular
narrative linearity and shaped his fiction instead around certain charged, symbolic, even epiphanic incidents. The
novel’s central characters move easily through the stratified English society of the early years of the twentieth century,
encountering industrial workers and industrial magnates, the inhabitants of arty-crafty cottages and cultured country
mansions, the clienteles of effete London cafes, Southwell tea-shops, and Swiss skiing hostels. Women in Love opens
with an unanswered question about marriage and ends with an unanswerable speculation about relationships beyond
both the marital and the narrowly heterosexual. It explores a world which is fragmenting from a lack of coherence,
but it neither looks nostalgically back to a lost pre-industrial ‘blood-intimacy’ nor confidently forward to a new social
order. In chapter 26 (‘A Chair’) Birkin and Ursula briefly contemplate the prospect of an earth made safe for popular
democracy and inherited by ‘the meek’ but they also recognize that it will not be their place. ‘Then what are we going
to do?’ Ursula asks, ‘We’re not like them — are we? We’re not the meek?’ ‘We’ve got to live in the chinks they leave
us’, Birkin replies.
When, in his novels of the later 1920s, Lawrence begins to ground his often ill-defined ideas of human liberation
in a discourse which is both political and psycho-sexual, his writing is both more awkward and more problematical.
Birkin’s ‘chinks’ are prised open to provide an adequate Lebensraum for a newly enlightened and emboldened elite.
Both Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926) explore a revitalized social ethic beyond the kind of socialism
which Lawrence sees as offering a materialistic and flabby democracy to the ‘meek’. Neither book has an English
setting and neither has much time for defunct English niceties or socialistic panaceas. Kangaroo flirtatiously
contemplates the rise and the failure of an Australian proto-fascism based on male-bonding; The Plumed Serpent, set
amidst the revolutionary fluidity of Mexico, dwells on the regenerative and redemptive potentiality of an Aztec bloodcult
of dark gods and phallic power. Both novels are symptomatic of Lawrence’s rejection of his roots and of his
restless search for new landscapes and new
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