David Herbert Lawrence

• One of the most exceptional figures

• Described as a rebel (trends, ideologies)

• Victorianism for him – a certain mentality, way of life

• He criticized

  • Hypocrisy, taboos, all kinds of inhibitions

  • Social convenances (the important thing was to fit to them)

  • Reduction of personality

  • Limited freedom of the intellectual

• Ignoring the body was what he didn’t like

• Father – coal miner, Northern England, his mother was a teacher

• He criticized the “Bloomsbury Group” – England not only mad of people from Oxford, people having parties etc

• Much more wealth to the human being than social convenances, intellect itself, but also body desire, eroticism

• He heard Freud’s theories, they expressed what he himself thought

• His favourable opinion of Freud changed – he wrote polemical essays to Freud’s works

• He criticized Freud for reduction of complexity of human life to only desires, Freud oversimplified the nature of human mind

• The life of people – intellectual development, desires, sexual desires

• He was also a painter (exhibitions)

• Only literature can show complexity of human life/being, no limitations

• State of the civilization and society

• Industrialization, machines, factories, production and consumption – he believed that it was dangerous, working in a factory for 8 hours like alienation

• Loss of humanity

• People are like machines

• Dangerous for personal mentality

• The rich, factory owners – they start thinking about people in the categories of loss & profit

• Portrayal of Lawrence – “Point Counterpoint”

• Lawrence’s characters represent\support his point of view, the other ones are criticized

• He travelled a lot (Mexico, Australia

• Novel, short stories, dramas, travel books

  • “Sons & Lovers” 1913

    • 1^st important novel

    • Key to his autobiography

    • Bildungsroman + Kunstlerroman

    • Young man growing to be a painter

    • Stadium of relationship between son & mother, without simplification and sensualisation

    • The mother loves her sons but somehow crashes them, feeling of hate, unpleasant things

    • Growing as a complicated process

  • “The Rainbow” & “Women in Love”

    • Family sage

    • 1^st generation – the most successful

  • “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” 1928

    • The most controversial novel, scandalous, pornographic content, officially banned in England

    • finally published in 1963 because of censorship

    • nowadays conventional, conservative, traditional

    • novel of ideas

    • Lady Chatterley’s maries a man who gets paralyzed during 1 WW, she takes a lover

    • Some love scenes

    • They discuss ideology, society, politics

    • Feminists do not like it – women should be passive, conservative

    • Class system – big mistake of British society

    • Healing society of social and sexual barriers

• His novels started to by more like sermons at the end of his life, he became more pathetic

• He was a spontaneous writer, if sth was good he made no corrections like J.Joyce

• He had no distance to his characters, structures etc

• The English didn’t develop expressionist literature, Lawrence was an exception