D.H. Lawrence is a prophet and his work is at once a
protest and a quest. It is a protest against a world dominated by reason and industry (theme
of industrialism) and an attempt to create a new world in which the basic meaning of
life would be realized. Lawrence believed that man must leave that section of his life
which is lit by the light of his intellect and that he must enter a deeper, darker zone
where he would feel the pulsions of the blood. This explains the importance he attached to
mature sexual relationships (theme of sex). What such a relationship is for him, is
extremely difficult to define in a few words not only because of its complexity but also
because of Lawrence's ambivalent attitude towards it. On the one hand he yearned after
"a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings,
each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one
force, like two angels or two demons. He wanted so much to be free, not under the
compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by insatisfied desire" (Women
in Love, ch.16 about Birkin). But on the other hand he seems to have feared and, if
only vaguely, to have believed at some moments that a relation with a man would be more
satisfactory (latent theme of homosexuality). Moreover, it is often difficult to make out
whether his rejection of life as it is lived now is not a rejection of life tout court;
there are certain passages in his work where one cannot get rid of the impression that he
really hates mankind.
(Prof. H. Servotte, English Literature in the Twentieth Century,
Survey and Anthology, 1969, I. pp. 24-30)
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