D. H. Lawrence: A Comment

Abstract

Kenneth Asher, in his stimulating article ‘D. H. Lawrence and the Ethical Life’ (CQ 40/2), does his best to persuade us that Lawrence is a thinker we should take seriously, but it is, I think, against his better judgement: he even refers to the ‘silliness’ of parts of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Of course, Lawrence's ideas are of interest as they are his, but Jessie Chambers was, I think, right when she said that ‘All his theorising had its origin in his personal dilemmas’, and found it boring. Of course, as Asher maintains, his theories do have relevance to his fiction, but even so, it is only a limited relevance and, indeed, may obscure appreciation of what Lawrence is actually doing, as much of his fiction is more traditional than his theories might lead us to expect. As a novel there is nothing particularly innovatory about Lady Chatterley's Lover. Lawrence's completely positive view of Lady Chatterley's secret affair with her husband's gamekeeper and the explicitness of his descriptions of their genital relations represent a difference from the traditional valuation of such goings on and traditional reticence about what specifically went on, but that in itself is not a difference in method.