D. H. Lawrence: Desire and Narrative

Abstract

This exploration of D. H. Lawrence's longer fiction marks a long overdue effort to bring the writing of a 20th-century British into a postmodern context. Earl Ingersoll's approach moves beyond the traditional binary of psychoanalysis and literature in which a single theoretical approach like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's is applied to the fiction of a writer like Lawrence. Ingersoll instead turns to theorists who have been influenced by Lacan - Peter Brooks, Jane Gallop, and Barbara Johnson, among others - to construct a framework for the reading of desire in these narratives by Lawrence. Individual chapters focus on four Lawrence novels - Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley's Lover - along with commentary on Lawrence's first novel. The White Peacock. Unlike earlier discussions of these novels as narratives about desire, Ingersoll's work examines how desire energizes the texts as narratives - whether it is the desire of narrative for its ending in The Rainbow or the implication of the reader in gazing at the male body in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Then, in a postmodern turn of its own, the book includes a chapter on Lawrence's problematic posthumous novel, Mr Noon, forcing readers to reconsider what terms like major novel and author mean. Because biographical criticism has dominated writing on Lawrence, some readers may be surprised by Ingersoll's study since it virtually ignores the author.