D.H. Lawrence and the Late-Victorian conception of an English Home

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As Lawrence travelled the world, moving ever further away from England, his home arrangements and their representation in his writing changed, from the typical farm or collier’s home to the Australian bungalow or Mexican villa. Being childless and a wandering writer, his role and place as a man in the household were necessarily unconventional by nineteenth and early-twentieth century standards. Predictably, his stories reflect such unconventional domesticity and, in my study of Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Plumed Serpent, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Fox, principally, I shall be examining the tensions between Lawrence’s perpetuation of the late-Victorian conception of home as a place of safety and comfort – especially when the English home is recreated abroad – and his rejection of the domestic ideal. Several of Lawrence’s female protagonists express a desire for a fixed, stable home, while male protagonists such as Aaron Sisson, Rupert Birkin and Richard Somers argue against repressive domesticity. This would seem to indicate that, in spite of the foreign settings and unusual marriages, Lawrence’s fiction endorses the sexual division of labour and gendered roles prescribed by authoritative Victorian texts, such as Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. Lawrence did replicate Victorian models of housekeeping and child-rearing, as well as the division of the home in male and female spheres, with distinct territories and boundaries. This being said, he also at times challenged those rigid, gendered spaces and roles, by imagining domestically inclined husbands and independence-seeking wives.