Life before Frieda

Abstract

This chapter begins by describing the deep impression made on Lawrence by Schopenhauer’s essay on `The Metaphysics of Love’, with its reduction of all love to a sexual, or more precisely reproductive instinct. When Lawrence discussed this essay with Jessie Chambers, it helped him recognise that he was less sexually attracted to her than to her brother Alan (see The White Peacock). Lawrence’s growing awareness of his bi-sexuality did not prevent him from deciding that he wanted to write about sex in more detail than previous English novelists, and from feeling increasingly frustrated, therefore, by his complete lack of personal experience. This build-up of sexual frustration became one of his major early subjects, especially as two of the more familiar methods of relief — masturbation and prostitution — were closed off to him. In desperation, he turned back to Jessie and cruelly recorded the failure of what was his first experience of sexual intercourse in the chapter of Sons and Lovers unfairly entitled `The Test on Miriam’. It was his almost immediately subsequent liaison with a dissatisfied married woman from his home town which helped him to describe his protagonist’s relations with Clare Dawes in that novel.