Patrick White and D. H. Lawrence: Sexuality and the Wilderness in a "Fringe of Leaves" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover"

Abstract

Most reviewers and critics of A Fringe of Leaves have noted that the novel possesses a number of analogues with other literary works. The most fundamental, of course, is its historical parallel with the story of Eliza Frazer; other important analogues that have been identified include the story of Tristram and Isolde, Virgil's Eclogues, and Ibsen's last plays.1' This paper explores another analogue of A Fringe of Leaves, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Although the parallel with Lawrence's novel is not announced and may not even be intended, comparison of the two works remains illuminating. Separated by time-the almost fifty years between A Fringe of Leaves and Lady Chatterley's Lover-and location-the thousands of miles between England and Australia-these novels explore the most basic questions about human nature. Both posit a fundamentally dialectical vision of existence: the constant shift and play between those opposite poles of life-spiritual and sensual, mind and body, human and animal. Both novels symbolize that dialectic through a further contrast between civilization and the wilderness. And both novels examine the meaning of that dialectical vision through remarkably similar plots and narrative structure, each one centering on a very complex woman who must choose between two men and, by implication, two ways of life. Through the choices of these women, White and Lawrence pose very similar questions about what it means to be human.