Upending the Telescope: D.H. Lawrence as Ecocritic and Birdwatcher

Abstract

Though he may have been wary of -ism labels, in this paper I would like to assess to what extent Lawrence qualifies as an ecocritic and how his activity as a literary critic affected his own writing. Indeed, his critical output reveals that his primary concern was the quality of pulsing life immanent in a work, what he called the moral vision in a novel, rather than aesthetics. I will focus, though not exclusively, on Studies in Classic American Literature which he revised between 1919 and 1922 while writing the novel Kangaroo and the poem “The Humming-bird” included in Birds, Beast and Flowers. Echoing his assessment of Americans’ connections with their environment as depicted in classical works, Lawrence remarked about Australia in a letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen “but the land has a ‘fourth dimension,’ and the white people swim like shadows over the surface of it” (Letters IV 238). In the novel Kangaroo, an epiphany in the Australian bush enables Lawrence’s alter-ego, Somers, to discard his ethnocentric views, the so-called “Babel” inherited from the country’s colonial past. By studying Lawrence’s keen observations of birds in particular, I hope to show how ecological awareness brings about a shift in language so that the “Babel” may be transcended in order to achieve “something beyond,” i.e., a cosmic ideal.