Writing against the family: gender in Lawrence and Joyce

Abstract

This first feminist book-length comparison of D. H. Lawrence James Joyce offers striking new readings of a number of the novelists most important works, including Lawrence s Who Died and Joyce s Finnegans Wake.Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson argues that a feminist reader must necessarily read against theories of psychoanalysis to examine the assumptions about gender embedded within family relations psychologies of gender found in the two authors works. She challenges the belief that Lawrence Joyce are opposites, inhabiting contrary modernist camps; instead they are on a continuum, both engaged in a reimagination of gender relations.Lewiecki-Wilson demonstrates that both Lawrence Joyce write against a background of family material using family plots family settings. While previous discussions of family relations in literature have not questioned assumptions about the family about sex roles within it, Lewiecki-Wilson submits the systems of meaning by gender is construed to a feminist analysis. She reexamines Lawrence Joyce from the point of view of feminist psychoanalysis, which, she argues, is not a set of beliefs or a single theory but a feminist practice that analyzes how systems of meaning construe gender produce a psychology of gender.Lewiecki-Wilson argues against a theory of representation based on gender, however, concluding that Lawrence s Joyce s texts, in different ways, test the idea of a female aesthetic. She analyzes Lawrence s portrait of family relations in Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love and compares Joyce s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with Lawrence s autobiographical text. She then shows that Portrait begins a deconstruction of systems of meaning that continues increases in Joyce s later work, including Ulysses.Lewiecki-Wilson concludes by showing that Lawrence, Joyce, Freud relate family material to Egyptian myth in their writings. She identifies Freud s essay Leonardo da Vinci a Memory of Childhood as an important source for Joyce s Finnegans Wake, which portrays beneath the gendered individual a root androgyny asserts an unfixed, evolutionary view of family relations.