Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Gerald Doherty

Critical Essay by Gerald Doherty

SOURCE: Doherty, Gerald. “The Short Fiction: Metaphor and the Rituals of Courtship.” In Theorizing Lawrence: Nine Meditations on Tropological Themes, pp. 131-44. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following essay, Doherty elucidates Lawrence's depiction of contemporary courtship rituals in his short fiction.

Like the previous meditation, this one is also structuralist in the Lévi-Straussian sense of the word: it tracks those transformations that follow regular laws. Once again it takes courtship narratives—this time in Lawrence's short fiction—as its object of meditation. However, it both develops and complicates the rhetoric of plotting I analysed in The Rainbow. Alongside the tripartite metaphorical schema, I introduce a second schema—an apocalyptic typology, based in what Lawrence called his “polly-analytics” (his metaphysical speculations). Both schemas, I suggest, exert a determining influence of the structure of the courtship rituals, especially in the short fiction, where a strict narrative economy makes this structure particularly conspicuous. Each...
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