Summary:
This essay contains a biography and literary analysis of D.H. Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence was one of the greatest authors in American Literature. He grew up in Eastwood moving several times. He attended Nottingham High School and later began teaching. Some of his greatest works were The Trespasser and The Rainbow. Many of his plays were versions of his novels. One of his great poems, "Green," was written when he began his relationship with Frieda.
D.H. Lawrence was born September 11, 1885. He was the fourth child of Author Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall. (Squires and Talbot pg. 2) Lawrence's Father was a coal miner in Eastwood. Within two weeks of his birth, the child had bronchitis. This stood as a warning that Lawrence's lungs would plague him all his life.
Lawrence's Family moved several times; they first moved to The Breach in 1887, then to Walker Street in 1891, and finally to Lynn Croft Road in 1902. (Worthen pg.7) Lawrence grew up in a good family. His mother always made sure that the children went to the Congregational chapel in Eastwood every Sunday.
Lawrence attended Beauvale School from 1892- 1898. The school had large classes and was very strict. The Headmaster was William Whitehead, a very stern man. In July 1898, Lawrence sat at a county council scholarship that was worth fourteen pounds to attend Nottingham High School and at age 13, he attended Nottingham High School. (Worthen pg.9) In July 1901 Lawrence completed a three-year course at Nottingham.
At fifteen, Lawrence began work at Haywoods, a surgical appliance manufacturer in Nottingham. Now away from home for fourteen hours per day, except Sunday and one half day per week, within six months Lawrence had pneumonia. Due to his mother's devoted nursing, and against expectations, he recovered.
In October 1902; when Lawrence was seventeen; he began a six-year teaching job at The British School. (Squires and Talbot pg.13) After his apprenticeship had passed he served as an uncertified assistant at The British School. He earned fifty-five pounds a year.
After he started his teaching job, he also began to write. This writing was done in secret at home. The only person to see this very early work was Jessie Chambers, a fellow teacher and close friend who lived at Haggs Farm. This farm and family provided a second home for Lawrence, away from the strains of his own family. Here, he helped with the hay making, discussed books and organized charades. Lawrence's first published work did not get his name into print. It was a story especially written for a competition run by the Nottingham Guardian in 1907. (Worthen pg.16) It was called a Prelude.
In December 1904 Lawrence sat the examination for the King's Scholarship, which would guarantee him a day place at Nottingham University College, where he could obtain his Teacher's Certificate. (Squires and Talbot pg. 20) He was in the top 37 of over 2,000 candidates, but was unable to take up the position until September 1906 due to financial hardship. Lawrence was to be disappointed by college. He felt that he gained nothing from the experience; the biggest disappointment being the lecturers themselves. He had imagined men full of enthusiasm and inspiration but instead remarked that he "might as well be taught by gramophones as by those men." (Squires and Talbot pg. 23)
Lawrence found Croydon in October 1908. Here he taught boys who were poor, deprived, and from institutions. A lack of diversion from his teaching gave him ample time to write. In 1911, Lawrence gave up teaching and began to work on writing. After Lawrence decided to give up his teaching career, he went to Italy to stay with his Aunts. He thought it would be a good idea to stay with them and spend time as a lector in a German college. In Italy, Lawrence continued writing. He was working on revising Sons and Lovers, one of his most famous novels.
Lawrence fell in Love with a woman named Frieda. At this time, she was already married. In 1914, Lawrence and Frieda married after she divorced. (Squires and Talbot pg.50) After they were married, they were unable to return to Italy because of the war. These were bitter years due to the war and the ban of the Rainbow. Lawrence and Frieda's time together was shown through many of his works. Mr. Noon was a fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda's first months together. "Look! We have come through!" is a poem covering the same period.
When the Lawrence's decided to move to Cornwall, it was crucial. They needed to find peace because of the destruction of the Rainbow and his ruined reputation. They failed to find peace and they fought with their same ferocity, they moved in March 1916. (Squires and Talbot pg. 102)
In 1916, war activity worsened and many young men were killed. Since Frieda was German, some of the Cornish people turned against Lawrence and Frieda. Police searched their cottage and they were accused of showing lights signaling to submarine crews. In October 11, 1917, they received an order to leave by the fifteenth. Lawrence describes most of his Cornwall stay in the "Nightmare" chapter of Kangaroo. (Worthen pg. 43)
D.H. Lawrence died March 2, 1930 in the care of his wife, Frieda Lawrence. Lawrence was buried in the old vence cemetery on March 1930. (Squires and Talbot pg. 376) A tombstone was decorated with Lawrence's emblem, the Pheonix.
Although Lawrence is deceased, his works live on. Great scholars have analyzed some of the greatest works. Lawrence's plays were often versions of his famous novels. Author E. Waterman describes some of these plays. He describes his first play, A Collier's Friday Night (1906), as an earlier and partial version of Sons and Lovers. (Spilka pg.143)
The play covers roughly the same material up to the last half of the chapter "Strife in Love." The first act presents the major conflict between Mrs. Lambert and her collier husband; the second act presents the minor conflict between mother, son, and girl; and in the third act these two conflicts are resolved as Mrs. Lambert wins out over both husband and girl. (Spilka pg. 144)
The difference between Mr. and Mrs. Lambert is essentially the same as in the novel: she resents her husband's lower-class background and her life as a collier's wife. (Spilka pg. 144) The husband reacts to his wife's withdrawal by emphasizing the very qualities she objects to; however, the husband is not given sufficient treatment to develop his side of the domestic quarrel. (Spilka pg.144) Neither is the girl, Maggie, characterized carefully enough to make her correspond to Miriam of the novel. The son's awakening love for Maggie, his first act of independence from his mother, is superficially handled so that Mrs. Lambert can easily dismiss the young and helpless girl. (Spilka pg.144)
A Collier's Friday Night oversimplifies conflict and character, presenting the mother's viewpoint one-sidedly without honestly treating the deeper issues. (Spilka pg. 144) The novel qualifies the attitude toward the mother and examines the nature of love much more complexly than does the play. (Spilka pg. 144)
Lawrence's next plays were three comedies, all written in 1912: The Married Man, Altitude, and Merry-Go-Round. The idea of The Married Man is that love must be honest and frank, not hidden and toyed with like a game. (Spilka pg.145) The plot centers around George Grainger, a married man, who is carrying on with two other women, as he tries to play at marriage. The comedy comes in when George's friend tells his girlfriends that George is married. The quick, short scenes of the play indicate that it needs further development, but it is doubtful whether anyone could make of it a successful comedy. (Spilka pg.145)
Like The Married Man, Merry-Go-Round needs revision but Lawrence never got around to it. The exposition is rough and many scenes need revision. (Spilka pg.145) The play has one good character, however. Old Mrs. Hemstock, grouchy and ill speaks a wonderful dialect of homey images. The plot is a Nottinghamshire As You Like It, with three pairs of lovers switching affections and partners for five acts. (Spilka pg. 145)
One of Lawrence's problems, which can be seen in Merry-Go-Round, was how to catch in creative language the words of love. (Spilka pg.146) In this play he stumbles around trying out witty dialogue. Only once in Act IV, Scene one, does he create the touch of tenderness, as Rachel expresses her love for Harry in terms of her anguish over his working in the mine. (Spilka pg.146)
In both The Married Man and The Merry-Go-Round Lawrence tried to fuse a serious theme with a comedy of manners. The fact that he never finished his revisions of these plays would suggest that he realized how artificial they were. (Spilka pg.147) The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd takes the serious element from the comedies and treats love in a working-class society much more effectively and dramatically than in the earlier A Collier's Friday Night.
Ronald P. Draper analyzes one of Lawrence's most famous novels, The Rainbow. This novel is most famous, not for its popularity, but because of the ban on the book. One of the reasons for the banning of the book was because it contained scenes of sexual intercourse.
The Rainbow opens with one of the most celebrated passages in Lawrence's work-the description of the old way of life of the male Brangwens. (Draper pg.57) This is a life in which man, beast, and non-animal Nature are all closely integrated. Sex for Lawrence is a principle of vitality, not merely a reproductive function, and is associated with an intuitive mode of apprehension. (Draper pg.57) The sexual imagery also points forward to the preoccupation throughout the novel with courtship, marriage, and sex. (Draper pg.57)
The blood-intimacy of the male Brangwens stands for something that has a deep appeal for Lawrence. (Draper pg.58) The first two generations achieve a relationship in which sex is a great revered mystery, but in neither case is it completely successful. The attempt at creating a true relationship in the third generation ends in failure highlighted by the collapse of Skrebensky as a lover in the last terrible scene on the moonlit Lincolnshire beach; but this scene has much wider implications for the whole of modern society. (Draper pg.58)
Blood-intimacy of the man, conscious awareness and education of the women balance one another. (Draper pg.59) Lawrence is not offering them as essentially male and female characteristics, but as complementary to one another in a really satisfyingly human way of life. The male and the female in the Brangwens joined together constitute the implicit standard of The Rainbow. (Draper pg.59)
Tom Brangwen manages to achieve some degree of emotional stability, and this is primarily the outcome of his struggle to adjust himself to his wife Lydia. (Draper pg.63) But his relationship with Anna also plays a part. The child is at first insecure and resentful of the strange new circumstances in which she finds herself after the marriage of her mother to Tom, and the effort which the latter makes to gain acceptance by the child is therapeutic for himself as well as her. (Draper pg.63)
The section devoted to Ursula and to the third generation is the longest book. The problems of the earlier generations come to a head in this one, and Ursula herself is a more complicated person than any of her forebears. (Draper pg.69) She has something of Anna's temperament, but she also inherits Will's religious sense and is in revolt against her mother's preoccupation with childbearing. In Ursula the blood of the Brangwens and the Polish blood of her mother and grandmother are mixed. (Draper pg.70) Ursula is an ultra-romantic who is forced to peel off layer after layer of illusion.
The novel ends when Ursula has her terrifying encounter with the horses, and then, after recovery from illness, is given her "rainbow" as the promise of a "new growth." (Draper pg.75) The horses are a peculiarly inscrutable symbol. The power and terror that they communicate give the episode a hallucinatory or dreamlike quality. (Draper pg.75)
Lawrence's second novel is The Trespasser. The novel's setting is the Isle of Wight and South London. Ronald P. Draper feels that Lawrence's friendship with Helen Corke is the most important source of the novel. (Draper pg.33)
Helen Corke had undergone a disastrous experience similar to that recorded in The Trespasser, of which she gives her own account in her own novel, Neutral Ground. Part of the manuscript of this novel formed the basis of The Trespasser.
There is an element of callowness in the book, by no means dominant, but reflecting perhaps the youthfulness of the earlier draft which Lawrence did not succeed in revising away. (Draper pg.34) More positively to the credit of the book is its tightness of structure.
In The Trespasser Helena has an affair with a married man, Siegmund, which ends in the latter's suicide. They steal five days on the Isle of Wight away from the complications of Siegmund's wife and children. It is here that the erotic interest of the novel arises.
Siegmund on the island becomes a sun lover. As in the later short story, "Sun," Lawrence links fertility and sunshine as the expression of a physical and spiritual rebirth, Through Helena, Siegmund finds release form the ashy condition into which his life has sunk. (Draper pg.34)
The phrase, "Siegmund with the sunshine on his forehead," is both literal and metaphorical. (Draper pg.36) The references of heat and fertility give a special retrospective significance to the very first chapter, which had shown Helena several months after Siegmund's death. (Draper pg.35) The presence of death in love is a traditionally romantic theme, and The Trespasser is to some extent a work of Romance. (Draper pg.37)
"Green" is one of Lawrence's greatest poems. The poem was the centerpiece for "Look! We have come through!" This collection covers the first months of Frieda and Lawrence's relationship. The collection was a celebration of love and marriage including its struggles and frustrations.
This collection chronicled Lawrence's developed relationship with Frieda. His union with Frieda and this collection of poems mark a turning point in Lawrence's life and career- his personal growth and the growth of the writer. (Squires and Talbot pg. 57)
The Inspiration of this poem was His wife's gorgeous green eyes. In "Green" he compares Frieda's eyes to dawn. He describes her eyes as if it is the first time he has ever seen them. He is describing them as if they are the first thing he sees in the morning and the only thing he wants to see.
You can find assonance in the poem with the words green, between, and seen. It is also found in the words sun and undone. There is a simile in the second stanza when he compares her eyes to flowers.
The theme of this poem suggest new found love with the line, "For the first time, now for he first time seen." (Squires and Talbot pg.58) The theme also shows beauty in nature with the description of dawn in the first stanza.
Lawrence opens up the poem with a beautiful description of dawn. He makes it seem like there is nothing more beautiful. In the second stanza he communicates with the reader that there is something- his wife's eyes. This is an excellent metaphor-it compares the beautiful description of dawn to Frieda's eyes. Eyes, after all, are considered by many as the gateway to the soul.
Lawrence's most popular novels, Rainbow and Sons and Lovers, are what led his very successful life. Although Lawrence ran into trouble concerning the Rainbow, it was still a very impressive novel. Lawrence also published successful plays and poems which are still being read today.
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