Week 15 D. H. Lawrence

Notes on D. H. Lawrence

“The Odour of Chrysanthemums.”

The chrysanthemums symbolize a series of “institutional moments” like marriage, but they’re an overdetermined symbol. Elizabeth has come to resent them, even if in the end she respects them, too. She picks them up when the workmen carrying Walter’s body knock them over. But the symbol must give way to the stark confrontation with Walter’s body, with his absolute “otherness.”

Walter had come to embody domestic obligations and little else -- he was a focus for Elizabeth’s sense of responsibility and her resentment, too, at the way he seemingly failed to live up to his end of marriage as a social contract. The body -- its silence, its separateness, forces her to confront the absolute, eternal otherness of Walter. The bible’s claim that in marriage, “a man shall leave his mother and cleave unto his wife, and the two shall be as one flesh” (a paraphrase) functions ironically here. But would understanding this have made a difference? Is the point that social forms result in a denial of individual life? This sounds like a main theme in Lawrence, and it is similar to Freud’s claims about civilization’s need to redirect the erotic energies of the individual towards larger, transpersonal, tasks. Freud writes of a need for “adjustment” due to the harmful effects of this need upon individuals, while Lawrence offers a spirited protest, perhaps even an outright rejection of it.

False relations entail consequences -- one must face up to them. Elizabeth recognizes Death as her “ultimate master,” but she will overcome the loss of Walter. Life is, after all, her “immediate master” (2330). I suppose Elizabeth’s voice is the central one, but Walter’s dead silence keeps her perspective from being the only source of significance, the only ground, for the truth-value of the story. There’s a stark sense in Lawrence that “truth will out,” and for him, truth seems to be equated with individual vitality.

“Why the Novel Matters.”

At base, Lawrence is defending the novel as a way of combating artistic specialization. He also sees the novel as opposing the division of individuals into job-doers of some sort or other, and opposing as well the division of the entire person into body, soul, and intellect. That argument stems from romanticism, and in particular from Emerson, who (in “The Poet” emphasizes authentic individual expression.

Lawrence’s theory implies an internalized kind of inspiration. The novel writer follows no external rules or generic conventions, but instead follows his or her own vital, organic impulses. The novelist writes as “man alive.” This defense of the novel is similar to that set forth by Henry James earlier -- James (in “The Art of the Novel”) writes that the novel should not be hemmed in by rules because it must remain free to embrace the whole of life, and not start excluding things on the basis of external conventions and narrow audience demands. Of course, the problem with arguments like that of Lawrence is that it is an ‘‘effect’’ of the very problem it protests against. I mean that Lawrence ascribes an almost magical power to the novel -- the novel alone, not any other form of literary art. Why does he need to constrict the efficacy of literary art to this one form? He speaks from the perspective and tone of a novelistic specialist -- something I believe Henry James largely avoids in the abovementioned essay.