外国文学欣赏_D.H.Lawrence

Frank discussion of sex
Style
Fusion of realism and modernism
Traditional --- form Innovative --- combining psychic
exploration with social criticism Rich symbolic images Combine dramatic scenes with an authorial commentary
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Major works
The White Peacock (1910)
Sons and Lovers (1913) The Rainbow (1915)
Women in Love (1921)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
Human Relationship --- chief concern
The core of his writing is to make this
relationship free and healthy. In all his life, he had been seeking the idealistic human relationship. To him, balance, not dominance, is the best guiding principle in the relationship --“star-polarity”.
Paul, consciously or unconsciously, tries his
best to keep his soul independent;he struggles frenziedly to break away from the possessive ties that have been strangling him. This psychic conflict in human relationships is the central theme of Sons and Lovers.
Sons and Lovers
The abnormal love brings about a splitting
personality in Paul, which in turn produces paralyzing effects on his relationships with other women like Miriam and Clare.
Paul is beginning to understand
that his mother’s love was smothering,
jealous, and ultimately destructive, that he must live without her, and that his release from her feels like a victory.
Wave pattern --- the rhythmic rise and fall
of the hero’s emotions Paul fights desperately against the dominant mother and the possessive girl friends to keep his soul independent.
Psychological Penetration
Reveal the deepest instincts of human
nature Dark self ---active unconsciousness --- the true source of passion White self --- social ego
The dehumanizing effect of mechanical
civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature
Passionate Love for Nature
Strongly advocated a return to nature, to a
Structure
1. The nature of human relationships ---
three destructive forms of love: The oedipal love between Paul and his mother; The spiritual love between Paul and Miriam; The physical love between Paul and Clare
Themes
The dehumanizing effect of the
industrialization The complexity of human relationships The emotional possession of one person by another The spiritual liberation of the protagonist in search for identity and fulfillment as an artist
3. Myth
Pluto, the king of the underworld, who fell
in love with the fair princess, Pesephone, and took her to his dark kingdom to be the queen;but she soon felt tired and yearned to return to the land of light. The dark king fought hard to prevent her from going back,but he finally yielded to her wish. So Pesephone spent half a year up on the land of light and half a year down in the kingdom of darkness.
A reformed, determined Paul
The ending ,with the city’s gold
phosphorescence, signifies Paul’s choice of life over the “darkness” of death.
Women in Love
2. “S” curve structure
Gradually revealing “the long and half-
secret process” of a son’s develoopment away from his parents. Paul swings his sympathy from his mother towards his father The main line of Paul’s emotional development.
unable to paint any more. Rejecting Miriam’s last appeal to him for romance, he feels suicidal one night, but changes his mind and resolves not to “give into the darkness.”
Birkin and Ursula have realized a fulfilled
love in their marriage by maintaining their integrity and independence as individuals and by achieving complete polarity with each other in marriage.
primitive way of life. Man can derive energy, power and a dark sort of joy only by getting his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, by keeping a harmonious relationship with nature.
Major themes
Relationship between men and women
Criticism of the modern world of money
and machines Oedipus complex
A Strong Reaction against the Mechanical Civilization
Darkness --- passion, energy and primitive -
-- the father Light --- reason, intellect and civilizwk.baidu.comtion --the mother
The ending of the novel
After his mother’s death, Paul feels lost,