D. H. Lawrence occupies an ambiguous position with respect to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and the other major figures of the modernist movement. While on one hand he shared their feelings of gloom about the degeneration of modern European life and looked to ancient mythologies for prototypes of the rebirth all saw as necessary, on the other he keenly distrusted the modernists’ veneration of traditional culture and their classicist aesthetics. The modernist ideal of art as “an escape from personality,” as a finished and perfected creation sufficient unto itself, was anathema to Lawrence, who once claimed that his motto was not art for art’s sake but “art for my sake.” For him, life and art were intertwined, both expressions of the same quest: “To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point.” The novel realized its essential function best when it embodied and vitally enacted the novelist’s mercurial sensibility. His spontaneity, his limitations and imperfections, and his fleeting moments of intuition were directly transmitted to the reader, whose own “instinct for life” would be thereby quickened. Lawrence believed that at its best “the novel, and the novel supremely,” could and should perform this important task. That is why he insisted that the novel is “the one bright book of life.” One way of approaching his own novels— and the most significant, by general consensus, are Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover—is to consider the extent to which the form and content of each in turn rises to this vitalist standard.

D. H. Lawrence occupies an ambiguous position with respect to James Joyce, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and the other major figures of the modernist movement. While on one hand he shared their feelings of gloom about the degeneration of modern European life and looked to ancient mythologies for prototypes of the rebirth all saw as necessary, on the other he keenly distrusted the modernists’ veneration of traditional culture and their classicist aesthetics. The modernist ideal of art as “an escape from personality,” as a finished and perfected creation sufficient unto itself, was anathema to Lawrence, who once claimed that...  Read More