What did D. H. Lawrence explore in the clash between mechanical civilization and human instinct? His literature and life shed light on sexuality, love, and the nature of human existence.
Known throughout the world as a novelist and as a poet, D. H. Lawrence is arguably the 20th century’s greatest problematic writer. It is true that his works were often misunderstood as sex literature or obscene literature, and people’s mouths were full of his works. For example, his last full-length novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned in his native England for 32 years, and it was only in November 1960 that it was acquitted of obscenity in recognition of its artistry. And he was a problematic writer because while other writers of his time, such as Joyce, Elliot, Faulkner, and Huxley, recognized contemporary concerns and explored new human relationships in unique literary forms, D. H. Lawrence, more than anyone else, intuitively dealt with the problems of primal human life.
In order to understand the ideas of D. H. Lawrence, who rebelled against mechanized modern civilization, excessive worship of ideas and old values, and burned himself in search of a new source of life, it is necessary to know his life first of all.
He was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, a coal mining village northwest of the industrial city of Nottingham, England, to an uneducated miner father and a poetry-writing former schoolteacher mother.
Eastwood at that time was suffering from the destruction of its beautiful mountain streams and rustic farmhouses by coal miners. In other words, he experienced in his childhood the chaos of so-called industrialism and the disruption of long-held rural aesthetics.
And because he was raised by a boozy but instinctive father and an elegant but intellectual mother, as mentioned earlier, he became a middle child between the two poles. In D. H. Lawrence’s work, we see the contrasting but harmonious aspects of these two sides of himself: the intellectual and gentle ‘light-self’ and the physical and demonic ‘dark-self’. Maybe this is what makes him so difficult to understand, but no matter how you look at his work, you can see this “light-self” and “dark-self” over and over again. On a deeper level, these two sides are contrasted and repeated to achieve a certain symbolism. Taking it a step further, these two sides represent day and night, life and death, sleeping and waking, and even the rhythm of living beings.
If modern rationalism and mechanical civilization rebel against these cosmic laws, man is truly helpless and ultimately doomed. To be saved, the two entities must be harmonized. In other words, man must recognize the other and achieve the ideal union of spirit and body, male and female. This would be the sublimation of spiritual and physical love through sex.
This theme of harmony sometimes manifested itself in autobiographical works based on his own life experiences, and sometimes in works depicting the realization of his ideology. In general, autobiographical novels were written in the first half of his career, represented by ‘Sons and Lovers’, and works of ideological realization were written in the second half, represented by ‘Rainbow’ or ‘Women in Love’.
In ‘Sons and Lovers’, D. H. Lawrence’s worries are well expressed, and his strange relationship with his mother is expressed by introducing Jessie Chambers, who has been with him since childhood, as Miriam in the work.
As I said before, this is a masterpiece of realistic autobiographical fiction that brings his experiences to life. Like most writers, he was true to himself, but in particular, he saw himself as a living, breathing part of nature.
“As my eyes are a part of me, so I am a part of the sun. I am a part of the sun, as my eyes are a part of me, and my feet are a part of the earth I know well, and my blood is a part of the great sea,” he once said. It is a celebration of life untouched by modern civilization. It is noteworthy that flowers in this work are also recognized as images of living entities.
After the publication of Sons and Lovers, he declared, “I will not write in the same way,” but with the publication of Rainbow in 1915, which can be considered a representative of his later novels, he began to write novels for the pursuit of ideology. This tendency was triggered by a very important love affair.
He met and fell in love at first sight with Frieda, four years older than D. H. Lawrence, who was the wife of Professor Weekley, a gifted writer from his time at Nottingham University, and had three daughters. He thought he had found his ideal woman, a woman so full of life that they soon fled to Germany together.
Upon their return to England in 1914, they were formally married. Their dreamlike marriage became the basis for his work throughout his life, or, in other words, the dreams he conceived in this reality manifested themselves in his art. Thus, his post-marital works are often the pursuit of an idealized male-female relationship and sometimes the expression of his dreams.
The representative works written during this period are The Rainbow and its sequel, The Women in Love, in which, in the final scene of The Rainbow, despite having experienced emotional disappointment in his relationship with Winifred or Skrebensky, Ursula sees ignorance as he dreams of a new paradise in a bisexual relationship. This is a symbolic representation of his desire for the realization of an idealized male-female relationship.
In any case, D. H. Lawrence wrote in a letter in 1913, “My belief in flesh and blood is my great religion. It goes deeper than the intellect……”, but the life of a couple with such strong egos must have been a constant struggle, and the dream of finding harmony in the midst of it must have been the inspiration for his work.
During World War I, he was accused of espionage, and at the end of the war, he turned his back on his country forever, traveling to Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Salone, Australia, the United States, and Mexico, where he wrote many works and travelogues.
The giant of the century, D. H. Lawrence, who longed for the union of living human beings with living human beings while preserving his ego to avoid becoming a slave to machine civilization, died on March 2, 1930, at the age of 45, in Vence, in the north of southern France, after battling with pulmonary tuberculosis.
