A Critical Study Of D.H. Lawrence's Fictional Style

As one of the most talented, and provocative figures in the history of English culture in the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence is a many-sided person : a novelist, a short story writer, a poet, an essayist, a playwright, a critic, a translator, and a painter. But he is a novelist first and last. Unfortunately he was often severely undervalued as a novelist during his lifetime. In the face of too much censure and misjudgement, Lawrence disappointedly complained that nobody would understand his works within three hundred years, but on the other hand he confidently expected that he would change the course of history of the world in the next thousand years. Interesting enough, just thirty years after his death witnessed a big change in the evaluation of his works and himself. He hasn't changed the course of the world history, but has been really treated with new eyes and gained increasing respects from critics and scholars and popularity all over the world. He has eventually created a scenic view in the world literary area attractive for many visitors. Therefore we may say in a sense that Lawrence is"a resurgent bird after death"from the ashes of the criticism—severely undervalued during his lifetime but increasingly appreciated after his death. His varied styles serve as fine feathers and make this renewed"bird"finer.As far as the study of Lawrence's novels is concerned, critics have focused attention more on the themes than the art, more on the morals than the aesthetics, and more on the contents than the styles and expressions. There still remain some problems to be explored and surveyed, of which Lawrence's fictional style has been paid very little attention to and therefore remains"almost entirely unexamined by criticism."In fact, Lawrence was not only a"great creative genius"in so-called social criticism and psychological exploration, as well as in depicting the man-woman relationship, but also a fine writer"who continually experimented with fictional style and was eminently conscious (as his letters and expository essays clearly reveal) of what he was doing."His modernist features have been embodied in the dual change of his subject matter and style. While his originality of subject matter appears in Sons and Lovers, his originality of style starts in The Rainbow and develops in Women in Love, and matures till Lady Chatterley's Lover. As a result, he has brought about great changes to the style of English novels and facilitated the development and flourishing of modernist novels.The present dissertation intends to make an approach to the four varied fictional styles in Lawrence's works, with his four representative novels, such as The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love, and some short stories as basic texts. The dissertation falls into six parts.Introduction first offers a brief review about the current situation of D. H. Lawrence studies both at home and abroad. It then states how and why the title is chosen, and what kind of literary critical stance and perspective might be employed to conduct a stylistic approach to Lawrence's novels. Broadly speaking, there are four typical styles in Lawrence's novels: realistic, expressionist, symbolic and fabulous. What interests us is that two or three styles may co-exist or be used simultaneously in one novel, but they are not mutually exclusive and often blur into"composites". In spite of that, only one of the styles works as the most essential or keynote, which can be regarded as the typical style of a certain novel.Chapter One approaches Lawrence's realistic style. Being influenced by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot in terms of the description of his native landscape and fictional style, D. H. Lawrence's first two novels show a main tendency of realism and naturalism in structure and technique. They are written in the manner of Victorian realism: the omniscient narrator, working with firm control, the facts set forth objectively. His popular saying"the novel is the one bright book of life"can be regarded as his vision of novel and reveals his realistic attitude toward writing. But later on, from The Rainbow, his third novel on, Lawrence turns out to be a modernist in many ways. So he is considered a successor to the traditional English realism as well as one of the creators of modernist English novels. The earliest examples of Lawrence's realistic mode of style are the short stories"Love Among the Haystacks,""Monkey Nuts,""Tickets, Please,""Odour of Chrysanthemums"and the novels The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers. They have conventional plots and characters and are rendered in a language that is almost transparent. In terms of chronology,"Odour of Chrysanthemums"is the meeting ground of the realistic and the symbolic modes of style. In terms of stylistic development, The White Peacock is just the shallow realistic experiment, while Sons and Lovers has been recognized as a"triumph of realism."Lawrence's realistic mode of style is quite obvious and typical in Sons and Lovers, but to take it as simply"realistic"is to neglect much of the novel's richness—or expand the concept of realism beyond recognizable limits. As a matter of fact, there is a breakdown of realism in the novel's second half. Rather than monolithic realism, a fluid interaction of various styles is interrelated and works together to express the central theme of the novel: realism supplies the bedrock, symbolism the significance, and expressionism the vision.Chapter Two explores Lawrence's expressionist style. As"the most provocative of modernist authors", Lawrence draws on sources as diverse as Renaissance art, English landscape painting, German expressionism, and Italian futurism, transforming all into the textures of his own vision and expression. He saw expressionist painting in its heyday and was impressed by it. He was greatly influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch. As a result, some of his novels, like The Rainbow and Women in Love, manifest profound kinship with aesthetics of European expressionism either in terms of ideological contents or in terms of expressive techniques. His language of the unconscious clearly has expressionist overtones. So the expressionist mode of style can be Lawrence's another striking stylistic feature worth observing in this section with The Rainbow and Women in Love as the breakaway from the realistic style.The use of expressionist art in Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love is by no means accidental, but is the natural result of the deep historical background at the time. His most representative novels like The Rainbow and Women in Love were written coincidentally in the years when the expressionism was quite prevailing throughout the Europe. So certain features of expressionism are therefore revealed expectedly throughout his works. For all the connections, The Rainbow remains a prewar novel, and Women in Love—written, like so many of the key works of Modernism, across the war—is a post-war novel, filled with the wound of war and the renewed encounter with disintegration, Lawrence's wartime experiences enter the story, and the hard expressionist dimension is intensified in his works.Chapter Three focuses on Lawrence's symbolic style. A survey of his novels shows that Lawrence is a symbolist by and large. One of the most important ways in which Lawrence convinces us of the reality or the inner non-social world to which his characters have access is by his use of symbolism. He is not only good at using symbols to realize his artistic purposes, but also has his own definition of the"symbol"different from the other symbolist writers. His symbolic style differs from traditional symbolism and refers to the vital relationship existing between the human and the natural as between single individuals and circumambient universe. Besides, there is a mythic tendency in Lawrence's symbolic style, hence it is also called a mythical symbolism by some critics. The symbolic style, in which most of the middle works of Lawrence are largely written, is often found in combination with other modes of style, for instance, the expressionist style. Lawrence's symbolic style does not make comments on an event, nor does it merely factually describe a scene; it becomes the event, absorbs it, so that to describe the nature and narrative significance of the event is to describe the nature of the style.Lawrence's characteristic symbolic style consists in a special effect of language rather than in the usual forms that are immediately recognizable as"symbolic."As F. R. Leavis writes, Lawrence's symbolic effects"work subtly in with the whole complex organization of poetic and dramatic means…and are no more to be brought helpfully under the limiting suggestion of symbolism than the Shakespearian means in an act of Macbeth".As far as the occurrence of symbols in Lawrence's novels is concerned, we may roughly come to the conclusion that there are four categories: 1. symbols are fused into the descriptions of landscape, like Birkin's moon-stoning scene in"Moony"; 2. symbols are conveyed in the dialogues, like the"star equilibrium"in Birkin-Ursula's dialogue; 3. symbols occur as particular signs or images, like"the beetle"and"the African statuette"; 4. symbols emerge as plots, like"Water-party"and"A Chair"in Women in Love. Through these kinds of symbolic ways, readers are attractively led into"the wood"of Lawrence's peculiar symbols.Chapter Four discusses Lawrence's use of fabulous style. Lawrence's later works have brought us to a less realistic and more fictional and more artistic kind of narrative: the fabulous style. This mode of style is concerned with a made-up world that exists deliberately outside the world we inhabit. It must also be admitted that it is a world which finds its meaning only in reference to the everyday world. It is"more shapely, more evocative, more concerned with ideas and ideals, less concerned with things". This is amply exemplified in works like"The Prussian Officer","The Rocking-Horse Winner", The Man Who Died and so on. The Man Who Died is the fictional embodiment of Lawrence's hopes and aspirations which could not be fulfilled in his real life—a kind of"objective-correlative"for his intensely enthusiastic utopian endeavors, for his generally prophetic inclinations. The tale is the tribute—the final tribute—to his own long, lonely, often wild, years of wandering, to his strong belief in a better world in the future. It is not surprising that it should have been written at a time when he was far outside—both physically and emotionally—his native England. It is not surprising either that he ends his fiction with the use of the fabulous style.The conclusion summarizes the change or evolution of Lawrence's fictional styles during his seventeen-year (1911-1928) literary career: Lawrence's fiction shows a development that begins with the realistic style, varies with the expressionist style, matures with the symbolic style, and ends with his use of fabulous style in combination with the realistic style.