Female self-fashioning in D. H. Lawrence's major fiction

When I began this project, I had a good understanding of Lawrence criticism, and found it highly unsatisfactory. In my research I discovered that the predominate methods of critical treatment in the field--critical attempts to demonize or domesticate D. H. Lawrence--repress and sublimate the difference his discourse could make in developing feminist forms of psychoanalytic literary criticism. In the early stages of the project I drew heavily on Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality and the works of French feminists Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Julia Kristeva. Upon discovering that the Foucault produced a patriarchal history of sexuality, however, I found myself turning more and more to psychoanalysis to seek alternative formulations of subjectivity and gender. I sensed the inadequacy of the simple choice between an essential unified self and a radically fissured "decentered subject"--and came to see that the appropriate view of subjectivity for Lawrence is much closer to that posited by object-relations: neither liberal ego theory or Lacanian psychoanalysis, but a view in which gender is seen as produced and maintained through cultural rather than anatomical arrangements. I felt more and more the desire to balance an interest in self and object-relations with the original theories of drive and defense. Those Post-Freudian psychoanalysts, whose works I studied, included Michael Balint, D. W. Winnicott, Anton Ehrenweig, Hanna Segal, Lawrence Kubie, William Niederland, Margaret Mahler, and Heinz Kohut. In my dissertation, I employ traditional ego psychology as well as current pre-oedipal theories towards the creation of an intersubjective model that accommodates a feminine principle.; In the mature form of the dissertation, I employ a feminist psychoanalytic model via the object-relations of D. W. Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin, and Kristeva's psychoanalytic work on "abjection." (The term "abjection" describes the horror of the pre-oedipal attempt to separate from the mother.) With this model I argue that the clash of phallic intention and homoerotic "sub-text" in Lawrence's work produces a psychic space arising from contradiction in which the emergence of female erotics may be traced. Lawrence's imaginative texts lend themselves readily to the psychoanalytic discussions I present not for their biographical significance but because of the polyvalent quality partially determined by the relationships among his novels, critical texts, and psychoanalytic works.