The Art Of The Self--A Review Of The Self-Exploration In D.H.Lawrence's Works

This paper is intended to elaborate on D.H.Lawrence's characterization of the various selves in his four major novels: Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley's Lover. A detailed psychological portrait of Paul Morel in the Sons and Lovers clearly reflects his distorted self. Paul is overwhelmed by the unnatural love that his mother fosters in him, so he suffers from an emotional and physical "split" which renders him incapable of having an emotional as well as physical bond with the women. In Women in Love, Lawrence introduces a wholly new type of person---Gerald Crich---into his fiction. Gerald appears to be very powerful and resourceful, but actually this character is subtly and repeatedly shown to embody an inner psychological emptiness. And he must identify with a mechanical world of order to make up for an inner deficiency. We cannot look in The Rainbow for the old stable ego of the character. Ursula demands a greater freedom and demands to be freed from the restrictions of the social world. However, she gains her position by becoming less personal and more mechanical. Connie in Lady Chatterley's Lover is partly the modern young woman we have seen in Ursula, wondering what to make of life. She fights for the free spirit in herself. And she finally perceives that life exists and continues quite beyond and outside her self. The view of the self in Lawrence's novels is remarkable in its complexity and sophistication. The major advance on the earlier novels is in Lawrence's clear perception of the social dimensions of the self and in his effort to define the subtle relationships between these and the aspirations of its characters towards personal freedom. His views of the self involve a linking of the natural, the organic and the spontaneous, as against the social, the mechanical, and the compulsive.