D.H. Lawrence's Exploration Of The Unknown

As a major writer of the early 20^th century, D. H. Lawrence believes that the civilized world has become a spiritual wasteland. Lawrence seeks a remedy for its condition. Unable to follow, because he rejects, both the Judeo-Christian and the Enlightenment past, unsupported by fellow writers for whom Romanticism was simply a tradition in decline, and unwilling to accept the harsh claims made for the will to power by the most powerful ideology of his day, the Nietzschean, he finds himself exploring a world he regards as yet undiscovered, where he nevertheless believes truth dwells. Two of his novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love, reflect his spiritual journey into the Unknown (as he calls it) and the development of his inner self.For Lawrence, the Unknown has the following features: First, it transcends the ordinary world in being timeless and infinite. Second, it is sublime, mystical, and sacred. Third, it bestows meaning on life as the way to achieve a non-Christian immortality of the soul.In the first part of The Rainbow, Lawrence is influenced by Platonism and Christianity, not in the sense that he believes in the Christian God or Platonic forms, but in the sense that he shares the Christian and Platonic belief in the existence of something objectively real beyond everyday existence, some "first cause" against which the meaning of life is defined.