A Study Of Characters' Psychology And Narrative Voice In Lady Chatterley's Lover

D. H. Lawrence is one of the greatest British authors in the 20th century. On the basis of the detailed textual analysis of the characters'psychology and the narrative voice in his last novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, this thesis tries to explore the relationship between the content and the form of the novel.According to Freud, the unconscious part of the human psyche houses three parts: the"id", the"ego", and the"superego"which are controlled by the"pleasure principle", the"reality principle"and the"morality principle"respectively. The energy for the operation of"id"comes from instincts, and the love instinct is called"libido", which has three phases of development: the oral, the anal, and the genital, and it is in the third stage that the"Oedipus complex"manifests itself. The successful handling of such a complex enables one to pass from the"pleasure principle"to the"reality principle". It requires one to suppress his/her instinctual desire to the unconscious, which shows and relieves itself through various activities, such as writing. Otherwise, a destructive personality will be the result. In narratology, the narrative voice means"Who speaks?"But in the present account it usually refers to the vocal or tonal quality projected through a text. There are usually the narrator's discourse and the characters'discourse in a text; and correspondingly the narrative voice has two forms—the narrator's voice and the characters'voice. Related to the basic features of Freud's theories of psychoanalysis and the basic theories of narratology, the exploration of the novel in this thesis goes on three aspects. Firstly, introducing briefly Freud's psychoanalytic theories and the"narrative voice"in narratology, and the general idea of the novel which the theories are going to analyze—Lady Chatterley's Lover. Secondly, applying Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the characters'psychological developments in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the lives of the hero and heroine get more hopeful and meaningful due to the natural manifestation of their"id", while the negation of"id"and an over-emphasis of"superego"make the personality of the protagonist helplessly destructive, and his life turns more empty and meaningless day by day. From the distinction between the psychological developments of these two types of characters, it is not hard to find Lawrence's advocate of natural instincts and his opposition against cold rationality. Thirdly, applying"narrative voice"in narratology to analyze the discourses in Lady Chatterley's Lover, to see how they contribute to the effective expression of the hero and the heroine's healthy psychology and the protagonist's abnormal psychology. Two major aspects are analyzed: the narrator's voice—including the narrative voice in the narrator's intervening comments and in his description of a scene; and the characters'voice—including the narrative voice in direct speech and written records.So we can see that the theme of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is to sing high praise to natural instincts and to oppose cold rationality. For the expression of this motif, two levels are explored in the novel. On the content level, the narrator shows the distinction between the psychological developments of two pairs of characters. On the structure level, the effective manipulation of the narrative voice contributes greatly to the expression of characters'psychology and the theme of the novel, thus the harmony between the content and form of the novel.