Lawrence’s Prejudice Against Working Class

David Herbert Lawrence is universally acknowledged as a very distinctive writer in the history of western literature in the twentieth century. The Lawrencian scholarship mainly pays attention to the class prejudice in his early works, ignoring the continuity of class prejudice as presented in his late works, especially in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The present thesis gains enlightenment from Fredrick Jameson’s political unconscious to demonstrate Lawrence’s political unconscious as presented in Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which Lawrence expresses his revulsion and prejudice against working class. Firstly, the thesis presents a critical review of the domestic and international academia on this novel, looking forward to locating critical vacancy, thereby the space for a further analysis of Lawrence’s repressed ideology in the text is exposed. Lawrence’s prejudice can be thoroughly validated from the following three aspects:the contrast between working class and middle class in the body depiction, social gatherings, and landscape.The first chapter canvasses Lawrence’s prejudice against working class through the depiction of body. This section is divided into three parts. Through a comparative analysis of body between the working class and the middle class, the body of the former ones is generally subsumed into three categories:unholy body, alienated body, and undisciplined body. All these types expose the vulgarity of them, elucidating Lawrence’s unconscious snobbery towards them. At last, the thesis discusses the reason why Lawrence describes the body of the working class:Lawrence is influenced profoundly by her mother’s middle-class values, and his aversion to his father’s rudeness and vulgarity results in his prejudice towards the working-class people, which has probably extended and been suppressed in the literary texts.The second chapter centers on the contrast between working class and middle class in social gatherings. All their discrepancy in the aspects of educational background, ways of social gatherings, and languages used in communication will be conducive to explicate Lawrence’s unconscious prejudice towards the working-class identity which gives rise to his awkwardness in social interactions with the middle class.The third chapter delves into the repressed prejudice towards the working class as reflected in the description of the landscapes. This part involves three items:class marked on the landscapes, the lonely king in the wood, and Wragby wood as a pseudo Utopia. Lady Chatterley’s Lover seems to ignore the class distinctions, telling the romantic story of a working-class gamekeeper and the middle-class woman. In reality, Lawrence has unconsciously marked the landscape with class prejudice. A large number of celebrities and intelligentsia gather at Wragby Hall, and the Wragby wood belonging to the Chatterleys estate is related to words such as "vital", "alive", and "life" which symbolize vigor, fertility and life force, all of which are in a sharp contrast to Tevershall village where there is a lack of natural beauty. Under the illusion of Utopia, a Jamesonian perspective can still shed light on the class barriers and Lawrence’s unconscious prejudice towards the working-class people.