D. H. Lawrence’s Ideas On Love Revealed In Colliery Trilogy

David Herbert Lawrence was born in1885, and died in1930. He is one of the mostinfluential British writers in the early20thcentury. He is a productive writer, and has created alarge amount of works, including ten novels, ten dramas, nearly seventy short stories, about athousand of poets,5534letters, a large number of essays, travel books, and reviews. Of all hisworks, people may be more familiar with his novels such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sonsand Lovers, and Women in Love. But we should not overlook his achievements in writingplays. Actually, at the beginning of his writing career, it was plays and poetry that he devotedmost to. Lawrence is famous not only for his novels but also for his plays. He is a successfuldramatist.In his short life, Lawrence left us eight full-length plays and two fragments, including ACollier’s Friday Night, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, The Daughter-in-Law, Touch and Go,The Merry-go-Round, The Married Man, The Fight for Barbara, David, Noah’s Flood andAltitude. Lawrence’s believes that the business of art is to reveal the relationship betweenman and his circumambient universe, including human relationship, with the relationshipbetween man and woman at its core. He believes the greatest human relationship will alwaysbe the man-woman relationship. Like his novels, most of his plays focus on complicatedrelationship between two sexes and reflect Lawrence’s ideas on love, which is realisticallymeaningful to readers nowadays.Three of his plays, A Collier’s Friday Night，The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowingof Mrs. Holroyd, are known as "colliery trilogy", which tells the failed love and distortedrelationship in colliery families. Lawrence’s ideas on love are fully revealed in the three plays.That is, love should be based on the union of spiritual communication and sexuality, activepursuit of love and independence. Lack of any factor results in failed love.Lawrence is a collier’s son. That’s why most pieces of his works are about minorcharacters in mining towns, especially the colliers. His life experience and the age havegreatly influenced Lawrence. He witnessed that Industrialization began to destroy the naturalenvironment of the English country and distorted human relationship, especially the man-woman relationship. He explored a way to establish a harmonious relationship betweenman, nature and society. Lawrence supports the idea of saving the decaying civilization witha rearrangement of human relationships, especially a rearrangement of the man-womanrelationship.Colliery trilogy is Lawrence’s greatest plays. A detailed study of the theme will help usfurther understand Lawrence’s ideas on love and his other works.