D. H. Lawrence: Organicism and The Modernist Novel: Hughstevens

9
HUGH STEVENS
D. H. Lawrence: organicism and

the modernist novel
Can fiction be modernist when it aims to help us to recapture a premodern,

or even ‘primitive’, relationship with nature and with our own bodies, and
dissolve boundaries between the self and the world? This is the question we
must answer in considering D. H. Lawrence’s (1885–1930) conflictual rela-
tionship with literary modernism. In Lawrence’s most challenging state-
ments about the purpose of the novel, he emerges as something like an
ecological antimodernist, continuing a tradition of Romantic organicism
which modernism often appears to leave behind.
The novel, in Lawrence’s view, goes astray when it affiliates itself with specific
types of experimental modernism, because its real benefits derive from its
potential to help us to resist the damaging effects of modernity. The novel’s
immediate task might be to offer us aesthetic representations of the world in all
its complexity, but this task, for Lawrence, is part of a greater project of cultural
regeneration. In a series of essays written in 1923 and 1925, including ‘Art and
Morality’ and ‘Why the Novel Matters’, Lawrence shows an unrestrained
contempt for the modernist novel, at least as it is practised by some of his
celebrated contemporaries.1 He argues that there are three categories of modern
fiction: ‘serious’, ‘popular’ and ‘valuable’. ’Serious’ and ‘popular’ fiction repre-
sent fiction as it is being written in the 1920s, and both derive from and
propagate the self-consciousness which Lawrence regards as the great pro-
blem of modern culture. Self-consciousness, and here Lawrence is influenced
by his reading of Friedrich Nietzsche,2 is an awareness of self as separated
from the natural world, a mental condition arising from the influence of
modern, rational, scientific thought, with its dualisms and harsh delineation
of subject and object. In an early draft of an essay on John Galsworthy,
Lawrence complains that the ‘real individual’ is destroyed by self-conscious-
ness, which in turn is a product of what Lawrence calls ‘the social conscious-
ness’. Modern ‘social individuals’ are diminished creatures, ‘always aware of
the ‘‘you’’ set over against the ‘‘me,’’ always conscious of the ‘‘it’’ which the
‘‘I’’ is up against . . . The social consciousness can only be analytical, critical,
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HUGH STEVENS
constructive but not creative, sensational but not passionate, emotional but
without true feeling.’ Lawrence complains that the modern novel contains no
‘real individuals’. The modern novel is complicit in the process whereby ‘the
real individual lapses out, leaving only the social individual’.3
Lawrence’s examples of ‘serious’ modern novelists include many of those
we would now think of as defining ‘modernism’ – James Joyce, Marcel Proust,
and Dorothy Richardson – and their fiction is described as ‘dying in a very
long-drawn-out fourteen-volume death agony, and absorbedly, childishly
interested in the phenomenon’, a ‘dismal, long-drawn-out comedy’ made
up of ‘self-consciousness picked into such fine bits that the bits are most of
them invisible’. This modernist fiction is artificial, ‘senile precocious’, an
unhealthy extension of adolescent absorbed self-consciousness into adult-
hood. On the other hand, popular novels (Lawrence’s examples include
Edith Maude Hull’s The Sheik (1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922)
are spurious and conventional, ‘just as self-conscious’, only with ‘more
illusions about themselves’. Their heroines and heroes are ‘lovelier, and
more fascinating, and purer . . . more heroic, braver, more chivalrous, more
fetching’ than those in the ‘serious’ novel, and present a series of hackneyed
identities in which the ‘mass of the populace ‘‘find themselves’’’.4
Like Goldilocks, Lawrence finds his first two categories of ‘serious’ and
‘popular’ unhelpful precursors to the ideal third. The third category, of ‘real
valuable fiction’, is what fiction should aspire to: this is a fiction which can
reveal ‘life’. This revelation requires first a move into somewhere secret,
private and dark, whence we will emerge renewed, cleansed and freshened.
In ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, Lawrence argues that ‘unless we proceed to
connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources, we shall degenerate’, and
the novel – or at least the real novel – can help us in this process: ‘If we can’t
hear the cries far down in our own forests of dark veins, we can look in the real
novels, and there listen-in. Not listen to the didactic statements of the author,
but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods
of their destiny.’5 In Lawrence’s organicist metaphors self, nature and the
novel are all harmoniously entwined: our veins are forests, fictional characters’
destinies are dark woods. A historical and cultural dimension is present in
these metaphors, as the forest and the woods stand for the natural world in
English and German ecological thinking; in England the woods are nostalgi-
cally equated with an old England which has been lost; in German ecological
thinking the forest is often figured as the soul of the German people.
There is a paradox at work here, as Lawrence’s intentions for the novel are
didactic, but he believes the novel’s success depends on its being, in essence, a
nondidactic form. The novel is the key artform which will help us to escape
degeneration by reconnecting us with our primeval sources.6 The reader
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D. H. Lawrence: organicism and the modernist novel
plays an important role in this process, as the reader must differentiate

between inauthentic authorial views and the authentic voices of characters.
If we ‘listen in’ in the correct manner, we will shed the harmful self-
consciousness that Lawrence associates with modernity. On the other
hand, modernist fiction’s efforts to trace the mental processes of sophisti-
cated and self-conscious sensibilities destroy what Lawrence sees as the
novel’s main strength.
Another paradox is present in Lawrence’s argument, because the novel –
the literary form with which he is most identified – is itself a modern form,
dependent on modern technology for its production and circulation, on
modern education and a skilled workforce for its readership. In addition,
the novel requires the felling of trees and the production of paper through
modern industrial methods; put crudely, novels destroy the very trees they
should be enabling us to discover. Lawrence’s polemic on behalf of the novel
works alongside his more general attack on technological and industrial
modernity, so it is not surprising that the examples he gives of the ‘real
novel’ are the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Plato’s
Dialogues and Augustine’s Confessions, all narratives from a time before
the invention of printing or the development of the novel as a genre.7
Lawrence’s frequent polemical statements arguing for a preindustrial social
organization, if taken seriously, would rob him of his own vocation as
effectively as state censorship did during the First World War. The ‘real
valuable’ novel will save humanity from modernity, but only this modernity
enables the production of the novel. The novel finds readers because the
population has become literate, but universal education is abhorred by
Lawrence as an institution which stops the child from growing up with a
creative and imaginative relationship to the natural world. Lawrence’s views
on education are implicit in several portrayals of teachers and unhappy
school pupils (above all in The Rainbow, 1915), and are stated explicitly in
‘Education of the People’ and Fantasia of the Unconscious, a polemical essay
of 1922.8 Here universal education is identified as ‘so uncouth, so psycho-
logically barbaric, that it is the most terrible menace to the existence of our
race’. Lawrence advocates that all schools should be closed for an indefinite
period, ‘elementary education should be stopped at once’, and fathers should
‘see that [their] boys are trained to be men’, just as mothers should ‘see that
[their] daughters are trained to be women’.9 The growth of and success of the
novel, however, coincides with and depends on growth in rates of literacy
brought about by modern education, and by the reduction in average work-
ing hours achieved by modern forms of labour and specialization.
Lawrence’s defence of the novel requires that it should be associated
with a ‘natural’ humanity which modernity threatens to destroy. Lawrence
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HUGH STEVENS
advances a vitalist and organicist aesthetic for the novel which conforms to
criteria prominent in European aesthetics since their foundation as a disci-
pline by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1735.10 Terry Eagleton notes
how, for Baumgarten, ‘aesthetics mediates between the generalities of reason
and the particulars of sense . . . [I]n their organic interpenetration, the ele-
ments of aesthetic representation resist that discrimination into discrete units
which is characteristic of conceptual thought.’11 Lawrence’s defence of the
novel endows it with qualities remarkably similar to those that Baumgarten
attributes to ‘aesthetic representation’; his aesthetic ideals for fiction have as
much in common with Romantic organicism and Victorian realism – the
‘complex web’ of society as represented in George Eliot’s fiction – as with
modernist radicalism. The ‘business of art’, Lawrence claims, ‘is to reveal the
relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living
moment’, and the novel is the best form to carry out this business, as the
novel is the ‘highest complex of subtle inter-relatedness that man has dis-
covered’.12 The novel captures the ‘interrelatedness’ of life, but ‘inherently is
and must be’, Lawrence argues, ‘[i]nterrelated in all its parts, vitally, orga-
nically’.13 The novel ‘is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing
rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live, as nothing
else can: no didactic Scripture, anyhow.’14 Lawrence’s views anticipate the
central claims made for his fiction by the generation of admiring critics
writing under the influence of F. R. Leavis: the novel is valuable because it
can reveal ‘life’ to us. ‘The novel is the one bright book of life.’15
Lawrence’s plea that we should not listen to ‘the didactic statements of the
author’ is an idea frequently found in his writing. Its most celebrated appear-
ance is the aphoristic command, in Studies in Classic American Literature
(1923): ‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.’16 One might follow W. B.
Yeats, however, in asking, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’17
What parts of a novel are ‘tale’, and what parts are ‘artist’? Moreover, the
advice to trust the ‘tale’ is problematic, as a ‘tale’ is not a person whom one
can trust or be suspicious of. Does one trust the tale to tell the ‘truth’? Does
one trust the tale’s presentation of events, or does one trust the view of
human nature presented in the tale? Is ‘trust’ a mode of reading which does
not require interpretation, and is miraculously free of the problems of inter-
pretation? How do we trust a tale when it presents different and contra-
dictory views of a character or a situation? And, as narrative theory has
taught us that a tale is a particular ‘narration’ of a ‘plot’ – a series of events
which can be thought of as different from the tale itself – if one trusts the
‘tale’, does one trust the ‘narration’ or the ‘plot’, the ‘fabula’ or the ‘sjuz-
het’?18 It is unsurprising that Lawrence is often condemned for failing to
follow his own advice. A common critical judgement prefers his short stories
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and short novels (such as The Ladybird or The Captain’s Doll, both 1923),
which show off his narrative gifts at their best, to novels like Lady
Chatterley’s Lover (1928) or The Plumed Serpent (1926), in which the tale
is supposedly smothered by the interfering voice of the artist.
Lawrence’s critical reputation has been going down a long slide since Kate
Millett’s Sexual Politics, first published in 1970, toppled it off the lofty
heights it reached under the influence of F. R. Leavis, for whom Lawrence
was (in 1955) ‘incomparably the greatest creative writer in English of our
time’, and ‘one of the greatest English writers of any time’.19 This fall might
have been less severe if Lawrence had only done less, written less, and pruned
his own ‘didactic statements’ from his prose. Even Lawrence’s most admiring
readers find it hard to make sense of the great heterogeneous clutter which is
his oeuvre. The high praise accorded Studies in Classic American Literature
is accompanied by disdain for his Study of Thomas Hardy. His travel writing
is much admired; his letters have received few critical assessments. His novels
are regarded as uneven: most critics regard his novels of the 1920s as
disappointing in comparison with his three most highly regarded novels,
Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921),
all written in the previous decade (Lady Chatterley’s Lover has received a
great deal of critical attention, but much of this attention has been less than
admiring). Critics have admired his poetry, but figures such as Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams are more highly
esteemed as the most innovative poets of modernism. His philosophical
essays, such as The Crown (1915), have few readers.
The enormous disparity in critical assessments of Lawrence’s writing is
worth noting, not only because it suggests that his writing might vary in
quality, but also because it arises from conflicting impulses at work within it.
Readers who respond negatively to Lawrence’s interfering voice in his fiction
echo views advanced, but not followed, by Lawrence himself. The novel’s
ability to reveal ‘the trembling and oscillating of the balance’ will be threa-
tened, Lawrence writes, if ‘the novelist puts his thumb in the pan, for love,
tenderness, sweetness, peace’.20 If the novelist wants the novel to express
the value of a particular ideal, like ‘peace’, the resulting work might fail to
represent human relationships in all their complexity. These views are
expressed frequently and persuasively. But, if one reads a range of
Lawrence’s work, it is impossible not to view him as a writer who has not
stopped with his thumbs, whose arms are plunged deep into the pan, up to
the elbow, so palpable are his designs upon the reader. In ‘The Future of the
Novel’ Lawrence claims that ‘it was the greatest pity in the world, when
philosophy and fiction got split’.21 His claim here echoes the more famous
claim made by T. S. Eliot in his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ that ‘[i]n
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HUGH STEVENS
the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we

have never recovered’ – though his examples of novelistic philosophy, or
philosophical fiction, are much older than the seventeenth century. Echoing
Eliot’s complaint that recent poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and
Robert Browning ‘do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of
a rose’,22 Lawrence wants the philosophical and fictional aspects of the novel
to be inseparable; this return to an older mode of writing before the mythical
separation will enable a new mode of writing to emerge which can ‘present us
with new, really new feelings, a whole new line of emotion, which will get us
out of the old emotional rut’.23 Lawrence wants to return to what he sees
as an older mode of writing in order to achieve something new.
Lawrence’s formulation of a novelistic aesthetics based on notions of
organic form is consistent with his advocacy of organic social organizations
and ways of living which will enable us to reconnect with ‘nature’. His
organicism has a complex genealogy. Anne Fernihough has demonstrated
its philosophical affiliations with late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century German organicist and völkisch philosophies.24 It also has a social
and biographical provenance, as it is in part a response to Lawrence’s
experiences of the industrialism of English coalfield society, and the social
divisions and tensions of the collier community in which he grew up. Indeed,
before one attempts to locate Lawrence’s modernism, one needs to acknowl-
edge how Victorian he is. His fiction continues a project begun by George
Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, and continued by Thomas Hardy: an analysis of
the impact of modern technologies on provincial communities, in which the
‘shock of the new’ was caused by the industrial revolution rather than by
aesthetic revolutions. Lawrence was born and grew up in Eastwood, a
mining village on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border. His childhood
gave him an intimate acquaintance with the rural industrialism of coalfield
society, and his fiction describes the environment of the Midlands as one in
which the traditional components of English pastoralism – flowers, trees and
forests, water and pasture, country houses, cottages and gardens – brush up
against the waste products and frantic activity of mines, steelworks and
factories. These stark contrasts are explored in most depth in three key
novels, The Rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, all of
which examine the impact of what Lawrence calls the ‘mechanical’ on the
landscape and on our way of living. In these novels the modern has a demonic
and fascinating power, an awful destructiveness.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s last novel, offers his bleakest realiza-
tion of the destructiveness of the industrial and the modern. The impact of
modernity is shown through Lawrence’s portrayal of human lives and his
descriptions of a ravaged landscape. Modern industrialism and modern war
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are devastating in their impact on the Midlands coalmining community

described in the novel. The First World War kills the elder of the two
Chatterley brothers and cripples the younger, Clifford, who is shipped
back from Flanders ‘more or less in bits . . . the lower half of his body, from
the hips down, paralysed for ever’.25 Clifford’s father ‘chop[s] down his trees
and weed[s] men out of his colliery, to shove them into the war’ (11); the trees
are used for ‘trench timber’ (42). Thus Lawrence connects the injuries to the
natural world with injuries to the body. There is an awful continuity between
the trenches and the mines. Mrs Bolton, the working-class woman who
nurses Clifford, was widowed when her husband, aged only twenty-eight,
‘was killed in an explosion down pit’ (80).
Clifford Chatterley’s estate, Wragby, has a ‘fine old park of oak trees’ (13)
and a wood with game and gamekeeper, but from the house ‘one could see in
the distance the chimney of Tevershall pit with its cloud of steam and smoke,
and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall
village . . . rows of wretched, small begrimed brick houses with black slate
roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful blank dreariness’ (13). (Here, the novel
differs significantly from Sons and Lovers, since the coalminers’ houses are
seen only ‘in the distance’, rather than from within.) The burning pit-bank
emits a ‘stench’, a ‘sulphureous combustion of something under-earth:
sulphur, coal, iron or acid’, which fills the house; the air smells of ‘sulphur,
coal, iron, or acid’ and ‘even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled
persistently’ (13).
Just as T. S. Eliot realized the linguistic excitement and literary energies
that can be generated from a sordid, squalid, urban environment, Lawrence,
in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, makes poetry out of the stuff of modern industry.
The ‘utter soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands’ yields, paradoxi-
cally, writing of great energy, stylistic toughness and novelty, which poeti-
cally captures the violent clashes of the industrial environment, its smells, its
sounds, its textures, its awful visual splendours, – ‘the rattle-rattle of the
screens at the pit, the puff of the winding-engine, the clink-clank of shunting
trucks’, the ‘red blotches’ of the furnaces that ‘burned and quavered’ in the
night (13). We are accustomed to descriptions of the bad air, the smogs, or
fogs, of the city, whether the yellow fog which, in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), ‘rubs its back upon the window-panes’, or, in
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart (1938), the ‘fog’ which invades
the houses of London, so that, in daytime, indoors, her young heroine,
Portia, ‘could hardly see the rest of the room . . . it was not like night but
like air being ill’.26 Lawrence’s writing reminds us that this pollution also
affects small towns and the rural landscape, where the mud is ‘black with
coal-dust’, the miners’ cottages are ‘blackened’, and the skies fill ‘with a
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HUGH STEVENS
whole array of smoke plumes and steam’. The ‘open, rolling country, where
the castles and big houses still dominated, but like ghosts’ gives way to a
‘tangle of naked railway-lines, and foundries and other ‘‘works’’’ and the
soundscape is violent, dominated by the ‘huge reverberating clank’ of iron,
‘huge lorries’ which ‘shook the earth’, and whistles which ‘screamed’ (155).
‘Nature’ is not an obvious retreat from modern industry, as modern industry
has contaminated the entire ecosystem.
Lawrence believes his critique of industrial modernity puts him at odds
with the literary and artistic movements of modernism, which he sees as
having a symbiotic relation with new technologies and what he calls the
‘mechanical’. Lawrence’s fiction, despite its political waverings and plethora
of contradictory political identifications, is fairly consistent in its diagnosis
of the ills of modernity. In The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover we see
the same historical ‘grand narrative’ being presented. The narrator of the
latter novel tells us that England’s stately homes are abandoned and ‘are
being pulled down’, England’s cottages are replaced by ‘great plasterings of
brick dwellings on the hopeless countryside’. These changes are not hapha-
zard changes in a local environment but, the narrator suggests, representative
of a change in epoch, a change in ‘meaning’ itself. One grand order – the
‘organic’ – is supplanted by another – the ‘mechanical’:
This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls
wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the
cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One mean-
ing blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the
continuity is not organic, but mechanical. (156)
Here, Lawrence condenses history into a single opposition: between the

agricultural and the industrial, the organic and the mechanical. The impulse
is nostalgic and elegiac, but it is unclear whether the elegy is for mere
‘nature’, or for a preindustrial, hierarchic ordering of society dominated by
grand estates. According to this narrative, Lawrence’s fiction is ‘modern’
because it shows a consciousness of this process of change; it is written, as it
were, after the old meanings have been blotted out. And its central couple,
Connie and Mellors, can show us the way to a new organic continuity.
The relationship between Connie and Mellors is important for several
reasons. It involves a reawakening of the body, of the most ‘secret places’
of life. It involves a rejection of the conventional ordering of industrial
society (though their plans at the close of the novel, to run a small farm,
are hardly revolutionary). But the relationship is in itself a rejection of social
ordering, as it breaks down the boundaries of class. In the process, however,
it pushes them away from society; they do not respond to the problems of
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modernity by bringing about social change, but by fleeing. (Ironically, this

gesture of flight – as exemplified by Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s 1916 A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – can be seen as a characteristically
‘modernist’ response.) Connie, wife of the industrialist and aristocrat
Clifford Chatterley, forms a relationship with Mellors, a collier’s son who
has (like Lawrence himself) moved away from his working-class roots. As a
boy he won a scholarship to ‘Sheffield Grammar School, and learned French
and things’; during his career in the army ‘some Indian colonel took a fancy
to him, and made him a lieutenant’. His reading certainly makes him familiar
with the culture, science and politics of modernity: it includes ‘books about
bolshevist Russia, books of travel, a volume about the atom and the electron,
another about the composition of the earth’s core, and the causes of earth-
quakes: then a few novels: then three books on India’ (212). Together Connie
and Mellors embark on a discovery of nature and primitive sexuality which,
despite Lawrence’s own loathing of ‘self-consciousness’, has an intellectual
and philosophical genealogy in highly conscious modes of modern thought.
They are absolutely Lawrentian in their belief that an exploration of each
other’s ‘secret places’ can undo the contamination of the new mechanical and
industrial England. Mellors tells Connie, ‘An’ if I only lived ten minutes, an’
stroked thy arse an’ got to know it, I should reckon I’d lived one life, sees ter!
Industrial system or not!’ (223).
When Connie dances naked in the rain ‘with the eurythmic dance-movements
she had learned so long ago in Dresden’ (221), when Connie and Mellors
make love outside in the rain, when the lovers thread flowers through each
other’s genitals, we can recognize various social influences in their actions,
even as these actions are intended to help them to escape the social. Their
actions are flamboyant realizations of the ecological antimodernism of late
nineteenth-century English thinkers such as William Morris and John
Ruskin, or of Edward Carpenter, who lived with his male lover George
Merrill in the Derbyshire village of Broadway, writing books on sex and
sexuality as well as poems influenced by Walt Whitman in a little hut by the
brook at the end of his garden.27
Early in the novel we are casually given some information about events in
Connie’s youth which anticipate the central events of the novel. At the age of
fifteen – in 1910, according to the novel’s somewhat dodgy chronology28 –
Connie is ‘sent to Dresden . . . for music among other things’, and there,
with her sister Hilda, she lives freely with students, argues with men ‘over
philosophical and sociological and artistic matters’, and tramps ‘off to
the forests with sturdy youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! – they sang
the Wandervogel songs, and they were free’ (6). This Dresden sojourn is
significant for a number of reasons. Late nineteenth-century Germany
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HUGH STEVENS
witnessed the formation of the Wandervögel movement, in which bands

of youths would go hiking and tramping. William H. Rollins writes that
hundreds of thousands of Germans ‘engaged in ‘‘life-reform’’ (Lebensreform)
activities . . . vegetarians, nudists, temperance advocates, clothing- and life-
style-reformers’.29 Various ecological movements began working with the
concept of Heimat, or ‘homeland’, and in 1904, in Dresden, these move-
ments were unified with the formation of the Bund Heimatschutz (League
for Homeland Protection). This movement was an ecological response to
the rapid industrialization of Germany in the late nineteenth century, and
its intellectual and political ideas drew not only from German Romanticism
but also from Morris and Ruskin. Its vision is remarkably similar to
Lawrence’s and that of his fictional gamekeeper intellectual, Mellors.
These movements are difficult to characterize ideologically, as their
responses to industrialism vary from a conservative nostalgia to anticapital-
ist radicalism. One commentator notes that youth movements like the
Wandervögel responded to the rapid changes of German industrialism with
a belief in an ‘ideal image of pre-industrial peasant-dominated cultivated
landscapes’.30 A more radical tendency was evident at the 1912 ‘Second
International Heimatschutz Congress’ held in Stuttgart; in his opening
address Carl Johannes Fuchs, a professor of national economy in
Tübingen, claimed, ‘The really central problem of the Heimatschutz is
simply one and the same in all modern civilized states: it is the struggle
against a capitalism that mercilessly destroys what has grown up over time
along with its beauty.’31
This environmental activism was accompanied by other forms of activity
which aimed at developing the individual’s relation to nature, such as
reforms within education. Connie will have learnt her eurythmic dance
movements at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute at Hellerau, near Dresden,
founded by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1910. At the institute, which was
internationally renowned, Jaques-Dalcroze’s various unconventional peda-
gogic methods were taught. His teaching used body improvisations and
movements in order to learn rhythm and harmony. Different bodily move-
ments correspond to various musical concepts; under the Jaques-Dalcroze
method the body itself becomes a musical instrument. The teachings were
important not only in education but also in expressionist dance: music,
movement and therapy come together in the work of figures such as
Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman.32
At the close of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Mellors outlines a programme for
reform, many of the elements for which – such as clothing reform, nudism
and the use of dance and music – could have come from early twentieth-
century German ecological political and cultural movements. Men should
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wear ‘scarlet trousers’, ‘dance and hop and skip, and sing and swagger and be
handsome’, and ‘learn to be naked and handsome . . . and to sing in a mass
and dance the old group dances, and carve the stools they sit on . . . Then they
wouldn’t need money. And that’s the way to solve the industrial problem:
train the people to be able to live and live in handsomeness, without needing
to spend’ (299–300).
Despite Mellors’s utopian sentiments, Connie’s and Mellors’s discovery of
nature differs from early twentieth-century environmental movements, in
that they discover the wild as an isolated couple, rather than as part of any
meaningful community. This movement from an emphasis on the commu-
nity to an emphasis on the individual can be traced throughout Lawrence’s
fiction. Although The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers and The
Rainbow – his three Nottinghamshire novels written before Women in
Love – show tensions between individual and community, these novels also
give some grounds to hope that these tensions might be resolved. In these
three works of fiction, rural life, nature and agriculture evoke what
Lawrence calls the ‘blood-intimacy’ of an organic community.33 The indus-
trialism of coalmining threatens and works against this organic integrity, but
the opposition between healthy rural communities and damaging industri-
alism leaves an ideal of organicism intact.
In Women in Love and in most of his subsequent fiction, however,
Lawrence’s metaphysic of blood-consciousness no longer attaches itself to
or works within any particular community. If it survives at all, it survives
only as an unrealized ideal awaiting the discovery of or creation of a place in
which it might be lived out; or within an individualism which is suspicious of
community; or within sexual relations outside the dominant ordering of
marital domesticity and familial life.
In Women in Love and in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there is no continuity
between the romantic couple and a broader canvas of social life, no symbolic
linking of marital union with procreation and the institution of the family. In
Women in Love Rupert Birkin asks Ursula Brangwen to ‘wander about for a
bit’, to ‘set off – just towards the distance’; he tells her: ‘I should like to go
with you – nowhere . . . That’s the place to get to – nowhere. One wants to
wander away from the world’s somewhere, into our own nowheres.’34
Connie and Mellors have plans that are equally vague. Mellors urges
Connie, ‘Bit by bit, let’s drop the whole industrial life, an’ go back’ (219).
The novel, however, gives no indication of how one might actually lead a
preindustrial lifestyle, of where it is one should go back to.
It seems that Lawrence was much more skilled at expressing his angry
disgust at modernity than he was at suggesting solutions to the problems he
identified. In ‘A Propos of ‘‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’’’, he talks of our need to
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HUGH STEVENS
‘get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the
universe’, a process which will take place through ‘the ritual of the seasons,
with the Drama and the Passion of the soul embodied in procession and
dance, this is for the community, an act of men and women, a whole
community, in togetherness’.35 But the individualism, isolation and aliena-
tion of his fictional lovers go against any formation of community. Their
discovery of sensuality leads to some kind of renewal and regeneration, but
this is a regeneration of individuals, not a regeneration of society. It takes a
utopian leap of the imagination to see how these stories of lovers cavorting
naked in the woods will bring about cultural regeneration, but Lawrence, in
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, is prepared to make that leap. A striking authorial
digression in that novel tells us:
It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.
And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform
and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can
lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel,
properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the
passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of spiritual awareness
needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. (101)
Lawrence seems to be saying that reading his own novels will lead our
sympathy away from ‘things gone dead’ into ‘new places’, and reveal for us
‘the most secret places’, unleashing a cleansing, freshening, spiritual aware-
ness. What are these secret places, however? When Connie and Mellors are
together in the woods, Lawrence tells us that Mellors touches the ‘two secret
openings to her body’, ‘her secret places’ (223); later, in the scene (notorious
among critics and readers of the novel) when the lovers have anal sex,
Mellors is described as ‘[b]urning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames,
in the most secret places’ (247). Lawrence’s politics here are radical, idiosyn-
cratic and fanciful. One way of understanding them is as a precursor to
thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, whose blend of Marxism and
Freudianism connected sexual repression with political and social repres-
sion. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) was enormously influential in
the 1960s, the decade in which the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was lifted
and the decade in which Lawrence was taken most seriously as a cultural
critic. If we consider that it was not until the 1960s that ideas of sexual
liberation came to be popularly connected with notions of personal libera-
tion and social regeneration, then Lawrence’s novel, for all that it is rooted in
the England of the 1920s, is strikingly radical for its own time, even if its
belief in the messianic possibilities of sexual liberation now seems touchingly
naı̈ve and its vision of sexuality remains seriously discredited by subsequent
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feminist criticism of Lawrence. If Millett’s Sexual Politics was the key text
which began the decline in his critical reputation, Lawrence nevertheless was
himself advancing an early version of sexual politics. And, if he is a key figure
in the history of antimodernism, his fictional portraits of alienated indivi-
duals trying to find some redemption in the realm of personal relationships
and sexuality remain central to modernism, and the way in which modern-
ism is associated with a reimagining of the sexual self.
Notes
1. These essays are all reprinted in D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and
Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
2. For the influence of Nietzsche on Lawrence, see Anne Fernihough, D. H.
Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and
Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press, 1997).
3. Lawrence, ‘John Galsworthy’, Study of Thomas Hardy, pp. 250–1.
4. Lawrence, ‘The Future of the Novel’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, pp. 151–3.
5. Lawrence, ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, pp. 204–5.
6. See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and William Greenslade,
Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
7. Lawrence, ‘Future of the Novel’, pp. 154–5.
8. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Education of the People’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers
of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (London: Heinemann, 1936),
pp. 587–665.
9. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the
Unconscious (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 81–2.
10. See Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, p. 1.
11. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 15.
12. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, pp. 171, 172.
13. Lawrence, ‘The Novel’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 186.
14. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’, p. 175.
15. Lawrence, ‘Why the Novel Matters’, in Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 195.
16. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Penguin,
1971), p. 8.
17. William Butler Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, in Yeats, The Collected Poems
of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 242.
18. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Intention and Design in Narrative (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984) for an exposition of these concepts in narrative theory.
19. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955),
p. 18, and Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).
20. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’, p. 173.
21. Lawrence, ‘Future of the Novel’, p. 154.
22. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber
and Faber, 1951), pp. 287–8.
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HUGH STEVENS
23. Lawrence, ‘Future of the Novel’, p. 155.

24. See Fernihough, D. H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, pp. 20–33.
25. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires (London:
Penguin, 1994), p. 5. Further references cited parenthetically.
26. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 114.
27. See Emile Delavenay, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in
Edwardian Transition (London: Heinemann, 1971).
28. Michael Squires notes that Connie is eighteen in 1913, twenty-three in 1918, but
only twenty-seven in 1924 (explanatory notes to Penguin edition of Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, p. 349).
29. William H. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and
Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 73.
30. Cited in Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home, p. 166.
31. Ibid., p. 97.
32. For more on Jaques-Dalcroze, see Irwin Spector, Rhythm and Life: The Work of
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1990), and Marie-
Laure Bachman, Dalcroze Today: An Education Through and Into Music
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
33. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (London: Penguin,
1995), p. 10.
34. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John
Worthen (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 315.
35. Lawrence, ‘A Propos of ‘‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’’’, Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
p. 329.
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9

D. H. Lawrence: organicism and

Can fiction be modernist when it aims to help us to recapture a premodern,

plays an important role in this process, as the reader must differentiate

the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we

are devastating in their impact on the Midlands coalmining community

Here, Lawrence condenses history into a single opposition: between the

modernity by bringing about social change, but by fleeing. (Ironically, this

witnessed the formation of the Wandervögel movement, in which bands

23. Lawrence, ‘Future of the Novel’, p. 155.

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