D. H. Lawrence: Pleasure and Death
2000; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoD. H. Lawrence was a virtual textbook embodiment Freud's theories about pleasure principle and instinct. Focusing on acultural determinism, Freud viewed destructiveness and pleasure principle as equally fundamental vacillating rhythm life,(1) yet he also asserts that pleasure principle seems actually serve instincts (p. 63). He conceptualized desire move beyond pleasure principle as urge inherent in organic life restore an earlier [inorganic] state things because of conservative nature living substance (p. 36). Seeking a key to a universal logic human social Freud formulated his theory instincts, pronouncing that the aim all life is death (p. 38). As a proximate case in point, he had before him that extraordinary manifestation man's destructiveness, terrible war which has just ended (p. 12). Lawrence's great struggle can be couched as an attempt imagine a world free deathwish and Dantean teleology. As antagonists worthy his animus, he denominated grip class and family constrictions; landscape laid waste by industrial revolution; Christianity's death-obsession; horrific desolation Great War. Much Lawrence's major fiction--including Sons and Lovers, Rainbow, Women in Love, The Woman Who Rode Away, St. Mawr, Man Who Died, and Lady Chatterley's Lover--concludes irresolutely, as if impelled by desire toward unreachable solutions, ones impossible fulfillment or completion this side death. Lawrence, it seems, lacked faith in future he craved, one predicated upon affirmation human relations and mortality. If such fulfillment is occur, Lawrence implies, it must do so beyond confines his fictive texts.(2) deadly combat with his mother, who in Lawrence's representation had already devitalized his and killed his brother, was primary, repeatedly refought, a haunting that recurred throughout his life. In an act adoration, Lawrence rushed first copy White Peacock into his dying mother's hands (in 1910), but though inscription he had written for her was read out, she turned away and never mentioned it. Having loved his mother almost with a husband and wife love that doesn't seem natural and having been born hating my father so much that he could wish him damned,(3) Lawrence came describe his mother's dying with increasing distance and aesthetic disdain: It is a continuous `We watched her breathing through night' [from Thomas Hood's `The Death-Bed'] ... and still she is here, and it is old slow horror. I think Tom Hood's woman looked sad but beautiful: but my mother is a sight see and be silent about for ever ... Banal! ... desire my life, at present, is have mother buried. He then writes, suddenly, without transition, that he has just proposed marriage Louise Burrows.(4) Dominated by his mother in life, Lawrence performed an exorcism during her dying; subsequently, as Sons and Lovers' Paul Morel, and though his mother did not consent die, he and his sister, driven by impatience at her lingering, committed euthanasia get free her. Afterward, they laughed together like two conspiring children. On top all their horror flicked this little sanity (p. 394). Lawrence's maternal deathbed depiction represents a repudiation Victorian convention. aesthetic death, public mourning, and ritual funeral are stripped bare reveal a dark underside: dying that is agony for mother and agonizing for survivors; a self-absorbed with no thought but for himself; ungrieving children; an unappeased dead mother who remains a haunting presence. In a final chapter called Derelict, Paul turns from the darkness he associates with his mother and heads alone toward symbolically ambiguous city lights, in what Lawrence calls Paul's drift toward death. …
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