“Curiously Alive and Vital”: D.H. Lawrence, Gender and the Body

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the importance of the body to identity and fulfilment in three of D.H. Lawrence’s best-known novels. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Rainbow, and Women in Love, each written in the early twentieth century before Lawrence’s death in 1930, Lawrence represents the bodies of his characters as equally as integral to their identities as their minds. Also prominent in these works are Lawrence’s criticisms of modern technology, as well as of the privileging of the mind and mental processes that this technology encourages. Lawrence offers the “life of the body” as an alternative to mental, mechanical life. For him, the body has a consciousness of its own, and the body’s sensations are as informative as the mind’s thoughts. Additionally, Lawrence explores the relationship between masculinity and femininity, and its interaction with the relationship between the mind and body; Lawrence’s female characters, in these works, more successfully achieve the life of the body. Their embodiment, I argue, facilitates their more complete identities and greater, more fulfilling relationships with others, compared to those characters, mostly male, who work primarily with machines and privilege their minds at the expense of their bodies. Motherhood and pregnancy are also, for these women, ways to re-evaluate the links between the body, the self, and the wider community. Furthermore, I examine Lawrence’s concept of the posthuman through these texts, showing that in his ideal vision of a future humanity, the body must remain integral to human life if true identity and fulfilling relationships are to be preserved.