ABSTRACT
The extent to which Lawrence believed that a “real community” could be built out of fulfilled individuals “seeking greater fulfilment” has long been a subject of discussion for critics, who generally seem to agree that Lawrence never thought the matter through to either a satisfactory or a responsible conclusion. Comments on this aspect of Lawrence’s thought have ranged from Rick Rylance’s measured observation that Lawrence “cannot reconcile his opposed ideals of social harmony and spontaneous individuality” (168), to John R.Harrison’s impatient claim that “Society becomes impossible if the moral code of each individual is to fulfill his spontaneous desires, and Lawrence should have realised it” (186).1 Yet Lawrence’s position cannot be so easily dismissed, and Harrison’s remark in particular is loaded with unintended irony. Lawrence, it should go without saying, was clearly convinced that the society of his own time had in fact become “impossible,” and he often pointed to the carnage of the Great War to prove it. But for Lawrence the transformation of society into a nightmare was plainly the result of something quite different from individuals fulfilling their own spontaneous desires: “It is not the will of the overweening individual we have to fear to-day,” he wrote as the war raged on, “but the consenting together of a vast host of null ones” (RDP 43). Whatever Lawrence “should have realized,” his reasoning here is hard to refute: the slaughter in France and Flanders was clearly not the sustained expression of spontaneous individuality but, as with all modern wars, the orchestrated movement of a controlled population.
