ABSTRACT
Understanding how Lawrence illustrates social and political ideas in his fiction involves the reader in an almost constant process of contextualizing the actions of his characters within a broad framework of ideological principles. This may at first sound like a particularly incongruent approach to take to the work of an author who never tired of expressing his deep distrust of abstractions, and who always placed an enormous importance on the immediacy of human experience. It may also seem to be conceptually out of joint with a writer who at one point near the end of his life attempted to disclaim any connection between his novels and his political concerns: “The great social change interests me and troubles me,” Lawrence wrote in 1929, “but it is not my field.” “As a novelist,” he claimed, “I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my real concern” (2P 567). But any novelist who also declared, as Lawrence did, that “each individual is a term of the Infinite” (RDP 136) is clearly inviting his readers to find far reaching implications in the actions of his fictional characters. Indeed, given Lawrence’s bold claim that “what holds true cosmologically holds much more true psychologically” (RDP 136), the process of identifying his ideas about the nature of the individual with his concerns about the plight of society would appear to be a rather modest step. It was Lawrence, after all, who declared that the “sickness in the body politic…lies in the heart of man, not in the conditions” (Hardy 15), a notion which clearly suggests his sense, as Russell noted (1968:20), of an immediate relationship between individual psychology and social circumstances. As a general rule for reading Lawrence’s fiction, therefore, one can rather safely say that the “change inside the individual” is not a separate issue from so-cial change, but is inextricably linked to it. For Lawrence, what holds true for the individual holds just as true for society.
