ABSTRACT
D. H. Lawrence was born in 1885 in the small coal-mining town of Eastwood, England. The women who had the greatest influence on Lawrence's love life were his mother Lydia, his friend and lover Jessie Chambers, and his wife Frieda von Richthofen. Lawrence undertakes to burn out the shame that in his time still defined attitudes toward the body and sexuality. Lawrence especially disliked Christianity's fixed dogma and numbing ritual, idolatry of the Crucifixion and reverence for suffering, promise of salvation and other-worldly hopes, celebration of the weak and revenge against the strong, and promotion of asceticism and preoccupation with sin. Lawrence continued to attend church but with increasing resentment for its inflexible dogmas and rituals. Lawrence valued symbolic crucifixion in the form of disappointment and suffering in life as a prelude to spiritual resurrection. His most extended analysis of such vengefulness is in Apocalypse, which envisions the end of the world when the meek shall seize the earth.
