ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the confluence of corporeality, national identity and modernity in some works by Woolf and Lawrence because both make a point of articulating their ambivalences about certain types of modernity through a grotesque national habitus identified as German. It examines how Edwardian culture framed its discomfort with the body as a site of pleasure, as a site of production and as a site of consumption before moving on to forge an explicit connection between grotesque Germanises and bad' modernity in both writers' work. Woolf and Lawrence were still working within a Victorian tradition of the grotesque that, in turn, took its inspiration from German art and culture. There is no pleasure to be had in this universe of inhuman machines because fulfilling pleasure is too human the non-fulfilling sex Lawrence describes in Lady Chatterley's Lover is sex as mere orgasmic technique, as mechanical friction.
