ABSTRACT
To align Lawrence with anarchism under the subject of marriage, as I propose to do, may seem at first glance to be a rather unlikely enterprise, doomed from the start for reasons far too significant to be overlooked or treated lightly. One of these reasons, a critic might suggest, is the fact that while marriage is obviously one of Lawrence’s most urgent and central concerns-reaching, as it does, into almost every corner of his written work —marriage is at best of only marginal interest to anarchism, a subject infrequently mentioned by anarchists themselves and almost always ignored by the historians of libertarian ideas.1 Moreover, my critic might continue, while marriage is obviously a political institution, Lawrence deals with the subject in what seems to be an utterly de-politicized way, at least in the sense that his concern with marriage is consistently fleshed-out in almost exclusively personal (as opposed to political) terms. Or to put the matter in a slightly different way, Lawrence’s interest in what he calls the “whole of the relationship between man and woman” (P 194) appears to lie completely outside the ken of any anarchist concerns, particularly outside that critique of State government so central to everything that anarchism upholds.
