Chapter One

In a number of instances, domestic spaces in Lawrence’s writing shatter the Victorian myth of the home as a maternal, timeless, harmonious haven—an ideological rendering that works to maintain the dominant social order by obscuring social relations existing in the home. Going against this cultural picture of domestic space, the home in Lawrence is replete with power imbalances and tensions between family members. Lawrence’s little discussed poem, “Discord in Childhood,” published in Amores (1916), provides an interesting entry point for looking at domestic space in his works. ¹ As the title suggests, the poem is about Lawrence’s recollection of childhood charged with conflicts and discord. Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips, And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship’s Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously. Within the house two voices arouse in anger, a slender lash Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound Of a thick lash booming and brushing, until it drowned The other voice in a silence of blood ‘neath the noise of the ash. (The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence 36) Several critics have read the poem in light of an early form of the Lawrentian philosophy of the opposition in human relationships or a painful recollection of his unhappy experience of parental conflicts. ² Refusing to read the poem in terms of a typical Lawrentian theme, Sandra M. Gilbert stresses the powerful poetic imagination that enhances pure violence to the level of mystery (46). Although these readings have pointed out certain thematic concerns of the poem, they tend to universalize (“human relationships”), to personalize, or to dehistoricize (“mystic power”) the home, dismissing its socio-political significance in the poem.