ABSTRACT
The work of Lawrence and Mansfield emerges from the context of the Great War and indicates modernist preoccupations with social dance. In that emergence, their work relies on portrayals of social gatherings as at once stultifying and destructive, but also ripe with potential.1 In Lawrence’s hands, the dance underscores the endurance and unassailable centrality of the heterosexual couple in the renewal of society; in Mansfield’s, it offers a peculiar blend of collective pleasure and a stage for flirtation which empowers women to reject the couple (indeed, marriage and domesticity). Lawrence rejects the social gathering of dancers in combinations much larger than two; Mansfield is more sympathetic to such gatherings as the context for a newly empowered postwar femininity. This chapter will compare and contrast Lawrence’s and Mansfield’s representations of social dancing in the context of the Great War’s shaping of intellectual and artistic visions.
