ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book concentrates on the convergence of the antipathies towards women and vision, and the anxious disavowal which accompanies that convergence. The word is repeated to the point of nonsense and laboured at key spiritual moments in Lawrence's fictional texts to signify positive sexual and unconscious states. Lawrence's philosophy of life and sexual identity rests upon the tension between the two, and so darkness and light, blind sex and what he called sex in the head are consequently gendered. Sex in the head is sex made visible, sex in the wrong place and aroused to visual pleasures. Darkness is the realm of the valorised macho superhero, whilst women too often prefer the illuminated world of conscious control, sexual inauthenticity, visual engagement. A wealth of novelistic and critical energy is spent denigrating the act of seeing in favour of the darkness of touch.
