ABSTRACT
It is axiomatic that the exploration of gender relations pervades Lawrence’s entire oeuvre – his fiction, essays, poetry, drama, letters, criticism, translations and paintings. All his novels explore in some way the problems of marriage, or relations between couples, in the face of what he saw as the degenerative forces emanating from modern, industrial, democratic society. Lawrence came to believe in the primacy of male authority within marriage. He also believed that there was a sphere outside marriage, where men should relate to other men. These were issues which were contested in his own marriage, and marriage is explored, to varying degrees, in all his novels and much of his other work. In The White Peacock there are chapters entitled “The Courting” and “The Fascination of the Forbidden Apple.” In The Trespasser (1912), a man disintegrates after leaving his wife and family. In the highly autobiographical Sons and Lovers, Lawrence analyses his parents’ marriage and his own early sexual experience. The Rainbow is in part a family saga and begins with an Englishman marrying a Polish lady. In Women in Love, Birkin and Crich debate the merits of marriage in the chapter “Marriage or Not.” In The Lost Girl, Alvina has several relationships before she finds her true marriage partner. Aaron’s Rod examines the progress of a man who leaves his marriage to save his own spirit from going under, and Kangaroo includes an ironic portrayal of the battle for supremacy within a marriage in the chapter “Harriett and Lovatt at Sea in Marriage.” St. Mawr portrays the collapse of a marriage between an Australian and an American. In The Plumed Serpent, an interracial marriage has regenerative possibilities for a European woman. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a paralysed marriage is jettisoned in favour of a regenerative union that transcends class and moral conventions. Lawrence’s “Argument” introducing the poems in Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) heralds the centrality of Lawrence’s commitment to marriage expressed in the poems and the associated conflict. Amongst his essays, those assembled in Assorted Articles (1930), written in the last 18 months of his life, pieces such as “Matriarchy,” “Sex Appeal” and “Do Women Change” show Lawrence still actively engaging with relations between men and women. In “Sex Appeal” Lawrence laments that “we deny sex and beauty, the source of the intuitive life” (LEA, 145:27–8).
