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David Herbert Lawrence

letteratura inglese



David Herbert Lawrence


Lawrence was born in 1885 in Nottinghamshire. Lawrence's family was poor (his father was an illiterate coal miner) so, at the age of fifteen, he was forced to work. He was really close to his mother (belonging to middle class). When he got enough money, he started attending the Nottingham University College and then he became a teacher.
He lived two important love relationships: the first one with Jessie Chambers (a woman following the strict Victorian code) and the other one with Frieda Weekley (a woman following modern ideas) who will spend all her life with Lawrence.

With Frieda, he travelled to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, North America and Mexico and wrote several books among the most remarkable is "Twilight in Italy". He died ill with tuberculosis in France in 1930.




Lawrence's masterpiece is "Sons and Lovers" (published in 1913). It tells about the Morels, a family, living in a poor coal-mining villag 323h71d e, whose members were an illiterate coal miner, a cultured woman and four children out of all them the older are William and Paul. Unfortunately William gets pneumonia and dies so Mrs Morel dedicates all herself in taking care of Paul: between the two rises a strong relationship (typical of Oedipus complex). However, Paul falls in love with Miriam Leivers (inspired by Jessie Chambers) but Mrs Morel goes against this relationship because she is afraid she could be excluded from Paul's life. Meanwhile Paul gets engaged with Clara Dawes (inspired by Frieda Weekley), but this time Mrs Morel doesn't go against this relationship because it is just based on sex. Anyway Clara comes back to the man she has divorced from and leaves Paul and meanwhile Mrs Morel gets ill with cancer. Paul and his sister Annie, unable to see anymore their mother suffering, decide to kill her causing her a morphine overdose. But Paul has to make a hard decision about his destiny: following his mother by killing himself or going on living; at the end, he decides to go on living. As we can clearly see the novel has an autobiographical vein; the cultural differences between Lawrence's parents and the strong relationship between him and his mother marked deeply Lawrence's adolescence. Besides we can notice an important innovation: the introduction of low social class in novels; Lawrence, through his works, makes the low class' conditions emerge and, by doing so, he can be seen, from a thematic viewpoint, very close to Italian literary movement of Verismo (Lawrence was so fascinated by Verga's works, that he even dedicated himself in translating several Verga's masterpieces like 'Mastro Don Gesualdo'). Anyway there are several innovations introduced by Lawrence; one of these is the language: Lawrence's novels are very complex because of the presence of several figures of speech and symbolisms. In any case Lawrence can't be fully considered as a writer of Modern Literature because in his works there are some features typical of Victorian Age; from a narrative point of view, Lawrence is really descriptive and his novels make use of the third person narrator. So there's no doubt in stating that in Lawrence's works Victorian and Modern features live together; as demonstration of that, in his masterpiece, there is the emersion of two antithetic figures: Miriam (representing Victorian Age) and Clara (representing Modern Age).
The extract called "What is she?" (pages 269-270) deals with thoughts occurring in Paul's mind while contemplating Clara who is swimming in the sea. The text is based on one of the most important concept in Lawrence: relationship between man and woman. According to Lawrence woman represents nature meanwhile man is rationality and he can't really understand woman's essence; consequently he feels inferior towards woman. Anyway, the only one thing which can make man and woman get together is sex: man can reach nature and a metaphysical dimension thanks to woman. Besides Lawrence sides even for a primitive life, consequently he is for instinct instead of reason, nature instead of industrialization and countryside instead of town. The text can be divided into two parts: the first one describing Paul's thoughts about Clara (from line 1 to line 19); this part is dominated by the description of Clara swimming in the sea; here Paul, who represents rationality, asks to himself "what is she?", but he can't find an answer; consequently Clara is compared to a "large white bird toiling forward" (line 3), a "big white pebble in the beach" (line 4), a "clot of foam" (line 5) a "grain of sand in the beach" (line 9) a "concentrated speck blown along - a tiny white foam-bubble" (line 10). Paul, unable to give a definition to Clara, sees her getting smaller and smaller (it reaches a peak around line 10) and then, at the end of the extract, she returns "even bigger than the morning and the sea" (line 32). The second part (starting from line 20) is based on action; we can immediately realise it thanks to the presence of verbs of action from line 21 ("he undressed and ran quickly"). In this part Clara calls Paul to join the swimming, he accepts but he's "a poor swimmer" (line 25) and he feels inferior to her; anyway, in the sea the act of sex takes place ("she heaved on a wave, subsided, her shoulders in a pool of liquid silver" in line 22); for the first time the author, by referring to sex, brakes with the Victorian moral code, but he had to face censoring problems: in fact, a lot of Lawrence 's works were considered obscene and they were banned. The text is even rich of figures of speech; the most important are the antithesis in line 1 ("body moving with heavy grace"), another one in line 2 ("She grew smaller"), an alliteration of "s" (line 6) giving a sense of slowness (typical of thoughts), a metaphor (line 23) comparing Paul's sperm to "a pool of liquid silver".



The text called "The wind-Swept Ash-tree" is taken by "Sons and Lovers" and it tells about the violent relationship between Mrs and Mr Morel. The father, in fact, comes back home completely drunk and treats his wife violently; meanwhile, upstairs, children can hear anything happening downstairs and, naturally, they're really worried about their mother. The text is based on a parallelism: the cruel relationship between Mr and Mrs Morel is compared to an Ash-tree swept violently by the wind. Mr Morel and the wind are aggressive, as we can notice it thanks to expressions like "caught the houses with full force, and the tree shrieked again" (line 5), "booming shouts" (line 16), "then the bang, bang of his father's fist" (line 18), "fiercer and fiercer" (line 25). Meanwhile Mrs Morel and the Ash-tree can't react against the violence they receive and we can see it by looking at the expression in line 17 ("sharp replies"). The text is mainly based on the sense of hearing especially from line 8 to line 28: here children are in the darkness with "a feeling of night, of vastness, and of terror" (line 13) and the only thing they can do is hearing what's happening downstairs; so the text is dominated by terms linked to the sense of hearing: "demoniacal noise" (line 9), "thuds" (line 15), "nasty snarling shout" (line 18), "piercing medley of shrieks and cries" (line 20), "hummed, whistled, and shrieked" (line 26), "trump upstairs in his stocking feet" (line 30), "they heard the water of the tap drumming into the kettle" (line 31). The extract ends with the image of children playing happily around "the lonely lamp-post" (line 35) which represents Mrs Morel.






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