Major works: Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

Biographical notes:

• Oddly matched parents: father was a coal miner, mother a woman "of more intellect and culture"
• Lifelong struggle with health, pneumonia twice in childhood, much of adult life spent in feverish, unsuccessful quest for good health, died at 44 from tuberculosis
• Taught school before turning to writing full-time
• Fell in love with Frieda von Richtofen, sister of famous W.W. I German flyer, the "Red Baron."  The relationship was complicated at the outset by her already being married and having three children.
• Because Lawrence and Frieda lived in Germany before the war, and because of her famous brother, the Baron, Lawrence was accused of spying for the Germans--which has been offered as partial explanation of antagonism against his works in England.

Controversy, Controversy
Largely because of Lawrence's frank treatment of sex and sexuality, several of his novels were delayed publication because of charges of pornographic obscenity.  One pre-eminent British literary historian claims that Lawrence "had a sick mind, and an obsession with sex."  Cooler heads have suggested in response that Lawrence was "modern" in his attempt to explore the human psyche in all its aspects, including primitive and  subconscious instincts (including sex).  Lawrence sought to show "the whole person."  Lawrence wanted to liberate the 20th-century person from constricting traditions of action, thought, and feeling, thereby helping to find full self-realization.

As Julian Moynahan puts it, "Lawrence is, after all, the most hopeful and future-oriented of modern writers.  His call for looseness and openness in fictional form is part of his impassioned vision of freedom for modern man: the freeing of instinct from its cultural prison, the freeing of the human community from its bondage to outworn customs, from conventional religious beliefs, gone stale and dead, from all creeds and ideologies, including literary ones, which teach that man is tied or doomed by odds of present circumstance or the accumulated errors and failures of his historic past."

The Primitive Self: "blood consciousness"
In Sons and Lovers, a novel with much thinly-veiled autobiographical reference to his own life, Lawrence describes conflict between mother and son—later "he is persuaded that such women were particularly responsible for the prevalence of a consciousness divorced from the life of the body; and he railed furiously against mother-love."

In his exploration of the unconscious forces in life, Lawrence came to see lines of opposition between blood consciousness (the non-rational, immediate, tangible, vital, and instinctual) and mind consciousness (the intellectual, analytical, and abstracting).  He felt that modern technological society, coupled with Victorian moral codes, had weighted the individual too strongly towards mind, thus he advocates more attention to blood.  He did not call for complete freedom of the id, but he thought that self-fulfillment required a healthy mix of both mind and blood.

Mellors, the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley's Lover, represents the blood-consciousnessnes or the life-urge, as opposed to the intellectual Clifford Chatterley, whose wounds in W.W.I left him paralyzed from the waist down.  Mellors lives in the woods and tends game for the hunt--he is crude, sensual, passionate, and animalistic, and Lady Chatterley's dilemma is that she cannot combine the best parts of each of the two men, her husband and the game-keeper.

"Odor of Chrysanthemums" is often interpreted as drawing this same line of conflict between the instinctual self and the intellectual--Elizabeth Bates may never have recognized her husband's "blood"-side until it was too late.  In any event, the Bates marriage apparently involved some struggle for possession and dominance between the Mr. and Mrs.

Teaching history

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