Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction: Life works
- 1 Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- 2 Family Romances: Home, marriage and memory
- 3 The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- 4 Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Conclusion: Sex words and silence
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction: Life works
- 1 Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- 2 Family Romances: Home, marriage and memory
- 3 The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- 4 Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Conclusion: Sex words and silence
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Love is the mysterious vital attraction which draws things together, closer, closer together. For this reason sex is the actual crisis of love. For in sex the two blood-systems, in the male and female, concentrate and come into contact, the merest film intervening. Yet if the intervening film breaks down, it is death. (SCAL 71)
The only thing to do is to get your bodies back, men and women. (‘Men Must Work and Women As Well’, P2 591)
Much has been written about sex as gender, and about sexuality, in Lawrence, but what about sex itself? A commitment to consummate sexual experience is the central element of Lawrence's writing and philosophy. In ‘The Real Thing’, his 1927 diatribe against the women's movement, he writes,
Love between man and woman is neither worship nor adoration, but something much deeper, much less showy and gaudy, part of the very breath, and as ordinary, if we may say so, as breathing. (P1 199)
Full sexuality is, however, dependent upon the achieved individual sexual identities of the two players as man and woman. As I argued in chapter 3, feminist cultural critique partly cut its teeth on readings of Lawrence as exemplary literary misogynist. This has meant that all subsequent analysis of Lawrence, even vehemently anti-feminist or ostensibly apolitical readings, must engage in some sort of defensive evasion of the early feminist case. However, more recent psychoanalytically informed analyses, or work drawing upon gay theory, have argued for a much more sexually contradictory Lawrence than this rather monolithic masculine monster. Rather than oppose with a countervailing critique, we might instead read Lawrence against himself. There is a desperation in his polemicizing, in his insistent assertion of the strictures of roles. All of his work can be read as an anxious investigation of how the messiness of existence fails to fit into a neatly organized system of binary qualities, however hard Lawrence at times might want to make the system stick. I began chapter 3 with a quote from Fantasia of the Unconscious on the difference of men and women. Lawrence continues a little later:
The whole mode, the whole everything is really different in man and woman. Therefore we should keep boys and girls apart, that they are pure and virgin in themselves.
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- Information
- D. H. Lawrence , pp. 86 - 109Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997