PART ONE – Biographical/Historical Context
The image with which D. H. Lawrence most associated was the Phoenix, whose presence rises eternal from its own ashes. Plagued by tuberculosis, complex psychological issues between himself and his mother and wife, and the suppression of his works because of their frank sexual depictions, Lawrence has arisen from the ashes of a premature death at age 44 to represent one of the most influential literary artists of the 20th century. Lawrence’s birth occurred in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on September 11, 1885 and his death in a sanatorium on the French Riviera came on March 2, 1930 (Encarta, 1). Lawrence was the son of a coal miner who drank to excess and beat his wife and children. This caused him to become deeply attached to his mother, “Lawrence’s affections were fixed upon his mother, an almost crippling attachment which is disclosed in Lawrence’s best novel, the autobiographical Sons and Lovers” (Untermeyer 461). Her death when Lawrence was twenty-six greatly affected his health and he soon fell in love with a married woman who would become his one close human bond in life, Frieda von Richtofen. They eloped two years after meeting and were never to enjoy much peace because, since she was German and Lawrence detested the artificiality of modern society, they became the victims of the spy-hunting fever that swept the region as World War I began. Lawrence fled England never to return and never to actually find a true land he could call home-though he lived in many.
Where influences on Lawrence are concerned, one must cite Nietzsche because of the deep compassion and conviction on behalf of the author that an artist is possessed by his work to the exclusion of all else-in other words an attempt to develop the “Superman” of Art by following the Dionysian impulse to the exclusion of the social impulse. Lawrence was deeply contradicted internally as a result of the pl...