D.H. Lawrence was long a controversial literary figure largely because of his attention to sexual issues in his works. Kingsley Widmer identifies the aesthetic of Lawrence as primitivistic, which he differentiates from primitivism:
The primitivistic is the aesthetic employment in the twentieth-century arts of primitive materials and forms in ways which are significantly antithetical to the values of primitivism. Instead, the widespread primitive materials and methods in the modern arts must be understood as a sophisticated artifice for presenting amoral explorations of experience (Widmer 342).
Widmer defines primitivism as having certain elements:
1) a preference for the natural, seen in a positive light;
2) a preference for the life and products of a primitive people, with primitive here being either cultural or chronological;
3) an exaltation of an earlier and more primitive stage of history; and
4) a preference for nostalgia in terms of accepting natural simplicity over artificial complication (Widmer 342).
Lawrence combines his working-class roots with the higher social position afforded by his education in an England much shaped by social class. His father was a coalminer. David Herbert Lawrence went through University College, Nottingham, and worked for a time as a teacher. His career as a writer is closely tied with his life, so much so that distinguishing between the two is difficult:
Misunderstandings about his supposed obsession with sexuality and the needless legal action for obscenity in connection with two of his novels (The Rainbow and Lady Chatterly's Lover) initially distorted judgment of his work, but he is now firmly established as a major modernist novelist. On the other hand, he has been the subject of irrelevant hero-worship which is equally distorting, and which he would have repudiated (Williams 218).
The sexuality of both male and female characters is strong and often...