D.H.

Lawrence: Some personal information

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1908) was born on 11 September 1885 in Eastwood

(Nottinghamshire), a growing collier village of about 5000 inhabitants and a vast
majority of the male population were colliers ( Lawrence’s father and all three
paternal uncles worked down the pit). It was a tightly-knit community of men
whose life depended on each other. They also had to support wives, few of whom
had jobs, and children who mostly could not wait until they were 14 to be able to
start as colliers. It was not a promising background for a man who would make his
life’s work writing about the fulfilled relationships of men and women, and the
crucial relationships b/w human beings and the natural world.
Lawrence was the fourth child of Arthur Lawrence and Lydia Beardsall. Lydia had
originally had ambitions to be a teacher and was always bookish and interested in
intellectual matters. Her marriage to a collier in 1875 created a great deal of tension
in the family. No matter their poverty, Lydia had married for love, a man who
worked with his hand ( and came home black). But it also seems possible that when
he married Lydia he had not told her that he himself worked underground. The loss
of her own family, her disillusionment with her husband, and her anger at the ease
with which, after early promises, he slipped back into the male world of evenings
spent drinking with his mates, her dissatisfaction with her own roles as wife and
mother had created in Lydia Lawrence both depression and a great deal of anger
Home life for the Lawrence children became polarized between loyalty to their
mother as she struggled to do her best for them, in saving and encouraging them in
taking their education seriously, and a rather troubled love for their father, who
was increasingly treated by his wife as a drunken never- do-well and who drank
to escape the tensions he experienced at home. Lydia Lawrence consciously
alienated the children from their father, and told them stories of her early married
life ( like, for example, the episode when Arthur locked her out of the house at
night ) which they never forget or forgave their father for. All the children apart
from the eldest son George grew up with an abiding love for their mother and
various kinds of dislike for their father. Arthur Lawrence, for his part, unhappy at
the lack of respect and love shown him and the way in which his male privilege as
head of the household was constantly breached, reacted by drinking and
deliberately irritating and alienating his family. It seems quite likely that, for long
periods of their childhood, his drinking and staying out in the evenings until his
tipsy return would lead to a row, effectively dominated the children experience. His
behavior, and his spending of a portion of the family income on drink, caused all
the major quarrels between the parents, divided the children’s love and loyalty and
left D.H Lawrence with a profound hatred of his father and an anxious sympathetic
love for his mother. The young Paul Morel lying in bed at night praying “ Let him
be killed at pit” ( Sons and Lovers) is probably a true memory of the young Bert
Lawrence, lying in bed waiting for his father’s return home at night.
During childhood, like the other children in family, young Herbert Lawrence was
 on his mother’s side. He resented his father’s coarse behavior and allied himself
with his mother’s delicacy and refinement. After the death of an elder brother, he
became the center of his mother’s emotional life. In a letter written in 1910, he
wrote: “ Their marriage has been one carnal, bloody fight. I was born hating my father as
early as I can remember. I shivered with horror when he touched me. He was very bad
when I was born.”
So, his working class background, his locality, Eastwood-“ the country of my heart”, and
the tension between his parents were the raw materials for quite a number of his works..
When his mother developed cancer in 1910, and as she wasted away, Lawrence was
devastated and described the next few months as his “sick years”. It is clear that
Lawrence had an extremely close relationship with his mother and his grief following her
death became a major turning point in his life. He began writing Paul Morel (later Sons
and Lovers) as an investigation into his relationship with her. Her bitter disapproval of
her son’s relationship and near romance with Jessie Chambers also featured in the novel.
It was said that Sons and Lovers was a brilliant illustration of Sigmund Freud’s theory of
the Oedipus Complex and represented his deep concern with the male-female
relationship.
. He believed that industrialization and machinery degraded people and bitterly blames”
D.H Lawrence got a reputation as a writer on sexual themes but actually his themes were
much wider than that. He examined all aspects of human relationships, the relationship
between Man and Nature, between the spirit of Man and the spirit of industrialism which
could deny the true nature of humanity. His radical ideas about human relationship were
deeply influenced by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He explored the ideas that
people’s motives for their actions were unconscious and deeply linked to sexuality. Sex,
for Lawrence, was a moral issue and represented the mysterious generative aspect of the
universe. It was also a way to respond to the inhumanity of the industrial culture.
He was at odds with the materialistic outlook of his day and could not bear pretence of
any kindthe moneyed classes and promoters of industry”
He was a modernist in so far as he relied heavily on the use of symbols in his stories. But
the realistic nature of his writing was evident in his unflinching depiction of the grim
struggles of everyday life.