Showing results by author "D. H. Lawrence" in All Categories

"Smile" is one of Lawrence's shorter pieces, a thumbnail sketch of an idea. A man is relieved that his wife is dead and struggles to hide his relief when confronted with his wife's body. The relief breaks out into a smile, which he struggles to excuse. How much better it would have been, Lawrence seems to be saying, if he had just laughed out loud!

"Samson and Delilah" is set against a Cornish backdrop. Lawrence and his wife tried to settle in Cornwall during the First World War, but were hounded by the authorities and forced to leave. Lawrence pointedly describes the local people as "mindless" in this story. It is almost a Homeric story of a husband returning home after a long absence, having to fight to regain his wife. But in this story, it is the wife who is the obstacle. But she succumbs to the man's physical presence, as Lawrence demanded all women should if they were to attain happiness.

"The Primrose Path" looks at what can be the ephemeral nature of man and woman, love, and the horror and certainty of death, which seems to hang over all the characters in this haunting short story.

"Wintry Peacock" is, on the surface, a tale of misdirected love or even irresponsible love, the relationship between the wife and the peacock being the most strange, but it is the conspiracy of the two men in the story to prevent the truth coming out about the husband's love child that is most disturbing. The innocent are punished and the guilty get away with their sins, and the author goes laughing down the hill at the end of the story.

"You Touched Me" is a comic/tragic story of a forced marriage brought about by an accidental touch in the night, but the depth of the writing leaves the listener unsure if the couple are marrying for money or to release the passions realized by the touch.

"The Princess" of the story is a spoiled, sexless woman who is thrown in with a passionate man whom she takes into her bed and then rejects. This rejection leads to his ultimate death. Lawrence again pleads his case for the necessary domination of woman by man and shows the sterility of a life lead without sexual passion. Set against the bleak mountains of South America, it is one of Lawrence's most enduring tales.

"Tickets Please" returns Lawrence to his native Nottingham during the First World War. The social revolution of women doing jobs previously done by men also begins to change the relationship between the sexes, and the women in the story are aggressive and wanting their rights. But are they happier for conquering the flighty male in the story, or is the domination of man by woman one step too far, only generating hate and unhappiness?

"England, My England" is set in the years before the Great War of 1914, seen by some as an idyllic time of sunshine and peace before everything was shattered by the mechanized war. The family is placed in an idealized setting, deep in the English countryside, but there are snakes in this Garden of Eden. There is conflict between man and woman, brought to the fore by an accident to a child, and there is the seeming purposeless life led by the husband. The story ripples with the eugenic theories popular at the time, yet the conflicts are finally solved by the horror of the war.

"Adolf" is a charming story of a wild rabbit introduced by the father into a miner's home, to the delight of the children and the despair of the mother. Larger questions of life and death and nature and civilization are touched on with a light hand.

The theme of the woman for whom the man is not "good enough" is worked out fully in Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers. The story is beautifully observed, as are the relationships in working families of the time. The suspense of "will she, won't she marry him" is kept on the boil until the last line of the story. "Fanny and Annie" is a small masterpiece of a short story.

In "The Thimble", Lawrence moves to the world of the affluent middle classes, a world to which he perhaps aspired. The story is a touching one of a disfigured husband returning home from the war to a beautiful new wife. The thimble of the story can be seen to represent purposeless, surface beauty, which has no function. The husband casts the thimble away, but can this marriage survive the surface damage and find a deeper meaning?

"The Blind Man" is a delicate study of a loving relationship blighted by the man's blindness and disfigurement in the First World War. The arrival of an old friend of the woman brings into the open feelings and fears previously suppressed.

"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" is a story gripping in its content. It encompasses the terror of death and disgrace, which is redeemed by passion and sexuality. The question Lawrence leaves open is whether the doctor's avowal of love is genuine or driven by the awakening of his own sexuality and pity for the woman.

"The Wilful Woman" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1922. "The Wilful Woman" remained unfinished, and so the tough, spoiled, rich American woman, used to having her own way, does not get the nemesis Lawrence may have had in mind for her. Whether it was the Wordsworthian lessons of nature as she battles her way through the American wilderness or the harder lessons of a waiting husband who may or may not want her, we will never know.

"Monkey Nuts" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1922. "Monkey Nuts" turns the traditional love story on its head. It is the woman (the new liberated woman Lawrence had little time for) who does the chasing and the boy who is reluctant. Lawrence seems to be saying it is the unspoken love between the two men in the story which is more satisfying than the possible love between the man and the woman, which the boy rejects. Although the older man goes through the motions of chasing the girl, even he seems to realize the sterility of one-sided love.

"Rex" is a riotous story of the turmoil caused in a household by the arrival of a puppy. The setting is similar to the one found in Sons and Lovers, but Lawrence thought this scene deserved the fuller treatment of a short story. The question of the destructive force of unconditional love is left open.

The hero of this story returns to England to undertake a "respectable" marriage, but is drawn to see the passionate love of his life once more. Their mutual passion attracts and repels the couple in equal measure, but the young man pulls away in a literal fire of passion. He escapes from the witch of his desires to the respectability he craves, but we wonder if he can be truly happy without the sensual side of his life being satisfied.

In this beautifully observed study of a new marriage and the sexual tensions that run through it, Lawrence returns to his theme that happiness in marriage can only come with the submission of the woman to the man. The young wife strains against the bonds of being married and dallies with another man but returns to the arms of her husband once he shows his true feelings for her.

Lawrence is often accused of misogyny, and this story used as evidence against him. There is the simple but honest mine worker who has taken on a wife who is "above" him, but who is struggling to understand her and her feelings for him. Slowly, the story unravels the woman's past. The listener cannot be entirely unsympathetic to her plight - Lawrence is too good a writer to let that happen - but her dishonesty has probably ruined two lives, and our feelings are for the husband.

In "The Prussian Officer", there is an anti-militarism theme, unpopular as the nation drew near to war, and an examination of latent homosexuality as the officer in the story struggles with his feelings for his orderly. The young soldier is driven beyond his breaking point, but finds a kind of redemption in his final return to natural surroundings and, symbolically, he finds equality in death with his tormentor as they are put side by side in the mortuary.