There are those who are born with a star and those who are born with a star. David Herbert Lawrence belongs to the second group. At least it can be considered that way taking into account that a guy of his ability and extensive literary production never achieved the success he deserved.
Attacked by various flanks from the powers that be, the narrowest moralists of his time to powerful feminist circles such as her own Virgina Woolf, His work went through censorship, public contempt and a posthumous assessment that led him to an exile that in the end should not have supposed so much trauma given his traveling spirit.
But, as often happens in the cultural sphere, everything that stirs up the most reactionary spheres ends up acquiring greater value when there is finally an opening or transition towards new currents, towards an assumption of new eras of thought and creation.
As for her attacks from feminism headed by Virginia Woolf, the truth is that those female characters in her works that were criticized for are really women who are liberated in the sexual sphere and capable of confronting, even in an inconsiderate way, the world. that they have had to live, which is still paradoxical the attack of a feminism that, despite everything, still needed an iconic image of a faithful woman in all circumstances.
Lawrence's humble origins, with a miner's father, perhaps made this disregard for him possible. That a type of lower middle class climbed to the top of the cultural sphere to deal with severely criticizing industrialization, capitalism and classism and who could also work in narrative, poetry, dramaturgy and even literary criticism did nothing more than corroborate the discomfort of power, capable of generating the opportune current of opinion with which to generate the reprehensible character, calling him a pornographer or any other type of label that aroused popular animosity.
But in the end time puts everything in its place. AND the work of David Herbert Lawrence It is already among the most recognized in the Anglo-Saxon world.
Top 3 Recommended Books by DH Lawrence
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Sex as a singular meeting point, like the orgasmic explosion derived from the clash between reason and vital drives.
Called obscene, banned at the time and practically unrecoverable for the cause even in 1960, this novel perhaps caused more discomfort at the time, because it represented a transgression in many other aspects beyond the sexual.
That a married woman belonging to high places decided to dispose of her young and poor lover and that they both indulged in this illicit passion could be grounds for repudiation.
But the added component of social criticism, the revolt of moral approaches and the invitation to seek spaces of freedom among so many impositions of the early twentieth century, became the main affront for the reviewers of the status quo of the moment.
Children and lovers
Autobiographical novel in many aspects (as in so many other cases throughout its literary production), as the author also recognizes.
And the truth is that the starting scenario with a marriage lacking any hint of love is very similar to what the author had to live.
With the continuous conflict between the father and the uneducated man, abandoned to his vices and unable to assume any family burden, the mother Gertrude Morel gives herself up to the upbringing of young William and Paul.
The problem is that her boundless dedication becomes a bouquet of thorns, especially when Paul finds that other irreconcilable love with a suffocating motherhood.
The Virgin and the Gypsy
If you haven't had enough with Lady Chatterley's lover, I assure you, neither has Lawrence. Still more freed from the straits of English society, his stay in Italy served to give birth to this work.
So transgressive was the novel in its time that it was certainly not published in its entirety until many years later. We meet in it Yvette, a maid that her father wants to educate trying to balance knowledge and iron morality, ends up going off on a tangent and falling in love with a gypsy.
Daily life, the atmosphere of dedication to small pleasures, sexuality... everything that gypsy culture entails ends up stealing the soul of the young woman, unable to control all that fire ignited in the discovery of distant lifestyles that, without However, they tune in to something that she had always carried inside, waiting for the final explosion.
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