Divya Saksena
Middle Tennessee State University, USA
"A much bigger thing than passion" - D. H. Lawrence's Women and Love in the Postcolonial Classroom "Love is a much bigger thing than passion, and a woman much more than sex." D. H. Lawrence, Letter to Edward Garnett, 2 June 1912
This paper bases itself on D. H. Lawrence's belief in the capacity of individuals to overcome fragmentation through love in order to negotiate their relationships within multiple interpretative communities. Reviewing too his personal achievement in doing so, it will examine his experience of women and love, from his mother to friends like Jessie Chambers, Louie Burrows and Blanche Jennings, to his wife Frieda Weekley. It will show how his writings between 1905 and 1913 reflect his perception of women and the role these particular women played in his artistic development as a writer, at least up until the publication of Sons and Lovers. In particular it will draw upon 15-plus years of teaching Lawrence in undergraduate programs in India and the United States from the postcolonial perspective. Why does Lawrence continue to survive as a favorite writer for students? How does he create and occupy what Homi Bhabha calls the "third space" that "displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom?" In response, I contend that Lawrence in a large part remains un-read and that there is a need to return to his non-fictional writings, to follow his arguments in entirety, as he made them. Yes, he is an advocate of gender differences. This is not to deny his belief in equality of opportunity to people of different sexes. It is, rather, to emphasize his warning against equality of expectations from separate individuals who are essentially different, not only in gender but also in their capacity to achieve an aesthetic and thereby moral response through their own instincts and emotions. To this end, I have frequently used Lawrence's non-fiction writing to trace the trajectories of his developing artistic imperatives. Rarely does one find so confessional and honest a writer, or one so willing to share generously his thoughts and ideas with others even in his private correspondence. Along with the abundant references to his mother Lydia Lawrence, this paper will therefore examine in some detail the letters he wrote to Jessie Chambers, Louie Burrows and Blanche Jennings—the primary feminine and/or amatory influences in his life before the all-encompassing experience of his love for Frieda Weekley. All these women (with his sister Lettice Ada Lawrence and friend Edward Garnett) were to a considerable extent instrumental in assisting Lawrence's struggle to articulate his own experience of love as well as his concept of love. Through them, he was ultimately able to write about the emotion with critical insight in Sons and Lovers, with confidence in Women in Love and with courage in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Years ago as a rookie teacher still finishing my M.Phil at Delhi University, India, I was given Lawrence's Sons and Lovers to teach as a 'special assignment.' None of the senior male professors at the college wanted to teach a mixed-gender class a text with that "dirty-sounding" title. And what the men wouldn't do, their women colleagues didn't want to touch with the proverbial bargepole. Since then I nearly always got the Lawrence unit—that is, Sons and Lovers—with the Honors undergraduates. While the concern of "Is it a dirty book?" or "Why was he banned?" faded over time, the students still tended to approach the book with trepidation. When I left Delhi University in 1998, I had taught the novel to several groups of seniors at a women-only college. Moreover, as a woman who actually requested the Lawrence unit instead of the "safe" ones like Joseph Conrad or E.M. Forster, I was soon an established Lawrence freak. For the students, however, now it was not trepidation, but indignation at the alleged mistreatment, even brutality, meted out to the women characters in Lawrence's novel. Going by their readings in postcolonialism and by radical feminist interpretations of Lawrence's work, the young women in the class would angrily begin to dismiss him as rabidly anti-feminist, as they would Paul Morel. Yet Sons and Lovers remained for every class a prime favorite, not only to read but also to write on for the final examination. Regardless of their ideological indoctrination or politicizing, my all-women classes never failed to succumb to the Lawrence magic with words. Since I encouraged, sometimes even compelled them to read Lawrence's other writings, they eventually distinguished the fine line of difference between the real-life Lawrence and his fictional alter-ego Paul Morel. Gradually their initial concern: "Was he really like that with real women?" morphed into the question "What was he really like with real women?"
In the summer of 2005 in Delhi, some of my former students met up with me and quite naturally, the talk turned to our Lawrence classes. As determined professionals, they had chosen financial independence and careers instead of the traditional option of marriage. In the context of postcolonial urban India, they now constituted a new kind of east-west hybridity, a "third space" of their own. I casually asked if reading Sons and Lovers had put them off love and relationships. Surprisingly