Judith Ruderman
Duke University, USA
D. H. Lawrence's Dis-Ease: Examining the Symptoms of "Illness as Metaphor"
Susan Sontag's 1978 essay called "Illness as Metaphor" suggests a useful approach to one aspect of Lawrence in/and his times. Sontag's premise is that an illness, particularly one whose cause and/or cure is unknown, may accrue a constellation of meanings about personal and national character in a given era. That is, a medical condition is as much an historical lens as any other cultural component.
The illness I place under the microscope, tuberculosis, was a signal disease for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lawrence "expressed" his ailment, and illness in general, obliquely through metaphors for the ills of his society; thus, his characters and his language are frequently disease-ridden. In turn, the Establishment reacted to Lawrence's subversive works in terms of disease, thereby revealing "illness as metaphor" in another, complementary (but surely not complimentary) sense.
Examining tuberculosis as cultural marker leads—via Lawrence's view on the cause of TB (in his essay on Poe)—to a brief diagnosis of a present-day medical issue, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (M. S. B. P.), and hence to an updated take on the "devouring mother" in particular and contemporary Western cultural concerns in general.