D. H. Lawrence’s Self-Consciousness

Abstract

The self-consciousness of D. H. Lawrence’s poems, novels and stories is not obvious or central. To read other writers of the timeT. S. Eliot, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Beckett— is to encounter headon books which, through explicit analysis, convolution or analogy, reflect on themselves. These authors look at art, look at the imagination of other artists, and look at themselves. This kind of reflexiveness is not peculiar to the twentieth century (nor did it begin in English and French eighteenth-century literature, and go underground during the nineteenth century). Most art is selfconscious in one way or another, imaginative achievement taking its place congenially amongst imaginative creations. Lawrence is no exception, though his selfconsciousness is less conspicuous than that of his contemporaries. Certain kinds of self-consciousness are subjects on which he holds a moral position; they are psychic states of which he disapproves. They are also phases of his imaginative experience through which he needs to pass.