Tenley Williams

In the "Study of Thomas Hardy" and "The Crown," D. H. Lawrence sets forth a philosophy and a mythography of the self for a modern world. At the core of his polemical works and his fiction is the idea of an absence, an insufficiency that he represents in dualities, such as hub and wheel, male and female principles, dark and light, birth and death, birth and rebirth. Both works are also a response to the profound impact of the Great War on Lawrence's views on the nature of solitude, community, and the purposes of art, and to the Freudian trope of the self as a fiction in competition with his own. ;"The Crown" is Lawrence's "proposition about life" and a statement of resistance to the incursion of psychoanalysis into art. As a nonconformist Christian, he moves toward apocalyptic vision and renewal based upon a healthy attitude toward sex as an organizing trope. The difficulty of expressing or realizing the "non-human quality of life" is the artistic tension central to the "Study," his first attempt to articulate the philosophy he will struggle to shape into a distinctive aesthetic in his novels. From Hardy, he takes the essential dualism of nature and culture; like Freud, he takes the imaginary space where the "unconscious" meets the "conscious mind," the idea of an affective, mute, interior force at the innermost recesses of being; like Emerson, he seeks an irreducible place "beyond which analysis cannot go." ;In both the "Study" and "The Crown," Lawrence's prophetic voice interweaves the myth and politics of a social order with an idea of psychological being that defies the Freudian psychoanalytic model. With an aesthetic that claims psychological being for art, Lawrence swerves from the Victorians and the Romantics into the volatile matrix of a nascent twentieth-century modernism