Résultats de "D H Lawrence" dans Toutes les catégories

Two Blue Birds tells the tale of the classic triangle of the man, the wife and the secretary, who struggle to work out what their relationships are with each other. Neither of the women seem to want the man sexually but the secretary offers devotion while the parasitic wife has more insight into the man and his work. All the relationships seem unhealthy, all three seem to want something different but are incapable of expressing what they desire.

"The Lovely Lady" is a fine observation of a life - the lovely lady of the title - that thrives by sucking the life out of others. The two victims escape by a somewhat melodramatic and comical means, but in the process destroy the lovely lady and form what will probably be a dull and passionless union.

"Rawdon's Roof" is a slight comic piece, relying for its humor on the folly of a man throwing away his chance of happiness because of an unexplained and unlikely vow.

"The Undying Man" is a slightly unfinished piece, drawing its inspiration from Shelley's Frankenstein about the creation of life and the fear of death. It is interesting to speculate where Lawrence would have gone with the story, but the sound of broken glass is the most likely ending.

"The Blue Moccasins" has the charm of looking at some eternal human problems such as unequal marriage, the waning of sexual desire, and a woman who cannot give herself wholly to her husband in a thoroughly English and local setting: the stage of an amateur dramatic society where all the passions and delusions come to a head.

"Mother and Daughter" can be understood as one of Lawrence's diatribes against women. Two women do their best to get along without men, but in the end, as Lawrence always proposed, a woman cannot be fulfilled without a dominant man, however unsuitable he may be.

"A Dream of Life" is unfinished, but there is enough extant to let us know where Lawrence was going in this story. He begins by looking back and bemoaning what has become of his generation, under the thumb of women and lacking the spark of his father's mining friends. Then, in a scene reminiscent of Pilgrim's Progress, he travels forward in time and sees his village in the distant future. The people are living in an idealized commune, but do they have the spark of life?

Just as the lovely Alvina Houghton comes of age, her widowed father’s business starts to dry up. In a drastic effort to regain his fortune and secure his daughter’s standing in society, James Houghton buys, of all things, a theater. Her father’s plans and dreams go misunderstood in the town, but the theater itself does quite well...for a time. One of the traveling players employed at the theater, a sensual Italian man named Ciccio, catches Alvina’s eye, and she finds herself intensely attracted to him.

"The Last Laugh" is another of Lawrence's supernatural stories, set in a dreamlike snowy London. The question left open is who the three people in the story saw on the snowy evening. Perhaps Pan, returned to destroy the Christian God, as the church is destroyed in the story, and to bring love to the frigid young woman in the form of a policeman who is prevented from leaving the house. But why the other quite harmless, and Platonic lover, had to die is a mystery. Perhaps because he had made love to a Jewess?

"Sun" is a sensual story of a woman rediscovering her sexuality through the power of the sun. But for the unexpected arrival of her businessman husband, she was ready to give herself to a local peasant, but is finally pulled back to respectability by her husband. But she is free to remain apart from him in the sun.

"Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" tells the improbable story of an intellectual editor persuading a working woman to live with him. We would say now "on the rebound" from a failed marriage, but Lawrence crosses the class divide and poses questions about what makes us attracted to other people. The intellectual twists and turns of the magazine editor contrast nicely with the stark honesty of the spurned miner husband.

"The Flying Fish" is unfinished, but tells the story of an Englishman, Gethin Day, returning home after years in South America. There is a hint of the homesickness Lawrence may have felt during his long exile. The bulk of the story is the time spent on the ship which is taking Day back to England. It is a ship of fools, a "plague ship", and the only positive note is the joy Day sees in the play of the flying fish and porpoises around the ship. It is tantalizing to speculate how Day would have adapted to English life again, confined to an old house in an old country.

"Glad Ghosts" is another of Lawrence's supernatural stories, set in the archetypical country house. He doesn't attempt to explain the supernatural happenings which occur, but uses them to extol his own ideas of the power of the sex drive and the triumph of life over death.

"The Border Line" is unusual in that Lawrence dabbles in the supernatural (as he was to do again in "The Rocking-Horse Winner" two years later) and that this is less a story in the traditional sense and more an exploration of the mind of a particular woman, based on his own wife, Frieda. Katherine, in the story, realizes that her real love was her first husband, whom she should, according to Lawrence, have submitted to to gain real happiness. As Lawrence says in the story, thinking of his German wife, perhaps, "Beyond all race is the problem of man and woman."

"Things" takes a cutting look at two "idealistic" young Americans who travel around Europe in an attempt to give their spoiled lives some meaning, and in the end settle for suburban America, surrounded by their possessions, their "things".

"Adolf" is a charming story of a wild rabbit introduced by the father into a miner's home, to the delight of the children and the despair of the mother. Larger questions of life and death and nature and civilization are touched on with a light hand.

"You Touched Me" is a comic/tragic story of a forced marriage brought about by an accidental touch in the night, but the depth of the writing leaves the listener unsure if the couple are marrying for money or to release the passions realized by the touch.

The theme of the woman for whom the man is not "good enough" is worked out fully in Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers. The story is beautifully observed, as are the relationships in working families of the time. The suspense of "will she, won't she marry him" is kept on the boil until the last line of the story. "Fanny and Annie" is a small masterpiece of a short story.

"England, My England" is set in the years before the Great War of 1914, seen by some as an idyllic time of sunshine and peace before everything was shattered by the mechanized war. The family is placed in an idealized setting, deep in the English countryside, but there are snakes in this Garden of Eden. There is conflict between man and woman, brought to the fore by an accident to a child, and there is the seeming purposeless life led by the husband. The story ripples with the eugenic theories popular at the time, yet the conflicts are finally solved by the horror of the war.

"The Wilful Woman" was written by D.H. Lawrence in 1922. "The Wilful Woman" remained unfinished, and so the tough, spoiled, rich American woman, used to having her own way, does not get the nemesis Lawrence may have had in mind for her. Whether it was the Wordsworthian lessons of nature as she battles her way through the American wilderness or the harder lessons of a waiting husband who may or may not want her, we will never know.