Showing results for "dh lawrence" in World Literature

Publicada en Florencia a cuenta del autor en 1928 y prohibida en Gran Bretaña hasta 1960, cuando fue objeto de un famoso juicio por obscenidad, El amante de lady Chatterley está considerada hoy en día una de las grandes novelas del siglo XX. En sus páginas, D. H. Lawrence no solo explora con lujo de detalles el romance adúltero entre una mujer casada con un aristócrata y el guardabosques de su finca, sino que ofrece un magnífico diagnóstico de la sociedad británica del periodo de entreguerras, «una época esencialmente trágica».

"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.

In post-war East Midlands, in a home dominated by their difficult grandmother and aunt, Yvette and Lucille are two sisters struggling to bring joy into their lives. Their mother, having run off in a scandal, leaves the two to suffer a dysfunctional family life and oppressive domesticity. But one day, Yvette meets a free-spirited gypsy and his family, awakening her sexual desires and compounding her disenchantment.

In "The Prussian Officer", there is an anti-militarism theme, unpopular as the nation drew near to war, and an examination of latent homosexuality as the officer in the story struggles with his feelings for his orderly. The young soldier is driven beyond his breaking point, but finds a kind of redemption in his final return to natural surroundings and, symbolically, he finds equality in death with his tormentor as they are put side by side in the mortuary.

Lawrence is often accused of misogyny, and this story used as evidence against him. There is the simple but honest mine worker who has taken on a wife who is "above" him, but who is struggling to understand her and her feelings for him. Slowly, the story unravels the woman's past. The listener cannot be entirely unsympathetic to her plight - Lawrence is too good a writer to let that happen - but her dishonesty has probably ruined two lives, and our feelings are for the husband.

"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.

Lawrence is at his best in this story, taken from the scenes of his childhood and based on characters he knew intimately. The main themes of the story are the class system that dominated society at the time and the pressures put on the young lovers who have to overcome it, and the position of women in society who have nothing to offer but their bodies. For the sake of security and position, one daughter makes a loveless marriage whilst the other daughter gives all that up for love.

The Woman Who Rode Away is a dark, troubling story set in the wilderness of South America. What makes this story compelling is that the woman is at the end of her personal tether and the Indians are at the end of their cultural one. They seek one another out for terrible but perhaps predictable uses. Each of them looks to the other for "salvation" in a way that expresses the desperation and futility of their situation.

In this story, Lawrence returns to the scenes of his young manhood with farming scenes and the life he experienced when courting Jessie Chambers at Haggs Farm in Nottinghamshire. Two brothers find love in two different women, both out of the ordinary for farm lads - one a German nanny, the other the wife of a tramp who begs food from the farmers. Both men are redeemed from their rivalry for each other and their suppressed sexuality by the first experiences of love on the same night.

The Man Who Loved Islands is a haunting story of a man who tries to control his life by making his world ever smaller by moving to increasingly smaller islands. Each one proves to be beyond his ability to control either other people or his sexual desire, and finally the last island conquers him. The story can even be seen as a metaphor of man's inexorable march to death, when we are all finally alone.

"The Princess" of the story is a spoiled, sexless woman who is thrown in with a passionate man whom she takes into her bed and then rejects. This rejection leads to his ultimate death. Lawrence again pleads his case for the necessary domination of woman by man and shows the sterility of a life lead without sexual passion. Set against the bleak mountains of South America, it is one of Lawrence's most enduring tales.

Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society?

"In Love" handles a serious subject in a light, almost comic way. A couple are engaged but have no sexual feelings for each other. The tensions, as they try to do what is expected of them, explode until a compromise is reached. But will the marriage last?

"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 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.

"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.

"Samson and Delilah" is set against a Cornish backdrop. Lawrence and his wife tried to settle in Cornwall during the First World War, but were hounded by the authorities and forced to leave. Lawrence pointedly describes the local people as "mindless" in this story. It is almost a Homeric story of a husband returning home after a long absence, having to fight to regain his wife. But in this story, it is the wife who is the obstacle. But she succumbs to the man's physical presence, as Lawrence demanded all women should if they were to attain happiness.

"Wintry Peacock" is, on the surface, a tale of misdirected love or even irresponsible love, the relationship between the wife and the peacock being the most strange, but it is the conspiracy of the two men in the story to prevent the truth coming out about the husband's love child that is most disturbing. The innocent are punished and the guilty get away with their sins, and the author goes laughing down the hill at the end of the story.

"The Overtone" looks at a sterile marriage with no children and no spontaneous sexual feeling between the couple. Lawrence seems to lose interest in the story, although he introduces a younger woman who walks away baffled at the end. His purpose seems to be to analyze the relationship between men and women in religious terms - Christianity for the women and the old Pan religion for the men. Lawrence produces some fine writing, but the argument at the end of the story seems contrived.