Abstract
How time is viewed in D. H. Lawrence’s novels has been diversely interpreted. Some critics see his writings as past-oriented and cyclic. Others argue that he “never looked back at the past,” and that his writings are future-oriented. A resolution of these contrary readings can be effected by a close study of his two major novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. What becomes evident is that his fictional world sings “of what is past, or passing, or to come,” and that the two novels embody all three of these experiences of time.
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Notes
See Walter Allen, The English Novel (New York, 1957, p. 439, and in New York Times Book Review (September 5, 1965), pp. 4, 25.
George H. Ford, Dickens and his Readers (Princeton, 1955), p. 254.
Edward Alexander, “Thomas Carlyle and D. H. Lawrence.” University of Toronto Quarterly (April, 1968), p. 256.
Laurence Lemer, The Truthtellers (London, 1967), p. 193.
Walter J. Ong, “Evolution, Myth, and Poetic Vision.” Comparative Literature Studies (1966), 1–20. Ong’s distinction is essentially between writers who believe in progress (he cites Tennyson, not altogether aptly, as an example), who view time as “linear,” and those writers who believe that the past repeats itself in the present, that there is no true progress, and who view time hence as “cyclic.” As examples of the latter attitudes he cites Yeats, Lawrence, and Joyce. Yeats’s view of time, Ong says, is “spectacularly and desperately anti-evolutionary.” —On the historical background of these two concepts of time, see G. J. Whitrow’s observation that in the mediaeval period “the linear concept was fostered by the mercantile class and the rise of a money economy.” “The cyclic”, on the other hand, was reinforced by “ownership of land,” for to the landowner “time was felt to be plentiful and associated with the unchanging cycle of the soil. With the circulation of money, however, the emphasis was on mobility.” —Whitrow, “Reflections on the History of the Concept of Time.” The Study of Time,ed. J. T. Fraser, et. ai., (Berlin, 1972), p. 7.
Scott Sanders, D, H, Lawrence (London, 1973), p. 101. See also Oates, New Heaven and Earth (New York, 1974), p. 39.
J. T. Fraser, The Voices of Time (New York, 1966), p. 254.
John Raleigh, in Partisan Review (1958), p. 260.
Lord Raglan, The Hero (New York, 1956), p. 4 cited by Claire Rosenfield, Paradise of Snakes (Chicago, 1967), p. 31.
See Rosenfield, p. 31
See G. H. Ford, Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. Lawrence (New York, 1965), ch. 8.
In Women in Love there are occasionally scenes of the same sort, most memorably when the lovers visit the inn at Southwell Minister: “Father came here with mother,” Ursula remarks (ch. 23).
For a useful analysis of how Lawrence employs the present tense in The Rainbow see Roger Sale’s article in Colin Clarke’s Casebook, The Rainbow and Women in Love (London, 1969), 104–08.
For a discussion of the phrase as used by Lawrence, see Oates, pp. 50–51. Browning’s poetry, of course, may also be cited, as when the speaker in “The Last Ride Together” reflects: “What if we still rode on, we two/ With life forever old yet new, / Changed not in kind but in degree, / The instant made eternity.” —See also “The Experience of Timelessness,” a discussion of ecstacy in the dance, the forest, and the bower, by J. T. Fraser in his of Time, Passion and Knowledge (New York, 1975), 305–11. Eraser’s account of the dance could be effectively illustrated by Lawrence’s fine essay, “The Dance of the Sprouting Com” in Mornings in Mexico (1927), and also by the sheaves-gathering scene in The Rainbow (ch. 4).
See G. H. Ford, “Dickens and the Voices of Time,” Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius (Berkeley, 1971), 46–66.
Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture: 1300–1700 (London, 1967), p. 105.
See J. B. Priestley, Man and Time (New York, 1968), p. 20.
Ursula also suffers sometimes from a despair that her life has been pointless (chapter 15), but the experience, for her, is transient.
F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London, 1955), pp. 173–174.
On the general effects of tick-tock, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York, 1967), 44–46.
Cf. Gudrun and Loerke who “never talked of the future.” (Ch. 30).
See James R. Baker, “Lawrence as Prophetic Poet.” Journal of Modern Literature (July, 1974), 1219–38.
The Quest for Rananim,ed. George J. Zytaruk (Montreal, 1970), p. 61. —For a useful discussion of prophetic writing, Heilsgeschichte (salvation history), see J. T. Fraser, Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge,ipip, 21–11; 368–78.
See Ford, Double Measure, p. 97.
All the quotations are from the doctrinal essays, the Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), The Crown (1915), Love (1917), and The Two Principles (1919).
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Ford, G.H. (1978). The Eternal Moment: D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love . In: Fraser, J.T., Lawrence, N., Park, D.A. (eds) The Study of Time III. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-6287-9_23
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