Blake & D. H. Lawrence

BOOK REVIEWS the extensive discussion of Ursula's childhood and the dramatically lesser childhoods of Winifred Crich and Loerke. Indeed, since the gnomish sculptor Loerke deserves only the last two paragraphs as "the perverse bearer of the childhood motif," one might ask why the childhood of Gerald Crich is glossed over. And more might be made here of the absence of children in this desperate novel. One recalls the earlier draft in which Gudrun is pregnant with Gerald's child, for example. Over all, D. H. Lawrence and the Child offers a sensitive, intelligent, yet fairly traditional reading of Lawrence. Although its last chapter makes reference to the work of Jacques Lacan, this study works outside the arena of poststructuralist theory of the past decade and a half—a factor which might recommend it to some readers! Others might argue that the psychoanalytic insights into childhood of Lacan as well as those offered by the sociologist Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering : Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, 1976) and the psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein (The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, 1976) make useful background for a study of the child. As readings of Lawrence's major work, however, Sklenicka's book will prove useful in directing attention to the function of the child and to the theme of childhood and parenting. Earl G. Ingersoll SUNY College at Brockport Blake & D. H. Lawrence Margaret Storch. Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. 226 pp. $28.95 READING Margaret Storch's book is a happy reminder of the great distance we have moved in literary criticism since this reviewer sat on her hands to conceal frustration at the complacent pontifications of formalists and new critics. And high time! Sons and Lovers is the novel on which so many of us formed our first vision of some dark connection to our parents which we were apparently fated to act out in our own intimate relationships. To discuss it under the constraints which excluded biography was stultifying to the reader and a betrayal of the novel. What an obtuse evasion it seemed to dismiss the overdose that Paul Morel administers to his mother as a "mercy killing!" It denied the mother/son symbiosis which is at the very core of the developing artist's emotional life. It is the death of such critical hegemony and the development of 259 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 psychological theory which feminist approaches can utilize that make possible the theoretical matrix of Storch's book. Using the object relations theory as advanced by Melanie Klein, Storch locates the origins of both Blake's and Lawrence's ambivalence toward women in the prominent role played in their childhood by a weak, absent or depreciated father with whom the sons could not identify in forming a union against the dangerously powerful rival parent. The result is that a strong sense of gender fails to develop, in response to which the male child overvalues masculinity and creates a grandiose sense of self as protection against the imago of the rival parent which he had internalized (or in psychoanalytic terms, "introjected"). For Blake and Lawrence this internalized rival becomes in their work the poetic vision of the Female Will. Both see its manifestation in a way quite at odds with the thought of their time in which reason and abstraction were considered the forte of males. For Blake the triumph of reason and abstraction was embodied in the Enlightenment which he considered a great evil. For Lawrence it was idealism of which the strongest and most perverse form was the overbearing and sentimentalized mother whose influence in the adult male's life was sex in the head. The Kleinian paradigm that Storch uses is a most useful tool for her trenchant readings of Blake and Lawrence; they have demonstrated in their work that—at least as artists—they viewed human life as an ongoing conflict between the internalized fantasy object, never outgrown , and the avatars of the object encountered in adult relationships. Storch asks about Blake and Lawrence, men who were both formed by the English dissenting tradition which is...