The Absence of Authentic Realism in Lawrence

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Recommended: Females in 20th century literature

"The whole thing is an astonishing feat of imagination. If we do not, in reading it, think of it as a feat, that is because it all seems so real. And this reality derives from the intensity and profound seriousness of Lawrence's interest in human life." (F. R. Leavis)

The most striking thing about F. R. Leavis' statement above regarding D. H. Lawrence's short story `The Woman Who Rode Away' is how totally I disagree with Mr Leavis on every point. While Leavis praises the force of reality Lawrence creates, I will argue that there is an absence of any `authentic realism' in Lawrence's fatalistic portrayal of the woman. I will question the notion that there is anything `astonishing' or imaginative in Lawrence's hackneyed age-old `rape fantasy', whilst also examining the curious disparity between how F. R. Leavis and I read this story, and trying to ascertain why such a chasm of understanding should exist between what Mr Leavis concludes is `poetic' and `astonishing', and what is, to me, utterly distasteful.

Kate Millett's work, Sexual Politics has been long criticised for its lack of the `conventional respect for authority and intentions of the author', but for such a reader as I, bewildered by the representation of one of my sex, and baffled by the gap in understanding between the esteemed Mr Leavis and myself, there is no question that Millett's text represents something of an epiphany. She puts words to the unspoken problem confronting the female reader when she approaches texts such as Lawrence's, that she is asked by literary and cultural custom to read and understand as a man: `Hers is not meant to be the last word on any writer, but a wholly new word, little hard before and strange. For the first time we are being aske...

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... (Norton: New York 1996)

de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex tr. Parshley, H. M. (Vintage: London 1997)

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell: Oxford 1986)

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Penguin: Middlesex 1974)

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper (Viagro: New York 2003)

Heilbrun, Carolyn. `Millett's Sexual Politics: A Year Later' (class handout)

Lawrence, D. H. `The Woman Who Rode Away' (class handout)

Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover (Penguin: London 1993)

Leavis, F. R. extract from D. H. Lawrence Novelist (class handout)

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics (Viagro: London 1993)

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics (Routledge: London 1987)

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar (Faber and Faber: London 1988)

Showalter, Elaine. `Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness' (class handout)

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