D.H.

LAWRENCE (1885-1930)
Life and Works: David Herbert Lawrence was born in 1885 at Eastwood,
a colliery village in Nottinghamshire. His father, a miner, was a pleasure-
seeker. While the father sought his pleasure outside home, the mother
dominated the home and family. She was determined that her children should
not have anything to do with the squalid life in the colliery village. Lawrence
portrayed his mother’s domineering character in his third novel Sons and
Lovers.
Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottinghamshire High School. He stayed
there till the age of fifteen. He then took a job with a manufacturer of surgical
goods in Nottinghamshire. Next, he worked as a school-teacher in Croydon.
In 1909 Lawrence published some of his poems. Two years later. The
White Peacock, a novel was published. His mother died of cancer during this
period. Lawrence had an attack of pneumonia in 1911. He gave up teaching
and became a professional writer.
In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Weekly, wife of Professor Ernest
Weekly, to Germany. Though they were attached too each other. Frieda was
miserable because she had difficult for Lawrence because of the unsettled,
wandering life of the couple and of their childlessness.
In 1913 Lawrence published his next novel, Sons and Lovers. This novel
is largely autobiographical. The central figure, Paul Morel, is Lawrence
himself. The mother in the novel draws the son towards herself and away from
his sweetheart. This was Lawrence’s personal experience also. The father in
this novel is meant to be a portrayal of Lawrence’s brutal, drunkard father.
Subsequently, Lawrence felt that he was unduly harsh in his portrayal of his
father.
In July 1914, Lawrence married Frieda. When the first World War broke
out, Lawrence was ill. He was therefore spared combatant duties. He settled
with his wife on the Cornish Coast. Unfortunately, he and his wife were
expelled from England. In 1915 Lawrence published The Rainbow which was
considered obscene and banned.
Lawrence travelled extensively in Italy and Sicily, Ceylon and Australia.
U.S.A and Mexico, finally returning to Italy in 1928. He felt that Christianity
was exhausted and sought in ancient civilizations like those of Mexico and
Australia, a substitute for the devitalized Christian civilization.
In the last ten years of his life Lawrence published Women in Love,
Kangaroo, a novel with an Australian setting, The Plumed Serpent which has
a Mexican background, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which he glorified sex
as an effective antidote to the sterility of industrial civilization. He also wrote
much poetry, drawing attention to the instinctual life led by birds, animals and
reptiles. Snake and Mosquito are the most famous of his poems. Lawrence
has also to his credit several travel books containing vivid descriptions of the
countries he had visited, short stories, essay and several literary studied.
Lawrence’s views on sex: Lawrence is noted for his unconventional
views on sex. He fought a life-long battle against the established notion that
sex is indecent and a sin to be avoided at all costs. “I want men and women”,
he wrote, “to be able think sex fully, completely, honestly and cleanly”. He
regarded sex as the inexhaustible source of the fire of life. He opposed the
intellect or the mind dominating the body. The body, he felt, should not be
imprisoned by the mind; “I have always inferred that sex meant blood-
sympathy and blood-contact. Technically this is so. But as a matter of fact,
nearly all modern sex is a pure matter of nerves, cold and bloodless”. It should
not be construed, however, that Lawrence advocated animalism. He did not.
His aim was to return to the primal energy of Eden, before the human
consciousness was tarnished by the sense of sin.
Lawrence saw men and women engaged in a mutual battle. Each tried to
dominate and destroy the other’s personality. Lawrence most vehemently
attacked woman’s possessiveness and her relentless bid to keep her man to
herself. In Aaron’s Rod, a man expresses Lawrence’s own hatred of the
possessive women as follows:
“I hate her, when she knows, and when she wills. I hate her when she will
make of me that which serves her desire. She may love me, she may be soft
and kind to me, she may give her life to me. But why? Only because I am
hers.”
Lawrence wanted men and women not to possess, and he possessed by,
each other. He wanted them to love each other and at the same time live
“separately”, like “stars”.
Much of Lawrence’s philosophy of sex was derived from Freud. Like Freud,
Lawrence also felt that children are destroyed, and not helped, by excessive
parental love. He showed in Sons and Lovers how an over-fond mother tends
to wreck her son’s sex life. Again, like Freud, Lawrence attached importance
to the role played by the unconscious. (He elaborated his views on the
unconscious in his two-prose works, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
and Fantasia of the Unconscious.) The men and women in his works are jets
of emotional energy drawn form the vast, dark tides of unconscious impulse.
Lawrence described this dark, unconscious impulse in terms of a mystic
religion. He was an anti-rationalist and wanted men and women to be
governed by their solar plexus and not their intellect.
 Lawrence hated Christianity in its organised form. He had nothing but
contempt for such Christian virtues as humility, pity and good-will. Lawrence
was antagonistic to Jesus Christ. In his novella The Man Who Died, he depicts
Jesus coming alive from the tomb and falling love with a young Pagan
priestess.
To sum up, with his pro-sexual and anti-intellectual stand, Lawrence had
revolutionized the modern man’s attitude to sex.
ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)
Life and Works of Aldous Huxley: Born in 1894 Huxley left Eton at
seventeen because of temporary blindness. In the early years of the First
World War, he worked in a government office and later taught in a school.
After the war he turned journalist. Soon he made himself the most eminent of
the contemporary writes by his short stories, novels and essays.
Limbo and Mortal Coils are collection of short stories. Crome Yellow, Antic
Hay, Those Barrer Leaves, Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaya, Brave New
World, After Many Summer, Time Must Have a Stop and Ape and Essence
are his famous novels.
An Analysis of Huxley’s Novels: Crome Yellow, Huxley’s first novel, is
just a piece of conversation. The scene is a house party where the guests
spend their time talking about art, sex, farming, social problems, religion,
education, etc. All old certainties and dogmas are derided at by the
conversationalists.
Antic Hay shows the young school master Theodore Gumbril yearning to
be a Rabelaisian, enjoying life to the fullest possible extent. Mrs. Viveash,
having lost her husband in the first World War, finds her life empty. The
characters in the novel have no roots and no moral or religious or political
principles.
Those Barren Leaves also presents a satiric picture of modern civilization.
The characters are mere types. They include a bizarre middle-aged woman, a
handsome young amorist, a loquacious satyr, an adventuress and an
ingenuous young girl. Three characters, Chelifer, Cardan and Calamy are
memorable. Calamy is torn between asceticism and philandering. Finally, he
decides to become a hermit. Chelifer condemns this as sheer escapism.
Carden says that modern can neither obey blindly nor behave reasonably.
Point Counter Point is Huxley’s quest for the man best suited to face the
dilemma of civilization. There are three characters, representing three different
lifestyles- Philip Quarles, his wife Elinor, and Mark Rampion. Philip has a
keen, many-eyed intelligence. But he is inhuman. Mark Rampion is Huxley’s
projection of his friend D.H. Lawrence. He embodies the abounding joy of true
marriage. He is vital and human but is very impulsive. Also, he is bitterly anti-
science. The elderly scientist Lord Edward is wrapt in his research. He
despises human beings and wants population to be reduced. Huxley’s dislike
of the world seems to have increased.
Brave New World is a technical tour-de-force. The past, the present and
the future are shuffled in a seemingly irrational manner. The past lives in the
present and the present implies the future. The protagonist Antony Beavis
works out an attitude to life based upon three principles: i) true love between
people ii) subordinating the ego to a moral code and iii) the rejection of the
worship of the state.
After Many a Summer, Time Must Have a Stop and Ape and Essence are
Huxley’s last three novels. In After Many a Summer Huxley attacks the
corrupting effect of great wealth. Also, like Swift, he expresses a horrible
vision of increasing the span of human life endlessly. The result is that man
becomes an ape. Time Must Have a Stop is also a satire. It shows the spirit of
an epicurean revisiting his earlier scenes of sensual pleasure. Ape and
Essence imagines a Third World War destroying civilization completely. In
this distant future men become repulsive apes; babies are born physically and
mentally deformed as a result continuous atomic release; these deformed
babies are sacrificed by eunuch priests and their mothers are flogged. The
vision is much more horrible than Swift’s.
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941)
Her Life and Works: Virginia Woolf’s father was the eminent Victorian
critic and scholar, Sir Leslie Stephen. She grew up in a circle where standards
of culture, taste and intelligence were of the highest. She began her writing
career as a contributor to literary journals. After her marriage in 1912 to
Leonard Woolf, she shared in the activities of the Hogarth Press which
published the works of many rising and advanced thinkers. Overcome by
depression, Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941, by drowning in a river.
Her first novel was The Voyage Out (1915). It is told in the conventional
narrative manner. But the concentration is on character-analysis rather than
on incidents. The same emphasis on character-analysis and the same Jack of
incidents characterize Night and Day (1919), another study in personal
adjustment. Jacob’s Room (1922) is her first major work. The character of
Jacob in this novel is revealed through a series of impressions passing
through the minds of many characters. The technique of the internal
monologue is used completely in this novel. This same method, handled with
greater finesse, is used to describe an event occupying only one day in Mrs.
Dalloway. But through interior monologue, the author presents what happened
some thirty years ago. Ordinary Londoners are also presented with accuracy.
To The Lighthouse, accounted as her masterpiece, is a study of the members
of the Romney family. The ultimate development of her method appears in
The Waves (1931) from which plot is entirely lacking. It is a symbolic work in
which the consciousness of six characters is studied in a series of internal
monologues. Flush (1933), The Years (1937) and the unfinished Between the
Acts show her usual delicacy of touch and brilliant technical mastery. Orlando,
a Biography traces from Elizabethan to modern times the life of Orlando who
not only appears as a number of different people, but also changes sex in the
middle of the story. It is full of vivid colour and striking evocations of historical
settings and periods.
CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S NOVELS
i) The sameness of her themes: Virginia Woolf reacted the novel of
social manners as produced by writers like Arnold Bennett. For her, realities
were inward and spiritual rather than outward and material. The elusiveness of
these inner realities is the recurrent theme of her novels. Her characters are
seen in search of these realities.
ii) Her technique: It is in the field of technique that Virginia Woolf makes
her most important contribution to the novel, She specialized in the ‘stream of
consciousness’ technique. The technique was not a new one. Dorothy
Richardson, authoress of Pointed Roofs (1915), Black water (1916) and
Honeycomb (1917) and James Joyce, author of Ulysses and Finnegans
Wake, had already practised it. This method enables the novelist to analyse
mental status with accuracy. But its disadvantage is that, if handled by an
incompetent writer, the novel would become an incoherent jumble of
impressions of characters into unified artistic wholes. She said:

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which
they fall, let us trace the pattern however disconnected and incoherent in
appearance.

iii) Her characters: The range of Virginia Woolf’s characters is small. She
usually concentrates on women, particularly women with delicate sensibilities
like herself. Mrs. Dalloway is a typical example.
iv) Her style: Virginia Woolf’s style is poetic. It is the language of cultured,
refined people. She uses plenty of images and symbols in her novels. Her
novel The Waves is replete with symbols.

GEORGE ORWELL
 Life and Works of George Orwell: George Orwell’s real name was Eric
Blair. He was born in 1903, in Bengal, India. After the birth of George Orwell,
the family had to leave Bengal for England. He took his education at Eton. He
was graduated in 1921. He then took a job in Indian Imperial Police and was
sent to Burma. He was in Burma from 1922 to 1927. In 1927, he returned to
England on leave, Then he took up a job as a teacher in 1929. His first book,
an autobiographical work, Down and Out in Paris and London was published
in 1933. The first book used the name George Orwell. In his first novel,
Burmese Days which came out in 1934, he portrayed all his experiences in
Burma. In 1935, he published another novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter. Then
he published the following:
1. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
2. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
3. Homage to Catalonia (1938)
4. Coming up for Air (1939)
5. Inside the Whale, and other Essays (1940)
6. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
It is always true that a writer is influenced by the characteristics of the age
in which he lives and works. George Orwell is no exception to this fact as he
depicts the social and political changes of his own time. The twenty years of
his writing between 1933 and 1953 witnessed a great change due to various
political upheavals.
Animal Farm: In 1945, Orwell published Animal Farm, an anti-Utopian
novel in the form of an animal satire. The subject of the satire is Soviet
Russia. It brought huge money to him. It is a little book but a full one. Actually,
the book was written in 1943 and 1944, toward the end of World War II. It was
rejected by four publishers before its popularity. The purpose of the book is
manifold:
1) First, it is a wryly humorous animal story.
2) It is also a pointed attack of Stalinism.
 3) It satirises the events of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Russian
Communism.
The novel, Animal Farm, can be read at two levels:
1) as an animal story with a moral in it;
2) as a fable of serious political satire.
The novel, Animal Farm, is a satirical attack on the totalitarian form of
Government in Russia headed by Stalin. In form, it is a satire on the history of
Russia under Communist rule, from the Revolution in 1917 to the Teheran
Conference in 1943. After the overthrow of monarchy in 1917, Stalin assumed
the rule of Russia. So in Animal Farm, Orwell portrays how the power vested
in an individual would inevitable create a dictator leading to exploitation and
suppression of people resulting in tyranny. This he does through the depiction
of the credulous nature of the animals and the figure of Napoleon. In fact, the
whole novel, deals with events like:
1) the Russian Revolution
2) the conflict between Stalin (Napoleon), and Trotsky (Snowball)
3) Russia’s relationship with Nazi Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.A.
4) The meeting of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt
5) Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941.
In the novel, one may come across a number of historical parallels.
Nineteen Eighty-four is Orwell’s anti-Utopia. In this novel he shows how a
totalitarian government, headed by the mysterious Big Brother, can brainwash
an individual into believing that two and two are five. The subjects are at the
mercy of rulers. Orwell wrote this novel with the dictator Stalin and the Soviet
Union in mind.