Lady Chatterley 2.docx

1、Lady Chatterley 2标题： D. H. Lawrences world vision of cultural regeneration in Lady Chatterleys Lover 作者： Jae-Kyung Koh 来源： The Midwest Quarterly. 43.2 (Winter 2002): p189. From Literature Resource Center. 文章类型： Critical essay 书签： 为此文档添加书签 THE GREAT WAR brought about fundamental changes in postwar Br

2、itish and European society. Apart from massive destruction of life and property, it had profound effects on attitudes, encouraging disillusionment, cynicism, and political, social, and moral disturbance. Traditional Christian values, and traditional political and social hierarchies, were weakened, a

3、nd the world that had existed before the war disappeared. The death toil was enormous. The ruling class was particularly badly hit, but the exceptional scale and range of British losses did serious damage to the established socio-cultural systems at every level in the society. It also created bitter

4、 anger at, and savage contempt for, the rigid social rules and class barriers of the pre-war years. In Britain in the Century of Total War Arthur Marwick observes that, as a result of the war society in the Twenties and Thirties exhibited all the signs of having suffered a deep mental wound, to whic

5、h the agony and the bloodshed, as well as the more generalised revulsion at the destruction of an older civilization and its ways contributed (62). It was from this bleak postwar perspective-amid the fragmentation and collapse of the established socio-cultural systems-that D. H. Lawrence set out to

6、explore the idea of cultural regeneration. His prophetic vision of the future was built upon a cyclical view of history, in which psychological forces were seen as the causes of historical change. In any particular phase of human history, a particular conception of the human prevails; as a result, a

7、 particular group of human impulses is dominant, while others are ignored or even repressed: after a time, the elements in the psyche which have been denied expression force their way to the surface, and with this return of the repressed comes the beginning of a contrasting historical phase. Through

8、out the Christian era, the emphasis had been on altruism and self-restraint rather than self-assertion, and-historically speaking-the long dominance of that tradition had made possible the establishment of the inhuman mechanical discipline of modern industrialism. In Lawrences cyclical theory, histo

9、rical change is driven by the struggle of the repressed to return: the result is a psycho-historical conflict which finds expression in a dialectic of destruction and re-creation. For Lawrence, the war was both a symptom of the final decline of the Christian era and also an indication that a new his

10、torical phase wits beginning; so, despite the cynicism and pessimism of the age, his vision of postwar society is a tentatively hopeful one, looking forward to the birth of a society which will be the antithesis of the present mechanised and dehumanized one. The coming of the era will bring to an en

11、d both the social divisions of present-day society and also the psychic divisions which threaten human creativity. In Lady Chatterleys Lover, Chatterley is a representative of the inhuman mechanical determinism of the post-war period, in which a new type of human relationship between the industrial

12、magnates and their workers is established. The bodies and minds of the latter become docile and mechanized, and they are reduced to being instruments, cogs in the colossal machine of the productive system. Chatterleys wound in the war symbolizes not only psychic death and the paralysis of the extra-

13、rational dynamic forces of the psyche but also the inexorable destructive forces of industrialism itself. It is his psychic barrenness, and his devotion to the mechanical principle, rather than his physical impotence, which frustrates the deepest desires of his wife Connie. Lawrence shows her changi

14、ng fundamentally through her encounters with Mellors, her husbands gamekeeper, of a physical awareness and tenderness which is totally different from her previous mental life. Mellors is an example of a recurrent figure in Lawrences fiction: the man who resists and struggles against a repressive rea

15、lity dominated by industrialism, and who seeks to find not only a new basis for human relationships based upon tenderness between human beings, but also to make it the basis for social renewal. To this end, he transforms his instinctual and unconscious creative energy into the kind of Dionysian crea

16、tive reality on which the possibility of a future civilization depends. In this essay, I will discuss Lawrences presentation of industrialism, a system which has had enormous effects on those subjected to it; under its influence, whole communities had gradually become mechanized, their spirit made d

17、ocile by its discipline. Lawrences attitude to industrialism is complex, and even ambiguous: the social and psychological developments which it has made possible can (as the beginning of The Rainbow in particular makes clear) help to liberate people from group and tradition-based identities, and mak

18、e possible the development of autonomous individuality. I will examine the diverse side-effects of modern industrialism in my discussion of the major characters in Lady Chatterleys Lover, linking these with Lawrences vision of a renewed postwar world with a new kind of society, and a new basis for h

19、uman relationships. This prophetic vision is built upon the belief that a pre-industrial cosmic consciousness can be reestablished; central to such a consciousness is the tragic recognition and acceptance of the truth that destruction and death carry the promise of rebirth, and that they create the

20、physical or psychological space needed by new emerging forms of life. Chatterley has been seriously wounded in the Great War. He has returned to his country house at Wragby Hall, permanently paralyzed from the waist down, and confined to a motorized wheelchair. Since his return, he has gained fame a

21、s a writer of ultra-modern stories, while also being a technocrat and industrialist, developing new techniques for exploiting the mines. As a colliery owner and industrial master, he is naturally interested in developing the industry further and, like Gerald in Women in Love, he creates a system whi

22、ch allows him to dominate his workers through a harsh system of control. His drive to perfect the organization and technology of the industry, and to turn the workers into instruments of the productive system, are ways of compensating for the physical paralysis caused by his war injury; they also re

23、flect his time studying modern coal-mining techniques during his stay in Bonn before the war. In Discipline and Punish, which deals with the socio-individual control operated t)y the disciplinary techniques and power of carceral institutions over an individuals body and his time and space, Michel Fo

24、ucault examines the human body as the object and target of power. By the eighteenth century, the body had come increasingly to be seen as a mechanism composed of independently usable parts-the analyzable body and the manipulative body; the aim of the disciplinary mechanisms established then is an in

25、crease in both the docility and the utility of the body. Thus the human body becomes a docile object, an instrument which can not only be subjected and manipulated, but which can also be shaped, trained, transformed, and improved by the exercise of power mechanisms: the body enters a machinery of po

26、wer that explores it, breaks it down, and reorganizes its parts. Foucaults power mechanism, discipline, recreates the body as tool, and makes possible the complex system, the body-as-machine; in Lady Chatterleys Lover, Lawrence illustrates the polymorphous effects of Chatterleys industrial regime on

27、 the miners, whose bodies are made instrumental and mechanical. He exerts his power to make the bodies (and spirits) of his workers docile to the demands of the great machine. Like Geralds, his aim is not so much maximum profit as maximum efficiency in the exploitation of the natural (and human) wor

28、ld. This demands the total subjection of the miners bodies-achieved by introducing advanced methods of organization and the deployment of the latest technology. Chatterley exercises his total control over his employees in order to increase efficiency; his aim is to increase their economic utility. T

29、he miners bodies have to be made into docile instruments, parts of the pit rather than parts of life (180). Chatterleys attitude to his workers (and to people in general) is expressed in his two slogans-the industry comes before the individual (180) and the function determines the individual (183).

30、But his fear of the men also reveals his own subconscious recognition that their queer, crude life is, nevertheless fuller than his and that, looking at him, they are aware of this. The means by which Chatterley sets out to achieve his aim is the process Foucault calls normalization-one of the enorm

31、ous instruments of power in Foucauldian perspective-and the miners have little choice but to submit to the powerful discipline imposed in the pit, and to the marginalizing of their independence, autonomy, and vital energies. The miners, regarded in the widest sense, represent the masses and the hars

32、h mechanical power system is an expression of Chatterleys strong sense of his ruling class superiority. He defends the established class divisions as a necessary element of the order of things, claiming that the disparity between the different classes is a matter of unalterable fate, in which the masses are doomed to be controlled, tamed, and dominated. The power, which he sets out to impose, comes from the dominance of the ruling classes over the lower classes. Chatterleys overriding aim is to impose discipline on Nature so as to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial produ