T H E S I S

92
The early D.H.Lawrence of The White Peacock is a callow novelist,
passionately observing the lyricism of nature, }Sy investigation
of his ideas of sex in that period, not only through The
White Peacock» but also according to many critics and biographers*
leads me to the conclusion that he was a romantic puritan, a man
fit to live and write in the world of the senses. From the very
beginning the physical world held his attention far more than the
spiritual world, and his assertion that the body's life is prior
to the mindfs life follows«"
This natural disposition and the peculiarities of his growing-up
in a rural environment are the background of his inadequate
sexual development. Moreover, in his adolescence his sexual
behaviour was conditioned by two other distinct poles«»] On
one side was Jessie Chambers, his first girl-friend, the woman
upon whom his literary career was based, but through whom he had
his first sexual frustration; on the other, there was his mother,
his first actual love, the glory and disgrace behind his hardly
admitted Oedipus complex, who stigmatized his sexual formation
for a lifetime*
These peculiar conditions, the fact that his father failed
as a father and head of the family, and was a drunkard, and the
continuous recurrence of a serious illness - pneumonia - (which
later on became tuberculosis), were decisive factors in the formation
of childhood traumas. These traumas were never accepted
by Lawrence, so they remained unconscious and repressed,and could
not be overcome*'
These traumas produced in Lawrence what Freud calls npolymorphously
perverse disposition18 in sexual behaviour, which is