T H E S I S

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misunderstood sexual theme, is going to be the core of my investigation,
and unlike the critics in general, I have found it useful
to compare and contrast the last novel with Lawrence’s first,
The White Peacock.
I believe that this objective complements the
existing critical approaches to Lawrence's dualities: light and
dark, mind and senses, brain and body, male and female, and thus,
the first and the last.
Al group of good critical essays belonging to his last period
which embody some of his best prose philosophizing will also
be examined. A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover? written in defence
of his last novel, and Pornography and Obscenity are two
excellent essays of his last year, 1929, in which he presents riot
only his selfdefence, but as a dying man, his last arguments on
the subject which became the touchstone of his writings; sex.
' Yet, according to many critics, Lawrence never quite came
to terms with sex# His friend, biographer, and critic, Richard
Aldington, says;
l,Por Lawrence sex was a flowering of the mysterious life
force, an unknown God who must be brought into the consciousness.'1
(PGB 105)
Carrying the point a bit further, Lawrence's first girl-friend,
Jessie Chambers, wrote about him in her personal records
"I could not help feeling that the whole question of sex
had for him the fascination of horror.(ETJ 153)
There was (and still is) one sort of person who could think
of sex as something ‘'mysterious*' or of having "horror*': a moralist,
or better, a puritan.
By exploring Lawrence's thoughts on the subject of sex I
intend to examine to what extent he is a puritan and if so, what