T H E S I S

kind of puritan. He is certainly not the common sort of puritan,
even though he wa3 originally educated in his mother’s ingrained
puritanism, through the Congregationalist Church, He is a
.(1)*
"Double Measure51'1 J puritan, or better say an anti-puritanical
puritan, Lawrence lived at a time of transitions his first books
were written while Queen Victoria was still alive and the spirit
of prudery was still strong in English Letters, But the early,
prudish, Lawrence became a prophet of a religion of sex who advocated
the salvation through the body, and who was even called a
sexual fascist, A puritan would not admit sex or the body in so
high a place, but this special puritan, Lawrence, believes that
sex has to be purified^ and tracing his doctrine of sex we can
see that this "priest of sex" becomes, even unconsciously, a
puritan who is against the old Victorian puritans*
- Preaching his doctrine of sex Lawrence has gone probably
too far, even for an anti-puritan, maybe "unwatched" as he says
how "the novel comes out of one’s hands". As I am going to show,
he goes into a dangerous area which for now I will be content to
call "dark sex", diverted from normal sexuality. And this is
typically a product of a puritan mind« I think we have to consider
again his contradictions, his dualities. I have to agree
with Jessie Chambers when she says that Lawrence overemphasized
the importance of sex (he was 21 then), but spoke of those who
suffered from "sex in the head"(ETJ XXXIII), which is a
good
•: statement, recorded by Jessie in 1935» five years
after Lawrence's death and many years before R«Aldington's(1950)
* Look for notes in the appendix at the end of this work.