T H E S I S

Ih
rence took perhaps excessive pride, rather as if he believed
himself called eventually to sit at the right hard of
Oliver Cromwell. ... Lawrence as a child - and, never forget,
a very intelligent and oversensitive child - surrendered
to this powerful, raucous religious emotionalism» However
much he may have rebelled against it intellectually as.
a youth and man, the influence never wholly left him. 11 (PGB21)
So here lies Lawrence's puritanical background: his mother
who became his protector was an "ingrained puritan’1 of the old
tradition, to use Lawrence's own words., In Sons and Lovers he
states; "She (Mrs. Morel) was a puritan, like her father, highminded,
and really stern. 11 (SAL 18) Certainly he inherited some
puritanic factors from his mother; the preaching and protesting
side of his nature, the neurotic nonconformist Protestantism,
and self-righteousness which influenced his life and his works.
- His early readings were often chosen from among "prophetic”
authors like Carlyle, Whitman, Spencer, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Blake, and Buskin* According to B. Aldington "you might add that
both (Buskin and Lawrence) were fanatics about sexj Buskin for
purity through abstinence, Lawrence for purity through what he
called 'fulfilment1«”(PGB k2) Each in his own way tried to "purify”
sex.
Shepherd says that "theoretically unshockable, Lawrence in
practice had, one might almost say, a puritanical streak.”(SPS38)
And Aldington points to a primary contradiction in Lawrence's pu-
ritanism, which will figure large in the general argument of this
work;
"He achieved a most strange mixture of his mother's backstreet
Victorian morality and intellectualized emancipation. 1
The sexual habits and behaviour of everyone else were wrong,