T H E S I S

66
knowledge of Lawrence's life and works.1
Lawrence preaches this
"phallic consciousness" as "a bridge for the future" when man is
ready to put sex in the right place. Tommy Dukes, one of Sir
Clifford's guests, who sometimes has Lawrence's voice in the novel,
says:
"Our civilization is going to fall. It's going down the
bottomless pit, down the chasm. And believe me, the only
bridge across the chasm will be the phallus!"(LCL 77)
Although this "phallic consciousness" is highly symbolic,
the original reference of the word "phallus", from the Greek -
"phallos", is the penis, venerated in old religious
systems as symbolizing generative power in nature. And Lawrence
explained the significance of the novel in a letter to Witter
Bynner on March 1928:
"It is a nice and tender phallic novel - not a sex novel
in the ordinary sense of the word... I sincerely believe
in restoring the other, the phallic consciousness: because
it is the source of all real beauty and all real gentleness
§ And those are the two things, tenderness and beauty,
which will save us from horrors..."(TDS 1^9 and SPS 2^)
This "nice and tender phallic novel" brings a variation of
the traditional romantic motif of folklores Sleeping Beauty and
Prince Charming. Connie is the Sleeping Beauty who is here awakened
not by Prince Charming's kiss, but by his tender sexuality.'
Prince Charming is not a beloved knight and nobleman, but a gamekeeper,
a natural man, speaking in broad dialect of "cunts" and
"arses". From this point of view it would have been better if
the title John Thomas and Lady Jane had been kept. In fact, the
novel (even the third version) ends up like this:
"John Thomas says good-night to Lady Jane, a little droopingly,
but with a hopeful heart." (LCL 317)