Morality and Immorality in the novels of D H Lawrence by Rayees Ahmad Ganaie (Research Scholar at D.A.V.V, Indore, MP, India)

International Journal of Research in Social Sciences
Vol. 9 Issue 1(1), January 2019,
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268 International Journal of Research in Social Sciences
http://www.ijmra.us, Email: editorijmie@gmail.com
Morality and Immorality in the Novels of D.H. Lawrence
Rayees Ahmad Ganaie
Abstract
D.H Lawrence although was initially considered as an immoral and a taboo writer but his
writings contain immense volume of harsh truth inside. His characters explicitly are
obviously are sinister and committing the immoral acts, the acts which are anti-human but
the somehow linked with the chastity and for their immoral actions there are some
compelled by the social forces of their time. His heroines are often found the prey of the
mysterious obsessions and their society is generating the compulsive forces by the
presentation of characters seems so bizarrely in spoliation. His characters have their
morality but which is not seen because that is harboring in their intrinsic personality. They
are rational hence they are fully familiar of morality and chastity. Most of D.H.
Lawrence‘s literary work manifests a determined and painstaking effort to answer the
questions posed by the series of crises that simmered throughout the Victorian era and
erupted with the First World War. Deeply hurt and angered by what he saw as the
degeneration and waste of human life caught in the nets of sterile conventions, imposed by
an aged, failing civilization and fading religious dogmas, he bravely undertook the
necessary task to find and reclaim the fundamental values of life through a persistent if
sometimes contradictory exploration of human identity and the self.
Keywords: Moral, Immoral, Society, Humanism and Culture.
His three important works, A Study of Thomas Hardy (1914-1915), ―Education of the
People‖ (1918) and Fantasia of the Unconsciousness (1918), show how relentlessly,
Lawrence was considering the possibility of establishing a harmonious world by modifying
modern attitudes and taking account of gender, religion and psychology. These concerns
were widespread at the time and his thinking contains a multiplicity of political and
cultural influences, derived from theosophy, socialism, sexual reformism, evolutionism
and religious primitivism. The inter-textual references in his work, not only reflect the
conflicts of an intellectual at times of protracted and serious crisis – a part of the inevitable
rhetoric of anxiety in an era of torment – but also provide a key for a better understanding
of his work, a text that more than most seems open to interpretation.
Lawrence‘s novels in which there are characters particularly heroines which seems the
sinners but that is not the total reality. Basically, there is a fine balance of vices and virtues
in the character of his fictional characters. According their mind and heart they are living
in a saintly world while as their explicit world is considered as immoral and sinistric. It is
the balance not of the personality of his characters but of almost of every human. His
characters are squeezed by the social forces and especially the force of patriarchal social
set up of those times. Everyone talks and ridicules upon the sins of others without
searching out the reasons behind. So we can say that D.H Lawrence is the one of that kind
of truth which itches harshly.

Ph.D. Research Scholar, School of Comparative Languages and Culture, Department of English, Devi Ahilya
Vishwavidyalaya, Indore (MP)

The significance of D.H. Lawrence's Nonconformist past is widely acknowledged and yet
the more precise nature of its character and influence has been largely ignored. One
possible reason for this is Lawrence's own tendency to minimize, in retrospect, the extent
of his involvement with the Chapel religion of his childhood. In relation to other key
influences, critics have pointed out Lawrence's tendency to 'cover his traces' and to insist
that 'what he advocated came from his deeper self ... not outside') Eleanor Greene thus
explains Lawrence's 'violent renunciation' of Nietzsche, while Cohn Milton concludes his
study of Nietzsche's influence on the early works of D.H. Lawrence with the observation:
―Nietzsche's influence on Lawrence was profound, but precisely because of this it is only
rarely evident in direct references or obvious borrowings. Instead it tends to appear in that
more subtle and pervasive fashion which we might expect when ideas have been
thoroughly assimilated and creatively used‖1
Graham Hough, in The Dark Sun, devotes a chapter to 'The Quarrel with Christianity' he
says he shows a surprising lack of scholarly differentiation in his perception of
'Christianity'. This is most explicitly revealed in a footnote when he dismisses the Christian
attitude to sexuality:
I take it for granted that Christianity does depreciate sexuality, or at most make reluctant
concessions to it; and that Lawrence was right in believing this, wherever else he was
wrong; and that the Chestertonian ... trick of representing Christianity as a robustly
Rabelaisian sort of faith is a vulgar propagandist perversion.2
The White Peacock seems to be strongly influenced, both positively and negatively, by
Lawrence's inherited notions of Christianity. The setting, mood and imagery, the plot, the
dilemmas and the characters, are all shaped by Eastwood Congregationalism and are more
fully understood when interpreted in this context. These values - of order, control, and
rationality - are not, of course, confined to Reid or to Eastwood Congregationalism or to
Christianity. From the much wider grouping of values, I am, in analyzing the Eastwood
Congregationalist influence, selecting but one strand in a whole complex of influences on
the novelist. I am not, of course, suggesting that the complexity can be reduced to a single
strand, or that Lawrence's work can be 'explained' by this one influence.
In The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence, they are three initiation protagonists superficially;
however, they can be integrated into an initiation experience. The protagonists Lydia and
Anna serve as a pretext for Ursula, the central protagonist. Their pursuit is the same;
Ursula has achieved the final goals of self-discovery and initiation which her forerunners
fail to. In this way, the initiation experiences of the first and second generations of
Brangwen family are just the variations of Ursula‘s initiation experience. In addition, they
lay foundation for Ursula‘s growth.
Lydia is a daughter of a Polish landowner and she is widowed when she marries Tom
Brangwen. Though she is thirty-four years old at that time, she can also be viewed as
initiation protagonist, for she does not achieve the goal of maturity and self-discovery. As
for the age limitation of protagonists in Bildungsroman, Professor Rui mentions:
―The age of initiation protagonists is mainly from thirteen to twenty or so, while there is
no absolute restriction. Toni Morrison‘s Song of Solomon is universally viewed as a
Bildungsroman, in which the initiation protagonist is more than thirty years old. The
initiation protagonists are defined as the youth by most experts, while the implication of
word ―youth‖ is obscure.‖3

Actually, the initiation experience for Lydia is a process of discovering herself and
regaining her own identity. At the very beginning, when Lydia marries Lensky—a young
doctor who is superior to her both intellectually and economically, she is completely
conquered by Lensky and loses herself totally. ―Lydia, as if drugged, followed him like a
shadow, serving, echoing‖ In the patriarchal society, the majority of women have long
been denied the access to education and social activities, so they are inferior to men both
spiritually and economically, as Zhang states: ―Marriage is the traditional and maybe the
only way for women to enhance their economic and social status. Thus a woman tends to
choose, or rather have not much choice but to marry a husband who is superior to her
either spiritually or economically. This inevitably leads to a discrepancy in socioeconomic
status and in intelligence between the husband and wife, which usually results in the
subjugated and dependent position of woman in the family. So apart from the social
suppression, women are suppressed more directly by their husbands‖4
The reason becomes that the women get strokes of compulsions to move towards
immodesty world. So the women are herself less responsible for her immoral acts
whenever she is not having such kind of intentions.
Lawrence believed that sacred experiences occur when a person develops an
unselfconscious, impersonal, and spontaneous relationship with another person or being.
This relationship must be both mutual and felt, and it is the relationship itself that activates
the religious awareness. The relationship is a means to awareness as well as a form of
awareness itself: deep connection produces profound reciprocal awareness; expanded
awareness enables a full sense of connection. The sacred encounters represented in
Lawrence‘s novels are experienced by the characters as an influx of passion or peace.
Sons and Lovers is the most autobiographical of D H Lawrence‘s novels published in
1913. It is often called the magnum opus in the realm of literature. Lawrence is the minute
observer of man and woman relationship. The female characters play dominant role in his
novels. They represent certain thoughts and ideas. Sons and Lovers present three
prominent female characters-Mrs Morel, Miriam and Clara Dawes. These three women are
all tragic characters and their tragedies lie in the fact that they only function as stones in
Paul‘s life and the world of men and their suffering from the imprisonment of the
patriarchal society. Mrs Morel is pitifully diagnosed with Oedipus complex, which enables
her to be a powerful hermaphrodite and gains access to power. Miriam is imprisoned by
Victorian morality, but her world is not purely spiritual. Clara is the woman who makes
Paul a real man, but Paul only sees the physical aspect of her. So Paul‘s patriarchal
character is revealed in the discussion of these three women. This paper attempts to show
that these three women are wholly responsible for their own tragedy giving an analysis of
the Victorian morality and industrial civilization.
Paul‘s first lover, Miriam, was a beautiful and shy girl. She is modelled after Jessie
Chambers, the one-time close friend of Lawrence. Many of the incidents in which Paul and
Miriam are involved together were written by Jessie herself and Lawrence incorporated the
passages supplied by her in the novel virtually without any change. Miriam is the daughter
of Mr and Mrs Leivers of the Willey Farm. Although living in a country village which was
controlled by her father and brothers who looked down upon her, she was irreconcilable to
mediocrity. She did not want to follow the same old disastrous road of average village
girls; she looked forward to making life meaningful Learning is the only distinction to
which she thinks to aspire. It would be unjust to her to attribute her desire for knowledge to

mere vanity. Her interest in intellectual pursuits is partially genuine. But in reality there
was no such room for her to exist; what she had was just the freedom of imagine. Paul‘s
appearing made Miriam have her own idol, but this love soon added pain to her life
because of her religious zeal. Since she was very young, Miriam sincerely believed in
religion which played a major role in her life. She thought “God was omnipotent, and He
knew everything in the world‖5
. So even her love to Paul may request the permission of the
God: ―O‘Lord, let me not love Paul Morel. Keep me from loving him, if I ought not to love
him‖6
. We can see that under religion‘s control, Miriam‘s emotion severely depressed. She
was only a doll, without anything of her own idea. Miriam consciously built their intimate
relationship on imagination, namely spirit on love, not flesh on love.
In The Rainbow Anna is a kind of lady who loves to visit the church constantly and she is
often the devotee of worship but when some kind of suppressions ache her, she feels to
something negative or immoral because she tries to be so unchained from the social chaos
and oppressions. Anna perceives the church as a place where a mystery unfolds and not as
a place of adoration of the Absolute God. The Lincoln Cathedral episode is the symbolic
epitome of this split from the traditional religion of rule and dogma. The church, symbol of
―an outmoded Absolute‖7
stands for Anna as the ultimate confine in which she would feel
―roofed in‖8
and deprived of her freedom. Yet, Anna, claiming ―another right‖9
responds to
the mystical aspects of the cathedral like a new goddess among old gods. Her impulse to
reject her husband‘s almost sexual need for the womb-like warmth of the church is
completely logical: she believes he is unfair to her; she is the female her husband must
adore and embrace. She feels betrayed by his attachment to the church, and consequently
adopts an antagonistic attitude towards the place.
Lawrence is very great in presenting both sides of a women, he shows us the scences
where the women are saintly inside and sometimes busy in the walks of immortal journey.
But his works have not only depicted only the humiliation and contamination of his
character but side by side they are of great souls as they think pure with pristine intensity
but when circumstances bamboozle upon, they get forced to commit fouls. And also he has
a tremendous respect for women. In one of his essays Lawrence writes: ―A woman is one
bank of the river of my life, and the world is the other‖10
Conclusion
D.H Lawrence has justified goodly the dichotomy of morality and immorality in his works.
He has never deliberately heightened the virtues and nor he has suppressed their vices.
With employing his subjectivity, he has presented the reasonable tension between vice and
virtue. He is candidly making his readers to realize that the good and bads are running
coincide in the human personality, we cannot deny the fact that a man cannot be a perfect
saint because he has the dealing and desires in this world and also the social life is
somehow responsible for the immoral behavior of man. If he will live with full social
liberty, he will live with the moral purification.
References
1. Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen
University Press, 1987. P.234
2. Graham Hough, the Dark Sun London: Duckworth, 1956, p. 246.
3. Rui, Y. P. Research on American initiation stories. Beijing: Chinese Social and Science
Press, 2004, p.24
4. Zhang, L. Women in the rainbow. Changsha: Hunan Normal University,2006, p.7

5. Miller, H. The world of Lawrence: A passionate appreciation Santa Barbara. USA:
California Press,1980.p.256
6. Drabele, M. The Oxford companion to English literature. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.1993,p.128
7. Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of D.H. Lawrence. Kansas: Kansas University
Press,1986,p.84
8. Smith, Frank Glover. D.H. Lawrence‘s The Rainbow. London: Camelot Press Ltd,
1971. P.189
9. Ibid.p.188
10. D. H, Lawrence, We Need Another in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H.
Lawrence, London: William Heinemann Ltd.,1936, p. 192

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