Marginal Sexual Identities

Most of D. H. Lawrence's fictions were strongly autobiographical. He melted too much personal experience into his works. Since he became his mother's focus of life, Lawrence was obsessed by overwhelming maternal love. He could not love girls normally. Freudian psychoanalysis explained his trouble as Oedipus complex. The early experience greatly influenced Lawrence almost throughout all his life. His protagonists loved one another more or less unusually. Taking Lawrence's life experience and the political climate of his time into account, I try to analyse Lawrence's several fictions which were concerned with varied expressions of marginal feelings, such as Oedipus complex, homosexuality, misogamy, misogyny, sadism and masochism, phallic worship and so on. From Oedipus complex to homosexuality, whenever these happened on Lawrence or his protagonists, the development of marginalized sexual identities attracted me to find out their pertinence. Lawrence's thinking changed greatly in his last period of creating. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, he explicitly stressed that sex was the ultimate salvation of woman, but his tune never changed—men were superior to women.In the thesis the growing environment of Lawrence and how it influenced him were analysed first. It was true that his early life was a little passive, but when he wrote the Rainbow, Women in Love, Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo his thinking was much freer. However, there were some things Lawrence did not present. I put more attention on his interpretation of homosexuality. His sexual orientation was not identified permanently even if he married a woman. Lawrentian homosexuality, to define more exactly, was homosociality. Its further development was hindered by various factors. Sometimes he imputed the unsuccessful homosociality to women and women-dominated marriages. He painstakingly constructed womanless surroundings and ended up with nothing definite. In the Plumed Serpent, he even pinned his hope on mysterious religion. Lawrence's exploration of relationship between the same sexes has already reached its dead end. Therefore, I overleapt the...