Metaphor as a Strategy of Resistance in D.H. Lawrence

Metaphor is of central importance to the major English modernist writer D.H. Lawrence. Thinking took place in and through developing metaphors in order to avoid what he saw as the traps of Western rationality, participating in a wider intellectual turn towards the structures of language as a locus of meaning at a time – the modernist period – when older truths were giving way and new possibilities were urgently sought. Fiona Becket (1997, p. 2) has placed Lawrence’s interest in metaphor rather than logic and reason under the heading of poetic thinking: