D.H. Lawrence’s Representation of the Body and the Visual Arts”

From the early novels onwards, Lawrence’s work displays a close attention for the body, which is perceived not as a whole but as a series of parts that reclaim their own independence, moving and acting as if disentangling themselves from the centre, from the mind which presumes to keep them under control. Whereas in the early novels the act of dismembering the unity of the body (for instance Lettie’s hands in The White Peacock and Helena’s feet in The Trespasser) is circumscribed to isolated episodes, with Sons and Lovers it has become central to Lawrence’s fiction, as all the characters seem to struggle to achieve a lost wholeness. This state of physical disorientation and uneasiness, which becomes even stronger in relationships between the sexes (both heterosexual and homosexual), clearly reveals the influence of contemporary experimentation in the visual arts. Where the body becomes the central focus, its modes of representation undergo a radical transformation (from the desperate tension of bodily forms in Expressionism, especially in the paintings of Die Brücke, to the multiple movement of the body in space of Futurism, and the chromatic primitivism of The Fauves). The aim of this essay is to show how Lawrence’s idiosyncratic representation of the body (both in his fiction and in his paintings) is rooted in the contemporary response to the need for new forms of bodily representation and expression in art.