| Abstrakt: |
D.H. Lawrence's impact on his contemporaries was enormous and still continues to be so due to the polemics that his fiction brought to bear on the way social reality was captured in British fiction, but perhaps more especially because of his boldness in portraying a society that was pretentious1, and failed to acknowledge its own weaknesses. The paper builds on this premise to argue that more than anything else, Lawrence portrays women who have the energy and ability to, and do overthrow the values of patriarchy that impinge on their possibility of self-assertion. The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley's Lover, portray heroines who in their avid and genuine attempts to pull themselves out of their exacerbated and moribund social confines, undermine their roles as traditional mothers, exasperate their men folk and succeed even if in some cases only minimally, to ascertain their own freedom. To Lawrence, these women are strong willed, fearless, daring and create by their actions the hope of a less pathetic and compromised future. Contrary to held opinions therefore, the paper locates the source of men's anguish in Lawrence's fiction to their inability to contain the vigour of women and continue to make belief about their own power. Put differently, the paper evolves on the belief that Lawrence's fiction wrestles with the power and authority of women over men and the disturbing realisation of its inevitable permanence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
