Discussion: Woolf and Phillips

Laura presented some material on Virginia Woolf and MODERNISM - 1890-1930
That is was a reaction against classical and realistic traditions - art, writing, architecture etc
Impressionism immediately preceded this - did not reject as much as modernism did
But all of these were attempt to bring elements of everyday life into things but were also against realism.
The artists were usually well-trained in classics and would layer these allusions into their work to show they are familiar with them but are rejecting them.
Common themes were: Sexualism and the family - sexual explorations
They show a shift from subjective to objective - examples of visual art - more obvious but present in literature as well.
Also a shift from rural to urban - the war also had a big impact.

Marx - modermist art grew out of European mass of individualism, industrialism, interaction of human and machine
With Darwin - we see humans evolving, evolving or regressing
With Freud - into the modern - conversational free association, stream of consciousness, writing and literature were affected as writers felt they had to present internal life as well
With Nietzsche - natural selection replaced god; God Is Dead; hatred for systemizers, rail against entrenched rules

Modernity - different from the Enlightenment and the Romantics - dates to the present, very contemporary.  The Modern - dates from French Revolution

Virginia Woolf - born 1882 - 3rd child
Mental problems started when 13 &  mother died, 1/2 sister died later as well as step-mother, father died when 22
Sexually abused by older half-brother - detailed in her autobiography
She connected her numerous breakdowns to the position of women in her lifetime
Married Leonard Woolf at age 30 - suffered repeated mental issues and Woolf would support her through these.

ART - should we be supporting art?  Naomi and Chris felt that we should, as every age or culture or period is most known or renowned by their 'art' (literature, painting, music, architecture).  They felt (as did much of the class) that art was worth supporting.

Poverty and wealth each have a significant effect on the mind and creativity.  Woolf delves into this towards the end of Chapter 1.  Poverty is deadening and locks someone out of the worlds and necessities that they need to nurture and release their creativity.  Being wealthy also is constraining as it locks people into a confined safe world.

Gender and Voice - is this important?  Gender is important in much of literature, we want to know and it affects us and how we see the work.  This isn't the case in art, music or literature where usually we can't tell the gender and we don't care, it doesn't affect our response.

We spoke about woman's presence in culture.  Finally, within the books written by her contemporaries, Woolf finds female characters who represent the uniquely female experience without having to qualify this within the context of the masculine world.  This continues to be an ongoing challenge in today’s film industry, where the majority of films fail to pass the 1985 three-step Bechdel Test:

1. Are there at least two women in this film?
2. Do these two women have names?
3. At one point throughout the film, do these two women talk to each other about any subject other than a man? 

The majority of films don't pass.  Lauren put all the books we read this year through this test and 90% of them failed.

There was also discussion about value and commercialism.  And how we value much of women's work or issues.

Naomi led our discussion on Adam Phillips book Darwin's Worms.  He is the 1st author we've read who is still alive.  He is 59 and is a psychotherapist..  It is also the 1st book that is a secondary source.  This book was published in 2001 and so is contemporary to all of us. 

We are the animals who seem to suffer the most from our ideals, according to Phillips.  We spoke about whether humankind suffers from new ideals of human perfectibility which leaves us frustrated by these impossible ideals and therefore experienced as continuous failure; and whether this is a fair assessment of our human condition?  Most of the speakers felt that we do have ideals that are unrealistic and these creates unhappiness.  The key, based on Phillips book, is acceptance, being happy with the lives we have, with change, with the inevitability.

We also spoke about Darwin's anthropomorphizing of animals, even earthworms and how science has changed in this regard, for decades removing all human qualities possibly to justify abuse and experimentation on them.  Now science is doing a lot of research into animals and what emotions, instincts and feelings they may have.  We spoke about various animals and how some have a sense of self and others don't 'seem' to have a sense of self.  The problem is our limitations in how to assess this.

We also had a discussion about Freud's concept of a death drive.  Most of the class did not buy into this concept but this may be terminology issue with the word 'drive'.  I agree death is inevitable and so there is a death process.  Stephen said it was more that our organism has a drive towards decay and death and we have to be aware of this, live knowing that death is inevitable and also live accepting life.  It's hard to get into these discussions without getting enmeshed in trite aphorisms that we see mass-produced into 'inspirational or motivational' posters and executive desk accessories.

Woolf: A Room of One's Own

Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One's Own; Oxford World's Classics, Oxford, 2008

I really enjoyed this book.  I would have loved to have been sitting in the audience listening to Woolf speak.  It was interesting to read her comments about the differences between the women's colleges (Newnham, Girton) and the men's.  In my naiveté when I would read about the women's colleges and when I would read about the men's colleges at Cambridge or Oxford, I assumed we were talking about similar animals.  I never imagined that the women's colleges were so hard fought for nor so under-endowed - though it makes perfect sense that that is how it was given the male-dominated world we live in.

Woolf imagines a university environment where subjects are interdisciplinary, "lectures would be abolished in favour of discussions" and awards and honours would be gone.  Sounds great - it certainly hasn't gone that way in the past 90 years.  She speaks about women being "victims of informal patronage which discriminates against them in terms of both selection & promotion" - and that too is certainly still the case today.  The "old boys" network is still a factor.

Woolf has a great way of describing things - it's this quality that makes me think I would have enjoyed knowing her.
pg 10

As I leant against the wall the University indeed seemed a sanctuary in which are preserved rare types which would soon be obsolete if left to fight for existence on the pavement of the Strand.

Though Woolf was able to make her comments, about the sexism all about and how women have been so constrained, in a quietly clever and humorous there are times when what she sees around her or reads makes her angry.  She speaks about reading a 'learned professor' who wrote about "the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women' and how subconsciously she drew an angry picture, doodle, not realizing until then how angry the comment made her.  But Woolf realizes that many of these comments come from men who themselves are angry about something and she asks what are they angry about?

The source of the anger is a puzzle.  I would imagine it is equally puzzling (if it exists) to minority groups as well (women are interesting in that they are by no means a minority group and yet they have been treated as different, as lesser than, as lesser than the patriarchs for millennia it seems).  pg 43

Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of the professor,  His was the power and the money and the influence.  He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor.  He was the Foreign Secretary and the Judge.  He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts.  He was the director of the company that pays 200% to its shareholders.  He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself....With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything.  Yet he was angry.

As Woolf tries to figure out what 'men' are angry about, she decides that the anger arises from a perceived need to protect one's superiority.  To be superior, others have to be inferior. She also muses on women being used by men as mirrors to reflect them back to themselves as being larger than they really are.  I'm not sure about that.  Though I can think of many instances where this is true (behind every man stands a great woman type stuff) I don't know if it's a universal societal thing - especially in 2013.

Later on Woolf quotes Oscar Browning who used to examine the [women] students at the [women's] colleges of Newnham and Girton and who said, "the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man." pg 69

Reading this book was a great reminder of how limited women's lives were within the last century still. I grew up with women's lib being a big civil rights topic and went to school and started working when there were many professions that were male-dominated.  Being a veterinarian has shown this very clearly.  My class was the 1st one at my college to have as many women as men in it.  Almost all our profs were men and I remember working at a clinic on the summer break and having a farmer tell me that he thought women becoming vets could be a good thing because their husbands would save on vet bills.  I remember having my pager (shows how old I am) go off in a store when I was on call and having the clerk assume it was one of the men on either side of me, not mine and when I turned it off, she asked if it was my husbands.

Getting back to Woolf, she mentions the ways women could earn any money of their own: addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children.  She describes the difficulty of toiling away at these jobs and trying to survive on the small amount of money and says (pg 48):

But what still remains with me as a worse infliction than either was the poison of fear and bitterness which those days bred in me.

She writes about the man being the 'lord and master' of the household and the control exerted over women, especially as regards to who they will marry.  I can't help but think about what I read about the situation for women from India and it persists even when they come to Canada with men feeling that it is OK to beat or kill the women in their lives if they don't obey their wishes.  We see these outcomes in the paper - within the last few weeks a man (originally from India) was sentenced for shooting his teenage girlfriend because she wanted to break up with him.  A father and son and newer wife (the parents originally from India) in Ontario kill ALL the women in the family except the newer wife because the older daughters were trying to live more free lives.  Women burned because they want to marry the man they love, women beaten for not obeying, dowry murders etc etc.  It's not so much the murder of someone close to you that is puzzling to me, we see many "crimes of passion" but it is these cases where women are being killed, not so much because they don't love someone any more or were unfaithful but because they dared not to obey the men in the family.  Woolf writes about how wife-beating was accepted.  I remember reading old Andy Capp cartoons as a kid and being shocked by Capp punching and beating his wife was used a subject of humour and something to be endured in a marriage.  Woolf mentions the paradox where women are seemingly held to high regard as objects of beauty, delicate, frail, innocent, alluring, pure on the one hand and yet on the other hand she is completely insignificant. pg 54-56

Woolf laments the situation that we know almost nothing about what was really like for women prior to the 18th c.  She recalls an elderly bishop who said it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare [I would argue it would be hard for anyone, man, woman or Martian, to have the genius of Shakespeare].  This same bishop was asked if cats go to heaven and replied that they don't but they do have souls.  Woolf comments: "How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one!" pg 59

A great quote was Margaret of Newcastle, the Duchess, who said (pg 79):

Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms."

She also quotes Dorothy Osborne, a woman who "wrote letters".  She ends one of her letters with a very evocative phrase (pg 81):

...when I have supped I goe into the Garden and soe to the syde of a small River that runs by it where I sitt downe and wish you with mee...

Woolf writes about Aphra Behn (1640-1689) who made her living as a writer but also was rumoured to have been a spy and to have been promiscuous.  Woolf describes the "value men put on a woman's chastity"

A few times Woolf refers to the [in]famous quote of Samuel Johnson's about women and [insert talent or activity here: Johnson used preaching but it could be writing, Doctoring, teaching math, building a bridge, soldiering etc etc] preaching (pg 417):

Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog walking on his hind legs.  It's not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

What Woolf wants for women - and which anyone not part of the power elite of the world should have - is "the habit of freedom, and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton's bogey for no human being should shut themselves out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women" then Shakespeare's sister, who didn't receive his education and never got a chance to be anything, whatever that might have been, might have been able to realize her potential.

The copy of the book we read was combined with another work "Three Guineas." I didn't get a chance to read the 2nd book but I'll try and get back to it this summer.

Phillips: Darwin's Worms

Phillips, Adam: Darwin's Worms; Basic Books, New York, 2000

I really enjoyed this book.  As I read it, I kept thinking that what Phillips was saying seemed so true, that what he was concluding about Freud and Darwin's contributions to our knowledge of the world we live in and our lives themselves was so insightful and made so much sense.  His discussions of the importance of their work helped fill in some of the lacunae that kept tripping me up as I would read these texts - the sense that I'm missing so much and because I'm missing it, I can't see the big picture.  Phillips' take on the state of our knowledge about the world so far, for me was invigorating and, to use a trite expression, 'life-affirming'.

In his prologue, Phillips asks

How could it be possible that we were only natural creatures, but that nature was felt to be insufficient for our needs?  Either nature must be in some (old-fashioned) sense evil, or we have misconstrued our needs.  [pg 15]

He goes on to say that Darwin and Freud showed us that nature doesn't take sides and that "there was nothing now that could promise, or underwrite, or predict, a successful life."   "Nature seemed to have laws but not intentions, or a sense of responsibility."  This reminds me of a Stephen Crane poem I used to like to think about in my teens:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation."

Phillips writes that both Darwin and Freud were sceptical about the perfectibility of Man, a theory that despite having been brought up Catholic and despite an interest in Buddhism and Eastern religions, I've never really believed in, nor have I aspired to perfection.  That's not to say that I don't think that 'improvements' can't or shouldn't be attempted but that a goal of perfection is not even worthy of being aspired to.  Phillips writes that for both Darwin and Freud "we are the animals who seem to suffer, above all, from our ideals" [pg 17].  In Saturday's discussion about Frankenstein, Byron spoke about one of the versions of the Prometheus myth where Zeus kept making forms of humans but not embuing them with life because they weren't yet perfect.  Then Prometheus interfered and brought humans to life, gave us fire imperfect as we are - and by so doing, prevented us from being perfect, prevented Zeus from perfecting us.  Of course, had Zeus perfected humans, they wouldn't have been us; or we aren't them.  Phillips says that by our constant striving after knowledge, perfection, goodness etc, we are denying ourselves "the pleasure of reality" [pg 18]. I think Lawrence would have somewhat agreed with that - with his celebration of sex, nature, simplicity; and with his rejection of industrialization and class.

Phillips speaks about how

reality was a viable term for [Darwin and Freud]: that they used the word to do something.  Because, as a concept, it was a synonym for nature, it was rarely ironized by them. [pg 18]

That's a far cry from today where if you ask someone what the word 'reality' means to them, they are, sadly, most apt to talk about 'reality TV", an ironic if not oxymoronic term for 2013.  According to Phillips "If there are laws of human nature, some of them at least are of a peculiarly recondite logic." [pg 21]

The fact that we want to survive and reproduce, and the fiction that we desire in the way Freud describes, tells us remarkably little about how we should live.  Indeed, it tends to ironize prescription (when it doesn't render it cynical). And yet, of course, Darwin and Freud furtively prescribe in their writing through what they praise.  Their morality resides in their celebrations, as much  as in their dismay: where they find beauty is where they find happiness... [pg 22]

All along, some people have looked to animals, for their differences and for any commonality with humankind, to try and make sense of the world and of what it is to be human.  "...it is by comparing ourselves with other 'sentient beings' that we can find the proper place for our experience. [pg 22]

The word 'sublime' has been used alot in the texts we've been reading since Christmas, those from the 1600s on.  I didn't have a complete sense of what the authors meant when they used it - usually to describe Nature.  Phillips provides the best explanation I've read.

the experience of the sublime was essentially that which was beyond the making of sense: it was about what overawed us.  Whatever was in excess of a person's capacity for representation - whatever threatened our belief in our languages - was sublime... [pg 24]

 Phillips writes about Freud's 1916 paper 'On Transience' which Professor Zaslove sent us before his lecture on Freud.  I was fully in Freud's camp on this, that it is the transience of things that give them if not all their value, at least increased value.  In Saturday's discussion about Frankenstein, we were talking about his desire to solve life and death, to figure out how to prevent death - and I began to think about what life would be like if we were immortal.  I can't see how we would enjoy anything.  If we had eternity to do, try, experience anything and everything we could think of, what would be the point of any of it, what would be the joy or the excitement of any of it.  Freud intimated "there were two kinds of people: those who can enjoy desiring and those who need satisfaction."

I see this duality of perspective in my work.  We have to deal with death and loss of pets - and I've had to go through this personally with my own pets as well as with family members and their pets, and countless times with clients.  There are some people who in the midst of grief when they lose a pet say that they don't know if they will ever get another pet as it's too hard.  For myself, I can't think that way.  I'm very cognizant of the arc of having a pet and that they will get sick, and they will eventually die - I deal with this every single shift I work - but I can't let that overshadow all else.  I can't think about having a pet, enjoy taking them for a walk or curling up with a purring contented cat, and in the midst of that let myself be oppressed with thoughts that some day they will die and I will be sad.  That day will come and I will be sad - excruciatingly sad - but that is the reality.  I have no desire to avoid it by opting out.

The individual person, like the species of which she is a member, is going nowhere discernible (or predictable), and nowhere in particular. But this is not so much a cause of grief as an invitation to go on inventing the future.  As Darwin and Freud discover more and more about the powers of the past - about how the present is continually being rushed by the past - they also realize one simple fact: that the past influences everything and dictates nothing. [pg 29]

This last phrase, to me, is all you ever would need to know to be a counsellor or psychoanalyst. Yes - you will be affected by what has happened to you in your past BUT you are not bound by it, it does not define you, it dictates NOTHING.

For Darwin it was a simple matter of biological imperatives - survive and reproduce.  For Freud there was the complicating factor of man's desire for happiness - and "their unhappiness shows that they are divided against themselves." [pg 30]

Once happiness matters - and happiness entails the pleasures of justice as inextricable from the pleasures of sexual satisfaction; the possibilities of kindness made sufficiently compatible with a sense of aliveness - so-called biological functions become moral questions. [pg 31]

In my work for Veterinarians Without Borders (not to say that I don't think about this at home in Canada as well) I end up thinking alot about humans, animals and the environment, the "One World" concept we are [finally?] starting to accept.  Darwin wrote "I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life..." 4th Chapter.  Phillips goes on to write: "Beauty and complexity are self-evidently good, and they can be found now in the co-adaptation of the ecological system." [pg 38]  "Nature is astonishingly prolific, but it is a prodigal process going nowhere special, sponsored by destruction and suffering." [pg 40]

Phillips looks to a particular aspects of each man's work to say something about life.  For Darwin, it was his work on the lowly earthworm.  For Freud, it is the reasoning behind his hatred about biographers.  They were men grappling with the state of knowledge in the 19th century.

In their writings we see religious traditions and sensibilities struggling to transform themselves into secular, scientifically informed ways of life. pg 116

He asks some tough questions in his epilogue. "Since a natural world is a world of continuous change and therefore continuous loss, how and why does loss matter?"  pg 117  He writes about their discoveries leading them to a secularized world, a world that no longer needs, that no longer can use, a god to give it meaning; and states "The risk was that life could be seen as an enormous waste; the pain of existence would not only be without justification, it could be without compensation. "  pg 117

There was so much I liked about this book and this author.  Who could resist an author who would write, I assume non-ironically, "given the conventional iconography of worms"? [pg 41]  One analogy I didn't agree with however was when Phillips compared Darwin's "side attack" on the status quo, through his observations about the role and importance of the common earthworm, with "middle-class fears of unionizing".  Philips suggests Darwin was intimating [pg 59] that "there may be parallels and analogies in the social hierarchy; that those at the bottom can do perfectly well what those at the top claim for themselves." While this may have held some truth 100 years ago, in 2013, the middle-class assuredly includes unionized workers, or said another way, you won't find many unionized workers in the ranks of the poor.  Said yet another way, the middle-class are not at the top, and the unionized worker is by no means at the bottom of any societal hierarchy.  If anything this hierarchy, in the 21st century, remains more gender-based, not worker's class-based.

In the section on Freud, with his odd fear of biographers, Phillips writes

It is not merely that we might be endangered by people's assumed knowledge about us, or our assumed knowledge about them - as in racist or sexist fantasy - but that it is misleading to assume it is knowledge that we want or that we have of people, any more than it is knowledge that we get from listening to music.  pg 74

 Phillips expounds a bit upon Freud's theory of a death wish, something I've never read up on.  He says that our life story:

this cosmic death story is in two acts. First, at no definable moment, and by no describable agent or process, 'The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception.' [...] And then for equally mysterious reasons ... the next thing happened...  'For a long time, perhaps,' he writes, 'living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death.' pg 79

Freud believed that we intellectually wish to live but that we instinctively wish to die, but to die our own way.  Phillips asks "Indeed, what is narrative about if it is not about objects of desire and the detours and obstacles and dangers entailed in their acquisition?" pg 83

...it is as if there are two kinds of life stories going on inside us.  From the point of view of the death instinct - that Freud is inclined to regard as the omniscient narrator - my life is a story about dying in my own fashion.  From the point of view of the life instinct, of Eros, more life is being sought and sustained.  pg 84

 "To be or not to be, that is the question"  Shakespeare, yet again, blazed a path we are still following.

'Instincts and their transformations are at the limit of what is discernible by psychoanalysis.' [pg 91]

Phillips writes that for Freud biographies were 'spurious and misleading' accounts of a life whereas psychoanalysis shows that a person's account of their own life is what should be relied on.  I don't know that I would agree at all, given the vagaries and unreliability of memory not to mention the impact of perspective.  I don't think there is any true or complete summary of a life - even if, as in these times of recording every moment and posting it online, an entire life were recorded and played back.

Lives dominated by impossible ideals - complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love - are lives experienced as continuous failure. pg 115

Phillips says that Darwin and Freud "press us to think of our lives as more miraculous than our deaths; our death is inevitable, but our conception is not."  pg 128

Habit, like bad science (or prejudice) creates an illusion of predictability; it keeps things the same by turning a blind eye to difference.  Darwin, Notebook 1839

This really resonates with me as I've always been someone very comfortable in habit and often made uneasy by the prospect of change.  Freud added to Darwin's insights about the constant state of change and adaptation (and co-adaptation) by bringing humankind's internal life into the mix, along with the external world, saying we also have to adapt to the internal world of desires, memory, repressions etc. Thinking of change as the normal state of affairs, not just something that occurs but as the main truth of life, as the most important factor in our lives and as the one we need to accept if not embrace, is an exciting way to think about things.

Discussion: Frankenstein

We began this discussion by, as usual, speaking a little bit about the background of the person as well as what was going on in the world (usually Europe) at the time. In this case, Mary Shelley's backstory was as interesting or even more so than the text we are reading of hers. There were several significant people in her life, most notably her father William Godwin and her lover (later husband) Percy Bysshe Shelley. As well, in the background, there is her deceased mother, early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose writings Mary Godwin Shelley would have read.


Mary Godwin would also have been exposed to many many intellectuals during her childhood: writers, philosophers, scientists, politicians etc. Percy Shelley was a fan of Mary Wollstonecraft and of William Godwin and falls in love with Mary Godwin when she is about 17. They elope (illegally as PB Shelley is still married to Harriet Westbrook) to the continent, accompanied by Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont (who later becomes Lord Byron's lover). After a couple of years of moving around on the Continent and in Britain, the Shelleys head back to Europe, again accompanied by Claire. Byron has been ejected from England due to accusations of incest among other things and the Shelleys find themselves his neighbours in Switzerland. Claire becomes pregnant with Byron's child - her daughter Allegra was born in 1817. Prior to the summer of 1816 when she began Frankenstein, Mary Shelley bears two children, a daughter who dies a few days after birth and later a son, William. That Fall (1816), both Harriet and Mary's older half-sister, Fanny, commit suicide. Mary completes Frankenstein the following spring, 1817.

Frankenstein was conceived during a summer spent in Switzerland with PB Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Byron. The Shelleys had had to travel through France in 1814, just after Waterloo which had devastated France. Mary would have had a close connection to France given her mother's interest and presence in Paris during the French Revolution. There had been a volcanic eruption and the weather that summer was very bad and they had to amuse themselves indoors, reading gothic novels and German ghost stories and eventually challenging each other to write their own ghost story. Mary struggled to find a worthy idea and an image comes to her in a nightmare one night. Shelley continued to work on Frankenstein upon their return to England in the Fall, with PBS' encouragement and support. It is published in January 1818.


We discussed several of the noted themes in this novel: alienation, intellectual hubris and good science/knowledge vs bad science/knowledge. One area of discussion was about the difference between 'being' and 'appearing', a Rousseauian concept and which we see in the alienation and rejection of the creature based solely on his appearance.


Stephen also mentioned the recurrence of the word 'sympathy', here meaning a sympathy of minds. Captain Walton is looking for this and feels he had found it in Victor Frankenstein; the creature is desperate for this and never finds this, and this drives his actions his entire life.


Stephen's notes for this discussion include some "plots to follow": Walton’s Journey to find the “power that attracts the needle” – Walton is the one who “learns”, who has a chance to reform himself; those seeking glory via the pursuit of knowledge “secret of life”, becoming isolated from society; the Creature’s transition from benevolent “child of nature” to violent predator due to alienation and injustice.


There were also various themes: Nature vs Nurture – The Individual and Society; Dangerous Knowledge (including the failure of science to take responsibility for its creations which in the 20th century became a metaphor for issues around nuclear power); Parenting (and the issue of men trying to take over women's role as the carrier and nurturer of the child - women were particularly weak in this novel which is interesting considering the author is a woman) and the novel was also affected by the proximity of the French Revolution (power of reason, the innate human capacity for reason and benevolence and justice).


BYRON gave us some background on the Prometheus myth, important since Shelley's novel has the subtitle "The Modern Prometheus". Her husband, PB Shelley also considered himself a Prometheus. Prometheus was originally a trilogy (Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound and just the title of the 3rd, lost, play, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer). He was a titan and his name is thought to mean foresight (though one theory translates it as thief of fire). Prometheus helped Zeus but later interfered in Zeus' plans. He is seen as a trickster figure. In Hesiod's Theogeny, the use of fire was already known to humans but Zeus takes it away as punishment for a trick. Prometheus smuggles fire back to the humans in a giant fennel stalk. In Aeschylus' play, in addition to giving mankind fire, Prometheus is also thought to have taught them several arts of civilization such as science, medicine, agriculture as well as mathematics and writing He helped Zeus but then he intervened in Zeus' creation of man by giving humans fire. He became a figure who represented rebellion but who also represented human striving, especially after scientific knowledge. I don't know whether prior to Frankenstein Prometheus symbolized the risk of overreaching, hubris and unintended consequences.


Byron asked about Alienation: "the monster is victim to extreme alienation. Do we relate to this today? Some types of alienation include alienation from his creator, alienation form friends, alienation from himself. But, is the monster actually alienated from himself? Or are we today more separated from ourselves than the monster was? (On 131 the monster asks himself questions most people wouldn’t dare. He tries to understand himself.) Oddly, regarding alienation, we can perhaps see the monster and Frankenstein as aspects of one being separated from itself...could this be an outcome of what happens when we 'knowers' don't really know ourselves? Is this our warning?" Stephen noted that Frankenstein and his creature are never seen together and asked whether this could position them as 2 facets of a human being. Similarly, Frankenstein's friend Henry Clerval could be seen as an amalgam of various missing aspects of Frankenstein's being: lightness, gaiety, creativity, passion and compassion, conscience etc.

Byron had a lot to say about what Frankenstein tells about Beauty. "Our society is filthy. Our understanding of beauty is delusional and off target. We have people injecting botulin into their faces. We have people cutting the fat out of their bodies without making any more significant life changes. We have lineups at the makeup store where people pay plenty of money to paint over their skin. We have people putting silicone into their chests to look bustier. We have people eating liquid diets. People starving themselves to look thinner. People spending hours a day at the gym. And to what end? Is this end beauty? It is more likely that the hideous monster is a better example of what beauty ought to be? Most of us can’t accept ourselves in our own skins, so who are we to judge beauty? Are our imperfections what make us ‘ugly’? Or is it more likely our imperfections are what make us beautiful and we cannot see this?"


"Arguably, the monster’s biggest problem is that he is too human. In fact, he is more human and humane than people not created by Frankenstein. What does this say about our fellow creatures and the level of humanity with which we treat each other? How good have we gotten at being terrible human beings since the time this book was written? Would a present-day retelling look much different? Or is this really just a warning of our ambitions as human beings striving to be what we think better human beings would be? Victor says it himself: "seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition" (220)."


Abilio also presented some aspects of the novel. He spoke about the danger not just of science but of knowledge, citing Facebook and do we want one site where everyone, from childhood friends to employers to people you met travelling etc, can find out masses of information about you. It made me think about data mining and the gigabytes of information companies and governments are collecting about us, to the point that analysis of our emails, Facebook posts, spending habits etc can tell a stranger what our age and gender is, religion, sexual orientation, whether a woman is pregnant and when she is due (being done currently by Walmart to allow for targeted marketing of customers so they can send them ads for baby stuff).


I'm still amazed at how relevant many of these texts are. We often read them thinking that we have to remember the context in which they were written or make allowances for customs and norms of the time yet so often the insights, the conflicts, the questions they are grappling with are ones we still are grappling with today. Wondering about the danger of knowledge takes us right back to where we started in September with Genesis and Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. And here we are with Mary Shelley in 1817 worried about the dangers of untempered intellectual curiosity and here we are today still unable to come to any consensus as we play around with DNA, with weapons of mass destruction and with super computers and the Higgs Boson.

Shelley: Frankenstein

Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus; Penguin Classics, London, 2003

Mary Shelley grew up in a household composed of her father, noted rationalist philosopher and writer William Godwin, her step-sister Fanny (who was the 1st daughter of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and her American lover, financier Gilbert Imlay) as well as Godwin's 2nd wife and her children.  Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had died 10 days after Mary's birth, due to complications from the birth.  According to Maurice Hindle's introduction, Mary grew up with a father who espoused the view that a "new system, based on 'universal benevolence', could create a just and virtuous society," maintaining that this virtue "would naturally emerge from the exercise of reason and free will, as developed in an 'enlightened' society."  Hindle quotes Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and writes "knowledge, and the enlargement  of intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy...and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society."

Hindle mentions the Gothic imagery popular at the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and the use of monster imagery to demonize anything challenging the status quo.  Hindle notes that this style even permeated the writing of conservative political philosophers such as Edmund Burke, and in his introduction he includes a passage from Burke commenting on the French Revolution where he wrote that "vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change in its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity.  It walks abroad; it continues its ravages..."  Godwin himself was commonly described as a monster.  Walpole described him as 'one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history' and Burke called Godwin's opinions "pure defecated atheism...the brood of that putrid carcase the French Revolution."

Hindle ends his introduction by quoting physicist Brian Easlea in Fathering the Unthinkable who raises the issue of "Mary Shelley's indictment of masculine ambition" and her exposure of "the compulsive character of masculine science."  Hindle tells us that in her last novel, Shelley ends by having the hero say "This...is Power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious and daring; but to be kind, compassionate and soft." In Frankenstein, Shelley certainly seems to want to highlight the hubris and the danger of the purely intellectual approach to science, something that still resonates today when the newspapers are full of reports of people trying to manipulate DNA to create new, "better" beings, implanting uteruii into women so that they can bear children, manipulating our environment on a scale that is truly earth-shattering and then proposing to mine the solar system for our short term benefit...  The awareness that today these reckless experiments in the name of 'science' are being driven by greed rather than by the intellectual thrill of discovery, or by a thirst for power via domination over nature, just makes mankind's hubris that much more unbearable.

The original frontispiece for Frankenstein, contains a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost.  This poem has been referenced in so many texts we've read the last couple of months that I am going to have to finally read it.  Echoes of this poem come up again and again in this text.

pg 96 "Alas...when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?"

Shelley writes alot about nature.  "When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations.  A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy." [pg 71].  The nature in Switzerland, where she and P.B. Shelley were living when she conceived of and wrote Frankenstein, contributes an enormous amount to the Gothic - as well as the elemental - feel of the book.  I couldn't help but compare her descriptions of the area around Geneva with her mother's descriptions of Denmark, Norway and Sweden when she travelled through those countries in the 1790s.  I find her writing particularly her choices of adjectives (imperial, vast, glorious, immutable and especially the overused adjective 'sublime') overwrought but I did appreciate the scenery she evokes, and the sense of place.

The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands.  These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation ...  [pg 99]

...Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and it's tremendous dome overlooked the valley. [...] The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal nature bade me weep no more.  [pg 98] 

Shelley was particularly affected by her hikes around the Mer de Glace near Chamonix.

The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses.  Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds.  My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed - 'Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.'

I can't help but contrast this paean to the joys of life with the perspective Shelley offered some 25 pages earlier.   Frankenstein's youngest brother William is murdered by Frankenstein's nameless monstrous creation. Frankenstein's friend Henry, in an excess of exclamation points and overblown sentiment, tries to console him:

Dear lovely child, he now sleeps with his angel mother! Who that had seen him bright and joyous in his young beauty, but must weep over his untimely loss! To die so miserably; the feel the murderer's grasp!  How much more a murderer, that could destroy such radiant innocence!  Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we; his friends mourn and weep but he is at rest.  The pang is over, his sufferings are at an end forever.  A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain.  He can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that for his miserable survivors.

Truly a bleak outlook on life.  I'm not sure that I would have found Henry's words comforting in the face of the loss of a child.  This is always something I have never understood about many religions: the Christian religions which preach about living your life in such a way that you may ascend to heaven but regardless you will have to spend time in purgatory (and as Dante showed us in his Inferno, there was no section except the outermost part of the circles of Hell where you would want to spend even one second); the Vedic texts and Buddhist philosophy which counsel people to aim for the almost unattainable Nirvana; the Greeks describing an unattainable perfection of forms; to the Islamic texts with their promises of the companionship of pure ones in paradise.  Why should there be any sorrow or resistance to death if what comes later is what you are supposed to be aiming for, if life is just something to be endured and suffered through.  I can understand that, if day-to-day life is hard, people would dream of something better after they die but in that case, why fear it or grieve its coming?

Frankenstein is a Gothic story.  Shelley describes the scientist's dark arts; and the original concept for the story came to her in a dream when she saw the image of the pale creator bent over his awful creation.  She describes his research:

Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm... I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. [pg 52-53]

Even the 'monster' says that "Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it." [pg 102] - though he had far more reason than Frankenstein himself to find life unbearable.  "So much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men." [pg 168]

Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.  I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy [he says to Frankenstein] and I shall again be virtuous. [pg 103]

The monster pleads a good case for the torment of his misery and, aside from his quickness to wreak revenge, he seemed to have the possibility of goodness as well as baseness within him - just as mankind does.  Yet Frankenstein, despite his initial agreement to create a companion for the monster, deems him "a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated [Frankenstein's] heart." [pg 170] I don't find the monster, other than his physical abilities, to be any more malignant, evil, depraved, barbarous etc than mankind.  The media and history books are full of people far more evil, depraved and ill-intentioned than Frankenstein's monster.  To this day.  So far civilization does not seem to have extracted or cured any of these tendencies from human nature.

At the end of the story the monster laments:

Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment.  Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.  pg 223

Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind has sinned against me?  pg 224 

Society still judges people by appearance, forgiving the beautiful and engaging and condemning the ugly, the odd, the different.

Frankenstein is a good example of reason gone bad.  His scientific curiosity and his hubris took him into dangerous territory and like the scientists today who push the envelope either to see if they can or because of greed, he didn't engage his intellect to consider what the results of his actions might be, nor his humanity to care about the consequences.  Shelley seemed to want to offer a warning about the dangers of actions untempered by humanity or by those human feelings which we tend to think are desirable (compassion, fellow feeling, mercy, unselfishness, affection etc).  She has Frankenstein say:

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.  I do not think that the  pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.  If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. pg 56

He goes on to say that had this rule been observed Greece would not have been enslaved and the Americas would have been discovered more gradually and the existing empires (Mexico and Peru are the examples given) not destroyed.  In Frankenstein's case he allowed his reason to be a slave to his passion (which Hume has said is how it always has to be).  The consequences of reason being the slave of dark passions (greed, jealousy, hate, envy) often seem to be the most terrible.  The narrator [pg 29] notes that Frankenstein "appeared to despise himself for being the slave of passion"but here he is just speaking about allowing his equanimity to be affected by despair or grief.  In the rest of the book however, Frankenstein reminds me of Werther in his self-absorption and lamentations about how his feelings are affecting him.  Page after page about his anguish, shame, guilt, despair, wretchedness, suffering, melancholy etc etc etc. Ah poor me!!

After moping around for years, worrying and depressing everyone around him, Frankenstein has the gall to say to Elizabeth, his patiently-waiting childhood companion, on their long-delayed wedding day:

You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! if you knew what I have suffered, and what I may yet endure you would endeavour to let me taste the quiet and freedom from despair that this one day at least permits me to enjoy. [pg 197]

The self-absorbed, whiny, arrogant man! His sufferings?!?  He caused the death of his youngest brother and allowed the execution of an innocent young family servant unjustly blamed for the murder.  He's kept his family and especially Elizabeth waiting and in the dark about how he is doing - and WHAT he is doing - for almost his entire adult life.  He has unleashed a monster and treated it in such a way that its only aim is to wreak revenge on Frankenstein by taking away anyone he loves (as Frankenstein has prevented the monster from having any loving companion in his life) - and he doesn't warn any of his 'loved' ones of the danger they are in because he is too afraid to own to the enormity and the consequences of his actions.  And he then has the audacity to chastise Elizabeth for being melancholy on their wedding day.

Towards the end, Frankenstein speaks to Captain Walton about reason and passion.  He asks him to "undertake [Frankenstein's] unfinished work; and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue. [...] I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.

Shelley also has the monster suffer the effects of passion:

I knew that I was preparing myself for a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.  pg 222

Both Frankenstein and his monster allowed their passions to take over their lives and this weakness consumed their lives and laid waste to the lives of everyone around them.

At the end, Shelley imbues the monster with all the mixtures of qualities we find in mankind.

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.  [pg 222]

Shelley wrote these words in 1816 yet today we are still trying to figure it all out.  There was an article in the newspaper today reporting the results of some experiments into humans behaving in mean or bullying ways. Situations were set up with research subjects where they were told or induced to ostracize or gang up on or to make things difficult for a few other participants.  When they assessed the feelings of the people who had been bullied and compared it to the people who had done the bullying behaviours, they found that it was psychologically more traumatic for the person acting badly or meanly than for the victimized or oppressed person.

I didn't like Shelley's overwrought writing style but the situation she imagined and the themes she wove into her work still hold resonance today - and her imagery has endured and kept a firm place in people's imaginations and in our roster of bogeymen.

Discussion: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

This text is being read in the section called Politics & The Body, along with The Communist Manifesto, Freud, Thoreau and Frankenstein.  Professor Thomas Grieve led the class this time, a specialist in literature from the modern period (1910-1930)

Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:

• Loss of pastoral world
• Class system
• War

He quoted from Wordsworth

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          The world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mellors represented the world that is being lost.  He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks.  His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".

We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors.  It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate.  They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.

Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel.  They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking.  This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times.  At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"

Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global.  The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.

Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel.  How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it.  For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us.  His hero, Mellors holds the power.  Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel.  He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus.  It's the man who liberates the woman.  He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually.  For me it was quite paternalistic.  I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.

Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men.  Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.

Lawrence: Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterly's Lover; Bantam Classics, New York, 2007

This edition is a Bantam re-issue of the "Original Unexpurgated 1928 Orioli Edition" with a 1968 preface by Lawrence Durrell and a newer introduction by Ronald Friedland.  The backstory and explanations about this book were almost as fascinating as the book itself.  Because of the language and the subject matter, Lawrence knew it would have trouble getting it published in England so it was published in Italy.  I remember reading this book in either my late teens or early 20's.  I don't remember finding the book to be anything special at the time - though I was probably equal parts titillated and made anxious by the language and sex scenes, having been an obedient and overtly conforming child.

Reading this book now, from the vantage point of well-established adulthood, I found the descriptive language enthralling and the perspective on the industrial age fascinating.  The use of dialect - and I'm more tolerant of the use of words like fuck and cunt now - not because I'm more tolerant to crude language (I still think it's lazy, limiting and monotonous) but because I'm open to the idea that Lawrence needed to use these words to communicate the point he was trying to make.  This changed viewpoint no doubt owes something to the years I've accumulated but also something to the course texts I've been reading and discussing since September.  I also think it reflects how the world has changed in the last few decades, that is, even within my lifetime.

The book starts out with Sir Clifford and Lady Chatterly [Constance] married; and though they feel during their one month's honeymoon that they are intimate, it's not a physical intimacy.

this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction. ... No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And the sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. pg 9

 After the honeymoon in 1917 Clifford ships off to war.  He is shipped back home in 1918, "smashed", paralyzed and with no interest in any physical intimacy with Connie.  Their life is one of her supporting him in his efforts to achieve fame and fortune as a writer.  His dependence and her subservience as 'helpmeet' create a life they both initially deem intimacy.  Connie eventually looks for something more and begins a sexual love affair with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Mellors.  Mellors is a Tevershall man, born into a collier family but raised above his 'station' during his service during the war, in India.  He comes back, somewhat physically damaged by the war, emotionally damaged by his unhappy marriage to a local woman, and determined to live a quiet life in the woods, alone.

Lawrence expounds upon 2 main themes in his novel: the evils of industrialization and the redeeming power of sexual connection.  His descriptions of the Nottinghamshire countryside, where he grew up, are evocative of the blight that descended upon the green countryside of England.

but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.  pg 10

The people were as haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. pg 11

...up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding... pg 11 

Sir Clifford's friends are all a bit effete, snobs with various character gaps and hangups, prejudices and damage.  The most appealing of these for me was Tommy Dukes, his bachelor friend who, when asked whether he believes in anything, replies:

"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady."  [pg 40]

Lawrence writes well about the class system and its inflexibility.   He describes the gulf between Wragby Hall, seat of the Chatterly's, and the village people of Tevershall, writing on page 12

Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps non-existent south of the Trent.  But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take place.  You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

The character of Michaelis, Lady Chatterly's 'upstart' Irish lover gives Lawrence a chance to show the relentless class system in England, in Clifford's contempt for his presumption and for being, despite all his success and his polish, the "wrong sort", an arriviste and a "Dublin mongrel."  Connie feels some sympathy for him, the outsider - "and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling."  [pg 23]  Michaelis doesn't reach her as a woman though, despite the sex - he doesn't love her.  For Lawrence, achieving orgasm at the same time is a key feature of true union between a man and a woman.  While I admired his attempts to describe love, sex etc through a woman's viewpoint, the main perspective in the book seemed very much male, with this being just one example.

Clifford is an unsympathetic character.  I initially felt sorry for him, gone to war to do his duty and returned home broken and empty.  However he is very self-absorbed, and becomes increasingly selfish - with a child's selfishness - as the years passed.  He is a snob and a man who, even without the excuse of injury and paralysis, would have self-restricted himself to a shallow, cold life empty of human connection.  Though sexual intromission is not possible for him, he has no desire for any physical intimacy with his wife, no physical connection.  His sense of entitlement due to his class, heritage and position are accepted by him to be his god-given birthright.

"No wonder the men hate you," she said.

"They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could.  Don't thrust your illusions on other people.  The masses were always the same, and will always be the same.  Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our collier or the Ford motorcar workmen...It is the masses: they are the unchangeable.  It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.  Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus.  What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and posioned our masses with a little education."

[...] "And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, nor swords.  The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be.  It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves." [pg 200]

Despite Sir Clifford's opinion that the masses and the class system are immutable, and not only should not be changed but cannot be changed, he is just as fully convinced that, give him a son fathered by anyone, and he can bring him up a proper Chatterly, ready and able to assume his rightful position.

"I don't care who his father might be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.  Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterly of him.  It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.  Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler.  Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products.  It is the overwhelming pressure of environment."

"Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said. 

"No, my child! A; that is romantic illusion.  Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate.  And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.  The individual hardly matters.  It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.  And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is."

"Then there is no common humanity between us all!"

"Just as you like.  We all need to fill our bellies.  But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there  is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes.  The two functions are opposed.  And the function determines the individual." [pg 201]

Lawrence also speaks insightfully about the emotional trauma or damage to the psyche that can persist or which can take years to manifest (he likens it to a slowly developing bruise).  This must have been something seen in returning soldiers after WW1 but it also makes me think of Freud's research and that of other psychoanalysts of the previous 50 years.  This slow persistent trauma crops up in both Sir Clifford and in Mellors, both damaged in the war.  He has a great passage about decay and time marching on:

all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind.  They were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.  They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.  [pg 52]

Lawrence wrote many passages celebrating nature and "Olde England" and decrying industrialization and the pace of change of modernity.  While this mainly manifests itself in Mellors, the gamekeeper, Clifford too longs to preserve the old ways:

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees [of the wood around Wragby Hall].  He felt they were his own through generations.  He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.  [pg 43]

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying.  Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash.  For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless, inertia, silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on.  From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world.  She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees.  They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence...  [pg 69]

There is also much phallic imagery in the book, Sex, potency and especially male sexuality are used as the barometer of a healthy life, a true life, of humanity.  Some examples of Lawrence's powers of imagery [pg 92]:

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up.  The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun!  

Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flakey oak leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky. [pg 132]

I found it interesting that Lawrence chose to write the book from a woman's point of view.  Some of his  passages seem awkward and like what a man would think a woman might feel.  Some seemed more discerning, such as when Michaelis the Irish lover is half-heartedly trying to convince Connie to leave Clifford and live with him.

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing.  These men, they were all alike, they left everything out.  They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.     [pg 54-55]

Nature is used as the antithesis of the industrialization, the civilization, the modernity of the world.  Lawrence sees that movement away from the natural to be the main cause and symptom of man's decay and eventually his destruction.  Mellors is his voice in this.

When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane.  Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane...they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up."

"You mean they'll kill one another?"

"I do...! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred year's time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten.  They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. [...]  To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else.  And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species... "[pg 239]

"...when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel ... the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. [...] [I]t's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life.  I'd wipe machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. [pg 242]

Lawrence also makes frequent mention of Mammon and the bitch-goddess of success.  Mellors the gamekeeper is a damaged man who has decided that retreat into solitude and nature are all he wants out of life.  When he connects with Lady Chatterly he is dragged back into the world of feeling, connection, relationship.

But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory.  The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it.  A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.  The world allows no hermits.  And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.  For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not the woman's fault, not even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.  The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.  There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform...

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing.... And they would do her in!  As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life.... But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.  For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.  [pg 129-130] 

Lawrence is equally pessimistic about society: "...conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. [...] He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast."  [pg 130] and about civilization:

The young ones get mad because they've no money to spend.  Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend.  That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out...The women are the maddest of all.  But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays. [...]  [pg 220]

 If you could only tell them that living and spending are not the same thing!

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't. [...] I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.  [pg 331]

Some of his writing and themes reminded me of Hemingway and trying to get back to basic pleasures, lives of action and simple motivations.  It fit in well with what we've been reading of Darwin and of Freud as well as the class concerns and angst of Dostoyesvsky.  I'm finding all the books we're reading swirling around in my brain and it's hard to pick out one thread or trail that I want to explore.  I wish I had unlimited time to explore all these thoughts and questions.