Romanticism, Decadence, History

Abstract

This chapter tracks the impact of history on D. H. Lawrence's development from The Rainbow to Women in Love. It follows a development keyed to Lawrence's experience of the Great War, the traumatic event which, if unnamed in either of the two novels, generates and explains the striking difference between them. His process of development here provides a kind of history in miniature of a long nineteenth century, where the Romanticism of the earlier century turned into the decaying and then decayed Romanticism of Decadence and, through further turns of the early twentieth century, Modernism. In play and at stake in this process is the history and memory of Revolution, a substantial promise in earlier Romanticism, which abides in Lawrence's social imaginary as a possibility--now lost--of transformational historical change. The sense of despair in Women in Love discovers thus its longer historical memory and profounder literary consequence.