Lawrence, Dana and the Destructive Element

Abstract

I begin by revisiting Lawrence’s reading of Dana’s Two Years before the Mast reading it not as a critique of Dana but as a Lawrencian fiction in which the sea plays a central symbolic role. As Lawrence reflects on the vital relation of the human and the non-human, the sea seems to represent its destructive possibilities which Dana and Melville variously encounter, and thereby allow Lawrence to explore. In the Dana essay it is especially necessary, but not easy, to hold in focus the competing levels of the literal and scientific, on the one hand, and the metaphorical and visionary on the other. Sometimes the relation is strained as I suggest occurs in the flogging episode but this double vision is the basis for appreciating Lawrence’s representation of the sea.