Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1984

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Daniel J. Schneider

Committee Members

Joseph T. Trahern, Ralph Norman, A. Richard Penner

Abstract

Spirit of place plays a significant role in all of Lawrence's fiction, yet critical interpretation of Lawrence's employment of place in his stories usually is divorced from the basic premises of his philosophy and psychology. Subsequently, this study investigates Lawrence's correlation of his pollyanalytics and spirit of place in his writings. The shorter fiction has been chosen as the focus of this work because it has received far less attention than the longer.

The four primary centers of human consciousness as set forth by Lawrence in Fantasia of the Unconscious are investigated in con junction with other Lawrencean philosophical-psychological tenets present in his essays so as to illustrate Lawrence's integration of such pollyanalytics with specific places in the short fiction. Subsequently, three primary psychic polarities of Lawrence's pollyanalytics--North and South, Sympathetic and Voluntary, Life and Death--are examined in their relation to the shorter tales, and they are found to permeate place and psyche in fifty-two of Lawrence's sixty-seven shorter works.

This study illustrates the fact that Lawrence was supremely aware of the pollyanalytic-place interchange from his earliest short story, "The Fragment of Stained Glass" (1907). His skill in integrating place with psyche steadily improved so that in 1913, when he wrote "The Prussian Officer," he clearly was approaching artistic maturity. Nevertheless, Lawrence reached his pinnacle of effectiveness with this technique in the tales written between 1921 and 1926, such as "The Captain's Doll" (1921), "The Border Line" (1924), "St. Mawr" (1924), and "The Man Who Loved Islands" (1926). Lawrence merges place and psyche more subtly in his later tales, but it still serves its original purpose: it is an effective and purely Lawrencean method of thematic and character development.

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