A Study of D.H.Lawrence's Prose Style

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The study attempts to clarify and define certain aspects of Lawrence's style that some critics have characterized simply as "poetic", incantatory", hypnotic", or "inexplicable". Lawrence's style can be accounted for, but only on the basis of close analysis, and the peculiarities of certain types of passages which are unique to Lawrence's work can be qualified.
Lawrence's family was the most important inportant influences on his style. The central fact of his early family life was conflict, or tension always on the verge of erupting into conflict. Out of the conflict between Lawrence's parents grew what was to become a good part of their author son's private religion and much of the basis for his art. It was in his family that his sense of polarites began. We need to remember that Lawrence made symbolic connections with respect to his mother and father, and the parents represented to him opposing dialectial forces.
The first and largest influence on Lawrence's literary work was his family, and by extension his family's religion. His sense of his religous family ties, his religion itself with its bymns and Bible training were the most important elements in the formation of his prose style. Taken alone, they can account for the repetitive cadences and the evangelical tone of much of his work, for the Biblical and religious diction, imagery, and symbols, and for the imagery and language of opposition; even perhaps for his feeling of "mission" as a writer. His love for the Bible, although he disclaimed it, was with him all his life.
Lawrence uses the Nottingham/Derbyshire dialect as a language of the heart or blood as opposed to the "intellectuasl" or conceptual standard London dialect.
We can find in nearly any given work almost all of the things that mark his style in differing combinations. But we can find certain types of passages more or less in isolation which will serve perhaps as a way into the prose. There are, for example, passages of intense nature description to be found throughout nearly all of the works. Lawrence uses the personification and alliteration in The White peacock and The Tresspasser. Sons and Lovers chronologically the next novel and The Rainbow which follows it shows it show further development in his ability to treat nature. By the end of The Rainbow, he had fully matured in his ways of evoking and using natural things in fiction. The prose used in the nature description of The Rainbow seems generally Biblical, and this sort of symbolic use of things in nature is mythical or Biblical.
As we read through Lawrence's works, including the poems, we find that after nature description, the next most common aspect of his prose is "preachiness"‥ the prophetic voice.
Along with his family and the chapel, we must also see that Lawrence's reading of Carlyle and Ruskin had some effect on his habit of breaking into "a preach". Much of the "prophetic voice" surely must be attributed to the frustration of Lawrence's rising expectations as a writer and a man of the world.
What, then, of the passages of "preachiness" themselves? What are their stylistic characteristics, and what makes them unique to Lawrence? Sometimes his preaching was negative, ie, against the present with its machines and haste and sadism; and at other times he was a positve preacher, with a positive, though mystical, program for change. The passages positive, sure in tone, dogmatic and assertive, as if the speaker was morally knowledgeable. Their rhythms are driving and repetitive, somewhat like those we have examined in the passages of nature description, but more harsh, curt, pushy. Often they break easily in to the religious in ideals and diction.
The another characteristics of Lawrence's prose style is symbolic. The characteristics which can be found in one degree or another throughout Lawrence's symbolic passages as follows.
They are often associated with moolight oreerie light. They often have a rhythm of repeated action, of coming and going or of a particular, symbolic act recurring again and again. They use a rhythm of repeated images, which often symbol.