D H Lawrence & Paradoxes Psychic Life

Contributing to the debate about D. H. Lawrence's relationship with and fictional portrayal of women, this book discusses how the dynamic tensions of his art dramatically reenact the competing forces of psychic and relational life. In her examination of Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and various short stories, Schapiro discusses how Lawrence's best works reveal a continual struggle to recognize and be recognized by the other as an independent subject. Drawing on Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytic theory of intersubjectivity, she also demonstrates how a breakdown of balanced subject-subject relations in his texts gives rise to defensive polarities of gender and of domination and submission.