Whenever I think of D.H. Lawrence, I think of rabbits. This probably has to do with the fact that the first of his writings I ever came across was a short story in a college English class about one such rabbit named Adolf (this was written decades before that name became forever tainted). And while the class certainly covered his mastery of lyrical language and his place as a modernist writer, we didn’t discuss how one of his books became integral to the open discussion of sex and sexual expression in modern literature and pop culture. And we definitely did not go over the fact that Lawrence was bi.
Born on September 11, 1885, in the English Midlands to a coal miner father and educated lace-making mother, David Herbert Lawrence was the last of four children in a working-class town. Growing up, Lawrence had two great passions that fed his later works ― his love of roaming in nature and a love of literature that his mother passed down to him. While he won a scholarship to Nottingham High School, he did not get on well with his classmates, as he was often ill or frail, did not do well at sports (the smoke-choked coal town air didn’t help matters much), and had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps like most of the other classmates. He was, however, an excellent student when the depression of his circumstances didn’t get to him. His family life was also bleak and troubled, as his father was a drinker, nearly illiterate, and faced financial difficulties.
Lawrence left school at 16 to become a junior clerk at a surgical appliances factory, but his brother’s death and a case of pneumonia he caught during his grief put an end to that. Instead, he went to school, got a teaching certificate from University College Nottingham in 1906, and became a teacher while continuing his childhood passion for writing. Over the next several years, Lawrence wrote his first few novels, The White Peacock, The Trespasser, and Sons and Lovers.
During the spring of 1912, Lawrence’s life took a hairpin turn when he met and fell hard for Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of a college professor. Within weeks he broke off an engagement he had with a previous woman, decided he would commit to writing full-time, and ran off with Frieda to the continent for a few years, marrying in 1914.
Lawrence is kind of the epitome of the writer that follows the “write what you know” idiom, as a huge section of his writings traces back to his life experiences and opinions. Over the course of the next decade or so, the writer would publish plays, poems, and more novels ― the latter of which led to acclaim and much controversy due in particular to their sexual content as well as their ideas which challenged the class system in England. These works included The Rainbow and Women In Love, companion pieces following the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. Women In Love, in particular, has multiple characters heavily based on real-life friends and lovers of his ― Ursula as Frieda, Gudrun as Katherine Mansfield, Gerald as J.M. Murry, and Rupert Birkin as a stand-in for himself. This book in particular explores bi themes more thoroughly than most of his other works, with Lawrence’s surrogate repeatedly arguing for the need for forms of love from both women and men in order to be satisfied on spiritual and intimate levels.
As for his own bisexuality, academic Mark Kinkead-Weekes asserted in his three-volume biography of Lawrence that the author “openly accepted his bisexuality by 1914”. In my research, I found some allegations that Frieda accused Lawrence of having an affair with a male farmer while writing Women In Love in 1916, but I can’t find a trusted source enough to lay it as “evidence” here. However, Lawrence was also noted for writing in a letter: “I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not.”
These findings, coupled with the feelings of his stand-in in Women in Love and multiple homoerotic explorations in writings (including the likely bisexuality of Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover), seem to provide sufficient evidence that Lawrence held bisexual attractions. Whether or not he acted on them, however, may be lost to the sands of time. But, as we know, bisexuality isn’t about action but attraction, and he seems to have clearly harbored an attraction to multiple genders.
Lawrence continued to write until his later days, despite critics at the time labeling his works as pornographic and trying to not get them published under laws of obscenity, including his perhaps most well-known novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. While he died from complications from tuberculosis in 1930, Chatterley's was banned from publication in the States and England until 1960, when a jury allowed Penguin Books to publish the masterpiece as they found them not guilty of violating Britain’s Obscene Publications Act. The case is now considered a harbinger of greater discussion of sexual expression and more liberal sexual mores in American and Western culture of the 1960s and beyond.
Lawrence’s life was a fascinating one that I could not cover all the great points of in just this column, so I highly suggest if you find him interesting, seek out his works and learn more about his life. (Pro-tip: start with his short stories, as they’re more accessible.) “Adolf” isn’t a bad spot to start.
Though he was scorned and banned for the greater part of his adult life, Lawrence is now hailed as one of the best writers of the English modernist movement — and, consequently, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His works, spanning themes as expansive as sex, love, class, and death, make him one of the most consequential writers of the modern day. And he was bi.
Comments
Facebook Comments