LAWRENCE IN ANOTHER LIGHT: "WOMEN IN LOVE" AND EXISTENTIALISM
Especially when viewed as the response or reaction to or development away from the seemingly dead end of naturalism, existentialism, though currently out of fashion, is nonetheless among the more important literary philosophical developments of the twentieth century. And yet, though the whole tenor of Lawrence's thought is anti deterministic and though he almost certainly is one of the three or four most important English language novelists of the century, D. H. Lawrence only infrequently is considered in the context of existentialism. To be sure, for Norman Mailer, Lawrence's greatest interest lies precisely in his existentialism. Mailer represents Lawrence's thinking in this way: "People can win at love only when they are ready to lose everything they bring to it of ego, position, or identity?love is more stern than war?and men and women survive only if they reach the depths of their own sex down within themselves. They have to deliver themselves over to the unknown." Mailer believes that "No more existential statement of love exists."1 Eliseo Vivas also has recognized an important existentialist element in Lawrence. Writing before Sein und Zeit and U ?tre et le n?ant and therefore "lacking the terminology that existentialism has put at our disposal," Lawrence, Vivas says, "had to put his quarrel in terms of mind against the blood, reason against instinct,"2 dichotomies that are fundamentally existential. More recently, T. H. Adamowski has examined Lady Chatterley'sLover within an existentialist frame, though chiefly with respect to the sexual components of that novel.3 Otherwise, the slate, mainly, is blank.4 One, of course, would not expect to find Joyce's fiction construed as existentialist since it is, though hardly naturalis? tic, nonetheless strongly deterministic. On the other hand, critics often find existentialism to be an appropriate frame of reference for Conrad's fiction. This does not surprise since his situations, and the ways leading into and out of them, are similar to those of the later French writers whom we indeed call existentialists. I would like to make the case here for considering Lawrence, in essentials, to be a profoundly existentialist writer. After all, writers whom