Volume 52, Number 3 · February 24, 2005
The Ideal Husband
By Benjamin Kunkel
The Lost Girl
by D.H. Lawrence, with an introduction by Lee Siegel and notes by Keith Cushman
Modern Library, 368 pp., $13.95 (paper)
D.H. Lawrence is often thought of as a novelist of sex when really his great subject was marriage. We tend to forget that Lady Chatterley's lover was also her second-husband-to-be. Yet marriage was Lawrence's religion as sex was merely his sacrament. 'There's very little else, on earth, but marriage,' said Tom Brangwen in The Rainbow, drunk at his daughter's wedding. Lawrence was intoxicated for most of his life with a similar apprehension. Marriage unites two people; it also proves that no such thing is possible. And so marriage was for Lawrence not so much the symbol as the very type of his thought and experience: he insisted with an indivisible passion on both the inviolability of human individuality and one's need for others. And having pledged himself as a young man to this contradiction, he lived with it until he died.
Review, 4031 words
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