Anshu Chhetri - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Anshu Chhetri

'I cannot live here anymore; and I am sure I cannot do any more work for this country', Lawrence ... more 'I cannot live here anymore; and I am sure I cannot do any more work for this country', Lawrence wrote in a letter of 17 November 1915, when Frieda and he were ready to go to America -a country he saw as bad, but nearer to freedom. 'I think there is no future for England: only decline and fall. That is the dreadful and unbearable part of it: to have been born into a decadent era, a decline of life, a collapsing civilisation' i . Women in Love was published in 1920, but written during World War I and completed in 1916. This was a particularly difficult time for Lawrence. He was trapped in Cornwall by the war, unable to leave because his passport had been confiscated and constantly under pressure from the authorities, who seemed to be convinced that he was a spy. His sense of persecution had a great influence on his writings, added to which was the general cultural pessimism of his days. Many of his contemporaries in England and Ireland as well as on the Continent shared this pessimism: Yeats, Mann, Proust, Joyce, Eliot were all disturbed by the passing of the old order to which they belonged. Many literary works of these years were characterized by a cynicism about the outer world and an obsessive interest in psychic states, aggravated by Freud's lifelong pessimism. Another factor in Lawrence's bitterness was the ongoing industrialism, which had not only ruined the scenery of his childhood days, but also mechanized humanity and murdered its natural impulses, an evil intensified by the war.

'I cannot live here anymore; and I am sure I cannot do any more work for this country', Lawrence ... more 'I cannot live here anymore; and I am sure I cannot do any more work for this country', Lawrence wrote in a letter of 17 November 1915, when Frieda and he were ready to go to America -a country he saw as bad, but nearer to freedom. 'I think there is no future for England: only decline and fall. That is the dreadful and unbearable part of it: to have been born into a decadent era, a decline of life, a collapsing civilisation' i . Women in Love was published in 1920, but written during World War I and completed in 1916. This was a particularly difficult time for Lawrence. He was trapped in Cornwall by the war, unable to leave because his passport had been confiscated and constantly under pressure from the authorities, who seemed to be convinced that he was a spy. His sense of persecution had a great influence on his writings, added to which was the general cultural pessimism of his days. Many of his contemporaries in England and Ireland as well as on the Continent shared this pessimism: Yeats, Mann, Proust, Joyce, Eliot were all disturbed by the passing of the old order to which they belonged. Many literary works of these years were characterized by a cynicism about the outer world and an obsessive interest in psychic states, aggravated by Freud's lifelong pessimism. Another factor in Lawrence's bitterness was the ongoing industrialism, which had not only ruined the scenery of his childhood days, but also mechanized humanity and murdered its natural impulses, an evil intensified by the war.