1“Home” is a concept that is familiar to everyone, that we understand intuitively and yet, that is often difficult or confusing to explain to others. There have been many approaches (psychological, phenomenological, and sociological among others) that have attempted to make sense of and define what the home is. In general, sociological approaches tend to focus “on issues of class, gender, tenure and age, while non-sociological emphasize issues of territoriality, psychological needs and attachments, and phenomenological connectedness” (Somerville 228). In his review of both empirical and theoretical literature on the meaning of home, Peter Somerville observes that in the end “all types of study have revealed the same recurrent meanings of home as the center of family life; a place of retreat, safety and relaxation, freedom and independence; self-expression and social status; a place of privacy, continuity and permanence; a financial asset; and a support for work and leisure activities” (227-228).
2In his posthumously published essay “Return to Bestwood,” D.H. Lawrence shows the complexity of the meaning of home when he states: “I came home to the Midlands for a few days, at the end of September. Not that there is any home, for my parents are dead. But there are my sisters, and the district one calls home; that mining district between Nottingham and Derby” (15). In his case, home is first connected to one’s native village or birthplace, and then also strongly linked to the family and the familiar. If the notion of home has commonly been associated with the maternal, it does not seem to be the case for Lawrence who couples the lack of home with the death of both parents, rather than of his mother. Indeed, many of his works show his ambivalent attitude towards the mother. While the image of the “ideal home” as a place where children can thrive under their mother’s watch and protection is still dominant in our society, our culture and in literature, for Lawrence, the notion of “home” is not necessarily connected with the maternal, but rather with the paternal. For instance, in Sons and Lovers, the mother’s high-handed attitude towards the father, and, by extension, towards the mining community, results in creating a disharmonious household and estranging the children from their father. Family tensions and the mother’s stifling love have urged the children to seek escape from the family nest. In his short story Sun, Lawrence also depicts Juliet, an emotionally unavailable mother who considers her son a burden: “the child irritated her, and preyed on her peace of mind. She felt horribly, ghastly responsible for him: as if she must be responsible for every breath he drew. And that was torture to her, to the child, and to everybody else concerned” (28).
3If from Lawrence’s viewpoint, mothers fail to provide a haven for the family, fathers make up for it by initiating a communal feeling in their children. First, in the poem “Nostalgia,” the speaker realizes that following the death of his father, “the place is no longer ours” (135). Then, in his late essay “Return to Bestwood,” talking about the coal miners, Lawrence confesses that “It is they who are, in some peculiar way, ‘home’ to me […] the miners at home are men very much like me, and I am very much like them” (22, 23). This statement establishes a connection between the writer’s own father (Arthur Lawrence), the mining community and Lawrence’s idea of home. For D.H. Lawrence, home is more than just a space or a place, it has more to do with the idea of shared intimacy and the sentiment of belonging to a community. His late writings are tinged with nostalgia for a distant past, for a time when the collective was prioritized over the individual, before homeliness was superseded by homelessness; homelessness which according to Karl Marx, finds its root in capitalism and social inequalities.
4To define the notion of home from Lawrence’s point of view, it is necessary to start by recognizing that the meaning of the home is never gender neutral. Recent studies have suggested that men tend to perceive the home in terms of status and achievement, while women, on the contrary, are more likely to see the home as an emotional sanctuary or a shelter; they “care more about the home than men and derive more satisfaction from it” (Somerville 229). The nineteenth century “Cult of Domesticity,” also known as “Cult of True Womanhood,” and its emphasis on the separate spheres, identified womanhood with the domestic space of the home and men with the public sphere, thus to a great degree contributing to these gender differences. Sons and Lovers partly exemplifies the ideals of the Cult of Domesticity by representing a mother, Gertrude Morel, who oversees her children’s education and the functioning of the household. She also spends a lot of time in the drawing room and the kitchen, while the father, Walter Morel is responsible for providing for his family; he is the breadwinner and endorses financial obligations. He is most of the time in public places, either at work or at the pub. If Mrs. Morel fulfills some of the duties expected from women, she is not the typical Victorian woman either. Although she is a stay-at-home mother, she is far from being submissive and instead she seems to have the upper hand over her husband and has great influence on her children, which fosters their hostility towards the father, whom “all the children […] were peculiarly against” (SL 97), as well as their alienation from the mining community. This alienation is made visible, for instance, in Paul’s aversion for Mr. Braithwaite’s and Winterbottom’s use of the Eastwood dialect. He scornfully tells his mother: “They’re hateful, and common, and hateful, they are, and I’m not going any more. Mr Braithwaite drops his ‘h’s,’ an’ Mr. Winterbottom says ‘You was’.” (SL 112) Paul’s vehement rejection of the regional dialect, specifically its grammar and pronunciation, makes him an outsider in the mining community of Eastwood, which position Lawrence would reconsider by the end of Sons and Lovers and in his later writing. Clearly language plays an important role in building a sense of belonging to a community and instilling a homelike feeling. Gertrude is presented as Walter’s complete opposite in “class, intellect, education (including literacy), and attitude toward money, but most obviously and explicitly she is his (and his community’s) opposite in linguistic terms,” (Hillier 26) and mainly speaks “standard English.” If those differences were a source of attraction at the beginning of their relationship as we learn in “she was to the miner that thing of mystery and fascination, a lady. When she spoke to him, it was with a southern pronunciation and a purity of English which thrilled him to hear” (SL 44), Hilary Hillier explains that “after a time linguistic differences between Mrs Morel and her husband become increasingly associated with discord. This is especially so when the children are born and eventually come between them” (27). Both William and Paul grow up speaking standard English, that is, linguistically away from their father and the community. However, their paths are not exactly the same. Hillier notes that “William moves linguistically, socially, and then geographically (to London) as he aspires to fulfil his mother’s and his own ambitions: he wants to become ‘a gentleman.’ His aspirations prove to be insecurely based, however, and in the end, he is destroyed” (29). Just like William, Paul’s strong attachment to his mother contributes to his rejection of the mining community at first visible, as mentioned previously, through his contempt for the Eastwood dialect. However, if he first appears to reject the community, he also seems to retain some connections with it. Hillier further notices that Paul follows a different path and that he “could be regarded as some kind of linguistic ‘bridge’,” that “he retains his connection with the community and its speech forms, while making a limited geographical move – commuting to Nottingham rather than moving to London” (29). While Paul fulfils his mother’s ambition when he works at Jordan’s and makes intensive use of his linguistic skills (via French translation for example), he is also revealed to use some of the grammar forms he despised earlier, thus also demonstrating that he accepts the community as well, especially when he engages in relationship with women other than his mother. For instance, Hillier observes that in his encounter with Clara down the riverbank at Wilford Grove, he switches to dialect, especially to the intimate and warm tha. First, as Hillier points out (31), he asked her:
“Why dost look so heavy?” There then follows a sequence of tha forms as he “pleadingly” and “imploringly” caresses and kisses her face: “Never thee bother […] tha shouldna worrit […] Yea tha does! Dunna thee worrit,” which are reminiscent of his father in his most tender moments with Mrs Morel. This continues for a time when they have climbed back to the top of the slope and he begins to clean Clara’s shoes, clogged with dirt from the river bank. Once again, we hear echoes of Morel’s voice: “And now I’ll clean thy boots and make thee fit for respectable folk.”
5Then following his mother’s death, Paul falls into depression but manages to overcome his suicidal thoughts. He decides to “walk towards the city’s gold phosphorescence,” to “walk towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly” (SL 492), which could be interpreted as his decision, in the end, to fully embrace the Eastwood community.
6In his essay “Return to Bestwood” which was written when he came back to Eastwood in 1926, Lawrence confesses:
Now I am turned forty, and have been more or less a wanderer for nearly twenty years, I feel more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world. I can feel at ease in Canal Street, New Orleans, or in the Avenue Madero, in Mexico City, or in George Street, Sydney, in Trincomalee Street, Kandy, or in Rome or Paris or Munich or even London. But in Nottingham Road, Bestwood, I feel at one a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion. (15)
7In his statement, Lawrence clearly shows his ambivalent feelings, “a devouring nostalgia” and “an infinite repulsion,” for his birthplace. His bittersweet feelings stem from his nostalgia for the “old England,” accentuated by a sense of loss brought about by industrialism. While he hates the industrial landscape of England, he experiences an “acute nostalgia” (“Return to Bestwood” 22) for coal miners of bygone times and remembers: “the homeward-trooping of the colliers when I was a boy, the ringing of the feet, the red mouths and the quick whites of the eyes, the swinging pit-bottles, and the strange voices of men from the underworld calling back and forth” (“Return to Bestwood” 21), and he feels deeply connected with them. He admits that:
They have, I think an underneath ache and heaviness very much like my own. It must be so, because when I see them, I feel it so strongly.
They are the only people who move me strongly, and with whom I feel myself connected in deeper destiny. It is they who are, in some peculiar way, “home” to me. I shrink away from them, and I have an acute nostalgia for them. (“Return to Bestwood” 22)
8Hence, he seems to strongly empathize with the plight of those men: “I feel doom over the country, and a shadow of despair over the hearts of the men, which leaves me no rest. Because the same doom is over me, wherever I go, and the same despair touches my heart” (22). It is obvious that the mining community is home to him. It provides familiarity and helps maintain his identity. In the end, he declares that “I know that the miners at home are men very much like me, and I am very much like them: ultimately, we want the same thing. I know they are, in the life sense of the word, good.” (“Return to Bestwood” 23) This statement testifies to Lawrence’s sympathy for the colliers, rather than his alienation from them, although he stated earlier feeling “more alien, perhaps, in my home place than anywhere else in the world” (“Return to Bestwood” 15). His feeling of estrangement from his home place is linked to an intense disillusionment, a result of “the turbulent years of political unrest and the social change after the war and also experiencing the aftereffects of the Victorian age” (Nakada 71) that he describes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover:
This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic but mechanical. (LCL 167)
9Tomoko Nakada points out that Lawrence criticizes the Victorian age “for lots of ‘ugliness,’ ‘ugly ideas, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationships’” (Nakada 71). She further explains that:
The twin evils are industrialism and intellectualism, which induces the destruction of man’s vitality and the numbing of his creative spontaneity and sensual awareness. […] Christianity conceals and strongly represses sexuality, which, as a result, fosters prostitution and pornography. Lawrence protests against the defilement and debasement of physical love by Puritanism and prurience, maintaining that the tragedy of the mind’s precedence over the body was formed by these twin evils. (71)
10In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence’s pessimism culminates in the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellor’s anticipation that “there’s bad time coming” (324). While he reflects upon the societal ills that he believes put his fellows in a vulnerable position, he nonetheless adopts a hopeful pessimistic attitude. As a hopeful pessimist, Lawrence is convinced that things are going in the wrong direction and yet, he remains hopeful of potential future changes. He maintains that we can remedy the situation by embracing the primitive world he associates with his father and by extension with the colliers. In his essay, “Nottingham and the Mining Countryside” (1926), Lawrence shows appreciation for the “physical contact” and “physical awareness” of his father and the miners, who had “a lustrous sort of inner darkness,” “real being,” and “a peculiar sense of beauty” (108), and at the same time he condemns the working class’s unsophisticated manners and simple mindedness. Therefore, as Nakada observes, Lawrence makes the gamekeeper in the novel “almost like a gentleman” (LCL 50). Indeed, he has
[…] received a grammar school education, has been an office clerk, and during the war, an officer, but he has refused his middle-class identity and reverted deliberately to the working-class life and ways of his blacksmith father. He can, therefore, modulate his accent to project himself as either a gentleman or a peasant, switching codes like Lawrence. His dialect is elusive, and close to the language of Lawrence’s childhood, in brief, close to nature, and it prepares the way for Connie’s “receiving either a magical agent or helper” (Propp 39). (Nakada 84)
11While he bears the characteristics of a gentleman, Mellors also perpetuates the old primitive qualities of body awareness that Lawrence admired so much in his father and in the fellow miners, thereby, Lawrence can identify with his father through assimilation with the gamekeeper. So, the paternal world enables him to rediscover his roots, although he relentlessly mourns the loss of the England of his childhood and finds his birthplace disheartening.
12Finally, it is in his poem “Nostalgia,” set in Cornwall, that the connection between one’s childhood home and the father figure is paramount. In this poem, the speaker’s memory of his birthplace remains extremely vivid: “the place is palpable me, for here I was born” (Stanza 2). He is haunted and welcomed by the ghosts of the past: “only the old ghosts know // I have come, I feel them whimper in welcome, and mourn” (Stanza 2). While the place with its “shadowy house” and its “darkness” could appear disquieting at first, the speaker shows that it can also be a reassuring and safe space as the use of the terms “heaven,” “easy sailing” and “welcome” suggests. The ghosts of his past “welcoming and mourning” empathize with the speaker and his loss. In the third stanza, it is revealed that this feeling of loss is caused by the sudden death of the father:
My father suddenly died in the harvesting corn
And the place is no longer ours. Watching, I hear
No sound from the strangers, the place is dark, and fear
Opens my eyes till the roots of my vision seem torn. (Stanza 3)
13The speaker’s anxiety stems from the unfamiliar, associated with the “strangers” (Stanza 3) who are occupying his childhood house, which reinforces the idea that familiarity is created through kinship and in the speaker’s case, through his relationship with his father. The loss of the familiar seems to be what has driven him away from his homeplace, perhaps sending him into exile. However, he expresses an ardent desire to reconnect with his roots when he wonders in stanzas 4 and 5:
Can I go no nearer, never towards the door?
The ghosts and I we mourn together, and shrink
In the shadow of the cart-shed. Must we hover on the brink
For ever, and never enter the homestead any more?
Is it irrevocable? Can I really not go
Through the open yard-way? Can I not go past the sheds
And through to the mowie? − Only the dead in their beds
Can know the fearful anguish that this is so.
14The series of rhetorical questions demonstrate that he is tormented by his desire to reconnect with his past, with his childhood and especially with his home that he lost when his father “suddenly died in the harvesting corn” (Stanza 3).
15In conclusion, this article has examined the complexity and the multi-dimensionality of the notion of “home” in D.H. Lawrence’s writings. In his work, Lawrence explores its different meanings by considering several aspects such as gender, community, and identity. He demonstrates that the “home” is more than just a physical structure or a dwelling (a house or a building), but instead that it is tightly linked to the memory of his childhood, a memory that is tinged with nostalgia and a longing for a return to his roots. Finally, for Lawrence the home is strongly associated with the paternal and by extension with the mining community, which gives him a feeling of belonging, familiarity, and intimacy.