1A curious paradox blights most travellers who journey far from home in search of the exotic and unfamiliar: an immediate need to feel at home in a foreign setting. Why? No doubt because the appeal of what is alien is contingent upon a guarantee of security – the feeling of foreignness is only enjoyed as long as it does not threaten one’s identity and integrity. Lawrence, as well as other writers of the colonial period such as E.M. Forster and Joseph Conrad, reveals this tension between interest in other cultures and rootedness in one’s own culture, in his two major foreign-set novels, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, and in the travel essays of Mornings in Mexico.
2Neither Lawrence or his characters are immune to the typical reaction of the European traveller, which is to seek in foreign cities and landscapes any feature which might remind them of home. The travelling narrator of Mornings in Mexico memorably observes that “[i]f there were no church to mark a point in these villages, there would be nowhere at all to make for” (MM 26). Kangaroo’s Richard Somers continuously views the city of Sydney with the eyes of a Londoner:
The train ran for a long time through Sydney, or the endless outsides of Sydney. The town took almost as much leaving as London does. But it was different. Instead of solid rows of houses, solid streets like London, it was mostly innumerable detached bungalows and cottages, spreading for great distances, scattering over hills, low hills and shallow inclines. (K 76)
3The comparison with the home capital shows Sydney at a disadvantage, disorganised and insubstantial. Moreover, Somers only admires urban characteristics which remind him of those he might find back home in England. He is finally so overcome by homesickness that the automatic parallels he draws between Sydney and London seem to deprive Sydney of its singularity, reducing the city to a meaningless oddity:
Somers wandered disconsolate through the streets of Sydney, forced to admit that there were fine streets, like Birmingham for example, that the parks and the Botanical Gardens were handsome and well-kept […] But oh, what did he care about it all! In Martin Place he longed for Westminster, in Sussex Street he almost wept for Covent Garden and St Martin’s Lane, at the Circular Quay he pined for London Bridge. It was all London without being London. (K 20)
4What Lawrence represents in these extracts is the instinctive analogy with home which the British traveller will summon to make sense of an alien cityscape or landscape, and possibly, to domesticate what he may feel to be an inhospitable environment – in the sense of transforming a strange place into a more familiar setting.
5This is precisely what British colonisation effected in India, recreating British places and customs, notably English gardens, English Clubs, Europeanised villas, bungalows and hotels, while offering British forms of recreation like tennis, billiards, plays, tea-time, cocktails, and cooking British food. Historian Judith Roberts explains: “the creation of an English garden was also important for the psychological and physical survival of those living a temporary existence in an alien country and in a hostile climate. The English countryside and the English garden formed a powerful image, perhaps a myth, that was constantly evoked” (Roberts 115). Similarly, the English Club plays a central role in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), as a place from which natives are excluded, giving the British colonials a sense of security and unity, and a place where the conventions and values of the home country are upheld, preventing any disintegration of their British identity. Forster writes:
[t]he amateur orchestra played the National Anthem. Conversation and billiards stopped, faces stiffened. It was the Anthem of the Army of Occupation. It reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and in exile. It produced a little sentiment and a useful accession of will-power. The meagre tune, the curt series of demands on Jehovah, fused into a prayer unknown in England, and though they perceived neither Royalty nor Deity they did perceive something, they were strengthened to resist another day. (A Passage to India 26-27)
6Forster’s implicit satire is palpable in the choice of demeaning adjectives, pinpointing the forceful and restrictive imposition of Britishness. Lawrence also briefly mentions that institution in The Plumed Serpent, when Judge Burlap almost immediately asks Owen at the start of their conversation: “Been in the club yet?” implying that a visit to the club is a prerequisite for any foreigner in Mexico City, but to which Owen replies: “No […] I haven’t. American clubs aren’t much in my line” (PS 33).
7Kate Leslie, on the other hand, does seek the comfort of British traditions in Mexico City, after the upsetting experience of the bullfight. She first takes refuge in her usual tea-house, Sanborn’s, to shake off the lingering unpleasantness of her meeting with Cipriano Viedma: “She was glad to get to her corner in the tea-house, to feel herself in the cosmopolitan world once more, to drink her tea and eat strawberry shortcake and try to forget” (PS 24). Later, she accepts an invitation from “a Mrs Norris, widow of an English ambassador of thirty years ago,” who asks her to “come out to tea this afternoon and see the garden” (PS 30). During that afternoon visit, Kate’s interest in Mexican culture and history is awakened by her encounter with Don Ramón, but at the same time, her conversation with Cipriano has an adverse impact on her cultural openness. Kate’s attitude to home and the foreign is somewhat similar to Mrs Moore’s in A Passage to India, since both are curious about the natives and their customs, yet often fearful of them and quick to retreat into isolation and thoughts of their British home. Unlike Mrs Moore, however, Kate is entirely free to travel as she pleases, being unrestricted by male relatives or a patriarchal British community like the one Forster depicts in the British Raj of the 1920s. Historian Jenny Sharpe explains that “a feminized, racially exclusive domesticity was critical to the construction of British imperial power in India: the restriction of middle-class women to the home is the sign of national virtue and moral superiority […] the domestic sphere is a space of racial purity that the colonial housewife guards against contamination from the outside” (Procida 124-125).
8Considering the fact that Lawrence’s novel is set in the same period as Forster’s, the early 1920s, albeit in Mexico, removed from any form of British rule, Lawrence’s female protagonist is remarkably unimpeded by domestic demands and keen to interact with both native men and women. Admittedly, Lawrence and Forster had differing purposes when writing about the British abroad: Forster mockingly highlighted their preoccupation with maintaining a belief in racial superiority dependent upon recreating English homes and habits abroad, whereas Lawrence enthusiastically showed them discovering foreign homes, foods and customs. For instance, Forster fiercely criticises the attempt to reproduce English dishes in a country unaccustomed to such food:
[…] the menu was: Julienne soup full of bullety bottled peas, pseudo-cottage bread, fish full of branching bones, pretending to be plaice, more bottled peas with the cutlets, trifle, sardines on toast: the menu of Anglo-India. A dish might be added or subtracted as one rose or fell in the official scale, the peas might rattle less or more, the sardines and the vermouth be imported by a different firm, but the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it. (A Passage to India 47)
- 1 “There are stalls of new, various-shaped bread, brown and bright: there are tiny stalls of marvello (...)
9By contrast, Lawrence’s characters are delighted with or critical of local food, but always interested in sampling it and savouring its novelty.1
10While the British in India built their own streets, hotels, clubs, gardens and bungalows, of which Forster is amusingly critical, as in the description: “Then they reached their bungalow, low and enormous, the oldest and most uncomfortable bungalow in the civil station, with a sunk soup plate of a lawn” (A Passage to India 29), British travellers in Lawrence’s novels are anxious to find housing which might suit their English taste and satisfy their fancy for indigenous architecture. Lawrence was evidently captivated by the houses he saw in Mexico, since The Plumed Serpent offers numerous and lengthy descriptions of the various characters’ homes, stressing their strangeness or charm, and often reflecting in some way the needs or personality of their owners. Mrs Norris’s hacienda is presented thus:
They pulled up at last at big gate-doors, beyond which was a heavy pink-and-yellow house, and beyond the house, high, dark cypress trees. […] The square, inner patio, dark, with sun lying on the heavy arches of one side, had pots of red and white flowers, but was ponderous, as if dead for centuries. A certain dead, heavy strength and beauty seemed there, unable to pass away, unable to liberate itself and decompose. There was a stone basin of clear but motionless water, and the heavy reddish-and-yellow arches went round the courtyard with warrior-like fatality, their bases in dark shadow. Dead, massive house of the Conquistadores, with a glimpse of tall-grown garden beyond, and further Aztec cypresses rising to strange dark heights. (PS 32)
11Lawrence’s use of the adjectives “heavy,” “dark,” “ponderous,” “dead,” “motionless,” “massive” emphatically point to Mrs Norris’s lasting social weight and importance, as well as her static and decaying seclusion. In like manner, Don Ramón’s house in Jamiltepec is a strong, protective fortress, which nonetheless betrays an underlying impression of weakness conveyed by the terms “barren,” “empty” and “neglect”:
Kate found herself in a big, barren yard, that seemed empty. There were high walls on the three sides, with sheds and stables. The fourth side, facing, was the house, with heavily-barred windows looking on to the courtyard, but with no door. Instead, there was another zaguán, or passage with closed doors piercing the house. […] The terrace, with green plants on the terrace wall, went round the three sides, the roof above supported by big square pillars that rose from the ground. Down below, the pillars made a sort of cloisters around the three sides, and in the little stone court was a pool of water. Beyond, the rather neglected formal garden with strong sun and deep mango-shade. (PS 162)
12Lastly, Kate’s house in Sayula is a “cool, dark” haven of “sparkling flowers” (PS 109) and many other plants, marked by contrasts of shade and light and colours, as contrasted as Kate’s feelings of admiration and repulsion towards Mexico; while Cipriano’s Villa Aragón is “rather like a little castle, absurd, yet […] pleasant” (PS 419), terms which once again seem to point to Kate’s appraisal of the man himself.
13Lawrence’s European protagonists in Kangaroo are likewise both critical and appreciative of the Australian architecture they discover in and around Sydney. Their first impression of Australian lodgings is decidedly negative, particularly for Harriett, who contemptuously dismisses them with comparisons to animal dens: “all these little dog-kennelly houses […] like chicken houses with chicken runs” (K 12). What further analysis of Sydney’s suburban landscape discloses, is that Harriett and Richard Somers are unsettled by its general appearance of neglect, compared to their previous experience of living in Hampstead Garden, a carefully designed London suburb (K 364). The word “cottage,” used to refer to Sydney’s suburban houses, is placed between quotation marks as a clear indication of the Somers’ disapproval of such denomination, which they spontaneously associate with the type of housing they were used to in Hampstead:
[…] they wandered along a wide, rutted space of deep sand, looking at the “cottages” on either side. They had impossible names. But in themselves, many of them were really nice. Yet there they stood like so many forlorn chicken-houses, each on its own oblong patch of land, with a fence between it and its neighbour. There was something indescribably weary and dreary about it. The very ground the houses stood on seemed weary and drabbled, almost asking for rusty tin cans. And so many pleasant little bungalows set there in an improvised road, wide and weary—and then the effort had lapsed. The tin shacks were almost a relief. They did not call for geraniums and lobelias, as did the pretty Hampstead Garden Suburb “cottages.” (K 26)
14The mixture of “pleasant little bungalows” and “tin shacks” destabilises the English traveller, who cannot reconcile the individually nice bungalows with the generally shabby appearance of the neighbourhood. Moreover, the constant parallel that is drawn between Sydney and London makes it difficult to find a home, a quest which the novel repeatedly questions, oscillating between the necessity of a home, in accordance with the Victorian ideal, and the rejection of a confining and deceptive notion of hominess.
15The famous “Home, Sweet Home” phrase is a concept which was adopted in the Victorian age, though it had been in use since the eighteenth century. It expresses a search for material comfort in the homes of wealthy families, as well as a yearning for the comforts of home in the traveller’s mind. Lawrence’s most prominent travellers, the Somers and Kate Leslie, would seem to endorse such aspirations, considering their active search for a home abroad and their immediate urge to rearrange it. The scene describing Harriett and Richard moving into their first bungalow in Sydney is delightfully sarcastic:
Before Harriett had even taken her hat off she removed four pictures from the wall, and the red plush tablecloth from the table. Somers had disconsolately opened the bags, so she fished out an Indian sarong of purplish shot colour, to try how it would look across the table. But the walls were red, of an awful deep bluey red, that looks so fearful with dark-oak fittings and furniture: or dark-stained jarrah, which amounts to the same thing; and Somers snapped, looking at the purple sarong—a lovely thing in itself:
“Not with red walls.”
“No, I suppose not,” said Harriett, disappointed. “We can easily colour-wash them white—or cream.”
“What, start colour-washing walls?”
“It would only take half a day.”
“That’s what we come to a new land for—to God’s Own Country—to start colour-washing walls in a beastly little suburban bungalow? That we’ve hired for three months and mayn’t live in three weeks!”
“Why not? You must have walls.”
“I suppose you must,” he said, going away to inspect the two little bedrooms, and the kitchen, and the outside. (K 12)
- 2 “The women flew at the house with hot water and soda. Jack and Somers spent the morning removing be (...)
16Besides the amused recollections and undercurrent of ridicule this autobiographical scene conveys, it also draws attention to the domestic impulses of these English, middle-class protagonists, who characteristically embrace a trend which, in the aftermath of WW1, takes on a larger significance than simply making oneself at home in a foreign country. Hilary Hinds explains: “the reconstitution of the nation in the aftermath of a profoundly destabilizing world war involved a reconfiguration of middle-class domestic values as the proper and defining location of the English character” (Hinds 311). Kangaroo is indeed set in the years following the First World War, whose lingering shadow persists in the Somers’ experience of Australia. Hinds continues: “Hence, by extension, the idea of the English nation itself—for which the middle class increasingly stood in hegemonic synecdoche—became ‘at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private’” (Hinds 311). Harriett and Richard are a typical illustration of this idea of private domesticity, wary as they are of making contact with the world outside their home – initially embodied by their neighbours, the Callcotts – and always anxious to find refuge in a suitable house and in each other. Lawrence shows his own preoccupation with domestic wellbeing in the long description of “Coo-ee,” Victoria Callcott’s bungalow on the Pacific, followed by a detailed account of the Somers and Callcotts’ cleaning frenzy.2 The effect of the war on English domesticity is also mentioned in Kangaroo with regards to cooking: “Like plenty of other women Harriett had learned to cook during war-time, and now she loved it, once in a while” (K 34-35), and the high-tea resulting in Harriett’s “wonderfully successful cooking morning” (K 34) is once more depicted in extensive detail, a clear indication of Lawrence’s personal pleasure in home-cooked food, although to Richard Somers “it was like being back twenty-five years, back in an English farm-house in the Midlands, at Sunday tea” (K 36), a reminiscence which intensifies his feeling of estrangement and displacement, instead of bringing him home comfort.
- 3 “The second day, Kate had the energy to cast out one suite of bent-wood and cane furniture from her (...)
17Like the Somers, Kate Leslie’s first reaction upon moving into her new house in Sayula is to create domestic comfort by altering her interior decoration.3 The furniture and its arrangement are minutely presented:
In the centre of Kate’s red-tiled salon were two crescents: a black bent-wood cane settee flanked on each side by two black bent-wood cane chairs, exactly facing a brown bent-wood cane settee flanked on each side and the eight chairs were occupied by the ghosts of all the Mexican banalities ever uttered, sitting facing one another with their knees towards one another, and their feet on the terrible piece of green-with-red-roses carpet, in the weary centre of the salon. The very sight of it was frightening. (PS 110)
- 4 Lawrence had won a competition and his design was bought by Liberty London, known for its developme (...)
18Lawrence’s judgemental observations on home decor are rather unexpected, but considering the primary influence of his childhood home, the later influence of the Bloomsbury group’s domestic art at the time, to which he was certainly exposed, and the heritage of the Arts and Crafts movement, which he had studied,4 Lawrence had evidently developed a sense of home aesthetics.
19Thus, some Lawrencian travellers are quick to recreate abroad the domestic comforts of a space in which they might feel at home, imposing upon the foreign lodging their sense of a proper English home. In her study The Early Victorians at Home, Elizabeth Burton quotes Emerson, saying of the Englishman: “If he is in the middle condition, he spares no expense on his house […] within it is wainscoted, carved, curtained, hung with pictures and filled with good furniture. ‘Tis a passion which survives all others to deck and improve” (Burton 97). Yet, despite the obvious fondness the Somers and Kate Leslie have for home-improvement, Lawrence also counteracts this generality in Aaron’s Rod, where Aaron himself, having left England for Italy, reflects upon the desirability of English comforts:
At home, in England, the bright grate and the ruddy fire, the thick hearth-rug and the man’s arm-chair, these had been inevitable. And now he was glad to get away from it all. He was glad not to have a cosy hearth, and his own arm-chair. He was glad to feel the cold, and to breathe the unwarmed air. He preferred the Italian way of no fires, no heating. If the day was cold, he was willing to be cold too. It if was dark, he was willing to be dark. The cosy brightness of a real home—it had stifled him till he felt his lungs would burst. The horrors of real domesticity. No, the Italian brutal way was better. (Aaron’s Rod 209)
20Here the opposition between the “cosiness” of an English home – consisting of brightness, warmth, softness and a feeling of propriety – and the “brutal” lack of comfort of an Italian hotel room, leads to a rejection of English home comforts, which Aaron describes in terms of oppression: “inevitable,” “to get away,” “stifled,” “horrors of real domesticity.” The adjective “real,” employed twice in this extract, further underlines the burdensome responsibilities attached to domestic life, which Aaron has fled.
21In time, Richard Somers likewise questions the essence of home, its presumption of necessity, its illusory singularity, following a distressing interview with the dying Kangaroo which pushes him to seek solitude:
Home again. But what was home? The fish has the vast ocean for home. And man has timelessness and nowhere. “I won’t delude myself with the fallacy of home,” he said to himself. “The four walls are a blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep.”
[…] Home, to tea. The clicking of the clock. Tic-tac! Tic-tac! The clock. Home to tea. Just for clockwork’s sake. (K 333)
22Somers gives two definitions of home in this passage: first, it acts as a simple physical protection against exposure to the elements, “four walls” or “a blanket” to shield him. Home is emptied of its emotional significance and of its rootedness in an immutable place; it is as “the vast ocean,” grounded neither in time nor in space, so that home becomes a “fallacy” to the traveller, who rejects all connections. Secondly, home is a place to which one returns: “Home again,” “Home, to tea.” Domestic obligations are attached to it, in the form of a shared meal at a fixed time, for instance. But the repetitions in the second paragraph, the plosive alliteration in [k] and the exceptionally brief sentences, all point to the burden and boredom associated with the idea of home in Somers’ struggling mind.
23It is telling that Lawrence should choose two male protagonists to voice his anxieties about the oppressiveness of home, while, for the most part, his female protagonists yearn for or are content with the advantages of a house, which guarantees them a steady home. It seems that the appeal of a home is common to Lawrence’s domestically imprisoned mothers, to his freedom-aspiring young women and emancipated travelling women. Harriett Somers is deeply attached to the ideal of “a house and a little garden and as much space to herself as possible, knowing nobody, but having Lovatt always there” (K 67). Lawrence insists on the importance Harriett attaches to a suitable dwelling, as though the success of her marriage depended on it:
Harriett liked the house immensely. It was beautifully built, solid, in the good English fashion. It had a great big room with dark jarrah timbering on the roof and the walls: it had a dark jarrah floor, and doors, and some solid, satisfactory jarrah furniture, a big, real table and a sideboard and strong square chairs with cane seats. The Lord had sent her here, that was certain. (K 81)
24The solidity and strength of the furniture act as a metonymy for their marriage in Harriett’s mind, and the confidence given to her by a sort of manifest destiny ensures the fulfilment of her married life with Richard. Thus, Harriett’s delight in the house (“Joy!” “Perfect! Perfect!” K 80) is bound to her happiness as a wife, a condition which her husband fails or is reluctant to acknowledge, unlike Lawrence the writer, who shows remarkable sensitivity to her domestic longings.
25Ironically, in his letters, Lawrence appears more cynical regarding Frieda’s same wish: “[Frieda] says she wants a house—when I say right-o! she says: not here—perhaps Lago di Garda: perhaps Taormina: perhaps the ranch. So there you are—you can’t take a house at that rate” (Letters vii 54). The indecision he underlines is characteristic of his heroes and heroines with respect to the idea of a home: it is a social ideal which his women characters long for, even as they aspire to greater freedom and escape from domestic constraints. Consequently, even Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, who boast of not wanting a house and home, are troubled by the thought of their non-conformity and of missing an opportunity:
What was she short of now? It was marriage—it was the wonderful stability of marriage. She did want it, let her say what she might. She had been lying. The old idea of marriage was right even now—marriage and the home. Yet her mouth gave a little grimace at the words. She thought of Gerald and Shortlands—marriage and the home! Ah well, let it rest! He meant a great deal to her—but—! Perhaps it was not in her to marry. She was one of life’s outcasts, one of the drifting lives that have no root. No, no it could not be so. She suddenly conjured up a rosy room, with herself in a beautiful gown, and a handsome man in evening dress who held her in his arms in the firelight, and kissed her. This picture she entitled “Home.” It would have done for the Royal Academy. (Women in Love 376)
- 5 “If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was (...)
26Yet, while Gudrun chafes against the confining, conventional vision of an idyllic home, her musings reveal the attraction of “stability” and safety procured by a home. This dichotomy is at the heart of the concept of home, which Lawrence subtly explores, alongside other modernist writers and in the wake of Victorian literature. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is a foundational reflection on the privacy a home may provide, or fail to provide, for women. In spite of its removal from the public sphere, a young woman’s home isn’t a private space, Woolf argues, unless she is given “a room to herself” (52), which “was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century” (61). Although none of Lawrence’s major female figures are writers, and therefore differ a little from Woolf’s examples of literary women needing a room of their own to write,5 they do seek private spaces within their homes, and places of refuge and safety from the outside world. Repelled by her stay in a hotel in Mexico City, Kate Leslie goes in search of a house to rent in the small town of Sayula: “She wanted an old Spanish house, with its inner patio of flowers and water. Turned inwards, to the few flowers walled in by shadow. To turn one’s back on the cog-wheel world. Not to look out any more on to that horrible machine of the world. To look at one’s own quiet little fountain and one’s own little orange-trees, with only heaven above” (PS 104). Her criteria – an “inner patio,” “turned inwards,” with a “quiet little fountain” and “little orange-trees” – clearly express her wish for simplicity, peace and seclusion. Yet Kate does not consider her house in Sayula as a true home, only as a refuge at times: “Kate was glad to get back to her own house, and to be more or less alone” (PS 414), or on the contrary, as a house that “seemed empty, banal, vulgar” (PS 211), to which she is reluctant to return, in the paradoxically named chapter: “Home to Sayula.” The complexity of the concept of home is also demonstrated in Constance Chatterley’s feelings towards Wragby Hall, which is originally her husband’s family home. Constance has been given a bedroom and a sitting-room of her own on the first floor, a detail to which I shall return in due course, and the recurrence of the words “her room” in the novel shows that she does not feel at home in the rest of the house. Interestingly, whenever she wishes to escape Clifford or Mrs Bolton, she flees “up to her room: or out of doors, to the wood” (LCL 110), two remote spaces which, though seemingly opposed, afford freedom and a sense of protection.
27Lawrence’s exploration of the various significations and embodiments of home probably owes much to Charles Dickens’ fiction, a defining template of 19th century English domesticity, the best example of which may be Bleak House. The novel indeed rests upon the contrast between the ill-named Bleak House, a safe haven provided by Mr Jarndyce for the three young protagonists, and the empty prison that is Chesney Wold to the despondent Lady Dedlock. In like manner, Lawrence’s heroine in The Woman Who Rode Away is portrayed as a captive in her own home, the description of which emphasises its prison-like dimension:
Under the nakedness of the works, the walled-in, one-storey adobe house, with its garden inside, and its deep inner verandah with tropical climbers on the sides. And when you looked up from this shut-in flowered patio, you saw the huge pink cone of the silver-mud refuse, and the machinery of the extracting plant, against heaven above. No more. (WWRA 39)
- 6 “Gradually her nerves began to go wrong: she must get out. She must get out” (WWRA 39).
28The psychological strain of such a carceral habitat eventually leads the woman to thoughts of escape, in order to preserve her sanity.6
29For Aaron Sisson too, domesticity is a stultifying prison, from which we rapidly see him break free. The very beginning of the novel places him within concentric circles of enclosures, at the centre of which is his house – the epitome of imprisonment, which he has unknowingly imposed on himself: “He strode over a stile, crossed two fields, strode another stile, and was in the long road of colliers’ dwellings. Just across was his own house: he had built it himself” (AR 5). His active crossing of spaces and boundaries foreshadows his journey away from his home and from England, to flee the repetitive monotony and stasis of domestic life. This becomes especially apparent at Christmas, a time of traditions and rituals, repeated year after year: “To Aaron Sisson this was home, this was Christmas: the unspeakably familiar. […] The acute familiarity of this house, which he had built for his marriage twelve years ago, the changeless pleasantness of it seemed unthinkable. It prevented his thinking” (AR 11-12). Aaron rejects familiarity because its very changelessness precludes intellectual and artistic stimulation. To him, home is synonymous with limitations and deprivation, linguistically rendered in the previous passage by the privative particles “un-” and “-less” (“unspeakably,” “unthinkable,” “changeless”). Aaron experiences domestic intimacy as a physical discomfort, extending beyond even his own home, since the sight of other people’s domestic lives also repels him: thus, the lit-up interiors of colliers’ homes at night gives him “a sense of indecent exposure, from so many backs” (AR 39) – the “backs” being here the backs of the houses, to which, however, the mention of “indecent exposure” confers a bodily meaning. As a consequence, “[h]e felt himself almost in physical contact with this contiguous stretch of back premises. […] It was revolting” (AR 39). The term is then used again, much later, in reaction to Sir William’s house in Novara: “The place, the home, at once fascinated and revolted him” (AR 122).
30Birkin expresses the same feelings about what he calls the “home instinct”: “It is disgusting, people marrying for a home” (WIL 152), he declares with characteristic fierceness, adding: “it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.” (WIL 352). His harangue against marriage and a home is motivated by the same fears as Aaron Sisson: paralysis and disintegration, conveyed by such expressions as “each couple […] stewing in its own little privacy,” “I don’t want a definite place,” “It is a horrible tyranny of a fixed milieu, where each piece of furniture is a commandment-stone” (WIL 352, 356; italics mine).
31At this stage, it may seem fair to conclude that Lawrence largely conforms to the domestic pattern, in terms of male and female roles within the home, established within Victorian society by the mid-nineteenth century and authoritatively theorised by Ruskin in his 1865 lecture on Sesame and Lilies. A sentence such as “After the evening meal the women were busy making up beds and tidying round, while the men sat by the fire” (K 81) proves this point. Yet we consistently find evidence of Lawrence challenging this conventional pattern, setting it up and then going on to disrupting it. In Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin delineates the purpose of a home and the complementary gendered roles to be taken up within it: “This is the true nature of home,” he claims, “it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.” Certainly, many of Lawrence’s heroines adhere to this definition and aspire to the security of a home, though, as we have seen, excessive protection may turn home into a prison. Ruskin’s celebration of the peaceful home underpins his notion of a woman’s duties: “the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.” In this way, Ruskin postulates that a woman’s place is inside her home and her faculties must be turned inwards, while a man’s place is outside the home, “to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence.” In this distribution of roles and spatial division of the home, we recognise the foundations of Lawrence’s opening to The Rainbow. Without going into a detailed analysis, let us just underline how Lawrence uses Ruskin’s principles to overturn them: while the Brangwen woman may be tied to her house, her attention faces outwards and “her deepest desire hung on the battle that she heard far off” (R 11); whereas the Brangwen husband out in the field “faced inwards” (R 11) to the peaceful life of the farm.
- 7 “the seed of Studies in Classic American Literature lay buried deep in his sensibility and can be t (...)
32Inevitably, then, Lawrence’s conception of home is modelled on nineteenth-century literature and social ideals. Before even Ruskin’s conceptualisation, frontier literature prescribed such gendered roles, whereby women were to use the meagre resources available to them to recreate a home in the wilderness and offer some modicum of comfort for the men who protected it, by fighting off enemies and wandering into the woods for sustenance. We know that Lawrence cherished Fenimore Cooper’s novels as a youth,7 and one such as The Pathfinder (1840) endorses the conventional domestic paradigm, though the character of Mabel Dunham, a plucky soldier’s daughter, does point, however tentatively, to a slightly greater degree of emancipation. British colonial writing also celebrates the model of the colonial wife who succeeds in creating a “civilised” home in difficult circumstances. Rosemary Marangoly George notes that “[i]n their letters, diaries, and conduct books, housewives applauded themselves for their own and their servants’ inventiveness in producing a semblance of domestic order out of the most meagre resources” (George 101), a model Lawrence reproduces in his travelling women. What is most interesting in George’s study of imperial domesticity is how “the art of making a home” becomes a matter of national importance, because, as George argues: “in the Empire, the need for constant creation of such ‘civilization’ was urgently felt. Novel after novel suggests that it is the daily construction of the home country as the location of the colonizer’s racial and moral identity and as the legitimization of the colonizer’s national subjecthood that made possible the carrying out of the work of Empire” (George 107). The feminine role of building a home in the foreign country to uphold the values of the home country thus becomes fundamental to the construction of a stable Empire and confers a form of political power upon the Anglo-Indian woman.
33Moreover, a further shift in the conception of English domesticity serves to explain a reversal in Lawrence’s representation of domestic roles: Hilary Hinds describes “the interwar years as a matrix in which particular modes of middle-class femininity became culturally prominent in the reproduction of a newly domesticated and inward-looking model of Englishness, which [Alison Light] terms ‘conservative modernity.’ These years saw not only an expansion and domestication of the middle class, [Light] suggests, but also, through the domestication of the national character, its feminization” (Hinds 311). The feminisation of English men – or “when man loses his unconscious faith in himself” (Late Essays 305) – deeply preoccupied Lawrence, as we know from essays such as “The Real Thing,” but for the purposes of this article, the discussion will stay focused on the relation between feminisation and the home. The most explicit illustration of this trend in Lawrence’s fiction is Rawdon Lilly, who provides a counterpoint to Aaron’s sharp anti-domestic feelings, in Aaron’s Rod. Lilly’s domestic abilities are fastidiously enumerated in the episode where the two men are living together, leaving no doubt as to Lawrence’s fondness for such housework: “He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and unobtrusive a housewife as any woman. […] He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid” (AR 98). Lilly’s own perception of his domestic skills excludes any thought of feminisation or loss of virility, highlighting instead the value of such efficiency and self-reliance. His busy meticulousness is contrasted with Aaron’s deliberate and antagonistic idleness: “Lilly went out on to the landing, and set the chops to grill on the gas stove. Hastily he put a small table on the hearth rug, spread it with a blue-and-white cloth, set plates and glasses. Aaron did not move. It was not his nature to concern himself with domestic matters—and Lilly did it best alone” (AR 106). Lawrence also uses Aaron’s focalisation to criticise Lilly’s domesticity: “Lilly’s skilful housewifery always irritated Aaron: it was so self-sufficient” (AR 106). The derogatory application of the term “housewifery” is evidently intended to denigrate Lilly’s masculinity, yet Lawrence does not allow Aaron’s antidomestic, male chauvinism to triumph over Rawdon Lilly’s admirable housekeeping:
But most irritating of all was the little man’s unconscious assumption of priority. Lilly was actually unaware that he assumed this quiet predominance over others. He mashed the potatoes, he heated the plates, he warmed the red wine, he whisked eggs into the milk pudding, and served his visitor like a housemaid. But none of this detracted from the silent assurance with which he bore himself and with which he seemed to domineer over his acquaintance. (AR 106)
34Lilly is perfectly at home in his domestic duties and seems to draw strength from them. Lawrence stresses the natural (“unconscious,” “unaware,” “quiet,” “silent”) authority he commands with a plethora of synonyms: “assumption,” “priority,” “assumed,” “predominance,” “assurance,” “domineer,” set against the simile “like a housemaid,” so as to assert Lilly’s ascendency of character over a resistant and diffident Aaron.
- 8 “She felt there was a curious glamour about him. It made her feel bitter. He had an unfair advantag (...)
35Although Rawdon Lilly is not the only male character to display interest and take pleasure in housekeeping, his unassuming dedication to his chores and the “silent assurance” he derives from them are quite singular. In Mr Noon, Lewie Goddard is said to enjoy preparing the table for tea, but the statement rings like a confession, undermined by concession: “He liked doing the things, really, on these days when the work-woman was absent” (Mr Noon 7). The qualifying insertion of “really” and the restrictive temporal clause suggest that Lewie is self-conscious about it. Lawrence also genially derides Harold Wagstaff, in Mr Noon, for his eagerness, as a modern young husband, to join in the cooking and other domestic tasks: “‘It would do with a drop more water, dear, don’t you think it would?’ he said to Fanny, putting his arm round her neck as they both stared into the stew-jar, she crouching on the hearth-rug” (Mr Noon 71). Despite the slight aura of ridicule surrounding these domestically-inclined husbands, Lawrence seems to commend their attitude towards responsibilities in the home, which brings Aaron Sisson’s absolute rejection of his own into sharper contrast. It cannot be asserted that Lawrence condemns Aaron’s antidomestic feelings and actions, but when compared with other male characters such as those discussed above, and in the light of Aaron’s wife Lottie’s vehement rebukes,8 I must conclude that Lawrence did try to distance himself from the Victorian idea of gendered roles within the household.
- 9 “As she meditated, at about nine o’clock, he opened the door and came in, slinking, and yet sulky. (...)
36Nonetheless, Lawrence’s fiction still bears a visible trace of the Victorian division of the home into male and female spheres, with definite rooms and furniture being assigned to women or men. In her study on late-Victorian homes, Julie-Marie Strange speaks of “the gendered, affective and temporal organisation of domestic space: mothers were overwhelmingly located at the spatial heart of home (by the cooking range) to represent their position at the affective heart of family life” (Strange 705). This is mostly evident in Sons and Lovers, which numbers a great many scenes structured around Mrs Morel’s various chores in the kitchen and her central role in the family: indeed, as Strange also observes, “women’s domestic labour included emotional labour, particularly as mothers” (705), which is certainly true of Mrs Morel. “When fathers did inhabit homes in the context of everyday life, they occupied specific spaces within it that underscored their paternal authority and status” (705). Indeed, as Strange goes on to show, the armchair by the fire is the most prominent and recurrent place of authority in Sons and Lovers, and in Aaron’s Rod, as mentioned previously. Lawrence expressly makes that connection with respect to Walter Morel who, “as master of the house, sat in his armchair, with his back to the hot fire” (SL 238) – that is to say, in the most comfortable position available in the room. Later in the novel, when Morel deferentially offers it to his son’s fiancée, Lawrence calls it “the collier’s armchair, the place of honour” (SL 144). As Julie-Marie Strange is careful to point out, “these masculine sites made special space for men in a context of space where all family members congregated, often together, for meals, chores and (varying degrees of) leisure” (705), a context of space which is in fact overwhelmingly feminine and thus, where Walter Morel is constantly portrayed as feeling uneasy, either awkwardly slinking or boisterously hurrying around the house.9
- 10 “[…] as McKeon notes, within the household, masculine space, such as the library or study, was usua (...)
- 11 “‘It would die in our parlour.’
37Indeed, insofar as the shared family rooms in a collier’s home are the kitchen and the parlour, both defined as feminine spaces, working-class men like Morel had no space of their own, unlike men of the middle-class, who might retire to their study or library for privacy.10 The parlour is a particularly interesting space in Lawrence’s fiction in terms of the gender dynamics and tensions it discloses. In working-class homes, it was an “extraordinary space [which] denoted a degree of status but also a calendar of special or family times, such as Sundays, annual festivities like birthdays or Christmas or life cycle milestones such as weddings, baptisms or funerals.” (Strange 705). Indeed, Sons and Lovers opposes “[t]he dwelling-room, the kitchen” and “the uninhabited parlours of all the colliers’ wives” (SL 10), the former usually being described as warm and lively, whereas the parlour is a cold room,11 only used for special occasions, such as William Morel’s funeral wake.
38However, in middle-class Victorian homes, Elizabeth Burton notes that the parlour is a space for “[e]veryday living […] the intimate family room – all cosiness, comfort and clutter” (Burton 97). This is the case at the Leivers’s farm. Though not a middle-class home, the parlour is here entirely different from the Morels’: “It was a long, low, warm room” (SL 224), a place of culture and refinement arranged by Miriam, a mirror of her personality, and an intimate space for her and Paul. Since the parlour is a woman’s space in the Victorian home, admitting a man into it is significant, and the fact that Paul “loved Miriam’s long, low parlour, with its atmosphere of romance, its flowers, its books, its high rosewood piano” (SL 266) points to his feminine sensibility, thus foregrounding Lawrence’s questioning of masculinity and femininity. As I noted earlier, this matter is specifically tied up with the question of domestic spheres, and Lawrence was acutely aware of this connection because of his personal situation as a man who worked from home – from his bed even, when he was seriously ill – an exceptional circumstance for a man at that time. A critic of Charles Dickens’ novels observes that “To be engaged in work while still at home is a problematic state of affairs for a Victorian man […] the separation of the domestic sphere from the economic sphere was central to nineteenth-century ideology. To be ‘at home and at work’ generally means that one is engaged in housework – that one is a woman” (Rena-Dozier 814), reminding us of Aaron’s perception of Rawdon Lilly. Yet many of Dickens’ characters combine their living quarters and economic activities, none more so than David Copperfield, of whom Rena-Dozier writes: “One of the significant elements of David’s domestic space is the way in which his writing (remunerative labor) is integrated into the nonremunerative space of the parlor” (826). While Dickens had begun to “deconstruct these boundaries” (Rena-Dozier 820) between domestic and economic spheres, feminine and masculine domains, Lawrence addressed his unease with feminine and masculine roles, by challenging their stability and complexifying the notion of home in his novella The Fox.
39The Fox is a tale of displacement, trespass and invasion, where proper places are constantly disrupted. First, a pair of urban girls settle on a farm they find themselves unable to manage productively; secondly, a youth comes home to his grandfather’s farm only to find that it isn’t his home anymore: he is an intruder in the girls’ new home, yet they are intruders in a home that was once his: “it’s my own home, in a way” (The Fox 19), he defiantly comments. In fact, young Henry’s behaviour around the house asserts his sense of domestic ease, one might almost say of ownership, as he “come[s] to tea in his shirtsleeves as if he were at home” (27) and takes his tea on the sofa rather than at the table (16). Yet to Banford, he is an intruder whose very physical appearance is at odds with her carefully arranged interior:
[…] he gave Banford’s sitting-room the look of a lumber-camp. She resented this. For on her sitting-room floor she had a red Turkey rug and dark stain round, the fire-place had fashionable green tiles, the piano stood open with the latest dance-music: she played quite well: and on the walls were March’s hand-painted swans and water-lilies. Moreover, with the logs nicely, tremulously burning in the grate, the thick curtains drawn, the doors all shut, and the pine-trees hissing and shuddering in the wind outside, it was cosy, it was refined and nice. She resented the big, raw, long-legged youth sticking his khaki knees out and sitting there with his soldier’s shirt-cuffs buttoned on his thick red wrists. (The Fox 28-29)
40Like Miriam’s parlour, Banford’s sitting-room reflects the two women’s personalities and Banford’s fondness for delicacy and intimacy, which the youth’s outdoor look brings out all the more.
41Henry is continually likened to the outdoors: “His face seemed extraordinarily a piece of the out-of-doors come indoors: as holly-berries do” (48), preparing the reader for his suggested affinities with the fox, whereas Banford is associated with indoors, where she performs domestic chores. Paradoxically, though she resents the intrusion of the boy’s outdoor manner, Banford immediately takes on the traditional female role of waiting upon the man in the house: “It gave her just the same kind of gratification to attend on him, to get out the bath for him, and everything” (19). March, on the other hand, assumes a masculine role, involved with outdoor chores, but she also crosses from outdoors to indoors, changing her clothing accordingly from a man’s “hard-cloth breeches, wide on the hips, buttoned on the knee, strong as armour” to a woman’s “simple slip of bluey-green crape, with a line of gold stitching round the top and round the sleeves, which came to the elbow” (48). These parallels are neatly constructed and buttressed by the domestic spheres and the gendered roles ascribed to them, so that what started as an unconventional domestic situation – “There wants a man about the place” (17) – gradually reverts to a conventional model.
42Constance Chatterley’s “sitting-room on the third floor, the top floor of the central portion of the house” (LCL 24) is another iteration of Miriam’s parlour and Banford’s sitting-room, a place of even greater intimacy than the other two, since it is removed from the living-rooms on the lower floors, inaccessible to her disabled husband on the ground-floor: “Her room was the only gay, modern one in the house, the only spot in Wragby where her personality was at all revealed. Clifford had never seen it, and she asked very few people up” (LCL 24). Connie consequently enjoys privacy to a large degree, owing to her social status and her family circumstances, a rare occurrence, which Virginia Woolf would appreciate. It is therefore noteworthy that she should be oblivious to Mellors’ own desire for intimacy, as Lawrence has her repeatedly invading the gamekeeper’s domestic spaces. Connie first intrudes on his privacy while Mellors is washing himself in his back yard. Lawrence sets the scene with the purpose of conveying a pervasive sense of seclusion, which Connie explicitly violates:
As she came out of the wood on the north side, the keeper’s cottage, a rather dark, brown stone cottage, with gables and a handsome chimney, looked uninhabited, it was so silent and alone. But a thread of smoke rose from the chimney, and the little railed-in garden in the front of the house was dug and kept very tidy. The door was shut. […] She peeped through the window, and saw the dark little room, with its almost sinister privacy, not wanting to be invaded. (LCL 65-66)
43Despite these warning signs of guarded intimacy, Connie persists and discovers the partially undressed gamekeeper, whose nakedness evinces the same impression of deliberate seclusion as his dwelling: “the sense of aloneness, of a creature purely alone, overwhelmed her. Perfect, white, solitary nudity of a creature that lives alone, and inwardly alone” (LCL 66). After her initial reaction of confused wonder, she reverts to the mindset her social position demands, in a show of hypocritical resentment intended to conceal her unease: “She was rather annoyed. Why should she be made to stumble on these vulgar privacies!” (LCL 66). I find the use of the term “vulgar” to be a wry comment on Connie’s own manner – whether it was calculated or not on Lawrence’s part – considering her many imprudent and rather tasteless encroachments on Mellors’ private life and possessions. These are disclosed, first in a letter from Mrs Boulton, further to which Constance herself acknowledges her foolish intrusions and the imposition of her presence in his domestic space: “She had not been able to refrain from perfuming his one or two handkerchiefs and his shirts in the drawer, just out of childishness, and she had left a little bottle of Coty’s Wood-violet perfume, half empty, among his things. She wanted him to remember her in the perfume” (LCL 264); next, in a letter from Mellors, in which his tone seems half-reproachful, in its impersonal turns of phrase:
You have heard that my wife Bertha came back to my unloving arms, and took up her abode in the cottage: where, to speak disrespectfully, she smelled a rat, in the shape of a little bottle of Coty. Other evidence she did not find, at least for some days, when she began to howl about the burnt photograph. She noticed the glass and back-board in the spare bedroom. Unfortunately, on the back-board somebody had scribbled little sketches, and the initials, several times repeated, C. S. R. (LCL 269)
44Thus, Lawrence discreetly delves into the territorial tensions between lovers, focusing on a woman’s invasion of a man’s privacy, bolstered and protected in this particular instance by her social status as Lady of the manor, whereby she may move unrestrained upon her crippled husband’s property, which includes the gamekeeper’s cottage, while none may trespass on her own privacy.
45Another compelling portrayal of territorial tensions in the home is to be found in The Plumed Serpent, by way of the stark opposition between Kate Leslie and her Mexican servants. Here Lawrence touches upon the delicate subject of imperial home management, though the setting is Mexico and not British India. Nevertheless, with Kate in the role of the English settler, and Juana and her family in that of the native population, The Plumed Serpent reproduces the strained relationships between coloniser and colonised which characterised the British Raj. The description of Kate’s servants’ living quarters is reminiscent of the demeaning accounts of Indian homes in the literature of Empire, which characterised them as “dwellings,” “ramshackle huts” and “dim, lightless, segregated quarters that can be lighted up only by the introduction of Western practices,” Rosemary Marangoly George reminds us (George 113). Similarly, Juana and her children live “in a den at the back of the projecting bay of the dining-room. There, half screened, was the well and the toilet, and a little kitchen and a sleeping-room where the family slept on mats on the floor. There the paltry chickens paddled, and the banana-trees made a chitter as the wind came” (PS 109). Lawrence’s introduction of the Mexican family is explicitly degrading and dehumanising, highlighting as it does the bleakness, the sordidness even, of their habitat – an animal “den” devoid of human cleanliness. Historian Mary Procida points out that “in the Anglo-Indian imagination [the native kitchen] was, like the Indian bazaar, also a filthy place” (Procida 129), a characteristic which Lawrence never fails to stress in relation to Juana and her daughters’ living conditions: “Themselves indifferent to their surroundings, they would live in squalor. The earth was the great garbage-bowl. Everything discarded was flung on the earth, and they did not care. Almost they liked to live in a milieu of fleas and old rags, bits of paper, banana skins and mango stones” (PS 141). In addition to their reportedly bestial habits, the Mexican family are further dehumanised by being incorporated into Kate’s ownership of the house, since that is how they are first mentioned: “With the house went a Mexican Juana with two thick-haired daughters and one son” (PS 109). Later on, they are mentioned in passing, meaningfully inserted between material possessions, as though no different: “Kate returned to her house, to her servants and her rocking-chair” (PS 332). Their seeming absence of domestic decency and cleanliness by European standards conforms to the typical colonial view identified by Rosemary George: “Hence the ‘native’ as manifest in the representation of his/her home is either a ‘lack’ or in ‘excess’” (George 113).
46The reader of The Plumed Serpent is given to understand that the uncomfortable proximity of Kate’s servants’ living quarters is not only due to their squalor, but also to the feeling of mystery that enfolds the place. Juana’s kitchen is often referred to as a dark, inscrutable space: “There were two kitchens, the one next the dining-room, belonging to Kate, and the narrow little shed under the banana-trees, belonging to the servants. From her verandah Kate looked away down to Juana’s kitchen shed. It had a black window-hole” (PS 221). The division of domestic spaces between mistress and servants is in fact unequal, insofar as the servants move boldly about Kate’s quarters to serve her, while as mistress of the house she rarely, or only gingerly, ventures into their quarters. Her supremacy is ceaselessly challenged, in spite of but also because of her isolated position of ownership, which she strives to uphold: “Kate was uneasy and a bit forlorn. She felt something was happening down in the servants’ corner, something secret in the dark. And she was stranded in her isolation on her terrace. But, after all, it was her house, and she had a right to know what her own people were up to” (PS 221). The power struggle between them emerges in sundry short episodes, such as Kate’s attempt to home-school Juana’s daughters, who resent her authority even as they appreciate her attention, provoking Kate into open conflict:
They would press upon her, trespassing upon her privacy, and with a queer effrontery, doing all they could to walk over her. With their ugly little wills, trying to pull her will down.
“No, don’t lean on me, Concha. Stand on your own feet!”
The slight grin of malevolence on Concha’s face, as she stood on her own feet. Then:
“Do you have lice in your hair, Niña?”
The question asked with a peculiar subtle, Indian insolence.
“No,” said Kate, suddenly angry. “And now go! Go! Go away from me! Don’t come near me.” (PS 147)
47The same intention underlies the episode which immediately follows, where Juana and her daughters start hunting for lice in one another’s hair in the presence of Kate’s guests, with a determination to bring into collision their habits and hers, their living space and hers. The issue of shared space is brought to a climax when Kate banishes them from where they were sitting – “at the other side of the patio, full in view” of “the visitors […] drinking tea with Kate on the verandah” (PS 147): “‘If you must pick lice,’ she said in a shaking voice to Juana, shaking with anger, ‘pick them there, in your own place, where you can’t be seen.’” (PS 147).
48On the whole, Kate’s relationship with Juana and her family conforms to the typical colonial paradigm wherein the mistress treats her servants like uneducated children. As Rosemary George observes with regards to India: “In the absence of her children, the Englishwoman sets out to discipline the ‘natives’ in her compound – and we are repeatedly assured that these persons are no more than children requiring discipline. With her home and compound as her domain, the Englishwoman’s challenge, her duty even, is to keep this strange and unmanageable territory under control. Her triumph is to replicate the empire on a domestic scale” (George 108). While it is certainly not Kate Leslie’s intention to impose any imperial dominion over her household, her demands and expectations are inevitably at odds with the culture of her servants and give rise to strained relations: “Kate felt her household a burden.” (PS 151). Moreover, when she acknowledges that “[h]er servants were the clue to all the native life, for her” (PS 151), the implication is that her domestic space encapsulates the whole of Mexico, and consequently, the colonial power struggle within her home replicates the one unfolding on a national scale.
49Lawrence’s conception of home was largely defined by the Victorian ideal, to which as a writer of a generation that is heir to such a heritage, he was in a position either to conform to or, in other ways, to challenge, by way of a deconstruction of, and distancing from, the rigid patterns of the traditional domesticity. On the one hand, we witness the dilemma of his travelling protagonists who, having fled the social, political or moral constraints of their home country, are nonetheless anxious to feel at home abroad, recreating the home comforts they are used to and unwittingly perpetuating the colonial attitude of British settlers. On the other hand, rebellious characters such as Aaron Sisson and Gudrun Brangwen strive against the entrenched necessity of a home, denouncing it as an oppressive and unstimulating environment, which inhibits their creative ambitions. However, most of Lawrence’s female characters desire both the security of a steady home and a degree of freedom from domestic constraints — thereby conforming to the social ideal dictated by the Victorians — while also aspiring to more unconventional forms of married or unmarried independence. Lawrence thus adopts a modernist stance, in reaction to Victorian values, when we find him defying the conventional vision of an idyllic home, as well as the Victorian idea of gendered roles within the household. Yet his fiction also frequently depicts clearly delineated domestic and economic spheres as essentially feminine or masculine domains, where privacy and intimacy – whether respected or violated – are well-established notions belonging to an idea of home which many of us still live by today.