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D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and the Impracticability of Home

Stefania Michelucci

Résumé

In this paper I intend to discuss the concept of home and homelessness from an anthropological perspective. I will first analyze this concept in the short story “A Little Cloud” from Dubliners by James Joyce. In this story, the house/home becomes a prison which is almost impossible to escape from, undermining any dream. In the second part of my paper, I will compare this prison to the necessary, but problematic homelessness in Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence.

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Introduction

  • 1 See Michelucci 2002, pp. 1-6, Kern, 1983, and Isaak, 1986.
  • 2 For a detailed analysis see Gurr, 1981, Remotti 1993, Rto faceobertson, 1994, Chambers 1994, Robert (...)

1From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, contributions to scientific thought by Einstein, Darwin, Freud, Frazer and Bergson, among others, begin to modify conceptions – and consequently alter literary representations – of ontological categories such as time, space, place, community, and identity.1 Since the turn of the twentieth century and the following two world wars, interest in the periphery rather than in the center has grown. Writers from former colonies, for example, have come forward, ready to challenge the hierarchical categories to which they had been subjected. For most migrants, including artists who choose a voluntary exile and write in a language different from their mother tongue, the interaction between different places and the often-contrasting organization of space in the place of origin and that of destination play a vital role in their artistic production and individual growth. Central to the experience of migrants is the category of multilocality, as well as that of “placelessness,” linked to “homelessness,” also connected to the idea of identity in transit, involving frequent expressions of regret over the loss of old places and bitter disaffection for new ones. To survive, one must adapt to a new place and a new community.2

Topsy-turvy homes in Joyce’s Dubliners

  • 3 Home is the place where a person lives in harmony with the surrounding environment. Cf. Bachelard 1 (...)

2Whatever form it may take, the sense of home plays a fundamental role when adapting to a new place. From an anthropological perspective, home is the embodiment of dwelling and belonging; it conveys a sense of being welcome and comfortable in a place. It is thus the vital setting where human beings can express themselves in relation to the self, the community, and the external world. Having a home is also the vital condition for the preservation of one’s intimacy and the ability to face the outer world.3 In James Joyce’s Dubliners, this vital and primeval idea of home is completely turned upside down. From a place of freedom and protection, it turns into a prison, a place of intimate and physical torture, and sometimes into a tomb, as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In all the stories from Dubliners, from those based on the Bildung theme leading from childhood to adulthood, to public life (and also in “The Dead”), home is the place where human potentialities and aspirations do not blossom, where individual wings have been clipped and crushed since childhood. Communication is hindered by a pervasive climate of misunderstanding, humiliation, and abuse, often generating sudden rage and uncontrollable destructive and self-destructive violence.

3Dublin is a city of the Dead, similar to Dante’s Inferno, where there is no hope, no possibility of escape, no salvation. Home is nothing but an oppressing cage, a preparation for the final tomb.

  • 4 Joyce 2000, pp. 65-81. See Brown 1993.

4My analysis will focus on one story about adulthood, “A Little Cloud.” Its tripartite structure represents first the repressed feelings and aspirations of the protagonist, followed by his activities in the streets and in the pub. The conclusion to the story is located in his home at the end of the day. “A Little Cloud” is the eighth story in Dubliners.4 It is placed exactly in the middle of the collection and reveals a web of interrelations with all the stories.

  • 5 See Mosher 1991, pp. 378-392.

5The protagonist, “Little Chandler,” is a modest clerk with a passion for poetry (he reads Byron, the great romantic poet, symbolizing the exact opposite of his narrow life), entrapped in a marriage without love. He is called “Little,” not because of his stature but because of his timid, vulnerable personality. He is a naïve dreamer, longing for a better life away from his humiliating and apparently inescapable family cage. At the beginning of the story, his hope lies in the appointment, in a luxurious hotel, with an old acquaintancecalled Gallaher who moved to London and became a successful journalist.5 The meeting turns out to be a disappointing match between ingenuousness and sophistication, provincial and metropolitan life, periphery and center. Not only will this encounter be of no help to Little Chandler in his dream to publish some poems he has not written yet but it will amount to a cruel aggravation of his sense of humiliation. The abuse of alcohol, and Gallaher’s ostentatious boldness and vulgar language end up intoxicating the protagonist’s tender naiveté, amplifying his repressed frustration. Little Chandler becomes aware of his spiritual superiority and curses the destiny which has been so cruel to him. At the end of this scene the reader finds him at home with an infant on his arms.

6He needs to take care of the infant because the young couple cannot afford a housemaid. When he gets home, his wife rebukes him and leaves the house (he had forgotten to buy something). Looking at her picture, Little Chandler recalls the time he had given her that blouse. She had kissed him for the present but had gone immediately mad at him because it was too expensive. Although they married only two years before, their marriage has already become an irreversible experience of separation and isolation. Communication has turned into mere submission and abuse; passion and love are utterly absent from it. Little Chandler finds a meager shelter in his dreams, conjuring up a utopian literary career and images of elegant Jewish ladies. While for his cynical friend Gallaher these images stand for money and success, Little Chandler turns to them as a source of inspiration for an exotic romance, an escape from a dull, unpoetic life, also suggested by Byron, the great romantic poet he is reading. He tries to survive the prison of his real home by dreaming “a place of us” full of affection.6 His dreams are however constantly gnawed at by a cruel reality, dissolving like sandcastles at the first wave. The line “this narrow cell,” from Byron’s “On the Death of a Young Lady,” mirrors his condition as a prisoner.7 The poem itself seems to echo the death of the woman he had loved and married, who has turned out to be greedy, cold, and utterly deaf to his romantic expectations. Then, all of a sudden, the baby wakes up screaming, obliging the protagonist to abandon his dreams and to face his unsatisfactory real life.

  • 8 Joyce 2000, p. 80. With particular attention to this action and to the role of father and child tur (...)

7Despite being the father, Little Chandler reacts in a childish way, yelling back at the baby and provoking a hysterical, convulsive cry in the little one. The loud desperation of the baby, who feels a prisoner in his father’s arms, corresponds to Little Chandler’s own frustration. The impotent despair of these frustrated entrapped souls (father and child) is interrupted by the arrival of Annie, who once again confirms her role as a domineering mother and her subtle antagonism to her husband. She tears the baby from Little Chandler’s arms, calling him “my little man” and comforting him.8 The baby is the real object of her love, her life companion, in other words, the man in the house. Little Chandler, her husband, is ruthlessly pushed away. Like a scolded baby, he stammers apologies, blushes with shame and sheds tears of guilt. The reader witnesses something else besides humiliation and frustration; it is more an irreversible usurpation of roles and a sad scene of domestic abuse.

8Home is here a prison and the source of manifold failures for the protagonist: he fails in his life, in his dreams, in his marriage and even in his role as a father. He regresses to a primordial state of infantile inability to be himself and to find his place within the world. Here, home is not only a place of others, where the protagonist does not feel at ease, but also an unknown place of constant threat and danger.

9This paradox is a leitmotiv in most of the stories. Suffice it to mention “Eveline,” where the protagonist feels entrapped by her home (and the promise to her mother to keep the family together) and longs to escape. But then, when offered the chance of sailing to “explore another life” in Argentina with her lover, she refuses to board the ship at the very last minute. Earlier in the story there is an Italian reference, when she remembers the last night of her mother’s illness and that there was an organ-player in the street, playing “a melancholy air of Italy.” The Italian reference echoes a faraway land, corresponding to the turning-point suggested by the idea of a future life in Argentina, a land across the ocean, from which there would probably be no return.

The Utopian Harbor

10Situations similar to those found in James Joyce’s stories appear in D.H. Lawrence’s first masterpiece, Sons and Lovers (1913), where Paul Morel’s growth and fulfilment (announced by the city’s gold phosphorescence at the end of the novel) is destined to take place far away from home.

  • 9 On Sons and Lovers, with particular attention to the relationship between Walter and Gertrude Morel (...)

11In Sons and Lovers, home is a prison for a married couple (Walter and Gertrude Morel), a place of abuse and dehumanization. Inside this place  presumed to be a shelter and a place of communion for the family  there is however a climate of mutual incomprehension and hostility between husband and wife, which recalls Little Chandler’s sad imprisonment. Gertrude Morel’s social aspirations, her bitter contempt for the mines (which for the household is the source of its material subsistence), and her never-ending tendency to play the victim results, day after day, in Walter’s growing alienation from the house. Gertrude redirects all her expectations to the children, suffocating them. As a result, Walter’s alienation leads him to abuse of alcohol and violence, whereas Gertrude’s unsatisfaction turns her into a dehumanized mother, a jailer, preventing the children from experiencing a natural growth.9

  • 10 For a detailed analysis of the experimental nature of Women in Love in a European Modernist perspec (...)

12Turning now to Women in Love and the question of the impractibility of home. I will highlight the experimental nature of this novel, combining a close reading with critical suggestions based on anthropology and human geography.10 My discussion focuses on the crisis of home, seen as an objectification of modernist disorientation, and on the figuring of places, of thresholds, liminal borderline places, known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar.

  • 11 From this sentence to the end of the penultimate paragraph of this essay, I re-use some passages fr (...)

13The demarcation, apparent in Lawrence’s The Rainbow, between “places of us” (where “us” coincides with home and its “under places” offering a refuge from external threats) and “places of others” (the product of an order imposed from above), breaks down in Women in Love.11

14Already in The Rainbow, the reader witnesses an irreversible split within the organic communion of the domestic environment, when the pregnant Anna dances naked in front of the fire, alienating her husband Will from this experience. The latter remains on the threshold and feels not only excluded but disoriented, unable to understand the new language which Anna seems to speak to herself, a language of the body and of utter liberation. It is a new means of communication, which the couple can no longer share within the domestic environment. In Women in Love, the sense of a functional organisation of space is greatly diminished, suggesting a state of crisis from which, as Birkin prophetically announces, it will be possible to exit only through a ground-breaking action, a rebirth.

15For him, this will first require the destruction of the old order, not only in England, but in Europe as well. Home is no longer seen as the place where an individual lives, organically belonging to an environment in a larger community, but as a mere place of lodging or dormitory.

16Ursula and Birkin repudiate their homes and avoid creating another one, because that would mean rooting themselves in the old order and renouncing any complete fulfilment of the self. For Birkin, this nesting instinct, and the reluctance to face exposure to the external world, proves a lethal germ, capable of exterminating his generation: “One should avoid this home instinct. It’s not an instinct, it’s a habit of cowardliness. One should never have a home” (WL 352). For him, the “place of us” of married life is “anywhere.” In lieu of the lethal stability of home, he counter-proposes the fertile precariousness of homelessness: “it isn’t really a locality, though,” Birkin argues. “It’s a perfected relation between you and me” (WL 316).

17The process, which moves the characters from rootedness in a seemingly self-sufficient home life to a total uprooting, takes place by way of an alternation between regressive centripetal movement and progressive centrifugal movement – that is, between the tendency to absorb external space into the domestic environment and the opposite tendency to expand the self into a space free from predetermined limits. In Women in Love, closed spaces are often projections of an individual will which absorbs space, severing all contact with the external world: home therefore becomes a place of conflict and mutual violence.

  • 12 For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Ursula and Birkin and their transcendent, liber (...)

18Lawrence uses the parallel development of the stories of the two couples to confirm, by comparison and contrast, the idea of a crisis of “home.” Ursula and Birkin move slowly towards mutual acceptance when each of them ceases to try to engulf the other in his/her own world. This process ultimately leads them to give up the very idea of home and to choose a vagabond existence in which their residence is (as it was for Lawrence and his wife, Frieda), a perpetually changing “anywhere.”12

19Unlike Birkin and Ursula, Gerald and Gudrun are involved in a centripetal relationship which reflects each partner’s desire to attract and enclose the other in his/her own world.

  • 13 For Stewart, “Gudrun’s characteristic mode of seeing is to enclose within a frame. […] Gudrun regar (...)

20Gudrun tends to transform every outdoor environment into a studio, a place in which she can exercise her own control and power. This happens, for instance. in the hypnotic, domineering dance in front of the cattle (WL 167-168), which is not an interaction with wild nature, but an attempt to draw its energies into her own sphere, to tame and bend them to her will. So centripetal is Gudrun and Gerald’s relationship, demanding a near-total assimilation of the external, that they manage to turn even the immense stretch of snow in the Tyrol into a closed place, a prison which, for Gerald, becomes a tomb.13

  • 14 See Michelucci 2002, pp. 74-85, Levy 1991, p. 5-19 and Foster 1981, pp. 185-206.

21The opposition between centrifugal and centripetal movements draws attention to the category of the threshold, or line of demarcation between two different places, the crossing of which, on the one hand, can make the process of growth possible, but, on the other, entails the risk of being unable to return. Thresholds become more and more indefinite in Women in Love, mirroring the characters’ difficulties in finding a true direction in life. Sometimes, when a goal cannot be envisaged, the road ahead may even appear to be totally blocked. This happens to Gerald, who, once he has left England, “gets stuck” in the ethereal whiteness of the Tyrolean snows, completely incapable of identifying a new destination: “He had lost all his sense of place” (WL 473). Ursula and Birkin avoid Gerald’s because they gradually learn to cross the threshold of the other’s space, without trying to conquer it.14

Conclusion

22From what has been discussed, there emerges the impracticability of home in Joyce and Lawrence, but also in other writers. Home becomes, at the beginning of the 20th century, a synonym of prison, a place where there is a greater risk for the character of experiencing abuse and in some instances even death as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, rather than being a place of growth and fulfilment.

23In Joyce, the situation is similar to that of Kafka’s story, with the difference that the border between victim and abuser is a very subtle one, and if there are two characters both seem to be experiencing an overwhelming unsatisfaction. In Lawrence’s Women in Love, the characters try to escape the risk of abuse and annihilation but, in the case of Gudrun and Gerald, they only end up a further risk of annihilation. The core of the family turns out to be extremely fragile, a source of life-giving value.

24This search is also found in Joyce’s Ulysses, in Bloom’s wanderings in the streets of Dublin, driven by an inextinguishable restlessness, an obscure desire for adventure combined with a nostalgia for home and, at the same time, the awareness that his home, that particular day concentrating the action of the novel, has been profaned by Molly’s infidelity with Blazes Boylan. Paradoxically, it is a home where he has to stay away from, where he only partially belongs.

25In the whole novel, the search for a harbour, for a place of belonging, goes on and on, round and round in the odyssey of the multiple islands of Dublin and the end of the quest is never completely achieved by either of the two main characters Bloom and Stephen. In Ulysses, the centrality of home is also linked to the novel’s Homeric subtext since The Odyssey is all about Ulysses’s attempt to reach his home again. But this long-desired harbour ultimately turns out to be an imperfect, unsatisfactory existential goal, just as his search for a really “consubstantial son”(Joyce 32).

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Bibliographie

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Bonds, Diane S. “Going into the Abyss: Literarization in Women in Love,” in Essays in Literature 8 (1981), pp. 189-202.

Byron, George Gordon. “On the Death of a Young Lady.” https://www.poetry.com/poem/15175/on-the-death-of-a-young-lady

Brown, Terence. Introduction and Notes to James Joyce’s Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Chambers, Iain. Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London: Routledge, 1994.

Corigliano, Emma. Tempo spazio identità. No place like home. Milano: Angeli, 1991.

Dainotto, Roberto M. Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Delany, Paul. “Sons and Lovers: The Morel Marriage as a War of Position,” in D.H. Lawrence Review 21 (1989): pp. 153-165.

Doherty, Gerald. “The Dialectics of Space in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers,” in Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993), pp. 327-343.

Foster, John B. Jr. “Crystal and Star: Nietzsche and the Symbolic Action of Women in Love,” in Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, pp. 185-206.

Gurr, Andrew. Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature. Brighton: Harvester, 1981.

Isaak, Jo A. The Ruin of Representation in Modernist Art and Texts. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Introd. and Notes Terence Brown. London: Penguin, 2000.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. The Corrected Text. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, with a New Preface by Richard Ellmann. London: Penguin, 1986.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space1880-1908. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. Eds. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Levy, Eric. P. “Lawrence’s Psychology of Void and Center in Women in Love,” in D.H. Lawrence Review 23 (1991), pp. 5-19.

Michelucci, Stefania. Space and Place in the Works of D.H. Lawrence. Jefferson: McFarland, 2002.

Michelucci, Stefania. “… The Going Round / And Round and Round…/ Until Merely Going Round Is a Final Good,” in The D.H. Lawrence Review 44.2 (2019), pp. 3-27.

Michelucci, Stefania. “D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love: An Anthropological Reading,” in Studying English Literature in Context. Ed. Paul Poplawski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 357-371.

Mosher, Harold F. “Clichés and Repetition in Dubliners: The Example of ‘A Little Cloud’,” in Style 25. 2 (Fall 1991): pp. 378-392.

O’Grady, Thomas B. “Little Chandler’s Song of Experience,” in James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1991), pp. 399-405.

Remotti, Francesco. Luoghi e corpi. Antropologia dello spazio, del tempo e del potere. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993.

Robertson, George et al. Eds. Traveller’s Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. Routledge: London, 1994.

Rowley, Stephen. “Gerald’s White Light – A Modern Metaphor: The Meaning of Whiteness in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love,” in The Journal of D.H. Lawrence Studies 5 (1988-1989), pp. 20-30.

Stewart, Jack. F. “Dialectics of knowing in Women in Love,” in Twentieth Century Literature 37.1 (1991), pp. 59-75.

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Notes

1 See Michelucci 2002, pp. 1-6, Kern, 1983, and Isaak, 1986.

2 For a detailed analysis see Gurr, 1981, Remotti 1993, Rto faceobertson, 1994, Chambers 1994, Robertson 1994 and Dainotto, 2000.

3 Home is the place where a person lives in harmony with the surrounding environment. Cf. Bachelard 1969 and Corigliano 1991. From an anthropological perspective see also Remotti 1993, pp. 96-107.

4 Joyce 2000, pp. 65-81. See Brown 1993.

5 See Mosher 1991, pp. 378-392.

6 See Michelucci 2002, p. 2-3. The opposition between “places of us,” that is of the social community, and “places of others”, identified with institutions, with order imposed by the outside, in other words with power, is suggested by Remotti1993, pp. 11-75.

7 George Gordon Byron, “On the Death of a Young Lady”. https://www.poetry.com/poem/15175/on-the-death-of-a-young-lady

8 Joyce 2000, p. 80. With particular attention to this action and to the role of father and child turned upside down, see O’Grady 1991, pp. 399-405.

9 On Sons and Lovers, with particular attention to the relationship between Walter and Gertrude Morel, see Michelucci 2002, pp. 32-54, Delany 1989, pp. 153-165 and Doherty 1993, pp. 327-343.

10 For a detailed analysis of the experimental nature of Women in Love in a European Modernist perspective, see Michelucci 2019, pp. 3-27.

11 From this sentence to the end of the penultimate paragraph of this essay, I re-use some passages from my previously published essay, “D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: An Anthropological Reading,” in Studying English Literature in Context: Critical Readings, Paul Poplawski (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 356-369 (363-366); reprinted with permission, courtesy of CUP. Living in any community involves the constant need to compare one’s place with the outside world, with the diversity of other places, a comparison which on the one hand jeopardizes one’s identity, but also saves one from isolation, paralysis, and death. See Remotti, pp. 76-107.

12 For a detailed analysis of the relationship between Ursula and Birkin and their transcendent, liberating union, see Stewart 1991, pp. 59-75, Bonds 1981, p. 194, and Michelucci 2002, pp. 64-87.

13 For Stewart, “Gudrun’s characteristic mode of seeing is to enclose within a frame. […] Gudrun regards others with ‘objective curiosity,” as material for her art, just as Gerald regards men and matter as instruments of his will” (63-65). See also Rowley 1988-1989, pp. 20-30.

14 See Michelucci 2002, pp. 74-85, Levy 1991, p. 5-19 and Foster 1981, pp. 185-206.

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Stefania Michelucci, « D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and the Impracticability of Home »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 56 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 octobre 2024, consulté le 09 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/3927 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12om0

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Auteur

Stefania Michelucci

Stefania Michelucci, PhD, is Full Professor of English Studies at the University of Genoa, Italy. She has written extensively on 19th and 20th century British and American writers with particular attention to the relationship between literature and the visual arts and literature and anthropology. Among her books, Space and Place in the works of D.H. Lawrence (2002), The Poetry of Thom Gunn: A Critical Study (2009) and with Ian Duncan and Luisa Villa, The British Aristocracy in Popular Culture: 200 Years of Representation (2020). She has been a visiting scholar and has lectured in many universities across the world including The University of California, Berkeley, Keio and Kyoto Tachibana University, Japan and The University of Zululand, South Africa. She has recently been elected a member of the European Academy of Science and Arts (2023).

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