11 - Lawrence and the politics of sexual politics

Summary

Introduction: the priest of love?

If sex has replaced religion as the opium of the people, how are we to assess the self-appointed priests? In a letter written on Christmas Day, 1912, D. H. Lawrence declared, 'I shall always be a priest of love' (i. 493), a resonant phrase later adopted by Harry T. Moore for the title of his biography of Lawrence. The phrase captures some of the contradictions of authority in Lawrence's work, suggesting that awkward combination of the didactic and the prophetic which has so troubled Lawrence's critical reception. His writing unsettles aesthetic judgement by cutting across the relative autonomy of life and art to explore new experiences of feeling and belief. In The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (1955), for example, Mark Spilka argued: 'that Lawrence was a religious artist, and that all his work was governed by religious ends'. Kate Millett's very different critique echoed this characterisation: 'Lady Chatterley's Lover is a quasi-religious tract recounting the salvation of one modern woman . . . through the offices of the author's personal cult, “the mystery of the phallus”'.