ISSUE OF THE DAY:
A brief return to England to consider Sexuality and Class Conventions

D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930)
"The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922)

Introduction:
-- Lawrence and the Industrial Midlands
--Working class: rough, inarticulate, emotional/passionate
--Middle class: professional, articulate, but inhibited by convention
--Sex: i. as a magnetic, irresistible force pursued intuitively, unconsciously
ii. both liberating and enslaving; creative and self-destructive

Question: What does this view of the sexual instinct imply about personal or social responsibility?

1. Opening paragraphs: 2258/2330
--What will happen to Mabel? (bulldog)
--Joe, Fred Henry, Malcolm = working class, physical, animal.

2. Narrative Style:
--repetition = incantation or bludgeoning?
--2258/2331: Joe and the horses

3. Connection between JF and MP
--2260/2333: Dr. Jack Ferguson
--middle-class professional
--polite, articulate
--Mabel Pervin: silent, "sulkiest bitch..."
--Drawn to the graveyard, death 
--"Their eyes met"= 2263/2335
2336: Ferguson's work: killing/craving
--The Pond = Death?

4. Discovery and declaration of Love--Take care here! (this is not moralized nineteenth-century realism; take note of the formal repetitions and crafting that characterize modernism.)
i. 2265/2337: He--deliberate, conscious, life-preserving
ii. 2266/2337: She--returning to consciousness, question "Do you love me?" Intuitive response to his life-preserving
iii. 2267/2339: He--no words; "no intention," rational resistance, fear
iv. 2367/2340: She intuits what he feels unconsciously
He: gives in to a magnetic force: a pain that is life; she: reflects joy that is "terrible."
v. Is Lawrentian love pleasure or pain? Free choice or coercion? Liberation or imprisonment?

5. JA (e.g. Persuasion) Pre-Freudian.
coupling = rational choice: class, economics, morality, all imagined and narrated as coinciding with desire

GB Shaw: sex = unspeakable

DHL: Post-Freudian
coupling = instinctive, irrational: desire is beyond conscious, rational morality, politics, economics, and class conventions.