D. H. Lawrence's Influence On War

No one doubts that World War I was one of the major influences on the whole atmosphere of the early twentieth century. The higher degree of brutality, the amounts of deaths and the catastrophe it brought to the lives of European people was beyond any logic. The dread was spread in every house in Europe. People were losing faith more and more in their leaders. Artists started to show their discontent in different ways through their arts. Freud wrote in his essay that as civilized people we expected that our white raced authorities would find some other ways of settling their differences and conflicting interests (Freud, 1918, 6). D. H. Lawrence wrote in his letter “war is just hell for me… I can’t get away from it for a minute: live in a sort …show more content…
As Kingsmill 1936 wrote “if ever a man suffered from the war… it was Lawrence” (99). Because of all these sufferings he should have not been indifferent to the war even if he was not in the middle of the chaos. One can trace the impact of it in character’s words, their philosophy on life and death and also in their acts. As an obvious example one can name “Birkin’s consciousness” which “is profoundly affected by that holocaust” (12). Lawrence himself directly states that: “I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters” (10). In the novel Aron’s Rod he “shows the effects of The Great War on his generation in the blasted lives of those living in the waste land” (Domenichelli, 2004, 48) and he shared this “post-war paranoia … with many men of his generation” (232). One sees this also in the changing view of his home country England from his hope to disappointment. Till right before 1915, the year when The Rainbow was banned, “he was hopeful of beneficial changes” as we can witness this in the “title of The Rainbow” which refers to “God’s promise to Noah” (Lawrence, 1998,