His Ideas of Sex and Blood Consciousness D. H. Lawrence His Ideas of Sex and Blood Consciousness

Priest of Love His early writings – 1. Autobiographical; 2. With a sense of mission to address people’s deepest needs His Letters:　　 e. g. 1913, "I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people" (Letters I: 511). "I do write because I want folk - English folk - to alter, and have more　sense" (Letters I: 544). 　(source: http://mss.library.nottingham.ac.uk/dhlbiog-chp4.html )

From Priest of Love to an Exile (2) Exiled after his elopement with Frieda, a German woman. Several factors: his books’ being banned, Frieda’s German identity during the time of war his dissatisfaction with Western civilization.

Priest of Love: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.” (source: http://www.cyber-nation.com/victory/quotations/authors/quotes_lawrence_dh.html ) “The blood also thinks, inside a man, darkly and ponderously. . .

His Critique of Western Civilization Industrialized  too intellectual and dehumanized; Promotes a new awareness of self and connection with Nature.  1. Balance between Blood and Mental consciousness; 2. Primitive Man; 3. Balance between man and woman by developing “pure” same-sex blood relationship.

Duality of human consciousness: Mind vs. Blood “The mind and the spiritual consciousness of man simply hates the dark potency of blood-acts: hates the genuine dark sensual orgasms, which do, for the time being, actually obliterate the mind and the spiritual consciousness, plunge them in a suffocating flood of darkness. . . . Blood-consciousness overwhelms, obliterates, and annuls mind-consciousness.” (Lawrence “Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter” Studies in Classic American Literature )

Mind vs. Blood “The brain is. . . the terminal instrument of the dynamic consciousness. It transmutes what is a certain flux into a certain fixed cypher. . . The mind is the instrument of instruments; it is not a creative reality.” Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 247 “For the blood is the substance of the soul, and of the deepest consciousness. It is by blood that we are: and it is by the heart and liver that we live and move and have our being, are one and undivided. (Apropos 111)

Lawrence’s philosophy (2) modern – “We always want a ‘conclusion,’ an end.” Primitive –having mythical and symbolic consciousness. “To them a thought was a complete state of feeling awareness, a cumulative feeling, a deepening thing, in which feeling deepened into feeling in consciousness till there was a sense of fullness. (Apocalypse 80)

“The Blind Man” Maurice’s existence: filled with blood consciousness. E.g. his appearance (406); his motion in his bedroom (407); his feeling the table ( 409) and smelling the bowl of violets (410). Bertie: “…when there is no thought and no action, there is nothing.” (411) Isabel: blindness as deprivation, but “something [is] there.” (412)