Love and Hate in D. H. Lawrence

Abstract

Focusing on D. H. Lawrence's reaction to gay upper-class figures such as John Maynard Keynes, and his awkward relation to the writer John Middleton Murry, the article seeks to unravel the ostensibly “queer” or homoerotic aspects of Lawrence's writing by analyzing the ambivalent closeness of love and hate in his representations of male same-sex relationships. At the same time as his homophobic outbursts often exhibit the qualities of a homoerotic poetics Lawrence's language can be simultaneously homophobic and homoerotic. Lawrence's essay “David”, on Michelangelo's statue, for example, seems like a homoerotic offering from Lawrence to Murry, which Murry rejects, triggering Lawrence's furious—yet also “unbearably” ambivalent—attack on both Murry and Murry's wife, Katherine Mansfield. The proximity of love and hate in Lawrence's language shows an attraction to homoeroticism even as Lawrence wants to distance himself from the homosexual.