@spendius,
Quote:Heat of the moment is one thing - but that...I'm sorry...that was just venting on his part. He was filtering it through his own experience and very recently experienced experience at that - it really lacked integrity in terms of honestly communicating what Nathaniel Hawthorne may have meant or wanted to communicate.
This was all about DH Lawrence.
His wife was not a faithful person spendius - in fact she engaged in serial adultry - which is how she ended up with him. I'm sure that affected his views on the subject. I couldn't get behind his vitriol to even begin to get an idea of what methods of analysis he employed to arrive at his conclusions about what Hawthorne intended the reader to experience in the Scarlet Letter - which is what literary criticism is SUPPOSED to explain and clarify for the reader.
Although it did make me want to read it again (The Scarlet Letter) - my highschool English teacher certainly never focused so minutely on any of the particular themes that Lawrence did- specifically 'Americans as intellectual and emotional dimwits'- which again- I think Lawrence filtered through his own experience of what he viewed himself to be- a more sophisticated twentieth century European.
I did think that was an interesting angle in terms of the Puritanism that was rampant at the time the novel was set- and I guess still is in some aspects of American thought and culture (as it compares to European).
The Scarlet Letter was set in the 17th century when Americans were breaking their backs with manual labor to build the country- yet he alluded to the fact that Americans had distanced themselves from the mindlessness and blood -consciousness of manual labor , in the 20th century - I'm not clear on how that would have entered into Hawthorne's thoughts when he was writing Scarlet Letter- some of the issues Lawrence alluded to or directly approached seemed to be more about his own thoughts about Americans than anything Hawthorne may have been trying to express or even exhibit himself.
Quote:That's easy to say too and understandable. I'm sure all the ladies and all the henpecked males will rally around and support what you say.
However--Lawrence's views are very similar to those of many others. From Homer through Ovid and Juvenal and Rabelais and de Laclos and de Sade and Stendhal and Flaubert and Frank Harris and Henry Miller and Bob Dylan and even Bill Haley. To name a few. You should read Simon Raven sometime.
Oops--I forgot Shakespeare.
And that movie where Barbara Stanwyk brought Richard Chamberlain's spiritual purity to heel just for the fun of it.
Yeah, sort of reminds me of how Henry corralled March in Lawrence's,
The Fox- which is one of my favorites by him.
So it plays out both ways Spendius - yes-it certainly does . Even DH Lawrence can see that.
And he also wrote this:
Quote:Fidelity by D.H. Lawrence
Man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferae,
older than plasm altogether is the soul underneath.
And when, throughout all the wild chaos of love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks,
a man's heart and a woman's,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.
So how does that theme square with the other? He was very complicated.
Quote:Ideally, from your point of view, all males should be unaware of it and then they are putty in your hands.
From my point of view? I haven't expressed my point of view about it - I've only expressed the point of view that I didn't particularly think Lawrence did an even handed or balanced job of his analysis of The Scarlet Letter.
My point of view is that men and women should just tell each other what they want. That'd save a lot of confusion, wouldn't it?
Open your eyes cice girl, Obama's approval rating is definitely slipping!
