D.H. Lawrence, Schoolteachers, and Novel Guidance

In his odd and strident postwar tract Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923), D.H. Lawrence condemns the now nationally mandated elementary education: “Our poor little plants of children are put into horrible forcing beds, called schools …Let all schools be closed at once” (105–106). Although Fantasia has long been considered a kind of eccentric outlier in the annals of modernism, it reflects the dynamic interest in education that courses through the literary and journalistic writing of the period, and, certainly, relates to the despairing scenes of Ursula Brangwen teaching in The Rainbow. Lawrence’s preoccupation with the negative effects of institutional education on children links, I demonstrate, to his interest in the effects of literature on readers. In “Morality and the Novel” (1925), which can be read as an essayistic distillation of the principles shaped by The Rainbow, Lawrence asserts that “the business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe, at the living moment.” The novel replaces the rote, herd-like values of schooling and collective impositions of morality with its spurs to responsiveness, and its capacity to refocus the reader’s attention on her ever-changing interactions with the people, things, and spaces around her.