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Freud/Weston/Frazer/Jung about lances and swords and guns (and keys) as phallic symbols, chalices
and grails (and bowls, of course, also) as symbols of female sexual organs. Back to Andrea s bowl: it
really is about sex. Specifically, it s about her identity as a woman, an individual, and a sexual being,
rather than as an extension of a lover or a husband. She fears being merely an auxiliary of some man s
existence, although her autonomy, as symbolized by the bowl, is made problematic by its having been
purchased for her by...a man. He only buys it, though, after seeing that she really connects with the
bowl, so it really is hers in the end.
To talk about sex in literature almost inevitably leads to discussion of D. H. Lawrence. The great thing
about Lawrence, from my point of view, is that you can never go wrong bringing sex into the analysis.
Partly because sex had been taboo for so long and therefore was a largely untapped resource for the
novelist, he worked tirelessly to explore the subject. His work has plenty of mentions of sexual
relations, some oblique, some explicit, and in his last novel, Lady Chatterley s Lover (1928), the great
forbidden reading-fruit of everyone s youth, he pushes right past the limits of censorship of his time.
The sexiest scene he ever wrote, though, is not a sex scene. It s wrestling. In Women in Love, the two
main male characters wrestle one evening, in language in which the sexual charge is ferocious. They ve
been going on about blood brotherhoods and the closeness of their friendship, so the wrestling is not
all that surprising. Lawrence isn t comfortable making them openly homosexual but he wants a
relationship and a physical expression that is nearly as close as the love-and-sex relationship
between man and woman. Ken Russell certainly understood what the scene was about when he filmed
the novel back in 1969; I hadn t understood it, being too conditioned not to look for anything
homoerotic and, I suppose, too insecure as to what that might say about one of my favorite writers.
Once I saw the film, though, I went back and reread the scene, and Russell got it right.
My favorite Lawrence story, bar none, is called The Rocking-Horse Winner (1932), about a little boy
who wants to please his mother. His father is a failure in business and therefore a great
disappointment to the materialist mother. The son, Paul, senses the desperation for money in the
house, senses his mother s dissatisfaction, senses the inability of his mother to love him, or anyone, in
the face of her own colossal self-absorption. He connects the lack of his mother s love with the lack of
money, then discovers that he can pick the winners of upcoming horse races if he rides his rocking
horse to the point of exhaustion. Here s what Lawrence has to say:
He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery, he
would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls
peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, the eyes had a
strange glare in them. The girls dared not speak to them.... He knew the horse could take him to where
there was luck, if only he forced it.... At last he stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop and
slid down.
Say what you will, I think he s talking about masturbation. When I teach this story, I try to lead the
students to this idea without insisting on it. Usually there is one hardy and perceptive soul who gets it
and asks, with something between a smirk and a cringe, the question I m hoping for. One or two others
nod, as if they sort of thought that but were afraid to think it through. Thirty-five others look like the
ceiling is about to fall.
Is it really?
Let s look at the pattern that s set up: child wants to supplant father in his mother s affections, child
desperately wants mother s approval and love, child engages in highly secretive behavior involving
frenetic, rhythmic activity that culminates in transporting loss of consciousness. What does that sound
like to you? This is one of the clearest Oedipal situations ever captured in fiction, and for good reason.
Lawrence was part of the first generation to read Freud and so, for the first time, to consciously
employ Freudian thinking in literature. The notion of sublimation kicks in here, for both character and
writer. Obviously, sexual engagement with the mother is not an option, so Lawrence sends the boy,
Paul, in search of the luck his mother desires so terribly. The means of his search is sufficiently creepy
that it frightens his presexual sisters and causes consternation among the adults, who feel that he s too
big for a rocking horse.
Is it really masturbation? Not literally. That would be icky and not particularly interesting. But
symbolically it fulfills the function of masturbation. Think of it as a surrogate for a surrogate for sex.
What could be clearer?
Why? Part of the reason for all this disguised sex is that, historically, writers and artists couldn t make
much use of the real thing. Lawrence, for instance, had numerous novels suppressed and undertook a
monumental battle with the British censors. Same as in film.
Another reason is that scenes in which sex is coded rather than explicit can work at multiple levels and
sometimes be more intense than literal depictions. Those multiple levels have traditionally been to
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