The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression

In Women in Love, expressionist language is not just optical or kinetic but reveals the vital or conflicted life behind surfaces, expressing allotropic states of being to an extent never previously attempted.

The episode in which Mrs. Morel is thrust outdoors by her drunken spouse is the first of a series of intense moonlight scenes in Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Perfume, glistening leaves, vibrating moonlight, distant sounds, and swooning sensations merge in a mélange of impressions detached from mental…

Lawrence modulates his style from a decorative fidelity to nature, as prescribed by Ruskin, to an atmospheric diffuseness and rendering of color interactions characteristic of impressionism.

As Oscar Wilde writes at the height of the Aesthetic movement when Pre-Raphaelitism was shading into Art Nouveau and Symbolism, "All art is at once surface and symbol".

The aesthetic and decadent movements of the 1890s are marked by selfconscious attention to style and surface and by increasing symbiosis of the arts: forms and themes mutate and migrate, as one medium fertilizes another.

The poet H.D. ( Hilda Doolittle) is not the only one who felt an extraordinary affinity between Lawrence's vision and Van Gogh's. Lawrence himself read Van Gogh's letters, copied one of his drawings, and made the Sunflowers the focus of his own attempt to conceptualize art.

Literary norms of realism no longer apply to Lawrence's style after Sons and Lovers. His vision communicates the unseen along with the seen, permeating character, action, and theme.