D. H. Lawrence and a New Ecological Consciousness

In the growing academic field of ecological studies, D. H. Lawrence`s fiction fits in as one of the most articulated voices promoting ecological consciousness. Each of the texts selected for the study advances Lawrence`s “ethics of responsibility” for the environment: in Sons and Lovers, we may trace the idea of nature as a thing to love and possess like a human lover; in “Second Best,” nature is a parallel soul narrative (the two earlier texts deal more extensively with the first element-earth); in “The Woman Who Rode Away,” Lawrence mythologizes and consecrates the greater level of knowledge about the surrounding non-human world (air); and in the story “Sun,” one of his four ancient elements-fire, embodied in the Sun-becomes personalized, thus indicating a completion of Lawrence`s implied system of ecological awareness. Lawrence constructs in his fiction a consciousness in progression from the physical, the sensual, the emotional-to the cosmic, wherein the non-human world becomes the accessible signification system for the unconscious, not discarding in any sense the value of the cosmos as a mysterious and powerful totality.