The Thermodynamics of Gender: Lawrence, Science and Sexism

The ways that gender ideologies are encoded in literature and narrative configurations have long been concerns of feminist criticism. Recently, these concerns have also led to an investigation of gender biases that inform other intellectual pursuits, and particularly discipline of science. Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sandra Harding, for example, have shown how ostensibly discourse of - as well as much of epistemological matrix of Western world - bears imprint of patriarchal authorship, mainly by reproducing inscriptions of gender in its models and texts. What remains to be explored, it would appear, is three-way interaction between gender, literature and and what further encourages such an investigation is current scholarly emphasis upon way that changes in scientific theory are reproduced in changes in literary style and form. The work of D. H. Lawrence lends itself to such an interdisciplinary investigation particularly well. Gender issues and relationship between sexes in his work have long been at forefront of critical analysis (and have furthermore been invited by Lawrence's widely known statements on topic); in addition, Lawrence evolved a lifelong and complicated relationship to and technology of his day. Following largely anti-scientific esthetic of British Romantics, for example, he located his narrative cosmos along fault line of organic and mechanical, whereby recuperative agency of natural is almost always juxtaposed to destructive effects of technological. Because Lawrence believed that humankind's continued exposure to rationalization and mechanization of modern world engenders a condition of pure intellection that represses instinctual urges and desires - what he was fond of calling blood-consciousness - Machine and Science in his world frequently operate as a threat to an almost prelapsarian Eden, as a figuration of Fall: humankind's original sin. Lawrence, however, was in his own way also interested, and positively so, in scientific and technological developments. He knew and approved of Einstein's Theory of Relativity because it confirmed his belief in total interdependent connectedness of universe: that the whole thing hangs inevitably together, as he himself put it (Fantasia 11). Einstein also valorized his contention that there is no [single] absolute principle in universe and that everything is relative (Fantasia 182), and Lawrence viewed Relativity as a theory that could transcend rigid causalities of his scientific nemesis: logical positivism. Lawrence described logical positivism as objective and as a science of dead world, and opposed to it his own subjective (Fantasia 12). In contrast to logical positivism, where reality is registered through conscious mind or through independent observation, Lawrence advanced theory that reality can be apprehended directly through a series of symmetrically arranged centers on body and that this reality can be confirmed by appealing to intuition of others. Clearly, such a corporeal apprehension is, even by contemporary accounts, fantastic in extreme. What is important, however, is that many of Lawrence's deeply-held beliefs, such as relativity or flux of reality and observer's participation in that flux, have much in common with physics of twentieth century. In words of N. Katherine Hayles, while Lawrence was ignorant of much factual knowledge about new science, he anticipated spirit of its principal results (86). This essay continues in spirit of such revisionist criticism and seeks to retrace dialogic relationship between Lawrence's literary texts and text(s) of science. Instead of focusing on affinities between Lawrence and quantum physics, however, I would like to lay bare some of points of intersection between Lawrence and that was most visible in his day, particularly in its industrial manifestation of steam engines and locomotives: thermodynamics. …