[DOWNLOAD] "Hester and the Homo-Social Order: An Uncanny Search for Subjectivity in D. H. Lawrence's "the Rocking-Horse Winner" (Critical Essay)" by D.H. Lawrence Review * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

📘 Read Now     📥 Download

eBook details

• Title: Hester and the Homo-Social Order: An Uncanny Search for Subjectivity in D. H. Lawrence's "the Rocking-Horse Winner" (Critical Essay)
• Author : D.H. Lawrence Review
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 115 KB

Description

On one level, "The Rocking-Horse Winner" focuses on the way a young boy becomes obsessed with gambling. On another level, however, Lawrence also centers on the way the young boy's neurosis directly results from his relationship with his mother. Indeed, even though the story is ostensibly about the young boy, Paul, it begins with a lengthy and complex description of his mother, and even though Hester Cresswell, like several of Lawrence's female characters, has been categorized as a "man-devouring woman" (Junkins 89), I suggest that in this particular case Lawrence opens his story with an instance of gender reversal: "There was a woman who [...] had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew" (790). Although she is biologically a woman, Hester has taken on the qualities of a conventional man. In terms of her private, autonomous subjectivity, Hester desires to embody the characteristics traditionally attributed to men: unconditional power, privilege, and wholeness. At the same time, however, because women have, in large measure, been determined by exterior qualities and roles--wife, mother, socialite--they have been denied a private, autonomous self. In this regard, they conventionally embody absence or lack, and, in this sense, as Lawrence suggests in the passage quoted above, Hester experiences a figurative castration, a wound, which she, like the conventional male, must cover over at all costs. (2) In this essay, then, I illustrate how Hester is both executor and victim of the homo-social order. (3) That is, Hester is caught in a dilemma, for she alternates between her desire to embody a private, autonomous subjectivity and a public, social identity rooted in her need to fulfill her conventional roles as wife, mother, and social matriarch.

Free PDF Download "Hester and the Homo-Social Order: An Uncanny Search for Subjectivity in D. H. Lawrence's "the Rocking-Horse Winner" (Critical Essay)" Online ePub Kindle