| Description |
This project examines three literary texts written by two modern writers, D.H. Lawrence and Georges Bataille. D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Georges Bataille's short stories, "Madame Edwarda" and "The Dead Man," deviate from conventional depictions of eroticism from the early to mid-twentieth century. Though their attention to the erotic is foregrounded in the texts, this project is concerned with the portrayal of the body and the emphasis the authors attribute to, and the way in which they interpret, the bodily experience. The depiction of both the male and female body will be analyzed, as this will ultimately serve as the entry for seeing how gender is operative within the texts. This project will demonstrate how traditional notions regarding masculine virility and feminine passivity are challenged through Lawrence's and Bataille's fiction, a deviation which essentially creates a tension between conventional portrayals of the male and the female while it also most notably advocates for a more progressive awareness of, as well as a divergence from, universalized gender classifications. Throughout my analysis of the three primary texts by Lawrence and Bataille, I plan to incorporate relevant feminist scholarship, including Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Ashley Tauchert's Against Transgression, and Hélène Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa." I will challenge Cixous' concept of écriture féminine through Lawrence's and Bataille's depictions of the female body and female desire. Cixous' assertion in her essay, "Woman must write woman," effectively annihilates the possibility of man writing woman (877). Cixous even states, "It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming to know her-by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond the Old without delay" (878). Presented in this light, although Cixous initially establishes a rigid binary opposition between man and woman and man's legitimacy in writing woman, she fails to consider whether man can in fact write woman. My study shows how the portrayal of the male and female bodies in Lawrence's and Bataille's texts illustrate their inclination to challenge all oppressive systems in a program for both "social and sexual redemption," an agenda that ultimately foregrounds literary and sexual transgression (Millett 242). |
