From Lady Chatterley’s Lover to The Deer Park

Marriage, Instinctual Primacy, and the Dialectic of Erotic Risk

Authors

  • Peter Balbert Trinity University Author

Keywords:

D. H. Lawrence, The Deer Park, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, erotic risk and courage, marriage and sexuality, literary influence

Abstract

A revised reprint of Peter Balbert’s essay, a version of which first appeared in Studies in the Novel 22 (1990). Balbert traces D. H. Lawrence’s influence on Mailer, from The Prisoner of Sex back to The Deer Park, reading Mailer’s sexual aesthetic as a dialectic of risk, courage, and growth rooted in Lawrence’s faith in instinctual primacy and shaped also by Hemingway. Comparing Lady Chatterley’s Lover with The Deer Park, he sets Connie and Mellors’s erotic risk against Eitel’s cowardly retreat from Elena, and considers marriage in both writers’ lives and works. The essay closes with a 1989 letter from Mailer explaining that a passage he once attributed to Lawrence was his own, part of an Esquire spoof.

Author Biography

  • Peter Balbert, Trinity University

    Peter Balbert is Professor of English at Trinity University. He has published more than forty essays on D.H. Lawrence and other modern and contemporary writers, and is the author of D.H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination and D.H. Lawrence and the Psychology of Rhythm, and is the co-editor of D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. In 2016, Cambridge Scholars will publish his book, D.H. Lawrence and the Marriage Matrix: Intertextual Adventures in Conflict, Renewal, and Transcendence? His introduction to the Anthem Press omnibus edition of Sons and Lovers,The Rainbow, and Women in Love will be published in January 2016.

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Published

2015-09-30

Issue

Vol. 9 No. 1 (2015): Maestro

Section

Classic Interpretations

How to Cite

Balbert, Peter. “From Lady Chatterley’s Lover to The Deer Park: Marriage, Instinctual Primacy, and the Dialectic of Erotic Risk”. The Mailer Review, vol. 9, no. 1, Sept. 2015, pp. 249–281, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/528.