Impotence, Recovery, and the Honorable Beast

The Aesthetics of the Fourth Dimension in The Virgin and the Gipsy

Authors

  • Peter Balbert Trinity University Author

Keywords:

D. H. Lawrence, The Virgin and the Gipsy, impotence, the fourth dimension, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Deer Park

Abstract

This Classic Interpretation reprints Peter Balbert’s essay, a shorter version of which first appeared in Papers on Language and Literature 29 (1993) and an expanded version of which appears in his D. H. Lawrence and the Marriage Matrix (Cambridge Scholars). Balbert contests the long-standing view of The Virgin and the Gipsy as a minor prelude to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He reads the 1926 novella against Lawrence’s near-fatal illness of 1925, his probable impotence, and the essays on the novel written during his recovery, showing how Lawrence renders Yvette’s awakening through an aesthetics of the “fourth dimension.” Balbert also links the novella’s idea of time as the flow of the soul to the close of Mailer’s The Deer Park.

Author Biography

  • Peter Balbert, Trinity University

    Peter Balbert is Professor of English at Trinity University. He has published more than fifty 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. His most recent book, D.H. Lawrence and the Marriage Matrix: Intertextual Adventures in Conflict, Renewal, and Transcendence, has just been published by Cambridge Scholars.

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Published

2016-09-28

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2016): 10th Anniversary Issue

Section

Classic Interpretations

How to Cite

Balbert, Peter. “Impotence, Recovery, and the Honorable Beast: The Aesthetics of the Fourth Dimension in The Virgin and the Gipsy”. The Mailer Review, vol. 10, no. 1, Sept. 2016, pp. 370–409, https://mailerreview.org/journal/article/view/582.