Izabel Brandão
Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil
Lawrence's homeless hero: an ecocritical-feminist reading of Kangaroo
Kangaroo is one of Lawrence's most criticized novels. Despite its arguably reactionary political content, flawed characters and plot, it shows the writer with a fine hand for matching changes of environment changes with the main male character's conflict. This is possible because the Lawrentian hero, Richard Lovat Somers, is 'derelict'. I would therefore like to approach the novel in terms of Lawrence's homeless hero. The idea is to consider Somers's time in Australia as if it were a sort of limbo, or border (in Bhabha's term), after his being 'expelled' from England due to the war, which is mediated by his relation to the environment (the harbour, the sea, the bush) till the moment he boards a ship for the United States, with all that such a mediation entails. The notion of non-place (Augé 1991; Buel 2002) as demarcatory of identity can be associated to Somers's sense of homelessness (no-placeness) as opposed to Harriet's being in-place anywhere in the world. This might mean that the woman, yet again in (or perhaps in spite of) Lawrence is the one with whom stability lies. Thus the paper will provide a feminist reflection on the scope of this notion as associated to Somers's (by extension to Harriet too) sense of place and his choice for being an outsider, a loner, even whilst he tries to work on his man-to-man relationship, and his frustrated attempt to ban the woman from 'serious' issues in his life.