Jill Franks
Austin Peay State University, USA
'In Lawrence's novel Alice would be quivering with life and meaning': Parody and Reverence of Lawrence's Love Ethic in Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Maureen Moore's The Illumination of Alice Mallory (1991), and Robert Roper's The Trespassers (1992)
As scholars who have dedicated a portion of our professional lives to studying and teaching Lawrence, we know how frequently he is mocked, both within and outside of the academy. In particular, his love ethic takes cheap shots and gets distorted, or alternatively, copied and revered. As a canonical, modernist Master, writers have been as interested in him as readers; his influence creates as much anxiety as any of the less controversial modern novelists. In this paper, I compare three twentieth-century novelists who answer back to Lawrence: 1930s British journalist Stella Gibbons, late twentieth-century Canadian novelist Maureen Moore, and 1990s Californian novelist Robert Roper. Focusing on questions of gender and genre, I will show that Gibbons parodies Lawrence's purple prose and social determinism, while Moore is more interested in satirizing Lawrence's love ethic directly. Both have much fun with the stereotypical male Lawrence scholar who uses the credo to get women into bed. Roper, on the other hand, does not parody Lawrence at all. He rewrites Lawrence with the minor changes necessary to reflect advances in technology, psychoanalysis, and feminism (perhaps), but essentially embeds the plot, character, and ethos of Lady Chatterley's Lover within his novel. The essay considers the social implications of gender and genre in Lawrence revisions.