Orientalism in D. H. Lawrence’s Novelistic Representation of Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critical attention to D. H. Lawrence’s two Italian novels has focused on themes of sexual politics and leadership politics, and few critics have noted their engagement with colonial politics. Informed by postcolonial studies, this paper argues that Lawrence’s representation of Italy in The Lost Girl and Aaron's Rod is overloaded with Orientalist imagery in that Italy is imagined as an Other within Europe that contrasts with the industrialised and civilised North. Italy is portrayed as alternatively redemptive and destructive. While the Italian landscape is idealised as an exotic Other, its people and culture are demonised as a savage Other. Both representation modes are trapped in the logic of imperialist discourses. The celebration of the landscape marginalises Italy from the modern world and the demonisation of the community affirms the racial and cultural inferiority of Italy. Lawrence’s representation of Italy indicates that in the cultural imagination of Britain the racial and national others within Europe are often subject to the colonising gaze of the ‘imperial eyes’.