Abstract for 2008 Honors Colloquium
Sarah Vogelsong
English
"Between Women: Sisterhood in D.H. Lawrence"
My thesis concerns Lawrence's treatment of female-female relationships in his works, and focuses especially on the concept of sisterhood, biological and social. Many of Lawrence's most powerful texts were written around the First World War, when male and female roles were called violently into question, and his novels struggle to place women in this new context. Disturbingly, they often identify women only in relation to men, and Lawrence portrays the shift away from a female-dominated domestic world to new male frontiers. I look at this problem through a philosophical lens, discussing Lawrence's preoccupations with merging and Hegel's master-slave dynamic, as well as using later feminist theory.
