Empire and New Liberalism: Anti-Bildungsroman of D. H. Lawrence and J. M. Barrie

This paper aims to examine how D. H. Lawrence’s idea of life in Sons and Lovers, which is defined in terms of non-growth, is closely related with the changing discourse of British imperialism, paying attention to his letter in which he refers to J. M. Barrie’s work. In the paper, the point is that the British Empire was moving toward not expansion but maintenance in the Edwardian socio-cultural discourse. At the same time, the discourse of new liberalism effected changes not only in social policies, but also at the level of each individual’s lifestyles, where the traditional masculinity, which once worked for the advocacy of empire-building, grew increasingly irrelevant. In such a situation, the hero Paul Morel as one of the imperial subjects is not able to accept the 19th-century idea that he should physically and mentally grow up, which leads him to reject the prospect of having an intimate relationship with and marrying a woman; the framework of the Victorian Bildungsroman is collapsing here, where the growth is no longer a stable metanarrative that prescribes manliness. He tries instead to keep his youth. In other words, what Lawrence tries to do in Sons and Lovers is, I argue, to describe a new British way of life that suits the Edwardian situation with using the older framework of Bildungsroman. Sons and Lovers stands in the tradition of Bildungsroman, but it also takes into account the changing notion about growth of that era.