Literature Network » D.H. Lawrence

Metaphor and mental disturbance: the case of Lady Chatterley's Lover. (novel by D.H. Lawrence)

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From: Style
Date: 19960322
Author:Doherty, Gerald

Textual "neurosis" and textual "psychosis" have their rhetorical source in two different performances of metaphor. The distinction between the two forms of mental disturbance is highlighted in sexual narratives like Lady Chatterley's Lover that juxtapose sexual trauma and erotic wish-fulfillment in a dramatically oppositional way. In that novel, neurosis is triggered by libidinal repression and takes the form of the disfiguring metaphor. Psychosis, by contrast, is triggered by the orgasm, and takes the form of the hallucinatory metaphor: it trades in fantasies of mastery, wholeness, and ...

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