Lawrence, so recently enshrined as a mascot of the swinging Sixties, had been unmasked by second-wave feminism as a sadistic pornographer who merely pretended to care about women.Īll the same, Wilson read Lawrence on the sly, reveling in his “fierce certainties,” his indomitable belief that he was right and everyone else was not merely wrong but wrongheaded. Worse still, they seem to positively relish their subjection to a series of two-dimensional, noisy, and frankly fascistic men. Millett’s coruscating commentary had revealed how all those self-actualizing Lawrentian women-the schoolmistresses, artists, and suffragists-inevitably yield to the bullying power of the phallus in the end. It was the early 1980s and, thanks to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969), every good feminist now knew that Lawrence’s “Priest of Love” persona, based on his once-banned novels The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), concealed an ugly misogyny. Lawrence’s books in the house and her college English professor refused to teach him. When Frances Wilson was a teenager her mother forbade D.H.
