The Prussian officer

In this essay I shall be contrasting the concept of "otherness" that Lawrence articulated in texts of 1917-19 with that analysed in Hegel's famous "Master-Slave dialectic" and the influential twentieth-century discourses that derive from it. I shall be arguing, however, that in some of his most powerful works of fiction, especially "The Prussian Officer," Lawrence dramatises otherness in a way that resembles Hegel's idea more than his own.

I became interested in the concept of otherness in Lawrence through working on his travel writing from a postcolonial perspective. He made extensive use of the term in writings of 1917-19, specifically in the revisions to Women in Love and in the early versions of Studies in Classic American Literature. His use of the term in these texts is central to his representation of relationship with the natural world and between men and women. Otherness in Lawrence's use invariably has positive and optimistic connotations. In the first version of his essay on de Crèvecoeur he writes:

The pure beauty of the sentiment here lies...in the deep, tender recognition of the life-reality of the other, the other creature which exists not in union with the immediate self, but in dark juxtaposition. It is the tenderness of blood-knowledge, knowledge in separation. (SCAL 199)

The notion of recognition is central. The self recognises the other as not-itself: this recognition avoids the "merging, mingling...absolute identification of the lover with the beloved" that Lawrence detested (SCAL 240). Nevertheless it entails "the communion of beings" (240): it is equally distant from the insulation of the predetermined will, which he equally hated. "Will" and "insulation," together with terms such as "repetition," "mechanical," "predetermined" and "sensation," are regularly opposed to "otherness" in his writing.