3 - The Trespasser

Summary

In his second novel Lawrence seems to have experimented with forms and methods quite different from those of The White Peacock. The first novel attempts to evoke a complex pattern of relationships between a number of people; the second concentrates with furious intensity on the affair between Siegmund MacNair and Helena Verden. The White Peacock takes place over a period of years; The Trespasser, though framed by a prologue and epilogue set some months after Siegmund's suicide, happens essentially within one week. The rooted familiarity of the first novel, full of landscapes and impressions which Lawrence himself had known throughout his life, is exchanged for the Isle of Wight, which Lawrence knew personally only from a holiday enjoyed there in the summer of 1909. Where The White Peacock laments the inevitable farewells that have to be made to the country of one's youth, The Trespasser looks forward with the despair of melancholy adolescence to the crisis and desolation of middle age. The main relationships are dealt with more intensely than in The White Peacock. The result fluctuates wildly and is normally written off by critics as a very minor work indeed. Containing some of Lawrence's most extravagantly unleashed prose, it tempers the rhapsodies with a new symbolic suggestiveness and manages to blend moments of intimate pain into what the author realistically thought, immediately after writing it, was ‘a decorated idyll running to seed in realism’.