At the time of his writing, sexual attitudes had taken a drastic shift away from the remnants of the Victorian era and into a sort of enlightened, intellectual state of freedom. After the First World War, real advances began to be made in regards to attitudes towards sexual relations. 'M

Within the characters of Clifford and the friends that visit him, it is quite clear how the view of sex in society had become dehumanised and cold. Through these characters, Lawrence throws out his ideas in a randomly circulated way, between them. In the conversation in Chapter 4, the discussion of sex makes it seem more like just another physical necessity of life, something that is needed occasionally, like food and water, but nothing much more than that. 'Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them,' is just one of the many such views that Lawrence saw as harmful. While a character such as Charlie May believes that it is only right to finish a conversation with a woman by having sex as it would be a fitting end to the intellectual stimulation, Tommy Dukes believes that it does not matter, and that you can live perfectly normal lives without ever bothering about such trivial things as sex.

odern sex' and education of a sort had begun to evolve. People were beginning to believe that they had control over their own sexuality and had the choice when to evoke it, loosing the natural vitality that it once had, making it far more meaningless and false. The 1920's was the decade of the introduction of contraception, giving an even wider gap between sex and procreation than had been there before. Already, attitudes had been shifting towards a decrease in the relationship between intellectual thought and sexual relations. The idea of mental compatibility was becoming the desired option for relationships and marriage, when, until fairly recently, it had been chiefly the domain of property exchange and procreation to meet this end. However, even in the early nineteenth century, this shift was clearly beginning to evolve, making one's life centralised around the wealth you had rather than your sexual desirability. This can be seen in the works of the likes of Charles Dickens, with the increased sense of poverty and striving for wealth to attain a better quality of life, and Carl Marx, who tried to show how we were becoming too focused on the material. As we entered into the inner war years, the ideas were firmly set that relationships were for love, mental compatibility, shared thoughts and the ability to communicate, an idea that is not entirely foreign to us these days. Lawrence saw this as a way in which you lost something in the sexual relationship due to relating to each other on a different level and making relationships uncomfortable. He felt that introducing the idea of conversation to sex, as the new cosmopolitan bohemian set felt, was a misconception of it. Sex was more a question of what it was to be a human being, and this new view was altering what it meant to be by separating the relationship between mind and body. Lawrence believed that sex was just as fundamentally a part of the body as intellectual stimulation of the mind, not just accidentally there as something to be done.

Lawrence was not a radical modernist, such as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, who had set structured interpretations of what they wanted to do with the works they produced, but he did share similar views with them. He agreed that, after the war, culture and society had become morally deficient and directionless. But the thing he saw as the biggest threat to this natural being was the Industrial Revolution, man and machine destroying nature and making it something cold, harsh and dead rather than the vast, mysterious being it had been to the likes of Wordsworth and other Romantic writers. The sublime image of Thomas Hardy's Egdon heath had been reduced to dust and organic growth ploughed over for coalmines and factories. But, not only did it lessen the importance of the natural world, it also implemented a strong social culture that dominated the personal life of every individual. World War One was just the first obvious extreme of this intense industrialisation on life, centralising

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Approximate Word count = 3383
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page double spaced)