Man-Animal relationship in D. H. Lawrence's twin novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love: A Zoocritical Perspective

Abstract

This study has attempted to explore human treatment of animals in Lawrence’s novels. Ecocriticism provides the macro framework for this study. Animals are integral agents of our ecosystem. Human treatment of animals reflects their treatment of nature as animals represent nature and violence against animals can be regarded as violence against nature itself. Ecocriticism explores the relationship between human and the non-human world in literary and cultural representations. Zoocriticism, as an emerging trend in eco-criticism, focuses on the representation of animals and man-animal relationship in literary texts. This study is qualitative in nature. Textual analysis technique has been utilized for the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. Zoocriticism, as a subfield of Ecocriticism, is employed as a lens to analyze the relationship between humans and animals in Lawrence’s selected novels. Lawrence in his fiction reflects upon concerns beyond the human world. He explores various kinds of relationships such as man to man, man to nature and man to animal relationships. Human beings, in his novels, demonstrate ambiguous relationship with animals. This study will be quite significant as it would make us realize the importance of more than human world in our ecosystem and will enable us to reconsider our relationship with the non-human world for the overall benefit of the ecosphere. Future researchers can take clue from this research to conduct similar research on Lawrence’s other works as well as on other writer’s texts.