Space and Characters: The Construction of Individual Experiences in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Space and Characters: The Construction of Individual Experiences in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Summary/Abstract: The word proxemics was coined by the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall in 1963 (“A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behaviour”). Whereby he meant “the interrelated observations and theories of humans’ use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture”. A picture will reproduce objects and people distributed in space, yet Hall is interested in the “hidden dimension” of what Henri Lefebvre (“The Production of Space”) would define as “perceived space”, its subjective image in the observer. Nevertheless, the proxetics/ proxemics polarity – physical space versus perception of human contact within a hierarchy of proximity – intimate, family, institutional, public – seems to us to be a postwar elaboration of psychologist Wilhelm Wundt’s physical image/psychical image binary (“Sinnliche und übersinnliche Welt“ 1914). Modernist fiction was epistemologically indebted to this school of physiological psycbology (Wundt) or pragmatism (William James). D.H. Lawrence is a case in point. In his notorious novel, published in 1928, D.H. Lawrence investigates, among other themes, how personal experiences can be shaped by space. The characters in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and their interpersonal relationships are molded according to the features of the spaces they inhabit or pass through at different moments of the narrative. The varying modes of connection between the characters and the spaces they populate are formulated in terms of both distance and proximity.

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