Lawrence's selves are borne of their desire, and their struggle is to wrest control of that desire, to fulfil and keep faith with it: possession of ‘one's own soul in silence’ is the ultimate tenet of Lawrence's individualism. But Lawrence's selves are also borne into intense human webs, demanding nets of need and dependence, which curtail and contain that desire. A double current runs through and animates the self here, a tension between urgent, individual desire and the frame which holds it in check. This is what I want to explore in this chapter.

Throwing his actors into an inevitable social connectedness, Lawrence insistently challenges their sovereignty by trial of family and community. The struggles of the individual for self-contained isolation, such as those described in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, ‘The Escaped Cock’, and ‘The Man Who Was Through with the World’, are futile. The family immerses the subject in the social. Perhaps even more than the anti-humanist IT or unconscious which I discussed earlier, the family is the most visible stage upon which the ‘old stable ego’ is challenged. ‘What must be broken is the egocentric absolute of the individual’, Lawrence writes in his review of Burrow's Social Basis of Consciousness:

In Lawrence, no one is normal. The narcissistic ego cannot reign absolute for long when subjected to the unremitting challenge of context. This, then, is what relativity means to Lawrence: although as I said earlier he occasionally laments the fact that there is no longer ‘one absolute principle in the universe’, relativity ensures that his individuals are never allowed to be absolute and complete for and in themselves. His dramas of subjectivity are staged in a way which inevitably undercuts the sovereignty of the subject.