D H Lawrence and Shyness

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence is not usually viewed as a writer who was much concerned with, or sympathetic to, shyness. But shyness is structurally crucial to his exploration of emotion. His work echoes then-contemporary models for understanding shyness—from William James’s “tender-mindedness” to Jung’s “introversion,” to the physiologist Angelo Mosso’s idea of the “inner blush.” Lawrence, suggesting the cognitive richness implicit in shyness, emphasizes the insights it offers into emotion, selfhood, and embodiment, even while he indicates that it might be too painful a state to be borne indefinitely. Although his own personal shyness became a quality that he had to discard as a writer, his work captures what it is to be at once invested in shyness and attempting to move beyond it.