D.H. Lawrence's search for wholeness of being : from twilight in Italy to the lost girl

Abstract

In his novel The Lost Girl, Lawrence would resume the themes he had explored in his travelogue, Twilight in Italy in which his euphoric discovery of the country is set against his rejection of modem mechanisation and industrialism. The heavily brooding philosophical reflections he added to the original descriptive essays testify to a linguistic and intercultural restlessness that is symptomatic of his search for what he called wholeness of being. With attention to the stylistic and rhetorical features of the text, this article aims to show how, in his representation of the relationship between the two main protagonists, Alvina Houghton and her Italian lover Ciccio Marasca, Lawrence dramatizes this search in terms of a metaphysical quandary in which interpersonal relations override the confines of national and cultural identity.