The Dialectic of Space in D.H.Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
NOVELISTIC SPACE IS CONVENTIONALLY CONCEIVED Of as a product Of literal language. Spatial representations of the world of the text are constructed through the close bondings of words to their referents. Such a bonding projects a solid and concrete universe, grounded in stable meaning-relations. Figurative language, by contrast, disrupts this stable bonding. In its transfers and transformations, metaphor especially breaks with literal sense, creating "new aspects, new dimensions, new horizons of meaning" (Ricoeur 250). Rather than just describing the world, metaphor redescribes it.1 This simple dichotomy between literal and figurative language has special relevance for Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. As a traditional realistic novel, it exploits to the full the close bondings of literal language to create a space of confinement, where these bondings signify the "bondage" of the characters to the real world the novel describes. Space connotes containment, curtailmentÂ— diminishing and diminished horizons. But Sons and Lovers is also