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  • D.H. Lawrence Give Her A Pattern

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    Francesca Malandrucco
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    This document summarizes David Herbert Lawrence's views on societal expectations of women and the "patterns" men impose on them. It argues that women feel pressure to conform to masculine ideals and theories of what women should be. Throughout history, different types of men produced different standards and stereotypes of womanhood that many women felt compelled to emulate. However, the real tragedy is that men fail to accept women as fully human beings in their own right, instead viewing them as objects or ideals to be defined by masculine terms.

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    D.H. Lawrence Give her a pattern

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    This document summarizes David Herbert Lawrence's views on societal expectations of women and the "patterns" men impose on them. It argues that women feel pressure to conform to masculine ideals and theories of what women should be. Throughout history, different types of men produced different standards and stereotypes of womanhood that many women felt compelled to emulate. However, the real tragedy is that men fail to accept women as fully human beings in their own right, instead viewing them as objects or ideals to be defined by masculine terms.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    165 views1 page

    D.H. Lawrence Give Her A Pattern

    Uploaded by

    Francesca Malandrucco
    This document summarizes David Herbert Lawrence's views on societal expectations of women and the "patterns" men impose on them. It argues that women feel pressure to conform to masculine ideals and theories of what women should be. Throughout history, different types of men produced different standards and stereotypes of womanhood that many women felt compelled to emulate. However, the real tragedy is that men fail to accept women as fully human beings in their own right, instead viewing them as objects or ideals to be defined by masculine terms.

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    David Herbert Lawrence

    GIVE HER A PATTERN (1929)

    The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt
    themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is
    thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is
    hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which
    man’s picture of woman to live up to.
    For, of course, just as there are many men in the world, there are many masculine
    theories of what women should be. But men run to type, and it is the type, not the individual,
    that produces the theory, or “ideal” of woman. Those very grasping gentry, the Romans,
    produced a theory or ideal of the matron, which fitted in very nicely with the Roman property
    lust. “Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion.” — So Caesar’s wife kindly proceeded to be
    above it, no matter how far below it the Caesar fell. Later gentlemen like Nero produced the
    “fast” theory of woman, and later ladies were fast enough for everybody. Dante arrived with a
    chaste and untouched Beatrice, and chaste and untouched Beatrice began to march self-
    importantly through the centuries. The Renaissances discovered the learned woman, and
    learned women buzzed mildly into verse and prose. Dickens invented the child-wife, so child-
    wives have swarmed ever since. He also fished out his version of the chaste Beatrice, a chaste
    but marriageable Agnes. George Eliot imitated this pattern, and it became confirmed. The
    noble woman, the pure spouse, the devoted mother took the field, and was simply worked to
    death. Our own poor mothers were this sort. So we younger men, having been a bit frightened
    of our noble mothers, tended to revert to the child-wife. We weren’t very inventive. Only the
    child-wife must be a boyish little thing — that was the new touch we added. Because young
    men are definitely frightened of the real female. She’s too risky a quantity. She is too untidy,
    like David’s Dora. No, let her be a boyish little thing, it’s safer. So a boyish little thing she is.
    There are, of course, other types. Capable men produce the capable woman ideal.
    Doctors produce the capable nurse. Business men produce the capable secretary. And so you
    get all sorts. You can produce the masculine sense of honour (whatever that highly mysterious
    quantity may be) in women, if you want to.
    There is, also, the eternal secret ideal of men — the prostitute. Lots of women live up
    to this idea: just because men want them to.
    And so, poor woman, destiny makes away with her. It isn’t that she hasn’t got a mind
    — she has. She’s got everything that man has. The only difference is that she asks for a
    pattern. Give me a pattern to follow! That will always be woman’s cry. Unless of course she
    has already chosen her pattern quite young, then she will declare she is herself absolutely, and
    no man’s idea of women has any influence over her.
    Now the real tragedy is not that women ask and must ask for a pattern of womanhood. The
    tragedy is not, even, that men give them such abominable patterns, child-wives, little-boy-
    baby-face girls, perfect secretaries, noble spouses, self-sacrificing mothers, pure women who
    bring forth children in virgin coldness, prostitutes who just make themselves low, to please the
    men; all the atrocious patterns of womanhood that men have supplied to woman; patterns all
    perverted from any real natural fulness of a human being. Man is willing to accept woman as
    an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a
    bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one
    thing he won’t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.

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