Representation of Disability in D. H. Lawrence’s The Ladybird

Abstract

This research is on D.H. Lawrence’s The Ladybird to analyze the issues of disability represented in the novel. The novelist who suffered himself from ill health leads him to cast sympathy on the marginalized people of the deformed body. He got shocked by the modern world’s damage to the human body and spirit—in a new statistical, mechanistic environment and in the devastation of the most industrialized of wars-he writes about disability and the need for renewed balance of faculties in the novel. Employing his unique approach to Eastern Tantric philosophies, which help to promote holistic healing of the body, this work argues that Lawrence is a pioneer of modern theories of body and soul. In The Ladybird, for instance, disability leads to a pursuit of balance and mutual healing and inner beauty as well as compensatory sensory development. It also highlights on the importance of an autobiographical approach to Lawrence to reveal his empathy with the disabled, wounded and ill.