Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Lawrence, D. H. - Linda Ruth Williams (essay date 1998)

Lawrence, D. H. - Linda Ruth Williams (essay date 1998)

Linda Ruth Williams (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: Williams, Linda Ruth. “‘We've Been Forgetting That We're Flesh and Blood, Mother’: ‘Glad Ghosts’ and Uncanny Bodies.” D. H. Lawrence Review 27, no. 2 (1998): 233-53.

[In the following essay, Williams perceives “Glad Ghosts” to be an exploration of Lawrence's psychoanalytic theories.]

For it is true, as William James and Conan Doyle and the rest allow, that a spirit can persist in the after-death. Persist by its own volition. But usually, the evil persistence of a thwarted will, returning for vengeance on life. Lemures, vampires.

(SCAL 80-81)

Lawrence wrote this in 1918, in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe, but it is only one of his lines on the life of the dead. “There's a long way to go, after the point of intrinsic death, before we disappear” says Birkin in Women in Love. “We live on long after our death, and...

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