I was struck, especially in our more recent classes, about how much of Lawrence’s life has been dedicated to ordering and “making right” various events, actions, memories, etc., and failing to do so. He tried to reorder his sexuality to align with the British male heterosexual ideal and failed; there’s evidence that he pursued relationships with boys like Dahoum, along with those first lines from Seven Pillars. He tried to do right by the Arabs into whose political life he had inserted himself unsolicited but refused to abandon British imperial interests, and so failed, since he could not do right by every standard, all of the time. He tried to order and control thoroughly his own body by testing its limits, and failed, and his testing devolved into the erotic, masochistic flagellations he inflicted on himself.
If I had to guess, I would locate the origin of this impulse in his childhood and the strictness of his upbringing, interrupted by bursts of chaos or violence, like when he discovered his parents’ scandal and when his mother beat him. Perhaps he inherited the impulse to make things right from his mother, who some of the scholars we’ve read postulate brought her children up so strictly and religiously to compensate for the nonconformity of her marriage.
To me, Lawrence’s impulse toward ordering also makes Mousa’s clarifications about the holes in his accounts of his time in the Middle East more interesting. What purpose did it serve for him to invent, at least in some respect, these incidences of violence and nonconformity, such as the events of Deraa, or to take credit for more work in the Revolt than he actually deserved? He could have, as some scholars wrote, been inventing these episodes as a means of self-punishment and self-revelation—i.e., he knew there was something nonconformist about him, or he recognized internally some homosexual impulse, and so felt the need to invent Deraa so that he could order himself in the world. He felt the need to punish his own nonconformity by exaggerating/falsifying it and projecting it to the world, so that people would understand where he lay in the order of the world.
He might have taken more credit than he deserved for the Arab and British efforts in the Middle East because of his guilt over his failure to safeguard the rights he had promised the Arabs. By making it appear as though he had done more than he had, Lawrence could right his place in history; his misdeeds could be outweighed by revolutionary action.
If I had more time/space, I would have tried to understand Lawrence’s upbringing through a psychoanalytic framework, which I believe would help in understanding some of his choices, especially those that seem contradictory. Altogether, I believe that Lawrence, despite appearances, was unsure of who he was, what he wanted to be, or even what he was doing as he did it. He was passionate, but frequently irresponsible, not dissimilarly from Isabelle Eberhardt. His impulse to order the world to his vision is more Bell-like, and the fluidness of his identity was in some ways like Freya Stark’s. I’m glad we saved Lawrence for last—I’ve liked being able to compare him to our previous spies.
I thought your focus here on Lawrence’s drive to find “order” in his life compelling, especially how his impulses affected all aspects of how he expressed himself, from his own sexuality, disciplining his body (even to the point of masochism), and political action. Understanding possible roots in his childhood is significant as it builds a frame for his later ideas regarding self-punishment, and also ties strongly to the English cultural norm of emotional and physical repression that would have certainly been inculcated into Lawrence from a young age. I wonder, then, how much of Lawrence’s compulsive chase of “order” was meant for himself and how much was designed for the society he had to interact with, as well as (given his exploits were already being written about and advertised during his lifetime) how much it was meant to influence the perception of those receiving his story. I also enjoyed Lawrence coming last, especially because I’d heard of him but not our other three spies, and I liked spending time unpacking questions of espionage and empire through them first before turning to the more popularly known Lawrence.
Enjoyed this post working through psychological roots of Lawrence’s inner struggles even as these are presented as outward triumphs of masculinity and Empire; also liked reading Sophie’s response which brings up the question of the degree to which the drive to “order” was a means to ensure his place in “civilization”–much like Freud’s famous formulation, “Civilization and its Discontents.”
Glad you liked the “order” of the course!