SOURCE: Stoltzfus, Ben. “‘The Man Who Loved Islands’: A Lacanian Reading.” D. H. Lawrence Review 29, no. 3 (2000): 27-38.

In the following essay, Stoltzfus offers a Lacanian interpretation of “The Man Who Loved Islands.”

“The Man Who Loved Islands” is a story that lends itself to Lacanian analysis because its theme, structure, and language replicate psychoanalytic concepts of the Other, castration, desire, language, and aphanasis or the loss of sexual desire. Aspects of Saussurian linguistics and Freudian theory (the touchstones of Lacan's thought) are embedded in the title. To love “I-lands” is to dwell within the split self, a division that mimes the splitting (Spaltung) during Lacan's so-called “mirror stage” of the infant's development (1-8). D. H. Lawrence foregrounds not only the islander's fragmented identity but also his progressive misanthropy. In due course, his arrested desire and attitude repudiate all contact with men, his wife and daughter, even life itself...