"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten"
About this Quote
Lawrence doesn’t scold so much as diagnose: the “very worst wickedness” isn’t lust, rage, envy, or any melodramatic sin. It’s the bourgeois maneuver of pretending those forces don’t exist. He takes aim at denial as a moral posture - the kind that keeps you respectable, hygienic, and spiritually anesthetized. “Passionate evil” is a deliberately provocative pairing: passion is usually coded as vitality, evil as corruption. Lawrence welds them together to insist that our darker impulses are not alien intrusions but part of the same energetic core that also produces love, art, and will. The danger isn’t having that energy; it’s mislabeling it, repressing it, and then letting it leak out sideways.
The second sentence lands like a hard cut. Refusal doesn’t make us pure; it makes us “secret and rotten.” The rot here is psychological and social: secrecy breeds duplicity, moralism, projection. People who can’t admit their own appetites become experts at surveilling everyone else’s. Lawrence was writing against a late-Victorian and early modern culture that prized restraint and decorum while quietly depending on hypocrisy to function. His broader project - across novels like Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and his essays - treats modern life as a machine for deadening the body and laundering desire into acceptable forms.
The intent is less confession than liberation-by-honesty. Lawrence isn’t asking readers to indulge “evil” but to recognize it, metabolize it, and stop outsourcing it into shame, gossip, and cruelty. A society that can’t name its inner violence doesn’t eliminate it; it institutionalizes it.
The second sentence lands like a hard cut. Refusal doesn’t make us pure; it makes us “secret and rotten.” The rot here is psychological and social: secrecy breeds duplicity, moralism, projection. People who can’t admit their own appetites become experts at surveilling everyone else’s. Lawrence was writing against a late-Victorian and early modern culture that prized restraint and decorum while quietly depending on hypocrisy to function. His broader project - across novels like Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and his essays - treats modern life as a machine for deadening the body and laundering desire into acceptable forms.
The intent is less confession than liberation-by-honesty. Lawrence isn’t asking readers to indulge “evil” but to recognize it, metabolize it, and stop outsourcing it into shame, gossip, and cruelty. A society that can’t name its inner violence doesn’t eliminate it; it institutionalizes it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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