Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by D. H. Lawrence

  I can only write what I feel pretty strongly about: and that, at present, is the relation between men and women. After all, it is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation. Or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women (The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 30).

  It is clear from the passage already quoted in which Gudrun asks Ursula if she has considered marriage, that Ursula’s answer is neither a reflection of acquiescence to an outmoded tradition nor a dismissal of love. It is, however, a dismissal of love as it was presently constituted, “the end of experience,” as Ursula puts it at the start of the novel. On the other hand, it is clear that Ursula, unlike her sister, is open to the possibility of love, provided it is real love. However, it is fair to say that at the beginning of the novel neither she nor Birkin, nor for that matter anybody else, has any idea of what love means. Thus, as in Hamlet, in which the reader is invited to explore with the protagonist a variety of moral issues from the nature of duty and responsibility to the nature of love and friendship, Lawrence takes his characters on a voyage of self-discovery concerning the nature of love. He also invites the reader, and most of all himself, on that same and all-important journey. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess has understood well Lawrence’s quality of using the novel to explore truth. In a very insightful comparison of the prose of Joyce and Lawrence, Burgess observes:

  Stylistically, Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness that looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. No potential writer would ever take Lawrence as a model; Ulysses is a textbook of literary technique (Burgess, Flame into Being, pp. 4-5).

  Ursula feels “some kinship” with Birkin, a “tacit understanding, a using the same language,” but she is unwilling to romanticize her feelings. And, since Ursula dislikes Hermione and feels somewhat intimidated by her, though she does everything in her power to resist it, her interest in Birkin seems initially, at least in part, to be piqued by the possibility of doing Hermione a bad turn. In any case, her interest in Birkin is certainly not motivated by a desire to complete herself. Ursula would find the idea of needing a man to complete oneself repulsive and outdated. However, if the traditional motive of marriage as self-interest and security is dismissed, and if the concept of needing a man to complete oneself is dismissed, what can be the basis on which to reinvent modern love? Lawrence is not writing a pot-boiler. His characters must struggle to arrive at the truth, as one does in real life. In the chapter “An Island,” in which Ursula and Birkin are apart and isolated from the world like a new Adam and a new Eve, it is clear that Ursula believes in love. Though she is intrigued by Birkin’s scandalous and fanciful ideas of a world without humanity or individual love, she forces him to concede the fact that he does believe in love and loves humanity. Birkin’s reluctance to share in the love of humanity has everything to do with the hypocrisy of humanity itself in the name of love. Though Ursula is unwilling to throw out love because others have eroded its meaning, she shares Birkin’s sense of the shallowness and stupidity of love in modern times and therefore encourages him in his fantasies. The bond is thus established. They are united by the search for a love that is not love as it is presently constituted. Without ever directly stating it, by the end of the chapter, Ursula and Birkin have opened themselves to the possibilities of being united forever.

  In the chapter entitled “Moony,” Birkin and Ursula get down to the complexities of defining love both for themselves and for our age. “I want you to serve my spirit,” Ursula tells Birkin. This sounds to him too much like traditional love, and he rejects it out of hand:

  “I know you do. I know you don’t want physical things by themselves. But, I want you to give me—to give your spirit to me....” ...

  “But, how can I, you don’t love me! ...” ...

  “It is different,” he said. “The two kinds of service are so different. I serve you in another way—not through yourself,-somewhere else. But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves—to be really together because we are together....”

  “No,” she said, pondering. “You are just egocentric. You never have any enthusiasm, you never come out with any spark towards me. You want yourself, really, and your own affairs. And you want me just to be there, to serve you” (pp. 249-250).

  If the language is vague, at times even nonsense, it is the language of everyday life, particularly as it relates to love. It is a language that has to be invented at every step because modern love has yet to be invented. Or, more accurately, it is being invented with every word. What we understand is that the old love with inequality on both sides cannot stand. This calls into question whether the word “love” itself is adequate to describe this new condition. Birkin keeps referring to something “beyond love.” This in the end is too vague for Ursula, and she insists that he tell her he loves her in the old-fashioned way, but with the new meaning that they have attached to it. Ultimately, he acquiesces, though he is concerned that this concession might signal a return to abandoned principles. By the end of the chapter, Birkin goes even further and asks Ursula to marry him. In rejecting traditional love, they have, nevertheless, affirmed the principle of its biblical roots. God created man with the capacity to reject His will: There can be no love without absolute freedom. Love must always be given freely. Without freedom, love isn’t really love.

  Because Lawrence is interested in showing us the dilemma of everyday life, his characters are not beyond overreaching, petty jealousies or being downright silly. Ursula insists on using the old-fashioned word “love,” but she pretends to herself that she is put out by Birkin’s proposal to her. She insists that she does not want to give herself up to him, and it is not difficult to grasp her exasperation with him in his vague insistence on wanting “more than love.” Such a state of affairs creates strange bedfellows: Natural allies may turn against one another, and one’s natural enemy may come to one’s side. It should not shock us, therefore, that Mr. Brangwen bullies Ursula to answer Birkin’s marriage proposal, a proposal he delivers to his daughter secondhand, rather than waiting for Birkin to do so. On the other hand, it is Hermione who sides with Ursula against Birkin, supporting Ursula’s decision to accept or reject Birkin’s proposal on her own terms, a truly Christian gesture on Hermione’s part, since she would have loved to have had Birkin under any circumstances. “Wisdom is a butterfly / And not a gloomy bird of prey,” the poet W. B. Yeats reminds us. Birkin and Ursula understand this and find that the most direct route to truth is a circuitous one. Preconceptions lead to the dead, unproductive, snow-abstraction of Gerald and Gudrun. A life of pursuing one’s instincts leads back to Pussum.

  In order to reinvent the past, one must start over completely. This means turning one’s back on the present as well as the past. Birkin urges Ursula to quit her job and to leave England with him. Theirs will be a whole new beginning. Ursula will not entertain the idea that Hermione and Birkin can remain friends if Ursula and Birkin are to reinvent themselves. Personal relationships, too, must fall victim to this radical transformation. If Gerald and Gudrun are not put aside, at least as their respective intimate relationships with Birkin and Ursula are presently constituted, it is because they are assumed to be traveling along the same path. When this proves not to be the case, a distance immediately inserts itself between Birkin and Ursula and their intimates. Gerald undergoes the ultimate alienating experience, and Gudrun’s behavior, primarily toward Gerald, serves to divorce her from her sister and Birkin. This is, after all, a true marriage not only of minds but also of souls. One must be morally responsible toward others, but one cannot tolerate immoral, callous behavior from those with whom one is intimate.

  Of course, already at the end of “Moony,” Ursula has accepted the necessity of putting distance between her and Gudrun. “So she withdrew away from Gudrun and from that which she stood for, she turned in spirit towards Birkin again” (p. 264). Ursula’s sacrifice is, of all the characters‘, the greatest. Co
nsequently, her growth during the course of the novel surpasses even that of Birkin. Gudrun is, after all, her sister and someone she loves dearly, so it takes great moral courage on Ursula’s part to understand what has to be done and do it. Birkin, as we shall see, never makes a complete break with Gerald as a love interest and until Gerald’s death is looking for a way to fuse his relationship with Gerald with his relationship with Ursula. “‘He should have loved me,’ he said. ‘I offered him’ ” (p. 483). To Ursula, Birkin’s insistence is not only stubbornness, but a violation of their hard-won comprehension of the nature of modern love and their participation in it.

  “Did you need Gerald?” she asked one evening.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I want a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.”

  “Why aren’t I enough?” she said. “You are enough for me. I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?” (p. 484).

  Ursula is right. Birkin’s position is “false, impossible.” It does not matter whether Birkin wants a friendship with a man—and here Ursula is extremely mature not to deal with the issue of homosexuality. Gerald is another presence, one from whom Birkin cannot quite disconnect himself, even though Birkin built with Ursula a new definition of love.

  Whatever else one might think of Lawrence, the fact is that he examines the malaise of love in his time and works through it to a solution. T. S. Eliot, who was so scathing about Lawrence, explores similar ground in his poetry. His hero (or antihero) Sweeney, who appears in several poems, is full of crude, sexual confidence, anticipating the lover of the typist in The Waste Land, who is more than content to have meaningless sex, as is the typist herself. These are not just individual failings but in Eliot’s poetry are the failings of his generation, a generation incapable of love or passion. Even assuming this to be true, Eliot had no solution. Lawrence, influenced by French Symbolism, as was Eliot, commiserates with Rimbaud and then starts out to identify the problem more fully, concluding that not only does love have to be reinvented, but in the process life must be reinvented with it.

  We must now turn our attention to Birkin’s relationship with Gerald, which has an especially modern character and which Lawrence depicts in an exceedingly daring and advanced way. Again, it appears more than just mere coincidence that Rimbaud, shockingly, and often amusingly, describes his homosexual relationship with Verlaine, a relationship that led the poet to again reflect on male and female love. Birkin proposes an enduring friendship with Gerald:

  “You know how the old German knights used to swear a Blutbruderschaft,” he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.

  “Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood into the cut?” said Gerald.

  “Yes—and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives. That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it” (p. 206).

  Lawrence forces us to admit the latent homosexual character of this macho act. Gerald opts to table the decision “till I understand it better” but he does not dismiss it out of hand. In the chapter “Gladiatorial,” which, significantly, follows “Moony,” where Birkin and Ursula establish the foundation for their relationship and lay down the tenets for modern love, the homosexual character of Birkin’s relationship with Gerald is lent physical contact. It is of such an intensity one might call it symbolic sex. In describing what happens as “a kind of mutual physical understanding,” Lawrence here explores a love that circumvents the brain and is present to the body, or, as Lawrence would have it, to the blood.

  There is no platonic love here, despite the fact that Birkin’s love is never sexually consummated with Gerald. When Birkin says at the end of the novel, “He should have loved me,” it is clear that what he means is a fully realized sexual, as well as spiritual love. In this way, Birkin implies, Gerald would have been saved from the fate of death. Lawrence is an advocate for a bisexual love, much as Shakespeare was when he wrote, in “Sonnet 144”:

  Two loves I have of comfort and despair

  Which like two spirits do suggest me still;

  The better angel is a man right fair,

  The worser spirit a woman, colour’d ill.

  It is obvious here that the ill-colored spirit in Lawrence’s work is the physically fairer Gerald, not the woman, Ursula. It is also clear that Ursula has every right to object to Birkin’s intrusive desire for Gerald, and that her centeredness is what keeps Birkin grounded.

  The relationship between Gerald and Birkin raises the issue of Lawrence’s own sexual preferences, the more so because Lawrence, especially in Women in Love, is not only a novelist but an advocate of a way of life. Sons and Lovers reveals a classic Oedipus complex. Paul’s love for his mother, as with Lawrence’s relationship with his own, went beyond anything that could reasonably be described as normal. Lawrence himself was well aware of this. According to Jessie Chambers, Lawrence’s childhood friend, Lawrence confided that he had always loved his mother “like a lover. That’s why I could never love you.” Another event that demonstrates how Mrs. Lawrence actively sought to undermine Jessie’s relationship with her son deals with a scarf Jessie was wearing on a walk with Lawrence and his mother. The young woman asked if the scarf looked good on her. Instead of answering, Lawrence passed the question on to his mother, who did not answer either but gave “a bitter glance, and turned away....”

  Regarding the question of whether Lawrence was homosexual, the discussion often turns on the nature of homosexuality itself. Here, however, we see the Oedipus complex brought into a different light. It is not merely a complex of thought and feeling adapted at a vulnerable age in one’s childhood but an active condition that can endure as long as the mother is alive and even beyond her death. Mrs. Lawrence actively discouraged Lawrence in his love of other females, as she had Lawrence’s brother William Ernest before him. Nor is it a question of finding in Frieda, who was six years older than Lawrence, a mother substitute, but a woman who could counterbalance his mother’s will, still very much alive in Lawrence’s consciousness after his mother’s death.

  Moreover, as Lawrence himself was aware, though Mrs. Lawrence undermined Lawrence’s love for Jessie, she left him free to adore Jessie’s brother, Alan. Lawrence followed Alan around the farm as he did his chores, and the two spent a great deal of time in the hay in the barn, talking at times with a burning intimacy. There is no record of whether this friendship was ever sexually consummated. However, Lawrence supposedly told Compton Mackenzie, “I believe that the nearest I’ve ever come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about sixteen.” As Moore points out in The Priest of Love, Alan Chambers was a farm boy, not a coal miner. This does not necessarily mean that they are not one and the same person. Lawrence, normally brutally truthful, might have found this situation too delicate to be open about. After all, it would have needlessly exposed not only Alan, but Jessie and the entire Chambers family, to ridicule in a rural area where such goings-on were not taken in stride. The point Lawrence is making, regardless of who it was, is that he had a near perfect love not with a woman, but a man.

  The model for the Gerald—Birkin relationship is Lawrence himself and his friend, the writer John Middleton Murry. Lawrence would also use Murry and his wife, the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, as models for the dramatic arguments between Gerald and Gudrun that lead to Gerald’s death at the end of Women in Love. Murry and Mansfield were experiencing their own problems because Mansfield had fallen in love with another friend of Lawrence’s, Mark Gertler. Lawrence used this real-life drama to his own advantage, making Gertler his model for Loerke. Murry did double duty in the novel. According to Murry, in his autobiography Between Two Worlds
(1935), his relationship with Lawrence closely paralleled the scene between Birkin and Gerald in “Gladiatorial.” Lawrence insisted that he and Murry have a Blutbruderschaft, swearing eternal friendship.

  As the two men walked over the moors, Murry kept insisting he needed no sacrament: “If I love you, and you know I love you, isn’t that enough?” But Lawrence would rage at him, “I hate your love, I hate it. You’re an obscene bug, sucking my life away” (Moore, p. 260).

  Lawrence wanted wrestling as part of the blood brother pact between the two men, just as took place between Gerald and Birkin. It is unclear whether it went further. Frieda appears to dismiss any homosexual affair between Lawrence and Murry or anyone else. Elsewhere, she writes that Lawrence’s homosexuality lasted only a short time. Those statements would appear to contradict each other.

  The strongest argument against the charge that Lawrence uses Women in Love to advocate homosexual practices as the true road to modern love is that in the context of the novel, Ursula’s focus remains fixed on reinventing love, and she does not permit Birkin to stray from this idea, no matter how much he might wish to do so. Gerald is killed off because, as we have seen, he symbolizes the snow-abstraction of Western Europe and its inability to love in a passionate sense with the blood and the genitals. There is no question that Gerald’s continued existence in the novel would have wholly undermined this idyllic relationship between Ursula and Birkin.