To be fair, while it is true that Lawrence has identified Gerald with a Nietzschean will to power—the scene of Gerald abusing the horse would be one example; associating him with old Norse gods and other Wagnerian imagery, another—Lawrence is in search of no Valhalla. Rather, Ursula and Birkin turn their backs on this Nordic landscape and head symbolically for the sunshine of Italy. Gerald dies in the snow, his natural element, and Gudrun goes off with Loerke to Germany, the land of Wagner. The final message of the novel is that homosexuality is simply one more avenue tried and rejected in the reinvention of love. We imagine Ursula and Birkin, like Lawrence and Frieda in their most idyllic moments, in the garden of some Italian villa sipping a glass of wine under a blazing Italian sun, Dante’s symbol of eternal love and perfect understanding.
An issue of major concern to the twentieth century that Lawrence explores in his work is women’s rights. As early as Sons and Lovers, Lawrence was extremely sensitive to the repressive nature of a male-dominated society, in which women did not have an opportunity to realize their full potential:
“Don’t you like being at home?” Paul asked [Miriam], surprised.
“Who would?” she answered, low and intense. “What is it? I’m all day cleaning what the boys make just as bad in five minutes. I don’t want to be at home.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want to do something. I want a chance like anybody else” (p. 171).
Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, had a chance at a more independent life with Lawrence, and she took it. Ursula, who is already freer than Miriam in that she has a profession, is still bound by societal expectations for women. Both she and Gudrun are openly envious of men and their freedoms, as noted in the scene in which the two sisters see Gerald swimming. Lawrence was very much out front on the issue of women’s equality. This is not to say that Birkin, or for that matter Ursula, are beyond the conventions of their day as they strive for a freer life. They both want to be served, for example, and consider it a grave fault that the other is unwilling to do so. Lawrence once insisted that women had no souls, which caused Frieda not to speak to him for several days. There is no such outrage in Women in Love, but one often finds that Birkin, a reservoir for ideas, does not always know his own mind, and that Ursula, on the other hand, knows precisely what she wants. This is not by accident. Lawrence wanted to give the choicer morsels of life and understanding to women. The work is, after all, entitled Women in Love for a reason. The fact is that, although it is as much about Birkin and Gerald as it is about Ursula and Gudrun, it is Ursula’s novel.
In the chapter entitled “A Chair,” Lawrence, with a brilliant economy of means that blends symbolism effortlessly with the realism of the novel, as he has done throughout the work, uses the occasion of Ursula and Birkin buying a chair in the flea market to demonstrate how Ursula’s point of view keeps the couple on track. Here Lawrence really outdoes himself in that what begins as a discussion about decorating and style develops into a commentary on the state of Ursula and Birkin’s relationship and ends by becoming a subtle spiritual thesis about how life in general should be lived:
“Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? Really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—”
“It could afford to be materialistic,” said Birkin, “because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.”
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
“And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,” she cried. “I believe I even hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn’t my sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I’m sick of the beloved past” (pp. 357-358).
It is Ursula who urges the couple, not toward compromise, but toward a new view of male-female relationships, grounded in Lawrence’s own particular brand of spirituality. One cannot fail to notice here the echo of the “Sermon on the Mount,” in which Jesus urges his followers to live like the lilies of the field, advice that Lawrence and Frieda took literally, living in rented residences all over the world. One hears, too, again in the passage condemning beauty, the old echo of Rimbaud’s poetry: “One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter.” If we understand the chair to be a symbol of art in everyday life, then we can accept the fact that in getting rid of the chair, they are doing what Ezra Pound urged the modern writer to do, to “make it new.”
As touched on earlier, we know absolutely nothing about the background of Birkin. We meet Ursula’s family, the Brangwens. Mr. Brangwen, with his irascibility, is closer to Paul’s father, Mr. Morel, in Sons and Lovers—that is, to Lawrence’s own father—than he is to the Mr. Brangwen of The Rainbow, who was rather affable and easy. In Women in Love, we have a more in-depth look at Gerald Crick’s family than the family of any other character. We even meet Hermione’s brother. However, we are given nothing about the family of Birkin, who is Lawrence’s surrogate, not even a reference. It is such a notable absence that one cannot doubt it was done intentionally. It seems almost inevitable that in a novel that explores class difference, set in a country that could not be more class-conscious, a reference to Birkin’s background would be unavoidable. It is as though Birkin arrived in England from outer space. Of course, we know Birkin is an inspector of schools, which would put him vaguely in the middle class, but his pedigree is conspicuously missing. One could say that in writing Sons and Lovers, one of Lawrence’s objectives was to document the life of the poor in a mining town, and that done, he had no interest in repeating that type of novel. This is still held against Lawrence in his hometown of Eastwood. In the eyes of the hometown folks, a miner’s son who ran off with the aristocratic wife of a university professor, a man who was proud, for a time at least, to count as his friends the members of the snobbish Cambridge-Bloomsbury group, a man who lived abroad most of his adult life, was practicing the class equivalent of racial passing. Anthony Burgess amplifies this point:
Today it is a decent lower-middle-class town, with chain groceries and videocassettes for hire, gentlemanly pubs, good-mannered people.
The good manners falter a little when David Herbert Lawrence is mentioned. “We don’t go much for him here,” a pub landlord told me. When I paid my first visit to Eastwood as a boy, there were old men who remembered Lawrence’s father—“a real old English gentleman”—while Bert Lawrence was a mardarse and a mother’s lad. Lawrence had put Eastwood on the literary map, which is always a shameful thing in England, and he had produced the wrong sort of literature (Burgess, p. 16).
The larger issue that Lawrence faced—and that Joyce, Yeats, James, Eliot, or any writer from a group subjugated by the cultural and/or political mainstream—is this: Does the writer have an obligation to be the spokesperson for his own particular group? The answer in each of the cases mentioned above is, yes, within limits, but only the writer should define those limits, and that gives the writer a very wide margin. Joyce continued to write about Ireland all his life, though he did not live in Ireland virtually any of his adult life. Yeats continued to live in Ireland and in fact made Ireland his theme, but he made a point of doing it on his terms, spending time in England and calling Ireland and its problems “fool driven.” Eliot abandoned America to play the role of an English gentleman. Lawrence followed, to some extent, each of these roads. In Sons and Lovers he does, in fact, write as close to a proletarian novel as one can without it being propaganda. It is an honest depiction of a miner’s family, and this is all that it need be for us to understand the strains under which the Morel family is living. However, even in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence stressed the human element. In Women in Love, he strips English society of its veneer, as Burgess corre
ctly notes, and shifts his focus from the problems of the English poor to the more universal issue of reinventing modern love. In fact, England itself is renounced in favor of Italy. However, in another sense, it is not altogether true to say that Lawrence abandons completely his concern for the poor in Women in Love. One might say that he focuses on the same issues in Women in Love that he did in Sons and Lovers, though in Women in Love his perspective on society in this mining town has radically shifted to that of the upper class. The workers are still doomed because Gerald is doomed, as is in a sense Hermione. Why do the people of England suffer? Lawrence asks. They suffer because they do not know how to love and because they are subject to the fate of snow-destruction.
To do something new that you know may not find favor with the critics or your countrymen takes courage. Lawrence also showed courage and good judgment by deviating from The Rainbow, even though both it and Women in Love were born within a book he called The Sisters, in which Ursula and Gudrun, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Brangwen, appear:
The setting of Women in Love is Lawrence’s native province, as in The Rainbow, but a brutal change has taken place in it between the two books. The countryside is recognizably the same, except that it holds a deeper ferocity than before, but the coal-mining industry is no longer what it was when Lawrence’s, or Paul Morel’s father worked in it. It has ceased to be primitive and loosely organized, a kind of neolithic continuation of a Silurian culture, which dug out coal with its bare hands for iron smelting. Where it was paternalistic and easygoing, it has become impersonal, tyrannical, and scientifically efficient. This is the work of Gerald Crich, son of a mine owner who held to the old way and, unable to accommodate his thinking and his feeling to the brutality of change, is slowly dying (Burgess, pp. 114-115).
However, not all the changes are for the worse. Ursula is essentially different in Women in Love. from the character by that name in The Rainbow. She is still driven and independent, but she has taken a quantum leap forward in maturity, wisdom, and cynicism that cannot be accounted for by time, even if a large time lapse was supposed to have taken place between the two novels. The two Ursulas are simply different people. The Ursula from The Rainbow is so concerned with her own independence that in effect she renounces love—and not only renounces it but stifles its growth—because she does not want to follow Skrebensky abroad. Yet Ursula does precisely this at the end of Women in Love. in quitting her teaching job and going abroad with Birkin. It may be argued that Skrebensky did not completely understand her independence as a woman, and that Birkin did. True—but the Ursula of Women in Love. would have never been involved with Skrebensky in the first place. Nor, we imagine, would she have had the lesbian affair with her teacher that Ursula had in The Rainbow. It is not a question of morality per se. This Ursula, the one of Women in Love, seems gifted in seeing what is essential and is not herself inclined, nor does she see why Birkin should be so inclined, to be involved in any enterprise that diverts the focus of true love.
Gudrun, too, has undergone a transformation between the two works, though one far less radical than Ursula’s. This is in part because her character was less well developed in The Rainbow, and one had the sense that she is more easygoing than her sister. In Women in Love, Gudrun, as we have seen, is far more unfeeling than any of the other characters, except Loerke, who is on a par with her in emotional insensitivity and even cruelty. But then Gudrun, like Gerald, is bound by symbolism as she is not in The Rainbow. This gives her character a certain determinism, like that of a character in a Greek drama. Lawrence had courage, and it not only took courage for him to depart from the models that he himself created in The Rainbow, but it is a sign of his artistic curiosity to see how Ursula might turn out if she had a new mindset—a determination to reinvent love—that might encourage her to take another direction. We now know how she and Gudrun turn out in Women in Love. They become totally different people than they are in The Rainbow. The approach Lawrence uses in these two works is much like Picasso used when he would take a particular pictorial idea to a certain point and develop that same idea but in new directions, variations on a similar theme.
Critics have charged that Women in Love lacks a precise style or the brilliant technique of Joyce. The passage by Burgess quoted above makes that claim. Lawrence’s enemies made a similar point at the time the novel was released. Even friends, such as John Middleton Murry, were critical of him. Flaubert, whom Lawrence certainly read, and by whom he was clearly influenced in the area of acute observation of reality, both in nature and human relationships, used character to elucidate our understanding of society. However, Flaubert contrived situations, plausible and realistic though they were. For Flaubert, the novel was complex, not unlike a poem, in which precisely the right word must be chosen, the mot juste, and combined with a precise and beautiful rhythm to which the novel itself was subject. There were two poets, both contemporaries of Flaubert’s, who first succeeded in freeing literature from the tight constraints to which Flaubert subjected it. One was a Frenchman, Charles Baudelaire, who is the apostle of modernism. In his poems, but especially in his essays on painting and literature, Baudelaire almost single-handedly dragged romantic literature into the modern era. In defining and liberating the modern, Baudelaire invented the prose poem, a genre Rimbaud would perfect at only twenty years old. The prose poem freed literature of the artificial. It was style that renounced formal style in favor of a far more imperceptible one that employs the rhythms of everyday life. The other poet was the American Walt Whitman, who demonstrated that literary form could be annihilated and poetry would not only still exist, it could even be intensified. From Whitman came the Americans—Pound, the greatest craftsman of the new writers, Eliot, Hemingway, and Stein, all of whom in their way were, as Henry Miller would say about Rimbaud, assassins of the old literature.
In Women in Love, Lawrence took almost equally from these two traditions. From Flaubert and the Symbolists, he took symbolism to give his characters an expanded, if more precisely defined meaning, while in the tradition of the Americans, he let them appear to run free. Though Pound said of Lawrence that he had mastered the modern form before Pound had, it is not true. Pound in his imagist manifesto had decided that the poem should be composed not of feet, as in classical poetry, but of breath phrases, the way that we speak in modulated breaths. This is the technique Lawrence chose for Women in Love; the subject matter and the dialogue as spoken in real life would determine the flow and structure of the novel. This is why to some it appears Women in Love has no structure at all. Great literature, Lawrence came to realize, is the seemingly artless creation of everyday life, with its rhythms, its immediacy, its truthfulness, and its life-and-death struggle with the problems of existence, with just enough art to give it definition and to make us think it is directly drawn from reality, even when we know we are being manipulated. “If it does not seem a moment’s thought,” writes Yeats, “our stitching and unstitching have been naught.” For this one needs a very great writer, and this is what Lawrence was when he created Women in Love.
Norman Loftis is a poet, novelist, essayist, philosopher, and film-maker. His works include Exiles and Voyages (poetry, 1969), Black Anima (poetry, 1973), Life Force (novel, 1982), From Barbarism to Decadence (1984), and Condition Zero (1993). His feature films include Schaman (1984), the award-winning Small Time (1989), and Messenger (1995). He is currently Chair of the Department of Literature at the Brooklyn Campus of the College of New Rochelle and is on the faculty at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, where he has taught since 1970.
FOREWORD
D. H. Lawrence
This novel was written in its first form in the Tyrol, in 1913. It was altogether re-written and finished in Cornwall in 1917. So that it is a novel which took its final shape in the midst of the period of war, though it does not concern the war itself: I should wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.
The book has been offered
to various London publishers. Their almost inevitable reply has been: “We should like very much to publish, but feel we cannot risk a prosecution.” They remember the fate of The Rainbow, and are cautious. This book is a potential sequel to The Rainbow.
In England, I would never try to justify myself against any accusation. But to the Americans, perhaps I may speak for myself. I am accused, in England, of uncleanness and pornography. I deny the charge, and take no further notice.
In America the chief accusation seems to be one of “Eroticism.” This is odd, rather puzzling to my mind. Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty “amours,” or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?
Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions. Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us. Let man only approach his own self with a deep respect, even reverence for all that the creative soul, the God-mystery within us, puts forth. Then we shall all be sound and free. Lewdness is hateful because it impairs our integrity and our proud being.
The creative, spontaneous soul sends forth its promptings of desire and aspiration in us. These promptings are our true fate, which is our business to fulfil. A fate dictated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a false fate.
This novel pretends only to be a record of the writer’s own desires, aspirations, struggles; in a word, a record of the profoundest experiences in the self Nothing that comes from the deep, passional soul is bad, or can be bad. So there is no apology to tender, unless to the soul itself, if it should have been belied.
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