CHAPTER 34
Women in Love (1920)
D. H. LAWRENCE
REREADING Women in Love after many years, I discover it to be strangely distant from what I had recalled. Several decades ago, I knew the book so fully that I anticipated many paragraphs, even chapters, but in those days I had a kind of provisional belief in Lawrence. The book now appears stranger and richer, more original than I had recalled. Ambivalences of the will, modes of being are represented by a sharpness that seems uncanny, since the power to suggest so many complex apprehensions could be judged without precedent in the novel.
Lawrence on his heights astonishes, almost showing what cannot be shown. The Rainbow and Women in Love are his triumphs, equaled only by a number of his poems and by many of his short stories. In the endless war between men and women, Lawrence fights on both sides. He is superb at giving us really murderous lovers’ quarrels, as in Chapter 23, “Excurse,” of Women in Love, where Ursula and Birkin suffer one of their encounters upon what Lawrence calls “this memorable battlefield”:
“I jealous! I—jealous! You are mistaken if you think that. I’m not jealous in the least of Hermione, she is nothing to me, not that!” And Ursula snapped her fingers. “No, it’s you who are a liar. It’s you who must return, like a dog to his vomit. It is what Hermione stands for that I hate. I hate it. It is lies, it is false, it is death. But you want it, you can’t help it, you can’t help yourself. You belong to that old, deathly way of living—then go back to it. But don’t come to me, for I’ve nothing to do with it.”
And in the stress of her violent emotion, she got down from the car and went to the hedgerow, picking unconsciously some flesh-pink spindleberries, some of which were burst, showing their orange seeds.
“Ah, you are a fool,” he cried bitterly, with some contempt.
“Yes, I am. I am a fool. And thank God for it. I’m too big a fool to swallow your cleverness. God be praised. You go to your women—go to them—they are your sort—you’ve always had a string of them trailing after you—and you always will. Go to your spiritual brides—but don’t come to me as well, because I’m not having any, thank you. You’re not satisfied, are you? Your spiritual brides can’t give you what you want, they aren’t common and fleshy enough for you, aren’t they? So you come to me, and keep them in the background! You will marry me for daily use. But you’ll keep yourself well provided with spiritual brides in the background. I know your dirty little game.” Suddenly a flame ran over her, and she stamped her foot madly on the road, and he winced, afraid that she would strike him. “And, I, I’m not spiritual enough, I’m not as spiritual as that Hermione—!” Her brows knitted, her eyes blazed like a tiger’s. “Then go to her, that’s all I say, go to her, go. Ha, she spiritual—spiritual, she! A dirty materialist as she is. She spiritual? What does she care for, what is her spirituality? What is it?” Her fury seemed to blaze out and burn his face. He shrank a little. “I tell you it’s dirt, dirt, and nothing but dirt. And it’s dirt you want, you crave for it. Spiritual! Is that spiritual, her bullying, her conceit, her sordid materialism? She’s a fishwife, a fishwife, she is such a materialist. And all so sordid. What does she work out to, in the end, with all her social passion, as you call it. Social passion—what social passion has she?—show it me!—where is it? She wants petty, immediate power, she wants the illusion that she is a great woman, that is all. In her soul she’s a devilish unbeliever, common as dirt. That’s what she is at the bottom. And all the rest is pretence—but you love it. You love the sham spirituality, it’s your food. And why? Because of the dirt underneath. Do you think I don’t know the foulness of your sex life—and hers?—I do. And it’s that foulness you want, you liar. Then have it, have it. You’re such a liar.”
She turned away, spasmodically tearing the twigs of spindleberry from the hedge, and fastening them, with vibrating fingers, in the bosom of her coat.
He stood watching in silence. A wonderful tenderness burned in him at the sight of her quivering, so sensitive fingers: and at the same time he was full of rage and callousness.
This passage-at-arms moves between Ursula’s unconscious picking of the fleshly, burst spindleberries, open to their seeds, and her turning away, tearing the spindleberry twigs so as to fasten them in her coat. Birkin reads the spindleberries as the exposed flesh of what Freud called one’s own bodily ego, suffering here a sparagmos by a maenadlike Ursula. It is as though Birkin himself, lashed by her language, becomes a frontier being, caught between psyche and body. Repelled yet simultaneously drawn by a sort of orphic wonder, Birkin yields to her ferocity that is not so much jealousy as it is the woman’s protest against Birkin’s Lawrentian and male idealization of sexual love. What Ursula most deeply rejects is that the idealization is both flawed and ambivalent, because it is founded upon a displaced Protestantism that both craves total union and cannot abide such annihilation of individuality. Birkin-Lawrence has in him the taint of the Protestant God, and implicitly is always announcing to Ursula, “Be like me, but do not dare to be too like me!,” an injunction that infuriates her. As Lawrence is both Birkin and Ursula, he has the curious trait, for a novelist, of perpetually infuriating himself.
The central difficulty of Women in Love is Lawrence’s split between a Puritan will and a High Romantic sensibility quarried from Shelley, Blake, Thomas Hardy, and Walt Whitman. Division in the self compelled Lawrence to misunderstand totally Sigmund Freud, to the point where the poet-prophet asserted that the founder of psychoanalysis wished to cancel all inhibitions. That is to turn Freud into the Marquis de Sade.
There are five crucial persons in Women in Love: Rupert Birkin, who clearly is D. H. Lawrence; Ursula Brangwen, a kind of vision of Frieda von Richthofen, who eloped to the Continent with Lawrence while she was still married to his former teacher, Ernest Weekley, leaving behind their three children. There are the tragic, hopelessly ill-matched Gerald Crich, industrialist and malcontent, and the fascinating Gudrun Brangwen, younger sister of Ursula. Gudrun is a sculptor, a beautiful nihilist who wishes only to know others, and loses interest once they are known. Lawrence modeled her on the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield, who died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four in 1923. Mansfield was married, separated and divorced from, remarried, and separated again from the literary critic John Middleton Murry, whom Lawrence portrayed as Gerald Crich. For a time, Murry was Lawrence’s disciple, but betrayed him both by having an affair with Frieda and by writing a rather nasty book: Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence (1931), in which Lawrence is exhibited as a repressed homosexual, a person so sexually overexcited that he always arrived too soon, as it were, and found release only by anal intercourse with Frieda. All this may well have been true, but Murry’s tonality is sometimes offensive. Aside from his appearance as Gerald Crich, there is a delightful travesty of him as one Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928). That leaves only Hermione Roddice, Birkin’s cast-off mistress, a fierce parody of Lady Ottoline Morrell, an eccentric and wealthy noblewoman who patronized writers and artists. Her husband, a lawyer, threatened to sue Lawrence, and a few changes were made to satisfy him.
It may be that even a brief glance at Lawrence’s models is misleading. Ken Russell’s wonderful film Women in Love (1969) is remarkably true to the novel, partly because the five crucial actors perform superbly, Glenda Jackson as Gudrun in particular. Birkin/Lawrence is played by Alan Bates, who at moments seems to be Lawrence. Oliver Reed, dark and saturnine, is threatening as Gerald Crich, while Jennie Linden is a fit lover/antagonist for Bates as Birkin. Not least in any sense is Eleanor Bron as Hermione, always on the verge of hysteria and fury.
When I turn over Women in Love in my exhausted moments after the endless exercise I have to perform to keep going in life, I see first the Strindbergian battle to the love-death between Gudrun and Gerald. Lawrence certainly had read Strindberg and could not ward off the influe
nce, though he attempted to do so:
But I don’t want to write like Galsworthy nor Ibsen, nor Strindberg nor any of them, not even if I could. We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.
(1913 letter to Edward Garnett)
Strindberg wrote two plays called The Dance of Death, both in 1900. Properly directed and performed, they still shock with their dreadful recoil from marriage. Three wives endured Strindberg; his palpable misogyny was hectic and unchecked. Lawrence, whatever his flaws, is in the tradition of male novelists who lovingly and profoundly portrayed women: from Samuel Richardson to James Joyce.
The relationship between Ursula and Birkin, after many vicissitudes, culminates in an authentic marriage between two strong souls who recognize that neither must subsume the other. Joy, in the alert reader, celebrates this union between benign wills, each with its own limitations. Ursula wants a kind of paradise of achieved desire, while Birkin distrusts himself, though not her, and knows that all paradises are lost.
Lawrence attempts to balance the harmonics of this pragmatic wholeness against the discord and mounting danger of the frenetic and finally numbing clash of irreconcilables in the agon of Gerald and Gudrun. When the novel concludes in a Strindbergian dance of death, Gerald wanders off into a landscape of snow and ice and welcomes his death there by freezing. It is just to observe that this is not so much suicide as it is Gudrun’s assassination of her lover.
The German sculptor Loerke (the name alludes to the Old Norse god Loki, a mischief maker), homoerotic and deathly, has become friendly with Gudrun and infuriates Gerald by this apparent intimacy. Loerke asks her to join him in Dresden in an aesthetic relationship:
“You won’t tell me where you will go?” he asked.
“Really and truly,” she said, “I don’t know. It depends which way the wind blows.”
He looked at her quizzically, then he pursed up his lips, like Zephyrus, blowing across the snow.
“It goes towards Germany,” he said.
“I believe so,” she laughed.
Suddenly, they were aware of a vague white figure near them. It was Gerald. Gudrun’s heart leapt in sudden terror, profound terror. She rose to her feet.
“They told me where you were,” came Gerald’s voice, like a judgment in the whitish air of twilight.
“Maria! You come like a ghost,” exclaimed Loerke.
Gerald did not answer. His presence was unnatural and ghostly to them.
Loerke shook the flask—then he held it inverted over the snow. Only a few brown drops trickled out.
“All gone!” he said.
To Gerald, the smallish, odd figure of the German was distinct and objective, as if seen through field glasses. And he disliked the small figure exceedingly, he wanted it removed.
Then Loerke rattled the box which held the biscuits.
“Biscuits there are still,” he said.
And reaching from his seated posture in the sledge, he handed them to Gudrun. She fumbled, and took one. He would have held them to Gerald, but Gerald so definitely did not want to be offered a biscuit, that Loerke, rather vaguely, put the box aside. Then he took up the small bottle, and held it to the light.
“Also there is some Schnapps,” he said to himself.
Then suddenly, he elevated the bottle gallantly in the air, a strange, grotesque figure leaning towards Gudrun, and said:
“Gnädiges Fräulein,” he said, “wohl—”
There was a crack, the bottle was flying, Loerke had started back, the three stood quivering in violent emotion.
Loerke turned to Gerald, a devilish leer on his bright-skinned face.
“Well done!” he said, in a satirical demoniac frenzy. “C’est le sport, sans doute.”
The next instant he was sitting ludicrously in the snow, Gerald’s fist having rung against the side of his head. But Loerke pulled himself together, rose, quivering, looking full at Gerald, his body weak and furtive, but his eyes demoniacal with satire.
“Vive le héros, vive—”
But he flinched, as, in a black flash, Gerald’s fist came upon him, banged into the other side of his head, and sent him aside like a broken straw.
But Gudrun moved forward. She raised her clenched hand high, and brought it down, with a great downward stroke on to the face and on to the breast of Gerald.
A great astonishment burst upon him, as if the air had broken. Wide, wide his soul opened, in wonder, feeling the pain. Then it laughed, turning, with strong hands outstretched, at last to take the apple of his desire. At last he could finish his desire.
He took the throat of Gudrun between his hands, that were hard and indomitably powerful. And her throat was beautifully, so beautifully soft, save that, within, he could feel the slippery chords of her life. And this he crushed, this he could crush. What bliss! Oh what bliss, at last, what satisfaction, at last! The pure zest of satisfaction filled his soul. He was watching the unconsciousness come unto her swollen face, watching the eyes roll back. How ugly she was! What a fulfilment, what a satisfaction! How good this was, oh how good it was, what a God-given gratification, at last! He was unconscious of her fighting and struggling. The struggling was her reciprocal lustful passion in this embrace, the more violent it became, the greater the frenzy of delight, till the zenith was reached, the crisis, the struggle was overborne, her movement became softer, appeased.
Loerke roused himself on the snow, too dazed and hurt to get up. Only his eyes were conscious.
“Monsieur!” he said, in his thin, roused voice: “Quand vous aurez fini—”
A revulsion of contempt and disgust came over Gerald’s soul. The disgust went to the very bottom of him, a nausea. Ah, what was he doing, to what depths was he letting himself go! As if he cared about her enough to kill her, to have her life on his hands!
A weakness ran over his body, a terrible relaxing, a thaw, a decay of strength. Without knowing, he had let go his grip, and Gudrun had fallen to her knees. Must he see, must he know?
A fearful weakness possessed him, his joints were turned to water. He drifted, as on a wind, veered, and went drifting away.
“I didn’t want it, really,” was the last confession of disgust in his soul, as he drifted up the slope, weak, finished, only sheering off unconsciously from any further contact. “I’ve had enough—I want to go to sleep. I’ve had enough.” He was sunk under a sense of nausea.
He was weak, but he did not want to rest, he wanted to go on and on, to the end. Never again to stay, till he came to the end, that was all the desire that remained to him. So he drifted on and on, unconscious and weak, not thinking of anything, so long as he could keep in action.
The twilight spread a weird, unearthly light overhead, bluish-rose in colour, the cold blue night sank on the snow. In the valley below, behind, in the great bed of snow, were two small figures; Gudrun dropped on her knees, like one executed, and Loerke sitting propped up near her. That was all.
Gerald stumbled on up the slope of snow, in the bluish darkness, always climbing, always unconsciously climbing, weary though he was. On his left was a steep slope with black rocks and fallen masses of rock and veins of snow slashing in and about the blackness of rock, veins of snow slashing vaguely in and about the blackness of rock. Yet there was no sound, all this made no noise.
Earlier in the novel, having slapped Gerald after a kiss, Gudrun had vowed that she would give the last blow. Here she uses all her strength:
She raised her clenched hand high, and brought it down, with a great downward stroke on to the face and on to the breast of Gerald.
Perhaps she has saved the wretched Loerke, but she has accomplished her deepest desire: to murder Gerald. And he wants to be murdered, since he bears the mark of Cain, having killed his own brother in a gun accident in their yout
h. After nearly strangling Gudrun, Gerald chooses what for him is the only alternative:
He had come to the hollow basin of snow, surrounded by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immediately he went to sleep.
Sometimes I think that this is the dark glory of Women in Love. Whatever Lawrence’s intentions, Gerald remains unsympathetic, almost from start to finish. Gudrun frightens me, but it seems not possible to reject her. Her vitalism is negative yet remains suggestive of lost human possibilities, whereas Gerald’s vacuity is prolonged and irreversible. Perhaps Lawrence was too severe at the close in denying Gudrun any affect except a poor irony and a contempt she delays turning upon herself. Birkin has come to see Gerald’s body and asks Gudrun what he can say to the authorities, if they require explanation:
Gudrun looked up at him, white, childlike, mute with trouble.
“There weren’t even any words,” she said. “He knocked Loerke down and stunned him, he half strangled me, then he went away.”
To herself she was saying:
“A pretty little sample of the eternal triangle!” And she turned ironically away, because she knew that the fight had been between Gerald and herself and that the presence of the third party was a mere contingency—an inevitable contingency perhaps, but a contingency none the less. But let them have it as an example of the eternal triangle, the trinity of hate. It would be simpler for them.
Birkin went away, his manner cold and abstracted. But she knew he would do things for her, nevertheless, he would see her through. She smiled slightly to herself, with contempt. Let him do the work, since he was so extremely good at looking after other people.
Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279) Page 33