WOMEN IN LOVE BY D. H. LAWRENCE

INTRODUCTION

According to F.R. Leavis The Rainbow and Women in Love are Lawrence’s best novels. And out of this selection Women in Love seems the best to show the author’s most mature art. It is better to consider it separately from its predecessor, and it is the most complex, difficult and modern of the two, but not necessarily the best. With this book Lawrence was making a radical break with earlier fiction. It may seem disturbing for the subject deals directly and openly with sexual relationshops, and because it shows civilised human beings impelled by forces within them well below the level of their conscious will or choice. Instead of portraying human beings as consciously analysable personalities, as nineteenth-century novels had done, he wanted to get at what today is called the subconscious. The deeper being had to be made visible. Lawrence also wanted to get rid of the idea of a stable ego, the belief that personality is constant , and show human beings as fluctuating and changeable. To do this Lawrence had to find a language for what had been inexpressible before. He also had to find new ways of using words to capture rhythms of hidden processes of the psyche. He dramatised them and had them act out their inner being, and that is why dialogue is so important in his novels. The new insight required a new art.

Women in Love is a war novel, even though its society is apparently at peace and its date is left (deliberately) vague. In the depths of all the characters there is violence, threatening to destroy one’s own self and the others. This is because the novel was written at a time when all over Europe people had thrown themselves into the First World War. This violence related both in a conscious and unconscious way with sex and power is what this paper is going to try to investigate.

WOMEN IN LOVE 

Gerald-Gudrun

Lawrence’s world is coming apart, and this creates more difficulty since "the art, in language and form, must be such as can render and explore violence, disintegration, deadly excess", and so it becomes even more disturbing for readers who like to think of themselves as civilised and self-controlled. A crucial question is posed for the critic who has to figure out whether this is a destructively violent and excessive work or a diagnosis of violence and excess which enables the author and reader to come through the experience with a better understanding of themselves.

Kinkead-Weekes explains that the book’s structure seems to work by isolating two or three characters, often in the presence of some catalyst that brings out their inner being, and then every so often collecting a whole party together, so that the reader is led to compare and contrast more widely and see what is happening as a dimension of society. This occurs in chapter XIV, "Water-Party" which refocuses what has gone before and prepares the reader to what is still to come. We see a social party in an apparent peace, but there are some hidden tensions. The Crich estate may be thrown open for the day, but still there is a policeman at the gate, which means that really not everyone can come in. Will Brangwen not being a gentleman is uneasy, his daughters , even though they have entrées as teachers, show different kinds of defence and aggression about their situation as women. Hermione as an aristocrat feels free to inspect other people. On the other hand Birkin never feels quite right socially. Already here we can see how the characters have an inner self which has nothing to do with the apparent situation, and in which many cases is full of violence and attack wishes. The festivities have about them an undertone of suppressed violence and Hyde seems to believe "that this violence is intrinsic to the ruling elite".

When Ursula begins to sing, the differences which had been emerging between both sisters become clearer. Ursula with her uncertainty lives at the "centre of her own universe", while Gudrun when she begins to dance un-inhibits herself and reveals her inner self in an unconsciously exposure, first her urge to free herself from repression, then to express herself, and then to define and assert herself against the male. Behind her apparent submission to the attractive and dominating male lies a strongly reactive female counter-aggression. She is first fascinated by Gerald at the wedding in the first chapter "His totem is a wolf". In their relationship there is an impulse to be childlike and suppliant, but there is a sense that this is also a mode of power, and can swiftly turn into aggression. When Gerald substitutes himself for the bulls, the hidden violence in this pattern of submission/aggression spurts out in an instantaneous blow across his face, and the dialogue that shows them both shocked into sudden awareness of their sex-relation as a kind of war. The reaction of Gudrun’s conscious mind is "Why are you behaving in this impossible and ridiculous fashion", but deep inside Gudrun is wondering who will prove stronger the man or the woman.

In chapter XVIII, "Rabbit", is a clear example of violence. Gudrun tries to have the great buck rabbit Bismarck out of his cage by the ears. The animal sensing the man’s hand comes down screams in fear of death and having power of his own reacts against the attempt to grasp him by instantaneous violence. This in turn brings fury and cruelty to Gudrun as she battles to control the bestial stupidity. Having seen this scene the reader is prepared for the struggle between the sexes, for really her cruelty is only projected on the rabbit and it’s not destined to it. From behind the realism, the new art begins to open a dimension undiscovered in earlier fiction, for "the scream of the rabbit ... seemed to have torn the veil of their consciousness", and for Kinkead-Weekes "what lies behind the veil in Gudrun and Gerald is revealed to them both presently, beyond disguise". The language shows the strain of having to put into words something which by definition is almost beyond articulation, and which therefore seem far-fetched or even absurd. Gudrun looks at Gerald as if she were at his mercy as far as he could treat her as he had treated Bismarck. And Gerald feels Gudrun as a soft recipient for his cruelty. When Gerald stares into the redness of that score produced by violence, he can momentarily sense his way through the bloody medium into his own psyche as well as hers, "The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond". With the sight of blood he feels the excitement of violence, of exerting power over a living creature sadistically or masochistically. As the lovers exchange hints of the possibilities their subconscious has suggested, they show a readiness to offer and accept rabbit-sexuality and animal violence. For Lawrence, sex is always "a going through, beyond one’s ordinary self and old consciousness, into a new mode of being. But medium in the space beyond the normal atmosphere is pleasure in violence, whose final frisson is death". Gudrun knows, but never says that she and Gerald have little in common except a craving wish for fulfilment through extreme sensation, and a kind of death wish.

According to G.M. Hyde the struggle for power in Europe is also the power game that is under Gudrun and Gerald. Hyde explains that the "apparently harmless but actually vicious (because frightened ) rabbit cathects the violence of Gerald and Gudrun’s relationship and reflects it back, magnified, hyperbolic, as an effect of the war". Hyde also explains that it reflects the war between sexes long sustained but long contained because of the Victorian hypocrisies. The insistent process of projection and over determination affects the language, a language which is specific to the emotional tensions in the situation as well as redolent of war.

The dying of Thomas Critch in chapter XXIV, "Death and Love", shows the horror of dissolution for a man who had willed to lived what he had considered a high and Christian life (though not for his wife), but who is now imprisoned in his dying body. Gerald’s fascination towards death keeps him at his bedside and feeds his nihilism. But love does seem to offer to him, at first, a path away from death to life. So when he kisses Gudrun under the bridge he seems to drink Gudrun into himself and his power, she is gone into him so that she is perfected. But it is part of the dialectic of their relationship, their similar incapacity for true love- that this need of Gerald’s to fill in his void caused by the slow disintegration and death of his father, should call out in Gudrun the mocking, destructive and malicious side of her nature. When her fingers wonder over his face it is with an excitement of knowing, of gathering him by touch, wanting to have him in her hands : to posses the enemy. When in desperation he comes from his father’s grave to her bed, we see this even clearer. He now takes her fully, sexually, to pour into her all "his pent-up darkness and corrosive death ", and feel himself warmed and healed. He falls asleep like a child, but she is left awake "destroyed into perfect consciousness". Love for them is always one-sided. One dominant and the other always submissive or rebellious, one all-taking and the other giving. The "and" of the chapter’s title points to connection, not progress. In their love there is something death-dealing.

But in a few occasions besides this love as "sex-war" in terms of domination and submission , there is another way to love for Gerald and Gudrun. As they set in the lake together their love becomes different. There is a space between them and with that they seem capable of being themselves. As they balance the canoe they seem to balance each other without wanting to posses or dominate. They are both overcome with the beauty of their otherness. To Gudrun now Gerald’s maleness is a wonder and not a threat. And he for the first time lets go and doesn’t try to control or impose himself. There is a new peace and beauty.

Birkin-Ursula

The novel is structured by constant parallels and comparisons. There is also violence and deathliness in Birkin and Ursula. But as we discover in chapter XIX, "Moony", it is a kind of violence which can heal as well as destroy. Kinkead-Weekes explains that we think of life as a creative process. But there are times when the cycle of creation seems to have come to an end, and everything is given over to a death process. Birkin feels that it is "fin se siècle" and that they are all "fleurs du mal". Ursula argues and doesn’t accept this deathliness. She isn’t a flower in dissolution, but feels warm and flamy with life. The changeability of this pair is evident when Birkin is ill ("Water-Party"), and Ursula reacts in repulsion at what she sees as his deathliness. She feels hatred toward him for he is oppressive to her ego.

In the chapter titled "Moony", Ursula and Birkin show this change from violence into tenderness, after the storm comes the calm. As Ursula wanders through the dark trees hating the moonlight which makes everything definite and visible to consciousness, she is drawn to the darkness in which one can loose oneself. She finds Birkin by the pond and then a game between the water and the moon is started. "The moon goddess codes both the destructive and the creative parts of the "anima", or female emanation from the male self, and this is the site of Birkin’s battle". The impact of the first that Birkin throws at the pond makes the moon reflection look like a wruthing cuttlefish. Hyde explains : "That the split moon is also the split psyche and the fissured surface of Lawrence’s novel like a kind of shattered mirror that still just only holds together. The fragments insist on reconstituting themselves in a new order, alternately `rose-like´ and unsettling like a polyp (again an echo of the violent imagery of `Water Party´.". The second stone makes the moon explode, but Birkin’s explosions momentarily obliterate the moon, and them it re-forms. Then he throws stone after stone and the reader submits to the experience in the language and rhythm. It is an experience of extraordinary violence. But after comes a strange peace, and tenderness where words of truth can be spoken. Hatred and deathliness have vanished. After the apparently destructive violence the moon looks different, it’s no longer something hard and triumphant. Now it is a rose, "constellated" in the dark water. This remind the reader as Kinkead-Weekes points out of Ursula’s rose (which is not a "fleur du mal") which is against Birkin’s dark river of dissolution.

What has seemed to happen in the pond and in the subconscious the lovers is a mode of "love" in which the relationship can grow through conflict. The clash of personalities, even violence can turn to harmony and peace. In Lawrence sex had been seen as a kind of death and rebirth, a loss of consciousness and as an experience of oblivion at the hands of the other, but opening a new life beyond. But then in Lawrence, there were times when violence and destruction have to go far indeed before new creation can begin. The subconscious may have to be deeply agitated, neurotic consciousness broken apart or almost completely disintegrated, before the new harmony can come about and the whole self become calm and composed. But as soon as they begin consciously to speak, misunderstanding, conflicts start again. Ursula thinks Birkin is a demanding male in search of supremacy and that she is supposed to submit and serve, and Birkin is unclear about what he wants. He is also infuriated by the "Magna Mater" (the great female and mother) that he finds in her and her assertive will and self-insistence. Nevertheless, "they reach something real for a moment, when the words and self-willed egos give way". After Birkin is able to clarify to himself the different way that modern men and women go.

Kinkead-Weekes explains that dissolution may be necessary before new integration can begin. There is also an opposite (Arctic) way of disintegration and reduction when mind is wholly dominated by mind and will, the white life we have seen in Gerald. The Birkin who used to preach about the "river dissolution now has been brought by Ursula and the experience of the pond to glimpse a third way, which he calls "paradisal", over optimistically. Yet, he has glimpsed a violence and disintegration which can heal, and the opposites can be themselves "constellated" together in new peace and beauty.

Chapter XXIII, "Excurse", begins by rediscovering the violence of "Moony" in more realist terms. Birkin and Ursula have a flaming row over Hermione and other things. The engagement rings he has bought are signs of the commitment he wants. Ursula’s resistance to commitment is caused by jealousy and her sense of being undervalued. Birkin is infuriated by her making everything personal and the row gets out of hand and culminates with her throwing the rings at his face and insulting him as corrupt and being split between false spiritually and dirty sex. But comically she has to stop for a biker passes by, this according to Kinkead-Weekes shows how even in his darker novels there are moments of pure comedy (which answers to those who accused Lawrence of little humour). Once again, violence and seeming hate can apparently be healing if accepted. Birkin takes the denunciation and even takes some truth in it, and under the impact, oblivion comes over him again. The knot of his conscious mind is broken and he is "dissolved in darkness", aware only of his need for her to come back. And she does, with a flower (rose), for him. After violence, everything is simple, calm and loving.

In "The Saracen’s Head", Lawrence tries to embody the essential condition and full extent of what he means by Birkin’s way of love. Ursula makes an extraordinary discovery ; "And she was drawn to him strangely ... ineffable riches". As her sense of mystery increases the language becomes more extraordinary. The moment is vitally important. The strain of the language is at its greatest hereabouts. Is the coming together of independent individuals, neither dominating nor serving, this is the essential definition of a love which liberates for Lawrence. True individuality is a divinely creative life force. Birkin to her is wonder and mystery. The individual life force she is touching is physical, as well as psychological and mystical, because for Lawrence the "otherness" is not an idea but is forcefully there in others, not only palpable but fully experienced by touch, in the flesh. This is why Lawrence produces a language of touch, subconscious and not idea, that can convey at the same time the sense of energy and force. It has a power that is invisible but very real and dark because it has nothing to do with the conscious mind. It is also impersonal and transcendent. But it is not defined by it. The experience is of the essence of sexual relationship for Lawrence : a death, a rebirth, the discovery of a new land and a wonderful new life. This love has managed to fuse individuality and commitment. It shows how two independent and opposite beings can, without loosing individuality, commit themselves and be balanced by each other. This will not put an end to conflict or violence, but the author shows "Birkin and Ursula finding their way through from egotism, neurosis and deathliness toward a new life".

Lawrence thought that what was fully formed and finished was dead, which is why his best works end with a question rather than with a conclusion. That is also why the relationship between Ursula and Birkin is inconclusive, and their finding and marrying each other only a better beginning and not the typical "happy-ending" of the nineteenth century novel.

Gerald-Birkin

Also, there is a question of whether Birkin and Gerald can have a relation of this kind (as Ursula and Birkin). The fact that the woman are sisters prevents such a relationship between them, though Ursula’s relation with Winifred Inger was a major factor in the outrage at The Rainbow. Women in Love suggests that for Lawrence the distinction of one way of love from the other may be more important than the gender of the lovers.

Birkin meets Gerald in the library after being repulsed by Ursula and is angry and Gerald is in a nihilistic state. Gerald finds that when work stops he is left to himself and that inside of him there is a void. There is anger, frustration and ennui find an outlet in violence (chapter XX), and takes shape in "a friendly wrestling match, naked, surrounded by books suggesting civilisation and the mind". Is it an exploration of sublimated homosexuality ? Is it, as in chapter "Rabbit", a power struggle for dominance ? Or is it in the end as in chapter "Moony" a Blakean conflict of opposites out of which comes growth, so that opposition proves true friendship ?

Both males lapse into unconsciousness, but when consciousness returns there seems again to be a peace, a wholeness, reintegration and a new tenderness. Words that would normally be difficult to say are said : "I think you are beautiful". In the instinctive handclasp and intimacy, men can have a relationship that leaves them individually separate but with the possibility of permanent commitment (blood-brotherhood). The initial sense of difficulty and disturbance may seem less when the reader realises how, through parallel comparisons and constant re-orchestration, the novel guides one to itself. And only by coming to terms with the possibility of a creative as well as destructive violence one can understand the paths the characters take, and the scenes that show them dividing towards one destination or another.

The assumption that there is nothing else to build life upon except violence and hatred, policed by law, prompts Birkin’s deviant behaviour as he drinks the champagne at the wedding "accidentally on purpose". In the existential space between Gerald and Birkin a tense sort of dialogue begins to take shape. This conversation makes apparent the condition of England at this particular point in time. It cannot be separated from the struggle for supremacy in Europe. It is ironic that it should be at Breadalby, Hermione’s house (home of culture) that "the conversation rattles like artillery fire". But at Shortlands too, aggression keeps breaking through, showing the reader only too clearly where the war is really being lost and won.

It is also clear why it matters so much to Birkin to affirm knowledge as a power, even when this is perceived by others as threatening. He belongs, Hyde explains, to that peculiarly disinterested class of aliens (Matthew Arnold’s term) in English society, which passes for an intelligentsia. The intelligentsia of Great Britain seems to make a poor showing in Lawrence’s novels for it is shown as corrupt and venal (idea that Chekjov shows very powerfully in his theatre plays).

W.W. Robson points out that we cannot ignore Birkin’s own sense of his failure. After all, the last chapter, in which Birkin gazes down at the dead Gerald, is a final taking-up of the issues first proposed between them in the chapter called "The Train". Birkin has come to realise that his ideal of "ultimate marriage" was not sufficient. It needed completion by the male relationship with Gerald. But this too has failed. What makes Gerald’s death tragic is not the death itself but its effect on Birkin. And the whole effect of the book is the show that the kind of love he wanted is illusory.

CONCLUSION

This novel is built up on comparable dualities in terms of what Lawrence calls "life" and "dissolution". These terms mean a creative empathy with the world on one hand, and on the other the negative death drive which can also be a mode of creation, but which are also forces of destruction. The reader is made aware of the pattern of complementaries as well as of opposites. Death is the condition of life, as male of female, negation of affirmation and so on. Lawrence held firmly to a dialectical vision of life, to the thesis that "without contraries is no progression".

Women in Love has a structure which arises from Lawrence’s dual theme. And it does seem in part to justify the unusualness of its formal conception : a novel whose plot does not answer to the usual account of "character in action". There is development, but it is a deeper level than that of personality. The book’s strong pattern derives from the contrast between the destinies of the two couples, and the subsidiary, though important, masculine relationship between Gerald and Birkin. But what is the significance of this pattern in expressing the intended total meaning of Women in Love ? Leavis believes that the Birkin-Ursula relationship sets up a standard from which the Gerald-Gudrun experience is a deviation. But Birkin too is a sick and tortured man, who doesn’t achieve with Ursula the kind of fulfilment which he has made his "raison d’être".

BIBLIOGRAPHY

-Dodsworth, Martin : The Penguin History of Literature, vol.7. Penguin, 1994, London.

-Ford, Boris : The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol.8. Penguin Books, 1988, London.

-Hyde, G.M. : D.H. Lawrence. Macmillan, 1990, Hong Kong.

-Lawrence, D.H. : Women in Love. Penguin, 1995, London. ----Martín, Felix et ali : Historia de la literatura inglesa, vol. II. Taurus, 1988, Madrid.

-Pinto, Ana : D.H. Lawrence : un modelo de técnica narrativa. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1983, Salamanca.

-Pujals, Esteban : Historia de la literatura inglesa. Gredos, 1988. Madrid.

-Sanders, Scott : D.H. Lawrence : The World of the Five Major Novels. Viking Press, 1973, New York.