Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

Far more than Ursula and Birkin, Gudrun and Gerald symbolize Lawrence’s personal worldview of Western man as he presently exists. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic beings such as Gerald are not only out of touch with their sensibility, they lack the knowledge of the blood, which for Lawrence is an intuitive knowledge that surpasses knowledge of the brain. In the chapter entitled “Totem,” Gerald sees an African sculpture that symbolizes the bohemian nature of Halliday’s flat where he views it. Lawrence writes:

Later, in the chapter entitled “Moony,” Birkin reflects on the statue he saw in Halliday’s apartment, and its meaning crystallizes for him:

Thus, for Lawrence, the ancient darker races have a knowledge that is the pure sensuality of the blood. The Nordic races, in supplanting the darker, southern ones, have failed to connect with the sensuality of the innermost self that brings blood-knowledge and are thus left with ice-knowledge that lacks the immediacy and depth of the latter. It is Gerald who most embodies this ice-knowledge, and it is he who is, therefore, fated to die a symbolic arctic death.

Early in the novel Birkin identifies Gerald as Cain because Gerald had accidentally killed his brother. Significantly, Lawrence dismisses accidental behavior, suggesting several times throughout the novel that accidents are conscious acts. “He did not believe that there was any such thing as accident,” Lawrence writes of his surrogate. “It all hung together, in the deepest sense” (p. 24). This idea anticipates Sartre’s concept in
Being and Nothingness
that there is no hidden subconscious behavior and that man is responsible for all his actions. In both cases, man is given credit for having more control over the universe than he actually does. In Sartre, this concept results in the romantic tenet of existentialism that man must be the destiny of man. However, for Lawrence, it takes an ugly turn in his later work, which suggests that certain people have the right to control the world by assuming their own destiny on the backs and at the expense of others. In any case, the brother that Gerald-Cain kills is symbolic of Gerald’s ice-destructiveness. Birkin tells Minette, who Lawrence virtually everywhere refers to as the Pussum, that Gerald is a former soldier who explored the Amazon, thus linking him with further physical destruction and with the ancient Native American past, which Lawrence will explore in later works.

The Pussum is identified with the African statue, which resembles a black beetle. What the Pussum fears most is self-discovery, being aware of herself—that is, as a black beetle. Together she and Gerald are a temporary union of opposites. This contrasts sharply with Gerald’s infatuation with Gudrun, the snow-queen to his snow-king. Gudrun and Gerald’s connection is at its most evident in the chapter “Love and Death,” in which Gerald goes to Gudrun after his father’s death and empties himself A relationship that finds its ultimate satisfaction in death will end in death. Appropriately, Lawrence chooses the snow-abstraction of Switzerland as the setting for Gerald and Gudrun’s ultimate confrontation. Gerald’s death is presided over by Loerke, whose name is intended to suggest the Norse god, Loki, the trickster whom Wagner uses to good effect in the Ringgold cycle. Gerald despises Loerke, and this fact causes us to sympathize with Gerald, who, one feels, does not deserve the fate to which he is destined and against which he struggles. He searches for love and feeling, and if in the end he is disappointed in his inability to find either, it is a tragic fate, not an act of evil. He is ultimately a victim of Gudrun, who represents for Lawrence the type of modern woman who attempts to reinvent love by destroying both it and the man unlucky enough to offer it to her.

If for Dante the most despised of sins is fraud against art—though its cause is thoroughly human, precisely because only human beings can engage in it—for Lawrence it was largely the same. Loerke prostitutes his art, and Lawrence shows us that this is a form of perversion by associating Loerke with a cold and indifferent bisexuality. That Lawrence does not condemn homosexuality per se is obvious from his sympathetic treatment of the relationship between Birkin and Gerald. On the other hand, that Gudrun is identified with Loerke makes it clear that Lawrence sees in her an active perversion—that is, a turning away from the natural order of true love. In the larger sense, Gudrun symbolizes the snow-destruction that is, in Lawrence’s view, the essence of the Nordic, or Western, world and its lack, as in Gudrun, of an ability to feel. “Not a word, not a tear—ha!” reflects the woman who informs Gudrun of Gerald’s death. “Gudrun was cold, a cold woman” (p. 478). It is the triumph of the snow-goddess.

The relationship between Birkin and Hermione represents another failed attempt of modern man and woman to reinvent love. The character Hermione was drawn from Lady Ottoline Morrell, with whom Lawrence had an intense friendship, if not a torrid love affair, as is the case with Hermione and Birkin. The Madame de Staël of the Bloomsbury group and the wife of a wealthy member of Parliament, Lady Morrell cut quite a figure. She was immortalized both by T. S. Eliot in “Portrait of a Lady” and by Ezra Pound in “Portrait d’une Femme.” In both, the American poets are on the outside looking in at Lady Morrell and the doings of her literary circle. Lawrence, on the other hand, is an intimate, at least to the extent that he chooses to be. If Gudrun is the ultimate ice-queen, Hermione shares with her the Nordic inclination toward ice-knowledge, in her attempt to reduce the world to what can be apprehended by the brain, without sharing Gudrun’s hatred of men or Gudrun’s inability to love. “But knowing is everything to you, it is your life” (p. 37), Birkin reproaches Hermione in the “Class-Room” chapter. Birkin’s comment is reminiscent of a letter Lawrence wrote to Lady Morrell, “Why must you always use your will so much, why can’t you let things be, without always grasping and trying to know and to dominate. I’m too much like this myself.”

In “Breadalby,” the chapter that Lawrence places strategically after “Totem,” the author creates a sharp contrast between Hermione, the ultimate in northern European civilized being, and the African statue, symbolic of man’s vital primitive past, to the latter’s advantage. Hermione has invited her lover, Birkin, and Ursula, Gudrun, and Gerald to Breadalby, where everything is exquisite and civilized. It is not just that Hermione wishes to live life in her head. She uses her wealth and position to orchestrate the lives of others. She marshals her guests about in activities that she has chosen for them. It is no wonder that Ursula and Gudrun, forceful women in their own right, instinctively rebel, refusing to go swimming. The highlight of the scene is the argument Birkin and Hermione have regarding democracy—a scene that ends with Hermione striking Birkin with a lapis lazuli ball, almost killing him. Even if she is in love with Birkin, and is correct in her support of democracy as opposed to Birkin, who advocates ideas that are the seeds of fascism, Hermione, like Gudrun, nevertheless must fulfill her snow-destruction destiny. It is significant and ironic that Birkin is saved literally from death by a classic Greek text—he partially blocks another, potentially deadly, blow with a heavy volume of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides—because the Greeks were the first proponents of democracy and also represent the integration of ancients (that is, an integration of the primitive and modern, positioned as they were historically between Egypt and Rome). Nor should it be lost on us that in addition to integrating what Lawrence would term blood-knowledge and ice-knowledge, there was in Greece an integration of love, such that homosexual and heterosexual love had equal weight. It should be further observed that Lady Morrell had sent Lawrence a copy of Thucydides as a present in 1916.

Hermione’s counterpart in
Women in Love
is Pussum, on whom we have briefly touched. If Hermione would reinvent love by staying wedded to her intellect, an intellect whose deeper sources she eschews, the Pussum is all sensuality. As noted, she reminds Gerald of a black beetle and is thus associated with the statue in Halliday’s flat, and its pure sensualism. “It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew her” (p. 77). Gerald reproaches Birkin for liking the statue, warning Birkin that he “likes the wrong things, things against yourself.” However, it is Gerald who actually sleeps with the Pussum and who involves himself fatally with Gudrun, who is identified with the Pussum by being her complete opposite, the other side of the same coin. Pussum cuts the young Russian friend of Halliday and draws blood, as Gudrun slaps Gerald in a gesture of gratuitous contempt. Halliday is completely frightened by Pussum, yet for all her ability to strike fear in the hearts of men, she is used by them, as naked before them in her profession as a studio model, as Gudrun, the painter and ice-queen, is remote.

Pussum is free to be herself. As a model, of course, she has chosen a profession that goes against the conventions of her day. Beyond this, she does not pay lip service to a value system in which she does not believe. She is pregnant with Halliday’s child, but she seems to have no desire to get married, nor even to contemplate the advantages of marriage or its necessity as a social convention or a means of economic security. In fact, her contempt for convention is such that she sleeps with Gerald during her pregnancy and in Halliday’s apartment. She is not a hater of men, but she is a woman without fear, or rather, she is a woman who evidently only fears herself, since the only thing she admits to fearing are black beetles, with which she is identified.

Having cleared the deck, so to speak, of erroneous possibilities for reinventing love in modern times, Lawrence now turns his attention quite seriously to Ursula and Birkin. True, the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald opens the novel and for all practical purposes closes it, but it is fated from the start, as we have seen, to be something that must be played out like a Greek tragedy from which there is no escape. In the relationship between Ursula and Birkin, though, Lawrence sets out to explore the meaning of love in our times. If, as argued throughout this essay, he acknowledges with Rimbaud that love has to be reinvented, love’s reinvention must take into account the realties of the modern age. Moreover, Lawrence must draw on the most important fund of knowledge he has on the subject, his relationship with Frieda. Lawrence rejects all formulas for love, which are faded and washed out by the centuries. The true meaning of love has to be as relevant to our time as Dante’s philosophy of true love was to his own. It must be real. Above all, it must be heartfelt. In a letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence writes:

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: