A shadow came over Ursula’s face.
“I might,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.
“You don’t think one needs the experience of having been married?” she asked.
“Do you think it need be an experience?” replied Ursula.
“Bound to be, in some way or other,” said Gudrun, coolly. “Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.”
“Not really,” said Ursula. “More likely to be the end of experience” (p.5).
It is not lost on us that Ursula is embroidering, the symbol of the traditional woman. Lawrence uses this symbol to sharply contrast Ursula’s thoughts on marriage with those of most women in her time. Right from the beginning the reader is disabused of the notion that this will be a conventional novel. Lawrence establishes from the start that both sisters are distinctly modern women in their thoughts and feelings, despite their Edwardian surroundings. Ursula, for her part, does not reject the concept of marriage outright but merely the idea of marriage as it is traditionally conceived. Hence, her question about what precisely Gudrun means by marriage. For her part, Gudrun raises the issue of marriage in its practical aspects, whether it would be worth considering if it were financially beneficial, or whether one should consider it as a grand experience that might prove to be favorable or unfavorable. The question of love is never raised by Gudrun, but it is implicit in Ursula questioning of Gudrun’s specific definition of matrimony.
If the personalities of the two sisters are contrasted from the outset of the novel, Lawrence teases us as to who, in fact, is the more modern of the two without ever answering the question during the course of the novel in any definitive way. True, Gudrun initiates the discussion, which would at first make her appear the more traditional of the two. Gudrun seems to consider marriage as a practical institution unencumbered by love. However, we soon find out that Gudrun is anything but traditional in most of her thinking. She has gone off to live the life of a painter in London, an extremely radical act for a woman at that time and a bold one even today. Nor is her daring confined to London. She steals away to the local red-light district to be picked up by a working-class young man. In other words, she not only challenges the existing concepts of what a young woman should be, she seems interested in shattering those standards; yet she is willing to consider marriage for her own purposes.
Critics have noted that Gudrun’s name is that of a goddess in Norse mythology. Indeed, the whole of Women in Love has a Wagnerian flavor to it. Like a goddess, Gudrun appropriates for herself a freedom that apparently is beyond love or at least not subject to it. At the same time, she does not at first seem inclined to detach herself completely from traditional ways of doing things, even if she rebels. We are forced to ask whether Gudrun, who has moved beyond love as a defining principle and condition for male and female relationships, is more modern than her sister, who renounces love and marriage as they are presently and would revolutionize men and society in order to achieve happiness. Ursula is not looking for an expedient relationship. The sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, are really two sides of the same project of breaking with the past, and their relationship with Birkin and Gerald, respectively, explore from two different perspectives the possibilities of modern love.
If Gudrun is the embodiment of a German ice-queen detached from family and not quite believing in love, she finds in Gerald her corresponding Nordic ice-king. The son of the mine owner to whom responsibility now falls for directing the mine operations due to his father’s illness, Gerald is of the exalted regions of Valhalla, and Gudrun, despite herself, is appropriately drawn to him:
But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing (p. 12).
Despite the mutual attraction they have for each other, they are as doomed as characters in a Greek tragedy. It is a measure of Lawrence’s genius as a writer that Gerald and Gudrun move with the ritual of destiny toward their predetermined end without violating the sense of realism that is the strength of the work. In the chapter entitled “Water-Party,” Lawrence reveals Gudrun’s contempt and fearlessness of males when she rushes heedlessly toward a herd of dangerous longhorn steers. When Gerald questions her as to why she did it, as an answer she smacks him soundly across the face. “You have struck the first blow,” says Gerald. “And I shall strike the last,” Gudrun replies prophetically (p. 170).
Gudrun, then, represents modern woman in her hatred of men. It is not that she sets out to despise Gerald, or men in general. On the contrary, she sees in Gerald a possible mate. “I shall know more of that man,” she says when she sees him in church at his sister’s wedding. She even goes so far as to ask herself, “Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?” (p. 13). However, as a modern woman trapped in a traditional society still under the sway of Victorianism, she is drawn to the expression of her freedom but does not know how, or does not wish, to integrate it with the love of men. We have already noted that she went off to London to pursue an art career and that she allows herself to be picked up by workers. But the desire for freedom is evident in her everyday life. “She wears her clothes in pure defiance.” She gives “her word like a man” (p. 163) and insists on rowing Ursula and herself at the water party. She insists on Ursula singing while she dances a wild, ritualistic, and sexual celebration to her freedom that eventually attracts the cattle that she fearlessly charges. When Gerald accuses her of trying to drive them mad, he is unwittingly speaking of himself also. “God, what it is to be a man!” she exclaims after she and Ursula witness Gerald swimming naked. “The freedom, the liberty, the mobility! ... You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it” (p. 45). Lawrence’s surrogate, Birkin, spells it out for us. Gudrun and Gerald are “born in the process of destructive creation,” the river of darkness that is the “inverse process” of Aphrodite (p. 171).
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:
He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath....
“Why is it art?” Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.
“It conveys a complete truth,” said Birkin. “It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.” ...
“Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme” (p. 77).
Later, in the chapter entitled “Moony,” Birkin reflects on the statue he saw in Halliday’s apartment, and its meaning crystallizes for him:
She knew what he himself did not know. She had thousands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of years since her race had died, mystically: that is, since the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken, leaving the experience all in one sort, mystically sensual. Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive h
appiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution (p. 253).
Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? (p. 254).
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 ac
tually 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:
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