Women in Love

Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. 7 July 2009. Project Gutenburg. Web. 21 June 2010.

I think that there was a flaw in my reading strategy when it comes to Women in Love. I decided to read it by audiobook, since I could obtain a recording of it for free on Librivox. The recording is actually quite good, done by a woman who sounds like a professional voice artist. The only thing is, it takes a lot longer to listen to someone read a book than to read it in your head. I’ve been putting Women in Love on when I mend clothes or knit or fold laundry, and it was an enjoyable accompaniment for the most part, but it did take me 3 months to read it that way! I had to go back and skim a good deal of it in order to remember the first parts!

D.H. Lawrence is obsessed with consciousness. The word consciousness is used 1, 379 times in 451 pages. He wants to look at what’s happening inside people on both a conscious and unconscious level. And he wants to think about how one person’s consciousness affects another person’s consciousness. And he wants to talk about how a person’s consciousness is affected by the world outside, and he wants to come up with some way of capturing the consciousness of the world. In Women in Love, there is a sense that there is too much consciousness, that thinking too much about the world, and about oneself and others, and what they think, can be harmful.

At the beginning of the novel, Ursula is described as “a woman of the new school, full of intellectuality, and heavy, nerve-worn with consciousness” (11). Her man-like consciousness (she moves in the intellectual world of men) is often too much for the frailty of her female emotions and body. She is afraid of everything: of Gudrun getting married, of the home in which she grew up, of her own depth of feeling, of the hostility of the world, of going mad, of Rupert Birkin’s moody affections (4, 7, 8, 151, 276). She is afraid of any harm coming to her emotional self, because everything affects her so deeply, and so she over-questions everyone and everything in hopes of defending herself. She is also easily frustrated by her own process of self-actualization. As she says, “it infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I CAN'T get straight anyhow. I don't know what really to DO” (110). She comes across almost child-like at times, as she, for example, begs Rupert (over and over again) to tell her that he loves her (138, 224). Rupert, for his part, thinks there is something better, beyond love, a kind of union which occurs in a spiritual vacuum, outside of the pressures of human social relations, outside of the confines of language and bodies (169, 180). Rupert tells Ursula:

'There is... a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane.” (130)

I think his desire for his kind of love is an attempt to counter the kind of mechanization and lack of connectivity in which Gerald is so deeply entrenched in the coal mines (103). (Williams discusses this industrialization aspect). Rupert, like Ursula, picks everything apart, with an almost childlike obstinacy. As Hermione says, “he really IS like a boy who must pull everything to pieces to see how it is made” (126). Their thinking too much, however, is what both attracts and repulses Ursula and Rupert to one another; with them, attraction and repulsion, love and hate, always go hand-in-hand, one rising from the subconscious, while the other retreats back into it (151, 153-4, 179). Rupert, however, eventually does share the kind of spiritual love he desires with Ursula (which turns out to have a lot to do with sex?), and she with him (282-3, 288).

Aside from sharing this love with Ursula, however, Rupert also shares it with his old comrade Gerald: “The two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other” (182). His love of Gerald is just as deep as his love of Ursula, as is revealed by his suggestion that he and Gerald “build a world” together (186), by the rather memorable homo-erotic jujitsu scene (241-3), and Rupert’s deep mourning of Gerald at the novel’s end (435).

Similarly, I think Gudrun and Ursula share a kind of romantic friendship together––“when they were together, doing the things they enjoyed, the two sisters were quite complete in a perfect world of their own” (148)––where they are content to be in each other’s company, much as the two men are, but their connection does not seem to have the same sexual charge as the men’s (235).

The other deep kind of love or spiritual connection in the novel is that of a (hu)man and the natural world. Ursula, in her over-conscious way empathizes with flowers (16). Nature is a kind of refuge for Ursula, a place where she feels whole and at peace, not afraid, as she is in social situations: “Among the trees, far from any human beings, there was a sort of magic peace. The more one could find a pure loneliness, with no taint of people, the better one felt. She was in reality terrified, horrified in her apprehension of people.” (218). For Rupert, love of nature, like love of a man, is more easily deep and pure than trying to love a woman: “To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman” (95). Gudrun’s love of nature, I think, has partly to do with her artist’s temperament. She and Gerald are ultimately incompatible––their loathing, unlike the loathing between Rupert and Ursula, finally wins out over the attraction––because Gerald does not understand the artist’s temperament, Gudrun’s free-spiritedness, her love of nature. Wanting to enjoy the twilight, Gudrun yells at Gerald, “Go away... and leave me to it. It is beautiful, beautiful... It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. Don't try to come between it and me. Take yourself away, you are out of place—” (407). Gudrun’s attraction to nature is almost sexual at times (think of the erotic language used to describe her dance with the cows) (150). Even Gerald, however, who is such a harsh individualist, machine-like, a god of industry, resentful of emotion, is not immune to the allure of nature; in fact, he seems to subconsciously long for the experience the others seem to have of nature, while also resenting them for making him think too much (161, 199).

Part of love here also seems to be giving oneself over to another person, that is, giving up one’s individuality to become half of a couple. Rupert does not admit that this is what he wants. He says he wants to meet on equal terms, but he believes that “the last, perhaps highest, love-impulse [is to] resign your will to the higher being”and for him, the higher being is clearly a man (125). Eventually, Ursula does give into this “submission he insists on” even though she claims earlier she will not (264, 284). After their marriage, Rupert and Ursula become a unit, a kind of a third “I”, both giving up something of themselves to be together (335). The less emotive/feminine, if more artistic Gudrun, on the other hand, is not willing to give up her individuality nor to surrender to monogamy; though she initially seems like she will submit to Gerald, she turns out to have a will equally strong to his. Gerald becomes aware of this in the scene where she tries to capture a rabbit for Winifred to draw. After an intense struggle (resulting in Gudrun being scratched): “Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange, darkened eyes, strained with underworld knowledge, almost supplicating, like those of a creature which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition” (215). Gudrun and Gerald are both highly stubborn, highly individualist people, and though this is clearly a force of attraction to them––their sex together is like a battle - described exhausting and violent (313)––it is what ultimately drives them apart, as Gerald fails to dominate Gudrun, who instead turns to the more artistically-minded Loerke (413).