Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (6 page)

Moreover, as Lawrence himself was aware, though Mrs. Lawrence undermined Lawrence’s love for Jessie, she left him free to adore Jessie’s brother, Alan. Lawrence followed Alan around the farm as he did his chores, and the two spent a great deal of time in the hay in the barn, talking at times with a burning intimacy. There is no record of whether this friendship was ever sexually consummated. However, Lawrence supposedly told Compton Mackenzie, “I believe that the nearest I’ve ever come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about sixteen.” As Moore points out in
The Priest of Love,
Alan Chambers was a farm boy, not a coal miner. This does not necessarily mean that they are not one and the same person. Lawrence, normally brutally truthful, might have found this situation too delicate to be open about. After all, it would have needlessly exposed not only Alan, but Jessie and the entire Chambers family, to ridicule in a rural area where such goings-on were not taken in stride. The point Lawrence is making, regardless of who it was, is that he had a near perfect love not with a woman, but a man.

The model for the Gerald—Birkin relationship is Lawrence himself and his friend, the writer John Middleton Murry. Lawrence would also use Murry and his wife, the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, as models for the dramatic arguments between Gerald and Gudrun that lead to Gerald’s death at the end of
Women in Love.
Murry and Mansfield were experiencing their own problems because Mansfield had fallen in love with another friend of Lawrence’s, Mark Gertler. Lawrence used this real-life drama to his own advantage, making Gertler his model for Loerke. Murry did double duty in the novel. According to Murry, in his autobiography
Between Two Worlds
(1935), his relationship with Lawrence closely paralleled the scene between Birkin and Gerald in “Gladiatorial.” Lawrence insisted that he and Murry have a Blutbruderschaft, swearing eternal friendship.

Lawrence wanted wrestling as part of the blood brother pact between the two men, just as took place between Gerald and Birkin. It is unclear whether it went further. Frieda appears to dismiss any homosexual affair between Lawrence and Murry or anyone else. Elsewhere, she writes that Lawrence’s homosexuality lasted only a short time. Those statements would appear to contradict each other.

The strongest argument against the charge that Lawrence uses
Women in Love
to advocate homosexual practices as the true road to modern love is that in the context of the novel, Ursula’s focus remains fixed on reinventing love, and she does not permit Birkin to stray from this idea, no matter how much he might wish to do so. Gerald is killed off because, as we have seen, he symbolizes the snow-abstraction of Western Europe and its inability to love in a passionate sense with the blood and the genitals. There is no question that Gerald’s continued existence in the novel would have wholly undermined this idyllic relationship between Ursula and Birkin.

To be fair, while it is true that Lawrence has identified Gerald with a Nietzschean will to power—the scene of Gerald abusing the horse would be one example; associating him with old Norse gods and other Wagnerian imagery, another—Lawrence is in search of no Valhalla. Rather, Ursula and Birkin turn their backs on this Nordic landscape and head symbolically for the sunshine of Italy. Gerald dies in the snow, his natural element, and Gudrun goes off with Loerke to Germany, the land of Wagner. The final message of the novel is that homosexuality is simply one more avenue tried and rejected in the reinvention of love. We imagine Ursula and Birkin, like Lawrence and Frieda in their most idyllic moments, in the garden of some Italian villa sipping a glass of wine under a blazing Italian sun, Dante’s symbol of eternal love and perfect understanding.

 

An issue of major concern to the twentieth century that Lawrence explores in his work is women’s rights. As early as
Sons and Lovers,
Lawrence was extremely sensitive to the repressive nature of a male-dominated society, in which women did not have an opportunity to realize their full potential:

Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, had a chance at a more independent life with Lawrence, and she took it. Ursula, who is already freer than Miriam in that she has a profession, is still bound by societal expectations for women. Both she and Gudrun are openly envious of men and their freedoms, as noted in the scene in which the two sisters see Gerald swimming. Lawrence was very much out front on the issue of women’s equality. This is not to say that Birkin, or for that matter Ursula, are beyond the conventions of their day as they strive for a freer life. They both want to be served, for example, and consider it a grave fault that the other is unwilling to do so. Lawrence once insisted that women had no souls, which caused Frieda not to speak to him for several days. There is no such outrage in
Women in Love,
but one often finds that Birkin, a reservoir for ideas, does not always know his own mind, and that Ursula, on the other hand, knows precisely what she wants. This is not by accident. Lawrence wanted to give the choicer morsels of life and understanding to women. The work is, after all, entitled
Women in Love
for a reason. The fact is that, although it is as much about Birkin and Gerald as it is about Ursula and Gudrun, it is Ursula’s novel.

In the chapter entitled “A Chair,” Lawrence, with a brilliant economy of means that blends symbolism effortlessly with the realism of the novel, as he has done throughout the work, uses the occasion of Ursula and Birkin buying a chair in the flea market to demonstrate how Ursula’s point of view keeps the couple on track. Here Lawrence really outdoes himself in that what begins as a discussion about decorating and style develops into a commentary on the state of Ursula and Birkin’s relationship and ends by becoming a subtle spiritual thesis about how life in general should be lived:

It is Ursula who urges the couple, not toward compromise, but toward a new view of male-female relationships, grounded in Lawrence’s own particular brand of spirituality. One cannot fail to notice here the echo of the “Sermon on the Mount,” in which Jesus urges his followers to live like the lilies of the field, advice that Lawrence and Frieda took literally, living in rented residences all over the world. One hears, too, again in the passage condemning beauty, the old echo of Rimbaud’s poetry: “One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter.” If we understand the chair to be a symbol of art in everyday life, then we can accept the fact that in getting rid of the chair, they are doing what Ezra Pound urged the modern writer to do, to “make it new.”

 

As touched on earlier, we know absolutely nothing about the background of Birkin. We meet Ursula’s family, the Brangwens. Mr. Brangwen, with his irascibility, is closer to Paul’s father, Mr. Morel, in
Sons and Lovers
—that is, to Lawrence’s own father—than he is to the Mr. Brangwen of
The Rainbow,
who was rather affable and easy. In
Women in Love,
we have a more in-depth look at Gerald Crick’s family than the family of any other character. We even meet Hermione’s brother. However, we are given nothing about the family of Birkin, who is Lawrence’s surrogate, not even a reference. It is such a notable absence that one cannot doubt it was done intentionally. It seems almost inevitable that in a novel that explores class difference, set in a country that could not be more class-conscious, a reference to Birkin’s background would be unavoidable. It is as though Birkin arrived in England from outer space. Of course, we know Birkin is an inspector of schools, which would put him vaguely in the middle class, but his pedigree is conspicuously missing. One could say that in writing
Sons and Lovers,
one of Lawrence’s objectives was to document the life of the poor in a mining town, and that done, he had no interest in repeating that type of novel. This is still held against Lawrence in his hometown of Eastwood. In the eyes of the hometown folks, a miner’s son who ran off with the aristocratic wife of a university professor, a man who was proud, for a time at least, to count as his friends the members of the snobbish Cambridge-Bloomsbury group, a man who lived abroad most of his adult life, was practicing the class equivalent of racial passing. Anthony Burgess amplifies this point:

The larger issue that Lawrence faced—and that Joyce, Yeats, James, Eliot, or any writer from a group subjugated by the cultural and/or political mainstream—is this: Does the writer have an obligation to be the spokesperson for his own particular group? The answer in each of the cases mentioned above is, yes, within limits, but only the writer should define those limits, and that gives the writer a very wide margin. Joyce continued to write about Ireland all his life, though he did not live in Ireland virtually any of his adult life. Yeats continued to live in Ireland and in fact made Ireland his theme, but he made a point of doing it on his terms, spending time in England and calling Ireland and its problems “fool driven.” Eliot abandoned America to play the role of an English gentleman. Lawrence followed, to some extent, each of these roads. In
Sons and Lovers
he does, in fact, write as close to a proletarian novel as one can without it being propaganda. It is an honest depiction of a miner’s family, and this is all that it need be for us to understand the strains under which the Morel family is living. However, even in
Sons and Lovers,
Lawrence stressed the human element. In
Women in Love,
he strips English society of its veneer, as Burgess correctly notes, and shifts his focus from the problems of the English poor to the more universal issue of reinventing modern love. In fact, England itself is renounced in favor of Italy. However, in another sense, it is not altogether true to say that Lawrence abandons completely his concern for the poor in
Women in Love.
One might say that he focuses on the same issues in
Women in Love
that he did in
Sons and Lovers,
though in
Women in Love
his perspective on society in this mining town has radically shifted to that of the upper class. The workers are still doomed because Gerald is doomed, as is in a sense Hermione. Why do the people of England suffer? Lawrence asks. They suffer because they do not know how to love and because they are subject to the fate of snow-destruction.

To do something new that you know may not find favor with the critics or your countrymen takes courage. Lawrence also showed courage and good judgment by deviating from
The Rainbow,
even though both it and
Women in Love
were born within a book he called
The Sisters,
in which Ursula and Gudrun, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Brangwen, appear:

However, not all the changes are for the worse. Ursula is essentially different in
Women in Love.
from the character by that name in
The Rainbow.
She is still driven and independent, but she has taken a quantum leap forward in maturity, wisdom, and cynicism that cannot be accounted for by time, even if a large time lapse was supposed to have taken place between the two novels. The two Ursulas are simply different people. The Ursula from
The Rainbow
is so concerned with her own independence that in effect she renounces love—and not only renounces it but stifles its growth—because she does not want to follow Skrebensky abroad. Yet Ursula does precisely this at the end of
Women in Love.
in quitting her teaching job and going abroad with Birkin. It may be argued that Skrebensky did not completely understand her independence as a woman, and that Birkin did. True—but the Ursula of
Women in Love.
would have never been involved with Skrebensky in the first place. Nor, we imagine, would she have had the lesbian affair with her teacher that Ursula had in
The Rainbow.
It is not a question of morality per se. This Ursula, the one of
Women in Love,
seems gifted in seeing what is essential and is not herself inclined, nor does she see why Birkin should be so inclined, to be involved in any enterprise that diverts the focus of true love.