University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Organic Wholeness Of Being In Selected Novels Of D.H. Lawrence

(USC Thesis Other)

Organic Wholeness Of Being In Selected Novels Of D.H. Lawrence

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-4543 ROSSMAN, Charles Raymond, 1938- ORGANIC WHOLENESS OF BEING IN SELECTED NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE. University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan G) CHARLES R A Y M O N D ROSSM AN 1969 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ORGANIC WHOLENESS OP BEING IN SELECTED NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE By Charles Raymond Rossman A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 1968 UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N CALIFORNIA TH E GRADUATE SCHOO L UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFO RNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by ................iQharle_s .R aym ond. R .ossm an............... under the direction of his.....Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R OF P H IL O S O P H Y D«te...AugustL ..1.968. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairman £a / . CONTENTS Page I INTRODUCTION . . .................................. 1 i | PART I: THE SEARCH FOR VISION AND FORM Chapter I. THE WHITE PEACOCK .................. ..... 11 II. SONS AND LOVERS............... 23 PART II: EXPRESSIVE FORM AND MATURE VISION III. THE RAINBOW................................... 94 j IV. WOMEN IN LOVE................................. 164 PART III: THE FINAL VISION— RESURRECTION OF THE BODY V. LADY CHATTERLEY1S LOVER............. 227 LIST OF WORKS C I T E D .......... 272 INTRODUCTION The personal experience of an artist is never merely personal. In the act of transforming experience into art, the artist looks so deeply into himself that his personal, subjective experience becomes significant for you and me. Artists are, as Ezra Pound put it, the antennae of the human race. These words apply especially to D. H. Lawrence, who was at once a very personal and a prophetic writer. His fiction is extraordinarily personal. It has an unusually large biographical element, with scenes, events, physical settings, even characters, taken relatively unaltered from life. Lawrence himself is a frequent character in his fic tion, and even when he is not physically present in a work, the quests of the characters, as well as their limitations and obstacles, are generally Lawrence's own. For Lawrence, the novel was a concrete embodiment of his own experience, a way of apprehending that experience and assimilating it, and ultimately a way of extending experience. Lawrence believed that a writer "loses his sicknesses" through his work, and he described his own act of writing as finding "the form one's passion . . . wants to take." Lawrence further said that his motto was "Art for my sake." 1 Yet despite the thoroughly personal quality of his work, Lawrence was an especially acute antenna of our race. His personal experiences— his sicknesses and passions as they find form in his art— have helped to shape the self- j image and the vision of the world of a half-century of j readers. Lawrence's piercing scrutiny of human relations; his awareness of the frightening threat of brutalization and mechanization that the industrial society poses for human beings; his moving and concrete vision of the anti- vital effects of desiccated, uprooted traditions and ideals; above all, his ceaseless probing of what it means to be a whole human being, alive in the flesh: these personal, intensely felt experiences of Lawrence's, imaginatively realized in his fiction with equal intensity, became far more than merely personal. Lawrence's artistic expression of his experience, for example, speaks very loudly to me. Reading Lawrence's fic tion has forced me to examine innumerable comforting delu sions about myself and my world that I had held unawares, and has forced me to reconsider many other conclusions that I consciously held. He has led me down streets and back- alleys of experience that I had not known existed. Some times the journey was an exhilarating one down sun-bathed, tree-lined, broad and beautiful boulevards; sometimes X was led down narrow and winding paths pocked by dangerous pits land ruts. But nearly always the contour of my map of re- I ality was reshaped or enlarged. What follows in the pages i ahead, then, is one man's interpretation of the adventure of reading Lawrence's fiction. In evaluating that adventure, I hope to report more than personal responses. Just as Lawrence the artist, by looking deeply into himself, found things of relevance to many men, so do I hope that my readings of his works pene trate to the central intentions of the works, and reveal those intentions in a manner that has significance for all of Lawrence's readers. I aim "to accomplish the perennial tasks of criticism, which are: to discriminate the formal organization of works of art; to determine the coherence | and completeness of these organizations; to judge the moral, intellectual, and affective value of what has been discrim inated. I know that these are grand aims; and I am aware |of my limitations as a discriminator of Lawrence's form and j |a determiner of its coherence, just as I am aware of my weaknesses as a judge of his value. Some of these weak nesses and limitations are inherently mine, some are due to the culture I have lived in. They combine to ensure that the remarks that follow, however, are not the final word on Lawrence, nor perhaps an objective and "verifiable" word. -^-Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life (Princeton, 1963) , p^ xviii. I They are, nevertheless, a personal word that aspires to be | jmore than a merely personal word. * * * Past writings on Lawrence fall into three rough phases.j In the quarter century that stretches from the mid-1920's, ; before Lawrence's death, to about 1950, the books and ar ticles on Lawrence concerned themselves mainly with Law rence the man and Lawrence the visionary prophet. This was the period Harry T. Moore described as the "battle of the ! memoirs," when friends and enemies of Lawrence danced on his coffin and traded licks. It was a time when the camp followers quarreled over the deceased's remains, while most of the world ignored his art. (Two happy exceptions were the surprisingly perceptive D. H. Lawrence: An American Interpretation, published in 1924 by Herbert J. Seligmann; and D. H. Lawrence; An Unprofessional Study, which Anais Nin published in 1932, two years after Lawrence's death.) During the decade beginning in 1950, writing on Law rence became less intimate, as the camp followers died off, and more objective and evaluative of Lawrence as an artist, as the university professors^flourished. Lawrence, at last, began to receive the serious critical attention, as an artist, that- he deserved. This was the decade of the im portant scholarly work of Harry T., Moore, and of the criti cal studies by Martin Jarrett-Kerr, F. R. Leavis, Graham 5 Hough, Mark Spilka, and Eliseo Vivas. Vivas's study, D. H. Lawrence, The Failure and the Triumph of Art, an antithetical, carping attack on Lawrence's "formlessness," marked the end of the decade (published in 1960) and typi fied a trend in much of the writing about Lawrence up to that time. More and more, during the 1950's, Lawrence's work had been scrutinized by purely formalistic studies that severely criticized his "failures" as an artificer. And at the same time, many critics examined his work from rigidly narrow points of view: Lawrence as symboliste, Lawrence as moralist, Lawrence as Jungian, Lawrence as neu rotic. More recent Lawrence criticism has striven to tran scend the constraints and limitations of purely formalistic studies. Whereas R. P. Blackmur had attacked Lawrence ear lier for the fallacy of "expressive form," and Eliseo Vivas had criticized him for incoherence of structure, recent critics have attempted either to argue for the validity of "expressive form," or to show that the debate is peripheral and tenuous; and thus they have moved beyond the sterile questions of form to consider anew the questions of meaning, achievement, and value. My own study belongs with the last group. My aim is to remain flexible and unsystematic; to explore the form and the central meaning of Lawrence's fictional works— a 6 I form and meaning derived from internal criticism, but in terpreted in a broad context that assumes that literature is intimately related to life; to consider a group of the 1 ' I novels in a chronological progression which concerns itself I t | with the meaning of particular works and simultaneously i | formulates the larger unity, vision, and meaning that Law- i rence1s work as a whole reveals. My bias should be clear. I am less interested in the artist as maker, and more in- | ! terested in the artist as seer. I will explore the form of Lawrence's work, therefore, mainly as a necessary prelimi nary to a delineation of the vision of man and of the world j that that form expresses. I In his essay "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," I Lawrence wrote, "I see the soul as something which must be developed and fulfilled throughout a life-time, sustained and nourished, developed and further fulfilled, to the very end. . . . "2 Lawrence here states what I take to be his : major theme, the theme that I will chiefly concentrate on j in my study: the struggle of the individual spirit to lib- i ! erate itself, to define and achieve wholeness of being. Lawrence's characters are born into labyrinthine pris ons from which they must struggle to find the exits. Sometimes the prison is the mass, of men in general, the i 2D. H. Lawrence, Sex, Literature, and Censorship (New jYork, 1959), p. 99. 7 herd, or sometimes simply the smaller groups of family or nation; and the struggle is then to achieve individuation. Sometimes the prison is a perverse relationship with an other individual, man or woman, and liberation means to i ■ ^ fracture the relationship. Frequently, a character's fear | of his bodily, sensual self is his prison, and he struggles to escape a purely mental form of consciousness and a fruitless, sterile, deracinated mental life. The prison that entraps Lawrence's characters takes many forms: busi ness, war, convention, egocentrism, sexual lethargy, vel- leity, puritanism, loneliness, other people. To discover and to illuminate these forms of prison is one of my goals in the essays that follow. Frequently, Lawrence's characters strive to find their door of escape from prison in a right relationship. Throughout his fiction, Lawrence explored the possibilities of wholeness or fulfillment through relationships, pushing the theme through a variety of modes: relationship with the opposite sex, with the same sex, with all men in gen eral, with the non-human natural world, with the "dark god." Each of these relationships seems able to be attempted in a false manner which stifles human needs and frustrates or ganic growth; or in one or more true manners which fulfill underlying needs and promote organic wholeness. A common goal of Lawrence's characters is to understand the vari- eties of false and true manners of relationship. It is another of my goals in this study. In a fictional fragment written two and a half years i before his death, and misleadingly titled "Autobiographicalj Fragment" on its posthumous publication, Lawrence spoke about a stone quarry that he had loved as a child, and had revisited as a man: "In this still, warm, secret place of the earth I felt my old childish longing to pass through a gate, into a deeper, sunnier, more silent world.Many of Lawrence's characters share with their creator his longing to "pass through a gate" into a better world (or a better self). In my study, I will examine the variety of gates and doors, and their analogues, which the Lawrence char acters use to free themselves from a repressive and con stricting past and to lead themselves toward a higher world of fulfillment and organic wholeness. During the course of the essays to follow, I will show that doors and gates are not only metaphors for stages of metamorphic growth through which a character passes, but are major structural elements of much of Lawrence's fiction. Not simply doors, which provide escape; but also windows, which supply a vision; houses and other buildings, which can be prisons, as even countries sometimes are— numerous images of doors, windows, 3d . H. Lawrence, Phoenix (New York, 1936), p. 824. 9 houses, and other architecture, like arches and slopes, along with changes of altitude and location, are used by Lawrence to give structure to his heroes' quests for organic j wholeness of being. To the extent that the following essays concern themselves with technique, they concentrate j chiefly on these images and the patterns they form, and on the numerous images of and allusions to religion and myth. Religious images blend with the images of doors and gates to give the quests and the threshold crossed a profoundly religious, prophetic significance. The specific ends of these quests— that is, the or ganic wholeness that Lawrence's characters seek, and that some find--cannot be defined in brief: indeed, the fol lowing essays as a whole constitute that definition. But these words indicate the religious, prophetic nature of Lawrence's achievement: As I brooded on the religion of humanity, the reli gion of evolution, the religion of social and scientific progress, the flesh wearied on my bones. I gradually came to feel that the only recent English writer besides Yeats to break into new spiritual territory outside the Christian boundaries was D. H. Lawrence. . . . "4 4Graham Hough, The Dark Sun (New York, 1960), p. i. PART I: THE SEARCH FOR VISION AND FORM The White Peacock Sons and Lovers "Wide is the gate, and- broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction." "Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Matthew VII: 13-14 CHAPTER I THE WHITE PEACOCK In a letter to Blanche Jennings written six months before he began the third and final version of The White Peacock, Lawrence remarked that "most folks are afraid to grow up; that's why they defer it so long. Real indepen dence and self-responsibility are terrifying to the major ity. . . Lawrence's comment epitomizes the central theme of The White Peacock, in which the characters perma nently defer growing up and accepting self-responsibility. Because they refuse responsibility for their own existences — or as Lawrence might put it, because they deny the life flame within them— they fail to establish satisfactory, . life-fulfilling relationships, and they are left, in the end, trapped in their loneliness, either hardened and un fulfilled fragments of human possibility, or decaying and uprooted human derelicts. The White Peacock is a quiet, pastoral novel, with a kind of feminine charm. It seems quite un-Lawrencean, in many ways, when judged in the light of Lawrence's later 3 - The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore (New York, 1962), I, 19. Hereafter cited in the text as CL. 11 fiction— it has a bashful reticence about sexuality, for example, and it lacks the desperate intensity generated by the situations in all the books from Sons and Lovers on. In The White Peacock, things go quietly to Hell, or rather j Lethe, the figurative setting of the final chapter. But | through its central themes and concerns, The White Peacock foreshadows the life-long preoccupations of Lawrence's fic tion: human growth; the inner conflict between the in stinctual, passionate, unconscious side of man and his cerebral, conscious side; the bodily basis for all human values--i.e., the somatic roots of the spiritual and intel lectual blossom; and the fulfillment of the individual in passionate relationships. The story is a love triangle narrated by Cyril Beardsall, an ineffectual young painter and sometime poet who lives with his sister Lettie and their mother beside Nethermere mill-pond in the English midlands. Across the pond to the north of the Beardsalls1 cottage stands Strelley Mill, where George and Emily Saxton live with their parents and younger sister. George is a powerfully- built, sensual but uncultured farmer who loves Lettie Beardsall. Lettie feels deep physical attraction to George, but she refuses fully to acknowledge it. She tempts him, encourages him, and finally drops him when her fear of the body succeeds in stifling her attraction. Once Lettie 13 turns from George, he finds life pointless and futile. He lacks passionate inner purpose and sufficient strength to live without external props. Without Lettie, he says, he has no foundation on which to build his castle. He searches for an alternative foundation, seeking it in socialism, horse-trading, land speculation, marriage, and in bringing up his daughter. But nothing satisfies him, nothing re places Lettie, and George drifts into drunkenness and lonely, embittered inactivity. At the novel's close, George has been forced by his delirium tremens to retire to his sister Emily's farm, "Among the Marshes of Lethe." There, Emily scorns him; Cyril, after a visit to the farm, decides he has become worthless; a few people give him gentle sympathy; and George waits listlessly for a death he seems to desire. Lettie, after deciding against George, finds little more fulfillment in her life than George does. She marries Leslie Tempest, the wealthy son of a colliery owner and landholder, and goes to live with him at Highclose, Leslie's country manor located across the pond from Strelley Mill and the Beardsalls' cottage. (The triangle of residences corresponds to the triangle of lovers.) When Lettie ehooses Leslie over George Saxton, when she accepts the world of wealth, culture, convention, and socialrespect ability that Leslie and Highclose represent, she does so by 14 denying the passionate, instinctive, sensual attraction she has felt for the more natural, more physical George. She denies, that is, the passionate, instinctive side of her own nature. She reduces herself to nothing more than men tal consciousness. Thus fragmented and alienated from her ; ! innermost, unconscious self, Lettie finds her existence increasingly futile, purposeless, and unrewarding. She finally abandons her self-responsibility completely and begins to live through her children, a life once removed. The struggle between Lettie and George announces one of Lawrence's main themes: the struggle between will- driven, egoistic, cultured women and the more physical, earth-bound men. Lettie prevails in her struggle. She un dermines George's virility, she weakens his hold on life, and she leaves him a broken fragment. But Lettie is no real victor. She suffers from the lack of union with a potent, energizing male--her husband Leslie is as egoistic and cerebral as she--and her idealism and soulfulness have no roots in the physical world. If the idealistic Lettie and the instinctive George could effect genuine union, the novel suggests, each would provide for the other a gateway toward a larger, fuller life. Lettie could provide George the foundation on which to build his castle, and she could share it with him. But such a union proves impossible in The White Peacock--the gates to human fulfillment remain unopened. 15 Thus, we find embodied in The White Peacock the chief underlying convictions of Lawrence's later fiction. Men have their very individuality in relationship, Lawrence ! asserted: the gateway to fulfillment is other people. And | the prerequisite for bridging the destructive gap between j people is assertion of the passionate, sensual side of | human nature. One must accept the wisdom of the body. One must integrate the unconscious and the conscious, the phys ical and the cerebral, into an organic whole. Only such a person, The White Peacock implies, discovers inner, pas sionate purpose and achieves independence and self-respon sibility. And only such a person can realize true intimacy and vivifying contact. Neither Lettie nor George can meet these requirements. Just as The White Peacock offers an early version of Lawrence's world-view, so does it introduce many of the major images and symbols to be developed in later novels. For example, Lettie and George are frequently described in terms of flowers, blossoming, and buds. Lettie conceives of herself as a flower in the bud: "As for me, the flower is born in me, but it wants bringing forth," she remarks to George.2 And Lettie thinks of George as a "great firm bud of life" (p. 55), an image that suggests the phallus as 2D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock (Carbondale, 111., 1966), p. 33. All further references are to this edition. 16 well as a flower waiting to be delivered into bloom. The flower— which has its roots in the soil and grows upward toward the sun, and thus suggests the integrated person who has unified body with soul or mind— becomes in his later j works one of Lawrence's most potent symbols of life. In Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel signifies his sexual attraction to Clara by sprinkling her with flowers. Later, Clara re ceives a bouquet from a waitress immediately after she and Paul first make love. In Women in Love, Ursula Brangwen describes the ideal human as a "walking flower." And in Lady Chatterley's Lover, Connie Chatterley and Mellors weave flowers into each other's pubic hair to sanctify their bodies and demonstrate their oneness with all life. The fundamental images of The White Peacock, however, are architectural and spatial: symbolic structures, loca tions, thresholds, and movement. In the novel's opening scene, Cyril stands on the bank of Nethermere pond, gazing at the water and musing over the degenerate appearance of the aging valley. Nethermere Valley has lost its fertility and become uninhabitable because of the destructive inroads of modern, industrial society. The Tempests, who own the valley, destroy it for profit by converting it into rabbit breeding grounds. As Cyril meditates, George approaches, flops carelessly on the ground, and begins talking of the futility of life in Nethermere Valley. While he talks, he 17 pokes in the earth with his finger. He succeeds finally in uprooting a nest of field bees, whose buzzing has caught his attention. The bees instantly swarm from their vio lated nest, startled and agitated, and stagger aimlessly around their now-unhidden eggs. The circumstances of the bees, who are uprooted from the comfortable and secure nat ural home near to the earth, parallels the circumstances of the Saxton family, which is eventually evicted from its Strelly Mill farm home, as the rabbits overrun the pondside farm and destroy its productivity, and rats infest portions of the pond itself, gradually converting it into a stagnant swamp. The Saxton home must be abandoned, a casualty of commercialism. George's family moves to Canada to begin anew--as Mellors and Connie Chatterley will plan to do in Lawrence's last novel. George, however, stays behind to seek a new home in the midlands. George searches, then, for both a metaphorical and a literal home: he wants to discover direction in his life and to sink deep roots, in order to found a stable and per manent home. He attempts to achieve both goals through marriage to Lettie, as he explains to Cyril after she has married Leslie: You see I built on Lettie. . . . You must found your castles on something, and I founded mine on Lettie. You see, I'm like plenty of folks, I have nothing defi nite to shape my life to. I put brick upon brick, as they come. . . . I have looked to marriage to set me busy on my house of life, something whole and complete. . . . I must marry or be . . . lost. . . . (pp« 259- 260) When George's attempt to found a castle on Lettie fails, he i turns to Meg, whom he marries. He moves with her into the | Ram, a pub which George operates for some time, but that j proves not to be a castle, either. At last, he goes to his J sister's farm, where he is scorned and unwelcome. George i i never builds his castle— he never realizes a satisfying inner purpose nor accomplishes a life-fulfilling relation ship— because he never discovers that the foundation he seeks lies inside him, in his own body which he has par tially denied to please Lettie. George, Lettie, the Saxtons, even Cyril: all under take a search for a home. All move from location to loca tion. Their search and movement give external form to their inner struggles for organic wholeness, and to their quest for life-fulfilling relationships. Cyril expresses the yearning they all feel one afternoon when he comes upon a pair of new-born larks huddled in a nest near Strelley Mill: In my heart of hearts, I longed for someone to nestle against, someone who would come between me and the cold ness and wetness of the surroundings. . . . It seemed as if I were always wandering, looking for something which [the larks] had found. . . . I ran with my heavy clogs and my heart heavy with vague longing, down to the mill. . . . (p. 243) The dying Nethermere Valley; the flight to Canada? the 19 movement among Strelley Mill, Highclose, and the Ram— Law rence's use of these structures and locations marks the early stage of a characteristic technique that he incorpo- i rates into many of his later novels: Ursula Brangwen j leaves the March Farm to initiate her movements around much j of England and Europe; Rupert Birkin first inhabits his secluded cottage, then dreams of his island, and finally flees to the Alps; Connie Chatterley abandons Wragby Hall to rendezvous in the woods with Mellors, and they both escape to London where they plan further flight to Canada; all strive to escape a moribund world and to build a "cas tle" or "nest" of their own, And because each of these characters is a part of the moribund world, until his es cape, his external movement parallels the inner release of a constricted and reduced self-— establishment of an exter nal castle corresponds with the discovery of inner founda tions. In addition to symbolic structures and changes of location, numerous images of doors, gateways, and thresh olds appear in The White Peacock. The doorways underscore, of course, the failure of Lettie and George to become each other's "doorway" to fulfillment. But beyond that sugges tion , Lawrence has used gates and doorways to structure and emphasize the novel's events. Nearly every decisive scene is marked by passage over a threshold, and Lawrence de 20 scribes the failure of George and Lettie as a failure to cross important thresholds. For example, at one point in the story, Lettie seems to be vulnerable to George, willing to accept him— but he cannot overcome his indecisiveness, and he does not ask her to marry him. When George cannot | be coaxed to act, both Lettie and Cyril are disappointed. As the two leave the mill, the gate they pass through is explicitly noted. And although George does not know it at the time, with Lettie's passing through the gate, she passes beyond his reach forever: We waited . . . at the wood gate. We all lingered, not knowing what to say. Lettie said finally: "Well— . . . Good-night— Good-night. . . ." "Good-night," he said, with regret, and hesitation. . . . He lingered still a moment; she hesitated— then she struck off sharply. "He has not asked her, the idiot!" I said to myself. "Really," she said bitterly, when we were going up the garden path, "You think rather quiet folks have, a lot in them, but it's only stupidity— they are mostly fools." (p. 208) Lawrence, in the following chapter, makes his own commen tary on the significance of this gate: "George, as usual, discovered that he had been dawdling in the portal of his desires, when the doors came to with a bang" (p. 209). Soon after George's failure to ask Lettie to marry him, she marries Leslie Tempest. Lawrence describes her life.at. Highclose with the following words, which combine 21 both house and door images: She seemed to live, for the most part contentedly, a small indoor existence with artificial light and padded upholstery. Only occasionally, hearing the winds of life outside, she clamored to be out in the black, keen storm. She was driven to the door, she looked out and called into the tumult wildly, but . . . caution kept her from stepping over the threshold. (p. 318) Because Lettie has earlier feared to accept the instinctive, physical side of her nature, because she has resisted George, who might have provided her with the gateway to an organically growing and blossoming existence, Lettie finds herself in a constraining and tent-like Highclose— living a timid life in a prison of her own making. We have, in these threshold images, the nascent form of what will become in later works— as the essays that fol low will show— a guasi-mythical conception of human growth as metamorphic transformation. In mature form, threshold images marks stages of an individual’s growth, of his transformation, of his increased awareness, or conversely,, of his decline. The White Peacock, then, foreshadows both Lawrence's later themes and his later techniques. The White Peacock may be un-Lawrencean in many ways, as I remarked above, but it provides an excellent introduction to the Lawrencean novel. Sons and Lovers seems to come from an author under going a transformation himself-— and it is thus simulta neously a transitional and a seminal work, a threshold and | a new beginning. My brief discussion of The White Peacock i - - i has aimed primarily at foreshadowing Sons and Lovers, the first truly "Lawrencean" novel, to which I now turn. CHAPTER II SONS AND LOVERS The White Peacock is the work of a gifted prospective writer. Even though it has far more charm and strength than its neglect by the critics would indicate, its imma turity is obvious. It is often over-written, with numerous florid descriptions of natural settings, and sometimes under-written with several confusing gaps in the narrative. Dialogue often seems stilted. One reads the novel and makes constant reference to Lawrence's future work. "Ha! There will be no more of this, after Sons and Lovers," one thinks. Or "This will become Lawrence's chief interest in Women in Love." In short, The White Peacock commands at tention chiefly because of Lawrence's accomplishment in later works. The case of Sons and Lovers seems at first altogether different. Sons and Lovers is a mature work of art, of high quality, which is often called Lawrence's finest achievement and is sometimes regarded as "one of the best novels written in the English language in the first half of 23 24 our century. Yet, despite the respect that the novel deserves in its own right, Sons and Lovers is a transi tional work, the seminal work for both Lawrence the man and! j Lawrence the artist. Through the writing of Sons and j Lovers, Lawrence put behind him several sterile attachmentsj of his youth and thus gained the freedom to go on and ma- J ture as man and artist. In Sons and Lovers, Lawrence clearly delineated his vision of the world, of man's place in it, of the possibilities of life and for life, and of the obstacles that hinder the realization of these possi bilities. All of the fictional traits that can properly be called "Lawrencean"— the sensual, spontaneous prose; the concrete image used symbolically; the apparent repetitious ness; the overt eroticism; the contrast of "phallic con sciousness" or "blood consciousness" with "mental conscious ness"; the concern with the individual in relationships; I |the organic universe, parts of which, like the sun and moon, can become literal forces in the lives of individuals; the hero that struggles toward wholeness of being— combine for the first time in Sons and Lovers. Because of the intimate relationship between Lawrence's life and his fiction— he used his art to work out many of lEliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art (Bloomington, Indiana, 1964), p. 173. 25 his real-life problems, in a sort of self-therapy— the manner in which Sons and Lovers was a transitional, seminal work in Lawrence's private life deserves brief elaboration. His re-creation of his youth and young manhood helped him personally to cross the threshold into maturity and inde pendence. As one critic has persuasively shown, Lawrence needed to die as a son before he could be born as a man. Sons and Lovers portrays that death and re-birth on its final page, when Paul Morel accepts his mother's death and O affirms his own independent life: But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.3 (p. 420) Father Tiverton's theory has been substantiated by Law rence 's biographers, as it has by Lawrence himself in a letter about Sons and Lovers in which he stated that "one sheds one's sicknesses in books— repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them" (CL, I, 234). These conclusions are more than biographically important: they also have important implications for Lawrence's fiction. 2Father William Tiverton [Martin Jarrett-Kerr], D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence (New York, 1951), pp. 23-25, passim. ^All references are to the Modern Library edition of Sons and Lovers (New York, 1962). 26 First, they warn any reader or critic who wishes to understand Lawrence's art on its own terms that he will be unable to do so if he strictly observes the aesthetic prej udices of this age of "internal criticism" and the "bio graphical fallacy." For Lawrence, a novel was more than a linguistic structure self-contained between its own covers. It was a way of assimilating past experience and of extend ing consciousness through an exploration of imagined expe rience. Lawrence's personal problems and emotions there fore often formed the substance of his writing— and because Lawrence was an uncommon man, many of these experiences and emotions seem strange or even abnormal to readers who are less intense, sensual, religious, or penetrating than Law rence. A knowledge of Lawrence's life and other writings, judiciously applied, can help these readers understand Lawrence's intention, and how well he fulfills it, in a given work. Father Tiverton's observations have a second implica tion for Lawrence's fiction: they form the basis for an answer to the most frequent criticism of Lawrence's work-- that it is formless, merely impressionistic; that he su perbly captures the moment in rich detail, but that he pre sents his emotions without structure and, hence, without understanding them. Mark Schorer has labelled Sons and Lovers a "technical failure" because Lawrence thought it 27 enough "merely to repeat one's emotions, merely to look into one's heart and write," a "mistaken notion of tech nique" that condemned Lawrence "merely to repeat the round i j of emotional bondage."^ Frederick Hoffman makes a similar j i criticism this way: j Form for Lawrence was unimportant— though he was I capable of writing aptly finished short tales and nov elettes, his longer novels are held together by a suc cession of moments of crucial experience; its continuity is fitful, the modus vivendi a series of revitalized crises of bodily relationship.5 Another important critic, R. P. Blackmur, has attacked Lawrence for his "fallacy of expressive form."^ Although each of these complaints is partially right— Lawrence does give us his raw emotional crises in his books— all of them are largely wrong because they falsely assume, in Mark Spilka's words, that the "emotional life is formless in it- self."? Lawrence, on the contrary, believed that an emo tional man is purposeful, that he grows. Candid expression of emotion--what Blackmur disparagingly calls "expressive ^"Technique as Discovery," Myth and Method: Modern Theories of Fiction, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1960), p. 95. ^Freudianism and the Literary Mind (New York, 1959) , p. 173. c "D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form," Language as Gesture (London, 1954). ^The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomington, Indiana"^ 1955) , p. 30. 28 form"— therefore leads to explicit ends: to emotional and spiritual maturity, to organic wholeness. As Lawrence claimed in the letter quoted above, one repeats and pre sents again one's emotions to be master of them. Because man is a being with purpose, his emotional struggles are not aimless, but directed, and his consciousness helps him to achieve his aims. An art, therefore, that portrays an emotional struggle is as directed, as "structured" in crit ical parlance, as the struggle itself. Lawrence's art has form, but a form that escapes many readers brought up on the technical experimentation of twentieth century litera ture and on the canons of New Criticism. Lawrence found his form at the source of his art, at the raw experience itself as he envisioned it. A comparison of Sons and Lovers with The White Peacock illustrates Lawrence's growth in candor and understanding as well as his clearer, sharper vision that results. For example, the Beardsall family in The White Peacock occupied a picturesque lakeside cottage and never wanted for money, in sharp contrast with the poverty endured by the Morels in the Bottoms. Lawrence's direct treatment in Sons and Lovers of his indigent youth as a collier's son, without the veneer of gentility, allowed him to contrast Gertrude Morel's soul-corroding pursuit of worldly success with Paul's vivifying plunge into the hidden recesses of the 29 self. A second example is the suppressed relationships in The White Peacock— among the father, the mother, the sons, and the lovers--that Lawrence candidly made the chief sub ject of the later book. Like Paul Morel, Cyril Beardsall, the obvious Lawrence-figure in the first novel, had an un commonly powerful attachment to his mother, and Cyril's relationship with Emily Saxton prefigured Paul's affair with Miriam. But in The White Peacock Lawrence backed away from these relationships when they got too close, and the idealized mother played practically no part in the story after the opening chapters, while the Beardsall father was dropped from the book in the first fifty pages. Similarly, Emily disappeared altogether just when she seemed most at tractive to Cyril, only to return later with a fiance whose presence relieved Cyril from the need for decisive action. But in Sons and Lovers Lawrence had matured enough to con centrate on these suppressed relationships and themes. He showed how a home became a prison for a husband and wife, and a womb for the sons, when mechanistic attachments be tween fragmented beings supplanted loving relationships between purposive, whole individuals. Lawrence summarized these destructive relationships in a letter to Edward Garnett which provides a good synopsis of Sons and Lovers, as well as one of its best brief inter pretations. The relevant portions follow: 30 A woman of character and refinement goes in the lower class, and has no satisfaction in her own life. She has had a passion for her husband, so the children are born of passion, and have heaps of vitality. But as her sons grow up, she selects them as lovers— first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother-- urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they i can't love, because their mother is the strongest power J in their lives, and holds them. . . . As soon as the young men come into contact with women there is a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul. But the split kills him, because he doesn't know where he is. The next son gets a woman who fights for his soul— fights his mother. The son loves the mother:— all the sons hate and are jealous of the father. The battle goes on between the mother and the girl, with the son as object. The mother gradually proves the stronger, because of the tie of blood. The son decides to leave his soul in his mother's hands, and, like his elder brother go for passion. He gets passion. Then the split begins to tell again. But almost unconsciously, the mother realizes what is the matter and begins to die. The son casts off his mistress, attends to his mother dying. He is left in the end naked of everything, with the drift toward death. (CL, 1/ PP» 160-161) Lawrence's synopsis reveals the "sickness" he lost in the book— a near-fatal attachment to the mother which prevented independence and the capacity to love with both body and soul— and also underscores the novel's chief theme: man's need for independence. Sons and Lovers's frustrated char acters are prisoners seeking independence from constraints that stunt their growth.. They live diminished lives, but strive for fuller ones. Gertrude Morel, for example, who felt trapped by industrialism and the lower class that she married into, aimed to transcend that class, vicariously, through the social advancement of her sons. Paul Morel, like his mother, was imprisoned by an industrialism which 31 consumed fourteen hours each weekday and imposed alien and sterilizing goals on him, such as the shop's mechanical J pace that finally broke Paul's health, or the more destruc- j tive business ethic of stifling passion during working | \ hours and leaving love-making for its allotted time after ward. Paul was further imprisoned by his mother's puritan- j ism which caused him to deny his sexuality until he was twenty-four years' old. But Paul's most destructive prison was his mother's devouring love, which robbed him of his independent existence and caused him to become a fragmented being who created a false polarity of physical and spiritual love. Miriam felt herself doubly imprisoned: denied, like Paul, her independent purpose in life by her servant-like position on the farm as cleaning woman, cook, and swine- girl; fragmented and incomplete because, like Paul, her mother's puritanism made her ashamed of her physical, sex ual self. And finally, Clara Dawes was pitifully trapped in her loneliness, unable to make contact with her husband, her co-workers, or her friends, until her passionate affair . with Paul gave her the self-confidence she needed to break out of her self-imposed imprisonment. Thus the people in Sons and Lovers are virtual pris oners, detained on the road to independence and wholeness as human beings. No one has become a full-sized person; everyone suffers from some form of stunted emotional or 32 spiritual growth, and everyone is ensnared in destructive relationships .that are sterile and mechanical for one or both of two reasons: they involve only portions of one's total being or they are not based on respect for the inde pendent "otherness" and separate purpose of others. Law rence portrays in Sons and Lovers his first coherent, fully realized vision of the inhuman state of human beings and their relationships. This is Lawrence's mature vision of industrial man, who has remade himself in the image of his machines, and who treats himself and others like mechanisms or instruments. This is the vision implicit in all of Law rence 's fiction following Sons and Lovers— the condition that all his characters must cope with in their efforts at self-liberation. Just as Lawrence's vision in Sons and Lovers is a matrix for his later fiction— as well as his tracts, polem ics, and life in general— so is Paul Morel's struggle to define himself and to mature into independence and organic wholeness a paradigm for the quests of Lawrence's later heroes. Paul's life shaped the pattern of "expressive form": the growth of the individual organism is a series of metamorphoses, a succession of "rites of passage" that lead to progressively fuller states of being. Mark Spilka has characterized the quest of Lawrence's heroes as essen tially religious, as the "resurrection . . . of the human 33 O soul, within the living body." The vital goal of all Lawrence's heroes is to assert or renew the sacred life within them, a goal that Schorer and Hoffman fail to recog- j i nize as the structural principle which gives Lawrence's | novels their forward movement. j * * * . | I have elaborated my general observations about Law rence's vision and about the ritual struggle of his guest ing heroes at this point because Sons and Lovers is a semi nal work. For the same reason, the Lawrencean vision needs further— more specific— explanation. Lawrence believed in an organic universe. The uni verse was not, for him, a completed system fully explain able by the mechanistic, causal principles that govern mat ter in motion. The sun was no whirling ball of dead gases, the earth and its inhabitants no accidental collection of haphazardly arranged atoms. Lawrence's universe was alive, literally alive— an endless process of becoming. His world was not created, but was being created. New creatures were constantly born, grew toward maturity, and died. And al though each creature was only a temporary incarnation of the on-going, continuous life force, a vital and concrete embodiment of an eternal flux, each creature had its ®Spilka, pp. 22-31. 34 separate vitality and its independent purposes. Every creature had its end and was an end. Lawrence thus stressed purpose over cause, growth and change over stasis,.uniqueness over uniformity, integrated j wholeness over fragmentation, independence over parasitism, j i and interdependence (of integrated and self-directed indi viduals) over egoism or "individualism" (of selfish enti ties that view the world and others as extensions of them selves) . Lawrence saw every living being as unique and isolate, with its independent purpose to fulfill. A flow er's purpose, for example, might be to sink its roots deeply in the soil, to absorb its nourishment, to grow to ward the sun, to blossom and produce its seed, and inevi tably to die. And, paradoxically, no being can fulfill itself in absolute isolation, for no. man is an island. Even the flower fulfills its purpose only through self- nourishing relationships with other matter--it needs the earth and the sun, it needs water, and it needs the wind or a bee. Men no less than flowers have their unique purposes,, which they can fulfill only in relationship. But unlike a flower, a man is not created independent and isolate— he enters the world physically attached to his mother and de pendent on her for every need. Thus, as, a first step to ward individual fulfillment, a man must assert his sepa rateness from his.mother, must struggle to realize his very 35 individuality. Only then can he proceed to the "maturity," "wholeness," or "fullness of being" that I have referred to as the vision Lawrence embodied in Sons and Lovers and the goal Paul strove to attain. Lawrence depicts this growth as a metamorphic process with several identifiable stages: (1) a recognition of one's own separateness and the "otherness" of all things and persons; (2) a discovery of one's inner source of crea tive energy— of the "dark god within one" or Lawrence's Holy Ghost— which can be released, paradoxically, only through right relationships; (3) an acceptance of self- responsibility for the fulfillment of the unique purpose the first two stages imply; (4) a balanced assertion of all one's physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual at tributes under the conditions of recognizing the necessity and interpenetration of them all, and the danger that one may usurp or stifle others; (5) finally, an achievement of creative union with other people and the whole living uni verse that preserves one's individual integrity— epitomized by a sexual fusion of the self with the opposite sex which creates a new person. Lawrence showed in Sons and Lovers how delicate and easily perverted is the process of individual maturation. First, a man has his individuality only in relationships with other people, and while some people nourish individ- uality and acknowledge each person's separateness, others stifle growth by denying each person's inviolate otherness and unique purpose. Secondly, man has a mind--which he can use either to foster or to prevent his self-realization. His mind, for example, can acknowledge the wisdom of his bodily instincts— or it can denigrate the body and stifle the instincts with an imposed "morality." His mind can grant every man's separate purpose, or it can bully other men into pursuing its purpose. Most pathetic and dangerous of all, a man can lose confidence in himself, because of his mind, and deny his own self-importance or abandon his own purpose. This last occurred in The White Peacock, a novel which illustrates, in fact, nearly all of the perversions of maturation I have just cited. Lettie Beardsall and George Saxton failed to establish a life-fulfilling relationship because they violated the "central law of all organic life . . . that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself."^ They both lacked the strength to as-: sert either their isolate selfhood or its sensual, instinc tual core. And in thus denying their innermost selves, Lettie and George forfeited the basis for creative contact with each other— and the novel concluded with Lettie ^D. h . Lawrence, "Edgar Allan Poe," Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City, New York, 1951), p. 75. 37 withering at Highclose Manor and George drowning "among the Marshes of Lethe." Amidst the oceanic chaos of life, Law rence believed, each man must be Noah and build his own i ark, or he drowns. j Like The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers is about man's j requisite isolation and his perilous need to escape it. But because Lawrence had a fuller grasp of the personal ex periences that underlay both novels, he dealt more candidly with those experiences, as I have shown above, and focussed more sharply— and with greater penetration— on specific obstacles that hinder creative relationships and prevent the growth of individual selfhood. * * * Critics commonly describe Sons and Lovers as Lawrence's most conventional novel. In terms of narrative technique — a chronological sequence of overlapping relationships— this description fits. Just another apple in a barrel full of them. However, as Dorothy Van Ghent and Mark Spilka have brilliantly demonstrated, Sons and Lovers is not ex clusively based on a narrative logic, but also on a poetic logic of images and symbols that strengthen and extend the narrative and its controlling vision.10 jn this technical lOSpilka, pp. 40-57. See also his essay, "Was D. H. Lawrence a Symbolist?" Accent, XV (Winter 1955), 49-60. Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function 38 sense, too, Sons and Lovers marks a transitional point in Lawrence's career. As Lawrence was shaping his view of the world, he developed an appropriate manner of writing to express it. j From the first, Lawrence's prose had been laden with | rich, sensual imagery, with detail piled upon detail. He | had a sort of x-ray vision that pierced to the heart of things and discriminated the significant from the unimpor tant, so that his densely-textured passages, at their best, had an intense vividness. (This trait, in part, accounts for Lawrence's pre-eminence among descriptive- and travel- writers.) In his early fiction Lawrence used this gift like a realist, to create full-bodied, concrete, vivid scenes that a reader could easily grasp and involve himself in. Even though he showed a strong tendency toward more expressive images in The White Peacock-— in patterned images of doors, houses, and apples, for example, and in occasional symbolic scenes— Lawrence's own later characterization of the book as "a decorated idyll running to seed in realism" (CL, I, 67) seems accurate. His symbols in The White Pea cock function traditionally either as omens of things to, come or as emphases that underscore what would.be under stood without them— -an example is the white peacock that (New York, 1961), pp. 247-252. I have drawn heavily on these two critics in this section of my paper. 39 defecates on the statue of a man, in a symbolic parallel to the treatment the men of the novel receive at the hands of their women. But in Sons and Lovers Lawrence moved beyond the merely vivid details of realism and began to exploit the expressive possibilities of images and symbols. His images retained their concreteness and extraordinarily literal quality, but they began to perform additional labors of ex pression. As Dorothy Van Ghent says, "Perhaps in no other novelists do we find the image so largely replacing episode and discursive analysis, and taking over the expressive functions of these, as it does in Lawrence.1 1 Furthermore, the symbolic manner that Lawrence developed in Sons and Lovers was unique, differing both from the more traditional symbols of The White Peacock and from the correspondence tradition of symbolism stemming from Baudelaire, which sought to evoke timeless spiritual reality with its sugges tive symbols. Lawrence's characteristic symbols do more than point, underscore, suggest, or evoke. They are con crete and extremely literal, and they express crucial, in timate relationships between men and direct, vital connec tions between men and nature. They portray, that is, Law rence's organic world, in which the moon, the sun, lilies, ^■'■Van Ghent, p. 247. 40 or a stallion can become a literal presence and a concrete force in the lives of people.^2 A passage toward the conclusion of chapter one offers a good illustration. Walter Morel has returned home late i . | at night, drunk, and after quarreling with Gertrude, who is | pregnant with Paul, he runs her out of the house into the garden: The moon was high and magnificent in the August night. Mrs. Morel, seared with passion, shivered to find herself out there in a- great white light, that fell cold on her, and gave a shock to her inflamed soul. . . . The presence of the night came . . . to her. She glanced round in fear. . . . She hurried out of the side garden to the front, where she could stand as if in an immense gulf of white light, the moon streaming high in face of her, the moonlight standing up from the hills in front, and filling the valley where the Bottoms crouched, almost blindingly. . . . She became aware of something about her. With an effort she roused herself to see what it was that pene trated her consciousness. The tall white lilies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was charged with their perfume, as with a presence. Mrs. Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. Then she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy. (pp. 23-24) The moon and the lilies do not point to eternal truths or evoke spiritual realities, as they might in the works of a - * - 2Spilka, The Love Ethic, pp. 40-42. 41 French symbolist or in those of an orthodox Christian or Platonic writer, all of whom conceive of material objects as imperfect representatives of timeless, transcendent, spiritual, ideal forms. Rather, Lawrence's moon and liliesj get as concrete, literal forces in a vitalistic world, forces that can make intimate contact with Gertrude, who j i shares with them a measure of the all-permeating life-forcej i or "quickness." This passage occurs in the midst of a larger narrative— the struggle between Gertrude and her husband, followed by Gertrude's attempts to re-enter the house— and Lawrence does not pause to explain or comment on the mysterious power of the moon and the lilies. He merely presents them and renders their effect on Gertrude, so that we sensuously share with her, if we can, the moon's searing, shocking white light, its "blinding" force. Without inter pretive comment, Lawrence lets the living image speak for itself. The lilies, especially, express this life-force, this "quickness"-?-the yellow pollen they contain is liter ally the life-stuff, the equivalent of the phallus and semen in a man. This is the force that overpowers Gertrude and mocks her estrangement from her husband and the un wanted child she is carrying. The passage continues: Mrs. Morel . . . lost herself awhile. She did not know what she thought. Except for a slight feeling of sickness . . . herself melted out like scent into the shiny, pale air. After a time the child, too, melted with her in the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested 42 with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon. {p. 24) Gertrude1s melting loss of self is emphatically not the sort of merging, the "soul-communion," that Miriam seeks j later with Paul. Nor is it the bodily transcendence and ’ i union with a spiritual infinite that Western thought' (e.g., Christianity, Platonism, Transcendentalism, German Ideal- j I ism) commonly refers to as "transcendence" or "oneness." Gertrude's loss of self means a loss of ego, a trans-per sonal connection between the quickness deep within her and the quickness of other things. It means an identification with the vague and mysterious, but materially real and pow erful, forces of nature— forces that are a continuous flux, and of which the moon, the lilies, the hills, the houses, and Gertrude are only several of innumerable concrete em bodiments. Lawrence's images, then, express a powerful, material, organic universe that is held in tense inter relationships by a potent, flowing life-force. This seems strange and alien to most modern readers. Lawrence's organic view of the world and his belief in extra-biological "quickness" are closer to primitive vi talism than to modern cosmologies. And in an age when even God has died, a living moon is more than many men can under stand. Passages such as those quoted above have often been ridiculed by Lawrence's detractors, and have embarrassed 43 even his admirers, so that many of them attempt "symbolic" interpretations— by which they usually mean to deny that Lawrence meant, literally, what he said. But the fact is that in such scenes Lawrence did literally mean what he j said. He began to write like this in Sons and Lovers, and I he continued in the same manner throughout his career. A reader may agree or disagree with Lawrence's vision, but he must understand its literal reality for Lawrence if he wants to understand Lawrence s work. A clear and sympathetic grasp of Lawrence1s organic universe, of the flow of energy that surges through it, and of the "quickness" that depends on contact with that energy, provides the interpretive key to Sons and Lovers and his later fiction. We see at once, for example■ , that in Sons and Lovers a terrible rupture of organic nature has oc curred, that the flow of vital energy has been choked off, the life-giving connections severed, with the result that the people suffer diminished— or destroyed— quickness, just as a plant without water or sunlight withers. In the pas sages quoted above, for example, Gertrude was afraid, timid, and had a "slight feeling of sickness" in the presence of the life-force. "Phallic consciousness," that is, the sniff of pollen, made her swoon, and when she later dis covered in a mirror that some of the yellow dust had clung to her nose, she quickly brushed it off. Her resistance j 44 | | to, and incompatibility with, these life forces signify an . organic disruption and her own partial "quickness"— which j further manifest themselves in her turning away from her i husband, her reluctance to bear her child, her suppression : of her erotic self, and the unnatural attachments she forms i with her sons. Similarly, Walter Morel's disintegration j s seems clearer when viewed in this light. After Morel and Gertrude quarreled violently and he flung a drawer at her head, Morel stood fascinated as he watched Gertrude's blood drop into the hair of baby Paul and penetrate to his scalp. This blood-communion between Gertrude and Paul literally forms a perverse, two-way flow of energy that unnaturally excludes Morel, leaving him like a tree without sap. After wards Morel shriveled. Like a tree, he literally, physi cally diminished: "There was a slight shrinking, a dimin ishing in his assurance. Physically even, he shrank, and his fine full presence waned" (p. 26). In the same way, when we understand that flowers, for Lawrence, literally contain life, we see more clearly what Miriam lacked— her "shortage somewhere" in Paul's words— and tried to acquire by "absorbing" flowers. These and numerous scenes like them become fully comprehensible only when we understand Lawrence's.world-view and his imagistic manner of portray ing it. * * * 45 "John, the beloved disciple, says, 'The Word was made Flesh.1 But why should he turn things around?" asked Lawrence in the opening words of his long-neglected "Fore word to Sons and Lovers." Lawrence went on to assert that ! I i Christ, the Word, was uttered by the Father, who was Flesh, j Christians, he said, distort the cycle by emphasizing the Word incarnate and ignoring the Flesh that necessarily pre ceded the Word. Christianity emphasizes the fruit, as it were, and ignores the seed, the tree, the roots, the leaves, the sap--all the prerequisites to the fruit. Lawrence, on the other hand, stresses the beginning of the cycle, the seed.1^ Critics have long ignored Lawrence's foreword, perhaps because of its ponderously quasi-biblical style, perhaps because its content seemed rather heady or grandiose for an introduction to an apparently realistic family chronicle. But it deserves attention, because it contributes in many ways to an understanding of Lawrence and his work. First, the foreword forthrightly asserts some of Lawrence's basic beliefs as a young man, several years before his first long essays. Secondly, it joins with the earlier, synopsis l^Lawrence wrote this introduction in a letter to Edward Garnett, dated January, 1913, but he withdrew per mission to publish it in a later letter, and it remained unpublished until Aldous Huxley printed it,, two years after Lawrence's death, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1932). 46 letter to Garnett to provide a fuller statement of Law rence's conscious intentions in Sons and Lovers. Thirdly, ! it reveals yet another way in which Sons and Lovers is a j 111 seminal work: Lawrence worked with religious and mythic themes and images throughout his life, drawing particularly heavily on the Bible. His concern in this foreword for the ignored pre-history of Christ foreshadows his later inter est in the post-Resurrection history, the subject of sev eral polemics and of The Man Who Died. Finally, the fore word suggests that Sons and Lovers has a religious and mythic significance. If we take the foreword seriously, and examine the novel's narrative and images with this sug gestion in mind, it becomes clear that Sons and Lovers is essentially a religious story, and that religious and mythic parallels and images provide important elements of Lawrence's "poetic logic." For example, the mythic element becomes obvious if I I repeat a statement made above "that in Sons and Lovers a I " terrible rupture of organic nature has occurred, that the flow of vital energy has been choked off, the life-giving connectionis severed, with the result that the people suffer diminished— or destroyed— quickness, just as a plant with out water or sunlight withers." This abstract description of the novel's situation shows how similar it is to the traditional myth of the quest for the grail, as we know it 47 from anthropologists and literary critics, and as it was featured in Eliot's The Waste Land. Viewed from this per spective, Paul struggles to cut the umbilical tie to his mother and to make contact with the World Navel. He seeks j to break free from a false communion with his mother--in j which each draws nourishment from the other, in a sort of | I reciprocal vampirism— and to establish with another person } and with the whole organic universe a true communion— in this case the grail-secret which would set nature's life- nourishing forces flowing again. Sons and Lovers1 similarities to the grail story are quite extensive. But I will pursue them only as far as they illuminate the novel's structure and theme. For ex ample, in the grail legend the monarch the Fisher King suffers from a mysterious affliction, usually a wound in the genitals. In Sons and Lovers Gertrude, Paul, and Miriam all suffer similar afflictions: Gertrude gradually forfeits her erotic life as she turns against her husband and takes on her sons as lovers; and Paul remains a virgin until he is twenty-four, when he and Miriam finally succeed in overcoming their sexual inhibitions. Even then, the sex is spiritualized by Miriam, who submits to Paul as if to a religious sacrifice, and Paul does not truly succeed in overcoming his affliction until his affair with Clara. The normal pattern for the mythical hero's adventures, 48 according to Joseph Campbell, is "a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life- enhancing return."14 in addition, the hero usually encoun ters a female temptress, who attempts to sidetrack his quest with offers of a false source of power, but he over comes the obstacle she represents and finally accomplishes a sexual union with a goddess (the magna mater) whose sym bolic womb is the passageway the hero seeks to the life- force. Sons and Lovers has a parallel for each of these aspects of the myth. Both Gertrude and Miriam function as female temptresses, each of them tempting Paul with a de structive form of communion which leaves Paul's physical, sexual self dormant. Communion with Gertrude is a sterile symbiosis which denies independence to either Paul or his mother. On the other hand, communion with Miriam is soul- communion, only on the level of the Word. When Paul recog nizes this, he leaves Miriam as a nun, but she tempts him back again with her spurious sex. Clara Dawes, to whom Paul turns next in quest of communion of both Word and Flesh, is the goddess, the magna mater with the symbolic womb. Before mating with her, Paul achieves several forms of "separation from the world." One is separation from Miriam. J-4<rhe Hero With a Thousand Faces (New York, 1956) , p. 35. 49 Another is abandonment of his mother's egocentric drive for external, worldly success. A third is Paul's defeat of his mother's puritanism and his partial rupture from her: "There was now a good deal of his life of which necessarily he could not speak to his mother. He had a life apart from her— his sexual life" (p. 345). Finally, Paul and Clara make the most overt separation together, on the day of their first physical act of love. Their trip to Clifton !Grove is a clearly marked departure from the world. First, j i they take the train from the city. Then, walking on foot, "They paid their two halfpennies at the turnstile and crossed the bridge" (p. 3 06), afterwards arriving at the j entrance to the Grove, where they.must cross a stile. Eveni then, to make their separation more complete, they descend the muddy cliff to the river below. After their sexual act, Paul emphasizes the departure by observing "Now we're back at the ordinary level" (p. 311) when they have reached j the cliff-top once again, and by elaborately and pointedly cleaning their shoes and arranging their clothes to restore themselves to respectability in preparation for their re turn to the everyday world. In Clara's symbolic womb, Paul at last achieves a communion of the Flesh. j But communion with Clara is solely of the Flesh, and I because true communion, of both Flesh and Word, has not been accomplished, Paul does not complete the mythic hero's 50 quest with an emphatic "life-enhancing return" to the world. His sexual union with Clara vivifies them both, yet it re mains a personal--and partial— regeneration, hardly of i j heroic enough magnitude to heal a ruptured nature. Hence Paul and Clara "return to the world" on a small scale— a | dinner in a public restaurant and a train-ride back to Not-j tingham. On the novel's final page, Paul affirms his ties with the world and turns toward the city, but he is far from a triumphant hero. Comparison here of Sons and Lovers with the mythic pattern demonstrates how very narrow Paul's victory has been, and how great a struggle he still has before him. The religious significance of Sons and Lovers has been implicit throughout my discussion pf mythical parallels. In the first place, the story of Christ itself is a variant of the grail-quest myth, and at least one critic has based his interpretation of Sons and Lovers on the premise that Paul Morel is an analogue of C h r i s t . 15 More significantly, the concrete working out of Paul's quest to understand and to achieve life-fulfilling communion led Paul to a redis covery of the Flesh ignored by Christianity. Paul dis covered in Clara's womb that divinity is physical, not 15Edwin M Moseley, Pseudonyms of Christ in the Modern Novel (Pittsburgh, 1962), pp. 69-86. In none of my remarks above am I consciously indebted to Moseley's work, which takes quite a different tack. 51 spiritual, the Flesh not the Word. He learned that self- transcendence means descent rather than ascension. Paul | confirmed that "John, the beloved disciple" did indeed ■ "turn things around." When we interpret Sons and Lovers from this religious perspective, we see the relevance of Lawrence's seemingly inappropriate foreword, and we can un-r | derstand Lawrence's exasperation at the Freudian critics j who read the novel as if it were a dramatized case-study of the Oedipus complex. Their pseudo-science blinded them to Lawrence's momentous intention--nothing less than a rever sal of The Gospel According to John! Many religious images, allusions, and scenes confirm I and elucidate the religious meaning of Sons and Lovers. j For example, Christmas, The Feast of the Incarnation, re curs throughout the novel as the time of important events. Gertrude and Walter met one Christmas and were married the next. On Christmas, William returned triumphant and bear ing gifts, after his "success" in London. Neither Walter nor William survived as individuals in relationship with Gertrude, and Christmas here serves as ironic commentator on the relationships of these three/ people— the incarnation of false communion and of self-destructive worldly success. Another reference to Christmas, the novel's last, suggests Paul's rejection of these very things. With Christmas ap proaching, Paul's mother continued to survive her deadly 52 illness: "She'll live over Christmas," , said Annie. They were both full of horror. "She won't," he replied grimly. "I s'11 give her morphia." (p. 393) Paul killed his mother with a glass of poisoned milk, an act that symbolizes various things. It meant killing the embodiment of self-devouring love and of false success. It meant killing the person Paul had depended on for nourish ment and his very purpose in life. Ironically, Paul's act of destroying the woman he depended on represented a coura geous assertion of independence . That it happened at Christmas emphasizes the Christian parallels: Gertrude's death forces Paul to stand alone, to be born at last as a man. Comparison of Paul with Christ shows, as comparison of Paul with the mythic hero showed, how precarious Is Paul's hold on life. Paul's birth at Christmas is less a birth,than an eviction from the womb. Other religious days besides Christmas mark important developments in Sons and Lovers. On Good Friday, Paul and Miriam took an outing. Miriam loitered behind the others during the walk, because "She did not fit in with the others; she could rarely get into human relations with any one. . . . " (p. 165) Miriam quivers, Lawrence adds, "as at some 'Annunciation.'" The linking of Good Friday— i.e., Christ's bodily death— and the Annunciation— i.e., Christ's sexless conception— with Miriam strikingly underscores her frigid and intensely spiritual form of communion, and al most equates her with the Virgin Mary. Three days later, on Easter Monday, Paul and Miriam visited a church and paused together at the communion rail, in a gesture that reveals Paul's temporary acceptance of Miriam's bloodless communion. Finally, the chapter "Defeat of Miriam," which ends with Paul's charge that Miriam is a nun who expects him to be a mystic monk, occurs during Holy Week. Numerous other images and allusions draw attention to Sons and Lovers1 religious dimension. Paul's nickname is Postle, a reminder of his namesake St. Paul and the spiri tual love he stood for and Paul struggles against. Miriam, whose name is a variation of "Mary," has on her bedroom wall a picture of St. Catherine, perhaps the most famous virgin after Mary herself, and a "Virginia creeper" grows around Miriam's bedroom window. In one scene, Miriam iden tifies herself closely with Christ. Fearing her attraction to Paul, she prays for divine guidance: "0 lord, let me not love Paul Morel. Keep me from loving him, if I ought not to love him" (pp. 171-172). She will, that is, stifle her love for the sake of the Word— "if I ought not." But she concludes to herself that even though love "caused her shame," she would love Paul as a sacrifice, "as Christ would." The scene clearly indicates that Miriam's love and 54 Christian love are the same in Lawrence's mind, and that both loves make St. John's error of placing the Word before | the Flesh. I will cite three more religious images: in | | the chapter "Defeat of Miriam," Paul reads to Miriam from the Gospel of St. John; Lawrence describes Walter's forfei ture of independence as a denial of the God inside him; and | Lawrence describes Paul's quest as a struggle to realize ! his God. Additional religious images and allusions could be adduced to further demonstrate the religious signifi cance of Sons and Lovers, but the above adequately shows how importantly religion, like myth, figures in both the theme and structure of the novel. * * * I Clearly, Lawrence is a maker of images. One fully understands Lawrence's fiction only through careful exami nation of the images that so largely usurp narrative's ex pressive function. So far, I have discussed the function i and meaning of several patterns of imagery in Sons and t • { Lovers, and I have in passing alluded to several others. In this section, I will briefly examine some of the remain ing image patterns— specifically those of food and clothing — that comprise the poetic structure of the novel. More than fifty times in the action food is explicitly prepared, offered, or eaten. The matter of who prepares food, who offers it, who eats it, and the spirit of the 55 exchange frequently illuminates the characters' attitudes and the nature of their changing relationships. Food, as nourishment, relates intimately to the mythic pattern, just as it relates to the religious theme of communion— or its absence. In this respect, food suggests also agape, the Christian love-feast; food is rarely eaten in a spirit of brotherhood in Sons and Lovers, just as brotherhood is rarely achieved in any activity in the novel. Finally, the fact that the characters in the novel eat so often reveals how much they desire fulfillment. Pathetically, the food they consume seldom leads to growth. As an example, the exchange of food in, the Morel fam ily reveals the unnatural interdependency between Gertrude and her sons, and their perverse exclusion of the father. In the novel's opening scene, Gertrude detained William from going to the fair long enough to feed him. At the fair, he won a prize which he gave to his mother— two egg- cups. The gift thrilled her. Two episodes with Walter contrast sharply with the willing exchange of food between Gertrude and William. First, two pages after William makes a gift of the egg-cups, Walter comes home with some ginger bread and a coconut for Gertrude, which she receives with hostility and without thanks. Some time later, Walter car ries tea in bed to Gertrude, but once again she is resentful and ungrateful (p. 27). This is the pattern that persists 56 throughout the first half of the novel: mother and sons cater to each other, and they ignore the father, to whom they do not offer food, and from whom they do not accept it.! Examples: Walter eats toast and bacon alone by the fire | for breakfast (p. 27) . He prepares his own lunch for the | mine (p. 27). He returns from the mine for the noon meal, j i and is rebuked before eating because he has come home be fore dinner is ready, and after eating because he mussed the tablecloth (p. 35). One night Walter demands food and Gertrude refuses.to serve him, which provokes the drawer- throwing episode. Gertrude then "serves" the baby Paul with a drop of blood that settles into his hair— a blood commu nion against the father (p. 38). . The following day, Walter eats alone (p. 40), and on the following Sunday the family dines without calling him: "Let him lie," says Gertrude (p. 41). Morel returns for lunch one noon, and finds no meal because Gertrude had prepared only enough food for her and the children; so Morel eats the lunch he had taken to the mine, alone (p. 78). Paul and William compete to find mushrooms and berries for their mother (p. 68). Paul re fuses his father's invitation to have a drink with him (p. 72), but he eats out with his mother in Nottingham, al most as though they were on a date (p. 97). There are many more similar episodes, but I will cite just three that par ticularly reveal the different attitudes Gertrude has for her sons and for her husband. When William returns from London for Christmas, Gertrude spends days filling the pan- j try with special treats for him; and when Paul goes to j Jordan's to work, she sends his noon meals with him; but one night when Walter discovers a pork-pie in the pantry | and begins to eat it, Gertrude turns on him and Paul nearly) i attacks him— and Walter flings the pork-pie into the fire- | place (p. 213). These images, thus isolated and brought together, show how pathetically isolated Walter is from his family, and how cruelly they have excluded him. The mother and a son, on the other hand, comprise a closed energy system, a vam- piric exchange of nourishment. Furthermore, if we recall that Christianity stresses, in feasts and communion, nei ther how much food is eaten, nor its quality, but the spirit of brotherhood and love with which it is shared, we see the perversity of Gertrude's rigorously puritan moral ity. We are constantly reminded of the perverse communion of Gertrude and Paul by the repeated bread images. They several times serve each other wafers of bread with butter, and Paul helps his mother with the bread baking. As the friendship between Paul and Miriam grows more intimate, however, Paul briefly becomes less attached to his mother— which he reveals by carelessly burning the bread. Seen in 58 this context, the poisoned milk Paul serves his mother takes on additional symbolic force, as the climax of a pro gression of attitudes expressed by the exchange of food: as a youth, Paul gladly gives food to his mother and re ceives it from her; when he has another source of nourish ment— Miriam— he becomes more careless of his mother's supply, and burns the bread; at last, as his first gesture of emerging independence, he gives his mother unwholesome- food, the poisoned milk. Similarly, other changes of attitude manifest them selves in eating scenes. For example, on William's first visit home after finding work in London, he brings with him lavish gifts of food for everyone. But on his second visit, he brings only Gypsy, who absorbs the money he had previously had for food-gifts. (Significantly, William must buy necessities like underwear for Gypsy, because she wastes her own money on such delicacies as glazed chest nuts.) Gertrude correctly interprets William's failure to bring food to her as a sign that Gypsy threatens her own hold on William, and she subtly coaxes him to turn away from Gypsy. Another illustration of symbolic food exchange occurs after Clara Dawes returns to Jordan's. Clara re mains aloof from her co-workers, cold and somewhat contemp tuous. Paul seeks contact with her, and tries to bridge the distance between them by offering her a chocolate. She 59 accepts— and Paul feels very good. But that evening he discovers that Clara has left the chocolates on her machine, untouched. Clara is unable to accept or share with another. The next day, Paul makes a scene about the chocolates, j pointedly throwing them out the window and pressing several j new ones on Clara. Suddenly, all the forces that keep Clara apart from people— her self-doubts, her fears that others might hurt her, her resentment of past injuries-- converge in the chocolates, and their offer becomes a cri sis: "She felt the three chocolate creams would burn her if she touched them. It needed all her courage to slip them into the pocket of her apron" (p. 268). But Clara gradually gains confidence in herself and Paul, and she slowly emerges from her solitude. Their increased intimacy climaxes in sexual union— and the radical change in their relationship is symbolized by a joyous love feast they share afterwards at Clifton Grove. Alcoholic drinks illu minate Paul1s relations with Baxter Dawes in a way parallel to the chocolates: at the moment of greatest antagonism between them, before their fights, Paul hurls a glass of beer in Dawes' face; but much later, when Paul and Baxter have overcome their distrust and hostility, and have achieved their strangely sober intimacy, their drinking to gether marks the accomplishment. Images of clothing function like food images to ex- 60 press the themes of the novel, Sons and Lovers. For ex ample, Gertrude reveals her feelings of "superiority" by haughtily informing a neighborhood woman that she, Gertrude,: is above repairing stockings to earn extra money, as the i other women in the neighborhood do. But her superiority j looks like foolish pride and self-delusion- when, ironically,) she helps Paul obtain a job in a factory which manufactures, among other things, stockings. Stockings enter into Paul's first day at Jordan's, when he is interviewed for his posi tion: Paul translates for Mr. Jordan an order in French for stockings without toes. (A wonderful symbol for the fragmented people of Sons and Lovers, whose signs of incom pleteness are generally less conspicuous than missing toes.) Just as morality and hyper-spiritual religion stifle the Flesh, so can clothing misrepresent and stifle the flesh that it covers. Fancy dress clothes, to illustrate, were alien to Walter Morel, as Gertrude discovered when she examined the frock-coat he wore on Sundays and was married in. The gentlemanly prosperity portrayed by the coat was a mere facade— its inner packet was stuffed with six-month- old bills, yet unpaid. In chapter ten, Paul must attend a dinner party at the home of a man who had bought one of Paul's paintings. Gertrude alters his dead brother's suit for the occasion, so that Paul will look a gentleman. It seems to Gertrude, now that Paul has sold a painting, that 61 Paul is travelling the same route to "success" that William had taken. But William's old suit fits Paul ill, and after a few dinner dates in his evening suit, he clashes sharply with his mother for the first time, informing her that he ! i does not wish the sort of commercial and social success that she craves for him. Paul wanted to inherit neither j i William's role nor his suit. To wear William's suit was a misrepresentation and falsification of Paul's true self, just as, for that matter, it had symbolized self-destruc tion and self-denial when William had worn it. But of all Lawrence's clothing images, the collar ex presses most. It weighs as heavily on the necks of the men in Sons and Lovers as the albatross weighs on the neck of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. Like Coleridge's albatross, Lawrence’s collars symbolize a crime against organic nature. A too-tight collar is a stricture of the throat (cf. food images) that can cut off the food supply and even choke off life itself. It thus serves as the perfect image to repre sent the strangle hold that Gertrude had on William and tried to maintain on Paul. A stiff collar, in addition, is formal dress, of the kind that a successful man, by Ger trude's standards, would wear, and a collar thus stands for the sort of misdirected striving that measures self-ful fillment by the false standards of the social world. A collar, too, is part of the traditional costume worn by 62 priests and ministers, and therefore suggests the flesh- repressing, intellectual, spiritual, moral religion of Gertrude and Miriam. It thus appears to be one of Walter's healthiest in stincts that he "preferred . . . a scarf round his neck" (p. 19) . A collar embodies all the things most opposite to Walter's nature. Viewed in this light, the scene at the conclusion of chapter one, after Gertrude has regained en trance into the house, foreshadows all the future struggles between Walter and Gertrude: When Mrs. Morel entered, she saw him almost running through the door to the stairs. He had ripped his col lar off his neck in his haste . . . and there it lay with bursten button-holes. It made her angry. (pp. 25-26} It angers Gertrude because it represents a challenge to her domination and to her religious beliefs and social aspira tions. William, however, presents no challenge in this respect: She liked to do things for him: she liked to put a cup for his tea and to iron his collars, of which he was so proud. It was a joy to her to have him so proud of his collars. . . . So she used to rub away at them with her little convex iron, to polish them. . . . (p. 55) William accepts with pride the collars with which Gertrude stifles him. Even though he appears unconsciously to know how dangerous the collars are— he fights with another boy and rips the lad's collar,, and shortly before his death he 63 complains of a collar rash— he is unable to rid himself of the oppressive things. Ironically, Gertrude twice warns i William of the danger that she herself represents. The first time, Gertrude attempts to dissuade William from dat-; ing a girl that interests him with the remark, "... One ’ day you'll find a string round your neck that you can't pull) off" (p. 56). The second time occurs just before William's death, after he complains, "What a rash my collar's made under my chin!" Gertrude replies, "You should wear differ ent collars" (p. 134). But instead, the rash becomes a disease which spreads over his face to his brain, and kills him. The life is literally choked out of William by his collar, which clearly embodies all the perverse qualities of Gertrude's influence. Gertrude's attempt to make Paul wear his brother's old suit therefore represents an even greater threat to Paul than it first appears, and Gertrude's seemingly tender reminiscences as she readies the suit for Paul is simultaneously a grim reminder and an ominous medi tation: "As she smoothed her hand, over the silk collar she thought of her eldest son" (p. 255). These observations explain what otherwise strikes one very oddly: when Paul and Miriam at. last manage to have sex together, the only item of clothing that Lawrence mentions being removed from either of them is Paul's collar: "He never forgot seeing her as she lay on the bed, when he was unfastening his collar" (p, 289). Paul attempts to remove his mother's influence by removing his collar. As the rest of the novel testifies, Gertrude's grip on him is too tight to be so easily escaped; yet, the act of removing the collar does j signify a very important threshold crossed; at twenty-four,j Paul finally asserts his sexuality and escapes his virgin ity. * * * Through its poetic structure of myth, religion, image, and symbol, Sons and Lovers depicts a world of triply alientated men, who have lost contact with themselves, with their fellow men, and with organic nature. Lawrence per ceived the terrible irony that in an age of "rugged indi vidualism" and fundamentalist Christianity, men rarely achieved either true selfhood or genuine communion. In Sons and Lovers, industrial man is less than a per son. He is a faceless, economic unit, an egocentric com petitor whose prosperity, or mere survival, requires him to outmaneuver his rivals— as Gertrude outmaneuvered the pot tery man to buy his dish at a bargain price; or as Paul captured first prizes for his painting and got invitations for dinner with his wealthy patrons; or as William left the mines behind him as he climbed out of his class. Indus trialism, in Sons and Lovers; further de-^humanizes men by forcing them to adjust to mechanical routines rather than 65 natural rhythms— like Walter's daily descent into the mines, which parallels the phallic motion he has lost? and which caused him to live in nearly-constant darkness; or like Paul's daily roundtrip to the Nottingham factory which man-j ufactured appliances for broken people. Christianity in Sons and Lovers is no more humane than j ” " • i industrialism. Gertrude's religion honored the Word but debased the Flesh. It consisted in pious maxims that lacked feeling, and therefore fostered neither individual growth nor community among individuals. The food imagery discussed above revealed that in her home the staff of life signified mechanistic interdependence, in the case of Ger trude and her sons, and a cruelly destructive exclusiveness, in the case of the family versus Walter, but never commu nion. Even Gertrude's overt attempt at community lacked the necessary warmth and passion, and resulted in intellec tual "cooperation": she joined the Women's Guild, "a little club of women attached to the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which met on Monday night . . . to discuss the benefits to be derived from cooperation, and other socail questions" (p. 51). Miriam's religion, like Gertrude's, denigrated the Flesh. Her intensely spiritual Christianity was less intellectual than Gertrude's, but more militantly exclusive of sex. Miriam's communion was the false commu nion of the Gadarene swime, which plunged as one to their 66 physical death. Stated so briefly and directly, the circumstances of ! the characters in Sons and Lovers sound bleak and negative, j But these circumstances can be altered. They are the | status quo, the starting point from which a character struggles toward maturity. They are the prison from which ! j one must liberate himself. From this perspective, the first part of Sons and Lovers may be seen as a delineation of the "prison," and the second, longer part as an account of Paul's efforts toward liberation. In fact, Lawrence consciously thought of his characters as prisoners seeking liberation— that is, as diminished persons searching for openings and passageways to fuller, more vital states of being— and, as we have seen, he used many architectural images, especially doors and gates, to convey his charac ters' conditions and struggles. As Paul sits in the Best- wood Co-op reading-room, scanning the job advertisements, for example, Lawrence remarks that "already he was a pris oner of industrialism" (p. 89). And one night when Paul walks Miriam home, they have a moment of extreme spiritual intimacy en route, a soul-communion beside some ivory roses with a "white, virgin scent." Lawrence describes Paul as feeling "anxious and imprisoned" (p. 161). And as he did in The White Peacock, Lawrence frequently included images of buildings and homes: the Morels battle, for example, for the mastery of the home— which the battle converts to a prison; Clara and Baxter Dawes represent a "broken home," and the reconciliation Paul effects is described as having "put their house together"; Miriam and Paul perform their I | act of sex at Miriam's grandmother's cottage, almost like i mock home-making. And throughout the novel, Lawrence em- j phasized significant events and moments of decisive action j or growth in the lives of the characters with images of doors and gates. An illustration is the use of doors and gates, as well as the house, to express the extent of Wal ter's collapse. In chapter one, Morel arrives home angry, kicking open the' garden gate and breaking the latch. In the house, -he and Gertrude fight, and he forces her out into the garden, bolting the kitchen door behind her. After the drawer-throwing.fight between the Morels, during which Walter's manhood "broke," the house and the doorway signify the change in the Morels' relationship. They once again fight, but this time he abandons the house. Like a child, he wraps up a parcel in a blue handkerchief and "runs away from home." But, he dumps the bundle at the garden gate, and returns meekly that night, after a bout of drinking. Morel has not only lost dominance in his home— illustrated by the fact that it is no longer Gertrude who. leaves— but he also lacks the courage to take decisive action and cross an important threshold— the garden gate 68 where he dumps his parcel. But the most important gateways in Sons and Lovers are figurative. Just as other people form the bars of many "prisons," so do they provide the doors of escape. As Paulj explains to Miriam, one grows to fuller life through rela- j tionship with other people: | . . . My mother, I believe, got real joy and satisfac tion out of my father at first. I believe she had a passion for him; that's why she stayed with him. After all, they were bound to each other. . . . That's what one must have, I think, . . . the real, real flame of feeling through another person, . . . the something big and intense that changes you when you really come to gether with somebody else. It almost seems to fertilize your soul and make it that you can go on and mature. (p. 317) The second portion of Sons and Lovers relates Paul's at tempt to fertilize his soul through a passionate relation ship and to "go on and mature." Paul's quest-— to define and to achieve fullness of being— is the chief subject of the novel and, for that matter, that quest is the chief subject of Lawrence's life-time body of fiction. Because of this, I will examine in some detail the changes and de velopments of relationships that occur in part two of Sons and Lovers. And in order to give focus to my discussion, I will briefly summarize and extend some of my remarks to this point. The "flame of feeling through another person" that Gertrude experienced during the first months with her hus band does not succeed, finally, in opening up for her a 69 wider, fuller more independent existence. Instead, the Morels' passionate relationship disintegrates, partly be cause they are too different from one another— he purely sensuous, she extremely moral and intellectual— to effect aj lasting union, partly because Walter refuses to accept his | responsibilities, and partly because Gertrude does not re spect Walter's integrity and individuality. As the Morels' relationship crumbles and she turns against her husband, the whole family suffers disastrous results. For example, when Walter feels his wife gradually withdrawing her love from him, and when the family begins to pain him by exclud ing him from their activities, his natural physicality, his spontaneous warmth, and his sensuousness become mere ugly brutishness. His lovable urge to share things with people, signified by his numerous rebuffed offers of food to Ger trude, converts itself, at home, to resentment and hostil ity, and finds meager satisfaction on week-ends when he acts as part-time bartender, where people pay for what he offers them. Walter finally loses his self-pride, his in dependence, and even his manhood, becoming virtually a dependent child in his own home. The home that had once been filled with love and warmth at last seems to him al most a cage, a place from which he would like to escape and to which he is always reluctant to return. And Gertrude loses as much as her husband does. Because she lacks a ! ! passionate love-relationship with a man, the physical por tion of her total being slowly atrophies, and she becomes more and more exclusively cerebral. This makes her an ex- j cellent "manager," it is true, but the home she manages | often seems to her, as to Walter, a prison, and she fre quently yearns to leave it. Worse still, she loses her in-j dependent grip on life, and begins to live vicariously j j through her sons. Both Morels, then, because of their fractured relationship, become fragmented and incomplete beings, incapable of living fruitful, independent lives. The sons suffer, if anything, even greater losses than the parents. Both William and Paul pursue bourgeois vi sions of success given them by their mother, a success that externalizes them and helps stifle their inner lives. Both come to hate their father. Both experience tormenting dif ficulty in asserting their physical, erotic selves. Nei ther of them can love a woman with their whole being. Both of them, in short, are trapped by their mother's sterile and mechanistic love that robs them of their independence and stunts their emotional and psychological growth. Paul, especially, finds it impossible to live a life of indepen dence from his mother. As a child, his life's ambition is to bring the mother her fulfillment; later, about the time that Paul seeks his first job, he plans "quietly to earn his thirty or thirty-five shillings a week somewhere near 71 his home, and then, when his father died, have a cottage with his mother. ..." (p. 89). These are Paul's circum stances when he first meets Miriam Leivers. * * * During Paul's long affair with Miriam, he strives to achieve, first, an independent consciousness, that is, an independent understanding of life and self; secondly, the strength to assert that individuality; thirdly, an accep tance and the strength to assert the physical, sexual por tion of his total being; and finally, an intimate relation ship with someone other than his mother. Paul struggles, in sum, to be liberated from his mother's domination. Miriam, like Paul, is a prisoner of her past and her environment. Like Paul, she exerts little influence over her own existence; but unlike Paul, she consciously resents it. She is a romantic, dreamy girl, who conceives of her self as "something of a princess turned into a swine-girl . . . [and] a maiden in bondage" (pp. 142-145). Miriam hates her position as swine-girl. She desperately wants to learn things, and she wants to be considered learned by others. When Paul and Miriam first meet, therefore, they have a great deal in common: each is more or less in bond age; each is intellectual and inquisitive; each has re pressed his sexuality. Moreover, each has great difficulty establishing deep relationships with other people. As Paul and Miriam grow increasingly intimate, each helps the other to partial attainment of his aspirations. Ultimately, their relationship collapses, but in the interim, each pro- i vides for the other a gateway to fuller life and greater . j self-knowledge. • Paul and Miriam rapidly establish intellectual inti- | 1 macy. Miriam wants to learn, and Paul is willing to teach. Together, they read fiction and philosophy and poetry; they discuss art and artists. Paul teaches Miriam algebra and French. And as Miriam acquires abstract knowledge, she prompts Paul toward knowledge of himself and life. She stirs Paul's mind and promotes a steady growth of his con sciousness. Paul's newly-awakened intellectual vivacity reveals itself soon after he and Miriam begin to see each other. For example, when Miriam asks Paul why she likes a picture he has painted, he replies: It's because— it's because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it's more shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really. (p. 152) Paul's halting explanation illustrates how Miriam urges Paul to consciousness with her probing questions. It also shows what it is that he is becoming conscious of: that one must penetrate the insubstantial appearance of things— which is mere shadow and dead crust— and lay bare their 73 I vital core if he is to understand life. Paul's reply fore shadows the time when he will strive to see beyond the dead crust of his mother's imposed vision, and when he will j attempt to abandon her shadowy, cerebral world and embrace j the physical world of shimmery life. ; i When Paul first begins to visit the Leivers' farm, he i has still developed no intellectual independence from his mother. One day, for example, he and the men debate the issue of nationalization of the land, and Paul unconsciously argues his mother's views, since "these were as yet his own" (p. 157). But once in contact with Miriam and the Leivers, Paul begins to discover that they use their minds in a dis tinctly different way from his mother's logical, practical, 1 utilitarian mentality. He soon understands that his mother's materialistic intellectuality helps one get ahead in the world of affairs, but does not equip one for under standing either himself or the larger world, as Miriam's probing intellectuality does. Gertrude's logicality is mainly pragmatic, middle- class striving and puritanical moralizing, whose function is less to help Paul realize himself than to use him to attain Gertrude's own vicarious fulfillment. On the other hand: Miriam was the threshing-floor on which he threshed out all his beliefs. While he trampled his ideals upon her soul, the truth came out of him. She alone was his 74 threshing-floor. She alone helped him towards realiza tion. (p. 227) Through his relationship with Miriam, Paul comes to see the j weaknesses of his mother's way of thinking, and to under stand the necessity of filtering his thoughts through a ! j I different kind of consciousness. He turns against her at- j titudes about art, religion, and the social world, and be- j gins to shape a world-view of his own. Miriam literally provides Paul with a doorway to an independent consciousness and a measure of self-direction. But as Paul seeks to realize the God within him, he sets aside his intellectual interests, and he tries to overcome his sexual inhibitions. Here, Miriam can be of no help to Paul. Her own sexuality is even more repressed than his. When Paul initiates this new struggle toward acceptance of the physical, sexual portion of his total being, therefore, he and Miriam are unable to duplicate the intimacy they achieved on the cerebral plane. In other words, they find it impossible to complete the relationship they have formed, impossible to achieve an intimacy that involves their total humanity. As Paul gradually turns from the shadowy world of the mind and seeks a confrontation with the depths of emotion and passion, his union with Miriam disintegrates. A main reason for this disintegration— but far from the only rea son, as I will show below— is Miriam's fear of the body. I Miriam has always been from the beginning of her associa- j ' " ; tion with Paul, physically afraid. She feared the chicken | pecking grain from her hand, for example, on Paul's first | visit to Willey Farm. She panicked when Paul pushed her up | and down in a swing with even mild pressure. She was even i | timid crossing stiles.Paul's repressed passions, on the i * other hand, have sought expression from the beginning. One early example was when he horrified his sister Annie with ! |his sacrifice of her doll Arabella, which he burned on an | altar of bricks, afterwards smashing the charred remnants I of arms and l e g s . 17 Another time, as Paul and his mother i took a walking trip to Willey Farm, he pointedly insisted to her that he thought the mine machinery was beautiful be cause he "liked the feel of men on things" (p. 123). As Paul grows older and his love affair with Miriam becomes progressively more intimate, on a cerebral plane only, Paul's passions more and more persistently demand recogni tion. His relationship with Miriam starts to dissatisfy l^Notice that each of these physical actions which frighten Miriam are characterized by an up-and-down motion, just like the sex act that she later fears. l^The altar is especially significant— the burning of the doll is a pagan ritual. Paul, the child of a puritan mother who has consecrated him to spiritual love, here foreshadows his later dissent from his mother's moral stan dards and his future resurrection of the passions, as well as the paganism of Lawrence's later work. 76 him and make him restless, even though he did not know himself what was the matter. He was naturally so young, and their intimacy was so abstract, | he did not know he wanted to crush her to his breast to i ease the ache there. He was afraid of her. The fact j that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in | him been repressed into a shame. (p. 179) j t In time, Paul seems consciously to understand the struggle j within him, and he starts to turn against Miriam and the intellectuality and spirituality she represents. His anta gonism toward her increases until, one day as they walk in Miriam's garden, he reacts explosively to her fondling of the flowers; he bursts out with a series of questions and accusations: Why must you always be fondling things? . . . Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart, out of them? . . . You wheedle the soul out of things. . . . You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere. (p. 218) Soon after this outburst, Paul breaks off with Miriam, after writing her a letter in which he describes their love as sterilely, exclusively soulful. "In all our relations no body enters" (p. 251). He calls her a holy nun. Paul turns for sexual satisfaction to Clara Dawes, a large-bosomed, sensuous woman a few years Paul's elder who has separated from her husband. It is ironic that Miriam, in a sense, despite her sexual failure, still provides Paul with the passageway to sexual satisfaction, because she introduced Paul and Clara. But Paul does not, however, 77 initiate his therapeutic, passionate relationship with Clara before returning to Miriam (in chapter eleven, "The I Test On Miriam'1) for a final attempt to achieve bodily, i sensuous intimacy with her. He openly confronts her with his physical cravings. Paul convinces Miriam that sexual love is "the high-water mark of living," but when they at j last have sex, it is not the passionate union that he had ! sought; instead, Miriam fails the "test" by merely submit ting to Paul, by sacrificing herself to him: She was very quiet, very calm. She only realised that she was doing something for him. He could hardly bear it. She lay to be sacrificed for him because she loved him so much. And he had to sacrifice her. For a second, he wished he were sexless or dead. (p. 290) Miriam has corroborated Paul's accusation that she has a shortage somewhere. Her pathetic attempts at sexual union display all too clearly how exclusively spiritual her love for Paul is. Paul informs Miriam that he doesn't want "another mother," that he wants "only to be free" (p. 296). They separate decisively, their eight-year effort to achieve complete love a failure. However, Miriam's failure of the "test" falls far short of completely accounting for the failure of her rela tionship with Paul. In recent years, Lawrence's most in fluential critics have emphasized Miriam's soul-sucking spirituality and her sexual failure in order to argue that she defeats herself in the collapse of her love affair. 78 In their efforts to document the inadequacies of the "split consciousness" theory and to counter reductive, oversimpli- i [ fied Freudian interpretations of Sons and Lovers, these [ critics have themselves sometimes been guilty of oversim plification. They have minimized the extent to which Paul j remains embroiled in an oedipal attachment to his mother, j i and thus the extent to which Gertrude can be blamed for j Miriam's defeat. And they have overlooked altogether the important truth that Miriam, like Paul, positively wanted to overcome her sexual inhibitions, and that Paul therefore failed her. Because the burden of my argument is that Paul and Miriam are both figurative prisoners that seek libera- ation through their relationship with each other, both of these last points deserve spelling out. First, because it has never been acknowledged, the second point— that Miriam did indeed wish to get into closer touch with her body and her passions. Miriam has much less of the "nun" in her makeup than Paul can admit, Even though Mark Spilka is correct when he asserts that "the chief 'split' between Paul and Miriam comes from the abstract nature of their love," and that "the final responsibility for this split belongs with Miriam, " -*-8 one reason that Miriam remains a "nun" is that 1SThe Love Ethic, p. 66. 79 Paul is unable to help her pry open the convent door. Miriam demonstrates, on the first occasion when she and Paul are together, that she can overcome her physical fear with the help of a tender, patient assistant. She had been; terrified by the thought of the chicken pecking grain out of her hand, but Paul patiently convinces her that she has I nothing to fear. Through soothing, gentle words, and re peated illustrations, he convinces her: At last Miriam let the bird peck from her hand. She gave a little cry— fear, and pain because of fear— rather pathetic. But she had done it, and she did it again. "There, you see," said the boy* "It doesn't hurt, does it?" She looked at him with dilated dark eyes. "No," she laughed, trembling. (p. 128) Similarly, Miriam wished to experience the pleasure of sex. Paul's body at times fascinated her: "She wanted to run her hands down his sides" (p. 189). And she was attracted to the same creative, life force that attracted Paul, as the following scene shows. Paul has taken some warm eggs from a nest and holds them in his hands: Miriam could not help touching the eggs, and his hand, which, it seemed to her, cradled them so well. "Isn't it a strange warmth!" she murmured, to get near him. "Blood heat," he answered. (p. 223) Miriam here crowds physically close to Paul; she can't re- 80 sist touching the eggs; she is fascinated by their warmth ("blood heat"): clearly, Miriam is not entirely a disem bodied nun 1 Clara Dawes, who certainly must be granted some exper tise on matters of sex and passion, also testifies to Miriam’s sexual potential. When Paul says that Miriam is sexless and "wants a sort of soul union," Clara replies that "You haven't found out the very least thing about her. . . . She doesn't want any of your soul communion. That's your own imagination. She wants you" (pp. 277-278). It is true, of course, that when Paul afterwards returns to Miriam to verify Clara's assertion, Miriam fails the "test." But a scene between Paul and Miriam, after their unsuccess ful attempts at sexual intimacy, eloquently qualifies Miriam's failure: "When I come to you," he asked her, his eyes dark with pain and shame, "you don't really want me, do you?" "Ah, yes!" she replied quickly. He looked at her. "Nay," he said. She began to tremble. "You see," she said, . . . "you see— as we are— how can I get used to you? It would come all right if we were married." He lifted her head, and looked at her. "You mean, now, it's always too much of a shock?" 81 "Yes— and— " "You are always clenched against me." She was trembling with agitation. "You see," she said, "I'm not used to the thought— " "You are lately," he said. "But all my life. Mother said to me: 'There is one thing in marriage that is always dreadful, but you have to bear it.1 And I believed it." "And still believe it," he said. "No," whe cried hastily. "I believe, as you do, that loving, even in that way, is the high-water mark of living." "That doesn't alter the fact that you never want it." "No," she said, taking his head in her arms and rock ing in despair. "Don't say sol You don't understand." (pp. 290-291) This scene— certainly one of the most poignant in Sons and Lovers— boldly underscores the fact that Paul also fails Miriam. She is right, he does not understand. He is so possessed by the urge to satisfy his own sexual desires and to define the role of passion in a man's life, that he has no patience to deal gently with Miriam's trepidation. That is not to say that Paul is cruel or selfish: it is simply that his own struggle to cast off his cerebral con sciousness and assert his sensuous masculinity requires so much energy and attention that he has none to spare in assisting Miriam. As I have said, Lawrence's critics have generally not understood how Paul fails Miriam in this 82 respect, and how he thus contributes to the failure of their relationship. i The other major cause for the failure of their rela tionship— and the second facet of Sons and Lovers that some recent critics have tended to minimize— is, of course, the ; strength of Paul Morel1s continuing attachment to his j mother. This hardly needs elaborate documentation: Ger- j trude is clearly jealous of Miriam throughout the course of Paul's affair with her, as she had been of William's girls. A single episode, in the crucial chapter "Strife in Love," illustrates both the strength of Paul's affection for his mother and its unequivocally oedipal nature. Gertrude has complained to Paul that she is only his servant, and that the rest of him is for Miriam. He answers her with the wailing cry, "You know it isn't, mother, you know it isn't. . . . No, mother— I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you." Paul rushes to her chair- side, and As he stooped to kiss his mother, she threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his shoulder, and cried, in a whimpering voice . . . "I can't bear it. I could let another woman— but not her. She'd leave me no room, not a bit of room— " And immediately he hated Miriam bitterly. "And I've never— you know, Paul— I've never had a husband— not really— " He stroked his mother's hair, and his mouth was on 83 her throat. . . . "Well, I don't love her, mother." (p. 213) As mother and son are thus making love, Walter Morel comes j through the door. "At your mischief again?" he accuses. Within an instant, the two rivals, father and son, nearly | come to blows— as William and his father had— but a fist- j fight is prevented when Gertrude faints. Later that night, j ! 1 before he goes to bed, Paul begs his mother, "Don't, sleep j with him, mother." As Paul himself goes to sleep, his soul rests "at peace because he still loved his mother best." In the scene immediately following, Paul accuses Miriam of wheedling the soul out of things because she has a shortage somewhere, and breaks with her. There is no doubt, then, that one reason for the dis- I integration of the love between Paul and Miriam is that "he had come back to his mother. Hers was the strongest tie in his life" (p. 222). Despite the large measure of freedom that Paul has achieved, then, despite his unusual capacity for a sensuous response to the world around him, Paul has not gained liberation from the incestuous attachment that he and his mother— both quite innocently— have formed. Paul turns against Miriam because she fails him sexually, it is true, but also because she wants the soul that he has placed in his mother's hands. And Gertrude, brooding over the new discoveries that Paul has made— about sex, about the emotions, about passion: about life— knows that she 84 cannot hold Paul forever simply by satisfying his spiritual needs: . . . It was not enough. His new young life, so strong and imperious, was urged towards something else. It made him mad with restlessness. She saw this, and wished bitterly that Miriam had been a woman who could take this new life of his, and leave her the roots. (pp. 222-223) Significantly, this passage occurs in the chapter "The De feat of Miriam," just before Paul turns to Clara, a woman who will "take this new life" of Paul's, and leave most of the soul that Miriam competes for in his mother's care. * * * Just as Miriam had helped Paul to form his mental con sciousness, Clara Dawes helps him extend that consciousness to include the sexual, emotional, physical portions of his total being. Paul's relationship with Clara is so nearly j exclusively physical, that she can almost literally be de scribed as his gateway to passionate fulfillment. She is not, however, merely Paul's instrument-— in fact, Paul proves to be as much help to her as she is to him. Law rence's description of their first meeting, one afternoon at Miriam's house, masterfully anticipates the role each will play in the other's life: Clara sat in the parlour reading. He saw the nape of her white neck, and fine hair lifted from it. She rose, looking at him indifferently. To shake hands she lifted her arm straight, in a manner that seemed at once to keep him at a distance, and yet to fling something to him. He noticed how -her breasts swelled 85 inside her blouse, and how her shoulder curved hand somely under the thin muslin at the top of her arm. (pp. 229-230) This first image of Clara foreshadows the intensely physi cal part she plays in Paul's life, and the sensuous reac- ; tions he has to her: he is always aware of her throat, of : the shape of her breasts, of the down on her arm, or of thej i texture of her skin. She answers to the sensuous, erotic need in his life. Similarly, the scene reveals Clara's situation— her extreme isolation from others and her reluc tance to make contact (her manner seems to "keep him at a distance"), as well as her unconscious urge to transcend that isolation (her manner seems also "to fling something to him," as though she is sending Paul a signal that she needs help). j When Paul first meets Clara, she is an embittered feminist, antagonistic towards men, and aloof and suspi cious even of other women. She had left Baxter Dawes after five years of marriage. Or rather, her coldness and aloof ness had driven her husband away. As Paul later explains to Miriam, Clara had been "only half-alive? the rest was dormant, deadened. And the dormant woman . . . had to be awakened" (p. 317). Clara, then, like Paul, needed what Miriam calls a "baptism of fire in passion" (p. 318), an experience of the "flame of feeling through another person" that had fertilized Mrs. Morel's soul. 86 Paul and Clara rapidly make their sexual union. Law rence achieves some of the most intensely sensuous writing of his career in the chapter "Passion," where Paul and Clara bed down by a river-bank, under the noses of a small herd of cows, after a desperate struggle along the river's red mud banks. Later in the same chapter, Paul's desires reach an unbearable pitch, with every nerve and sense quiv ering, as he lusts for Clara during a pointless drama that he takes her to, and as he and Clara— in a scene whose comedy rivals Fielding— sit and play cards at Clara's house, wishing urgently that the mother would go to bed so they can be alone. As the chapter concludes, Paul takes Clara on the living room floor, as her mother sleeps upstairs.. Such intense passion, of course, soon burns out. Be- for long, Paul and Clara find that their sex has begun to lose its zest, and they add spice to it with daring experi ments, like having sex very near the water, or very near a path where people are walking. Soon, too, Clara becomes discontent with being solely Paul's night-time lover, and she begins to yearn for intimacy on planes other than sex ual. Because Clara can compete with neither Miriam nor Gertrude in this sphere, Paul begins to draw away from her. Before long, Clara is accusing Paul of distance: "You've V. never come near to me. You can't come out of yourself, you can't" (p. 362). Paul's attachment to his mother has still 87 not been broken, and he remains unable to enter into a love that is both physical and spiritual. Paul cannot come out of himself in personal relation ships. He cannot open up to others. But through his "bap- ' tism of fire in passion" with Clara, he learns to transcend ; himself on a different plane: he discovers his relation to ! supra-personal forces, to the "life force," the whole liv- j ing universe: As a rule, when he started love-making, the emotion was strong enough to carry with it everything— reason, soul, blood— in a great sweep, like the Trent carries bodily its back-swirls and intertwinings, noiselessly. Gradually the little criticisms, the little sensations, were lost, thought also went, everything borne along in one flood. He became, not a man with a mind, but a great instinct. . . .It seemed the wintry stars were strong also with life. He and-they struck with the same pulse of fire, and the same joy of strength which held the bracken-frond stiff near his eyesheld his own body firm. It was as if he, and the stars, and the dark herbage, and Clara were licked up in an immense tongue of flame. . . . (pp. 363-364) Clara has provided Paul with a gateway to the shimmery life-stuff, beyond the dead crust: Paul enters her womb, and passes on to contact with the mysterious life-stream itself. Sex with Clara has been impersonal, elemental. His immense passion with her is an "initiation and a pas sion. . . . But it was not Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. . . . It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force" (p. 354). Through Clara, Paul discovers depths that he cannot fathom — and that Lawrence, as yet, can fathom neither. They are 88 an aspect of the "God within you" that Lawrence just begins to explore in Sons and Lovers; but they are discovered ) 1 through Paul's passionate relationship with Clara. As the fire dies down* and their loving becomes more mechanical, Paul and Clara begin to fight. Finally, they see less and less of each other. They part for good when ! Paul arranges for Clara and her former husband Baxter to j I meet, after he has prepared each of them for the meeting. Through their relationship with Paul, both Clara and Baxter have grown to the point that they can re-create their failed marriage. Clara has lost her bitterness, and has gained sufficient self-assurance so that she can open up to others. Her passion for the young man had filled her soul, j given her a certain satisfaction, eased her of her self-mistrust, her- doubt. Whatever else she was, she was inwardly assured. It was almost as if she had gained herself, and stood now distinct and complete. (p. 361) Paul and Clara, then, dissolve their relationship without regrets, and with each of them the better for having expe rienced it: "Together they had received the baptism of fire, each through the other; but now their missions were separate" (p. 361). * * * When Paul finishes with Clara, she rejoins her husband, in "The Release," the penultimate chapter of Sons and Lov ers. The "release" of the title, however, refers not to 89 Clara, but to Gertrude. It is the chapter she dies in, after her long and painful deterioration from a cancer. The only release from his mother that Paul achieves in the chapter, however, is the purely literal release that fol- j lows from her physical absence: Gertrude is no longer j present to exert direct influence. But Paul remains spiri-j j tually dependent on his mother, after her death; and be- j cause he has never been able to sever the umbilical cord and accomplish his independent existence as a separate, integrated being, Paul falls into the same inertness, the same "drift toward death," that Gertrude had experienced after the death of William, to whom she had been overly attached. "Everything seemed to have gone smash for the young man. . . . Everything seemed so, different, so unreal" (pp. 409-410). Paul lives in complete isolation, keeping himself apart from others and alone with his despondent thoughts. Much of the time he is in a semi-intoxicated trance., Hours at a time pass without his knowing it. He so loses his hold on life that death becomes an appealing temptation. When Miriam makes a last, futile effort to renew their relationship, they have dinner together in Paul's room, and Paul accompanies her home to her cousin's house, where they part for good. As Paul leaves Miriam, he feels "the last hold for him had gone" (p. 419). Of course,' 90 it has not— he still has the tie to his dead mother to be severed. Walking on the edge of town, surrounded by the blackness of night, the terrible internal struggle comes to! the surface of Paul's consciousness. He sees at last that j he must resolve to live without his mother, or he will fol-; low her into the darkness of death: | . . . His soul could not leave her, wherever she was. j Now she was gone abroad into the night, and he was with her still. They were together. But yet there was his body, his chest, that leaned against the stile, his hands on the wooden bar. They seemed something. Where was he?— one tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. . . . "Mother!" he whispered— "mother 1" She was the only thing that held him up, himself, amid all this. And she was gone, intermingled herself. He wanted her to touch him, have him alongside with her. But no, he would not give in. Turning sharply, he walked towards the city's gold phosphorescence. His fists were shut, his mouth set fast. He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her. He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly. (p. 420) In these, the final words of Sons and Lovers, Paul Morel at last struggles with, and accepts, the truth that he must live his own life and bear the responsibility for his own existence. His mother can no longer hold him up amid the chaos of threatening nothingness— he must support himself. Characteristically, Lawrence has given emphasis to this moment of supreme importance in Paul's life by including an 9! actual, concrete gateway; the stile represents the last threshold to be crossed. Paul has the courage to cross it. * * * Many writers on Sons and Lovers have made much of these final words. Paul's decisive affirmation has some times been taken as a final resolution of all the complexes! and troubles that plague him. Of course, it is not. Paul's decision is a noble and a difficult one. It represents a great success. But it is only a beginning, not a consumma tion. Paul has at last been reborn into a fledgling life of independence from the support of external props. It is a great victory and a promising beginning. What Paul fails to find, during Sons and Lovers, is "the woman who would truly 'release' him, the woman who would do for him what Frieda— who attracted Lawrence both physically and spiritually— was doing for Lawrence at the very moment of writing Sons and Lovers.- * - 9 Paul has gained his independence, but he has still not achieved an inti macy on both the physical and spiritual planes. He has achieved independence, an intellectual vision of his own, and a capacity to experience deep passion. Furthermore, he has probed to the core of life, and made contact with the elemental life force. But Paul has accomplished these l^Harry T. Moore, D. H. Lawrence: His Life and Works (New York, 1964), p. 89. 92 things in a mechanistic fashion, one aspect at a time, un related to the rest of himself. He has not yet integrated i I them into an organic whole. PART IX: EXPRESSIVE FORM AND MATURE VISION The Rainbow Women in Love "Man, most fundamentally is not engaged in the dis covery of what is there, nor in production, nor even in communication, not in invention. He is enabling being to emerge from non-being." R. D. Laing, Politics of Experience "I see the soul as something which must be developed and fulfilled throughout a life-time, sustained and nourished, developed and further fulfilled, to the very end. . . ." D. H. Lawrence, "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover" "The via media to being, for man or woman, is love, and love alone." D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy "It is so arranged that the very act which carries us out into the uriknown shall probably deposit seed for security to be left behind. But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of the seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea." D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy 93 CHAPTER III THE RAINBOW A censor intervened almost immediately after the pub- j lication of The Rainbow. At the urging of the National j . . . . . . . . i Purity League, a successful court action was brought against the novel, and five weeks after publication the first edi tion was confiscated and destroyed. Englishmen were both politically outraged and morally shocked by Lawrence's cogent vision of England's industrial democracy as a "mea ger and paltry," "unspiritual" system in which "only the greedy and ugly people come to the top" (p. 434); by his attack on war as an inhuman "game" played by selfless nul lities deluded into sacrificing themselves for abstractions; and by his prescription for earthly salvation through proper sexual relationships between men and women. With Queen Victoria dead less than fifteen years and most Eng lishmen still thinking of sex as a "dirty little secret,"'*' The Rainbow assumed that man's deepest nature was sexual, that his fundamental relationships were sexual, and that "only through a readjustment between men and women, and a lLawrence, Sex, Literature, and Censorship, p. 71. 94 95 making free and healthy of this sex" (CL, I, 204) could England and Englishmen be regenerated. Obviously, The Rainbow has much in common with Sons | and Lovers. Both novels portray industrial societies in | which man, as Lawrence says elsewhere, is "like a great up- ; rooted tree, with its roots in the air"; both novels con- j cern man's efforts to re-plant himself in the universe, to j establish vitalizing communion with the whole organic cos mos; and both novels portray the individual's painful struggle to achieve communion with another person, through the act of sex,.which will lead to organic wholeness. But as Lawrence told Edward Garnett when he was just beginning The Rainbow, the two novels also have many differences. Lawrence enthusiastically wrote to his friend; i It's all crude as yet . . . but I think it's great — so new, so really deeper than I think anybody has ever gone in a novel. . . . It's all analytical— quite unlike Sons and Lovers, not a bit visualized. (CL, I, 193) Lawrence's remarks, in part, inaccurately describe The Rain bow, because the novel contains numerous vividly and con cretely "visualized" scenes; but Lawrence correctly asserts that The Rainbow is "deeper" in vision and more "analytical" in method than the earlier novel. In The Rainbow Lawrence sought to depict the very essence of his characters, their ^Lawrence, p. 106. 96 innermost core which gave continuity to their protean ex ternal forms, to their changing "personalities" and shift ing attitudes. Lawrence thus was seeking as a writer some thing very close to what Paul Morel attempted as a painter, as Paul explains to Miriam once when she asked what seemed so "true" to her about a particular painting: It's because there is scarcely any shadow in it; it's more shimmery, as if I'd painted the shimmering protoplasm in the leaves and everywhere, and not the stiffness of the shape. That seems dead to me. Only this shimmeriness is the real living. The shape is a dead crust. The shimmer is inside really. (p. 152) In The Rainbow, Lawrence tried to penetrate the "dead crust" of personality in order to lay bare the human nu cleus, the inner kernel which realizes itself in an inte grated, whole being. In another letter to Edward Garnett Lawrence explained what he was attempting. Garnett had helped publish Sons and Lovers, but he disliked the next book and severely criticized it each time Lawrence sent him the manuscript. Finally, after four complete re-writings and as many major revisions, Lawrence took his manuscript to another pub lisher. But before his move, Lawrence answered Garnett's criticism with a remarkable defense and clarification of his new conception of character. The letter is crucial for an understanding of Lawrence's fiction from The Rainbow on, so I quote from it at length: 97 I don't think the psychology is wrong: it is only that I have a different attitude to my characters, and that necessitates a different attitude in you, which you are not prepared to give. . . . That which is physic — non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than j the old-fashioned human element— which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I ob ject to. . . . You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego— of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecogniz- j able, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states j which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon.- The ordi nary novel would trace the history of the diamond— but I say, "Diamond, what! This is carbon." And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) . . . Again I say, don't look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the charac ters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form. . . . (CL, I, 281-282) Lawrence here describes character as a dualism that is, I fundamentally, the dualism between appearance (coal, soot, 1 i diamond) and underlying reality (carbon). On the one hand, there is appearance: personality, convention, the "certain moral scheme," the "old stable ego" of character. On the other hand, there is the reality . . . but alas, the real ity is intangible, impalpable. It is the shimmering proto plasm inside the dead crust. Nevertheless, it is "is-ness" of a being— the inner, essential self that can be under stood only by penetrating the surfaces of ego and person ality— that Lawrence attempted to discover and portray in The Rainbow. Since the completion of Sons and Lovers, Lawrence had 98 increasingly stressed the physical, instinctive, sensual nature of man's essential being. A letter that he wrote to Ernest Collins some two months after finishing Sons and Lovers indicates the trend of his thinking: My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling in tervention of mind, or moral, or what-not. I conceive a man's body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things around— which is really mind— but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how from out of prac tically nowhere, and being itself. . . . (CL, I, 180) Lawrence's language here is necessarily vague because the concept he wants to explain is difficult and elusive. Yet this letter, and the later letter to Garnett, quoted above, make several important points: the breathing, thinking, behaving man that presents himself to our senses is the embodiment of a "flowing" life "flame," the incarnation of a mysterious life force that has its roots deep within the body and blood, far beyond the limits of the conscious in tellect. It is this inner force which activates a man. The direction of the flow is from the inside outward. Lawrence conceived of this flowing inner self as a kind of seed from which the mature self grew. It was for him an inner life that struggled outward, like a chicken 99 strives to break its shell. In this respect, Lawrence's carbon and diamond metaphor somewhat misleads, unless one understands the transfiguration from coal to diamond as growth: diamond is refinement and development of the "in ner" carbon. Lawrence's conception of character may be more fully understood if we consider a second metaphor, that of the egg that grows into a caterpillar, which in turn becomes a pupa or chrysalis, before the final glorious realization as a butterfly. Human beings develop like but terflies emerging from the cocoon; in Lawrence's words: They are people each with a real, vital potential self . . . and this self suddenly bursts the shell of - manner and convention and commonplace opinion, and acts independently, absurdly, without self-knowledge or ac quiescence. 3 The "allotropic states" a character passes through then, ideally, are stages in the realization of his potential self. Self-realization, or as Lawrence also calls it, "the growth of the soul," occurs in a series of transfigurations or metamorphoses which require the death of the old self to enable the rebirth of the new self. Plainly, these are concepts that Lawrence began to form as he wrote Sons, and Lovers, and I touched briefly on some of them in my discussion of that novel. By the time of The Rainbow, Lawrence had made the flowing life flame that ^Study of Thomas Hardy, in Phoenix (London, 1936), Paul Morel discovered through his sexual relationships with Clara Dawes into his "great religion." And he made it, and t ] the transfigurations it works, into his chief fictional ! concern. By now, however, Lawrence had a keener under standing of the inner self and of the conditions that nur ture or frustrate its realization. He stressed growth as j i an unconscious, unintellectual process, that acts "absurdly"; I I on a person, without his "self-knowledge." He emphasized the mysterious and unknown sources of this force within one, and the courage one required to abandon the intellec tual hold on oneself— the ego and "personality," both fixed and incomplete selves— and let the life force from the un known take him in an equally unknown direction. Here lies the meaning behind Lawrence's mandate to "leap into the un known” and be. In order to penetrate to pure being, Lawrence in The Rainbow had to abandon traditional notions of plot and character. Conventional realism conceives of a character as an ethical'agent, and it shows his actions, describes his moralizing, registers his feelings and thoughts. But Lawrence had no interest in the actions, morals, feelings, and thoughts themselves— his subject was the ethical agent, per se, that originated and performed the actions; the mind or consciousness that weighed the morals or thought the thoughts; the self that experienced the feelings— and grew 101 toward fuller being. And just as Kierkegaard knew that no scientist would ever discover consciousness by peering through a microscope at a lump of brain on a glass slide, Lawrence knew that inner self or essential being could not be portrayed by realism's photographic reproduction of sur faces— the inner self cannot be depicted directly, it can ! only be suggested, evoked, conveyed by indirection, and in- ! ferred by a reader, because it exists within and anterior to its outward manifestations. To express this inner self, Lawrence extended the poetic technique he developed in Sons and Lovers. Narrative is reduced to a minimum in The Rainbow. The novel proceeds by episodes that seem like poetic, symbolic interludes. Lawrence has created, his remarks to Garnett notwithstanding, realistic settings in vivid detail and characters recognizable in conventional moral terms; but he juxtaposes in sharp contrast numerous highly symbolic scenes, many ritual scenes, several symbolic characters, and other characters who are forces or states of being in carnate. Lawrence shifts suddenly from the realistic mode to the symbolic or ritual mode, with the effect that the first makes the latter more "real," and the latter extends a symbolic or ritual meaning to the former. In addition, he uses many other poetic techniques, particularly a new rhythmic and metaphorical language; patterns of images 102 that underscore the symbolic meaning, such as architectural images of many types, religious images and allusions, and I images of shells, kernels, and seeds; and spatial movements that parallel growth or change within a character, such as ; from farm to town or from home to school. i Having made these preliminary observations about the ! themes and techniques of The Rainbow, I will turn now to | the novel itself to examine the three generations of Brang- wens who strive to realize themselves as organically whole beings through passionate relationships with the opposite sex. * * * ' I Paul Morel provided an important key to The Rainbow1s structure and intended meaning when he described himself and Miriam in terms of horizontals and perpendiculars: He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizon tals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the per sistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstacy and lost itself in the divine. (p. 177) Lawrence has here used horizontals and perpendiculars as images for sharply contrasting orientations toward life. The second section of Sons and Lovers dramatizes the failure of the perpendicular orientation and the battle of the hor izontal orientation to assert itself through Paul. 103 In the opening passage of The Rainbow, horizontals and perpendiculars reappear. They again express fundamental | and opposing values, two contrasting modes of being and of viewing life: . . . A church-tower stood on a hill, the houses of the little country town climbing assiduously up to it. Whenever one of the Brangwens in the fields lifted his head from his work, he saw the church-tower at Ilkeston in the empty sky. So that as he turned again to the horizontal land, he was aware of something standing above him and beyond him in the distance.4 Horizontal and Norman arch are not identical in The Rainbow, as they were in Sons and Lovers. Lawrence has by now dis criminated between them and presents as horizontal an ori entation opposite to, and equally inadequate as, the per-^ pendicular orientation. In The Rainbow, the horizontal represents "blood-intimacy": life turned inward and rely ing on its instincts and impulses to such an extent that it becomes mindless and selfless; life in unconscious commu nion with the teeming earth and the animal world. The hor izontal embodies the spontaneous, physical, internal, un differentiated world— it is the candle without the light, to recall Lawrence's image, or in Mark Spilka's words, the "primitive indefinite." The perpendicular, the Gothic ^D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York [n.d.]), p. 1. All further references are to this, the Modern Library edition. ^Love Ethic, pp. 13-25, 117. 104 arch, and the church tower, on the other hand, represent an outward craving that becomes so intense that it, too, results in selflessness. It is a seeking after "higher" things, as Miriam called them: Morality, spirituality, in-I tellectual awareness, the Christian infinite. In its ex- ; treme form, the perpendicular becomes a disembodied mind or! will or spirit— the light without the candle. i In general, these are the two principles in conflict throughout The Rainbow. Each of them, in isolation, is inadequate and although perhaps life-fulfilling in the past, now exhausted. (The horizontal farmland once offered a sanctuary to the Brangwens, but has now been invaded by perverse horizontals, the railroad and canal. The perpen dicular exerts a powerful attraction, but undergoes con stant attack throughout the novel, until at last Ursula and Skrebensky visit a church that is literally crumbling [p. 278].) However, each orientation also represents an impulse or value that is necessary to wholeness. The goal of The Rainbow1s characters, the transfiguration that they grow toward, is a state of being that will hold these two orientations in balance, in a union that allows each to remain separate■ , but related to the other. The symbol for this state of being is the rainbow or the Norman arch. It is a state.in which the horizontal and perpendicular bal ance and qualify each other, combining in an individual 105 (1) the contact with the inner, creative forces, the seed of individual purpose deep within one, and (2) the outward thrust toward growth-giving union, the aspiration for what the Brangwen women call a "higher state of being"— this is wholeness, oneness, Lawrence's "Holy Ghost." In The Rainbow, more clearly and emphatically than in j any earlier novel, Lawrence represents the quest for whole- j j ness as a struggle to escape constricting enclosures, a struggle to liberate an imprisoned self. His questing characters— Tom, Anna, Ursula— all feel trapped, and each consciously seeks a doorway to escape. Lawrence gives tangible form and structure to their quest, as he had in the novels discussed above, through numerous images of jail-like rooms and houses, through images of doors, gates,; and thresholds, and through patterns of movement. He fur ther emphasizes the nature of the struggle through frequent use of battle- and prison-imagery. As the novel opens, the images of horizontal and per pendicular, of farm and town, are developed and extended. The Brangwen men, for generations, have been content on the "secure fortress" of the farm, "on the safe side of civilization, outside the gate" (p. 6). They are only dimly aware of other activity than theirs, of a world be yond their own. But: The women were different. . . . The woman wanted an other form of life than this, something that was not 106 blood-intimacy. Her house faced out from the farm- buildings and fields, looked out to the road and the village with church and Hall and the world beyond. . . . She craved to achieve [a] higher being, if not in herself, then in her children. (pp. 2-4) The Brangwen women's discontent with the farm made them |feel "obscured and stifled all their lives" by a "lack of freedom to move" (p. 4). These obscure longings and aspi rations are given concrete embodiment by Tom Brangwen1s mother, who decides that the difference between animals and men, or between commonplace men and more noble men, is knowledge. Her longing to escape the farm and enter "the finer, more vivid circle of life" (p. 4) fixes on the con crete goals of church, Hall, and school, which symbolize for her the active world of men. In Mrs. Brangwen's quest and specific goals we encoun ter the first of many bittersweet ironies and painful- pleasures in The Rainbow. (Cf, the title of chapter fif teen: "The Bitterness and Ecstasy.") On the one hand, her striving is a necessary step toward fulfillment: she al ready has "the drowse of blood-intimacy," like the Brangwen men, the horizontal orientation; but she additionally feels "the wonder of the beyond" and craves a "higher form of being," the perpendicular orientation (pp. 2-5). But on the other hand, fulfillment never comes as the result of a rationally determined quest. There is no road marked "This way to a higher form of being," and no character in the ! 107 i | !novel who consciously fixes on a specific goal outside him self as the key to fulfillment ever achieves that state. Fulfillment results from an abandonment of one's conscious self to the life force within, which then flows outward to make vivifying contacts with things beyond one's self. It results from "a leap into the unknown," not from a leap into the conventional church or schoolhouse. Ironically, !during the course of the novel, the Brangwens fulfill the I initial quest for church, Hall, and school--and each proves :to be a detour rather than a road to higher being. j Tom Brangwen is the first generation of Brangwens to |actively seek a life beyond the farm. His outward thrusts recur in rhythmic cycles--recalling Lawrence's description ;to Garnett of the "rhythmic form" his characters take. First, he strives "outward to knowledge," sent "forcibly jaway to grammar-school in Derby" (p. 9) by his mother. ! But Tom is inarticulate and has little intellectual capac ity, and the attempt proves misguided. He gains no knowl edge but the humiliating self-knowledge that he is intel lectually incompetent, and he returns to the farm with his self-respect wounded and his outward thrust thwarted. He settles into a sort of mindless co-existence with the farm. Then, at age nineteen, seduced by a prostitute, Tom reawakens to the larger world. The experience shocks him into realizing that women of a sort other than his mother and sister exist. And although the commercial, mechanical sex disgusts him, it arouses his sexual instincts, teaches him that "the business of love was, at the bottom of his soul, the most serious and terrifying of all to him" (p. 13), and prompts him to seek a more wholesome sexual relationship. But Tom cannot overcome his sexual inhibi tions, and he soon lapses, once again, into quietude on the farm, with his sexual desires simmering on a back burner. All Tom's latent desires come to a feverish boil a few years later when one afternoon he meets a flirtatious girl at an inn. The girl herself puts Tom "in a state of won der," but the girl's foreign lover thoroughly overwhelms and fascinates him. The foreigner's "courteous contempt," his aristocratic bearing, his exquisite graciousness, his tact and reserve, his surety, his sheer difference and foreignness— all these provoke a crisis in Tom. He feels an intense craving for life and experience beyond his own narrow knowledge. He becomes obsessed by the constraints of his life: He resented it. . . . He balked the mean enclosure of reality, stood stubbornly like a bull at a gate, refusing to re-enter the well-known round of his own life. (p. 19) He feels like a trapped bird. He wants to go away. He dreams of foreign places and international travel, and he becomes increasingly bitter about his attachment to the farm: "There was nothing in it he wanted. Yet could he 109 ever get out of it? Was there anything in himself that would carry him out of it?" (p. 21). The "anything in him self" that Tom longs for is, of course, the flowing life flame itself. Tom's three outward thrusts from the farm have represented three efforts by Tom's inner self to be come free and flow outward, to realize itself through con- ! tact with the "other." Each of the two earlier attempts had failed: Tom's craving for experiential, sensual knowl edge was misdirected and stifled by attendance at grammar school; Tom's instinct for passionate sexual relationship with a woman, after being both aroused and mocked in his affair with the whore, went unfulfilled because a false morality inhibited him: he could not think of a "nice girl" "like that." Finally, this, his third attempt at self-liberation, fails too. "Still he could not get free" (p. 21). For some time after his encounter with the co quette and her foreign lover, Tom feels a "hot, accumulated consciousness . . . awake in his chest" (p. 21); he wants desperately to get away, to find a woman. But he cannot act, and despite his churning insides, he maintains a calm and normal appearance. Finally, he drowns his cravings with brandy and, by obliterating his own individuality and manhood, achieves a spurious oneness with the world. He once again lapses into a sort of half-life, "aloof from any women, antagonistic" (p. 22). i 110 Tom's three flowing and ebbing attempts to realize his inner self demonstrate many of the remarks from Lawrence's | letters discussed above, such as those about "allotropic | states," an inner "ego," the "flowing flame" within one, i and characters developed through "rhythmic form." Simi larly, the narrative events that follow— Tom and Lydia each stimulating the other to emerge from withdrawal and achieve a measure of wholeness— illustrate, and are clarified by, my remarks about Lawrence's use of ritual and his concep tion of growth as transfiguration or rebirth. Tom and Lydia, when they discover each other, both respond uncon- Isciously, involuntarily. Each provokes the life-force in ! I |the other to exert itself and work a transformation on !their inner beings. Lawrence describes each transformation i |in detail, depicting it as a ceremonious ritual in which Tom and Lydia are driven by elemental, inner forces to un dergo rebirth. In the two episodes, which Lawrence nar- i ’ !rates in a heightened, ceremonious language, Tom and Lydia ] !seem like Essential Man and Essential Woman personified, | |like mythical images of fundamental experiences. Tom has been withdrawn to his cocoon on the farm for i some five years when he passes Lydia in the road and knows instinctively and involuntarily that she is the woman to free him. Because of her, A swift change had taken place on the earth for him, as if a new creation were fulfilled, in which he had Ill real existence. Things had been all stark, unreal, barren, mere nullities before. . * . It was coming, he knew, his fate. The world was submitting to its trans formation. He made no move: it would come, what would j come. (p. 25) [ The transformation, of course, occurs within Tom. Lawrence j presents its gradual workings through multiple images of doors, thresholds, and rooms; for instance, one day after j Tom has passed Lydia in the road, he is having tea, when, j j There came a knock at the front door. It startled him like a portent. No one ever knocked at the front door. He rose and began slotting back the bolts, turn ing the big key. When he opened the door, the strange woman stood on the threshold. . . . He stepped aside and she at once entered the house, as if the door had been opened to admit her. That startled him. It was the custom for everybody to wait on the doorstep till asked inside. He went into the kitchen and she fol lowed. . . . Her self-possession pleased him and in spired him, set him curiously free. . . . And she went. Brangwen stood dimmed by her departure. (pp. 27-31) Lawrence has already told us in the novel's opening pages that Tom's mother had built her house so that the front faced outward toward the world at large. The extent to which Tom has stifled himself and cut himself off from the world is signified by the fact that this front door is sealed by several bolts, in addition to a "big key." The multiply-locked front door shows, too, Tom's insecurity, his unsureness and fear of the unknown world beyond Marsh farm— even a knock at that door startles him. Finally, the fact that Lydia passes through the doorway to the unknown, wider world underscores her symbolic role in Tom's life— she carries to his threshold the strangeness, the mysteri- ousness, that he had lacked courage to leave the farm and seize for himself. Lydia brings a liberating "unknown" and "self-possession" to the Brangwens. i Lydia's arrival at Tom's kitchen unlocks the impri- | soned life force within him, and afterwards he bends to- I wards her without conscious effort, like a stick carried in! a stream. One night, "almost without thinking," (p. 34) he! ceremoniously washes himself, dons his finest clothes, trims his beard, and leaves for Lydia's residence to pro pose to her. Lawrence describes the episode in intensely rhythmic and almost biblical language. En route to Lydia's house, Tom passes through three gates, which further empha size the mythical, ritual nature of the scene. He arrives outside Lydia's kitchen window and stands there in the dark for some time, gazing into the lighted kitchen and listen ing to Lydia sing in her foreign language as she rocks her child. Then he crosses the threshold--steps from darkness into light— and proposes. In Lydia's arms, after she ac cepts him, Tom swoons and falls asleep for a few seconds: "He came to gradually. . . . He returned gradually, but newly created, as after a gestation, a new birth" (p. 38). Tom's ritual transfiguration dramatizes a fundamental Lawrencean imperative: self-realization cannot occur in isolation, but only in relationship with another person. Lawrence does not dramatize Lydia's rebirth. Instead, he 113 narrates it and shows that it occurs over a long period of time; and the imagery he selects to convey Lydia's trans figuration reveals another Lawrencean imperative: self- realization depends not only on relationship with another person, but on relationship with the whole organic world which shares with a person the same essential life force. Lawrence1s imagery seems to equate Lydia with traditional vegetation myths of gods who are reborn in springtime and bring light to darkness, growth to barrenness, and birth to death, either spiritual or physical.^ (Cf. Tom's movement from darkness to Lydia's lighted kitchen, and his descrip- | tion of life before Lydia as "stark, unreal, barren.") Before Lydia met Tom, she had been living a withdrawn life as a domestic in the vicarage. Her first marriage, the struggle to live in a war-torn Europe, and her efforts to survive, as a widow, in a strange new country, England, i j had all exhausted Lydia. She had no interest in living. She had become aloof, foreign, isolated, and above all, dark. "She was like one walking in the Underworld, where the shades throng intelligibly but have no connection with one" (p. 44). But a series of events in the outside world force Lydia— against her conscious will not to live— to a "new parturition," which comes about, as Tom's rebirth had, 6Moseley, p. 115. 114 through a rhythmic flowing and ebbing of leaps forward and lapses backward. First, the sea brings her, in her dark ness, "a strange insistence of light . . . to which she must attend" (p. 45). She lapses back into indifference and darkness, but soon "a light from a yellow jasmine1 ' catches her, and even though she wants to die, the sunshiny! I days, the scent of trees, bees buzzing, and tumbling yellow! | crocuses make her feel "like somebody else, not herself, a new person" (p. 47). When the vicar shows her some eggs in a thrush's nest, she feels like the mother-thrush herself. Then, when she passes Tom in the road, her journey back from the underworld to resume physical life is completed: she tingles in her body as he passes her. "The voice, of her body had risen strong and insistent. . . . She wanted him . . .for her awakening" (p. 48). . . . Blind instinct led her, to take him, to have him, and then to relinquish herself to him. . . . The warmth flowed through her, she felt herself opening, unfolding, asking, as a flower opens in full request under the sun, as the beaks of tiny birds open flat, to receive. . . . She was as new as a flower. . . . (p. 48) Lydia's rebirth affirms what Tom's had shown: fulfillment requires another person; and the life force is a physical, non-intellectual process that works in a person and on a person. Additionally, the numerous flower, sea, bee, bird, and other nature images combine to portray a powerful com munion with nature. These images function in a manner 115 reminiscent of the scene in Sons and Lovers where Gertrude Morel stands beneath the moon in her garden and loses her self in communion with the hills and flowers and houses. Lydia literally shares with birds and flowers a common "quickness"; these images are no romantic metaphors for in ternal changes only, although they do, to be sure, express internal changes as well. Finally, Lydia's rebirth extends the significance of Tom's transfiguration in a second way that also suggests Sons and Lovers. As I showed above, Paul's quest closely parallels traditional mythic quests. Lydia's quest goes further than Paul's in paralleling mythic patterns; in Lydia's case, Lawrence consciously in corporated the traditional images of underworld and spring time rebirth amid a rejuvenated nature. Myth embodies the deepest truths and experiences of a whole people or culture, so when we understand as myth the ritual rebirths of Tom and Lydia, they take on social and religious significance of great breadth. In fact, when considered in the light of the running criticism of Christianity and industrialism carried on throughout the novel, and in the light of the book's apocalyptic final paragraph that prophesies regener ation for all mankind, the mythic quest for wholeness ini tiated by Tom and Lydia but pursued by two following gener ations of Brangwens becomes the imperative Of Everyman in the industrial age. 116 Tom Brangwen achieves very limited success in his effort to free himself and become an integrated, whole be- i ing. He has not, after all, succeeded in his outward thrust from the farm toward the "unknown." Rather, the un known, in the form of Lydia, has come to him. And even ; before their marriage, Tom fails Lydia because of his fear ! of her strangeness and foreignness. After her transfigura-I tion, she has blossomed and opened like a flower, "atten tive and instinctively expectant before him, unfolded, ready to receive him" (p. 49). But Tom cannot act, "be cause of self-fear," and she gradually closes again to him. Throughout the first years of their marriage, they con stantly battle each other coming closer together, then fly ing apart again. Tom never really knows her; she remains foreign and unknown to him forever, even after she con fronts him with his aloofness and charges that: You only leave me alone or take me like your cattle, quickly, to forget me again. . . . You come to me as if it was for nothing, as if I was nothing. . . . (p. 85) The crisis provoked by Lydia's charge proves two things to Tom: first, even though Lydia had crossed his threshold, he had never admitted her; secondly, through standing in awe of Lydia and fearing his own inner self, Tom had never really penetrated inward to discover the life force flowing within him. Now, Tom yields, both to Lydia and her foreign ness, and to his own inner nature. The two come together 117 again, in an intensely passionate and sensual union. Lawrence's language and images make clear that through ' i I their impassioned sexuality Tom and Lydia reach the greatest fulfillment of which they are capable. Tom has accepted the unknown, and therefore "come within the blazing kernel I of darkness." Their sexual union becomes "much more won- j derful to them" than before, and it carries them "into an- | other circle of existence.1 1 "She was the doorway to him, he to her." They have been transfigured a second time. But Tom's fulfillment is qualified by the fact that the two continue to go their separate ways, understanding each other and knowing each other no better. Each has de fined his own self, and understood his own inner purpose, through the relationship with the other. But neither has I gained real knowledge of the beyond, the other. And nei ther has become fully independent of the other as a whole, separate being. Thus, when the rainbow sign appears in the sky to mark their consummation, it takes both of them to form the rainbow— neither has achieved the rainbow condition individually, has brought the horizontal and perpendicular into a relatedness that realizes the Holy Ghost within. For this reason, Anna Brangwen appears beneath the rainbow sign, signifying its incompleteness and the task that lies ahead for a future generation. For the same reason, when Tom drunkenly enunciates at Anna's wedding his principle 118 that "a married couple makes one angel" (p. 127) his brother counters by asserting an extremely individualistic creed: "You've got to go on by yourself. . . . Everybody's got a way of their own. . . . It's only a dog as hasn't" (p. 132). Plainly, these two creeds— the spontaneous com munion and selflessness espoused by Tom, and the egocentric self-assertion espoused by Alfred— are variations of the horizontal and perpendicular orientations, which remain at odds and unrelated as the first generation's guest comes to an end. * * * In the second generation, Anna Brangwen continues her father's quest for self-liberation. Lawrence takes pains to demonstrate the similarity between young Anna and her father, and to show that Anna's quest represents Tom's own striving extended into a second generation. Tom at times even thinks of Anna as an extension of himself and an in strument for his own fulfillment: he wants to make Anna into a great lady, for example, after he returns from a visit to Mrs. Forbes, his brother Alfred's sophisticated lover, feeling depressed about his own lack of accomplish ment in the outside-world; and he is bitterly offended when Anna decides to marry, because Anna offered him a strength and security he did not feel within him, and because she gave him, vicariously, "the further, the creative life. 119 . . . It was as if his hope had been in the girl" (pp. 118- 119) . Lawrence emphasizes the intimacy between Anna and her | father, and the similarities in their characters by first ! portraying Anna as resentful of the move to Marsh Farm and : hostile toward Tom, and by then dramatizing her gradual { acceptance of him and his values. Anna and Tom achieve ! i communion with each other and with the whole organic world in a scene that Lawrence heightens into another ritual transformation by such emphatic means as: a change of lo cation (Tom and Anna leave the house for the barn); the presence of baptismal water (it is raining, which suggests the water that accompanied Lydia's earlier rebirth, and that reappears at important scenes throughout the book); i the intimate nearness of animals and plants (the barn is filled with animals and hay); contrasting darkness and light, a number of doors, and even a rainbow of sorts (the "dark arch of a loft"): He opened the doors, upper and lower, and they en tered into the high, dry barn, that smelled warm even if it were not warm. He hung the lantern on the nail and shut the door. They were in another world now. The light shed softly on the timbered barn, on the white-washed wall, and the great heap of hay; instru ments cast their shadows largely, a ladder rose to the dark arch of a loft. Outside there was the driving rain.- . . .A new being was created in her for the new conditions. . . . He seemed to be sitting in a timeless stillness. What was he listening for? He seemed to be listening for some sound a long way off, from beyond life. . . . There was the eternal world, unchanging, as well as the world of life. (pp. 70-73). 120 In this scene, Anna relinquishes her antagonism and hos- ! j tility toward Tom and accepts him as her father, afterwards loving him more, even, than her mother. And by her "re birth" as a Brangwen, she acquires the Brangwen feeling of blood-intimacy with all the natural world. Brangwen is j also transfigured in the scene, in that he transcends, for I ; a moment at least, the mindlessness.of his oneness with I nature, and achieves a deeper, conscious understanding of his relationship to both the living world of the farm and to the unknown and unseen infinite world beyond. (The scene also illustrates how Tom fears this "unknown" and flees from it: "The swift unseen . . . silenced him and he j was overcome. He turned away indoors, humbly." That Tom closes the door on the "unknown" is his failure that limits his fulfillment in life.) During the communion between Tom and Anna in the barn, jthe baton was passed on, so to speak, in the Brangwen's I three-generation relay. Soon after, Anna begins calling | Tom her father, and she takes the name Brangwen. She ac quires many of his character traits. She has his reckless ness and carelessness, and his occasional aloofness and mistrust of intimacy, as well as his oneness with the farm and nature. Most significantly, she shares Tom's urge to j carry himself beyond blood-intimacy, to move, past the gates of the farm into the outside world— but she also shares 121 Tom's deep ambivalence toward the outside world, his simul taneous attraction toward it and fear of it. Anna reveals i both these attitudes by the excitement she shows, on the one hand, at taking rides with Tom into town to market— ; tentative thrusts into the "unknown"— and by the fear she feels when she actually encounters that unknown: she is j frightened when Tom leaves her for a moment to do some marketing; and she is terrified by Nat-Nut, a cretin with no roof to his mouth who sells nuts at the market, and she adamantly refuses to have anything to do with him or to eat his nuts. With marvelous compression, Lawrence expresses the welter of conflicting aspirations and fears inside Anna through the figure of Nat-Nut, symbol of the fascinating yet repulsive unknown, and purveyor of nuts— the essential, hardcore, inner reality beneath- the crust of the world's appearances— that must be accepted if one is to grow out ward. Anna as a child, like her father, fears to "leap into the unknown." But as Anna grows1older, she wants more and more badly to escape the farm. By the time she is seventeen, she spends much of her time gazing longingly out her window (p. 95) and dreaming of ways to get away. She thinks of herself as a prisoner, and she imagines scenes of medieval monks trapped in torture cells (p. 97). She attempts "many ways . . . of escape" (p. 96), but each proves unsatisfac- 122 tory: she could not lose herself in the church, because its emphasis on verbal commandments seemed false to her, j * i ! who distrusted spoken truths and valued only felt ones; reading provided no escape, because it also emphasized lan-j guage, and Anna craved for experience rather than words; and visits to her girlfriends only bored her and left her j i feeling empty and futile. j So when Anna meets her cousin Will, he suggests to her the unknown and mysterious world beyond, as Lydia had to Tom and as Skrebensky does to Ursula. She sees in him her long-sought gateway to higher being; and her passionate courtship with Will does, in fact, help Anna to free her self and grow in several ways. It arouses and sets flowing the "life flame" within her, coaxes into existence her latent sexuality, makes her intensely aware of her own in ner self as a being that is differentiated and individual. And as her sensual relationship with Will awakens and frees Anna's separate self, it simultaneously extends and deepens her connections with all of life: Anna and Will make love in the barn among the beasts, and they agree to marry as they stack sheaves of grain beneath the moon, in an in tensely rhythmic scene which seems to be a ritual affirma tion of the essential oneness of the life force that pul sates through Anna, Will, the grain, and all of the living cosmos, including the moon. Because of her relationship 123 with Will, Anna undergoes a transformation, which Lawrence stresses by the ritual moonlight scene; by the change of j location from barn to house as "the two young people . . . began to draw apart and establish a separate kingdom" (p. 105); by the presence of rain as Will and Anna vow their love (a scene which Tom witnesses— the water here j marks the "rebirth" of Anna, and the "death" of Tom in her j j life, a death by water that literally takes place a few chapters later); and by the language of escape: In him she had escaped. In him the bounds of her experience were transgressed: he was the hole in the wall, beyond which the sunshine blazed on an outside world. (p. 105) And of course, the most obvious and striking movement of all is the literal escape after the marriage, when Will carries her away from the farm to the cottage in town, a cottage specifically situated next to the church that the Brangwen men watched from their fields and that Tom's mother had taken as a symbol for higher being. Ironically, after having married and escaped the farm to live near the church, Anna finds that she must struggle with both her husband and the church if she wishes to con tinue her outward growth. She discovers that she and Will are "opposites, not complements" (p. 158). Will ceases to be a doorway for her in her quest for fulfillment, and in stead becomes an obstacle. Similarly, the church and 124 Christianity stand in her way, representing a potent at traction to take a dead-ended side journey. The long i struggle between Anna and Will, and between Anna and the church, as it is presented in the chapters "Anna Victrix" and "The Cathedral," is puzzling and difficult to under stand. We can see that something has gone wrong, for ex- ! ample, when it does; but it is hard to know what or why. j In the same way, we can see that things have improved, when they have, but again we find it hard to say why or how. In addition, some of what happens in these two chapters seems flatly inconsistent with other portions of the book. For example, the fact that Will is called "dark" and Anna "light" apparently contradicts his aspirations for the J church and Anna's denial of it. And for Will to incorpo rate both "blood-intimacy" and intense will, as well as the Gothic, church orientation, apparently confuses the other wise clear themes and values I have discerned in the book. Perhaps most inconsistent and confusing of all is the fact that, on one hand, Lawrence plainly attacks Will's depen dence on the church as allegiance to a false infinite, or as a Miriam-like leap into the divine; while on the other hand, it seems equally clear that Lawrence approves when Ursula at last discovers that "self" is "a oneness with the infinite" (pp. 416-417). The following revealing statement, which Lawrence 125 wrote while he was at work on The Rainbow, illuminates not only Anna's quarrel with the church and her intermittent . j love for her husband, but also the natures of the horizon tal and perpendicular modes of being, and the meaning of the fulfillment that Tom, Anna, and Ursula seek: It is past the time to cease seeking one Infinite, ignoring, striving to eliminate the other. The Infi nite is twofold, the Father and the Son, the Dark and the light, the senses and the Mind, the Soul and the Spirit, the Self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the Tiger and the Lamb. The consummation of man is twofold, in the Self and in Selflessness. (There is Creative Infinite, found within one, and Ultimate Infinite, found by projection outward.) And man must know both. But he must never confuse them. They are eternally separate. The lion shall never lie down with the lamb. . . . They are always opposite, but there exists a re lation between them. This is the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity . . . which relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God. To say that the two are one, this is the inadmissible lie. The two are related, by the intervention of the Third, into a Oneness. . . . And in the Holy Spirit I know the Two Ways, the Two In finites, the Two Consummations. And knowing the Two, I admit the Whole. But excluding One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make nullity, nihil.? Most important to note here is that when Lawrence speaks of the infinite, he has in mind a twofold infinite, the two terms of which are the horizontal and perpendicular orien tations that appear in The Rainbow. The horizontal repre sents the Creative Infinite: the flux of life that began 7Twilight in Italy (London, 1950), pp. 80-82. My at tention was first drawn to this passage by Mark Spilka, Love Ethic, p. 118. 126 with the initial, primordial, one-celled organism and flowed onward to the present, with each successive living being its embodiment. Seen exclusively from this point of view, the individual being remains undifferentiated, a part of the flux, the mere bearer of the seed and the instrument of life's perpetuation. This infinite is the beginning | place for every person's growth, the sexual, phallic self, and it is known by descent within (as Paul and Clara "de scended" the cliff, literally, and within themselves, figu ratively to find this aspect of the dual "God") rather than ascent or projection outward. The perpendicular, on the other hand, represents the Ultimate Infinite: the individ uation and differentiation that follows when life becomes aware of itself. Seen exclusively from this point of view, j the individual's outward striving results in an uncreative, selfless, and externalized fragment who has left behind his roots in the creative life flux and abandoned a neces sary portion of his total being. A person realizes the horizontal infinite through sexual, passionate relationships with another person, just as Tom and Lydia discovered themselves through their sen sual love, and just as Will and Anna eventually find them selves in their intense sensuality after Will's failed attempt to seduce the girl in Nottingham. The perpendicu lar infinite, on the other hand, is realized through what 127 Lawrence always called "passionate purpose,"or in other words, a purposive activity that draws on the inner flow and channels it outward to the external world. (.after finding himself through his sexuality with Anna, Will be gins to flow outward in this fashion, as the fact that he resumed his carving and took up other creative activities, such as the night handicraft classes, shows.) Thus, for Lawrence, the "self" is less a state of being than it is an activity: a center of feeling and purpose in the process of becoming. In commenting on these ideas at length here, after having touched on them in the opening pages of the essay, I am not merely preaching to the already converted. In the first place, we are now better able to understand more thoroughly what I only sketched in above in outline form. In the second place, the above quotation reveals the reli gious intensity with which Lawrence uttered his views on life, and by implication, the religious significance of the quest dramatized in The Rainbow--a significance which will receive much more attention in these pages from now on. Thirdly, these ideas apply to both The Rainbow and Women in Love, both perplexing masterpieces that have confused even the most adroit critics. For example, Graham Hough delin eated the perpendicular versus horizontal theme as it oc curs in the novel's opening pages? but he failed to see 128 that these two values or orientations give structure to the entire novel and are fundamental elements of human fulfill ment, which is The Rainbow's chief theme; after noting the perpendiculars and horizontals, Hough amazingly declared: Then, as so often and so disconcertingly in Lawrence from this time on, the theme apparently announced here disappears and we are concerned wtih Tom Brangwen's marriage to a Polish lady.8 This is the sort of flippant carping that has marred too much criticism by critics who are unwilling or unable to take Lawrence on his terms, and instead judge him by inap propriate standards (prejudices?) developed elsewhere. In the face of such insensitivity, the fundamental assumptions behind The Rainbow cannot be made overly explicit. To return now to Anna and Will, Anna progressed quite a ways down this road toward the rainbow during her court ship and early days of marriage. She had realized herself as an embodiment of the universal and continuous life force. Beyond that, while still maintaining her connections with the whole of life, she had emerged from the shimmering, flowing universal flux as a differentiated being, with an inner self, and she had begun the outward thrust. She' had begun, that is, the formation of the Third or Holy Ghost which relates the two infinites. At this point, Will be came an obstacle in her path. ^Hough, p. 60. 129 Will incorporates both horizontal and perpendicular— both infinites— as previous Brangwens had not. He has joined them, however, in a disharmonious juxtaposition, rather than in an integrated relationship. His being re mains mechanical and fragmented, rather than organically whole. Will has confused the two infinites. (Cf, above: "They are eternally separate. The lion shall never lie down with the lamb"; and Lawrence's description of Will's plight with the words: "The lion lay down with the lamb in him" [p. 179].) In him, the two infinites are alternative forms of selflessness. On the one hand, he retains the blood-intimacy of the Brangwens; on the other hand, he has a sense of religious mystery and a craving for a timeless absolute found outside the teeming flux of the phallic hor izontal. But he has moved directly from the horizontal to the perpendicular, without realizing the mediating and re lating self. (Cf. above: "But exclusing One, I exclude the Whole. And confusing the two, I make nullity, nihil.") The movement from horizontal to perpendicular should be a flow, and it requires a bridge, a rainbow, a self, a Holy Ghost. Through submerging himself, without a Self, in the two infinites, Will has denied the Holy Ghost in him and converted the Christian Trinity into a duality. Having no inner self to rely on, Will depends on the outside world, which he tries to fix with his determined 130 will, his obstinate and egocentric desire. He cannot outward from his inner self; he can only gobble up the out-i | side world, draw on it for his sustenance. He becomes a predator. Lawrence's images, with which he presents Will , to us, substantiate this. Images of birds, for example, frequently appear in The Rainbow, often to describe the j feeling of a trapped character (Tom and Ursula both are ; i described as trapped birds). About two-thirds of these bird images pertain to Will, and they consistently define him as a predator or hawk: when he first visits Anna he has "quick, steady eyes, like a bird's, like a hawk's" (p. 99); when Anna first kisses him, "his eyes were hard and bright with a fierce purpose and gladness, like a ■ hawk's" (p. 107); Will's hollowness is indicated by another bird image, when Lawrence describes his eyes "like a bird's, utterly without depth” (p. 104); when Anna and Will are struggling bitterly for dominance of their home, he watches her "with his hateful, hard, bright eyes, hard and unchang ing as a bird of prey"; and as he overcomes her, in the same scene, "his eyes glittered, and as if with malignant desire. She shrank and became blind. She was like a bird being beaten down" (p. 144). These images of Will as a bird of prey take on added impact when we recall that he has become a hawk only because he denies the Holy Ghost in him— the symbol of which is often a dove. The contrast 131 here is between that which devours and that which creates or produces. Because Will's flowing inner self has crys tallized, the outward flow cannot occur, and Will instead takes in. The recurring image of the eye, which appears with almost every instance of the bird images, corroborates my remarks, since the eye, with the mouth and ear, are the three ways we "take in" our world. In the light of these remarks, the struggle in "Anna Victrix" has more consistency and significance. After their marriage, Will and Anna seclude themselves from the world behind locked doors in their cottage. They spend much of the first few days in bed, and their sexual dis coveries work transformations on both of them. But at last, Anna wants to return to the outside world: she is only partially created, and she feels a renewed urge to thrust outward: she wants to have a tea party. Will resists, and their battle begins. Will attempts to dominate her with his will power, because he feels insecure and incomplete without her. "He wanted her to come to him, to complete him. . . . Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him" '(p. 167) . As the battle progresses, Will reveals the extent to which he is selfless and without self-responsibility. And as he struggles to overpower Anna and use her strength, he feels contempt for his own unman liness: "He was ashamed that he could not come to fulfill 132 ment without her" (pp. 170-171). Anna violently accuses him of destroying her, of not letting her live, but even as he acknowledges to himself how dependent on her he is, he continues to exert pressure. Anna holds him off for a spell by dancing naked to Will's "nullity," in a ritual scene that demonstrates her intimate relationship to the ! i creative life forces and dramatizes Will's emptiness; but j she must eventually eject him from her bedroom in order to survive as a separate being. At last, Will lets go his egocentric drive, and yields. He feels "born for a second time, born at last unto himself, out of the vast body of humanity. Now at last he had a separate identity" (p. 178). Anna, then, is the victor in the struggle between them; but Will is equally victorious, having gained a fledgling self. The battle in "Anna Victrix" is not simply the uni versal love-battle, as some writers have seen it. Nor does Anna smother Will and take over the dominance of the home, achieving her victory on the strength of her approaching motherhood. Anna's "victory," in fact, is quite ironic. What she has succeeded in doing is to help her husband to formulate his being— surely Will's victory. And it mocks them both, because the self he has acquired "was a very dumb, weak, helpless self, a crawling nursling" (p. 178), and he shortly lapses back into secure submergence in the two infinites. Anna, on the other hand, gives birth to her 133 first child, Ursula, and she abandons the quest for her own fulfillment, when she is still "not quite fulfilled . . . a door half opened" (p. 182). As the chapter concludes, the rainbow appears in the sky for the second time, not to mark her fulfillment, but to show her how far she still must go: A faint, gleaming horizon, a long way off, and a rainbow like an archway, a shadow-door. . . . Must she be moving thither? . . . But why must she start on the journey? . . . She could not go. . . . She relinquished the adventure to the unknown. She was bearing her children. . . . She was a door and a threshold, she her self. Through her another soul was coming, to stand upon her as upon the threshold, looking out, shading its eyes for the direction to take. (pp. 183-184) If we place Anna's struggle in its larger context than the battle with Will, and recall that she had begun on Marsh farm with the yearning to "escape" and discover the myste rious and dark beyond, we see the irony and pathos of Anna's "victory." Lawrence ironically describes Anna's de cision not to remain a traveller in quest of the rainbow as settling into "her builded house" (p. 185)--she had fled the "prison" of Marsh farm, in effect, only to occupy an other of her own construction. The greatest irony in "Anna Victrix" lies in the fact that throughout the chapter Anna prods Will to differentiate himself from the horizontal form of selflessness but in the end she, herself, falls into even more mindless and selfless immersion in the life flux than Will, what Lawrence describes as the "trance of motherhood" (p. 206), with her outward thrust completely numbed: "The outside, public life was less than nothing to her, really" (p. 207). j "Anna Victrix," which starts in a honeymoon bed and concludes with the birth of one child accomplished and the conception of a second child announced, presents the rela- j tionship of Will and Anna to the Creative Infinite or hori-j- zontal mode. The two following chapters, "The Cathedral" and "The Child," present the relationship of Will and Anna to the Ultimate Infinite or perpendicular mode, and their extremely limited success at relating horizontal and per pendicular into a rainbow, respectively. "The Cathedral," like "Anna Victrix," is narrated mainly from Anna's point of view in order to show up Will's failure. But just as | "Anna Victrix" conveyed a double-edged criticism, portray ing not only Will's failure but also Anna's collapsed out ward drive and her conversion into a baby-making machine, "The Cathedral" similarly reveals that both Will and Anna are misdirected in their pursuit of the Ultimate Infinite. In the opening scene of "The Cathedral," Anna and Will visit the Baron Skrebensky's family, in a contrasting par allel with the opening of the preceding chapter'— in which Anna and Will closed themselves off from the world— which serves as a sort of bridge to carry the reader's attention away from matters of blood intimacy and the Creative Infi 135 nite, and as a pointer toward the new subject, the outward thrust and the Ultimate Infinite. The Baron and his new wife reawaken Anna's old craving for escape to experiences beyond her constrained world of Cossethay cottage: Anna realized how different her own life might have been, how different her own living. Her soul stirred, she became another person. Her-intimacy with her hus band passed away, the curious enveloping Brangwen inti macy, so warm, so close, so stifling . . . was annulled. She denied it. . . . (pp. 187-188) The opening scene, then, is another transformation scene, presenting a new "allotropic state" of Anna. But Anna's new state has an ironic facet to it that reveals the per version of Anna's outward impulse by mocking her specific goals. The Baron Skrebensky, who so arouses and stimulates Anna's imagination, is in fact a rather comical figure. He appears to have such a "separate and interesting," "hard, intrinsic being" in Anna's eyes, to be "so unservingly sure',' "so distinct," so "cool, hard," "freer," and "detached" (pp. 186-187). Yet on the previous page Lawrence described him as so dependent on his first wife that he was left "raving" and "disconsolate" at her death. Suggestively playing on the word "came," Lawrence describes the Baron's years after his wife's death: Three years later came the startling news that he had married a young English girl of good family. Everybody marvelled. Then came a copy of "The History of the Parish of Briswell, by Rudolph, Baron Skrebensky, Vicar of Briswell." . . . It was dedicated: "To my wife, Milicent Maud Pearse, in whom I embrace the generous spirit of England." 136 "If he embraces no more than the spirit of England," said Tom Brangwen, "it's a bad look-out for him" (p. 185) The erotic connotations of "came," the aridity of his book's title and subject, and Tom's wisecrack combine to suggest that the Baron was sexually inadequate, or at least: I not the secure, complete, intrinsic being that Anna admired; him as. And the deflation of Skrebensky reflects, of i course, on the judgment of Anna, making her stirred soul and her longing for the unknown seem faintly like self- delusion. (This impression is strengthened by recalling that Anna had earlier striven to satisfy her yearning for the outside world by having a tea party— a rather ignoble realization of the Ultimate Infinite.) Because of the . opening scene's ironies, an ironic undercurrent runs be neath Anna's argument with Will in Lincoln Cathedral. Will cannot contain himself as he and Anna head for the cathedral after their visit to Skrebensky, and he runs on ahead, feeling ecstatic, Lawrence says, because he is about to "pass within to the perfect womb" (p. 189). Once inside the cathedral, however, Anna too feels "overcome with wonder and awe." She feels the attraction of the spiritual infinite, the powerful pull of the timeless, noiseless, fluxless stasis. At last, for a moment, Anna understands what Will finds in the cathedral; but she also understands that the cathedral and what it represents are 137 lifeless in their stillness, deathly in their peace. The cathedral is a "seed in silence, dark before germination," where the radiant life of a flower would be inconceivable. The cathedral stands for the beginning and the end— the darkness of the womb and the darkness of death-— but it of fers no possibility of life. Therefore, she resists the attraction it exerts, and she asserts that, "However much there is inside here, there's a good deal they haven't got in" (p. 191). Seizing on the sly faces of a stone carving, Anna uses them as a support to bolster her resistance; and she begins an argument with Will that concludes with his disillusionment in the cathedral's meaning. Anna wins the argument, and thus saves both herself and Will from self- destructive immersion in Will's infinite. But Anna's vic tory is more questionable, even, than her victory in "Anna Victrix." She succeeds in destroying Will's cathedrals for him, without either fully recognizing the value of what Will had sought, or providing alternative goals of even equal value. Anna correctly adjudges the limitations of the cathedral; but her own unfeeling and naively rational pursuits seem at least as illusory and self-deceptive as Will's had been. The result is that Anna's victory is solely destructive; and Will continues with his devotion to churches— now a truly pathetic devotion, since he no longer believes in them, but simply honors them as symbols for an 138 impossible attempt— while Anna herself abandons completely her quest for the unknown and "higher being." | | Anna's philistine misunderstanding of mystery and re ligion, and her embracement of a foolish and shallow ratio-j nalism, indicate that Lawrence is less sympathetic with her| than most criticism of The Rainbow realizes. Anna is gen- ! erally regarded as Lawrence's spokesman in opposition to Will's blind and passionate worship, and although there is much truth to this judgment, I have shown that the struggle between Will and Anna cannot be so neatly categorized. Throughout their two-chapter struggle, Lawrence carries on a complex exploration and double criticism that conveys no i simple or obvious moral imperative. An example of Lawrence's ironic turnabouts occurs in "The Child," which follows "The Cathedral" and presents the final appraisal of the success achieved by Will and Anna in their quest for the rainbow. Whereas the previous chapters stressed Anna as the adventuresome quester, as well as the victor, "The Child" focuses on Will's quest for fulfillment. Will has again become a bully who cannot let others be. His lack of individuation and inner purpose— his selfless ness— have developed into a perverse, false self: a hard, will-driven, egocentric, insecure "personality" that views the outside world as a testing ground of its own worth, and that falsely equates the attainment of conscious goals and 139 the domination of other people with fulfillment. Will has neither learned to live from the inside out, nor found the gateway to release the stopped-up inner flow of the life force. But after he fails in his attempted seduction of a lower-class Nottingham girl, he returns to Anna and she converts his willful, manipulative sex-desire into an in tense, but cold and without tenderness, sensual love through which each of them penetrates to his innermost, im personal, sensual, passionate core. The heat of passion burns away all their shame and inner fears, and Will dis covers the "passionate purpose" that has so long eluded him— paradoxically, a descent within himself liberates him to purposive activity in the outside world. Ironically, Anna, has finally provided Will with the doorway that she herself has sought: And gradually, Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the outside life. . . . His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life. . . . He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind. . . . He had at length, from his profound sensual activity, developed a real purposive self. (p. 223) Will's rebirth to purposive and self-responsible exis tence parallels Tom Brangwen's final transformation that concluded the section of the novel dealing with him and Lydia. Both Tom and Will find a gateway to self-liberation in sexual activity with their wives. Both discover that fulfillment requires definition of an inner self, rather ! 140 I |than dependence on the outer world. And these parallels i I underscore the important difference between the two re- i !births that constitutes the unique achievement of the sec- ( |ond generation of Brangwens: through Anna, the Brangwens I had escaped the farm, but only to a new prison; through j |Tom, the prison of Cossethay cottage (symbolizing the pri- ; son of their hard-shell personalities that shielded their I fearful and insecure inner selves) finally opened its doors: |"The house by the yew trees was in connection with the j ' ;great human endeavor at last. It gained a new vigour thereby" (p. 224). Ursula, the third generation of Brang wens, becomes the first of them really to live in the out- f |side world. ; * * * Beginning with its opening lines. The Rainbow contains I some sort of religious reference or biblical correspondence Ion nearly every page. The novel's overt religious themes I and structural elements form one of the continuous thematic threads running through the book and reveal Lawrence's I • clear religious intentions— The Rainbow might justifiably be called Lawrence's Genesis (or perhaps his Paradise Lost). jYet none of The Rainbow's numerous critics has examined the religious aspect in any detail, with the exception of . George H. Ford, who has written that: The Rainbow is the story of the ancestry, birth, 141 development, suffering, trials and triumphs of a prophet, or, more accurately, a prophetess, Ursula Brangwen, whose mission it will be to show the way out of a wilderness into a Promised Land.® j Ford's remark exaggerates insofar as he seems to dismiss the first two generations of Brangwens as mere background for Ursula's apocalyptic quest. But he accurately assesses: i the great significance of her quest, which is religious in ; I the sense that it depicts an individual's search for "sal- j vation," in the sense that it implies a path for a whole people to follow toward regeneration, and in the sense that it explicitly criticizes the path of Christianity. In order to make clear the full measure of The Rain bow 's religious significance, I will range back to the be ginning of the novel and work forward, briefly noting key elements that shape the religious context of Ursula's search for organic wholeness of being. In the first place, the rainbow itself was God's sign to Noah to signify His convenant. Secondly, the novel's opening page, as I have remarked, introduces the image of the church, which is associated with the perpendicular infinite that is criti cized throughout the book, and which undergoes specific attack from Anna, culminating in the Lincoln Cathedral scene. In the opening chapter, the intensely rhythmic ^Double Measure (New York, 1965), p. 130. 142 language and the narrated account of unspecified genera tions of Brangwens on Marsh Farm suggest the generations of i I I patriarchs in Genesis, and make Tom Brangwen himself seem like a patriarch. The Brangwen farm, too, is Eden-like to the men, who find satisfaction in it— it is the Brangwen women, the Eves, who wish to expand their paradise's lim- j its. In addition, Tom is symbolically associated with Noah,j as Julian Moynahan has observed,through his drunken wed ding speech and the displaying of his drowned body, both of which suggest Noah's exposure to his sons, and through his drowning by water, which suggests a transposed biblical flood. The parallels are hardly rigid or exact, but they convey the feeling that Tom is a patriarch, as he also seems to Ursula later, when the stories her grandmother tells her in the bedroom of the farm after Tom's death "be came a sort of Bible to the child" (p. 244). In the second generation, Anna performs Eve's role on three specific occasions: she, a woman, was the first Brangwen to expand the constraints of the Brangwen Eden- farm; just as she informs Will that the wedding bed is de limiting; and just as she argues against him that the cathedral, too, is delimiting. Tom's carving of Adam and Eve is abandoned after he learns about women from experi- lOThe Deed of Life, p. 69. 143 ence with Anna and after Anna herself attacks his concep tion of Eve as being a puppet. And Will supplies a varia tion of the Eden-theme when, upon hearing Anna's voice in the cathedral, he thinks, "This was the voice of the ser pent in his Eden" (p. 192). Anna compares herself to David i in the scene where she dances naked before "her own" Lord, j rather than before her husband, as David had danced before his Lord rather than Michael. ' Finally, when Anna decides to cease her quest for fulfillment, and to have babies in stead, she makes her decision from atop "her Pisgah mount" where on the horizon she sees a tempting rainbow, but does not follow. Instead, she says of Ursula— named after a saint— that: The child she might hold up, she might toss the child j forward into the furnace, the child might walk there, amid the burning coals and the incandescent roar of heat, as the three witnesses walked with the angel in the fire. (p. 183) The scene parallels the earlier communion scene in the barn between Tom and Anna, in that it passes on the burden of the Brangwen quest to a new generation. More importantly, it clearly implies that Ursula's quest will be prophetic, that she will be a witness to the true God in a world full of infidels, as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were wit nesses and walked in the fire with God's angel. (There may be some criticism of Anna's own quest implied in this bib lical analogy: the soldiers who tossed Shadrach, Meshach, 144 and Abednego into the flames— as Anna plans to toss Ursula into them— were themselves unbelievers who were destroyed i by the flames. In the following chapter, Anna makes her attack oh Will's cathedral.) Seen from this religious perspective, The Rainbow tells the story of the Fall from Eden and the search for a | new Promised Land. Potentially, it is a Fortunate Fall, j for despite the great plenitude of the Marsh Farm-Eden, it had imprisoned man's intellect and his moral sense, and thus denied him wholeness of being. The Fall could mean, paradoxically, an "ascent" from primordial, mindless dark ness to the benedictory, wholesome light of the.inquiring and moral intellect— the Fall could mean, that is, the achievement of functional wholeness of man's potential being. (Cf. the Holy Ghost that appears as a tongue of flame, and recall that Tom Brangwen had a friend during his school days that he remembered as "a sort of light," and that Tom's movement from outside Lydia's kitchen across her threshold was a movement into the light; recall also that Will Brangwen is darkness, Anna sometimes light; and recall Lawrence's image, quoted above, of the candle and flame.) But the Fall could also mean a plunge into Hell, for the land east of Eden is fraught with dangers and pitfalls— with false arks and rainbows, like the church which Will worships so mindlessly it becomes a new Eden; or like the 145 exclusively rational, and therefore destructive, intellect Anna brings to bear on Will's beliefs; or like the Hall and school that were admired on the farm by Tom's mother, and are achieved by Ursula in the form of Skrebensky, who is associated with government and civic duties (Hall), and the schools she teaches in and attends. j Ursula's quest therefore has many dimensions and many j obstacles, and it is given structure through a complex blend of patterns of movement, images of buildings and rooms, religious allusions and images, images of contrast ing darkness and light, and a variety of symbolic charac ters and scenes, including the baffling scenes with Skre bensky beneath the moon and the visionary scene in which Ursula escapes from horses. Ursula's section of The Rain bow puzzles and mystifies every reader to some extent, and it has driven some critics to the arrogant assumption that because they find it difficult, Lawrence must have been confused. For example, Graham Hough writes that in Law rence's narration of Ursula's relationship with Skrebensky, Lawrence is trying to convey something further, some thing of deep importance to him, as is plain from the agonized contortions of his style. But it never comes through. The attraction and failure between Ursula and Skrebensky ought to be a mystery, but in fact it becomes a muddle. We might dismiss Hough's remarks as the sort of witty ■^Hough, p. 69. 146 bravado by which careers are often made in the literary scholarship business, if it were not such a commonplace j i charge among critics of The Rainbow. Even Julian Moynahan, j a Lawrence critic generally not so easily bewildered as ! Graham Hough, finds the novel puzzling enough to remark: "Why do some of these characters succeed in saving them- j selves while others fail? This question is virtually impos-i sible to answer."12 Substantial criticisms can be made of the third portion of The Rainbow: Lawrence sometimes seems impatient to get it over with, and lapses into essays writ ten in his own voice; the rhythmic attraction and repulsion that works well in the first two sections, between Tom and Lydia and between Will and Anna, seems only repetitious in the third section of the book, which could be condensed a good deal without much loss; and, it must be admitted, j Ursula's quest ie difficult to understand, and the polari ties of horizontal and perpendicular seem sometimes to shift their meanings in a way that confuses. But Hough and Moynahan simply err when they assert that little reason or intended order unifies and clarifies The Rainbow. The at traction and failure between Ursula and Skrebensky is no muddle, as I will now attempt to show. Ursula has a more pronounced sense of being imprisoned than, perhaps, any other character in Lawrence's fiction. ^ Moynahan, p. 47. At home, she becomes nearly frantic in her efforts to es cape the noise and intrusions of the large family, and she j | desperately moves from room to room, first locking herself in her bedroom, then in the parish room, to'be alone with her dreams of remote and exotic places. From these early scenes of her childhood until the last page of the novel, Ursula is restlessly moving from place to place, driven by a violent urge to escape. I have discussed how images of thresholds and other architecture conveyed the quests of Tom and Anna Brangwen, so I will not demonstrate at length their function in Ursula's section of the novel, beyond citing some of her most significant moves. She escapes her house for the first time by attending the grammar school in Nottingham, where she felt "she was upon another hill-slope, whose summit she had not scaled, . . . liberated into an intoxicating air" (p. 253). But Ursula still lives at home, where she feels free only on Sundays, at first, and where she comes to feel trapped all the time, until she simply "must get away" from the "poky house crammed with kids" (p. 337). She therefore seeks work far from her home when she finishes high school, but her family refuses to allow her to leave, and she must settle for a position at a near by school. Even after having thus compromised, on Ursula's first day of work she feels that the tram leads "to freedom'.' She is disillusioned immediately upon passing through the i 148 i j school's domineering, church-like, arched doorway, however, i when she finds that the place looks like an "empty prison." i Such words as "prison," "cell," "freedom," "liberation," and "escape" occur dozens of time.s during the description of Ursula's experiences as a teacher, making it very clear that the school sought by the first Brangwen Eve, back on the Marsh Farm, was not a rainbow, but a false ark. But Ursula has not yet learned the lesson, and she goes on to college. Two significant moves take place before Anna leaves her job at Brinsley Street School for the college. Anna makes several visits to the Schofield farm, which serves as | a symbolic window into the Brangwen past, and reveals how far into the outside world the Brangwens have now pene trated. Ursula rejects Anthony Schofield's offer of mar riage— his offer to readmit her to Eden— because of the unconsciousness of his oneness with his surroundings: He did not see it. He was one with it. But she saw it, and was one with it. Her seeing separated them infinitely. . . . They went on in silence down the path, following their different fates. . , . She was a trav eller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfillment of his own senses. (pp. 393-394) Ursula here espouses what amounts to a doctrine of a Fortu nate Fall. She seeks a consciously-lived life of instinct and sensuality, and Eden offers only the instinct and sen suality, only the candle without the flame. The second 14§ move before Ursula attends college occurs when the whole family changes houses. Will has a new job and a more pres tigious position in the town, so they leave the Cossethay i cottage behind them like a dead skin. Ursula, at first, feels overjoyed at the prospect of moving, and Lawrence | fills the scene with numerous images of flower-buds open ing, pear trees, sunshine— -multiple fertility and rebirth images. The move seems like another metamorphic stage of growth. But when Ursula discovers the new home, her heart sinks: it is "red-brick suburbia,1 ’ "good and substantial," yet impersonal and lifeless. The new house represents so cial success to Will and Anna, and it makes them happy. But it saddens Ursula— the "rebirth" through social success is an illusion, and the move from Cossethay fulfills her as little as all her previous moves had. Ursula, however, does not yet see this, despite her self-assurance that she sees what Anthony Schofield could not. She continues to search outside herself for fulfill ment, and she goes away to college. The college is a huge stone building, with "foolish" architecture and "ugly" Gothic arches. Within a year, "a harsh and ugly disillu sion came over her again" (p. 410). The life goes out of her studies, says Lawrence, and the whole attempt seems "sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches." Ursula flees the college and desperately moves from hotel to hotel with Skrebensky, neurotically searching in three countries for what has constantly eluded her from the first move out of i her Cossethay house to grammar school. When, in the nov el's last chapter, Ursula has an apocaplytic vision induced by her experience with the horses, it happens as she is making plans for yet another move, this time to India. ; Plainly, until the episode of the horses and Ursula's vision, she is trapped in a perpetual cycle of escape and disillusionment, followed by another escape. From her1 home to grammar school to the "man's world" of Brinsley Street School; from the Schofield farm and the new Brangwen home to the college and after that to Europe— perpetual running, perpetual seeking, and never any finding. Ursula herself recognizes the futility of it all during a poignant, lucid moment after the college has turned sour: Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. (p. 412) Ursula constantly suffers disillusionment, of course, only because she has illusions in the first place. Her greatest illusion is that in striving outward, in seeking fulfill ment through connection with the outer, active man-made world, she no longer acknowledges the need for a concomi tant striving inward ^toward her inner, creative life flame. Ursula has carried the Brangwens full circle: her grand father Tom existed mainly in the horizontal mode and groped 151 outward toward the perpendicular; Ursula during her quest comes to exist mainly in the perpendicular mode, and must | re-discover the horizontal. In seeking the "beyond" of the; man-made world, she has alienated herself from the inner unknown "beyond" the limits of consciousness. She has be come a flame that has lost its candle. And the horses in | the final chapter represent the unconscious, the instincts, | the headwaters of the flowing life force, reasserting them selves. They shatter Ursula's illusion that fulfillment can result from an exclusively conscious quest; and the rainbow appears. Ursula begins her self-estrangement, i.e., the aliena tion from her innermost self, as a teen-ager trying to make sense out of Christianity. On the one hand, she loves re ligion's mystery and extra-human sense of immortality. On the other hand, she has acquired a pragmatic, workaday out look on the world from her mother. She finds the two ori entations incompatible, and rather than attempt to recon cile them or to decide in favor of either, she simply di vides her life into a Sunday world— removed from practical affairs and permeated by a feeling of mystery and peace-- and a weekday world--in which the work gets done,. But eventually Ursula feels the strain of a fragmented life> Sunday mystery and weekday drifting become unacceptable as she develops a moral intelligence and awareness of herself 152 as a self-responsible entity. She wants more than Sunday submersion in immortality— she wants a guide to action. I She thinks of herself as a "half-stated question": "how to ; act. . . . Whither to go, how to become oneself" (p. 267). ; Having asked these questions, she begins to reject Chris tianity's answers. First she rejects the humble side of j Christ— she will not turn the other cheek!— then she re- j coils against the command to give to the poor. Finally, her love for herself and her fellow men are eroded, and she begins to feel mistrustful and antagonistic towards others. Her visionary, mysterious, religious attitude toward the world withers; simultaneously, she becomes practical, ego centric, outward striving; and she suppresses her inner self. Fulfillment for her in this "allotropic state" means success in the external world of affairs. In this mood, Ursula meets Skrebensky. She immedi ately embraces him as a gateway to the outside world, par ticularly when he remarks, "The outside world was always . . . naturally a home to me" (p. 275). Before meeting Skrebensky, Ursula had often mused over the biblical pas sage, "The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair: and they took them wives of all which they chose." She thought of herself worthy of a Son of God, and she mistakes Skrebensky for such a man. They quickly be come lovers, but it is a "sex-in-the-head" affair, as 153 Lawrence calls such struggles between finite, personal, egoistic people. Ursula uses him to satisfy herself, like a vampire. She loves only the shell of him, the outer him j that relates to the outer her, the selfless penis she can use and dominate. He obliges her by allowing himself to be loved as an object, possessed like a thing. As their af- | fair continues, Ursula becomes deeply divided in her inner being: she seeks to realize her vital, inner self through her sensual affair with Skrebensky, even as she faintly understands that he is mechanical and coreless, a dead ab straction; she continues with him out of sheer momentum, pretending to herself that is more than an affair of pos- sessorship, and fooling herself into believing that she loves him. By the time Skrebensky leaves England for the Boer War, their love-making has become a form of cannibal ism, with Ursula destroying him during the sex act, and afterwards reviving him. Significantly, Skrebensky gives her a box of sweets when he leaves— and they provoke a crisis in her. She refuses to share them and eats every one herself, all the time feeling guilty and ashamed. Ursula has been transformed into a devouring ego, as her father had been earlier. After Skrebensky leaves, Ursula has a lesbian affair with Winifred Ingar, which reveals how distorted Ursula's relationships with other people have become. Perhaps more 154 importantly, during the affair with Winifred, Ursula exter nalizes herself still further. Winifred is a scientific i | humanist and an advocate of social justice for woman. Through her influence, Ursula rationalistically strips re ligion of its dogmas and takes an interest in social ques tions. She craves social independence, and begins at this j time to think of a job away from home. By the time Skre- | bensky returns from Africa, nearly three years after he left, Ursula has trapped herself in the cycle of escape and disillusionment and escape that I described above. The mad dash from European capital to European capital that Ursula makes with Skrebensky, after they renew their affair, reflects her inner turmoil. Like Paul Morel, j i Ursula suffers from a split between the mental and physical portions of her total being. Her integrity has been shat tered, and her mind and body are at war. Her mind seeks fulfillment in the outside world, and it can persist in its quest only by stifling the wisdom of her body. Several times, Ursula has half-acknowledged her situation, but nevertheless continued on her course. For example, as her first affair wtih Skrebensky gathers momentum, he and she come upon the barge "Annabel" while out for a walk. The bargeman is spontaneous, confident, gentle, cheerful, reverent, bold, rooted in physical experience, unconcerned with society— in a word, alive. (Cf. the gamekeeper of The White Peacock who had similar traits and was named Annable.) Ursula feels the connection between them, and afterwards ' j Skrebensky feels his own lack, senses his own failure, be cause he cannot love with both body and soul, like the bargeman. Less than a dozen pages after this scene, Ursula reads the biblical account of Noah, the flood, and the ! covenant— which she finds disgusting, because the covenant,I she says, is one of possessorship, of "man's stock-breeding lordship over beast and fishes" (p. 306). To a reader, it seems clear that Ursula's relationship with Skrebensky is the same sort of stock-breeding possessorship, and that the barge "Annabel" offers an alternative to Noah's ark. But Ursula persists in her will-driven, outward striving, and ignores her feelings. In the same way, she ignores the j evidence of her feelings after visiting her uncle Tom's colliery town, where she sees the ugly way that the system there molds the men into mechanism to fit its needs— -in the following chapter she enters an analogous system at Brins ley Street School. And again, after discovering at the school that even a well-intentioned and conscious person cannot survive without becoming a mechanical tyrant who converts fifty individual students into "one disciplined, mechanical set" (p. 361), Ursula nevertheless ignores her feelings and becomes more mental still, by going to college. By "ignores the evidence of her feeling," I mean that 156 Ursula acts irrationally, inappropriately, mechanically. Her experiences do not alter her. Her feelings do not ! ! change her mind. Even conscious disgust or outrage does not provoke her to change her course. Despite disillusion after disillusion, Ursula continues to pursue her conscious ; — and dead--goals. Ursula suffers from the failure of J courage that inflicts many of Lawrence ■ s characters— the | courage to trust one's inner, bodily wisdom; the courage to live from the inside outward; the courage "to leap into the unknown." That Ursula lacks such courage is ironic, and marks how far she has retrogressed in her dizzying efforts to fulfill herself through external pursuits, because on the night when she first met Skrebensky, she said, "I don't think brains matter. . . . It matters whether people have courage or not. . . . Courage for everything" (p. 272). Eventually, the life force asserts itself inside her, despite the direction her mind prefers, in a manner similar to Lydia Brangwen's rebirth against her conscious intention. It begins one day in biology lab at the college, as Ursula peers through her microscope at a shadowy plant-animal. She recalls a conversation she had a few days before with a woman doctor of physics who argued that we should not "at tribute some special mystery to life" (p. 416). Life, she said, is a complex physical and chemical activity, more complex than such activities as science already understands, 157 but still of the same order, nevertheless. Watching the cell through her microscope, Ursula knows that the doctor is wrong. The cell has a purpose as a unified, separate being, she realizes, and is not merely an accidental con junction of physical forces: Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away I into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a one ness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity. (pp. 416-417) Ursula's discovery that "self was a oneness with the infi nite" might baffle and confuse a reader who recalled the i i earlier attack on Will Brangwen in Lincoln cathedral, wherei the infinite was described as inimical to life. Perhaps Graham Hough had this scene in mind when he called Ursula's portion of The Rainbow "muddled" But it was the Christian infinite— the Ultimate Infinite in isolation— that was un der attack in Lincoln cathedral, and, as I have shown, Lawrence used "infinite" in two different senses. Ursula here refers to the Creative Infinite— the infinite dis covered by descent within, as Paul Morel, Tom Brangwen, Lydia, Will, and Anna had descended within themselves and discovered, in varying degrees, the Creative Infinite. It is the unknown life force within— hence, it is knowledge that, paradoxically, she cannot understand: in Lawrencean 158 terms, "blood-knowledge," rather than mind-knowledge. Looking through her.microscope, Ursula literally "passed away": a part of her egoistic, personal, outward-seeking self died, so that her integrated and complete self might begin its rebirth. As I have said above, the Creative In finite is realized through sexual relationship: Ursula's discovery occurred on the day when Skrebensky returned to her life. In fact, Skrebensky was waiting for her at the very moment that she examined the cell and felt herself reawaken. Ursula joyfully greets Skrebensky. But three years before she had misjudged him, so she still does not under stand how hollow and selfless he is, when she renews her affair with him. Instead, because he has been to Africa, she believes that he represents the "darkness" that she now seeks in an effort to regenerate her stifled sensuality and passions. They make love, and for some time each feels re newed, as though the creative source within them had been tapped. Ursula finds in her sensual love a "permanent self." She wallows in her rediscovered darkness, hating the light she had once sought: "The stupid lights. . . . The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness" (p. 423). For weeks, she goes about in darkness, seeing at last the sham and dead crust of the external 159 world that she had previously tried to define herself in: "What are you, you pale citizens?" her face seemed to say, gleaming. "You subdued beast in sheep's cloth ing, you primeval darkness falsified to a social mecha nism. She went about in the sensual sub-consciousness all the time, mocking at the ready-made, artificial daylight of the rest. "They assume selves as they assume suits of clothing," she said to herself. . . . "What do you think you are?" her soul asked of the professor as she sat opposite him in class. . . . "You are a lurking, blood-sniffing crea ture with eyes peering out of the jungle darkness, snuffing for your desires. . . . " (p« 423) Ursula has at last renewed her contact with the Creative Infinite— "unlimited darkness" or "primeval darkness"— but having done so, she begins to discover Skrebensky's lack of darkness, to see that he is an abstract and selfless mecha nism. Her conflicting discoveries challenge her as-yet tenu ous hold on her new and "darker" self, raising the tensions within her to their highest, most frenzied pitch during the novel's last fifty pages. Having descended into the "un known" life force inside her, she wants to reestablish con tact with the life force throughout the whole cosmos. She is torn- between accepting Skrebensky as a husband, or re jecting him as the obstacle to fulfillment that she is beginning to realize he is. Skrebensky's offer of marriage, of course, means the dead crust of society threatening to impose itself on her again; Skrebensky thinks of love and 160 ■ marriage as ends in themselves, as social achievements, after which one settles down. But Ursula thinks of love as j an impersonal, non-social attraction on a physical level— and it is not, for her, its own end, but is a gateway to realization of the inner life flame, and to connection withi the outer living universe. This explains Skrebensky's j failure in the celebrated love scene beneath the moon, when he tries to please her, copulating on a sand dune, but cannot: There was a great whiteness confronting her, the moon was incandescent as a round furnace door, out of which came the high blast of moonlight, over the seaward half of the world. . . . He felt his chest laid bare, where the secret was heavily hidden. He felt himself fusing down to nothingness, like a bead that rapidly disappears in an incandescent flame. (p. 451) j I have quoted this passage to show Skrebensky's specific j ] failure. George H. Ford has pointed out that this passage recalls Anna Brangwen's scene atop her Pisgah when she tosses Ursula into the furnace, to walk in the fire as a witness of the Lord (see above, p. 143).13 In the light of that earlier passage, we can here see Skrebensky's failure: he is not a witness of the true Lord— near to the "round furnace door," he is fused "down to nothingness." The se cret in his chest— his nothingness— is bared. He cannot deliver Ursula, cannot put her into contact with the cosmos - * - 3Ford, p. 131. 161 — the moon— through the act of sex. Undelivered, Ursula becomes frenzied, vicious, overwhelmed by her devouring, j i dominating desire: she struggles for consummation with the; moon, not merely with him, and when he cannot provide it for her, she destroys him with her "beaked mouth." It is important to notice that Ursula remains unful- j filled, unconnected with the cosmos she has cut herself off I from. She cannot reestablish the vital contact alone; she needs a man, and sexual relationship with him. But Skre bensky is not her equal, and proves incapable of providing the doorway Ursula needs. She finds that doorway, the lover equal to her demands, in Birkin, her lover in Women I | in Love. j Before The Rainbow concludes, however, Ursula under goes one last rhythmic transformation. After Skrebensky's manhood proves inadequate and he leaves her for India, she discovers she is with child. She talks herself into ac- i cepting Skrebensky--in flat violation of everything she has learned during the last few scenes. She convinces herself that she has demanded too much, that a nice little house in India should satisfy her, that Skrebensky would make her a good husband. In short, she begins anew to stifle her pas sions and to falsify the life force by imposing mental judgments on it. The fantastic scene during which Ursula barely escapes 162 from horses that corner her during a rainstorm in a field portrays the revolt of her instincts against this new im- I position. The snorting/ threatening horses, with their j drumming hooves, their "powerful flanks," "dark flanks," "fierce flanks," their "haunches, so rounded, so massive, pressing, pressing, pressing," "their great haunches," j "their intense darkness," represent the specifically sexual; life force flowing inside Ursula that will no longer be denied. The rainbow that appears to Ursula after she has spent several days in bed, following her encounter with the horses and her loss of Skrebensky's baby through miscar riage, may betray a shallow social optimism on Lawrence's j part, as many critics of the novel insist. But it does ! j signify the first union of the outside world with the inner, creative flow— the relationship of the perpendicular to the horizontal through a mediating Third or Self— that occurs in the novel. Ursula still lacks the life-fulfilling sex ual relationship she needs, but she has crossed all the important thresholds, has realized all the aspects of her being, and brought them into integrated relationship, and she stands waiting for fulfillment. She understands, at last, the futility of her desperate search in the dead, mechanical world of economic and educational system— both destructive and mechanical worlds that preclude the 163 individual. She is, at last, a witness of the only Lord that Lawrence could acknowledge: the Holy Ghost, the God within. CHAPTER IV WOMEN IN LOVE Anyone who reads through the body of criticism, inter-; i pretation, abuse, and panegyric that Women in Love has stimulated since its publication in 1920— five years after the appearance of The Rainbow— must find it a sobering and confusing experience. Critics agree that Women in Love is Lawrence's longest work— an empirical fact— and something like a consensus considers it Lawrence's most difficult and most carefully structured novel. Many admirers, and even a few annihilators like Eliseo Vivas, think of it as Law rence's finest achievement, along with The Rainbow. But on| ! nearly everything else, the critics disagree: on the structure of Women in Love, on the ideas that permeate the book, on the value or wisdom of those ideas, on the mental and emotional health of its author. Since its publication, Women in Love has excited ex treme and conflicting responses. One of the first reviews attacked the novel violently, calling it "obscene,” a "book the police should ban," a "loathsome study of sex depravity — misleading youth to unspeakable disaster," and a work 164 ; 165 t | which approached "the borderland of crime. " • * - A dozen years | Jlater, Norman Douglas seemed much less disturbed by the jbook, and he dismissed it as so much long-winded drivel, a i | "dreary waste of words," a work with little of value which | jcould provide "inspiration" to "scholars and men of the | world."^ Witter Bynner, like Douglas an acquaintance of Lawrence, could not dismiss the book so easily. For him, | i Women in Love was the product of a mind that needed "some | sort of medical treatment," a mind "utterly without imagi nation, humor, or warmth," that had created a novel "more 3 concerned with hate than with love." Writing two decades ! later in one of our "standard" histories of the novel, ! Edward Wagenknecht called Women in Love a "bad-smelling" | novel with "the odor of death about it," a horror com pounded by a fictional situation that was "neither clear nor convincing."^ A year before Wagenknecht1s book was published, Mark Schorer admitted: "I have known almost no ;reader who, on first reading, did not find [Women in Love] - * - W . Charles Pilley, "A Book the Police Should Ban . . . ," John Bull, XXX (No. 798, Saturday, 17 September 1921), 4. Reprinted in D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biog raphy , ed. Edward Nehls (Madison, 1958), II, 89-91. ^Nehls, II, 11-15. Reprinted from Looking Back (New York, 1933), pp. 282-287. 3Nehls, II, 233-234. ^Cavalcade of the English Novel (New York, 1954), p. 496. 166 either opaque beyond endurance, or tiresome, or revolting." But Schorer went on to assert that readers must "make an i effort to tolerate" the book, that Women in Love is diffi cult because it attempts more than fiction is capable of, and that if we cannot hear Lawrence in this work, "we are lost."^ Two years later, Mark Spilka studied Women in Love j with special concern for the human relationships it por- ! trays, and found it Lawrence's major expression of a love 6 ethic and a brotherhood theme. Many writers have echoed Schorer's complaint about the book's opaqueness, its sheer impenetrability. F. R. Leavis thought it a great artist's finest work, but he conceded that "the drama becomes decidedly esoteric; no longer, that is, immediately intelligible and convincing to the novel- reader who approaches in good faith but with no special apparatus of interpretation.After explicating a key chapter, Graham Hough remarked, "what happens afterwards I do not fully understand."^ Eliseo Vivas disagreed with men like Schorer, Leavis, and Spilka, who found wisdom in Women 5"Women in Love and Death," D. H. Lawrence; A Collec tion of Critical Essays, ed..Mark Spilka (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey* 1963), pp. 59-69. . ^Love Ethic, pp. 121-168. ^D. H. Lawrence; Novelist (New York, 1956), p. 230. ^Hough, p. 81. 167 in Love. To go to it for wisdom, he said, is folly. Like other critics, however. Vivas found Women in Love Diffi cult: "A first reading . . . and even a second or a third gives us little more than a chaos of incidents and scenes that . . . seem to lack formal relationships" because the : book is "incredibly rich in detail and in substance.1,9 j l The denseness and opaqueness of Women in Love have j ~ | caused several controversies over specific matters of form and content. Leavis sees the parallel love affairs of Rupert Birkin-Ursula Brangwen and Gerald Crich-Gudrun Brangwen as the chief structural principles in the novel, and he holds that the affair between Birkin and Ursula con stitutes a norm against which we should measure the other affair. Vivas accepts the two love affairs as the essen- i tial structural elements of the novel, but he quarrels with Leavis over the "normative" value of the Birkin-Ursula af fair. Vivas argues that Birkin's sexual relationships are abnormal, to the point of emotional illness, and a failure by even Birkin's own standards. Mark Spilka agrees with the idea that Birkin and Ursula provide a normative love relationship, but Spilka additionally stresses Birkin's de sire for a passionate— but not sexually abnormal--relation- ship between men as well as between men and women. (Vivas 9Vivas, pp. 226, 270. 168' simply deflates Birkin's quest for a relationship with a man to sublimated homosexuality— on Lawrence's part as wellj i as Birkin's.) W. W. Robson, on the other hand, subordinates the parallel love affairs to the figure of Birkin himself. Robson insists that Birkin is the organizing principle of Women in Love, that the novel is the story of his attempts I to teach Ursula how to overcome a romantic and sentimental j | conception of love. Robson also believes that it is wrong to call Birkin's ideas normative, because the "kind of love he wanted is illusory. "^-0 Similar controversies abound in criticism of Women in Love. Is Women in Love a sequel to The Rainbow, as Law rence called it? Is Birkin nothing more than Lawrence's j ! mouthpiece? Is Gerald Crich a dramatized concept, or is he i a convincing character? Is Birkin exclusively Ursula's teacher, or does he also learn from her? Is the misan thropy in the novel gratuitous and unmotivated? Is Women in Love only destructive, or does it offer positive and creative alternatives to the death and destruction that un deniably permeate it? What is the novel about? These many controversies, these many conflicting eval uations and responses stimulated by Women in Love, indicate a major problem faced by any commentator on the novel: the ■^^D. H. Lawrence and Women in Loye," The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford (Baltimore, 1961) , pp. 2139-300. 169 book is so rich, so dense, that any interpretation in less than a full volume must necessarily omit a great deal, and I must oversimplify much of what is included. And these con-; troversies also make more understandable my own occasional : uncertainties and tentative conclusions, just as, by empha-j sizing the fact that almost any statement about the novel | is a controversial one, they justify what otherwise might appear as undue elaboration of obvious points, or might ap pear as crude paraphrase. * * * Many critics have quarreled with Lawrence's descrip tion of Women in Love as a sequel to The Rainbow, but there are several connections between the two books, and it is helpful to see Women in Love as a development from the earlier book. For example, we find Ursula's love affair with Birkin in Women in Love far more significant when we know of her previous love-experience with Skrebensky, and when we can recall its failure. Ursula herself recalls that affair, and compares Birkin to Skrebensky. She makes other references to her past life in The Rainbow at key moments when that past illuminates the present. She refers to Marsh Farm, to the passage in Genesis about Sons of God, and to Lincoln cathedral, for example. Similarly, Will Brangwen occasionally figures in the second book, and it strikes us that he has become surly and conventional, "as 170 uncreated at fifty as he was at twenty." Most importantly, however, we gain from seeing the thematic continuity and development that links the two novels. The Rainbow conveys the story, through its larger movements, of the evolution of man's consciousness and the history of civilization. The book opens with unconscious characters living in "blood intimacy" with the whole of organic nature, and concludes with highly conscious, cere bral characters who have left their pastoral origins far behind to exist in the twentieth century's mechanized, in dustrialized society. Their outward thrust from the primi tive home proves, in balance, to be destructive. The Rain bow' s characters become uprooted and detached from organic nature, severed from intimate contact with their fellow men, and out of touch with their own deepest selves. As we read the final chapters of The Rainbow, in which man has been mechanized and reduced to a "meaningless lump" who serves the machines and lives amidst squalor in the "brit tle corruption of houses and factories," we have already entered the wasteland world of Women in Love. The Rainbow was conceived and mostly written before the war, even though it did not appear Until 1915. The war's tremendous impact on Lawrence does not reveal itself very much in the novel, therefore, and Ursula foresees, in the final words of the book, a future in which the corrupt 171 world is swept away and replaced by a new world built upon "the living fabric of Truth." But the war soured Lawrence's i i vision of the world, and he was near despair as he worked on Women in Love. As so often occurred with Lawrence, a personal letter written soon after completion of Women in Love, in July 1917, makes important revelations about his j attitudes then and the effect they had on his work: S j The Rainbow . . . was all written before the war, though revised during Sept. and Oct. of 1914. I don't think the war had much to do with it— I don't think the war altered it, from its pre-war statement. . . . I knew I was writing a destructive work, otherwise I couldn't have called it The Rainbow-— in reference to the flood. . . . And I knew, as I revised the book, that it was a kind of working up to the dark sensual, or Dionysic or Aphrodisic ecstasy, which actually does burst the world, burst the world-consciousness in every individual. What I did through individuals, the world had done through the war. But alas, in the world of Europe I see no rainbow. I believe the deluge of iron rain will de stroy the world here, utterly: no Ararat will rise above the subsiding iron waters. There is a great consummation in death, or sensual ecstasy, as in the Rainbow. But there is also death which is the rushing of the Gaderene swine down the slope of extinction in death, rather than our Consummation. So be it: it is not my fault. There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love. . . . I don't think anybody will publish this either. This actually does contain the results in one's soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive— consummating. It is very wonderful and terrifying, even to me who have written it. (CL, I, 519) The Europe that Lawrence described in this letter is the Europe that forms the setting of Women in Love. The bright future that Ursula had envisioned five years earlier in The Rainbow realized itself in Women in Love as a nightmarish 172 reality, a deadly environment populated by living-dead men who seem bent on flinging themselves, like lemmings or Gaderene swine, down the "slope of extinction" to their complete destruction. I argued in the last chapter that Ursula's quest in The Rainbow was a religious one: a search for a new cove- j nant that would not violate man's integrity, as Ursula be- j i lieved that the earlier covenant between God and Noah had violated it--God the Great Proprietor, she thought, and Noah his stock-breeding agent on earth, partners in a cove nant of possessorship. Ursula discovered the God within her, and the new rainbow sign marked a state of being and I becoming that she had finally achieved. Seen from this j perspective, that is, as a sequel to this development, i Women in Love portrays a world which has refused to embrace the new covenant, a world which has ignored the "fabric of Truth" that Ursula discovered, and has therefore degener ated into a latter day Sodom.11 The point to stress here is that a Sodom— whether bib lical or Lawrencean— can develop only when gross violations of man1s being and nature1s laws have occurred. Sodom re sults when the covenant is broken. Women in Love was 11In the phraseology of the letter quoted above, Ursula achieved consummation through sensation in The Rain- bow, whereas the culture that provides the setting of Women in Love achieves extinction through sensual ecstasy. 173 Lawrence's attempt to understand and to cope with the Euro pean Sodom through an imaginative exploration of the psy chological failures and the infractions of nature's laws that gave rise to it. It is a tough-minded, even a de- ; structive book— as Lawrence and his critics agree— because it will settle for nothing less than the demolition of j Sodom and the death of the kind of being that made it pos- j i sible. Here the typical Anglo-American reader needs to check his stock responses, if he wishes to understand Law rence's intentions. For despite the fact that our century has seen the murder of more men than any other century, despite Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Mississippi, Vietnam, and even the story of Christ, which stresses the necessity of death as a preliminary to rebirth, we feel instant revul sion for any overtly expressed call for destruction— even 12 creative destruction. We might mitigate this revulsion if we recall that Women in Love is a mythical, symbolic work of fiction, not a political platform— as Vivas, for example, sometimes seems to fear that it is. Furthermore, I disagree with both Lawrence and those of his critics who 12in the event that "creative destruction" sounds like Orwellian double-talk, I refer the.reader to Henry Miller, "The Universe of Death," The Cosmological Eye (Norfolk, Conn., 1939), pp. 107-134, for a discussion of "creative death" in Lawrence and Joyce; and to Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man (New York, 1964) , pp. 24-36, for a psychoanalyst *s discussion of destruction in the service of life. 174 insist that the book remains purely destructive and does not offer any positive, creative alternatives to the death j and destruction that undeniably permeate it. I hope to show’ that the two types of death— final and creative-— appear in Women in Love. Before elaborating these ideas, however, I offer a brief description of the novel's content and strue-j ture to help give focus to the discussion. ! Into the wasteland setting, Lawrence placed four per sons who strive for personal integration and life-fulfill ing relationships: Rupert Birkin, Gerald Crich, Ursula Brangwen, and Gudrun Brangwen. Ursula and Gudrun are teachers at Willey Green Grammar School, aged twenty-six and twenty-five respectively. Birkin is an inspector of schools, and Gerald is the wealthy son of the colliery owner. As the novel opens, all four live in a state of in ertness, of suspended half-life and expectancy. Gerald feels this mood least of all, because he is busy with the modernization of his mines, but the others are frustrated and even embittered at their lack of fulfillment and at the lack of nourishment in their environment. In chapter one, the girls talk of marriage, which neither finds attractive, but which Gudrun feels is the inevitable, conventional next step. Ursula hates the thought of a conventional and per manent bond with a single man, although she seems attracted by the thought of children. Gudrun, on the other hand, 175 abhors the thought of children— a sure sign in Lawrence that something fundamental is amiss. Gudrun is an artist, and it thus seems ironic that she would accept the idea of a conventional marriage— she has just returned from a bohe mian life in London— and reject the idea of children— the epitome of creativity. The chapter concludes with the two girls observing a wedding party that includes Rupert Birkin, whom Ursula eventually marries, Gerald Crich, whom Gudrun takes as a lover and finally drives to his death, and Hermione Roddice, a refined, possessive, and extremely cerebral daughter of a baronet who has been Birkin*s lover for some time. In the following chapter, during the wedding reception; at Shortlands, the Crichs1 estate, the characters reveal themselves through conversations. Gerald and Hermiorie have a passion for polemics, and they maintain a running, and exceedingly abstract, debate on such matters as race, self- deception, nationhood, hatred, and competition. Birkin scorns the discussion, but when he has been reluctantly dragged into it, he shocks the wedding guests with ex tremely heretical views, asserting that conventional morals, standards of behavior, emulation are all bad because they stifle the spontaneous, individual, single self. Somewhat later, Birkin asserts that Gerald has an unconscious desire to be murdered, after Gerald has answered Birkin*s call for 176 spontaneity with the fear that if everyone did as he pleased, "we should have everybody cutting everybody else's throat in five minutes." The chapter closes with the two i j men pausing in silent enmity, each refusing to acknowledge that he has a great regard for the other, because both be lieve that a deep relationship between men is unnatural and unmanly. The following three chapters present the beginning of i ! | the three relationships that are developed in the book. In "Classroom" Birkin confronts Ursula with the rudiments of his philosophy of sexual polarity. (Hermione, appropri ately, is present during Birkin's "lesson": at this point, the three represent a love-triangle.) "Diver" initiates the relationship of Gerald and Gudrun. "In the Train" fur thers the incipient relationship between Birkin and Gerald, when they accidentally take the same train to London. They argue about religion, human development, materialism, and I ! sexual love as the center of a man's life. In London, I Birkin introduces Gerald to several of his bohemian friends. Gerald sleeps with one, the Pussum, in the apartment of an other, Halliday. Gerald stays with her in Halliday's j apartment— where Birkin and several other people also stop j ! over— for several days. j Gerald feels simultaneously fascinated and repelled by Halliday's African statues. He thinks the carvings obscene, 177 iand he resents Birkin's insistence that they are high art. ! |The carvings seem to strike a chord deep within Gerald that |he refuses to acknowledge: "He wanted to keep certain i n ! 'illusions, certain ideas like clothing" (p. 89). (Ironi-j : e jcally, Birkin and Gerald have no clothes on as they stare at the statues and discuss them.) Gerald has previously been described as "arctic," "white," and "northern" so a | reader feels that a weird sort of kinship through contrast joins the arctic and African images, like opposite sides of !the same coin, even though it is uncertain what the two images represent. After his trip to London, Birkin becomes increasingly antagonistic toward humanity and toward the superficial intellectuality of his acquaintances. He moves to an iso lated cabin by Willey Water, and wishes that he could live on an island in the center of it, undisturbed by even a woman. At a gathering of social butterflies at the Roddice mansion, Breadalby, Birkin provokes Hermione to a sadistic outburst. Her facade of self-possession and imperturbabil ity shatters, and she tries to kill Birkin with a ball of lapis lazuli. Birkin accepts her frenzied outburst as a healthy sign of increasing spontaneity, but he hates the ! i jinner self that Hermione's spontaneity reveals, and he i I 13^11 references are to the Modern Library edition of Women in Love (New York, 1950). 178 becomes still more misanthropic. Despite his withdrawal from humanity, he finds Ursula too attractive to be ignored. I The two become closer and closer, all the time struggling to convince each other that each has a vision of sexual relationship that the other should accept as the right one. I i ! After a long period of flowing together and drifting apart | — in a manner reminiscent of the rhythmic ebb and flow of | | feelings in The Rainbow— Birkin and Ursula finally marry. | ;During their struggle, Birkin has been assessing the orien- i tations toward life that the African and arctic images represent, and he rejects both to accept a third way, the way that he and Ursula have worked out through their dia lectic struggle. Each has compromised his position on love i a little, and each has learned something from the other. They go on a European holiday to the Austrian alps with Gerald and Gudrun. Gerald and Gudrun, in the meantime, have become lovers. [Neither Gerald nor Gudrun can face his inner self with courage and honesty, and neither consciously seeks growth and understanding, as Birkin and Ursula have. They do not gain in self-knowledge, and their love affair remains one between fragmented, will-dominated, self-deluded, and la tently violent beings really incapable of intimate, recip rocal relationship. These truths become evident after they reach Innsbruck, where each lets himself go, and they begin i a terrible and vicious battle for possessive mastery of | | each other. Gerald explodes in a sadistic rage, as Hermi one had, and tries to kill Gudrun. While he is strangling her, he regains a measure of self-control and leaves her, to climb upward toward the summit of the snow-covered slopes, where he freezes to death beneath a crucifix placed in the snow. Gudrun remains physically alive, but the ex perience has revealed to her the violent hollowness within her. Her spiritual destruction is complete, and she plans to go off with Loerke, an artistic and sexual pervert she has met at the resort. (Artistic pervert because he de votes his art to the interpretation of machinery and in- j sists that art has nothing to do with life. Sexual pervert; because he uses bodies of others as instruments— and be cause he is homosexual, as well.) i Birkin and Ursula had left the resort soon after ar riving because they could not stand the frozen barrenness. I They now return to help tend to official details caused by |Gerald's death. Throughout the novel, Birkin had tried to ! coax Gerald into forming a deep, passionate attachment-— bludbruderschaft. as Birkin called it— without success. As the novel ends, Birkin mourns his friend's death and in sists that Gerald could have avoided it if he had divested himself of inhibitions and opened up to warm and loving human relationships. 180 Of course my general account of Women in Love grossly oversimplifies the novel. I have tried to make clear in my summary/ however, that it is only secondarily a novel of I |external events, and that it is primarily a psychic drama | " • I given shape by the evolution of certain key themes. Narra tive plays a smaller role in Women in Love than in any of Lawrence's fictions. Events portray internal states of the characters, and many events seem quite baffling and mean ingless in conventional realistic terms. The poetic method of the novel mainly relies on the following techniques: symbolic scene, such as Birkin throwing rocks at the moon's reflection on Willey Water, and the wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald; symbolic setting, such as the fundamen tal structural metaphor of Sodom, the snow-bound Austrian setting of the final one-fifth of the novel, and the numer ous location changes made by the characters? ritual, such as the rebirth of Birkin and Ursula, and the passage from !Enqland to the alps; image patterns, that intertwine and j • overlap throughout the novel, particularly of flowers, water, bugs, animals, slopes, and the polarity of African and arctic. I mean nothing compelling by these categories, of course, because they frequently overlap— how can one ‘ ( separate image and setting, for example— but I offer them as one way of perceiving and giving order to, in Vivas's words, "the chaos of incidents and scenes" of Women in Love. 181 Having thus indicated, in brief, the structure and content |of the novel, I turn to an examination of some of the im- jportant image patterns and the themes that they express, beginning with the religious element that I introduced above with the hint of a latter-day Sodom. * * * j | Women in Love, like all of Lawrence's novels, contains very many Christian allusions, parallels, images, and ref erences. But these religious elements of the novel have been overshadowed, in most critical discussions, by a con- i jcentration on the puzzling African and northern images, on |the strange theories of "star-equilibrium" and "bludbruder- ! 14 schaft," or on the difficult symbolic scenes. It seems to me, however, that the religious element in the novel is fundamental, and that the other themes and the many puz zling scenes gain their full significance only when inter preted in the light of the larger, religious context. For in fact, the novel was consciously structured as a biblical | analogue: the gradual dissolution and corruption of Euro pean culture into a latter-day Sodom which must be de* stroyed before a regeneration, a fresh cycle of creation, ■^Two exceptions are George H. Ford, who interprets Women in Love as an escape from Sodom, but does not explore the extent to which religious elements function throughout the book; and Eliseo Vivas, who compares Birkin's quest to a Sartrean— i.e., atheistic and existentialistic— commit ment to values. 182 ; can occur. There can be no doubt of this. Among the names I ! | that Lawrence considered for the novel were two that ! stressed the biblical parallel and emphasized the ideas i | that dissolution was gradual and all-pervasive: The Latter t Days and Dies Irae, "Day of Wrath," that is, Judgment Day. | ("Dies Irae" is also a portion of the Mass for the Dead.) f i And in the novel itself, Birkin insists that the world has \ f | become a Sodom. For this reason, he welcomes destruction | as the end of the cycle and a new beginning. ! ! The general dissolution pervades the entire world of Women in Love, all its institutions and all its inhabitants, including Birkin. The dissolution is specifically destruc- i tive, anti-human, even anti-vital, and it stems from a I deep-seated and unacknowledged destructiveness and self- hatred within individuals. These observations require some elaboration, because a full understanding of the univer sality and the nature of the dissolution in Women in Love ! | goes a long ways, I believe, toward explaining Birkin's misanthropy, which some critics have believed to be little more than an expression of emotional illness in Lawrence. Eliseo Vivas, for example, says that "the fact that we remain in the dark as to the reason for Birkin's hatred of his fellow men constitutes one of the defects of the 183 novel."And W. W. Robson argues that Birkin's character ization is "a defect of the imagination" because "Birkin's [hatred is not clearly accounted for. . . ."16 Birkin's misanthropy is only a concretely focused and boldly expressed instance of the anti-vitality that consti tutes the given world of Women in Love. Take, for example, the debasement of the sacrament of marriage into, as Birkin icalls it, egoisme a deux. In the opening conversation be tween Ursula and Gudrun, Gudrun asks, "Don't you really want to get married?" She is taken aback when Ursula an swers, "I don't know . . . , it depends how you mean." For j Gudrun, it means only one thing, the conventional settling down with a single man in a house, filling the house with j i |possessions, and tending to the routine of everyday affairs. Gudrun's marriage is conventional rather than sacred union, and sterile rather than fruitful— she abhors the thought of children. For Ursula, such a marriage is "likely to be the end of experience." | 15vivas, p. 228. Vivas does not remain in the dark for long. One of the major burdens of the argument in his essay is to show that Birkin is sick, and that his sickness stems from "a profound emotional disorder, an obdurate major disharmony," in Lawrence. (See, also, Vivas, p. 270.) l^Rokson, p. 300. Like Vivas, Robson decides that Birkin cannot be understood apart from Lawrence's own "state of mind" at the time of the writing of Women in Love. Robson identifies that state of mind as a "nightmare of suspicion and persecution." 184 But such a marriage is the norm in Women in Love, where people prefer conventional attachments that mean ex periential death to passionate and reciprocal relation ships.-^ The first chapter concludes with an example of such a marriage, between Gerald Crich's sister and a naval officer, in which the conventional aspects of the ceremony j overwhelm the individuality of the participants: Gerald, i for example, is angry because his sister broke form and playfully ran ahead of the bridegroom; the bride's father "mounted the steps stiffly, as if his spirit were absent" (p. 20); the groom "stared unconsciously, as if he were .neither here nor there," less an individual than a type: "He looked a typical naval officer, manly, and up to his duty" (p. 24). ! Some twenty-five chapters later, two episodes reveal j how irrelevant to love or to the inner purposes of the mar ried couple the institution of marriage has become. The first takes place one afternoon when Ursula dnd Birkin visit a market where they hope to buy furniture they can use after they get married. They poke among "heaps of rubble," and finally buy a chair,, which they immediately l^It is interesting to compare Lawrence's vision of modern marriage with a leading psychoanalyst's description of it as "well-oiled relationships between persons who re main strangers all their lives." Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, 1963),p . 74. 185 decide they don't want. They try to give it away to a secretive, dejected, rather shabby couple who are expecting a baby. As it happens, the couple has not yet married, but they are going to because of the child. Marriage, for them, will be an imposed convention that "legitimizes" an already accomplished fact, as though the new life needs the sanction of the bureaucracy of state or church before it has a right to its own existence. The second episode oc curs in Ursula's home the night she informs her family that she has decided to marry Birkin the following day. Some time earlier, Birkin had gone to Ursula's house to propose, and her father became furious because she wouldn't give an answer. Now, when she has decided, he again becomes out raged because of the short notice. She tells him that he has known all along that she would soon marry, and that she is now ready for it: '"Ready in yourself'— - yourself, that's all that mat ters, isn't it? 'I wasn't ready in myself,"' he mimicked her phrase offensively. "You and yourself, you're of some importance, aren't you?" (p. 418) When Ursula accuses her father of bullying her, he responds with a blow to the side of her face that knocks her against the door, graphically confirming her accusation. If we re member what an intensely personal matter marriage was for Tom and Lydia back on Marsh Fram, what a life-giving con summation it was, we understand how much it has degenerated. The church, too, reflects the culture-wide dissolution. 186 The cathedral in The Rainbow, even though the ideas it rep- | resented were under attack, inspired awe, reverence, a i ■ I sense of mystery in those who entered it. Those who enter j the church in chapter one of Women in Love feel nothing but i J concern for correct manners. Nobody consciously believes j I in Christian teachings, and Christianity, as a religion, is an exhausted institution that people cling to for sentimen tal or ceremonial reasons. This attitude is typified by Hermione's brother Alexander, who is a member of parlia ment; he speaks to some women guests in Hermione's home: "I must go to church and read the lessons. They ex pect me." "Are you a Christian?" asked the Italian Countess. • • • I "No," said Alexander. "I'm not. But I believe in keeping up the old institutions." "They are so beautiful," said Fraulein daintily. "Oh, they are," cried Miss Bradley. (p. 112) The point here is not that people no longer believe in | Christianity's doctrine. What is degenerate is that hu- i manity has lost the sense of religion, the feeling for mys- i tery, the capacity for awe; and then, having lost these, people haven't the courage to let go, to yield their hold on out-worn institutions. Of course, Christian doctrine itself, as Lawrence sees it, is anti-vital. And the secular legacy of Christianity in Women in Love, the doctrine of brotherly love and the I spiritual equality of men, undergoes attack throughout the book by Birkin, and reveals itself in the life of the elder !Crich to be self-delusion and sentimentality. One purpose I of the chapter "The Indusrial Magnate" is to demonstrate | ;that an ethic of charity and brotherly love is unworkable, l I unworkable because hypocritical— Crich's charity and his |love falsify his deepest feelings. "He had substituted | I pity for all his hostility" (p. 244), says Lawrence. And Crich's wife seems to have Lawrence's approval when she decides that her husband1s charity and love had about them something of repressed pleasure in the suffering of other people: 1 It seemed to her he was never satisfied unless there was some sordid tale being poured out to him, which he drank in with a sort of mournful, sympathetic satisfac tion. He would have no raison'd'etre if there were no lugubrious miseries in the world, as an undertaker would have no meaning if there were no funerals. (p* 247) Mr. Crich has not consciously lied to himself. In fact, he sincerely believes his doctrine of the "Godhead of hu- I manity." But his doctrine can only be held at the expense of genuine feelings— he cannot admit, for example, that he feels hostility or hatred or anger. He pretends his darker side, the furies, doesn't exist. Most anti-vital of all, "Perhaps he . . . loved his neighbor even better than him self-— which is going one further than the commandment" (p. 245) . In worshiping an abstraction, humanity, he for gets that the masses are composed of individuals— and that j 188 | he is one of those individuals. The life flame can only burn in concrete, individual persons; but finally, the I • I | "flame [which] burned in his heart, sustaining him through everything, [was] the welfare of the people" (p. 245). As i an old man, Mr. Crich has thoroughly forfeited his own j j inner, life flame, has become hollow inside, and persists i only on will power, with which he forms an "armour . . . of pity" to shield his inner dread. When he dies, says Law rence, it will be "as an insect when its shell is cracked" (p. 244). "The Industrial Magnate" chapter portrays, in the account of Gerald's modernization of the mines, the most destructive, degenerate facet of the modern Sodom: the mechanization of work, with the result that men have been reduced to pure mechanism, abstracted to crude process, molded into interchangeable tenders of machinery, and iden tified completely with their economic function. | Just as Mr. Crich's principles are presented by Law rence as a deterioration of Christian values--the spiritual equality, without the reverence, leading to abstraction and leveling— so are Gerald's principles shown to be a further degeneration from his father's debased Christianity: "He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian at titude of love and self-sacrifice was old hat" (p. 258). Gerald abandons the equality, but extends the process of 189 i I | abstraction to the point where he conceives of the entire world as matter to be dominated by his will: "Man's will was the absolute, the only absolute. And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends" (p. 255}. In applying I everything else to impose perfect organization, to make the i | mines a smoothly running, inhuman mechanism: "the very j | expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a i great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition" (p. 2 60). Gerald con structs his pure mechanism with religious fervor— it is, for him, a new infinite, to replace the Christian infinite, a "God-motion, this productive repetition ad infinitum. And Gerald was the God of the machine, Deus ex Machina" (p. 260). It is, of course, the Moloch-worship that Ursula, in The Rainbow, decried in her Uncle Tom and his lesbian wife Winifred Inger. And it stems from deep fear of the unknown | — of mystery, the irrational, uncertainty, all the quali ties that one must accept to remain alive and to avoid sub stituting mechanical principles for organic ones. Gerald's father had protected himself from his fear with an insect like shell, an armor of pity and charity. Gerald escapes his fear by reducing everything to secure and controlled system. And the colliers whom Gerald subjects to his sym- i metric hell suffer from the same fears and insecurities, so they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope seemed to perish as they became more I and more mechanised. And yet they accepted the new j conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out ! of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich. . . . But | as time went on, they accepted everything with some i fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he j represented the religion they really felt. . . . There i was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, j but satisfying in its very destructiveness. . . . It was I what they wanted. . . . They were exalted by belonging ! to this great and superhuman system which was beyond I feeling and reason, something really godlike. . . . It | was what they really wanted . . . , this participation j in a great and perfect system that subjected life to ; pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of free- \ dom, the sort they really wanted. (p. 263) i i | The "sort of freedom" that the colliers find is freedom j j from the uncertainties of life itself, and freedom from the i ! burden of self-responsibility that accompanies inner, or ganic purpose. The colliers prefer to escape that burden, | even at the cost of greatly reduced vitality. They abandon personal, inner centers of purpose, and rely on the social mechanism to give their lives direction. From Lawrence1s viewpoint, their choice is inhuman and destructive: i ! It was the first great step in undoing, the first ; great phase of chaos, the substitution of the mechanical | principle for the organic, the destruction of the or ganic purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest chaos. . (p. 263) The general dissolution extends beyond the bourgeois and laboring worlds into education, bohemia, and the world j of artists. It afflicts the whole decaying organic form of society. Thus Birkin and Ursula feel that they must 191 |quit their positions in the school system the moment they i I [have decided to marry. And before she agrees to marry | |Birkin, Ursula suffers a fit of despair during which she nearly prefers death to returning to school for another week of "mechanical activity . . . , a life of barren rou- i |tine, without inner meaning. . . . . Better die than ! ' _ |live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repeti- j tions" (p. 216). Lawrence does not dramatize for us any of that deadening mechanical activity, although we have sev eral pages of Ursula's reverie. But a reader who remembers |the long school-teaching episode in The Rainbow finds Ur- jsula's words extremely evocative, and readily assents to i [interpretation of education. In the case of bohemia, Women ; in Love contains sufficient dramatic evidence of its dis solution in the person of Halliday, the Pussum, and their friends. Halliday is selfless and hysterical, either a "pure servant, washing the feet of Christ, or else he is making obscene drawings of Jesus— action and reaction— and between the_two, nothing" (p. 107). The Pussum is simply a |"harlot" with a "certain smell" about her skin, a selfless sex-mechanism. Loerke, the German sculptor who attracts Gudrun, is the most thoroughly corrupt and degenerate figure in the novel— in him, the world of art, to Lawrence the most crea tive and vital of human activities, descends to a level of 192 |dissolution beneath that, even, of industry. As a person, jhe lives in "inorganic misery," concerned only with his ! work and brutal toward people. He is homosexual, or rather ! ' jbi-sexual, for he has abused a young girl whom he "loved ! and tortured and then ignored," in Ursula's words (p. 491). j He insists that his interest in Gudrun has nothing to do | with her beauty or her sexual attractiveness— he wants "a j |little companionship in intelligence," someone who can l understand. Love sickens him, and life itself is a "baga telle" of no importance. All that counts is art. But his art, he insists, is irrelevant to life. Loerke believes that art "should interpret industry, ' ■ i as art once interpreted religion" (p. 483). Industry, he correctly analyzes, has become inhuman and lifeless, pure j mechanical motion in which man serves the machine. Thus, he reasons, for art to interpret industry, it too should be purged of any relevance to life or humanity, and it should be pure form. When Ursula asks him why he has made the j horse in one of his sculptures so stiff, rather than "deli cate and sensitive," as horses really are, he answers: . . . That horse is a certain form, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see— it is part of a work of art. . . . It is a picture of nothing, of absolutely nothing. It has nothing to do with anything but itself, j it has ho relation with the everyday world of this and j other, there is no connection between them, absolutely I none. (p. 490) 193 In its context, this speech sounds pathetically degenerate, ;because Ursula persists in questioning him, naive about art l ! |as she is, and makes him— and Gudrun, who sides with Loerke — seem brutal, insentient, dead. (The scene acquires added power through Loerke1s choice of a horse as his devitalized and irrelevant model, because earlier in the book a horse had figured with great impact as almost the life force in carnate, in the scene in which Gerald forced the animal to itolerate the roar of a steam locomotive. Gerald and Loerke, also, become associated through this scene, as they do i |through Loerke's reference to industry as a successor to religion--compare Gerald as deus ex machina.) Enough has been said, I feel, of institutions and in dividuals to make the general destructiveness and dissolu tion of the world portrayed in Women in Love unmistakably |clear. Before leaving the subject, I will illustrate !briefly the manner in which Lawrence uses patterns of ±m- |ages to convey the culture-wide dissolution. We sense the i |atmosphere of dissolution and decay immediately when the Brangwen girls leave their home in chapter one. They walk toward the church through streets that are "utterly form less and sordid," even though "without poverty" (p. 11). Walking in the "gritty street," Gudrun feels like "a beetle i toiling in the dust." (The beetle image is doubly loaded-- compare Mr. Crich1s internal void described as an insect- 194 | like shell; and compare Loerke1s later characterization as i j a beetle.) The girls pass a "black patch of common-garden, I where sooty cabbage stood shameless." They continue down I |a "black path through a dark, soiled field" (p. 12). The I j very air gleams black, making the girls experience their surroundings as an "underworld." Several images recur in patterns, as the insect-image |does. Birkin repeatedly speaks of "fleurs du mal," "marsh i [flowers," and "flowers of dissolution," and concrete ex- j |amples lend significance to scenes, without.any comment. y X |For example, Gerald and Gudrun finally come together in an j |unconscious bond in the chapter "Sketch-Book," and that i |chapter is introduced with the following image in the first I paragraph: I Gudrun had walked out to a gravelly shoal, and was seated like a Buddhist, staring fixedly at the water- plants that rose succulent from the mud of the low shores. What she could see was mud, soft, oozy, watery mud, and from its festering chill, water-plants rose up, | thick and cool and fleshy. . . . But she could feel their turgid fleshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she knew how they rose out of the mud, she knew how they thrust out from themselves. . . . (p. 134) The marsh flower is a wonderfully appropriate image to ex press the mushy, formless interiors of Gudrun, who here identifies with the flowers, and Gerald, whose pleasant "personalities" and external appearances have no firmly embedded internal roots. (But the image is far more com plex than this— that Gudrun knew the flowers brands her as 195 I one of the destructive, hyper-cerebral people of the novel, |and it prepares the way for her later, exclusively cerebral, |union with Loerke. Also Gudrun's "sensuous vision" in- i (creases the image's significance when we remember Birkin's earlier distinction between "sensual," which denotes for him a desirable capacity for experience of the outer world j |and one's self, and "sensuous," which implies a destructive, ;egoistic refusal to open up to the outer world— pure self- awareness and self-seeking. And the image gains even greater impact through contrast with the immediately fol- j I lowing image of Ursula "unconsciously" communing with but- terflies--which Birkin later describes as "pure creation.") Water is another recurring image that functions j throughout the novel as a symbol of dissolution, as Eliseo Vivas, among others has noted.18 Gerald is attracted by |the Pussum's eyes, on which "there seemed to float a film |of disintegration, a sort of misery and sullenness, like oil and water" (p. 72). Gerald demonstrates his profi- iciency at swimming in three separate chapters, yet ironi cally, when he assumes the responsibility of watching the water in "Water Party," his siste,r drowns and strangles a young man who tries to save her, as well. And water ruins Gudrun's sketch-book, after Gerald knocks it into Willey •^Vivas, pp. 232-233. 196 | ! ; I ! 1 Water. Or again, the snow that Gerald dies m can be | | thought of as frozen water. When Hermione has her lawn party, all the guests but Birkin and the Brangwen girls I rush to take a swim, where they look like "great lizards" ! from the "primeval world" (p. 114). Birken tries to ex- ! |plain the downward course of civilization to Ursula, and |he draws on water as a metaphor: reality, he says, is a | "dark river of dissolution," a "black river of corruption" (p. 196). His description looks backward to the bathing scene at Hermione's estate, and it looks forward to Loerke, i who is described as a rat in the river of corruption (p. 487). | Another symbol of dissolution reveals itself in my I remarks about water imagery— animals. People are repeatedly ; | |described in terms of predatory or otherwise unpleasant ! |animals. For example, one of Hermione's party guests, the |Contessa, is described, like Loerke, as a water rat. And j Miss Bradley, who finds the "old institutions" so beautiful, jlooks "plump and big and wet . . . like one of the slither- I |ing sea-lions in the zoo" (p. 114). Old Sir Joshua, the elderly sociologist "whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient," is specifically the "great lizard" of the crowd. (Lawrence's pot-shot at his former friend, Bertrand Russell.) In "Water Party," Gudrun's lantern has on it a picture of a "great white cuttle-fish" with a very "fixed 197 and coldly intent" face (p. 199). (This image again dis plays the complexity of Lawrence1s image patterns and the j I density of the book. Gerald has been described as the per- |son who saves Gudrun from the underworld of the colliers, I yet she finally drives him, her savior, to his death— just ! !as Gerald's sister takes her savior to his death/ by cling- !ing to his neck with her arms, in this chapter. Gudrun |seems associated with the girl through the multiple-armed |sea-creature, the cuttlefish. Note, too, the "white" and "cold"— and compare the arctic imagery that describes Gerald throughout the book, and the snow-bound location of the show-down between them.) Another example is the de- jscription of Hermione as "a fish in the water, or a weasel i t |on the grass," two animals that Lawrence believed to be all |"head" and desire to "know" (p. 333). Finally, in Birkin's |most despairing moments, he often likens mankind to the extinct ichthyosaur, a marine reptile which Birkin calls i "one of the mistakes of creation" (p. 145). The last example of images of dissolution that I will cite is an image that Lawrence borrowed from the Bible and used in the letter describing his state of mind after com position of Women in Love which I quoted above— the image of the death-slope, or slope of dissolution or extinction. 198 down which the Gaderene swine plunged.-*-® The image is a fundamental, structural element, equivalent in function and |meaning to the idea of Sodom. That is to say, the image |of creatures blindly plummeting to their destruction repre sented the present and future direction of Europe for Law- jrence during the war— he uses the image frequently in let- } j | | ters of the period— and it concisely summarizes the circum- j I stances in Women in Love, combining the ideas of self- | |destruction, downward fall, unconsciousness, and through |the word "slope," gradual process. Cultural disintegration ! |is gradual and unconscious, arid may even be mistaken for |progress by members of the culture. Thus, Birkin must try | to convince Gerald and Ursula, as well as Halliday, whom he j i also tries to save, of their own dissolution. For this j i ! |reason, Birkin insists to Gerald that the African statues in Halliday's apartment are not primitive, but decayed civilization, that "there are centuries and hundreds of |cerituries of development" behind them (p. 88) . Birkin also j i ■ iuses the idea of the slope of dissolution to explain to I Ursula why the modern Sodom must be destroyed, and he con- cretly illustrates with the image of a rotten apple that must fall from the tree. Such downward movements have been j i I 19George H. Ford discusses the image of the death- j slope as an underlying conceptual image, but cites only a single example from the text, pp. 200-201. 199 ;the subject of this entire section of my essay, of course— | las in the decline of marriage, religion, work, art. And i i |like the image of the fleurs du mal, several slopes of dis- |solution appear in the text without remark from Lawrence: |such as Gerald's diving beneath the surface of Willey Water I i |in futile search for his sister's body? or the repeated j mention of the deep sloping sides of the pond that are re vealed after it is drained to recover the bodies. When we understand the meaning of this slope— a decline that re sults in violent death— we see why Birkin feels a "passion j of gratitude" to Ursula when she comes to him as a wife and thus arrests his plunge "with the rest of his race down the 1 [slope of mechanical death" (p. 423). And as a final ex- i | ample, when Gerald forsakes the "frenzy of delight" he feels as his hands crush Gudrun's throat, and drops her nearly-dead body to wander instead among the slopes of J i snow, where he dies beside a "half-buried crucifix, a | i |little Christ under a little sloping hood," the slopes re- j I I mind us that Gerald's destructive frenzy is the perverse I culmination of a process that has been underway since the novel's opening page. On the other hand, if we do not un derstand the meaning of the slopes, the passage that de- 20 scribes Gerald's final moments loses most of its forceru 20Among the studies of Women in Love that I am famil iar with, Ford's is the only one that mentions death-slopes. 200 j ! He had come to the hollow basin of snow., surrounded | by sheer slopes and precipices, out of which rose a ! track that brought one to the top of the mountain. But | he wandered unconsciously, till he slipped and fell down, j and as he fell something broke in his soul, and immedi ately he went to sleep. (p. 540) My intention in this portion of the essay has been to demonstrate the universal dissolution of the latter-day Sodom that forms the setting of Women in Love. Some crit ics have stressed the destructiveness and misanthropy of Birkin, as I remarked earlier, and for this reason I have omitted Birkin entirely and endeavored to show the destruc tiveness of everyone else. I want to show that although j !Birkin may, indeed, be emotionally disturbed, he has a I world full of company. His misanthropy and destructiveness are far from "unmotivated," but are instead, as I remarked j i above, simply concrete examples, candidly expressed, of the! dissolution that has victimized everyone in the book. | Birkin is only a consciously ailing member of a universally, but unconsciously, sick culture. In fact, because he re- |alizes he is sick and destructive, he may even be the i I jhealthiest person in the book. To speak of healthiness after documenting at length such pervasive illness may seem nearly comical. But if what has been said so far seems to corroborate Wagenknecht's assertion that Women in Love has "the smell of death" about it, it is because only part of the book has been examined, . 201 | 1 for Women in Love also holds out hope for life. I will next discuss the positive vhlues of the book, the possibil ities for individual growth and for escape from Sodom that |if offers. * * * There is life, as well as death, in Women in Love. In fact, each of the symbols of dissolution discussed above— j i |flower, water, animal, insect— has its creative, vital counterpart in the novel. In chapter one, for example, as the Brangwen girls walk toward the church, for a moment jthere is "a vague scent of sap and of spring, perhaps of l ] violets from off the graves" (p. 15)— this flower of re- i birth is the exact opposite of the fleurs du mal. Much later, Ursula describes herself as a "rose of happiness," and she thinks of an integrated, self-directed being as a "walking flower," Birkin tosses daisies into the water, in an act that symbolizes organic unity--the petals radiating | I from a living center, floating down the river of life. And j ' ' Birkin rushes to nature, that.is the flowers and.grass, after Hermione1s attempt to kill him, where he replenishes his strength by removing his clothing and rolling among the plants. In one of the novel's most important scenes, where Birkin and Ursula first come together in the chapter "Class- Room," Birkin uses catkins to "teach" Ursula a lesson about the fundamental, sexual polarity of life. He informs her 202 that children need only two crayons to draw the flowers, . . . So that they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I'd chalk, them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasize. . . . What's the fact?—- red little spiky stigmas of the female flower, dangling yellow male catkin, yellow pollen flying from one to the other. (pp* 39-40) Animals, even more than flowers, symbolize life as well as death. They several times show the destructiveness and insentience of Gerald, Gudrun, or Hermione. For ex ample, in the chapter "Coal Dust" (Cold Us?), Gerald forces his horse to tolerate the crashing noise of a passing loco motive, and to stand steady despite its urge to flee the machine. To do so, Gerald must dig his spurs into the horse's side until he draws blood, and he seems more like the mechanical locomotive, in his relentless insistence, than like a living being. In contrast to the horse, with its proud inner purpose, Gerald appears mechanistically willful and anti-vital. Gudrun is shocked at Gerald's be havior, but she later displays the same urge to dominate spontaneous creatures when, in "Water-Party," she attempts to intimidate the cattle with her hypnotic dance. Winfred's rabbit, Bismarck, drives Gerald and Gudrun together and reveals to them their essential unity in hatred of life— they both respond to the tremendously vital creature with an obscene contempt and destructiveness. Hermione Roddice ridicules a swan for openly showing his hurt and loss when 203 his mate goes off with another swan, but her ridicule boo merangs because we remember, from her interior monologue in chapter one, that she feels as dependent on Birkin as the swan feels on his mate. The difference between Hermione and the swan is that Hermione can deceive herself, but the swan acknowledges the pain. In these examples, the animals provide the measure that reveals the extent of human corruption. Animals also provide models for human salvation. For example, when Birkin can no longer bear the effete intellectuality of the conversation made by Hermione1s guests in "Breadalby," he slips away to copy a Chinese drawing of a goose. Hermione, characteristically, wants to know why he has copied it— she must "extract his secrets from him" (p. 100)— and Birkin explains: "I know what centres they live from— what they perceive and feel— the hot, stinging centrality of a goose . . . , the curious bitter stinging heat of a goose's i i |blood. ..." (Birkin1s words are a blow to Hermione, whose i own center is not in the blood, but in the mind, because she cannot comprehend them with her rational categories. She becomes, "witless, decentralised," and suffers "the ghastliness of dissolution, broken and gone in a horrible corruption," because she will not acknowledge meanings that her mind alone cannot grasp. Only a few pages later, she attempts the murder of Birkin.) And just as the goose re- 204 ; veals what centers Birkin should live from, so does his cat i !Mino demonstrate to Birkin and Ursula the behavior that i ! !results from life centered in the blood. I Even the repulsive insect image has its vital counter- | |part in the butterfly, which Birkin twice uses as an ex- ! !ample of creative, developing and growing being. Water i |also appears in a creative role— although only once— when |Birkin describes the duality of life and refers to the |other river, "the silver river of life" that opposes the ! |river of dissolution" (p. 195). Taken together, the cat- jkins, the horse, the rabbit, the goose, the butterfly, and I the river of life comprise a definite, positive, vital |alternative to the deadly black world that men have created i | |in Women in Love. Furthermore, these images expose the I I root cause for the man-made Sodom: men live from the wrong |"centers." Man has reduced himself from a feeling, sensing, 1 |thinking being, to a primarily thinking being, for whom jeven sensuality has become a cerebral event. (For example, i iBirkin attacks Hermione1s deliberate and self-conscious sensuality as "Pornography— looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental" [p. 46].„) Men no longer know the inner, spontaneous, pre- j I intellectual purposiveness that is evidenced in animals- and j plants— the intuitive flow of the life force has been 205 usurped by the mind which should be only its servant, and the centers of feeling have dried up. Birkin stresses that the hyper-cerebral people of Women in Love have reduced themselves, have lost their es sential, creative vitality, and that he does not want them |to abandon consciousness, but to expand it. The problem, |Birkin believes, is not that men have "too much mind, but ! j too little"— -they are "imprisoned within a limited, false j set of concepts" (p. 45). Conventions and imposed mental !categories have destroyed spontaneity and limited the range | of human feelings to a narrow, learned and therefore arti ficial, set of socially approved, intellectualized feelings ; and emotions. It is as though men are the crescent of the i I moon in its first quarter, and Birkin seeks the fulfillment j jof the full moon. The real problem then, as it has been in earlier novels, is specifically one of growth, of release, of getting free. But growth cannot occur in Women in Love before the ;death of the old self. One must let go of imposed mental i categories, relinquish exclusively mental consciousness, deny conventional and external social props, acknowledge the fear and uncertainty and destructiveness inside him, stop lying to himself and bring his feelings and thoughts into harmony. One must penetrate to the inner, sensual, I purposive core of being; then, having found it, free it to 206 flow outward in living, reciprocal relationships with both men and women. These are terribly difficult tasks, for they require the admission that one’s life has been, in part at least, misdirected; that one's most cherished val ues are false, or even deadly; that one is, in short, an uncreated being. These are the goals of Birkin's quest, and they are the lessons he tries to teach others. Birkin's quest, like Ursula1s in The Rainbow, requires a rebirth for its attainment, and it is a religious quest for salvation. Two early scenes emphasize both these points. In the chapter "Class-Room," Hermione asks, "But |do you really want sensuality?" Birkin answers, Yes . . . , that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfillment— the great dark knowledge you can't have in your head— the dark involuntary being. It is death to oneself— but it is the coming into being of another. (p. 47) Two chapters later, "In the Train," Birkin's conversation with Gerald reveals the religious importance this rebirth las a spontaneous, sensual being has for Birkin. Before l ' entering the train, the two men talk about a newspaper article that calls for the rise of "a man who will give new values to things, give us new truths, a new attitude to life, or else we shall be a crumbling nothingness in a few years, a country in ruin— " Birkin agrees with the news paper, but believes that few people have the courage "to stare straight at this life that we've brought upon our- 207 selves, and reject it, absolutely smash up the old idols of ourselves." Birkin asserts that things are "completely bad," and that the only hope is the discovery by men of a new "centre and core" for their lives. Gerald confirms Birkin's analysis of men's inner void by admitting that his |life doesn't center at all, that it is artificially held i i itogether by the social mechanism. Birkin answers: ! j I know . . . , it just doesn't centre. The old | ideals are dead as nails— nothing there. It seems to | me there remains only this perfect union with a woman | — sort of ultimate marriage— and there isn't anything ! else . . . , seeing there is no God. (p. 64) Birkin seeks, then, rebirth.as a being who would ful fill himself in relationship, and he conceives of the rela tionship as equivalent to God, or as serving the function I | of God in a Godless world. Birkin's quest is a religious j j * j search for values that can redeem a whole dissolute culture, or at least those members of it who wish redemption. Nu merous additional religious allusions help cast Birkin in the role of redeemer: for example, he is often called, specifically, a "Salvator Mundi" (Ursula uses the label sarcastically, but she eventually accepts much of his "mes sage") ; Halliday refers to Birkin as a "Jesus," and he calls Birkin's letter urging him to regenerate himself and abandon the Pussum a "Bible" (p. 435); Ursula jeers at Birkin, before she understands his version of love, as the keeper of the "Ark of the Covenant" (p. 147); but she 208 afterwards understands and accepts, and she then calls Bir kin a "Son of God" (p. 357); Birkin himself refers to his "ultimate marriage" as a "paradisal entry into pure being" (my italics). Despite the general dissolution of the latter-day Sodom, therefore, possibilities for life still remain. To |fulfill them requires death of the worldly, egocentric, I |predatory self, and rebirth as a purposive, independent be- ! ing who may enter into an essentially religious, genuinely sacramental "perfect union" or "ultimate marriage" with i another purposive, independent being. Eventually, Birkin and Ursula achieve rebirth and join in "ultimate marriage." They attain a measure of fulfillment, and they escape from n the universal dissolution. However, their union does not provide Birkin the complete fulfillment he had sought, and the novel concludes on a troubled, tentative, doubtful note. The nature of their fulfillment, the degree to which ithey fail, and the normative value of their relationship |are uncertainties that merit some elaboration, and I there fore consider them in some detail next. * * * During his ride with Gerald in the train, Birkin iden tifies mankind's greatest impediment to self-realization: | "We are such dreary liars. Our one idea is to lie to our selves" (p. 60). The biggest lie of all, he elaborates in 209 a tirade to Ursula, is the pretense of love with which men conceal from themselves their own hostility and inhumanity: . . . They say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in saying this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest— and see what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards who daren't stand by their own actions, much less their own words. . . . They maintain a lie, and so they run amok at last. It's a lie to say that love is the greatest. . . . What people want is hate— hate and nothing but hate. And in the name of righteousness and love, they get it. They distil them selves with nitroglycerine . . . out of very love. If we want hate, let us have it— death, murder, torture, violent destruction— let us have it: but not in the name of love. (p. 143) Birkin's speech occurs in the chapter "An Island," as a prologue to a three-page denigration of mankind that culmi- ! nates with Birkin's assertion that humanity is a mistake of jcreation, like the ichthyosauri, that must be wiped from the earth so that pure life--rabbits and butterflies and flowers— can exist in an undefiled world. Probably these pages are among those that have con- | ivinced some critics that Women in Love is deeply misan- I !thropic and Birkin emotionally disturbed. Birkin's ideas are shocking, and he probably is emotionally disturbed, but it is a mistake to conclude that the entire novel— and especially Lawrence himself— is misanthropic and sick. Birkin's remarks should be understood in the light of sev eral qualifications. In the first place, much of what Birkin says is flatly 210 true, and it is borne out dramatically in the novel. People do conceal their hatred and destructiveness with a S veneer of love or charity, or with professions of egalitar- | ianism. I have already described the example of Mr. Crich. i Like him, Hermione Roddice affects democratic respect for all mankind. But beneath her surface calm and grace, she j | harbors deep contempt for most people, which she reveals | ' i in her intellectual snobbishness; she opposes spontaneous sensuality and independence, which she plainly demonstrates with her efforts to dominate Birkin, his cat, and her own feelings; and she represses tremendous violence and antag onism, which finally breaks forth in a destructive fury when she attempts to murder Birkin, whom she supposedly j ! "loves." Similarly, Gerald professes concern for the mate- ! I rial well-being of the masses, and he declares his love for ! " ‘ \ ■ | Gudrun. But his actions betray a profound callousness and j I cynicism toward humanity, and his "love" for Gudrun even- i j tually unmasks itself as a disguised urge to dominate and j possess her, even if it means he must destroy her. Like Gerald, Gudrun professes love and represses hatred and an urge to control which finally gets free. Even Will Brang- wen's very minor role in the novel illustrates this same split between words and true feelings; he exclaims his love for Ursula as he clubs her with his fist. What I am describing here— the rhetoric of love that 211 !conceals feelings of hatred— is but an instance of the j broader, more fundamental split between thoughts and feel ings that runs through all the novels discussed so far. ILettie Beardsall and George Saxton stifled the "wisdom of ! • | the body." Paul Morel's root problem was an inability to i !coordinate the desires of his body and his mind. Tom Brangwen suffered the same affliction when he quenched the "hot, accumulated consciousness" that burned inside him I with brandy and with simple refusal to acknowledge it. And as I showed above, it was the denial of the body by the mind that explosively corrected itself at the end of The Rainbow, beginning with Ursula's scrutiny of protoplasm through the microscope and concluding with the vision of horses. In Women in Love, this split has intensified and | become the extreme of destructiveness— is once described, in fact, as racial death. It afflicts everybody in some form, and lies at the core of Birkin's search for "new | centers" and "ultimate marriage." In the European Sodom, the split has resulted in an imbalance in the direction of excessive mental conscious ness and repression of the senses and feelings. The con cealment of hatred and destructiveness with love and char ity has several parallels in the denial of other feelings. Gudrun, for example, appears poised and calm and works as a creative artist, but her sangfroid and creativity are men 212 tally imposed and deny an inner restlessness, uncertainty, and insecurity— she frequently reveals this with blushes | |and with her abhorrence of children. Gerald's mother and nurse both attest to his hysteria, and Gerald reveals his tremendous lack of self-sufficiency the night he creeps into Gudrun's bed and comes to her like a child to a mother — yet he, too, displays a surface sangfroid and maintains an appearance of self-command through sheer will power. Hermione carries this self-deceit further than anyone. She believes that she is sensual, spontaneous, inner-directed, but in truth her self-sufficiency can be deflated by a !"positive, robust" maid, and she is flung down the "bottom less pit of insufficiency" by the "slightest movement of ; jeering or contempt" (p. 18). She preaches spontaneity and ; |attacks the purely analytic mind, but she is the most will- ! There always seemed an interval, a strange split be tween what she seemed to feel and experience, and what ! she actually said and thought. She seemed to catch her thoughts at length from off the surface of a maelstrom j of chaotic black emotions and reactions, and Birkin was ! always filled with repulsion, she caught so infallibly, | her will never failed her. Her voice was always dispas- j sionate and tense, and perfectly confident. (p. 158) Birkin, like Hermione and the others, suffers from this split. His search for "new centers" is largely an effort to excavate buried feelings, and the acknowledgement i of misanthropy quoted above marks his first step toward in tegration of thought and feelings. Despite this first step, ful character in the book 213 land despite the fact that he is the prophet of spontaneity and the enemy of his hyper-cerebral environment, he has a ilong way to go to fulfill his quest. As he puts it to Ursula: "... 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" (p. 142). One of the things Birkin has stifled, in fact, is the "growing part" of himself, the |spontaneous and purposive center: his intellectualizing about the world's problems and the method of solving them leads him to the self-destructive thesis that everyone— including himself— should die to begin a new cycle of crea- ! tion. He fatalistically rejects the possibility that re- i jbirth can occur in individuals who might escape the' Sodom j j he feels around him: "We are the end, not the beginning" he insists to Ursula. She argues that, "The beginning comes out of the end," and one of her chief tasks is to convince him of the error of his reply: "After it, not out I of it. After us, not out of us" (p. 197). Birkin re presses his feelings in several other ways, as well. He denies, for example, his craving for an intimate, sensual relationship with a man. He refuses to admit that he "loves" Ursula. And he is reluctant to sever permanently and finally his attachment to the corrupt world that he consciously hates, as his lingering attachment to Hermione — even after she tries to brain him— reveals. | In the same way, Ursula deceives herself about her true feelings. Several times, Ursula feels frightened or hostile, and she sometimes breaks into tears unexpectedly, ! j as in the end of "Class-Room." Nevertheless, she will not acknowledge her inner uncertainty and misery, and she per sists in believing that nothing is amiss. She defiantly tells Birkin: "I am a rose of happiness." "Ready made?" • l he ironically asks (p. 197). Ursula clings to a sentimen- 1 tal, self-denying conception of romantic love which rests on a spiritualized definition of oneself as an incomplete being who gains wholeness only through union with another being. Ursula's idea of love resembles Tom Brangwen's idea | , t of a married couple that equals one angel— she conceives of I the love-relationship as two fragmented beings who merge into a single identity, a unity-through-selflessness, whereas Birkin seeks a relationship between complete indi vidual beings who enlarge themselves in relationship. Bir- jkin's task is to convince her that she is neither "ready- j made" nor incomplete, but an isolate, purposive being who lives from the inside outward and maintains her indepen dence even in relationships. There is thus a touch of irony in their contest, in that each partially stifles his own inner purposiveness, but nevertheless tries to nourish its growth in the other. Sometimes the irony becomes obvious sarcasm, with Birkin 215 !as the butt, such as the time in "An Island," when Ursula makes him feel like a fool by asking: "And if you don't believe in love, what do you believe in. . . . Simply the |end of the world and grass?" (p. 146). I stress this be- I cause one must realize, as some of Lawrence's critics do not, that Birkin changes a good deal during the course of |the novel, if one wishes to understand Birkin's misanthropy or the struggle between him and Ursula. In fact, during their struggle, each alters his initial position, and each ' [ learns from the other. In the chapter "Sunday Evening," for instance, Ursula renounces the superficial happiness that Birkin had mocked and at last faces the inner void imposed on her by her jmechanistic life as a schoolmarm. Earlier, she had been horrified by the ugliness of the world— during brief mo ments when she let herself see it— but for the most part she denied the reality of the ugliness and pretended to be happy. In "Sunday Evening" she begins to realize that a i I | socialized, "personal" identity is reductive, an imprison ment of her true self. As Birkin said in "Class-Room"— in remarks that provoked her to tears— she has been imprisoned in false concepts, not conscious enough, because too exclu sively mentally conscious. She concludes that the life of an egocentric competitor in a sordid world is a death-in- life, and she decides that the only escape is embracement 216 of a further death, in order to be reborn. To describe Ursula's "death," Lawrence employs all the images of meta- | | morphosis that I have discerned in his earlier works—-gate- j ways, journeys, a leap like Sappho into the "unknown": I Let us die, since the great experience is the one j that follows now upon all the rest, death, which is the I next great crisis in front of which we have arrived. If we wait, if we baulk the issue, we do but hang about | the gates. . . . There it is, in front of us, as in front of Sappho, the illimitable space. Therein goes the journey. . . . On ahead we will go, into death, and whatever death may mean. . . . (p. 218) ["Sunday Evening" depicts Ursula's greatest crisis, in which ! j the veil is ripped away from the world and her own self- deception is exposed. She accepts the things she discovers, |but she feels the pain of discovery. In the end, she as- |serts the primacy of the body, the joy of living with the I "pure unknown" of uncertain tomorrows and nonintellectual, bodily consciousness. She begins to understand what Birkin means by "pure being," beyond both the ego and the phallus. In the chapter immediately following, Birkin begins |his own metamorphosis. He reasserts his conviction that t death is better than a mechanistic, will-dominated life, and he reaffirms his hatred of the old-fashioned kind of love that Ursula offers, in which a man is a broken half of a couple and their union is egoisme a deux: The hot, narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these mar ried people, and shut themselves into their own exclu sive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples 217 insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted. . . . (p. 226) But Birkin also yields a bit on these same points: he | finally asserts that life is worth fighting for, and per- i | sisting in, in contrast with his earlier death-thoughts; and he acknowledges that "his life rested in" Ursula, that I I he needed to have her around if he could have her on his terms. Significantly, as Birkin makes these admissions, he simultaneously begins to feel the craving for relationships with other people, as well, and to face his deep, but un acknowledged, feeling for Gerald. It is in this chapter :that he first proposes the man-to-man union, "bludbruder- schaft." ! I Having thus partially healed the breach between ! ' thought and feelings, the divorcement from deepest self that both Birkin and Ursula suffer from, they drift apart for a while. The tension of growth and submission is too j great. Birkin goes to France. Ursula remains at home, feeling isolated and antagonistic— she has discovered the world's horror, but she has not yet been reborn as an indi vidual being that lives purposively and independently, re gardless of the dissolution of her ambience. They come together again in the celebrated chapter "Moony." I agree with nearly every critic who has commented on the scene in which Birkin hurls rocks at the moon's reflection on Willey 218 W&ter: it powerfully expresses something beyond what can be stated overtly and discursively. Yet, some of its mean ings do seem obvious, Birkin's act itself signifies, of course, the tensions of the conflict, on all its levels, with Ursula— who has been earlier identified with the moon, jThe image that persistently reforms itself, after each of |Birkin's assaults, has the staying power of both Ursula's j i |unyielding wrongheadedness and her undeniable rightness; it ! 1 i resists Birkin's attack, as steadily as Ursula has, and it reforms for counterassault, as Ursula has. The moon ap- i pears on the surface of the water, and thus may signify the "surface" or mental consciousness that Birkin believes pre dominates in Ursula. And like Ursula, the moon's reflec tion has attracted Birkin, even though he comes to do battle with it. Birkin rejects both the "African way" suggested by Halliday's statues and the "arctic northern" destructive ness after his episode with the moon, and he asserts that i !there is a third way, "paradisal entry into pure, single { being." The African and arctic polarity represent degener ate forms of the horizontal and vertical modes of being in The Rainbow; Whereas in The Rainbow the two modes had been merely forms of selflessness, in Women in Love they have declined into anti-vital, uncreative forms of dissolution. For example, Birkin realizes that the African statue repre- 219 sents a degeneracy that means sensuality and mindlessness I I carried to a deadly extreme: | ! He remembered the African fetishes he had seen at : Halliday1s so often. There came back to him one, a | statuette about two feet high, a tall, slim, elegant figure from West Africa . . . , a woman, with hair | dressed high, like a melon-shaped dome. He remembered j her vividly: she was one of his soul's intimates. . | She knew what he himself did not know. She had thou- ! sands of years of purely sensual, purely unspiritual ! knowledge behind her. It must have been thousands of j years since her race had died, mystically, that is since the relation between the senses and the outspoken i mind had broken, leaving the experience all one sort,. mystically sensual. (p. 288, my italics) The schism between feelings and thoughts, carried to its deadly extreme, is the essence of the "arctic northern" way, |too— Birkin sees that the two ways are simply the different j . !methods with which greatly different cultures complete the same process of dissolution. His "third way," on the other hand, is the way of "becoming" rather than dissolution, the !way that coordinates mind and body and fulfills inner pur pose, rather than destroys every purpose through mindless j sensuality or mechanistic will. | ’ Birkin and Ursula form their union in "Excurse." Bir kin brings with him, on an automobile outing with Ursula, three rings--signifying the "third way"— with which to pro pose marriage. Ursula refuses his proposal with jolting accusations: she charges that he still wants Hermione, that he is lingering in his death-thoughts, that he is a "dog returning to his own vomit," a foul and a false liar. i 220 ; Amazingly, he accepts her accusation, and he acknowledges I |that he has been self-destructive and hateful. Birkin yields his old position, and Ursula gives him a flower, symbol of organic life. For the first time in the novel, Birkin declares that he is happy. He feels tremendously exhilarated, and simultaneously at ease: "the life flowed through him as from some new fountain, he was as if born out of the cramp of a womb" (p. 356). It is the first joyous moment in the novel, and a moment of rebirth and awakening to a new self for both Ursula and Birkin. For example, Birkin drove on in a strange new wakefulness, the tension of his consciousness broken. He seemed to be conscious all over, all his body awake with a simple, glimmering awareness, as if he had just come awake, like a thing that is born, like a bird when it comes out of an egg, into a new universe. (p. 356) By "his consciousness broken," we should understand that the false, limited, excessively mental consciousness that Birkin has theoretically attacked since the early pages of |the novel has at last been escaped. In the language of Lawrence's polemics, Birkin has achieved "blood conscious ness" as well as mental consciousness through his union with Ursula. Both of them have broken through the con straints on their inner, growing selves, and they thus have escaped deadly Sodom and entered into "a new universe." Birkin and Ursula park the car in Sherwood Forest and consummate their union. They spend the night in the car— I a deeply significant, because mobile, "bedroom." Having ! I escaped Sodom, they can no longer sink permanent roots. They resign their positions with the school, and they leave |England for a life of wandering, after legalizing their ! relationship in the chapter "Flitting." In this chapter, i they also complete their metamorphosis. After Will Brang- wen strikes Ursula, she runs to Birkin. He receives her with great tenderness, numerous embraces, and declarations of love. He regrets only the violence— a regret that points to the change he has undergone. They legally marry j the next day, and it means another rebirth: Now, washed all clean by her tears, she was new and frail like a flower just unfolded, a flower so new, so tender, so made perfect by inner light. . . . "I love you," he whispered as he kissed her, and trembled with pure hope, like a man who is born again to a wonderful, lively hope far exceeding the bounds of death. She could not know how much it meant to him, how much he meant by the few words. . . . (p. 422) f • • For Ursula to blossom like a flower is fulfillment of a I purpose that has been stifled since chapter four, when she was described as "like a shoot that is growing steadily, but which has not yet come above ground" (p. 57), and which i has been foreshadowed by numerous references to Ursula as a flower. Birkin has been reborn with two capacities that Ursula has urged on him since the beginning of their rela tionship— the capacity to love and to feel hope. / 222 The several paragraphs following these are an incom parable panegyric to love and beauty— and to Ursula and her powers of delivering Birkin from his old self "who was so i | near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death" (p. 423). Through his relationship with Ursula, Birkin has lost his inclinations toward death i |and destructiveness and his remnants of mental conscious ness. "He worshipped her, . . . He gloried in her, in his one grain of faith. . . . This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life" (p. 423). With these words, Birkin fulfills the religious quest he initiated in the I train when he told Gerald he sought an ultimate relation- i ship that would serve the function of God. Birkin echoes, i no doubt consciously, Christ's words "I am the resurrection, and the life." And just as Christ proved his divinity I through the resurrection, so does the love-relationship between Birkin and Ursula prove its divinity by working a |resurrection in them both, after their "death." In the i i face of these developments, I find the charge of Eliseo Vivas and others that Women in Love is exclusively destruc tive utterly incomprehensible. In fact, the parallel with the words of Christ provides an answer to Vivas1s main criticisms. Vivas attacks Birkin1s love as inadequate and a failure as a norm because Birkin seems unsatisfied with it, because Birkin wants additional relationships with 223 Gerald and "a few other people." But surely, no one who f | conceived of himself as a Christ could rest content in in- i itimacy with a single person. Birkin wants genuine commu- ! - Inion— but sensually based, unlike the earlier Christ— not | | simply a love affair. Par from being the perversity that i Vivas suggests, Birkin1s desire represents another facet of his growth— and another example of the extent to which he 'has conquered his destructiveness and antagonism toward men. Compare his attitude in chapter two, for example, when Mrs. Crich urges Birkin to befriend Gerald (who, like | Cain, killed his brother, and who, according to his mother, "has never had a friend"): "Am I my brother's keeper?" he said to himself, al most flippantly. Then he remembered, with a slight I shock, that that was Cain's cry. (p. 28) In the beginning of the novel, Birkin shared some of Gerald's Cain-like antagonism, which intensified into the misanthropy I have examined above. As the novel closes, I Birkin has forsaken his misanthropy and adopted a sort of modified brotherly love that is sensual and restricted, rather than spiritual and universal. To accomplish this, of course, required the realiza tion of Birkin and Ursula that they were trapped in a deathward-drifting society, and further required the death j of their social, egoistic, personal selves, in order to be reborn. Neither Gerald nor Gudrun can accept creative 224 death that leads to rebirth, and so they both continue down the slope of mechanical-— and literal— death. In contrast with Birkin and Ursula who search for the vital center within them, Gerald and Gudrun feel at home high in the Alps, in the Tyrol which is described as the frozen center, the know, the navel of the world, and other images that stress a frozen, abstracted, dead "center." A similar contrast is conveyed through the frequent play on the words "let go." Birkin and Ursula want to "let go" in a healthy manner— of their cerebral consciousnesses, of their constrained inner selves, of their feelings in order to bring them into harmony with their thoughts. When ap plied to Gerald and Gudrun, however, the words amount to a threat: in the chapter "Threshold," for example, they feel the urge to "let go" in an African frenzy; and in "Conti nental," Birkin reflects that when the English really "let go," it will be time to run. Because Gerald and Gudrun fear to "let go" in any manner that promotes increased self-knowledge, greater intimacy, or a rebirth, they are the sort of people who, as Birkin prophesied earlier— "run amok." Their deep-seated destructiveness finally pene trates their sangfroid, resulting in Gudrun's complete de generacy and in Gerald's actual death, beneath the cruci fix that signifies death without the resurrection, the incomplete cycle, and which serves as a reminder, perhaps, 225 of Gerald's refusal to accept the "Christ" that Birkin dis covered . Women in Love ends, it is true, on a troubled note. Birkin wonders if he truly wants a further relationship, beyond that of marriage. The world is still a dissolute Sodom. But Birkin and Ursula have achieved a separate peace. They have hope and they have love. What they lack is a hospitable world in which to flourish. PART III: THE FINAL VISION— RESURRECTION OF THE BODY Lady Chatterley's Lover "Our thinking, our dreaming does not let us be in touch with our on-going processes. We lost our senses by using our minds too much— so the prescription is now, 'Lose your mind and come to your senses.'" Frederick Peris, founder of gestalt psychotherapy "The essence of society is repression of the individ ual, and the essence of the individual is repression of himself . . . , the refusal of the human being to recog nize the realities of his nature." Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death "I want, with Lady C., to make an adjustment in con sciousness to the basic physical realities." "As for my novel . . . , it's a declaration of the phallic reality." "I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I've gone." D. H. Lawrence, from his letters 226 i CHAPTER V [ t LADY CHATTERLEY'S; LOVER i — ~ ~ l _ J ™ I I During the decade between Women in Love and Lady Chat- jterley's Lover, Lawrence wrote what Mark Schorer called his ; "really shattered books."-'- The war had convinced Lawrence j ithat democracy meant mob rule, and that industrialism re duced the masses of men to half-dead, selfless abstractions ifilled with latent destructiveness. In his fiction of the period, he rejected such traditional Western values as ! rational and critical thought, a social order based on law | | and elected representatives, a brotherhood of spiritually | equal men, and the ethics of productivity. He tried, in stead, to extend organic wholeness, spontaneity,, and sen suality beyong the rare individual, and to make them the basis for social cohesion. His efforts led Lawrence to concern himself primarily with the relationship between leader and follower, which culminated in the attempt of The Plumed Serpent to resurrect ancient and primitive gods as the foundation for a religious state which some critics have attacked as fascist. "Women in Love and Death," p. 61. 227 228 Lawrence used these novels to test in his imagination I certain abstract principles he thought might provide alter- I 1 . . . | natives to the insane world he saw m .rums around him. As a whole, these works have received fair treatment only rarely at the hands of critics, who have often ignored | their exploratory nature, their tentativeness, their iro- |nies and'ambiguities, their status as fictions rather than i I calls to action, and above all, their ultimate rejection by i | Lawrence as portrayals of workable alternatives to European j democracy. Lawrence has suffered tremendously from literal- I | minded readers who failed to discern the mythic, ritualis- ]tic, and symbolic qualities of these works, and who treated ! I |a single novel like The Plumed Serpent as though it em- | i ibraced Lawrence's total vision. i ! I Yet, despite this partial defense of the leadership novels, I confess that I find the anger, misanthropy, frus tration, and disillusionment of these "shattered books" : anti-vital. The separation of Ursula and Birkin from the decaying world of Women in Love was an assertion of indi vidual integrity and an affirmation of life. But the with drawn heroes of Aaron's Rod, The Boy in the Bush, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent have been tainted by the death-in- life that they seek to escape, and they carry it with them into their isolation. As a result, their affirmations seem, at times, clearly destructive. And their flights— ! 229 ' I first to Italy, then Australia, then Mexico— resemble more i ! the desperate, directionless running of Ursula in The Rain- I } i bow than the courageous, purposive escape from Sodom that i I she accomplished with Birkin in Women in Love. i 1 ■ ■ i ! Lawrence himself, of course, found the "shattered I I books" inadequate. With Lady Chatterley's Lover, he put j |behind him his interest in leadership, and he abandoned his I search for values that might regenerate an entire culture. ! ■ |He returned to England for his setting, where his story j |focused narrowly on individual regeneration rather than i I political formulation. He described his new attitude in a letter written to Witter Bynner some two months after com^ I j Ipletion of the final version of Lady Chatterley's Lover; The hero is obsolete, and the leader of men is a | back number. After all, at the back of the hero is the i militant ideal: and the militant ideal, or the ideal militant, seems to me also a cold egg. . . . The leader- cum-follower relationship is a bore. And the new rela tionship will be some sort of tenderness, sensitive between men and men and men and women, and not the one I up one down, lead on I follow, ich dien sort of busi ness. So you see I'm becoming a lamb at last. . . . j But still, in a way, one has to fight. But not in | the 0 Glory! sort of way. I feel one still has to fight for the phallic reality, as against the non- phallic cerebration unrealities. (CL, II, 1045-46) The "fight for the phallic reality" portrayed in Lady Chat- terley1s Lover is the intensely individualistic struggle of two people to realize themselves as vital, passionate, i purposive, independent beings in the midst of a hopelessly abstract and mechanized, moribund social order. There is 230 no leader, no follower, no futile and desperate running, and no political movement. In many ways, therefore, Lady Chatterley echoes the themes and settings of Women in Love and The Rainbow. The contrast in The Rainbow between pastoral and industrial or social worlds has its parallel in Lady Chatterley in the wood, on the one hand, versus Wragby Hall, Tevershall, England, Italy, even the whole of Europe, on the other hand. Just as the canals and the railroad showed the Marsh Farm to be a doomed Eden, so is Mellors's wood blighted by bar ren patches of wasteland where Sir Clifford's father had felled trees to supply trench timber to the English forces during the war, and even the sky over the wood has been in fected by the sulphurous fumes from the neighboring mines. The Sodom of Women in Love reappears— descended somewhat further down the slope of dissolution during the ten-year interim— as the industrial England and war-making Europe of Lady Chatterley. Clifford Chatterley is a more gro tesque version of the industrialist, Gerald Crich. Mellors is a less cerebral, more overtly sensual Birkin. And Con nie Chatterley is a functional reincarnation of Ursula. Even the perverse artist of Women in Love, Loerke, has a near counterpart in Duncan, whose art is "all tubes and 231 valves and spirals and strange colors, ultra modern,"^ and the effete intellectuals that gathered at Hermione's estate | reappear, transformed, as Clifford's circle of acquaint- I |ances— "friends" would be too strong a word. As they did I ! jin Women in Love, these intellectuals represent the funda- j mental evil in Lady Chatterley's Lover; a disproportionate, { uprooted cerebration that usurps the activity of the senses | and stifles the vitality of the body. And as in Women in I Love, Lady Chatterley1s Lover presents a couple who escape j the evil, find personal salvation, and achieve a separate peace through a specifically sexual relationship. What is | I new in Lady Chatterley is the certainty of the presentation j ! — the destructive world of Lady Chatterley is more thor- ougly dissolute than the Sodom of Women in Love, and the escape and regeneration of Mellors and Connie far less am- i | biguous and tentative than that of Birkin and Ursula. Fur- ; thermore, the love relationship has become more explicitly jphallic, has been purged of the small residue of "spiritu- ! ality" that remained in Women in Love, and Lawrence treats | that phallic relationship, of course, with greater candor | | than any serious.English novelist before him. Finally, the relationship between Mellors and Connie— unlike the one | ^D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley1s Lover (New York, j1959), p. 345. All further references are to this edition. 232 between Birkin and Ursula— is procreative as well as re generative. The method of Lady Chatterley also resembles the ear lier books. As in Women in Love, the quest of Mellors and Connie Chatterley is for escape from their Sodom-like sur roundings. Wragby Hall imprisons Connie as Ursula's homes | had imprisoned her, and passage among three houses— from | | Wragby Hall to Mellors1 Hut to Mellors1 Cottage— gives con- | crete, external structure to Connie's inner growth. En trance to or departure from these buildings symbolizes |radical changes in consciousness— as Connie gradually re- i |linquishes her exclusively mental consciousness and as j Mellors slowly emerges from his hardshell isolation from j i ' * ' i all human contact— and the passage is usually represented as crossing an important and literal threshold. Doors ap pear frequently. Other patterns of movement, beyond these movements from house to house, figure importantly and sym bolically in Lady Chatterley. The village of Tevershall, |for example, is a hideous microcosm of the larger world, I and passage through it proves to be a traumatic jolt for Connie. Connie's trip to Italy seems to confirm the ugli ness and futility that Connie discovered in Tevershall. And as the story closes, Mellors and Connie have both fled j i Wragby for London, with a further flight— this time to S Canada and a farm of their own: back to Marsh Farm at 233 last!— only six months ahead of them. Another echo of the earlier books is the manner of growth that Connie and j Mellors achieve: each undergoes a metamorphie transforma- i " j tion, a death of one self and rebirth of another. This ! mythic element is underscored by numerous allusions to hell, to the underworld, to blossoming, to purifying water. And as in The Rainbow and Women in Love, there are several rit ual scenes, particularly of dancing and of communion with nature. Finally, the narrative quest of Lady Chatterley's Lover takes on religious significance through numerous re ligious images and allusions: Connie forsakes the bitch- goddess success (actually the devil, Mammon), undergoes a i resurrection of the flesh, and realizes the "unnamed God" l j which has "wakened in [her] guts" (p. 2 82). The similarities between Lady Chatterley's Lover and Women in Love suggest that Lady Chatterley may be discussed, i . j as Women in Love was in the previous chapter, in terms of its two contrasting worlds— the destructive, dissolute |world of Wragby and all Europe, in contrast with the vital ! ! ‘ world of becoming that Mellors and Connie begin to shape for themselves in the wood.3 Before beginning that discus- 3Julian Moynahan also interprets the book in terms of these contrasting worlds, which he calls "Death-in-Life" and "The-Vital Realm." See The Deed of Life, pp. 150-172. I am indebted to this excellent essay for much of my under standing of Lady Chatterley, but I have tried to move 234 |sion in detail, I will recount in summary form the chief events of the narrative. Since the novel is both short and famous, a very brief account should suffice. Connie Chatterley lives with her aristocratic husband, who has been paralyzed from the waist down by an injury suffered in World War I, on their Midlands estate Wragby j Hall, adjacent to the colliery town of Tevershall. Connie and Sir Clifford sense that their age is a tragic one, but they bear this awareness stoically, amusing themselves with Clifford's short stories. Clifford has gained some success and popularity— and wealth— as a writer of witty, intellec tual short fiction. They live a cerebral life and care little for sex, which they do not miss at all. After some time of this, Connie begins to feel a growing restlessness and sense of futility, and at the suggestion of her father, she takes a lover, a playwright named Michaelis. Michaelis has a greater name and a larger income than even gir Clif ford, but he is completely disillusioned with life. Connie believes she loves him at first, until he insults her by truthfully informing her that she uses men during the sex act only to satisfy her ego. During their affair, however, she feels renewed vigor and vitality, and she stimulates Sir Clifford to write even wittier and more entertaining beyond Moynahan's generalizations to a closer examination of image patterns, structure, and through them, theme. 235 fiction. Sir Clifford, in the meantime, has begun.to la- i | ment his lack of an heir. He shocks Connie by suggesting |that she form a discreet liaison and conceive a child. Connie's health begins to fail severely after her break with Michaelis. Sir Clifford is forced by Connie's sister, against his protests, to take on a woman servant to care for his bodily needs, so that Connie may be freed from the chores. Once she has this bit of freedom, Connie en joys the outdoors more and more, and she spends a great deal of time roaming in the wood that forms part of the Chatterley estate. Eventually, she bitterly resents her cerebral life and her physical languishing. One day in the woods, she submits to her long-stifled passion and has sexual intercourse with Mellors, Sir Clifford's gamekeeper. Sex seems ridiculous to her at first, even though it satis fies her enough that she returns to the wood for more. Finally, thanks to her passionate relationship with Mellors, !Connie feels genuinely and completely alive for the first i ' time in her life. She now recognizes physical existence as the root of all value. On the other hand, as Connie dis covers the source of her life in the body. Sir Clifford becomes more and more abstracted. He drops his interest in fiction and turns to the remodeling and managing of his collieries. He shows himself to be a great master of prac tical men and a genius at organization. Simultaneously, he 236 becomes increasingly dependent on his nurse, Mrs. Bolton, until at last, she bathes him, feeds him, shaves him, treats him like her baby; and he leans on her shoulder, fondles her breasts, and enjoys her motherly caresses. Connie leaves Wragby for a holiday in Venice, but she has by now learned to hate Clifford and to love Mellors, I whose child she carries. Mellors's estranged wife tries to force herself back on him while Connie is gone, and she discovers clothing and small personal articles that Connie has left unawares in Mellors's cottage. Mellors's wife i gossips throughout the neighborhood that Mellors has had I j Connie in the cottage as a lover. Sir Clifford disbelieves i ithe gossip, but squelches it by serving a warrant on Mel- | jlors's wife. He also fires Mellors, who goes to London. i j Connie returns from Venice, but she goes to London and | jMellors rather than Wragby Hall and Clifford. She finally | j gets enough courage to make her break from Clifford and to i !tell him of the affair with Mellors. He is outraged, I - |spiteful, and childish. He cries on Mrs. Bolton's shoulder i land refuses to grant Connie a divorce. As the novel ends, Mellors is at work on an English farm, waiting for his own divorce, and Connie is in London, waiting for the expira- Ition of the six-month period during which Mellors must stay I |away from her. Mellors thinks that Clifford will relent after a time and agree to the divorce, but whether he does | or not, Mellors and Connie plan to emigrate to Canada and buy a farm with Connie's money. This brief summary should provide sufficient inter- |pretive context for the discussion of the anti-vital, ab- j |stracted, destructive world of Lady Chatterley from which | | Mellors and Connie extricate themselves, and to which I i I now turn. j * * i e | j Lady Chatterley's Lover opens with these words: "Ours |is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragi- I ‘ i |cally. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins. |. . ." In fact, as the novel makes clear, we are the !ruins. The immediate tragedy is the world war, but the war | |merely reflects the underlying cataclysm: the death of ;warmth and feeling among human beings. The "tragic age" is an age of general callousness and of pervasive disregard for the individual, in which mankind has been abstracted I into pure will and been reduced to money-grubbing or pres- itige-seeking mechanism. No organic connection unites peo- Iple, no common feeling, no shared purpose. The community has given way to the crowd, the individual to his social function. There remain no men thinking, no men working, no ! men writing, no men governing or planning or managing. There are only thinkers, writers, governors, planners, and managers, every one a passionless human component of the i I j 238 | vast social-industrial mechanism. All are caught up in an unfeeling, coldly mechanical system that perpetuates itself in a vicious circle: the brutal system brutalizes individ uals like Clifford Chatterley, who then take their place of authority in the system and add to it their own insentience, making it even more brutal than before. During the first one-fifth of Lady Chatterley, phrases |like "out of contact, "no connection," "a sense of isola- i jtion," "out of touch," or some other reference to human re- | lationships gone wrong, appear on nearly every page. And | all the situations and events of these pages work to illus- j |trate the truth of Mellors's lamenting assertion: ! ' j And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half- j conscious, and half alive. We've got to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying need. (p. 334) Human intimacy— physical contact and emotional involvement — have become impossible in the "normal" world of Lady ! Chatterley's Lover. Most relationships are symbiotic in- | _ | terdependency, reciprocal vampirism. Occasionally people cooperate to accomplish mutual goals. At the most, "inti macy" means only verbal contact, an exchange of ideas. Sex for such people is an anachronism, "merely an accident, or an adjunct, one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness. . . ." (p. 11). This is the world in which Connie is born, eduaated, and 239 married, and in which she lives until her sexual relation ship with Mellors. Three powerful symbols portray this | anti-vital world: Tevershall and the nearby countryside, Wragby Hall and the guests that visit it, and Sir Clifford. Tevershall surrounds Wragby Hall, its park and wood, like a no man's land bordering a prison compound. It is a ! | soulless coal-and-iron Midlands village that begins almost I ! jat Wragby Hall's park gates, and that trails in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile; houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness. (p. 11) Tevershall is an insistent presence that cannot be shut out, i even by the gates of Wragby Hall or the walls of the man- ! sion. One can see the pit chimneys in the distance from I . ■ ■ ! the park, and in the "rather dismal." rooms of the house Connie hears the "rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit, the puff of the winding engines, the clink-clink of shunt ing trucks," and the whistle of locomotives (p. 12). ; Tevershall spews its black ugliness everywhere, contami— I nating the sky, blackening homes and flowers, undermining its residents and making them as dreary and lifeless as the countryside— even sheep in Tevershall are grey, dirtied by "black manna from skies of doom." Lawrence frequently re- | fers to it as an "underworld," and Connie feels that she | lives underground. Tevershall is a literal hell-on-earth: Tevershall pit bank was burning, had been burning for j 240 years, and it would cost thousands to put it out. So it had to burn. And when the wind was that way, which was s often, the house was full of the stench of this sulphu rous combustion of the earth's excrement. But everi on windless days the air always smelt of something under earth: sulphur, iron, coal, or acid. (p. 12) I Lawrence carefully delineates this hellish environment in ' the first chapter of Lady Chatterley, and Connie1s reaction to it indicates the extent to which she, too, is dead as the novel opens: she took it in at a glance, "and left it at what it was: unbelievable and not to be thought about" (p. 11). She tried to ignore it, to bear it stoically. At this point, Connie has no vision of another world, no.idea that she can shape her environment, as well as adjust to it. In chapter eleven, however, when Connie takes an auto mobile ride through the Tevershall countryside, the full horror of what man has done to himself in creating such a grimy and hopeless existence penetrates her "in a wave of terror." Connie has just made love with Mellors for the first three times in the previous chapter, and she feels a new self being awakened in her womb. This newly-alive self sees Tevershall through different eyes. Everything is squalid and black: "blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black." Connie under stands its meaning with new insight: j 241 | | The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter nega- | tion of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the | instinct for shapely beauty . . . , the utter death of j the human intuitive faculty. . . . The England of today j . . . was producing a new race of mankind, over-con scious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous, intuitive side dead,— but dead I Half- corpses, all of them. . . . There was something uncanny and underground about it all. It was an underworld. (pp. 180-181) She asks herself, "Ah, God, what has man done to man?" But j |now Connie can answer the question as well as ask it: They have reduced them to less than humanness; and now there can be no fellowship any morel It is just a nightmare. . . . It was dead. The fellowship was dead. There was only apartness and hopelessness. (p. 182) The description of the industrial wasteland continues for |ten pages more, as Connie travels on to Squire Winter's | |estate, Shipley, with its ornamental ponds filled with ref- | i use tossed there by passing colliers, and with its land-- scaped park filled with milling colliers who use it as a right-of-way. Squire Shipley welcomed the men— they were less ornamental than deer, but far more profitable. Connie : becomes convinced as she looks in horror out the car window that the maniacal passion to make money has transformed humanity into elementals, "creatures of another reality," weird and distorted servants of the elements of coal, the elements of iron, the elements of carbon, clay, and sili con, Workers and bosses alike, it seems to Connie, are headed toward absolute death. In their pursuit of money i (and their worship of the machine, they have subordinated I 242 j | themselves to dead things, and the result can only be death i ! to them as well. Connie arrives back at Wragby frightened ! |but illuminated. As the same chapter concludes, Mrs. Bolton tells Con nie the story of her husband1s death twenty-three years earlier. Ted Bolton had been unique among colliers: he | knew how to love a woman, how to make passionate contact j with her without yielding his independent manhood. For this the people of Tevershall had hated him. Physically out of touch themselves, they felt a jealous destructive- jness and hostility toward anyone who was not. Mrs. Bolton | : explains to Connie: | "Oh, my Ladyl And that's what makes you feel so I bitter. You feel folks wanted him killed. You feel I the pit fair wanted to kill him. . . . They all want to separate a woman and a man, if they're together." "If they're physically together," said Connie. (p. 195) Ted Bolton's death had been an accident, but the town had : willed him dead, nevertheless, because of his sexuality. | And Tevershall's hatred of sexuality amounts, of course, to jhatred of life itself. Tevershall's life-hatred demon strates itself again, more than a hundred pages later, when the people of the town eagerly take up the story about Con nie visiting the cottage of Sir Clifford's gamekeeper. The gossips delight in denigrating someone who boldly asserts j i the primacy of sex. The gossip follows Connie all the way 243 to Venice, where the artist Duncan Forbes interprets for her the motives of the malicious busybodies: you'll see, they'll never rest till they've pulled | the man down and done him in. . . . If he's a man who | stands up for his own sex, then they'll do him in. It's j the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural and vital thing. They won't have it, and they'll kill you before they'll let you have it. . . . You have to snivel and feel sinful or awful about your sex, before you're allowed to have any. (p. 319) The Victorian fear of sex is only one of the attitudes that Lawrence attacks in Lady Chatterley: It appears no less destructive than the sex-is-merely-sensation or sex-is-an- itch-to-be-relieved attitudes held by some of Clifford's modern friends. I will discuss them shortly when I examine Wragby Hall as a symbol of the destructive world in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Before turning from Tevershall to Wragby, I want to mention one image related to Tevershall that recurs so frequently that it becomes a powerful secondary image of both the destructive and vital worlds--the air. The sul- |phur- and soot-polluted air grays and blackens everything, j and pinkish white flakes of ash settle everywhere. The gray haze overhead extends from Wragby to the horizon, so that Connie always feels as though she lives "inside an enclosure, always inside. Life always a dream or a frenzy, inside an enclosure" (p. 45). At times, a small patch of blue sky clears directly over Wragby Hall, suggesting that escape is possible and hinting that another world exists. 244 Significantly, Connie has a bedroom on the third floor— Clifford's is on the first— as near to that patch of blue I as she can get. And after Connie's affair with Michaelis i | breaks down, the affair she had hoped would rejuvenate her and add some joy to her life, she walks in the park with : Clifford in a scene which Lawrence describes thus: "The day had greyed over: the small blue sky that had poised low on its circular rims of haze was closed in again, the lid was down . . (p. 53). The disappearance of the blue marks the end of a phase in Connie's life, and stresses | that Michaelis was not a doorway of escape from Wragby. Similarly, references to the sky or air reappear several | times as metaphors for escape or as indicators of the ugli^ ! ness of Tevershall. When Mellors considers leaving Wragby ! Hall with Connie, for example, he describes it as "going to America, to try a new air" (p. 169). And Connie decides in Venice, right after discovering that she is pregnant, that "a clear sky was almost the most important thing in life" {p. 316). The Venetian sky lets through the sun, something rarely seen at Wragby Hall, and Connie soaks it up for weeks, regaining her health and storing the energy she will need to inform Clifford of her love for Mellors and her decision to leave him. Wragby Hall is a "warren of a place without much dis- |tinetion" that has survived since the eighteenth century j 245 l | I (p. 11). (A "warren" is an enclosure, either land or i | building, used for breeding purposes, especially rabbits. The description stresses Wragby's prison-like nature for Connie, while ironically mocking Clifford1s impotence and his suggestion that Connie provide him an heir— he is the breeder, but not the father.) Connie finds it an oppres- ! | sively orderly and mechanical prison from the moment she arrives: It was awfulI What could you do with such a place . . . all these endless rooms that nobody used, all the midland routine, the mechanical cleanliness and the mechanical order! . . .The place seemed run by mecha nical anarchy. Everything went on in pretty good order, strict cleanliness, and strict punctuality; even pretty i strict honesty. And yet, to Connie, it was a methodical anarchy. No warmth of feeling united it organically. j | (p. 16) ; | i i After two years at Wragby, Connie begins to feel that her j |life is non-existence, a void. Wragby seems always filled |with people, Clifford's guests and acquaintances, yet noth- I |ing ever happens. "It was all a dream; or rather it was :like the simulacrum of reality" (p. 18). The people that gather at Wragby and the activities i |that occur there all represent the lifeless, destructive world. Most guests come because Clifford wants to use them to advance as a writer. Neither Clifford nor the guests know or care for one another. They feel flattered at being ! invited to an aristocrat's estate, and they repay him with the praise he wants. However, from among the dozens of 246 people who stream through Wragby's gates, Clifford has formed a small coterie of young intellectuals who meet there regularly for conversation about important social and |political questions. These young men share several traits: ;they all believe in the life of the mind; they all dismiss everything but intellectual activity as a private, unimpor tant matter; and they all believe that the only important human contact is intellectual and verbal. Their mental life is an abstract, disconnected activity, very similar to money earning— pure mechanism. Their thoughts, of course, |have nothing to do with anything else in their lives. i ! | Chapter four is chiefly devoted to an argument among |these intellectuals about sex. Each of them— -Charlie May, I |Hammond, and Tommy Dukes--presents an attitude that is as destructive, in its way, as the fear and hatred of Tever shall. Charlie May advocates a broad-minded casualness about sex. Just as when you're interested in talking to a |woman, you talk, says Charlie May, so should you take her jto bed if you're interested. Sex is a physical form of talk, of conversation. (Charlie here advocates what Law rence saw as heresy of the first order--the primacy of the Word over the Flesh. Charlie illustrates the most perverse form of "spirituality," the intellectual who imposes ideas and words onto physical life. All of Mellors's behavior works to refute May, as well as Clifford and others, by 247 asserting the absolute primacy of the flesh— Mellors, for example, never uses the word "love.") Charlie May expands i ihis point by equating sex with hunger and indigestion: he has certain precise intellectual calculations to make, "which concern me almost more than life or death" (p. 36), and either hunger, indigestion, or sex could hamper them if not tended to. Therefore, he satisfies all his bothersome, bodily demands, so that he can proceed with more important activities. Hammond, on the other hand, has a real fear of sex. He disagrees with May on the grounds that May squanders too much energy on sex: "You'll never do what you should do, Iwith a fine mind such as yours. Too much of you goes the jother way" (p. 37). Hammond fears that sex might hurt his mind. Hammond holds a position midway between the re pressed Victorian and the naively enlightened, like Charlie May, who debase sex by dismissing it as just another appe- i I tite. i Tommy Dukes is at once the most enlightened and the most debased of the three. He is enlightened because he sees the life-destroying abstraction implicit in all the attitudes toward sex— in Tevershall's, in Hammond's, and in Charlie May's. Furthermore, he bases his objections to "mental-sex" on his recognition of the perils of the ab stracted intellect. Tommy has no illusions, he sees the 248 suppressed hatred and destructiveness beneath all abstrac tion. The "mental life," he says, has its roots in envy ; and spite, in the "sheer joy of pulling somebody else to 3 I bits . . ." (p. 40). The exclusively analytical mind has ! i I no real knowledge, because: | Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the ! consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much i as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyze I and rationalize. Set the mind and reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is criticize, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly impor tant. My God, the world needs criticizing to death. | Therefore let's live the mental life, and glory in our ! spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, I it's like this; while you live your life, you are in some | way an organic whole with all life. But once you start | the mental life you pluck the apple. You've severed the connection between the apple and the tree: the organic connection. And if you've got nothing but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple . . . you've I fallen off the tree. (p. 41) Dukes goes on to attack the whole list of Lawrencean evils: industrialism is an abstracted mechanism that substitutes efficiency and men-as-interchangeable-parts for organic I wholeness and inner purpose; social and intellectual life in the Weat. are passionless mechanisms, manned by heartless human automata; love is a delusion bred by the property instinct and the "success" motive;, most institutions depend on hatred of life and hatred of men unlike one's self, a mechanical and perfectly logical hatred that proceeds with deadly validity from an initial, destructive premise: man equals his mind. Tommy's list of positive vaiues, on the other hand, can be stated briefly: "I believe in having a 249 'good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the i |courage to say 'shit' in front of a lady" (p. 44). | If this were all. Tommy Dukes would seem to make Mel- jlors's appearance in the novel unnecessary, for Dukes talks | very much like Mellors, and like their creator himself. |But Dukes only talks, and therein lies his own perversion, i He is sexless himself, a great talker and a "mental-lifer," I and he knows it: My heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say "shit!" in front of my mother or my aunt. . . . (p. 44) I Furthermore, Tommy Dukes seems to accept Charlie May's the ory of sex as a form of conversation, "just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them" (p. 36). And when Connie goes to him later, after she has begun to feel bodily numb and overly cerebral, and asks him about sexually based relationships, in contrast to verbal or intellectual relationships, he advises her to let sex lie dormant. Tommy has all the right opinions, but he cannot act on his beliefs or words. Tommy is the most pa thetic of all the examples of the split between mind and body that run through Lawrence's work. Despite his Law- rencean opinions, he can only announce the principles which Mellors will live. He plays, in a way, John the Baptist to Mellors's Christ. (This is no fanciful metaphor: Two chapters later Dukes debates another of Clifford's lifeless 250 guests, Olive Strangeways, who looks forward to a scien- | tific future of immunized women and babies in bottles. S ;Dukes advocates a "democracy of touch," prophesies the doom |of western civilization unless it is realized, and calls |for the "resurrection of the body." The only bridge into a [vital future, he says, is the phallus. "Resurrection of i I the body" perfectly describes what Mellors achieves.) Clifford Chatterley is by far the most striking symbol of the deadly, abstracted industrial society. Michaelis, Hammond, Charlie May, Tommy Dukes, and the other house i I !guests'are fixed, narrow characters who appear briefly as !the embodiment of an attitude or idea, and for this reason ! jI have treated them like fixtures of Wragby Hall. But |Clifford is master of Wragby and economic lord of Tever- > shall, and as the third principal character of the novel he |functions in several different roles. Clifford is best un- |derstood not as a fixed type which Lawrence hated, which is ithe way Eliseo Vivas sees him,^ but as "an experimental ^Vivas feels so antipathetic towards Lawrence's inten tions that he seems at times to concoct ad hoc critical theory with which to demolish the novel. Clifford Chatter- |ley is a wronged man, for Vivas, who has served his country honorably in time of war and has taken permanent marriage vows, only to be repaid by infidelity. Vivas also attacks the continuous presence of Clifford in the novel, on the grounds that he runs away with a story that is meant to be Connie's and Mellors's. Vivas supports both these com plaints with "a well-defined notion of what a novel is," and thus tries to pass off his moral judgments as objective evaluation. He cannot simply say that he dislikes Lady 251 hypothesis: given such and such conditions, then what E T other conditions will result." From the beginning, Clifford is a grotesque carica ture . By the third paragraph of Lady Chatterley, we have had Clifford's marriage, his war injury, and his recovery: [Connie] married Clifford Chatterley in 1917, when he was home for a month on leave. They had a month's honey moon. Then he went back to Flanders: to be shipped over to England again six months later, more or less in bits. . . . His hold on life was marvelous. He didn't die, and the bits seemed to grow together again. (p. 1) Lawrence's careful flippancy matches that of Clifford and his friends from Cambridge who could take nothing in life seriously, until they went to war and were threatened with death. Clifford always appears to the reader through the narrator's interpretive lens, so that involvement with him as a person is nearly impossible. Even our natural compas sion for a cripple dissipates when we discover that Clif ford's wound makes little difference in his life, that he cared little for sex even before his paralysis. His real loss, to him, is his legs, and he seems to find his motor ized wheelchair an adequate substitute. The war injury Chatterley because he finds Mellors and Connie abhorrent, but instead adduces critical maxims with which to find them unaesthetic. Like Lawrence's characters, he imposes mental categories on phenomena, rather than empirically deducing his categories. See Triumph and Failure, pp. 120-125. C Moynahan, p. 151. My remarks on Clifford draw heavily on Moynahan's analysis. 252 only aggravates his intrinsic willfulness and insentience, and his paralysis merely gives external form to his inner, emotional wreckage. I Clifford is an emotional and sexual cripple, and as such represents his whole culture. Connie describes him as the "negation of human contact." His life's goal is to extend his will over the will of others, disregarding any |other considerations but efficiency of organization. The I inovel poses the question, "What will become of a disem- I j bodied will and mind that have no emotional connections I |with life?" Clifford's story is the answer. i As a young man, Clifford scorned Cambridge and went to i . i ;Germany for his education, where he studied mining engi- i neering, even though he apparently had no interest in it, nor even any intention of applying it to his own mines. Everything was ridiculous to him: government, universities, war, his father, even himself. He felt very insecure among |strangers or people from a different social class. Deep ! • ■ |within, he felt shy, nervous, paralyzed. He felt no real purpose in his own existence or in others', and life was rather like a mad hatter's absurd tea party. Then, Clif ford went to the war and returned a physical, cripple. Clifford's history after his recovery suggests the slope of dissolution of Women in Love. He becomes increas ingly abstracted, insentient, and out of touch. His devo- ,253 tion to words marks the first stage in his increasing ab straction: he is the apostle par excellence of the primacy |of the Word. He begins to write short stories which gain him rapid fame and critical success. Literature, to him, means clever linguistic structures that provoke critical I praise, and the critics willingly praise Clifford's mean- ! ' 1 ingless nothings spun out of empty words. (Clifford's literary triumphs, along with Duncan's reputation as a painter later in the novel, parallel Gudrun and Loerke and their dehumanized art in Women in Love.) The next stage in Clifford's dissolution relates spe- i Icifically to sex. During the debate between Tommy Dukes and the others, Clifford remarks that sex "completes the intimacy" between man and woman. Intimacy means verbal and intellectual contact, and if sexual contact follows later, I so much the better. Somewhat later, Clifford subordinates sex much further, debasing it and the feelings of the par ticipants to the level of mere instrument. One day as 1 |Clifford lounges in the woods he feels the thrill of owner- i ship, feels proud that the woods are his possession. And he jolts Connie by suggesting that she have an affair to get him a son, an heir to continue the chain of ownership. Clifford has abstracted himself still further: sex now has i 1 nothing to do with intimacy, but is simply the method of | providing owners for the world's property. | 254 | The last stage of Clifford's abstraction occurs when j he abandons his interest in writing and in intellectual i 'conversation with his cronies, and forfeits even the slim ! j human contact he had experienced in order to become the | !operator of the collieries that he had heretofore ignored. i Clifford's brilliant modernization of the mines, his appli cation of the most advanced techniques, his consummate genius for organization, and his unquestionable capacity to I dominate men of affairs, almost exactly parallel the ac complishments of Gerald Crich in the chapter "Industrial |Magnate" in Women in Love. Clifford's devotion to these |goals converts him— as Crich's had also converted him— into |a completely abstract and mechanical person. Clifford no i |longer has any guests at all to his mansion, but instead j I becomes an avid listener to the radio:— where he receives i I !the Word without the need for tolerating the bodily pres- ! |ence of the speaker, and without the bothersome task of I i replying. Clifford has transformed himself into a creature with a "hard, efficient shell" like a lobster or crab, "in vertebrates of the crustacean order" with shells like steel but insides like pulp (pp. 128-129). His will works as though someone had plugged it in— pure mechanism at work on ^Recall the sea monsters, the "mistakes of creation" that Lawrence used as a powerful image of dissolution in Women in Love. 255 the external world, the malleable substance that offers resistance but finally yields. And simultaneously* his inner void has become thorough, and he relies on Mrs. Bol ton like a baby, drawing all his nourishment from her, de pending on her for his most intimate bodily needs; he has | no more organic purpose as the novel ends than the minute ! ■ | hand on a watch. ! Tevershall, Wragby Hall, Clifford's friends, and Clifford himself, then, combine to present a ghastly, deadly world where men are more attached to typewriters and radios than to their wives, where everyone is an isolated shell in competition with the earth's other crustaceans; where the individual is a mere worker, if he is poor, or a mere property owner, if he is rich; and where sex has be come a sloppy anachronism. There is no feeling, no commu nion, no organic purpose. My next section will discuss the purposive, vital world discovered by Connie and Mellors. tV * As Lady Chatterley's Lover begins, the trauma of the war has further numbed the senses and feelings of a popula tion that was already dying. Clifford's decline simply extends a process already initiated throughout the culture. ! ‘ ! His "fall," ironically, is literally a rise to progres- j sively higher levels of abstraction. Connie and Mellors move in an opposite direction, achieving renewed vitality 256 : through a "resurrection of the body," in Tommy Dukes' : words. They "rise" to life by descending into the body i from which Clifford and his culture have cut themselves I | loose. For Connie, it means an utter, complete transformation i i of her being, the death of her egoistic, mental, spiritual consciousness and the birth of a new and more complete self. Lawrence reveals Connie's character and presents its radi cal transformation primarily by showing us her changing sexual relationships. Some dozen specific acts of sexual intercourse are referred to or described, which both struc ture and cause Connie's growth. Connie had had her first love experiences as a univer sity student in Germany before she was eighteen. But Con- jnie's first commandment in Dresden had been "Thou shalt |have men to talk to!" and the sex had always been an after- math, a "minor accompaniment," to sociological, philosophi cal, and artistic conversation. She was educated for "freedom" rather than purpose, and for "adjustment," rather than creativity. Both these meant, to her, successful as sertion of her ego, whereas the "sex business" seemed rather a sordid subjugation to a man. Men, however, "in sisted on the sex thing like dogs. And a woman had to yield" (p. 4). In yielding, Connie enjoyed the sex-thrill within her, and she very nearly "succumbed to the strange 257 male power. But quickly [she] recovered . . . , took the sex-thrill as a sensation, and remained free" (p. 6). After she married Clifford, sex became less important still. Clifford was a virgin and cared little for physical -intimacy. Then he received his war injury, after which sex disappeared from Connie's life altogether. It was at this time that her health began to fail and that she took Mi- chaelis, on her father's advice, as a lover. Three sepa rate instances of intercourse are described between them, each of which adds to our understanding of Connie. After the first love making, Connie can once again enjoy physical sensation, but she has no inkling that sex can be anything more than that. Their second act of intercourse reveals that Connie and Michaelis objectify each other, use each other for personal satisfaction, rather than strive for reciprocal relationship. Michaelis always reaches his cli max very quickly, while Connie deliberately holds back hers and then forces him to continue his activity until she is satisfied. She uses his "erect passivity" to bring herself to a climax, and their sexual relationship becomes a cu rious thing midway between masturbation and real connection. Connie and Michaelis continue their affair in this way for some time, during which she regains much of her health and feels more vigorous than she ever has, until the third specific act of intercourse. By now, their love making has ! 258 ! ' ■ become a contest of wills: i ! Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis be- | for he had really finished his. . . . She had to go on i after he had finished . . . , while he heroically kept himself up, and present in her, with all his will arid self-offering, till she brought about her own crisis. . . . (p. 61) i !Connie embitters Michaelis: } ; You couldn't go off at the same time as a man, could you? You'd have to bring yourself off! You'd have to run the show! . . . You keep on for hours after I've gone off . . . and I have to hang on with my teeth till you bring yourself off by your own exertions. (p. 61) Michaelis's speech stuns Connie. It is a blow that kills something inside her, turning her against Michaelis and destroying her instinct for sex. A phase of her life has |ended. Sex becomes more ridiculous and unnecessary for her j I than ever. This period in Connie's life represents the i "death" required before she can be reborn. Now that everything seems pointless and dead to Connie, j she resigns herself stoically to enduring a meaningless |existence. Despite her mind's resolve, however, her body protests, and she becomes progressively weaker. When she is near serious illness, several things conspire to ini tiate a new phase in her life. First, she comes upon Mellors's cottage in the wood one day while he is washing his body from the waist up. She watches him, unseen, and feels a "shock in her womb." This occurs during a time that Connie has been thinking more and more about having a child, and immediately after she has remembered the bibli 259 cal command, "Go ye into the streets and byways of Jeru salem and see if ye can find a man" (p. 73). A "man," she thinks, and the word crowds each page of the novel before and after the washing scene, with Mellors himself referred to several times as "the man." Next/ Olive (Oh live?) Strangeways visits.Wragby Hall to advocate babies in bottles and provoke Tommy Dukes into his call for the resurrection of the body. And finally, Mrs. Bolton arrives to free Con nie from taking care of Clifford, and Connie feels herself "released into another world. . . . A new phase was going to begin in her life" (p. 97). This seems an appropriate place to pause, before dis cussing the rebirth Connie undergoes through her sexual relationship with Mellors, to indicate how Lawrence uses images of houses, doors, and spatial movement in Lady Chat terley. Wragby Hall always resembles a prison to Connie, and Lawrence stresses its dismal and stifling atmosphere on several occasions. Wragby Hall and its park are made to seem even more prison-like by the wall that surrounds and encloses them. A path made pink by the falling ash from the sky runs from the mansion to the wood-gate, however, and shows the escape route from Wragby. This "fine ribbon of pink" not only emphasizes the gate and the wood to which it leads, but it also seems like an artery, a life-line, that tempts Connie to follow it from the cerebral house to its bodily life-source. Lawrence introduces the pink rib bon without comment, but a reader who notices it can hardly fail to interpret it symbolically when, some one hundred |and fifty pages later, he discovers that the path leading |through the wood to Mellors's cottage is bordered by red I daisies— an obvious continuation of the life-line through the park. The symbolic contrast between wood and Wragby park is heightened by the park's pale pinkness caused by ashes, versus the dark red caused by flowers: ashes from the mines versus flowers which symbolize life. Lawrence marks each of Connie's passages through the wood-gate with some kind of emphasis: the first time she uses it, for example, occurs early in the novel when she and Clifford S ' are out for a walk in the park, and Connie runs forward eagerly to open the gate herself— her eagerness speaks plainly of her desires, just as Clifford's anger at her for not letting the servant open it reveals his fears. Later ’in the novel, when Connie sneaks out to the wood to meet Mellors, he always accompanies her to the gate. Connie's escape from the prison of Wragby Hall is gradual. At first, she merely enters the wood and enjoys I the life she finds there. Then, she comes by accident upon the hut in which Mellors hatches baby chicks. She loves the hut, and asks Mellors— still an aloof stranger to her— for a key so that she may go there to sit and observe the 261 | wood. The hut eventually becomes their rendezvous place, I and entry into it represents perhaps the most important I threshold that Connie crosses. For Mellors, too, who has j | been embittered by past experiences with women and humanity | in general and has isolated himself from all people, entry | into the hut with Connie means the crossing of an impor tant threshold. Lawrence gives these inner conflicts ex ternal form by emphasizing the doorway: Mellors at first ! refuses to give Connie a key, and they argue the issue. As they argue, Connie sits in the doorway itself, and Mellors | works on the malfunctioning door. When he gets the sliding | door working properly, he looks up at Connie and feels "a j j slight thin tongue of fire . . . in his loins" (p. 103). l l | Connie feels a second "shock in her womb" at the same time. i j The liberation of Connie's sexuality, then, corre sponds with her gradual physical movements, from Wragby ; hall to the hut, from the hut to Mellors's cottage, from |the cottage to Venice, from Venice to London, and in the i |future a move to Canada planned. Sexual liberation— which ; means liberation as a purposive individual— cannot be ac complished without fleeing Wragby Hall: when Connie's attempt to find wholeness through her affair with Michaelis collapses, Lawrence calls it the collapse of her "house of cards." And when Connie does make her escape from Wragby, it is structured by emphatic reference to each threshold 262 | crossed— for example, the first time Connie visits Mellors's I cottage, one afternoon, she walks down the red-daisy path jand finds "the wide-open door" (p. 197). Previously, Con- | ' i j nie had passed the door and found it shut. (The same scene j uses the sky-sun imagery to lend emphasis, too. The cot tage is in the sun, the sun shines into the room, the sun light lights the doorway. In Wragby's park, one never sees or feels the sun.) Having made these observations, I will now continue the account of Connie1s rebirth brought on by I her sexual relationship with Mellors. j | After Mrs. Bolton's arrival at Wragby releases Connie !into another world and a new phase of her life, she spends much time wandering in the wood, enjoying the buds and blossoms and newly-hatched birds, and all the other signs of life she finds there. But they pain Connie as well as thrili her, for she longs more than ever to have a child, and she feels agonizingly her forlornness and uselessness. Her pain becomes particularly acute one day shortly after getting a key to the hut from Mellors, when she visits the hut and discovers a new batch of baby chicks. In bending to caress the fluffy creatures, Connie cries. Just then, Mellors arrives. Until this moment, the two had been re served and even hostile, but he is moved by Connie's tears to open up to her. He touches her, begs her not to cry— and they go to the hut, where the chickens hatched, and 263 I ! make love for the first time. Connie cannot respond. |After Michaelis's attack, she "could strive for herself no jmore," so the "activity was all his" (p. 136). Neverthe less, the love act "lifted a great cloud" from Connie and "left the sky crystal" (p. 137), as it never has been at sulphur-aired Wragby. In presenting this act of intercourse between Connie and Mellors, two absolute strangers, Lawrence reverses Clifford's attitude that "sex completes the intimacy." Here, sex initiates the intimacy, as in the catkins of Women in Love or the dozens of flower images in Lady Chat terley. Clifford, no doubt, voiced the opinion of the great majority of people in the Western world when he ar- j Igues that intimacy is begun on a level of ideas, words, attitudes, and interests, and that sex is, as we say, a consummation. The fundamental idea behind the affair be tween Connie and Mellors is that intimacy begins at the level of feeling and sensation. | Connie and Mellors must try twice more before she can respond. The third time they make love melts Connie's re serve: she gives way to Mellors, who rouses her to a cli max, for the first time in her life that she has allowed a man to do this. Having achieved her climax simultaneously j I with Mellors, she returns to Wragby Hall sensing a new self coming to life in her womb and bowels. And significantly, 264 she feels that she loves Mellors with this new self. Be fore, she had clung to her egoistic concept of personality, and had resented the impersonality of Mellors, assuming that he did not care for her. Now, she realizes that the "her" she had wanted him to love was a false self, an in complete self. She loves his physical being, now, with her newly-born physical being. Connie has experienced, for the first time in her life, real union with another person. It is necessary to examine these love-making episodes in some detail, because they have generally been misinter preted by hostile critics, and have received insufficient attention from Lawrence's admirers. Harry T. Moore, for example, speaks of these scenes as boldly realistic dec scriptions of the sex act, but he has little to say about the ritualistic, even religious aspect of the sexual pas sages, and he remarks very briefly on the rebirth Connie achieves through sex.7 If one fails to understand Connie's iritual transformation of being, one loses the point of the repeated episodes of love. Even Julian Moynahan's excel lent interpretation of the novel falters in this respect: "The sexual scenes succeeding the first," he claims, "re- p ally add nothing new." 7Moore, Life and Works, pp. 225-234. ^Moynahan, p. 166. 265 Connie's fourth and fifth times with Mellors accom plish the most in her movement toward rebirth. The fourth |union is a failure--Connie slips back into her previous I !"sex-is-ridiculous" attitude, she allows her mind to split from her body again: And this time the sharp ecstasy of her own passion did not overcome her; she lay with her hands inert on j his striving body, and do what she might, her spirit j seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the | butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her. . . . ; Yes, this was love, this ridiculous bouncing of the but- ! tocks, and the wilting of the poor insignificant, moist little penis. This was the divine love I After all, the moderns were right when they felt contempt for the | performance; for it was a performance. (pp. 204-205) Here Connie stands apart from her body, scorning it, and |she cannot reach her climax. Afterwards, she cries, sob- | bing to Mellors, "I want to love you and I can't" (p. 206). Mellors tells ner that she can't force love with her will, and that the love she wants is not the kind he offers. Again, Lawrence reverses the conventional idea: sex pre cedes love, and love completes the sexual intimacy, rather I |than the other way around. Connie refuses, momentarily, to accept the idea, and she turns against Mellors. She finds him a coarse clown, half-bred because he does not turn his back while putting on his pants— at least Michaelis did that much. Connie's mental consciousness, her self-con scious, self-protective, self-assertive ego, tries to re assert itself. Mind and body war for a moment. But Mellors understands. He takes her in his arms 266 I | |again and this time she yields. She lets go at last— lets j go her cerebral hold on herself, yields to her passionate longings, and places herself in the hands of another. It involves a terrible risk: it means the abandonment of defensiveness, the opening up to another person, making herself vulnerable. It is, as Lawrence describes it in earlier novels, Connie's "leap into the unknown": she has opened herself to Mellors; she can be hurt; he must be ten der; and he is. The result is an incomparable sexual expe rience that completes Connie's rebirth: And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass. Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-travelling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder from the center of soft plunging . . . till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion the quick of her plasm was touched . . . and she was gone. She was gone, and she was born: a woman, (pp. 207-208) Lawrence here describes more than the rhythms of sexual intercourse and the ecstasy of its climax: this is the mo ment of Connie's rebirth. She has lost her old, egoistic, personal self. She has become alive in the flesh, has been completely transformed. A few minutes before, Mellors haunches were ridiculous— now they are beautiful. His but toning of his pants was an insult— now it too is beautiful. He is ineffably beautiful, she feels a deep sense of repose, of mystery and awe, of wonder and joy. 267 After this, Connie's vision is changed, new capacities land feelings are awakened. Their sex takes on a religious, I ritual quality. She leaves off her clothes for Mellors when she comes to visit— their pagan ritual. They entwine flowers in each other's pubic hair— another ritual that asserts the oneness of all life. One night, in the rain, |they dash out of Mellors's cottage naked, to dance in the l |rain and make love on the ground— -another ritual communion j scene that demonstrates their oneness with nature. Earlier, Tommy Dukes had said that when one is organically alive he is somehow at one with all life. At the time, Connie had laughed to herself, but now she lives the truth of Dukes's words. Their remaining acts of intercourse achieve further purposes. The night before Connie leaves for Venice, they make love all night long in an intense sensuality never ex perienced by Connie before. It "purifies" her, burns out I her "shame" of all the body's "secret places." (A close reading indicates that they indulge in anal intercourse during this night of passion.) Finally, after her return from Venice, they make love in Mellors's London quarters during an evening that seals their fates into a single future. Connie decides that Mellors's body is the "only home" for her (p. 335) . * * i 268 I t ! Connie and Mellors overcome their isolation from other humans. Connie learns that the body is more than the con- itainer of her mind. Connie also discovers that sex can be far more than mere sensation— though it is that, too. Both Connie and Mellors realize, through each other, a renewed vitality and a sense of inner direction so powerful that they defy the world. Their accomplishments— achieved si multaneously with the resurrection of their bodies— are Lawrence's final vision. Personal warmth and spontaneity, genuine human connectedness, passionate inner purpose, a I sense of at-oneness with all living things, the capacity to ! j experience reverence and awe and mystery— these are the I traits of the organically whole person. j Lawrence judged our age as a time when men were near self-extinction through excessive abstraction. Individual |purpose and real feeling for other people had succumbed to I jman's abstract visions of himself as worker or owner or t ■ consumer or soldier or what have you— never the whole man. j | | Lawrence had a fine mind, and he constantly fought against his own excessive intellectuality, yet he knew that the i bane of our time was mind cut loose from feeling and will without organic purpose. The years since his death, it I seems to me, have verified his fears many times over— our j mid-century worlds in which might seems invariably to make right, in which nations devote themselves wholly to extend- 269 | ing their power, and in which brilliant men dedicate their i lives to improving weapons of destruction have become even more destructively abstract than the world Lawrence at tacked, so that the finest minds now perform the highest folly. Nevertheless, those who attack Lawrence as "anti- i I intellectual" need to be reminded that Lawrence1s own i i I ! achievements were products of the intellect, and that his !attack was launched against abstracted intellect, never against "man thinking." Lawrence explained his position in a letter to the Brewsters: It's a novel of the phallic Consciousness: or the phallic Consciousness versus the mental-spiritual Con sciousness: and of course you know which side I take. The versus is not my fault: there should be no versus. The two things should be reconciled in us. But now they're daggers drawn.9 |And just as excessive cerebrality was destructive of the j | organically whole human, so was excessive sexuality— al- i !though Lawrence's feelings on this score have received far | less publicity. I conclude with a passage from Fantasia of |the Unconscious which Mark Spilka has suggested should be | the beginning of all studies of Lawrence: Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you get the collapse of living purpose in man. . . . Assert purposiveness as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our political life. . . . And so there you are. You have got to base your great ^Quoted by Moore, Life and Works, p. 228. 270 purposive activity upon the sexual fulfillment of all your individuals. That was how Egypt endured. But you have got to keep your sexual fulfillment even then sub ordinate, just subordinate to the great passion of pur pose: subordinate by a hair's breadth only: but still, by that hair's breadth, subordinate.10 j -^D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (London, 11961), p. 108. LIST OF WORKS CITED 271 LIST OF WORKS CITED jBlackmur, Richard P. "D. H. Lawrence and Expressive Form,1 1 The Double Agent. New York: Arrow Editions,'1935. Brown, Norman O. Life Against Death. New York: Random House, 1959. Bynner, Witter. Journey With Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences. New York: Day, 1951. Quoted in Edward Nehls, ed. D. H. Law rence: A Composite Biography. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. New York: The World Publishing Company, 1956. Douglas, Norman. Looking Back. New York: Harcourt, 1933. I Quoted in Edward Nehls, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Com- | posite Biography. |Ford, George H. Double Measure. New York: ! and Winston, 1965. i j Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: 1963. . The Heart of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Hoffman, Frederick J. "Lawrence's Quarrel With Freud," | Freudianism and the Literary Mind. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1945. Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Gerald Duckworth and Company, 1956. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Random House, 1967. Lawrence, D. H. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore. New York: Viking Press, 1967. _______________. Fantasia of the Unconscious. London: William Heinemann, 1961. j 272 Holt, Rinehart Bantam Books, 2 73 Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley's Lover. New York: Grove Press, 1959. _____________ The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley. New York; The Viking Press, 1932. _______________. Phoenix: The Poshumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. New York: The Viking Press, 1936. The Rainbow. New York: Random House, 1943. __________ . Sex, Literature, and Censorship, ed. Harry T. Moore. New York: The Viking Press, 1953. Sons and Lovers. New York: Random House, 1962. _______________. Studies in Classic American Literature. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1951. ___________ . Study of Thomas Hardy, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence. New York: The Viking Press, 1936. _______________. Twilight in Italy. London: William Heinemann, 1950. The White Peacock. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966. Women in Love. New York: Random House, 1950. Leavis, F. R. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. New York: Knopf, 1956. Miller, Henry. "The Universe of Death," The CosmologiOal Eye. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1939. Moore, Harry T., ed. AD. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Carbon dale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959. D. H. Lawrence: His Life and Works. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964. Moseley, Edwin M.' Pseudonyms of Christ in the Modern Novel. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University Of Pittsburgh Press, 1962. 274 Moynahan, Julian. The Deed of Life. Princeton, New Jer sey: Princeton University Press, 1963. Nehls, Edward, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. 3 Vols. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957-1959. Peris, Frederick. "Gestaltist Peris: Race Between Human ism and Fascism," Los Angeles Free Press, January 12, 1968. Pi'lley, W. Charles. "A Book the Police Should Ban . . . ," John Bull, XXX (No. 798, Saturday, 17 September 1921), 4. Quoted in Edward Nehls, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography. Robson, W. W. "D. H. Lawrence and Women in Love," The Modern Age: The Pelican Guide to English Lieterture, Volume 7, ed. Boris Ford. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1961. Schorer, Mark. "Technique as Discovery,1 1 Myth and Method: Modern Theories of Fiction, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, . 196 0. ______________. "Women in Love and Death," D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Spilka. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1963. Spilka, Mark. D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1963. ■ . The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence. Bloming- ton, Indiana: University Of Indiana Press, 1955. . . "Was D. H. Lawrence a Symbolist?" Accent, XV (Winter 1955), 49-60. Tiverton, Father William [Martin Jarrett-Kerr]. D. H. Lawrence and Human Existence. New York: Philosophi- cal Library, 1951. Van Ghent,. Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. Vivas, Eliseo. D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Tri umph of Art. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern Uni versity Press, 1960. 275 Wagenknecht. Edward. Cavalcade of the English Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Comic Characterization In The Fiction Of Graham Greene

PDF

George Henry Lewes' Evolutionism In The Fiction Of George Eliot

PDF

Thematic Change In The Stage Plays Of Harold Pinter, 1957-1967

PDF

The Poetic Styles Of Miguel De Barrios

PDF

Censorship And The Victorian Drama

PDF

Kingsley Amis: Writer As Moralist

PDF

The Discreet And Conspiratorial Convention: The Autobiographical Writings Of Christopher Isherwood

PDF

The Development Of Method And Meaning In The Fiction Of 'Saki' (H. H. Munro)

PDF

The Relationship Between The American Liberal Press And The German Writers In Exile, 1933-1945

PDF

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A Chronology: August 20, 1795 - January 14, 1804

PDF

Joyce-Bergson Correspondences In The Theory And Time Structure Of 'Dubliners,' 'A Portrait,' And 'Ulysses'

PDF

'Evan Harrington': An Analysis Of George Meredith'S Revisions

PDF

The Poetic Dramas Of Robinson Jeffers

PDF

Satire In The Prose Of Francisco Zarco

PDF

'Difficult Balance': The Poetry Of Richard Wilbur

PDF

Estudio Y Edicion Critica De La Comedia 'Los Cabellos De Absalon' De Pedro Calderon De La Barca. (Spanish Text)

PDF

La Nature Dans Le Theatre De Francois De Curel

PDF

An Experimental Investigation Of Heat Conduction Through Liquid-Liquid Phase Boundaries

PDF

Ralph Ellison'S "Invisible Man" As A Repository Of Major Elements From Principal Western Literary Traditions

PDF

The Game-Play In Twentieth-Century Absurdist Drama: Studies In A Dramatictechnique

Asset Metadata

Creator Rossman, Charles Raymond (author)

Core Title Organic Wholeness Of Being In Selected Novels Of D.H. Lawrence

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Coanda, Richard J. (committee chair), Durbin, James H., Jr. (committee member), Hesse, Everett W. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-646640

Unique identifier UC11360979

Identifier 6904543.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-646640 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6904543.pdf

Dmrecord 646640

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Rossman, Charles Raymond

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA