Women in Love

"The first thing to note is how extraordinary it is that the Alps appear in this novel, given that it appears to be set during the First World War. At the end of the novel, the characters travel from rural Nottinghamshire to the Tyrol. Yet Tyrol was Austrian, and Britain was at war with Austria. Even getting there would have involved crossing the war fields of western Europe. That is an oddity that underlies the novel’s strange relationship to the First World War. The war is present and implicit, but it is not there at the level of plot. The bitterness of the vision of the novel—which he called his ‘apocalypse’—is implicit in its treatment of the Alps which, although not enemy territory, are ultimately destructive. “Gerald commits an unplanned and only semi-voluntary suicide” Some characters have alpine ecstasies, but they are the ones who are unsuccessful. The characters who are successful are the ones that realise, after spending some time in the Alps, that they have to get away from the unreality of the snow, the uplift, the perfection. They have to descend into the land of the olive trees and lemons and oranges. They have to escape into Italy. That is Lawrence’s persistent sense of the mountains: it is great to be there, but also important to work out that you have got an escape route, and that you use it. It does. Lawrence’s description of Gerald’s death is one of his most moving pieces of Lawrence’s writing. Gerald commits an unplanned and only semi-voluntary suicide. He fights with his lover Gudrun and partially strangles her, before giving up on the attempt. Then he simply stumbles away. Darkness falls, and he is a man on top of an Alp without any concern about returning home. At a certain point, he slips and falls. And that is it. It is a beautiful description: he falls into deep snow—it is a very gentle fall—and then he dies. Women in Love veers in a way that one has to recognise—otherwise one will write it off as badly written—between what is fairly traditional realist prose, and Lawrence’s own brand of modernism. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For example, the character of Birkin in society is rather self-conscious, diffident and ironic. When he is described making polite conversation at a wedding, we are in the territory of realist fiction. And then, at other times, when he is interacting with his lover Ursula, his characterisation becomes wholly different. Lawrence wrote about this and said that he wanted to get away from ‘the old stable ego of the character’. He presents people as sites of conflicting forces, rather than as autonomous self-directed entities. This is central to his understanding of who we are. We are not merely that which is comprehended by our own consciousness or will, or indicated by the word ‘personality’. “He felt that there was a benefit in knowing that it is important at times to live unconsciously, instinctively, intuitively” He has an extraordinary—and apparently self-contradictory—term: blood-consciousness. Blood and consciousness would appear to be opposites, but he attributes to blood a kind of consciousness; to represent a character as having this is to break beyond realism. Lawrence also breaks out into prose in which he continuously repeats words and phrases. He grasps at the same word in slightly different ways to try and make it mean something different, something true to the world and to his own philosophical-cum-spiritual interpretation of it. Yes. There is always a sense of compromise with failure in Lawrence. His ambition is limitless and his attempts cannot match his ambitions. This includes describing that which is unconscious in language. There is an obvious paradox here, of which he was aware. But he also felt that there was a benefit in knowing that it is important at times to live unconsciously, instinctively, intuitively. Unless consciousness has actually wrapped itself around that, then it will not be able to abnegate control. That is what he wanted the mind to do. So, through the medium of words, he hoped to lead us to live differently. Perhaps, although Lawrence rejected ethics as conventionally understood. He was strongly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of living ‘beyond good and evil’. In his essay ‘Morality and the Novel’, he redefined morality in terms of fidelity to being that which one profoundly is, which will change. It is a question of maintaining the ‘forever trembling and changing balance between me and my circumambient universe’. It is not trying to fix anything, or acting according to a fixed will. It is not killing somebody because they are German and you are English and you have been told to do so because there is war, but because you are angry with the man and you want to kill him. It is worth pointing out that Lawrence was not a pacifist, but he absolutely abhorred the non-passional, purely willed, mechanical mass-murder of the First World War. No, I think there are other convincing sex scenes. These would have to include the sex between Ursula and Birkin in the High Alps, which is anal sex. This is one of about three descriptions of anal sex in Lawrence’s fiction; there are others in The Rainbow and Lady Chatterley’s Lover . I also think that the lust between Gerald and the Pussum in the Pompadour is wonderfully done. Unlike the other examples of sex and sexual attraction in Women in Love , this is common or garden variety lust. It is just what happens when a strikingly good-looking, glistening young man enters a rather seedy bohemian bar in central London, and sees a slightly loose, extremely attractive young woman. Their eyes meet, and they just know that somehow or other that evening they are going to have to fix it so that they have sex with each other. And they do. But for the most part, Lawrence does not set out to describe straightforward lust. For him, sex has all kinds of dimensions and burdens. We enter different dimensions when sexual experience takes place. And I stress ‘sexual experience’ rather than sex itself, because penetrative sex is only a fraction of what he describes. “Part of the lack of clarity comes from his notoriously ambiguous use of the word ‘loins’” One of the most extraordinary—and to many people, bewildering—sex scenes in Women in Love occurs in the chapter called ‘Excurse’. It is very unclear what is actually happening. Part of the lack of clarity comes from his notoriously ambiguous use of the word ‘loins’. Rupert and Ursula have gone for a day trip to Southwell. Significantly, they have not visited the Minster, but go straight to an inn. In a private room in this inn, they have an experience which seems to involve her kneeling in front of him and holding the backs of his knees and pressing herself to him. They both have a transcendent and fusing experience. It is not having sex; that happens later in Sherwood Forest, but that is the lesser experience. The point is that you have to stop being literal when thinking about Lawrence and sex. If you want the literal, if you want the simple, if you want the merely biological and the non-spiritual, then you can find a few instances of that in his writing, but they are a small minority. So, he is not a good sex writer from any conventional standard of sex writing. But one of his great missions is to argue that conventional sex writing, and indeed conventional sex, is trivial at best and destructive at worst."