1D. H. Lawrence’s vision is mainly built around the resolution of the contradictions inherent in man, particularly the tension between man’s most primitive emotions and the impersonal laws of society. Of that conception, Women in Love1 is a good example which reads as an experimental novel where D. H. Lawrence develops his conceptions of both human beings’ interrelationships and the relation of men with the universe. Thus Mark Schorer already remarked in his introduction to Lady Chatterley’s Lover that, like The Rainbow, Women in Love isn’t a novel as such, not even a ‘psychological novel,’ rather a ‘psychic drama[s] in which primary human impulses rather than human personalities struggle and embrace, and [they] end with heroes who have made a journey of the soul and whose regeneration puts them beyond the conditions of that social world out of which the novel as we have known it has always come....’2 In other words, emotions are de-personalized so that their contradictory fluxes can be studied. Hence the novel can be seen as a metaphor of the tension to be resolved between the here and now of the subject’s emotions and their projection into impersonal objects or ‘objective correlatives,’ ‘the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art.’3 Relationships are presented as a balance of forces, such as physics comprehends it, of tensions to be resolved, the ultimate and ideal resolution being the harmonious union symbolized by Birkin and Ursula’s marriage: it sets that resolution in a relation to the universe, which escapes the mechanistic logic of the British society at the turn of the century. What Birkin requires of Ursula (and Gerald for that matter) is the surrender of her self, no less than her depersonalization, in order to reach the real essence of emotion. Meanwhile, Women in Love is an attempt at expressing emotions into an impersonal work of art. Outside such ideal resolution the antagonistic forces try to abolish each other according to the principle of action/ reaction, a pairing to which the philosopher Jean Starobinski devoted his last opus, Action et réaction (vie et aventures d’un couple).4 The violence generated by that couple of forces leads, when not resolved into union, to total destruction, as all the deaths in the novel—accidents, fatal illnesses, attempted murder and the suicide (murder?) of Gerald—exemplify.

2The mystery of the universe is lost for atomized man and woman, as they are isolated in their respective singularities (or ‘onenesses’). The sudden decision to marry made by Ursula and Birkin aims at establishing a balance of their antagonistic forces into an equilibrium whose point is set beyond love itself and which reproduces the ‘star equilibrium’ at the center of Lawrence’s vision. In such a vitalist conception of the world comparable to Goethe and R. M. Rilke’s, love, the supreme emotion, is not the end but the means, the end being renewing man’s contact with the cosmos, ‘the great sources of our inward nourishment,’ which fed man before the tragedy of philosophical thought. ‘We must plant ourselves again in the universe... It means a return to ancient forms,’ wrote D. H. Lawrence. (Lawrence 1967, 119) Hence the importance in Women in Love of the references to a bestiary and a totemized art which reaches back to the times before cerebral knowledge (symbolized by the sterile culture of London artistic society), times of intuitive and sensual knowledge. That is a conception conforming to the romantic rejuvenation of the Renaissance vision of the world as an animans, a great animated being. Like Goethe, Coleridge or Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence looks for meaning in those vitalist intuitions that preceded the geometrisation of the universe.5

1 Action/Reaction

3The tragic world that Lawrence both stages and rejects in Women in Love reflects the scientific thinking of his time. In one of the important books of the beginning of the nineteenth century entitled Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme, Senancour expresses the same disenchanted vision of the world where mechanistic necessity is seen as all-powerful.6 Atomism and mechanism have taken the place of the harmony that used to rule relationships. The gap that has increased between master and workers, man and man, man and woman, father and children, gapes like an abyss:

‘And father?’
Gudrun looked at Ursula, almost with resentment, as if brought to bay.
‘I haven’t thought about him: I’ve refrained,’ she said coldly.
... The sisters found themselves confronted by a void, a terrifying chasm, as if they had looked over the edge. (Lawrence 1980, 11)

4As a reaction to the feeling of inferiority he had when he thought how dependent he was on his workers and not the other way round, Gerald’s father had devised—and maintained despite his wife’s reluctance—a system to help the poorest among them, never letting down anyone who would ask for his charity. Such an attitude corresponded to a conciliation between the demands of the soul (his) and the needs of the body (the miners’). To such an empathy taking place far beyond the wheels of the mind, his wife had opposed a life-long resistance, bringing about the very destruction of their marital relation, ‘a relation of utter interdestruction.’ (244) In the same way, Gerald is his father’s enemy, along a concatenation of actions coming from the heart (the father) and reactions worked out by the mind (the son): ‘For Gerald was in reaction against Charity; and yet he was dominated by it... So he was partly subject to that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it.’ (246) Having got rid of his emotions, he implements a reform of the working conditions in the mine, which represents a complete destruction of what his father had achieved. Such an atomization of human relations into a chain of actions provoking as many reactions of a purely mechanistic order can only be achieved through the transformation of Gerald himself into a machine. Gudrun has that ultimate vision of her lover as a chronometer, like a system of intricate small wheels, a mechanism only able to turn out boredom.

5The metaphysical abyss that is created by the sterile action/reaction system gives birth to despair, all the more so as language has lost the power entrusted to it by the soul, a power that it could give back to the soul through the mystery of a fruitful action/reaction process Honoré de Balzac evokes when he speaks of ‘le mystère d’une action et une réaction merveilleuse entre la parole et la pensée.’7 Julius Halliday is one of the avatars of the fatal failure, since he symbolizes the artist deprived of the faculty of combining Nature (natura naturata) and the creative drive (natura naturans), the only possible way of achieving a meaningful union of subject and object:

‘Of course,’ he [Birkin] said, ‘Julius is somewhat insane. On the one hand he’s had religious mania, and on the other, he is fascinated by obscenity. Either he is 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.’ (Lawrence 1980, 106)

2 Violence and the Sacred

6When the desire to merge with the object (with the godhead in Julius’s case, with the alter ego as far as the couples Gerald/Gudrun, Birkin/ Ursula, Birkin/Gerald are concerned) is not achieved by transcending the dialectics of opposition, it can only result in violence and death. Gerald’s father dies before his son, but his death does not represent the destruction of all human feelings as Gerald’s death does: ‘And Gerald! The denier! He left the heart cold, frozen, hardly able to beat. Gerald’s father had looked wistful, to break the heart; but not this last terrible look of cold, mute Matter.’ (540) Gerald and Hermione each embody the active subject who does not admit the presence of a reactive subject, in other words who does not recognize duality. ‘Le repli de l’individu sur son seul être actionnel est à la fois admirable et mortel.’ (Starobinski 226) Admirable indeed, to Gudrun’s eyes, is the picture of Gerald swimming in the river, at the beginning of their love-story: ‘He was alone now, alone and immune in the middle of the waters, which he had all to himself... just himself in the watery world.’ (51-52) Admirable and deadly for D. H. Lawrence who comments: ‘The sense of isolation, followed by the sense of menace and of fear, is bound to arise as the feeling of oneness and community with our fellow-men declines, and the feeling of individualism and personality, which is existence in isolation, increases.’ (Lawrence 1967, 122) That sheer and potentially dangerous pleasure felt by Gerald, as he was swimming on his own in the river, he is incapable of feeling it again, when he has to share it with Gudrun as they look at the mountain covered with snow and Gudrun feels overwhelmed by the power and the beauty of it: ‘... the centre, the knot, the navel of the world, where the earth belonged to the skies.’ (Lawrence 1980, 450) The reason is Gerald belongs to a world where the concatenation of actions never leads to any kind of transcendence. To D. H. Lawrence, Gerald seems to be, more than any other character in Women in Love, the embodiment of the separation of human beings into as many distinct unities which stand in opposition both to each other and to the universe as a whole. That is a situation he analyzes in A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘We have abstracted the universe into Matter and Force, we have abstracted men and women into isolated units, incapable of togetherness—so that all three great relationships are bodiless, dead.’ (Lawrence 1967, 121)

7Union and/or marriage, stand at the centre of the dialectics of Women in Love. The theme is tackled in the very first lines: ‘“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you really want to get married?”’; and taken up again and again along various variations. However, Birkin (doubtless D. H. Lawrence’s persona) tries to make Gerald see that the successful union of man and woman goes hand in hand with a fruitful relationship between man and man, as if the latter were a kind of apprenticeship in trust, so that marriage be not only some ‘Egoisme à deux... a sort of tacit hunting in couples....’ (397) Gerald rejects the offer, ‘Rupert’s offer of alliance, to enter into the bond of pure trust and love with the other man, and then subsequently with the woman.’ (398) The dialectics of reason wins over the language of body and heart which nearly carried the day when the two friends were wrestling,8 at the very moment their two expressions of violence had cancelled each other in a metaphoric loss of consciousness. As he stared at Gerald’s dead body Birkin remembered wistfully how Gerald’s hand had suddenly closed over his, as one would think of a promise unfulfilled. (540) Instead a feeling of hostility had grown between the two men, who gradually looked like two forces repelling each other: ‘They always kept a gap, a distance between them, they wanted always to be free each of the other’ (109); ‘The two men revoked one another.’ (491)

8Paradoxically, accepting otherness is the only way of abolishing opposite forces. Of the two sisters, it appears that Ursula has more chances of achieving union, ‘togetherness.’ It is true that they are both able to know moments of pure bliss when they are together; they can be perfectly complementary: ‘The two sisters were like a pair of scissors, ... or like a knife and a whetstone, the one sharpened against the other.’ (56) But Ursula’s secret universe sometimes arouses violent reactions in Gudrun, as though the other’s mystery was a denial of her own person: ‘Ursula seemed so peaceful and sufficient unto herself... at the centre of her own universe. And Gudrun felt herself outside.’ (185)

9On the contrary, the Ursula/Birkin couple is ideal because the connection is made while preserving the other’s ‘oneness’ and mystery: ‘for she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.’ (361) Their communion of course acts as a foil to the other two couples’ relationships (Gudrun/Gerald on the one hand, Birkin/Hermione on the other), which climax in an attempted murder (Hermione trying to club Birkin) and a murder, for even if we can consider that Gerald commits suicide, Gudrun remains its conscious instigator when she decides that one of the two forces engaged in an action/ reaction process must win over the other: ‘The deep resolve formed in her, to combat him. One of them must triumph over the other. Which should it be?’ (465)

10As for Hermione, she gives expression to a violence which is only the result of her helplessness when she is confronted with the strength of the mental universe Birkin has built, in complete opposition to hers. Her repeated impossibility to understand the other’s mystery has gradually turned from a mental image to a deathdrive: ‘... she laid as it were violent hands on him, to extract his secrets from him. She must know. It was a dreadful tyranny, an obsession in her, to know all he knew.’ (99) The other has become a wall against which her willpower breaks: ‘And then she realized that his presence was the wall... she must break down the wall—she must break him down before her... and the blow came down, almost breaking his neck, and shattering his heart.’ (116-18) The least irony of course is not that he tries to protect his head with a thick volume of Thucydides’ works, whose art consisted in attributing to his historical characters sophistic speeches used as as many analyses of their actions. That might be seen as a mise en abyme of D. H. Lawrence’s narrative technique in Women in Love where his reflection on creation is linked to the analysis of the forces that govern men and their relations to the universe.

11Thus it appears that Gerald and Birkin are in complete contradiction as far as their idea of art is concerned. The primitive statue of the woman giving birth focalizes Gerald’s attraction/repulsion as he is confronted with a mystery that can’t be intellectualized. ‘It is art,’ says Birkin later (the art that combines natura naturata and natura naturans, the object and the creative drive). ‘Gerald also lifted his eyes to the face of the wooden figure... it was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath.’ (87) However, he refuses to call the statues ‘art,’ seeing only ‘a sheer barbaric thing’ where Birkin sees ‘pure culture in sensation.’ But it is mostly the sign that he is unable to recognize—in himself and in others—the primitive and sacred mystery which is their real beauty and which can only set modern Englishmen apart from what they think is true culture. The latter merely transforms them into puppets playing the social roles already ascribed to them on the stage of the world. Gudrun, with an artist’s eye, ‘saw each one as a complete figure, like a character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette in a theatre, a finished creation.’ (15) In Gerald she can immediately see the primitive substance, ‘His totem is the wolf,’ she repeated to herself. (16) Birkin ‘resembled a deer’ on the lookout (26-7), the party swimming in the river are ‘saurians... just like great lizards,’ or else ‘a shoal of seals.’ (112-13) Gerald, who looks like Dyonisos in Gudrun’s eyes, possesses all the pagan mystery of sensuality but does not want to recognize it and so is unable to draw vital strength from it. That is why he is doomed to die without leaving anything behind. The totemized image of Gerald bringing the slender mare under his control, using the power of his muscles and his rider’s instinct to master and crush the other creature is inverted through a mirror-effect into Loerke’s sculpture of the frail naked girl riding a stiff horse. Ursula recognizes it as the representation of Loerke’s brutal sexual instinct. Loerke violently opposes Ursula’s interpretation, claiming that he must not be confused with what his art produces.

12It seems that we touch here the most sensitive point of Lawrence’s reflection on the role of impersonality in art as ‘the only truth about the real world’ (Ursula’s conclusions). It is the locus where the tension between man’s most primitive emotions and the impersonal laws of society can be resolved. But, like Gerald whose death he is soon after that scene going to precipitate, Loerke uses his animal instinct to mechanistic ends. Of the violence of the primitive tensions which used to be resolved in the sacred, there only remains in Loerke’s art, as in Gerald’s expression, sheer violence.

13Birkin comments:

‘He lives like a rat in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s farther on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.’
‘Probably,’ said Gerald.
‘He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.’ (481)

14To understand the figures of Jewish artists whose art can only exist through the destruction of its object’s most sacred part, it is sufficient to read Apocalypse. There Lawrence recurrently expresses the idea of the conscious destruction of pagan culture by the ‘Jewish-Christians’: ‘So that the old pagan book must quite early have been taken and written over by a Jewish apocalypist, with a view to substituting the Jewish idea of a Messiah and a Jewish salvation (or destruction) of the whole world, for the purely individual experience of pagan initiation.’9 The sources of the creation of the Self have dried up, their traces covered by two thousand years of Judeo-Christianism. Separating art from the inward sources of nourishment can only lead to the reproduction of the prevailing bourgeois ideal. Thus Breadlaby is full of an artificial and superficial charm, ‘sunny and small like an English drawing of the old school,’ a decor reproducing art whose aim is to arrange Nature instead of letting it surge in all its dionysian vividness, sentimentality in the place of true emotion. The two sisters react in the same way to Hermione’s recreation of an ideal pastoral setting in the mining district: ‘“Isn’t it complete! said Gudrun. It is as final as an old aquatint.” She spoke with some resentment in her voice... There seemed a magic circle drawn about the place, shutting out the present, enclosing the delightful, precious past, trees and deer and silence, like a dream’. (Lawrence 1980, 91-3)

15To Birkin’s eyes Hermione’s house is the quintessence of self-deception. Hermione’s social class mechanically represents stale emotions and pretends it is art: ‘He was thinking how lovely, how sure, how formed, how final all the things of the past were... this house, so still and golden, the park slumbering its centuries of peace. And then what a snare and a delusion this beauty of static things—what a horrible dead prison Beadalby was....’ (108) The joy of creation is absent in such re-presentation where no living artist expresses himself. It is a purely mental game, as Ursula feels it: ‘The attitude was mental and very wearying.’ (93)

16Two conceptions of knowledge, culture and artistic creation are confronted and symbolized by the couples of forces Birkin/Hermione, Birkin/ Gerald, or Birkin/Julius. On the one hand, the conviction that knowledge is given by the mind, on the other the intuition that knowledge is to be found in the senses and their pleasure, true sensuality:

‘But your passion is a lie,’ [Birkin] went on violently. ‘It is not passion at all, it is your will...’
‘But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?’ [Hermione] asked, quite unable to interpret his phrases.
‘In the blood,’ he answered. (47)

17That is what Starobinski names ‘la réaction des poètes contre l’abstraction,’ in a chapter that could read as a comment passed on Women in Love: ‘Monde mort, cœurs battants.’ (Starobinski 254) In that respect, D. H. Lawrence is the direct inheritor of the romantic philosophical thought and poetry. Wordsworth asked:

What then does the poet do? He considers man and the objects that surrounds him as acting and reacting upon each other, so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and pleasure; he considers man in his own nature, ... he considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sensations, and finding every where objects that immediately excite in him sympathies which, from the necessities of his nature, are accompanied by an overbalance of enjoyment.10

18To have the intuitive knowledge, one has to go back to what Lawrence called the ‘pre-tragic’ time: ‘We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe.’ (Lawrence 1967, 118) Through such an experience Birkin cures the wounds inflicted by Hermione: ‘He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers... how fulfilled he was, how happy!’ (Lawrence 1980, 119-20)

19And more tellingly, it is the contemplation of the moon, the feeling of its living presence that definitively unite Ursula and Birkin in the chapter ‘Moony.’ The experience comes for Ursula at a time when she feels ‘isolated in herself,’ ‘hard and indifferent’ in an impersonal world where emotion has been washed away: ‘All the world was lapsing into a grey wish-wash of nothingness, she had no contact and no connection anywhere.’ (275) She first resents the moon, ‘the great presence, watching her,’ but then Birkin really gives it life by throwing a stone in the pond where the planet is reflected:

It seemed to be drawing itself together with strange, violent pangs, in blind effort. It was getting stronger, it was reasserting itself, the inviolable moon. And the rays were hastening in in thin lines of light, to return to the strengthened moon, that shook upon the water in triumphant reassumption. (Lawrence 1980, 278)

20I suggest, as a conclusion, to read Birkin’s gesture as he throws the stone at the moon’s reflection to make it swell and contract in a systole/ diastole reaction, as the symbol of the artist’s attempt at projecting emotions into impersonal objects. Actually, by choosing to displace the center of literary creation from human personalities to characters embodying impulses, D. H. Lawrence achieves a displacement from the locus (the birthplace, the home, linked to the subject as a seat of emotions which is threatened by the discontinuity of Time) to Space at large. Space and its mystery becomes ontological priority. Hence, the necessity for the couple Birkin/Ursula to have ‘no house,’ just to wander through unknown space where emotion can be, as it were, aestheticized into impersonal objects. The self then becomes a microcosm of that macrocosm, the infinite, the inner world.