from Journal of Modern Literature, Volume 23, Number 2
"Jews of the Wrong Sort": D.H. Lawrence and Race
Ronald Granofsky
.
________________________________________
In The Captain's Doll, a novella from the early 1920s, D.H. Lawrence takes his protagonist, Captain Alexander Hepburn, from post-war occupied Germany to Tyrolean Austria in amorous pursuit of the much younger Countess Johanna zu Rassentlow, familiarly known as Hannele, after the captain's wife has died under suspicious circumstances. The two travel together to a mountain glacier and stay at a hotel full of tourists, among whom are "many Jews of the wrong sort and the wrong shape." As is often the case in Lawrence's fiction, it is unclear here whether the comment is the narrator's free indirect rendering of the thoughts of the protagonist or the narrator's own description separate from Hepburn's perception. In any case, these Jews are people who, on the one hand, are condemned for pretending to be something they are not--"so that you might think they were Austrian aristocrats, if you weren't properly listening, or if you didn't look twice"--but, on the other hand, are appreciated somehow, for "they imparted a wholesome breath of sanity, disillusion, unsentimentality to the excited 'Bergheil' atmosphere."1 In isolation, the remark might seem frivolous, even quite common by between-the-wars standards, but, together with many other racist statements in Lawrence's writings, the rather off-hand description raises questions about a major twentieth-century author who remains in some respects enigmatic. For one thing, it raises the question of what, for Lawrence, would be Jews of the right sort and shape.
The issue of Lawrence and race is entangled in his writing within a nexus of competing ideological and psychological formulations, and to untangle it is no easy task. In my view, race for Lawrence is one of many related categories that make up a worldview that is keyed upon gender concerns, specifically as those concerns arise out of an adult reaction against the early dependency of a highly sensitive male child upon his mother. Long ago, Christopher Caudwell cuttingly used Lawrence's own pseudo-scientific phraseology to express Lawrence's view of the human dilemma as "the yearning of the solar plexus for the umbilical connexion."2 I believe that the vexed issue of Lawrence and race can be brought into sharper focus than has previously been the case if it is positioned within the context of his struggle, in the displaced form of his fiction, to free himself from the debilitating aspects of that umbilical connection. At the very time when Lawrence was frequently crossing national boundaries in his life, there is in his writing an ongoing exploration of the boundaries that serve to protect the vulnerable self's integrity, alongside a defensive aggression in the form of misogyny or racism when the boundaries of the self are threatened. Lawrence's negative attitude toward Jews is obdurate because he associates them with both a female threat to the self and with a more general tendency to breach category confines, a tendency whose dynamic recalls the more immediate female threat.
There are times, mostly fairly early on in his life, when Lawrence seems anxious to rise above the racism of his era. In a 1913 letter to Gordon Campbell, Lawrence writes that "[i]t is no use hating a people or a race or humanity in mass. Because each of us is in himself humanity."3 He was even capable of imagining himself becoming racially other in the poem "Tropic" from Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923): "Behold my hair twisting and going black./ Behold my eyes turn tawny yellow/ Negroid;/ See the milk of northern spume/ Coagulating and going black in my veins."4 Even here, however, an element of escape from maternal dependency can be read into the white milk turning black, an image, conceivably, of maternal lactation negated as much as of racial otherness. Similarly, Lawrence was capable of identifying with Jews, if in a decidedly negative manner: "[Gibbon] says the Jews are the great haters of the human race . . ." he writes in a letter of May, 1918, "I feel such profound hatred myself, of the human race, I almost know what it is to be a Jew."5
Usually, however, the Lawrence we see declaiming on race is a Lawrence who comes close to justifying Kingsley Widmer's hyperbolic label, "the modern rebellious Protestant psychopath as intellectual artist."6 There is certainly enough material in Lawrence's writing to suggest strongly that he held views that we would today call racist and anti-Semitic. His letters are full of such convictions, while his fictional characters complain, for example, of "Chinese and Japs" who "teem by the billion like . . . vermin," or of "niggers" who wallow.7 However, one of the seemingly most damning pieces of evidence of all may well be misleading. We have been conditioned by the history of this century to equate with racism Lawrence's concept of the superior wisdom of "blood consciousness," what he termed at one point his "great religion."8 But we may question whether Lawrence's "blood consciousness" really is an ideology of race. Jascha Kessler, for one, certainly thinks that it is: "No wonder Lawrence's later books were popular in Nazi Germany," she writes in a 1964 article, "his blood theory led him directly into totalitarian ideology. For to Lawrence blood was not merely a trope, or a spiritual symbol: it was the quintessence of the racial."9 Christopher Heywood, however, has suggested that Lawrence's blood consciousness owes a great deal to the neurological, non-racial writings of the Frenchman Bichat and the Englishman Hall.10 In the letter in which Lawrence sets out his "great religion," the blood is opposed to the intellect. He repeats the opposition metaphorically in comparing the body to a candle flame and the intellect to the light from the candle shed on objects around it. His interest, he claims, is in the flame itself, not in the objects illuminated. The context of blood here, then, sounds very much like the Cartesian mind-body split, not like a racial concept at all. Nor is Lawrence's use of blood as a symbol in his own fiction--for example, in the chapters "Coal Dust" and "Rabbit" in Women in Love (1920)--invariably racial. Blood has highly charged connotations, and for many of Lawrence's readers there is undoubtedly a connection between Lawrence's "blood knowledge" and his willingness in his leadership fiction to contemplate the spilling of blood, but we should be careful not to place such matters on racial hangers when Lawrence clearly had no intention of doing so. Lawrence's closet is filled enough with skeletons as it is.
As James F. Scott has suggested, most readers of D.H. Lawrence "are at least casually aware that [he] thought in racialistic and ethnocentric terms."11 Nevertheless, most critics of Lawrence's work, it is fair to say, have gingerly stepped around the issue of his racial opinions as if it were something a dog had left in the way, or else they have quickly berated Lawrence and gone on to more interesting subjects. Jeffrey Meyers' biography of Lawrence is a good example. Meyers spends just under three pages and a footnote detailing Lawrence's Jewish friends and his anti-Semitism, concluding somewhat laconically that "Lawrence's tirades against Jews did not prevent him from having Jewish friends and publishers."12 True enough, but that tells us little. Meyers makes no attempt to understand either the racism itself or the Janus-like letter writing that sees Lawrence rail against Jews when communicating with the anti-Semitic Robert Mountsier (who acted as his American agent for a time) while denouncing Montsier's prejudices to Jewish friends or acquaintances.13 The few writers who do try to grapple with Lawrence's attitudes to race can be divided roughly into three camps. Representing one extreme is Bertrand Russell's well-known suggestion that one can draw a straight line from Lawrence to Auschwitz.14 Emile Delavenay, under the immediate impact of the Second World War, strongly condemned Lawrence's use of the anti-Semitic and anti-humanistic ideas of such writers as Houston Chamberlain and his admirer Otto Weininger.15 Similarly, Kessler directly associates Lawrence's blood knowledge with Nazism's racial theories and eugenic practices. For Kessler, blood racism is a new form of racism in world history, one that may be identified with the primitivism which Lawrence and other Modernists were so attracted to: Lawrence "is stonily serious about race; for without differentiation according to race, there is no differentiation of blood, and without blood differences no distinctions can be possible between the 'gods' of the blood, hence no innate superiority exists, no absolutes by which to gauge inferiority, no means for establishing servile races. . . ."16
A little further removed in time from the war than Delavenay and Kessler, there have been a variety of defences of, or explanations for, Lawrence's remarks on race. One interesting example is Barbara Mensch's book entitled (using Adorno's term) D.H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, in which Mensch argues that Lawrence was fascinated by "the authoritarian personality" but always countered such a character in his fiction with a liberal one.17 For Mensch, Gerald Crich's death in Women in Love, in fact, shows "that Lawrence views authoritarianism as a fatal flaw."18 Similarly, she argues, although The Plumed Serpent's Cipriano is comparable to Adolf Eichmann, it is the much different Don Ramón whom the novelist endorses.19 It is generally true that when a Lawrence character speaks of extermination it is of the human species, not of one particular race. It is perhaps worth mentioning, however, that, outside his fiction, Lawrence was capable--even before the First World War--of calling for the extermination of the English, although the rhetorical excess here suggests a venting of spleen rather than a serious desire. In a July 1912 letter to Edward Garnett, he writes of the English, "Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters. . . . God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime" (Letters I, p. 422).20 Daniel J. Schneider has criticized Delavenay's attack on Lawrence as a distortion of Lawrence's position, one that ignores the writer's often critical attitude to Chamberlain's ideas. Delavenay, Schneider suggests, was strongly influenced by the historical events that occurred in Europe after Lawrence's death in 1930 (an influence that Delavenay has acknowledged).21 Indeed, a major hurdle to a clear understanding of the subject of Lawrence and race is the way in which European Fascism developed after his death. He could not possibly have imagined those developments, and we cannot forget them.
Finally, in something of a middle position between the accusers and defenders of Lawrence on race is the argument of Judith Ruderman. Agreeing that Lawrence was anti-Semitic, Ruderman insists, rightly I think, that this should form not our conclusion but more properly a starting point for a discussion of the writer's worldview. After detailing Lawrence's anti-Semitic remarks in fiction and non-fiction alike, Ruderman concludes that he was neither a rabid racist nor a blameless product of his time.22 Her most suggestive remark on the subject is that "Lawrence's attitudes toward the Jews . . . express certain tensions found at the core of his work," tensions that might "reveal fruitful connections between misogyny and anti-Semitism,"23 the same collocation, in fact, that Susan Griffin postulates in her study of pornography.24
I would also place the claims of Paulina S. Pollak in this middle camp. Although her 1986 article is wholly censorious of Lawrence's anti-Semitism, it makes an effort to understand the sources of the prejudice. Where a good deal of Ruderman's work on Lawrence, and, by extension, her essay on his anti-Semitism, place the emphasis on pre-oedipal problems between mother and child--a position with which I generally agree--Pollak argues for a straightforwardly oedipal reading of father-son antipathy. Pollak makes several interesting points in her attempt to demonstrate that Lawrence fits the "model of the personality prone to acts of anti-Semitic persecution";25 however, there are problems with her argument. First, it is ahistorical: the individual predicted by the model tends to see hostility everywhere in the outer world, and Pollak assumes that such a description fits Lawrence. But Lawrence's anti-Semitic remarks date to prewar days, while his view of the entire world as hostile dates only from 1915, when such a conviction is perfectly understandable for a man who had a novel suppressed by court order and was being watched as a potential wartime threat because he had spoken out against the war and had a German wife. According to the model, the individual disposed toward anti-Semitism feels threatened because of his or her own inadequate feelings of self and by the fact that Jews, on the contrary, have "the courage to be different".26 The idea of inadequate self-definition points us in the right direction, but the suggestion that Jewish apartness constitutes a threat does not make sense in Lawrence's case. Lawrence valued what he called "otherness" very highly. In the specific example of the "Jews of the wrong sort" in The Captain's Doll, the narrator is criticizing not the Austrian Jews' attempts to be different but their desire to assimilate. Pollak's argument, moreover, depends upon the Christian view of the Jews as representative of the father who kills the son, a situation that is inverted in the oedipal paradigm. These implications of alleged Jewish deicide do not apply to other ethnic or national groups derided by Lawrence, and, furthermore, there is the fact that, in life, it was his mother's death that Lawrence actually hastened and not his father's. Pollak is, of course, correct in her claim that "Lawrence's prejudice was buried at deep, emotional levels of his personality and served demanding psychic needs,"27 but the sense of a vulnerable self in Lawrence derives from pre-oedipal patterns that are associated with the mother and, by extension, with women in general.
In my opinion, the extreme view of Lawrence as proto-Nazi--Kessler's position, in other words--is both right and wrong. It is right in the sense that Lawrence's post-war Weltanschauung is centered about the concept of differentiation (more precisely, hierarchy) but wrong in that race is not the key differentiating criterion for Lawrence even late in his career when, as in The Plumed Serpent (1926) most emphatically, it is said to be. In fact, race and other constructs, such as class, that are capable of hierarchical formulation are, in Lawrence, generally if covertly subsumed by the larger concerns of the gender struggle that is played out in his middle to late fiction as he continues to contend with the oldest hierarchy of all, that of mother and child. What is most crucial as a context for the condemnation of the Austrian Jews' efforts at assimilation in The Captain's Doll is thus the importance of maintaining rigidly demarcated boundaries of all sorts. In this sense, then, Lawrence's anti-Semitic attitude may be seen as a displacement of a fear of amorphous boundaries, ultimately those protecting his vulnerable sense of self. Women who try to suffocate men and Jews who try to hide their Jewishness have this in common for Lawrence: they do not respect the boundaries that make discrimination among individuals possible.
* * * *
, discussing Golding's novel Forward from Babylon (1920): "I do wish it had been more Jewish. One can hardly see any difference between your vision and the English vision. I wish you had given one the passional truth of Reb Monash's Yidishkeit [sic]. . . . And a Jewish book should be written in terms of difference from the Gentile consciousness--not identity with it" (Letters III, p. 690).
Lawrence, then, wishes to insist on discriminating, separating out, one race from another. In the rejected epilogue to his commissioned history book, Movements in European History (1921), Lawrence uses what is perhaps his favorite metaphor, the growing tree, to describe his conception of the relationship among the races. He thereby suggests a fundamental unity and equality among races even as he is at pains to describe their separateness: "In its root and trunk, mankind is one. But then the differences begin. The great tree of man branches out into different races. . . . And each great branch has its own growing tip. . . . Every branch has its own direction and its own growing tip. One branch cannot take the place of any other branch. Each must go its own way, and bear its own flowers and fruits."33 Such a formulation can apply to individuals as well, of course. Lawrence struggled throughout his life and writing career with boundary definitions in an effort to strengthen his own sense of selfhood, a sense badly damaged by mothering that tended to suffocate that sense and to violate boundaries, as the very title to his autobiographical Sons and Lovers (1913) serves to indicate. In Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence even seems to blame his mother indirectly for his consumption: "On the upper plane, the lungs and heart are controlled from the cardiac plane and the thoracic ganglion. Any excess in the sympathetic mode from the upper centres tends to burn the lungs with oxygen, weaken them with stress, and cause consumption. So it is just criminal to make a child too loving."34 A similar fear of suffocation is evident in racist remarks by Lawrence while in the then-Ceylon en route to Australia. There is something approaching hysteria here that suggests the need for hierarchy and separation in the service of racial discrimination: "Those natives are back of us--in the living sense lower than we are. But they're going to swarm over us and suffocate us. We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip. Now we're going to fall. But you don't catch me going back on my whiteness and Englishness and myself" (Letters IV, p. 234). Boundary setting and violation are also important in The Rainbow (1915), particularly in the relationship of Anna and Will Brangwen, which is almost destroyed when Anna feels Will's dependence on her becoming a terrible burden, even a predatory threat, as we see in the chapter "Anna Victrix."35 Anna "wanted to thrust him off, to set him apart" because she feels that she is being devoured (Rainbow, p. 173). In Women in Love, something of a reprise of this situation, but with much more deadly results, occurs in the relationship between Gerald and Gudrun as described in the chapter "Snowed Up": "As they grew more used to each other, he seemed to press upon her more and more. . . . [H]e dropped his respect for her whims and her privacies, he began to exert his own will, blindly, without submitting to hers."36 Finally, we may view the poem "New Heaven and Earth" as the narration of a struggle to overcome extreme solipsism, a condition that is the inverse of engulfment but equally refuses both to recognize self-boundaries--"I shall never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end/ when everything was me . . ."--and to recreate a reassuring sense of boundary definition: "I put out my hand in the night, one night, and my hand/ touched that which was verily not me, . . . I was greedy, I was mad for the unknown . . ." (Poems, pp. 257, 259).
Lawrence's anxiety about Jews violating boundaries leads to characterizations that, in some cases, go well beyond the one in The Captain's Doll in terms of fear and loathing. In Women in Love, one of Birkin's well-known philosophical principles is that there are two great drifts towards racial/cultural death in his era, tendencies in which dissolution is made inevitable by the break with the cultural balance between body and mind (Women, pp. 253-54). One is the "Arctic" way of the Northern peoples, a hyper-consciousness whose characteristics are personified most clearly in Hermione Roddice and whose direction is exemplified by the icy death of Gerald Crich. The other is the "African" way of pure sensuality, the self-destructiveness of which is represented as early as The Rainbow by Anton Skrebensky, who, newly returned from Africa, invites his own vitalistic "annihilation" by Ursula Brangwen. In Women in Love, Birkin foresees Gerald's death in the snow as a fulfillment of the fate of "Arctic man" (Women, p. 254), which is predicated on the "white" races "having the arctic north behind them," while the African process is "controlled by the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara" (Women, p. 254). There is, however, an inconsistency in Women in Love between the ideology of these two processes of dissolution and Lawrence's portrayal of the cosmopolitan and avant-garde Jewish artist Loerke (based loosely on the painter Mark Gertler) as a contemptible, even disgusting exemplar of dissolution. Loerke has taken the process of racial decay further along than anyone else in this novel and, arguably, anywhere else in Lawrence. Gudrun considers him "to be the very stuff of the underworld of life. There was no going beyond him" (Women, p. 427). Birkin calls him "'a little obscene monster of the darkness'" and suggests that he must be Jewish because, as a "rat" in "the river of corruption," he is far ahead in the process of dissolution (Women, p. 428).37 Indeed, Lawrence wrote in October of 1916 to Mark Gertler about Gertler's painting "The Merry-Go-Round," a work he admired very much and had in mind for part of Loerke's Cologne piece, that "[i]t would take a Jew to paint this picture. . . . You are of an older race than I, and in these ultimate processes, you are beyond me, older than I am. . . . It will be left for the Jews to utter the final and great death-cry of this epoch: the Christians are not reduced sufficiently" (Letters II, pp. 660, 661).
It is Loerke's presumed Jewishness that would appear to be key to the negative, almost classically anti-Semitic portrayal, for, otherwise, it would seem, "he is a small, dark man of the type who, like Lewis in St. Mawr and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent, conveys positive cultural values . . ." for Lawrence.38 Although the portrayal of Loerke is an extreme example, the same anti-Semitic tendency is clearly present in other works: Alfred Kramer in Mr. Noon (1984) (based on Frieda's brother-in-law Edgar Jaffe) has "a drop too much of Jewish blood in his veins, and so we must not take him as typical of the sound and all-too-serious German professors for whom the word is God."39 Nor should we forget the authoritarian leader Ben Cooley in Kangaroo (1923), a Jew who yearns for the love and support of Richard Somers but who is rejected and dies.
The narrative manoeuvre in Kangaroo is revealing in that it is wholly unconvincing, especially in terms of Lawrence's own formulation during this period of two antithetical urges in humanity, love and power: this polarity serves much more clearly than the earlier Arctic/African opposition to bring out the fear of engulfment that partly underpins Lawrence's anti-Semitism. In other words, the manoeuvre may lead to narrative confusion, but it clarifies the racism. The most lucid fictional enunciation of the contrast between love and power is put in the mouth of Rawdon Lilly in Aaron's Rod (1922). Lilly makes it clear that the love urge (whether directed at an individual, at humanity as a whole, or at God) leads to a loss of selfhood, whereas the power urge, he tells Aaron, is what protects the self: "'You've got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it's the only thing you have got or ever will have, don't go trying to lose it. . . . Your own single oneness is your destiny'" (Aaron, p. 295). In Kangaroo itself, a novel laced with anti-Semitic remarks, Ben Cooley initially represents the power urge, at least in his political platform and his tactics. But Lawrence simply does not know how to end the novel without the inconsistency of also associating Cooley with the love urge so that, in rejecting him, the Lawrence figure, Somers, will be rejecting love rather than power. Cooley's character was based on an Australian Jew, Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal,40 so Lawrence simply made him Jewish in this hastily written novel. But since Jews for Lawrence are associated with the threat of merger and of boundary violation, Cooley illogically becomes an exponent of the love urge.
In terms of Lawrence's non-fiction, we may look to his brilliant Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) for examples of the way love seems to threaten the self through merger with an other. In the essay on Poe, the fate of Roderick Usher is clarified through the perspective of love's dangers: "Love is the mysterious vital attraction which draws things together, closer, closer together." But there must be limits to the merging, for "[t]he central law of all organic life is that each organism is intrinsically isolate and single in itself."41 Lawrence even issues a warning late in the essay: "Beware, oh woman, of the man who wants to find out what you are. And, oh men, beware a thousand times more of the woman who wants to know you or get you, what you are" (Studies, p. 76). And, of course, the symbolic incest in Poe's story represents the dangers of love-merger and boundary violation: "They would love, they would merge, they would be as one thing. So they dragged each other down into death" (Studies, p. 85). And "the result is the dissolution of both souls, each losing itself in transgressing its own bounds" (Studies p. 86). Similarly, when writing on Melville, Lawrence argues that "[e]very relationship should have its absolute limits, its absolute reserves, essential to the singleness of the soul in each person" (Studies, p. 152). As for Whitman, Lawrence's chapter on the poet, as one would expect, reads like one long tirade against love and merging: "This merging, en masse, One Identity, Myself monomania was a carry-over from the old Love idea. It was carrying the idea of Love to its logical physical conclusion" (Studies p. 182).
* * * *
Insofar as Lawrence sees them as boundary interlopers, then, Jews represent or at the very least are a reminder of a dynamic that is far too dangerous to ignore. In addition, Lawrence seems to have accepted a classical tenet of anti-Semitism, that Jewish men have become feminized. Not only would such a belief add to their supposed tendency to traverse boundaries, gender boundaries in this case, but it would also align them directly with the very people whose presence is most dangerous to Lawrence's own sense of self-boundaries, women.42 Returning to our touchstone on Lawrence and race, it is possible to argue that, judging by internal and external evidence, the Jews in The Captain's Doll are of the "wrong sort" not only because they want to assimilate but also because their race, even unassimilated, has become feminized. This qualification, of course, makes the racism no less objectionable, but it is an important nuance that we must take into account if we are to understand Lawrence's writing and, indeed, if we are to understand some of the psychological origins of racism itself. The Captain's Doll turns out to be subtextually about the power struggle inherent in any sexual relationship for Lawrence at this point in his career, where women represent the terrifying "devouring mother" within a relationship and where a man must do all he can to assert his maleness and priority. The Captain's Doll's Mrs. Hepburn is considerably older than her husband, and she has brought her fortune to the marriage. The marriage for him, the narrator informs us, has been "a long slow weaning away" (Fox, p. 114), a phrase that echoes Lawrence's description of his own difficulties in gaining independence from his mother (Letters I, p. 527). As I have suggested elsewhere,43 Hepburn's wife's fatal fall from her hotel window may be related symbolically to the comment in "Education of the People" (composed in 1920) that to save the sanity of our children we must pull down the mothers "from their exalted perches."44 Now Hepburn will not be satisfied with Hannele until the terms of this new relationship are altered to reflect his belief in male priority. He has proved himself by attaining his own exalted perch on top of the glacier, thereby defeating the same "Arctic" world that, in Women in Love, proves fatal to Gerald Crich. Gerald dies not directly because of the interference of the racially-other Loerke but because of the woman to whom he had clung, at one point, as an infant clings to its mother: "Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, and she could not put him away" (Women, p. 345). That Loerke and Gudrun form a tandem which excludes Gerald is suggestive of the conflation of women and Jews as threats and of misogyny and racism as the emotional reactions to those threats.
Similarly, in The Lost Girl (1920), Alvina Houghton is brought down by circumstances from her lofty position in the social edifice of her home town--a movement signalled by her descent into her father's coal mine--until her lover, the Italian Ciccio, her social inferior in English terms, feels able to assert his mastery. When Ciccio pays a call on the Houghtons, Alvina "stood on the doorstep above him" and looks down on him "from her height." Nevertheless, Ciccio beckons with his eyes, in which there is "a dark flicker of ascendancy," and Alvina steps "down to his level" to follow him.45 When he kisses her, Alvina paradoxically comes alive even as she feels herself die; to complete the ascent-descent inversion, when Alvina runs indoors to her room, in the realization that she loves Ciccio, she "kneeled down on the floor, bowing down her head to her knees in a paroxysm on the floor" (Lost, p. 175). It is only in this way that the paradox inherent in the title of the novel--that to find herself Alvina must lose herself--may be actuated. In The Fox, one of two companion stories to The Captain's Doll, the male protagonist is again much younger than the female, a state of affairs that inevitably in Lawrence bears parent-child overtones. Henry Grenfel must vigorously combat those overtones in his relationship with Nellie March. And so he simply dismisses March's objection that she is old enough to be his mother, although, in fact, she is not; but even in his own mind, he must insist on his priority in a way that protests a little too much: "[h]e was older than she, really. He was master of her" (Fox, p. 23). In the final novella of the volume, The Ladybird, there is a curious inversion which is related, I believe, to Lawrence's childhood illnesses and dependence upon his mother. The severely wounded male protagonist, one of Lawrence's little dark men, who has been likened to "a child that is very ill and can't tell you what hurts it" (Fox, p. 163) and himself feels that he has lost his manhood as a result of his dependence, heals himself and "cures" the nervous unease of the Sleeping Beauty figure, Lady Daphne. No maternal care here.46
The fight in Lawrence for the priority of the son/husband over the mother/wife can be traced back at least to Sons and Lovers (1913), in which the issue is camouflaged by the much more obvious and dramatized struggle between Mrs. Morel and Miriam for the love of Paul. But clearly Mrs. Morel's death at the end of the novel liberates Paul, and Paul brings that death about (or at least hastens it, as Lawrence had done with his mother in life). He resorts to euthanasia, not murder. Nevertheless, the pattern is set whereby the death of the other (especially the motherly other) and/or what she represents is strongly connected to self-liberation. Paul Morel feeds his mother poisoned milk, thereby at once commenting upon the toxic nature of maternal nourishment (when administered, like Mrs. Morel's medicine, in too large doses) and avenging himself in a symbolically appropriate way. And we are back once again to the "milk of northern spume/ Coagulating and going black in my veins" of "Tropic."
In Aaron's Rod, the inclusion of Jews among those who are immediately to be made slaves in the harebrained reactionary scheme of Argyle (a scheme that is endorsed in large part by Lilly) seems to be racially motivated and thereby to support Jascha Kessler's argument that Lawrence needs the idea of the differentiation of blood in order to provide for servile (and thus for superior) races. Argyle tells Levison, his interlocutor, that he would make slaves of "'[e]verybody, my dear chap: beginning with the idealists and the theorising Jews . . .'" (Aaron, p. 279). However, we must think back to the earlier scene at the Royal Oak pub and Lawrence's description of Aaron's apparently ongoing flirtatious relationship with the landlady, an obvious foreshadowing of his much more developed liaison with the Marchesa Del Torre. First, the landlady is called "a large, stout, high-coloured woman, with a fine profile, probably Jewish" (Aaron, p. 17). Her nose has "a subtle, beautiful Hebraic curve," and she herself is one "who loved intellectual discussion" (Aaron, p. 18). This is important in the light of Argyle's comments regarding "theorising Jews." Shortly afterwards, the narrator has apparently studied the woman's genealogy, for now she is simply "the Hebrew woman," and it is her lustfulness that is central rather than her intellectualism (Aaron, p. 23). There is an elision, then, between race consciousness and a threatening, because sexually demanding, femaleness. Theorizing Jews, people whom Argyle apparently feels a need to control, turn out, in the subtextual scheme of the novel as a whole, to be associated with lustful women who would enslave the male through the arts of seduction. Despite his best efforts, Aaron backslides in his flight from women when he has a brief and debilitating affair with the Marchesa. She, evidently, wants Aaron to play the mama in their relationship--a very interesting new wrinkle in Lawrence's fiction: "she seemed almost like a clinging child in his arms" (Aaron, p. 261). She wishes, he feels, "to curl herself on his naked breast" (Aaron, p. 272). Aaron's otherwise marked desire to be infantilized--his wish to be babied by Lilly, for example--is thwarted when the Marchesa treats him like the mother, herself the baby at the breast. I must stress that these connections are subtextual and not readily apparent on a first reading. The fact that the landlady of the pub in Aaron's Rod is Jewish is a very minor detail in the novel, but why make her Jewish at all? Aaron is in flight from women, and, I am arguing, the fact of the landlady's ethnic identity may be understood within that context in this work, as, more generally, Lawrence's racism may be related to his attitude to women.
In his essay on Thomas Hardy, Lawrence goes off on one of his seemingly aimless tangents to discuss race. Once again, there is a strong connection here to gender, and, while the link is often covert in Lawrence, in this instance, the view of Jews as feminine is explicit, while Lawrence's wish to control their movements is easily discernible behind the projective manoeuvre of blaming women: "But in the terrible moment when they should break free again, the male in the Jew was too weak, the female overbore him. He remained in the grip of the female. . . . He had become the servant of his God, the female, passive. The female in him predominated, held him passive, set utter bounds to his movements, to his roving . . ." (Phoenix, p. 450). In another Lawrence essay, "The Two Principles," we see clearly how race and gender concerns become confused: ". . . some races, men and women alike, derive from the sun and have the fiery principle predominant in their constitution, whilst some, blonde, blue-eyed, northern, are evidently water-born. . . . Nevertheless, if we must imagine the most perfect clue to the eternal waters, we think of woman, and of man as the most perfect premise of fire" (Phoenix II, p. 234).
Delavenay suggestively claims that Lawrence was influenced by the Jewish anti-Semite Otto Weininger to see Judaism, in Weininger's words, as "'saturated with femininity, with precisely those qualities the essence of which I have shown to be in strongest opposition to the male nature.'"47 In short, races seem to be polarized for Lawrence by their degree of feminization. Races which he disapproves of--English and Jewish primarily--are either female in cultural predilection or produce men who are cowed to the point of impotence. Women become "cocksure," men "hensure," in Lawrence's terms. Those of whom he approves--Italians for a time, American natives, Aztecs--put women in their place even if that place is one of human sacrifice, as in the notorious "The Woman Who Rode Away." Race becomes a displaced battleground for Lawrence's fight with women, a fight he would like to give the aura of political significance but which in reality stems from his childhood dependence upon his mother. In that sense, the only race that finally matters to Lawrence is the "race" of men, that is, the male of the human species, as in Sea and Sardinia (1921): "One realizes, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality mongrels. The old, hardy indomitable male is gone."48
In a recent article, Howard J. Booth attempts to place Lawrence's attitudes to race within the context of psychoanalysis and of post-colonial theories about the construction of subjectivity and colonized others in the imperial project. For Booth, Lawrence's writing generally represents a refreshing openness to transformation by the encounter with racial others, but the critic is puzzled by remarks in the essay "On Being a Man," in which Lawrence is not so open in his description of an imaginary meeting of a racial other, in this case, an African-American in a train. Booth writes: "Though he criticises fixing the African-American with a single word, he then falls into a series of stereotypes. It is solipsistic because the other is only important in so far as he offers an experience for the self. The hierarchies between white and black are not questioned, they remain in place," and, indeed, the description in the essay ends "with Lawrence making an easy slide into issues of gender and heterosexual relations."49 The question as to why "racist discourses infiltrate a passage where Lawrence is considering engagements with otherness that change and transform the self positively"50 might be answered by reference to the evidence that Lawrence prizes otherness not as a catalyst to self-transformation but as a reassurance that his self-boundaries are not threatened, the same sense he needs in his relations to women.
The eliding of race and gender terms of reference becomes a pattern in Lawrence's writing, but it is not always easy to discern because of the passionate, disconnected way of argumentation which he employs. There is a concealed concern in much of his fiction with a childlike dependence on a woman--often couched in terms far different from that concern. Lawrence will devote much of his creative life to imagining ways to protect his self-integrity from the threat of his own dependency on women, and in so doing he will strike out at other races, but particularly at Jews as a group, for their boundary crossings remind him unconsciously of his greatest fear. This is not to say that Lawrence's anti-Semitism is not racism but merely that, like all irrational beliefs, it has hidden causes that are worth exploring. In Lawrence's case, the hidden roots of anti-Semitism appear to lie in an equally irrational but more understandable (because traceable) misogyny. His work retains its fascination, among other things, as the creation of a tremendously conflicted man whose struggles can teach us something about race hatred.
Atmospheric drama of two steamy affairs, based on D.H. Lawrence's classic novel. Forward-thinking artist Gudrun (Jackson) and her teacher sister Ursula (Linden) are introduced to Gerald (Reed) and Rupert (Bates). The more conventional Ursual and Rupert marry while Gudrun and Gerald have an affair that ends violently when Gudrun takes up with another man. Deservedly Oscar-winning performance by Jackson; controversial nude wrestling scene with Bates and Reed is hard to forget. Followed nearly two decades later (1989) by a "prequel": "The Rainbow," also from Lawrence, also directed by Russell and featuring Jackson.
Abstract In Women in Love, Birkin's fulfilment in the relationship with Ursula Brangwen is presented as the result of a struggle to achieve the separation of his self from a devouring mother image. Lawrence's unconscious fantasies concerning the processes contributing to the achievement of this goal are expressed in his depiction of Birkin's strategies. We can distinguish three different strategies: the homoerotic escape, the direct attack on the devouring mother image and the anal erotic self-assurance. We will analyze the devouring mother concept as well as these strategies and check whether the data related in the novel can fit in psychoanalytic formulations of relations and fantasies concerning the separation-individuation process in infancy and early childhood. Finally, we wonder to what extent the eventual relationship of Birkin with Ursula, presented as a fulfilment, can be conceived as a mature sexual love relation"
The Industrial Magnate" chapter of Women in Love, Reuben Light and Gerald Crich attempt to understand this Godless world through the display of power found in electricity. Both embrace science in defiance of their fathers' beliefs. A wealthy mine owner, Thomas Crich had always tried to run his coal mines by Christian precepts:
He was a large employer of labour, he was a great mine-owner. And he had never lost this from his heart, that in Christ he was one with his workmen. Nay, he had felt inferior to them, as if they through poverty and labour were nearer to God than he. He had always the unacknowledged belief that it was his workmen, the miners, who held in their hands the means of salvation. To move nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must gravitate towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God made manifest. In them he worshipped the highest, the great, sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity.18
Gerald was always antagonistic to his father--"[He] had feared and despised his father, and to a great extent had avoided him all through boyhood and young manhood" (210)--and was much closer to the mother who, in turn, worshipped him: "Only Gerald, the gleaming, had some existence for her" (210). Mrs. Crich is as non-Christian and pragmatic as her husband is humanitarian and idealistic. Theirs is an unhappy marriage of opposites, as is the Lights' union.
Like Gerald, Reuben rejects the beliefs of his father, a monomaniacally religious minister "who is the victim of an inner uncertainty that compensates itself by being boomingly over-assertive."19 His God is Ephraim Cabot's eye-for-an-eye, vengeful God of the Old Testament whose awesome strength is displayed in the crackling lightning which so terrifies Reverend Light. Rebelling against this tyrannical conception, Reuben--again like Gerald--feels much closer to his mother, whose "expression is one of virtuous resignation" and whose mouth is "rebellious ... determined and stubborn" (422). Reuben embraces science--electricity--after his mother "betrays" him to his father. He leaves home, berating Reverend Light's fundamentalist beliefs and focusing all his attention on the maternal, crooning figure of the dynamo. O'Neill endows his dynamo with feminine qualities in an attempt to show that man, bereft of God, has turned to science as a child turns to its mother: "It's like a great dark idol...like the old stone statues of gods people prayed to...only it's living and they were dead...that part on top is like a head... with eyes that see you without seeing you...and below it is like a body...not a man's... round like a woman's...as if it had breasts...but not like a girl...not like Ada...no, like a woman...like her mother...or mine...a great, dark mother!...that's what the dynamo is...that's what life is!..." (474)
Gerald is able to express his scorn for conventional Christianity when his father's illness puts him in charge of the mines. No Christian charity for Gerald: "Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of mankind. There had been so much humanitarian-ism, so much talk of sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions, like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else mattered" (215). No longer would the mines be run with a thought for the men, since, to Gerald, "[t]he whole Christian attitude of love and self-sacrifice was old hat" (219). He saw that "one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism so subtle and harmonious in its workings that it represents the single mind of man, and by its relentless repetition of given movement will accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman principle in the mechanism that he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald with an almost religious exaltation" (220). Like Reuben's dynamo--whose "song is the hymn of eternal generation" (482)--Gerald's "great and perfect machine" (220) represents perfection to him, "one pure, complex, infinitely repeated motion, like the spinning of a wheel..." (220). And, as it does for Reuben, electricity becomes Gerald's new religion: "An enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into every mine.... Gerald was [the workers'] high priest, he represented the religion they really felt" (223). Gerald thinks he can subjugate and dominate man and nature, but Lawrence clearly shows that he is worshipping, like Reuben, a false idol.
Substituting science for religion brings both Gerald and Reuben to insanity. Gerald thinks, "What he was doing seemed supreme, he was almost like a divinity. He was a pure and exalted activity" (224). But with the success at the mines, he realizes his own superfluousness: "He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he knew not what of. He looked at his own face. There it was, shapely and healthy and the same as ever, yet somehow, it was not real, it was a mask. He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a composition mask.... He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a purely meaningless bubble lapping round a darkness" (224-225). Reuben, too, is radically changed when he trades God the Father for Dynamo the Mother: "In contrast to his diffident, timid attitude of before, his manner is now consciously hard-boiled. The look on his face emphasizes the change in him. It is much older than his years, and it is apparent that he has not grown its defensive callousness without a desperate struggle to kill the shrinking boy in him. But it is in his eyes that the greatest change has come. Their soft gray-blue has become chilled and frozen, and yet they burn in their depths with a queer devouring intensity" (457). Embracing science brings destruction and self-loathing to both men.
Although "The Industrial Magnate" contains the most explicit expression of Gerald's obsession with science, Lawrence uses electricity as a metaphor throughout the novel to describe sexual attraction. For example, when Gerald is about to make a conquest: "He felt full of strength, able to give off a sort of electric power.... The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich.... He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge" (57-58). And a few pages later: "Minette sat near to Gerald, and she seemed to become soft, subtly to infuse herself into his bones, as if she were passing into him in a black, electric flow. Her being suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness.... And as she swung her head, her fine mane of hair just swept his face, and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity" (65-66). O'Neill does not use the language of electricity, but he does show that Reuben's conception of love changes radically after he rejects God:
Reuben: "What we did was just plain sex--an act of nature--and that's all there is to it!"
Ada: "Is that all--it means to you?"
Reuben: "That's all it means to any one! What people call love is just sex--and there's no sin about it!" (469)
Thus, both authors show that conceiving of male/female relationships in terms of science is destructive, inhuman; "love" becomes a mere manifestation of sexual currents, of animal attractions.
One of the problems with O'Neill's play is that Reuben is searching both for Belief and for Mother. He tries to shun his sexual feeling for Ada because he feels that it is a betrayal of his mother's pure love. After he sleeps with Ada, the only expiation he can offer is suicidal immolation: "There is a flash of bluish light about him and all the lights in the plant dim down until they are almost out and the noise of the dynamo dies until it is the faintest purring hum. Simultaneously Reuben's voice rises in a moan that is a mingling of pain and loving consummation, and this cry dies into a sound that is like the crooning of a baby and merges and is lost in the dynamo's hum" (488).
What is striking in both novel and play is the authors' suggestion that a mother figure is somehow the "answer" to the sterile perfection of the modern world which is symbolized by electricity. Lawrence does not emphasize--as O'Neill certainly does--the Oedipal relationship between Gerald and his mother, but it is significant that, after his father's death, Gerald sneaks into Gudrun's bedroom and finds a peculiarly maternal comfort in her bed: "Like a child at the breast, he cleaved intensely to her, and she could not put him away.... He was infinitely grateful, as to God, or as an infant is at its mother's breast" (338). "And she, she was the great bath of life, he worshipped her. Mother and substance of all life she was" (337). Unable to find fulfillment either in the perfectly run mines or in his relationship with Gudrun, Gerald--like Reuben--commits suicide, curling up (foetus-like) in the freezing snow.
Early in Women in Love, Gerald is shaken by the views of a friend:
"The old ideas 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."
"And you mean if there isn't the woman, there's nothing?" said Gerald.
"Pretty well that--seeing there's no God."
"Then we're hard put to it," said Gerald. (51)
Realizing that there is no God, Gerald is indeed "hard put to it," and turns first to science and then to love, but neither offers him solace. How to "belong" in the modern world is the question posed by Gerald and Reuben at the onset of their quests, and it remains unanswered at the conclusion of the novel as well as the play.
Sexuality, Society,
and Individual Growth in
D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love
Interpretation of the relationship between Gerald Crich and Birkin in Women in Love has been afflicted by cloudiness and fuzziness. In the past there has been an unwillingness to confront the homoerotic nature of the portrayal of this relationship. The critics are not altogether at fault because until the full text of the novel was recently available in the Cambridge edition the presentation of the relationship between Birkin and Gerald was affected by censorship. The full text makes the homosexual aspect more explicit.
A homoerotic theme is consistently present in Lawrence's fiction from the time of The White Peacock on Lawrence, however, had to do battle with his own homosexual feelings as the famous prologue to Women in Love indicates. In this autobiographical statement Lawrence confesses to his attraction towards dark and blond masculine types. He reflects his Puritanical upbringing both in this passage and in other passages in letters where he refers negatively to "lovers of men" in disgusted tones and uses insect imagery to reflect his own perception of such lovers. For example, he writes to his friend Koteliansky about "These horrible little frowsty people, men lovers of men, they give me such a sense of corruption, almost putrescence, that I dream of beetles" (L 11 323). Love reflects this prejudicial view of male lovers. Lawrence was also more open about the homosexual nature of their relationship in the original: he was forced to remove references to their sleeping arrangements since presentation of male homosexuality would have added fresh fuel to the fire of protest and demand for censorship of the novel.
Nevertheless, Rupert Birkin, a central narrative voice often close to the narrator's own voice, defends the ideal of male love against Gerald's strictures. Gerald's view of homoerotic feeling is that "it has no basis in nature"; the following dialogue occurs at a point in the narrative in which Birkin finally persists in his demand for a final commitment from Gerald and argues for the psychological necessity of a life-long relationship of one man to another. Birkin argues for an "additional perfect relationship between man and man -- additional to marriage" (352). Gerald says that he is incapable of feeling deeply enough:
Surely there can never be anything as strong between man and man as sex love is between man and woman. Nature doesn't provide the basis.
Birkin replies, "Well, of course, I think she does" and argues against the exclusivity of marriage: "And you've got to admit the unadmitted love of man for man. It makes for a greater freedom for everybody."
Birkin therefore asserts his own sexual philosophy against Gerald's objections that homosexuality does not have a "basis in nature" and in the novel he pursues his relationship with Gerald with as much single-mindedness as he pursues Ursula. There is therefore no doubt that Lawrence was exploring the creative potential inherent in a realised love between two men.
Birkin fights for a relationship with Gerald against Gerald's own ambivalence. Moreover, he stands by his ideal of male love as healthful in the face of Ursula's description of it as perversity. He even regards the source of Gerald's tragic self-destruction at the end of the novel as a failure to fulfill himself through a commitment to their relationship.
Lawrence therefore claims that the expression of homoerotic feeling makes an essential contribution to psychological growth; this is the effect of his dramatisation of his male protagonists in Women in Love. I wish to explore further the contribution of homosexuality to the total portrayal of human sexuality in the novel and to explore to what extent the psychological development of characters is affected by the bold concept that homosexuality is not against nature but grounded in nature. I also wish to understand the phrase "basis in nature": is such a basis biological or psychological? I have been helped to understand Lawrence's concepts of sexuality by the psychiatrist Paul Rosenfels; his books Homosexuality and the Psychology of the Creative Process and Love and Power aided my development of the thesis that Lawrence is presenting a new psychological understanding of the nature of sexual relationships and their contribution to processes of psychological growth.
Birkin's fight for the notion that his love for another man is not perverse but healthful dramatises a central polarity in the novel. Distorted expressions of sexuality in characters like Hermione Roddice, Loerke, Gudrun, and Gerald reflect the destructive instincts of a society given over to war and the fascist repressions of an authoritarian world. The essentially dramatic nature of the psychological action in Women in Love is revealed in the tendency of characters to confront one another antagonistically and to establish a sense of living connection in the process. The context of the drama is the cultural disintegration of society in the period of World War I. Critics have recognised that the culture of Europe is represented in the novel n the throes of a struggle between the forces of life and death. Homosexuality in its range of expression is presented in the centre of that struggle.
Lawrence expresses through Birkin the notion that "we grow or die." Society has the opportunity of two choices: the path of life and fulfillment or a choice of various paths of psychological disintegration and death. How is society to move towards life? Lawrence's solution is that individuals, through commitment to one another under conditions of psychological health can move society forward to life. Individual growth is the only hope for the life of the whole culture.
If the specifically homoerotic expression of sexuality is placed in the narrative at the centre of the opposing forces of creativity and life in society on the one hand and the forces of destruction on the other, how can homosexuality contribute towards the creative? Primarily by allowing the individual to realise his own inner identity. Such a condition of self realisation was for Lawrence an essential expression of individuality. Historical circumstance made such self definition a critical issue in a society which was sacrificing the individual to the collective mechanism of war. Social and industrial institutions were conspiring to sacrifice the individual upon the altar of aggressive patriotism.
Birkin is the central character through whom Lawrence explores the theme of individual psychological growth fostered independently from social institutions. In Chapter X of The Rainbow Ursula had begun the revolt against tyranny of marriage and family life, "the life of babies and muddled domesticity." Analogously, Birkin at the beginning of Women in Love is attached to the world of official education as school inspector and a false relationship with Hermione Roddice. Birkin soon gives up his position and cuts himself off from all social bonds. His act of throwing off all social rules and regulations allows him to become the representative individual who is determined to find truth and right for himself. He can fill such a role only by cutting himself loose from the conventional constraints that channel the psychic energies of most people: a conventional institutionalised marriage, a job, a profession, and the family. Men and women must expand themselves by growing through each other: such is Lawrence's vision of human relations in most of his fictional work.
The process of growth and expansion in psychological experience is grounded in notions of polarity. Lawrence's position does not reflect solipsism and social isolation. After Women in Love Lawrence felt impelled to formulate a full, metaphysically based psychological system in writings such as Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psycho-analysis and the Unconscious. Later in his career Lawrence acknowledged the work of a pioneer American social psychologist, Dr. Trigant Burrow, whose book The Social Basis of Consciousness Lawrence reviewed enthusiastically for The Bookman in 1927. Lawrence was deeply sympathetic to Burrow's view that "personal systems of men, single and collective, are but relative to an organic societal consciousness." Burrow corresponded with D.H. Lawrence and in a letter of September 9, 1927 inveighed against the enslavement of the individual to his own self image -- a state which tempted the individual consciousness into a world of artificially constructed self involvement. Burrow urged for this reason his reader to abandon "his stupid purpose in life apart from the purpose that is life" (B185).
Lawrence's enthusiasm for Burrow reflects his own progress towards a social vision which transcends the perspective of the individual ego. Human beings can only grow through one another. They can do that neither individually nor collectively but only organically through the mutual need of individuals to complete their identities through one another. Individual relationships must reflect a free and open expression of the fulfilled self and cannot be dominated by collective and institutionalised regulation. Since there is a social basis in consciousness, human beings are individually incomplete and need to encounter opposed aspects of themselves. Only in this process can the imprisoning constraints of narcissism be overcome. Moreover such a process can only come about at a stage in culture where the individual is doing more than adapting to his physical and social environment. Lawrence's exploration of psychological growth is therefore placed in a context which includes the experience of polarity expressed in the meeting of dominant and yielding personality types. The concern with polarity is explored in the metaphysical writings which succeed Women in Love: "The Crown" and "The Reality of Peace." The concern for the role of power and leadership in psychological and social life is explored in subsequent novels such as Kangaroo, Aaron's Rod, and The Plumed Serpent.
Paul Rosenfels's conceptions of psychological growth offer some profound analogies to Lawrence's dramatisation of these concepts in novelistic terms as well as to his metaphysical expression of them. Rosenfels's exposition is dense and scientific; Lawrence's is often mystique ridden and esoteric. (Rosenfels comments that the struggle for individual truth often takes esoteric forms.) Nevertheless, their conceptions complement one another, for both psychologist and novelist grasp rationally and intuitively the essence of what it means to grow psychologically.
I have selected three key concepts from Rosenfels's writings since they have direct application to Women in Love. I wish now to outline -- necessarily in somewhat reductive fashion -- Rosenfels's concepts of adaptive versus creative life-modes, character specialisation and polarity, and the inter-reactions between Love and Power.
A purely adaptive mode is characterized by the subjection of psychological energies to the practical demands of living. The individual is born into a physical and social environment which demands conformity to established values and endorses devotion to society's institutions. Civilized man, however, possesses a psychological surplus which provides the basis for inner identity. Creative, as apart from adaptive modes of living, provide that sense of individual identity. Rosenfels emphasises the crucial importance of separating the creative and the practical if an individual wishes to achieve a condition of psychological health. In both the adaptive and creative modes of living, yielding, and assertive elements are required. Biologically, there is a capacity to receive information from the environment, the product of a submissive mode. There is also the capacity for control which demands an assertive relationship to the environment.
With civilisation comes specialisation of these assertive and yielding elements. At the biological level such specialisation is related to gender and sexual development; the masculine is associated with dominance and control and the feminine with yielding and submission. But character specialisation, independent of biological gender, is a crucial later stage of civilized humanity -- crucial because it provides opportunities for psychological growth and understanding. Rosenfels uses the terms "masculine" and "feminine" to describe psychological modes relating to assertion and mastery on the one hand and to modes of service and submission on the other. These psychological modalities are quite independent of biological gender.
Rosenfels therefore asserts that growth in human relationships has nothing to do with the difference between male and female genitals. True mated relationships are psychological not sexual and concern the interaction between yielding and assertive types. Rosenfels's concepts might have been useful to D.H. Lawrence in resolving the problem he presents in the discussion between Gerald and Birkin in Women in Love. Rosenfels provides a theoretical "basis in nature" for homoerotic relations which would allow Birkin to answer Gerald's denial of such a basis.
Lawrence and Rosenfels would also have agreed with each other that the individual has to move from the adaptive to the creative mode and resist the attempt of society to detach sexuality from its psychological moorings for then it becomes "an external thing subject to social rules and regulations" (R 16). Psychologist and novelist both share the deep perception that social subjection of the individual to external social norms stifles growth and creates compulsion. Gerald Crich is a dramatic embodiment of this process: what Birkin offers Gerald is a means by which he can free himself from a compulsive enslavement to the mechanical world of the coal mines; mastery in the psychological sphere can prevent enslavement to bureaucratic organisation.
The freedom comes from being able to explore and be fully conscious of one's own identity. Such creative exploration of the self flourishes in the interrelation between Love and Power capacities. Rosenfels asserts that Love and Power have to encounter each other and he amplifies these terms by defining love as a focus on an external object that inspires expanding awareness and comprehension. Power, on the other hand, is operational and is expressed through action.
Rosenfels recognises that the concept of power has a negative connotation in modern intellectual society but insists that there is an impelling need to understand it especially since "it is in the interaction between love and power that masculine identity finds its true access to an expanding interpersonal world" (R 37). Lawrence certainly recognised that power on the loose had created the disintegration of European society in World War I. In Women in Love he also clearly reflects the impact of his reading of Nietzsche's Will to Power. Nietzsche and World War I encouraged his recognition that an unwillingness to fulfill the ends of power leads to neurotic forms of defense such as compulsive action, masochism and enslavement of the self. "Only love can light your world; only power can claim it," is Rosenfels's version of this truth.
At the beginning of Women in Love Birkin recognises that his quest for love is ended: "Love gives out in the end," he complains. He wants, therefore, not the "meeting and mingling" of love but "a balance of opposites"; he, too, recognises that the individual can preserve his/her own sense of self only through psychological growth. The interaction of opposites promotes that creative growth upon which, finally, the growth of society depends.
Lawrence's exposition of the polarity theme in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious often resonates with Rosenfels's psychological system. For example, Lawrence says,
The amazingly difficult and vital business of human relationship has been almost laughably under estimated in our epoch. All this nonsense above love and unselfishness is more crude and repugnant than savage fetish worship. Love is a thing to be learned through centuries of patient effort. It is difficult, complex, maintenance of individual integrity throughout the incalculable processes of interhuman polarity (225).
Lawrence would have agreed with Rosenfels that love and unselfishness are only one half of a polarity, the other half characterised by the modalities of assertion and power. I wish now to approach the text of Women in Love in terms of the polarity and to explore further the psychological aspects of Birkin and Gerald.
First it must be said that Birkin is presented as the character dedicated to the ideals of growth and individuality. Though his voice is not synonymous with that of the author it is the most dominant in the novel; Birkin does not achieve any final end to his quest for inner realisation, mainly because there is no end to what is a continuous process. However, his voice is the most questioning of the collective, institutional will. He fights fiercely for a sense of his own inner identity and is obviously the champion of a modality of power and mastery. He desires freedom from all control and proposes a relationship to Ursula which is the model of masculinist values, in Rosenfels's terms. Thus Birkin does not want individual men to be helplessly dependent on the female or the female on the male.
Birkin asks himself the question, "Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole?" and answers "It is not true" (WL, 225). The truth about human relations is, for Lawrence, more complex than can be comprehended by a simple polarised pattern based upon sex and gender. Such an over simplified view of human nature restricts the ideal of human fulfillment to sex alone. However, the individual's fulfillment is more important than sex. Lawrence's endorsement of the work of Trigant Burrow on the societal consciousness reflects his own conviction that individual fulfillment is more important than sexual satisfactions. He is later to read in Burrow's The Social Basis of Consciousness that polarity based upon gender opposition is not a sufficient picture of the complex nature of human dualities. Burrow asserts that "in place of the bipolar position of man and woman we have substituted the bidimensional attitude of male and female" (207).
Civilisation has therefore transcended pure biological need and created a psychological need to grow through each other. This ideal of fulfillment through polarisation in relationship can, moreover, be achieved in a variety of ways not restricted by the single heterosexual relationship. Lawrence anticipates Rosenfels's concept of growth and, in his emphasis on what Burrow calls the "society instinct" the current object relations school of psychoanalysis represented by post-Freudian theorists such as D.W. Winnicott and W.R.D. Fairbairn. The latter school has replaced the assumed preemptory needs of the biological drives or instincts with the impulse towards meaningful relating.
The polarity of submission and dominance has a central role in the process of growth. The individual is enabled to grow through the giving of his personal and spiritual resources. The dominant individual can creatively exploit the resources of the other. The yielding individual grows through the giving of personal and spiritual resources. There is therefore a potential for creative exchange in relationships; the patterns of giving or receiving, self-assertion or mastery versus yielding, cut across gender.
Such an insight can provide the "basis in nature" for same sex relating that Birkin asserts in Women in Love. Birkin experiences a primary physical attraction towards Gerald reinforced by his understanding of Gerald's masculine power based psychological disposition. The relationship is doomed to failure in the novel -- perhaps because they are characters with the same polarity, in Rosenfels's terms. However, the scene in the chapter "Gladiatorial" in which Gerald and Birkin wrestle with each other explores the processes of mastery and submission between individuals. Birkin seems to want to help Gerald to realise his masculine dominance. His failure to do so is a tragedy because Gerald is not able to grow and therefore dies. Not only can he not fulfill a masculine role with Birkin but he is destroyed by his failure to match Gudrun's dominance.
Gerald has a value for Birkin psychologically in so far as a relationship with him would neutralise any temptation to sacrifice his independence to Ursula. Although he unashamedly gives to Ursula the feminine role of serving his own growth needs, he believes in the idea that she can grow too. His relationship to Gerald would provide another channel for the exploration of a power based love.
Birkin's formula does not work in the novel any more than it might in real life. However, I think Lawrence expresses as much psychological truth in his depiction of its failure and collapse as he does in elaborating the ideal. His psychological analysis of Gerald's collapse and destruction by his own psychological defenses gives a profoundly tragic dimension to the novel.
What accounts for Gerald's inability to give himself to others and for the over-riding concerns with power assertion, revealed in his cruel domination of the horse at the rail crossing in the chapter "Coal-Dust"? The answer is supplied in the extended analysis of Gerald's character in the chapter "The Industrial Magnate." The concept of polarity governs Lawrence's picture of Gerald's early history and family structure. Gerald's parents are polarised types: the father is a somewhat sentimental adherent to the gospel principles of charity who maintains the dependence of his employees with presents and hand outs. He ignores the servile state of the total body of employees under his control and sustains the weak parasitical ones who come seeking charity with hard luck stories. His wife, ironically called Christiana, cannot stand her husband's weakness, drives the suppliants away if she can and fights her husband:
And all the while his wife had opposed him like one of the great demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey with the fascinating beauty and abstraction of a hawk (242).
The antagonism between husband and wife is an extreme one and drives Christiana into violent modes of expression: "of wild and over-weaning temper, she could not bear the humiliation of her husband's soft, half-appealing kindness to everybody" (242) Charity breeds hate; Thomas Crich, on the other hand, concludes a sacrificial life mode with death from a bloody hemorrhage which is a parody of the crucifixion.
The presentation of Gerald's psychology is plainly the product of this polarity. He has followed his mother's masculine polarity n reaction from his father whose values he totally reverses. When he takes over the management of the mines during his father's illness and after his death, he does so in a spirit of ruthless efficiency, devoid of pity for the fates of the individuals under his control. In reversing the charity of his father he becomes an allegorical representative of unyielding mechanism. Gerald's harsh dominance is a product of a massive over-reaction from his father and is modelled on his mother's almost insane antagonism. For these reasons Gerald cannot feel, cannot love or fulfill himself in his personal relations with anyone else. The impulse towards any realisation of the inner self has been destroyed as a result of the false giving of his father. Gerald cannot respond from the heart; only the values of rational organisation and control compel his respect.
Lawrence states that Christiana is "in a fierce tension of opposition like the negative pole of a magnet" (244); such magnetic tension, however, characterises all the personal relations in the novel. In no character is the polarity principle more evident than in Gerald who is subject to his father's Charity principle in so far as he is in reaction against it.
Gerald's powerfully polarised reaction against his father creates a problem; as his father drifts out of life, Gerald has to confront the reality of defining his own inner identity as well as his own social role in terms of a kind of unifying principle, even though he realises that "the whole unifying idea of mankind seemed to be dying with his father" (248).
Gerald's false solution to his psychological problem is to make a god out of the machine. As a result, he represses the warm and charitable side of himself, becomes "curious and cold" and eventually the ruthless reformer of industry who sacrifices human considerations in the interest of a machine like efficiency. He thus avoids the irreconcilable conflict his father had wrestled with when his miners went on strike. (Thomas Crich's "love" for his employees did not prevent him from being in a state of war with them when they went on strike for more just payments.)
The miners were correct in rejecting Thomas's brand of charity in favour of social justice. However, Lawrence as narrator had insisted on Thomas Crich's awareness of the conflict between the important cultural ideal of the unity of men and the social division created by economic inequalities. Gerald certainly does not create any viable solution to this problematic division. He simply abandons democratic equality as a principle, without, as Lawrence says "bothering to think to a conclusion" (255).
Gerald becomes a high priest of a new mechanical order -- an order linked with the war which was itself an inhuman machine. This abandonment of democratic equality, charity, and humanity creates a cultural tragedy reflected in the personal tragedy of Gerald's sexual and personal relationships. Gerald's repression of Charity on the social level is connected to Gerald's incapacity to reorganize the principles of Love and Power as complementary opposites. His masculine identity is expressed in his urge to exploit the social and environmental resources around him and to assert his mastery over them. But Gerald cannot connect with any kind of love. His power assertion is crude and inhuman and because it is based on the repression of his own inner identity it cannot fulfill the aims of psychological growth.
Lawrence uses another instructive polarised pattern in Women in Love: relationships which exemplify psychological disease are presented antithetically against those which provide a model for psychological health. The strong instinct towards healthful self-realisation is reflected in the characters of Birkin and Ursula. Birkin has had the strength to throw off a false cultural idea as embodied in Hermione; his hatred of Hermione is a healthful symptom of his determination to gain his own inner freedom. As Rosenfels comments, "(there is) a necessity for the creative thinker to give full vent to hatred of a false ideal if he is to separate from it" (L&P 72). Hermione's frustrated power assertion is vented in a murderous act: the crushing blow with the paper weight on Birkin's head. Birkin, however, is not "willing to be murdered" and in a way Hermione's act is vindicated because it allows them both to be free. This relationship is a microcosm of a state of society at the time of World War I -- a state in which individuals are not willing to "come clean" but rather allow frustrated power assertion to seek the ultimately destructive forms of war and mass killing.
Readers of The Rainbow also know that Ursula has fought free from a destructive relationship with her first love, Anton Skrebensky who is in many ways a prototype of Gerald Crich. Like Gerald his personality is restricted to the professional role -- in his case the soldier. He is a power based individual who has the same fatal tendency to submerge his individual identity beneath his professional role.
The relationship between Gerald and Gudrun is based purely upon psychological defences and the nature of their attraction to each other has everything to do with frustrated power and little to do with fulfillment. Gerald's imposition of power in the famous scene where he forces his horse to confront the steam engine at the rail tracks is a false expression of masculinity which Ursula sees through but Gudrun is attracted towards. Ursula perceives instinctively that Gerald is obsessed with dominance because his masculine power urge is trapped and cannot find free expression. Gudrun's submission to this classic expression of sadistic impulse is a false submission. She has a psychologically masculine nature and she is therefore fascinated by a power based individual who is in fact a mirror image of her. Their relationship can therefore only lead to internecine struggle. Gerald is destroyed by the relationship and Gudrun attains no genuine salvation since she transfers her dominance to Leitner, another figure whose power urge is directed by compulsive dominance, sometimes of a sadistic kind. Gudrun's submission is false because it is based upon passive anger
The intense preoccupation with the power urge in Women in Love has struck some readers as itself obsessive. I believe, however, that Lawrence was reflecting his own deeper perception of a culture which was disintegrating precisely because it had not been able to control and integrate its aggressive and power based impulses. Human relationships form the nucleus of society. If power and aggression are allowed to fester unexpressed they will seek explosive and destructive outlets. For this reason war harnesses powerful psychological energies. Lawrence recognised there is a basic impulse to individual fulfillment and when that is blocked the culture as well as the individual disintegrates.
Sexuality can be expressed in healthful or destructive ways whether it be between individuals of the same or opposite gender. Trigant Burrow later asserted that all sexuality is narcissistic, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Analogously, Lawrence's attacks on homosexuality can be interpreted as attacks on narcissistic sexuality between people of either sexual orientation. Leitner is an example of an individual whose homoerotic urge is not healthfully expressed. Birkin strives to find a way in which the same impulse can be directed towards life and growth. The tragedy of the culture is perhaps contained in Ursula's denial of the validity of Birkin's perception of a psychological complementarity which is independent of gender. Gerald's refusal to allow Birkin to help himself and Gerald fulfill each other in turn leads to Birkin's feelings of intense disillusion -- not only in the hope of his own final fulfillment but in the ongoing life of the whole human species. Lawrence offers more to the reader than a nihilistic vision or psychological bankruptcy: the path of growth lies open for those who wish to follow it. If the power and submission urges are not met, the psychological fate of the species is not promising. If it is true, as W. H. Auden says, that "we must love one another or die" we must know how to love one another and what that love means in terms of our personal and social fulfillment.
يمكنك أن تستفيد من الصلاحيات الإضافية للعضو و المشاركة في المنتدى بالتسجيل من هنا , كما يشرفنا أن ينضم إلينا الأساتذة و المعلمون 
تسجيل الدخول
تصفح جوال
الأسئلة المتكررة
بحث
::
::
thank u al off u
