• عنوان المشاركة: Women in Love .. Male / Female Relationships
مرسل: الخميس تشرين الثاني 27, 2008 8:01 م
مراقب عام
اشترك في: 20 تشرين الأول 2007
المواضيع: 440
المشاركات: 9878
المكان: حمص
القسم: اللغة الانكليزية
السنة: دبلوم تأهيل
لا يوجد لدي مواضيع بعد
Abstract
The gender problem has entrapped the male and the female into the struggle for subjectivity, the battle for survival, a war for supremacy. The metaphor of “mutual hellish recognition,” in the chapter entitled “Rabbit,” illustrates D. H Lawrence’s critique of the war between male dominance and the female counter-attack. In an open text like Women in Love, the writers undo some contradictions and disclose Lawrence’s assertion of establishing the equilibrium Male / Female relationship. Keywords: gender, subjectivity, male dominance, equilibrium
Women in Love begins with a discussion about marriage between Ursula and Gudrun. For Gudrun, a traditional marriage is an “experience of some sort” that could relieve her boredom and ultimately provide self-fulfillment. Her sister, Ursula, however, questions this and asserts that the experience of marriage could be “the end of experience”. These two women are not searching for romance as their 19th-century counterparts did but instead for authentication and escape from a barren and outmoded life. This change in attitude becomes evident when Ursula contradicts her sister who utters dissatisfaction with modern life because “Everything withers in the bud”. Unwilling to define herself according to traditional patriarchal guidelines, Ursula decides that marriage is “more likely to be the end of experience”. “The questioning nature of Gudrun’s and Ursula’s opening dialogue,” observes Nigel Kelsey, “accumulates in intensity as the questions themselves accumulate; definite feelings of emptiness, fear and loss”. The dialogue builds to an essential and radical question, one that later became prominent in early feminist thought: is the desire for marriage essential to female nature or a social construction? In the absence of obvious choices they can only anchor their knowledge in a fear of the lesser known. Maria Dibattista suggests, this chapter “Sisters” centers on the radical isolation of modern woman, isolated from marriage and its central affirmations”. Troubling images of marriage are illustrated in the portrayal of Gerald’s mother and prove what Ursula doubts that the nature of marriage is problematic. Gerald’s mother is locked in a marriage of “utter interdestruction” that shatters her mind and her husband’s vitality, and she submits to him “like a hawk in a cage”. Mrs. Crich appears here as living proof of Ursula’s fears that marriage can be the end of experience for a woman. The radical strategies to combat this fear becomes a marked trait of Ursula’s character shown in her frequent demand that Rupert Birkin tell her he loves her, and in her desire for Birkin but her fears of yielding “her very identity” to him, knowing that he could accept love only on his terms. The symbolic image of the drowned couple provides another negative image of union and offers evidence of how one partner in a male / female relationship may dominate and possibly destroy the other. To Ursula, Birkin seems “a beam of essential enmity, a beam of light that did not only destroy her, but denied her altogether, revoked her whole world. She saw him as a clear stroke of uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like being whose existence defined her own non-existence”. To echo Ursula’s struggle, Birkin insists that “the old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage”. His anger over the state of marriage matches Ursula’s, and in response he also embraces a specific “conjunction where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other” . He desires impersonal relations between earnest individuals. Lawrence asserts a similar philosophy in his letter to Catherine Mansfield: I am sick and tired of personality in every way. Let us be easy and impersonal, not for ever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us. Birkin’s theory of “star equilibrium” takes its thematic cue directly from Lawrence’s own dream of a healthier, less anxious exchange between lovers and friends. Birkin persuades Ursula to establish a union where each commits to the other while maintaining the integrity of the self. Ursula, however, prefers her own approach to human affection, and tries to provoke verbal declarations of love from Birkin. Ursula asks Birkin so often to confirm this spiritual dimension of their relationship that Birkin calls the question her war-cry: “’A Brangwen, A Brangwen,’--and old battle-cry.--Yours is ‘Do you love me?--Yield knave, or die’”. Despite her yearning to be loved and her insistence on the supremacy of love over the individual, Ursula is fearful that she will be consumed by him, and she sometimes becomes aggressive in her resistance to such envelopment. Lawrence cast Ursula as the modern woman with grasping qualities of the modern cultural degeneration. When Birkin comes to propose to Ursula and ends up doing so with her father in the room, Ursula-- flustered, “driven out of her own radiant, single world” by the unexpected proposal--cries out to both men, “why should I say anything?. . . You do this off your own bat, it has nothing to do with me. Why do you both want to bully me?”. Her contrariness about whether she is the owner or the owned is succinctly illustrated by a single sentence from her consideration of Birkin’s proposal: “Let him be her man utterly, and she in return would be his humble slave--whether he wanted it or not”. Ursula tries to find the balance that allows her to be so close to Birkin but not with the sacrifice of her independent soul This struggle to achieve some equilibrium presages her modern womanhood. In Women in Love, Leo J. Dorbad found, “Balance--sexual or otherwise--is a key factor in any critical discussion of the novel. Some form of balance is indeed the primary goal of every character”. Not only Ursula and Birkin, but also Gerald and Gudrun encounter the challenge of searching for balance in a male / female relationship. Gerald, for example, is trapped in a deep-seated perversion that might be related to a painful childhood memory--his accidental killing of his brother. Unlike Birkin, Gerald does not entertain lofty thoughts of spiritual or philosophical development and derives most of his pride from his precarious position as an industrial magnate. He blindly dedicates himself to the continuous mechanization of his family’s coal mines. He takes over the prestigious position from his rapidly aging father. But Gerald displays none of his father’s Victorian benevolence. Instead, he sees his workers as damned spirits, mere robots. Ironically, he establishes “the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition, repetition and infinitum, hence eternal and infinite”. Such an individual, flagrantly ignoring the intrinsic dignity and personality of others, cannot possibly hope to achieve true connection with another human being, even in matters of simple friendship. A corrupted soul from the start, he prevents himself from achieving what Birkin prizes most: freedom for two. Gudrun possesses a degree of creative potential, a sincere desire to lend her world a spiritual significance beyond the merely sensuous side of life. But even her artistic endeavors, especially her little figurines, bear the ominous mark of her excessive willfulness, her tendency toward manipulation and possessiveness. “From the outset of their relationship”, observes Charles Rossman, “Gerald and Gudrun are locked in a struggle for mastery over one another”. Thwarted and desperate, the combined wills of Gerald and Gudrun soon manifest themselves as an extreme lust for power and begin to usurp what little tenderness, love, and humanity they share. The terms of their unspoken contract are, as Lawrence says, diabolical: The bond was established between them, in that look, in her tone. In her tone, she made the understanding clear--they were of the same kind, he and she, a sort of diabolic freemasonry subsisted between them. Henceforward, she knew, she had her power over him. Wherever they met, they would be secretly associated. And he would be helpless in the association with her. Her soul exulted. Mutual repulsion between Gerald and Gudrun is an extremely degrading process. Nothing less than pure challenge and needless viciousness, Gerald and Gudrun’s doomed relationship is rooted in infected ground. Gudrun once declared her supremacy over Gerald when she slapped him and said that she would strike the last blow in their relationship as well as the first. Gerald’s dominance over the maze and miners prompts the reader to conclude that Gudrun will not win her battle for supremacy. Lawrence conveys the colorful obscenities of their relationship, its corrosive willfulness and violent possessiveness, in a series of powerfully dramatized episodes. In the “Rabbit” chapter, Gudrun and Gerald express their “mutual hellish recognition” after they are both clawed by the rabbit, Bismarck . Gerald’s desire for domination and its link to violence emerges when Winifred decides to “frame” another animal by drawing it. When Gudrun tells Gerald, “We’re going to draw [the rabbit],” Gerald replied, “Draw him and quarter him and dish him up” . Gudrun smiles at Gerald’s mockery and their eyes meet in the knowledge of their inherent cruelty. They give full expression to their mutual attraction to such power plays when they try to remove the rabbit from its cage--another framing image. Its frenzied opposition thwarts Gudrun’s attempt to capture, “a heavy cruelty well[s] up in her,” which Gerald observes her sullen passion of cruelty “with subtle recognition” . Gerald responds with similar outrage when he tries to subdue the rabbit and, like Gudrun, is scratched. This event turns out to be curiously ritualistic; once again both lovers acknowledge their subterranean attraction and so reaffirm the twisted pact between them: Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange, darkened eyes, strained with underworld knowledge, almost supplicating, like those of a creature which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition. Taking their lead from such dubious currents of feeling, Gerald and Gudrun proceed to engage themselves in a program of sexual warfare and violence, denying their potential capacity for true connection. That Gudrun and Gerald unite at the end of “Rabbit” chapter in “mutual hellish recognition” becomes an apt metaphor for the complexity of male / female relationships. Gerald desperately seeks out Gudrun as his primary source of verified existence, his only source of working stimulation. Rendered helplessly by his own emptiness, Gerald drains whatever sustenance he can from Gudrun: “As he drew nearer to her, he plunged deeper into her enveloping soft warmth, a wonderful creative heat that penetrated his veins and gave him life again. He felt himself dissolving and sinking to rest in the bath of her living strength” . Ironically, Gudrun also derives a kind of passive pleasure from this strange experience: “and she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist. The terrible frictional violence of death filled her, and she received it in an ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute, violent sensation” . Both Gudrun and Gerald transform their capacity for normal, healthy sexuality into lust and assertiveness. In doing so, they make themselves into agents of death. “The interchanges between men and women in Women in Love,” as Wendy Perkins observes, “are complicated by the historical moment of the novel, an age where individuals no longer turn to society for advice on forming relationships” . Perkins further remarks: “As Ursula, Birkin, Gudrun, and Gerald struggle to gain knowledge of themselves through contact with each other, they [re]evaluate gender roles, raising questions regarding the contradictory impulses of domination, submission, and equality and their links to human sexuality” . In the dreary, industrialized atmosphere of England, Ursula, Gudrun, Birkin, and Gerald all face the void of modern existence and turn toward relationship with others for salvation. The process of discovering their own needs as they explore unions with others involves complex questions like “a struggle for consciousness, a search for definition” . Lawrence didn’t tell his reader whether these characters find the answer in their long years of struggling. Lawrence has shown in Women in Love “that experience is equivocal, ambivalent, that there are no clear answers or wholly adequate resolutions” . Asserting the importance of representing the ambiguous nature of human experience, Lawrence writes, “If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail. Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality. . . . And of all the art forms, the novel most of all demands the trembling and oscillating of the balance” . To maintain the “trembling and oscillating of the balance,” Lawrence leaves the four main characters, as Mark Schorer puts it, “compounded of a double drive” and free in the plot to choose between life and death . In the closing episodes, Ursula and Rupert leave the Alps to choose life, while Gudrun and Gerald stay in the mountains, engaged in a mortal content of wills. Gudrun is now repelled by Gerald, who seems to her “like a child that is famished crying for the breast . . . he needed her to put him to sleep, to give him repose”. Gudrun rejects both the child-man she sees in Gerald and the role of nurturer in which he has tried to cast her. For her everything has become “intrinsically a piece of irony” . To replace Gerald she singles out Loerke, a “small, dark-skinned man with full eyes, and odd creature, like a child, and like a troll, quick, detached”. Spurred on by her unfaithfulness and his gnawing lack of stability, Gerald becomes a would-be murderer and attempts to strangle Gudrun. Failing to exercise the full force of his will upon her, he ultimately embraces death as his only recourse. Neither Gerald nor Gudrun is inherently evil or demonic, but their unwillingness to define themselves against each other prevents them from obtaining peace. Unable to approximate a suitable degree of impersonal emotions, they helplessly witness the disintegration of their relationship, permitting it to lapse into animal aggression and violent sensuality. There is, as Eliseo Vivas claims, “a kind of love between the two of them. But it would be no less inadequate to call it ambivalent” . Langbaum ascribes the unbalance to the underlying “hate’ in their attraction to each other. Schneider calls it “a violent battle for survival, a war for supremacy, in which one of the partners must be master and the other slave”. Unable to determine the limits of their selfhood, of their physical and spiritual boundaries, both Gerald and Gudrun forever deny themselves the invaluable privileges of balanced love. Ursula’s marriage with Birkin seems a model of domestic bliss in contrast to the relationship of Gudrun and Gerald. It is when her openness to star equilibrium grows steadily, Ursula “had learned at last to be still and perfect”. After they exchange tender emotions in the quaint atmosphere of a local inn, they embark on a refreshing drive through the dark woods of Sherwood Forest. Both lovers seem to have experience of profound change. Yet the indeterminate ending where Birkin suggests he needs a relationship with a man to be satisfied leaves the question of marriage as a route to self-fulfillment open. Barthes notes: “To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it. . . . [an ideal text contains] a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds”. What Barthes said echoes Lawrence’s assertion that “the novel most of all demands the trembling and oscillating of the balance”. Although Birkin and Ursula reconcile their intimate relationship, they are not brilliantly counterbalanced, nor do they achieve what Birkin emphasizes the star equilibrium, drawn together by their gravity (love) and repulsed by their inherent polarity (utter singleness). The real balance of male / female relationship is thus left incomplete. The incomplete becomes an integral part of Lawrence’s artistry.
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آخر تعديل بواسطة عصام في الخميس تشرين الثاني 27, 2008 8:19 م، عدل 1 مرة
• عنوان المشاركة: Women in Love .. Male / Female Relationships
مرسل: الجمعة تشرين الثاني 28, 2008 6:09 م
آرتيني مؤسس
اشترك في: 03 آذار 2007
المواضيع: 32
المشاركات: 522
القسم: EN
السنة: ----
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