Dr Tarek Musleh is a professor of English

Literature at Philadelphia University. He has

written a number of papers, mostly on English
fiction, and a book entitled:

English Fiction: From Defoe to Golding

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 The Impurity of Love in Women in Love

Women in Love dramatizes the possibility of developing love

relationships away from a mad world heading for destruction. The war
atmosphere and the negative influence of modern industrial
civilization are strongly felt in the novel. The irony of the book is
that if individuals can escape the negative influence of the modern
world, they can hardly avoid the destructiveness inherent within
their soul.
Women in Love was written in the middle of the First World War;
although the novel is not about the war itself, it powerfully reflects its
atmosphere and influence on the individual. There is so much of what
Lawrence ca1ls 'the results of one's soul of the war in Women in Love.
The novel poses the question that if all is lost in the outside world, the
only thing left for the individuals is to seek their personal salvation
and 'cultivate their own garden', largely by establishing a 'healthy' love
relationship, based on recognizing the otherness of the partner.
Women in Love explores the possibility of surviving away from a
mad world bent on self-destruction. Industrialism has disfigured the
countryside, distorted life, and made man like a machine. While the
two sisters Ursula and Gudrun are walking down the road of Beldover
they feel uneasy and frightened of the whole atmosphere which is
uglified and made sordid by industrialism. Human interaction is
somewhat strained because modern industrialism has even affected
personal relationships and made man a slave to the technological
progress which he himself has created.
Women in Love explores the possibility of establishing love
relationships in a hostile world. The two protagonists Birkin and
Ursula have to suffer so much in their arduous search for fulfillment
through a relationship surrounded by all sorts of difficulties, partly as
a result of living in a hostile society, and partly as a consequence of
their complicated psyches. They have to fight not only against being
involved in the outside world but also against the temptation of
responding to the dormant destructive force which is inherent within
their souls, a force which is given free dramatic rein by the two
'antagonists' in the novel, Gerald and Gudrun. Thus the bitter irony of
the novel is that if one can partially escape the negative influence of

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the outside world, one can hardly come to terms with one's own
conflicting personality and psychological needs. Hence the love
atmosphere of the novel is marred by several factors from within and
without.
F. R. Leavis has stated that the love relationship between Birkin
and Ursula establishes some kind of 'norm' on the basis of which one
can judge the other relationship between Gerald and Gudrun.(2)
However, the so-called normative relationship is a reflection of
troubled personalities that it is difficult to associate with normality. As
soon as we meet Birkin we realize that he is not an ordinary person
who easily bows to the pressure of society. As a typical Lawrencian
hero, he is 'isolated' without any family or social bonds to restrict him
or draw him to conventional life. He is self-reliant and enthusiastic to
preach his own views on life and people. He finds modern England
ugly and ruined by industrialism. He hopes to find personal salvation
in an 'ultimate' marriage and a 'sacred' friendship. Initially he has a
relationship with Hermione Roddice who defines his character
through standing as an opposing force for what he believes in. He
preaches 'spontaneity' whereas she stands for the values of the upper
class which are artificial and dead.

In spite of her confidence in herself Hermione is deficient and

insecure. Her sense of insecurity is coupled with over-developed will
power. She needs Birkin, for 'when he was there, she felt complete,
she was sufficient, whole'. She does not want to treat Birkin as a
separate human being with an independent individuality but rather as
an extension of her personality and she ultimately tries to dominate
him. Ironically, her intellectuality and domineering personality hide a
strong sense of insecurity.
Obviously Hermione stands for modern civilization. In terms of
technology, the modern world has achieved a high position on the way
of progress. But the price has been too high and for all its greatness
modem industrialism is self-destructive, spreading death and ugliness.
Like modern civilization, Hermione is hollow at the core. She resorts
to her upper class values to compensate for the vacuum which she
feels within.
Ironically, when Birkin ends his relationship with Hermione, he
falls in the trap of Ursula who, despite being radically different from

3
Hermione, wants to mother him and manipulate him in her own way.
Neither woman treats him as an independent person with a free spirit
which desires to be recognized but not 'stifled' through 'merging' with
another human being:

He felt tired and weak. Yet also he was relieved. He gave up his old position. He
went and sat on the bank. No doubt Ursula was right. It was true, really, what she said.
He knew that his spirituality was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of
pleasure in self-destruction. There really was a certain stimulant in self-destruction, for
him - especially when it was translated spiritual1y. But then he knew it - he knew it, and
had done. And was not Ursula's way of emotional intimacy, emotional and physical; was
it not just as dangerous as Hermione's abstract spiritual intimacy? Fusion, fusion, this
horrible fusion of two beings, which every woman and most men insisted on, was it not
nauseous and horrible anyhow, whether it was a fusion of the spirit or of the emotional
body? Hermione saw herself as the perfect Idea, to which all men must come: and
Ursula was the perfect Womb, the bath of birth, to which all men must come! And both
were horrible, why could they not remain individuals, limited by their own limits? Why
this dreadful all-comprehensiveness, this hateful tyranny? -Why not leave the other
being free, why try to absorb, or melt, or merge? One might abandon oneself utterly, to
the moments, but not to any other being. (p. 348)

Had Lawrence offered Birkin the right woman without any

conflict, the book would have been different and less dramatic. As it
is, Ursula and Birkin have to work out a love relationship that
achieves 'a pure stable equilibrium between the lovers'.
Ursula is sensitive, possessive, and protective. She struggles so
much to assert to Birkin that she should be sufficient for him without
his 'special' friendship with Gerald. The whole novel enacts a drama
related to the search for a lasting relation between the sexes and how
such a bond may provide some 'personal immunity amid the public
disaster'. The marriage of Birkin and Ursula is a relative success
especially if it has to be contrasted with the destructive passion of
Gerald and Gudrun.
To believe that Birkin is a positive portrayal of the individual who
is seeking personal salvation as a result of his disillusionment with the
public side of life is certainly to simplify the issue. Presumably, he is
the antithesis of Gerald who is purely self-destructive and sick to the
backbone. However, a critical analysis of Birkin will prove that he,
too, is sick, submitting to despondency and despair. His view of
people is certainly unhealthy and reflects a troubled personality
verging on misanthropy:

4
 'I myself can never see why one should take account of people, just because they
happen to be in the room with one: why should I know they are there?' (p. 26)
'Not many people are anything at all',… 'They jingle and giggle. It would be much
better if they were just wiped out. Essentially, they don't exist, they aren't there.' (p. 27)
'Let mankind pass away - time it did. The creative utterances will not cease, they
will only be there. Humanity doesn't embody the utterance of the incomprehensible any
more. Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way. Let
humanity disappear as quick as possible.' (p. 65)

A more obvious sign of Birkin's sickness is to be found in the

chapter entitled 'Excurse' where Ursula denounces his sexual
propensities associating his sex life with 'death' and 'foulness' and
calling it a mixture of spirituality and dirt. She calls him 'obscene',
'perverse' and 'death eating'. Birkin admits all these charges,
recognizing that he was 'perverse, so spiritual on the one hand, and in
some strange way, degraded on the other'; 'he knew that his spirituality
was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in self-
destruction'. (pp. 344-8)

'The pleasure in self-destruction' is partly due to the dominance of

a hostile world which creates unhealthy conditions for a creative
existence, and partly a result of the 'unstable ego' which Lawrence has
spoken about:

You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is
another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes
through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any other we've
been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged
element. (3)

Lawrence's characters do have social life but more importantly

they have their psychic existence which primarily motivates their
action. Birkin's 'pleasure in self-destruction' is certainly part of
Lawrence's ability to explore the depth of human nature and find
'destructiveness' and instability underlying even a so-called positive
character like Birkin.
The period of intense conflict between Birkin and Ursula
eventually results in their marriage to consummate their separate

5
being in 'a new paradisal unit regained from the duality'. The form
their marriage takes is against all social conventions. They give up
their jobs and renounce all possessions and decide to 'wander away
from the world's somewheres into [their] own nowhere', contending
the possibility 'to be free, in a free place, with a few other people'.
Presumably, this is a Lawrencian ideal of a life which does not restrict
the lovers to social order or any conventional life which might affect
their creative existence. However, from a practical viewpoint this
'utopia' looks somewhat far-fetched and too abstract. To stop working
is certainly destructive for both the individual and society; to renounce
possessions even of a chair is quite impractical; for man cannot
survive without at least a few possessions. Birkin's justification that
possession might confine them and relate them to 'an old base world'
is not really convincing: to live almost in isolation is difficult to work
out since there is a strong interdependence between the individual and
society without which life cannot go on. Of course one can understand
Lawrence's dissatisfaction and even disgust with a society that is too
oppressive and at war with itself in every form of life, but to go to the
extreme of 'isolation' is unworkable, to say the least. Lawrence seems
here to be confined to an idea which he imposes on the narrative, as a
result of his extreme reaction against society and his concomitant
over-enthusiasm to preach isolation. According to John Bayley,
Lawrence's abstract idea of character is sometimes responsible for
being unable to create an artistic distance between himself and his
characters:

The great conventional character can only be created by love, by our delight in the
existence of another person; and conversely the reality of love can only be conveyed
through the medium of such characters. For in the hands of a master their existence
enables us both to see them from the outside and to feel what they are feeling, both to be
aware as a phenomenon and to experience it vicariously in ourselves. (4)

On the basis of this assumption, Bayley concludes that Lawrence

cannot create characters of love because the dominance of his
intellect and ideas is pervasive in his narrative. Bayley quotes
Lawrence's famous remark about the absence of 'the old stable ego of
the character' and suggests that his preoccupation with universal and
archetypal forces prevents him from observing the significance of the
characteristics which make people different. Lawrence is confined to

6
an idea of what people are like which prevents him from portraying
real characters distinct from his personality, Besides Anna and
Vronsky, for example, or Othello and Desdemona, Birkin and Ursula
are 'bloodless ghosts'.(5)
Regardless of Bayley's general views about Lawrence, his
particular criticism that in Women in Love the author's presence is
strongly felt seems to be largely fair. At times Birkin uses an abstract
kind of language that is hardly suitable for a character that has been
objectified and dramatically presented. The above mentioned passage
about Birkin's repulsion of having a 'fusion' with either Hermione or
Ursula is openly didactic and is a proof of Lawrence's enthusiasm to
show his own distaste of the possessiveness of women. Even while the
two lovers, Birkin and Ursula, are quarrelling in the chapter 'Excurse',
they use abstract Lawrencian expressions that are not particularly
suitable for the situation such as 'truth lover', 'purity monger', 'eater of
corpses', 'death eating', 'spiritual intimacy', 'emotional jealous
intimacy', etc. By the same token, when Birkin proposes to Gerald in
the chapter 'Man to Man' that they should swear a 'Blutbruderschaft'
(blood brotherhood), he not only appears confined to an idea which is
somewhat eccentric but he also uses a language - such as 'implicitly',
'perfectly', 'ultimately', and 'organically' - that is typical of the
insistence of a preacher:

'You know how the old German knights used to swear a Blucbruderschaft,' he said
to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.
'Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other's blood into the cut?' said
Gerald.
'Yes - and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives. That is what
we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete. But we ought to swear to love each other,
you and I, implicitly, and perfectly, finally without any possibility of going back on it.'...
'We will swear to each other, one day, shall we?' pleaded Birkin. 'We will swear to
stand by each other - be true to each other - ultimately - infallibly - given to each other,
organically - without possibility of taking back.' (pp. 231-2)

The fact that Birkin is a self-portrait of Lawrence should not

concern us here. Neither should we be deluded that Birkin is not
always admirable and is sometimes criticized by Ursula as being a
pervert and a preacher. This is a remarkable way of self-criticism, but
it does not obliterate or even reduce the charge of didacticism;

7
preaching under any disguise, is unjustifiable especially if the writer is
dealing with concrete situation.
Actua1ly, Lawrence's greatness is not so much related to day-to-
day reality, but rather to his ability to explore the mystery of the
cosmos, and penetrate the deep recesses of human nature. In those
examples, the poetic language which he is a master of is absolutely
justifiable and has the magical effect of submerging the reader into a
situation of a 'willing suspension of disbelief' which silences his
possible objection to the author's infiltrating didacticism.
Lawrence is probably far more successful in portraying the
character of Gerald than that of Birkin. Unlike Birkin who is
sometimes distorted by preaching and by using an abstract language,
Gerald is more credible as a lively character with flesh and blood; he
is also more mature: one sign of his maturity is that he does not take
Birkin too seriously. He stands as the 'god of the machine' and as a
symbol of a self-destructive civilization. In theory, he opposes all the
Lawrencian ideals of 'spontaneity' and of having a relationship where
'a pure stable equilibrium between the lovers' is realized. He leads a
life depending on will power which he exercises on the miners by
introducing up-to-dare methods, unconcerned with the human price of
progress. This wil1 power is symbolically illustrated by forcing the
Arab mare to confront the train, an apt emblem of the will imposed on
the instinctive world of animals. His relationship with Gudrun is a
result of fu1filling his desire to exercise power and sensual pleasure.
Ironically, despite his strength, he feels insecure and, at times, looks at
Gudrun as a comforting mother-figure.
There is no doubt that Gerald is the victim of the author's scheme
of Women in Love. Lawrence wants to portray Gerald as the negative
force of self-destructive industrialism; but Gerald is fully 'internalized'
and a comprehensive picture of both his external and internal life is
dramatically presented. There is something like a convention in fiction
which states that 'knowledge breeds sympathy: to understand all is to
forgive all'. On this basis, many readers have found Gerald a more
sympathetic figure than Lawrence has intended. (6) His inability to
provide a healthy kind of love for Gudrun is absolutely tragic. He is
aware of his deadness within and suffers so much when he is
confronted with the fact that he can neither love Gudrun nor anyone
else. It is bitterly moving when somebody is aware of one's

8
limitations, sense of nihilism and consequently of predicament and
despair. Probably modern readers sympathize with Gerald because
they can identify with him on the grounds of suffering from similar
conditions. His death for Lawrence is symbolic of the industrious but
insensitive class which is already spiritually dead and heading for its
own destruction. His death for the reader represents the tragedy of
modern man: lack of faith in God (Gerald is 'born an unbeliever');
inability to respond to love and friendship; distrust of people and
institutions; and an awareness of the vacuum within and without. In a
word, Gerald's tragedy is that of those who firmly believe in the
meaninglessness of life and consequently deny the sanctity of
existence. Therefore, we feel more on the side of Gerald when Gudrun
is not moved by his death, even though the woman suffers from a
passion which is equally destructive and similar to that of Gerald in
many ways.
One possible interpretation for the sympathetic treatment of
Gerald is that Lawrence himself is perhaps more drawn, at least at a
subconscious level, to the destructive force which applies to the
human side of Gerald. It is extremely difficult to imagine writers who
are able to provide an overall picture of a particular character without
having themselves something of that portrait, no matter how objective
they appear to be. Similarly, Shakespeare may not approve of the
murder committed by Macbeth; nonetheless, there is no absolute
condemnation but rather awareness of the limitation of humans and
their blind ambition in the face of temptation: Macbeth is both a
victim and a victimizer. The same thing can be said of Raskolnikov in
Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment who is vividly shown to be more
of a victim than the woman he murdered. Hence the main irony of
Women in Love: the powerful destructiveness in Gerald is often
echoed in Birkin in a different way, and both kinds are inevitably a
reflection of Lawrence himself. In other words, if individuals can
partially withdraw from a self-destructive world, they can hardly live
in peace inside themselves because there is so much destructiveness
inherent within their very soul, and this is their real tragedy. For that
reason, the end of the novel appears a little strained: the incomplete
relationship between Birkin and Ursula is not only marred by the
absence of a Gerald but rather by the presence of so much
destructiveness engulfing man from within and without.

9
 The novel is open-ended and explorative, but it reflects the idea
that the so-called pure love is more of a cultural ideal which ignores
the complicated psychology of Man who is by nature unstable
emotionally and cannot be controlled. Despite all the desperate
attempts of Birkin to propagate the idea of looking at the other as an
independent human being, he cannot apply it himself. He tries to
impose his thirst for a Gerald on another person, ignoring Ursula's
rejection of the whole idea and the possibility that she may have a
similar, though perhaps different kind of need. Pure love is a principle
that can never be fully realized within a relationship conducted by
men and women whose human nature is largely loose, promiscuous
and egoistic. Thus the future for the relationship between Birkin and
Ursula is somewhat vague and speculative. However, it is unlikely that
Birkin's need for an ideal friendship with a man will be realized
without severe consequences.

10
 Notes

1. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1981), pp. 11-12. All later references to the novel are to this
edition.

2. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (London, 1955), P. 167.

3. Quoted in D. H. Lawrence: A Collection a Critical Essays, ed.

Mark Spilka: (Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs: 1963), P.52.

4. John Bailey, The Characters of Love (London; Constable,

1960), p. 39.

5. Ibid. P.29.

6. See W. W. Robson, 'D. H. Lawrence and Women in Love', in

The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 7
(Harmondswonh: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 314.
1.

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