“It is like a country in an underworld,” said Gudrun. “The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous—it’s really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.”The characters, too, have a symbolic dimension, occupying an individual dimension but also standing in for social classes, racial types, and cosmic principles. Ursula and Birkin are Woman and Man in the ideal, able to consummate their natures by casting off all external determinants and becoming pure selves able to join in a perfect marriage. Despite his intense misanthropy, his loyalty to whatever vast inhuman principle subtends mere humanity—he says, "Man is a mistake, he must go"—Birkin speaks for Lawrence's principle of absolute individuality:
“But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: ‘Now you’ve got what you want—you’ve got your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don’t obstruct me.’”The marriage Birkin proposes to Ursula—who had espoused a similarly individualist worldview at the end of The Rainbow—will transcend mere love, mere sex, the unsatisfying union of bodies, because it will join the husband's and the wife's souls in a sustaining tension. When Ursula first hears his idea—for context, they are watching Birkin's pet tomcat bat with its paw at a submissive female feline—she scoffs, to which he replies:
“I agree that the Wille zur Macht is a base and petty thing. But with the Mino [i.e., the tomcat], it is the desire to bring this female cat into a pure stable equilibrium, a transcendent and abiding rapport with the single male. Whereas without him, as you see, she is a mere stray, a fluffy sporadic bit of chaos. It is a volonté de pouvoir, if you like, a will to ability, taking pouvoir as a verb.”In other words, Ursula protests what she sees as a misogynist sophistry as old as monotheism: a rhetorical justification of male dominance that runs from Genesis to Nietzsche, observable, too, in nature. Yet for Rupert, the will-to-power in the union of man and woman finally consummates itself in a marriage of true minds that has little to do with bodies, and still less to do with the uniting of property or the establishment of a lineage, those traditional biological and social functions of marriage. It's unimaginable that any of the novel's main characters would ever have children, not least because—like Milton's rebel angels—they declare themselves parentless, without history, pure gnostic emissaries of the true god on this alien earth, as Ursula imagines in the late passage that hymns her successful marriage to Rupert:
“Ah—! Sophistries! It’s the old Adam.”
“Oh yes. Adam kept Eve in the indestructible paradise, when he kept her single with himself, like a star in its orbit.”
She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should ‘remember’! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper notes, sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of reality, where she had never existed before.But Gudrun and Gerald's affair is destined to be different. "Destined" is the main word that attaches to Gerald overall. He accidentally shot and killed his brother as a child, though Birkin and the sisters all wonder if there's any such thing as an accident in a case like that, with Birkin reflecting, "He did not believe that there was any such thing as accident. It all hung together, in the deepest sense." Later in the novel, his little sister Diana drowns at a boating party, her watery grave another symbol of the "underworld" that threatens to suck the characters down.
But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing. Perhaps he was thirty years old, perhaps more. His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. “His totem is the wolf,” she repeated to herself. “His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.”Gerald fails to love two of the main characters: both Birkin and Gudrun. For Birkin, the marriage of man and woman should be complemented by a different but equivalent love of man and man. Lawrence, exegete of 19th-century American literature, was perhaps inspired by Whitman's distinction between amative love (sexual desire between man and woman) and adhesive love (comradely affection between man and man). As in Whitman, however, this superficial Platonism shades into outright homoerotics. In perhaps the novel's most famous passage, Birkin and Gerald sportively wrestle naked in a drawing room:
So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense. He seemed to penetrate into Gerald’s more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection, always seizing with some rapid necromantic fore-knowledge every motion of the other flesh, converting and counteracting it, playing upon the limbs and trunk of Gerald like some hard wind. It was as if Birkin’s whole physical intelligence interpenetrated into Gerald’s body, as if his fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man, like some potency, casting a fine net, a prison, through the muscles into the very depths of Gerald’s physical being.Despite this interpenetration of man and man, however, Gerald doesn't understand or pretends not to understand Birkin's offer of love. Likewise, his obsessive lust for Gudrun—in another memorable passage, he sneaks into her family's house late at night to make love to her after his father's death—doesn't end in anything like the utopic marriage of Birkin and Ursula. Rather, when the characters sojourn to the Alps for a Continental vacation, their affair culminates in an attempted murder and a successful suicide.
He was really like one of the 'little people' who have no soul, who has found his mate in a human being. But he suffered in his discovery. She too was fascinated by him, fascinated, as if some strange creature, a rabbit or a bat, or a brown seal, had begun to talk to her.The stunted, trollish Loerke is distinctly implied to be gay, since he travels and rooms with a strapping man, but we are also told that he sexually preys on and abuses teenaged girls, the models for his art. If the narrator compares him to a rabbit, a bat, and a seal—as well, at one point, to a "street Arab"—Gerald and Birkin join in with further elaboration:
“He lives like a rat, in the river of corruption, just where it falls over into the bottomless pit. He’s further on than we are. He hates the ideal more acutely. He hates the ideal utterly, yet it still dominates him. I expect he is a Jew—or part Jewish.”In an essay on the novel from her collection Contraries, Joyce Carol Oates referred to Women in Love as Lawrence's Götterdämmerung, but considering this extravagant abjection of Loerke—gay and Jewish, verminous and perverse, an inner tooth gnawing away at western civilization—we might less decorously accuse the author of anticipating the Holocaust.
“Probably,” said Gerald.
“He is a gnawing little negation, gnawing at the roots of life.”
"It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see—it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art."While this is obviously counter to Lawrence's stated views—in his criticism, he championed Romantic organicism and moral art and rejected the aesthetic school of Flaubert, Mann, and Joyce as stiff and anti-vital—it's hard not to see a reflection on this very novel's imagistic and theatrical form in Loerke's words. Lawrence himself counseled readers to trust the tale, not the teller—and here the tale seems to align itself with its ostensible villain.
