n  n   

I want to find you, where you don’t know your own existence, the you that your common self denies utterly. But I don’t want your good looks, and I don’t want your womanly feelings, and I don’t want your thoughts nor opinions nor your ideas—they are all bagatellas to me.

n  n
If you’ve already experienced gag reflex, then you know what to partly expect from this book. Yet to say this was all this book was about, would mean I did not take the time to read all of it.

After having had friendly debates about men, women, and the ways in which they love, you will appreciate dialogue that toys with the questions: Who is the wife? Who, the mistress? And what of the playboy? Publish this book today and it will center on the complexities of dating. This is considered “the most important work by the most important twentieth-century English novelist” most likely because of the way Lawrence tends to write about desire and passion. He does this perfectly in Sons and Lovers and he takes it to an even more disconcerting level in this novel. Perhaps what he does most beautifully is stick with themes and setting; choosing instead to define his characters by the way they live and think. Pierce through into an inner thought, travel through some idea, and this is how you get to sense each character.
n  n   

“You’ve got to lapse out before you can know what sensual reality is, lapse into unknowingness, and give up your volition.”

n  n
Find love in the form that works for you, is the message from Women in Love. It is a debate about the different forms of love and the choices each one has to choose his or her own kind of love: married love or partnership, passionate love or spiritual love.

The story focuses on feminist sisters, Gudrun and Ursula, and their significant others, Gerald and Birkin. Gudrun and Ursula are teachers who stand apart in society because of their ideals, even by the way they dress and interact with others (yes, a good shade of pink or yellow���or jeans in the midst of suits—always symbolizes the middle finger in the air). Is one woman “born a mistress?” Is the other settling for marriage or choosing love? To think, this was first published in a 1916 male repressive society, and yet these are female characters making such radical lifestyle choices, like Gudrun leaving home to live in London as a single artist.

Every December, Lawrence and I have our yearly encounter. In 2013 it was with Sons and Lovers. Last month, Women in Love. Though I saw him strike some universal themes with this work, I preferred the characters and story of Sons and Lovers, especially at those moments when the prose here deviated to this sort of madness:

n  …his body stretching and surging like the marsh-fire, stretching towards her, his hand coming straight forward like a stem. Her voluptuous, acute apprehension of him made the blood faint in her veins, her mind went dim and unconscious. And he rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence.n

Seriously, why did that last sentence even take place?

In her literary critique of this book, Virginia Woolf wrote, “…one feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or its effect upon the architect of the sentence.” Oddly, this is why I love D.H. Lawrence’s unpredictable prose and weird word repetition (it rubs off, I've been repeating sangfroid for days now).

The central claim of this book is that love between man and womb-an,
While spiritually profound, is yet not enough for a true man;

He must also have deep friendship with another man, like a flame
- Not in a homosexual way, as some braindead reviewers have claimed,

Reading their 2000s prejudices into the work of a proto-fascist
Who felt that masculine/feminine archetypes should be more stubborn and fractious,

That they should be of value in themselves, not just as the means to a union,
And that only by the rule of thirds can man achieve communion.

Holy crap what a miserable book. If your Emo or wannabe Emo this is the book for you. You hear people complain that Tolkien will write about a tree for 3 pages, well in this book the author will describe the same thought for 3 pages and then goes absolutely no where with it! My wife explained it best. There is no one in this book to root for. You just end up wishing all the characters would hold hands and jump off a bridge.

the author is obviously trying to make you think about sacrifice and love but ended up making me feel drained and delusional.

https://edebiyatdanostalji.blogspot.c...

A difficult, thought provoking, memorable, original, rewarding read about many issues including passion, love, marriage and relationships. Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are sisters in their 20s. Ursula is a teacher in the country and lives with her parents. Gudrun is an artist who comes back from London to see her family. Two men are introduced into their lives, Rupert Birkin, a teacher, and Gerald Critch, a successful businessman.

Whilst there is a dramatic ending, the novel does not have much plot momentum. It’s a novel that is concerned with ideas and the individual’s reason for being.

Here are some examples of the author’s writing style:
‘But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.’
‘Instead of chopping yourself down to fit the world, chop the world down to fit yourself.’
‘That’s the place to get to - nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewhere, into our own nowhere.’

Well, I finally finished. This is not my sort of book at all. I found it incredibly dull, did not feel connected to any of the characters and had mixed feelings about the writing. There were some beautiful passages describing landscape and some amusing dialogue but other sections that were repetitive (the word "loins" 7 times on one page) in ways I did not care for.

The novel itself was really dense and I probably didn't understand enough of it to make a fair review since half way through I started rushing through it so I could be done with it. Lots of discussions of love, existential angst, conflict between past/present/future, nihilism (expressed by Birkin) and more. Considered controversial at the time due to it's treatment of sexual themes but all quite tame for modern readers.

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.

This is another old review, written for another website back in 2003, my memory of this book is shoddy at best.

I believe D. H. Lawrence, despite writing constantly about men and women in a risqué manner for his time, is gay. Why do I say this? Because of the three Lawrence novels I've read to date in only one does he even get close to writing an authentic relationship between a man and a woman. It's not in the two novels I would expect though. In Lady Chatterly's Lover and in Women in Love Lawrence writes about women as if they are an alien species that he has heard about but never seen. In each book during the sensual scenes (because honestly there is no real sex in Lawrence's books and I'm really at a loss why everything he wrote was deemed pornographic, even for the tighter laced post-Victorian era he wrote in) between a man and a woman I really expected him in earnest to write that women have teeth down there. You know in their loin regions. Oh, and before I start the review proper the one novel that he seems to write women well is in The Rainbow, the first novel in the Trilogy that follows with Women in Love and ends with Aaron's Rod. But, as one last pre-review aside, The Rainbow could have just been called Jude the Obscure - Part 2 since it read exactly like a Thomas Hardy novel.

So, anyway Women in Love is by some strange group of polltakers considered the most widely read English novel of the 20th Century (2011 addition: I have no idea where I came across this fact). I doubt this, and if I'm wrong then people really need to get out and read more of the 20th Century Classics. The story involves two sisters (the women who will fall in love), and two men (the recipients of this affection). Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the daughters of the protagonist of The Rainbow, begin the novel by having a discussion about marriage. Ursula, the eldest daughter, is a schoolmistress (a teacher). Her sister, Gudrun, has just begun teaching also after a time away from their provincial hometown life. Gudrun was an artist of some merit that fluctuates throughout the novel to fit the scenes, but by an average account she made a modest success during her time in London. Why she returned to the backwoods home she grew up in is never quite explained, but she is back home, and that is enough for the novel.

The two sisters begin the novel by talking about marriage. Ursula for some unknown reason doesn't think she needs to get married, and this shocks her bohemian sister who for some reason can't understand why her sister would go against social customs. This scene is stupid in light of the novel taken as a whole. Both women throughout the novel change their opinion on this question with gusto. The reader after awhile has to wonder if Lawrence just happened to put words into the character's mouths to play devils advocate, or if he is trying to say something like women have a flippant nature. Besides very radical shifts in opinion the women are given very little description besides the color of clothes Gudrun is wears and that each are quite beautiful. What do they look like exactly? Well Lawrence is a bit vague on that. I never could quite get a mental image of either of them. Only one woman in the whole book is ever described in detail and she's a boyish built shorthaired baby-talking lispy nymph, who warrants pages of description but who is pretty much unnecessary for the plot.

The women really aren't important to the novel though, even though they are in the title. The real characters are the two men, Birkin and Gerald. Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, is a local teacher also. Sometimes he's a preacher though; I couldn't tell which he really was. Once he was even something like the principal of the school. Oh but who cares for consistency, especially since he never seems to go to work or have any material responsibilities. The details aren't important anyway, but I'll get to that in a bit. Birkin is basically an opinionated bore, dressed in a Heathcliff-esque (Wuthering Heights reference, not the lazy cat) brooding manner who spouts off his quasi-naturalism to anyone happening to cross his path. Birkin's angry all the time, quite violent in speech and sickly. He is never painted in a good light and doesn't represent a very good model for Lawrence's personal philosophy (if this is what he is trying to achieve with the character). Ursula falls in love with this pig headed fool.

Gudrun falls in love with the other man, Gerald. Gerald's from a rich family that owns all of the coal mines in the surrounding area. He's quite good looking in a Germanic / Nordic way, and is the most richly described character in the book. He's just about as flippant as the women are though (as fitting the bottom to Birkin's top). He likes being a captain of industry. He hates being a captain of industry. He is having the time of his life with his adventurous lifestyle. Everything bores him to tears. He's a spineless worm around Gudrun. He's a domineering patriarch towards Gudrun. Why does he change? Sometimes we are given hints, sometimes the changes come after talking to Birkin, but most of the time they just seem to change in order to have something else for Birkin to expound about. One other thing about Gerald, Birkin loves him quite passionately and believes that a pure love between two men is stronger than any love a man and a woman can share.

So, what is the novel about? Basically these four people squabbling over each other and having a lot of fights based on 'strongly' held ideals. Not much happens in the novel. Events take place in the background, but the plot is never driven. There are not enough characters to create any intrigue over the romantic outcome, and the characters all seem to fall right in line with their respective partners too easily. Of course they fight, but every time one of them really gets angry the other one always seems to come crawling back in beaten submission to the gloriousness of the other. This is played out in just about every possible permutation (with the exception of Gudrun who only fluctuates between icy bitch and vaguely interested in Gerald (but she is a woman in love don't forget)). The novel breaks down to being about the ideas that Birkin holds and to a lesser extent the ideas of the other characters. None of the other three hold ideas drastically different from Birkin's though; they just aren't quite as passionate about them and that works as a set up for Birkin's angry assaults.

So what are the basic ideas? I'll explain them this way first. If you've ever read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged take away the plot, keep the characters and everything about them, then remove the strong capitalist overtones but keep the strong individualism, bull headedness, and the way the strong characters dominant and lay themselves prostrate to each other and you've got the general idea of this novel. Or better yet read anything by Neitzsche and take away all the bookishness of his philological learning and just keep the random attacks on everything in modern society and you've got a pretty fair picture of Birkin. And Birkin is the novel.

If those descriptions don't help basically Birkin believes that everything in modern society is diluted, horrible, weak and wrong. Everything good about the world has been bastardized into a pale spectre of it's true self, and life is basically lived inauthentically by just about everyone. Only a few people are aware enough to realize this, and for those few living just a few pure moments is more valuable then living a lifetime like the masses do. Maybe if I hadn't read many other books that deal with this same idea I would find the ideas in this novel novel, but honestly nothing said was very interesting to me. I'd heard it all before, and read it in either more eloquent manners or with plots that sustained my interest beyond the constant preaching. When modern society isn't being critiqued to death various forms of love are being argued. These arguments could all have been taken straight out of Plato's Symposium with Birkin as the wise but assholeish Socrates at the helm.

On the topic of love, there are only two scenes where passion takes any kind of substantial form. The first is between the two men when they decide to wrestle each other. During this scene their 'oneness' gets penetrated by the other, and Birkin is surprised when Gerald rises up in a welcoming motion over powers and tops him. The only other scene is between Ursula and Birkin. This scene deals mostly with the mightiness of Birkin's loins, and the realization that not all truth of the world springs from the phallic center of man but deeper mystery's lie in the whole body of a man (man meaning man, not a pre PC word for people). Both scenes are quite homoerotic and added to my feeling that Lawrence only included the women to the novel as a social convention. The real love story is between the two men. The ideal a woman can fill in Lawrence's world is as an attractive beard that will act as a shield between the sensitive man and a harsh world.

I did like the book though, all criticism aside. I think that Lawrence is a very talented writer and worth being read. Even though the content of the book did little for me his writing style was wonderful and his description of place is amazing. I'd highly recommend The Rainbow to people interested in trying out Lawrence though. Actually I would recommend reading Thomas Hardy to anyone interested in the topics of pastoral English life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it's interplay between tradition and modernity as it relates to individual versus society. This novel, while considered a classic, I think boils down more to being an angry book by a man angry about the treatment his earlier books had received. It was difficult not perceiving this book as a five hundred-page rant by Lawrence.

This wasn't much of a consumer review, but basically I'd say if you are interested in reading the canon of 20th century English novels then you should check this out. If you are looking for a nice easy read I'd avoid this one and settle for something more interesting from the same time period. Who would I recommend? Well Thomas Hardy as I said, or Anton Chekov. I'm sure there are many other wonderful late 19th century writers who tackle Lawrence's terrain in a more enjoyable manner. I just realized that I'm only recommending 19th century authors in lieu of this 20th century writer. Maybe Lawrence would have been a better fit to the previous century. As a last stalwart against the High Modernist tradition emerging in the early 20th century he comes across as a bitter and reactionary opponent to the coming times, but his anger makes most of his arguments seem half-baked and impotent.

Prin acțiunea și dialogul personajelor cărții, Lawrence explorează teme mari: dihotomiile umanității și naturii, masculin și feminin, intelectualism și spontaneitate, așteptări sociale și dorințe individuale.

"- Dar nu poți înlătura cu totul spiritul competitiv, spuse Gerald. Este unul dintre stimulentele necesare producției și progresului."

"- Norme? Nu. Urăsc normele. Ele sînt totuși necesare oamenilor de rînd. Cînd ești cineva poți să fii tu însuți și să faci ceea ce-ți place."

What a pretentious sack of shit. Sorry, but this book makes me so mad I can't even think. Why am I mad reading Lawrence? Where to begin. All the characters are unlikeable, especially the one named Birkin, who apparently personifies Lawrence in retrospect. His misogyny and phallocentrism sickens me. The story doesn't seem to go anywhere, just a bunch of long long ramblings by some privileged men and women who don't even know what to do with their lives. And some scene just doesn't even make sense. Argh I hate this book.

More like Men In Love, am I right?

If there is anything like a truth to sexual relations, I'd say that Lawrence's account here comes pretty close to capturing at least one fold of the central knot of it. He weaves his narrative around four centers of consciousness, two male, and two female, in an effort to capture the essential meaning of their relations to themselves, to one another, and to the nothingness from which their consciousness springs, from moment to moment. He movingly captures the shimmering movement of their consciousnesses over the fathomless darkness of mere being.

The thread of narrative follows them as they dissolve into liminal, pre-reflective, pre-personal levels of purely immersive sense experience. We see them there scattered beyond all conceptual bounds, in a quivering, unreal because too real world of pure senseless, impersonal image. We see them before the question of meaning even has any meaning. And from there the narrative follows them also as they gather themselves back up out of the experienced flux, propping themselves up with their relationship to one another, and with their own bubble of meanings. Following the death of his father, Gerard finds himself to be hollowed out, and describes himself as a shimmering bubble of consciousness enveloping a dark core of nothingness. The brush with death only reveals the permanent, overlooked truth: that this is indeed, what a personality is, a shimmering bubble around a void.

To escape from the knowledge of absolute negation that death brings, each wagers on love. The dynamic of the characters' lives thus modulates itself between the two poles of death and love, between the two absolutes of negation and ecstasy.

It is worth reading this if only to witness this seemingly magical oscillation it sustains between the two extremities of our being: from the lucid world of waking consciousness, in which we have our definite contours and stance in things, pragmatic fixity, to the underworld at which we feel ourselves to be, ultimately, strangers to ourselves. Faceless. Shapeless. Unknown. Unfathomably other to ourselves. It is there that Lawrence's story asks us we must meet, if we are to really say we love each other. It is there that we must forge our relations with one another, ourselves, and the world.

"There is," he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, "a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you-not in the emotional loving plane-but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me."

This encounter with nothingness is not, I think, the essence of truth for him as it was for later existentialist writers. It seems to be rather springboard for a more genuine creation. The encounter with nothingness is the seed of everything, of a genuine creation, relation, and truth. This is because it is the true impersonal seed of the personality, and thus, of our world.

I should say that the frothy steaminess of the language was, at times, alienating for me. Perhaps it is a matter of incompatible sensibilities here; I tend to prefer works that lavish the most impressionistically detailed descriptions on the marginal incidents of life, while sketching the climactic, consummatory moments from a respectful remove, with the infinite suggestivity that can be effected only by the sidelong glance cast by sparse simplicity of description. Melodrama such as Lawrence oftentimes indulges in at key moments of dialogue obscures for me the meaning he so desperately wishes to convey by those very passages. Hyperbole ironically diminishes and distorts truth.

Simone de Beauvoir, in "The Second Sex," criticized Lawrence's boastful claims of this work, his claim, namely, that he was finally showing an authentic portrait of "woman becoming individual." However, what Lawrence attempts to show here is that we have been mistaken about our true relations because we have been mistaken about ourselves. Through Ursula and Birkin's relationship, he shows that "woman becoming individual" makes possible the emergence of the true relationship between man and woman; it reveals the true contours of their essential otherness to each other. De Beauvoir condemns Lawrence of distorting his portrait of his characters - both male and female - by projecting his foregone essentialist conclusions into it.

But it is unfair to criticize an author for being true to the very essence of his vision. Ursula and Birkin are not just isolated, autonomous individuals for him, but centers of force in the larger creative process of the world. They are thus defined not just in themselves, but also in terms of their irreducible otherness to each other, an otherness which is at times a source of deep attraction, at others, of irreconcilable opposition. They are irreducibly individual, just as they are participants in archetypal types: each is also Man, the active principle, and Woman, the subtle principle.

In Lawrence's vision, we are ourselves - centers, unities, worlds unto ourselves - and we are also caught in a web of relations. We are individuals who are also a part of a dual pattern. The characters acquire deeper definition not merely as autonomous subjects, but by adopting, willy-nilly, a position in a world of countervailing forces, hence all the images of flux he uses to structure the most revelatory moments in the story. It is by opposing each other, just as well as by learning to love each other, that they acquire fuller being. And it is by their love of one another and by their struggle against one another that they oppose the ultimate opposer, death, whose specter from early on comes to stalk the consciousness of them all.

Man is to woman, as woman is to man, the face of nature come ecstatically, terrifyingly close. His male and female characters alike show a fear of ultimate intimacy with one another which is a little like the fear of self-annihilation. This is because both instinctively seek to find in the relation with the other the abolition of separate subjectivity in favour of the higher awareness that can only be found on the other side of self-surrender in relation. His descriptions of the shedding aside of self of both parties can be pretty gut-wrenching if you let them sink in, emotionally, even by today's pornographic standards. Their hunger for a kind of absolute closeness can border on the disturbing. Nobody really wants to go peering that deeply into the fabric of one's relations as these characters end up doing.

Ironically though, in the very concluding chapter of her great work, de Beauvoir finds herself agreeing with the core of Lawrence's insight into the unity emerging from oppositional duality that structures the human condition:

“To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.”

All in all, the book is a call to a deeper meditation, on our part, on the deeper spiritual meaning of our relations. If you open yourself up to its searching light, it can reorganize your insides, bringing new clarity, and perhaps, revealing new priorities.