Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [13]
Pussum is free to be herself. As a model, of course, she has chosen a profession that goes against the conventions of her day. Beyond this, she does not pay lip service to a value system in which she does not believe. She is pregnant with Halliday’s child, but she seems to have no desire to get married, nor even to contemplate the advantages of marriage or its necessity as a social convention or a means of economic security. In fact, her contempt for convention is such that she sleeps with Gerald during her pregnancy and in Halliday’s apartment. She is not a hater of men, but she is a woman without fear, or rather, she is a woman who evidently only fears herself, since the only thing she admits to fearing are black beetles, with which she is identified.
Having cleared the deck, so to speak, of erroneous possibilities for reinventing love in modern times, Lawrence now turns his attention quite seriously to Ursula and Birkin. True, the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald opens the novel and for all practical purposes closes it, but it is fated from the start, as we have seen, to be something that must be played out like a Greek tragedy from which there is no escape. In the relationship between Ursula and Birkin, though, Lawrence sets out to explore the meaning of love in our times. If, as argued throughout this essay, he acknowledges with Rimbaud that love has to be reinvented, love’s reinvention must take into account the realties of the modern age. Moreover, Lawrence must draw on the most important fund of knowledge he has on the subject, his relationship with Frieda. Lawrence rejects all formulas for love, which are faded and washed out by the centuries. The true meaning of love has to be as relevant to our time as Dante’s philosophy of true love was to his own. It must be real. Above all, it must be heartfelt. In a letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence writes:
I can only write what I feel pretty strongly about: and that, at present, is the relation between men and women. After all, it is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation. Or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women (The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 30).
It is clear from the passage already quoted in which Gudrun asks Ursula if she has considered marriage, that Ursula’s answer is neither a reflection of acquiescence to an outmoded tradition nor a dismissal of love. It is, however, a dismissal of love as it was presently constituted, “the end of experience,” as Ursula puts it at the start of the novel. On the other hand, it is clear that Ursula, unlike her sister, is open to the possibility of love, provided it is real love. However, it is fair to say that at the beginning of the novel neither she nor Birkin, nor for that matter anybody else, has any idea of what love means. Thus, as in Hamlet, in which the reader is invited to explore with the protagonist a variety of moral issues from the nature of duty and responsibility to the nature of love and friendship, Lawrence takes his characters on a voyage of self-discovery concerning the nature of love. He also invites the reader, and most of all himself, on that same and all-important journey. Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess has understood well Lawrence’s quality of using the novel to explore truth. In a very insightful comparison of the prose of Joyce and Lawrence, Burgess observes:
Stylistically, Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness that looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. No potential writer would ever take Lawrence