Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [16]
Whatever else one might think of Lawrence, the fact is that he examines the malaise of love in his time and works through it to a solution. T. S. Eliot, who was so scathing about Lawrence, explores similar ground in his poetry. His hero (or antihero) Sweeney, who appears in several poems, is full of crude, sexual confidence, anticipating the lover of the typist in The Waste Land, who is more than content to have meaningless sex, as is the typist herself. These are not just individual failings but in Eliot’s poetry are the failings of his generation, a generation incapable of love or passion. Even assuming this to be true, Eliot had no solution. Lawrence, influenced by French Symbolism, as was Eliot, commiserates with Rimbaud and then starts out to identify the problem more fully, concluding that not only does love have to be reinvented, but in the process life must be reinvented with it.
We must now turn our attention to Birkin’s relationship with Gerald, which has an especially modern character and which Lawrence depicts in an exceedingly daring and advanced way. Again, it appears more than just mere coincidence that Rimbaud, shockingly, and often amusingly, describes his homosexual relationship with Verlaine, a relationship that led the poet to again reflect on male and female love. Birkin proposes an enduring friendship with Gerald:
“You know how the old German knights used to swear a Blutbruderschaft,” 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 No wounds, that is obsolete.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” (p. 206).
Lawrence forces us to admit the latent homosexual character of this macho act. Gerald opts to table the decision “till I understand it better” but he does not dismiss it out of hand. In the chapter “Gladiatorial,” which, significantly, follows “Moony,” where Birkin and Ursula establish the foundation for their relationship and lay down the tenets for modern love, the homosexual character of Birkin’s relationship with Gerald is lent physical contact. It is of such an intensity one might call it symbolic sex. In describing what happens as “a kind of mutual physical understanding,” Lawrence here explores a love that circumvents the brain and is present to the body, or, as Lawrence would have it, to the blood.
There is no platonic love here, despite the fact that Birkin’s love is never sexually consummated with Gerald. When Birkin says at the end of the novel, “He should have loved me,” it is clear that what he means is a fully realized sexual, as well as spiritual love. In this way, Birkin implies, Gerald would have been saved from the fate of death. Lawrence is an advocate for a bisexual love, much as Shakespeare was when he wrote, in “Sonnet 144”:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman, colour’d ill.
It is obvious here that the ill-colored spirit in Lawrence’s work is the physically fairer Gerald, not the woman, Ursula. It is also clear that Ursula has every right to object to Birkin’s intrusive desire for Gerald, and that her centeredness is what keeps Birkin grounded.
The relationship between Gerald and Birkin raises the issue of Lawrence’s own sexual preferences, the more so because Lawrence, especially in Women in Love, is not only a novelist but an advocate of a way of life. Sons and Lovers reveals a classic Oedipus complex. Paul’s love for his mother, as with Lawrence’s relationship with his own, went beyond anything that could reasonably be described as normal. Lawrence himself was well aware of this.