Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [17]
Regarding the question of whether Lawrence was homosexual, the discussion often turns on the nature of homosexuality itself. Here, however, we see the Oedipus complex brought into a different light. It is not merely a complex of thought and feeling adapted at a vulnerable age in one’s childhood but an active condition that can endure as long as the mother is alive and even beyond her death. Mrs. Lawrence actively discouraged Lawrence in his love of other females, as she had Lawrence’s brother William Ernest before him. Nor is it a question of finding in Frieda, who was six years older than Lawrence, a mother substitute, but a woman who could counterbalance his mother’s will, still very much alive in Lawrence’s consciousness after his mother’s death.
Moreover, as Lawrence himself was aware, though Mrs. Lawrence undermined Lawrence’s love for Jessie, she left him free to adore Jessie’s brother, Alan. Lawrence followed Alan around the farm as he did his chores, and the two spent a great deal of time in the hay in the barn, talking at times with a burning intimacy. There is no record of whether this friendship was ever sexually consummated. However, Lawrence supposedly told Compton Mackenzie, “I believe that the nearest I’ve ever come to perfect love was with a young coal-miner when I was about sixteen.” As Moore points out in The Priest of Love, Alan Chambers was a farm boy, not a coal miner. This does not necessarily mean that they are not one and the same person. Lawrence, normally brutally truthful, might have found this situation too delicate to be open about. After all, it would have needlessly exposed not only Alan, but Jessie and the entire Chambers family, to ridicule in a rural area where such goings-on were not taken in stride. The point Lawrence is making, regardless of who it was, is that he had a near perfect love not with a woman, but a man.
The model for the Gerald—Birkin relationship is Lawrence himself and his friend, the writer John Middleton Murry. Lawrence would also use Murry and his wife, the short story writer Katherine Mansfield, as models for the dramatic arguments between Gerald and Gudrun that lead to Gerald’s death at the end of Women in Love. Murry and Mansfield were experiencing their own problems because Mansfield had fallen in love with another friend of Lawrence’s, Mark Gertler. Lawrence used this real-life drama to his own advantage, making Gertler his model for Loerke. Murry did double duty in the novel. According to Murry, in his autobiography Between Two Worlds (1935), his relationship with Lawrence closely paralleled the scene between Birkin and Gerald in “Gladiatorial.” Lawrence insisted that he and Murry have a Blutbruderschaft, swearing eternal friendship.
As the two men walked over the moors, Murry kept insisting he needed no sacrament: “If I love you, and you know I love you, isn’t that enough?” But Lawrence would rage at him, “I hate your love, I hate it. You’re an obscene bug, sucking my life away” (Moore, p. 260).
Lawrence wanted wrestling as part of the blood brother pact between the two men, just as took place between Gerald and Birkin. It is unclear whether it went further. Frieda appears to dismiss any homosexual affair between Lawrence and Murry or anyone else. Elsewhere, she writes that Lawrence’s homosexuality lasted only a short time. Those statements would appear to contradict each other.
The strongest argument against the charge that Lawrence uses Women in Love to advocate homosexual practices as the true road to modern