Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [19]
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
“And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,” she cried. “I believe I even hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn’t my sort of beauty. I wish it had been smashed up when its day was over, not left to preach the beloved past to us. I’m sick of the beloved past” (pp. 357-358).
It is Ursula who urges the couple, not toward compromise, but toward a new view of male-female relationships, grounded in Lawrence’s own particular brand of spirituality. One cannot fail to notice here the echo of the “Sermon on the Mount,” in which Jesus urges his followers to live like the lilies of the field, advice that Lawrence and Frieda took literally, living in rented residences all over the world. One hears, too, again in the passage condemning beauty, the old echo of Rimbaud’s poetry: “One evening, I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter.” If we understand the chair to be a symbol of art in everyday life, then we can accept the fact that in getting rid of the chair, they are doing what Ezra Pound urged the modern writer to do, to “make it new.”
As touched on earlier, we know absolutely nothing about the background of Birkin. We meet Ursula’s family, the Brangwens. Mr. Brangwen, with his irascibility, is closer to Paul’s father, Mr. Morel, in Sons and Lovers—that is, to Lawrence’s own father—than he is to the Mr. Brangwen of The Rainbow, who was rather affable and easy. In Women in Love, we have a more in-depth look at Gerald Crick’s family than the family of any other character. We even meet Hermione’s brother. However, we are given nothing about the family of Birkin, who is Lawrence’s surrogate, not even a reference. It is such a notable absence that one cannot doubt it was done intentionally. It seems almost inevitable that in a novel that explores class difference, set in a country that could not be more class-conscious, a reference to Birkin’s background would be unavoidable. It is as though Birkin arrived in England from outer space. Of course, we know Birkin is an inspector of schools, which would put him vaguely in the middle class, but his pedigree is conspicuously missing. One could say that in writing Sons and Lovers, one of Lawrence’s objectives was to document the life of the poor in a mining town, and that done, he had no interest in repeating that type of novel. This is still held against Lawrence in his hometown of Eastwood. In the eyes of the hometown folks, a miner’s son who ran off with the aristocratic wife of a university professor, a man who was proud, for a time at least, to count as his friends the members of the snobbish Cambridge-Bloomsbury group, a man who lived abroad most of his adult life, was practicing the class equivalent of racial passing. Anthony Burgess amplifies this point:
Today it is a decent lower-middle-class town, with chain groceries and videocassettes for hire, gentlemanly pubs, good-mannered people.
The good manners falter a little when David Herbert Lawrence is mentioned. “We don’t go much for him here,” a pub landlord told me. When I paid my first visit to Eastwood as a boy, there were old men who remembered Lawrence’s father—“a real old English gentleman”—while Bert Lawrence was a mardarse and a mother’s lad. Lawrence had put Eastwood on the literary map, which is always a shameful thing in England, and he had produced the wrong sort of literature (Burgess, p. 16).
The larger issue that Lawrence faced—and that Joyce, Yeats, James, Eliot, or any writer from a group subjugated by the cultural and/or political mainstream—is this: Does the writer have an obligation to be the spokesperson for his own particular group? The answer in each of the cases mentioned above is, yes, within limits, but only the writer should define those limits, and that gives the writer