Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [9]
If the personalities of the two sisters are contrasted from the outset of the novel, Lawrence teases us as to who, in fact, is the more modern of the two without ever answering the question during the course of the novel in any definitive way. True, Gudrun initiates the discussion, which would at first make her appear the more traditional of the two. Gudrun seems to consider marriage as a practical institution unencumbered by love. However, we soon find out that Gudrun is anything but traditional in most of her thinking. She has gone off to live the life of a painter in London, an extremely radical act for a woman at that time and a bold one even today. Nor is her daring confined to London. She steals away to the local red-light district to be picked up by a working-class young man. In other words, she not only challenges the existing concepts of what a young woman should be, she seems interested in shattering those standards; yet she is willing to consider marriage for her own purposes.
Critics have noted that Gudrun’s name is that of a goddess in Norse mythology. Indeed, the whole of Women in Love has a Wagnerian flavor to it. Like a goddess, Gudrun appropriates for herself a freedom that apparently is beyond love or at least not subject to it. At the same time, she does not at first seem inclined to detach herself completely from traditional ways of doing things, even if she rebels. We are forced to ask whether Gudrun, who has moved beyond love as a defining principle and condition for male and female relationships, is more modern than her sister, who renounces love and marriage as they are presently and would revolutionize men and society in order to achieve happiness. Ursula is not looking for an expedient relationship. The sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, are really two sides of the same project of breaking with the past, and their relationship with Birkin and Gerald, respectively, explore from two different perspectives the possibilities of modern love.
If Gudrun is the embodiment of a German ice-queen detached from family and not quite believing in love, she finds in Gerald her corresponding Nordic ice-king. The son of the mine owner to whom responsibility now falls for directing the mine operations due to his father’s illness, Gerald is of the exalted regions of Valhalla, and Gudrun, despite herself, is appropriately drawn to him:
But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing (p. 12).
Despite the mutual attraction they have for each other, they are as doomed as characters in a Greek tragedy. It is a measure of Lawrence’s genius as a writer that Gerald and Gudrun move with the ritual of destiny toward their predetermined end without violating the sense of realism that is the strength of the work. In the chapter entitled “Water-Party,” Lawrence reveals Gudrun’s contempt and fearlessness of males when she rushes heedlessly toward a herd of dangerous longhorn steers. When Gerald questions her as to why she did it, as an answer she smacks him soundly across the face. “You have struck the first