Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence Women in Love (1921)
Women in Love has been hailed as Lawrence's greatest novel in certain quarters, and while it's undoubtedly up there, I'm not convinced. As you may already know, Women in Love began life as the second half of The Rainbow before evolving into its own thing, and so continues the lives of Ursula and Gudrun whom we met in the first book while inevitably reiterating certain themes of the same, notably expressing the then revolutionary notion of women as capable of leading an independent existence, or at least one not entirely reliant upon the goodwill of men; but I'm not convinced that this is all it's trying to do.

Rather, if we take The Rainbow as a summation of human progress, society, and ethics dating from Biblical times to the modern era - as represented by the stratified generations in the novel - then Women in Love is principally looking forward to speculate on where we go from here.

It was written as a modern novel in a world wherein electric lighting was still very much a novelty, and accordingly borrows from adjacent modernist territories, particularly the visual arts which reoccur as sign posts - or possibly scratching posts - throughout the book, which itself orders its chapters in a sequence suggesting pictures at an exhibition with the reader moving ponderously from one scene to the next as most of the actual narrative motion occurs somewhere off the side of the page. As with individual paintings in an exhibition, each new chapter brings a different emphasis in terms of mood, colour and subject. Chapter six opens with what could easily be a description of a painting by Manet or Toulouse-Lautrec, introducing Minette who is unmarried, pregnant and fearless - much like Boccioni's similarly employed Modern Idol of 1911. If she seems a harshly lit character, it would probably be more accurate to suggest that she is simply described without sentiment, a description underscored by the then fashionable African totems and Futurist art at the house she shares in Bohemia, as such providing contrast to the tradition and conservative values espoused in chapter eight. Further to this contrast, the stately Breadalby House is acknowledged by Gudrun as resembling an old aquatint, while in chapter eleven the larger estate inspires Ursula to comment that one could have lovely Watteau picnics here.

The divide - here referring to culture and tradition as much as to class - is further emphasised by the mechanisation of the mine workers described in chapter nine, as a new sort of machinery in terms which echo the Futurists whilst unfortunately foreshadowing both Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher. Lawrence was clearly aware that where we go from here would be violently mechanistic, having written at least some of the novel during the first great war. Women in Love spends much of its page count engaged in destruction as a creative act, specifically destruction of the old order right down even to basic Victorian sentiment and the comfort of tradition. Gudrun and Ursula are school teachers, modern women teaching the science which has given birth to the twentieth century and even the possibility of the future being more than a simple continuation of the past. Even the title, Women in Love, seems possibly ironic, either a focus shifted to those who were traditionally the object of love and so denied autonomy in the socially sanctioned expression of the equation; or perhaps a bitter comment on love as a more violent and visceral institution than Victorian society would have had it.

Even if, as has been pointed out by Kate Millet, Lawrence's women can never be more than Lawrence's idea of women - an accusation which I rather feel misses the point - the sheer balls of this novel being titled Women in Love in 1921 shouldn't be taken for granted, nor that Ursula and Gudrun are the principal characters, the ones who react against everything herein, not least being the views of the author as voiced through Rupert Birkin. Lawrence was here attempting to cut through the bullshit, including his own bullshit.

Women in Love destroys nineteenth century sentiment without mercy or favouritism, even revealing newly embraced notions of progress as red in tooth and claw, with Gerald Crich exposed as a ruthless objectivist machine in The Industrial Magnate; with the supposed innocence of even children shown as essentially cruel in Rabbit.

What, one might wonder, does Lawrence presume to build in the wake of all this revelation and destruction? I don't know, and I'm not sure he knew, instead finding himself obliged to settle with approximations of what he didn't want and a vague notion of the direction in which we should probably be heading. Inevitably some of the proposed way forward allows for Lawrence's poorly quantified desire for a relationship which allows for a big strapping male friend on the side, but this is a personal preference rather than a manifesto, and I don't think the retroactive application of fashionable gender related neologisms is likely to help anyone in this instance. Otherwise, he's mainly asking questions which no-one had thought to ask in the presumed hope of getting an answer which wasn't too stupid.

There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of chaos, what then?

The novel is the response, I guess, approximately summarised thus:

'You can only have knowledge, strictly,' he replied, 'of things concluded, in the past. It's like bottling the liberty of last summer in the bottled gooseberries.'

Women in Love was a massively ambitious undertaking, a novel which, in stylistic terms, seems to map rather than describe the emotional and symbolic meaning of that which befalls Gudrun, Ursula, Rupert, and Gerald; so it isn't a realistic novel and arguably has more in common with symbolist art or even Boccioni's states of mind paintings than with the nineteenth century page turner. Unfortunately it's also much longer than it really needs to be to express that which it expresses, which is possibly a hazard of the exploratory nature of its composition - itself a doubtless deliberate echo of Lawrence's own life at the time, particularly as he leaves England in search of whatever may be out there. So if it's not Lawrence's greatest novel, then it was at least his most daring as of 1921 - assuming The Lost Girl, which I've still to read, doesn't turn out to be five-hundred pages of potato prints with rude words written around the circumference. It's also a bit on the chewy side.