The Lawrence Character

The notion of character as locus of the revelation of an essential human nature leadsto theresultthatthenovel’scharactersenactcertain practicesassocially normative. The novel is thus sometimes accused as a primary locus of bourgeois values and of the regularization, legitimization, even normativization of certain bourgeois codes.²³ Lawrence’s novels defy this accusation. His characters are not always consistently and finely drawn. Sometimes in certain scenes they cease to be recognizable as clearly defined characters and become symbols of elemental states of joy, or fulfillment, or anger, or despair. Indeed, Virginia Woolf declared: “Human character changed in 1910”(320), suggesting that ways of perceiving had irrevocably changed.²⁴ Fundamental to the change in modes of perceiving was the recognition of, or even confrontation with, the unknown and unknowable. As a result, novelists begin to create characters which cannot be wholly understood; each character

becomes an “unknown mode of being”to the other characters. In view of this, the question recently raised is, in Docherty’s words,

whether moral criticism should besimply aquestion of‘evaluation’of characters, based upon some pre-judicial set of moral preferences, or whether criticism might more seriously take ethics into account with the

consequence that subjectivity—the subject position from which evaluations are made—is itself called into question. (1996: 37)²⁵

Put another way, the difference inherent in these two ethical stances toward characters is between a humanist neo-Leavisite moral criticism, and a criticism informed by the thought of critics like Levinas or Derrida.

In this sense, Lawrence’s characterization stands in “other”relation to both approaches. On the one hand, Lawrence’s narrative calls into question the supposed certainties of the individuated essences of characters. He is concerned with the

“characterization”progressing as process, resisting (imperialist) appropriation and containment. There is the production of an excess, a surplus of narrative, and it is this surplus which disturbs the neat equalities of the economy of identity and which calls into question the function of representation in his narrative. Representation is thus conceived more as “excessive”than as a simple “duplication”or substitutive mimetic doubling. The presence or center of personal identity is regarded as an effect or product of differentiating relations with the other. In other words, the self is knowable only indirectly and inferentially through knowledge of that which it is not.

Consequently, the Lawrence character is more often “about-to-be”than actually “is.”

It is this disappearance of a transcendental self which is one of the most valuable effects of Lawrence’s characterization, wherein a consciousness can properly engage with its Other. Lawrence’s treatment of characters recalls Kristeva’s assertion of

“subject-in-process”in the term of “exile”: “How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming astrangerto one’sown country,language,sex and identity “(1986: 299)?

On the other hand, the striking difference between Lawrence’s characterization and the ethical criticism based on the notion of character as “dis-position”(Docherty 1996: 56) lies in the fact that Lawrence simultaneously sticks to some intrinsic and

hence unchanging element in the self. As I have mentioned earlier, modernism represents a paradoxical state (or maybe a double crisis) in the historical construction of personal identity. The rise of the individual as a value went along with its

increasing disintegration as a category. The fundamentally unstable and ungrounded nature of individuality became more and more evident with an understanding of the social process of which it was a part. For Lawrence, one of the most important aspects of this is his puritan insistence that the dissolution of the category only makes the responsibility of the individual even more vital. However, it should be noted that this is not moral responsibility in a narrower sense as responsibility for one’s own being—i.e., one should be responsible for some unchanging element in the self, which is seen by Lawrence to challenge the superficial (and hence changing) social self. In other words, Lawrence perceives his characters in terms of the honesty and integrity of perceptions rather than in terms of the moral consequences of their behaviour. On that account, what they are is more important than what they do. The integrity and purity of their souls are standards by which they are primarily judged. In a word, the most distinctive feature of Lawrence’s treatment of his characters is the innovations in narratives attacking enduring traits in literary characters, which is paradoxically brought about by Lawrence’s insistence on some constant element in the self.

In his early fiction Sons and Lovers, which is usually regarded as a more traditional work in comparison with his later work, we can still trace the mutinous interplay of textual differences which has deliberately contested the representation of characters. Throughout the novel, there are moments when the authority of

representation is undermined by contending viewpoints that remind us that the

original representation was only a representation of reality rather than the thing itself.

For instance, the narrator’s emphatic condemnation of Walter Morel is contradicted by those scenes which serve to demonstrate his spontaneous vitality and warmth. Morel

is at first accused by the narrator as an “outsider”in the family: “Conversation was impossible between the father and any other member of the family. He was an outsider. He had denied the God in him”(SL 63). Yet the next scene redefines Morel’s intellectual weakness as sensual strengths: “The only times when he entered again into the life of his own people was when he worked, and was happy at work . . . . They united with him in the work, in the actual doing of something, when he was his real again”(SL 63). The old collier is at one time a dirty brute, but at another he profoundly has our sympathy. In this novel, Paul’s view of his father is not permitted to stand unqualified. Paul’sjudgmentofMorel as a brutal, careless, inarticulate drunkard is counterbalanced and placed in an ironic perspective by the dramatization ofscenesin which Morel’swarmth,humour,tenderness,and delight in creative activity are appreciated. When Paul sells a painting, in the middle of the family celebration we find, with a sense of tender shock, Morel weeping secretly for his dead son, William (SL 139). Moreover, we are made aware that in his own way Morel really cares for his wife, bringing her tea in bed (only to be scolded in case it has no sugar), and this tenderness emerges again at her death, though he is also

frightened and awkward, feeling pushed to one side by his son (SL 399). Lawrence’s treatment of Morel is a good deal more sympathetic than those critics who accord priority to Paul’spointofview havenoted.

In fact, the narrative suggests that all the characters, in addition to Morel, are perhaps best seen as a series of conflictual or transgressive selves, each defined and undermined by some differential relations. Hence Mrs. Morel is at one time a creature of superb and lovable heroism; and yet there is no doubt that she is from time to time downright disagreeable. Any attempt to portray the character in a seamless structure of words is exceeded and undermined by the domain of operative difference and ineffable otherness. It is in this sense that Lawrence’s characters should not be

judged by strict moral categories but by multiple perspectives presented in the text.

Take Miriam for example. In her room is a mirror: “In the little looking glass nailed against the white-washed wall, she could only see a fragment of herself at a time”(SL 207). In this novel Miriam is shown to the reader glance by glance and she herself serves as a mirror for other characters, particular for Paul, whose labels thus “do not in the end either adhere to Miriam or totally obscure her”(Gavin 29). And it is surely right for Gavin to suggest that Miriam “deserves to be defended against labeling or reductions”(41). Miriam’s mirror thus serves as a clue to Lawrence’s advice—“never trust the artist, trust the tale.”

Shortly after completing a draft of The Rainbow, Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnet, announcing a break with traditional conceptions of character (and hence of the self). In this letter, Lawrence describes what he is attempting to do in The Rainbow and Women in Love:

Idon’tcareaboutphysiology ofmatter—but somehow—that which is physic—non-human, in-humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element—which causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral scheme is what I object to . . . . There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states . ..to discover . . . the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say, “diamond what! This is carbon.” And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) (LII 182-3)

Lawrence’s ambivalence towards the dissolution of ethical subjectivity makes him obsessed with what he calls “carbon,”some constant element located deeper than

mere personality, which is for him no more than the changing “allotropic states”of this chemical element, made manifest as coal or diamond, as heroes and villains, in the social order. Lawrence thus relegates the social dimension of the character to a second order of things, asserting that the really interesting component is this

“radically unchanged”element of life. As has been argued above, Lawrence’s habitual punning on sight/blindness or known/unknown has a revolutionary intent which attempts to shatter the “kodak”image of the self, and so the new conception of characters dwelling upon the dialectic between changing and unchanged requires in readers a deeper sense than the eye of traditional realism. The social self with its predictable and mechanical forms is made more indefinite, flexible and alive by sticking to one’s deepest being. In other words, the character is judged not by social or established moral criteria but by the degree to which he is true to the “carbon”of his nature.

Hence Ursula, in The Rainbow, refuses the chances offered by the Suffragette Movement, for she does not want, she says, simply a mechanical freedom, a freedom within the existing nation-state. She is suspicious of any system, which will reduce the individual to a “norm,”and yet “a norm is merely an abstraction, not a reality”

(FU 47). She believes that the commitment of her friends to the nation-state reveals their spiritual sickness, their submission to an external system. So for her,

Skrebensky has no resources within himself to question contemporary social ideology, though he is a good citizen, carrying out his colonial functions in Africa and India.

In other words, Skrebensky’s social vision accords no intrinsic value to the individual, only a functional contribution to the social “ideal.”²⁶ Ursula is finally released from her old ego to a sense of true individuality by abandoning social and historical

identity:

I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the

world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammeled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality. (R 464).

At the end of the novel, the vision of the rainbow reappears— the vision of fulfillment in the rounded arch created by the union of water and sunlight, flesh and spirit, origin and end, the unconscious and the conscious. After being violently frightened by the horses, Ursula knows now that she can never yield to the ugly mechanical way of life. And yet, as I have mentioned earlier, an inherent opposition exists between the circle as a complete, perfect entity, and the rainbow in its

incompleteness as an arc. The constant tension in the novel between the definite self, and its amorphous, instinctual need to belong to a larger whole which makes the self fragmentary, remains unresolved at the end. The intensity with which the self is trying to become exclusive and unique is always undermined by its desire to belong, to share, and to obliterate itself. This “trembling instability of the balance”cannot be destroyed as long as the self remains in the physical world. Lawrence’s vision of fulfillment of the self is undermined by the symbol of fulfillment itself.

While Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow trace the chronological development of characters’growing awareness of themselves, the spatial and contrapuntal structure of Women in Love complicates and confounds readers’attempt to define or even understand the characters. In his new conception of the character, Lawrence rejects not only “the certain moral scheme”but also the demand for characters possessing the recognizable individuality that we associate with social realism. In other words, Lawrence repudiates the traditional view of a character as a collection of traits that somehow reveal a center of personal identity or an essence. In the letter quoted above, Lawrence warned, “don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the

lines of certain characters: the characters fall into . . . some other rhythmic form”(LII 184). Instead of being fitted neatly into some sort of moral scheme, whereby we can tell clearly the “good”from the “bad,”the “right’form the “wrong,”the characters in Women in Love are best seen as indiscernible variations on some of the major themes.

In the opening chapter, the five major characters are introduced by dialogue and action, external description and internal monologue, which are also used to show how the five self-contained existences are somehow mutually dependent, and how they exist within others’mind and emotions. None of the characters is allowed to be known simply in isolation; on the contrary, the access we are afforded to each character is through the filter of a major relationship.

For instance, it is peculiarly striking that almost all the other characters in the novel replicate Birkin’s ideas in one way or another. Nonetheless, while they illustrate and enact what Birkin says, they are at the same time meant to be different or even negative embodiments of his ideas and his life. More broadly, the “tangled strands of implication”within the same term are employed to make separate beings (and the ideas they manifest) constantly rubbed against one another in unharmonious friction. There are numerous examples of this dis-identical and frictional repetition.

For instance, it’s certainly not an easy task for the reader to distinguish Birkin’s singleness from Loerke’s autonomy.²⁷ In his insistence on the “pure balance of two single beings—as the stars balance each other”(WL 163), “singleness”is surely a positive term in Birkin. But the word is also used repeatedly to describe Loerke, whom Birkin regards as a symptom of nihilism. Gudrun finds in Loerke “an uncanny singleness, a quality of being by himself, not in contact with anybody else, that marked out an artist to her”(WL 480 ). Moreover, Birkin’s “indifference”

towards the world is also manifest in Loerke who “made not the slightest attempt to be at one with anything (WL 462). Lawrence plays cunningly and dangerously with

these similarities, and the readers are always being asked to make subtle distinctions.

The imperceptible difference between Gudrun and Ursula is also equivocal and seems essentially rhetorical. Ursula’s changeableness indicates her vitality: “she was so quick, so lambent, like discernible fire, and so rich in her dangerous flamy

sensitiveness”(WL 142). On the contrary, Gudrun’s mobility is usually associated with images of disintegration instead of life, decomposition instead of animation—she is “a water-lily undulating in the swamp”and “a seagull above the flood of chaos”

(WL 159, 225). On the other hand, Ursula’s changeableness does no harm to the self-centrality in her, which is contrapuntally presented as fatal intactness in Gudrun.

Ursula doesn’t need others to ratify her existence: “She was in some self-satisfied world of her own”(WL 241). Being associated with the image of the moon, Ursula manifests the quality of static plenitude: “She had her queer, radiant, breathless manner, as if confused by the actual world, unreal to it, having a complete bright world of her self alone”(WL 252). Quite the opposite, any such self-sufficiency and self-centeredness in Gudrun are presented not as plenitude, but as murderous rigidity and inviolability. It seems that Gudrun’s character development follows the process of, in terms of allotropic images, progressive hardening, until she reaches a jewel-like intactness and a frozen integrity.

Likewise, it is surely hard to figure out exactly what differences Lawrence means to establish between the debased sensuality of the mind represented by Hermione, the corruptive dark sensuality inherent in the African statue, and the loveable sensuality of what Birkin calls“thedeepestphysicalmind”(WL 341).

Birkin’sattack on Hermioneismost probably Lawrence’sarticulation ofhisendorsed doctrine of the primacy of instinctive consciousness over mental consciousness. Yet as I’ve made it clear in the above, what torments Hermione also makes not only Birkin but all the other characters anxious or entangled in one way or another.

Consequently, Hermione is considerably more than a vehicle for Lawrentian dogma—her very defects are actually in some sense shared by everyone else in the novel. As a modern and intellectual woman, Hermione in different degrees anticipates and reflects the difficulties of other characters. Given that the major characters are potentialities of each other, it seems inadequate to see the novel dichotomously as the love story of the ideal Lawrentian couple contrasted with the destructive couple.

The new conception of character enunciated above by Lawrence poses many difficulties and practical problems for the novelist as well as for the reader.

Lawrence himself is at times willing to admit that he is floundering among his own concepts. And as we have seen in the above, the reader can make sense of the distinctions of the characters only by something very abstract about them. On that ground, Moynahan asserts that most of the readers would be more interested in diamond and coal than in undifferentiated carbon: “If one cares to differentiate characters from one another . . . it must be done in terms of what they do, think and feel humanly and socially, and these terms must mediate what they ‘inhumanly’

are . . . . You cannot write a novel about carbon and nothing but carbon”(42).

Indeed, it’s impossible to have characters of “pure carbon.” Any attempt to create a

Indeed, it’s impossible to have characters of “pure carbon.” Any attempt to create a