Women in Love—Unison in Separateness

As a man who comes “from the Infinite,”Birkin persistently seeks to revalue old values of love. To Ursula’s anti-historical claim that love “always means that same thing,”Birkin counters that its meaning has changed, and he urges that they “let the old meanings go”(WL 123). When Ursula asks what the new meaning of love is, Birkin replies tentatively, “I don’t know—freedom together”(WL 124). Frustrated by the abstraction of his own language, Birkin offers a vivid image of the love he wants— “an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings—as the stars balance each other”(WL 139). In his insistence on impersonal conjunction, Birkin advocates a mandatory pledge which is nonetheless based on the separateness of beings: “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star”(WL 139-144). Birkin thus asserts that love returns us to an encounter with “a real impersonal me”:

There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional

relationship. So it is with you. But we wan to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn’t. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can. (WL 145)

Put differently, lovers must grasp the point that identities come about only in their isolation, and only as a result of difference: one Being is what it is only because it recognizes its separateness from another Being. Through awareness of the loved one as an inviolable other—a separate self whose autonomy can never be absorbed—each becomes aware of himself (or herself) as pure other to the loved one: “For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real

otherness”(WL 320). Each enjoyed the “perfectly suspended equilibrium”(WL 319) in a love relationship only through respecting the intrinsic otherness of the other.

However, as has been indicated above, Lawrence makes Ursula a critical partner who can both criticize Birkin’sexcesses and enhance his admirable qualities, thereby creating a“duality offeeling”in thereader’sresponse. The vital side of Birkin is relativized by his priggishness and earnestness, which has made Ursula uncomfortable. When he asksforan “irrevocable”pledge, he asks with a“clang of mistrust and angerin hisvoice”and beginsto preach at Ursula on thethemeof“the realimpersonalme,”repeatedly referring to “thestars”to illustratetheimpersonal balance he seeks. Actually, what he is preaching is not silly in itself, once we separate the doctrine from the overblown manner in which he pushes it on Ursula.

His request for a pledge is a legitimate demand for ethical commitment, but his insistence upon utter separateness makes him obstinate and inflexible. Even after their lovemaking, Birkin relapsesinto willfulintellectualism:“And hewanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarized with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love has become madly abhorrentto him”(WL 270). To this and all the self-regarding talk of stars balanced

in conjunction, Ursula deliversascathing rebuttal:“You,and love! You may well say,you don’twantlove. No,you wantyourself,and dirt,and death”(WL 389).

For Ursula, Birkin’s mere words provide him with an easy excuse not to act, and hence she interprets all this as a form of selfishness, as a plea for masculine

supremacy. Therefore, while Birkin uses the word “orbit,”Ursula alters the word to

“satellite”(WL 139). Moreover, Ursula argues that Birkin’spassionateinsistence springs from a sense of insecurity, which derives from the discrepancy between his words and deeds:

‘Idon’ttrustyou when you drag in thestars,’shesaid. ‘Ifyou were quitetrue,itwouldn’tbenecessary to beso far-fetched.’

‘Don’ttrustmethen,’hesaidangrily. ‘Itisenough thatItrust myself.’

‘And thatiswhereyou makeanothermistake,’shereplied. ‘You don’ttrustyourself. You don’treally wantthisconjunction,otherwise you wouldn’ttalk so much aboutit,you’d getit.’

He was suspended for a moment, arrested.

‘How?’hesaid.

‘By justloving,’she retorted in defiance. (WL 216)²⁴

Ursula’sremarks are really pointed. Indeed, Birkin attempts to liberate himself and Ursula from the inertia and falsity that linguistic and social codes attach to the word

“love”and its interpretation. But the return to language is parodic, demonstrating the tendency of language to turn natural facts into artificial concepts:

Birkin first achieves a simple awareness of the inconsistencies in his preaching. He thought he had been wrong, perhaps. Perhaps he had been wrong, to go to her with an idea of what he wanted. Was it really only an idea, or was it the interpretation of a profound yearning? If the latter, how was it he was always talking about sensual fulfillment? The

two did not agree very well. (WL 245)

In fact, all his descriptions and definitions of the relationship he wants are measured against, and therefore haunted by, the word “love.” And eventually he has to use the word, even though it is now supposed to carry with it the accumulated meanings of all his talks with Ursula. Ursula’s attack makes Birkin accept, though tentatively and partially, the old-fashioned sort of love as a correlative to the“impersonalbeyond.”²⁵ Up to this point Birkin has been preaching from a standpoint of rejection of the more mundane aspects of love, and now Birkin was made to see the necessity of relating his yearnings to the real world.

Moreover, in one sense, Birkin’s new conception of love as “mutual unison in separateness”is a fantasy of self-sufficiency. It is a means of self-preservation, where the two egos support and define, but do not invade and destroy, each other. In other words, “star-equilibrium”isan idealstate of safety and stasis where there is neither conflict nor threat to being. However, as Lawrence sees it, the tension between self and other is what defines the ego; conflict is thus an existential necessity both in individual being and in any relationship. Therefore, when the “unison”

represents an ideal state of non-violence, its denial of intersubjective violence also leads to a denial of any possible relationship. In fact, Lawrence himself reflects on the contradiction between stasis and process in his two definitions of love in the essay

“Love.” On the one hand,

We are like a rose, which is a miracle of pure centrality, pure absolved equilibrium. Balanced in perfection in the midst of time and space, the rose is perfect . . . in the realm of perfection . . . neither temporal nor spatial but absolved by the equality of perfection, pure immanence of absolution. (P 153)

In this sense, Birkin’s formulation of “star-equilibrium”matches the state of

“balanced in perfection”described above. On the other hand,

Love is the hastening gravitation of spirit towards spirit, body towards body, in the joy of creation. But if all be united in one bond of love, then there is no more love. And therefore, for those who are in love with love, to travel is better than to arrive. For in arriving one passes beyond love, or rather, one encompasses love in a new transcendence . . . . Love is not a goal; it is only a traveling. (P 151)

On account of this, Birkin’s ideal love— the “final love which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility” (WL 137)— is not only a denial of human characteristics in the lovers, it is also a state of perfect inertia tantamount to nonexistence.

Therefore, “star-equilibrium”as a formulation of love should be weighed not only against Ursula’s critical response to Birkin but against Lawrence’s own

assertions in his expository writings. Moreover, Birkin’s conception of an ideal loving relationship is also challenged by his own inconsistencies throughout the novel.

In effect, while insistent on the separateness of each lover, Birkin sometimes does appear to desire the fusional love. When Birkin tells Gerald that he aspires to a

“perfect union with a woman”(WL 51), he seems to be repeating the longing for fusion that had resounded over the centuries. The following gush from Birkin would also align him with the older romantic ideal of fusion between lovers: “In the new superfine bliss . . . there was no I and you, there was only the third, unrealized wonder, the wonder of existing not as oneself but in a consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality”(WL 361). At the same time Birkin obviously affirms the ideal of fusion with a crucial

reservation—love is a willingness to lose oneself in order to regain a deeper sense of oneself as autonomous. In other words, a crucial aspect of autonomy can only be realized, paradoxically, when one is willing to throw oneself into love without holding back, as Birkin tells Ursula: “in coming to you, I am without reserves or defenses”

(WL 138). The tension between fusion and autonomy has been central to the issues

concerning love that preoccupied Lawrence.

In such a deliberate and complicated way, the meaning of love is relativized in different contexts and is especially manifested through Birkin and Ursula’s

relationship which develops through a testing of ideas. Whenever Birkin indulges himself in giving a sermon, Ursula interrupts with a derisive remark—“So cocksure!” or“Why drag in thestars”(WL 210, 218)? Whenever Ursula relapses into stale ideas, Birkin snapsback:“Sentimentalcant”(WL 321). As I’ve argued in Part One, Birkin’sspeechesare expressions of character rather than authoritatively sanctioned truth. Although there is more of Lawrence in Birkin than in any other characters, Birkin is never Lawrence’sspokesperson. If his ideas on historical decline and the need for new relationships between men and women seem more eloquent than those of others, they are nonetheless contested right to the end. In fact, Birkin and Ursula expose the fallacy of each other. Through the lovers’debate comes the complicated interplay of self and other beyond the state of solipsism. They are made prepared to respond to the other as different, and surprising. As Lawrence describes their relationship, “Ursula was strictly hostile to him. But she was held to him by some bond,somedeep principle. Thisatonceirritated herand saved her”(WL 159). In their being well pleased with as well as resistant to what the other says, they seem to adopt the position of careful attendance that Levinasassociateswith “proximity”or

“thesupremepassivity ofexposureto another”(OB 47). In other words, they both have learned how to enjoy what other people say, even if what they say does not give the answer that was expected. At the end of the novel, they are still arguing, but arguing creatively. Because of their energy and pertinacity as well as their common capability of withdrawing their will from time to time, Birkin and Ursula succeed in forging a relationship that can survive among the ruins of the modern world.

While the fights between Birkin and Ursula are productive, those between Gerald and Gudrun are not. If there were a common target of attack in Birkin’s and

Ursula’s notions of love, it’ll be the sterile and dominant type of possession. Birkin explicitly rejects the kind of love that is built on the impulse of total merging, or of molding others after the image of oneself. While Ursula retains vestiges of a healthy possessiveness in her affection for Birkin, it is hardly ever aggrandizing or tyrannous.

Instead of incorporating the other, their love lets the other be in a recognition of the attraction of mutual difference. In contrast to this notion of love as both “freedom and attraction,”both “separation and alliance”(ESD 13), the Gerald/Gudrun

relationship is predominated by baleful contest where the aim of each lover is to conquer the other: “But always it was this eternal see-saw, one destroyed that the other might exist”(WL 241). Both Gerald and Gudrun desire to incorporate the other in a cycle of spiraling violence, as each struggles to usurp the space occupied by the other. It seems that the outcome can only be the victory of the one and the defeat of the other. While they are originally attracted by the other’s unique difference, as it is in the case of the Morels and that of Will and Anna, each finally desires to master the other by annihilating the difference that incites their desire in the first place.

Beyond that, Gerald and Gudrun have a “relation of utter interdestruction”(WL 248). The course of their affair confirms Birkin’s theory of murderers and

murderees who are ruled by the “profound if hidden lust of destructive impulses”(WL 36). A series of vivid animal-scenes communicate Gudrun and Gerald’s “mutual hellish recognition”(WL 267), a vicious need to disrupt the organic dignity of living things. The scene of Gerald’s bullying his red Arab mare mentioned above draws Gudrun to the point of swooning. In addition, a scene where Gudrun teases a herd of bullocks reverses Gerald’s brutalization of his mare. The beasts frighten Ursula, but Gudrun dances insinuatingly close to the animals, expressing her fearless

independence before them. Gerald’s initial response in this battle of wills is to resist her with a “faint domineering smile”(WL 193), but when Gudrun strikes him on the face the character of their relationship is set. The blow gives vent to her

“unconquerable lust for deep brutality against him”(WL 194), while in him it releases a new form of aggressiveness. Both characters are in such a way overwhelmed by the dark, demonic feelings they inspire in each other.

Another scene suggestive of the two lovers’demonic powers is the blood-rite involving the Crich family’s great, white rabbit. Gerald’s mauling of the rabbit, and the bloody scratches it scores on the arms of both Gerald and Gudrun, create a

swearing of eternal viciousness and violence between these lovers. Both characters arearoused by therabbit’sextremity ofterror. While Gerald swoons before a

mystical essence of evil, Gudrun responds with a sado-masochisticecstasy to Gerald’s subduing of the rabbit. “Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene

recognition”(WL 273). Their love relationship involves the excitements of violence because both are moved by the emotions of cruelty evoked by the other. Such a bondage of “obscene recognition”makes the two lovers turn their love into a “deadly contest.” Naturally, rapture and desperation, or communion and isolation, are the contraries connected with love throughout the novel. Birkin and Ursual have their own way of transcending or making use of this dialectic. They can make themselves exposed to the transforming power of love: “It was a fight to the death between them—or to new life: though in whattheconflictlay,no onecould say”(WL 144).

Yet the love between Gerald and Gudrun is fatally and hopelessly controlled by this destructive dialectic. Love for them turns out to be nothing more than the impulse to defend the self or to manipulate the other, since what love offers them is fear of being absorbed, or anger at being rejected, by the other. Both are too threatened by their own inner emptiness to expose themselves defenselessly and passively to the transforming power of love.

In the respect of Gerald, having exhausted his interest in the mines, he has no place for his go to go, as Gudrun earlier joked. By the same token, he tends to see marriage with Gudrun as an end, a terminus towards which they have been traveling

so far. It means certainty, fixedness in one woman and establishment for himself in social and family life. While Birkin regards his forthcoming marriage with Ursula more as a beginning of another phase in his life than an end to the tentativeness of courtship, for Gerald, “Marriagewasnotthecommitting ofhimselfinto arelationship with Gudrun. It was a committing of himself in acceptanceoftheestablished world”

(WL 398). On that account, Gerald is using up, rather than replenishing, love. He appears to Gudrun as both lover and child, subjugating and worshiping her, pouring into herhis“pent-up darkness and corrosivedeath”and drinking in her“living effluence”(WL 430-31). Their passion, unlike that of Birkin and Ursula, is a bondage in which one is fulfilled at the expense of the other. What revives him seems to her a death. Losing his father, Gerald turns to Gudrun, with all the pathos of Will’s fumbling need for Anna, and he imbibes her as a means of restoring his

enfeebled being. His night with Gudrun in the chapter called “Death and Love”gave him a“gratefulself-sufficiency”thatsheresented(WL 378). By making love an instrument of “nourishing”himself, Gerald is eventually forced to admit that he cannot do without Gudrun as evidently she can do without him.

Despite their “mutual hellish recognition,”their relationship is a hell in which Gudrun survives Gerald, due to her final indifference. While Geralds’pressing needs make him destructively fragile, Gudrun’s indifference protects her, giving her a frigid intactness. Through mockery and apathy, Grudrun transfers to her lover the sense of rejection and exclusion that exposure to love can bring. Gerald is for her a scapegoat forced to take the place of her own insecure self-image, so that she can then vent all her scorn on it, yet remain completely immune to shame. Gudrun’sfinal responses to the snowy wastes can be seen as a logical extension of her qualities of coldness, unresponsiveness, and especially aestheticism. Her cold integrity and cruel survival-capacity nullify and destroy Gerald. At the same time, Gudrun pays dearly for her immunity as witness. By making herself a detached witness, Gudrun also

reduces her entire experience of the world to the single element of cynicism and irony.

Consequently, she is incapable of freely accepting the risks and uncertainties inherent in her surrendering herself to a true love-experience with Gerald: “She could give herself up to his activity. But she could not be herself, she dared not come forth quite nakedly to his nakedness, abandoning all adjustment, lapsing in pure faith with him”(WL 490). Moreover, life becomes for her a permanent state of not caring about anything, being forever detached from everything, without roots or moorings.

Rejecting Gerald reinforces her persistent failure to achieve a passionate immediacy of life: “Everything turned to irony with her; she recognized too well . . . the mockery

Rejecting Gerald reinforces her persistent failure to achieve a passionate immediacy of life: “Everything turned to irony with her; she recognized too well . . . the mockery