D. H. LAWRENCE

‘But do you really want sensuality?’ [Ursula] asked puzzled.

Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfillment – the

great dark knowledge you can’t have in your head – the dark involuntary

being. It is death to one’s self – but it is the coming into being of another.’

‘But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head?’ she asked,

quite unable to interpret his phrases.

‘In the blood,’ he answered; ‘when the mind and the known world is

drowned in darkness – everything must go – there must be the deluge. Then

you find yourself in a palpable body of darkness, a demon –

(Women in Love, 57-58)

Lawrence’s contemporaries and even later generations of readers found it

difficult to come to terms with this philosophy of life and, more specifically,

with the novel as a means of expression of this obviously shocking view. This

is all the more surprising if we consider the fact that from among all modernist

novelists, Lawrence is the one whose relations with modernism are the most

difficult to demonstrate on account of his highly conventional mode of

constructing his novels. Given the fact that Lawrence’s work is dealt with as

modernist, readers already familiar with the by now imposed canon of

modernism expect to be confronted with a text that formally parallels and

expresses the fragmentariness and relativity of the value system at the

beginning of the twentieth century.

The narrative fiction of Joyce and Woolf, following the novelistic

tradition set up by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, gives up the nineteenth-

century realistic convention, felt as too tyrannically restrictive, and focuses on

the complexity of the characters’ inner world to the detriment of the delusive

world of external events. The modernists’ option in matters of content is

accompanied by their interest in devising the appropriate narrative technique

able to render the characters’ minds transparent and to dig out zones left

unexplored before. This shift of focus characteristic of most of the modernist

novelists’ enterprise has brought about a much too often formulated and

sometimes little grounded accusation of isolation of the modernist fiction from

the relevant social and political issues of the time. Although this accusation can

be invalidated, what remains true in connection with the modernist novelists’

works is the fact that they use the material provided by external reality only as

a background and prompt to demonstrate the inner complexity of the

individual. Although modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf place

their characters in environments reminiscent of actual locations and associate

them with moments intended to create an illusion of chronology, what this

generally plotless narrative offers is a dimension which definitely exceeds the

limits of one day and one place. Consequently, stress is laid on character

treatment at the mental level to the detriment of the character’s analysis in a

social milieu. We cannot deny the fact that the major experimenters of the

period revalued the tradition of realism and symbolism by incorporating it into

the practice of modernism, but this was only a way to ensure the amount of

given information indispensable to facilitating access to their experiment. Yet

in the context of a changing reality, Joyce’s innovation, no matter how

technically shocking it may have been, was never misunderstood. It was more

or less easily accepted for what it was – a form devised to capture the spirit of a

changing world.

With D. H. Lawrence, things become more complicated, since he is “a

novelist who appears to be applying the received formula, who gives no

obvious visual signs of rebellion and experiment.”1 This apparent

conventionality of technique, which produces, however, something totally new

from a conceptual point of view, contributes to Lawrence being perceived as a

unique figure among his fellow novelists. All the modernists have artistically

played with their readers’ horizon of expectations. They challenged the shared

sense of value of the nineteenth-century audiences, both in form and in content.

The scope of Lawrence’s challenge is broader if one takes into account the

1 David Daiches, op. cit., 139.

striking discrepancy between the conventional novelistic form that Lawrence

opted for and the magnitude of the blow that he apparently struck to the

‘orthodoxies’ of the period and to the moral sense of value of his middle-class

audience. From under the mask of a well-behaved writer in terms of observance

of the novelistic convention, Lawrence challenged not only his audiences, but

also the whole value system of a world seemingly enthusiastic about the

liberation of spirit at the beginning of the twentieth century.

If Lawrence was much too often misjudged, this is because he

contradicted an existing system of shared values. “Victorian culture accepted

literature as socially important, and allowed it to take over some of the

functions previously fulfilled by religion. In order to do this it had to be

ethically oriented. This sense of limitation imposed on the writer as his part of

the social consensus became increasingly irritating, as the period went on, to

those more interested in the True and the Beautiful than the Good.”2 If we want

to understand Lawrence’s literary offer correctly, we have to interpret his work

outside any pre-established moral code. If judged by the standards of morality,

Lawrence’s novels could be considered either moral or immoral, which is what

his contemporaries wrongly did. Or, it was several decades before Lawrence

started writing his novels that Henry James had warned readers that the only

standards a work should be judged by were the artistic ones. Reminding us of

the ancient precepts of education, according to which the Good, the True and

the Beautiful were never taken separately, a literary work may be seen as moral

on condition it is a well-achieved, thus beautiful, form of knowledge, thus

capable of accessing truth.

Finding too little in common with experimental modernism, Lawrence

seems to favour the ideas of the Italian Futurist Marinetti. In a letter written in

June 1913 to his friend and literary advisor Edward Garnett, Lawrence tries to

make his point as to the type of character he was thinking of and trying to

construct in his novels. Paying appropriate attention to the reservations that

Lawrence expresses in connection with Marinetti’s views, which gives the

proper dimension of his own opinions, the reader of Lawrence’s novels can

better understand the importance that the novelist assigned to character in his

2 Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London and New York, Routledge, 1993) 3-4.

work and absolve him from any moral guilt. “I translate him clumsily, and his

Italian is obfuscated – and I don’t care about physiology of matter – 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.”3 Lawrence “saw his job as a novelist as – above all

– to make his contemporaries aware of themselves, of the real nature of their

emotional lives, of their needs and desires.”4

Rather than subordinating his characters to the old-fashioned convention

of plot, although he was one of the few modernists who never rejected plot

completely, Lawrence preferred to “write about people discovering themselves,

and each other, and about the sense of opposition they experienced, particularly

in love and marriage.”5 Dwelling upon a traditional institution, that of marriage,

and a generally human feeling, love, Lawrence explicitly states his interest in

the self and the definition of the self against the ‘other’. The investigation of

self and ‘otherness’ in a state of permanent, but also illuminating, conflict is the

reason for Lawrence’s opting for the theme of sexuality. Superficially

considered, this theme has constantly generated negative evaluations of his

work, especially among his contemporaries, in terms of morality. No other

modernist writer inflicted so much anger upon his contemporary audience and

critics as Lawrence did. The formal shock of the use of the ‘stream of

consciousness’ technique by modernist writers could never parallel the moral

shock that Lawrence consciously exposed his readers to. Yet, just as most

modernists would not sacrifice the exactingness of their art to a wider

popularity, Lawrence obstinately stuck to the theme of sexuality as “the

greatest of these arenas of conflict; the area of our lives in which our most

anxious and demanding feelings are directed towards another human being, to

be answered or rejected.”6 He is not, however, attracted to the idea of sexuality

in itself. He simply considers it the proper medium for expressing the integrity

of the self.

3 quoted in Peter Faulkner, op. cit., 62.4 John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence (London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1991) 6.5 Ibid., 23.6 Ibid., 24.

Thus, in spite of his being negatively perceived by his contemporaries,

Lawrence is not essentially different in artistic intention from his fellow

modernist novelists. He attempts to make his art into an appropriate form of

expression of life. This is proved by Lawrence’s own definition of himself: “I

am a man alive, and as long as I can I intend to go on being a man alive. For

this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to

the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who are all masters of

different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”7

Lawrence’s view of the essence of life, however, is a highly original one,

which may account for its coming into open conflict with the public sense of

value at the time when his work was produced. In an effort to give a proper

justification for his diverting from the commonly acknowledged truths,

Lawrence explains his essential interest in the human being as an identity

beyond the limitations imposed on it by any social relationships or external

circumstances. In a letter dated June 1914 addressed to his friend Edward

Garnett, Lawrence detailed on the purpose of his art:

“You mustn’t look in my novel [The Rainbow] for the old stable ego of

the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is

unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs

a deeper sense than any we have been used to exercise, to discover are states of

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.)”8

Placing his characters in situations characteristic of the turn-of-the-

century world, which represent to a certain extent the moral and social

standards by which his work has been evaluated, Lawrence is particularly in

search for the depths of the self. We may even say that this quest performed in

depth makes the characters lose their credibility in terms of their social roles.

Against the background of and in contrast with an apparently conventional and

stable system of values, an image of the modern world emerges as a result of

7 quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993) 120.8 quoted in Christopher Gillie, op. cit, 49-50.

Lawrence analysing the environment of the characters and their roles in

society. However, this image is nothing but a pretext for Lawrence’s

investigating the essence of the human self, be it modern or not.

If we consider Women in Love, which is, as a matter of fact,

acknowledged as Lawrence’s most modernist novel, we discover that the social

roles assigned to the characters are only masks behind which the individual’s

innermost, even primitive, drives and impulses are hidden. Rupert Birkin is

presented as a too little verisimilar Inspector of Schools, although his

connection with the education system generates interesting discussions in the

novel as to the modern perspective on education. Gerald Crich fails to represent

the industrialist at the beginning of the twentieth century, in spite of all the

discussions about mines, mining and technological progress that his social

position encourages. The same keeps valid both for the central feminine

characters, Ursula and Gudrun, and for the secondary one, whose association

with ideas representative of the age – decadence, aestheticism, education,

religion – is obviously attracting, but certainly little relevant to Lawrence’s

attempt to investigate the self.

D.H. Lawrence “insisted that he was going ‘a stratum deeper’ than anyone

else had ever gone” and “going deeper meant abandoning the ‘old stable ego’,

the traditional concept of character.”9 Against the background of the sterile

modern life, Lawrence looks for the hidden energies in each and every

individual, which makes us see his characters not as exponents of various social

categories, but all as one and similar receptacle of emotions and repressed

impulses that, by confrontation with the other, can spring to the surface. There

is no essential difference between Gudrun and Ursula in their ability and

wilfulness to submit to the vitalistic energies buried in them, although there

could be little, if any, similarity between them when socially defined and

censured.

Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went

in a strange and palpitating dance towards the cattle, lifting her body

towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some little frenzy of

9 David Trotter, ‘The Modernist Novel,’ The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 76.

unconscious sensation, […] ebbing in strange fluctuations upon the cattle,

that waited, and ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from her,

watching all the time as if hypnotised, their bare horns branching in the

clear light, as the white figure of the women ebbed upon them, in the slow,

hypnotising convulsion of the dance.(Women in Love, 196)

Although the four central characters of Women in Love are presented as

distinct individualities throughout the novel, and they reveal themselves as

different in various situations, although they feel attracted to and repelled by

each other, being gathered and contrasted in couples, no matter how imperfect

these may be, the unknown ego that is brought to the surface, sometimes in

fear, some other times in stupor or ecstasy is what keeps them together. The

characters seem to disagree as to the essence of life, they seem to perceive the

human nature in different terms. Yet all embody Lawrence’s ideas about the

primacy of the unconscious, discovering their identity beyond their old stable

ego. Starting from Freud’s ideas, but rather siding with C.G. Jung, Lawrence

tries to demonstrate that “the instinctual realm became destructive only because

it was repressed rather than respected.”10 His characters are in a continuous

effort of balancing the unconscious and the ego, through relationships with the

other.

It is generally considered that “the division of attitude between the two

pairs of protagonists divides the novel. Gerald and Gudrun inhabit a naturalist

degeneration plot: progressive exposure of an inherent moral flow drives them

down through boredom and despair to subjection or death.[…] Birkin and

Ursula […] inhabit what a symbolist regeneration plot would look like, if

Symbolism had ever gone in for plots. They have no history […] and they

renew themselves by yet further disembodiment.”11 Artistically, they all serve

Lawrence’s purpose. In a plotless novel, challenging, yet little popular to the

reader, Lawrence investigates the human self, in quest of the individual’s deep

strata of being. Adopting a novelistic convention that reminds one of realism,

with clear symbolist influence, Lawrence delimits his artistic standpoint in

terms of modernism, unusual and little ‘orthodox’ as this may have been.

10 Michael Bell, op. cit., 23.11 David Trotter, op. cit., 79.

To demonstrate the extent of the conventionality and modernity of

Lawrence’s narrative formula, it could be useful to consider in parallel two of

his novels, one appreciated by critics as highly conventional, typically realist,

Sons and Lovers, the other more easily brought under a modernist denominator,

Women in Love. What the reader may be surprised to discover is that, in spite

of the apparent formal differences between them, both novels essentially

perform the same function. By efficiently playing with the reader’s horizon of

expectations and forcing him to reorganise both his knowledge of the world

and his perception of the human relationships, the two novels are artful

instruments of investigation of the deepest aspects of the human self.

No matter how surprising its title may have sounded for the prudish

readers used to the Victorian thought patterns, Sons and Lovers starts off in a

pure realistic manner. It begins by an accurate and detailed presentation of the

setting, obviously expected to have proper relevance to the life of its numerous

main or secondary characters. The social milieu is far from being or resembling

a modern one. The novel is set in provincial England, reasonably far away from

London or any other urban environment, which could have suggested a clear

modern dimension of the characters’ lives. Moreover, if the characters reach

the metropolis it is just for them to have somewhere to come back from.

‘The Bottoms’ succeeded to ‘Hell Row’. Hell Row was a block of thatched,

bulging cottages that stood by the brook side on Greenhill Lane. There lived

the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. […] And all

over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked

in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down

like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among

the corn-fields and the meadows. (7)

By the way in which it begins, Sons and Lovers seems to be a narrative

confirmation for what the reader expects the novel to be judging by its table of

contents: a realistic piece of narrative, benefiting from the cohesiveness

provided by a tightly knit plot. ‘Part One’, at least, clearly conveys the sense of

narrative solidity due to a chronologically ordered plot, which can be only

reassuring for those readers for whom the title meant more than they were

ready or prepared to accept.

The illusion of realism is reinforced when the characters are introduced,

initially through the direct characterisation offered from the perspective of the

same omniscient narrator we identify behind the presentation of the setting.

[Mrs. Morel] was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. A

rather small woman, of delicate mould but resolute bearing, she shrank from

the first contact with the Bottoms women. She came down in the July, and

in the September expected her third baby. (9)

Lawrence takes advantage of all the narrative facilities the third-person

omniscient narrator could offer him. He exploits to the full the privilege of

omniscience translated into the flexible and unrestricted movement in time and

space. But even more importantly, he turns to good account the omniscient

narrator’s capacity to move in and out of the characters’ minds. Consequently,

from among the techniques that he could have opted for in order to render the

mind transparent, Lawrence prefers the oldest and the most indirect one,

psycho-narration. The choice of this technique is twice advantageous in the

case of Lawrence’s novels. On the one hand, it contributes to reinforcing the

illusion of realism, thus giving readers the sense of comfort and security that

only their being confronted with things known from a narrative point of view

could give. Besides, the reliable God-like omniscient narrator is expected to

keep not only the narrative under control, but also the view of a changing world

underlain by a highly relative value system. On the other hand, psycho-

narration will offer Lawrence the opportunity to explore linguistically those

deep zones of the human being beyond individual understanding and thus

impossible to express in the character’s own idiom. Lawrence will manage thus

to move further than many of the modernists by using a method most readers

were familiar with and accepted. Lawrence’s art consists precisely in the fact

that, although he uses a method already exploited by the Victorians, he

prevents his novels from looking like the Victorian novels at all. We may thus

venture to say that the formal conventionality of Lawrence’s novels is only the

mask he needed in order to have his new philosophy of life accepted.

Paul did not realise William was dead, it was impossible with such a bustle

going on. The puller-off swung the small truck on to the turn-table, another

man ran with it along the bank down the curving lines.

‘And William is dead, and my mother’s in London, and what will she be

doing?’ the boy asked himself, as if it were a conundrum. (170)

In the quoted fragment, Lawrence adopts a typically realist manner. After

a relatively elaborate introduction on the part of the omniscient narrator, in

which the reader is warned about the nature of the psychic states that are being

narrated, the character, Paul Morel, is allowed to monologise under the form of

the quoted interior monologue. “And William is dead, and my mother’s in

London, and what will she be doing?’ This may be seen, on a superficial

analysis, as a sign of modernity. We may be tempted to consider this

foregrounding of the fictional consciousness indicative of the novelist’s effort

to free the reader from the obtrusive control of the omniscient narrator and to

offer him unmediated access to the figural mind. The inquit formula ‘he

thought’ and the use of the quotation marks, however, have exactly the

opposite effect on the reader. Instead of drawing attention to the character’s

consciousness, the punctuation and the verb of thinking will point to the

existence of two distinct viewpoints. Moreover, the interspersing of the

narrator’s discourse with the character’s interior monologue indicates not only

the clear distance between the two voices, but also the separation between the

external and the mental worlds. We can see in this combination of psycho-

narration and quoted interior monologue the success of Lawrence, the realist,

and the awkwardness, even failure of Lawrence, the modernist. The modernist

writers will seldom use such a narrative formula, given their perception of the

world of the mind as continuous with the external one.

Lawrence uses this formula several times in ‘Part One’ of Sons and

Lovers, that is in that part in which he realistically records Paul Morel’s

evolution from birth to the age of sixteen, when his brother’s death brings

about the reformulation of Paul’s relationship with his mother and with

himself. In ‘Part One’, Paul is defined within the environment in which he was

born and through the external relationships he establishes with the others. ‘Part

One’ is just the beginning of the process of Paul’s growing aware, of himself

and of the other. Paul is not capable yet of appropriately analysing himself. His

feelings, thoughts and emotions are far from being crystallised and so the

character cannot be granted the narrative responsibility of expressing them in

his own idiom. This explains why Lawrence decides to stick to the more

conventional mode of presenting consciousness, psycho-narration, only seldom

combined with the quoted interior monologue.

‘Part Two’ focuses on the making of Paul’s identity, both as an individual

and as an artist. Paul is in search of his true self. He is in a constant process of

definition of the self, vacillating between sensuality and rationality. Paul learns

to know himself and tries to come to terms with himself through the very

special relation with his mother and through the love affairs he had with two

women of totally opposite disposition. The more aware of himself he becomes

in ‘Part Two’, the more freedom he is given as a narrative voice. He starts

thinking of himself and of the others, these mental processes being presented to

the reader under the more frequently used form of the narrated monologue. The

method adopted to present Paul’s mind, in particular, in the guise of the

narrator’s words still point to the existence of two voices, but this time the

outer world is incorporated into the inner. The reader has a less obviously

mediated access to the figural consciousness. Besides, by giving up plot almost

completely in ‘Part Two’, Lawrence smoothly transfers interest from the world

of outer events to the character’s inner motions. Paul’s increasing awareness of

himself and his increasing ability to express himself in words brings about,

from a narrative point of view, the silencing of the audible omniscient narrator

of ‘Part One’. The narrator no longer assumes a position of superiority, his

voice becomes equal in intensity with the character’s, whose consciousness

comes into prominence and becomes transparent for the reader.

He was walking to the station – another mile! The train was near

Nottingham. Would it stop before the tunnels? But it did not matter; it

would get there before dinner-time. He was at Jordan’s. She would come in

half an hour. At any rate, she would be near. He had done the letters. She

would be there. Perhaps she had not come. He ran downstairs. Ah! He saw

her through the glass door. Her shoulders stooping a little to her work made

him feel he could not go forward, could not stand. He went in. He was pale,

nervous, awkward, and quite cold. Would she misunderstand him? He could

not write his real self with this shell. (371)

After realistically covering a series of events in chronological succession,

Sons and Lovers performs a subtle, almost imperceptible movement in depth,

into the character’s consciousness. Paul’s maturing process is no longer

contemplated and analysed from the outside, stage by stage. It becomes the

object of self-investigation, from the inside. The clearly delimited

chronological time is suspended, being replaced by time subjectively perceived.

Mentally, the moment expands into timelessness, being incorporated into it.

The concluding pages of the novel are revealing in this respect. They offer us

the image of a lonely individual still in search of his real self, unable to assert

his identity in relation to a particular place and moment of time. Yet, Paul is

more mature in his ability to confront the darkest recesses of his soul and thus

to come closer to the essence of life He becomes more articulate as well, which

is also suggested by Lawrence’s using the narrated monologue, rather than

psycho-narration.

Beyond the town the country, little smouldering spots for more towns – the

sea – the night – on and on! And he had no place in it! Whatever spot he

stood in, there he stood alone. From his breast, from his mouth, sprang the

endless space, and it was there behind him, everywhere. The people

hurrying along the streets offered no obstruction to the void in which he

found himself. […] He got off the car. […] Everywhere the vastness and

terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by

the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding

everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no Time, only

Space. Who could say that his mother had lived and did not live? (509-510)

Sons and Lovers is a novel of growing self-awareness. Artfully exploiting

the realist heritage, Lawrence explores in Sons and Lovers the potentialities of

the consciousness investigating techniques and makes the novel into a form of

knowledge, capable of probing into man’s inner life. As the novel progresses in

the direction of Paul’s deeper understanding of himself, Lawrence’s methods of

investigation of consciousness resemble more the methods employed by the

incontestably modernist novelists. The initially intrusive presence of the

omniscient narrator becomes more veiled as prominence starts being given to

the character’s consciousness. The audible voice of the narrator, previously

seen as the only source of knowledge, loses in intensity and intermingles with

that of the character. The points of view multiply, inducing in the reader the

sense of a highly relative and subjective reality, in spite of the original illusion

of a stable system of values and beliefs created through the narrative

conventions of realism.

Women in Love represents a greater artistic challenge, in spite of its

adopting a narrative strategy similar to that of Sons and Lovers. More aware of

his art and of the view of life that he wants to express, Lawrence plays more

effectively with his readers’ expectations in a clear effort to move deeper into

the darkest recesses of the human being, far beyond those layers of

consciousness expressible in words.

The novel begins and, at moments, progresses in a realistic way, reason

for which we find it difficult to identify under the formal realistic shell the

modernist renewal that Lawrence operates. The atmosphere the reader is

introduced to in the first pages of the novel is one specific to a Victorian or an

Edwardian novel, rather than that he has already become familiar with in the

works of the modernist writers interested in the character’s consciousness.

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their

father’s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a

piece of brightly coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a

board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their

thoughts strayed through their minds.

‘Ursula,’ said Gudrun, ‘don’t you really want to get married?’ Ursula laid

her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and

considerate.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘It depends how you mean.’(19)

The opening paragraph and the initial verbal exchange between the two

women encapsulate the sense of a value system whose stability the novel will

place under question. In their father’s house, which suggests the patriarchal

Victorian society with all the attention it accorded to family, the two women

are performing activities that indicate their middle-class origin and are

discussing about an institution, that of marriage, incontestably central to the

Victorian moral landscape. The sense of stability and peacefulness conveyed by

the opening lines largely depends on the point of view from which the story is

narrated. Omniscience is seen as the best narrative solution for the expression

of ideas such as those Lawrence proposed in the beginning of Women in Love.

The only sentence that the experienced reader might take as a warning as to

what narrative mode Lawrence is to adopt comes almost unnoticed in the end

of the first paragraph. “They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts

strayed through their minds.” Besides, Ursula’s ambiguously formulated

answer “It depends how you mean” casts doubt on the very truths the text

seems to assert. It is as if, after creating a certain horizon of expectations in his

reader, Lawrence decided to play upon it, with a view to making his reader

assume the responsibility of refreshing his perception of world and fiction.

Set in the apparently settled environment of provincial England, Women

in Love touches on issues that are reminiscent of the stable Victorian value

system and institutions: marriage, religion, education, family. Up to this point

Lawrence’s relation to modernism remains problematical. The reader seems to

be invited to continue his reading comfortably relying on his already acquired

knowledge of the conventions of realism. The characters dialogise in a by now

established Jamesian manner, the omniscient narrator controlling and

withdrawing from the narrative at various times.

Yet, shortly after having created the illusion of solid realism, Lawrence

starts formulating his standpoint as a modernist writer. He begins to subtly

investigate his character’s consciousness, adopting the technique of the

narrated monologue. This being a form of rendering the character’s thoughts

under the guise of the narrator’s words, the plunge into the character’s mind is

far from being abrupt. The combination of narrated monologue and psycho-

narration increases even more the effect of continuity between the outer world

and the inner world due to the coincidence of person and tense between the two

methods. It is not surprising therefore that, for most readers, the loosening of

the omniscient narrator’s control and the passage from the outer world to the

character’s consciousness may even remain unnoticed.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were

human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world,

outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green

velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she

were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any

minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.(24)

The stability, both narrative and ideological, whose illusion Lawrence

created in the opening pages of the novel, is questioned by Lawrence’s

resorting to a technique meant to make the mind transparent. The reader feels,

however, that Lawrence’s investigation will not stop at the mental level. It will

go even deeper, in zones that cannot be controlled mentally. “She was afraid”,

without any additional commentary on the part of the omniscient narrator opens

up towards zones of the unconscious Lawrence developed an acute interest in.

As the novel progresses, this vacillation between the conventions of

realism and the interests of the modernist writer is continued. An apparently

realistic presentation of a character, by direct characterisation, alternates,

sometimes to the reader’s puzzlement, with a lucid investigation, from the

omniscient narrator’s point of view, of the same or another character’s inner

self.

Her son [Gerald] was a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height,

well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. 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. […] His gleaming beauty,

maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to

the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his

unsubdued temper.[…] And then she [Gudrun] experienced a keen

paroxysm, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known

to nobody else on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her

veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. (27)

In Sons and Lovers psycho-narration had been used in a rather

conventional manner (‘He thought that’) either to clear the way for the

character’s monologue or to compensate, if necessary, for the still immature

character’s inability to express in words his uncertain thoughts and feelings. In

Women in Love, psycho-narration is extensively used as the indispensable path

leading to the sub- and unconscious levels of the mind. The verb ‘think’ or

other similar verbs suggesting conscious mental activities are no longer of use,

since it is not these activities the text deals with. Consequently, for the reader to

know that he has access to the sub-verbal depths of the mind, the text always

contains a clear indication of the quality of the psychic states that are being

narrated. The ‘paroxysm of violent sensation’ and ‘the unconscious glisten’ are

textual reference points for the reader who becomes thus aware that he has

moved beyond the individually articulate layers of the mind towards deeper

strata, as those indicated by the text. Besides, the reader realises that he has

lost his comfortable position of contemplator of a world of stable values and

publicly shared meanings that had been represented in the conventional

realistic manner. Paradoxically, through the oldest and most indirect of all

narrative modes for presenting consciousness, Lawrence enables his readers’

access to zones of the mind that had not been explored before.

Even if Women in Love also enlarges upon issues pertaining to the

modern world, such as the Bohemian life of London, the aesthetic penchant of

various characters, the newly-established position of women in society, these

are only exterior aspects of an individual driven by energies that exist beyond

or under the stable ego.

The complexity of the interior life of Lawrence’s characters is conveyed

by a masterly, and unexpected, combination of the three modes for presenting

consciousness in third-person contexts, ranging from the verbal to the sub-

verbal layers of the mind. What is, however, a characteristic of Lawrence’s

novels is that psycho-narration always subordinates and includes the other two

methods, which clearly indicates Lawrence’s interest in those deep strata of the

mind whose elucidation can never become the full responsibility of the

character. And, surprisingly, if we want to demonstrate Lawrence’s modernity,

it is not in spite, but because of this old and worn out narrative strategy for

expressing the mind that Lawrence can be considered a modernist novelist.

Let us consider the following excerpt, which gives the reader the measure

of Lawrence’s investigating abilities. Through an artful alternation of

techniques, Lawrence manages to plunge into Ursula’s deepest self and cover

the whole range of the character’s psychic states.

‘Then let it end,’ [Ursula] said to herself. It was a decision. It was not a

question of taking one’s life – she would never kill herself, that was

repulsive and violent. It was a question of knowing the next step. And the

next step led into the space of death. Did it? – or was there - ?

Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside the

fire. And then the thought came back! The space of death! Could she give

herself to it? Ah, yes – it was a sleep. She had had enough. So long she had

held out and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to resist any more.

In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was dark.

She could feel within darkness, the terrible assertion of her body, the

unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that is too much, the

far-off awful nausea of dissolution set in within the body.’ (223)

The darkness of the human being, whose meaning is conveyed through

the narrative technique, is also revealed, in Lawrence’s case, through an

elaborate texture of symbols whose function is to offer readers further paths of

access to inexpressible meanings. The symbol of ‘water’12, under all its varied

forms, from dew, through rain or the water in a rivulet or a lake to snow is

central to Women in Love. It helps readers see the novel as an expression of the

primordial vitality and of a temporary regression and disintegration, at the same

time, both characteristic of Lawrence’s philosophy of life. Symbolically, 12 see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, op. cit., vol. 1, 107-117.

‘water’ suggests the modern individual’s potentiality of extracting the energy

that will lead to regeneration and reintegration by taking a plunge into the

darkest recesses of the being. ‘Water’ symbolises life to be discovered in

darkness and having an infinite regenerating power. It is in ‘water’ as a symbol

that we can see the unity of the feminine and the masculine as an expression of

Lawrence’s striving for wholeness.

Lawrence was interested in human relationships and the way in which the

individual defines him/herself through these relationships. That is why he built

his novel on the relationships between two central couples, Gerald Crich –

Gudrun Brangwen, Rupert Birkin – Ursula Brangwen. By referring this

organisation to the title of the novel, one may derive another modernist feature

of Lawrence’s work. For all modernists, the title is part of the organic structure

of the fictional world, it is elaborately worked upon so as to establish an

appropriate relationship between the writer and the reader as to the meaning

boundaries of the work. If looked at in this way, the title of Women in Love

creates a new horizon of expectations for the reader of modernism. It implicitly

states from the very beginning that a reading of the novel in terms of the

centrality of the two couples would be oversimplifying. The whole range and

mosaic of secondary characters would be only fictional creations meant to

create an illusion of plot with a writer who showed too little interest in plot as a

conventional backbone for his novel. They would be only a much too artificial

way to create a background of minor relationships against which the

individuality of the main characters constitutes itself. To assume such a thing in

connection with Lawrence would be not only depreciatory about Lawrence’s

contribution to setting up the canon of modernism, but also detrimental to our

understanding of the meaning of Women in Love. The way in which the title of

the novel balances itself against the treatment of the subject matter would

rather be indicative of the fact that Lawrence tried to find a solution to express

the integrity of the modern individual. Just like the other modernist writers who

were interested in the essence of the individual and the human nature,

Lawrence’s character, individually or involved in social relationships, is a sum

total of inner and outer influences. Instead of strictly focusing on the contrast

between the two central couples, the reader of Lawrence’s Women in Love is

invited to derive profit from seeing both main and central characters as partial

definitions of the modern spirit and to integrate these fragments into a holistic

view of the individual as body and soul, as individuality and social being.

Constructed in a modernist manner, which technically involves a subtle

combination of conventional and innovative elements, Women in Love

constitutes itself into a novel focusing on the modern spirit. All the anxieties

and certainties of the modern individual at the beginning of the twentieth

century are embodied in the mosaic of main and secondary characters of the

novel. It may be asserted that the only central character of Women in Love is

the modern individual, socially and individually perceived, whose identity is

built up out of the fragmentary, sometimes unilateral identities of the various

characters of the novel.