One need not go far to seek a Modernist parallel for this use of imagery: it is close to the heart of Modernist ideology. One can liken the Homeric subtext of Ulysses to the Brangwensaga’s Biblical subtext, or see in Lawrence an echo of Yeats’ (and perhaps Eliot’s) appropriation of ancient poetic archetypes. Modernist writers would use (often haphazardly, although sometimes systemtically) the debris of myth and legend to enforce the a-temporality of their work, as well as adding a symbolic layer which detached them from the hated and hollow mimesis of the Realist impulse. Lawrence does something similar by gathering Christian myth and forging it anew in the crucible of the Brangwensaga. Such an act both liberates the spiritual from a historical framework (essentially by destroying it) yet paradoxically brings an intense time-awareness by marking the death of Christianity.
The Christian subtext is also shared by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Daedalus, Lawrence’s characters reject the givens of the previous generation, particularly in religion. For Lawrence, this was a progression from the oedipal drama played out in Sons and Lovers, and the ‘battle of the generations’ remained crucial in a movement intensely aware of its own modernity. A similar pattern can be seen, not only in A Portrait…, but in the conflict between James and Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse, as well as the father/son dramas of Expressionist theatre.
Thus in the Brangwensaga, the fairly freely-structured linear narrative represents a repudiation of the religion of forebears. Anna, the emergent and educated woman, shatters her husband’s pristine spiritual vision in Lincoln Cathedral:
She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the passion he has. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which has been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead matter – but dead, dead.
His mouth was full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of his vital illusions. Soon he would be stark, stark, without one place wherein to stand, without on belief in which to rest. (The Rainbow, p.205)
Will Brangwen is described as half-articulate, half-created and between the outer forms of Christianity and the essence of some ‘eternal absolute’: thus he initially liberates Anna, but is ultimately entangled in the ideology of the old generation, despite his mysterious brooding nature (this dark, pagan side recalls Morel.) His conservatism is emphasised in his conflict with Ursula (a true proponent of modernity) as dramatized in Women in Love as they argue about her possible marriage. The tension created between Rupert, struggling to articulate a new religion, and Will, still passively bound to the old one, is palpable. Indeed, the marriage of Will and Anna represents altogether a ‘half-state’ between the creative equilibrium of the 1840’s, and the striving of the new generation. This can be seen in the listless decadence of their early marriage, and the eventual self-consumption: “this was what their love has become, a sensuality violent and extreme as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness of love. It was all the lust and the infinite, maddening intoxication of the senses, a passion of death.”This violent sensuality is, incidentally, the passive subjugation to lust which Birkin later lives in fear of.
Both Will and Anna both latch on to Ursula as an outlet, but Ursula, as Lawrence’s culmination of a New Woman will eventually reject them both: “her heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted.”Ursula’s early encounters with Christianity are ambiguous, bound up with three things which will become crucial in Women in Love’s exposition of a new religion. Firstly, the old forms of Christianity are to be discarded, since the immediate experience of eternity is far purer and more pressing. Secondly, there is a violent recoiling from the material world, manifested here in Ursula’s horror at poverty: “there was something unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity.”Finally, the ultimate expression of this new religion is to be found in sensuality: Ursula’s sensual fantasies about Christ allow for her sexual awakening with Anton, and presage the saviour/sex symbolism which will be deployed in Women in Love.
By the time Ursula has reached educated and relatively liberated womanhood, she talks with Feminists and purges religions of its dogma and theological equipage, approaching a purer, more human religion. This movement in continued in Women in Love, except at a heightened level. Birkin declares, prefaced by a scriptural reference to Sodom: “Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way.”Gerald is seen to repudiate the unsustainable Christian philanthropy of his father in pursuit of a new industrial mechanical utopia, in which he is god of the machine. Both men are atheists, agreeing at least that “the old ideals are dead as nails.”The two sisters are not concerned with God and traditional religion, but the unconscious and conscious drives of love, sex, fulfillment, marriage, art and self. In short, they strive within the tripartite structure of eternity, society and sex described above. Characteristic of the novel is the scene where Birkin comes to Ursula (‘Sunday Evening’) and she is alone because the others have gone to Church.
If The Rainbow represents the ascent of modernity and the creation of a new hope for the liberated Ursula, then Women in Love is the hardening of that hope into a religion. Yet it must be emphasised that Lawrence’s is an open-ended narrative. The reader is left in an ambiguous position, both with the final pair of lines and the general progression of the closing chapter. The ideal of a religion (or rather a spirituality) of modernity is only tentatively attained at best. As Birkin is the symbolic analogue to Christ, the harbinger of a new ideology, the ‘son of God’ who comes to Ursula, it is in him that the root of the modern religion is to be found. Incidentally, it is also Birkin who Lawrence modeled after himself. His modernity encapsulates the question posed by the chapter ‘Death and Love’: to attain eternity by liberating the male/female relationship from the debasing and soulless grip of industrial dystopia. It is a very real choice, death or love: “better die than mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.”
The Rainbow sets the precedent for ephipanies of sensuality. Sex is at the heart of emotional liberation, as an act of creation, of anti-rational heights of experience, and of the conjunction of male and female – a transcendence of opposites. The sexual transfiguration of Tom and Lydia – “at last they had thrown open the doors”– is reprised by Anna and Will: “all the night for him now, to unfold, to venture within, all the mystery to be entered, all the discovery to be made.”Similar revelations accompany the sexual scenes involving Ursula and Anton. Yet it cannot be ignored that these threaten to become merely transitive moments of realisation: sustaining the polarity between male and female becomes the stumbling block, to ensure that Birkin’s pair of stars do not annihilate each other. Both the marriage of Will and Anna, and Ursula’s passionate affair with Skrebensky fall apart (it is notable that Ursula, the child of modernity, has the strength to resist subjugation by Anton, the figure of the soldier and aristocrat.)
This problem – purifying the sex act – becomes a central one in Women in Love. Unlike both The Rainbow, and the earlier Sons and Lovers, it is not until the chapter Excurse that there is a truly redemptive sensual moment:
She had her desire fulfilled. He had her desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence of mystic, palpable, real otherness.
They slept the chilly night through under the hood of the car, a night of unbroken sleep. It was already high day when he awoke. They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritence of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. (Women in Love, p.366)
Birkin’s torturous problem, up until the creative equilibrium with Ursula is achieved, is one of escaping the old conception of romantic love. His rhetoric is deliberately overblown, and Lawrence undercuts what he was struggling to articulate with Ursula’s withering commentary, but the issues raised are nevertheless profound, albeit frequently confused and frustrating. Rupert accurately identifies the fact that the word ‘love’ has become vulgarised: instead he seeks something beyond love, slave neither to passion nor social institution; a marriage that is at the core of being, but which does not obliterate the identity of the individual. Ursula, on the other hand, still believes in love and brings intimacy and sensuality, but also a fear of being possessed and subjugated, simply because she has not experienced the spiritual dimension that Birkin embodies: “she had had lovers, she had known passions. But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God.”It is not so much a fusion of these two elements, but the setting of them into a dynamic equilibrium, that realises the needs of both. This is exactly what Gerald and Gudrun fail to do, and their relationship becomes a violent struggle for domination; poisoned by the possessive needs of both parties. As Gudrun chides him: “try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less.”
Thus sensuality and sex have the potential to become cornerstones of modern spirituality, but they bring with them the difficulties of balancing the mental and the physical, the abstract and the sensual, the individual and the total union. When combined with the clinging desires of the human soul, intensified by the industrial condition, sensuality becomes something as dangerous as it can be redemptive: Lawrence juxtaposes sensual arousal with violence and cruelty (witness the scene where Gerald breaks his horse.) The creative/destructive polarity of ‘love’ can either be harnessed, or it can fall apart and turn upon those who formed it. It is especially interesting that Lawrence’s rejection of traditional love also embraces the possibilities of homosexual love, as seen in Ursula’s lesbianism and Birkin’s desire for Gerald.
The second crucial element of the new religion is a social one. The Rainbow dramatises the problem by showing how increasing education is simply leading to greater disillusion. Will Brangwen would not mind if “the whole monstrous superstructure of the world today, cities and industries and civilization”were swept away. Ursula, too, sees a terrible fascination in the industrial slavery of the collieries, and hates herself for submitting to the mechanical system of the schoolroom: “everything went to produce vulgar things, to encumber material life.”This distaste for the industrial is carried over into Women in Love, where both Ursula and Gudrun are repelled by the spectre of industry; Gudrun escaping into art, Ursula into nature. Yet there is a curious double-image, where both (but especially Gudrun) are peversely attracted to the miners and the pit. Perhaps this is because the miners represent not only the realities of the modern situation, which any new ideal must face, but also a subterranean and almost inhuman world similar to that through which seekers must pass to achieve Birkin’s transcendent post-human state.
Rupert, characteristically, goes to an extreme, deriding the dead tree of humanity and claiming social existence is an aggregate lie. Again, this is a position which Ursula helps to rescue from sheer nihilism with her sensual feel for the creative possibilities of human relationships. Gerald remains the curious case – the commercial magnate – yet he too has a transformative vision, but one which takes industrial society in an entirely different direction from that envisaged by the other three. Nevertheless, a reaction is actualised in their trip to Austria, and particularly Rupert and Ursula’s departure to Italy, which symbolised Lawrence’s long-time fascination with the vivacity of cultures of the sun, be they Mediterranean or Central American. The sexual ‘dissent’ and the café culture of London (even though it is satirised) represent other modes of resistance that link back to the initial figure of the new generation departing from the forms of the old.
The tripartite structure is completed with eternity. This is the true ‘triangle’ of Women in Love. In seeking eternity, they must balance the demands of sex and society: both with their own complications. Both the men are too coldly intellectual: Gerald suffering from a closed mechanical and social view of existence, Birkin from the opposite – an abstract, anti-social, nihilistic view devoid of feeling, self-destructive and depraved. The Brangwen women bring sensuousness and an experiential reality to complement both: at first sight a sexist and stereotyped view on Lawrence’s part until the character of the Brangwen men is remembered from The Rainbow. In Ursula and Rupert’s relationship, the balance becomes creative, and although there is tension, it is productive tension. For Gudrun and Gerald, the outcome is destructive. Gerald has been ably described as “the anarchic Dionysian spirit trying to express itself in the Apollonian (degraded) forms of industrial production” by DiBattista.Conversely, Gudrun is perhaps the Apollonian spirit – envisaging the purity of art and society co-joined as embodied in Loerke – yet tortured by the passing of time and her own passionate desires which erupt and disrupt her placid exterior. Because neither character is fully resolved internally, their relationship cannot last and ends in tragic violence.
Thus we see, throughout the Brangwensaga, the emergence of figures struggling to define a new ideal, a new religion, rooted in a fixed idea of eternity, drawing from the well of sensuality and opposed to the degrading mechanization of society. This is pretty much the ideological battle of Modernism itself, and it is unsurprising that in the characters we can see some of the trends of art. In Gerald’s industrial utopia, we can detect the ideology of Futurism: the glory of the machine, of industry and progress – it is no coincidence that Gerald used to be a soldier, and just as Futurism degenerated into Fascism, Gerald turns to murder. Birkin ably represents the mystic strain of Modernism of which Lawrence himself was a part, and also some of its contradictions: its pretentiousness, its need to anchor spiritual reality in sensual reality, and so forth. Gudrun and Ursula perhaps illustrate the crisis of subject and object. Gudrun veers from one to another: from being possessed entirely by the mountain landscape to a need to exert her will over Gerald. She seeks the purity of artistic form that neither pure expressionism nor pure impressionism can satisfy, but the union of sculpture with industrial architecture (beauty with function) may well be able to: “(Loerke) existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was only his work.” Again, this calls to mind Bauhaus, or perhaps Imagism in its desire for honest aesthetic unity and purity. Ursula, on the other hand, represents a balance between impression and expression; the duality and multiplicity of sensual creation, as opposed to the monumental singular power of Loerke, forging Platonic forms into architectonic reality.
Among them all, they represent all the varied, and sometimes contradictory strains of Modernism, striving to find its ideal among its own paradoxes. Lawrence’s religious vision is essentially the same as Modernism’s aesthetic one: how to break through to the timeless from a condition – modernity – which is intensely aware of its own temporality. The new order demands a fresh ideal with which to reclaim the heights of the old: witness the similarities between Tom and Lydia, and Ursula and Rupert. The seeds for their relationship are laid along with the first canal cutting, and the start of the industrial era. The Brangwensaga charts this process – finding the true expression of modernity – and thus manages to be both a universally archetypal yet deeply historical text. Lawrence’s task was to create a new sex relation, a new society, but above all a new ideal. Despite appearances, his was a truly religious vision.
Bibliography
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (1915)
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)
D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, Everyman Edition, ed.Mara Kalnins (London, 1992)
D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed. Phillip Balbert and Phillip Marcus (Ithica & London, 1985)
D.H. Lawrence: The Novels, Alastair Niven (Cambridge, 1978)
Landmarks of World Literature: Sons and Lovers, Michael Black (Cambridge, 1992)
D.H. Lawrence and the Modern World, ed.Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (Basingstoke, 1989)
River of Dissolution: D.H. Lawrence and English Romanticism, Colin Clarke (London, 1969)
For example, The Sense of History in ‘The Rainbow’ collected in D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World, ed. Peter Preston and Peter Hoare (Basingstoke, 1989)
Women in Love, p.405
The Rainbow, p.219
Ibid, p.204
Women in Love, p.358
Ibid, p.420
The Rainbow, p.208
Ibid, p.104
Women In Love, p.440
The Rainbow, p.237
Ibid. p.267
Ibid. p.285
Women in Love, p.76
Ibid. p.75
Women in Love, p.224
The Rainbow, p.96
Ibid. p.124
Women in Love, p.358
Ibid. p.500
The Rainbow, p.193
Ibid. p.435
Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: DH Lawrence and English Romanticism (London, 1969)
Maria DiBattista, Women in Love: DH Lawrence’s Judgment Book collected in DH Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed.Phillip Balbert and Phillip Marcus (Ithica & London, 1985)
