Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [17]
To be fair, while it is true that Lawrence has identified Gerald with a Nietzschean will to power—the scene of Gerald abusing the horse would be one example; associating him with old Norse gods and other Wagnerian imagery, another—Lawrence is in search of no Valhalla. Rather, Ursula and Birkin turn their backs on this Nordic landscape and head symbolically for the sunshine of Italy. Gerald dies in the snow, his natural element, and Gudrun goes off with Loerke to Germany, the land of Wagner. The final message of the novel is that homosexuality is simply one more avenue tried and rejected in the reinvention of love. We imagine Ursula and Birkin, like Lawrence and Frieda in their most idyllic moments, in the garden of some Italian villa sipping a glass of wine under a blazing Italian sun, Dante’s symbol of eternal love and perfect understanding.
An issue of major concern to the twentieth century that Lawrence explores in his work is women’s rights. As early as Sons and Lovers, Lawrence was extremely sensitive to the repressive nature of a male-dominated society, in which women did not have an opportunity to realize their full potential:
“Don’t you like being at home?” Paul asked [Miriam], surprised.
“Who would?” she answered, low and intense. “What is it? I’m all day cleaning what the boys make just as bad in five minutes. I don’t want to be at home.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I want to do something. I want a chance like anybody else” (p. 171).
Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, had a chance at a more independent life with Lawrence, and she took it. Ursula, who is already freer than Miriam in that she has a profession, is still bound by societal expectations for women. Both she and Gudrun are openly envious of men and their freedoms, as noted in the scene in which the two sisters see Gerald swimming. Lawrence was very much out front on the issue of women’s equality. This is not to say that Birkin, or for that matter Ursula, are beyond the conventions of their day as they strive for a freer life. They both want to be served, for example, and consider it a grave fault that the other is unwilling to do so. Lawrence once insisted that women had no souls, which caused Frieda not to speak to him for several days. There is no such outrage in Women in Love, but one often finds that Birkin, a reservoir for ideas, does not always know his own mind, and that Ursula, on the other hand, knows precisely what she wants. This is not by accident. Lawrence wanted to give the choicer morsels of life and understanding to women. The work is, after all, entitled Women in Love for a reason. The fact is that, although it is as much about Birkin and Gerald as it is about Ursula and Gudrun, it is Ursula’s novel.
In the chapter entitled “A Chair,” Lawrence, with a brilliant economy of means that blends symbolism effortlessly with the realism of the novel, as he has done throughout the work, uses the occasion of Ursula and Birkin buying a chair in the flea market to demonstrate how Ursula’s point of view keeps the couple on track. Here Lawrence really outdoes himself in that what begins as a discussion about decorating and style develops into a commentary on the state of Ursula and Birkin’s relationship and ends by becoming a subtle spiritual thesis about how life in general should be lived:
“Why must you always praise the past, at the expense of the present? Really, I don’t think so much of Jane Austen’s England. It was materialistic enough, if you like—”
“It could afford to be materialistic,” said Birkin, “because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t. We are materialistic because we haven’t the power to be anything else—try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but materialism: mechanism, the very soul of materialism.”
Ursula was subdued into angry silence. She did not heed what he said. She was rebelling against something else.
“And I hate your past. I’m sick of it,” she cried. “I believe I even hate that old chair, though it is beautiful. It isn