Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [9]
If Gudrun is the embodiment of a German ice-queen detached from family and not quite believing in love, she finds in Gerald her corresponding Nordic ice-king. The son of the mine owner to whom responsibility now falls for directing the mine operations due to his father’s illness, Gerald is of the exalted regions of Valhalla, and Gudrun, despite herself, is appropriately drawn to him:
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. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing (p. 12).
Despite the mutual attraction they have for each other, they are as doomed as characters in a Greek tragedy. It is a measure of Lawrence’s genius as a writer that Gerald and Gudrun move with the ritual of destiny toward their predetermined end without violating the sense of realism that is the strength of the work. In the chapter entitled “Water-Party,” Lawrence reveals Gudrun’s contempt and fearlessness of males when she rushes heedlessly toward a herd of dangerous longhorn steers. When Gerald questions her as to why she did it, as an answer she smacks him soundly across the face. “You have struck the first blow,” says Gerald. “And I shall strike the last,” Gudrun replies prophetically (p. 170).
Gudrun, then, represents modern woman in her hatred of men. It is not that she sets out to despise Gerald, or men in general. On the contrary, she sees in Gerald a possible mate. “I shall know more of that man,” she says when she sees him in church at his sister’s wedding. She even goes so far as to ask herself, “Am I really singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?” (p. 13). However, as a modern woman trapped in a traditional society still under the sway of Victorianism, she is drawn to the expression of her freedom but does not know how, or does not wish, to integrate it with the love of men. We have already noted that she went off to London to pursue an art career and that she allows herself to be picked up by workers. But the desire for freedom is evident in her everyday life. “She wears her clothes in pure defiance.” She gives “her word like a man” (p. 163) and insists on rowing Ursula and herself at the water party. She insists on Ursula singing while she dances a wild, ritualistic, and sexual celebration to her freedom that eventually attracts the cattle that she fearlessly charges. When Gerald accuses her of trying to drive them mad, he is unwittingly speaking of himself also. “God, what it is to be a man!” she exclaims after she and Ursula witness Gerald swimming naked. “The freedom, the liberty, the mobility! ... You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it” (p. 45). Lawrence’s surrogate, Birkin, spells it out for us. Gudrun and Gerald are “born in the process of destructive creation,” the river of darkness that is the “inverse process” of Aphrodite (p. 171).
Far more than Ursula and Birkin, Gudrun and Gerald symbolize Lawrence’s personal worldview of Western man as he presently exists. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic beings such as Gerald are not only out of touch with their sensibility, they lack the knowledge of the blood, which for Lawrence is an intuitive knowledge that surpasses knowledge of the brain. In the chapter entitled “Totem,” Gerald sees an African sculpture that symbolizes the bohemian nature of Halliday’s flat where he views it. Lawrence writes:
He saw vividly with his spirit the grey, forward-stretching face of the negro woman, African and tense, abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath....
“Why is it art?” Gerald asked, shocked, resentful.
“It conveys a complete truth,” said Birkin. “It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.