Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence

The great shadow of the First World War hangs ominously over D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, an existential meditation on love, politics and society. The novel explores a broad and tangled web of life’s essential questions, taking the reader down into the troubled early twentieth century’s subconscious, but ultimately providing no answers. Taken as a whole, Women in Love, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has an unresolved quality about it, an ambiguity that is both engaging, evocative and open to interpretation.

D. H. Lawrence died young, at forty-four, but wrote with a seemingly inexhaustible energy. During his short life he mastered poetry, the short story and the novel. Two of his most famous novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), were written as the one novel, but broken up into two by Lawrence’s publisher. This is extraordinary productivity in itself, as the two novels together make up a thousand pages. The idea was to publish them in quick succession, but an obscenity trial intervened for The Rainbow, and Women in Love would have to wait for publication. It was first published in New York City in 1920, in a limited edition of 1250 copies, available only on subscription. This was due to the controversial nature of its predecessor.

Reading Women in Love today, one doesn’t bat an eyelid at its sexual content. In fact there’s very little actual sex in it, but rather an ocean of conversation where everything – politics, economics, sex, society – is discussed ad infinitum. This constant looking at subjects from every possible angle, of arguing intellectual positions inside and out, gives the novel a deeply brooding, existential quality. Nothing is sure in Women in Love. The characters are all in a struggle for self-realisation and understanding. Every question that is asked only gets a half answer, and is left hanging in the air. Spiritually, emotionally and physically, every character is unfulfilled. Happiness, or any type of contentment or peace with the world, seems an impossibility. Everyone in Women in Love tries to live a conventional life of love, family and marriage, but unsettling questions and psychic disturbances throb underneath the surface. Society presents barely a veneer of settled, conventional life, while underneath everything is fractured and broken, even dangerously close to collapse.

The Brangwen Sisters and Their Lovers

The story revolves around two sets of lovers. There are the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun. Ursula works as a teacher, while Gudrun is a sculptor. They meet two men, the intellectual and idealistic Rupert Birkin, and the coal-mine heir Gerard Crich, who is overtly masculine and economically rational. Ursula takes up with Rupert Birkin, while Gudrun forms a relationship with Gerard Crich, who comes to her after his father’s funeral in an emotionally disturbed state and the two have sex. Most of the novel centres around these four main characters, whose lives become closely intertwined as they fruitlessly search out the answer to life’s most vexing questions, and try to achieve happiness. An added emotional complexity is Rupert’s wish to form a close male relationship with Gerard, one that rivals in intensity his involvement with Ursula. Rupert’s aim is for a complete emotional and spiritual union with both sexes, a perfect marriage, in effect, with a man and a woman.

The tensions and anxieties that simmer constantly underneath the brittle surface of these relationships cannot be kept in check forever, and eventually things fall apart. Gudrun and Gerard’s love affair comes to a tragic end, while Ursula and Rupert’s marriage is not entirely satisfactory. As we leave Ursula and Rupert on the last page of Women in Love, the reader feels that this marriage will either limp along miserably, or necessarily end, causing confusion and loneliness.

It has to be admitted that it is difficult to know what Lawrence really meant us to understand, if anything, in Women in Love. Much of the dialogue, and even action, is often contradictory and leads nowhere in particular. If anything, the novel is a long internal conversation that the author is having with himself, and is fascinating for that alone. While the dialogue may appear frustrating in its ambiguity, it is compelling because it is a mirror of Lawrence’s tortured consciousness.

Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the unnerving tone that runs throughout, the novel has quite a liberating effect. As Gudrun, Ursula, Rupert and Gerard unload all of their questions and troubles about life, it works as a kind of release for the reader. Also liberating is Lawrence’s treatment of gender. Both men and women in Women in Love are genuine intellectual equals, to such a degree that has perhaps not been expressed anywhere else outside of Shakespeare. Lawrence effortlessly inhabits the skin of both his male and female characters, treating gender almost as a superficial mask. No great weight is given to either specifically male or female qualities. Lawrence is more interested in individual psychology, rather than the battle of the sexes.

Where sex is concerned in the novel, it is treated with a disconcerting closeness to death. Sex and love for Lawrence always has some violence and tragedy lurking close by, ready to undo any pleasure or happiness. Falling in love doesn't bring out the best in his characters, and can even prompt a desire to violently strangle the beloved to death. In one scene Birkin is given a violent blow to the head by an old lover, Hermione, causing him to stumble into the woods and enjoy a sensuous, naked roll in the grass. Violence and sensuality go hand in hand in Women in Love. Again, Shakespeare comes to mind, especially the poet’s ‘problem play’, Measure for Measure, which closely binds sex to death in a nihilistic union that points to a disgust for sex itself.

Published after the horrors and carnage of the First World War, it’s impossible not to read the arid emotional wasteland of Women in Love as a shell shocked response to that European catastrophe. The novel repeatedly asks how to live, how to find contentment, how to find spiritual and emotional connection to our fellow beings, but ultimately cannot provide any answers. Women in Love cannot be read to find wisdom or an explanation to our most fundamental questions, but rather it invites us to experience Lawrence’s deeply troubled state of mind, his confusion and despair.

Women in Love, by D. H. Lawrence. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0141441542