Women in Love: the Male / Female Relationships

黃 埔 學 報 第 五 十 一 期 民 國 九 十 五 年 155
WHAMPOA - An Interdisciplinary Journal 51(2006) 155-161
Women in Love:
the Male / Female Relationships
劉 煌 城 、 張 簡 麗 淑
Department of Foreign Languages, ROC Military Academy
Abstract
The gender problem has entrapped the male and the female into the struggle for
subjectivity, the battle for survival, a war for supremacy. The metaphor of “mutual hellish
recognition,” in the chapter entitled “Rabbit,” illustrates D. H Lawrence’s critique of the war
between male dominance and the female counter-attack. In an open text like Women in Love,
the writers undo some contradictions and disclose Lawrence’s assertion of establishing the
equilibrium Male / Female relationship.
Keywords: gender, subjectivity, male dominance, equilibrium
Women in Love begins with a
discussion about marriage between Ursula
and Gudrun. For Gudrun, a traditional
marriage is an “experience of some sort” that
could relieve her boredom and ultimately
provide self-fulfillment 1 . Her sister, Ursula,
however, questions this and asserts that the
experience of marriage could be “the end of
experience” (2). These two women are not
searching for romance as their 19 th -century
counterparts did but instead for
authentication and escape from a barren and
outmoded life. This change in attitude
becomes evident when Ursula contradicts
her sister who utters dissatisfaction with
modern life because “Everything withers in
the bud” (2). Unwilling to define herself
according to traditional patriarchal
guidelines, Ursula decides that marriage is
“more likely to be the end of experience” (1).
“The questioning nature of Gudrun’s and
Ursula’s opening dialogue,” observes Nigel
Kelsey, “accumulates in intensity as the
questions themselves accumulate; definite
feelings of emptiness, fear and loss”(141-42).
The dialogue builds to an essential and
radical question, one that later became
prominent in early feminist thought: is the
desire for marriage essential to female
nature or a social construction? In the
absence of obvious choices they can only
anchor their knowledge in a fear of the
lesser known. Maria Dibattista suggests, this
chapter “Sisters” centers on the radical
isolation of modern woman, isolated from
marriage and its central affirmations” (72).
Troubling images of marriage are illustrated
in the portrayal of Gerald’s mother and
prove what Ursula doubts that the nature of
marriage is problematic. Gerald’s mother
is locked in a marriage of “utter
interdestruction” that shatters her mind and
her husband’s vitality, and she submits to
him “like a hawk in a cage” (209). Mrs.
Crich appears here as living proof of
Ursula’s fears that marriage can be the end

156 黃 埔 學 報 第 五 十 一 期 民 國 九 十 五 年
of experience for a woman.
The radical strategies to combat this
fear becomes a marked trait of Ursula’s
character shown in her frequent demand that
Rupert Birkin tell her he loves her, and in
her desire for Birkin but her fears of yielding
“her very identity” to him, knowing that he
could accept love only on his terms (178).
The symbolic image of the drowned couple
provides another negative image of union
and offers evidence of how one partner in a
male / female relationship may dominate
and possibly destroy the other. To Ursula,
Birkin seems “a beam of essential enmity, a
beam of light that did not only destroy her,
but denied her altogether, revoked her whole
world. She saw him as a clear stroke of
uttermost contradiction, a strange gem-like
being whose existence defined her own
non-existence” (190). To echo Ursula’s
struggle, Birkin insists that “the old way of
love seemed a dreadful bondage” (191).
His anger over the state of marriage matches
Ursula’s, and in response he also embraces a
specific “conjunction where man had being
and woman had being, two pure beings,
each constituting the freedom of the other”
(191). He desires impersonal relations
between earnest individuals. Lawrence
asserts a similar philosophy in his letter to
Catherine Mansfield:
I am sick and tired of personality in every
way. Let us be easy and impersonal, not
for ever fingering over our own souls, and
the souls of our acquaintances, but trying
to create a new life, a new common life, a
new complete tree of life from the roots
that are within us. (Letters 1: 359)
Birkin’s theory of “star equilibrium” takes
its thematic cue directly from Lawrence’s
own dream of a healthier, less anxious
exchange between lovers and friends.
Birkin persuades Ursula to establish
a union where each commits to the other
while maintaining the integrity of the self.
Ursula, however, prefers her own approach
to human affection, and tries to provoke
verbal declarations of love from Birkin.
Ursula asks Birkin so often to confirm this
spiritual dimension of their relationship that
Birkin calls the question her war-cry: “’A
Brangwen, A Brangwen,’--and old
battle-cry.--Yours is ‘Do you love
me?--Yield knave, or die’” (WL, 244).
Despite her yearning to be loved and her
insistence on the supremacy of love over the
individual, Ursula is fearful that she will be
consumed by him, and she sometimes
becomes aggressive in her resistance to such
envelopment. Lawrence cast Ursula as the
modern woman with grasping qualities of
the modern cultural degeneration. When
Birkin comes to propose to Ursula and ends
up doing so with her father in the room,
Ursula-- flustered, “driven out of her own
radiant, single world” by the unexpected
proposal--cries out to both men, “why
should I say anything?. . . You do this off
your own bat, it has nothing to do with me.
Why do you both want to bully me?” (253).
Her contrariness about whether she is the
owner or the owned is succinctly illustrated
by a single sentence from her consideration
of Birkin’s proposal: “Let him be her man
utterly, and she in return would be his
humble slave--whether he wanted it or not”
(258).
Ursula tries to find the balance that
allows her to be so close to Birkin but not
with the sacrifice of her independent soul.

劉 煌 城 、 張 簡 麗 淑 :Women in Love:the Male / Female Relationships 157
This struggle to achieve some equilibrium
presages her modern womanhood. In Women
in Love, Leo J. Dorbad found,
“Balance--sexual or otherwise--is a key
factor in any critical discussion of the novel.
Some form of balance is indeed the primary
goal of every character” (96). Not only
Ursula and Birkin, but also Gerald and
Gudrun encounter the challenge of searching
for balance in a male / female relationship.
Gerald, for example, is trapped in a
deep-seated perversion that might be related
to a painful childhood memory--his
accidental killing of his brother. Unlike
Birkin, Gerald does not entertain lofty
thoughts of spiritual or philosophical
development and derives most of his pride
from his precarious position as an industrial
magnate. He blindly dedicates himself to
the continuous mechanization of his family’s
coal mines. He takes over the prestigious
position from his rapidly aging father. But
Gerald displays none of his father’s
Victorian benevolence. Instead, he sees his
workers as damned spirits, mere robots.
Ironically, he establishes “the very
expression of his will, the incarnation of his
power, a great and perfect machine, a system,
an activity of pure order, pure mechanical
repetition, repetition and infinitum, hence
eternal and infinite” (220). Such an
individual, flagrantly ignoring the intrinsic
dignity and personality of others, cannot
possibly hope to achieve true connection
with another human being, even in matters
of simple friendship. A corrupted soul
from the start, he prevents himself from
achieving what Birkin prizes most: freedom
for two.
Gudrun possesses a degree of creative
potential, a sincere desire to lend her world a
spiritual significance beyond the merely
sensuous side of life. But even her artistic
endeavors, especially her little figurines,
bear the ominous mark of her excessive
willfulness, her tendency toward
manipulation and possessiveness. “From the
outset of their relationship”, observes
Charles Rossman, “Gerald and Gudrun are
locked in a struggle for mastery over one
another” (277). Thwarted and desperate, the
combined wills of Gerald and Gudrun soon
manifest themselves as an extreme lust for
power and begin to usurp what little
tenderness, love, and humanity they share.
The terms of their unspoken contract are, as
Lawrence says, diabolical:
The bond was established between them,
in that look, in her tone. In her tone, she
made the understanding clear--they were
of the same kind, he and she, a sort of
diabolic freemasonry subsisted between
them. Henceforward, she knew, she had
her power over him. Wherever they met,
they would be secretly associated. And
he would be helpless in the association
with her. Her soul exulted. (114)
Mutual repulsion between Gerald and
Gudrun is an extremely degrading process.
Nothing less than pure challenge and
needless viciousness, Gerald and Gudrun’s
doomed relationship is rooted in infected
ground.
Gudrun once declared her supremacy
over Gerald when she slapped him and said
that she would strike the last blow in their
relationship as well as the first. Gerald’s
dominance over the maze and miners
prompts the reader to conclude that Gudrun
will not win her battle for supremacy.

158 黃 埔 學 報 第 五 十 一 期 民 國 九 十 五 年
Lawrence conveys the colorful obscenities
of their relationship, its corrosive willfulness
and violent possessiveness, in a series of
powerfully dramatized episodes. In the
“Rabbit” chapter, Gudrun and Gerald
express their “mutual hellish recognition”
after they are both clawed by the rabbit,
Bismarck (234). Gerald’s desire for
domination and its link to violence emerges
when Winifred decides to “frame” another
animal by drawing it. When Gudrun tells
Gerald, “We’re going to draw [the rabbit],”
Gerald replied, “Draw him and quarter him
and dish him up” (230). Gudrun smiles at
Gerald’s mockery and their eyes meet in the
knowledge of their inherent cruelty. They
give full expression to their mutual
attraction to such power plays when they try
to remove the rabbit from its cage--another
framing image. Its frenzied opposition
thwarts Gudrun’s attempt to capture, “a
heavy cruelty well[s] up in her,” which
Gerald observes her sullen passion of cruelty
“with subtle recognition” (232). Gerald
responds with similar outrage when he tries
to subdue the rabbit and, like Gudrun, is
scratched. This event turns out to be
curiously ritualistic; once again both lovers
acknowledge their subterranean attraction
and so reaffirm the twisted pact between
them:
Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange,
darkened eyes, strained with underworld
knowledge, almost supplicating, like
those of a creature which is at his mercy,
yet which is his ultimate victor. He did
not know what to say to her. He felt the
mutual hellish recognition. (234)
Taking their lead from such dubious currents
of feeling, Gerald and Gudrun proceed to
engage themselves in a program of sexual
warfare and violence, denying their potential
capacity for true connection. That Gudrun
and Gerald unite at the end of “Rabbit”
chapter in “mutual hellish recognition”
becomes an apt metaphor for the complexity
of male / female relationships.
Gerald desperately seeks out Gudrun
as his primary source of verified existence,
his only source of working stimulation.
Rendered helplessly by his own emptiness,
Gerald drains whatever sustenance he can
from Gudrun: “As he drew nearer to her, he
plunged deeper into her enveloping soft
warmth, a wonderful creative heat that
penetrated his veins and gave him life again.
He felt himself dissolving and sinking to rest
in the bath of her living strength” (337).
Ironically, Gudrun also derives a kind of
passive pleasure from this strange
experience: “and she, subject, received him
as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of
death. She had no power at this crisis to
resist. The terrible frictional violence of
death filled her, and she received it in an
ecstasy of subjection, in throes of acute,
violent sensation” (337). Both Gudrun and
Gerald transform their capacity for normal,
healthy sexuality into lust and assertiveness.
In doing so, they make themselves into
agents of death.
“The interchanges between men and
women in Women in Love,” as Wendy
Perkins observes, “are complicated by the
historical moment of the novel, an age
where individuals no longer turn to society
for advice on forming relationships” (233).
Perkins further remarks: “As Ursula, Birkin,
Gudrun, and Gerald struggle to gain
knowledge of themselves through contact

劉 煌 城 、 張 簡 麗 淑 :Women in Love:the Male / Female Relationships 159
with each other, they [re]evaluate gender
roles, raising questions regarding the
contradictory impulses of domination,
submission, and equality and their links to
human sexuality” (233). In the dreary,
industrialized atmosphere of England,
Ursula, Gudrun, Birkin, and Gerald all face
the void of modern existence and turn
toward relationship with others for salvation.
The process of discovering their own needs
as they explore unions with others involves
complex questions like “a struggle for
consciousness, a search for definition”
(Mike 216). Lawrence didn’t tell his reader
whether these characters find the answer in
their long years of struggling. Lawrence has
shown in Women in Love “that experience is
equivocal, ambivalent, that there are no clear
answers or wholly adequate resolutions”
(Keith 192). Asserting the importance of
representing the ambiguous nature of human
experience, Lawrence writes, “If you try to
nail anything down, in the novel, either it
kills the novel, or the novel gets up and
walks away with the nail. Morality in the
novel is the trembling instability of balance.
When the novelist puts his thumb in the
scale, to pull down the balance to his own
predilection, that is immorality. . . .
And of all the art forms, the novel most of
all demands the trembling and oscillating of
the balance” (“Morality” 172-73). To
maintain the “trembling and oscillating of
the balance,” Lawrence leaves the four main
characters, as Mark Schorer puts it,
“compounded of a double drive” and free in
the plot to choose between life and death
(53).
In the closing episodes, Ursula and
Rupert leave the Alps to choose life, while
Gudrun and Gerald stay in the mountains,
engaged in a mortal content of wills.
Gudrun is now repelled by Gerald, who
seems to her “like a child that is famished
crying for the breast . . . he needed her to
put him to sleep, to give him repose” (457).
Gudrun rejects both the child-man she sees
in Gerald and the role of nurturer in which
he has tried to cast her. For her everything
has become “intrinsically a piece of irony”
(409). To replace Gerald she singles out
Loerke, a “small, dark-skinned man with full
eyes, and odd creature, like a child, and like
a troll, quick, detached” (395). Spurred on
by her unfaithfulness and his gnawing lack
of stability, Gerald becomes a would-be
murderer and attempts to strangle Gudrun.
Failing to exercise the full force of his will
upon her, he ultimately embraces death as
his only recourse. Neither Gerald nor
Gudrun is inherently evil or demonic, but
their unwillingness to define themselves
against each other prevents them from
obtaining peace. Unable to approximate a
suitable degree of impersonal emotions, they
helplessly witness the disintegration of their
relationship, permitting it to lapse into
animal aggression and violent sensuality.
There is, as Eliseo Vivas claims, “a kind of
love between the two of them. But it would
be no less inadequate to call it ambivalent”
(246). Langbaum ascribes the unbalance to
the underlying “hate’ in their attraction to
each other. Schneider calls it “a violent
battle for survival, a war for supremacy, in
which one of the partners must be master
and the other slave” (183). Unable to
determine the limits of their selfhood, of
their physical and spiritual boundaries, both
Gerald and Gudrun forever deny themselves

160 黃 埔 學 報 第 五 十 一 期 民 國 九 十 五 年
the invaluable privileges of balanced love.
Ursula’s marriage with Birkin seems a
model of domestic bliss in contrast to the
relationship of Gudrun and Gerald. It is
when her openness to star equilibrium grows
steadily, Ursula “had learned at last to be
still and perfect” (307). After they exchange
tender emotions in the quaint atmosphere of
a local inn, they embark on a refreshing
drive through the dark woods of Sherwood
Forest. Both lovers seem to have experience
of profound change. Yet the indeterminate
ending where Birkin suggests he needs a
relationship with a man to be satisfied leaves
the question of marriage as a route to
self-fulfillment open. Barthes notes: “To
interpret a text is not to give it a (more or
less justified, more or less free) meaning,
but on the contrary to appreciate what plural
constitutes it. . . . [an ideal text contains] a
galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of
signifieds” (5). What Barthes said echoes
Lawrence’s assertion that “the novel most of
all demands the trembling and oscillating of
the balance” (“Morality” 173). Although
Birkin and Ursula reconcile their intimate
relationship, they are not brilliantly
counterbalanced, nor do they achieve what
Birkin emphasizes the star equilibrium,
drawn together by their gravity (love) and
repulsed by their inherent polarity (utter
singleness). The real balance of male /
female relationship is thus left incomplete.
The incomplete becomes an integral part of
Lawrence’s artistry.
Notes
1 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love. New
York; penguin Books, 1980, p. 1.
Subsequent textual
citations are to this edition with page
number in the parentheses
Works Cited
[1] Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard
Miller. New York: Hill and Wang,
1974.
[2] DiBattista, Maria. “Women in Love: D. H.
Lawrence’s Judgment Book.” D.
H.Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration,
edited by Peter Balbert and Philip L.
Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell UP, (1985):
67-90.
[3] Dorbad Leo J. Sexually Balanced
Relationships in the Novels of D. H.
Lawrence. New York: Peter Lang, 1991.
[4] Kelsey, Nigal. D. H. Lawrence: Sexual
Crisis. London: Macmillan, 1991.
[5] Kermode, Frank. “D. H. Lawrence and
the Apocalyptic Types,” Continuities,
New York: Random House, (1968):
122-51.
[6] Lamgbaum, Robert. The Mysteries of
Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature.
New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
[7] Lawrence, D. H. “Morality and the
Novel.” Study of Thomas Hardy and
Other Essays. Ed. Bruce Steele.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985:
171-76.
[8] ---The Collected letters of D. H.
Lawrence. Ed. Harry T. Moore. 2 vols.
New York: Viking, 1962.
[9] Mike, Stephen. Toward Women in Love:
The Emergence of a Lawrentian
Aesthetic. New Haven: Yale UP. 1971.
[10] Perkins, Wendy. “Reading Lawrence’s
Frames: Chapter Division in Women in
Love” The D. H. Lawrence Review. ( 3
Fall 1992): 229-246.
[11] Ross, Charles L. Women in Love: A

劉 煌 城 、 張 簡 麗 淑 :Women in Love:the Male / Female Relationships 161
Novel of Mythic Realism. Boston:
Twayne, 1991.
[12] Rossman, Charles. “‘You are the Call
and I am the Answer’: D. H. Lawrence
and Women.” D. H. Lawrence Review
8 (1975): 255- 328.
[13] Sagar, Keith D. H. Lawrence: Life into
Art. Athens: U of Georgia P. 1985.
[14] Schorer, Mark. “Women in Love and
Death.” D. H. Lawrence: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Spilka,.
Englewood cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall,
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[15] Spilka, Mark. “Defending lawrence.” D.
H. Lawrence Review 20.3 1988:
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[16] Vivas, Eliseo. D. H. Lawrence: The
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Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1960.
摘 要
本 論 文 旨 在 探 討 勞 倫 斯 所 著 《 戀 愛 中 的 女 人 》 的 兩 性 關 係 。《 戀 愛 中 的 女 人 》 呈 現 傳 統
與 現 代 男 女 對 婚 姻 愛 情 的 不 同 觀 念 。 作 者 以 後 現 代 理 論 檢 視 文 本 中 性 別 、 婚 姻 、 父 權 、
物 質 及 心 靈 的 對 比 以 闡 明 書 中 主 角 柏 金 所 提 倡 的 兩 性 平 權 , 相 敬 互 助 的 男 女 關 係 。 作 者
企 圖 解 構 文 本 中 男 女 主 角 對 於 愛 情 、 婚 姻 的 矛 盾 論 述 , 來 看 勞 倫 斯 在 《 戀 愛 中 的 女 人 》
所 呈 現 的 生 活 哲 學 。
關 鍵 詞 : 性 別 、 父 權 、 傳 統 與 現 代 、 解 構 、 矛 盾 論 述

162 黃 埔 學 報 第 五 十 一 期 民 國 九 十 五 年