Women in Love: the Male / Female Relationships

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.