Women in Love: the Male / Female Relationships

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