Women in Love
The hunger of sex is amazingly set forth by D. H. Lawrence, whose novel The Rainbow was suppressed in England and who has now brought out his Women in Love in the United States in a sumptuous volume delightful to eye and hand. Mr. Lawrence admits no difference between Aphrodite Urania, and Aphrodite Pandemos; love, in his understanding of it, links soul and body with the same bonds at the same moments. And in this latest book of his not only is there but one Aphrodite; there is but one ruling divinity, and she holds her subjects throughout a long narrative to the adventure and business and madness and warfare of love. Apparently resident in the English Midlands, Gudrum and Ursula Brangwen and their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich actually inhabit some dark wood sacred to Dionysiac rites. If they have an economic existence, it is of the most unimportant kind; at any moment they can come and go about the world as their desires drive them. If they have any social existence, it is tenuous, or at best hardly thicker than a tissue of irritations. War and politics and art and religion for the time being are as if they had never been. Each pair recalls those sundered lovers of whom Aristophanes told the guests at Plato’s Symposium—lovers who, in reality but halves of a primordial whole, whirl through space and time in a frantic search each for its opposite, mad with delay, and meeting at last with a frantic rush which takes no account of anything but the ecstasy of reunion.
If references to Greek Cults come naturally to mind in connection with Women in Love, these lovers none the less have the modern experience of frantic reaction from their moments of meeting. They experience more than classical satiety. Mad with love in one hour, in the next day they are no less mad with hate. They are souls born flayed, who cling together striving to become one flesh and yet causing each other exquisite torture. Their nerves are all exposed. The intangible filaments and repulsions which play between ordinary lovers are by Mr. Lawrence in this book magnified to dimensions half heroic and half mad. He has stripped off the daily coverings, the elaborated inhibitions, the established reticences of our civil existence, and displays his women as swept and torn by desires as old as the race and older, white-hot longings, dark confusions of body and spirit. Gudrum and Ursula are women not to be matched elsewhere in English fiction for richness and candour of desire. They are valkyries imperfectly domesticated, or, in Mr. Lawrence’s different figure, daughters of men troubling the sons of God, and themselves troubled. No wonder then that the language which tells their story is a feverish language; that the narrative moves with a feverish march; that the final effect is to leave the witness of their fate dazed with the blazing mist which overhangs the record. Most erotic novels belong to the department of comedy; Women in Love belongs to the metaphysics and the mystical theology of love.