Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF

senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution (p. 253).
     
    Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? (p. 254).
    Thus, for Lawrence, the ancient darker races have a knowledge that is the pure sensuality of the blood. The Nordic races, in supplanting the darker, southern ones, have failed to connect with the sensuality of the innermost self that brings blood-knowledge and are thus left with ice-knowledge that lacks the immediacy and depth of the latter. It is Gerald who most embodies this ice-knowledge, and it is he who is, therefore, fated to die a symbolic arctic death.
    Early in the novel Birkin identifies Gerald as Cain because Gerald had accidentally killed his brother. Significantly, Lawrence dismisses accidental behavior, suggesting several times throughout the novel that accidents are conscious acts. “He did not believe that there was any such thing as accident,” Lawrence writes of his surrogate. “It all hung together, in the deepest sense” (p. 24). This idea anticipates Sartre’s concept in Being and Nothingness that there is no hidden subconscious behavior and that man is responsible for all his actions. In both cases, man is given credit for having more control over the universe than he actually does. In Sartre, this concept results in the romantic tenet of existentialism that man must be the destiny of man. However, for Lawrence, it takes an ugly turn in his later work, which suggests that certain people have the right to control the world by assuming their own destiny on the backs and at the expense of others. In any case, the brother that Gerald-Cain kills is symbolic of Gerald’s ice-destructiveness. Birkin tells Minette, who Lawrence virtually everywhere refers to as the Pussum, that Gerald is a former soldier who explored the Amazon, thus linking him with further physical destruction and with the ancient Native American past, which Lawrence will explore in later works.
    The Pussum is identified with the African statue, which resembles a black beetle. What the Pussum fears most is self-discovery, being aware of herself—that is, as a black beetle. Together she and Gerald are a temporary union of opposites. This contrasts sharply with Gerald’s infatuation with Gudrun, the snow-queen to his snow-king. Gudrun and Gerald’s connection is at its most evident in the chapter “Love and Death,” in which Gerald goes to Gudrun after his father’s death and empties himself A relationship that finds its ultimate satisfaction in death will end in death. Appropriately, Lawrence chooses the snow-abstraction of Switzerland as the setting for Gerald and Gudrun’s ultimate confrontation. Gerald’s death is presided over by Loerke, whose name is intended to suggest the Norse god, Loki, the trickster whom Wagner uses to good effect in the Ringgold cycle. Gerald despises Loerke, and this fact causes us to sympathize with Gerald, who, one feels, does not deserve the fate to which he is destined and against which he struggles. He searches for love and feeling, and if in the end he is disappointed in his inability to find either, it is a tragic fate, not an act of evil. He is ultimately a victim of Gudrun, who represents for Lawrence the type of modern woman who attempts to reinvent love by destroying both it and the man unlucky enough to offer it to her.
    If for Dante the most despised of sins is fraud against art—though its cause is thoroughly human, precisely because only human beings can engage in it—for Lawrence it was largely the same. Loerke prostitutes his art, and Lawrence shows us that this is a form of perversion by associating Loerke