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

with a cold and indifferent bisexuality. That Lawrence does not condemn homosexuality per se is obvious from his sympathetic treatment of the relationship between Birkin and Gerald. On the other hand, that Gudrun is identified with Loerke makes it clear that Lawrence sees in her an active perversion—that is, a turning away from the natural order of true love. In the larger sense, Gudrun symbolizes the snow-destruction that is, in Lawrence’s view, the essence of the Nordic, or Western, world and its lack, as in Gudrun, of an ability to feel. “Not a word, not a tear—ha!” reflects the woman who informs Gudrun of Gerald’s death. “Gudrun was cold, a cold woman” (p. 478). It is the triumph of the snow-goddess.
    The relationship between Birkin and Hermione represents another failed attempt of modern man and woman to reinvent love. The character Hermione was drawn from Lady Ottoline Morrell, with whom Lawrence had an intense friendship, if not a torrid love affair, as is the case with Hermione and Birkin. The Madame de Staël of the Bloomsbury group and the wife of a wealthy member of Parliament, Lady Morrell cut quite a figure. She was immortalized both by T. S. Eliot in “Portrait of a Lady” and by Ezra Pound in “Portrait d’une Femme.” In both, the American poets are on the outside looking in at Lady Morrell and the doings of her literary circle. Lawrence, on the other hand, is an intimate, at least to the extent that he chooses to be. If Gudrun is the ultimate ice-queen, Hermione shares with her the Nordic inclination toward ice-knowledge, in her attempt to reduce the world to what can be apprehended by the brain, without sharing Gudrun’s hatred of men or Gudrun’s inability to love. “But knowing is everything to you, it is your life” (p. 37), Birkin reproaches Hermione in the “Class-Room” chapter. Birkin’s comment is reminiscent of a letter Lawrence wrote to Lady Morrell, “Why must you always use your will so much, why can’t you let things be, without always grasping and trying to know and to dominate. I’m too much like this myself.”
    In “Breadalby,” the chapter that Lawrence places strategically after “Totem,” the author creates a sharp contrast between Hermione, the ultimate in northern European civilized being, and the African statue, symbolic of man’s vital primitive past, to the latter’s advantage. Hermione has invited her lover, Birkin, and Ursula, Gudrun, and Gerald to Breadalby, where everything is exquisite and civilized. It is not just that Hermione wishes to live life in her head. She uses her wealth and position to orchestrate the lives of others. She marshals her guests about in activities that she has chosen for them. It is no wonder that Ursula and Gudrun, forceful women in their own right, instinctively rebel, refusing to go swimming. The highlight of the scene is the argument Birkin and Hermione have regarding democracy—a scene that ends with Hermione striking Birkin with a lapis lazuli ball, almost killing him. Even if she is in love with Birkin, and is correct in her support of democracy as opposed to Birkin, who advocates ideas that are the seeds of fascism, Hermione, like Gudrun, nevertheless must fulfill her snow-destruction destiny. It is significant and ironic that Birkin is saved literally from death by a classic Greek text—he partially blocks another, potentially deadly, blow with a heavy volume of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides—because the Greeks were the first proponents of democracy and also represent the integration of ancients (that is, an integration of the primitive and modern, positioned as they were historically between Egypt and Rome). Nor should it be lost on us that in addition to integrating what Lawrence would term blood-knowledge and ice-knowledge, there was in Greece an integration of love, such that homosexual and heterosexual love had equal weight. It should be further observed that Lady Morrell had sent Lawrence a