Lawrence's "Women in Love"

[RogerBear]

This is a serious question. I am finding it difficult to calibrate, in this present age of narrative frankness, what Lawrence did and did not mean by his descriptions of passion. At the end of the Water-Party chapter of WOMEN IN LOVE, Ursula and Birkin are walking along a deserted lane. She initiates an embrace to which Birkin responds, "and soon he was a perfect hard flame of passionate desire for her." Four lines later, "satisfied and shattered, fulfilled and destroyed," he goes home. At the time, I read this as a pretty suggestive indication of total physical union, but though I am still in the middle of the book I am beginning to suspect that this was not the case. By the time of LADY CHATTERLEY, he will make these things quite clear, but at this stage in his work, it is suprisingly hard to tell.

[Lil O'lady]

Perhaps in this extract he is being deliberately ambiguous. I don't know enough about the timing of his books to comment on the order of publication etc but happen he was not a big enough 'name' to get away with being openly grubby at this point in his career.
I just find him an irritating mummy's boy. Sorry.

[joggerjayne]

Women In Love is Lawrence's tour de force - a far better novel than, say, Lady Chatterley.

Women In Love follows on from The Rainbow (in narrative terms). Remember that the publication of The Rainbow had resulted in a prosecution for obscenity. You have to read Women In Love within that context.

Lawrence clearly wanted to take The Rainbow "one step further" ... but had to use poetic descriptions of both action, and environment. The readers would know what was going on, if they wanted to. But, likewise, Lawrence could easily point to the "filthy mind" of any detractors.

Women In Love is full of intensity ... the violence between Birkin and Hermione, the homosexual history of the sculptor Loerke, the catastrophic relationship between Gerald and Gugrun, Gerald's suicide scene.

If you are in any doubt as to which way to interpret scenes like yours, RB, I think there is little doubt that you should look for the most intense feasible interpretation. I am fairly confident that DHL envisaged Birkin giving Ursula a damn good seeing-to.

JJ x

[joggerjayne]

... although, given the dynamics of that particular passage ...

... I think it is SHE who gives HIM a jolly good seeing to !!!

JJ x

[jno]

I suspect JJ, and you, are right; but in truth, we can't know, unless Lawrence spelt it out in a letter somewhere. All we've got to go on is the words he used. No doubt he had something in mind. His readers probably did too. But we don't know if they all read it the same way as he did; and decades later it's difficult for us to read any of their minds. Leaving it up to the reader's imagination was standard in those days (because of the possibility of obscenity prodecution); in a more literal-minded age we sometimes have trouble coping with this deliberate obscurity.