CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE

THE LAUGH OF ACHIEVED BEING

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF

THE WHITE PEACOCK AND WOMEN IN LOVE

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in

English

by

Sharron Kollmeyer Cox

May, 1983 The Thesis of Sharron Kollmeyer Cox is approved:

Dr. Philip Handler, Chairman

California State University, Northridge

ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Behind every student there are people who know the student first as daughter, wife, mother, or friend. To those people in my life, especially Hap and Shirley Kollmeyer, Skip, Shane, Robbie, Alice, Kathy, Barbara,

Ilene, and Margie, I wish to express my gratitude. I would also like to thank Dr. Philip Handler, my committee chairman, for his interest in and knowledge of my subject; his on-going encouragement is responsible, in large part, for the completion of this project. Further, I wish to acknowledge the help of Dr. William Anderson whom I have had the privelege of working with over the last three years. Taskmaster though he may be, he exemplifies the word mentor. Finally, my special thanks go to Dr. Robert Noreen for his guidance, his insistence on excellence, and his time. I believe that I would rather have him like something - anything I have done - than anyone else I know.

iii For my parents and in memory of Sanford Emil

Klemme, my grandfather, who first taught me reverence and compassion for the natural things of this world, and who, like DHL, clung ferociously to life.

iv To be with Lawrence was a kind of adventure, a voyage of discovery into newness and otherness. For, being himself of a different order, he inhabited a universe different from that of common men - a brighter and intenser world, of which, while he spoke, he made you feel. He looked at things with the eyes, so it seemed, of a man who had been at the brink of death and to whom, as he emerges from the darkness, the world reveals itself as unfathomably beautiful and mysterious .•• A walk with him in the country was a walk through that marvelously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of his novels. He seemed to know, by personal experience, what it was to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself.

Aldous Huxley

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

APPROVAL ...... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • ...... iii DEDICATION ...... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS • ...... vi ABSTRACT ...... • vii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER

I. "It's Got Every Fault •.• But" .•• 7

II. "To Take Two Couples and Mark Out Their Relationship" • • • • • • . 39

III. "The Profoundest Experiences in the Self". • 73

CONCLUSION • 103

ENDNOTES ••• • 106

BIBLIOGRAPHY • 111

vi ABSTRACT

The Laugh of Achieved Being

A Comparative Study of

The White Peacock and Women in Love

by

Sharron Kollmeyer Cox

r-taster of Arts in English

The White Peacock is D. H. Lawrence's first novel and as such has generally been ignored by critics. It contains, however, what is quintessential in Lawrence's work and, in fact, possesses a striking similarity to

Lawrence's masterpiece, Women in Love. This paper argues for the recognition of The White Peacock's worth ip_ the canon of Lawrence's work.

The argument is presented in three chapters. The first chapter is an explication of The White Peacock which defines the novel's strengths and weaknesses. Strengths are found in Lawrence's originality, perception, intensity, and obvious love of language. Weaknesses include

vii Lawrence's handling of point of view, characterization, plot, and symbolism. Chapter Two establishes the relationship between The White Peacock and Women in Love.

Each novel presents Lawrence's major thematic preoccupations --reverence and compassion for the things of the natural world, the horror of industrialism, and the need to learn to love. In each novel Lawrence uses similar landscapes and characters. In each novel Lawrence also employs similar technical devices such as parallelism, foreshadowing, and imagery formulated from nature. Chapter

Three critiques Women in Love in relation to the critical problems found in The White Peacock. Again, point of view, characterization, plot, and symbolism are considered. This time, however, Lawrence was successful with each of these.

Indeed, Women in Love is the expression of an artistic genius in control of his craft.

viii INTRODUCTION

Near the end of his short life D. H. Lawrence wrote:

••• (my novels) are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and waits - like a god with a twenty lira ticket - and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles ••. that's what my books are not and never will be ... whoevef reads me will be in the thick of a scrimmage.

This scrimmage often originated from the intensely personal approach Lawrence took to novel writing. He saw the novel as neither an artistic rendering of a prescribed form, nor as the mere retelling of a story, either wholly invented or given new life through invention. Rather he saw the novel as an ''adventure of the mind." 2 Although he wrote for twenty years, sometimes poetry, essays, travel books, or philosophical tracts, he became and remained primarily interested in the novel. His purpose was always the same: he sought to convey the idea that not art but the quality of the lived experience was his greatest concern. He was fond of saying, "my motto is Art for my sake." 3 In a letter, written in 1915, to Lady Ottoline Morrell, who he was to later bitterly satirize as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, he comments on how sadly he sees Van Gogh, for whom, creating Art for one's sake was never enough:

But best of all, if he could have known a great humanity where to live one's animal would be to create oneself, in fact, be the artist creating a man in,living fact (not like Christ, as he wrongly said) - and where the art was the final expression of the created animal or man - not the be-all and being of man - but the end, the

1 2

climax. And some men would end in artistic utterance, and some wouldn't. But each one would create the work of art, the livifg man, achieve that supreme art, a man's life. One can hardly imagine a more personal approach.

·Lawrence's critical reputation has been built posthumously around what are considered his best novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love.

Consequently most studies of Lawrence begin with Sons and

Lovers and ignore the earlier work. It is true that like most writers, Lawrence had to learn to write. It is also true, that in his particular case, he used his early novels for this purpose. They are, therefore, often unsure and flawed. But they are more than that. The early novels,

The White Peacock in particular, demonstrate Lawrence's originality, his eloquence, and his ability. Stephen Miko, in discussing the early novels, says in Toward Women in

Love that the first novels present "evidence of a search for the most fundamental kinds of consistency, a basic search for coherence." 5 As interested as Lawrence was in the novel form, as intensely as he wanted to create that supreme art, a man's life, during this period Lawrence struggled with both the form and with his life. This paper argues that a comparative study of two of Lawrence's first five novels, The White Peacock published in 1911, his first and least well known novel, and Women in Love published in

1920-1921, his fifth and most critically acclaimed novel, provides us with a new appreciation of his earlier work, 3

for uneven and imperfect as The White Peacock may be, it still contains what is quintessential in Lawrence's work.

This study also argues that consideration of the critical problems found in The White Peacock yields an understanding of what Lawrence needed to correct before he could write

Women in Love. Although Lawrence necessarily changed and grew as an artist, his basic concerns both in matters of form and content remained the same. As he worked to solve the critical problems he encountered while writing The

White Peacock, he placed a new emphasis on the importance of unconscious motivation not found in his earlier work.

This not-withstanding, study of his first novel, especially in relationship to Women in Love, provides an understanding of Lawrence's distinctive characteristics as a novelist.

The argument will be presented in three chapters. The first chapter will examine The White Peacock. The primary purpose of this chapter will be to explicate the critical problems of the novel. These problems include: Lawrence's unskilled use of the first person narrator, his sketchy unbelievable characterization, his unstructured plot, his literary pretentiousness, and his forced symbolism.

Chapter Two of the thesis will establish a relationship between The White Peacock and Women in Love.

Both novels parallel each other in a number of ways. Each of the books is the story of two couples and their attempts to establish permanent relationships. Both novels are set, 4

for the most part, in the Derbyshire countryside and mining towns. The White Peacock presents, for the first time, many of Lawrence's major themes later to be amplified in

Women in Love: the necessity of a connection with the physical non-human world, the belief in nature as healer, the horror of the blight of industrialism, and the belief that one needs to "learn to love." A further link between the two novels is established by Lawrence's use of elemental symbols (e.g., the moon), of light and dark imagery, of parallelism, of foreshadowing, and his use of nature (e.g., his knowledge of the things of the countryside) in both books. Finally, what is acknowledged in both novels is the same: a resolution for wasted human potential must be sought.

Chapter Three will consider Lawrence's best known work, Women in Love, in relationship to the critical problems found in The White Peacock. Again, the focus will be on matters of narration, characterization, plot, and symbolism: the major weaknesses of his first novel. In

Women in Love, however, Lawrence overcame these weaknesses - by using a less limiting narrative stance, creating a new form of characterization, constructing a carefully structured plot, forming vivid, arresting symbols - and created a masterpiece.

Reading The White Peacock is a much richer experience than most of Lawrence's critics would have us believe. 5

Although Lawrence wrote the novel at the very beginning of his literary career, there is much in it that anticipates

Women in Love, which he wrote, by his own admission, at the height of his creative powers. The White Peacock shows a

natural world in crisis and hints at the possibility of a private world which could transcend this crisis: Women in

Love offers a picture of this private world. The concern of The White Peacock still rests, however, with the social self: the gift of Women in Love is the presentation of the

essential self. Interestingly, after the publication of his first novel, Lawrence published three other novels in

four years. What he learned in those four years was substantial, for a less gifted artist could not have accomplished as much in such a short period of time. But

Lawrence was different from most. His intense personal energy and his equally intense desire to turn into art all that he observed and experienced made him different. In the preface to a critical guide to his works written in

1922, he sets himself apart:

To the vast public, the autumn morning is only a sort of stage background against which they can display their own mechanical importance. But to some men still the trees stand up and look around at the daylight, having woven the two ends of darkness together into visible being and presence. And soon, they will let go the two ends of darkness again, and disappear. A flower laughs once, and having his laugh, chuckles off into seed, and is gone. Whence? Whither? Who knows, who caret? That little laugh of achieved being is all. 6

Lawrence was a man for whom the trees still stood up and looked at daylight. The vivid imagery, the intensity of experience, the abundance of detail, the reverence for nature, the obvious delight in the beauty of language found in The White Peacock were the first expressions of

Lawrence's genius. The novel itself was Lawrence's first laugh of achieved being. CHAPTER I

After Ford Maddox Ford read D. H. Lawrence's first novel, The White Peacock and helped smooth its way at

Heinemanns, he wrote the young author, "It's got every

fault that the English novel can have. But you've got 7 Genius." It was heady praise for the young man who had

previously written only poetry. Ford's remark, however, proved to be correct: Lawrence did have genius, and The

White Peacock launched a literary career. Later reflecting back on his first novel, Lawrence would explain that he composed it mainly during lectures over a two-year teaching course he took at u.c. Nottingham. He said that he wrote it for Jessie Chambers, later to become the Miriam of Sons and Lovers, whom he went to for judgment and who thought that it (the book) was wonderful. He had told her that he would follow the "usual method of constructing a novel," that is, "to take two couples and mark out their relationships." 8 To this end, he wrote about the love affairs between Leslie Tempest, the son of a mine owner and

Lettie Beardsall, a superior young lady: and George Saxon, a crude but admirable farmer, and his cousin Meg, a lusty but uncultured barbmaid. The novel also concerns itself with the unrealized love affairs between Lettie and George, and between Cyril, the narrator who is Lettie's brother, and Emily who is George's sister. Lawrence says that he used Alan Chambers, Jessie's brother, as a model for

7 8

George, and Haggs Farm as a model for the Saxon farm.

Furthermore, he wanted to call the novel Nethermere, but

Jessie suggested instead Th~_Wh!t~-P~a£££k, no doubt because of the odd little story Annable tells in which he associates modern women with proud peacocks. He finished the book while working as a schoolmaster at Davidson Road

Boys' School in Croydon, South London, and his new friend

Helen Corke helped him edit the manuscript. 9

Other critical comments on the novel made at the time of its publication were, like Ford's, both favorable and unfavorable. Henry Savage in the March 18, 1911, edition of Academy praised the novel as "beyond all argument an admirable and astonishing piece of work." He continued,

"We use the word astonishing advisedly, for, like most new books of uncommon merit, The White Peacock surprises even while it charms." He hailed Lawrence as an author of

"individuality and courage," one of the rare ones who

"intends to tell the truth as he sees it": as one who produced a book of considerable achievement, and infinite promise." He believed that Lawrence had- "quickened with new life" an old theme, and felt that the author had had particular success with the portrayal of the character of 10 George." An unsigned review in The Daily News on

February 14, 1911, took a somewhat different view. It found The White Peacock metaphor to "smear the whole book."

The reviewer found little life in the book, little humour, 9

and a profusion of metaphor and simile, "D.H. Lawrence does

not seem able to conceive anything without making it 'like'

something else" was the comment. The critic objected to

the characters, seeing them as pictures rather than as

people. He writes: "They move easily between public

houses and dinner parties, and among their habits is a

trick of messing and caressing and stroking each other's hair or arms." He objects to Lawrence's fondness for the

word "brutality" and concludes that what we always have in

the novel are sick thoughts. 11 Violet Hunt, who had helped Ford convince Heinemanns to publish the novel, was

enthusiastic about the book. She saw the novel as a

political document and, in her review in the Daily Chronicle on February 10, 1911, she urged:

It should be read by all those superior persons who say that they have no time to read novels because they are engaged in public works. It should be read by these people before all other because f rom i t s p a g e s t h e y w i 11 1 e a r n something of the mind of the classes ••• 12

Another review in the conservative, aristocratic

Morning Post on February 9, 1911 concluded, "For all that, The White Peacock is a book not only worth reading but

worth reckoning with, for we are inclined to believe that

its author has come to stay." "For all that" refers to the unsigned reviewers' preoccupation with the question of whether or not Lawrence was a man or a woman. The author had also questioned whether the people in the novel were 10

real people or the author's puppets - "do they really discuss Ibsen and Aubrey Beardsley in farmhouses in the

Trent Valley?" the article asked. 13 Alan Monkhouse, a novelist and playwright on the editorial staff of the Manchester Guardian also gave the novel somewhat of a mixed review. In the February 8, 1911 edition, he wrote that Mr.

D. H. Lawrence's novel offers some promise but that that promise was difficult to define. He writes that he understands George's decline, given the cast of supporting characters, and finds Cyril "literary and unhumorous." Yet he concludes, "But Mr. Lawrence can write."14

Lawrence's recent critics mainly take the position that The White Peacock is the flawed and imperfect first work of a great artist. Eager to get on to the major novels, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love, few devote much time to the novel, and most ignore it.

Critics, however, who do consider it--Ronald Draper,

Stephen Miko, Aidan Burns, Gavriel Ben-Ephraim, and Keith Alldritt among them--find The White Peacock interesting qecause it presents many of Lawrence's primary themes in seminal form. For them, the novel also has worth in that it is the first expression of the reverence and compassion for nature that Lawrence would later include in all his works, and the first demonstration of his ability to create an intensely accurate reproduction of the visible world.

The novel itself is a mixture of natural descriptions 11

and romance. It provides a picture of English provincial life, and in it Lawrence attempts to study personal relationships. Nearly all of these relationships, however, fail: the love affair between George and Lettie is thwarted by class and education, the love affair between

Cyril and Emily is thwarted by time and distance, and the marriages of Leslie and Lettie and George and Meg suffer horrible consequences and appear doomed from the outset.

In the novel, as Ronald Draper states, all of the main characters are "cast out from adolescence into unsatisfied 15 adulthood." Lawrence seems more interested in creating the general sense of dissatisfaction and decay that permeates the book than in adequately explaining why these relationships fail: they just fail. At the end of the novel, we are left with a rapidly decaying physical world and a social world that has collapsed. Perhaps Lawrence is unable to give us more because Lawrence himself is uncertain about the meaning of the story he has to tell: it was a story that he would need to tell again and again before even he understood its meaning.

Reviewers of the novel, both past and present, have suggested that The White Peacock had some critical problems. Lawrence, as early as 1908, also admitted that there were problems with the novel. In a letter to Blanche

Jennings he says:

In the first place it is a novel of sentiment - 12

may the devil fly away with it - what the critics would call, I believe, an "erotic" novel ••• all about love- and rhapsodies on Spring scattered here and there - heroines galore - no plot - nine-tenths adjectives - every colour in the spectrum descanted upon - a poem or two scraps of Latin tnd French­ altogether a sloppy, spicy mess. 1

Although the "sloppy, spicy mess" Lawrence is referring to here is an earlier version of the novel, he is remarkably

good at defining the published novel's critical problems.

Specifically, these problems include the ineffectiveness of the first person narrator, sketchy unbelievable

characterizations, an unstructured plot, literary pretentiousness, forced symbolism, and a lack of clarity.

Most novels suffering from such problems would simply be cast aside~ most novelists who had such problems would simply not be read. The White Peacock, however, contains

such an intensity of experience, such a convincing abundance of detail, such obvious delight in the beauty of

language, and such vivid imagery that it cannot be cast aside~ and Lawrence was read and continues to be read. In fact, consideration of the novel's critical problems does not overshadow the novel's critical attributes. Indeed, this novel should be read as actually presenting a clear picture of what Lawrence needed to correct in order to master his craft: he needed to learn how to write~ he already knew how to think and feel. It is not difficult to understand why critics like

Savage and Monkhouse believed that Lawrence had promise as 13

a writer. Early in The White Peacock, Cyril Beardsall, the

first person narrator of the novel, recalls a March walk

through the wood outside of the quarry:

I found that I was walking, in the first shades of twilight, over clumps of snowdrops. The hazels were thin, and only here and there an oak tree uprose. All the ground was white with snowdrops, like drops of manna scattered over the red earth, on the grey-green cluster of leaves. There was a deep little dell, sharp sloping like a cup, and white sprinkling of flowers all the waydown, with white flowers showing pale among the first inpouring of shadow at the bottom. The earth was red and warm, pricked with the dark, succulent green of bluebell sheaths, and embroidered with grey-green clusters of spears, and many white flowerets. High above, above the light tracery of hazel, the weird oaks tangled in the sunset. Below, in the first shadows, dropped hosts of white flowers, so silent and sad: it seemed like a holy communion of pure wild things, numberless, frail, and folded meekly in the evening light. Other flower companies are glad: stately barbaric hordes of blue-bells, merry-headed cowslip groups, even light, tossing wood anemones: but snowdrops are sad and mysterious. We have lost their meaning. They do not belong to us, who ravish them. The girls bent among them, touching them with their fingers, and symbolizing the yearning which I felt. Folded in the twilight, these conquered floweret~ are sad like forlorn little friend of dryads.

~awrence writes prose with the vividness and immediacy of poetry, employing as he does the devices of imagery, personification, alliteration, simile, and metaphor. This novel begins his life-long love affair with "pure wild things," and his life-long quarrel with those who "ravish them."

Although he was successful in recreating the natural 14

world in all its abundant detail, Lawrence was less successful with his first person narrator whose function it was to provide the novel's readers with a verbal picture of the beautiful natural world of the Valley, and a running commentary of the social goings on of its inhabitants.

Most of the time Cyril is an effete, nostalgic, vague, sensitive, humorless, wistful, immature young man who idealizes landscape, as seen in his reaction to the snowdrops, and records "the blossoms of passion, and the decay of tragedy," yet remains untouched. He says, "I wished that in all the wild valley something would call me forth from my rooted loneliness" (WP79), but this loneliness is never explained and when Cyril does presumably get the call, it is to France where he goes for no apparent reason, and with no concrete goal. Cyril was Lawrence's first and last attempt at first person narration. In a letter to Blanche Jennings, he records his difficulties, "I will •.. stop up the mouth of Cyril- I will kick him out- I hate the fellow!" Although it is too simplistic to insist that Lawrence and Cyril are one and the same, Lawrence himself must have been thinking along those lines when he told Jessie Chambers that the gamekeeper Annable was necessary to the novel because otherwise, "it is too much one thing, too much me." 18 In the completed version, Cyril remains. Lawrence did not stop his mouth or kick him out. Rather, he entrusted the 15

telling of the tale solely to him, and that authorial

choice resulted in many critical problems.

None of Lawrence's other novels employ the use of a

first person narrator. John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence and

the Idea of the Novel, who also finds Lawrence's use of the

first person narrator a failure, comments:

The White Peacock shows how hard it was for an intensely intelligent and sensitive and well-read young man to write a novel; how much the complexities of his upbringing affected the kind of novels he would write ••• actually interf.fred with his capacity to write a novel. Lawrence, however, published the novel and the affectation

of his narrator, no doubt, comes from an attempt to overcome what Worthen locates as the "complexities of his

upbringing." Ronald Draper, although he would like to believe that the affectation of Cyril is intentional, admits:

Yet there are many self-consciously literary and pretentiously allusive passages in which Cyril is not speaking in his own character, but simply as the narrator, and in these Lawrnece's control is not yet fine enough to make one confident that he has detached himself from the affectation which accompanies the narration. If the theme of "accursed human education" forms a serious part of the novel's purpose, it is, one suspects, because the novelist himself is struggling with a tendency which he dislikes, but cannot wholly e~~ape - nor, as yet, see clearly for what it is.

Lawrence was struggling to present his material apart from his own personal experience as a highly sensitive

self-conscious young man. At this time in his life, it was 16

a separation he could not make.

Lawrence's use of Cyril as the narrator interferes with the clarity of the novel. Christopher Brown in his

article, "As Cyril Likes It: Pastoral Reality and Illusion

in The White Peacock," locates Cyril's problem, and what it

is about Cyril that interferes with the novel's clarity, in the fact that The White Peacock presents two "versions of the pastoral." To use Brown's words, these versions are

the reality of the microcosom created by the valley, and

the illusion of the life in the valley that would be created by wish fulfillment. Cyril imagines a new Eden; but life in the valley is hardly that. Because of the clash between these two ideas, Cyril never grasps the 21 impact of the story that he tells. He begins "watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the millpond"

(WPl), and ends by watching the men mow in the fields, and saying to George, "you ought to be like that" (WP367). Of course, George could never be like that and Cyril is incapable of grasping the weight of George's tragedy. Similarly, Cyril is rarely capable of admitting that life in the valley is anything less than idyllic. In both instances, Cyril remains an observer, discounting the experience he has participated in. This may even have been acceptable if what Cyril had observed was accurate, or if he learned anything from his observations, but it is not and he does not. He assumes the stance, therefore, of an 17

unreliable narrator, but not one created with any sense of irony. As Brown states, we don't doubt that Cyril could

"see" elements of Nethermere well enough to report and comment on them, but he chooses not to handle most of the negative aspects of life there because in a profounder sense he cannot admit them into his consciousness. Brown continues: "His personality requires him to feel, and therefore to emphasize, something other than the full truth and makes him another in a long line of false Arcadian perceivers. 1122 What Cyril is capable of perceiving is always tainted with a great deal of nostalgia and notions of vague suffering. He muses:

I rembered, one day as I sat in the train hastening to Charing Cross on my way from France, that it was George's birthday. I had the feeling of him upon me, heavily, and I could not rid myself of the depression. I put it down to travel fatigue, and tried to dismiss it. As I watched the evening sun glitter along the new corn-stubble in the fields we passed, trying to describe the effect to myself, I found myself asking: 11 But what's the matter? I've not had bad news, have I, to make my chest feel so weighted? 11 (WP357) When Cyril is confronted with the bad news in the flesh standing before him, his chest does not feel weighted.

What Cyril is usually not capable of is accuracy of perception, action, or growth. In fact, Brown concludes his article, "To the novel's major theme the example of Cyril adds a collary well expressed by T. S. Eliot: "human 23 kind/Cannot bear very much reality." 18

Because Cyril can neither be thought of as a reliable narrator or an unreliable narrator who could be viewed with consistent irony, we cannot trust his experience to have any validity. In The Moon's Dominion Ben-Ephriam finds

Cyril to be somewhere between a reliable and an unreliable narrator and writes, "We gradually begin to feel that the removal of Cyril would improve the novel."24 An example of this is found in the scene in which Cyril, who has grown up fatherless, goes with his mother and sister to the death bed of his wayward father. They arrive but the father is already dead to which Cyril responds: "I felt the great wild pity, and a sense of awful littleness and loneliness among a great empty space. I felt beyond myself as if I were a mere fleck drifting unconsciously through the dark" (WP52). All this for a man he did not know. It is hard to believe in Cyril's "pity" or his "terror" or his

"horror." In truth, Cyril's view of things is almost always over-stated, or understated. Most often it is clouded by his wish-fulfillment and overly subjective perception.

Problems of a different kind arise with Cyril as narrator: his habit of making himself the constant focus of attention and his habit of reporting on things he could not have known. Consider this passage:

The bracken held out arms to me, and the bosom of the wood was full of sweetness, but I journeyed on, spurred by the attacks of an army p • 19

of flies which kept up a guerrilla warfare round my head till I passed the black rhododendron bushed in the garden, where they left me, scenting no doubt Rebecca's pot of venegar and sugar.(WP6)

Stephen Miko sees this as both self-consciously clever and self-consciously literary. The narrator here takes part in a little drama with personified nature - he commanding a guerrilla army with "flies striking swiftly from hiding, taking cunning advantage of over." 25 Narrative distance is destroyed by the narrator's involvement. Being the center of attention is not enough to make a character's observations interesting or significant ones. Lawrence is, in fact, not in control of his narrative stance, and makes Cyril, perhaps like himself, too conscious of education and what he believed to be artistic expression.

Lawrence also has Cyril reporting of things that he has not witnessed. Ben-Ephraim agrees:

Lawrence's control over his first person narrator, moreover, is sometimes careless. Early in their relationship, Cyril leaves the novel's two protagonists, George Saxon and Lettie Beardsall, alone, to play out the subsequent scene without the benefit of his presence. Cyril's withdrawal, as Lawrence apparently did not realize, leaves the two characters in a narrative vacuum .•. It hardly seems coincidental that it is precisely when George and Lettie are freed that they reveal themselves with memorable intensity. Lawrence's technical oversight hints, therefore, that Cyril's commentary is a stricture on Thu White Peacock, not an enhancement of it.

Cyril is most useful as a character when he reports on scene that he actually participated in. He and George sit 20

smoking by the fire the evening that Cyril has told the legend of the peonies:

"She said it ended well - but what • s the good of death- what's the good of that?" He turned his face to the ashes in the grate, and sat brooding. Outside, among the trees, some wild animal set up a thin wailing cry. "Damn that row!" said I, stirring, looking also into the grey fire. "It's some stoat or weasel, or something. It'd been going on like that for nearly a week. I've shot in the trees ever so many times. There were two - one's gone." Continuously, through the heavy, chilling silence, came the miserable crying from the darkness among the trees. "You know," he said, "she hated me this afternoon, and I hated her -" It was midnight, full of sick thoughts. "It is no good," said I. "Go to bed - it will be morning in a few hours."(WP269) Here Lawrence arranges the scene so that George is center stage, Cyril understands the impact of what he is saying, and tries to intervene in his friend's behalf. Of course,

George is like the lonely wild animal, and morning, because he has defined his existence by Lettie, will never come for him. Even from the first then, Lawrence was able to create characters who were emotive. After this first novel he discarded the cumbersome technique of first person narration; he was then able to allow these characters to both respond and grow within the framework of a more flexible narrative stance. The second major weakness in the novel is in the area of characterization. The main characters all seem thwarted 21

by either class or education, or both, but suffer most from their creator's inability to give them life. This cast of performers - the lyrical narrator, the proud lady, the rustic farmer, the wealthy mine-owner's son, the sensuous bar-maid, the disturbing gamekeeper - move in and out of relationships with each other but never seem to live up to their potential to be interesting fully developed characters. Further, although they seem to want to connect with each other, they never do. With the exception of

Annable, they are all characters who have found themselves at the end of adolescence with no where to go. Annable has, before the novel's start, already renounced the world the others have to try and make their way in. There is not a model for success among the lot of them as they all, in one way or another, end up at much the same place - in despair. Meg, the bar-maid who becomes George's wife, is triumphant in motherhood and Christianity, and Leslie, the mine-owner's son, is triumphant in politics and business, but these are shallow triumphs for Lawrence. At best, Meg is a wife without a husband totally devoted to her children, and Leslie is a husband without a wife abandoned by Lettie to their children. At novel's end, George is a drunkard living with his sister, Lettie is an artistic dilettante who has renounced her sensuality, and Cyril is drifting back and forth between England and France. Annable has escaped it all by dying early in the book. 22

George is the most fully developed character in the novel. He is a physically beautiful strong man of the land who gives up farming for inn-keeping, socialist politics, and horse-trading but who, as Ronald Draper says, "suffers from a fatal inertia and diffidence."27 He drifts through marriage, and politics, and alcoholism, moral collapse, and physical decay. At the end of the novel, Cyril says, making the final separation between the two of them: When we went into tea, he was, as Tom said, 'downcast.' The men talked uneasily with abated voices. Emily attended to him with a little, palpitating solicitude. We were all uncomfortably impressed with the sense of our alienation from him. He sat apart and obscure from us, like a condemned man.(WP368}

George had previously been awakened to life by his more-learned middleclass friends, Cyril and Lettie. Cyril and he were fast friends, yet when he lost Lettie, he apparently lost everything:

"You see, it's not so much what you call love. I don't know. You see, I built on Lettie" he looked up at me shamefacedly then continued tearing the shavings "you must found your castles on something, and I founded mine on Lettie ••• you see, you and Lettie have made me conscious and now I'm at a dead loss." (WP235} One, however, must question why. George is given a natural vitality by the author but he is never allowed to use it.

He is more successful in business than he ever was in farming; he marries a warm, if culturally illiterate woman; he has a family; he makes a lot of money, but ends in ruin.

Perhaps John Worthen comes the closest to the answer by 23

stating that Lawrence only created stock figures in the novel. He notes: Even George, who has moments of physical actuality, is more interesting in the novel as an example of something - at first, physical ease, and la~ on, spiritual decline - than ~ something. There is merit in Worthen's argument. Lawrence did not allow his characters to utilize the resources he gave them because he imposed his story on them~ he did not let the story develop from his characters.

Lettie offers similar problems. From the beginning of the novel, Lawrence takes great care when depicting

Lettie's character. Yet, the question as to her believability remains. Is she a real young woman or is she in the novel only for decoration, there only to provide the vehicle for George's downfall? Early in the novel, she says to George:

"You are blind, you are only half-born~ you are gross with good-living and heavy sleeping. You are a piano which will only play a dozen common notes. Sunset is nothing to you - it merely happens anywhere .•• You never grow up, like bulbs which spend all summer getting fat and flesh, but never wakening the germ of the flower. As for me, the flower is born in me, but it wants bringing forth. Things don't flower if they are overfed. You have to suffer before you blossom in this life ••. " (WP42) Whatever one may think of the triteness of the metaphor that she uses, her speech at least has some energy.

Indeed, it is with George that she comes the closest to reaching her potential. After she has made her choice of 24

Leslie, a choice that Lawrence never really explains, she

does not have any more grand speeches. The author seems to

drop her: to be less interested in her than in George's

decline. It is as if, to use Lawrence's own metaphor, she

is not allowed to blossom. Later in the novel he records

this scene:

Leslie knelt down at her feet. She shook the hood back from her head, and her ornaments sparkled in the moonlight. Her face with its whiteness and its shadows was full of fascination, and in their dark recesses her eyes thrilled George with hidden magic. She smiled at him along her cheeks while her husband crouched before her ••• As she turned laughing to the two men, she let the cloak slide over her white shoulder and fall with silk splendor of a peacock's gorgeous blue over the arm of the large settee. There she stood with her white hand upon the peacock of her cloak, where it tumbled against her dull orange dress. She knew her own splendour, and she drew up her throat laughing and brilliant with triumph .•• "Won't you take off my shoes, darling?" she said, sinking among the cushions of the settee. Leslie kneeled again before her.(WP292-293)

Here she has become something of an ornament herself.

Instead of continuing to see her as a woman, the author has turned her into a symbol. Ben-Ephriam concurs:

The excerpt, marred by the forced tone that infuses it, portrays Lettie as a dangerous temptress unattractive in the garish stylization of her seductiveness. Furthermore, the use of the word "peacock" specifically li~ks her to z~e novel's central image: the wh1te peacock. This link to the novel's central image deprives Lettie of any of the human characteristics that could have saved her 25

from being more than just a stock figure. She becomes associated with Annable's white peacock, Lady Crystable, and aligned with unfaithfulness, pretension, pride, and vanity. Lady Crystabel is never more than a character in a fairy-tale romance. Lettie also then assumes this role as Cyril, through his narrative commentary, does most of her talking for her in the last half of the book. Her early, vibrant challenges to George and to life are gone mid-novel. Like George's vitality, Lettie's is never allowed to develop.

There are some instances in the novel, however, when

Lawrence is successful with characterization. One character in the novel who succeeds, perhaps, in a way that the others do not, and who looks ahead to other characters, is the gamekeeper Frank Annable. Annable is the center of attention from the moment he appears, but his influence is confined only to a few chapters. A Cambridge man, Annable now lives down in the woods at a house called "the

Kennels." He is, according to Marguerite Howe, the first of the "Lawrentian dark men of the earth." 30 He tells

Cyril the almost archetypic story of himself and Lady Crystabel, his white peacock. He complains about the deathly effects of civilization and sums up his philosophy on 1 i f e, "Be a good anima 1, whether it • s man or woman" (WP202), simply. This Annable had done by leaving his unfaithful first wife and society and, with a second 26

less highly-placed woman, having nine children in fourteen

years. Both Ben-Ephriam and Miko see him as a vitalist who is also brutal and cynical in his conviction that one

should live life as an animal. In the scene in the churchyard when a peacock lands on a stone angel, Annable

scoffs:

"The proud fool! - look at it 1 Perched on an angel, too, as if it were a pedestal for vanity. That's the soul of a woman- or it's the devil." ••• "Just lookl" he said, "the miserable brute had dirtied that angel. A woman to the end, I tell you, all vanity and screech and defilement."(WP174-175) But for all his protests, Annalbe's "good animal existence" must be questioned. Even as he is supposedly living his ideal, he displays constant gloom and restlessness. Ben-Ephraim comments: Annable is self-pitying, as well as self-congradulating - both these emotions make the degree of his objective understanding suspect. Because of his self-serving bias, his interpretation of the bird's defecating on the angel's head is so grossly, not to say, humorously, obvious and prejudiced, so unequivocal in the relative moral positions it ascribes to males and females, that the image ~s ~ir~ual~~ stripped of all suggestive 1mpl1cat1ons. In addition to the stance he takes, and the fact that his gloom and restlessness are never fully explained, soon Annable is dead, caught in a rock slide, and out of the novel. After the funeral, little mention is made of him again, and his philosophy is never discussed. Annable, whatever problems he presents, is, however, proof that 27

Lawrence could create interesting believable characters.

He is an early version of Mellors, and like Mellors, distrusts both civilization and women. He, unfortunately,

suffers by being dropped from the book too soon. Much of

his vitality is compromised because the implications of what such a character might have contributed to the meaning

of the novel are never allowed to develop. Instead, Annable seems extraneous rather than essential to the

story. Another major weakness in the novel is that it lacks

organization. The White Peacock is a long book that moves from point to point with little or no structural plan. Lawrence had told Jessie Chambers that he was not

interested in plot per se, but it is difficult to begin to define what the plot of the novel is. It does, as was

Lawrence's plan, start out with two couples and chart their course; it does, in some sense, present what Ben-Ephraim

calls the fundamental Lawrencian story: "the struggle for

fulfillment experienced by a woman with a strong, integrated sense of self" 32 : and, it does give the first expression of Lawrence's core story of the superior woman, superior by way of education and birth, and the socially

inferior man. What it does not do, however, is follow any logical progression. The story is told between rhapsodies to Spring, to use Lawrence's words, and scraps of Latin and

French. It is hard to follow the stories of either of the 28

two couples or to project what the outcome of the novel will be. Lawrence's immaturity when handling characterization and the intrusion of the narrator at inappropriate times only add to the confusion. Draper has said that the novel is diffuse, and that while it has breadth, taking in as it does a wide range of the countryside between Nottingham and Derbyshire, that the parallels that it attempts to draw are often crudely handled. 33 What the novel seems to be then, again using Lawrence's words, is a mosaic that is not held together by the glue of an identifiable plot but rather by some vague form of longing that all the characters experience but can never define. The novel rambles onward towards its conclusion without any clear direction of its path, leaving the reader unsatisfied and with many questions left unanswered. Ben-Ephraim notes: "In general (in the final third), the novel grows steadily more amorphous and its literary quality gradually deteriorates. In the last section painfully awkward time-shifts combine with mala~roit narrational technique, to make the always episodic novel nearly disjointed." 34 Although Lawrence claims that he is not concerned with plot, the novel suffers badly from lack of it. At the end of the novel, the reader is left with the question as to whether or not there has been any worthwhile story told. Lawrence would never be concerned with plot as the be-all in his novels, 29

but the complete lack of story line in The White Peacock

needed to be corrected: clearly it stood in the way of

understanding. Along with the problems of narration,

characterization, and plot, The White Peacock also suffers

from the literary pretensions of its author. This is most

evident in Lawrence's handling of the colliers as

curiosities rather than as real people. Jessie Chambers

writes concerning Lawrence:

Lawrence belonged absolutely to the stock from which he sprang; bone of their bone. There was no distance between him and the people amongst whom he lived; when he talked to them he spoke out of the same heritage of thought and feeling; he was like them, only greate3 in a sense that he contained them in himself. 5

But in his first novel, Lawrence chose to ignore these

people that he knew so well. It is the Haggs Farm side of

life in the Nethermere Valley, embellished somewhat with education and literature, that he focuses on. The Eastwood

side of life in the Valley is forgotten. The choice to write about what he did know best put him at a disadvantage

from ~he beginning. Richard Aldington says, "If we must

look for faults rather than enjoyment in books, we might point out that a real disadvantage in The White Peacock is

the author's snobbishness." 36 The mining landscape that

will become such an important part of Lawrence's work is mentioned only infrequently in the novel. Keith Alldrift

in The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence notes its 30

absence:

Lawrence removes it (the mining landscape) from his field of vision for the same reasons of literary convention that he removes his characters f39m the working-class milieu, that he knew best. An illustration of this point occurs when Lettie and Cyril meet two colliers on the road early one Christmas morning: As we came to the gate where the private road branched from the highway, we heard John say 1 Thank you• - and looking out, saw our two boys returning from the pit. They were grotesque in the dark night as the lamp-light fell on them, showing them grimy, flecked with bits of snow. They shouted merrily their good wishes. Lettie leaned out and waved to them, and they cried •oorayl • Christmas came in with their acclamations.(WP123)

David Herbert Lawrence of Sheffield, the son of a coal miner, never had anything near a coachman named John; the colliers that he describes are, according to Worthen, equally 11 Unreal 11 and like stock figures in a nineteenth century society novel, 11 all of them vanish like spirits at cock-crow with the ending of the chapter ... 38 The White Peacock is not a working class novel but rather a novel written by a member of the working class who thought novels - should be written this way. The subjects that Lawrence deleted, they very subjects that he knew best, were deleted by the young author as unfit subjects for art. The colliers of this novel are mere oddities that seem to have little effect on anyone including the author. In the novel, Lawrence has not yet found all of his true 31

subjects.

Yet, parts of The White Peacock are written with

energy, intensity and simplicity. Early in the novel he

describes a walk Cyril and George take through the woods at that special time when day turns into evening:

The day had been hot and close. The sun was reddening in the west as we leaped across the lesser brook. The evening scents began to awake, and wander unseen through the still air. An occasional yellow sunbeam would slant through the thick roof of leaves and cling passionately to the orange clusters of mountain-ash berries. The trees were silent, drawing together to sleep. Only a few pink orchids stood palely by the path, looking wistfully out at the ranks of red-purple bugle, whose last flowers, glowing from the top of the bronze column, yearned darkly for the sun. (WP34-35) Later in the novel, in a narrative passage, Cyril and a

young boy named Sam dig Sam's father, Annable, out from

under the pile of stones. Cyril knows Annable is dead but Sam does not understand:

"He won't get up," he said, and his little voice was hoarse with fear and anxiety ••• "He's not asleep," he said, "because his eyes is open - look1" I could not bear the child's questioning terror. I took him up to carry him away, but he struggled and fought to be free. "Ma'e 'im get up- ma'e 'im get up," he cried in a frenzy, and I had to let the boy go. He ran to the dead man, calling 'Feyther 1 Feyther 1 '" and pulling his shoulder ••• (WP181)

How much more powerful and intense the writing is in each of these passages, whether descriptive or narrative, than it is in the silly but clever dialogue that Lawrence often 32

includes in the novel's social scenes:

"Lord, a giddy little pastoral - fir for old Theocritus, ain't it, Miss Denys?" "Why do you talk to me about those classic people - I daren't even say their names. What would he say about us?" He laughed winking his blue eyes: "He's make old Daphnis there' pointing to Leslie - 'sing a match with me, Damoetas - contesting the merits of our various shepherdesses - begin Daphnis, sing up Ameryllis ••• " (WP262) As Stephen Miko remarks, "the book would hardly have suffered for omitting this and most of the other social scenes, for they seldom make thematic points which are not better made in more intimate gatherings, and they almost never reveal something important about the major characters. 39 Lawrence was capable of writing powerful, realistic, and beautiful prose and did so at times in The

White Peacock. His use of the dialect in the scene at the quarry lends a sense of urgency and realism unequaled elsewhere in the novel. His cataloguing of nature, by the formation of imagery and the use of personification, celebrates nature beautifully. What Lawrence had to learn was that scraps of Latin and French, and classical references, did not figure largely in the making of a great novel but that writing about what one knew best did.

The last two major critical problems found in The

White Peacock center on the symbolism that Lawrence used in the novel and the question of what the novel finally means.

In The Moon's Dominion, Ben-Ephraim objects to the central 33

symbol of the book, the white peacock, because it comes

from Annable, whose mixed emotional make-up undermines his . . . 40 0 b JeCt1V1ty. Years after his first novel's publication, Lawrence in "The Dragon of the Apocalypse" wrote concerning symbolism:

You can't give a great symbol a meaning any more than you can give a cat meaning. Symbols are organized units of consciousness with a life of their own, and you can never explain them away, because their value is dynamic, emotional, belonging to the sense-consciousness of the pody and the soul and not simply mental. 4 As is often the case, Lawrence is his own best critic. The symbolism in The White Peacock does not work because it is almost exclusively mental. Annable makes the jump from peacock to modern woman because of one unfortunate personal experience, because he has been "shot down in the pride of his body" (WP177). Cyril watches Lettie reject George for Leslie and makes a similar jump associating Lettie with the proud peacock. George, who is rejected, and Leslie, who suffers daily from Lettie's pride, never make this association. By the end of the novel, the emphasis has shifted so far away from Annable's story and Lettie, focusing as it does solely on George, that one is not sure what the novel had to do with peacocks in the first place.

If the real intent of the novel is to celebrate nature, as many critics have believed, then Annable's story is actually unnecessary and detracting. The white peacock, I ' 34

therefore, is an example of faulty symbolism for rather

than forming an integral part of the meaning of the novel,

it actually obscures it.

Citing another example of faulty symbolism, Ronald

Draper comments that the poetic suggestiveness of the

horizon broadening beyond Nethermere to Yorkshire, London,

France, and even Canada, where some of the Saxon family

emigrate, "almost, but not quite, gives the novel symbolic

stature."42 But again nothing is done with this horizon and the family simply leaves and is out of the book.

Still another example of where Lawrence's symbolism

does not add to the understanding of the novel is found in a scene in which George is examining some bees whose wings do not yet function:

"Leave them alone," said I (Cyril). "Let them run in the sun. They're only just out of the shells. Don't torment them into flight." He persisted, however, and broke the wing of thenext. "Oh dear - pityl" said he, and crushed the little thing between his fingers. Then he examined the eggs, and pulled out some silk from round the dead larve, and investigated it all in a desultory manner, asking me all I knew about the insects. When he had finished he flung the clustered eggs into the water and rose. (\'1Pl4)

In a later scene George "cheerfully drowns" an injured family cat. In both instances George is surprisingly cruel and brutal if he is to be considered as the ideal pastoral man. What is the reader to infer from this: that George's demise is traceable back to these acts of brutality: that 35

if Lettie were to give him her love, he would dissect it in a similar desultory manner? Is Lettie•s choice of Leslie so bad then, as both the narrator and the outcome of the story implies? Are George•s acts of disregard for nature symbolic of something evil in his character? Isn•t he one of those who Cyril speaks about who causes the snowdrops to have lost their meaning? And, if not, then why does Lawrence have George ravish nature? These are questions that cannot be answered, because the author himself could not answer them. Lawrence attempted to use symbols to carry the meaning of his novel. He was inexperienced with their use, however, and his symbols are either forced or vague.

It follows that because the symbolism is faulty and difficult to understand, that the larger over-all meaning of the novel is unclear. Ben~Ephraim pinpoints one of the problems that can arise from this lack qf clarity: Critics have generally admired Annable, either because of his intrinsic vividness: •Annable reduces all the other characters to shadows, • or because of his importance as a theoretical forerunn~r: 1 Annable is the first bearer of the Laurentian philosophy.• Whatever the truth of these judgments, and the first is patently untrue, while the second badly requires elucidation, Annable•s worldview does little justice to the complexities of The White Peacock. He, and not Lawrence, really is a ranting misogynist, but to accept his theories as the whole meaning of the novel is to fall in~o. th~ fallacy that has trapped some of its crl.tl.cs. 3

But the question remains. If the meaning of the novel is 36

not centered on an acceptance of Annable's philosophy, then

is it centered on Cyril's pastoral ideal, or the notion

that begins the novel that live in the valley is already in a state of degeneration, or on the idea that one finally must leave the Garden of youth behind? It is hard to tell.

Is the intent of the novel to relate the white peacock theme of Annable's story to Lettie and by way of example

show how her life is wasted by an excess of pride? Is the

intent of The White Peacock to illustrate the evils of drink? Lawrence, because of his experiences with his

father, had something personally ivested in this theme at

this time. Is the intent of the book to present as many

characters from different social classes, integrated

together in one book, with the hopes of illustrating that

people, regardless of class or education, can appreciate

Ibsen? Is the intent of the novel to tell Cyril's story of

value longing for the loss of youth? Later, writing as a

literary critic, Lawrence was to charge that one must always trust the tale, but in this novel which tale do you trust? The White, Peacock, far from being the shallow book

that many critics regard it, actually offers its readers

too much. Granted, problems with meaning are something that critics of Lawrence are constantly forced to deal with. But the problem in The White Peacock is particularly acute because Lawrence was not in control of his form and not sure of what he wanted to convey. Harry T. Moore in ~ 37

H. Lawrence: His Life and Works underscores this point: The White Peacock, which with its groups of young couples in a rural setting drew much from George Eliot and other traditional novelists, goes to pieces structurally after the "Poem of Friendship" chapter. There is a painful public meeting between George and Lettie, following which the characters are moved about like checkers over the years. Until this point, about three-fifths of the way through, the story has been fairly consistent and even paced in development, but now there are spasmodic jumps of two years, five years, one year, and so on. The main theme, the deterioration of George, is all that hold the book together and this is often too fragmentarily presented. The other characters become vaguer: Cyril, for example, seems to go to France at times, but how and why is never clear. Too much detail in such matters might prove burdensome, but after the closeness of the circumstantial focus of the first sixty percent of the book, the s h u t t.l i ~~ cinema o f the 1 as t parts i s confusl.ng. In the first half of the novel, Lawrence perhaps gives us too much detail: in the second half he does not give us enough. The overall meaning of his novel then can only be guessed at.

What does not have to be guessed at, however, is that considering that The White Peacock is a first novel, it is, even with all ~ts flaws, an admirable attempt. In it

Lawrence first declared his affinity with nature. In it Lawrence first conveyed the intensity of experience that would become characteristic of all of his work. In it Lawrence first attempted to interpret the relationship of man in society and of man to his natural environment. In it Lawrence first formulated his imagery from nature and 38

first used dialect. An ineffective first person narrator, underdeveloped characters, forced symbolism, and a lack of clarity, however, prevent The White Peacock from standing alongside of Lawrence•s finest work. In order to correct the novel 1 s problems, Lawrence needed to employ a less cumbersome narrative technique, develop a new form of characterization, formulate meaningful symbolism, and write from his own experience not from what he thought his experience should have been. He did not forget the people nor the landscapes of the Nethermere Valley. In Women in Love, the novel he loved passionately and considered his best work, he told their story again. But this time he was in complete control: this time he was a master of his craft. CHAPTER II

Few of Lawrence's major critics consider The White Peacock beyond noting that it is a young man's book.

Often, if the novel is discussed, the words "slight,"

"callow," "underdeveloped," or "immature" are applied to it. Certainly, even Draper, Miko, Clark, and Roberts among those critics who find the novel of some interest and value, do not link it primarily to any of Lawrence's later work. Perhaps this is why one is so unprepared for the numerous similarities that exist between it and Lawrence's masterpiece, Women in Love. Nevertheless, these similarities do exist and they are significant. For instance, each of the two novels was written and rewritten a number of times; passages in each of the novels had to either be altered or deleted altogether before they could be published. More importantly, the two novels resemble each other in matters of content, characterization, setting, and form. These parallels make a strong case for considering The White Peacock as a preliminary sketch for

Women in Love. This, in turn, enhances the value of the earlier work and adds support to the idea that from the first, Lawrence was a gifted and perceptive writer.

Lawrence labored over the writing of both The White Peacock and Women in Love. In a late autobiographical sketch, he comments on the task of writing his first novel:

39 40

I had been trussling away for four years getting out The White Peacock in inchoate bits, from the underground of my consciousness. I m~st ha¥~ written most of it five or six t1.mes •.•

It is well documented, both in Lawrence's personal correspondence and in critical studies concerning him, that

Women in Love was also writted, trussled away, and rewritten numerous times. Lawrence began the novel first in the Tyrol in 1913, worked on it for the next three years, and then rewrote it in its present form in Cornwall 46 in 1917. In the foreward to the American edition, written in 1919, he attempts to define his effort to write:

Man struggles with his unborn needs and fulfillment. New unfoldings struggle up in torment in him, as buds struggle forth from the midst of a plant. Any man of real individuality tries to know and to understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes along. This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out of art. It is a very great part of life. It is not a s up e r i mp o s i t i on o f a theory • I t i l? the passionate struggle into conscious being.

Lawrence both engaged in and recorded this personal struggle for expression while writing The White Peacock and

'Vlomen in Love: it is this unremitting struggle that is present at the core of his work even from the beginning.

Something that is also associated with Lawrence's work from the beginning are the ongoing problems that he had with the publishers in regards to textual changes. It was while working on his first book that Lawrence experienced 41

his first such problem. Warren Roberts in A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence notes that Heinemann asked Lawrence to make certain corrections. One phrase 11 the dirty devil' s run her muck over that angel .. was changed to 11 the miserable brute has dirtied that angel, .. and a passage of six lines was changed from the American edition: 48

God! - we were a passionate couple - and she would have me in her bedroom while she drew Greek statues of me - her Croton, her Hercules! I never saw her drawings. She had her own way too much - I let her do as she liked with me. Then gradually she got tired - it took her three years to have a real bellyful of me.

In the British edition to:

Lordl - we were an infatuated couple - she would choose to view me in an aesthetic light. I was Greek statues for her, bless you: Croton, Hercules, I don't know whatl She had her own way too much - I let her do as she liked with me. Then gradually she got tired- it took her three years to be really glutted with me. (WP177)

Objections to and changes of this sort of diction would happen again and again in Lawrence's literary career as he deliberately used the English Language in a manner in which it had never been used before. During the publishing of

Women in Love, he was convinced that he needed to delete the Prologue, in which Birkin openly admits his homo-erotic feelings, and the passages that contained allusion to the loves of Achilles and Patroclus and to the love of David and Jonathan. 49 Again, in these passages Lawrence was 42

deliberately dealing with subject material not normally

found in the English novel at that time. 50 Turmoil always

surrounded Lawrence and what he wrote. Yet one could hardly have expected less. It was Lawrence, it should be remembered, who wrote in Fantasia of the Unconscious:

We have no one law that governs us. For me there is only one law: I am I. And that isn't a law, it's just a remark. One is one, but one is not alone. There are other stars buzzing in the centre of their own isolatiog And there is no straight path between them. 1 Lawrence followed no one law when writing his novels either. He constantly sought to expand the possibilities of the form by the language he used and the subjects he considered. This concern was with him, albeit to a lesser degree, from his first novel onward. More substantive comparisons between The White

Peacock and Women in Love, however, involve matters of content and form. Lawrence chose to construct each novel from the same general plan, "to take two couples and mark out their relationships." In Women in Love, as he had in The White Peacock, Lawrence told the story of two couples,

Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, and Gudrun Brangwen and

Gerald Crich. In the later novel, however, instead of including a thwarted love affair between two of the main characters of the opposite sex, as he had between Lettie and George in the first novel, Lawrence included a thwarted relationship between two of the main characters of the same 43

sex, Rupert and Gerald. Ursula and Rupert, and Gerald and

Gudrun, both together and as individuals, search, as the

couples in The White Peacock had, for lasting worthwhile relationships. As is characteristic in all of Lawrence's fiction, these relationships are hard, if not impossible,

to find.

Many of the characters in both novels share similar social and intellectual backgrounds, and have similar psychological temperaments. Leslie Tempest and Gerald erich, for example, are both the sons of mine owners. They are the advocates of the new machinery that will do the work of men and eventually rob man of his usefulness. Both command positions of power; both have money and use it; both are committed to the future; and both try to exercise the supposed rights of their social positions by forcing

their will on others. Both display unnecessary brutality:

Leslie when he joyfully pulls off the head of a lame rabbit, Gerald when he mercilessly beats his mare into submission at the railroad crossing. Both do not communicate well with nature; and both enter into rather horrible and destructive relationships with proud and willful women. Leslie ends up with a frigid wife as his punishment; Gerald, unable and unwilling to combat Gudrun any longer, commits suicide and ends up frozen to death in the Alpine snow. The women these men fall in love with also mirror one another. Lettie Beardsall is an early 44

version of Gudrun Brangwen, who lacks Gudrun's knowledge of the city. Both women are self-centered, given to wearing bright colors for effect, and dedicated to the principle that men should serve them. Both are artists of minor stature: Lettie dabbles in painting, Gudrun sculpts small animals and birds. Both women also enter into rather destructive and horrible relationships with prideful men, but, as is the case with Leslie, Lettie seems to get off easier than does Gudrun, who at the end of the novel drifts off towards Germany. Lettie, at least has her children, her home, and social position as wife of the most powerful man in the Valley at the end of The White Peacock. Gudrun has nothing; she has, she says, no desire to return to England, and no clear plans for the future. She is a lost soul, alone, with no anchors, in a world that, like herself, is heading for disaster. Perhaps the fact that both Leslie and Lettie are spared the harsh fate of Gerald and Gudrun, has more to do with the fact that in the earlier novel, Lawrence was not fully in control of characterization and less to do with any questions of merit. Lettie challenges both George and then Leslie as

Gudrun challenges Gerald. Neither woman remits, although Lettie does turn away from the physicality that George offers her while Gudrun turns toward the physicality that Gerald offers her. There are also slight resemblances between Cyril Beardsall and Rupert Birkin, each books 45

so-called Lawrence figure; there is no character in The

White Peacock, however, to compare with Ursula - Lawrence had not yet met Frieda Von Richthofen.

This similarity among characters is best illustrated, though, by the relationship between the two sets of male

friends in each book. Cyril and George are the clear

forerunners of Birkin and Gerald, and it is through their relationship that Lawrence first sought to convey homo-erotic feeling. In the bathing scene from The White

Peacock Cyril's attitude toward George, which is generally sympathetic if at times critical, is transformed into a powerful love: (George) knew how I admired the noble, white fruitfulness of his form ..• He saw that I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of men, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have ever known since, either man or woman. (WP292) In "Gladiatorial" Birkin suggests to Gerald, who is described as being "completely and emptily restless, utterly hollow"(WL258), that they wrestle to release tension. After: 46

He still heard as if it were his own disembodied spirit hearing, standing at some distance behind him. It drew nearer, however, his spirit ••• He realized that he was leaning with all his weight on the soft body of the other man .•• He put his hand to steady himself. It touched the hand of Gerald that was lying out on the floor. And Gerald's hand closed warm and sudden over Birkin's, they remained exhausted and breathless, the one hand clasped closely over the other. It was Birkin whose hand, in swift response, had closed in a strong, warm clasp over the hand of the other. Gerald's clasp had been sudden and momentaneous. (WL264) At the end of this chapter, Birkin suggests in another perfect moment of love, that "life has all kinds of things, there isn't only one road" (WL268). An acceptance of this feeling that exists between both pairs of men would reflect that other road. At the end of Lawrence's first novel, however, this feeling is all but lost to drunkenness; at the end of Women in Love this feeling remains only as

Birkin's hope, now shattered by Gerald's death and his refusal to accept any form of love that is not destructive. In addition to having similar characters and relationships, Women in Love and The White Peacock also share identical settings. In an essay written in 1929 entitled "Nottingham and the Mining Countryside," Lawrence records:

I was born nearly forty-four years ago, in Eastwood, a mining village of some three hundred souls, about eight miles from Nottingham, and one mile from the stream, the Erewash which divides Nottinghamshire from Derbyshire. It is a hilly country looking west 47

to erich and towards Matlock, sixteen miles away, and east and north-east towards Mansfield and the Sherwood Forest District. To me it seemed, and still seems, an extremely beautiful countryside just between the red sandstone and the oak-trees of Nottingham, and the cold limestone, the ash-trees, the stone fences of Derbyshire. To me, as a child, and as a young man, it was still the old England of the forest and agricultural past: there were no motor-cars, the mines were, in a sense, an accident in the landscape, and Robig Hood and his merry men were not very far away. 2

It was this landscape that Lawrence used as settings in both novels. Further, it was the connection that he made between himself and this landscape that fostered his life-long belief that a vital electric current ran through all living things. 53 Through the years Lawrence often adopted a procedure in his fiction whereby he only changed placenames: Strelley Mill of The White Peacock was actually Felley Mill located just north-east of Haggs Farm on the way to Newstead Abbey across from High Park where

Robin Hood's Well is located: Eastwood became the Wiley Green of Women in Love; Nethermere Reservoir in The White

Peacock was really Moorgreen Reservoir located somewhat south of Felley Mill, and Lamb Close House, owned by the

Barber family, the local coal-owners, which was located just south of Moorgreen Reservoir and to the north-east of Eastwood became in turn Highclose in The White Peacock, then Shortlands in Women in Love, and finally Wragby Hall in Lady Chatterley's Lover. 54 Another link between the two novels is that within this setting, characters move back 48

and forth from specific location to specific location. In

The White Peacock the characters move back and forth between the Saxon farm, the Beardsall cottage, and the

Tempest manor. In Women in Love the characters move back and forth between the Brangwen family home, the erich manor, the Roddice mansion at Breadalby, and Birkin•s cottage at the Millpond. In The White Peacock Cyril moves from Nethermere, to London, and then on to France. In

Women in Love all the four main characters move from the Midlands, to London, and then on to the Continent. In neither book are the characters stationary, although the principal landscape that dominates each book remains the same.

Perhaps even a stronger connection between the two novels is that The White Peacock presents, for the first time, many of Lawrence•s major themes. One of those themes that he would later amplify in Women in Love, comes directly out of Lawrence•s use of landscape and centers on his strong belief both in the necessity of remaining close to Nature and in the regenerative properties present in the physical non-human world. Lawrence interpreted Nature as process, as motion, as force, and as such insisted on a dynamic relationship between man and the natural world.

Nature, for Lawrence, was not something static against which man could test his will, but rather something fluid, ever-changing from which man could learn. It was the 49

connection then, that man made with the land, that was the

important connection: it was this connection, Lawrence believed, that kept man in touch with his aliveness. Keith

Alldritt in The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence comments that Lawrence had a "pervasive concern with

landscape and the natural order in all their unceasing mutation. "55 It was in The White Peacock, the main theme of which critics often regard as the celebration of nature, that Lawrence first expressed these ideas by creating

effective and beautiful descriptions in an attempt to show this necessary connection between man and the .non-human world.

Not surprisingly, then, the writing in The White Peacock is best when Lawrence writes about the countryside:

I was born in September, and love it best of all the months. There is no heat, no hurry, no thirst and weariness in corn harvest as there is in the hay. If the season is late, as is usual with us, then mid-September sees the corn still standing in stock. The mornings come slowly. The earth is like a woman married and fading; she does not leap up with a laugh for the first fresh kiss of dawn, but slowly, quietly, unexpectantly lies watching the waking of each new day. The blue mist, like memory in the eyes of a neglected wife, never goes from the wooded hill, and only at noon creeps from the near hedges •.. (WP27)

Indeed, Lawrence has written a lyrical prose poem. There are many such moments in the book. Richard Aldington notes: 50

A remarkable feature of the book, apparently quite unnoticed at the time, was its almost magical power of evocation of the non-human world. In this Lawrence had something in common with Ruskin among the Alps and on the roads of France: with Richard Jeffries among the fields and woods and lanes of England: with Hudson on the pampas: but with his own original~6Y of perception and intense feeling. This kind of originality of perception and intensity of feeling can also be demonstrated in a narrative passage

that documents George and Meg's careless wedding trip to Nottingham:

The mare took her own way, and Meg's hat was disarranged once more by the sweeping elm-boughs. The yellow corn was dipping and flowing in the fields, like a cloth of gold pegged down at the corners under which the wind was heaving. Sometimes we passed cottages where the scarlet lilies rose like bonfires, and the tall larkspur like bright blue leaping smoke. Sometimes we smelled sunshine on the browning corn, sometimes the fragrance of the shadow of leaves. Occasionally it was the dizzy scent of new haystack. Then we rocked and jolted over the rough cobblestones of Cinderhill, and bounded forward again at the foot of the enormous pit hill, smelling of sulphur, inflamed with slow red fires in the daylight, and crusted with ashes. (WP280) So vivid is Lawrence's writing here that passages like this, whether narrative or descriptive, are like individual paintings. Stephen Miko asserts that it was writing of this sort found in The White Peacock that, "points toward Lawrence's later insistence on nature as a separate but vital presence."57

It follows that it was one of Lawrence's greatest gifts to be able to formulate metaphors that actualize and 51

magnify our sense of beauty or 11 the glamour of the seen 58 world ... But Lawrence's concern goes beyond a mere recording of what he sees. He may see the earth as a woman married and fading, and he may see scarlet lilies like bonfires, and he may be able to smell sunshine on browning corn, but there is more. Lawrence also believed in nature's ability to heal mankind of his malaise. The White

Peacock was his first expression of this belief. Cyril, vaguely unhappy and discontent, is refreshed by a walk through the countryside:

There the daffodils were lifting their heads and throwing back their yellow curls. At the foot of each sloping, grey old tree stood a family of flowers, some brusten with golden fullness, some lifting their heads slightly, to show a modest, sweet countenance, others still hiding their faces, leaning pensively from their jaunty grey-green spears: I wished I had their language, to talk to them distinctly. Overhead, the trees with lifted fingers shook out their hair to the sun, decking themselves with buds as white and cool as a water-nymph's breasts. I began to be very glad ... (WP185)

In Women in Love this idea of the regenerative quality of the physical world, of nature as healer, is continued.

Here landscape and nature, play an even larger role as Birkin heals himself, through direct communion with the non-human world. Hermione symbolically tries to kill him with the assertion of her dominant will, and literally tries to kill him with a piece of lapis lazuli to the skull. He runs out of her house and into the forest: 52

Birkin, barely conscious, and yet perfectly direct in his motion, went out of the house and straight across the park, to the open country, to the hills. The brilliant day had become overcast spots of rain were falling. He wandered on to a wild valley-side, where were thickets of hazel, many flowers, tufts of heather, and little clumps of young-fir trees, budding with soft paws. It was rather wet everywhere, there was a stream running down at the bottom of the valley, which was gloomy, or seemed gloomy. He was aware that he could not regain his consciousness, that he was moving in a sort of darkness. Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the armpits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact. (WL99-100)

After this contact with nature, Birkin is healed somewhat and is finally able to break off his deathly relationship with Hermione. He can now prepare himself for what is to come; he can now grow.

Interaction between the characters and the landscapes in this novel give the often intense personal interaction between the characters a larger, more universal meaning.

There are many such instances in the book - Ursula and

Birkin's night in Sherwood Forest, their night huddled together on the bow of a ship crossing the Channel to

France, the water party scenes at Shortland, and the culminating disastrous events in the Alpine snow. Again, as it was first introduced in The White Peacock, the 53

important connection is the connection that man makes with nature. High up in the snow, Gerald's inability to connect with nature, which contributes to his eventual death, is again demonstrated when nature excites Gudrun but can only antagonize him: They climbed together, at evening, up the high slope, to see the sun set. In the finely breathing, keen wind they stood and watched the yellow sun sink in crimson and disappear. There in the east the peaks and ridges glowed with living rose, incadescent like immortal flowers against a brown-purple sky, a miracle ... To her it was so beautiful, it was a delirium, she wanted to gather the glowing, eternal peaks to her breast, and die. He saw them, saw they were beautiful. But there arose no clamour in his breast, only a bitterness that was visionary in itself. He wished the peaks were grey and unbeautiful, so that she should not get her support from them •.• (WL438)

Both Gerald's and Gudrun's response to nature in this scene are representative of both their individual personalities and of the success each of them has with forming this vital connection with nature. Clearly, Lawrence's handling of nature in The White Peacock prepared him for how he was to use it in Women in Love.

Another of Lawrence's major themes that first found expression in The White Peacock; and that became a major concern in Women in Love, was the theme of the blight of industrialism. Many critics who have seen only weakness in

Lawrence's first novel consider that it is little more than a pseudo-romantic version of an English Garden of Eden with a few rhapsodic vignettes thrown in for good measure. 54

Careful reading of the opening lines of the novel, however, challenges that view from the outset:

I stood watching the shadowy fish slide through the gloom of the mill pond. They were grey, descendants of the silvery things that had darted away from the monks, in the young days when the valley was lusty. The whole place was gathered in the musing of old age ••• The water lay softly, intensely still. Only the thin stream falling through the millrace murmured to itself of the tumult of the life which had once quickened the valley. (WPl) The life of the Valley has, even at novel's start, already changed; the change was fostered by the industrialism that had spread across Lawrence's Nottingham district even before he was born. This now sluggish life foreshadows many of the key events that take place in the book: George's inability to act in his own behalf once he has set his sights on Lettie, Lettie's choice of the mineowner's son over the farmer's son, the determination of the local squire to preserve the rabbit population even at the cost of the financial ruin of his tenants, the endless series of bad marriages, and the overall sense of decay present at the end of the novel. The landscape had more than begun to change and Lawrence, although he spends little time in the book discussing the mines or machines, is well aware that this is no longer the England of Robin Hood. If this valley is an English Garden of Eden, it is a ruined one. In Women in Love his focus on the industrial ugliness of the mines and machinery will be sharper. He does include 55

in The White Peacock, however, a terrifying description of the outcasts who sleep under Waterloo Bridge in London and who are themselves an illustration of the blight of industrialism:

At night, after the theatre, we saw the outcasts sleep in a rank under Waterloo Bridge, their heads to the wall, their feet lying out on the pavement: a long, black ruffled heap at the foot of the wall. All the faces were covered but two, that of a peaked, pale little man, and that of a brutal woman ••• outside, on a seat in the blackness and the rain, a woman sat sleeping, while the water trickled and hung heavily at the ends of her loosened strands of hair. Her hands were pushed in the bosom of her jacket. She lurched forward in her sleep, started, and one of her hands fell out of her bosom. She sank again to sleep. George gripped my arm. "Give her something," he whispered in panic. I was afraid. (WP321-322)

This is the beginning of Lawrence•s long fight with industrialization and its effects. It is noteworthy that this encounter occurs on the only visit that the rustic pays to the city, and that once George leaves the land he falls into drunkenness which reduces him to a state similar to that of these outcasts.

In Women in Love Lawrence picks up this theme again. There are numerous references in the novel to the ugliness of the land which has been caused directly by its industrial development. Lawrence, however, does not ~nly confine his observations to the mines, miners, and landscape in this novel, he also relates this theme to

Gerald Crich personally. Gerald is the figure in the book 56

who is most identified with industrialism. Lawrence writes:

There were two opposites, his will and the resistant Matter of the Earth. And between these he could establish the very expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. He found his co-ordination into pure, complete infinitely repeated motion, like the spinning of a wheel ••• And this is the God-motion, this productive repetition ad infinitum. And Gerald was the God of the machine, Deus ex Machina. And the whole productive will of man was the Godhead. (WL220) Throughout the novel, Gerald is described as a soldier, an explorer, a Napoleon of industry, but this is not enough to save him. He ends up committing suicide in a place far away from his machines, and even Birkin who loves him, can only finally compare him to a mass of dead maleness, a dead rabbit, or a dead stallion (WL471). The first expression of the tension that Lawrence locates in these two opposites, Gerald's will and the resistant matter of Earth, appears in The White Peacock. The land, once beautiful, is now scarred and altered by industrialism. Just as the gloomy water in the millpond is representative of the quality of life now found in the Valley, so the death of the flower of industrial might, Gerald erich, is representative of Lawrence's ongoing belief in the horrible prospects of industrial life. In Women in Love Gerald's will and his devotion of the machine cause his downfall~ in 57

The White Peacock the shadowy descendants of the once silvery fish in the millpond are half dead, like the life in the Valley, when Cyril first notices them. Lawrence wrote in his unpublished papers: "The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile." 59 It was a theme he was concerned with all his life. Yet another one of Lawrence's major themes that is first introduced in The White Peacock, and then later dealt with at length in Women in Love, is Lawrence's belief in the need to learn to love. In a letter to Blanche Jennings written in 1908, Lawrence states:

Somehow I think that we come into knowledge (unconscious) of the most vital parts of the cosmos through touching things ... such a touch is the connection between the vigorous flow of two lines. Like a positive electricity, a current of creative life runs through two persons, and they are instinct with the same life force - when they gbss on the mouth - when they kiss as lovers do. Later, he would write that "one must learn to love and go through a great deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail. "61 The White Peacock is Lawrence • s first attempt to handle the love and marriage theme that would become so characteristic of his work. Primary for Lawrence is the search for a permanent connection with another human being: the drive to love and be loved is the chief preoccupation of most of his characters. The connections established between the characters in this 58

novel, however, whether between Lettie and George, Lettie

and Leslie, Annable and Lady Crystabel, George and Meg,

Cyril and Emily, Alice and Percival Charles, or even Mrs. Beardsall and her wayward drunken husband, are failures.

Perhaps the only marriage that could be a success, is between Emily, Cyril's old sweetheart, and her ideal

pastoral partner, farmer Tom Renshaw. By the time this marriage takes place, however, the tone of the novel has been set - Cyril is "done with the Valley of Nethermere, "

George, whom many locate as the main character of the novel, is hopelessly lost to drink, and it is evident that

most of the love relationships that have been entered into

in the novel have left something to be desired. Nevertheless, The White Peacock was Lawrence's first experiment with the nature of sexual response and the first

expression of his highly personal views on love. In this novel, he is, unfortunately, often unclear as to what

exactly goes wrong between the lovers. What he later was to insist upon was that there was a mindless connection, an unconscious vitality that emerges between two people who

are akin in spirit, and that this vitality must be

acknowledged, this connection realized and exploited, when

learning to love.

An early encounter between Lettie and George in The

White Peacock perhaps provides a clue as to where they go wrong and how this is tied in with Lawrence's idea that one 59

needs to learn to love:

"You ought to have been a monk - a martyr. A Carthusian." He laughed, taking no notice. He was breathlessly quivering under the new sensation of heavy, unappeased fire in his breast, and in the muscles of his arms. He glanced at her bosom and shivered. "Are you studying just how to play the part?" she asked. "No -but-" he tried to look at her now, but failed. He shrank, laughing, and dropped his head. "What?" she asked with vibrant curiosity. Having become a few degrees calmer, he looked up at her now, his eyes wide and vidid with declaration that made her shrink back as if flame had leaped towards her face. She bent down her head, and picked at her dress ••. (WP28-29) Here the lovers alternate back and forth between wanting to make a declaration of some sort and then not wanting to make it. Lettie taunts George, suggesting that he should have been a monk, into denying that statement, perhaps with a reference to his feelings towards her, and then she retreats from it. George at first takes no notice of her and then physically stimulated first retreats, then, after composing himself, looks at her with intensity. He does not, however, finally make any sort of verbal declaration. The lovers, by failing to acknowledge the unconscious vitality that exists between them, do not connect. Lawrence writes in Studies in Classic American Literature:

The hardest lesson for us to learn is openness. I believe there has never been an age of greater mistrust between persons than ours today under a superficial but quite genuine social trust. Don•t trust anybody with your real emotions: if you•ve got any: that is the 60

slogan of today. Trust them with your money, ever, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them. 6 This is the lesson that Lettie and George never learn. George is never able to tell Lettie how he feels: Lettie is never able to accept her physical attraction to George. Ironically, George does become something of a monk, and Lettie something of a martyr because of their refusal to be open with one another and their refusal to acknowledge the unconscious vitality that exists between them. Stephen Miko believes that scenes like these found in The White

Peacock clearly foreshadow what he calls Lawrence's

11 psychic dramas ... He writes, 11 Several descriptive devices common to that technique are already evident in this interchange: the insistance on the novelty of sensation, the location of sensation in a part of the body, the use of firey and electric metaphors to evoke the quality of the psychic event ... 63

In Women in Love Lawrence reconsiders the problem of needing to learn to love. Birkin and Ursula have a conversation that will ultimately lead to their successful connection. Here Lawrence attempts to highlight the heart of the conflict both for them personally and for modern lovers in general as he has Birkin once again call for openness:

11 I can't say it is love I have to offer - and it isn't love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder - and rarer. There was silence, out of which she said: 11 You mean 61

you don't love me'?" She suffered furiously, saying that. "Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn't true. I don't know. At any rate, I don't feel the emotion of love for you - no, and I don't want to. Because it gives out in the last issues." "Love gives out in the last issues?" she asked, feeling numb to the lips. "Yes it does. At the very last, one is alone, beyond the influence of love. There is a real impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationships. But we want to delude ourselves that love is the root. It isn't. It is only the branches. The root is beyond love, a naked kind of isolation, an isolated me, that does not meet and mingle, and never can. (WL136-137)

Birkin goes on to say that what he wants is something he calls "star-equilibrium." He wants a commitment to openness, a connection, a dance in which both dancers see

each other openly but both dance, not in subserviance nor dominance, but in trust. Later he says to Ursula, "I want

you to give me - to give your spirit to me - that golden light which is you- which you don't know- give it to me

II (WL242). It is this acknowledgment of something unconscious, something sexual yet intangible that Lettie and George can never give each other, and that Gudrun and

Gerald will fight against, each locked in a battle of their respective wills, until ferociously sexually intimate, they destroy each other by their psychic distance and inability to be open with each other and to trust one another. These

"psychic dramas" began in The White Peacock.

The White Peacock was also the first novel in which many of Lawrence's major characters end alone often as a 62

result of failing in love. No wonder Lawrence identified the process of learning to love with the grail quest and with suffering. Few of his characters ever finally learn how to love; most of his characters, therefore, end alone.

In The White Peacock, George, Annable, and Cyril all end alone. George has not been able to learn how to love, Annable has been defeated in love, and Cyril has never really had the opportunity to love. Not connected with anyone or anything, he returns to the Valley for brief unsatisfactory visits after Lettie's and George's fatal marriages. But even before he goes abroad, Cyril is engulfed in sadness and longs for some form of vital connection. On a walk to the Mill, he comes across a lark's nest:

I became conscious of something near my feet, something little and dark, moving indefinitely. I had found again the larkie's nest. I perceived the yellow beaks, the buldging eyelids of two tiny larks, and the blue lines of their wing quills .•. I gently put down my fingers to touch them; they were warm; gratifying to find them warm, in the midst of so much cold and wet. I became curiously absorbed in them, as an eddy of wind stirred the strands of down. When one fledging moved uneasily, shifting his soft ball, I was quite excited; but he nestled down again, with his head closer to his brother's. In my hearts of hearts, I longed for someone to nestle against, someone who would come between me and the coldness and wetness of the surroundings. I envied the two little miracles exposed to any tread, yet so serene. It seemed as if I were always wandering, looking for something which they had found even before the light broke into their shell. I was cold ••. I ran with my heavy clogs and my heart heavy with vague longing. (WP255) 63

As would become characteristic in Lawrence's fiction, here his character identifies warmth and connection with events that occur naturally in the physical world. Apart from others of his own species, cut off because of education, or society, or the inability to be open and to trust, Cyril, as will other of Lawrence's characters, looks to nature as teacher. Only in the physical world can Cyril find this kind of vital, unconscious connection that he both wants and needs. In Women in Love Birkin will say that all he wants is to sit in a wheat field with his love (WL90). Loneliness, however, seems even more potent when these examples from the physical world are happened upon. Men and women, men and men, or women and women do not nestle together easily: Cyril's heart, as was Lawrence's throughout his life, is heavy in this realization, and with the confirmation of his own aloneness. In Women in Love many of the major characters also end alone. Gerald dies in the snow, Gudrun is left unsettled, and even Birkin, who lives at the Mill with Ursula at the end of the novel, is also somewhat alone because of the failure of his relationship with Gerald. Lawrence describes Gerald's death: Lord Jesus, was it the bound to be - Lord Jesus! He could feel the blow descending, he knew he was murdered. Vaguely wandering forward, his hands lifted as if to feel what would happen, he was waiting for the moment when he would stop, when it would cease. It was not over yet ..• (WL465) 64

Then he describes Birkin's reaction to Gerald's death after he has been summoned back from Italy to handle the matter of his funeral:

He turned away. Either the heart would break or cease to care. Best cease to care. Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery. Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe .•• But he went in again, at evening, to look at Gerald between the candles, because of his heart's hunger, suddenly his heart contracted his own candle all but fell from his hand, as, with a strange whimpering cry, the tears broke out. He sat down in a chair, shaken by a sudden access. (WL469-471)

Whether Lawrence's characters seek their own isolation, as

Gerald did, or whether they have it thrust upon them as

Cyril and Birkin do by the failure of the relationships that they are involved in, the fact remains that Lawrence's characters are often left alone with some vague sense of longing. This longing, first appearing in The White Peacock, resurfaces again in Women in Love.

There are other similarities between the two novels that have more to do with form than with content. Lawrence first used elemental symbols in The White Peacock. Ben-Ephraim notes in The Moon's Dominion that the moon is the most central and significant of the elemental symbols 64 that Lawrence uses to d enote 1nner. s t a t es o f b e1ng. . The moon is associated with independent, inviolable female being. The appearance of the moon in the first novel excites Lettie, encourages her independence, and stimulates 65

her into reckless unabandoned action:

Where the sky was pale in the east over the rim of the wood come the forehead of the yellow moon. We stood and watched in silence. Then, as the great disc, nearly full, lifted and looked straight upon us, we were washed off our feet in a vague sea of moonlight. We stood with the light like water on our faces. Lettie was glad, a little bit "exalted." (WP70) Lettie gives herself over to this moonlit force and expresses what Ben-Ephraim calls "superiority and separateness." He explains: Women in Lawrence's fiction are frequently depicted in this mood of cruel independence - a mood often accompanied by the appearance of the moon. This moon-state is associated with a kind of femininity that men can never approach, that never gives reassurance or satisfaction. The moon is oppressive to the men who suffer from it but also victimizes the women who experience it. Thus the Lawrence women often endure a strength-in-isolation nearly as painful as the weakness-i~-disintegration undergone by Lawrence's men. Lettie is affected by the moon in that she gathers strength from it to be and to do what_ she wants rather than what society expects from her. In her proud isolation, however, she also acts rashly, denying her instinctual attraction towards George and almost as an act of rebellion marries

Leslie. It is an empty act~ indeed, rather than acting from a position of strength to better her own advantage, she acts from this position of proud isolation to her psychic disadvantage and ends up actually doing what society would have her do anyway. Another one of Lawrence's women who is affected by the 66

moon is Ursula in Women in Love. Another one of Lawrence's men who is disturbed by this cruel independence that women

seem to find in the moon is Birkin. In the famous moon

scene from Women in Love from which Maud Bodkin in Archetypal Patterns in Poetry says the novel derives much of its archetypic significance, Birkin shatters the

reflection of the moon in the pond. 66 Here the moon, much as it had in The White Peacock, represents this

moon-dimension in women that is hard and separate and

apart. Birkin seeks to bring that part of Ursula's nature, her female ego, under his control so as to release her from

its destructive effects. The energy found in the writing in this scene is hardly equalled throughout the book: And he was not satisfied. Like a madness, he must go on. He got large stones, and threw them, one after the other, at the white-burning center of the moon, till there was nothing but a rockingof hollow noise, and a pond surged up, no moon any more, oinly a few broken flakes tangled and glittering broadcast in the darkness, without aim or meaning, a darkened confusion, like a black and white kaleidoscope tossed at random .•. (WL240) Ursula, of course, is assaulted by this action: Ursula was dazed, her mind was all gone. She felt she had fallen to the ground and was spilled out, like water on the earth. Motionless and spent she remained in the gloom. Though even now she was aware, unseeing, that in the darkness was a little tumult of ebbing flakes of light, a cluster dancing secretly in a round twining and coming steadily together. (WL240)

The moon is Lettie's and Ursula's personal symbol. Both 67

women are associated with the moon in that they both have natures that are, on one hand part virginal like Diana, and on the other hand, part uncontrollable like Cybele, the pagan goddess of the moon who had debilitating powers. Lettie never lets go of her union with the moon and moves towards a more virginal life as the novel progresses. Ursula, by accepting Birkin's challenge to form a new egoless union with him, comes closer to overcoming this moon-madness. In both novels Lawrence also uses symbols of the sun and of water, but it is his use of the moon as the major symbol for his primary female characters in each novel that is particularly striking. Just as Lawrence used elemental symbolism in The White Peacock and in Women in Love, so he also used light and dark imagery in each novel. L. D. Clark considers that Lawrence first developed the basis for the use of much of this imagery in The White Peacock. Explaining Cyril's view of darkness and space Clark writes: For Cyril darkness means the comforting night of his first home and his love of it is simple nostalgia arising from contrast to an overlighted city. But the passage is based on Lawrence's own feeling of exile in London when first away from his dark Midlands and it suggests the inclination behind L~~rence's later affinity for the creative dark.

In The White Peacock Cyril asks: When does the night throw open her vastness for me and send me the stars for company? There is no night in a city. How can I loose myself in the magnificent forest of darkness when night 68

is only a thin scattering of the trees, of shadows with barrenness of lights between ... (WP299)

Clark conlcudes that darkness was cojoined from the

beginning with a certain cognizance of place, with the depth and mystery of the creative force, that was

symbolically represented in the dark reaches of the night.

In Women in Love Lawrence once again uses light and dark imagery. Gerald is often described as possessing a white Nordic light: like the lights in London, it is a

destructive light. When the four principals arrive for a holiday in the snow, it is Ursula who soon complains about

the unnatural white light that the snow places on everything. It follows then, that the most exquisite night in the book is the one spent in the pitch black of Sherwood

Forest by Ursula and Birkin. From this night of creative mystery they emerge forever changed: They looked at each other and laughed, then looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritance of a universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. They hid away the remembrance and the knowledge. (WL313) In both novels, Lawrence metaphorically uses the darkness and its particular space as a nurturing force. Stylistically, both novels resemble each other in a number of ways. Ronald Draper states that the main 68 organizing device of The White Peacock is parallelism. The chapter entitled "The Father" parallels George's decay: 69

Lettie's behavior mirrors that of Lady Cyrstable; the

chapter "Dangling the Apple" has its companion piece in

"The Fascination of the Forbidden Apple"; and Meg, Lettie, and even Emily find ways to reduce their men to servants and assume the righteous Mother-Eve role. The main organizing device of Women in Love is also parallelism. In this novel Lawrence carefully structures the novel around a point and counter-point organization. The novel begins with a discussion concerning the past and present possibilities of marriage and relationships, all of which seem limited. Gudrum sums up the theme of this exchange when she says, "Don't you find that things fail to materialize? Nothing materializes. Everything withers in the bud" (WL2). At the close of the novel, the discussion is still about the possibilities of meaningful relationships, and plenty has withered in the bud - Gerald

is dead, Birkin distraught, Gudrun lost, and Ursula bewildered. Lawrence arranges his chapters much the same way he did in the first novel, alternating between the two relationships, and between "Man to Man," and "Woman to

Woman" which are also titles of individual chapters. Lawrence also uses foreshadowing in both novels. In

The White Peacock its use is obvious: the millpond prepares the reader for the sense of decay present at the end of the novel; George's demise is seen in Cyril's father; Lettie's attitudes toward George and later Leslie 70

are similar to Annable's Lady's ideas~ and to some extent

Meg's superior mother role, what Cyril locates as the

security of "her high maternity" (WP 314), is fore shadowed by Cyril's mother. When Cyril visits the Saxons at the Rams Inn, George confides in Cyril, "Meg never found any

pleasure in me as she does in the kids" (WP31 7), and Cyril looking in on their new set of twins sadly notes:

They lay cheek by cheek in the crib next the large white bed, breathing little, ruffling breaths, out of unison, so small and pathetic with their tiny shut fingers. I remembered the two larks. (WP317) Again, this kind of natural easy connection vividly

underscores what Meg and George, Cyril, and most of the other characters in the book do not have: Cyril's finding of the larkie's nest earlier in the novel foreshadows this.

In Women in Love, Lawrence uses foreshadowing particularly in the chapters entitled "Coal Dust," "Mino," "Rabbit, 11 and

"Water-Party." In 11 Water-Party" Gerald states that he is responsible for the safety of those who either swim or boat on Wiley Water. In this chapter Lawrence presents the possibility that Gerald and Gudrun could possibly achieve a perfect, equally balanced relationship. He writes, " ••• (he was) magically aware of being balanced in separation, in the boat ..• " (WL169). But this magic moment is soon shattered when Gerald goes into the water to save his sister Diana and her boyfriend. He fails, and when they

find the lovers bodies near dawn, Diana's arms are tightly 71

wrapped around the young doctor's neck. Gerald says

simply, "She killed him." It is a statement which

describes the kind of love that murders: a statement that ends all possibilities of Gerald ever achieving an equally

balanced relationship with Gudrun: a statement that

foreshadows his own death. It is evident then that Lawrence's two novels, The

White Peacock and Women in Love are strinkingly similar in

a number of ways that previously might not have been

supposed. They share similar settings, characters, and have the same general organizational plan. Thematically,

they both address many of the same issues, man's need for communion with Nature, the tragedy of industrialism, the

individual's need to learn to love, and the solitary

position one often finds himself in after the failure of

love. Stylistically, Lawrence used elemental symbolism,

light and dark imagery, parallelism, and foreshadowing in

both novels. Both novels give Lawrence the opportunity to demonstrate his remarkable knowledge of the things of the

countryside: both novels end quietly, Cyril looking once

again to France, his friend George now totally lost to him and to life, Rupert mourning the death of Gerald but still

unwilling to give up his belief in another kind of love.

In each novel Lawrence has presented a picture of the society in which the characters live, traced out their attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to become integrated whole 72

people by way of establishing some sort of transforming relationship that will make this wholeness manifest. In each novel what the reader is left with is a large amount of wasted human potential. Lawrence, like his men and women, was a seeker: in each of these novels while what is sought is yet to be found, Lawrence is still looking.

Perhaps this was the only resolution that Lawrence could offer: perhaps, given the uncertainty of modern life, that is the only resolution possible. The White Peacock contains the major preoccupations of Women in Love, Lawrence's masterpiece. Many of the ingredients that were to make his greatest work distinctly

Lawrentian are found in this first novel. Lawrence corrected many of his first novel's weaknesses and turned them into his fifth novel's strengths. He was an artist who learned by doing; a writer of amazing power who was always trying to improve. Much of what he did in The White Peacock, he discarded. But what he kept, he used as a base on which to build Women in Love. This realization makes The White Peacock all the more valuable to those who both read and study Lawrence. ,,

CHAPTER III

Women in Love was written during the period of the

Great War, a period of extreme unhappiness and distress for Lawrence. The novel tells the story of characters who, much like Lawrence himself, search for personal fulfillment amid the crumbling of modern civilization. The novel also presents its readers with a choice: either death-in-life submission to a machinelike existence, this illustrated by the outcome of Gerald and Gudrun's perverse coupling, or a new kind of life, a life of resurrected "being, " this illustrated by the on-going efforts of Birkin and Ursula to form a meaningful relationship. Lawrence's personal correspondence of the time reveals how intensely he felt about this novel, which he called "the book of my free soul": 69

I know it is true, the book. And it is another world, in which I can live apart from the foul world which I will not accept or acknowledge or even enter. The world of my novel is big and fear 1 e s s - f

That he would not accept, acknowledge, or enter into what he perceived as "the foul world" is demonstrated by the fact that the War is never mentioned in the novel, although it hangs like a spectre of destruction over it. In the foreward to the American edition written in 1919, Lawrence explains the reason for this very deliberate omission. He writes: "I wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the War may be taken for granted in the

73 74

characters"(WLviii). He also notes the personal nature of his vision, stating: "this novel pretends to be a record of the writer•s own desires, aspirations, struggles: in a word a record of the profoundest experiences in the self"(WLviii). Then, after underscoring his characteristic struggle for verbal consciousness, Lawrence concludes his foreward with a statement of belief that could serve as a coda for the novel:

We are now in a period of crisis. Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure. Those others, that fix themselves in the old idea, will perish with the new life strangled unborn within them. (WLviii) It was in hopes of finding those people, the people who could bring forth the new passion, that Lawrence wrote.

Lawrence presents a paradox in Women in Love. He seems to insist that people of heightened consciousness, those sensitive people who have a compassion for the things of the natural world, and who accept the idea that one needs to learn to love, both should and do live in a world apart from this "foul" world. Yet the novel itself offers a fiercely realistic rendering of this world, of twentieth-century England. The novel can also justifiably be classified as an experimental novel, stretching as it does what had been the conventional limits of the English novel by including characters cut adrift from the traditional sources of support, new modes of psychological 75

characterization, and examinations of sexual relations,

without dogmatic conclusions. The opposition between another world and this one and the experimental nature of

the book --especially the unusual handling of character-­ create difficulties for the reader that on some occasions mirror the difficulties of the characters. It follows then

that critics have long debated its meaning - some finding the novel apocalyptic and prophetic, others finding it merely self-indulgent and excessive. Indeed, Keith Sager,

in his recent study of Lawrence, records that critics

remain deeply divided over it. 71 Few, however, deny its worth: most --Sager, Miko, Moore, and Draper among them--

find it the fullest expression of Lawrence's genius. As complex and experimental as the novel was, however, Lawrence still achieved meaning through the use of the

established literary conventions of point of view,

characterization, plot, and symbolism: Indeed, Women in Love, more than any of Lawrence's other novels,

demonstrates his skill as a craftsman.

Essential to Lawrence's growth as an artist was his use of a less limiting point of view. To this end he

abandoned first person narration after The White Peacock, using either editorial or selective omniscience as

narrative techniques in most of his subsequent writing. In

Women in Love he objectified his story material first by the elimination of the ''I" witness, then by eliminating 76

both the author and the narrator and ostensibly allowing the story to come directly through the minds of the characters, creating a heavy emphasis on the presentation of scene. This technique allowed Lawrence to be mobile enough to move in and out of his character's consciousness and to establish a fixed center from which he could comment on the ongoing action at some distance. This expanded the possibilities of the story by removing the restrictions of a protagonist-narrator who could only summarize or present directly what he has witnessed. For example, at the railroad crossing, after Gerald erich has beat his mare into submission in front of Ursula and Gudrun, Gudrun runs to open the gate. Lawrence writes:

The gatekeeper stood ready at the door of his hut, to proceed to open the gate. But Gudrun sprang suddenly forward, in front of the struggling horse, threw off the latch and flung the gates asunder, throwing one-half to the keeper, and running with the other half forwards. Gerald suddenly let go the horse and leaped forwards, almost on to Gudrun. She was not afraid. As he jerked aside the mare's head, Gudrun cried, in a strange, high voice, like a gull, or like a witch screaming out from the side of the road: "I should think you're proud."(WL105)

Here comment comes through characters: internally through the mind of Gudrun and externally through her action and speech. The vitality of the scene resuls in large part from Gudrun's witnessing of it and her reaction to it. She is, in fact, the one character most qualified to transmit the story materials to the reader. The most immediate 77

result of this change in point of view is that the affectation that accompanied a character like Cyril Beardsall's narration is gone. The persona of the narrator has disappeared - and with it other problems, the narrator commenting on things he could not have possibly known, and the narrator making himself the center of attention - replaced by a central intelligence that works from multiple viewpoints. So Gudrun offers the absent narrator and author's point of view in this scene contributing to the action and allowing Lawrence not only to tell but to show how he feels about Gerald's brutality.

Another way in which Lawrence expanded the possibilities of his story by using a more flexible point of view, is seen in his presentation of the unconscious.

In Women in Love Lawrence attempts to reveal a created world of values and attitudes. Realizing that he could no longer rely on the general background of belief that had united the novelist with his public in Victorian times, Lawrence had to find a way of presenting this created world. He did this by showing his characters in the midst of confusion, stripped of the traditional supports, searching for their own systems of belief. As a way of articulating this confusion, he dramatized mental states.

Here his purpose and his technique coincided: indeed, a benefit of selective omniscience is that it allows the writer to present a character's unconscious motivations and ' ' 78

thoughts while exploring the possible reasons for his emotional responses. Lawrence does this when he records how Birkin feels towards Ursula. Of course, Birkin's feelings, which are often said to mirror Lawrence's, are expressed unconventionally: But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. This marriage with her was his resurrection and his life.(WL361) Although Birkin is the one character in the novel who could come the closest to verbalizing these kinds of feelings, of marriage as resurrection, of himself as a product of historical process, Lawrence here chooses not to have him do so. By presenting, without comment, feelings the

character himself may be unaware of, the author, by not judging or apologizing for his character, lets the story speak for itself. The effect is that the novel's created world of values and attitudes is compellingly rendered.

Use of the restrictive first-person narrator in The White Peacock precluded Lawrence from going into George Saxon's

unconscious mind to show why the loss of Lettie is as devastating as it is. All he could do was have George explain, in a conversation to Cyril, 11 You have to build on 79

something and I built on Lettie"(WP274). It is a statement that adds little to either the created world of the novel or to the understanding of George's personality. By using selective omniscience in Women in Love, however, Lawrence used another channel of information to convey the story to the reader: in doing this, he also explored the unconscious parts of the human personality as they had never been explored before in the novel.

Yet another advantage of the point of view that Lawrence adopted in this novel was that it allowed him to go into the consciousness of individual characters while they were actually formulating their thoughts. In a conversation between Gudrun and Ursula, a conversation during which the characters would have been left in a narrational vacuum if one of them had been the first person narrator, the sisters say goodbye while discussing love one last time: Ursula was silent, trying to imagine. "I think," she said at length, involuntarily, "that Rupert is right - one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old." Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes. "One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree," she said. "But I think that a new world is a development from this world, and that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn't to find a new world at all, but only to secure oneself in one's illusions." Ursula looked out the window. In her soul she began to wrestler and she was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere word-force could always make her 80

believe what she did not believe.(WL429)

Ursula returns to the argument and gains confidence throughout the remainder of the conversation; Gudrun,

unable to deter her, finally sarcastically comments, "Go

and find your new world, dear ••• After all, the happiest

voyage is the quest of Rupert • s Blessed Isles" (WL430), and the sisters separate. By using a narrative technique that

allowed him to present thoughts and feelings as they occurred consecutively, Lawrence was able to observe that most private of things, a character's thought process.

The point of view that Lawrence utilized in Women in Love, then, strengthened his writing. For the most part, he was able in Women in Love to show rather than to tell his story. Because selective omniscience focuses on the presentation of scene, allows the writer to dramatize mental states, and gives the distanced narrator access to character's thought processes, the story of Women in Love is rendered with more intensity and vividness than is that of The White Peacock. The fixed center in Women in Love, more than discoursing with authority, generally serves as a point of reference. In fact, when a problem arises in the

narration of the novel, it does so because the author

intrudes on this fixed center. Then Lawrence, assuming a preacher stance, comments, sometimes at length, on the decay of civilization, the ascendency of the machine, the

"African process," or the new theories of modern art. An 81

example of this occurs in a concluding scene when Birkin goes over the snow slopes to see where Gerald died. Lawrence writes: He turned away. Either the heart would break or cease to care. Best cease to care. Whatever the mystery which has brought forth man and the universe, it is a non-human mystery, it has its own great ends, is not the criterion. Best leave it all to the vast creative, non-human mystery. Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.(WL470) Here Lawrence uses the opportunity of Birkin's grief to digress on the great non-human mystery, give us a basic lesson in Lawrencian philosophy, and expand his story beyond its immediate relationship to his four major characters. Both Mark Scherer and Diana Trilling, as

Norman Friedman documents in his article "Point of View in Fiction," fault Lawrence with not objectifying his material 72 ln. lnstances . 1.l k e th.ls. All three critics find the reason for this in Lawrence's inability to overcome consistenly an authorial identification with the protagonist. Although Scherer and Trilling both focus on the problem as it is present in Sons and Lovers, it is also present in Women in Love to a much lesser degree. In this novel, however, Lawrence's identification with Rupert

Birkin is less obvious than is his identification with Paul

Morel in the earlier book: Birkin is the Lawrence-like figure in the novel: Paul Morel is a recasting of Lawrence as a young man. Nonetheless, whatever the problems were 82

that Lawrence had with point of view in Women in Love, its narration is skillfully handled. His use of multiple selective omniscience in place of the "I" witness narrative frame of The White Peacock facilitates rather than impedes meaning.

Another example of Lawrence's growth as an artist is found in his handling of characterization. In Lawrence's first novel characterization is one of the novel's major weaknesses; in Women in Love it is one of the novel's major strengths. In a now famous letter to David Garrett, written while he was working on the novel, Lawrence states: You mustn't look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, which needs a de;ger sense than any we've been used to exercise. It was that other ego that he sought to introduce into the novel. Using terms like "consciousness," "patterns of suggestiveness," "unconscious motivation," and "intangibility," Lawrence's primary purpose was to probe deeply into a character's personality where the characters themselves did not know that they lived. He wants his reader to be aware that he is doing something new in the English novel. To this end, he deliberately constructs sentences like, "It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. She heard his words in her unconscious self, consciously (Lawrence even 83

italicizes) she was as if deafened, she paid no heed to them" (WL13 0). The question as to where Lawrence picked up all this --from Freud by way of Frieda and Otto Gross-- is certainly speculative. Lawrence never gave credit to Freud, and often bitterly opposed his theories. The question that is relevant to the text, however, is not one of origin, but rather one of application: Are the characters in Women in Love believable as reasonable representations of real people, or did Lawrence in relying too heavily on emerging psychoanalytic theories produce only fragmented, under-developed characters?

A brief look at these characters enables us to answer this question in the negative. Gerald erich is the most vividly drawn of the novel's four major characters. Like Leslie Tempest in The White Peacock, he is the son of a mine owner who quickly falls into the service of the capitalist ethic. Unlike Leslie Tempest, however, who remains only a shadowy figure in the background of the main action, Gerald erich is the vehicle Lawrence uses to raise all the important questions of the novel. He is a character who has the capacity, possessing as he does definable character traits and acting and reacting as he does in a consistent manner, to convince the reader of his believability. From the beginning of the novel, he is a proud and willful man: someone set apart because of wealth and position and because of a rather horrible incident, his 84

shooting of his brother, that occurred when he was a child. But his course is not totally pre-ordained. Like all of Lawrence's characters, he is a searcher who suffers internal torment from external circumstances. In Gerald's case, however, his search is limited because of his insistence on the dominance of his will. In the chapter entitled "The Industrial Magnate, " Lawrence explains Gerald's motivation:

And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits of victory were mere results ..• He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive machine.(WL217-219} Throughout the novel Gerald will act from this standpoint.

As his father's health fails, he takes over the mines, reorganizes them, and builds them into extremely efficient mechanisms, often at heavy cost to the humans involved. Because of his desire to exercise his personal will, he turns away from the nurturing experiences in life, (i.e.,

Birkin's offer of Blutbruderschaft} and turns towards the more horrible experiences in life, (i.e., Gudrun' s challenge that results in a violent love-hate relationship}. Throughout the novel, Gerald reacts in an appropriate, if at times harsh, manner. After his liaison with Minette, he wants to give her money to "close the account" (WL89}: after his father's death, he does not discourse on his "wild pity" as does Cyril Beardsall, but 85

seeks forgetfulness in Gudrun's bed. In his parting conversation with Birkin, explaining why he will stay with Gudrun to the destructive end, he is still the industrial magnate who sacrifices the human factor for power: "No. There • s something final about this. And Gudrun seems like the end to me. I don't know - but she seems so soft, her skin like silk, her arms heavy and soft. And it withers my consciousness, somehow, it burns the pith of my mind." .•• "It blasts your soul's eye," he said, "and leaves you sightless. Yet you want to be sightless, you want to be blasted, you don't want it any different." (WL431) It can never be different for Gerald because he is a proud and willful man who refuses to compromise what he sees as his position of personal power. Birkin reminds him that he has loved him as well, to which Gerald replies, "Have you? .•• or do you think you have(WL431)?" Lawrence comments, "He was hardly responsible for what he said" (WL431}. But the real strength in Lawrence's depiction of Gerald's character comes from the fact that indeed Lawrence wants the reader to feel that Gerald is responsible. Lawrence creates many opportunities for Gerald to choose a life apart from the death-in-life submission he seems fated for. But instead Gerald ignores these opportunities: beats his mare at the crossing, stops the widow's coal, turns away from the warm hand of friendship, equates sex with death, assaults nature, and co~mits suicide. All of these are either acts of cruelty or brutality or acts of 86

insensitivity that once again ignore the human factor. Each of these choices on Gerald's part represents a wrong choice in that it insists on the dominance of the personal will and denies the possibility for the more humane attributes of compassion, compromise, and self-love. In many ways Women in Love is really the story of Gerald erich's wrong choices. Although he is the flower of his civilization, a beautiful, intelligent, priveleged man, he sacrifices the vestiges of his humanness for power. To underscore this point of Gerald's responsibility, Lawrence has Birkin note the survival rope near Gerald's actual deathplace: Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to the crest. He might have heard the dogs in the Marienhutte, and found shelter. He might have gone down the steep, steep fall of the south side, down into the dark valley with its pines, on the great Imperial road leading south to Italy.(WL469) Again, as Birkin views Gerald's body back at the Inn, Lawrence puts the matter of choice before the reader: It had a bluish cast. It sent a shaft like ice through the heart of living man. Cold, mute, material. Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand with a warm, momentaneous grip of final love. For one second - then let go again, let go forever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered. Those who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved. Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after death. He might have lived with his friend, a further life.(WL471)

In The White Peacock Lawrence did not take the care with 87

George Saxon's character that he later took with Gerald erich's. The reasons for George's demise, therefore, are never quite understood, and Cyril, while he feels a vague suffering because of his friend's decline, is capable of little more. In Women in Love the reasons for Gerald erich's death are well documented. His continual insistence on the dominance of his personal will and his continual pursuit of power rather than fidelity mark his course. At the end of the novel, in fact, Gerald is rightly labled "the denier"(WL472). The fineness of Lawrence's characterization of Gerald lies in Gerald's definable character traits and in his consistent action.

He emerges a believable, if tragic, figure. It necessarily follows then that Birkin's reaction to Gerald's death is stronger than is Cyril's reaction to George's deterioration. Indeed, the intense grief expressed at the end of the novel is Birkin's. It is a grief so overpowering that one suspects that Lawrence could have just as easily titled his novel Men in Love. Lawrence was equally successful with other characters in the novel: Gudrun, the hardened, cynical modern woman who must impose her will; Loerke, the industrial sculptor who embraces the distinctly anti-Lawrentian view that man must serve Art: Hermione, the wealth intellectual dilettante who insists on the elevation of the mental life over the physical: and Ursula, the intelligent, 88

compassionate modern woman who struggles for selfhood and who, because she is capable of compromise and capable of integrating both the physical and the mental aspects of life, grows. Lawrence was also successful with the least predictable character in the book, Rupert Birkin. As Lawrence's primary spokesman, Birkin questions what it is to be human, suffers severe mood swings, often vacillating between caring and not caring both for individuals and for life in general, and engages in a paradoxical intellectual search for a mindless self. He often cries out passionately against humanity: "I detest what I am outwardly. I loathe myself as a human being. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth and humanity is a tree of lies." (WL119) There is more here than mere misanthrope. Birkin is trying to make a point when he sets up the individual against the masses: he is calling for self-responsibility. Often times Birkin appears to relish life, yet at other times Lawrence writes: He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times to take one's chance with death than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to persist and persist and persist forever, till one were satisfied in life ••. (WL192) 89

He is, of course, the one character in the book who does persist and persist; always testing the limits of convention, always trying to find a new and better way.

There are times, however, when even Ursula, his partner in the book's on-going dialectic, sarcastically refers to him as a "Salvadore Mundi," a negative version of a world savior, because of his relentless pursuit. In an exchange between the two lovers, Ursula also privately expressed her reservations:

"What I want is a strange conjunction with you-" he said quietly - "not meeting and mingling; you are quite right: but an equilibrium, a pure balance to two single beings: as the stars balance each other." She looked at him. He was very earnest, and earnestness was always rather ridiculous, commonplace to her. It made her feel unfree and uncomfortable. Yet she liked him so much. But why drag in the stars.(WL139)

More than any other character in the novel, Birkin attempts to verbalize his feelings. Yet, he is often replete with indecision; Lawrence, aware of this, had other characters, frequently Ursula, comment on his often seemingly foolish earnestness or on his changing point of view. Compared to

Gerald, who is so anchored with family, social position, and financial standing, Birking seems incomplete. He has no extensive background. All we know about him is that he is a school inspector, that he has friends in London, and that he lives at the Mill. He has no obvious character traits other than the fact that he is an intellectual who 90

always seems to be either questionning something or to be angry at something. This, however, is not because of

Lawrence's inability to handle characterization. On the contrary, Birkin's indecision and freedom from a structured

past is purposeful and necessary. If one of Lawrence's main objectives was to transcend the limits of social

realism in the novel by inventing new modes of characterization, then it follows that a character in search of self-hood, as Birkin is, would have indecisive,

unpredictable psychological patterns. Murray M. Schwartz in his article "D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis" explains: The Laurentian "I" I discern is a restless man, a man who is "between" but who yearns to be at an extreme of existence to metamorphose like the Phoenix. But every metamorphosis becomes another return to the pattern of his life, and every return leads to ~is desire to inform or be informed by another. 7 So it is with Birkin. He is a character "in between," a character who constantly struggles both with his own self concept and with his need to verbalize this struggle. He is a character who, after every change, is referred back both to the pattern of his own life and to those people, Ursula and Gerald, who are important to him. Lawrence appears less sure with Birkin's character because Birkin is

less sure about himself. Indeed, Lawrence's characterization of Birkin is a master stroke. Once again, as was the case in his choice of a less rigid narrative 91

stance, Lawrence's use of emerging psychological theories of personality improved his writing by enhancing rather than obscuring meaning. Lawrence's first novel suffers from the absence of a clear structure. Women in Love has no such problem. Lawrence carefully developed his plot, constructed a storyline that was evident, and incorporated the tensions,

variations, and repetitions that he found in his story into his structure. The basic device of the novel, as Ronald

D raper s t ates, 1s. compar1son. and contrast. 75 Lawrence 1s. interested in the comparisons and contrasts that exist between men and women, men and men, women and women, the natural and the mechanistic worlds, the social and the

psychological self, sexual and economic dominance, anti-thesis and synthesis. To explore these, he structures his novel around the idea of point and counterpoint. The opening chapter establishes an affinity between the two sisters. They engage in one of the many discussions concerning love and marriage that run through the novel. Basically, with the addition of Hermoine at selected times, they present the woman's point of view. This affinity that they share goes beyond mere blood relation as the sisters are also fast friends. The second chapter of the novel establishes an affinity between Birkin and Gerald. They also have a discussion, again one of many that they will engage in throughout the course of the novel, about 92

individuality and spontanaity. More or less they establish

the man's point of view. Their affinity, while not a blood

relation (although Birkin would have them be blood brothers) is as strong and fast as that of the two sisters. Only at the end of the novel, when Gudrun has allied herself with Loerke and Gerald has condemned himself to

sure death, will the relationship between the two sets of friends dissolve. Because it is Lawrence's intention to trace the development and outcome of the two separate relationships,

and allow for the possibility of a third that results from the corning together of these four characters, he found it

useful to construct his chapters in a parallel manner. The

chapters "Man to Man," "Woman to Wornan, 11 "Death and Love, .. and "Marriage or Not," all mirror one another. If Lawrence presents one view of things, he counters with the opposing view. Even specific occurances --Hermione's attack on Birkin, and Gerald's attempt to kill Gudrun, Gerald's tormenting of the mare and Gudrun's tormenting of the cattle, the finding of the bodies of the dead lovers and Gerald's death in the snow, Rupert's lectures on catkins and the manner in which to eat a fig and Ursula's gift of wild flowers, Herrnoine's esoteric dance and Loerke's theories on art-- to name but a few, parallel each other.

Again and again, conversations and scenes are repeated.

The effect of this kind of juxtaposition is that a rhythmic 93

structure is created: the novel is like a fine tapestry carefully woven together with every conversation, every scene, every detail, every character contributing to the development of its major theme. It would be hard to

exclude anything from Women in Love; from The White Peacock, where development is uneven and extraneous material is included, large cuts could be made that would hardly effect the outcome.

The story line of Women in Love is obvious. Lawrence begins with a plan in mind to show the disastrous outcome of a relationship based on the imposition of the will, and all his efforts point to those culminating events in the Alpine snow. Gerald's death, more than any other event in the novel, unifies the book. From Gudrun's early comment that "nothing materializes; Everything withers in the bud" (WL2), we are prepared for Gerald's death. What has

withered in the bud is Gerald erich, the flower of our industrial society. Again, as was the case in The White Peacock, Lawrence presents a story whose outcome points to large amounts of wasted human potential. This time, however, plot contributes to rather than detracts from meaning. The progression towards the novel's end is sure, if deadly: Lawrence's use of parallel chapters, point and

counterpoint, and corresponding incidents, leads the reader to a place very different from that of the reader of The

White Peacock. At the end of The White Peacock, we are not 94

sure why all the relationships studied in the novel fail; nor are we sure we understand why George declines as he does and why Cyril goes back and forth between France and the Valley. In Women in Love we know that both Gerald's and Gudrun's insistence on the imposition of their personal wills have led to a dead-end; we also know that while Birkin and Ursula may not have found all the answers, their relationship, built as it is on communication and compromise, will continue on. Yet another example of Lawrence's mastery of the novel form can be seen in his use of symbolism. The symbolism of The White Peacock is mostly forced and at times almost exclusively mental; the symbolism of Women in Love is arresting and vividly embellishes the meaning of the novel. Lawrence included so many scenes of what Ronald Draper refers to as "great scenes of untranslatable symbolic power" 76 that at times the reader feels consumed by images. In chapter after chapter, Lawrence's symbolism delineates the novel's two contrasting love affairs. Three major encounters, for example, serve to convey symbolically the quality of the relationship shared by Gerald and Gudrun. In the "Water-Party" chapter of the novel, Gudrun dances before a herd of Gerald's Highland cattle, finally putting them into flight. Gudrun's dance for domination clearly symbolizes her reaction to Gerald. Lawrence writes: Then in a sudden motion, she lifted her arms 95

and rushed sheer upon the long-horned bullocks •.. Gudrun remained staring after them, with a mask-like defiant face. "Why do you want to drive them mad?" asked Gerald coming up with her. She took no notice of him, only averted her face from him.(WL161)

And so it will continue throughout their relationship. Each will seek to drive the other mad and each will take no

notice of the other once locked in this combat. Gudrun strikes Gerald lightly in this scene to which he remarks,

"You have struck the first blow," and she replies, "And I shall strike the last"(WL162). Ironically, Gerald declares his love for her at the end of this scene to which she again counters, "that • s one way of putting it" (WL163). At the end of the chapter, after the dead lovers• bodies are found, Gerald remarks, "she killed him," but misses the

symbolic significance of that statement.

In "Rabbit" a scratch from a frenzied rabbit further establishes the bond between Gerald and Gudrun. George Beacker identifies this as, "a blood brotherhood that verifies their psychic bond and in advance defeats the possibility of blood brotherhood that Birkin seeks." 77

Beyond that, it also initiates them both into some kind of obscene mystery:

There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate. This thwarted her, and contravened her, for the moment. "God be praised we aren • t rabbits," she said, in a high, shrill voice. The smile intensified a little, on his face. 96

"Not rabbits?" he said, looking at her fixedly. Slowly her face relaxed into a smile of obscene recognition. "Ah Gerald," she said, in a strong, slow almost manlike way." -All that, and more." Her eyes looked up at him with shocking nonchalance. He felt again as if she had hit him across the face - or rather, as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally. He turned aside. "Eat, eat my darling!" Winifred was softly conjuring the rabbit, and creeping forward to touch it. It hobbled away from her. "Let its mother stroke its fur then, darling, because it is so mysterious -."(WL235-36)

This mystery, Ronald Draper confirms, is a kind of

"sophisticated sadism, ironically tinged by the childish imitation of maternal affection with which Gerald's little sister, Winifred, treats the rabbit." 78

In a third critical encounter, Gerald comes to

Gudrun's house after his father's funeral to make love for the first time. Now that Lawrence has established the perversity of their relationship, he wants to underscore the link that it shares with death and the death-in-life process. When Gudrun asks Gerald, dirty with mud from his father's grave, why he has come to her, he can only answer,

"Because it has to be so. If there weren't you in the world, then I shouldn't be in the world either" (WL336).

This will be the only type of reciprocity they will share.

Far from being an encounter between ideal lovers, their sexual union seems like one more between mother and child.

This direct link with death and the abdication of any 97

manner of choice of either of the two participants prepare the way for Gudrun to snarl at Gerald, in "Snowed Up," "I had to take pity on you. But it was never love"(WL433). By establishing Gudrun's quest for dominance, both lover's sadism, and Gerald's unfortunate linking of sex and death, Lawrence tells their story symbolically with unbelievable intensity. In truth the entire novel is a study in symbolism.

The symbolic content of The White Peacock, Annable's story of Lady Crystable, George's destruction of the bee's wings, Cyril's flight to France, for example, interfere with the clarity of the novel. But the symbolic content of Women in Love has the opposite effect in that it clarifies the meaning of the novel. Like Gerald and Gudrun's relationship, Ursula and Birkin's relationship can also be delineated by symbolism: Birkin's stoning of the moon, the couple's argument in "Excurse," their high-tea at the Sacracen's Head, their night in Sherwood Forest, their flight from the stark white coldness of the Alps to the warmth of Italy. Similarly, the supporting characters are also delineated symbolically: Hermoine by her "Greek ballet," Loerke by the beating of the young art student who served as a model for the statuette over which Ursula and

Loerke discuss art. Lawrence overcame the difficulties he had with faulty symbolism in his first novel by allowing the symbols in Women in Love to grow from his story rather 98

than building his story around artificially constructed symbols: this, perhaps more than anything else, marks the maturing of his style. It follows then that if the structure of the novel is tightly defined and the symbolism of the novel is vivid, that the larger meaning of Women in Love is much clearer than is that of The White Peacock. So rich is the novel, so personal is the vision, however, that its meaning continues to be debated in critical writing even today. Yet, the general meaning of the novel can safely be said to center on three primary points: the consideration of marriage as a transcending relationship, the need to redefine the meaning of modern life, and the possibility of another kind of love. Three representative conversations put these concerns directly before the reader. The book actually begins with a series of questions concerning marriage:

"Ursula, " said Gudrun, "don • t you really want to get married?" "I don't know," she replied. "It depends how you mean .•• " "You don't think one needs the experience of having been married?" she asked. "Do you think it need be an experience?" replied Ursula. -- "Bound to be, in some way or other, " said Gudrun, cooly. "Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort." "Not really," said Ursula. "More likely to be the end of expereince."(WLl)

The discussion continues through the novel. Lawrence, as he had in previous works, searches for a transforming 99

relationship that can provide a means of escape from what he saw as a tortured and brutal world. In Women in Love as

in The White Peacock, most of the realtionships he examines are failures. He seems to say in this novel, however, that openness, trust, and compromise, the attributes of Ursula and Birkin's relationship, are far more desirable than the willfulness, power, and violence, the characteristics of Gerald and Gudrun's relationship. Actually, Ursula, who originally expressed the belief that marriage most likely would be the end of experience, enters into a marriage that seems destined to be the beginning of experience; Gudrun, who originally wanted the "experience" of marriage, ends up in a relationship that finishes with physical and spiritual death. Lawrence's meaning here is clear: only Ursula's and Birkin's marriage has a chance of success; Gudrun and

Gerald's relationship remains a further example of the failure to connect.

In a second characteristic conversation from the novel, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich discuss the meaning of life:

..... Wherein does life centre, for you? 11 11 I don't know- that's what I want somebody to tell me. As far as I can make out, it doesn't centre at all. It is artificially held together by the social mechanism ... Birkin pondered as if he would crack something. 11 I know," he said, 11 it just doesn't centre. The old ideals are dead as nails - nothing there. It seems tome there remains only this perfect union with a woman - sort of ultimate 100

marriage- and there isn't anything else." "And you mean if there isn't the woman, there's nothing?" said Gerald. "Pretty well that - seeing there's no God." (WL51) This discussion continues throughout the book. Rupert will amend his position to allow for another kind of love;

Gerald will constrict his position by refusing to question the meaning of life and insist only on the imposition of his personal will. At times Birkin will express his hate for humanity but his love for the individual man; at times

Gerald will express his love for humanity but his hate for the individual man. Like the major female characters in the book, both men will search for answers to questions that Lawrence felt needed to be considered in order to live a meaningful life. Birkin, by not demanding firm, conventional answers to these questions, will open himself up to the idea of a new passion and the possibility of a life of "resurrected being"; Gerald, by insisting of absolute, traditional answers to these questions, will fix himself in the old idea and will "perish with the new life strangled unborn" within him. Ursula and Birkin have one last conversation back at the Mill after the concluding events on the Continent that also contributes largely to an understanding of the general meaning of the novel. Once again, Lawrence puts Birkin's idea of the possibility of another kind of love before the reader. He concludes his novel with Ursula saying: 101

"You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you." "It seems as if I can't," he said. "Yet I wanted it." "You can't have it, because it's false, impossible," she said. "I don't believe that," he answered.(WL473) More than a mere summing up of the events that have taken place in the novel, more than simply a way out of the novel, this last conversation, by ending the novel with questions still left unanswered and with answers still being sought, makes one of Lawrence's major points. The other kind of love that Birkin has been denied because of Gerald's death remains desirable if not readily attainable; as the novel opens with questions that seem impossible to answer, so it ends quietly without demanding firm answers.

Interestingly, both The White Peacock and Women in Love end in this quiet manner. Indeed, this kind of ending is characteristic of Lawrence's work. Richard Aldington comments:

He abhorred any kind of 'formula writing' and his faults are due mostly to this passionate determination to be true to life as he experienced it. For the same reason his books usually end quietly, almost indeterminately - for the slick or drama;~c ending must nearly always be false to life. But the ending conversation of Women in Love is an integral part of the novel, whereas the ending of The White Peacock, in which George sits apart from the other men and Cyril makes the final division between the two of them, is not.

In truth, what we know by the end of Women in Love, that 102

there are no longer hard and absolute answers, is

reaffirmed by this ending. Lawrence uses his novel as a medium, a tool for instruction: his lesson is simple,

those who continue to insist on stringent systems, who resist the ebb and flow of life, who demand firm answers, who restrict their vision to include only what is conventionally accepted by the social mechanism, are doomed.

Women in Love is Lawrence•s masterpiece: it is

Lawrence at his artistic best. He had, because of his continuing problems with censorship, little hope of publishing the novel. Yet, he wrote it anyway, explaining in a letter to a friend:

But a work of art is an act of faith, as Michael Angelo says, §8d one goes on writing to the unseen witnesses.

Lawrence•s premonition was correct: it took him four years to get the novel published. The critical problems that one encounters in The White Peacock are not present in Women in

Love. Lawrence masterfully crafted his point of view, characterization, structure, and symbolism in the later novel. That the novel still holds the interest it does today is a tribute to the genius of its creator. Lawrence once said that great books escape their date, 11 that no one has ever settled Lear•s business, or Ivan Karamazov•s business, or the business of the white whale ... 81 So it is with Women in Love. Pretending only to be 11 the profoundest experiences in the self, 11 it too has escaped its date. CONCLUSION

Lawrence had a continuing interest in the novel as an

artistic form throughout his literary career. He was proud

to call himself a novelist and marked the novel as "the one 82 bright book of life." What emerges from this comparative

study of two of his novels is his reverence for and compassion with the things of the natural world, his

on-going commitment to study human relationships, and his willingness to experiment within the form of the novel.

The events that came between the writing of The White

Peacock and Women in Love --the death of his mother, his marriage to Frieda, the commencement of hostilities of

World War I-- affected him monumentally. His experience with life broadened, his vision intensified, and his writing improved. His basic concerns, concerns he had voiced in The White Peacock, however, remained intact. He still found communion with nature, whether he was writing about Cyril's finding of the larkie's nest or Birkin's sitting among the primroses. He still found horrors in the spread of industrialism, whether he was writing about the murky water in the pond in the Nethermere Valley, or the scars left by "C, B. & co.'s" colliery railway. He still found worth in human relationships, whether he was writing about the warm friendship between George and Cyril, or in

Rupert's attempt to establish a blood-brotherhood between himself and Gerald. On the other hand, he still found

103 104

destructive consequences in other relationships, whether he

was writing about Lettie and George's thwarted love affair,

or about Gudrun and Gerald's realized one. In his writing

he continued to find his symbols and his imagery from the

natural elements, including his considerable knowledge of

the things of the countryside. He continued to insist on a

new kind of resolution to make creative use of the large

amounts of wasted human potential that he detailed in his

fiction. He continued to believe that a man and a woman

could choose a life of integrated being if they would only

acknowledge the often unexplainable vitality that exists

between them and throw off the shackles of sexual

repression and conventional morals. Above all, in each of

the novels, he continued to struggle with his own personal

need for the verbal expression of his ideas.

Henry Miller in The World of D. H. Lawrence speaks of

the phrase that he encounters most often in Lawrence's writing: "what I am trying to do." He feels that this

phrase is reminiscent of Cezanne, who was always trying to realize something in his art. This struggle, Miller sees,

as the very act of creation itself. Miller writes of

Lawrence:

But all the time he was trying, trying harder almost than any other man you can think of, and if he failed to realize all that he was attempting, he nevertheless succeeded in trying, and that seems tg me to be the most important thing about him. 3 105

Indeed, whether one experiences Lawrence in The White

Peacock, his first and often imperfect novel, or in Women in Love, the novel in which he reached his zenith, one cannot fail to be impressed by this endless striving for artistic expression. The time spent in studying either of these two novels, and in studying them in concert, is well spent. In both novels, even the first, we have a clear picture of that man who sees the trees stand up and look at the daylight, and who watches the flower chuckle off into seed: the artistic genius. ENDNOTES

1. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry Moore (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1962), p. 829.

2. Richard Adlington, "Introduction", The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 7.

3. Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 5.

4. Collected Letters, p. 233.

5. Stephen Mike, Toward Women in Love (New York: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 2.

6. D. H. Lawrence, "Preface", A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence by Edward D. McDonald (Philedelphia: Centaur Book Shop, 1925), p. 13.

7. D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literar Anthony Beal (New York: The V1king Press,

8. Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genies, But ••• (New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), p. 110.

9. Helen Corke, D. H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. SO.

10. Ronald Draper, D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage (New York: Burns, Noble, Inc., 1970), pp. 42-43.

11. Draper, pp. 40-41.

12. Draper, p. 38.

13. Draper, pp. 36-37.

14. Draper, pp. 34-35.

15. Ronald Draper, D. H. Lawrence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), p. 33.

16. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 31.

17. D. H. Lawrence, The White Peacock (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 153. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in text as (NP).

106 107

18. E. T. (Jessie Chambers), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), p. 103.

19. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (New Jersey: Roman and Littlefield, 1979), p. 13.

20. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 31.

21. Christopher Brown, "As Cyril Likes It: Pastoral Reality and Illusion in The White Peacock", Essays in Literature, Vol. 6N2 (Fall, 1979), p. 188.

22. Brown, p. 192.

23. Brown, p. 192.

24. Gavriel Ben-Ephraim, The Moon's Dominion (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickson University Press, 1981), p. 31.

25. Miko, p. 13

26. Ben-Ephraim, p. 32.

27. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 32.

28. Worthen, p. 12.

29. Ben-Ephraim, p. 47.

30. Marguerite Howe, The Art of Self in D. H. Lawrence (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 5.

31. Ben-Ephraim, p. 50.

32. Ben-Ephraim, p. 33.

33. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 32.

34. Ben-Ephraim, p. 46.

35. Worthen, p. 12.

36. Aldington, p. 111.

37. Keith Alldritt, The Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence (London: Edward Arnold, 1971), p. 13.

38. Worthen, p. 11.

39. Miko, p. 23. 108

40. Ben-Ephraim, p. 51.

41. Beal, p. 158.

42. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 33.

43. Ben-Ephraim, p. 48.

44. Harry T. Moore, D. H. Lawrence: His Life and Works (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964), p. 38.

45. Worthen, p. 7.

46. Originally Lawrence had envisioned Women in Love as part of a larger work entitled The Sisters. This book, however, became too large and he dl.Vl.ded J.t 1nto two novels; The Rainbow and Women in Love.

47. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Viking Press, 1960), p. viii. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in text as (WL).

48. Draper, D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, p. 27.

49. Charles L. Ross, "Homo-erotic Feeling in Women in Love" in Robert Partlow and Harry Moore, eds., D. H. LaWrence: The Man Lived, Papers Delivered at the D. H. Lawrence Conference, April 1979 (Carbondale: Southern University Press, 1981), p. 169.

50. By the writing of his last novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence included both objectionable diction and objectionable subject matter when he attempted to give detailed consideration to female sexual response. The censorship battle that raged over this novel continued long after his death.

51. D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 25.

52. D. H. Lawrence, "Nottingham and the Mining Counyryside," as found in The Portable D. H. Lawrence, ed. Diana Trilling (New York: Viking Press, 1960), p. 613.

53. Collected Letters, p. 103.

54. Harry T. Moore, Priest of Love (London: William Heinemann, 1962), pp. 520-521.

55. Alldritt, p. 15. 109

56. Aldington, P· 112.

57. Miko, P• 15.

58. Alldritt, P• 13. 59. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 18.

60. Collected Letters, P· 103.

61. Collected Letters, P• 285. 62. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1951), p. 26.

63. Miko, P• 33.

64. Ben-Ephraim, p. 43.

65. Ben-Ephraim, p. 65.

66. Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 289.

67. L. D. Clark, The Minoan Distance (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), p. 41.

68. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 33.

69. Collected Letters, p. 454.

70. Collected Letters, p. 477.

71. Keith Sager, The Life of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 99.

72. Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction," PMLA, Vol. LXX (Dec. 1955), pp. 1182-1184.

73. Beal, p. 18.

74. Murray M. Schwartz, "D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis: An Introduction," D. H. Lawrence Review (Fall, 1977), p. 220.

75. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 76.

76. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 76.

77. George Becker, D. H. Lawrence ( New York: Ungar Publishing, Co.), p. 67. 110

78. Draper, D. H. Lawrence, p. 84.

79. Aldington, "Introduction", pp. 7-8.

80. Collected Letters, p. 97.

81. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 4. 82. Beal, p. 105.

83. Henry Miller, The World of D. H. Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1980), p. 261. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aldington, Richard. D. H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius But ••• New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950. Alldritt, Keith. Visual Imagination of D. H. Lawrence. London: Edward Arnold, 1971. Beal, Anthony, ed. D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism. New York: The Viking Press, 1956.

Becker, George, J. D. H. Lawrence. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980. Ben-Ephraim, Gavriel. The Moon's Dominion. Rutherford: Farleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1981.

Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: Oxford University Press, 1934. Brown, Christopher. "As Cyril Likes It: Pastoral Reality and Illusion in The White Peacock." Essays in Literature, Vol. 6N2 (Fall, 1979), 187-192.

Burns, Aidan. Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1980.

Clark, L. D. The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980. Clarke, Colin, ed. D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, a Casebook. London: MacMillan and Co., Ltd., 1969.

Corke, Helen. D. H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965. Delany, Paul. D. H. Lawrence's Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War. New York: Basic Books, 1978.

Draper, Ronald P. D. H. Lawrence. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964.

D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. New York: Burns, Noble, Inc., 1970.

111 112

Ford, George H. Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1965. Friedman, Norman. "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept." PMLA, Vol. LXX (Dec, 1955), 1160-1184. ---- Hamalian, Leo, ed. D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Criticism. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1973. Howe, Marguerite B. The Art of Self in D. H. Lawrence. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1977. Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. London: Penguin Books, 1977. Fantasia of the Unconscious. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1951. The White Peacock. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1979. Women in Love. New York: The Viking Press, 1960. McDonald, Edward D. A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence. Philadelphia: Centaur Book Shop, 1925. Miko, Stephen. Toward Women in Love: The Emergence of a Laurentian Aesthetic. New York: Yale University Press, 1976. Miller, Henry. The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1980. Moore, Harry T., ed. The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. I & II. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1962. The Priest of Love. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1974. Partlow, Robert and Moore, Harry, eds. D. H. Lawrence: The Man Lived, Papers delivered at the D. H. Lawrence Conference, April 1979. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. 113

Roberts, Warren. A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. London: Hart-Davis, 1963. Sagar, Keith M. D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. The Art of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967. The Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Schwartz, Murray M. 11 D. H. Lawrence and Psycho­ analysis: An Introduction." D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Fall, 1977), 219-225. Stoll, John E. D. H. Lawrence: A Bibliography 1911-1975. New York: \iHnston Publishing Co., 1977. ------~~--~

T., E. (Jessie Chambers). D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record. London: Jonathan Cape, 1935. Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence and The Idea of the Novel. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979.