F : Iwjfv, Lllreaspr of C$E Department of English

STRIFE, BALANCE, A WD ALLEGIANCE: '11,m SCHEMATA

OF WILL IK FIVE NOVELS OF D. H. XAvJRENCK

APPROVED:

Ma j ox- P r of 0 3 s or /

Minor P r of e r> s or

f : IWJfv, lllreaSpr of c$e Department of English

De?m of the Graduate School STRIFE, BALANCE, AND ALLEGIANCE: THE SCHEMATA OF WILL IN FIVE NOVELS OF D. H. LAWRENCE

THESIS

Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Teresa Monahan Fiddes, B.A. Denton, Texas August, 1968 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. D. H. LAWRENCE: THE HERITAGE OF THE IRRATIONAL 1

II. THE NORDIC AND AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS: THE WILLS TO NULLITY 9

III. THE THEORY OF BALANCE: A GOOD TIGHT PUNT . . 1*1

IV. CONTACT OF THE LEADER: PERSONAL AND COSMIC. . 70

BIBLIOGRAPHY 92

iii CHAPTER I

D. H. LAWRENCE: THE HERITAGE OF THE IRRATIONAL

125 "The mysteries practiced among men are unholy mysteries." 126 "And they pray to these images, as if one "were to talk •with a man's house, knowing not what gods or heroes are." Heraclitus D. H. Lawrence made the final break through the mask of Victorian prudery to gain a full conception of man and his role in the universe. His principal emphasis is on the restoration of man's conception of himsel£---a^.jinimal, an animal capable of conceptualizing, but essentially animal all the same. In attempting to restore man to the mindless state of irrational animism, Lawrence did away with the con- ventional idea of man as the perfection of God's created universe. Lawrence did not conceive of man as being controller of the natural universe; he thought of man as being, like Mellors in Lady Chatterlv's Lover. a warden who lives within natural order. He attacks vain intellectual sophistry of the scientific, industrial society and finds man to be a brute spirit caged by the conventions of his puny reason and his self-imposed social customs. Philosophically, he changes the emphasis from being to becoming. But Lawrence is not original in his argument. The

Hundred Years' War against an over-intellectualized -world was begun by Schopenhauer, carried on by Nietzsche, and passed

on to Freud; Lawrence's petard is the last resounding ex- plosion. Within Lawrence's cry of "blood consciousness" and

"mindlessness" resound the echoes of Schopenhauer's dark will, Nietzsche's concept of personal power, and Freud's

libido. Lawrence's is the most powerful vindication of the

irrational present in the twentieth century. Whereas Freud

speaks to science, Lawrence speaks to man himself.

Lawrence came into contact with Nietzsche and Schopen-

hauer shortly after adolescence. Jessie Chambers, in her

book about herself and Lawrence, records some of the reading

with which she and Lawrence became acquainted. They read

widely together in philosophy, and discovered the ideas of

T. H. Huxley, Haeckel, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.'' In

one of the first manuscripts of Sons and Lovers (Paul Morel

B'), Lawrence states with autobiographic precision that Paul

and Miriam read Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche at the

ages of sixteen and seventeen.^ Because of "E.T.s" objection

to the passage, it was deleted in the printed text.3

1 Frederick J. Hoffman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind (New York, 1957), p. 15^~ %arry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence. (New York, 1951 ), p. 379. ~ ~

%-Iarry T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1962), p. 72. Lawrence's ideas on Being and Becoming were also influenced by his readings in the Greeks. After he left college life, he read Plato, "... and still more, the earlier men like Heraklitos and Anaximander, in whose notions of flow, of balance, and of the elements it is evident that he found much comfort."1* Lawrence is not exactly like any one of the above philosophers; he never directly imitated the thought of authors he had read. Instead, he let their ideas take root and grow in the creative centers of his own mind, so that when he expresses a concept of an irrational will in his own writings, it is in his unique language, tempered by his experience, and further reading and vitslized for his own age.

He never gave up anything. He assumed a critical ambivalence of acceptance-rejection in all his reactions to the intellectual world around him.' ... It is a mistake therefore to say that Lawrence ^ was influenced by Freud or Bergson or Nietzsche; . . . ?

So, although Lawrence is a direct successor to the ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he never uses the precise terms of their expression. They are all different in the specific applications of their ideas to the society of which they were a part; but the essential ideas are very close. Lawrence is like each of the three philosophers, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heraclitus, but he alters, changes, and reinterprets both

11 William York Tindall, H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York, 1939), p. 19* ^Hoffman, Freudianism. p. 1 52. >4 language and idea to fit the scheme of life which he perceives at different moments in his own existence. The greatest similarity between Lawrence, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche is that the basis of each man's philosophy is a concept of irrational will, a life force which motivates all action, all becoming. For Schopenhauer, will is the pulse of life, the mystery of existence, the groundless, unjustifiable primum mobile of the reactions of cause and effect.^ All the world is will made manifest; it is never conscious until it reaches its objectification in the intellect of man. But that intellect does not have the capability to know the life 'force, or to explain it, because the will is groundless. It does not exist per se in time, space, or causality, the three constituent elements of science, mathe- matics, hence knowledge.7 The body is the will objectified therefore, the mind, as part of the body itself, is an extension of the irrational. Life, thereby, has no basis except to be, and to become, and to change. Lawrence comes closest to this doctrine in Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious in explaining the generation of new iife through the conception of a child. He defies scientific analysis of conception being the child's partaking of his parents' respective

6 Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, edited by Irwin Edman (New York, 1955"), p -7 lb id ., pp. 86-87.

^Ibid., p. 71. natures. Something new, different, and inexplicable is •within the child which has nothing to do with its creatorr The nature of the infant is not just a permutation- and-combination of elements contained in the natures of the parents. There is in the nature of the infant that which is utterly unknown in the natures of the parents. . . . There is in the nature of the infant something entirely new, underived, underivable, something which is, and which will forever remain, causeless.9 It is this" sacred unknown which is the basis for all individuality. And for Lawrence, as well as for Nietzsche, the individual is all-important. Nietzsche echoes the theory of the irrational life force in his concept of the will to power, Essentially, the will to power is present in the will to know oneself apart from the traditional ideational concepts of society; he must discover his individuality, the mystery . of his existence.

No one can build thee the bridge, over which thou must cross over the river of life, save thyself alone. There are paths and bridges and demigods without number, that will gladly carry thee over, but only at the price of thine own self; thy self woulqist thou have to give in pawn, and then lose it.'u

"The free man is immoral because it is- his will to depend upon himself and not upon tradition." With Nietzsche, will becomes a conscious operation of self-discovery; but again, he provides no explanation for its being. The force resides in a universal compulsion to become.

"9D. E. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unc onscious (New" Y or ks 1 967), p. 1 1 Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche,, edited by Geoffrey Clive (New York, 1965), p. 329. The great distinction between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is contained in their respective views of the will as it controls man's actions. For Schopenhauer, it is deterministic The will stimulates man's desire for a goal in order to force him to be in motion in a chaotic world of senseless, endless cause and effect. The goal is never gained, because ideals exist only as propellents of man's ambition. The acrid taste of disappointment and gradual decay is the most common of every man's experience. "Life is the constant self assertion of this will; a long desire which is never fulfilled; dis- illusion following attainment."'''' Desire, passion become suffering. Man is the tool of the will in the pursuit of his desires, in his blind striving. Life is a struggle without meaning.

Nietzsche, however, is much more optimistic. .Man is not driven; rather, the perceiving man drives himself. "Nietzsche regards the complex structure of human desire as evidence not of the will to live but of the will to power. Passions are a force for the assertion of individual importance. ^ The difference between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is that between voluntaristic pessimism and voluntaristic optimism.^3

T. Bailey Saunders, "Translator's Preface," The Pessimist's Handbook.by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Helen E. Barnes (Lincoln, Nebraska), p. xxxvi. 12Hoffman, Freudianism. p. 302. 13ibid. Lawrence borrows the ideas of both men in the development of his thought. When the passions are directed toward sensationalism, self-titillation, selfish ends, then the will to power expresses itself in conscious domination of others, a subjection of someone to another's parasitic personal will. This deviation is the main source of the faults in our society today; the passions are exploited for their utility to the intellect. However, when the passions and desires, hence will, thrust the individual into a mystic mindlessness and a transitory union with cosmic will manifests .itself, the inherent strength of a timeworn earth becomes part of the individual. Immersion in mindless irrationality constitutes a mystic fulfillment in the thought of D. H. Lawrence. An individuality is gained, as in Nietzsche's will to power, but there is a simultaneous awareness of the self suspended in time and space, not in a social or historical situation.

In a sense, Lawrence takes up where Schopenhauer left off. He assumes the destructive nature of the unchecked will, and of a certain kind of cold, corrosive desire; but then he calls for the cessation of that (conscious) will and desire, and in its stead, a kind of balance of polarity in love, which will allow spontaneous desire to well up from within and bring fulfillment.'^ A giving up of conscious self leads to the discovery of a greater Irrational identity. In the love novels, the new identity manifests itself in the polarity of opposite

1U • Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D. H. Lawrence (Blooraington, Indiana, 1 955) 3 p. 8 essences. The essential male and the primordial female balance each'other in a polarity of motion. In the later novels, a "leader" guides those who, in their primordial essences as incomplete individuals, recognize in him the ability to align the mass of mankind with the cosmic forces which impel all being. Schopenhauer plunges into the unknown irrational and immediately abstains from it forever in aseptic withdrawal. In attempting to deny the life force, he in fact expresses nullification. Nietzsche struggles with the conflicting waves of the dark will and the light of intellect and can conceive hope only in a future when a race of natural aristocrats shall gain the rudders of power preparatory to the coming of the Superman. But he curses the irremedial present even as the clouds of insanity dim his brain. Lawrence reconciles the internal conflict of mind and body in the polarity of balance within the individual and in the balance of love and power between individuals. But at the same time he, too, perceives the horror of the present decadence. His novels are filled with descriptions of Dantesque Inferno, into which reliance upon reason has cast Western civilization. CHAPTER II

THE NORDIC AND AFRICAN CONSCIOUSNESS:

THE WILLS TO NULLITY

10*+ It is not good for men to get all they wish to get. It is sickness that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hanger, plenty; weariness, rest. | Heraclitus

"Fie, that ^here should be a regular price at -which a man should cease to be a personality and become a screw instead!" Nietzsche I! The twp ways of knowing experience are through thought and through feeling. Lawrence does not advocate either extreme of perception as a panacea to the running sores of man's condition. In his novels, he repeatedly rejects abstraction ajid sheer tingling feeling as ends in themselves. In Women in Love Lawrence gives name to both extremities,

The Nordic •wil l is the drive to abstraction, to mechanistic precision, jto scientific knowledge of isolated unrelated facts. The! African process is a form of dissolution, an immersion o f one's whole self In pure sensation. There is a negation of mind, yet this mind drives itself consciously to feel all th e nuances of the thrilling descent into noncreative nullity. Paradoxically, the African will rests upon the ability of the mind to abstract pure feeling, while the

Nordic will rests upon an idea of progress created by the ceaseless drive of the life force in the chain of cause-effect. 10

In both, there is a loss of individuality, either in the irrevocable precision of the machine or in the dark abyss of perfect nullity. The Nordic will is based upon the reliability of reason. For Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Lawrence, reason and mental consciousness are the sources of most of the evil and decadence in the universe. Reason leads mankind to believe that truth is located in one place, enshrined in reverence, stable throughout and for all time. All three men realize, however, that Truth is an old shapechanger, a reality only insofar as it regenerates itself through the experience of man. Reason is an aspect of man's nature, a means of his knowing, and it is not inherently bad. But since the enshrinement of Platonism in terms of Christianity, reason has become a god in itself; it makes man more aware of abstract reality, rather than of life. In so doing, it negates the life of man by emphasizing intangible, unattainable existences beyond. Reason chills the warmth of active becoming.

. . . Here in the sphere of quiet deliberation what completely possessed (marQ and moved him intensely before, appears to him cold, colourless, and for the moment external to him; he is merely a spectator, the observer. ... a man suffers or accomplishes in cold blood, what is of the utmost and often terrible importance to him.'

Schopenhauer illustrates in the first book of The World as

1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, edited by Irwin Edman (New York, 1956),"pp. M^PT7. 11

Will and Idea that the basis of reason is instinct.2 Know- ledge is based upon a reliance upon instinct in long-repeated situations and experiences. "The memory of experience crystallizes into -what we call intelligence or reason."3 Reason is an extension of instinct, of the will, of the life force. And as its extension, is merely an instrument of the irrational power of becoming and is not the controller of life at all.

However, the great error of the modern world (the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries) is the prominent feeling that reason, and knowledge derived from reason, can find the solutions to the problems of man's existence. Analytical knowledge, no matter how applied, is not the study of life, but of death. Knowledge of anatomy can only be achieved by a study of the separate" parts which constitute the living beast. To know it is to kill it. In order to know facts, one must control, negate, stifle spontaneous life. So it is the conclusion of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and finally Lawrence that rational knowledge is not the means that can bring man into a meaningful relation with the life force.

Schopenhauer vindicated the irrational as a part of man's nature; Nietzsche disclaimed all idealism as the basis of the decadence of human life. In idealism and in logic

2Ibid., p. l»8. 3h. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Nietzsche (Boston, 1913), p. 71. 12 is manifested man's attempt to stop the flux of change, to render something permanent and lasting. The Nordic -will to control overpowers instinet3 and the ideal begins to regulate life rather than simply be an extension of man and life itself. The ill perpetuated in idealism is the negation of the significance of individual man. He is sublimated into an abstract reality, -which gives him a womb-like security from the challenge of life. . . . Appealing attitudes . . . are all so many risks which the instinct runs of 'understanding itself' too soon. Meanwhile the organizing 'idea,' which is destined to become master, grows and con- tinues to grow into the depths-~it begins to command, it leads you slowly back from your deviations and aberrations, it prepares individual qualities and capacities, which one day will make themselves felt as indispensable to the whole of your task—step by step it cultivates all the serviceable faculties before it ever whispers a word concerning the dominant task, the 'goal,5 the 'object,' and the 'meaning of it all. The individual becomes a cog in the machine of the fulfillment of an ideal higher, more vaulted than life itself. Man becomes the sterile instrument of a purpose which makes existence a secondary condition to its fulfillment. The fulfillment of the ideal subsumes the personal development of the individual.

Lawrence's greatest battle is with reason and logic as it presents itself in institutions, glorified fields of scientific endeavor, and the social cults of intellectualism.

^Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, edited by Geoffrey Clive (New York, 1965), P* 63. 13

According to Lawrence, the id eal is not a method of* achie>7ing a higher metaphysical reality, but it is really a means of one man ensuring a material gain from or gaining domination over another man. The institutionalized order which the ideal establishes in society is used by some to exploit others. An ideal established in control of the passional soul is no more and no less than a supreme machine- principle. And a machine, as we know, is the active unit of the material world. Thus we see how it is that in the end pure idealism is identical with pure materialism, and the most ideal peoples are the most completely material. Ideal and material are identical. The ideal is but the god in the machine—the little, fixed machine-principle which works the human psyche automatically.5 The machine principle is the drive of the Nordic will, which seeks order, and arbitrary power through the structure of society. Lawrence attacks the machine principle in all of his novels through the presentation of the grotesque effects which the mechanistic ideal has on human existence. His attacks on Christianity, science, industrialism, aestheticism, and sensationalism all have a basic premise that human life is a mystery, and defilement of the Inexplicable with the invasion of programmed ideals and preconceptions results in the misuse of power and a distortion of society and individuals into the deformed postures of mechanic existence. Spontaneity becomes subject to mental control.

Man is aware of the flux of existence, the Schopenhauerean will, but all too often he tries to control it, to bring it

^D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York, 19^7), p. 12. 1*t under the domination of the Nordic intellect. The individual tries to dam the river of life-energy flowing through him; in the cases "where the effort is completely successful, life is given over to the mechanic responses of cause and effect. Life assumes the gruesome aspect of irrevocable automatism. The river of the life-force is rechannelled through the generators of the mental dam to produce energy, power. It is this conscious drive to acquire power -which causes the great distortion in the individual man and, through him, wrecks his society. Power is sought in itself for domination, control, and knowledge. When the power-principle replaces the life-principle, all relationship between unique individuals ends in the schism of master and slave. Whether the master be Christian, the controller of the social machine, or the Narcissist in search for sensation through sado-maschocism, one individual is subsumed into another. By submission to the 'higher' entity, the individual gives up his power of becoming and allows himself to be shaped by the master. The master in turn has sacrificed his uniqueness to the idealistic principle. The intellectual life does away with the life of the intuitive, spontaneous will ultimately. And in so doing, does away with meaningful experience.

Christianity is a terrible foe for both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Because Christianity wants to deny the natural attributes of man and emphasize his spiritual nature, 15 individuality is diluted in a massive attempt of humanity to renounce its earthly existence and soar to other worldly rewards. Schopenhauer chides Western religion for being so impudent as to conceive of its allegories as dogmas^ and for being so blind as to attempt to disassociate man from the animals and make him a higher being.'7 Nietzsche abhors the religion which spawns the fawning humble, loving Christian, with a pride cloaked in self-abnegation, and with a secret machocistic joy in suffering. "What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy with all the botched and the weak— Q Christianity." Lawrence adds his chime of protest to the clangor of Nietzsche's denouncements for identical reasons. The denial of the individual self and the disassociation of man from natural roles, and therefore, from instincts, is attacked by Lawrence most vehemently in The Plumed Serpent. Dona Carlota, wife of the new spiritual leader of Mexico, Don Ramon, uses the guise of her Christian concern for her husband to sheathe her intention of controlling him through the power of righteousness,- which that religion gives her against him. For Lawrence, religion has meaning if it am- plifies the experience of the individual, but if the

^Schopenhauer, The Pessimist's Handbook, edited by Helen E. Barnes, translated by T. Bailey Saunders {Lincoln, Nebraska, 196H), p. 311. ^Ibid., p. 317. O Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. *+27 • 16 individual ceases to grow and let the life force fructify through the forms of becoming, then he becomes the dead statue, the pillar of salt, of conscious -willed force. Being is given up for righteousness and power. That this is Dona Carlota's aim is evident from all the details -which Lawrence gives in his descriptions of her. Her love had turned from being the spontaneous flow, subject to the unforeseen comings and goings of the Holy Ghost, and had turned to will. She loved now with her will: . . . She became filled with charity, the cruel kindness. Her winsomeness and her elvishness departed from her, she began to wither, she grew tense. And she blamed him, and prayed for him. Even as the spontaneous mystery died in her, the will hardened, till she was nothing but a will: a lost will.9 Dona Carlota sacrifices the life-flux, spontaneous will of natural becoming, for the personal will of her own mind. She surrenders her womanly nature for Nordic power. Dona Carlota squelches her natural spontaneity by rerouting its impulses through the brain. In so doing, she lives by dying every day; she glories in the sacrifice she makes for her religious, mental ideals. She revels in her self-imposed martyrdom when she sees Don Ramon has achieved his apotheosis of manhood in the godhead of Quetzlcoatl. As Don Ramon enacts the living faith of vitalism through the mythological symbols of the Old Aztec, primeval world, Dona Carlota con- vulses in spasms of hatred, calling curses upon his profaner of her personal will. Before her actual death, she does

9d. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York, 195^)» p. 228. 17 reveal that her hatred is generated by her husband's refusal to submit to her conscious power. When Don Ramon's friend, Don Ciprianoj tells the dying -woman that she was never married in fulfillment to Ramon but '"married to her own way,"' she fully acquieces: "Ah, I never married Ramon. No! I never married himl How could I? He was not what I would have him be. . . ."10 In refusing to recognise the new values of self-respect, which Ramon was attempting to revive in the souls of the men of Mexico, Carlota perceived only his opposition to her, which she fought with the perverted humility of Christianity. Nietzsche states it succinctly when he observes this death- wish which lies within the dogma of Christianity. . . . the unconditional will of Christianity to recognize only moral values, has always appeared to me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a "will to perish;" . . In moralistic terms, the love which Carlota professes for others and which she manifests in acts of charity and pity for those below her is her means of protection for a very 1 P hard kind of egoism. The disdainful pity of Christian charity is based on a conceited sense of superiority. 10Ibid.. p. 380. 1 1 Nietzsche, Thje Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 1^7. 1 2Ibid.. p. 62. 18

Although this novel expresses Lawrence's argument against Christianity most strongly, he also attacks Western social religion more subtly in The Rainbow in the courtship and marriage of Anna Lensky and Will Brangwen. The Nordic will and the African process of dissolution are contradictory drives, but one does not necessarily exclude the other. Both are based on man's ability to mentally abstract ideas from the flux of experience. Will finds great satisfaction in the soaring leaps of religion to attain the absolute. He can find it in a hymn or in his study of the leaping pointed arches of European cathedrals. It is a -wonderful means for losing himself in the immensity of effort of all mankind for

the unattainable. The verity was his connection with Anna and his connection with the Church, his real being lay in his dark emotional experience of the Infinite, the Absolute.^ Besides providing a spiritual experience for Will, his passion for churches and abstract involvement makes him dependent upon the Church itself for the experience. The similar mystery which he experiences in sex with Anna, he reveres in the same way. The Nordic and African wills are present simultaneously in the character, Will Brangwen. He seeks sublimation into the ideal, into the perfect machine, in his religion. He seeks perfect selflessness in the abyss of

1 3D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York, 1967), p. 155» 19 overwhelming sexual passion -with Anna. He does not feel independent, he is not integral, whole. He relies upon ex- ternals for his personal fulfillment, rather than tearing his development from the. pangs of his own experience. Sensuality and spirituality are only realities for Will because of the existfence of the Church and his wife. He has no knowledge of'them within his soul. To wean him of his dependence upon her, Anna forces Will to sleep alone for a period, in order for him to realize to some degree his own individuality and strength.1,4 For Anna soul and self are synonymous, but Will is not able to make this integration of spirit and body. . '. . The thought of her . soul was intimately mixed up with the thought of her own self. Indeed, her soul and her own self were one in the same to her. Whereas he seemed simply to ignore the fact of his own self, almost to refute it. He had a soul--a dark, inhuman thing caring nothing for humanity. . . . And in the gloom and the mystery of the Church his soul lived and ran free, like some strange underground thing, abstract.15 When Will is caught up in his spiritual ecstasies, Anna in- terrupts his transcendence with reminders of mundane reality. Will Brangwen is in a way the conscious victim of the high priest of spirituality. He accedes gratefully to the loss of self in the quest for bottomless intellectual sensation. He wants to become absorbed into a more complete wholeness, and he -in turn wants to absorb others into himself,

-"^Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 183. 1 ^Ibid .. p. 155. 20

There is not a will to po-wer evident in this character. Rather there is, again, a will to perish, but in this instance Will Brangwen perishes in the assertion of selfless abstraction. Existence is gained through another and not within himself. But he does realize the fatality of his psychic wish and fights against it until he and Anna have confronted each other as-mutually independent creatures. Here religion provides two areas through which the natural unconscious will can be diverted into abnormal or damaging channels. The will can be consciously used to control via the dogmatism of the religion itself; the individual thus fe.els compelled to control obstinate forces in order to fulfill the "vision" of a higher role. The individual uses this hypocritical ruse to deceive himself that his domination is justified by a higher purpose. In spiritual terms, re- ligiosity can be a means of negation of self through the passionate obliteration of identity in sacred spirituality. The Nordic extension of the religious passion manifests itself in controlling contrary forces through self-righteous assertion. The African process occurs within the religious #y framework as individual identity disappears amid the vaulted v*' ideals of pure aestheticism and spirituality. From these two deviations extend the perversions which science, industrialism, and aestheticism have wrought on modern culture. The quest for power in science and industry reduces all humanity to energy; the quest for intellectual appreciation 21 of dead art forms reduces all experience to narcissistic sensation. In both cases, creativity is completely and irrevocably dead. Science and industry are the most horrifying villains in Lawrence's novels. The reliance upon the certain factual knowledge gained from smothered life gives science an aura of death, of devitalization. The cold calm of the laboratory echoes with the silence of death. Industry, the extension of science, reduces all forms of life to Matter or to forms of mere potential energy. All the world then becomes de- humanized, devoid of personality. Although science and industry lay waste to the tremendous spontaneous being of mankind in general, they have a more terrifying effect upon the scientist or the industrialist himself. Through the perpetual struggle between identification with subject and object, the scientist gains power. Us he exercises more extensively his control of the object world, he, in turn, is robbed of his own vital subjectivity. The split between the intuitive spirit and the thinking mind leaves only the blind, endless struggle between subject and object or between object and object. The Schopenhauerean aesthetic death wish rises to stop the stupid conflict of existence. Beneath the frenzy of the struggle lurks a black nothingness which threatens to envelop the individual who is defeated. In serving the machine, when one loses function, he consequently loses existence, a reason to live at all. 22

The horror of the industrialized world is not only that it converts men into machines, but it does, in fact, turn all natural phenomena to the vile consequences of the automatized •world. Lawrence's belief is that the world and its natural disasters or blessings are actually only, reflections of the ty.pe of disaster or wholesomeness which exists within the individuals in society. An earthquake, Lawrence explains ... is no merely external event; rather "the mysterious and untenable motion within the hearts of men is in some way related to the motion within the earth, so that even earthquakes are unaccountably related to man's pyschic being--not merely related but dependent on it."l6

There is an extensive correlation between the microcosmic nature of the individual mind and the macrocosmic nature of the universe. It is a Schopenhauerean concept that this is true, based on the assumption of perpetual strife. All of man's intellectual efforts are made to lessen the endless strife and chaotic struggle of life. If the will is always present but controlled, then it will manifest itself in small instances, changing the environments and the people for the expression of its inevitable force. If it is per- fectly controlled, then at some point its pure force will come through and wreak destruction on the mentally controlled world. To regulate life too closely is in fact to toy with

l6Philip Rieff, "Two Honest Men," Thg Listener. LXIII (May 5S 1960), p. 795. 23 death in two ways: devitalization and final destruction by uncontrollable forces. Tom Brangwen and Winifred Inger in The Rainbow are devitalized members of an industrial society; Gerald Crich of Woman in Love is a young Siegfried,-who challenges cosmic powers with his own.17 The panorama of existence which Lawrence portrays in his novels is astounding. His concepts penetrate even the most insignificant characters. Tom Brangwen and Winifred are two such characters who add to J the larger theme of The Rainbow-Women in Love-Aaron's Rod trilogy. Gerald as a major character will be considered more fully in a subsequent chapter.

The marriage of Tom Brangwen to Winifred Inger in The Rainbow exemplifies the type of correlation between individuals and environment which Lawrence uses to emphasize the inter- dependence of man and natural surroundings. Their own decadence is magnified in the environments in which they live.

Lawrence's characters communicate in terms of - . . . correlatives of place. More successfully than in the work of any of his contemporaries, the power of place is identified with the force of mind and personality.1 °

Tom Brangwen, the son of the Tom Brangwen with whom The Rainbow begins, is a foreign-looking man, darker skinned *

1 ?Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of Dj. fiL Lawrence (New York, 1951)j p. 163. 1 R - Frederick J. Hoffman, The Mortal Ng; Death and the Modern Imagination (Princeton, New Jersey, 196k), p. 3. 2U than his brothers. He has no interest in the Brangwen farm land called the Marsh, though he is due to inherit it; he abrogates his rights of primogeniture to his brother Fred. Tom Brangwen is contemptously cool of the emotion aroused in his family by the accidental drowning of his father, but Ursula, his niece, sees him later snarling alone in bestial anger against the forces which have snatched his father in death.^9 Tom is modish and affluent, handsome, and socially accepted by the monied classes. He prefers residence in cities rather than on isolated farms. In subsequent years, he becomes the manager of a large colliery in Wiggiston.

Winifred Inger is a tall, stately school mistress, -with •whom Ursula becomes involved emotionally. Winifred, too, is modish and has accepted the current social-scientific thought of the time. But Winifred's scientific outlook shields a bitter internal struggle from being perceived by others, just as Tom's control over his emotions hides his inner being from society. Ursula does realize this dual nature of her teacher as she becomes more integrated into Winifred's social world.

Ursula was introduced by her friend to various •women and men, educated, unsatisfied people, who still moved within the smug provincial society as if they were nearly as tame as their outward behavior showed, but who were inwardly raging and mad.20

1 ^Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 2*49• 2^Ibid ., p. 3^2. 25

Winifred initiates a Lesbianistic relationship with Ursula, her student. Winifred has rejected men because they -want to take women only as they correspond to a predetermined idea that they have of women in general. She finds that no one •wants to know a woman as an individual. Ursula rejects Winifred finally, after realizing that Winifred wants to per- petrate the same crime on her. She wants to remake Ursula into a reflection of herself, to form the girl into her own idea.21 Basically, Winifred is corrupt. "At bottom of her jwinifredj was a pit of black despair."^ This despair is present because she conceives life ideally; it becomes a project of attainment of specified goals. Thus, happiness is only attained by fulfillment of anticipated wishes. Schopenhauer defines this type of attainment as a negative process.

All satisfaction, . . . commonly called happiness, is . . . only negative, and never positive'. It is not an original gratification coming ... of itself, but must always be the satisfaction of a \ifish. The wish ... is the condition which pre- cedes every pleasure. Thus the satisfaction or the pleasing can never be more than a deliverance from a pain, from a want; . . .<3

Tom Brangwen is described -in terms similar to those chosen by Schopenhauer. His desires have all been fulfilled,

21 Ibid.

22Ibid.. p. 3H3. 2^Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. p. 261. 26

He has done and become all that he wishes to, and still he is empty of purpose and lasting satisfaction. "They had all ended in a disintegrated lifelessness of soul, •which he hid under an utterly tolerant good humor. ... He had come to a stability of nullification."^ He exists, and, therefore, fills his life with activity which has no moral purpose except to be. He is driven by that irrational -will into the endless stream of action and reaction which does not affect him in his real being. Existence is for him merely a series of dramas with all too predictable consequences. He is active merely to gain the reassurance of sensation of vitality; it is the only means Tom has of knowing that he is not dead.

Ursula brings Winifred and Tom together. She wants" to be rid of the decadent Winifred, and she realizes the com- patibility of the futility and corruption of both their natures. They do marry and live in the booming coal town of. Wiggiston, where they literally find the empty mechanization of their souls objectified all around them. "It was like some gruesome dream, some ugly, dead, amorphous mood become concrete."^5 Tom and Winifred are disintegrated. All life is a perpetual chaos of unrelated, bifurcated activity.

There is no end to be gained but sensation itself. The town itself reflects their own decadence, their lack of cohe- siveness.

^Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 3^3 • ^Ibid.. p. 3^*+* 27

The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no artery, no organic formation. There it lay, like the new foundations of a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin disease.26

Although Tom Brangwen's house is on a hill apart from the town, it is constructed of the same red-brick material which constitutes the town. Tom and Winifred despise the system of industry, but they each do serve it to escape the perversity of their souls.2? Tom's house is a further extension of the town below in the way that he has designed it. The adaptation reflects the organization of his mind, also. The whole front part of the house is an enormous library, "... with one end devoted to his science."2® But the investigations he pursues are not wondrous, but mechanical, and his windows look out over the "hideous abstraction of the town, and at the green meadows and rough country beyond, and at the great mathematical colliery on the other side."29 That Brangwen himself realizes that there is an intimate correlation between the man and the job he performs is revealed in his first conversation with Winifred the day Ursula brings the woman to meet her uncle. With all the quiet authority of a god who controls the fates of the men within

26Ibid.

27Mark Spilka, Thg Love Ethic of D*. EL Lawrence (Bloomington, Indiana, 19557} p. 109.

28Ibid.. p. 3^5- 29 Ibid. 28 his mechanistic power, he explains this situation as he describes the marriage of a collier within the industrial system. "We reckoned him. as a loader, he reckoned himself as a loader, and so she knew he represented his job. Marriage and home is a side show. . . . The pit matters. Round the pit there will always be side shows, plenty of 'em."30

Winifred chimes in, applying the same principle to all other areas, and, of course, to herself. "'What is he at home, a man? He is a meaningless lump—a standing machine, a machine out of work.'"31 Just as the marriages of the colliers are side shows to the coal pit, so too is the forthcoming marriage of Winifred and Tom a sideshow to the pit of despair which lies at the bottom of both of them. The two seek and find identity in the other: the machine principle rules them both. Both find purpose and freedom in serving the machine of industry or of scientific abstraction which shields them from the realization of the black nullity of their intrinsic natures. In Winifred and Tom, the life force is routed through the Nordic will to domination. As they serve the order of an automatized world, they gain the relative freedom of control. As they serve the dissolution within each other, they carefully hide the horrible sterility of purpose which they share.

3°Ibld., pp. 31* 7-3^8. 31 Ibid., p. 3U8. 29

But the parody of purposeful existence is not only found in industry and science. Ursula also experiences the machine present in the educational system -when she herself teaches and when she goes on to further her education at the university. In teaching, she finds that she must submit to the mechanical process of treating her students as objects and to control them by the force of her conscious will.32 stead of being gratified by imparting knowledge to her students, Ursula feels that she is merely another mechanism • •which establishes her as some abstract authority over an order of vindictive slave-students. The educational machine makes her students expect force as the integral part of their education; they, therefore, expect and even demand brutal treatment from her. Finally Ursula finds that she must submit to this role designated to her by her superior, a sadistic Mr. Harby. In playing victim to Ursula's mastery, Vernon, a student whom Ursula canes, forces her into the abstract position of Teacher-Authority. In acquiesing to the order of the system, she loses her own identity. "She was in the hands of some bigger, stronger, coarser will,"33 the controlled will of tradition which seeps through all ordered society.

3^Spilka, The Love Ethic. p. 109. 33i,awrence, The Rainbow, p. H01 . 30

Ursula also finds in furthering her education that science, which can unfold the marvelous mystery of life, has been reduced to the study of cause-effect relationships present for the expedient service to the industrial machine. "It -was a little apprenticeship where one was further equipped for making money. The college itself was a little, slovenly, laboratory for the factory."^ Education qualifies the individual to become the "... flunkey to the god of material success."35 jts primary concern is not with the development of the individual.

Lawrence, speaking through Ursula's experience, finds all intellectual endeavor to be the further binding of oneself to the machine which governs and controls the life of humanity through society, the machine which creates an unqualified mastery for some over a- rigid slavery of work for others. No creation exists except as a "side-show" for an amorphous, meaningless society. Thus, art is relegated to the area of diversion and amusement; aesthetic appreciation is demeaned to the level of a social tool which qualifies one to become part of an intellectual Bohemia or a select clique. The Bohemia side-show presented in Women in Love also nullifies existence by its abuses of power and its inherent decadence. The system of masters and slaves exists, but because it is

Ibid.. p. *435. 3%>id. 31 intellectually understood instead of intuitively sensed, the positions of master and slave become malleable. One can be either in the aesthete world, depending upon whimsey, fancy, and desire. For Lawrence's aesthetes, the victim controls and experiences more exactingly the titillation of the fall into nullity. The African process of nullity is an end in itself. No rebirth of individuality is possible; no fruit comes from the labors of parturition.

The -worlds of the aesthetes are presented in Women in Love through various characters. Lawrence carries out the depiction through the people of the social clique of the Pompador, ironically located at Picadilly Circus. The other clique of the intellectually aware centers around Hermione Roddice on her estate Breadalby. Hermione is like Carlota of The Plumed Serpent, in that she wants to control the man she 'loves' by binding him to her through his fulfillment of exact roles. Hermione is a complete master; she can never consent to a supremacy above her own. Like the industrial magnate, Gerald Crich, she justifies and assures herself of existence by the power she wields over other people. Her sensation, like Carlota's is gained through righteousness. Hermione represents all the traditional beliefs of the aristocratic classes. She feels that they are, in fact, objectified in her. At the same time, she realizes that they are a sham; but they form 32 a facade which she must perpetuate, maintain, and serve, or her existence is nullified. As such, she is the embodiment of Idea, of the knowing methodical mind. She was a priestess without belief, "without con- viction, suckled in a creed outworn, and condemned to the reiteration of mysteries that were not divine to her. . . . And she was a leaf on the old great tree of knowledge that was withering now. To the old and last truth, then, she must be faithful even though cynicism and mockery took place at the bottom of her soul.3°

Her persistence in maintenance of outworn Ideas is the source of her corruption. She has the verification of the aristocratic past to convince herself of her logical and moral correctness. So, all people and all things must correspond to the flow of her mind, must fit into their precise pre- designated positions and responses with no deviations. By her subtle direction and suggestion, all conversation and all events at Breadalby occur only through her methodical channelling. Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen feel that they are being manipulated when they visit the Breadalby estate.37 In Rupert Birkin, however, Hermione finds opposition, the one thing which she cannot tolerate. Birkin persists in piercing through the facade of her belief and forces her logically to perceive her own nothingness. "For with her mind she was unable to attend to his words; he caught her,

H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York, 1966), p. 28k. 37 Ibid., p. 76. 33 as it were, beneath all her defenses, and destroyed her with some insideous occult potency."-® That she does realize her own nullity is evident in her confrontation of Ursula and Birkin in Ursula's school room. As she soliloquizes upon the sterility of life without spontaneity, she reveals that this is the nature of her own personal dilemma.

"... Or is it better to leave them (children) untouched, spontaneous. Hadn't they better be animals, simple animals, crude, violent, anything, rather than this self-consciousness, this incapacity to be spontaneous." They thought she had finished. But with a queer rumbling in her throat she resumed, "Hadn't they better be anything than grow up crippled, crippled in their souls, crippled in their feelings—so thrown back--so turned back on themselves—incapable—" Hermione clenched her fist like one in a trance— "of any spontaneous action, always deliberate, always burdened with choice, never carried away." Again they thought she had finished. But just as he was going to reply, she resumed her queer rhapsody— "never carried away, out of themselves, always conscious, always self-conscious, always aware of themselves. Isn't anything better than this? Better be animals, mere animals with no mind at all, than this, this nothingness—"39

The demonstrative pronoun, this, isolates Hermione's defi- nition to the immediate person in whom the nullity is most evident, herself. But her realization does not save her from her ennui; she is able still to define herself only in terms of traditional aristocratic values. And she obsti- nately refuses to be opposed. When Rupert does openly oppose her in a discussion of democracy, she must justify her own

3®lbid.. p. 82. 39Ibid.. p. 34. 3H existence by trying to obliterate him, later striking him on the head -with a ball of lapis-lazuli. In expunging his being, she rids herself of all opposition one conscious level; on another, she enjoys the pleasure-pain of power over another's life. Their relationship can only be completed by Rupert's becoming subsumed into her mind. One means of affecting this absorption is to physically kill him and unite him to her in the blood bath of death, since mentally he evades, dodges, and pierces her. Her enjoyment of his attempted murder is a sadistic sexuality. . . it was a convulsion of pure bliss for her, lit up by the crushed pain of her fingers."14® Just as her mind extinguishes spontaneous life, so she de- stroys any man who comes to her. Her pain adds to the coursing feeling of power raging through her body. She allows the backwash swamp of her inner nature to flood her mind with its brackish corruption. The child of pure intel- lectuality is death. Yet spiritually, mentally, Hermione finds herself pure, untainted. "... she remembered what she had done, but it seemed to her, she had only hit him as any woman might because he provoked her. . . . She knew that spiritually she was right,

Like Carlota, Hermione would like to be a pitiable victim, the slave to the male, but only because she realizes the

>4QIbid.. p. 98.

141 Ibid., p. 99. 35 infinite converse power of the victim over the oppressor. "Hermione would have been his slave—there was in her a horrible desire to prostrate herself before a man—a man who worshipped her, however, and admitted her as the supreme thing.All her sexuality is only expressible through a sado-maschocistic enjoyment of pain. But the pain must be inflicted through the use of her lover as an instrument of her conscious personal will. She provokes retaliation that she might enjoy the consequences of being despoiled and gain ascendency over her controlled afflictor. Because Birkin refuses to serve her, her final consummation must be his death. Her basic corruption, of course, prevents her from conquering the vital Birkin, who represents the natural flow of will as life force in the male. There is reiterated the theme of the knowing mind reducing life to certain cause-effect relations while simultaneously creating a perversion within the particular individual. Just as Winifred and Tom Brangwen serve the industrial machine for the purpose of gaining the freedom of power within the order of industry, so does Hermione become priestess to Idea. She states to her guests at Breadalby one afternoon, "'Yes, it is the greatest thing in life—to know. It is really to be happy, and be free.1l,L *3 Like Winifred and Tom,

l|2Ibid.. p. 286. ^3Ibld.. p. 78. 36

Hermione serves that she may be vindicated, proven right, in opposition to her larking half-awareness of perversion below the surface of the conscious mind. Also like them, her gratification is gained through the meaningless activity of entertainment and irrelevant conversation, all the while worshipping the pure, beautiful sensations of power through which her identity is kept and ecstatically lost. She controls people collectively and individually, presenting herself as their superior, a guiding light to the good life.

The aesthetes of the Pompador in London do not possess the social position and justification of Hermione Roddice, but within the closed circle of their clique they do possess a kind of collective power. For the most part, however, their perversion is more obvious. The petty conversation and the discussions of art in the Pompador is a recognized diversion for them, not a major purpose. The master-slave relationship exists most exclusively on a one-to-one basis. The,perversion of the clique is typified in the image of mirrors, which Lawrence introduces in one of Birkin's attacks on Hermione.

"You've got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it. There in the mirror you must have everything. But now you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want life of pure sensation and 'passion.'"HH

^Ibid., p. 35. 37

It is this aspect of mental consciousness which is charac- teristic of Hallidy and Minette in the Pompador. The first description of the Pompador states that the walls are hung •with mirrors.The people who patronize the bistro like to watch their own reactions in the endless repetition of reflection. In much the same way, they mirror each other to gain the sensationalism they crave. It is also significant that, after a trip to the Continent, Tom Brangwen brings a mirror as a gift to Ursula.1*^ With the crowd of intellectuals, pain is endured or inflicted for the sexual sensation and mental anguish reaction which it creates. These people are much more oriented toward sensationalism than is Hermione, who gains her gratification from control. Hermione's actions are willed; the reactions of Hallidy and Minette are "dangerously spontaneous."^7 They seek sensation as an end in itself. It is the mindless activity which reassures them not of vitality, but of mere existence. They perpetuate outrage as artificial stimulus to the centers of being which are slowly drying up. The search for pure sensation is epitomized in the carving of the African woman in childbirth, which Gerald

^ibid.. p. 5U. h(L Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 2h0. •<7R. I. Chamberlain, "Pussum, Minette, and the Africo- Nordic Symbol in Women in Love." PMLA. LXXVIII, pt. 2 (September-December, 19^3)j p. H09. 38 finds in Halliday's apartment. Gerald, -who is the Nordic- willed consciousness objectified, finds his perfect antithesis represented in this statue, perfect mindless passion, and he is repulsed by the primitive carving. Birkin explains it to him: "'Pure culture in sensation, culture in physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual. It is so sensual as to be final, supreme.'"^ Gerald is never the same after his encounter with the sensual state and the sensationalistic crowd; he is irrevocably but subtly changed from having encountered his contradiction. Gerald's later struggle is to reconcile the opposite, to obliterate it, or be stifled himself.

Halliday himself revels in the torment of Minette's return from the country, -where she was supposed to have had a child. When she knifes his hand, he objects hotly, but with equal fervor, he submits to her abuse. When Gerald sleeps with his mistress, Ninette changes her role from that of Oppressor to that of Victim. And her reactions to him stimulate Gerald's desire to do something to violate her. She invites the pillage of her body and always gives this impression of devastation to her lovers.

Her inchoate look of the violated slave, whose fulfillment lies in her further and further violation, made his nerves quiver with acutely desirable sensation. After all, he was the only

lift Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 72. 39

-will, she was the passive substance of his will.

He tingled -with subtle biting sensation. By sleeping with Gerald in Halliday's apartment, Minette is further violating her previous lover, gaining power over him in inflicting the pain which he himself desires. Halliday provides hospitably the tool, the bed and the room, whereby she can wield the weapon of control over him, just as he provides the knife which she uses to jab him with at the Pompador. The victimized Minette, whom Gerald finds lying beside him, is but the reflected image of the psychically crucified Halliday. The mind is extinct for these aesthetes. They do not want to know, only to feel, to experience. But like Hermione, the feeling is generated by the emotional activity of the wish, the preplanned desire, and the inevitable fulfillment of defilement. And all the while the mirrors of mental awareness of the spoiling reflects the feelings and the events ad infinitum. Just as Tom and Winifred become the willing cogs of the industrial system, so do the intellectuals become the willing instruments of torture for each other's pleasure and pain. Power is gained and lost, exercised and submitted to, for the floods of sensuality which it thereby releases. The corruption of all these characters is not that there is a master, but that one should willingly consent

I+9Ibid.. p. 72. bO to be slave, "the passive substance of [another's] will."5® The mastery is artificially awarded, arbitrarily assigned by prescribed roles of behavior, not intuitively felt between individuals. Tom and Winifred gain control by allegiance to the science-machine5 Heriiii one inherits her dominance with her estate; Halliday and Minette alternately wear the tattered cloak of power arbitrarily. There is no real basis for mastery other than the existing order. There is no integral recognition of individuality in oneself, no person who stimulates respect for his person. The African process and the clear light of the Nordic will, when sought as ends in themselves, leave the chaos of values which Lawrence presents in the industrial, intellectual wastelands of his novels.

5°Ibid., P. 72. CHAPTER III

THE THEORY OF BALANCE: A GOOD TIGHT PUNT

Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre. Heraclitus In the Wasteland, opposition means conflict to the death, one individual becoming victor over the other, sucking the vitality of the victim. Life becomes essentially parasitic. Like Heraclitus, Lawrence perceives the necessary strife between, opposites, but the conflict leads to the creation of a new and vital bond. Like the lyre and the bow, man and woman must bring forth the secret and unexpected note of harmony, which will put them at balance with each other. The sexual mystery of union forms the basis of all Lawrence's philosophy. The inexplicable drive for man to fulfill himself in woman and for woman to complete herself in man forms the significant tie between Lawrence and the historical heritage of the twentieth century. The recognition of the power of personal transformation via sexual intercourse is the basis of both Nietzsche's and Schopenhauer's concepts of will. Nietzsche calls the sexual drive the imminent expression of the will to power; Schopenhauer refers to it as the primary aspect of the Irrational driving man to action. h2

Nietzsche's praise of the phallic impulse is evident in his interpretation of the cult of Dionysus in ancient Greece. For it is only in the Dionysian mysteries, in the psychology of the Dionysian state that the funda- mental fact of the Hellenic instinct—its will-to- live—is expressed. What did the Hellene secure himself with these mysteries? Eternal life, . . . real life conceived as the collective prolongation of life through procreation through the mysteries of sexuality. Schopenhauer finds the sex drive the most immediate aspect of the Irrational will. He maintains that the genitals are direct objectification of the will, a manifestation of function to perpetuate the flux of existence. But Schopenhauer's philosophy is not merely an investi- gation of. the nature of will, the irrational; it is also a vindication of Idea as a form of reality. Schopenhauer's chief contribution to philosophy is his realization that all rationalization is based on illogical premises, unprovable subjective statements. There is a definite polarity between the two in man's formation of concepts of himself and his world. Thus, he sounds very much like Lawrence when he dis- cusses the genitals as the primary force for the continuation of strife and flux of existence.

. . . the genitals are properly the foe us of will, and consequently the opposite pole of the brain,

^ >riedriech Nietzsche, The' Philosophy £f Nietzsche, edited by Geoffrye Clive (New York, 1965), p. 75. ^3

the representative of knowledge, i , the other side of the world, world as idea.^ Lawrence's terms to describe a similar internal relationship of polarity are found in Fantasia of the Unconscious. The internal balance is between plexuses and planes of knowledge, the "Primal consciousness" being centered in the correct relationship of ganglia and plexuses to each other. Thought is relegated to another area of discussion. Thought ... is instrumental only, the soul's finest instrument for the business of living. Thought is just a means to action and living. But life and action take rise actually at the great centres of dynamic consciousness.3 Both Schopenhauer and Lawrence agree that the vitality of

procreation is the primary means of attaining immortality,

that is, life-renewal in time. Consummation means a psychic

and a literal death through fruition and further growth.

Idea tries to arrest the process of becoming in order to

sustain the permanence of tranquility. Thereby, strife,

struggle, and motion characterize the individual alive in

time. The polarity which exists within the individual between

will and idea is also seen duplicated in the balanced re-

lations of man and woman, the achievement of which is only

O Arthur Schopenhauer, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. edited by Irwin Edman (New York"7"l 9 ), p. 27H~» ^D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconsc Fantasia of the Unconscious (New York, 19^7), p. 7^~» bk attainable through struggle. Satisfactory [sex1] . . . demands that the definite degree of his manhood shall exactly correspond to the definite degree of her -womanhood; so that the one-sidedness of each exactly annuls that of the other.^

The polarity of the sexes manifests itself in the comple- mentary fulfillment of individual physical and psychical inadequacies.5 Both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have carefully defined ideas concerning the achievement of balance bet-ween the sexes: they both perceive the male as honest, courageous, proud, capable, and objective; the -woman as weak, cunning, evasive, deceptive and subjective. The role of -woman bearer of the race makes her weak. Her interests are confined to the expedient exploitation of the male and the male world so as to assure herself of security for herself and for her 6 children. Nietzsche develops an analogy between nations and the role that women play towards men, which H. L. Mencken cites. We have seen how a weak nation, unable, on account of its weakness, to satisfy its will to survive and thirst for power by forcing its authority upon other nations, turns to the task of keeping these other nations . . . from enforcing their authority upon it. Realizing that it cannot rule, but must serve, it endeavors to make the conditions of its

^Schopenhauer, Thg Philosophy of Schopenhauer, p. 358. ^Ibid.. pp. 358-361.

%. L. Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (Boston, 1913), pp. 17^-177. k5

servitude as bearable as possible. The effort is commonly made in two ways: first, by ostensible renouncing its desire to rule, and secondly, by attempts to inoculate its powerful neighbors with its ideas in subterranean and round about ways, so as to avoid arousing their suspicion and opposition.' Woman cannot prevail by force so she circumvents her masters by the diversions of coquetry, cajolery, hypocrisy and dis- simulation. She cannot meet open opposition because her forces are not strong enough to stand confrontation. There- fore, male dominance must continually assert itself over the unconscious undermining of the female will. It is natural and eventually beneficial that the conflict exists, but the male must always have the principal power for there to be an harmonious relationship of essential maleness and essential femaleness.

These are the reactions of two men aware of the decadence O of the idolized lady, and of her growing power through social emancipation. In recognizing woman as idol, civilization renounced its masculinity, suffered the castration.by the Christian ideal, and became meek and humble. Accepting woman as superior amounts to a total disruption of the natural flow of the will as a life force. In the philosophy of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, woman is not capable of extended

7Ibid., pp. 175-176. Q Arthur Schopenhauer, The Pessimist's Handbook, edited by Helen E. Barnes, translated by T. Bailey Saunders (Lincoln, Nebraska, 196*+), p. 215» it 6 responsibility; -when she tries to assume this as a role, she inevitably renounces her power for the fulfillment of herself as woman. Schopenhauer notes this proneness to relinquish social responsibility for the.security of the hearth in the last paragraph of his famous essay on women: That -woman is by nature meant to obey may be seen by the fact that every -woman who is placed in the unnatural position of complete independence, immediately attaches herself to some man, by whom she allows herself to be guided and ruled. It is because she needs a lord and master. If she is young, it will be a lover; if she is old, a priest.9 Lawrence does not reduce his women to the role of marionettes to wiser manipulating males. He fully believes that woman must achieve her full development of her individual self. However, the necessary condition for fruition of psychic health is relation, relation to a lover. Man does guide her and bring her to a fuller self-realization, which she cannot achieve alone. Nathan Scott finds in Lawrence's female characters a basis for the assumption that Lawrence himself distrusted women. He states that Lawrence has a "profound despair over the possibility of our achieving a 'balanced polarity' in the sexual relation—a despair which probably derives . . . from his persistent distrust of Woman and of her irrationality and unpredictability.""10 But

9 lb id. 1%athan A. Scott, Jr., Rehearsals of Discomposure (New York, 1952)s p. 1U8. ^7

Lawrence is at least willing to let his heroines try to overcome their ego-oriented selves. The women in Lawrence's true unions, like Ursula Brangwen and Kate Leslie, relinquish a mystic part of self to the higher power and mystery of the male—.i.e., in Birkin and Cipriano. They let the man guide them to new discoveries of being. Thus, there is an advocacy of-a type of male dominance over the female; but it is not one consciously enforced over the woman; it is the primordial natural role of the sexes. Like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Lawrence believes fully in the struggle for sexual balance. Very often when the male, because of social and ideational castration, is not able to meet the demands of the essential female, he is destroyed by her, eaten, consumed; he begins the death-in-life cycle of victimization which characterizes all decadent existence in Lawrence's novels.

Vital sexuality is the basis for all creative existence. The sensual aspect of the vitalism suggests pain, experience, re-evaluation, decision. Sexuality reaches all aspects of life and influences it profoundly. Just as the mechanized world of Hermione, Tom Brangwen, Jr., and Winifred Inger all distort, sterilize, and pervert life by making existence conform to their narrow expectation, so does true sexuality restore, renovate, renew, make moving, alive. All thinking reflects the vital processes of sexuality. U8

. . . our thoughts must be continually born to us out of our pain and we must, mother like, share -with them all that -we have in us of blood, heart, order, joy, passion, pang, conscience, fate, and fatality.1'

Lawrence's terms for expressing a similar view of life based on perpetual renewal are quite similar to those which Nietzsche chose to use. The business of living is to travel away from the source (sexuality!/. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must arise every dadflyV afresh nntout. onf thpe finvkdark seQPQa onf t.htheo bloodhi nnri . 1 2 The distortion created by the emasculation of the male in modern industrialized society is all too evident in the \ novels. But Lawrence carefully underlies his intent with subtle water imagery of oceans, seas, pools, lakes, tears, and rain. The imagery of water usually designates irrational / force, Schopenhauer's will, "the dark sea of the blood." The reaction of characters'to water is a sure indication also of the psychic imbalance that afflicts them or of the stability of balance which they have been able to achieve. When the water is dammed, it unleashes its force unexpectedly; when it is channelled, it leaps its boundaries; when it is frozen into ice, it solidifies and stifles all that dares to remain within it. Closely correlated with the revengeful will is the imagery of boats, which consistently depicts the couples sailing on the turbulent waters, of passion in the crafts of love.

11Nietzsche, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, p. 119. ^Lawrence, Fantasia, p. 210. ^9

Water itself as it flows violently or passively throagh the novels is the clearest manifestation of the life force itself and the revenge the life force takes when it is dis- torted either by mental channelling, or pare outpouring release. Like Schopenhauer, Lawrence realizes the pure reliance upon the unconscious is not in itself adequate answer to the question of man's life in a modern mechanized environment. In The Rainbow, the death of Tom Brangwen, Sr. by the flood of incessant rains emulates the tide of the unconscious which he is relenting to in his own psychic being. Tom Brangwen remains sensitive to the world of change which en- croaches on his land by railroads and industry and presents itself in the persistent questions concerning causes of his step-daughter, Anna, but his vague dissatisfaction with causes'^ is immured by his reliance upon the unconscious life. In avoiding conscious awareness and its subsequent frustration, he drowns his perception in drunkenness. His reliance upon only this mode of being is in fact symbolized ironically by his immersion in the flood at the Marsh as he stumbles in the water looking for the first cause of the high water.

"So Tom Brangwen dies, drunk as Noah to forget the wearying puzzles of middle age, drowned in a flood of rain."1** His

1 ^Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York, 1967), p. 101. ^Marvin Murdick, "The Originality of The Rainbow." A IL Ex. Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore (Carbon- dale, Illinois, 1959), p. 68. 50 soliloquy on the rain as he stands outside the tavern getting ready to go home illustrates his position. He asks his horse • if . . the rain-water wash {esj the sense in, or does it wash it out.'"15 He even tries to rationalize the overwhelming presence of water in terms of the scientific cycle. "'There's np more to-day than there was a thousand years ago—nor no less either. You can't wear water out. . . . Try to wear it out and it takes its hooks into vapour, it has its fingers at its nose to you.'"1^ Then upon gaining the security of the house, Tom goes out again to settle the horse for the night and is again confronted with the mysterious water. Ironically, Tom leaves the horse shed to find the source of the teeming waters, and in so doing is swept away: He went to meet the running flood, sinking deeper and deeper. His soul was full of great astonish- ment. He had to go and look where it came from, though the ground was going from under his feet. He went on towards the pond shakily.'' It is predictable that Tom will meet this end. He is caught between the quiet tradition and content of his wife and the persistent questions of Anna. He does not want conscious knowledge; he has the dark mystery of life with Lydia, which is reflected in the March productivity. His choice is sub- mersion in the unconscious life, but that in itself is not

^Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 2k "\, l6Ibid.. p. 2k2. 17Ibid., p. 2*43. 51 enough. His complete immersion is his final death. But it is not an evil end. He comes to the destiny of fruition of all mankind, death, and he goes to meet it. He has led a full life in balance with his world; he is ripe for another form of existence. So, in a way, he is reborn through those same destructive waters.

Tom Brangwen is the Noah of the twentieth century. The promise of the Rainbow is that further generations will escape the flood of flux, of the purely unconscious life. They must now grapple with the problems created by the contradictions of awareness and feeling. There can be no more great floods, complete destruction of selves in pure flux. Modern man must struggle with the difficult balance between will and reason, between creativity and determinism, between Nordic and African consciousness. Thus the Rainbow attains fuller significance in that it indicates a climactic breaking point between the past and the future; it promises both new development and degeneration. The Rainbow as a traditional symbol assures the re-establishment of order between the waters and the earth, between blind drive and conscious choice. Because of the allegorical promise of the rainbow, no character other than Tom Brangwen, Sr. is destroyed by flood waters. All of the friends of Ursula dawdle dangerously in dammed-up rivers and ponds, but they are never swept away by the natural flood. Bathing and swimming throughout The Rainbow and Women 52 in Love is a sure indication of decadence, of a conscious indulging in the sensations of sexual spontaneity; it is never a full commission of self to the cycle of creative regenerative death through fruition.

Winifred Inger is a well-trained swimmer. She can hold her own against the currents of passion. She is described as being like Diana, goddess of the moon, lifter of tides.18 She invites Ursula for a weekend at her cabin at the Soar and seduces the young student as it rains outside. The two then bathe at night, Winifred carrying the entranced Ursula down to the water. Once there, the rain comes down in a "sudden ice-cold shower.1,19

A whole team of athletic swimmers appear at Hermione's party at Breadalby, among them Gerald Crich, whom Gudrun has previously seen both swimming in the water ("Diver," Chapter IV) and boating on it ("Sketchbook," Chapter X). He is the real master of the water, "the Nibelung"20 who finds himself perfect and immune in the water.21 In the chapter entitled "Yaterparty" (XIV), Gerald is then, too, "responsible for the water."22 Gerald himself seems to have a very special connection with water, an aspect of his character which is

l8 1 Ibi£., p. 336. 9ibid.T p. 339. ?0 ^ Lawrence, Women in Love (New York, 1966), p. I4O. 21 Ibid. 22lbid.. p. 152. 53 more fully developed farther in the novel. Sir Joshua, an antiquated anthropologist-guest at Breadalby is described as being part of a great "'primeval -world, -when great lizards crawled about. ",23 Miss Bradley, the athletic emanpipated female, is given animalistic qualities. "... Miss Bradley . . . plump and big and wet, looked as if she might roll and slither'in the water, almost like one of the slithering sea lions at the Zoo."2*4 The Italian countess, who looks like a dainty statue of ivory and gold, is transformed in the

water to a "quiet silent, water rat."25 Hermione herself seems to be "powerful and unconscious in the water,"26 something like a dozing crocodile? It is significant here, too, that Ursula, Gudrun, and Birkin refuse to bathe. A clue to the corruption of Gudrun's character is given in her confession that she does swim but does not at this time because of her dislike for the amphibious crowd.2?

The immersion of these people in water parodies the final imbalance of Tom Brangwen. Tom's self"immersion is at least subconsciously performed in accordance with a natural cycle. The intellects of Breadalby and Shortlands choose to dive far below the surface of existence into the perfect inolated world of primordial water, just as they choose to

23 lb id., p. 9*4. ibid. 2''Ibid. 26 lb id. 27Ibid.. p. 95. 5U plunge below the surface of consciousness to derive the isolated tingling of sensation from each other. They actually drive themselves to react passionately in given circumstances. Tom Brangwen dies in the swarming flood of irrational creative flux; these tantalize themselves with the tingling sensations of fruitless passion. These enjoy the emulation of death after their separate and individual climaxes. It is a release from self, not a development.

Gerald, the Uebermensch. finally realizes the cold fatality of water as he dives into the Willey Water searching for the bodies of his sister Diana and her fiancee. He is horrified at the extent of the world below the surface, just as he is to be horrified by the world which exists under the surface of his conscious will. "'There's a current cold as hell.ni28 Birkin's dark river of corruption has been made present physically, culturally, and psychically. Gerald seems fated even now to realize that the dark river contains more than the two for whom he is searching. "'If once you die .'. . then it's over, it's finished. "Why come to life again? There's room under that water there for thou- sands. "'29 Does he realize that he and Gudrun are already in the vast tide of sensationalistic decadent experience? His fate is momentarily foretold when the body of Diana is

28lbid.. p. 175. 29Ibid., p. 176. 55

found, the death grasp of her hands choking her lover,

bringing him down -with her.30 He will try to bring the same fate on Gudrun, by choking her and bringing her into final annihilation with him. As Gudrun turns out the womanly lights on her boat, she becomes the full goddess, like Diana, witch of the moon, stealing the power of her light from the son; she saps the masculine power of the Nordic light-bringer, the industrial magnate.

"Water Party" foretells Gudrun's final victory in the struggle between her and Gerald, as well as begins it. Gudrun, who has been dancing before the Crich cattle, stops long enough to tell Gerald that she fears neither the cattle nor him and strikes him on the face. Both realize that the sex struggle has begun, initiated by this overt action. Gerald recognizes this beginning: "'You have struck the first blow'" to which Gudrun replies with prophetic intuition,

"'And I shall strike the last.'"31 Their relationship is marked to the last by each one striving with Faustian drive to experience all that the other is and has. In the industrial world, Gerald rules over the inert Matter by force of his personal will. "And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The subjugation itself was the point, the fight, the be-all, the fruits of victory were mere results."32

3°Ibid .. p. 1 81 . 31 Ibid. 32ibld.. p. 216. 56

Gerald applies the same principle to his Arabian mare^3 to the Pussum, and he intends to work it on Gudrun, too. Just as Gudrun and Gerald are initiating their struggle, Birkin is describing the dark river to Ursula; it is the river of dissolution, decay, the sensuous means of a struggle to the death. "The other River, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea ... It is your reality, nevertheless, . . . that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls—the black river of corruption And our flowers are of this—our sea-born Aphrodite, all our -white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality nowadays." . . . When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution—then the snakes and swans and lotus and march-flowers-- and Gudrun and Gerald-"born in the process of destructive creation.3h

Complete immersion in this sensuous river of sexuality results in a struggle to the death with universal forces. As Gudrun and Gerald float on the Willey Water, Gerald lapses out, feels that his self has been subsumed by objects, things around him. "Now he had let go, imperceptibly he was melting into oneness with the whole. It was like a pure, perfect sleep, his first great sleep of life."35 (Diana's perfect sleep of death.)

33 lb id.. p. 103.

3^ Ibid.Thirl-,. p-n.- 16^. 35 Ibid., p. 170. 57

The dark river is Lawrence's most specific description of Schopenhauerean will, which unconsciously impels all creation, all natural processes, but which, if given full acquiescence, drives one surely and ultimately to destruction. Lawrence significantly names the lake at Shortlands, where Diana dies, the Willey ¥ater, and Birkin is the one who finally lets down the dam and releases the pent water behind it which has snatched her life. It is Birkin1s serious problem whether or not he and Ursula are immersed wholly in the dark river; he realizes that they necessarily are rooted in the river. Ursula asks Birkin if they are born in the "process of destructive creation," and he must concede that they, too, are. "'In part, certainly. Whether we are that in toto, I

don't know yet.'"36 Total immersion means giving up of the self (to either sensation or idealism) rather than extending it. The destructive creation which results is manifest in the image of the lily. "'Some people are pure flowers of dark corruption—lilies. But there ought to be some roses,

warm and flamy. You know Heraclitus says 'a dry soul is best.'"37 And how is one to keep his soul dry, apart from the turbulent river of darkness? The answer can be found in the significant symbolism of boats. One retains his separateness from the flood by a correct balance. Individually, it is

36 lb id.. p. 16U. 37ibid. 58 the balance within the self bet-ween -will and reason. In relationship, it is the correct role of man to woman; literally it is the balance bet-ween the elements of the earth and of •water.

Gerald and Gudrun are in a canoe, an unwieldy mode of transport for these heaving tides, as they drift back to the party at Shortlands soon after their challenges have been given and accepted. Ursula and Birkin are in a boat, Birkin rowing ahead of Gudrun and Gerald. Gerald and Gudrun, though fated for a terrible struggle, seem here to have achieved the serenity of balance. They are both separate, yet contained, within the protective unity of the canoe. Both seem to realize the content of this unity which they momentarily. share: "There is a space between us," he said in the same low unconscious voice as if something were speaking out of him. And she was magically aware of their being balanced in separation in the boat. She swooned with acute comprehension and pleasure. "But I am verv near." she said. . . . "Yet distant, distant."38

Yet within moments the serenity is disturbed by the announce- ment of Diana's fall into the water. And immediately Gerald leaves the boat-balance to dive into the shadowy realm to try to find his sister. That this stability will be disturbed is prefigured by the fact that the balance in the boat is not a true one based on a sexual polarity. Gudrun is paddling

38 lb id., p. 169. 59 and steering the canoe, giving the couple direction, as Gerald sinks into unconsciousness. She has assumed the masculine role and can see the unity of her sister and her lover as they precede her boat. Gerald is wounded, marked like Cain. He, too, has killed his brother. His hand has been caught in machinery and he is unable to assume the male polar role for his female. That he will topple into the water is inevitable. Even Gudrun realizes it. Her first exclamation at hearing of Diana's accident is, "'¥asn!t this bound to happen?'"39 ^3 Gerald begins almost convulsively to dive again and again, searching, trying to find the sister image of himself in the -water, an unconscious Narcissus slowly wreaking his own death.

Ursula and Birkin appear earlier in connection with boats. Ursula herself is seen in a swing boat with Skrebensky in The Rainbow, and she visits a family who lives in a boat on the canal close to the Marsh. Here she gives her name and a jeweled necklace to a baby who has just come. The isolated life of the family itself is represented by the boa(t, which moors only occasionally and floats alone with calm self- sufficiency. There is another boat sequence in the chapters of ,Women in Love. "Sketchbook" (X) and "An Island" (XI). These chapters have to do with .the initial encounters of Gerald with Gudrun and of Birkin with Ursula. In "Sketchbook"

39Ibid.. p. 171. 60

Gudrun is sitting in the Willey Yater slowly sketching phallic water plants when Hermione and Gerald see her and row up to her to chat. Here Hermione is calling out directions to Gerald, telling him where to direct the boat as he rows. They stop to talk with Gudrun, and she offers to let them inspect her drawing. As Gerald reaches to take the drawing from Hermione, she drops it so as to let it fall into the water. Gerald must retrieve it and lean awkwardly out of the boat, stretching to get it. He leaned far out of the boat reaching into the water. He could feel his position was ridiculous, his loins exposed behind him. "It is of no importance," came the strong clanging voice of Gudrun. She seemed to touch him.- But he reached further, the boat swayed violently. Hermione, however, remained unper- turbed. He grasped the book under the water and brought it up dripping. Gerald manages his position with Hermione in his boat; she is a creature of personal will, like himself. He can hate her for making him look ridiculous, and not let her have power over him. But Gudrun senses even now that she and he are joined in an unallowable union, that they are each other's

fates. The bond was established between them in that look, in her tone. . . . She made the understanding clear—they were of the same kind he and she, a kind of diabolic freemasonry existed between them. Henceforward, she knew she had her power over him. I-Jherever they met, they would be secretly associated. And he would be helpless in the association with her

lf0 Lf1 Ibid.. p. 113. Jbid.s p. 11^. 61

Gerald, though "responsible for the -water" is perpetually unbalanced -with it.

Birkin, contrarily, has the perception and ability to float, master, and direct his. own boat. 'While Gudrun in rejoicing in her secret power, Ursula is meeting Birkin, who is making his punt watertight in the chapter entitled "An

Island" (XI). He asks her if she thinks he is doing the repair work correctly, since she is the daughter of Will

Brangwen, the shop teacher in the school system which Birkin supervises. "'You are your father's daughter, so you can tell me if it will do. She is not only the daughter of a specific man, a skilled mechanic, but within his name a clearer relation is ascertainable. She is the daughter of

Will, the unconscious natural force of life. It is significant that Birkin hails her in this way to check for leaks in the boat, which could dump him into the strange, powerful

Willey Water. The heritage of Brangwen Noah's rainbow is passed to Ursula. "Ursula, the daughter of Will and Anna, is the child of the Cathedral experience.And she is the child which Anna herself presents to the Rainbow of promise.1114

The punt leaks a little, but as Birkin points out, he would bob back to the top of the water if the boat should

Lf2Ibid.. p. 115.

^Horace Gregory, Th§ Pilgrim of the ADOcalvcse (New York, 1933), p. 37. Lj.1^ Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 193. 62 tarn him over.**5 He takes Ursula to an island "where they engage in arguments about love, self-development, and humanity. They thwart each other but they re-establish their mysterious, nebulous relation by floating rafts and boats, each of their own making. Picking a daisy he dropped it on the pond so that the stem was a keel, the flower floated like a •water-lily, staring -with its open face up to sky. It turned slowly round, in a slow, slow Dervish dance as it veered away. . . . Ursula turned to look. A strange feeling possessed her, as if something were taking place. But it was all intangible. And some sort of control was being put on her. She could not know. She could only watch the brilliant little disks of the daisies veering slowly in travel on the dark, lustrous.water...... "Look," he said, "your boat of purple paper is,escorting them, and they are a convoy of rafts."4® Ursula made the purple boat out of the paper which had wrapped a piece of chocolate.. The independence of each is here definitely drawn. Each can maintain his bouyance on the waters, of passion, and the course of rafts of flowers and the boat of paper show that Ursula and Birkin will-sail together. "Surely these two people seem marked for salvation. We feel the full force of this episode only when the Gudrun- Gerald-in-the-canoe episode provides it pendant and contrast.

^Lawrence, Women in Lovet p. 116. ^Ibid.. p. 123.

^Angelo P. Bertocci, "Symbolism in Women in Love." in A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore (Carbondale, Illinois, 1959), p. 91. 63

Birkin describes the relationship that he -wants -with Ursula in terms of balance and polarity.

But I want us to be together without bothering about ourselves—to be really together because vje are together, as if it were a phenomenon- not a thing we have to maintain by our effort.^"

Here is the balance which is needed to prevent a dousing and possible drowning in the dark river of personal passion. The important distinction between the Gerald and Gudrun relationship and that of Ursula and Birkin is the inherent separateness and integrity which Ursula and Birkin enjoy together. There is no victimization of one by the other; there is no dogmatic leadership of one by the other. Yet Birkin does manage to dissuade Ursula from her personal concept of love into a more pervasive, involving role with him. What they gain, they achieve together, each depending upon the other, but their mutual dependence is not an escape from their separate individuality. Gerald is perpetually seeking to escape from himself through Gudrun, and his increasing dependency on her for this function finally completely in- capacitates him to take any action whatever. The same power Gerald exercises over Matter and over his Arabian mare and the Pussum he would like to put over Gudrun. Gudrun herself wants the "experience of being married"1*9 to add to her long repertoire of recommendations to the aesthetic intellectual

^Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 2^2. ' 149Ibid., p. 1. 6b world of the Continent. This attitude reveals her sensual quest for pure sensation. Both consider the other as finite experiences; each savors his own separate "lapsing out" "without regard to the other. They are each other's instruments. There is no creative outburst of growth between them. There is only the ever-increasing rolling river of temporal ennui. Gerald's failure to bring Gudrun into his -willed power is the result of his ever-increasing dependency on her for regenerative energy. When his father dies, Gerald blindly seeks her at her parents' house and seeks revitalization through sexual experience. His dependency is just perceived in "Sketchbook" as he stretches for the tablet in the water, feeling vulnerable and challenged, and in "Water Party" when he relinquishes the canoe to her and slips into the abyss of selflessness. She has aroused him to life, but she has doubly tied him to her. The Master of the Pussum becomes the Slave-victim of the Earth Mother, the moon goddess.

seems unable to support himself beyond a woman's orbit. ... he fails to lead a creative, purposive existence of his own, and apparently here in the realm of spiritual satisfaction, has can- celled out £he significance of his sensual enrichment. Like Tom Brangwen, Jr. and Winifred Inger, Gerald attains freedom in service to the machine industry and the coal mine. "He was God of the machine."^ Here in the world of

^OSpilka, Love Ethic, p. 1. ^ Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 215» 65 industry he can exercise his power, feel it coursing through himself as he affects changes in his environment, controls the lives of other men. Serving the machine justifies his existence. But the machine world turns all those -who enter it -wholly into its instruments. And Gerald with his cold Nordic -will is no exception. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained calm, calculative, and healthy, and quite freely deliberate even whilst he felt with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic reason was breaking way now. . . .52 He looks to Gudrun to revive those centres of feeling and then attaches himself to her with parasitic dependency, only to be rejected and destroyed by her. Ursula and Birkin, however, do manage to achieve a polarity of balance which neither sucks nor saps either-, but genuinely renews. The absorbing sensuality of Gerald in- volves his seeking his identity through and in the love object; two become one through the abnegation of self by one or the other. Ursula and Birkin achieve an impersonal love in which both recognize the independence of the other and the inherent difference between each; two become one by partaking of the sensual experience which results in a regenerative growth in active responsibility, socially and personally. Lawrence insists ... on the uniqueness of the individual soul. . . . equality of spirit is a falsehood . . . ; spiritually there is pure

2 ^ Ibid.. p. 225. 66

difference, intrinsic otherness bet-ween one man and the next.53 The "radically unchanged element" is a primordial affinity to the life force, Schopenhauer's will which unifies and isolates all existence as it takes form in tangible things. This connection with the life force is drying up in Gerald and the disassociation is mimicked again by the environment in which the final chapters take place. The dangerous insurgent tides of the Willey Water are becalmed as Gerald's relationship with Gudrun develops and place changes to the frosty Tyrol, where the sterility of frozen, hardened ice governs growth. Gerald becomes- the pure manifestation of that cold Nordic will which changes all things into machines, all life into intellect. Even his relationship with Gudrun is not only his means of stimulating the lingering life impulse of sexual passion, but it is also the arousing of Gerald's mechanical will of nullification, which he must ultimately direct toward himself. Gudrun rejects him, finds herself unfulfilled in him.

The climax of sensual reaction, once reached in any direction, is reached finally, there is no going on. There is only repetition possible, or the going apart of the two protagonists, or the subjugating of the one will to the other, or death.5h

He has only shared- with her the sensual reaction of his

-^Spiika, Love Ethic, p. 111. ^Lawrence, Women in Love, p. UU3. 6 7 mechanic mind. Once he perceives the dark pit of despair within him, which his "side-show" affair with Gudrun has been unable to mask, he allows himself to slip into it, as the despairing swimmer glides to the bottom of the dark underworlds of water. "Lawrence does not have his Siegfried killed by a boar-spear; he dies a 'psychological' death when his will-to- live is broken."^ The waters of the life force gush forth in Gerald's attempt to murder Gudrun, but abate quickly, leaving only the cold pit within. As he falls into the valley, "the navel of the mystic world,"^ his death in the snow strangely recalls the death of his sister, Diana, who also died in the mountains and valleys of the underworld of the Willey Water.57

What Ursula and Birkin gain through fruition in degeneration and death of one- aspect of self, Gerald and Gudrun turn into an ultimate aim. The fall into chaos is thrilling, though finally without purpose.

Gudrun and Loerke, though they seem to have the potential for a creative relationship, are ultimately bound to the fate of the English Bohemians. They are the fleurs du mal, in- terested in the infinite world of sensation of slow degene- rative reduction. There is no ripening and fruition, only

^Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D. H. (New York, 1951), p. 163. ^Lawrence, Women in Love, p. H00. 5?Ibid., p. 180. 68 decay. The unpolarized electricity of sensation will finally barn them, too. There was only the inner, individual darkness, sensation, within the ego, the obscene religious mystery of ultimate reduction, the mystic frictional activi- ties of diabolic reducing down, disintegrating the vital organic body of life.5° The African will of disintegration becomes the goal of the artistic life. The future which Gudrun and Loerke playfully describe in conversation of a world split into two is being created by them in the new relationship that they share. "... a man invented such a perfect explosive that it blew the earth in two, and the two halves set off in different directions through space, to the dismay of the inhabitants; or else the people of the world divided into two halves and each half decided .it was perfect and right, the other half was wrong and must be destroyed; . . ."59 The world is

split in two; male is against female hurtling through the night of space with no relation, and, of course, they do destroy each other, just as Gudrun has caused the death of Gerald. Man is a combination of the Nordic will and the African passion. He must accept both within himself, and allow them to achieve a reciprocal balance within himself. Then and only then is the individual capable of relationship. Each man and woman is isolate, alone, independent and different.

lb id., p. UU3. 59 ib id.. p. 69

Bat fall self development is achieved through meaningful relationship -which ever ripens through a balance. It is the balance of becoming, of star equilibrium, the matching of maleness against femaleness that which allows the irrational •will to work itself out to fruition and to the fulfillment of the individuals. Ironically, one achieves selfhood to feel the complete immersion of the self in the creative flux tides of the unknown irrational will of Schopenhauer. Attempts to alter its course, inevitably lead to perversion and destruction. But Lawrence never felt that this could be accomplished fully within the relationships of man and woman. Man's relation to his fellow man is also painfully crippling him; his contact with cosmic unity is negligible, too, because there is no link, no relationship. The original source of the societal evil resides in the warped relations of the Gudruns, Geralds, Loerkes, and Hermoines of our world, and after the problem is rectified between a given man and woman, there is a whole world of society which must be renewed. The creative will, what Lawrence calls the primal consciousness, must be found by all and extended in all directions and actions with others. CHAPTER I?

CONTACT OF THE LEADER: PERSONAL AND COSMIC

82 "It is a weariness to labour for the same masters and be ruled by them." 83 "It.rests by changing." Heraclitus

The electric affinity which Birkin and Ursula share is based upon the sexual impulse in man. Their union inspires both to a vitalization of their inner selves. In that Birkin awakens in Ursula the drive to personal fulfillment through relation to himself, so she recognizes him as a guide to the life renewal. To a "natural" leader this concept of affinity forms the basis of the thought behind Lawrence's later novels, Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent. The idea is derived from Schopenhauer, but politics is the dynamics of power, and, therefore, Lawrence's philosophy here is more akin to a Nietzschean concept of will.

In his Fantasia of the Unconscious. Lawrence defines the nature of man in terms of internal, balanced opposites. All meaningful relationships continue this correspondence of planes and plexuses. Recognition of the sexual polarity leaves the man free to act in his society. According to Lawrence, consciousness emanates from itself in the body through two great plexuses located in the thorax and the

70 71 abdomen. From these two centers of feeling and subjective knowledge emanate the three electrical circuits of relation by which man orients himself in the external -world. The electrical circuits which constitute life are not all completed within the individual. There are three groups of circuits: those which run from one center to another within the individual; those which run between individuals; and those which run between an individual and the non-human cosmos.1

Man must also establish meaningful contact with other men if his being is to be unimpaired. Birkin, in Women in Love. desires to establish this contact with Gerald and strives to do so in spite of Gerald's efforts to put him off. He looked at Gerald with clear, happy eyes of discovery. Gerald looked down at him, attracted, so deeply bondaged in fascinated attraction, that he was mistrustful, resenting the bondage, hating the attraction. "We will swear to each other, one day, shall . we?" pleaded Birkin. "We will swear to stand by each other—be true to each other—ultimately— infallibly—given to each other organically— without possibility of taking back." . . . Gerald just touched the extended fine, living hand, as if withheld and afraid. "We'll leave it till I understand it better," he said, in a voice of excuse.2 In refusing Birkin's offer of Blutbruderschaft. Gerald only leaves himself more vulnerable to the death wish impulse which finally overcomes him in Switzerland. Even at this point, Birkin has an intimation of Gerald's fatalism. "He seemed now to see, not the physical, animal man, . . . but

1Eric Bentley, A Century of Hero Worship (Boston. 1957)» p. 230. 2D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York, 1966), p. 199• 72 the man himself, complete, and as if fated, doomed, limited."3 The two men do seem to consummate their relationship with each other in spite of Gerald's conscious rejection in the wrestling bout at Shortlands. As they struggle together in the darkness, the physical contact of their bodies establishes an understanding which no objective work or abstract phrase could adequately describe. But even here, Birkin is gently rejected by Geralds who lets go the binding handclasp before they both swoon into oblivion.14 The temporary kinship is absolved later by Gerald's conscious actions, and Birkin is left at the end of the novel in a "state of grievous pathos without him."5 Birkin is left with a star polarity with Ursula, but he has no male counterpart to go with him in* effecting a purposive existence in society. Lawrence spent a great deal of time attempting to define the needed connection between men that is more than friendship and less than homosexuality, based upon that surge of natural impulse similar to the sexual drive between man and woman. The major difference between the bond of man-to-man and that of man-to-woman is not its sexual basis, but the direction which it takes. The relationship of man-to-woman

3 Ibid. ^Lawrence, "Women in Love, p. 26k. .%ark Schorer, "Women in Love and Death," in D. H. Lawrence: Collection of Critical Essays. edited by Mark Spilka (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1963"), p7 60. 73 tends to be self-sufficient once it is established. The relation of man-to-man is founded upon deep, sensual feeling, but it is expressed in meaningful action, in purposive deeds. In The Fantasia of the Unconscious. Lawrence attempts to elucidate the roles of men to each other.

Is this new polarity, this new circuit of passion between comrades and co-workers, is this also sexual? It is a vivid circuit of polarized passion. Is it hence sex? It is not. Because what are the poles of positive connection?--the upper, busy poles. What is the dynamic contact?—a unison in spirit, in understanding, and a pure commingling in one great work. A mingling of the individual passion into one great purpose."

In Aaron's Rod. Lawrence further investigates the possibilities of social connection between men, and it forms the major concern of the novel. Aaron Sisson, a coal-mining foreman in rural England, leaves the long-established and limited existence he has known in his community. He finds he has no meaningful relation, not with his wife, nor with his daughters, nor with his coarse friends. He realizes that he and his wife, Lottie, have achieved the climax of perfect antithesis in the love-hate spawned by marriage and perpetuated by mechanized society. He finds his life maintained and created by circumstances of industry, familial responsibilities, and the tight society of the coal-mining village. And as Aaron and Lawrence meander in the meaningless aesthetic realms of

£ D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious ancj Fantasia of the Unc onscious (New York, 1967), p. 1 5"! . 7H the affluent in this novel, Aaron finally discovers Rawdon Lilly, who is not a savior, but who is the guide. Halfway through this tedious and apparently irrelevant novel, Lilly finds Aaron wandering drunk in the streets of London and takes him into his care. Aaron is sick physically, but also psychically, having gone through the inevitable nullity of chaotic experience. He has again experienced revulsion from the sexual scheme of things after consummating an affair with an intellectual, Josephine, and he has con- cluded that the modern woman is only a snare, a trap carefully laid to force man to fulfill the demands of her personal will. But this Napoleon, though deprived of political power, is destined to achieve the means for the potency of full individuality. He will eventually achieve the internal balance within himself, and be ready for further experience. The contravened knot of this novel appears to be in Aaron's bowels; he is hopelessly constipated, and a doctor reveals that he must clean out his innards or die. Lilly is alone (his wife Tanny is away for some months visiting relatives in Scandanavian countries), and he incorporates Aaron into his neat, hidden, ballywick apartment, where he proceeds to nurse Aaron back to proper physical and spiritual being. This is achieved first by making Aaron's bowels move, and then by awakening him to his social potentiality. Lilly effects this awakening of both levels of the life force by 75 rubbing down the sickly body of his patient -with oil. Quickly he uncovered the blond lower body of his patient, and began to rub the abdomen -with oil, using a slow, rhythmic^-circulating motion, a sort of massage. For a long time, he rubbed finely and steadily, then went over the whole of the lower body, mindless, as if in a sort of incantation. He rubbed every speck of the man's lower body— the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs and knees, down to his feet, rubbed it all warm and glowing with camphorated oil, every bit of it, chafing the toes swiftly, till he was almost exhausted.7

Aaron gradually gets better. Both Aaron and the reader begin to be aware of the priestly qualities of this secret, searching Zarathrustra. He will give Aaron new drive, renew the circuit between this man who wants to be alone and the connection in the world. He revives the lagging will to live and later develops an idea of a type of will to power based upon personal creativity. "Thus, 'touch' ... is conceived here in its fullest and finest sense, as a mode of communion as a binding and regenerative force for love, friendship, and creative labor."® Harry T. Moore compares Lilly to Zara- thrustra, and his teaching method for this one disciple is much akin to that of Nietzsche's prophet. Lilly periodically lectures and leads, and in so doing tries to direct Aaron not to a purely obedient role, but he instills in him the desire also to overcome his master. "As a creator, jLilly]

?D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod (New York, 1965), p. 91. 8Mark Spilka, Th§ Love Ethic j£f D* H*. Lawrence (Bloomington, Indiana, 1955)9 p. 192. 76 needs Aaron1s response, and he seeks a living relationship, not a complete mastery over another human being. Like Zarathrustra, "who cries out at the end of the Prologue that he -wants not dead but living companions, Lilly knows that the creator cannot be a necrophile.It takes Aaron quite a •while to realize that he does owe Lilly "life submission," for the power of Lilly is and must be intuited. Mental conception would constitute recognition for attributes not those of the true,Innate leader. The unstated but implicit recognition by Aaron of Lilly as a kind of spiritual master, a leader, is the final action, •which completes the tedious plot of Aaron's Rod. The fact that the recognition is never stated consciously by any of the characters is an indication that the relationship between the two men is of the vital electric sort, one of the irrational, but fruitful, pulls of gleaming life. What Aaron discovers in Lilly is not a reflected image of himself, but rather a shadowy figure whose independence and indifference he envies and desires half consciously to develop. It is not brother- hood but leadership which Aaron discovers in his connection with Lilly.''® The major truth which Aaron learns from Lilly is the inescapability of self. In his conversations with

^Harry T. Moore, Life and Letters of D. H. Lawrence (New York, 1951), p. 1WT ^Spilka, Love Ethic. p. 16*4. 77

Aaron at the end of the novel, Lilly pronounces the terms and the conditions for self-fulfillment: • "... You can't lose yourself neither in •woman, nor humanity nor in God. You've always got yourself on your hands in the end. . . . There inside you lies your own very self, like a germi- nating egg . . . from the egg into the chicken and from the chicken into the one and only phoenix. . . . All men say they want a leader. . . . It's the deep, fathomless submission to the heroic soul in another man . . . life submission."11

The shift of imagery here is notable. All through the novel, the central image has been that of Aaron's rod, his flute, and in Freudian terms, his phallus. By the magic of his creative Pan-like flute, Aaron arouses the Marchesa, the •wife of an acquaintance, to a new youth. She sings for the first time in several years when Aaron accompanies her on his instrument, just as he awakens a sexual response in the woman. But the song she sings is a swan song for her dying youth, and she still faces the nihilistic stoicism, the dead- ness of her existence with her husband, who is ironically named Manfredi. Aaron refuses to be implicated in her self- gravitating death impulse and leaves her to her nonheroic Byronic husband. The rod is also Aaron's only means of sup- porting himself. So by prostituting his creative talent, he is able to feed and clothe himself, just as his connections with women of the aesthete world (Josephine and the Marchesa) actually end up providing him with places and appointments

1 1 Lawrence, Aaron's Rod. pp. 286-287. 78 to play. In terras of Lilly's speech here, the role of the individual is altered, especially in the case of Aaron, from the thrust of conception to the mystery of growth. Thus, the flute is broken by a bomb thrown into a cafe by anarchists; Aaron has previously sworn off women, and tries now to ex- change his withered stalk for the promise of new life implicit in the name "Lilly." Aaron, by Lilly's direction, throws the remnants of his flute into the river.

Aaron was quite dumbfounded by the night's event: the loss of his flute. Here was a blow he had not expected. And the loss was for him symbolistic. It chimed with something in his soul: the bomb, the smashed flute, the end. "There goes Aaron's Rod, then," he said to Lilly. "It'll grow again. It's a reed, a water- plant. And you can't kill it," said Lilly unheeding. "And me?" "You'll have to live without a rod, meanwhile. 1,12 The reference to the water plant again brings to mind the bloom of the swamp, the lily. In terms of imagery, there can be no doubt as to whom Aaron must now look for leadership, for life submission. Aaron is beginning a new stage of personal development, by means of a terrible transition. But he is assured of a much fuller life. A tadpole that has so gaily waved its tail in the water must feel very sick when the tail begins to drop off and little legs begin to sprout. The tail was its dearest, gayest, most active member, all its little life was in its tail. And now the tail

12Ibid.. pp. 275-276. 79

must go. It seems rough oil the tadpole; but the iitt^e green frog in the grass is a new gem, after ElX •

Aaron, like the green frog, finally consents to the leaving

off of stagnant and decaying parts that place him in an arti-

ficial injust order, and he makes ready to try out his new

leaping legs.

Life submission is essentially the recognition of power,

a realization of the passimal Dionysic impulse to self-fulfill-

ment. Lawrence's idea here is more closely akin to that of

Nietzsche than to Schopenhauer. For Nietzsche and for Lawrence,

Self is Power manifest in the ability both to lead and to

become. John Middleton Marry makes a significant observation

about the power novels of Lawrence.

It is very meet and right that men should recognize ana be submissive to5 the magical dynamic power that is sometimes manifest in men. To recognize power in another is to become powerful oneself. The recognition is the current that, passes between souls of two achieved individuals.14

Like Ursula's submission to Birkin, the consent to mastery

is the final link in the fulfillment of individual self. So

Aaron, by yielding to Lilly's guidance,is promised the discovery of

a world of deeper, richer existence, better than the super-

ficial frenzy of the political, social and personal life

^Lawrence, Sex, Literature and Censorship (New York, 1953)j p. 6*4.

1*4 pp. 187-188±ddlet°n Mu^^y, £22 of Woman (New York, 1931), 80

•which he now knows. In perceiving Lilly's abilities, Aaron conceives of his own potentiality. Aaron receives the promise of significant existence by adherence to the leader's direction.

As master, Lilly cannot force allegiance, subjugate his follower, and, most importantly, he does not consciously use Aaron for specific ends. Rather, both men come to know the strange power of respectful and awesome recognition of themselves and each other.

Lilly attempts to define the nature of the power which he realizes and wants to bring to Aaron in the final pages of the novel. "... It is a vast dark source of life and strength in us, now, waiting either to issue into true action, or to burst into cataclysm. Power— the power urge. The will-t©-power--but not in Nietzsche's sense. Not intellectual power, not mental power. Not conscious will-power. Not e^en wisdom. But dark, living, fructifying power.

Despite his disclaiming of Nietzsche's sense of power, Rawdon Lilly is still essentially allied to that philosopher's thought, both in this recognition of the Dionysian impulse and in his belief of the individual who will lead men "across the abyss to a more splendid future."1^ Lawrence modifies Nietzsche, so that the synthesis he finally achieves is actually the inherent power and vitalism of Schopenhauer's

1 - -'Lawrence, Aaron's Rod. p. -288. 1^Schorer, p. 62. 81

irrational will and Nietzsche's destructive Dionysus blended together with an implied concept of an ordered universe. The balance of mastery which Lawrence is describing is based on the assumption that the natural order of power, i.e., male over female, active men over nonactive, will restore civilization and our world to a primeval state of fertility, growth, creativity, and order. These things are implied in Aaror^'s Rod. but they form the substance of Lawrence's later novel, X2& Plumed Serpent, which investigates more closely the nature of power and the role of the leader to individuals and to masses.

The premises of connection and balance of Lawrence's earlier novels form allegory in The Plumed Serpent. Woman, in order to find her role of fulfillment in the universe must establish a circuit of polarity with a man who is in harmony with the primordial mythic rhythms of the cosmos. So does culture complete itself through a particular leader to find unison with the universe. The development of this awareness of a particular culture is a major theme of The Plumed Serpent, a novel concerned ostensibly with the political upheavals of Mexico in the beginning of the twentieth century.

The third circuit of relation between man and the cosmos has been destroyed by idealism, materialism, and scientific thought. Thus, in the picture of Mexico which Lawrence presents, the governments of the country are always 82 transitory and unstable. .Leaders keep promising socialism to the primitive souls of the Mexican people, only to find their efforts frustrated by some counter-revolution, -which promises basically the same things that the governing factions already presented. A basic need of the people is neglected, wliich is not political or economical; there is a deeper need for full direction of human action. The people want to know and feel a justification for existence, not a series of petty bribes to make life more financially feasible. It is the attempt of the hero of this novel, Don Ramon, to restore the Mexicans to a primal, mythic awareness through a political, religious movement. He promises man, not social progress, but a revitalization of spirit through the reestablishment of primitive deities, beliefs, and customs that have been drummed out by the influence of foreign powers.

Christianity was artificially imposed over the veneration of the Aztec gods. Don Ramon rediscovers the potency of the cultural past; he attempts to make the people of Mexico aware of their own intrinsic dignity and beauty by animating their history. He wants to involve them dynamically in a mythic ethnic consciousness. The plumed serpent, the symbol of the old god Quetzlcoatl, is the emblem and the identity adopted by Don Ramon in his power religion. He maintains that he is the manifestation of the Aztec god of 83 the past, returning from the dark beyond to enliven the spirit of Mexico. The hero is a necessity because most people lack the third kind of circuit, that -which runs bet-ween man and the cosmos. The hero is the man most alive because he possesses all three groups of circuits. He is necessary because other people do not . . . The act of -worshipping a master puts man in a vital rapport -with the heart of the cosmos.^ The leader can perform the impossible feat of pulling together opposites-. Lawrence develops his philosophy in terms of the conflict of opposites: life against death, man against -woman, human nature against animalistic tendencies. Intellectual light tries to repel the soft darkness of ignorance, or nonmental knowledge, just as the day fights a perpetual battle with night. Nature is full of the balance and antithesis of opposites, and so is Lawrence.

... it is the essence of Lawrence's intuition that two poles of opposition are not fixed or static; they are fluid forces in perpetual conflict, of dissolution and resolution; so that he creates a kind of psychical dialectic, and his relationships are not for a minute rigid. The pattern is fluid, as . . . two forces and their derivatives attract and repel.'" The basis for the thought is plainly to be seen in The Plumed Serpent. It is the flux of natural earthly phenomena, or in Schopenhauerean terms, the drive of the irrational will in created things. It is the logical extension of Lawrence's earlier books that his philosophy culminates in a celebration

^Bentley, p. 230. ^®Shorer, p. 55» 8H of the deities of an ancient fertility cult, whose very patterns juxtapose life and death, maleness and femaleness, as they fight and merge in a grand scheme of order. Expressed philosophically, the conflict and the balance are between the two opposed, but here united, ideas of love and power. In Aaron's Rod. Rawdon Lilly has maintained that Western civilization has exhausted the fountainhead of possibility flowing from love; he believes the power motive to be the only way for modern man to acclimate himself to his universe^ Don Ramon believes that the two can be joined, only if it is admitted that love is inevitably a selfish impulse and is an extension of the power pulse of the life force. Therefore, the gentle Don Ramon is both opposed and joined to Don Cipriano, who represents brute military power. Don Ramon, Quetzalcoatl, becomes the symbol of love which unites men. He brings to flower the dark passionate streams of the masses and gives them an outlet for emotion in a religious mysticism. Wedded intimately with the love concept is that of power. In order to establish, rapport with the universe, the acknow- ledgement of the master and a recognition of an individual self must be made. Following this acceptance, a discipline of the masses, a kind of training must follow. This indoc- trination can only occur within the context of an authori- tarian power. Don Ramon achieves this by adding to his

^Lawrence, Aaron's Rod, p. 286. 85 cosmology of deities the vindictive power of jikstice in the figure of Huitzilopochtli and his very militant army, A specially trained corps of young men called the Men of Quetzalcoatl form. They not only sing the chants in tribute to the god, but they then become powerful enough to strip the church at Jampiltec of all Christian symbols; the group of men then burn the statues and relics with great ceremony in a rite which commemorates the dying God of Christianity and welcomes the new spring announced by the reappearance of Quetzalcoatl, who himself is a dying god of old fertility cults. Recognition of the revived god cannot always be intuited by men; the force of power must also accompany the man who shall lead men to new cosmic awareness. Don Ramon inaugurates his new religion because he is attuned to the primal consciousness beneath the superficial knowledge of mind. He sinks into a primordial timelessness, from which he derives his power. As he prepares for a ceremony which calls down the rain, Don Ramon touches upon the vital quick in a private ritual. . . . and standing mute and invisible in the centre of the room he thrust his clenched fist upwards with all his might feeling he would break the walls of his chest. And his left hand hung loose, the fingers softly curling downwards. And tense like a gush of a silent fountain, he thrust up and reached down in the invisible dark convulsed with passion. Till the black, waves began to wash over his consciousness, over his mind, waves of darkness broke over his memory, 'over his being like an incoming tide till at 86

last it -was full tide, and he trembled and fell to rest.toc+ '2 0 As the bloodfilled phallic arm reaches for the sky, the left hand pulls in the direction of the fecund earth. The hero is a wave in the creative flux, a fish in the stream, and in submitting to its flow is his peace. His solar plexus is dynamic, his mind is gone. Into such a man the life force flows from behind, below, and beyond, filling him with power and connecting him vitally with sun and moon.2'

Opposites are united in the figure of one man. And the coming spatters of rain prefigure the black floods of primal being. Don Ramon teaches his people to lose their artificial mental identities imposed by European ideals on the primitive culture of Mexico. The prayer which he uses is not a verbal one. He becomes a pillar of irrational dark blood, which reaches.the centers of the life force and restores the third circuit of cosmic actuality to Mexico.

In a world of chaos, Don Ramon promises not order but peace. He offers no solutions to specific problems, but he presents a philosophy which promises tranquility of being and acceptance of fate. The strife of existence can have the order of mystery, and this mystery Don Ramon calls the Morning Star. Instead of escaping from the thrust of the will through aestheticism, as Schopenhauer would, Don Ramon

20d. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York, 195*0. p. 212.

^William York Tindall, D^ EL Lawrence and Susan His Cow (New York, 1919)} p. ^1. 87 becomes infused with the will and, ironically, finds peace, unity, and balance in mysticism. That star, the "ultimate clue," hovers like a bird- snake in tranquil suspense between the energies of the cosmos, between day and night, earth and sky, •reconciling these opposites. The star of twilight suggests marriage and peace. Rising between heart and loins, it is womanhood for woman and manhood for man.22

Also representing the merging and balance of opposites in the Trinity of deities, which Ramon injects into his new religion, adding Malintzi, a fertility goddess, to the cosmology of Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. Within the Trinity the full chain of Lawrentian being is represented. By the union of irrational essences, man communicates with the renews woman, man leads man to action, and the leader brings a culture to realization of its vital actuality. Kate Leslie finds true being' by stripping herself of her European mode of being and acclimating herself to that of pure primi- tivism. Her marriage to Huitzilopochtli represents the union of intellect and passion, as well as that of the goddess of fertility and the lord of the lightning. In coming into contact with Cipriano and Ramon, she finds consciousness which slowly awakens to the full fearfulness and the power of awesome life. She can only describe it in terms of will. At the centre of all things, a dark, momentous Will, sending out his terrible rays of vibrations

^^William York Tindall, "Introduction" in The Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence (New York, 195^)s p« xi. 88

like some vast octopus. Arid at the end of the vibration, men created men, erect in the dark potency, answering Will with will, like gods or demons.23

Kate, "who is in some respects a later version of Ursula

Brangwen,finds union with the sons of God that Ursula long aspires to attain. She becomes part of mythic being itself when she assumes the role of the goddess Malintzi. And though Cipriano gives her complete freedom, she will never be able to totally withdraw from his guidance. As she attempts to leave the Mexican rituals and return to Europe, she finds that she is indeed compelled to stay, seemingly by a greater power than her personal mental will.

Cipriano is renewed by the allegiance of the woman,

but he is himself elevated in his conflict and alighment

with Don Ramon, who heads the Trinity of Love-Power-Fertility.

It is only through Don Ramon that Cipriano finds cohesion

with primal rhythms of existence. He, too, loses that indi-

vidual alert self, and his soul becomes immersed in the

greater power of the dark will-in which Don Ramon initiates

him through ritual. Touch provides the necessary switch to

pull the dark floods of power from their channeled courses.

In the initiation of Cipriano, Don Ramon first touches the

^Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, p. ^23. ^Harry T. Moore, "The Plumed Serpent: Vision and Language," in D. H. Lawrence; A Collection of Critical Essays. edited by Mark Spilka (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, T963), p. 6h. 89 eyes of the initiate, wrapping him in perfect alive darkness.

When the darkness is most alive and perfectj Ramon's question of who lives in the darkness cannot be answered by the ego of

Cipriano. Cipriano gradually loses completely his awareness of individuality and finds himself totally at one with the darkness, part of a greater power and a greater peace.

"Who lives?" "Who--I" Cipriano no longer knew. . . . "Is it all dark?" But Cipriano could not answer. The last circle was sweeping round, and the breath upon the waters was sinking into the waters, there was no more utterance. . . . And both men passed into perfect unconsciousness, Cipriano within the womb of undisturbed creation, Ramon in the death sleep.^5

Thus, Cipriano is transformed from mere humanity to full apotheosis as Huitzilopochtli, and is the living militant representation of the dark waters which wash all mankind.

Don Ramon recognizes his power and his responsibility as the leader of his people. He sets himself up as the god

Quetzalcoatl and attempts to revive a dying, wasted world by means of the mythic quickening of integrity of the people of

Mexico.

If . . . proof of Don Ramon's Fuehrerprinzip is needed, Lawrence provides it in his mysterious doctrine of stars. According to Don Ramon, each man and each woman is a fragment. Wholeness is possible only in the mystic communion, beyond the phallic mystery, of man and man, of man and woman.

^Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, pp. ^0301*. 90

yhen communion is perfect, a star rises between man and.man, or man and wonan, and all achieve wholeness together ... In 'The Plumed Serpent, all characters are fragments-7except the Leader. He alone is a perfect whole.2° The triad of Lawrencean gods is complete, ready to work the redemption of Mexico. Love, fertility and power incarnate mast come into the world and reorient it. And even so, the ultimate defeat of Don Ramon himself seems likely by the end of the novel. The forces of the mechanized world are many and will not tolerate refutation. The Morning Star unites men who realize the paltriness of intellect and strive for the full existence of earth knowledge. But recognition of the mystery of the Morning Star must come first, and by the end of The Plumed Serpent it seems that too few people are perceiving the true rays of its light. The importance of this novel does not lie in its political ramifications; its religious message is principally what strikes cleanly through the confusion of shadowy symbols, soft incantations, and storm troopers. Lawrence uses politics only insofar as it develops or provides a realistic basis for the imaginative attempt to create sacred space in a profane universe.Lawrence tries to establish some meaningful order in this novel, which will encompass all the societal roles

^Allen Guttman, "The Politics of Irrationality," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. V (Summer, 196V), p. 159. '

^Tindall, DHL and Susan His Cow. p. 179- 91 of man. If Lawrence fails to do this convincingly, one should not doubt the validity of his vision. Rather, one might wonder if his own exacting fact-to-fact thinking stiffens his true message of malleability and transforms it to tyranny of undifferentiated masses, rather than a hierarchy of blessed people. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Aldington, Richard, "Introduction," Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence, New York, The Viking Press, 196V. Auden, W. H., Th§ Portable Greek Reader. New York, Viking Press, 19^T. Barnes, Helen E., editor, "Schopenhauer, Evangelist of Pessimism," in The Pessimist's Handbook, by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 196H. Bentley, Eric, A Century of Hero Worship. Boston, Beacon Press, 19^7. "" Bertocci. Angelo P.. "Symbolism in Women £& l°ve," A Ih fL Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore, Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959* Chambers, Jessie (E. T.), IL Hj. Lawrence: J. Personal Record. New York, Knight Publications, i93*5• "~ Clark, Laverne Harrell, Dark Night of the Body. Austin, Texas, University of Texas Press, 1 §6^. Clive, Geoffrey, editor, "Introduction," The Philosophy of Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche, New York, Mentor Books, 1965» Edman, Irwin, editor, "Introduction," The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, by Arthur Schopenhauer, New York, The Modern Library, 1 956. Freeman, Mary, Ih |L Lawrence: i Basic Study His Ideas. New York, Grosset and Dunlap, 19b5- Goodhart. Eugene, The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence. Chicago, University of Chicago Press^ 1963.

Gregory, Horace, Thg Pilgrim of the Apocalypsef New York, The Viking Press, 1933*

92 93

Hoffman, Fredrick J., Freudianism and the Literary Mind, New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1957- .s The Mortal Wo: Death and the Modern Imagination, Princeton, N. J., Princeton University Press ^ 1• Kaafciann, Walter, Nietzsche: Philosopher. Psychologist. Anti-Christ. Cleveland, Ohio, World Publishing Co., 1966. Kessler, Joscah, "Descent Into Darkness: The Myth of The Plumed Serpent." in A ,D. H. Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore, Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959• Lawrence, D. H., Aaroq's Rod. New York, Viking Press, 19&5« _, Kangaroo. New York, Viking Press, 196k. _» The Plumed Serpent. New York, Vintage Press,

—j Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and onscious. New York, The Viking Press,

,, Thg Rainbow. New York, The Viking Press, 1967< ,, Sex. Literature and Censorship, edited by Harry T. Moore, New York, Twayne Publishers, 1953- . Women in Love. New York, The Viking Press, 19&r. Leavis, F. R., Dj. L Lawrence: Novelist. New York," Alfred A. Knoph, 195oV Menken, H. L., .The Philosophy of Friedrlch Nietzsche. Boston, Luce and Company, 1913*

Moore, Harry T., editor, A D. ,H. Lawrence MiscellanyT Carbon- dale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959. , The Intelligent Heart: The Life of D. H. Lawrence. New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1*9627

} The Lifg and Works Hj. New York, Twayne Publishers, 195*17 9k

Moore, Harry T., "The Plume.d Serpent; Vision and Language," in £& IU Lawrence; ""jl Collection of Critical Essays. edited by Mark Spilka, Englewood Cliffs, N. J., Prentice ' Hall, Inc., 1963« . editor, Sex, Literature and Censorship, by D. H. Lawrence, New York, Twayne Publishers**",* i953- Murdick, Marvin, "The Originality of The Rainbow." in A D» H. Lawrence Miscellany, edited by Harry T. Moore, Carbon- dale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 1959- Murry, John Middleton, Son of Woman. New York, Jonathan Cope and Harrison Smith, 1931. Nietzsche, Friedriech, The Philosophy of Nietzsche, edited by Geoffrye Clive, New York, Mentor Books, 19^7 Rieff, Phillip, "Introduction," Psychoanalysis and the Un- conscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious by D. H. Lawrence, New York, Viking Press, 1 9o7* Saunders, T. Bailey, "Translator's Preface," in The Pessimists Handbook by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Helen E. Barnes, Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press. 1964. Schopenhauer, Arthur, The Pessimist's Handbook, edited by Helen E. Barnes, translated by T. Bailey Saunders, Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 196k. , The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, edited by Irwin Edman, New York, The Modern Library, 1956. Scott, Nathan A., Jr., Rehearsals of Discomposure. New York. ' King's Crown Press~19??.

Siligmann, Herbert J., Eu EL Lawrence; J\n ^mericaij Inter- pretation. New York, Thomas Seltzer", 192V.

Spilka, Mark, editor, ITj. Lawrence; £ Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliff's, *N. J., Prentice-Hall,""inc.. 19^3. j SkS Love^thic of D. H. Lawrence. Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press", 1950* Tindall, William York, Ih IL Lawrence and Susan His; Cow. New York, Columbia University Press, 1939~ 95

Tindall, William York, "Introduction," Thg Plumed Serpent, by D. H. Lawrence, New York, Vintage Press, 195*+.

Warner, Rex, The Cult Power. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippin- cott, Co., I9V77

Articles

Arnold, Armin, "D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Mann," C omparative Literature, XIII (Winter, 1961), 33-38.

Bradley, J. A., "Challenge of D. H. Lawrence." Hibbert Journal. LVIII (April,. 1960), 281-287. ——»

Chamberlain, Robert L., "Pussum, Minette, and the Africo- Nordic Symbol in Lawrence's Women in Love," PMLA, LXXVIII, pt. 2 (September-December, 19S3I, O^^Tl6.

Engleberg, Edward, "Escape from the Circles of Experience: D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as a Modern Bildungsroman," PMLJLJ LXXVIII, pt. 1 (March, June, 1963), 103-113.

Guttmann, Allen, "D.Lawrence: The Politics of Irration- ality," Wisc_onsJin Studies in Contemporary Literature. V (Summer, 1^57),

Merivale, Patricia,^"D. H. Lawrence and the Modern Pan Myth," mmenJUl Language and Literature. VI (Autumn. 19OH7, 297-305V

Nulle, Stebleton H., "D. H. Lawrence and the Fascist Movement," New Mexicp Quarterly Review. X (February, 19*40), 3-15.

Rief'f,^Philip^"Two Honest Men," The Listener. LXIII (May 5,

Steinhauer, H., ^"Eros and Psyche: A Nietzschean Motif in Anglo-American Literature." Modern Language Notes. T.XTV (April, 1919), 217-228. ~

Widmer, Kingsley, "D. H. Lawrence and the Art of Nihilism." Muzos Review, XX (Autumn, 1958), 6OH-616.

Wright, Raymond, "Lawrence's Non-human Analogues," Modern LaiigDa&e Not^, LXXVII (May, 1961 ), k26-k32. ~~~