CHAPTER 1 THE MEDIATOR TRANSCENDED: THE STRUCTURE OF DESIRE IN WOMEN IN LOVE Murry or Leavis Criticism of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love has, on the whole, developed around the Murry’s and Leavis’ interpretations. J.M. Murry scathingly criticized the novel for defects of characterization and for the self-deception of Rupert Birkin, the Lawrence-figure, adding that the couple of Birkin and Ursula Brangwen cannot be differentiated from the Gerald and Gudrun pair.1 However, F.R. Leavis, in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, attempted to retrieve the status of Lawrence as a great artist through his own detailed analysis of the dramatically organized form and the objective representation of characters.2 In spite of the great influence of Leavis, his criticism did not manage to entirely invalidate the standpoint of Murry. Some critics follow Murry’s argument further and daringly accentuate the repressed homosexuality in Birkin, which, they think, underlies the complicated relationships among the main characters.3 This viewpoint, it must be said, does seem persuasive, compared with the reading of Mark Spilka, which, laying strong emphasis on the ideal union or “star-equilibrium” between Birkin and Ursula, tends to overlook the unsatisfactoriness of their married relations.4 1 J.M. Murry, “J.M. Murry in Nation and Athenaeum: 13 August 1921, xxix, 713-14”, reprinted in D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald P. Draper, London: RKP, 1970, 168-72; Son of Woman: The Story of D.H. Lawrence, London: Jonathan Cape, 1931, 106-22. 2 Leavis, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, 174-236. 3 Scott Sanders, D.H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels, London: Vision, 1973, 123-32; Jeffrey Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature 1890-1930, London: Athlone, 1977, 140-49. As for the controversy between Colin Clarke who follows Murry’s standpoint and Mark Spilka, who belongs to the Leavis line, see Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D.H. Lawrence and English Romanticism, London: RKP, 1969, ix-xv, 70-110; and Mark Spilka, “Lawrence Up-Tight, or the Anal Phase Once Over”, Novel, 4 (1971), 252-67. 4 Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D.H. Lawrence, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1955, 10 Literature along the Lines of Flight The problematics of desire Despite the critical truism that Women in Love consists of two dramatically contrasted stories, the hesitant tone of the ending makes it difficult to conclude simply that one is a disastrous death and the other a happy marriage.5 The mystic marriage, which is apparently achieved by Birkin and Ursula, eventually turns out to be problematical because of the abortive friendship between Birkin and Gerald Crich. 6 This relationship between the two men is indeed the problematic core of the novel and lends support to the charges of those who find in Birkin a symptom or proof of Lawrence’s repressed homosexuality. Jeffrey Meyers, for example, interprets the narrative as a perverse, homosexual love story, presenting the ending as Birkin’s choice of Gerald and refusal of the love of Ursula: the perverse desire “negates Birkin’s commitment to female love” and “clarifies Birkin’s final lament”.7 One of the principal loci that leads some critics to this kind of reading is clearly the cancelled “Prologue” to the novel, which was not published until 1963. Certainly Birkin’s affinity for man is narrated here conspicuously, as Birkin, seeing “a strange Cornish type of man”, feels “the desire spring up in him, the desire to know this man, to have him, as it were to eat him, to take the very substance of him”.8 Yet it seems inadequate to attribute this critical situation of desire solely to Birkin’s male and personal perversity, since the representation of 121-47. 5 For an interesting reading that investigates the dramatic and mythical construction of the novel, see Evelyn J. Hinz, “Hierogamy versus Wedlock: Types of Marriage Plots and Their Relationship to Genres of Prose Fiction”, PMLA, 91 (1976), 900-13; and P.T. Whelan, D.H. Lawrence: Myth and Metaphysic in The Rainbow and Women in Love, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research P, 1988, 49-99. 6 For the readings that question the happy marriage of the Birkin and Ursula pair or refer to the problematic friendship between Birkin and Gerald, see Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy: Essays on the Idea of Tragedy in Life and in the Drama, and on Modern Tragic Writing from Ibsen to Tennessee Williams, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1966, 121-38; Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, Boston: Little, Brown, 1976, 156-85; John Worthen, D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, London: Macmillan, 1979, 83-104; and Anne Wright, Literature of Crisis, 1910-22: Howards End, Heartbreak House, Women in Love and The Waste Land, New York: St Martin’s, 1984, 113-57. 7 Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature, 143. 8 D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1920), eds David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987, 505 (hereafter cited parenthetically as WL). .