Marilyn Gaull

Romantic Reinventions in D. H. Lawrence's "Women in Love"

Author(s): Eugene Stelzig
Source: The Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 44, No. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2013), pp. 93-97
Published by: Marilyn Gaull
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24044228
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 anism on the Net 57-58 (2010): http://id.erudit.org/
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Wordsworth Circle 42.1 (2011): 27-33; Ruskin, John. The
Diaries of John Ruskin. Ed. Joan Evans and J. H.
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C.C. Ed. The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey. 6
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id.erudit.org/iderudit/009261ar

Romantic Reinventions in D. H. Lawrence's

Women in Love

Eugene Stelzig
State University of New York, Geneseo

D. H. Lawrence's imagination has deep affinities with sense of wonder "the natural religious sense," and a "sixth
and is rooted in European Romanticism. Over four decades sense." Like some of the Romantics (Cf. Wordsworth's "we
ago, in 1969, Colin Clarke noted that "the English Romantics murder to dissect") he was given to the temptation of hyper
had made a deep impression on him" (3), and Lawrence bole on this point: "When all comes to all, the most precious
himself acknowledged that "Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality element in life is wonder . . . The one universal element in
and Keats's Odes" were among "the poems which have meant consciousness which is fundamental to life is the element of
the most to me" ("Hymns in a Man's Life," 130). In 1955, wonder" ("Hymns in a Man's Life," 132, 131). For Lawrence
Mark Spilka, observed that Paul Morel's love interest in Sons the poet and visionary, the experience of wonder is closely
and Lovers, Miriam, "is Wordsworth, at least in her attitude to related to that of ecstasy, or what Wordsworth celebrated as
nature, or toward flowers" (47). The lyrical celebration of na- "the sentiment of being" as a kind of cosmic current that con
ture and instinct runs through Lawrence's fiction and poetry, nects the individual with the totality of being:
culminating in the pastoral setting of Clifford Chatterley's
forest that frames the lovemaking of Connie and Mellors. I was only then
The Wordsworthian daffodils that Connie sees behind the Contented when with bliss ineffable
gamekeeper's cottage are the poetic signifier of their passion- I felt the sentiment of Being spread
ate encounters: "and there they were, the short-stemmed O'er all that moves, and all that seemeth still,
flowers, rustling and fluttering and shivering, so bright and O'er all, that, lost beyond the reach of thought
alive" (89). The tenderness of the lovers' erotic resurrec- And human knowledge, to the human eye
tion"a growing tenderness of the growing hyacinths"is Invisible, yet liveth to the heart . . .
polarized against the industrial landscape beyond the forest, (The Prelude [1805] II 418-24)
"the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized
greed" (126).
The Wordsworthian sense of cosmic connectedness
Like the major Romantic writers in England and Eu- and affective participation in the life of nature as a spiritual
rope, Lawrence was keenly attuned to the idea of living in a force beyond the mere physical or material reality"Wonder
mysterious universe beyond the reach of the reductive pow- not/ If such my transports were; for in all things/ I saw one
ers of rational or rationalizing explanation. He called the life, and felt that it was joy" (The Prelude [1805] II 428-30)

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also pulses through Lawrence's writings. For him, the nowness nied by a prodigious power of rendering the immediately ex
and hereness of the sentiment of being and of feeling fully perienced otherness in terms of literary art." (256-57).
alive in a living universe also constitutes, as it did for Nietz
sche, a rejection of both Platonic and Christian transcenden- As for the Romantics, who (especially Wordsworth) ap
talisms as a negation of the here and now for some other or plied meticulous craft and multiple revisions to their sponta
better or higher realm. The Romantic challenge is to be fully neous and inspired overflows, for Lawrence the rendering of
present in the living moment: "For man, as for the flower and the living moment and the mystery of our being required ar
beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, tistic craft of a high order and discipline: his major novels,
most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may from Sons and Lovers to Lady Chatterley's Lover, went through
know, they cannot know the beauty and the marvel of being various drafts and stages of revision,
alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But
the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and Lawrence's celebration in his fiction, poetry, and other
ours alone, and ours only for a time" ("Apocalypse," 199). prose writings of the vital and redemptive energies of the nat
The loss of the sense of wonder, which Lawrence saw as the ural worldhis Romantic vitalismtaps into a tradition run
disease of modem humanity, is equivalent to death: "Modern ning from Rousseau's and Wordsworth's championing of the
people are inwardly bored . . . They are bored because they life of nature and natural impulse ("one impulse from a ver
experience nothing. And they experience nothing because nal wood," "The Tables Turned") up through Nietzsche's val
the wonder has gone out of them. And when the wonder has orizing of the Dionysian. Like the visionary Blake and
gone out of a man he is dead" ("Hymns in a Man's Life," Shelley, Lawrence affirmed erotic energy, and like many Ro
131). mandes did in differing degrees, he pushed back imagina
tively against the dehumanizing impact of the Industrial
For Lawrence, art is implicitly avant garde because it Revolution and its dark Satanic mills as evident in the bleak
seeks "to reveal the reladon between man and his circumam- and environmentally degraded early 20th century-Midlands
bient universe, at the living moment: As mankind is always coal-mining country-side in which he grew up. The latter
struggling in the toils of old relationships, art is always ahead turns up repeatedly as a grim reality in his fictionin Lady
of the 'times', which themselves are always far in the rear of Chatterley's Lover this "insentient iron world" of "greedy mech
the living moment" ("Morality and the Novel," 108). The vi- anism and mechanical greed" (126) is polarized against the
sionary poetics of the living moment are connected with the erotic resurrection of the lovers through the tenderness of
ecstatic Wordsworthian sentiment of being. Like the Roman- touch (across class barriers) rendered in the vernacular of
tics, Lawrence invests this "moment" with quasi-religious sig- four-letter words and lyrically framed by the forest setting
nificance: "our life consists in this achieving of a pure and flower catalogues,
relationship between ourselves and the living universe about
us. This is how I 'save my soul' by accomplishing a pure rela- In an introduction to Romanticism published in 2010,
tionship between me and another person, me and other peo- Michael Ferber revisited and sought to resolve the Lovejoy
ple, me and a nation, me and a race of men, me and the Wellek controversy of the early 20th century by provisionally
animals, me and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me defining Romanticism by way of Wittgenstein's concept of
and the skies and sun and stars . . . This, if we knew it, is our "family resemblances." In the wake of the New Historicism,
life and our eternity: the subtle, perfected relation between overarching definitions of Romanticism are not exactly the
me and my whole circumambient universe" ("Morality and theoretical agenda du jour, but at my advanced stage in life's
the Novel," 109). mysterious and wonderful journey I find the unfashionable
attractive, and so I will quote Ferber's wide-angle defini
The impact of the Romantics on Lawrence is evident in tionprecisely because its normative features also character
a late essay, where he asserts that "living and having being ize much of the poetic vision of D.H. Lawrence as an early
means the relatedness between me and all things." His insis- 20th century Romantic writer:
tence on his "connection with [his] circumambient universe"
is based on his awareness that "every natural thing has its own
living relation to every other natural thing" ("Aristocracy," Romanticism was a European cultural movement, or
234-35). In 1932, Aldous Huxley in an introduction to Law- set of kindred movements, which found in a symbolic and in
rence's letters captured succinctly the Romantic quality of ternalized romance plot a vehicle for exploring one's self and
Lawrence's poetics of wonder, stating that his "special and its relationship to others and to nature, which privileged the
characteristic gift was an extraordinary sensitiveness to what imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than rea
Wordsworth called 'unknown modes of being'. He was always son, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural
intensely aware of the mystery of the world, and the mystery world, which 'detranscendentalized' religion by taking God or
was always for him a numen, divine. Lawrence could never the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul and replaced
forget, as most of us almost continuously forget, the dark theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which
presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of honored poetry and all the arts as the highest human cre
man's conscious mind. This special sensibility was accompa- ations, and which rebelled against the established canons of

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 neoclassical aesthetics and against both aristocratic and bour- thage, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, the legendary Atlantis, and
geois social and political norms in favor of values more indi- the lost city states of Africa" (184) to frame this doomsday
vidual, inward, and emotional (10-11). scenario through a dense pattern of transcultural symbolic
allusions.

The family resemblances between Lawrence and Euro- Lawrence famously asserted, "You mustn't look in my
pean Romanticism (as defined above by Ferber) are strik- novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is an
ingly evident in his most intellectually ambitious, important, other ego, according to whose action the individual is un
and challenging novel, one written in an apocalyptic mode recognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropie states
or mood during World War I, Women in Love. The internal- which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to
ized romance plot is developed through the love relation- exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically
ships that define the symbolic quest romance that is unchanged element" (letter of 5 June, 1914; Selected Literary
Lawrence's ideal of romantic-sexual love as "star equilibrium" Criticism, 17).
as it is unfolded in Birkin and Ursula's ongoing dramatic and
dialogic negotiation of their conflicted relationship. The as- Thus Birkin is, in terms of the realistic novel tradition
tronomical metaphor of two stars in balance is also a radical of the 19th century that Lawrence is both invoking and radi
revision of the Romantic ideal of romantic love as mutual cally transforming, a middle-class English school inspector
mirroring and incestuous merging of identities as we see it in who pays a professional visit to Ursula's classroom early in
Percy Shelley and Byron, for instance. The privileging of the the novel, but he is at the same time, by way of an allotropie
imagination, the turn to nature for solace or reconciliation sea-change, a reclusive and at times misanthropic neo
and as a source of the mystery of the divine, the replacement Zarathustran visionary whose literary lineage can be traced
of conventional theological concepts with the stress on sym- back to the Romantic poet-prophet-bard figure. Like that of
bolic tropes arising from human passion, the view of art as the poet of the opening book of The Prelude, Birkin's "spirit"
the highest human creation, and the rejection of both bour- is "clothed in priestly robe" (I [1805], 11. 61-62). Like the
geois and aristocratic social and political norms for "values Romantics, Lawrence is marked by the "spilt religion" syn
more individual, inward, and emotional" are all central fea- drome that T. E. Hulme (pejoratively) identified with Ro
tures in Lawrence's prophetic and apocalyptic novel. Its Ro- manticism. Lawrence asserted about himself, "Primarily I am
mantic resemblances and reinventions are projected a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written
obviously though not exclusively through the Lawrence fig- from the depth of my religious experience" (letter of April
ure, the unlikely school inspector, Rupert Birkin, whose vi- 22, 1914, Selected Literary Criticism, 17) and this passion is mir
sionary critique of a Europe in the throes of cataclysmic self- rored in Birkin's bardic and hierophantic pronouncements
destruction also reflects many of the darker themes and mo- throughout the novel. Indeed, Birkin is a later incarnation of
tifs of European Romanticism: alienation and misanthropy; the archetypal Romantic hero figure for whom the locus of
the destructive forces in nature, the tension between love the meaning and mystery is the relationship to nature and
and hate and the struggle of the will to power in the sexual instinctthe latter, as mapped through the sexual relation
sphere charted in different configurations in the relationship ships and couplings in the novel, bears a heavy burden of
between Gudrun and Gerald and Birkin and Ursula that are meaning as the touchstone of and clue to our human
at the imaginative and psychic core of the novel, the mechan- destiny,
ical and Urizenic death forces inherent in the "Industrial
Magnate" Gerald Crich. Just as Lawrence pushes or stretches the Romantic ex
ploration of the passions to the sexual limit by the time he
Women in Love reveals Lawrence as a leading modernist scripts the four letter erotic lyricism of Lady Chatterley's Lover
writer who projects an updated or revisionary Romantic out- near the end of his career, he also radicalizes the idea of the
look in a new century to address (imaginatively and provoca- embrace of nature in the earlier Women in Love. Near the
tively) a pervasive cultural crisis. Although transformed in the opening of The Prelude, Wordsworth, freed from the prison of
context of the cataclysmic upheavals of the early twentieth the city, is alone outdoors, in a recumbent position: "long I
century, the apocalyptic atmosphere of Women in Love comes lay/ Cheared by the genial pillow of the earth/ Beneath my
as no surprise to anyone familiar with that strain also present head, soothed by a sense of touch/ From the warm ground,
in Romanticism (e.g., Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Byron's that balanced me, else lost entirely" (I [1805], 11. 87-90).
"Darkness"). Lawrence imaginatively reworked the apocalyp- Birkin, like Wordsworth, is glad to leave the city behind him
tic motif in the context of the Great War as he struggled with in order to turn to nature. But unlike the solitary, spectator ab
multiple revisions and recastings of his visionary novel. As he extra poet, the Laurentian alter ego manifests a powerful mis
wrote in a letter of November 7, 1916, "The book frightens anthropy focused on his dread of the city. On the train to
me: it's so end-of-the-world" (quoted in Ford, 164). As London, he rejects humanity as "a dead letter" and looks for
George H. Ford has stressed, "how civilizations die, or might ward with a gloomy gusto to its disappearance. His dislike of
die, is the subject of Women in Love," and Lawrence draws the city to which he is heading is a correlative of his dread of
extensively on "history, prehistory, and myth . . . Rome, Car- humanity. The dread and hopelessness he feels in "approach

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ing London" is a function of "his dislike of humanity, of the night upon mysterious night, the night masculine and femi
mass of mankind" that "amounted almost to an illness" (53). nine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind,
only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness." For
Birkin's Timon-like and nauseated rejection of human- Lawrence as for the Romantics, the deeper mysteries of being
ity is specifically a rejection of the entrenched cultural and revealed in this erotic union are beyond the reach of lan
political structures of the traditional English class system as guage, and his experimental verbal gesturing at them results
embodied in Breadalby, the country estate of Hermione Rod- only in a smokescreen of portentous abstractions pointing to
dice, the rich and pretentiously unconventional aristocrat "a mystery, the reality of that which can never be transmuted
(based on Lady Ottoline Morrell) with her M.P. brother, who into mind content, but remains outside, living body of dark
moves in the advanced intellectual and bohemian circles of ness and silence and subtlety, the mystic body of reality"
her moneyed world, and who, ensconced in her class privi- (312).
leges, has the chutzpah to assert "If we could only realize that
in the spirit we are all . . . equal ... all brothers therethe The over-the-top rhetoric of mystification that marks
rest wouldn't matter, there would be no more of this carping some of the language of Lawrence the neo-Romantic poet
and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, de- metaphysician as well as the bardic pronouncements of
stroys." Birkin, whose long-standing affair with Hermione is Birkin are at times subjected to a critique and ironic defla
ending, rejects her condescending viewpoint, insisting on the tion in the dialectical exchanges of this persistently dialogic
spiritual inequality of humans: "In the spirit, I am as separate novel. This is true especially of Ursula's challenging of
as one star is from another . . . Establish a state on that. One Birkin's overbearing prophetic and at times sexist assertions
man isn't any better than another, not because they are as they endlessly debate the terms of their evolving relation
equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no ship. Early in the novel she reacts strongly against "the
term of comparison" (96-97). Birkin's poetic insistence on Salvator Mundi" touch in him, and his preaching "to anyone
separateness reaches a post or neo-Romantic outer limit who came along," which she castigates as "a very insidious
when, after having been nearly killed by Hermione smashing form of prostitution." When she mockingly challenges him,
a lapis lazuli paperweight on his head, he goes out into na- "if you don't believe in love, what do you believe in? . . . Sim
ture for healing contact among "the bushes and flowers": ply the end of the world and grass?," and he answers self
"He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the righteously"beginning to feel like a fool""I believe in the
touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down na- unseen hosts," she comes back with a devastating reply that
ked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the appears to carry the full authority of the text (trust the tale,
primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to his arm- not the teller): "And nothing else? You believe in nothing
pits, lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. visible, except grass and birds? Your world is a poor show"
It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed (121). The protracted interlocutory conflicts and confronta
to saturate himself with their contact" (100).This misan- tions of this dramatic novel can be seen as a version of ro
thropic yet healing and quasi-erotic "contact" with the natu- mantic irony undercutting or at least destabilizing Birkin's
ral world has similarities with the Wordsworthian/Romantic self-important prophetic utterances; they can also be seen as
embrace of nature, yet goes it one better in a revisionary a mode of modernist perspectivism opening up to an infinite
mode by pushing it to the limit of the absurd. regress where all truth claims are subjected to a skeptical mise
en abme. The master of this mode of ironic undercutting is
If the neo-Romantic poetics of misanthropic separate- the dwarfish German sculptor Loerke, a Derridean decon
ness are foregrounded in the quirky actions and bardic pro- structor avant la lettre, whose playful cynicism the brilliant if
nouncements of Birkin throughout Women in Love, so are the increasingly nihilistic Gudrun finds so irresistibleto the
dialectically complementary poetics of erotic connectedness chagrin of Gerald and Birkinin the last part of the novel,
that culminate in the (long-delayed) consummation of his
conflicted and constantly renegotiated relationship with Ur- Lawrence's ambitious World War I novel in which he
sula. After their final battle in "The Excurse" chapter, they explores in a symbolic and quasi-apocalyptic mode both the
find a "new heaven" and a "new universe" (303) as they "de- mysterious creative and destructive forces at work in nature,
lighted in each other's presence, pure presence" (305). The history, and in individual human relationships is at once
natural-supernaturalistic tenor of their erotic coming-to- deeply rooted in the European Romantic imagination and an
gether reaches a.poetic climax in the night-time setting of innovative if not always successful yet daring visionary experi
Sherwood Forest where the two lovers experience the "pure ment to address the perceived culture crisis of the Great War
mystic nodality of physical being" (311). Their achievement and the early 20th century in a poetic prose that aspires to
of the Laurentian ideal of "star-equilibrium" is also the but can only take verbal stabs at "a palpable revelation of liv
Blakean moment of fulfilled desire: "She had her desire ful- ing otherness." As the Romantics knew only too well, lan
filled. He had his desire fulfilled" (312). Lawrence's poetic guage is never adequate to but ultimately always in arrears of
language seeks to suggest the wonder of their ecstatic con- "the living moment." At its best, Lawrence's most challenging
gress in the forest: "his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity and in many ways definitive novel extends into the early
were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body mysterious twentieth century the visionary and symbolic modes of high

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Romanticism. But Women in Love also seems to cast its WORKS CITED

thought lines beyond the horizon of Romanticism, and even

Clarke, Colin, River of Dissolution: D.H. Lavrrence ? English Ro
neo-Romantic apocalypticism, in this unsettled and unset
manticism (Barnes & Noble, 1969); Ferber, Michael, Ro
tling novel of ideas that seems to call into question all the
manticism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University
positions adumbrated in its protracted and conflicted dia
Press, 2010); Ford, George H., Double Measure: A Study
logues. The message of Lawrence's most prophetic book re
of the Novels and Stories of D.H. Lawrence (Norton, 1965);
mains unsettled and unsettling a century after its
Huxley, Aldous, "Introduction" to his edition of The
composition. Even its concluding dialogue between Birkin
Letters of D.H. Lawrence (1932), rpt. in D.H. Lawrence: A
and Ursula, after their return from the frozen winter land
Critical Anthology, ed. H. Coombes (Penguin, 1973),
scape of the Tyrolean alps (reminiscent of the arctic setting
254-64; Lawrence, David Herbert, Apocalypse (Viking
of the conclusion of Frankenstein) where Gerald froze to
Press, 1960); "Aristocracy," in Reflections on the Death of a
death, ends on a negative note of irresolution and disagree
Porcupine (Indiana University Press, 1969), 223-40;
ment. When Birkin insists once more on his (bisexual) ideal
"Hymns in a Man's Life," in D.H. Lawrence: Late Essays
of an "eternal" male friendship to complement his love for
and Articles, ed. James T. Bolton (Cambridge University
Ursula, and she dismisses this ideal as "a perversity," insisting,
Press, 2004), 130-34; Lady Chatterley's Lover (Bantam,
"You can't have two kinds of love," he replies with a nega
1968); "Morality and the Novel," in Selected Literary Criti
tion"I don't believe that"(472-73) that leaves the door
cism, ed. Anthony Beal (Viking Press, 1966), 108-18;
wide open to endless renegotiation (s) of the romantic rela
Women in Love (Viking Press, 1960); Spilka, Mark, The
tionships so richly yet problematically scripted in the novel
Love Ethic of D.H. Lawrence (Indiana University Press,
1955); Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 1805, in Wil
liam Wordsworth: The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill
(Oxford University Press, 1984).

Robert Southey's Madoc in America

Juliet Shields
University of Washington, Seattle

The Madoc myth shows up in a range of late 18th cen- nomic and political discontents they experienced under Brit
tury and early 19th century works on both sides of the Atlan- ish rule. Southey, as Caroline Franklin has shown, drew
tic, from John Filson's Discovery, Settlement and Present State of heavily on Iolo's knowledge of the myth for his epic poem
Kentuckey (1784) in the United States to a 1791 series of es- Madoc (1795-1805). However, Madoc asserts the British right
says in the British Gentleman's Magazine. Two of the best to the Ohio Valley by first affirming the justice of British co
known British re-workings of myth were by the Welsh poet lonial government of Wales. In employing the myth to claim
Edward Williams known by his bardic name Iolo Mor- the British continuing stake in the settlement of the Ohio
ganwg and by Robert Southey. During the mid-1790s, Valley, Southey establishes a geographic and ideological
both Southey and Iolo made plans to emigrate to western equivalence between Wales and the western frontier as primi
Pennsylvania, then the gateway to the American West, in or- tive regions offering an escape from political oppression, but,
der to escape the stifling politics of counter-revolutionary somewhat paradoxically, only if they could first be brought
Britain. Both were deterred by financial difficulties, and under civilized colonial rule,
their poetic adaptations of the Madoc myth perhaps allowed
them to indulge imaginatively in risk-free vicarious migra- In comparison to Ireland, Scotland, and England,
tion. However, their adaptations of the myth were also politi- Wales contributed relatively few people and resources to the
cally charged commentaries on Anglo-Welsh relations and on settlement of British North America. Some historians have
British ongoing colonial projects in North America. Both questioned the existence of a distinctive Welsh diaspora, ar
poets employed the Madoc myth to represent the western gui rig that for all intents and purposes 18th and early 19th
frontier as a place where the revolutionary ideals of liberty century "Welsh migration can be accounted part of the
and equality might yet flourish. Yet their poems say more broader English movement" (Horn 38).' Yet, the Welsh con
about the previous six centuries of English colonial govern- tribution to the Romantic-era lore of migration and settle
ment of Wales than about the possibility of British settlement ment was disproportionately large. Wales offered British
of the Ohio Valley. In his "Address to the Inhabitants of migrants the legend of Prince Madoc, who, in the 12th cen
Wales" Iolo used the Madoc myth to imagine for the Welsh tury, left his home in war-torn Wales and sailed to the Gulf of
an American homeland that would free them from the eco- Mexico, where his people subdued, and in some tellings,

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