The Ninth Street Center What People Say About Us

Sexuality, Society,
and Individual Growth in
D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love

by Michael Ballin
Associate Professor Emeritus
Department of English
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3C5

Interpretation of the relationship between Gerald Crich and Birkin in Women in Love has been afflicted by cloudiness and fuzziness. In the past there has been an unwillingness to confront the homoerotic nature of the portrayal of this relationship. The critics are not altogether at fault because until the full text of the novel was recently available in the Cambridge edition the presentation of the relationship between Birkin and Gerald was affected by censorship. The full text makes the homosexual aspect more explicit.

A homoerotic theme is consistently present in Lawrence's fiction from the time of The White Peacock on Lawrence, however, had to do battle with his own homosexual feelings as the famous prologue to Women in Love indicates. In this autobiographical statement Lawrence confesses to his attraction towards dark and blond masculine types. He reflects his Puritanical upbringing both in this passage and in other passages in letters where he refers negatively to "lovers of men" in disgusted tones and uses insect imagery to reflect his own perception of such lovers. For example, he writes to his friend Koteliansky about "These horrible little frowsty people, men lovers of men, they give me such a sense of corruption, almost putrescence, that I dream of beetles" (L 11 323). Love reflects this prejudicial view of male lovers. Lawrence was also more open about the homosexual nature of their relationship in the original: he was forced to remove references to their sleeping arrangements since presentation of male homosexuality would have added fresh fuel to the fire of protest and demand for censorship of the novel.

Nevertheless, Rupert Birkin, a central narrative voice often close to the narrator's own voice, defends the ideal of male love against Gerald's strictures. Gerald's view of homoerotic feeling is that "it has no basis in nature"; the following dialogue occurs at a point in the narrative in which Birkin finally persists in his demand for a final commitment from Gerald and argues for the psychological necessity of a life-long relationship of one man to another. Birkin argues for an "additional perfect relationship between man and man -- additional to marriage" (352). Gerald says that he is incapable of feeling deeply enough:

      Surely there can never be anything as strong between man and man as sex love is between man and woman. Nature doesn't provide the basis.

Birkin replies, "Well, of course, I think she does" and argues against the exclusivity of marriage: "And you've got to admit the unadmitted love of man for man. It makes for a greater freedom for everybody."

Birkin therefore asserts his own sexual philosophy against Gerald's objections that homosexuality does not have a "basis in nature" and in the novel he pursues his relationship with Gerald with as much single-mindedness as he pursues Ursula. There is therefore no doubt that Lawrence was exploring the creative potential inherent in a realised love between two men.

Birkin fights for a relationship with Gerald against Gerald's own ambivalence. Moreover, he stands by his ideal of male love as healthful in the face of Ursula's description of it as perversity. He even regards the source of Gerald's tragic self-destruction at the end of the novel as a failure to fulfill himself through a commitment to their relationship.

Lawrence therefore claims that the expression of homoerotic feeling makes an essential contribution to psychological growth; this is the effect of his dramatisation of his male protagonists in Women in Love. I wish to explore further the contribution of homosexuality to the total portrayal of human sexuality in the novel and to explore to what extent the psychological development of characters is affected by the bold concept that homosexuality is not against nature but grounded in nature. I also wish to understand the phrase "basis in nature": is such a basis biological or psychological? I have been helped to understand Lawrence's concepts of sexuality by the psychiatrist Paul Rosenfels; his books Homosexuality and the Psychology of the Creative Process and Love and Power aided my development of the thesis that Lawrence is presenting a new psychological understanding of the nature of sexual relationships and their contribution to processes of psychological growth.

Birkin's fight for the notion that his love for another man is not perverse but healthful dramatises a central polarity in the novel. Distorted expressions of sexuality in characters like Hermione Roddice, Loerke, Gudrun, and Gerald reflect the destructive instincts of a society given over to war and the fascist repressions of an authoritarian world. The essentially dramatic nature of the psychological action in Women in Love is revealed in the tendency of characters to confront one another antagonistically and to establish a sense of living connection in the process. The context of the drama is the cultural disintegration of society in the period of World War I. Critics have recognised that the culture of Europe is represented in the novel n the throes of a struggle between the forces of life and death. Homosexuality in its range of expression is presented in the centre of that struggle.

Lawrence expresses through Birkin the notion that "we grow or die." Society has the opportunity of two choices: the path of life and fulfillment or a choice of various paths of psychological disintegration and death. How is society to move towards life? Lawrence's solution is that individuals, through commitment to one another under conditions of psychological health can move society forward to life. Individual growth is the only hope for the life of the whole culture.

If the specifically homoerotic expression of sexuality is placed in the narrative at the centre of the opposing forces of creativity and life in society on the one hand and the forces of destruction on the other, how can homosexuality contribute towards the creative? Primarily by allowing the individual to realise his own inner identity. Such a condition of self realisation was for Lawrence an essential expression of individuality. Historical circumstance made such self definition a critical issue in a society which was sacrificing the individual to the collective mechanism of war. Social and industrial institutions were conspiring to sacrifice the individual upon the altar of aggressive patriotism.

Birkin is the central character through whom Lawrence explores the theme of individual psychological growth fostered independently from social institutions. In Chapter X of The Rainbow Ursula had begun the revolt against tyranny of marriage and family life, "the life of babies and muddled domesticity." Analogously, Birkin at the beginning of Women in Love is attached to the world of official education as school inspector and a false relationship with Hermione Roddice. Birkin soon gives up his position and cuts himself off from all social bonds. His act of throwing off all social rules and regulations allows him to become the representative individual who is determined to find truth and right for himself. He can fill such a role only by cutting himself loose from the conventional constraints that channel the psychic energies of most people: a conventional institutionalised marriage, a job, a profession, and the family. Men and women must expand themselves by growing through each other: such is Lawrence's vision of human relations in most of his fictional work.

The process of growth and expansion in psychological experience is grounded in notions of polarity. Lawrence's position does not reflect solipsism and social isolation. After Women in Love Lawrence felt impelled to formulate a full, metaphysically based psychological system in writings such as Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psycho-analysis and the Unconscious. Later in his career Lawrence acknowledged the work of a pioneer American social psychologist, Dr. Trigant Burrow, whose book The Social Basis of Consciousness Lawrence reviewed enthusiastically for The Bookman in 1927. Lawrence was deeply sympathetic to Burrow's view that "personal systems of men, single and collective, are but relative to an organic societal consciousness." Burrow corresponded with D.H. Lawrence and in a letter of September 9, 1927 inveighed against the enslavement of the individual to his own self image -- a state which tempted the individual consciousness into a world of artificially constructed self involvement. Burrow urged for this reason his reader to abandon "his stupid purpose in life apart from the purpose that is life" (B185).

Lawrence's enthusiasm for Burrow reflects his own progress towards a social vision which transcends the perspective of the individual ego. Human beings can only grow through one another. They can do that neither individually nor collectively but only organically through the mutual need of individuals to complete their identities through one another. Individual relationships must reflect a free and open expression of the fulfilled self and cannot be dominated by collective and institutionalised regulation. Since there is a social basis in consciousness, human beings are individually incomplete and need to encounter opposed aspects of themselves. Only in this process can the imprisoning constraints of narcissism be overcome. Moreover such a process can only come about at a stage in culture where the individual is doing more than adapting to his physical and social environment. Lawrence's exploration of psychological growth is therefore placed in a context which includes the experience of polarity expressed in the meeting of dominant and yielding personality types. The concern with polarity is explored in the metaphysical writings which succeed Women in Love: "The Crown" and "The Reality of Peace." The concern for the role of power and leadership in psychological and social life is explored in subsequent novels such as Kangaroo, Aaron's Rod, and The Plumed Serpent.

Paul Rosenfels's conceptions of psychological growth offer some profound analogies to Lawrence's dramatisation of these concepts in novelistic terms as well as to his metaphysical expression of them. Rosenfels's exposition is dense and scientific; Lawrence's is often mystique ridden and esoteric. (Rosenfels comments that the struggle for individual truth often takes esoteric forms.) Nevertheless, their conceptions complement one another, for both psychologist and novelist grasp rationally and intuitively the essence of what it means to grow psychologically.

I have selected three key concepts from Rosenfels's writings since they have direct application to Women in Love. I wish now to outline -- necessarily in somewhat reductive fashion -- Rosenfels's concepts of adaptive versus creative life-modes, character specialisation and polarity, and the inter-reactions between Love and Power.

A purely adaptive mode is characterized by the subjection of psychological energies to the practical demands of living. The individual is born into a physical and social environment which demands conformity to established values and endorses devotion to society's institutions. Civilized man, however, possesses a psychological surplus which provides the basis for inner identity. Creative, as apart from adaptive modes of living, provide that sense of individual identity. Rosenfels emphasises the crucial importance of separating the creative and the practical if an individual wishes to achieve a condition of psychological health. In both the adaptive and creative modes of living, yielding, and assertive elements are required. Biologically, there is a capacity to receive information from the environment, the product of a submissive mode. There is also the capacity for control which demands an assertive relationship to the environment.

With civilisation comes specialisation of these assertive and yielding elements. At the biological level such specialisation is related to gender and sexual development; the masculine is associated with dominance and control and the feminine with yielding and submission. But character specialisation, independent of biological gender, is a crucial later stage of civilized humanity -- crucial because it provides opportunities for psychological growth and understanding. Rosenfels uses the terms "masculine" and "feminine" to describe psychological modes relating to assertion and mastery on the one hand and to modes of service and submission on the other. These psychological modalities are quite independent of biological gender.

Rosenfels therefore asserts that growth in human relationships has nothing to do with the difference between male and female genitals. True mated relationships are psychological not sexual and concern the interaction between yielding and assertive types. Rosenfels's concepts might have been useful to D.H. Lawrence in resolving the problem he presents in the discussion between Gerald and Birkin in Women in Love. Rosenfels provides a theoretical "basis in nature" for homoerotic relations which would allow Birkin to answer Gerald's denial of such a basis.

Lawrence and Rosenfels would also have agreed with each other that the individual has to move from the adaptive to the creative mode and resist the attempt of society to detach sexuality from its psychological moorings for then it becomes "an external thing subject to social rules and regulations" (R 16). Psychologist and novelist both share the deep perception that social subjection of the individual to external social norms stifles growth and creates compulsion. Gerald Crich is a dramatic embodiment of this process: what Birkin offers Gerald is a means by which he can free himself from a compulsive enslavement to the mechanical world of the coal mines; mastery in the psychological sphere can prevent enslavement to bureaucratic organisation.

The freedom comes from being able to explore and be fully conscious of one's own identity. Such creative exploration of the self flourishes in the interrelation between Love and Power capacities. Rosenfels asserts that Love and Power have to encounter each other and he amplifies these terms by defining love as a focus on an external object that inspires expanding awareness and comprehension. Power, on the other hand, is operational and is expressed through action.

Rosenfels recognises that the concept of power has a negative connotation in modern intellectual society but insists that there is an impelling need to understand it especially since "it is in the interaction between love and power that masculine identity finds its true access to an expanding interpersonal world" (R 37). Lawrence certainly recognised that power on the loose had created the disintegration of European society in World War I. In Women in Love he also clearly reflects the impact of his reading of Nietzsche's Will to Power. Nietzsche and World War I encouraged his recognition that an unwillingness to fulfill the ends of power leads to neurotic forms of defense such as compulsive action, masochism and enslavement of the self. "Only love can light your world; only power can claim it," is Rosenfels's version of this truth.

At the beginning of Women in Love Birkin recognises that his quest for love is ended: "Love gives out in the end," he complains. He wants, therefore, not the "meeting and mingling" of love but "a balance of opposites"; he, too, recognises that the individual can preserve his/her own sense of self only through psychological growth. The interaction of opposites promotes that creative growth upon which, finally, the growth of society depends.

Lawrence's exposition of the polarity theme in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious often resonates with Rosenfels's psychological system. For example, Lawrence says,

      The amazingly difficult and vital business of human relationship has been almost laughably under estimated in our epoch. All this nonsense above love and unselfishness is more crude and repugnant than savage fetish worship. Love is a thing to be learned through centuries of patient effort. It is difficult, complex, maintenance of individual integrity throughout the incalculable processes of interhuman polarity (225).

Lawrence would have agreed with Rosenfels that love and unselfishness are only one half of a polarity, the other half characterised by the modalities of assertion and power. I wish now to approach the text of Women in Love in terms of the polarity and to explore further the psychological aspects of Birkin and Gerald.

First it must be said that Birkin is presented as the character dedicated to the ideals of growth and individuality. Though his voice is not synonymous with that of the author it is the most dominant in the novel; Birkin does not achieve any final end to his quest for inner realisation, mainly because there is no end to what is a continuous process. However, his voice is the most questioning of the collective, institutional will. He fights fiercely for a sense of his own inner identity and is obviously the champion of a modality of power and mastery. He desires freedom from all control and proposes a relationship to Ursula which is the model of masculinist values, in Rosenfels's terms. Thus Birkin does not want individual men to be helplessly dependent on the female or the female on the male.

Birkin asks himself the question, "Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole?" and answers "It is not true" (WL, 225). The truth about human relations is, for Lawrence, more complex than can be comprehended by a simple polarised pattern based upon sex and gender. Such an over simplified view of human nature restricts the ideal of human fulfillment to sex alone. However, the individual's fulfillment is more important than sex. Lawrence's endorsement of the work of Trigant Burrow on the societal consciousness reflects his own conviction that individual fulfillment is more important than sexual satisfactions. He is later to read in Burrow's The Social Basis of Consciousness that polarity based upon gender opposition is not a sufficient picture of the complex nature of human dualities. Burrow asserts that "in place of the bipolar position of man and woman we have substituted the bidimensional attitude of male and female" (207).

Civilisation has therefore transcended pure biological need and created a psychological need to grow through each other. This ideal of fulfillment through polarisation in relationship can, moreover, be achieved in a variety of ways not restricted by the single heterosexual relationship. Lawrence anticipates Rosenfels's concept of growth and, in his emphasis on what Burrow calls the "society instinct" the current object relations school of psychoanalysis represented by post-Freudian theorists such as D.W. Winnicott and W.R.D. Fairbairn. The latter school has replaced the assumed preemptory needs of the biological drives or instincts with the impulse towards meaningful relating.

The polarity of submission and dominance has a central role in the process of growth. The individual is enabled to grow through the giving of his personal and spiritual resources. The dominant individual can creatively exploit the resources of the other. The yielding individual grows through the giving of personal and spiritual resources. There is therefore a potential for creative exchange in relationships; the patterns of giving or receiving, self-assertion or mastery versus yielding, cut across gender.

Such an insight can provide the "basis in nature" for same sex relating that Birkin asserts in Women in Love. Birkin experiences a primary physical attraction towards Gerald reinforced by his understanding of Gerald's masculine power based psychological disposition. The relationship is doomed to failure in the novel -- perhaps because they are characters with the same polarity, in Rosenfels's terms. However, the scene in the chapter "Gladiatorial" in which Gerald and Birkin wrestle with each other explores the processes of mastery and submission between individuals. Birkin seems to want to help Gerald to realise his masculine dominance. His failure to do so is a tragedy because Gerald is not able to grow and therefore dies. Not only can he not fulfill a masculine role with Birkin but he is destroyed by his failure to match Gudrun's dominance.

Gerald has a value for Birkin psychologically in so far as a relationship with him would neutralise any temptation to sacrifice his independence to Ursula. Although he unashamedly gives to Ursula the feminine role of serving his own growth needs, he believes in the idea that she can grow too. His relationship to Gerald would provide another channel for the exploration of a power based love.

Birkin's formula does not work in the novel any more than it might in real life. However, I think Lawrence expresses as much psychological truth in his depiction of its failure and collapse as he does in elaborating the ideal. His psychological analysis of Gerald's collapse and destruction by his own psychological defenses gives a profoundly tragic dimension to the novel.

What accounts for Gerald's inability to give himself to others and for the over-riding concerns with power assertion, revealed in his cruel domination of the horse at the rail crossing in the chapter "Coal-Dust"? The answer is supplied in the extended analysis of Gerald's character in the chapter "The Industrial Magnate." The concept of polarity governs Lawrence's picture of Gerald's early history and family structure. Gerald's parents are polarised types: the father is a somewhat sentimental adherent to the gospel principles of charity who maintains the dependence of his employees with presents and hand outs. He ignores the servile state of the total body of employees under his control and sustains the weak parasitical ones who come seeking charity with hard luck stories. His wife, ironically called Christiana, cannot stand her husband's weakness, drives the suppliants away if she can and fights her husband:

      And all the while his wife had opposed him like one of the great demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey with the fascinating beauty and abstraction of a hawk (242).

The antagonism between husband and wife is an extreme one and drives Christiana into violent modes of expression: "of wild and over-weaning temper, she could not bear the humiliation of her husband's soft, half-appealing kindness to everybody" (242) Charity breeds hate; Thomas Crich, on the other hand, concludes a sacrificial life mode with death from a bloody hemorrhage which is a parody of the crucifixion.

The presentation of Gerald's psychology is plainly the product of this polarity. He has followed his mother's masculine polarity n reaction from his father whose values he totally reverses. When he takes over the management of the mines during his father's illness and after his death, he does so in a spirit of ruthless efficiency, devoid of pity for the fates of the individuals under his control. In reversing the charity of his father he becomes an allegorical representative of unyielding mechanism. Gerald's harsh dominance is a product of a massive over-reaction from his father and is modelled on his mother's almost insane antagonism. For these reasons Gerald cannot feel, cannot love or fulfill himself in his personal relations with anyone else. The impulse towards any realisation of the inner self has been destroyed as a result of the false giving of his father. Gerald cannot respond from the heart; only the values of rational organisation and control compel his respect.

Lawrence states that Christiana is "in a fierce tension of opposition like the negative pole of a magnet" (244); such magnetic tension, however, characterises all the personal relations in the novel. In no character is the polarity principle more evident than in Gerald who is subject to his father's Charity principle in so far as he is in reaction against it.

Gerald's powerfully polarised reaction against his father creates a problem; as his father drifts out of life, Gerald has to confront the reality of defining his own inner identity as well as his own social role in terms of a kind of unifying principle, even though he realises that "the whole unifying idea of mankind seemed to be dying with his father" (248).

Gerald's false solution to his psychological problem is to make a god out of the machine. As a result, he represses the warm and charitable side of himself, becomes "curious and cold" and eventually the ruthless reformer of industry who sacrifices human considerations in the interest of a machine like efficiency. He thus avoids the irreconcilable conflict his father had wrestled with when his miners went on strike. (Thomas Crich's "love" for his employees did not prevent him from being in a state of war with them when they went on strike for more just payments.)

The miners were correct in rejecting Thomas's brand of charity in favour of social justice. However, Lawrence as narrator had insisted on Thomas Crich's awareness of the conflict between the important cultural ideal of the unity of men and the social division created by economic inequalities. Gerald certainly does not create any viable solution to this problematic division. He simply abandons democratic equality as a principle, without, as Lawrence says "bothering to think to a conclusion" (255).

Gerald becomes a high priest of a new mechanical order -- an order linked with the war which was itself an inhuman machine. This abandonment of democratic equality, charity, and humanity creates a cultural tragedy reflected in the personal tragedy of Gerald's sexual and personal relationships. Gerald's repression of Charity on the social level is connected to Gerald's incapacity to reorganize the principles of Love and Power as complementary opposites. His masculine identity is expressed in his urge to exploit the social and environmental resources around him and to assert his mastery over them. But Gerald cannot connect with any kind of love. His power assertion is crude and inhuman and because it is based on the repression of his own inner identity it cannot fulfill the aims of psychological growth.

Lawrence uses another instructive polarised pattern in Women in Love: relationships which exemplify psychological disease are presented antithetically against those which provide a model for psychological health. The strong instinct towards healthful self-realisation is reflected in the characters of Birkin and Ursula. Birkin has had the strength to throw off a false cultural idea as embodied in Hermione; his hatred of Hermione is a healthful symptom of his determination to gain his own inner freedom. As Rosenfels comments, "(there is) a necessity for the creative thinker to give full vent to hatred of a false ideal if he is to separate from it" (L&P 72). Hermione's frustrated power assertion is vented in a murderous act: the crushing blow with the paper weight on Birkin's head. Birkin, however, is not "willing to be murdered" and in a way Hermione's act is vindicated because it allows them both to be free. This relationship is a microcosm of a state of society at the time of World War I -- a state in which individuals are not willing to "come clean" but rather allow frustrated power assertion to seek the ultimately destructive forms of war and mass killing.

Readers of The Rainbow also know that Ursula has fought free from a destructive relationship with her first love, Anton Skrebensky who is in many ways a prototype of Gerald Crich. Like Gerald his personality is restricted to the professional role -- in his case the soldier. He is a power based individual who has the same fatal tendency to submerge his individual identity beneath his professional role.

The relationship between Gerald and Gudrun is based purely upon psychological defences and the nature of their attraction to each other has everything to do with frustrated power and little to do with fulfillment. Gerald's imposition of power in the famous scene where he forces his horse to confront the steam engine at the rail tracks is a false expression of masculinity which Ursula sees through but Gudrun is attracted towards. Ursula perceives instinctively that Gerald is obsessed with dominance because his masculine power urge is trapped and cannot find free expression. Gudrun's submission to this classic expression of sadistic impulse is a false submission. She has a psychologically masculine nature and she is therefore fascinated by a power based individual who is in fact a mirror image of her. Their relationship can therefore only lead to internecine struggle. Gerald is destroyed by the relationship and Gudrun attains no genuine salvation since she transfers her dominance to Leitner, another figure whose power urge is directed by compulsive dominance, sometimes of a sadistic kind. Gudrun's submission is false because it is based upon passive anger

The intense preoccupation with the power urge in Women in Love has struck some readers as itself obsessive. I believe, however, that Lawrence was reflecting his own deeper perception of a culture which was disintegrating precisely because it had not been able to control and integrate its aggressive and power based impulses. Human relationships form the nucleus of society. If power and aggression are allowed to fester unexpressed they will seek explosive and destructive outlets. For this reason war harnesses powerful psychological energies. Lawrence recognised there is a basic impulse to individual fulfillment and when that is blocked the culture as well as the individual disintegrates.

Sexuality can be expressed in healthful or destructive ways whether it be between individuals of the same or opposite gender. Trigant Burrow later asserted that all sexuality is narcissistic, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Analogously, Lawrence's attacks on homosexuality can be interpreted as attacks on narcissistic sexuality between people of either sexual orientation. Leitner is an example of an individual whose homoerotic urge is not healthfully expressed. Birkin strives to find a way in which the same impulse can be directed towards life and growth. The tragedy of the culture is perhaps contained in Ursula's denial of the validity of Birkin's perception of a psychological complementarity which is independent of gender. Gerald's refusal to allow Birkin to help himself and Gerald fulfill each other in turn leads to Birkin's feelings of intense disillusion -- not only in the hope of his own final fulfillment but in the ongoing life of the whole human species. Lawrence offers more to the reader than a nihilistic vision or psychological bankruptcy: the path of growth lies open for those who wish to follow it. If the power and submission urges are not met, the psychological fate of the species is not promising. If it is true, as W. H. Auden says, that "we must love one another or die" we must know how to love one another and what that love means in terms of our personal and social fulfillment.

Bibliography

Burrow, Trigant. A Search for Man's Family: The Selected Letters of Trigant Burrow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1958.

__________. The Social Basis of Consciousness: A Study in Organic Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, 1927.

Lawrence, D.H. Collected Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

__________. Fantasia of the Conscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Phoenix, ed. London: Heinemann, 1971.

__________. The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead Weekes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

__________. Women in Love, eds. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Rosenfels, Paul. Homosexuality: The Psychology of the Creative Process. New York: Ninth Street Centre, 1971.

__________. Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity. New York: Libra Publishers Inc., 1966.

-- reprinted from Etudes Lawrenciennes
by The University of Paris at Nanterre
(February, 1996)