Staging the gaze in D.H. Lawrence's 'Women in Love.'

Studies in the Novel, Fall, 1994 by Earl Ingersoll

Lawrence's fifth novel, Women in Love, has been almost universally judged among his finest achievements.(1) As a "war novel" coming out of what Paul Delany has termed "Lawrence's nightmare,"(2) it offers a testament of survival, a heroic response to his radical isolation on the cliffs of Cornwall where he felt like a fox run to ground. His letters from the period emphasize his despairing recklessness in constructing a long work which he knew in advance stood even less chance of reaching an audience than The Rainbow had in the fall of 1915 when it was burned by the public hangman on the streets of London.(3)

It was The Rainbow that made his achievement in Women in Love "belated." As Charles Ross has extensively shown in his study The Composition of "The Rainbow" and "Women in Love,"(4) Lawrence began what was to be the celebration of his and Frieda's pursuit of "true marriage" in one of the early drafts of these "Brangwen novels" called "The Sisters," then turned his attention away from the story of the characters who would become Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin when he decided that his heroine needed more experience." That decision produced The Rainbow. When he returned to the manuscript of Women in Love, he had just finished reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick for the first time, and clearly he found in Melville a kindred spirit. Like his American counterpart, he was struggling to write what looked to be an unpublishable novel, in part because its desperate pursuit of Blutbruderschaff(5) would inevitably be read as homoerotic. Much of Women in Love's power is generated by elements of its narrative structure. The organic time frame of an action beginning close to the vernal equinox and ending near the winter solstice seems a gesture toward one of the classical unities. Similarly, the two-couples structure that he found in Hardy's fiction enhances the novel's impact. One other factor that lends Women in Love some of its power is Lawrence's development of his two couples within the framework of references to eyes and seeing. It is a framework based in a traditional notion of "vision." but it is also one that may be read in light of the contemporary concern with looking at and being looked at, or the gaze.

One aspect of the complex relationship between the two couples--Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich--is the pronounced contrast in the development of visual exchange between the characters. It might be noted at the outset that a concern with looking at and being tooked at in Lawrence's work is not unique to Women in Love. In The Rainbow, for example, Tom Brangwen looks at Lydia Lensky passing him on the road and "involuntarily" blurts out, "That's her," and later the young Ursula begins to read her own beauty and desirability in the impassioned gaze of her future lover Anton Skrebensky.(6) These more conventional expressions of visual exchange offer a good starting point since they persist in Women in Love. They are increasingly displaced, however, by more intricate expressions of looking.

The contrast between conventional and more complicated expressions of visual exchange is evident in Women in Love from the beginning in the descriptions of the two couples' developing relationships. Birkin first becomes significantly aware of Ursula during Hermione's theatricalizing of the Ruth story in her drawing room at Breadalby. What he sees is an Ursula who is "like a strange unconscious bud of powerful womanhood, He was unconsciously drawn to her. She was his future."(7) Birkin's looking at Ursula here and recognizing in an instant that she represents "his future" repeats the healthier consequences of visual exchange in Tom's recognition of Lydia as his future wife. Unlike the Gudrun-Gerald relationship, the growing love of Ursula and Birkin is noticeably lacking in looking and being looked at, with one notable exception. The exception occurs in the "Moony" chapter in which Ursula comes upon Birkin stoning the moon's reflection. Before she is aware of his presence, however, Ursula suddenly senses the moon "watching her," and we are told that "she suffered being exposed to it" (p. 245). Her reaction against the moon's reflection on Willey Water seems to generate the presence of another watcher, whom she immediately knows must be Birkin. Because for a long time she does not betray her presence as a watcher, Ursula becomes a voyeur. Why else is she uncomfortable that he might do "something he would not wish to be seen doing" (p. 246)? When he becomes aware of her presence while he stones the moon's reflection upon the water, it is clear that his intent gaze upon the moon's reflection has been "reading," or calling up in his unconscious, an aversion that mutely speaks to Ursula's aversion to this light and her unspoken desire for a darkness beyond the darkness of the night. The promise of that other darkness is offered in the lovemaking in the

"Excurse" chapter. In the parlor where they have had their tea, Ursula and Birkin make love, in a fashion. Visual exchange becomes prominent in the scene, yet it is implicated in a renewal of vision. Here the visual exchange seems to highlight mutuality and a depth of tenderness released by the power of the metaphoric: