The art of appropriation: the rhetoric of sexuality in D.H. Lawrence - Rhetoric and Poetics

Style, Summer, 1996 by Gerald Doherty

Although in his essays, Lawrence configures the sexual act as the expression of the tension between these two gravitational poles - "a dual passion of unutterable separation and lovely conjunction of the two" (Reflections 10) - in his fiction the metaphoric imperative often seems to prevail. Metaphor takes advantage of the complicity between its basic operation (the act of appropriation) and the phallic drive to possess and conquer. It lends itself to narratives that inscribe the female as the alien other who subjects herself to the male will-to-power. As a consequence, representations of metonymic sex (contiguous bodies, masturbatory sexual play) are comparatively rare in Lawrence's fiction, especially in their "pure state" uncontaminated by the complementary impulse to usurpation and conquest. One particular episode in a novel is exemplary: in the encounters between Will and Anna in The Rainbow that mark the culmination of their erotic life, the pair depersonalize one another, Anna's body is fetishized, and Will makes his primary goal the intensification of pleasure rather than the inducement of orgasm. It is to this episode (often labeled "pornographic") that we now turn our attention.

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After Will and Anna have relinquished their attempt to sustain the blissful (metaphorical) union, the ideal two-in-one, "complete and beyond the touch to time and change" (135), achieved in their honeymoon idyll in Anna's cottage, they engage in a "profound" and "violent" sexual experiment in which they abandon the "moral position" that had previously constrained their lovemaking. Though Lawrence wrote this extensive scenario (twelve pages in all) into the final manuscript of The Rainbow in a deliberately provocative language ("immoral and against mankind") he was subsequently forced to tone down its lubricity to accord with the propriety and demands of a publisher (Methuen) who was "offended by the callous, predatory quality of Will's amorousness" (Ross 46-52). Noting their differences from other Lawrentian representations of sex, critics have since faulted these scenes both for their pornographic "perversity" and for their gross "sensuality."(9) This "perversity," as we shall see, results because Lawrence uses metonymy as the constituting trope of phallic desire in its instrumental and fetishistic dimension.

The episode commences with Will's growing "sil[ence]" and "separate[ness]," an "indifference to responsibility" that makes him withdraw from Anna. Permitting the "unadmitted life of his desire" to come to the fore, he pursues other women precisely because they are strangers ("He wanted the other life . . . [h]e wanted the other"). He cultivates random connections without commitment based on a simple contiguity, closeness-to-hand. A young factory girl (Jenny) who sits beside him in the Nottingham Empire whets is sexual appetite. A purely contingent figure, Jenny signifies only the anonymity that liberates his desire and objectifies her in the process ("He was quite unaware that she was anybody").