In 1914 Lawrence and Frieda were back in England. Weekley had stopped stalling over the divorce from Frieda, which was finalized in July, making it possible for Lawrence and Frieda to wed. The marriage took place on July 13, at the South Kensington Registry Office. They did not have long to celebrate: Two weeks later war broke out, and Lawrence and Frieda were prevented from obtaining passports and forced to spend the war years in England. Critics and biographers often portray these years in England as an unmitigated disaster that left Lawrence an all but broken man. This is given credence to some extent by Lawrence himself, who in his writing after the war fumed against the democratic system that he felt had abused and humiliated him and made it all but impossible for him to work. The truth is that, despite significant difficulties, these were the most productive years of Lawrence’s life. The incredible output of quality writing that seemed to have reached its apogee in Italy under the inspiration of Frieda not only continued in England, but reached a new zenith. Lawrence was again hard at work on
The Sisters.
In February 1915 he reported that he had already revised it seven times. Lawrence would eventually divide the novel in two. The first part became
The Rainbow,
which traces the lives of the Brangwens, a prosperous family of farmers, through four generations. When it was published in 1915, it was banned for obscenity, and the courts ordered that all the publisher’s copies be destroyed, with little or no protest from the publisher himself. In 1916 the second part of The
Sisters
novel was completed. Its new title was
Women in Love
and it would become one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature.
One theory about why
The Rainbow
was banned is that it was done for political reasons and had little or nothing to do with obscenity. This is possible, given the lack of graphic obscenity in the novel. According to this point of view, Lawrence with his candor and irritability angered people who were in a position to do him harm. For instance, in 1915 the Lawrences took a cottage lent them by Viola Meynell, daughter of the poet Alice Meynell, which brought him into contact with Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the arts, Bertrand Russell, and other members of the Cambridge-Bloomsbury group. Lawrence soon wore out his welcome by mercilessly satirizing Lady Morrell (as Hermione in
Women in Love)
and lecturing her and Russell on their moral shortcomings. No one in this group may have directly been responsible for aiding in the banning of
The Rainbow.
On the other hand, no one lifted a finger to stop it either.
A clear and more present hostility presented itself in 1916 when Lawrence moved to Cornwall. He invited John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield to join him and Frieda. Lawrence romanticized the locals, to whom he talked freely, airing his antiwar philosophy. Presently, his home was searched by the locals and the authorities, and he and Frieda were treated like spies. It did not help that Frieda’s cousin was the German ace, Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron. The Lawrences were given three days to clear out of Cornwall and for the rest of the war were subject to surveillance and persecution. It is, therefore, not surprising that at the end of the war, the Lawrences left England to live in a virtually permanent exile.
In 1919, as soon as they could get visas, the Lawrences immediately returned to Italy, eventually settling in Taormina, Sicily. Lawrence’s novel
The Lost Girl
was published in 1920 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Edinburgh, which brought with it a sum of one hundred pounds. Lawrence was still productive, but he never regained that brilliance of the early days in Italy and the war years in England. 1921 saw Lawrence shifting his talents to nonfiction. He published
Sea and Sardinia,
a travel book,
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious,
his answer to Freud, and
Movements in History,
a high school text. At the urging of his friend Earl H. Brewster and his wife, in 1922 Lawrence and Frieda sailed for Ceylon. The Brewsters, both Buddhists, were versed in Eastern philosophy. For years Lawrence had talked about leading a spiritual utopia of enlightened souls, which he called Rananim, so one would think that his landing in the east would have been manna to his soul. Instead, it was poison. Lawrence did not take well to either Ceylon or Buddhism. After a short stay, the Lawrences went for six weeks to Australia, which provided the setting for his novel
Kangaroo. Aarons Rod,
begun in 1918 and put aside, was published in 1922, along with
England, My England,
a collection of stories, and
Fantasia of the Unconscious,
a sequel to Lawrence’s book on psychoanalysis published the previous year.
One unexpected event occurred during the Lawrence’s trip east: A rich American woman looking to establish her own utopia in New Mexico read a serialized version of
Sea and Sardinia
in
The Dial
magazine; she decided that the spiritually inclined Lawrence would be the glue to make her community adhere. The woman’s name was Mabel Dodge Sterne (she was later known as Mabel Dodge Luhan). She had noble and sincere ideas, not only about forming a spiritual community, but about protecting Native Americans. After much negotiating, Lawrence sailed to America and settled in New Mexico on Mabel Dodge’s estate. It’s fair to say that this move had a major impact on Lawrence’s remaining work. Certainly,
Studies in Classic American Literature
(1923), which put American literature on the map as a literature to be taken seriously, would not have been written if Lawrence had not made this voyage to America. At a time when America’s “Lost Generation” was still escaping the United States to find inspiration and culture in Europe, Lawrence escaped Europe to find inspiration in America’s people and writers.
Kangaroo
and
Birds, Beasts and Flowers,
a new volume of poetry, were also published in that year. However,
The Plumed Serpent,
published in 1926, in which Lawrence explores the will to power and Native American culture, is the most important work of Lawrence’s American experience, highly flawed aesthetically and politically dangerous though it may be.
The same year
The Plumed Serpent
was published, Lawrence was back in Florence beginning his last novel,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
When it was published in 1928, it was banned in both America and England. Lawrence had by then begun painting; at an exhibition in London on July 5, 1929, the police confiscated his paintings of frontal nudity. That same day, Lawrence suffered a massive tubercular hemorrhage. Earlier efforts at finding a cure in Germany and France had been unsuccessful. At the end of 1929, Lawrence moved to the south of France, and he died on March 2, 1930, in Vence. Almost until the end he was writing and taking care of his correspondence.
Many consider
Women in Love
the most important work by the most important twentieth-century English novelist (Joyce was Irish). The novel, as Joyce Carol Oates points out, is neither exclusively about women in love nor even exclusively about women.
Women in Love
could as easily be entitled
Men in Love,
for it deals as much with its two male heroes, Gerald and Birkin, as it does with the three central female characters. Whether or not
Women in
Love sets out to answer consciously Rimbaud’s dictum that love must be reinvented, is a matter for debate. What is beyond debate is that Lawrence, using the moods and, to a degree, the methods of the Symbolist poets, does in fact set out to address the question of modern love and to reinvent roles and attitudes, to revolutionize modern man’s emotional life.
Lawrence appears acutely aware that love cannot be reinvented in the rigid formalism of traditional society. The liberation of love requires to some extent the general liberation of mankind. To this end, Lawrence opens
Women in Love
with the sisters Ursula and Gudrun having a frank discussion about marriage. Cleverly, Lawrence has Gudrun, the colder of the two sisters, whose relationship with Gerald will end in disaster, initiate the conversation about marriage:
“Ursula,” said Gudrun, “don’t you
really want
to get married?” Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It depends how you mean.”
Gudrun was slightly taken aback. She watched her sister for some moments.
“Well,” she said, ironically, “it usually means one thing! But don’t you think anyhow, you’d be—” she darkened slightly—“in a better position than you are in now?”
A shadow came over Ursula’s face.
“I might,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”
Again Gudrun paused, slightly irritated. She wanted to be quite definite.
“You don’t think one needs the
experience
of having been married?” she asked.
“Do you think it need
be
an experience?” replied Ursula.
“Bound to be, in some way or other,” said Gudrun, coolly. “Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.”
“Not really,” said Ursula. “More likely to be the end of experience” (p.5).
It is not lost on us that Ursula is embroidering, the symbol of the traditional woman. Lawrence uses this symbol to sharply contrast Ursula’s thoughts on marriage with those of most women in her time. Right from the beginning the reader is disabused of the notion that this will be a conventional novel. Lawrence establishes from the start that both sisters are distinctly modern women in their thoughts and feelings, despite their Edwardian surroundings. Ursula, for her part, does not reject the concept of marriage outright but merely the idea of marriage as it is traditionally conceived. Hence, her question about what precisely Gudrun means by marriage. For her part, Gudrun raises the issue of marriage in its practical aspects, whether it would be worth considering if it were financially beneficial, or whether one should consider it as a grand experience that might prove to be favorable or unfavorable. The question of love is never raised by Gudrun, but it is implicit in Ursula questioning of Gudrun’s specific definition of matrimony.
If the personalities of the two sisters are contrasted from the outset of the novel, Lawrence teases us as to who, in fact, is the more modern of the two without ever answering the question during the course of the novel in any definitive way. True, Gudrun initiates the discussion, which would at first make her appear the more traditional of the two. Gudrun seems to consider marriage as a practical institution unencumbered by love. However, we soon find out that Gudrun is anything but traditional in most of her thinking. She has gone off to live the life of a painter in London, an extremely radical act for a woman at that time and a bold one even today. Nor is her daring confined to London. She steals away to the local red-light district to be picked up by a working-class young man. In other words, she not only challenges the existing concepts of what a young woman should be, she seems interested in shattering those standards; yet she is willing to consider marriage for her own purposes.
Critics have noted that Gudrun’s name is that of a goddess in Norse mythology. Indeed, the whole of
Women in Love
has a Wagnerian flavor to it. Like a goddess, Gudrun appropriates for herself a freedom that apparently is beyond love or at least not subject to it. At the same time, she does not at first seem inclined to detach herself completely from traditional ways of doing things, even if she rebels. We are forced to ask whether Gudrun, who has moved beyond love as a defining principle and condition for male and female relationships, is more modern than her sister, who renounces love and marriage as they are presently and would revolutionize men and society in order to achieve happiness. Ursula is not looking for an expedient relationship. The sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, are really two sides of the same project of breaking with the past, and their relationship with Birkin and Gerald, respectively, explore from two different perspectives the possibilities of modern love.
If Gudrun is the embodiment of a German ice-queen detached from family and not quite believing in love, she finds in Gerald her corresponding Nordic ice-king. The son of the mine owner to whom responsibility now falls for directing the mine operations due to his father’s illness, Gerald is of the exalted regions of Valhalla, and Gudrun, despite herself, is appropriately drawn to him:
But about him also was the strange, guarded look, the unconscious glisten, as if he did not belong to the same creation as the people about him. Gudrun lighted on him at once. There was something northern about him that magnetised her. In his clear northern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice. And he looked so new, unbroached, pure as an arctic thing (p. 12).
Despite the mutual attraction they have for each other, they are as doomed as characters in a Greek tragedy. It is a measure of Lawrence’s genius as a writer that Gerald and Gudrun move with the ritual of destiny toward their predetermined end without violating the sense of realism that is the strength of the work. In the chapter entitled “Water-Party,” Lawrence reveals Gudrun’s contempt and fearlessness of males when she rushes heedlessly toward a herd of dangerous longhorn steers. When Gerald questions her as to why she did it, as an answer she smacks him soundly across the face. “You have struck the first blow,” says Gerald. “And I shall strike the last,” Gudrun replies prophetically (p. 170).
Gudrun, then, represents modern woman in her hatred of men. It is not that she sets out to despise Gerald, or men in general. On the contrary, she sees in Gerald a possible mate. “I shall know more of that man,” she says when she sees him in church at his sister’s wedding. She even goes so far as to ask herself, “Am I
really
singled out for him in some way, is there really some pale gold, arctic light that envelopes only us two?” (p. 13). However, as a modern woman trapped in a traditional society still under the sway of Victorianism, she is drawn to the expression of her freedom but does not know how, or does not wish, to integrate it with the love of men. We have already noted that she went off to London to pursue an art career and that she allows herself to be picked up by workers. But the desire for freedom is evident in her everyday life. “She wears her clothes in pure defiance.” She gives “her word like a man” (p. 163) and insists on rowing Ursula and herself at the water party. She insists on Ursula singing while she dances a wild, ritualistic, and sexual celebration to her freedom that eventually attracts the cattle that she fearlessly charges. When Gerald accuses her of trying to drive them mad, he is unwittingly speaking of himself also. “God, what it is to be a man!” she exclaims after she and Ursula witness Gerald swimming naked. “The freedom, the liberty, the mobility! ... You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it” (p. 45). Lawrence’s surrogate, Birkin, spells it out for us. Gudrun and Gerald are “born in the process of destructive creation,” the river of darkness that is the “inverse process” of Aphrodite (p. 171).