Abstract
There is no doubt that Lawrence regarded not only the state of human civilisation in his time, but also his own response to it, as very nearly desperate. The voyage of Birkin and Ursula to utopia is put forward not with any sense of confidence but because ‘there isn’t anything else’. The phrase I have just quoted comes from the conversation between Birkin and Gerald in the train. Birkin has said that the old ideals are dead and there remains only ‘ultimate marriage’. ‘ “And you mean if there isn’t the woman, there’s nothing?” said Gerald. “Pretty well that — seeing there’s no God.” “Then we’re hard put to it,” said Gerald.’ On the showing of Women in Love we are indeed. Gerald’s sphere of activity, mechanical production of material goods, is an empty sphere. Birkin’s — education — seems equally pointless, since ‘You can only have knowledge … of things concluded, in the past’, and the past is dead. Between them, their activities touch on the whole range of human purpose, material and (in the broad sense of the word) spiritual. Both turn from their public activity to very limited personal relationship, as the sole remaining location of meaning in life, the difference lying only in the degree of desperation indicated by the timing.
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Notes
Studies in Classical American Literature (1923), ch. 12. Reprinted in D. H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (1956), pp. 402–3.
English, vol. 26 (1977), pp. 23–40. Mr Black is reviewing F. R. Leavis’s book, Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976), from which I quote later in my paragraph.
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘The Marble and the Statue: the Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence’, in Imagined Worlds, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (1968), pp. 371–418.
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© 1985 Peter New
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New, P. (1985). Women in Love: ‘I want to be disinherited’. In: Fiction and Purpose in Utopia, Rasselas, The Mill on the Floss and Women in Love. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07704-5_16
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