D. H.

LAWRENCE

But do you really want sensuality? [Ursula] asked puzzled.

Birkin looked at her, and became intent in his explanation.
Yes, he said, that and nothing else, at this point. It is a fulfillment the
great dark knowledge you cant have in your head the dark involuntary
being. It is death to ones self but it is the coming into being of another.
But how? How can you have knowledge not in your head? she asked,
quite unable to interpret his phrases.
In the blood, he answered; when the mind and the known world is
drowned in darkness everything must go there must be the deluge. Then
you find yourself in a palpable body of darkness, a demon
(Women in Love, 57-58)

Lawrences contemporaries and even later generations of readers found it

difficult to come to terms with this philosophy of life and, more specifically,
with the novel as a means of expression of this obviously shocking view. This
is all the more surprising if we consider the fact that from among all modernist
novelists, Lawrence is the one whose relations with modernism are the most
difficult to demonstrate on account of his highly conventional mode of
constructing his novels. Given the fact that Lawrences work is dealt with as
modernist, readers already familiar with the by now imposed canon of
modernism expect to be confronted with a text that formally parallels and
expresses the fragmentariness and relativity of the value system at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
The narrative fiction of Joyce and Woolf, following the novelistic
tradition set up by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, gives up the nineteenthcentury realistic convention, felt as too tyrannically restrictive, and focuses on
the complexity of the characters inner world to the detriment of the delusive
world of external events. The modernists option in matters of content is

accompanied by their interest in devising the appropriate narrative technique

able to render the characters minds transparent and to dig out zones left
unexplored before. This shift of focus characteristic of most of the modernist
novelists enterprise has brought about a much too often formulated and
sometimes little grounded accusation of isolation of the modernist fiction from
the relevant social and political issues of the time. Although this accusation can
be invalidated, what remains true in connection with the modernist novelists
works is the fact that they use the material provided by external reality only as
a background and prompt to demonstrate the inner complexity of the
individual. Although modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf place
their characters in environments reminiscent of actual locations and associate
them with moments intended to create an illusion of chronology, what this
generally plotless narrative offers is a dimension which definitely exceeds the
limits of one day and one place. Consequently, stress is laid on character
treatment at the mental level to the detriment of the characters analysis in a
social milieu. We cannot deny the fact that the major experimenters of the
period revalued the tradition of realism and symbolism by incorporating it into
the practice of modernism, but this was only a way to ensure the amount of
given information indispensable to facilitating access to their experiment. Yet
in the context of a changing reality, Joyces innovation, no matter how
technically shocking it may have been, was never misunderstood. It was more
or less easily accepted for what it was a form devised to capture the spirit of a
changing world.
With D. H. Lawrence, things become more complicated, since he is a
novelist who appears to be applying the received formula, who gives no
obvious visual signs of rebellion and experiment.1 This apparent
conventionality of technique, which produces, however, something totally new
from a conceptual point of view, contributes to Lawrence being perceived as a
unique figure among his fellow novelists. All the modernists have artistically
played with their readers horizon of expectations. They challenged the shared
sense of value of the nineteenth-century audiences, both in form and in content.
The scope of Lawrences challenge is broader if one takes into account the
1

David Daiches, op. cit., 139.

striking discrepancy between the conventional novelistic form that Lawrence

opted for and the magnitude of the blow that he apparently struck to the
orthodoxies of the period and to the moral sense of value of his middle-class
audience. From under the mask of a well-behaved writer in terms of observance
of the novelistic convention, Lawrence challenged not only his audiences, but
also the whole value system of a world seemingly enthusiastic about the
liberation of spirit at the beginning of the twentieth century.
If Lawrence was much too often misjudged, this is because he
contradicted an existing system of shared values. Victorian culture accepted
literature as socially important, and allowed it to take over some of the
functions previously fulfilled by religion. In order to do this it had to be
ethically oriented. This sense of limitation imposed on the writer as his part of
the social consensus became increasingly irritating, as the period went on, to
those more interested in the True and the Beautiful than the Good. 2 If we want
to understand Lawrences literary offer correctly, we have to interpret his work
outside any pre-established moral code. If judged by the standards of morality,
Lawrences novels could be considered either moral or immoral, which is what
his contemporaries wrongly did. Or, it was several decades before Lawrence
started writing his novels that Henry James had warned readers that the only
standards a work should be judged by were the artistic ones. Reminding us of
the ancient precepts of education, according to which the Good, the True and
the Beautiful were never taken separately, a literary work may be seen as moral
on condition it is a well-achieved, thus beautiful, form of knowledge, thus
capable of accessing truth.
Finding too little in common with experimental modernism, Lawrence
seems to favour the ideas of the Italian Futurist Marinetti. In a letter written in
June 1913 to his friend and literary advisor Edward Garnett, Lawrence tries to
make his point as to the type of character he was thinking of and trying to
construct in his novels. Paying appropriate attention to the reservations that
Lawrence expresses in connection with Marinettis views, which gives the
proper dimension of his own opinions, the reader of Lawrences novels can
better understand the importance that the novelist assigned to character in his
2

Peter Faulkner, Modernism (London and New York, Routledge, 1993) 3-4.

work and absolve him from any moral guilt. I translate him clumsily, and his
Italian is obfuscated and I dont care about physiology of matter but
somehow that which is physic non-human, in humanity, is more interesting
to me than the old-fashioned human element which causes one to conceive a
character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The certain moral
scheme is what I object to.3 Lawrence saw his job as a novelist as above all
to make his contemporaries aware of themselves, of the real nature of their
emotional lives, of their needs and desires.4
Rather than subordinating his characters to the old-fashioned convention
of plot, although he was one of the few modernists who never rejected plot
completely, Lawrence preferred to write about people discovering themselves,
and each other, and about the sense of opposition they experienced, particularly
in love and marriage.5 Dwelling upon a traditional institution, that of marriage,
and a generally human feeling, love, Lawrence explicitly states his interest in
the self and the definition of the self against the other. The investigation of
self and otherness in a state of permanent, but also illuminating, conflict is the
reason for Lawrences opting for the theme of sexuality. Superficially
considered, this theme has constantly generated negative evaluations of his
work, especially among his contemporaries, in terms of morality. No other
modernist writer inflicted so much anger upon his contemporary audience and
critics as Lawrence did. The formal shock of the use of the stream of
consciousness technique by modernist writers could never parallel the moral
shock that Lawrence consciously exposed his readers to. Yet, just as most
modernists would not sacrifice the exactingness of their art to a wider
popularity, Lawrence obstinately stuck to the theme of sexuality as the
greatest of these arenas of conflict; the area of our lives in which our most
anxious and demanding feelings are directed towards another human being, to
be answered or rejected.6 He is not, however, attracted to the idea of sexuality
in itself. He simply considers it the proper medium for expressing the integrity
of the self.
3

quoted in Peter Faulkner, op. cit., 62.

John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence (London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1991) 6.
5
Ibid., 23.
6
Ibid., 24.
4

Thus, in spite of his being negatively perceived by his contemporaries,

Lawrence is not essentially different in artistic intention from his fellow
modernist novelists. He attempts to make his art into an appropriate form of
expression of life. This is proved by Lawrences own definition of himself: I
am a man alive, and as long as I can I intend to go on being a man alive. For
this reason I am a novelist. And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to
the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet, who are all masters of
different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.7
Lawrences view of the essence of life, however, is a highly original one,
which may account for its coming into open conflict with the public sense of
value at the time when his work was produced. In an effort to give a proper
justification for his diverting from the commonly acknowledged truths,
Lawrence explains his essential interest in the human being as an identity
beyond the limitations imposed on it by any social relationships or external
circumstances. In a letter dated June 1914 addressed to his friend Edward
Garnett, Lawrence detailed on the purpose of his art:
You mustnt look in my novel [The Rainbow] for the old stable ego of
the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is
unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs
a deeper sense than any we have been used to exercise, to discover are states of
the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the
same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history
of the diamond but I say Diamond, what! This is carbon. And my diamond
might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.)8
Placing his characters in situations characteristic of the turn-of-thecentury world, which represent to a certain extent the moral and social
standards by which his work has been evaluated, Lawrence is particularly in
search for the depths of the self. We may even say that this quest performed in
depth makes the characters lose their credibility in terms of their social roles.
Against the background of and in contrast with an apparently conventional and
stable system of values, an image of the modern world emerges as a result of
7

quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993)
120.
8
quoted in Christopher Gillie, op. cit, 49-50.

Lawrence analysing the environment of the characters and their roles in society.
However, this image is nothing but a pretext for Lawrences investigating the
essence of the human self, be it modern or not.
If we consider Women in Love, which is, as a matter of fact,
acknowledged as Lawrences most modernist novel, we discover that the social
roles assigned to the characters are only masks behind which the individuals
innermost, even primitive, drives and impulses are hidden. Rupert Birkin is
presented as a too little verisimilar Inspector of Schools, although his
connection with the education system generates interesting discussions in the
novel as to the modern perspective on education. Gerald Crich fails to represent
the industrialist at the beginning of the twentieth century, in spite of all the
discussions about mines, mining and technological progress that his social
position encourages. The same keeps valid both for the central feminine
characters, Ursula and Gudrun, and for the secondary one, whose association
with ideas representative of the age decadence, aestheticism, education,
religion is obviously attracting, but certainly little relevant to Lawrences
attempt to investigate the self.
D.H. Lawrence insisted that he was going a stratum deeper than anyone
else had ever gone and going deeper meant abandoning the old stable ego,
the traditional concept of character.9 Against the background of the sterile
modern life, Lawrence looks for the hidden energies in each and every
individual, which makes us see his characters not as exponents of various social
categories, but all as one and similar receptacle of emotions and repressed
impulses that, by confrontation with the other, can spring to the surface. There
is no essential difference between Gudrun and Ursula in their ability and
wilfulness to submit to the vitalistic energies buried in them, although there
could be little, if any, similarity between them when socially defined and
censured.
Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went
in a strange and palpitating dance towards the cattle, lifting her body
towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some little frenzy of
9

David Trotter, The Modernist Novel, The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael
Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) 76.

unconscious sensation, [] ebbing in strange fluctuations upon the cattle,

that waited, and ducked their heads a little in sudden contraction from her,
watching all the time as if hypnotised, their bare horns branching in the
clear light, as the white figure of the women ebbed upon them, in the slow,
hypnotising convulsion of the dance.(Women in Love, 196)

Although the four central characters of Women in Love are presented as

distinct individualities throughout the novel, and they reveal themselves as
different in various situations, although they feel attracted to and repelled by
each other, being gathered and contrasted in couples, no matter how imperfect
these may be, the unknown ego that is brought to the surface, sometimes in
fear, some other times in stupor or ecstasy is what keeps them together. The
characters seem to disagree as to the essence of life, they seem to perceive the
human nature in different terms. Yet all embody Lawrences ideas about the
primacy of the unconscious, discovering their identity beyond their old stable
ego. Starting from Freuds ideas, but rather siding with C.G. Jung, Lawrence
tries to demonstrate that the instinctual realm became destructive only because
it was repressed rather than respected. 10 His characters are in a continuous
effort of balancing the unconscious and the ego, through relationships with the
other.
It is generally considered that the division of attitude between the two
pairs of protagonists divides the novel. Gerald and Gudrun inhabit a naturalist
degeneration plot: progressive exposure of an inherent moral flow drives them
down through boredom and despair to subjection or death.[] Birkin and
Ursula [] inhabit what a symbolist regeneration plot would look like, if
Symbolism had ever gone in for plots. They have no history [] and they
renew themselves by yet further disembodiment.11 Artistically, they all serve
Lawrences purpose. In a plotless novel, challenging, yet little popular to the
reader, Lawrence investigates the human self, in quest of the individuals deep
strata of being. Adopting a novelistic convention that reminds one of realism,
with clear symbolist influence, Lawrence delimits his artistic standpoint in
terms of modernism, unusual and little orthodox as this may have been.
10
11

Michael Bell, op. cit., 23.

David Trotter, op. cit., 79.

To demonstrate the extent of the conventionality and modernity of

Lawrences narrative formula, it could be useful to consider in parallel two of
his novels, one appreciated by critics as highly conventional, typically realist,
Sons and Lovers, the other more easily brought under a modernist denominator,
Women in Love. What the reader may be surprised to discover is that, in spite of
the apparent formal differences between them, both novels essentially perform
the same function. By efficiently playing with the readers horizon of
expectations and forcing him to reorganise both his knowledge of the world and
his perception of the human relationships, the two novels are artful instruments
of investigation of the deepest aspects of the human self.
No matter how surprising its title may have sounded for the prudish
readers used to the Victorian thought patterns, Sons and Lovers starts off in a
pure realistic manner. It begins by an accurate and detailed presentation of the
setting, obviously expected to have proper relevance to the life of its numerous
main or secondary characters. The social milieu is far from being or resembling
a modern one. The novel is set in provincial England, reasonably far away from
London or any other urban environment, which could have suggested a clear
modern dimension of the characters lives. Moreover, if the characters reach the
metropolis it is just for them to have somewhere to come back from.
The Bottoms succeeded to Hell Row. Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brook side on Greenhill Lane. There lived
the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. [] And all
over the countryside were these same pits, some of which had been worked
in the time of Charles II, the few colliers and the donkeys burrowing down
like ants into the earth, making queer mounds and little black places among
the corn-fields and the meadows. (7)

By the way in which it begins, Sons and Lovers seems to be a narrative

confirmation for what the reader expects the novel to be judging by its table of
contents: a realistic piece of narrative, benefiting from the cohesiveness
provided by a tightly knit plot. Part One, at least, clearly conveys the sense of
narrative solidity due to a chronologically ordered plot, which can be only

reassuring for those readers for whom the title meant more than they were
ready or prepared to accept.
The illusion of realism is reinforced when the characters are introduced,
initially through the direct characterisation offered from the perspective of the
same omniscient narrator we identify behind the presentation of the setting.
[Mrs. Morel] was thirty-one years old, and had been married eight years. A
rather small woman, of delicate mould but resolute bearing, she shrank from
the first contact with the Bottoms women. She came down in the July, and in
the September expected her third baby. (9)

Lawrence takes advantage of all the narrative facilities the third-person

omniscient narrator could offer him. He exploits to the full the privilege of
omniscience translated into the flexible and unrestricted movement in time and
space. But even more importantly, he turns to good account the omniscient
narrators capacity to move in and out of the characters minds. Consequently,
from among the techniques that he could have opted for in order to render the
mind transparent, Lawrence prefers the oldest and the most indirect one,
psycho-narration. The choice of this technique is twice advantageous in the
case of Lawrences novels. On the one hand, it contributes to reinforcing the
illusion of realism, thus giving readers the sense of comfort and security that
only their being confronted with things known from a narrative point of view
could give. Besides, the reliable God-like omniscient narrator is expected to
keep not only the narrative under control, but also the view of a changing world
underlain by a highly relative value system. On the other hand, psychonarration will offer Lawrence the opportunity to explore linguistically those
deep zones of the human being beyond individual understanding and thus
impossible to express in the characters own idiom. Lawrence will manage thus
to move further than many of the modernists by using a method most readers
were familiar with and accepted. Lawrences art consists precisely in the fact
that, although he uses a method already exploited by the Victorians, he prevents
his novels from looking like the Victorian novels at all. We may thus venture to

say that the formal conventionality of Lawrences novels is only the mask he
needed in order to have his new philosophy of life accepted.
Paul did not realise William was dead, it was impossible with such a bustle
going on. The puller-off swung the small truck on to the turn-table, another
man ran with it along the bank down the curving lines.
And William is dead, and my mothers in London, and what will she be
doing? the boy asked himself, as if it were a conundrum. (170)

In the quoted fragment, Lawrence adopts a typically realist manner. After

a relatively elaborate introduction on the part of the omniscient narrator, in
which the reader is warned about the nature of the psychic states that are being
narrated, the character, Paul Morel, is allowed to monologise under the form of
the quoted interior monologue. And William is dead, and my mothers in
London, and what will she be doing? This may be seen, on a superficial
analysis, as a sign of modernity. We may be tempted to consider this
foregrounding of the fictional consciousness indicative of the novelists effort
to free the reader from the obtrusive control of the omniscient narrator and to
offer him unmediated access to the figural mind. The inquit formula he
thought and the use of the quotation marks, however, have exactly the opposite
effect on the reader. Instead of drawing attention to the characters
consciousness, the punctuation and the verb of thinking will point to the
existence of two distinct viewpoints. Moreover, the interspersing of the
narrators discourse with the characters interior monologue indicates not only
the clear distance between the two voices, but also the separation between the
external and the mental worlds. We can see in this combination of psychonarration and quoted interior monologue the success of Lawrence, the realist,
and the awkwardness, even failure of Lawrence, the modernist. The modernist
writers will seldom use such a narrative formula, given their perception of the
world of the mind as continuous with the external one.
Lawrence uses this formula several times in Part One of Sons and
Lovers, that is in that part in which he realistically records Paul Morels
evolution from birth to the age of sixteen, when his brothers death brings about
the reformulation of Pauls relationship with his mother and with himself. In

Part One, Paul is defined within the environment in which he was born and
through the external relationships he establishes with the others. Part One is
just the beginning of the process of Pauls growing aware, of himself and of the
other. Paul is not capable yet of appropriately analysing himself. His feelings,
thoughts and emotions are far from being crystallised and so the character
cannot be granted the narrative responsibility of expressing them in his own
idiom. This explains why Lawrence decides to stick to the more conventional
mode of presenting consciousness, psycho-narration, only seldom combined
with the quoted interior monologue.
Part Two focuses on the making of Pauls identity, both as an individual
and as an artist. Paul is in search of his true self. He is in a constant process of
definition of the self, vacillating between sensuality and rationality. Paul learns
to know himself and tries to come to terms with himself through the very
special relation with his mother and through the love affairs he had with two
women of totally opposite disposition. The more aware of himself he becomes
in Part Two, the more freedom he is given as a narrative voice. He starts
thinking of himself and of the others, these mental processes being presented to
the reader under the more frequently used form of the narrated monologue. The
method adopted to present Pauls mind, in particular, in the guise of the
narrators words still point to the existence of two voices, but this time the
outer world is incorporated into the inner. The reader has a less obviously
mediated access to the figural consciousness. Besides, by giving up plot almost
completely in Part Two, Lawrence smoothly transfers interest from the world
of outer events to the characters inner motions. Pauls increasing awareness of
himself and his increasing ability to express himself in words brings about,
from a narrative point of view, the silencing of the audible omniscient narrator
of Part One. The narrator no longer assumes a position of superiority, his
voice becomes equal in intensity with the characters, whose consciousness
comes into prominence and becomes transparent for the reader.
He was walking to the station another mile! The train was near
Nottingham. Would it stop before the tunnels? But it did not matter; it would
get there before dinner-time. He was at Jordans. She would come in half an

hour. At any rate, she would be near. He had done the letters. She would be
there. Perhaps she had not come. He ran downstairs. Ah! He saw her
through the glass door. Her shoulders stooping a little to her work made him
feel he could not go forward, could not stand. He went in. He was pale,
nervous, awkward, and quite cold. Would she misunderstand him? He could
not write his real self with this shell. (371)

After realistically covering a series of events in chronological succession,

Sons and Lovers performs a subtle, almost imperceptible movement in depth,
into the characters consciousness. Pauls maturing process is no longer
contemplated and analysed from the outside, stage by stage. It becomes the
object of self-investigation, from the inside. The clearly delimited
chronological time is suspended, being replaced by time subjectively perceived.
Mentally, the moment expands into timelessness, being incorporated into it.
The concluding pages of the novel are revealing in this respect. They offer us
the image of a lonely individual still in search of his real self, unable to assert
his identity in relation to a particular place and moment of time. Yet, Paul is
more mature in his ability to confront the darkest recesses of his soul and thus
to come closer to the essence of life He becomes more articulate as well, which
is also suggested by Lawrences using the narrated monologue, rather than
psycho-narration.
Beyond the town the country, little smouldering spots for more towns the
sea the night on and on! And he had no place in it! Whatever spot he
stood in, there he stood alone. From his breast, from his mouth, sprang the
endless space, and it was there behind him, everywhere. The people
hurrying along the streets offered no obstruction to the void in which he
found himself. [] He got off the car. [] Everywhere the vastness and
terror of the immense night which is roused and stirred for a brief while by
the day, but which returns, and will remain at last eternal, holding
everything in its silence and its living gloom. There was no Time, only
Space. Who could say that his mother had lived and did not live? (509-510)

Sons and Lovers is a novel of growing self-awareness. Artfully exploiting

the realist heritage, Lawrence explores in Sons and Lovers the potentialities of
the consciousness investigating techniques and makes the novel into a form of
knowledge, capable of probing into mans inner life. As the novel progresses in
the direction of Pauls deeper understanding of himself, Lawrences methods of
investigation of consciousness resemble more the methods employed by the
incontestably modernist novelists. The initially intrusive presence of the
omniscient narrator becomes more veiled as prominence starts being given to
the characters consciousness. The audible voice of the narrator, previously
seen as the only source of knowledge, loses in intensity and intermingles with
that of the character. The points of view multiply, inducing in the reader the
sense of a highly relative and subjective reality, in spite of the original illusion
of a stable system of values and beliefs created through the narrative
conventions of realism.
Women in Love represents a greater artistic challenge, in spite of its
adopting a narrative strategy similar to that of Sons and Lovers. More aware of
his art and of the view of life that he wants to express, Lawrence plays more
effectively with his readers expectations in a clear effort to move deeper into
the darkest recesses of the human being, far beyond those layers of
consciousness expressible in words.
The novel begins and, at moments, progresses in a realistic way, reason
for which we find it difficult to identify under the formal realistic shell the
modernist renewal that Lawrence operates. The atmosphere the reader is
introduced to in the first pages of the novel is one specific to a Victorian or an
Edwardian novel, rather than that he has already become familiar with in the
works of the modernist writers interested in the characters consciousness.
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their
fathers house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a
piece of brightly coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a
board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their
thoughts strayed through their minds.

Ursula, said Gudrun, dont you really want to get married? Ursula laid
her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and
considerate.
I dont know, she replied. It depends how you mean.(19)

The opening paragraph and the initial verbal exchange between the two
women encapsulate the sense of a value system whose stability the novel will
place under question. In their fathers house, which suggests the patriarchal
Victorian society with all the attention it accorded to family, the two women are
performing activities that indicate their middle-class origin and are discussing
about an institution, that of marriage, incontestably central to the Victorian
moral landscape. The sense of stability and peacefulness conveyed by the
opening lines largely depends on the point of view from which the story is
narrated. Omniscience is seen as the best narrative solution for the expression
of ideas such as those Lawrence proposed in the beginning of Women in Love.
The only sentence that the experienced reader might take as a warning as to
what narrative mode Lawrence is to adopt comes almost unnoticed in the end
of the first paragraph. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts
strayed through their minds. Besides, Ursulas ambiguously formulated
answer It depends how you mean casts doubt on the very truths the text
seems to assert. It is as if, after creating a certain horizon of expectations in his
reader, Lawrence decided to play upon it, with a view to making his reader
assume the responsibility of refreshing his perception of world and fiction.
Set in the apparently settled environment of provincial England, Women
in Love touches on issues that are reminiscent of the stable Victorian value
system and institutions: marriage, religion, education, family. Up to this point
Lawrences relation to modernism remains problematical. The reader seems to
be invited to continue his reading comfortably relying on his already acquired
knowledge of the conventions of realism. The characters dialogise in a by now
established Jamesian manner, the omniscient narrator controlling and
withdrawing from the narrative at various times.
Yet, shortly after having created the illusion of solid realism, Lawrence
starts formulating his standpoint as a modernist writer. He begins to subtly
investigate his characters consciousness, adopting the technique of the narrated

monologue. This being a form of rendering the characters thoughts under the
guise of the narrators words, the plunge into the characters mind is far from
being abrupt. The combination of narrated monologue and psycho-narration
increases even more the effect of continuity between the outer world and the
inner world due to the coincidence of person and tense between the two
methods. It is not surprising therefore that, for most readers, the loosening of
the omniscient narrators control and the passage from the outer world to the
characters consciousness may even remain unnoticed.
Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were
human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world,
outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green
velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she
were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any
minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.(24)

The stability, both narrative and ideological, whose illusion Lawrence

created in the opening pages of the novel, is questioned by Lawrences
resorting to a technique meant to make the mind transparent. The reader feels,
however, that Lawrences investigation will not stop at the mental level. It will
go even deeper, in zones that cannot be controlled mentally. She was afraid,
without any additional commentary on the part of the omniscient narrator opens
up towards zones of the unconscious Lawrence developed an acute interest in.
As the novel progresses, this vacillation between the conventions of
realism and the interests of the modernist writer is continued. An apparently
realistic presentation of a character, by direct characterisation, alternates,
sometimes to the readers puzzlement, with a lucid investigation, from the
omniscient narrators point of view, of the same or another characters inner
self.
Her son [Gerald] was a fair, sun-tanned type, rather above middle height,
well-made, and almost exaggeratedly well-dressed. 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. [] His gleaming beauty,

maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to
the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his
unsubdued temper.[] And then she [Gudrun] experienced a keen
paroxysm, a transport, as if she had made some incredible discovery, known
to nobody else on earth. A strange transport took possession of her, all her
veins were in a paroxysm of violent sensation. (27)

In Sons and Lovers psycho-narration had been used in a rather

conventional manner (He thought that) either to clear the way for the
characters monologue or to compensate, if necessary, for the still immature
characters inability to express in words his uncertain thoughts and feelings. In
Women in Love, psycho-narration is extensively used as the indispensable path
leading to the sub- and unconscious levels of the mind. The verb think or
other similar verbs suggesting conscious mental activities are no longer of use,
since it is not these activities the text deals with. Consequently, for the reader to
know that he has access to the sub-verbal depths of the mind, the text always
contains a clear indication of the quality of the psychic states that are being
narrated. The paroxysm of violent sensation and the unconscious glisten are
textual reference points for the reader who becomes thus aware that he has
moved beyond the individually articulate layers of the mind towards deeper
strata, as those indicated by the text. Besides, the reader realises that he has
lost his comfortable position of contemplator of a world of stable values and
publicly shared meanings that had been represented in the conventional
realistic manner. Paradoxically, through the oldest and most indirect of all
narrative modes for presenting consciousness, Lawrence enables his readers
access to zones of the mind that had not been explored before.
Even if Women in Love also enlarges upon issues pertaining to the modern
world, such as the Bohemian life of London, the aesthetic penchant of various
characters, the newly-established position of women in society, these are only
exterior aspects of an individual driven by energies that exist beyond or under
the stable ego.
The complexity of the interior life of Lawrences characters is conveyed
by a masterly, and unexpected, combination of the three modes for presenting
consciousness in third-person contexts, ranging from the verbal to the sub-

verbal layers of the mind. What is, however, a characteristic of Lawrences

novels is that psycho-narration always subordinates and includes the other two
methods, which clearly indicates Lawrences interest in those deep strata of the
mind whose elucidation can never become the full responsibility of the
character. And, surprisingly, if we want to demonstrate Lawrences modernity,
it is not in spite, but because of this old and worn out narrative strategy for
expressing the mind that Lawrence can be considered a modernist novelist.
Let us consider the following excerpt, which gives the reader the measure
of Lawrences investigating abilities. Through an artful alternation of
techniques, Lawrence manages to plunge into Ursulas deepest self and cover
the whole range of the characters psychic states.
Then let it end, [Ursula] said to herself. It was a decision. It was not a
question of taking ones life she would never kill herself, that was
repulsive and violent. It was a question of knowing the next step. And the
next step led into the space of death. Did it? or was there - ?
Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside the
fire. And then the thought came back! The space of death! Could she give
herself to it? Ah, yes it was a sleep. She had had enough. So long she had
held out and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to resist any more.
In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was dark.
She could feel within darkness, the terrible assertion of her body, the
unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that is too much, the
far-off awful nausea of dissolution set in within the body. (223)

The darkness of the human being, whose meaning is conveyed through

the narrative technique, is also revealed, in Lawrences case, through an
elaborate texture of symbols whose function is to offer readers further paths of
access to inexpressible meanings. The symbol of water 12, under all its varied
forms, from dew, through rain or the water in a rivulet or a lake to snow is
central to Women in Love. It helps readers see the novel as an expression of the
primordial vitality and of a temporary regression and disintegration, at the same
time, both characteristic of Lawrences philosophy of life. Symbolically,
12

see Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, op. cit., vol. 1, 107-117.

water suggests the modern individuals potentiality of extracting the energy

that will lead to regeneration and reintegration by taking a plunge into the
darkest recesses of the being. Water symbolises life to be discovered in
darkness and having an infinite regenerating power. It is in water as a symbol
that we can see the unity of the feminine and the masculine as an expression of
Lawrences striving for wholeness.
Lawrence was interested in human relationships and the way in which the
individual defines him/herself through these relationships. That is why he built
his novel on the relationships between two central couples, Gerald Crich
Gudrun Brangwen, Rupert Birkin Ursula Brangwen. By referring this
organisation to the title of the novel, one may derive another modernist feature
of Lawrences work. For all modernists, the title is part of the organic structure
of the fictional world, it is elaborately worked upon so as to establish an
appropriate relationship between the writer and the reader as to the meaning
boundaries of the work. If looked at in this way, the title of Women in Love
creates a new horizon of expectations for the reader of modernism. It implicitly
states from the very beginning that a reading of the novel in terms of the
centrality of the two couples would be oversimplifying. The whole range and
mosaic of secondary characters would be only fictional creations meant to
create an illusion of plot with a writer who showed too little interest in plot as a
conventional backbone for his novel. They would be only a much too artificial
way to create a background of minor relationships against which the
individuality of the main characters constitutes itself. To assume such a thing in
connection with Lawrence would be not only depreciatory about Lawrences
contribution to setting up the canon of modernism, but also detrimental to our
understanding of the meaning of Women in Love. The way in which the title of
the novel balances itself against the treatment of the subject matter would
rather be indicative of the fact that Lawrence tried to find a solution to express
the integrity of the modern individual. Just like the other modernist writers who
were interested in the essence of the individual and the human nature,
Lawrences character, individually or involved in social relationships, is a sum
total of inner and outer influences. Instead of strictly focusing on the contrast
between the two central couples, the reader of Lawrences Women in Love is

invited to derive profit from seeing both main and central characters as partial
definitions of the modern spirit and to integrate these fragments into a holistic
view of the individual as body and soul, as individuality and social being.
Constructed in a modernist manner, which technically involves a subtle
combination of conventional and innovative elements, Women in Love
constitutes itself into a novel focusing on the modern spirit. All the anxieties
and certainties of the modern individual at the beginning of the twentieth
century are embodied in the mosaic of main and secondary characters of the
novel. It may be asserted that the only central character of Women in Love is the
modern individual, socially and individually perceived, whose identity is built
up out of the fragmentary, sometimes unilateral identities of the various
characters of the novel.