This is another old review, written for another website back in 2003, my memory of this book is shoddy at best.I believe D. H. Lawrence, despite writing constantly about men and women in a risqué manner for his time, is gay. Why do I say this? Because of the three Lawrence novels I've read to date in only one does he even get close to writing an authentic relationship between a man and a woman. It's not in the two novels I would expect though. In Lady Chatterly's Lover and in Women in Love Lawrence writes about women as if they are an alien species that he has heard about but never seen. In each book during the sensual scenes (because honestly there is no real sex in Lawrence's books and I'm really at a loss why everything he wrote was deemed pornographic, even for the tighter laced post-Victorian era he wrote in) between a man and a woman I really expected him in earnest to write that women have teeth down there. You know in their loin regions. Oh, and before I start the review proper the one novel that he seems to write women well is in The Rainbow, the first novel in the Trilogy that follows with Women in Love and ends with Aaron's Rod. But, as one last pre-review aside, The Rainbow could have just been called Jude the Obscure - Part 2 since it read exactly like a Thomas Hardy novel.So, anyway Women in Love is by some strange group of polltakers considered the most widely read English novel of the 20th Century (2011 addition: I have no idea where I came across this fact). I doubt this, and if I'm wrong then people really need to get out and read more of the 20th Century Classics. The story involves two sisters (the women who will fall in love), and two men (the recipients of this affection). Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, the daughters of the protagonist of The Rainbow, begin the novel by having a discussion about marriage. Ursula, the eldest daughter, is a schoolmistress (a teacher). Her sister, Gudrun, has just begun teaching also after a time away from their provincial hometown life. Gudrun was an artist of some merit that fluctuates throughout the novel to fit the scenes, but by an average account she made a modest success during her time in London. Why she returned to the backwoods home she grew up in is never quite explained, but she is back home, and that is enough for the novel.The two sisters begin the novel by talking about marriage. Ursula for some unknown reason doesn't think she needs to get married, and this shocks her bohemian sister who for some reason can't understand why her sister would go against social customs. This scene is stupid in light of the novel taken as a whole. Both women throughout the novel change their opinion on this question with gusto. The reader after awhile has to wonder if Lawrence just happened to put words into the character's mouths to play devils advocate, or if he is trying to say something like women have a flippant nature. Besides very radical shifts in opinion the women are given very little description besides the color of clothes Gudrun is wears and that each are quite beautiful. What do they look like exactly? Well Lawrence is a bit vague on that. I never could quite get a mental image of either of them. Only one woman in the whole book is ever described in detail and she's a boyish built shorthaired baby-talking lispy nymph, who warrants pages of description but who is pretty much unnecessary for the plot.The women really aren't important to the novel though, even though they are in the title. The real characters are the two men, Birkin and Gerald. Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, is a local teacher also. Sometimes he's a preacher though; I couldn't tell which he really was. Once he was even something like the principal of the school. Oh but who cares for consistency, especially since he never seems to go to work or have any material responsibilities. The details aren't important anyway, but I'll get to that in a bit. Birkin is basically an opinionated bore, dressed in a Heathcliff-esque (Wuthering Heights reference, not the lazy cat) brooding manner who spouts off his quasi-naturalism to anyone happening to cross his path. Birkin's angry all the time, quite violent in speech and sickly. He is never painted in a good light and doesn't represent a very good model for Lawrence's personal philosophy (if this is what he is trying to achieve with the character). Ursula falls in love with this pig headed fool.Gudrun falls in love with the other man, Gerald. Gerald's from a rich family that owns all of the coal mines in the surrounding area. He's quite good looking in a Germanic / Nordic way, and is the most richly described character in the book. He's just about as flippant as the women are though (as fitting the bottom to Birkin's top). He likes being a captain of industry. He hates being a captain of industry. He is having the time of his life with his adventurous lifestyle. Everything bores him to tears. He's a spineless worm around Gudrun. He's a domineering patriarch towards Gudrun. Why does he change? Sometimes we are given hints, sometimes the changes come after talking to Birkin, but most of the time they just seem to change in order to have something else for Birkin to expound about. One other thing about Gerald, Birkin loves him quite passionately and believes that a pure love between two men is stronger than any love a man and a woman can share.So, what is the novel about? Basically these four people squabbling over each other and having a lot of fights based on 'strongly' held ideals. Not much happens in the novel. Events take place in the background, but the plot is never driven. There are not enough characters to create any intrigue over the romantic outcome, and the characters all seem to fall right in line with their respective partners too easily. Of course they fight, but every time one of them really gets angry the other one always seems to come crawling back in beaten submission to the gloriousness of the other. This is played out in just about every possible permutation (with the exception of Gudrun who only fluctuates between icy bitch and vaguely interested in Gerald (but she is a woman in love don't forget)). The novel breaks down to being about the ideas that Birkin holds and to a lesser extent the ideas of the other characters. None of the other three hold ideas drastically different from Birkin's though; they just aren't quite as passionate about them and that works as a set up for Birkin's angry assaults.So what are the basic ideas? I'll explain them this way first. If you've ever read Ayn Rand's Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged take away the plot, keep the characters and everything about them, then remove the strong capitalist overtones but keep the strong individualism, bull headedness, and the way the strong characters dominant and lay themselves prostrate to each other and you've got the general idea of this novel. Or better yet read anything by Neitzsche and take away all the bookishness of his philological learning and just keep the random attacks on everything in modern society and you've got a pretty fair picture of Birkin. And Birkin is the novel.If those descriptions don't help basically Birkin believes that everything in modern society is diluted, horrible, weak and wrong. Everything good about the world has been bastardized into a pale spectre of it's true self, and life is basically lived inauthentically by just about everyone. Only a few people are aware enough to realize this, and for those few living just a few pure moments is more valuable then living a lifetime like the masses do. Maybe if I hadn't read many other books that deal with this same idea I would find the ideas in this novel novel, but honestly nothing said was very interesting to me. I'd heard it all before, and read it in either more eloquent manners or with plots that sustained my interest beyond the constant preaching. When modern society isn't being critiqued to death various forms of love are being argued. These arguments could all have been taken straight out of Plato's Symposium with Birkin as the wise but assholeish Socrates at the helm.On the topic of love, there are only two scenes where passion takes any kind of substantial form. The first is between the two men when they decide to wrestle each other. During this scene their 'oneness' gets penetrated by the other, and Birkin is surprised when Gerald rises up in a welcoming motion over powers and tops him. The only other scene is between Ursula and Birkin. This scene deals mostly with the mightiness of Birkin's loins, and the realization that not all truth of the world springs from the phallic center of man but deeper mystery's lie in the whole body of a man (man meaning man, not a pre PC word for people). Both scenes are quite homoerotic and added to my feeling that Lawrence only included the women to the novel as a social convention. The real love story is between the two men. The ideal a woman can fill in Lawrence's world is as an attractive beard that will act as a shield between the sensitive man and a harsh world.I did like the book though, all criticism aside. I think that Lawrence is a very talented writer and worth being read. Even though the content of the book did little for me his writing style was wonderful and his description of place is amazing. I'd highly recommend The Rainbow to people interested in trying out Lawrence though. Actually I would recommend reading Thomas Hardy to anyone interested in the topics of pastoral English life during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and it's interplay between tradition and modernity as it relates to individual versus society. This novel, while considered a classic, I think boils down more to being an angry book by a man angry about the treatment his earlier books had received. It was difficult not perceiving this book as a five hundred-page rant by Lawrence.This wasn't much of a consumer review, but basically I'd say if you are interested in reading the canon of 20th century English novels then you should check this out. If you are looking for a nice easy read I'd avoid this one and settle for something more interesting from the same time period. Who would I recommend? Well Thomas Hardy as I said, or Anton Chekov. I'm sure there are many other wonderful late 19th century writers who tackle Lawrence's terrain in a more enjoyable manner. I just realized that I'm only recommending 19th century authors in lieu of this 20th century writer. Maybe Lawrence would have been a better fit to the previous century. As a last stalwart against the High Modernist tradition emerging in the early 20th century he comes across as a bitter and reactionary opponent to the coming times, but his anger makes most of his arguments seem half-baked and impotent.
Strip naked and wrestle like a gladiator with this octopus of a novel that challenges your endurance, tolerance, and reading skill. Brawny and awkward; lithe and feral; this novel celebrates the ambiguity that coexists in all reflective lovers. D. H. Lawrence’s words are “quick and slippery and full of electric fire.“ Bravely advance or hastily retreat from the force of his androgyny and sensual genius. ‘Women In Love” (“WIL”) defies interpretation and throws you off balance with its verbal, emotional, and sexual jui jitsu. The metaphorical may be literal; the literal may be metaphorical. Images and characters fluctuate like quicksilver, and WIL nearly exhausts us with its fluid force and the endless possibilities of love and hate. Even the title, “Women in Love,” is ironic and playful. Who are “women?” What is love? Are they in love?WIL, a nominal sequel to “The Rainbow,” continues the story of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and introduces us to the men who become their lovers, Rubert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The plot seems to hinge on the question of whether these two women can benefit from close relationships with their respective mates. As the couples move from an English coalmining town (where they meet) to the Alps (where they dare), we will discover whether the couples find freedom and fulfillment or domination and dementia.The characters are original, strange, misanthropic, and unreasoning. They “are very repulsive when cold… But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction—a curious kind of full electric fluid like eels.” No matter if the characters of this novel infuriate you; they infuriate each other as well. Their certitude, contempt, condescension and their frequent use of the word “hatred” for the blandest of people made me wince, but I reconsidered when I stopped taking these words so literally and also considered that DHL wrote WIL while the world was slaughtering itself during the First World War. Despite the insane obscenity of that war, British censors suppressed a novel that merely celebrated new frontiers of love in lyrical language that is tame by today’s standards--though the pulsating words retain their blood force. WIL yields (or refuses to yield) itself to multiple interpretations, and two astute and like-minded readers may reach opposite conclusions about the motivations of the characters. “Am I called on to find reasons?” I have my own interpretations, but I will keep mine to myself and leave you to your own. “Life has all kinds of things. There isn’t only one road.” Rather there is a dizzying array of possibilities and permutations, and this inherent ambiguity and contradiction testify to the power of DHL’s vision--not to its weakness.Filling the vacuum created by the evaporation of religious belief, Lawrence spreads the gospel of a sacramental-physical-mystical-love that contains a sensual “blood knowledge,” transcending intellect, categories, and labels. “Other people had such a passion to make everything of one degree, of one pattern.” Perhaps DHL proffers an ideal beyond personal love wherein two or more people give freedom to the others to remain authentic individuals but who also remain committed to the relationship. I appreciated WIL as lyrical experience more than a novel of ideas. I hope to always remember the pleasure I felt when I read some scenes, only a handful (of many exquisitely drawn by DHL) are presented here: CATKINS. Ursula draws androgynous catkins (the little red ovary flowers that only produce pollen from the long danglers to fertilize their own nuts). “You’ve got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into being.”(38)PRIMROSES. A dejected Birkin walks among the primroses and lies down in the nettles. “To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one’s belly and cover one’s back with handfuls of fine wet grass, as soft as breath, soft and more delicate than the touch of any woman. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for how fulfilled he was, how happy.” (100)ISLAND. Birkin and Ursula explore an island overgrown with daisies. “A company of florets, a concourse, become individual…The daisy is a perfect little democracy, so it’s the highest of flowers, hence its charm.” (118)DANCING. The women, relishing new licentious freedom, swim naked in a pond. Upon shore, Ursula sings while Gudrun dances in eurhythmics even after confronted by a herd of Scottish bulls, of which she is no longer afraid. “Pulsing and fluttering her face, her feet all the time beating and running up to the measure of the song, as if it were some strange incantation, her white, rapt form drifting here and there in strange impulsive rhapsody, seeming to be lifted on a breeze of incantation, shuddering with strange little runs…clutched in pure, mindless tossing rhythm, and will set powerful in a kind of hypnotic influence.”(156)STRANGE FRUIT. The accidental deaths of some minor characters force Ursula to reflect on life and death at age 26. “She was fulfilled in a kind of bitter ripeness, there remained only to fall from the tree into death. There was a certain peace in the knowledge…How beautiful, how grand and perfect death was, how good to look forward to it.”(183)MOONY. Birkin throws stones into a pond to destroy the image of the moon reflected there, but the reflection re-gathers itself. “The moon had exploded on the water, and was flying asunder in flakes of white and dangerous fire. Rapidly, like white birds, the fires all broken rose across the pond, fleeing in clamorous confusion, battling with the flock of dark waves that were forcing their way in. But at the center, the heart of all, was still a vivid incandescent quivering of a white moon not quite destroyed.”(234) EXURSION: Ursula and Rupert exchange anal sex, after high tea, that will bring them into equality of relationship. “He had taken her at the roots of her darkness and shame—like a demon. Laughing over fountain of mystic corruption which was one of the sources of her being, laughing, shrugging, accepting, accepting finally. (290)DEATH AND LOVE. Immediately after his father’s death, Gerald sneaks into Ursula’s room for grief sex. ”He lifted her and seemed to pour himself into her, like wine into a cup. She reached up, like Eve reaching to the apples on the tree of knowledge… Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death and he was whole again. (317, 331)SNOW REVERIE. Sensuous Alpine scenery transfixes Ursula. “Oh but this—she cried almost involuntarily in pain. In front was a valley, shut in under the sky, the last huge slopes of snow and black rock, and at the end, like the navel of the earth, a white-folded wall, and two peaks glimmering in the late light. Straight in front ran the cradle of silent snow, between the great slopes that were fringed with a little roughness of pine trees, like hair, round the base.”(383) Don’t underestimate the force of this magnum octopus or you will be pinned by its tentacles. DHL is “like a boy who pulls off a fly’s wings or tears open a bud to see what is in the flower.” This book speaks to the masculine and the feminine that coexist, sometimes uneasily, in all of us, and we are an admixture of contradictory attitudes and crazy sexual circuitry. None of us is identical to another and, usually, we exasperate those who know us intimately. Readers burdened with judgmentalism and certitude regarding sexuality will not find this androgynous novel (or its predecessor) congenial. DHL preaches that if we choose to enter love, we must give our lovers freedom to live authentic lives and not attempt to re-create them in our own image. How much freedom will you grant your lover? At what point does unselfish love become surrender to the will of the lover? When does natural selfishness in love become dominance? May we all be lucky to find worthy partners. Not all of DHL’s devotion to particular kinds of love spoke to me, but WIL forced me to think deeply about many areas of my life, and I see it as another text in my quest for freedom from fear and as a resource to find words for my own declarations of independence. Exhausted and spent, I fought the octopus to an honorable draw. “One ought to wrestle and strive and be physically close. It makes one sane.” Do you merely live? Do you seek fulfillment? Are they the same? Reader, will you accept the challenge? Will you judge yourself or others? Will you quit so easily before you have broken a sweat? “Best strive with oneself only, not with the universe.” Now reader, shall we strip and begin? July 6, 2014.Here is a link to my review of "The Rainbow," the first novel of the Brangwen Family saga; https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
What do You think about Women In Love (2003)?
Ken Russell's film of this book is the only film I have seen when I can say he didnt destroy the book in the making. The screenplay was all DH Lawrence...so I cant understand why you didnt like the book...
—Suzanne
Ever noticed how many people hate DH Lawrence? Often for opposite reasons by the way--there are those who condemn his misognyny, while others allege him to be too doting of the fair sex. Which is it? Sometimes he's damned for being too obscene, but elsewhere dismissed as overly fussy about flowers and horses. He even gets clubbed for creating self-absorbed characters, just after someone has taken a swipe at him for promoting a harmful ideal of sacrificial love. All of these folks can agree that they strongly dislike to read Lawrence's books, but from hearing them converse, one might almost conclude that the entire group can hardly be discussing the works of a single author. The variety of accusations are impossible to reconcile.I think it is just this pattern of polarized criticism of his work that ought to point us to the obvious power Lawrence held as a novelist. If a single man can provoke simultaneous accusations of depicting egotists and martyrs, obscenity and prudery, sexism against women and reverence for women, then obviously he is hitting his mark in there somewhere as an artist. Lawrence's critics might not all reach the same specific conclusions about the dreck they've just endured, but they are united in judging him a failure.Now there are plenty of worthy theorists whose tidy explanation of these contradictory responses among Lawrence's critics is that they are not, in fact, contradictory. On the contrary, these psychologists argue that such disparate elements in Lawrence's writing are unassailable proof, not of the man's status as a literary genius, but of his latent homosexuality.My two objections are strenuous, but almost too obvious to mention. First, the fact that Lawrence wrote a lot about women, love, the self, and sex proves nothing whatsoever about his being gay. It only proves that he was a human, and that his particular strategy for facing his complexity as a human was to write books about it. I happen to think it a great approach, and I find the results to be outstanding and insightful. So I'm happy he turned his feelings and thoughts into novels. Others however will stick to the view that he would have been better off at a gay bar.The second problem with this dismissive response to Lawrence is that it doesn't answer the original question: how is it that Lawrence's critics say such opposite things when they complain about him, and so vociferously? To call him gay will never do, because simply to accuse a writer of being gay does nothing to explain how he can bring about this sharp contrast in opinions.I think the truth is that Lawrence is guilty of all of the seemingly dichotomous charges being laid at his feet. But what has caused such alarm in others is a cause of tremendous joy in me. If you couldn't already tell, I'm a Lawrence fan. I love his books, and especially this one. ( Sons and Lovers is also brilliant.) It is full of beautifully made scenes in which you can actually feel the orchestrated and opposing emotions and thoughts of two different characters at the same time. Often these are scenes of disagreement, between lovers, between sisters, and between best friends. As I read, I was pulling for everyone because everyone is sympathetic.Lawrence's descriptions of nature are often so powerful because of the barely restrained beauty of his objects, and because just as you are beginning to enjoy the ride, violence spills onto the scene and you are swept onto the next chapter. The scene where Gerald is trying to impress his girlfriend by riding his horse up to the edge of the train track as the engine flies past is a perfect demonstration of this ability Lawrence posesses. The best part of this book is at the end when Gerald dies in the Alps while trying to understand life, and then the final mysterious dialogue between the remaining lovers, Rupert Birkin and Ursula Brangwen. Read the book.
—Edward Waverley
First of all, this book should be called something more like "I Hate You With the White Hot Intensity of a Thousand Suns" instead of it's actual title. If people are really walking around with the thoughts that Lawrence writes of in this novel, I AM PERSONALLY TERRIFIED! With that being said, the novel was a great read lol. My husband commented at one point, "I've never seen you so caught up in a book." I really couldn't put it down. I will also add that though the title would seem to indicate that it focuses on women, it really doesn't. There are four main characters in my view and two of them are men. I can't really say that the women have more than a bit over 50% of the books time dedicated to them. Maybe at the beginning it's that way but it's pretty much equal time for the two sexes through the bulk of the book. And it is not a small book. I enjoyed it. But I enjoy period novels so I am naturally drawn into them. Enjoy!
—Deanna
