Title: Staging the Gaze in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love
Abstract: fifth novel, in Love, has been almost universally judged among finest achievements.(1) As a war novel coming out of what Paul Delany has termed Lawrence's nightmare,(2) it offers a testament of survival, a heroic response to radical isolation on the cliffs of Cornwall where he felt a fox run to ground. His letters from the period emphasize despairing recklessness in constructing a long work which he knew in advance stood even less chance of reaching an audience than had in the fall of 1915 when it was burned by the public hangman on the streets of London.(3) It was that made achievement in in Love belated. As Charles Ross has extensively shown in study Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love,(4) Lawrence began what was to be the celebration of and Frieda's pursuit of true marriage in one of the early drafts of these novels called The Sisters, then turned attention away from the story of the characters who would become Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin when he decided that heroine needed more experience. That decision produced Rainbow. When he returned to the manuscript of in Love, he had just finished reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick for the first time, and clearly he found in Melville a kindred spirit. Like American counterpart, he was struggling to write what looked to be an unpublishable novel, in part because its desperate pursuit of Blutbruderschaff(5) would inevitably be read as homoerotic. Much of in Love's power is generated by elements of its narrative structure. organic time frame of an action beginning close to the vernal equinox and ending near the winter solstice seems a gesture toward one of the classical unities. Similarly, the two-couples structure that he found in Hardy's fiction enhances the novel's impact. One other factor that lends in Love some of its power is development of two couples within the framework of references to eyes and seeing. It is a framework based in a traditional notion of vision. but it is also one that may be read in light of the contemporary concern with looking at and being looked at, or the gaze. One aspect of the complex relationship between the two couples--Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, Gudrun Brangwen and Gerald Crich--is the pronounced contrast in the development of visual exchange between the characters. It might be noted at the outset that a concern with looking at and being tooked at in work is not unique to in Love. In Rainbow, for example, Tom Brangwen looks at Lydia Lensky passing him on the road and involuntarily blurts out, That's her, and later the young Ursula begins to read her own beauty and desirability in the impassioned gaze of her lover Anton Skrebensky.(6) These more conventional expressions of visual exchange offer a good starting point since they persist in in Love. They are increasingly displaced, however, by more intricate expressions of looking. contrast between conventional and more complicated expressions of visual exchange is evident in in Love from the beginning in the descriptions of the two couples' developing relationships. Birkin first becomes significantly aware of Ursula during Hermione's theatricalizing of the Ruth story in her drawing room at Breadalby. What he sees is an Ursula who is like a strange unconscious bud of powerful womanhood, He was unconsciously drawn to her. She was future.(7) Birkin's looking at Ursula here and recognizing in an instant that she represents his future repeats the healthier consequences of visual exchange in Tom's recognition of Lydia as wife. Unlike the Gudrun-Gerald relationship, the growing love of Ursula and Birkin is noticeably lacking in looking and being looked at, with one notable exception. exception occurs in the Moony chapter in which Ursula comes upon Birkin stoning the moon's reflection. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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