Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
Women in Love, which began as early as 1913, was provisionally titled "The Sisters", then later "The Wedding Ring". As the vast manuscript began to take shape over the next two years, Lawrence published the first part as The Rainbow (1915). With significant revisions and a complete rethinking of the material, he published a second Brangwen novel in 1920. In its final form, Women in Love is less a continuation of The Rainbow than a completely different novel. To be sure, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen persist in their pursuit of happiness. Yet The Rainbow's Gudrun was a minor figure; in Women in Love, she is an important protagonist, with a fully developed psychology. Ursula's change is even more dramatic. In the previous novel, she was a woman passionate about independence, while in Women in Love she is submissive: less impulsive, less heroic, more almost tame.
Their lovers, Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin, complement the sisters' essential temperament. Like the fiery and strong-willed Gudrun, Gerald is a sensual ruler and ruler, used to submitting horses to his iron command as well as overloading his workers in the coal mines. On the contrary, Rupert (a Lawrence-like personality) is sensitive, introspective, emotionally fragile despite her intellectual vitality and his charm.
Unless one reads Lawrence's canceled prologue to Women in Love, a chapter that can be examined in author's posthumous volume Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works (1968), one cannot fully understand why. of Rupert's shyness as a lover. Yet this prologue is an essential key to perceiving what follows in the novel. Even though Rupert was zealously pursuing his relationship with Hermione Roddice, he was trying to leave behind a much more satisfying emotional friendship with Gerald. Whether the men's previous relationship had become a physical homosexual relationship is not entirely clear, although Lawrence seems to exclude the physical element. However, Rupert is erotically aroused more by men than by women and certainly not by Hermione, despite her frantic love for her or his sincere desire to love her tenderly: he always wanted to love women. All the while he wanted to feel that heated, loving attraction for a beautiful woman, which he often felt for a handsome man. But he couldn't. Whenever she was a woman, too much spiritual and brotherly love came into play; or, in reaction, there was only a kind of brutal and insensitive lust.
At the beginning of the novel itself, a reader who ignores this complication in Rupert's psychosexual orientation may not fully understand why the character experiences so many problems in his relationship with Ursula. The couple, after all, seems to be well adapted culturally, intellectually, even emotionally. The two share a similar background in education and social class, they are both intelligent, sensitive, tolerant and certainly "love" each other. Yet their love must be tested and refined. Many readers will be amazed at the lengthy controversies between Ursula and Rupert: the ongoing, often circular debates about the meaning of love, the subtle definition of the roles each partner must adopt to make the relationship work. Precisely this test is at the heart of Ursula and Rupert's pairing, as it results in compromises that make the couple's marriage possible.
Ursula wisely and lovingly belittles Rupert's secret fear that women dominate him sexually. In fact she is more comfortable than she is with a man's hugs. In the chapter "Gladiatorial", Rupert and Gerald ease their tensions (and sublimate their repressed eroticism) with wrestling; more than that, for Rupert, touching is a sign of hope for "blood brotherhood", a deep and binding friendship ...
