between the «productive» sphere of the modern bourgeoisie and modern women on one hand, and a «contestive» organic community of athletes and hand-to-hand soldiery akin to Plato's Republic on the other.
Lawrence's mother and father, figured as the passionate, naturally noble, but oppressed man and the spiritual, willful, and repressed woman, appear throughout Lawrence's novels. They are central to The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron's Rod (1922), St. Mawr (1925), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Moreover, Lawrence tended to reproduce his parents' struggle in his own relationships, especially in an early and failed romance with Jessie Chambers and in his lasting, if stormy, marriage with Frieda Weekley. But there are two cru-717- cial variations that Lawrence's own experience introduced into the models he took from his parents.
First, Lawrence attained the cultural capital that his mother only vaguely symbolized. Indeed, he often portrayed himself as a fully formed intellectual at war with the intellect, a working-class artisan who had achieved cultural sophistication only to abandon the superfices of mind for the fundamentals of body and blood. Second, he could explore through his own experience a homosexual desire that went beyond the comradeship of the miners. Lawrence's sexual ambivalence, expressed with great force in the «Prologue» that he deleted from Women in Love, allows him to portray homoerotic desire-at times more overtly than at others-as itself a redemptive force. In episodes of The White Peacock, Women in Love, Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo (1923), and The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence documented the attraction of homosexual desire in only thinly veiled descriptions.
Lawrence met and eloped with Frieda von Richthofen Weekley, the wife of his French teacher at University College, Nottingham, in 1912. She would come to represent the great female principle in his thinking and his fiction. But she also appeared to be a refinement and synthesis of the qualities Lawrence attributed to his parents. Frieda possessed in actuality the cultured heritage that Lawrence had projected onto his mother; but she was at the same time spontaneous, physical, and sexually open, allowing him previously denied contact with the natural nobility supposedly hidden behind the crude behavior of his father. Lawrence's relationship with Frieda was in large part a struggle with a modern woman-she was sexually liberated and educated-who at times embodied the passionate sensuality Lawrence sought and at others proved to be an incomplete answer to his need for a community of individuals in «contestive» harmony. The Trespasser (1912), Women in Love (1920), Mr. Noon (part 1, 1934; complete, 1984), Kangaroo, even Lawrence's revision of Mollie Skinner's Boy in the Bush (1924), all rehearse this tension in one way or another.
Lawrence identified the intellectual, willful woman with the selfconsciousness and automatism of modernity as a whole. He disliked the mentalism of psychoanalysis, and tried-in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921) and Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922) — to reinterpret some of its findings in terms of impulses arising from specific bodily regions. But he shared Freud's tendency to distinguish in women an active, clitoral orgasm of immature sexuality from a passive, vaginal, — 718- and mature response, and in the novels from Women in Love on linked the former to the calculating will plaguing modernity and the latter to organic nature. In The Plumed Serpent, it is a woman's (clitoral) control over orgasm that is problematic: Cipriano literally withdraws from Kate Leslie to prevent it, and she ends up all the more attached to him as a result. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mellors's marriage to the sensual but vulgar Bertha falls apart when her own too-clitoral, too-conscious sexuality overwhelms him: she refuses to achieve orgasm with him, preferring to wait until after his own. 'She sort of got harder and harder to bring off,' he tells Constance, 'and she'd sort of tear at me down there, as if it was a beak tearing me.' Rarely has the male fear of castration by a strong woman been depicted with such honesty, if not hysteria.
This dichotomy between the passive, vaginal woman and the active, clitoral one, however spurious it appears today, complemented Lawrence's sense that his homoerotic desire (like heterosexual sodomy) might promise not only an escape from women who demanded the same intellectual and political prerogatives as men, but salvation from modernity itself. Lawrence rejected the more expressive homosexuality he found in many around him, may have had only one homosexual encounter, and either deleted or destroyed (as is the case with the essay 'Goats and Compasses') those of his writings that openly confronted his desire for men. The abhorrent nature of lesbianism emerges clearly in The Rainbow and 'The Fox' (1922). But as with his response to the critics who saw only pornography in his treatment of heterosexual intercourse, Lawrence distinguished between two kinds of homosexuality. Violently repelled by the «corruption» and 'deep inward dirt' of John Maynard Keynes and friends at Cambridge (a corruption that appears in the artist Loerke in Women in Love), he still yearned for a healthier, life- affirming, at times even puritanical homosexual «tenderness» (as in the same novel's Birkin.)
This vague quality of' tenderness'-the word was an earlier title for Lady Chatterley's Lover-would likewise differentiate two kinds of heterosexual sodomy. With Rupert and Ursula in Women in Love (chapter 29) or Mellors and Constance Chatterley in Lady Chatterley's Lover (chapter 16), sodomy represents the acme of their experience of one another. In the latter novel especially, sodomy at once transcends sensuality, tenderness, and love, 'burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places,' though it depends on a completely submissive woman-'She had to be a passive consenting thing, — 719- like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her.' But with Gerald and Gudrun in Women in Love (chapter 31), the same act forecasts their violent separation and Gerald's destruction, and follows Gerald's rejection of Rupert's affections. Like the later Freud, Lawrence accepted life and death instincts, and linked them to forms of sexuality. Whether or not one wishes to see Lawrence's use of heterosexual sodomy as a psychologically (and legally) censored mask for homosexuality, both heterosexual sodomy and homosexuality thus carry the risk of death for Lawrence even as, under the right circumstances, they promise liberating rebirth. Perhaps because of its untenability for him, homosexual love symbolized the possibility of social redemption in Lawrence's novels in ways that heterosexual love never could.
Though it is in one sense obvious that Lawrence never abandoned the project of sifting through his parents' marriage, it is also true that family life itself became a surrogate in his writings for powerful social conflicts. Biography is finally a seamless web of relations that extend from the home to the world. The tension between his mother and father, and between countless fictional couples derived from them, is also Lawrence's way of presenting class struggle in its grittiest form. There were major union strikes in 1893, 1912, and 1926. Conditions underground were hellish before the war, and death was routine. Throughout those prewar years, mine owners responded with a 'peculiar mixture of paternalism and ruthlessness,' in Jeffrey Meyers's apt phrase. The mental deliberateness and sexual impotence Lawrence associates with a hereditary or commercial elite were thus everywhere opposed by the damaged bodies and self-destructive resentment of the working class. Descriptions of mining villages, like those of Wiggiston in The Rainbow, are thus paradoxically haunted not only by Lawrence's deep resentment of modern capitalism but also by his animus toward the stunted miners themselves.
The only positive, heroic figures to arise from this impasse are those who through the force of some natural ability and insight struggle out of the working class, yet abandon labor's crass appeal for money. These figures recapture an organic contact with persons and things that remains merely an unconscious vestige in the modern laborer. Obviously, Lawrence is himself often the model for the type, which appears as Rupert Birkin in Women in Love, both Aaron Sisson and Rawdon Lilly in Aaron's Rod, Gilbert Noon in Mr. Noon, and Richard Lovatt -720- Somers in Kangaroo; as Don Ramon Carrasco and General Cipriano Viedma in The Plumed Serpent, figures now informed by Mexican politics and Lawrence's views of race consciousness; and, as if constituting the opening and closing statements of Lawrence's career, as the Panlike gamekeepers Annable in The White Peacock and Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The typology Lawrence derived from his parents would likewise embody modernity's struggle over gender and sexual identity. The militant drive for women's suffrage peaked in the years just preceding the war, the period of Lawrence's first literary efforts. (Women would not win the right to vote until 1918.) It was a time when otherwise respectable, bourgeois women smashed storefront windows and took up hunger strikes in prison. Though the resistance was largely an urban phenomenon, Lawrence registered its impact even in the rural isolation of his hometown, Eastwood. Sons and Lovers is primarily a bildungsroman about Paul Morel. Raised in a mining town, Paul suffers both from his father's brutality and his mother's dissatisfaction. When his older brother dies, Paul forms a powerful bond with his protective mother, one that threatens his father and makes any satisfying romantic relationship with his friend Miriam impossible. But Paul soon meets Clara Dawes, a divorced, liberated woman portrayed at first as a militant and bitter suffragist. Despite her strong suspicion of men and the memory of her drunken and abusive husband, she is attracted to the younger, intellectual Paul and finds a new sexual satisfaction with him.
While Lawrence's narration is clearly sympathetic to her position, the novel locates both the source of and the solution to her social discontent in her sexuality. By the end, Paul Morel has so arranged things that Clara,
