'ecstatic,' winds up whispering to her ex-husband, 'Take me back, take me back!' Paul begins to lose himself in the memory of his dead mother. But in the last lines, rather like Eugène de Rastignac at the end of Balzac's Père Goriot, he turns defiantly away from despair and back toward the 'humming,' sparkling town. The story of Clara, her husband, and Paul functions both as a wish-fulfilling resolution of the conflict between Lawrence's parents and as a recognition of his own inevitable exclusion. But it is also the means through which Lawrence encapsulated his understanding of the period's gender politics.
While the details vary, Lawrence returns numerous times to a scenario in which women's social discontent is linked to a failed erotic life with men. One must remember the link drawn at this time between -721- women's emancipation and the repression of male sexuality. The slogan popularized by suffragist Christabel Pankhurst in 1913 was 'Votes for Women and Purity for Men.' Lawrence repeatedly attacked all that the slogan implied: in Lettie's tragic refusal of George in The White Peacock; in the contrast of Clara Dawes with Miriam Leivers in Sons and Lovers; in the disappointment of Anna and Will's marriage and in Ursula's destructive lesbian affair in The Rainbow; in Rupert's struggles with Hermione and Ursula and in Gudrun's fatal rejection of Gerald in Women in Love; in Alvina Houghton's sexual awakening at the hands of the brooding Italian, Ciccio, in The Lost Girl; in the Marchese's revitalizing affair with Aaron Sisson in Aaron's Rod; in the eventual submission of Kate Leslie to General Cipriano Viedma in The Plumed Serpent; in Lou Witt's sexual response to an untamable horse in St. Mawr, and, of course, in the erotic transformation of Connie Chatterley by Lawrence's most perfectly idealized image of himself, the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover. The threat posed by modern woman is parried by the woman's renunciation of calculating intellect and by her sensual liberation through contact with a powerfully instinctual male-whether human, equine or, as in 'The Fox,' vulpine.
By the same token, male sexual response to women takes on dramatic significance. In essays like A Study of Thomas Hardy' and 'The Crown (both completed in 1915) and in his two books on psychoanalysis, Lawrence outlines a male sexuality that depends for its success on spontaneous instinct, yet carries social significance of biblical proportions. Healthy sexuality in Lawrence, unlike that of many other male modernists, is finally not dependent on reproduction or fertility (though masturbation is still rejected) or on any organized, social function-but neither is it treated as if existing apart from these. Rather, sexuality forms a bodily religion all its own, one that is prerequisite to social change and well-being. And, as already noted, it is decidedly ambivalent in gender preference. There are strong indications, stated bluntly in the deleted prologue to Women in Love, that full satisfaction with a woman would always be impossible, and that only homosexual love, however threatening, might suffice. Nevertheless, it is from sexual fulfillment with a woman that Lawrence drew his most far-reaching hypotheses about the meaning of male sexuality.
Along with a never-used introduction to Sons and Lovers, the essays from 1915 outline Lawrence's attempted philosophical synthesis of sexual intercourse and Christian theology. 'Down the road of the blood, — 722- further and further into the darkness, I come to the Almighty God Who was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,' Lawrence wrote in 'The Crown.''It is thus… that I come to the woman in desire. She is the doorway, she is the gate to the dark eternity of power, the creator's power.' In the 'Study of Thomas Hardy' (initially titled 'Le Gai Savaire' [sic] after Nietzsche), Lawrence's literary revisionism is overwhelmed by his psychological and phenomenological reading of the Christian trinity.
The traditional formula from the Gospel of John-'And the word was made flesh'-is reversed, so that the flesh (now God the Father) appears to have been made word (Christ), with the eternal tension between them symbolized by the Holy Spirit. The Old (Jewish) Law of the Father is thus connected not only to the flesh, but to matriarchy and the dark body of the woman; and the New (Christian) Love of the Son is linked to the Word, self-awareness, light, and male individuation. Like Nietzsche's duality of Dionysus and Apollo, Father and Son are struggling opposites balanced, in a strange echo of Hegel and Carlyle, by Spirit. (The famous image of the lovers' star-equilibrium in chapter 23 of Women in Love, borrowed in all likelihood from Edward Carpenter, is one version of the Spirit's tense balancing act.) More important, it is now through the body of the woman that Lawrence believes he can make contact, as an individual, with the Power and the Law of the Father.
Such 'pseudo-philosophy,' as Lawrence himself called it, would be simply tiresome were it not for the light it sheds on one of Lawrence's major novels, The Rainbow, and on the mystical significance attached to nonrational physicality throughout his fiction. The novel traces three generations of male-female relationships from the mid- nineteenth century to the early twentieth. It opens, however, in the biblical cadences of an antediluvian era (the giant flood occurs later in the novel) filled with the autochthonous, near-incestuous Brangwen clan. The awkward but fulfilling marriage of the worldly Polish widow and expatriate Lydia Lensky to earthy Tom Brangwen is succeeded by the marriage of her daughter (by her first husband) Anna to Tom's nephew Will. But Anna's critical intellect is in conflict with the 'dark emotional experience' that Will finds in their solitude and in the church, and their struggle is resolved only when Anna, «Victrix» at last, bears children. After the flood that kills patriarch Tom, her daughter Ursula's development occupies the latter half of the book. -723-
Ursula reproduces her mother Anna and grandmother Lydia as she is courted in a near-mythic landscape. Like her mother, Ursula offers herself to the moon (and to her lover, Anton Skrebensky) in rites of sensual awakening and fertility: 'Her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft dilated invitation touched by the moon.' Initial failure with Skrebensky is followed by a shame-inducing lesbian affair with the all-too-modern Winifred Inger-who winds up marrying Ursula's mechanical uncle, Tom, and settling in the equally mechanical town of Wiggiston. After disappointing attempts at schoolteaching and university, Ursula returns to Skrebensky. Though their passion explodes for a time, Ursula wants something beyond Skrebensky's power. The novel ends with one of Lawrence's most expressionistic scenes. Ursula, now pregnant by Skrebensky, is chased by a small group of horses galloping apocalyptically around her in a rain that 'could not put out the hard, urgent, massive fire that was locked within these flanks, never, never'; she miscarries as a result of the encounter. But in the midst of the 'dry, brittle, terrible corruption' spreading out from the coal town of Beldover, Ursula sees a rainbow promising a 'new germination' and an end to modernity's horrors.
The sweep of generations in the novel loosely follows the progression of Father, Son, and (though only in the rainbow's promise) Holy Spirit outlined by Lawrence's metaphysics. The model also frames Lawrence's treatment of heterosexual love as an attempt to reestablish contact-through the body of the (symbolically maternal) woman-with a physical, nonverbal father who rejected his all-too-verbal son. Moreover, this «philosophy» also suggests the beginnings of Lawrence's later fictional meditations on power. In Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent especially, legitimate social authority is rooted not in pragmatic or utilitarian human relations but in the flesh of the Father that reveals itself in wordless sexual power and ritual incantation.
Similarly, Lawrence's «philosophy» points to the underlying grounds of his racism. Jews, Celts, Italians, Indians, and Mexicans occupy highly ambivalent positions. They are all on the one hand closer to the primal sources embodied here by the Father (Lawrence believed that white skin was unnatural). Yet they are on the other constantly denigrated in the novels either for being oblivious to the force of their inheritance, as are the childlike Mexican peasants of The Plumed Serpent; dissolute perverters of the flesh in the name of machinery and calculation, like the Jewish homosexual Loerke in Women in Love; or sentimental egotists, — 724- like the Jewish, pseudofascist revolutionary Ben Cooley in Kangaroo (modeled after Lawrence's friend S. S. Koteliansky), who substitutes a personal, suffocating demand to be loved for the impersonal, unconscious racial power locked within him.
Finally, then, beyond both class and sexuality, the typology suggested by Lawrence's parents structures the relation of Europe to its ethnological opposites. Though there is no evidence that Lawrence read Ferdinand Tönnies's work on the distinction between community and society, he would have been acquainted with a similar distinction in Marxian thought from the Eastwood Fabian socialist William Hopkin. Lawrence's Luddism could be derived easily enough from his childhood experiences. But his social perspective also evolved from his reading of Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin, Whitman, and Nietzsche. His plans during the war for an ideal community, Rananim, recalled nineteenth-century utopianism dating back to Coleridge. He had a passing familiarity, through Frieda and her sister Else, with sociology derived from Weber, and a critical though unique appreciation of Freud's early work. Lawrence also had a fascination for anthropology and the study of myth; he had read Herbert Spencer's Education, E. B. Tyler's Primitive Society, at least parts of Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, and Jane Harrison's Ancient Art and Ritual. As preparation for The Plumed Serpent, he consulted works of a more specific nature on Mexican culture, such as Zelia Nuttall's Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations and Lewis Spence's Gods of Mexico. And he was at least acquainted with the thought of Edward Carpenter, an important Midlands apologist for
