Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence · 1885–1930 · England
Why it matters
Two sisters, two men, and Lawrence's most ambitious inquiry into love, will, and the life of the body. Passion rendered as metaphysics, in prose that was banned as often as it was worshipped.
At a glance
Abstract, near-mystical passages on will and desire slow the narrative considerably.
Deep dive
Two sisters, two very different men, and Lawrence's argument about what a marriage would have to become to survive contact with real equality between the partners.
Written for readers who have finished the book. No plot recap, and nothing here is safe to read first.
Themes & symbolism
Rupert Birkin's theory of "star equilibrium", a bond between two people who remain as separate and self-sufficient as stars held in mutual orbit rather than merging into one another, is the novel's answer to every failed union it stages around it. Birkin acts the theory out literally one night at the pond below his cottage, hurling stones at the moon's reflection to shatter it, an attempt to break the image of Cybele, the ancient clinging mother-goddess of undifferentiated female love, that he associates with the kind of marriage he refuses to enter. Ursula watches the stone-throwing with real unease, resisting the idea as cold and abstract until she has watched enough of the alternative to recognize what he's actually offering her.
Gerald Crich modernizes his father's colliery with ruthless efficiency, treating the mine, the machinery, and the men who work it as instruments of his own will rather than as anything with an interest of its own, introducing new machines over the objections of workers who understand exactly what they're losing. Lawrence draws a straight line from that industrial coldness to the way Gerald later needs to dominate Gudrun completely, love curdling into the same appetite for control that made him an efficient mine owner and, eventually, a violent partner.
The Wrestling Match
Birkin and Gerald wrestle naked by the fire one evening in the chapter "Gladiatorial," a scene of sustained physical intimacy Lawrence writes with the same intensity he gives any of the novel's heterosexual encounters, limbs interlocking until neither man can say afterward which of them was winning. Birkin proposes afterward a kind of Blutbruderschaft, blood-brotherhood, between them, an additional bond meant to run alongside marriage rather than instead of it, and Gerald, moved but unable to answer in kind, deflects the offer into something lighter than Birkin intended. Ursula's later refusal to accept that Birkin might need this as much as he needs her is the argument the book ends on without resolving, one man's desire for total intimacy with both a man and a woman treated as a real, unmet need rather than a metaphor for something safer.
The last seal: what actually happens, and why it lands the way it does.
The ending, explained
In the Tyrol, Gudrun drifts toward the sculptor Loerke, whose cold, purely aesthetic view of art and cruelty appeals to something in her that Gerald's physical will can no longer satisfy; Gerald, undone by jealousy, attacks Gudrun, tries to strangle her, and then walks alone into the snow, exhausted, where he freezes to death, found later half buried on the mountainside. Birkin grieves him with a force that surprises Ursula, and tells her plainly, at the very end, that he had wanted eternal union with a man as well as with her, that one love was never going to be enough for him. Ursula calls the idea impossible, insists a person can only have one kind of ultimate love, and the novel closes on their disagreement, unresolved rather than argued shut, a marriage beginning on a note of open dispute.
