D.H. Lawrence and The Flight From History

D. H.
Lawrence and the Flight from History

Author(s): Millicent Bell
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Fall, 1998), pp. 604-618
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27548588
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D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE
FLIGHT FROM HISTORY
MILLICENT BELL
THERE istoricalnomeaning.
escapeTherefrom history,
are moments nor is there from his
in human time
when the flight from history is the very motive of the artist
and the theme of his work, and yet that flight is itself the
most historical of literary gestures. This flight is what is
dramatized in Lawrence's Women in Love.
In many ways it is a baffling novel, but most of all because
of the omissions Lawrence allowed in the presentation of
Rupert Birkin. When he is compared to others around him,
this chief character is curiously unexplained. Of course, if we
have read his The Rainbow, which chronicles the preceding
generations of Brangwens, we already know the family his
tory behind the two most recent Brangwens, Ursula and
Gudrun. But even without this preparation we understand
fully the sisters' own social placement in this sequel. Although
he is newly introduced in Women in Love, we know every
thing the realist novel requires we should know about Gerald
Crich?his class and social position, the economic role he
plays at a particular point in the growth of the industrial
economy of England, and his family relationships and his
personal past. Lawrence provides both a psychological ex
planation for his character and a brilliant historic interpre
tation of his development into an "industrial magnate." But
Birkin, also new to the later book, is never supplied with a
prehistory. We know only that he is a school inspector and a
university graduate. Where does he come from? What family
has he? What has been his experience before the time he
appears as an old lover of Hermione? And how can we ex
plain without such information the extraordinary bitterness
? 1998 by Millicent Bell
MILLICENT BELL 605
that seems to fill him, his rejection not only of all inherited
social forms but his dread of marriage, his desire to redefine
it so radically that it seems hardly realizable even to the
woman who loves him?
In some respects Women in Love is so powerfully a novel
in the realist tradition that one may be tempted to think that
the odd informational vacancy about Birkin is a flaw. To
acclimatize this figure to the realist context that supports the
other characters, we will be tempted to go outside the novel
?for, if he is least explained and recognizable as coming
from a real world, he is the character most directly drawn
from life. There is plenty of evidence that Lawrence was
thinking of Frieda and himself and of his friends Middleton
Murray and Katherine Mansfield when he determined his
quartet of characters, particularly of his own struggle to
achieve love for both man and woman. As we inevitably re
member this, we also remember Lawrence's painful experi
ences during the war years and see at once how his view that
mankind had become "a dead tree, covered with fine brilliant
galls of people" comes out of the Cornwall period. Such a
prehistory is not supplied for Birkin, but it can be imagined,
and we can see the way it can justify and explain a Birkin-like
searcher if we read the later Kangaroo, a novel that brings
into direct view some of Lawrence's war experience.
We can also make Birkin more credible psychologically if
we reinsert the excluded "prologue" that survives in manu
script. Here, surely, is a missing part of the novel, we say,
for in it Birkin's homosexuality is made explicit?it is not
merely the idealized blutbruderschaft that Birkin longs for in
the novel. The prologue is precise, not only in identifying the
conscious sexuality of Birkin's feelings for men, which seize
him overmasteringly from time to time, but also in abolishing
the mystery of his difficult heterosexuality: "It was for men
that he felt the hot, flushing, roused attraction which a man
is supposed to feel for the other sex." Homosexuality as a
cause of Birkin's difficulties in loving Ursula can also be con
firmed if we choose to restore the passage in which he reflects
606 D. H. LAWRENCE
that his love for Gerald "was complemented by the hatred

for women"?words that Lawrence eliminated in the pub
lished novel.
It might, then, seem only a sort of textual emendation, the
reparation of mutilations imposed upon Lawrence by others,
to add authorial biography or rejected manuscript material to
what the published novel offers. While we will not actually
insert such "restorations" on the pages of the book one holds
in one's hand, our informed awareness of what has been left
out may create a truer text in our minds, closer to the artist's
intent. The writer himself must have felt compelled, in a
period of war hysteria, to eliminate direct criticism of the
government or any record of his own sufferings caused by
anti-German prejudice. And homosexuality was still a for
bidden subject, so that the prologue would have equally
prevented publication. Lawrence had reason to self-censor,
anticipating the public censor who had already suppressed
The Rainbow as soon as it was published.
And perhaps, too, the novel may be said amply to justify
readings that fill its gaps not so much with the author's own
life or rejected manuscript elements as with the stuff of gen
eral history. Without reference to these one may say too sim
ply that it is a novel about modern marriage, a search for a
better relation between men and women. Not only in the
character of Gerald but in Birkin's rage and despair of finding
authentic selfhood we may suspect an abstraction from Law
rence's view of modern industrialism which, more than any
society before it, seemed to reduce human individuality to a
function in the vast mechanism of a profit-making society?
which was Raymond Williams's way of reading Lawrence.
And one may even agree with George H. Ford that this novel,
which does not once mention war, is "about war" and nothing
else, though one should note that there is some ambiguity in
Lawrence's statement that it "took its final shape in the midst
of the period of war, though it does not concern the war it
self." Lawrence had added: "I should wish the time to remain
unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for
granted in the characters."
MILLICENT BELL 607
Our insight into Birkin's implicit homosexuality increases

rather than diminishes historic meaning. We can say that
Birkin's sexual responses represent his impossible position as
a man between classes, unable not only to choose between
men and women as sexual partners but unable, even in his
homosexual life, the prologue makes clear, to choose between
the "northmen" of power like Gerald, the mine-owner's son,
and proletarian "night-smelling" men, a policeman, a soldier
casually encountered, or a miner. But one can discover the
same historicity without the aid of this inclusion. The very
indefiniteness of characterization resulting from Lawrence's
refusal to provide Birkin with a representative typological
explanation permits one to see him as an undefined?that is,
"classless"?man. He represents precisely that historic escape
from class categories and confining origins of which Lawrence
himself was an example: he might be a scholarship boy, a
miner's son, who had gone to the university, changed his
accent and his style of dress, and moved into the bohemia of
London and Garsington. That he is a school inspector relates
him to the process of education that makes possible such a
translation out of the working class.
But I am going to argue, nevertheless, that we must hesi
tate before making even these recuperations; that, in fact, as
the work was shaped to allow its curious lapses of realist
logic, it attained a form that made use of its deprivations.
It is not a perfect achievement of explicatory realism?no, it
is a metaphysical novel consciously directed against the logic
of character and circumstances which constitutes the realist
tradition. Birkin, its hero, becomes the agent of the writer
who would try strenuously to dispense with the conventional
formulas by means of which stories make sense; in his relation
with others this hero himself strives to strip them of their
inauthentic social selves, to reach some inexpressible essence.
Such an attempt?both the novelist's and his character's?
could not help but fail, and yet it results in Lawrence's most
profound novel of modern negativity. To have included any
immediate causes of disillusion in his prophet's history would
have diminished the poetic strength of his desperate mission
608 D. H. LAWRENCE
?which is, precisely, to discover a selfhood, a life story, that

escapes altogether the conventions not only of literature but
of ordinary social experience. Even the most justified addition
of historicist or biographical meaning reduces the extrava
gance, the afflatus, of Lawrence's aim. For the novel goes
beyond its implicit social critique, seeking to rescue selfhood
from bondage to all compacts, all conventions. Its violent
Dies Irae tone may be allowed to represent the desperate
end-of-the-world mood which accompanied this attempt, a
realization that such a freedom was nothing less than annihi
lation of the self?and of the universe of concepts that sup
port the self?rather than seeing in that violence simply the
reflection of the war's violence.
Few studies of Women in Love or of The Rainbow fail to
quote the famous letter to Edward Garnett in which the nov
elist declares his abandonment of "the old stable ego of char
acter" and asks his reader to expect to find "another ego,
according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable,
and passes through, as it were, allotropie states which it needs
a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise, to dis
cover are states of the same single radically unchanged ele
ment. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single
element of carbon ...)." He says, "that which is physic?
non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the
old-fashioned human element?which causes one to conceive
a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consis
tent." This provocative directive forecasts not only the sur
render of those conventions of coherence, rooted in social
habits of thought, which enable us to understand ourselves
and others, but it announces the search for a core in human
nature which, while it dispenses with all the signs by which
we know individuality is yet the very essence of individuality.
It is in Women in Love more radically than in The Rain
bow that Lawrence enacts the statement's negative as well as
positive implications. In its mood of end-of-the-world, of the
diminution of the Western sense of the self in the cosmos and
in society, the novel is quite different from its predecessor.
The Rainbow's mystical confidence in the possibility of per
MILLICENT BELL 609
sonal relation to the forces of nature?which he had admired
in Hardy?makes itself felt less strongly. One may ask what
Lawrence means by his rejection of the naturalist viewpoint
in Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, whose characters, he
thought, lacked "real being." In the foreword written for his
publisher's advertising pamphlet, he had written, "a fate dic
tated from outside, from theory or from circumstance, is a
false fate"?which is not only a declaration of personal faith
in a free self but an injunction to the novelist to loose his
characters from old-fashioned conceptions of causation. But
what was to take the place of these?
Lawrence's admiration for Hardy has its mystical side.
While he said that a Hardy character possessed a "real, vital,
potential self," he also noted that that self was made manifest
by "explosive" and "unreasonable" action. Such action was
also inexplicable. Lawrence, at this very time, was stimulated
by Futurism's obsession with the combination, in human be
havior, of incompatible opposites, of violently irreconcilable
qualities which no naturalistic analysis, psychologic or soci
ologie, can reconcile. From 1909 to 1914, as Emile Delavenay
has shown, Lawrence was deeply absorbed in study of Mari
netti, Boccioni, and the Italian Futurists and wrote of his
agreement with Marinetti's desire to "destroy all psychology"
and to substitute some sort of "physics."
Lawrence's critics have honored his hope that pure essence
may somehow emerge in his novels, but in ways he would
have rejected, to be sure. It is common to assume, for ex
ample, that his idea of "carbon" essentially refers to a psycho
logical substratum in personality, and that we see an eruption
into view of the Freudian unconscious in unanticipated mo
ments of explosion in which normal behavior ceases?as in
the scenes of Gerald with the mare at the crossing, or Gerald
and Gudrun and the rabbit, or Gudrun and the bullocks,
where the animals in these scenes may be said to represent
the suppressed "animal" part of the psyche. But such expla
nation only offers, I would say, alternate "diamond" or "coal"
definitions of character?identifications based on old or new
categorical reading of behavior, on social structures of sig
610 D. H. LAWRENCE
nificance to which the definitions of modern psychology may

now be added. They are no more "carbon" and no more ex
press an abstract essence of personality than do more obvious
or conscious aspects of selfhood.
Yet, as Mary Freeman has pointed out, Lawrence's char
acterizations are not truly Futuristic but attain their own
consistency?Gerald as the "chained wolf," Ursula in her
"dangerous helplessness," Gudrun in her "will-to-power," even
Birkin's "chameleon flexibility." The novelist in Lawrence
could not rest satisfied with incoherence and discontinuity,
for it is only by some characterizing, totalizing scheme that
one can assimilate one's impressions of others?in fiction or
in life?to a sense of meaning. It is paradoxically true that
Lawrence is actually more successful in this novel than almost
anywhere else in his fiction in using the techniques by which
the novel has always differentiated and explained human
lives?making a broad survey of "types" in an integrated
local world in which character finds its place. And the critics
who describe his characters in terms of the conventions of
modern psychology are not altogether wrong: Lawrence fo
cused more deeply upon psychic states that can be related
to the character's sexual as well as social tensions than had
novelists before him. Yet this, too, is not really a departure
from the idea that personality, both in its emotional and its
logical operations, constitutes a definable entity.
For Lawrence such achievements were not a true victory,
however. The sense of failure or partial failure with which
the novel closes is often understood to be the result only of
Birkin's grief at the loss of his chance of a male union, which
had existed in Gerald, and the persisting experimentalism of
his marriage to Ursula. Yet this failure and this continued
doubt?of author and character?derive, fundamentally, from
the fact that a transcendent personal element that he has
sought not only in others but in himself is only to be posited
mystically while remaining unrealized. The attempt on the
part of both the writer and his fictive persona to reach a
"carbon" of the self more fundamental than coal or diamond
is doomed, for it is only by means of the discarded idea of
MILLICENT BELL 611
character that human beings can conceive themselves or their

destinies. Just as "carbon," the chemical element, never exists
save in one or another of its allotropie states, since there is
only a theoretical physical or chemical definition of carbon
which is neither diamond nor coal nor any other existence in
space of its molecular nature?so it was equally impossible
for Lawrence to reach a "nonhuman" definition of personality
dispensing with conceptions of consistency and cause, the
illustration of traits, or a context of social or psychologic
typology or "moral scheme." This failure?embraced as much
as it is struggled against?brings Women in Love to the
threshold of an existential skepticism about the meaningful
ness of events and the integrity of personality.
But the novel wonderfully dramatizes its negativity, the
casting off of forms. As though acting for the conventional
novelist, Ursula, watching the guests at the Crick wedding in
the first chapter, sees "each one as a complete figure, like a
character in a book, or a subject in a picture, or a marionette
in a theatre, a finished creation. She loved to recognize their
various characteristics, to place them in their true light, give
them their own surroundings, settle them forever as they
passed before her along the path to the church. She knew
them, they were finished, sealed and stamped and finished
with, for her." Only the Cricks seem "not quite so precon
cluded." And the strange Mrs. Crick gives an early statement,
to Birkin, of the irrelevance of this very process of defining
persons: "What has Mr. So-and-so to do with his own name?"
she asks, while Birkin, replying, expresses a view still more
radical, "Not many people are anything at all. . . . They jingle
and giggle. It would be much better if they were just wiped
out. Essentially, they don't exist, they aren't there."
Lawrence's very opening in Women in Love is an an
nouncement, hard to miss, that the Brangwen sisters, no less
than their creator, are braced to resist the definition of female
selfhood by the traditional marriage plot. His choice of this
moment for our first view of them when they are about to
attend a wedding, is an intertextually conscious reference to a
long tradition of novelistic openings in which young women
612 D. H. LAWRENCE
are found poised to contemplate their futures. Often it is a

pair of sisters who so meet us?as in Middlemarch or The
Old Wives9 Tale. Ursula and Gudrun, also, are sisters at the
brink of marriage who will, in seeking this end, find the only
kinds of plots available to them. But Ursula, who does marry,
says immediately that marriage is "likely to be the end of
experience"?and this is not only a statement concerning the
married state itself but a warning to the reader against ex
pectation of the English novel's commonest mechanism of
closure. Of course, like all the heroines whose example they
"affront" in the fashion of Henry James's Isabel Archer, the
Brangwen sisters are about to encounter the very men with
whom they will form unions.
As I have remarked, the sacrifice of Birkin's historicity is
necessary if we are to see him as an apostle to others of a
selfhood that owes nothing to cause. Lawrence's dramatic
sense makes his hero's quest itself the means of imposing an
other plot, a struggle between himself and those others whose
companionship in pure absoluteness he obscurely craves?
Ursula and Gerald. Yet in his inability to find, through them,
what he wants, he is prompted to surrender his dedication to
a heroic history. "Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life?"
he thinks. "Why not drift on in a series of accidents?like a
picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human rela
tionships? Why take them seriously?male or female? Why
form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drift
ing along, taking all for what it was worth?"
Nevertheless they begin, he and Ursula, that journey which
is more flight into dissolution than search for "somewhere
where we can be free." The metaphysical is lost in the banal
when Birkin dreams of a place "where one needn't even wear
much clothes?none even." Birkin's longing is really for a
freedom to be unrestricted by social forms of all sorts, to be
free of prescribed roles, to be inexhaustibly potential and
unbounded by relationships or possessions or conventional
rituals?by what James's Isabel calls those "appurtenances"
(and not merely the clothes which express her dressmaker)
that fail to express her. They must not even buy that charm
MILLICENT BELL 613
ing chair which reminds Birkin, thinking of himself in terms

of novels, of "Jane Austen's England." All houses and furni
ture are "the past perpetuated on top of you, horrible"; even
if you have a perfect modern house done by the designer Paul
Poiret, he says, "it is something else perpetuated on top of
you." It is not a question of new or old forms, but of dis
pensing with forms of any kind. Their fugue is, as Birkin
admits, not to anyplace in particular in the real world but
"away from the word's somewheres, into our own nowhere."
So, the home, that frame, physical and emotional, which
contains and explains the individual life and expresses the
continuity of generations in the realist novel, is metaphys
ically dead, not merely outmoded in some immediate sense.
Beldover and the Brangwen house represent to Ursula and
Gudrun in the first chapter not only, socially speaking, an
"obsolete life," a dead society, but as though it were Plato's
cave, divorced from the real forms of outer life, a "country in
an underworld" in which "the people are all ghouls, and
everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of
the real world ... all soiled, everything sordid." When the
two women go for the last time to the emptied house which
had enclosed their parents' lives and their own youth they
are stirred to revulsion. "One must be free, above all, one
must be free. One must forfeit everything else but one must
be free?one must not become 7, Pinchbeck Street?or
Somerset Drive?or Shortlands." The rejection of home and
family is a rejection of all attachment to place and to one's
generative past.
Birkin's view of the disjunction between the "essential"
self and everything else seems to produce in him an uninterest
in society, even a feeling that "humanity is a dead letter" and
that the impersonal something of which it is an expression
might be better expressed if mankind were to pass away. Law
rence's utopianism, his hope of a "Rananim," is absent here.
"Man is a mistake. He must go," leaving the earth to "the
grass, and hares and adders, and the unseen hosts," Birkin
tells Ursula. When, at Breadalby, talk arises concerning a
new state of man, Birkin rejects both Sir Joshua's idea of
614 D. H. LAWRENCE
social equality and Hermione's rhapsodie "in the spirit we

are all one." He insists: "We are all different and unequal in
spirit?it is only the social differences that are based on acci
dental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathe
matically equal. . . . But spiritually there is pure difference
and neither equality or inequality."
In the "On the Train" conversation with Gerald, Birkin had
begun by saying, intransigently, "First person singular is
enough for me," but then he qualifies this by the declaration
that life must center upon "a perfect union" with a woman.
Yet by this "union" he would reject even more absolutely
than Ursula the kind of marriage which is "the end of ex
perience." "The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage,
a sort of conscription. . . . The merging, the clutching, the
mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him." Hu
man beings are not broken halves of a whole, he muses, re
jecting the old myth. "Rather we are the singling away into
purity and clear being, of things that were mixed." In this he
feels himself different from Gerald, who seems doomed, "as
if he were limited to one form of existence, one knowledge,
one activity, a sort of fatal halfness, which to himself seemed
wholeness."
More and more Birkin loses interest in what is convention
ally called personality?"people were all different, but they
were all enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation." The
union which he wants to forge with Ursula is more a divest
ment than anything else. "One must throw everything away,
everything?let everything go, to get the one last thing one
wants . . . freedom together," he tells her. He insists that at
the last one is beyond the influence of love. "There is a real
impersonal me, that is beyond love, beyond emotional rela
tionship." It is in that condition in which they are "two stark,
unknown beings" that he wants them to approach each other.
Only negatives define this condition of formless, unname
able being where "nothing known applies." "We will both
cast off everything, cast off ourselves even, and cease to be,
so that that which is perfectly ourselves can take place in
us. ... I want to find you, where you don't know your own
MILLICENT BELL 615
existence, the you that your common self denies utterly. But
I don't want your good looks, and I don't want your womanly
feelings, and I don't want your thoughts nor opinions nor
your ideas?they are all bagatelles to me."
We are quite ready to hear this as impatiently as does
Ursula who does make him say, at the end of the "Mino"
chapter: "I love you. I'm bored by the rest." But Lawrence
only temporarily undermines Birkin's yearning demand for
that "carbon" absolute that cannot be expressed in the forms
of life. Birkin may say, "I love you," but he doubts his own
sense of an "I" that speaks so. "How could he say T when he
was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I,
this old formula of the age, was a dead letter. . . . How can I
say, 1 love you' when I have ceased to be and you have
ceased to be: we are both caught up and transcended into
a new oneness."
Reflecting upon the alternatives of the African statuette and
the "snow-abstract annihilation" of the white race, Birkin still
urges a third way, the entry into pure single being. "Single
ness" is a repeated word in the book, representing Lawrence's
undefinable carbon, for it is by relation, comparison and con
trast, that we define ourselves socially but lose our unique
ness. Yet Ursula draws back from Birkin's invitation to a
marriage defined as "mutual unison in separateness." She
opposes Birkin with what seems to him a female demand for
"fusion." "Fusion, fusion, this horrible fusion of two beings,
which every woman wants and most men.... Why could they
not remain individuals, limited by their own limits," he says.
Birkin can use the word transcended speaking of a condition
when he and Ursula have lost sense of the "I," and this seems
to imply a romantic conception of transcendent spirit rolling
through all things. But in Women in Love the implication of
essence seems without religious basis. Hence the attraction
of death, of dissolution, so important a theme in this and
others of Lawrence's novels. It is not in life but in death, after
all, that the "pure inhuman otherness" might be reached. The
journey that she agrees to undertake with him is a passage
from the known and the knowable into an abstract world of
616 D. H. LAWRENCE
alpine ice, a place that is inimical to life. The long chapter

"Continental" begins the journey with a marvelous symbolic
representation of the departure further and further away from
all things familiarly human or marked by our recognitions of
ordinary meaning, and symbolically reminiscent of mythic
representations of the passage to the land of death.
Ursula already has come to feel that "loss of self" which
has been identified as the characteristic malaise of the mod
ern consciousness?yet the language Lawrence employs to
represent her has biblical overtones, and strains towards the
religious conviction of coming rebirth after the necessary
death of the seed. The night journey across the Channel
seems to her a return to chaos with promise of a recovery of
a lost Paradise:
There was no sky, no earth, only one unbroken darkness,

into which, with a soft, sleeping motion, they seemed to
fall like one closed seed of life falling through dark,
fathomless space. ... In the midst of this profound
darkness, there seemed to glow on her heart the efful
gence of a paradise unknown and unrealised. Her heart
was full of the most wonderful light, golden like honey
of darkness, sweet like the warmth of day, a light which
was not shed on the world, only on the unknown paradise
towards which she was going, a sweetness of habitation,
a delight of living quite unknown, but hers infallibly.
But Birkin has no such confidence of "bliss in fore-knowledge."

Like Milton's Satan he feels himself "falling through a gulf of
infinite darkness, like a meteorite plunging across the chasm
between the worlds. The world was torn in two, and he was
plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable rift."
Their landing on the continent continues the images, clas
sical or biblical, of loss of the human world: "Strange and
desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx
into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night." As
they wait for their train at Ostend, everything seems "deso
late, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate,
MILLICENT BELL 617
forlorn, nowhere?grey, dreary nowhere." As the train takes
them across Belgium, Ursula's vision of the vanished human
past is represented in a matchless passage:
She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm life at

Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her
childhood, how far was she still to go! In one lifetime
she had travelled through aeons. The great chasm of
memory from her childhood in the intimate country sur
roundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm?she re
membered the servant Tilly, who used to give her bread
and butter sprinkled with brown sugar in the old living
room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in
a basket painted above the figures on the face?and now
when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin,
an utter stranger?was so great, that it seemed she had
no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cos
sethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not
really herself.
Her childhood memories of herself as "creature of history"

come back again, in the mountains, and painfully she strug
gles to divest herself of them, to regard them as mere shadows
on the walls of Plato's cave:
Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone
down the abyss? Could she bear, that it had ever been!
She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and
stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like
views on a magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkes
ton, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a
shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an un
real life. It was as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic
lantern show. She wished the slides could all be broken.
She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide
which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She
wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to
this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk
618 D. H. LAWRENCE
of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled.

She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her.
What was this decree, that she should remember'? Why
not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth without any
recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with
Birkin, she had just come into life here in the high snow,
against the stars. What had she to do with parents and
antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she
had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she
was herself, pure and silvery, she belonged only to the
oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper notes,
sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of
reality, where she had never existed before.
It is an awesome, apocalyptic passage, a climax in which

the inheritor of all the rich experience of Lawrence's double
novel, Women in Love and The Rainbow together, strives to
become, like Birkin, a character without history. But the
pages that follow before the end belong more to the sterile
struggle of Gudrun and Gerald than to any progress forward
for Ursula and Birkin. Women in Love is still a novel, and
Lawrence, still a novelist, will show them at the last on a
recognizable human plane, surviving to argue over their mar
riage, exhibiting the shape of coal or diamond because carbon
has no other mode of being than one or another of its allo
tropie forms.

D.H. Lawrence and The Flight From History

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D.H. Lawrence and The Flight From History

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D. H.

Lawrence and the Flight from History

? 1998 by Millicent Bell

that his love for Gerald "was complemented by the hatred

Our insight into Birkin's implicit homosexuality increases

?which is, precisely, to discover a selfhood, a life story, that

nificance to which the definitions of modern psychology may

character that human beings can conceive themselves or their

are found poised to contemplate their futures. Often it is a

ing chair which reminds Birkin, thinking of himself in terms

social equality and Hermione's rhapsodie "in the spirit we

alpine ice, a place that is inimical to life. The long chapter

There was no sky, no earth, only one unbroken darkness,

But Birkin has no such confidence of "bliss in fore-knowledge."

She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm life at

Her childhood memories of herself as "creature of history"

of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled.

It is an awesome, apocalyptic passage, a climax in which

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