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Pussum, Minette, and the Africo-Nordic Symbol in Lawrence's Women in Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert L. Chamberlain
Robert L. Chamberlain*
Affiliation:
Grand Valley State College, Allendale, Mich
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Extract

The crucial and controlling metaphor of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is a metaphor of destruction, that two-faced image of disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold. Much of the novel's interest and more than half its meaning lies in Rupert Birkin's eccentric, hardly normal struggle to become modern history's new norm, and it is Birkin who conceives and develops this Africo-Nordic symbol as a way of giving habitation and name to his mystical perceptions. These Herculean labors are, of course, the labors of Lawrence also, only his arena is the entire novel; through its pages he scatters sparks of fire and ice, shimmering designs in black and white, mud and snow, showers of color, because the entire work is his attempt to perceive poetically what neither he nor we could perceive otherwise. Birkin's attempt in “Moony” (Chap, xix) to destroy the reflection of the ambivalent moon's reflected light is only one of the novel's numerous set poems or “constitutive symbols,” and the following great meditation on death by heat and by cold is simply the locus classicus of simultaneous efforts by both the character and his creator to express in metaphor the novel's deepest insights. But the literally thousands of allusions metaphoric and literal to matters Arctic and African which run through the whole work, cutting across chapters and groups of chapters, binding, finally, beginning to end, make of Lawrence's Women in Love itself a constitutive symbol. As are Moby Dick and A Passage to India, Der Steppenwolf and Julie de Carneilhan, so is Women in Love constructed like a poem; and poems, especially long ones, are not easily made. The making of this one preoccupied, even obsessed, Lawrence for a number of years. He long considered it, rightly, his masterpiece, and we know that under his shaping hands it took various shapes. When it was still more than a year from completion, its 1913–14 augmentation had already swelled larger than its parent body and been published as The Rainbow (1915).

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1963 , pp. 407 - 416
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

1 The term is Eliseo Vivas' in D. H. Lawrence: the Failure and the Triumph of Art (Northwestern University Press, 1960), passim.

2 See in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Aldous Huxley (New York, 1932), entries for The Sisters, The Wedding Ring, The Rainbow, Dies Irae, and Women in Love during the years 1913–16.

3 A Bibliography of the Writings of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (Philadelphia, 1925), pp. 10–13.

4 Ibid., p. [9].

5 “Women in Love: a Corrected Typescript,” University of Toronto Quarterly, xxvii (1957), pp. 34–53.

6 I received no reply to my letter of inquiry to Random House regarding the text of their edition.

7 Letter of 9 Jan. 1962 from A. B. Best, Viking Press, N. Y. The original Compass edition was printed from the plates used by Modern Library.

8 H. T. Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York, 1954), p. 212; D. H. Lawrence: a Composite Biography, ed. Edward Nehls (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1958), ii, 92–94.

9 Moore, p. 284.

10 Composite Biography, ii, 93.

11 In this paper, context ought to make clear whether my citations, identified by chapter titles rather than by page numbers, come from the second English edition (or Compass), the first American edition (or Modern Library), or the first English edition.

12 This chapter is so named in the first English edition and in the Compass edition; in Modern Library it appears as “In the Pompadour”; there are no chapter titles in the first American edition.

13 “Women in Love,” p. 50.

14 Lawrence's failure to change one “Pussum” to “Minette” (in “Gudrun in the Pompadour”) and one “fair” to “dark” in describing Halliday looks like oversight. But since revisions do appear one paragraph away from the unexplained “Pussum” and one line away from the contradictorily “fair” Halliday, it is possible that in arrogance or vengeance Lawrence allotted to Halliday and his mistress one oversight each, tell-tale vestiges of their former libelous identities.

15 These colors might be called “quasi-symbols,” Vivas' term—that is, they are wholly explicable. But they do not seem to be signs, since what they loosely signify, masculinity and femininity, are themselves being explored and redefined in the novel. I do not here treat Lawrence's use of such other colors as green and blue chiefly because, as far as I can grasp them as consistently symbolic, they function within limited contexts, not through the whole novel. In one chapter various bright colors of a dress may indicate a Bohemian desire to épater le bourgeois, whereas any one of the colors may in other contexts suggest quite other things. Thus it is that green, for instance, can, depending upon context, suggest unconventionality or fertility or spirituality or the sub-human.

16 Davis, “Women in Love,” p. 39.

17 D. H. Lawrence, p. 299.

18 J. M. Murry believed that by 1916 Nietzsche was already one of Lawrence's “discarded prophets” (Composite Biography, i, 377), but the similarities between certain phrases and ideas in Zarathustra and Birth of Tragedy and phrases or motifs in Women in Love are striking.