Being Perfect: Lawrence, Sartre, and "Women in Love"

Abstract

When I have had occasion to teach Women in Love, certain passages in the novel have always proved troublesome. Indeed, they are troublesome at any time, but the classroom situation brings them into special focus. I am referring to such passages as Birkin's accounts of star-equilibrium, the rhapsodic chapter called Excurse, in which the love of Birkin and Ursula is consummated, the description of Gerald as industrial magnate, and aspects of the relationship of Gerald and Gudrun. In general, these passages refer to what might be called of being. On the one hand, these are described in terms of perfection: sufficiency, fulfillment, wholeness, completion, indeed, divinity itself. These are contrasted to descriptions in terms of the negative: deficiency of being, emptiness, nullity, void, and so on. The pedagogical problem arises when students ask to what aspects of reality such states might refer. Modern criticism's emphasis on the self-referential quality of art makes such a question seem naive, but, then, modern criticism often sounds, in this respect, like Loerke when he lectures Ursula on art: 'It has nothing to do with anything but itself, it