Community in "Women in Love"

Abstract

Perhaps because in the 1960s we became increasingly aware of the gravity of social problems, recent readers of Women in Love have often expressed dissatisfaction that the main characters reject their society so emphatically. So frequently have critics felt compelled to condemn or justify this separation of individuals from society that we may take the novel's ability to make us react this way as one of its important strengths.1 Most critics resist, of course, reducing any novel to an exposition of a social philosophy. But this resistance can lead to an opposite kind of dogmatism. Colin Clarke writes that Women in Love is a novel with a message, not 'instructing us to adopt one course rather than another'; we can't even say that perhaps it reaches conclusions, which is what seems to be entailed in the proposition that perhaps Birkin reaches them.2 Up to a point such an impulse is sound; we all want to distinguish art from propaganda. But a reader ought to be uncomfortable, I think, with the idea that a novel like Women in Love, which is so clearly about modern society, embodies no discernible social values. A novel's actions are likely to commit it, however vaguely, to values which suggest courses of action. A novel is unlikely to raise important questions, such as, what are the most fulfilling relations among individuals? or, what is the proper relation between an individual and society? without implying answers. At least, a reader ought to make this assumption. That different readers keep finding opposed answers-which is emphatically the history of the criticism of Women in Loveonly testifies to the book's suggestiveness. The two closely connected questions that I have just stated about relations between individuals and between individual and society provide the starting point for this paper. One may doubt that Birkin and Ursula can have a fulfilling relationship if they reject society and so exist in a social void. One may ask if the affirmation of their marriage is relevant to those without independent incomes or to those who are not impelled to reject society. I want to approach such problems by arguing that we can see Birkin and Ursula not as sunk motionless in isolation from modern society but rather as working tentatively and half-unconsciously back toward society in the broad sense of humanity. What Birkin and Ursula mainly react against is the social-industrial structure of Western civilization, with its values and its modes of perception. In the process of breaking loose from existing