The Debates on Visual Arts as a Cultural Critique in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), whose final shape was taken during the First World War, inevitably deals with such modern crises from the problems of human relationships to the degeneration of culture and society. In the process, the novel brings to the fore an apocalyptic vision of the decadent Western civilization. In the novel, Lawrence, an amateur painter himself, takes issue with many artist characters and art schools such as primitive art, Impressionists, Bloomsbury, Futurism, Asian art etc. Many debates on art objects are connected with the criticism of life and society set in an atmosphere of cultural turbulence. Lawrence criticizes a group of degenerate London artists―Gudrun Brangwen, Julius Halliday―for their sensualism manifested in their worship of primitive art. He also criticizes Futurism for its cerebral emphasis and mechanism. Loerke’s industrial art is portrayed as an extreme version of the mechanical dehumanization of art; thus, his art epitomizes all the terror that Lawrence felt about modern art and the negative cultural forces behind it. The author tries to find an alternative trend of vital art in the Third World art such as Chinese painting or African fetishes, as opposed to the degenerate Western art. However, the novel also reveals a limit of Lawrentian cultural critique in the form of Eurocentric biases. For example, Rupert Birkin, the hero of the novel, argues that he can capture the essence of Chinese culture by copying a picture of geese. The grounds of his overbearing confidence in the knowledge of the other are neither verified nor deconstructed. Both Asian and African art works are appropriated to represent some oppositional principle to what Birkin believes to be the defects of Wetern culture. In this sense, it seems that he sets out to respect the other but ends up absorbing it into the frame of the same. However, Lawrence does not always totalize his aesthetic vision. Although he was certainly subject to Eurocentric backsliding, Lawrence tries to keep alive his spontanenous and multi-faceted aesthetic response towards the European and non-European artworks. Overall, Lawrence’s aesthetics in Women in Love, manifests itself as the significant attempt to a cultural critique which responds to, and incorporates the counter-cultural perspective of artworks and life.