The road to disillusion

Abstract

The theme here is the attack on `love’ Birkin inaugurates; but the starting-point Lawrence’s interest in nerve centres (`chakras’), and how these function, in an unpublished essay on Whitman, to endorse sexual relations between men. His suspicion of the dominance women can assume in sex is illustrated with episodes from The Lost Girl. How this problem relates to the extra-marital affair he had around this time with Rosalind Baynes could never be known, although it seems significant that this was when he was writing his tortoise poems with their talk of being `crucified into sex’. The backdrop is always his difficult relationship with Frieda yet his ability to occasionally treat that with wry humour is obvious from Mr. Noon, and the much more successful `The Captain’s Doll’. Travelling round Europe after 1919, Lawrence met Maurice Magnus who described him as on the lookout for bi-sexual individuals like himself. His movements are reflected in the protagonist of Aaron’s Rod who participates in a bonding scene with another man (comparable to the naked wrestling in Women in Love), but also in various episodes of sexual intercourse with women which leave him painfully conscious of having yielded them his power.