Discuss D.H Lawrence As A Religious Write Essay, Research Paper

?It was not for her to

create, but to recognise a man created by God. The man should come from the

Infinite and she should hail him?the man would come out of the Eternity to

which she belonged? (The Rainbow) Discuss Lawrence

as a ?religious? writer.It is tempting to think of Lawrence in

universals. The ecstatic rhetoric of his prose and his evocation of hnature

lend the fiction a timeless quality. Technically, the Brangwensaga (The Rainbow

and Women in Love) encourages

parallelism between generations and a consequent reduction in the influence of

history; a movement also reinforced by the conjunction of creation and

apocalypse imagery in transcendence of time. Undoubtedly, Lawrence did intend

these archetypal resonances. Yet there is another side to Lawrence; that of a

uncompromisingly modern writer, a powerfully modernist novelist. His sexual scenes are not only explicit, but

(even more radically?) they reject the Romantic ideal of lover?s union for a

conflict of polarised individuals. His evocations of nature are no mere

pastoral idylls, but often dark and threatening, and continually thrown into

contradistinction with the reshaping of industrial development, particularly

mining. The Rainbow can be analysed

as a social and historical novel[1]

and Women in Love?s satirical

treatment of caf? life in bohemian London is forcefully urban and contemporary.

Timelessness is Lawrence is not simply

something that permeates all of history, but rather a true escape from history:

a definite function of the Modernist condition. As Ursula says: ?I hate the

present ? but I don?t want the past to take it?s place.?[2]

Neither it is homogenous: just as every love affair depends on the

individuality of the lovers, every age has an individual temperament.

Lawrence?s concern in the Brangwensaga is

to chart the emergence of modernity, and watch modernity struggle for a

saviour. Essentially, embodied in these two novels is the search for a new

religion. Not content to merely shore up the fragments of shattered myths,

Lawrence (like Yeats and the Surrealists) was committed to rend the fabric of

industrial society in order to create a new reality. (This desire reached a

concrete apex in his later novels, such as The

Plumed Serpent.) It is important to keep sight of the modernist context,

noting how accurately Lawrence evokes the differing reactions of men and women

to modernity and comparing his work with those of his contemporaries.Lawrence signals this quest for a new

religion by appropriating the imagery of the old: both novels are infused with

heavy Christian imagery. At the broadest level, The Rainbow generally represents the idea of creation, showing the

evolution of three generations, including a parallel to the Biblical Noah myth

via the death of the patriarchal Tom Brangwen. Conversely, Women In Love concentrates the narrative down to Ursula and Gudrun,

and although it reprises the flood motif (representing, perhaps, the merged

duality of creation and destruction), it is filled with apocalyptic visions,

and encircled by a series of transformative deaths. The vague analogues are

between the Old Testament book Genesis

in The Rainbow and the New Testament

ideas of redemption and salvation (especially within the Book of Revelations) in Women

In Love. This co-relates with the broad drift of the narrative: the fall of

Eden/the end of the pre-industrial age, and the search for a new redemption of

industrial modern society.Lawrence further pins this progression

down by using religious images explicitly. There is the Adam and Eve carving in

The Rainbow, provoking a chain of

Eden imagery that includes remembrances of pastoral idylls by Ursula ? ?One day

she would find daisies in the grass, another day, apple-blossoms would be

sprinkled white on the ground, and she would run among it, because it was

there?[3]

and an acknowledgement by Tom that Anna ?was the voice of the serpent.?[4]

Similarly, in any hundred page stretch of Women

In Love, the reader encounters a wealth of appropriated Christian imagery

and language. For example, Ursula acknowleges the ?Sons of God?[5],

Gudrun is compared to Eve reaching for the apple, Gerald comes to Gudrun for

mystical healing, Rupert?s marriage is described as ?his ressurection and his

life?[6]

and scriptural echoes are made to the Sermon on the Mount, and the Harrowing. Yet the Brangwensaga is far more than a mere Biblical allegory: it twists

the imagery of Christianity into a wholly new metaphysic. Creation and

apocalypse no longer become the alpha and omega of religious teleology, but a

dynamic interplay circling incessantly within Lawrence?s general

fall/redemption linear narrative. Pagan hints are introduced in the pantheistic

exaltation of nature, the evocation of an animistic ?life-force? and explicit

phrasing: ?She felt like the earth, the mother of everything.?[7]

Images of birth, destruction and rebirth sit side by side, both in The Rainbow ? ?a mystery of life and

death and creation, strange, profound ecstasies and incommunicable

satisfactions?[8] and in Women in Love, where it rises to

dominate the metaphysical crisis of the protagonists: ?they seemed to fall like

one closed seed of life falling through dark.?[9]

Lawrence plays out this creative/destructive interplay through his dominant

trope, that of the lovers. Persistently there is a battle both between the lovers

(love and hate as stemming from a deeper well of passions seeking

manifestation) and within the lovers, who must struggle with the tension

between union and individuality. It is this circularity (in the use of

dualities and repeating tropes) cutting across and fragmenting his

straightforward scheme of events that is the technical result of Lawrence?s

strange double-nature: the paradox of modernity trying to seek timelessness, of

history trying to abolish itself.One need not go far to seek a Modernist parallel for this use of

imagery: it is close to the heart of Modernist ideology. One can liken the

Homeric subtext of Ulysses to the Brangwensaga?s Biblical subtext, or see

in Lawrence an echo of Yeats? (and perhaps Eliot?s) appropriation of ancient

poetic archetypes. Modernist writers would use (often haphazardly, although

sometimes systemtically) the debris of myth and legend to enforce the

a-temporality of their work, as well as adding a symbolic layer which detached

them from the hated and hollow mimesis of the Realist impulse. Lawrence does

something similar by gathering Christian myth and forging it anew in the

crucible of the Brangwensaga. Such an

act both liberates the spiritual from a historical framework (essentially by

destroying it) yet paradoxically brings an intense time-awareness by marking

the death of Christianity.The Christian subtext is also shared by Joyce?s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Like Daedalus, Lawrence?s

characters reject the givens of the previous generation, particularly in

religion. For Lawrence, this was a progression from the oedipal drama played

out in Sons and Lovers, and the

?battle of the generations? remained crucial in a movement intensely aware of

its own modernity. A similar pattern can be seen, not only in A Portrait?, but in the conflict between

James and Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse,

as well as the father/son dramas of Expressionist theatre. Thus in the Brangwensaga,

the fairly freely-structured linear narrative represents a repudiation of the

religion of forebears. Anna, the emergent and educated woman, shatters her

husband?s pristine spiritual vision in Lincoln Cathedral: She had got free from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the

passion he has. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive as he would, he

could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which

has been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to

her, a shapely heap of dead matter ? but dead, dead. ?? His mouth was

full of ash, his soul was furious. He hated her for having destroyed another of

his vital illusions. Soon he would be stark, stark, without one place wherein

to stand, without on belief in which to rest. (The Rainbow, p.205)Will Brangwen is described as half-articulate, half-created and

between the outer forms of Christianity and the essence of some ?eternal

absolute?: thus he initially liberates Anna, but is ultimately entangled in the

ideology of the old generation, despite his mysterious brooding nature (this dark,

pagan side recalls Morel.) His conservatism is emphasised in his conflict with

Ursula (a true proponent of modernity) as dramatized in Women in Love as they argue about her possible marriage. The

tension created between Rupert, struggling to articulate a new religion, and

Will, still passively bound to the old one, is palpable. Indeed, the marriage

of Will and Anna represents altogether a ?half-state? between the creative

equilibrium of the 1840?s, and the striving of the new generation. This can be

seen in the listless decadence of their early marriage, and the eventual

self-consumption: ?this was what their love has become, a sensuality violent

and extreme as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness of love. It

was all the lust and the infinite, maddening intoxication of the senses, a

passion of death.?[10]

This violent sensuality is, incidentally, the passive subjugation to lust which

Birkin later lives in fear of.Both Will and Anna both latch on to Ursula as an outlet, but Ursula,

as Lawrence?s culmination of a New Woman will eventually reject them both: ?her

heart burnt in isolation, like a watchfire lighted.?[11]

Ursula?s early encounters with Christianity are ambiguous, bound up with three

things which will become crucial in Women

in Love?s exposition of a new religion. Firstly, the old forms of

Christianity are to be discarded, since the immediate experience of eternity is

far purer and more pressing. Secondly, there is a violent recoiling from the

material world, manifested here in Ursula?s horror at poverty: ?there was

something unclean and degrading about this humble side of Christianity.?[12]

Finally, the ultimate expression of this new religion is to be found in

sensuality: Ursula?s sensual fantasies about Christ allow for her sexual awakening

with Anton, and presage the saviour/sex symbolism which will be deployed in Women in Love. By the time Ursula has reached educated and relatively liberated

womanhood, she talks with Feminists and purges religions of its dogma and

theological equipage, approaching a purer, more human religion. This movement

in continued in Women in Love, except

at a heightened level. Birkin declares, prefaced by a scriptural reference to

Sodom: ?Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new

way.?[13]

Gerald is seen to repudiate the unsustainable Christian philanthropy of his

father in pursuit of a new industrial mechanical utopia, in which he is god of

the machine. Both men are atheists, agreeing at least that ?the old ideals are

dead as nails.?[14] The two

sisters are not concerned with God and traditional religion, but the

unconscious and conscious drives of love, sex, fulfillment, marriage, art and

self. In short, they strive within the tripartite structure of eternity,

society and sex described above. Characteristic of the novel is the scene where

Birkin comes to Ursula (?Sunday Evening?) and she is alone because the others

have gone to Church.If The Rainbow represents

the ascent of modernity and the creation of a new hope for the liberated

Ursula, then Women in Love is the

hardening of that hope into a religion. Yet it must be emphasised that

Lawrence?s is an open-ended narrative. The reader is left in an ambiguous

position, both with the final pair of lines and the general progression of the

closing chapter. The ideal of a religion (or rather a spirituality) of

modernity is only tentatively attained at best. As Birkin is the symbolic

analogue to Christ, the harbinger of a new ideology, the ?son of God? who comes

to Ursula, it is in him that the root of the modern religion is to be found.

Incidentally, it is also Birkin who Lawrence modeled after himself. His

modernity encapsulates the question posed by the chapter ?Death and Love?: to

attain eternity by liberating the male/female relationship from the debasing

and soulless grip of industrial dystopia. It is a very real choice, death or

love: ?better die than mechanically a life that is a repetition of

repetitions.?[15]The Rainbow sets the precedent for ephipanies of sensuality. Sex is at the

heart of emotional liberation, as an act of creation, of anti-rational heights

of experience, and of the conjunction of male and female ? a transcendence of

opposites. The sexual transfiguration of Tom and Lydia ? ?at last they had

thrown open the doors?[16]

? is reprised by Anna and Will: ?all the night for him now, to unfold, to

venture within, all the mystery to be entered, all the discovery to be made.?[17]

Similar revelations accompany the sexual scenes involving Ursula and Anton. Yet

it cannot be ignored that these threaten to become merely transitive moments of

realisation: sustaining the polarity between male and female becomes the

stumbling block, to ensure that Birkin?s pair of stars do not annihilate each

other. Both the marriage of Will and Anna, and Ursula?s passionate affair with

Skrebensky fall apart (it is notable that Ursula, the child of modernity, has

the strength to resist subjugation by Anton, the figure of the soldier and

aristocrat.)This problem ? purifying the sex act ? becomes a central one in Women in Love. Unlike both The Rainbow, and the earlier Sons and Lovers, it is not until the

chapter Excurse that there is a truly

redemptive sensual moment: She had her desire fulfilled. He had her desire

fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her, the immemorial magnificence

of mystic, palpable, real otherness. ? They slept the

chilly night through under the hood of the car, a night of unbroken sleep. It

was already high day when he awoke. They looked at each other and laughed, then

looked away, filled with darkness and secrecy. Then they kissed and remembered

the magnificence of the night. It was so magnificent, such an inheritence of a

universe of dark reality, that they were afraid to seem to remember. (Women in Love, p.366)Birkin?s torturous problem, up until the creative equilibrium with

Ursula is achieved, is one of escaping the old conception of romantic love. His

rhetoric is deliberately overblown, and Lawrence undercuts what he was

struggling to articulate with Ursula?s withering commentary, but the issues

raised are nevertheless profound, albeit frequently confused and frustrating.

Rupert accurately identifies the fact that the word ?love? has become

vulgarised: instead he seeks something beyond love, slave neither to passion

nor social institution; a marriage that is at the core of being, but which does

not obliterate the identity of the individual. Ursula, on the other hand, still

believes in love and brings intimacy and sensuality, but also a fear of being

possessed and subjugated, simply because she has not experienced the spiritual

dimension that Birkin embodies: ?she had had lovers, she had known passions.

But this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back

to the sons of God.?[18]

It is not so much a fusion of these two elements, but the setting of them into

a dynamic equilibrium, that realises the needs of both. This is exactly what

Gerald and Gudrun fail to do, and their relationship becomes a violent struggle

for domination; poisoned by the possessive needs of both parties. As Gudrun

chides him: ?try to love me a little more, and to want me a little less.?[19]Thus sensuality and sex have the potential to become cornerstones of

modern spirituality, but they bring with them the difficulties of balancing the

mental and the physical, the abstract and the sensual, the individual and the

total union. When combined with the clinging desires of the human soul,

intensified by the industrial condition, sensuality becomes something as

dangerous as it can be redemptive: Lawrence juxtaposes sensual arousal with

violence and cruelty (witness the scene where Gerald breaks his horse.) The

creative/destructive polarity of ?love? can either be harnessed, or it can fall

apart and turn upon those who formed it. It is especially interesting that

Lawrence?s rejection of traditional love also embraces the possibilities of

homosexual love, as seen in Ursula?s lesbianism and Birkin?s desire for Gerald.The second crucial element of the new religion is a social one. The Rainbow dramatises the problem by

showing how increasing education is simply leading to greater disillusion. Will

Brangwen would not mind if ?the whole monstrous superstructure of the world

today, cities and industries and civilization?[20]

were swept away. Ursula, too, sees a terrible fascination in the industrial

slavery of the collieries, and hates herself for submitting to the mechanical

system of the schoolroom: ?everything went to produce vulgar things, to

encumber material life.?[21]

This distaste for the industrial is carried over into Women in Love, where both Ursula and Gudrun are repelled by the

spectre of industry; Gudrun escaping into art, Ursula into nature. Yet there is

a curious double-image, where both (but especially Gudrun) are peversely

attracted to the miners and the pit. Perhaps this is because the miners

represent not only the realities of the modern situation, which any new ideal

must face, but also a subterranean and almost inhuman world similar to that

through which seekers must pass to achieve Birkin?s transcendent post-human

state.[22] Rupert, characteristically, goes to an extreme, deriding the dead

tree of humanity and claiming social existence is an aggregate lie. Again, this

is a position which Ursula helps to rescue from sheer nihilism with her sensual

feel for the creative possibilities of human relationships. Gerald remains the

curious case ? the commercial magnate ? yet he too has a transformative vision,

but one which takes industrial society in an entirely different direction from

that envisaged by the other three. Nevertheless, a reaction is actualised in

their trip to Austria, and particularly Rupert and Ursula?s departure to Italy,

which symbolised Lawrence?s long-time fascination with the vivacity of cultures

of the sun, be they Mediterranean or Central American. The sexual ?dissent? and

the caf? culture of London (even though it is satirised) represent other modes

of resistance that link back to the initial figure of the new generation

departing from the forms of the old.The tripartite structure is completed with eternity. This is the

true ?triangle? of Women in Love. In

seeking eternity, they must balance the demands of sex and society: both with

their own complications. Both the men are too coldly intellectual: Gerald

suffering from a closed mechanical and social view of existence, Birkin from

the opposite ? an abstract, anti-social, nihilistic view devoid of feeling,

self-destructive and depraved. The Brangwen women bring sensuousness and an

experiential reality to complement both: at first sight a sexist and

stereotyped view on Lawrence?s part until the character of the Brangwen men is

remembered from The Rainbow. In

Ursula and Rupert?s relationship, the balance becomes creative, and although

there is tension, it is productive tension. For Gudrun and Gerald, the outcome

is destructive. Gerald has been ably described as ?the anarchic Dionysian

spirit trying to express itself in the Apollonian (degraded) forms of

industrial production? by DiBattista.[23]

Conversely, Gudrun is perhaps the Apollonian spirit ? envisaging the purity of

art and society co-joined as embodied in Loerke ? yet tortured by the passing

of time and her own passionate desires which erupt and disrupt her placid

exterior. Because neither character is fully resolved internally, their relationship cannot last and ends in tragic

violence. Thus we see, throughout the Brangwensaga,

the emergence of figures struggling to define a new ideal, a new religion,

rooted in a fixed idea of eternity, drawing from the well of sensuality and

opposed to the degrading mechanization of society. This is pretty much the

ideological battle of Modernism itself, and it is unsurprising that in the

characters we can see some of the trends of art. In Gerald?s industrial utopia,

we can detect the ideology of Futurism: the glory of the machine, of industry

and progress ? it is no coincidence that Gerald used to be a soldier, and just

as Futurism degenerated into Fascism, Gerald turns to murder. Birkin ably

represents the mystic strain of Modernism of which Lawrence himself was a part,

and also some of its contradictions: its pretentiousness, its need to anchor

spiritual reality in sensual reality, and so forth. Gudrun and Ursula perhaps

illustrate the crisis of subject and object. Gudrun veers from one to another:

from being possessed entirely by the mountain landscape to a need to exert her

will over Gerald. She seeks the purity of artistic form that neither pure

expressionism nor pure impressionism can satisfy, but the union of sculpture

with industrial architecture (beauty with function) may well be able to:

?(Loerke) existed a pure, unconnected will, stoical and momentaneous. There was

only his work.? Again, this calls to mind Bauhaus, or perhaps Imagism in its

desire for honest aesthetic unity and purity. Ursula, on the other hand,

represents a balance between impression and expression; the duality and

multiplicity of sensual creation, as opposed to the monumental singular power

of Loerke, forging Platonic forms into architectonic reality.Among them all, they represent all the varied, and sometimes

contradictory strains of Modernism, striving to find its ideal among its own

paradoxes. Lawrence?s religious vision is essentially the same as Modernism?s

aesthetic one: how to break through to the timeless from a condition ?

modernity ? which is intensely aware of its own temporality. The new order

demands a fresh ideal with which to reclaim the heights of the old: witness the

similarities between Tom and Lydia, and Ursula and Rupert. The seeds for their

relationship are laid along with the first canal cutting, and the start of the

industrial era. The Brangwensaga

charts this process ? finding the true expression of modernity ? and thus

manages to be both a universally archetypal yet deeply historical text.

Lawrence?s task was to create a new sex relation, a new society, but above all

a new ideal. Despite appearances, his was a truly religious vision.Bibliography D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

(1913) D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

(1915) D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

(1920) D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems,

Everyman Edition, ed.Mara Kalnins (London, 1992) D.H. Lawrence: A Centenary

Consideration, ed. Phillip Balbert and Phillip

Marcus (Ithica & London, 1985) D.H. Lawrence: The Novels, Alastair Niven (Cambridge, 1978) Landmarks of World

Literature: Sons and Lovers, Michael Black

(Cambridge, 1992) D.H. Lawrence and the

Modern World, ed.Peter Preston and Peter Hoare

(Basingstoke, 1989) River of Dissolution: D.H.

Lawrence and English Romanticism, Colin Clarke

(London, 1969) [1] For example, The Sense of

History in ?The Rainbow? collected in D.H.

Lawrence in the Modern World, ed. Peter Preston and Peter Hoare

(Basingstoke, 1989) [2] Women in Love, p.405 [3] The Rainbow, p.219 [4] Ibid, p.204 [5] Women in Love, p.358 [6] Ibid, p.420 [7] The Rainbow, p.208 [8] Ibid, p.104 [9] Women In Love, p.440 [10] The Rainbow, p.237 [11] Ibid. p.267 [12] Ibid. p.285 [13] Women in Love, p.76 [14] Ibid. p.75 [15] Women in Love, p.224 [16] The Rainbow, p.96 [17] Ibid. p.124 [18] Women in Love, p.358 [19] Ibid. p.500 [20] The Rainbow, p.193 [21] Ibid. p.435 [22] Colin Clarke, River of

Dissolution: DH Lawrence and English Romanticism (London, 1969) [23] Maria DiBattista, Women in

Love: DH Lawrence?s Judgment Book collected in DH Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed.Phillip Balbert and

Phillip Marcus (Ithica & London, 1985)