Defiantly Unconventional, Definitely Modernist: Sexuality in Women in Love and To The Lighthouse - Essay Example

Defiantly Unconventional, Definitely Modernist: Sexuality in Women in Love and To The Lighthouse Modernism in literature involved not only a break with conventional modes of writing, but also a break with social and literary conventions in general. As Peter Brooker notes, "What [the] 'modernists' came to prescribe was a 'modern' art which could administer to and correct 'the modern world', not collaborate with it" (6). Women in Love(1920) by D.H.Lawrence and To The Lighthouse(1927) by Virginia Woolf exemplify not only the deliberate flouting of the conventions of traditional narrative on the part of the writer but also the defiant disregard of social and other conventions in authorial comment as well as in the words and deeds of some of the main characters. Sexuality, however private or individual a concern, is bound by social conventions, and these conventions had been generally accepted by the pre-modernist writers of the Victorian era. As Bradbury observes, "Like all knowledge, the novel changes with history and its own environment" (3). Writing in an age when "human character"(Woolf, "Mr Bennett" 320) had changed, novelists like Lawrence and Woolf felt the need to express as much as they could of the whole truth of this change. A new life required new ways of recording life and the "stream of consciousness" technique afforded the new modernist writers of the early twentieth century what appeared to be the perfect method of expressing the essence of the life of thought as it is lived. There are a number of women characters in Women in Love, but Lawrence makes it clear that his focus is on the pair of unconventional sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen. In fact, the first chapter of the novel, which introduces them, is titled "Sisters." Their first conversation sets the tone of the novel: 'Ursula,' said Gudrun, 'don't you really want to get married' Ursula laid her embroidery in her lap and looked up. Her face was calm and considerate. 'I don't know,' she replied. 'It depends on how you mean.' (1) Gudrun phrases her thoughts slightly differently, aiming perhaps, for greater clarity. She asks her sister whether, if married, she wouldn't think herself "in a better position than you are in now." As Ursula thinks this over, a "shadow" comes over her face. After careful consideration she only says, "I might. . . .But I'm not sure." Gudrun, who as the more artistic one could be considered the more unconventional of the two sisters, proceeds to steer the conversation along more unconventional lines of thought: 'You don't think one needs the experience of having been married' she asked. 'Do you think it need be an experience' replied Ursula. 'Bound to be, in some way or other,' said Gudrun, coolly. 'Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an experience of some sort.' 'Not really,' said Ursula. 'More likely to be the end of an experience.' Gudrun sat very still, to attend to this. 'Of course,' she said, 'there's that to consider.' This brought the conversation to a close. (1) Such an extremely rational and objective approach to a subject like marriage in a conversation between two unmarried sisters may have appeared a deliberate pose except for the fact that the conversation continues to reveal that Ursula has rejected "several" good offers of marriage. She reveals that she had been tempted to accept "an awfully nice man" "in the abstract, but not in the concrete." In the face of the concrete reality, she is "only tempted not to" (2). Gudrun too acknowledges the strength of this particular temptation, and the sisters laugh. The novelist adds the revealing comment, "In their hearts they were frightened." Unconventionality is rather frightening, especially when one is on the first wave of a rising tide of change. As the conversation flows on, Gudrun makes the forthright admission that "I was hoping now for a man to come along." Her next words imply that this desire for "a highly attractive individual of sufficient means" is the fruit of acute boredom, of the feeling that "Nothing materializes! Everything withers in the bud." In this situation, she says, marriage "seems to be the inevitable next step"(3). It may appear that these words sound rather bitter, but the novelist comments that Ursula "pondered this, with a little bitterness.' Ursula echoes the conventional argument in favor of marriage, but rather 'doubtfully': 'Of course there's children-.' Gudrun, however, is in no doubt about the flaws of this particular argument, and the conversation takes an interesting look at the whole question of marriage and children. At her sister's 'cold' question, "Do you really want children, Ursula" a "dazzled, baffled look" appears on Ursula's face. Gudrun says that she gets "no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children" and her sister agrees that perhaps "one doesn't really want them, in one's soul-only superficially." This is rather too 'definite' however, for Gudrun, and finally the sisters close the conversation with the comment that their feelings are true "when one thinks of other people's children" (3). The two sisters then lapse into silence, and thought. This might seem somewhat sterile, but F.R. Leavis, sees the "astonishing fertility of life" (151) at the core of this conversation. The novelist comments that Ursula had the strange brightness of a "flame that was caught, meshed, contravened." The implication, of course, is that an unconventional spirit should not be caught or contravened in the mesh of ordinary customs and traditions. Unlike her sister, Ursula is not an artist, and it is therefore, that much more difficult for her to understand her inner reality: She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hand out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still, she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come. (3) Gudrun, however, appears completely unafraid of living on the edge. Somewhat "superbly"(at least partly for effect) she says, "If one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere"(4) and only a "slow mocking smile" answers Ursula's concern for the risks involved in such an enterprise. It is also, surely, significant that after this conversation, the two sisters agree to "go out and look at that wedding" of the daughter of the chief mine-owner of the district, Thomas Crich. The novelist uses this situation to highlight the contrast that the two sisters afford to the "group of uneasy, common people" (7). A comment from one of the plebeians evokes a disproportionately violent inner response in Gudrun, and she refuses to enter the church: A sudden fierce anger swept over the girl, violent and murderous. She would have liked them all to be annihilated, cleared away, so that the world was left clear for her. How she hated walking up the churchyard path, along the red carpet, continuing in motion, in their sight. (7) It is this fierce individuality that impels her to express the depth of her inner self in her own way and without reference to the values of the rabble who surround her. If they seem to expect her to enter the church, she will do exactly the opposite, to show that she is her own person and not the sum total of the conventions society expects of her. This incident, so early in the novel, reveals the character of this decidedly unconventional woman, even when set in conjunction with her own slightly less conspicuously unconventional sister. The scene of the wedding gives the author the perfect opportunity to introduce a variety of characters, of varying degrees of conventionality. Mrs Crich, for instance, "looked like a woman with a monomania, furtive almost, but heavily proud" (8). It is through Gudrun's thoughts that the reader sees Gerald Crich and his mother: His gleaming beauty, maleness, like a young, good-humoured, smiling wolf, did not blind her to the significant, sinister stillness in his bearing, the lurking danger of his unsubdued temper. 'His totem is the wolf,' she repeated to herself. 'His mother is an old, unbroken wolf.' (8) The depth of feeling that the sight of Gerald evokes in Gudrun is expressed in heightened terms. It is described variously as "a keen paroxysm," a "transport", an "incredible discovery." This violent feeling possessed her wholly, and she tells herself "assuredly, 'I shall know more of that man' (9). The desire to see him again, the "necessity" to see him again was intense and overwhelming, partly "to make sure it was not all a mistake, that she was not deluding herself, that she really felt this strange and overwhelming sensation on his account, this knowledge of him in her essence, this powerful apprehension of him." Hermione Roddice is seen through Ursula's eyes-"she was a man's woman, it was the manly world that held her." The thought of Hermione reminds Ursula of Rupert Birkin, a man Hermione was on intimate terms with. The novelist describes Hermione as one who had sought to appear invulnerable, but whose soul was "tortured, exposed" because "she had no natural sufficiency, there was a terrible void, a lack, a deficiency of being within her" (10). Hermione craves for Rupert Birkin to 'close up this deficiency' for ever. Less unconventional than the Brangwen sisters, Hermione felt "completesufficientwhole" only when Rupert was with her. She had tried varied tactics to shore up her defences against the world-aesthetics, culture, world-visions, disinterestedness-but "she could never stop up the terrible gap of insufficiency" (11). However, Birkin was 'perverse' and although the two of them had been lovers for years, Hermione knew that "he was trying to break away from her finally, to be free." Birkin was to be the groom's man, but neither he nor the groom had yet arrived. Hermione feels "a pang of utter and final hopelessness. beyond death, so utterly null, desert"(12). Ursula's own feelings at this turn of events are revelatory. She who had spoken so assertively against marrying "could not bear it that the bride should arrive, and no grrom. The wedding must not be a fiasco, it must not." The bride arrives first, however, and when the groom arrives late and dashes to overtake her, she races him to the church door "with a wild cry of laughter and challenge"(13). Birkin makes a philosophical comment to Mr Crich who replies with a laconic grunt. The novelist describes Birkin as a man who pretended to be quite ordinary: His nature was clever and separate, he did not fit at all in the conventional occasion. Yet he subordinated himself to the common idea, travestied himself. He affected to be quite ordinary, perfectly and marvelously commonplace. And he did it so well, taking the tone of the surroundings, adjusting himself quickly to his interlocutor and his circumstance, that he achieved a verisimilitude of ordinary commonplaceness that usually propitiated his onlookers for the moment, disarmed them from attacking his singleness. (14) Birkin and Ursula are drawn to each other despite all the unpredictable ways in which Hermione tries to hold him to herself. Birkin visits Ursula's house to propose to her, and seeing her father first, makes his intention known to him. This may have been true to Birkin's manner of pretending to be conventional, but whatever the intention, the effect was quite unpromising. Old Brangwen has no kind feelings for the 'new-fangled' Birkin and Ursula does not appreciate the news of the proposal being broken to her by her father. She is quite insistent that she does not wish to be 'bullied' into marriage by the two of them. Again, as Gudrun had seen at the very beginning, she becomes quite intimate with Gerald Crich who, if he enjoys a physical wrestling bout with the 'angel'Rupert Birkin, has many demons of his own to wrestle with spiritually as well. His intimacy with Gudrun also causes him sorrow especially when she draws closer to the sculptor Loerke in the Alps, where the sisters go on holiday with their men. At last, in a "barren tragedy" Gerald loses his life in the hills. For Terry Eagleton, Gerald is "one of Life's abortions" (268). As marked a man as Cain, Gerald had accidentally killed his own brother when they were boys, and he fails to rescue his sister from drowning to death when he is a man. Gudrun had marked him out for herself on the day of the wedding at the beginning of the novel, and at last when Gerald dies, he dies a marked man, marked no less by himself and his demons as by Gudrun and her demands. This death of what Eagleton has called a "life-denier" is as much an aesthetic necessity as the unconventionality of the stronger characters, for, as Ellis observes, Lawrence had tried "to demonstrate that the old world was moribund and that there was an urgent need for something new" (xxii). Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, however, starts on a more Freudian note although the sexuality in the novel is quite subdued. We see Mrs Ramsay promising her young son James an outing if the next day were to be a fine one. James is only six, and as he conjures up visions of an exciting excursion to the lighthouse, his father pours cold water on all his plans with the words, "But. it won't be fine" (8). James's inner reaction is unexpectedly violent: "Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it." There is no doubt that Mr Ramsay was right-his uncompromising dedication to fact was only too well known to his children for them to doubt his words, much as they hated him for it. It does not need to be stressed that Virginia Woolf was quite familiar with the theories of Sigmund Freud, especially his study of what has been called the "Oedipus complex." Mrs Ramsay, as a keen 'harmonizer', tries to soothe the boy, assuring him that it would be a fine day. As the novelist tells the reader, "Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of beingMrs Ramsay deplored" (14). Mrs Ramsay invites Charles Tansley to accompany her on an errand in the town and they meet Mr Carmichael on the way. Mrs Ramsay confides to Charles that Mr Carmichael "should have been a great philosopherbut he had made an unfortunate marriage" (16). The reaction to this confidence is revealing: It flattered himit soothed him that Mrs Ramsay should tell him this. Insinuating, too, as she did the greatness of men's intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of all wives-not that she blamed the girl-and the marriage had been happy enough, she believed-to their husband's labours, she made him feel better pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked, had they taken a cab, for example, to have paid the fare. As for her little bag, might he not carry that (17) Thus are the male sex led by the crook of feminine fingers, and if this is true of Charles Tansley the house guest, it is no less true of the great Mr Ramsay who craves soft words from his wife to blow away the melancholy that sometimes has him in thrall. All the while, as Mr Tansley prattles on about himself, Mrs Ramsay tells herself that he "was an awful prig-oh yes, an insufferable bore" (19). Though this be the thought in her breast, when she leaves him to complete her errand, Mr Tansley has the thought that "she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen" before he told himself that this was nonsense: "She was fifty at least; she had eight children" (21). When she comes back, and allows him to hold her bag, "Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cyclamen and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman for the first time in his life. He had hold of her bag." As for her, when they are back home and he reminds young James that there would be no trip to the lighthouse, "Odious little man, thought Mrs Ramsay, why go on saying that" (22). Later, when sitting for Lily Briscoe's painting, Mrs Ramsay is immersed in her own thoughts. She saw how Charles Tansley and other men tried their best to emulate her husband but only succeeded in parodying him: "All these young men parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it would rain; they said it would be a positive tornado" (23). Lily Briscoe, however, considers Mr Ramsay at once a ridiculous and alarming figure and sighs with relief when he walks unseeingly past her declaiming Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade." She "could not have endured" him to look at her painting (26). The coming of William Bankes, however, does not discompose Lily and she let him stand beside her and look at her painting. Bankes divines that Lily loved being with the Ramsays-"(for she was in love with them all, in love with this world)" (32). Lily find it difficult to see Mr Ramsay's greatness: You have greatnessbut Mr Ramsay has none of it. He is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr Bankes) have not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs and his children. He has eight. You have none. (35) Mrs Ramsay, meanwhile, is planning and plotting matches for Lily Briscoe, oblivious of the fact that Lily is not interested. She judges that "Lily's charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it" (37). Later, when Mr Ramsay comes to his wife, oppressed by thoughts that he was a failure, "her capacity to surround and protect" (53) gives him succor. Lily Briscoe failed to understand at first "why he always needed praise" (62) and "how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time" (63). Lily the artist then gets a kind of insight into the mind of Mr Ramsay: Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. If you are exalted you must somehow come a cropper. Mrs Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then the change must be too upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a change from the things he thinks about. (63) Lily makes it clear that she did not mind the man's egotism. She disliked only "his narrowness, his blindness" (64). She refuses to consider Mr Ramsay a hypocrite; he was instead "the most sincere of men" although wrapped up in himself. When Bankes looks at Mrs Ramsay, however, Lily discerns in the look of the sixty-year-old man rapture equivalent to "the loves of dozens of young men"(65) and she refrains from any criticism of her. Lily continues to think about this love: It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. Such a rapture-for by what other name could one call it-made Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of importance, something about Mrs Ramsay. It paled beside this 'rapture', this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight lying level across the floor. (65-66) Like a bee drawn by sweetness, Lily Briscoe gravitates to Mrs Ramsay, and hoping to absorb as if by osmosis the "knowledge and wisdom stored in Mrs Ramsay's heart" "she leant her head against Mrs Ramsay's knee" (71). Only, nothing of the sort happened. Yet, the experience of her soul made her give thanks to "Mr Ramsay for it and Mrs Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world with a power which she had not suspected" (74). Mr Ramsay notes the sternness at the heart of his wife's beauty as he passes her, even when he is inwardly chuckling to himself about a story concerning the philosopher Hume. He felt sad and pained by her remoteness and his own inability to help her. He cannot but think of how he made things worse for her with his irritability and touchiness. He, who had been considered aloof from other people, realized a peculiar sadness: She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her. (89) The sight of a star gives Mrs Ramsay keen pleasure and she looks around for her husband to share the beauty of the sight, but she stops herself in time. For, philosopher as he was, "If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little world, with one of his sighs" (97). Mrs Ramsay, too, sometimes feels blue. "But what have I done with my life thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table" (112). She seemed a failure at her avowed vocation of creating harmony: Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it, nobody would do it, and so, giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch begins ticking-one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper. (113) Even Lily Briscoe notices how old and worn and remote Mrs Ramsay looked. Charles Tansley is with them, and although Lily thinks him "the most uncharming human being she had ever met" (116) and although she cared tuppence for his contemptuous opinion of women writers and artists, she teases him, asking him to take her to the Lighthouse with him. He makes a rude reply and Lily reflects that he should have been alone in his room with his books-"That was where he felt at his ease." Lily speaks politely to Tansley out of consideration to her hostess, and he too purges himself of his egotism and behaves rather more warmly. She feels Mrs Ramsay's gratitude, but reproaches herself for her insincerity: She had done the usual trick-been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst(if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere. (123) Seeing Minta, whose marriage has been planned and arranged, as it were, by Mrs Ramsay, Lily thanks Heaven she heed not marry: "she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilution" (138). She gets a simultaneous insight into an aesthetic problem and decides "She would move the tree rather more in the middle." As night falls, Mr Ramsay, who has been hoping to hear his wife speak of her love for him, realizes her love without the need of any words: "he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him" (167). The ravages of time are recorded in "Time Passes"-Mrs Ramsay dies, Andrew the eldest son dies in battle and Prue, his sister, dies in childbearing. The family does not come together for ten years and again, when they gather, Lily Briscoe is at hand, hoping to finally complete her painting. Another trip to the lighthouse is planned and the plan is carried out despite Mr Ramsay's irritability. Mr Ramsay had hoped to be soothed by Lily's sympathy but she finds she needs some herself. Apparently both Lily and Mr Ramsay acutely feel the loss of Mrs Ramsay. In the last pages of the book, as the boat reaches the lighthouse, Lily is undistracted even by the presence of Mr Carmichael by her side, and she finishes her painting to her satisfaction: "With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision" (281). However, as Margaret Drabble remarks, "The vision passes. This is the nature of it. The great revelation will never come. And this itself is the revelation"(xxviii). The thought should make the artist and indeed the man and the woman to treasure the little visions and revisions of life. If in Women in Love extreme unconventionality is seen as a force of change, in To the Lighthouse the most unconventional characters are those who yearn for the touch of tradition in the person and character of the harmonizing Mrs Ramsay. The artist Lily Briscoe appears asexual almost, relieved to be free from the degradation and the dilution of love and marriage and sex. This is in itself an unconventional position for a twentieth century character and her unconventionality rewards herself and, at times, some of the people she comes into contact with. At any rate, she finds at least a passing fulfillment in her art-a fulfillment that might suffice to sustain her through the voyage to the lighthouse of life. References Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. Introduction. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Glasgow: Fontana, 1990. Brooker, Peter, ed. Introduction. Modernism/Postmodernism. London: Longman, 1992. Drabble, Margaret, ed. Introduction. To the Lighthouse. By Virginia Woolf. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Ellis, David, ed. Introduction. Women in Love. By D.H.Lawrence. London: Everyman, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. The English Novel. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Lawrence, D.H. Women in Love. London: Everyman, 1992. Leavis, F.R. D.H.Lawrence: Novelist. London: Chatto and Windus, 1962. Woolf, Virginia. "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown." Collected Essays, Vol. 1. London: Hogarth, 1971. ----. To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Read More