LAWRENCE AND CHRIST
47
who insists at the end of the novel that Birkin is her whole life,
rejects love as an ideal. Ursula makes the rejection in an argument
with Gudrun toward the end of the novel.
. . . Love is too human and little. I believe in something
inhuman of which love is only a part. I believe that what we
must fulfill comes out of the unknown to us, and it is some–
thing infinitely more than love.
It
isn't so merely human.
Given Ursula's statement that Birkin is enough for her-"I don't
want anybody else but you"-Ursula's little speech to Gundrun
seems like a justification of Birkin's life, not her own. It is as if
Lawrence wanted a confirming statement from Ursula to vindicate
Birkin's actions to the reader.
The suspicious critic, oriented to psychoanalysis, sees in this
rejection of love and of Woman a concealment of "a fear in Birkin,
perhaps as deep as, or deeper than, his longing for Ursula."l The
critic has only to invoke in support of this view Birkin's strange
relationship with Gerald, particularly as it is expressed in the
homoerotic wrestling episode and the peculiar note of discontent
on which the novel ends, in which Birkin expresses his desire for
"eternal union with a man." Birkin, from
this
point of view,
suffers from a homosexual fear of women.
That there is something in this view can be denied only by
one whose commitment to the Laurentian ethos is fanatical. But
the homosexual impulse in Birkin is inadequate to explain the
experience
that is gained by a rejection of a love all "too human
and little"-that experience of the "unknown" of which the pas–
sionate embraces of Birkin and Ursula do give us a glimpse and of
which there is an intimation in Birkin's speculations, occasioned by
his viewing of an elegant sculptured figure from West Africa, in
which he speaks of the African "process" as a "further sensual
experience-something deeper, darker, than ordinary life can give."
Birkin earlier described the African way as "pure culture in sensa–
tion, culture in the physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual."
1.
See Eliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence:
The Failure and Triumph of Art
(Evans–
ton: Northwestern University Press, 1960), pp. 255-272. His critical tact,
perhaps a trifle overscrupulous, prevents Vivas from stating this outright,
but his implication is unmistakable.
