Supernatural Unification of Souls in Women in Love
In Chapter XX: Gladiatorial of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, after Birkin failingly proposes first to Ursula’s father then to her, he immediately leaves for Gerald’s house. In his own words, “I walked out of the house and came here” (238). Gerald, amused, labels Birkin’s strange dependence on him in the face of adversity with a poignant biblical allusion:
“And so you came here to wrestle with your good angel, did you?” (238).
This refers to Genesis 32:22-32 of the Bible in which Jacob wrestles with God, and lives to reunite with his angry, long lost brother with God’s blessing. In this way, we have to think about Birkin’s love life as a subsection of Gerald’s own. By comparing Birkin’s post-Ursulan rejection conversation with Gerald as Jacob when he wrestled with God, Gerald become a deification of himself, and Birkin a simple human being. Birkin is looking for simple love with Ursula, and he will find it—Gerald knows. But Gerald is looking for a much more complicated thing than that. He wants to “feel that [he has] lived, somehow—and [he] doesn’t care how it is—but [he] wants to feel that” (240). Birkin sums it up as “fulfilled,” but he is a simple man with simple needs. Gerald needs much more in love than what would satisfy a normal man.
Unlike Birkin and Ursula’s zesty love scene with ringing depictions of radiant “sons of God from the Beginning” and “luminous daughters of men” (273), Gerald goes for something much stranger, less passionate in a typical way, but more passionate in his own odd way. His passion resides inside death’s province. Gerald “crushed her upon his breast” and “she felt she would, swoon, die” (288). Like Jesus sacrificing himself on the cross, Gudrun poured out her life, “flowing into him” (289). He was the “firm, strong cup that receives the wine of her life” (289). Gerald receives Gudrun’s “death” in a voluptuous ecstasy, a love bound in death.
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