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Perhaps it would be useful to try to establish a wavelength by looking at a chapter. The book's structure seems to work by isolating two or three characters, often in the presence of some catalyst that brings out their inner being, and then every so often collecting a whole party together, so that we are led to compare and contrast more widely and see what is happening as a dimension of society. So chapter XIV, 'Water-Party', refocuses what has gone before and prepares for what is to come. What we see is a society apparently at peace and at play. Since this is class-ridden England, there are signs of social tension: the Crich estate may be thrown 'open' for the day, but there is none the less a policeman at their gate, so not everyone can come in. Will Brangwen, not a gentleman, is ill at ease. His daughters, though they too have entrees as teacher and artist, show different kinds of defence and aggression about their situations as women - as has grown ever clearer since the opening scene. Hermione the aristocrat feels free simply to inspect other people. Birkin the more diplomatic school inspector is never quite right, socially. Gudrun both despises 'the crowd', and remembers with horror her boat trip up the Thames, with fat bourgeois men throwing coins for ragged urchins to scrabble over in the appalling mud. So tensions in the body politic are registered, yet may seem containable within the festivity over which Gerald Crich presides. It is a scene, so far, whose art Jane Austen, George Eliot or Henry James might have recognized. Just at one or two points they would have been taken aback, however: the conflict between what the clothes of the two sisters 'say' and the involuntary expressions on their faces and how they move, which suggest conditions of their 'being'; or the way that Gudrun with Gerald (for all her sophistication) both becomes child-like and seems to make 'the blood stir in his veins, the subtle way she turned to him and infused her gratitude into his body' (163:12-14, my italics). There the new subterranean language is at work, showing how being impacts on being sexually, without touch and below conscious awareness, in a mode of seductive female submission to male power - apparently.
Having been trusted with a canoe, the sisters escape into a private world where they can be themselves, naked and free (as Gudrun complained in chapter IV, 'Diver', women couldn't be). When Ursula begins to sing, the differences which have been emerging since the beginning become suddenly clearer: Ursula for all her uncertainty lives 'at the centre of her own universe' (165:28-(), while Gudrun always has to demand that the other be aware of her. As Gudrun begins to dance, she un-inhibits and reveals her inner self in an unconsciously suggestive exposure: her urge first to free herself from repression, then to express herself, and then unmistakably (with the arrival of the highland bulls) to define and assert herself against the other, the male. Behind her apparent submission to the attractively, dominating male lies a strongly reactive female counter-aggression. Previous hints gather into revelation: her first fascination with Gerald (' "His totem is the wolf'" - 14:40); the taking to herself of his forcible mastery of the delicate mare (113:29¬36); but also her ambivalent high gull-scream "'I should think you're proud'" (112:35); the impulse to be childlike and suppliant, but the sense now that this is also a mode of power, and can swiftly turn into aggression. When Gerald substitutes himself for the bulls, the hidden violence in this pattern of submission/aggression spurts out in spite of herself, in an instantaneous blow across his face, and the prophetic dialogue that shows them both shocked into sudden awareness of their sex-relation as a kind of war. '''Why are you behaving in this impossible and ridiculous fashion'" is the reaction of her conscious mind (171:11-12) - but the Gudrunness of Gudrun has unmistakably come out on a deeper level, as has the question of whether the man or the woman will ultimately prove the stronger.
- Yet 'love' as sex-war, in terms of domination or submission, defeat or victory, is not the only possibility open to Gerald and Gudrun. As they set out on the lake together in the frail canoe, the mode of their love suddenly becomes quite different. There is space between them - and with that they seem able both to be themselves, balancing each other, and to see a magical beauty in the other without wanting to possess or to dominate. Gudrun may feel -at first that she has Gerald at her mercy, but she is soon overcome by the beauty and mystery of his otherness, his maleness now a wonder not a threat. And he, who always keeps so tight a grip on himself, begins for the first time to let go, to become 'lapsed out' (I78:II) into his surroundings, not trying to control or impose himself on them. Now there is extraordinary new peace, and beauty. For this couple there are two quite different ways of being 'in love'. Which way will they go?
Meanwhile Birkin has danced his sardonic dance, which Ursula doesn't like because it combines self-abandon, which attracts her, with mockery suggesting distance. (The novel is structuring itself also by constant parallels and comparisons.) Later he preaches a sermon, drawn directly from 'The Crown'. We think of life as a creative process; but there are times such as now, when the cycle of creation seems to have come to an end and everything is given over to a death process, a dark river of corruption. Birkin feels that it is fin de siecle, and they are all fleurs du mal (flowers of dissolution). But though Birkin voices ideas that were Lawrence's, he is only part of 'D. H. Lawrence' now. For Ursula argues. She will have none of his acceptance of deathliness (however necessary before new creation can come about). She isn't a flower of dissolution, but feels herself a rose, warm and flamy with life. She detects a death-wish in him, a sickness, which she must fight. Sermon is taken up into drama. Do we take sides?
It is time to light the lanterns, and see deeper. They are rose and primrose, or blue; they suggest a life above the surface and below, a cool, dark. vitality and a warmer, flamier life. The greatest beauty appears when they set each other off, in contrast and balance. Yet Gudrun is afraid of the underworld of the cuttlefish and makes Ursula take that lantern. We shall see that white writhing sea-creature again; but the question now is what might be involved in rejecting it. Was Blake right, for instance, that everything that lives is holy, all energy eternal delight? Or are there subhuman modes of being that should be rejected and denied?
They set out on the lake, these two pairs 'in love', with the lanterns adding beauty to the night, the lights reflected in the dark water. But people are subject to their world. The magic is broken by an 'accident', which results in the drowning of Gerald's sister Diana and of the young doctor who dives to save her. But was it accident? Twice already the question has arisen of whether things do happen accidentally, or because of secret impulse: Gerald as a child shooting his brother (26:10) and Birkin drinking his champagne at the wedding 'accidentally on purpose' (30:34). Diana's voice was heard at the wedding, too, the voice of the rebel (27:31-2). Why was she dancing on the roof of the boat? Was it the stimulus of disobedience, the excitement of danger, the frisson of risking death? Something potentially dangerous, certainly - linking her with Gudrun, and with Gerald who becomes a diver now in a much darker mode than the glad naked freedom of the earlier chapter (see chapter IV, 'Diver'). Below the surface lies a whole dark, cold, deathly world which seems bigger and more real to Gerald than the one up above; and he is dangerously drawn to it. There might be two kinds of 'lapsing out', one suddenly sees: into unity with a living universe, or into nothingness in death-wish, in desire not to be. Birkin now sees this in his friend, and struggles against it as Ursula had struggled against nihilism in him. The pairs are not only 'in love' - whether in tender or aggressive ways - they are also poised at crossroads between modes of deathliness and possibilities of new life.
