DH Lawrence, Women in Love

Question 1

Why is it art…

Answer 1

‘Why is it art?

‘It conveys a complete truth’, said Birkin. ‘It contains the whole truth of that state, whatever you feel about it.’

Question 2

the old story…

Answer 2

‘the old story - nothing but action and reaction, and nothing inbetween’

Question 3

‘one shouldn’t talk when…’

Answer 3

one shouldn’t talk when one is tired and wretched. One Hamletizes, and it seems a lie’

Question 4

‘she seemed to try and put…’

Answer 4

she seemed to try andput her hands out, likke an infant in the womb, and she could not…still seh had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come’

Question 5

What does Hermione claim?

Answer 5

it is better to be ‘animals, crude, vioelnt, anything, rahter than the self-consciousness …this NOTHIGNESSS’

Question 6

what does Hermione claim humans are?

Answer 6

‘overconscious, burdened to death with consciousness’

Question 7

Hermione: ‘when we have knoweldge..#

Answer 7

‘when we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowing?…forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge’

Question 8

What does Rupert argue of Hermione?

Answer 8

‘you don’t want to BE an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions..the last and worst kind of intellectualism…pornography….[to] have it all in your consciousness, mkae it all mental’

Question 9

Biikrin: you’ve got to learn not-to-be….

Answer 9

You’ve got to learn not-to-be, before you can come into being. But…we’d rather die than give up our little self-righteous slef-opinionated self-iwll’

Question 10

What does Birkin claim of people?

Answer 10

They “aren’t sensual, only sensuous”, and “refuse to live in another world, from another centre”

Question 11

How is Birkin’s escape to nature described?

Answer 11

He was “barely conscious, and yet perfectly driecti in his motion”, and “this was his marraige-plae”

Question 12

Gudrun, sketching plants:

Answer 12

what she could see was mud….but sehcoudl feel their turgid feshy structure as in a sensuous vision, she KNEW how they rose out of the mud’

Question 13

Why should you always be doing…

Answer 13

Why should you alwyas be DOING? …it’s so plebian. I think it is better to be really patrician, and do nothing but be oneself, like a walking flower?

Question 14

What does Herimone vs Birkin insist about the will?

Answer 14

Hermione insists “the will can do anything”, but birkin calims that to use the will like that is “obscenity” and “fatal”

Question 15

what does Heriome say se really wants?

Answer 15

I really DO want to see things in their entiret,y, with their beuaty left to them….their natural holiness. don’t you feel you can’t be tortured into any more knwoeldge?’

Question 16

Ursula: it is so IRREVERENT…

Answer 16

It is so IRREVERENT to hink evryhtin gmust be realised in the head Really, something must be left to the Lord”

Question 17

What does Rupert claim the search for absolute knweoldge is like?

Answer 17

” it is….tearing a bud to see what the flower will be like…purely destructive”

Question 18

birkin “this life…”

Answer 18

This life…we’ve got to bust it completely, or shrivel inside it…for it won’t expand’

Question 19

What is Gerald’s fear?

Answer 19

‘being locked up anythere - or being fastened….bound hand and foot’

Question 20

Birkin: “if manking is esroyed…I am …”

Answer 20

If manking is destroyed…I am satisfied. That which informs all is there, and cnan never be lost. After all, what is mankind byt just one expression of the ncomprehensible….Humanity doesn’t embdoy the utterance of the incomprehensible any more Huamnity is a dead letter….let humanity disappear as quicly as possible’

Question 21

What does Birkin claim humanity iself is?

Answer 21

Humanity itself is dry-rotten…[people won’t] fall off the tree when they’re ripe till they beocme infested with ltitle wroms and dry-rot#

Question 22

Birkin: humanity is a huge…

Answer 22

Humsnity is a huge aggresage lie…far less than the indiviudal, becuase the individual may soemtimes be capable of turht, and huamnity is a tree of lifes”
as opposed to “the real tree of life”

Question 23

What does Ursula calim of the wrold?

Answer 23

“man will never be gone…the wrold will go with him”

Question 24

“so we cover the earth wtih foulneess….”

Answer 24

So we cover the earth wtih foulness; life is a blotch of labour…so your miner can have a pianoforte”
though Ursual argues “it is a sysmbold for something very real, a real desire for something higher”,Birkin dispures thsi existence

Question 25

What does Birkin scorn?

Answer 25

the esxistence of a collective society - insists he is content with “the “first person singular”

Question 26

Ursula - of life

Answer 26

Life “doesn’t centre at all…artificially held together bythe social mechanism”

Question 27

What does Hermione sugegst of patriotism?

Answer 27

the patriorical appeal” is to the “commerical instict”, not “the racial instict”
In constrast, Gerlad claims all races have their “commerecail aspect////strive against ohter familie,s other naturions”

Question 28

the carved negroes [statues]/..

Answer 28

the carved negroies looked almost like the foetus of a human being…the extreme of physcial sensation, beyond the limits of metnal cosnciosuness’

Question 29

Herlad vs Birkin on the carved negroes

Answer 29

Gerlad - “it is not HIGH art”; “waht culture”?
Birkin - “pure culutre in senstation, cultue in the phsycial consciousness…utterly sensual”
but gerald “resented it. he wanted to keep certain illusions,c certain ideas like clothing”

Question 30

I don’t want to know you…

Answer 30

I don’t want to know you. I want to be gone out of myself, and you to be lost to tourself,so we are found different”

Question 31

She knew them, they were finished with…

Answer 31

She knew them, they were finished with…none that had anything unresolved, until the Criches’

Question 32

of Gerald - it was the rich play…

Answer 32

It was the rich play of words and interchange of feelings he ejoyed, the real content of the words he never really considered: he himself knew better’

Question 33

Birkin - ‘there is lifewhich belongs…’

Answer 33

there is life which eblongs to death, and the re is life which isn’t death…I want love that is like sleep, like being born again…like death …[yet] more than life itself…..like a naked ifnant formt he womb….new air all around one”

Question 34

Birkin - I don;t believe in love…

Answer 34

I don’t beleive in love…..vulgarised…..[but] can’t get away from it’
CT Ursula, who insists that love “alwyas means the same thing”

Question 35

Birkin and Gerald’s relationship

Answer 35

“burned with each other, inwadly”, yet deny lvoe as “unmanly”

Question 36

Gudrun and Gerald…the exchange of feeling…

Answer 36

The exchange of feeling between them was storng and apart form their consciousness…..Gudrun was aware of his body”

Question 37

there is a beyond, in you and me…

Answer 37

there is a beyond, in you and me, which is further than love, beyond the cope, as scars are beyond the scope of vision. Some of them/’

Question 38

‘the world is only held togehter…’

Answer 38

the world is only held together by the ystic conjusnctino, the ultimate unison between people - a bond’

Question 39

Birkin: we delude ourselves that love is the root…

Answer 39

We delude ourseles that love is the root…it is only the brances.the root is beyond love…an isoalted me, that does NOT meet and mingle, and never can’

Question 40

What does Gudrun insist of Gerald and the horse?

Answer 40

He ‘FORCED’ the hourse; ;the mare pawed and struck away emchanically now…for the man encompassed her…as if she were pert of his own physique’
Gudrun then faints ‘and when seh recovered, her soul was calm and cold, without feeling…as if numbed in her mind’

Question 41

What does Gerald say the horse has?

Answer 41

“two wills”- to be controlled by te “human will” or to be “wild”.
birkin suggests that “it is the last, perhaps highest, love impulse…resign your will to the higher being”

Question 42

the same secret sense

Answer 42

the same secret sense seemed to be working in the souls of all alive…a secnet sense of power, and of inexpressible destrucitvensss, and of fatal half-heartedness, a sort of rottenness in the will’