Abstract
Chapter 4 discusses how in Women in Love the transport reference and symbolism exposes a war subtext reflecting Lawrence’s wartime concerns about restricted mobility, entrapment and the intrusive mechanization of society. Transport is co-opted in the novel, as it was literally by war, to fulfil society’s apocalyptic and destructive impulses, reflected in the novel’s positioning of mobility as a technological battleground for determining human identity. Humphries explores the relationship between literal transport and the imagery of transport that the war provokes within the characters. Humphries refers to trains, tramcars and motor cars but focuses particularly on imagery of boat, ship and submarine manoeuvre to reflect Lawrence’s concern with water and entrapment, which lies at the heart of his personal fear of stasis and of being surrounded by unseen hostility and threat.
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Notes
- 1.
Paul Delany, D.H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and his Circle in the Years of the Great War (Sussex: Harvester, 1979), p. x; Fella Bouchouchi, ‘D.H. Lawrence: The Novels and Essays of the War Period’, Etudes Lawrenciennes 25 (2001): 95–108; p. 96; F.R. Leavis, Thoughts, Words and Creativity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 63.
- 2.
Kyoko Kay Kondo’s argument for the importance of underlying symbols by which we interpret the narrative is also significant for this chapter’s approach to transport episodes in Women in Love. Kondo argues that ‘metaphor becomes a dramatic action’ in Women in Love and states that ‘what is unique with Lawrence is that the characters’ entanglement with metaphor is also a vehicle for the book’s exploration and discovery’. See Kondo, ‘Metaphor in Women in Love’, in Keith Cushman and Earl Ingersoll, eds, D.H. Lawrence: New Worlds, pp. 168–182 (New Jersey: Fairleigh University Press, 2003), p. 169. Metaphorical subtexts of specific war scenarios and technologies—though not literally present in the text—can, therefore, become powerful agents of meaning through historical context.
- 3.
Ottoline Morrell, Ottoline at Garsington, 1915–1918 (London: Faber, 1974), p. 65.
- 4.
Mechanical transport was ‘omnipresent’ on the Western Front (Peter Thorold, The Motoring Age: The Automobile and Britain 1896–1939 (London: Profile, 2004), p. 85). Gerard DeGroot reveals the extent of transport expansion required by the fighting front alone: ‘in 1914 the B[ritish]E[xpeditionary]F[orce] went to war with 334 lorries, 133 cars, 166 motorcycles, 300 guns and 63 aircraft…By 1918, however, a BEF army of 2,500,000 men required 31,700 lorries, 7,694 cars, 3,532 ambulances, 14, 646 motorcycles, 6,437 guns and 1,782 aircraft.’ See DeGroot, Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War (Harlow: Pearson, 1996), p. 81.
- 5.
John Worthen argues that the first version of Women in Love, written in 1916, keeps up a ‘running battle with the fact of the war’. It was written, says Worthen, ‘not to a post-war world disillusioned with society, and resigned to its fate, but one actually fighting a war’, pp. 70, 73. See Worthen, ‘The First “Women in Love”’, in David Ellis, ed., D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook, pp. 51–70 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Charles Ross, however, sees the novel as ‘in one sense, an allegory of the war’. Interestingly, Ross also sees the final version of Women in Love as ‘postwar in the sense that it reflects the passion for travelling and for departures made possible by advances in technology and transportation accelerated by the war’, pp. 123, 7–8. See Ross, Women in Love: A Novel of Mythic Realism (Boston: Twayne, 1991). Arguably, therefore, the final version of the novel contains together both Lawrence’s initial sense of the saturation of war in human relationship but also his immediate post-war impulse for mobility beyond trauma and stasis in search of otherness.
- 6.
Scott Sanders believes that the war ‘confirmed…[for Lawrence] the triumph of the mechanical principle’ as a form of ‘dehumanization’, while Michael Bell describes Gerald as ‘the projected backdrop for Lawrence’s own vision of the technically efficient blankness of the modern world’. See Sanders, D.H. Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels (London: Vision, 1973), p. 109 and Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 116.
- 7.
Bethan Jones, ‘Entrapment and Escape in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love’, in David Ellis, ed., D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook, pp. 205–220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 210.
- 8.
Kim Herzinger’s belief that ‘Lawrence displays his Vorticist imagination at crucial moments in his work’ might be applied to the frequent allusions to inner drowning as a metaphor of cataclysm in Women in Love. See Herzinger, D.H. Lawrence in his Time 1908–1915 (London and Toronto: Bucknall, 1982), p. 124.
- 9.
Helen Wussow, The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence (Pennsylvania: LeHigh University Press, 1999), p. 17.
- 10.
Fiona Becket has noted the predominance in Lawrence of ‘metaphors of flow’. She argues in D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (London: Macmillan, 1997) that ‘his figures privilege motion and mobility, principally “tides”, “efflux”, and the operations of these as process’, pp. 66–67. Others like Marguerite Beede-Howe, Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Ginette Katz-Roy and David Trotter have drawn attention to the significance of water, of underworlds and the subterranean in Lawrence.
- 11.
Andrew Harrison’s argument in D.H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism: A Study of Influence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), p. 145, that ‘the electrical vocabulary brings with it an intimation of violence and conflict that points to the internalization of the bitterness of war in the characters’ is particularly relevant here. Lawrence characterizes Hermione’s mood like a charging up of energy towards release and this resembles reports of the electrically charged atmosphere in the U-20 submarine prior to the launch of the first torpedo at the Lusitania. Robert Ballard in his book Lusitania (Ontario: Madison, 2009) describes how, typically, the U-20 crew ‘reported the U-boat ready for attack’ and ‘the atmosphere in the narrow hull became electric. It was as if a button had been pressed, charging the air, tightening every nerve’, p. 85.
- 12.
Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 276–277.
- 13.
Frieda Lawrence, Not I, But the Wind, 1935 (London: Harper Collins, 1983), p. 69.
- 14.
Hew Strachan in The First World War (London: Simon and Schuster, 2003) states that the effects of submarines during 1916–1917 ‘would be achieved less through damage than through terror’ and Lawrence was aware that the submarine’s silent unseen presence went beyond the Atlantic waters into the national consciousness and the consciousness of his characters, p. 215.
- 15.
Strachan, The First World War, p. 216.
- 16.
Mary Bryden. Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), p. 8.
- 17.
Bryden, Gilles Deleuze, pp. 8, 82.
- 18.
Bryden, Gilles Deleuze, p. 8.
- 19.
Douglas Burgess Jr. argues that the ‘race for maritime supremacy’ between Germany and Britain between 1889 and 1914 produced a ‘breed of mammoths whose size exceeded the technological limitations of the age’, p. 7. See Burgess Jr., Seize the Trident: The Race for Superliner Supremacy and How It Altered the Great War (London: McGraw-Hill, 2005).
- 20.
Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modern Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 25, 45.
- 21.
Sylvia Martin, Futurism (Los Angeles: Taschen, 2005), p. 52.
- 22.
DeGroot, Blighty, pp. 35–36.
- 23.
Umberto Boccioni, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture’, 1912, in Umbro Apollonio, ed. Futurist Manifestos, pp. 51–65 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), p. 64.
- 24.
Catherine Carswell, The Savage Pilgrimage (London: Chatto, 1932), p. 22.
- 25.
David Trotter cites Ursula’s separateness on the tram as what divides her from the fate of her sister. ‘The point about Birkin and Ursula is that they are never tempted to immersion. They suspend themselves, unconscious like the butterflies, above the dust in which Gudrun toils, above the ooze into which Gerald repeatedly plunges’, p. 265. See Trotter, ‘D.H. Lawrence: Women in Love, Men in Madness’, in Trotter, ed., Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis and the Professionalization of English Society, pp. 250–283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 26.
Given Beede-Howe’s assertion that in Women in Love ‘Nottingham and London are regions of Hell, subterranean or submarine’, this sense of the tram as a ship floating over alien waters harbouring enemies Ursula must evade seems to be particularly apt, p. 74. See Beede-Howe, The Art of the Self in D.H. Lawrence (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1977).
- 27.
Kinkead-Weekes links this water-party with the summer of 1914 just before the Sarajevo assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand when he states that ‘here is a society apparently at peace and at play’, p. 227).
- 28.
The Titanic stewardess Violet Jessop recalls the ship’s maiden embarkation in similar tones: ‘Gently Titanic disengaged herself from the side of the dock and we were off on a soft April day. Slipping gracefully away, full of high hope, never the din of send off—goodbyes, fluttering flags and handkerchiefs. We were proudly escorted by the tugs, tooting their farewells and Godspeed, while from the dock the sounds grew fainter.’ Titanic Survivor: The Memoirs of Violet Jessop Stewardess, ed. John Maxtone-Graham (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), p. 121.
- 29.
Burgess Jr. describes how Titanic was ‘symbolic of her age’ and stresses the tensions of separateness and the illusions of mass entertainment these ships embodied and which covered a more sinister truth about society: ‘ships like the Titanic were microcosms of Edwardian class and social structures, recreating the tiered hierarchy that prevailed ashore…perhaps even more important, they were floating world’s fairs, representing the themes of mass culture, consumerism, technological fetishism, and phantasmagoria that some later historians would believe contributed to capitalism’s persistent survival in the face of severe, widespread economic injustice’, Seize the Trident, p. 143.
- 30.
Colin Milton argues in Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987) that ‘the whole future of the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald is summed up in the exchange which follows the slap in “Water-Party”’. He states that in striking the first blow ‘her confidence in ultimate victory is an expression of an intuitive awareness that her kind of strength, more subtle and developed than Gerald’s, represents a much greater degree of strength’, pp. 154–155.
- 31.
Kinkead-Weekes, ‘Violence in Women in Love’, in David Ellis, ed., D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: A Casebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 227.
- 32.
Milton argues that ‘Both Gerald and Gudrun feel a kind of fascination with and affinity for the inchoate, watery realm in which the couple have disappeared’ and Gudrun is linked to ‘the underwater world and its sinister denizens’, Lawrence and Nietzsche, pp. 155–156.
- 33.
Burgess Jr. reports eyewitness accounts of the Lusitania’s last moments that seem to be echoed in Lawrence’s dramatization of the boat tragedy in Women in Love: ‘When the sea closed over the Lusitania’s stern and almost a thousand people were suddenly immersed in the cold water, a great cry went up…and just before, it lingered only a few minutes before gradually quieting into a terrible, unnatural silence. The sea was clotted with a seething mass of detritus and passengers…’ p. 233.
- 34.
Keith Sagar argues in D.H. Lawrence: Life into Art (Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1985) that ‘Hell, for Lawrence, is a condition of fixity or of purely mechanical motion’, p. 164.
- 35.
The cyclist here is described by Frank Kermode as ‘very typical of Lawrence’ in that it ‘dares the reader to take the profound for the ridiculous’ and remind us that ‘this is life, not a scribble to be resolved by reference to some doctrine, not a fantasy either.’ See Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 73.
- 36.
Interestingly, Stefania Michelucci argues that ‘in Women in Love, the exploration of unknown spaces is incapable of producing regeneration or existential fulfilment.’ See Michelucci, Space and Place in the Works of D. H. Lawrence, trans. Jill Franks (North Carolina: McFarland, 2002), p. 67. Where this seems true of Gudrun and Gerald, Birkin and Ursula, arguably, do achieve regeneration and fulfilment through the exploration of new space.
- 37.
Jones, ‘Entrapment and Escape’, p. 217.
- 38.
Harrison argues in Lawrence and Italian Futurism that ‘the place of Futurism in Women in Love has been greatly underplayed or simplified by critics’, p. 126.
- 39.
Krockel, War Trauma and English Modernism: T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence (London: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 19–21.
- 40.
Thomas Strychacz notes in Women in Love ‘the ever-present struggle for social power, or the struggle to maintain power, that underpins each moment of the text’, p. 206. See Strychacz, Dangerous Masculinities: Conrad, Hemingway, and Lawrence (Florida: Florida University Press, 2008).
- 41.
John Humma sees Gudrun’s behaviour as ‘selfish in its instrumentality’ (125). ‘Lawrence in Another Light: Women in Love and Existentialism’, in David Ellis, ed., D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: a Casebook, pp. 111–134 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
- 42.
Harrison claims that Gerald represents Lawrence’s ‘overriding critique of the mindlessness of mechanical warfare’, Lawrence and Italian Futurism, p. 126.
- 43.
Hugh Stevens in ‘Women in Love, Psychoanalysis and War’, in Howard Booth ed., New D.H. Lawrence, pp. 80–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) writes very interestingly about this inclusion of the Kaiser’s statement and its implications. See pp. 93–96.
- 44.
Howard Booth, ‘Lawrence in Doubt: A Theory of the “Other” and its Collapse’, in Howard. J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, eds, Modernism and Empire, pp. 197–223 (Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 197.
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Humphries, A.F. (2017). ‘Yet Underneath was Death Itself’: Transports and Subtexts of War in Women in Love . In: D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50811-5_4
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