Thus it would seem at first that neither of the two sexes is privileged. Neither is subject. Woman is neither a prey nor a simple pretext. As Malraux notes, Lawrence thinks that it is not enough, unlike Hindus, for woman to be merely the occasion for a contact with the infinite, as would be a landscape: that would be another way of making her an object.50 She is as real as the man; a real communion has to be reached. This is why Lawrence’s heroes demand much more from their mistresses than the gift of their bodies: Paul does not want Myriam to give herself to him as a tender sacrifice; Birkin does not want Ursula to limit herself to seeking pleasure in his arms; cold or burning, the woman who remains closed within herself leaves the man to his solitude: he must reject her. Both have to give themselves to each other, body and soul. If this giving is accomplished, they have to remain forever faithful to each other. Lawrence believed in monogamous marriage. There is only a quest for variety if one is interested in the uniqueness of beings: but phallic marriage is founded on generality. When the virility-femininity circuit is established, desire for change is inconceivable: it is a perfect circuit, closed on itself and definitive.
Reciprocal gift, reciprocal fidelity: Is it really the reign of mutual recognition? Far from it. Lawrence passionately believes in male supremacy. The very expression “phallic marriage,” the equivalence he establishes between the sexual and the phallic, is proof enough. Of the two bloodstreams that mysteriously marry, the phallic stream is favored. “The phallus is the connecting link between the two rivers, that establishes the two streams in a oneness.” Thus man is not only one of the terms of the couple, but also their relationship; he is their surpassing: “The bridge to the future is the phallus.” Lawrence wants to substitute the cult of the phallic for that of the Goddess Mother; when he wants to highlight the sexual nature of the cosmos, it is through man’s virility rather than woman’s womb. He almost never shows a man excited by a woman: but over and over he shows woman secretly overwhelmed by the vibrant, subtle, insinuating appeal of the male; his heroines are beautiful and healthy, but not sensuous, while his heroes are troubled wild animals. It is male animals that embody the troubling and powerful mystery of Life; women are subjugated by their spell: this one is affected by the fox, that one is taken with a stallion, Gudrun feverishly challenges a herd of young oxen; she is overwhelmed by the rebellious vigor of a rabbit. A social privilege is connected to this cosmic one. Because the phallic stream is impetuous and aggressive and bestrides the future—Lawrence does not make himself perfectly clear on this point—it is up to man to “carry forward the banner of life”;51 he reaches for goals, he incarnates transcendence; woman is absorbed by her sentiments, she is all interiority; she is doomed to immanence. Not only does man play the active role in sexual life, but it is through him that this life is transcended; he is rooted in the sexual world, but he escapes from it; she remains locked up in it. Thought and action have their roots in the phallus; lacking the phallus, woman has no rights to either: she can play the man’s role, and brilliantly at that, but it is a game without truth. “Woman is really polarised downwards, towards the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull. And man is polarised upwards, towards the sun and the day’s activity.”52 For woman, “her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly.”53 If she turns upward, the moment comes when everything collapses. In the domain of action, man must be the initiator, the positive; woman is the positive on the emotional level. Thus Lawrence goes back to the traditional bourgeois conception of Bonald, Auguste Comte, and Clément Vautel. Woman must subordinate her existence to that of man. “She’s got to believe in you …, and in the deep purpose you stand for.”54
Then man will owe her tenderness and infinite gratitude. “Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her … You feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you.”55 Lawrence adds that to merit this devotion, man must be authentically invested with a higher purpose; if his project is but a sham, the couple sinks into insignificant mystification; better still to enclose one’s self in the feminine cycle—love and death—like Anna Karenina and Vronsky or Carmen and Don José, than to lie to each other like Pierre and Natasha. But subject to this reserve, Lawrence, like Proudhon and Rousseau, advocates monogamous marriage where woman derives the justification for her existence from her husband. Lawrence was just as vituperative as Montherlant concerning the woman who wants to reverse the roles. She should cease playing at the Magna Mater, claiming to be in possession of the truth of life; dominating and devouring, she mutilates the male, she forces him to fall back into immanence, and she leads him astray from his goals. Lawrence was far from disparaging motherhood: on the contrary; he rejoices in being flesh, he accepts his birth, he cherishes his mother; mothers appear in his work as magnificent examples of real femininity; they are pure renunciation, absolute generosity, and all their human warmth is devoted to their children; they accept them becoming men, they are proud of it. But the egotistical lover who tries to bring the man back to his childhood must be feared; she cuts man down in his flight. “The moon, the planet of women, sways us back.”56
She speaks incessantly about love: but to love for her is to take, to fill the void she feels in herself; this love is close to hate; so it is that Hermione, who suffers from a horrible deficiency because she has never been able to give herself, wants to annex Birkin; she fails; she tries to kill him, and the voluptuous ecstasy she feels in striking him is identical to the egotistic spasm of pleasure.57
Lawrence detests modern women, celluloid and rubber creatures who claim a consciousness. When the woman has become sexually conscious, “there she is, functioning away from her own head and her own consciousness of herself and her own automatic self-will.”58 He forbids her to have an autonomous sensuality; she is made to give, not to take. Putting words in Mellors’s mouth, Lawrence cries out his horror of lesbians. But he also blames the woman who has a detached or aggressive attitude to the male; Paul feels wounded and irritated when Myriam caresses his loins, telling him: “You are so fine!” Gundrun, like Myriam, is at fault when she feels enchanted with her lover’s beauty: this contemplation separates them, as much as the irony of icy women intellectuals who consider the penis pitiful or male gymnastics ridiculous; the intense quest for pleasure is no less blameworthy: there is an acute, solitary pleasure that also separates, and woman should not aim for it. Lawrence sketched many portraits of these independent, dominating women who have missed their feminine vocation. Ursula and Gudrun are of this type. At first Ursula is a dominator. “Man must render himself up to her. He must be quaffed to the dregs by her.”59 She will learn to overcome her will. But Gudrun is stubborn; cerebral, artistic, she fiercely envies men their independence and their potential for activity; she persists in keeping her individuality intact; she wants to live for herself; ironic and possessive, she will remain forever shut up in her subjectivity. The most significant figure is Myriam because she is the least sophisticated.60 Gerald is partially responsible for Gudrun’s failure; but vis-à-vis Paul, Myriam alone bears the full weight of her ill fate. She also would like to be a man, and she hates men; she does not accept herself in her generality; she wants to “distinguish herself”; because the great stream of life does not pass through her, she can be like a sorceress or a priestess, but never a bacchante; she is moved by things only when she has re-created them in her soul, giving them a religious value: this fervor itself separates her from life; she is poetic, mystical, maladapted. “She was not clumsy, and yet none of her movements seemed quite THE movement … she put too much strength into the effort.” She seeks interior joys, and reality frightens her; sexuality frightens her; when she sleeps with Paul, her heart stands aside in a kind of horror; she is always consciousness, never life: she is not a companion; she does not consent to meld with her lover; she wants to absorb him into herself. He is irritated by this will; he becomes violently angry when he sees her
caressing flowers: she seems to want to tear their hearts out; he insults her: “You’re always begging things to love you … as if you were a beggar for love … You don’t want to love—your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren’t positive, you’re negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you’ve got a shortage somewhere.” Sexuality does not exist to fill a void; it must be the expression of a whole being. What women call love is their greed before the virile force they want to grab. Paul’s mother lucidly thinks about Myriam: “She wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him till there is nothing left of him, even for himself. He will never be a man on his own feet—she will suck him up.” The young girl is happy when her friend is ill because she can take care of him: she attempts to serve him, but it is a way of imposing her will on him. Because she lives apart from him, she excites in Paul “an intensity like madness. Which fascinated him, as drug taking might.” But she is incapable of bringing him joy and peace; from the depth of her love, in her secret self “she had hated him because she loved him and he dominated her.” And Paul distances himself from her. He seeks his balance with Clara; beautiful, lively, animal, she gives herself unreservedly; and the lovers reach moments of ecstasy that surpass them both; but Clara does not understand this revelation. She believes that she owes this joy to Paul himself, to his uniqueness, and she wants to appropriate him: she fails to keep him precisely because she wants him for herself. As soon as love is individualized, it changes into avid egotism, and the miracle of eroticism vanishes.
The woman must renounce personal love: neither Mellors nor Don Cipriano consents to saying words of love to his mistress. Teresa, the model wife, becomes indignant when Kate asks her if she loves Don Ramón.61 “He is my life,” she replies; the gift she concedes to him is something quite different from love. Woman must, like man, abdicate all pride and all will; if she embodies life for the man, he embodies it for her as well; Lady Chatterley only finds peace and joy because she recognizes this truth: “She would give up her own hard, bright female power. She was weary of it, stiffened with it. She would sink in the new bath of life, in the depths of her womb and her bowels, that sang the voiceless song of adoration”: so she is called to the rapture of the bacchantes; blindly obeying her lover, not seeking herself in his arms, she forms with him a harmonious couple, in tune with the rain, the trees, and the spring flowers. Likewise, Ursula renounces her individuality in Birkin’s hands, and they attain a “star-equilibrium.” But it is The Plumed Serpent above all that reflects in its entirety Lawrence’s ideal. For Don Cipriano is one of those men who “carry forward the banner of life”; he has a mission and is entirely given over to it to such an extent that virility in him is surpassed and exalted to the point of divinity: if he anoints himself god, it is not a mystification; every man who is fully man is a god; he thus deserves the absolute devotion of a woman. Imbued with Western prejudices, Kate at first refuses this dependence; she is attached to her personality and her limited existence; but little by little letting herself be penetrated by the great stream of life, she gives her body and soul to Cipriano. It is not a slave’s surrender: before deciding to stay with him, she insists that he recognize his need for her; he recognizes it, since in fact woman is necessary for man; so she consents to never being anything other than his companion; she adopts his goals, his values, his universe. This submission expresses itself even in eroticism; Lawrence does not want the woman to be tense in the search for pleasure, separated from the male by the spasm that jolts her; he deliberately refuses to bring her to orgasm; Don Cipriano withdraws from Kate when he feels her close to this nervous pleasure; she renounces even this sexual autonomy. “Her strange seething feminine will and desire subsided in her and swept away, leaving her soft and powerfully potent, like the hot springs of water that gushed up so noiseless, so soft, yet so powerful, with a sort of secret potency.”
We can see why Lawrence’s novels are first and foremost “guidebooks for women.” It is infinitely more difficult for the woman than for the man to submit to the cosmic order, because he submits in an autonomous fashion, whereas she needs the mediation of the male. When the Other takes on the form of a foreign consciousness and will, there is real surrender; on the contrary, an autonomous submission strangely resembles a sovereign decision. Lawrence’s heroes are either condemned from the start or else from the start they hold the secret of wisdom;62 their submission to the cosmos was consummated so long ago and they derive such interior certitude from it that they seem as arrogant as a self-important individualist; there is a god who speaks through their mouths: Lawrence himself. But the woman must bow to their divinity. Even if the man is a phallus and not a brain, the virile individual keeps his privileges; woman is not evil, she is even good: but subordinated. Once again, it is the ideal of the “real woman” that Lawrence offers us, that is, of the woman who unhesitatingly assents to defining herself as the Other.
III. CLAUDEL OR THE HANDMAIDEN OF THE LORD
The originality of Claudel’s Catholicism is of such an obstinate optimism that evil itself turns to good:
Evil itself
Abides its own share of good which must not be wasted.63
Adopting the point of view that can only be that of the Creator—since we assume the Creator to be all-powerful, omniscient, and benevolent—Claudel subscribes to creation entirely; without hell and sin, there could be no free will, no salvation; when he brought forth the world from nothing, God foresaw the Fall and the redemption. In the eyes of Jews and Christians, Eve’s disobedience had put her daughters in a very bad position: we see how badly the Fathers of the Church have mistreated women. But here, on the contrary, she is justified if one accepts that she has served divine purposes. “Woman! that service she once by her disobedience rendered to God in the earthly Paradise; that deep agreement reached between her and him; that flesh she put at the disposal of redemption by way of the fault!”64 There is no doubt she is the source of sin, and through her man lost paradise. But man’s sins have been redeemed, and this world is blessed anew: “We have not left the paradise of delight in which God first put us!”65
“Every Land is the Promised Land.”66
Nothing that has come from God’s hands, nothing that is given, can be in itself bad: “We pray to God with the entirety of his work! Nothing he made is in vain, nothing is alien to anything else.”67
And furthermore, there is nothing that is unnecessary. “All things that he has created commune together, all at one and the same time are necessary each to each.”68
Thus it is that woman has her place in the harmony of the universe; but it is not just an ordinary place; there is a “strange and, in Lucifer’s eyes, scandalous passion that binds the Eternal to this momentary flower of Nothingness.”69
Of course, woman can be destructive: In Lechy, Claudel incarnated the bad woman who drives man to his destruction;70 in Break of Noon, Ysé ruins the life of those trapped by her love. But if there were not this risk of loss, there would not be salvation either. Woman “is the element of risk he deliberately introduced into the midst of his marvelous construction.”71 It is good that man should know the temptations of the flesh. “It is this enemy within us that gives our lives their dramatic element, their poignant salt. If our souls were not so brutally assailed, they would continue to sleep, yet here they leap up … This struggle is the apprenticeship of victory.”72 Man is summoned to become aware of his soul not only by the spiritual path but also by that of the flesh. “And what flesh speaks more forcefully to man than the flesh of a woman?”73 Whatever wrenches him from sleep, from security, is useful: love in whatever form it presents has the virtue of appearing in “our small personal worlds, ordered by our conventional reasoning, as a deeply perturbing element.”74 Often woman is but a deceptive giver of illusions:
I am the promise that cannot be kept, and my grace consists of that very thing. I am the sweetness of what is, with the regret for what is not.
I am the truth that has the countenance of error, and he who loves me does not bother to disentangle each from each.75
But there is also usefulness in illusion; this is what the Guardian Angel announces to Doña Prouhèze:
Even sin! Sin also serves.
So it was good for him to love me?
It was good for you to teach him desire.
Desire for an illusion? For a shadow that forever escapes him?
Desire is for what is, illusion is for what is not. Desire pursued to the furthermost point of illusion
Is desire pursued to the furthermost point of what is not.76
By God’s will, what Prouhèze was for Rodrigo is “a sword through his heart.”77
But woman in God’s hands is not only this blade, this burn; the riches of this world are not meant to be always refused: they are also nourishment; man must take them with him and make them his own. The loved one will embody for him all the recognizable beauty in the universe; she will be a chant of adoration on his lips.