Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction: Life works
- 1 Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- 2 Family Romances: Home, marriage and memory
- 3 The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- 4 Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Conclusion: Sex words and silence
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Introduction: Life works
- 1 Philosophies: The quick, the dead and ‘the old stable ego’
- 2 Family Romances: Home, marriage and memory
- 3 The Fox, the Cat and the Rabbit: Gender and its differences
- 4 Dangerous Pleasures and Dark Sex
- Conclusion: Sex words and silence
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I can only write what I feel pretty strongly about: and that, at present, is the relations between men and women. After all, it is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation, of the readjustment of the old one, between men and women. (L1 546)
Lawrence famously wrote that the most important thing to write about was the relationship between the sexes. He also wrote both that we must strive to keep the sexes pure, and that the difference between them is essential:
We are wrong when we say that there is no vital difference between the sexes. There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do. (FU 102)
However, this difference is only maintained – it only ‘remains so’ in Lawrence – an act of solitary exertion on the part of the man, and a corresponding submission by the woman:
You've got to know that you're a man, and being a man means you go on alone, ahead of woman, to break a way through the old world into the new. And you've got to be alone. (FU 192)
As Lawrence wrote in a letter to Katherine Mansfield in November 1918, in order for man to be able to ‘go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for permission or for approval from their women’, the woman must first ‘yield some sort of precedence to a man’, they must ‘follow as it were unquestioningly’. Female submission is high on Lawrence's behavioural agenda. Speaking of both horses and women in Women in Love, Birkin argues that ‘the last, perhaps highest, loveimpulse’ is to ‘resign your will to the higher being’ (WL 202).
Lawrence was obsessed with the position of women, their role, their sexuality. His novels are often the stories of women, privileging their perspective as the main narrative focus. Alvina Houghton, Ursula Brangwen, Constance Chatterley, Kate Leslie, unquestionably dominate the novels in which they feature.
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- Information
- D. H. Lawrence , pp. 64 - 85Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 1997