28). Hermione was indeed the "social equal" - if not "far the superior" - of anyone she might meet. Still, with all that cultural and social buildup by Lawrence, Hermione's soul "was tortured" because she felt vulnerable...there was a secret chink in her armor" (p. 29).
And part of her torture was that she was obsessed with Rupert Birkin, whom she passionately longed for and hoped he would be at the wedding. They had been lovers for years so she knew what to expect from him and yet he tried to get away from her. So readers have this sense of a woman's strong social and sensual desire to lay eyes on a man, but wait, after Hermione became so obsessed with the hope that he would be at the wedding she even suffered a "little convulsion" and indeed her "slender body convulsed with agitation" (p. 31). And when she realized that Birkin wasn't in the church, "A terrible storm came over her, as if she were drowning. She was possessed by a devastating hopelessness" that was "beyond death, so utterly null, desert" (p. 31). One can imagine an intelligent person being disappointed, even emotionally drained, at the possibility that the one person she [Hermione] wanted desperately to see was not there. But "beyond death" is about as severe a description as possible, yet Lawrence pulls these off throughout the novel. The author is sadistic in this regard, but it is done for a purpose.
Indeed, Lawrence's book is overflowing with "physical and mental violence" and the characters exhibit "both masochistic and sadistic qualities" (Howe, 2002). The author in fact goes beyond creating characters that are extreme in their thoughts and actions, according to a scholarly article in Papers on Language & Literature ("Beastly Desire: Human/Animal...
Thanks to Lawrence the characters' mechanism for sexual arousal and dominance morphs into "animal proxies" (Howe p. 1).
One of the animals used literarily to symbolize a human in Lawrence's novel is Gerald's horse, which is a red Arab mare. In trying to break the male of being afraid of loud noises, Gerald forces the mare to stand near a railroad track while a loud train is passing. Like some men in the novel dominate women, Gerald dominates this animal. Lawrence, by portraying the human male as indifferent to an animal's feelings, is also showing his readers that men interchange women for mere animals. The mare was actually bleeding as Gerald cut it with spurs. "The encounter is violent...[but also] sexual, taking on the form of a brutal rape" (Howe p. 2). By digging spurs into the poor mare, Gerald is in fact doing it with "phallic urgency...a repetition akin to sexual thrusts" (Howe, p. 2).
And so not only does Lawrence write with stunning descriptiveness and deftly describe characters and situations through brutally realistic narrative, he brings humans and animals together in genre, and it is all packaged around perverse sexuality. Men like Gerald believe it is within their God-given power to dominate over females, and a female like Hermione gets her emotions and hopes up high, only to be devastated by a single incident in which what she hoped would be in front of her is not there at all.
Works Cited
Lawrence, DH Women in Love. New York: Signet Classic, 1995.
Howe, Andrew. "Beastly Desire: Human/Animal Interactions in Lawrence's Women in Love." Papers on Language & Literature. (2002), 38.4, 429-442.
