If I were to list the things I find most boring in the world, somewhere near the top of the list you would find “compulsory heterosexuality” and “English aristocratic drama.” Both of these things are so boring to me that I actively feel disdain—more than simply ignoring it, it actually makes me unwell. So I wasn’t particularly excited to jump into another early 1900s English novel about English people struggling to have basic social interactions. But I am powering through this list, and so with open mind and stiff upper lip I dove into Women in Love.

If there’s anything I should say about this book, it’s that it’s mistitled. It should be Men in Love. With each other.

The book ostensibly follows two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, as they fall for two men, Rupert and Gerald, themselves close friends, and respectively marry them. But the story quickly becomes more complex. The novel engages in class politics, domestic violence, trauma, homo-platonism and, arguably, homoromanticism and homosexuality. Gerald is driven and extrinsically motivated; Rupert, a semi-autobiographical Lawrence, is introspective and frail, apathetic to the meaning of love and seeking englightenment and self-awareness. Rupert disastrously proposes to Ursula and, despite her acceptance, flees to meet Gerald at a cabin in the Midlands. There, absent their women, they indulge each other’s company around a fire. Suddenly, the topic of conversation is wrestling and the two men strip naked and Gerald teaches some moves. What follows is unquestionably homoerotic:

So the two men entwined and wrestled with each other, working nearer and nearer. Both were white and clear, but Gerald flushed smart red where he was touched, and Birkin remained white and tense. He seemed to penetrate into Gerald’s more solid, more diffuse bulk, to interfuse his body through the body of the other, as if to bring it subtly into subjection, always seizing with some rapid necromantic fore-knowledge every motion of the other flesh, converting and counteracting it, playing upon the limbs and trunk of Gerald like some hard wind. It was as if Birkin’s whole physical intelligence interpenetrated into Gerald’s body, as if his fine, sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man, like some potency, casting a fine net, a prison, through the muscles into the very depths of Gerald’s physical being.

Their wrestling match ends in climax:

At length Gerald lay back inert on the carpet, his breast rising in great slow panting, whilst Birkin kneeled over him, almost unconscious. Birkin was much more exhausted. He caught little, short breaths, he could scarcely breathe any more. The earth seemed to tilt and sway, and a complete darkness was coming over his mind. He did not know what happened. He slid forward quite unconscious, over Gerald, and Gerald did not notice. Then he was half-conscious again, aware only of the strange tilting and sliding of the world. The world was sliding, everything was sliding off into the darkness. And he was sliding, endlessly, endlessly away.

But despite this bond, which Lawrence describes as a Blutbrüderschaft, Rupert and Gerald develop their relationships with Ursula and Gudrun, respectively, and the two couples take different paths. Gerald’s sister drowns in an accident at a party; his father, the coal mine owner, dies and Gerald, a single-minded industrialist, puts his relationship with Gudrun on rocky grounds.

The two couples head to the Austrian Alps together for a vacation and Gudrun, tired of being ignored by Gerald, flirts openly with a frail and effeminate artist at the resort. In a fit of rage and feeling like his masculinity is challenged, lays hands on Gudrun and tries to strangle her. In a moment of clarity, and embarrassed by his actions, he walks out of the resort along the snowy peaks. He falls and dies.

Gerald’s death shocks none more than Rupert, who realizes that he loved him. He tells Ursula that he needed no woman other than her, but that he needed also the love of a man. The novel ends as the pair struggle with the meaning of this love.

“Did you need Gerald?” she asked one evening.

“Yes,” he said.

“Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.”

“Why aren’t I enough?” she said. “You are enough for me. I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?”

“Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”

“Well –” he said.

“You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”

“It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

“You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.

“I don’t believe that,” he answered.

This idea, that someone can love in different ways, of different sexes, that one cannot survive on a single kind of love alone, is stunningly modern. The challenge to the compulsion of monogomous heterosexuality and that love must be either romantic or familial is still a radical one. I find it remarkable that a novel now over a hundred years old can tell a story so messy and queer that it remains highly relevant today. The book is heartbreaking, erotic, and beautifully written. It’s a story for anyone who’s ever been in love with their best friend. And it shows how far we still have to go towards making it normal that people can truly love different people in different ways; indeed perhaps that they must.

To read more about my Modern Library project, read this post.

Women in Love
D. H. Lawrence
ISBN 9780141441542