696 Lawrence, D. H.
up his goods, which [are] the stuff of disequality.”
The conflict breaks his heart, destroying his illu-
sions about his relationship with the colliers. The
riots and their aftermath reveal Thomas Crich to
be good natured, idealistic, and charitable, but also
sentimental, deluded, and, finally, more materialistic
than he had thought. As much as he values Chris-
tianity, Thomas also values property, profit, and his
class status.
When Thomas becomes ill, retreating into a
solipsistic religiosity, his son Gerald takes over as
director of the firm, at a time when the mine is more
run down than ever. Like his mother Christianna,
Gerald despises his father’s charitable disposition,
having no sympathy for the workers. In fact, during
the riots he longs to go out with the soldiers to shoot
the miners. Educated in the science of mining at a
German university, Gerald successfully modernizes
the coal mines, increasing their efficiency and output.
Where his father was sentimental, Gerald is coldly
rational but also darkly sadistic. He accomplishes his
“great reform” not for the money but for the satis-
faction of dominating nature. He envisions himself
in a “fight with Matter,” in a struggle to “reduce
it to his will.” Gerald extends this domination to
his employees. Conceiving of the miners as mere
“instruments,”Gerald takes pride in “the stream of
miners flowing along the causeways from the mines
at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,
slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all
moving subjugate to his will.” Subordinating nature
and humanity to his designs, Gerald sees himself as
the “controlling, central part” of a smoothly running
machine. He becomes the “God of the Machine,”
completing the contrast with his father, who saw the
miners as a manifestation of God.
In this brief family history Lawrence captures
his sense of the problems of industrialism. He por-
trays the class conflict and exploitation endemic
to industrialism, along with the masters’ failures of
understanding and empathy. He reveals the dehu-
manizing of the working classes, as well as the sen-
timentalism and megalomania of the ruling classes,
who are also dehumanized by their lust for power.
He shows how the scientific method can be a tool
for ruthlessly dominating humanity as well as the
environment. He also links the desire for control and
power to sexual politics. As Women in Love shows,
Gerald takes the same approach to Gudrun as he
does to his mines. He tries to dominate and control
her. He also tries to dominate and control himself,
exhibiting a strange combination of nihilism and
repression. Ironically, after Gerald commits suicide,
freezing to death in the Alps, he becomes simply
“cold, mute Matter.”
Mitchell R. LewisGender in Women in Love
In Women in Love Lawrence portrays men and
women as “perfectly polarized,” each sex having “a
single, separate being, with its own laws.” According
to this essentialist view of gender, men and women
recognize in the other a fundamentally “different
nature.” It is a nature, moreover, that is unknowable,
beyond conscious understanding. The result, in the
case of heterosexual relationships, is a mutual recog-
nition of “the immemorial magnificence of mystic,
palpable, real otherness.” A vitalist who scorned
scientific knowledge, Lawrence suggests that even
in their sexual relationships, men and women never
really know each other. Drawing on religious and
metaphysical language, Lawrence typically por-
trays relationships as ineffable experiences in which
human beings encounter each other’s absolute but
impersonal natures. Lawrence insists on the pos-
sibility of mutual fulfillment, but his emphasis on
gender-difference complicates the issue. In fact,
Lawrence finally depicts heterosexual relationships
as violent power struggles over who has authority
and control. Thus Lawrence’s emphasis on gender
difference is linked inseparably to a focus on gender
hierarchy. His characters battle for dominance over
the other, driven by a largely unconscious will to
power.
The battle between the sexes is repeatedly the-
matized in the novel. For instance, Ursula thinks
that Rupert is “a bully like all males,” while he con-
siders her an arrogant “queen bee,” a mother who
desires “to have, to own, to control, and to be domi-
nant”. Rupert also reflects on the “female tyranny” of
Hermione. Similarly, while watching Gerald dance,
Gudrun resolves “to combat him” until one triumphs