698 Lawrence, Jerome, and Robert E. Lee
this need a “perversity” and cannot understand why
she is not enough for him. While Rupert often
indicates that his desire for men is simply a need for
male friendship, Lawrence clearly suggests that it is
homoerotic.
An early if indirect indication of this homoeroti-
cism occurs after Hermione assaults Rupert with a
ball of lapis lazuli. Disgusted with Hermione and
women in general, Rupert wanders through a val-
ley, removes his clothes, and proceeds to walk “to a
clump of young fir-trees, that were no higher than
a man.” What follows is a symbolic homoerotic
experience with the fir-trees: the “soft sharp boughs
beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against
them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly,
and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp
needles.” In addition, “a thistle . . . pricked him viv-
idly.” Rupert also clasps “the silvery birch-trunk” to
feel “its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and
ridges.” The experience leaves him feeling that he
“did not want a woman—not in the least.”
A more direct representation of homoeroticism
is evident later when Rupert and Gerald wrestle in
the nude. As the two fuse into a “tense white knot
of flesh,” Rupert’s “great subtle energy” attempts to
“penetrate” Gerald’s body, to fuse them into “one-
ness.” The insistent repetition of the word “pen-
etrate” carries obvious homoerotic overtones, and
the reiteration of the word “knot” echoes the earlier
scene with the fir-trees. In the end, Rupert and Ger-
ald clasp hands, each thinking that the “wrestling
had some deep meaning to them—an unfinished
meaning.”
The novel concludes with Rupert mourning
the death of Gerald, as he argues again with Ursula
about his need to love a man. Ending the novel in
this way, Lawrence suggests that the relationship
between Rupert and Gerald may be the real focus
of the novel, not their relationships to Ursula and
Gudrun. Reinforcing this position is Lawrence’s
suggestion that the heterosexual relationships are
Oedipal in some way. Rupert thinks of Ursula as
an oppressive “queen bee” or “Great Mother,” while
Gerald seeks solace from Gudrun like “an infant . . .
at its mother’s breast.” Perhaps the aggressive behav-
ior toward women seen in both Gerald and Rupert
is simply a function of their repressed homosexuality.
What is clear, in any case, is that Lawrence perceives
himself to be exploring the topic of sexuality at a
time when traditional Western sexual mores are no
longer acceptable. Rupert, in particular, is trying to
negotiate relationships with Ursula and Gerald for
which he has no precedents. He is trying to take
the “love-and-marriage ideal from its pedestal,” to
do away with “the exclusiveness of married love,”
and “to admit the unadmitted love of man for man,”
to create “a greater freedom for everybody, a greater
power of individuality both in men and women.”
The novel’s conclusion leaves these complex issues
unresolved.
Mitchell R. LewisLaWrEnCE, jEromE, anD
robErT E. LEE Inherit the Wind
(1955)
Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s play Inherit
the Wind has become a standard of American drama.
Inspired by the trial of Tennessee schoolteacher
John Scopes, who was charged under a Tennessee
law that forbade the teaching of evolutionary theory
in schools, the play chronicles a titanic struggle
for free speech and free thought as lawyers Henry
Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady argue
over Scopes’s fate.
Though Scopes is in the middle of the plot,
Drummond occupies its moral and thematic cen-
ter. Drummond is the play’s model for tolerance,
healthy skepticism, and reasoned faith. He is at
once a crusader against bigotry while at the same
time finding the compassion to understand, and
even admire, what is noble in the bigots he fights
against. In his most powerful speech Drummond
declares that an “idea is a greater monument than
a cathedral,” a notion that summarizes the play as
a whole. The greatness of humanity, Lawrence and
Lee suggest, is in its ability to fashion transcendent
concepts, enduring ways of understanding the world.
The physical things of the world are transitory and
fleeting by comparison.
But though ideas may be monuments, they
should not, the authors imply, be monolithic and
unchanging. Instead, the play calls on us to cherish
our ideas even as we critique them. When Drum-