Question- What are relationship between the works of Lawerence and Nietzschean philosophy 'In women in Love.' novel?

Answer -

The relationship between the works of Lawerence and the Philosophy of Nietzsche has sustained discussion by a number of critics Nietzschean issues of selfhood, power and will in other words, to what might be termed concerns driving from the individual.

Gerald's identification with power could be seen to mark him out as the most obisiously Nietzschean character in woman in love, due to several Lawerencian characters of physical coercion, which, again, merge human character and the natural world. Gerald forces his more to by a railway gate during the loud passage of a goods train, and despite her frightened.

Convulsions, restrains the horse. 'almost as she were part of his own physique'. The most prominent of such links is that joining him to water and the second glimpse Gudrun has of Gerald is in diver. Seeing him swimming at willy water, she stands; as if fascinated motionless by a man who exult. Himself because of own advantage, his possession of a world to himself in his isolation in the new element unquestioned and unconditioned. Later in 'Water-Party', Gerald submerges himself again, in the unsuccessful attempt to save Diana Crich and Dr. Brindell, emerging from the lake like a water rata like a seal's interestingly, his hand by this point has been infined - I trapped it in some machinery by the same cogs of industrialism that will later represent his domination over the miner-workers. After being helped from the water by Birkin, he is 'slack and motionless in the boat, his head blunt and blind like a seal's his whole appearance in human, unknowing.

The resonance of a Nietzschean will to power in Gerald might be seen as further rainforced by the extent to which the miners. Gerald's actions may result in an absolute display of control that might be seen in terms of a Nietzschean triumph of the will to power, but this comes at the expense of reducing, eventually, his ability to control Gudrun and finally, in his violent attack on Loerke late in the novel and subsequent wandering to his death, the ability to control himself.

When viewing women love in Nietzschean terms, Gerald might be seen as connected to ideas of European disintegration, and his responsibility for an industralised dehumanisation as representative of the wider cruelty of world war I that lurks in the background throughout the novel. However, Gerald can not be seen as an exact or complete figuration of Nietzschean thought with in women in love, as his simultaneous identification with power and the joyful, perhaps even festive imposition of cruel force (his journey by motor car through the groups of workers have the air of ritual about them) also places him within Nietzsche's conception of the pre-moralised. 'nobles' existing before the rise of Socratic thought, Christian and Kantian moralities and the rise of such unhealthy decodence. Whilst Gerald can be linked to Nietzschean thought within Lawerence's novel, and whilst the natural world is and essential part of such connection, It is impossible to regard Lawerence's character as an Nietzshe's philosphy.

Indeed the 'Mino' chapter of women in love contains an over attembt by Lawerence to differentiate himself from Nietzschean thought, in that Rupert Birkin's assumption of male superiority in the behaviour of the Mino Cat toward females is, for Ursula.

Will to power is nothing less than the ultimate metaphysical principal of Nietzschean philosphy, the ground of all being and in human life all its activity is unconsious.

Whilst Nietzschean ideas within women in love from an essential part of the novel's treatment of life, of nature and of the organic and further more, can be excluded from any apporach to the novel from an ecocritical perspective, Lawerence. Lawerence does not fully identify himself with the philospher.

In the closing chapters of the novel, both main female characters in fact, provide a balance to the more agreessive Nietzschean assertions of Gerald and Birkin.

Gurdrun's change of heart, however does not preclude the continued existence of a Nietzschean-morality after all, it is not power itself that she flees, but Gerald's specific embodiment of such force.

Whilst nature and the organic in women in love can be related to organicist concepts also used to provide fertile philosphical ground for Nazism, Lawerence's novel like Nietzsche's ideas do not and can not be made to cancel each other. Out like acid and alkali, in a process of neutralisation, but persent, rather, in worrying proximity.

...Prev | Next...