A brief historical reprise: I have argued at length in Chapter 1 that the metaphor of inversion—the turning inside out or upside down of desire in relation to gender—constituted the dominant, if not sole, explanatory paradigm by which late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Euro-American culture structured its understanding of both the ontology and the etiology of “homosexuality.” In the paradigmatic instance of the male homosexual or “invert,” this explanatory figure would be reduced to a suspiciously convenient formulation: anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, a female soul/spirit/psyche lodged or encased in a male body. The historical instantiation of this model of same-sex desire entailed the fluctuant and (ultimately only) partial supersession of the precedent model, “sodomy,” whose taxonomic mission was less to define the relation between being and desire than it was to classify and order the relation between bodies and acts. Above all, and in clear contradistinction to the inversion paradigm, the sodomy model did not presuppose, either theoretically or practically, an essential “heterosexual” linkage between an already gendered desire rooted in the depths of the subject (anima muliebris) and the objects of that desire’s gratification; thus the “unnaturality” of sodomy did not lie in the twisted or cross-gendered composition of the subject’s desire, but rather in the “mistaken” way in which the subject chose to lay his, or her, body down.

The cultural deployment of the inversion model was hardly a linear development. Sodomy did not concede overnight, nor was inversion irrevocably installed by the vertical imposition of power. As divergent but copresent sexual taxonomies, sodomy and inversion jostled one another, cheek to jowl, for both discursive space and institutional validation, with the latter model achieving taxonomic dominance largely because of its close filiation with the ascendent discourses and institutions of modernity: medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis. A more than vestigial sodomy is, after all, still with us, especially in statutory law, where the human body remains directly subject to the intervention of the state. Furthermore, the discursive and institutional “implantation” of the inversion model was complicated, but also subtly facilitated, by two modifications that might at first seem to have vitiated or impaired the efficacy of inversion as a model of same-sex desire. First, the language of “homosexuality,” whose origins are roughly contemporaneous with those of “inversion,” would overtake and largely displace the vocabulary (but not the metaphorics) of inversion, whose currency in any event proved more durable in England than elsewhere in Europe or in America, no doubt in part because Havelock Ellis, having entitled his influential volume Sexual Inversion, promoted the term successfully there. But this supplanting of one lexicon by another did not vitiate the figural power of inversion, whose fundamental trope—the notion of a twist or torsion in the alignment between (the gender of) the subject’s desire and (the sex of) his or her body—would continue to operate, pseudonymously but effectively, within the discourse of homosexuality. And second, the obviously rudimentary articulations of the inversion metaphor, especially etiological formulations like the quasibiological anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, would yield over time to more sophisticated psychological, and especially psychoanalytical, permutations, part of whose revisionary effect was to bestow upon inversion the benefit of an afterlife it otherwise could not have enjoyed. Even Freud, who in 1905 disqualified the idea of a “natural” or intrinsic sexuality and severed all but the most arbitrary linkages between “sexual instinct” and “sexual object,” nevertheless continued to deploy both the erotics of inversion and the essentialist gender assumptions behind those erotics.

All of this impinges immediately upon Lawrence’s writing, which wrestles to a fatal draw with exactly these serpentine contradictions regarding homosexual cathexis. Freud was driven to theoretical incoherence, Lawrence to “fundamental equivocation” and narrative violence. For these are the contradictions that inflect the sexual argument of Women in Love and constitute the novel’s interpretive crux: it is from this “tense white knot of flesh” that the narrative unwinds itself so gorgeously, so heterosexually, and finally so murderously. In the published version of the novel, the homotextual problematic surfaces as such in “Man to Man,” the talky chapter that sets up the grunting athleticism, some seventy pages later, of “Gladiatorial.” Having suffered another of his episodic fits of gynephobic revulsion (“It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne him. Man was hers because she had borne him…she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable” [200]), Birkin unloads upon Gerald a pounding lecture about “the slopes of degeneration—mystic, universal degeneration” (204). Gerald, who is just bright enough to play dumb on the subject, remaining in this way the “dark horse to the end,” looks “at Birkin with subtle eyes of knowledge. But he would never openly admit what he felt. He knew more than Birkin, in one direction—much more” (205–6). And then, as if by the solar effect of Gerald’s gaze, “the problem” dawns on Birkin:

Quite other things were going through Birkin’s mind. Suddenly he saw himself confronted with another problem—the problem of love and eter-nal conjunction between two men. Of course this was necessary—it had been a necessity inside himself all his life—to love a man purely and fully. Of course he had been loving Gerald all along, and all along denying it.

He lay in the bed and wondered, whilst his friend sat beside him, lost in brooding. Each man was gone in his own thoughts.

“You know how the old German knights used to swear a Blutbrüderschaft,” he said to Gerald, with quite a new happy activity in his eyes.

“Make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood into the cut?” said Gerald.

“Yes—and swear to be true to each other, of one blood, all their lives.—That is what we ought to do. No wounds, that is obsolete.—But we ought to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it.”

Birkin’s musing here may begin in Platonic abstraction—“the problem of love and eternal conjunction between two men”—but it moves expeditiously enough to the barely effaced, and appropriately Germanic, sexual fantasy of Blutbrüderschaft, the fantasy, obviously, of opening the body and sharing its fluids, implying in turn the subjacent transposition of blood and semen.^[14] And if Birkin is rather quick to subtract his own body from the proposition he is in the process of making (“No wounds, that is obsolete,” he demurs once Gerald-the-literalist has diagrammed, in red crayon, the scene of conjunction), then this subtraction itself presupposes the extension, literally the transfusion, of the body into language—into, that is, the logos of what we now pathetically call “male bonding” (a phrase that, in my ears at least, continues to ring of the hardware store). No “strange conjunction” (148), just promises of same: instead of “rub[bing] each other’s blood into the cut,” Birkin instructs Gerald, “we ought to swear to love each other, you and I…finally, without any possibility of going back on it.” In this retrofantasy, language is first saturated, as if blood could be bled back into words, and then frozen, as if language could hold forever the full charge and discharge of Eros. Words “of one blood.”

The projectile force of this Lawrentian desire impels fantasy well beyond the conversation of Birkin and Gerald. In a letter of August 1916 to Amy Lowell, who had just given him a typewriter, Lawrence implicates first the media of novel writing itself, and then the body of his wife:

I am busy typing out a new novel, to be called Women in Love. Every day I bless you for the gift of the type-writer. It runs so glibly, and has at last become a true confrere. I take so unkindly to any sort of machinery. But now I and the type writer have sworn a Blutbrüderschaft.

We go down and bathe—not the typewriter, but Freida and I. Today there were great rollers coming from the west. It is so frightening, when one is naked among the rocks, to see the high water rising to a threatening wall, the pale green fire shooting along, then bursting into a furious and wild incandescence of foam. But it is great fun. It is so lovely to recognize the non-human elements: to hear the rain like a song, to feel the wind going by one, to be thrown against the rocks by the wonderful water. I cannot bear to see or to know humanity any more. (Letters, 3:645)

It is worth more than a laugh, that tumbling confusion between Freida and the typewriter. Lawrence’s comic sequence may seem benign enough, but consider the phantasmagoria. The simple typing of Women in Love (a task, by the way, that Lawrence soon abandoned) begins as a “glib” exercise in interfluent masculine erotics, the neuter machine having been gendered as a “true confrere” who needn’t balk at an easy Blutbrüderschaft; perhaps the writer’s imagination was piqued by the saturation of the typewriter’s ribbon with ink. However indisputably solid such a machine may be as a physical object, it is, like all physical objects for Lawrence, absolutely susceptible to symbolic appropriation—unstable as water, and light as air. Notice, for instance that in the course of the eight sentences I have just quoted from the letter, the mutability of the machine is adumbrated orthographically; the word typewriter “itself” is spelled in three ways: “type writer,” “type-writer,” and “typewriter”; Lawrence may have been averse “to any sort of machinery,” but the nuts and bolts of language were putty in his hands. And no sooner does the fluid bonding of man and machine achieve its happy apotheosis in Blutbrüderschaft than the paragraph breaks, as the whole passage is dipped, with barely a pause, “into the great rollers coming from the west.” Thus immersed, the typewriter dissolves and emerges by a kind of transsexual magic as…none other than Freida herself, the Magna Mater incarnate, and “naked” to boot. Luckily for everyone involved, the reader too, this vision is immediately eclipsed by apocalytic seas of serendipitous ejaculation, as the strong water “burst[s] into a furious wild incandescence of foam.”^[15]

I am not being facetious. The fantasmatics of desire and gender that frolic “naked among the rocks” in Lawrence’s letter repeat those that operate, in a very different emotional tenor, throughout Women in Love. A recognizable sequence unfolds in both texts, roughly as follows. An irrepressible but nonetheless repressed desire for “eternal conjunction between two men” incites a barely effaced fantasy of sharing bodily fluids, a fantasy that, were it permitted to lip the rim of the genital, we could unproblematically designate as “sodomitical”; the term, with all its anatomical dubiety, would apply precisely. But this fantasy about human bodies is prematurely disembodied. Or rather, it has been arrested in the body of the signifier, literally in the pseudochivalric blah blah of Blutbrüderschaft, which displaces the act sufficiently (“No wounds,” etc., those having become “obsolete”) to shield the implicated males from the untenable anagnorisis of homosexual self-recognition. (Without the “wounds” one may always retreat, via a technical honesty anyway, to the high ground of masculine protest, which in turn predictably generates so much violence between, among, and within men: I, whoever I may be, am not one of “these ‘friends,’ these beetles”; if need be, I will “scotch” them, especially if they are in me.) But the sequestration of desire in an airy discourse of eternal devotion (promises, promises) hardly solves what Birkin correctly thinks of as “the problem,” which remains so acute, and acutely tempting, that some other “solution”—narrative, figural, characterological—must be attempted, if only to redistribute the considerable tensions generated by the conflict between desire and interdiction. In both the novel and the letter Lawrence resorts to the same rhetorical narrative solution; he deploys a metathesis of gender—less technically, an inversion—in which submerged homosexual desire, or a typewriter, resurfaces in (sometimes extra-urgent) heterosexual guise: Freida in the foam, buck naked; Gudrun, fully clothed, spasming to rhythms identical to those driving Birkin’s desire for Gerald—or, in the chilled Latin of the sexological formula, anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa. In each case the gender dynamics are the same: where man was, there woman shall be; cherchez la femme; la donna é mobile. Such is the fraudulent substitution subtending all articulations of the inversion metaphor, which thus refuses to countenance the masculinity of male homosexual desire, a refusal shared, we should note, by Lawrence’s title Women in Love, which silently ingests, all the better to occlude, the open secret of the novel’s secret subject: men in love.

The gender metathesis embedded within the inversion figure entails a specific violence: the elimination of at least one male, either by murder or “castration.” In the sexological formulation, that castration requires no messy instrumentation, neither scalpel nor gelding spoon, since the masculine subject has been handily dispatched via theoretical feminization (no animus virili to disturb the complacency of the equation); and in Lawrence’s comic letter of 1916 his “true confrere,” that mute but pliable typewriter, leaps (or is it pushed?) from the paragraph break into the sea, never to type again: Freida Victrix. Only in Women in Love does Lawrence adequately calculate the destructiveness of this process, and there only equivocally. In sacrificing the character whose radiant maleness so exacerbates Birkin’s nagging “problem,” Lawrence unleashes, with a little help from Gudrun and Loerke, the implacable death drive that crouches within the inversion trope. From the beginning of the narrative, and in direct proportion to the miner’s son’s energy and desirability, this push “for the smash of extinction at the bottom” targets Gerald’s person and Gerald’s body with a sniper’s patient calculation (DP, 280). All the claptrap early on in the novel about Gerald having slain his brother, and therefore presumably deserving the violence that befalls him, provides at best an improbable justification for the itch in the sniper’s finger, which derives rather from the narrative’s “profound but hidden lust” (33) to murder and to be murdered, a reciprocating Todestriebe that anticipates Freud’s own by several years. It is the gratification of this complex lust that charges the closure of Women in Love with its irresistible momentum, thereby providing “the real Russian bang” (the sniper having yielded to his itch) that Schorer so admired. To Gudrun’s ominous question in “Diver”—“where does his go go?” (48)—the novel answers emphatically, unswervingly, “To the Alps—to die.” “Death by perfect cold” (254).

And so Gerald is put on ice; more accurately, put on display as ice, “bluish, corruptible ice,” his once-resplendent body now an “inert mass,” “cold, mute, material” (480). With this “frozen carcase of a dead male” (477) the novel coolly repudiates the possibility that Birkin’s desire might ever warm to adequate human gratification, and it is enough to provoke in Birkin a double, or bifurcated, recollection, one hot and one cold. Memory: “Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand, with a warm, momentous grip of final love. For one second—then let go again, let go forever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered” (480). Counter-memory: “Birkin looked at the pale fingers, the inert mass. He remembered a dead stallion he had seen: a dead mass of maleness, repugnant” (480). (The whole of Women in Love’s murderous homosexual teleology is condensed in this juxtaposition of Birkin’s memories: from “warm, momentous grip” to cold, “pale fingers…inert…repugnant”; from the “gleaming beauty [of] maleness” [14] to “a dead mass of maleness, repugnant.”) But before that stallion’s impressive energies are subdued by the narrative’s deep freeze—the blond stallion, I mean, who drives Gudrun to “strange transport” (15) in “Coal-Dust” when he stupendously dominates the red Arab mare, his “strong, indomitable thighs” “clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure control; a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into unutterable subordination” (113)—before that stallion is subdued by cold, the author requires first that things heat up and then that they melt down. (This is, after all, a Lawrence novel.) This thermal process precipitates the crisis in reading that so disturbed Murry’s poise; for once these couples begin heating up, they also begin melting into each other, couple into couple, thereby compromising (thereby eroticizing) the only distinction upon which the dualistic heterosexual argument of the text has even the ghost of a chance of establishing itself. The line inscribing this difference dissolves in the heat of sex, despite the continuing narrative imperative that the sense of difference—a difference that makes sense—be sustained. This is to say that both couples obsessively “lapse” (crucial Lawrentian process) not just into each other, but also into Women in Love’s swampy language of “flux” and “dissolution,” a tendency about which critics have just as obsessively complained. In one of the best essays ever written on the novel, Leo Bersani, far kinder to Lawrence than most, puts the critical frustration with just the right touch of loving parody: “When the connection is made between two life currents or two death currents, minds ‘go,’ people ‘lapse out’ and ‘swoon,’ they have ‘transports’ and ‘keen paroxysms,’ and the ‘veil’ of ‘ultimate consciousness’ is ‘torn.’ Nothing is more disorienting in Women in Love than the use of such expressions as descriptive narrative accompaniments to the most banal action or the most controlled, unremarkable dialogue.”^[16]

Ever since Murry’s original complaint about x collapsing indiscriminately into y, critical anxiety (more rarely: critical excitation) over trip-wire lapsing and knee-jerk swooning has proceeded largely from sheer cognitive frustration: with both couples lapsing apace, the language of the novel works perversely to block or intermit the fundamental binarism that organizes its plot. If the erotic path represented by Birkin and Ursula leads, by whatever obscure turns, to life and (equivocal) marriage, and that represented by Gudrun and Gerald leads to death and destruction, then the difference between the couples must signify; literally it is vital, the difference between life and death. But it is also virtually illegible, beyond clear specification except in its ultimate effects, and repeatedly undermined both by the writing’s most vigorous energies and by the insistent obscurity of particular sex acts that are after all never very particularly performed (whether by the copulars or their author, who can tell?). Bersani reads this indifference to difference as Lawrence’s major strategy in his war against “the anecdotes of personality,” against conventional notions of a unitary self, however complicated or vexed, whose coherence and intelligibility are grounded in a traceable personal history (example: Paul Morel). In Women in Love, Bersani argues, Lawrence attempts “to destroy the superstructure of personality in order to redefine human beings in terms of their primary impulses to live or to die” (A, 168). As with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a text Bersani also invokes, this is a dualism whose vengeance overrides the vicissitudes of character or person: “Now the impulse to live and the impulse to die are not exactly attributes of personality; rather, they are attempts to enlarge on or to obliterate the very field in which the anecdotes of personality are possible. Personality must therefore be read as a system of signs or of choices which can be deciphered back to a primary choice of life or death” (A, 164). Unimpeachable as far as it goes (farther in this regard than anyone else has yet gone), this argument recalls Lawrence’s own account of his intention at the time of writing; in an oft-cited letter to Edward Garnett, father of the “Dear David” whose impending gayness would drive the novelist to fantasies of “inward corruption” and “triumphant decay,” Lawrence puts his purpose with characteristic vehemence:

You musn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same radically-unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say “diamond, what! This is carbon.” And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.)

You must not say my novel is shaky—It is not perfect, because I am not expert in what I want to do. But it is the real thing, say what you like. And I shall get my reception, if not now, then before long. Again I say, don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, like when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown. (Letters, 2:183–84)

“You musn’t look,” etc. Suppose we resist this authorial directive long enough to focus attention upon the middle ground that intervenes between “the old stable ego of the character,” a mere derivative or epiphenomenon according to this letter of 1914, and its ontological foundation or bedrock, that “same radically-unchanged element” toward which Lawrence would turn his reader’s blinking gaze, much in the manner of the magician who captivates his audience with the loud business in his left hand while he works the real trick silently in his right. What do we find there, wherever there is, in this middle distance, the intervenient space between diamond and carbon? What we find is Lawrence’s deliberately perverse inscription, not exactly what he says he has put there, but rather a version of it: strange “allotropic states” that indeed render individual characters “unrecognizable” and that require “a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states,” not of a “pure single element” (the plain truth of carbon), but rather of a relentless narrative impulsion, a death/sex drive everywhere in the process of gender transference. Allotropic is instructive in this regard. Semantically, it means “having different properties, though unchanged in substance” or essence (OED); such a definition firmly roots the different in the same, thereby exposing transformation as a secondary process whose dazzling operations nonetheless leave the base element or essence “radically-unchanged”: diamonds are but carbon in evening dress.^[17] Etymologically, allotropic indicates a turning or twisting (from the Greek tropos, to turn) toward or through the different (the Greek allos, or other); as such, it suggests a perversion (from the Latin vertere, to turn) that stops just short of the foundation, leaving its homo intact. This compound term thus describes with formidable economy the perverse itinerary that controls this novel’s admitted but admittedly blocked homosexual desire: its desire of the homo for the homo: of the man for the man who stands not merely as himself but also as the representative, even the guarantor, of the same, of the same man, of the man, that is, whose self-sameness must not be overthrown or degraded by the “feminine” cast of his desire. Viciously and ironically, this itinerary ultimately requires that homosexual desire seek its release in the Absolute Other (death, here “by perfect cold”), which after all reduces everything to the same cold mute material, that “inert mass” of “repugnant” dead matter. But the directness of this trajectory is interrupted by a violent detour whose feminine contours I have already suggested: masculine desire must “pass through, as it were” the allotropy of Lawrence’s All-But-Absolute Other, the anima muliebris that haunts his texts: woman, mother, mater, matter, here doubly and duplicitously incarnated in Gudrun and Ursula. Through mater, then, toward matter: toward the “cold, mute Matter” (480) that Gerald finally becomes at novel’s end. Fully feminized by death, Gerald’s “dead mass of maleness” becomes “repugnant” to Birkin’s eye, so much so that Birkin must immediately remember Gerald, contrary to the evidence of his senses and his own previous description, as warm, even warming: “That dead face was beautiful, no one could call it cold, mute, material. No one could remember it without gaining faith in the mystery, without the soul’s warming with new, deep life-trust” (480).

The teleological ferocity of this itinerary—death for some men, hostility toward women, unappeasable homosexual longing in the men who survive—must not be underestimated, especially in a culture whose everyday scenarios continue to play it out with an efficient reflexivity usually called “natural.” Nor can we afford to ignore the serpentine entanglement here between homophobia and misogyny, since the desperation of this itinerary responds to a perceived “feminine” threat. In Lawrence’s fiction at this time, as in the never quite perverse enough logic of inversion, the ever-imperilled male (the male, that is, who must work ceaselessly to erect and sustain an always impossible masculine subjectivity) is open to invasion on two fronts, front and back: from the woman without (her name is legion), and from the woman within (the legion having been condensed into the subject’s own name, say “Dear David”). Not the least of Women in Love’s extraordinary power derives from the blinded lucidity with which the novel both enacts and exposes this oppressive dynamic, which operates simultaneously as a (seemingly essential) truth of (in)human psychology and as a (manifestly artificial) mode of representation. This homophobic appropriation of the feminine (a process by no means reducible to the aberrations of a merely personal psychology) helps to explain, if not to justify, Women in Love’s obsessive thematization of gynephobia and the sometimes flat functionalism of Lawrence’s female characters, here and elsewhere. (Ursula, for instance, too often seems neither the subject nor object of “authentic” desires so much as the formally imposed mouthpiece of the opposition: the woman required by the narrative to kick sand in Birkin’s face.) Lawrence understood, if never quite thoroughly enough, his appropriation of the feminine and was not embarrassed by it: “I don’t care so much about what the woman feels—according to the usage of the word,” he writes just before launching into “allotropic states.” “That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about what the woman is—what she is—inhumanly, physiologically, materially—according to the use of the word: but for me, what she is as a phenomenon (or as representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception” (Letters, 2:183; italics original). And so woman is deployed—“used”—according to the writer’s rhetorical need to represent that “greater, inhuman will,” “according to the use of the word…for me.” Women I have known have questioned the beneficence and legitimacy of this “greater” will, discerning in it, after all the metaphysical huffing and puffing, a formula of sufficient brutality: cunt for cock’s sake.

Or, in my argument, cunt in cock’s place. This modification of the feminist recognition may be put more “professionally”: given the logic of gender substitution governing homoerotic displacement in Women in Love, female genitalia (never of course offered in the pink) will come to represent something other than the specificity of woman’s desire and pleasure, a subject about which Lawrence seemed to believe he knew everything; the vagina and its amazing surround will come to represent, even in its textual ablation, a particular mode of castration anxiety, specifically that which advenes upon a certain male subject when he realizes, or even as he works assiduously not to realize, that his desire may be situated beyond the phallus, or beside it, or astride it, or even no longer in terms of it. (“Life has all kinds of things,” Birkin tells Gerald during their not quite postcoital chat after all the sweating in “Gladiatorial.” “There isn’t only one road” [276].) Suppose this male discovers (with what widening shock he may never be able quite to say) that his pleasure is no longer seated firmly in his cock, or that the focus of his desire is, or has become, the “contour and movement” of men in the street.

All the time, he recognised that, although he was always drawn to women, feeling more at home with a woman than with a man, yet it was for men that he felt the hot, flushing, roused attraction which a man is supposed to feel for the other sex. Although nearly all his living interchange went on with one woman or another, although he was always terribly intimate with at least one woman, and practically never intimate with a man, yet the male physique had a fascination for him, and for the female physique he felt only a fondness, a sort of sacred love, as for a sister.

In the street, it was the men who roused him by their flesh and their manly, vigorous movement, quite apart from all individual character, whilst he studied the women as sisters, knowing their meaning and their intents. It was the men’s physique which held the passion and the mystery to him. The women he seemed to be kin to, he looked for the soul in them. The soul of a woman and the physique of a man, these were the two things he watched for, in the street. (501–2)

The person doing the breathless watching here is the Ur-Birkin of Women in Love’s infamous prologue (appendix 2 in the Cambridge edition), written in the spring of 1916 as the novel’s opening chapter and rejected some months later as Lawrence wrestled once again to subdue his unruly leviathan. Much that is direct and clear-sighted here would become diffused and deflected in the version finally published in 1920. Birkin’s urgent genital response (“hot, flushing, roused”) to the provocation of male flesh, “quite apart from all individual character,” would suffer inflation into the quasimetaphysical problematics of “eternal conjunction between two men”; his “terribly intimate” feminine identification, that affinity with the “meaning and intents” of “the women he seemed to be kin to,” would be transposed into, among other things, his peaky misogyny and lackluster desire for women generally and Ursula particularly; and Lawrence’s recognition that Birkin’s homosexual desire is shadowed by an inverse subjective correlative, a deeply internalized homophobia whose considerable energies drive the novel in its final form to furious closure, would lose the perspicacity that it has here: “This was the one and only secret he kept to himself, this secret of his passionate and sudden, spasmodic affinity for men he saw. He kept this secret even from himself. He knew what he felt, but he always kept the knowledge at bay. His a priori were: ‘I should not feel like this,’ and ‘It is the ultimate mark of my deficiency, that I feel like this’ ” (505; italics original). This analysis of Birkin’s emotional and psychological duplicity is impressively clear. In order to keep a secret from oneself, one must first possess the very knowledge (“He knew what he felt”) that one will then proceed, with a disingenuousness born of genuine desperation, to disown; too dangerous to be allowed to curl around hearth or heart, such knowledge must be kept “at bay” by the effort of a continuous pressure; only in this way may such knowledge be sustained just beyond the horizon of a consciousness too frightened to embrace it openly and too lucid to foreclose it entirely. And as Lawrence also clearly understood, the subjective operations of this duplicity are objectively mandated; that is, they derive from, and continue to incarnate in the form of human feeling, certain culturally specific a prioris.

Among these a prioris are the obvious, such as those that misidentify gay desire as “the ultimate mark of my deficiency,” and the not so obvious, such as those that indicate the path of gendered signification through which such a misidentification must wind its tortuous way. When, for instance, Birkin’s eye scans the street for objects of identification and desire, it proceeds by way of the same binarism that informs the metaphorics of inversion: “The soul of a woman [anima muliebris] and the physique of a man [corpore virili], these were the two things he watched for in the street.” The almost technical specificity of Lawrence’s phrasing here suggests both the broad cultural diffusion of inversion as an explanatory paradigm and Lawrence’s own familiarity with particular textual versions of it.^[18] But Birkin’s erotic gaze is differentiated from the sexological formula by its mode of articulation; the formula proceeds by conjunction or compaction, the gaze by dislocation and dispersion. The two components that the diagnosticians of sexology had so conveniently conjugated (a female soul enclosed in a male body) are disjoined, bifurcated again, in the dissociated field of Birkin’s watching: a soul here and a body there. Here I identify, there I want. Obviously, this splitting does not occasion the “liberation” of homosexual desire, its happy effusion into the drift of the gaze. On the contrary, it dictates a subtler reinscription, under much more complex narrative conditions, of an erotics of inversion within the figure constituted by the novel itself.

Or rather, by the novel as it was about to become. As Lawrence retreated from so direct a vis-à-vis with homosexual desire (a retreat, we should note, just some months subsequent to his visit to Cambridge and the ensuing dreams of black beetles), his narrative would adopt and elaborate the gender trajectory he had already begun to map in his acute analysis of Birkin’s gaze. In Women in Love as finally published, the desires that the prologue so emphatically lodges within Birkin’s “own innate being” (504) have been transported, across gender, into “the soul of a woman” whose body also “just happens” to be female. The result for the narrative is an enabling distortion that may be expressed in another convenient formula, this one my own: where Birkin’s desire had been, there Gudrun’s body shall be; and what this distortion enables is a “fundamental equivocation” much like the one toward which Murry himself had so equivocally gestured. Birkin can sustain the technical nicety of a “true” heterosexuality even as he grapples, however wordily and incompetently, with the problematics of “eternal conjunction” between men, while Gudrun and Gerald can explore, via the gender transposition that Gudrun now literally embodies, the murky sex that Birkin and Gerald can’t quite wrestle themselves into. The subjacent anatomical fantasy operating here, never of course articulated in the text, should be obvious. Gudrun and her (implied) vagina, both repeatedly associated with mud and the Flux of Dissolution, come to substitute for the male subject’s bodily orifices and for the possibility that he might (or worse: might want to) be penetrated, most specifically at the anus, a site so overburdened with desire, pleasure, loathing, and anxiety (just to mention the obvious few) that it must be blocked from direct representation even as it also promises, for exactly the same reasons, to release an overwhelming millenial satisfaction: “floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches” far “deeper than the phallic source” (314). As Bersani suggests apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, such great expectations are a lot to ask from an asshole, “except as a consequence of fantasies which, to begin with, attribute extraordinarily intense affective and moral value to anal pleasure. That is, the explicit value conferred on anal sex [or, as here, its digital complement] makes no sense except as the sign of a more complicated fascination with anality” (A, 172). In Women in Love that “more complicated fascination” infuses, if not everything, then just about everything else, most especially the book’s fundamental heterosexuality, that heavy and funless sexuality that is by no means focused exclusively upon the fundament.

But if not there, then where? If, as Jonathan Dollimore writes, “Lawrence finds ecstasy not in heterosexuality per se but [in] its radical perversion,”^[19] then where shall that perversion root its representations when, at the level of what may be said or shown, the specific loci of the perverse have been, by law or convention or “taste,” already foreclosed? How else, in Lawrence, than by a displacement into frontal violence, a violence that traverses the bestial? Interdiction, whether specific or general, whether internalized within the subject as the murmurings of nature or externally codified in the muscular body of the law, does not produce silence and blankness, or not merely these, but also representation elsewhere and otherwise, representation responsive to the subtle but profound violence of metamorphosis. In “Rabbit,” after having instructed her charge, Winifred Crich, Gerald’s younger sister, to sketch the family pet, Gudrun reaches into the rabbit hutch to remove “the great, lusty” beast and is astounded to discover that, instead of a rabbit, a “thunder-storm…had sprung to being in her hand” (240):

They unlocked the door of the hutch. Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back. There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears…

…Her heart was arrested with fury at the mindlessness and the bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her.

Gerald came round as she was trying to capture the flying rabbit under her arm. He saw, with subtle recognition, her sullen passion of cruelty.

“You should let one of the men do that for you,” he said, hurrying up.

“Oh he’s so horrid!” cried Winifred, almost frantic.

He held out his nervous, sinewy hand and took the rabbit by the ears, from Gudrun.…

The long, demon-like beast lashed out again, spread on the air as if it were flying, looking something like a dragon, then closing up again, inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man’s body, strung to its efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came up in him. Swift as lightning he drew back and brought his free hand down like a hawk on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there came the unearthly, abhorrent scream of a rabbit in the fear of death. It made one immense writhe, tore his wrists and his sleeves in a final convulsion, all its belly flashed white in a whirlwind of paws, and then he had slung it round and had it under his arm, fast. It cowered and skulked. His face was gleaming with a smile.…

Gudrun looked at Gerald with strange, darkened eyes, strained with underworld knowledge, almost supplicating, like those of a creature which is at his mercy, yet which is his ultimate victor. He did not know what to say to her. He felt the mutual hellish recognition. And he felt he ought to say something, to cover it. He had the power of lightning in his nerves, she seemed like a soft recipient of his magical, hideous white fire. He was unconfident, he had qualms of fear.…

She lifted her arm and showed a deep red score down the silken white flesh.

“What a devil!” he exclaimed. But it was as if he had had knowledge of her in the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and soft. He did not want to touch her. He would have to make himself touch her, deliberately. The long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness, letting through the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond. (240–42)

The genius of this passage (which I have truncated mercilessly), and of the great chapter from which it comes, derives from characteristic Lawren-tian strengths: from the way in which the writing catches the sheer animality of the rabbit in its homely facticity and in the extremity of its motion; from the way in which that animality, while being thus materially rendered, is nonetheless also seamlessly insinuated into a complex and contradictory symbolic web whose impalpable filaments ultimately flutter into the “red ether of the beyond, the obscene beyond,” an abstraction that in turn is immediately reincarnated, folded back into “the long red rent of [Gudrun’s] forearm, so silken and soft”; from the way in which the physical action (trying to pick up a rabbit) and its associated dialogue collate and condense the erotic violence that had begun in “Coal-Dust” when Gudrun identified with the red Arab mare being dominated by Gerald and that ends with Gerald’s perplexed submission, in “Snowed-Up,” to a dominatrix whose power he has always felt with an electrifying frisson but never once understood, much less mastered; and, finally, from the way in which the entire chapter, as part of the narrative ensemble, mediates between the chapter that immediately precedes it (“The Industrial Magnate,” in which Gerald’s need to dominate matter receives a highly abstract analysis) and the chapter that immediately follows (“Moony,” in which Birkin’s sexual desperation ignites a parallel scene of “strange conjunction” [148], as Ursula watches her lover, in still another whirring of limbs, stone the reflected face of the moon in Willey Water). All of this is incomparably done, in Lawrence’s casual, offhand manner.

But in “Rabbit” the strangest inflection of all is the homoerotic (but hardly gay) one—an inflection doomed from the beginning to seem “forced,” the compulsory imposition of an obsessive criticism, since in this chapter Birkin is, of course, nowhere to be found, off somewhere, no doubt, being sick or disgusted or bitching at the stars. In any event, not here. Yet what is this scene if not the graphic and spectacular realization, in the wrong body, of Birkin’s desire for Blutbrüderschaft with Gerald? And what is the narrative function of the rabbit (named Bismark!) if not to overwhelm, in a flurry of tremendous kicks, the very civility that mandates the obsolescence and “obscenity” of ritual mutilation, as when men “make a little wound in their arms, and rub each other’s blood into the cut”? “No wounds, that is obsolete,” Birkin reassures Gerald as they consider the exchange that they will never share, but the rabbit’s violence hardly acknowledges such polite considerations—the wounds it inflicts are immediate, multiple, and profuse. Both Gerald and Gudrun are “badly scored,” appropriately enough, at the wrists, although Gudrun appears to be redundantly cut, both at the wrists and along the (whole?) length of her forearm; indeed, Lawrence’s odd use of a preposition suggests that, upon display, Gudrun’s arm, or perhaps her whole being, metamorphoses into a wound, a slit, a gash: “She lifted her arm and showed [Gerald] a deep red score down the silken white flesh…it was as if he had had knowledge of her in the long red rent of the forearm.” The criticism has largely agreed to see a gynephobic and hallucinatory genitality here, a reading obviously encouraged by the heavily thumbed Biblicism of the phrasing “he had had knowledge of her.” And although Gerald and Gudrun do not literally “rub each other’s blood into the cut,” as Gerald says to Birkin, this omission would hardly seem to count, since precisely this ritual is being enacted at the level of the gaze, where the lovers look alternately into each other’s eyes and into each other’s wounds; Gerald even wants to enumerate the cuts—“How many scratches have you?” (242)—as if to say, let me count the ways. The gaze exchanged between Gudrun and Gerald seals a “mutual hellish recognition” that, even as it bypasses words of love, nonetheless perversely fulfills Birkin’s desire “to swear to love each other, you and I, implicitly and perfectly, finally, without any possibility of going back on it” (206–7): “Glancing up at him, into his eyes [Gudrun] revealed again the mocking, white-cruel recognition. There was a league between them, abhorrent to them both. They were implicated with each other in abhorrent mysteries” (242). And again, a page later: “There was a queer, faint, obscene smile over his face. She looked at him and saw him, and knew that he was initiate as she was initiate” (243). Joint initiation, mutual implication, abhorrent league: this diction confirms the recognition that the transposition of Blutbrüderschaft into demonic heterosexuality is being ritually completed, here “with shocking nonchalance” (243). And all thanks to a rabbit.^[20]

One final point, worth underscoring because the chapter closes by repeating its violence, closes, that is, by reopening its wounds, slash after slash, upon Gerald’s person specifically. New wounds open as old wounds are eyed. (In the exchange in gazes in which Gudrun is the transparent master, Gerald merely participates, and a bit blindly.) For as Gerald looks, so is he cut, both inside and out: “the long, shallow red rip [“of” Gudrun’s arm] seemed torn across his own brain, tearing the surface of his ultimate consciousness.” And once more: “He felt again as if she had hit him across the face—or rather, as if she had torn him across the breast, dully, finally” (243). The sheer redundancy of these descriptions obsessively inscribes an oddly gendered violence: if, as seems inescapable, the display of Gudrun’s “deep red score” represents, in a single cut, both the female genitalia and the terror that a man may feel in his own fascination with that cut, then this is a vaginality that Gerald must share, as his own and in his own body; for what Gerald “recognizes,” however dumbly, in the mirror of Gudrun’s slash is nothing other than his own desire to be violated, to be torn, and thereby to abdicate the power that is indissociable from his sense of masculine being and performance—from, we might say, the performance of being masculine. (“You should let one of the men do that for you,” he tells Gudrun just before he takes the rabbit and assumes his wounds.) Furthermore, Gerald receives this recognition not merely as a proleptic anxiety (“I see that this might happen to me”), but as a species of déjà vu: even before he watches, after all, Gerald is already bleeding from analogous wounds, and as he watches he is cut again and again. Caught thus in an overwhelming ocular “league” with Gudrun, even the novel’s incarnation of male beauty and virile power suffers a mocking feminization, “castrated” by a woman whose gaze bespeaks the desire of a man formally absented from the exchange. Gerald, who thus finds himself many leagues beyond his natural depth, is perhaps wise to experience all of this so “dully” and “finally.” In any event, however darkling his recognitions, Gerald “turned aside” (243).