Women in Love, excerpts

1.
‘You don’t think one needs the EXPERIENCE of having been married?’ she asked.
‘Do you think it need BE an experience?’ replied Ursula.
‘Bound to be, in some way or other,’ said Gudrun, coolly. ‘Possibly undesirable, but bound to be an
experience of some sort.’
‘Not really,’ said Ursula. ‘More likely to be the end of experience.’
(…)
Don’t you find yourself getting bored?’ she asked of her sister. ‘Don’t you find, that things fail to
materialise? NOTHING MATERIALISES! Everything withers in the bud.’
‘What withers in the bud?’ asked Ursula.
‘Oh, everything—oneself—things in general.’ There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered
her fate.
‘It does frighten one,’ said Ursula, and again there was a pause. ‘But do you hope to get anywhere by just
marrying?’

2.
The locomotive chuffed slowly between the banks, hidden. The mare did not like it. She began to wince
away, as if hurt by the unknown noise. But Gerald pulled her back and held her head to the gate. The
sharp blasts of the chuffing engine broke with more and more force on her. The repeated sharp blows of
unknown, terrifying noise struck through her till she was rocking with terror. She recoiled like a spring
let go. But a glistening, half-smiling look came into Gerald’s face. He brought her back again,
inevitably.
(…)
He bit himself down on the mare like a keen edge biting home, and FORCED her round. She roared as
she breathed, her nostrils were two wide, hot holes, her mouth was apart, her eyes frenzied. It was a
repulsive sight. But he held on her unrelaxed, with an almost mechanical relentlessness, keen as a sword
pressing in to her. Both man and horse were sweating with violence. Yet he seemed calm as a ray of cold
sunshine.

3.
Suddenly [Ursula] started. She saw, in the shaft of ruddy, copper-coloured light near her, the face of a
man. It was gleaming like fire, watching her, waiting for her to be aware. It startled her terribly. She
thought she was going to faint. All her suppressed, subconscious fear sprang into being, with anguish.
‘Did I startle you?’ said Birkin, shaking hands with her. ‘I thought you had heard me come in.’
‘No,’ she faltered, scarcely able to speak. He laughed, saying he was sorry. She wondered why it amused
him.
‘It is so dark,’ he said. ‘Shall we have the light?’
(later in the book)
He stood there in his strange, whole body that had its marvelous fountains, like the bodies of the sons of
God who were in the beginning. There were strange fountains of his body, more mysterious and potent
than any she had imagined or known, more satisfying, ah, finally, mystically-physically satisfying. She
had thought there was no source deeper than the phallic source. And now, behold, from the smitten rock
of the man’s body, from the strange marvellous flanks and thighs, deeper, further in mystery than the
phallic source, came the floods of ineffable darkness and ineffable riches.

4.
Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a strange palpitating
dance towards the cattle, lifting her body towards them as if in a spell, her feet pulsing as if in some little
frenzy of unconscious sensation, her arms, her wrists, her hands stretching and heaving and falling and
reaching and reaching and falling, her breasts lifted and shaken towards the cattle, her throat exposed as
in some voluptuous ecstasy towards them (…) She could feel them (the cows) just in front of her, it was
as if she had the electric pulse from their breasts running into her hands. Soon she would touch them,
actually touch them. A terrible shiver of fear and pleasure went through her. (…)
‘Hue! Hi-eee!’ came a sudden loud shout from the edge of the grove. The cattle broke and fell back quite
spontaneously, went running up the hill, their fleece waving like fire to their motion. Gudrun stood
suspended out on the grass, Ursula rose to her feet.
It was Gerald and Birkin come to find them, and Gerald had cried out to frighten off the cattle.

5.
‘The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening
all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels
thronging. But the other is our real reality—‘
‘But what other? I don’t see any other,’ said Ursula.
‘It is your reality, nevertheless,’ [Birkin] said; ‘that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us
just as the other rolls—the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this—our sea-born
Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.’
‘You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?’ asked Ursula.
‘I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,’ he replied. ‘When the stream of synthetic
creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation.
Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution—then the snakes and swans and lotus—
marsh-flowers—and Gudrun and Gerald—born in the process of destructive creation.’
(…)
‘You are a devil, you know, really,’ she said. ‘You want to destroy our hope. You WANT US to be
deathly.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I only want us to KNOW what we are.’

6.
‘A freak!’ exclaimed Gerald, startled. And his face opened suddenly, as if lighted with simplicity, as
when a flower opens out of the cunning bud. ‘No—I never consider you a freak.’ And he watched the
other man with strange eyes that Birkin could not understand. ‘I feel,’ Gerald continued, ‘that there is
always an element of uncertainty about you—perhaps you are uncertain about yourself. But I’m never
sure of you. You can go away and change as easily as if you had no soul.’
He looked at Birkin with penetrating eyes. Birkin was amazed. He thought he had all the soul in the
world. He stared in amazement. And Gerald, watching, saw the amazing attractive goodliness of his eyes,
a young, spontaneous goodness that attracted the other man infinitely, yet filled him with bitter chagrin,
because he mistrusted it so much. He knew Birkin could do without him—could forget, and not suffer.
This was always present in Gerald’s consciousness, filling him with bitter unbelief: this consciousness of
the young, animal-like spontaneity of detachment. It seemed almost like hypocrisy and lying,
sometimes, oh, often, on Birkin’s part, to talk so deeply and importantly.
Quite other things were going through Birkin’s mind. Suddenly he saw himself confronted with
another problem—the problem of love and eternal 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.

7.
Ursula stayed at the Mill with Birkin for a week or two. They were both very quiet.
‘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.

8.
‘God cannot do without man.’ It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is
false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These
monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way
the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal
creative mystery could dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created being. Just as the horse has
taken the place of the mastodon.
It was very consoling to Birkin, to think this. If humanity ran into a ‘cul de sac’ and expended itself, the
timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more
lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation. The game was never up. The mystery of creation
was fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible, forever. Races came and went, species passed away, but ever
new species arose, more lovely, or equally lovely, always surpassing wonder(…) Human or inhuman
mattered nothing. The perfect pulse throbbed with indescribable being, miraculous unborn species.