Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 981
Women wanted freedom. The result is a hollowness, an emptiness which frightens the stoutest heart. Women then turn to women for love. But that doesn’t last. It can’t. whereas the emptiness persists and persists.
The love of humanity is gone, leaving a great gap. The cosmic consciousness has collapsed upon a great void. The egoist sits grinning furtively in the triumph of his own emptiness. And now what is woman going to do? Now that the house of life is empty, now that she’s thrown all the emotional furnishing out of the window, and the house of life, which is her eternal home, is empty as a tomb, now what is dear forlorn woman going to do?
“To me, dancing,” said Romeo, “is just making love to music.”
“That’s why you never will dance with me, I suppose,” relied Juliet.
“Well, you know, you are a bit too much of an individual.”
And really, surely this is all to the good. If the young don’t really like copulation, then they are safe. As for marriage, they will marry, according to their grandmothers’ dream, for quite other reasons. Our grandfathers, or great- grandmothers, married crudely and unmusically, for copulation. That was the actuality. So the dream was all of music. The dream was the mating of two souls, to the faint chiming of the Seraphim. We, the third and fourth generation, we are the dream made flesh. They dreamed of a marriage with all things gross- meaning especially copulation- left out, and only the pure harmony of equality and intimate companionship remaining. And the young live out the dream. They marry: they copulate in a perfunctory and halfdisgusted fashion, merely to show they can do it. And so they have children. But the marriage is made to music, the gramophone and the wireless orchestrate each small domestic art, and keep up the jazzing jig of connubial felicity, a felicity of companionship, equality, forbearance, and mutual sharing of everything the married couple have in common. Marriage set to music! The worn- out old serpent in this musical Eden of domesticity is the last, feeble instinct for copulation, which drives the married couple to clash upon the boring organic differences in one another, and prevents them from being twin souls in almost identical bodies. But we are wise and soon learn to leave the humiliating act out altogether. It is the only wisdom.
To the music one should dance, and dancing, dance. The Etruscan young woman is going gaily at it, after two thousand five hundred years. She is not making love to music, nor is the dark- limbed youth, her partner. She is just dancing her very soul into existence, having made an offering on one hand to the lively phallus of man, on the other hand, to the shut womb- symbol of woman, and put herself on real good terms with both of them. So she is quite serene, and dancing herself as a very fountain of motion and of life, young man opposite her dancing himself the same, in contrast and balance, with just the double flute to whistle round their naked heels.
And I believe this is, or will be, the dream of our pathetic, music- stunned young girl of today, and the substance of her children’s children, unto the third and fourth generation.
The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.
For, of course, just as there are many men in the world, there are many masculine theories of what women should be. But men run to type, and it is the type, not the individual, that produces the theory, or ‘ideal ’ of woman. Those very grasping gentry, the Romans, produced a theory or ideal of the matron, which fitted in very nicely with the Roman property lust. ‘Caesar’s wife should be above suspicion.’ – So Caesar’s wife kindly proceeded to be above it, no matter how far below it the Caesar fell. Later gentlemen like Nero produced the ‘fast theory of woman, and later ladies were fast enough for everybody. Dante arrived with a chaste and untouched Beatrice, and chaste and untouched Beatrices began to march self-importantly through the centuries. The Renaissance discovered the learned woman, and learned women buzzed mildly into verse and prose. Dickens invented the child-wife, so child- wives have swarmed ever since. He also fished out his version of the chaste Beatrice, a chaste but marriageable Agnes. George Eliot imitated this pattern, and it became confirmed. The noble woman, the pure spouse, the devoted mother took the field, and was simply worked to death. Our own poor mothers were this sort. So we younger men, having been a bit frightened of our noble mothers, tended to revert to the child- wife. We weren’t very inventive. Only the child- wife must be a boyish little thing- that was the new touch we added. Because young men are definitely frightened of the real female. She’ s too risky a quantity. She is too untidy, like David’s Dora. No, let her be a boyish little thing, it’s safer. So a boyish little thing she is.’
There are, of course, other types. Capable men produce the capable woman ideal. Doctors produce the capable nurse. Business the capable secretary. And so you get all sorts. You can produce the masculine sense of honour in women, if you want to. There is also the eternal secret ideal of men- the prostitute. Lots of women live up to this idea, just because men want them to.
And so, poor woman, destiny makes away with her. It isn’t that she hasn’t got a mind- she has. She’s got everything that man has. The only difference is that she asks for a pattern. Give me a pattern to follow! That will always be woman’s cry. Unless of course she has already chosen her pattern quite young, them she will declare she is herself absolute, and no man’s idea of women has any influence over her.
Now the real tragedy is not that women ask and must ask for a pattern of womanhood. The tragedy is not, even, that men give them such abominable patterns, child- wives, little- boy- baby= face girls, perfect secretaries, noble spouses, self-sacrificing mothers, pure women who bring forth children in virgin coldness, prostitutes who just make themselves low, to please men; all the atrocious patterns of womanhood that men have supplied to woman; patterns all perverted from any real natural fullness of a human being. Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby- face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopedia, an ideal, or an obscenity; the one thing he won’ t accept her as, is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex.
And, of course, women love living up to strange pattern, weird patterns- the more uncanny the better. What could be more uncanny than the present pattern of the Eton- boy girl with flower- like artificial complexion? It is just weird. And for its very weirdness women like living up to it. what can be more gruesome than the little- boy- face pattern? Yet the girls take it on the avidity.
What a man has to do to- today is to admit, at last, that all these fixed ideas are no good. As a fixed object, even as an individuality or a personality, no human being, so they may as well leave it alone. As soon as anybody, a man or woman, becomes a great I AM, he becomes nothing. Man or woman, each is a flow, a flowing life. And without one another, we can’t flow , just as a river cannot flow without banks. A woman is one bank of the river of my life, and the world is the other. Without the two shores, my life would be a marsh. It is the relationship to woman, and to my fellow men, which makes me myself a river of life. And it is this, even, that gives me my soul. A man who has never had a vital relationship to any other human being doesn’t really have a soul. We cannot feel that Immanuel Kant ever had a soul. A soul is something that forms and fulfills itself in my contacts, my living touch with people I have loved or hated or truly know. I am born with the clew to my soul. The wholeness of my soul I must achieve. And by my soul I mean my wholeness. What we suffer from today is the lack of a sense of our own wholeness, or completeness, which is peace. What we lack, what the young lack, is a sense of being whole in themselves. They feel so scrappy, they have no peace. And by peace I don’t mean inertia, but the flowing of life, like a river.
We lack peace because we are not whole. And we are not whole because we have known only a tithe of the vital relationships we might have had, we live in an age which believes in stripping away the relationship. Strip them away, like an onion, till you come to pure, or blank nothingness. Emptiness. That is where most men have come now: to a knowledge of their own complete emptiness. They wanted so badly to be ‘themselves’ that they became nothing at all: or next to nothing.
It is not much fun, being next to nothing. And life ought to be fun, the greatest fun, not merely ‘having a good time,’ in order to ‘get away from yourself.’ But real fun in being yourself. Now there are two great relationships possible to human beings: the relationship of man to woman, and the relationship of man to man. As regards both, we are in a hopeless mess.
And what is sex, after all, but the symbol of the relation of man to woman, woman to man? And the relation of man to woman is wide as all life. It consists in infinite different flows between the two beings, different, even apparently contrary. Chastity is part of the flow between man and woman, as to physical passion. And beyond these, an infinite range of subtle communication which we know nothing about. I should say that the relation between any two decently married people changes profoundly every few years, often without their knowing anything about it; though every change causes pain, even if it brings a certain joy. The long course of marriage is a long event perpetual change, in which a man and a woman mutually build up their souls and make themselves whole. It is like rivers flowing on, though new country, always unknown.
But we are so foolish, and fixed by our limited ideas. A man says: ‘ I don’t love my wife any more, I no longer want to sleep with her.’ But why should he always want to sleep with her? How does he know what other subtle and vital interchange is going on between him and her, making them both whole, in this period when he doesn’t want to sleep with her? And she, instead of jibbing and saying that all is over and she must find another man and get a divorce- why doesn’t she pause, and listen for a new rhythm in her soul, and look for the new movement in the man ? with every change, a new being emerges, a new rhythm, establishes itself; we renew our life as we grow older, and there is real peace. Why oh, why do we want one another to be always the same, fixed, like a menu card that is never changed?
If only we had more sense. But we are held by a few fixed ideas, like sex, money, what a person “ought” to be, and so forth, and we miss the whole of life. Sex is a changing thing, now alive, now quiescent, fiery, now apparently quite gone, quite gone. But the ordinary man and woman haven’t the gumption to take it in all its changes. They demand crass, crude sex- desire, they demand it always, and when it isn’t forthcoming, then- smash- bash! Smash up the whole show. Divorce! Divorce!
However! We take it, I assume, that pornography is something base, something unpleasant. In short, we don’t like it. and why don’t we like it? Because it arouses sexual feelings?
I think not. No matter how hard we may pretend otherwise, most of us rather like a moderate rousing of our sex. It warms us, stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day. After a century or two of Puritanism, this is still true of most people. Only the mob-habit of condemning any form of sex is too strong to let us admit it naturally. And there are, of course, many people who are genuinely repelled by the simplest and most natural stirrings of sexual feeling. But these people are perverts who have fallen into hatred of their fellow men: thwarted, disappointed, unfulfilled people, of whom, alas, our civilization contains so many. And they nearly always enjoy some unsimple and unnatural form of sex excitement, secretly.
The whole question of pornography seems to me a question of secrecy. Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things. Secrecy has always an element of fear in it, amounting very often to hate. Modesty is gentle and reserved. Today, modesty is thrown to the wind, even in the presence of the grey guardians. But secrecy is hugged, being a vice in itself. And the attitude of the grey ones is: Dear young ladies, you may abandon all modesty, so long as you hug your dirty little secret.
This ‘dirty little secret ’ has become infinitely precious to the mob of people today. It is a kind of hidden sore or inflammation which, when rubbed or scratched, gives off sharp thrills that seem delicious. So the dirty little secret is rubbed and scratched more and more, till it becomes more and more secretly inflamed, and the nervous and psychic health of the individual is more and more impaired. One might easily say that half the love novels and half the love films today depend entirely for their success on the secret rubbing of the dirty little secret. You can call this sex excitement if you like, but it is sex excitement of a secretive, furtive sort, quite special. The pain and simple excitement, quite open and wholesome, which you find in some Boccaccio stories is not for a minute to be confused with the furtive excitement aroused by rubbing the dirty little secret in all secrecy in modern best- sellers. This furtive, sneaking, cunning rubbing of an inflamed spot in the imagination is the very quick of modern pornography, and it is a beastly and very dangerous thing. You can’t so easily expose it, because of its very furtiveness and its sneaking cunning. So the cheap and popular modern love novel and love film flourishes and is even praised by moral guardians, because you get the snaking thrill fumbling under all the purity of dainty underclothes, without one single gross word to let you know what is happening.
Then secondly, in his adventure of self- consciousness a man must come to the limits of himself and become aware of something beyond him. A man must be self- conscious enough to know his own limits, and to be aware of that which surpasses him. What surpasses me is the very urge of life that is within me, and this life urges me to forge myself and to yield to the stirring half- born impulse to smash up the vast lie of the world, and make a new world. If my life is merely to go on in a vicious circle of self enclosure, masturbation self- consciousness, it is worth nothing to me. If my individual life is to be enclosed within the huge corrupt lie of society today, purity and the dirty little secret, then it is worth not much to me. Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies. It is first, freedom from lies. It is first, freedom from myself, from the lie of myself, from the lie of my all importance, even to myself; it is freedom from the self- conscious masturbating thing I am, self- enclosed. And second, freedom from the vast lie of the social world, the lie of purity and the dirty little secret. And the other monstrous lies under the cloak of this one primary lie. The monstrous lie of money lurks under the cloak of purity. Kill the purity lie, and the money lie will be defenceless.
And that is the whole point. We are today, as today, as human beings, evolved and cultured for far beyond the taboos which are inherent in our culture. This is a very important fact to realize. Probably, to the Crusaders, mere words were potent and evocative to a degree we can’t realize. The evocative power of the so- called obscene words must have been very dangerous to the dim- minded, obscure, violent natures of the Middle Ages, and perhaps is still too strong for slow- minded, half- evoked lower today. But real culture makes us give to a word only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind, and savers us from violent and indiscriminate physical functions, without getting all messed up with physical reactions that overpowered him. It is no longer so. Culture and civilization have taught us to separate the reactions. We now know the act does not necessarily follow on the thought. In fact, thought and action, word and deed, are two separate forms of consciousness, two separate lives which we lead. We need, very sincerely, to keep a connection. But while we in thought we cannot really act, and while we are in action we cannot really think. The two conditions, of thought and action, are mutually exclusive. Yet they should be related in harmony.
Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.
And it is obvious, there is no balance and no harmony now. the body is at the best the tool of the mind, at the worst, the toy. The business man keeps himself ‘fit,’ that is, keeps his body in good working order, for the sake of his business, and the usual young person who spends much time on keeping fit does so as a rule out of self- conscious self – absorption, narcissism. The mind has a stereotyped set of ideas and ‘feelings,’ and the body is made to act up, like a trained dog: to beg for sugar, whether it wants sugar or whether it doesn’t, to shake hands when it would dearly like to snap the hand it has to shake. The body of men and women today is just a trained dog. And of no one is this more true than of the free and emancipated young. Above all, their bodies are the bodies of trained dogs. And because the dog is trained to do things the old- fashioned dog never did, they call themselves free, full of real life, the real thing.
But they know perfectly well it is false. Just as the business man knows, somewhere, that he’s all wrong. Men and women aren’t really dogs: they only look like it and behave like it. somewhere inside there is a great chagrin and a gnawing discontent. The body is, in its spontaneous natural self, dead or paralysed. It has only the secondary life of a circus dog, acting up and showing off: and then collapsing.
What life could it have, of itself? the body’s life is the life of sensations and emotions. The body feels real hunger, real thirst, real joy in the sun or the snow, real pleasure in the smell of roses or the look of a lilac bush; real anger, real sorrow, real love, real tenderness, real warmth, real passion, real hate, real grief. All the emotions belong to the body, and are only feel a mental excitement. Then, hours after, perhaps in sleep, the awareness may reach the bodily centres, and true grief wrings the heart.
Our education from the start has taught us a certain range of emotions, what to feel and what not to feel, and how to feel the feelings we allow ourselves to feel. All the rest is just non- existent.
