The Alienating Gaze

As D.H. Lawrence's masterpiece and a classic in modernist novels, Women in Love (hereafter abbreviated as WL) is rich and profound in content and unique and original in form. In China, almost all the critical essays interpret its theme as the condemnation of industrial civilization embodied by the hero named Gerald. Suchinterpretation can be said to be at the social level--the novel is a exposure andcriticism of the inhuman capitalist society. This thesis attempts to go deeper to the philosophical level, that is, to interpret the novel as dealing with human basic existential conditions. And the focus is not on Gerald the hero but on the gazing women.Women in Love is a philosophical novel in that it explores some ontological matters. Is human existence conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational, in opposition to reality or in unity with it? Lawrence is deeply concerned with these questions in Women in Love. The theme of WL can be said to be alienation, which is dealt with in A Propos of Lady Chalterley's Lover in terms of apartness and togetherness. Lawrence thinks that human has to go back to its rudimentary conditions of being. With its theme being alienation, Women in Love abounds with frequent and significant descriptions of women's eyes such as "heavy", "leering", and "blue" and Lawrence expressed his negative attitude toward the sense of sight more than once. This thesis attempts to explore the link between alienation and gaze and analyze the existential conditions of the gazing women.The first two parts include introduction of Lawrence's life and general review of WL. The introduction of Lawrence's life is not just a listing of haphazard facts. It aims to draw from the facts two conclusions which are the foundations of the theses' arguments, the first being his experiences of women and his misogyny, the second being his vicissitudes in society and his opposition between the natural selfand the social self. The general review is on the novel's form and content. The novel can be called a dramatic poem as far as its form is concerned and a philosophical novel as far as its content is concerned. The review of its form is necessary because its unique form, which is free from the restriction of traditional plot, allows room for tlie author's description of and comments on women's gaze. And the review of its philosophical content provides a context for understanding the meaning of significant description of women's gaze.The third part serves as a theoretical support for the forth part. From Lawrence's essays and novels, two pairs of antithetical conclusions are drawn: vision is a vice while blindness is a virtue; women are always gazing while men remain blind. The two pairs of conclusions constitute a foundation upon which the argument of this thesis is built.The forth part is the main body of the thesis. It analyses the alienating effects of gaze. First, sight, which is conscious and mental, alienates them from the universe, which for Lawrence is unconscious and irrational. Sight, for Lawrence, produces the self's edges. Seeing thrusts the other away from the self, and thus self-consciousness is created. And sight is used to differentiate and to know. Therefore it is mental and related to logos which Lawrence criticized. Obsessed with vision, Gudrun was often kept in the alienated state of wakefulness by her "glittering" consciousness while her lover was in perfect unconscious sleep. She had nostalgia for the cinema, a visual art whose effect Lawrence thought was neurotic and mental and which Heri Bergson used as a metaphor for the metaphysics. Similarly, Hermione, another alienated woman in WL, must put her animalism in the mirror, also a device for vision as the cinema is, to realize it in her head and make it mental. Alienated by knowledge, Hermione has "a lack of robust self or "a deficiency of being ", a word that echoes Heidegger's "Dasein". Secondly, gaze causes alienation between man and woman. Whereas Birkin tries to forge a relationship of "being together like two balanced...