Introduction

1Logic is the study of the principles of deductive reasoning and can be considered as a valid system, or mode of reasoning. Lawrence used the phrase “logic of emotions” before it became a buzz phrase for neurobiologists and other experts, and opposed it to the complementary “logic of reason.” In “Give her a Pattern” (Phoenix II), written in 1929, Lawrence states quite openly the distinction he makes between the logic of reason and the logic of emotion as embodied by men and women, at the same time establishing a gender difference between the two. He says:

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.
[...] Women are not fools. They have their own logic, even if it’s not the masculine sort. Women have the logic of emotion, men have the logic of reason. The two are complementary and mostly in opposition. But the woman’s logic of emotion is no less real and inexorable than the man’s logic of reason. It only works differently.
[...] Whereas men are fools. They are based on a logic of reason, or are supposed to be. And then, they go and behave, especially with regard to women, in a more than feminine unreasonableness. ( PII 535-37)

2In Women in Love, written some ten years earlier than the above, Gudrun and Lœrke reflect on love:

“[...] Women and love, there is no greater tedium,” he cried.
She was slightly offended. And yet, this was her own basic feeling. Men, and love—there was no greater tedium.
“I think the same,” she said” (WL 458)

• 2 “How We Judge an Emotion as Valid,” Sarah L. Hutson-Comeaux and Janice R. Kelly, http://link.spring (...)

Women and men hold similar gender stereotypes about emotionality. Emotionality is typically associated with women; that is, people believe that women are more emotional than men. [...] women were perceived to express emotions more than men were, but few differences were found to exist in the perception of men’s and women’s emotional experience. [...] even though participants believed that the same situation would elicit similar feelings in men and women, they perceived large gender differences in women’s and men’s expression of that emotion. [...] it appears that the consistent gender differences in the emotion stereotype literature are based on beliefs about the expression of emotion more than they are on beliefs about the emotional experience.2

4It seems there is a common emotional experience, a common logic of emotion, even if faulty or illogical, that leads characters to rationalization and decision-making, whether male or female, hinting at a certain bisexual logic of emotions, something akin to the co-existence of sexuality and thought. To quote Julia Kristeva—“ Il n’y a pas langage d’homme d’un côté et langage de femme de l’autre, raison d’homme d’un côté, raison de femme de l’autre [...] mais “coprésence de la sexualité et de la pensée,” (Kristeva 196-197) a kind of mental bisexuality. Indeed, a close textual analysis of emotions and their expression in the novel does not give evidence of gender differences but rather of universal human emotions and conflicting illogical patterns of emotions that help the characters to make vital decisions through a complicated process, an emotional reasoning that works differently from deductive reasoning and could therefore be called “illogical logic,” that is, contradicting or disregarding the principles of logic, not following logical principles or reasoning. In Women in Love, male and female characters are prone to being prey to violent emotions that make them “act crazy,” or deviate from so-called normal composure or state of mind (“In a culture where it is common to regard “composure” as a person’s “normal state,” phenomena such as joy, despair, shame, or fear may indeed be viewed as a “departure” from the normal, “baseline state.” Wierzbicka 25) As such, their emotions can be “regarded as a dangerous threat to morality and rationality.” They can also be considered as a “powerful source of our capacity for self-deception,” to quote Ronald de Sousa. But this deviation from the norm is also an “avenue to self-knoWLedge” since “knowing one’s own repertoire of emotional responses” is essential in this process.

5I have tried to study the characters’ specific emotions of love and anger even though they are sometimes difficult to differentiate, and will then focus on the illogical logic of emotions as expressed in several passages that lead to apparently paradoxical conflict resolution and decision-making.

Women and Men in Love and Anger: Emotions and their Metaphorical Expression

7Now let us focus on several occurrences of love and anger in the novel that more often than not tend to overlap and intermingle—with the notable exception of Ursula’s emotion metaphors, both in what she experiences and what she elicits in others, especially Birkin.

8Indeed, Ursula’s emotions of love and anger are consistent, and one could say logical. Her love metaphors are mostly characterized by opening, burning, flowing or flying metaphors with a spatial dimension or bodily orientation in space, as well as flower similes, also corresponding to an upright position evocative of love and joy. In the “Excurse” chapter, “new eyes were opened in her soul” (WL 312); for Birkin, she is “like a fresh, luminous flower, glinting faintly golden with the dew of the first light” or “the silent delight of flowers,” (313) “a paradisal flower,” “a flower of luminousness” (314). Later in “Continental,” the same images apply: “Her heart is full of the most wonderful light, golden like a honey of darkness,” her face “like a flower that grows near the surf” (388); still further on, in “ Snow,” Ursula in love feels “like a bird flying in the air,” with “her voice soaring out,” “like the motion of a bird’s wings that is up in the wind, [...], she played with sentimentality, [...] full of a conceit of emotion and power,” she is “dilated and brilliant, like a flower in the morning sun, [...] her veins all golden” (407). Emotion is mixed with the notions of sentimentality and power, which is an interesting development given the negative undertone Lawrence attributes to the terms sentiment and sentimentality - lower, superficial forms of emotion. Ursula’s love for Birkin can turn to hate, fuelled by anger, and the images of flow, movement and light are then turned into images of crystallization and fixedness: “Ursula felt such a poignant hatred of him, that all her brain seemed turned into a sharp crystal of fine hatred. Her whole nature seemed sharpened and intensified into a pure dart of hate. [...] the most poignant and ultimate hatred, pure and clear and beyond thought.” Her hate is “gem-like,” “a diamond” (198). Later, “in the stress of her violent emotion,” she feels a “flame,” a “flash” of anger running through her and her eyes are “blazing like a tiger’s”(197). Flower and gem images, as the two extreme metaphorical expressions of Ursula’s emotions are the “fleur ouverte” and “coquillage clos” images that correspond to the “jouissance florale” or “frigidité impénétrable” quoted by Kristeva concerning Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of flowers and oysters as representative of woman (Kristeva 150)

9Unlike Ursula, Hermione’s love emotion consistently combines with hate and anger, and is characterized by images of dissolution, decentralization and darkness. She forever feels “dissolution setting-in in her body,” suffering from “the ghastliness of dissolution,” with “no presence, no connection,” “full of sepulchral darkness” (WL 89). The best example involving Hermione is her anger at Birkin in the lapis lazuli paperweight scene. There is indeed a fine pattern of emotion metaphors, difficult to unravel, as if hate and anger give her energy and dynamism which love can never bring her. If love fills her with emptiness and darkness, hate and anger on the contrary move her in dynamic and violent waves (104). Hermione in anger struggles against tension and chaos, “as a swimmer is struggling with the swirling water.” Her climactic, voluptuous gesture of anger - crashing the paperweight on Birkin’s head - is more like the sexual thrill of orgasm, “delight,” “delirium of pleasure,” “consummation of voluptuous ecstasy,” “unutterable satisfaction” (105).

10Quite surprisingly, the number of love/ anger references is high in connection with Gerald, with reference to either Minette or Gudrun. Gerald’s emotional states are often depicted in detail, with numerous references to electricity, from a “spark” as soon as he sees her, to a full, “black electric flow.” Under her ambiguous gaze, Gerald “felt full of strength, able to give off a sort of electric power. [...] The electricity was turgid and voluptuously rich, in his limbs. He would be able to destroy her utterly in the strength of his discharge” (64-65). Later, Gerald feels that Minette “suffused into his veins like a magnetic darkness, [...] like a fearful source of power. [...] rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain,” “in a subtle friction of electricity” (72-73). Apart from the obvious innuendos as to the strength of his discharge, the interest is in the love/lust metaphor of electricity and current circulating in a sort of body power station, which is not surprising if we consider that Gerald is the Futurist man. But love emotion expressed by the metaphor of electricity and its variants is not limited to Gerald. Ursula too felt that “living fire ran through her,” “ a dark flood of electric passion,” (313), “a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy” (314); and Hermione: “ terrible shocks ran over her body, like shocks of electricity, as if many volts of electricity suddenly struck her down” (105); whilst Gudrun in “Sketchbook,” on seeing Gerald rowing on the lake, also felt “ perished in the keen frisson of anticipation, an electric vibration in her veins, intense [...] His glistening, whitish hair seemed like the electricity of the sky” [...]. And as if in a spell, Gudrun was aware of his body, stretching and surging like the marsh-fire,” so voluptuously that “ her mind went dim and unconscious,” “ he rocked on the water perfectly, like the rocking of phosphorescence” (120). In the “Death and Love” chapter, the title of which evidently points to the ambivalent relationship binding Gerald and Gudrun, the same pattern of electric emotions is at play: “His body vibrated taut and powerful [...]. She felt she would swoon, die, under the vibrating inhuman tension of his arms and body—she would pass away” (330). Gerald feels she is “melting into his limbs and bones, as if he were soft iron becoming surcharged with her electric life” (331). They both experience a sense of foreboding in their love/ lust for each other. The powerful tension and vibration between them, the sleeping “lightning” in their veins waiting to be awakened, the “radio-active” luminescence that their bodies give off, can only be lethal, and not life-giving. Even his appearing as “the young Hermes” (343), Mercury, or quicksilver, is threatening. It is therefore not surprising that their love-making will turn out to be so destructive, even if initially Gerald is restored to life - the hurt, seared tissue of his brain healed by her “soft effluence” (344). In Gudrun, after their first sexual encounter, conflicting emotions ebb and flow, from “over-tenderness” to “terror” and “intolerable oppression” and “torture” (347). Gerald had already remarked: “I’m not angry with you. I’m in love with you” (171) which is indeed one way of putting it!

11I would like to point out that this analysis of the different occurrences of emotions and emotion metaphors linked to the characters’ emotional states of love and/ or anger, shows that Birkin is the least given to expressing his emotions, or at least, that Lawrence’s treatment of Birkin’s emotions is remarkably restrained, whereas Gerald’s emotions are recorded carefully and are much more numerous. Indeed, Birkin in relation to Ursula and Hermione seems to spend his time in evasion or denial, as Ursula’s demonstration of emotion, her “emotional tones” always put a “constraint” on him (131). He resorts to negative phrases like “I don’t feel the emotion of love for you,” “beyond any emotional relationship” (145), or “merely making words” (41) reacting verbally rather than emotionally, with a tendency to say too much rather than feel too much. He may also resort to actual physical flight, wandering off, running away, and thus evoking an immemorial reaction to emotion. Or he simply refuses to acknoWLedge Ursula’s emotions and feelings: “I don’t want your womanly feelings,” (147) love being for him mere “sentimental cant” (152) to which he prefers some other impersonal connection “that is beyond love, beyond any emotional relationship” (145).

Three examples of the illogical logic of emotions

13I have analysed several instances of the conflicting emotion patterns that somehow help the characters to reach resolution and decisions, or at least, to get a better apprehension of the situation. It is not reason, nor rational thinking, that has helped the character to reach a degree of understanding but the circularity or overlapping of emotions, or the passage from one extreme emotional state to another, that is, from love to anger to hate. The couples concerned by those emotional shifts are Ursula and Birkin in “Moony,” Gerald and Birkin in “Gladiatorial” and Gerald and Gudrun in “Snow.” Emotion, body reaction, feeling and thought can thus be combined so that the illogical logic of emotions can lead to the logic of reason. Here I would like to refer to Antonio Damasio’s lecture “Emotion, Feeling and Social Behavior: the Brain Perspective,” which helped me grasp the differences between these notions and which also shows that Lawrence knew empirically these differences as his characters react according to the neuroscientist’s description. Indeed, all the characters in Women in Love follow the pattern described in Damasio’s lecture, from the confrontation with an emotionally-competent external stimulus which generates or triggers a physical reaction in the body, like changes in facial expression and heart rate and the release of chemical molecules into the bloodstream, out of which finally comes the perception of those changes, a perception that is the feeling induced by the emotion. The feeling is not only the emotion added to the mental realization of this emotion, but also the memory of previous emotions.

14In “Moony,” Ursula goes from a hateful reaction to Birkin’s proposal, to a sisterly bond with Gudrun in her rejection of marriage, through a repulsion for Gudrun, to re-asserted love for Birkin. I would argue that it is through the oscillations between different emotional states that Ursula reaches a decision, or at least understands things more clearly. The emotion metaphors also oscillate between fluidity and crystallization, radiance and darkness. From being “radiant as if in sunshine” (WL 259) when Birkin arrives, she “darkened, her soul clouded over,” she shrank and “ebbed away in silent hostility,” (260) “recoiling upon herself,” becoming “hard and self-completed, like a jewel” (261). This recoiling from Birkin creates a bond of understanding with her sister, a kind of “easy female transcendency” (262) that gradually evolves into a repulsion for Gudrun, which then makes her “turn in spirit towards Birkin again” (264). This emotional to-and fro, from one person to another, helps her understand herself in her desire to surrender fully to love: “For she believed in an absolute surrender to love” (265). Her final resolve could have been reached after rational debate within herself, but is in fact brought about by emotional oscillations between hate and love, repulsion and attraction: “Let him be her man utterly[...] ( 265).

15The same pattern is at play for Birkin in “Gladiatorial,” where we find a similar movement from anger to same-sex bonding, to decision-making and love for Ursula. After proposing to Ursula, “Birkin had hurried blindly away from Beldover, in a whirl of fury” and “went straight to Shortlands” (266). The pattern of attraction and repulsion expressed by Birkin and Gerald’s combination of love and fight is actually bodily enacted in their wrestling session. The way their physical changes are expressed is also revealing, especially after Birkin’s remarks on Japanese wrestlers who “repel and attract, both. [...] both repulsive [...] when cold, [...]. But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction—a curious kind of full electric fluid—like eels” (269). During their wrestling bout, Birkin and Gerald “interfuse,” “interpenetrate” and “interlace,” finally falling exhausted to the floor, their blood striking hard in their chests. Again, leaving aside the obvious homoerotic implications, what is interesting is the almost physical fusion, the electric circuit established between the two men, like chemical synapses, junctions crucial to the biological phenomena “that underlie perception and thought.” It is only after this emotional experience and its bodily reactions that they can express themselves verbally (with difficulty), rationalise: “There were long spaces of silence between their words” (272). and come to a conclusion: “One feels freer and more open now,” (273). The wrestling experience started from Birkin’s fury at the fiasco of the proposal, and ends with his decision to go back to Ursula and propose again, mainly thanks to his admission of love: “‘I think—I love her,” said Birkin, his face going very still and fixed”(275).

16The third example I would like to focus on is that of Gerald and Gudrun in “Snow.” The chapter seems to be a vortex, a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, where the characters are subjected to extreme emotional states that threaten to bring them close to madness without recourse to any thought or rationalisation. Of course, the emphasis is on Gerald and Gudrun’s relationship, but Ursula and Birkin are also affected by the cataclysmic atmosphere. As soon as Gudrun arrives in Hohenhausen, her heart freezes, her vital flow of positive emotions stops, she shrinks as if the “white, perfect cradle of snow, new and frozen” “chilled her heart,” (398) “isolating the soul, surrounding the heart with frozen air” (399). Later, Gudrun realises that she has finally “reached her place” and can “settle down like a crystal in the navel of snow,” a revelation that fills her with a “strange rapture” (401). Similarly, Gerald feels the same pull of the place on his emotions: “passion came up in him, stroke after stroke, like the ringing of a bronze bell,” “his knees tightened to bronze,” “his hands were living metal,” “ his heart rang like a bell clanging inside him,” ( 401-402) the term “passion” showing the extremity of his emotion without specifying which emotion. But this metal-like strength does not prevent his heart from being surrounded by the same “icy vapour” (401) as Gudrun’s, the conflicting emotional states combining into the metaphor of “flame of ice” (402). In the end, the swirl of conflicting emotions is such that there is a loss of logic or thought, the see-saw movement between extremes of love and hate is such that the inner being is destroyed. Gudrun suffers from physical sensation resembling a heart attack: “her heart was plunging, she was almost fainting” ( 415) whereas Gerald admits that his passion for Gudrun “withers [his] consciousness, [...] burns the pith of [his] mind, [...] blasts [his] soul’s eye,” (439) “[his] brain [...] charred as rags, [...] shrivelled as if struck by electricity” ( 440). Gerald does not go from the illogical logic of emotion to the logic of reason as the violence of his conflicting emotions, from bliss to torture, cannot have a positive impact on his survival. On the contrary, it will destroy him, first with physically painful sensations in the brain, then with loss of speech: Gerald can be both “verbal and blank” (439) or “blank before his own words,” (440) (which is a peculiar phrase), and finally deprived of any thought: “And his brain turned to nought at the idea [of losing Gudrun]. It was a state of nothingness” (445). There is a fatal “strange rent” torn in him, the “strange infinitely-sensitive opening of his soul, where he was exposed” (446) as if he had been turned inside out or skinned like an écorché, leaving his sensitive inner being exposed and bloody. But even a bloody écorché would be closer to life than Gerald who turns to nought, to an icy pebble, repellent, “cold, mute matter” (480).

The verbalization of emotions

17Emotions and emotion metaphors are expressed in the text by free indirect style. However, there is another means of expressing emotions in the novel which is through conversations about emotions in which each character expresses him or herself, supposedly according to his or her inner experience. As has often been remarked, the novel is framed by two conversations: between Gudrun and Ursula in the opening chapter about the experience of marriage; and between Ursula in Birkin in the final chapter about “another kind of love.” Both exemplify the impossibility or inadequacy of language and its logic to convey inner emotions—no matter how hard one tries to approach the unutterable. Consider the number of occurrences of terms of uncertainty: “it depends how you mean,” “I might,” “I’m not sure,” “possibly,” “more likely,” etc... (WL 7). These terms are echoed by Birkin’s final words “I don’t believe that” (WL 481). But there are two other interesting conversations - one between Ursula and Birkin in the chapter “An Island,” and one between Gudrun and Gerald in the chapter “Snowed Up.” Throughout their conversation, Ursula and Birkin seem to embody gender stereotypes revealed by the dichotomy: logic of emotion/ logic of reason which results in Birkin actually made to feel a fool: ”He was beginning to feel a fool” (129). They seem to be talking in the name of an emotion, for example “in the name of love” (127) but not because they feel that emotion. This discourse about emotion, especially between two people who are obviously in love with each other, is ironically circular, as Ursula wants Birkin to confess that he is in fact in love with her. Ursula moves closer and closer to the topic through a cunning series of questions: “that doesn’t alter the fact that love is the strongest, does it? (127); “But you believe in individual love, even if you don’t believe in loving humanity?”; and “Then why do you care about people at all?[...] if you don’t believe in love?”(129). Birkin discourses cleverly and reasonably while being made to feel more and more like a fool and losing the argument. Love, “being one of the emotions like all the others, [...] all right whilst you feel it” but which cannot become an absolute (according to Birkin), creates “a duality in feeling” in Ursula, making “a fine hate of him quicken in her bowels”(129), thus emphasising at the very beginning of their relationship the ambivalence of those emotions.

18Similarly, before Gerald’s death, the real end of the love affair between Gerald and Gudrun is also a conversation about love, like an inverted replica or the opposite tablet of a diptych. If Birkin was made to feel a fool by the end of their conversation and thus compelled to admit that, indeed, love by Ursula’s standards was the greatest feeling of all, Gerald is forced to admit that there never was any love between himself and Gudrun. The exchange has a kind of inescapable yet flawed logic that tolls the bell for the affair long before Gerald’s actual death. The lengthy exchange leaves us with an impression of faulty, distorted logic that true emotion would never lead to. It is the exact contrary of Ursula’s decision-making, resulting from deeply disturbing but positive emotional stress. Let me just outline the logical steps of the demonstration and the destruction:

“How much do you love me?” [...], “How much do you think I do? he asked. [...] “Very little indeed,”[...] “Why don’t I love you?” he asked, [...] “I had to take pity on you.—But it was never love.” [...] “Why must you repeat it so often, that there is no love?” he said in a voice strangled with rage. “Well you don’t think you love, do you?” she asked. He was silent with cold passion of anger. “You don’t think you can love me, do you?” she repeated, almost with a sneer. “No,” he said. “You know you never have loved me, don’t you?” “I don’t know what you mean by the word ‘love’,” he replied. “Yes you do.– You know all right that you have never loved me. Have you, do you think?” “No,” he said [...] “And you never will love me,” she said finally. “Will you?” [...] “No,” he said. [...] “Say you love me,” she pleaded. “Say you will love me for ever—won’t you—won’t you?” [...] “Won’t you say you’ll love me always?” she coaxed. “Say it, even if it isn’t true—say it Gerald, do.” “I will love you always,” he repeated, in real agony, forcing the words out. [...] “Fancy your actually having said it,” she said, with a touch of raillery. He stood as if he had been beaten. (WL 442-443)

19Contrary to Ursula’s emotional state which contributes to her self-understanding, the apparently logical and rational demonstration of the loveless quality of this affair and the will to verbalise a sort of non-love, leads to confusion in both speech and emotion. No wonder then that Gerald feels totally destroyed and negated, while Gudrun, on hearing the news of Gerald’s death, has literally lost her bearings, emotionally, verbally, rationally and even morally: “[She] did not know what to say. What should she say? What should she feel? What should she do? What did they expect of her? She was coldly at a loss” (475). As for Lœrke, he felt “as emotionless and barren as herself” (476).

20As a conclusion, it seems that Ursula is the only one in the novel capable of experiencing and expressing almost unadulterated emotions, the only one to follow the illogical logic of emotion that will help her make the right decision through her awareness of her emotional states. Her instinctive appraisal of her emotions, as well as her understanding of their fluctuations, lead to rational thinking and self-knoWLedge. She is also the only one in the novel to link present emotions with past emotions and memory, acknoWLedging the fact that emotions are modified by past experience of them, creating a cumulative effect resulting in an “integrated perception of both body and thought,” to use Damasio’s words, a “duality” that is by no means an ambivalence—in the sense of a conflict between positive and negative valence-carriers in psychology—which is obviously the case with the other characters in the novel who either remain silent or fall prey to confusion. That is why she admits that “memory was a dirty trick played upon her” and yearns for “a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollection or blemish of a past life,” she wants to be “new and unbegotten” and to rise “free on the wings of her new condition” (409-10). Thus, she is the only character in the novel to have reached self-knoWLedge through emotion and feeling, which Herman Hesse called “clearness,” a kind of “pre-lapsarian perception,” “operating outside” any sort of “bias” (see Patrick Martin), through an “alternative mode of knowing.”