Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Killing the Angel in the House
expression in Rupert Birkin’s notion of “star equilibrium” in Women in Love: “What I
want is a strange conjunction with you—not meeting and mingling…but an equilibrium,
a pure balance of two single beings:—as the stars balance each other” (148). Th is idea has
some resonance with Irigaray’s later writing, in which she focuses on the heterosexual couple
as having the potential to redeem society, asserting that in order to celebrate marriage
“a harmonious passage from the exterior to the interior, from the interior to the exterior
of bodies…is needed. Th at the two be here and there at the same time, which is not to say
that they merge” (Nietzsche, 124-25). Irigaray is often invoked in Woolfi an studies, but
her exploration of the heterosexual couple as the ground of a genuine sexual diff erence
that will entail an ethical relation to the other bears some similarity to Lawrence’s later
work with its increasing emphasis on sexual diff erence.
However, Women in Love also works to undermine any revised ideal of heterosexuality,
ending with Birkin lamenting the death of Gerald Crich and their failure to achieve “another
kind of love” (481). Th e search for a male friend, which recurs through Lawrence’s
fi ction, is usually interpreted as a homosexual subtext, but may also represent an attempt
to balance male and female relationships, just as Lily Briscoe must balance Mr. and Mrs.
Ramsay in order to “complete” her vision/picture. Indeed, as Leo Bersani observes, “there
seems to be a profound tendency in Lawrence to get rid of sex altogether” (169) and in its
avoidance of the frictional opposition of conventional male/female relations, Ursula and
Birkin’s relationship in Women in Love seems to peter out into a stillness caused by the
absence of diff erence. And it is this question of diff erence that is so troubling to theories
of gender and sexuality: without diff erence are we once again reduced to what Luce Irigaray,
among others, would excoriate as the phallocentric doctrine of the same? Without
sexual diff erence are we, like Irigaray, haunted by the androgynous fi gure of the angel as
the “most beautiful” of the many “consequences of the nonfulfi llment of the sexual act,”
“messengers who never remain enclosed in a place, who are also never immobile” (Ethics
15)? Is this the type of angel ideal that Woolf and Lawrence risk creating in their texts?
Woolf’s later work remains committed to breaking down the boundaries of sex and
gender, most successfully perhaps in Th e Waves (1931). For example, Andrea Harris asserts
that Bernard “becomes a diff erently gendered being, one in whom masculine and feminine
coexist” and concludes that “Woolf sketches the contours of a new state of being in
which diff erence no longer represents an obstacle or battlefi eld but instead a fertile ground
of exchange” (354, 355). And Miriam Wallace traces Woolf’s image of the “seven-sided
fl ower” as a vision of the merged subject (135-36). But what of the underlying anxiety
about corporeality betrayed by images like this and by Birkin’s abstract idea of “star equilibrium”?
In his work after Women in Love, Lawrence seems to strive to redress the balance
with the body through an increased emphasis on sexual diff erence. Feminists, from
Simone de Beauvoir onwards, have criticised Lawrence’s doctrine of “phallicism,” which is
perceived as privileging the male. And yet, this ignores the ethics of “otherness,” inherent
throughout Lawrence’s writing, but most clearly expressed in his later works. For example,
in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), Lawrence asserts that “Th e whole mode, the whole
everything is really diff erent in man and woman…the vital sex polarity…the magic and
the dynamism rests on otherness” (103). And the following, perhaps seminal, statement of
Lawrentian “otherness” is drawn from Studies in Classic American Literature (1922):
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