Lawrence’s Tragic Lovers:The Story and the Tale in Women in Love

Abstract

A part of our received wisdom about Women in Love is that the novel enacts a tragedy, at the centre of which is the character of Gerald Crich. As Pritchard explicitly puts it, ‘Gerald is the tragic hero of Women in Love’.¹ The imaginative breadth and power of the final episodes in the Alps, the complex and convincing sense of Gerald’s representativeness, above all the fact that unlike most Lawrencean antagonists he has a large measure of certain indispensable human qualities, undoubtedly make the word ‘tragedy’ seem appropriate — perhaps uniquely so in Lawrence’s oeuvre. And yet one finds in many commentaries a surprisingly bland acknowledgement that Gerald is manipulated by his author in a way that discredits him. The following passage, for example, occurs in Pritchard’s study one page before the statement that Gerald is a tragic hero:

Lawrence makes Gerald less complex and initiate in corruption than he was before, and clumsy and insensitive, in order to emphasise Loerke’s nature; Gerald becomes for Gudrun the epitome of the brute and mechanical, while he becomes obsessed with desire for sexual self-obliteration in her. She turns to Loerke…²