"There will be a new embodiment, in a

new way": Alternative Posthumanisms in

Women in Love
Deanna Wendel
Indiana University

This essay places Women in Love in dialogue with posthumanism in order to understand what kind of a nonhuman world the novel might be imagining when Rupert
Birkin declares that "humanity is a dead letter," and when characters alternately degrade
and idealize what they identify as the inhuman, superhuman, or extra-human. largue
that Lawrence's array of prefixes does not graft easily onto the "post" of posthumanism,
and that Women in Love constantly invokes, but never settles on a definitive answer
to Katherine Hayles's question: "What kind of posthumans will we be?" Instead, the
novel enacts a series of alternative posthumanisms that, through their vexed encodings
ofthe human and humanist, direct us to refiect on the merits and limitations of our own
contemporary theorizations.

Keywords: D.H. Lawrence / Women in Love I posthumanism

i i
umanity," in the words of Women in Love's Rupert Birkin, "is a dead
^ ^ letter" (65). What, then, shall replace it? Birkin's declaration, I
I
I argue, begs to be placed in conversation with posthumanist theory,
from its monoliths like Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles, to emergent
discourses such as queer posthumanism. However, only a few critics have yet
devoted attention to the interplay between D.H, Lawrence's corpus and current
work in posthumanism, although they share myriad goals, dreams, and conflicts.
The commonplace subjects of posthumanism (animals, objects, machines) have
received ample attention in Lawrence scholarship, but under differentthough
relatedrubrics: animal studies, science and literature, or ecocriticism. If critics
have legitimate reasons for not branding Lay/rence or his work as "posthumanist,"
despite identifying his interests in dismantUng the binaries that posthumanism
likewise seeks to undonature/culture, mind/body, human/animal, subject/
objectthose reasons are, nonetheless, valuable to make explicit.
Of course, some readers, such as ecocritic Del Ivan Janik, have gone so far
as to hail Lawrence as not only inaugurating "the literature of environmental

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consciousness" but also standing "at the beginning ofthe modern post-humanist
tradition" (74). From a science and literature perspective, Jeffrey Wallace explores
Lawrence's development of an "antihumanist (or posthuman) humanism" in order
to defamiliarize long-held conceptions of Lawrence as anti-science (8). In many
respects, I take Wallace as a starting point, while critiquing Janik's romantic
version of posthumanism'to be posthumanist, after all, is not necessarily to
be environmentally conscious nor to fully "reject humanism," as Janik states
Lawrence has (78). However, I do see precisely such ecological romanticism
poignantly, if problematically, reflected in characters such as Birkin.^
Like Wallace, I use posthumanist theory to conduct a "rigorous dialectical
analysis" ofthe human itself, but through the lens of a plurality of posthumanisms (8). Women in Love imagines not one, but a series of unstable terms for the
non- or after-the-human: what's sometimes a desire for the overarching term
ofthe "inhuman" is at other times the "superhuman" or "extra-human." I take
this trio of favored prefixes as a (loose) organizational structure for this essay,
devoting a subsection to each, tracing which versions of posthumanism might
best find themselves in Lawrence's theorizations. Taking a cue from Judith
Halberstam and Ira Livingston, I believe that other prefixes to the human do
not necessarily compete (nor benignly align) with the posthuman, but rather, as
the authors state in Posthuman Bodies, that "the 'post' of posthumanism interests
us insofar not really as it posits some subsequent developmental state, but as it
collapses into sub, inter, infra, trans, pre, anti" (viii).^ In the case of Women in
Lovein, super, 2.nd extra.
I use the more traditional/as/ initially, with some caveats, to frame Birkin's
understanding of a temporal and teleological "new embodiment" after the human,
aligning the character's assertion with certain Utopian valences of posthumanism.
Lawrence uses both in and rion to refer to animals in the text, using oppositional
terms to the human. Undermining Birkin's efforts to be "posthumanist," the
novel frequently emphasizes human/animal differencemost prominently, if
ironically, in Ursula's efforts to treat animals.humanely. The prefix i/>er appears
in connection to Gerald's coal mining "machine," while sub embodies the other
"spatial" and also potentially evaluative term that describes the transformative
effect of this machine on the colliers themselves. Extra appears in the text only
once (but crucially) in relation to Birkin's hope for an ideal romantic relationship
that could be a vehicle for finally "transcending" the human.
Lawrence's constant re-prefixing renders Women in Loiie well-suited to reflect
on the discourse of posthumanism, the "post" of which has made for, as Cary
Wolfe notes, a befuddling word that often "generates different and even irreconcilable definitions" (xi). Lawrence's new preflxes depict such multiple visions
that resonate as posthumanisms, rather than a unified definition or "field." As
Katherine Hayles has suggested, posthumanism is less a question of to be or not
to be; rather "the question is what >^/of posthumans we will be" (246, italics
mine). I examine Women in Love's incessant invocation of this question, while
arguing that it never decides on a satisfying answer. Rather, the novel's multiple

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answers betray its dissatisfaction with any one of its propositions, each of which
can be unraveled into composing humanisms.''
Of course, these distinctions are not as cut-and-dry as this divisive structure
of subsections {post, in, super, extra) may make it appear. One has to recognize
Women in Love as an entangled web before attempting any foray into interpretation, taking into account the novel's propensity to adamantly state the opposite
of a claim that, on the previous page, it asserted with fervor. This, too, is human.
As Graham Holderness proposed in an analysis of Women in Love in 1986, "criticism should not assist the text to achieve false ideological coherence, but should
rather deny that completeness" (128). I agree with Holderness that an attempt
to repair Lawrence's ideological rifts would be both an injustice and a falsehood.
Such "denial of completeness" can be critically productive for readings of posthumanist theory as well.
These prefixes, then, are partly interested in reifying some of what stubbornly
remains human/ist in Lawrence's characters, despite their declarations of helpless
or willful breaks from humanity. More important than whether or not Women
in Love "is" posthumanist is its inspired mapping of desires to be. Channeling
Holderness, my conclusion proposes, then, not that posthumanism is deluded
with itself or a fruitless discourse (as some critics have rather bluntly stated) but
rather that its value rests in its own incompleteness. The novel's consistent failures
to theorize the nonhuman(ist) point to the desires and limitations of our posthuman imaginaries, ultimately calling more for a new, or different, humanism than
for a post- state.
BIRKIN'S POSTHUMAN DREAMS
Though Rupert Birkin is not the only character in Women in Love who declares
his wishes to get beyond the human, he is the only character who consistently
engages others in dialogue about humanity's nature and anticipated end. He is
hardly subtle about his feelings: he states, in one of his usual vague iterations,
that "Humanity is a dead letter. There will be a new embodiment, in a new way"
(65). Birkin's search for an embodiment to replace not only "the human" but also
the collective humanity that he particularly despises may be the most legitimately
posthuman desire in the novel. As Katherine Hayles claims, posthumanism places
itself at odds with the Foucauldian emphasis on "bodies" and instead emphasizes
"embodiment," which foregrounds individual enactments of what it could mean to
be human, while the "body," even if variously marked, invokes a normative model
(196-7). I suggest that we take both Birkin's and posthumanism's imaginings of
new embodiments seriously, but not as a real present or feasible future in which
we can say that we are no longer human. In fact, Birkin's adamant desire not to
be human proves itself to be all too human.
It would be tempting to read Birkin as the "messenger" of either posthumanism or at least an alternative to humanist anthropocentrism, as some understandably have. While never using the word "posthumanist," Gerald Doherty reads

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Birkin in this vein as "an idiosyncratic apostle of a biocentricity that foregrounds

the animal body" (71). A "biocentric view" that sees human and nature as equal
"partners" is also what Ivan Del Janik deems posthumanist in Lawrence (72).
Birkin's perspective speaks to the "post" of posthumanism in the sense that he
sees humanity as having run its course: "if mankind passes away, it will only mean
that this particular expression [of the incomprehensible] is completed and done.
. . . Let mankind pass awaytime it did" (65). Birkin sometimes prophesizes the
"post" as the complete end of humanity rather than a less humanist "embodiment"
of it. At other times, his dream merges Darwinian discourse with religion in a
bizarre evolutionary schema." At the end of the novel, he muses from particulars
to generals while gazing at Cerald's corpse: "The eternal creative mystery could
dispose of man, and replace him with a finer created being. Just as the horse has
taken the place of the mastodon" (595). Birkin stands passively back from the
human and the new "embodiment" seems here to have nothing to do with what
was once the human. It is its replacement, just as the mastodon and the horse are
not "related" either.
At other points, Birkin's perspective is actively misanthropic: "his dislike
of mankind, of the mass of mankind, amounted almost to an illness" (66). The
"post" fantasy, for Birkin, constantly slips into the aggressively /-human. Birkin
is happy to find a fellow misanthrope in Mrs. Crich, when the family hosts the
Luptons' wedding party, and they momentarily connect. However, despite their
shared opposition to the human, Mrs. Crich puts Birkin on the spot in asking
him to qualify his views, in a rich dialogue worth examining in full:
"People don't really matter," he said, rather unwilling to continue.
The mother looked up at him with sudden, dark interrogation, as if doubting his
sincerity.
"How do you mean, matter?" she asked sharply.
"Not many people are anything at all," he answered, forced to go deeper than he
wanted to. "They jingle and giggle. It would be much better if they were just wiped
out. Essentially, they don't exist, they aren't there."
She watched him steadily while he spoke.
"But we don't imagine them," she said sharply.
"There's nothing to imagine, that's why they don't exist."
"Well," she said, "I would hardly go as far as that. There they are, whether they
exist or no. It doesn't rest with me to decide on their existence. I only know that I
can't be expected to take count of them all. You can't expect me to know them, just
because they happen to be there. As far as I go they might as well not be there." (23)

This enigmatic dialogue is stunning in its seemingly non-sensical gesture

toward issues that have great import for posthumanism many years later. The passage employs Karen Barad's key terms in Meeting the Universe Halfway"meaning" and "mattering"loaded words that, Barad notes, "entangle" ontological,
epistemological, and ethical senses (3). Mrs. Crich's question, "How do you mean,
matter?" demands that Birkin make transparent his use of language, which he is

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clearly uncomfortable doing (he'd rather leave the premises for meaning/mattering at face value)but on another level, things that "mean" or have "meaning"
also physically (have) "matter" (3). Birkin realizes that his own dismissal of the
human might not matter if he cannot explain his logic. Mrs. Crich's skepticism
suggests she knows that she and Birkin are not sharing a lexicon. To say people
"don't matter" means potentially A) they're of no consequence to me (Mrs. Crich's
own eventual dismissal) or B) they have no inherent value. It could also potentially
indicate C) that humans have no true "substance" at all. The first possible reading
is clearly an ethical assertion, but on the third and to some extent the second levels, the issue is also an ontological one, the stakes of Barad's meaning/mattering.
What would it mean to say, as Birkin does, that humans actually do not exist? It is
their physical matter that Mrs. Crich cannot help but notice, as she fills cups and
plates at the dinner party, where the theory and practice of saying that humans
don't matter clash. "They are there, and that's a nuisance," she dryly remarks (24).
Birkin's and Mrs. Crich's perspectives valuably help negotiate the distinction between a "meaningful" anti-humanism and a different trajectory of misanthropy grounded in wounded individualism and the anomie of the subject.
Such anti-humanism may be part of the posthumanist agenda that attacks liberal humanism's history of abuses of both nonhumans and denigrated groups of
humans. Of course, Birkin's repulsion at humans who "jingle and giggle" makes
his explanation nothing short of absurd. However, Mrs. Crich's attempt to make
Birkin account for the conditions that would make humans matter or not matter
is a crucial question for posthumanist theory, as it asks how we can make a value
judgment of our "ism" frameworks.
The ethical question of whether or not "people matter" also may contain a
threatening shade of eugenics, which critics have read in Birkin's claim that the
world would be better if humans were "wiped out." Wallace points to this dark
side of posthumanism in claiming that "the human in eugenics is always-already
posthuman" because of its assumptions of human essence-lessness, alterability,
and manipulability (155). Wallace discusses eugenics in the context of Lawrence's
work at large, and my reading of Gerald's brand of posthuman cyborgianism (the
"superhuman") explores how posthumanism could, in an extreme derivation,
devalue the human under "a totalitarianism whose extreme logical conclusion is
the policy of genocide" (155). Although generally Birkin's vision ofthe posthuman
is Utopian, his contempt in this passage is not exempt from the seeds of such a
dystopian posthumanism, even as his reason for humans' non-matteringthey
''jingle and giggle"prompts laughter.
Birkin, then, serves as a problematic figure who exemplifies posthumanism's
own vexations. As readers, we are asked to take his philosophy somewhat seriously, if only due to its page count. However, we should be cautious of unquestioningly accepting such dogma. Even Birkin admits that his words are insufficient,
effectively "deorganicizing" himself: "I was becoming quite dead-alive, nothing
but a word-bag" (226). Characters tend to view Birkin as a source of ridicule just
as often as they find his words profound. In the key classroom scene, when Birkin

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usurps Ursula's role as teacher, and lectures her schoolchildren on the anatomy of
the catkinsflower,he ends with an irritated audience. Both Hermione and Ursula
leave "hostile and resentful," and Birkin has even been emasculated by a laugh
from Hermione, "jeering him as if he were a neuter" (45).
While Ursula and Hermione critique Birkinthrough the laughter that
jousts him, temporarily, from his teacherly presumptionsBirkin's backlash
toward Hermione is still more scathing. Birkin may be ridiculous, but Hermione
(he says) is a hypocrite. In an argument that parallels some posthumanist critiques of other authors' humanisms, the lovers wage an argument over the merits
of scientific education, as well as the supposed tension between hermeneutics
and "direct connection" with nature. Hermione asks Birki whether this human
knowledge is worth its price: "Hadn't [the children] better be animals, simple
animals, crude, violent, anything, rather than this self-consciousness . . . ?" and
asks "If I know about the flower, don't I lose the flower and have only the knowledge?" (42). Hermione's romantic view of nature as "the real" that also posits
science as a destructive force may resonate with posthumanism in the ecocritical
sense intended by Del Janik.
Such a perspective frustrates Birkin not so much because of its content, which
he seems to advocate often enough, but because it does not rightfully seem to
issue from Hermione's mouth. Birkin is left no option but to take on the role of
antagonist in the argument. In frustration, he eviscerates Hermione for being in
bad faith about her embrace of animality:
You are merely making words. Knowledge means everything to you. Even your
animalism, you want it in your head. You don't want to be an animal, you want to
observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely
secondaryand more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What
is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and
the animal instincts? . . . only you won't be conscious of what that actually is: you
want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture. (43)

This false, "mental" interest turns away from the animal (and from the inner
animality of the human that Doherty refers to) back upon the observer. The
emphasis on the human's supposed animality instead becomes a vain self-reflection that Birkin deems "that Lady of Shalott business" (44). "You've got that
mirror," he says, "your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own
tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it" (44). Birkin's critique of
Hermione enacts Barad's own mirror metaphor for "reflexive methodologies" that
comprise a dangerous humanist way of both doing science and being in the world,
which she draws from Haraway. For Barad, the reflexive mode ultimately reinscribes a liberal humanist subject position, and she proposes in its stead a "difractive methodology" that is more "attuned to the entanglement of the apparatuses of
production [of agential cuts]" which, unlike the mirror-relationship, "does not fix
what is the subject and what is the object in advance" (30). Hermione, in Birkin's
laceration of her, claims to be interested in a Deleuzian becoming-animal, but

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really is only interested in imagining herself as "other" and then "observing [her]
own animal functions"making a common humanist error of splitting the self
into a pleasurable subject/object division. This renders the animal neither actively,
entangled with the human, nor "integrated" in Doherty's sense, but a passive
object ofthe Cartesian mind's "gaze."
In their attempts to understand and avoid "animalism in the head," Women
in Love and much work in posthumanism run along parallel tracks. The novel's
appraisals of various invocations of animals as serving anthropocentric, humanist projects of figuration is one sense in which Women in Love can be thought of
as posthumanist, which often entails an oppositional framework that defines the
(wrong kind of) humanist. I am not suggesting that Birkin's critique of Hermione
frees him from making the same "error" of reflexivity he claims she does, nor that
the theorists pinpointing other theorists' anthropocentrisms are exempt from
their own. Birkin's perspective as "word-bag," after all, brings his own status into
question. Contrasted with the finer gradient of humanist/nonhumanist distinctions that Cary Wolfe offers, Birkin draws a not-so-subtle dualism between what
he likes to think of as his and Hermione's approaches to animalism: that of "real
sensuality" versus visual "pornography" of "looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions" (44). In a heat of passion, he tells Hermione that,
if there's anything animal-sensual in her, the only way to get there is violence: "If
one cracked your skull, perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman
out of you, with real sensuality" (44).
Ironically, though, it is Birkin who eventually hasquite literallyhis
skull cracked by Hermione, who in a fit of rage bashes him with a lapis-lazuli
paperweight. This trauma leads to what could be read as the most nonhumanist,
"real sensual" experience of all the scenes in the novel. Leaving Hermione's house
and stumbling out into the countryside after his injury, Birkin, "barely conscious,"
finds a grove of fir-trees and flowers. Finding that "he wanted to touch them all,"
"he took off his clothes and sat among the primroses" moving against them until
"he seemed to saturate himself with their contact" (124). However, in finding
"they were too soft" for his liking, Birkin moves to the fir-trees and "beat his loins
with their clusters of soft sharp needles," a sensation he deems "more beautiful
than the touch of any woman" (125). In a scene more bizarre than a few short
quotes can illustrate, Birkin praises the lovely "responsive vegetation," an image
of human/nonhuman contact that even our most transgressive posthumanisms
do not seem to have envisioned.
So does this fir-tree scene actually get us anywhere, or does this new "question of the plant" still seem less important to us than that of the animal, in the
context of the celebration of all the hybridities, fusions and entanglements that
define certain branches of posthumanism? Or does the nonhuman connection
Birkin seems to achieve here, even calling the fir-tree grove "his marriage place,"
another ecological primitivism of the cringe-worthiest kind? (126).' Although
animals have drawn ample attention in Women in Love and Lawrence scholarship
at large, the plant seems to concern very few, in relation to the much-read scenes

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of animal/human encounters. It seems, after all, that most of our posthumanist

theory is not so much anthropocentric as it is animal-centric (or in other variations
machine-centric). Gerald Doherty's understanding of Birkin as biocentric apostle,
however, would benefit from being placed in this context o bios as concerned with
more than just animal life. This is one sense, perhaps, in which Birkin can expand
our definitions of posthumanism and its range of human/nonhuman entanglements. However, we cannot ignore the dystopian elements and possible costs that
attend Birkin's understanding of both the human and the posthuman.
NONHUMAN ANIMALS,THE INHUMAN, ANDTHE INHUMANE
While I have just noted that "animalcentrism" is prominent in posthumanist
theory, for this reason it is worth turning briefly to the animals in Women in Love,
in order to ask to what extent this emphasis on nonhuman lifewhich Lawrence
also calls the "inhuman"can be said to be posthumanist. As this topic has been
amply discussed already, with the effect of polarizing critics, I take as a starting
point the critical milieu that has already inquired to what extent Lawrence's animals can be understood as "real." This section deals explicitly with theory's as well
as Women in Love's objective to find a nonanthropocentric way of understanding
the animal. I take some issue with the laudatory readings that have claimed that
Lawrence can be thought of as "biocentric," as well as a reception of Lawrence
that initially hailed his work as embracing the "real being" of animals. I argue
that we cannot say the text succeeds in actually doing this, but its failures are
poignant ones, and that posthumanism would be well-suited to reflect on such
textual failures, including its own.
Just as Haraway critiques theorists like Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari
for making real animals subservient to larger philosophical projects, and Birkin
demeans Hermione for her mirror logic of "animality," Lawrence critics have
long been divided on whether or not Lawrence can be said to be concerned with
"real" animals. Some, like Graham Hough, wrote as early as 1956 that Lawrence's
nature poetry in particular breaks from a tradition of "passive appreciation" in
an attempt "to penetrate into the being of natural objects, to show what they are
in themselves" (201). Sounding like a proto-post-humanist. Hough writes that,
"[Lawrence's work] has little to do with common human subjectivity; it is an
attempt to put common human subjectivity in its place by showing the myriad
of queer, separate, non-human existences around it." Likewise, Lawrence was
applauded by some of his contemporaries for seeing animals in themselves. W.H.
Auden claimed that Lawrence's legacy would not be his understanding of human
relationships, but rather his "genuine visions of plants, of animals, of certain
passionate states" (51). (Note that Auden does not forget the plant). For Auden,
Lawrence loved animals not as objects but as "neighbours" (48). However, many
other critics have examined the extent to which Lawrence's animals never quite
become real, remaining "analogues" for the human or mediums for the translation of human desires.* Amit Chaudhuri, for instance, presents Lawrence's poetic

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depictions of the nonhuman, in Birds, Beasts and Flowers differently than Auden,
as a play of signifiers always attentive to "the gaps between the [animal] thing
that is named . . . and the description which is supposed to identify it and 'bring
it to life" (60). For Chaudhuri, "the word or name'bat' or 'snake'remains, to
a large extent, textual, and does not simply and unproblematically travel off the
page towards life and the landscape" (60).
As Doherty's reading suggested, there is perhaps another method that
involves making divisions between characters, without stating that Lawrence is
humanist or posthumanist. We have, in Doherty's reading, the biocentric Birkin
and Ursula who embrace (their own) animality and Cerald and Cudrun who
"effectively corral it off in their desire to negate and destroy it" (69). Cudrun's
and Cerald's violence is not against merely inner specters of animality but real
animals, too. In an oft-critiqued scene, Cerald forcibly holds his frightened mare
within inches of a passing locomotive, while Ursula and Cudrun watch from afar.
Wallace reads this scene as one that "stages the relationship between technology
and nature as contestatory," while it simultaneously "horrifies the watching Brangwen sisters" (34). It is Ursula's later confrontation with Cerald over.the horse that
marks her, for Wallace, unlike Doherty, not as biocentric "human animal" but as
a humanist subject with "passionately humane responses" (26). Ursula's language
conflates animal rights with human rights, despite her own oft-stated "repulsion
for the human." However, Wallace's reading of the horse/train scene also levels
out Ursula's and Cudrun's own initial reactions (grouping the sisters together as
"horrified") when it seems that Cudrun's response, along Doherty's lines, begs to
be read as distinct from her sister's.
Cudrun's horror toward Cerald's treatment of the horse actually appears to
participate in it by making "the mare" into an object of imaginative sexual transference; she cannot stop thinking about "the strong, indomitable thighs of the
blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure control" as he
brings the mare into "soft-blood-subordination" (133). As Doherty points out, in
both this and the shared violence against the animal that is the attempt to remove
the rabbit Bismarck from his cage, Cerald's and Cudrun's erotic desires for each
other are narratively triangulated through a form of sadomasochistic behavior
toward animals.' For Doherty, Cerald and Cudrun are caught in what Derrida
deems a humanist carnophallogocentric "culture of sacrifice" of the animal body,
a claim which I would not dispute, but I would ask to what extent Ursula stands
outside of the anthropocentrism that underpins this culture (71). When Cudrun,
on a shared walk, calls a robin "a little Lloyd Ceorge of the air," Ursula initially
agrees about the resemblance, but then "there came the revulsion": "After all, it is
impudence to call them little Lloyd Ceorges. They are really unknown to us, they
are the unknown forces.... How stupid anthropomorphism is!... The universe is
non-human, thank Cod" (323). While Birkin critiques "animalism in the head,"
Ursula critiques humanist anthropomorphism. However, Ursula forgets, when she
mentally reproaches Cudrun for not recognizing that robins are fundamentally
"inhuman" and "of another world," that it is on these same grounds of treating

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the animal as other that Gerald justified his behavior toward his mare. Horses,
Gerald had explained to her, may have a "will" but no "mind" as humans do, and
in fact, it was Birkin who qualified this by relating them to women, claiming that
both women and horses have "two wills," one to subordinate and the other to rebel
(290). How much ofthe animal as the subject of conversation and debate is lost
when Birkin suggests its humanist figuration of women, we might ask?
I have attempted to draw out a double bind in that both those humans who
do. violence to animals and those who actively seek not to are concerned with
this shared end of seeing animals "in themselves," rather than reflections of
humansor Hermione's mirror logic. However the same "othering" stance can
easily be read in radically different ways. To foreground an animal's alterity can
be read, on the one hand, as an admirable refusal to take an anthropocentric
stance, but on the other, as an anthropocentric reflection ofthe human's anxiety
that there might be any underlying similarity. To see animals as not different,
however, in order to talk about equal rights, despite good intentions toward animals, draws attention to the beneficence of the human who extends the rights,
and seeing "sameness" in the animal risks a humanistic reflection mode. Nonetheless, the characters like Gerald, who insist that animals should be recognized
as fundamentally different from humans tend also, in Women in Love, to do the
most harm to animals. This is even though their impulse might seem laudable for
avoiding the kind of liberal humanist "incorporation" strategy of pluralism that
Cary Wolfe refers to, of extending subjectivity to groups who have previously been
on the fringe of it (99). Although Ursula interrogates the "inhumane" treatment
of animals in a way that invokes the considerable place of activism and animal
rights in the current posthumanist conversation, the novel also undermines these
concerns by leaving open the question of whether animals in this novel, or in
literary texts at all, really "are" animals, as opposed to "animalism in the head"
or only animals-on-the-page. Ursula occupies a troubled positionher defense
of animals would apparently lend itself to the biocentric and posthumanistbut
it is hard, the text implies, not to be humanist when insisting on the humane
treatment of animals.
THE SUPERHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN
While animals may take center stage in much posthumanist theory, the cyborg
represents another staple figure, which, speaks to Gerald in Women in Love. As
already established, Gerald is in no danger of being considered posthumanist in
the sense of his fusions with animals; his "couplings" with his horse or Bismarck
are more likely to be considered irredeemably humanist dominations of nature
than posthuman transgressions that emphasize kinship. Gerald is not a cyborg
of the kind that Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" calls for: "a creature in
a post-gender world" from which "we can learn from our fusions with animals
and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos" (172). He
is still very much "the embodiment of Western logos"; Gerald's fusions ofthe

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human(man) and machine are not the pleasurable frisson sort of "dangerous possibilities" that the cyborg holds for Haraway, but rather just the dangerous kind,
a "superhuman" at odds with Birkin's imagining of a Utopian posthumanism.
As Barbara Mensch and others have argued, Gerald highlights a totalitarian impetus in the novel: "if there is an 'antagonist' in the novel, it is Gerald,
the exponent of mechanical order, who feels he must rigidly control all that is
spontaneous in the human being" (72) I would argue that totalitarian drive is
inextricable from his goal to become a "mechanical" posthuman, to view all things
as potential extensions of himself, in a vast extension of humanist mirror logic.
As the so-called "God of the machine," head of an increasingly mechanized coal
mining production, Gerald also collectively dehumanizes his workers. Conceiving
of "the pure instrumentality of all mankind," he revolutionizes his father's business
to maximize profit, introducing new machinery and cutting workers. Without
qualms, he dismisses "the whole democratic equality problem as a problem of
silliness"; in which the non-mattering of individual selves serves as the basis for
his impersonal philosophy, in which only the "great social productive machine"
bears weight (276). Forms of "sentimental humanitarianism" denoted by "widows, those stock figures [of sympathy]" must be done away with, which includes
cutting benefits to relatives of miners and introducing machinery that becomes
more human than the humans themselves, serving as "great iron men" (279).
The workers he does keep largely run new machines, and in that sense become
cyborgs themselves.
Yet I do not want to reductively present Gerald's world as an apocalyptic
anti-human dystopiaindeed, Utopian possibilities collapse into the dystopian
elements, even for the colliers: ". . . the work was terrible and heart-breaking in
its mechanicalness.... There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness" (281). This world represents "the
most wonderful and superhuman" (281). Thus, while Birkin dreams of getting
beyond the human, Gerald (in a very different register) already has, while under
the banner of the "superhuman," as both what is simultaneously most human
and exceeding the human. He reiterates an inherent humanism that conceives of
the othermachines, animals, and for Gerald, also womenas instruments,
as opposed to the likewise problematic reflection-of-oneself humanism branded
upon Hermione. What is at once "terrible, inhuman" is simultaneously "wonderful and superhuman." Gudrun, too, fetishizes the colliers' human/machine
hybridity: "In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness,
the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like
strange machines, heavy, oiled" (135). If the machine does not seem to justify my
reference to Gerald as cyborgfor admittedly he seems to occupy a particularly
humanist place in the midst of the machine as its organizerhe admits that the
longer he runs the business, the more "perfect" his industry has become, and the
more he feels his own superfluousness in it. Gerald is no longer the Cartesian
mind that runs the system-as-body, but a rudimentary organ that has outlived
its usefulness. Here is a human who finds that he no longer has any place in a

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posthuman world of his own creation, who lives in fear of becoming "a purely
meaningless babble lapping around a darkness" (282).
Leaving behind this particular nonhuman vision, the finale ofthe novel finds
our four lovers together in the Swiss Alps, a common vacation spot that the narrative renders strangely ungrounded in time or space. It presents an abstracted world
of snow and ice that is largely devoid of life, a place where Gudrun says one feels
wondtriully "bermenschlichmore than human" (488). Increasingly, for Gerald,
it looks like he has arrived at the state of finally transcending all that is human,
including his previous cyborg dys-utopia. At the same time, the "super" suggests
that somehow his breaks from humanity make him a human ideal, more in the
tradition ofthe human overreacher than any other character. It seems that, from
his very introduction in the novel, in which he was conceptualized by Gudrun as
a "smiling wolf," and "pure as an arctic thing," he has reached the cold place that
the language of the narrative has destined him for, while the others are far from
home (11). But here the animal metaphor ofthe wolf fuses problematically with
Gerald's simultaneous growth into the inorganic or mechanic. Pulling a toboggan through the snow, he forgets that Gudrun is present on the sled and becomes
"one" with the moving object, making no distinction between its matter and his;
"it seemed to him the flying sledge was but his own strength spread out, he had
but to move his arms, the motion was his own" (521).* If the animal "inhuman"
is conceived throughout the text as idealistically embodied, then the cyborg,
as Hayles might say, is in danger of being framed as so hyper-embodied (an
expanding, ever-permeable network) that it risks mischaracterization as actually
"disembodied" and immune to its own frailty.
When Birkin and Ursula have left the Alps, and Gudrun is growing increasingly close to Loerke, Gerald takes more often to the more comforting inhumanity ofthe hills, tiring of love and life, for on his skis, he could be "more like some
powerful, fateful sigh than a man, his muscles elastic in a perfect, soaring trajectory, his body projected in pure fiight" (521). So Gerald spends his final days, in
the fancies of losing his body, before his attempted murder of Gudrun and his
own death alone in the mountains, a warning-sign to any would-be cyborgian
posthumanisms ofthe "disembodiment" variety that Katherine Hayles cautions
against. If Birkin's claims about human and posthuman "matter" merit empathy
as well as laughter, remaining relatively harmless, then Gerald's "super-human"
offers the most troubling, most dystopian version of a follow-up to the human, one
that gives us greater reason to be attentive to our constructions ofthe posthuman.
THE EXTRA HUMAN, OR THE POWER OF LOVE
Having examined the dangers of the "superhuman" posthumanism in Women
in Love, and the less glaring humanist blemishes in the prefixes "post," and
"in," I hope to offer one last proposition that might seem surprising in relation
to the insight the novel has to offer regarding humanisms-within-posthumanismsthe way the novel vigorously imagines human love as an alternative means

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of "becoming posthuman." The novel tries to propose sexuality as an avenue for

characters to attempt to write themselves out of human being. My final claim,
then, is the inverse of Wallace's, who asserts that in Lawrence's novels "sexuality is
the primary mode of the 'hard struggle to come into human being'" (158). Instead,
I am interested in how Birkin engages in the practice of imagining a particular
relationship that could exceed the human, whether or not this is achieved.
At this point, it will make sense to turn to a second "dead letter" from Birkin
that exists alongside, and along with, the dead letter that he says is "humanity."
Just as posthumanism tends to take as a starting point a Cartesian mind/body
split, and its dependence on the "I" that thinks, apart from the body, Birkin
also asks, "How could he say T when he was something new and unknown, not
himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter" (458). What
prompts this meditation from Birkin, however, is not precisely the question of the
"I think" of the cogito, but its relation to those little words Ursula needs him to
say: "I love (you)" (458). When he utters them, he is thrown into disarray, realizing
"it was not the whole truth . . . How could he say T . . . ?" (458).
As Birkin interrogates the "I" that gives unity both to the body it "owns" and
gazes upon the world as something separate from itself, so too individuated love
doesn't seem to work anymore either. Birkin lambasts Ursula throughout the novel
for her naivete in "the old way of love": "he would rather not live than accept the
love [Ursula] proffered . . . he wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as
it were. The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent" (240).
Critics such as Carolyn Tilghman have read this as dissatisfaction with prescribed
forms of heteronormativity, "courtship rituals, marriage and home life," and also
with the form of the domestic narrative itself (90). Tilghman asserts that Birkin's
relationship with Gerald is to serve as an antidote to this narrative, but ultimately
fails and does not offer a "workable corrective" "to the perceived evils visited on
human beings by the domestic narrative and its maternal power base" (107,108).
Although Tilghman interestingly notes that these "evils" are seen as affecting
the general category of "human beings," she does not explain why this word choice
might be particularly telling. Although scholars have written about homosexuality and the anti-marriage ideals of the novel, few have noted how from its onset,
the nonhuman permeates even that most human ritual of marriage. Marriage, a
few pages into the novel, is disrupted by the "animality" of the bride and groom,
who break from their walk and chase each other to the altar. It becomes instead a
violent "sport" in which the groom flies to the church, "his supple haunches working like those of a hound who bears down on the quarry" (17). As the wedding
bells ring, Ursula wonders about the connection between human marriage and
its impacts on a universal or collective nonhuman consciousness: she "wondered
if the trees and the flowers could feel the vibrations and what they thought of it"
(20). Importantly, not only has marriage been "ecologized" or "animalized" in a
more expansive context, but it has become a spectacle to be witnessed more than
it is a ritual the sisters wish to participate in. It has aesthetic interest, even as it is
becoming questionable, obtuse: "Shall we go out and look at that wedding?" (6).

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133

Thus the "problem with humanism" collides with the problem of the trajectory of the realist romance novel's plot, in an only half-hearted attempt at
modernist break from that tradition^ This traditional plot might end in enforcing
a limiting conception of t:he human: two (heteronormative) liberal humanist subjects sever themselves from the world and from other possible couplings. Birkin,
of course, eventually marries Ursula, despite constant professions of his other
longings and in one chapter, his own Baradian "entanglement" with Cerald in
ju-jitsu ("a tighter, closer oneness of struggle . . . a strange, octopus-like knotting
and flashing of limbs") (331). The final words of the novel indicate Birkin's regret
for the foreclosure of any relationship with Cerald, one which he had wished he
could have outside of his marriage to Ursula. An ideal love, one which even Birkin
and Ursula seem to flicker into at times, is neither exclusive nor ego-based: "there
was no I and you, there was only the third unrealised wonder, the wonder of not
existing as oneself. . . [but as] a new paradisal unit regained from the duality"
(458). Like Birkin, Ursula informs Cudrun that she has reached the conclusion
that "love is too human and too little. I believe in something inhuman, of which
love is only a little part . . . it isn't so merely human" (544). Cudrun, however,
asserts "Well, I've got no further than love yet," refusing to be post-romance (544).
This dream of a "new paradisal unit" that Birkin imagines holds some hope of
being an entanglement of two humansrather than his other erotic "marriage"
to the fir trees, which for all its Utopian possibility, proves, as one might imagine,
to be infeasible and ultimately unsatisfying.
Birkin's skepticism toward the possibilities of marriage becomes, with the
human, one of the most common objects of his derision throughout the novelthe
two frequently intertwine. Marriage's "time," like that of the human, is up. Of
course, in opposition to this marriage and this vision of a shared household where
"the human" becomes "humans" husband and wife is Birkin's dream of a love
between two men: such a love can still only be conceived by the text as "extrahuman" (450, italics mine). This designation of some form of non-heteronormative
relationship as outside the human is, of course, problematic, in its invocation of a
history that wielded exclusion from the human and inclusion in other categories
(such as the animal or object) as a foundation for terrible abuses. However, here it
is the human itself that is denigrated, and non-membership romanticized.
Birkin cannot answer the question of himself and Cerald, though he tells
Ursula "It's the real problem I can't solve. I know I want a perfect and complete
relationship with you . . . and we've nearly got itwe really have. But beyond that.
Do I want a real, ultimate relationship with Cerald? Do I want a final, almost
extra-human relationship with him . . . or don't I?" (450). It is useful here to
return to the moment of Cerald's death, and as Birkin looks at Cerald's corpse, it
consoles him to move from the loss of the particular (the man he loved) to the general, dreaming that "the timeless creative mystery would bring forth some other
being [than the human], finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race . . .
new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being" (595). Over
the corpse of Cerald, Birkin dreams a posthumanity in the true "after" sense of

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"post." Yet the body of Gerald elides this; it does not even seem human at all and in
Birkin's memory it reverts to a recollection of animality. He can only recall "a dead
stallion he had seen: a dead mass of maleness, repugnant" and Gerald's last look
does not resemble "the beautiful face of one whom he had loved" but "this last,
terrible look of cold, mute Matter"a horrifying lack of any remainder of oncehuman-ness (596). This is the human reduced only to physical "matter," Barad's
ontological level, with the epistemological and ethical questions surrounding
Gerald's death stripped from the picture. Death, after all, is truly posthuman. .
Thus this last "extra-human" has iterated perhaps the most humanist posthumanism, in the part of Lawrence's novelistic world grounded not in radical break,
but in a romantic novel tradition. The novel devotes itself ultimately to marriages
and domestic strife as possibly the site for its own paradoxical transcendence of
the human, if only love could be done "right," which might just demand a queer
posthumanism. In fact, as some have argued the extent to which posthumanism
is always already queer: as Livingston and Halberstam state, "Driven instead by
the double impossibility and prerequisite to become itself, the posthuman body
intrigues rather than desires; it is intrigued and intriguing just as it is queer: not
as an identity but because it queers" (14).' However, it is important to note that
in Women in Love, the queerness remains as a desire and that the transcendence
of the human it promises does not come to pass. Birkin has the last word (so
maybe posthumanism can have Birkin as "spokesman" or "messenger" after all)
in response to Ursula's assertion that it's "impossible" to have "two kinds of love."
The novel's, and Birkin's, stubborn response "I don't believe that," concludes, like
my reading ofthe logic underlying the novel's array of posthumanisms, with both
denial and lingering possibility.
THE "NEW" HUMAN
We can think of love in Women in Love, then, as the final lens for considering
(a different) humanism. The romance novel's inherited generic "problem of love"
aligns, for Birkin, with the problem ofthe human; the possibility of individual
love has been problematized by posthumanism's own skepticism toward the
Cartesian self The version of love structured on the marriage ritual and the
heteronormative model of the nuclear family is designated by Lawrence as the
most restrictive liberal humanist formula yet, even above the cyborg's extension
of all things as instrumental matter, or characters' anthropocentric treatment of
animals. But rather than reconfigure what counts as acceptable human love, Lawrence envisions the ideal combination of relationships as something that would
result in radically transcending the human. Lawrence constructs the Birkin/
Gerald relationship as, ideally, a vehicle for becoming posthuman, through the
male/male love that Birkin conceives of as "extra-human." In this sense, Lawrence
envisions the possibilities of a queer posthumanism, but this "extra-human"like
the other prefixestragically does not come to pass. This amorous posthumanism, as I've argued our theory does, remains in a state of lyric potentiality. My

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understanding of Women in Love is likewise that it is not (yet) able to dispense with
the human or with humanism, for better or worse that it imagines, ultimately,
a world that is not quite posthumanist but posthumanfiA.
I have argued that the novel's array of prefixes, from "super" to "extra," do not,
in the end, graft easily onto the "post" of posthumanism. The "post" itself often
serves to level out a wide range of differencesdifferences that Women in Love
illuminatesbetween heterogeneous hybrids of humans, animals, machines,
plants, and objects. While this essay has traced the text's posthuman imaginaries,
it is with a consideration of their failures to stick, as well as their vexed encodings
of the human and humanist. We might nonetheless still be tempted to call this
novel posthuman, but if we do, it may be wiser to think in terms of "posthumanisms" rather than "posthumanism." As Halberstam and Livingston state, "there is
no 'best' representative of the posthuman. Posthumans have been multiply colonized, interpenetrated, constructedas well as paradoxically empoweredbut
neither virtue nor vice attaches automatically to this multiple position" (10). Nor,
they clarify, does the posthuman "necessitate the obsolescence of the human" (10).
The versions of the posthuman in Women in Love, then, do not ultimately cancel
each other out, nor do they transcend the humanism the text also contains.
The rhetoric of this particular posthumanism is framed similarly to what
could be considered a call for a "new humanism," or perhaps humanism with a difference. Critics such as Warren Montag, Nancy Armstrong, and Neil Badmington have gestured toward such a jumping-ofFpoint for reconsidering the human
rather than endorsing its end. Armstrong and Montag suggest that we "trace the
limit of the human in its current state" while not necessarily embracing Foucault's
prophesizing of its disappearance (2). They ask whether the human could itself
be imagined differently, crucially severed from the liberal humanist subject the
assumed pairing that much posthumanist theory, like Birkin, tends to see as
indivisible (4). Badmington similarly critiques posthumanism, but sees it as an
insightful framework nonetheless for reflecting on the human. He interrogates the
ways in which the human continually "haunts" the posthuman, constituting its
inherent "remains," or Derridean traces that cannot be easily eradicated (12, 13).
Posthumanist scholarship then becomes uniquely positioned to attend to these
remains and to "take the form of a critical practice that occurs inside humanism"
(22). If, in this analysis of Lawrence, we similarly decentralize Birkin's initial
posthumanist perspective and take Mrs. Crich's instead. Women in Love asks us to
confront that concrete remainder of humans: even when conceptually dismantled,
still, "There they are, whether they exist or no" (23).

Acknovi/ledgments
1 would like to thank Richard Nash for comments on this piece in its development. I am also indebted
to Scott Herring, Jess Waggoner, and Kelly Hanson for their perpetual insight, encouragement, and
invaluable feedback throughout multiple drafts of this essay.

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Notes
1. Other ecocritics have responded with some skepticism to Janik's claim that Lawrence helps to
initiate an era of literary posthumanism. Garrard asserts that the common "dark green reading"
of Lawrence has glossed over "the struggle with questions of power, gender, sexuality and religion
that early posthumanism involved" in his study of through lines between Lawrence and Nietzsche
as problematic figures that ecophilosophy has embraced (10).
2. GifFney and Hird also point to the tendency of prefixes to the human to "melt" or slip into each
other: they note "other configurative prefixes 'in' and 'sub' also work here" but ultimately choose
"non" because they believe it best demonstrates how categories can become normative even when
"necessitating a relation fabricated on negation, denial, resistance and rejection" (2).
3. Cary Wolfe's distinction between "posthumanist" and "posthuman" is significant here (xv). It
has everything to do with the crucial question of what part ofthe word "posthumanism" that "ism"
shackles itself to, whether it believes that we are beyond the conceptual framework of humanism
or actually beyond the human. Also note that many ofthe writers who are called "posthumanist"
do not think of themselves as belonging to any such an "ism" or "ist," as Haraway has stated {When
Species Meet 17).
4.

For work that places Darwin specifically in conversation with Lawrence, see Granofsky (2003).

5. The reading of Lawrence as advocating a return to nature from an oppressive industrial civilization has long been a staple reading in deep ecology. See LChapelle's largely celebratory D.H.
Lawrence: Future Primitive (1996) for one ofthe first that posits Lawrence as "primitivist" in this
sense.
6. See Wright (1961), one ofthe first to claim that the animals in Women in Love are primarily
symbolic or analogical parallels to the human pairs.
7. While I bracket these issues, there is a fascinating question of humanist/posthumanist perspectives surrounding the artistic representation of animals in the novel. Tlie battle with Bismarck is
initiated by Winnie's desire to draw him, while Gerald's pun on how he'd rather "draw him and
quarter him" speaks to a violence of representation that has some share in the physical violence to
come. Gudrun's miniatures of animals could likewise comprise another essay altogether, in addition
to her relationship with fellow-artist and so-called "creature" Loerke.
8. See Duffy (2009) for further theoretical and historical context that might elucidate Gerald's
fascination with speed, which Duffy calls the most "modern pleasure."
9. In addition to Halberstam and Livingston, for work on queer posthumanism (a burgeoning field),
see Giffney and Hird, as well as MacCormack.

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