Blutbrüderschaft and Self Psychology in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love

The primoridal discovery of the novel is that of self—and primordial is intended here in a privileged way: the primordial as preeminent, as the prior, the first validating condition for intelligibility.

One of the means by which D. H. Lawrence sought to reconcile spiritual and sensual components of the self and to establish a “nourishing creative flow” between the self and the other was the concept of Blutbrüderschaft. Long before he introduced the term in Women in Love, Lawrence had tentatively explored the theme in The White Peacock and Sons and Lovers. But the reconciliation of spiritual and sensual modes of consciousness through male bonding was to become a dominant theme in Women in Love, Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent. Sacramental though the action may be in Cyril and George's bathing scene in The White Peacock, the ritual is that of pastoral romance, not the open invitation to vows of blood brotherhood that Rupert Birkin offers to Gerald Crich in Women in Love.1

Women in Love contrasts the developing relationship of Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin with that of Ursula's sister Gudrun and Gerald Crich and parallels these relationships with that of the two men to each other. Ursula is a teacher and Gudrun an artist, while Birkin is a school inspector and Crich the well-to-do son of a mine owner and,