Women in Love

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she

had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She

wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be

referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of

whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be

rendered up.

It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the

Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers

because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna

Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all.

He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable.

She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he

not know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what

was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservience,

claiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own

again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering. By her very

suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her

everlasting prisoner.

And Ursula, Ursula was the same--or the inverse. She too was the awful,

arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest

depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable

overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it

herself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before

a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she

could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of

perfect possession.

It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man

must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex

was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a

woman, before he had any real place or wholeness.

And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken

fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of

one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being,

of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us

of the mixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of

this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the

man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear

and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense

surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two

stars.