ABSTRACT
This chapter is a study of two texts in which Lawrence explores the paradox of his oedipal relation with Gross by assuming his identity and simultaneously attempting to surpass it. It begins with a discussion of the political vision of Twilight in Italy before turning to a consideration of Women in Love, starting with a study of its two central male characters, Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin, as exempla of the typological opposites first defined by Gross and later elaborated by Jung under the headings of extrovert and introvert. The chapter presents the novel as a critique of patriarchy, focussing first on the figure of the dying or the ineffectual father and then on the language of rape, so central to Gross’s conception of German patriarchy. There follows a discussion of Lawrence’s presentation of the New Man, in which Gross and Lawrence are canvassed as component parts, inter alia, of the ‘familiar compound ghost’ that is Birkin, before the chapter concludes with a discussion of the novel’s critique of the rationalist basis of modern culture and its embodiment of that critique in its mythological structure, understood as a deliberate attempt on Lawrence’s part to surpass all forms of analytic thinking.
