ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies a number of contradictions at the heart of Lawrence's work, contradictions which allow this against-the-grain celebration of Chaplin's cinematic face to slip through. In Irigaray's model, however, woman's role as mediator is essentially impotent: they are the transparent junctions through which male desire flows, passages of transaction rather than transforming agents in relationships in their own right. The chapter explores the Luce Irigaray's work on women as mediators of male homosexual transactions, as a way of setting up the position of the woman's eyes in relation to Lawrence's male spectacles. The male spectacle is central, but the female gaze is formative. The key Lawrentian experiences are all fixed moments of Being, epiphanal poses which complete the male figure in his metaphysical landscape. Certainly, Lawrence's women act as conductors in the flow of male desire, facilitating his enjoyment in, and disavowal of, the desired male spectacle. Lawrence's aesthetics are vigorously non-functional: beauty is a mystery.
