Birkin’s Color-Quartet in Women in Love

Abstract

D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love, most strongly influenced by modern art, overtly concerns itself with aesthetic currents and arguments and throws much light on the writer’s aesthetic development. Readers of Lawrence frequently observe that certain color patterns in Women in Love are prominently connected with the inner struggle of the male protagonist Birkin. Thus, I have attempted to analyze in detail Birkin’s “color personalities” and demonstrated how each “color character” has been painted with a striking contrast between his dominant and complementary hues. Therefore, I have explored the color theories provided by the colorists Goethe, Kandinsky, and Cézanne and applied them to contextualize Lawrence’s novel whose portrayal of Birkin’s “color-character” is complicated and full of contradictions; it is, in the current phrase, overdetermined. Although the portraiture of Birkin is based on the color-quartet of blue-white-black-yellow, blue become the dominant color, the rest complementary ones which support Birkin’s major blue. The four colors are inter-related and build up a visual impression of Birkin’s “color-character.” Not only blue is the only color which can be seen as a medium hue to uncover a hidden fear to his buried mother-incest, but also it provides the dominant medial hue connected with Birkin’s detached meditation on the “star equilibrium,” a reconciliation of two strikingly different cultures, the black African and white European. Apart from the dominant color of blue, white symbolizes Birkin’s sensual perception of the “lotus mystery” in the flux of mud; yellow demonstrates the free association of Birkin’s counterpart, Gerald, as it does the couple of bohemian artists Halliday and Minette; black suggests Birkin’s darken sensual identification with the West African statuette. I have tried to show how Lawrence’s painstaking uses of color symbolism, and his great concern for modernist art, have been major forces in shaping and giving depth to Women in Love.    

Key words: color-character, Women in Love, blue, African statuette, white, black, yellow, Expressionism