Photo by David Shale of a deep-sea anglerfish (female)
One of the most extraordinary passages in Lawrence's Women in Love opens chapter XVI and concerns the question of sexual dimorphism, or the polarised duality between men and women.
Feeling sick of everything and vehemently hostile towards the old ideal of love proffered by Ursula, Birkin reflects upon what might take the place of a life lived together in the "horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction" [199]. Finding the thought of union - be it blissful or otherwise - repulsive, Birkin hopes for something cooler, clearer, and cleaner than the sticky intimacy enjoyed by couples:
"On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned man into a broken half of a couple ... And he wanted to be single in himself ... not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. ... And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him." [199-200]
Unfortunately, in Birkin's experience at least, women were unlikely to share in this dream of a post-sexual (post-human) future, in which there was a further conjunction beyond love between two pure beings, balancing each other "like two angels, or two demons" [199].
It seemed to him that "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 ... the Great Mother ... out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up." [200]
For Birkin, the maleness of men must be more than something supplementary or epiphenomenal. Otherwise, they are in danger of becoming sea-devils; a species of anglerfish that exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism (the male of the species being greatly different from the female in size, shape, structure and function).
This sounds at first as if the anglerfish have achieved what Birkin dreams of; i.e. pure polarised opposition between the sexes, where each is "free from any contamination of the other" [201]. But, as anyone who knows about these creatures is aware, this isn't the case at all.
Rather, when mature, the tiny male fish seeks out and attaches himself permanently to the body of a far larger female with his sharp, beak-like mouth. Releasing an enzyme that dissolves his own face and the flesh of her body, the male literally fuses with the female, merging circulatory systems. Having lost his head, his testicles swell in size and the male fish thus becomes not only parasitically dependent upon the female for all his nutritional needs, but a mere sexual appendage and sperm bank.
The female sea devil is then a fishy Magna Mater; she assimilates the male whom she has borne back into herself with pure assumption, filling Birkin and those men who would be free and singular beings, living a kind of starry existence beyond love (and beyond woman), with an almost insane fury.
See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 199-201.
And, if interested in the topic, see also Theodore W. Pietsch, "Dimorphism, parasitism, and sex revisited: modes of reproduction among deep-sea ceratioid anglerfishes (Teleostei: Lophiiformes)", in Ichthyological Research 52 (3): 207–236 (25 August, 2005).
This sounds at first as if the anglerfish have achieved what Birkin dreams of; i.e. pure polarised opposition between the sexes, where each is "free from any contamination of the other" [201]. But, as anyone who knows about these creatures is aware, this isn't the case at all.
Rather, when mature, the tiny male fish seeks out and attaches himself permanently to the body of a far larger female with his sharp, beak-like mouth. Releasing an enzyme that dissolves his own face and the flesh of her body, the male literally fuses with the female, merging circulatory systems. Having lost his head, his testicles swell in size and the male fish thus becomes not only parasitically dependent upon the female for all his nutritional needs, but a mere sexual appendage and sperm bank.
The female sea devil is then a fishy Magna Mater; she assimilates the male whom she has borne back into herself with pure assumption, filling Birkin and those men who would be free and singular beings, living a kind of starry existence beyond love (and beyond woman), with an almost insane fury.
See: D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 199-201.
And, if interested in the topic, see also Theodore W. Pietsch, "Dimorphism, parasitism, and sex revisited: modes of reproduction among deep-sea ceratioid anglerfishes (Teleostei: Lophiiformes)", in Ichthyological Research 52 (3): 207–236 (25 August, 2005).
