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copy of Thucydides as a present in 1916.
    Hermione’s counterpart in Women in Love is Pussum, on whom we have briefly touched. If Hermione would reinvent love by staying wedded to her intellect, an intellect whose deeper sources she eschews, the Pussum is all sensuality. As noted, she reminds Gerald of a black beetle and is thus associated with the statue in Halliday’s flat, and its pure sensualism. “It was a terrible face, void, peaked, abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath. He saw the Pussum in it. As in a dream, he knew her” (p. 77). Gerald reproaches Birkin for liking the statue, warning Birkin that he “likes the wrong things, things against yourself.” However, it is Gerald who actually sleeps with the Pussum and who involves himself fatally with Gudrun, who is identified with the Pussum by being her complete opposite, the other side of the same coin. Pussum cuts the young Russian friend of Halliday and draws blood, as Gudrun slaps Gerald in a gesture of gratuitous contempt. Halliday is completely frightened by Pussum, yet for all her ability to strike fear in the hearts of men, she is used by them, as naked before them in her profession as a studio model, as Gudrun, the painter and ice-queen, is remote.
    Pussum is free to be herself. As a model, of course, she has chosen a profession that goes against the conventions of her day. Beyond this, she does not pay lip service to a value system in which she does not believe. She is pregnant with Halliday’s child, but she seems to have no desire to get married, nor even to contemplate the advantages of marriage or its necessity as a social convention or a means of economic security. In fact, her contempt for convention is such that she sleeps with Gerald during her pregnancy and in Halliday’s apartment. She is not a hater of men, but she is a woman without fear, or rather, she is a woman who evidently only fears herself, since the only thing she admits to fearing are black beetles, with which she is identified.
    Having cleared the deck, so to speak, of erroneous possibilities for reinventing love in modern times, Lawrence now turns his attention quite seriously to Ursula and Birkin. True, the relationship between Gudrun and Gerald opens the novel and for all practical purposes closes it, but it is fated from the start, as we have seen, to be something that must be played out like a Greek tragedy from which there is no escape. In the relationship between Ursula and Birkin, though, Lawrence sets out to explore the meaning of love in our times. If, as argued throughout this essay, he acknowledges with Rimbaud that love has to be reinvented, love’s reinvention must take into account the realties of the modern age. Moreover, Lawrence must draw on the most important fund of knowledge he has on the subject, his relationship with Frieda. Lawrence rejects all formulas for love, which are faded and washed out by the centuries. The true meaning of love has to be as relevant to our time as Dante’s philosophy of true love was to his own. It must be real. Above all, it must be heartfelt. In a letter to Edward Garnett, Lawrence writes:
    I can only write what I feel pretty strongly about: and that, at present, is the relation between men and women. After all, it is the problem of today, the establishment of a new relation. Or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women (The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, p. 30).
    It is clear from the passage already quoted in which Gudrun asks Ursula if she has considered marriage, that Ursula’s answer is neither a reflection of acquiescence to an outmoded tradition nor a dismissal of love. It is, however, a dismissal of love as it was presently constituted, “the end of experience,” as Ursula puts it at the start of the novel. On the other hand, it is clear that Ursula, unlike her sister, is open to the possibility of love, provided it is real love. However, it is fair to say that at