Farewell to the Priest of Love

31:1, Book Reviews Iy, so lame as to be embarrassing: "The overt anti-Emersonianism of Madame Merle's view of the self, noted both by Philip Rahv and by Poirier, seems to me an involuntary or repressed allusion on James's part." Involuntary? Repressed? What seems evident is that Bloom simply cannot bring himself to acknowledge that James had grave reservations about the extremity of Emerson's reading of the self in relation to freedom. Bloom is quite right that for Isabel, "what matters is the integrity of her will," but he cannot quite see that, much as he sympathizes with Isabel's desire for absolute freedom, James stands at some considerable distance from his headstrong young heroine, as Chapter 6 of Book I suggests: "Altogether, with her meager knowledge, her inflated ideals, her confidence at once innocent and dogmatic . . . she would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader's part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant." James does indeed engage in the dialectic of Freedom and Fate, but this is a dialectic larger than Emerson's formulation of it, and in Isabel James portrays the tragic consequences of believing in the inflated ideal of self-reliance. Readers interested in acquiring a collection of recent essays on James may well wish to compare Bloom's anthology with that just compiled by James W. Gargano. Published by G. K. Hall, Gargano's two-volume set Critical Essays on Henry James is subtitled TAe Early Novels and TAe Late Novels. This collection is much more mainstream in its selection of critics, offers broader coverage of James's career, and provides a generous selection of contemporary critical reviews of The Master's work. At $60.00, however, the set is also a good deal more expensive than Bloom's single-volume price of $29.50. James W. Tuttleton New York University FAREWELL TO THE PRIEST OF LOVE Cornelia Nixon. Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. $25.00 Geoffrey Harvey. 'Sons and Lovers' (The Critics Debate). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1987. Cloth $22.50 Paper $7.95 Don't expect Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women to be about the leadership novels of the 1920s, for those works figure only marginally . Instead Cornelia Nixon is primarily concerned with D. H. Lawrence's turn against women as it is embodied in the transition from TAe Rainbow to Women in Love. She argues that "in TAe Rainbow, self-realization is achieved through transcendent physical experience, usually sex between partners who fear each other as the unknown but break through their fear to a consummation that is associated with procreation." In contrast in Women in Love "the via media to 114 31:1, Book Reviews being is not sex but stillness and an impersonal bond based on recognition of the partner's umeachable otherness, whereas sex is treated as destructive of self and others" (113-14). Nixon interprets these novels by way of her thesis that antifeminism and authoritarianism are linked in Lawrence. This thesis is not as original as she seems to think, nor does she bear Lawrence any good will. Nevertheless, her readings of the two masterpieces are striking and provocative. Lawrence's Leadership Politics is strongly anti-Leavisite in cast. Gone is the healer and priest of love with his radiant vision of human renewal and social revitalization. Nixon writes instead in the line of Colin Clarke's River of Dissolution, R. E. Pritchard's D. H. Lawrence: Body of Darkness, and David Cavitch's D. H. Lawrence and the New World. Leavis proclaimed that vitality and health were at the center of Lawrence's vision, but the anti-Leavisites perceive in Lawrence a figure notable for his confusion, instability, unresolved conflicts, misogyny, and latent homosexuality. Nixon also draws on Kate Millett's now familiar indictment of Lawrence for his crimes against women. Unlike Millett, she makes her case in measured tones, but she does carry a chip on her shoulder. Nixon's critique of Lawrence's leadership politics is grounded in a sexual politics of her...