Close your eyes, my love, let me make you blind! The solution that ever is much too deep for the mind, Dissolved in the blood [β¦] D. Then I shall know which image of God My man is made toward[β¦] D. Later, Plotinus developped the idea of a many faced Eros and contended that there are as many Eroses as there are hearts.
Then, Christianity separated the Hellenic vulgar Eros from his spiritual counterpart, naming the latter Agape. Herbert Marcuse sets Eros in opposition to civilization, showing the destructive effect of desexualization in the weakening of Eros in favour of Thanatos. One more development of the image of Eros that comes to Michel Foucault is that of a purely social construct.
This outburst absolved formally repressed, marginalized or neglected languages of sexuality and the erotic. The main rhetorical problem, however, as Julia Kristeva claims, was not resolved in the literature of the 20th century: what is the new language of love and eroticism like? But what was Eros for Lawrence? This does not deviate, in fact, from the general Christian understanding: the opposition between Eros and Agape.
But in his fiction, Lawrence turns into a crafty realist who tries to involve, in the discourse of love, besides the spiritual and the sensual, all its possible varieties: maternal love, Christian love, patriotic love, possessive and brutal love, obsessive and unrequited loveβ¦. It makes sense first to reconstruct that image, in its upper or lower case forms.
The first directs us towards its godly, mythical origin, the second, towards human nature. Here, the arrow of Eros strikes two potential lovers: Frances, whose boyfriend has jilted her, perhaps giving preference to a more sophisticated type, comes home to her village with suppressed suffering. There is no special triggering event, but an attempt to capture, to feel acutely and to relate in language this mysterious and illogical instant when desire is born between a man and a woman.
