The crucial position of Aaron's Rod in development of Lawrence's fiction has not been recognized. Readers have responded with a feeling of anti-climax after the spectacular achievements of Women in Love and even the inclusion of the novel as the first in the category of "leadership" novels has not always been helpful. For example, Peter Fjagesund describes Aaron's Rod as "a bitterly disappointing introduction to the cult of male superiority" (121) and complains that Aaron is not heroic. The disappointment may come from the expectation that the novel is primarily about leadership, for a deeper appreciation is expressed by Michael Bell who presents Aaron as in search of "a truly balanced singleness" (141). Bell develops a refreshingly new approach to the novels central concern: the contradiction between the rhetoric of singleness of being and the social world.

I approach Aaron's Rod as a novel about the interrelations between Love and Power, a theme that allows Lawrence to develop his concern about the difficulty of reconciling individual psychological development with the "societal consciousness". Jeffrey Meyers supports my concentration on the love and power theme when he notes that the character Lilly announces to Aaron: "There are only two great dynamic urges in life: love and power" and concludes that "the novel attempts to work out the complex relations between them" (115). He does not, however, explore the interrelationships between the psychological, spiritual, cultural and social contexts of love and power or estimate the extent to which Lawrence at least partly resolves the apparent conflict between these two polarities.

My own understanding of Lawrence's success in at least pointing towards a model for the resolution of love and power oppositions has been helped by the remarkable psychoanalytic analysis provided by the work of the psychiatrist Paul Rosenfels, especially in his book . Rosenfels believed that the growth of civilization was dependent upon the development of interpersonal creativity. He was critical of Freudian psychoanalysis and troubled that psychology, or what he terms "the science of human behaviour", had been detached from its philosophical base and attached to a pathologising medical perspective. Psychoanalysis was restricted, in his view, by a reductive perception of human nature and became too content to correct abnormalities and neuroses rather than to offer a path of psychic growth to the individual or to encourage the development of meaningful human relationships aimed at the discovery of the unknown aspects of consciousness. He seems to share with Lawrence an excitement at the potential for relationships to be a means for the discovery of truth and for the reclamation of the unknown through a process of human interpersonal growth.

Rosenfels is particularly interested in the phenomenon of psychic growth as it may occur in the context of individual relationships between opposed psychic polarities. These psychic polarities are similar to Jung's introvert and extrovert types — types that first occurred as part of the evolutionary process in which the individual survives by adapting to or asserting him or herself over the environment. There occurs within the human species, in the more evolved context of civilisation, a character specialisation between yielding or assertive character types. He uses the terms "masculine" and "feminine" to characterise these types but asserts that character specialisation in civilised social contexts transcends biological gender. Therefore biologically masculine and feminine persons can be both yielding or assertive. Rosenfels interprets civilisation as a process in which individuals move out of what he calls the adaptive mode of existence (concerned with physical survival) to a creative context concerned with the realisation of identity as social beings.

Rosenfels relates the idea of assertive and yielding character specialisation to Power and Love dimensions of consciousness. The Power-based individual accumulates tensions which need to be discharged in active, assertive modes; the feminine personality type discharges a surplus of energy in the "work" of love. The "work" is the energy used to enlarge the growth of the psyche and is essential if love is to be a meaningful experience. Moreover, sexual relating either betweeh same gendered or heterosexual couples, is explained as the coalescence of polarised psychological types for the purposes of mutual growth on the individualistic level. Such polarisation explains the existence of such archetypes as the soldier and priest/scholar, the heroic active individual or the submissive, reflective individual.

Rosenfels pioneered the psychological exploration, in a non-pathologising context, of same gender relationships. He was interested in these relationships because sexual relating is transferred entirely from a biological/reproductive context to the psychological context of the creative development of the personality through the growth provided, psychologically, by the engagement of opposed psychic polarities: Same gender relations thus have the potential for serving the needs not of the adaptive, survivalist mode but the creative mode of expansion of Truth through the exploration of the inner psychic realm. Lawrence never went as far as this in his exploration of his homoerotic impulses butin Women in Love and Aaron's Rod developed a similar perspective. Rosenfels's model provides a relevant point of reference for the critic attempting to understand Lawrence's presentation of this aspect of human experience. Such an approach would be more conducive to understanding and less flawed by collusion with Lawrence's own internalised homophobia manifested in the treatment accorded to this theme by some distinguished Lawrence critics.

Lawrence seems to share with Rosenfels a conviction that the growth struggles of the individual stem from the dynamic stress between adaptive or survivalist and creative modes, as they are expressed throughout a lifetime. The end product of such a life struggle must have as its primary personal goal an intent to deal with the inadequacies of power in the civilized world. These inadequacies reduce the state of civilisation to an immature, even adolescent phase of development.

Love and Power are not new concerns in Lawrence's previous writing. In trying to redefine the nature of love, he had to face the problem of how the individual manages to reconcile his/her own personal autonomy and freedom with submission to the demands of another human being. Women in Love presented the formula of "star-equilibrium": Rupert Birkin's tentative solution to the problems of assertion and yielding, reconciled the opposing claims of personal autonomy and growth with the demands of shared relating. This novel is distinguished by a deeper exploration of male relating than Lawrence had attempted before. In the characterisations of Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin the exploration of the homoerotic impulse is conducted in a strong power-based context, symbolised in the wrestling of the two characters. However, the relation between Gerald and Rupert ends in failure and personal tragedy, an incompletion which led Lawrence to return to this homoerotic context in Aaron's Rod in his exploration of the relation between Lilly and Aaron, a relationship which has significant parallels and contrasts to the Gerald/Birkin relationship. The context of the Love and Power theme establishes Aaron's Rod as a natural extension of the concerns of Women in Love and the fiction which had led up to it as well as the inauguration of a new phase of "leadership novels."

No consideration of Lawrence's development of the Power theme in his fiction can neglect his continuing response to the thought of Friedrich Nietszche. Rupert Birkin in Women in Love differentiates his own view of the power dimension from the "Wille zur Macht" of Nietszche. Colin Milton has shown that Lawrence read Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil as early as 1907. Lawrence shared Nietzsche's perception that the evolutionary struggle for survival presented by biological science appeared to contradict sharply the notion that human motivation can be guided by a spirit of pure Christian altruism. Although Lawrence was ambivalent to the reliance on "will" in Nietzsche's concept of Will-to-power, he, nevertheless, engages with it in Women in Love through Birkin's criticism of the 'Wille zur Macht". Lawrence shared with Nietszche a perception that instinctual strivings have an intelligence that directs the individual along a path of selfhood rather than mere survival. Colin Milton stopped short after his discussion of Women in Love and complained that although the middle novels Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent, are not less amenable to Nietzschean reading. "Lawrence turned away from what he did best — exploring the fluid and intense world of personal feeling — to an area of political belief and action of which he had no experience and little sympathy" (8). I believe, on the contrary, that Aaron's Rod is a natural extension of the concerns of Women in Love as well as a further development in a different direction. Lawrence makes a richly complex relationship between the political and the personal in Aaron's Rod as he tries to expand his concept of love by the inclusion of power. The Nietzschean concept of power is still a point of reference for Lawrence in Aaron's Rod but modified by a possible allusion to another strong early influence on Lawrence: Schopenhauer, specifically the essay "The Metaphysic of Love".

The picaresque action of Aaron's Rod is structured through patterns of ideological debate between the characters. It is in these debates — strategically placed in the early chapters and the last chapter — that the themes of love and power emerge explicitly. The central character in these debates is Lilly, the representative of Lawrence's own Nietzschean opposition to the love ideal and embodiment of values of strong leadership and power. Aaron is, however, the protagonist and Lilly the supporting character and their relationship is an indication that Lawrence is both working out his own inner divisions between the rival claims of love and power and differentiating his own life philosophy from Nietzsche's.

The first debate about love and power occurs between Lilly and a secondary character, Jim Bricknell, the son of a colliery manager and representative of the industrial society of the Midlands. Jim is attached to the traditional notions of Christian love in ways reminiscent of Thomas Crich in Women in Love whereas Lilly reflects Gerald Crich who reacted against his father's charity through his own assertion of power. Jim is confident in his knowledge of the nature of love: "I know what love is, I've thought about it. Love is the soul's respiration"(62). Lilly is impressed by the metaphor and asks to see it printed out on a card to be set up on the mantelpiece of the room they are talking in. Lilly's emendation of the message is drastic: LOVE IS THE SOUL'S RESPIRATION is expanded by recognizing that respiration is a naturally polarised activity involving inspiration and expiration. Lilly adds to the sentence on Jim's card the declaration WHEN YOU LOVE YOUR SOUL BREATHES IN and WHEN YOUR SOUL BREATHES OUT, IT'S A BLOODY REVOLUTION.

Lawrence, however, presents through Aaron's relationship to Lilly, a more subtle and complex critique of the love ideal than Lilly presents on the suface. The power breath of revolution is still integrated with the love breath of inspiration. Neither power nor love are self-sufficient but are dialectical expressions. Lawrence, as authorial voice in this debate, reflects a Bakhtinian view that all truth is a matter of relationship, dialectical and dialogical. He is concerned to dramatise, explore and reconcile the nature of the relationship between love and power as well as well as the problems of balancing these two powerful elements in the individual and in western culture. Lawrence was sensitised to the cultural aspects of this problem by his own difficulties in accepting his submissive or "feminine" side.

The debate between Jim Bricknell and Lilly is extended in the chapter "A Punch in the Wind". Jim repeats his allegiance to love and draws it more explicitly into relation with Christian norions of sacrifice. "Don't you think love and sacrifice are the finest things in life?" he asks. He is drawn to the sacrifice of himself to the ideal of love: "I mean love — love — love. I sacrifice myself to love. I reckon that's the highest that man is capable of and he explicitly supports this view by appealing to the Christ ideal: "Christ is the principle of love"(77). Lilly repudiates this ideal by proclaiming that Christ's love was dependent upon and supported the treachery of Judas. For Jim, Christ and Judas are the finest thing the world produced. For Lilly they are a "foul combination"(78).

The dialectic is further extended in the more central relationship of Aaron and Lilly, especially in the last chapter "Words" when Lilly proclaims: "There are only two great dynamic urges in life: love and power." Aaron is not convinced: "'Love and power?' said Aaron. 'I don't see power as so very important'"(293). The qualification of the power ideal is important to note. However, power is partly reinstated as a value when Lilly responds to Aaron's admission that he has as much hate as love in him. Lilly argues that hate is the recoil from the love urge and implies that it is dangerous to repress it. The relationship between these two values is problematised: power cannot exclude love but neither can love repress power.

Lawrence undertakes a quest for the integration of love and power in Aaron's Rod that recognises the cultural and personal implications of such a quest. The final goal of integration is impeded by the domination in personal and cultural relations of false forms of love and false forms of power. Lilly advocates the power mode without himself necessarily embodying the ideal; he argues for the merits of power against the resistance of Aaron who still dallies with modes of love — although he too is directed by false modes of love in his failed marriage and his relationships, particularly with the Marchesa in Italy. The novel extends the debate about Power and Love to the culture of postwar Europe and asks a number of questions. Why does this culture have such a hard time integrating power and love or even recognising the validity of the power urge? Why has the Christian ideal of love proven to be so destructive? What would it be like to bring power and love together? How would that integration change the nature of love or modify the ideals of power?

Personal and political factors drove Lawrence to pursue this quest into the nature of power and love. His personal resistance to the all encompassing love of women and his desire to reintegrate the values of his rejected father have been charted by Judith Ruderman. Undoubtedly, Lawrence's fear that his own psychic identity could have been destroyed by his mother's love remained a strong factor. L. D. Clark also comments that Aaron is a projection of Lawrence as his father. These factors could well have encouraged his embracing of the values of power and the exploration of male bonding rather than male/female bonding. The recognition of such psychological factors does not, however, preclude the recogrrition of other cultural and intellectual forces. The most powerful of these was definitely the first world war.

Lawrence was attempting a response to the nihilist collapse of values that occurred in Europe after the war by continuing his quest for a principle of unity of cohesion that would not rigidify the social order or oversimplify individual experience. Rigidity and oversimplification occur if human relations are confined to unidimensional Love or unidimensional Power. Lawrence expresses successfully in his human dramatisations in Aaron's Rod that human consciousness cannot be confined to a single mental or emotional movement. Even love, expressed in Jim Bricknell's words as "Life, the very breath of the soul" is redefined by Aaron, inspired by his own musical soul: "now he realised that love, even in its intensest, was only an attribute of the human soul: one of its incomprehensible gestures"(165). Men and women need a less narrow ideal to live by: one function of the repressed element of power is to amend the narrowness of love.

Lawrence celebrated Power, the "pouvoir" that enables in the posthumous essay "Blessed are the Powerful." Here is Lawrence's account of the manifold, multidimensional nature of power: Power is manifold. There is physical strength, like Samson's. There is racial power, like David's or Mahomet's. There is mental power, like that of Socrates, and ethical power, like that of Moses, and spiritual power like Jesus' or like Buddha's, and mechanical power, like that of Stephenson, or military power, like Napoleon's or political power like Pitt's. These are all true manifestations of power, coming out of the unknown.(442)

The crisis of the world war forced Lawrence to think creatively about the nature of power itself as well as its relation to love. He intuitively recognised that repressed power urge had fed the destructive aspects of the war and that this repression of power had restricted the celebration and expansion of this powerful evolutionary force in human civilisation. He probably returned to Nietzsche's thought once again, reconsidering the role of Christian values in restricting power. "Blessed are the Powerfull" reverses of course the message of the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament. Christ is temporarily replaced in The Plumed Serpent by the pagan Quetzalcoatl; in that novel Christianity had to be placed in abeyance — at least until the imbalance of power can be worked out. Power pervades Aaron's Rod but in ways that present it as a problematic and disturbing force in human society and human psychology. Its problematic and disturbing elements do not mean that Lawrence cannot celebrate it too by exploring some of its multidimensional aspects: Lilly and Aaron highlight its spiritual dimensions; the military, mechanical mode is dramatised in the bomb explosion in the chapter "The Broken Rod" and its political aspects are explored in Lilly's interest in the protofascist Italian ideals of the strong leader.

Lilly's perspective is critically placed by Lawrence in several ways and Lawrence, unlike Nietszche, does not simply abandon the love ideal. He examines ways in which Love, like Power, can also be falsified and limited. Jim Bricknell expresses a pernicious distortion of the love ideal in Christian culture: its association with sacrifice. There is no essential reason why the soul that loves cannot be powerful but the soul that sacrifices itself weakens and destroys itself, Jim's association of love with sacrifice ("Don't you think love and sacrifice are the finest things in life?")(77) is anathema to Lilly. Lawrence dramatises the disintegration of a whole culture through false sacrificial love in the first world war. Lawrence's opposition to such a love is supported in several classic poems of the Great War such as Wilfrid Owen's "Greater Love" or "Dulce et Decorum est pro Patria Mori". Owen's tragic irony juxtaposes the high flown traditional ideal of sacrificial love with images of cruel mechanical destruction, mass death, and a Judas-like betrayal of the youth of England by its leaders. (ln The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence explores primitive sacrifice as an expression of sacred power divorced from love.)

Lawrence's exposing of the roots of traditional love in sacrifice occurs at the personal as well as the political level. For example, Aaron is forced to leave his wife Lottie because of her sacrificial stance and her demand that Aaron sacrifice himself on the altar of his family and marriage. Aaron is supported in his revolt against sacrifice by his encounter with Lilly who is Lawrence's Nietzschean voice in the novel. In seeing Christ and Judas as "a foul combination", Lilly partly reflects Nietzsche's horror of the sacrificial mode in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietszche attacks Christianity most vehemently when he is declaiming against the sacrificial mode: "The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation"(65). Sacrifice, for Nietszche, was at the top of the ladder of religious cruelty and the New Testament fusion of love with sacrifice in the ideal of the crucifixion forces him to declaim against those who "have bound up this New Testament along with the Old Testament into one book, as the 'Bible' as 'the book in itself'"(71). Nietszche admires the divine Justice and immense scale of the Hebrew "Old Testament." Lawrence's use of Old Testament biblical typology in Aaron's Rod through, for example, the symbolic significance of Aaron s name may reflect Lawrence's endorsement of Nietszche's admiration for the expression of power found in the Hebrew Bible.

Power alone is by no means a panacea to cure the ills of society. For this reason Lilly, the chief exponent of the power ideal, is placed critically by Lawrence in several ways. Lilly often gets caught by the contradictions implicit and explicit in his own paradoxical arguments. For example, he is forced to argue for a kind of slavery of the inferior to the superior when he asserts: "People are not men: they are insects and instruments, and their destiny is slavery"(281). The character Levinson greets this assertion as "the preposterous pretentiousness of a megalomaniac." Lawrence, without privileging Levinson's criticism particularly, allows Lilly to modify his own extremism by also declaring that " every man is a sacred, holy individual, never to be violated."

Lilly presents himself as a contradictory Moses to Aaron, offering as much darkness as light. His gospel of power reinstates the power urge but the confusion of his defence of slavery, on the one hand, and of inviolate individual freedom on the other, shows that he needs to clarify his thought. The bomb explosion occurs at the end of this episode and dramatises the way in which raw power can invade human culture and experience in a devastating way. The impact is both physically and psychically destructive: CRASH!

There intervened one awful minute of pure shock, when the soul was in darkness.

Out of this shock Aaron felt himself issuing amid a mass of terrible sensations: the fearful blow of the explosion, the noise of glass, the hoarse howl of people, the rushing of men, the sudden gulf, the awful gulfing whirlpool of horror in the social life.(282)

This climactic, violent incident brings to the surface the implied destructive violence in society and in human relationships that exists as a discordant melody to the music of Aaron's flute. The flute is broken and destroyed, suggesting that Aaron's values based on love, cultural continuity, harmony and the inner peace of a single being are continuously threatened if not obliterated in this culture.

The condition of war is the single most destructive element in the consciousness of this society. Michel Foucault in Power/Knowledge comments that "politics is the continuation of war by other means" and asks "Shouldn't one conceive all problems of power in terms of the relations of War?"(4) The state wages a form of war even in peace, though this Foucauldian version of power is presented as not only a force that weighs negatively but as one that "traverses and produces things, induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourse." Although Lawrence introduces similar perspectives on power in his writings and creative fiction, he is unlike Nietszche and Foucault in not wanting to abandon the power of love and in striving to find ways in which power can be connected or reconciled to love.

The conflict between love and power is the essential basis of the relationship between Aaron and Lilly who may, as L. D. Clark suggests, be projections of Lawrence's own psyche. I would now like to develop an interpretation of the Aaron/Lilly relationship in terms of the interaction between power and love based personalities. I will structure my discussion around the following key episodes in the novel: Aaron's abandonment of his wife and family in the Midlands, his first encounter with Lilly: the episode in which Lilly massages Aaron; the re-encounter with Lilly in Italy and Aaron's affair with the Marchesa.

Aaron's inner necessity to leave home and physically, if not financially, abandon his wife and family has a context: the failure of a culture dependent on notions of Christian sacrificial love. The early chapters of the novel are suffused with biblical allusion: to the story of Lot in "The Pillar of Salt" chapter and also to the Nativity. Peace and goodwill do not exist in a war ravaged culture and love and sacrifice have produced death in the culture and psychic atrophy in this particular family. Before Aaron actually abandons his family he responds ironically to his child's expression of love of a Christmas tree ornament; "Look, Father, don't you love it?" "'Love it?' he re-echoed, ironical over the word love"(10). The child, Millicent, shortly after smashes another ornament, a re-enactment of the principle that each man kills the thing he loves. The "little splashing explosion' of the blue ball prefigures the explosion of the bomb at the end of the novel. Christian peace and goodwill do not operate in this culture partly because love has been transferred to objects. The child's attachment to the material object symbolises the false power of materialism that Aaron later acknowledges: "It's money on both sides: it's money we live for and money is what our lives are worth"(21).

Aaron is an emblematic hero dramatising the search for a recreated, transformed self, He realises that the human soul is larger than love alone and that power is needed as a corrective to self-abnegation. He has parted from his family, like the eagles in Whitman's poem "Dalliance of Eagles" to follow his own path of self-realisation.

His aloneness does not preclude him from making significant contacts with others and exploring some relationships. His sexual "apartness" may reflect Lawrence's response to Schopenhauer's idea in "The Metaphysic of Love" that "the moment of coition" determines the psychic nature of the child born as the result of it. In other words, the sexual relationship has to be healthy and balanced if the child produced from it is to be healthy, and hence society as a whole.

When Aaron visits the Royal Oak Inn in chapter 2 he feels some sympathetic attraction to the ambivalently characterised Jewish landlady. The narrator comments that as Aaron sat near the landlady "he loved to luxuriate, like a cat, in the presence of a violent woman"(22). He is attracted, in other words, to the power base of this woman, a polar opposite to his wife Lottie. Although at present he withdraws from her, since "there was a hard opposing core in him" and he is "deeply antagonistic to his surroundings", he feels more attraction to this woman than to the sobbing, complaining wife who is consoled by the doctor when Aaron creeps back unobserved to his own house. The lack of a true empowered psyche in his own wife is what determines his decision to leave forthwith. He is deeply alienated from "the infernal love and good-will of his wife"(25).

Virginia Hyde has explored the rich pattern of biblical typological allusion in Aaron's Rod that informs the relationship between Lilly and Aaron especially in Florence. I would relate this typology to Lawrence's disillusion with society's use of the New Testament ideas of love and sacrifice, as well as to Nietzsche's opposition to those who "have bound up this New Testament, along with the Old Testament into one book, as the 'Bible', as 'The Book in itself'".

Aaron functions in a way that reinforces the traditional priestly association of his name. He is the spokesperson for Moses, the prophet of power whose role is presumably filled by Lilly in Lawrence's novel. Aaron's Rod is the flute — which can blossom and bear spiritual fruit. In the episode in Numbers 17 about the revolt of Korah and his confederates, Aaron functions as the priestly intercessor between the living and the dead, reducing the numbers of those destroyed in an earthquake. Aaron's spiritual stance offers hope amidst the destruction of the war and post-war violence and although he is associated in the Bible with the story of the golden calf and materialism, he stands in Lawrence's novel as the opponent of such materialism. But as a modernist hero, Aaron is not untainted by the disease of his society.

In the next stage of his quest Aaron works as a musician at the opera house in London and makes his contact with Lilly. The Aaron/Lilly relationship, with Lilly standing as a version of Moses, creates a complex relationship for the reader. Lilly's ideological positions are modified by Aarons critical response. Aaron falls into Lilly's hands — literally becomes subject to him — in the chapter 'Low-Water mark". His drunken condition and later succumbing to influenza is precipitated by his abandonment of his family and a subjection to Josephine Ford. Aaron at various points in the narrative yields to the temptation to be taken care of by women in temporary love alliances which are mainly destructive to his own inner growth. Josephine and later the Marchesa in Italy are the love equivalents for Aaron of Lilly's "punch in the wind". The narrative does not necessarily invite judgment on Lilly or Aaron but reveals a society structured in such a way that the integrity of the individual is continuously in danger of being fatally compromised.

The condition of war is all pervasive and is reintroduced into the reader's consciousness by the visit of Herbertson to Lilly's flat. Herbertson recollects obsessively the horrors of the war in a morbidly compulsive way. These horrors have invaded his consciousness and the war has created a bruise in the psyche which distorts human relationships. The conflicts of the characters are induced by their immersion in either false forms of love or distorted forms of power. The result of such psychic incompletion is either loneliness, alienation or violent conflict. Lawrence seeks not harmony or sentimental happiness through love but the creative expression of conflict.

Examples of false or incomplete expressions of power or love are important diagnostic indicators of the fundamental disharmonies within a civilisation. Aaron's relationship to Lottie is distorted by false versions of sacrificial love. Josephine Ford suggests that men marry simply because they are lonely. Jim Bricknell advocates a purely sacrificial love. The Marchesa tries to establish a Cleopatra-like dominance over Aaron. Heterosexual love functions in variously distorted ways: Lawrence's hero withdraws temporarily into himself but breaks his detachment to some degree through a homoerotic and healing connection with Lilly.

Lilly's massaging and caretaking of Aaron has a personal and symbolic value in so far as he brings Aaron to some semblance of wholeness through physical touch and the body. The homoerotic and physical aspects of the act are not all of the significance of the episode. In showing how two men can react together in a healing way, Lawrence's presentation of Lilly and Aaron looks back inescapably to the interaction of Gerald and Birkin in Women in Love. Gerald Crich was an extreme embodiment of the power-based personality and Birkin, the apostle of the ethic of "star-equilibrium", had a similar orientation to the "pouvoir" of Power. The relationship of these two power-based characters, one humanised and the other linked to the mechanical/industrial mode of power and control, ended in incompletion and tragedy. Their physical bonding was established through the famous wrestling episode.

The difference between wrestling and massaging is profound: Lawrence attempts a less violent and more tender connection between the male characters, with an emphasis on healing love, and even an element of submission. Lilly expresses a strong power mode perhaps midway between Birkin and Gerald; Aaron is faithful to the path of love. Aaron's Rod represents an advance over Women in Love in its recognition of the necessity for love and tenderness to be connected to power and for assertion to be combined with love or submission — even in males, the traditional power brokers of society.

Lilly, through a ritual oil anointing, is putting Aaron in touch with a power-based love allowing him to adopt temporarily a stance of submission and a receptiveness to tenderness which is making no sacrificial or possessive claims upon him. The role of this homoerotic relationship in expanding Aaron's psychological growth gives the relationship a significance which differentiates it from the mildly satirised homosexual relationships berween Angus, Francis, Algy and James Argyle portayed during Aaron's Italian journey. Aaron is in a sense yet another casualty of war, albeit a domestic war within an oppressive marriage, a fitting microcosmic image of the war itself. Lilly is both male nurse and an initiator into a new mode of psychological relating. It is a remarkable development for Lawrence to make his male power representative a healer and a caretaker.

Lilly also furthers Aaron's quest by bringing him to Italy, for Aaron follows Lilly there. Florence operates as a symbol for the possibilities of a cultural renaissance based on the new understanding of love and power. Aaron recognises Florence as "one of the world's living centres" and describes "the sense of having arrived — of having reached a perfect centre of the human world"(212). Aaron feels "a new self, a new life-urge rising inside himself. Florence seemed to start a new man in him." Lilly also thinks optimistically that civilization could come to fruition: "Why not flower again, why not?"(233), asks Lilly.

Lawrence's travel books indicate that his trip to Italy was a wonderful occasion for healing and self-renewal for him. In Aaron's Rod Lawrence draws on that personal eryerience and strives to attain a vision of life possibilities by a culture so seriously damaged by the Great War — a perspecrive which again could be seen as an advance upon the nihilism expressed through Birkin at the conclusion of Women in Love. Birkin's bleak vision of the complete atrophy of the human race is critically placed within the novel but Aaron's Rod confirms the possibilities for faith and hope. Lawrence shared with Nietszche a faith in the shaping, form-creating force of the life process that works from within, utilising and exploiting external circumstances. The Renaissance past of Florence is presented not as a nostalgic point of reference but as a typological indicator of the course of future evolution.

Lilly's "Why not flower again, why not?" is the central question of the whole narrative. The architecture and art of Florence, "the lily flower" of cities, partly confirms Aaron in his quest for a renewal of life and civilisation. Florence celebrates male energy or, as Aaron says, Florence is a town of "just men. The rarest thing left in our sweet Christendom"(213). The ideal sounds misogynistic but Lawrence perceived that the Great War had not only literally destroyed the young manhood of Britain but fatally wounded the psyches of those who were left. Michelangelo's David is the symbolic epitome of this Florentine masculine ideal and one Aaron responds to with wonder; David may be a symbolic projection of Aaron as musician-healer and agonizer over war. As David charmed Saul with his harp and fought Goliath, so Aaron charms with his flute and wrestles with the Goliath of post-war triumph, most notably in his affair with the Marchesa. Aaron perceives the statue as offering only the promise not the fulfillment of the perfection of the male. David is identified as the adolescent male, and his presence in the Hebrew Bible is a typological and predictive one. However, if he looks forward to a male perfection still to be realised, the fulfillment is not to be found for Lawrence in the Christ that David traditionally points towards. The New Testament sacrificial ideal has to be modified if the degenerary and betrayal of the war-ridden world is to be healed.

Florence and Italy are also part of this contemporary reality that involves violence and destruction on a personal and political level. The affair that Aaron has with the Marchesa is dramatised as a typical Lawrentian struggle. After Aaron leaves her, he is robbed by soldiers — an incident that Aaron responds to with a sense of deep violation. The soldiers force him to acknowledge the real power of evil and that evil is in himself as it is in the soldiers. Even music affects Aaron with a strange anger; and orchestra makes him "blind with hate or I don't know what. But I want to throw bombs"(225). This statement allies Aaron in a way with the anarchist bomb which explodes openly and shatters his flute.

This internal violence within Aaron's psyche has to be worked out and his love affair with the Marchesa affords Aaron an opportuniry to purge himself, if not completely, of his "destructive element". Lawrence identifies the Marchesa symbolically with Cleopatra and the allusion to Shakespear's tragedy supports the prevailing theme of the novel: Love in the context of war. The Marchesa herself is yet another victim of the war; she used to sing but since the war she is unable to: Aaron is linked to the Marchesa in this regard since his music is also to be silenced by the anarchist bomb. The sexuality of the affair puts Aaron in touch with a very male phallic pride: Aaron feels triumph in satisfying the Marchesa in a way her aristocratic husband cannot. The northern British working class man becomes a kind of Mellors exhibiting "his own virile title to strength and reward"(257) for the benefit of the aristocratic female but his moments of sexual triumph are accompanied by "dreams of strange black strife"(258).

The conclusion of the affair is accompanied by a fresh realisation: Aaron knows he cannot be the Don Juan, the romantic lover. As a husband, he knows that he is married in spiritual as well as literal sense; despite the separation from Lottie. Aaron fulfils more rhan a financial responsibility. For this reason, Aaron extricates himself from the Marchea's passion by using his own hate to withdraw from that passion. However, this romantic affair brings a recognition with it: that he, Aaron, has power inextricably involved with his love.

In a letter to himself, Aaron reminds himself that he believes in the fight and nothing else: the fight that is the "fight of love"(263). There can be no romantic capitulation to an ideal female nor any escape into a sensuality disassociated from the struggles of personal growth and the realisation of the power of the self. After the affair is over, Aaron's chief consolations are his aloneness and his remembrance of Lilly's presence. Lottie's existence gives him the acknowledgment of the reality of marriage and Lilly reminds him of the necessity ofachieving personal power. Aaron's Rod, like Women in Love, closes on an ambivalent note. There is no resolution of the relationship of Aaron and Lilly or of Aaron's marital impasse. Does Aaron's refusal to capitulate to Lilly repeat Gerald Crich's refusal to acknowledge his commitment to Birkin? Aaron does advance beyond Gerald in his refusal to allow himself to be destroyed by either Lottie or the Marchesa and in his knowledge of the strength of his own aloneness and his partial acknowledgment of Lilly's wisdom. He will not serve Lilly or recognise his authority but he knows where his path is: in the fight of love. He is ambivalent to both love ("for of all things love is the most deadly to me")(263) and to power ("I don't see power as so very importanf) (294). However, he does know more about what love is and he does acknowledge the anger within himself and the necessity to integrate it in his quest for love and connection. Aaron does not allow the reader to see a promised land but he does give him or her a hope for a renewed personal and social order.

Aaron, in advancing beyond Gerald Crich in Women in Love, provides Lawrence with his own vantage point from which he can pursue his continuing quest into the nature of the relations between love and power. Although an intuitive metaphysical and psychological thinker rather than a systematic scientific thinker, Lawrence's imaginative fiction and prose writings do accord with Rosenfels's elaboration of the truths of love and power. Lawrence certainly shares with Rosenfels a dissatisfaction with Freud's sexual theory of repression and develops instead a perception that the creative growth potential in human relationships offers hope for a social order threatened with destruction and afflicted by psychic disorder. Lawrence struggles in his subsequent novels with the relations between love and power rather than establishing a stable sense of the ways in which they might work in creative coordination. Richard Somers in Kangaroo reacts against the all-embracing love philosophy of the leader Kangaroo; conversely Kate Leslie in The Plumed Serpent reserves to herself something of Aarort's aloneness as a defence against Cipriano's male power position. In Lady Chatterly's Lover Lawrence reintroduces an emphasis on love as tenderness. The theme of love and power, appearing as a critical conflict in Women in Love, is gradually explored but only partially resolved. The search for a resolution of the conflict brings with it clarification of the nature, importance and functioning of the love and power dimensions in human relationships and in the whole social order.

Bibliography

Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Clark, L. D. The Minoan Distance. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980.

Fjagesund, Peter. The Apocalyptic World of D. H. Lawrence. Norwegian University Press,1991.

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Hyde, Virginia. The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence's Revisionist Typology. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Kinkead-Weekes, M. D. H. Lawrence; Triumph to Exile 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. Aaron's Rod ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

__________. Kangaroo. Penguin Books, 1997.

__________. "Blessed are the Powerful" in Phoenix II, ed. Warren Roberts. London: Heinemann, 1968.

Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence's Experience of Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Milton, Colin. Lawrence and Nietszche. Aberdeen University Press, 1987.

Nietszche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Allen and Unwin 1967.

Rosenfels, Paul. . New York: Libra Publishers, 1966.

Ruderman, Judith. D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother. Durham: Duke University Press, 1984.

Schaekner, Peter. Class, Politics, and the Individual. Cranbury, N. J. : Associated University Presses, 1985.

Schopenhauer, A. "The Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes" in Will Durant, ed. The Works of Schopenhauer. New York: Frederick Unger, 1955. Lawrence, in his review of Trigant Burrow's The Social Basis of Consciousness, endorses Burrow's replacement of the inward sense of separateness for Freud's sex-repression as the root of modern neurosis. Lawrence says, " it is only when we can get a man to fall back into his true relation to other men, and to women that we can give him an opportunity to be himself"(382). Edward D. McDonald ed. Phoenix London: Heinemann 7967, 377-382. L. D. Clark comments on Aaron's cannibalistic dream in Aaron's Rod that it reflects Lawrence's insistence that "a division imposed by modern society and current views of human society are responsible for such aberrations as homoeroticism and that these divisions can be cured by linking together the sources of the blood and the sources of the mind". The Minoan Distance, p. 231. I agree that Lawrence certainly had a negative, puritanical perception of homosexuality but I would differentiate that from homoeroticism which Lawrence presents in Women in Love and Aaron's Rod as an occasion for psychic growth and/or an expression of the societal consciousness. In the course of her discussion of the reclamation of the father in The Devouring Mother Judith Ruderman seems to endorse the extreme pathologising of homosexuality in the work of Charles Socarides. Birkin says, "I agree that the Wille zur Macht is a base and petty thing", Women in Love Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p.150. "Aaron is a hero modelled in many respects on the elder Lawrence and on qualities in Lawrence himself attributable to being his father's son"(230). As late as The Plumed Serpent Lawrence gives to the character Julio Toussaint this expression of Schopenhauer's philosophy: "I hope we are not Puritans. I hope that I may say that it depends on the moment of coition. Either the spirit of the father fuses with the spirit of the mother to create a new being with a soul, or else nothing fuses but the germ of creation." London: Heinemann, p. 59. Is Aaron given this recognition that sexual relations conducted under the wrong psychic conditions will perpetuate those conditions? His own children seem to suffer as the result of the distortion of his own marriage. Reprinted from D. H. Lawrence Studies
by The D. H. Lawrence Society of Korea (Vol. 8, July, 1999)