The Selected Works of Virginia Woolf

Though assuming superficially different profiles-different allotropes-each of his characters was in fact composed of the same substance, and it was the novel's new task to reveal that substance and the essential, nonsynchronous dualisms within it opposing blood and mind, male and female, law and love, stasis and motility. (This assault on the conventionally individualized ego is hardly unique to Lawrence, however; using a rather different vocabulary, Virginia Woolf would question nineteenth-century notions of character in similar ways.) The sometimes cloying repetitions of Lawrence's writing from this period-"the pulsing, frictional to-and-fro which works up to culmination" (from the foreword to Women in Love) — are an attempt to mimic the flows of nonhuman instinct rather than conscious intellect. Second, the extravagance of his prose would no longer be reined in, as language still is in Hardy, by the need to make moral evaluations. The narrative could range beyond conventional notions of good and evil to conjure up the nonhuman element of human experience ...»