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Sijia Yao: Cosmopolitan Love:
Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang
(University of Michigan Press, 2023) [a]
I.
One of the books reviewed in the latest edition of the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2025) is Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang (2023) [b].
Written by Li Zhimin, a Distinguished Professor of English at the School of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou University, it intrigued me enough that I decided I would read Yao's book for myself to discover if she really does misread Lawrence's project as much as indicated.
For Lawrence - just to be absolutely clear at the outset - was not a utopian in the transcendent (and optimistic) sense that Yao argues and had no truck with cosmopolitanism if the latter is interpreted as a form of universal humanism.
As for love, Lawrence absolutely rejects such when it is written with a capital 'L' and transformed into something grandiose and morally ideal; when it becomes diseased and insisted upon as the only thing that matters; when it becomes politicised and serves as a justification for violence, hatred, and authoritarianism.
Even in his Chatterley writings, Lawrence prefers to speak of touch and tenderness rather than use the L-word and whilst he subscribes to a politics of desire, he ultimately thinks the transformation of society will require a new religious sensibility more than a sexual revolution and his democracy to come is, of course, an immanent utopia (now/here), existing in the bonds between people, not an ideal utopia (no/where) that "transgresses and transcends local, national, global,
and even cosmic boundaries" (9).
To his credit, Li does find flaws with Yao's study. But, unfortunately, he too seems to buy into the (Christian and Beatlesque) idea that all we need is love in order to "help the world become better" [c] and the human family achieve its collective maturity.
II.
As my knowledge of (and interest in) the Chinese-American author Eileen Chang is strictly limited, I'll not be commenting here on Yao's discussion of her work, nor the nature of the link made between Chang's writings and those of Lawrence, as all such comparisons are, if not exactly odious, then often questionable, even when adopting a third term methodology [d].
Yao opens her Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love with the following line: "Love as a feeling is universal" (1) and normally that would be enough for me to immediately close a book. For even if this is factually correct from a bio-anthropological viewpoint, the expression of love is, of course, determined by language, history, culture, etc. (as I'm sure Yao knows; speaking immediately afterwards of Chinese love and Western love as distinct traditions).
Nonsensical phrases casually dropped into the Introduction such as "it stirs one's spiritual being" (11) are also problematic and usually book-closing for me, but, in this case, I'm determined to press on and "pursue the true meaning" (11) of a text which promises to "restore [Lawrence's] literary glory" (14) and address the problems of today.
III.
According to Yao, "in imagining how love breaks down preexisting orders and creates alternative utopian realities" (25) Lawrence divides love into four forms, "each corresponding to different phases of an ideal subject's maturity: parental, sexual, adulterous, and transcendental" (25-26).
She then explains how she traces the subject progressing through these four separate phases, transforming their relationships in the process, as they move toward cosmoplitan love as she understands it. Thus the four phases also structure her book: beginning with chapter 1, in which the love of a child for its parents is transformed into sexual love for a non-familial other; a topic Yao discusses with reference to Freud's Oedipus complex and the question of incest.
I'll take a brief look at this and the following two chapters - which illustrate how Lawrence used his model of eroticised philosophy to challenge nationalism and modernisation within a secular society - before then examining the fourth and final chapter in a little more detail, as this is the one I think will most interest (and infuriate), dealing as it does with Lawrence's creation of an "alternative language of divine love to
render secular existence transcendentally meaningful" (29) and allowing lovers to enter a "mysterious dimension of utopia" (29).
IV.
The argument of chapter one is essentially this: cosmopolitan love = good; incestuous desire = bad. And as the incest prohibition is "the foundation of cosmopolitan love" (32) - as well as that which also provides "the framework of all morality" (32) - it is also unquestionably in need of enforcement; human culture depends on it.
This sounds very Freudian, but, actually, Yao wants to reverse certain aspects of Freud's thinking on this issue, arguing that whilst he wishes to see incest as "conforming to a
universal Oedipal dynamic that originates from children" (33), Lawrence, in Sons and Lovers (1913), correctly identifies parents and the local culture as the "main drivers of incestuous desire" (33); an idea he later develops in his two books on the unconscious.
I'm more than happy to be convinced by what Yao says here. It's certainly the case that, whilst influenced by Freud, Lawrence was no Freudian and vehemently rejected the psychoanalytic interpretation of his work. As Deleuze and Guattari recognise, Lawrence is fundamentally anti-Oedipus.
V.
Chapter two - 'Sexual Love as Public Defiance' - argues that there's a radical politics of desire; one capable of not only liberating the subject (particularly the female subject), but challenging ideas surrounding class and race, debunking prejudice and social convention, etc.
So nothing very new - and it's as if Foucault never lived!
Yao's reading of The Virgin and the Gipsy is untenable, naive, and cliché-ridden; a young woman, stifled by false morality and a corrupt social order, sets out on a quest to discover her "primal selfhood" (54), the climactic flood at the stories end symbolising the unleashing of her "primitive desire" (54) and sexual awakening.
Yvette is a woman transformed - a woman empowered - a woman in love! Because this is not just an erotic tale in which a randy passing gipsy deflowers the vicar's daughter, it's a utopian love story and a subversive (anti-English, post-colonial) cultural expression. Oh, and it's a rejection of the patriarchy and sexually objectifying male gaze too.
Yao concludes her second chapter thusly:
"If the critique of incestuous love described in chapter 1 represents the
struggle to break the shackles of an oppressive and immoral family culture, the affirmation of sexual love finds a way to reach a realm of freedom
that is briefly achieved through a utopian moment that coincides with the
cosmopolitan transcendence of national boundaries." (68)
Notes
[a] This 172 page text is available to purchase in hardback and paperback formats from the usual outlets, but is also freely available online as an open access book, thereby generously allowing anyone to read, download, or share it: click here to access via JSTOR. All page numbers given in this post refer to this work.
The author, Sijia Yao, is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Soka University of America (a private liberal arts college based in California).
[b] See 'Sijia Yao, Cosmopolitan Love: Utopian Vision in D. H. Lawrence and Eileen Chang, reviewed by Li Zhimin', in the JDHLS, Volume 7, Number 2 (2025), ed. Jane Costin (published by the D. H. Lawrence Society, Eastwood, Notts.), pp. 202-206.
[c] Li Zhimin, ibid., p. 205.
The good professor goes on to explain that when love triumphs, "people from different interest groups would be more ready to recognise each other's family values" (205-06) and live according to the rule of law within a rational political framework. Humanity, Maturity, and Family (HMF): these are the (Kantian) key terms and fundamental values of his own utopian vision; see chapter 12 of his book written in collaboration with Daniel Braun, China Being Led and Leading: A Literary and Cultural Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), pp. 151-162.
[d] See the section on comparative methodology in the Introduction to Cosmopolitan Love, pp. 19-25.
This post continues in part two (sections VI-X): click here.
