Sijia Yao's Cosmopolitan Love and Utopian Vision: Or How to Have D. H. Lawrence Spinning in His Grave (Part 1: Sections I-V)

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.  

D. H. Lawrence & Malcolm McLaren: Sex Pistols

McLaren & Lawrence outside SEX [1]

 

 

I.

 

If, like me, you are keen to promote the idea of D. H. Lawrence as a Sex Pistol, then it's surely important to show how his artistic project, like McLaren's, shared a similar aim: namely, to confront the English with the one thing they feared most: sex ...

 

II. 

 

"It is a pity that sex is such an ugly little word", says Lawrence in a late article for the Sunday Dispatch [2], though this hadn't prevented it from becoming a key term in his vocabulary. Indeed, his critics - and they were legion - accused him of being sex obsessed. 

 

I don't think that's true. But it's certainly the case that sex was central not only to Lawrence's libidinally material philosophy, but also to his politics of desire. 

 

For sex, said Lawence, brings people into touch and thus counters the alienation produced by modern industrial capitalism and "perpetually interferes with the nice money-making schemes" [3] of those who feed off this system [4].        

 

Lawrence's democracy of touch - a kind of immanent utopia that exists now/here in the real bonds formed between lovers and rests upon a new economy of bodies and their pleasures - is quite literally fucked into existence; for men and women having been made new after the act of coition, "wish to make the world anew" [5]. 

 

That's why Oliver Mellors - the gamekeeping protagonist who fucks Lady Chatterley every which way from Sunday - declares with naive sincerity that if men and women only copulated with warm hearts then "'everything would come alright'" [6].

 

Whether Malcolm McLaren subscribed to such a romantic view is debatable. But he had certainly read Lady Chatterley's Lover [7] and one would imagine that, like many who were born of the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s, McLaren would regard Lawrence as one of those sleeping on the right side of the bed ...

 

 

III. [8]  

 

Quickly bored even with his own projects and uncomfortable with the idea of commercial success, in the spring of 1974, McLaren decided to radically refurbish 430 King's Road and rebrand the tiny shop as Sex: 

 

'"The one thing that scares the English. They are all afraid of that word.'" [9] 

 

The façade included a 4-foot sign of pink foam rubber letters spelling out the new name in capitals. The walls of the interior of the boutique were also lined with pinkish foam rubber and covered with graffitied lines taken from erotic literature and Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967). Latex curtains, red carpeting, and various sexual paraphernalia used decoratively helped to create the sleazy (somewhat intimidating) look of an authentic sex shop. 

 

Sex sold fetish and bondage gear supplied by existing specialist labels, as well as designs by McLaren and Westwood which were intended to be provocative rather than seductive. These included T-shirts printed with images of a nude adolescent smoking a cigarette; homosexual cowboys, bare female breasts; and - perhaps most notoriously - a leather mask of the kind worn by the Cambridge Rapist. Lines taken from pornographic texts were also often added to the designs, as were various Situationist slogans from May '68 and references to some of Malcolm's heroes, such as the playwright Joe Orton.

 

 

IV. 

 

Despite the fact that both Lawrence and McLaren wilfully outraged English society and openly fought against censorship and bullying authority, I'm not sure that Lawrence would have been a customer at Sex had he been a young man living in London in the mid-1970s, rather than during the Edwardian period.

 

In fact, he would probably be horrified by McLaren's antics and dismiss him as just another grand pervert guilty of getting his sex in his head; a man full of ineffable conceit and boundless ego. And in this he'd amusingly anticipate Johnny Rotten's opinion ... [10]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The photo of McLaren outside his King's Road store was taken in 1976, when he was aged 30. The photo of Lawrence was taken when he would have been around the same age, in 1915.   

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essay and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 144.

[3] Ibid., p. 145.  

[4] That said, Lawrence was conscious of the fact that - as Deleuze and Guattari put it - sex is also present in "the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate ..." In other words, unconscious libidinal investments bear directly upon the socio-historical field. See Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 293. 

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 136. 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 206.  

[7] In a list of his top ten books compiled for The Guardian in February 2000 - click here - McLaren places Lady Chatterley's Lover at number 7 and describes it as blissfully romantic. 

      For a post in which I discuss the McLaren-Lawrence relationship (published 30 May 2024) click here.

[8] I have taken material for this section from an earlier post on TTA entitled 'Passion Ends in Fashion' (1 December 2023): click here.

 

[9] Malcolm McLaren, quoted by Paul Gorman in The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 220. 

      Lawrence places the blame for this morbid and at times hysterical fear of sex amongst the English on the arrival of veneral disease in Europe during the Renaissance period. Due to the great shock of syphilis and its ghastly consequences, the Elizabethans, says Lawrence, came to regard their own bodies with horror and began to privilege spiritual-mental life over instinctive-intuitive being. 

      See D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles ... pp. 182-217. And see also my discussion of this astonishing essay by Lawrence in the post entitled 'On Art and Syphilis' (17 September 2018): click here.  

 

[10] It should be noted that I don't share this opinion and think it absurd for Lawrence to group together and dismiss so many other arists and thinkers - including Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust - in the manner that he does. One is tempted to paraphrase one of his own lines and remind him that what is perverted to one man is the laughter of genius to another.  

      See my post on D. H. Lawrence and the grand perverts (21 March 2017): click here. 

 

 

For related posts, please click here, here, and here. 

 

 

In fond memory of Malcolm on what would have been his 79th birthday.

Bad Penny

Penny Slinger: Exorcism: Inside Out

Richard Saltoun Gallery (London)

 

I. 

 

Sometimes, we need an artist to turn up like the proverbial bad penny in order to reintroduce a little magic, a little eroticism, and even a little horror into our otherwise safe, sexless, and disenchanted world. 

 

And so, step forward out of the shadows of the past Penny Slinger; a provocative London-born artist whose combination of surrealism and feminism into a queer gothic practice no longer shocks as it once did, but which nevertheless still excites, often amuses, and occasionally gives one the creeps. 

 

 

II. 

 

Her solo exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (London) - Exorcism: Inside Out - is composed of a number of photographic collages set against the backdrop of a spooky mansion house. The dark fairy tale elements remind one of Angela Carter, with a touch of Daphne du Maurier thrown in (all those birds and animal-headed people) [1]. 

 

We are informed that Slinger is attempting to integrate her own body into an archetypal landscape and  'engaging in a cultural exorcism that explores themes of fetishism and sexploitation from a feminist perspective'. 

 

And that's far enough, although, ideas of empowerment, self-actualisation, and sexual liberation now seem a little naive and old-fashioned and the art itself creaks with more clichés - or what her supporters would call timeless and universal symbols - than you can shake a broomstick at. 

 

Some might believe Slinger's images to be just as daring and challenging now as when they were first conceived, but, unfortunately, that's not the case. And, ultimately, what we are left with here are memories of exhilarating sixties radicalism inspired by Max Ernst; a sincere attempt to transform the outer world through inner dream and the politics of desire ... [2]

 

Notes

 

[1] The exhibition coincides with publication of Slinger's book An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (Fulgur Press, 2024); an extended version of her 1977 book An Exorcism, which has been withheld from UK publication for all these years after another work, Mountain Ecstasy (1978), was seized and destroyed by the British customs having been deemed to be pornographic.  

[2] For an alternative take on Slinger's exhibition, see Young Kim's review in A Rabbit's Foot (30 August 2024): click here.    

Notes on the Sexy, Secret, Stereotyped World of the Secretary

Select her carefully and she'll prove the loveliest 

and most valuable of all fringe benfits. - Helen Gurley Brown

I. 

As Derrida notes, the rise of the personal computer has made the figure of the secretary structurally redundant. Only those who wish to continue marking "the authority of their position" still insist on hiring a secretary, even when they could quite easily do the work themselves on their laptop. 

Why should that be? 

Well, partly, it's a sign of status to sit behind a machine-free desk and reconstitute the old-fashioned boss-secretary relationship, passing over hand-written notes to by typed, or dictating whilst some bright young thing practises her shorthand. As Derrida says, power in the workplace has to be mediated, if not delegated, in order to (be seen to) exist.

But, there's also something else going on; something to do with desire and the way in which it infiltrates and directly invests even the most formal and professional of workplaces as a kind of productive energy. 

The fact is, argue Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality is everywhere - not least in the offices and boardrooms of big business. It's in the way a bureaucrat fondles the files; an accountant analyses the financial data; and it's there in the relationship between a male boss and his female secretary ...          

Never shy of discussing sexual politics, D. H. Lawrence naturally had something to say about all this. In an article first published in the Sunday Dispatch in November 1928, Lawrence writes:    

"The business-man's pretty and devoted secretary is still chiefly valuable because of her sex appeal. Which does not imply 'immoral relations' in the slightest. Even today, a girl with a bit of generosity likes to feel she is helping a man, if the man will take her help. And this desire that he shall take her help is her sex appeal. It is the genuine fire, if of a very mediocre heat. Still, it serves to keep the world of 'business' alive. Probably, but for the introduction of the lady secretary into the business-man's office, the business-man would have collapsed entirely by now. She calls up the the sacred fire in her, and she communicates it to her boss. He feels an added flow of energy and optimism, and - business flourishes. That is perhaps the best result of sex appeal today - business flourishes."

I think that's a pretty astonishing passage for several reasons (not necessarily all the right reasons). For one thing, it anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's analysis in Anti-Oedipus - as it does Helen Gurley Brown's claim in Sex and the Single Girl that office romances have a positive effect on performance and productivity. For not only will a man up his game when trying to impress a woman, but a girl in love with her boss will exhaust herself 24/7 and still wish there was more she could do to help. 

 

II.

The term secretary is derived from the Latin secernere and has connotations of something private or confidential (the English word secret has the same etymological root). A secretarius was someone, therefore, who discreetly handled the personal (or business) affairs of a powerful individual. Over time, whilst the duties of the secretary have varied and expanded, essentially the role has remained the same.

In 1870, Sir Isaac Pitman founded his famous school for would-be secretaries. Originally, much like the profession itself, it only admitted male students. But with the invention of the typewriter more and more women began to train as secretaries and by 1919 the role was primarily associated with the fairer sex. 

The period between 1945 and 1980 can probably be regarded as the golden age of the secretary. After this date, new technology and new office politics increasingly saw the role decline or transform. Secretaries became office managers, or personal assistants, or, indeed, bosses themselves and the work place became a boring, sterile environment: no fags, no booze, no flirting, no fun. 

Obviously, no one wants to write in support of sexual discrimination or sexual harassment. But, I have to admit that I find the new puritanism and political correctness just as concerning. Over the last fifty years our attitude towards the erotics of the workplace has moved from bawdy delight and Benny Hill to stern disapproval and the Time's Up movement.

Glancing down blouses and upskirts, making risqué remarks and double entendres, is now strictly forbidden or even legislated against. Some companies, apparently, have even introduced solemn love contracts for employees to sign, outlining what is and is not appropriate behaviour and who they can and cannot date.

It's all a very long way from the world of Mad Men. And if, in many respects, that's a good thing, in some ways it's a bit of a pity, because, as indicated earlier, some men and women work better and with real joy when they feel themselves attractive and subject to the charged flow of desire. Lawrence writes:

"If only our civilisation had taught us how to let sex appeal flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of sex clear and alive, flickering or glowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we migh all of us have lived [and worked] all our lives in love, which means kindled and full of zest, in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things. Whereas what  a lot of dead ash there is to life now!"  

Notes 

Jacques Derrida, 'The Word Processor', Paper Machine,  trans. Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 29-30. Click here to read online.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 293.

Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, (Bernard Geis Associates, 1962).

D. H. Lawrence, "Sex Appeal', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 147-48.

See also: Julie Berebitsky, Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power, and Desire, (Yale University Press, 2012), which offers a more critical and in-depth analysis on this subject than I've been able to offer here. 

Click here to view George Costanza's (failed) attempt to do the right thing and stay out of trouble when hiring a secretary in the Season 6 episode of Seinfeld entitled 'The Secretary', dir. David Owen Trainor, written by Carol Leifer and Marjorie Gross (original air date 8 Dec 1994). 

And click here to view the trailer for the 2002 film Secretary, dir. Steven Shainberg, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson based on the short story (of the same title) by Mary Gaitskill.

A Brief Note on Love, Hate and Humanism

According to Lawrence, the mistake made by those who claim to love humanity lies in their moral insistence on the fact, rather than in their feeling of being at one with their fellow men and women. 

And although some may care a little too earnestly about the suffering of unseen strangers, Lawrence concedes that we are physically - if remotely - connected to all people everywhere and that mankind is thus ultimately one flesh:

"In some way or other, the cotton workers of Carolina, or the rice-growers of China are connected with me and, to a faint yet real degree, part of me. The vibration of life which they give off reaches me, touches me and affects me [...] For we are all more or less connected, all more or less in touch: all humanity." 

This libidinal humanism - if we may call it such - is central to Lawrence's politics of desire. And it is intended to be in stark contrast to the "nasty pronounced benevolence" which is only a disguised form of "self-assertion and bullying", that he often associates (fairly or otherwise) with Whitman.

Lord deliver us, says Lawrence, from this latter form of (ideal) humanism and from all falsification of feeling: "Insist on loving humanity, and sure as fate you'll come to hate everybody."    

I think there's something in this suggestion that every time you force your own feelings or attempt to force those of another, you are likely to produce the opposite effect to the one hoped for. And we would do well to consider this today of all days, as we remember again the time when, in the name of Love, Europe rushed into four years of mechanical slaughter and self-sacrifice. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Nobody Loves Me', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 311-20. 

For a related post to this one on Lawrence's humanism, human exceptionalism, and belief in a common ancestor, click here.

Sandals

Young girls in strappy Greco-Roman style sandals: what excites the most; the bareness of the feet, or the tightness of the binding?

Or perhaps it's the fantasy of owning slaves. For desire can quickly negate liberalism and every erection makes despotic.