"...but the worst and last form of intellectualism"

Class-room! What an adrenaline rush. Lawrence bombarded me most suddenly with this mess of a philosophical debate, and it is hard not to get carried away from the novel itself and discuss the well-worn and ever-sore debate that Hermione and Birkin take up--Hermione's claim to desire the destruction of self-consciousness appears so much the mosaic reverberation of Schopenhauer's enthusiasm toward Eastern religions, or maybe Dostoevsky's underground man, who mockingly and deploringly praises the "man of action"as he laments his own acute consciousness. But Birkin is the touchstone to the novel's literary revelations and the truth behind the philosophical mud that Hermione attempts to disguise as romanticism, and he reveals the sadness and inauthenticity of Hermione's proclaimed role as the "free woman," telling her: "now that you have come to all your conclusions, you want to go back and be like a savage, without knowledge. You want a life of pure sensation and 'passion.'" For all her claims (and here I agree with Birkin, who somehow warms me with his cold dismissal of those around him), Hermione speaks from intellectual conceit; she espouses a dreary, anti-humanitarian doctrine that, though she desires it to be taken as wild, savage, and romantic, Birkin recognizes as the epitomical conclusions of pessimistic intellectualism. Thus is her heavy, fair hair the physical representation of her heavy veneer of grace and superiority, hiding her despair over the emptiness, the reoccuring theme of nothingness, that denies her right to happiness and seemingly to love.

Though, let me say in a lack of conclusion, that I do not mean to squash Hermione fully; her feminine condition so far seems to me the most challenging and interesting. But more on that later, perhaps.