Miriyaum

Myriam is one of the central examples in Simone de Beauvoir’s reading of D. H. Lawrence: a poetic and mystical young woman whose effort to make love an inward, absorbing bond leaves her lover feeling confined rather than joined to her. Her story tests Lawrence’s ideal of reciprocal communion, while Beauvoir’s account also exposes the unequal terms on which that ideal rests.

Identity and Place in Lawrence’s Fiction

Beauvoir presents Myriam as Paul’s lover and as the least sophisticated of Lawrence’s independent, dominating women. Though she is deeply responsive to the world, she does not experience it directly: things move her only after she has recreated them inwardly and given them religious meaning. This habit makes her poetic and mystical, but also, in Beauvoir’s analysis, maladapted to ordinary life and intimacy.

Her difficulty is not a lack of feeling. Rather, she approaches feeling through consciousness and interpretation, remaining inwardly separate from the reality she longs to embrace. Beauvoir condenses this contrast by describing Myriam as consciousness rather than life, and therefore not a companion in the kind of mutual encounter Lawrence demands.

Her Relationship with Paul

Myriam wants to care for Paul and serve him, but Beauvoir argues that this care also becomes a way of imposing her will. When Paul is ill, the young woman is happy to look after him; her devotion thus offers a form of closeness while also placing him in a dependent position. The relationship turns on this contradiction: she longs to be joined to Paul, yet attempts to draw him into herself rather than meet him as an independent person.

Her inwardness shapes their sexual relationship as well. Beauvoir describes Myriam as frightened by sexuality and unable to surrender to the encounter; when she sleeps with Paul, her heart remains apart, in a state of horror. For Paul, her distance intensifies desire rather than bringing peace. Beauvoir says it produces in him an intensity like madness, fascinating in a way she compares to drug-taking, but it cannot make their relationship sustaining.

Conflict and Separation

Paul becomes angry when he sees Myriam caressing flowers. He reads the gesture as another expression of her need to be loved: in his accusation, she does not love the things she turns toward but begs them to return her affection. The flowers sharpen the conflict between them. Myriam’s attempt to draw love from what surrounds her appears to Paul as absorption, a demand that leaves no room for the other’s independent existence.

Paul’s mother recognizes the same danger in Myriam’s relation to her son, believing that Myriam wants to absorb him until nothing remains of him for himself. This judgment echoes Paul’s response: her efforts to care for him and claim intimacy seem to threaten his independence. Beauvoir also notes the emotional reversal beneath Myriam’s devotion: in her secret self, she hates Paul because she loves him and he dominates her. Paul eventually distances himself from her; she cannot give him joy and peace, and their connection does not become mutual communion.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Myriam’s relationship with Paul illustrates a larger problem in Beauvoir’s treatment of Lawrence: love can fail when it is organized around possession, whether the attempt is to absorb another person or to claim that person exclusively. Myriam’s inward, all-consuming desire is one form of this failure. Clara, who later gives herself to Paul more freely, does not resolve it: she also tries to appropriate him, and Paul cannot remain with her either. The contrast makes Myriam’s separation part of a wider inquiry into whether lovers can encounter each other without reducing one to the other’s need.

Beauvoir presents Myriam as responsible for much of her unhappy fate in relation to Paul, but her account does not treat her longing as detached from power. Myriam hates men and does not accept herself in the generality Lawrence’s ideal prescribes; she wants to distinguish herself, while the great stream of life does not, in this framework, pass through her as it does through the figures Lawrence approves. The result is a double bind: the independence she retains is interpreted as separation, while the surrender demanded for communion risks making her desire subordinate to a male ideal. Her story therefore illuminates both the emotional cost of possessive love and the gendered assumptions built into Lawrence’s proposed resolution.