African art with its grotesque distortions of facial features and anatomy had a peculiar appeal to European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. It addressed the unconscious of 'civilized' people and aroused primal emotions and feelings long suppressed in and by their own culture. These art forms had the ability to shock as well as to liberate, stimulating unconscious drives and desires that the ego could not capture. African art as represented in Women in Love is to be perceived of in the context of Lawrence's 'primitivism', which is to be explained by his concept of the 'fetish' and by the interplay of ritual and reflection in Birkin's response to the African sculptures he sees at Halliday's apartment.

After an explanation of the terms 'primitivism' and fetish' in their historical contexts, I will move on to how these concepts are perceived and dealt with by Birkin and Crich. While Crich encounters the 'primitive' with a typical! European/colonialist attitude of disgust and utter resentment, Birkin, on the other hand, is haunted by cultural alienation and seems to be open to other modes of being. In the course of the paper I will mainly focus on how Birkin comes to recognize the destructiveness and limits of European as well as African monoculture and searches for a unifying thread with which he may be able to complete his being, combining bodily consciousness with spiritual energy. While other characters like Loerke, Gudrun, and Hermione reveal their decadence and lose themselves to fantasy and escapism, Birkin, after going through a phase of conscious 'primitivizing', resists and struggles and finally makes existential choices that determine his being. Together with Ursula he does not abandon one monologic cultural form for another; rather they find a way out that is made only for themselves, not a general solution as offered at the end of The Rainbow. Birkin and Ursula's solution is to be found in the blurring of contrasts, upper and lower, sensual and mental centers.