Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by D. H. Lawrence

  Chapter XXII

  1 (p. 293) “suckled in a creed outworn”: This phrase comes from the poem “The World Is Too Much with Us,” by William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

  2 (p. 295) “You should have a man like the old heroes”: Lawrence is contrasting the old love, symbolized by Hermione, who believes for all her own liberation in other areas that a woman should stand by her man, with the new love, symbolized by Ursula, who insists on being equal in every sense.

  Chapter XXIII

  1 (p. 303) Excurse: The excursion that is the subject of this chapter is that of Birkin and Ursula traveling out of their old lives and their old way of thinking. Before they can be truly in the new way of being, they must renounce the old. Thus, Birkin is forced to sever even his friendship with Hermione, and both Birkin and Ursula quit their jobs.

  2 (p. 319) His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek: Lawrence identifies the Greeks with the brain and intellect and the Egyptians with phallic or body knowledge; it is the latter that Lawrence most values and the former that has doomed Europe.

  Chapter XXIV

  1 (p. 346) “If there weren’t you in the world, then I shouldn’t be in the world, either”: This is Gerald’s dilemma as ice-king; his love and passion are contaminated with death, yet he cannot live without them.

  Chapter XXV

  1 (p. 353) “You are like Lord Bacon, Gerald,”he said. “You argue it like a lawyer—or like Hamlet’s to-be-or-not-to-be”: Lord Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a lawyer and statesman, as well as a philosopher and a great essayist. Many of his themes and passages wound up in Shakespeare’s work virtually unedited. It is this fact that led some to believe that Bacon was really William Shakespeare. Actually, Shakespeare, like the artist Pablo Picasso in our time, was a great borrower—some would say a great thief—which the lack of copyright laws at the time made possible.

  2 (p. 354) “marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Egoisme à deux is nothing to it”: The French phrase translates as “egotism of two,” meaning two people sharing a common egotism or conceit. This is the way Birkin views traditional marriage. Gerald and Gudrun would be just going through the motions.

  Chapter XXVI

  1 (p. 356) A Chair: Having shown how Gerald and Gudrun represent the old, worn-out values of love, Lawrence is ready to show the new love in action, of which the chair is a symbol in this chapter.

  2 (p. 358) “And if you have a perfect modern house done for you by Poiret, it is something else perpetuated on top of you”: The reference is to French fashion designer Paul Poiret (1879-1944). Lawrence is again invoking his “lilies of the field” motif, in which he rails against possessions and designer homes and clothes. His stance is very much a sort of neo-primitivism.

  3 (pp. 358-359) “You have to be like Rodin, Michael Angelo, and leave a piece of raw rock unfinished to your figure”: French artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), perhaps the greatest modern sculptor, emulated Italian artist Michelangelo (1475-1564), arguably the greatest sculptor ever. Both often intentionally left their work unfinished. Birkin is suggesting that one should live as these sculptures are created—by leaving a little piece of nature in one’s life.

  Chapter XXVII

  1 (p. 374) “She’s a born mistress, just as Gerald is a born lover—amant en titre”: The French phrase translates as “lover in title.” Birkin is saying that Gerald is not necessarily born to be married but is a man born to be the keeper of a woman such as Gudrun, who is a “born mistress.”

  Chapter XXVIII

  1 (p. 382) In the Pompadour: This chapter, in which Gudrun retrieves Birkin’s letter from the bohemian group at the Pompadour, is based on a similar incident in which writer Katherine Mansfield stole a book of Lawrence’s poems, Amores, from the Philip Heseltine (see note 2 to chapter V) group while they were in the midst of making fun of Lawrence.

  ChapterXXIX

  1 (p. 397) “Don’t be too hard on poor old England, ” said Gerald. “Though we curse it, we love it really”: Many of Lawrence’s countrymen have never forgiven him for living most of his life abroad. This is his way of saying that in spite of his hardships in England during World War I, and in spite of England’s intractability, which will doom it and all the West, he still loves England, in his own way.

  2 (p. 406) Herr Loerke was the little man with the boyish figure, and the round, full, sensitive-looking head: This character is based on Loki, the trickster god from the Nordic myth also used by composer Richard Wagner in his operas (see note 1 to chapter I and note 1 to chapter IV). Loerke’s dissembling nature intrigues Gudrun, especially his commercializing of art. Lawrence’s Loerke is far more wicked than Wagner’s Loki and seems to have sprung from a modern hell, not Valhalla.

  Chapter XXX

  1 (p. 443) Snowed Up: In this very clever title Lawrence is stating a fact—that Gerald and Gudrun are in fact snowed in—and at the same time saying that the snow-abstraction that has been a theme throughout the novel has reached the point of the terrible snow-destructiveness forecast early on. In a word, the ice-queen is now triumphing over the ice-king.

  2 (p. 451) She thought of... Mary Stuart, and the great Rachel: Queen Mary Stuart of Scotland (1542-1587) and actress Élisa Félix, also known as Mademoiselle Rachel (1821-1858), are cited by Gudrun as examples of women whose adventurous love lives were secondary to their work. Mary Stuart was married three times. Here Gudrun is rationalizing her inability to love, suggesting it is the product of a higher calling, art.

  Chapter XXXI

  1 (p. 483) “He should have loved me, ” he said “I offered him”: Birkin until the end of the novel insists on a homosexual connection between him and Gerald. However, it is Ursula whose point of view prevails, even if Birkin literally has the last word.

  INSPIRED BY D. H. LAWRENCE AND WOMEN IN LOVE

  Theater

  Critic Leo Hamalian describes D. H. Lawrence’s play Touch and Go (1920) as a continuation of Women in Love. In D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996), Hamalian notes, “With the exception of Ursula, the main cast of Women in Love takes the stage almost unchanged. Gerald Crich becomes Gerald Barlow, a mining magnate; Birkin becomes Oliver Turton, the spokesman for Lawrence; and Gudrun is transformed into Anabel Wrath, who tutored Gerald’s sister Winifred before leaving Gerald for an affair with a foreigner.” Lawrence, in fact, had just finished Women in Love when he began composing his drama, which depicts the conflict between mine owner Gerald Barlow and his employees, who go on strike when Barlow refuses to allow them to unionize. The play, which depicts the inherent struggle between capitalism and organized labor, closes with the frenzied miners beating Gerald while Anabel watches in horror.

  In the preface Lawrence wrote to the play, he proposes a new breed of theater, “A People’s Theater,” which would offer affordable seating and plays that are about “people ... not mannequins. Not lords nor proletariats nor bishops nor husbands nor co-respondents nor virgins nor adulteresses nor uncles nor noses. Not even white rabbits nor presidents. People. Men who are somebody, not men who are something.” Even more than in Women in Love, Lawrence attempts in Touch and Go to impress upon his audience his ideas about democracy in twentieth-century England.

  Film

  In the 1960s there was a wave of Lawrence film adaptations, beginning with Jack Cardiff ’s Sons and Lovers (1960), and followed in close succession by Mark Rydell’s The Fox (1967), Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), and Christopher Miles’s The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970). Women in Love continues to be the best known of these. Russell, who went on to direct Tommy and Crimes of Passion, evokes the exuberant rhythm of Lawrence’s writing through the use of dance scenes, a technique he probably learned during the making of his 1966 television documentary Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World, about renowned movement artist and Lawrence contemporary Isadora Duncan. One of Lawrence’s key techniques, repetition, comes alive in the film’s imagery; in one example, Russell juxtaposes sh
ots of Ursula and Birkin entwined, one just after love-making and one with them floating in water.

  Russell’s adaptation of Women in Love garnered several Academy Award nominations, including for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Screenplay. Glenda Jackson was chosen Best Actress for her portrayal of Gudrun. The performances of others in the cast are admirable, including Alan Bates and Oliver Reed as Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, respectively, and Jennie Linden, who plays Ursula. Russell went on to dramatize two other Lawrence novels: a 1989 film version of the prequel to Women in Love, The Rainbow, and Lady Chatterley, a 1993 production for British television in which Russell also plays the role of Lady Chatterley’s father, Sir Reid.

  Visual Art

  In addition to writing poems, stories, novels, and plays, D. H. Lawrence was an accomplished painter; one of his friends was American landscape artist Georgia O‘Keeffe. During a 1929 visit to Lawrence’s New Mexico ranch, O’Keeffe painted the large pine under which Lawrence liked to write in the morning. Lawrence described this tree as “standing still and unconcerned and alive” with a “green top one never looks at” and a trunk “like a guardian angel.” In “The Lawrence Tree,” O’Keeffe depicted its sturdy character with rusty red oil paint and a perspective that looks upward from the ground, capturing the branches jutting against a blue, starlit sky.

  In 1993 D. H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo (1923) inspired Australian painter Garry Shead, winner of his country’s prestigious Archibald Prize, to create a series of oil paintings. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel follows two European expatriates as they attempt to find a satisfying community, or “ur-society,” in post_World War I Australia. Shead’s oils depict a bearded Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, in various outback settings, including Lawrence’s house, “Wyewurk,” on the Sidney coast. In “Magpie,” Lawrence sits at his writing table separated from Frieda by a magpie perched on a sea-fronted ledge that frames his small, sun-glanced cottage. To the left of the frame in “Dusk,” Lawrence appears within this same cottage ledge, while Frieda stands outside; Lawrence is effectively fenced in from the bluish twilight, cut off from the community of men snaking through the trees to the right, and the tall, long-eared kangaroo, which occupies the center of the painting in silhouette. Some editions of Lawrence’s Kangaroo now come packaged with drawings from Shead’s highly original series.

  COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

  In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

  Comments

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  There is another novel, sequel to The Rainbow, called Women in Love. I don’t know if Huebsch has got the MS. yet. I don’t think anybody will publish this, either. This actually does contain the results in one’s soul of the war: it is purely destructive, not like The Rainbow, destructive-consummating. It is very wonderful and terrifying, even to me who have written it. I have hardly read it again. I suppose, however, it will be a long time without being printed—if ever it is printed.

  —from a letter to Waldo Frank ( July 27, 1917)

  JOHN MACY

  In Women in Love we have four young people, two men and two women, whose chief interest, for them and for us, is in amatory relations. This is indicated by the title of the story, one of those obvious titles which only a man of imagination could hit upon, so simple that you wonder why no novelist ever thought of it before. Now the erotic relations of people, though a tremendous part of life, as all the great tragic romances prove, are still only part of life. Nobody knows this better than Mr. Lawrence. The first story of the Brangwen family is richer than the second, not because of the proverbial falling off of sequels, not because Mr. Lawrence’s power has declined—far from it!—but because the first novel embraces a larger number of the manifold interests that compose the fever called living. In it there are not only young lovers, but old people, old failures, the land, the town, the succession of the generations, rooted yet restless. Ursula emerges from immemorial centuries of English life, touched with foreign blood out of Poland (when an English novelist wishes to introduce variety and strangeness into the dull solidity of an English town he always imports a Pole, or a Frenchman, somebody not quite English).

  Ursula’s background is richer than all her emotional experience. Her father, her grandfather, the family, all the tragi-comedy of little affairs and ambitions, the grim, grey colliery district, the entire social situation, are the foundation and walls of the story, and she is the slender spire that surmounts it all—and is struck by lightning. In The Rainbow she goes to ashes, and in Women in Love she revives, burns again, and finds in her new love a new element of dissatisfaction.

  —from the New York Evening Post Literary Review (March 19, 1921)

  EVELYN SCOTT

  Women in Love is not pure as an art form, but it is because art is too limited for Lawrence’s conviction of reality. Lawrence’s poetry seemed out of place in the Imagist Anthology. A number of his contemporaries express finely the delicate nostalgic emotions of neo-classicism, the emotions of nuns. The Parnassian muse, though she speaks of orgies, is a virgin. Lawrence is aesthetically unchaste. His genius has consorted with life and has acquired mystical imperfections, nail-prints in the palms.

  —from The Dial (April 1921)

  JOHN MIDDLETON MURRY

  Mr. Lawrence is set apart from the novelists who are his contemporaries by the vehemence of his passion. In the time before the war we should have distinguished him by other qualities—a sensitive and impassioned apprehension of natural beauty, for example, or an understanding of the strange blood bonds that unite human beings, or an exquisite discrimination in the use of language, based on a power of natural vision. All these things Mr. Lawrence once had, in the time when he thrilled us with the expectation of genius: now they are dissolved in the acid of a burning and vehement passion. These qualities are individual no longer; they no longer delight us; they have been pressed into the service of another power, they walk in bondage and in livery....

  Women in Love is five hundred pages of passionate vehemence, wave after wave of turgid, exasperated writing impelled towards some distant and invisible end; the persistent underground beating of some dark and inaccessible sea in an underworld whose inhabitants are known by this alone, that they writhe continually, like the damned, in a frenzy of sexual awareness of one another. Their creator believes that he can distinguish the writhing of one from the writhing of another; he spends pages and pages in describing the contortions of the first, the second, the third, the fourth. To him they are utterly and profoundly different; to us they are all the same. And yet Mr. Lawrence has invented a language, as we are forced to believe he has discovered a perception for them. The eyes of these creatures are ‘absolved’; their bodies (or their souls: there is no difference in this world) are ‘suspended’; they are ‘polarized’; they ‘lapse out’; they have, all of them, ‘inchoate’ eyes. In this language their unending contortions are described; they struggle and writhe in these terms; they emerge from dark hatred to darker beatitudes; they grope in their own slime to some final consummation, in which they are utterly ‘negated’ or utterly ‘fulfilled.’ We remain utterly indifferent to their destinies, we are weary to death of them.

  At the end we know one thing and one thing alone: that Mr. Lawrence believes, with all his heart and soul, that he is revealing to us the profound and naked reality of life, that it is a matter of life and death to him that he should persuade us that it is a matter of life and death to ourselves to know that these things are so. These writhings are the only re
al, and these convulsive raptures, these oozy beatitudes the only end in human life. He would, if he could, put us all on the rack to make us confess his protozoic god; he is deliberately, incessantly, and passionately obscene in the exact sense of the word. He will uncover our nakedness. It is of no avail for us to protest that the things he finds are not there; a fanatical shriek arises from his pages that they are there, but we deny them.

  —from Nation and Athenaeum (August 13, 1921)

  ARNOLD BENNET

  No finer work has been done in our time than Lawrence’s finest. He is not yet understood, even by the majority of his admirers. But he will be; and meanwhile his work must accept injustice. In the future no first editions of present-day writers will be more passionately and expensively sought for than Lawrence’s, unless perhaps Joyce’s. I regard this as certain.

  —from the Evening Standard (April 10, 1930)

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

  Comparing [Lawrence] with Proust, one feels that he echoes nobody, continues no tradition, is unaware of the past, of the present save as it affects the future. As a writer, this lack of tradition affects him immensely.... One feels that not a single word has been chosen for its beauty, or its effect upon the architect of the sentence.