Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (81 page)

Birkin went home again to Gerald. He went into the room, and sat down on the bed. Dead, dead and cold!

There was no response from that which had been Gerald. Strange, congealed, icy substance—no more. No more!

Terribly weary, Birkin went away, about the day’s business. He did it all quietly, without bother. To rant, to rave, to be tragic, to make situations—it was all too late. Best be quiet, and bear one’s soul in patience and in fulness.

But when he went in again, at evening, to look at Gerald between the candles, because of his heart’s hunger, suddenly his heart contracted, his own candle all but fell from his hand, as, with a strange whimpering cry, the tears broke out. He sat down in a chair, shaken by a sudden access. Ursula, who had followed him, recoiled aghast from him, as he sat with sunken head and body convulsively shaken, making a strange, horrible sound of tears.

“I didn’t want it to be like this—I didn’t want it to be like this,” he cried to himself. Ursula could not but think of the Kaiser’s: “Ich habe es nicht gewollt.” She looked almost with horror on Birkin.

Suddenly he was silent. But he sat with his head dropped, to hide his face. Then furtively he wiped his face with his fingers. Then suddenly he lifted his head, and looked straight at Ursula, with dark, almost vengeful eyes.

“He should have loved me,” he said. “I offered him.”
¹

She, afraid, white, with mute lips answered:

“What difference would it have made!”

“It would!” he said. “It would.”

He forgot her, and turned to look at Gerald. With head oddly lifted, like a man who draws his head back from an insult, half haughtily, he watched the cold, mute, material face. It had a bluish cast. It sent a shaft like ice through the heart of the living man. Cold, mute, material! Birkin remembered how once Gerald had clutched his hand, with a warm, momentaneous grip of final love. For one second—then let go again, let go for ever. If he had kept true to that clasp, death would not have mattered. Those who die, and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved. Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after death. He might have lived with his friend, a further life.

But now he was dead, like clay, like bluish, corruptible ice. Birkin looked at the blue fingers, the inert mass. He remembered a dead stallion he had seen: a dead mass of maleness, repugnant. He remembered also the beautiful face of one whom he had loved, and who had died still having the faith to yield to the mystery. That dead face was beautiful, no one could call it cold, mute, material. No one could remember it without gaining faith in the mystery, without the soul’s warming with new, deep life-trust.

And Gerald! The denier! He left the heart cold, frozen, hardly able to beat. Gerald’s father had looked wistful, to break the heart: but not this last terrible look of cold, mute Matter. Birkin watched and watched.

Ursula stood aside watching the living man stare at the frozen face of the dead man. Both faces were unmoved and unmoving. The candle-flames flickered in the frozen air, in the intense silence.

“Haven’t you seen enough?” she said.

He got up.

“It’s a bitter thing to me,” he said.

“What—that he’s dead?” she said.

His eyes just met hers. He did not answer.

“You’ve got me,” she said.

He smiled and kissed her.

“If I die,” he said, “you’ll know I haven’t left you.”

“And me?” she cried.

“And you won’t have left me,” he said. “We shan’t have any need to despair, in death.”

She took hold of his hand.

“But need you despair over Gerald?” she said.

“Yes,” he answered.

They went away. Gerald was taken to England, to be buried. Birkin and Ursula accompanied the body, along with one of Gerald’s brothers. It was the Crich brothers and sisters who insisted on the burial in England. Birkin wanted to leave the dead man in the Alps, near the snow. But the family was strident, loudly insistent.

Gudrun went to Dresden. She wrote no particulars of herself. Ursula stayed at the Mill with Birkin for a week or two. They were both very quiet.

“Did you need Gerald?” she asked one evening.

“Yes,” he said.

“Aren’t I enough for you?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You are enough for me, as far as a woman is concerned. You are all women to me. But I wanted a man friend, as eternal as you and I are eternal.”

“Why aren’t I enough?” she said. “You are enough for me. I don’t want anybody else but you. Why isn’t it the same with you?”

“Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.”

“Well—” he said.

“You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!”

“It seems as if I can’t,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.”

“You can’t have it, because it’s false, impossible,” she said.

“I don’t believe that,” he answered.

I am indebted to Jack Stewart for his “Notes” in the Modern Library edition of D. H. Lawrence’s
Women in Love
(2002) and the “Explanatory Notes” in the 1987 Cambridge edition, edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen.

1
(p. 5) Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay Of their farther’shouse in Beldover:
Lawrence’s original manuscript in which Ursula and Gudrun appeared was called
The Sisters
. However, Lawrence divided the book and published it as two novels:
The Rainbow
, which appeared in 1915 and was banned, and
Women in Love
, first published in 1920. Ursula and Gudrun appear in both books. Previous editors have pointed out that Ursula is the name of a martyred saint and also the name of a Swabian moon-goddess. Gudrun, the daughter of a Nibelung king, murders her husband. The choice of Gudrun’s name links this character with the work of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), a device Lawrence uses throughout
Women in Love
. Gudrun, therefore, is a symbol of what Lawrence views as the destructive snow-abstraction of Nordic culture, which has lost its passion and sensuality. It should be noted, however, that these names, meaningful as they may seem, appear to have no symbolic function at all in
The Rainbow
. This leads us to the next point: that
Women in Love
is not a true sequel, and that though Ursula and Gudrun have the same names and the same parents and even the same professions in both novels, they are not, in fact, the same people. The community of Beldover also appears in both novels. In
The Rainbow
it is a middle-class farming and mining community modeled on Lawrence’s hometown of Eastwood. In
Women in Love
, it is still a mining town, though more highly organized and industrialized than the town in which Lawrence grew up.

2
(p. 6)
But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe:
Artemis is the virgin goddess of hunting and nature in Greek mythology. Hebe is the goddess of youth and spring. Lawrence is saying that Ursula and Gudrun have the appearance, at least, of being wholesome country girls, not ones sowing the wild oats of youth.

3
(p. 6)
“So you have come home, expecting him here?”:
In
The Rainbow
, Gudrun is studying to be a painter, though there is no mention of her going to London, or of Mr. Brangwen’s sharp objection to Ursula’s wanting to go to London to teach. Lawrence resolves this by suggesting some conflict between Gudrun and her father.

4
(p. 12)
There was something northern about him that magnetized her. In his clear nortbern flesh and his fair hair was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice:
Lawrence is establishing Gerald as a symbol of the “snow-abstraction” of northern cultures in the West, which in his view are doomed, at least in their present state.

5
(p. 13)
This was Hermione Roddice, a friend of the Criches:
This character is based on Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), a member of the Cambridge-Bloomsbury circle and a cultural force in her own right around whom a number of great writers and thinkers gathered. Ezra Pound immortalized her in one of his best lyric poems, “Portrait d’une Femme.” T. S. Eliot also pays her a rather begrudging tribute in “Portrait of a Lady.” Since the character of Hermione is so firmly based on Lady Morrell, naturally speculation arises as to whether she and Lawrence shared the same intimate relationship as Hermione and Birkin, Lawrence’s surrogate in the novel. There is no definitive evidence that they did.

6
(p. 13)
Her long, pale face, that she carried lifted up, somewhat in the Rossetti fashion, seemed almost drugged:
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) was a leading Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter. His sumptuous portraits of women were famous for their vague and dreamy classical style.

1
(p. 24)
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” he said to himself, almost flippantly.... Not that he was Cain, either, although he had slain his brother:
In the Bible (Genesis 4:8-9), Cain kills his brother Abel. Previous editors have noted that Gerald’s character is partially based on Sir Thomas Philip Barber, member of a prominent Nottinghamshire family who accidentally killed his brother. The point Lawrence is making, however, is that Gerald has been born with the mark of Cain.

2
(p. 26)
“A race may have its commercial aspect, ”he said. “In fact it must.... You must make provision. And to make provision you have got to strive against other families, other nations”:
Gerald is advocating social Darwinism, which Hermione and Birkin oppose. In later works, The Plumed Serpent in particular, Lawrence is not opposed at all to minority white rule among darker people.

1
(p. 36)
“Do you really think the children are better for being roused to consciousness?”:
Though Hermione has a very open attitude about race, she is very condescending toward members of the lower classes. Lawrence, himself a miner’s son, never makes a direct attack on the upper classes, with whom to some extent he wanted to identify On the other hand, Birkin can be scathing to Hermione when she acts grand, and Gerald is the symbol of what is wrong with Europe.

2
(p. 40)
“But why should I be a demon—?” she asked
. “ ‘Woman wailing for her demon lover’—”
he quoted:
The line Birkin quotes is from “Kubla Khan,” by Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834). Coleridge wrote the poem while under the influence of drugs; thus it is an example of a sort of knowledge or a work that bypasses the intellect and comes straight from the unconscious, or the blood, as Lawrence would put it. Unfortunately, Coleridge was never able to finish the poem because he could not recapture the same drug-induced state of mind.

1
(p. 44)
He waved again, with a strange movement of recognition across the difference. “Like a Nibelung, ” laughed Ursula:
Here Lawrence again links one of his characters to the work of Richard Wagner and his Ring of the
Nibelung,
a series of four operas based on Norse mythology. This time the reference is in relation to Gerald and to the Nibelung king of the underworld who steals the ring from the fair Rhine maidens.

2
(p. 45)
“Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, don’t you think?”:
Writer Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) was the sister of William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Lawrence uses novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817) in the chapter entitled “A Chair” as a symbol for an idyllic English past that the modern age has corrupted (as when Gerald Crich installs electricity in a classic English house).

1
(p. 50)
Now Birkin started violently at seeing this genial lookflash on to Gerald’s face, at seeing Gerald approaching him hand outstretched:
This scene between Gerald and Birkin, with its frank discussion about love, parallels the opening scene in the novel, where Gudrun and Ursula express similar concerns.

2
(p. 57)
“you’d better come round to the flat, and see what you can make of Halliday and his crowd”:
With the character Halliday, Lawrence satirizes the real-life composer Philip Heseltine (1894-1930). Better known as Peter Warlock, he was a prominent composer admired for his editions of Elizabethan music. Warlock was originally a great supporter of Lawrence but later became a sworn enemy.

1
(p. 62)
“He’s a soldier, and an explorer, and a Napoleon of industry,” said Birkin, giving Gerald his credentials for Bohemia:
Lawrence is cleverly continuing his use of Gerald as a symbol: He has the mark of Cain, and he kills his darker brother. Gerald’s snow-abstraction destructiveness is opposed in this chapter to Birkin’s championing of primitive, more sensual cultures, as symbolized by the African statue. This is one of the central themes of the novel.