Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (83 page)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 shots 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.

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.

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.