Women in Love was the sequel to the novel The Rainbow about the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, living in the Midlands (the central belt of England above London) in the 1910s. Ursula is a schoolteacher who meets school inspector Rupert Birkin. Gudrun, a painter recently moved from London, runs across Gerald Crich, rich heir to a coal-mine. The four of them become friends. Ursula and Birkin begin a friendship with romantic overtones, while Gudrun and Gerald eventually have a love affair.
Mechanisation of coal-mines by Gerald Crich
Apart from telling a story, the author is at pains to set forth the philosophy of each character at some length: how the colliery was mechanised to improve productivity, the nature of knowledge, the transcendence of love, what lies beyond death, and so on. It is as though the private diaries of D.H.Lawrence have spilled over into the novel. His vocabulary too is different from that of authors of the early nineteenth century. The nearest he comes to talking of nudity and love-making is ‘suave loins of darkness.’ Take this rapturous passage:
Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, made her want to die, to die … his back rounded and soft—ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!
The emotions of a character have large swings in a single conversation, starting with endearments and ending in expressions of hate and revulsion – the word hate is used 64 times. Electric charges often flow between people, and that technical idea is used 34 times to express the impassioned flow of feelings. Clearly DHL is magnifying ordinary feelings manyfold times in order to create drama, but the overuse of such words diminishes their effect.
Here are some word frequency statistics:
love (429), dark (371), death (169), hand (141), kiss (86), breast (38), electric (34), mystic (33), loins (21), hate, hatred (64)
The scenes are painted with a screenplay writer’s eye for detail, and a film director would have little trouble framing the important scenes cinematically. This is one reason the novel bulges; the second reason stems from all those mini-dissertations on subjects by people like Rupert Birkin, and later the Dresden sculptor, Loerke, whom Gudrun meets in the Tyrolean Alps. We not only get to picture them from the descriptions of their body, but we get to know their interior life from these tutorials on various subjects they expatiate upon.
Gerald Crich urges his mare to face the train
Gudrun & Ursula watch in horror as Gerald Crich urges his horse to confront the train
One of the scenes that would dismay any reader is that of Gerald Crich urging his nervous mare to stand still as the goods train thunders past, screeching, at a level crossing. He uses the whip and spurs with overmastering force, to the point the horse’s flanks start bleeding. It’s a piece of animal abuse that should have been far more offensive than the tepid ‘obscenity’ that caused the novel to be banned in the UK for a decade.
June 25 has been fixed as the date for the next session, Poetry, with no specific theme.
