'Women in Love'

D.H. Lawrence is one of the great artists of the industrial age. In his writing his characters feel the urge to question the life-denying mechanised forces at work at the beginning of the twentieth century, where we still are, and enjoy a new-found freedom in communion with the deepest human instincts, and the natural world. He will give us characters who are on the edge of something bigger than themselves, far beyond the petty defining notions of modern society, something they don't understand but which disturbs, and draws them on.

In Women in Love (1920), two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, venture out into a colliery town and see the working class world of coal dust, hard labour and poverty. Although amused and detached in their superior middle class ways, we can sense their greater malaise regarding themselves; Ursula cursing her familiar home surroundings, as she is drawn to the streets of the industrial coal-mining Midlands. There is a dark beauty in the description of these ‘ugly’ surroundings : ‘hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air’.

The young women appear to be more imprisoned in themselves and their petty judgements than the more natural folk around them : ‘No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all’. It makes Gudrun think. Although she sounds detached in her amused observations about everything being ‘a ghoulish replica of the real world...’, the experience brings home to her the restricted narrow life she leads. Being out here is like a ‘violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world’, leading her to ask, ‘then what was her own world, outside?’ Her own clothes feel out of place, artificial, like a thick suit of armour separating her from a greater reality she has always shut out, the gritty world of working people :’She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour.’

As the sisters move out of and beyond the colliery town into the countryside round about, Lawrence paints a striking picture of the gradual fading of industrial dirt and pollution, ‘Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and wooded hills...’, followed by complete freedom, from both middle class and industrial constriction, the glorious inimitable Lawrentian description of bushes and flowers bursting forth with life! Such delicacy of observation, as if he can feel the essence of the vital, natural life he describes. 

Here is the extract:

 

As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feeling frightened her.

The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling-houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous, gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion.

They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all.

“It is like a country in an underworld,” said Gudrun. “The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous—it’s really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.”

The sisters were crossing a black path through a dark, soiled field. On the left was a large landscape, a valley with collieries, and opposite hills with cornfields and woods, all blackened with distance, as if seen through a veil of crape. White and black smoke rose up in steady columns, magic within the dark air. Near at hand came the long rows of dwellings, approaching curved up the hill-slope, in straight lines along the brow of the hill. They were of darkened red brick, brittle, with dark slate roofs. The path on which the sisters walked was black, trodden-in by the feet of the recurrent colliers, and bounded from the field by iron fences; the stile that led again into the road was rubbed shiny by the moleskins of the passing miners. Now the two girls were going between some rows of dwellings, of the poorer sort. Women, their arms folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the end of their block, stared after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out names.

Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.

She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: “I want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.” Yet she must go forward.

Ursula could feel her suffering.

“You hate this, don’t you?” she asked.

“It bewilders me,” stammered Gudrun.

“You won’t stay long,” replied Ursula.

And Gudrun went along, grasping at release.

They drew away from the colliery region, over the curve of the hill, into the purer country of the other side, towards Willey Green. Still the faint glamour of blackness persisted over the fields and the wooded hills, and seemed darkly to gleam in the air. It was a spring day, chill, with snatches of sunshine. Yellow celandines showed out from the hedge-bottoms, and in the cottage gardens of Willey Green, currant-bushes were breaking into leaf, and little flowers were coming white on the grey alyssum that hung over the stone walls.