Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [272]
“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.
ENDNOTES
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.
Chapter I
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