Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [278]
ChapterXXIX
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.
Chapter XXX
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.
Chapter XXXI
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.
INSPIRED BY D. H. LAWRENCE AND WOMEN IN LOVE
Theater
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.
Film
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.