“She had felt Tom go by almost as if he had brushed her. She had tingled in body as she had gone up on the road. Her impulse was strong against him because he was not of her sort. But one blind instinct led her to take him, to have him, and then to relinquish herself to him. It would be safety. Also he was young and very fresh.”
Her passional reactions are not from the mind. They are spontaneous and know no inhibition. After a second quite casual meeting, Tom goes to the vicarage where she, a Polish lady, is housekeeper since her husband, a doctor obliged to leave his country for political reasons, had died and left her and her baby daughter in dire want. “Good evening,” says Tom, “I'll just come in a minute”; and having entered, he continues, “I came up to ask if you'd marry me.” He arouses an intensity of passion in her that she cannot, or wishes not, to withstand. But Tom is conventional and so they are married. The description of his marital lust is lurid to the last degree, and finally after one great debauch “he felt that God had passed through the married pair and made Himself known to them.” Tom is largely brawn and brute, though he has a vein of sentiment, and finally he yields to drink and meets a violent death, leaving two sons, a namesake who is attracted to his own sex, Fred who suffers the tortures of a mother-sapped spirit, and Anna, his stepdaughter.
Anna hates people who come too near her until she meets Will Brangwen, the son of Tom's brother who had flagrantly offended matrimonial convention. She is fascinated by this æsthetic serious self-satisfied youth with a high-pitched voice, who sings tenor and who is interested in church architecture and ritualism. Anna hurls herself at Will's head and tells him in no uncertain tones of her all-consuming love before he makes any protests. She arranges the wheat shocks in the moonlight so that they will propitiate her purpose, but only passionate caresses and a proposal of marriage result. This disappoints her, but the men of the Brangwen family, though consumed with elemental passion, are sex-slackers compared with the women. Will goes into states of ecstasy sitting motionless and timeless, contemplating stained-glass windows and other religious symbols, and she hates him violently.
“In the gloom and mystery of the church his soul lived and ran free, like some strange, underground thing, abstract. In this spirit he seemed to escape and run free of her.”
They are happy only when in the throes of conjugality. She is profoundly fecund and has periods of ecstasy when she thinks God has chosen her to prove the miracle of creation. In her exaltation, big with child as she is, she dances naked in her bedroom, to the Creator to Whom she belongs.
In order to develop the now widely disseminated Freudian ideas about the love of the eldest girl for the father, the antagonism between the mother and daughter, etc., Will falls in love with his oldest child, Ursula. “His heart grew red-hot with passionate feeling for the child” when she is about a year old. “Her father was the dawn wherein her consciousness woke up wide-eyed, unseeing, she was awakened too soon.” The writer, master as he is of the mysteries of perversion, uses this sympathy and Will's extrauxorial vagaries and wanderings to cause, vicariously, a welling-up of passion in Anna. After a revolting scene with a grisette, Will goes home to his wife who immediately detects that there is a change in him, that he has had a new experience. She is excited to wild lubricity, and “he got an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delight she was.” But this is the book of Ursula. The spontaneous passions of the grandmother and mother are incidental.
Ursula goes through with the son of the old Polish clergyman Baron the same sort of experience that her father went through with the flapper that he picked up at the movie, only not with such slancio. The purpose of this episode is to point out the intensity of love in the female and her clamour for the dominant male. When Ursula finds that Skrebensky is a slacker,
“She stood filled with the full moon, offering herself. Her two breasts opened to make way for it, her body opened wide like a quivering anemone, a soft, dilated invitation touched by the moon. She wanted the moon to fill into her, she wanted more, more communion with the moon, consummation.”
Since Ursula has not met the one-hundred-per-cent male, and as “her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her,” Mr. Lawrence now brings her into relations with a finely portrayed Lesbian, Winifred Inger. The description of their first real contact in the bungalow at night and their night bath is willfully and purposely erotic. Ursula, tired of Winifred, plans to marry her to her uncle, Tom. When they meet “he detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately he knew they were akin.” One might safely say that Mr. Lawrence had before him, or in his mind's eye, when he penned the description of Tom, the photograph of one of his fellow-poets of a generation ago whom the English public found necessary to put in the Reading Gaol.
“His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid the strange, repellant grossness of him, the slight sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his rather fat thighs and loins.”