Women in Love, DH Lawrence (plot, characterisation)

Plot

The action of the novel centers on the parallel courtships of Ursula by the intellectual Rupert Birkin and Gudrun by the industrialist Gerald Crich. These dynamics are complicated, however, by the strong connection between the sisters, as well as the more ambiguous bond between the two male friends. Although in Lawrence’s initial drafts attribute an explicitly homosexual attraction to Birkin, the final version proves more evasive, leaving only the subterranean suggestion of Birkin’s earnest offer of sworn blütbruderschaft in the manner of Germanic knights.^[1]Ultimately, the two relationships go in very different directions. The initial strife between Birkin and Ursula over his lingering attachment to the controlling Hermione Roddice is resolved by his eventual willingness to break off their relationship, and Birkin and Ursula give up their jobs as teachers to take up a more bohemian lifestyle. Gerald and Gudrun begin on the firm ground of mutual sexual attraction, and their bond intensifies when Gerald’s ailing father invites Gudrun to become the art tutor for the family’s young daughter Winifred. But she finally comes to find Gerald emotionally inaccessible and during a winter holiday in the Tyrol abandons his intimacy in favor of a German sculptor, precipitating Gerald’s suicide.

Characterization

Lawrence drew heavily on his friends and acquaintances in peopling the world of Women in Love, often veering so close to outright portrait as to alienate those displeased with their depictions. Ursula and Gudrun were originally conceived as representations of Frieda and her sister Else. Their youths are transposed, however, onto the coal-mining town of Beldover, whose environs are accurately drawn from Lawrence’s own childhood in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. Gudrun also owes something to Katherine Mansfield, as the incident in Chapter 28 where Gudrun takes one of Birkin’s letters away from table of mockers is based on Mansfield doing the same with a copy of Lawrence’s Amours.The character of Birkin is very recognizably Lawrence himself in philosophy and manners, but one sharp difference with Sons and Lovers is the criticism and even outright mockery which the other characters (and even the story itself) seem to treat him. Ursula in particular emerges as a frequent counterbalance, as when Birkin tells her that he is looking for a “strange conjunction…a pure balance of two single beings:”
She looked at him. He was very earnest, and earnestness was always rather ridiculous, commonplace, to her. It made her feel unfree and uncomfortable. Yet she liked him so much. But why drag in the stars! The figure of Gerald Crich is more of a composite. Structurally, he is based on the industrialist Thomas Barber, who acceded to the chairmanship of Barber, Walker & Co. at the age of 21 in 1897. Many of the details of his characterization – the accidental killing of a younger brother, the brutalization of a horse in Chapter 9, the death of a young family member during a pleasure cruise in Chapter 14 – are taken from his life. The source of the imagined intimacy between Birkin and Crich is less determinate, although Lawrence’s friend John Middleton Murry apparently believed himself to be Gerald’s original.  Hermione Roddice seems to hybridize several women Lawrence knew. The suffocating influence she exerts over Birkin recalls Paul Morel’s relationship with Miriam, which Lawrence based on his own with Jessie Chambers. But Hermione also strongly evokes Lady Ottoline Morrell, a Bloomsbury hostess with whom Lawrence had an apparently ambivalent relationship. Breadalby is certainly based on her home, and her brother Alexander recalls Lady Ottoline’s husband Philip, also a Liberal MP and pianist. Indeed, she had even given Lawrence a lapis lazuli paperweight as a gift, an object which Lawrence reimagines as the weapon with which Hermione clouts Birkin when he tries to distance himself from her.

Some minor characters were sketched even more directly from Lawrence’s past. Will Brangwen has been often associated with Alfred Burrows, the father of Lawrence’s former fiancée Louisa, who was in fact a church organist and handicrafts instructor and apparently disapproved of Lawrence. The London figures of Halliday and the artist’s model Pussum were based on Philip Heseltine, better known to posterity as the composer Peter Warlock, and the artist’s model Minnie Channing, called “Puma” among her friends.

In general, the major departure from Sons and Lovers is the emphasis on bonds between characters of the same age, rather than intergenerational relationships. Although Ursula finds herself seriously at odds with her father over her marriage plans, there is no emotionally domineering parent like Gertrude Morel, and while Birkin does resemble Paul Morel in many respects, his background and family are left completely unexplored.