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By Root 14679 0

’s family, and this is all that it need be for us to understand the strains under which the Morel family is living. However, even in Sons and Lovers, Lawrence stressed the human element. In Women in Love, he strips English society of its veneer, as Burgess correctly notes, and shifts his focus from the problems of the English poor to the more universal issue of reinventing modern love. In fact, England itself is renounced in favor of Italy. However, in another sense, it is not altogether true to say that Lawrence abandons completely his concern for the poor in Women in Love. One might say that he focuses on the same issues in Women in Love that he did in Sons and Lovers, though in Women in Love his perspective on society in this mining town has radically shifted to that of the upper class. The workers are still doomed because Gerald is doomed, as is in a sense Hermione. Why do the people of England suffer? Lawrence asks. They suffer because they do not know how to love and because they are subject to the fate of snow-destruction.

To do something new that you know may not find favor with the critics or your countrymen takes courage. Lawrence also showed courage and good judgment by deviating from The Rainbow, even though both it and Women in Love were born within a book he called The Sisters, in which Ursula and Gudrun, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Brangwen, appear:

The setting of Women in Love is Lawrence’s native province, as in The Rainbow, but a brutal change has taken place in it between the two books. The countryside is recognizably the same, except that it holds a deeper ferocity than before, but the coal-mining industry is no longer what it was when Lawrence’s, or Paul Morel’s father worked in it. It has ceased to be primitive and loosely organized, a kind of neolithic continuation of a Silurian culture, which dug out coal with its bare hands for iron smelting. Where it was paternalistic and easygoing, it has become impersonal, tyrannical, and scientifically efficient. This is the work of Gerald Crich, son of a mine owner who held to the old way and, unable to accommodate his thinking and his feeling to the brutality of change, is slowly dying (Burgess, pp. 114-115).

However, not all the changes are for the worse. Ursula is essentially different in Women in Love. from the character by that name in The Rainbow. She is still driven and independent, but she has taken a quantum leap forward in maturity, wisdom, and cynicism that cannot be accounted for by time, even if a large time lapse was supposed to have taken place between the two novels. The two Ursulas are simply different people. The Ursula from The Rainbow is so concerned with her own independence that in effect she renounces love—and not only renounces it but stifles its growth—because she does not want to follow Skrebensky abroad. Yet Ursula does precisely this at the end of Women in Love. in quitting her teaching job and going abroad with Birkin. It may be argued that Skrebensky did not completely understand her independence as a woman, and that Birkin did. True—but the Ursula of Women in Love. would have never been involved with Skrebensky in the first place. Nor, we imagine, would she have had the lesbian affair with her teacher that Ursula had in The Rainbow. It is not a question of morality per se. This Ursula, the one of Women in Love, seems gifted in seeing what is essential and is not herself inclined, nor does she see why Birkin should be so inclined, to be involved in any enterprise that diverts the focus of true love.

Gudrun, too, has undergone a transformation between the two works, though one far less radical than Ursula’s. This is in part because her character was less well developed in The Rainbow, and one had the sense that she is more easygoing than her sister. In Women in Love, Gudrun, as we have seen, is far more unfeeling than any of the other characters, except Loerke, who is on a par with her in emotional insensitivity and even cruelty. But then Gudrun, like Gerald, is bound by symbolism as she is not in The Rainbow. This gives her character a certain determinism, like that of a character in a Greek drama. Lawrence had courage, and it not only took courage for him to depart from the models that he himself created in The Rainbow, but it is a sign of his artistic curiosity to see how Ursula might turn out if she had a new mindset