Women in Love (Barnes & Noble Classics S - D. H. Lawrence [267]
Chapter XI
1 (p. 122) An Island: Lawrence uses the island as a symbolic paradise where Ursula and Birkin, a new Adam and a new Eve, begin to deal with the modern problem of love.
2 (p. 126) “Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest—and see what they are doing all the time”: See the Bible (1 Corinthians 13:13). The hypocrisy of people who praise love and charity has made Birkin disown the word “love.” It has become a cliché.
Chapter Xll
1 (p. 133) Carpeting: In this chapter, which is Hermione’s chapter, carpeting symbolizes her attempt to impose her will on Birkin in the form of decorating ideas. This chapter is opposed by a later chapter entitled “The Chair,” in which Ursula and Birkin buy a chair together and then decide that they have no need of possessions.
Chapter XIII
1 (p. 149) “I agree that the Wille zur Macht is a base and petty thing”: The German phrase means “will to power,” an idea popularized by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) meaning that all living things have an incarnate will to “grow, spread, seize, become predominant,” as Nietzshe put it in Beyond Good and Evil. In Women in Love, Lawrence makes clear he is against the Nietzschean will to power, but in his later works, The Plumed Serpent in particular, Lawrence appears very much in favor of it.
2 (p. 149) “Ah—Sophistries! It’s the old Adam”: Ursula is saying that Birkin is falling back into the old, historical pattern of thinking that men should dominate women. Lawrence also wrote two stories, “The Old Adam” and “New Eve and Old Adam,” on this topic.
Chapter XIV
1 (p. 163) So saying, having givenher word like a man, she and Ursula entered the frail craft, and pusbed gently off: Lawrence establishes here both the repressed condition of women, whose word is not ordinarily taken as binding, and Gudrun’s liberated ideas. Gudrun not only gives her word like a man but insists on rowing her own boat, an obviously symbolic action.
2 (p. 167) Nevertheless, Gudrun, with her arms outspread and her face uplifted, went in a strange palpitating dance towards the cattle: Gudrun’s dance symbolizes both her own liberation and her desire to dominate and even madden males, here symbolized by bulls.
3 (p. 170) “You have struck the first blow”: Gerald’s is a prophetic statement, one that anticipates the end of the novel.
4 (p. 172) “You mean we are flowers of dissolution—fleurs du mal?”: This is another reference to a French Symbolist poet, this time to Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), whose book Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) introduced both Symbolism and modernism into French poetry.
5 (p. 172) “You know Herakleitos says ‘a dry soul is best’”: The Greek philosopher Herakleitos, also spelled Heracleitus or Heraclitus (c. 540-480 B.C.), believed all things were in flux and therefore subject to constant change. He believed fire’s combustion was the origin of the cosmos, anticipating the “Big Bang” theory. In many sources, Herakleitos is quoted as having said, “A dry soul is the wisest and best.”
Chapter XV
1 (p. 190) there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho into the unknown: A legend that has grown up around lyric Greek poet Sappho (c.610-c. 580 B.C.) is that, in despair over an unrequited love, she took her own life by throwing herself into the sea. Ursula, unlike her sister Gudrun, shows herself to have deep feelings about love, though she does not accept the fact that it must come with “baggage.”
2 (p. 192) There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanised life: Lawrence here is saying that death is better than the mechanized love of meaningless routine. It sounds romantic and heroic, but it is unlikely that either Lawrence or Ursula would actually be willing to die rather than live a life of infinite boredom.
Chapter XVI
1 (p. 198) The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage: This is further evidence that Birkin’s intent, like that of Ursula, and of Lawrence, is to reinvent love. This chapter, “Man to Man,” explores the idea of male love as an alternative to the old way of relating, a dominant theme throughout the novel.