Could there be a better nutshell of modernist themes? Nah.

Folks

• Ursula Brangwen, our Earth Mother figure, she teaches in a local school, and begins the novel in a state of incipience (“unconscious bud of powerful womanhood”) and ends up marrying Rupert Birkin in DH’s model relationship, though she has to abandon her petty egotistical need to “enslave” him in the model of the femme fatale, as well as abandon her erroneous belief that Rupert’s view is misogynist and controlling. She must learn to be herself, by herself, and learn how to change, how to die and be reborn, before she can achieve Rupert’s cosmic balance. She thinks it’s “degrading” not to be happy.

• Rupert Birkin, the ill-looking, physically almost not there school-inspector weakling who is too earnest, loves a good degradation, and is too pious – but who in the end holds the right views. Reserved but adaptable, mobile and changeable, intense and violent, he loves “the purely individual thing in [each person], not collective habit.” A Nietzschean, he dislikes complacent humanity and believes that you have to die and be reborn: to keep changing. He needs Ursula because he is unbalanced and needs someone to set him into balance.

• Gudrun Brangwen, sister of Ursula, an art student from London who’s teaching the schools temporarily, smart, cold, confident, ironic, a “crystal” in that she needs nothing but herself. Completely self-willed, she tends to be too analytical and imperious, like Hermione, and when she judges, she “finishes things off,” even if they’re people. Her relationship with Gerald is the perfectly terrible opposition, with no respite or complementariness. Though Gerald tries to control her and deny her privacy, she swears to have the last blow – and she does. Narrow and too in love with mechanical humanity, DH really damns her.

• Gerald Crich, the mine owner’s son, a Northern beauty who seems utterly dominant but has a weak spot that makes him more vulnerable than Rupert. Tall, good looking, proud, and a leader, he nonetheless has a powerful death drive. He tries to be pure Will (though Gudrun is better at that), pushing animals, mine-workers, and the Earth into submission, thus representing the Enlightenment project, as well as Englishness, with its mere shopkeeper mentality. He must die because he refuses to accept death, that is, he refuses to change.

• Hermione Roddice, the rich, cultured, utterly controlled first woman of the neighborhood. tall, fair, slow; rich, lovely, impeccably dressed, she’s nonetheless repulsive because she is only Mind and Will—a caricature of Ottoline Morrell. She must be the best in everything, and she must control everyone around her, but she is not self-sufficient: “built over a chasm.”

Themes

• Hatred of humanity
  • They are too alike
  • No one tries to transcend their original state
• Anti-England
  • Quantitative multiplicity is disgusting: home with couples with babies with servants…. it’s all the same
  • England likes the ordinary
• Radical otherness of human beings
  • The perfect relationship is quiet in the awareness of the other person’s radical otherness, complete mystery
• Gudrun’s Slumming
  • She sees the workers as glamorous
  • She finds the mechanization of human life revolting and fascinating
  • Ultimately, we’re to judge her glorification of mechanized humanity
• Rupert’s view on Love
  • Two stars balancing one another
    • 273: “unison in separateness”
    • People should not pour into each other, abandon themselves for the other, only live within the couple
      • Love isn’t slavery or debauchery
    • Each person should have his/her own personal integrity: the self is first and most important
  • Passion: it should be impersonal, deeper than the personal: not about your petty outside: your physical appearance or your status
  • Sex: if you’re spiritually intimate, it makes sense to be physically intimate
  • Why care about relationships?
    • They help you contact your unconscious self, your real self underneath your petty ego
    • They help you transcend death: you will last in the other person
    • Love is the only pure activity we have left.
  • It could sound like anti-feminism, but it’s really not fundamentally misogynist (it’s just Lawrence has to have his prophet a man)
• Significance of Objects
  • They prove/remind you of the beauty of the material world.
• Hatred of repetition
• Death and Rebirth
  • Nietzsche-like, DH demands that you constantly die and recreate yourself. You must transcend your petty ego and become something better than just human.
  • Each race goes through different stages, is dead and reborn: look at the Egyptian, then Greek stages he shows.
  • Bergson comes out at end of book: Creation endlessly unfolds, “utter new races and new species, in its own hour, new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being.” (409): it’s the promise we have that keeps away nihilism
  • New is here even if you can’t see it yet, says Ursual: spiritually being there while materially not being there is still REAL, if not actual.
• Decentering of the Human
  • Lots of mention of the inhuman parts of life: the Tyrol landscape, the animals (Ursula’s little Lloyd George bird)
• Organizing the Chaos
  • Chaos = nihilism, boring freedom (154)
• Refusal to suffer
  • Suffering “bores” Rupert
  • Ursula says it’s degrading to be unhappy
• Terrible Mechanism of humanity
• Labor and Industry
  • Gudrun’s Slumming
  • Gerald as Capitalist
    • As Enlightenment entrepreneur: “all moving subjugate to his will… They were ugly and uncouth, but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine.” (229)
      • “It was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends” (230)
    • As Taylorist: he only cares how efficient the laboring body is (229)
  • The mine and surrounding town (as landscape)
  • Says he doesn’t particularly care about money: it’s all about the subjugation and efficiency
  • His father liked to believe that giving the miners jobs helps them, that he’s a philanthropist really
    • But Gerald knew that “the whole Christian attitude of love and self-sacrifice was old hat…useless to cant about it” (233)
  • Gerald sees equality as mystical, abstract, but not actual or practical: practical equality is chaos:
    • “Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of man, the will for chaos.” (233)
  • Gerald, “without bothering to think to a conclusion, gerald jumped to a conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equalit problem as a problem of silliness.” He only wants “the great social productive machine” to work perfectly: that’s what he considers harmony and order.
  • What are his improvements? They mechanise human movements: Taylorism, so they must work harder than ever, but according to Gerald (and narrator), Gerald “represented the religion they really felt,” the “new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying.” (237)
    • Of course, DHL wants more than destruction, but also construction.
  • Loerke, Gudrun’s eventual partner
    • “Whereas machinery and the acts of labour, are extremely, maddeningly beautiful.”
    • “Art should interpret industry, as art once interpreted religion.”
    • “Is there nothing but work?” asks Gudrun. “Nothing but work! No, it is nothing but this, serving a machine, or enjoying the motion of a machine—motion, that is all.” (441-2)
    • This guy is wrong, all against true movement of change, but instead a slave to the machine, and truly represents the art of Gerald’s style of industrialization.
    • Birkin interprets this cant: “He is the perfectly subjected being.” and he is gone further, “Stages further in social hatred. He lives like a rat.” (446)
• Marxism
  • The Marxist trajectory: Birkin and Ursula shudder horribly when they think about the meek inheriting the earth, ie, the laboring class being in charge, leaving people like them to live in the “chinks” left over (377)

Style

• Strange indirect discourse: uses no metalanguage to hint to the reader that ID will come, so it’s weirdly a new kind of consciousness representation. It doesn’t release the narrator into the character’s mind, like stream-of-consciousness would do, but instead keeps the narrator’s firm control over the representation of the mind of the character. You could call it a transitional style of consciousness representation, one allied with Henry James, not Woolf or Joyce.
• Imagery
  • Beetle rolling dung is from Ladybird
  • Tyrol from Ladybird
  • The underworld
  • Submerged people

Modernity

• The modern scenery is amazing
  • Cafes, Poiret and Picasso, Parnell, automobiles, Japanese wrestling, photography, radium and radioactivity, African sculpture, eurythmics, bobbed haircuts, and women’s ankles.
  • Sociology
  • He already interprets the modern world through its objects.
• Critique of Social Institutions
  • Yet he doesn’t abandon them: we should marry, but we need a new idea of marriage
• Gerald as Crisis of the Established Order
  • “He did not innherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea of mankind seemed to be dying with his father….the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration…. he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction…. he had lost entirely the mechanical certainty that had been his triumph.”
    • Gerald’s family shows us the history of the Enlightenment and its relationship to capital. And now it’s in crisis, along with its vision of humanity as tools. (227)
  • “His mind was very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any moment it might burst and leave him in chaos… He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out of him, his divine reason would have been gone.” (239)
    • The end of Reason
• Birkin’s Meditations
  • On the African sculptures in Halliday’s apartment: they seem to show him Europe’s future, with the end of the relationship between mind and body, leaving only “sensual experience:”
    • “Thousands of years ago, that which was imminent in himself must have taken place in these Africans: the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution….” 262-3
    • Death of “creative spirit”
    • Life without hope
    • The solution is love: having a separate soul, yet loves
• Hermione
  • She’s all about knowledge: “She was a leaf upon a dying tree” and only has “old, withered truths,” which had been great but had passed, because she doesn’t believe in inner life or the spiritual world. 304
  • “It was the superficial unreal world of fact.” (406)
• New Kind of Knowledge Needed
  In Ursula’s words, Hermione’s “knowledge is dead understanding,” 308 and its cure, where one can “know mystically, in unrevealed touch. She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is the death of knowledge, the reality of surety in not-knowing.” 332
• Materialism
  • Birkin doesn’t like it when it’s the only aspect of reality, and he means less the typical idea of materialism than he means mechanistic living
  • In Jane Austen’s England, “It could afford to be materialistic because it had the power to be something other—which we haven’t…try as we may, we can’t bring off anything but mechanism, the very soul of materialism.” 371
  • “down the slope of mechanical death” they’re going, thinks Birkin (385)
• Gudrun and Ursula in their empty childhood home
  • “It was void, with a meaninglessness that was almost dreadful.” ”’Really, this room couldn’t be sacred, could it?’” asks Ursula 390
• Fragmentation of Identity
  • You change so often, you’re never the same person with a personal life-history
  • Ursula on childhood: “it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.” 408
  • “She wanted to have no past…. What had she to do with parents and antecedents?” 427
• On Changing
  • “One wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old… You’ve got to hope off.”
• Inhuman:
  • “I believe in something inhuman, on whcih love is only a little part. I believe what we must fulfil comes out of the Unknown to us… It isn’t so merely human.” 457
  • This is Ursula sounding like Nietzsche because she finally agrees with Rupert
• Lack of choices
  • Loerke: “Between the religion d’amour and the latest ‘ism,’ and the new turning to Jesus, oen had better ride on a carousel all day.” 478

Other Quotes

• ”Nothing materialises! Everything withers in the bud.” (Gudrun 3)
• “One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison.” (Birkin 103)
  • Believes that people aren’t all equal: that even though social differences are superficial, spiritual differences are truly unequal
• Love: “an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings” (Birkin 149)
• “Suffering bores me, anyhow.” (Birkin 155)
• Life is about “transmutation,” “unless I set my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of life, fix myself and remain static, cut off from living. But better to die than to live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move on with the invisible…a joy of submitting to that which is greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown…. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanised life.” (Ursula finally getting it: 197)
• Sordid commercial life: “The sea they turned into a murderous alley and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it.” (197 commerce leads to means-ends and war)
• “When you’re not at work you should be in love.” (Gerald 276)
  • I’d call that the motor of the bildungsroman!
• On Marriage: “There remains to put it on a broad social basis, and to achieve a high moral purposes,” Birkin 365
  • So, they don’t want to completely tear down every sign and signal of tradition, but rework it to fit their needs
  • It’s not amoral, it’s new moral
• On Art
  • Loerke and Gudrun: as Non-Representational, when Ursula complains that the statue horse doesn’t show the sensitivity of a real horse:
    • “That horse his a certain form, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see…it has no relation to anything outside that work of art” (448)
    • “It has no relation with the everyday world of this and the other, there is no connection between them.” (449)
  • But Ursula: “the world of art is only the truth about the real world, that’s all—but you are too far gone to see it.” (450)
  • DH doesn’t definitely come to a decision on the plane of art…

Questions/Notes

• DH seems to conceive of every level of human experience, from the most intimate to the most general, through the same laws: individuals, couples/families, countries, and universe must allow change; the individual and the social tend to fall to the same error; etc
  • That’s why he’s such a prophet, a mystic modernist: everything DOES align eventually; it does match up on a higher level
• Ford Madox Ford on Lawrence
  • Ford likes him, but not when he’s recording conversation, where they act like they’re reading out of the Encyclopedia, Ford says
  • Lawrence is okay except when he indulges himself in excesses (I agree)