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General Remarks

• Plot similarities
  • In Fox and Doll, two women fight over a man, leading with the death of one women, which is explained as a release because she never would’ve been happy (despite the partner trying his/her hardest), and getting into new marriage with the other woman, who submits to a creepy marriage consisting of obeying him
    • In Ladybird, you do have a creepy marriage resulting, and fighting over a partner, but the grasp of the story is more political than personal
• Repeated images/characterizations
  • Men as “aloof” and “diffident”
  • Women as both “shy” and “sardonic”
    • Strange mixture of opposites: innocent but sexual
    • The modern subject? Innocent and corrupt?
    • Character development as mastery of one of the elements over the other?
  • Judgment on humanity
    • High: Men having control over a mountain
    • Low: Hatred of humanity
  • Frightful toll of WWI
  • The power of the gaze and mask: the unseeing eye
  • Marriage in its many possible forms
    • DHL experiments over the right form of marriage
    • But it seems ultimately sexless/about friendship or about domination
    • Implies impossibility of marriage of equals
  • Creatures turning into people and vice versa
    • The wife as bird, Dionysus as bat, Daphne as she-cat
    • Humanity as not being as human as we wanted to think
  • Underwater
    • Women being underwater
    • People being inaccessible or separated by a veil
• Style
  • Episodic: the stories each echo one another in theme, plot detail, and imagery
  • Each story itself isn’t episodic: still wants the connective tissue of the realist novel, though he can’t invest it with any interest (apologetic “So even the longest climb finally ended” type of transitions)

The Fox

Folks

• Banford, the sickly, small, be-spectacled, gray-haired investor who has the cash to buy the farm; she needs March and won’t let her go; but then Henry takes advantage of a dangerous situation to kill her and make it look like an accident or just her fault for being stubborn

• March, the man of the relationship, she does all of the work on the farm; yet she’s womanly, and the man wants to marry her, eventually getting her to but not making her happy—for all she wanted to do was make Banford happy, she never could, and now she never can. She only has submission to look forward to.

• Henry Grenfel, the real fox (although we do see an animal fox at the beginning that prefigures Henry because it takes away the white hens, which he ends up killing) who ends up killing Banford and emigrating with March just because he had a whim to have her, and have her he must

Themes

• Making People Happy
  • You can’t make people happy; you can’t reach that goal
  • You can’t make yourself happy, either
• Wartime scarcity
• Hunting
  • As expression of pure will
  • As metaphor for marriage
• Love
  • Typically figured as death
  • Also, tran-substantiation
    • “Producing his voice in her blood”
    • Staring puts yourself literally inside someone else
    • Cf Harriet Hume (their bond is that they are physically parts of each other)
• England
  • “little and tight”
• Work
  • They “disbelieved in living for work alone” (8)
    • But that leads to failure in a farm, where you have to work all the time
  • March still likes to do her fancy work (“paint curvilinear swans on porcelain” and paint fire-screens
    • Clearly, Lawrence doesn’t see that as real labor

Quotes

The Captain’s Doll

Folks

• Hannele, the captain’s mistress; a fallen Austrian aristocrat living in Germany as a fancy-work maker (a dollmaker); she eventually succumbs to the captain’s demands about marriage

• Captain Hepburn, Scottish officer in English army keeping the peace in Germany; he swerves from thinking himself of no account to all of the sudden saying there’s nothing bigger than him, even the Alps the hike upon, due to his first wife’s death, releasing him from her love

• The Wife, whose love turns him into a doll, just as his mother’s and sister’s love did to him before; she is dry, demanding, materialistic, threatening, and ruthless, but he fooled himself into thinking her a “fairy” out of place in this modern world; she dies, perhaps by murder, falling off a balcony. Supposedly, she was born out of time
  • “I always felt she was born in the wrong period—or on the wrong planet.”
  • Recalls that fairy tale about a fairy waiting by the road-side for her mortal lover; “Only nowadays motor-lorries go along the moor roads, and the poor thing is struck unconscious, and carried into our world.” (112)

• Mitchka, Hannele’s business partner, afraid of Hepburn; eventually dies in a lovers’ quarrel

• Regierunsrat, the fallen Austrian monarchist, now nominally a republican, a governor of a tiny region; he is grand though he looks like a bourgeois commoner at first glance; a symbol of the new Austria

Themes

• Resort town! (118-52, Kaprun in the Tyrole, Austria)
• Marriage
  • “Marriage a l’anglais:” assumed by the Germans to be cold, loveless
  • His love with his wife just ensnared him, turned him into an automaton who just cared about making her happy: a weakling, a cuckold
  • He decides that he just wants a Wife, someone just to obey him, and that will be better
  • Critique of love as marriage bond: it is too choking and can turn into doll-making at any moment
    • Even Hannele submits to it eventually, preferring having him this way than not having him any other way (even though at first she wants to be loved, and loved because she is uniquely herself)
    • Like March, she gives in to a stronger male, but her giving in isn’t quite as negative as March’s because she seems more aware
• Objects
  • The doll is a person reified, a person made an object
    • Sitting in the shop window: “lounging there…and nothing to do, among the bric-a-brac and the bibelots.” (116)
    • The painting has the doll there with a poached egg and a vase of sunflowers: just another thing among other things—which is seen as disturbing
      • Painting seen as vulgar (human on plane with objects, and set to representation)
    • He hates having been made a doll, and she promises to burn the painting
      • Remember, she felt disgusted and nauseated when she thought of him being a mere servile pile of limbs for the benefit of the wife (she ridicules a private scene of him promising to make her happy), so we do know she doesn’t want to dominate him ever, that she wouldn’t like to make a doll out of him (so maybe their marriage is okay with her)
  • The Wife is seen as being shot through with objects: “She never forgot her things – her trinkets and her furs and her furniture. She never got away from them…and everything in her mind was mixed up with them.” (112)
• End of the War: example, Fallen Austria
  • Before the war is seen as beauty, achievement, wealth
    • Vision of a woman riding on a mule that has a red velvet covered ornate chair on it, with an array of natives helping her, makes them say, “That looks like almost before the war!” (133)
    • “It seemed lovely, almost like before the war. Almost the same feeling of eternal holiday, as if the world was made for man’s everlasting holiday. But not quite. Never again quite the same. The world is not made for man’s everlasting holiday.” (134)
  • Imagery: the bank-notes being weighted instead of counting; the mice chewing on boxes of them; electric being cheap, the little resort town is bravely strung with them
  • “Really, there’s hardly one man left the same as he was before the war. Terribly degenerated.” (97)
• People being opaque
  • We cannot really understand other people
  • “He must be mad!” she constantly thinks.
  • “He was a puzzle to her.” (139)
  • Imagery of people being on or from different planets
• Humanity Not Meaningful
  • He seems to disappear from her thoughts and knowledge when he’s not physically there (84, 89)
  • But later he will force her recognition of him, after his wife has died and he has been freed
• Female labor
  • Her fancy-work, usually just idle leisure, is now giving her an income
    • It always was bankable, eh?
  • But you don’t have to pay duty on them (87) because they are just “toys”
  • Cf March painting swans on porcelain and painting fire-screens for their own decorative use (8-9)
• Condition of Man, according to Hepburn
  • “There is no life outside, for human beings,” nothing outside of “bibelots and… furniture and… talk.” “In a great measure, there’s nothing.”(113)
  • What does he hate about the mountains? “Their loftiness and their uplift. I hate their uplift. I hate people prancing on mountain-tops and feeling exalted.” (137)
    • Then he says he’s bigger than the mountains
• Making People Happy
  • His former goal had been only to make her happy
  • Cf March’s goal, only to make Banford happy
    • She never could make her happy
    • Doesn’t mind that Banford died because she’d never really be happy
• Shopping
  • The wife first meets Hannele in the latter’s shop, and she wants to buy a doll she really loves (great consumer)
  • And she uses Goethe to do so, quoting something about people always thinking they’d be happy somewhere else
  • Goethe and consumerism, a happy marriage: insatiable humanity turned to buying
• Mountain and Glacier Formations
  • Sublime: scary but beautiful
  • Dangerous: he could fall
  • Sexy: shaped like vagina
  • Action? By the time they’re done with it, they’re ready to marry
  • He says he’s more than the mountain (cf Ladybird when Dionys feels like he could put the mountains up and take them down)
• Fiction and Reality Mixed
  • “She felt that if he never came back, she would be just as if she had read a rather peculiar but false story, a tour de force which works up one’s imagination falsely” (97)
  • “Hannele could see her [the Wife, as she threatens H over tea] being a heroine, playing the chief part in her own life-romance.” (99)
    • We can see here that Hepburn is right in his assessment of their marriage
  • The reality of illusions (this time, the illusion of his charm): “You could call it an illusion if you liked. But an illusion which is a real experience is worth having. Perhaps this disillusion was a greater illusion than the illusion itself.” (107)
    • Cf Good Soldier: to Hannele, it is a goodly apple
  • Perhaps this is how she’ll be happy: she just wants her illusion

Quotes

• “Words mean so little,” he says as he convinces her to come near so they could touch
  • Because physical sensation is the only meaning for him
  • Humankind not about thinking or acting, but sensation (83)
• “A hatchet had gone through the ligatures and veins that connected him with the people of his affection, and that he was left with the bleeding ends of all his vital human relationships.”
  • Crisis temporarily changes human relationships (113)

The Ladybird

Folks

• Lady Beveridge, old school humanist to be knocked out of power by the war; nineties bluestocking; sons die in war

• Earl Beveridge, the primitive “damned” by the text; sensual, cruel, selfish, he has almost been taken over by Lady B’s humanity; he’s like the ghost of pre-civilization still walking around with a little power but mostly humiliation

• Lady Daphne, their remaining progeny, sick with a missing husband and a dead baby when we first see her; strong, reckless nature inherited from father has been pushed down, inwards; her outer beauty is the “whited sepulchre” for her true nature (according to Dionys); her war is inside, but like Persephone she compromises: day with Basil (democracy, friendship) and night with Dionys (death, passion)

• Count Dionys, a family friend of the Beveridges, the Austrian count who’s a prisoner of war in England recovering from severe wounds; he doesn’t want to live, full of anger; god of destruction of the world of man, he’s the lord of the underworld; name symbolic of Dionysus, family crest the Ladybird. The plot arc follows him: his hospital time and time at an English manor recovering, when the ladies visit him; culminating in a visit by Basil and Daphne; then ending with his visit to Daphne’s parent’s manse

• The Ladybird, the family crest, which was the symbol of the pyramids (beetles pushing dung balls around, aka earth, stimulated creation of pyramids); it’s on the thimble he gives her (obedience, making him shirts)

• Basil Apsley, the husband, a European optimist believing in the many forms of love, which spur action, that the only problem we have is too narrow a kind of love—but he stops believing it once the Count takes Daphne as a sexual wife from him and once the war has come (he says something died in him during the war)

Themes

• War Suffering
  • Can’t even brood over your private sorrows because everyone is suffering
  • “I feel as if I have lost my manhood for the time being.” because of the explosions (171)
  • “The world I was sane about has gone raving.” (175)
• Political
  • Europe is in the fight between good and evil: sweet Lady B versus selfish Earl B; democratic optimistic Basil versus pessimistic authoritarian Dionys; the war inside Daphne, who has “the fatal humility of her age” (196) yet has anger seething through her hereditarily (ie, it’s inside of us)
  • Daphne symbolizes the fight for Europe’s zeitgeist around WWI
  • The war is slowly causing a pivot: the struggle, once balanced towards generosity and optimism, after the war turns into a tacit agreement to let evil in (ie, authoritarian systems) during the night (“something of me died in the war” 220; “the bonds, the connections between him and his life in the world had proken, and he lay there a bit of loose, palpitating humanity” 167); will eventually become all authoritarian, all the Lord of Underworld
  • Europe has committed moral suicide, says the Count
  • Lawrence prefigures the rise of authoritarianism, although he doesn’t guess future war over it (thinks it’ll be rather peaceful)
  • 174: Count says he needs to take back traditions he threw away, and later his singing of country songs, folk songs, brings Daphne to him as a call: thus, the cultural heritage part of fascism comes out
• Freudian
  • The dark inside of us: all white outside, but dark inside (“the whited sepulchre” hides the “dark fire” inside)
    • Cf id
  • “it seemed a scar in himself, in his brain as it were” (192)
    • Cf Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Nietzsche
  • Nietzsche’s higher health, as told by Basil
    • “When you’ve went through the ordeal,” “you arrive at a higher state of consciousness, and therefore of life. And of course, at a higher plane of love.” (198)
  • The natural aristocrat, as told by Dionys
    • The few people with lots of will shall be given power
• England as a quantitative multiplicity: just a bunch of hedgerows, houses, wifes, and husbands all alike (it’s why the Count at first hates England, though he does like the Elizabethan home of Daphne’s parents with all its peasants and farms)
• Alternative marriages
  • Critique of typical male-female relations
    • “She would not be lovely and a queen to him,”
    • Instead, “The wild cat has its mate.”
    • She says the love as if she’s a beautiful moon makes her “nerve worn” (182)
  • Different models of love
    • The newlyweds (with the moon-love, you’re Artemis! you’re Venus!)—silly and childish
    • Worship: Basil says it’s more than love, but seriously, it’s just foolish and still childish
    • Sibling: this is how their marriage ends, with unsexual love
    • Passionate demon-marriage: the marriage that waits for the night but can’t live in the day
      • It’s a love that only happens after death, in the underworld
      • Cf Harriet Hume
      • While people change and live, they can’t have an ideal love
  • This novelette is where Lawrence pushes his ideas about marriage into the political realm: absolute control not over the wife, once she gives permission, but instead over a whole people
• Masculinity and Femininity
  • Why are Lawrence’s men all “diffident and aloof?” And the women all “shy and sardonic?”
• Contact versus Individuality
  • Basil: you have to have contact with people
    • All contact is but a form of love
    • Contact is what spurs action, the fountain of action
    • Contact spurs construction and destruction: war or cathedrals
    • Democratic spirit
  • Dionys: absolute will
    • You have to have your will beyond the reach of any person
    • Someone “by nature an aristocrat” will be given power by the people, who will deliver that power to him
    • After they give up their autonomy, they must obey him
    • Authoritarian spirit