So let's finally look at the ice world symbolism. Some of this is me just thinking out loud because I have not come to any definite conclusion.
Here's a section in Chapter 29 that seems to address it.
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She [Ursula] was dilated and brilliant, like a flower in the morning sun. She felt Birkin looking at her, as if he were jealous of her, and her breasts thrilled, her veins were all golden. She was as happy as the sun that has just opened above clouds. And everybody seemed so admiring and radiant, it was perfect.
After dinner she wanted to go out for a minute, to look at the world. The company tried to dissuade her -- it was so terribly cold. But just to look, she said.
They all four wrapped up warmly, and found themselves in a vague, unsubstantial outdoors of dim snow and ghosts of an upper-world, that made strange shadows before the stars. It was indeed cold, bruisingly, frighteningly, unnaturally cold. Ursula could not believe the air in her nostrils. It seemed conscious, malevolent, purposive in its intense murderous coldness.
Yet it was wonderful, an intoxication, a silence of dim, unrealised snow, of the invisible intervening between her and the visible, between her and the flashing stars. She could see Orion sloping up. How wonderful he was, wonderful enough to make one cry aloud.
And all around was this cradle of snow, and there was firm snow underfoot, that struck with heavy cold through her boot-soles. It was night, and silence. She imagined she could hear the stars. She imagined distinctly she could hear the celestial, musical motion of the stars, quite near at hand. She seemed like a bird flying amongst their harmonious motion.
And she clung close to Birkin. Suddenly she realised she did not know what he was thinking. She did not know where he was ranging.
Like a flower in the sun, that is Lawrence's perfect state, suggesting of nirvana, if you will. Then notice this paragraph:
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And they turned home again. They saw the golden lights of the hotel glowing out in the night of snow-silence, small in the hollow, like a cluster of yellow berries. It seemed like a bunch of sun-sparks, tiny and orange in the midst of the snow-darkness. Behind, was a high shadow of a peak, blotting out the stars, like a ghost.
What is interesting here is that ice world is placed in direct opposition to the star symbolism, the snow peak blotting out the stars. We know that the star symbolism is associated with Ursula and Birkin's relationship, and so we understand the the snow/ice symbolism is associated with Gudrun and Gerald. But is it diametrically opposite? How would stars be diametrically opposite snow and ice? Heat? Source of energy? Lawrence is big on the sun as a symbol for positive things. Lawrence loves to use the metaphor of people melting. Ice would be the opposite, the crystalization, and Lawrence loves that metaphor as well. People are hard, crystal, and then melt from the sun or something. Ursual is now out of that perfect "flower" state. Is it because of the cold? The section continues:
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They drew near to their home. They saw a man come from the dark building, with a lighted lantern which swung golden, and made that his dark feet walked in a halo of snow. He was a small, dark figure in the darkened snow. He unlatched the door of an outhouse. A smell of cows, hot, animal, almost like beef, came out on the heavily cold air. There was a glimpse of two cattle in their dark stalls, then the door was shut again, and not a chink of light showed. It had reminded Ursula again of home, of the Marsh, of her childhood, and of the journey to Brussels, and, strangely, of Anton Skrebensky.
Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to have come down from the slopes of heaven to this place, with Birkin, not to have toiled out of the murk of her childhood and her upbringing, slowly, all soiled. She felt that memory was a dirty trick played upon her. What was this decree, that she should `remember'! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life. She was with Birkin, she had just come into life, here in the high snow, against the stars. What had she to do with parents and antecedents? She knew herself new and unbegotten, she had no father, no mother, no anterior connections, she was herself, pure and silvery, she belonged only to the oneness with Birkin, a oneness that struck deeper notes, sounding into the heart of the universe, the heart of reality, where she had never existed before.
"Views of a magic lantern" is I think how movie pictures were referred to back then. So Ursula is getting flashback pictures of her prior life. Why is this a bad thing? Because I think it fragments Birkin out. They are no longer those two stars that have formed a constellation. The cold drives the person to his inner core self. The passage continues further:
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Even Gudrun was a separate unit, separate, separate, having nothing to do with this self, this Ursula, in her new world of reality. That old shadow- world, the actuality of the past -- ah, let it go! She rose free on the wings of her new condition.
Gudrun and Gerald had not come in. They had walked up the valley straight in front of the house, not like Ursula and Birkin, on to the little hill at the right. Gudrun was driven by a strange desire. She wanted to plunge on and on, till she came to the end of the valley of snow. Then she wanted to climb the wall of white finality, climb over, into the peaks that sprang up like sharp petals in the heart of the frozen, mysterious navel of the world. She felt that there, over the strange blind, terrible wall of rocky snow, there in the navel of the mystic world, among the final cluster of peaks, there, in the infolded navel of it all, was her consummation. If she could but come there, alone, and pass into the infolded navel of eternal snow and of uprising, immortal peaks of snow and rock, she would be a oneness with all, she would be herself the eternal, infinite silence, the sleeping, timeless, frozen centre of the All.
Gudrun wants to experince the cold, learn it, gather its knowledge. But the cold she thinks is the "navel of the mystic world" the end of experience, the eternal infinite. She too wants the state of nirvana, but she thinks she can find it in the ice world. And then much later in the chapter, Gudrun and Gerald go tobagganing.
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For Gudrun herself, she seemed to pass altogether into the whiteness of the snow, she became a pure, thoughtless crystal. When she reached the top of the slope, in the wind, she looked round, and saw peak beyond peak of rock and snow, bluish, transcendent in heaven. And it seemed to her like a garden, with the peaks for pure flowers, and her heart gathering them. She had no separate consciousness for Gerald.
She held on to him as they went sheering down over the keen slope. She felt as if her senses were being whetted on some fine grindstone, that was keen as flame. The snow sprinted on either side, like sparks from a blade that is being sharpened, the whiteness round about ran swifter, swifter, in pure flame the white slope flew against her, and she fused like one molten, dancing globule, rushed through a white intensity. Then there was a great swerve at the bottom, when they swung as it were in a fall to earth, in the diminishing motion.
They came to rest. But when she rose to her feet, she could not stand. She gave a strange cry, turned and clung to him, sinking her face on his breast, fainting in him. Utter oblivion came over her, as she lay for a few moments abandoned against him.
`What is it?' he was saying. `Was it too much for you?'
But she heard nothing.
When she came to, she stood up and looked round, astonished. Her face was white, her eyes brilliant and large.
`What is it?' he repeated. `Did it upset you?'
She looked at him with her brilliant eyes that seemed to have undergone some transfiguration, and she laughed, with a terrible merriment.
`No,' she cried, with triumphant joy. `It was the complete moment of my life.'
To Gudrun the snow is completeness but it is an illusion. She climbs to the peak thinking she has reached the navel of the world, but she sees there are peaks upon peaks beyond. It is not the end, and she will have to go through cycles of climbing, cycles of redoing the same mechanical thing, and ultimately there is no end to the ice world. It is another eternal cycle. Later still Urusla decides she must leave.
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Ursula went out alone into the world of pure, new snow. But the dazzling whiteness seemed to beat upon her till it hurt her, she felt the cold was slowly strangling her soul. Her head felt dazed and numb.
Suddenly she wanted to go away. It occurred to her, like a miracle, that she might go away into another world. She had felt so doomed up here in the eternal snow, as if there were no beyond.
And
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`I hate it,' she said. `I hate the snow, and the unnaturalness of it, the unnatural light it throws on everybody, the ghastly glamour, the unnatural feelings it makes everybody have.'
And then she tells her feeling about the snow and her urgency to leave to her sister:
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But Gudrun read the unconscious brightness on her sister's face, rather than the uncertain tones of her speech.
`But don't you think you'll want the old connection with the world -- father and the rest of us, and all that it means, England and the world of thought -- don't you think you'll need that, really to make a world?'
Ursula was silent, trying to imagine.
`I think,' she said at length, involuntarily, `that Rupert is right -- one wants a new space to be in, and one falls away from the old.'
Gudrun watched her sister with impassive face and steady eyes.
`One wants a new space to be in, I quite agree,' she said. `But I think that a new world is a development from this world, and that to isolate oneself with one other person, isn't to find a new world at all, but only to secure oneself in one's illusions.'
Ursula looked out of the window. In her soul she began to wrestle, and she was frightened. She was always frightened of words, because she knew that mere word-force could always make her believe what she did not believe.
`Perhaps,' she said, full of mistrust, of herself and everybody. `But,' she added, `I do think that one can't have anything new whilst one cares for the old -- do you know what I mean? -- even fighting the old is belonging to it. I know, one is tempted to stop with the world, just to fight it. But then it isn't worth it.'
So what can we make of all this. The ice world separates the self and drives each to its indivudual core. To reach nirvana one has to eliminate this idividual self, melt that crystalized self to a new static being. The cold is another endless cycle, an illusion of finality, like the will is an illusion of self.
I don't know if I made any sense. There is some good thoughts there but overall just babbling I think. Perhaps I confused myself and everyone. :sick:
