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Originally Posted by
manolia
I am becoming a fan of D H Lawrence :)
Go go Janine!! I have read the first three chapters (not much, work gets in the way lately).
Yes, Manolia!!! I knew you would become an avid fan. Next you will be like me, buying countless Lawrence books. I think I have over 25! Now that is obsession. Sorry real life work gets in the way. Duties on the homefront here do, too. Manolia - your post is a good one and your enthusisam for this story really shows through.
I have just completed only Chapter 1, but I am taking it slowly and really absorbing it, this time around. I thought a lot about Chapter 1 last night and my impression is that there is a lot there. There are many key paragraphs suggesting events that will develop in the future. Chapter 1 is a well constructed introduction to everything - the changing industrial world, the family environment and the relationship of the husband and wife with their separate views on life, the initial attraction and short-lived love, the friction that develops due to their separateness. What really stands out to me is how well Lawrence knew these characters. It was as though he could crawl into their very skins and show us the way they both were thinking and feeling - amazing inner portraits of both people. It is no wonder since they were based on his real parents. He certainly knew them well and was not afraid to reveal, even to himself, the inner deep turbulent way in which they reacted to each other. This must have been a painful process to actually write this way and see one's parents on the page. Last time I read the novel I did not feel as sympathetic to the father, but this time, due to additional readings, commentaries and new perspectives on my part, I felt more sympathy at time for his position in the marriage.
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Yes they are pretty different the Morels. That differance is what attracted them to each other i think.
Mr Morel admired Mrs Morel because "she was very lady like" and he used to speak reverentially to her, using "thous and thines".
Mrs Morel was fascinated by his warmth and liveliness. She came form a puritan family, where men and especially her father (a short description is being given) are very restraint and silent.
Janine, i think their true happiness lasted only a few months.
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The next Christmas they were married, and for three months
she was perfectly happy: for six months she was very happy.
They seemed to be happy for six months. Yes, that is pretty brief.
The next paragraphs show how things begin to change or how reality sets in. At first "he signed the pledge" and his living by her standards - quite co-operative, but then it says he was "nothing if not showy".
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He had signed the pledge, and wore the blue ribbon of a
tee-totaller: he was nothing if not showy. They lived, she thought,
in his own house. It was small, but convenient enough, and quite
nicely furnished, with solid, worthy stuff that suited her honest soul.
The women, her neighbours, were rather foreign to her, and Morel's
mother and sisters were apt to sneer at her ladylike ways.
But she could perfectly well live by herself, so long as she
had her husband close.
Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried
to open her heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially,
but without understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy,
and she had flashes of fear. Sometimes he was restless of an evening:
it was not enough for him just to be near her, she realised.
She was glad when he set himself to little jobs.
One can see when the differences and friction exists and then begins to creep in and become more evident and eventually prominent in their life together. They really cannot communicate on a deeper level, of which the mother longs for this level of intimacy after the 'honeymoon' period of their marriage is over - say the first 6 months. The father reacts by becoming restless. Each person seems to place an effect on the other unconsciously, which is so realistic of real life couples, who ultimately become more and more distanced from each other, when they can't work things out.
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That's exactly what caught my interest. What i loved in "Women in love" was the dreary and bleak setting, which depicts Lawrence opinion concerning indusrialisation. Same setting here too.
Below, from the first line of the book, it is evident that this ugliness and bleak atmosphere is going to be a key issue in the book. Sometimes in movie commentaries I have heard the director refer to the atmosphere of the film as a character of it's own such as a rainy type gloomy film. In a sense, this image of the mines and the colliers becomes a live character in this and many of Lawrence's novels. It could be called the menacing character or threat. Lawrence saw it as a disease spreading over the natural countryside of his youth.
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"THE BOTTOMS" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block of thatched,
bulging cottages that stood by the brookside on Greenhill Lane.
There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two
fields away. The brook ran under the alder trees, scarcely soiled
by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by
donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin.
Lawrence even uses the word 'Hell' in his very first paragraph...interesting way to begin a book.
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Hmmmm..good question.
I believe that whatever love there is, it is very superficial.
The two people got together because they were merely atracted by certain things in each other's personality (see above what i wrote to Janine). There wasn't any long lasting acquaintance between them, they kinda rushed in a thoughtless marriage.
I think it was somewhat superficial and yet there seemed to exist some sort of love between them at first, however the type of love that Gertrude hoped to have was never evident and therefore she may have been deluding herself with higher expectations of her husband. This, he was incapable of achieving; it just was not in his nature. She would have liked to change him into what she expected him to be, but he obviously was a simplier being with his own ideas of living - some place it says he was more 'sensual' than she was. I can't find the exact quote now. Both of these people are stubborn and will not yield or compomise. There is no 'give and take' in this marriage and so it is doomed to exist from the start as a very unhappy one. Even in their difference's in speech the difference is made manifest. He speaks, as Lawrence once referred to as 'heart speech' and she speaks in "head speech' or the higher form of English.
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Nevertheless, it seems that a kind of love has existed and it is apparent by Mrs Morel thoughts. In certain parts, especially when Mr Morel is ill, we can see Mrs Morel talking to herself and saying that "she didn't want him dead. She still wants him for herself (putting aside the fact that he is the breadwinner)". The same when Mr Morel decides to leave her and she evntually realises that he was just hiding in the back of the house.
This is so parallel to the story we are doing in short stories. Did anyone read it yet? I think the feelings she is having about Mr. Moral's illness are very complex and cannot be easily interpretted. If you read the story 'Odour of Chrysantamums' you see a 'what if' scenerio being played out, in the wife's mind. Interesting that she thinks - 'she wants him for himself'. I have not read that part yet, but am anxious now to read it. I only vaguely remember that scene, so I don't have a complete comment formed as yet.
I thought this passage of interest and sort of sums up the feeling later that the wife is having about her life.
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She went indoors, wondering if things were never going to alter.
She was beginning by now to realise that they would not. She seemed
so far away from her girlhood, she wondered if it were the same
person walking heavily up the back garden at the Bottoms as had run
so lightly up the breakwater at Sheerness ten years before.
"What have I to do with it?" she said to herself. "What have
I to do with all this? Even the child I am going to have!
It doesn't seem as if I were taken into account."
Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along,
accomplishes one's history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself
as it were slurred over.
"I wait," Mrs. Morel said to herself--"I wait, and what I wait
for can never come."
That last line makes evident that what Mrs. Morel is wanting she know she will never have. It is a very poignant line.
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But the most important part is when she stops caring about his actions (that's where her love stops) and then turns to her sons.
As for Mr Morel we get hints of his love in many places. First we learn that he is jealous of his first born child. Then we see that even when he is angry with her and they fight he has great pungs of guilt (although he never admits it).
I agree. I think in the first chapter, the description of her feelings when the father gives the son his first haircut is very significant. Something inside of her seems to be shattered at that moment - it goes way deeper in meaning than the mere haircut of the child. I think in a way it is the father being dominent over the mother and saying ok, "I am the father and this is how it is going to be". I thought of my neighbor who actually did cut his boys hair when they got to a certain age and the mother would have had no say in the matter. It seems the father also knows how precious the hair is to the mother and the keeping the child a baby as well and so he goes and does this on his own, to her horror. Surely he knew what he was doing, but then again, he may have not realised the extend of how it would effect the mother.
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Presently she came to an end, soothed the child and cleared away
the breakfast-table. She left the newspaper, littered with curls,
spread upon the hearthrug. At last her husband gathered it up and put
it at the back of the fire. She went about her work with closed
mouth and very quiet. Morel was subdued. He crept about wretchedly,
and his meals were a misery that day. She spoke to him civilly,
and never alluded to what he had done. But he felt something final
had happened.
Afterwards she said she had been silly, that the boy's hair
would have had to be cut, sooner or later. In the end, she even
brought herself to say to her husband it was just as well he had
played barber when he did. But she knew, and Morel knew, that that
act had caused something momentous to take place in her soul.
She remembered the scene all her life, as one in which she had
suffered the most intensely.
This act of masculine clumsiness was the spear through the side of
her love for Morel. Before, while she had striven against him bitterly,
she had fretted after him, as if he had gone astray from her.
Now she ceased to fret for his love: he was an outsider to her.
That line - "a spear through the side of her love for Morel" is very significant and also symbolic in reference to Christ and suffering; the suffering sacrificing Christian. This is a major turning point in the relationship and instead now of "striving bitterly against him", Gertrude is now "distances" herself and "ceased to fret for his love"...and "he was an outsider to her".
In this earlier quote we see when the boy was born, that the father was decent to the mother, but it did not satisfy her loneliness:
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Gertrude Morel was very ill when the boy was born.
Morel was good to her, as good as gold. But she felt very lonely,
miles away from her own people. She felt lonely with him now,
and his presence only made it more intense.
This distance between them is like they live on two planets. I find these following passages interesting and significant after the child is born.
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At last Mrs. Morel despised her husband. She turned to
the child; she turned from the father. He had begun to neglect her;
the novelty of his own home was gone.
Then her own opinion of his at this point.
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He had no grit, she said
bitterly to herself. What he felt just at the minute, that was all to him.
He could not abide by anything. There was nothing at the back
of all his show.
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There began a battle between the husband and wife--a fearful,
bloody battle that ended only with the death of one. She fought
to make him undertake his own responsibilities, to make him fulfill
his obligations. But he was too different from her. His nature
was purely sensuous, and she strove to make him moral, religious.
She tried to force him to face things. He could not endure it--it
drove him out of his mind.
This paragraph shows the dynamics of their battle and how the react to each other and the distinct differences in their natures and their ways of thinking. He cannot in the end endure her trying to 'force him' into 'moralistic' modes or being. I have read commentaries that state that the image of Lawrence's father portrayed in this book was totally unfair and that later Lawrence regretted that he was so harsh towards his father. Both adults acted childishly at times and the blame was equal for the tumultuous admosphere in the household. No one was the culprit or to blame. Their marriage became a complex and damaging one for the children between them, which is sad.
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Great observations Alexei.
I agree! Good post. And now what are you appologising for? I don't see that you gave anything away and anyway forget what I said earlier. You can't give away anything about this book; at least not to me. I read it before. ;)
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There is a certain point where Mrs Morel stops critisising her husband about his drunkeness, because she just doesn't care anymore. This is the point, chronologically, where we can safely say that her love is dead.
Also, to comment on your first point, Mrs Morel is more like disappointed and hurt, she doesn't actually try to fight back. YEs, that seems to be true. The answer can be found again in her upbringing. Mrs Morel comes from a puritan family. She is a devout christian and she has learned to restrain her feelings.Quite the opposite from Gudrun from "Women in love" who was a tigress ;)
Yes, well somewhere in the text it mentioned that she began criticising him, not to benefit the marriage any longer, but to save his soul, to save him as a man. Mrs. Morel was a deeply and staunchly religious woman in this respect. Remember she was brought up as a 'tee-totaller' and drinking must have been a sure way to hell so she was trying also to reform him. I do think the marriage goes dead at some point given all these various factors and finally she even gives up the quest to save her husband and is totally numb to her life and marriage. It is true that she learned to restrain her feelings being a devout christian woman. Interesting that it is the opposite to Gudrun in "Women in Love". Remember too, that this novel would have been set earlier in the century than WIL, so some attitudes would be changing at the time Lawrence wrote this later novel.
Hi Virgil, good to see you here giving a few comments. It is interesting comparing the book with Joyce's novel. Both are 'coming of age' novels and I did not know the word you presented with the definition, so now I learned something new today.
Hi Amalia - impatient one - do read on! :lol:
Whew - this took me forever to write - a small novel I think! Hahaha
