Women In Love

Ursula is one of the protagonists and Gudrun’s sister. She first appeared in The Rainbow, the novel that preceded Women in Love. In that novel, she had a sexual relationship with an older woman, Winifred. This makes her a foil to Rupert, who is attracted to men as well as women. At 26, Ursula works as a teacher at Willey Green Grammar School—the same school system in which Rupert works as an inspector. Though she has lived in Beldover her whole life, to her, it feels like “imprisonment in nothingness” (373). She fears that being an unmarried schoolteacher is all she will accomplish in her life: she has “periods of tight horror, when it seem[s] to her that her life [will] pass away, and be gone, without having been more than this” (52). However, Ursula gets married, leaves her job, and travels overseas with her husband, Rupert, by the end of the novel.

She is associated with light and brightness in the novel. One of the first descriptions of her is that she has the “strange brightness of an essential flame” (9). The imagery of brightness that surrounds her is, at times, connected to the symbolism of flowers. Near the end of the novel, Rupert thinks of her as “dilated and brilliant, like a flower in the morning sun” (407). Flower imagery is associated with sexuality and nature. The day that Rupert thinks of her as the dilated flower ends with her giving in to his sexual requests, which leads to her feeling both “bestial” and “free” (413).

Ursula’s opinions about love change dramatically over the course of the novel. She moves between being infatuated with Rupert to spurning him. At one point, she believes she “love[s] only children and animals” (244), but also “want[s] pure love” (244). In the beginning of the book, she believes love is the most important thing and that love is bigger than the individual. By the end of the novel, she agrees with Rupert that there is something larger than love in the universe.

Gudrun, 25, is Ursula’s younger sister and one of the main protagonists. They are only 10 months apart, and they are very close although their personalities are somewhat opposite. At the beginning of the novel, Gudrun has just returned to Beldover after working as an artist in London. She is “beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed” (8). Gudrun’s question about marriage—if Ursula wants to get married—is the first line of dialogue in the novel. This is significant because Ursula’s journey to marrying Rupert provides the main throughline of the narrative.

Early in the novel, Gudrun teaches art at the same school as Ursula. After Gerald’s sister Diana drowns, Gudrun becomes a private art tutor for Winnie, Gerald’s younger sister. During this time, she lives in a studio at the Criches’ home, Shortlands. She likes Winnie and enjoys having the freedom to make her art, but she still has larger questions about where her life is headed. She mainly struggles with traditional versus nontraditional values. At one point, Loerke tells Gudrun: “You are an extraordinary woman, why should you follow the ordinary course, the ordinary life?” (457). In the end, Gudrun agrees with this statement. However, she first attempts to have a traditional relationship with Gerald.

While they are on vacation, Gudrun realizes that she does not want a conventional relationship with Gerald. She thinks about society as “wheels within wheels of people—[…] a very madness of dead mechanical monotony and meaninglessness” (464). The clock imagery represents the drudgery and inevitability of traditional domestic life. In the end, Gudrun realizes she is “one of life’s outcasts, one of the drifting lives that have no root” (376), and goes to pursue art in Dresden.

Gerald is one of the main protagonists. Like Gudrun, he has returned to Beldover after traveling. However, unlike her, his return involves taking over the family business of running the mine. While Rupert is obsessed with love, Gerald is obsessed with his work and having “a fight to fight with Matter” (227). By this, he means that he wants to be more powerful than the earth by extracting its coal. The gossip among Shortlands, Beldover, and Breadalby is how Gerald “killed his brother when a boy, and was set apart, like Cain” (172). This repeated biblical allusion—and its foreshadowing of violence—sets Gerald apart from the other characters. In his childhood, long before the events of the novel, he is surrounded by violence, from the situation with his brother—a gun accident—to a strike at the mines. His character arc is the only one that is marked by death and violence.

During the course of the novel, Gerald loses more family members. Diana, his sister, drowns and kills her would-be rescuer in the process, and Gerald’s father, Thomas, also dies after a long illness. Both Rupert and Gudrun are attracted to Gerald, and they both have erotic and violent experiences with him. Early in the novel, Rupert notices how Gerald’s “blue eyes [a]re lit up with a little flame of curious desire” (60). After the two men vigorously wrestle, Rupert admits to Gerald “I think also that you are beautiful” (273). However, Gerald is far more violent with Gudrun, nearly strangling her to death and punching Loerke.

In the end, his violent conflict with “Matter” (227), or nature, ends with him dying during a reckless climb in the Alps. This death is heavily foreshadowed throughout the novel by Lawrence’s use of imagery of violence and isolation that surrounds Gerald. Rupert considers how Gerald is “one of these strange white wonderful demons from the north, fulfilled in the destructive frost-mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, […] death by perfect cold?” (254).

Hermione is Rupert’s lover and Ursula’s rival for his attention. She is wealthy and beautiful and holds this over Ursula, who is from a modest background. Hermione is frequently described as intellectual rather than emotional and therefore masculine. Lawrence uses her to highlight the gendered nature of 1910s English society. Those around Hermione think that by caring about ideas rather than sentiment, “[s]he betray[s] the woman in herself” (295).

Hermione is a foil for Ursula in that, on the surface, she seems like an ideal partner for Rupert because their views are so closely aligned. While Hermione initially wants to marry Rupert, she is also interested in sex outside of marriage, which was unconventional at the time. These beliefs are in contrast with those of Ursula, whose values stem from Christianity. For all his unconventional traits, Rupert ends up wanting a woman who is more emotional, like Ursula, rather than Hermione. Ursula tells Hermione, “You don’t give him a woman’s love, you give him an ideal love, and that is why he reacts away from you” (297). Hermione offers an intellectual sort of love, similar to Rupert’s, but he wants to be with someone who has more emotional intelligence than he does. After Rupert does not attend Hermione’s going-away gathering at Shortlands, she gives up on marrying him and leaves for Florence.