Abstract
Critics have not been generous to the Ursula of Women in Love. Characteristic reactions include the harsh and ideological dismissal of her by Kate Millett and Carolyn Heilbrun, who view her, respectively, as ‘Birkin’s wife and echo … an incomplete creature … the epitome of passivity’,1 and as merely the ‘satellite to Birkin’s star’.2 Such a common misreading by feminists of Ursula’s role is surprising given their frequent calls for woman’s active sexual partnership in marriage; for such is the status that a persistent Ursula both encourages and achieves with her head¬strong and often contradictory husband. There are also the more sober disappointments of consensus Lawrence criticism, which still encourages an approach to the novel that either virtually ignores Ursula or bemoans a purported submissiveness in her relationship with Birkin. Only in some undeveloped remarks by, among others, F. R. Leavis, Frank Kermode, Julian Moynahan, and Charles Ross, is there a significant implication that her function in the work and her attachment to Birkin are other than subsidiary or tangential; even their acknowledgements of her resistance to Birkin’s doctrines do not suggest that she provides any compelling counterpoint, any ethos of her own to offer against her lover’s more didactic exhortations.3
‘But why do you always grip your lips?’ he asked, regretful.
‘Never mind,’ she said swiftly. ‘It is my way.’
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Notes
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970; London: Virago, 1977), 263–5.
Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 102.
‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and in Edward D. McDonald (ed.), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking 1972), 476.
David Cavitch writes with particular condescension about Ursula, as he stresses the way Birkin’s doctrine ‘disappoints her expectations of more romantic language’, ‘On Women in Love’, from Leo Hamalian (ed.), D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Criticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 55.
‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, 481. H. M. Daleski, in The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), discusses several relevant contradictions in Birkin’s explanation of his metaphysic and employs the Hardy essay to speculate on ‘male’ and ‘female’ elements in the novel. But Daleski disregards the active, directive function of Ursula’s own criticism of Birkin, and he fails to relate Lawrence’s idea of ‘female being’ in the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ to either an instinctual mode of living or to Ursula’s affirmation of such a response to life.
For a relevant sense of the Lawrences’ life during this period, see especially Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence,rev. edn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 191–365, and
Keith Sagar, The Life of D. H. Lawrence (New York: Pantheon, 1980; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 85–103.
George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (eds), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 142.
Mailer, The Prisoner of Sex (New York: New American Library, 1971), 101.
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© 1989 Peter Balbert
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Balbert, P. (1989). Ursula Brangwen and ‘The Essential Criticism’: The Female Corrective in Women in Love. In: D. H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19889-4_4
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