David Herbert Richards Lawrence

[HERO]

D. H. Lawrence: EIE (ENFj-Ni?). My ex-boyfriend thought he VI'd SLE.


- from Homosexuality and Literature 1890-1930 by Jeffrey Meyers; pp. 138-139 [IX—D. H. Lawrence (The White Peacock)]: In Lawrence’s novels, frustrated passion and frustrating marriage lead inevitably to a moment of male love.
The swimming scene takes place immediately after Lettie’s final rejection of George during the third idyll in the wood, and at the end of Cyril’s tepid and unsuccessful courtship of George’s sister, Emily. Cyril, who is sometimes called Sybil, longs for someone to nestle against, and his strong attachment to George during the hay harvest culminates in the Whitmanesque ‘Poem of Friendship’ where the naked men roll in the grass and frolic in the pond, and the faithful dog chases away the intruding Emily. A bit earlier, George is sexually excited by looking at Cyril’s reproductions of the effeminate Beardsley’s Atalanta and Salome: ‘the more I look at these naked lines, the more I want her. It’s a sort of fine sharp feeling, like these curved lines’ (187). And at the pond, as Cyril Beardsall admires George’s naked body, George ‘laughed at me, telling me I was like one of Aubrey Beardsley’s long, lean ugly fellows. I referred him to many classic examples of slenderness’, in the same way that Annable compared himself to Greek statues. And as Cyril loses himself in contemplation of George’s physical beauty, he remembers the story of Annable. George

saw I had forgotten to continue my rubbing, and laughing he took hold of me and began to rub me briskly, as if I were a child, or rather, a woman he loved and did not fear. I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman. (257)

The ‘rubbing’ is explicitly homosexual as Cyril replaces his tall and threatening sister Lettie (just as George replaces Emily for Cyril), and becomes ‘a woman he loved and did not fear’ in this final representation of the limp, passive figure pressed against the powerful male in An Idyll. The feeble rationalization (‘to get a better grip’) for the ‘naked bodies one against the other’ only heightens the homosexual effect, which to the reader is far from ‘vague and indecipherable’. We are not told what George feels, but Cyril projects his own feelings on to his lover (‘it was the same with him’). The frank, lyrical look ‘with eyes of still laughter’ is a satisfying contrast to George and Lettie’s torture ‘to look thus nakedly at the other’. Cyril’s final statement is a paraphrase of David’s lament for Jonathan in II Samuel 1: 26, ‘very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women’. In the ‘Poem of Friendship’, the Whitmanesque and biblical motifs combine to form a satisfying homosexual idyll that contrasts with unhappy marriages and frustrated love.

- from Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence; p. 5 (Chapter I – Sisters): As she went upstairs, Ursula was aware of the house, of her home round about her. And she loathed it, the sordid, too-familiar place! She was afraid at the depth of her feeling against the home, the milieu, the whole atmosphere and condition of this obsolete life. Her feelings frightened her.
The two girls were soon walking swiftly down the main road of Beldover, a wide street, part shops, part dwelling houses, utterly formless and sordid, without poverty. Gudrun, new from her life in Chelsea and Sussex, shrank cruelly from this amorphous ugliness of a small colliery town in the Midlands. Yet forward she went, through the whole sordid gamut of pettiness, the long amorphous gritty street. She was exposed to every stare, she passed on through a stretch of torment. It was strange that she should have chosen to come back and test the full effect of this shapeless, barren ugliness upon herself. Why had she wanted to submit herself to it, did she still want to submit herself to it, the insufferable torture of these ugly, meaningless people, this defaced countryside? She felt like a beetle toiling in the dust. She was filled with repulsion.
They turned off the main road, past a black patch of common-garden, where sooty cabbage stumps stood shameless. No one thought to be ashamed. No one was ashamed of it all.
‘It is like a country in an underworld,’ said Gudrun. ‘The colliers bring it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it’s marvellous, it’s really marvellous—it’s really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It’s like being mad, Ursula.’

- pp. 5-6: Women, their arms folded over their coarse aprons, standing gossiping at the ends of their block, started after the Brangwen sisters with that long, unwearying stare of aborigines; children called out names.
Gudrun went on her way half dazed. If this were human life, if these were human beings, living in a complete world, then what was her own world, outside? She was aware of her grass-green stockings, her large grass-green velour hat, her full soft coat, of a strong blue colour. And she felt as if she were treading in the air, quite unstable, her heart was contracted, as if at any minute she might be precipitated to the ground. She was afraid.
She clung to Ursula, who, through long usage was inured to this violation of a dark, uncreated, hostile world. But all the time her heart was crying, as if in the midst of some ordeal: ‘I want to go back, I want to go away, I want not to know it, not to know that this exists.’ Yet she must go forward.
Ursula could feel her suffering.
‘You hate this, don’t you?’ she asked.
‘It bewilders me,’ stammered Gudrun.
‘You won’t stay long,’ replied Ursula.
And Gudrun went along, grasping at release.

- pp. 2-4: ‘When it comes to the point, one isn’t even tempted—of, if I were tempted, I’d marry like a shot. – I’m only tempted not to.’ The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.
‘Isn’t it an amazing thing,’ cried Gudrun, ‘how strong the temptation is, not to!’ They both laughed, looking at each other. In their hearts they were frightened.
There was a long pause, whilst Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women. Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula’s sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated by Gudrun’s perfect sang-froid and exclusive bareness of manner, said of her: ‘She is a smart woman.’ She had just come back from London, where she had spent several years, working at an art-school, as a student, and living a studio life.
‘I was hoping now for a man to come along,’ Gudrun said, suddenly catching her underlip between her teeth, and making a strange grimace, half sly smiling, half anguish. Ursula was afraid.
‘So you have come home, expecting him here?’ she laughed.
‘Oh my dear,’ cried Gudrun, strident, ‘I wouldn’t go out of my way to look for him. But if there did happen to come along a highly attractive individual of sufficient means—well’— she tailed off ironically. Then she looked searchingly at Ursula as if to probe her. ‘Don’t you find yourself getting bored?’ she asked of her sister. ‘Don’t you find that things fail to materialize? Nothing materializes! Everything withers in the bud.’
‘What withers in the bud?’ asked Ursula.
‘Oh, everything—oneself—things in general.’ There was a pause, whilst each sister vaguely considered her fate.
‘It does frighten one,’ said Ursula, and again there was a pause. ‘But do you hope to get anywhere by just marrying?’
‘It seems to be the inevitable next step,’ said Gudrun. Ursula pondered this, with a little bitterness. She was a class mistress herself, in Willey Green Grammar School, as she had been for some years.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘it seems like that when one thinks in the abstract. But really imagine it: imagine any man one knows, imagine him coming home to one every evening, and saying “Hello,” and giving one a kiss—‘
There was a blank pause.
‘Yes,’ said Gudrun, in a narrowed voice. ‘It’s just impossible. The man makes it impossible.’
‘Of course there’s children’—said Ursula doubtfully. Gudrun’s face hardened.
‘Do you really want children, Ursula?’ she asked coldly. A dazzled, baffled look came on Ursula’s face.
‘One feels it is still beyond one,’ she said.
‘Do you feel like that?’ asked Gudrun. ‘I get no feeling whatever from the thought of bearing children.’
Gudrun looked at Ursula with a mask-like, expressionless face. Ursula knitted her brows.
‘Perhaps it isn’t genuine,’ she faltered. ‘Perhaps one doesn’t really want them, in one’s soul—only superficially.’ A hardness came over Gudrun’s face. She did not want to be too definite.
‘When one thinks of other people’s children’—said Ursula.
Again Gudrun looked at her sister, almost hostile.
‘Exactly,’ she said, to close the conversation.
The two sisters worked on in silence, Ursula having always that strange brightness of an essential flame that was caught, meshed, contravened. She lived a good deal by herself, to herself, working, passing on from day to day, and always thinking, trying to lay hold on life, to grasp it in her own understanding. Her active living was suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet to come.
She laid down her work and looked at her sister. She thought Gudrun so charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy of ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve. Ursula admired her with all her soul.

- p. 7: Gudrun sat down in silence. Her mouth was shut close, her face averted. She was regretting bitterly that she had ever come back. Ursula looked at her, and thought how amazingly beautiful she was, flushed with discomfiture. But she caused a constraint over Ursula’s nature, a certain weariness. Ursula wished to be alone, freed from the tightness, the enclosure of Gudrun’s presence.

I think the character of Gudrun Brangwen (from Women in Love) might be Ni-ENFj (Beta NF) and Ursula might be Fi-ESFp (Static and Sensing type).


- from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence; p. 7: Sometimes life takes hold of one, carries the body along, accomplished one’s history, and yet is not real, but leaves oneself as it were slurred over.

- p. 12: Her father was to her the type of all men. And George Coppard, proud in his bearing, handsome, and rather bitter; who preferred theology in reading, and who drew near in sympathy only to one man, the Apostle Paul; who was harsh in government, and in familiarity ironic; who ignored all sensuous pleasure: -- he was very different from the miner. Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing; she had not the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never learned even a Roger de Coverley. She was puritan, like her father, high-minded, and really stern. Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man’s sensuous flame of life, that flowed off his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful, beyond her.
He came and bowed above her. A warmth radiated through her as if she had drunk wine.

I’m not too sure regarding some of the types here. Perhaps ILI for Gertrude (or some INXx type) and maybe SEE for her husband, Walter Morel (or some ESXx type).


- from The Plumed Serpent [Quetzalcoatl] by D. H. Lawrence; p. 8 (Chapter I—Beginnings of a Bull-Fight): So this was a bull-fight! Kate already felt a chill of disgust.
In the seats of the Authorities were very few people, and certainly no sparkling ladies in high tortoise-shell combs and lace mantillas. A few common-looking people, bourgeois with not much taste, and a couple of officers in uniform. The President had not come.
There was no glamour, no charm. A few commonplace people in an expanse of concrete were the elect, and below, four grotesque and effeminate looking fellows in tight, ornate clothes were the heroes. With their rather fat posteriors and their squiffs of pig-tails and their clean-shaven faces, they looked like eunuchs, or women in tight pants, these precious toreadors.

- p. 4: Behind, above, sat a dense patch of people in the unreserved section. Already they were throwing things. Bum! came an orange, aimed at Owen’s bald spot, and hitting him on the shoulder. He glared round rather ineffectually through his big shell spectacles.
“I’d keep my hat on if I were you,” said the cold voice of Villiers.
“Yes, I think perhaps it’s wiser,” said Owen, with assumed nonchalance, putting on his hat again.
Whereupon a banana skin rattled on Villiers’ tidy and ladylike little panama. He glared round coldly, like a bird that would stab with its beak if it got the chance, but which would fly away at the first real menace.

- pp. 2-3: This was a reserved place in the “Sun.”
Kate sat gingerly between her two iron loops, and looked vaguely around.
“I think it’s thrilling!” she said.
Like most modern people she had a will-to-happiness.
“Isn’t it thrilling!” cried Owen, whose will-to-happiness was almost a mania. “Don’t you think so, Bud?”
“Why, yes, I think it may be,” said Villiers, non-committal.
But then Villiers was young, he was only over twenty, while Owen was over forty. The younger generation calculates its “happiness” in a more business-like fashion. Villiers was out after a thrill, but he wasn’t going to say he’d got one till he’d got it. Kate and Owen—Kate was also nearly forty—must enthuse a thrill, out of a sort of politeness to the great Show-man, Providence.