Clifford Hall: Portrait of a Reclining Lady
(Oil on canvas 48.5 x 59 cm)
I.
Many people have had sex on a sofa. But only a few establish an erotic relationship with their sofa in the manner of the unnamed 27-year-old woman in D. H. Lawrence's short story 'The Thimble' [a].
Usually, the passage in which the woman fondles her sofa, pushing her fingers deep inside, is interpreted as a sign of her sexual frustration and/or unfulfilled sexual desire. And, to be fair, it's true that she hadn't seen her husband for many months - "not since her fortnight's honeymoon with him, and his departure for France" [190] - so perhaps she does have a certain pent up passion.
But I like to think that since the honeymoon and his going off to fight, the woman who had "lived and died and come to life again" [190], had also reconfigured her sexuality in a queer new fashion. In other words, I prefer to read Lawrence's text not in terms of what Judith Ruderman calls symbolic masturbation [b], but as an interesting case of objectophilia ...
II.
It's clear from the beginning of the story that the woman likes nice things. And, although apparently short of money, after renting a small flat in Mayfair - an affluent, upper-class area of London then as now - she fills it with suitable furniture. Only when she has made the flat complete and perfect and is surrounded by many alluring objects, is she satisfied.
Human love, in comparison, has never quite done the trick; she has always remained at some level alone and untouched. And as she awaits the return of her (badly disfigured) husband, she feels a certain cold anxiety.
It's only by putting on her favourite black silk dress and her jewellery that she can feel safe and secure; protected, as it were, by her own finery and fashionable beauty. And it's only by moving her hands "slowly backwards and forwards on the sofa" [194] that she can begin to unwind; "as if the friction of the silk gave her some ease" [194].
But she doesn't stop with simply sliding her hands across the surface of the sofa; she soon progresses to the far more intimate act of digital penetration:
"Her right hand came to the end of the sofa and pressed a little into the crack, the meeting between the arm and the sofa bed. Her long white fingers pressed into the fissure, pressed and entered rhythmically, pressed and pressed further and further into the tight depths of the fissure, between the silken, firm upholstery of the old sofa, whilst her mind was in a trance of suspense [...]
The working, slow, intent fingers pressed deeper and deeper in the fissure of the sofa, pressed and worked their way intently [...] they worked all along, very gradually, along the tight depth of the fissure." [194]
In this extraordinary passage, Lawrence gives the practice of couch sex a perverse new twist and makes searching down the back of the settee for loose change (or, as in this case, an old thimble) now seem far less innocent [c].
Notes
[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Thimble', in England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 190-200. All page references given in the post refer to this edition.
Lawrence wrote 'The Thimble' in October 1915 and it was first published in the American literary magazine Seven Arts (March 1917). The sofa-loving woman, Mrs Hepburn, was based on Lady Cynthia Asquith (large feet and all).
As the Japanese Lawrence scholar Gaku Iwai points out in the essay cited below, very few critics pay 'The Thimble' much attention - and, to be fair, even Lawrence grew to dislike it, telling his bibliographer Edward McDonald in 1924 that he would "rather like 'The Thimble' to disappear into oblivion" (see Letters V 104). By this date he had, of course, radically revised and extended the tale into the far better known novella The Ladybird (1921).
See: Gaku Iwai, 'Wartime Ideology in "The Thimble": A Comparative Study of
Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence', Études Lawrenciennes, 46 (2015): click here to read online.
[b] Judith Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, (Duke University Press, 1984), p. 76.
[c] Readers should note that the story doesn't end here, even if the post does. Lawrence ultimately has to reaffirm the love of man and woman - his whole sexual metaphysic is based on such - thus Mr and Mrs Hepburn are reconciled and reborn into a new life of co-dependence and mutual desire, he throwing the thimble she found "embedded in the depths of the sofa-crack" [194] out of the window.
Finally, those who have enjoyed this post might find an earlier post in which I discuss Stéphane Sitayeb's essay on sexualized objects in Lawrence’s short fiction of interest: click here.
