Jennie Linden as Ursula and Glenda Jackson as Gudrun
Women in Love, dir. Ken Russell (1969)
"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."
- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love
These enigmatic lines, which appear early on in the opening chapter of Lawrence's greatest novel, arguably provide a key not merely to the character of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, but to the sexual politics of the book and Lawrence's often disconcerting views on women - particularly modern women.
In the first sentence, the narrator isn't indicating the ages of the sisters just as a matter of sexist convention (one still subscribed to even now by certain members of the press). Rather, he wants us to understand that they have had experience in the world, including the world of love. They are knowledgeable women, even if unmarried and childless, not naive, inexperienced young girls, or unhappy spinsters still dreaming of their first kiss.
However, the next sentence opens with a crucial conjunction that qualifies what has just been said:
The sisters were women ... But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls ...
In other words, whilst Ursula and Gudrun have had lovers in the past - and so were not technically virgins - yet they appeared to still have something virginal about them; not so much an innocence or purity, but a remoteness characterized as a specifically modern phenomenon related to the collapse of values and death of authentic, spontaneous feeling.
We might say that whilst both sisters had been fucked, neither had been touched or in any significant manner changed by their sexual encounters. They were essentially cut off from other people, from the men they knew, and yet ironically indifferent to the fact - prepared to joke about their single-status and fiercely proud of their independence.
Like sisters of Artemis, they planned on hunting down every new experience and sensation dressed in short-skirts and brightly coloured-stockings, whilst remaining free and essentially untouched. They possessed not the lovely innocence of the goddess Hebe which is tied to youth and, crucially, to an idea of service and submission promising fulfilment (Hebe, for those unfamiliar with Greek mythology, was the adolescent cup-bearer to the gods of Olympus).
Gudrun especially will never get down on her knees to any man, as Gerald discovers to his cost. She will strike the first and last blow in the battle of the sexes and never play the humble slave. Ursula, however, through her transcendent and abiding relationship with Birkin, does eventually learn how to become a wife and woman in the officially-approved Lawrentian manner; i.e. accepting the man and the superfine stability that he offers as a fate.
For without such, it's implied, she's just like a stray cat - a fluffy bit of chaos ...
This post was suggested by David Brock and I am grateful for his thoughts on the topic.
