GCSE English Tuition: How to create Character and Setting with The Daughters of the Vicar by D H Lawrence. TWO!

”If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Hemingwway ( Ice Berg Theory)

 

Now read the extract below and see the difference between Hemingway’s ideas and Lawrence’s narrative delivery.

I  know we are told to ‘show don’t tell’ in Creative Writing, but in Lawrence sometimes a good bit of ‘telling’ works most effectively!

 The tone seems almost biblical in its rhythm, in its sense of inescapable, relentless inevitability.  The Vicar’s wife below is trapped by her choices and by the emotions she feels as a reaction to these choices, thus the ‘telling’ narrative incarcerates her within her own self inflicted existential cul de sac. 

 

 “I am more like L than anybody. We are unthinkably alike in fact.” Katherine Mansfield

At first his wife raged with mortification. She took on airs and used a high hand. But her income was too small, the wrestling with tradesmen’s bills was too pitiful, she only met with general, callous ridicule when she tried to be impressive.

Wounded to the quick of her pride, she found herself isolated in an indifferent, callous population. She raged indoors and out. But soon she learned that she must pay too heavily for her outdoor rages, and then she only raged within the walls of the rectory. There her feeling was so strong, that she frightened herself. She saw herself hating her husband, and she knew that, unless she were careful, she would smash her form of life and bring catastrophe upon him and upon herself. So in very fear, she went quiet. She hid, bitter and beaten by fear, behind the only shelter she had in the world, her gloomy, poor parsonage.

Children were born one every year; almost mechanically, she continued to perform her maternal duty, which was forced upon her. Gradually, broken by the suppressing of her violent anger and misery and disgust, she became an invalid and took to her couch.

 

 

DHLawrence is brilliant at giving representation to  small spaces- literal small spaces and the small spaces that live on within minds, within relationships where claustrophobia often reigns on, festering away lives.

And linked to these small spaces is rage, an emotion with variegated colours that may destroy,  but ironically may also sustain human beings for years, as they rage on, wallowing  in the ‘dis-ease’ that is their existence.

Lawrence in the extract above, describes the progress of the Vicar’s wife’s rage. He delineates her rage’s journey as she seeks final refuge in ‘her couch’ inside the death driven ‘poor parsonage’ where hope is suffocated by raging, stultifying despair.

Look how sexual relationships are rendered inhuman and robotic by the word ‘mechanically.’ The word is an adverb, modifying the verb ‘born’, though  the hiatus/delayed gap  between the verb and the adverb reveals the extent of the physical disassociation;  the chasm between sex and emotion;  between maternity and love.

Once again, I detect a peculiar hearkening to Jane Austen , maybe to a character like Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park who spends much of her life resting on a chaise longue! Yet in Lawrence, the irony is absent. This is no comedy, he shows us the utter absence of the Vicar’s wife from daily life and leaves no space for self mockery. Indeed the characters take them selves so seriously that they are dangerous even to themselves, whilst in Austen we do recognize that Lady Bertram’s fatigue, her affectation of ennui, has more than a little irony concerning the endless leisure of the privileged classes, where females in particular are like Lady Dedlock in Dickens’ Bleak House, nearly literally ‘bored to death’!