THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY WAS WRITTEN IN 1926 but published posthumously in 1930. It is, therefore, unedited and unrevised, and one wonders whether the rather curious ending – where the Gypsy sheds his anonymity by signing a letter – might not have been the intended ending.
The book deals with the then-forbidden budding (the ‘pure-white snow flower’ metaphor is ubiquitous throughout the story) passion between the rector’s daughter, Yvette, and the mostly anonymous gypsy she meets by accident in his camp. He is attracted by the flower of her virginity, she by the aura of the forbidden and the chthonic earth forces bursting from under the repressive life of the rectory and the whole Victorian ethos that Lawrence was trying to overthrow.
The narrative begins with the disappearance of Cynthia, who has left her husband, Arthur, the rector, and their two daughters for a younger, penniless man. The rector’s mother, the formidable Granny, with Aunt Cassie and Uncle Fred in tow, moves into the rectory. The daughters, Yvette and Lucille, have finished boarding school and done a year at finishing school in Lausanne. Granny, known as ‘Mater’, loathes the errant mother, who is referred to as ‘She-who-was-Cynthia.’ Cynthia, by her very absence, exercises power over the lives of those she has left behind, particularly her daughters. Yvette and Lucille have a sense of her glamorous presence, with its heady mix of ‘brightness,’ ‘danger’ and ‘selfishness’. The Mater’s loathing of Cynthia extends to Yvette and Lucille. Yvette, who is her father’s pet, is the Mater’s great rival. In her the Mater sees ‘some of the vague, careless blitheness of Cynthia.’ Similarly, Aunt Cassie, for whom ‘vitriol’ is almost a synonym, despises the girls.
Yvette and Lucille come across as rather conventional, even empty-headed, yet Lawrence chooses Yvette to be the conduit of an illicit passion. Bored with the conventional attentions of suitable young men of her class (one notes how decisive class was for Lawrence) and loathing everything to do with her father and especially the domineering Granny, the exotic charms of the gypsy play upon her adolescent sensibility. The two begin a kind of cat and mouse game with each other, fuelled by the gypsy’s mother’s prophecy, which includes a reference to a body of water which indeed comes to fruition in the flood at the end of the book. However, the passion remains unconsummated, even after the two flood victims peel off their clothes to warm up after soaking and Yvette sinks into a deep slumber. After the flood the gypsy disappears but sends a letter that seems to open up a suggestion of meeting again, but we are left wondering whether this could ever happen.
Lawrence presents the rectory – with Mater, Aunt Cassie, Uncle Fred and the rector – as a Victorian Hell, symbolising repression, hypocrisy and class snobbery.
A sub-plot emerges in the story of ‘a little Jewess’, as Lawrence repeatedly calls her, and her younger lover, whom Yvette has met at the gypsy’s camp. The rector detests the errant couple and, fearing a repetition of his wife’s elopement, forbids his daughter to continue visiting the couple. The ‘little Jewess’ reference raises questions about Lawrence’s anti-Semitism and the prevalence of literary anti-Semitism in the works of his contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, who espoused an ideology of the undesirability of Jews in a civilised society.
His descriptions of nature, and particularly the flood (which literally sees the two would-be lovers thrown together), are atmospheric and beautiful. He also captures the brooding landscape and the insulation and claustrophobia of the village of Papplewick, especially as represented by the rectory and its inhabitants. As the novella is set between the two world wars, there’s a pervading sense of a suspended reality in the lives of the characters.
The sexual frisson and interaction of Yvette and the gypsy lacks a certain element of verisimilitude. One wonders if this is a consequence of Lawrence’s ideology.
The protagonists seem rather dated. The character of the gypsy is deliberately unfocused. He is, according to one account, a war hero, but also a seducer and an innocent abroad. Anonymous till the last sentence of the book, he is more a creature of Lawrence’s ideology of passion than a real character. It is difficult for the reader to warm up to the characters. The Mater is selfish and domineering; her son, the rector is weak, and Uncle Fred is an almost inconsequential presence. Aunt Cassie is middle-aged, emotionally and sexually unfulfilled and anorexic at the family table.
There is a Biblical allusion in the flood, with its cleansing of what, in Lawrence’s eyes, would be the degenerate and repressive Victorian edifice.
The novella is only of 90 odd pages. However, it packs an intense amount of descriptions and raises the significant issue of the nature of human desire.
– Golden Langur
