The horror of not being ourselves without the other being frightens us even now, because this abandon–the feeling of being in love for real and finally found the other part of the self- does not abolish the self, but enriches it by becoming a greater self, a complex self of two beings as one self – the twilight concept of the soulmate.

The myth of the flood, the blood intimacy, the change of souls into the acknowledgement of the selves turned into a certain rage of men against women when they discovered they were dependent on them and not the vice-versa, rather the merging of the souls by becoming independent selves and not always creating the dual being of both in one and, most important of all, the kernel, are the main themes of DH Lawrence’s thinking.

The novel tells the story of the Brangwens, who had lived for generations at the Marsh farm, yet as the generations grow, they try to break away from inoculating society’s ideas and visions of life and love. The men were dominated by the blood intimacy, rather instinctual, seen as working at the farm, feeling the pulse and body of the soil, and having a wife that was submitted to them and bore them children. Yet, the women were different, they were also caught into the blood intimacy, but they could see outside the farm and their men and the future industrialization. Alfred,Tom, than William Brangwen, they were men of the land, they belonged to it, yet they also belonged to their wives, as only they could make them fulfilled as instinctual beings. They didn’t allowed their wives no their daughters any freedom at all, especially when Anna marred William and broke away from Tom, her stepfather, he seemed to have lost the world, and Anna actually found her fate as being a mother of many children, her husband Will felt just as Tom had felt about him, when Ursula wanted to become a school teacher in a far place, he decided she should stay close and found for her a near by Cossethay job as a schoolteacher.

Ursula Brangwen is the main figure within the author’s ideas and visions, and she’s the one to fight the men’s world, the prison of society and of an unfulfilling marriage.

She had the “chance” to marry Skrebensky, a lieutenant and could travel with him in India, she was her youth’s sweetheart, he went away with her kisses to Africa, and meanwhile she found comfort in her school mistress’s , miss Winifred Inger’s,arms, yet still after two years Anton Skrebensky returned and wanted to marry her and take her , as his wife, to India, she didn’t wanted, because she didn’t believed in marriage, although she loved him and was his lover , she knew marriage is not for women like her, she somehow managed to find her kernel, her true self, her blood intimacy and the rainbow, after Alfred married soon after she refused his marriage proposal and left for India, although she wrote him a letter when she thought she was pregnant, he did not care, he was married. She sensed the calling of the sea, it’s wilderness, it’s silence and all it’s unrisen dawns, the horse herd that frightened her, that made her run through the rain, fulfilled her and made her the free Woman that she became.

The most beautiful family saga I have ever read, true then, in the early 1912’s, true now in the 2015’s, true, real, smashing true the reality and vitality of senses, of the men, fragile and weak in front of feelings and delusion of losing the women and the women that sensifyed sense and saw reality and love as it was, cruel and unfulfilling, yet still understood the true meaning of their calling : the flood, the kernel, the blood intimacy, womanhood and pregnancy, love, destiny and the rainbow after the great flood.

Enjoy!

“There are so many dawns that have not yet risen. It seemed as if, from over the edge of the sea, all the unrisen dawns were appealing to her, all her unborn soul was crying for the unrisen dawns.

As she sat looking out at the tender sea, with it’s lovely, swift glimmer, the sob rose in her breast, till she caught her lip suddenly under her teeth, and the tears were forcing themselves from her. And in every sob, she laughed. Why did she cry? She did not want to cry. It was so beautiful that she laughed. It was so beautiful that she cried.”

“The world existed only in a secondary sense : she existed supremely!”

“The snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of the night.”

“Here, within the great, whispering-shell, that whispered all the while with the reminiscence of all the centuries, time faded away, and the echo of knowledge filled the timeless silence.”

“He was an animal that knows that is subdued. Her heart flamed with the sensation of him, of the fascinating thing he offered her, and with sorrow, and with an inconsolable sense of loneliness. Her soul was an infant crying in the night. He had no soul. Oh, and why had she? He was the cleaner.”

“She was struggling between two worlds, her own world of young summer and flowers, and this other world of work. And the glimmer of her own was between her and her class.”

“Ursula felt her whole life begin when Miss Inger came into the room. She dreamed of the school mistress, made infinite dreams of things she could give her, of how she might make the elder woman adore her. ”

About Tom and Anna Brangwen :

“He would go all day waiting for the night to come when he could give himself to some luxurious absolute of beauty in her. The thought of hidden resources in her, the undiscovered beauties and ecstatic places of delight in her body, waiting for him to discover them, sent him slightly insane. He was obsessed.

And she, separate, with a strange, dangerous, glistering look in her eyes received all his activities upon her as if they were expected by her and provoked him when he was quiet to more, till sometimes he was ready to perish for sheer inability to be satisfied of her, inability to have had enough of her.

This was what their love had become, a sensuality violent and extreme as death. They had no conscious intimacy, no tenderness of love. It was all the lust and the infinite, maddening intoxication of the senses, the passion of death. ”

“Who was she to be wanting some fantastic fulfillment in her life? Was it not enough that she had her man, her children, her place of shelter under the sun? Was it not enough for her, as it has been enough for her mother? She would marry and love her husband and fill her place simply. That was the ideal? ”- another brick in the wall???

“She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”